Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Ethan Canin
Ethan Canin has been getting some pretty good notice, so when Carry Me Across the Water became available at Audible.com I figured I would give it a shot. And now I'm not so sure I understand what all the excitement was about.
I'm not saying, mind, that it was a bad book. It's a good book, in fact. It just isn't a great book. By now it's a few weeks since I listened to it, and it isn't resonating in my head, which is one of the ways I can tell how good a book is. There have been a few in the last year or two that didn't leave a glorious first impression but that lingered in my imagination.
Canin tells a big story in this novel, and one with a lot of resonance within itself -- anti-Japanese racism, Jewish identity and anti-Semitism, the nature of love and committment, and more. The viewpoint character is an older man, born in Germany, who came to America as a teenager, served in the Pacific war, married a shicksa, and became a wealthy brewer in Pittsburgh. The backstory is pieced together in memories, more or less in chronological order, tying the reconstruction, in America, of his German life (where his family was also wealthy), with his troubled memories of the war. He is in the last stage of his life, past 75, and has not done badly with his life. He has, however, killed (probably) two men.
Morally, he is probably in the clear on both killings. One was during the war, the other a petty gangster who threatened him, his family, and his business. Of the two, the one that bothers him now is his work as a soldier. This is all nicely done. He has regrets, some of them not the usual, and he makes efforts both to conceal and resolve them. And yet, at the end, I was left unsatisfied.
Now, I don't need a neat resolution to enjoy a novel. I hope that my own novel doesn't have a pat ending. Nevertheless, when the protagonist (I read this long enough ago that I forget the name) finds his act of atonement and resolution, I felt a letdown. Was that all? What had troubled this man so much for so long should have required a more dramatic climax, and should have tied better to the many small problems that had been building through the book.
dmh
I'm not saying, mind, that it was a bad book. It's a good book, in fact. It just isn't a great book. By now it's a few weeks since I listened to it, and it isn't resonating in my head, which is one of the ways I can tell how good a book is. There have been a few in the last year or two that didn't leave a glorious first impression but that lingered in my imagination.
Canin tells a big story in this novel, and one with a lot of resonance within itself -- anti-Japanese racism, Jewish identity and anti-Semitism, the nature of love and committment, and more. The viewpoint character is an older man, born in Germany, who came to America as a teenager, served in the Pacific war, married a shicksa, and became a wealthy brewer in Pittsburgh. The backstory is pieced together in memories, more or less in chronological order, tying the reconstruction, in America, of his German life (where his family was also wealthy), with his troubled memories of the war. He is in the last stage of his life, past 75, and has not done badly with his life. He has, however, killed (probably) two men.
Morally, he is probably in the clear on both killings. One was during the war, the other a petty gangster who threatened him, his family, and his business. Of the two, the one that bothers him now is his work as a soldier. This is all nicely done. He has regrets, some of them not the usual, and he makes efforts both to conceal and resolve them. And yet, at the end, I was left unsatisfied.
Now, I don't need a neat resolution to enjoy a novel. I hope that my own novel doesn't have a pat ending. Nevertheless, when the protagonist (I read this long enough ago that I forget the name) finds his act of atonement and resolution, I felt a letdown. Was that all? What had troubled this man so much for so long should have required a more dramatic climax, and should have tied better to the many small problems that had been building through the book.
dmh
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
The Honourable Schoolboy
Despite the disapproval of my favorite graduate school advisor, I have long admired John Le Carre for his imagination and craft. The opening of The Looking-Glass War, for example, is a master class on how to open a novel that is about, as so many of Le Carre's novels are, trying to understand the world from insufficient information. It introduces the subject by providing the reader with more information than the characters will have until the very end (when George Smiley shows up, in what is not a Smiley novel, to enforce reality on the others), thus emphasizing the importance of sufficient data.
The Honourable Schoolboy is, on the other hand, a Smiley novel, and not even Smiley has all the necessary information. It starts not long after Bill Haydon (Smiley's old comrade, Lady Anne Smiley's old lover) has been exposed as a Soviet mole, and the Circus (the otherwise nameless intelligence organization that is the matrix for most of Le Carre's books) is in disarray. Old operatives must be reactivated, including some who were chucked out by Haydon because they were effective and some who were chucked out because they were not. It's hard to tell which are which, sometimes. (Incidentally, I've never worked out a complete chronology of the Smiley books, but this site: http://www.robotwisdom.com/jorn/smiley.html claims to have it.)
