Journal of a Lockdown, 9 May 2020
If you love books, then on at least ten occasions you have said: “I wish I had time to just lie in bed for a week, reading books.”
I love books, I have lots of books to read, and I have time.
Today I picked up Topics of Conversation by Miranda Popkey. It’s a good-looking volume that fits perfectly in your hand, same size as Weather by Jenny Offill. There’s even a blurb by Jenny Offill. The difference is that the dust jacket of Topics is smooth and slippery, while Weather’s has a pleasantly rough texture that is easier to hang on to. Which is also how I found their contents.
The jacket copy compares this debut novel to the work of Offill, Rachel Cusk, and Lydia Davis. Makes marketing sense: it piques the interest of readers like me who revere those authors, but it also puts a lot of pressure on Popkey.
As the title promises, the novel is a series of conversations between the narrator and different women—employer, friend, classmate, mother—in a span of 17 years. Like Weather or Cusk’s Outline, what plot there is is gleaned from inside the narrator’s head. In this case it’s about coming to terms with being a woman in a culture that tells women what to want. Topics is about desire, rage, power, gender, revulsion. In the course of the novel, the narrator has attractions, affairs, gets married, has a child, moves houses—it’s her life story, captured in analytical, often self-lacerating (not for nothing is Sylvia Plath mentioned right off the bat) talks.
The prose is very skillful and detached, like the play by play of a tennis tournament in the early rounds before the topseeds come in. The voice is serious verging on humorless, but that’s more about me and how I need jokes to distract myself from the terror of being alive. Popkey is going for the opposite of distraction, putting the protagonist under a microscope, then dissecting her.
Rating: I will return to this after lockdown, because right now I’m looking for escape.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
May 13th, 2020 at 08:40
Hi Jessica.
I love books and being able to put my feet up, read and escape into someone else’s world was a treat. Pre-lock down, I averaged one book a week. But when the lock down started, I couldn’t bring myself to escape as I felt like I needed to keep track of what’s happening outside. But after a month and a half and after they kept lengthening the lock down, I’ve allowed myself to escape. It also makes time go by faster as I’d run out of projects to do.
I’m half an hour outside of Toronto, Canada. Our wide open spaces allow us to easily maintain distance while going out for a walk in the neighbourhood (suburb), groceries hardly have line ups or if they do, it’s not like the 4-hour endeavour that my Marikina-based friend described. Population isn’t as dense here. So we’ve been lucky in the sense that we haven’t been hugely inconvenienced. It’s also because we didn’t lose our jobs or business.
Not writing this to make you feel bad. Just telling you how things are for my situation and ‘keep you company’. I’ve maintained a lock down journal as well though what I’ve written isn’t as good as yours. Today’s entry though are all predictions of worst case scenarios.
Anyway, you don’t need to post this on your blog entry’s comments. I just wanted to say Hi.
May 13th, 2020 at 23:15
Hello and thank you for writing from your side of the world. Compare the situation in the environs of Toronto to New York City next door: Yikes. Stay safe and sane!
May 19th, 2020 at 08:14
Actually it’s not just New York City that we’re afraid of, it’s the whole country! We don’t want the border restrictions on non-essential travel lifted at all. But because we do need food to keep coming to us via trucks, they’re saying that it’ll be the truck drivers that could create new infections here.
Stay safe and sane, too!