Mary Louise Dallon, his heroine, lives outside a small Irish town, a daughter of one of its few Protestant families. Suitable men to marry are thin upon the ground, and when she marries Elmer Quarry, a bachelor twice her age and owner of the town’s drapery shop, she confronts his sexual inadequacies and his two sisters’ viperous natures with an innocence which is fatal. Things go from worse to worst when Mary Louise meets her cousin Robert again, and childhood love re-emerges, taking up every inch of Mary Louise’s heart. He reads her Turgenev; they look for herons. Matters resolve themselves by means of rat poison, fishcakes, toy soldiers and homes for the insane. William Trevor is a writer in the finest tradition; one with particular sensitivity for people who cannot manage as others do. His exquisite style uses laughter and pity in classic contemplations of the tidal dramas human flesh is heir to.
William Trevor was born in County Cork, educated in Ireland and has lived in Devon in later life. He has won many awards for his fiction which includes The Children of Dynmouth (1976), Fools of Fortune (1983), Felicia’s Journey (1994) and Love and Summer (2009). Reading Turgenev was published with another novella, My House in Umbria, in a single volume entitled Two Lives.
Age in year of publication: sixty-three.
Amos Tutuola 1920–1997
1953 The Palm-Wine Drinkard and his dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads’ Town
‘I was a palm-wine drinkard since I was a boy of ten years of age,’ the novel begins. But on the death of his palm-wine tapster, our narrator, who is not satisfied, saying that ‘the whole people who had died in this world did not go to heaven directly, but they were living in one place somewhere in the world.’ He decides to travel in search of his palm-wine tapster in the world between heaven and earth. The novel is the story of his fantastic adventures. It reads like a folk tale, part of an oral tradition; it is told simply, and the style is artless and increasingly effective. In every paragraph a new monster or threat appears, or a new journey, or a new strange vision; there is constant metamorphosis. He finds a wife along the way; the tone is wide-eyed, innocent, even-handed. Most of his escapades are from a world of nightmare and unconscious dread; both Jung and Freud would have had a field day with this book. What distinguishes it is the quality of its imaginative energy, its refusal to settle for a single story or a single meaning. The sense of the dead and the living and the half-dead sharing this strange world is very powerful and the use of the storyteller’s art and the sheer verve of the narrative make this one of the best African novels to appear over the past fifty years.
Amos Tutuola was born in Nigeria and worked in Lagos and Ibadan in Western Nigeria most of his life. His other novels include My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954) and Pauper, Brawler and Slanderer (1987).
Age in year of publication: thirty-three.
Anne Tyler 1941–
1988 Breathing Lessons
Maggie Moran, wife to Ira for twenty-eight years, is a ‘whiffle-head’, one of those women who tell a perfect stranger the entire story of their life, with attendant husband and children standing by, rigid with embarrassment. Breathing Lessons tells the story of twenty-four hours in the life of the sublime Maggie, Ira and their two disappointing children, Jesse and Daisy: ‘Mom? Was there a certain conscious point in your life when you decided to settle for being ordinary?’
Maggie pursues happiness, indeed insists upon it. As they take a trip to the funeral of the husband of Maggie’s best friend Sabrina (where Maggie sings ‘Love is a Many Splendoured Thing’, one of Anne Tyler’s unsurpassed virtuoso performances), dreams end in disaster, but real life taps Maggie buoyantly on the shoulder.
Anne Tyler’s novels chronicle with intricate delicacy the scratchy habits of domestic life; her affectionate disembowellings of marital and family arrangements send out simultaneous signals of anguish and humour, always captured in small details, delicately inserted, almost thrown away. Baffled but hopeful, Tyler people are in total command of pathos and humour, and, using the author’s greatest gift, they keep the reader teetering on the edge of laughter — the out-loud kind, and the flickering kind — producing a constant humming impatience for the next page.
Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis and lives in Baltimore. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982) and The Accidental Tourist (1985, filmed 1988) are two of the best of her novels. Breathing Lessons won a Pulitzer Prize.
Age in year of publication: forty-seven.
John Updike 1932–2009
1960–1990 The Rabbit Quartet
Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981), Rabbit at Rest (1990)
These four novels tell the story of Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, American male. We first meet him aged twenty-six, an ex-basketball player married to Janice whom he abandons, pregnant, for Ruth. Rabbit’s women — his wife, his mom, his mother-in-law, his sister, his daughter-in-law and his varied mistresses and encounters are alive in every varicose vein, as is Rabbit’s organ itself which takes on a life of its own, leading Rabbit to infidelities and betrayals, always rising and falling, jiggling around, no peace to be had at all. Life with Janice under these circumstances always remains complex and reflects the times — the Vietnam War, race relations, a society in turmoil on all fronts. The misdemeanours of Rabbit and Janice’s son Nelson echo everything that has gone before, and as their lives progress, sex overapplied and misused becomes a mordant, always explicit, analogy for the disintegration of the United States under a barrage of drugs, wars, junk food and TV; eerily predicting too, Clintonesque adventures to come.
Updike is an irresistibly funny writer with a deceptively easy style. His sense of comedy and his quirky philosophical contemplations flash through this quartet, a contemporary American classic. Each novel can be read separately, but read them all; each one seems even better than the one before.
John Updike was born in Pennsylvania and lived in Massachusetts. Novelist, poet, essayist and short story writer, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for both Rabbit is Rich and for Rabbit at Rest.
Age in years these books were published: twenty-eight — fifty-eight.
Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell) 1930–
1986 A Dark-Adapted Eye
Ruth Rendell writes under two names, her own and that of Barbara Vine. The Rendell novels are, generally, detective novels centring on Chief Inspector Wexford and the fictional southern English town of Kings Markham, whilst those written under the name of Barbara Vine are psychological novels in the manner of Dickens or Wilkie Collins. To start on her detective novels, read From Doon with Death (1964), a Rendell classic. And so too is A Dark-Adapted Eye, her first Barbara Vine novel. Set in Suffolk, mostly in the 1950s, this story of the Longley women, Vera and Eden, uses the things that English gentlewomen do — embroidery, baking, keeping a spotless house, making do and behaving as women should — as a foil for what they also do in secrecy, in pursuit of power. This story of love and murder between sisters has such impact that the very trees in the Suffolk lanes arch up to warn of the damage wreaked, particularly on their menfolk, by women such as these, tight-laced in snobbery, fighting for life within rigid social rules.