I'm reading another one of the books floating around: The Best of Friends by Joanna Trollope. I read The Men and the Girls, also by Trollope, last year, but never got around to blogging about it.
I'm about 20% in, and my opinion of Trollope is undergoing a shift. I had thought of Trollope as a writer who liked to stand cliches on their head; in this novel she seems to be exploring a problem that does not begin as an exploded cliche.
Trollope has a website, by the way, and from it I learned that she's been named to the panel for the Orange Prize ("Celebrating excellence, innovation and accessibility, it is the UK’s most prestigious annual book award for international fiction written by a woman."). A new book is coming out in February or March: The Soldier's Wife. And, again, according to her website, she's one of six novelists that has been asked to "rework" the novels of Jane Austen (hers is Sense and Sensibility). Since I sense no decrease in interest in Austen, I bet the book will be successful and more folks will discover Trollope.
According to Wikipedia, Trollope is a fifth-generation niece of the great Victorian novelist, Anthony Trollope.
Another amusing bit of trivia about her is that, according to this article in the Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/feb/11/featuresreviews.guardianreview10, she has been dubbed Queen of the Aga Saga but she protests that she's mentioned an Aga in only two of her novels. The Men and The Girls is one of them; Julia has an Aga. And Julia would have an Aga: not because the Aga is so expensive but because it's the best. Julia's gift, and her affliction, may be that she is attractive, an excellent manager, one of those people who's good at everything -- except, perhaps, understanding the anguish of the mere mortals among us. However that may be, her strength is important to her husband and her family in the crisis that occurs in the novel.
In The Best of Friends Hilary finds out, after agreeing to marry Laurence, that his best friend is a woman, Gina. Twenty years later, this friendship becomes problematic when Fergus, Gina's husband, suddenly leaves Gina and Gina, bereft, becomes a burden to Hilary and Laurence in her state of collapse.
As I read this novel I really enjoyed bits of psychological insight Trollope offers. When Gina confesses to her mother that she knows her own daughter, Sophy, blames Gina for the collapse of her marriage and is afraid to talk to Sophy because she can't bear being confronted by her anger, her mother Vi says, "You've got to do something to show her that you care."
On the whole, however, I preferred The Men and the Girls, with its cast of really improbable characters. James meets Kate at a bar when his friend, Hugh, accidentally spills beer on her. James and Kate start to go out and and two months later, Kate moves in. Kate is deliriously happy and seems not to notice or ever think about their 20-year age difference. But Kate refuses to marry James.
Hugh, James' lifelong friend, is married to a woman a little younger than Kate; Hugh and Julia met at work and Julia, Hugh's wife, seems never to have even noticed their age difference. She's an attractive, confident woman who's mapped out a life with Hugh, children, and a tastefully decorated antique house.
And then, as they say, it all goes pear-shaped. When James tells Kate that he's struck a woman on a bicycle with his car, Kate snaps, "You stupid old man," and horribly, really means it, I think. Soon James becomes taken, almost infatuated, with the woman he hit. Miss Batchelor, his victim, is a bright, educated, lonely and impoverished woman -- older than James -- who enjoys both James' company and all the attention that follows, in a clear-eyed way.
Kate becomes jealous and moves out, leaving her daughter (not James' child) behind, and she misses her daughter, painfully. James misses Kate, and he, his elderly uncle, Leonard, his old friend Hugh, and Joss, Kate's daughter, make up a lively and delightfully mismatched menagerie, with frequent visits from Oxford spinster Miss Batchelor and later, visits from a homesick American academic wife who falls in love with James.
Both novels have slightly surprising, not entirely happy endings in which some people have to Be Brave and Get On With It.
Trollope seems to take cliched ideas -- in this case, older men married to younger women -- and turn the cliches of our thinking about these inside out and on their head. Of course, I like that sort of thing.
But I find myself feeling still confused about certain things: how can it be that Kate could fall in love with James, and Julia with Hugh, without ever thinking about the age difference? How could Laurence have a woman as his best friend for years without trying to make it something more? James is described as someone who has not made any effort to look younger, and yet he engenders love in two women and perhaps a kind of fascination, or at least enthusiasm, in Miss Batchelor. What is James' secret? And what drew him to Kate after several years of relatively contented widowerhood? I understood that Kate's feelings about James changed, but I never quite understood why.
