A Storm at Fairacre, Village Diary, Changes at Fairacre by Miss Read read by Gwen Watford

A pleasant lyrical description of the minute details of English country life presents the full world of a small town’s folk, in all their deep old  habits, their social quirks and irritabilities, and their precious sense of the finite order of inherited obligations.

Mrs Willett can tackle a hundred jobs without having been taught any of them. She can salt pork or beef, make jams, jellies, wines, chutnies and pickles, she can bake pies with all manner of pastries, cakes, tarts, and her own bread, which is particularly delicious, she can make rugs, curtains and her own clothes, she can help a neighbor in childbirth, and at the other end of  life’s span compose a corpse’s limbs for decent burial. She is as good a gardener as her husband, can distemper a room, mend a fuse, and sings in the choir. …. There are so many different activities to engage her that when she tires of one there is another to which she can turn and get refreshment. From turning her heavy old mangle in the washhouse she will come in and sit down to stitch a new skirt. She will prepare a stew and while it simmers on the hob filling the little house with its fragrance, she will practice her part in Mr Annets new anthem, ready for the next Church festival. And… she sees a satsifying result from her labours. The clothes blow on the line. The skirt is  folded and put away in the drawer ready for next Sunday. Mr  Willett will come in and praise her bubbling stew…

In this little English village is a little English school with children who are kept busy snipping gum nosed paper in all the colors of the rainbow.

“Make just what you like: flowers, leaves, lambs, birds, butterflies…anything that makes you think of Spring.
Most of the class had flung themselves with abandon into this glorious snipping session but there were as always one or two stolid and adenoidal babies who were completely without imagination and awaited direction apathetically. “Make grass then”…had said Miss Jackson…

 

From Fairacre to Thrush Green, a  village inferior in coziness and character, whereof spring faithless wives, drunken gravediggers,  vain architects and  stingy spinsters.. With this inferiority comes humor: imagine a fat food-loving Nellie housecleaning for three aged sisters, who spoon out a teaspoon of silver polish each time she comes to clean the house.

.

A Friend From England by Anita Brookner read by Cherie Lunghi

Rest, it seems, is a peculiarly English thing. Restfulness in all its timorous, melancholic glory cushions the indoor lives of Oscar and Dorrie Livingstone, in a peculiarly English way. Not as the accidental sidebar of an otherwise busied existence but as an aspiration, a calling, a rigorous end in itself.  Oscar is

…a bulky soft-voiced man with beautifully cared for hands. Something about him broadcasting the resignation of a schoolboy who has to submit to an inspection before he is allowed to leave the house.

All in all they are a placid wistful couple, resigned and melancholy by themselves and for each other. Well fed, well napped, well sheltered they form a restful destination for the nervous, ambitious, insecure and disinclined Rachel Kennedy who would have liked to see herself in this pink shell of kinship and central heating. Miss Kennedy takes up a remote and impassive alliance with Heather, the passive offspring of this mildly inert, mildly well off couple who accommodates her parents imagination by pretending to manage her own clothing shop in London, a Daisy Miller with short hair, unexcitable and worrisome.

She would glide from virginity to matronhood with no sense of a change in her condition. She would duplicate her mother, succeed her, and no doubt become the center of the family circle in her own home with the full approbation of that mother whom she planned so closely to copy… As she sat there emotionless and smiling in the midst of this agitated assembly,  she looked like the bride in a Breughel painting, as if she were already at her own wedding breakfast.

Rachel Kennedy lives a perfectly balanced and satisfyingly sombre life, too glad to come to rest at the Livingstone family home, to inhabit the functionary role of ‘friend’, to perform the duties of that functionary, like a glum, gloved observer at a greenhouse of rest. Here she studies English life, exacting a micro-analytics of personality and sensibility and mood as meticulous as a clinical formula.

