As I mentioned in a previous post, the last time the West London Ladies who Lurch met we read Obama's Dreams of my Father.
Well, round about then Eva was working in her smart gallery one day when the Big Canon who publishes it came in and somehow or another the subject of books came up.
I imagine it went something like this:
'He's seems like a very nice man, that Obama.' (Eva)
'Yup, we're really cleaning up with his books...' (the Big Canon)
He bought jewelery, apparently. I hope that wasn't supposed to be a surprise...
Anyway, as the conversation turned from politerature to reading groups, the Big Canon promised to send her some books which we could read. Oh did he now, I thought doing my inner, head waving, finger snapping, girlfriend thing when she announced this over the designer grass at the last meting. What's so great about their books - I've been offering them Nancy Huston's Fault Lines for months and there have been no takers, just the usual suggestion that we all reread Jane Sodding Austin. You can't have another publisher wading into your own book club bearing rival best-sellers, Independent Alliance or no ruddy Alliance... Luckily the promise has not yet been fulfilled.
So in the absence of free Canon fodder, I jumped in with a suggestion. I wanted something toast-ish, but very literary toast, the sort of reliable plot-driven, alternative existence kind of book that swallows up two days of your life and makes you feel like you've lost a friend when you turn the last page.
Some of us had raved about Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved (which I read when I had flu during a family holiday in the Athen's Hilton - never even looked out the window at the Acropolis, just curled up in bed with New York for a day longer than was absolutely necessary), so I chose The Sorrows of an American. Fran was not convinced: 'Has anyone read the reviews? Let's have a back up in case it's no good.'
I was mightily offended. No good and Siri do not belong in the same sentence. However, once I had the book I carried it around with me for weeks with all the other things I should have been reading, feeling tired and dispirited every time I looked at it nestling amongst the manuscripts. The book bag is the equivalent of the gym membership - you think that simply having it is sufficient effort - goodness knows you shouldn't have to actually use it. And then I was on my way home from work and the bus broke down, so out came Sorrows and by the time I turned the first page I was gone, living in Brooklyn, with a psychoanalytic practice and a lodger - ah the lodger/landlord plot - what would we do without it? How else would opposites collide? Of course, a few pages further on I was slightly disconcerted to discover I was a man, and then, on the heels of that realisation, just as I was happily settled in to my new life, much perturbed to find myself lusting after another woman. On one page you're looking round your apartment at the furniture feeling comfortably tweedy and bookish and then, hey wait a minute, hold on there, no, no, NO, I don't do breasts...
Too late to go back though, I was already hooked on the dead Norwegian father who conveniently never threw anything away and has left behind a secret and a room full of papers and letters behind so that it can be unearthed, unlike my own father whose only paper trail was a tiny diary in which he recorded the weather and had said, on his last visit to my house for lunch, that 'Marion looked very nice today.' There's a story in that too, but no hidden skeletons. No our skeletons are all out on stands for everyone to label.
I was late for the reading group discussion as I had been to an networking event at a woman's magazine in South London (several freelancers with a case of wine and several bowls of chips with mayonaisse, each of us saying 'I never usually come to these sort of things but I need the work..: I never usually eat chips but these are delicious.... I 'm not really drinking at the moment but yes, why not...) I had done the sensible thing and printed out a map, and then done the stupid thing and forgotten my glasses, so I had been wandering around the Tate Modern looking for the restaurant holding a piece of paper in my hands, thrusting it under the nose of strangers asking them if they could read. Surprisingly nobody punched me.
So, much delayed as a result of my little game of blind woman's bluff, by the time I arrived at the house of the host, the women had already dissed and dismissed the novel and were eating cupcakes, rapturously.
None of them liked my choice.
'Who recommended that awful book anyway,' asked Eva as Fran looked smug.
'Erm it was me,' I said with a mouth full of cake as Siri and I went home with our tales between our legs.
I have them reading Fieldwork next time which they had better like or my credibility is blown. If this book doesn't save me, I fear the Canons might be in a with a chance. Maybe all booksellers should forget the belly bands and the metallic lettering and just cover their books with cream cheese icing.
Some people have no ruddy taste.
