strange and random happenstance: Middlesex

Ashenden by Elizabeth Wilhide
Published by: Simon and Schuster
Publication Date: January 8th, 2013
Format: Hardcover, 339 Pages
Rating: ★
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Time and neglect have been brought to bear on Ashenden Park. Occasionally loved and cared for, the great estate has fallen into the hands of two siblings after the death of their aunt. They don't know what they should do with this giant white elephant they have inherited. Going back through time to the houses beginning in 1775, James Woods is finishing the architectural touches for his new masterpiece to be wrought in Bath stone, though little does he know that tragedy will personally strike him and his employers will never finish the house. It's 1844 and a new family cares for and loves Ashenden, it is the home of their dreams and their children love it well, but their grandson is feckless. 1938, the house is once again in disrepair, cut up and sold for whatever money the current owner can get for a ceiling or a mantelpiece. 1946, the war arrives and a man who is a prisoner lives where one day he will return a house to lost glory for the aunt of two siblings. Ever rising and falling in it's luck will Ashenden Park be glorious ever again?

It takes a lot to make a house memorable in literature. I don't think it's something that you can set out to do, it's something that happens over time. Manderley, Number Four Privet Drive, Tara, Pemberley, all these places are held in the hearts of readers. We imagine what it would be like to go there, to walk through the woods, to gaze at the family portraits, to be immersed in the world of our favorite story. To us readers these are tangible places that we can visit, if only in our imaginations or between the covers of our favorite book. To have the conceit of following a house through time is at once intriguing and sheer folly. If Ashenden proves anything it's that the engendering of a house in literature can not be forced on us.

In order to fall for a literary house you have to fall for the story. A house itself isn't a story unless it's peopled. Would Hill House be evil and menacing without inhabitants? No, it couldn't be because there's no one to interact with it's bricks and mortar, there's no Eleanor. The house just sits there waiting for occupants. Why yes, Asheden does become occupied, but by having the narrative spread out decades apart over a hundred plus years with different characters there is no way to become invested in the story. The house is an empty vessel and here are some people who occupy it, but don't bother getting too invested in them, they'll be gone soon enough. If there had only been some overarching plot separate from the house itself, like in Mark Gatiss's Crooked House that weaves together hauntings of Geap Manor over a two hundred year period to a conclusive denouement, well, that might have been something I could have worked with, but sadly there wasn't.

As for these people who flit through Ashenden over time. I couldn't have cared less about them. Rarely were they nice or kind, usually they were self centered jack-offs. The way the book is written it's really just intertwined short stories. I'm not the biggest fan of short stories. I like scope. I like having a beautifully built world that I can immerse myself in, which is why I like television and miniseries more then movies. Short stories are hard to invest in unless they are perfectly crafted little jewels that can stand on their own. By having the stories linked through Ashenden this is never possible. Each story with a jerk and a bump leads to the next and the next, with ever more unlikable characters that I didn't want to invest my time in.

But the short narratives weren't the most annoying thing. What really got me was this fine breadcrumb trail of characters and even objects that Wilhide wove through the book. So to recap, lots of unlikable characters I don't like and don't care to remember are peppered throughout the history of Ashenden like little Easter Eggs. Somebody hold me back. Sure, it's a cute idea, a way to link past and present, but sometimes cute ideas should not be employed because they annoy the heck out of your readers. It's gimmicky and gets maddening real fast. That stupid brown cow pitcher, and I have to say, I actually liked a pitcher of a brown cow more then anything else in this book. I liked an inanimate object more then the people. Um, that's a problem.

This is Wilhide's first fiction book, having written a plethora of books on design and architecture, and I have to say it shows. She was unable to create an engaging book. If her goal was to show the "living history" of the house, well, I guess she did that. Wilhide was able to show how the house changed and adapted over time from it's construction to it's current state of dilapidation, but it was a depressing show and tell that felt like I was reading about the slow death of the house sinking further into despair. Never did it feel like she was exulting the house, never once giving it the people it deserved. A pop star? Please no. Anyone who was nice to the house was skimmed over. One of those nice persons was name Florence Henderson, and I hope that this was historical, because otherwise, WTF Wildhide! No.

Houses all have stories to tell. But does this mean that the stories should be told? No it doesn't. What got me most was that anytime you almost felt invested the story would shift, much in the way Jeffery Eugenides Middlesex did, and you were back at square one, usually with an even more unsavory cast of characters. If you set out to do something unique and different go all in. Go epic, go centuries of detail and dirt. Don't reign yourself in, and don't under any circumstance ellipses over time with little introductory paragraphs at the start of each chapter that are ethereal and dreamlike but are really the type of amateurish and indulgent writing that should have been cut.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments

Labels: Ashenden, British Country House, Crooked House, Downton Denial, Easter Eggs, Elizabeth Wilhide, Jeffrey Eugenides, Manderley, Mark Gatiss, Middlesex, Pemberley, Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Published by: Picador USA
Publication Date: 2002
Format: Paperback, 529 Pages
Rating: ★★
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Cal was born Callie. There was no surgery, there was no accident. There was just a fluke of genes and a lack of knowledge. Cal tells us his story. The journey from female to male. The fact that being a hermaphrodite, while he has male genes, being raised female, has influenced him greatly, but not as greatly as he told the eminent Dr. Luce. Yet, to tell his tale, we must travel back in time. How was he formed? What where the confluence of genes that led to him. Desdemona and her brother Lefty, his paternal grandparents. They fled Greece in the onslaught of the Turkish. They also fled the fact that they where siblings, as well as third cousins. It was a very small village they came from, a village where sometimes, babies where born who where neither one thing or another.

