I received Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows for Christmas (after shamelessly begging my mother for it) and I've been slowly reading it for the last week or so. I had never even heard of West until about six months ago and then received The Return of the Soldier by her as a birthday gift. That proved to be one of the best WWI novels I have ever read - even though it doesn't take place on the battlefield. I was so impressed by West's abilty to convey so much while being so understated that I pretty much fell in love with her. When I found out that Andrea Barrett wrote the Introduction for Fountain then I pretty much had to have it.

It's one of those deep and rich British family novels where on the surface nothing huge and dramatic occurs, but actually a family is being rocked to its knees at every moment and you can hardly believe the quiet intensity of what you are reading. Fountain is based, apparently, a bit on West's life which as it deals with domestic issues between husbands and wives on one level and siblings on another, seems perfectly plausible and possible. I'm thinking the part about the poltergeist is all fiction, but who knows (and it is so unexpected to find it here, but then to see it handled in such a straighforward no nonsense British way - it's perfect!). The main problem for the family in the story is that the father is bad with money - he keeps losing his newspaper jobs for unexplained reasons and though he finds another one, he always feels compelled to gamble away any excess dime and leave it to his long suffering wife to somehow keep the family afloat. At one point the narrator, a young girl named Rose, asks her mother why another family member in a similar situation married such a difficult man. Her mother answers that of course she had to marry because otherwise "how could she get [her daughter] Rosamund if she hadn't married someone?" This leaves Rose to consider:

"It was as if Mamma, my Mamma, or Rosamund's Mamma, or anybody's Mamma, were in a place like the Zoo or Kew Gardens, and was waiting for her little girl and finally saw her standing outside the entrance, on the other side of the gate, and said to the attendant in charge of the gate, 'My little girl is outside, would mind if I went outside and fetched her in?' She would have to be polite to the attendant who let her through the gate, no matter what he might be like."

Rose suddenly grasps the powerlessness of women, of all women, and is appalled by how awful that lack of power is.

Here's what really weird though. I'm also reading a young adult novel, Chicks with Sticks, about a group of girls who discover themselves through knitting. (It's really sweet and I'm enjoying it alot.) There's a moment though when one of the characters, Amanda, reveals that her parents have an interesting idea as to how she should plan for the future in spite of her learning disorder (it sounds like she's dyslexic):

And just like that I'm back in England at the turn of the last century, just like that nothing seems to have changed at all.

Rebecca West really knew what she was talking about, didn't she? One minute she has me reading about girls who are impressed by someone owning a "motorcar" and the next minute her words are echoed by girls in Chicago trying to navigate high school. I'm enjoying the hell out of this writer, and I haven't even gotten to the book yet that made her famous. Life is simply grand when you discover someone who can move you like this. It's just wonderful.

Now - if I could just get that Little Big Town song "Boondocks" out of my head everything would be perfect. Is that sucker addictive or what?!