All this to say: The straw is officially part of the culture wars, and you might be thinking: “Gah, these contentious times we live in!” But the straw has always been dragged along by the currents of history, soaking up the era, shaping not its direction, but its texture.
The invention of American industrialism, the creation of urban life, changing gender relations, public health reform, suburbia and its hamburger-loving teens, better living through plastics, and the financialization of the economy: The straw was there for all these things — rolled out of extrusion machines, dispensed, pushed through lids, bent, dropped into the abyss.
You can learn a lot about this country, and the dilemmas of contemporary capitalism, by taking a straw-eyed view.
But after the high, there’s always a comedown, and this is true both in the short term (as in, the next day’s hangover) and in the long. Turns out the book’s seemingly diffuse structure, while unsuitable for carrying a quick plot, is actually essential to accomplish this other greater goal: understanding how people change over a lifetime, how a self is built, how the past is revised to suit the present, how adults come to epitomize exactly what they hated most as children, how secrets and pain and trauma play out in a mind and a body over the decades.
Why is it worse to conclude with “Kind regards” than “Yours sincerely”? Because kindness is something that necessarily involves the other person, the one to whom you are writing, and it’s that person, the recipient of the message, who ought to be judging whether what you’ve said is kind or not. It isn’t for you, the sender of the regards, to say. Sincerity, on the other hand, is feasibly in the power of the sender to judge, so it is an appropriate thing to claim on his or her own behalf (even if the recipient may have good cause to suspect a complete absence of sincere feelings).
All this is only to argue that any discussion or history of manners has to concern itself as much with their reception as with their acquisition or imposition. To be understood as polite or civil, a way of speaking or behaving needs another person to recognise it as such. What also needs to be recognised is that an alternative, impolite way of handling the same subject or situation is always available (and indeed sometimes unleashed by politeness, as in the stream of expletives following that toilet notice).
This isn’t a book written in the shadow of death, as Inside the Wave was; there’s not the same resonance and intensity, and some of the stories are slight. But there are new departures on the themes that preoccupied Dunmore: childhood, motherhood, war, friendship, forgotten lives. And where her subject is women under threat or siege, the writing takes off.
Like Language poetry, Gregory’s poems are difficult in the sense that they resist sense, at least common sense. But, like all good poetry, “Yeah No” invites you in by slowly teaching you its codes, and by reminding you that sense is not always the point: “You are reading this if you don’t understand.”