What We’re Reading This Summer: Pocket Reads
Helen Rosner on “Great Granny Webster”
“Great Granny Webster” presents itself, at first, as a comic novel: a madcap portrait gallery of absurd aristocrats trapped in the self-created, self-imposed miseries of their haughty stations. It is funny, genuinely, but the comedy gives over, page by page, to something like dread—the accumulating weight of family history, the obligations of inheritance. Lady Caroline Blackwood drew on her own upper-class, Anglo-Irish upbringing for this autobiographical fiction about the multigenerational destruction of women by their own families, and the novel has the unshakeable, freaky urgency of truth.
Beyond its tartness, its specificity, and the sensuous, elliptical line work of its prose, the book serves as a vinegary corrective to the novel of nostalgic country-house girlhood. Blackwood, with her firsthand knowledge of drafty manors and unhinged families, explains with remorseless precision what lies behind the fantasy—what happens when the houses, and the people in them, are neither charismatic nor lovable. The novella’s three discrete portraits—each grotesque, farcical, and illuminating, especially Aunt Lavinia, a glitter-tragic screwball who deserves infamy on par with Zelda Fitzgerald and Holly Golightly—assemble into a working theory of the narrator herself, unnamed and for much of the book strangely blank, almost a third party in her own life.
“Granny” very nearly won the 1977 Booker Prize, Philip Larkin having rejected it in part on the grounds that it was too close to reality to count as fiction—a judgment that’s obviously outrageous, and likely sexist, and the edge of underdoggery it gives the book is so in keeping with its own narrative tone that it nearly feels contrived. I press this book into the hands of nearly every American woman I know who carries around an embarrassingly Anglophile fascination with family silver, marabou, and gin—there are so many of us!—and I have no intention of stopping.
Alexandra Schwartz on “Ballerina”
Whenever I pick up a book by Patrick Modiano, a writer I love, I feel that I am on a kind of diving expedition, going down, down, down into the hushed, clouded sea of memory. For Modiano, it is the past that is real. The present goes barely acknowledged in his many slim, enigmatic novels, except as a kind of disorienting rupture with the world he inhabits in his mind. Reading “Ballerina,” Modiano’s latest novel, from 2023 (it was translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti), I was startled by a glimpse of contemporary Paris: “It looked like a huge amusement park or the duty-free shops in an airport. . . . The passersby walked in groups of a dozen or so, dragging their rolling suitcases, and most of them wore backpacks.” (Backpacks? Quelle horreur!) But “Ballerina” is really set in the sixties, when the narrator, then a penniless writer of song lyrics, knew, and maybe loved, the dancer of the title, a young woman who had recently arrived in the city with her young son. They both have a strange connection to a possibly kind, possibly sinister landlord named Serge Verzini. But you don’t read a Modiano novel for plot. You read one for atmosphere. Think of Jeanne Moreau, wandering dark Parisian streets all night long in Louis Malle’s “Elevator to the Gallows” to the sounds of Miles Davis’s trumpet. This novel is like that: a hunt for a person long vanished, mournful and mysterious, as brief and beautiful as a flashbulb.
