This month, we bring you a list of smart summer reads to enjoy at the beach: a lighthearted love story, Landing, by Emma Donoghue; filmmaker Miranda July’s quirky collection of short stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You; and an experimental family drama, The Accidental, by Ali Smith.
Landing by Emma Donoghue (Harcourt)
Emma Donoghue’s fifth novel, Landing, is the perfect summer read. Quick, light and sexy, it is a love story between two women who come from wholly different worlds.
Síle O’Shaughnessy is a sophisticated, 40-year-old Indian-Irish flight attendant. She is the ultimate urbanite who’s traveled the world and thrives off the energy of city living. Though she has a group of colorful friends and a supportive family, she is in a stagnant and sexless relationship with a woman named Kathleen. “The planets still turned,” she thinks, “so what had become of the gravitational pull?”
In walks 25-year-old museum curator Jude Turner. Jude lives in Ireland, Ontario, an extremely small Canadian town where she was born, raised and has absolutely no interest in leaving. Despite a history of dating both men and women – and the occasional passionless fling with ex-boyfriend Rizla – she is mostly single.
When Jude is forced to travel to England (it’s her first time on a plane) to retrieve her ailing mother, she meets Síle and the two exchange contact information. The correspondence, slow to start, soon evolves into daily emails and phone calls that turn intimate. After months of long-distance flights, both women are forced to consider the depth of their blossoming relationship.
Landing raises interesting questions about the importance of geography over companionship, but distance is not the only challenge the two women face. They live disparate lives, originate from different backgrounds, and each has a collection of friends who may or may not have their best interests at heart.
At first, like many couples who are complete opposites, it is actually difficult to see the attraction. But as Síle and Jude persevere, it becomes more obvious why the two are together and what each has to offer the other. The real issue, then, is how they plan to reconcile their differences – and, most importantly, the thousands of miles that separate their two homes.
Donoghue’s scrutiny of the gentrification of Ireland is interesting from Síle’s perspective. “I remember that feeling of being the only ethnics in town,” she says. “You couldn’t so much as pick your nose in case the neighbors jumped to the conclusion that all you people pick your noses.”
As a bisexual butch, Jude offers her own unique insights into stereotypes and labels: “They always get that wrong in the movies, they make the girly-girl the one with all the guys in her past. Whereas in my experience it’s the tomboys who hang round pool halls and cars with the guys, and fool around with them, too.”
With its modern themes, Landing is more akin to Donoghue’s recent short story collection, Touchy Subjects, than to her historical novels like Slammerkin. The ideal book to throw into your beach bag, it is a straightforward read – easy to pick up, easy to put down, and easy to pick up again.
No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories by Miranda July (Scribner)
The characters who inhabit bisexual performance artist and filmmaker Miranda July’s No One Belongs Here More Than You – and their peculiar circumstances – are far from the norm. But it is not their strangeness that makes them so intriguing; it is July’s extraordinary ability to capture and bring out their humanity.
Though the themes are varied, all of the narrators in this collection exhibit a profound and vast loneliness. In “The Swim Team,” a woman tries to win back her lover by telling him how she once taught a group of elderly students to swim in her kitchen. Somehow she believes that this part of her life, which she has kept hidden, will prove that she is in fact worthy: “If I had thought this would be at all interesting to you I would have told you earlier, and maybe we would still be going out.”
A woman becomes obsessed with her downstairs neighbor, a married epileptic art director, in “The Shared Patio.” Desperate to connect, her vulnerability quickly surpasses her quirkiness – “waiting, waiting, waiting, for someone to notice that I rise each morning, seemingly with nothing to live for, but I do rise.”
In “It Was Romance,” a group of women learn “how to be romantic.” After an exercise where the narrator has to synchronize and then syncopate her breathing with her partner, who is a stranger, the two exchange a hug and start crying on each other’s shoulders. “We could smell each other’s shampoo and the laundry detergents we had chosen. … The snaps on our jeans pressed into each other and our breast exchanged their tiredness, tales of being over- and underutilized.”