That's the espionage background. But a LeCarre novel is never just about espionage. It is about character. First, there is the constant evolution of Smiley, from the wistful retired grass widower of Call For the Dead and A Murder of Quality to the semi-triumphs of the Karla novels, where he finally entraps Haydon, ruptures (apparently irrevocably) the relationship with Anne, and finally lands Karla himself, to the elegies of The Secret Pilgrim. Then there are the portraits of the other spies (and nearly everyone in these books is a spy of some sort). In this case the spy at the heart of the matter is one Jerry Westerby, retired by Haydon but never a full-time agent. He's a journalist becalmed in rural Italy when he gets the call, and he is thrust into the collapsing American war in Southeast Asia to untangle some of Smiley's always massively complex threads.
What Westerby learns in his espionage is fascinating, but what he fails to learn about himself (for he remains, in so many ways, just a schoolboy, despite his approach to middle age) is just as central to the story. It moves forward and back, in flashbacks that show us his entry into the business of espionage while the story is moving him toward his exit. Le Carre might almost have set himself the problem of keeping us interested in a character who doesn't learn much from his experiences. But he does it, and not only by giving us the spy plot. Even though Westerby doesn't change significantly, our perception of him can as we learn more about him. There's a sense, then, in which we become characters in the book, the characters who are changed by the action. Ursula LeGuin managed that in "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," but that's a short story. Doing it in a novel (even if this is only part of what the novel is doing) is pretty impressive.
dmh
The Honourable Schoolboy is, on the other hand, a Smiley novel, and not even Smiley has all the necessary information. It starts not long after Bill Haydon (Smiley's old comrade, Lady Anne Smiley's old lover) has been exposed as a Soviet mole, and the Circus (the otherwise nameless intelligence organization that is the matrix for most of Le Carre's books) is in disarray. Old operatives must be reactivated, including some who were chucked out by Haydon because they were effective and some who were chucked out because they were not. It's hard to tell which are which, sometimes. (Incidentally, I've never worked out a complete chronology of the Smiley books, but this site: http://www.robotwisdom.com/jorn/smiley.html claims to have it.)
That's the espionage background. But a LeCarre novel is never just about espionage. It is about character. First, there is the constant evolution of Smiley, from the wistful retired grass widower of Call For the Dead and A Murder of Quality to the semi-triumphs of the Karla novels, where he finally entraps Haydon, ruptures (apparently irrevocably) the relationship with Anne, and finally lands Karla himself, to the elegies of The Secret Pilgrim. Then there are the portraits of the other spies (and nearly everyone in these books is a spy of some sort). In this case the spy at the heart of the matter is one Jerry Westerby, retired by Haydon but never a full-time agent. He's a journalist becalmed in rural Italy when he gets the call, and he is thrust into the collapsing American war in Southeast Asia to untangle some of Smiley's always massively complex threads.
What Westerby learns in his espionage is fascinating, but what he fails to learn about himself (for he remains, in so many ways, just a schoolboy, despite his approach to middle age) is just as central to the story. It moves forward and back, in flashbacks that show us his entry into the business of espionage while the story is moving him toward his exit. Le Carre might almost have set himself the problem of keeping us interested in a character who doesn't learn much from his experiences. But he does it, and not only by giving us the spy plot. Even though Westerby doesn't change significantly, our perception of him can as we learn more about him. There's a sense, then, in which we become characters in the book, the characters who are changed by the action. Ursula LeGuin managed that in "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," but that's a short story. Doing it in a novel (even if this is only part of what the novel is doing) is pretty impressive.
dmh
A. S. Byatt
For some reason it took me a long time to appreciate Matisse. I used to go to the Museum of Modern Art, in Manhattan, every Saturday, and I learned to love Monet and Picasso and Feininger and many others, but I never had a visceral connection with Matisse. I'm not an artist, of course (at least not a visual one, although I occasionally take a good photograph), and perhaps it takes an artist's eye to see without instruction just how interesting Matisse really is.
Now that I'm much older, I do see that, but it's a mature appreciation without that memory of excitement that I still get when I look at, say, a great Turner. I never had that moment that Gully Jimson had (in the novel; it didn't get into the film of The Horse's Mouth) where he looked at a Matisse and it "skinned [his] eyes." I suspect that A. S. Byatt did have that moment.
Matisse is not at the center of each of the three stories in The Matisse Stories -- his work is clearly near the focus of only one of them -- but the author's love of his work comes through, even where it does not inform.
In the first story, "Medusa's Ankles," Matisse is the painter of a nude, a print of which hangs (for much, but not all, of the story) in a beauty salon where the protagonist has her hair done every week. The story is really about the relationship between this middle-aged, donnish woman and her hair; no, between her and her self-image; no, between her and her hair stylist -- all right, all of those. Byatt never makes reductive analysis easy. She puts us in her characters' heads, and they are people, with the complexities of real and interesting people. The stylist has a complicated love life and ambivalent feelings toward the profession at which he is so good.
