→ October 30, 2013
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Middlemarch.

This week’s Behind the Dish podcast reunited me with my old Baseball Today co-host Eric Karabell. And you all thought I died when I went over that waterfall with Bias Cat, didn’t you?

George Eliot’s Middlemarch appears on the Bloomsbury 100 and ranks 9th on Daniel Burt’s Novel 100, but after my intense dislike of her novel Mill on the Floss*, I expected a similarly arduous read, with slow prose and distant, even odious characters. Middlemarch feels like the work of a different author, however, less bleak and moralistic, with stronger, better-rounded characters (and a few jerks), and every bit as pointed a perspective on the restrictive nature of Victorian society, especially regarding the rights of women.

* Not to be confused with Millon de Floss, one of the great biographer-stalkers of his time.

Middlemarch weaves several related stories together, all centered in the fictional English town of the title, revolving around idealistic young characters whose desires go beyond the traditional spouse-seeking of English literature prior to the 1860s. It begins with Dorothea Brooke, destined to be the semi-tragic heroine of the novel’s first major plot, as she rejects a suitor nearer her age and emotional temperament to marry the dour, chauvinistic theologian Edward Casaubon, a blowhard who is the first of the novel’s many comic side characters. Dorothea’s other suitor, Sir James Chettam, marries Dorothea’s sister in what becomes a far happier marriage. Edward refuses to induct Dorothea into his intellectual life, perhaps because it is nearly bankrupt, leaving her bored and unhappy until his early death, at which point an absurd codicil to his will forbids her to take up with Edward’s distant cousin, Will Ladislaw, who is a far better emotional match for Dorothea.

Middlemarch is also home to the Vincy siblings, Rosamund and Fred, a financially irresponsible pair who have very different aims in romance: Fred wants to marry Mary Garth, with whom he’s been in love for years, while Rosamund sinks her claws into the young doctor Tertius Lydgate, because she sees him as a path to upward mobility. Fred’s ability to marry is hampered by his dissolution, which leads him to bankrupt himself and nearly do the same to Mary’s father, while Rosamund manipulates the idealistic Lydgate, who doesn’t plan on marrying because it would interfere with his professional endeavors, into a betrothal he didn’t desire.

Eliot takes the usual themes of marriage and inheritance as the starting point for deeper explorations of character and societal mores than contemporary novels typically explored, helping usher in an era of fiction where independent women were increasingly found as central characters and where their lower standing in a male-dominated culture was fodder for entire novels. Dorothea begins as a high-minded, emotionally immature woman who reaches for some ill-defined goal in marrying the old pedant Casaubon, only to realize she’s grasped at a cloud and lost her independence without any intellectual gain. Fred has to be shamed into a life of industry and diligence, in a career that seemed beneath him, to have any chance to marry the woman he loves. Lydgate’s match with Rosamund turns out to be disastrous, as her extravagance nearly bankrupts him, his researches grind to a halt, and he’s caught up in a scandal involving the local squire Bulstrode, who makes ill use of the doctor to try to hide his own mistakes. While some characters face consequences for their own sins, others find their lives constrained by the need to keep up appearances, or by the effects of gossip about untoward appearances. Even in the epilogue, Eliot grants most of her characters middling outcomes, where financial success and happiness are mutually exclusive; Dorothea may at least fare the best, as she can find happiness even in an imperfect situation, telling Ladislaw that “if we had lost our own chief good, other people’s good would remain, and that is worth trying for,” marking why she stands above the rest as the novel’s real protagonist and most empathetic character.

As much as Dorothea stands at Middlemarch‘s moral center, Lydgate struck me as the most fascinating character because of the small window he provides into Eliot’s own views on the rise of science and research in English society and culture. Lydgate arrives in Middlemarch intending to work as a doctor to fund his researches, bringing ideas for reform and for greater service to those unable to afford proper medical care to a small town with decidedly staid ideas on what a doctor should do and say. The obstacles he encounters from the town’s aged, established medics slow his practice significantly, even when he has some success in treating difficult cases, but it is the marriage to the dim-witted, materialistic Rosamund that destroys his intellectual curiosity, because he can no longer devote time to research or volunteer work because he has to pay the debts she has accumulated. Coming from a male author, this might read as misogynistic, but Eliot imbues all of her characters, male and female, with strengths and defects, so even the venal Rosamund is multi-dimensional, while the reader cannot exonerate Lydgate of blame in his own downfall. (It’s also hard to accuse Eliot of anti-feminism when she has Mary say, “Husbands are an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order.”

