Tuesday Morning Read
¶ In The Boat, a near-novella, “Halflead Bay,” set somewhere in Australia that I couldn’t locate. (There is a Maroomba Air, but no Maroomba; not according to Google, anyway.) The story is hard to read because it works like a scenario: the characters have to be followed around an understated landscape. Being teenagers and/or Australians, the characters are understated themselves.
Held up to the right light, “Halflead Bay” looks to be a classic cusp-of-manhood story. Everything is about to change for Jamie anyway, when along comes the girl of his dreams, Alison — trailing in her wake the certainty of a dust-up with her brute of a boyfriend. Held up to the wrong light, however, it has a pre-shrunk quality, as if all the elements of a coming-of-age novel had been anaerobically concentrated so as to fit into a cut-down narrative frame. I had the odd feeling that Jamie would not be happy to know that other people could read his story.
¶ In Aubrey, hints of dyslexia, in the life of Edmund Waller.
He has a great memory, and remembers a history, etc, etc, best when read to him; he used to make his daughters read to him. Yet, notwithstanding his great wit and mastership in rhetoric, etc, he will oftentimes be guilty of misspelling in English. He writes a lamentably bad hand, as bad as the scratching of a hen.
We also learn that Sir Isaac Wake, a diplomat, had a “fine seat at Hampstead in Middlesex, which looks over London and Surrey.”