→ June 15, 2009
→ By

Gone with the Wind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Light in August.

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

On to more important matters…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tropic of Cancer.

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

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

10. A Death in the Family, James Agee.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. The Sportswriter, Richard Ford

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

5. Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin

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

4. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

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

3. Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence

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

2. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller.

Suck. QED.

1. Moby Dick, Herman Melville

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

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

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

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

Catch-22.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
→ February 12, 2009
→ By

Rabbit, Run.

I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you’re first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate.

Rabbit, Run, (#97 on the Radcliffe 100 and part of the TIME 100) has been on my to-be-read shelf for a few months, but in light of the recent death of author John Updike, I decided to move it up in the queue. I originally started this book about ten years ago, got through three or four pages, realized it was going to be depressing, and sold it at a used book store. I was more successful in a second attempt.

“Rabbit” is Harry Angstrom, a 26-year-old former high school basketball star who is now married to a twenty-year-old woman who has already born him a son and is pregnant again. Their marriage is crumbling, or has crumbled, to a point where any conversation degenerates into sniping and insults and where Janice is just withdrawn into alcohol and the television. Rabbit has a job demonstrating the MagiPeeler, a vegetable peeler for sale at the local five and dime store, a career roughly as fulfilling as his marriage. Faced with nothing rewarding in his life, Rabbit runs off, walking away from wife and job and falling into an affair with a slattern from the other side of town.

The fundamental problem with Rabbit, Run from my perspective is that Updike seems to be trying to present Rabbit as a sympathetic character: A young man suddenly realizing that he is trapped into a life of mediocrity and unhappiness, both in stark contrast to the small-world stardom he had in high school, who decides that the best option is to run, both physically and metaphorically. The truth is that Rabbit is a grade-A Asshole who mistreats his wife and then his mistress, refuses to take responsibility for his actions or to live up to the obligations of commitments he’s made (like, say, knocking up two women), or to just generally behave like an adult. Yes, his wife is a train-wreck, an alcoholic with hints of depression, but Rabbit at one point puts alcohol back in her hands when she is trying to give it up, because he can’t adjust to a reality of her sober and the commitment that that implies. But not only is his wife never depicted as “bad” enough for him to leave her, he has an innocent son, Nelson, who adores him as two-year-olds adore their parents, and on whom Rabbit runs out without any apparent pangs of remorse. I have a two-year-old, and I can’t imagine any situation in my marriage that would make me leave the house and not even try to see my daughter for over two months. Janice (Rabbit’s wife) tells her husband at one point after he has returned from his lost weekend about Nelson:

“Oh. Every day, ‘Daddy home day?’ until I could belt him, the poor saint. Don’t make me talk about it, it’s too depressing.”

It’s heartbreaking, and it makes Updike’s attempts to show some affection on Rabbit’s part towards the boy ring totally hollow. You have a clear two-way bond with your child by that age; if you can walk away from that for two months without making any attempt to see the kid, in all likelihood, you have no soul.

The craft of Rabbit, Run is strong. Updike’s prose is wonderful, as anyone familiar with his article on Ted Williams’ retirement knows. He’s also telling, or trying to tell, a larger story of the fears a person faces upon realizing that he has inextricably left his youth behind and has even made irreversible choices that dictate the path of the rest of his life. Rabbit is surrounded by people who symbolize hopes and fears and responsibilities, from the minister and his wife who represent faith and doubt, to the declining high school basketball coach who represents the past and ages and fades like memories, to the baby Janice bears, a metaphor for their marriage, briefly reborn as that, for whatever reason, is the event who finally brings Harry back home. But the fact that it’s well-written only made it an easier read, not a more compelling one, as my dislike for Rabbit only grew as the book went on and he failed to show any sign of maturity or simple recognition of the consequences his actions have on those around him.

Next up: A re-read of Catch-22. I have crab apples in my cheeks and flies in my eyes already.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , ,
→ December 5, 2008
→ By

The Color Purple.

Listen, God love everything you love – and a mess of stuff you don’t. But more than anything else, God love admiration.
You saying God vain? I ast.
Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.

I’ve mentioned before that I haven’t cared for most of the Jewish-American novels I’ve read, but in fact, I have the opposite feeling about most of the African-American novels I’ve read: With one exception (James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain), I’ve loved all of them. And Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (#5 on the Radcliffe 100, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983) may have helped me realize why.

