Everything Under and Penelope Fitzgerald, Together
This weekend I started Everything Under by Daisy Johnson. Here's the preface: "The places we are born come back. They disguise themselves as migraines, stomach aches, insomnia. They are the way we sometimes wake falling, fumbling for the bedside lamp, certain everything we've built has gone in the night. We become strangers to the places we are born. They would not recognise us but we will always recognise them. They are marrow to us; they are bred into us. If we were turned inside out there would be maps cut into the wrong side of our skin. Just so we could find our way back. Except, cut wrong side into my skin are not canals and train tracks and a boat, but always: you." Wow.
I've only just begun (cue humming a Carpenters song...), but Everything Under is about Gretel, who lives on a houseboat with her mother before the mother abandons her. As soon as I read that, my mind immediately went to the late British author Penelope Fitzgerald. I read her biography by Hermione Lee this summer and learned that Fitzgerald, too, took her children to live on a houseboat on the Thames for a bit. (She did not abandon her children, however!)
Fitzgerald won the (Man) Booker Prize in 1979 for Offshore. Have you heard of her? It's ok: It unfortunately wouldn't be surprising if you have not. As I was preparing for #FridaysWithCarolShields last week (which I realized I posted a week in advance...oops), I read this quote by Shields, who won the Pulitzer: "You know, I am a realist, and I know the shelf life of a book is about four months...Someone sent me a list of all the Pulitzer Prize winners since something like 1915, I think, and half of them I'd never heard of, half of them. So I don't think literary reputations live on, very few of them. Books, you know, fall out of the public eye.”
Everything Under was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2018, and Johnson is the youngest-ever nominee in the prize's history. Amazing! I'm really, really drawn in to this novel so far. Yet I wonder: Will Johnson one day end up with Fitzgerald and Shields, on a list of authors that only the die-hards remember? A lot to think about here.
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