Year: 2011

Appearing Elsewhere: Our Books, Ourselves

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In honor of the second anniversary of the launch of The Second Pass, founding editor John Williams (prompted partly by the VIDA statistics and the ensuing discussion about women and criticism) invited contributions for a feature by women about books by women that they felt deserved more attention. The collection is now posted and includes a fascinatingly diverse assortment: Ranylt Richildis writing on Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (which readers of this blog will know gets plenty of attention around here!) and Emma Donoghue’s Slammerkin (“inspired by the messy, irreducible worlds of folklore, desire, and crime”); Emma Garman on Elaine Scarry’s Dreaming by the Book (a “groundbreaking investigation into how words on a page — flat, inert, devoid of sensuous qualities — are miraculously transmuted into fully fledged, three-dimensional worlds in the mind’s eye”); Jessica Ferri on Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (“a genre-busting book that bravely asserts there is a difference in the way men and women are treated not only as artists but as people”); Xarissa Holdoway on Jane Hirshfield’s Given Sugar, Given Salt (“her frequent invocations of heart, hope and grief would quickly irritate if they weren’t balanced so well with precision”); Jennifer Szalai on Mona Simpson’s My Hollywood (“a keen exploration of the American experience, with all of its attendant exhilarations and disappointments”); Emily Bobrow on Iris Murdoch’s A Word Child (“full of a dark curdling humor, the kind that captures the interior hum of a perceptive man who knows that he is a loser, and who knows it is partly his fault”); and me on Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Disturbances in the Field. I’ve mentioned my longstanding admiration for Disturbances in the Field before here, particularly in my post about Schwartz’s Leaving Brooklyn (which is also fabulous). I wasn’t sure that it really counted as “underappreciated,” but then, when you really love a book, it’s hard to imagine that it is ever appreciated as much as it should be. It was challenging trying to explain just what about the novel moves and impresses me so much. I was tempted to, but ultimately didn’t, include the little personal detail that when I sat down to review the book for the piece, it fell open to a particular moment near the middle and I had read literally about four words before I was helplessly crying. That’s how powerful its hold is on my imagination and my emotions–indeed, that hold has only intensified over the years, particularly since I became a parent. Anyway, it is certainly one of the ‘books of my life,’ and if your TBR pile isn’t already teetering, you should consider adding it on.  Of the other books in this feature I think the one I’m most interested in trying is the Iris Murdoch: she’s a writer I have long meant to read, but I’ve never been able to focus on where to start.

Congratulations on two good years, John! Thanks for choosing this way to celebrate, and for inviting me to contribute.

In my 20s, I found it a compelling, if unconsoling, exploration of the kind of adult life I hoped to have: at once intellectually rigorous and emotionally intense

A little stumble out of the gate…

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

Remember my bold March reading plans, so recently announced? Well, it’s not that they are completely derailed or anything, but I admit that The Man Who Loved Children has presented me with an unexpected obstacle in the form of Sam Pollit, the single most annoying character I’ve ever met. What’s so annoying about him? Mostly, that he talks like this:

‘Boys,’ said he, ‘boys, you soon won’t have your little feyther with you. He is going away to Greenland’s icy mountings and India’s coral strand. You have to look after yourselves, your mother, and your sisters. I want all of you to stand together and look after the house for me, not only the female hanni-miles mentioned and aforesaid, but also the real honest-to-goodness hanni-miles, Procyon the raccoon, Gimlet the parrot, Didelpha the vixen opossum, Cocky-Andy the sulphur-crested cockatoo, Big-Me the pygmy oppossum, not to mention the birds and reptilians. That will be quite a job even for you smart boys. Now we’ll have to work up a schedule. And fustest, you must write to your poor Sam [that’s him] ebbly week and tell him how ’tis tuh hum; and second, you must keep a record of the birds and anni-miles wot visit Tohoga House. Tohoga Place that is. No! Momento! Loogoobrious can do that. It will be a good thing for her, keep her mind off of her herself, on which onpleasant objeck,’ he continued (believing that Louie was there), ‘it is glued at time of speaking. But that is, no doubt, on account of her fai-hairy figuar and her bewchus face.’

Seriously, WTF? I am pretty sure he is meant to be annoying–insufferable, even?–but if that quality is too perfectly realized, it’s about as risky as representing a tedious bore too exactly (the Baron of Bradwardine, anyone? who is rescued only–or maybe not quite–by Scott’s obvious affection for him and what he stands for?). We’ll see how this goes. At the moment, though, I dislike it so intensely whenever Sam starts talking that (a) I am all on his neurotic wife’s side in what he calls “this everlasting schism” (they aren’t speaking–but can you blame her?) and (b) I am hoping his trip to “Greenland’s icy mountings” lasts the rest of the novel.

March Reading Plans

Rohan Maitzen9 Comments

International Women’s Day seems like a fitting occasion to declare that I have had enough of the intensely masculine atmosphere of police procedurals for a while. I have now read 5 of the Martin Beck books and while I think they are very good of their kind, it is still not the kind that best suits my own personal taste and I’m ready to read something different. I don’t even want to finish the attempt at a properly nuanced commentary on the role and depiction of women in them that I started to write just now and then deleted! There’s plenty to be said about it, I’m sure, and I’m not calling the books sexist. I just want to take my mental life somewhere else for a while–which means I’m also not keen on reading more Henning Mankell just yet either. Reading Danielle’s nice post at A Work in Progress about her own March reading plans made me think about what I have to look forward to or might choose to focus on for the rest of this month. One of the great luxuries of being on sabbatical, after all, is exactly that choice!

