Jude the Obscure

 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy is strange, beautiful, uneven, surprising. At its most basic level, it's an anti-marriage polemic. There's a lot more going on in this late-Victorian novel, however. The pressures of class, gender roles, academic elitism, and societal expectations thwart its protagonists at every turn, and in the end it's difficult to locate just one obvious antagonist. The title character and his cousin/lover Sue are victims of their era and place, but they're also deeply impulsive, annoying, and foolish. There's a horrific tragedy near the end that feels unearned. It's a weird read, but I enjoyed it on the whole.

Thomas Hardy is canonical and well known: many of his works are assigned in college or advanced high school classes. To me, though, he's new. One reason that I'm intentionally vague in my summary is that the plots of these novels are genuinely surprising if you're like me and don't know the story going in. I read my first Hardy novel, Far from the Madding Crowd (a more successful work), last summer and enjoyed it. One of these years, I'll get around to Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and beyond. I prefer Hardy to Dickens: he's more economical and, when he wants to be, poetic. Every so often, every few chapters, the prose elevates into Keats/Shelley/Byron-levels of transcendence, and that makes me want to keep reading. 

Ducks

 Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton is a memoir and graphic novel about her time, just after college, paying off her student loans in work camps in northern Alberta. I thought it was terrific. I'm not accustomed to graphic novels, and I read Ducks in less than a day, so I don't know if that's the medium or my fascination. Either way, it's a powerful work: beautiful and tragic, infuriating and inspiring. I'd seen some of Beaton's work before, a hilarious internet cartoon strip that lampoons The Great Gatsby, among other things. I was excited for Ducks, but unprepared for the depths and honesty of her account.

By her telling, the gender disparity on the work crews is about fifty to one, men to women. As a young woman, she stood out in the worst possible way, then, in a pre-#MeToo workplace. She had to navigate the pervasive sexual harassment, along with communal overwork, drug abuse, environmental degradation, racism, and untreated mental illness. In her honesty and avoidance of didacticism, she also remembers moments of beauty, courage, and kindness. I read a book recently called Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 (reviewed on this blog) that presented workplace sexism as a cudgel, an unrelenting force. That book was a diatribe; Beaton's is a complicated memoir. In its humor, weariness, and unsparing realism, Ducks is much more effective.

When I was in college, I worked for an emergency catering company that served forest fire camps. It was dramatic, hardscrabble labor. I worked 110-hour weeks, smoked cigarettes, lost sleep, and went mildly crazy. And I only worked that job for two summers! Given her sex, job description, time frame, and remote location, Kate Beaton had a much worse go of it than I ever did. My experience helped in my reading of Ducks--it gave me a starting point and several moments of shared understanding--but her story took me on a journey. Highest recommendations for this astonishing book. 

Olive Kitteridge

 Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout is a collection of short stories that take place in a small town in Maine, all of which have something to do with the titular character. It's a strong collection, concerned with interiority and trauma response. Olive as a character reminds me of Ramona Quimby, in a series I'm reading with my daughter. Both act out in publicly antisocial ways, which is dealt with predictably by their peers, but which masks their inability to communicate frustration and anxiety. I felt that some stories in the collection forced a cameo from Olive, and that on balance they actually had too many traumatic things to be quite believable, but it was a worthwhile read on the whole.

We Don't Know Ourselves

 We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland by Fintan O'Toole is one of the better nonfiction books I've ever read. Thorough and lively, it's a comprehensive survey of Irish history since the author's birth, in 1958. O'Toole's personal narrative is muted and serves only to ground the larger account of Ireland's economy, political violence, and culture. I had heard of the Troubles, of course, and seen films and television shows that told parts of the story (with varying success). O'Toole's book gave the big picture, without making the terrorism the most interesting aspect of those years. Sociological and religious forces drove much of We Don't Know Ourselves, explaining everything from political corruption to population declines to real estate. 

The inherent contradictions and "known unknowns" that permeate Irish society were the real subject of the book. It explored Ireland's place, as a mostly independent, mostly Catholic, population on the frontiers of Europe during the Sexual Revolution. The tensions between public and private morality proved unsustainable. How a country can officially enact the most socially conservative laws in the developed world, while privately ignoring child abuse at parochial schools, engenders barely concealed rage. O'Toole is not detached. He does not romanticize his country's plight. His clinical descriptions of the IRA's bloodlust, for example, deflate any sympathy from American readers. If there's a plot in the text, it's how a country gradually but emphatically rejects the teachings of the Catholic Church. Given the hypocrisy and collective, willful ignorance, it is an understandable conclusion.