"The Color Purple" by Alice Walker

 An epistolary novel of a sort in that the story is told as if the protagonist Celie is writing letters to God. This has the advantage that the novelist can use the conceit that they don't know what is about to happen next. But, despite the careful use of mis-spelt words to give an authentic feel, these snippets have too much controlled narrative to sound like letters. Later, there are letters written to Celie. These are even more obviously contrived.

Nevertheless, the voices of the two main characters, Celie and Shug, come through very strongly.

One of my problems with this book is that it is issue driven. We start off with child sexual abuse; it almost feels that the author has contrived to select a hook with the biggest shock value. Then the protagonist is married off to a man who wants a wife to work for him and to have sex with; he beats her. Before too long we have lesbianism, racism, colonialism, slavery, the true origin of the Uncle Remus stories, lynching, female circumcision ... It is almost as if the author can't think of an issue without being compelled to add it to the story. This means that some of the characters (eg Nettie) simply become channels to report on these things. This reduces them from potentially three-dimensional characters into mouthpieces.

There are characters. The core of the book involves the narrator, Celie and her relationship with Shug, a jazz singer who is Celie's husband's former lover and occasional boyfriend. It is by observing how Shug confronts the world that Celie learns how to stop being exploited, downtrodden and abused. There are also two other characters: Harpo, Celie's stepson and his wife Sofia, who have an on-off relationship. Harpo tries hard to treat Sofia better than his father treats his stepmother; Sofia version of standing up to the world gets her into trouble that even she can't handle. These four characters could have made an excellent novel on their own, but every time Nettie shows her face she preaches.

The other interesting character is that of Mr ------, Celie's husband. He's very much the villain at the start. Then we discover that when he was in love with Shug, he was a different person. By the end of the book he is tamed. He is not the only baddie to be redeemed. It is almost as if the author is saying that if you are true to yourself, if you stand up for yourself, then in the end goodness and righteousness will prevail. It makes a book that started with a shock into a feel-good novel by the end. But I found such redemptive character arcs unconvincing.

A potentially great novel spoiled by too many issues, too much plot and too little concentration on the characters. 

Selected quotes: 

(page references refer to the Wiedenfeld & Nicolson paperpack published in 2017)

• "I don't know how to fight. All I know how to do is stay alive." (p 18)
• "Next time us see Harpo his face a mess of bruises. His lip cut. One of his eyes shut like a fist. He walk stiff and say his teef ache." (p 36) I love the eye that is 'shut like a fist'; both descriptive and hinting at the reason for his injury.
• "She weak as a kitten. But her mouth just pack with claws." (p 47)
• "Harpo sits on the steps acting like he don't care. He ... whistle a little tune. But it nothing compared to the way he usually whistle. His little whistle sound like it lost way down in a jar, and the jar in the bottom of the creek." (p 64)
• "She wearing a skintight red dress look like the straps made out of two pieces of thread." (p 69)
• "'Tea' to the English is really a picnic indoors." (p 123)
• "Nobody feel better for killing nothing. They feel something is all." (p 129)
• "There is a way that the men speak to women that reminds me too much of Pa. They listen just long enough to issue instructions." (p 146)
• "The God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful and lowdown." (p 173)
• "You better hush. God might hear you. Let 'im hear, I say. If he ever listened to poor coloured women the world would be a different place, I can tell you." (p 173)
• "Have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me." (p 174)
• "I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it." (p 177)
• "People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back." (p 177)
• "Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?" (p 177)
• "Every time I conjure up a rock, I throw it." (p 178)
• "I don't know who tried to teach him what to do in the bedroom, but it must have been a furniture salesman." (p 225)

January 2024; 261 pages

The Color Purple won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Less" by Andrew Sean Greer

 Arthur Less is a not-terribly-successful gay novelist. One ex-boyfriend is a famous poet, another ex-boyfriend is Freddy, the son of the Carlos who has been a frenemy of Arthur's all these years. Invited to Freddy's wedding to another man, Arthur decides the only way to avoid accepting is to be out of the country so he strings together a series of minor literary offers into a world tour: an interview in New York, a lecture in Mexico, a prize event in  Italy and so on. His experience are comic and tragic and most of all they are absurd (he is almost late to interview a more famous novelist because the clock in the hotel lobby isn't working and the publicist assumes Arthur is a woman; the novelist repeatedly vomits because of food poisoning etc). 

It is a gentle, rambling picaresque with some poignant observations on life from the perspective of a gay man growing old without a partner and some moments which prompted a chuckle (which is rather more than most 'comic' novels elicit from me). It is sweet and kind and amusing but, as is the common fault of picaresques, there is little structure and no drive: it is difficult to see that we are going anywhere until the last section, rather rapidly, attempts to make sense of it all. Otherwise, the most interesting thing about the book is that it occasionally lapses into the narrator talking directly to the reader; the mystery of the narrator's identity is not revealed until the end.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2018

There are some magical lines:

• "As he waits, around and around the room circles a young woman in a brown wool dress, a species of tweed humming-bird, pollinating first this group of tourists and then that one." (Less at First)
• "It is a bad musical, but, like a bad lay, a bad musical can still do its job perfectly well." (Less at First)
• "There follows, I am sad to say, a very long ride on a very long road ... to your final place of rest. He sighs, for he has spoken the truth for all men." (Less Mexican)
• "The cruel checkmate logic of conversation" (Less French)
• "Twenty years of joy and support and friendship, that's a success. Twenty years of anything with another person is a success. If a band stays together twenty years, it's a miracle. If a comedy duo stays together twenty years, they're a triumph. Is this night a failure because it's going to end in an hour?" (Less Moroccan)
• "People use the same old table, even though it's falling apart and it's been repaired and repaired, just because it was their grandmother's. That's how towns become ghost towns. It's how houses become junk stores. And I think it's how people get old." (Less Moroccan)
• "We know there's no love of your life. Love isn't terrifying like that. It's walking the fucking dog so the other one can sleep in, it's doing taxes, it's cleaning the bathroom without hard feelings." (Less Moroccan)
• "With a joy bordering on sadism, he degloves every humiliation to show its risible lining." (Less Indian)
• "By now he is well acquainted with humility. It is the one piece of luggage he has not lost." (Less At Last).

Perhaps a little superficial but cute and clever. April 2021; 261 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God