Freddy’s Book
Freddy’s Book by John Gardner (1980). Published by Ballantine Books. 214 pages.
The story of Freddy’s Book starts in modern times, narrated in the first person by a chummy professor named Winesap, open minded and jolly, a professor of something called “Psycho-history. Winesap is a refreshing character, genuinely optimistic and kindly, free from all the overblown vanity and professional jealousy that characterize academic characters in most modern literature. It’s especially noteworthy that he seems to be a champion of the talents of the young: he is easily inspired by the prospect that one of the students he lectures to may be “some young Gibson or Macaulay not yet conscious of how good he is.” At a party, Winesap meets a crotchety, mean-tempered professor named Agaard, a scholar of Scandanavian history whom Winesap admires academically even though he finds him personally repulsive. After accepting an invitation to Agaard’s house, Winesap then patiently sits by and endures a barrage of criticism hurled at him by Agaard: real history should be confined to fact, not fiction and fancy. In Agaard’s eye, Winesap represents a sign of fatal decadence.
Why, then, does Agaard invite Winesap to his house at all? The answer has to do with his son, Freddy. Described by his own father as a monster, Freddy Agaard stands seven feet tall and has voluntarily locked himself in a room filled with books. He shows signs of being a genius, but the real nature of his intelligence remains a mystery because he refuses to show anyone the book he’s written. Agaard knows that Freddy admires the work of professor Winesap, and hopes that Freddy will show his book to Winesap, which he eventually does, dropping it off for him in the dead of night.
The book is called King Gustav and the Devil. The first 57 pages of Freddy’s Book tells the story of how Winesap gets possession of the book on a cold, snowy Wisconsin night and the rest of the novel consists only of the text of this strange story Freddy has written. We never find out what Winesap’s reaction to the book is, we never find out whether Freddy eventually is able to escape his self-imposed isolation. But the framing story of Freddy, Winesap and Agaard does serve to prime our minds for the fact that we’re embarking on a weird journey into a narrative terrain very remote from anything we’d expect from contemporary American fiction.
The story concerns Gustav Vasa of Sweden, an actual historical figure, and his faithful friend, the knight Lars-Goren. Lars-Goren is a taciturn man, who is “considered to be of great intelligence, for though he thought slowly, he thought clearly and soundly, so that again and again his opinions were found to be more valuable in the end than the opinions of men quicker and more dazzling.” Indeed, throughout the story Lars-Goren’s thinking process is so slow that he seems entirely inactive. He basically acts as a passive, but very reflective witness as he watches his friend Gustav Vasa be tempted by the Devil himself into starting a revolution against Denmark for Swedish independence. While the plot is filled with historical upheavals, with insurgencies and counterinsurgencies, conspiracies and military campaigns, all these events occur at such a remote distance to the plot that we get the sense that these are merely a mask for something that is emerging much more slowly: the birth of a new sort of civilization.
The most striking element of the story is the Devil, who walks freely about, takes on all sorts of forms, and often makes no secret as to who he is. His role is always to entice more turmoil and bloodshed. He appears on all sides of every conflict, counseling not only Gustav Vasa but also the Danish King Kristian and the supremely cynical Bishop Brask.
We get the sense that for the Devil, all the constant struggle and change in government actually represents a sort of stasis: as long as people keep sowing conflict, the human spirit can never grow.
And the Devil seems farthest away during the prolonged and serene reveries of Lars-Goren as he turns his back on the business of helping found a kingdom and visits his estate, taking joy in seeing his children going up and reflecting on the duties a feudal lord bears to his peasantry. He is especially touched when he sees Bernt Notke’s statue depicting St George’s slaying of the Dragon, a statue that comes to symbolize for him the notion that the Devil himself can eventually be overthrown.
Although we never see an actual glimpse of Freddy again, his character traits do keep popping up in the narrative of King Gustav and the Devil. For instance, take a look at some of the things Winesap says to encourage Freddy:
“It’s not easy writing books! You know, that’s the one place where all human beings are equal . . . whatever we may seem to be—humpbacked, tall or short, pale or ruddy, never mind . . . when we pick up that pencil we’re all in the same boat . . . A man may say anything when he’s just talking . . . but when he’s writing he ha time to think it over and re-do it until it’s right.”
This description of slow, deliberative thought complements the description of Lars-Goren’s own process of circumspection. And the recollections of Bishop Brask also recall the bookish nature of Freddy:
“When I was young, I was a great reader of books. They were my chief pleasure—my very life. . . But books are expensive and you’d be surprised how easily they burn, if the fire gets hot enough. And so one involves oneself in money-grubbing and politics, even war. For the luxury of reading the gentle thoughts of Plato or St. Ambrose, or sharing the pastoral meditations of the Emperor who turned his back on Rome to run a chicken farm—for the supreme pleasure of musing at one’s ease on the glorious illustrations of the Arabs or the masters of Byzantium—one turns one’s whole attention to manipulating fools full of bloodthirts and ambition . . . crushing underfoot all that God and the philosophers have stood for.”
In the end, Lars-Goren and Bishop Brask are sent out to the frozen waste of Lappland on what appears to be a fool’s errand—they must kill the Devil. During the journey across the vast expanse of land, there is little for them to do but talk, debating lofty issues. Brask seems to dominate the discussion, bolstered as he is by his extensive knowledge of philosophy, but Lars-Goren, the man of few words, is the one who proposes new and challenging ideas—a model for tolerance and universal human decency that challenges Brask’s cynicism.
Interestingly, the opening, modern, section of Freddy’s Book reads very much like a contrivance, whereas the fictional story of Lars-Goren feels far more genuine for all its fantastical elements. A modern reader may well be put off by the long sections of philosophical discussions at the end of the book. I think we’ve all been somewhat entrained to interpret novels as plot outlines for movies and there’s a waning recognition of the fact that they can also serve as a wonderful nursery for meaningful ideas and ways of looking at life. In this book, John Gardner seeks to remind us that great ideas may linger locked away for generations inside labyrinths of obscurity unless we engage that most enlightened and democratic forms of action: careful, patient, open-minded listening.
The story of Freddy’s Book starts in modern times, narrated in the first person by a chummy professor named Winesap, open minded and jolly, a professor of something called “Psycho-history. Winesap is a refreshing character, genuinely optimistic and kindly, free from all the overblown vanity and professional jealousy that characterize academic characters in most modern literature. It’s especially noteworthy that he seems to be a champion of the talents of the young: he is easily inspired by the prospect that one of the students he lectures to may be “some young Gibson or Macaulay not yet conscious of how good he is.” At a party, Winesap meets a crotchety, mean-tempered professor named Agaard, a scholar of Scandanavian history whom Winesap admires academically even though he finds him personally repulsive. After accepting an invitation to Agaard’s house, Winesap then patiently sits by and endures a barrage of criticism hurled at him by Agaard: real history should be confined to fact, not fiction and fancy. In Agaard’s eye, Winesap represents a sign of fatal decadence.
Why, then, does Agaard invite Winesap to his house at all? The answer has to do with his son, Freddy. Described by his own father as a monster, Freddy Agaard stands seven feet tall and has voluntarily locked himself in a room filled with books. He shows signs of being a genius, but the real nature of his intelligence remains a mystery because he refuses to show anyone the book he’s written. Agaard knows that Freddy admires the work of professor Winesap, and hopes that Freddy will show his book to Winesap, which he eventually does, dropping it off for him in the dead of night.
The book is called King Gustav and the Devil. The first 57 pages of Freddy’s Book tells the story of how Winesap gets possession of the book on a cold, snowy Wisconsin night and the rest of the novel consists only of the text of this strange story Freddy has written. We never find out what Winesap’s reaction to the book is, we never find out whether Freddy eventually is able to escape his self-imposed isolation. But the framing story of Freddy, Winesap and Agaard does serve to prime our minds for the fact that we’re embarking on a weird journey into a narrative terrain very remote from anything we’d expect from contemporary American fiction.
The story concerns Gustav Vasa of Sweden, an actual historical figure, and his faithful friend, the knight Lars-Goren. Lars-Goren is a taciturn man, who is “considered to be of great intelligence, for though he thought slowly, he thought clearly and soundly, so that again and again his opinions were found to be more valuable in the end than the opinions of men quicker and more dazzling.” Indeed, throughout the story Lars-Goren’s thinking process is so slow that he seems entirely inactive. He basically acts as a passive, but very reflective witness as he watches his friend Gustav Vasa be tempted by the Devil himself into starting a revolution against Denmark for Swedish independence. While the plot is filled with historical upheavals, with insurgencies and counterinsurgencies, conspiracies and military campaigns, all these events occur at such a remote distance to the plot that we get the sense that these are merely a mask for something that is emerging much more slowly: the birth of a new sort of civilization.
The most striking element of the story is the Devil, who walks freely about, takes on all sorts of forms, and often makes no secret as to who he is. His role is always to entice more turmoil and bloodshed. He appears on all sides of every conflict, counseling not only Gustav Vasa but also the Danish King Kristian and the supremely cynical Bishop Brask.
We get the sense that for the Devil, all the constant struggle and change in government actually represents a sort of stasis: as long as people keep sowing conflict, the human spirit can never grow.
And the Devil seems farthest away during the prolonged and serene reveries of Lars-Goren as he turns his back on the business of helping found a kingdom and visits his estate, taking joy in seeing his children going up and reflecting on the duties a feudal lord bears to his peasantry. He is especially touched when he sees Bernt Notke’s statue depicting St George’s slaying of the Dragon, a statue that comes to symbolize for him the notion that the Devil himself can eventually be overthrown.
Although we never see an actual glimpse of Freddy again, his character traits do keep popping up in the narrative of King Gustav and the Devil. For instance, take a look at some of the things Winesap says to encourage Freddy:
“It’s not easy writing books! You know, that’s the one place where all human beings are equal . . . whatever we may seem to be—humpbacked, tall or short, pale or ruddy, never mind . . . when we pick up that pencil we’re all in the same boat . . . A man may say anything when he’s just talking . . . but when he’s writing he ha time to think it over and re-do it until it’s right.”
This description of slow, deliberative thought complements the description of Lars-Goren’s own process of circumspection. And the recollections of Bishop Brask also recall the bookish nature of Freddy:
“When I was young, I was a great reader of books. They were my chief pleasure—my very life. . . But books are expensive and you’d be surprised how easily they burn, if the fire gets hot enough. And so one involves oneself in money-grubbing and politics, even war. For the luxury of reading the gentle thoughts of Plato or St. Ambrose, or sharing the pastoral meditations of the Emperor who turned his back on Rome to run a chicken farm—for the supreme pleasure of musing at one’s ease on the glorious illustrations of the Arabs or the masters of Byzantium—one turns one’s whole attention to manipulating fools full of bloodthirts and ambition . . . crushing underfoot all that God and the philosophers have stood for.”
In the end, Lars-Goren and Bishop Brask are sent out to the frozen waste of Lappland on what appears to be a fool’s errand—they must kill the Devil. During the journey across the vast expanse of land, there is little for them to do but talk, debating lofty issues. Brask seems to dominate the discussion, bolstered as he is by his extensive knowledge of philosophy, but Lars-Goren, the man of few words, is the one who proposes new and challenging ideas—a model for tolerance and universal human decency that challenges Brask’s cynicism.
Interestingly, the opening, modern, section of Freddy’s Book reads very much like a contrivance, whereas the fictional story of Lars-Goren feels far more genuine for all its fantastical elements. A modern reader may well be put off by the long sections of philosophical discussions at the end of the book. I think we’ve all been somewhat entrained to interpret novels as plot outlines for movies and there’s a waning recognition of the fact that they can also serve as a wonderful nursery for meaningful ideas and ways of looking at life. In this book, John Gardner seeks to remind us that great ideas may linger locked away for generations inside labyrinths of obscurity unless we engage that most enlightened and democratic forms of action: careful, patient, open-minded listening.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
By John Fowles
First in a series of 3 installments — 26 October 2008
The Magus is a book about a modern man drawn into a scheme that, while fascinating, is really more like an intricate private fantasy than anything we can imagine happening in real life. The Collector takes place buried in the psychological prison of an enclosure behind a secret door at the back of a basement. How disconcerting it was that the third book of Fowles’ I read should open up its doors on the Victorian era.
For readers of the English language, the Victorian era is the closest thing we have to public space in the world of literature. Wuthering Heights, Emma, Pride and Prejudice, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Alice in Wonderland, The Christmas Carol; even in a modern America that shuns literacy and denies the importance of anything even slightly old or unfamiliar, our schools and our teachers do seem to recognize that there’s something universal in these stories that can engage children. From early childhood it was always Victorian images that were the strongest in my mind when I was asked to imagine the past, the way the world must have been before the invention of cars and lightbulbs. Knights in armor, cowboys and horses, all these had the aura of something that was partly make believe. But the Masterpiece Theater world of Victorian England was the world as it really was.
In this book, Fowles puts his own research at the forefront. He’s constantly breaking into the narration with references to his sources, with data about the working life of Victorian servants, the prejudices of the middle and aristocratic classes, and especially with reminders about how we must not mistake the attitudes of the Victorians with those of today’s world.
Far from breaking the illusion, these references serve to make this novel feel more real and more interesting, not only because you feel like you’re getting a really high quality tour of the world as it once existed, but also because in setting his novel in the Victorian Era, Fowles has found a perfect setting for his own ideas.
This is how I would propose it: In The Collector, Fowles shows us two people separated by a wall that cannot be broken. The wall is composed of class prejudices, of sexual desire and internal repression, of primal fear and of self-absorption. In The Magus, we see the story of a man who, through the extraordinary efforts of an eccentric millionaire, is allowed for just a moment to see his own personal walls shattered. It’s a compelling story, at least to me, but it’s somehow very hard to understand completely what barriers it is that Nicholas Urfe breaks down, because he lives in the same world we all do.
But the world of The French Lieutenant’s Woman is far enough removed from our own that we’re able to distance ourselves from the character of Charles Smithson, a young man who expects to inherit a baronetcy and a substantial fortune, who’s on the verge of affecting a very comfortable marriage with a woman—Ernestina—who seems perfectly satisfactory by all the standards Charles has been trained to apply to the world around him.
And then there’s the outcast woman, Sarah Woodruff, called “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” by some and “The French Lieutenant’s Whore” by others, because she is said to have lost her virginity to a handsome foreigner who has since abandoned her.
John Fowles tells us that the phenomenon of Charles falling in love with Sarah is identical to the end of the Victorian era. And because he’s dug up so many wonderful facts and stories about 19th Century England to illustrate his point, this rather abstract metaphor becomes quite visceral and believable. Unlike Nicholas Urfe’s brief period of disorientation at the hands of the scheming Maurice Conchis, Charles’ crisis is drawn out over more than a hundred pages as he resists Sarah, condemns her as mad, sees his hopes for inheritance dashed, runs for consolation to the seamy demimonde of London, and finally succumbs to the temptation to destroy the self that Sarah represents.
It works precisely because Victorian literature is characterized by such a wonderful tradition of coincidence. Whereas Maurice Conchis’s whole consciousness shattering project seemed a labyrinthine contrivance whose complexity often obscured the revelation at its own heart, the downfall of Charles Smithson seems to be driven by the same forces that drove the fates of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens’s characters.
IB Singer said that every writer needs to find stories that no one else can tell. It’s impossible for me to imagine anyone else telling the story of Sarah Woodruff. Fowles intentionally makes her an enigma. The great characters of the Victorian era, Sherlock Holmes and Emma Woodhouse, Ebenezer Scrooge and David Copperfield all are so vivid that they can live inside our minds. But Sarah Woodruff seems to pass mysteriously just beyond our grasp in a way that eludes the Victorian style and makes this novel seem truly a feat of magic.
Second in series of three installments — 2 November 2008
So what is it that this Sarah Woodruff symbolizes? Like the White Whale in Moby Dick, she stands at the center of a network of symbolism that fills up the whole book, but she never quite passes completely into the realm of pure symbol. In one very interesting chapter Fowles pulls out of the narrative entirely and declares that, although Sarah, like all the characters in the novel, is his creation, he cannot and will not reveal her inner motives, although he had planned to do so. She won’t reveal them up to her author.
