La maladie de la mort

In addition to an arbitrary percentage of Swedish reading, my annual reading goal also includes four books in French, lest those hours spent in French class go totally to waste. And just to drive home the point that I actually do have chill, this year was the first time since I introduced the goal that I actually met it.

By the skin of my teeth, with a Marguerite Duras novella at the buzzer, but nonetheless I met it! Merry Christmas to me.

La maladie de la mort (The Malady of Death, English translation available at the Internet Archive, also a worthy cause to donate to!) describes the brief relationship between an unnamed man (told in second person, so always just “vous”) and an unnamed woman he pays for sex-and-also-more. The man wants to experience love for once in his life, and the conditions of this transaction suggest what he thinks love is, or ought to be:

You say she mustn’t speak, like the women of her ancestors, must yield completely to you and your will, be entirely submissive like peasant women in the barns after the harvest when they’re exhausted and let the men come to them while they’re asleep. So that you may gradually get used to that shape moulding itself to yours, at your mercy as nuns are at God’s.

The woman denies being a prostitute, but still agrees to the deal, and over the course of their seaside hotel tryst she reads him for filth. Or, not filth exactly, but she’s able to name the character flaw within him that he’s never quite able to define. Whence the title of the work derives: she tells him that he is touched by the malady of death.

A lot about this situation is reminiscent of a chapter out of Jamie Bartlett’s The Dark Net, a book that is somehow nearly a decade old? Imagine a pre-Trump examination of 4chan. A simpler time. (As an aside, I was disappointed in The Dark Net because I thought it would be an examination of the actual Dark Net, meaning the stuff that happens online beyond the crawlable purview of search engines. It was actually about all of the antisocial but still highly Googlable behavior I was already aware of because I had a misspent, Terminally Online youth: pro-ana/pro-mia, suicide clubs, relentless online bullying campaigns, etc.)

One of the few things in The Dark Net that was actually of interest to me was the chapter on cam girls, maybe because I have limited (read as: zero) experience in that arena. The overwhelming consensus from the interviews that Bartlett conducted was that the best paying and most loyal customers for a cam girl often wanted, more than whatever explicit sexual experience, something that feminist theory would call “emotional labor” and that the cam girls called “the girlfriend experience.” This particular class of customer just wanted a space with another human being to give vent to their anxieties, blow off steam, maybe exhibit a level of vulnerability, and just overall to be seen—this on greater or equal footing than just sexual gratification.

The same dynamic seems to play out in La maladie de la mort. The man believes that what he’s missing is sex, he sets out terms and conditions that are built on that assumption, and as the relationship progresses (over a few days? weeks? the timeline is a bit muddy) the woman engages in a bit of psychological judo and by the end the man seems to realize…love wasn’t what he thought it was? He is inherently unloveable?

All you remember of the whole affair are certain words she said in her sleep, the ones that tell you what’s wrong with you: the malady of death.

Soon you give up, don’t look for her anymore, either in the town or at night or in the daytime.

Even so you have managed to live that love in the only way possible for you. Losing it before it happened.

Or he’s gay? (I missed the gay subtext in French and in English alike. Sometimes I’m not gifted at close reading.) Which then makes the extreme violence of the man’s initial terms for the relationship something on par with, say, Phil’s emotional abuse and psychological torture of Rose Gordon in The Power of the Dog. How aware either of these men are about their natural proclivities, or how they feel about them, is up for discussion.

Duras wrote in a variety of mediums, no stranger to film or stage, so it’s not surprising that her afterword on this very short piece is a reflection on how she would stage it as a play. Nor is it surprising that people have done exactly that!

