No one seems to recognize the name of Betty MacDonald any more. When I was little, her humorous books had a place of honor on my mother’s shelves and her series of Mrs. Piggle Wiggle books were staple of kid lit in primary school. She was even responsible for a Hollywood film series. These days only Google and Wikipedia can find her. If you aren’t familiar with mid-20th century pop literature, Betty MacDonald was a phenomenon. Her first book, The Egg and I (Yeah, I bet you thought that name only belonged to a restaurant franchise!) came out the year the war ended and sold a million copies in less than a year. It has the single greatest dedication I have ever read (To my Sister Mary, who always believed I can do anything she puts her mind to) and some seventy years later, it’s still good. Not flawless, but very, very good. The story is simple. Betty Bard is raised in a family of fascinating people and learns her mother’s guiding principle for a good marriage is, “whither thou goest, I will go.” When she was twenty, Betty married Bob, an insurance salesman twelve years older than herself. …
It seems half the world loves Julian Fellowes. A few mangy souls, like me, remember when he played Kilwillie in “Monarch of the Glen” but once he penned the screenplay to “Gosford Park” his acting days were numbered and his creation of of Downton Abbey and elevation to the House of Lords probably mean we’ll never see him in character again. Oh well. A wise person once wrote that authors, at their best, seem to pull back the curtain for their readers and introduce us to a world we wouldn’t otherwise know. What Julian Fellowes reveals is the inner workings of the British class system and if you think that’s a thing of the past, you need to pick up his novel Snobs. As of 2009 at least, the aristocracy still owns the most boring, exclusive club in town and the excluded are still trying to get in. The plot is a simple one: Edith Lavery is one of those very pretty British girls with a weathy, untitled father and a mother with social ambitions. She makes the acquaintance of Charles Broughton, an unmarried earl and heir to the Marquis of Uckfield. (That’s mid-rank in British nobility, lower than a…
The mercury’s dropping tonight and most Southerners I know hate the cold. We’re starting school later, turning on space-heaters, taping shut doors and doing every last thing we can think of to avoid exposure to frost. Well, some Southerners can’t handle cold. We can tolerate endless heat, corrupt politicians and bad manners from visiting outsiders but our homes and our lives aren’t made for frigid temps and sub-zero windchills. So we check our weather apps and complain about the artic blasts because most Southerns prefer not to suffer in silence. For cold tolerance and stoic behavior you have to travel to the plains where I grew up. Kansans have made an art form out of endurance. Maybe that’s why William Inge’s prairie characters work so well in his plays, especially “Bus Stop”. These folk know how to deal with a cold, dark night. If you’ve seen the movie Bus Stop (and if you haven’t, don’t bother) you may think this is another Marilyn Monroe vehicle but the play is not. Bus Stop is really about feeling cold and lonely and there are few places as cold and lonely at a diner in the middle of Kansas. Some of the characters…
I’m usually a lukewarm John Grisham fan. I was a youngish paralegal when he hit it big with The Firm, but I found too many holes in the next few legal thrillers to enjoy them much. I’m too much of a southern girl not to love A Time to Kill and I like some of his non-legal stories. I love what he did for the Oxford American. All in all, you could say there are writers I usually like more but that’s not true today. Today, I found out about Gray Mountain and this evening, I read the book. I had to because this Grisham thriller touches a field close to home. This is his book about coal. For those who don’t know, coal generates a lot of the USA’s electricity. Right now, it supplies about thirty-nine percent, more than any other single source, and that’s way down from what it used to be. Coal mining is a big, tough industry and it has a huge impact where I live. People have jobs and incomes here that they probably wouldn’t have except for coal. On the other hand, the toll mining takes on a human body is scary. Even with…
“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.” So begins seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain, the narrator of Dodie Smith‘s I Capture the Castle. You’ve got to admit that’s an interesting opening line. Only eight words and you know something unusual must be going on because who sits in a sink to write? Well, Cassandra does and she has a good reason to since that position catches the last of the daylight. The Mortmain family doesn’t have electricity. They’re a 1930’s family living in a medieval castle and they use lamps and candles after sunset. If they sound romantic and eccentric, I Capture the Castle suggests that normalcy may be something only people with an income can afford. The Mortmains might still be eccentric under regular circumstances but right now they’re too poor to be normal. Once Mr. Mortmain wrote a successful book and their income was such that eccentricity was more acceptable but that was before his leviathan-sized writer’s block moved in. Since then the family has been making do on his ever-decreasing royalties, the money his second wife brings in from artist modeling jobs and what the family gets from selling the castle’s furnishings. (Not really their property). It is obvious…