Northanger Abbey film.

Now that’s more like it. The new movie version of Austen’s Northanger Abbey was spot-on, very faithful to the original novel with some excellent performances.

The plot of the novel, well preserved in the movie, is the simplest of Austen’s canon. Catherine Mansfield is a teenaged girl living in an English country village who loves to read the Gothic romances popular at the time, and who uses those novels as a substitute for the life experience she lacks. A wealthy couple offers to bring her to Bath with them for a few months, where she meets two suitors, Mr. Tilney and Mr. Thorpe, and becomes fast friends with Mr. Thorpe’s sister, Isabella, who is in love with Catherine’s brother James. One of her suitors is good, and one is bad. There’s a misunderstanding over her relationship with the wealthy couple. And that’s almost all of it. It’s a trifle compared to the character studies of Pride and Prejudice and Emma, but it’s witty and sweet.

This adaptation – I only know of one other, which I haven’t seen – hews quite closely to the plot of the novel, keeping the characters all true to Austen’s writing. Felicity Jones is excellent as Catherine and it doesn’t hurt that she looks like a cuter version of Natalie Portman. Carey Mulligan – also pretty darn cute, and someone had fun with her in wardrobe – was superb as the superficial and often condescending Isabella. And unlike last week’s version of Persuasion, this film allows its scenes to develop rather than rushing us from one spot to the next to try to cram the book into 90 minutes of air time.

Next up: A new take on Mansfield Park, my least favorite Austen novel, due in no small part to its priggish heroine, Fanny Price. There was a 1999 film version starring the underrated Frances O’Connor as Fanny, and while it was a good movie, it was only loosely based on the novel, incorporating some elements from Austen’s own life (using her letters as a basis) and also just flat-out changing some things around. This upcoming version is reported to be more faithful to the text – the screenplay was written by Andrew Davies, who wrote the screenplay for the new Northanger Abbey version and the screenplay for the definitive 1995 Pride and Prejudice miniseries – which strikes me as a mixed blessing.

More Jane.

I didn’t mean for this to become the all-Jane Austen blog, but I stumbled on this AP article on Andrew Davies, the screenwriter behind the famed 1995 Pride and Prejudice adaptation and behind this Sunday’s new take on Northanger Abbey. For a guy who talks about making changes to novel texts in his adaptations, he’s all the way at the “faithful” end of the continuum of adapters.

Wicked.

I have a rule when it comes to novels: If there’s a map of a fictional place in the front, move in the other direction. I can’t think of a book since the Lord of the Rings series that had such a map at its start and didn’t end up the worse for it.

The fact that the author took time to make up a country or a region or a continent or whatever does not impress me; it tells me he was more enamored with the creation of irrelevant details than he was with things like plot, character development, or themes. This preference for creation over craft bedevils the fantasy genre as a whole, and it’s the reason why I rarely bother to read anything from that section of the store.

Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West has sold over three million copies, earned mostly positive reviews, and spawned a massively successful Broadway musical. So I want to hesitate before calling the book something of a bore, a revisionist fantasy that reflects the awkward worldviews and odd fascinations of a teenaged boy even though it was written by an adult man. I won’t hesitate, but I want to.

Wicked is a parallel novel, telling the “other side” of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by providing a backstory for the Wicked Witch of the West, as well as her sister, trying to make them sympathetic characters. The Wicked Witch of the West is given a name, Elphaba, which in and of itself has a mythology in the novel, and she’s a Hermione Granger sort of child, an intellectual who takes up the causes of the oppressed; she’s shunned from birth because she was born with green skin (a point which is explained later in the book in what I found to be a very unsatisfying way), and it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that until her death she has major daddy issues.

Wicked struck me wrong in multiple ways. Reusing someone else’s characters and setting is unoriginal; recasting them and altering facts or personality traits is unethical. Maguire alters entire characters and turns chunks of Baum’s original story on its head. He also clearly intended for this to be a novel of ideas – it’s a superficial one at best – and again, if you’re going to do that, make up your own universe first. Wicked‘s text also includes some awkward descriptions of sex and bodily functions, almost as if the book was written by a teenaged boy or someone who had that particular species’ fascination with those two subjects and unfamiliarity with the former. I admit that it’s not easy to write about sex – there’s an entire award devoted to the problem – but Maguire’s style is just painful, from perfunctory descriptions of the mechanics of sex to oddly jarring mentions of defecation or regurgitation.

