Double Decker Bus

so I smiled coquettishly at brown-eyed faces on the subway,

grew love affairs like mushrooms in a dark, damp forest,

          planted them with museum visits, kisses against doorframes, and coins thrown in wishing wells,

          devoured them, happily so quickly, with clean breaks, agitated café dates, and scenes in which someone banged a door and vanished into the streets, one last furious embrace.

You don’t visit anymore,

so I flit from city to city, leaving no door unlocked for your odd hour arrival,

          leaving behind unmade hotel beds, and moonlight conversations about my last address’s heartbreak with men who pronounce pain in different ways,

         drove rich Italian cars and spent nights in the backpacker’s musty motel room, one-night stands with the intimacy of sharing cheap morning coffee and cigarette smoke.

It’s been so long since you came over,

that forgetting you has become a tour around the world, the way this Parisian baker splutters over chili just like that time you bit into one over dinner,

          giving your favourite sweater away to some boy with a guitar on some rainy day, who kept strumming at my arms and looked at me as if I could be his moment of muse and magic,

          staged all our fights in brawls with drunken men in Brazil, shoving another man and breaking his crockery for that time you held on too long and too harshly.

  You don’t visit anymore,

yes, that’s what I thought, but I came back to what everyone called my home and found you growing a beard at my door,

          I used to be your pitstop in this city, a tan face under a roof you could hold and breathe closely, heavily into my ears with mustard, time-zones, and stories of the midnight sun,

        winning me over with a new language to tell me you love me with, not knowing this time, it was different,

this time, I had as many ways of asking you to leave as you had of lying of love,

this time, this is no more,

you can’t visit here anymore.

Penelope Lively is one of those writers I associated with brilliance and some degree of unreadability as a child, and as usual, I can blame it on Mamma and the very well-read copy of Moon Tiger on the bookshelf. Imagine the bewildered ten-year-old, eagerly picking up a book by a happy-sounding writer like Penelope Lively, titled pleasant simple things like Moon Tiger – both of which I liked – and discovering that she really couldn’t understand any of it.

A few years down the line, as I ventured to more friendly-looking covers by Lively – The Photograph in my school library, Consequences (more recently), and now Family Album – the bit about brilliance remained, but I realized how beautifully readable she actually was. Her writing reminds me of Alice Munro, but Lively’s sentences can be more complicated occasionally. I couldn’t find a paper dedicated to this particular novel, so I resorted to discussing a review again, and since I clearly love the Guardian when it comes to this, the Guardian it is (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/aug/08/family-album-penelope-lively-review).

As the review begins, All "happy family" novels are alike. They present the shiny, noisy, splashy surface of family life, ruffled only by obligatory eccentricity. Then, before long, the shadows begin to slide along beneath, leaving the reader to guess which are the harmless tangles, and which the tooth-baring sharks. The murkier the layers of secrecy, the more satisfying the schadenfreude.’ While I completely agree with this observations, I wonder if it has been stated as a point of weakness for a novel which clearly centers around ‘family’; it is strange to expect the source of conflict and its trajectories taking place externally to what the novel claims to be.

Allersmead might be one of my favourite ‘literary houses’. It is warm, cozy, it’s descriptions are homely and it feels like one big English cottage. Even as Lively flips through time, flashbacks, different first person narratives, interspersed with third-person narration, she is smooth, distant, and controlled. In fact, the coolness and emotional apathy (?) in her own narrative voice filters down into the lives of the characters, their relationships with each other, with their lovers and partners, and with their parents. Even Alison, for all her mothering and warmth and sacrifice, is written about in a way that only Lively could, with ‘a tendency to watch more effectively than to inhabit’. I felt an absence in the perfect ‘interlocking’ of all the puzzles and undercurrents in the book – all the foreshadowing about the family secret really didn’t amount to much. The adultery and Clare could have created an interesting intense emotional ripple amongst characters I so longed to genuinely sear me with some emotion. I also absolutely hated Charles, which goes to show he’s probably  a well-created character.