I think it’s going to be a pretty intense month for women writers–which is not unusual for me, of course. In fact, prompted by the flap about the VIDA statistics, I did a quick tally of the contemporary books I’ve written up on Novel Readings and came up with around 72% women authors. (This may in itself be one tiny piece of anecdotal evidence for the difference it might make having more women involved in editorial roles at the major periodicals: if their own reading skewed at all towards women writers, that would inevitably shift the sense of what books deserve attention.) Like Danielle, I’m reading Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus for the Slaves of Golconda reading group. I’m also determined to finish Margaret Kennedy’s Together and Apart. I’m going to reread Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and also, maybe, Agnes Grey, as I’m hoping to write something about AB for Open Letters Monthly. First, though, I’ve just begun Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, because after all the detective novels with their mostly pedestrian prose I really wanted to dive into something where the writing really mattered–and the first two chapters have already convinced me that an extraordinary (if not altogether pleasant) reading experience lies ahead. Here’s her description, for instance, of Henny Pollit’s family home:

She had the calm of frequentation; she belonged to this house and it to her. Though she was a prisoner in it, she possessed it. She and it were her marriage. She was indwelling in every board and stone of it: every fold in the curtains had a meaning (perhaps they were so folded to hide a darn or stain); every room was a phial of revelation to be poured out some feverish night in the secret laboratories of her decisions, full of living cancers of insult, leprosies of disillusion, abscesses of grudge, gangrene of nevermore, quintan fevers of divorce, and all the proliferating miseries, the running sores and thick scabs, for which (and not for its heavenly joys) the flesh of marriage is so heavily veiled and conventually interned.

The passage starts out calmly enough, but that riff on marriage as a diseased body wrapped in the veils of domesticity lacerates the imagination. I’ve also already had to look two words up in the dictionary: “desquamating” and “crepitations.” (I’m sure you all already knew just what these mean.)

The other two books I’m planning to get through are Trollope’s La Vendée, which one of my PhD students is writing a chapter on (I’m about three chapters into that one, and as she and I were discussing today, it reads more like Scott–though not, perhaps, Scott at his best!–than like Trollope) and, for my other reading group, Brian Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. I haven’t started that one yet, but I will say that the NYRB Classics edition has a gorgeous cover:

It sounds like a great month, actually. If I do get through all of these, I’ll be pretty proud of myself! But if I don’t, that’s OK too, because there’s always April…

So what about you? Anything on your TBR pile that you are especially looking forward to?

Ahdaf Soueif: Is Everything I’ve Done Now Obsolete?

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

Monday morning: time for a little thinking out loud as I warm up for my week.

I’ve said quite a lot on this blog about my interest in Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif. I first discovered her when I came across The Map of Love in Duthie’s on a trip to Vancouver (sadly, Duthie’s is another independent bookstore that has now closed up shop). I read it and wrote it up soon after. (I hadn’t looked at that post for a long time, and it is interesting to see how mixed my reaction was, as I’ve just reread the novel very slowly, in “work mode,” and appreciated it much more overall. Though the issues that struck me as unsuccessful in the working out of the Lady Anna plot [I see I actually used the word “boring”!] still strike me as problems, they seem also more deliberate, more politically challenging, than I understood them to be on that first reading.) I was interested enough to get ahold of In the Eye of the Sun and to read more about Soueif–which led me eventually to an idea for a critical essay which led me to a bunch of reading in post-colonial theory, then a conference presentation, then yet more post-colonial theory. My intention for some time has been to extend the discussion of In the Eye of the Sun into a comparative discussion of the two novels, with particular attention to their engagement with the novels and moral philosophy of George Eliot. When my sabbatical began, finishing this essay was first on my “to do” list, and indeed reviewing my notes and sources and rereading The Map of Love were among the first things I got working on in January.

Then the January 25th revolution began. It is no credit at all to me that I took a special interest in this world-historical event because for the past couple of years I had been reading and thinking a fair amount about contemporary Egypt–with a literary bias or angle, to be sure, and I wouldn’t begin to claim expertise in either Egyptian history or modern Egyptian politics. Still, I learned far more about both than I would ever have done otherwise as I puzzled over the relationship between the worlds Soueif’s characters inhabit and the literary traditions she draws on. Because of the imaginative investment I’d made in Soueif’s novels, the real world struggle that might otherwise have been just one more story in the headlines felt more personal to me. I suppose another way to put it would be that it was part of a story I was already in some sense following. I’ve written a couple of times here about fiction that aspires (among other things) to illuminate or humanize difference–this is one of the explicit goals, for instance, of Mahbod Seraji’s Rooftops of Tehran. Then there are the books that made me think about Anthony Appiah’s term ‘moral tourism’—A Thousand Splendid Suns is one example, The Wasted Vigil another (more sophisticated) one. Though I think it’s possible to criticize works that market themselves through an appeal to the very exoticism or Orientialism they also want to undermine, watching the stream of videos and tweets and reports coming from Tahrir Square made me think about how much more prepared I was to listen to and hope for the protesters than some other people (including, it often seemed, most of the staff and the stable of commentators at CNN) who seemed stuck in reductive stereotypes and worn-out narratives about the Middle East. (Rather than try to say a lot more about this myself, I’ll refer you to Aaron Bady at zunguzungu and his links and comments about the way the regime itself contributed by ‘staging Orientalist theater.’ All of his posts from January 25 to February 11 are worth reviewing–and of course his blog is worth following just in general.) In my post about The Wasted Vigil I worried about the value of the aestheticized experience we get of ‘otherness’ by reading such novels. While fretting that reading is not, really, acting, I still wondered whether, “if reading leads to understanding, especially appreciation for nuance and complexity, isn’t reading a kind of doing? Isn’t it a good thing to do? And wouldn’t the world be a better place if more people (former world leaders, even) perhaps read such novels?” As I watched Al Jazeera obsessively through those astonishing, frightening, exhilirating days, I couldn’t help but be aware that I would have been acting differently (though not, I hope and believe, indifferently) if I hadn’t read the novels I had, and particularly if I had never started reading and writing about Ahdaf Soueif.