This is where I leave you by Jonathan Tropper performed by Ramon de Ocampo

If you’re Jewish and you have a brother and he’s still married, this is NOT how he will sound after he divorces his goyishe wife who you’ve never liked anyway. Because the person reading this acid-funny tale doesn’t have the nasal force or the resentful irregularity or that specific Jewish brand of ironic despair in the face of public failure that dunks every insult, every complaint, every abusive remark (“This is my brother Judd… Judd is recently cuckolded.”) in borscht-belt tenderness.

When this brother is summoned home to your father’s funeral, he will be driving forward but wishing in reverse.

When people give directions to any home or business in West Covington they use [my parent's house] as a negative landmark. If you see the big white house then you’ve gone too far. Which is precisely what I’m thinking.

Your sister will have installed a high tech baby monitor in the front hall, so you can all hear the baby screaming in amplified stereo as you eat lunch but

…she doesn’t seem at all inclined to go upstairs and quiet the baby. “We’re letting her cry” she announces, like it’s a movement they’ve joined.

If you’re Jewish, this imaginary brother is sitting shiva in hell, i.e. surrounded by his family, thinking about his divorce from a beautiful woman who he had once been able to make laugh. Once, he’d

read enough Playboy … to know that beautiful women want a man who can make them laugh. Of course what they really meant was a man who can make them laugh after he delivered multiple orgasms on his private jet with his trustee 9 inch cock.

If you’re not Jewish, you already knew this. But you may be interested in this unhappy family’s way of being unhappy. I doubt it.

Cleaning Nabokov’s House by Leslie Daniels read by Bernadette Dunne

“John has left me his town. Although now that his town didn’t have the children in it..”

The demented but funny* ex-wife of a husband who should have come with instructions on how to load the dishwasher invites our sympathy because:

1. the ex-person has custody of the children
2. she is vaguely overweight
3. her mother doesn’t recognize her voice on the phone ["Your father could talk to anybody, to Osama Bin Laden" as though there was another Bin Laden who was a better conversationalist.]
4. she opens a cat-house for middle-aged women with nothing to do but paint their bathrooms and get pedicures

She finds an old delapidated lodge just outside of the dull little University town of Onkwedo, hires the men’s crew team as research assistants for a science experiment on female sexual response, and launches her career as a Madame while she finishes a novel by Nabokov on the side.

She interviews with a potential sex-worker:

Sydney Walker carefully arranged a tiny ipod system with speakers …on the mantle above the fireplace. He turned on a Los Lonely Boys song, Heaven, and began to strip. It was the most interesting thing I’d watched since they put a mirror up for the birth of [my daughter].

She looks for a new place to live:

It looked as if a young architect, fresh from Onkwedo’s own Wainwright University, had fallen in love with Frank Lloyd Wright, bought himself a pile of wood, borrowed a hammer and set to work. Like the Second Little Pig had been schooled at the Bauhaus.

She goes to New York City to meet with a lawyer:

I wondered if his real name was Max or whether the company had merely insisted on something mono-syllabic.

She goes out on a date:

I used to be a catch. Dated three or four at a time. I burned out. And when they show up with those big pocketbooks I know I am in trouble… They bring their own sex toys. Is that progress? I feel like the Hoover guy….

Threading the Needle by Marie Bostwick read by Hilary Huber, Bernadette Dunne

Imagine a Cobbled Court Quilt Shop. A Blue Bean Bakery. A For the Love of Lavender Herbal Boutique. Farms, handiwork, handicraft, prudent, helpful, hardware-toting neighbors, dainty small town gossip, happy volunteers, lavender soap: the fantasmatic drift of post-Madoff sub-urban female regret. What does a pretty pacified community look like when the women take over the finances and the values? New Bern, Connecticut.