She later realizes: “It was romance. Not the falling-in-love kind but the sharing of air between our shoulders and chests and thighs.”
In several of the stories, July is able to bring her character’s life into focus with one distinct moment. The narrator of “The Man on the Stairs” wakes to the sound of an “intruder” in her home. The scene is distilled, moving outside the bedroom walls and into everything else that is truly wrong in the character’s world. As she listens to the painfully deliberate steps, her fear of dying turns to a fear of living, and suddenly when she says, “I was going to die and it was taking forever,” she is not necessarily referring to the man on her stairs.
In the exceptional “Something That Needs Nothing,” two young girls run away from home to live like adults — “anxious to begin our life as people who had no people.” They find an apartment with an “ancient bed,” which “was tremendously thrilling for one of us. One of us had always been in love with the other.”
After trying to make ends meet, they begin prostituting themselves out to wealthy women — or one woman who can at least afford their services (“We hoped she was familiar with the work of Anaïs Nin”). When another girl comes between the two, the devastated narrator begins working at a porn shop stripping for men, and with the help of a simple wig takes on an entirely new identity.
Miranda July, whose film Me and You and Everyone We Know won several awards (including the Critics Week Grand Prize at Cannes ) in 2005, brings her distinct humor and style to each story in this unforgettable collection. It is an absolute must-read.
The Accidental by Ali Smith (Pantheon Books)
Openly lesbian author Ali Smith’s The Accidental uses the familiar narrative strategy of “a stranger comes to town.” But that is the only conventional aspect to this brilliant novel, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award, which was recently released in paperback.
The Accidental is the story of how the Smart family’s lives are turned upside down when a woman named Amber shows up at their summer cottage in Norfolk, England. After initial confusion as to why she is even there, they finally accept her into their home, no questions asked, and each member places her on a distinct and often undeserving pedestal.
Eve Smart, a biographer of sorts, is convinced that Amber is one of her philandering husband’s students. Michael Smart, an English professor with a reputation for sleeping with undergrads, thinks Amber is here to torture him with her ambivalence. The Smarts’ son, Magnus, believes she is an angel sent to save him from the guilt of contributing to a classmate’s suicide. Their daughter, Astrid, is simply enamored.
Several of the chapters move forward in a traditional narrative style, while others circle back on scenes to offer an alternative point of view. When the perspective changes, so does the prose, often reflecting the character’s voice. Astrid repeats herself to reinforce her developing ideas about the world and her family; an entire section is dedicated to Michael’s self-indulgent poetry; Eve’s biographies are written as mock interviews with her subjects, all long dead, and thus her first chapter is a series of questions and answers.
Smith is an ingenious storyteller. A lyrical meditation on the word “beginning” can lead Astrid to obsess over everything from all the summers before she was born to the text messages she’s recently received from classmates — “HA HA U R A LESBIAN U R WEIRDO.”
Magnus’ guilt-ridden spiral takes him from wondering how it would feel to be kicked to death by a bunch of kids hanging outside a chip shop — and thinking he might just deserve it — to losing his virginity: “Inside her was like going inside a boxing glove, or a room made of pillows, or wings. Magnus exploded into a billion small white feathers.”
Smith’s prose can sometimes read like a screenwriter’s notes to the director. For example: “The sound of vacuuming stops suddenly. The French windows are open. The room fills with the sound of the garden i.e. birds etc.”
Other times, she goes so far into the character’s mind it feels almost invasive: “Astrid feels her own bones underneath the warm breath, thin and clean there like kindling for a real fire. She thinks her heart might combust right out of her chest id est the happiness.”
At one point, Amber warns Eve of the Scottish adage, “Be careful not to let folk over your threshold till you’re absolutely sure who they are.” It’s a lesson each character learns all too well. Amber is the catalyst for major changes in the Smith family, but ultimately, like most “a stranger comes to town” tales, it is not about the stranger at all.
