Such Good Friends

Title: Such Good Friends

Author: Lois Gould

Year of publication: 1970

Inner cover blurb: 'We were at least as happily married as anybody else, which maybe wasn't very, but it was all anybody could reasonably expect.  All I could, anyway...
   But now Julie Messinger, age 31, mother of two, is going through the kind of hell that may destroy her marriage, if not her life.  It starts when her husband Richard enters a hospital for a simple operation, which turns into a medical disaster that may cause his death.  While her fate, as well as his, hangs suspended in the hospital's Intensive Care Unit, she is compelled to unlock all the doors behind which the unthinkable truths about her husband, her friends and herself have been carefully hidden.
   Suddenly Julie and the people she thought she knew best begin to betray themselves in way that shock them all, and for reasons none of them can explain.  The whole intricate fabric of their familiar world - loyalties, love, sex - is torn apart and rewoven in a strange and frightening new pattern.  Each is shattered by this one catastrophic experience, but only Julie is so changed by it that she will never again live by the same rules, or in the same way.
   This intensely revealing portrait of a dramatic marital crisis, through which people discover their unknown selves, could only have been written by a woman.  Yet perhaps no other woman writer, and certainly no man, has ever created a heroine with so acute a sense of her own sexual feelings and attitudes, so unclouded a vision of the feminine psyche in search of fulfilment.
   Such Good Friends compels both startled laughter and the pain of recognition.  At once erotic and anti-erotic, tough and heartrending, it is a book whose plot never detracts from its haunting statement about human behaviour.  Its strength lies in revealing what people do to each other in the name of friendship; how some use even love and death as masks or weapons; and how they may survive, scarred, yet in a way more whole than before.'

Quick flick reveals: Like the blurb, the book seems to go on a bit without really telling you much.  Has the tone of an American Bridget Jones on seventies prescription drugs.  What's not to like?

Random paragraph: 'Normally, I'm a fantastic shopper; I operate on a kind of radar which I must have developed as a reaction to all those years of suffering in clothes, or hiding under them.  Now that I was a perfect size 9 and could walk around impersonating a pretty girl, dressing was a sacred privilege, something entrusted to me.  Girls who have cried into their mirrors are never really sure what will happen if they smile now.  Won't the mirror send you right back to your old self?  You tremble in ecstatic stage fright every time you enter the try-on room with the curtain that doesn't quite close.  Don't be silly, you are pretty, see?  Oh, but that isn't me!


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Another Part of the House

Title: Another Part of the House

Author: Winston M. Estes

Year of publication: 1970

Inner cover blurb: '"Good times are just around the corner," the catch phrase of the Depression years, offered the promise of better days which never seemed to come.  And yet the best days of all, the days of a family bound together by love regardless of adversity - these are the days portrayed in this vital and penetrating novel of family life in the Texas Panhandle in the 1930's.
   Another Part of the House is told through the eyes of ten-year-old Larry Morrison, who is aware that the times are troubled but doesn't know why.  He understands conditions only insofar as they affect him and his family.  To him, the Depression, the drought, the dust, and, most of all, death are potential destroyers of the only real security a child knows - his home.
   "Stealing and dying," Larry observes, "both of these terrible things happened in our own family right under my very nose, and here I was still living, eating, sleeping, playing, breathing and walking around on two legs."
   Here, too, are the other members of Larry's family, living through happy times as well as hardship in the pages of this moving story.  Written with compassion and understanding and an undeniable sense of truth, Another Part of the House is a warmhearted evocation of a vanished way of life.  The wonder of its telling lies in the author's ability to transform the humor and sadness of everyday events into an affirmative, unforgettable narrative.'

Quick flick reveals:  "I found Another Part of the House fascinating and enjoyed it enormously," said P.G. Wodehouse of this book, which we can safely assume means he didn't read it.  Estes seems pretty much lost to history, perhaps because his characters 'exclaim' 'agree' and 'command', rather than just 'say' things in the Elmore Leonard-approved style that marks the barriers of good taste right now.  Still, looks pretty interesting, although probably not as good as A Garden of Sand by Earl Thompson.

