→ February 2, 2010
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Ulysses.

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 It’s hardly non-fiction despite Joyce’s meticulous attention to detail in his settings and historical references.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(All uncover their heads. Women whisper eagerly.)

A MILLIONAIRESS

(Richly.) Isn’t he simply wonderful?

A NOBLEWOMAN

(Nobly.) All that man has seen!

A FEMINIST

(Masculinely.) And done!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ January 10, 2010
→ By

Gilead.

Marilynne Robinson’s debut novel, Housekeeping, came out in 1980, won several major awards (including the PEN/Hemingway Award for the best debut novel of the year), eventually landed on TIME‘s list of the 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005, and represented Robinson’s only published work of fiction for 25 years until she finally brought out her second novel, Gilead. And all that that novel ever did was win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It is as if the literary world was saying:

Dear Ms. Robinson:

It is the opinion of our community that you should write more books.

Sincerely,

All of us

Robinson’s strength, at least based on these two novels, isn’t so much her storycraft as her prose, which is just remarkable, unlike any contemporary author I’ve ever read, word-perfect and genuine and lyrical and any other florid term used to describe brilliant writing. She nails every task laid before the writer of a novel of emotions, as both of her books are, from descriptive passages to the idiom of language and even internal monologues, like this one, where the narrator, Reverend John Ames, stops to reflect on the way he’s writing this book, which is a letter to his young son in the form of a memoir:

In writing this, I notice the care it costs me not to use certain words more than I ought to. I am thinking about the word “just.” I almost wish I could have written that the sun just shone and the tree just glistened, and the water just poured out of it and the girl just laughed – when it’s used that way it does indicate a stress on the word that follows it, and also a particular pitch of the voice. … There is something real signified by that word “just” that proper language won’t acknowledge. It’s a little like the German ge-. I regret that I must deprive myself of it. It takes half the point out of telling the story.

Reverend Ames is 76 years old at the book’s outset and is dying, slowly, of a heart condition, but at the same time is the father of a seven-year-old boy thanks to a second chance at love and marriage that found him marrying a woman many years his junior who happened to wander into his church one day, an event that turned out to be love at first sight. He knows that he’s dying and wants to leave a long letter to that son so that when the child is older he has something more to remember his father by than vague memories from childhood of a feeble old man who struggled to go up the stairs to his study. Reverend Ames walks back through the stories of his father and grandfather, both preachers but of wildly different sorts and temperaments, only to have to shift gears slightly when the son of his best friend, John Ames Boughton, drifts back into town after a long absence. The younger John Ames, named for the Reverend, has been a lifelong disappointment to his own father, another preacher, and to Reverend Ames, and to many others in the small (fictional) town of Gilead, Iowa. (Gilead is, itself, a place mentioned in Genesis, and the name apparently translates to “hill of testimony,” so I presume Robinson chose it as this novel is entirely the Reverend Ames’ testimony, not just of his faith but of his life.) Boughton’s purpose in the town isn’t clear, and he makes repeated attempts to talk to Reverend Ames – generally antagonizing him – before his purpose becomes clear shortly before the end of the book. Along the way, Reverend Ames presents his thoughts on all sorts of matters theological and mundane, interspersed with personal recollections from his own life and heartfelt passages about his wife and son:

I’d never have believed I’d see a wife of mine doting on a child of mine. It still amazes me every time I think of it. I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.

I tell my daughter every day, multiple times a day, how much I love her, how much it has meant to me to have her in my life, how she is the center of my universe. Anything I have ever said to her in that vein has seemed wholly inadequate. I know exactly how Reverend Ames felt when he said those words.

Robinson didn’t wait 25 years for a follow-up, publishing Home, the story of John Ames Boughton, in 2008.

Next up: I must be out of my mind, but I’m going to try to tackle James Joyce’s Ulysses. I just can’t stand seeing it on five of my “greatest” booklists without a check mark next to it, or at least the knowledge that I gave it a legitimate effort.

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→ January 5, 2010
→ By

Pedro Páramo.

Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo is barely a novel at a scant 123 pages and under 40,000 words, but was apparently a major influence on post-colonial literature in Latin America, most famously as the book that inspired Gábriel García Márquez to write One Hundred Years of Solitude. Rulfo’s use of magical realism doesn’t seem all that groundbreaking today, but at the time it was published, it was.

Rulfo set the book apart from the beginning through its odd structure – seventy passages of varying lengths, some as short as a paragraph, all written as an interior monologue with very little descriptive prose. The novel includes three separate plot strands, loosely connected but woven together with frequent confusion as to which strand is the current one. Juan Preciado’s mother makes him promise to return to the town of his birth to find his father, Pedro Páramo, whom Juan’s mother abandoned when Juan was very young. On the way there, Juan has an unusual encounter with a strange man who tells him that Pedro PPáramo is his father as well, only to reveal that Páramo has been dead for many years. Juan finds the town, Comala, empty, yet full of ghosts and memories – yes, he sees dead people – and it turns out that the title character is the reason for the town’s decline and death, one that infects Juan as well, leading to an even more bizarre sequence of conversations he has and overhears from within his own grave. (Whether or not Juan is dead the entire novel is apparently a major subject of scholarly debate; I think he’s dead from the start, as the sequence that supposedly describes his death is unusually vague, but he doesn’t know he’s dead until that passage.) He learns that Páramo fathered many children with the women of the town, but became obsessed with the one he couldn’t have, Susana, who eventually returned to the town and married Pedro but never gave him her heart, after which he decided to starve the town to death.

Rulfo wrote the book after a visit to the town where he was born, one that was nearly depopulated as part of the great urbanization in Mexico in the early part of the last century. This shift also meant the destruction of local institutions in the rural towns that were the backbone of Mexican culture. The desolation and loneliness he experienced on that return visit formed the basis for the abandoned Comala of the novel – haunted by sounds and memories without a clear line between life and death (perhaps because everything is on the wrong side of that line). You can play all sorts of matching games between the main characters and the forces or events that shaped that period of Mexico’s history – Susana, for example, could stand in for that siren’s call of the city that ultimately wrecks the towns and people who heeded it – because Rulfo painted them with broad strokes and doesn’t provide a ton of detail in such a short work. He also gave his characters names with obvious metaphorical implications – Páramo is “barren,” Preciado is “precious,” Fulgor is “glow” – which is great fodder for academic interpretation, and I’m not sure it’s possible to read or enjoy this book without looking at that second level of meaning. The plot itself is so thin and unsatisfying that it can’t stand on its own and only rises to greatness when you consider Rulfo’s concern for his country rather than his characters.

Since Pedro Páramo needs analysis for the reader to fully grasp what Rulfo was trying to express, here are a few links I found useful in thinking about the book once I’d finished it:

Next up: Marilynne Robinson’s follow-up to one of my top 100 novels (her 1980 debut, Housekeeping), the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead.

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→ January 2, 2010
→ By

The Mating Season.

I’d rank P.G. Wodehouse’s The Mating Season as perhaps my favorite Jeeves/Wooster novel for its extraordinarily high degree of silliness and slightly more convoluted plot (although Wodehouse’s plots, at least the Jeeves/Wooster ones, are nearly all alike), but above all because Bertie Wooster has a little more character than normal in this novel, as opposed to the many books and stories where he’s a highly amusing fathead.

The story involves, as usual, couples whose intended marriages are either forbidden by forbidding relatives or split up by squabbles, four such couples in this case, including Wodehouse regulars Augustus “Gussie” Fink-Nottle and his aristocrat flower-child fiancée, Madelyn Bassett, who believes the stars are God’s daisy-chain … and that Bertie is hopelessly in love with her, which makes him her backup plan should Gussie fail to deliver the goods. Of course, Gussie does fail to d. the g., while a brother-sister tandem finds their hoped-for nuptuals on hold due to the presence of five forbidding aunts at Deverill Hall, where Bertie arrives pretending to be Gussie, only to have Gussie later arrive pretending to be Bertie, which means that Gussie (as Bertie) gets the use of Jeeves. There’s also an angry dog, a village talent show, some dancing on chairs, and a very inappropriate dinner-table joke.