My spectator’s interest and my scholarly interest converged completely as Soueif herself became a conspicuous presence in the revolution. She wrote several pieces for the Guardian reporting from Cairo, including some written in the center of Tahrir Square. She was interviewed for various programs including on NPR, and she is featured in this excellent documentary on the ‘Women of Tahrir‘. Her home page now features the exuberant headline “Welcome to the New Egypt; Have a Lovely Stay.” Tomorrow night she is giving the Edward Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia (how I wish I could be there!), long scheduled but now announced with the title “Notes from Tahrir Square.”

All of these events, from the protests and their outcome (still, of course, very much a work in progress) to Soueif’s activism and role as an eloquent mediator between two worlds she knows equally well, have very little to do with me personally. I understand that! They are about so much more, something much, much bigger than my essay project. I issue that disclaimer because now I’m going to focus on what they have meant, or might mean, for me and that essay project, my own little work in progress.

One reasonable answer is: nothing at all. The essay is about the engagement between Soueif’s novels and a particular literary predecessor. The novels haven’t changed, and the essay was never going to be an intervention in current events.

But another answer is, surely something. Rather unexpectedly, something that began as a purely academic project has at least peripheral relevance to our contemporary moment. Writing about Soueif has gone from being a quirky sideways move for a Victorianist (finally, a new angle for writing about George Eliot!) to being something with some real possible significance, including to readers outside the academy–though not necessarily if the essay continues along quite the same lines as before.

And what about the essay’s lines of argument? Actually, they were never entirely literary. Or, more accurately, they always dealt with ways in which literary form reflects or enables ethical thinking, and the ethical issues, particularly in The Map of Love, have a lot to do with Egyptian history and encounters between ‘east’ and ‘west.’ The arguments I have been trying to work out are arguments about crossing cultural borders, inhabiting hybrid identities, the limits or potential of sympathy, the role of the imagination in mediating difference. Particularly in The Map of Love, these abstract issues are played out in the context of the occupation of Palestine; of the vexed role of the United States in the Middle East in general and Egypt in particular; of reductive Western stereotypes of both Arab men and Arab women; and of the dehumanizing realities of life in Mubarak’s police state. On January 25th, as it happens, I was taking notes on Chapter 16, which includes an impassioned political discussion among a diverse group of Egyptians, mostly women, and Isabel, an American visitor, who mostly listens (one not-so-subtle hint here is that America would do well to listen more to the voices of the people in the countries they meddle in, a lesson that of course the ongoing uprisings eloquently continue). Here’s an excerpt:

‘Ya Doctor, a national project comes about as an embodiment of the will of the people,’ Arwa says. ‘Nasser’s project finally did not work because for the people to have a will it has to have a certain amount of space and freedom, freedom to question everything: religion, politics, sex –‘

‘So the sans-culottes had freedom and space?’

‘No, and your revolution here will be an Islamist radical one. Because every other ideology is bankrupt. And capitalism isn’t an ideology, it isn’t something that people can live by . . . ‘

. . .

‘It seems to me,’ says Isabel, after a moment, ‘that people are completely caught up in trying to analyse the situation. But no one says, “This is what we should do.”‘

‘I don’t think anyone knows what we should do,’ I say.

‘I know some things we should do,’ Deena says. ‘We should speak out against the sanctions on Iraq. We should put a time limit on this so-called peace process. What’s the use of sitting around talking peace when the Israelis are constantly changing the landscape–putting things on the ground that will be impossible to dismantle?’

‘And when the time came, you’d go to war?’ Isabel asks.

‘If we had to. And I would stop this charade of ‘normalisation.’ What normalisation is possible with a neighbour who continues to build settlements and drive people off the land? . . . I’d mobilise the people to get our economy straight–‘

I can see why this section struck me on my first reading, as laborious, though clearly done with the understandable goal of trying “to educate her Western readers about international politics from a non-Western point of view, especially about the effects of colonialism in the early story, and the conflict over Palestine in the contemporary one.” In the novel, this kind of conversation (though educational) makes less difference to how people actually behave towards each other than the personal relationships that forge across boundaries of potential misunderstanding–Lady Anna’s romance with Sharif, in the earlier plot, but also, maybe more significantly, her friendship with his sister Layla, and then Isabel’s romance with Omar in the more contemporary plot, and again, more significantly, her friendship with his sister Amal. These affective developments (or so I was [am] going to argue) move people into what Soueif has called the ‘mezzaterra,’ a space Soueif says (in her introduction to her essay collection Mezzaterra) has been sadly beleaguered and dangerously shrunken in recent decades. My essay has been aiming at a discussion of how Soueif draws on both English and Arabic literary traditions as well as manipulates her own literary forms to explore and maybe expand that territory.  I’m also very interested in the relationship between her emphasis on romance and friendship and the role of the novel in achieving cross-cultural understanding. And I’m interested in the pessimism in The Map of Love, in the way violence cuts off compromise and seems to show the inadequacy or futility of those same personal relationships for bringing about real political change.

Isn’t all this just as interesting and relevant as it was before January 25th? My problem right now is that while the context of the project seems to have a whole new hum of significance and that’s exhilarating, when I contemplate its specifics, I feel strangely deflated.