Random paragraph: 'I couldn't get interested in yellow boxcars.  My attention was nailed by the swarms of men perched in boxcar doors and atop flatbeds like so many blackbirds.  While Ozell licked his forefinger and stamped the palm of his hand for good luck - one time each per yellow boxcar - I ticked off forty-eight men aboard the freight train before I lost count.'


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The Dolly Dolly Spy

Title: The Dolly Dolly Spy

Author: Adam Diment

Year of publication: 1967, Pan edition 1968

Back cover blurb: '"The most modern hero in years... He's hip, he's hard, he likes birds, and, sometimes, marijuana..."  Daily Mirror
   PHILIP McALPINE
   "The latest Instant Hero of Fiction.  He is the contemporary Bond... McAlpine is a Secret Service agent, too.  He also has the same obsessive interest in sex.  But about there they part company..."   Sunday Mirror
   THE DOLLY DOLLY SPY
   "There is any amount of violence and almost everybody is threatened with torture or rape or both... very efficient, not too jagged and extremely easy to read"   The Bookman
   ADAM DIMENT
   "is twenty-three; his hero, Philip McAlpine, is based on himself.  That is to say he's tall, good-looking, with a taste for fast cars, planes, girls and pot... One of the most interesting characters in the book is his loathsome British secret service chief, Quine, who talks camp and calls McAlpine 'luv'.  'Quine', says Diment, 'is God.  A sort of non-caring vicious God.  He's the Establishment rolled into one.  He's all authority."  Atticus, The Sunday Times'

Quick flick reveals: Diment's Austin Powers-esque take on Bond was very popular in its day, but his star faded quickly, and he himself disappeared off the face of the planet at some point in the seventies, possibly to the extra-terrestrial body known as Switzerland.  Quite looking forward to reading a book whose hero 'is based on himself'.

Random paragraph:  'I have a fifteen-year lease on a three-roomed bit of real estate in Hampstead. A number of modish knick-knacks like expensive record players, deep foam, leather hide, swivel, wing-backed chairs, a wall-to-wall white Chinese carpet, floor-to-ceiling bookcases and a small but very good wine stock.'


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The Satyr

Title: The Satyr

Author: Robert DeMaria

Year of publication: 1972, Sphere edition 1973

Back cover blurb: 'Marc, a thirty-five year old editor, was a bachelor and would probably remain one as long as his mother was alive - even though he wanted to marry the young and beautiful Laura.
   Laura, he insisted, had to be a virgin bride.  And for a sensualist like Marc, this meant he had to look elsewhere for his bedmates.
   Mother was the problem.  For she treatened to disinherit him if he married Laura.  There seemed to be only one way out.  Murder...'

Quick flick reveals: Seems quite a standard 'man has lots of sex and plots to murder his mother' story, but Anthony Burgess thought it was great so there might be something more to it than that.

Random paragraph: 'But the wedding night, that was another matter.  That would be my ritual, my black mass, and our roles would be reversed.  Laura would be the passive initiate.  I would be the hooded priest with the jewelled dagger.  I would lead her through the forest of the male kingdom to the castle of obedience and teach her, on her knees, to recite prayers of the flesh.'


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Body Charge

Title: Body Charge

Author: Hunter Davies

Year of publication: 1972, Sphere edition 1974

Back cover blurb: 'Franko Baxter roamed the streets of London in the unlicensed mini-cab he drove for Mr Innocent of Fantastic Cabs.  When he wasn't picking up passengers, he was on the heath kicking a football with his friend Ginger or anyone else who was around.
   But Franko's trouble was that he got involved.  With Shuggy, down from Glasgow to try his luck with a big league team; with Zak, a graduate drop-out on the dole, and his sexy wife; with Joff, top bisexual TV producer; and with the police investigating a homosexual murder.'

Quick flick reveals: Hunter Davies is now best known as a top Beatles biographer, but he has written a number of novels over the years.  I thought this one was going to be about football hooligans, but closer inspection reveals it to be about murders, and football, and homosexuality, and taxis... or something.