The novel moves quickly despite some clunky prose and the aforementioned problems, because the material itself is so lightweight. I don’t mind lightweight reading if it’s entertaining and was intended to be lightweight, but Wicked is almost devoid of humor and suffers under the weight of some of its pretensions, including an explicitly stated question on the nature of evil that is only sparingly addressed. I’m tilting at a windmill given the book’s success and the way it has opened up a cottage industry for Maguire, who has since written similar books revising Snow White and Cinderella to his liking, but I’d like to see someone dump some water on Maguire before he desecrates another classic work by writing an adolescent retelling.

Persuasion (2007).

When it comes to film adaptations of classic novels, I’m a purist – I want them to hew closely to the original text. The 2007 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion (showing on and off this week on PBS) was a disappointment, although unlike a lot of Janeites, I don’t view the 1995 version as all that great either.

Anne Elliott is a 27-year-old maiden who, eight years previously, was talked out of accepting a marriage proposal from a young naval officer named Frederic Wentworth; Anne’s father is a baronet, while Wentworth was untitled and poor, and therefore her family and a close family friend all urged her to decline the proposal. Eight years later, Frederic returns to Anne’s life via a small coincidence, still unattached but now quite wealthy, and apparently harboring a little resentment over the earlier snubbing.

The problem both filmed versions have revolves around Anne. In the book, Anne has a quiet strength of character and an unhappy acceptance of her maiden status, which, given her age, is presumed to be permanent. In both films, however, she’s a terrified little mouse – the 1995 version has Amanda Root (as Anne) wandering around with her eyes wide open in terror the entire time, while the 2007 version has Sally Hawkins trembling her lips half the time and bursting into tears whenever she’s alone. Anne Elliott was based somewhat on Jane Austen herself, and it’s hard to accept the character as an über-effeminate weakling.

Because the 2007 version is so short (under 90 minutes), most of the secondary characters get short shrift and find their foibles sharpened to caricature status. Anne’s father goes from an oblivious snob to a wastrel bore. Her sister Mary goes from a self-centered invalid to a sniveling witch. Her other sister, Elizabeth, mistreats Anne in the book but is barely evident in the novel. Anne’s cousin, Henrietta, is promised to a young curate in their parish who appears in the book but doesn’t appear at all in the film.

And the ending … ah, the ending. Suffice to say that an English lady would not be found running all over Bath, half out of breath, in search of anyone, and certainly wouldn’t be caught playing tonsil hockey in the middle of the street with the man of her dreams.

If you’ve read Persuasion – and if you haven’t, you should – and want to see a film version, go with the ’95 version, which is at least faithful to the text and long enough to bring out some of the subtler characterizations of the secondary figures. The 2007 version, unfortunately, seems destined to be a curiosity as a misguided attempt to improve on the prior version by making everything shorter and more severe.

This Sunday, PBS’ “Complete Jane Austen” series continues with a new adaptation of Austen’s Northanger Abbey, probably the least well-known of her six completed novels, featuring the silliest of her heroines.

Attention Janeites…

Starting this weekend, PBS’ Monsterpiece Masterpiece Theatre will be showing adaptations of all six of Jane Austen’s novels, including the definitive five-hour Pride and Prejudice adaptation starring Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy. First up is a new take on Persuasion, the most overlooked of her novels, but one without a good film version; the most recent attempt prior to this one starred Amanda Root as Anne Elliott, who spent the entire film sporting a look of wide-eyed terror as if she was in permanent danger of having someone shove a twelve-inch carrot up her ass. Since the novel’s Anne Elliott is generally smart and independent, Ms. Root’s take didn’t quite work for me. The book is probably Austen’s wittiest, with some great characters and plenty of dry humor; the opening scene where Anne’s uncle decries the lack of attractive people about town is priceless.

Love in the Time of Cholera.

