I’ll go ahead and apologize to those of you who are super organized and hoping I’ll have some sort of rhyme or reason to the order in which I’m reading these books. Today I went to Half Price Books hoping to have great luck and be able to chose from a multitude of the books on the list. Unfortunately, I was only able to find a few so I had to chose from those. Maybe sometime in the future I’ll be able to be more decisive about which ones I read next. I’m hopeful anyways!
I started off with A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh, who as far as I can tell, wrote a number of books satirizing the London gentry. I have at least one other book by this author on the list, Brideshead Revisited. A Handful of Dust is the story of the breakdown of a marriage, and the way it is handled in wealthy circles. The main characters of the novel are Tony and Brenda Last, and their son Johnny. They live in a huge old Gothic manor, called Hetton, which Tony loves and grew up in. Tony and Brenda would be wealthy, but Hetton takes around 3/4 of their income just to maintain it. Tony and Brenda often have weekend guests up to the manor just to show the house and entertain, and on one such weekend they meet a man named Mr. Beaver. He’s 25 years-old and what i would classify as a professional moocher, as well as trying to be an escort to married women. He goes to parties and gets himself invited to people’s houses. Brenda meets and is a little intrigued by Mr. Beaver. I get the feeling she is bored and a little unsatisfied with life at Hetton. One thing leads to another and she starts seeing him in London, eventually renting a flat and telling Tony she is there taking economics classes. Throughout it all Tony is trusting and understanding, just wanting what will make her happy. Now you all know what happens next. Johnny, their young son, dies in a hunting accident; which prompts Brenda to decide to leave Tony and officially live with Mr. Beaver. She seems relatively unmoved by her sons death, thinking at first it was John Beaver (Mr. Beaver) who had died, she actually said “Thank God” when she realized it was her son. Messed up right? She asks for a divorce and Tony goes out of his way to oblige for her until he realizes she will be asking for 3/4 of everything he makes, which would cause him to have to sell Hetton. He refuses to divorce her and goes away on a safari. The book ends with his family thinking he’s dead, when in fact he’s trapped with a deranged native who makes him read to him day in and out, and his wife Brenda remarried right away. The only semi-consolation is that the family members who he left his wealth and Hetton to, care about restoring Hetton to its former glory, which is what Tony had always been trying to do.
In a word, depressing. I don’t like books that leave everything unsettled and open. I’m guessing that I’ll have to get used to that, as that seems to be pretty common with critically acclaimed novels. They aren’t all sad are they?
