The Country Girls: Three Novels and an Epilogue - Edna O'Brien

I picked up this book in large part because I watched the Ken Burns documentary on Hemingway, and Edna O’Brien was the “talking head” I liked best. I picked the first book I found in the Ottawa Library website, which also seems to be her most famous. Somewhat confusingly, The Country Girls is one of those multi-novel sagas that gets repackaged as a single book, so I wasn’t sure at first if it was truly a collection of several works or merely styled that way—especially given the part about the epilogue, which wouldn’t make sense to publish independently.

In truth, the three books that make up The Country Girls were indeed distinct novels, each published two years apart. The first, also called The Country Girls, introduces us to the eponymous girls: Caithleen “Kate” Brady, a self-conscious and wounded girl who narrates the book and its immediate sequel; and Bridget “Baba” Brennan, her brasher, more worldly friend. Their relationship is fractious, with Baba being outright cruel to Kate at times, but beneath their occasional hostilities runs a deep and unbreakable cord of friendship that binds the three books together. The Country Girls introduces us to Kate’s and (to a lesser extent” Baba’s home lives. showing Kate’s long-suffering mother and abusive alcoholic father. Baba’s family, though more outwardly prosperous—her mother is a glamorous figure and her father a veterinarian, while Kate’s family are struggling farmers—have struggles of their own, and happiness is in short supply. The two girls go to the convent—Kate on the strength of a scholarship, Baba through her parents paying the tuition—where they struggle to adapt to the oppresive atmosphere. Kate maintains an illicit and largely unconsumated relationship wit hthe older Mr. Gentleman, and the book concludes with her being left high and dry when hoping to run off with him.

The Lonely Girl features much less Baba, and is mainly a story of Kate’s relationship with Eugene, a sophisticated, agnostic documentary film-maker. Though fully grown, Kate remains in many ways the girl referenced in the title, as she struggles between the countervaling forces of her father and her would-be husband.

In Girls in Their Married Bliss, the perspective shifts to Baba, who narrates some passages while a third person narrator continues on with Kate. We learn that baba is unhappily married to a financially successful but ignorant and abusive contractor. Her fatalistic view of her own situation and pragmatism contrasts with kate’s doe-eyed optimism, as both women model the worldviews first forged by their own mothers. Much of the book involves a custody battle between Kate and Eugene over their son, Cash. Though still well-written, the book is arguably the weakest of the three, meandering in places and lacking the clear arc of the first two books. The epilogue is once again narrated by Baba, whose now thoroughly jaded view of the world seaps through in a caustic string of asides and invective. It sloshes about it places, but is a powerful conclusion, and serves to bind the three novels—linked but discrete—into a distinct whole.

O’Brien’s writing is crisp and strong. Perhaps it is simply because of where I first heard of her, but Hemingway’s influence seems to hang over much of the first book, fading as she progresses, until a style much her own emerges at the book’s conclusion. it was an interesting exercise to read the books in sequence, watching subtle changes in her cadence. Overall, the books were quite good, and Iwill probably pick up another by her at some point.

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden - Hannah Green

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden is a good example aof a novel that suffers from poor synopses. It is generally billed as the story of Degborah Blau, a young woman whose life is divided between the relaity of a mental institution and the fantasy realm of Yr.

Superficially, this is accurate, but it strongly implies that Yr is a Narniaesque place of adventure and magic, where Deborah goes to fulfill the destiny denied her in the real world. Whereas the Yr reflected in the book is far less tangible. Its few physical features are scarecly mentioned at all, and generally only in recolleciton between Deborah and her psychiatrist, Dr. Fried. We the reader spend basically no time in Yr at all. Instead, we see it through her discussions with Dr. Fried and her own internal struggle. Yr is less a place than a pantheon of Gods that has grown increasingly oppressive, and a language in which Deborah’s scrambled thoughts can be more clearly articulated.