I’m a big fan both of Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez’s work and of magical realism in general, so I was excited to pick up Love in the Time of Cholera , which promised to take Garcí­a Márquez’ style and apply it to an epic romance. The result is more the story of a man who refuses to grow up, and in the end, is rewarded for it.

The plot of Love in the Time of Cholera revolves around the long-suffering Florentino Ariza, who falls in love with Fermina Daza when the two are teenagers, only to see her reject him and marry the wealthy young doctor, Juvenal Urbino. Florentino decides that he must wait for Dr. Urbino to die, at which point he can resume his pursuit; in the meantime, he will get his rocks off with almost every woman who crosses his path (the novel claims he has 622 affairs over the 51 years of Fermina’s marriage, not including one-night stands, seemingly a mathematical impossibility for a man with a full-time job, even granting that Florentino conducted some of those affairs simultaneously), with a particular jones for widows. (I’ll give you all five seconds to glean the significance of that. Got it? Excellent. Let’s move on.)

It seems that this is intended as a soaring romantic tale of a love that wouldn’t die, that transcended the years, and so on, but that feeling disappears from the novel the moment Fermina rejects Florentino until after Dr. Urbino dies. Garcí­a Márquez (GGM, from here on out) tells us Florentino’s emotional state is due to his immense ability to love, but it seems to me that Florentino was suffering from a case of arrested development. When he approaches Fermina just hours after her husband has died to reiterate his undying love for her, he’s not being romantic – he’s acting like a self-centered teenager, tone-deaf to the emotions of the people around him. It is as if he has caught a disease and doesn’t wish to be cured.

That ending is one of the book’s brightest spots; it’s a clever and unexpected resolution to a plot that looks to be headed toward a predictable, Hollywood-style ending (they get together, one of them dies, the women in the audience cry and see it over and over again), and it includes some of the book’s best writing. GGM does have an incredible gift with prose, and uses it to great effect in parts of the book about love and sex, fear of aging and death, and familial relationships:

But in her loneliness in the palace she learned to know him [her son], they learned to know each other, and she discovered with great delight that one does not love one’s children just because they are one’s children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.

One negative aspect I’ve noticed in other GGM works shows up again here – his obsession with bodily functions. For example:

Even when it was not the season for asparagus, it had to be found regardless, so that he could take pleasure in the vapors of his own fragrant urine.

Wow. Thanks for sharing. Good thing this wasn’t a scratch-and-sniff edition. One of the fantastic things about GGM’s masterwork, One Hundred Years of Solitude , is that it transports the reader into a sort of dreamstate, where closing the book results in a brief moment of confusion that’s akin to waking up in the middle of a vivid dream. Yet Love in the Time of Cholera continually interrupts any of its own attempts to create that immersive, dreamlike feeling with verbal tritones about urine, feces, vomit, or semen.

By tying up the romance story and fading out the various little subplots one by one, GGM leaves the reader with a satisfying ending that’s not unrealistically happy (one of the subplots ends very badly, although it’s brushed off a bit in the broader context). The problem is the meat of the book, where the reader sees Florentino and learns he’s not a romantic hero but a juvenile antihero unworthy of the exaltation that the ending seems to give him.

Death Comes for the Archbishop.

Before I get to the writeup, a quick note to those of you who pushed me to pick up Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen: I did pick it up today, and I’ll read it at some point in the next few weeks. The picture of Moore on the back scares the crap out of me, though. I would move to the other side of the street if I saw that coming at me.

I think Willa Cather is one of the most underappreciated novelists out there, and I can’t figure out why. Her novels are wonderful, beautifully written with great attention to detail and a deep understanding of human emotions. Her main characters are always compelling. And for people who read with an agenda, she offers a little of everything – she was as sincere an American patriot as you’ll find (by which I mean she clearly loved America and Americans, especially the immigrants who made this country what it is), and for the multiculturalists, she was one of America’s first great female novelists and probably its first great lesbian novelist. For whatever reason, however, her work has been gradually deprecated over time, and it’s a shame.

My first introduction to Cather’s work was My Ántonia, a story of immigrant families on the Nebraska plain, with a focus on the eldest daughter, Ántonia. It’s a beautiful novel that starts out as something of a love story but instead is a celebration of friendship wrapped around a praising of the immigrant’s work ethic.