Middlemarch might be the most-praised novel ever written in the English language. Virginia Woolf referred to it as “the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” A.S. Byatt used that quote in her 2007 review, saying it was possible to argue – seriously, can you get more wishy-washy? – that Middlemarch is “the greatest English novel.” Daniel Burt’s top 100 only lists two English-language novels ahead of it – the abysmal Moby Dick and the abstruse Ulysses, the latter by an author who’d abandon English entirely in his next novel, Finnegan’s Wake. Eliot’s prose is far more pleasant to read than Melville’s and easier to digest than Joyce’s, with incisive wit (as in the “husbands” comment above) or profound renditions of human emotions:

When the commonplace “We must all die” transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness “I must die – and soon,” then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first.

Writers who craft realistic characters typically exhibit this understanding of emotion and thought, whether the feelings depicted are negative (fear of mortality) or positive. Eliot can drift from compassion to disdain – Mary, the novel’s most insightful speaker, points out that “selfish people always think their own discomfort of more importance than anything in the world,” which is undeniable – over the course of a few pages, but there is always the sense that she reveres character, even if she doesn’t always revere her specific characters. I don’t share Woolf’s and Byatt’s veneration of Middlemarch, as the Lydgate/Rosamund thread tended to meander and Rosamund was the least compelling character in the book, but it is a marvelous novel, a broad study of many brilliantly rendered characters, and a lesson in integrating multiple storylines into a single narrative.

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→ October 23, 2013
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The Return of the Native.

I was assigned two books in my Lit class in my senior year of high school on which I bailed after 20 or 25 pages, reading the Cliffs’ Notes for one and watching the movie for the other. I eventually read both books in full as an adult, as both are on the Novel 100 and, to be honest, it bugged me that I’d never made a more serious attempt to finish them. One of them was Theodore Dry … er, Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, which amounted to 200 pages of shit in an 800-page novel. The other was Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, which is one of my favorite novels ever written, a tragedy as well but a work of consummate beauty in prose and characterization, as well as the best example I have encountered of the use of irony in a serious novel.

The Bloomsbury 100 includes a second Hardy title, The Return of the Native, which doesn’t quite hit the heights of Tess but also doesn’t inspire the same frustrated outrage that that other novel does. Native instead focuses on the interconnections between a number of flawed characters in a tiny English hamlet, and how tiny choices create avalanches of consequences for all of them, with an ending that, in veritable Hardy-esque style, leaves no one truly happy.

The native of the book’s title is Clym Yeobright, a former resident who has found success in the Parisian diamond trade, but finds the work unfulfilling and has returned to Egdon Heath to embark on a scheme to educate the children of the poor. By the time Clym enters the scene, we have already met the other characters and seen their entanglements: Thomasin Yeobright, Clym’s cousin, is betrothed to the unstable Damon Wildeve, who himself is still in love with the local maiden Eustacia Vye, who had had an affair with Wildeve but generally disdains all of the local residents as beneath her. Thomasin returns home to Egdon Heath from a marriage ceremony with Damon that didn’t come off, as Wildeve lacked the proper license, by way of the reddleman (a traveling seller of the pigment red ochre) Diggory Venn, who also carries a torch for Thomasin. When Wildeve and Thomasin do marry, Eustacia throws herself at Clym, hoping he’ll enable her escape from Egdon Heath when he returns to Paris, unaware that he has no plans to do so. When Wildeve and Eustacia both find themselves in unhappy marriages, their liaison is rekindled, leading the four down a path into tragedy.

For a man somewhat estranged from his church, Hardy reflects a strongly moralistic worldview in his writing, more so here than in Tess, where he directs more of his ire at the chauvinistic Victorian environment that condemns his title character to a life of misery. Native takes more of a balanced approach to its subject, combining a frank look at sexual politics and the essence of human emotions with a plot where nature dooms the least morally sound characters over the more innocent ones. Hardy’s language makes it clear that Eustacia is the wicked seductress and Wildeve the feckless lover and husband, with Thomasin in particular receiving treatment as the victim of their maneuvers.

