Review of My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead, Jeffrey Eugenides
I'd buy any book with Jeffrey Eugenides' name on the cover. I've never met him, but I think he is a rare and remarkable writer. And here he is, not writing himself for once, but editing an impressive - and disconcerting - anthology of love stories, My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead. More...
On Female Friendship
So important to most women. Such sympathy; such support; such sisterhood; such sabotage. And, in modern times, with families scattered across the globe, such a powerful substitute for the intimacy once provided by the huge family network of sisters and cousins and aunts, all geographically and emotionally involved in each other’s lives. Friends have, in a way, become family, with this crucial difference: you choose them. More...
On Literary Prizes
Once upon a time, literary prizes were rare - and rarified. Think of the Prix Goncourt, and the Pulitzer, and the Nobel Prize for Literature.The prize givers, it seemed, made their choices - however magnificent - on the superbly lofty assumption that the general reader was automatically in possession of a Phd. More...
Tokyo Girl Power
When he was twenty-six, my brother fell in love with a male impersonator. Yes, you heard me. A male impersonator. A woman dressed as a man, performing as man, for a living. And what is more, she was Japanese. More...
On Tokyo
Before I went to Tokyo, I had two vague preconceptions about it. One was my own armchair traveller, Lost In Translation sort of image, of neon, and noodles, and karaoke bars in streets festooned with cables. The other was provided by people - mostly men - who'd been there for work, and had been baffled by it. More...
On the BBC
For as long as I can remember, there seems to have been a chorus of outrage about the BBC. If it isn’t accusations about bias and feeble governance, then it’s demands to withdraw the licence fee from an over mighty subject. More...
On Moira Stuart
Handsome.Clever. Dignified.Warm.Accessible.Serene.Mature.
Apply those epithets to any man applying for a public face job in television, and you don't just come up with Mr Right; you come up with Mr Absolutely Perfect. More...
On Reading to Children
Grandmother hood gives you a second bite at this particular cherry. In my case, although I obediently read Horrid Henry and Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl to my older grandchildren (still pretty small…). More...
City Walks
Catch a boat at Millbank Pier, opposite Tate Britain, writes Joanna Trollope, and be carried down the river, past the London Eye, to the Bankside Pier for Tate Modern. Move slightly east downriver to contrast what you have just seen with the engaging exterior of the Globe Theatre. More...
For as long as I can remember, there seems to have been a chorus of outrage about the BBC. If it isn’t accusations about bias and feeble governance, then it’s demands to withdraw the licence fee from an over mighty subject. If it isn’t dire revelations about low staff morale and disaffection, it’s allegations of unjustified navel-gazing and arrogance. And whatever else is the matter, the current Director General — whoever he is — (and why hasn’t it been a she?) - is invariably deemed to be entirely the wrong man for the job.
This kind of dissatisfied clamour is, I suppose, inevitable. Not only is the BBC an organisation of globally iconic status, with an incredible consequent reach, but it is also, by virtue of the existence of the licence fee, owned by all of us. Every single person who tunes into BBC radio or television is entitled to feel, vehemently in many cases, that it is indeed Their BBC. The possessive is not only powerful, but important.
Successive governments have, understandably, been nervous of doing anything too radical about the BBC. It isn’t an impersonal leviathan like the NHS: it is, for the reason given above, very personal indeed and the wrong kind of interference might cause a disconcertingly unmanageable public backlash. But now, at last, things are going to change. Interestingly, they are not going to change because of what people — any people — have decided, but because of what technology, as we are constantly and painfully learning, is making change compelling. The digital world means constant change, which in turn, means constant media response.
And there’s another thing. The present government has decided to replace the Governors with the BBC Trust and has agreed that the present charter shall remain, at least for a decade, and that the licence fee shall, in principle anyway, continue for the same period. But what that fee shall be has not yet been decided and, if it turns out to be less than the licence fee of the past, the sheltering walls of fortress BBC will be, to some extent, breached and the winds of commerce and competition that can then blow in might bring about yet more change, change that might alter the BBC’s fundamental personality.
So, uneasy though this moment is, it’s a good moment to reflect on what one — me, in this particular case — might want to keep from the ‘old’ BBC and what one might hope for, from its as yet less defined future self.
I have to start, personally, with radio. BBC radio — home and world services — have been the background voice of my life, all my life. Television arrived in my life — as with many contemporaries of mine — in my late teens, and although I have become devoted to a lot of it, it isn’t quite in the bloodstream the way radio is. I look at kids in the street, dreamily lurching along plugged into the private world of their MP3 players, and I can see exactly what the allure is, for them. They may be listening to something very different from anything I’ve ever listened to, but the principle of the simultaneous privacy (almost confessional…) and independence of just hearing something by yourself, of your choice, is very, very attractive. I have radios in every room, I have a short wave radio that has been all over the world with me and, if I’m not listening to a specifically BBC station, I feel somehow short changed. Even when the programming or presenting is exasperating or boring or just plain bad, there is a feeling that I can be as involved — or as uninvolved — as I wish, that there is an unspoken BBC axiom about treating the listener as an admittedly, unpredictable, equal.
I imagine that the same feelings, roughly, apply to those who grew up with television and who have it quacking comfortably away in the corner all day. The visual seems to me a little more dictatorial than the purely aural and to succumb more easily to a monotony of output — no doubt money speaks very loudly in these decisions — but the programming still manages to throw up some startling success and surprises — as well as an astonishing amount of bread and circuses. I see television’s role, even if I don’t naturally turn to it, before I turn to radio — except in hotel bedrooms where BBC World often provides unspeakable comfort, a comfort that I have been trying to analyse as being more than just the familiarity born of almost six decades of companionship.
And this is what I have come up with. There are plenty of things that madden me about the BBC (justify, please, the vast expense of News 24 against the undoubtedly very cheap, very quality, very thought provoking Today programme on Radio 4, for starters) but none of them madden me enough to shake my loyalty. And I think that is because I have the strong impression — not contradicted by some very close connections with the BBC over the last twenty years — that the employees are, if not immune to loutishness and boastfulness and all the usual human follies — intelligent, imaginative and committed. There is a job satisfaction, by and large, which triumphs mostly, over job exasperation. And that quality of mind and purpose is evident in both scheduling and programme making, and has resulted in a kind of prime patina that still clings stubbornly to the whole organisation, however subject it is to many a pratfall when trying to be too hip, or to compare with CNN. It attracts wonderfully able people because, quite simply, it always has.
