→ August 10, 2009
→ By

The Death of the Heart.

TV today – ESPNEWS at 2:40 and Outside the Lines in the 3 pm half-hour, both EDT.

Articles: Preview of the signing deadline. First report from the Under Armour Game. Second report should be up this afternoon.

Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart appears on both the TIME and Bloomsbury lists and ranked 84th on the Modern Library 100; TIME‘s Richard Lacayo praised the way Bowen used the main character, 16-year-old ingenue/orphan Portia, to reveal the cruelty of the characters around her: “In the mirror of her innocent eyes, experience will catch a glimpse of its own reflection. It’s not a pretty picture.”

This theme was unmistakeable, as Portia is particularly useful to Bowen in laying bare the selfish, jealous, spiteful nature of Anna, wife of Portia’s half-brother Thomas; after Portia’s parents die, she goes to stay with Anna and Thomas in London, only to find herself tied up in the quiet, seething resentment and anger between them, Anna’s paramours (whether consummated or not isn’t quite clear, although I don’t think it needs to be), and that most essential element in any English novel, the servants. Bowen does infuse some comic elements, but the novel’s greatest strength is in her descriptive prose:

Portia had learnt one dare never look for long. She had those eyes that seem to be welcome nowhere, that learn shyness from the alarm they precipitate. Such eyes are always turning away or being humbly lowered – they dare come to rest nowhere but on a point in space; their homeless intentness makes them appear fanatical. They may move, they may affront, but they cannot communicate. You most often meet or, rather, avoid meeting such eyes in a child’s face – what becomes of the child later you do not know.

Bowen also has a little fun with caricatures, not of whole characters but of little traits, some humorous, some shocking:

She walked about with the rather fate expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her…

But ultimately, The Death of the Heart is dull. Very little happens; Portia falls for one of Anna’s beaux, the shiftless, irresponsible Eddie, earning the scorn of just about everyone around her and heading for an inevitable heartbreak at Eddie’s hands. Bowen focuses so heavily on emotions and settings that the plot, while not truly thin, is short, and the novel’s end brought release from the oppressive air of the time period.

Next up: Non-fiction with Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, the story of his year in exile in a tiny mountain village in southern Italy.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ July 20, 2009
→ By

The Grapes of Wrath.

The Grapes of Wrath is an angry, incendiary novel that blends poetic prose and sharp characterization with a severe downward-spiral plot and one-dimensional antagonists to incite a specific reaction in the reader, one of revulsion toward an economic system that, in Steinbeck’s view, was impoverishing an enormous class of Americans while enriching a lucky few. It’s a six-lister, ranking #10 on the Modern Library 100, #3 on the Radcliffe 100, and #54 on The Novel 100, and only missing from the Guardian 100. (I don’t believe any book shows up on all seven of the booklists I use, partly a function of their varying eras – such a novel would have to have been published between 1900 and 1950, in English – and partly a function of the Guardian‘s clear contrarian bent.) According to Daniel Burt’s essay in The Novel 100, it was banned and burned when first published due to its political perspective and controversial closing scene, while literary critics frowned on its preachy dialogue, thin characters, and bombastic plotting, but its reputation appears to have been rehabilitated over time, with the work now widely recognized as an American classic.

The family at the story’s center is the Joads, one of many Oklahoman families who lose their farms and head west toward the promised land of California, where jobs allegedly await these families if they can handle the trek across the southwest. The chapters alternate between those focusing on the Joads’ plight and general scene-setting chapters that provide background for the core plot and give Steinbeck a chance to wax poetically, as on the subject of Route 66:

66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert’s slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there. From all of these the people are in flight, and they come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight.

The Joads reach California but not entirely intact, and end up in a “government camp,” a squatter’s paradise with real buildings, clean sanitary facilities, and a fair but strong system of self-government that enforces cooperative behavior through social pressure and the rarely-used threat of ouster. The system works perfectly, and even an attempted coup by outsiders is quickly thwarted through teamwork. It is the idyllic view of communism common to much literature of the interwar era, although to be fair to Steinbeck, the camp was not a unit or system of economic production but a social safety net for the unfortunates swept aside by capitalist greed during the Depression. The Joads aren’t in the camp for very long, but the idea of a self-enforcing system like this one operating without a whiff of corruption among those in power is incredibly naive. Steinbeck’s commentary isn’t just limited to the scene-setting chapters, and one major criticism of the novel is that he puts his opinions into the dialogue, making characters sometimes seem like mouthpieces for his political views, like Uncle John’s comments on rampant consumerism:

Funny thing, I wanta buy stuff. Stuff I don’t need … Stuff settin’ out there, you jus’ feel like buyin’ it whether you need it or not.

Steinbeck’s prose didn’t seem bombastic to me, nor was I troubled by slightly preachy dialogue; perhaps the 70 years since the book’s publication have seen such widespread degradation in prose writing that what was overbearing in 1939 seems fresh and clever today. Most impressive to me, however, was the book’s pacing. The Joads lose their farm, travel west over sparse land, and end up in a Hardy-esque series of big and small calamities in California that leave the reader afraid to hope for anything, yet Steinbeck focuses on little details like repair work on the family’s car to keep the text moving even when the family isn’t. There’s also a clear faith in the goodness of man – at least, of poor man – encapsulated not just in the jarring final scene but in many small sacrifices made by and for the Joads earlier in the book.

I wondered on Twitter last week if Cormac McCarthy had any of this book in mind when writing The Road, a similarly what-the-hell-can-go-wrong-next story that also focuses on a parent trying to keep a family together against impossible odds. The Joads know the name of their destination on the desolate road, but don’t know what it holds; the Man doesn’t know the name of his destination, but has a similarly vague sense of what might be there to go with the strong sense that he must take the Boy there. Both books show the best and worst of humanity in horrible situations. Both authors put substantial focus on food – not just the search for the next source, but on the consumption of it. And perhaps the father and son in the barn at the end of Grapes inspired McCarthy to build a novel around a boy and his father.

