The book:
After taking in a huge range of different subjects and themes in recent selections, this month we though we would return to something close, familiar and personal - Adam Mars-Jones’ memoir of his father, Kid Gloves.
That Kid Gloves is quite so superbly written should really come as no surprise: Mars- Jones is a prize-winning and highly respected short story writer, novelist and literary critic.
When his widowed father - once a high court judge and always a formidable figure - drifted into vagueness if not dementia, Mars-Jones took responsibility for his care. Intimately trapped in the London flat where the family had always lived, the two men entered an oblique new stage in their relationship. Kid Gloves comes from the aftermath of that unlooked-for intimacy.
Moving, profound and universal in its specific family details, we very much hope you enjoy your September choice.
What the Guardian thought:
Right at the beginning of this memoir of William Mars-Jones, a distinguished high court judge, Adam Mars-Jones describes moving into his parents’ house at Gray’s Inn, London, to help care for them. At the time, his father was slipping into vagueness rather than dementia. His mother was dying of cancer, “something she did with self-effacing briskness in little more than a month”. He describes how his mother became worried about where her ashes would be stowed while waiting for her husband to join her (the plan was to be interred together in Llansannan, Wales, where Mars-Jones senior was born).
Adam Mars-Jones comes up with a solution – a bit of domestic gallantry. He suggests he keep them in the top of a cupboard, which, one is slightly surprised to hear, closes the matter: “This little piece of symbolic hospitality was enough to bring her peace of mind.” And, once she is gone, he describes the feeling that she has died with “nothing left undone or unexpressed”. His mother (whom he says he most resembles) seems, like her ashes, to be easy to stow as a subject.
His father, by contrast, seems unstowable: there is to be no tidying away or easy summing up. Since Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son was published in 1907, there have been many memoirs written by sons about their fathers: Philip Roth, Michael Frayn, Blake Morrison, Rupert Christiansen and Patrick Lane have all attempted it, and Mars-Jones (who has borrowed from John Mortimer’s autobiographical play for the subtitle of his book) joins this company with an entertaining, tricky, nuanced portrait. Judging a judge is a delicate sport – actual judgment is left to the reader.
Ultimately – inevitably – it is his father’s judgment of him that is most at stake. He wishes he could have persuaded his father to see him not as a “butterfly brain” but as “something much more useful, a bee brain”. His description of bravely coming out one New Year’s Eve (when his father was still hale) is the most involving part of the book. “If there were an annual general meeting of the Homophobia League then he would be an honoured guest, if not a keynote speaker…” Mars-Jones senior tries all sorts of strategies to persuade his son he is not gay – case not closed until he deems it closed. But then, towards the end of his life, he undergoes a sea change, unexpectedly restyling himself as a pro-gay rights man. One of his favourite commands to his sons used to be: “Rally buffaloes!” Now he is rallying. Does Adam Mars-Jones rejoice? No way: he rages against this reinvention, finds it suspect, too easy. (“Dad had to go too far.”) For above all, we require our parents to be themselves and not slip out of character. Or, as he puts it, “Barnacles don’t just slip off the hull.”
Kate Kellaway - Read the full review
If you liked this, then try:
- Jeremy Hutchinson’s Case Histories by Thomas Grant
- Latest Readings by Clive James
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