My great fear now, I realise, is that in the face of these changes, the BBC might lose its nerve. A lot of bath water has to be flung out to meet the ineluctable demands of progress but it’s vital to hang onto that strange, brainy, diverse, eccentric baby. There’s enough collective cleverness at the BBC, surely, to navigate an ingenious way through both the technology and legislation to come, and to ensure that the organisation remains, as it always has, just out of reach of control, just beyond definition. It may be mine, but I’d rather it belonged to itself first. As it always has.
Handsome.Clever. Dignified.Warm.Accessible.Serene.Mature.
Apply those epithets to any man applying for a public face job in television, and you don't just come up with Mr Right; you come up with Mr Absolutely Perfect.And any television company that can secure such a man to front programmes or read the news, would immediately bind him to themselves with hoops of steel, and ensure he was shortlisted for entry into the Alan Bennett Hall of Fame for National Treasures.The drawback is that such men are as rare as the proverbial chickens' teeth.
However - take those same seven adjectives, and apply them to a woman in the same position, and television executives find a whole new - and childishly judgemental - set of programmes to operate by.
Handsome? No thank you, say the executives,we want sexy. Clever? Difficult: we need her to flirt, you see, just fractionally, with interviewees and co-presenters and viewers, and we certainly can't countenance her being of superior intelligence to any of the above.Dignified? Oo - scary! Makes us think of a schoolmarm.Warm? We need spirited. Accessible? All young women are accessible, aren't they? That's what they're FOR, thank goodness.Serene? Don't see the point - serene doesn't make for good (i.e. edgy) television. Mature? What? WHAT? MATURE? You mean over FORTY? Good God, she'll be practically drawing her pension, she might have LINES round her eyes, what an absolutely repellent notion, it'll turn viewers off in droves etc etc etc.
You think I exaggerate? I wish I did.But the last paragraph describes ,even if a little flamboyantly, the thinking - if you can dignify it thus - behind the recent sacking (yes, we will call spades, spades, here,please) of Moira Stuart, by the BBC.
Moira Stuart has all the qualities I list at the beginning of this piece. To that list, you could also add experience : she has worked impressively for the BBC for over a quarter of a century. She used to read - you'll all remember this - the BBC morning news bulletins quite beautifully, managing to inject the grimmest items with a kind of grave compassion that I doubt any man could match. Then, gradually, her job was pared away until she was only reading the news bulletins on Andrew Marr's (excellent) Sunday morning programme on BBC1.Now, even that has been taken away from her.
And the reason? No prizes for guessing.Moira Stuart is - I can hardly bear to tell you this, the revelation is so shocking - 55. That's right - not 85 or 95 or even 75, but 55.
That makes her younger than Michael Parkinson, younger than Sir Trevor MacDonald,younger than Jon Snow and Jeremy Paxman and even that Peter Pan of presenters, Alan Titchmarsh.She is possibly, as an adult woman of experience and sagacity (never mind wit and charm) better looking than she has ever been, and her speaking voice has the capacity to be sympathetic to every class, caste, colour and gender. But - and this "but" seems to override all else in these infantile times, she is not thirty. And she does not dress for the red carpet, she dresses for her JOB.
This situation is, however, about much more than a flagrant injustice meted out to an admirably professional woman at the height, not just of her powers, but of her usefulness to the very organisation which is so wilfully squandering her.There are two points to be made in addition, here, and I will start with the practical one.
This is that the BBC is a public-service broadcaster. I am a huge fan of the BBC and will defend to the death it's right not to be meddled with by self -interested governments, but even if it belongs to no government, it DOES belong to all of us, because we fund it, through the licence fee.As an organisation, it pays pretty loud lip service to its obligation to ask us licence payers what we want, but only acts on our replies when it suits it to do so - that is,when it doesn't conflict with its desire to be hip (so embarrassing) or a version of CNN or blatantly commercial or whatever the current vogue is. And this particular case is absolutely a case in point.
The younger generation do not watch the news regularly and solemnly on television. The kids who might be disaffected by seeing someone over 35 reading the news are getting their news from the internet and via mobiles and I-Pods - its their parents who still tune in to television to discover what is going on, and those parents are more than happy - indeed largely prefer - to have that news read by someone of stature, especially when the news is, as it is almost entirely these dark days, hard to bear.
It isn't a pretty young newsreader's fault that she appears far too lightweight to read harrowing news - she can't help her youth any more than Moira can help being 55 - but her seductive, youthful presence is just not respectful enough, by its very nature, to the people whose serious situations she is reporting on.We want grown up news read by grown up people, and we want the intelligent warmth, to make it possible to take in, that a grown up woman can uniquely provide.
The second point is social. We would, as a society, do well to look with some scepticism, at our slavish adoption of the cult of Eternal Youth and Physical Flawlessness.It is, frankly, immature to a dangerous degree, to see life, in all its aspects, as only worthwhile if everything, including people, is valued primarily, and often solely, for looks alone. It is also deeply, deeply dull. Young faces are ravishing, and a tonic to all of us to have about, but those faces, attached to inevitably inexperienced people, are not a fraction as interesting as those faces are going to become, with time. And the same goes for the brains behind them - true and fascinating individuality, that individuality that we so value in Jeremy Paxman and Alan Titchmarsh and Moira Stuart, is one of the many plusses of not being thirty any more. To deliberately chuck out such remarkableness of personality, acquired the only way such distinction CAN be acquired, by being knocked about by life for five or six decades is, quite frankly crackers.And babyish crackers at that.
I'm thrilled with the Daily Mail for starting a campaign in Moira's defence.I hope everyone who has been kind enough to stay with me to the end of this piece will raise the roof loudly enough and long enough to make the BBC realise that we mean business, on Moira's behalf, and on behalf of any other significant female presenter or newsreader who has the temerity to persist with birthdays after thirty five.
Grandmother hood gives you a second bite at this particular cherry. In my case, although I obediently read Horrid Henry and Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl to my older grandchildren (still pretty small…) I also seize any chance to sneak in a Beatrix Potter, especially The Tailor of Gloucester. I love this story and they do too — the bad cat, and the good mice, and the snow, and the names of the stuffs in the Tailor’s shop give the book an air of magic and romance, while Beatrix Potter’s language is, by contrast, so very, very practical. And the illustrations of course, are a joy. “Alack, alack, I am worn to a ravelling” has in fact passed into family language….
