→ May 12, 2013
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Sons and Lovers.

I chatted on Thursday, and also posted an updated top 100 draft prospects ranking, with links to 40 scouting reports posted and another 20 either in the queue or en route to my editors.

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D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers was far easier to read than his later work Women in Love, although little of any consequence happens to the morose protagonist, the original mama’s boy of western literature, the human fungus Paul Morel. The book appears at #9 on the Modern Library 100 and is on the (unranked) Bloomsbury 100; it made the honorable mention list of 100 in the original Novel 100 and moved up to #62 when Daniel Burt revised the list in 2010.

Paul Morel stands in for Lawrence in this semi-autobiographical work, mirroring Lawrence’s peculiarly close relationship with his own mother and its effect on his attempted affairs with two women. The fictional Morel is the third child and second son of a working-class couple whose marriage has deteriorated through the father’s drinking and the mother’s domineering personality, a conflict that causes Paul and his older brother William to lose respect for their father entirely as they age. Paul forges an unusual bond with his mother that hinders him in two relationships in his late teens and early twenties, one with the innocent, smothering Miriam, the other with the more independent yet conflicted Clara.

Paul himself is a drip – enough that the literary critic Harold Bloom referred to this novel as “a portrait of the artist as a young prig.” Paul is obsessed with some kind of inner spiritual satisfaction independent of religion that he would find in love, but only finds it, for reasons never entirely clear to me, in his relationship with his mother – who does not satisfy his intellectual or artistic pretensions, only reveling in his modest successes, while discouraging his relationship with the sweet but nonintellectual Miriam, viewing her as a rival for her son’s affections. That affair sours when Paul discovers the more wordly Clara, separated from her husband under circumstances that Lawrence deliberately obscures from the reader until later, and with whom Paul has an affair that revolves more around sex than love (cast as “passion” within the book), an affair that withers later when Paul’s mother begins to die of cancer and when Paul meets Clara’s husband, a dim-witted brute severely damaged by his wife’s abandonment.

Even though Lawrence modeled Paul after himself, the emotional center of the novel isn’t Paul but Paul’s mother, who married beneath herself, grew miserable with her choices, and chose to focus her energies on her sons, first William and then Paul, living vicariously through them and manipulating them emotionally to try to influence their choices. She fails with William, and when that bond is beyond recovery, she turns to Paul, molding him as she sees fit, directing him in the workplace and in romance to the point where he cannot form a sound adult relationship with another woman while she still lives. There is no hint of untoward behavior, but the “Lovers” of the book’s title are clearly William and Paul, the surrogate loves of their mother’s otherwise unhappy life.

The saving grace of Sons and Lovers is the sheer intensity of Lawrence’s descriptions of emotions, both within Paul’s head and through his dialogue with his mother, Miriam, and Clara. It’s difficult to make passages that revolve around thought and feeling into compelling reading, yet Lawrence’s prose here never flagged – his familiarity with poetry is evident, as is his deep connection to the material. Paul’s a nebbish, more antihero than here – after he breaks with Miriam, you’re like, dude, cut the damn cord already – but Lawrence can invest the reader in Paul’s story despite that emotional immaturity.

Next up: I just finished Dan Koeppel’s superb non-fiction book Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World.

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→ March 31, 2012
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Saturday five, #2.

Five books, five links to my own stuff, and five links to others’ articles.

I’ve read eight books since my last post on any of them, so I’m going to take a shortcut and catch up by highlighting the five most interesting. Now that spring training is ending, I hope to get back to regular dishblogging soon.

* Charles Seife’s Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea is the one non-fiction book in this bunch, a history-of-math tome that incorporates a fair amount of philosophy, physics, and religion all in a book that’s under 200 pages and incredibly readable for anyone who’s at least taken high school math. The subject is the number zero, long scorned by philosophers, theologians, and even some mathematicians who resisted the idea of nothing or the void, yet which turned out to be critical in a long list of major scientific advances, including calculus and quantum mechanics. I generally prefer narrative non-fiction, but Zero moves as easily as a math-oriented book can get without that central thread.

* Dashiell Hammett’s Nightmare Town is one of three major Hammett short-story collections in print (along with The Continental Op and the uneven The Big Knockover), and my favorite for its range of subjects and characters without feeling as pulpy as some of his most commercial stories. The twenty stories are all detective stories of one sort or another starring several different Hammett detectives, including early iterations of Sam Spade and the character who eventually became the Thin Man, as well as a western crime story that might be my favorite short piece by Hammett, “The Man Who Killed Dan Odams.”

* Readers have recommended Tim O’Brien’s short story cycle The Things They Carried for several years, usually any time I mention reading another book that deals with the Vietnam War and/or its aftermath. The book, a set of interconnected stories that feels like an novel despite the lack of a central plot, is based heavily on O’Brien’s own experiences in that conflict, especially around death – of platoon mates, of Viet Cong soldiers, of Vietnamese civilians, and of a childhood crush of O’Brien’s who died at age 9 of a brain tumor. The writing is remarkable, more than the stories themselves, which seemed to cover familiar ground in the genre, as well as O’Brien’s ability to weave all of these disconnected stories into one tapestry around that central theme of death and the pointlessness of war. The final story, where he ties much of it together by revisiting one of the first deaths he discussed in the book, is incredibly affecting on two levels as a result of everything that’s come before.