I'm about 20% in, and my opinion of Trollope is undergoing a shift. I had thought of Trollope as a writer who liked to stand cliches on their head; in this novel she seems to be exploring a problem that does not begin as an exploded cliche.
Trollope has a website, by the way, and from it I learned that she's been named to the panel for the Orange Prize ("Celebrating excellence, innovation and accessibility, it is the UK’s most prestigious annual book award for international fiction written by a woman."). A new book is coming out in February or March: The Soldier's Wife. And, again, according to her website, she's one of six novelists that has been asked to "rework" the novels of Jane Austen (hers is Sense and Sensibility). Since I sense no decrease in interest in Austen, I bet the book will be successful and more folks will discover Trollope.
According to Wikipedia, Trollope is a fifth-generation niece of the great Victorian novelist, Anthony Trollope.
Another amusing bit of trivia about her is that, according to this article in the Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/feb/11/featuresreviews.guardianreview10, she has been dubbed Queen of the Aga Saga but she protests that she's mentioned an Aga in only two of her novels. The Men and The Girls is one of them; Julia has an Aga. And Julia would have an Aga: not because the Aga is so expensive but because it's the best. Julia's gift, and her affliction, may be that she is attractive, an excellent manager, one of those people who's good at everything -- except, perhaps, understanding the anguish of the mere mortals among us. However that may be, her strength is important to her husband and her family in the crisis that occurs in the novel.
In The Best of Friends Hilary finds out, after agreeing to marry Laurence, that his best friend is a woman, Gina. Twenty years later, this friendship becomes problematic when Fergus, Gina's husband, suddenly leaves Gina and Gina, bereft, becomes a burden to Hilary and Laurence in her state of collapse.
As I read this novel I really enjoyed bits of psychological insight Trollope offers. When Gina confesses to her mother that she knows her own daughter, Sophy, blames Gina for the collapse of her marriage and is afraid to talk to Sophy because she can't bear being confronted by her anger, her mother Vi says, "You've got to do something to show her that you care."
On the whole, however, I preferred The Men and the Girls, with its cast of really improbable characters. James meets Kate at a bar when his friend, Hugh, accidentally spills beer on her. James and Kate start to go out and and two months later, Kate moves in. Kate is deliriously happy and seems not to notice or ever think about their 20-year age difference. But Kate refuses to marry James.
Hugh, James' lifelong friend, is married to a woman a little younger than Kate; Hugh and Julia met at work and Julia, Hugh's wife, seems never to have even noticed their age difference. She's an attractive, confident woman who's mapped out a life with Hugh, children, and a tastefully decorated antique house.
And then, as they say, it all goes pear-shaped. When James tells Kate that he's struck a woman on a bicycle with his car, Kate snaps, "You stupid old man," and horribly, really means it, I think. Soon James becomes taken, almost infatuated, with the woman he hit. Miss Batchelor, his victim, is a bright, educated, lonely and impoverished woman -- older than James -- who enjoys both James' company and all the attention that follows, in a clear-eyed way.
Kate becomes jealous and moves out, leaving her daughter (not James' child) behind, and she misses her daughter, painfully. James misses Kate, and he, his elderly uncle, Leonard, his old friend Hugh, and Joss, Kate's daughter, make up a lively and delightfully mismatched menagerie, with frequent visits from Oxford spinster Miss Batchelor and later, visits from a homesick American academic wife who falls in love with James.
Both novels have slightly surprising, not entirely happy endings in which some people have to Be Brave and Get On With It.
Trollope seems to take cliched ideas -- in this case, older men married to younger women -- and turn the cliches of our thinking about these inside out and on their head. Of course, I like that sort of thing.
But I find myself feeling still confused about certain things: how can it be that Kate could fall in love with James, and Julia with Hugh, without ever thinking about the age difference? How could Laurence have a woman as his best friend for years without trying to make it something more? James is described as someone who has not made any effort to look younger, and yet he engenders love in two women and perhaps a kind of fascination, or at least enthusiasm, in Miss Batchelor. What is James' secret? And what drew him to Kate after several years of relatively contented widowerhood? I understood that Kate's feelings about James changed, but I never quite understood why.
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