42. Late in the Day, Tessa Hadley
Alex, Zach, Christine and Lydia have been friends for years - first two sets of schoolfriends (the girls and the boys), then two married couples who lived near one another and whose lives remained intertwined. The book opens with Lydia, now in her late 50s, calling Christine and Alex to let them know that her husband, Zach, has died suddenly.
This has had great reviews but I didn't enjoy it much. The characters and their actions are stage-y, they talk to each other like this:
I never did my own housework or learned to cook - and I had a nanny when Grace was little. Now I don't know how I'm going to fill my days! I can't go on with what we did before. What would I do in all those exciting places, meeting those wonderful people, on my own, without Zachary's unstoppable enthusiasm? His enthusiasm always seemed so risky to me, as if he was setting himself up for disappointment - though he never was disappointed. The world went on supplying him with beautiful people making their beautiful gestures: good things came into being, to fulfil his expectations. They won't come into being for me, that's for sure.
Two of the characters are so unpleasant that you can't work out why anyone would want to be either their friend or their lover, and so the relationships at the heart of the book made no sense to me. I imagine there was deliberately a claustrophobia (again, maybe a staginess) in the limited set of characters and their intricate entanglement, but I just kept thinking "Man, I would have looked outside this group for a husband".
43. Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, Cho Nam-Joo
I came to this after reading Frances Cha's If I Had Your Face last year, a book about the extreme pressures placed on young Korean women in a society which combines traditional patriarchy (the education and career prospects of boys still frequently prioritised over those of girls, for example) with nasty modern misogyny from internet and pop culture (unachievable standards of beauty for young women leading to South Korea having the highest number of cosmetic surgery procedures per capita worldwide).
This book, a bestseller in Korea, depressingly contains more of the same. Cho tells the story of her undistinguished protagonist (her name is very common in Korea, like calling a UK character "Jane Smith" - she's an everywoman) in flat, unemotional style. At the opening of the book she's a married mother who starts to show symptoms of psychological distress. The rest of the book is an account of her life as told to her psychiatrist, and we see that she is a willing and pliable girl, who works hard and tries her best but is set up by society to fail, because the expectations on her as a female are too high and too contradictory.
Jiyoung was standing in the middle of a labyrinth. Conscientiously and calmly, she was searching for a way out which didn't exist.
We see her struggle with sexism and sexual harassment, with lack of opportunities, and with the judgemental attitudes of people around her. Occasionally Cho will supplement her matter-of-fact narrative with footnotes, giving facts and statistics to back up the narrative ( In 2005, the year Kim Jiyoung graduated from college, a survey by a job search website found that only 29.6 per cent of new employees at 100 companies were women, and that was mentioned as a big improvement. ).
This was the first Korean novel to sell over 1m copies in over a decade, and has (so I have read) sparked activism and drawn attention to the problems faced by women not only in South Korea but further afield in Taiwan and Japan. Not a fun read, but an important book.
44. More Than A Woman, Caitlin Moran
And, talking of fun feminism, here's Caitlin. Oof! Groo! etc etc
This has been reviewed a fair bit here and most people seem to have reached the same conclusion I did: not terrible throughout, but patchy.
Caitlin's voice is no longer the edgy, marginalised one it used to be (or thought it was), back when How To Be A Woman cut through into the mainstream. It is, honestly, a bit embarrassing that she is a rather well-off, London-based, white media darling, still writing about being the outsider - those sections were a bit cringe. However she is absolutely right about the invisibility and emotional labour of older women (although she really should be looking around and giving more space to the issues faced by older women in less privileged groups).
Some people find CM too mainstream, too ready to pander, not radical enough, not feminist enough. Personally, I think she draws the line where it needs to be drawn, but can be inclusive in ways that are helpful and humane. I liked her chapter about the problems faced by young men and the one about how feminist infighting and cancel culture are harming our chances of progress, both of which I think are thoughtful and useful.
And I love this. This, this is my life as a middle-aged woman:
If someone makes you a cup of tea in a mug that is not your favourite, all your happiness and gratitude is somehow crushed by a disappointment and fury that it's not in the favourite mug. You have to go into the kitchen and secretly decant it into "the good one" and then spend the rest of the day thinking, mournfully, "No one knows the real me. No one at all.
I have never felt so seen 