The plot does bring some narrative greed – you know everything’s going to work out fine, but seeing how Wodehouse (through Jeeves) works his way out of the mess he created for his characters is always a pleasure, and Season doesn’t disappoint. But what draws me back to Wodehouse is his dry wit, which infuses prose and dialogue alike and leaves him without peer among comic novelists. I won’t spoil the dinner-table joke, but I also enjoyed his droll description of a dog chasing a cat while he’s chased by his pudgy female owner:

It was the cat who eased a tense situation. Possibly because it had not yet breakfasted and wished to do so, or it may be because the charm of Bertram Wooster’s society had at last begun to pall, it selected this moment to leave me. It turned on its heel and emerged from the bush with its tail in the air, and the white, woolly dog, sighting it, broke into a canine version of Aunt Charlotte’s A-hunting-we-will-go song and with a brief ‘Hallo, hallo, hallo, hallo’ went a-hunting. The pursuit rolled away over brake and over thorn, with Madeline Bassett’s school friend bringing up the rear.

Position at the turn:

1. Cat
2. Dog
3. Madeline Bassett’s school friend

The leaders were well up in a bunch. Several lengths separated 2 and 3.

Interesting to no one but me: Apparently I’ve read The Mating Season before, but I didn’t recall it at all, which means I probably read it in 2001 or 2002 when I first discovered Wodehouse and read many of his Jeeves books in a short period of time. Also, this marked my 86th book read in 2009, a new personal best for a single calendar year (although I suppose you might argue that I’m playing the Arbitrary Endpoints Game with myself). I may be obsessive, but I’m diligent about it.

A few of you have asked me where to start with Wodehouse. The book that got me started is now out of print, but you can still buy it through amazon under its UK title, The World of Jeeves: A Jeeves and Wooster Omnibus. It contains two collections of short stories plus one Jeeves novel.

Next up: Pedro Páramo, a surrealist novel by Juan Rulfo, spurred by a question from reader Kirby in April of 2008.

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→ December 29, 2009
→ By

A House for Mr. Biswas.

Lying in the room next to Shama’s, perpetually dark, Mr. Biswas slept and woke and slept again. The darkness, the silence, the absence of the world enveloped and comforted him. At some far-off time he had suffered great anguish. He had fought against it. Now he had surrendered, and this surrender had brought peace.

Nobel Prize-winner V.S. Naipaul first achieved critical acclaim with A House for Mr. Biswas, which appears at #72 on the Modern Library 100 and is on the (unranked) TIME 100. As you might imagine, the novel details the lifelong desire of Mohun Biswas, an Indian man born to expatriate parents in Trinidad, for a house of his own, as much for what it represents (independence, status, success, dignity, masculinity) as what it provides (privacy, stability, an escape from his insane in-laws). But Mr. Biswas is no up-from-nothing Horatio Alger hero – he’s petulant, immature, and incredibly self-centered to the point of all but ignoring his brilliant young son until the son’s academic efforts promise to shine respect upon his father.

Mr. Biswas is partly a comedy, with Naipaul mining some humor from small bits of dialogue and the minor calamities that befall the title character. Mr. Biswas goes to work for one of the smaller newspapers in Port of Spain, and receives some pointed and slightly obnoxious feedback from the paper’s harried editor:

‘”Considerably” is a big word meaning “very,” which is a pointless word any way. And look. “Several” has seven letters. “Many” has only four and oddly enough has exactly the same meaning.’

And Naipaul’s ear for dialogue down to the minutiae of conversation is very strong. But the core theme, that Mr. Biswas perseveres despite continued misfortunes, strikes me as less a celebration of human dignity than a mockery of how some people can’t get out of their own way – or perhaps that people can achieve their goals despite screwing up left and right for twenty or thirty years. Almost everything that goes wrong for Mr. Biswas is his own fault. He rushes to marry a girl of whom he knows nothing, then he keeps knocking her up despite the fact that they have no money and mooch off her extended (and crazy) family). He blows a month’s salary on a dollhouse for his daughter; he buys a house he can’t afford without even bothering to see it in the daylight; he’s rude to everyone, including his wife, and then acts surprised when he gets nastiness in return. By the end of the book, I was half-hoping he didn’t get the house after all, even though it was promised in the prologue that he did.