South Bank to Trafalgar Square - 2½ miles, 3 hrs
Grade: easy - Map: OS 173
Catch a boat at Millbank Pier, opposite Tate Britain, writes Joanna Trollope, and be carried down the river, past the London Eye, to the Bankside Pier for Tate Modern. Move slightly east downriver to contrast what you have just seen with the engaging exterior of the Globe Theatre. Then turn your back on Shakespeare’s theatre and cross Sir Norman Foster’s wonderful, silvery Millennium Bridge to the river’s north shore, with a spectacular view of St Paul’s Cathedral ahead of you. Perhaps confine yourself to a visit to the south chancel and the tomb of John Donne, poet and dean of the cathedral. It’s terrific — Donne is sitting upright, neatly wrapped in his shroud.
Leave the cathedral and walk west, down Ludgate Hill and along Fleet Street, pausing to turn up Bolt Court to Gough Square, to admire the façade of the house where Dr Johnson (and his beloved cat, Hodge) lived. On down Fleet Street, past Aldwych, turning up Wellington Street to Covent Garden, see that other St Paul’s, the actors’ church. Then leave along Long Acre and dawdle down Charing Cross Road until you reach Trafalgar Square in all its new public-space glory. Time, by now, for a little something. The National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing has a good restaurant and café, and, once revived, you might contemplate a lovely little finale. Go up that magnificent stone staircase to the main gallery floor and seek out my favourite Annunciation. It’s on a fan-shaped panel, painted by Fra Lippo Lippi, and the Virgin has a ray of golden light piercing her belly, and a look of the most intense inner concentration.
Once upon a time, literary prizes were rare - and rarified. Think of the Prix Goncourt, and the Pulitzer, and the Nobel Prize for Literature.The prize givers, it seemed, made their choices - however magnificent - on the superbly lofty assumption that the general reader was automatically in possession of a Phd. It was almost as if fiction couldn't be trusted to stand on its own merits, but had to be buttressed by being seen as a branch of philosophy. Indeed, I remember, at a slightly daunting lunch at the British Embassy in Paris, some twenty years ago,sitting next to an alarming old French Academicienne, who informed me that if fiction was ever to be regarded as an important art form,it had to be remorselessly intellectually aspirational.
I was thinking about that encounter - she corrected my syntax, as well as my accent - last week, while watching Jo Rowling on television, engagingly making a chocolate cake for her small son's birthday, and using exactly the same unaffected tone of voice to describe that activity as she did when talking about her writing. My first thought - gleefully - was that perhaps, as they can't now smoke in public places, French intellectuals mightn't be able to think the same way any more, and will have to descend from their pinnacles of pretension to bake cakes for four year olds in what my eldest grandson describes as True Life. The second thought was how much things have changed in the literary world, in the last ten years, and how the increasing egalitarianism and accessibility of modern fiction is reflected in its prizes.
There is now a multiplicity of prizes, and for every kind of writer.There are prizes for first novels, and for novels written by people under thirty five; there are prizes for novels written by women and novels written by members of the Commonwealth; there are prizes for fantasy novels,and romantic novels, and childrens'novels, and comedy novels and, suitably,prize daggers for crime novels. There is money, too, in current literary prizes,and there is also publicity, which is,as we all warily know, a very mixed blessing these days. And, as is ever the case where money and publicity create their peculiarly explosive cocktail,there are shrieks of criticism and shudders of distaste - too many prizes in all the transiently fashionable categories going to all the wrong people for regrettably populist reasons etc etc.
However - and it's an important however - we are where we are. It is hearteningly evident that people of all types and ages WANT to read (viz the great H.Potter) as long as they can be drawn in without feeling pressured or judged. And this desire to read - a good book is, after all, a wonderful kind of private confessional - in a confusing world where over a quarter of a million titles are published each year in the UK alone, is where the wealth of literary prizes most helpfully come in. Panels of judges, chosen these days from all kinds of occupations, not just academics, choose long lists, then short lists, of every kind and, hey presto, some excellent selection has been helpfully done for you. And the accompanying publicity means that you have to be pretty determined, to escape being aware of it.
Lists of every kind.This phrase is at the top of my mind just now, on account of chairing the Costa (n&eacturee Whitbread) Book Awards later this month. The Costa famously specialises in lists of every kind.There are, initially, five panels of judges considering, quite independently of one another, submissions from publishers in five categories - novel, first novel, biography, poetry and childrens'. A winner is chosen in each category, and then,on the award day, all the judges gather to select an overall winner for the supreme prize. This process, say the objectors, is absurd and impossible. How can you compare, say,a heavyweight biography with a comic novel? The answer is that you don't. What you do is choose the best book in it's category, the one that adds the most lustre to its particular genre : in short, the most enriching book of the five, whatever its type. Such as, in the last few years, the very varied joys of Kate Atkinson's "Behind the Scenes at the Museum", Claire Tomalin's "Pepys" and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf - all superbly good, and none either inaccessibly arcane or disaffectingly defiant. And because the prize happens at the end of the literary year, so to speak, it often manages to rescue deserving books that got overlooked by previous panels.
The thing about this prize - indeed about quite a number of modern prizes - is that the abiding principle is about reading as a pleasure. The five categories of the Costa act as a kind of giant book club, giving equal weight and prominence to all these different kinds of writing - and therefore of reading, and thus providing a salutary reminder to us all that in the solitary, and thus inevitably rather self reverential, world of writing, and the urgent commercial pressures of modern publishing, readers are the reason that the whole industry is there in the first place. And should be both thanked, and encouraged, in consequence.
Awards day - January 22nd - will be fascinating. If the final meeting is stormy, that will simply prove to me that people mind, profoundly, about books, and want to see their favourite out there, being read on buses and trains and holidays. I shall be intrigued to see, among my fellow judges - an impressive collection of inseparable brains and beauty including Polly Samson, Emily Maitlis, Alex James and Dylan Jones - who fights for what, as the victor ludorum. And whatever they choose, I'll have the vast satisfaction of knowing that it will be a book with wide popular appeal, which is exactly, to my mind, what literary prizes exist for.
So important to most women. Such sympathy; such support; such sisterhood; such sabotage. And, in modern times, with families scattered across the globe, such a powerful substitute for the intimacy once provided by the huge family network of sisters and cousins and aunts, all geographically and emotionally involved in each other’s lives. Friends have, in a way, become family, with this crucial difference: you choose them.
I find, now and then, that the subject of one of my books somehow leads to the next... It’s not so much unfinished business as that I discover that I’ve touched on an idea that leads to another and another, none of which are quite relevant to the current book, but which definitely need exploration in a book of their own.
While I was writing Second Honeymoon, I had a look — not much more than that — at the contemporary position of women and work, and of male reaction to it, especially if the woman succeeds in her work. And while I was writing, I found myself thinking about women in the workplace, women working together, and from that it was but a short hop to thinking about women together anyway, women as friends, women in situations where their social loyalties are strenuously tested against their visceral female instincts.
