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Sleeping Arrangements |
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The Washington Post San Francisco Chronicle Anne Tyler, The Baltimore Sun Los Angeles Times People Ingram THE OBSERVER January 16, 2005 When her mother died of cancer, Laura Shaine Cunningham's two eccentric bachelor uncles gave up everything to raise her….tragedy brought the three together - and … comedy kept them close. 'A beautiful story that I will cherish for years to come,' said Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, in one rare pronouncement. Muriel Spark described it as a 'great pleasure'. Jessica Mitford wrote: 'I did so love it. The uncles, the grandmother, the mother. The whole thing was a terrific treat.' The book began to take on a life of its own. It sold, and went on selling. Today, it is studied in high schools and colleges, and is a well-loved staple of book groups from Seattle to Savannah. 'The New Yorker bought extracts. Cunningham's childhood is so very unlikely, and her memory of it so marvelously Technicolor, that the book has the quality of fine fiction. It is touching, without ever being mawkish, socially aware without ever being preachy. It has a lot to say about growing up poor in America, and about living in an immigrant community. It is also invigoratingly frank on the subject of the sexuality of children. But most enjoyable of all, it features a cast of genuine eccentrics - characters with an almost Dickensian resonance. Eight years old, Laura - or Lily, as she was in those days - is brought up by her mother. The two of them live a peripatetic life because, thanks to a shortage of affordable cheap housing, they are homeless; fearful of using up the goodwill of family and friends, they move from place to place, sleeping in spare rooms or, more often, on floors and under tables. They can change households 'in minutes'. Lily and her mother move to a fresh, white studio apartment in the Bronx. This bare box lies inside AnaMor Towers, a building with an unexpectedly ornate interior. In the lobby, murals depict scenes of Dionysian excess. The lift is of 'Ionic' design. Every resident must pass a frieze of Pompeii on their way to the incinerator. Lily has two friends: wild Diana, whose father is some kind of criminal, and who is happy for the local flasher to pay her to touch his 'thing'; and the altogether more privileged Susan, who likes to play some rather recherche games (her favourite involves Lily pretending to be a sailor and breaking into Susan's bedroom, where she then has to watch her friend perform exotic dances). With these two, Lily has a high old time. Then, one day, the idyll is broken. Her mother dies of cancer, and in her place come her two brothers: Len, a 6ft 6in private investigator, a trenchcoat-wearing cross between Abraham Lincoln and Sam Spade, and Gabe, a librarian who, in spite of his Jewishness, writes gospel songs in his spare time. Lily is mad with grief. But thanks to these two men, who give up everything to come and live with her, her life goes on almost as normal. Len and Gabe are kindly but eccentric. They rustle up popcorn for breakfast – Len wearing a pith helmet in place of a chef's hat - and allow her to paint the apartment candy-stripe pink. Slowly, instinctively, they learn to raise a little girl; slowly, instinctively, she learns to raise two unmarried middle-aged men. SUNDAY HERALD Unlikely Bedfellows of Humour and Grief Make for a Pleasurably Painful Memoir, February 13, 2005 “The life we live inside our candy-striped, orange and pink and white apartment is as different as it appears…yet it was a happy family. For all its exuberant, unexpected humour, Sleeping Arrangements is also a very moving, eloquent study of grief. Dreams spill out in to daytime realities. Etka has nightmares about giving birth to a baby and losing it, and wakes up searching frantically among the bedsheets. Cunningham’s approach ensures a constant and compelling interplay between two moods:”If tragedy has brought us together, it’s comedy that keeps us close.” It is this powerful blend of opposite emotions tugging at the reader throughout, that makes this unusual, wonderfully vivid memoir such a pleasurably painful read.” FAMILY VALUED, review by Jonathan Self “I’d almost believe a politician before I’d trust a publisher’s book-jacket blurb. In the case of the American writer Laura Shaine Cunningham’s childhood memoir, Sleeping Arrangements, however, Bloomsbury’s hyperbole is entirely justified. For