Cather appears on the three main book lists I’m working through via another novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop. While I’d rank this just a shade below My Ántonia, it’s still an amazing book. Death Comes for the Archbishop is a story of friendship, even more so than My Ántonia, along with a story of faith, set among the New Mexico territory when it was still largely uncharted land.

The main character, Father Jean Latour, doesn’t become an archbishop or receive a visit from the Reaper until the book’s final chapter; the book is almost a biography of his life starting from his transfer out to the southwest. Latour is accompanied by Father Joseph Vailliant, a slightly flawed foil to Latour’s compassionate Catholic faith, and the two slowly build their church’s following in their oversized territory village by village, overcoming corrupt local priests, narrowly avoiding a murderer, befriending the real-life frontiersman Kit Carson, and all the while deepening their friendship.

If there’s a criticism of the novel, it’s the general lack of conflict; problems are solved in short order and there’s no villain or enemy or large obstacle overshadowing the whole book. But I’d argue that to point out this as a failing of the book is to miss the point – Cather’s writing is compassionate, sensitive, almost sentimental, emphasizing the bonds that form between friends and the way that those bonds help us react to and influence the world immediately around us. It’s an optimistic outlook, one that I suppose is out of favor at the moment in the literary world, but if we value diversity in everything else, we should value it in literary viewpoints too.

A Clockwork Orange.

Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange appears on the three major lists of the best books of the 20th century (Modern Library, Radcliffe, and the TIME 100), one of 25 books to pull off the trifecta. It’s a masterwork, a deeply philosophical novel that poses serious questions about liberty and free will, as well as a linguistic tour de force written in a brilliantly expressive invented slang.

The novel is narrated by Alex, who refers to himself as “Your Humble Narrator,” a teenage tough called a “droog” who spends his evenings causing mayhem, assaulting older citizens, dabbling in the occasional rape, and listening to dramatic pieces of classical music. Eventually arrested in a home invasion gone awry, Alex spends two years in prison before he’s offered a chance to gain his freedom in two weeks if he submits to an experimental treatment known as the “Ludovico Technique,” probably the best-known sequence from the book or the movie version, where Alex is forced to watch violent films with his eyelids held open. In its final third, Alex re-enters society and the questions begin: Is a man still a man if he’s acting morally by force rather than choice? How much do we want or expect our government to do in the name of public safety?

Burgess created his own slang for the novel to give it a futuristic or alternate-history feel. Most of the new words draw from Russian vocabulary – “nadsat,” meaning teenager, from the endings of the Russian words for the numbers between eleven and nineteen; “viddy,” to see, from the Russian “vidyet” – with occasional invented slang words, like “sinny” for the cinema. It makes the first few pages of the book a bit tough to get through, but after a while, it becomes easier to follow and adds color to Alex’s language, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes almost musical, while also creating a clear delineation between his speech and that of the adults around him.

My senior year in high school, I took an AP lit class with Mrs. Glynn – who saw phallic and “concave” symbols on every page of every book – and she assigned us a choice of one of three books: Slaughterhouse-Five (also on all three top-100 lists), Catch-22 (ditto), and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (omitted by Modern Library). I ended up reading and enjoying all three, since they presented moral or philosophical questions, often about horrible situations, with heavy doses of humor and a thoroughly modern tone. A Clockwork Orange would have fit perfectly on this list, and if anything, Burgess’ novel is more clever and more serious than the other three.

A Death in the Family.

James Agee’s A Death in the Family is praised as an American classic, as a lyrical account of the death of a 36-year-old father of two and the effect this has on his family. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1958.

I hated it.

Yes, there is an inherent sorrow in the event at the book’s center, based on the death of Agee’s father when Agee himself was just six years old (the age of the older child, Rufus, in the book). Jay Follet gets a call in the middle of the night that his ill father is nearing death, and he races up to try to get there before the old man dies. It turns out to be a false alarm, and on the way home, Follet dies in a one-car accident. I think we can all agree that that’s a pretty awful turn of events.