I remember seeing a painting, a year or two ago, at an exhibition about the Renaissance Home, at the V & A. It showed three generations of the same sixteenth century family, men, women and children. And underneath the painting was the telling curatorial comment: The life of every woman in this painting was dictated and circumscribed by her physiology. Quite. And has it really changed? When one looks at the stages of female friendship, one wonders. First there are all the conspiracies and cruelties of the school playground. Then comes the defiance of adolescence, when friends become absolutely sacred as a way of asserting independence from one’s repressive and embarrassing family. After that, there are the intense and dangerous fertile decades, when friends are crucial but men, for other and more primitive reasons, are even more so. These are the years of bonding over babies — and betrayal over men. These are the years of those Jane Austen girls, for whom marriage was a career as well as a biological compulsion, and who got sheer beastliness to one another down to a fine art.
And after that, something rather wonderful seems to happen. Not only does the internal physical clamour mellow into something less distractingly urgent, but women (I speak in very general terms!) appear to wake up to the possibility of friends who are, at last, not like themselves, in type or age or outlook. Friendship, as time goes on, becomes a broader thing, less restricted by the accepted orthodoxies of age and stage, and definitely wider in vision.
It was this aspect of women’s friendship that was the grit in the oyster for Friday Nights. There are six women in the novel; one is a retired professional, two are single mothers, one is married, three have children, most are single and all, except the first, are still working. Their work ranges from running a small company, through managing a shop, to being an aspiring disc jockey. And it is the friendship between this last, a girl of 22, called Jules, and the retired professional, who is about 70, that forms a steadily growing emotional spine to the book. These two women, nearly half a century apart in age, who recognise qualities in each other that satisfy both need and taste, without reference to the duller conventions of friendship, are evidence of what can happen when sexual and social competitiveness is taken out of the equation.
I always do research for my novels. It’s partly a habit left over from my historical fiction days, and partly — a larger part — a desire to make the contemporary reality I’m working on as real as possible. After all, there will be readers out there who know far more about a topic than I do, whether it’s stacking supermarket shelves, or trying to sustain hatred for your nice new stepmother. And so, whether the subject is practical, or psychological, I go in search of a truth — insofar as that is ever possible — which I might suspect, or imagine, but which I need to have confirmed by people who’ve been through whatever mill it is, that I’ve chosen to write about. And this time, with Jules, the disc jockey, it was clubbing.
I grew up with Elvis. And the Rolling Stones. (No, not the Beatles. Sacrilege, I know, but there we are.) I could probably still get most of Leonard Cohen and James Taylor word perfect. But modern dance music, club music, was impenetrably foreign to me, as was the very young, obsessed culture that surrounds it. However, if I was going to get Jules right, as a character, than I was going to have to learn. I was going to have to learn about clubbing, and about the music that is at the heart of it. So I did.
My first port of call was a real disc jockey. I’ll call her Cindy. We never met, because she a bad back (how I wondered?) and was resting at home, but we e-mailed, and we spoke on the telephone, and the element that captivated me at once — and lasted throughout this whole extraordinary, exhilarating musical journey — was that she never once said, “What’s someone your age doing in a culture like this?” Nor did anyone in the music shops, or the clubs, and I shouldn’t think any one of them was more than twenty five. It just goes to show — never, ever judge a book by its cover…
Cindy said that the first thing I had to do, to create a credible girl disc jockey, was to choose her music. All disc jockeys specialise — garage, trance, hip hop — and Cindy recommended house music to me, for Jules.
“House music?”
“Funky house,” she said, “Very musical. Very vocal.”
“Okay -.”
“And,” she said, “Your girl might be tomboyish, very assertive, because you’re fighting your corner when you start, you’re competing with the boys.”
“Who for?”
“The dance promoters. They’ll fill the clubs with people sympathetic to a certain kind of music. And the DJ’’s job - ” and her voice filled with energy — the DJ’s is to keep the music worthy of the dance floor, and being played on the radio. You have to keep it worthy.”
Cindy sent me, then, to the right record shops, in Soho. These shops are as far removed from HMV or Virgin Megastores as you can imagine, small and shabby and staffed by people who are as serious and specialist as any antiquarian booksellers. It was here that I learned that house music - “it has an uplifting, positive message” — had originated in a gay club in Chicago, and that ecstasy was its companion drug. “Drugs and dance music have always gone hand in hand,” an earnest boy explained to me, “Drugs are for extra experience.” It was here, also, that I learned about vinyls. It was extraordinary, in this world of CD’s, to see them again, 12 inch vinyls, lovingly produced by tiny amateur bands, practising in garages in Croydon and sheds in Walthamstow, and displayed in proudly labelled sleeves on the walls — Fanatix, Hardsoul, Fridayloop, Fadeout. And from these vinyls, DJ’s carefully mix and blend a sequence of music that can, if done right, keep a dancefloor full, and moving, for hour upon hour, the beat (strictly four-four, in house music) melting periodically into a breakdown, when the pace on the dancefloor slows to a rhythmic sway, and then the beat picks up again, and with it, the energy.
“You get it right,” one boy said, “And the kids go wild. All night. They just go wild, if you get the beat right.”
Of course, I had to see for myself. I rang — with some trepidation: what kind of nutter would they think I was? — a club, recommended for house music, behind Ladbroke Grove. The male voice the other end didn’t miss a beat. I’d be very welcome, he said. There’d be a couple of comps waiting for me at 11pm on the door. He hoped I’d have a good time. I put on black jeans, and my spectacles, and took a friend, and a notebook. I know why I took a friend and a notebook, but I wonder why I chose my specs — something to hide behind? Something to distance myself? The club was in a series of basements almost under the Westway, with a forbiddingly roped-off entrance guarded by hefty black men in suits. We were waved through, and in, and down past a bored looking girl guarding racks of metal coat hangers, to the club itself.
It was dark. Very dark. The only lights were red. The walls were black, with white graphics — “You cool brigade”, “Keep it unreal.” There were white Formica topped tables round the edge, and a dais with black leather sofas labelled “Reserved”. The only real light — red again — was around the DJ, a pallid young man, fag in mouth, loose shirt over trousers, ceaselessly adjusting his controls.
And there was the beat. It wasn’t so much deafening as huge. It gets you right in the breast bone, as if it’s inside your body as well as your head — more an experience, somehow, than music. The dance floor was full, boys in narrow jeans and T-shirts, girls in dresses and 4 inch heels, or jeans and trainers, all weirdly splashed with violet coloured strobe lighting swinging back and forth across them. I couldn’t help wondering what a medieval painter, with religion on his mind, would have made of the scene.
