Nabokov, Vladimir. Pnin. London: Penguin Books, 1997.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Friday, July 20, 2007
A Yellow Raft in a Blue River
I am reading Michael Dorris' book. I really liked it. What I liked so much was Dorris' sensivie understanding of women characters - not romanticising but, almost as if he could feel what they are. The disturbed lives of three generations of women from the Native American community could be read in the novel - the granddaugher Rayona, the mother Christine and the Grandmother Aunt Ida are the characters. It raises questions about the community, gender, problems of alcholism, disturbed families, foster parents etc which, I realized later, Dorris would have faced in his personal life.
Dorris is accused of abuse by his foster child and another child of his was also planning to give a case against him. Louise Aldrich and he shared a legendary writing career, but they separated at some point. Dorris committed suicide later.
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Sights Unseen
Gibbons, Kaye. Sights Unseen. New York: Avon Books, 1996.
The book explores the consciousness of Hattie Barnes. She remembers her mother who was suffering from mental illness. The excruciating pain of those years when she was a maniac depressive is recounted with extreme love and care. The father, Frederick Barnes and brother Freddy is also there in the picture along with Pearl Wiggins, the strong woman who is the housekeeper. The grandfather, Mr. Barnes and Ms. Woodward, his sister-in-law were “keeping company.” So, he had left his estate to her, which finally passed on to Hattie. It is in this house that Maggie Barnes, the mother finally dies. She misses a step while carrying luggage from the top of the stairs and tumbles down to her death.
The style is light and almost humorous, though the incidents which are described are not quite so.
The book explores the consciousness of Hattie Barnes. She remembers her mother who was suffering from mental illness. The excruciating pain of those years when she was a maniac depressive is recounted with extreme love and care. The father, Frederick Barnes and brother Freddy is also there in the picture along with Pearl Wiggins, the strong woman who is the housekeeper. The grandfather, Mr. Barnes and Ms. Woodward, his sister-in-law were “keeping company.” So, he had left his estate to her, which finally passed on to Hattie. It is in this house that Maggie Barnes, the mother finally dies. She misses a step while carrying luggage from the top of the stairs and tumbles down to her death.
The style is light and almost humorous, though the incidents which are described are not quite so.
Monday, April 09, 2007
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Audrey Hepburn's Neck
Brown, Alan. Audrey Hepburn's Neck. New York: Pocket Books, 1996.
This is the growing up story of Toshi Okamoto, a young man from Japan. From his nineth birthday onwards he develops a crush for Audrey Hepburn, especially her beautiful neck. He sees the movie with his mother, with whom the boy shares a special relationship. This leads him to a series of affairs with American women which are disastrous. The novel is about the intercultural exchanges between Japanese, the next generation after the neuclear war and their children who revers "foriegners." It is also about the misconceptions that happen between two groups of different languages.
This is the growing up story of Toshi Okamoto, a young man from Japan. From his nineth birthday onwards he develops a crush for Audrey Hepburn, especially her beautiful neck. He sees the movie with his mother, with whom the boy shares a special relationship. This leads him to a series of affairs with American women which are disastrous. The novel is about the intercultural exchanges between Japanese, the next generation after the neuclear war and their children who revers "foriegners." It is also about the misconceptions that happen between two groups of different languages.
Monday, January 08, 2007
The Miss America Family
Baggott, Julianna. The Miss America Family. New York: Washington Square Press, 2002.
In this stunning follow-up to the acclaimed Girl Talk, a fading beauty-pageant veteran and her sixteen-year-old son team up as the delightfully nimble co-chroniclers of one family's soulful, mordantly funny remembrance of things past. With her irreverent evocation of suburban dissolution, Julianna Baggott gives us a fictional world whose emotional complexity and comedic dysfunction closely resemble our own.