Purple is narrated by two poor, black sisters, separated in their teenage years by their spiteful father and the new husband of Celie, the “ugly” sister, because he wanted to marry the younger, prettier Nettie but found his advances spurned. Separated by oceans both literal and metaphorical, the women write to each other about their experiences and their struggles, Celie’s in poverty in rural Georgia, Nettie’s on a decades-long mission in Africa. The novel is more Celie’s than Nettie’s, both because Celie’s letters get more airtime, but also because her struggles are more mundane, while Nettie’s letters are there in part to show parallels between the oppression of native Africans and that of African-Americans in the American south.

Celie’s story is also much more compelling than Nettie’s. Celie bears two children by the man she believes is her father, who begins raping her at a very early age and who, each time she bears a child, takes the baby away without telling her where he went or what he did with the child. She marries “Mr. _______” to save Nettie, who is both prettier and more intelligent in Celie’s estimation, from becoming trapped in the same cycle of bad marriages to abusive husbands in which her mother and stepmother were trapped. Through Celie, we hear the stories of her stepson’s wife, Sofia, who is unsatisfied to live the doubly-subservient life of a black woman and pays a heavy price for her defiance; the libertine singer Shug Avery, Mr. ______’s sometime mistress who becomes a confidant/lover to Celie; and eventually see the male characters earn some redemption, albeit only after their women have in some way rejected them.

Despite the fact that the women of The Color Purple (other than Shug Avery, who refuses to be oppressed but has a strong sense of self-preservation) are oppressed in just about every way, from rape to abuse to violence to poverty to lack of education to an instance of female genital cutting in the African branch of the story, the novel is dominated by their love of life, an optimism in spite of themselves and their situations that drives them forward and lets them appreciate little details and blessings even in a life that seems stacked against them:

Nobody cook like Shug when she cook. She get up early in the morning and go to market. Buy only stuff that’s fresh. … By one o’clock everything ready and she call us to the table. Ham and greens and chicken and cornbread. Chitlins and blackeyed peas and souse. Pickled okra and watermelon rind. Caramel cake and blueberry pie.

(I admit that it is not an accident that I chose a quote about food.)

Walker omits most of the normal methods of building narrative greed, aside from a late and almost superfluous question about when and how Nettie will return from Africa, instead letting the characters themselves – particularly Celie and Shug – drive the story forward. You become invested in Celie almost from the beginning as the underdog who doesn’t know she’s an underdog, or perhaps just doesn’t have time to worry about being the underdog because she has to cook and clean and fight and live.

(As for those serious Jewish-American novels I don’t seem to get, the overwhelming sense I get of those novels is of cynicism and ennui – the inability to see life for its better aspects in the face of its struggles. That common theme only became clear to me as I was considering why Walker’s novel, which should be sad in so many ways, was uplifting.)

Next up: It only took a day or so to read Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, another Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner, so I should have that review up before the holiday.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ October 16, 2008
→ By

Winnie-the-Pooh.

Seriously – A.A. Milne’s first book of stories for his son, Winnie-the-Pooh, is #22 on the Radcliffe Publishing Course’s list of the 20th century’s top 100 novels. They’re pushing the definition of “novel” with this one, both because it’s a collection of stories rather than a novel and because it’s very short, but it’s still a fun read and something I look forward to reading to my daughter.

The stories revolve around the familiar set of characters, including Edward Bear, better known as Winnie-the-Pooh, a “Bear of Very Little Brain” who has a series of minor adventures that typically involve a rescue at the hands of Milne’s son, Christopher Robin. The humor is unmistakably English, almost like Wodehouse or even Waugh for children, and the language used isn’t dumbed down. The characters have actual character – Rabbit is bossy, Owl is book-smart but light on street smarts, Piglet talks a good game but is actually a chicken, and so on. Winnie-the-Pooh is a little dim, but can sometimes be clever despite his diminutive cranium. And I have to admit that I share a certain affinity with the bear:

“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Piglet at last, “what’s the first thing you say to yourself?”
“What’s for breakfast,” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?”
“I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” said Piglet.
Pooh nodded thoughtfully.
“It’s the same thing,” he said.

Speaking of Waugh, I’ve got one more review from my trip, his Decline and Fall, probably coming on Friday.

