how strange it is to be anything at all

Being lent books can be a tricky proposition. On the one hand, there is the misinformed lender who presses into your hot little hand a novel so outside your realm of interest, so cosmically distant from anything you might come even remotely close to enjoying, that you question not only the person’s tastes but your relationship to him. And of course, this is always the one who pelts you with obnoxious “did you read it yet”s and other, more specific follow-up questions. (Um, sorry if I have ever done this to you.) But on the other hand, there are those happy times when friends lend books that are so very just right. I read, before the holidays, just such a book, a surprise bestseller in 1926: Lolly Willowes, by Sylvia Townsend Warner (and am now reading another, Mothers and Other Monsters, which, as promised, is amazing.)

Lolly Willowes is a strange novel, and thoroughly un-put-down-able. I don’t want to give too much away here, but I will say that it is one of those books with that curious bait-and-switch kind of structure – a book that pretends to be one kind of book and then, fairly late in the game, reveals itself to be another animal all together. Do readers have enough patience for this kind of thing anymore? I wonder. I’ve been told it’s a “total grad school book,” and I can see why – it’s essentially about a woman trying to suss out what options exist for her if she doesn’t want to get married, what possibilities life can hold outside the assumed life cycle events. But don’t be turned off by the women’s study-ish sound of it – it’s never didactic, always imaginative and deliciously strange.

This book is full of bizarre imagery that almost sneaks up you – you think you’re reading an ordinary passage about spring cleaning the family home and suddenly, bam, you encounter: “At certain seasons a fresh resinous smell would haunt the house like some rustic spirit…if it were fine, the stuffed foxes and otters were taken out of their glass cases, brushed, and set to sweeten on the lawn.” I feel the steady hand of an assured writer here, particularly rereading it in retrospect. (Isn’t that a pleasurable reading experience? When, after finishing a book, you see that every line was pointing towards the suddenly inevitable-feeling end?) And what a weird, awesome, eerie image: the stuffed animals sitting out on the lawn, as if waiting to be reanimated.

The book is peppered with similarly surprising, yet entirely telling and accurate details. When Lolly’s father is dying, she looks at his nurses and “their starched white aprons looked to her like unlettered tombstones.” Then there’s Lolly herself, as alienated, awkward, and well-meaning as any good heroine should be. In answer to a potential suitor’s statement that February is a dangerous month, she agrees: “It is…If you are a were-wolf, and very likely you may be, for lots of people are without knowing, February, of all months, is the month when you are most likely to go out on a dark night and worry sheep.” Not even Elizabeth Bennett would ever say anything so bizarre.

Really I think this book is about reimagining one’s life, about stalling inertia. There is a wonderful moment when Lolly looks at her family at the dinner table: “She felt as though she had awoken, unchanged, from a twenty-years slumber, to find them almost unrecognizable. She surveyed them, one after the other. Even Henry and Caroline, whom she saw every day, were half hidden under their accumulations—accumulations of prosperity, authority, daily experience. They were carpeted with experience.”

Lolly's eventual solution for herself is pretty metal, and totally fun to read. If anything, I felt like the book ended a little too soon after she "finds herself"...but maybe that was to leave room for a sequel? Or really, maybe that's not really the point at all.

Actually, I think that might be it. The point is the process, not the destination. Something that serves me well to keep in mind, I think. In fact, a resolution of mine, if it can be called that, for the new year.