Sarah stands out as being the only character in the book that acts even slightly an adult. This is another theme that seems to run through Fowles’s books—although the characters are all adults with adult responsibilities, they seem to be ruled by a set of childish vanities. Charles and Ernestina go through life as though they’re living in a fairy tale, partly because that’s precisely what they are doing. They’re both slated to earn huge inheritances, and while they each have their little cavils and pouting fits with one another, they’re both bolstered deep down by the thought that the ultimate struggle that lies in store for them is the choice of what kind of prosperity exactly they want to choose. Will they move into the large manor house or the small manor house? Will Charles carry on with his amateur paleontology, or will he find some other hobby to occupy his time but not fulfill his longing to ambition.
At first, Sarah seems to be childish as well. She spends her life moping about, staring at the sea, presumably in hopes that the French Lieutenant who once seduced her will come back. But as the novel progresses and she continues to meet with Charles in the primeval groves of the wild region known as the Undercliff, it begins to become clear that she’s not as much a victim of childish passion as we first thought. Does she really have any illusion that her French Lieutenant will ever come back? Did she even love him in the first place? And if not, why does she willingly allow herself to remain in a community where she’ll always be shunned as a fallen woman? Confused by these questions, Charles confides in his fellow Darwinist Dr Grogan, the only man he can trust to respond rationally.
As a Darwinist and atheist, Dr Grogan seems to stand outside the prison of stereotypes and that defines the Victorian era of this book, and yet his response hardly seems that of a reasonable man. He feels certain that Sarah is dangerously ill and must be institutionalized immediately. She is, after all, the inferior of Charles, who must seem to her like a god.
As it turns out, Dr Grogan is correct in thinking that Sarah represents a great danger to Charles’s future as a happy Victorian gentleman, but his notion that Sarah is mad seems diametrically opposed to the sort of rational humanism that Grogan wishes to represent.
The Undercliff, where Charles and Sarah meet, is home to a series of fossils that inspire Charles to realize the fact that Darwin’s natural not only carries the potential for evolutionary progress but also for mass extinction. Sarah Woodruff represents all the forces that will eventually extinguish the Victorian era, but what are those forces? I think that the answer lies in the other name that she’s given by the people of Lyme Regis, the name that’s used least frequently in the book: Tragedy. The true blindness of the Victorian era is not just a denial of sexual desires or the baser nature of even the most refined gentleman, but rather the denial of the tragic nature of life, in the sense of Greek or Shakespearean tragedy where a system destroys itself by its own striving toward nobility. The name “Tragedy” is appropriate for Sarah, but not so much because she’s a victim of tragedy but an agent of tragic catharsis. Although I doubt I can get to the bottom of it, I will try to expand on that idea in my next installment of this review.
Third installment • 23 November 2008
I remember one time I had an acting teacher who suggested that we almost always see the people around us as representations of something rather than as actual human beings. We see people as representations of our ambitions, as challenges to our status, as political opponents or as collaborators at work, as role-models and as supervisors, as parents or children, but it’s exceedingly rare that we simply view them as people who have been set as unwillingly and unwittingly into the great en medias res of life as we ourselves have been.
That memory came to me today as I was thinking about what more there was for me to say about French Lieutenant’s Woman. It seems to me that in all of Fowles’s works I’ve read so far, his central theme is precisely this blindness we carry around with us, this blindness which keeps us from ever quite recognizing the people around us for what they really are. Victorian society especially seems to depend on such blindness. Charles and his fiancée Ernestina enter into the book with a pat answer to every question of human nature that might come their way.
What makes this argument worth listening to is that Fowles doesn’t write off the blindness of the age as a mere handicap. He’s explicit about the fact that he has a great admiration for the achievements of Victorian society, for the incredible productivity and creativity that arose during that time, but he does seem to suggest that these benefits were achieved at the price of creating a society that was incredibly rigid and unyielding in its notions of human value.
I think that one of the weaknesses of Fowles is that his focus on satori-like moment when the scales fall away from a person’s eyes requires him to make his plots pivot on these moments of personal revelation that are very difficult to communicate to the reader and that must seem contrived and alienating to anyone who hasn’t experienced such moments themselves. One of the ways that Fowles manages to get around this problem is by repeatedly bringing up excerpts of poetry by Tennyson and Clough that are always closely attuned to the inner entrapments and awakenings of Fowles’s characters. Another way that he manages this is by admitting that the character of Sarah Woodruff resists even the omnipotence of the novelist. He cannot see fully into her mind, cannot even guess at her true motivations, and in the end this puts her not only beyond the Victorian stereotypes that Charles uses to navigate his way through life, but also puts her outside of the Freudian and Marxist analyses with which Fowles tries to explain his other characters.
First in a series of 3 installments — 26 October 2008
The Magus is a book about a modern man drawn into a scheme that, while fascinating, is really more like an intricate private fantasy than anything we can imagine happening in real life. The Collector takes place buried in the psychological prison of an enclosure behind a secret door at the back of a basement. How disconcerting it was that the third book of Fowles’ I read should open up its doors on the Victorian era.
For readers of the English language, the Victorian era is the closest thing we have to public space in the world of literature. Wuthering Heights, Emma, Pride and Prejudice, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Alice in Wonderland, The Christmas Carol; even in a modern America that shuns literacy and denies the importance of anything even slightly old or unfamiliar, our schools and our teachers do seem to recognize that there’s something universal in these stories that can engage children. From early childhood it was always Victorian images that were the strongest in my mind when I was asked to imagine the past, the way the world must have been before the invention of cars and lightbulbs. Knights in armor, cowboys and horses, all these had the aura of something that was partly make believe. But the Masterpiece Theater world of Victorian England was the world as it really was.
In this book, Fowles puts his own research at the forefront. He’s constantly breaking into the narration with references to his sources, with data about the working life of Victorian servants, the prejudices of the middle and aristocratic classes, and especially with reminders about how we must not mistake the attitudes of the Victorians with those of today’s world.
Far from breaking the illusion, these references serve to make this novel feel more real and more interesting, not only because you feel like you’re getting a really high quality tour of the world as it once existed, but also because in setting his novel in the Victorian Era, Fowles has found a perfect setting for his own ideas.
This is how I would propose it: In The Collector, Fowles shows us two people separated by a wall that cannot be broken. The wall is composed of class prejudices, of sexual desire and internal repression, of primal fear and of self-absorption. In The Magus, we see the story of a man who, through the extraordinary efforts of an eccentric millionaire, is allowed for just a moment to see his own personal walls shattered. It’s a compelling story, at least to me, but it’s somehow very hard to understand completely what barriers it is that Nicholas Urfe breaks down, because he lives in the same world we all do.
But the world of The French Lieutenant’s Woman is far enough removed from our own that we’re able to distance ourselves from the character of Charles Smithson, a young man who expects to inherit a baronetcy and a substantial fortune, who’s on the verge of affecting a very comfortable marriage with a woman—Ernestina—who seems perfectly satisfactory by all the standards Charles has been trained to apply to the world around him.
And then there’s the outcast woman, Sarah Woodruff, called “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” by some and “The French Lieutenant’s Whore” by others, because she is said to have lost her virginity to a handsome foreigner who has since abandoned her.
John Fowles tells us that the phenomenon of Charles falling in love with Sarah is identical to the end of the Victorian era. And because he’s dug up so many wonderful facts and stories about 19th Century England to illustrate his point, this rather abstract metaphor becomes quite visceral and believable. Unlike Nicholas Urfe’s brief period of disorientation at the hands of the scheming Maurice Conchis, Charles’ crisis is drawn out over more than a hundred pages as he resists Sarah, condemns her as mad, sees his hopes for inheritance dashed, runs for consolation to the seamy demimonde of London, and finally succumbs to the temptation to destroy the self that Sarah represents.
It works precisely because Victorian literature is characterized by such a wonderful tradition of coincidence. Whereas Maurice Conchis’s whole consciousness shattering project seemed a labyrinthine contrivance whose complexity often obscured the revelation at its own heart, the downfall of Charles Smithson seems to be driven by the same forces that drove the fates of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens’s characters.
IB Singer said that every writer needs to find stories that no one else can tell. It’s impossible for me to imagine anyone else telling the story of Sarah Woodruff. Fowles intentionally makes her an enigma. The great characters of the Victorian era, Sherlock Holmes and Emma Woodhouse, Ebenezer Scrooge and David Copperfield all are so vivid that they can live inside our minds. But Sarah Woodruff seems to pass mysteriously just beyond our grasp in a way that eludes the Victorian style and makes this novel seem truly a feat of magic.
Second in series of three installments — 2 November 2008
So what is it that this Sarah Woodruff symbolizes? Like the White Whale in Moby Dick, she stands at the center of a network of symbolism that fills up the whole book, but she never quite passes completely into the realm of pure symbol. In one very interesting chapter Fowles pulls out of the narrative entirely and declares that, although Sarah, like all the characters in the novel, is his creation, he cannot and will not reveal her inner motives, although he had planned to do so. She won’t reveal them up to her author.
Sarah stands out as being the only character in the book that acts even slightly an adult. This is another theme that seems to run through Fowles’s books—although the characters are all adults with adult responsibilities, they seem to be ruled by a set of childish vanities. Charles and Ernestina go through life as though they’re living in a fairy tale, partly because that’s precisely what they are doing. They’re both slated to earn huge inheritances, and while they each have their little cavils and pouting fits with one another, they’re both bolstered deep down by the thought that the ultimate struggle that lies in store for them is the choice of what kind of prosperity exactly they want to choose. Will they move into the large manor house or the small manor house? Will Charles carry on with his amateur paleontology, or will he find some other hobby to occupy his time but not fulfill his longing to ambition.
At first, Sarah seems to be childish as well. She spends her life moping about, staring at the sea, presumably in hopes that the French Lieutenant who once seduced her will come back. But as the novel progresses and she continues to meet with Charles in the primeval groves of the wild region known as the Undercliff, it begins to become clear that she’s not as much a victim of childish passion as we first thought. Does she really have any illusion that her French Lieutenant will ever come back? Did she even love him in the first place? And if not, why does she willingly allow herself to remain in a community where she’ll always be shunned as a fallen woman? Confused by these questions, Charles confides in his fellow Darwinist Dr Grogan, the only man he can trust to respond rationally.
As a Darwinist and atheist, Dr Grogan seems to stand outside the prison of stereotypes and that defines the Victorian era of this book, and yet his response hardly seems that of a reasonable man. He feels certain that Sarah is dangerously ill and must be institutionalized immediately. She is, after all, the inferior of Charles, who must seem to her like a god.
As it turns out, Dr Grogan is correct in thinking that Sarah represents a great danger to Charles’s future as a happy Victorian gentleman, but his notion that Sarah is mad seems diametrically opposed to the sort of rational humanism that Grogan wishes to represent.
The Undercliff, where Charles and Sarah meet, is home to a series of fossils that inspire Charles to realize the fact that Darwin’s natural not only carries the potential for evolutionary progress but also for mass extinction. Sarah Woodruff represents all the forces that will eventually extinguish the Victorian era, but what are those forces? I think that the answer lies in the other name that she’s given by the people of Lyme Regis, the name that’s used least frequently in the book: Tragedy. The true blindness of the Victorian era is not just a denial of sexual desires or the baser nature of even the most refined gentleman, but rather the denial of the tragic nature of life, in the sense of Greek or Shakespearean tragedy where a system destroys itself by its own striving toward nobility. The name “Tragedy” is appropriate for Sarah, but not so much because she’s a victim of tragedy but an agent of tragic catharsis. Although I doubt I can get to the bottom of it, I will try to expand on that idea in my next installment of this review.
Third installment • 23 November 2008
I remember one time I had an acting teacher who suggested that we almost always see the people around us as representations of something rather than as actual human beings. We see people as representations of our ambitions, as challenges to our status, as political opponents or as collaborators at work, as role-models and as supervisors, as parents or children, but it’s exceedingly rare that we simply view them as people who have been set as unwillingly and unwittingly into the great en medias res of life as we ourselves have been.
That memory came to me today as I was thinking about what more there was for me to say about French Lieutenant’s Woman. It seems to me that in all of Fowles’s works I’ve read so far, his central theme is precisely this blindness we carry around with us, this blindness which keeps us from ever quite recognizing the people around us for what they really are. Victorian society especially seems to depend on such blindness. Charles and his fiancée Ernestina enter into the book with a pat answer to every question of human nature that might come their way.
What makes this argument worth listening to is that Fowles doesn’t write off the blindness of the age as a mere handicap. He’s explicit about the fact that he has a great admiration for the achievements of Victorian society, for the incredible productivity and creativity that arose during that time, but he does seem to suggest that these benefits were achieved at the price of creating a society that was incredibly rigid and unyielding in its notions of human value.
I think that one of the weaknesses of Fowles is that his focus on satori-like moment when the scales fall away from a person’s eyes requires him to make his plots pivot on these moments of personal revelation that are very difficult to communicate to the reader and that must seem contrived and alienating to anyone who hasn’t experienced such moments themselves. One of the ways that Fowles manages to get around this problem is by repeatedly bringing up excerpts of poetry by Tennyson and Clough that are always closely attuned to the inner entrapments and awakenings of Fowles’s characters. Another way that he manages this is by admitting that the character of Sarah Woodruff resists even the omnipotence of the novelist. He cannot see fully into her mind, cannot even guess at her true motivations, and in the end this puts her not only beyond the Victorian stereotypes that Charles uses to navigate his way through life, but also puts her outside of the Freudian and Marxist analyses with which Fowles tries to explain his other characters.
The Collector
by John Fowles. (1963) Published by Dell. 255 pages.
Reviewed 21 October 2008
I decided to change my reading habits a little. Normally, I try to read switch directions as often as possible, to jump from classical to contemporary authors, from fiction to nonfiction and so on as often as possible. But I decided to see what it would be like to focus on one author whom I like a lot. After being so bowled over last year by The Magus, I decided to go back to John Fowles and find out what else he’s written.
The Collector is a book whose subject is so dark—it tells the story the kidnapping of a girl by a young man with a distinctly bland set of sociopathic tendencies—that it’s hard to say “Oh, I just love that book” without depicting oneself as something of a pervert.
While the scenario itself has all the lurid elements of captivity and depravity that are celebrated today in the mythology built up around Hannibal Lecter or the Saw series of movies, it’s notable that there are no scenes of outright torture in this book. The kidnapper, who adopts the false name Ferdinand, goes out of his way to create a comfortable environment for his captive. Does that mitigate his crime or does it serve rather to underscore the fact that no amount of comfort can serve as compensation for the crime of depriving an innocent of her freedom.
There’s something essentially acidic in John Fowles. I think he knew deep down the strident, judgmental direction that literary criticism was headed in, the way that young students especially are encouraged to condemn first and foremost to condemn the author. I think that at some level the sly and Machiavellian Fowles not only anticipated this trend, but he also decided quite deliberately in this, his first published novel, to offer himself up as a sort of intentional sacrifice, and then to profit from the confusion of those who would condemn him.
The first knee-jerk reaction of today’s critic would be to condemn Fowles for writing the ultimate puerile male fantasy novel, a masturbatory wish fulfillment of a man who seeks only to possess a woman, to own her as an object without ever recognizing her as a person.
The second part of the novel takes the form of the diary of “Ferdinand’s” captive Miranda. It is clear after only a short time that Miranda has a far greater claim to the author’s sympathies, and this must give the lie to the knee-jerk condemnation of the book laid out above. If Miranda were to principally define herself as Ferdinand’s victim, if she developed the sort of subservient mentality that he would like to see in her, there might still be a strong case for condemning the book as an example of male objectification. But Miranda is surprisingly indifferent to the person of Ferdinand. Indeed, she’s quite contemptuous of him as a non-entity; she loathes his utter lack of aesthetics. The second part of the book hinges not so much on Miranda’s struggle for her freedom as her attempts to come to terms with her own identity as an artist. Her thoughts are characterized by the anxiety and self-absorption typical of any young artist, but as Miranda’s situation becomes direr it becomes clear that her real struggle is to move as quickly as possible away from her naiveté, to face the fact of her own limitations and come to terms with the facts of her own mortality without the luxury of the slow, ideal ripening processes that most souls in liberty would hope to enjoy.
