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On the Vancouver-Montreal flight today, I reread Amanda Cross's mystery novel In the Last Analysis.
On the second page, I was thinking "the past is a foreign country": the shift I noted there was the class and economic geography of Manhattan, as Kate Fansler is thinking about why psychiatrists all had their offices on or just off Fifth Avenue, or in rare cases on Central Park West, and her friends thinking she was odd and making some kind of weird point by living way over on the West Side, with a view of the Hudson River, rather than in the fancier bits of the East Side. There are a lot of other "past is a foreign country" moments in there, from the early-Sixties discussions of psychoanalysis and Freud, to "please deposit ten cents for another five minutes" on a phone call, or the idea that almost nobody would understand her friendship with a man who had once been her lover, to Kate thinking about newspaper and magazine articles bemoaning that young people all seemed to want security rather than adventure. "The Sixties" didn't start in 1960, after all.
That said, the book holds up pretty well, despite some annoying bits of class bias I don't remember noticing before. If someone thinks that very few people will understand how they're living, maybe they're right; if they think that the police specifically won't understand because they're lower-middle-class, that tells me that person doesn't understand the police as people who have lives outside their work either—you don't have to be upper-class or of the intelligentsia to have a non-standard personal life, or know people who do. One sense in which the book holds up is that I neither remembered nor figured out most of the key plot points; I don't reread mysteries too frequently, because knowing the answers before I start takes some of the fun out of it for me.
[regular service may be resumed next Wednesday]
On the second page, I was thinking "the past is a foreign country": the shift I noted there was the class and economic geography of Manhattan, as Kate Fansler is thinking about why psychiatrists all had their offices on or just off Fifth Avenue, or in rare cases on Central Park West, and her friends thinking she was odd and making some kind of weird point by living way over on the West Side, with a view of the Hudson River, rather than in the fancier bits of the East Side. There are a lot of other "past is a foreign country" moments in there, from the early-Sixties discussions of psychoanalysis and Freud, to "please deposit ten cents for another five minutes" on a phone call, or the idea that almost nobody would understand her friendship with a man who had once been her lover, to Kate thinking about newspaper and magazine articles bemoaning that young people all seemed to want security rather than adventure. "The Sixties" didn't start in 1960, after all.
That said, the book holds up pretty well, despite some annoying bits of class bias I don't remember noticing before. If someone thinks that very few people will understand how they're living, maybe they're right; if they think that the police specifically won't understand because they're lower-middle-class, that tells me that person doesn't understand the police as people who have lives outside their work either—you don't have to be upper-class or of the intelligentsia to have a non-standard personal life, or know people who do. One sense in which the book holds up is that I neither remembered nor figured out most of the key plot points; I don't reread mysteries too frequently, because knowing the answers before I start takes some of the fun out of it for me.
[regular service may be resumed next Wednesday]
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"the past is a foreign country"
I also find that there's a clear discontinuity between times I actually experienced and those I've only read about. (There's an obvious parallel here with places I've actually visited and those I've just read about.) The former I can genuinely miss; the latter I can only imagine.
I guess it's all part of getting older.
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Specific issues - the farm people in The James Joyce Murders and The Trouble with Winifred are also depicted as "people who can't possibly understand what's important to us because their lives are so foreign to ours", the Oxford academics and their wives (Oxford academics, apparently, are all male, something which would, I suspect, come as news to the SCR of Shrewsbury College) in The Problem of Max have never heard of feminism and the wives are "well-trained geishas" and so on.
And yes; massive classism. A sympathetic character in The Problem of Max when the issue of a professional soccer game comes up says,"I have no interest in witnessesing the cavortings of the lower classes" and no-one - including Kate - even blinks.
There's even a point where Kate claims that the cops would be minded to arrest her because her alibi was attending an Arlo Guthrie concert at Madison Square Gardens; she really does come over as someone who's inherently very conservative, with "all you kids get off my lawn" attitudes of intolerence that implies, but in love with an image of herself as the one true lefty in any given society in which she finds herself.