“A man is anxious because he has lost too much time and has ended up thinking about all he should have thought about when he had the time.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (JUL 18, 2010)

This book unsettled me. Its rendering of a mind descending (drifting? decaying?) into an Alzheimerian abyss is frightening in its deft, almost poetic, description. Indeed, it is disarming in its expanding degrees of what is normal to what is irrevocably and silently lost. If you worry about Alzheimer’s–and who cannot but worry–or have experienced it in your family, the tale told in The Wilderness, the story of Lincolnshire (England) architect Jake Jameson, will stun you. Simply and frighteningly stun you.

Do not be put-off by my comments. This is not a horror show. Rather this the tracing of a gentle clear mountain stream as it winds and falls its way to complete and utter otherness, the wilderness of the ocean where the river is lost forever. This is a meditation on memory and what they–indeed, we ourselves–consist of. If we are the accumulation of experience stored as shards called memories, what do we become as those shards are lost? It is the opposing Proustian, equally philosophical, question. In this instance Jake’s memories move and resist pattern and ultimately are never the same twice. He cannot escape the flow, for this is his world, what he has in fact become. For example, his daughter Alice. She has come to town to visit him with her boyfriend, the poet. At least he thinks it is Alice. He remembers her childhood and how he and his wife struggled to conceive her and one thought leads to another, tumbling. Alice tells him she is pregnant. And then, later, while looking through a photo album with a man he thinks he should know (the reader is not sure either), Jake sees a photo: “In this one there is a child in a white bed, and he recognizes the open, empty features on their way somewhere, but perhaps lost….and he wants to take the series of tubes and machines from the bed so that she can be comfortable.” We learn from an observer: “Oh, dear Alice,” the woman says. ‘She had been in hospital for such a long time, look how tiny she is.” And finally: “This was just a few days before she died.” So who was the pregnant woman who visited him? Or was that just a jumbled memory? Who did that memory belong to? Similarly, their is the fate of his wife, Helen. Did she have a stroke or fall from a ladder? Further, there is a recurring gunshot through the novel, the piercing crack of a round being fired. Was someone shot? Wounded or killed? But it never resolves, like a memory that cannot be pinned down. These threads interweave and the reader cannot see the tapestry from which they are unraveling. Nor can Jake. We are in his world.

There is a masterly technical aspect to this book which unsettles the reader. At times one becomes, like Jake, lost in “the wilderness” that is Jake’s mind. The text becomes the disorienting individual experience. Memories come and go like a breeze through a empty house, from everywhere and from nowhere in particular. You experience this one and then another washes over you. It is a device that puts the reader on the same unsteady footing as the protagonist. My wife read this book before I did. When I finished we compared notes. It was remarkable how we each experienced the book in a different fashion. She held to some narrative, like a snippet of memory, and I dismissed the same snippet to hold another in its place. For instance, there is a woman in the novel, Joy, the daughter of a family friend. We cannot trust Jake’s recollection of what did or did not happen between he and Joy. While I was convinced of one rendering, my wife subscribed to another. And both were correct. Or both wrong. There was no definitive conclusion. If this were music it would suggest two–or more–contrapuntal melodies interweaving but never resolving. Instead the listener is left not knowing, struggling with emptiness. “One must always fight back, not in the hope of winning but just to delay the moment of losing,” thinks Jake, battling the ensuing emptiness. It is a struggle we participate in.

Early on in the novel Jake, going to his retirement celebration, pulls off the road. He “lifts his glasses, and rubes his eyes. He has been doing this journey to and from work every day for thirty-five years. He pores over the map.” We all know the feeling of forgetting for a moment that very thing we think is most secure in our memory. Nothing to worry about, we console ourselves. But like rocks being laid, the weight grows steadily, but grows nonetheless. A few pages later, “he failed to notice…the confusion, the clotting of thoughts, disorientation….” And so the rocks are laid one atop the other, until ever so naturally, a few hundred pages later, Jake is sitting with people he does not know, but thinks he should, looking at a photo album filled with images of people he does not recognize. And then the last sentence: “He grips the hand that has found his, opens his eyes, and walks on.” How did this happen? you ask. How did he get to that place. But you know, because you, the reader, walked along with him from quiet forgetfulness to disorientation, loss of memory, confusion and finally, heartbreakingly, blind resignation.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 27 readers
PUBLISHER:	Anchor; 1 edition (April 6, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Samantha Harvey
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another Alzheimer victim: Lost by Alice Lichtenstein

Bibliography:

• The Wilderness (February 2009)

“You’ve got a dark side hidden away in there somewhere, haven’t you?”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage (JUN 18, 2010)

Special –> interview with Jenn Ashworth

Imagine, for a moment, that you live in a nice quiet little middle-class street policed by the local volunteer neighbourhood watch. All the gardens are tidy and well-kept. The neighbours know one other, and nothing much ever happens here. And then imagine that a madwoman moves in next door.

