Two very different fiction books: romance and satire.
When I was on “vacation” last week, I read two very different fiction books: One Afternoon by Siân James and Self Care by Leigh Stein. (To understand why I am hesitant to describe my time away as a “vacation,” stay tuned for my article that will run this weekend.)
Anyway, here are two mini reviews, lumped together only because I read both works last week.
One Afternoon is an unpretentious novel, first published in 1975, about a widow named Anna Goodhart living in England with her three children. She realizes she is pregnant after ending an affair with an old acquaintance. To be honest, the romance genre isn’t really my cup of tea; I’ve generally enjoyed what I have bought from the U.K.-based publisher Persephone Press, so I just purchase things indiscriminately whenever I’m at their location in Bath, and that’s how I ended up owning a copy of One Afternoon. (See here for my review of a 1949 guide for housewives, also a Persephone Press book.)
I admit that I enjoyed One Afternoon, even though it is a love story. The prose was artistic without being flowery, the underlying plot was predictable yet interspersed with little surprising asides, and the characters were complex but uncomplicated — all of which I say positively. I appreciated the pace of the story, and the dialogue was expertly written. My sole qualm is that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the appeal of Charlie, the man with whom Anna has an affair.
One subtle aspect of the book is especially worth praising in the pages of National Review. I was pleasantly surprised that modestly pro-life themes emerged without rendering the novel a strikingly political work. “At no time did I seriously consider abortion. . . . Women who can accept such an idea are level-headed, their imagination well under control, whereas I, with a tadpole-like creature one centimetre long inside me, was already thinking of it as the son of my heart,” Anna thinks. Later in the book, the unmarried Anna is “thoroughly nervous” for her appointment with the “stern-looking” doctor. She worries he will be judgmental, given the circumstances of her pregnancy, but he surprises her with a smile and says: “Cheer up, Mrs Goodhart. Babies are nice little things.” I honestly didn’t expect hidden conservative messages in a novel about an affair, but the doctor’s simple statement might just be the most reassuring and effective thing that we, supporters of the pro-life movement, could say to a woman who is contemplating abortion or anxious about remaining pregnant.
In stark contrast to One Afternoon, Self Care is a satirical novel centering on two Millennial white women who run a social media start-up that is focused on women’s “wellness” during the first Trump administration. Self Care is thoroughly entertaining, so much so that I did audibly laugh a couple of times. The author has perfectly captured the cringeworthy feminist culture that I grew up in, and as I was reading, I wondered if I was trapped in a dog mom’s perfectly tailored Pinterest board. For example, one member of a focus group in Self Care is providing suggestions for improving the feminist “community” online hub, and she suggests that women on the platform should have to disclose who they voted for — then, another participant chimes in to say that “I wouldn’t want to shame anyone who isn’t a US citizen (and couldn’t vote).” The fictional leading ladies, Maren and Devin, are so realistic that not only can I imagine them, but I might have actually met these exact women at my local yoga studio or overpriced coffee shop. Maren, for instance, previously worked at a nonprofit that sought to “end gender-based oppression by placing sculptures of vaginas in high-trafficked public areas.” (Another character, Khadijah, was not as convincingly written. I would find the Khadijah character more believable if she were a bit less compromising, and if her inner monologue were more ruthlessly progressive.)
Although the book isn’t exactly advanced reading, good insights do seep through the pages about Millennial feminism — some aspects of which have evolved into what we now dub “wokeness” — and how it manifests practically, such as in the form of the “scorekeeping of identities.” “When one of our influencers messaged me because she was at the bottom of one of these [social media] pile-ons, I told her she had two choices: She could capitulate, admit she was wrong, apologize, promise to never again post selfies she took with the orphans she cared for in Mombasa because now she understood the meaning of white saviorism,” Maren explains to us. “Or she and I could . . . find something from her past that showed she, too, had suffered, and with a single post we could turn the tides of sympathy in her direction.”
And so I would recommend both books, but each appeals to very distinct audiences. If you want a pleasant and undemanding romance novel, then One Afternoon is a good option. (It gets bonus points from me for subtly advancing vaguely conservative sentiments in a manner that is palatable to an apolitical, or even left-leaning, reader.) People looking to laugh — specifically laugh at progressive feminists and wokeness — should buy Self Care. But I worry that an older crowd, meaning the folks who are unfamiliar with the brand of Millennial feminism that dominated niche spheres of the internet roughly a decade ago, just might not “get” it. Still, a National Review reader will be amused by Stein’s theoretical applications of the woke martyrology framework, even if some of the satirized cultural references are a bit confusing.