“Use me!” Miss Peycroft cried in ringing tones. “I am absolutely ready. Pure, so to speak, and unsullied, ready and waiting to be the heroine of your next novel.”–to Alma Porch, writer
Australian author Elizabeth Jolley completely won me over with Mr. Scobie’s Riddle (1983), a sad, funny, and wonderfully moving novel about the residents of a nursing home, and Miss Peabody’s Inheritance (1984), a delightful novel involving the lively correspondence between a popular Australian author and one of her admiring but repressed fans back in England. Because Jolley grew up in England and did not emigrate to Australia until 1959, when she was thirty-six, I have always associated her with my favorite British authors of the 1970s and 1980s—sly and subtle female writers like Muriel Spark, Jane Gardam, Barbara Pym, Penelope Lively, Alice Thomas Ellis, and Beryl Bainbridge, who did not hesitate to use satire to bring down the pompous, while also creating memorable characters whose often humorous dialogue brings them to life on the page. Products of their time and setting, these authors could skewer their characters’ social pretensions with the literary equivalent of a penknife, rather than a rapier, while maintaining a “lady-like” demeanor of innocence. Not surprisingly, Bainbridge, Lively, and Spark were all honored by the Queen and became Dame Commanders of the British Empire. Gardam has been honored as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, and Ellis and Pym were elected Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature. All have won numerous literary prizes.
The earlier books that I have read by Jolley, while a bit more boisterous in some ways than the works of her contemporaries in England during the period, seem to fit comfortably into the niche occupied by these other, better known authors, despite Jolley’s unconventional (and some might say outrageous) private life. With Foxybaby (1985), which follows Mr. Scobie (1983) and Miss Peabody (1984), however, Jolley permanently separates herself from her peers back in England, writing a book in which nothing is sacred, with characters who are sometimes crazy, usually self-absorbed, unashamedly venal, and often bawdy. She is realistic – and enthusiastic – in her depiction of sex in all its variations as salve for the souls of the lonely and the sometimes bored. Nothing about this book is dainty or subtle.
The novel opens with Miss Alma Porch, a timid teacher and writer at a girls’ school, writing to Miss Josephine Peycroft, the Principal at Trinity College, located in a remote area of western Australia, about a summer job. The principal has hired Porch to conduct a drama program which will be part of the session to build a “Better Body Through the Arts.” On her way to Trinity, however,Porch is involved in a car crash which leaves her car and two others in need of substantial repairs. She is not reassured when she overhears the conveniently parked tow truck operator tell a companion, “We’re in business. I’m telling you, three cars orf to the smash yard just in one trip, not three trips but one. Yo’ll get your share never youse worry.”
Wheat fields lining both sides of the road were the only scenery for Porch as she traveled west to Trinity College.
Her arrival at the school itself also has ominous overtones. Miss Peycroft has her own ideas of the manner in which she wants Porch’s play to be produced “by the students,” and she demands that Mrs. Viggars, a well-off return visitor, be the lead player. Porch’s first vision of Mrs. Viggars is in a photo from the previous year in which Viggars, in a course called “Basic Self Expression,” is shown sitting in a refrigerator-sized box with a cushion on her head, rocking her way across the courtyard. As the other participants arrive, two of them being gorgeous young men brought by a former participant, it becomes clear to everyone except Porch that these additional participants are there to provide nightly “fun and games” for the people who brought them, and perhaps for each other. Porch is already aware from conversations which have taken place under her bedroom window, that the tow truck operator Miles, his wife, and another woman are already having a great deal of extracurricular fun, chasing each other around the grounds. Openly lesbian and gay relationships abound, and assignations of all kinds occur at any time and place. Throughout the novel, it is Porch who seems to be left out, though she often overhears her companions’ suggestive conversations and is frequently trapped so that she cannot escape participating in these events vicariously.
The play, “Foxybaby,” for which Porch has brought the requisite props, raises many issues which obviously parallel those of the participants in the program, the primary themes being the relationship between alienation, loneliness, and lack of love. The play’s lead character, Mr. Steadman, a scholar and writer, is waiting outside a cafe for his daughter Sandy to leave and go home with him, as the play opens. Sandy, “Foxybaby,” is recently released from prison. She has just had a baby, and is suffering from drug addiction. Her child is also infected and addicted – and not thriving. The action, as Porch develops it, is accompanied by punk rock and disco music, though Peycroft keeps trying to change it. The relationship between father (Steadman), daughter, and granddaughter reveals itself as the play continues. Predictable complications arise. (Obviously, this play is not going to be a candidate for any Tony Awards.)
