Friday, 22 January 2021 10:07 pm
Book Review: The Grammarians: A Novel
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deckardcanineThe back cover of this 2019 publication declares that author Cathleen Schine is "often praised alongside Nora Ephron and Nancy Mitford, not to mention Jane Austen." Of those four names, I knew only half, so maybe it was time to get acquainted with another. Anyway, it wasn't hard to guess why my family picked this out for me; one of the main characters even shares my occupation for a while.
The story follows several decades, starting around the late '50s, in the lives of New York City Jewish identical twins Laurel and Daphne Wolfe, whose very names are a hint that appreciation of language runs in the family, tho they manifest it most of all. Early on, they're as close as can be, always happy to wear the same clothes and partake in the same activities. They exhibit differences in personality (e.g., Laurel usually does things first), but that doesn't take a toll on their friendship -- until adulthood, when the differences pile up to the point of hostility. One of the biggest forces to come between them amounts to Laurel's descriptivism versus Daphne's prescriptivism. Guess which one's the teacher, poet, and book reviewer and which one's the copy editor and columnist.
I'd say it's as interesting psychosocially as it is verbally. There seems to be an inverse relationship between how well the twins get along with each other and how well they get along with everyone else, as if they were united primarily by the world as a common enemy. In childhood, their own parents fearfully don't know what to make of them, and their uncle is downright cold toward them. Perhaps the first sign that they're going to go separate ways comes when they start looking for romance. They are also more unified when both are struggling to make ends meet than when both have found major career success.
While you may get a sense of progression toward the absurd, I find the story mostly credible. Oddly enough, the moment I deem hardest to believe comes in the first post-prologue chapter, when the twins can say the equivalent of "insufferable pedant" in their private language before they've graduated to drinking from cups. No wonder they both become famous in the realm of linguists.
For the most part, I relate better to Laurel, even if her job is further from mine and she's more of a leader than I am. In several conflicts, I'm inclined to take her side. That said, Daphne's just as likely to have a point. For example, Laurel has the right to undergo cosmetic surgery, but it's understandable that Daphne would take that as a personal insult. I like such hard-to-resolve issues in fiction, if only because they reflect an under-acknowledged aspect of reality. Later in the book, I see a toss-up between the two women as Laurel grows uncomfortably serious and both are too caustic, at least regarding each other.
Any book that's largely about words themselves really has to be well written. Schine doesn't fall short of that standard, in slightly salty dialogue or sage narration. I had to put down the book several times to look up things (not just vocabulary terms), which enriched the experience to my mind. It does play a bit fast and loose with tenses -- the last two chapters even lean heavily on the future tense -- but somehow it didn't jar me. Maybe I was too immersed by then. If anything bothered me, it was the occasional big leap in focus, especially across time, between paragraphs that lacked an extra line break in between.
Of course, it's not too surprising if the organization is a little offbeat in such a chaotic tale. It's worth noting that each chapter begins not with a number or title but with an entry from Samuel Johnson's antiquated dictionary. Once I realized that the entry in question was relevant to what happens during the chapter, I would often flip back to check it. Two-page chapters notwithstanding.
Will I read more of Schine? Hard to say. She's written only 11 books in the course of 36 years, none with an individual Wikipedia page. Two have been adapted to film, but they bombed as such. The descriptions I see don't suggest much variety; I think Schine's a bit overly prone to inspiration from her own life. But that didn't stop me from watching lots of Woody Allen movies, so maybe I'll take a chance on one of her higher-rated titles.
In the past, I've made a point to follow a woman's book with a man's so I don't run out of women's books too quickly, but more than half the current promising candidates on my shelf are by women. I am now reading Diane Duane's So You Want to Be a Wizard.
The story follows several decades, starting around the late '50s, in the lives of New York City Jewish identical twins Laurel and Daphne Wolfe, whose very names are a hint that appreciation of language runs in the family, tho they manifest it most of all. Early on, they're as close as can be, always happy to wear the same clothes and partake in the same activities. They exhibit differences in personality (e.g., Laurel usually does things first), but that doesn't take a toll on their friendship -- until adulthood, when the differences pile up to the point of hostility. One of the biggest forces to come between them amounts to Laurel's descriptivism versus Daphne's prescriptivism. Guess which one's the teacher, poet, and book reviewer and which one's the copy editor and columnist.
I'd say it's as interesting psychosocially as it is verbally. There seems to be an inverse relationship between how well the twins get along with each other and how well they get along with everyone else, as if they were united primarily by the world as a common enemy. In childhood, their own parents fearfully don't know what to make of them, and their uncle is downright cold toward them. Perhaps the first sign that they're going to go separate ways comes when they start looking for romance. They are also more unified when both are struggling to make ends meet than when both have found major career success.
While you may get a sense of progression toward the absurd, I find the story mostly credible. Oddly enough, the moment I deem hardest to believe comes in the first post-prologue chapter, when the twins can say the equivalent of "insufferable pedant" in their private language before they've graduated to drinking from cups. No wonder they both become famous in the realm of linguists.
For the most part, I relate better to Laurel, even if her job is further from mine and she's more of a leader than I am. In several conflicts, I'm inclined to take her side. That said, Daphne's just as likely to have a point. For example, Laurel has the right to undergo cosmetic surgery, but it's understandable that Daphne would take that as a personal insult. I like such hard-to-resolve issues in fiction, if only because they reflect an under-acknowledged aspect of reality. Later in the book, I see a toss-up between the two women as Laurel grows uncomfortably serious and both are too caustic, at least regarding each other.
Any book that's largely about words themselves really has to be well written. Schine doesn't fall short of that standard, in slightly salty dialogue or sage narration. I had to put down the book several times to look up things (not just vocabulary terms), which enriched the experience to my mind. It does play a bit fast and loose with tenses -- the last two chapters even lean heavily on the future tense -- but somehow it didn't jar me. Maybe I was too immersed by then. If anything bothered me, it was the occasional big leap in focus, especially across time, between paragraphs that lacked an extra line break in between.
Of course, it's not too surprising if the organization is a little offbeat in such a chaotic tale. It's worth noting that each chapter begins not with a number or title but with an entry from Samuel Johnson's antiquated dictionary. Once I realized that the entry in question was relevant to what happens during the chapter, I would often flip back to check it. Two-page chapters notwithstanding.
Will I read more of Schine? Hard to say. She's written only 11 books in the course of 36 years, none with an individual Wikipedia page. Two have been adapted to film, but they bombed as such. The descriptions I see don't suggest much variety; I think Schine's a bit overly prone to inspiration from her own life. But that didn't stop me from watching lots of Woody Allen movies, so maybe I'll take a chance on one of her higher-rated titles.
In the past, I've made a point to follow a woman's book with a man's so I don't run out of women's books too quickly, but more than half the current promising candidates on my shelf are by women. I am now reading Diane Duane's So You Want to Be a Wizard.