But the kids, like puppies scenting a novelty, were swarming round me in minutes. What was I doing? Why’d I got a notebook? Did I want to dance? Was I going to put them in my story? Would I send their mum a copy?
“You want to watch it,” a tiny, perfectly groomed girl said to me, “There’s some dodgy men here. I,” she added proudly, “Can take care of myself.”
I looked up. Around the dancefloor, on their own, were a few, older, black men, watchful and slightly disconcerting.
“Look at the bar prices,” a boy said, following my gaze. “Red Bull and vodka, seven fifty, I ask you. A tab of E’s only a couple of quid.”
In the girls lavatories — all flat surfaces, such a cisterns, carefully hidden behind hardboard panels — a pretty Vietnamese girl was cleaning up. “Don’t you mind this?” I asked her, “Don’t you hate cleaning up after everyone?”
She looked up at me, her eyes shining.
“I love being in the club! I love it here!”
They do love it. They love the energy, and the belonging, and the commitment to this primal language of beat and movement. They love the darkness and the danger because both are quite glamorous when you are invincibly young. I left with mobile numbers, and sweet messages, from Dan and Ben and Fran and Darren and Emma, and, more importantly, with some understanding of how compelling the rite of modern dance music is, to those of the right age for it.
And then I went home, to write about Jules.
When he was twenty-six, my brother fell in love with a male impersonator. Yes, you heard me. A male impersonator. A woman dressed as a man, performing as man, for a living. And what is more, she was Japanese.
I don’t think our parents are particularly narrow-minded. I mean, they aren’t bigoted or racist or anything, but it’s quite easy to throw them off balance with something unfamiliar, something they don’t know. So when she heard about the Japanese male impersonator, my mother began, at once, to fret about how would she ever see her Japanese grandchildren and would they speak English? And Dad said after a pause, “Is she a lesbian?”
“Ignore him,” I told my brother.
“I am,” Matt said, “And she’s not. She’s an otokoyaku.”
“A what?”
“An otakoyaku. She plays the male roles. She isn’t the star of her troupe but -” proudly “- she’s the next best thing.”
My brother worked in bank. It was an international bank, and he went to work in its head office, in the City of London, every day, from Slough, where we grew up. It wasn’t particularly exciting, but we hadn’t been brought up to excitement, so I didn’t miss it, and I didn’t think Matt did, either. He had his job, and the flat he shared with two guys he’d been at school with, and the rugby club, and Sophie, who’d been his girlfriend since they were fifteen, and whose parents went to the same Rotary and Inner Wheel dinners as Mum and Dad did. When I got married, Matt was our best man, and Sophie caught my bouquet (apricot and cream roses) and everyone said ah, bless, the way they do, and that’ll be the next wedding, won’t it?
But it wasn’t. Matt went on dating Sophie and going to work and playing rugby and bringing his work shirts home for Mum to starch the collars and Sophie began to look a bit tense and gaunt. So I said to Matt, using the bossy elder sister licence I’d always used, “What are you going to do about Sophie, Matt? Aren’t you going to ask her to marry you?”
And he looked out of my kitchen window — we were sitting at the table at the time because I was spooning apple puree into the baby — and said, “I can’t. I’m going to Japan.”
He’d asked his manager, it seemed. He’d said to his manager that he felt stuck in a rut, but that he didn’t want to leave the bank. And after a few weeks, his manager called him in and said that there was a vacancy going to assist in managing expatriate accounts, in Tokyo.
“Tokyo!” Matt said. He couldn’t even picture, at that moment, where Tokyo was, on his mental globe. “Japan, you mean?”
His manager looked at him.
“That’s the one,” he said.
We couldn’t believe it, none of us. We were stunned. Mum cried buckets, and we waited for Sophie to cry too. But she didn’t. She went very pale, and very quiet, and then she took herself off to stay with a friend in Edinburgh.
“You’re a fool,” I told Matt.
He was packing. Throwing things into a case in no order.
“You’ve always thought that,” he said. “What’s new?”
The bank gave him a service flat in Marunouchi, the business district of Tokyo. I expected it to have sliding screens and tatami mats on the floor, but he said it was actually very Western, only barer and the lavatory had an electrically heated seat and a button you pressed for a hygienic water spray. He said Tokyo was very clean and there was almost no litter. He said the Japanese were very clean, and the taxis had white lace seat covers and the older drivers wore white cotton gloves. He said the subway was not only clean, but efficient, and safe, and girls could take late night trains dressed in hot pants and thigh boots, without being bothered. He said there was no tipping, that the Japanese expected to give and receive good service. He said that the younger, bolder people on the street stared openly at his blue eyes.
I know, especially at the beginning, that he was lonely. And not just quietly lonely, but acutely so. There were two other Englishmen in his section at the bank, but they were older, with Japanese wives and families, and the younger men, the men his sort of age, went drinking and clubbing in a dedicated way he didn’t feel quite comfortable with, especially as these drunken nights didn’t seem to lead to any real bonding. Whatever happened after six in the evening, whatever was said, was never referred to again. So he was left with a hangover from too much saké, and no progress on the friends front. It was hard.
He did his best; I’ll say that for him. He bought a guide book, and he set off to explore Tokyo. He went to look at the wacky teenagers parading in Harajuku on Sunday mornings; he went to Shibuya on Friday nights; he took the monorail across to Odaiba and watched the neat couples, and the neat families, while they sat on the manmade beach below the Rainbow Bridge, and watched the flying fish, flipping in the sunset. He went to the Shinto shrines in Akasaka and Zojo-ji, he toured the Tokyo Tower, he stood under the giant TV screen beside Shinjuku Station which seemed to be Tokyo’s favourite meeting place, he went window shopping in Ginza. And then he returned to his bare flat, via a cheap noodle bar, and e-mailed me, about his day.
I said, “Why don’t you tell Sophie all this?”
“Can’t,” Matt said.
I think, despite all his efforts, he was getting pretty low. He couldn’t say so, of course especially not to our parents, and he sent lovely things back at Christmas, really lovely things, the kind of things that would never have occurred to him before, like embroidered slippers and painted fans and a padded coat for the baby, with a dragon on the back, and red piping. He spent Christmas Day on his own in the flat watching a DVD of great football goals, drinking Sapporo beer, and he said I wasn’t to tell anyone.
I didn’t. But I was really relieved when Mr. Nori began to appear in the e-mails. Mr. Nori was a senior assistant manager in Matt’s section, at the bank, and he spoke some English. He was older than the others, Matt said, and a great smiler. When he smiled, or laughed, his eyes disappeared into the other lines in his face, so he was just a big mouth of laughing teeth. Matt drew a picture of Mr. Nori laughing, and sent it, as an attachment.