"The Widower," by James Jacques Joseph Tissot, a painting which Mrs. Viggars suggests represents what Steadman is facing--dependence, need, sorrow, protection, and possession.
Elizabeth Jolley is obviously having great fun taking advantage of the freer, more forgiving attitudes of Australia as she creates this over-the-top novel, filled with wild characters – some, like Porch, exceedingly repressed, and some like Mrs. Viggars and Miss Harrow, taking part in a summer program in the boonies where they have little else to do except pursue their desires in a safe atmosphere, away from civilization. Jolley’s large cast of characters is well-choreographed to allow their farcical actions to proceed in many different directions at once, though the novel’s focus and themes sometimes get lost in the confusion. The ironies of the “Foxybaby” play, with its strange and sexual subtexts, stereotyped characters, and clichéd action, are frequently matched with quotations from real literary sources – Sophocles, Goethe, Proverbs, Jon Dryden, Ibsen, Schopenhauer – to provide “breadth” and “depth” to the action, but few readers will take these seriously. Ultimately, the novel connects the action in Porch’s play with real life, and this is where everything spins wildly, and some might say, quite happily out of control.
ALSO by Elizabeth Jolley: MR. SCOBIE’S RIDDLE and MISS PEABODY’S INHERITANCE
Photos, in order: The author’s photo is from http://www.heraldsun.com.au
The Western Australia wheatfield may be found on http://markosun.wordpress.com
Alma Porch brought her fox stole with her for the play, “Foxybaby.” http://www.osfcostumerentals.org
James Jacques Joseph Tissot’s “The Widower,” painted in 1876, is symbolic of some of the action in Alma’s play. http://www.amazon.com
Living in an ethnically and religiously mixed neighborhood in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Nihil Herath is one of about a dozen children – Tamil, Sinhalese, Burgher, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, and Catholic – who take their cultural differences for granted. Nihil’s Sinhalese family is new to the neighborhood, but they fit in immediately with their neighbors, and under the leadership of Nihil’s mother, Savi Herath, they soon become the backbone of their little community. A teacher with a lot of experience, Mrs. Herath keeps her children and their friends active and busy, playing songs and encouraging their singing to her piano accompaniment, whether she, a Buddhist, is playing Christian hymns or the music from any of the other religions. A Sinhalese, Mrs. Herath has no hesitation about shopping in Tamil stores, even when her meddlesome next-door neighbor, Mrs. Silva, warns her against certain Tamil merchants. She invites Rose and Dolly Bolling, two neglected and ill-clothed Tamil children, to join her children for tea, and she eventually sees that they receive clothing that they need, without embarrassing them. Her goal is always to “do good,” though she does this instinctively and without moralizing.
If you came to this review because the title suggests that this is a romantic, even pretty, little novel of love in exotic India, then you will be shocked by what you discover here. This is a tough novel depicting what author Uday Prakash, controversial in his own country, sees as a major hurdle for India – not necessarily in the major cities so much as in the rural countryside. The economic changes in India in the 1990s have brought about a thriving middle class and a vibrant life in the cities, much of it “American style,” but those changes do not translate into similar changes in rural states, where traditional ways of life continue, including dramatic contrasts between the wealthy Brahmin class, which still controls the economic, political, and intellectual life of many areas, and the non-Brahmins who seem unable to rise, no matter how hard they try, because those very Brahmins also control most of the opportunities.
Although Irish author Colum McCann has written six previous books and a collection of stories, winning many literary prizes including both the National Book Award and the IMPAC Dublin Prize for his most recent novel,
Baron Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi di Malomonte, Commissario of Public Safety at the Royal Police Headquarters in Naples, is a lonely man. Growing up as the orphaned child of a wealthy family, he has been living with his Tata Rosa ever since. Now in her seventies, she is “a bossy, indelicate, nitpicking ballbuster, a lousy cook with a rotten personality. But she’s all the family I have,” he comments. With a natural shyness that is close to terror when it comes to women, the thirty-year-old Ricciardi’s only real “friend” is his deputy, Brigadier Raffaele Maione, in whom he confides nothing about his private life. With his life secure because of his wealth, Ricciardi does not fear losing his job, and he often goes his own way in investigations if he feels justice will be better served. He has little fear of his department’s higher-ups, most of whom walk a fine line to avoid embarrassing government officials who, in 1931, are closely associated with Mussolini and his Fascists.