Random paragraphs: 'He put his hand on my shoulder.  I pushed him away.  Come round any time, he said.  Come round tonight.  He was having a few people in.  He knew there were several young people there I'd love to meet.
   Drink, money, now sex.  All that was missing was Green Shield stamps.'


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A Woman In Space

Title: A Woman In Space

Author: Sara Cavanaugh

Year of publication: 1981, Ace/Stoneshire edition 1983

Back cover blurb: 'She's young, she's lovely - she's an astronaut!  And she's been assigned a dangerous mission: to discove the wherabouts of four missing male astronauts who had preceded her to the Moon.  Carol's space ship is mysteriously caught up in a force field that draws her inexorably into outer space.  Carol's mission is in great danger, as is her life and that of the man she loves!'

Quick flick reveals: A bit of a novelty this: a sci-fi novel aimed exclusively at the female reader.  Astronaut Carol tackles male chauvinism, space danger, and inadequate washing facilities (Inner cover blurb: 'Spacewoman's problem: How do you take a bath without your male copilot peeking?').  Looks fun.

Random paragraphs: 'She would find out, and in the process maybe find a way out of her dilemma.  Having decided on a course of action, Carol went to the closet and picked out a sexy outfit.  She would try to bait Marcus!  She would offer her love to him in return for a slight favor.
   Send her back to the moon!'


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Lost Book Library Reading Round-Up no. 3

More books from the Lost Book Library I have now read, or failed to read.

The Sioux by Irene Handl

Status: Completed

One I read before I started the library.  I found this novel about a freaky French family by Metal Mickey's Gran to be intriguing, but ultimately a bit stagey.  David Quantick was raving about it on Twitter the other week though, so what do I know?

Glitterball by Rochelle Larkin

Status: Abandoned, p. 98

I was initially impressed by this disco-themed novel clearly inspired by the story of Studio 54.  Despite being satisfyingly racy with assorted seventies pill-popping rock stars, disco divas and general beautiful people descending on the latest New York nightspot, it also matter-of-factly explored what it involved to actually set up and run the place.  It had it's own weird integrity, which is exactly what I'm looking for here.  About a third of the way in, however, the whole book was sunk by an improbable and gynecologically detailed sex scene that smashed through the protagonist's character arc like a donger-shaped wrecking ball.  It felt sellotaped in to keep the publisher happy, and, the illusion broken, suddenly the whole thing just seemed rather silly.  My initial fear was that this book wouldn't be sexy enough for its subject matter.  Turns out it was just too sexy for it.

Thumb Tripping by Don Mitchell

Status: Completed

This hippy-hitchhiking novel was a delight, all in all.  Telling the story of counter-cultural couple Gary and Chay, and of their adventures hitching rides across California, it follows a basic story pattern of 'hitch ride/find something to disapprove of in attitude to life of driver/escape from car when driver reveals themselves to be total mentalist'.  Nevertheless, there are some enjoyably strange situations, such as a suburban housewife stealing a watch from the corpse of a crash victim, and it's subtle enough to expose the limitations of both straight and hippy life choices.  This is a book that asks the question 'Where do we go from here?', and shrugs its shoulders.

Cuckoo by Wendy Perriam

Status: Completed

A well-off couple can't conceive.  Meanwhile the husband's illegitimate daughter crashes into their lives, forcing the wife into an affair with a Polytechnic lecturer in Icelandic Studies.  Although there are a lot of good things going on here, and Perriam's eye for telling detail is astonishingly strong, this doesn't quite hang together.  Starting off like Carla Lane, before veering towards Neil LaBute before settling somewhere around Mike Leigh, it feels like the ideas for two different novels are living unhappily together in the same paperback body.  The protagonist is sometimes the most uptight prude on the planet, sometimes happy to slum it with the aforementioned lecturer in his filthy flat, and improbably getting a job as a cab driver for a few chapters.  The husband is essentially nasty, with no insight provided into why he is, or whether there's anything else going on in there.  Nevertheless, there are lots of enjoyable scenes, including what sounds like the house party from Hell and a fantastic early 80s polytechnic end-of-term ball.  More a novel made up of good bits than a good novel.