Mr. Nori was not just unusual in that he was so genial; he was very unusual in that he asked Matt to come out to his house, and have a meal. Matt had been told that he wouldn’t be asked to a Japanese house, because of the commuting distance problem, and because Japanese houses were considered too small to welcome big Westerners. But Mr. Nori said his wife would like to see Matt, at their home, and that he was to take a train out to the suburbs — one and a half hours — where Mr. Nori would meet him, on Saturday.
He was quite nervous, he said. He remembered to wear clean socks, and he remembered to buy a gift for Mrs. Nori, some English tea in a heritage tin, wrapped up like a present. He bought whisky for Mr. Nori — Chivas Regal seemed to be the thing — and that was wrapped too, in red paper, with ribbons. He expected their house to be made of light timber, or even paper, and to be in a pretty street of similar houses with ornamental ponds in front, and willow and cherry trees, and little lacquered bridges. But it was a small grey-beige house, in a narrow grey-beige street, and the only tree in sight was a plastic one, in the Nori’s front garden, under which crouched a plastic rabbit. He felt, he said, the size of an elephant.
Mrs. Nori was small, and also smiling. She wore a kimono and white toe-split socks, and she took away his jacket and his shoes, and ushered him into a series of long, narrow rooms, with smooth wooden floors and almost no furniture beyond a huge cream leather Western style sofa in front of a vast plasma TV screen. Around the sofa was a scattering of wooden tables and prominently displayed on these tables were over a dozen photographs, in silver frames and bamboo frames and frames of fancy gilding. They struck Matt because they were all of the same person, a girl, a young woman, and they were all posed and formal and the girl was made up to the nines.
Mrs. Nori made Matt sit on the sofa. He gestured at the photographs.
“Your daughter?”
The Japanese, apparently, don’t like saying no. So Mr. Nori laughed uproariously and said that he and his wife were just two people.
“No children?”
Both Noris laughed again. Then Mrs. Nori gestured towards the nearest photograph — the girl was very strangely dressed in a red sequinned waistcoat and a ludicrously ruffled shirt — and said something in Japanese, beaming at my brother. He looked at Mr. Nori.
“My wife is in fan club,” Mr. Nori said.
“Fan Club?”
“Takarazuka, “ Mr. Nori said, “She is big fan. Her mother is big fan. Her sister is big fan. This girl” — he nodded towards the photographs — “Is big star. Not top top star, but big star. My wife takes her lunch box sometimes. Fish, pickled vegetables, rice, cake. You like cake?”
The girl, it transpired was called Shakiko, known to her adorers as Kiko. She was a member of the Takarazuka Revue, Western —style musical shows using only unmarried women, with audiences — mostly women — of over two and a half million a year. The most important, and popular, stars of this revue were the otokoyaku, who took the male roles, and Kiko was one of those. She had been selected — from thousands of applicants — when she was sixteen, and she was now twenty four and in her golden period. She had had big roles in Manon, and Guys and Dolls, and a version of Aïda called Song of the Kingdom. Her greatest role was in The Rose of Versailles, an adaptation from Japanese manga. Her fan club was official, devoted, and responsible for her comforts and her reputation.
“Is whole life!” said Mr. Nori, smiling broadly, “When she is not here, in house, she is doing fan club for Kiko!” He clapped his hands together. He had thought of a joke. “In Japan, men have geisha! In Japan, women have Takarazuka!”
Matt looked at the photographs. The girl, despite the mask like make-up, was very, very pretty. He glanced at Mrs. Nori.
“Could I meet her?”
Mr. Nori laughed tremendously. “No boyfriend allowed! Not permitted boyfriend!”
Matt kept looking at Mrs. Nori.
“Could I come with you? To the Revue? To see her on stage?”
The Takarazuka Theatre in Tokyo was enormous. It was purpose built, with a special revolving stage and a walkway, called the Silver Bridge, which took the girls, in their incredible costumes, right out into the audience. There must have been thousands and thousands of women in that audience, Matt said, and almost no men, and only one Westerner. Him. He said the atmosphere was as reverent as in a church. He said he felt really, really privileged to be there. He said he didn’t mind the sentimentality, or the melodrama or the over-lavish feathered outfits. He said the whole thing was just fantastic, and that Kiko, dressed as a matador and stamping her glossy booted feet, was the most fantastic thing of all.
Mrs. Nori let him wait with her at the stage door. She let him, he knew, because he was a blue-eyed Westerner, and that gave him status. Kiko’s fan club had to wait below the top stars fan club, and the front row of fans had to kneel, to give the back row a good view of the star. There was no pushing, or screaming, or jostling. The star’s glory would be diminished if her fans behaved badly. When Kiko came out, dressed in a man’s tuxedo, with her short, bronzed hair tucked behind her ears, and a mannish swagger, Matt said he was ready to faint.
He could think, after that, of nothing else. He badgered Mr. Nori to badger Mrs. Nori until he was allowed to come in the car once or twice, when Mrs. Nori drove Kiko to rehearsals. Kiko spoke English. Without looking at him, she told him that English conversation was part of a Takarasienne’s training, along with ballet, modern and traditional dance, tap, music, theatre history, singing, tea ceremony and etiquette. She told him that the Takarazuka motto — Be pure, be proper, be beautiful — was very strictly observed. She told him that the first year girls have to clean the dormitories for everyone else, with mops and brushes, to teach them humility. She told him she had never had a boyfriend, but that there was a rich industrialist who wanted to marry her when she was twenty five, the classic Japanese age for marriage.
“And will you?” Matt said. He said his knuckles were white with clenching.
“ I don’t want to be married,” Kiko said. Then she flicked a glance at him, the first time she had ever looked his way. “I am an artist,” she said.
His e-mails were obsessed. He could only write about Kiko. Because he was a Westerner, because he was being promoted in the bank, because he had blue eyes, Matt was allowed to see Kiko sometimes, in Mrs. Nori’s house, discreetly, away from any possibility of being seen. He couldn’t kiss her, he couldn’t even hold her hand, but they could talk and he could gaze and gaze. He said he loved it that she had trained herself to be a man, because she was so much a girl and the contrast was electrifying. She gave him a signed photograph of herself in a white spangled suit and a silver top hat, and one, which he cherished, of her when she first went to the Takarazuka Music School, one of the most competitive schools in the world, dressed in the school uniform of white blouse, grey flannel skirt and jacket, and red tie, with her then black hair in pigtails.
