And guess what, Jane? Fairy tales aren't real.

Hey readers! I have finally got around to a book review -- well, a rant/book review, in letter form, a la the Mercy review from a while back. Enjoy~

Dear Jane Green,

How could you? How could you write a book like Jemima J?

I have to assume that you are an intelligent woman, because, in general, writing is hard, and writing a novel is even harder. You have somehow managed to come up with an okay plot, some decent characters, and even played around a little bit with narration and perspective. You're also British, which, as we all know, makes you at least sound smarter than us kooky New-Worlders.

But you have obviously missed the memo on some very important facts of life, and I find myself in the awkward position of both wanting to kill you and wanting to take you aside and have a nice, deep heart-to-heart with you. Since I obviously can't, I will instead have to settle for writing you a cyber-letter, a letter which you will never read, but will make me feel infinitely better for having gotten my incredible anger off my chest.

So, Jane (can I call you Jane?), here are just a few of the things I feel you should know:

1) Not all fat girls are funny. I see why you would like to think so, Jane, and we would all like to think that everyone has one redeeming factor that could make someone fall in love with them, and for fat girls, it's easy to say that they have excellent personalities, or are sarcastically funny. In fact, it's almost realistic, because so often people who are insecure use sarcasm or other forms of humor as defense mechanisms.

I thought you were really, really close to getting to the 'some people are just mean' idea, as well as the 'just because someone's fat doesn't mean she's a good person deep inside' theory, when you introduced Jenny the surly PA. But as it turns out, Jenny is a delightful person, who also nabs the dream guy. Too bad, Jane. Too bad.

2) Not everyone would be striking if they just lost some weight. Guess what, Jane? I know you're beautiful (nice picture on the jacket, by the way), but here's a news flash: some people are just dogs. There are no two ways about it. There are plenty of skinny, ugly girls out there, plenty of average-sized ugly girls, and plenty of people who are just kind of middling. Paul the graphics dude drawing in some cheekbones on Jemima is not enough to convince me that she would, in fact, be a babe if she lost 90 pounds.

And shame on you for telling fat girls that if they would only exert a little effort, lose a little bit of weight, they'd be turning heads in Starbucks. That is so untrue, I can't even express to you how completely false it is. It's almost as outrageous as telling women that if they just lost a stone or two, they would finally get that promotion, those designer clothes -- which you also seem to think will actually happen, judging from your novel.

3) Not every girl gets the guy. Jane, have you ever heard of a spinster? That's right, that's a woman who never marries, usually because no one wanted to marry them. Sometimes they have a terrible past, like Miss Havisham, but more often than not they are just women who were left over when everyone else paired off. Just because some chick loses weight does not mean she is going to get the guy of her dreams, and it is just so wrong of you to suggest that someone should change everything about herself on the off chance that the guy of her dreams will fall in love with her.

For every Jemima, there is an average girl somewhere, pining after some gorgeous guy who will never notice she exists. Eventually, said average girl will settle, not for the hot young TV presenter, but for some balding 40-year-old man. Or maybe for an overweight World of Warcraft aficionado with Cheez Doodle stains on his t-shirt. But Jane, she will settle, or buy thirty cats and live alone in an apartment for the rest of her sad, lonely life. Those are her choices.

4) Not all almost-virgins are good in bed. Let's be real, Jane. There's a reason virgins are virgins. It's because either no one wants to have sex with them, or they're so freaked out about the possibility that they might blow it (not in that way) that they put off sex as long as possible. Or they're religious, but let's put that option aside for the moment. Either way, the first time one of these girls has sex is going to be an awkward, messy, possibly painful experience. It is not all doing the reverse cowgirl on some mind-blowing hottie, whom they will later shag on a desk, a fur rug, and in an elevator. Life is just not that fair.

5) The Perfect Guy isn't ever perfect. Now, Jane, I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that I'm totally wrong, because you have met your knight in shining armor (sorry, armour, to you) and he is wonderful and fantastic and everything you dreamed, which is why you dedicated your book to him. That's nice. But I don't believe it for one bloody second.