The split in the novel is thus not really reality versus fantasy, but internal versus external, as Deborah struggles to permeate the barrier without destroying herself in the process. We also spend more time with her family than I’d expected, who are portraying wit ha refreshing level of nuance. Her mother and father are flawed people, and subject to a less than perfect family dynamic marred by the outsized personality of her grandfather, but they all care about her deeply, and the root cause her illness is not foisted upon them. There’s no single breakthrough that brings Deborah back to the real world—another common cliche in books about mental illness—but a gradual paring back of thought and memory. All told, it paints a nuanced and accurate portrayal of therapy, which is perhaps not surprising, given the the novel is semi-autobiographical and concern’s the author’s actual experiences.

The book was perhaps not what I expected to be, but is ultimately stronger for defying those expectations. The writing is rich and eloquent, with evokative imagery that never feels stilted or excessive. Deborah’s whiz kid dialogue, clotted with witticisims, seemed a bit much, but this receded over the course of the book, and was likely meant to show her defense mechanisms. I found it jarred wit hthe otherwise naturalistic dialogue, but it wasn’t a fatal flaw.

Nuit - Edgar Hilsenrath

You try to stay human, but afterwards, what does it get you?*

I first heard about Edgar Hilsenrath after reading his obituary in the paper, so I guess you could say I was late to the party. Still, his work sounded interesting and I thought I’d check it out. Unfortunately, the only book of his available from the Ottawa library was a French translation of Nacht. I don’t typically read French books in translation, as it seems kind of pointless—if I’m not reading a novel in its original form anyway, I might as well read it in a language in which I’ve written multiple books, instead of one in which I still struggle to order things effectively in restaurants. But you take what you can get.

It’s interesting to compare this book to John Hersey’s The Wall, especially since I started and finished Hersey’s book during the period in which I read Hilsenrath’s (French books take me forever). Both stories are about Jews living in ghettos in Eastern Europe under Nazi occupation: The Wall takes place in Warsaw, Nuit in a city in Romania. Both describe the harrowing circumstances in great detail. The chief difference is in their tone. While The Wall doesn’t shy away from the horror of the Warsaw ghetto, its nevertheless retains a level of hope cut with realism. Life is hard, and people do turn on each other, but their remains a certain camaraderie, and even heroism.

No such nobility is to be found in Nuit. Life is simply about survival, and brutality reigns. The book’s “hero,” Ranek, eagerly awaits his own brother’s death so that he can in good conscious snatch the gold teeth from his jaw and trade them for food. The caustic indifference of the characters to their own suffering and that of their neighbors and friends is cut with the darkest of dark humor. Put next to The Wall, Nuit paints a very bleak picture of ghetto life (and while The Wall is based on the true and profoundly heroic tale of the Warsaw uprising, it’s worth noting that Hilsenrath actually lived in a Jewish ghetto under Nazi occupation; Hersey didn’t.)

But that’s too simplistic a take. There is heroism of a sort in Nuit, and as shabby as it may seem, it’s nonetheless remarkable given the circumstances in which the characters find themselves. This heroism emerges in simple moments of humanity. Every choice a character makes in which self-interest is not the pervading driver is in itself heroic, because the substance of their lives has worn so thin that the slightest yielding could cause them to rip in two. To offer shelter to two orphans may seem like basic human decency; asking them to pay for the privilege in cigarettes sounds downright mercenary. But for Ranek, who does just that, taking them on costs him dearly in the goodwill of his neighbors, and such a currency is the only in which he remains even remotely solvent. When you look at it that way, trading a roof for a few cigarettes seems generous.

I can’t comment much on Hilsenrath’s prose, since I observed it through the double filter of translation and a foreign language, but on a purely practical level it appeared ornate enough to push my facility with French to the limit. I’m picking up Camus next, and just thinking of his prose in comparison feels like a relief. As for his story and characters, there is a richness here, one leavened with a bitter sort of humor without being cheapened by it. A powerful book.

*On essaie de rester humain… et après? Qu’est-ce qu’on y gagné?