It's 1987 in Greenville, Delaware. Ezra Stocker is the son of an insomniac ex-Miss New Jersey named Pixie and a gay, absentee father; the stepson of an ex-quarterback dentist with a taste for turtle-patterned golf pants; and the grandson of a superstitious, stroke-addled woman with a passion for birds and some truly odd notions about fish and the family ancestry. He has created for himself a specific goal this summer vacation: to make a list of "Rules to Live By," his own set of guidelines to take him through life. A boy whose chief distinguishing traits include webbed toes and a knack for standardized aptitude tests, Ezra has no reason to expect that by the end of this particular summer, due largely to a doomed romance with a wealthy podiatrist's daughter and a fateful episode with a gun, every one of those rules will be tossed out the window.
It's 1987 in Greenville, Delaware, but Pixie Stocker is consumed by the past. When she was Ezra's age, she too sought the secret rules and how-to's for negotiating life and attaining her dream of the all-American family. Pixie had found her answers in the comfortingly black-and-white strictures of Emily Post -- and later in the rigid absolutes of the beauty pageant circuit. Such certainties have long since vanished, replaced by the relentless haunting of her memory, and the ceaseless reverberations of a long-ago act of brutal violation. When Ezra's grandmother, disoriented from her stroke, reveals to her daughter an explosive and long-buried family secret, she spurs Pixie toward a...
Monday, January 01, 2007
The Inheritance of Loss
Desai, Kiran. The Inheritance of Loss.
"The Inheritance of Loss" opens with a teenage Indian girl, an orphan called Sai, living with her Cambridge-educated Anglophile grandfather, a retired judge, in the town of Kalimpong on the Indian side of the Himalayas. Sai is romantically involved with her math tutor, Gyan, the descendant of a Nepali Gurkha mercenary, but he eventually recoils from her obvious privilege and falls in with a group of ethnic Nepalese insurgents. In a parallel narrative, we are shown the life of Biju, the son of Sai's grandfather's cook, who belongs to the "shadow class" of illegal immigrants in New York and spends much of his time dodging the authorities, moving from one ill-paid job to another.
What binds these seemingly disparate characters is a shared historical legacy and a common experience of impotence and humiliation. "Certain moves made long ago had produced all of them," Desai writes, referring to centuries of subjection by the economic and cultural power of the West. But the beginnings of an apparently leveled field in a late-20th-century global economy serve merely to scratch those wounds rather than heal them.
Almost all of Desai's characters have been stunted by their encounters with the West. As a student, isolated in racist England, the future judge feels "barely human at all" and leaps "when touched on the arm as if from an unbearable intimacy." Yet on his return to India, he finds himself despising his apparently backward Indian wife.
The judge is one of those "ridiculous Indians," as the novel puts it, "who couldn't rid themselves of what they had broken their souls to learn" and whose Anglophilia can only turn into self-hatred. These Indians are also an unwanted anachronism in postcolonial India, where long-suppressed peoples have begun to awaken to their dereliction, to express their anger and despair. For some of Desai's characters, including one of the judge's neighbors in Kalimpong, this comes as a distinct shock: "Just when Lola had thought it would continue, a hundred years like the one past — Trollope, BBC, a burst of hilarity at Christmas — all of a sudden, all that they had claimed innocent, fun, funny, not really to matter, was proven wrong."
There is no mistaking the literary influences on Desai's exploration of postcolonial chaos and despair. Early in the novel, she sets two Anglophilic Indian women to discussing "A Bend in the River," V. S. Naipaul's powerfully bleak novel about traditional Africa's encounter with the modern world. Lola, whose clothesline sags "under a load of Marks and Spencer's panties," thinks Naipaul is "strange. Stuck in the past. . . . He has not progressed. Colonial neurosis, he's never freed himself from it." Lola goes on to accuse Naipaul of ignoring the fact that there is a "new England," a "completely cosmopolitan society" where "chicken tikka masala has replaced fish and chips as the No. 1 takeout dinner." As further evidence, she mentions her own daughter, a newsreader for BBC radio, who "doesn't have a chip on her shoulder."
Desai takes a skeptical view of the West's consumer-driven multiculturalism, noting the "sanitized elegance" of Lola's daughter's British-accented voice, which is "triumphant over any horrors the world might thrust upon others." At such moments, Desai seems far from writers like Zadie Smith and Hari Kunzru, whose fiction takes a generally optimistic view of what Salman Rushdie has called "hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs."