One somewhat trivial reason for this, I think, is just that literary criticism is not revolutionary action, it’s scholarly writing. Most of the time, I’m good with this. I’ve even felt discomfort (or worse) with criticism that aims or claims to be overt activism. As if! Our job is not really to march in the streets but to analyze the refractions of politics through literary history and literary form (among other approaches we can take and things we do, of course). And as I keep saying (because though I’m sure…pretty sure…it’s true, I need to reassure myself about it) Soueif’s novels are what they are, and nothing in the analysis I’ve been doing is inappropriate to them. I just have get on with it: to finish the piece and submit it for peer review as planned.

But less trivial is my uneasy sense that maybe the questions and arguments I’ve been pursuing are somehow mistaken from the start, or, if not necessarily mistaken, are not the most important questions to be asking right now. It matters how ‘east’ and ‘west’ understand each other, but throughout the days of protest one resonant message (from, just to name one eloquent voice, Mona Eltahawy) was that the events in Egypt were about Egypt–not about America, or Israel, or any other country obsessing about what the revolution might mean for it. A fascinating post today at Millicent and Carla Fran’s blog notes

After all we’ve written and thought about “selfish” and “unselfish” feminism, about the problems posed by Qaddafi’s female guards and the uneasy relationship between Middle East and West, it’s an honor to witness how Muslim women are talking not to the West (that’s a fraught interaction) but to each other about their vision for the future and—maybe as importantly—their vision of the past. (read the rest here–it lays out an important unfolding Twitter conversation about Muslim feminism)

In The Map of Love (also, but not quite so much, in In the Eye of the Sun) Soueif is explicitly working on ‘east’/’west’ relationships–this is hardly an issue that has been resolved by recent events, but recent events have also shown how partial this preoccupation is, maybe even that focusing on it tilts the conversation in a misleading way towards the east-west encounter as defining what matters. Or maybe what they have shown is that, unbenownst to her, Soueif was writing, not one historical story and one contemporary one, but two historical stories: by placing her novel so carefully in time and place, she made herself vulnerable to–not obsolescence, but at least becoming dated. Highly topical fiction transcends the passing of its moment either by exemplifying that moment so powerfully that it can go on to represent it, or by using its topical specificity to reach towards lasting problems or themes. I’ve only just begun to think about this, but I’m not sure if The Map of Love achieves the latter kind of resonance. If not, does that really matter at all to the novel as a novel? And does it matter at all to the essay that I’ve been trying to write? Is there some other essay I should be writing, either about The Map of Love or about Ahdaf Soueif?

In her interviews with NPR’s Renee Montagne, Soueif talks about her own work in progress:

The novel that I have been trying to work on for years now, was really supposed to be a prelude to something like this happening. And so now, you know, whats happened has caught up with it. And I at some point will have to sit and think whether it’s possible to sort of incorporate what has happened into what I’ve been doing, or whether everything that I’ve done is now obsolete.

I think it’s clear in context that she doesn’t mean the last remark generally, that “everything she’s done” over her whole writing career is obsolete but only that a novel imagined as a “prelude” to some kind of Egyptian transformation must be re-imagined now that radical change is underway. Her comment echoes in my head, though, as I work through my notes and contemplate the essay I’ve been trying to write. At least now I’ve started trying to articulate the questions it raises for me.

This Month in My Sabbatical: Stupid Short Month!

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

Where the dickens did February go? It only just started, and now it’s past. Sigh. I knew it was going to be a compromised month because in its infinite wisdom the Halifax Regional School Board decided to move the kids’ usual March break to February and extend it to two weeks, ostensibly to allow families to attend the Canada Winter Games, which Halifax hosted. I have yet to talk to one family that went to any of the sporting events: most seem to have left town, or just hunkered down–which is what we did. Between my sabbatical and my husband’s February break overlapping with the kids’ for one week, we managed to juggle things OK without packing them off to some kind of camp: this option is one great gift of the flexibility of academic schedules, but also as the kids get older (they are 9 and 13 now–which makes me … young! very young!) they are more self-sufficient about entertaining themselves. Still, I am cursed with a need for silence and extended contemplative periods without interruptions if I want to do serious reading or writing, so I knew that the second half of the month would not be my most productive time. What I hadn’t figured on was the four snow days in the first two weeks of the month, which meant that altogether they were in school (and thus I was “at work” in the usual way) only SIX DAYS in February.

Still, there was time to read and write, and even some time to think. When I fretted about how the break weeks were going to go, my daughter sagely recommended that I should “make plans for things that you can do, and then do them!” And that’s pretty much what I did: I adjusted my expectations and ambitions to focus on the projects that weren’t quite as intensive. Hence all the reading and blogging about crime fiction, which has actually brought me a lot closer to some decisions about how to mix up the second half of the reading list for my mystery fiction course. Right now, I’m thinking I’ll take out Rankin’s Knots and Crosses and probably a few short stories, and put in Ed McBain’s Cop Hater (to make the transition to contemporary police procedurals and a bridge to the Scandinavian writers explicitly influenced by him) and then either one of the Sjowall and Wahloo series or one of Henning Mankell’s. I still have more to read, but this direction makes sense to me, and I feel increasingly comfortable about being able to work with the material. I’m almost finished Mankell’s The Fifth Woman, and it really is quite a different kind of book than Faceless Killers. I don’t like the case much, and I still am finding the style dull, but it is just much richer and more interesting. That said, it’s also quite long, which may make it less than optimum for late in the term. I have a handful of other related titles to read but this seems like progress.