In that story, the protagonist has her moment of truth when she looks in the mirror at the redecorated salon and realizes that she looks like a middle-aged woman who has just had her hair done. Her reaction to that, and the events that follow, are satisfying without being pat.
This story also diverges from what I think of as Byatt's great theme (based on this book, The Game, and The Virgin in the Garden, all of her work that I've read): the thorny relationships between art, the artist, and the world. The other two stories come back to that. "Art Work" focuses on three people with very different relationships to their art. One of them, in fact, works in secret, her day job being to clean the home of the other two. That couple met in art school and followed different paths; he paints in the attic of the house, reworking the same subjects and solving different technical problems in each painting, and she has become a design editor for a slick magazine. It is perhaps unsubtle to have their Caribbean housekeeper (spoiler coming up) turn out to be the best artist of them all, but part of the story is about the difficulties of maintaining an artistic vision and commitment, and the commitment that is not a subject of discussion is certainly one that deserves respect and consideration. Not discussing it can be a way of preserving it.
The last story, "Chinese Lobster," puts Matisse and his work squarely at the center. A student accuses her advisor, a famous critic and scholar, of sexual harrassment. The dean in charge meets the advisor over dinner to learn his side of the story. (Nothing improper here; they just have dinner. It's an informal inquiry.) He's a Matisse expert, and her work is a reaction to Matisse and his ideas about women. The conversation ranges freely, but what the two participants have in common (until one of them discovers an additional commonality, which they share with the student, and which gives the story a sudden extra layer of depth) is love of Matisse and Chinese food and concern for balancing the encouragement of possibly revolutionary artists with maintaining some artistic standards. (Not all new ideas are good ones; the student's work consists mostly of smearing Matisse prints with her own feces.) It's an uncomfortable story, not least because we come away from it -- or I came away from it, at least -- with a clear sympathy for the accused professor. We don't want to dismiss the accuser as delusional, or as overreacting to an innocent word or gesture, because that generalizes to all such accusations. But this woman may actually be delusional. And, in fact, Byatt never made me lose my sympathy for the student, even though I ended by disbelieving her.
Well, that's a sign of good art. Now if only I can get to the point where Matisse makes me uncomfortable.
dmh
Now that I'm much older, I do see that, but it's a mature appreciation without that memory of excitement that I still get when I look at, say, a great Turner. I never had that moment that Gully Jimson had (in the novel; it didn't get into the film of The Horse's Mouth) where he looked at a Matisse and it "skinned [his] eyes." I suspect that A. S. Byatt did have that moment.
Matisse is not at the center of each of the three stories in The Matisse Stories -- his work is clearly near the focus of only one of them -- but the author's love of his work comes through, even where it does not inform.
In the first story, "Medusa's Ankles," Matisse is the painter of a nude, a print of which hangs (for much, but not all, of the story) in a beauty salon where the protagonist has her hair done every week. The story is really about the relationship between this middle-aged, donnish woman and her hair; no, between her and her self-image; no, between her and her hair stylist -- all right, all of those. Byatt never makes reductive analysis easy. She puts us in her characters' heads, and they are people, with the complexities of real and interesting people. The stylist has a complicated love life and ambivalent feelings toward the profession at which he is so good.
In that story, the protagonist has her moment of truth when she looks in the mirror at the redecorated salon and realizes that she looks like a middle-aged woman who has just had her hair done. Her reaction to that, and the events that follow, are satisfying without being pat.
This story also diverges from what I think of as Byatt's great theme (based on this book, The Game, and The Virgin in the Garden, all of her work that I've read): the thorny relationships between art, the artist, and the world. The other two stories come back to that. "Art Work" focuses on three people with very different relationships to their art. One of them, in fact, works in secret, her day job being to clean the home of the other two. That couple met in art school and followed different paths; he paints in the attic of the house, reworking the same subjects and solving different technical problems in each painting, and she has become a design editor for a slick magazine. It is perhaps unsubtle to have their Caribbean housekeeper (spoiler coming up) turn out to be the best artist of them all, but part of the story is about the difficulties of maintaining an artistic vision and commitment, and the commitment that is not a subject of discussion is certainly one that deserves respect and consideration. Not discussing it can be a way of preserving it.
The last story, "Chinese Lobster," puts Matisse and his work squarely at the center. A student accuses her advisor, a famous critic and scholar, of sexual harrassment. The dean in charge meets the advisor over dinner to learn his side of the story. (Nothing improper here; they just have dinner. It's an informal inquiry.) He's a Matisse expert, and her work is a reaction to Matisse and his ideas about women. The conversation ranges freely, but what the two participants have in common (until one of them discovers an additional commonality, which they share with the student, and which gives the story a sudden extra layer of depth) is love of Matisse and Chinese food and concern for balancing the encouragement of possibly revolutionary artists with maintaining some artistic standards. (Not all new ideas are good ones; the student's work consists mostly of smearing Matisse prints with her own feces.) It's an uncomfortable story, not least because we come away from it -- or I came away from it, at least -- with a clear sympathy for the accused professor. We don't want to dismiss the accuser as delusional, or as overreacting to an innocent word or gesture, because that generalizes to all such accusations. But this woman may actually be delusional. And, in fact, Byatt never made me lose my sympathy for the student, even though I ended by disbelieving her.