You have created this character, Ben Williams, and he is certainly delightful in every way. Ben is too delightful. Ben doesn't even have the flaws requisite in a Nora Roberts character. Ben never leaves his socks on the floor. Ben collects original vintage political cartoons. Ben drinks Becks from the bottle, wearing an impeccable suit and watching the news. Ben is adorably awkward, and actually utters the phrase: "Er, yes. Quite." Ben the deputy news editor is so hot every woman in London is absolutely gagging to be with him, yet he remains blissfully unaware of his hotness and is just waiting for the right girl.

But what is most important in our darling Benjamin's life? Becoming a BBC newsreader, and hanging out with the junior reporters on staff. Oh, and being incredibly sweet to the fat girl. Whom he will later shag, but only after she's turned into the babe of his dreams.

The above are just some basic things I think you should be aware of, dear Jane. You are a good writer -- hell, I stuck with you for 300 pages while you blithered on about Jemima's weight loss regime and how amazingly sweet Mr. Deputy News Editor is. I think it's cool that you played off of the little Brad/Jennifer thing -- I am assuming Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston were together when you wrote this? At any rate, even if it's just a coincidence, I enjoyed it.

And, to be fair, I enjoyed that Jemima lost the weight, I enjoyed that she got the guy, I enjoyed the makeover, and I enjoyed that she was happy with herself. What I didn't enjoy was the letdown when I closed the book -- the letdown as I realized that life wasn't actually like this, that no one loses 90 pounds in three months, that a guy like Ben Williams would never notice Jemima J, and that not every girl is a diamond in the rough.

So thanks for giving me four hours of escape to a world where anything is possible, but maybe next time you could get a tighter grip on reality and possibly write a book worth rereading.

Thanks,
Disgruntled Reader

PS: Americans get sarcasm fine, thanks. There's no need to be snarky about it.
PPS: Are you aware that your main concept is a lot like Jennifer Weiner's in Good in Bed? Just curious.

'Tis in my memory lock'd...

I’ve read a few books in the past month or so, mainly topping off half-read books that have collected dust over the past two years. While none of them seemed to really merit their own post, I sat and tried to think of some meaningful common theme or thread that would connect them and thus allow me to post about all of them at once. I’ll give you their titles and you tell me if you can come up with one: Peter the Great: A Biography, The Museum Guard and The Forest. Anything? I was stuck in a similar situation of no continuity. The best and most pathetic result of my thinking was “history.” The common thread of history. Pitiful, I know.

Or is it really so? Forgive me, but I would argue that the common thread of history connects much more than three books pretty obviously about that subject. The Forest by Edward Rutherford aptly illustrates this perhaps obvious point. It is an epic work of historic nonfiction that fascinatingly traipses through centuries of English history focused in and around the New Forest in southern England (near Salisbury, the setting of one of his other wonderful and similarly formatted books, Sarum). The book moves through the centuries briefly pausing every two hundred years or so to look in on the evolution of a given place, a few chosen families and the country’s broader history. The book is comprised of little snapshots and while each chapter is equally interesting and Rutherford undeniably excels at quickly creating fully-formed characters one can’t help but care about, the broader point the book makes is that while we all go about our lives and seem so unrelated and so different, a common history unites us all, and oftentimes even more common and closer than you think. Rutherford makes the subtle point that history is more important than just for studying; it shapes who we are and who we become as a people, as individuals and as families. Even without active knowledge of the past—a mode in which most of his characters blithely exist—history undeniably moves us.