Basde on a small sample of two novels, Hardy might be my favorite writer of prose after the incomparable F. Scott Fitzgerald, as Hardy’s poet self pops up repeatedly in the text of his novels. He refers to the “black fraternization” of the “obscurity in the air and the obscurity in the land” to describe the desolate scene off the moors near Egdon Heath, and describes Eustacia examining her own dismal situation by thinking “what a sport for Heaven this woman Eustacia was.” Clym, after the last of his tragedies in the novel, declines to appear at an event for fear he “might be too much like the skull at the banquet,” which is a hell of a lot better than referring to something in a punchbowl. Eustacia says “I’d give the wrinkled half of my life!” to live in a cosmopolitan place where she could live like a lady, a throwaway phrase that becomes more meaningful when her life is in danger later in the book.

Hardy, always full of sunshine, has time to refer to Clym’s loss of innocence as

the stage in a youngman’s life when the grimness of the general human situation first becomes clear; and the realization of this causes ambition to halt awhile.

And he mirrors my own thoughts on the rising tide of darkness as autumn closes:

Moreover to light a fire is the instinctive and resistant act of man when, at the winter ingress, the curfew is sounded throughout Nature. It indicates a spontaneous, Promethean rebelliousness aganist that fiat that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness, misery, and death. Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.

Of course, I doubt Hardy meant I should light my Weber kettle grill in response to the shortened days, but that’s the best I’ve got.

Two final side notes on The Return of the Native:

* A 1994 TV movie adaptation starred two then-unknown actors as Damon and Eustacia: Clive Owen and Catherine Zeta-Jones. I think it’d be worth seeing on that basis alone.

* I can’t hear the name of this novel without thinking of this sketch.

Next up: I’ve been lax at writing up books lately, but I’ve gotten through Middlemarch and Anthony Trollope’s The Warden, as well as David Goodis’ noir novel The Wounded and the Slain, and am now on the non-fiction The Land That Never Was: Sir Gregor Macgregor And The Most Audacious Fraud In History by David Sinclair. If anyone has a particular interest in either of those classic novels, drop a line in the comments.

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→ September 8, 2013
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Kipps and Dangerous Liaisons.

Last week’s ESPN content included a look at a few top prospects who were called up and a Klawchat. I also contributed to the new Future Power Rankings by naming a “new #GUY” prospect for each system, ignoring players who were just drafted in June or who were previously on my top 50/100.

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I’d only read one H.G. Wells novel, his sci-fi/social commentary classic The Time Machine, before encountering Kipps The Story of a Simple Soul on the Bloomsbury 100. Another novel of deep social criticism, Kipps represents Wells’ attack on the gulf between haves and have-nots in late 19th century England while simultaneously rejecting socialism as a solution, wrapped in the envelope of a rags-to-riches-to-rags romance that works effectively on its own and as a delivery mechanism for Wells’ polemics.

Kipps himself is Arthur “Artie” Kipps, who has been shipped off by his mother (with his father unknown) to be raised by his Puritanical and simple-minded aunt and uncle. While attending a useless primary school, he falls in love with Ann, the sister of his best friend Sid, only to lose track of her when he begins his apprenticeship as a draper at age 14. The drudgery and limited outlook for working-class children sent into this sort of indentured servitude comes under Wells’ fire, as does the factory system’s wide latitude for employers to cheat their helpless employees. Kipps ends up the recipient of a windfall inheritance, seeking then to raise himself up above his lower-class upbringing, yet also struggling with questions of moral responsibility associated with his newfound wealth, many raised by the minor character Masterman – an ardent socialist dying of tuberculosis. Kipps’ fortune disappears almost as quickly as he obtained it, and it is in his response to this turn of events that his inner character emerges from the facade of the semi-polished and utterly superficial Kipps of the book’s middle section.

Wells wrote Kipps with a satirist’s pen, mocking people with wealth and power at every turn yet never sparing those poor in all but ideas. Masterman’s polemics on capitalism are somewhat undercut by Wells’ decision to make the novel’s one socialist – or its only real philosopher of any sort – terminally ill with a disease known at the time as “consumption.” Kipps’ sudden acquisition of wealth changes the way nearly everyone in his life treats him, turning many supporting characters into comic relief, while also throwing him into many situations he finds embarrassing that are also send-ups of the circumstances that created them, such as a scene in the fine restaurant of the hotel he’s inhabiting, where walking in with the wrong shoes is just the first of his problems. The reader can only feel badly for Kipps, who is a stranger in the strange land of privilege, while scorning the various aristocrats who’d look down on him for his naivete.

