Regular readers of the Chatner may recall I spent July in Massachusetts as part of my first writer’s residency at Mastheads. I am right in the middle of the manuscript of my first novel, Women’s Hotel. It’s a book that’s very much concerned with middleness — the middle of the century, edge cases of middle-classness, middling talent, and insufficient ambition. It’s also reminded me how very difficult it is to write a pretty-good novel.
I need to read at least one Barbara Pym novel to prepare for Women's Hotel, because I haven't read any as of yet. Which one should I choose? Which one will optimally prepare me to Get The Joke?
I'm pressing A because B was so familiar that I could hardly get through it without cringing. I want to compare it paragraph to paragraph to a recent journal entry I wrote after discovering a huge and embarrassing mistake my work nemesis made, and getting to solemnly notify my colleagues. ("We're on the same team, broadly!" I wrote. "His embarrassment equals institutional embarrassment which equals my embarrassment, or should. And yet I'm so gleeful I want to pirouette.")
So anyway, Salieri monk hits entirely too close to home for me to properly enjoy, while caustic friend lady is someone I can feel a pleasant if slight moral superiority over.
What a feast!!
I need to read at least one Barbara Pym novel to prepare for Women's Hotel, because I haven't read any as of yet. Which one should I choose? Which one will optimally prepare me to Get The Joke?
I'm pressing A because B was so familiar that I could hardly get through it without cringing. I want to compare it paragraph to paragraph to a recent journal entry I wrote after discovering a huge and embarrassing mistake my work nemesis made, and getting to solemnly notify my colleagues. ("We're on the same team, broadly!" I wrote. "His embarrassment equals institutional embarrassment which equals my embarrassment, or should. And yet I'm so gleeful I want to pirouette.")
So anyway, Salieri monk hits entirely too close to home for me to properly enjoy, while caustic friend lady is someone I can feel a pleasant if slight moral superiority over.
I think Excellent Women is the place to go!
I want sooooooooo badly to read them both and also I think that you should write a vampire story
I’m obsessed with these and can’t get enough, especially of Thomas Merton’s ENEMY! More seething monks please
I mean both.gif
Hope it’s a matter of sequencing and not elimination
Oh, goodness, B. I started reading thinking I would be able to stop when my tea timer went off, but that tea has STEEPED.
I would absolutely read all of these books! Fantastic excerpts
A
B all the way. I have had those thought processes before, not relating to death, but still...
I confess that I kind of want the best friendless woman’s friendship breakup to somehow be tangentially related to Merton’s death, but I’m no good.
A!!! A+
Delicious! I read to the end of B and then immediately hit back, reload the page, and choose A
These are both so delightful! I’m voting B only because it’s longer and so I got more deeply into it
A
Spiteful monk has real force behind it. The kind of force a writer has to have paid for in advance.
B, please! Thoroughly enjoyed that excerpt.
If I must choose, then B, but absolutely want to read all!