→ February 9, 2010
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Mrs. Dalloway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ February 3, 2010
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More thoughts on Ulysses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ February 2, 2010
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Ulysses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(All uncover their heads. Women whisper eagerly.)

A MILLIONAIRESS

(Richly.) Isn’t he simply wonderful?

A NOBLEWOMAN

(Nobly.) All that man has seen!

A FEMINIST

(Masculinely.) And done!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ November 12, 2009
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Cold Comfort Farm.

Klawchat today at 1 pm EST.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ October 21, 2009
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Hangover Square.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ September 3, 2009
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Brighton Rock.

Today’s chat transcript is up and, I think, rather snarky. I wrote a bit about Happ and Penny last night on the Four-Letter. I’m tentatively scheduled to be on ESPN Radio tonight at 10:25 pm EDT.

Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock is his lone entry on the Bloomsbury 100, yet more evidence that as much as critics agree that Greene was a great novelist, they can’t seem to agree on what his best work was. Modern Library had The Heart of the Matter on their top 100; Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo put both that work and The Power and the Glory on theirs; the Guardian put The Quiet American; and I believe I’ve seen similar praise (that I can’t locate) for The End of the Affair. And for all of that, I loved the half-serious/half-satirical Our Man in Havana*.

*Apropos of nothing, this is now the 11th Greene novel I’ve read, including all of his “serious” novels. That puts him sixth on the list of authors when ranked by the number of titles I’ve read – your challenge is to guess who the top five are in the comments. One hint: I’ve never written up a book by #2 or #4 on this site.

Brighton Rock is lumped in with Greene’s “Catholic novels,” but while there’s certainly a lot of discussion among the characters of religion and its relation to right/wrong, I think that’s at most a secondary theme in the book. The novel focuses on a teenage delinquent nicknamed “Pinkie” who has taken over one local gang of street toughs who run, among other things, small-time bookmaking outfit. Pinkie’s gang commit a murder before the book has started, which leads to a string of murders and attempts all aimed at covering up the initial crime. Pinkie himself starts out as just an amoral, power-hungry killer, but as the book progresses and Greene peels back the layers of Pinkie’s character, we see more that he is driven by a raging feeling of inadequacy, set off when others show a lack of respect for his abilities, and driven by a desire to be seen as a capable adult.

Pinkie is pursued by an amateur detective named Ida Arnold, whose passing acquaintance with one of Pinkie’s victims turns into a quest to identify the killer(s) and see them brought to justice, a quest that itself changes shape as the story progresses. While Pinkie has clear, dogmatic views on life informed by inexperience and a superficial form of Catholicism, Arnold is a spiritualist with an independent moral compass of less certain origin. Pinkie hooks up with a girl who could provide testimony against his gang for one of the killings, and saving her becomes part of Ida’s quest, but the girl herself (Rose) is a cipher of a character who is childlike in her thoughts and actions.

Greene’s novels are short and tend to move along quickly, but despite the detective-novel portion of the plot, Brighton Rock was slow and plodding, especially when the camera focused on Pinkie, who is more interesting as a character to study and dissect than as one whose actions we might want to follow.

Next up: I’m a bit behind on reviews, as I finished John Cheever’s Falconer last night.

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→ August 10, 2009
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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.

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→ July 20, 2009
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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: , , , , , , , , , ,
→ June 15, 2009
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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: , , , , , ,
→ February 18, 2009
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Eyeless in Gaza.

I’ve been sitting on a writeup of Eyeless in Gaza for a week-plus because I’m not sure how to sum it up. It’s a strange book with one clever literary device but an odious protagonist and a philosophical vein that, frankly, bored me.

I’ve read two other Huxley books – the dystopian classic Brave New World and the social satire Antic Hay – but Eyeless bears no resemblance to either work. The protagonist, Anthony Beavis – no, no sign of Butthead, sorry – is a morally rudderless libertine who lost his mother at an early age and was raised by an emotionally distant father who rebounded into a second marriage. He goes to college where he befriends a shy, religious boy named Brian, only to betray him a few years later by seducing his intended. Some years later, Anthony has an existential crisis while trying to write a “sociological” book that is more of a philosophy of life.

The clever device was the weaving of multiple timelines together without destroying the feel of the narrative. You know from early in the book, for example, that Brian is dead, because it’s revealed in the latest timeline, but because Huxley has chopped up his story into four or five timelines and cycles among them as they converge towards the book’s end, the how and why comes out in stages. It’s not the only book to use this method of telling a story, but the separation among storylines is more severe than in any other book I can remember, I don’t believe I’ve read an earlier book that used this device.

Beavis, however, is indeed a butthead. His betrayal of Brian is really just the icing on the cake, although it certainly colors one’s opinion of him to know that he betrayed his best friend and in possibly the only genuinely good person in the book. Everyone else is rotten and/or broken, and when one character threw another overboard or under the bus, I just greeted it with a shrug.

Eyeless in Gaza is part of the Bloomsbury 100, but that seems like a questionable call given the more enduring influence and popularity of Brave New World; in fact, Eyeless seems to be out of print in the U.S.

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I’m scheduled to be on the FAN 590 in Toronto on Wednesday at 6:05 pm, and we appear to be on for a 1 pm Klawchat on Thursday.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,