The Upstart by Piers Paul Read

Status: Abandoned, p. 65

A bit of a frustrating one, this.  This tale of a vicar's son who turns on his aristocratic childhood friends when they humiliate him and starts on a path of revenge-filled debauchery begins very well.  The description of post-war village life and the relations between the landowners and common-folk is impressively vivid, but the actual humiliation that spurs on the rest of the story, involving a dinner jacket, just feels too small for the momentous significance awarded to it.  Consequently, everything that followed felt false, and I couldn't be doing with it.  Oh well.

The Fun House

Title: The Fun House

Author: William Brinkley

Year of publication: 1961, NEL edition 1968

Back cover blurb: 'William Brinkley is recognised as one of America's leading satirists.
   THE FUN HOUSE is the the office of Vital, an American weekly picture magazine.  The staff are the biggest collection of odd-balls, eccentrics and geniuses ever to appear between the covers of one book.  Their lives and loves - above board and behind locked doors - make this one of the most uproarious stories you'll ever read.'

Quick flick reveals: Mad Men-era satire.  A brisk thumbing didn't make me laugh, but then neither did Catch-22.

Random paragraph: 'In short: No one whose real interest in life is women (and besides the arts and the fully, truly spiritual life it is the only really worthwhile one, the only other productive of real joy) should ever even consider going into any profession other than photographer.  That is our advice to all young men.'


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Confessions of a Spent Youth

Title: Confessions of a Spent Youth

Author: Vance Bourjaily

Year of publication: 1961, Corgi edition 1968

Back cover blurb: 'Never before has the sexual life of an American male been so completely revealed.  New York, Africa, Naples, Japan... four continents, seven countries, twelve women... a girl named Jeannie, one named Moomie, and Chizuko...

Quick flick reveals: Some guy crosses the planet having sex, as well as doing some army stuff.  Seems to be a proper novel, influenced by Hemingway and everything, and not a wank book, despite some very suspicious vibes being sent out by the packaging.  It's also weirdly long for a book which doesn't seem to have a plot.  Bourjaily looks like he could well be a serious author of quality whose work has slipped out of view with time.  Which is exactly the sort of thing we're looking for here, so that's good.

Random paragraph: '''Pretty, isn't it?"  She said, almost bitterly, covering the place with her hand, and stood up, turning her back to me and to the other bed.  "I've got to take care now," she muttered, supporting herself on the bedside table.  "Where's the john?"'


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Virgin Planet

Title: Virgin Planet

Author: Poul Anderson

Year of publication: 1959, Warner Books edition 1977

Back cover blurb: 'For 300 Year The Planet of Women Awaited The Coming of Man.  Then One Arrives...
   He is Davis Bertram, a space-explorer.  Buth how can he convince them he really is a man?  Their legends have built Men into gods.
   Trying to be worthy of hte Coming, the women imitate masculine virtues.  They are warlike, ambitious, ruthless.  Unless Davis can convince them he is a man, they will kill him for blasphemy.  But if he does convince them, the Doctor-Priests will kill him to protect their own iron control of the planet...'

Quick flick reveals:  Like nearly all the sci-fi that makes its way here, this isn't really a Lost Book.  Although no longer generally in print, Anderson's books circulate widely and sci-fi fans know who he is.  I just included it here though, because of the way the cover image (what is this strange planet where women feel compelled to wear bras but not pants?) and the accompanying blurb, along with THAT title, very strongly suggest that this astronaut is going to be having lots and lots of lovely sex without actually promising it.   (On an unrelated matter, this is by far the best-smelling book in the Lost Book Library.)

Random paragraph: 'Several mature women sprawled in the big chairs near the hearth.  They rose and stared at Davis.  He grew uncomfortable after a minute. "Hello," he said.'


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