Trump, Clinton, the Media and Sexism

Watching the Presidential election campaign from three thousand miles away is undoubtedly very different to being in America in the midst of it all. But from here, I have to say, it’s the strangest battle I have ever witnessed. It seems to me that the candidates are being judged on radically different criteria. If Clinton came out with one of the extraordinary statements that Trump makes on a regular basis, she’d be torn to shreds by the media, but Trump seems to be bullet-proof. And whilst Clinton is digging out every tax statement she’s ever made, and even opening her medical records for scrutiny (which surely ought to be prohibited on basic privacy laws), Trump blithely fudges all similar demands. The only way I can square this is by assuming the race pits a Good Girl against a Bad Boy, with all the stereotypical reactions this engenders. If Clinton is caught out in a lie then that’s a terrible crime, as Good Girls never lie. But Trump can say whatever outrageous thing he likes, because that’s wholly in keeping with what Bad Boys do.

But what’s happening also seems to go beyond sexism and into all kinds of stranger cultural territories. I have interpretations, which may or may not be right, it’s impossible to say. But I share them with you, for what it’s worth. As Brexit has so clearly shown us, we do get the political situation we deserve, rather than the one we need.

Let’s begin with the strangeness that was Hillary Clinton’s pneumonia. Not that it was strange for her to get pneumonia – that was the only reasonable bit. People do fall ill. And I would have thought that being a bit stressed, a bit tired, and meeting thousands of people, a percentage of whom are likely to be contagious, is a good way of catching something. Clinton’s pneumonia elicited a wave of anti-compassion that must at least say something about the weird relationship we have to illness, but let’s leave that to one side. I heard it described as ‘a poor campaign strategy’, which raised my eyebrows by a few inches. And then apparently the problem was that Clinton had tried to cover up her illness and not admit to it. So she lied, and this is all kinds of wrong.

Which, if nothing else, does indicate that the reality of being Hillary Clinton in the here and now is something no media pundit wants to take into account. I mean, just think about it. There you are, running for President of America with a massive schedule lined up, and you start to get ill. What’s the first thing you’re going to do? Hold a press conference? Of course not; you’ll do what anyone does in those circumstances. You’ll try to push through, make the least of it, look as normal as you possibly can and not breathe a word of complaint. You’ll do it for as long as you can because you don’t want to let anyone down, and anyway, tomorrow you may feel better.

That’s real, right? That’s what real people do. I can’t shake the feeling that if Trump had done that, he’d be hailed as a hero. But women live by different rules, and women really aren’t allowed to get sick. There used to be an advert on telly here in the UK for a painkiller or something, that featured two women, pushing kids in buggies, who meet in the street. They hail each other and stop to chat, discussing their busy day in prospect. It’s clear they both have stinking colds. Then they ask about each other’s husbands, who of course have the same cold but are both home in bed. See, this is what women do: they push through cheerfully and determinedly. There are no other acceptable options. This is the fantasy about female strength, and women are relied upon to make that fantasy real.

It’s no coincidence that the women on the advert are mothers. When children are little, they require their mothers not to be real. They badly need a wholly reliable presence: normal, calm, reassuring, focused entirely upon them. Good mothers do not bring their personal worries, problems and fears into the mothering realm. And I fear that the consequence of this selfless mothering is that women are forever more forbidden a chunk of their reality. They are not real people first and foremost; they are functions first and foremost.

I think it’s also a hangover from all those centuries of women being primarily wives and mothers, or else ornaments and trophies. That objectification joins up with the relationship we all had as small beings to our mothers, and the reality of being female, which includes, say, menstruation, illness, ageing, and feeling totally used by our families, becomes obscene, rather distasteful and best screened off from view. If Hillary Clinton lets slip her reality, shows her human weakness, then it’s more distressing and appalling than if Trump does it. There’s something wrong about a woman not fulfilling her function flawlessly, whereas men are allowed to be real people first, and we admire how they overcome their reality in their achievements. I think this is why men get made such a fuss of if they change a nappy or feed a baby. That man, with his important personal concerns and interests, actually took time out of his real life to do a menial chore! How amazing!

