filial piety

I'm in Portland for the Fourth, which means admiring my mother's skill at growing things, and my father's at blowing things up. My mother's vegetable garden has champagne currants, which are the most astonishing shade of translucent pink, clumped together like the eggs of a tropical fish. My father and glasseye spent the morning in target practice beside the fringe of woods that screens us from the housing development.

Susannah (my sister; it feels odd to name someone without an accompanying link) and my mother have just returned from New York. Eugene Lang has come through generously, with more than a full scholarship and two years' worth of transfer credit to LC's one, so she'll be in New York permanently come September.

***

I finished Peter Simple, and will discourse upon it to satisfy sartorias' curiosity:

The most interesting element of the book, I think, was Peter's friendship with O'Brien, his Irish superior. O'Brien is simultaneously a hero (baronet by the end of the book) and a comic character, with broadly drawn accent and incomprehensible Catholicism. He leads a young woman named Ella astray (though not so far astray as to require a hasty marriage; he cannot marry her since she is lower-class and poor, and he of course is fated for Peter's sister. Peter's sister accedes, rather like Marianne of Eleanor and Marianne, more to please her remaining family than out of passion. I do wonder whether one could write a modern novel in which the romance turned on the heroine doing what her family and friends thought all along would be a good idea.

The rest of Peter's relatives are doomed, since the happy ending depends on his becoming Lord Privilege. Some of the carnage seems unnecessary, such as the loss of his other sisters, and the madness of his father (since Midshipman Easy also involves a mad father, one wonders whether Marryat had personal reasons to be interested in the motif).

Some of the details of the father's madness reminded me of the teapot-uncle Patrick O'Brian's Diana shepherds briefly. Peter also has a sojourn in a madhouse, due to his scheming uncle the then-Lord-Privilege's plot; the details of the plot were strikingly similar to the forced madhouse incarceration in Sarah Waters' Fingersmith, and I wonder if Waters has deliberately reworked Marryat (or if the plot device is more common in nineteenth-century novels than I realize . . .)

***

I also read Sean Stewart's Perfect Circle, in two nights. During the first night I was quite absorbed; during the second I started to see the seam lines, as it were.

Sean Stewart's books are all about Being Part of One's Family. Perfect Circle varies the theme, by being as much about Dealing With One's Ex-Wife as Dealing With One's Family, Proper, but the thrust is still the same. I must confess that the theme is somewhat foreign to me; perhaps I have not had the right sorts of conflict with my own family. I read Sean Stewart more for the details, the way he sets up magic, the social commentary.

Besides family, Perfect Circle is about ghosts and Houston, Texas. The descriptions of Refinery Row created a familiar sort of paranoia; the descriptions of food left me skeptical (and a bit offended that my counterpart in the novel was so obviously Sonia, the uncomfortable Connecticut cousin-in-law). The ghosts are at first chilling-- and set up a truly messy accident scene, which sticks our hero with a $20,000 hospital bill, a form of suspense often ignored in the modern novel-- but by the end of the book we have seen so very ghosts that they are almost too familiar. In truth, the story was off-balance; the initial violence is too much for the rest of the book, which is stuck trying to be quirky instead of maudlin. It ends up feeling the way High Fidelity would feel if the hero didn't get the girl (which is, I must note, sensible of the girl), when it started out rather larger.

***

There is a hummingbird outside my window.