Author A.S. Byatt presents her novella-length treatment of Norse mythology in a light-touch narrative showing how it captures a young girl’s imagination in wartime England and has apparently stayed with her for the rest of her life. Byatt appends a short general treatment of her views on mythology, and a couple of illustrations for good measure. I’m no one to trust on this matter, but the main mythological plot and dramatis personae themselves seem exhaustive. It is certainly enough to turn my head, and to force me to reread certain sections to try to make sure I’d kept all the dozens of characters — be they gods, monsters, magic plants, or angry wolves — straight and accounted for.
Overall it’s a highly diverting treatment, and it benefits from the author’s scheme for presenting it as the young girl experiences it. Byatt departs from other retellings of other myths by modern authors, too: she chooses not to novelize her characters in the sense that she does not give them recognizable doubts, personalities, or psychologies. They are vain, vindictive, murderous, ambitious, or dishonest, but never self-doubting. As the author says in her afterword, “No, the wolf swallowed the king of the gods, the snake poisoned Thor, everything was burned in a red light and drowned in blackness.”
So for me, the most interesting aspect of Ragnarok was its effect on the young English girl who loves the myths so much. Compared to it, in the child’s mind Christian teaching pales to watery weakness. At the end, there is a very spare narrative of the thin little girl’s family — her handsome, intrepid father surprises her by returning from the war to a warm welcome, but post-war her mother fades into depression: the long-awaited return to the cottage from which they’d been evacuated “took the life out of the thin child’s mother,” as she sank into the quotidian routine. For the mother, “Dailiness defeated her.”
Ragnarok contains the vivid flights of a young girl’s fancy within a poignant — and pointed — framework. It’s learned, aesthetically refined, and in its way, comprehensive. I found it well worth the (less than onerous) effort. Take and enjoy!
Anissa Gray presents us with the dire predicament and splintered nature of the Cochran family in The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls. The girls of the title, the sisters and daughters of newly incarcerated Althea, each suffer from distinct and realistic challenges, from eating disorders to obsessive/compulsive behavior to substance abuse. Their progress and setbacks depend on cohesion and support from within their group, but it must come from members who doubt their own ability to provide it. Recounting how these desperate young people cope with personal travails makes for rewarding, vivid reading.
Long-simmering difficulties reach crisis when the state of Michigan finds Althea, the matriarchal figure of two sisters and two daughters, guilty of fraud, and sentences her to five years in prison. The narrative consists of the flurry of guilt, anger, fear, and psychic trauma suffered by the women in the wake of this verdict. We meet several of Althea’s fellow inmates and hear their bitter, sometimes inspired, reaction to their terrible lives. But the book mainly contains the insights and troubled memories of the three adult sisters as they try (without much confidence) to pick up and move on from Althea’s misdeeds. It’s told in a rotating first-person point of view of Althea and her two sisters.
Ravenously Hungry Girls contains heart-rending closeups of each sister’s struggle with her debilitating experiences and the irresistible force of their fears and compulsions. Gray doesn’t sugarcoat any of these issues, nor does she play them for sympathy. No, she paints her characters honestly, warts and all, and shares their failings and their dogged good intentions.
Through it all, the author reminds her readers of the institutional and cultural handicaps under which these women live. Their race presents its own disadvantages, and the men in their lives are quite far from perfect. Yet the writing hews to the unvarnished, unidealized truth, and she lets her readers judge the rightness of the characters and the narrative for themselves. For me, this novel hits the nail on the head, and shows its author to be a teller of a memorable story, with power, color, and unblinking honesty.
Author James Salter brought out All That Is in 2013 and in it he traces protagonist Philip Bowman’s relationship history. Bowman pursues and is pursued by a series of beautiful, alluring women from his youth and into his late middle age. In the period between World War II, in which Bowman serves in the U.S. Navy, through and past the wrenching end of the Vietnam War, Salter’s presentation of his hero’s parade of fidelity and infidelity is by turns emotionally engaging and shocking, but unfailingly vivid.
We meet Phil Bowman as a very young but well-respected officer on a ship in the Pacific, as the Allies prepare to invade Okinawa. He comes home with a new and deeper perspective, having lived through the carnage and destruction at sea. He enters the highly competitive publishing field in New York and soon proves a valuable asset to his employer. Well-known events pop up as background: the 1950s prosperity and confidence, the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, roiling social changes. Bowman is dazzled by a Virginia heiress and marries her, and the almost universal opinion is that the marriage can’t last. It doesn’t. Theirs is an amicable separation and divorce. Terminations of subsequent relationships don’t often share that characteristic.
Bowman at times proves a rather aloof partner after the first blush of romance fades. And through it all, we witness all levels of society, and are reminded throughout that the rich get what they want and treat others with disdain and customary contempt. Women raise their voices and push for liberating reforms, but these trends play a secondary role, behind Bowman’s exploits with women. He has one rather passionate relationship with a woman by whom he is utterly starstruck; she betrays and nearly ruins him financially. This event and its aftermath form the main nexus of the plot.
The hero serves as witness to social changes, even if they don’t affect him directly very often. Salter’s descriptions vary between uncannily beautiful and workmanlike. Character motivations strike as deeply true, and action has a gratifying inevitability. We are treated to numerous brief departures from the main course of action: generally these are background sketches of a minor character whom we don’t encounter again. They serve to round out the narrative, add color and depth, showing how social and sometimes insular the New York publishing world was at that time.
I found All That Is quite well-crafted but only moderate in its rewards. I’ve seen deeper and higher praise for it from media outlets, but it doesn’t dazzle me that way. This is not written to highlight arcane truths or to commemorate lofty ideals; its focus on the sexual exploits of its hero, and how he affects and treats his partners detracts from any such loftier ambition.
Renowned British novelist John Fowles published Daniel Martin in 1977, and has said that it is his favorite of his novels (in a 1986 interview with Professor Emerita Susan Onega of the University of Zaragoza: Jonathan, Richard, “Maramarietta.com, 2025, https://www.maramarietta.com/the-arts/fiction/john-fowles/, retrieved June 9, 2025). It’s a challenging work of fiction, and shows Fowles to be a master of the form. It will reward readers who love sophisticated conversation; erudite analyses of aesthetics and psychology; inward dialogue; and unorthodox approaches to writing fiction.
Dan Martin is a British screenwriter who in the 1970s has achieved worldly success in Hollywood. He’s attended Oxford University, been married and divorced, has a grown daughter, and is in a relationship with a young actress about his daughter’s age. A man with whom he attended Oxford (and is now a don) has fallen deathly ill and summons him from America because he wants to see Martin before he dies.
The meeting proceeds but events take a sudden shocking turn. As a result Dan vaults into a bout of soul searching; he realizes he has been pursuing the wrong things, including his partners, in his life, and now has a clear vision of what, and whom, he wants to pursue.
And this in broad strokes is the plot of the novel. But recounting the plot does nothing to establish in the prospective reader’s mind the depth of Dan’s yearning, nor of the erudition with which he pursues his goals. There is a lot of give and take, a lot of conversational thrusting and parrying with his chosen lover/wife/partner to be.
Along with deep and sometimes persuasive discussions of society and philosophy in England and America, we encounter Fowles’s playing with the narrative: he switches from third person to first person in an effort, I think, to capture Dan’s approach to his writing, and his view of himself. The book is full of philosophical asides, but they’re always in service to the protagonist’s thinking at the moment.
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