Reading Wednesday

[liv]

Recently read Balancing act by Joanna Trollope. (c) Joanna Trollope 2014, pub 2014 Doubleday Black Swan, ISBN 978-0-552-77855-8. I like Joanna Trollope, I love how well she writes within a fairly formulaic and low-status genre. Really great characterization, plots which are hardly worldshaking, they're all about people living their lives and starting and ending relationships and so on, but which gently push the envelope of obvious chicklit themes. Balancing Act barely even has a romance arc, though it does include some relationships, it's the story of a mother and her three daughters running a family business, and realizing that they all need a change of direction.

The business in question is a Stoke pottery, based on one of the real small businesses trying to revive what used to be the major industry locally for the contemporary economy. So not only is the book by an author I'm a fan of, it's also of local interest, so it pretty much jumped out at me from the giveaway shelf at work. And I did in fact end up reading it when I was sick last week, it was just the sort of frothy thing I needed when I was miserable with sore lungs.

I think in many ways my sympathy is not in the same place that the narrative's sympathy falls. I was really rooting for Susie to keep full control of the company that she founded out of very difficult circumstances, rather than learning the moral lesson that you can have better human relationships if you're less of a control freak. Equally I felt that both her delinquent father Morris and her mid-life crisis-having husband Jasper got more credit than they deserved for really very minor personal development successes. Even though Trollope is very much a pro-women writer, there seemed to be a lurking subconscious sexism. Morris abandons his baby daughter and lives a scratch existence in a hippy colony in the tropics, funded by his father continuing to support him financially, and when he turns up back in England at the age of 80 and expects his daughter and her family to support him, we're supposed to think he's wonderful because he plays with his great grandchildren and helps out round the house after a lifetime of never doing a stroke of work or taking any sort of responsibility? Jasper was the primary carer for the girls while Susie ran the business and mostly deferred to her decisions; ok, great, that's nice, but it hardly makes him a paragon of amazingness. It's not that it was a bad thing or wholly undeserved that later in life he started asking for space and money and support to pursue his own hobbies and interests, but you know, plenty of women devote thirty years to raising a family and emotionally supporting their husbands and you don't see novels about how amazing they are or where they get a fairytale happy ending of launching a minor rock music career in their 60s while their contrite spouses make up for not paying enough attention to them during their working lives.

I liked the three girls' stories, Cara and Dan being a bit too alike and not knowing how to handle it when their relationship is less than perfectly harmonious, and their discovery that what they really care about is management rather than the family business as such, and breaking away to live their own lives. Ashley breaking out of her older sister's shadow, allowing herself to be career-ambitious while combining that with raising two children, with Leo taking over as a stay-at-home father. He's not over-praised for that decision, nor is it romanticized, it's acknowledged that giving up paid work for full time parenting is an imperfect compromise. Actually I don't think Trollope likes children very much; I think I might not have noticed that before I started spending more time around small children, but she describes parenting very much in the same vein as this article. I appreciate that Oluo is making a feminist point by taking a stance against the commercialized, soppy, angel-in-house view of motherhood, and I think Trollope probably is too. Just that Ashley and Leo's kids in BA seem much more like a plot obstacle for them to overcome than like people you're supposed to empathize with. And I like Grace, who partly does have the traditional arc of leaving a quasi-abusive boyfriend (before things get too dark) and finding a much better man, but she also gets a lot of character development along the lines of understanding that you can still be nice and sweet yet command respect for your talents and be ambitious. And it's ambiguous whether her romance is going to be happy-ever-after or just part of her becoming more confident, and she gets approval for her preference for living alone.

Anyway, in spite of those quibbles, Balancing Act is very much the enjoyable fluff I was hoping for.

Currently reading Suite française by Irène Némirovsky. Not making much progress with this, as it's too grim for me to want to pick up.

Up next I'm about to go on a very long trip across Europe, spending most of a day travelling. So I intend to fill up my trusty e-reader and make sure I don't run out of reading material. It'll probably end up being mostly bookatorium stuff so I can keep up with the conversation.

Comments

[jack]

Oh, that's really interesting. The sort of books I probably wouldn't have thought to read, but I'm glad reading wednesday means I get to hear about it.

[liv]

You're welcome to borrow if you like. I don't think it's Trollope's best book, but she's reliably good, and if you ever feel like dipping into this kind of mostly marketed to middle-aged women stuff she's worth a try.