The romance plot is the overarching storyline in the book, covering Kipps from childhood till the point when he loses his fortune (in predictable, but yet somewhat amusing fashion), even though it functions as a subplot under the more academic themes relating to Kipps’ career and time as one of the idle rich. Kipps’ childhood romance with Ann lasts until he turns 14 and leaves for a career in fabric, after which he ends up with a crush on the more sophisticated Helen Walsingham, who views him sympathetically but without much interest until his inheritance turns up. The way in which Kipps acquires that money doesn’t fit neatly into either plot line, but also provides one of the book’s most entertaining passages, particularly because the non-drinker Kipps goes on a lengthy bender that leads to an improbable connection to the lost money, while leading into a lengthy fish-out-of-water passage where Kipps flops and flounders his way through upper-class society.

Wells mimics lower-class speech in Kipps’ dialogue, with liaisons like “a nactor” for “an actor” and elisions like “mis’bel” for “miserable,” which can make reading the text a little slower, but he more than makes up for it with direct, modern prose that avoids the sluggishness that I’ve encountered in some of the other Bloomsbury 100 novels, even contemporaries of Kipps. It’s funny, cutting, sweet, and still quite relevant in a time of rising income inequality in capitalist societies yet in a world where socialist economies have failed.

–

I also knocked out Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 epistolary novel Dangerous Liaisons*, which appears on both the Bloomsbury and Guardian lists, although it took a solid week to get through the tedious prose and absurdly long letters between the main characters. Focusing on a romantic rivalry between the rake the Viscomte de Valmont and his quondam paramour the Marquise de Merteuil, both gleefully free of morals and engaged in multiple intrigues simultaneously. Their rivalry leads Valmont to “seduce” (rape, in modern terms) the 15-year-old ingenue Cécile de Volanges, which in turns sets their mutual downfall in motion.

*Not to be confused with “Dangeresque Liaisons.”

For a work involving sex (most of it of the consensual variety) and betrayal, Dangerous Liaisons is a plodding read, as the entire book comprises letters between the various characters floridly describing what they just did, or what they might do next, or (in Cécile’s case) what they would just like to do. I assume Laclos was moralizing in two ways, over promiscuity/infidelity but also over those who treat others as mere pawns for their own gains or pleasures, as both Valmont and Merteuil treat multiple lovers (or victims) in this way over the course of the novel. Yet Laclos makes the novel so one-sided that it fast becomes boring, in the way that Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward wears out its welcome with sermonizing on how the world should be.

I haven’t seen the Academy Award-nominated adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons (a film adapted from a play adapted from a novel) starring John Malkovich (really?) as the roué Valmont, but I did watch the 1989 adaptation Valmont, with the far more believable Colin Firth in the role of the cad. That version altered the ending far too much to be considered a reasonable adaptation, crafting happy-ish endings for several characters and avoiding the more serious aspects of the novel’s depictions of Valmont and Merteuil (played by Annette Bening, also a solid casting choice).

Next up: Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March, another selection from the Bloomsbury 100, and a novel that has appeared on at least two lists of the most important novels in the German canon.

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→ August 29, 2013
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The Brothers Karamazov.

Ah, children, ah, dear friends, don’t be afraid of life! How good life is when one does something good and just!

I thought I’d like Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov a lot more than I actually did. I loved Crime and Punishment and at least enjoyed the prose of Notes from Underground, while several of you said you thought I’d like Karamazov given what other novels I’ve said I like.

The plot is quite straightforward for a novel of about 900 pages. The three brothers of the title all vary widely in temperament and philosophy: Dmitri (also called Mitya), the hedonistic, hotheaded eldest brother; the Ivan, the dour, academic, atheist middle brother; and Alyosha, the gentle, highly religious youngest brother. The three are tied together by their father, the cold, profligate Fyodor Karamazov, who had two wives and may have fathered a fourth son, Smerdyakov, out of wedlock. Fyodor has little to with raising his sons, and no emotional connection to them, but is tied to them by questions of inheritance and social standing.