I may have more to say on Grapes of Wrath, since it, like The Road, inspires so much thought after the first reading, but in the meantime, I’ve moved on to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,
→ July 8, 2009
→ By

Loving.

Henry Green was an unusual man who wrote unusual books, nearly all with one-word titles ending in “-ing.” One of his best-regarded novels, Loving, made the Modern Library 100 (#89) and the TIME 100. It has little plot and can be hard to follow, but the depiction of class differences in World War II Ireland (featuring an English family trying to escape the war and their English and Irish servants) is clever, incisive, and sometimes quite funny. The scattered, snobbish matriarch refers to all butlers as “Raunce,” regardless of their actual names; constantly loses items; and is completely oblivious to the fact that her daughter-in-law is shagging another man under the same roof. The butler who ascends to the title when the previous one dies is a money-grubbing, status-conscious, fatuous man, and is the closest thing the book has to a protagonist. One of the female servants is in love with Raunce; the other seems to have no idea with whom she’s in love, but wants to be in love with someone.

The plot is paper thin; it would be more accurate to say it comprises several subplots, including a lost or stolen sapphire ring, the romance between Raunce and Edith, and stories like the daughter-in-law’s affair that are almost background noise behind the nonstop dialogue among the servants. Green’s writing style is peculiar, with abrupt transitions from subject to subject and speaker to speaker and a cavalier attitude towards punctuation:

‘Now me lad she wants that glove and don’t forget.’
‘What glove?’
‘The old gardening glove Edith went birds’-nesting with,’ Raunce replied. ‘Holy Moses look at the clock,’ he went on, ‘ten to three and me not on me bed. Come on look slippy.’ He whipped out the decanter while Bert provided those tumblers that had not yet been dried. ‘God rest his soul,’ Raunce added in a different tone of voice then carried on,
‘Wet glasses? Where was you brought up?’

And the setting and subtle humor are reminiscent of Waugh and Wodehouse, two of my favorite authors, although I found Green’s prose a bit offputting until I got used to it.

Next in my queue is Green’s first novel, Living. For more on Green, this review of a biography of Green offers quite a bit of detail on his life and writing career.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , ,
→ June 15, 2009
→ By

Gone with the Wind.

Gone with the Wind is a five-lister, appearing on the TIME 100 and the Bloomsbury 100, ranking 100th on the Novel 100 and 26th on the Radcliffe 100, and winning the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1937. It is a sweeping epic of the South just before, during, and for years after the Civil War, with an emphasis on both the war’s effects on that region and specifically on the war’s effects on women and their role(s) in society. If you haven’t read the book or seen the film, you probably have the same impression that I did of the story, that it is primarily an ill-fated romance between Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, which ends with their famous exchange:

Scarlett: Rhett, Rhett… Rhett, if you go, where shall I go? What shall I do?
Rhett Butler: Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.

As it turns out, their romance is but one of many plot lines underpinning the book, which is much more about Scarlett than it is about Rhett … and the lines above were modified from their original form in the book, where Scarlett says to Rhett after he has made it clear that they’re through, “All I know is that you do not love me and you are going away! Oh, my darling, if you go, what shall I do?” To this, Rhett responds with a hundred-word soliloquy that ends with, “I wish I could care what you do or where you go, but I can’t. My dear, I don’t give a damn,” with the last few words said “lightly but softly.” I’m not sure which is better – the film version is punchier, but feels less authentic – but the difference in effect is striking.

Scarlett herself is a fascinating character and very well developed, or at least becomes so as the book progresses, and it’s a neat trick by Mitchell to flesh the character out without changing Scarlett’s fundamental selfishness or immaturity through a thousand pages* and a series of life events worthy of a month of General Hospital. Scarlett is more anti-heroine than heroine, but she is definitely between the two poles; despite the character flaws mentioned above and an insatiable desire to earn what might today be called “screw-you money,” she is a raging survivalist and refuses to give up hope even in hopeless situations. Her determination, perseverance, and work ethic save her and members of her family – although whether she cares about them is another matter – from death, starvation, homelessness, rape, and poverty, depending on which trial she’s facing, and she’s admirable for that sheer force of will and her view that dwelling on a past that’s gone or on the reasons why she won’t succeed at something is just a waste of time.

*So I found a site that has word counts for a lot of famous novels, and it turns out that GWTW is the longest book I’ve ever read. The revised list:

1. Gone With the Wind (418053 words)
2. Don Quixote (390883)
3. Lonesome Dove (365712)
4. Anna Karenina (349736)
5. Tom Jones (345139)
6. Jonathan Strange (308931)
7. Vanity Fair (296401)
8. The Pickwick Papers (274718)
9. The Woman in White (244859)

Two books I presume would be next on the list, The Woman in White and The Sot-Weed Factor, didn’t have word counts listed, but I pulled The Woman in White from gutenberg.org. This is probably of interest to no one but me, although I think it’s odd that I’ve read two of the top three in the last three months and five of the top nine (or six of ten) in the last fifteen months. Maybe I’m getting over that fear of long books?

The main problem I had with GWTW may be connected to how well-formed Scarlett is. Mitchell, according to what I’ve since read about the book (including Daniel Burt’s essay in The Novel 100, which is one of his best), was determined to tell the story of southern women in the postbellum south and how they were expected to fill contradictory roles. To that end, Mitchell created two characters, Rhett Butler and Ashley Wilkes, who symbolize the two main cultural forces acting on southern women in that time period. Butler represents modernity, a break with the past and with the societal and moral strictures that held women out of the workforce, in the home, and pumping out babies. Wilkes represents the past, but a past that, by the novel’s end, no longer exists – a genteel, aristocratic southern society that was based on slavery and the subjugation of a “white trash” underclass that was largely swept under the rugs of the well-heeled. Scarlett should choose Rhett and let go of her idealized Ashley, but by the time she develops enough self-awareness to see this, it’s too late.