What gets more depressing is how women climb onto the objectification bandwagon in this way. There is a strong tendency for women to fight and compete over their functionality. Again, motherhood is an excellent example for this. It has become completely hamstrung by a complex and impossibly demanding set of rules, and women will be the first to call other women out on not abiding by them. In fact, there’s a tendency for women to have rules for other women in just about every situation, and to judge very harshly other women whose rules may be different. If there is a third wave of feminism that is in any way effective, it will have to tackle the brutality that can arise between women whose rules and opinions do not cohere. Note the way that men back each other up, note the basic fraternity that always means they forgive each other every flaw and petty crime. They have terrific compassion for other men involved in the business of being men. Women could learn from this.

It does go some way towards explaining the extraordinarily kind attitude that seems to prevail towards Trump and his little ways. Every time I switch the radio on or turn to the internet, it seems that Trump is getting publicity for something terrible and untrue that he has said. But the whole tenor of the reporting is genial amazement. Is it that Trump goes so far beyond the boundaries of truth and acceptability that no one knows what to make of him? No one can find the words to describe what he is doing and so he can’t be called out on it?

Well I’m prepared to give that a try. Between you and me, I think that Donald Trump may actually be mentally unbalanced. Not as a joke, but as something that it might be a good idea to worry about. And I say this on the basis that he seems incapable of distinguishing inner reality from outer reality, which is the prime factor in all psychosis. For instance (there are a wealth of examples), his recent claim that Barack Obama is the co-founder of ISIS alongside Hillary Clinton. Even when clearly directed by his campaign managers to claim this statement was somehow sarcastic or a joke, he could not stop himself from endorsing the reality of it (as he sees it) again.

Freud was the first person to identify the disparity that exists between our inner psychic reality and the world out there. The two are not the same, because our subjective perspectives, an amalgam of hopes, fears, memories, associations and prejudices, colour everything we look at. So, for example, I remember watching an encounter between a graduate student and the Head of Department in a corridor at the Modern Languages Faculty. They stopped and spoke to each other for a moment, then moved on. The graduate came up  to me and said: ‘Well I am SO glad you were here to witness that! Did you see the way she laid into me! I can’t believe she just did that!’ And the honest answer from me would have been, no I did not see that happen at all. It looked like a perfectly ordinary and featureless meeting to me. But the graduate was unshakeable in her convictions. Her hopes and fears had got in the way.

And inner reality is a very emotional place. Nothing is stored inside our heads without some sort of emotion attached to it. We don’t even know that clouds bring rain without some sort of tagging system saying #goodthing or #badthing. It’s a terrifically complex system. But at our most sane, we are aware that some events trigger us more than others, that mood affects our judgement, that we have sacred cows and terrible fears and a stealthy tendency towards crazy thinking. However. We are deeply protective of the crazy parts (probably because they carry very tender emotions along with them) and so if that crazy thinking gets validated out in the real world, it has an unusual force to it. That graduate student longed for me to say, ‘Oh yes! My God! What outrageous behaviour by our Head of Department!’. Similarly when the apocalypse comes in the specific form of our private fantasy of apocalypse, we will be packing our bags to move to higher ground while repeating on a loop, ‘YES! I knew I was right to worry about that! Didn’t I say so? Haven’t I been saying so all along? I am justified at last!’

This is what the media has been doing for donkey’s years now. It plays on our crazy thoughts. It encourages and validates them. It blows on the embers of hatred, prejudice and envy. And politicians, seeing how effective this is, how much it makes people pay attention and feel engaged, have jumped on that bandwagon for all they are worth.

So to my mind, the media don’t know how to tackle Trump because he is their creature. He is a walking manifestation of every item of media hysteria and paranoia that has festered in an anxious mind. Donald Trump is what happens when tabloid newspapers have an orgy.

I imagine all the journalists out there, watching Trump go to work and thinking to themselves, if this guy becomes President, I’ll never have a slow day again. On Monday, he’ll create new laws that mean any woman not matching his criteria of physical acceptability must remain on house arrest. On Tuesday he’ll drop a nuclear bomb on North Korea. On Wednesday he’ll say that anyone with Hispanic ancestors within the previous century has to be deported. My career will be made!

What we wish for is as dangerous as what we fear. When will we learn that we are terrible at knowing what is good for us? It’s a good thing that outer reality is not the same as inner reality – life would be unliveable if it weren’t! It’s a relief that our fears come to nothing so regularly; moderation, good sense and reason are our salvation. Why do we not hold men up to the image of the Good Father the way we demand women be Good Mothers? The Good Father is a steady, calm reality check. He thinks before he reacts. He encourages fairness, justice, and honor, even when they go against powerful emotions. He is courteous and understanding. Wouldn’t it be good to expect a male President to embody the best of masculinity? Wouldn’t that be reasonable?