Kris

My last-minute scramble to read more Swedish before the end of the year led me to revisit Karin Boye’s Kris, a book I first read in 2017. I even wrote about it here! Ah, how embarrassing to keep any kind of public record of one’s life, but oh well. It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

In 2017, I felt like I had pretty much conquered Swedish and that the world was my oyster. Yet reading Kris was a struggle. Yes, I was reading several books at the time, but that’s a convenient excuse. The honest truth that I didn’t want to fess up to publicly was that Kris was just really, really hard. If anything, that’s probably why I was reading so many books at once: I needed something to reach for that wasn’t Kris. Each reading session included frequent breaks to count how many pages were left in this chapter, in the whole book. I stubbornly refused to look up new words because there were so many in any given section that any sense of flow would have been ruined. Nor did I have the patience to, for example, note all the words I didn’t know, look them up afterwards, and then read the chapter again. All of this should have clued me in to my immense hubris with respect to my actual functional level of Swedish, but it did not. Instead, I contented myself with declaring the book “difficult literature” and prided myself on having a brain big enough to finish the book at all.

This time around I finished the book in less than a week. Finally, I’m actually a genius at Swedish! (I can’t wait to revisit this blog post in another six years and flinch at the hubris.)

Since the actual reading experience was much easier, I had more brain left over to actually take in everything else in the book: the depression, the anxiety, the theology. Or, more humbly, maybe it wasn’t leveling up in Swedish that made all the difference. Maybe it was also the result of reading such an intense book in the depths of Swedish winter instead during the height of Swedish summer, or fresh war in Europe, or changes in my own personal circumstances. At any rate, it hit different this time around. More personal.

The first (as far as I can tell) English translation of Kris came out after my initial reading attempt in 2017: Crisis. Which means that this post won’t be my last about the book.

Gertrud

I got so much reading done in English while I was in the US that it put me at a disadvantage in terms of my Swedish-to-English book consumption ratio. Time to dig into the backlog to beef up my Swedish reading for the year!

I picked up Gertrud years ago on a visit to Hedengrens. This was in the Before Times, with one of those potential friends where things failed to launch and now you haven’t spoken in years, so there was just a lot of psychic baggage around the book that made me pass over it when browsing my shelves for my next read. Well, nothing like self-imposed reading goals to make you get over your abandonment issues, you weirdo!

(It’s me, I’m the weirdo.)

Gertrud is the first play I’ve read since February last year (Caged). (Not counting the play I attended in October, 2:22 — A Ghost Story. Or maybe that should count?) Didn’t even realize it was a play when I bought it, goes to show how much I was paying attention. The story is reportedly inspired by Söderberg’s own failed relationships (marriage and extramarital affair), but for all that the titular Gertrud is not only the protagonist but eminently sympathetic and relatable. Over the course of the three acts, Gertrud decides to leave her unhappy marriage, has her heart broken by the young composer Jansson, and rejects advances from her old lover Lidman in favor of traveling on her own.

I think it’s worth noting which version I read, also, since Söderberg made revisions and changes as the years went on, as recently as 1936 (29 years after the play’s initial debut), and different versions are available in different anthologies and collections. This one was from Atrium förlag, and according to the afterword, it’s the original manuscript in its entirety but with updated grammatical conventions and orthography.

The first comparison I thought of was A Doll’s House. Both are kind of grim Nordic realism, both involve women leaving their husbands. But while Nora is more or less forced into her situation, Gertrud’s decision to leave her husband is more an independent and positive action than Nora’s reaction. Arguably Gertrud’s feelings for Jansson serve as a catalyst for the decision, but that’s not on the same level as blackmail so I’m not inclined to make that comparison. You also get the impression that Gertrud has been considering this course of action for quite some time, possibly since the death of their son.

Much like The Barbizon, reading Gertrud in 2023 is kind of a personal bummer because it reminds me of the options I have available to me that women a hundred-odd years ago didn’t. Am I taking advantage of them, or am I wasting them? (Answer: mostly wasting them!) Would I have had the sense of purpose and strength of character to carve out an independent life on my own terms in restrictive and limiting times? (Answer: probably not!). The personal reflection prompted by these books is not the rosiest or the most flattering.

