The word RURAL does not do justice to the reality of Jimmy Carter’s boyhood. Hard scrabble, heavy farm work from the age of five on, barefoot plowing with a mule, it all sounds more like Abe Lincoln than Carter. But it is a true picture of his family and life in the Georgia farmlands during the Depression. He then had more black friends than white.
Refreshing to read of a President who worked hard and kept to a solid code of morality both as a youngster and as an adult.
Meredith Hall’s memoir was of special interest to me as I am very familiar with Hampton Beach, where the pivotal moment takes place for this All-A, pride of the family student when she has an unfortunate naive sexual encounter on the beach. As naive as I was at her age, the same thing could have happened to me on the night I double-dated with an equally naive friend two sailors on wartime leave. We went to Revere Beach. Luckily my date was not as predatory as Hall’s.
The ensuing story of Hall’s life as she pulls herself up from beatnik poverty to teacher of college litereature is moving and instructive, if a bit disjointed.
Ian McEwan reconstructs moment by moment, in every sensual detail, the dawn to dawn Saturday of a London neurosurgeon, from his unusually early awakening in time to see a fiery plane arrowing toward land to his emergency operation, in the pre dawn hours of Sunday, on the brain of a man who has threatened to kill him.
What he sees on the streets, hears on the radio, remembers, thinks while operating, feels for his wife, we share the whole experience as he talks with his talented blues musician son and newly published poet daughter, his lawyer wife, her irascible famous poet father, colleagues, patients, finally a dangerous brain damaged mugger.
Ironically, the writer McEwan describes in 19th century style prose the slow evolution of a physician’s mind almost devoid of poetry to evaluate the imagery with which his daughter celebrates her young sexuality.
For the reader there are astonishing new experiences in the world of neurosurgeons, London city life, blues guitar style, and Huntington’s Disease among others.
Similarly, McEwan’s On Chesil Beach describes a failed honeymoon in which a talented violinist whose chamber ensemble will become famous finds herself repulsed by the messy details of first sex with her earnest but inexpert young husband, a history major from a blue collar family. We come to know their parents, their homes, their early and later lives, and especially the details of Chesil Beach in this short novel, almost, for my stomach, too much about the sexual details of their unconsummated union.
In both books the plot, slight as it is, carries us along: will the doctor and his family survive, will the young lovers reconcile, although we think we know the answers from the first. And we feel we have lived for awhile in England, among different but not totally unfamiliar people.