Upstate by James Wood is about a man and his grown up daughters and how they react to life differently.

Do you ever start a book, notice something peculiar, and then can’t see anything but the repeated peculiartity? Such was the case with Upstate by James Wood (I’ll get to the peculiarity).

Alan Querry is a successful property developer from the north of England. He has two daughters: Vanessa, a philosopher who lives and teaches in upstate New York, and Helen, a record company executive based in London. The women are very different, “…Helen did things while Vanessa thought things”, but neither had ever quite recovered from their parents’ bitter divorce; the early death of their mother; and their disapproval of Candace, Alan’s second wife.

Alan’s worry about the future of his business is interrupted by Josh, Vanessa’s partner, who summons Alan and Helen to America to deal with Vanessa’s latest bout of depression. Over the course of six wintery days in upstate New York, the Querry family ponders the meaning of happiness and why some people find living so much harder than others.

He had known unhappiness, and some of it had been quite severe; but he didn’t think he’d ever really known despair. Despair was of the spirit, it was terminal.

It’s an inward looking novel and we spend much time in the minds of Alan, Vanessa and Helen. Unfortunately, they make little progress on the ‘big questions’ and pages of thoughtful reflection become rather pained and self-indulgent.

The navel-gazing is not the peculiarity. Instead, it’s Alan’s constant internal commentary on the appearance of his daughters. Here’s a sample –

He watched his two highly intelligent, grown-up daughters… Helen apparently more confident, acute, with her slightly sharp teeth, elegantly handsome, but also being disagreeable somehow, as if she were necessary medicine that Vanessa just had to take; Vanessa quieter, softer, with her long dark hair and slightly squinting eyes, but exact, precise in her every word and thought, and so, to him at least, quite as formidable as her more obviously intimidating sister.

Van looked radiant tonight, in a grey skirt and a sea-blue Indian top, inlaid with sequinny whatsits, and wearing a mother-of-pearl hairband (he had never before seen her wear a hairband). And her lovely eyes…

And as a father, he was put in the painful position of having to judge, from Josh’s possibly aroused perspective, the relative sexiness of his daughters: yes, from that point of view, Helen was the clear winner. She had a body and she knew what to do with it.

I did a straw-poll with friends and family, asking if they assessed the appearance of family members every time they saw them. No one did. At all. Why did it bother me? It seemed a little creepy. It didn’t seem authentic. I also wondered what narrative purpose it served (none, as far as I could tell).

The author, James Wood, is a highly regarded literary critic. Props to James for putting his own work out there for scrutiny. I enjoyed some of the sarcastic humour –

…he had to admit that America had never quite existed for him. He’d read somewhere that Americans used, per capita, three times as many sheets of toilet paper a day as the global average, which told him what he needed to know. It was an enormous, religious, largely reactionary place, with no real tradition of socialism, where the car parks were larger than many European villages.

But after a while, the slightly pompous and superior Alan started to grate, and I wondered, how much of Alan was James? All that ‘middle-aged white man writing about a middle-aged white man’ is bound to be tedious – nothing new to see here, folks!

2/5 Okay (just).

I received my copy of Upstate from the publisher, Random House UK, via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to the publisher and Net Galley for the opportunity to read 'Upstate'. I enjoyed reading this book and having lived slightly upstate in New York, loved the description of the journey along the Hudson and the coldness of Winter. The author's use of language is effective but I found the characters of the two daughters hard to really get to know and although the author tried to explain why they were like they were, I wasn't convinced. The character of Alan, was more effective and I could imagine him trying to do the right thing for both girls. I didn't; expect the book to end quite so quickly and felt there were too many unresolved aspects. What happened next???

A very thought provoking story of family dynamics. Made me think of how family's interact with each other in order to keep the peace when gathered together..

Alan Querry is in his mid to late sixties and lives in Northumbria, in the north of England. His roots are working class folk made good. He has two grown up daughters and a once strong business that is going through troubling times. One of his daughters, Vanessa (Van), the more fragile one, lives in America where she lectures in philosophy at a relatively obscure college in upstate New York. Alan has been contacted by Van’s boyfriend, Josh, who is worried about her current depressed state. A journey to America beckons for Alan, where he will meet up with his other daughter – the robust and confident Helen – in NYC, before they both travel upstate to stay with Van for a few days.

As Alan sets out in his journey some background detail starts to get filled in: his wife (the mother of the two girls) left him some time back but then subsequently fell ill and died; he is a reasonably successful property developer but a recent big deal seems to have gone bad and the company cash-flow is now under severe strain. He now has a new woman in his life, but thoughts of his deceased wife seem to be never far from his thoughts, or those of his daughters. As for the business, he just seems to be glad to escape the stress and strain of it all for a while.

