Murder! Mayhem! Revenge – ! – ending in a glorious absurd climax. A feminist tract taken to its ultimate hilarious finale. Brilliant! This is another of the Storybook ND (New Directions) books, this time written by Rachel Ingalls. This one has 60 pages six lines and two words. It was dropped off in my front porch by the usual invisible delivery man and I went out and picked it up. I took it into the kitchen, undid the packaging, took the book out and opened it. I glanced at the first page – as you do – just to have a look at it, read the first sentence, then the first paragraph, then the first page – and was totally hooked.
I stood where I was in the kitchen and read the whole thing – all at once – in one entranced go. It mounted and mounted in a crescendo of building hilarity to its crazy end. And when I put it down, I stood some more and laughed and thought about it all over again. A book of satisfying absurdity. Much enjoyed.
Helen and Edgar are a married couple. Their lives drift along reasonably comfortably. Edgar works in a private pathology lab somewhere. Helen does adult education classes twice a week – oil painting, flower arranging, intermediate French and beginning Italian and a few others. They have two sons, but they are at boarding school.
But the lease of the school where the adult education classes take place is running out and the school is about to close. So the classes are going to stop. Helen carefully lets Edgar know, well ahead of time. But Edgar never listens. Until, that is, when the classes are actually stopped and are no more. Helen tells him she’s going to be at home now every day from then on. Edgar hears her at last – and says she can’t possibly do that. He needs to have the house to himself. She says she can set up a studio down in the cellar and paint down there. He says he needs peace and quiet. She says, well painting isn’t very loud. He’s having none of it. She has to not be there at all.
He has his own ‘lab’ upstairs where he does his ‘experiments’ and which he keeps securely locked at all times. Helen has never been in it. He spends hours and hours in his lab – sometimes nearly all night. Helen accepts all this as part of life. She is amazingly calm about it all, having over the years built up strategies for dealing with him. But she is really upset that all she wants to do is be in her own house and he is forbidding her that simple thing.
But she goes on managing the usual household bits and pieces, and trying to find some new classes somewhere else. Until the morning when he complained from behind his newspaper that four segments of his grapefruit had not been cut properly through.
And that’s when life changed. He goes out to work after breakfast and Helen, who all this time has actually had a key to his lab which she had accidentally found but never dreamed of using, decides to go up and see what experiment was so important going on up there. So she goes upstairs – with the key.
And that’s the beginning of it all. The bulk of the book is what happens next. We meet somebody called Ron. That’s all I’m going to divulge! It is beautifully written, from the slow build-up to the mounting nuttiness of the end. The conversations between Helen and Edgar are masterly. Apparently Rachel Ingalls – an American who lived in the UK for many years – has written many books but I am sorry to say I had not heard of her until I read this. If they are all as wonderfully funny-macabre as this, I will be reading more. Sadly, I believe she died in 2019. But she’s left behind a book or two. So there are her books to read. I hope you enjoy this one as much as I did!
[We have a copy of In the Act in the library]
