Agent Carter

Anyone else watching Agent Carter? I got together with a couple of friends to see the premiere yesterday, and we ate the better part of a bag of peanut butter Oreos and agreed that Peggy's hats were marvelous (I mean, her whole wardrobe was marvelous, but especially the hats) and Jarvis was terribly funny and we would like to meet his wife sometime.

( Other highlights/thoughts )

100 Books, #41: Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary

In lieu of the Wednesday reading meme (because I accomplished basically no reading this past week, except a reread of Pamela Dean's Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary), I'm going to answer lycoris's December meme question: Tell me about your favourite book that you think I might not have heard of.

I actually have a tag that is partially devoted to this question: one of the things I used the 100 books tag for is to write reviews of tragically overlooked books that no one else knows even though I love them. Past reviews in this category include The Secret Voice of Gina Zhang, Nekomah Creek, Mummy, and Becoming Rosemary.

But this time I'm going to write about Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, because I did just reread it and because I think it's an absolute tragedy that I didn't hear about it to read it earlier. I don't know that I would have loved it more - I don't think it's a book you need to read at a certain age to love - but I would have loved having it as part of the leafmold of my mind when I was a teenager.

What I love about this book - one of the things I love about this book - is that it's so wide-ranging in its interests. The main characters talk about science and religion (and how science and religion fit together, or don't), feminism, philosophy, vocations, the meaning of friendship and the permutations of friendship, and the way that families work or don't work, and books and literature. This takes up a huge amount of the book: it's all urgently important to Gentian and her friends, and therefore provides the main plot of the book.

For instance, there are couple sections where the narrative absolutely stops while Gentian reads an act of Julius Caesar with her family. I feel like this is doing some sort of thematic work, the way that the Hamlet performance does thematic work in Dean's Tam Lin, but I'm not sure what it is and it's possible that Dean was just like "I feel like talking about Shakespeare."

This is not, suffice it to say, a book with a strongly propulsive plot. In fact, calling the story meandering doesn't really do justice to the way that their conversations loop back on themselves, covering the same ground from different angles, and then shooting off in new and strange directions.

I have heard Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary criticized because Gentian and her friends seem unrealistically precocious, and there is perhaps something to this - they're not only very bright, but also extraordinarily well read and capable of having precise and philosophically sophisticated arguments - but IMO it misses the point. That's not something that would have bothered me if I had read the book as a teenager, any more than it bothered me in Tamora Pierce's First Test that fifteen-year-old Neal apparently found a bunch of ten-year-olds completely suitable companions.

The other problem with the book is that the ending doesn't really come together (I wrote about this at greater length in my original review); endings don't generally seem to be Dean's strong suit - Tam Lin's ending seemed quite abrupt to me. But the book is a dialogue as much as a novel; it's interesting because of the explorations it takes through issues, and those explorations are not discounted because none of them tie up nicely at the end.

***

Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary has also led to some musing on my part about friendship novels - that is, novels where the friendship is the force that pushes the narrative, the way a romance pushes a romance novel, rather than novels where the friendship is important but the actual plot comes from something else (like The Eagle of the Ninth, say, where Marcus and Esca's friendship is absolutely integral but the story comes from the search for the eagle).

I think it's rather hard to structure a book around a friendship, because unlike a romance,
a friendship doesn't usually have an arc: there isn't a moment of consummation. It chugs along steadily unless things go south, and even the going south is often not dramatic. Drift kills friendship as much as anything else.

Perhaps having a non-standard structure is an important part of telling friendship stories? Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Changeling, my touchstone book about friendship, also has a distinctive structure. I must think about this.