Ok, now switch scenarios and imagine yourself as that madwoman, and that you’ve moved into that nice little neighbourhood. You’ve not only moved there, but you want to belong, you want to mingle, you want to make friends….

If you have an image forming in your mind, then you have arrived at the wickedly funny novel, A Kind of Intimacy by British novelist Jenn Ashworth. Politico compares the novel’s unreliable narrator, anti-heroine Annie Fairhurst to Stephen King’s Annie Wilkes from Misery. If you need any other analogies before buying this wonderful book then consider that for its savage, quirky humour, A Kind of Intimacy is likely to appeal to fans of Muriel Spark. Social identity is the fabric of this tale, and Annie’s refreshingly subversive, warped world view clashes with her tireless attempts to conform into conventional roles.

A Kind of Intimacy is told through the eyes of obese twenty-something Annie, and when the novel begins, it’s moving day. Annie loads up her cat, Mr. Tips, kicks the settee one last time, and says goodbye to her old life and nine long miserable years spent with her husband, Will. Full of optimism and determined to reinvent herself into some sort of suburbanite diva, Annie moves into her new home. When she propositions the milkman the very next day, it’s clear that Annie has serious problems, and that she’s going to make quite a splash in this small bland corner of suburbia:

He looked closely at me, and I made sure he could see a fold of pale, damp-seeming cleavage as I modestly tucked in the gown. He gave me another wink and tucked his clipboard under his arm.

“That’s the best offer I’ve had in about two days,” he said. “But I’ve got three more streets to do before I’m due home and if the wife doesn’t get her cup of tea in bed in,” he made a show of looking at his watch, “ooh, an hour and a half’s time, my life’s not worth living.”

I nodded, and tucked my hair behind my ears, not bothering about the gown flapping open now. Nothing ventured, and all that. I’d learned not to take it personally. I’m not to everyone’s taste. A friend of mine, Boris, told me I was a minority interest, like collecting Stilton jars or learning to fold birds.

Armed with self-help books borrowed from the library, Annie soaks up helpful hints she thinks will ignite her reinvention process. Reading titles such as: Loving Yourself: Tips for the Single Woman, Controlling Your Anger, Freeing Yourself, and Weekend Fixes for a Broken Heart, Annie hordes tips on social etiquette which she keeps in a cross-referenced notebook. While she thinks all this reading will bring dramatic changes to her life, instead it leads to a series of social disasters, and any social life Annie hoped to make in the neighbourhood is undermined by her petty vandalism. After eavesdropping on her neighbours Neil and Lucy, Annie decides to hold a house warming party as an ice-breaking event. The party draws a total of 4 guests–the drunk, newly-single Raymond, Neil and Lucy, and Dr. and Mrs. Choudhry. While Annie is convinced that Raymond casts lust-filled looks her way, her attention is solidly on Neil, a man she’s sure she’s met before.

At the party, Annie serves “six bottles of wine, a cheese and pickled onion hedgehog, a bowl of twiglets and a plate of fairy cakes.” It’s an awkward event, with the Choudrys radiating the complacent self-satisfied smugness of a happily married couple while valiantly pretending everything is normal. Lucy and Annie square off over the absence of olives, and the evening ends in disaster. This major disappointment heralds a self-destructive eating binge for Annie:

“My memories of the next few days are hazy. Someone called me on the telephone about an unpaid credit card, and I remember sitting at the bottom of the stairs in my nightdress singing all the verses to ‘Found a Peanut’. In my mind’s eye I can see myself very clearly, stamping my bare feet on the carpet and conducting myself through the chorus with an unlit cigarette. I can only presume I attempted to take up smoking, a habit, I’m pleased to confirm, that didn’t stick longer than my celebrations of those few days. I made frequent trips to the corner shop for tins of condensed milk, more wine, more cat food, and managed to spend a frightening amount of money there. I also remember a brief conversation with Lucy about local by-laws regarding noise levels in residential areas between the hours of eleven at night and seven in the morning.”

As the plot develops, Annie parcels out memories from her past–a childhood coloured by a father who can’t wait to get rid of her, a sexual experience that leaves a lasting impression, and a miserable marriage to a parsimonious man who seems to select Annie for her child-bearing abilities. In spite of the fact that she’s deranged, Annie, the most admirable character in the novel is an endearing anti-heroine–a mad woman who tries to survive in an insane world. Annie’s narrative is direct, funny and also rather disarming. Her world view and peculiar social identity is laced with a quirky sense of primness which mingles with her frankly unapologetic aberrant asocial behaviour; the result is a deliriously unique literary cocktail.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 14 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions (May 25, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Jenn Ashworth
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt Guy Savage’s interview with Jenn Ashworth
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another interesting female from Europa Editions: Queen of the Tambourine by Jane Gardam We don’t have a review of this one yet, but also check out: The Wife’s Tale by Lori Lansens

Bibliography:

• A Kind of Intimacy (May 2010) Betty Trask Prize
• Cold Light (October 2012)