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I’m sorry to report that I didn’t love Cloudy Jewel. A bunch of people recommended it, and it definitely sounds as if it should be right up my alley, but I’ve never met a Grace Livingston Hill character I liked more than a little, and if I had, Julia Cloud wouldn’t be it.

She should be. She’s a capable, unselfish spinster left at loose ends after her mother dies. She doesn’t want to go live with her genuinely awful sister and brother-in-law, and fair enough, but she hasn’t got enough money to do anything else. Enter her orphaned, almost grown-up niece and nephew, Leslie and Allison. They’re bound for college, and they want her to live with them and keep house and be a substitute parent with a salary. They find a house and furnish it at length, with nice rugs and modern appliances and kind of a lot of homemade curtains. And I don’t know what French gray enamel furniture looks like, but somehow it sounds really appealing.

So there’s home-making (always fun!) and winding the population of the town around the Clouds’ collective finger (usually fun) and also there’s kind of a lot of religion. Which isn’t actually a problem for me in itself, but it might be becoming a problem for me with Grace Livingston Hill. I might not have realized this if I hadn’t stopped in the middle of Cloudy Jewel to read something by Amy Le Feuvre, but I did, and when I came back to Hill afterwards she started to look like a hypocrite.

I mean, there’s a fine line. You want characters to be human beings, not saints, right? But Julia Cloud seems meant to be saintly, only Grace Livingston Hill doesn’t know how to show that. Julia’s clearly not meant to be too saintly — Hill knows not to do that. But she doesn’t know how to temper Julia’s saintliness. Like, laughing at Leslie and Allison’s mean-spirited jokes. Not cool. These aren’t, like, sociopathic, Tom Rover mean jokes, but they do betray a fundamental lack of sympathy for people in general.

Okay, so, eight or ten years ago I was at a bar or bat mitzvah for one of my cousins, and the rabbi talked about the commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself. My family hated this rabbi so much. We still talk about him once in a while. And here’s why: mostly he wanted to narrow the definition of “neighbor.” Your neighbors, he said, weren’t the people who happened to be around you. They were the people you’d chosen to go through life with.

Take a minute to think that through. Going by that definition, the commandment becomes meaningless. Because this is the golden rule: treat people as you want to be treated. You don’t get to choose who to be nice to and who not to be nice to. But what this rabbi was saying kind of boils down to this: be nice  to the people you want to be nice to. You only have to be nice to the people who are like you. In fact, you get to decide who is and isn’t worth treating well. And I’m not religious, but doesn’t that completely miss the point? I mean, you’re only really as nice as you are to the person you’re least nice to.

Hill reminds me of that rabbi. Not in an overt way, but…I don’t know. If I’m reading a book about people who are “real Christians,” I don’t want to see them delighting in uncharitableness towards people who haven’t done anything especially awful. And I say that as someone who’s pretty uncharitable, as a rule. If Julia Cloud is supposed to be better than me, I want her to actually be better.

I guess the bottom line is that all I want from religious fiction is a sense of everyone being essentially human, and worth being nice to. And it’s less important that I get that from the character then that I get it from the author. I get that from Le Feuvre. I get it from Susan Warner. I even get it from Mary Jane Holmes, who is super vindictive all the time and not necessarily very religious. But I don’t get it from Hill, who doesn’t seem to think anyone other than the three Clouds and their two best friends is terribly important. And sure, that’s not the end of the world. But it does leave a bad taste in my mouth.

Anyway.

I thought Cloudy Jewel was fun. I didn’t care about or respect any of the characters enough for more than that, and I haven’t figured out why the interior decoration and club organizing bits weren’t more satisfying for me, but I was, at least, really into Leslie’s motoring adventure. I mean, I was into any bit where Leslie shot at people. Also I’ve spent entirely too much time wondering why they couldn’t have carried a thermos or two on their cold-weather hikes and canoe trips instead of an actual pot of soup.

Cloudy Jewel isn’t on the shelf I thought it might be on, which means it’s in a box at my mom’s house, waiting to be moved to my apartment. So I continued my exploration of the work of Grace Livingston Hill with The Enchanted Barn. The Enchanted Barn is the story of a young secretary, Shirley Hollister, who needs to find a cheap home for her family for the summer, and ends up renting a stone barn.

First things first: at one point in this book, Shirley is reading  From the Car Behind. I’m not trying to cast aspersions on The Enchanted Barn when I say that that was genuinely the most exciting moment for me.

Aside from that, and the two foilings of plots that showcase Shirley’s extreme competence late in the book, mostly The Enchanted Barn is about the Hollisters’ new landlord, Sidney Graham, giving them things and falling in love with Shirley. But the improvements he makes to the barn, with and without their knowledge, aren’t balm to my materialistic soul in the same way as, say, Aunt Crete’s boatload of department store clothes.