Let’s see: what else? I’ve done some other reading and blogging, and I’m working on a small piece for another site about one of my favorite books (the struggle I’m having being satisfied within the 400-word limit is a salutary one for me, as I often give my students very short limits on their papers and blithely tell them how much harder it is to make a few words densely meaningful than to ramble on for several pages). I have done more letters of reference (and another request for one came in this week). Yesterday I returned a 50-page thesis chapter on Frances Burney. I prepared some materials in support of my nomination for a teaching award. I explored funding options for a conference I hope to attend in early September–in the next week or so, I need to write up a proper proposal for my part in a panel as well as one for a workshop for graduate students, which will probably be something to do with academic blogging. I practised using my iPad. The keyboard still nearly defeats me. Maybe I could use little sticky things to give me some tactile indication of where the darned space bar is: about 75% of the time, if I try to actually ‘touch’-type, I put “n” in instead. It’s a long way from the IBM Selectric I learned on back in 1983 to a perfectly flat glass screen. I worked on soliciting and editing pieces for the March issue of Open Letters Monthly. That’s about it. Oh: I also finished my little ‘Blue Ocean’ quilt!

Rebecca Mead, “George Eliot and Me”

Rohan Maitzen21 Comments

If Rebecca Mead’s “George Eliot and Me” * didn’t take up eight pages (eight pages!) in the New Yorker‘s anniversary issue, I would just let it go by without comment. But the New Yorker is prime literary real estate, and eight pages is a lot. It seems a fair assumption that Mead’s essay should be  significant in some way–that it should represent outstanding work of its kind. When, after reading it through three times, I still couldn’t find the payoff–well, that does seem to call for some discussion.

It’s not that “George Eliot and Me” is a terrible piece or anything–Mead is no Brenda Maddox (though she reports attending a talk by Maddox at which–surprise!–Maddox recounts the Curious Incident of the Honeymoon Defenestration). Then again, I notice Mead does think it’s important to tell us how plain Eliot was (however did I manage to write a whole essay on Eliot without feeling any need to bring this up?!) She also shares Maddox’s ageism, describing a female scholar she meets as “a tall woman, no longer young but still striking.” But? (This whole encounter is oddly described, actually: Mead introduces this scholar as a “notable exception” to a “maxim” she has just quoted, from Adam Bede: ‘The way in which I have come to the conclusion that human nature is loveable [sic]–the way I have learned something of its deep pathos, its sublime mysteries–has been by living a great deal among people more or less commonplace and vulgar.” I can’t tell if Mead means that this woman, though commonplace and vulgar, is an exception to the conclusion that human nature is lovable [if so, what a snidely gratuitous dig this is!] or, because she is not commonplace and vulgar, an exception to the idea that you can’t find lovable human nature in more glamorous guise.)

Anyway, as I was saying, it’s not a terrible piece. It’s nice to hear from someone who has loved Middlemarch a long time and feels she has learned from it. I felt a certain kinship with Mead on these grounds, especially at the beginning of the essay: “The first time I read George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” [I guess using quotation marks for novels rather than italics is New Yorker house style?] I was seventeen years old, and was preparing to take the entrance examination for Oxford University.” “Hey, me too!” I thought–except that I was eighteen and backpacking across Europe. So, not quite the same, but still, like Mead, I first read the novel early in my progress towards adulthood. Also, like Mead’s, my identifications and interpretations have changed over the years, not just because my own experience challenged my earlier assumptions and values, but because I learned to read the book better. Mead, too: on her early readings, she says, she “relished the satire” but “missed, more or less completely, the irony in the portrayal of Dorothea.” It’s an easy mistake; I made it too, once upon a time. And Mead and I share admiration for the novel’s moral wisdom, though I don’t think I’ve ever made Mead’s larger, and apparently continuing, mistake that “everything I might need to know about marriage, about love, about life itself, was encompassed in the novel’s eight hundred and fifty pages.” That’s a lot to ask of any novel–and it reduces the novel (as most of Mead’s comments d0) to a fairly literal set of lessons and examples that can be copied out epigrammatically.

Thinking it over, in fact, that attitude that the novel operates primarily at this level–as ‘philosophy teaching by examples,’ rather than as a richly organized aesthetic artefact–is what seems to me the essay’s greatest and most disappointing weakness. Nothing Mead says about Middlemarch is wrong, but none of it is going to surprise or even interest people who have thought much about Eliot or Middlemarch already, and none of it gives any sense of Eliot as an artist or a thinker: all we get, by and large, are one-sentence quotations used to illustrate points of character, theme or moral lesson. In the online “Ask the Author” chat that the New Yorker hosted, Mead mentions Zadie Smith’s essay, so she knows that there are richer ways to talk about Middlemarch.There are certainly richer ways to talk about The Mill on the Floss, which Mead mentions only to imply that it is “verbose,” which she then uses as an excuse to mention the (appalling) phenomenon of “a volume called ‘The Mill on the Floss: in Half the Time,’ an abridgement for those unable to countenance a six-hundred-page book.” I don’t think she means to endorse this absurdity, but juxtaposed against her “verbose” comment, it rather comes across that way. I see she didn’t get past her earlier lack of interest in Romola, either, here simply called Eliot’s “often tedious excursion into Renaissance Florence.” Sure, Romola is hard going and probably not a great novel. But you have eight pages in the New Yorker to talk about George Eliot! There’s so much more to be said about George Eliot’s novels, if you’re willing to work at it a little, to get outside your own head, and to explore not just her “maxims” (remember her cautions about people who live by them, after all–that’s one of the tedious philosophical bits that is probably left out of the truncated version of The Mill on the Floss) but her ideas and her craft. How did Mead figure out the irony at Dorothea’s expense, for instance, if not through the electric combination of Eliot’s intrusive narrator and her shifting point of view?