Well, that's a sign of good art. Now if only I can get to the point where Matisse makes me uncomfortable.
dmh
Saturday, April 09, 2005
Life and dogs
Another disclaimer: I've worked with Daniel Pinkwater, developing a series to be written by other authors, and I commissioned an article from him for a magazine (which is mentioned in passing in the book under consideration), and I bought from him the keyboard on which I'm writing this.
I don't think any of that affects my opinion of Uncle Boris in the Yukon, though. One of the reasons I worked with Daniel was because I admired his work. The flap copy of this book calls him one of the most influential of writers for children, and I suspect he's had a significant influence on writers for adults, as well. He's certainly influenced me.
I won't try to define his humor. If you have listened to All Things Considered long enough, you've heard his commentary. If not, you may have run into Blue Moose or The Wuggie Norple Story or The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death or Young Adult Novel, and if you haven't seen those you should run out right now and rectify the lack.
Uncle Boris is not at the sublime level of those, but it's pretty good. It is a memoir, starting before the author's own birth, of a family's relationships with dogs (and a cat or two). I have heard some of these stories before, probably in one of Daniel's collections of his ATC commentaries, but he has told them anew here, and the context gives them new resonance. Daniel and Jill (his wife, and the illustrator of this slim, pocket-sized hardcover) are (among many other talents) dog trainers, and this book adheres to the premise that the training goes both ways. Daniel, and later Daniel and Jill, learn as much from their dogs as the dogs learn from them. Possibly more, since the Pinkwaters are smarter than most of the dogs. (The last dog profiled, Lulu, is scary-smart.)
But that isn't really the main feeling one takes away from the book. In part, you come away with some of that same feeling I get from Brother Cadfael, of having spent some time in the company of a particularly interesting and articulate (and funny -- never forget that) guy. You have gotten to know him, perhaps not in a Dostoevskian depth, but enough to know you like him. You've gotten to know some of his friends and family (and oy, what a family! Uncle Boris and his Yiddish-speaking sled dog are only the introduction to this family), including a variety of animals. And you've seen some of the ties that bind the family together, even when it's just the two humans and their cats, dogs, and horses.
And, of course, it's just tremendous fun.
dmh
I don't think any of that affects my opinion of Uncle Boris in the Yukon, though. One of the reasons I worked with Daniel was because I admired his work. The flap copy of this book calls him one of the most influential of writers for children, and I suspect he's had a significant influence on writers for adults, as well. He's certainly influenced me.
I won't try to define his humor. If you have listened to All Things Considered long enough, you've heard his commentary. If not, you may have run into Blue Moose or The Wuggie Norple Story or The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death or Young Adult Novel, and if you haven't seen those you should run out right now and rectify the lack.
Uncle Boris is not at the sublime level of those, but it's pretty good. It is a memoir, starting before the author's own birth, of a family's relationships with dogs (and a cat or two). I have heard some of these stories before, probably in one of Daniel's collections of his ATC commentaries, but he has told them anew here, and the context gives them new resonance. Daniel and Jill (his wife, and the illustrator of this slim, pocket-sized hardcover) are (among many other talents) dog trainers, and this book adheres to the premise that the training goes both ways. Daniel, and later Daniel and Jill, learn as much from their dogs as the dogs learn from them. Possibly more, since the Pinkwaters are smarter than most of the dogs. (The last dog profiled, Lulu, is scary-smart.)
But that isn't really the main feeling one takes away from the book. In part, you come away with some of that same feeling I get from Brother Cadfael, of having spent some time in the company of a particularly interesting and articulate (and funny -- never forget that) guy. You have gotten to know him, perhaps not in a Dostoevskian depth, but enough to know you like him. You've gotten to know some of his friends and family (and oy, what a family! Uncle Boris and his Yiddish-speaking sled dog are only the introduction to this family), including a variety of animals. And you've seen some of the ties that bind the family together, even when it's just the two humans and their cats, dogs, and horses.
And, of course, it's just tremendous fun.
dmh
William Gaddis
William Gaddis is one of those writers I acknowledge as a genius but whom I haven't (or hadn't until recently) managed to read. I've dipped into The Recognitions and JR, but never made much headway; it was good stuff, but required a lot of concentration that I couldn't provide at that time.
