This book didn’t seem to fit in any of those categories but the nanny theme caught my attention. I read Anne Bronte’s Agnes Grey last year and also on the same theme but not quite the same level or time frame, You’ll Never Nanny in This Town Again. I haven’t read The Nanny Diaries yet but it’s on my list of books I want to read this year. So I picked up The Good Nanny.
There are a number of things not to like about this book, including mostly unlikable characters and a fairly improbable ending, but I was surprisingly pleased by it. It didn’t take long for me to notice that this really was a “book about books” or at least a book about people in the book industry – editors and authors.
I especially enjoyed the section where the main character decides to finally write the novel he’s been planning to write for years – full time. He starts off staring at a blank page, writes the title, and proceeds to fill several pages with first lines from other people’s books, including the well known, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
Then he gets out his quotation book. Here's an excerpt:
His quotation book was a black plastic binder into which he’d inserted the pages of his quotation file. He flipped to a quote from H.L. Mencken: “Writing, they all say, is the most dreadful chore ever inflicted upon human beings. It is not only exhausting mentally; it is also extremely fatiguing physically. The writer
leaves his desk, his day’s work done, with his mind empty and the muscles of his back and neck full of a crippling stiffness. He has suffered horribly that the babies may be fed and beauty may not die.”
He’d always felt Mencken meant to be funny now he wondered…He reread the famous Flaubert quote:
“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
He considered this a grand hyperbole. Maybe it wasn’t hyperbole at all…The longing among the people he knew who wanted to be writersnow seemed comical It was as if all the beef cattle out in the west had yearned for a trip to the Chicago stockyards.
I love the dry humor. You can just imagine that the author has lived this and is speaking from his own experience. I was also amused because I keep a quotation book just like this myself.
Later on in the same day, after being rejected by a literary agent the narrative goes on:
He went back downstairs and got his T.S. Eliot. Turned to
the dog-eared page and copied:
“Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure.”
Reading this made the whole book worthwhile in my book. Did you notice that it’s the same quotation from East Coker that I posted on Friday? Well I did. I love it when seemingly random things are connected in this way.
So I heartily recommend the book to any aspiring author or book-lover. Not so much for inspiration but for the humor.
By the time I finished the book I was curious about the author, Benjamin Cheever. The name, at least the Cheever part, sounded familiar, so I googled him. He is the son of the Pulitzer Prize winning author John Cheever, which is why the name sounded so familiar. Benjamin Cheever has some well-written and entertaining essays on the Web about getting published. Here are some links if you’re interested:
The Writing Life
Selling Ben Cheever
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