In fact, Desai's novel seems to argue that such multiculturalism, confined to the Western metropolis and academe, doesn't begin to address the causes of extremism and violence in the modern world. Nor, it suggests, can economic globalization become a route to prosperity for the downtrodden. "Profit," Desai observes at one point, "could only be harvested in the gap between nations, working one against the other."
This leaves most people in the postcolonial world with only the promise of a shabby modernity — modernity, as Desai puts it, "in its meanest form, brand-new one day, in ruin the next." Not surprisingly, half-educated, uprooted men like Gyan gravitate to the first available political cause in their search for a better way. He joins what sounds like an ethnic nationalist movement largely as an opportunity to vent his rage and frustration. "Old hatreds are endlessly retrievable," Desai reminds us, and they are "purer . . . because the grief of the past was gone. Just the fury remained, distilled, liberating."
What binds these seemingly disparate characters is a shared historical legacy and a common experience of impotence and humiliation. "Certain moves made long ago had produced all of them," Desai writes, referring to centuries of subjection by the economic and cultural power of the West. But the beginnings of an apparently leveled field in a late-20th-century global economy serve merely to scratch those wounds rather than heal them.
Almost all of Desai's characters have been stunted by their encounters with the West. As a student, isolated in racist England, the future judge feels "barely human at all" and leaps "when touched on the arm as if from an unbearable intimacy." Yet on his return to India, he finds himself despising his apparently backward Indian wife.
The judge is one of those "ridiculous Indians," as the novel puts it, "who couldn't rid themselves of what they had broken their souls to learn" and whose Anglophilia can only turn into self-hatred. These Indians are also an unwanted anachronism in postcolonial India, where long-suppressed peoples have begun to awaken to their dereliction, to express their anger and despair. For some of Desai's characters, including one of the judge's neighbors in Kalimpong, this comes as a distinct shock: "Just when Lola had thought it would continue, a hundred years like the one past — Trollope, BBC, a burst of hilarity at Christmas — all of a sudden, all that they had claimed innocent, fun, funny, not really to matter, was proven wrong."
There is no mistaking the literary influences on Desai's exploration of postcolonial chaos and despair. Early in the novel, she sets two Anglophilic Indian women to discussing "A Bend in the River," V. S. Naipaul's powerfully bleak novel about traditional Africa's encounter with the modern world. Lola, whose clothesline sags "under a load of Marks and Spencer's panties," thinks Naipaul is "strange. Stuck in the past. . . . He has not progressed. Colonial neurosis, he's never freed himself from it." Lola goes on to accuse Naipaul of ignoring the fact that there is a "new England," a "completely cosmopolitan society" where "chicken tikka masala has replaced fish and chips as the No. 1 takeout dinner." As further evidence, she mentions her own daughter, a newsreader for BBC radio, who "doesn't have a chip on her shoulder."
Desai takes a skeptical view of the West's consumer-driven multiculturalism, noting the "sanitized elegance" of Lola's daughter's British-accented voice, which is "triumphant over any horrors the world might thrust upon others." At such moments, Desai seems far from writers like Zadie Smith and Hari Kunzru, whose fiction takes a generally optimistic view of what Salman Rushdie has called "hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs."
In fact, Desai's novel seems to argue that such multiculturalism, confined to the Western metropolis and academe, doesn't begin to address the causes of extremism and violence in the modern world. Nor, it suggests, can economic globalization become a route to prosperity for the downtrodden. "Profit," Desai observes at one point, "could only be harvested in the gap between nations, working one against the other."
This leaves most people in the postcolonial world with only the promise of a shabby modernity — modernity, as Desai puts it, "in its meanest form, brand-new one day, in ruin the next." Not surprisingly, half-educated, uprooted men like Gyan gravitate to the first available political cause in their search for a better way. He joins what sounds like an ethnic nationalist movement largely as an opportunity to vent his rage and frustration. "Old hatreds are endlessly retrievable," Desai reminds us, and they are "purer . . . because the grief of the past was gone. Just the fury remained, distilled, liberating."
