A genre which possibly does not even exist

[oursin]

Thinking about my identity as North London Guardian-reading woman Of A Certain Age, I was thinking 'Whoops, ought to be getting on with my adultery-in-Hampstead novel'. (That, my friends, will be the day...)

And it then occurred me that in a fairly broad acquaintanceship with mid-C20th British litfic, I can't honestly think of enough novels that I've read which contained the plot motif of adultery in a Hampstead setting to go any way at all to constituting a viable subgenre, largely associated with women writers, and generally deployed dismissively in a subclause to praise some work as not belonging to this despised species. The concept is still extensively evoked in reviews and by columnists (I just googled it), but does it actually represent anything that one might find on the library shelves or in a bookshop?

A number of Stella Gibbons' novels are set in and around Hampstead and Highgate, but they are not about adultery.

I have a vague recollection (and can't be arsed to go and look it up) that the protag of Margaret Drabble's The Waterfall is living somewhere in the West Hampstead/Kilburn area when she begins an affair with her cousin's husband, but that does not at all fit in with the 'Hampstead-adultery' paradigm, which is about people with too much time on their hands, plenty of money, nice houses, and exquisitely sensitive feelings. Jane is a recently-deserted poet and single mother (the novel opens with her giving birth to child no 2) living in a near-slum.

Something closer to the paradigm would be a series of now forgotten (and not, I think, unjustly-neglected) novels by Stuart Evans, the 'Windmill Hill' sequence, 1970s/80s, about a group consisting of media professionals, academics, and politicians, quite a bit of which took place in the general area of Hampstead and the plot complications did, as I recall, involve a fair amount of extra-marital shagging of one kind and another. But in my recollection had pretensions to being 'state of the nation' novels, rather than the kind of girly-wirly sensitive evocation of individual emotional states and moral angst implied by 'Hampstead adultery novel'.

So I am coming to the conclusion the Hampstead adultery novel is yet another of those spectres that haunt discourse and cannot be located to specific examples, largely used as a rather lazy way of defining 'something this is not'.

Comments

[legionseagle.livejournal.com]

I don't suppose "Bouquet of Barbed Wire" could have been set in Hampstead, could it?

I think, myself, it's one of those phrases like "Aga Saga"; do people actually check that Joanna Trollope, Libby Purves et al actually include a branded kitchen appliance in each volume?

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I have a vague feeling of Notting Hill, but it's a very long time since I read it.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

There are other Drabbles that come a lot closer -- The Realms of Gold and The Ice Age. There's also Penelope Lively's The Road to Lichfield.

I think in the same way that David Lodge's Changing Places et seq represent the entire supposed genre of professors having affairs, these sorts of things represent that, even if it isn't always literally Hampstead. I know when people mention that it's The Road to Lichfield and The Ice Age that come to my mind immediately.

[livinglaurel.livejournal.com]

in the same way that David Lodge's Changing Places et seq represent the entire supposed genre of professors having affairs

//SNORT

....ahem, excuse me, yes. I call wish-fulfillment!

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't have characterised those particular Drabbles as predominantly about adultery in Hampstead (both have other things going on apart from the characters' affairs and extended episodes in the provinces, in RofG in Africa, and in IA in Eastern Europe) - as opposed to having both extra-marital affairs in the plot and Hampstead as part of the setting. But someone on my flist was commenting the other day on someone in her workplace looking at the cover of what she was reading, which happened to be North and South, and dismissing it as 'early chicklit'. So I can quite see that they could be thus categorised.

[legionseagle.livejournal.com]

Also, what about Penelope Mortimer: The Pumpkin Eater etc? That's Hampstead, isn't it?

[oursin.livejournal.com]

As her famous breakdown takes place in Harrods (doesn't it?) I would have guessed Kensington-ish. And the protag is the victim of others' adultery rather than the agent in an affair.

[livinglaurel.livejournal.com]

Sadly I am geographically handicapped to the point where I regularly got lost in the town where I grew up as an adult, so the only thing my poor brain was able to throw up ("Hampstead is....north? Amis country?") was A Far Cry from Kensington.