I’ve read a couple of review from respected sources and both reviewers seemed to hate this book. That said, one of the reviewers did seem to have a personal or professional bone to pick (the author here being a fellow literary critic). However, I don't understand the criticism of this novel at all – I loved it! Maybe it was because although Alan is some years older than me, he’s close enough in age for me to have some sympathy with the key concerns that seem to occupy his mind, these being the health and wellbeing of his children and his own ongoing financial security (not to mention his ability to leave something worthwhile to his daughters).

In some ways little of any consequence happens but that would be to significantly underplay the interest here. As Alan becomes ever more concerned about Van’s down state I found myself routing for them both, hoping that answers could be found and a way forward identified. But the issues are complex – as they always are when it comes to mental health. And please don't think it’s all doom and gloom, it’s really not that. It's a well crafted, beautifully written and thought provoking story that I found totally engrossing. I was really sad when it came to an end, but only because I'd so enjoyed my time with Alan and his girls.

This is the intimate portrait of family relationships and how they cope as a whole and individually with the vicissitudes of life. Beautifully written it invites much reflection on the bigger questions in life. How to do we cope with loss? Why are some of us more sensitive, more fragile than others despite being brought up in the same family? How do you develop resilience in your children?

The family we meet is Alan, the father of two grown up girls who have moved to America from England where Vanessa, the eldest, is a Philosophy Professor and currently involved with a much younger man, Josh, and Helen who lives in New York as a record executive for Sony. Alan's wife has died many years before in less than ideal circumstances and he is now with Candace. Thus the girls as teenagers had to deal with the death of their mother.

Alan and Helen are summoned by Josh after Vanessa has fallen down some stairs. Seemingly a minor event, both Alan and Helen are well acquainted with Vanessa's fragility and wonder whether Vanessa has had an accident in falling down the stairs or whether it had more purposeful intent.

Vanessa lives in Saratoga Springs so Helen meets Alan in New York and they travel together to see Helen. Helen and Alan are used to dealing with the problematic Vanessa and I'm sure most readers will recognise the situation of the 'problem' child/sibling dynamics that exist in such families.

I really enjoyed this portrait of an ordinary, middle class family and their relationships and interactions with each other that are exquisitely observed.

This is a really enjoyable book, which seemed to end a little abruptly. I want to know what happened next to all the characters, particularly Helen, as there seemed to be so much left to find out. There was a good discussion on what it means to be happy, and a general conclusion that spending too much time thinking about it is bad for you.
James Wood writes with affection about the blue-collar areas of upstate New York and Newcastle, and how they deal with their once great status.
Alan, the father, clearly loves his daughters, even though he doesn't always know how to help them. Having been given a new lease of life by his new partner Candace, he is able to put aside the business that has been his life to support Helen and Vanessa.

A tale of paternal love - even when your children are grown up, you are still a parent and would cross continents for them.

Alan has two daughters; Helen is a confident Sony executive who takes life head on, and Vanessa, a philosophy lecturer who questions life's purpose. Vanessa's boyfriend writes to Helen suggesting that Vanessa would appreciate a visit from her family as she has been struggling recently. Helen and Alan go to America, as they go they remember previous episodes when they have had to rush to Vanessa's side.

The book is beautifully written. Alan parental guilt stems from his divorce, the death of the children's mother, his new partner, his failed business - however I felt great sympathy for him as he was there for his children, even now when his business is collapsing.

Helen is so focused on herself that she has limited sympathy for her sister, but perhaps that is her coping mechanism, when she has seen her sister fall apart so many times.

And Vanessa, as a philosophy lecturer, she is doomed to question and examine relationships and life which rarely results in happy conclusions. Would she be 'happier' if she didn't think so hard?

A book that made me appreciate my life and relationships, as this tale acknowledges the thoughts, anguish and love that go into being a family.

Touching and tender at times though this novel may be, it’s nevertheless a surprisingly clunky and prosaic piece of work by the renowned critic. Observations on the US by a Brit? Yes, okay, but hardly ground breaking - the devotion to the flag, the blue of a winter sky. It’s a short work too, with scarcely enough meat on its bones to justify full book length. I had expected more.

This is a very well written introspective novel about a father's love for his daughters and his reminiscence about his life and his choices.

Despite excellent writing, I found the novel quite dull because it seemed like a rehash of many novels I've read before: straight middle-aged white man thinks a lot about his life and decisions while doing very little in the actual story. Some people may love this type of novel, but for me it feels a little self-indulgent and samey.