I’ve been trying to figure out why that is, and I’ve come up with some theories. Bear with me though, because I’m basically making this all up.

There are three acceptable ways for characters to heap material benefits on people in novels:

1. By dying. Ideally, the person who dies should be vastly wealthy and unknown (or almost unknown) to the beneficiary of their will, but it’s also acceptable for the heir to just not know how wealthy the dead person was (Mr. Bingle), or not to expect to be given the bulk of the fortune (The Year of Delight).

2. In arranged marriages. It’s great when a not entirely willing husband lavishes gifts on the heroine of a novel, but only if he isn’t in love with her yet, or doesn’t know he is. Fake engagements might also come under this heading (Patricia Brent, Spinster).

3. From a family member or anyone else who is absolutely never going to be the protagonist’s love interest. Elderly ladies giving Patty Fairfield things. Aunt Crete‘s nephew pampering her.

These options have a couple of things in common: first, the gifts can’t be construed as charity. And second, they can’t be intended to get anything from the main character; they have no strings attached, or are treated as a matter of course. And that’s why the giver of the gifts has to be either unequivocally not a love interest or already married, because if they’re wooing the heroine, or might somewhere down the line, the gifts could be construed as part of the wooing. And that kind of ruins it.

The things Sidney Graham does for Shirley and her family fail on both counts. Part of his interest in Shirley is his attraction to her, right from the beginning, which makes it really difficult to see him as disinterested. And then, while Hill makes a point of Shirley being very sensitive about accepting charity, but she can’t back that up. I mean, she can tell us that both Shirley and Sidney are young and kind of dumb, but that doesn’t make Sidney’s putting staircases and walls and chimneys and windows into the barn anything other than a gift to her.

It lessens the impact of the family living in a barn, too. I mean, they’ve got furniture and stairs and curtains and stuff, and, while it’s still largely a barn, there’s no camping out feel to it. It’s less the story of a family roughing it in a barn for the summer and more the story of a family moving from a cramped city apartment into a big house in the country.

It’s a fun story — I don’t want to suggest that I didn’t enjoy it. The baby’s baby talk was awful, but the next youngest kid’s slang made up for it. And while the living in a barn aspect and the being given nice things aspect weren’t satisfying, the bits where Shirley was extremely competent and earned everyone’s admiration really were. I just spend an excessive amount of time thinking about tropes, and about how fiction functions. It may be an attempt to justify my extremely lowbrow reading choices.

When I get in a certain kind of mood, there’s nothing that I want more than stories about downtrodden people being showered with care and nice things and the people who have been metaphorically treading on them having that shoved in their faces. And Aunt Crete’s Emancipation, by Grace Livingston Hill, is the distilled essence of that. And you guys know me pretty well, I guess, because a number of you have recommended it to me over the past few years. It’s my own fault for not giving in and reading it sooner.Aunt Crete is Lucretia Ward, a dumpy middle-aged spinster who lives with her sister Carrie and her niece Luella. They’re not particularly nice to her, in just about every way they can manage. They pass off to her the greater share of the housework, deprive her completely of anything she wants for herself, and put down everything about her: her looks, her intelligence…even the kindness and love for her dead eldest sister that make her look forward to a visit from her unknown Western nephew.  Carrie and Luella are much less excited about the nephew, who they picture as gawky and uncivilized, and flee to a seaside resort just before he arrives, leaving Aunt Crete to receive him — and also to finish trimming some of Luella’s dresses and make jam and whitewash the cellar. The nephew, of course, is neither gawky or uncivilized. He’s handsome and wealthy and well-educated and kind, and he both appreciates and returns Aunt Crete’s affection. He also quickly grasps the actual nature of the situation, hard as Aunt Crete tries to hide it from him, and immediately starts making up for it. First he takes her shopping for clothes, sparing no expense — an essential part of this kind of book — and then he takes her to the same resort Carrie and Luella have run off to. From there on, Hill wallows in gentle malice. And she does it with such balance. She’s less gentle than, say L.M. Montgomery, but less malicious than Mary Jane Holmes, who would have had Luella die at the end of the book, but not before all her hair had fallen out. Hill only makes Luella marry a plumber, but she rubs Aunt Crete’s newly acquired advantages in Luella and Carrie’s faces exactly as much as I wanted her to.  To paraphrase Jimmy Carr on 10 o’ Clock Live, Grace Livingston Hill has clearly found my level. I’m just kind of impressed by the purity of this book, for lack of a better word. It’s the platonic ideal of this trope, whatever this trope is called. It’s unsullied by romance and there’s no plot to speak of – just nice things being showered on Aunt Crete and not on Carrie and Luella, and Carrie and Luella having that rubbed in their faces. It’s petty, and vindictive on behalf of a character who couldn’t be, and I love it. I should go figure out where I left that copy of Cloudy Jewel.