But perhaps in complaining about the superficiality of the literary discussion in the essay I’m making a category mistake . Maybe the main point of “George Eliot and Me” is not to talk about George Eliot, at least not in depth, but about the effect of her work on Mead’s own life and personal development. “I have gone back to ‘Middlemarch’ every five years or so,” she tells us, and her “emotional response” has evolved each time. She has learned to understand why Will’s “youthful energies and Byronic hairdressing” would have appealed “to his middle-aged creator,” for instance. (Oops, that’s actually another Maddox-like moment: Eliot the acknowledged cradle-snatcher, fantasizing about a sexy youngster!) Mead has also used Middlemarch to test prospective partners: when one tells her he “admired the climactic scene of Will and Dorothea…clutching each other’s hands, at last, as a thunderstorm rages,” she knows “things would never have worked between us.” Poor guy: done in by the pathetic fallacy! Eventually Mead married someone who “prized ‘Middlemarch’ as much as [she] did.” There’s some genuine human interest in these anecdotes, at least for a fellow Middlemarch lover who (true story) began a long tradition of reading aloud to her own husband by bringing Middlemarch along on their honeymoon. (We gave up on this tradition round about the time Frankenstein got thrown across the room for its terrible prose…but that’s another story. Maybe I should pitch it to the New Yorker.) But there’s still not a lot of substance here for someone hoping to find those precious eight pages used to advance public appreciation for one of the greatest novelists in the English tradition. I’d have to be really interested in Mead–rather than George Eliot–to be happy to read so much about her. Or, alternatively, she’d have to use her personal experience of reading Middlemarch to take us to some place more universally revelatory or insightful.

That’s not what happens in “George Eliot and Me,” though. It doesn’t articulate and illustrate the genius of George Eliot, and neither does it use its autobiographical form to build to some personal revelation or to a larger intellectual debate about, say, whether it is a good thing or not to derive one’s moral lessons from literature (now that’s a very Victorian conversation!)–or how one might do so in a rich and complex enough way that the literary texture of the source is not sandpapered out in favor of bland platitudes. (Where is the moral challenge of George Eliot’s “celebration of the unremarkable” in Mead’s commentary? The village dance which concludes the essay oddly summons up the most conservative aspects of Eliot’s rural nostalgia–as if the happy peasants of Raveloe had nothing to answer for in Silas Marner’s long isolation, or Arthur Donnithorne’s birthday dance weren’t undermined by Hetty’s seduction and abandonment.) Instead, we wander off with Mead as she tries to track down the source of a quotation often attributed to George Eliot: “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” It is, indeed, surprising that despite the tenacity of the attribution, this line cannot be traced to any of Eliot’s works. Mead asks a lot of experts about it, including Rosemary Ashton and Rosemarie Bodenheimer (both of whom have written wonderfully about Eliot’s life and writing). Not only do they say they can’t find a source for it, they also, quite rightly, note that it doesn’t seem to fit with Eliot’s explicit moral philosophy, which makes rather a big deal about the way our choices have an indelible effect on our characters and futures. Mead even interviews the author of a self-help book who used the quotation as her title: “I was depressed for a few days, and then I remembered the quote.” Eventually Mead resigns herself: she can’t find a source for the quotation or conclusively prove Eliot never said it. “Like Lydgate,” she says, “I had aspired to make a link in the chain of discovery, and had failed.” Along with some interspersed biographical material, this quest plot takes up nearly three of the eight pages. It might have been worth the space if the investigation was “linked” to something significant. (Lydgate, after all, is hoping to find “the primitive tissue” of life.) I wonder, for instance, why this is quite such a popular quotation, why it seems to satisfy so many people as something George Eliot said. Does it bring her within a safer community of women–reassuring, nurturing–and make her more conventionally feminine than is easily done if we quote from Mead’s least-favorite of her novels, Romola? “Children may be strangled, but deeds never” doesn’t go very well on a greeting card. Or how about this, from Felix Holt: “It is not true that love makes all things easy: it makes us choose what is difficult.” Try selling that on a wall plaque.

It feels churlish, in a way, to be so critical of an essay that speaks so sincerely of its author’s admiration for one of my own favorite books. It’s a good thing to tell more people how great Middlemarch is. Mead and I both think that Austen is more popular because she’s easier on (and for) her readers. As Mead says, Eliot “surpassed her precursor” (but why does she go on to say that the reader “marvels at Jane Austen’s cleverness, but is astonished by George  Eliot’s intelligence”? Why “astonished”? I’m impressed–humbled–challenged–provoked by it, but not at all astonished). But the essay is a disappointment. It’s long (“verbose,” even), cluttered, and solipsistic, as if the greatest interest of George Eliot’s life and work really is that they have played a big part in Rebecca Mead’s life and work. At a time when it’s common to hear online writing decried for its lack of editorial oversight, rigor, and credibility, to see eight pages in one of the most prestigious magazines in the literary world used for something no better than this gives the lie to the claim that these supposed features of Old Media produce the best results. It’s not terrible–parts of it are even pretty good–but it’s certainly not great, and given its very prominent placement, it surely should be.

*The essay is called “George Eliot and Me” on the magazine cover, but “Middlemarch and Me” inside the magazine.

Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö: The Martin Beck Mysteries

Rohan Maitzen10 Comments

My education in Scandinavian crime fiction continues! After I expressed my doubts about Henning Mankell’s Faceless Killers, I received some very helpful advice in the comments thread. In particular, Litlove suggested the Wallander books participate in a peculiarly European mood of melancholia (about which, she rightly inferred, I am largely ignorant) and a literary tradition of what she, um, invitingly described as “ugly, grinding prose, empty, bleak, futile.” And Dorian, who added the nice term “effaced personality” to our conversation about how Wallander is characterized, noted that Mankell’s series has an important antecedent in the Martin Beck mysteries by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. If I had been reading Mankell solely for pleasure, I might not have felt obligated to do the extra work of adjusting my reading framework to take these contexts into account, even though in principle I agree that good reading requires situating the book appropriately. I was reading Mankell in part as a professional, though, so I felt I did need to try a little harder to understand what he was up to–and boy, am I glad I did, not just as a teacher/scholar but as a reader. Three books into the Martin Beck series, I am thoroughly enjoying them, and I’m already feeling as if I will read Mankell much better (more aptly, more appreciatively) when I turn to The Fifth Woman, which is waiting here on my desk.

Why am I liking the Sjöwall and Wahlöö books so much better than Faceless Killers? One likely answer is that I’ve already fine-tuned my expectations, so that the features they share with Mankell’s first Wallander novel are more familiar and comfortable. Among these I would include the bleak (grinding, empty, futile) atmosphere–including both the literal atmosphere of cold, wet, miserable winter (as Jonathan Franzen says in his introduction to The Laughing Policeman, the “weather inevitably sucks”) but also the moral and emotional atmosphere, which is grim in a resigned, routine way. There’s also the one-damn-thing-after-another plotting characteristic of a police procedural, where every lead has to be laboriously pursued, every interview methodically conducted. No snazzy locked-room mysteries, these, no death-by-icicle or orangutang, no brilliant ratiocination leading up to a triumphant revelation scene. In these books, crime is a sordid business, no matter which side of the law you are on. No wonder everyone drinks so much–or tries to (in the Beck books at least, the more you are looking forward to your aquavit, the more likely it is the phone will ring and tear you away from it).

To some extent, I would say too that the prose in the Sjöwall and Wahlöö books has the same somewhat clunky quality I objected to Faceless Killers. Those of us who know no Swedish (I’m guessing that covers all readers of this blog!) can’t know how far this is an effect of translation, of trying to capture the cadence of another language in English. There are some tics in the Beck books that do suggest that there’s something deliberate about it, something purposefully exotic, if you like. One small detail that stands out for me is the recurrent reference to ‘Martin Beck’ where I would expect the surname alone, e.g. “Martin Beck looked disbelievingly at Kollberg,” 200 pages in. That’s just the tiniest little bit jarring, as you read along; it lets you know you aren’t quite on your home turf. But more generally, I found Faceless Killers flat, whereas I am finding the Beck books dry–in a good way. They are almost as tersely declarative, but there’s a momentum to the language that I enjoy, and also there’s a wonderful streak of humor, sometimes sardonic, other times more flat-out comical (as with the two beat cops Kvant and Kristiansson–“Ask a policeman,” they helpfully tell a confused woman who asks them for directions).

I haven’t yet seen quite the scope of social criticism attributed to Sjöwall and Wahlöö in the prefaces provided to my editions–one by Mankell himself, another by Val McDermid, another, as I mentioned, by Franzen. Franzen calls the series “a ten-volume portrait of a corrupt modern society; Mankell says “the authors had a radical purpose in mind … to use crime and criminal investigations as a mirror of Swedish society.” I have seen enough, though, to believe that the critique already apparent accumulates over the remaining seven books–and especially in The Laughing Policeman (with its anti-Vietnam rallies and its complacently self-interested corporate villain) I can anticipate how it might proceed. Mankell writes that the authors never intended “to write crime stories as entertainment” and he points to Ed McBain as an inspiration for them, someone who showed how to use “crime novels to form the framework for stories containing social criticism.” McDermid highlights the difference between the Beck books and the “golden age” procedurals of the 1930s, set in a world in which “a bent cop is almost unthinkable; an incompetent one only a little less so.” I was actually surprised that none of these discussions mentioned the possible influence of hard-boiled detective novels: to be sure, one point of these is that their protagonist is not part of the official law enforcement system, but someone like Sam Spade moves precisely in a world of near-universal corruption (or, sometimes worse, incompetence) which very much includes the police. I mentioned the noir atmosphere of McBain’s Cop Hater, and I think there’s something of the same perspective–though illuminated by the flickering flourescent lights of bureaucracy, rather than the foggy fitfulness of street lights–in these bleak cop novels.

As for the cases, well, I didn’t like the graphic violence and sensational bursts of action in Faceless Killers. Two of the Beck novels I’ve read so far also turn on quite violent crimes, and particularly in Roseanna, the details are unrelentingly specific. Having read McBain’s comments about facing up to violence while still trying not to be “salacious” about it, I can see a similar principle at work in the Beck books, though I think the authors flirt with danger in the way they linger over the details of the sexual crimes and, especially, seem preoccupied with women’s sexual histories, or with women who are “too” sexually assertive or demanding. There are only rare cases of women who are something other than nagging/disappointed wives at home, or ‘whores’ shading into victims: here too, perhaps, some fruitful consideration might be given to the influence of hard-boiled novels, or perhaps this is just another reflection of the hyper-masculine world of the police. The standout exception is the woman police officer who helps entrap Roseanna’s murderer…but she too ultimately must play the vamp and then becomes a victim, only to be rescued. That the belatedness of the rescuers’ arrival is caused by the same kind of stupid screw-ups that typify the world of the novels more generally adds only a little painful irony to an exploitive situation.

These remain first impressions, but I feel like I’m making progress. I’ve talked fairly often about blogging as a way of thinking in public; it’s also, wonderfully, a way of learning in public. Thanks for your help so far–feel free to  keep correcting and supplementing my attempts to come to terms with this material!

