Reading Note:
Lively Nº Six
20 February 2015
This morning, I finished reading Family Album, the sixth novel by Penelope Lively that I’ve read in a little more than a month. At the opening, I expected to dislike it, largely because it promised to compare unfavorably with Heat Wave, which I had just read. The big, shabby-prosperous English family, with the distracted, book-writing father and the Laura Ashley-clad mother, with plenty of delicious meals and one very juicy scandal, and with six children, all of them vaguely hostile — the set-up threatened to be an awful cliché, requiring only a murder to serve as the ironic backstory of an Inspector Morse episode. (The menace of ennui was heightened by the fact that Heat Wave, a morally thrilling book, had just climaxed with a homicide.) But one of Lively’s great strengths is the ability to refresh familiar, even stock figures, making them new and different and themselves.
I was drawn in fairly quickly. The children (soon adults) turned out to be not so much hostile as wary, and their wariness was directed at their parents, not at each other. The parents were indeed highly self-indulgent — irresponsible, really. Mum wanted a big family, much as you might want an arrangement of flowers for a party; that a family would necessarily be composed of individual human beings who would grow up to have their own lives was of little moment during the planning stages and grounds for complaint later on. Dad couldn’t have cared less about any of it. He liked having sex (apparently) and had a trust fund to pay for the consequences. Add to this parental pediment a Scandinavian au pair who, in Barbara Vine’s hands, would either kill or be killed, but in this case simply stayed on as a member of the family — for good reason. How can one resist a family album with nine subjects?
But in the end, the nicest thing about Family Album, circumstantially, was that I did not finish it with the feeling that it was the best of the bunch. A nice change! I’d begun to worry that I was becoming weak-minded. Hitherto, each novel seemed better than the one I’d just read. That was the other nice thing: my regard for the other books leveled off a good deal. How It All Began bobbed to the top only slightly faster than According to Mark; Heat Wave struck me as an accomplishment of such a different order that I had to judge it separately; The Photograph, understandably popular, is nonetheless crowd-pleasing in the same way that Family Album is; while the appeal of Moon Tiger continues to elude me. I’m glad that I read it first.
Perhaps it is finally time to read The Blue Flower, and to be done with the other Penelope (Fitzgerald). I’ve reached the point where the familiarity of some of Penelope Lively’s themes might curdle immediate further reading. Garden centers, authors (and their well-known problems with the quotidian world), cheating husbands and ambitious women — these seem to pop up in all the books with contemporary settings. Also the passage of time, or, rather, the passage of generations. This is a problem for both Lord Peters (How It All Began) and Charles Harper (Family Album): in the twilight of their careers, they can no longer find sympathetic readers among the publishers. They are vieux jeux. Experience warns me to lay off Lively for a while. I want to keep her as fresh as she does her Harlequins and her Columbines.
***
A favorite passage from Family Album:
Alison is a homemaker, a housewife, that now outmoded figure, but her management skills are not highly developed. She does not plan ahead enough, she runs out of things, she forgets to get the boiler serviced or the windows cleaned, children berate her because they have grown out of their school uniforms or she did not give them the money for the charity raffle. Ingrid is frequently reminding her (“What would I do without you?”); Charles merely looks resigned, and detached.
She is aware of these deficiencies but not particularly concerned. After, all, everyone is fed, everyone is housed and cherished and listened to and helped and supplied with pocket money and birthday parties and love and attention and a real four-star family life, which is what matters, isn’t it? Never mind if there is the occasional blip; never mind if this is not one of those homes that are run like a machine, what matters is being part of a family, isn’t it? One lovely big family. For Alison, Allersmead is a kind of glowing archetypal hearth, and she is its guardian. This is all she ever wanted: children, and a house in which to stow them — a capacious, expansive house. And a husband of course. And a dear old dog. And Denby ovenware and a Moulinex and a fish kettle and a set of Sabatier knives. She has all of these things, and knows that she is lucky. Oh, so lucky. (30-1)
Regular readers will not wonder why I single this out for attention. In the first paragraph, the author indicts Alison (“her management skills are not highly developed” — as a housekeeper, she’s a flop) — while, in the second, Alison indicts herself, with her warping way of talking, her rhetorical questions and tendentious dismissal of alternatives. In fact, her children are not “listened to.” Alison has a peculiarly successful way of dealing with inconvenient home truths. Whenever her children start conversing sharply about the reality of life at Allersmead, Alison flusters imperviously: Now don’t be so silly, children; I don’t know what you’re talking about. As a character “up denial,” she’s right out of Tennessee Williams.
In Alison’s defense, we can absolve her of the fetishism that afflicts so many women in her position (and men, too). For Alison, things do not have to be just so. She very much wants two things to be true: she wants her elder son, Paul, to be present at all family celebrations (he is, she has actually told him, her favorite), and she wants to keep her mother’s Limoges service intact. When Paul, stoned or drunk, shows up late for her silver wedding anniversary party and drops a pile of the dessert plates into a smash, it becomes something that Alison can cry about years later. But, for the most part, Alison is almost eagerly flexible.
I never quite worked out how this woman became such a good cook. At the end of the story, her expertise allows her to teach classes that have waiting lists. How did such a disorganized person ever master the discipline of getting dishes to the table all at the proper temperature? How did she learn to deal with “blips” — of which there must have been many? Maybe the explanation is that Alison is truly a monster.
Bon weekend à tous!