I’ve been reading and managed to finish almost four books in the last five or six days. That’s no big deal. Mom would have read at least eight in that time.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first three–Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe (had me wondering if he’s the reincarnation of or channeling Mark Twain), Ordeal by Innocence by Agatha Christie, and A Girl Walks into a Book: What the Brontës Taught Me about Life, Love, and Women’s Work by Miranda K Pennington. This last book, The Accomplished Guest by Ann Beattie, is one I like, but I can’t quite figure out what keeps me from enjoying it as much as the others. This is what I’ve been pondering, along with all its tangents.

Obviously, part of what I don’t like, or what makes me uncomfortable, is that the stories don’t always have happy, or even satisfactory endings. But I don’t need a “happily ever after” ending to really like a story, so that’s not what’s niggling at the back of my brain.

Her characters are in my general age group, about equally older and younger. That’s a big plus… Well, it should be. Maybe it’s because she seems to focus on people who are mostly a bit more financially better off than I and most people I know, and often more formally educated.

Hmmm… There’s something. Whether they admit it or not, there is an element of snobbery that most, not all, university educated Easterners have, especially if they attended Ivy League or other prestigious Eastern universities. In my experience, it’s not intentional and rarely full blown snobbery, though I know that also exists. Actually, something I learned first hand when I moved back to the East after living a decade plus in the Midwest, is that we Easterners have an “air” that comes off as cold and/or snobbish to many not from the East. It’s a certain reserve we have that really isn’t meant to be cold or snobbish, usually. I suppose it comes, in part, from our need for personal space in big cities. And, whether we believe it or not we all (N, S, E, & W) have certain inclinations, prejudices and senses of entitlement. They’re not necessarily the same ones someone else has, but we all have them, nonetheless.

So I recognized that lack of initial identification as part of my dis-ease with the stories. I don’t live in quite the same stratum as many of them. But it’s not the main reason because I’ve read plenty of stories in which I did identify with both those above and below my own stratum.

Then, somebody said something in one story that may come from the source of the main discontent I feel. It’s something I’ve sensed in real life and have not been comfortable with there, either. Remember the command “Don’t trust anyone over thirty?” If you’re of my generation and don’t, excuse me, but what rock were you hiding under? Now, even at the time it was popular I thought that was a rather stupid thing to believe, and I still do, over or under any specific age. However I also wonder how anyone of the Boomer generation, whether they took that statement to heart or not, …how anyone can generalize back to then and say “When I was your age…” anything then was better than what they’re griping about now. We were not more polite than teens and 20somethings are today. We were not more hard working. We certainly did not respect people our age (now) more than the younger generations do us now, if we respected them at all. People then, as now, any time, of all ages, cover the full spectrum from rudest of rude to obsequiously polite to genuinely caring and kind (the definition of true politeness, to me). Hello! Specifics have changed. Reality hasn’t changed a whit!

… Well, this tangent could go on forever, but I doubt Beattie was going in that direction and her characters weren’t exactly, either. (Well, actually I can picture some of them going off on a rant similar to my previous paragraph.)

The closest I can get to figuring out the cause of the lack of identification finally comes down to something that may or not flow from that messed up nostalgia. It’s a combination of hanging to what bad happened and bearing a grudge. I don’t get it. I never did understand holding a grudge. Really. Never. I might (if I paid attention) be wary of or totally avoid someone because of what they did, but that’s about it. And I can’t claim any moral superiority about it. It’s just too much effort. Too much time and effort spent on (usually) someone who’s forgotten all about me and/or whatever happened. An incident/person not worth the headache/high blood pressure/heart attack holding a grudge can cause. It’s not that I never remember, but very often, if not always, especially if I feel the anger/hatred I felt at the time, I put it out of my mind after a prayer to help me forgive.

And people who live with grudges seems to be the theme of The Accomplished Guest. Whether it’s the oppressiveness of that grudge, or some other reason, there are a few I really don’t get. I see no point to the story except to depress, which I suppose is valid if the grudge is at least one point to consider for the depression. I dunno. I’ll finish the book tomorrow, but it was too much for me for a read-in-one-sitting.

…

I’ve merely been thinking with my keyboard. Very little editing, and that only because I don’t know how to write without continuous rereading. This post feels unfinished, but, at the moment, I have no more to say.