Well, I have now finished Agape Agape, and it was not easy reading but it was worthwhile. In fact, I'll probably read it at least once more at some point. Although it's a novella (80-something pages), there is an awful lot going on, and reading it over dinner, interspersed with newspapers and other books, is not the way to keep a grip on it. There are direct references to Nietzche, Plato, Tolstoy, Huizinga, and perhaps a score of others, and indirect ones beyond counting. There is a hint of Lear in the ravings of an old man (and more than a hint in his having divided his property between his three daughters), a hint of Krapp in the grasping for memory, and plenty of stuff that I'm sure I didn't catch.
The appended essay tells us that this short fiction was forged from decades' worth of notes toward a social history of the player piano, and that theme is strong in the book. The links to the Jacquard loom and Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" are obvious, perhaps, but necessary. Gaddis goes beyond that, of course, to the questions of the authenticity of the artistic experience: if you are operating a player piano, are you making music? This extends to questions of authorship (the unnamed narrator, whose fevered single paragraph makes the whole story, worries that his ideas may be stolen before he can write them down, before he can even create them) as well as audience.
I'm not even sure I can say much more than that, since the text is so dense, so digressive, so difficult. It's not a text to read, but to study, and I haven't done that. (This was my dining room book, not that I have time to study any text that I am not teaching.) But I can tell that it's worth studying, at least.
dmh
Well, I have now finished Agape Agape, and it was not easy reading but it was worthwhile. In fact, I'll probably read it at least once more at some point. Although it's a novella (80-something pages), there is an awful lot going on, and reading it over dinner, interspersed with newspapers and other books, is not the way to keep a grip on it. There are direct references to Nietzche, Plato, Tolstoy, Huizinga, and perhaps a score of others, and indirect ones beyond counting. There is a hint of Lear in the ravings of an old man (and more than a hint in his having divided his property between his three daughters), a hint of Krapp in the grasping for memory, and plenty of stuff that I'm sure I didn't catch.
The appended essay tells us that this short fiction was forged from decades' worth of notes toward a social history of the player piano, and that theme is strong in the book. The links to the Jacquard loom and Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" are obvious, perhaps, but necessary. Gaddis goes beyond that, of course, to the questions of the authenticity of the artistic experience: if you are operating a player piano, are you making music? This extends to questions of authorship (the unnamed narrator, whose fevered single paragraph makes the whole story, worries that his ideas may be stolen before he can write them down, before he can even create them) as well as audience.
I'm not even sure I can say much more than that, since the text is so dense, so digressive, so difficult. It's not a text to read, but to study, and I haven't done that. (This was my dining room book, not that I have time to study any text that I am not teaching.) But I can tell that it's worth studying, at least.
dmh
Sunday, April 03, 2005
The Earthbound Karamazov Brothers
Some of you may be familiar with the Flying Karamazov Brothers, whose juggling performances are witty and astonishing. I have long wondered about their connection with the Dostoevsky novel, which I had not read until now.
I guess now that the connection is that there are three of them. (Technically, I suppose you could say there are four in the novel, if you count Smerdyakov, but he is never proven to be a son of Fyodor Pavlovitch.) For me, at any rate, The Brothers Karamazov never takes flight.
I suspect that I am just not the right audience for Russian novels. I liked Anna Karenina just fine, and at least a novel's worth of War and Peace (nearly half of the book), and even most of Crime and Punishment. As an undergraduate, I enjoyed a couple of Solzhenitzyns. But the Russian novel, as I am familiar with it, is not only interested in telling a story and making its point, philosophical or psychological or whatever, through the story. It is interested in expressing a philosophical viewpoint, whether the story will bear it or not. The story stops for a while, or makes a detour into irrelevant territory, while the author has the characters sit around and discuss salvation or military strategy or the necessity of God for human (i.e., Russian) civilization, and then we get on with it.
Granted, this means that I like the nice, economical, modern novel. But I do manage to appreciate the English Victorians (or, at least, some of them) as well as Elmore Leonard. I have managed to get to the end of a (short) book by William Gaddis (of whom more later), who is hardly an action novelist. I don't mind a certain amount of digressiveness, but I just can't quite sympathize with chunks that go beyond digression into dissociation. (This will be tested when I listen to Moby Dick sometime later this year. I loved the book when I read it at 16.)
But how digressive is all that stuff in The Brothers Karamazov? Does it tie in closely with the theme of the story, at least? Well, yes, it does. As far as the story is concerned, the whole first section involving Father Zosima is basically static. It introduces the characters and their relationships, of course, but what it mostly introduces is the idea of suffering. The modern version might start just before Father Zosima bows down to Dmitri in respect for the suffering he is about to endure. Except, of course, the modern version would probably cut Father Zosima altogether. His death and premature decomposition propel Alyosha into the secular world, but that is only necessary because he's been living in the monastery. Make him a university student and you don't need that.