Yet Rhett and Ashley are so busy serving as symbols for the future (or for a future) and the past that they don’t work well as independent characters. Ashley is a simpering dandy with the initiative of a sea cucumber; he makes an expected marriage and has no useful skill or knowledge, since his plan is to live off his family’s wealth and holdings, all of which are destroyed in the war, leaving him an empty shell of a character for Mitchell to kick around when it suits her.

Rhett is far more complex than Ashley, and is constantly operating from unclear motives, which he lays bare (unconvincingly) in the book’s final pages. He’s an amoral opportunist who believes in nothing but his own pleasure and personal gain, yet makes irrational sacrifices that would appear to further neither of his aims. He loves Scarlett and eventually excoriates her for destroying their chance at happiness, without acknowledging that his derision, his neglect, and his recklessness all might place a little responsibility at his feet. His words are usually perfect, so perfect that he’s clearly a fictional character, yet when he is trying to convince his wife to forget the specter of Ashley and love him, he’s verbally abusive and can’t understand why his plan isn’t working. The final confrontation between Rhett and Scarlett, after yet another tragic death of someone close to them, has Rhett saying powerful, horrifying words about the death of love and the inability to erase the past, but his own role in the past is immaterial to him. He is reduced to a prop, like lighting designed to show Scarlett in an unattractive way.

Was Mitchell so locked in to developing her heroine that she left her male characters all half-formed or even caricatures? Was she unable to gross the gender chasm and create a compelling male character? With only one other completed novel during her lifetime, which she wrote as an adolescent, we’ll never get the answer to this. Reasons aside, that flaw keeps the book from greatness. It’s a shame that she didn’t flesh Rhett Butler out more fully, because he is interesting – an intelligent scoundrel who flummoxes Scarlett in their endless bickering:

(Rhett) “Still tied to momma’s apronstrings.”
(Scarlett) “Oh, you have the nastiest way of making virtues sound stupid.”
“But virtues are stupid.”

It’s also worth mentioning to anyone who does decide to tackle this book that it is full of language that today is considered highly offensive, mostly directed at blacks. There’s dialogue from whites towards blacks using plenty of n- and d-words, there’s also narrative text including those same words, but black characters’ dialogue is all written in the mocking style of “An’ den he say, Tell Miss Scarlett ter res’ easy. Ah’ll steal her a hawse outer de ahmy crall effen dey’s ary one lef’.” White characters in the book would have spoken English with a heavy Georgian accent as well, but Mitchell didn’t see fit to alter their dialogue to reflect the regional pronunciation; using stunted spelling for the words from slaves’ mouths serves to establish them as inferior persons within the book. Perhaps in a book of 300 pages, I could have overlooked it, but in 400,000-plus words, that type of language grates.

Next up: Nonfiction, just for a break – Stefan Fatsis’ Word Freak, about the rather odd subculture of competitive Scrabble.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ June 5, 2009
→ By

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

I recorded a half-dozen draft preview videos for ESPNEWS and the dot-com; the first two are on Steven Strasburg and the top hitters in the draft. Today’s chat transcript is here. Deadspin had a good post today on the Austin Wood/Mike Belfiore debacle, which quoted me, which is what made it a good post in the first place.

—

After the dual endorsement given by the two critics behind the TIME 100, I expected to love Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but I didn’t. I liked it, and I can see glimmers of brilliance in it, but the core story just didn’t grab me or propel me forward.

Oscar Wao is a Latino geek in New Jersey caught between his ethnic identity and his inner dork, a lover of sci-fi magazines and role-playing games who speaks in his own stilted vernacular and can not, for the life of him, get laid. His life is brief and not really all that wondrous, although it is pretty crazy, a sort of hysterical realism along the lines of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. The narrative breaks several times to shift narrators and jumps back once to tell the story of Oscar’s grandparents, particularly his grandfather, an educated man jailed over an apparent trifle by the brutal Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Indeed, Trujillo might be even more of a main character in this book than Oscar is, as the murderous tyrant appears in the subtext even in the present day, and the history of the Dominican Republic seems to parallel (imperfectly) Oscar’s story.

Díaz has a definite gift for language (Beli tried her hardest but she couldn’t spin bomb-grade plutonium from the light-grade uranium of her days) and reading his prose is frequently like tap-dancing on the edge of a deep crevasse – exciting, confusing, frightening, but, assuming you survive, something you’re not likely to forget any time soon. But ultimately, the story revolves around a character who’s not that compelling: Oscar is a geek and unlucky in love and life, but he’s not sympathetic – he’s almost robotic, and naïve only works on my sympathies for a little while, after which I start to wonder how a character who is allegedly quite smart can also be so dense. Diaz’s verbal gymnastics, his cleverness, and the intermittent humor all make Oscar Wao worth reading, but a tighter story and a central character who’s more human could have made this a masterpiece.

Next up: I’ve got about 360 pages left in Gone with the Wind.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ May 5, 2009
→ By

The TIME 100 Q&A.

Quick admin notes: NYC 1050 AM hit moved back to 9:25 pm tonight. Podcast of my chat with Jeff Erickson is available here. Tentatively scheduled to appear on 101 ESPN in St. Louis Wednesday at 1:20 pm CDT.

