Month: September 2015

We Are Not Ourselves By Matthew Thomas 

Fictional Memoir

Growing up in a poor, Irish-American family, Eileen Tumulty dreamed of a better, more generically American life: one that would enable her to shed her family name that connotes her unstable, tumultuous circumstances. As a little girl, she was forced into the tiresome, repetitious role of carer for her parents, leading to her almost inevitable future as a nurse. She meets Ed Leary, her future husband, on a blind date set up by her roommate. Although she had low hopes for anything substantive to come of the New Year’s Eve get together, she is pleasantly surprised when she meets him, finding him ambitious, thoughtful and considerate. Her feelings intensify when he whispers in her ear, ‘I realise you didn’t have to do this, and I promise to try to make it worth your time.’ She falls in love with him, something she didn’t think she was capable of doing. Despite his similar upbringing, he seems to fit her aspirations for her future, as she sees his potential for success and wealth: ingredients with which to build a stable, comfortable life. Her attraction to him is a reaction against her father, who stands for everything she is trying to run away from: he is most interested in social status and personal relationships, on being ‘the big man’; Ed, on the other hand, is uninterested in having a popular reputation in the community, focusing only on his neuroscientific research. At least he appears to appreciate Eileen, unlike her father, who barely notices her. However, when obsessively pursuing his projects, he often neglects the people around him, ironically not unlike the way her father treated her when she was a child. In time, Eileen realises they have different aspirations, and want different things from life: when Merck offers him a job, including a lab of his own, state-of-the-art equipment and a team of assistants, he rejects it for fear of becoming their puppet, instead opting for a modest career in teaching. His most important virtue in life is integrity, whilst Eileen holds success and growth as higher priorities. A little while after their son Connel is born, the narrative is split between him and his mother. In contrast to Eileen’s worrisome, supportive attitude, Connel’s narrative consists of his somewhat self-absorbed views and experiences of life in the Leary family. When Ed starts to act strange, Eileen and Connel feel confused and isolated; their insights on Ed’s slow deterioration are personable glimpses of living with someone with early-onset Alzheimer’s.

We Are Not Ourselves is eloquently, elegantly written, with mostly short sentences strung together that have a flowing, enticing effect on the reader. I was, at least in the beginning, so absorbed in the book that I felt as though I was Eileen, living through all her hardships and aspirations. Although effective, as this forced me to experience the persistent challenges that Eileen faced, this also meant that it made for quite a depressing read, as it was long, slow-paced and tiresome. Consequently, events in the book affected me less and less, despite their seemingly increasing importance. Additionally, characters that were intended to be interesting underwhelmed me: Connel’s self-absorbed, under-achieving ways irritated me, rather than made me sympathize with him, and although Ed is enigmatic, I was not intrigued to know more about him. A development near the end does humanise Ed, but too little, too late. While I understand why it had to be so long, as its setting stretches over more than half a century, and the author does try to make the book more palatable by separating it into sections, I nonetheless feel it’s too lengthy, as I became progressively more fatigued by the book’s length and Eileen’s repetitive existence. Overall, a great, well-written book, but one that I struggled to persevere with.

I would recommend this book to people who are interested in familial relationships, and a ‘real’ love story, not a romantic fantasy. It’s good for people who don’t mind a long, slow-paced book, one that doesn’t seem rewarding of uplifting until the end.

My Ratings (out of 10 As):

Plot/Story: AAAAAAAA

Writing: AAAAAAAAA

Pace: Slow

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Harper Lee’s New Book: Go Set A Watchman

Classic Literature, Fictional Memoir, Historical Fiction, Legal Fiction

To Kill a Mockingbird is an outstanding book. Exquisitely written, it is a book that saddens and yet heartens concurrently, leaving a warm, contented feeling, despite its less-than-happy ending for underdog Tom Robinson. However, the book’s uplifting effect on the reader comes at the expense of its realism: it touches on, yet mostly leaves unresolved, the issue of racism.

Go Set a Watchman, conversely, attempts to tackle racism; to explain it. Set 20 years after To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman is again narrated by Jean Louise ‘Scout’ Finch, at the age of twenty-six. She’s returning home from New York to visit her ageing father, Atticus. Set amidst the civil rights movement and the political unrest transpiring in the South, Jean Louise’s routine visit becomes regrettable when she learns jarring realities about her family, the town and the people she loves. Scout continues her narrative – written before, yet set after Mockingbird – resolute in her sense of right and wrong. She discovers to her horror that her father – until then revered as her beacon of morality – holds the same bigoted views that he had seemed to castigate. As Jean Louise loses grasp of her values, and assumed truths, she looks to her past for signs of what she had been blind to all along: that her father was not the ‘perfect’ person she thought he was.

Despite its mixed reviews and reactions, I enjoyed Go Set a Watchman. It’s a well-needed ‘wake-up call’ from the dream-like, simplistic world of To Kill a Mockingbird; Scout matures, and Watchman is the grown-up, ‘real’ story. It is said that much of To Kill a Mockingbird is a product of Lee’s editor, who knew that a more fantastical book based on the same story would sell better than a more ‘realistic’ one: perhaps he realised that people like reading something that makes them feel better about themselves. Who can say if this rumour is true, but I do think that the books seem completely different: Watchman is less a sequel, and more an elaboration on Mockingbird.

As the book progresses, Jean Louise’s disturbed and confused reaction to the news that her family is, in some ways, just like every other in Maycomb (their town), is an empathetic coming-of-age disillusionment with the world; disenchantment with childhood role models that many readers – myself included – could remember themselves feeling, despite different circumstances. Go Set a Watchman tries to make sense, to portray the experience of living in a small town in the South; it explains how hard it was to speak up, and stand up for what they think is right. Without excusing their guilt or sense of wrongdoing, it explores the intent behind their actions: it is natural to oppose political change. The book offers a comprehensible perspective of the South.

Watchman failed to explain conclusively the South’s opposition to the Civil Rights Movement – but perhaps this was intended: there is no simple, ‘correct’ answer; rather, one can only presume their mind-sets. This is a great book that offers context, depth and nuance to a beloved classic.

I commend this book to all, but particularly if you have read To Kill a Mockingbird. You would enjoy both of these books if you are interested in the Civil Rights Movement in America, from the viewpoint of a liberal, white Southern young woman. It’s a little slow-paced, because of all the flashbacks, but hardly hard to read. In fact, it’s incredibly readable, especially for the sequel to a classic.

My Ratings (out of 10 As):

Plot/Story: AAAAAAAAAA

Writing: AAAAAAAAAA

Pace: Medium/Slow

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