What Agee does from there – and in his defense, he had not finished working on the book at the time of his own death at age 45, with publication and a Pulitzer Prize coming two years after he died – left me cold. The constant changes of perspective, flitting from one character’s mind to another’s and back and forth in time, break any emotional connection the reader might have with the thinly-drawn characters. Follet’s wife/widow, Mary, is depicted with broad brush strokes as a staunchly Catholic woman drawn deeper into her faith (which isolates her from the rest of her agnostic family, who didn’t approve of her marriage to Jay in the first place) but with little voice of her own. Rufus gets the best material in a passage that describes his first meeting after the accident with the neighborhood toughs who pick on him daily, but by that point, I’d checked out emotionally. As for the lyrical prose, I must have missed it; there wasn’t a phrase or a passage that stuck with me for more than a few seconds, and I often found myself skimming paragraphs (Agee could have stood to shorten those) to try to get back to the dialogue. Yet somehow, this book won the Pulitzer – okay, I suppose I should stop pretending that means something, because it doesn’t, and being dead absolutely helps your chances of winning – and made the TIME 100, which has been a much more reliable reading guide. I suppose everyone’s entitled to a miss every now and then.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

I often come across books that are marketed as remarkable achievements for their young authors – Chris Paolini’s Eragon, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth – but such books always leave me thinking, “Pretty good for someone that age,” instead of just “Pretty good.” I’ve now found an exception.

Carson McCullers wrote The Heart is a Lonely Hunter when she was 22 years old, and there is no trace whatsoever of immaturity or short life experience anywhere in this book. It is filled with a deep sensibility of isolation and alienation, of spiritual voids and societal oppression. It seems to me that given her understanding and empathy for all of the characters around whom the novel revolves, McCullers would have to have been black and white, exalted and condemned, religious and irreligious, hopeful and hopeless, a witness to tragedy, a widow and a widower, a member of the underclass, a holder of a Ph.D. in literature, a mother, a father, and a drunk. Few authors ever show this level of understanding of the human condition; McCullers did it at an age when many authors are busy writing their theses.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter dissects the lives of five people in a small Southern town that is forever teetering on the precipice of financial ruin: Mick Kelly, a world-weary twelve-year-old girl whose family is squeaking by; Jake Blount, an angry, alcoholic drifter; Biff Brannon, the town’s bartender, who becomes a widower early in the book; and Dr. Copeland, an educated black man whose atheist/Marxist views and uncontrollable temper have alienated him from his own children. The fifth man, John Singer, is a deaf-mute whose life partner (it’s not made explicit whether the two are homosexual, but that detail is irrelevant – their relationship is that of a married couple) loses his marbles and is committed to an asylum. Singer becomes the somewhat-willing audience for the private thoughts of the other four characters, often responding with nothing more than nods and smiles, occasionally writing down a more detailed answer, and sometimes saying nothing at all. Is he a priest receiving confessions? A God or Jesus figure? Or the personification of an uncaring world? McCullers gives hints but no firm answers to these questions or to the question of what the other characters symbolize, leaving just enough room for the reader’s imagination and for a host of differing interpretations of her work throughout the ensuing years.

McCullers also had an unusual gift for prose and sits as a sort of bridge between the lyrical but difficult style of Faulkner and the plain but still sparkling text of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Her words are seldom superfluous, yet her descriptions are evocative, especially when discussing the thoughts or feelings of characters, as when one of the five characters above gains some measure of emotional advancement towards the novel’s close:

For in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and of valor. Of the endless fluid passage of humanity through endless time. And of those who labor and of those who—one word—love. His soul expanded. But for a moment only. For in him he felt a warning, a shaft of terror… he was suspended between radiance and darkness. Between bitter irony and faith.

I could see a criticism of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter‘s plot as thin. Very little happens in the book to move things forward, and there’s nothing to resolve at the end; the book’s climax is a little out of nowhere, with one event setting off a trigger of smaller events, petering out towards the story’s conclusion. However, the lack of narrative greed doesn’t stop the book from flowing because McCullers’ prose is so strong and her characters so well-developed. It’s a remarkable achievement for an author of any age.

If you’ve already read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Richard Wright wrote an excellent review in New Republicwhen it was published, but if you haven’t read the book, bear in mind that his review contains significant spoilers.