* I’m a big Haruki Murakami fan – and no, I haven’t read 1Q84 yet and won’t until it’s in paperback – but Dance, Dance, Dance was mostly a disappointment despite some superficial entertainment value, enough to at least make it a quick read if not an especially deep one. A sequel of sorts to A Wild Sheep Chase, it attempts to be more expansive than that earlier novel but still feels like unformed Murakami, another look at him as he built up to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a top-ten novel for me that hit on every level. Dance is just too introspective, without enough of Murakami’s sort of magical realism (and little foundation for what magical realism it does contain) and no connection between the reader and the main character.

* I loved Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, a funny, biting satire on upper-class life in the United States just after World War I, so I looked forward to House of Mirth, present on the Modern Library and Bloomsbury 100 lists, expecting more of that sharp wit but receiving, instead, a dry, depressing look at the limitations of life for women in those same social circles prior to the war. It’s a tragedy with an ironic title that follows Lily Bart through her fall from social grace, thanks mostly to the spiteful actions of other women in their closed New York society; it’s a protest novel, and one of the earliest feminist novels I’ve read (preceded, and perhaps inspired, by Kate Chopin’s The Awakening), but I found myself feeling more pity than empathy for Lily as a victim of circumstances, not of her own missteps.

Next up: I’m reading Martin Booth’s A Very Private Gentleman (filmed as The American) and listening to Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine: How Creativity Works. The Booth book is on sale through that link for $5.60.

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Five things I wrote or said this week:

On Jeff Samardzija’s revival.

This week’s chat.

One batch of spring training minor league notes, including the Angels, A’s, Rangers, and Royals.

Tuesday’s “top 10 players for 2017” column, which I emphasized was just for fun and still got people far too riled up. There’s no rational way to predict who the top ten players will be in five years and I won’t pretend I got them right. But it was fun to do.

I interviewed Top Chef winner and sports nut Richard Blais on the Tuesday Baseball Today podcast, in which he talked about what it was like to “choke” (his word) in the finals on his first season and then face the same situation in his second go-round. We also talked about why I should break my ten-year boycott of hot dogs.

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And the links…

* The best patent rejection ever, featuring Borat’s, er, swimsuit.

* A spotlight on Massachusetts’ outdated liquor laws. For a state that likes to pretend it’s all progressive, Massachusetts is about thirty years behind the times when it comes to alcohol, to say nothing of how the state’s wholesalers control the trade as tightly as the state liquor board does in Pennsylvania. The bill this editorial discusses would be a small start in breaking apart their oligopoly, but perhaps enough to start to crumble that wall.

* I admit it, I’m linking to Bleacher Report, but Dan Levy’s commentary on how Twitter has affected what a “scoop” means, especially to those of us in the business, is a must read. And there’s no slidshow involved.

* The Glendale mayor who drove the city into a nine-figure debt hole by spending government money to build facilities for private businesses – including the soon-to-be-ex-Phoenix Coyotes – won’t run for a sixth term, yet she’s receiving more accolades than criticism on the way out. Put it this way: Given its schools, safety, and public finances, we never considered Glendale for a second when looking to move out here.

* The “pink slime” controversy has led the manufacturer to suspend production at three of its four plants. That makes for a good headline, but are job losses really relevant to what should be a discussion of whether this is something people, especially schoolchildren, should be consuming? And now the controversy is moving on to carmine dye, derived from an acid extracted from cochineal beetles and used in Starbucks frappuccinos. If nothing else, I applaud the new emphasis on knowing exactly what we’re eating.

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→ November 5, 2011
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New Grub Street.

George Gissing’s 1891 novel New Grub Street (free for Kindle) is an angry, biting, brilliant, but slow-moving novel about writers grappling with a changing literary environment in late 19th-century England, faced with a growing dichotomy between serious literary work and lowbrow work that is more commercially viable. It appears on the Bloomsbury 100 and is an honorable mention in The Novel 100. Its title refers to the defunct Grub Street in London, which had become synonymous with hack writing by the time of this novel’s publication.

The two central characters, friends yet rivals, are Jasper Milvain, the materialistic, ambitious writer who thinks of writing as a trade rather than an art; and Edwin Reardon, a poor, married father who sees himself as an artist but struggles with writer’s block, perhaps brought on by the pressure of having to support a family and live up to his own expectations of himself.

Milvain – I’m assuming the “vain” part of his name is not a coincidence – is naked in his ambition, an English Julien Sorel (but less witless), and talks incessantly about his plans to further his writing career, including tricks like reviewing the same book with different opinions for multiple publications. He also seeks a profitable marriage to a woman with capital and who would make a suitable mate for him in nouveau literary circles, a goal that has him proposing marriage to a new legatee, Marian Yule, only to find him regretting the act when her fortune disappears before she can inherit it. His interest in romantic love is as limited as his concern for literary merit in his output:

“I care very little about titles; what I look to is intellectual distinction.” (Jasper)
“Combined with financial success.” (his sister, Dora)
“Why, that is what distinction means.”