The Museum Guard by Howard Norman concurs with the point that history is very much an active presence. His book is more character study than novel and tells the story of DeFoe Russett, a museum guard of a small, local art museum in Halifax called the Glace Museum. DeFoe’s simple existence is utterly unraveled (seriously, our even-keeled art lover is by the end of the book to be found in prison) when a certain painting arrives at the Glace Museum. The painting depicts a woman standing outside of a hotel in Amsterdam holding a loaf of bread and it proceeds to change all the character’s life in ways big and small. The book broadly deals with the onset of World War II, jewishness and how art can affect our lives, but DeFoe is most moved by two things: the premature death of his parents in a local zeppelin crash and the strange transformation undergone by his lover inspired by the painting. Both these events are deeply rooted in history: the zeppelin crash that killed his parents becomes part of the local history, dehumanizing the event for DeFoe even as he most sorely still personally feels the aftermath, and his lover retreats from reality into the historical moment portrayed in the painting. History is another character in the book; the common local history, the feeling throughout the book clearly felt by all the characters that they are witnessing history as Hitler begins his rampage through Europe and the actual withdrawal into history by DeFoe’s lover all reiterate the point that history is no passive afterthought. History is everywhere, informing decisions, moving action and forcing retrospection.

Of these three books, perhaps no protagonist (or subject, in this case) most sorely feels the pull and judgment of history than Peter in Peter the Great: A Biography by Lindsey Hughes. Of all the people in the books, Peter is by far the most aware of history as an entity. Rutherford’s characters primarily simply exist, at best only partially informed of what has come before through folklore or rumor. Norman’s DeFoe is primarily uninformed and only speaks to the history that he himself has experienced. But, as Hughes argues, Peter the Great was extremely conscious of the importance of history and strove constantly to make sure he was remembered properly and regarded well in the annals of history that came thereafter. Not only that, Hughes makes the argument at the end of her book that while Peter himself was involved in his own making of history, the Romanovs who held the throne after him were very much aware of the political importance and usefulness of history, using Peter’s memory and image well into the twentieth century to prove to their followers (and detractors) how good they really were for Russia. History was seen and used as a legitimization of the present because it still felt so relevant and so real. History was not something mustily confined to books no one read. History was real and it was everywhere.

Call this review an attempt to proselytize by a former history major, but history is too often mistaken for something unimportant, easily forgotten and rarely studied. I believe it is far more relevant to today than most people would give it credit for. As Rutherford shows through his study of the centuries, history is undeniably everywhere, even in the commonest or simplest story. Every moment is history. Life is entirely made up of interlocking disciplines and to forget any one among them, history particularly in my opinion, or to dismiss any one as irrelevant to the present, is not simply lamentable, it is inexplicable. Anything can create a connection and history does daily.

Power to the Sisterhood -- I guess?

Isabella Thorpe and Catherine Morland in the BBC's production of Northanger Abbey, courtesy of The New York Times

Yep, I am a failure. See what happens? You give me a co-blogger and I get lazy. Anyway, trust me, I have been doing lots of literary things, just nothing that's made it on this blog...until now.

I know this is not going to win me any friends, but I am becoming less and less a fan of feminist criticism. This is not to say that it's entirely without merit, or that feminist critics are not really intelligent, educated people. What I would like to point out, though, is that because most feminist critics are women themselves, they're more apt to project, or to see what they want to see in the books they examine.

Take The Romance of the Forest, for example. This is a great story, by one of the first popular woman writers, and clearly Ann Radcliffe must have been somewhat independent in her own right to even be a female writer. The main character in Romance is Adeline, a young lady who has been separated from her father, separated from her foster family, is being chased by an evil marquis, and who is pretty sure her ain true love is rotting in prison awaiting his death. So you can see how there is a lot of opportunity for Adeline to step up and assert her strong-willed womanhood or whatever.

Claudia Johnson, in her book Equivocal Beings (which is actually brilliant, except for this one point), argues that "Adeline behaves like a pretty good man, at least when her 'glowing charms' aren't in the way," further saying that Adeline and Theodore essentially 'trade off' being tearful and valiant at various points in the novel.

While it's true that Theodore has some tears throughout the novel, they are mostly when he is in prison being visited by his sick father. It's more standard for the male lead to be brave in this case, but when confronted by the prospect of death within the hour, along with a sobbing father, sister, and lover, I think pretty much any man would break (or could without being judged, at any rate). And let's remember that Theodore has valiantly rescued Adeline about twelve times before this point.