The Wikipedia entry on this book describes Miranda as a snob. Is she really? Certainly, she’s aware that she’s been trained to look down on Ferdinand for his bluntness of wit and lack of education. But there’s also a deep welling of sympathy in her, an impetus to find redeeming qualities even in her captor.
John Fowles made no secret that he was an elitist, and our young critic eager for a cause to condemn this book might be torn between which character is the more worthy of the reader’s contempt. Does Ferdinand represent the ruling gender elite, or does Miranda represent the ruling cultural elite?
I think the central virtue in Fowles is that he realized the great potential in wandering into this sort of philosophical briar patch. He recognizes the almost visceral need of the reader to rush toward judgment, and he uses it as an engine for his own narrative tension. In some ways, this is a silly book, a little too obvious, with too many heavy-handed references to The Tempest and too much focus on Miranda’s mentor G.P. (Gentle Prospero?) a curmudgeonly and lecherous artist who’s enigmatic pronouncements are not nearly so profound as Fowles thinks they are. But I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants to see how paradox and uncertainty can bring a novel to life, and how the fundamental challenge to any reader is to withhold judgment enough that it’s possible to listen to what’s really being said.
Reviewed 21 October 2008
I decided to change my reading habits a little. Normally, I try to read switch directions as often as possible, to jump from classical to contemporary authors, from fiction to nonfiction and so on as often as possible. But I decided to see what it would be like to focus on one author whom I like a lot. After being so bowled over last year by The Magus, I decided to go back to John Fowles and find out what else he’s written.
The Collector is a book whose subject is so dark—it tells the story the kidnapping of a girl by a young man with a distinctly bland set of sociopathic tendencies—that it’s hard to say “Oh, I just love that book” without depicting oneself as something of a pervert.
While the scenario itself has all the lurid elements of captivity and depravity that are celebrated today in the mythology built up around Hannibal Lecter or the Saw series of movies, it’s notable that there are no scenes of outright torture in this book. The kidnapper, who adopts the false name Ferdinand, goes out of his way to create a comfortable environment for his captive. Does that mitigate his crime or does it serve rather to underscore the fact that no amount of comfort can serve as compensation for the crime of depriving an innocent of her freedom.
There’s something essentially acidic in John Fowles. I think he knew deep down the strident, judgmental direction that literary criticism was headed in, the way that young students especially are encouraged to condemn first and foremost to condemn the author. I think that at some level the sly and Machiavellian Fowles not only anticipated this trend, but he also decided quite deliberately in this, his first published novel, to offer himself up as a sort of intentional sacrifice, and then to profit from the confusion of those who would condemn him.
The first knee-jerk reaction of today’s critic would be to condemn Fowles for writing the ultimate puerile male fantasy novel, a masturbatory wish fulfillment of a man who seeks only to possess a woman, to own her as an object without ever recognizing her as a person.
The second part of the novel takes the form of the diary of “Ferdinand’s” captive Miranda. It is clear after only a short time that Miranda has a far greater claim to the author’s sympathies, and this must give the lie to the knee-jerk condemnation of the book laid out above. If Miranda were to principally define herself as Ferdinand’s victim, if she developed the sort of subservient mentality that he would like to see in her, there might still be a strong case for condemning the book as an example of male objectification. But Miranda is surprisingly indifferent to the person of Ferdinand. Indeed, she’s quite contemptuous of him as a non-entity; she loathes his utter lack of aesthetics. The second part of the book hinges not so much on Miranda’s struggle for her freedom as her attempts to come to terms with her own identity as an artist. Her thoughts are characterized by the anxiety and self-absorption typical of any young artist, but as Miranda’s situation becomes direr it becomes clear that her real struggle is to move as quickly as possible away from her naiveté, to face the fact of her own limitations and come to terms with the facts of her own mortality without the luxury of the slow, ideal ripening processes that most souls in liberty would hope to enjoy.
The Wikipedia entry on this book describes Miranda as a snob. Is she really? Certainly, she’s aware that she’s been trained to look down on Ferdinand for his bluntness of wit and lack of education. But there’s also a deep welling of sympathy in her, an impetus to find redeeming qualities even in her captor.
John Fowles made no secret that he was an elitist, and our young critic eager for a cause to condemn this book might be torn between which character is the more worthy of the reader’s contempt. Does Ferdinand represent the ruling gender elite, or does Miranda represent the ruling cultural elite?
I think the central virtue in Fowles is that he realized the great potential in wandering into this sort of philosophical briar patch. He recognizes the almost visceral need of the reader to rush toward judgment, and he uses it as an engine for his own narrative tension. In some ways, this is a silly book, a little too obvious, with too many heavy-handed references to The Tempest and too much focus on Miranda’s mentor G.P. (Gentle Prospero?) a curmudgeonly and lecherous artist who’s enigmatic pronouncements are not nearly so profound as Fowles thinks they are. But I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants to see how paradox and uncertainty can bring a novel to life, and how the fundamental challenge to any reader is to withhold judgment enough that it’s possible to listen to what’s really being said.
Angels and Insects
by AS Byatt. (1992) Published by Chatto & Windus. 292 pages.
Reviewed 15 October 2008
Nobody can write about ideas the way the AS Byatt does. She allows the worlds of her stories to crystallize around the concepts and issues that she’s chosen to focus on, and this method is illustrated extremely well in the two novellas that sit side-by-side in this polished and successful work.
The first story, Morpho Eugenia, is focused on questions of evolution and creation. The tension between the two is not so much that of a two equal rivals going head-to-head. Rather, it’s the tension of the torch being passed somewhat unwillingly from an old, established sire and a young upstart. The story is that of the young scientist William Adamson who has found himself nearly destitute after losing most of the results from his recent expedition to the Amazon. He gains quick patronage from the Alabaster family; the old patrician Harald wants to use Adamson as a sounding board for his idea about a book that argues the case for God’s existence even in a post-Darwin world. The discussions between the two men are civil, but around the edges of the debate all the more volatile elements of the subject seep their way into the story. As a suitor for Harald’s daughter Eugenia, Alabaster is faced with all the antipathy of a British class system in which wealthy and titled families are infatuated above all with themselves, with their own rituals and routines and the belief in their own innate superiority.
Reading this story, you can understand why, at the tail end of the Victorian Era, a thinker like GB Shaw became so interested in the idea of a “life force.” The world of the landed elite is a sort of shell, ornately beautiful, essentially dead. As William becomes more and more entangled in the world of the Alabasters, he seems to draw his vitality not from the desiccated culture at its core, but from the enthusiasm of those who exist at its edges, the children and servants who inspire William to undertake an engaging project of carefully studying and depicting the natural history of the ant colonies surrounding the Alabaster home.
The real “life-force” that’s breaking through here is essentially the imagination, the ability to create and connect with the world in a meaningful way. Although the world of the Alabasters offers all sorts of material comforts, full acceptance comes at a price of the ability to take part in the world in any creative way. At the same time as Adamson discovers the limitations of the Alabasters’ world, we the readers also discover a lot of the richness of the biological world he studies. This is especially brought out by Matty Crompton, a woman of uncertain status who lives with the Alabasters and serves often as the driving force behind Adamson’s endeavors. Crompton is fascinated by the myriad references to mythology that are woven into the nomenclature of species as assigned by Linnaeus, and she’s inspired by this to create a series of fables which illustrate the way that science in the 19th century really inherited the wealth of imaginative energy that had once been the domain of religion.
In the second story, Conjugal Angel, the situation is quite different. Here, instead of looking at an imaginative journey at its beginnings, we survey it from its end. The story is largely about the strange love triangle Alfred Lord Tennyson, the poet Laureate, his sister Emily, and the young genius Arthur Henry Hallam, who was engaged to Emily and who, after his untimely death from a brain hemorrhage, was immortalized by in Tennyson’s long poem In Memoriam A.H.H.
This is very familiar territory for anyone who’s read Byatt’s Possession. To me, this story is a lot harder to read than Morpho Eugenia, but also a lot more rewarding because Byatt is focusing on something she’s extremely passionate about: the connection we form over time with select handfuls of words, snatches of poetry, little remarks, epigrams and observations; the way that these are colored by the criticism and the prying curiosity of the coterie of scholars and biographers and enthusiasts who form a sort of cage around the world of literature. If Morpho Eugenia seemed to be set against a dazzling world of sunshine and picnic-weather, Conjugal Angel has been quite deliberately set in a world of gloom and encroaching night, and all the scientific wonder and clarity has been abandoned for the spooky Victorian fixation on the occult.
After making such a strong case for science in her first story, why does Byatt seem to betray herself by writing a story in which séance goers seems to commune with sinister spirits? I think this is a way of consciously affirming the fact that there is something unscientific and arcane about literature, something inherently backward looking and yet necessary, at least for those who can be moved by careful examination of words. The folks around the séance table are deeply engrossed in a world of Swedenborgian theories and occult associations that seem not so much profane or ludicrous as just hopelessly antique to us now, a system of belief that may be fascinating to us, but which we can’t imagine actually subscribing to and inhabiting. But in order to really understand literature at it’s core, Byatt argues, you have to be willing to reincarnate these ghost worlds, these old systems of sentiment and fashion, these old mores and compulsions that once defined the way that people thought. It requires a lot of patience to follow Byatt as she pries open the minds first of Emily Tennyson and then her brother Alfred, but as you go along you feel that you’re witnessing first hand the way a writer is truly able to enrich herself, to strengthen her arsenal and to use fiction as a way of learning the real purpose of how it is she’s chosen to invest the deepest of her passion.
Reviewed 15 October 2008
Nobody can write about ideas the way the AS Byatt does. She allows the worlds of her stories to crystallize around the concepts and issues that she’s chosen to focus on, and this method is illustrated extremely well in the two novellas that sit side-by-side in this polished and successful work.
The first story, Morpho Eugenia, is focused on questions of evolution and creation. The tension between the two is not so much that of a two equal rivals going head-to-head. Rather, it’s the tension of the torch being passed somewhat unwillingly from an old, established sire and a young upstart. The story is that of the young scientist William Adamson who has found himself nearly destitute after losing most of the results from his recent expedition to the Amazon. He gains quick patronage from the Alabaster family; the old patrician Harald wants to use Adamson as a sounding board for his idea about a book that argues the case for God’s existence even in a post-Darwin world. The discussions between the two men are civil, but around the edges of the debate all the more volatile elements of the subject seep their way into the story. As a suitor for Harald’s daughter Eugenia, Alabaster is faced with all the antipathy of a British class system in which wealthy and titled families are infatuated above all with themselves, with their own rituals and routines and the belief in their own innate superiority.
Reading this story, you can understand why, at the tail end of the Victorian Era, a thinker like GB Shaw became so interested in the idea of a “life force.” The world of the landed elite is a sort of shell, ornately beautiful, essentially dead. As William becomes more and more entangled in the world of the Alabasters, he seems to draw his vitality not from the desiccated culture at its core, but from the enthusiasm of those who exist at its edges, the children and servants who inspire William to undertake an engaging project of carefully studying and depicting the natural history of the ant colonies surrounding the Alabaster home.
The real “life-force” that’s breaking through here is essentially the imagination, the ability to create and connect with the world in a meaningful way. Although the world of the Alabasters offers all sorts of material comforts, full acceptance comes at a price of the ability to take part in the world in any creative way. At the same time as Adamson discovers the limitations of the Alabasters’ world, we the readers also discover a lot of the richness of the biological world he studies. This is especially brought out by Matty Crompton, a woman of uncertain status who lives with the Alabasters and serves often as the driving force behind Adamson’s endeavors. Crompton is fascinated by the myriad references to mythology that are woven into the nomenclature of species as assigned by Linnaeus, and she’s inspired by this to create a series of fables which illustrate the way that science in the 19th century really inherited the wealth of imaginative energy that had once been the domain of religion.
In the second story, Conjugal Angel, the situation is quite different. Here, instead of looking at an imaginative journey at its beginnings, we survey it from its end. The story is largely about the strange love triangle Alfred Lord Tennyson, the poet Laureate, his sister Emily, and the young genius Arthur Henry Hallam, who was engaged to Emily and who, after his untimely death from a brain hemorrhage, was immortalized by in Tennyson’s long poem In Memoriam A.H.H.
This is very familiar territory for anyone who’s read Byatt’s Possession. To me, this story is a lot harder to read than Morpho Eugenia, but also a lot more rewarding because Byatt is focusing on something she’s extremely passionate about: the connection we form over time with select handfuls of words, snatches of poetry, little remarks, epigrams and observations; the way that these are colored by the criticism and the prying curiosity of the coterie of scholars and biographers and enthusiasts who form a sort of cage around the world of literature. If Morpho Eugenia seemed to be set against a dazzling world of sunshine and picnic-weather, Conjugal Angel has been quite deliberately set in a world of gloom and encroaching night, and all the scientific wonder and clarity has been abandoned for the spooky Victorian fixation on the occult.
After making such a strong case for science in her first story, why does Byatt seem to betray herself by writing a story in which séance goers seems to commune with sinister spirits? I think this is a way of consciously affirming the fact that there is something unscientific and arcane about literature, something inherently backward looking and yet necessary, at least for those who can be moved by careful examination of words. The folks around the séance table are deeply engrossed in a world of Swedenborgian theories and occult associations that seem not so much profane or ludicrous as just hopelessly antique to us now, a system of belief that may be fascinating to us, but which we can’t imagine actually subscribing to and inhabiting. But in order to really understand literature at it’s core, Byatt argues, you have to be willing to reincarnate these ghost worlds, these old systems of sentiment and fashion, these old mores and compulsions that once defined the way that people thought. It requires a lot of patience to follow Byatt as she pries open the minds first of Emily Tennyson and then her brother Alfred, but as you go along you feel that you’re witnessing first hand the way a writer is truly able to enrich herself, to strengthen her arsenal and to use fiction as a way of learning the real purpose of how it is she’s chosen to invest the deepest of her passion.
Begin Chess
Begin Chess by D.B. Prichard
I don’t know if I’ll ever be really good at chess, having picked up so late in life, and being more attracted to the idea of chess than to the game itself. But reading this book reminded me of the difference that the right approach to teaching a subject can make. Until now, my most “formal” introduction to the game was from another book which, like Prichard’s Begin Chess, was targeted toward children: Let’s Play Chess, a hardcover book filled with lavish illustrations in which the chess pieces are depicted as warriors from a fantasy world, the rooks as riders atop wooly mammoths, the queens as beautiful women in translucent shifts who are capable of firing energy beams from their fingertips. Great food for the imagination, but the text focused jumped quickly from explaining the moves of individual pieces to recounting whole endgames and then entire matches transcribed from the great games of such folks as Bobby Fischer and Gary Kasparov. While it certainly got me interested, it also frustrated me because I felt steps were being skipped.
What I like about Prichard is that for most of the book he forsakes the full chessboard and focuses on fields of sixteen or twenty squares and the conflicts that arise from just a few pieces. He keeps stressing that, while it’s tempting to memorize important scenarios, openings, and even entire games, it’s much more effective to learn a few principles that you’ll then be able to hold onto in a variety of situations. Prichard, I think, gives a little more credit to his audience, trusting that someone who has the time to devote to his tiny illustrations of chess tactics and strategy will then be able to translate them into the more chaotic world of real play.
I especially like that I came away from this book understanding that the chessboard, for all its apparent uniformity, actually has its own geography. Certain squares have their own importance, and this importance changes as the terrain itself is set up by the positioning of the pieces, particularly the pawns. This book has taught me why it might be interesting not just to play chess, but to undertake the thought processes involved in the game.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be really good at chess, having picked up so late in life, and being more attracted to the idea of chess than to the game itself. But reading this book reminded me of the difference that the right approach to teaching a subject can make. Until now, my most “formal” introduction to the game was from another book which, like Prichard’s Begin Chess, was targeted toward children: Let’s Play Chess, a hardcover book filled with lavish illustrations in which the chess pieces are depicted as warriors from a fantasy world, the rooks as riders atop wooly mammoths, the queens as beautiful women in translucent shifts who are capable of firing energy beams from their fingertips. Great food for the imagination, but the text focused jumped quickly from explaining the moves of individual pieces to recounting whole endgames and then entire matches transcribed from the great games of such folks as Bobby Fischer and Gary Kasparov. While it certainly got me interested, it also frustrated me because I felt steps were being skipped.