Reardon, on the other hand, is Gissing’s equivalent to the nameless narrator of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, poor (although not quite starving), with two published novels, neither of which sold well, the latter of which was less well-received by critics than the former, now facing reduced circumstances if he can’t complete and sell another work. His wife, Amy, loves him but grows exasperated with his self-defeating attitude; as their money troubles grow, their bickering becomes a quarrel that leads to separation, while Edwin convinces himself that Amy is withholding affection and also finds himself without love for their son, Willie.

Milvain and Reardon’s diverging paths are set against the contrast of two other secondary characters who follow more extreme versions of the same careers. Whelpdale is as ambitious as Milvain, yet far more sentimental, and succeeds in business through hard work and good character; Biffen, on the other hand, is a true starving artist, hard at work on a magnum opus that is, of course, unreadable, the completion of which leaves him without a purpose in life (and with almost no profit for his labors).

Jasper is far from sympathetic, but he’s the book’s most interesting character because he is in constant motion, scheming to push himself forward, making and breaking alliances as needed, playing both ends of an argument for his own gain. He views himself as worldly, yet shows a comical ignorance of the lives of those who lack his advantages:

“I always feel it rather humiliating,” said Jasper, “that I have gone through no very serious hardships. It must be so gratifying to say to young fellows who are just beginning: ‘Ah, I remember when I was within an ace of starving to death,’ and then come out with Grub Street reminiscences of the most appalling kind. Unfortunately, I have always had enough to eat.”

His plotting extends to his two sisters, Maud and Dora, pushing them to earn their livings through writing and to make advantageous matches; Maud is the silly girl, falling for a wealthy cad who is bound to disappoint her, but Dora, Gissing’s best secondary character here, is a very modern, progressive woman for that era; she sees her brother as superficial and isn’t afraid to openly mock him for it. Gissing narrates in the third-person, as he must to track all of these storylines, but Dora would have been an excellent choice for a first-person narrator and serves some of that role on a limited basis when she frames Jasper’s more absurd outbursts.

Gissing was an early proponent of naturalism in literature, using highly detailed, realistic language and settings to criticize the social order of the day, from the declining recognition of literature as art to the constraints of Victorian morality. When Amy and Edwin separate but can’t easily divorce, she raises this criticism of the difficulty of divorce for the lower classes:

“Isn’t it a most ridiculous thing that married people who both wish to separate can’t do so and be quite free again?” (Amy)
“I suppose it would lead to all sorts of troubles – don’t you think?” (Edith)
“So people say about every new step in civilization.”

English society survived, of course, and Amy’s/Gissing’s observation about doomsayers remains relevant today. New Grub Street isn’t a protest novel per se, but the struggles of Reardon (the more autobiographical of the two central characters) offer up a complaint against the rising materialism of the era drawn from Gissing’s own experiences as a starving young writer while foreshadowing Gissing’s own marriage to a woman who didn’t appreciate him as an artist.

Where New Grub Street falls short is in narrative greed. Novels about writers or writing tend to be light on action – will he finish the book? will she have enough to pay the rent? are not the sort of questions to keep the pages turning, and only Gissing’s heavy use of dialogue kept the pacing up. I’ve read a handful of novels about writers, the best of which was probably Dawn Powell’s The Wicked Pavilion, an ensemble novel that sends up all manner of artists and the rich philistines who fund them.

Next up: Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here, an alternate-history work about the rise of a American fascist politician leading up to the 1936 election.

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→ October 18, 2011
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The Good Soldier Švejk.

Jaroslav Hašek’s unfinished comic novel The Good Soldier Švejk: and His Fortunes in the World War, ranked #96 on Daniel Burt’s Novel 100 and part of the Bloomsbury 100, is a funny, sprawling, slow-reading, and deeply angry look at the pointlessness of war through the eyes of an anarchist soldier who’d be at home in Project Mayhem yet manages to put on a good face enough to keep himself out of harm’s way.

The novel follows the exploits – although given how little he manages to accomplish, we might better call them inploits, or unploits – of the soldier named Švejk (pronounced something like “schwayk”), who finds himself drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army at the dawn of World War I and acts with a single goal in mind, that of his own survival. Along the way, he’s passed from one half-wit superior officer to another, from power-mad lieutenants to drunken chaplains, gets lost (most likely on purpose) in Bohemia in a section ironically referred to as “Švejk’s anabasis,” gets arrested and nearly hung, and always responds to inquiries by telling the absolute truth, embellished with a ridiculous anecdote of someone Švejk knew in his hometown.

The grand secret of Švejk – the character and the novel – is that absurdity is the only viable strategy in the face of the absurdity of a higher authority. Faced with a war that makes survival unlikely, fought over a cause in which none of the fighters has a personal stake, Švejk chooses to “pretend to be an idiot,” playing the part of a perfect innocent who relives what is, in essence, the same episode over and over and always escaping by disarming and/or exasperating those who wish to send him to certain death on the front lines.