Adeline, however, is not valiant. Ever. Possibly when she finally breaks and tells La Luc she's in love with Theodore could be construed as heroic, but really, since she doesn't even know why that's important, it's not that heroic (hopefully that's not a spoiler...). She weeps and wails and moans and faints at every opportunity, including when she and Theodore are confronted in an inn by the Marquis' troops and both their lives are threatened. At some point, she actually hinders Theodore's usefulness, preventing him from defending them against the soliders by throwing a faint.

To interpret the book in a way that made any sense to me, I was forced to read Adeline not as a character, but as a plot device, or a catalyst, a passive center around which everything revolved (much like the eye of a hurricane). I should hesitate to take Claudia Johnson on regarding this point, but I think she's mistaken.

That's not to say she's the only one. Constantly, discussions in my literature class will revolve around "strong women" in novels where such women simply don't exist. One memorable discussion revolved around Isabella Thorpe, a character in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. Isabella and Catherine Morland, the main character, are both in Bath for the marriage market, but while Catherine sets her sights on Henry Tilney and sticks with him for the duration, Isabella plays two or three men against each other and, I believe, ends up losing both of them.

One girl in my class argued that Isabella was a strong woman, playing the marriage market to her own advantage and going after what she wanted. She argued that Jane Austen was way ahead of her time, having a character like this who went after her goal and didn't let anyone get in her way. She said she loved Isabella as a character because she was strong-willed, said what she liked, and did what she wanted.

Note, please, that this same girl takes pride in her own strong will and straight talk.

Note, also, that while Catherine Morland manages to nab the guy she wanted in the first place, Isabella constantly attempts to sell herself to the highest bidder, who turns out to be no bidder at all and abandons her in Bath.

That's not even mentioning the slight aside that while Catherine is a flawed character, she is still human and fairly realistic, while Isabella is an exaggerated gold-digger and, some critics argue, just an ironic characiture of the kind of woman in high society who was only interested in marrying well.

So while I'm glad women out there are re-reading classic novels from a feminist point of view and attempting to shed new light on the works, I think every reader and critic out there needs to be aware of the temptation to project what one wishes a character was onto a fairly ordinary and un-liberated character.

Obviously, there are flaws in every critical theory, from biographical critics who draw lines between actual and fictional events where there is no connection, to formal critics who fail to draw connections where they clearly exist, and we cannot expect those flaws to disappear. But it's important to recognize these flaws when we meet them, and also to be able to field them with more well-founded arguments.

(I promise, more book reviews at some point! I'm swamped with two papers for various classes, parts of which I am sure will make it up here at some point, so I haven't been doing much other reading. But it's coming!)

A Less Than Magical Look at Fairies

By Arthur Rackham, Fairy Illustrator Extraordinaire
In Fairies and Fairy Stories: A History author Diane Purkiss rather apologetically set out to write a scholarly history of fairies, opening her book with "This book is an imperfect and limping creature" and then remarking that "I had always thought of fairies as dull." One wonders whatever inspired her. Fortunately, she answers that question soon enough and it certainly wasn't Disney (in fact, Ms. Purkins seems to have a particular aversion to Disney and its purported "magic," a fact I will return to later). In Fairies Ms. Purkiss was inspired by the "real" fairies as she deems them. These are not the dewey, light-hearted fairies who live in the blossoms of daisies, oh no! Ms. Purkiss' "real" fairies are primarily nasty-spirited little creatures who humans live more in fear of than in awe of. Her book is spent tracing the history of these wicked creatures from ancient Greece through to the 21st century.

The narrative is undeniably interesting even as it winds through various points in quick and sometimes not quite fully fleshed out succession. The very scholarliness with which the Fae are treated is quite fascinating. Having never encountered an actual scholarly work on fairies, I was endlessly finding new ideas in this book. In fact, new ideas are primarily what this book brings the table. Most often, Ms. Purkiss brings up some fascinating way of looking at something, makes a brief mention of a primary source that backs up her argument and then speedily moves on to her next, probably equally interesting, idea. The book is so chronologically broad so as to not allow her more time to dandy with any one idea and she speeds through centuries and ideas at a sprint. One feels that she might have been better served limiting her time frame or lengthening her text so she could spent plenty of loving time with each new idea. (So perhaps the publisher is to blame in this instance, although her research at places seems a little spotty, so maybe it is Ms. Purkiss after all.)