Madelyn, “the widow Madoff”, is back in New Bern, Connecticut because that’s where the inherited house is located. But she might as well be “the ex-Mrs. Madoff” or the “Green Mrs. Madoff” or the “recovering Mrs. Madoff”. She and the house are ready for a reconstruction. Tessa is a new Christian, newly broke. She runs a lavender shop and quilts and prays. Listen:

..Then one day when I was in the shop, repairing some stitching on Madelyn’s quilt, I started praying. I prayed for Lee, for Josh, for Madelyn, for Margo, for Virginia, Evelyn, for all my doubts and worries as well as all the things I’m grateful for… Somehow as I was praying, rocking that needle back and forth the way Virginia taught me, I forgot to be awkward. Prayer flowed from me naturally, in a plain and continuous pattern that mirrored the motion of my needle; simple, rhythmic, thought by thought, stitch by stitch, forgetting to be worried about the outcome, focused only on that stitch, that inch, that curve, until I came to the end of my thread and myself and pulled my gaze back to discover the bigger picture….

Madelyn rebuilds her life at the same time she rebuilds the old house, from the inside out, with the help of a one-eyed recovering alcoholic Vietnam Veteran who runs the hardware store, and Tessa, and Lee, Tessa’s reconstructed farmer-accountant-husband, and all the girls from the Quilting Circle, and their friends…

To Be Sung Underwater by Tom McNeal narrated by Susan Boyce

What starts up as an Insider’s Guide to storage in L.A. develops into a diary by Holden Caulfield’s bitch-sister, grown up into another alienated and out of joint L.A. wife.

Judith was a thoroughly unpleasant daughter with a borderline personality disorder of a father who grew tomatoes in Nebraska and a mother in Vermont who collected nasty pronouncements about marriage in general and her father in particular. (“Our marriage, like all marriages, was happy until it wasn’t.” “Your father seemed happiest living in the rooms the rest of us weren’t permitted to enter.”)

Today Judith is a thoroughly unpleasant and increasingly dissociated wife who believes that her husband is having an affair with his fastidious secretary Miss Metcalfe.

By Chapter Ten, Judith has decided to move into her storage space, along with her old furniture, an identity named “Edie Winks” and her fantasies of an old beau in Rufus Sage, Nebraska…

The story flickers back and forth between the teenage Judith and the Judith in storage, much like Judith herself flickers on and off between emotional positions, postures, roles.

A Table by the Window by Lawana Blackwell read by Andrea Gallo

When she catches some of her wealthy highschool students plagiarizing their English papers, Carly wants to fail them. Instead, the School Headmistress tells her that she is being vindictive, and that Carly must overlook the “childish lapse in judgement” and give them another chance. It is on that very same morning that Carly is told that her grandmother has died, that she has inherited a house in Tulula, Mississippi.

It is not obvious that an educated single woman would want to leave San Francisco for a tiny little Southern town where little old ladies go to buy antiques and collectibles. And yet, Carly is charmed. She is also willful, pragmatic, resourceful, and a good cook. She does not look in a mirror in order to describe herself to us. She does not go shopping for shoes. She does not think about clothes, or boys. She buys books. She thinks about her white trash mother and her insecure childhood. She longs for a family she does not have. She wants to be useful, helpful, economic.

Perhaps the will to be economic is taking the place of the will to be free, for this type of woman, this type of American, in this type of century.

Too Many Murders by Colleen McCullough read by Charles Leggett

There is no question that there is a story here, about an otherwise nice city and an otherwise nice cop who is married to a rather understanding Englishwoman.  But it is not a story about the city and the cop and the Englishwoman in the 1960s.

It is not enough to reference an occasional Communist, to talk about Reds, or to look for a microdot.  Crimes, too, need to be referenced  with other crimes on the street at the time. To write about a cop in the sixties is not to write about a cop in 2011, without the cell phone , the laptop and the extra 30 pounds. Something must be also be said about what people who the cop doesn’t know assume, believe, and feel. What are the truisms of  1967? What are the common sense things that “everybody” knows so well that nobody needs to say anything about? Still yet, what are the things that nobody talks about and everybody sort of knows? Things not spoken earmark an era.

Unfortunately, the sixties just seem to get in the way of  this story.  The characters, however, are strong and sturdy types and deserve a place in 21st century Connecticut or New York or London. As do the criminals, and the sexual deviances.

Savages by Don Winslow read by Michael Kramer

A ruthlessly intelligent localization of the seven deadly sins, California style.