this delightful book is, as labeled, “a wry, funny and deeply affectionate portrait of the most unlikely of happy families. I would even agree it is a modern classic. …In this eccentric household, meals are taken at odd hours of the day and night, the denizens develop their own pidgin language, and there is a great deal of play-acting. One of the wonderful things about the memoir is that Cunningham avoids self-pity. She is also extremely funny.” TIMES ONLINE – SUNDAY TIMES BOOKS, review by Lucy Hughes Hallett “Cunningham’s memoir has a trenchancy to match its juvenile protagonist’s untempered view of the world. The shocking, the funny, the profoundly sad, are conveyed here with a directness that sharpens their impact and makes them glitter. “Our move had the effect of a magic trick,” she writes of the day she and her mother travelled by subway to a new apartment carrying everything they owned. “We changed households in minutes.” Her narrative is equally spare and breathtaking. In quick-fire sentences full of sardonic judgments and surprising detail she conjures up her helter-skelter childhood and the odd people who saw her safely through it. For all the menace of its setting and the fearsomeness of some of its characters, this is a happy story. A couple of emasculated OBs (short for Old Bachelors) and a demented matriarch turn out to be a family infinitely more satisfactory than the visible examples of the more conventional model. Susan downstairs is abruptly sent off to live with a sister when her presence becomes inconvenient to her mother, an ideal housewife; but Lily, although her hair is so matted it brings the social workers round to investigate her domestic circumstances, although her meals are eccentric (Uncle Len cooks only tuna croquettes) and her furniture mostly boxes, is doted upon. As bright, startling and unusual as the decor that Lily’s uncles allow her to impose on them (orange and pink stripes everywhere except on the gold lame sofa), Cunningham’s book is both a tough, lucid evocation of dangerous city life, and a story of abundant love. THE TELEGRAPH, 'My early life’s a fiction’ Charlotte Moore is moved by this celebration of an eccentric household January 22, 2005 What is to be done with the orphaned Lily? Her bachelor uncles, Len and Gabe, move in. As with their dead sister, fantasy plays a large part in their lives. Len, 6ft 6in, is a hypochondriac who over-identifies with Abraham Lincoln, has a mysterious mistress whom nobody ever meets, and an equally mysterious career - he could be a private investigator, but then again... When Lily is in trouble at school, Len's answer is to take her on holiday t o a Cuba in the throes of revolution. The pious, lachrymose Gabe runs a tiny library from a former school lavatory, writes sentimental songs and "escorts" single women within a 50-mile radius, always hoping to meet Miss Right. They allow Lily to decorate the tiny apartment in eight-year-old style (orange candy stripes) and feed her on the handful of dishes her mother used to prepare for her. Everything gets dyed pink in the wash, they don't know what to do with her hair and nails, but with their jokes, games, superstitions and goodnight rituals they weave a safety net for a child in freefall. They're joined by their ancient mother, "Etka from Minsk". Lily hopes for a cookie-baking grandma, but Etka, the author of an interminable work-in-progress called Philosophy for Women, scorns domesticity. She steals Lily's trinkets, snips unwelcome faces out of family photographs, and sings her own praises day and night. Yet she's an attractive character, as loveable as a boastful toddler. The tragedy of her life is that she has no college diploma. The uncles kindly present her with a fake one, complete with a bogus ceremony, after which her happiness is complete. Part of the strength of Lily's family is that they share an understanding of the value of delusion. This book is hot; it beats with the authentic pulse of childhood. When the newly bereaved Lily brings home a savage, diseased stray cat, hoping that it is her lost kitten Sparkle, the reader is at one with her childish illogic; we suspend adult disbelief in the power of magic thinking. Without sentimentality, Cunningham celebrates the eccentric household of which she was the centre. A family, says Cunningham, is "a separate country with its own language, skills, and style". With verve and tenderness, she takes us there.
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It all turned out well...
(Januray 16, 2005)