The folks who own the house we're renting in Connecticut have somewhat stodgy literary tastes—lots of coffee-table books about gardening and interiors, and plenty of history. (Recent houseguests of ours spent a half hour after dinner looking for blacks and Jews in the Social Register.) The owners' fiction choices, however, are much more mass-market, so when I came across Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love, written in 1945, I was surprised. What a frothy little treat! If I were the BBC, I'd get an adaptation rolling immediately: Mostly the story of Linda Alconleigh's love life, as told by her cousin Fanny, Pursuit is like Downtown Abbey without all the servants glumly milling about. The writing is breezy but insightful, and studded with zingy bits. Here's a wonderful example:
Alfred and I are happy, as happy as married people can be. We are in love, we are intellectually and physically suited in every possible way, we rejoice in each other's company, we have no money troubles and three delightful children. And yet, when I consider my life, day by day, hour by hour, it seems to be composed of a series of pinpricks. Nannies, cooks, and endless drudgery of housekeeping, the nerve-racking noise and boring repetitive conversation of small children (boring in the sense that it bores into one's very brain), their absolute incapacity to amuse themselves, their sudden and terrifying illnesses, Alfred's not infrequent bouts of moodiness, his invariable complaints at meals about the pudding, the way he will always use my tooth-paste and will always squeeze the tube in the middle. These are the components of marriage, the wholemeal bread of life, rough, ordinary, but sustaining; Linda had been feeding upon honeydew, and that is an incomparable diet.
Rolling the toothpaste is the secret to a happy marriage! Or maybe having 2 tubes....
Posted by: Adam | 28 August 2012 at 01:13 PM