The Modern Library (29 page)

Two families, the hardworking, God-fearing Lambs and the drinking and gambling Pickles, escape their diverse rural
catastrophes
and end up in Cloudstreet, making do, but uneasy in the midst of the city. With their children they settle into one of those vast ramshackle houses which have a life of their own, furnished with a pig outside that sings its head off ‘like a bacon choir’.

Winton has an excellent ear for the words and phrases Australians use. The Lambs and Pickles argue, fight and pass the time of day in an Australian idiom which is inventive, amusing and pithy, a perfect match for Winton’s natural skill at giving voice to the dreams and myths buried in everyday affairs.

Using sentiment with an exhilarating energy Winton carries each Pickle and each Lamb to magical or prosaic conclusions. It is rare to find a novel which so successfully combines family observation with unsugary charm and such easygoing cleverness, stirred into the entertainment and laughter of the people in the street.

(US:
How Right You Are, Jeeves
)

Jeeves is about to go on holiday (to Herne Bay for the shrimping), and Aunt Dahlia has invited our hero Bertie Wooster to her country seat at Brinkley Court, Market Snodsbury, near Droitwich, where Roberta Wickham, ‘the red-haired menace’, will be in residence, not to speak of Bertie’s former headmaster Aubrey Upjohn MA and his daughter Phyllis, and, to thicken the plot, Adela Cream, the mystery writer, and her son Willy. Very soon all is not well: Roberta has announced her engagement to Bertie in
The Times
so that her mother, who hates Bertie, will not object to her attachment to Bertie’s friend ‘Kipper’ Herring. ‘Kipper’, in turn, has written a vicious review of Upjohn’s new book, he also being a former pupil of Upjohn.

Is Willy Cream mad? Should Phyllis become engaged to him? Aunt Dahlia has cleverly lured Sir Roderick Glossop, the brain surgeon, to pretend he is her butler Swordfish and thus observe young Cream. ‘Kipper’, in the meantime, is invited to distract Phyllis. He is in love with Roberta but enraged by her ad in
The
Times
. Ma Cream, the mystery writer, is snooping around. Upjohn is suing the reviewer of his book for libel. ‘Kipper’ will be ruined. Where is Aunt Dahlia’s husband’s eighteenth-century silver cowcreamer? Luckily for everybody, Jeeves, who has been reading Spinoza’s
Ethics
, returns from his holiday, and the day is saved. The writing, as always, is sharply comic, and the plotting is as elaborate as ever. This is vintage Wodehouse.

Tom Wolfe is a brilliant ‘reporter novelist’, one of those writers who, avoiding literary ‘isms’, take life as his subject. Tom Wolfe was lucky. For his version of
The Rake’s Progress
, he had the comic insanities of 1980s New York for his material and, cool pioneer of the ‘New Journalism’, a baroque writing style to match.

This is a panoramic, rumbustious cartoon of a novel,
encompassing
every chicanery and vanity New York has to offer. Sherman McCoy is a Wall Street man with an annual salary of a few bucks less than a million dollars, a wife Judy and a mistress Maria. As with so much else in Sherman’s life Maria is a mistake: she involves him in a car accident with two black youths one of whom is mortally wounded and … bingo! Enter black ghetto leader Reverend Reggie Bacon, poisonous English hack Peter Fallow, harassed Assistant District Attorney Larry Kramer, and creepily ambitious District Attorney Abe Weiss – living, walking and talking examples of the seven deadly sins. All bring about Sherman’s downfall with brio and enthusiasm.

Tom Wolfe comes at the vanities of man like a boxer punching the air, using wit, audacity and ridicule as weapons. As a demolition job on the prancing snobberies, arrogance, greed and ambitions of American man, the novel is unsurpassed, and as a novel of unlimited entertainment and social comment, likewise.

The Americans encountered in these short stories could, with a bit of adaptation of surroundings and preoccupations, just as easily be Muscovites or New Zealanders. Wolff’s people are loners living together. ‘Even together, people were as solitary as cows in fields all facing off in different directions.’ But there is no self-pity and little sadness here. Instead, Wolff conjures up certain moments of recognition, moments when the riddles posed by the bewildering behaviour of others rise to the surface for baffled inspection.

Each story is firmly placed within the traumas and trivia of daily life: the jumble of bottles and tubes on a dressing table, the
flickering
of the television set, ‘chemical gizmos’ that turn the lavatory water blue. Amid this entirely recognizable world Wolff’s men and women, fathers and mothers, suitors, soldiers and schoolteachers negotiate safe passage. Children look after their parents (a favourite Wolff topic), dogs bark, newspapers are read and discarded, people hope for the wrong kind of love and create their own disappointments. Wolff records all this in writing of beauty and simplicity, a lemon twist of irony or wit often present. These are stories flavoured too with Wolff’s sense of delight in humankind at its most precarious, but there is always a notion of happiness fluttering in the air, like a delicate kite or a multicoloured balloon.

In Francis Wyndham’s novel, which quietly marks the end of a certain kind of English life, the narrator is a young man living in a village near Marlborough before and during the Second World War, an atmosphere recalled here through the songs and movies of that time. In this village live Sybil and Charlie Demarest, the class of English person young men were supposed to be defending, in fact odiously snobbish, boring and preternaturally cruel, most of all to their daughter Kay, whom they detest. She is not like them. Kay is awkward, undistinguished, with simple affections for the sun, for film stars and for friends. Kay has a droll penchant for not quite managing things, but she is not a snob, she loves what crumbs of life come her way, and most of all the dog Havoc whom she passionately adopts, abandoned as she is. Kay is the personification of those people who do not so much wish to be different, as are, and have to be. What happens to Kay and Havoc and the narrator is the stuff of this report from the Other Garden of England, the untended one, and nothing quite like it exists. The Other Garden gives an alternative view of the accepted world, always in subtle ways, not a word too many or out of place. Quizzically wise, irresistibly funny, this is a poignant novel of great intelligence.