I’m working my way through a half-dozen greatest books lists, from the Novel 100 to the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel/Fiction winners, but I think the most successful one for introducing me to books I liked or loved has been the TIME magazine list of the 100 greatest English-language novels published from 1923 to 2005. (Details on all the lists I use are on the FAQ.) On a whim, I contacted Lev Grossman, one of the two critics behind the TIME 100, and he and co-conspirator Richard Lacayo agreed to answer some questions I had about their list. Lacayo wrote about the process behind the list’s construction when it first appeared, and that essay may be useful background for those of you unfamiliar with the list itself.

Lev, you mentioned in your first response to me that you didn’t care for Tropic of Cancer, yet it’s on the list. How much did literary influence or academic value weigh against readability or trivial things like plot?

LG: I wasn’t that interested in academic value. I’ve spent some time in academia, and I feel like I have a good sense of what that’s good for it, and what it isn’t. As for readability, I’m a major backer of it. It was the fashion in the earlier part of the 20th to write very challengingly and elliptically and occasionally boringly. Which was a mode that was appropriate to its time. But not all those works are still worth the tremendous trouble they put the reader through.

I am however very interested in literary influence — works that changed the literary landscape through their sheer force and power and visionary newness. I’ll forgive a book a lot I would say I weighed those heavily.

RL: That was my pick, and one that I re-read for the list to make sure I still liked it. As I mentioned in that essay I wrote to introduce the list and explain how we made it, we didn’t agree on every title, and we decided not to, because we thought it would be more interesting for the list to include non-consensus choices. As for Tropic, I love the shaggy dog quality of that book. I don’t care whether it goes anyplace in particular. That willingness to blow off the “responsibility” to provide much of a plot is part of Miller’s personal ethic. The book is a demonstration of its own philosophy.

I was aware of the book’s history as the object of a landmark obscenity trial in the U.S., but it didn’t play any part in my judgment. And as for academic value – is Miller much read in “the academy”?

Unlike most lists of this ilk, yours was unranked. Why? If you had to choose a top 5 from your 100, what would it include?

LG: Oh, you know how it is. Lists are arbitrary enough as it is, without bringing ranking into it. You start splitting hairs, comparing apples and oranges … it started to seem absurd.

Top 5, off the top of my head?

Brideshead Revisited
Mrs. Dalloway
The Sound and the Fury
The Sun Also Rises
The Great Gatsby

RL: I just don’t think that’s possible. There’s no rational unit of measurement. You can do that with a poll of numerous critics by counting up which titles got the most votes, the way Sight and Sound magazine does every ten years with the greatest films. But I couldn’t claim with a straight face that Pale Fire is 22.5% better than Appointment in Samarra.

But if I had to pick a top five, it would probably be To the Lighthouse, Pale Fire, The Crying of Lot 49, 1984, Midnight’s Children but ask me a year from now and I might choose five others.

Your list was limited to novels first published in English. Why exclude works from other languages as long as they were eventually published in English? Did you consider, at the time or afterwards, creating a parallel list so that Franz Kafka and Gabriel Garcia Marquez could be similarly recognized?

LG: We did consider creating a parallel list. But the body of work was just too vast — how could we pretend to have read all of world literature, even in translation? We needed ways to narrow the field. That was one.

RL: We weren’t belittling “foreign” literature by not including it. We were paying it our respects. We felt we could not plausibly tell readers we had sifted the fiction of every nation. There’s simply too much of it – French, Japanese, German, Italian, Scandinavian, Latin American. Halldor Laxness may have won the Nobel Prize, but never made it on to my bookshelf. Lev and I both have English lit. degrees and have been reading for decades and were comfortable claiming to know enough of the range of English language work to make what we hoped were useful evaluations of it.

Also, I can never find the umlaut on my keyboard.

The Modern Library’s list, which covered the entire 20th century, was criticized for its lack of female and minority authors. Did you consider the authors’ genders or ethnicities at all in assembling the list? Should those be factors?

LG: I think it’s worth considering those things, along with everything else. There is a subjective dimension to the idea of ‘literary value,’ a big one, and Richard and I were conscious that the people making this list were two white men. We did our best to ensure that a broad range of points of view was represented.

RL: Lev speaks for both of us when he says we were aware that we were both white men drawing up this list, but I didn’t find it necessary to worry about that too much. For starters there were always going to be plenty of women on the list. Virginia Woolf is one of my favorite writers. Likewise Muriel Spark. Beloved? Death Comes for the Archbishop? These are no-brainers. In the end I think there are 19 titles by women.

Similarly with black authors, You don’t put Invisible Man on the list to be “correct”. You put it there because it’s so obviously brilliant. James Baldwin? Zadie Smith? We didn’t have to go searching for them. The only book by an African-American writer that I picked up because I hadn’t been introduced to it before and felt I needed to know it was Their Eyes Were Watching God, which I loved. Along with Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates that book was the fun discovery of this whole process for me. (Re-reading Portnoy’s Complaint was also a nice surprise. I had forgotten how good it was. Not just funny. Good in many ways.)

As I mention in that introductory text, there were writers who almost made the cut but didn’t quite — Dawn Powell is in that category for me. And as I also there, there are a number of women writers whose greatest work is in stories, not novels. Flannery O’Connor is a genius, but her novel, Wise Blood, doesn’t do it for me. Likewise Annie Proulx, The Shipping News notwithstanding, who once said to me herself that she considered stories her real forte. Close Range is my idea of a masterpiece, but it’s a story collection. Karen Blixen, Katherine Anne Porter, Shirley Jackson, Eudora Welty – same thing.

What I didn’t do was include a book simply because it represented any kind of social or political breakthrough. I love Christopher Isherwood’s novel A Single Man, about a gay man living in California after the death of his lover. It was published in 1964 and really is a breakthrough book in terms of introducing a gay character who’s not troubled by his own sexuality, just carrying on with his life. But good as it is, as a book it doesn’t measure up for me to The Berlin Stories.