Is one hundred years a long time? Is it nothing at all? A century can birth all kinds of technological advances and social upheavals, but it’s also not appreciably longer than one human lifespan. Put another way: I have clear and distinct memories of my great-grandmother. The world that Söderberg was writing in, and about, was the world she was born into. That piece of history is still in living memory for me, in a way. It’s wild.

Döden till mötes

I rescued this book from a “free to take” box along the sidewalk after a run sometime in summer 2020? 2021? What is time? Along with Miss Marples sista fall, because I can never say no to a free book, especially if it’s Agatha Christie.

There’s a Rian Johnson Tweet somewhere about how Christie’s novels are anything but formulaic and how she used the mystery novel as a front for experimenting in all kinds of other genres:

Something I love about Agatha Christie is how she never tread water creatively. I think there’s a misperception that her books use the same formula over and over, but fans know the opposite is true. It wasn’t just settings or murder methods, she was constantly stretching the genre conceptually. Under the umbrella of the whodunnit she wrote spy thrillers, proto-slasher horrors, serial killer hunts, gothic romances, psychological character studies, glam travelogues.

This element of Christie’s writing eluded me in my middle school whodunnit phase, but I think you can forgive a 12-year-old for not considering the finer points of genres like spy thrillers.

This quote came to mind as I was reading Döden till mötes (Appointment With Death), as did the fact that Christie rather famously couldn’t abide her fan-favorite protagonist. Appointment With Death came out in 1938, so there were still other Poirot books and stories to come, but already you can see Christie sidelining the Belgian detective as much as possible in order to tell another story.

Most of the book happens without Poirot present and, as Johnson’s observation above suggests, is a combination of gothic romance (the mysterious and alluring Raymond Boynton trapped by a domineering stepmother and protagonist Sarah King’s determination to rescue him) and glam travelogue (Christie’s eye for character is also turned to the landscapes of Jerusalem and Petra). And as far as that story goes, it’s…fine but dated. Anything set in Jerusalem these days is just going to come across as oof, to use a technical term. Even without the “aged like milk” setting, there’s a lot of surface-level psychoanalysis from the French psychologist Dr. Gerard that is meant to be narratively sound, and maybe even came across as reasonable and plausible in 1938, but today reads like pompous buffoonery.

On the other hand, Christie has a few conversations and observations that are still timely 80-odd years later. I don’t remember her roasting women quite so thoroughly in other books, but it’s been a while since I’ve read any so who can say. We have the tyrannical murder victim, Mrs. Boynton, who is quickly established as a vile and hideous creature through and through (the book never lets us forget that she’s fat!)*; we have the tiresome but accomplished Lady Westholme who is constantly the butt of everyone’s jokes, both for her domineering personality as well as her unattractive looks (powerful Hillary Clinton energy); and scatter-brained Miss Pierce is more or less dismissed by everyone. The golden mean of all three of these seems to be protagonist Sarah King, who can neither abide the airheaded Miss Pierce but who also finds Lady Westholme too much. As a result, King feels like a mouthpiece for Christie’s own opinions about women’s place in the world.

As for the whodunnit itself, it’s clever (to be expected!) but not as satisfying as other Christie novels. Some bits I untangled right away; other asides are dropped in that sound like they’re set up for a big reveal, but ultimately they just fizzle and go nowhere.

The Swedish translation is a job well done, though perhaps it’s easier to convey Agatha Christie in Swedish than Elmore Leonard. Regardless, Einar Thermaenius succeeded where Einar Heckscher failed; while my copy was fairly old, even new Swedish editions of Agatha Christie today are often still Thermaenius’s translation (his translation of The ABC Murders from 1938 saw an eleventh printing in 2015). Even “new translations” of Thermaenius (and others) are more often new edits of old translations rather than entirely new translations. Why mess with perfection?

