Cristina García’s novel, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, is pretty plainly not my sort of book, but there was a line in John Vernon’s fairly nice review the Book Review that I took to be a bit more declarative than it was. “García … attempts to deepen her characters with each successive pass of their stories.” Attempts! I’ve just re-read the review, and I might as well just refer you to it again. The writing is very good, but the characters and situations have a stock feel to them — and I really haven’t read very much Latin American fiction! Set in a hotel in what feels like Guatemala or El Salvador, the chapters follow a band of initially unrelated characters through a tumultuous week. It is difficult not to think of Grand Hotel, not only because of the slice-of-life feel to the glimpses into the characters’ lives, but also because those lives are lacking a certain inner substantiality. I can’t say that I cared for any of them. A hotel waitress referred to as “the ex-guerilla” is perhaps the most sympathetic, but she’s troubled by the bitterness of her activist history (and the ghost of her brother). A lady lawyer of German extraction who arranges for the sale of infants to prosperous Americans is agreeably hate-able. The story of the sad-sack Korean factory owner comes to a surprisingly happy ending. There — I oughtn’t to have said that. I’m glad that I read the book, mostly because I can say that I did, and didn’t mind doing so. But I’m constitutionally unable to relish the highly-colored narrative arabesques that threaten to send Ms García’s stories over the top.

Much more sympathetic were two novels that I read over the weekend. Yes, two. One was Jane Gardam’s God on the Rocks, and the other was Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado. Both books are astringently funny, but the one is as English as the other is American. The spirit of Ivy Compton-Burnett hovers over God on the Rocks, which came out in 1978 and has only now made its appearance in the United States. There’s a hyper-real feeling to the dialogue, as if every remark not only carries several levels of meaning but is also directed at interlocutors unseen as well as seen. This is another way of saying that the dialogue does not feel straightforward — which is precisely what Sally Jay Gorce’s tumble of talk feels like. Sally Jay is Ms Dundy’s ingénue, in her third month in Paris just out of college. It’s difficult to believe that Jean-Luc Godard did not pattern Patricia Franchini, the Jean Seberg role in A Bout de Souffle, after Sally Jay; but then Sally Jay is an avatar of sorts, an embodiment of postwar American larkiness. Her picaresque adventures have the rough cut of memoir that has been only slightly touched-up, and indeed the author remarks in an afterward that “all the impulsive, outrageous things my heroine does, I did. All the sensible things she did, I made up.”

The novel is narrated in the first person throughout — Sally Jay’s voice is as distinctive as Auntie Mame’s — but the third part of the novel is told as a series of diary entries, in which the heroine does not know what’s going to happen the next day. Here she recounts an exuberant evening spent with a matador/film star and his entourage.

Dinner was a riot. We threw pellets of bread across the tale at each other and made airplanes out of the menus and sent them sailing around the dining room. Then we had a really great idea. We were going to put a pat of butter on the end of knife and use the knife as a catapult to see if the butter wouuld stick to the ceiling. But Larry stopped us, so we flipped water at each other with our spoons instead.

Bax and Larry thought we’d gone crazy. I don’t know what the Quadrille thought, except it was clear that anything old Wheero wanted to do was OK with them. They were all twice his age, but if he’d been the King of the Underworld, they couldn’t have been more under his thumb. Unwritten law of the bullring.

We drove off to Bérobie in the lavender Cadillac with the hood down, Wheero and I sitting on top, our feet on the back seat, waving to the cars that passed and nearly falling off at every corner.

We found the little bar we’d been to the other night and started playing some more games. We took the labels off beer-bottles and put them on everybody’s wallets, sticky side up, and thre them at the ceiling so that the labels stuck there and the wallets came clattering down all over the drinks on the table.

I can’t say that such high jinks are to be found on every page of The Dud Avocado, and the madcap reminiscence of Robert Benchley is pretty much unique to this passage. But the novel is almost always this much fun to read.

“Fun” is decidedly not a word that comes to mind in connection with God on the Rocks. Set on the eve of World War II, in a Yorkshire sea-side town that’s so middle-class respectable that even the weather seems bourgeois, it’s a story of lost loose ends being tied up and then tied up again. At the heart of the narrative, a cold and ambitious woman has long before forbidden her son to marry the daughter of a local shopkeeper whom he has known since childhood. Now, in the novel’s present, the mother is an invalid, and to spite her socialistically-inclined children she has turned her home into a lunatic asylum, where one of the patients is a painter who will some day be recognized as great — or at any rate one of those blue plaques will be mounted on a nearby wall. Now the old lovers reconnect, and turn out to be somewhat different from what they might have expected. The shopgirl has married a religious bank manager, with whom she has two children. Indeed, what keeps all of this information from coming straight to the fore is Gardam’s focus on eight year-old Margaret’s impressions, which underscore the futility of trying to “protect” intelligent children from the facts of life (in the broadest sense of that term). Only gradually do the adults achieve the spotlight.

I can imagine someone’s coming away from God on the Rocks with the impression that it’s about the strangeness of love, but to my mind it’s not about love at all, but rather about the things that often stand in the place of love — desire, affection, duty, failure of imagination. As for love, it’s what’s really on the rocks.

At a tea to which Margaret is taken by her mother, the unprecedentedness of which is obliquely but almost oppressively apparent, the adults suddenly fall into a puzzling exchange of remarks.

Margaret looked from face to face like a person at a tennis match. She knew — though heaven knew how — that this game had been played before and very often and very happily. The tennis match idea stayed with her and she had a queer picture of her mother and Mr Frayling playing tennis with careful slow strokes on a summer evening with the shadow of the net growing long across the grass. Some people stood watching from a distance. Perhaps some old photograph.

“Do you and Mummy play this?” Charles Frayling asked her with his head on one side, as if to catch her answer exactly. sToll muddled with tennis, she looked at her mother.

“I don’t think we do, do we, dear?” Elinor said.

“Not ever.”

“Try,” said Charles. “It’s called the grand great word game.”

“The great grand word game,” said Elinor.

Later, Margaret informs the company that her father does not like to hear her mother addressed as ‘Mummy.’

It’s easy to see why God on the Rocks wasn’t brought out over here in the late Seventies. Its Englishness is an acquired taste, its indirectness a jeux d’esprit that might strike the uninitiated as merely withdrawn. It is impossible to imagine Sally Jay Gorce reading it without wondering if it might make better sense if she held the book upside-down.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 17th, 2010 at 12:01 am.