But could Alyosha be a university student? He is not worldly, even at the end of the story, and could hardly survive without either his inheritance from his father or the kindness of strangers. Part of the point of the Grand Inquisitor "poem" is the difficulty of being Christlike in the world. Alyosha manages by not being deeply involved in most of what goes on around him, and this would be much less believable in a university student (especially with the contrast of Rakitin, the corrupt divinity student). So let's keep the whole bit with Father Zosima -- but we can cut it down drastically. Dostoevsky is trying to talk not just about suffering here, but about religious politics and the evolution of the orthodox faith, and to him these are intensely important and intensely related issues.
That's where he loses me, of course. Those issues (other than suffering) are not very important to me. The suffering is intense and intensely portrayed, but Dmitri's grief at having to leave Russia is just too Russian for me. (My ancestors were reasonably pleased to be able to leave Russia.) Now, if I were a real scholar I'd probably be a New Historicist, so I'm perfectly willing to look at Dostoevsky in his historical context and in terms of his own goals. And by those, the book is a masterpiece.
I just didn't enjoy it all that much.
dmh
I guess now that the connection is that there are three of them. (Technically, I suppose you could say there are four in the novel, if you count Smerdyakov, but he is never proven to be a son of Fyodor Pavlovitch.) For me, at any rate, The Brothers Karamazov never takes flight.
I suspect that I am just not the right audience for Russian novels. I liked Anna Karenina just fine, and at least a novel's worth of War and Peace (nearly half of the book), and even most of Crime and Punishment. As an undergraduate, I enjoyed a couple of Solzhenitzyns. But the Russian novel, as I am familiar with it, is not only interested in telling a story and making its point, philosophical or psychological or whatever, through the story. It is interested in expressing a philosophical viewpoint, whether the story will bear it or not. The story stops for a while, or makes a detour into irrelevant territory, while the author has the characters sit around and discuss salvation or military strategy or the necessity of God for human (i.e., Russian) civilization, and then we get on with it.
Granted, this means that I like the nice, economical, modern novel. But I do manage to appreciate the English Victorians (or, at least, some of them) as well as Elmore Leonard. I have managed to get to the end of a (short) book by William Gaddis (of whom more later), who is hardly an action novelist. I don't mind a certain amount of digressiveness, but I just can't quite sympathize with chunks that go beyond digression into dissociation. (This will be tested when I listen to Moby Dick sometime later this year. I loved the book when I read it at 16.)
But how digressive is all that stuff in The Brothers Karamazov? Does it tie in closely with the theme of the story, at least? Well, yes, it does. As far as the story is concerned, the whole first section involving Father Zosima is basically static. It introduces the characters and their relationships, of course, but what it mostly introduces is the idea of suffering. The modern version might start just before Father Zosima bows down to Dmitri in respect for the suffering he is about to endure. Except, of course, the modern version would probably cut Father Zosima altogether. His death and premature decomposition propel Alyosha into the secular world, but that is only necessary because he's been living in the monastery. Make him a university student and you don't need that.
But could Alyosha be a university student? He is not worldly, even at the end of the story, and could hardly survive without either his inheritance from his father or the kindness of strangers. Part of the point of the Grand Inquisitor "poem" is the difficulty of being Christlike in the world. Alyosha manages by not being deeply involved in most of what goes on around him, and this would be much less believable in a university student (especially with the contrast of Rakitin, the corrupt divinity student). So let's keep the whole bit with Father Zosima -- but we can cut it down drastically. Dostoevsky is trying to talk not just about suffering here, but about religious politics and the evolution of the orthodox faith, and to him these are intensely important and intensely related issues.
That's where he loses me, of course. Those issues (other than suffering) are not very important to me. The suffering is intense and intensely portrayed, but Dmitri's grief at having to leave Russia is just too Russian for me. (My ancestors were reasonably pleased to be able to leave Russia.) Now, if I were a real scholar I'd probably be a New Historicist, so I'm perfectly willing to look at Dostoevsky in his historical context and in terms of his own goals. And by those, the book is a masterpiece.
I just didn't enjoy it all that much.
dmh
Friday, April 01, 2005
Kenneth Grahame
Not long ago we adopted the habit -- well, it may be too early to call it a habit -- of my reading to Judy for a while before we go to sleep. The first book was one of my all-time favorites, which she had not read: The Wind in the Willows.
Now, this is not a book that I fell in love with as a child. In fact, as a child I was only aware of the Disneyfied version. (This, along with a passing friendship with Daniel Pinkwater, has led me to teach my students that DisneyCorp. is The Great Satan.) Only as an adult, when I was asked to write a computer text adventure game (a genre now, sadly, dead) about a classic children's book, did I encounter the full text. Since I wound up doing the game on this book, I studied the text pretty closely at the time, and have since used it in a course (Major Literary Types: pick five books you want to talk about in class, and have the students read them). So I was hardly coming to this cold.