I came to this book purely due to its author - James Wood, currently both an academic and the literary critic of the New Yorker, a magazine I first picked up due to my monthly trips to the City but have carried on reading due to its in depth essays, not least its sometimes brilliant coverage of books. James Wood was raised in Durham, made his critical breakthrough as a reviewer for the Guardian, and now lives in America with his wife, the novelist Claire Messud. This is his second novel, after the heavily autobiographical (and poorly critically received) The Book Against God of which Wood himself has confessed I didn’t feel I got the hang of it ……..That’s what first novels are for—not getting the hang of it.

In the same interview (in 2012) Wood had written 35 pages of the book that became this novel, and his interviewer described it as “about an English businessman in his 60s who has two daughters, one of whom lives in Britain and works in music industry. The other teaches in the U.S. at a small college, but suffers from depression and tries to commit suicide. This spurs the dad to visit his daughter, though he hasn’t been to the States for some time. “

This serves as a perfect summary of the set up of the novel – written in the third person largely from the point of view of the father:
“I am Alan, son of George (deceased) and Jenny Querry (still alive), former husband of Cathy Pearsall (divorced and deceased), partner of Candace Lee, father of Vanessa and Helen.“

Although occasionally from Vanessa (a philosophy lecturer at a college) and Helen (a leading lights at Sony)’s viewpoint.

The book is set during a few days while Helen and Alan visit Vanessa, who lives in Upstate New York, but whose mental health has recently suffered a decided down-state. Helen is the mother of two twins, but the more thoughtful, less confident Vanessa has started her first really serious relationship with Josh, a younger man and writer for Wired and other tech magazines. Helen and Alan’s visit was effectively requested by Josh who contacted them to say that a recent broken arm Vanessa suffered seems to have been a results of a deliberate fall; cogniscent of her history of depression (some of it bought on by Cathy and Alan’s divorce) and impulsive acts Alan and Helen respond. While this is going on, the 60+ Alan is confronted by a crisis in his building business and Helen is on the verge of setting up her own streaming business.

Wood, an opinionated critic, in a review of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth coined the term “hysterical realism, a strong contrast between elaborately absurd prose, plotting, or characterization, on the one hand, and careful, detailed investigations of real, specific social phenomena on the other”. This novel not surprisingly is very different – concentrating on very limited plotting, careful written but far from overblown prose and a focus on what the intimate cast of characters feel and experience. The nature of the observations becomes critical in this type of novel and I struggled heavily early on with what seemed disappointingly clichéd examples:
“Candace’s mother had been so relentlessly ambitious, so determined to get out of her impoverished provincial Chinese village, that her school friends mocked her as ‘the toad who dreams of eating swan meat’.”

“Da had instructed him in that particular hardship; it was the way a lad kept himself ‘hard’. (Though Dad’s baths were also cold.) In the north of England, ‘hardness’ mattered more than cleverness or beauty or gentleness.”

“Britain, where the pavements were sopped with cold rainwater and everyone seemed to have attended queuing school, to learn how to do it with the requisite degree of resigned submission. “

However over time the novel grew on me.

One key area, and one fascinating for me as the father of three young girls, is Alan’s paternalistic reflections on his daughters, their very different characters and how they evolved over time:
“In happier times, Alan and Cathy had loved to observe the differences between their daughters. How often, in the evening, when other conversation faltered, the two parents talked about ‘the girls’, with the kind of fanatical wonderment –monotonous but somehow never boring! –that revolutionaries must lavish on their plans for the future ....... For a while, these differences seemed provisional, part of the scramble of growing up; everything was potential. But eventually, so Alan discovered ...... and, as if suddenly, while you were not properly attending to the matter (or so it seemed to him now), while you were too busy with your own foolish crises, your daughter became an adult, and those qualities that had seemed malleable were now hardened and fixed. “

The other key idea in the book is the balance between happiness and despair – and the key dynamic in the book and one with which it ends is the generally optimistic Alan trying to persuade the depression-prone Vanessa for whom happiness is a “puzzle” she struggles to solve, that life is worth living regardless of circumstance.
“‘But happiness,’ Josh said [to Alan], ‘doesn’t come easily to Vanessa. For some people, maybe for someone like me, happiness is like all the other things you take for granted –inner-ear balance, say, or the regular thump of my heart, or my ability to sleep at night. Not for Vanessa. It’s like she doesn’t have that inner-ear balance. You and I walk down the street and don’t fall down; for her, falling down is kind of like the default position. Not falling down is an achievement for her, something she has to work at.”

