#9 Open House

Yes, I completely realize that I skipped right over #8 - You'll Never Nanny In This Town Again. I read Suzanne Hansen's memoir about her time as a nanny to the stars yesterday morning and was thoroughly bored. First off because of my New Year's Revolution to try and stop consuming so much celebrity gossip (she worked for Michael Ovitz and his family), and I lapsed by actually reading this book, and second because it's so average that it's not really even worth writing about let alone wasting my precious anemia-starved brain on.

So then, last night I picked up Elizabeth Berg's Open House. It too was a quick read, an Oprah book, which meant that I finished it in three hours or so. It's an entirely passable novel about a woman in her early fourties dealing with life after separating from her husband of twenty years. She's never worked and has always enjoyed the simple pleasures of family life. The book itself is sweet and good tempered. And watching how the main character, Sam Morrow, changes as her life changes is good for the soul.

But it's funny how the back cover copy calls it a literary novel; and how different that designation is in the States vs. here in Canada. I wouldn't call it a literary novel. Not in the sense that Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go is absolutely literary. But maybe that's just my own prejudice about the subject matter and how these stories of women's lives just don't feel they have the weight of what I would consider to be important literature. Is that sexist and anti-feminist of me? Maybe, Berg's a good writer and it's an engaging story, but it's not anything new, and certainly not anything beyond how you feel after watching a particularly good episode of Grey's Anatomy. It's an entirely different kind of satisfying—reading Ishiguro you feel like you've learned something about the state of the human condition; reading Berg you feel like you've just spent a day being pampered, having a pedicure and are about to eat your favourite dinner. Both are good, but different.