Let me first admit that this was an accidental purchase: I’m sure James Frey is a great writer, but Bright Shiny Morning just isn’t the kind of book I usually spend money on. The blurb says, ‘Welcome to L.A. City of contradictions. Home to movie stars and down-and-outs. Palm-lined beaches and gridlock. Shopping sprees and gun sprees.’ Yes, definitely not the kind of book I buy, but somehow, under some delusions – maybe because of the cover of A Million Little pieces – I thought I would enjoy James Frey, and went ahead and ordered this book. Since then, it had been lying on my book shelf, and when I had to pick a book for Day Five, it made sense to try and read this one and see where it goes.

I chose to use The Guardian’s review of Bright Shiny Morning as reference for this piece; you can find it here: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/mar/21/bright-shiny-morning-james-frey. Bright Shiny Morning is definitely a dynamic novel – the prose is crisp, the images are sharp, the dialogue is decent. Like The Guardian says, Frey’s story is populated by ‘some very stock characters - the teenage lovers Dylan and Maddie, escaping from abuse in Ohio into seedy motels and dead-end jobs; the preening movie star Amberton Parker, living Hollywood hypocrisy to the hilt; the self-conscious Esperanza, an embodiment of all the hopes and humiliations of Mexican immigrants; and Old Joe, a bum washed up on the beach with a bottle of chablis for comfort’.

The chapters alternate between the narratives of the characters, and facts about LA’s history, starting with its establishment as a settlement. This does create an interesting dramatic effect, except I found it too obvious. I think that’s the problem with Bright Shiny Morning: everything was too obvious. It was funny to see Guardian saying ‘ Frey is no Raymond Carver’, because even the comparison seemed laughable.

This old edition of Intimacy belonged to my mother (and now I have effectively hijacked her entire library), and I vividly remember how I felt when I ‘noticed’ the book for the first time, around the time I was in fifth grade. The picture of the woman naked on the cover took a little time to decipher, and I remember the shock I felt, especially when I opened the book and the first line began ‘Lulu slept naked because she liked to feel the sheets caressing her body…’ I couldn’t believe Mamma could own such a book, and it wasn’t possible for me to grasp the idea that this too could be ‘fiction’, and that these lines might hold a story.

I was skeptical about whether I would be able to find a full-fledged paper or review of Intimacy, since it’s a short story, and I found this gem of a review by Edward Morris which was published in the Yale French Studies. The review took me through the book section-by-section, summarizing each action or monologue, and discussing its implications. For a story that seemed so simple and unsettling, Morris has unearthed a gorgeous trove of analysis in this review – for one, he compares Intimacy continuously to Ulysses. He describe the whole story as  a ‘situation open at both ends, with only a very arbitrary climax’. The concept of Lulu playing the ‘masculine-hero’ role in this story is central to Morris’ analysis of Intimacy. The three people who surround Lulu are Henri, her husband, Rirette, her dominating friend and confidante, and Pierre, her current possessive lover. While the first section is Lulu’s monologue, the second is Rirrette’s which Morris says makes Lulu’s seem ‘elemental’ in comparison. ‘Movement,’ says Morris, is the ‘sanest and most fundamental characteristic of Lulu; her suffering has come at points of forced inertia’.

This is what essentially happens in Intimacy: we meet Lulu, and see her restlessness with her bear-like husband, Henri, who is described as having a ‘soft, impotent non-masculinity’, the aggressive Rirrette, intent on guiding Lulu and dominating her life, and finally Lulu’s lover, Pierre, rich and crude, who like ‘pressing into her from the back’. Lulu deliberates over leaving Henri, then leaves him and announces it to Rirrette as they meet in a café, to go to Nice with Pierre, the idea of which again, repels her because of continual sex with Pierre; she decided to visit Henri to say goodbye properly, where again his passivity and helplessness frustrate her, and she goes back to the hotel to Pierre, only to write a letter to Pierre explaining she would not come with him to Nice, and will remain with Henri, at the same time, telling him she will still be his lover. All these ‘frustrated agitations’ then, are completely pointless. In his concluding lines, Morris looks at Intimacy in (of course) Existentialist terms: Lulu by refusing her choice, remains ‘astride of the paradox’ in her attempt to profit from both relationships.