Mrs. Beeton and the Completion Compulsion

The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton has finally returned to the library. Did I finish it? Well, I finished Mrs. Beeton, but I did not finish Mrs. Beeton.

It's a wonderful book, superbly researched and pleasant to read ("pleasant" means that the writing is fine: it does not interfere with the reading or bother the reader in any way, but it also does not provide its own "pleasure"). It's my favorite kind of biography, the kind I've harped on before, like The Peabody Sisters and Claire Tomalin's Pepys biography, that gives you the panorama of life and times and teaches you as much about the times as the life.

But this one also gives you a lot of the book (for those who don't recall, Mrs. Beeton wrote the definitive housekeeping book of Victorian England, sort of Cheryl Mendelson and Betty Crocker combined in one, and, like Betty Crocker, the book has been reprinted and repackaged ever since). Hughes spends entire chapters detailing the texts Isabella Beeton plagiarized from, citing what seems like just about every instance of plagiarism--and since virtually the entire thing was plagiarized, that's a lot.

Then, I must admit, the accumulation of detail begins to oppress, even though I generally adore detail. But when Hughes uses Mrs. Beeton's diaries of trips to France and Ireland to recount everywhere they went and everything they ate, I got--dare I say it?--a little bored. "They spent the next several days climbing mountains in Ireland and drinking copious amounts of beer with each meal" might have sufficed.

So I slowed down. I took breaks for novels and magazines. I felt guilty. There had already been one renewal, and there was not going to be another. Something had to be done. So I took action: first I skimmed the plagiarism and tourism; then I read till Mrs. Beeton's tragic death at a very young age; then I skipped the rest of the book, which was more than 100 pages about the afterlife of Mrs. Beeton and her book that was probably very interesting, but didn't particularly interest me. Then back went Mrs. Beeton and Mrs. Beeton to the library.

I was happy with the book and I was happy to be done with the book, but I did feel a bit guilty, because while I have learned to give up on books that I don't like, choosing to read just part of a book still seems somehow immoral.

My children dance about their books with impunity, skimming and skipping to their hearts' desires. Being particularly sensitive to the "scary," they just skip it: E's first real passion in a chapter book, the first book she has devoured, reading while walking and refusing to get out of the car, she is that engrossed, is Lois Lowry's All About Sam (understandably, as it yokes babies, toddlers, small children, and the oppressiveness of older siblings, all favorite topics), but she skipped the section where Sam becomes enamoured of dropping things in the toilet (actually, she handed the book to me and told me to tell her what happens and show her where that part is over). M doesn't like scary or boring. One of her current favorites is Madhur Jaffrey's Climbing the Mango Trees. She read the whole thing once, except some "boring stuff" about Jaffrey's family history; now she reads favorite chapters over and over, which is what she does with all her books.

Is it that they are of the multi-tasking multi-media generation? Where beginning and ending are just postmodern abstractions? Is it that they are as under the influence of their profoundly random father as their strictly linear mother? Are they more in touch with their own desires? Am I psychotically compulsive? Probably yes to all of the above.

But I just took Jane Smiley's 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel out of the library (I discovered its existence in this review of her new novel, which I haven't decided yet whether I want to read). I had no idea, until I got to the library shelf, how big it was, and I'm not sure I want to read her opinion on every single one of the 100 novels she covers in the second half of the book. But, you know, I don't have to! I can skim and skip. Because I can!

[Can I just say it's a good thing I'm quick with the delete key, because every single time I wrote Mrs. Beeton in this post, I actually typed Mrs. Beetong.]