If this sounds a lot like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, then you’ve got the idea. Švejk is not a direct antecedent to Yossarian; the latter’s subversion is explicit, while the former works through simpler and more ostensibly innocent means, like taking a direct order a little too literally. Working as batman to the lieutenant he haunts for much of the book, Švejk fulfills his master’s order for a dog by kidnapping one off the street, only to find that the dog’s owner is the lieutenant’s commanding officer, the insane Colonel Kraus, who peppers his harangues by asking his charges if they know what obvious words like “window” or “hoe” mean. Yossarian engages in more active efforts of sabotage – and has plenty of help from his fellow soldiers – whereas Švejk is a solitary operative attempting not to end a futile war but only to get himself to the next sunrise without getting shot.

(I’ve struggled to find a definitive answer on whether Švejk was a direct influence on Catch-22; Wikipedia – which is never wrong – states that it was, probably based on the claim by Czech writer Arnošt Lustig that Heller told him he couldn’t have written his masterpiece if he hadn’t first read Švejk. That seems to be the only source for this assertion; this 2004 New York Times review of a Švejk play states that Heller “ told various interviewers that Céline and Kafka were his most powerful influences and that Švejk was ”just a funny book,’” while a Vanity Fair article from August gives a non-Švejk origin story for Catch-22. I could see a truth in between the two extremes, where Heller, having read the book, was influenced by it on a subconscious level, drawing inspiration from its hero’s response to the war’s absurdity but never returning to the earlier novel in his writing process or alluding to it directly in the text.)

The Good Soldier Švejk is tough to read, even with its humor, for two reasons. One is the translation by Cecil Parrott that has earned criticism for excessively literal, “unimaginative” translations of words and phrases, leaving speech sounded stilted and losing the humor of the original Czech text (that’s the critic’s opinion, not mine). Slavic texts are often tough to read because the sentence structure in those languages differs from ours and because the literary style, especially in the 19th century and early 20th, tended toward long, ponderous passages. The other drawback is that the book is, by design, repetitive. War is stupid, monotonous, and produces entirely foreseeable results. I can’t blame Hašek for making that point through the circular plot, but the feeling that we’re not really going anywhere – combined with the knowledge that the novel is unfinished, so we can’t even get where we might have been going – made my forward progress slow.

Unrelated to any of the above, Hašek talks a lot about food, including jitrnice (a type of Czech liverwurst), goulash, and kolache (a fruit-filled pastry found in parts of Texas where Czech immigrants settled). I was most struck by Hašek’s description of how the insatiable soldier Baloun describes a dish he remembers from back home:

‘You know, at home in Kašperské Hory we make a sort of small dumplings out of raw potatoes. We boil them, dip them in egg and roll them well in breadcrumbs. After that we fry them with bacon.’ He pronounced the last word in a mysteriously solemn tone.

Shouldn’t we always pronounce “bacon” in a mysteriously solemn tone?

Next up: Evelyn Waugh’s biting comic novel Vile Bodies.

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→ April 25, 2010
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The Makioka Sisters.

Quick update on the baseball front – my editors have scheduled the top 100 draft prospects list for publication on Monday night, which gave me a chance to make a few major changes based on some last-minute dope.

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Junichiro Tanazaki’s The Makioka Sisters appears on the Bloomsbury 100 as the only Japanese-language novel on the list, which covers novels written prior to 1950. It’s a dense period piece, an observation on the decline of traditional Japanese culture, depicted through the declining fortune of the Makioka family and their struggle to find Yukiko, the third of four sisters, a husband.

Japanese tradition dictates (so I infer from the book) that the youngest daughter may not marry until her older sisters have all done so, and that provides the only real conflict at the heart of this wordy book, as Taeko (also called “Koi-san,” meaning “small daughter”) has already run off once with a beau and is clearly chafing under the thumb of tradition and her hidebound family. Both Taeko and Yukiko live with the second daughter, Sachiko, and her husband, but their lives are also run from afar, the “main house” in Tokyo where the oldest of the four sisters lives with her husband in gradually diminishing surroundings as their family grows.

The entire plot revolves around the family, particularly the three sisters in Ashiya, and repeated failures in the search for an arranged marriage for Yukiko; where the family had once rejected suitors because of their high standards, by the novel’s opening it’s clear that the tides are shifting, where their standards are becoming outdated while the desirability of a Makioka daughter for a wife is lessening. Yukiko herself is slowly revealed as a stuck-up, insular, immature woman in her early 30s, and it’s possible (but never made explicit) that her disinterest in every candidate presented to her is more a function of her fear of change, or a lack of desire to leave a comfortable, easy family life where she’s supported by her sister and brother-in-law and serves as a second mother to Sachiko’s daughter, Etsuko. Taeko, meanwhile, is the most compelling character but is given the least exploration, with Sachiko sitting closer to the novel’s center. Sachiko is trapped by the family’s rigid adherence to tradition, and her escapades become more serious as the novel moves on, some understandable even today (affairs with men of questionable reputation) and some not (she becomes an expert doll-maker and seamstress and earns some money for herself through her work). The same story, told from Taeko’s point of view, would have been twice as compelling, and I wish I’d had her thoughts on why rebellion was preferable to separation from her domineering family.

