Cringeworthy Attempt To Be Modern: According to Yes

According to Yes by Dawn French

Penguin

Pp. 365

Rosie Kitto, an eccentric primary school teacher from England, finds herself a position as a nanny/ au pair/ governess in an uptight house in Manhattan’s upper East Side for the Wilder-Bingham family. She has recently suffered a breakup, and she desperately wants to have a baby, so she decides to say yes to everything, hence the title, and sleep with every male in the household, despite the fact they are already in relationships. Her resulting pregnancy is the opposite of the immaculate conception as she has been intimate with the father, Kemble, son, Teddy, and randy old goat grandfather, Thomas. By the end of the book, no one knows who’s the father, so they all decide to help her raise the baby together, which is so preposterous that it really doesn’t count as a spoiler.

We are meant to take against the matriarch and grandmother, Glenn, because she is so cold that the men can’t help themselves but fall into bed with the plump, voluptuous and voracious Rosie. Glenn tries to control her family and replaces affection with obedience. “She has forgotten that if you don’t stoke the fire, it goes out.” She is upset when she is ignored by her family and she sits, “suspended in time, wondering if she matters”, while everyone fawns over Rosie.

Rosie takes the young twins, Red and Three, on trips to museums and parks to teach them things – one almost expects her to pop through a chalk painting on the pavement. She knows more about the city than those who have lived there all their lives because she is special and curious and connected.Of course, the boys pay attention and learn what they are meant to; they all take up gardening and plant new life in the plot on the roof. The boys want their parents’ attention, but as they don’t get it, they are sad and Rosie offers life lessons in a mawkish manner. 

The novel is crammed with out-dated clichés, about the lack of sophistication in England, which the U.S. market will love. The whole thing is written in the present tense, which is almost as irksome as her attempts to be ‘one of us’, which come across as cringe-worthy. She is apparently bold and direct. She teaches the boys to shout ‘Penis’ as loudly as they can get away with in public spaces. Hilarious. If you’re six. Why should others going about their business have to be disturbed by you indulging yourself with profanity?

When Thomas finally reconciles with Glenn, he tells her, “I wish I could shrink your fear, Glennie, then you could just come home and be my wife, Kemble’s mother and the boys’ granma. The real true you. Not the one you try so hard to pretend to be.” So, all that is left for a woman to have a happy ending is in her relation to men. Or to have a baby. Give me a break. This novel is infuriating in its middle-class conservatism and sexism. Dawn French’s alternative comedy status is long gone, as the cover endorsement by the Daily Mail should indicate.

How to Survive in Suburbia: Takes One to Know One

Takes One To Know One by Susan Isaacs

Grove Press UK

Pp. 355

Corie has retired from her role as a counter-terrorist agent for the FBI to become a wife to federal judge, Josh, and a mother to his daughter, Eliza. Although she still does some consultation work for the FBI, she ostensibly leads the perfect suburban life complete with a dog called Lulu, a ‘cover’ job recommending Arabic literature to a publishing house, and weekly lunch meetings with fellow freelancers at a French restaurant. And she is bored senseless. So, when she suspects a member of the group of being up to no good – he always picks the same seat to watch his car, changes phones often and makes frequent interstate trips – she imagines that he must have a secret life, and she sets out to investigate. Are her instincts, honed by training at the Bureau, correct, or is she desperately trying to create some excitement, and Pete from packaging really is simply bland?

Corie had approached marriage and suburban life with positivity and enthusiasm, but now she struggles to feign interest in her new environment talking about children’s homework and kitchen renovations. “I had opted for normality and gotten far better than I’d dreamed of. But the trade-off was giving up exciting, sometimes risky work and leaving the exploits to someone else. For family’s sake. Adventure for moms? The dads got that one.” So, she begins to examine Pete and his potential motives more closely. She thinks he may be creating an alter-ego to conceal his nefarious purposes because she recognises behaviour patterns she has displayed – hence the title.