*And a weird postscript to that. The English book covers all have covers that feature the landscape, elements of the plot, or spooky murder imagery unrelated to the actual story. It took a fair bit of scrolling to find one older example of a cover featuring Mrs. Boynton herself, and then rendered fairly neutrally:

The cover of "Appointment With Death" featuring an illustration of an overweight old woman in a pink dress in profile against a desert backdrop.

It took me zero seconds and zero scrolling to find much less flattering Swedish portrayals of Mrs. Boynton:

Cover of Swedish version of "Appointment With Death" featuring a caricature portrait of an overweight old woman with yellow cat eyes looking directly at the viewer. Another Swedish edition of Appointment With Death. There is once again an illustrated rendition of an overweight old woman sitting on a chair, but it only takes up a fraction of the cover space and she's not immediately menacing.

Are…are you OK, Sweden? Who hurt you?

Dix heures et demie du soir en été

This is the year of me obsessively reading Marguerite Duras (in French), for mostly circumstantial reasons.

  1. She has plenty of relatively short novels.
  2. They are available from the Stockholm library, along with Swedish translations.
  3. Did I mention they’re short?

Compared to Moderato cantabile or Les petits chevaux de Tarquinia, there’s a lot that actually happens in Dix heures et demie.

Maria and her husband Pierre, along with their (mutual?) friend Claire and their daughter Judith, are a French couple on vacation in Spain. Inclement weather forces them to stay at a small village, where their lives quickly become entwined with that of a man who has just murdered his nineteen-year-old wife and her lover. At the same time, the sexual tension between Pierre and Claire ratchets up to eleven—all while Maria seems just as drawn to Claire as her husband is.

Like Les petits chevaux, I read the French original in parallel with the Swedish translation (one section in French, then in Swedish, then in French again). There appears to be only one Swedish translation, the one from Ingmar Forsström. (A different translator than Les petits chevaux, Suzanne Palme, but equally skilled.) There’s not much to find online about him except that Wikipedia entry, not even a paywalled obituary. Dead at 40 years old, a stone’s throw from where I currently live. Memento mori, etc.

Do I even like Duras? She has an eye for landscape and weather, and weaves them deftly into the plot to lend tension to what is otherwise just brooding, unhappy people who drink like fish. The fact that she can instill such a sense of foreboding in the reader when so little actually happens in any given story is remarkable. I respect that. But her brooding, unhappy characters are also seen at such a distance that they’re hard to really distinguish. These aren’t books I viscerally enjoy, in the sense that I find the characters interesting or relatable or very complexly sketched. But for mood and for technical skill (and for language practice) you could do a lot, lot worse.

Philadelphia Noir

My approach to gifts is fairly unstructured and sporadic. If I see something that a friend or family member would like during the year, I buy it and then save it for the next appropriate gift-giving occasion. Usually, also, this takes the form of a book, because I like to stay on brand.

This is how I ended up in possession of a copy of Philadelphia Noir, the Philly entry in Akashic Books‘ popular Noir series. I’m from the area, a bookish friend has a particular penchant for crime and noir…it seemed like a natural fit for gift from me to him! Of course, I would be remiss if I gave someone the gift of a book without reading and vetting it first. I had enjoyed the copy of LA Noir a friend sent me, so I could probably trust that the Philadelphia edition would maintain the same level of quality, but still.

Well.

“Some of the stories are better than others,” I wrote in the note that I included with the gift. Which is the most diplomatic way I can possibly phrase it. And some of the stories are really good, or at least fun, and I had a great time with them (“Princess,” “Secret Pool,” “A Cut Above,” and parts of “The Ratcatcher” and “A Fishtown Odyssey” stand out). Others were a bit rough around the edges and had a tenuous quality to them, as if the author had written and submitted the story for the collection at the last possible minute, or if the editor had a limited pool of stories to choose from. That’s okay; maybe they were someone else’s cup of tea.