And, unfortunately, that was my major problem with The Makioka Sisters – 500 pages that hinge on a conflict that now feels dated without enough focus on the most interesting character in the worst position of any of the sisters do not make for a compelling read, and when the prose is dense and rich, it required some effort to get through it.

There was one moment of unintentional humor from this 1957 translation by the eminent Japanese-English translator, Edward G. Seidensticker – this footnote:

“Balls of vinegared rice, highly seasoned and usually topped with strips of raw or cooked fish.”

Yes, in 1957, the word “sushi” was sufficiently foreign to English-speaking readers that it required further explanation.

Next up: Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World.

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→ February 9, 2010
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Mrs. Dalloway.

Virginia Woolf ripped James Joyce’s Ulysses when it was first published, but liked the idea of a single-day novel enough to use it in a novel of her own, one that hews more closely to the conventional novel form and appears to be something of a rejoinder to Joyce’s genre-busting efforts: Mrs. Dalloway. Unfortunately, a straightforward novel about quotidian life is about as interesting as you’d expect a novel about the mundane thoughts of ordinary people to be; that is, it’s boring as hell.

Woolf’s gambit is to spend most of the novel inside the heads of her characters, with jarring, unannounced transitions from head to head, sometimes within a room (almost as if you had a sudden camera change, from behind one character’s eyes to behind another’s), sometimes to a separate time and place through the slimmest of segues. Only one of her characters might qualify as interesting, the shell-shocked Septimus Smith, who today would be diagnosed with post-tramautic stress disorder and possibly treated, thus making him relatively uninteresting for the novelist’s purposes. The contrast between his futile attempts to make sense of a world gone mad – he’s a World War I veteran who hears voices and suffers paranoid delusions – and the utterly insignificant thoughts of the vapid upper-class characters in the rest of the book is shocking, but Woolf spends too much time with the well-heeled and not enough with Septimus.

The one wisp of intrigue in the book comes from the hints at romantic tension between Clarissa Dalloway and her former flame, Peter Walsh, once a boy of some promise but now a man whose progress has been hindered by his own poor choices. The sight of Clarissa still stirs old passions in Peter, reducing him to tears or boiling him in rage … but nothing much comes of it and Clarissa’s party, the goal of her day, goes off as planned. Her own existential crises – mostly a fear of death or simply regret that all this must one day end – seem so much less serious given how she chooses to spend her time or emotions.

Peter does have one small episode that stood out, for me, for its sheer darkness, as he stalks – there’s no better word for it – a young woman in the streets of London for several blocks before giving up:

Well, I’ve had my fun; I’ve had it, he thought, looking up at the swinging baskets of pale geraniums. And it was smashed to atoms – his fun, for it was half made up, as he knew very well; invented, this escapade with the girl; made up, as one makes up the better part of life, he thought – making oneself up; making her up; creating an exquisite amusement, and something more. But odd it was, and quite true; all this one could never share – it smashed to atoms.

Up next: I’ve taken a few days off from reading, but I’ll start Edward P. Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Known World later this week.

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→ February 3, 2010
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More thoughts on Ulysses.

So I suppose a book as heavily analyzed as Ulysses is worth a second post. There were some interesting responses in the comment thread on the last post, and I wanted to respond to two of those here. First, from Jay:

Also, there’s a lot more good in Bloom than you give him credit for. He’s a very good father, and a better husband in most respects than the typical Dubliner like Simon Deadalus. He’s a progressive free-thinker (which often makes him seem out of step with the other characters). He’s also financially successful despite having changed jobs so many times. To be sure, he has his strange sexual interests, but these have a bearing on his past and only add to the very interesting Molly/Bloom puzzle. To characterize him as “pathetic, a deviant, simpering ne’er-do-well” is not fair. (You can also let this rant serve as evidence that the book can inspire some intense loyalty among some readers).

This seems to be a common view, that Bloom is a better character than I saw; Blamires called him Joyce’s “Everyman” and other critics just marvel at how well fleshed-out he is. Here’s what I saw, beyond his perverted sexual tastes. He’s not, in my view, a good husband; he’s a provider, yes, and that puts him above the median in Joyce’s Dublin, but he is emotionally tone-deaf and has allowed his marriage to atrophy after the death of their 11-day-old son. At a time when his wife needed him to step up, he appears to have done nothing, and while he’s not happy with his non-conjugal marriage and frequent cuckolding, he’s not doing jack about it, and if anything seems to be ignorant of the fact that things he does and says drive Molly further away from him. Perhaps the marriage is beyond repair, but given what I could glean from Molly’s soliloquy at the end of the book, I don’t think so. I also saw little evidence either way on the quality of his parenting or relationship with his daughter; he cares about her, which, again, may put him above the median for fathers in Joyce’s Dublin, but while that’s a necessary condition for good parenting, it’s not sufficient. And even his efforts to help Stephen Dedalus are rooted in self-interest, mostly the prospect of financial gain, not in genuine interest for the boy. His progressive, free-thinking philosophy has just shifted its locus from God to money.