Naipaul receives tremendous praise for his prose, which is effusive and heavy on descriptive language, reminiscent of Dickens’ prose … but of course, Dickens wrote in serial form and was striving to fill pages and stretch stories out over more issues, making him the bane of English and American schoolchildren for over a century now. The book appeared on the TIME 100, compiled in 2005, but received a less-than-flattering review in the magazine in 1962 when Mr. Biswas was first published; the reviewer praised the colorful patois of the Indian expatriates in the novel and their melange of old and new customs, “but Naipaul’s House, though built of excellent exotic materials, sags badly; ‘economy, style, and a less elastic blueprint would have done wonders.” A verbose author can be a pleasure to read when the plot moves quickly or the novel is short, but neither was the case in Mr. Biswas, which runs 560 pages in the current paperback edition and lacks any major narrative thread to pull the reader to the finish.

Next up: Back to Wodehouse – sort of a Christmas tradition for me – with one of the few Jeeves novels I’ve never read, The Mating Season.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ December 19, 2009
→ By

The Human Factor.

“And yet I’d always believed that one day I would see him again … and then I would be able to thank him for saving Sarah. Now he’s dead and gone without a word of thanks from me.”
“All you’ve done for us has been a kind of thanks. He will have understood that. You don’t have to feel any regret.”
“No? One can’t reason away regret – it’s a bit like falling in love, falling into regret.”

Graham Greene’s The Human Factor is a spy novel that, as the title implies, focuses heavily on the human cost of espionage, particularly the psychological cost, as it follows MI6 agent Maurice Castle through his own reexamination of his motives and loyalties to an amoral institution that might be more dangerous than the people they’re allegedly fighting.

Castle is a British-born agent who, during a lengthy field op in South Africa, fell in love with a black woman and thus also fell afoul of the laws against interracial relationships during that country’s apartheid era. That woman, the Sarah of the quote above, escaped South Africa with the help of a prominent Communist and now lives with Maurice and her son (his stepson) in a quiet London suburb. Castle’s simple existence is compromised by a spiritual bankruptcy that becomes clearer to Castle as an investigation into a leak from his small department leads to unforeseen consequences and forces him to make a life-altering choice.

Greene’s view of spy games was that they were more mundane than typical spy novels and movies would imply, and the novel has very little violence and nothing you could call action, instead focusing on the individual characters, from the complex Castle to the true believer Percival to the unregenerate South African partisan Muller, and how they view and react to the possibility of a leak. Castle’s position is precarious by definition, as he’s one of only three or four potential leaks in the department, and he has a known connection to the communist faction in South Africa, whose white-led regime was at the time a battleground for the Cold War powers. He’s aware of the investigation, but when he sees how far Percival might go to protect the agency, regardless of the moral or legal implications of his action, he’s forced to act.

Greene was among the best practicioners of the spy novel for his very reluctance to rely on action sequences and overt violence, both of which are crutches for a novelist in any genre outside of hard-boiled detective fiction. Setting that restriction on his writing meant Greene had to spend more time on character development and crafting realistic dialogue and actions for his characters, whether he was writing a farce or, as in this novel, a serious commentary. He paints a bleak picture of intelligence services as bureaucracies filled with men who either have no moral compasses or are willing suppress them for the good of the agency, and in a secondary theme takes more than his share of shots at the apartheid policy of South Africa that was still in effect for sixteen years after The Human Factor‘s publication. But while Greene fleshes Castle out fully – not that he’s all that sympathetic, and it is his spiritual bankruptcy more than anyone’s that defines the book’s lack of a fixed morality – most of his secondary characters get secondary treatment. We see, for example, glimpses of the lonely career man Daintry, but his subplot has no start or finish and he appears in some ways to have wandered on to the wrong set. Cynthia, the primary secretary for Castle’s group, plays a key role in the investigation portion of the plot, but as a prop, not as a defined character. The Human Factor is thus more a story of bureaucratic decay in the intelligence service in pursuit of questionable means aimed at dubious ends than a story of its characters, even though the climax and denuoement are very much about Castle himself.

