Missing this, and missing hands

Five books for people who like warm baths

Hi, I’m back. I have so much to discuss with you all, but maybe I’ll start by explaining why I stopped sending out these love notes.

The truth is that I went for a day trip to the Catskills, had a few drinks with this Dutch guy, and fell into a strangely deep slumber. I’m just waking up now, and happy to return to this work that I love. 

I’ve loads of books to discuss, and an exhaustive supply of opinions to share about the world at large. I’m also a little rusty as to how I even do this. I’ll start with what’s captured my imagination since late August: The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard. 

Has anyone besides my friend who sent it to me heard of these books? I hadn’t but now I’m wholeheartedly recommending them. I read them back-to-back, like a British version of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Series. This friend who gave me the Cazalets, by the way, could never get into My Brilliant Friend. “Too many words,” she said.

Speaking of too many words, by the time I closed the book on the 5th volume, I’d devoured over 2,500 pages. This was my War and Peace, but instead of Napoleon invading Russia, I had the quotidian realities of daily life for one extended English family between 1937 and 1958. 

Howard’s story follows four adult siblings and their families. We experience WW2 as they did, through food rations, clothing coupons, blackout curtains, and the sight of fighter planes overhead. (The war is a backdrop as they go about their lives but rest assured, one big dramatic part of the story is directly connected to the war.) I’m a sucker for any WW2 novel, and through the “too many words” of this series I became completely immersed in the lives of these characters as they grow up. Novels this good are like analog VR.   

Apparently, Elizabeth Jane Howard¹ was inspired to show life as it’s really lived, and based much of what happens on what happened in her real-life family. "I thought, people write books about war–storming up beaches with machine guns–very heroic, but they don't much write about what life was like for ordinary people," she said.

That doesn’t really seem accurate anymore–entire Amazon warehouses are filled with books about life for ordinary people. But it’s the rare book written with such compassion and attention that it elevates ordinary life, lends it the dignity so easily lost in the banality of picking up prescriptions, folding laundry, and emptying dishwashers. 

I realize that doesn’t sound so exciting, but neither is a warm bath and lots of people enjoy those, right? Plus, it’s not like nothing happens in these books. Lots does, and her clear-eyed portrayal of what life was like for the women of this time in particular ends up feeling feminist. Funny how that is; how being honest often tracks as radical feminism. Sexual assaults of the most heinous kind happen, abortions happen, stifling marriages happen, depression happens, homosexual love affairs happen. And wait until you read about how the nurses treat women who are giving birth. 

I can’t blame anyone who takes a hard pass on a five-volume chronicle of English life during WW2. I did struggle to get into The Light Years, the first book. It felt a little Downton Abbey, and the characters seemed like a laundry list of 20th-Century British archetypes. But I adore the pal who sent the books, so I kept chugging along. I’d often read for a few minutes then drift off, wondering if maybe she intended these as sleep aids not reading material. I was so disengaged I didn’t even realize that one character was missing a hand. It was casually referenced around pg. 137 as if I was told this in an earlier chapter. I was. Sometimes I'm not the most careful reader. Kinda makes you wonder why you’re getting literary advice from me, doesn’t it?

Maybe that embarrassing moment of crappy reading focused my attention, because I did eventually get really hooked on the first book and couldn't stop until I closed the last one. If you’re into beautifully written multi-generational sagas with fully-formed characters, get The Light Years. And spoiler alert: Hugh is missing a hand.   

According to a great article about her in The Guardian, Howard said, "novels are for showing people what other people are like." No duh. This is why I love reading fiction. The stories and the characters might be invented, but through great writing, we get to contemplate how we all feel and think.

And in the weeks ahead you’ll get lots more opportunities to contemplate how I feel and think because I will no longer be accepting moonshine from Dutchmen on fictional visits to the Catskills. I’ll be giving booknerd pro tips to gorgeous people like all of you. 

1. Howard was married to Kingsley Amis, father to Martin Amis, and she had an affair with Cecil Day-Lewis, father to award-winning cobbler and all-around hotty Daniel Day-Lewis. And if my recommendation isn’t enough, check out what Hilary Mantel (RIP) wrote about her, also in The Guardian.