Which, no. On several levels.

[pigeonhed.livejournal.com]

Was it not simply glib alliteration that created 'humping in hampstead'?

[oursin.livejournal.com]

But it is Hampstead rather than Hoxton or Hackney, with all the connotations that has (though these days it might well be in the process of being replaced by Hoxton).

[wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com]

I've been trying to come up with the US equivalent, and I find myself thinking of John Cheever and John Updike. They both have accumulated a great deal of literary respect for writing precisely that sort of novel: well-off suburbanites drinking and boinking to excess.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Ah, but they are men, so that makes it all SRS BZNZ and literarily respectable. When women do it it's girly and evading the SRS BZNZ of Life.

As William Gass explained,

[wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com]

That's because silly gurlz "lack that blood-congested genital drive which energizes every great style."

Re: As William Gass explained,

[madam-silvertip.livejournal.com]

And as Norman Mailer explained, silly gurlz cannot write with their balls (and inspire Cynthia Ozick's musing on what color ink they would do it in, if they could write with their balls).

Re: As William Gass explained,

[oursin.livejournal.com]

This is like ?Manet ?Renoir painting with his penis... Messy.

Re: As William Gass explained,

[madam-silvertip.livejournal.com]

Yup, and there's also skin oxygen deprivation to worry about. (quoth Morbid Bruiness to Merry Hedjog)

Re: As William Gass explained,

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Icon adoration! LolBurroughs!

[buffysquirrel.livejournal.com]

Gah, I don't care if the adultery novel is written by a man, a woman, or a hamster, nor where it's set. I ain't reading it. Therefore I cannot assist with your researches :D.

[madam-silvertip.livejournal.com]

Another such stereotype--more coherent in describing "something this is not" than "something which exists"--is the "Aga saga." The only woman writer whom I associate strongly with an Aga is Anna Haycraft, in her incarnation as a cookery writer--which would fit, wouldn't it? (By the way, is an Aga all it's cracked up to be? Not that I will ever be able to afford one.)

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

(By the way, is an Aga all it's cracked up to be? Not that I will ever be able to afford one.)

I imagine that it is if you genuinely need it to revive ducklings/puppies/lambs and also use it to heat your C16 farmhouse and hot water. But my aunt's was sheer pretension.

[madam-silvertip.livejournal.com]

If someone willed me ten thousand US dollars with the stipulation that it be spent on an Aga, I wouldn't cry. (That is if I could get it in the kitchen, which isn't a sure thing.) But I'd probably wonder how much I was actually using it in a way that can't be accomplished with my little electric stove.

If I was married to a publisher and had to cook for lots of drunken literary people I would probably be as in love with it as Mrs. Haycraft was with hers, but as someone who cooks for a household of two people who seldom entertain on any scale, I'd think about how much more someone else could be getting out of it.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

As I recall, one of the cookers in the dom sci room at my school was an Aga, or at least a solid fuel stove. Can't remember if I ever got to use it (we rotated round the various stations week by week).

[madam-silvertip.livejournal.com]

It does sound rather heavenly for multitasking, if one has some serious multitasking to do. And with seven (five surviving) kids and the publishing company I can well imagine that Anna Haycraft owed her career to it as much as to Colin--she parked her desk in front of it, as I remember, probably with the tacit understanding that if she was dislodged so would be the victuals.

But in terms of actual cooking, as opposed to multitasking, I tend to think that a cook who needs a fancy stove to produce something creditable is a poor cook. Most of cookery is in the pre-stove preparations (the old French-Italian-etc. standby of putting in the investment of time and money for good-quality, fresh ingredients and readying them as needed) and in the attention one gives to the stove stage, not the stove itself. If the stove provides the heat more or less reliably.

Again, if one's attention was often claimed by other things one would want a stove sophisticated enough to cook pretty much on its own. And probably one could get used to that part, under any circumstances. I'd like to cook on one at least once to see what it's like.