The Plot
This is a memoir, and more a string of events than a story with a plot. However, the basic premise is that the author, his wife and their toddler decide to give up life in San Francisco in favor of moving to a village in Wales. Here, the lovely country air and the peaceful British countryside will provide their child with the perfect setting for growing up.
My Thoughts
The author, Paul, and his wife, Jennifer, are finding life in the big city of San Francisco to be less than ideal for raising a child. So they dispose of their place in California and head to the village of Hay-on-Wye in Wales, where they have vacationed several times in the past. Note that Paul is the American born child of British citizens and as such is considered a British national by that country, so just up and moving there is not as complex as it might be. The action in this book also takes place pre-9/11 (specifically during the year 2000) so all craziness introduced by that incident is not yet in place.
Both Paul and Jennifer appear to be writers, and not employed in such a way that they’re tied to a geographic location. This and Paul’s citizenship status remove the biggest obstacles to indulging in their whim, and so they proceed to Wales. When they arrive, they establish themselves at a B&B and begin looking for a more permanent residence. It does not take them too long to locate an apartment which they can take for a longer period of time and they move in above one of the forty bookshops in the town.
The remainder of the book details their efforts and failure to locate a suitable house to purchase, and their eventual decision to give up and return to the United States.
It’s hard to discuss the book itself without making judgements upon the actions taken by the author and his family, so I’m going to get that out of the way first. I think their plan was poorly thought out and even more poorly executed. Though they had visited the town several times previously, they did not appear to have any real idea about the real estate market in the area and they had only the vaguest of notions about the neighborhood aside from the fact that there were bookstores around. Their search for a house was lackluster at best, as they apparently looked at only three or four houses during their entire effort. And then, when they decided that Hay-on-Wye was not the town for them, instead of looking nearby for a more suitable location, they packed it in and returned to the United States. It was all very odd.
Now, how much of the oddness stems from the way the tale was told, I cannot say. It is entirely possible that there were lengthy conversations and much house hunting which took place off camera and was neither alluded to nor described in any way. In fact, I know there must have been at least a few discussions which were not related to the reader, as we are informed of the family’s imminent return to the U.S. as a sort of aside, in the author’s thoughts as he converses with a resident of the town.
As one might guess from this, the narrative itself is very episodic, jumping from one event to the next and glossing over details which, while not necessary, would give more insight into the people in the book. At many points I felt like the author started a thread and then dropped it without resolution. For instance, at the beginning of the book we find ourselves in London, where Paul has agreed to do a freelance article about how some old conduits are being used now for fibre optic cables. This all ties in somehow with green construction, and he goes around London looking for examples of this. He doesn’t find any right away, and we never hear what happened with this article, the proceeds from which were supposed to cover part of the costs of moving to Wales from California. Did he ever write it? Did he make stuff up? What happened? The reader is left hanging.
This sort of thing happens over and over again throughout the book. Paul is hired to organize a section at one of the bookshops in town, owned by the man who made the town into the used bookshop haven it is today. He works on it diligently for a good fraction of the book, and then suddenly he mentions that he is done working there, with no real explanation as to why. Was he finished? Did he quit? What happened? The family looks at several houses, and clearly they do not end up buying any of them, but the interactions with the current owners trail off without any satisfying conclusions.
In the midst of these unfinished anecdotes that make up the bulk of the story are little bits of information and quotations which the author has pulled from old books, obscure and not so obscure. For many of these inserts he provides a proper citation, with the book of origin’s title, author and date of publication. And for others he provides no citation at all, throwing them out as random bits of trivia. Random bits of hard to check trivia. I know this isn’t a scholarly work, but if you’re going to say things that sound too odd to be true, then surely you’re well aware of how they sound and of the potential need to back these assertions up with proof. Some sources might have been nice.
The writing itself flowed well and struck just about the right note of humor. I kept wanting to compare him to John Hodgman; he certainly isn’t in the same class as Hodgman or even Dave Barry at his best, but the prose was very readable, and the selections from older books were varied and interesting. I would like to compare him to Bill Bryson or Peter Mayle but, alas, I have not yet gotten around to reading either of them, so I can’t.
In Short
The title of this book is somewhat misleading, as the author acknowledges midway through the book, when Sixpence House finally appears for the first time. It seems, at times, that the author could not decide if this was a straight up memoir or a collection of anecdotes tied together by various bits of obscure quotation from out of print books. It was interesting to read, though I wish he could have made up his mind as to which direction he was going to go. The book would have been better for being more focused, with more attention being paid to either tightening up the stories or packing in info from even more random books. These issues are probably as much a result of poor editing as they are the author’s scattered attention. But while it was not the best book ever, it did provide a fascinating little glimpse of Hay on Wye, and I do now intend to attend the Hay Festival at some point.