If I had an agenda of any kind it may have been British novels of the 20s, 30s and 40s. I like Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, the novels of Aldous Huxley beyond just Brave New World. Waugh. Graham Greene. It’s not the Masterpiece Theatre aspect, it’s just something about the ease with which they practice the conventions of novel.

Richard wrote at the time that you agreed on roughly 80 titles more or less off the bat. What book that made the list sparked the biggest disagreement? How about one that missed?

LG: It’s been a while since we formulated the list, and I’m trying to remember. Richard is a staunch Pynchonian, which I definitely am not — I’m sure I rolled my eyes at putting two Pynchon novels on the list. But I did it quietly. Likewise I expected resistance to some of the science fiction entries on the list — Dick, Gibson, Stephenson — but got none. Likewise the YA novel (Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret) and the graphic novel (Watchmen). I wish I had stories for you about shouting matches and fisticuffs, but it was a pretty civilized process. I think Richard’s essay has all the dirt there is in it.

RL: Not to sugar coat the thing, but there weren’t that many, partly because we had this agreement that there would be titles we just wouldn’t agree on. Lev likes graphic novels. It would never occur to me to put Watchmen on the list but he loves it. Meanwhile, I really enjoy a lot of what you might call classic modernist writers, the ones who play around with the conventions of the novel, from Woolf to Pynchon. That stuff bores some people, including sometimes Lev. It’s ice cream to me. As he mentioned to you, I would have put a third Pynchon title on (V.), but there wasn’t room. (And I’m not somebody who pats Pynchon on the head for everything he does. I pretty much panned his last book in the magazine.

Have you reconsidered – or regretted – any of the entries since the list was published?

LG: I haven’t.

RL: Only the books there weren’t room for, but that’s list making for you. As mentioned, Dawn Powell. Elizabeth Hardwick’s novel Sleepless Nights. Maybe The Wapshot Chronicle by (John) Cheever. E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel. (Saul) Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift.

Are there any works published since 2005 that you would place on a revised list?

LG: Yes, one. Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

RL: Oscar Wao, definitely.

KL: It’s on my to-be-read shelf and just moved up in the queue after that response.

Did you consider other lists or awards, such as Pulitzer Prizes, as criteria for inclusion or even as “bonus points” for specific books?

LG: We really didn’t. I’ve sat on enough awards committees to know how arbitrary they are. I don’t give them much weight.

RL: Did we care whether a book had won prizes? Not at all. The Nobel didn’t get Patrick White on the list. And The Pulitzer has gone to many dreary books.

*KL: Concur.

One inclusion that confused me at the time that I read it was Watchmen, which is really a short story stretched to novel length by illustrations. To me, it offers none of the complexity of even a short novel like Red Harvest. Tell me about the decision to include a graphic novel in a list of prose works.

LG: There are plenty of things to complain about in Watchmen, but a lack of complexity? I couldn’t disagree more! I’m a great believer in the power and importance of graphic novels — or comic books, as I prefer to call them — and I think they’re one of the most exciting things to happen to the novel in the 20th Century. To me the list would have had a hole in it without them.

I’ll throw some titles at you that I thought should have made the list or at least been considered. Tell me whether they came up at all, and if so, why they didn’t make the cut.

Cry the Beloved Country
Tender is the Night
A Confederacy of Dunces
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Empire Falls
The Dud Avocado

LG: Now we’re really going to expose the ugly underbelly of subjectivity in this list. A Confederacy of Dunces – I’ve always felt this book was rather heavy-handed and unfunny and hence over-rated. I know it’s beloved by many, and I’m buying myself some serious ire by saying that, but if there’s one rule I have as a critic, it’s never lie. And I couldn’t in all honesty put that book on the list, because I just don’t feel it’s great.

Tender is the Night was a tougher decision, it’s a beautiful novel with reams of great writing in it, but I think ultimately it’s slightly overstuffed and ungainly and melodramatic, especially when you put it next to the jewel-like perfection that is The Great Gatsby, which I think is better suited to represent Fitzgerald on the list.

I could go on slagging the classic works you’ve listed, but you get the general idea. I’ll just add that, to my shame, I had never read or heard of The Dud Avocado. There’s that ugly underbelly I was talking about.

RL: I read Cry the Beloved Country long ago, but wasn’t moved to re-visit it. I like Confederacy, but wasn’t in love with it. Tender is the Night was on my short list – an adolescent favorite, adolescents love doom. But Fitzgerald’s problem is that he wrote one book so perfect it makes everything else he wrote look a bit dim, even the good things.

The Dud Avocado – I’ll have to go looking for that one.

Awesome stuff. I’ll even forgive you for trashing Tender is the Night, which is my favorite novel by an American author. My readers will enjoy you taking me to task over Watchmen, although I stand my ground – it was thinner than a sheet of phyllo dough.

Thank you both for your answers and for the great list.

Filed Under: Literature, Media, TIME 100, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ April 30, 2009
→ By

Light in August.

Quick admin notes: Chat today at 1 pm (just for an hour). I’ll be on WHB in Kansas City with Rany Jazayerli at 7:30 CDT tonight. I’m trying to work out a hit time for our Chicago affiliate for tomorrow night as well.

On to more important matters…

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.

William Faulkner is best known for a quartet of books that dot all of the greatest-books lists to which I look for reading suggestions; The Sound and the Fury is his most acclaimed, but Light in August isn’t far behind, appearing at #57 on the Modern Library 100, #65 on the Radcliffe Course’s 100, and on the (unranked) TIME 100, as well as on the honorable mentions (the “Second 100”) in the Novel 100. So, as a Faulkner fan, I’m disappointed to report that I didn’t love it the way I loved Sound, Absalom, Absalom!, or his final novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Reivers.