What I like about Prichard is that for most of the book he forsakes the full chessboard and focuses on fields of sixteen or twenty squares and the conflicts that arise from just a few pieces. He keeps stressing that, while it’s tempting to memorize important scenarios, openings, and even entire games, it’s much more effective to learn a few principles that you’ll then be able to hold onto in a variety of situations. Prichard, I think, gives a little more credit to his audience, trusting that someone who has the time to devote to his tiny illustrations of chess tactics and strategy will then be able to translate them into the more chaotic world of real play.
I especially like that I came away from this book understanding that the chessboard, for all its apparent uniformity, actually has its own geography. Certain squares have their own importance, and this importance changes as the terrain itself is set up by the positioning of the pieces, particularly the pawns. This book has taught me why it might be interesting not just to play chess, but to undertake the thought processes involved in the game.
Vanity Fair
by William Makepeace Thackeray. (1848) Published by Penguin Classics. 814 pages.
Up to page 426. Reviewed 19 July 2008.
In his introduction to this book, J. I. M. Stewart makes it clear that Vanity Fair is a second-tier work as far as 19th Century British fiction goes. Why even read a book that’s not the best of the best, especially if it’s such a long and involved endeavor as this one?
I’m interested in books from different periods of time for the same reason that I’m interested in learning foreign languages, because it lets me distance myself from the place I live and the habits of thought that I otherwise take for granted. I’m especially interested in the way that humor has evolved over time. Vanity Fair has a few bits of good comedy. For instance, there’s the comedy of mistaken intentions when William Dobbin, the novel’s most sympathetic character, sits down with Miss Jane Osborne, who is dearly smitten with him, and tries to have a conversation with her. The poor Jane interprets every word as a sign that William Dobbin is about to propose. It’s just a short scene, but each little turn of the conversation is so well played out that it comes alive.
Later on in the story we watch the young wastrel Rawdon Crawley as he prepares to go to war, bidding farewell to his young wife Rebecca before going off with Wellington’s army to stave off the advance of the Napoleonic army. Touched by the sudden intimation of his own mortality, Rawdon scrambles to think of every last possession that Rebecca might be able to pawn off in case he dies. At the same moment that we’re amused Rawdon’s venality we’re also touched by the fact that this is the closest he’s going to get to real romantic love. And as soon as he leaves, we take a look into Rebecca’s head and see how she’s already scheming about how she might actually be better off if her husband dies on the battlefield.
Brilliant little Becky Sharp is probably the best reason to read this book. She’s a character calculated to defy every expectation of her era’s class-consciousness. An orphan girl of humble origins, she uses all her assets (a keen intellect, a perfect command of French, a nasty sense of humor and a remarkable beauty) to make the rich and powerful fall head-over-heels in love with her. She has generals making fools of themselves, she brings her best friend’s marriage to the brink of collapse, and she makes herself the toast of Belgian high society after Napoleon is defeated. Those who are won over by her let their imaginations run wild, ascribing to her the noblest, most romantic origins they can think of. In the same way, Thackeray encourages us to let our imaginations go as well when it comes to this character, so that by the time the novel is halfway finished we no longer need Thackeray to remind us of Becky’s ruthless character because we already feel as if we have an intimate understanding of her gloriously amoral style of getting a leg up on the whole world.
Although Thackeray claims this is “a novel without a hero,” it is also not a satiric comedy that’s all pitched at the same level. There are plenty of characters that we’re meant only to find ridiculous, such as the spinster Miss Crawley and the swarm of sycophants who gather around her hoping for a bit of her inheritance. But there are also characters who are more tragically than comically flawed, such as old Mr Osborne, who wants deeply to come to peace with his dead son George but is too stubborn to forgive the way George defied his father’s will and married without permission.
What makes this book worth reading is to see how even a second tier novelist of Thackeray’s era devoted himself to the nuance and texture of the world he created, creating space on the stage for humor and sarcasm to give way to moments of true emotion when the need arises.
pp. 426-660; reviewed 2 August 2008
At the end of a hectic day in our hectic world, it’s such a pleasure to sink into the world of a writer like Thackeray who, writing as he did in a serialized form, had every reason to draw his story out, to linger at every little point of interest, to wander off into idle jokes and contemplation. Especially after the battle of Waterloo has been put behind us, Thackeray seems to sit back and let his plot unfold at a slow pace.
This is a book about waiting. Becky and Rawdon and all their relatives wait for the wealthy Miss Crawley to die and pass on her inheritance. Amelia waits for her bitter father-in-law to forgive his grudges against his rebellious son. Poor William Dobbin waits for himself to build up the courage to finally reveal his love for Amelia. And as readers, we’re waiting for the Becky and Amelia’s sons to grow up. Young George Osborne is the spit and image of his dead father, and develops all his father’s overconfidence and bravado. Young Rawdon Crawley’s father is still alive, but has undergone a sort of spiritual death at the hands of the scheming Becky Sharp, who has encouraged him to dull his wits and go to seed while she pursues her own ambitions to penetrate the highest levels of society and especially to take as much advantage as she can of the lecherous Lord Steyne.
A different, more deliberate novelist might have recognized that the story has a natural climax in the battle of Waterloo. All the themes of the book are present there. We can see clearly the rivalry between Becky and Amelia, the inevitable cuckolding of Rawdon Crawley and the frustrated love of the honorable William Dobbin, who makes so many sacrifices to Amelia and yet can’t bring himself to admit his love for her. Once the smoke has cleared and we learn that George has died in battle, the story proper could end, and we could skip ahead to an epilogue where young Rawdon and George are grown, where Amelia and Becky confront each other, as they must inevitably do.
Such a plot structure would be far more economical and probably better. With all the wooly digressions done away with, this would be the sort of precise, clever book that actually makes a point about some theme, be it the vanity of all our worldly pursuits or the virtue of those who live a life without pretense. As it is, though, the novel is beautiful because it’s so inefficient, because it sprawls and wanders so much as Thackeray moves from point A to point B. We get lovely glimpses of the way old Rawdon Crawley nearly finds fulfillment in fatherhood, but doesn’t quite have the wit to understand what’s happening to him. We get to cringe at the injustice as Amelia not only loses her beloved son George, but also is all but forgotten by him. And all of Becky’s bad characteristics, already established prior to the Waterloo episode, get to come forward and develop fully.
More than half of this book is an extended epilogue, slow paced and idle, but what better form for a book whose purpose is to draw a vast mural of all the idle pursuits that people are guilty of.
p. 660 to end. Reviewed 16 August 2008
The most interesting part of this book’s end is the section where, after spending his entire adult life pining for Amelia Osborne nee Sedley, William Dobbin finally stands up to her and declares that he’s realized she isn’t worthy of him by dint of the fact that she’s spurned him all these years when anyone with sense would have recognized and embraced the worth of so much devotion. It stands out because it’s the closest thing there is in the book to a heroic monologue. During the course of the novel, Thackeray finds few emotional causes worthy of his endorsement. Those tract writers and parliamentarians who oppose the slave trade meet only with scorn. The plight of those less fortunate characters, such as Miss Briggs, are recognized, but only as an afterthought; after we get a dark laugh at the way Becky Sharp cheats Briggs out of her small fortune, we’re comforted by the fact that in the end someone looks kindly on her and provides her with a small income. But Thackeray doesn’t seem outraged at the lot of the poor in the way Dickens often was; he’s merely cushioning the novel out so as not to let Briggs distract from the central theme of the book. There are various devout Christians in the book, but we’re led to believe that, while they may be correct in their beliefs, they’re all rather dull.
In the sections leading up to the battle of Waterloo, we witness a literal overnight transition of George Osborne from a philandering good-for-nothing to a man with noble and heroic character who suddenly recognizes the great debt of love he owes his dear wife, Amelia. Here especially, Thackeray seems to be intentionally filing off the sharp edges of his claws. He admits outright that his domain as a writer encompasses only the activities of civilian life, and so here at the border of the military world he feels obliged to drop his own cynical view of the world and bestow Osborne with a fiction of nobility that Thackeray neither believes nor disbelieves, but one from which he can easily distance himself because it’s not of his own design.
But if the battlefield between warring armies is outside Thackeray’s narrative grasp, the battlefield between those who are celebrated and those who are jilted is firmly within it. That’s why Dobbin’s speech jolts us awake after we’ve spent nearly an eternity snoozing through the descriptions of Amelia and Dobbin’s trip to Germany. In Thackeray’s world, the wounds of a man who’s loved his entire life in vain are far more real than the wounds suffered by soldiers in war or by the widows of those soldiers who find themselves left behind to raise their children.
Dobbin’s speech is foreshadowed by the impassioned outburst of Lady Jane against her husband, Sir Pitt, who is on the verge of granting safe harbor to the scheming Becky Crawley. Lady Jane would be a totally forgettable character if it weren’t for this speech that comes out of nowhere in which this character suddenly finds her voice, reminding her husband of her unwavering loyalty and demanding asserting that in this one instance she must be able to make the rules: she will not be under the same roof as Rebecca Crawley.
Becky is the common denominator in both of these outbursts. Even though William is rejecting Amelia, his eyes have been opened to her flaws only because she’s willing to welcome Becky into her home.
Becky is central to the novel, but it’s difficult to understand what she represents. If I were pressed, I’d have to say that she represents the fact that the social world as Thackeray sees it is a zero-sum game. In order for one person like Becky Sharp to prosper and thrive, to gain the recognition of nobility and royalty, to be considered of “good character,” a whole range of people must unwittingly suffer.
There’s a great story here, but it feels as if Thackeray arrived at it almost by chance. Our own age of efficiency-in-fiction would demand that, having discovered his central theme, Thackeray must then go back over his whole narrative, trimming the fat, carefully orchestrating all the subplots and sideshows of the novel so that they somehow resonate with the story of Becky Sharp and her cursed ambitions.
I’ve no doubt that that sort of creative process would have resulted in a better book. However, for the student of writing it’s worthwhile to examine Vanity Fair as it exists today precisely because it’s so easy to see the novels flaws and its potential resting side-by-side. Each of us would probably revise the novel in our own way. If I were to take the story and run with it, I would first try to expand on the story of Becky’s lover, Lord Steyne. Having established the character of Becky, Thackeray needed to create a temptation worthy of her. Steyne is the Darth Vader of this novel. When Thackeray describes Steyne’s world in the chapter Gaunt House, his language immediately heightens itself, and we get a sense that we’re wandering into a territory where there are many ugly secrets. Later on we see how, confronted with the prospect of a duel with Rawdon Crawley, Steyne is able to essentially buy the man off with the offer of an out-of-the-way post as a colonial governor. And near the end of the book, when Becky is tempted to try to win Steyne back, one of his henchmen gives her an ultimatum that essentially tells her that she’s nothing but an embarrassment to the man, and can either get out of town now or face being killed in the dead of night. It’s a portrait of darkly varnished evil that’s all the more fascinating because Thackeray seemed to stumble on it inadvertently. If he’d been a more organized writer, Thackeray doubtless would have seen the value of the character and “capitalized” on it, introducing him earlier and fleshing him out and making him more central to the books narrative. There’s a lesson here to be learned by any young writer. But perhaps the sword has its double edge. I would wager that if Thackeray had been a less spontaneous, less meandering author, Thackeray never would have wandered into this character at all.
Up to page 426. Reviewed 19 July 2008.
In his introduction to this book, J. I. M. Stewart makes it clear that Vanity Fair is a second-tier work as far as 19th Century British fiction goes. Why even read a book that’s not the best of the best, especially if it’s such a long and involved endeavor as this one?
I’m interested in books from different periods of time for the same reason that I’m interested in learning foreign languages, because it lets me distance myself from the place I live and the habits of thought that I otherwise take for granted. I’m especially interested in the way that humor has evolved over time. Vanity Fair has a few bits of good comedy. For instance, there’s the comedy of mistaken intentions when William Dobbin, the novel’s most sympathetic character, sits down with Miss Jane Osborne, who is dearly smitten with him, and tries to have a conversation with her. The poor Jane interprets every word as a sign that William Dobbin is about to propose. It’s just a short scene, but each little turn of the conversation is so well played out that it comes alive.
Later on in the story we watch the young wastrel Rawdon Crawley as he prepares to go to war, bidding farewell to his young wife Rebecca before going off with Wellington’s army to stave off the advance of the Napoleonic army. Touched by the sudden intimation of his own mortality, Rawdon scrambles to think of every last possession that Rebecca might be able to pawn off in case he dies. At the same moment that we’re amused Rawdon’s venality we’re also touched by the fact that this is the closest he’s going to get to real romantic love. And as soon as he leaves, we take a look into Rebecca’s head and see how she’s already scheming about how she might actually be better off if her husband dies on the battlefield.
Brilliant little Becky Sharp is probably the best reason to read this book. She’s a character calculated to defy every expectation of her era’s class-consciousness. An orphan girl of humble origins, she uses all her assets (a keen intellect, a perfect command of French, a nasty sense of humor and a remarkable beauty) to make the rich and powerful fall head-over-heels in love with her. She has generals making fools of themselves, she brings her best friend’s marriage to the brink of collapse, and she makes herself the toast of Belgian high society after Napoleon is defeated. Those who are won over by her let their imaginations run wild, ascribing to her the noblest, most romantic origins they can think of. In the same way, Thackeray encourages us to let our imaginations go as well when it comes to this character, so that by the time the novel is halfway finished we no longer need Thackeray to remind us of Becky’s ruthless character because we already feel as if we have an intimate understanding of her gloriously amoral style of getting a leg up on the whole world.
Although Thackeray claims this is “a novel without a hero,” it is also not a satiric comedy that’s all pitched at the same level. There are plenty of characters that we’re meant only to find ridiculous, such as the spinster Miss Crawley and the swarm of sycophants who gather around her hoping for a bit of her inheritance. But there are also characters who are more tragically than comically flawed, such as old Mr Osborne, who wants deeply to come to peace with his dead son George but is too stubborn to forgive the way George defied his father’s will and married without permission.
What makes this book worth reading is to see how even a second tier novelist of Thackeray’s era devoted himself to the nuance and texture of the world he created, creating space on the stage for humor and sarcasm to give way to moments of true emotion when the need arises.
pp. 426-660; reviewed 2 August 2008
At the end of a hectic day in our hectic world, it’s such a pleasure to sink into the world of a writer like Thackeray who, writing as he did in a serialized form, had every reason to draw his story out, to linger at every little point of interest, to wander off into idle jokes and contemplation. Especially after the battle of Waterloo has been put behind us, Thackeray seems to sit back and let his plot unfold at a slow pace.
This is a book about waiting. Becky and Rawdon and all their relatives wait for the wealthy Miss Crawley to die and pass on her inheritance. Amelia waits for her bitter father-in-law to forgive his grudges against his rebellious son. Poor William Dobbin waits for himself to build up the courage to finally reveal his love for Amelia. And as readers, we’re waiting for the Becky and Amelia’s sons to grow up. Young George Osborne is the spit and image of his dead father, and develops all his father’s overconfidence and bravado. Young Rawdon Crawley’s father is still alive, but has undergone a sort of spiritual death at the hands of the scheming Becky Sharp, who has encouraged him to dull his wits and go to seed while she pursues her own ambitions to penetrate the highest levels of society and especially to take as much advantage as she can of the lecherous Lord Steyne.
A different, more deliberate novelist might have recognized that the story has a natural climax in the battle of Waterloo. All the themes of the book are present there. We can see clearly the rivalry between Becky and Amelia, the inevitable cuckolding of Rawdon Crawley and the frustrated love of the honorable William Dobbin, who makes so many sacrifices to Amelia and yet can’t bring himself to admit his love for her. Once the smoke has cleared and we learn that George has died in battle, the story proper could end, and we could skip ahead to an epilogue where young Rawdon and George are grown, where Amelia and Becky confront each other, as they must inevitably do.