I suppose my ultimate point here is that we hold men and women to very different standards, and that is more than mere sexism – it arises from deeply-held archetypes that promote extreme reactions. Isn’t it about time we looked long and hard at that disparity?

 

[I am so sorry to have been away yet again – more issues with my eyes, I’m afraid. Anyway, that’s a long story for another day! In the meantime, I just had to get the above off my chest…]

I Call Myself A Feminist

Twenty-five essays collected together with a generous helping of quotes from other well-known women, with the particular slant that the essays are all written by women under thirty. It’s an overview of the issues and concerns that continue to motivate activism in the 21^st century, as well as an attempt at rehabilitating the word ‘feminism’ from some of the old perjorative connotations of the past. The essays are brief, a few pages each, and they cover a wide variety of topics and perspectives. It’s a fascinating collection, provocative, thoughtful, sometimes funny.

But there are buts. Not one woman writing has a child, although motherhood remains the last great bastion of identity straitjacketing. All are women who have enjoyed early success and made something of their lives – they speak from a position of earned privilege. I found myself appreciating most the essays from a Nigerian woman who had grown up in a traditional and oppressive religion, a woman who worked in a centre for the victims of acid attacks and a female human rights lawyer. A large number of the other essays spoke about behavioural issues – from the difficulty of making the decision to change gender, and the resistance and prejudice one might consequently face, to the irritating tendency of men to hog the armrest in seats on the London tube (exert your right to space, ladies!). Several rightly evoked the appalling reputation of the media – tabloids, magazines, advertising, mostly – for reinforcing stereotypes. But most of these essays left me thinking that whilst Western women have removed the majority of physical constraints on their choices, the real battle remains with the mental chains we so easily place on our own thinking.

I was taught that feminism was about two things. It was about equal access to power – economic, political, social – and the freedom to be oneself, resisting the old insistence that Woman should be helpmate, carer, nurse, selfless angel. It was about creating a structure that offered equal opportunities within which we could all be individual and different. Where we seem to end up now is micromanagement of the behaviour of others, which is highly problematic.

Let’s look at the case for the opposition first. Laura Bates, author of Everyday Sexism writes ‘As feminists we are used to being told what we ‘should’ focus on, or scolded for ‘making a fuss’ about particular topics. Talking about rape or domestic violence is acceptable, but mention street harrassment and you’re ‘getting upset about nothing’ […]There is no reason why we shouldn’t tackle every manifestation of gender inequality, no matter how apparently ‘minor’.

Absolutely! A society free from all discrimination would be a utopia indeed. But there’s a danger that the woman who is harrassed on the street might be led to believe that her plight is equal to the woman who has been half beaten to death by the husband who controls her cash flow. And that wouldn’t be right, would it? Don’t we still need to maintain a sense of perspective? I don’t think that equality means that all crimes committed against women are equal.

There’s a very well-written essay about how important words are and how right it is to police them. One of the examples cited is scientist Tim Hunt’s foolish comments – poor attempts at a joke – about women in his laboratories, which provoked a twitter storm, viral humiliation, and some consequences for the man’s career. The writer is convinced that this was the correct outcome. Yet I say, where was the woman whose courage, generosity and sense of fair play made her stand up at the end of the speech and say: ‘Could you please redefine your position on this issue, because I think what you said may be open to some serious misunderstanding.’ There could have been a proper debate on the spot; it would have been a fabulous example of grace and diplomacy and the exercise of women’s right to speak up for themselves. Why does it feel to me that the thrill of self-righteous indignation held sway here instead? Words are indeed terrifically important, and I would rather use them to educate than crucify. Women have a power of intervention unparalleled in their history. Is twitter shaming the best we can do with it?

We may often regret our male colleagues’ thoughtless, sexist and downright stupid comments. We may well wish that their behaviour would be more respectful and courteous. But if we want to improve social behaviour, we all have to sign up to the same charter. That’s equality. So if women want the right to be outspoken, to be ‘unruly’, to speak our minds and shout down or shame the other, then it has to be okay for men to do the same things. If, as one writer in this book says ‘Women whose behaviour is repulsive and selfish entrance me. They seem far more alive and aware and unapologetic than most would ever dare to be’, then we must accept that men might be entranced by their repulsive and selfish behaviour, and feel more alive for it, too.

