Hits Different

Rereading, Donal Ryan, Curtis Sittenfeld, and a reading update

Hallo, it's me, Laura King. Earlier this summer, I got talking to a lady opposite me on a train home on a Friday evening. She asked me if I was enjoying my book (Long Island by Colm Tóibín), which she had already finished. I told her all about the live author event I had attended and we chatted happily for well over an hour. Normally I'd have enjoyed the first minute or two and then really wanted to get into my book, but I got really into this chat, which ranged across so many authors and genres and reading experiences.

Something we really agreed on was how interesting it was when you revisit a book years later, bringing your new perspective to the work and experiencing that alongside your memory of what you thought and felt about it before. It’s a lovely way of visiting the past version of you who once read this book, and you can often vividly recall where you were, physically or at that time in your life, because a version of you feels as though they are frozen in time inside that reading experience.

I had thought about this before, in the context of rereading books in my late twenties or early thirties that a much-younger feeling version of me encountered in my late teens or early twenties. The lady I spoke to described this experience being amplified as you get older, too, and greater stretches of time pass between readings, or you revisit that same old favourite a number of times over several decades.  In contrast I was talking about a shorter space of time, I think it still stands considering a) how much your life changes in just a few years in early adulthood, making it feel like a longer stretch of time and  b) you’re comparing your current self with one who was perhaps only starting to read books for adults outside of school or college and experiencing a lot of art for the first time. 

Ahead of the publication of Heart, Be At Peace by Donal Ryan last week, I reread one of my favourites, The Spinning Heart. I'm told you can read Heart, Be At Peace as a standalone novel, though it is the sequel set ten years later, but I don't really know why you'd do that in this case, depriving yourself of the reading experience of the original, as well as going into this second novel not knowing these characters really well. Though a story obviously unfolds throughout The Spinning Heart, I don't think the plot is really the point - what makes this novel so special is the way Ryan captures the vulnerability hiding behind the characters, and the village in which it is set too. 

The Spinning Heart is set in rural Ireland just after the last recession hit, and this change is brought home by the local developer going out of business, running away from the people he had stolen from and leaving the mess for his foreman, Bobby to clear up. Bobby, despite having been screwed over himself does his best for the other men and the people in his community, and is in general a Nice Man despite having absolutely no clue of how to talk about or feel his feelings, apart from secretly wishing everyday that he will check on his cantankerous, elderly father and find him dead. From Bobby we meet the developer's father,  then the local "harlot" turned old witch, then character after another spins out from  ach other, weaving a web that mirrors the somewhat insular community and the shockwaves rippling through it with each new crisis that follows.

I read The Spinning Heart ten years ago, myself, which allows me to appreciate the sequel coming out in “real time”. I wondered if it would live up to the memory I had of reading it at 22, barely out of college and full of notions about literature and being high brow and dismissing anything I thought was popular - and getting those notions promptly knocked out of me by brilliant new fiction I started reading just before and during my time working in a bookshop. At 32, I'm still in awe at the mastery at work here, a novel that never feels sparse despite its short length, nor overwritten despite the emotional scale of the work. It was the first novel I read (apart from the esteemed Ross O’Carroll Kelly) about the recession, and was probably one of the first “literary” novels to approach this topic (but I’m not going to get too bogged down in generalisations about genre here). It felt like a mirror or portal to the very recent past, and captured a lot of the national mood or attitudes that I had experienced but perhaps had never seen articulated. If anything, I now appreciate even more just how special and unique a novel this is as time has passed.

I also noticed that, if it was even possible, I felt more empathy for more of the characters on this reading. Of course I had really felt for characters like Bobby when I first read it, but I also understood some of the less likeable characters a lot more now I’m a little older, even if I didn’t necessarily like them any more, or agree with their outlook or actions. I was a lot slower to judge them, and I think that that has allowed me to get closer to the aim of this book which allows you to really get under the skin of so many characters.

In contrast, I had a hilariously different experience of rereading American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld after a very similar gap in time - though I still thoroughly enjoyed it. I listened to the audiobook in 2021, almost ten years after I came across it in a bookshop on a trip to New York.  When I first read about Alice I was so sympathetic and really felt for her throughout the novel. Her early heartbreak and guilt, and how her once quiet, introspective life is thrown into the limelight when she falls in love with the future president of the United States makes for a brilliant, entertaining read. I  particularly love how Sittenfeld writes passive characters (very demure…) so brilliantly when we are used to very different protagonists in fiction, and American Wife is a great example of that. 

However, when I was about 20, I understood that Alice was supposed to be vaguely inspired by Laura Bush, but I didn’t realise that Sittenfeld had intentionally, explicitly based it on her - though admittedly, not as explicit as her later (mad) novel Rodham, a fictionalised, “sliding doors” approach to Hilary Clinton’s real life. In recognising that the reader was supposed to understand this premise, I saw that this complicates the reader's relationship to the story and the choices the characters make. I think because I now have (some, not a lot) more life experience I saw Alice from a completely different viewpoint, and felt that her guilt and penitence for something that happened when she was young was to an extent self serving. 

Her grief and guilt are so hard to read, and Sittenfeld makes this feel so raw, but I really felt on rereading how Alice allows her past to bleed into her life for so long, having far too much of an influence on all of her relationships. This is one thing, but the fact that she doesn't seem to feel that same guilt for her the damage the family she marries into does is quite another, no matter how many simple yet important acts of kindness she carries out.  This new opinion of (and frustration with) the character didn't mean I enjoyed the book any less, rather it made the book far more interesting than I remembered and it made me forward to rereading and reexamining my relationship to some other favourites once some time has passed.

Reading update

Physical book: I'm writing this on Friday, so I’m still reading and enjoying Splinters by Leslie Jamison, which I expect to finish over the weekend. This is an account of the author's life in the wake of the birth of her first child and her divorce, and is particularly lovely on her love for her mother.

e-Book: I’m also almost finished Heart Be At Peace, which is of course almost unbearably lovely, but not as overwhelming as The Spinning Heart which I had read in one sitting.

Audiobook: I’m in the last stretch of Great Circle, and am finding how all the storylines are finally coming together really satisfying.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you join me next week for a new instalment of LauraEatsBooks… Again.