Such a plot structure would be far more economical and probably better. With all the wooly digressions done away with, this would be the sort of precise, clever book that actually makes a point about some theme, be it the vanity of all our worldly pursuits or the virtue of those who live a life without pretense. As it is, though, the novel is beautiful because it’s so inefficient, because it sprawls and wanders so much as Thackeray moves from point A to point B. We get lovely glimpses of the way old Rawdon Crawley nearly finds fulfillment in fatherhood, but doesn’t quite have the wit to understand what’s happening to him. We get to cringe at the injustice as Amelia not only loses her beloved son George, but also is all but forgotten by him. And all of Becky’s bad characteristics, already established prior to the Waterloo episode, get to come forward and develop fully.
More than half of this book is an extended epilogue, slow paced and idle, but what better form for a book whose purpose is to draw a vast mural of all the idle pursuits that people are guilty of.
p. 660 to end. Reviewed 16 August 2008
The most interesting part of this book’s end is the section where, after spending his entire adult life pining for Amelia Osborne nee Sedley, William Dobbin finally stands up to her and declares that he’s realized she isn’t worthy of him by dint of the fact that she’s spurned him all these years when anyone with sense would have recognized and embraced the worth of so much devotion. It stands out because it’s the closest thing there is in the book to a heroic monologue. During the course of the novel, Thackeray finds few emotional causes worthy of his endorsement. Those tract writers and parliamentarians who oppose the slave trade meet only with scorn. The plight of those less fortunate characters, such as Miss Briggs, are recognized, but only as an afterthought; after we get a dark laugh at the way Becky Sharp cheats Briggs out of her small fortune, we’re comforted by the fact that in the end someone looks kindly on her and provides her with a small income. But Thackeray doesn’t seem outraged at the lot of the poor in the way Dickens often was; he’s merely cushioning the novel out so as not to let Briggs distract from the central theme of the book. There are various devout Christians in the book, but we’re led to believe that, while they may be correct in their beliefs, they’re all rather dull.
In the sections leading up to the battle of Waterloo, we witness a literal overnight transition of George Osborne from a philandering good-for-nothing to a man with noble and heroic character who suddenly recognizes the great debt of love he owes his dear wife, Amelia. Here especially, Thackeray seems to be intentionally filing off the sharp edges of his claws. He admits outright that his domain as a writer encompasses only the activities of civilian life, and so here at the border of the military world he feels obliged to drop his own cynical view of the world and bestow Osborne with a fiction of nobility that Thackeray neither believes nor disbelieves, but one from which he can easily distance himself because it’s not of his own design.
But if the battlefield between warring armies is outside Thackeray’s narrative grasp, the battlefield between those who are celebrated and those who are jilted is firmly within it. That’s why Dobbin’s speech jolts us awake after we’ve spent nearly an eternity snoozing through the descriptions of Amelia and Dobbin’s trip to Germany. In Thackeray’s world, the wounds of a man who’s loved his entire life in vain are far more real than the wounds suffered by soldiers in war or by the widows of those soldiers who find themselves left behind to raise their children.
Dobbin’s speech is foreshadowed by the impassioned outburst of Lady Jane against her husband, Sir Pitt, who is on the verge of granting safe harbor to the scheming Becky Crawley. Lady Jane would be a totally forgettable character if it weren’t for this speech that comes out of nowhere in which this character suddenly finds her voice, reminding her husband of her unwavering loyalty and demanding asserting that in this one instance she must be able to make the rules: she will not be under the same roof as Rebecca Crawley.
Becky is the common denominator in both of these outbursts. Even though William is rejecting Amelia, his eyes have been opened to her flaws only because she’s willing to welcome Becky into her home.
Becky is central to the novel, but it’s difficult to understand what she represents. If I were pressed, I’d have to say that she represents the fact that the social world as Thackeray sees it is a zero-sum game. In order for one person like Becky Sharp to prosper and thrive, to gain the recognition of nobility and royalty, to be considered of “good character,” a whole range of people must unwittingly suffer.
There’s a great story here, but it feels as if Thackeray arrived at it almost by chance. Our own age of efficiency-in-fiction would demand that, having discovered his central theme, Thackeray must then go back over his whole narrative, trimming the fat, carefully orchestrating all the subplots and sideshows of the novel so that they somehow resonate with the story of Becky Sharp and her cursed ambitions.
I’ve no doubt that that sort of creative process would have resulted in a better book. However, for the student of writing it’s worthwhile to examine Vanity Fair as it exists today precisely because it’s so easy to see the novels flaws and its potential resting side-by-side. Each of us would probably revise the novel in our own way. If I were to take the story and run with it, I would first try to expand on the story of Becky’s lover, Lord Steyne. Having established the character of Becky, Thackeray needed to create a temptation worthy of her. Steyne is the Darth Vader of this novel. When Thackeray describes Steyne’s world in the chapter Gaunt House, his language immediately heightens itself, and we get a sense that we’re wandering into a territory where there are many ugly secrets. Later on we see how, confronted with the prospect of a duel with Rawdon Crawley, Steyne is able to essentially buy the man off with the offer of an out-of-the-way post as a colonial governor. And near the end of the book, when Becky is tempted to try to win Steyne back, one of his henchmen gives her an ultimatum that essentially tells her that she’s nothing but an embarrassment to the man, and can either get out of town now or face being killed in the dead of night. It’s a portrait of darkly varnished evil that’s all the more fascinating because Thackeray seemed to stumble on it inadvertently. If he’d been a more organized writer, Thackeray doubtless would have seen the value of the character and “capitalized” on it, introducing him earlier and fleshing him out and making him more central to the books narrative. There’s a lesson here to be learned by any young writer. But perhaps the sword has its double edge. I would wager that if Thackeray had been a less spontaneous, less meandering author, Thackeray never would have wandered into this character at all.
If You Want Me to Stay
by Michael Parker
Years and years ago I took a creative writing course from Michael Parker. This was shortly before the release of his first novel, Hello Down There. Since then I’ve enjoyed watching the direction he’s taken his work, and I think If You Want Me to Stay is the best so far, a potent, sad story of a boy who is lost in the world, whose connection to the world of adults is mainly through his extensive knowledge of soul music.
Our main character, Joel Junior, received his education in soul music from his father, a man who suffers from episodic bouts of mental illness, which render him a danger to himself and his three sons. The novel starts when the father loses his grip on reality “the worst time.” Joel Junior runs away from home with his youngest brother, Tank, and is forced to come up with a plan to help the two of them survive and find their mother, who absconded a few years ago without warning, having lost patience with her husband’s madness.
We have an intimate look inside Joel Junior’s head. At first, I was apprehensive about the constant references to the music of Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, Mavis Staples and Curtis Mayfield. The idea of giving the novel a “soundtrack” seemed gimmicky, like a writing exercise good for only a few pages at most. But Parker manages to render the way that songs worm their way into the brain so well that it never felt like the musical framework was imposed from the outside. Joel Junior uses his lexicon of soul sounds and lyrics as a guide to help understand all the most adult aspects of loneliness, hope and frustration that he encounters as he wanders through this world, and his interior arguments about the real meaning of songs like Sitting on the Dock of the Bay give us a sense of his intelligence that it would be hard to get otherwise.
We also get a feeling of Joel Junior’s intelligence from his language, which is unorthodox but never sloppy. Joel Junior is the latest in a string of Michael Parker characters who is dangerously naïve and open to the world around him; unlike the other characters, Joel Junior’s mental eccentricity is built into the structure of every sentence.
I love Michael Parker’s writing best for its economy. In composing his words, he leaves little to chance. But like any good magician, Parker has to conceal his craft through misdirection. That’s why it works so well that Joel and Tank’s quixotic journey is littered with so many odd, understated little encounters: along their way they meet fishermen and church ladies, shop clerks and drunkards whose significance is as random as that of anyone we might meet by chance in real life, and yet in the mind of Joel Junior they all become signposts on the way to reaching an understanding of who he is, where he’s come from, and the path that his life is likely to take from here on out. By the end of the book, Michael Parker has achieved stunningly well in creating the sort of poetic landscape of memories and symbols that John Irving so desperately wanted to create for Hotel New Hampshire. The overall effect is so muted and subtle that it’s only afterward that we see the brilliance in the fact that Parker has used soul music as his compass to write a book that captures all the frightening and startling possibilities inherent in the depths of a single human soul.
Years and years ago I took a creative writing course from Michael Parker. This was shortly before the release of his first novel, Hello Down There. Since then I’ve enjoyed watching the direction he’s taken his work, and I think If You Want Me to Stay is the best so far, a potent, sad story of a boy who is lost in the world, whose connection to the world of adults is mainly through his extensive knowledge of soul music.
Our main character, Joel Junior, received his education in soul music from his father, a man who suffers from episodic bouts of mental illness, which render him a danger to himself and his three sons. The novel starts when the father loses his grip on reality “the worst time.” Joel Junior runs away from home with his youngest brother, Tank, and is forced to come up with a plan to help the two of them survive and find their mother, who absconded a few years ago without warning, having lost patience with her husband’s madness.
We have an intimate look inside Joel Junior’s head. At first, I was apprehensive about the constant references to the music of Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, Mavis Staples and Curtis Mayfield. The idea of giving the novel a “soundtrack” seemed gimmicky, like a writing exercise good for only a few pages at most. But Parker manages to render the way that songs worm their way into the brain so well that it never felt like the musical framework was imposed from the outside. Joel Junior uses his lexicon of soul sounds and lyrics as a guide to help understand all the most adult aspects of loneliness, hope and frustration that he encounters as he wanders through this world, and his interior arguments about the real meaning of songs like Sitting on the Dock of the Bay give us a sense of his intelligence that it would be hard to get otherwise.
We also get a feeling of Joel Junior’s intelligence from his language, which is unorthodox but never sloppy. Joel Junior is the latest in a string of Michael Parker characters who is dangerously naïve and open to the world around him; unlike the other characters, Joel Junior’s mental eccentricity is built into the structure of every sentence.
I love Michael Parker’s writing best for its economy. In composing his words, he leaves little to chance. But like any good magician, Parker has to conceal his craft through misdirection. That’s why it works so well that Joel and Tank’s quixotic journey is littered with so many odd, understated little encounters: along their way they meet fishermen and church ladies, shop clerks and drunkards whose significance is as random as that of anyone we might meet by chance in real life, and yet in the mind of Joel Junior they all become signposts on the way to reaching an understanding of who he is, where he’s come from, and the path that his life is likely to take from here on out. By the end of the book, Michael Parker has achieved stunningly well in creating the sort of poetic landscape of memories and symbols that John Irving so desperately wanted to create for Hotel New Hampshire. The overall effect is so muted and subtle that it’s only afterward that we see the brilliance in the fact that Parker has used soul music as his compass to write a book that captures all the frightening and startling possibilities inherent in the depths of a single human soul.
The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove
by Christopher Moore. (1999) Published by Perennial. 304 pages.
Up to page 81; reviewed 1 June 2008.
Tokyo gets Godzilla; the rural California community of Pine Cove gets The Sea Beast, a five-thousand-year-old reptilian monster with a liberal libido who has no qualms about mounting the first gas truck he happens upon, believing it to be a coy, silver-skinned temptress. This is my first exposure to Christopher Moore, and what impresses me is not just that he’s funny, but that the humor doesn’t ever get in the way of the storytelling. Moore’s sense of comedy is closely related to Gary Larson and his Far Side cartoon, which seemed to be always drawing on the natural world for comedy; as a storyteller, he’s a lot like Stephen King: his world is populated by misfit eccentrics who are just real enough to be interesting but contemptibly twisted enough that we don’t mind too much when they get killed off in the most bizarre ways. Thankfully, Moore doesn’t seem to want to make the story drag on endlessly the way Stephen King likes to.
I especially like the way that Moore weaves in themes of sadness and chemical dependence: the hero of the book, constable Theo Crowe, is hopelessly addicted to marijuana; the people of his community are all unknowingly suffering withdrawal symptoms because their psychiatrist has replaced their antidepressants with sugar pills; and The Sea Beast brings with him an arsenal of disinhibiting pheromones that appear capable of drawing people into the worst kind of Midsummer Night’s Nightmare. And all of it’s rounded off by Catfish the Bluesman, whose story about trying to give the blues to his friend Smiley is one of the best things I’ve read in ages.
28 June; p 81 to end.
For a while, I was put off by the nasty and offhanded way Christopher Moore had some of his characters get killed off in this book (especially Les the handyman). I tend not to like stories that come from the philosophical perspective that most people are just trash. Of course, a lot of people might argue that it’s going too far to suggest that someone like Moore, whose titles include Bloodsucking Fiends (A Love Story). The Stupidest Angel (A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror) and Island of the Sequined Love Nun is “writing from” any sort of philosophical perspective whatsoever.
I’d counter that the author’s philosophy plays a huge role in even the dumbest of books; it’s responsible for the aftertaste we take away from reading, for the fact that even a brutal and tragic tale can leave us feeling stronger and wiser whereas an overly sentimental story can leave us feeling not only sickened but downright misanthropic.
By the end of the book, I thought Moore’s philosophy is not so much that people are trash as that we’re all just animals, all subject to the stresses and carnage of the natural world, and any attempt to place ourselves as a species of as individuals above this level is a feat of embarrassing pomposity. This is why one of my favorite characters in the book was Skinner, the dog, who always thinks of his “master,” Gabe, as “The Food Guy.” I think Moore would agree with me that Skinner is probably the smartest character in the book, and that all the other, human characters, would benefit a lot from giving up their obsessions with status, money, fulfillment and fame. It would be much more sensible to be concerned primarily with the joy of a bowl of kibbles, a friendly scratch behind the ears and an afternoon nap.
So it’s with a firmly biological perspective, driven by pheromones and predatory urges that Christopher Moore turns out a plot that seems somehow naturally absurd, a world in which there’s nothing more logical than a pharmacist’s hidden lust for sex with dolphins and manatees or a session of sexual intercourse between a schizophrenic B-movie actress and a giant sea lizard aided by a weed whacker. The book never gets bogged down in circumspection, but as I reader I could tell that Moore really did take the time to do some homework about themes as diverse as psychopharmacology, reptilian life and the manufacture of crack cocaine. I even learned a few things, like what a “gill tree” is. I got to appreciate the way a really clever author can stack his own deck of cards so that at the end of the book it feels like events really are unfolding faster than you’re able to take them in.
There are some weak points; the group of cultists drawn to worship the giant sea monster in the nude never really seem to have a lot to do, and the community of Pine Cove, though given lots of hormonal incentive, never really erupts into the sort of orgy of misbehavior worthy of Moore’s talent. Still, this was a really fun book to read.
Up to page 81; reviewed 1 June 2008.
Tokyo gets Godzilla; the rural California community of Pine Cove gets The Sea Beast, a five-thousand-year-old reptilian monster with a liberal libido who has no qualms about mounting the first gas truck he happens upon, believing it to be a coy, silver-skinned temptress. This is my first exposure to Christopher Moore, and what impresses me is not just that he’s funny, but that the humor doesn’t ever get in the way of the storytelling. Moore’s sense of comedy is closely related to Gary Larson and his Far Side cartoon, which seemed to be always drawing on the natural world for comedy; as a storyteller, he’s a lot like Stephen King: his world is populated by misfit eccentrics who are just real enough to be interesting but contemptibly twisted enough that we don’t mind too much when they get killed off in the most bizarre ways. Thankfully, Moore doesn’t seem to want to make the story drag on endlessly the way Stephen King likes to.
I especially like the way that Moore weaves in themes of sadness and chemical dependence: the hero of the book, constable Theo Crowe, is hopelessly addicted to marijuana; the people of his community are all unknowingly suffering withdrawal symptoms because their psychiatrist has replaced their antidepressants with sugar pills; and The Sea Beast brings with him an arsenal of disinhibiting pheromones that appear capable of drawing people into the worst kind of Midsummer Night’s Nightmare. And all of it’s rounded off by Catfish the Bluesman, whose story about trying to give the blues to his friend Smiley is one of the best things I’ve read in ages.
28 June; p 81 to end.
For a while, I was put off by the nasty and offhanded way Christopher Moore had some of his characters get killed off in this book (especially Les the handyman). I tend not to like stories that come from the philosophical perspective that most people are just trash. Of course, a lot of people might argue that it’s going too far to suggest that someone like Moore, whose titles include Bloodsucking Fiends (A Love Story). The Stupidest Angel (A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror) and Island of the Sequined Love Nun is “writing from” any sort of philosophical perspective whatsoever.