Next up: V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, which appears on both the Modern Library and TIME 100 lists and is one of two books that seem to be at the head of the Nobel Prize-winner’s canon.

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→ December 15, 2009
→ By

Run.

My analysis of the Halladay/Lee series of deals is up on ESPN.com. I’ll be on Sirius 210/XM 175 at 8:35 pm EST tonight.

—

Ann Patchett’s Run, the long-awaited followup to her masterpiece, Bel Canto, is, like its predecessor, a beautifully written and sensitive book, one that moves quickly despite its slow treatment of time, with most of the book’s action occurring in a 24-hour period. Unfortunately, it’s also lightweight and sentimental as Patchett overplays her political theme at the expense of any conflict in the story itself.

Run covers the Doyle family, comprising the father Bernard, an Irish-American former mayor of Boston; his two adopted African-American sons, Teddy and Tip; the unseen older biological son, Sullivan; and, for the opening chapter, the mother, Bernadette, who is dead when the story opens. Bernard, Teddy, and Tip are attending a lecture given by Jesse Jackson at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government on a snowy Boston evening, after which a traffic accident turns their insular world upside down when one of them is hurt and a bystander is critically injured.

Where Bel Canto had complex three-dimensional characters, Run has simple, entirely sympathetic ones. Tip, Teddy, and the young African-American girl Kenya who witnesses the accident are all thinly drawn; they are all runners (how stereotypical) and Tip and Teddy are each monomaniacal in their personal interests. Sullivan eventually appears, and his backstory is typical and excuses just about everything in his itinerant lifestyle, even the reason why he had to flee Africa to return to Boston unannounced. The closest we get to a complex character is Tennessee Moser, the woman injured in the traffic accident, whose conversation with her dead friend – Patchett wisely leaves the question of whether this is a religious experience, a dream, or a hallucination up to the reader – was, for me, the only truly compelling passage in the book, like a brilliant short story around which Patchett built a novel.

Patchett herself says in a Q&A at the end of the paperback edition that the story is primarily about politics, not family, and in a second note she fawns a little over the then-candidate Barack Obama. Kenya is the blatantly obvious Obama symbol, from her name to her sudden appearance on the scene to the way the plot unfolds where she is the person the Doyle family has been waiting for since the death of the mother (John Kennedy, perhaps?) almost twenty years earlier to the way she spurs Tip and Teddy to greater personal heights and even helps Sullivan straighten himself out … it’s too much, another example of the completely unrealistic expectations heaped on President Obama, who could turn out to be our greatest President ever and still fall short of the hyperbole. It’s ham-handed and a little condescending, and Patchett seems to have worked so hard to craft and protect this savior-character Kenya that she left virtually no conflict in the book – there is no unsympathetic character, no one working against the protagonists, little question of where we’re ultimately going. She offers one plot twist, but it turns out to have little effect on the plot, just some symbolic value that I won’t mention here for fear of spoiling it. I’m fine with books that are full of metaphor and symbolism, but give me plot and depth, too. The result here is a quick read and a warm one, but it’s a little maudlin and lacked the richness of the soaring epic of Bel Canto.

Next up: An “entertainment” from Graham Greene, one of his later spy novels, The Human Factor.

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→ December 13, 2009
→ By

A Time to Be Born.

Dawn Powell was a commercial failure as a novelist during her lifetime, despite accolades from her peers, including Ernest Hemingway, who called her his favorite living novelist. In fact, according to the Library of America,

At Dawn Powell’s death in 1965, nearly all of her books were out of print. Surveys of American literature failed to mention her. Among well-known critics, only Powell’s friend Edmund Wilson had ever published a lengthy and serious review of her work.

Powell died a pauper and was buried in an unmarked grave in New York’s Potter’s Field after a life riddled with depression, disappointment, and alcoholism. Yet her books have been on a modest thirty-year winning streak, one that the LOA credits Gore Vidal with starting in 1981.