Also, there is a Klawchat today at 1 pm – HTML page is here but it’s not linked on the baseball page yet.

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→ February 29, 2008
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Song of Solomon.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved is one of my favorite novels of any time period or genre, and since Song of Solomon is considered her second-best work, it’s been on my to-be-read list for a long time. It’s not quite the masterwork that Beloved is, but it’s still a great literary achievement of phenomenal scope, another example of how Morrison can take universal themes and express them through individual characters and simple stories.

Song of Solomon is the story of the Dead family, a black family separated by disagreement, by location, and by financial situation into two branches. The book’s central character, Macon “Milkman” Dead, is born in the opening pages, and the central plot strand follows his lifelong search for identity, although it’s not until the book’s final third that he realizes himself that that’s what he’s seeking. Along the way, he breaks with his father and forges a relationship with his paternal aunt, then reunites with his father and sets off on an ill-fated mission that harkens back to the origins of the family split. The novel uses this quest by the grandson of a freed slave to explore questions of racial identity, the double oppression faced by black women, and the uplifting and destructive powers of love.

The book is rife with references to the Bible and Greek mythology, including the unusual character names that are par for the course with Morrison, all bringing us insight into the characters themselves. Milkman has a sister named First Corinthians, named by her father by the random selection of a Bible verse, but named by Morrison to signify the woman’s role as someone who attempts to bring people together. (The apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians was occasioned by reports of possible schisms in the fledgling Christian church in Corinth.) Morrison also works in allusions to other stories and novels, some obvious, such as the way the character Circe serves a similar purpose to her Greek namesake, and some more debatable, such as the resemblance of Hagar, named after Abraham’s servant and concubine, to Nately’s whore from Catch-22. The heavy yet seamless use of allusions and references make reading a good Morrison novel into a textural experience.

Next up: The Pickwick Papers, by my high school nemesis, Chuckie Dickie. I’ve got 600 pages to go, so it might be a while before my next book writeup.

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→ January 24, 2008
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The Age of Innocence.

Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence made her the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel (now known as the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction), with good reason, as Wharton uses the classic love triangle formula to expose the darker side of the seemingly idyllic Gilded Age of the late 1800s while also incorporating some savage wit. It’s also in the Novel 100 (#61), the Modern Library 100 (#58), and the Radcliffe 100 (#42), although it was published two years too early for TIME‘s top 100 list.

Age‘s main character is Newland Archer, a young lawyer in the social elites of New York in the 1870s who is about to marry the pretty but dull May Welland, a socially acceptable match and one he doesn’t question until he meets her cousin, the Countess Olenska. The Countess has just returned to the United States after fleeing a disastrous marriage in Europe to a man who used her ill (although his exact crime is never defined, I inferred that he was beating her), and Archer finds himself drawn to her in an obsession laden with sexual overtones. He ultimately has to choose between his engagement and then marriage to a woman he likes, but for whom he has no passion, and the woman who ignites his passion but for whom he’d have to abandon his family and status while flying in the face of all social conventions.

For a novel built around a serious idea, the choices people have to make between conforming to societal norms and following the riskier paths that offer a chance for greater happiness, Wharton manages to incorporate some bitterly sarcastic humor.

She sang, of course, “M’ama!” and not “he loves me,” since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English- speaking audiences.

No one is spared, but Wharton has a particular enmity for the small-mindedness of the pro-propriety set, who conspire first to send Countess Olenska back to her husband and later to keep her and Newland apart.

On top of the love triangle and its underlying story about choice, The Age of Innocence reflects the social upheaval of the interwar period in which it was written. May Welland represents the longing for the pre-war period, a true age of innocence in which the U.S. hadn’t been embroiled in a major conflict since the Civil War, and prosperity and opulence seemed guaranteed. The Countess represents the future, from the vantage point of the end of World War I, from America’s increasing involvement with foreign nations to the uncertain economic outlook (the book was written in 1920, before the great bull run of the 20s) to the changing cultural and sexual mores of the time. Wharton comes down clearly in favor of the forward-looking viewpoint, but that doesn’t mean that Newland and the Countess live happily ever after.

The Age of Innocence is comfortably in the top 20-25 books I’ve read, more evidence that the most fertile period for the American novel was the time between the wars. It’s an outstanding marriage – pun intended – of wicked humor and social commentary, with a simple plot made interesting through strong characterization.

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