The author includes a lot of research as to the way that agents conduct their business, and, while Cories makes sardonic remarks about some of the training she received – “The bureau had been big on mindfulness, though they called it something more butch back then: staying in the alert zone” – her instincts also lead to valuable insights. Corie confides in her father, who is ex-NYPD and loves watching cosy British crime shows like Father Brown and Death in Paradise. “Like a lot of cops, he was a major mystery fan.” He reads Sherlock Holmes and puts some of the elimination processes to work, casting a net and then narrowing it.

The novel contains some typos and grammatical errors that should have been corrected by a more watchful editor, but these are mitigated by the fact that, as mentioned in the acknowledgement at the end, some people made donations to Long Island charities by bidding to have a character named after them, which is a great idea. This is a very easy-to-read novel, which combines the excitement of law enforcement with the tedium of suburban domesticity. It may hurry to its conclusion, but the characters are warm and engaging, which makes them enjoyable company.

New York Nostalgia: City of Girls

City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert

Bloomsbury

Pp. 466

This novel of New York and nostalgia is written in the framework of a letter. When Angela writes to Vivian asking, “Given that my mother has passed away, I wonder if you might now feel comfortable telling me what you were to my father?” Vivian decides to respond with the story of her life and, although we don’t actually know who Angela or her father is, and it’s quite some way through the book before we discover that, the format leads to a conversational style as Vivian talks to Angela without trying to upset or offend her.

Vivian grows up in a typical conservative WASP family in upstate New York, where there is an assumption that she will go to college, find a husband and settle down into the life of a wife and mother. Due to reasons of lethargy and lack of engagement, her parents pack her off to New York to stay with her Aunt Peg, who happens to run a rather dilapidated playhouse. Vivian has always been told that she hasn’t got a lot of talent, but she can sew, and she is soon making costumes for all the productions and winning friends with her skill with a needle and a tight budget.

When Vivian reaches New York and meets the showgirls, she is wildly distracted by their gossip and their glamour, and entranced by their lifestyle, which is different from anything she has ever known. The leader of this troop is the outrageously entitled personification of a whirlwind, Celia Ray. Her behaviour is infuriating and inconsiderate, but Vivian is happy to tolerate it because it makes her feel included into another world of conviction, enthusiasm and, above all, youth.

The novel is a love story to a time and a place. The time was the 1940s; the place was New York City, more specifically, the Lily Playhouse. Sure, there was a war approaching, but with the callow and shallow nature of self-obsessed youth, Vivian managed to disregard it, even though her brother had just joined the navy. New York is a city of dreams, possibilities and action, and in Vivian’s eyes and breathless descriptions, the Lily Playhouse is where these dramas take shape. It would be a fabulous, chaotic place to work, but the business model is unsustainable, and it is the sort of atmosphere that can be regarded fondly with hindsight, but not last forever or be recreated. Elizabeth Gilbert, through Vivian’s reminisces, is expert at blending the brilliance with the base, and tempering the glow of nostalgia with the grit of reality.

A theatre is the perfect metaphor for presenting a bright surface to conceal a shabby behind, and the shows that were staged at the Lily are the essence of this. “To my mind there was never anything better than those simple, enthusiastic revues. They made me happy. They were designed to make people happy without making the audience work too hard to understand what was going on.”

Vivian spends a lot of her youth being told who she is, and what she should be, by men. She discovers another talent – that of making men desire her – and she works that angle for all it is worth, and far beyond, damaging her own and others’ relationships in the process. There is a freedom of sex which she interprets as power; it is not as if she enjoys the act itself, but she does relish the game. She is callous and flippant and frivolous, and she loves every second of it, until she becomes entangled in a scandal and is judged, again unfairly, for her part in the affair – men get away with indiscretions; women are discreetly got away. In typical Moll Flanders style, the later bits of her life, when she comes to realisations and profundities are not as interesting as the titillating sections of her wild youth.

City of Girls is mainly fun and frivolous. It has some dark moments hiding in the shadows, waiting for the bright lights of the big city or the playhouse to fade to leave behind the reality of life. It is a paean to concealment; through theatre, fashion and sex, but it is not superficial. It is one person’s account, but it is also a universal truth. After all, as someone who knew a bit about theatre once wrote, “All the world’s a stage.”