Friday, December 15, 2006
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
When Rabbit Howls
The Troops for Truddi Chase. When Rabbit Howls. New York: Jove Books, 1990.
The book is about the condition of multiple personality disorder that the writer of the book suffers from. Truddi Chase lives with her troops. The troops are the multiple personalities who inhabit her ("her" being only one of the many selves who inhabit her self). This book is about her therapy and the notes she had prepared for her therapy which is used by the doctor with her permission. She enters this state of mind after the emotional turmoil of incestous child abuse which was sustained. "Rabbit" is the name of the child who was abused.
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Monday, November 06, 2006
Sacred Country
Tremain, Rose. Sacred Country.
The novel is about Mary/Marty/Martin. She is a misunderstood and ill-loved girl. Her mother Estelle is caught in a loveless marriage with Sonny. Timmy, her brother is loved and therefore hated by Mary. At six, she deciedes she is a boy and not a girl. This strong belief persists throughout her life and makes her closested and totally different from others. She falls in love with a girl, lindsey in her class but her love remains unrequitted. The narrative also weaves other stories, like that of Gilbert the dentist, and Walter the butcher, Edward and Irene, Pearl and Billy her step brother, Cord, Mary's/Martin's grandfather and McRye her teacher. Rose Tremain in her author''s statement says that: "I suspect that many writers deceive themselves about why they write. My self-deception is that I create in order to understand and that the final end of it all might be wisdom. This means that I deliberately seek out the strange, the unfamiliar, even the unknowable, as subjects for my novels and trust my imagination to illuminate them to the point where both I and the reader can see them with a new clarity. The writers I admire most seem to have this kind of goal: to comprehend experience distant from their own, in nature, place and time, and to let the extraordinary cast new light on the quotidian."
Suffragette City
Kate Muir, Suffragette City (Pan/Macmillan, 1999)
This is a funny and serious novel about Albertine, the decadent woman artist. She is single, lives with her room-mates, Wanda a fashion designer and Nosmo, a gay man, but does not have any deep relationship with anyone. She meets an interesting man, but as chance encounters go, does not know where the relationship is going inspite of being fully pregnent with his baby. In the meanwhile, she is haunted by her great-great grandmother's ghost who escapes through her letters preserved by Albertine's grandmother Rose. The novel ends with the coming together of the lost lovers and Albertine making it big in the art world, both of which happens along with her giving birth.
Monday, October 02, 2006
White Teeth
Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2000.
This is a very strange novel for a woman to have written. The main character is Archie, a middle aged white man going through a divorce. His wife Ophelia has just gone through a mental break down and decieded to walk out of a door-mat's existence for the past 30 years. In a fit of depression, Archie deciedes to kill himself but is saved. He decieds to explore life without regrets now and meets Clara, a beautiful black woman who was a Jehova's witness, now in a joint-smoking, group-sex-having commune. She is 19, but has a broken relationship with Ryan, who introduced her to a new life-style but then, under her mother Hertonse's influence, turned more of a Jehova's witness than her. The title of the novel derives from Clara's buck tooth, which she looses in a bike accident with Ryan. Now she has no teeth at all in the front row.
Salman Rushdie had assured us that this book "has bite."
Saturday, September 16, 2006
Friday, August 25, 2006
An Autobiography
Davis, Angela. An Autobiography. New York: International Publishers, 2000. (first Published in 1974).
