I think I might like this book

Last night I started to read Alex Jones's Helen Garner and the Meaning of Everything . It's about a retired academic of literary studies pondering life while reading the books of Helen Garner.

This is an odd choice, firstly, because the only book of Garner's I've ever read was Monkey Grip a really long time ago. I was 18 and, of course, I knew everything about life and love and most of the time I was reading the book I wished I could just SHAKE the central charater for being so utterly HOPELESS about men. And, secondly, I spent yesterday whimpering in bed with the sort of cold where you need to sleep for 18 hours and can barely remember your own name much less follow complex things like the news or books about other books you haven't read.

And this is a complex book. I mean it has appendices! And endnotes! Endnotes in a novel! Moreover, endnotes well worth reading because they're not just references but comments!

So I am a bit surprised to find how much I'm enjoying it.

Well, so far, of course.

On the bus this morning I giggled out loud and disturbed my neighbour mid-application of lipliner when I found this on page 35 where the protagonist (the Dreamer) is advising Poppy, a high school student with a much older friend who may or may not be a boyfriend, about studying:

At last we came to English. Polly's class were reading a number of novels. Rita had bought copies of them, and Poppy produced them now - a low, uneven stack of mulitcoloured covers reflected in the glass of the coffee table. Uppermost in the pile was The Great Fire.* I put my finger on it.
'I'd start with this one,' I said, 'it should appeal to you. It's like Lolita retold as a Mills and Boon.

Now I LOVED Shirley' Hazzard's The Great Fire . I bought copies for at least two other people as gifts. But, it has to be admitted, it is about a love affair between a very young teenaged girl and a much older man and even worse, the ending was really really really contrived in a chocolate-boxy way and not really entirely credible. So, you know, I felt a bit bad about laughing because I was emotionally involved so I thought maybe this Alex Jones isn't such a nice man after all.

But THEN, I realised there's an endnote!

I flipped over to it.

It says:

Perhaps the Dreamer's unduly harsh judgement is coloured by his circumstances at this point.

So funny and not that mean after all! Hooray!!