“[Vanessa thought} despair was never banished; the memory, and therefore the prospect of it, always lurked. She was often put in mind of a childhood holiday she had taken in Cornwall, and of her strange, uncanny sense that the blue thrill of the sea was always nearby. ....... Magical and a bit terrifying, was how she remembered it ....... For despair was like a sea. It threshed restlessly, just out of sight, always there: the deep enemy of human flourishing, inching away at its borders.”

“[Vanessa said] Dad, you said when we walked along the road, you said you weren’t “naturally buoyant”. Those were your words? But I don’t think that’s true. You were humouring me. I think for you it is natural. It’s innate. Is happiness just a trick of birth, a completely accidental blessing, like having perfect pitch? Josh has it: healthy, instinctive optimism. Helen has it, mostly. I don’t have it. “

As I read through the book, many other passages struck me to highlight, for example – this comment which could only have been improved by reference to the ill-judged recent decision to open the Booker to US books:

“It sometimes seemed as if in the last thirty years of his life, the little island nation that he grew up in, which for centuries had generated its own history and literature and record of prodigious scientific and industrial innovation, not to mention a fairly eventful politics, had meekly let the Americans come and restock the shelves with their own merchandise. “

On family resemblances
“Helen was leaning forward ...... Cathy used to lean forward like this. Sometimes the similarities were like a shocking plagiarism, an outrageous laziness on the part of the family genes.”

On religion, which although far less prominent than his first novel, still features at a critical juncture in this novel:
“And as for the question of God –well, he had a notion that ‘the question of God’ might all have been more or less sorted out in his lifetime, like Cyprus or polio. Vaguely, with lazy irritation, he imagined some final event of revelation, a kind of theological press conference. He didn’t know whether the final revelation would be that God existed or didn’t; what seemed strange, as he put his tired head down on the hotel pillow, was that it hadn’t yet been decided, two thousand years after Christ’s death. “

And then on the American East Coast winter (which almost needs to be added to the character list)
“It was coming down fast, in the passive-aggressive way of snow, stealthy but relentless, insisting on its own white agenda, the soft monotony cancelling all time, all resistance, all activity. “

The book is far from perfect – as well as the early clichés, there are lengthy chapters written form each of Helen and Vanessa’s viewpoints and examining their worlds – pop/rock music and philosophy respectively – which I found tedious. Josh is partly characterised by his “wacky” t-shirt slogans – which reminded me of the character of Ruby Redfort in Lauren Child’s excellent (but still children’s literature) series about the schoolgirl agent.

But overall a worthwhile read.

My thanks to Jonathan Cape for an ARC via Net Galley.

This is my favourite type of novel and the opportunity to read it came along with perfect timing, right after the holiday break. I welcomed its author’s calm tone, insight and perception, along with a striking landscape of snowbound New York State.

I found this intellectually stimulating in an accessible way. At the heart of it is the question of happiness and how some people find it a more natural state than others. Themes dealt with through individual contemplation and family dialogue that particularly engaged me are the future of the record business, urban landscapes, comparison between British and American ways of thinking.

Classy writing - a couple of examples that particularly struck me:

‘The abolition of privacy combined with the intensification of privacy - everyone coddling his little relationship with his little device.’

‘For despair was like a sea. It threshed relentlessly, just out of sight, always there: the deep enemy of human flourishing, inching away at its borders.’

On the downside, the characters fell a little flat for me. I loved what they had to say and what they thought, and I enjoyed their interaction, but I somehow didn’t come to love them. I couldn’t believe Candace really existed, though I suppose the idea of her brought Alan back from the brink of being thought a lonely man just past his prime. The character that seemed most real for me was Josh, by far the youngest but as aware of himself as any of them.

A finely paced, thoughtful novel that I’d recommend highly.

With thanks to Penguin Random House, Jonathan Cape via NetGalley for the opportunity to read this.

UPSTATE

It is a mysteriously long time since James Wood's first novel (The Book Against God) which I greatly enjoyed, but I found this worth the wait.
The title, referring to Upstate New York, where the novel is set, can also be seen as wordplay on being in an ‘up' state – or positive mood, which is the main theme of the novel : how to be happy - and whether it comes more naturally to some people than others. ‘Thinking about life and living life. What is the difference? Is there a difference?’ asks one of the characters.
The author illustrates this topic with a contemplative portrayal of the uneasy relationship between a father and his two very different daughters. Difficulties in communication are explored, not only those between generations but also between British and American world views, with philosophical musing on consumerism, capitalism and globalisation threaded in seamlessly to conversations
Although there is little in the way of plot, Wood is skilful at revealing character through dialogue and is also adept at evoking a sense of place and atmosphere. I love this inspired description of snowfall:
‘It was coming down fast, in the passive aggressive way of snow, stealthy but relentless, insisting on its own white agenda’
... exquisite!