"New Haven smelled of neglect"
Americanah
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2014)
https://glean38.rssing.com/chan-8541597/all_p15.html
= Right now I'm in the midst of reading the novel Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
= I had listened to her read from a short story in a National Book Awards Author Events podcast, and the quality of her prose plus how charming and smart she was in the interview part really made me want to delve more into her work (all the prizes she's won didn't hurt either).
= There's also an older interview/reading with her on the BBC's World Book Club podcast site that's well worth listening to (re her previous novel, Half of a Yellow Sun).
= She hooked me completely with the first paragraph of Americanah:
"Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, and although Ifemelu liked the tranquil greenness of the many trees, the clean streets and stately homes, the delicately overpriced shops, and the quiet, abiding air of earned grace, it was this, the lack of a smell, that most appealed to her, perhaps because the other American cities she knew well had all smelled distinctly.
Philadelphia had the musty scent of history.
New Haven smelled of neglect.
Baltimore smelled of brine, and Brooklyn of sun-warmed garbage.
But Princeton had no smell.
She liked taking deep breaths here.
She liked watching the locals who drove with pointed courtesy and parked their latest model cars outside the organic grocery store on Nassau Street or outside the sushi restaurants or outside the ice cream shop that had fifty different flavors including red pepper or outside the post office where effusive staff bounded out to greet them at the entrance.
She liked the campus, grave with knowledge, the Gothic buildings with their vine-laced walls, and the way everything transformed, in the half-light of night, into a ghostly scene.
She liked, most of all, that in this place of affluent ease, she could pretend to be someone else, someone specially admitted into a hallowed American club, someone adorned with certainty."
= I love the "delicately" overpriced shops and the "pointed" courtesy. I'm about a third of the way through, and it's the kind of book you can't wait to get back to in the evening after you've dispatched all the tasks of the day.
Amalia's Story, Chapter Sixty-Two
= Amalia Angeloni Jacobucci
1000 Characters About My Mother #15:
"What happened after the Cub Scout Banquet?"
"That would have been in March of 1965 . . . "
"Here's something! First published April 1965 -- "
"Louis Jacobucci, Casework Treatment of the Neglectful Mother."
"Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Services, Volume 46, Issue 4."
"Oh, look! They had references!"
“The Protective Service Caseworker: How Does He Survive Job Pressures?”
“Use of Homemaker Service in Families That Neglect Their Children."
“The Team Approach in Protective Service.”
"Character Disorders in Parents of Delinquents."
"There's more."
"That's OK."
Presently . . .
"Loneliness and Isolation in Child Neglect."
"Dispositional Empathy in Neglectful Mothers and Mothers at High Risk for Child Physical Abuse."
"The Training of Neglectful and Unsatisfactory Mothers."
"The Socialization of Emotional Understanding: A Comparison of Neglectful and Nonneglectful Mothers and Their Children."
"In ...
"What?!"
"I didn't say anything."
"How can you say such a thing?"
"I'm not going through this again."
"What do you mean?"
"All this -- denial. I'm done. I'm just going to say exactly what happened as I remember it."
"It never happened!"
"The reason I know it happened is that I renember it. I was eight years old. My brother was twelve years old. I was able to recover the date because I remember at some point in the week preceding the event, our father for some reason had told us, I'm going to be speaking at the Unitarian Church this Sunday at 11:00. It did not seem weird to me at the time, because he was always out of the house anyway. Plus all he used to when he was home was harangue me, so good."
"You lie."
"In fact, I remember thinking, it made sense that he would get something going on Sundays, because that was the only time he was ever even around anymore. Weekdays he was working, of course, and weeknights he was always at one of his many, many important community activities."
"You are delusional."
"Then, I found this article, and it all ...
"I have a thesis. My thesis is: In any woman's life, having children would have to be the most significant event. So, in my mother's story -- "
"Her family wasn't really any different from any of the other families."
"Yes."
"In what way?"
"She and her husband were both very active in community affairs. Both her children went to school."
"What else?"
"They were both boys?"
"Anything else?"
"No. That's it."
"So you said, that one way in which your mother's family wasn't really any different from any of the other families, was that she and her husband were both very active in community affairs. Can you tell me a little more about that?"
"Oh, sure. There was always something going on. Cub Scouts, she was like Den Mother of her older son's Cub Scout Pack. Pack 54. Plus the Comedy Club. Plus I'm pretty sure, she was involved in the kindergarten. She and her husband both. And politics. It was the Sixties."
"Just normal 60's Mom stuff."
"In any case, it's time to forget the past."