The only one of those I feel like calling out is one of the historical fiction stories in the last section of the book: “Reality.” I wrote the “Some of the stories are better than others” comment about halfway through my reading; by the time I got to “Reality” I left am extra post-it note with the comment “skip this one.” The premise of the story is that first the author (not the narrator, this is not a fictional affectation; I mean the author) brags about being a descendent of a minor historical figure in the area for absolutely no reason at all, and then while walking her dog runs into what she believes to be Colonial-era reenactors just acting out a scene in the middle of the sidewalk. She deems them as “surprisingly good, actually,” and assures us that she would know because she’s a history nerd and author. She also goes to great pains to include “comedy” in the guise of a cliche sitcom family before showing us that the crowd is also loving it and thinks this is the best thing they’ve seen all day. This becomes insufferable when it turns out these aren’t actors. No! They’re characters from her historical fiction (mystery?) novels come to life! And they have a crowd of admirers hanging on their every word!

Powerful “and then everyone clapped” energy.

At a last grasp to make it vaguely noir-ish, one of the historical characters fires a warning shot from his musket to threaten another one of the characters and, plot twist, it hits and kills a father who had been especially laudatory and impressed with the performance (and constantly telling the author/narrator to shut up so he could hear more of the story). The story closes with his young son thinking that his father’s very real gunshot wound is just part of the great performance, which he was also definitely enjoying a lot as an eight-year-old! Not bored out of his skull, this one! “Mom’s gonna be real mad about the stain on your shirt though, Dad. Dad? Dad?”

Did the story have the intended effect of me looking up the author? Yes. Did it have the intended effect of me wanting to read any of her novels? Absolutely not. The other dodgy stories in there were at least just stories for their own sake, so to speak, and definitely fit the noir theme. This one felt like a weird cross between advertising, wish-fulfillment, and self-aggrandizement, with the ending tacked on to make it a barely plausible candidate for entry into a noir collection.

The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free

In keeping with my “one book per indie bookstore per city visited” rule for my vacation last August, when my hosts took me to Book People in Austin I stood resolute to acquire one (1) book. I went in, prepared to be ruthless and discriminating in my choices, but in the end that was unnecessary because the solution presented itself almost immediately upon our entrance. And on sale, even!

While a to-read list can quickly become a graveyard of aspirations, I still find it to be a handy filter for bookstore and library visits. If I have a vague awareness of at least some books I at one point wanted to read, then it can help narrow down my browsing. That was exactly the case when I more or less walked right into The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free.

I read an excerpt from the book during its promotional rounds on Lit Hub, and thought the excerpt and the premise of the book were both interesting. On to the TBR it went. Two years later, here I am! The downside is that while I might have knocked Barbizon off my TBR, over the course of reading the book I probably added five or six other books because so many of the illustrious personages Paulina Bren outlines in the book sound like fascinating people and writers. In that sense, writing about the Barbizon is a great framework for looking at women writers from the mid-to-late twentieth century. It would be a great idea for a literary anthology or series and I wonder why no one’s done it yet.

Barbizon is a quick read; I was able to knock it out in about a day and a half. Of course, I was on vacation with bookish friends who were happy to spend hours sitting quietly and reading, so I might be overstating how snappy the pace is. Regardless, it’s a fun and breezy look at a piece of American history I’d never known about (even though I’ve read The Bell Jar) and, as I told one half of my hosting couple, it made me happy that I live here and now instead of sixty, seventy, a hundred years ago. If you plopped me in the lobby of the Barbizon hotel back in the fifties, or if I had been a college student in the sixties applying for a Mademoiselle guest editor role, I have no doubt I would have been summarily dismissed and rejected for not being pretty enough. Nor would I have been cut out to be a homemaker or mother, which even the most talented and ambitious women who boarded at the hotel seemed to inevitably become. (And yet, with all of this freedom and free time available to me, I fritter it all away on nonsense. But that’s another issue entirely!)

If only the world weren’t on fire…!