Another reader pointed to this story on the first Chinese translation of Ulysses, from the Atlantic Monthly. Even if you haven’t read Joyce’s book, it’s a great article, and it gives you some flavor for the wordplay in the book, which leads me to this comment from one of the many of you referring to himself as “brian:”

if you go into ulysses (even moreso finnegan’s wake) expecting plot, narrative, story, then you’re missing a large part of what the novel is trying to do. it brings language….sound, rhythm, cadence to an equal field with what we expect from an a-b-c story. there are sections of the book where it is perfecly advisable (and enjoyable!) to remove your critical mind from understanding the characters and their relationships and the plot from its movement to simply ‘hear’ the words and their sounds in a new way.

I understand, and understood from early on in Ulysses, that the play is not the thing – the language is. That’s great. It’s not what I like to read. I love getting lost in a good story – it doesn’t have to be a happy one, or a funny one, or a fast-paced one, as long as it’s a compelling one that’s well-told, with characters I can understand and with whom I can empathize. It’s analogous to the handful of you who criticized my omission of any Radiohead tracks from my list of my favorite songs from the 2000s, but Radiohead’s electronic, sparse, 2000s sound, while critically acclaimed, is just not what I like. I like guitars. I like plots. Sue me.

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→ February 2, 2010
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Ulysses.

James Joyce’s Ulysses, to me, is not a novel. It is a puzzle, or a set of puzzles, or even a grand intellectual adventure, but when writers discuss how Joyce subverted the novel form or changed how writers thought of the novel, they are covering for the fact that Joyce wrote an enormous work of fiction that is only characterized as a novel because our language does not have an adequate word to describe it. It’s not a short story, and it’s not quite a collection of short stories, since the eighteen sections of Ulysses share characters and occur in chronological order. It’s hardly non-fiction despite Joyce’s meticulous attention to detail in his settings and historical references. It’s epic in scope and vision, but not in story. The book really has nothing resembling a plot, as Joyce chose to focus on the minutiae of quotidian living without any overarching storyline or narrative greed to drag you through its verbal quagmires. It is its own category. It’s … ulysseian.

The reactions of contemporary writers to its publication were sharply divided, and many authors we still read and respect today though the book was awful for one reason or another. Daniel Burt’s essay in The Novel 100 on Ulysses – in my opinion, the best of the 73 essays in that book that I’ve read so far – quotes many of the critics:

Resisters of Ulysses have some distinguished company. D.H. Lawrence found int he book “Nothing but old fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness.” H.G. Wells called Ulysses a “dead end,” and Virginia Woolf labeled it “an illiterate, underbred book … the book of a self-taught working man.” Wyndham Lewis could detect only a vacuum at its core, “An absence of meaning, an emptiness of philosophic content, a poverty of new and disturbing observation” … After violating all of thenovel’s assumptions and expectations, Joyce replaced what was lost with a brilliant technical virtuosity pursued so relentlessly that even a supporter like Ford Madox Ford complained that “I am inclined to think that Mr. Joyce is riding his method to death.” Joyce himself contributed to the notion that the established compact between novelist and his audience has been altered and that his reader must rise to his demanding level, identifying his ideal reader as someone suffering “from an ideal insomnia,” and gleefully proclaiming that he put into Ulysses “so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant.” Many have been willing to let the scholars tuck in, while looking for their novelistic sustenance elsewhere in books more seemingly designed to be enjoyed rather than studied, to be read rather than reread.

Burt ranked Ulysses as the third-greatest novel of all time, and he clearly does not agree with the various critics of the work even while acknowledging the book’s high rating for difficulty, praising “its status as one of the supreme human documents in all of literature. NO other single day has been as fully or as brilliantly captured than [sic] June 16, 1904, nor has any novelist created a greater protagonist than Leopold Bloom…” I’ll give him the first point, but as for the second, I’m not so sure.

Bloom is fully realized, but he’s pathetic, a deviant, simpering ne’er-do-well with a stunning lack of awareness of the needs or even existence of people around him. Joyce put himself into both Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, but it’s almost as if by splitting his personality in two he created two incomplete characters, as Stephen himself has a dead quality to his moods and speeches, somewhere between disinterest and disengagement, as if he was barely even there to begin with. The lack of any compelling character limited my ability to connect with the book and enjoy the reading, as opposed to the superficial studying tactic I ultimately used.

To understand Ulysses on an initial read without any help, you would have to be an expert in Shakespeare and both books of the Bible, and familiar with English literature prior to the mid-1800s (as many books as I’ve read, I have never read any of what he’s parodied so far in the Oxen of the Sun section), Joyce’s Dubliners and Portrait of the Arist…, contemporary (for Joyce) Irish politics, Irish/English history, Irish slang at the turn of the last century, and Dublin geography. And the Odyssey, of course. And you’d have to have an enormous vocabulary, including a number of words no longer in common usage. It’s a book for polymaths. Or, it’s a book for the people whom polymaths think are “really smart.” I used The New Bloomsday Book by Harry Blamires, an English theologian and literary critic who clearly reveres Joyce’s work, and brings to the reading not just insight and clarity but his own interpretation of religious symbolism and allegory in a work that, to me, was on the whole antireligious.