This is the problem with all issues surrounding behaviour and identity. We all want people to behave better, and the chances are overwhelming that we will never be able to make them. We use the law against acts of violence and crime. But in the lower reaches of human behaviour, it’s hard to ‘make’ people give up their worse natures. Where did all that PC battling get us? The recognition that it’s unacceptable for people to express ugly predjudice in public places. Excellent! And then we created the internet whose main purpose can seem to be to provide a safe space for all that prejudice to be resurrected under the blissful cover of anonymity. Human nature is aggressive and judgemental. People will find a way to judge.

Believe me, I know how awful it is to be on the receiving end of sexist belittling. When I was nine or ten, the teacher who taught me every day, for every subject, was a man called Mr Wickenden. He regularly said unpleasant things about me in class – I remember him laughing with the other boys and saying I didn’t care about people, I only cared about money and clothes. I was quick-witted as a child, which didn’t go down well in the 70s. Once, doing some maths (my weakness) I struggled to understand the equation on the board; he humiliated me in front of the class until I was in tears (and I did not cry easily). He never treated any of the boys this way; I felt his persecution and it undoubtedly added to my belief that if I wanted to get away with being clever and well-spoken and tidy and good, I would need to make myself invisible.

For many years, this sort of behaviour struck me as completely unacceptable, as something we should legislate against, yes, why not! But as I have grown older, I have changed my mind. What I needed to learn to do was to look Mr Wickenden in the eye and think: you are so completely irrelevant to my sense of self. We are animals underneath it all; we know fear and vulnerability instinctively. What I needed to do was grow up, grow stronger, learn to protect myself without recourse to aggression, practice integrity. In some ways the issue was a sexist one, but in all the ways that mattered, I have come to understand it was developmental. And Mr Wickenden to one side, the worst, most insidious bullies I’ve come across have been female. I needed a strategy to deal with them, too. Thinking the world shouldn’t be cruel, that I shouldn’t have to fight for my right to be different, that I must be able always to do things my way without encountering resistence, even if it horrifies the ideology of the tribe, has actually held back my own growth.

I think that one of the best acts of feminism we can do on an everyday basis is support the women we know. Do something whenever possible to make their lives a little better, a little easier, a little richer. I think we need to expend our best energy on the real victims of the world – those caught up in war, famine, violence, plague and tyranny – and to keep a weather eye on the lesser crimes and make sure we don’t commit them too, in the name of retaliation. And when a first world, non-violent man makes a sexist comment, we might just raise our eyebrows and find him ridiculous; why on earth would we assign such behaviour more power than it truly has?

Stress, Creativity and Dancing Kittens

I didn’t mean to take a break from the blogworld – I was overtaken by events, a busy week which culminated in Mr Litlove coming home early from London one day (unheard of) and going straight to bed (even more unusual) with the flu, and he’s there still. Every time he speaks he coughs – well, it’s not so much a cough as the heaving bark of a walrus with a fifty-fags-a-day habit – so it’s been an exceptionally quiet weekend during which I seem to have been auditioning for the role of under-housemaid in the next series of Downton Abbey, endlessly up and down stairs with trays of food. I’m trying to view this positively, as my own little step workout which will have untold benefits to my thighs.

In the times when the bell to the master’s bedroom hasn’t been ringing, I’ve been reading some interesting books. All too appropriately, I was sent one called Stress Control by Susan Balfour, and whilst I’m still in the early stages of it, it seems to me a lot better so far than the average self-help guide as Balfour tries to go deeper and think harder about what causes stress and how we can tackle it. I was interested in the way she talks about holding onto both personal truths and received wisdom in times of trouble. We have to work hard to hang onto a mental equilibrium and soothe our minds, she argues, and I think that’s true. It really is hard work to prevent the mind rushing off into disaster scenarios, or disappearing down the wurmholes of self-pity, resentment or hopelessness. Whereas of course we do have a store of strengthening realisations that have usually been hard-won from other battles with fate. It’s impossible to say what mantra or truth or acknowledgement will work the trick as it’s such a personal thing. But Balfour suggests that such ‘truths need to be polished up and put on display in our lives…we must be proud of displaying our spiritual wealth.’ And that struck home with me as I know I am often indifferent in stressful situations to the wisdom I’ve gained elsewhere. Or perhaps not indifferent exactly, but too distracted to bother with it.

