8: Good Evening Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes (1939-1944)
How have I lived all this time in complete oblivious unawareness of Mollie Panter-Downes? Evidently she wrote most of The New Yorker by herself, while housewifing it up and cranking out novels and such. Good Evening Mrs Craven is so good, y'all. It's a book of short stories, bracketed by nonfiction pieces about the war. They're never about people who get a bomb dropped on their house; rather, they're about (generally middle to upper class almost always female) characters whose lives affected by the war in ways large and small. Many of them are funny, some of them are unbearably sad. Some are both. All are short enough to read on the toilet, so what are you waiting for?
There's such a keen (kindly or otherwise) observation of human nature on display in these stories. Yes, you want to do your bit and have a poor family from the East End come live with you in the countryside! There will be poor children who will benefit from some of that clean English air and they'll blossom and run around and see cows and go from being grimy to being Healthily Smudged! Oh, except they're real poor people, with real ground in dirt and real generational poverty and it isn't what you expected and you resent them for making you think about what it would be like to be from where they're from. For one thing, they don't seem to know how to perform gratitude in a way you can really enjoy.
Or the Blitz is finally over, thank heavens! But you're a shy, awkward person, and now none of the people in your apartment building have to hide out in the basement during air raids and form genial common cause. Nobody talks to you anymore and you're unbearably lonely; you miss the sirens.
Or what is it like, specifically, if the man you've been meeting for dinner so often the concierge assumes you're his wife gets called up? He says he'll make sure you hear if anything happens to him, which is clearly ludicrous. You haven't received a letter in a while. Should you call his wife?
I honestly don't have much to say about these because they're just uniformly so good. Just read them, you'll be glad you did. 5/5, absolute winner.
Thanks to the good people at the Witchita Public Library for interlibrary loaning me this book!
There's such a keen (kindly or otherwise) observation of human nature on display in these stories. Yes, you want to do your bit and have a poor family from the East End come live with you in the countryside! There will be poor children who will benefit from some of that clean English air and they'll blossom and run around and see cows and go from being grimy to being Healthily Smudged! Oh, except they're real poor people, with real ground in dirt and real generational poverty and it isn't what you expected and you resent them for making you think about what it would be like to be from where they're from. For one thing, they don't seem to know how to perform gratitude in a way you can really enjoy.
Or the Blitz is finally over, thank heavens! But you're a shy, awkward person, and now none of the people in your apartment building have to hide out in the basement during air raids and form genial common cause. Nobody talks to you anymore and you're unbearably lonely; you miss the sirens.
Or what is it like, specifically, if the man you've been meeting for dinner so often the concierge assumes you're his wife gets called up? He says he'll make sure you hear if anything happens to him, which is clearly ludicrous. You haven't received a letter in a while. Should you call his wife?
I honestly don't have much to say about these because they're just uniformly so good. Just read them, you'll be glad you did. 5/5, absolute winner.
Thanks to the good people at the Witchita Public Library for interlibrary loaning me this book!
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