Resettling in Detroit, they started a new life with their cousin Lina and her husband of convenience Zizmo. Lina likes the girls rather more than the boys, so is quite shocked when she and Desdemona both become pregnant, damn that arousing play they went to see. These two children will one day be Cal's parents. Spanning generations, the book shows how hard it is to live between two worlds. Male and female, Greek and American, child and adult. Is it genes that make us, environment, or something else entirely? Is it our choice?

I can see why this book won the Pulitzer. It's really well written, thought provoking, and an interesting and daring subject (hello again incest! You thought I was going to say hermaphrodite didn't you?), and literally made for book club dissection, which I will be doing. Yet, while enjoying the read, I never really felt that invested in the book or that enamoured of the characters. Middlesex is really at least six books in one; memoir, historical fiction, romance, coming of age, disillusioned youth, drifter in the vein of Holden Caulfield, and finally a weird John Waters Midnight Cowboy camp mash-up worthy of David Lynch.

The generational structure, which was necessary, because it showed how Callie became Cal, had the downside of me growing to really care about a character only to have Eugenides speed up the narrative and push them aside for the newer character to take the stage. He also had the tendency to not only marginalize the previous characters, but to demonize them in some fashion. Lefty and Desdemona's taboo love was turned sour, Milton and Tessie and their budding romance, turned into upper middle class boredom. While it shows that, indeed, life goes on and changes, it changed my feelings so much over the course of the narrative, that I began to marginalize the characters in my own mind before the author did it for me. We even seemed to be in sync when Dr. Luce came around, because after all that build up, he was there marginally for two weeks and then gone. With trying to cover so much historical ground, I hate to say this because I felt this book was overly long anyway and spent most of it's time stringing us along, but he should have made it an even bigger epic, so that the rush to end a tale and begin another tale was omitted and we could still care for those we had been previously reading about. Shift the focus, don't eliminate the previous characters as much. And don't put Desdemona in the guest house and only remember her after 100 pages to add a nice cyclical feeling at the end.

Other things that bothered me where quite nit-picky. Sometimes the language was overly written, this superfluous verbosity made me want to smack Eugenides from time to time, just as you probably wanted to do to me for using the phrase superfluous verbosity. This tendency in fact reminded me very much of Michael Chabon's The Final Solution, wherein I felt that Chabon wrote the book with a thesaurus full of obscure words just to drive me slightly insane. While Eugenides doesn't reach Cabon's heights of undesirable loquaciousness, he did have me shaking my fist and looking for a dictionary every once in a while.

Eugenides has a deft hand for humor, often leading to me laughing out loud, but occasionally he took the humor too far and it became a parody that didn't work. For example, the midnight car chase, started out funny, with it basically being the most sedate car chase ever, but then, it went over the top, and almost became a scene from one of Matt Damon's Bourne movies, but with an odd out-of-body coda. This, this was too much. As was the peep show in San Francisco. I'm not saying that this didn't work, I'm saying, it was more John Waters or David Lynch than any other part of the book and therefore did not feel like it was a part of this book.

String us along for hundreds of pages, at least Eugenides delivered where it mattered most. Callie. While parts of "her" own story I didn't like, such as the lecherous older men when she was younger and her slightly pervy brother, once she became a teenager the book soared. All teenagers have the feeling that something is wrong with them, that they are different. While, with Callie, this is indeed the case, it was still a struggle anyone can identify with, we didn't all start out as adults. The feelings for the Obscure Object, could be any crush or first love. But what I was really struck by was how well a male writer could capture the beginning of womanhood, to use a cliched phrase. All girls go through the waiting game of when they will start to develop. When will they need a bra, when can they start shaving, when do they need deodorant. When will they start to menstruate. In Callie's case, it is a futile waiting game, yet it's the fact that "she" doesn't know that it's futile like we readers do, that makes it that much more poignant. For me it recaptured that time in my life. I felt all these emotions that I had forgotten about all over again. For me it took me back to the summer of 1991 and how my golden birthday was ruined by the arrival of the bane of womanhood. Yet this book made me grateful. Made me realize how lucky I was. Middlesex cast a golden light on my own development and made me happy that I could re-experience that time in my life. Recapture the uncertainty and, like Callie when she becomes Cal, know the feeling of what it's like to realize who you are and start on the path to becoming who you will be.