I first heard of Dawn Powell in the introduction to Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, a book that was successful at its printing but fell out of print more than once after the author’s death. Terry Teachout compared Dundy’s legacy of mild obscurity to Powell’s, citing Powell as similar in style as well. Powell has no acknowledged magnum opus but A Time to Be Born seems to be among the critics’ favorites from her bibliography, and it did not disappoint, as it is a funny, bitter, snarky farce.

Powell chose to build the novel around a real-life power couple of the late 1930s, the Luces, Henry (founder of TIME magazine) and his wife Clare Boothe, who receives an unflattering portrayal in the scheming, selfish Amanda Keeler, who uses her feminine wiles and ability to manipulate others to overcome her humble, unhappy childhood and tear the publisher Julian Evans away from his happy marriage, launching her social career and, simultaneously, her career as a writer and pundit. Amanda’s carefully scripted life is upset, just slightly, when a childhood friend, Vicky Haven, comes to New York and receives a token job in the Evans’ publishing empire, only to find herself used by Amanda to cover up an affair while she unwittingly falls in love with her patron’s paramour.

Vicky is the sympathetic protagonist and is well-rounded, maturing as the book goes on from meek, self-effacing wallflower to determined if clumsy adult, but Amanda is the star of the show, a Becky Sharp of interwar America, batting eyelashes and working rooms, looking down on those who, if they knew her origins, would look down on her, and dominating a husband who is just as dominant on his own turf – the workplace. Amanda’s singleminded pursuit of power and the proxy for happiness it represents is understandable given her upbringing, and Powell shows us enough of this to evoke empathy in the reader until Amanda and Vicky come into inevitable conflict.

Powell’s wit is sharp, with descriptions built on backhanded compliments or outright putdowns, but even her descriptions of ordinary events show a facility with words that amuses for the length of the book:

…Ethel said, attacking her dainty squab with a savagery that might indicate the bird had pulled a knife on her first.

Where Powell shines beyond just raw wit and vitriol is her ability to see through characters and personalities right to the bone, as in her portrayal of the man who broke Vicky’s heart and sent her from her small Ohio town to New York, the shiftless Tom turner, who tries to compensate for his lack of worldliness at a dinner party with Vicky by arguing with everyone in sight:

“You’re quite wrong there, old man,” he stated disagreeably at every remark made by the other two men. He was one of those men who betray their secret frustration in this way: taken into a handsmoe mansion they fall silent, coming slowly to an indignant mental boiling point of “This should be mine!” until out of a clear sky they start to shower insults on the innocent host. Married to a plain wife they take it as a personal grievance when they meet a single beauty, and cannot forbear pecking at the beauty with criticisms of her left thumb, her necklace, her accent, as if destruction by bits will ease the outrage of not being able to have her. Unemployed, they jeer at the stupidity of an envied friend working so hard for so little pay. In the unexpected presence of an admited or celebrated person they are reminded gallingly of their own inferior qualities and humiliate themselves by inadequate sarcasm, showing clearly how impressed they are and how irrevocably inferior they know themselves to be.

A Time to Be Born is driven forward by the question of whether Amanda will get away with her schemes or whether she’ll get what’s coming to her, as well as whether the ingenue Vicky can find at least romantic happiness if not something more in the cold city. Powell’s male characters aren’t as strong or as well-built as her women outside of Amanda’s side dish Ken Saunders, and Julian Evans could have used more depth even if he was to remain an often spineless husband beneath his manipulative wife’s thumb, although his simmering revolt provides another subplot for the increasingly complex second half of the book.

Apropos of nothing, I did get a reward for slogging through Alice Adams a few weeks ago when I came across this allusion to one of the most enduring scenes in that drab book, where Alice, at a dance sans gentleman, sits in a pair of chairs on the veranda and pretends that her beau will be back at any moment:

Her agonized Alice Adams efforts to act as if she were reserving the other seat for a most distinguished but delayed escort, spoiled that evening too for her.

Next up: Ann Patchett’s long-delayed follow-up to her amazing Bel Canto, 2007’s Run.

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→ December 6, 2009
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Codex.

I’ve got a few new pieces up on the Four-Letter, including reactions to the Noel Argüelles signing, the Chone Figgins signing, and James Paxton’s lawsuit against the University of Kentucky.