Joyce shifts styles in each section of the book, often parodying some long-forgotten narrative technique or the overblown vocabulary of an earlier era of literature. That alone makes Ulysses a literary tour de force, as there seems to be little dissent against those who argue that Joyce’s parodies hit their marks, although only two of those sections – those referred to under the Homeric structure as Circe and Cyclops – remained effective and impressive for me. Circe, the longest (by pages) section of the book, is written as a play, in an alley where Bloom’s and Stephen’s paths finally intersect, and where reality and hallucination are interwoven in a way that often leaves the question of what’s real incompletely answered. It’s inventive and crazy and often quite funny, from situation or from simple wordplay:

A PAVIOR AND A FLAGGER
That’s the famous Bloom now, the world’s greatest reformer. Hats off!

(All uncover their heads. Women whisper eagerly.)

A MILLIONAIRESS

(Richly.) Isn’t he simply wonderful?

A NOBLEWOMAN

(Nobly.) All that man has seen!

A FEMINIST

(Masculinely.) And done!

Joyce takes Bloom’s fears, hopes, memories, and dreams and brings them to life in the alley, putting Bloom on trial, making him a world-renowned reformer, giving voice to inanimate objects or form to intangible concepts, and he keeps it interesting by keeping everything moving, in stark contrast to most of the rest of the novel.

In the Cyclops section, meanwhile, Joyce is parodying people, notably the “one-eyed” outlook of extreme Irish nationalists, but even showing Stephen Dedalus (per Blamires) sympathetically while also exposing his inherent egotism and vanity. Joyce interrupts his own narrative with mock-epic passages to announce the arrival of a new character or a faux-newspaper bit about the transformation of a character’s dog. Even without the basis in prior literature* that might have exposed me to the works Joyce targeted, I could still derive humor from the exaggerations and the abrupt changes in tone that allowed me to alter the way I heard the narrator’s words.

The book’s concluding section is legendary for its own difficulty, even more difficult to read than the 700-odd pages that preceded it. It is the soliloquy of Molly Bloom*, eight brobdingnagian sentences that cover 45 pages and include no punctuation marks of any sort. I have to assume that Joyce did this as some sort of reaction to Marcel Proust’s own logorrheaic style (In Search of Lost Time wasn’t published in English until after Ulysses, but Joyce was fluent in French and lived on the Continent while Proust was still alive and writing), but Proust at least used apostrophes and comma and quotation marks, and his sentences, while long, run 70-80 words rather than Joyce/Molly’s 1500-2000.

*Seriously. I’ve read nearly 500 novels, a huge chunk of them English/British, but aside from Dickens Joyce didn’t seem to hit anyone I’ve really read.

There is a substantial amount of wordplay in Ulysses, much of it buried in seemingly innocuous sentences:

There ensued a somewhat lengthy pause. One man was reading by fits and starts a stained by coffee evening journal; another, the card with the natives choza de; another, the seaman’s discharge.

I don’t think I have a dirty mind, but there’s no way you’re convincing me that was accidental. And he’s funnier with double entendres, hidden meanings, or quiet asides than the truly raunchy parts that helped get the book banned in the U.S. for a decade, despite the fact that none of it meets a modern standard for “pornographic;” it includes brief, crude, graphic descriptions of sexual acts in ways that would probably make the typical reader want to never have sex again.

The problem with Ulysses, again, is that there’s no pleasure – for me, at least – in the reading. It was often dull, occasionally excruciating, intermittently funny, rarely quick, and never compelling. I didn’t care at all about what happened to the characters, and I was only interested in the plot during the Circe episode. I consider myself a pretty well-read person, but much of what Joyce was doing in Ulysses flew over my head, and I think the book’s foundations are set in dated materials and events that just won’t resonate with a modern reader. (Exception: Shakespeare, who gets plenty of screen time in Ulysses, but while I enjoy Slick Willie’s plays I’m not an expert on them and have only read or seen six in total.) It was worth reading for all the references and allusions in later works that I wouldn’t have otherwise caught – Berlin Alexanderplatz certainly makes more sense to me now – and for getting to check it off on my various booklists (including the Modern Library 100, where it was #1), but it’s not an experience I’m rushing to repeat.

Next up: Virginia Woolf’s response to Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, her own one-book-in-a-day novel but written in conventional prose with, to my eye so far, lower overall ambitions.

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→ November 12, 2009
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Cold Comfort Farm.

Klawchat today at 1 pm EST.

Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm is the funniest book I’ve read this year and one of the funniest I’ve ever read. It combines the dry wit of vintage Wodehouse with the social commentary of Waugh and the literary satire of Henry Fielding. It is hard to believe it was Gibbons’ first novel, written when she was just 23, when it is so note-perfect.

Cold Comfort Farm tells the story of recently orphaned Flora Poste, whose parents were scarcely part of her life anyway, and who ends up staying with some distant relations in the south of England on the farm of the book’s title. Said farm is populated by a cast of ridiculous (and ridiculously named) characters, led by the mysterious Aunt Ada Doom, who stays in her room all but two days of each year and refers ad nauseum to the time when she was a little girl and “saw something nasty in the woodshed!” Aunt Ada keeps all her relations tied to the farm, threatening to go mad if any should leave, so everyone on the farm is horribly repressed in some way – most romantically or sexually, but some in other ways.