I’d counter that the author’s philosophy plays a huge role in even the dumbest of books; it’s responsible for the aftertaste we take away from reading, for the fact that even a brutal and tragic tale can leave us feeling stronger and wiser whereas an overly sentimental story can leave us feeling not only sickened but downright misanthropic.
By the end of the book, I thought Moore’s philosophy is not so much that people are trash as that we’re all just animals, all subject to the stresses and carnage of the natural world, and any attempt to place ourselves as a species of as individuals above this level is a feat of embarrassing pomposity. This is why one of my favorite characters in the book was Skinner, the dog, who always thinks of his “master,” Gabe, as “The Food Guy.” I think Moore would agree with me that Skinner is probably the smartest character in the book, and that all the other, human characters, would benefit a lot from giving up their obsessions with status, money, fulfillment and fame. It would be much more sensible to be concerned primarily with the joy of a bowl of kibbles, a friendly scratch behind the ears and an afternoon nap.
So it’s with a firmly biological perspective, driven by pheromones and predatory urges that Christopher Moore turns out a plot that seems somehow naturally absurd, a world in which there’s nothing more logical than a pharmacist’s hidden lust for sex with dolphins and manatees or a session of sexual intercourse between a schizophrenic B-movie actress and a giant sea lizard aided by a weed whacker. The book never gets bogged down in circumspection, but as I reader I could tell that Moore really did take the time to do some homework about themes as diverse as psychopharmacology, reptilian life and the manufacture of crack cocaine. I even learned a few things, like what a “gill tree” is. I got to appreciate the way a really clever author can stack his own deck of cards so that at the end of the book it feels like events really are unfolding faster than you’re able to take them in.
There are some weak points; the group of cultists drawn to worship the giant sea monster in the nude never really seem to have a lot to do, and the community of Pine Cove, though given lots of hormonal incentive, never really erupts into the sort of orgy of misbehavior worthy of Moore’s talent. Still, this was a really fun book to read.
Isaac Newton
by James Gleick. (2003) Published by Vintage. 191 pages. Reviewed 26 May 2008
I always feel a little cheated by James Gleick’s books, which seem heavy on biographical data and low on the science Gleick is supposedly so good at describing. Still, I really enjoyed this book, especially because it did such a good job at showing how Newton was frustrated early on with his attempts to come to grips with physical problems using written language as a tool. Gleick does a great job at showing what a muddle the state of thinking and especially the terminology in regards to physics was at the outset of Newton’s career, and there’s a sense of real excitement when Newton finally takes charge of the language in writing his Principia and selects the amazing handful of concepts (mass, force, velocity) that are still so useful to us now in understanding the world. Also, it was really enlightening to learn about the way Newton’s vast output of private writings was neglected after his death all the way into the 20th Century. This explains a lot about why there are so many questions that still linger about a man you’d expect to be better understood. I do wish that Gleick had lingered as long over Newton’s geometrical demonstrations as he did over the feud with Robert Hooke. Still, I think Gleick’s writing has improved incredibly since he wrote Chaos, and I learned a lot about Newton’s world and thinking process from this book.
I always feel a little cheated by James Gleick’s books, which seem heavy on biographical data and low on the science Gleick is supposedly so good at describing. Still, I really enjoyed this book, especially because it did such a good job at showing how Newton was frustrated early on with his attempts to come to grips with physical problems using written language as a tool. Gleick does a great job at showing what a muddle the state of thinking and especially the terminology in regards to physics was at the outset of Newton’s career, and there’s a sense of real excitement when Newton finally takes charge of the language in writing his Principia and selects the amazing handful of concepts (mass, force, velocity) that are still so useful to us now in understanding the world. Also, it was really enlightening to learn about the way Newton’s vast output of private writings was neglected after his death all the way into the 20th Century. This explains a lot about why there are so many questions that still linger about a man you’d expect to be better understood. I do wish that Gleick had lingered as long over Newton’s geometrical demonstrations as he did over the feud with Robert Hooke. Still, I think Gleick’s writing has improved incredibly since he wrote Chaos, and I learned a lot about Newton’s world and thinking process from this book.
The Hotel New Hampshire
by John Irving. (1981). Reader’s Circle Edition, published by Ballantine Books (2001). 401 pages.
Up to p. 287; reviewed 18 May 2008.
This book lost its thrill for me at about the same point that I started to understand what John Irving was up to. It was right after the character of Susie the Bear enters the book. We’re told that Susie is a homely American girl who patrols the Gasthaus Freud in Vienna (soon to be renamed “Hotel New Hampshire”) dressed in a bear costume. She keeps the hotel safe by growling and charging at anyone who gets out of line, especially those who are taking too many liberties with the prostitutes who work there. Except for the protagonist of the book and his family, no one ever sees through bear disguise. It took me a few moments of trying to fit this into my head (How could she see in the bear costume? How would anyone be fooled for more than a couple of seconds into mistaking a static bear mask for the real face of a living bear? What possible recompense could be enough to get this poor woman to live her life in this bear costume?) before I realized that you weren’t supposed to believe it was true. You were supposed to be swept away with the wildness of it all. There’s no way that Susie the Bear would ever exist in the real world, so obviously the bear is supposed to symbolize something. But what?
I’ve never read John Irving before, but I did see the movie Life According to Garp and I really enjoyed it. Not only did I enjoy it, but I felt that I agreed with it, as though it were a particularly insightful manifesto. Garp seemed to me to defend the importance of living a well-rounded life. The character of Garp is a wrestler but also a thinker. He’s artistic but absolutely unpretentious. He’s proud of himself but he also recognizes his failings. Most importantly, he is sensitive to literature, and he understands that symbolism exists not just on the page but in the world we live in. That’s why he buys a house that’s just been smashed by an airplane—because the house is connected now with an unforgettable event.
I know from experience that it’s easy to be exhilarated by the idea that life is rich in meaning and significance, but it’s hard work to hold onto this exhilaration for long. Life is complex and doesn’t easily boil down to a set of key thematic elements the way a really good novel can. Coming to terms with this fact is an important step in the maturation of anyone who loves literature.
In Hotel New Hampshire Irving tells the comic and tragic story of the Berry family. The family is supposed to be comic because it’s filled up with a bunch of quirky characters, and tragic because members of the family keep dying from heart attacks or train crashes. What’s really tragic about the family is that their creator never gives them the chance to be alive. Each one has been dealt a limited number of traits: the older brother, Frank, is homosexual and pessimistic; Franny is rude and mouthy; Lilly is small; Egg is deaf and loves dressing up in costume. Every time anything happens, we have to go through the same predictable cycle of each one of them reacting to it in his or her own predictable way. If there’s something small, Lilly is excited about it. If someone is enthusiastic, Frank immediately douses the enthusiasm by saying, “It doesn’t matter.” And if there’s someone who needs telling off, whether this someone is a prude or a feminist or a radical, Franny will tell them off with lots of cuss words.
This pattern of family quirks is monotonous enough before the family moves to
Vienna to take over Gasthaus Freud and turn it into the Hotel New Hampshire. As it turns out, they must share the hotel with a group of radicals and also a group of prostitutes. And each one of these characters has a similarly limited range of quirky attributes: Jolanta is the tough prostitute, Babette is the exotic prostitute, and so on ad nauseum. There are about two whole chapters that are basically nothing but a constant riff on this set of a dozen pseudo-characters.
But this is at least mildly amusing compared to the snowballing set of symbols that keeps building up as the book goes on. There’s the recurring motif of bears, and then the dog Sorrow who’s put to sleep because he farts too much, but is then stuffed and mounted. The first time that the mounted body of sorrow causes trouble (it’s put into an “attack pose” and when the grandpa sees it he has a heart attack) it’s clever and enjoyable. The grandfather was killed by an attack of sorrow—neat. But after that Sorrow keeps cropping up at every juncture of the plot until by the end of Chapter 9 he’s brought up on practically every page in close conjunction with other supposedly meaningful leitmotivs: whipped cream as a symbol of maternal love, the phrase “keep walking past the open windows” as a slogan of gallows optimism.
By making these symbols so obvious, Irving is trying to be accessible and unpretentious. All of them are supposed to be like neon signposts pointing the reader toward the melancholy truth at the heart of the Berry family’s existence. Good symbolism alerts the readers mind and allows it time and space to engage the imagination. But the symbolism in “Hotel New Hampshire” is nothing more meaningful or edifying than a string of billboards, a plethora of false advertisement cluttering the landscape and obscuring all that’s really worth looking at.
p. 287 to end; reviewed 26 May 2008
At one point the narrator of the book, John Berry, stands outside the apartment of his erstwhile crush and onetime lover (a radical who goes only by the name Fehlgeburt, meaning “Miscarriage”) and determines by the smell that she must have recently committed suicide. The scene ends with the observation that the scent of Fehlgeburt’s corpse is already worse than the stench of the dog Sorrow’s farts ever were. It’s at this point that I realized that Hotel New Hampshire was not only a disappointment, but that it would go down with Ahab’s Wife and Liam Callanan’s Cloud Atlas as one of the worst books I’ve ever read.
There are really four short stories at the core this book: The story of the Bear named State o’ Maine, the story of Frannie’s Rape, the story of the New Year’s Eve party and the story of the attempted bombing of the Opera in Vienna. Coming near the beginning of the book, the first three stories come off pretty well, but after that point Irving desperately contorts himself to link the first part of the book to the story of the bombing. By the time the bombing plot reaches is climax, Irving seems to be spending much more time luxuriating in the cleverness of the ideas and symbols he’s so far set forward that the events of the bombing seem entirely secondary. The bombers’ plot to take the Berry Family hostage and use them to destroy the Opera seems not only purposeless, but so poorly planned that it would only be feasible due to the absolute inability of said family to do anything but mope, sleep around with prostitutes, and insult each other in supposedly clever ways.
Whereas the book starts out with an enjoyably anarchistic spirit, it ends in this weird paralysis; not only does Irving seem paralyzed as a writer, but his characters more or less seem paralyzed. The narrator John Berry doesn’t seem ever to even consider taking on any sort of job whatsoever, and his father Win Berry retires into apparent dotage and senility at a ripe old age of 45. It’s difficult to reconcile Win Berry’s massive lack of ambition with daughter Lilly Berry’s claim that her father is essentially another Great Gatsby.
Up to p. 287; reviewed 18 May 2008.
This book lost its thrill for me at about the same point that I started to understand what John Irving was up to. It was right after the character of Susie the Bear enters the book. We’re told that Susie is a homely American girl who patrols the Gasthaus Freud in Vienna (soon to be renamed “Hotel New Hampshire”) dressed in a bear costume. She keeps the hotel safe by growling and charging at anyone who gets out of line, especially those who are taking too many liberties with the prostitutes who work there. Except for the protagonist of the book and his family, no one ever sees through bear disguise. It took me a few moments of trying to fit this into my head (How could she see in the bear costume? How would anyone be fooled for more than a couple of seconds into mistaking a static bear mask for the real face of a living bear? What possible recompense could be enough to get this poor woman to live her life in this bear costume?) before I realized that you weren’t supposed to believe it was true. You were supposed to be swept away with the wildness of it all. There’s no way that Susie the Bear would ever exist in the real world, so obviously the bear is supposed to symbolize something. But what?
I’ve never read John Irving before, but I did see the movie Life According to Garp and I really enjoyed it. Not only did I enjoy it, but I felt that I agreed with it, as though it were a particularly insightful manifesto. Garp seemed to me to defend the importance of living a well-rounded life. The character of Garp is a wrestler but also a thinker. He’s artistic but absolutely unpretentious. He’s proud of himself but he also recognizes his failings. Most importantly, he is sensitive to literature, and he understands that symbolism exists not just on the page but in the world we live in. That’s why he buys a house that’s just been smashed by an airplane—because the house is connected now with an unforgettable event.
I know from experience that it’s easy to be exhilarated by the idea that life is rich in meaning and significance, but it’s hard work to hold onto this exhilaration for long. Life is complex and doesn’t easily boil down to a set of key thematic elements the way a really good novel can. Coming to terms with this fact is an important step in the maturation of anyone who loves literature.
In Hotel New Hampshire Irving tells the comic and tragic story of the Berry family. The family is supposed to be comic because it’s filled up with a bunch of quirky characters, and tragic because members of the family keep dying from heart attacks or train crashes. What’s really tragic about the family is that their creator never gives them the chance to be alive. Each one has been dealt a limited number of traits: the older brother, Frank, is homosexual and pessimistic; Franny is rude and mouthy; Lilly is small; Egg is deaf and loves dressing up in costume. Every time anything happens, we have to go through the same predictable cycle of each one of them reacting to it in his or her own predictable way. If there’s something small, Lilly is excited about it. If someone is enthusiastic, Frank immediately douses the enthusiasm by saying, “It doesn’t matter.” And if there’s someone who needs telling off, whether this someone is a prude or a feminist or a radical, Franny will tell them off with lots of cuss words.
This pattern of family quirks is monotonous enough before the family moves to
Vienna to take over Gasthaus Freud and turn it into the Hotel New Hampshire. As it turns out, they must share the hotel with a group of radicals and also a group of prostitutes. And each one of these characters has a similarly limited range of quirky attributes: Jolanta is the tough prostitute, Babette is the exotic prostitute, and so on ad nauseum. There are about two whole chapters that are basically nothing but a constant riff on this set of a dozen pseudo-characters.
But this is at least mildly amusing compared to the snowballing set of symbols that keeps building up as the book goes on. There’s the recurring motif of bears, and then the dog Sorrow who’s put to sleep because he farts too much, but is then stuffed and mounted. The first time that the mounted body of sorrow causes trouble (it’s put into an “attack pose” and when the grandpa sees it he has a heart attack) it’s clever and enjoyable. The grandfather was killed by an attack of sorrow—neat. But after that Sorrow keeps cropping up at every juncture of the plot until by the end of Chapter 9 he’s brought up on practically every page in close conjunction with other supposedly meaningful leitmotivs: whipped cream as a symbol of maternal love, the phrase “keep walking past the open windows” as a slogan of gallows optimism.
By making these symbols so obvious, Irving is trying to be accessible and unpretentious. All of them are supposed to be like neon signposts pointing the reader toward the melancholy truth at the heart of the Berry family’s existence. Good symbolism alerts the readers mind and allows it time and space to engage the imagination. But the symbolism in “Hotel New Hampshire” is nothing more meaningful or edifying than a string of billboards, a plethora of false advertisement cluttering the landscape and obscuring all that’s really worth looking at.
p. 287 to end; reviewed 26 May 2008
At one point the narrator of the book, John Berry, stands outside the apartment of his erstwhile crush and onetime lover (a radical who goes only by the name Fehlgeburt, meaning “Miscarriage”) and determines by the smell that she must have recently committed suicide. The scene ends with the observation that the scent of Fehlgeburt’s corpse is already worse than the stench of the dog Sorrow’s farts ever were. It’s at this point that I realized that Hotel New Hampshire was not only a disappointment, but that it would go down with Ahab’s Wife and Liam Callanan’s Cloud Atlas as one of the worst books I’ve ever read.
There are really four short stories at the core this book: The story of the Bear named State o’ Maine, the story of Frannie’s Rape, the story of the New Year’s Eve party and the story of the attempted bombing of the Opera in Vienna. Coming near the beginning of the book, the first three stories come off pretty well, but after that point Irving desperately contorts himself to link the first part of the book to the story of the bombing. By the time the bombing plot reaches is climax, Irving seems to be spending much more time luxuriating in the cleverness of the ideas and symbols he’s so far set forward that the events of the bombing seem entirely secondary. The bombers’ plot to take the Berry Family hostage and use them to destroy the Opera seems not only purposeless, but so poorly planned that it would only be feasible due to the absolute inability of said family to do anything but mope, sleep around with prostitutes, and insult each other in supposedly clever ways.
Whereas the book starts out with an enjoyably anarchistic spirit, it ends in this weird paralysis; not only does Irving seem paralyzed as a writer, but his characters more or less seem paralyzed. The narrator John Berry doesn’t seem ever to even consider taking on any sort of job whatsoever, and his father Win Berry retires into apparent dotage and senility at a ripe old age of 45. It’s difficult to reconcile Win Berry’s massive lack of ambition with daughter Lilly Berry’s claim that her father is essentially another Great Gatsby.