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Pseudo-intellectual thrillers have thrived in recent years as a literary genre, particularly in mass-market paperbacks, with Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code leading the charge, although I think the style dates back to Michael Crichton’s preachy, predictable, very fast-paced novels from the early-to-mid-1990s. They’re potboilers in fancy dress, usually with lots of explanatory text so that you’ll understand the motive of the core crime or why everyone is running very fast. The technique of putting the protagonist in jeopardy and having various suspects and witnesses killed off over the course of a book works well in the spare writing of hard-boiled detective novels, but married with …

Lev Grossman, whose The Magicians was one of the best books I read in 2009, wrote a book in that genre that dispenses with the conventions of body counts, crazy chase scenes, and character cliches (like the beautiful yet brilliant female researcher). Codex, which came out in 2004, creates tension from the core mystery around the titular Codex (a medieval book that may hide a coded message, if it can be found, assuming it even exists) rather than the artificial tension that characterizes the more ponderous entries in the genre.

In Codex, investment banker Edward Wozny finds himself employed to catalog the rare book collection of one of his best clients, an English duke and his wife, and despite his instinctive indignation at the menial task, he takes it on and finds himself gradually sucked into the search for the missing codex, even when he realizes that not everyone involved wants the book to be found. At the same time, Wozny’s friends introduce him to a time-sucking computer game called MOMUS that seems to Edward to offer unexplained parallels and connections to the search for the codex. In both quests, he ends up hopelessly lost and has to enlist the help of others, including a not-beautiful yet brilliant female researcher who specializes in the alleged author of the missing tome.

The stakes are high for the characters in the book, but Grossman ignores the trend of raising the stakes to fate-of-the-world status, recognizing that something as small as a battle between two members of the same family can be serious enough to cause people to throw around large sums of money and throw wrenches in the works of another person’s plans. I found that the pace of Codex accelerated as it went simply because I wanted to know where the codex was, what it meant, and why the person who employs Edward wanted to find it. Grossman also avoids the pat ending, concluding the book on an appropriately ambiguous note, although he does rely on one error of judgment by a main character to get us to the finish line.

Next up: Dawn Powell’s satire of the publishing circles of late 1930s New York (particularly Claire Boothe Luce), a somewhat forgotten novel called A Time to Be Born.

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→ November 30, 2009
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The BFG.

I read Roald Dahl’s The BFG because it’s on the Guardian‘s list of the 100 greatest novels of the last 300 years. It’s a peculiar choice, as it’s a young adult book and quite short for a novel of any genre, although some of the macabre material makes it unsuitable for the younger part of the YA audience. It’s clever and very funny with a silly plot, and the title character is, for an ugly giant, totally endearing.

The novel begins with the abduction of Sophie, a resident of a London orphanage, by a 24-foot-tall giant who turns out to be one of nine living in a faraway place, and the only one who doesn’t run off every night to snatch people from their beds and eat them. This giant, the Big Friendly Giant of the book’s title, quickly becomes fond of Sophie, but their fast friendship faces a challenge when the BFG learns that the other Giants – including the Fleshlumpeater, the Bloodbottler, and the Childchewer – are planning a run to London to feast on English children during the “witching hour” when all humans are asleep and giants can run amok undetected. Sophie hatches a plan that involves the BFG and the Queen of England, some trickery, and six dozen eggs.

Putting The BFG on their top 100 novels of all time makes the Guardian‘s list look deliberately different or contrarian, but it is still an enjoyable book, mostly for its magical prose. Dahl was an extremely gifted wordplay artist, as the gibberish that comes out of the BFG’s mouth is often inspired, and the book overflows with puns, such as descriptions of how the “human beans” in each country taste (giants like Swedes for the “Sweden sour” taste; people in Panama taste “hatty” while those in Wellington taste of boots; and no one likes Greeks because they taste “greasy”). The explanation of why the giants’ home isn’t in the atlas and the description of the fizzy drink frobscottle are both priceless. It’s maybe a two-hour read and certainly worth the time investment, although I have a feeling I won’t be reading this to my daughter at any time in the next decade.

Next up: Back to friend of the dish Lev Grossman with his novel Codex.

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