Translation State

Ann Leckie’s Translation State was the only book I finished in October. Good thing I read enough during my trip to the US to balance that out!

Translation State is…fine? It’s hard for me to be fair in my evaluation because I recognize that I read it in A Mood, and I also went in with incredibly high expectations because Ancillary Justice was one of the top tier Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club picks not only of the year, but of all time.

In short: everyman Reet Hluid learns that he isn’t entirely human, but actually the offspring of a wayward member of a terrifying and vaguely cannibalistic alien race, the Presger  (or rather, their test tube baby science experiment race, Presger Translators, humanoids cooked up to help the ineffable Presger interface with humans). This entirely accidental revelation of his ancestry rips Hluid from his otherwise unremarkable life to be matched with Qven, another Presger Translator who is on the outs with their society.

What do I mean with that nebulous word “matched”? I mean something akin to “set up with.” Presger Translators are casually cannibalistic, or at least sadistic—we learn from Qven that dismemberments and eviscerations are standard fare schoolyard games among Presger Translator children—but then when adulthood hits, this turns from cannibalism into a merging that no matter how much Qven insists isn’t “doing the sex” still reads as “sex,” where the two parties consume each other? physically merge with each other? and then become some kind of new entity split across two bodies that are now a kind of average of both of them.

Hluid and Qven bond over a cheesy space opera, only to get called up before a tribunal to discuss their legal status under the prevailing galactic treaty drawn up between the Presger and the other races within the galaxy (are they human or not?). Violence erupts and chaos ensues, and we learn a little bit more about what the Presger (or Presger Translators?) can do: muck around with spacetime. Hluid and Qven, after nearly an entire book of misunderstanding-through-an-abundance-of-caution, merge and become a more fully realized Presger Translator Adult in order to save the day. You can’t be mad about that being a spoiler, either, because what we’re reading is essentially an alien romance with neopronouns and political intrigue slapped on for good measure; the happily ever after is a given.

The fact that it’s a romance that snuck in through the back door to a more straightforward and high-concept space opera series like Ancillary Justice is maybe why I don’t like it. I don’t enjoy romance. I don’t watch a lot of TV, trashy or otherwise, so I don’t find it qUiRkY aNd sO rELaTabLe when sci-fi characters do. (Love you, Murderbot, but you’re also guilty of this sin.) And despite the neopronouns and the antagonizing, on both ends, about consent and BUT THEY PROBABLY DON’T WANT TO MATCH WITH ME ANYWAY, the relationship between Hluid and Qven still feels pretty normal and straight, and also not particularly believable. Whatever important conversations they have where they bare their souls to each other seem to mostly happen off-screen, while their on-screen (on-page?) courtship seems to consist exclusively of watching TV together.

The comparison didn’t occur to me while I was reading it, but in summarizing the book just now Translation State has pretty strong echoes of The Gods Themselves, at least in terms of Presger biology. Leckie, at least, has a better handle on gender than Asimov.

If you’re thirsty for more Imperial Raadch adjacent content, Translation State scratches that itch. But I wouldn’t hand it off to anyone as an introduction to the Imperial Raadch books or to Leckie generally. Save it for later.

Are You My Mother?

I am constitutionally incapable of walking into a library without at least paging through something. And so while I was at one of my home libraries in August to renew my card, I took a stroll around the main floor to see if anything caught my eye. My circuit ended in the graphic novel section, where Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? was one of the featured books.

I knew Bechdel by reputation (who among us has not heard of “the Bechdel test” by now?) but not yet by works, even if I had heard of Fun Home and “Dykes to Watch Out For.” A memoir about parents? Well heck, very on brand to read while visiting one’s parents!

Happy families are all alike; unhappy families are all unique in their unhappiness. That’s the mood reading people’s reflections on their own parents. How are mine like theirs? How are mine different? Do we have any of the same difficulties in our relationships with them? Can I learn anything from how this person managed it (or didn’t)? Plus a heaping helping of: thank God my parents are the way they are.