Light in August is a story of isolation and the oppression of history, set in Faulkner’s usual spot of Yoknapatawpha County in northern Mississippi. Although the novel has several foci, the main charater for much of the book is Joe Christmas, a man of mysterious origins and unclear ancestry whose life has been marked by rejection and alienation. The book begins with the story of Lena, a young and naive woman, eight months pregnant, who walks and hitches her way from Alabama to Mississippi in search of the jackass who knocked her up and skipped town; when she arrives in the town of Jefferson, it is just after her paramour and Joe have been mixed up in a horrible crime, after which Faulkner jumps backward repeatedly in time to unfold Joe’s story in stages, from his brief time in an orphanage to his upbringing in a very strict household to, eventually, the circumstances of his birth. Joe himself suffers from a lack of identity because of his darker complexion and the possibility that he is part black, which in the south in the 1920s was (apparently) a major problem. Joe finds himself unaccepted by either the white or black communities and settles, by default, for a life of solitude until he meets a woman who is, if possible, more isolated than he is.

Christmas himself is about as clear a Christ figure as you’ll find in literature. (Thomas C. Foster’s book How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines, in addition to just being a fun read, has a whole chapter on Christ figures and how to spot them.) Christmas’ initials match those of Christ, he appears at the orphanage on Christmas Day (hence the name), he is 33 years old at the time of his death, and his parentage is unclear and the subject of much rumor and speculation. He’s not Jesus, of course – he’s selfish and a survivalist and angry at everyone – but the allusions are there, and Christmas himself wonders (indirectly) about whether God has forsaken him.

Most of the book’s main characters are on the run from history. Christmas is running from an ethnicity and upbringing he didn’t choose, and it is as if his story was written for him once he was born and rejected by his mother’s family. Jefferson’s disgraced minister, Reverend Hightower, has been haunted since birth by visions of a grandfather who was killed in battle before the Reverend was born, almost as if he is that grandfather reincarnated, and his inability (or unwillingness) to carve out his own path instead of chasing ghosts from the Civil War doom his marriage, his ministry, and ultimately his happiness. Lena is the only character running toward something, but she’s running toward a man who doesn’t want her (or their baby) and ignoring forks in her road that could give her stability, if not actual happiness.

The prose example I used above is, to me, classic Faulkner, a circular style where the author bends language to his will and gives abstract concepts physical form. Sound and Absalom are difficult but rewarding reads because of this prose style, but August is largely written in a more traditional style that robs the book of some of the color and complexity of Faulkner’s other works. I also found Christmas – described by one critic whose name appears lost to the sands of time as “the loneliest character” in literature – unsympathetic despite all of the hardships he endures and the fact that he starts life in an 0-2 count; although he fights at the drop of a hat, there is no fight in him, only a cold survival instinct, which may be realistic for someone who comes from a childhood devoid of love or affection but doesn’t make for a great central character.

Next up: Jasper Fforde’s First Among Sequels, book five (well, six, if you count The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco) in the Thursday Next series.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , ,
→ March 21, 2009
→ By

Tropic of Cancer.

I hated this book. It’s not a novel, certainly; filling 300 pages with f-bombs and see-you-next-Tuesdays without regard for plot or character does not a novel make. There is one sequence, covering about 3% of the book, that might actually be called a plot, but the rest is the self-serving and often vile ramblings of Miller’s alter-ego narrator. I’m a little Homer Simpsonish in that I like stories. When I pick up a novel, I want a story. Miller didn’t bother with one. Somehow it still made the TIME, Modern Library (#50), and Radcliffe (#84) 100s.

And since there’s little more to say on that front, here’s the Klaw anti-10, the ten books I’ve read through and hated the most.

10. A Death in the Family, James Agee.

Reviewed in December of 2007. Depressing, but also incoherent and distant.

9. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon

I know many of you loved it. I found it simplistic and totally derivative of the first book of The Sound and the Fury, and was put off by the diatribes Haddon put into the protagonist’s mouth. And it was boring. Other than that it rocked.

8. The Mambo Kings Sing Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos.

Reviewed in January. Other than occasionally making me hungry with its descriptions of Cuban food, the book has nothing to recommend it. It’s definitely in the Miller tradition of sex-as-bodily-function writing, but I’m pretty sure Hijuelos was trying to be lascivious, whereas Miller was just writing whatever words he vomited out of his brain.

7. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

Difficult prose, the merest shadow of a plot, and a completely bizarre and long tangent on the specific physical characteristics of hell. I know I’m eventually going to crater and read Ulysses, but let’s just say starting Joyce with Portrait because it was short was a Pedroia-esque error on my part.

6. The Sportswriter, Richard Ford

I would guess that of the TIME 100, this book is the most-read among BBWAA members, most of whom have told me they liked it. I found the title character to be insipid and immature and self-justifying and I wanted to smack him for about 300 pages. Grow up already.

5. Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin

Perhaps the only major work of African-American literature that I didn’t like – and oh boy did I not like it. It was never clear to me what the book was about; there was brutality, but to what end? I also felt no connection or empathy with the main character, John, which made the whole exercise seem like a waste of time.

4. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

More plot than Joyce or Miller, which is saying little. Three parts, the middle being the shortest and containing all of the significant events. I don’t love Hemingway’s sparse prose but it’s ambrosia compared to Woolf’s.

3. Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence

Another utterly pointless book, also banned or criticized for obscenity. The introduction to the edition of Tropic of Cancer that I read argues that Miller is the only author to write properly about sex, saying that Lawrence and James Joyce had “too much religion in their veins.” I have to say I found neither depiction of sex all that compelling, but at least Lawrence has the tension that arises from a set of externally-imposed sexual mores coming into contact with the physical and emotional nature of sex. Miller wrote about sex as a bodily function; getting laid was like taking a dump, more reminiscent of the random sex of Jonathan Swift’s Houyhnhnms than anything approaching erotica. Anyway, Women in Love is primarily notable for nothing much of anything happening until someone dies in a skiing accident, after which the book mercifully ends.

2. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller.

Suck. QED.

1. Moby Dick, Herman Melville

If this is the Great American Novel, everyone should just put away their typewriters and go home. They chase a whale that may or may not exist. There are extended passages that seem to be straight out of a 19th century whaleopedia. They chase some more. That’s pretty much the book, and the prose is maddeningly slow. Yet it was #5 on the Novel 100 and will come up in any discussion of great novels in the English language. My wife was an English major but never read the book for any class; she asked one of her college professors if she should read it, knowing it was considered a classic, and he gave an emphatic, “No.” He was probably later denied tenure for literary apostasy.

That list includes four books on the Novel 100 and five on the TIME 100, so even those rankings haven’t been fully reliable as my reading lists.

Next up: The City and the Mountains by Jose Maria Eça de Queirós, which I am already reading and enjoying.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ March 1, 2009
→ By

American Pastoral.

Before I get to the book, I’ve got two new draft blog entries up, one on Purke, Coffey, and Grichuk, the other on Graham, Cole, Wilson, and Berry. And, of course, Jason Churchill continues to churn out daily updates on top picks’ performances.

Stand in awe not of Communism, my idiot child, but of ordinary, everyday loneliness. On May Day go out and march with your friends to its greater glory the superpower of superpowers, the force that overwhelms all. Put your money on it, bet on it, worship it – bow down in submission not to Karl Marx, my stuttering, angry, idiot child, not to Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse-Tung – bow down to the great god Loneliness!

Philip Roth’s American Pastoral – winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, #99 on the Guardian 100, and part of the TIME 100 – tells the story of Seymour “Swede” Levov, a star high school athlete whose perfect, seemingly worry-free life is shattered when his daughter and only child, the ironically-named Merry, commits an act of domestic terrorism that takes a life and slowly tears Swede’s world apart. American Pastoral is one of Roth’s “Zuckerman novels,” featuring his alter ego, grumpy author Nathan Zuckerman, although it is a blessing that Zuckerman disappears as an active character after about 75 pages. The novel then shifts to of metafiction – it is not Swede’s actual story, but Zuckerman’s reimagining of Swede’s story based on a handful of details he got from Swede and later from Swede’s brother Jerry. This aspect is particularly unsatisfying; unlike, say, McEwan’s bait-and-switch novel Atonement*, we’re in on the gag all along, but the question of whether we’re reading Swede’s “actual” story or what Roth wants (consciously or subconsciously) Swede’s story to be hangs over the entire work.

*Oddly enough, the TIME 100 includes at least four works of metafiction – the two I’ve mentioned, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, and Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds. Only the last one was a fully-realized and satisfying work of fiction, which may be because it didn’t take its interior novel very seriously – the line between reality and fiction was deliberately blurred and the work is more farce than Serious Novel.

If Roth succeeded at anything, it was creating a deeply disturbing work of fiction. Other than the thought of one’s death, nothing hits at one’s emotional core as much as a thought of the destruction, gradual or acute, of one’s family. Merry appears to be just another angry teenager until she throws a bomb, and even in hindsight there was no clear warning to her parents that she was even capable of such an act of abject violence. Swede’s idyll is destroyed in between the time he goes to sleep one night and wakes up the next, and the devastation is compounded by the fact that Merry disappears immediately after the bombing. One thing that you can’t fully understand until you have a child is just how completely your emotions are wrapped up in that child. No matter what Merry did, Swede can not sever himself emotionally from her. She is his daughter, and his only child at that, and even if reuniting with her meant she would have to go to jail, he is emotionally determined to find her and, metaphorically and physically, bring her home.

Unfortunately, Swede’s emotional determination is an isolated character trait, as, for whatever reason, Zuckerman (Roth) did not imbue him with decisiveness. Swede confronts a couple of inflection points in the novel, simple and I would say obvious choices, and time and again he chooses inaction. There’s one scene towards the novel’s end where Swede has his best chance to piece something of his life back together – like a torn labrum, it will never be the same again, but it can be partially repaired – and, channeling Bill James on Jeff Bagwell, he passes. I found this not only maddening but beyond belief: There’s no way. I could not put myself into Swede’s shoes in that situation and choose “none of the above.” And I doubt many fathers, if any, would choose it either.

Swede’s failure to take any of the “right” choices means that the story lacks closure. We know from early on what has happened to Swede, and we have a pretty good idea of what ultimately happened to Merry (although whether Swede was telling the literal truth there may be open to debate). What we don’t get is the interim – Zuckerman focuses on the five or six years between the bombing and the start of the breakdown of Swede’s marriage, but doesn’t tell us what happened to Merry, who on earth Rita Cohen was, how exactly Swede’s marriage broke apart (did we see the triggering event? Did they hang on and fake it for a few more years), how he ended up with his second wife and three sons and whether or not that gave him any peace or happiness or proved inadequate to fill the gaping void left by the departure of his daughter from his life … we get none of these answers. I’m not saying every question needs a firm resolution, but Roth leaves us with more frayed ends than an overwashed head of hair.

The decision to focus on Swede over Merry is part plot contrivance, since Zuckerman knows Swede but never met Merry, but when Merry has a chance to say her piece, Zucker-Roth shifts to summary mode. We get pages upon pages of description of the manufacturing of ladies’ gloves and the history of the manufacturing of ladies’ gloves – was Roth momentarily possessed by the spirit of Herman Melville? – but of Merry’s life on the run we get a few paragraphs. The autobiography of Merry Levov could be – would be – a hell of a book. But I sure learned a lot about gloves, or the attitude of early 1970s couples towards Deep Throat, or the history of Bill Orcutt’s family.