Friday Five: New York Theme

Last weekend we were invited to a 40th birthday party. The theme was New York. We're not big fans of this penchant for fancy dress (I have a theory about it - and tattoos - which I won't expound as it will merely offend those friends who do like it - and tattoos) but we are fans of the birthday boy, so we went along as The Ramones.

This is partly because we like them and partly because we're lazy. It wasn't difficult to find leather jackets from the Salvation Army, dirty old jeans and fake converse shoes. We got a wig for Him Outdoors and I just didn't wash my hair for a week to get that lank and greasy look. No, you'll be pleased to hear, there are no photos.

His original idea was to go in a cardoard box with '3 o'clock x 3 o'clock; noon x noon' inscribed upon it. He was going to be Times Square. I wasn't keen on this plan, because I feared someone might introduce me as the square root. We also considered going as Occupy Wall Street protesters, but we don't know the other party guests and didn't want to risk political rants. Plus, it's difficult to drink with a dollar bill taped to your mouth - priorities, people!

Most of the men went as gangsters and most of the women went as molls. There were a lot of suits with fedoras and dresses with strappy heels. After that, these were the most popular outfits.

5 New York Dress Up Outfits:

1. Baseball/ basketball players/ fans (chucking on a Yankees cap requires minimum effort)
2. Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's - people who had never even seen the film (let alone read the book) were sporting a little black dress, fake pearls and tiara, and an up-do
3. A couple came as Seinfeld characters, Christine and Kramer. Having never watched Seinfeld I thought they were Annie and a random homeless dude
4. The statue of liberty - long green bridesmaid's frock, foam headgear and a torch - sweet!
5. King Kong and Fae Wray - genius, if a trifle hot for the guy

Helping Hands

A big thank you to my friend Lindsay for alerting me to this project by a student in New York. Her intention is to explore the imaginative use of communications technologies and see how they might 'augment, improve and bring delight and art into people's lives.'

To this end, she built a 'human-like object' which rolls in a straight line with a destination displayed on a flag. It relies on people it meets to read this flag and to aim it in the right direction to reach its goal. She wondered if people with their cynicism and paranoia would bother to help a lost little robot.

The results are nauseatingly cute and overwhelmingly heartwarming. Curiously I imagine that New York and London would be two places where this experiment might succeed. There is humanity and compassion in these cities; it just manifests itself in a slightly odd way. This is truely one from the 'restore your faith in human nature' files.

Read about Kacie Kinzer's robot project

Cloverfield

I recently watched Cloverfield on DVD. I'm gald I didn't watch it on the big screen because I suffer from cinema vertigo, caused by the use of QueasyCam. It's bad enough in the corner of my living room but when I'm assaulted by massive amounts of blurred, jerky, flashing shots I want to vomit; I get migraines and want to scream, 'Just use a sodding tripod, you moron!'

So, that aside, it was actually not bad. Best (and often) described as a cross between The Blair Witch Project and Godzilla, it is a disaster film set in New York City and filmed from one perspective of a bloke with a hand-held camera. He decides to capture the devastation on film rather than fleeing to safety because 'people are going to want to know how it all went down.' As you do.

He doesn't mention the fact that if it all works out he could flog this footage for a fortune, but seeing as he and his mates are prime examples of the shallow, materialistic, vapid, self-obssessed, Gen-Y, you can't tell me this didn't cross his mind, tiny though it may be.

The case of the missing plot or explanation has been heavily criticised, but I think the lack of omniscient director makes it interesting, albeit frustrating. In fact, despte the beautiful people, tumbling cities and giant scary monsters, the banal dialogue and unresolved ending add a touch of realism.

When this film was released, there was concern that viewers might suffer shellshock due to memories of 11th September when towers collapsed and the streets were full of dust and panic. The powers that be dismissed these worries. Do the movie moguls simply not care if it makes them a buck - or two million?

Does this mean we're immune to it now? Have we learned to live in the shadow of terrorism and destruction? Is that a part of our lives now? Or is it that we are resilient enough to bounce back? Seven years - is that what it takes?