Not that Are You My Mother? is didactic, or instructional. There are a lot of asides about Donald Winnicott and child psychology and Freud, but only because they were Bechdel’s own interests at the time of writing. And lots of Virginia Woolf and To The Lighthouse, as well. I guess one day I should make a real honest effort with that book, but today is not that day.

My dad is not Bechdel’s dad; my mom is not Bechdel’s mom. My relationships with them have different wrinkles and potholes than Bechdel has with hers, though sometimes they overlap or resonate in a kind of harmony. Never enough that the suggestions from her therapists feel like they can apply to me, but enough for me to do the slow nod of recognition.

Berries Goodman

Like Emil and the Detectives, Emily Cheney Neville’s Berries Goodman was another parental library inheritance that was always just around the house, never fully absorbed either into my books or my brothers’. It made for a nice break from dusting bookshelves, as it turned out.

We start off in a conversation between teenage Bertrand “Berries” Goodman and his childhood friend Sidney Fine, who Berries hasn’t seen since he moved out of the fictional suburbs of Olcott Corners to New York City. Sidney is playing truant and heading off to New Jersey for the day, for reasons unknown, and has called on Berries in New York for help and to catch up.

Then we flash back to one year in Berries’ and Sidney’s elementary school lives, right after the Goodmans’ relocation to Olcott Corners from New York. Berries quickly befriends Sidney, while jokes and comments from the adults around him make it clear that there is a not-so-subtle strain of anti-Semitism in the neighborhood. When other children, like Berries’ neighbor and frenemy Sandy, repeat similar talking points, Berries reacts in anger and confusion: anger at the insult to his friends (and by now it’s no spoiler that this includes Sidney as well as his friends back in New York) and confusion over the fact that anyone would even believe such stupid things. Everything comes to a head when the trio go ice skating and the bossy but well-meaning Sandy dares Sidney into a stunt that leaves him hospitalized. Sidney’s mother fears that the latent anti-Semitic attitudes are going to start escalating and pulls him out of their school in favor of the school in the nearby Jewish neighborhood and forbids Sidney from playing with Berries. For a while the two meet in secret, but after their fathers catch them out, they’re separated for good.

Not long after, Mrs. Goodman decides she’s tired of the suburban life and the Goodmans move back to New York. Years later this is where we catch up with teenage Berries and Sidney, who is trying to get a bus out of the Port Authority. Berries goes with Sidney back to Olcott Corners and things are eventually smoothed out between the two families.

The condensed version sounds like an anvilicious after-school special because I left out all of the slice-of-life incidentals. Everything in the actual book unfolds more carefully and casually than that and is interspersed with nostalgic unsupervised kids in suburbia shenanigans, and rather clear-eyed observations and criticisms of middle class American standards and parenting.

There’s an interesting comparison to be made just by looking at the difference in covers between Berries Goodman and another one of Neville’s young adult novels, It’s Like This, Cat. There are essentially two different covers for Berries Goodman, neither of which have been updated at all.

Screen shot of a Google images search for Berries Goodman. Only two cover images dominate: one with abstract color bars and one with an illustration of a boy on a bicycle in front of a house.
Berries Goodman

Meanwhile, It’s Like This, Cat seems to have been continuously updated and repackaged for a new readership.

Screenshot of a Google images search for "It's Like This, Cat." It shows a variety of covers in different art styles, seven in all.
It’s Like This, Cat

It’s Like This, Cat was on reading lists in my school years. I saw it in the library. But the only time I’ve ever seen Berries Goodman is in my shelves at home. Of course, I haven’t read Cat so I can’t make the comparison or even begin to guess at why that one has remained so popular and Berries hasn’t. But if you happen to stumble across Berries Goodman, you should pick it up. It’s a fun read and Neville has a fantastic ear for dialogue, especially between kids.