Becoming a Man in 127 Easy Steps
written and performed by Scott Turner Schoefield, performed at Out North. Reviewed 30 March 2008
I usually don’t like this sort of autobiographical one-person show, but Scott Schoefield is especially good at creating a rapport with the audience. The gimmick of letting the audience select the stories they want to hear from a selection of 127 possible anecdotes about being transgendered works because Schoefield uses it as a way of making the show less formal. The stories themselves come off as well rehearsed and well loved by their creator. The one I liked best was an angry piece directed at the performer’s own father, who’s threatened violence against his own daughter/son. While the performance is not at all haughty or pretentious, Schoefield’s aerial acrobatics, incorporation of Joseph Campbell references and use of ultrasound imaging to evoke the biological capriciousness of sexual determination all add the necessary polish to let the audience want to be guided through the performance wherever it will lead.
I usually don’t like this sort of autobiographical one-person show, but Scott Schoefield is especially good at creating a rapport with the audience. The gimmick of letting the audience select the stories they want to hear from a selection of 127 possible anecdotes about being transgendered works because Schoefield uses it as a way of making the show less formal. The stories themselves come off as well rehearsed and well loved by their creator. The one I liked best was an angry piece directed at the performer’s own father, who’s threatened violence against his own daughter/son. While the performance is not at all haughty or pretentious, Schoefield’s aerial acrobatics, incorporation of Joseph Campbell references and use of ultrasound imaging to evoke the biological capriciousness of sexual determination all add the necessary polish to let the audience want to be guided through the performance wherever it will lead.
Under the Volcano
by Malcolm Lowry, with Introduction by Stephen Spender. (1947). Printed by Plume Fiction in 1965. 376 pages.
Up to page 48. Reviewed 29 March
This book is the sort of fiction I find most enthralling, where I’m drawn as a reader very deep into the minds of reflective people right in the midst of their daily experiences. The story starts with an evening in the life one M Laruelle, a failed filmmaker living in Quanahuac, a small Mexican town situated between two volcanoes. During this particular evening, he recalls the Consul from Britain, Geoffrey Fermin. As Laruelle gradually drinks himself into a maudlin state of mind, he thinks back on his childhood friendship with Fermin, and summarizes what he knows of the man’s military career, hallmarked by a disturbing act of cruelty against German prisoners of war, which in his darkest moments Fermin admits to have carried out singlehandedly: the prisoners were incinerated in the ship’s boilers.
Clearly this opening section is intended to bracket the subject matter of the latter parts of the book, which will deal with the Consul’s time in Mexico, his broken marriage to a woman named Yvonne, and most importantly with the day of his death. I especially love the way that incidental sounds and occurrences keep penetrating Laruelle’s thinking, because to me as a writer and as a human being one of the most important conflicts in life is the ongoing attempt to find a balance between awareness of the present and reflection on the past: the invisible struggle to weed out distractions while not blinding oneself to the world; the quest for the right chain of mental associations and the endurance necessary to keep hoisting the chain up even as its branchings and tangles become evermore complex and thus weighty.
I very much liked the section that deals with Fermin’s letter to Yvonne, a letter that was never sent, filled with the sort of references to booze and cabbalism made by a man determined to use his own intelligence to destroy himself. I’m less charmed by the part of the second section where a nearby conversation keeps breaking into the scenery with Joycean associations just a little too forced to feel worthy of our attention. Still, I just love reading this book so far and hope the sensation will last.
p 48-121; reviewed 12 April 2008
My favorite part of this book so far has been the section told from the point of view of Geoffrey Fermin as he’s reunited with his wife Yvonne, because it brings together everything that’s horrifying about alcohol intoxication. What’s most horrifying about booze is how much fun it is; how it takes down our internal roadblocks, allows us to treat life as a grand joke, make novel and amusing observations without a moment’s introspection; how it unburdens us from the obligations of identity that are individually so tiny but collectively are capable of pegging us down for a lifetime. In reading the scenes where Geoffrey jokes with his wife, mocks her, struggles not to take another drink and then runs off to a tavern as soon as she gets in the bath, in reading these scenes the impression is of a splendid intellect shattered. Putting the pieces back together is a work of puzzlery for the reader, but because Lowry has made Fermin a full human being, the puzzlery is worthwhile. And Lowry clearly wants us to solve the puzzle, or at least assemble enough pieces that an image beings to form out of the nebula.
In the next chapter, we get a glimpse at Fermin’s rival for Yvonne’s affections: his own half-brother, Hugh, who seems to be plagued by everything that troubles Fermin, but to a lesser degree. A disenchanted journalist, tempted by the romance of throwing his lot in with those who battle against encroaching fascism, Hugh definitely has a trace of his brother’s cynical wit, especially after the first few drinks. But he seems to be protected from going too far with his boozing, protected not by prudence so much as an insulating sense of self-satisfaction. And this smugness, of course, makes him less attractive. It’s never said outright, but Lowry is telling us that Fermin’s alcoholism is a direct result of his brutal honesty and his drive for perfection.
There’s probably always the sense that getting wasted is an act of protest, but this sense must get more and more acute in periods that seem to reek to their core with injustice. Set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the rise of fascism in Europe or the ongoing American occupation of Iraq, there must be something liberating in the option of intoxication because when you’re drunk or stoned you at least have the option of becoming a conscious participant in the farcical nature of the plot that unfolds all around you.
As I grow older, intoxication becomes less and less attractive to me. Oftentimes it seems as histrionic and pointless an act of escape as jumping out a high window. But even if you don’t want to participate in such acts of self-destruction, it’s important to go to the scene of the tragedy, to examine the broken glass and traces of blood, both with a forensic eye intent upon discovering what horror might drive a person to such a point, but also with an artist’s eye to reassembling the mind and soul that’s been otherwise irrevocably sacrificed.
pp. 121-230; Reviewed 19 April 2007
It’s interesting to watch people attempt to be at leisure. You’d think that being at leisure would be the easiest thing in the world, but in order to take a holiday you first have to unhook yourself from all the reins and surplices that link you to the driving forces of conflict and ambition. So it is with The Consul, Geoffrey Fermin, and his company as they set off on a day trip to the town of Tomalín in order to see a “bullthrowing” competition. (I’m still not exactly sure what bullthrowing is—it seems to be some lesser variant of bullfighting, which itself is less an escape from struggle than an amplification.)
On the way, the group visits an amusement fair. To the addled brain of the Consul, the fair is less an amusement than a gauntlet of purgatorial tortures: suspended upside down on the roller coaster ride, he feels abandoned by the world and realizes he’s lost himself so much to drink that he’d actually prefer sudden violent death to the endless spiral of inebriation; running in search of a drink, he sees his wife and brother, Hugh, enjoying themselves at a shooting gallery and seems to come away defeated in a competition for being carefree. For months Fermin has pleaded with God for another chance at his marriage to Yvonne. Now Yvonne has returned, and asks only to share a little happiness with Fermin. But the only road to happiness Fermin knows passes through the mouth of a bottle of tequila.
You can’t completely love Fermin, but you can’t help empathizing with the dilemma he’s in. As the day wears on and he keeps sneaking away for a drink, he knows that he’s heading for catastrophe. His wife has come back to him in good faith, but instead of an experience of healing, Fermin seems destined to revisit and repeat the schism that separated them the first time around; only this time he won’t have the excuse of ignorance.
On the other side of the coin we have a long section of the book devoted to the reminiscences of Hugh about his career at sea. As a young man, Hugh played guitar and wrote a handful of silly songs. He pitched his own story to several newspaper editors: he would sign aboard a merchant marine ship and take along his guitar and his prodigious intelligence and he would come back a seasoned poet in the mold of Conrad or Melville. On board the boat, he seems to be tormented by how easy the life is compared to the romanticized version of raw toil he’d had in his head. He returns to London disillusioned and prepared to be annoyed at the instant celebrity that awaits him. Imagine his disappointment to find that in his absence his story has been all but forgotten by the press in his absence.
The nuance of the book lies in the fact that Hugh and Geoffrey find themselves in such a similar predicament: they’re quite fortunate men who nevertheless cannot be happy. But what is a comic predicament for Hugh is a tragic one for Geoffrey the Consul. It seems that Hugh will always be bailed out of his misfortunes, will always have the leisure to look back and pity himself for the fact that he deserved to be a much better man than he became. He will love himself, but the world will never leave him alone. The Consul on the other hand has gone a ways further along the road to ruin, cannot even afford himself the luxury of self-pity because he can no longer recognize who he truly is. Hugh can still play at the shooting gallery while Geoffrey is suspended on a roller coaster whose operator has fallen asleep.
p. 230 to end; reviewed 4 May 2008
I rushed myself to finish reading this book over the weekend, and that may have been a mistake. While the tenth and eleventh chapters are easy to follow, the last chapter reaches a chaotic climax that demands a great deal of time and attention if you want to keep tabs of all that’s going on. The idea is that Geoffrey, after cutting himself off from his wife and half-brother, wanders back to the Farolito, a tavern and brothel which, in his own private reckoning, represents the profoundest personal ruin imaginable. By this point he has long since switched from drinking beer and tequila to mescal, a concoction which gives him visions of being swift witted and entertaining but in truth only makes him uncontrollably cruel to those who seek to love him.
At the Farolito Geoffrey does, indeed, meet his ugly demise at the hands of the same band of thugs that earlier that day attacked an Indian by the roadside whom Geoffrey refused to help. There’s something satisfactory in the way that Geoffrey’s drunken mind equates the thugs with the general thuggishness of all those who would oppress the meek and vulnerable. And there’s a lot of poetic beauty in Geoffrey’s final visions of the world collapsing around him as he dies. But the novel fails for me because we never really get the sense of the bridge between the promising youth Geoffrey once was and the drunken wreck he is now. There’s all the drama of Greek tragedy, but without having a sense of inevitability, the tragedy seems histrionic instead.
Up to page 48. Reviewed 29 March
This book is the sort of fiction I find most enthralling, where I’m drawn as a reader very deep into the minds of reflective people right in the midst of their daily experiences. The story starts with an evening in the life one M Laruelle, a failed filmmaker living in Quanahuac, a small Mexican town situated between two volcanoes. During this particular evening, he recalls the Consul from Britain, Geoffrey Fermin. As Laruelle gradually drinks himself into a maudlin state of mind, he thinks back on his childhood friendship with Fermin, and summarizes what he knows of the man’s military career, hallmarked by a disturbing act of cruelty against German prisoners of war, which in his darkest moments Fermin admits to have carried out singlehandedly: the prisoners were incinerated in the ship’s boilers.
Clearly this opening section is intended to bracket the subject matter of the latter parts of the book, which will deal with the Consul’s time in Mexico, his broken marriage to a woman named Yvonne, and most importantly with the day of his death. I especially love the way that incidental sounds and occurrences keep penetrating Laruelle’s thinking, because to me as a writer and as a human being one of the most important conflicts in life is the ongoing attempt to find a balance between awareness of the present and reflection on the past: the invisible struggle to weed out distractions while not blinding oneself to the world; the quest for the right chain of mental associations and the endurance necessary to keep hoisting the chain up even as its branchings and tangles become evermore complex and thus weighty.
I very much liked the section that deals with Fermin’s letter to Yvonne, a letter that was never sent, filled with the sort of references to booze and cabbalism made by a man determined to use his own intelligence to destroy himself. I’m less charmed by the part of the second section where a nearby conversation keeps breaking into the scenery with Joycean associations just a little too forced to feel worthy of our attention. Still, I just love reading this book so far and hope the sensation will last.
p 48-121; reviewed 12 April 2008
My favorite part of this book so far has been the section told from the point of view of Geoffrey Fermin as he’s reunited with his wife Yvonne, because it brings together everything that’s horrifying about alcohol intoxication. What’s most horrifying about booze is how much fun it is; how it takes down our internal roadblocks, allows us to treat life as a grand joke, make novel and amusing observations without a moment’s introspection; how it unburdens us from the obligations of identity that are individually so tiny but collectively are capable of pegging us down for a lifetime. In reading the scenes where Geoffrey jokes with his wife, mocks her, struggles not to take another drink and then runs off to a tavern as soon as she gets in the bath, in reading these scenes the impression is of a splendid intellect shattered. Putting the pieces back together is a work of puzzlery for the reader, but because Lowry has made Fermin a full human being, the puzzlery is worthwhile. And Lowry clearly wants us to solve the puzzle, or at least assemble enough pieces that an image beings to form out of the nebula.
In the next chapter, we get a glimpse at Fermin’s rival for Yvonne’s affections: his own half-brother, Hugh, who seems to be plagued by everything that troubles Fermin, but to a lesser degree. A disenchanted journalist, tempted by the romance of throwing his lot in with those who battle against encroaching fascism, Hugh definitely has a trace of his brother’s cynical wit, especially after the first few drinks. But he seems to be protected from going too far with his boozing, protected not by prudence so much as an insulating sense of self-satisfaction. And this smugness, of course, makes him less attractive. It’s never said outright, but Lowry is telling us that Fermin’s alcoholism is a direct result of his brutal honesty and his drive for perfection.
There’s probably always the sense that getting wasted is an act of protest, but this sense must get more and more acute in periods that seem to reek to their core with injustice. Set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the rise of fascism in Europe or the ongoing American occupation of Iraq, there must be something liberating in the option of intoxication because when you’re drunk or stoned you at least have the option of becoming a conscious participant in the farcical nature of the plot that unfolds all around you.
As I grow older, intoxication becomes less and less attractive to me. Oftentimes it seems as histrionic and pointless an act of escape as jumping out a high window. But even if you don’t want to participate in such acts of self-destruction, it’s important to go to the scene of the tragedy, to examine the broken glass and traces of blood, both with a forensic eye intent upon discovering what horror might drive a person to such a point, but also with an artist’s eye to reassembling the mind and soul that’s been otherwise irrevocably sacrificed.
pp. 121-230; Reviewed 19 April 2007
It’s interesting to watch people attempt to be at leisure. You’d think that being at leisure would be the easiest thing in the world, but in order to take a holiday you first have to unhook yourself from all the reins and surplices that link you to the driving forces of conflict and ambition. So it is with The Consul, Geoffrey Fermin, and his company as they set off on a day trip to the town of Tomalín in order to see a “bullthrowing” competition. (I’m still not exactly sure what bullthrowing is—it seems to be some lesser variant of bullfighting, which itself is less an escape from struggle than an amplification.)
On the way, the group visits an amusement fair. To the addled brain of the Consul, the fair is less an amusement than a gauntlet of purgatorial tortures: suspended upside down on the roller coaster ride, he feels abandoned by the world and realizes he’s lost himself so much to drink that he’d actually prefer sudden violent death to the endless spiral of inebriation; running in search of a drink, he sees his wife and brother, Hugh, enjoying themselves at a shooting gallery and seems to come away defeated in a competition for being carefree. For months Fermin has pleaded with God for another chance at his marriage to Yvonne. Now Yvonne has returned, and asks only to share a little happiness with Fermin. But the only road to happiness Fermin knows passes through the mouth of a bottle of tequila.
You can’t completely love Fermin, but you can’t help empathizing with the dilemma he’s in. As the day wears on and he keeps sneaking away for a drink, he knows that he’s heading for catastrophe. His wife has come back to him in good faith, but instead of an experience of healing, Fermin seems destined to revisit and repeat the schism that separated them the first time around; only this time he won’t have the excuse of ignorance.
On the other side of the coin we have a long section of the book devoted to the reminiscences of Hugh about his career at sea. As a young man, Hugh played guitar and wrote a handful of silly songs. He pitched his own story to several newspaper editors: he would sign aboard a merchant marine ship and take along his guitar and his prodigious intelligence and he would come back a seasoned poet in the mold of Conrad or Melville. On board the boat, he seems to be tormented by how easy the life is compared to the romanticized version of raw toil he’d had in his head. He returns to London disillusioned and prepared to be annoyed at the instant celebrity that awaits him. Imagine his disappointment to find that in his absence his story has been all but forgotten by the press in his absence.