I don’t know if Roth has ever addressed this, but in many ways Swede Levov resembles Rabbit Angstrom. He’s not an agent of his own destruction the way that Rabbit is, but they have similar backstories – star high school athletes who never quite live down that early fame and promise but who carry their sports-related nicknames through life, who marry against the wishes of their domineering fathers, and whose family lives come apart at the seams as we watch and as they fail to take basic steps to preserve them. Rabbit runs, while Swede stammers. In the end, it’s kind of the same thing.

Had Roth not wasted the first 75-odd pages on that annoying little Zucker – thus sparing us his self-centered Donnie Downer act – and rounded out the Swede story a little more, it would have been a clear Klaw 100 entry. Once the narration shifted, the pace picked up dramatically around the handful of tangents into glove manufacturing and Orcutt family genealogy, and he created one very compelling (if flawed – but is the flaw Roth’s, Zuckerman’s, or Swede’s?) character in whom most readers, particularly parents, should find some sympathetic or familiar trait. If anything, the book ended 75 pages too soon, and I wish Roth had expended the energy he blew on Zuckerman’s prostate on filling in some of the blank spots on the Levov family canvas.

Apropos of nothing other than its presence in the book, I did learn one unusual new word: uxorious, meaning excessively fond of or submissive to a wife. I’ll have a hard time working that into a Draft Blog entry.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , ,
→ February 20, 2009
→ By

Catch-22.

I’m going to bet that of all the books on the Klaw 100, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is one of the five most-read among dish readers. The book, which appears on several greatest-books lists (it’s #7 on the Modern Library 100, #15 on the Radcliffe 100, #74 on the Guardian 100, and on the TIME 100) certainly seems like a book that many of us read during our high school or college years, whether or not it was assigned reading, simply because it was so damn funny and its status as one of the “it” books of its era never fully went away, the same way Catcher in the Rye has maintained its cachet after forty years*.

*I’m going to steal a page from JoePo today and insert some asides. I was accused in chat in a question I didn’t post of being “anti-cliché” because I didn’t like Catcher. I don’t really know how those two things are connected – neither Salinger nor his novel seem clichéd to me – but, more to the point, is anyone actually pro-cliché? Romance-novel publishers? Slasher-film producers? Actually, a few mainstream sportswriters come to mind so I’ll stop here.

Catch-22 is now one of only a handful of novels I’ve read twice, a list that also includes Pride and Prejudice (didn’t like it in high school, read Emma as an adult and loved it, re-read P&P and realized I’d missed all the wit the first time), Things Fall Apart (first read it at 13, didn’t get the point at all), and The Great Gatsby (just because). I think Catch-22 earns the prize for the longest gap between readings – I first read it in the fall of 1989*, which means it’s been an almost-unthinkable almost twenty years since my first trip through the dystopian anti-war masterpiece.

*I can tell I’m going to beat this gimmick into the ground. I first read Catch-22 by choice, but as it turned out, it was an assigned book during that same school year in AP Lit. We actually had a choice of three novels – this one, Slaughterhouse-Five, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Next – and while I eventually read all three, I took the easy route and wrote my paper on Catch-22.

The funny part of this story is that that class, taught by Mrs. Glynn, was a substantial learning experience for me beyond the books we were supposed to read. I skipped several of the books assigned in that class, including Tess of the d’Urbervilles (rented the movie, then read the book in 2005 and loved it) and An American Tragedy (800+ pages of tiny print and I know the SOB gets it in the end, I’m all set with that, used the Cliffs Notes), and consistently scored 5’s on the papers, which Mrs. Glynn graded on the AP scale. Catch-22 was one of only two books I really read word for word and cover to cover in that class, the other being Ellison’s Invisible Man. Unfortunately, while the paper was in Mrs. Glynn’s hands, she overheard me bragging to a classmate that I hadn’t read the majority of books in her class, and sure enough, on that paper, I got a 3. The lesson I took was that it doesn’t actually matter whether you do the work as long as you act like you did and present it well. I sleepwalked through college on this newfound confidence, only really working hard in math and foreign-language classes. There may also have been a lesson in my AP Lit experience in the value of keeping my mouth shut, a lesson I have never learned and promise you all that I never will.

My memory of Catch-22 was that it was a hilarious, often absurd anti-war romp, almost like an angrier, funnier Vonnegut. I remembered anecdotes, like Nately’s whore, Milo the entrepreneur, and cracks about flies in someone’s eyes. What I didn’t remember – or perhaps didn’t realize the first time through – was that it is a profoundly cynical book, satirizing and savaging more than just war, with democracy, capitalism, government, religion, and often just plain ol’ humanity all taking it on the chin and ending up bleeding on the floor. The plot is pretty thin; the novel itself is more a meandering collecting of anecdotes told in a nonlinear fashion, an effective technique for humor that left me often confused as to the order of events*, although to read and enjoy this book you don’t really need to worry too much about sequence.

*Well, except for when someone was killed – that sort of cleared things up a bit.

In fact, I’d argue that even considering the book’s deft wordplay and ironic humor, the book’s greatest comedy comes from Heller’s scene-shifting gimmick: In the middle of dialogue between two people about a third person, Heller will jump to the third person discussing the same subject without any transition whatsoever. The quotes themselves are usually funny, but the momentary disorientation – hey, he wasn’t in the room a moment ago – increases the humor.

I’ve read one of Heller’s other novels, the unusual God Knows, a sort of deathbed memoir of King David of Israel. It too uses a nonlinear storytelling device, but lacks the humor of Catch-22, and I haven’t felt compelled to read anything else by Heller.*

*From Heller’s obituary in the New York Times: “When an interviewer told Mr. Heller that he had never written anything as good as Catch-22, the author shot back, ‘Who has?'”

Next up: A collection of Raymond Chandler’s short stories, The Simple Art of Murder.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,