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Jul. 12th, 2016 08:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI read Jo Walton's My Real Children for book club last month, which many people who know me in real life now know because I briefly acquired a bad habit of going around saying things like "well, I've made my decision and ideally it won't accidentally lead to nuclear war!"
My Real Children follows a woman named Patricia Cowan through two alternate timelines: one in which she marries a dude named Mark when he asks her, and one in which she doesn't.
Personally, marrying Mark is definitely a mistake, because Mark is an asshole -- which is not to say that Trish's life is miserable forever because she made a mistake, but, you know, there's a significant period of misery time in there. On the other hand, the world in which Trish marries Mark is, on a global scale, significantly better than the world in which Pat dumps Mark and finds True Love with a woman (Bee) and a city (Florence) and is generally very happy with her personal choices; Pat's world is even more deeply messed up than our current one, in a hundred small and large ways that do and don't affect Pat and her overall wonderful family life. How exactly these changes to world history have come about is not necessarily clear or obvious.
In both worlds she has children, and loves them, with some complications.
(In the Pat-and-Bee world, the father of their children is a secular Jewish guy who said a couple things that made me put the book down and side-eye it for a minute -- "I'm Jewish, of course I speak Hebrew;" dude, you are a secular Jew! in England! there is no 'of course' there! -- but this is a relatively minor caveat.)
Mostly it's a relatively straightforward narrative of two different lives lived differently, by someone who starts out as the same person, but is arguably not by the end. Sad things happen, because sad things eventually happen in every life. There are small tragedies and large tragedies, and people get old, and people die. Things are terrible for some people and don't affect others. A whole city gets wiped off the map, but if you're not in the country where it happens, then, I mean ... it's sad, but you get on with things .........? (Which is the sort of thing Jo Walton has always excelled at, how it's possible to live a perfectly normal life around fairly terrible things.)
I read the end of the book as implying the necessity of a choice between the two worlds and lives, and I did not like that and wished it was not necessary. Other people argued that they did not read the ending as requiring a choice at all, that 'the person her life had made her' had to be both Trish and Pat at once. Which I like much better, but I don't know if it's what I actually think the book is doing.
My Real Children follows a woman named Patricia Cowan through two alternate timelines: one in which she marries a dude named Mark when he asks her, and one in which she doesn't.
Personally, marrying Mark is definitely a mistake, because Mark is an asshole -- which is not to say that Trish's life is miserable forever because she made a mistake, but, you know, there's a significant period of misery time in there. On the other hand, the world in which Trish marries Mark is, on a global scale, significantly better than the world in which Pat dumps Mark and finds True Love with a woman (Bee) and a city (Florence) and is generally very happy with her personal choices; Pat's world is even more deeply messed up than our current one, in a hundred small and large ways that do and don't affect Pat and her overall wonderful family life. How exactly these changes to world history have come about is not necessarily clear or obvious.
In both worlds she has children, and loves them, with some complications.
(In the Pat-and-Bee world, the father of their children is a secular Jewish guy who said a couple things that made me put the book down and side-eye it for a minute -- "I'm Jewish, of course I speak Hebrew;" dude, you are a secular Jew! in England! there is no 'of course' there! -- but this is a relatively minor caveat.)
Mostly it's a relatively straightforward narrative of two different lives lived differently, by someone who starts out as the same person, but is arguably not by the end. Sad things happen, because sad things eventually happen in every life. There are small tragedies and large tragedies, and people get old, and people die. Things are terrible for some people and don't affect others. A whole city gets wiped off the map, but if you're not in the country where it happens, then, I mean ... it's sad, but you get on with things .........? (Which is the sort of thing Jo Walton has always excelled at, how it's possible to live a perfectly normal life around fairly terrible things.)
I read the end of the book as implying the necessity of a choice between the two worlds and lives, and I did not like that and wished it was not necessary. Other people argued that they did not read the ending as requiring a choice at all, that 'the person her life had made her' had to be both Trish and Pat at once. Which I like much better, but I don't know if it's what I actually think the book is doing.
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Date: 2016-07-13 04:01 am (UTC)I can transliterate Hebrew letters, and I took two semesters' worth of the language in college, but only about five words of actual understanding have stuck to the present day.
The other thing that jarred me was the bit where one of Pat's kids asks their dad if him being Jewish makes them Jewish (after, if I remember right, he's expressed a wish to be buried in a Jewish cemetary), and his response is basically 'nope! your mother isn't Jewish which means there is nothing Jewish about you! never think about it again!' and they all laugh and do, in fact, never think about it again. Which, I mean, is technically accurate, but TO ME FELT WEIRD.
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Date: 2016-07-13 04:22 am (UTC)I try to be educational!
'nope! your mother isn't Jewish which means there is nothing Jewish about you! never think about it again!'
Okay, look, maybe Judaism is blanket matrilineal-only in the UK [edit: nope, it's not], but in the U.S. bilineal descent is recognized by both Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism and either way maybe Israel will give you tsuris for it, but that's not the same thing as a judgment of total irrelevance to one's life and/or family traditions. Let me join you in feeling weird!
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Date: 2016-07-13 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-15 01:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-14 07:52 am (UTC)IIRC, there's a bit in Among Others where Mori's Jewish paternal grandfather does the same nope, you aren't Jewish explanation. I think she actually thinks about it, afterwards? I don't know if that bit is actually supposed to be autobiographical about Walton, but it seems plausible.
Also it's set in 1980, when things might have been different, and I think the grandfather was just individually observant, not part of a synagogue or anything.
(My father was a secular Jew, and I was raised to think of myself as half-Jewish, and didn't actually learn about the matrilineality thing until I was 13 and someone on the internet "explained" to me that it wasn't actually possible to be half-Jewish.)
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Date: 2016-07-15 02:07 am (UTC)It's been a while since I've read it, so I might be misremembering, but the paternal grandfather is a very unsympathetic character, isn't he? Honestly, I don't find it implausible as a thing that a person would say or think, under certain circumstances. But it feels incredibly jarring to me, the idea of excluding your kids from that part of their heritage that way -- like the wicked child in the Four Questions, you know, 'what does all this mean to you' -- and the utter casual-ness of this conversation left me staring at the book like 'but isn't Michael supposed to be sympathetic, isn't he meant to care about these kids? Why does he think this has nothing to do with them?'