#27. The Amateur Marriage: Anne Tyler

So I gave up reading about writers, and started reading about marriages instead. The Amateur Marriage follows a similar theme to Love and Other Infidelities, in that it looks at how a marriage goes wrong. But what I also enjoyed about this is its exploration of what must have been an incredibly common phenomenon - couples marrying in the heat of the moment amidst the chaos of World War II, only to be left with the reality of post-war America, living in the suburbs with someone who may be all wrong for them, wishing they had made different choices, but having to live with the consequences.
This book also gives a view of the whole lives of central characters Michael and Pauline by taking jumps forward in time - how they get together, raise their family, fall apart, what they do next, and how their children grow up.
There is something of the detached observer in Anne Tyler's writing, and I feel I don't know enough of the characters. This is particularly frustrating in the subplot of the vanishing of Michael and Pauline's daughter Lindy - I wanted to know more about how they coped with it, why she did it, what happened to her. So it was a little dissatisfying in this respect.
And maybe this slightly dispassionate tone comes from the fact that the characters, for the most part, lived a life devoid of passion - even any enjoyment, it seemed.
Despite this (and I do like a bit more excitement and passion in my books), it was beautifully written and a thoroughly enjoyable read.

#26. Love & Other Infidelities: Helen Townsend

This is the book I always thought should have been written - about what happens after the 'happily ever after', when you find 'the one' and everything is meant to be clear and easy from then. When I was younger, I used to wonder why people wrote about the search for someone to love, and what happened after they had proved to be the wrong one, but not about what happened in between. Well this certainly does – charting the slow crumbling of a marriage in gut-wrenching detail.
Set in Sydney, the novel works chronologically through the years from 1975 to 1994. Each chapter has multiple narrators, so you get the perspective of various characters on the complicated interweaving of relationships over two decade. This device, while unsophisticated and a little jarring in the early chapters when you're trying to figure out how these people fit together, highlights how different a single situation - especially the inner workings of an intimate relationship - can look through different eyes.
In the end, though, it just made me feel kind of sad - and maybe that's why people tend not to write these books.

#25. Girl from the South: Joanna Trollope

I love Joanna Trollope, but I haven't read one of her books for years - not since Marrying the Mistress and Other People's Children. I love her style of writing, especially because the characters she creates and the scenarios she places them in are so real, and yet still light-hearted and engaging enough to ensure that you don't feel depressed at the unrelenting reality of it.
Girl from the South straddles London and Charleston, South Carolina to examine thirty-something angst - finding love, finding the right job, working out where you fit in, and so on. There are men who can't commit, girls who can't work out whether they want to be married mothers or to go a completely different way, and all are feeling like time is ticking - that things should be getting serious. Of course, my favourite character is Tilly, the features editor (there I go with the writers again!), who can't get her boyfriend Henry to marry her and instead ends up in an unsuitable relationship with unsuitable William who has been in love with her forever.
It should be predictable and irritating - but it's not. And that's the joy of Joanna Trollope.

#24. Chocolat: Joanne Harris

Now I realise that I may be one of the last remaining people on the planet not to have either read this book or seen the movie with Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp, but somehow I managed to completely miss both, up until now.
I loved this book, and its light-hearted whimsy was the perfect antidote to the increasingly depressing tales I have been reading recently. It has such a lovely array of characters, and I enjoyed stepping into the little village of Lansquenet every night with Vianne and her daughter Anouk, and imagining that lovely patissier with its beautiful chocolate delights. But it had just enough conflict and darkness to avoid sickly sweetness.
It also reminded me of the pleasures of fiction for its own sake, unclouded by too much 'worthiness'.