The autobiography is about a black activist's struggle against the american state. Angela Davis begins her autobiography with a crisis in her life. She is a fugitive running away from the FBI who has charged her against murder. She is finally caught by the police and is taken to the New York jail to await trial. The first chapter describes her trials in this jail and is titled "Nets." The text becomes a document of a black Marxist woman's interpretation of the state punitive system. In the beginning, she is placed in a room full of mentally deranged women, who have been deliberately given tranquilizers. It is a dead house and they are always spaced out on different drugs. Angela is placed there with the excuse that she might be attacked by the other inmates. But, the truth is that she is loved by them and they look upto her as an activist. Later when she is moved into solitary and then along with the other inmates, she developes a close relationship with the jailed women. There is a full fledged social life in the jail with homosexuality (including formalizing of relationships, sexual and otherwise) happening within its confines. Angela makes friends not only with the inmates but also some of the jail authorities. But, in between, she is handed over to California by New York state and has to shift her residence to another jail.
Thursday, August 24, 2006
A History of Insects
Roberts, Yvonne. A History of Insects. Surrey: Review, 2000. The novel deals with a colonial (to be more precise, post colonial - Peshwar, Pakistan in the 50s) childhood, the memsahibs and the sahibs still in an illusionary world of pre-independence, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and its targetting of the West, the meaningless marriages in which both men and women are caught, the racial tensions between the whites and the browns etc are the setting of this growing up tale of Ella Jackson. While it happens in the explosive situation of inter-racial tensions, the story is about the different secrets that Ella Jackson, the main character in the novel witnesses. They are all secrets of sexuality, forbidden and therefore dark. It is also the consequences of speaking about secrets. In fact, the title is derived from Ella's contradictory desire to speak and to keep secrets - her diary is named "A History of Insects" to make it look unattractive to the grownups.
She is child of nine, known to be imaginative and causing a lot of worry and distress to her mother, Alice due to that. Bill, her father, is from the working class background, and is unhappy in marriage. His only reason to hang on to Alice and her pettiness is Ella. The girl is growing up, lonely and without any reassuarance from a mother who thinks she has come between her and her husband's affection. The story revolves around an incident that Ella accidentally witnesses. She sees the murder of a Pakistani army man, colonel Ashraf Khan Afridi, who she revers and likes as her "uncle Ash." This happens in the "secret garden" which she frequents with the gardner Shafi. She witnesses the neighbour's wife, Marjorie and Ash making love and later, Marjorie's husband, Piers murdering Ash. But, since the body is never found, no one believes Ella. Ash's family is used to his disappearances and they do not complain. Ella is removed to the boarding school for some time due to Alice's insistence. It is St. Winifred's at Chowdiagalli. There Ella is subjected to the combined torture of Zuhra Iqbal who teaches her that "teacher's pets" like her and other white girls should be taught another lesson. She is a witness to another secret, between Caro and Millie, two senior girls in her group named "Buttercup." Both she and Zuhra are subjected to witness Dr. Mac, a preacher, masturbating. Zuhra has to leave St. Winifred's because she tells the truth about him. Ella remains because she becomes dumb and unable to speak for many months. Betty, the considerate American picks her up forcibly from the school and gets her home. But, it is trouble time there. President Nasser has announced the nationalisation of Suez Canal and anti-West sentiment is blowing all over the Islamic countries. There is riot in whcih Ella's father and Betty rescue and Anglo-Indian family, but seriously jeopardizing his career in the meanwhile.
Saturday, July 22, 2006
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. London: Bloomsberry, 2005.
Like all Harry Potter series, this book is also about the archetypal battle between the good and the evil. Rowling uses stereotypes quite effectively, sometimes to quite politically incorrect proportions, but the book inspite of it is also quite seductive.
The insight built in the previous book, that Voldermort and Harry cannot exist together - to be read as good and evil cannot survive together - seems to be built in this book also. But, I liked the building of the more complex stuff about good and evil - that Harry could actually read Voldermot's thoughts and there was Harry in Voldermot and the other way round.
The cental image in this book is the "Advanced Potion Making" text that Harry comes to possess by chance. This makes him an expert in a subject he was just average. The book belongs to an older student who signed as "The half blood prince." At some stage, Harry finds out that the half blood prince is also quite a dangerous person. Most of Hogwarts keeps going on in Dumbledore and Harry's private lessons where Dumbledore tries to get into the mind of Voldermort by reliving memories of Tom Riddle, his origins, his childhood and later his turning into Lord Voldermort. The findings lead to the conclusion that Voldermort was ashamed of his muggle origins and all his efforts at keeping the purity of the magical race is because he cannot face his own origins. Harry shares most of Voldermort's upbringing but has turned out t be the opposite.