Still, the great pleasures of this book persist, no matter how many times I read it. Forget about trying to make sense of the world in which these animals live. Sometimes Toad is treated as a person (he gets service in a pub, and is large enough to drive an automobile), sometimes he is treated as an animal (the barge woman grabs him by one arm and one leg and flings him into the canal). The animals have animal senses and instincts, but Water Rat writes poetry and has a small arsenal in his home. There are no female animals (except, mentioned but not seen, Mrs. Otter). No one works for a living (except the rabbits and mice, who seem to be a peasantry). No, the world of the Riverbank simply doesn't hold together logically. And there's no real reason why it should; it's a fantasy of an ideal life in rural Edwardian England.
Perhaps my long bachelorhood helps me to relate to these animals living happy bachelor lives. (Sex, of course, is simply not an issue.) I immediately connected with Mole, breaking out of his secluded underground life to set the novel in motion, encountering the world with fresh eyes and growing into an accomplished and adventurous animal. (Not that that would be a fair summary of my life, or any part of it.) Mole is, in some ways, an ultimate outsider. He lives underground, for one thing, and is thereby isolated from all who cannot find his home (even he has trouble finding it after a few months away). He knows next to nothing of the Riverbank (where he is soon living) and less about the Wide World and the Wild Woods. He seems to be poorer than the other animals (among the gentry, that is: Rat and Toad and Badger and Otter). He is the outsider coming into the group of friends. And when he and Rat have their encounter with the divine (the central episode of the book), it is Rat who senses most acutely what is happening, and retains contact with it longer (although Mole retains his memory a bit longer). Mole is, until the last chapter, always a little off-balance.
But my ability to relate to a character doesn't make it a great book. The characters do that on their own. They are real people, as well as being real animals (remember, these are animals who are Edwardian gentlemen, not realistic animals). They speak differently, they think differently, and they are clearly individuals. And they behave consistently (well, except for Toad) within an ethical position that the book espouses. (Oh, yes, it's also beautifully written and hugely entertaining.) The book is, quite simply, a paean to pantheistic paganism. Even the carol that the mice sing in the forecourt of Mole's house is not Christian, although it relates to (even depends on, in some ways) Christmas.
And if there were any doubt about the paganism of the book, the great central chapter, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn," would put it to rest. (One of my great regrets about the game version is that I was not allowed to include this chapter.) (Another is that it was never published, although the coding was completed.) For those who are unfamiliar, here is the rough outline: Rat comes home and tells Mole that Otter is worried about his son, young Portly Otter, who has wandered off. The two friends decide to go out in the boat to look for Portly, and spend a lovely night paying attention to the world as it appears under the stars. As dawn approaches, they are drawn by an indefinable impulse, later with music, to the island near the weir (the most dangerous spot on the river). On the island, they find Portly in the company and under the protection of the great god Pan. They gather the young otter and, in order not to blight the rest of their lives (since nothing can compare to the glory of the divine presence), they are granted the boon of forgetfulness.
And this is no odd quirk. According to a biography I read while preparing for the game version, Grahame was a leader in a paganist movement that had some influence in Edwardian England. (This should not be confused with modern paganism and Wicca. It's more a late Romantic efflorescence.) The whole book is about the essential goodness of one kind of life that is placed in opposition to human life with its jobs and banks and industry and change. The Badger points out that the tunnels to which his home is connected predate not only him, but the human city that once occupied the site. There were badgers there before there were humans, there are badgers now after the humans, and the humans may come and go again. Human history may have its cycles, but nature persists.
I suppose this connects, on a deep level, with my own belief that humanity is just a passing fancy, and that extinction is not too far off for us. Grahame, however, is more optimistic, believing that goodness will survive in the animals, even if we manage to remove it from our own characters.
dmh
Now, this is not a book that I fell in love with as a child. In fact, as a child I was only aware of the Disneyfied version. (This, along with a passing friendship with Daniel Pinkwater, has led me to teach my students that DisneyCorp. is The Great Satan.) Only as an adult, when I was asked to write a computer text adventure game (a genre now, sadly, dead) about a classic children's book, did I encounter the full text. Since I wound up doing the game on this book, I studied the text pretty closely at the time, and have since used it in a course (Major Literary Types: pick five books you want to talk about in class, and have the students read them). So I was hardly coming to this cold.