3 Quarks Daily Arts and Literature Blogging Prize

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

The fine site 3 Quarks Daily is once again running its Arts and Literature blogging contest, to be judged this year by blogger, essayist, novelist, and teacher Laila Lalami. I think these contests are a great way to draw attention to the engaged, passionate, articulate writing to be found in blogs: contrary to the whingeing of the nattering naysayers, I think there’s far more to celebrate than to lament in the wonderfully open, curious, diverse and generous conversation about books that the internet has enabled. I was truly honored to be among the finalists in last year’s competition, judged by Robert Pinsky, for my review of Daniel Mendelsohn’s remarkable book The Lost (yes, there’s some irony there, as he seems to be the Naysayer-in-Chief). I encourage everyone to think about posts they think represent the best of arts and literature blogging (whether their own or someone else’s), to post a nomination at 3QD, and then to spend some time browsing through the other nominations, which I’m sure will be full of treasures.

May Sarton, The Education of Harriet Hatfield

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

The Education of Harriet Hatfield is an awkward novel, struggling–or so it seemed to me–to maintain a difficult equilibrium between the human stories it tells and the didactic message those stories are designed to convey. The awkwardness is palpable, I think, because Sarton doesn’t trust her readers enough to infer her message from the stories, but instead makes it an insistently explicit part of her characters’ conversations, or her narrator’s commentary. The characters, especially Harriet herself, have the same distinctive individuality that marked the people in Sarton’s The Small Room, and the story itself is engaging and rich with thematic and political potential. Harriet, who has lived for many years with the somewhat overpowering Vicky, decides after Vicky’s death to use her inheritance to open a woman’s bookstore in the Boston neighborhood of Somerville. She has no business experience and no specific agenda except that she hopes the store will become a gathering place for women of all kinds as well as a repository of books by, for, or about women. What she hasn’t anticipated is that opening the store will also open up her life, both by challenging her to rethink her own values and relationships, and by exposing her–and those values and relationships–to the sometimes hostile scrutiny of her new community. Harriet realizes belatedly that her economically privileged life with Vicky has sheltered her in many ways, but particularly from any pressure to define or defend their relationship. She thinks of it in the context of the “Boston marriage,” shying away from the label “lesbian” (“That word always makes me wince,” she remarks); she feels strongly about women’s need to express themselves and take strength from each other, but she does not consider herself a feminst. But her naivete about herself and her store is immediately challenged, by supporters who applaud her venture for being something she never quite imagined it as, and by opponents who target her with graffiti, hate mail, and, eventually, vandalism and violence. “Dear manager or whoever you are,” reads the letter that first forces her to see herself through the eyes of hate:

This was a clean blue collar neighborhood until you and your ilk arrived. Now it is full of filthy gay men and lesbians. This is a warning. We do not want your obscene bookstore and we will do everything we can to get you out.

Harriet is a reluctant and unlikely revolutionary. But she comes to see her very conventionality as her strength: she is seen by all around her as a “lady,” and she decides that by coming out she can counter stereotypes and provide what she thinks of as one version of an “exemplary life,” an example to prove the point that gays and lesbians are people too. If that conclusion sounds a bit shallow or trite, I fear that impression is fair to the novel, which is preoccupied with showing examples of gays and lesbians who are Perfectly Nice People living Unobjectionable Lives despite being misunderstood, insulted, or actively discriminated against. Some subtlety is in play because to some extent it is Harriet herself who is gradually enlightened, losing her anxiety about labels, realizing that the privacy she and Vicky valued can also be seen as avoidance, perhaps even a form of repression or denial–not sexually, but politically. It’s a shock to her when an interview with her about the threats against her and her shop appears under the large headline “Lesbian Bookseller in Somerville Threatened,” but by the novel’s end she has embraced the changes this involuntary exposure brings to her life. ‘It has been in some ways excruciating,’ she tells the private detective finally called in to find out who is behind the attacks;

‘but I have to admit that it is giving me an education I had missed. It has forced me to be honest about myself. That is a salutary thing. I can identify for the first time with any persecuted minority and’–here I can’t help laughing–‘I know it is absurd, but I am proud of being in the front line. Because, you see, I am safer than most gay people are. By that I mean I am more or less self-supporting and no one else, except Patapouf [her dog] has been intimately involved. So I can dare without fear of hurting.’

The story of Harriet’s education is a good one in many ways, and the earnest intentions behind the novel’s broader agenda are unobjectionable–but those who need the lesson it teaches are, surely, hardly likely to pick up the novel, which is perhaps why I started to find its preachier moments so tedious, even though the individual stories that are woven in with Harriet’s have plenty of intrinsic interest and are often deftly indicated, like the story of Martha, the unhappy wife who longs to be an artist and paints uncomfortable dark pictures of trees with encroaching roots. I liked the bookstore stuff the bes. Like many bookish people, I have totally inaccurate but cherished fantasies about what it must be like to run an independent bookstore (yes, this despite the tales I’ve heard from actual bookstore owners like Colleen of Bookphilia!). I would love to have a store like Harriet’s nearby, where tea is served in the late afternoon and all kinds of interesting women hang around and find support and friendship. Sarton is honest enough to make it clear that Harriet’s business may never make money, that it’s only her inheritance that enables her to embark on this adventure. Knowing that Sarton and Carolyn Heilbrun were friends, I was amused to see Harriet recommending the Amanda Cross mysteries to a customer. Also, recalling Heilbrun’s chapter on Sarton in The Last Gift of Time, I remembered her saying that Sarton hated criticism and resisted editorial advice. The Education of Harriet Hatfield is a book that might have benefited from some advice, particularly if it had led Sarton to let Harriet go through her internal and political transformations without talking about them so much and so laboriously.