Dmitri’s womanizing eventually brings him into conflict with his father when the two pursue the same woman, while Dmitri also finds himself forced to turn to his family for money, leading to a dispute between Dmitry and his father over the former’s inheritance. When Fyodor is found murdered, Dmitry, who has vowed to kill his father before, is arrested and charged with the crime; Ivan ends up descending into madness while trying to esablish his brother’s guilt or innocence; and Alyosha, after leaving the monastery where he was a novice, ends up a sort of friend and mentor to Kolya, the brash leader of a group of local kids.

The novel’s length allows Dostoevsky to include a few subplots, such as Alyosha and Kolya, but the bulk of the novel is taken up by long passages such as the multi-chapter arc of Dmitri’s trial (in which Dostoevsky took aim at several highly publicized trials of the era, including one where the attorney defending a man accused of nearly beating his daughter to death humiliated the six-year-old victim on the stand). Another chapter has Ivan relating a parable he wrote, “The Grand Inquisitor,” to his brother Alyosha, expounding on Ivan’s questioning of the possibility of a benevolent, personal God, and the associated questions of free will and individual liberty. The story itself, which depicts a Spanish Inquisitor interrogating Jesus Christ after the latter returns to earth, leaves its ultimate meaning open to interpretation, fitting with the philosophical ambuigities of the novel as a whole.

Dostoevsky’s prose is actually quite easy to read, even though, like many Russian novelists, his sentences are long and he often veers from the main point. But I think my main problem with the book was that I could not get into the central philosophical conflict at the heart of the novel. Dmitri’s trial has some drama, as it’s not clear whether he’s guilty, but it is so long and drawn-out that his guilt is beside the point, as Dostoevsky seems to be offering his views on the jury trial itself, which was relatively new to Russia at the time the novel was published. Dostoevsky waxed extensively on similar questions of faith and freedom in Crime and Punishment while also delving into the nature of evil, and doing so in a novel that’s just over half of the length of this one, making it a more fluid read and also attacking the philosophical questions more effectively.

One bit I did enjoy was the substantial amount of dry, often dark humor in the novel, such as the comment about a European nose specialist who “can only cure your right nostril” and sends the patient to Vienna for a specialist who deals with left noses, or the devil, visiting Ivan in a hallucination, pointing out that, in hell, “we’ve adopted the metric system, you know.” More of that would have made the book more compelling for me, although I imagine Dostoevsky was using humor primarily for satire purposes, not for laughs.

I feel like I should emphasize here this is a matter of personal preference – I’m not questioning the book’s legacy or place in the historical canon. It’s 5th on the Novel 100, 29th on the Guardian 100, and part of the Bloomsbury 100 I mentioned in Thursday’s chat, and has been cited as a heavy influence by numerous later authors from across the world. It’s a very ambitious novel, and I imagine a difficult one to conceive and write because of how much Dostoevsky was trying to express through dialogue without the benefit of action. Unfortunately, it left me wanting something more substantial; as easy as it was to move through the novel, I was never fully engaged by any of the stories or by the characters. Perhaps it’s my own tastes, and perhaps the novel just read as dated to me, but it wouldn’t make my personal top 100.

Of course, it’s just possible that the Bluths are the Karamazovs and everything suddenly makes sense.

Next up: I read Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which is 7th on the Guardian 100, 32nd on the Novel 100, and on the Bloomsbury 100, after Karamazov. It’s bawdy and funny, full of explicit sexual humor and double entendres, but the language is so different from modern English that I found it hard to read and occasionally hard to follow. I’m now about a quarter of the way through H.G. Wells’ Kipps, which is also on the Bloomsbury 100.

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→ July 29, 2013
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The Dinner and more.

Two new breakdowns for Insiders – on the Jose Veras trade and the Scott Downs trade. More to come as we get more trade action.

Herman Koch’s The Dinner made it on to my to-read list about a year and a half ago after I caught a very positive review in the Guardian, a left-wing British paper that has one of the stronger arts sections I’ve come across. I finally picked the book up last month and … well, it’s a strangely mixed bag of bad writing and fascinating character study.

The story revolves around two couples having a dinner out where they are supposed to discuss the fact that their sons have committed a grievous crime, caught on CCTV that isn’t clear enough to identify the boys publicly but makes it clear to the parents who the guilty parties are – with the stakes rising when the video appears on Youtube with a telling detail at the end. Paul, the father of one of the boys, narrates the book; the other father, Serge, is a prominent public figure. The book’s path is nonlinear, with flashbacks and wobbly narration, but the slope of the plot line is negative, as one secret after another is revealed and it becomes clear that Paul’s narration isn’t as reliable as he’d like us to believe, while Serge, depicted from the start as something of an asshat, isn’t the root of the boys’ evil, either.