Naturally there are pieces of advice that also strike me as unhelpful, such as the suggestion that one way to rise above the muddle of an argument is to throw in some observation from outside it, for instance: ‘Just look at that beautiful sky’, which sounds to me like a good way to vex the other person beyond all reason. Balfour says this is effective with tantruming children, though in my experience a tantrum occurs when you go beyond the point of ordinary distraction being enough to divert escalating trouble. But what do I know? Maybe I’ll try it next time Mr Litlove has a coughing fit.

The mind in all its magnificent trickery was also centrestage in Christopher Bollas’s book, Cracking Up. Bollas is examining the constant freeflow of ideas, images and thoughts that race through the mind mostly unobserved. Like rush hour traffic, these mental elements congregate around experiences that have a particularly intense emotional resonance, though often they may be simple things, scarcely worth the charge they give us on first appearances. So for instance, Bollas describes one of these intense moments when, passing a record shop he notices an advertisement for Philip Glass’s opera, Akhenaten. He isn’t going to go in, but somehow finds that he does after all, his mind swimming in the memories of the evening when he saw the opera and all that happened then. At the same time, the mention of Akhenaten makes him think of his son who became interested in Egyptian history when he was about five, how the two of them talked about the school project he was working on, and this takes him on a chain of thought back to his own Greek ancestors and Bollas’s conflicted feelings about that part of the world. All sorts of lines of thought are generated by this chance encounter with the memory of a piece of music and when he has finally bought the record and carried on with his day he discovers in the library that he has momentarily misplaced his glasses. Of course he has: glasses, Philip Glass, the glass of the shop window, the slippery glass of the surface of his thoughts. He finds his glasses again.

We live in this soup of dynamic, ever-shifting mental elements that become dense and meaningful when we are brought into chance contact with vivid parts of the external world, and which then disperse in all directions, often simultaneously, as they spawn various emotionally-charged trains of thought. Bollas talks about ‘psychic bangs, which create small but complex universes of thought.’ This is effectively the work of free association that goes on all the time inside our minds; its effects are felt in how we react, experience and respond to everything around us, for every encounter is caught in a sticky web of associations. It’s impossible to experience in the moment – or at least the closest we come, I think, is when we are still ‘reading’ only the book is face down on our laps and we are staring into the middle distance – but parts of it can be reconstructed in retrospect. And because this is the source of all creativity, I think the more aware we are of the existence of these deep layers of thought, the more sensitive and creative we are as individuals.

Susan Balfour talks about how essential daydreaming is to keep our minds free and limber, and for Bollas, too, the freedom of the mind to pursue its endless avalanches of unexpected signification is an important part of mental health. I think this is also why the internet exerts such a power of fascination. When we begin with quite a respectable and justifiable reading of an online review of a book that looks interesting, which leads us on to author interviews in the Paris Review, and then the lyrics of a song we’ve been meaning to look up and then before we know what’s happening, we’re watching videos of synchronised dancing kittens, it’s like we’re just following the normal patterns of the mind, so normal that at some point the process becomes unconscious. Which is how you wake up, faintly alarmed, to find those kittens bobbing their heads to MC Hammer. The internet is just a vast externalised daydreaming mind. But ultimately it’s a time wasting distraction, the video equivalent of looking at the beautiful sky outside the window, because it’s not your own associations that are freewheeling in space, but the borrowed associations of other people.

Thinking about this brought me (via my own rhizomatic byways) to the conclusion that while freedom of mind and pleasure is a beneficial thing, stress plus a freewheeling mind often ends up in catastrophising. We’re back to that difficult place where it’s hard to prevent our thoughts from delivering us into dark alleyways where we’ll likely get beaten up. The mind needs strongholds, places of solidity which we can cling to while the turbulent stream of thought tugs at our legs. And maybe, the more as a culture we permit ourselves all sorts of freedoms, the less able we are, paradoxically, to make sensible calculations about the risks we run, the fears we suffer. Perhaps stress – in the moment we are experiencing it – is the place where we have to limit our creativity and value self-discipline instead.

On Rereading

I hardly ever reread a book these days, but I have just finished Anne Tyler’s brilliant novel, Ladder of Years and frankly I could turn around and start it all over again. I first read the novel in 1995, on holiday in Brittany with Mr Litlove and our six-month old baby. Mr Litlove’s favourite game then was to put one of his dinky socks on top of his head and see how long it took him to a) realise and b) remove it (answer: not long, but with just enough hesitation for comedy). Oh how times have changed. I started the book in some trepidation, afraid that it wouldn’t live up to my memory, but it was even better. Now I wonder whether the lure of rereading isn’t actually quite dangerous – why wouldn’t I spend all my time choosing guaranteed pleasure over the potential disappointments and pitfalls of all those unread novels? Well, in part at least because I do possess a lot of unread novels and they represent the triumph of hope. But still, I see I’m reaching a stage where rereading holds a seductive promise.

