Becky, Christmas, and Other Things
Now that I’ve let the veneer of sophistication slip away, I’m quite enjoying Sophie Kinsella. Brisk conversation, female friendships, comfort food, cosy English homes — what’s not to like? I used to lean towards horror or mystery whenever I wanted to read something set in England, but the new, improved me is looking for humour. Imagining things, being clumsy, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time…now this is a heroine I can absolutely get behind.
The last few English novels I read were all spooky. Slade House (David Mitchell), The Little Stranger (Sarah Waters), and White is for Witching (Helen Oyeyemi) feature houses as prominently as people. That is part of the allure of English settings, after all! A large, rambling house with a long driveway, manicured lawns, musty wallpaper, and heavy furniture; light fittings that need to be repaired frequently, water that drips fitfully out of taps, perennial rain, a dusting of snow. Houses rule in I Capture the Castle (not scary, but not very cheery, if I remember correctly) and Northanger Abbey. An English-inspired house competes with the protagonist in Mexican Gothic. English houses have definitely done a lot for the horror/thriller genre.
The Kinsella book is a refreshing change. I didn’t even know it was set in England until I started reading. I had just assumed that the Shopaholic series was American, thanks to the movie. I can’t help seeing the actors in my head when I read the book, but that’s alright. I have no idea how they were described at the start of the series — conventionally beautiful, perhaps?
Christmas Shopaholic has some commonplace, funny incidents that I can relate to: sending a chat in the wrong WhatsApp group and making feeble attempts to cover up the mistake, for example. I achieved this a decade ago at work, on a public chat channel meant for our team to interact with the users we worked with, when my colleague and I texted each other about how hungry we were. (We also had nicknames for each other, derived from our work usernames.) One of the users texted me politely in private, requesting us to go have breakfast.
Becky, the heroine of the Shopaholic series, is spontaneous. She is generous with her things, seemingly has plenty of money, and puts her foot in her mouth all the time. She is as ‘girly’ as they get, but can also talk her way into a two-hundred-year-old club for billiards and parlour music, which was hitherto restricted to men. However, with Christmas around the corner and the hosting assigned to her, Becky has a massive task on her hands. Which also makes this a mystery novel for me, for the Christmas season seems to make people more nervous than happy. The pressure to buy presents and Christmas trees, decorate, make dinners, prepare children for Nativity plays, please guests…and in the US, this is just a month after Thanksgiving. Surely festivals could be spaced out better? Winters are bleak, the nights are long, the air is bitingly cold, so why would you want to go and stare at the National Christmas Tree on the White House lawns from under an umbrella? (Because everything else is shut in DC in December and the roads wear a post-apocalyptic quiet. If I ever felt a pang for kirana stores at every street corner, it was then — and every time I had to walk three kilometres to buy a capsicum; for all your careful weekly Indian store planning, there is always one more item you need.)
But back to Becky — she is the conventional heroine that they make millions from. She knows much more about fashion than I ever will, and spends laughable amounts of money going shopping. From what I’ve seen so far, there isn’t much depth to her character, but she surprises me with occasional flashes of insight. This is exactly the kind of reading I want now. I’ve already picked out another Shopaholic to read after I finish this in a couple of days. I’ll report back on it soon.