Gibbons was parodying the romantic rural novels of the time period, most of which have been forgotten even as her novel has remained popular, with Flora herself referring to them and joking about fearing finding two cousins with names like Seth and Reuben when she gets to the farm, which, of course, turns out to be the case. Gibbons even took aim at one of the leading lights of the literary establishment: the simpering, sex-obsessed Mr. Mybug stands in for D.H. Lawrence, seeing phallic symbols everywhere he looks and, of course, falling hopelessly for Flora without any provocation on her part.

The introduction to the current edition of Cold Comfort Farm features an introduction by Lynne Truss that does an excellent job of breaking down the novel’s power to amaze even readers who aren’t familiar with the saccharine novels Gibbons was satirizing:

Flora finds at Cold Comfort Farm a group of people who have been reduced to novelistic clichés – rather like the curvy cartoon-figure Jessica Rabbit in the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, who famously drawled her existential plight, “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.”Flora helps each character out of his or her difficulties and they quickly find happiness. She is a character in a novel who reads the other characters as characters and rewrites them as people. It’s the ultimate narrative miracle

Think of it as a precursor to Jasper Fforde*, where, instead of the protagonist ‘jumping’ into a novel, she simply lives it, and takes the stock characters she meets and gives them each a third dimension (or, in the case of Seth, simply discovers it and opens it up to the world), working as an extension of the novelist within the book.

*Gibbons even dabbles a little in Ffordian futurism (if you’ll excuse the chronological error) in the book, continuing the parallel with Fforde, setting the book about 15-20 years after the year in which it was published, mentioning video-phones and air mail and and an Anglo-Nicaraguan war in 1946.

As Flora fixes or fills out each character, Gibbons exposes the stereotypes or just flimsy drawings through humor. The ancient Adam Lambsbreath is supposed to be simple and rustic, cleaning (“clettering”) dishes with a twig, and yet Flora wins him over by treating him as more than a prop. Even the farm’s bull, Big Business, is just looking for a bit of a release, and gets it in a passage where Gibbons seems to be having fun with us by channeling her own inner Mybug/Lawrence. And when someone finally replies to Aunt Ada’s cries of “I saw something nasty in the woodshed!” … well, I won’t spoil the book’s funniest line, a brilliant four-word riposte that turns the old bat’s story on its head.

Next up: Almost done with Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, a book good enough that I’m holding off on the revised Klaw 100 until I finish it.

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→ October 21, 2009
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Hangover Square.

Sorry for the disappearing act, but it was a long and hectic week in Arizona. I’ll be on the Herd at 11:10 am EDT on Wednesday, and on Mile High Sports 1510 in Denver at 8:25 am MDT.

He walked through Castle Square to the sea. When he reached the sea he saw that dawn was breaking over it, dimly, bluely, feebly, amidst the torn clouds of rain. He smelt the air and felt better. He was glad he had done this. He felt like a walk. He was doing the best thing.
And then he felt a curious snap in his head.

Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square, part of the Bloomsbury 100, is an overlooked work from the playwright behind the movies Rope (famous for director Alfred Hitchcock’s use of long takes with disguised cuts) and Gaslight, a psychological novel of a different sort: The protagonist is suffering from what we’d now call dissociative identity disorder*, and one of his personalities wants to murder the woman his other personality loves.

*Dissociative identity disorder is, according to one theory, a reaction to childhood trauma, such as abuse, but Hamilton depicts Bone’s split personality as something he’s had from birth.

George Harvey Bone’s primary personality is the saddest of sacks, a social outcast who spends his time following a group of libertines who abuse him verbally but are all too happy to take advantage of his occasional flush periods. The group includes Netta, an aspiring actress who is neither that talented nor that driven and is primarily hoping for luck or fate to hand her a big break. Bone is in love with her – or perhaps with the idea of her – and she plays with his emotions in a cruel, sadistic manner. Bone’s secondary personality is monomaniacal in its drive to kill Netta, realizing that she is the obstacle to Bone (or his primary personality) getting on with his life.

Hamilton was criticizing the seemingly impermeable barrier between social classes in interwar England, with Netta and her friends exploiting Bone when it suits them but refusing him full entry into their social circle. (Of course, part of their disdain for Bone is what they call his “dumb moods,” when he has actually clicked over to the secondary personality.) That subtext was obvious, but I’ve read several references to Hamilton also depicting fascism through the story, and I just don’t see it. It’s a good thriller, one where Bone’s murderous desires are made a little morally ambiguous by the rotten treatment he receives at the hands of the heartless Netta, and creeping fascism does receives its mentions (through Netta’s sort-of beau, Peter), but I’m hesitant to put more metaphor into the story than Hamilton intended.

The version of Hangover Square currently in print is full of unfortunate typos, and I’m not sure whether they’re from the original text or just sloppy editing by the new publisher. Some errors were unintentionally funny, like roadside “sinposts” (I assume you find those on the Highway to Hell) or, after a phone has been ringing for a while, “at last there was an answering dick,” without actually explaining who the dick was. (Sam Spade, perhaps? Philip Marlowe?)

Next up: I finished The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread while in Arizona; is anyone still reading it, or should I post a writeup with some discussion questions for those who already did? I’ve since moved on to Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road.

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