I thought I’d dig out my old research notes on rereading to see if they could help me gain a bit more insight into its pleasures. Matei Calinescu in his book Rereading, says ‘there are texts that haunt us, that cannot or will not be forgotten, and there are texts that haunt other texts, in the sense that they appear in them as expected or unexpected visitors, and even, some might say, as phantoms or spectres.’ Whilst I was interested in the front end of that sentence, Calinescu is more concerned with the back end. He is mostly talking about what happens when we read experimental or innovative novels, particularly those based on crime fiction. When we read crime fiction, whether we’re aware of it or not, we are experiencing the pleasure of having our expectations met. It’s one of the more ‘rule-driven’ genres, with, for example, the detective as the master reader of clues and suspect’s stories, and the formulaic surprise denouement. Several postmodern authors had a lot of fun with parodies and pastiches of such formulas, and Calinescu is thinking about the sort of ‘rereading’ that goes on as the reader progresses through such a ‘rewrite’, using familiar expectations to both note the places where the narrative goes awry but also recognising what is at stake in such playful distortions.

You could probably apply this concept of rereading to all innovative fiction, which asks the reader to bear an orthodox narrative in mind in order to make sense of the unconventional one by understanding how far, and in what ways, it departs from the original. He’s suggesting that a different kind of attention is required from the reader. Rather than be strapped into the boxcar of your standard story which whisks you off as a pure passenger on a ride, the more experimental fiction requires a kind of textual orienteering, as you study maps of other novels in your head while figuring out where the one in your hands is taking you. It explains, if nothing else, why those innovative novels are a much slower, more careful reading experience: you need to read the ghost of the underlying original as well as the actual story in the present.

Such an activity is not so far removed from the rereading that critics and researchers do, when you study a story over and over. Just reading a novel asks you to succumb to it, to stop thinking about its artificial construction and simply lose yourself in a fictional fantasy. When you read for a second time in a more reflective, analytical way, you’re lifting the lid off the text to see how it works underneath. You want to have a good look at the structure and see why it does one thing and not another, how it makes one argument at the expense of a range of others. I think this is perhaps why for some readers, critical reading is anathema, as much the same thing happens when a story fails to enchant and you are just left staring at cardboard sets and 2-d characters. Disliking a book and analysing a book may fall just too close together for comfort for some people.

But what about those books that haunt us and refuse to be forgotten? The closest I could come to anything that struck home was in the distinction made by another critic, Josephine Hilgard between involvement and absorbtion. Now, you may not agree with these particular terms and definitions, but the idea is that ‘emotional involvement’ means pleasure and enjoyment and a vividly engrossing experience, but the reader is aware that they are reading a made-up story. ‘Absorbtion’ takes the immersion that one step further so that the reader ‘partakes in a reading that is equivalent in grace and creative effortlessness to artistic inspiration.’ Hilgard says this means we can speak of ‘inspired readers’ just as we might talk about inspired writers. I wonder whether this kind of rereading, when you love a story so much you can read it again and again until it is a part of your own world, is such an inspired act. The reader can almost live the story, as if dreaming a particularly splendid dream; they take possession of it in some ways.

Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years is a book I could read repeatedly because it is sort of perfect for me in every sentence. The story of a middle-aged wife and mother who just walks away from her family while they are on the beach and keeps going, eventually locating in a different town and starting her life afresh, has no places where I wish things were different, no dull parts or implausible bits. It feels perfectly whole and necessary and I can sense my own desire to be up close to that. The sheer rightness of it all is part of the thrill. Even though it is in many ways an ordinary story, not one with many layers of implicit meaning that I wouldn’t pick up on the first time through. No, the enchantment is for me about a vicarious sharing of the artistic inspiration that went into it, the sense of watching the story unfold without a mishap, so confident in it that I can lose myself to it. The door is open for me to experience this because the novel corresponds so well to my purely personal and subjective feelings about what’s right and real in fiction; it absorbs me completely. Which of course means that my classic reread would not necessarily be anyone else’s. I’m thinking now about which books I really could read over and over again – surely a short list?