I read George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) back in college London semester, and I hated it. It is a largely autobiographical novel that reads like a memoir. I was deeply irritated by the protagonist's slumming, by his presumption of equality with and understanding of people who truly had nothing, and by his blithe, unthinking anti-Semitism and sexism. Those things still deeply irritate me; however, on this rereading I also found myself enjoying many aspects of the book. The book consists of two parts describing our hero's experiences going broke and working restaurant jobs in Paris, and staying broke and becoming a tramp in London. I like a book about real things--jobs and meals and lodgings and survival strategies--and not just the characters' feelings about...whatever. Orwell's prose style is crisp and funny. But more to the point, knowing in advance what I would dislike about the book gave me time to concentrate on what I did like, such as his indictment of charitable organizations that fail to show compassion and that humiliate the recipients of their charity, and his championing of the people he meets as individuals, not in that false chummy "we're all human beings regardless of how much money we have" way, but acknowledging that people express individuality in how they respond to poverty and danger as well. And I was glad Orwell wrote the book at all, because books like this need to be written and read.

Ironweed, a novel by William J. Kennedy (1984, winner of the Pulitzer Prize), is about Francis Phelan, an ex-ball player who's accidentally killed a scab, accidentally dropped and killed his own baby, and been on the lam ever since, feeling guilty and tramping. The novel takes place over the course of a couple days in 1938 when Francis returns to Albany and meets up with his friend Helen, another tramp. I thought I would enjoy it, but didn't, and am having a difficult time figuring out why, exactly, especially given what I just said about books "like this" needing to be written and read. I think perhaps that it is because regardless of my interest in what the characters do (like dropping babies and staying at the Salvation Army shelter and being attacked by the American Legion), I have little patience for any book about anybody that goes on and on in flowery language about the quality of the characters' souls. There's a whole lot of transcendence going on here, and I've got no use for transcendence. Hm.

Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris (A.J. Liebling, 1986) is a collection of essays, mostly published by The New Yorker in the '50s and '60s, reminiscing about Liebling's first year in Paris in the '20s, mostly what he ate when he ran out of his allowance. It is an okay book. But it failed to grab my attention for the same reasons as Calvin Trillin's The Tummy Trilogy (reviewed 8/2/05): every day I become a little less interested in dining at restaurants, and a lot less interested in hearing or reading about it. When I read food writers nowadays, I want them to know how to cook.

I'll finish up this set of reviews with Jean Rhys's After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1930), which I also hated during London semester. Now, I know that I hated it because it's very difficult for an ambitious 20-year-old to sympathize with a novel about a pretty woman who's fading faster than she can find another man to make her his mistress. Now that I'm 31 and like to think I've matured sufficiently as a reader to get past the need to sympathize with characters in order to appreciate them, I found this book dazzling and chilling and impossible to put down. The novel takes place over a couple days, as Julia Martin is abandoned by one lover in Paris and travels to London to try to pick up another. Julia asks why someone who wants more out of life than to work for too little money, live in a drab depressing town, and never have love, art, conversation, travel, or any of the beautiful things that many of us take for granted when we get jobs and "independence," should have to go without those things simply because she is born without them, marries and is widowed without attaining them, and cannot work to earn them. Rhys perfectly described the desperation of a person who sees that the only asset that can bring her happiness--her beauty--is being marred with every frown and every missed meal as she runs out of money. Yikes!