Motherload

I knew going into reading Kathleen MacMahon's first novel, This is How it Ends , that I would have trouble with it. Straightforwardly, this is because it received an enormous advance, and I'm envious. I'm hoping that by outing that here and now, what I have to say will somehow be more objective, as opposed to simply objectionable.  Let me also say, however, that I really wanted to enjoy it — no one goes into reading a novel wanting it to be rubbish. There isn't enough time for that. You're always hoping for gold. Here are the problems I had with it: 1. Contrived literariness It’s such obviously obvious literary ground. It comes across like a recipe for a 'literary novel' — you can feel the market positioning.  Can you, by the way, have a 'literary novel'? Surely something's either brilliantly well written, or it's not. Surely 'literature' refers to a piece of writing that's so powerful it st...

I loved Jeffrey Eugenides's Virgin Suicides , for its kooky, gothic feel, and the beautiful pendulous, globular writing. His next, Middlesex , meh, not so much. It felt to me like a novel-length splurge on a Foucauldian or Judith Butlerian problem. Perhaps a little precious of me, but it seemed dated, although apparently to the rest of the world, a thing of wonder. I also felt there were longueurs . The Marriage Plot , which we have waited many years for, feels like, literally, more of the same. I found it meandering, for all the wrong reasons. If its title referred ironically to its own lack of plot, this raised little more than a tired lit crit eyebrow in me. I kept waiting for the motor to start, to get under way. I felt as though I kept being fed character synopses. Perhaps this was because he'd chosen to write a perspectival novel in the third person: we move from one of the three main characters' points of view to another, filling in gaps in the (very simple) plo...

Daniel Kahneman was on Radio 4 today. The author of Thinking Fast and Slow set listeners a couple of logic problems. I put down the broccoli chopping and paid attention. A bat and ball together cost £1.10. The bat costs £1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? I fell straight into the trap — the ball must cost 10p. I jotted it down, and waited for the next. All roses are flowers. Some flowers fade quickly. Therefore some roses fade quickly. Is the logic right or wrong?  WRONG! Just because some flowers fade quickly, it doesn't mean that roses are in that group automatically. And while some roses might fade quickly, it's not because of the reason that 'some flowers fade quickly'. The latter I felt able to 'do': it was a syllogism , and its third part didn't follow from its first two, a logical fallacy. The maths question niggled at me, I felt dumb, because I knew it must be a trap, but I literally couldn't think how to solve i...

Here's something a bit fascinating. I just looked up the definition of 'jubilee'. It comes from the Hebrew, yobel , meaning ram or ram's horn, the thing with which you proclaim a jubilee. In Jewish history, the year of Jubilee was: A year of emancipation and restoration, which was to be kept every fifty years, and to be proclaimed by the blast of trumpets throughout the land; during it the fields were to be left untilled, Hebrew slaves were to be set free, and lands and houses in the open country or unwalled towns that had been sold were to revert to their former owners or their heirs.  The Romans got hold of this concept, and then the Christians, so that in the Roman Catholic church during the Middle Ages, a jubilee is 'a year of remission during which plenary indulgence may be obtained by a pilgrimage to Rome and certain pious works' . By 1526, it's come to mean 'shouting'. By 2012, as far as this mother is concerned, it has come to mean thi...

So I'm driving along, having just come out of a meeting, towards the end of last week. I hear the phone go, and when I have a moment look to see who the caller is. It's the children's school. The only reason the school calls me is if something bad has happened. I brace myself, and listen to the message. "Your son has been stung by a bee. Could you come into the school and take out the sting, as we're not allowed to do it." What? What ? So you're able to take my son and teach him, feed him, demand that he go to the toilet on time, tell him off for not paying attention, let him play in the enormous playground, tell his friends off for being rowdy, tell me off for somehow not teaching him at home enough ... but you're unable to administer basic first aid if he is stung? I go to the school. My son is sitting on his tiny chair, whey-faced, blotchy with shock, clutching a bear, and streaked with tears. He sees me and goes completely to pieces. He is ...

I was chatting to two good friends over the weekend. First of all the talk turned to the rudeness of dinner guests who RSVP, not with food allergies, but with whole shopping lists of foods they just don't happen to like. In one priceless example, a woman wrote back to one of my friends saying, " if you're thinking of a creamy pudding, I'll pass ". After we'd stopped laughing about this, one of my friends said, "oh, and can I do a straw poll on sheet washing? How often do you do yours?" It was perhaps sad in the first place that she wouldn't have thought of asking my husband this question, or perhaps it's just a capitulation to the apparently inevitable. But setting that aside, the point behind her question was her consternation at finding out that mums at her children's school wash their family's sheets every week. It wasn't that this made my friend feel sluttish. Far from it. My friend runs a highly successful marketing c...

This week, my son has been iller than I've seen him for a while. It's been a strange journey, which began with a headache at the weekend. It cleared up, so we went to visit a friend, but on the journey, he seemed to subside in the back of the car like a wilting leek. By the time we arrived at our friend's, he was sleepy, feverish and complaining of a stiff neck. The mention of the neck sent us ricocheting to the local A & E, suddenly envisioning meningitis, undiagnosed and fatal. They declared the problem to be an ear infection, and sent us packing with Amoxycillin and ear drops. I left the hospital, and took him for a treaty snack in a cafe. Whereupon he vomited vast amounts of pink liquid all over the floor, against the bin, up my sleeve, down his coat. Everyone in the cafe froze into a waxworks rictus of horror, pity and concern. This was the prelude to a couple of days of mystifying fever, projectile vomiting, further agonizing trips to the GP, re-diagnoses ...