It went on for a year, a whole year of shows and stage doors and Mrs. Nori’s car and Mrs. Nori’s cream leather sofa. By the end of that year, Matt’s Japanese was good, and his manners were better, and he was almost dead with frustration. He decided to take the plunge. Kiko had shown herself more than happy to be in his company, more than ready with the favours that the rules permitted, so, one afternoon when Mrs. Nori was brewing yet more of the green tea he had failed to find other than disgusting, he went down on one knee beside the cream sofa, and asked Kiko to marry him.
“Get up,” she said.
“Not until —.”
“Get up,” she said, “in Japan, it is women who kneel.”
“Did you hear me?”
“Perhaps,” she said.
“Will you marry me? I am absolutely mad about you and I’ll do anything and everything to make you happy.”
Kiko looked at her lap.
“I don’t want to marry.”
“Don’t you love me?”
She looked at him. She said, “I love you.”
“Well then -.”
“But I can’t marry. I love you but I won’t marry you.”
“Why on earth not?”
“Because,” she said, “I love what I do more.”
He said he got angry then. He accused her of being addicted to adoration, like some silly pop star, he told her that her best days in the Takarazuka were over, that she was trying to live a fantasy, that she was afraid of reality.
“This is reality,” Kiko said. “For hundreds and thousands of women, this is reality. They need this idealisation of men. I belong in the life that helps them to bear what they bear. In Japan, they have much to bear.”
“You’ll be too old, soon,” Matt said angrily, cruelly.
Kiko wasn’t in the least upset.
“I shall join the Special Troupe. I’ll have parts for decades. I’ll get other acting work.”
“Don’t you need me?”
She sighed. She was wearing a girl version of English cricketing clothes, cream flannel and wool, with a blazer. He said she looked adorable.
“I love you,” she said, “But I don’t need you. Not like I need this. This is a calling for me. Nothing will ever satisfy me like this does.”
He shuffled over so that he was kneeling close to her. He took her hands. For the first time. And she didn’t pull away.
“Are you sure?” Matt said.
She looked at him. She smiled. She said, “Completely,” and then she leaned forwards and kissed him quietly on the mouth.
He was in an awful state when he came home. The bank acted very generously really, and gave him a better position than the one he’d left, and he took a room in a colleague’s house in Battersea and we didn’t see him properly for months. I think he went a bit wild. He certainly looked as if he had and I got quite angry with him because I had Mum and Dad on my case, all the time, worrying about him, and I had two children by then so I didn’t have the time or energy to prop them up as well as run my house and look after my family and keep my part time job at the Health Centre going.
“Grow up,” I said to Matt, “Grow up and accept what’s happened and stop behaving like a stroppy teenager.”
And he did stop. Not then, of course, but just after his twenty eighth birthday, he appeared at Mum and Dad’s, with Sophie, and she’d had her hair cut, and she looked much better, and she was wearing a ring on her engagement finger. She’s a lovely person, Sophie, but you couldn’t really call her pretty. But she looked pretty that day, standing in Mum’s kitchen, not able to help fiddling with her ring.
They’ve got a baby now, Matt and Sophie. They live the other side of Newbury, so we don’t see all that much of them, but I think they’re happy. The baby is lovely and Matt’s a great father and if he thinks about Tokyo and Kiko now — indeed, did he even ever mention her to Sophie? — I wouldn’t know about it. Sometimes, when I look at him, I wonder if he’s got those photographs of her, the pig-tailed schoolgirl and the top hatted star, hidden somewhere to remind him of all those hopes and dreams. Or perhaps he doesn’t want to be reminded. Perhaps he has trained himself never to think of her again.
The odd thing is, that I haven’t. I think about Kiko quite regularly, and I never met her. I’ll be forty next birthday, and it’s one of those birthdays that makes you take stuff out of your mental cupboards and have a look at it. And I’m looking at my own hopes and dreams, and realising that I never had enough of them, I was never ambitious enough, never sufficiently curious or adventurous or — or certain. But Kiko was. Kiko knew what she wanted and what would make her happy, and it wasn’t the conventional things that society and upbringing and magazines tell you will make you happy. It was something else, something to do, very much, with romance and with love, but not in the conventional way, not the way featuring a man, and wedding bells. Kiko understood it, and she understood that it would serve her better in the long run, than even Matt’s love would. So she made her choice. She was serenely certain of it, and I envy her that. I really do.
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Tokyo
Before I went to Tokyo, I had two vague preconceptions about it. One was my own armchair traveller, Lost In Translation sort of image, of neon, and noodles, and karaoke bars in streets festooned with cables. The other was provided by people - mostly men - who'd been there for work, and had been baffled by it. "It's a business city," they said, "Pretty bleak. You won't like it".
But I did like it. I liked it a lot. I had the huge advantage of meeting up with a great friend there, someone who has known Japan for twenty years, and who was determined that I should see beyond any idée fixe.
"The thing about Tokyo," he said, "is that it is extremely Japanese, almost the essence of Japanese-ness. And the other thing is that nothing is as it seems".
Tokyo SEEMS, at first glance, almost familiar. There are the glittering high rises, and Prada, and advanced technology, and coffee shops, and Western lavatories (with heated seats - heaven) and posters of Victoria Beckham. The younger Japanese speak English. But when you look a little closer, when you leave the international hotels, and shops, and take to the streets and the immaculate subway, you begin to see that all the recognisable things are simply symptoms of the Japanese admiration for western culture - especially French and American - and have been laid, like a veneer, on a city that is profoundly rooted in its own national character.
Take, for starters, the basic layout of Tokyo. It lies wrapped round the northern and western shores of Tokyo Bay, and at its centre, like a spider in a web, (in this case, the spider is the diminutive, bug-loving Emperor Akihito, 125th occupant of the Chrysanthemum Throne) is the huge, hilly green island of the Imperial Palace. Nothing is visible of the actual palace; there are just green slopes, and stretches of moat with picturesque bridges and watchtowers, and carefully stunted pine trees, clipped to resemble clumps of broccoli. The Imperial Family is still deeply remote, and deeply revered, and they go about their formal, austere, rule-bound lives in utter and absolute privacy - at the heart of this ceaselessly moving city.
Beyond this secluded heart, the city stretches away, seemingly to infinity, lightly balanced, as so much in Japan appears to be, on the shifting tectonic plates that could explode into an earthquake at any time. Nobody speaks of it. Nobody in Tokyo, it seemed to me, speaks of anything alarming or disrespectful. The inhabitants of Tokyo, who probably work harder and longer than the inhabitants of any other major city in the world, are focussed on simply surviving the tension of living and labouring in a city crackling with energy and crammed with people.