It turns out that the plot isn’t actually the most important aspect of The Dinner, but is a vehicle for Koch’s studies of multiple characters, which all seem to be wrapped up in a greater examination of the latent sociopathy of modern middle-class parents. Koch never quite labels anyone a sociopath, but his scorn for such parents and their willingness to subvert their own morals to protect their children is evident. Even when one of the parents appears to want to do something resembling the right thing, it’s from base motives that do credit to neither parent nor child.

Koch is playing the fabulist here by creating parents who are more caricatures than realistic characters, bearing elements we might recognize in our friends or neighbors (or, heaven forbid, ourselves), but with wholes that feel flimsy. I’m avoiding too much discussion of specific characters to avoid spoiling anything, as Koch peels back the onion of his story over the course of the book’s 300 pages, but none of the four parent characters felt remotely real to me, and the two fathers are both drawn with sharp edges yet without internal shading. Koch created these characters so that they’d have to speak and behave in specific ways to achieve his desired outcome – and while the outcome itself reveals much about his characters, and at least will provoke readers to think about how close these actions and words come to reality, this artifice detracted greatly from the entire exercise for me.

Koch also made some curious decisions with the screen time granted to his four main characters, spending too much time with Paul and Serge while largely leaving their wives in the background. Clare, Paul’s wife, deserved far more attention, but her actions are largely on the periphery and mostly in reaction to Paul – although it’s unclear whether she views him as a partner or an antagonist to be managed. Babette, Serge’s wife, spends half of her scenes in tears, and only develops as a character in the final scenes, so late that her true motives are never apparent at all.

I don’t know if Koch is simply a clunky, awkward writer, or if the translation is poor, but I found his prose very weak and phrasing choppier than rough seas. (I’d offer examples, but the book is in Delaware and I am not.) The narrator is not entirely stable himself, so I’m willing to cut Koch some slack in this regard as a character like that shouldn’t think in clear, fluid sentences, but that doesn’t make it any easier to read.

Yet despite this laundry list of flaws, The Dinner does do two things very well. The suspense created by Koch’s decisions to hide most details from the reader at the beginning, unfurling everything in discrete, small steps, creates tremendous narrative greed that led me through the book at high velocity until it ended. And if his intent was indeed to explore or expose the banality of evil in middle-class families, he at least begins the excavation process, especially with Paul and Serge. It’s more fun-house mirror than looking-glass, but the picture staring back at us isn’t pretty.

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I’ve also been moving through more of the Bloomsbury 100’s classics, including Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil, or the Two Nations and James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

Disraeli’s legacy as a politican is stronger than his legacy as a writer, but Sybil holds up well as a work of political fiction, a furious rant about growing inequality in 1840s England and the aristocratic class’s refusal to acknowledge the issue or make any accommodations to address it. Disraeli grafts a romance on to his polemic, where a manor-born lord falls for the sweet, pretty daughter of a working man and socialist agitator, but the purpose of the book is clear – to stir up indignation in the hearts of the readers, against the country’s caste system and in favor of workers’ rights and a stronger social safety net. While many of his arguments are dated, the book’s core message about income inequality and the chasm between capital and labor feels just as relevant today. He even cites the often-heard argument that the lower classes are better off today than they’ve ever been, which is true but doesn’t mean they’re objectively as well-off as they could or perhaps should be, even if the issues Disraeli covers have been replaced by matters like lack of job security or spiraling health-care costs.

Hogg’s book reads today like a proto-novel for numerous genres – it’s a supernatural mystery, a gothic horror story, a religious parable, very early metafiction, and, most of all, it’s creepy-weird. The sinner of the book’s title is raised to believe he’s one of God’s elect – the novel is a clear attack on the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, now a quaint relic – and, in the process, becomes one hell of a sinner. The first third of the novel is a lengthy prologue, leading into the “memoir” itself, where the sinner tells of the extraorindary stranger who leads him down the road to perdition, a stranger whose true nature is never fully revealed to the reader. The satirical elements will likely pass by a modern reader, but it was a fascinating read for how it presaged so many subgenres of fiction and likely influenced later novels like Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (#12 on my all-time novels ranking).

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→ 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
→ By

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
→ By

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
→ By

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
→ By

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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