A Town Like Alice

I’d forgotten a book called A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute was my favorite book when I was a teenager until my sister remembered and gave it to me for my birthday a few weeks ago. Not two days later, Nancy suggested I try A Town Like Alice after she received my note about how much I liked North and South.

I liked the book, so much so that it made me think that in North and South and in A Town Like Alice, Nancy may have found the first books in a group of books that could include the best book I’ve ever read. Nancy found me these books after I told her what I liked in each of the books I've read that she's recommended.

So herewith, for Nancy, what I like about A Town Like Alice.

The book is about a young British woman, Jean, who is working in Malaya during World War II when she is a taken prisoner by the Japanese. The Japanese march her group of women prisoners from town to town, hundreds of miles across Malaya, promising that each town will hold a resting place that never materializes. The story begins after the war when Jean has inherited money from a relative and is living in London.

I liked the book because Jean behaves as I wish I would behave, and in doing so makes me feel inspired, not inadequate.

Jean is lucky enough to think creatively and brave enough to act on the ideas her creativity brings her. Throughout the march she eases the women’s path by wrangling illicit niceties—food, medicine—under the noses of the Japanese guards. After many women have died, she finds a resting place in a Malay village for those remaining by convincing the Japanese and the villagers to allow them to stop walking and to work in rice paddies.

Jean has the best answer I’ve heard to a question I like very much: What would you do if you were given more money than you feel you need? Jean thinks up and carries out a series of projects with her money—I love the creativity and the will here. She builds a well for the Malay village that took her in. And when she sees the women of a remote Australian outback town where she moves to marry a man she met during the way have done without ice cream parlors and dress shops, and other comforts of developed towns, she builds them those comforts.

But what I like best is that Jean is quiet about her good works in the way that only one who does not view them as deserving attention can be. She hides them, I’d say if I wanted to accuse her of design, behind her utterly run-of-the-mill presentation: She’s just a typist, someone says about her. I admire this in the same way I’m waiting to admire the first MacArthur genius grant winner who requests anonymity when they announce those prizes.

North and South

This is a letter I sent to Nancy after finishing North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell.

Dear Nancy,
My enjoyment of North and South was so much the greater because you found it for me. I didn’t expect my search for books I really enjoyed to produce one this good so early. Up until now, all of my favorite books have been books I think I could have found on my own—great famous classics. This had me worried that I was asking talented recommenders for help needlessly: To find books I really liked, I need only read from 100-best-books-ever lists. And then you recommended North and South, a book and an author I’d never heard of, which I'd guess I wouldn’t have found on my own.

I haven't wanted there to be more to read when I finished a book as much as I did for North and SouthI wanted to know what Margaret did after the book ended, after she’d decided she needed to find time for a life’s work in addition to spending time fulfilling the duties life presented her with. I wanted to know what that life’s work would be and what it would be like for her to accomplish it.

I wished she were my friend. For anyone who is that appealing when each of her thoughts and feelings are exposed by a probing author is surely a treat to visit with when she’s allowed to present only her best face, as we do to our friends in real life.

So thank you.

Nancy Pearl

I met Nancy Pearl, a librarian with her own action figure and a reputation as a genius book recommender, for tea today.

Nancy found me at the back of the line at the University of Washington book store coffee shop: “We are going to discuss books!” her face said to me. We got matching teas and sat down.

I told her I was looking for books I liked more than any other book I had read. She asked first what I liked about my current favorite book.

I like what I will call Dorothea's exceptionalism in Middlemarch I said. For Dorothea is determined to create something with her life, to build something unique for her fellow humans during her time on earth. She tries to help her husband write a book she believes vital to human civilization. She tries to build cotages for the servants who live on her uncle’s land She is less willing to be buffeted by the forces of circumstance that most of us cower before and more willing to try to do interesting things.

Oh, you might like North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, then, Nancy suggested.

I want to read about Dorothea’s life if it had gone just a little bit differently from the way Eliot had it go, I continued. Eliot had Dorothea fail at both the book and the cottages. Worse, Eliot seemed to lose interest in Dorothea’s attempts: Dorothea’s book project ends when her husband dies, and Eliot says too little about why Dorothea stopped trying for the cottages to satisfy me. I wanted hear what it would have been like for her to continue to try, and, ideally, to succeed at something that incurs high cost and and produces high reward.

”Try Gertrude Bell, Queen of the Desert, by Georgina Howell,” Nancy said. Gertrude is a woman who succeeds in doing something interesting: She creates Iraq.

Nancy was so unfazed by the specificity of my request that I felt only a hint of hesitation about making my demands for the book I wanted to read even more particular. In addition, I said, I’d really the protagonist to struggle before finding something to do that is interesting enough to hold her attention for longer than the first thrill the idea of doing it produced.

“Oh,” Nancy said, her voice suggesting she’d stopped herself from clapping her hands together with the pleasure of how well this was working out. “Gertrude Bell is perfect.”

Nancy cupped her tea and looked at me, expectant without a hint of impatience. Her air suggested she believed that I would be doing her favor if I asked her more questions about books when anyone else would believe that she was the one doing me a favor that morning. She was beginning to have me believe in her perception of what was going on, so I mentioned another reaction to another book: “I liked Madame Bovary because I am also curious, as Emma was in that book, about what is meant by words such as passion.” “If you want to see passion,” she said, “try Anna Karenina.”

Nancy wasn’t emiting any signals that suggested I should stop, so I squeezed in question after question and together we put together a reading list:

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell because I liked Dorothea in Middlemarch

Gertrude Bell, Queen of the Desert by Georgina Howell because I liked Dorothea in Middlemarch

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy because I wanted to see passion

What Happened to Anna K? by Irina Reyhn because I wanted to see passion

The World Beneath Her by Deborah Weisgal because there is a George Eliot like character in the book.