This is geering towards an adult fiction with the problems of love and Dumbledore's death happening which will take Harry towards adulthood without parents finally.
Monday, July 17, 2006
Sunday, June 11, 2006
Lisa, Bright and Dark
Neufeld, John. Lisa, Bright and Dark. New York: Signet Books, 1969.
This is about Lisa Sheffield, 16 years old who suffers a mental breakdown. It is about the daily dairy of observing the onset and progress of mental illness in an American teenager. The novel unfurls through the voice of her friend, Betsy Goodman, admittedly a very minor character in the whole narrative. Betsy studies in the same school as Lisa and is a friend of Mary Nell, who is closely associated with Lisa. So, the story that is opening out before the readers is through a character who is hearing from Mary and then seeing Lisa as a third party in the school. Mary Nell is admired by everyone, including Betsy. Another girl who is very popular in school is Elizabeth Frazer. Brian Morris is the cutest boy in the class and he is in love with Lisa. But, Lisa's wayward behaviour during her illness breaks the relationship. In the beginning of the narrative itself, we hear Lisa speaking to her parents in front of Mary, that she suspects she is going crazy because she is hearing voices in her head. Her parents think this is yet another one of her ploys to gain attention and is least bothered. One day at a party, Lisa suddenly goes away from the crowd and when her boyfriend Brian tries to come to her she rebuffs him. But, she returns after 10 minutes and everyone forgets the incident. Only when Lisa actually is seen cutting herself after the class does the school counsellor, Bernstein, get involved. At his insistence, the parents send her off on a vacation. But, this does not help lisa.
Betsy notices that Lisa had good days and bad days and it could be seen in her clothes. This is the basis of the title of the novel, Lisa Bright and Dark. After she comes back from the vacation, which was a visit to a clinic, Lisa sunk back more into her dark mood. One day she could not give answer to a question in calculus and she goes near the teacher and whispers in her ears the answer. This makes everyone notice that she was not normal.
Betsy describes the fear that everyone felt around Lisa. The friends would ignore her in her dark moods and be with her in her bright ones. But, she is angry with the school authorities who ignored Lisa's symptoms, though she herself felt fear and kept away.
There is a kind of relationship between Elizabeth and Lisa that keeps developing in the narrative. At one point, Betsy notices that Lisa was following Elizabeth around and the latter was ignoring her. Later she says that it was only Elizabeth who was not afraid of Lisa.When Mary and Betsy offer their help to Lisa (after failing to warn Lisa's family about the situation), Lisa herself suggests Elizabeth's name as someone who will understand. Elizabeth, though, comes out as extremely cold when Mary and Betsy confronts her with a demand for help. She joins them but is always critical and at a distance. She doesnt even look concerned for Lisa.
Also, Lisa’s actions could not be explained in anyway. She attacks Elizabeth once and the others could barely save her. Betsy understands that Elizabeth had a strange understanding of Lisa and guessed that she also would have suffered the same problems.
The only glimpse the outsiders get of Lisa’s inner world is through her words. She is very reticent of sharing it too. The fact that everyone remembers is the English world that she builds inside her head. If Lisa speaks with an English accent, then the girls understood that trouble was brewing.
Another interesting angle is the growth of Betsy as a person. She thinks she has only one ambition – to marry someone and live near a beach. Whereas, Mary Nell was ambitious and had leadership qualities. Elizabeth was arrogant and again had the quality of being an important person. Yet, Lisa chooses to trust Betsy because of she would understand her through her feeling rather than her head. Also, the narrative looks at the competition between the girls as a subtext, though the concentration is on their camaraderie.
One day, Lisa walks through the glass-paned door in Betsy’s house in front of her father Mr. Goodman. It is symbolic of Lisa’s final plunge into the world of mental illness and is rightly interpreted by everyone present as a desperate cry for help. But, Mrs. Shilling does not heed inspite of this. We realize that she is just refusing to see truth since it might call into question her own parenting of Lisa.