The nuance of the book lies in the fact that Hugh and Geoffrey find themselves in such a similar predicament: they’re quite fortunate men who nevertheless cannot be happy. But what is a comic predicament for Hugh is a tragic one for Geoffrey the Consul. It seems that Hugh will always be bailed out of his misfortunes, will always have the leisure to look back and pity himself for the fact that he deserved to be a much better man than he became. He will love himself, but the world will never leave him alone. The Consul on the other hand has gone a ways further along the road to ruin, cannot even afford himself the luxury of self-pity because he can no longer recognize who he truly is. Hugh can still play at the shooting gallery while Geoffrey is suspended on a roller coaster whose operator has fallen asleep.
p. 230 to end; reviewed 4 May 2008
I rushed myself to finish reading this book over the weekend, and that may have been a mistake. While the tenth and eleventh chapters are easy to follow, the last chapter reaches a chaotic climax that demands a great deal of time and attention if you want to keep tabs of all that’s going on. The idea is that Geoffrey, after cutting himself off from his wife and half-brother, wanders back to the Farolito, a tavern and brothel which, in his own private reckoning, represents the profoundest personal ruin imaginable. By this point he has long since switched from drinking beer and tequila to mescal, a concoction which gives him visions of being swift witted and entertaining but in truth only makes him uncontrollably cruel to those who seek to love him.
At the Farolito Geoffrey does, indeed, meet his ugly demise at the hands of the same band of thugs that earlier that day attacked an Indian by the roadside whom Geoffrey refused to help. There’s something satisfactory in the way that Geoffrey’s drunken mind equates the thugs with the general thuggishness of all those who would oppress the meek and vulnerable. And there’s a lot of poetic beauty in Geoffrey’s final visions of the world collapsing around him as he dies. But the novel fails for me because we never really get the sense of the bridge between the promising youth Geoffrey once was and the drunken wreck he is now. There’s all the drama of Greek tragedy, but without having a sense of inevitability, the tragedy seems histrionic instead.
Gentlemen of the Road
by Michael Chabon. (2007) Published by Del Rey. 204 pages.
Up to page 107. Reviewed 15 March 2008
Reading Michael Chabon’s account of an uprising in the Eastern European kingdom of Khazaria is like going back to the greatest games of pretend I used to play with my friends in childhood. I don’t know if it’s true of everyone, but my friend Duncan and I used to be shameless borrowers of themes and ideas, taking stories from books, tv and comics and reenacting them with action figures or in drawings or with toy soldiers or even just making up stories. Play was a means of bridging gaps through time and space and trying to explore events real and fictional that we were curious about.
The kingdom of Khazaria was an actual place, a Jewish kingdom located in the middle of Eastern Europe. I first learned of it reading Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe, Volume 3, (I highly recommend Gonick's whole series) and it fascinated me because it went so much against the stereotype of European Jews as a permanently displaced people. Michael Chabon is also interested in this aspect of the story and in his book he reminds us of the fact that the ideas of Judaism traveled far and wide during the Dark Ages; the main characters are Zelikman, a Jewish physician from the Frankish kingdoms, and Amram, an Abyssinian Jew on an apparently hopeless quest to find his lost daughter.
What’s fun about this novel? The much-celebrated use of lush vocabulary (fleam, mahout, affined); the sense of taking a visit to an intersection of the great Eastern cultures that actually thrived during the so called “Dark” Ages, which were a time of darkness and squalor mostly from the perspective of Western Europe; the chance to see Chabon flirt with thoughts of today’s cultural wars in the Middle East by drawing a bloody conflict for the fate of Khazaria where the labels of race and creed are all familiar but the affiliations are drastically different; and the chance to see how Chabon, who’s very good at “serious” fiction, takes on a setting that’s Tolkeinesque.
It would be more fun if the characters were a bit richer. Zelikman and Amram are basically nice guys, each with their own troubles and idiosyncrasies, but even halfway through the book I’m sure that neither of them will draw me in enough to inspire the sort of love-hate relationship I had with Grady from The Wonder Boys.
Page 107 to end; reviewed March 22, 2008
107 to end.
At the end of this book Chabon writes a short afterword in which he touches on what should already be blindingly obvious to everybody who’s familiar with his other work: that Gentlemen of the Road is very different from other things he’s written. Any time an author has to go to this much length to explain a supposedly bold artistic choice, you have to wonder if the motive is to vent all the lingering insecurity. In his afterword, Chabon tells us that we might be surprised that he’s breaking the rules; he usually writes New Yorker type fiction about contemporary conflicts and anxieties, and now he’s writing an adventure story. Having loved Wonder Boys, I know that I started reading this book with a sense of excitement. It seems natural that a writer like Chabon should try to expand his horizons, should take the skills he gained in describing more familiar territory and see how they transfer to settings more remote and exotic.
But when a writer enters a new genre, he or she should have something to contribute. Chabon seems to assume that because he’s writing about swordfights and troop movements, he no longer has to live up to the standards set in his previous books. Gentlemen of the Road borrows heavily from the clichés of fantasy writing and historical fiction, and does a major disservice to both genres by never partaking in the sort of overindulgence of the imagination that both genres allow. By taking Khazaria as his subject, Chabon has chosen a distinctive world to set his story in; one hopes he could make it into his own Hogwarts, his own Middle Earth, his own Narnia. But Khazaria ends up being just a piece of stock historical scenery, as though Chabon is saying, “Did you see the movie Gladiator? Just imagine the whole thing transposed a little to the east and you’ve got it.”
By the end of this book the narrative keeps making big jumps in time, as though he’s eager to get away from the whole situation. The sentences get long and muddled. Chabon seems to want to use elephants as a symbol for something, but it’s never clear what. The first chapters of this book were well written and fun to read, but by the end I was just thinking that if Chabon didn’t have anything fresh to offer with this book, at least he had the courtesy to make it short.
Up to page 107. Reviewed 15 March 2008
Reading Michael Chabon’s account of an uprising in the Eastern European kingdom of Khazaria is like going back to the greatest games of pretend I used to play with my friends in childhood. I don’t know if it’s true of everyone, but my friend Duncan and I used to be shameless borrowers of themes and ideas, taking stories from books, tv and comics and reenacting them with action figures or in drawings or with toy soldiers or even just making up stories. Play was a means of bridging gaps through time and space and trying to explore events real and fictional that we were curious about.
The kingdom of Khazaria was an actual place, a Jewish kingdom located in the middle of Eastern Europe. I first learned of it reading Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe, Volume 3, (I highly recommend Gonick's whole series) and it fascinated me because it went so much against the stereotype of European Jews as a permanently displaced people. Michael Chabon is also interested in this aspect of the story and in his book he reminds us of the fact that the ideas of Judaism traveled far and wide during the Dark Ages; the main characters are Zelikman, a Jewish physician from the Frankish kingdoms, and Amram, an Abyssinian Jew on an apparently hopeless quest to find his lost daughter.
What’s fun about this novel? The much-celebrated use of lush vocabulary (fleam, mahout, affined); the sense of taking a visit to an intersection of the great Eastern cultures that actually thrived during the so called “Dark” Ages, which were a time of darkness and squalor mostly from the perspective of Western Europe; the chance to see Chabon flirt with thoughts of today’s cultural wars in the Middle East by drawing a bloody conflict for the fate of Khazaria where the labels of race and creed are all familiar but the affiliations are drastically different; and the chance to see how Chabon, who’s very good at “serious” fiction, takes on a setting that’s Tolkeinesque.
It would be more fun if the characters were a bit richer. Zelikman and Amram are basically nice guys, each with their own troubles and idiosyncrasies, but even halfway through the book I’m sure that neither of them will draw me in enough to inspire the sort of love-hate relationship I had with Grady from The Wonder Boys.
Page 107 to end; reviewed March 22, 2008
107 to end.
At the end of this book Chabon writes a short afterword in which he touches on what should already be blindingly obvious to everybody who’s familiar with his other work: that Gentlemen of the Road is very different from other things he’s written. Any time an author has to go to this much length to explain a supposedly bold artistic choice, you have to wonder if the motive is to vent all the lingering insecurity. In his afterword, Chabon tells us that we might be surprised that he’s breaking the rules; he usually writes New Yorker type fiction about contemporary conflicts and anxieties, and now he’s writing an adventure story. Having loved Wonder Boys, I know that I started reading this book with a sense of excitement. It seems natural that a writer like Chabon should try to expand his horizons, should take the skills he gained in describing more familiar territory and see how they transfer to settings more remote and exotic.
But when a writer enters a new genre, he or she should have something to contribute. Chabon seems to assume that because he’s writing about swordfights and troop movements, he no longer has to live up to the standards set in his previous books. Gentlemen of the Road borrows heavily from the clichés of fantasy writing and historical fiction, and does a major disservice to both genres by never partaking in the sort of overindulgence of the imagination that both genres allow. By taking Khazaria as his subject, Chabon has chosen a distinctive world to set his story in; one hopes he could make it into his own Hogwarts, his own Middle Earth, his own Narnia. But Khazaria ends up being just a piece of stock historical scenery, as though Chabon is saying, “Did you see the movie Gladiator? Just imagine the whole thing transposed a little to the east and you’ve got it.”
By the end of this book the narrative keeps making big jumps in time, as though he’s eager to get away from the whole situation. The sentences get long and muddled. Chabon seems to want to use elephants as a symbol for something, but it’s never clear what. The first chapters of this book were well written and fun to read, but by the end I was just thinking that if Chabon didn’t have anything fresh to offer with this book, at least he had the courtesy to make it short.
I Saw Esau, the Schoolchild’s Pocket Book
edited by Iona & Peter Opie, illustrated by Maurice Sendak. (1992) Published by Candlewick Press. 160 pages.
There’s nothing in this book of taunts, chants and schoolyard riddles that will make you pause very long and ponder the meaning of life, Nor do these poems have the sometimes fantastical scope that you’ll get from a more “legitimate” book of nursery rhymes. But this book is a lot of fun because the editors have no compunction about filling their book with the silliness and capriciousness of true childhood. And Maurice Sendak’s illustrations give you a sense that spirit of this book, if not some of the rhymes themselves, reaches back beyond all the finery of the renaissance to the gritty and grubby world of the dark ages.
There’s nothing in this book of taunts, chants and schoolyard riddles that will make you pause very long and ponder the meaning of life, Nor do these poems have the sometimes fantastical scope that you’ll get from a more “legitimate” book of nursery rhymes. But this book is a lot of fun because the editors have no compunction about filling their book with the silliness and capriciousness of true childhood. And Maurice Sendak’s illustrations give you a sense that spirit of this book, if not some of the rhymes themselves, reaches back beyond all the finery of the renaissance to the gritty and grubby world of the dark ages.
Tishomingo Blues
by Elmore Leonard. (2002) Published by William Morrow. 308 pages.
Compared to Out of Sight, this book is a little bit lackluster and even phony. The whole idea of mixing up a southern mob thriller with a civil war reenactment seems too pat, a way to fill up a few paragraphs and chapters with trivia about archaic weaponry and bivouac sleeping arrangements. Nowhere is this more true than in the interminable passages where policeman John Rau drones on interminably about how best to prepare salt pork.
Still, in the last few chapters, when the inevitable stand off finally comes to pass, it becomes apparent that Elmore Leonard really is making some points here, especially about the way men compare themselves to one another. As is often the case, he creates a hierarchy based on the concept of “cool,” and the consequence of being uncool is typically death. Coolness is more than simply an ability to be unfazed by violence. The gangster Robert Taylor is able to outcool his boss Caesar Germano simply because Taylor forms a rapport with Germano’s henchmen, jokes with them, treats them with respect, and uses imagination in finding them new assignments and missions. That’s another aspect of “cool” that’s at play here, the concept of something being “cool” in the sense of fascinating. Robert is a dangerous character, but he also understands that behind all the darkness and danger of the world he’s chosen, there’s still the cops-and-robber appeal to the boyish mind. Interestingly, Robert develops a man-crush on the high-diver Dennis Lenahan, who doesn’t have any sort of criminal past but has chosen in his own way to structure his life around facing death.
Tishomingo Blues was an interesting diversion, but I came away feeling my time would have been better spent elsewhere.
Compared to Out of Sight, this book is a little bit lackluster and even phony. The whole idea of mixing up a southern mob thriller with a civil war reenactment seems too pat, a way to fill up a few paragraphs and chapters with trivia about archaic weaponry and bivouac sleeping arrangements. Nowhere is this more true than in the interminable passages where policeman John Rau drones on interminably about how best to prepare salt pork.
Still, in the last few chapters, when the inevitable stand off finally comes to pass, it becomes apparent that Elmore Leonard really is making some points here, especially about the way men compare themselves to one another. As is often the case, he creates a hierarchy based on the concept of “cool,” and the consequence of being uncool is typically death. Coolness is more than simply an ability to be unfazed by violence. The gangster Robert Taylor is able to outcool his boss Caesar Germano simply because Taylor forms a rapport with Germano’s henchmen, jokes with them, treats them with respect, and uses imagination in finding them new assignments and missions. That’s another aspect of “cool” that’s at play here, the concept of something being “cool” in the sense of fascinating. Robert is a dangerous character, but he also understands that behind all the darkness and danger of the world he’s chosen, there’s still the cops-and-robber appeal to the boyish mind. Interestingly, Robert develops a man-crush on the high-diver Dennis Lenahan, who doesn’t have any sort of criminal past but has chosen in his own way to structure his life around facing death.
Tishomingo Blues was an interesting diversion, but I came away feeling my time would have been better spent elsewhere.
Tales from Firozsha Baag
by Rohinton Mistry (first prineted 1987. This edition first published 2002) Published by Penguin Books. 250 pages. Reviewed 1 March 2008
Rohinton Mistry is preoccupied with suffering. At the end of this book—a collection of linked short stories that develop a novel’s momentum and scope over time—the character Kersi Boyce grows frustrated with his lack of knowledge when it comes to the trees of Canada, where he has made his new home. He vows to purchase a guide to trees so that next autumn when the leaves fall he will be able to recognize than just maple leaves.
In a similar way, by reading the stories of the dwellers of Firozsha Baag (an apartment complex housing members of Bombay’s Parsi community) we get a glimpse of what a field guide to suffering might be like. We see the controlled, redemptive suffering of Daulat Mirza as she bids farewell to her much loved husband; we see the tortured, adolescent sufferings of Jehangir Bulsara as we strives to understand his own sexuality and develop his abundant intellect in the most adverse of conditions; we see the sufferings that arise from pride and selfishness as the Bomans seek to evict the paying guests they’ve taken into their homes; we see the righteous suffering Percy Boyce who chooses to champion the interests of India’s indigent poor; and we see the suffering of the uprooted Kersi, who has to look back on all his memories of Bombay and try to find some sense in it.
I cannot recommend this book enough. The humor is wicked, the subject matter is gutsy, the thoughts are intricate and the characters engaging. In the course of these stories we see Mistry systematically gathering together all the ingredients that will eventually become central to his later novels Fine Balance and Family Matters.
Rohinton Mistry is preoccupied with suffering. At the end of this book—a collection of linked short stories that develop a novel’s momentum and scope over time—the character Kersi Boyce grows frustrated with his lack of knowledge when it comes to the trees of Canada, where he has made his new home. He vows to purchase a guide to trees so that next autumn when the leaves fall he will be able to recognize than just maple leaves.
In a similar way, by reading the stories of the dwellers of Firozsha Baag (an apartment complex housing members of Bombay’s Parsi community) we get a glimpse of what a field guide to suffering might be like. We see the controlled, redemptive suffering of Daulat Mirza as she bids farewell to her much loved husband; we see the tortured, adolescent sufferings of Jehangir Bulsara as we strives to understand his own sexuality and develop his abundant intellect in the most adverse of conditions; we see the sufferings that arise from pride and selfishness as the Bomans seek to evict the paying guests they’ve taken into their homes; we see the righteous suffering Percy Boyce who chooses to champion the interests of India’s indigent poor; and we see the suffering of the uprooted Kersi, who has to look back on all his memories of Bombay and try to find some sense in it.
I cannot recommend this book enough. The humor is wicked, the subject matter is gutsy, the thoughts are intricate and the characters engaging. In the course of these stories we see Mistry systematically gathering together all the ingredients that will eventually become central to his later novels Fine Balance and Family Matters.
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