Tag Archives: Elizabeth Jolley

Foxybaby and The Sugar Mother by Elizabeth Jolley

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With reading time at a premium due to an active 3-year-old and a high needs 4-month-old, I’m not able to dive into all the worthy books that are sent my way for review. So this will be a bit out of form for the Superfast Reader, more of an endorsement than a review, since I was only able to give these books a perusal instead of a read. But they are absolutely worth recommending, for their literary merit and sheer originality.

Foxybaby follows a writer with punk rock sensibilities through her residency at a weight loss camp for adults. The tone is blackly comic, but with a beating heart of real passion and humanity. For as grotesque as some of Jolley’s characters are, she never condescends to them. I was reminded so much of Jane Campion’s movie Sweetie–and that’s a high compliment.

The Sugar Mother is about a middle aged academic who falls in love with a much-younger woman, and then wants her to be a surrogate for him and his wife. I was less taken with this one, finding the scenario a bit distasteful, but the writing was psychologically astute and enjoyable as hell.

My Father’s Moon by Elizabeth Jolley

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Synopsis:
An unwed mother tries working in an impoverished boarding school and finds herself yearning for the nurse she fell in love with back when both were working in a military hospital in England during WWII.

Review:
My Father’s Moon is the first of three books in The Vera Wright Trilogy, an autobiographical series that has long been out-of-print. Highly praised in its time, Elizabeth Jolley‘s work wasn’t widely known outside of her native Australia until now.

Based on My Father’s Moon, I daresay Ms. Jolley’s reputation at home deserves to be expanded abroad. Her writing combines an elliptically modernist structure with classically rigorous character work, and I suppose she bears comparison to Virginia Woolf in that regard.

Vera is an oddly slippery character, in that it’s hard to understand her motivations and choices. I’m not saying this as a criticism; rather, it’s a result of the way that Jolley has chosen to tell the story, using flashbacks that are sometimes indistinguishable from the main action. She links the different times together using Vera’s invocation of the name Ramsden, the last name of the woman she loved. It’s a powerful technique, evoking longing and regret in equal measure.

I was quite impressed by Jolley and glad for the opportunity to be exposed to her work.

Many thanks to Persea for the review copy.