Breakfast at Tiffany's

Every so often (usually when something has gone wrong), I do a little rendition of Audrey Hepburne in the final scene of Breakfast at Tiffany's: one hand clutched to my chest and the other stretched out in front of me, swaying slightly, I yell "Cat? Cat!" with a faraway look in my eyes. With the swaying and all, I probably look drunk, and so no one really gets it. What I am trying to say is that I feel pummelled by life and to try to settle the world beneath me I sometimes act in cryptic ways. In future, perhaps it's best just to say that. Or even to not act unusually.

I like Breakfast at Tiffany's. But something about that final scene has always bothered me. Burrowing into Gregory Peck's arms seems as much of a reaction of fear as her other behaviours. Holly Golightly hasn't decided to trust the man; she's just using him. One day soon, I imagine, she's going to up and leave the man for some exotic white beach where she'll find some other man who wants to tame the wild thing.

All of this is clearer in the book. Miss Golightly is not the soft, fragile, damaged thing she is as Miss Hepburne; she's a mean-ass wildcat, vindicative, snobbish, deeply cynical. She is not soft and fragile, though she might be damaged. But she is damaged by nature, not by circumstance. She sees too much, feels too much, understands too much. She's smart. And not incidentally, like Miss Hepburne.

At the end of the book, there is no sobbing in Mr Peck's arms and Cat stays lost. Lost from Miss Golightly that is, because he finds himself a home, hopefully one where he has a name. The moral is that Miss Golightly and Cat did belong to each other; she just couldn't see it. But by the same token, she never belonged to Mr Peck. He was just another man who wandered in and then out of her life. He wanted to tame her, like the others, not to have each belong to the other. So she leaves him. And she leaves New York.

Someone once told me that the short story represents the ephemeral nature of relationships (I'm not sure if this is a necessary qualification but here goes) in New York. I agree with this - to a point. Because there is a true moment of self-awareness in the short story; one that shows up the last scene of the movie as fluff, as more of the same. Miss Golightly realises that although most relationships are ephemeral, some are more solid. Sometimes, two people really can belong to each other. We're all searching for that, I think, and that is when we accept ephemeral relationships as more solid ones. The movie perpetuates that very mistake.

Both endings, seen in this light, are bitter-sweet, for inverse reasons. Each throws the other into relief. They belong together.

Cat's Eye

While The Hour I First Believed threatened my faith in literature - well, contemporary literature at least - Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood restored it. My first foray into Atwood was the apocalyptic Oryx and Crake, followed by The Blind Assassin and The Handmaid's Tale. None of these really gripped me, yet I was intrigued by the way the author handled her language, a bit like an animal-wrangler might handle her latest pet - adoring but always cautious.

Cat's Eye is about a painter named Elaine Risley preparing for a restrospective of her work in her hometown of Toronto, Canada. Her reflections about the development of her work fuse together with her musings about the ways in which the city has and has not changed, until she is walking the path of her memory to confront old monsters. But there is more, so much more, that Elaine has (wilfully) forgotten and that she refuses to resurrect in her present tense. Something that is made clear and given ringing resonance by the narration of Elaine-as-a-pre-teen, which dominates much of the first two-thirds of the novel.

The plot may sound like that of the latest made-for-TV-in-time-for-Christmas flick, but Atwood's mastery of her craft saves the novel from ever reading like one. Metaphors are draped across the novel, invoked when needed and left to rest when not. No detail is superfluous, but this detail is never overwhelming. It carries you to the conclusions you are meant to reach, while letting you think you walked there yourself.

I finished the novel late last night and woke up this morning chewing on the phrase: "An eye for an eye." While Wally Lamb plays paintball target practice with a similar theme, missing more than he hit, Atwood is like a doctor drawing blood. I will be chewing on this one for a while, I think.

Disclaimer: I can't find an image of the cover of the specific edition that I read, which features the face of a middle-aged woman in shadow, with her chin in one hand. None of the other covers that I can find capture the magic of this novel, so I am choosing not to include a cover image.

The Hour that took an eternity

I haven't finished Wally Lamb's The Hour I First Believed yet, but I feel I have read enough to cast my vote. I have 150 pages of 720-odd to go. I have read both of Lamb's other novels, so I know from experience that they take some time to get going, but that the second half usually makes the initial slog worth it. I really can't see how Lamb is going to redeem himself in the next 150 pages.

This novel has none of the sense of craftmanship that I liked about his previous works. His characters feel like they have been lifted from his previous novels. His prose could do with some heavy editing, preferably with a hatchet. And, speaking of hatchets, Lamb wields his themes like he is trying to slug us with them.

The Hour I First Believed looks at violence and accountability, starting with the Columbine massacre and adding Hurricane Katrina somewhere along the way. There are both public and private crimes, so many of them in fact that I feel I am in the middle of a highbrow soap opera. With a little more subtlety, these crimes could explore some interesting ground. Instead, we rehash the same questions that were raised on every talkshow for two years after the massacre happened, getting nowhere.

Admittedly, I have never been Wally Lamb's biggest fan. I first read She's Come Undone, which I found equally laborious, mostly because the main character is a whiny pain in the ass. She becomes more fleshy in the final pages though. This Much I Know is True redeemed the author, somewhat. The themes were interesting and subtle, catching you out and tripping you up. I still took issue with the main character, another whiny pain in the ass, but somehow his moral insipidousness developed the novel and its themes.

The same character resurfaces in this novel. And no, he has not learnt anything along the way. He is still a whiny pain in the ass. He is also patronising and insipid and amazingly unself-aware given how much time he spends navelgazing. In fact, he reminds me of similar characters written by similar white American postmodern authors. Authors whose representations of women are blatantly misogynistic, but justified because they're "postmodern".