And there are many elements in Tokyo life to assist them. I was entranced by the subway; clean, courteous, and punctual to the second. I loved the taxi cabs, with their white lace seat covers, and the older drivers in white cotton gloves. I relished the absence of litter, and the astonishing safety of the streets, even at night, and the fact that as the Japanese regard good service as normal, they are offended if you tip. I thought the food was fantastic (with the possible slimy exception of tofu), the welcome dignified, and the shopping - if you avoid the global clichés - fascinating and beautiful (I came out of the Shinjuku branch of Isetan with half of Christmas, exquisitely wrapped, serenely accomplished in two hours...). And I loved the planting, and the water: the trees and hedges trimmed to bonsai perfection; the waterfalls cascading silently and soothingly down the interior walls of shops and offices; the flowers arranged as if they were small sculptures, a bloom to a vase.
I was also vastly taken with the variety. Around the green lung of the Imperial Palace, is a ring of different districts, all with separate personalities. From the business district of Marunouchi, through the shiny shopping streets of Ginza, to the embassies of Roppongi and the temples (red and gold and garnished with flames and Buddhas and dragons) of Asakusa, and the neon and noise (at last!) of Shibuya, there is a change of mood every mile. In a single day, I was steered up the Tokyo Tower,through the giant legs of one of Louise Bourgeois' vast and disconcerting spiders into the amazing shopping mall of Roppongi Hills,up to the extraordinary temple of Senso-ji, filled with petitioners writing their wishes and hopes on butterfly scraps of paper, and then out on the wonderful new monorail across Tokyo Bay to Odaiba, where we sat on a man made beach below the Rainbow Bridge, and watched the flying fish flipping in the sunset sea.
And then there was Harajuku. If you go to Tokyo, save Harajuku for a Sunday morning. Sunday morning is parade time in Harajuku - a parade of teenagers so wackily, crazily, inventively dressed and made up, as to make all western adolescent attempts at sartorial anarchy look merely pathetic. These kids mean you to stare; they mean you to take their pictures. Bold and noisy, they are as far from the tidy, exhausted workers, sleeping upright and jammed together on the Tokyo subway trains, as if they came from another planet.
It made me wonder, looking at them flaunting their carefully contrived oddity, if they will have an effect on the future, if they will have the power to take a radical sledgehammer to this industrious, polite, organised society, where taboos are the norm, where respect and shame still dictate personal conduct, and where it is considered very rude, to talk in a public lift. Will these teenagers ever have the economic clout to assert the cult of the individual, and the tolerance of the different that they are picking up from the West, and storm the Imperial Palace? And do I, however terrific I think they are, really want them to?
Review of My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead, Jeffrey Eugenides
I'd buy any book with Jeffrey Eugenides' name on the cover. I've never met him, but I think he is a rare and remarkable writer. And here he is, not writing himself for once, but editing an impressive - and disconcerting - anthology of love stories, My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead.
Love is, of course, extremely underfoot at this time of year. On Valentine's Day, to my annual delight, my local M&S will disgorge numbers of men, all clutching identical bunches of flawless crimson roses, and all wearing the expression of dogs invited to sit - just this once - on the forbidden sofa: defiant, complacent and nervous.
In my view, most of them would be better off ditching the roses and taking this book along to the obligatory candlelit dinner for two instead.
Eugenides has written a marvellous little essay on the love story to introduce his choices. It all began, he says, in a Michigan schoolroom, when he was 15; a plainly inspired Latin teacher made the class understand that two words in Catullus's frustrated lament that his mistress's dead pet sparrow still meant more to her than he did, sounded like birdsong. And not just birdsong, but elegiac birdsong, the first taste of the emotional power that exists, in life, in something that one simply cannot have. And that power is never more supreme than when applied to love.
Romantic love, the stuff of candles and roses and rings, is not, Eugenides maintains, the province of love stories. “Love stories,” he says boldly, “nearly without exception, give love a bad name”. The tension, the energy, the dark compulsion of a really good love story, don't come from having a home on the hill for just we two, but from not being able to have it. The memorable love story thrives on yearning and unrequited passion, on struggle and injustice and inequality, on adoreds and adorers never quite getting it together. And also, crucially, on love's own caprice and transience.
In Japan, the spring custom is to make a rapturous ceremony of Sakura, cherry blossom time. This is partly because the blossom is both lavish and ravishing, but also because it is fragile and perishable, so that its beauty is haunted by its imminent fading. So it is with the love in a good love story - the eros, Eugenides insists, not the agape - because “say what you want about love: death will finish it”. This love feeds upon fantasy and longing, and is part of the human emotional condition: “Push it down in one place, and it rises in another.”
It's hardly surprising, then, to find that the stories in this collection are as unsettling as they are stimulating. I thought, when I began to read, that I was going to be able to skip a few familiar ones (Chekhov's exquisite The Lady With the Little Dog, William Trevor's poignant Lovers of Their Time, Alice Munro's near perfect The Bear Came Over the Mountain) but found that I couldn't. Juxtaposed as they are, even the familiar have a new dimension because of their context in the book - Chekhov after a Harold Brodkey and followed by a truly Southern Gothic offering from William Faulkner, and Alice Munro bringing up the rear as a quiet and lethal reminder of where all loves might end.
And in between the known stories, there are some valuable and startling strangers. Having just seen the latest Ang Lee movie, based on an Eileen Chang short story, it was fascinating to find her Red Rose, White Rose here. She, and Chekhov, are not the only non-English speaking writers - there are stories from Guy de Maupassant, from Nabokov (a lovely contribution) from Isaac Babel and David Bezmozgis.
There are also some arresting American stories, such as Stuart Dybeck's account of teenage frustration in We Didn't and Harold Brodkey's outrageous and unflinching Innocence. Add Lorrie Moore, and Richard Ford at his most uncompromising, and Deborah Eisenberg's weird, affecting Some Other Better Otto, and you have an outstanding collection. Even the stories I couldn't get on with - Robert Musil's Tonka, for example - still made me feel that they needed to be there.
In painting, the subject of the Annunciation seems to summon something profound, and special, from even the most sophisticated painter. Perhaps, in this difficult and intense genre of the short story, the love story, as defined by Eugenides, has something of the same effect on writers.
It's as if none of them can fail to respond, with honesty, to everything implicit in one of Oscar Hammerstein's lyrics for South Pacific: “This, nearly, was mine.” And, of course, it's all in the nearly ...
My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead edited by Jeffrey Eugenides
HarperPress, £14.99; 576pp