Still, the great pleasures of this book persist, no matter how many times I read it. Forget about trying to make sense of the world in which these animals live. Sometimes Toad is treated as a person (he gets service in a pub, and is large enough to drive an automobile), sometimes he is treated as an animal (the barge woman grabs him by one arm and one leg and flings him into the canal). The animals have animal senses and instincts, but Water Rat writes poetry and has a small arsenal in his home. There are no female animals (except, mentioned but not seen, Mrs. Otter). No one works for a living (except the rabbits and mice, who seem to be a peasantry). No, the world of the Riverbank simply doesn't hold together logically. And there's no real reason why it should; it's a fantasy of an ideal life in rural Edwardian England.
Perhaps my long bachelorhood helps me to relate to these animals living happy bachelor lives. (Sex, of course, is simply not an issue.) I immediately connected with Mole, breaking out of his secluded underground life to set the novel in motion, encountering the world with fresh eyes and growing into an accomplished and adventurous animal. (Not that that would be a fair summary of my life, or any part of it.) Mole is, in some ways, an ultimate outsider. He lives underground, for one thing, and is thereby isolated from all who cannot find his home (even he has trouble finding it after a few months away). He knows next to nothing of the Riverbank (where he is soon living) and less about the Wide World and the Wild Woods. He seems to be poorer than the other animals (among the gentry, that is: Rat and Toad and Badger and Otter). He is the outsider coming into the group of friends. And when he and Rat have their encounter with the divine (the central episode of the book), it is Rat who senses most acutely what is happening, and retains contact with it longer (although Mole retains his memory a bit longer). Mole is, until the last chapter, always a little off-balance.
But my ability to relate to a character doesn't make it a great book. The characters do that on their own. They are real people, as well as being real animals (remember, these are animals who are Edwardian gentlemen, not realistic animals). They speak differently, they think differently, and they are clearly individuals. And they behave consistently (well, except for Toad) within an ethical position that the book espouses. (Oh, yes, it's also beautifully written and hugely entertaining.) The book is, quite simply, a paean to pantheistic paganism. Even the carol that the mice sing in the forecourt of Mole's house is not Christian, although it relates to (even depends on, in some ways) Christmas.
And if there were any doubt about the paganism of the book, the great central chapter, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn," would put it to rest. (One of my great regrets about the game version is that I was not allowed to include this chapter.) (Another is that it was never published, although the coding was completed.) For those who are unfamiliar, here is the rough outline: Rat comes home and tells Mole that Otter is worried about his son, young Portly Otter, who has wandered off. The two friends decide to go out in the boat to look for Portly, and spend a lovely night paying attention to the world as it appears under the stars. As dawn approaches, they are drawn by an indefinable impulse, later with music, to the island near the weir (the most dangerous spot on the river). On the island, they find Portly in the company and under the protection of the great god Pan. They gather the young otter and, in order not to blight the rest of their lives (since nothing can compare to the glory of the divine presence), they are granted the boon of forgetfulness.
And this is no odd quirk. According to a biography I read while preparing for the game version, Grahame was a leader in a paganist movement that had some influence in Edwardian England. (This should not be confused with modern paganism and Wicca. It's more a late Romantic efflorescence.) The whole book is about the essential goodness of one kind of life that is placed in opposition to human life with its jobs and banks and industry and change. The Badger points out that the tunnels to which his home is connected predate not only him, but the human city that once occupied the site. There were badgers there before there were humans, there are badgers now after the humans, and the humans may come and go again. Human history may have its cycles, but nature persists.
I suppose this connects, on a deep level, with my own belief that humanity is just a passing fancy, and that extinction is not too far off for us. Grahame, however, is more optimistic, believing that goodness will survive in the animals, even if we manage to remove it from our own characters.
dmh
Fowler redux
I realized I wanted to say a bit more about The Jane Austen Book Club, specifically about the nature of the narrator.
The narration seems to be in first-person plural. That is, the narrator occasionally refers to the club as "we." Yet the narrator also seems to have information that is not generally known to the club, including big chunks of members' pasts. And the narrator does not seem to be any of the people named as members of the club. (The different sections of the book focus on, as well as the Austen novels under discussion, individual group members whose lives relate to the novels. This never seems to be the narrator.)
So does this narrator shift from one section to the other? Is it "the club" that is the narrator in some way? Was the book badly edited and copyedited? (That is, was this a goof that wasn't caught?) Or did I just miss something because I was listening rather than reading?
dmh
The narration seems to be in first-person plural. That is, the narrator occasionally refers to the club as "we." Yet the narrator also seems to have information that is not generally known to the club, including big chunks of members' pasts. And the narrator does not seem to be any of the people named as members of the club. (The different sections of the book focus on, as well as the Austen novels under discussion, individual group members whose lives relate to the novels. This never seems to be the narrator.)
So does this narrator shift from one section to the other? Is it "the club" that is the narrator in some way? Was the book badly edited and copyedited? (That is, was this a goof that wasn't caught?) Or did I just miss something because I was listening rather than reading?
dmh