I hate to equate a character with their creator, but I can't help doing this here. Please, make this book end...

How I Live Now

How I Live Now by Meg Roshoff is a treasure that I had not expected to find. There was always a copy or two at the bookshop's biannual sale - I noticed because I love those Penguin Classic covers. I had seen it but never really noticed it. When someone brought it to bookclub, I was intrigued when she described it as an apocalyptic novel that has resonances with WWII Britain.

The main character is your typical (literary) neurotic American teenage girl - typical only in the sense that she reminds me of other characters in other novels bravely fighting wicked stepmothers and half-sisters and fathers who just don't notice them. She is sent to Britain in the face of a pending war to live with her aunt and cousins on a farm. Just when she thinks she has found herself in the Garden of Eden, war breaks out and the cousins are separated. She has to find a way to come to terms with the ways in which war has changed her life while trying to escape back to the rest of her family.

The book is ostensibly set in the present or the future - the main character has a cellphone, although it can't get a signal. But this is really the only clue. Otherwise, this setting has the feel of a Blyton-esque country idyll. In addition, the war does not involve nuclear weapons at all, only 'ordinary' bombs, which makes one wonder whether these kids are stuck in a time warp, and are in fact victims of WWII. These kinds of questions define the spirit of Roshoff's novel. It is passionate and unsettling; it pulls you in like mud, except you're more than happy to sit there, all soggy and cold.

I'm still puzzling over the ending, though. At the beginning of the novel, the main character hints that she and her cousins somehow bring the chaos on themselves. This becomes clearer at the end, but is more an expression of guilt than of reality. But then, that last chapter...

Portrait of an artist

I used to think that the idea of a tortured artist, writhing in a stinking mess of their own emotions, was a Romantic ideal. It served to idealise the profession, when a true artist is dedicated and disciplined and armed with intelligence. In the same breath I often wondered what makes art Art. What is it that makes so much contemporary art seem lifeless, intellectual? It stirs the emotions, sure, but often just because it is controversial.

Being a writer is hard. Writing a novel is hard. Every time I start a sentence I have to fight a monster who tells me this isn't good enough, I cannot do this. Every time I read something I have written, I have to agree with the monster. Yet something in me believes I can do this, so I persevere.

I wade through human emotions, picking the ones that are just right for what I want to say. Sometimes they're pretty little darlings, but usually they are distorted aborted things. Each emotion goes together with a set of gestures and facial expressions, personality traits and a personal history. It's difficult not to take these things on as your own, and sometimes they creep into the cracks and layer your everyday.

And usually, they are part of your everyday anyway. You recognise emotions because you have felt them; you assign gestures and expressions because you have used them.

At some point, someone isn't going to approve. Their criticism is going to be hidden in their words and gestures and facial expressions, and you know where they hide so you will see them. Every compliment contains a criticism, a something you are not.

But doesn't this hyper-self-awareness, this emotional sensitivity, make one's art better? Isn't THIS what art is? Something that shows you the best and the worst of people, and casts a spell around it so that you can't look away? Not something that horrifies you so much that you have to? Art is pain and suffering. It is also dedication and discipline. Art is venturing out into the depths of human experience and coming back with a spiny prize in your cupped palms.

Thirteen minutes...

One of my short fiction pieces was published in itch earlier this month and people keep telling me they wish it hadn't ended so abruptly. That abruptness was intentional; people are supposed to feel like they have been thrown up against a brick wall, like I did. I had felt completely disorientated after this experience, but I realise now that there wasn't enough groundwork.

I love the idea of the city and I love writing about the city. But that love can be difficult to reconcile with my writing. I see a bizarre character, like a man carrying two streetlight poles slung over his shoulder or a man preaching next to a traffic light, and I want to write them into a story. Usually, they become a symbol of an emotion or concept.

But how do I do this without in some way stripping them of their humanity? This sounds like a purely intellectual, and therefore redundant, question, but it's not. Who am I to patronise someone by using them as a symbol? How would you like it if someone wrote about you and then claimed that you embodied sadness or the rift between the classes?

In this particular story, I assume first that these people are in some way a danger to me because they come from a different social 'class'. Then I assume that they hold some knowledge about life that makes them spiritually superior to me. As if poverty is the portal to enlightenment.

That is my conflict at the end of the story. This is the brick wall I was thrown against. But, just like the previous piece that was published, I didn't tell people enough of the truth behind it.

In Miss Lecter, I hoped that people would see a break near the end, before the teacher imparts her moral. I was too chicken and too inexperienced to tell people that anything can be turned into a religion using pretty words. So instead I took the middle ground.

Being a writer means being brave. I haven't been brave enough.

"If Kelsey Newman's theory about the end of time is true..." I will have enough time to read every book on my list

Browsing through the local bookshop at lunch, I saw Scarlett Thomas's latest, Our Tragic Universe. When I first read The End of Mr Y, I loved it, although now I think perhaps there is just too much pop-science with very little substance. This amendment to my opinion might have something to do the second novel of hers I read, called Popco. That one just didn't hold together very well - I would like to say that it lacks direction, but it does have a direction, just not a very interesting one.

I'm intrigued by the blurb of Our Tragic Universe, but more specifically by this line: "If Kelsey Newman's theory about the end of time is true, we are all going to live forever." So, more pop-science then. And oh I do love pop-science (no sarcasm intended although it is here somehow). But the first paragraph let me down. It reads like something a talented high school student might write with some coaching, rather than something written by an experienced author. Read it for yourself and see.

To add to this, as much as I love the original cover idea, it seems a little staid - especially since the world and her mother have since used the same idea. They seem to have made some effort to update it through the colours, and it definitely jumped off the shelf at me, but something about it still bores me. Perhaps I will feel differently when I finish reading it?