At this point, Betsy is introduced to Neil Donovan by Elizabeth and she immediately develops a crush on him.
This is about Lisa Sheffield, 16 years old who suffers a mental breakdown. It is about the daily dairy of observing the onset and progress of mental illness in an American teenager. The novel unfurls through the voice of her friend, Betsy Goodman, admittedly a very minor character in the whole narrative. Betsy studies in the same school as Lisa and is a friend of Mary Nell, who is closely associated with Lisa. So, the story that is opening out before the readers is through a character who is hearing from Mary and then seeing Lisa as a third party in the school. Mary Nell is admired by everyone, including Betsy. Another girl who is very popular in school is Elizabeth Frazer. Brian Morris is the cutest boy in the class and he is in love with Lisa. But, Lisa's wayward behaviour during her illness breaks the relationship. In the beginning of the narrative itself, we hear Lisa speaking to her parents in front of Mary, that she suspects she is going crazy because she is hearing voices in her head. Her parents think this is yet another one of her ploys to gain attention and is least bothered. One day at a party, Lisa suddenly goes away from the crowd and when her boyfriend Brian tries to come to her she rebuffs him. But, she returns after 10 minutes and everyone forgets the incident. Only when Lisa actually is seen cutting herself after the class does the school counsellor, Bernstein, get involved. At his insistence, the parents send her off on a vacation. But, this does not help lisa.
Betsy notices that Lisa had good days and bad days and it could be seen in her clothes. This is the basis of the title of the novel, Lisa Bright and Dark. After she comes back from the vacation, which was a visit to a clinic, Lisa sunk back more into her dark mood. One day she could not give answer to a question in calculus and she goes near the teacher and whispers in her ears the answer. This makes everyone notice that she was not normal.
Betsy describes the fear that everyone felt around Lisa. The friends would ignore her in her dark moods and be with her in her bright ones. But, she is angry with the school authorities who ignored Lisa's symptoms, though she herself felt fear and kept away.
There is a kind of relationship between Elizabeth and Lisa that keeps developing in the narrative. At one point, Betsy notices that Lisa was following Elizabeth around and the latter was ignoring her. Later she says that it was only Elizabeth who was not afraid of Lisa.When Mary and Betsy offer their help to Lisa (after failing to warn Lisa's family about the situation), Lisa herself suggests Elizabeth's name as someone who will understand. Elizabeth, though, comes out as extremely cold when Mary and Betsy confronts her with a demand for help. She joins them but is always critical and at a distance. She doesnt even look concerned for Lisa.
Also, Lisa’s actions could not be explained in anyway. She attacks Elizabeth once and the others could barely save her. Betsy understands that Elizabeth had a strange understanding of Lisa and guessed that she also would have suffered the same problems.
The only glimpse the outsiders get of Lisa’s inner world is through her words. She is very reticent of sharing it too. The fact that everyone remembers is the English world that she builds inside her head. If Lisa speaks with an English accent, then the girls understood that trouble was brewing.
Another interesting angle is the growth of Betsy as a person. She thinks she has only one ambition – to marry someone and live near a beach. Whereas, Mary Nell was ambitious and had leadership qualities. Elizabeth was arrogant and again had the quality of being an important person. Yet, Lisa chooses to trust Betsy because of she would understand her through her feeling rather than her head. Also, the narrative looks at the competition between the girls as a subtext, though the concentration is on their camaraderie.
One day, Lisa walks through the glass-paned door in Betsy’s house in front of her father Mr. Goodman. It is symbolic of Lisa’s final plunge into the world of mental illness and is rightly interpreted by everyone present as a desperate cry for help. But, Mrs. Shilling does not heed inspite of this. We realize that she is just refusing to see truth since it might call into question her own parenting of Lisa.
At this point, Betsy is introduced to Neil Donovan by Elizabeth and she immediately develops a crush on him.
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