DreadfulPenny: Lamb in Her Bosom is like an ad for birth control AND an ad for why God hates birth control at the same time.
Diablevert: Hunh. That’s deep man.
DreadfulPenny: I actually think the best thing about the book is Cean’s internal monologues about motherhood. The one about how it feels to be pregnant, then her reluctance to have more children after the first two, and then her post-partum depression… all were surprisingly modern.
Diablevert: Which one did she have post-partum depression with? they kind of blur for me
DreadfulPenny: After number 3, I think, and then after the stillborn twins.
Diablevert: No recollection. Honestly, I’m not even sure if that one whose name starts with a W is a boy or a girl
DreadfulPenny: Wealthy Tennessee is TOTALLY a girl’s name. Duh.
Diablevert: Is it? If you say so. This book seems to be able to hold my attention like, every third paragraph or so.
DreadfulPenny: Actually, I only know that because I’m taking notes for the summary later. I’ve actually drawn a family tree that I should probably just scan, and that can serve for the plot description of the whole novel. It’s kinda like a soap opera, but everyone has bad teeth and likes to butcher hogs.
Diablevert: No. Soap operas have plot. Soap operas are nothing but plot. You are constantly wondering how events will compel a character to act in a certain way, and what affect this will have on the rest of the characters. Lamb, not so much. More like: Paragraph of theoretically plot-like occurrences, three chapters of musings on nature, motherhood, the coast, the race question, old age, etc.
DreadfulPenny: (I’ve actually never watched a soap opera, so that was a totally ignorant observation.) There is a lot of sexing and emotional sturm und drang, including that brother catfight.
Diablevert: But not really, though. Like, when you go to write this out, it’s going to sound like it has a plot. Condensed into a dozen paragraphs, maybe it does. But the reading experience is the most meandering damn thing I’ve every encountered.
DreadfulPenny: I agree… I think I said in our last chat that it’s extremely episodic, and the plot never really congeals.
Diablevert: The further I get into it, the more the fact that it has no plot is driving me nuts. Like, I actually really wanted to put the book down at like p 241, but then I was like, dammit, I have to finish this chapter. It was only ten pages, but it felt like such a drudge.
DreadfulPenny: It’s actually not bothering me so much, because I do feel like these characters’ lives are so vividly described. Again, it’s by no means the most interesting thing I ever read, but it’s not unbearable either. I feel like it’s the first Pulitzer in which poverty has been so crushingly described.
Diablevert: It’s not unbearable, and there are bits where I find it engaging, but it just fails to grip. That’s the other thing I don’t get about this book. How are we supposed to take this setting? Because it often sounds pretty fucking brutal, but it’s all described in such gauzy syrupy terms that I’m not sure how to take it.
DreadfulPenny: I actually get that part… the landscape is really the only beauty that these people have in their lives. So while they sound truly miserable, there’s still blooming trees and animals to observe and clouds and all that shit that makes you feel better to look at while your teeth fall out of your head.
Diablevert: Yeah, but there doesn’t seem to be any real shift in tone from how the natural wonders are described and how the natural/accidental/domestic horrors are described. When she goes into the “our god is a mean-ass god” stuff, there’s a tone shift. But you don’t feel a big shift in tone with some of the other stuff.
DreadfulPenny: That’s what makes me feel like this must have been either part of the author’s own experience or family stories that she’d heard a hundred thousand times.
Diablevert: I wonder about Miller, too. These stories are intimate, but at the same time remote…she doesn’t seem like she’s drawing from her own life, really. Like Tilly what’s her face, with the famous short story about the ironing.
DreadfulPenny: Tillie Olson?
Diablevert: Yeah, her.
DreadfulPenny: A few seconds of Googling has revealed that these were not the author’s own experiences, and only slightly inherited family stories, so my theory’s all blown to hell. I don’t know… I just don’t hate this book as much as you do. I mean, would I read it recreationally? No. But do I like it better than some other Pulitzers? Probably.
Diablevert: I don’t hate it, I’m just often bored by it. It’s like really traditional blues music, or something – something that is interesting, and might be enjoyable to listen to in the right mood, but if you’re not in the mood for it, it’s just a drag.
DreadfulPenny: It’s a way of life that’s interesting, that you don’t often read about. I mean, the idea that anyone would think for a second that the lives of slaves are more comfortable than their own is pretty insane, but actually makes some sense in this context. Ignorant, yes; ill-informed, yes; racist, yes, but sensical when your life is this horrid.
Diablevert: True. But the lack of structure is driving me nuts a bit. All this stuff happens, she includes all these incidents that should be heart pounding, and then they just wisp away like fog…it’s not like they have no impact on the characters, it’s just that they have no impact on the narrative, until somebody happens to recollect one, much later, during some entirely unrelated passage. Like the scene when she gets up from the birth bed and kills a goddamn mountain lion.
See? Typing that makes it sound heart-pounding. But the way it’s written, it’s like, “what’s that? a mountain lion?” And then we get one sentence of suspense, and then boom, next paragraph, it’s already dead. That didn’t bother you? I found some of that stuff jarring, actually.
DreadfulPenny: You mean “the painter”? It actually took me a minute to translate that into English.
Diablevert: Yeah.
DreadfulPenny: It didn’t bother me terribly. I mean, it probably will next time I sit down with this book, now that you mentioned it, but I don’t feel that the individual incidents particularly lack for drama. They’re just not strung together to emphasize or sustain that.
Diablevert: Maybe that’s it then. I feel adrift with no thread to pull me through. But going back to the racial aspect to this story – did you not find it a little off putting when the kids are playing “Coast” and the one kid wins by suggesting he’d bring back 100 slaves for his mother to whip? I was like, damn.
Thinking about it now, maybe that’s part of what she’s trying to show – how remote the actual fact of slavery was to these people, as remote as the life of a fine planter.
DreadfulPenny: That scene was the epitome of fucked-up.
Diablevert: But like, while a lot of the other books we’ve read were racist, this is the one where blacks are out and out discussed as the equivalent of livestock. It’s illustrative, in a way.
DreadfulPenny: But it made total sense to me, in the context of those characters.
Diablevert: But you get no feel from the author of like, how you’re supposed to take that. And normally I regard that as a good thing; it’d be hypocritical of me to take that back now….but I just don’t trust Miller. Especially after a few of the comments she puts in Cean’s mouth about the necessity of obeying her man, etc.
DreadfulPenny: This is funny, because I think I trust Miller a little more than you do, and you trusted Stribling more than I did.
Diablevert: Well, Stribling was sardonic.