For me, I (rather unsurprisingly, I'm sure, for loyal readers of the blog) found her brief comments on the imperialism of fairies (and, on a related note, the British nationalism and the use of fairies to that end) to be captivating. Ms. Purkiss, as always briefly, argues that fairies were a sort of home-grown British thing that really resonated with both country folk and urbanites through to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was then, as the countryside became increasingly known and the world outside of England was ever-expanding, that fairyland up and left England. Rather than being "o'er hill and under dale," fairies were now living "somewhere in Persia," because it was unknownable and people felt that distance from London to the exotic East was just as untraversable as the distance from Yorkshire to the seat of the Fairy Queen. There are snippets of thoughts of this caliber and of unfortunate brevity all through Fairies and one hopes that Ms. Purkiss goes back and perhaps expands on even one or two of the arguments put forth in the book.

The other short-coming of Fairies is Ms. Purkiss herself. She undermines her own argument with her firm distaste and disdain for what she deems to be "fake" fairies, those which have accompanied many a twentieth-century childhood. Her constant and fairly plain abhorrence of those fairies which she does not consider "real" does not make her argument stronger. Rather, it only makes the book seem particularly slanted and thoroughly biased against the fairies that anyone off the street would recognize as such. Rather than even discussing these "flimsy" fairies, Ms. Purkiss chooses instead to scoff at them and berate the reader about his or her own misconceptions as she attempts to prove that her fairies are in fact the "real" ones. As another reviewer put it, this argument in and of itself is fatally flawed as there is no one true belief in terms of fairies. That problem aside, Ms. Purkiss' personal convictions prevent her from truly presenting a full history of fairies.

One can't help but get the impression of a rather embittered, disgruntled, sci-fan fan and fairy-hater as the author interjects her own (often pretentious, bitter and generally disbelieving) opinions into the text. The final chapter, which deals with fairies in the "new millennium" was a particularly tough pill to swallow as Ms. Purkiss leads the reader through, first, a disparaging attack on what the latter-half of the twentieth century did to fairies in popular culture. (It is at this point that the disdain for Disney that has been quite apparent throughout her book truly hits its zenith. She damningly writes that they have "such strenuous banality that it almost leads the viewer to pick up a sturdy chainsaw at once" before continuing that every Disney fairy "is dull and powerless and unmemorable." Having been raised on those very fairies, forgive me if I beg to differ that they are any of those three adjectives. Personally, I find them to be quite lovely most of the time, have great powers of suggestion over the imaginations of children and adults alike and to be, as evidenced here, highly memorable.)

After this little jaunt into offending anyone who grew up in the late 1980s and all of the 90s, she then makes some particularly broad statements about how all middle class parents want little girls so much more than little boys (a sentiment I fully support, but the absoluteness of her statement which I do not) and how every good, sensible, intelligent mother feels a cringe of shame when her daughter wants to dress up like a fairy. I could go on about how she then discuses X-Files fan fiction and then Buffy the Vampire Slayer and vampires and then (believe it, people) Elvis, of all people. However, suffice it to say that all the little opinions that seemed out of place and distracting throughout the book bloom in her final chapter. These opinions leave a decidedly foul taste in one's mouth after a book that has done its best to disarm any pleasant notions of fairies the reader may have been holding onto.

Happily, those of a stout heart and of firm beliefs will have no trouble taking her arguments as interesting, her research as unusual and her tone as perhaps playful (rather than aggravating) and emerge from the other side of this book with some new ways of looking at the literature of fairies, but with their own private murmurings of "I do believe in fairies, I do...I do..." still pleasantly in tact.