Month: October 2013

Book Club: Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

talented-mr-ripleyMy local book club met Monday night to discuss The Talented Mr. Ripley. We were all newcomers to Highsmith, and though not everyone exactly enjoyed reading the novel (I definitely did), I think we were all intrigued and impressed by it — or perhaps I should say by her, and the quietly insidious way she got us on Tom’s side, even to the point that we would catch ourselves rooting for him at the worst possible moments.

How exactly does Highsmith pull this off? It’s certainly important that the novel keeps very closely to Tom’s point of view, but that doesn’t make it inevitable that we will fall into sharing his point of view: even with first-person narration, after all, we can learn to distance ourselves (think of the gap that opens up between us and, say, Stevens in The Remains of the Day, to pick just one of many possible examples). And it’s not that Highsmith plays any tricks on us with Tom. There’s no ambiguity about his actions; even the most horrific ones, which risk alienating us completely, are related with the same cool, remorseless detail as the scenery:

Tom glanced at the land. San Remo was a blur of chalky white and pink. He picked up the oar, as casually as if he were playing with it between his knees, and when Dickie was shoving his trousers down [to go swimming], Tom lifted the oar and came down with it on the top of Dickie’s head.

“Hey!” Dickie yelled, scowling, sliding half off the wooden seat. His pale brows lifted in groggy surprise.

Tom stood up and brought the oar down again, sharply, all his strength released like the snap of a rubber band.

There’s an element of horror, but there’s an equally strong feeling of impatience: Die already, Dickie! And why is it so hard to get you overboard? Much later, when Marge finds Dickie’s rings, don’t we wait with Tom to learn her fate, not so much with dread as with anticipation? To be sure, he’s not looking forward to “beating her senseless with his shoe heel,” but just as “his stories were good because he imagined them intensely, so intensely that he came to believe them,” this story is good because somehow we come to believe in Tom as our guy — the guy we’re interested in and thus, however perversely, rooting for.

How can this happen, though? Is he like Becky Sharp or Shakespeare’s Richard III — an anti-hero we appreciate because at least he’s active? It’s true that Tom is more interesting than any of the other characters. It’s partly that he’s busy, and it’s suspenseful wondering what he’ll come up with next and how he’ll get away with it. His constant spinning of new stories, duly adjusted to fit the new facts in evidence, is actually quite the feat; it’s remarkable that he manages to keep all the details straight. I wonder if some of the readerly pleasure the novel offers, as well as our investment in Tom himself, doesn’t come from his creativity, which is itself quite novelistic. There’s also not much about the other characters — especially his victims — to make us really care what happens to them. It’s an old trick of the mystery novelist to offer up an unsympathetic corpse, to minimize the tragedy and maximize the suspects — but we are still supposed to root for the detective, not the murderer, whereas here we have a decentered crime novel, one in which there’s no mystery, no anchoring moral weight from the detective or the police — who here are just risks and obstacles in Tom’s plots.

And Tom himself is not completely despicable. Indeed, for a sociopathic killer, he’s really quite an ordinary guy, even kind of a sad one. Is it because it’s possible to feel sorry for Tom that it’s hard to completely condemn him? He seems a kind of Everyman. He’s a dreamer. He wants such simple things: acceptance, friendship, a place to belong, a better life. Oh, and not to be himself. Is that so strange? Who hasn’t wanted to be someone more successful or interesting? It’s so much better being Dickie than Tom, or so he thinks:

He hated becoming Tom Ripley again, hated being nobody, hated putting on his old set of habits again, and feeling that people looked down on him and were bored with him unless he put on an act for them . . . He hated going back to himself as he would have hated putting on a shabby suit of clothes, a grease-spotted, unpressed suit of clothes that had not been very good even when it was new.

The path he’s chosen, too, isn’t an easy one: “it was a lonely game he was playing.” Secrets and lies — and Tom has so many, tells so many — isolate us from each other.

If only that were the wholesome lesson of The Talented Mr. Ripley: that it’s better to be ourselves and genuine than to play a part (OK, steal an identity) and be alone (better Tom Ripley dissatisfied than Dickie clobbered and dead?). But there’s no such comforting conclusion to Tom’s adventures. Instead, he walks away with “Dickie’s money and his freedom.” Is that the point, that there’s no harm in doing as he has done — and there might even be profit in it? No again, for even Tom realizes that “he’s going to see policemen waiting for him on every pier.” That’s a relief, anyway.

This Week In My Classes: Fictions of Development – Brontë, Dickens, and P. D. James

Rohan Maitzen8 Comments

oxford jane eyreWe had our last class on Jane Eyre in 19th-Century Fiction on Monday. Reflecting on my own diminishing enthusiasm for the novel, I’ve been thinking that one of my problems is not only over-familiarity but also difficulty seeing the novel anymore — it just doesn’t rise fresh from the page anymore but comes trailing clouds of interpretation. Why is this any different from any other novels I assign? I’m not sure! But somehow Jane Eyre just feels blurry to me now rather than sharp and exhilarating. I’m not saying I couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for it, especially during class discussion or while talking through essay ideas with students. And I’m certainly not saying I don’t think it’s a great and important novel. I just think it’s time to put it on hiatus from my syllabus for a bit. Maybe next time around I should take the plunge and assign Wuthering Heights instead. I’ve subbed in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall a few times, and it is one of my very favourites to read and to teach, but I’ve never actually taught Wuthering Heights, mostly because I have never liked it. And really, what kind of excuse is that?

Next up for us in this class is David Copperfield. This is all going to be quite fresh, as I come into it with no stash of pre-existing teaching materials or lecture notes. I’ve been mapping out a tentative set of topics for each of our eight (eight!) class meetings but I also want to defer some planning until I see how discussion goes. Also, given the luxury of so many sessions (it takes time, after all, to read 855 pages) I want to use more class time for group discussion and perhaps some collaborative exercises, in addition to the usual mix of call-and-response ‘lecture’ time. Today I did lecture for most of the time, setting up some context for Dickens himself and also some frameworks I hope will be helpful as they read on. One thing I wanted to address up front, for example, was the question of “excess.” I quoted that bit by Nick Hornby about the current preoccupation with “spare” writing and made some suggestions about what ethos is served by an aesthetic of abundance, from a principle of social inclusivity to an anti-utilitarian joy in the sheer possibilities of language and story-telling.* I also usually start a big novel like this with some suggestions about information management: the idea that Dickens’s novels are often structured as a ‘theme and variations,’ for instance. Motifs that get started right away in David Copperfield include bad husbands and child wives, education, parenting, and childhood: on Monday we’ll have a less structured discussion just collecting lots of examples under some of these headings to get a preliminary sense of what pattern emerges, and we’ll spend time, too, just getting to know the people. I’ll probably leave careful discussion of David’s narration until a bit later, but we’ve worked on retrospective narration as an important feature of Jane Eyre, so we should be ready to think about its effects here too. Oh, how I hope they get some pleasure out of the novel! I urged them today to let themselves have fun with it, which means, among other things, making sure to manage their time well enough that they aren’t reading it in such a rush that its length is just frustrating.

unsuitableIn Mystery and Detective Fiction we are also working on a story about growing up, P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. One of the things I usually emphasize when teaching this novel is the extent to which James is self-consciously working less in the tradition of the sensation or crime novel than of the domestic realists of the 19th-century. She cites Austen in particular as an influence, along with Trollope and George Eliot. Her interest in moral questions is really clear in this novel, which is one of the darkest in this course — not because the crime is necessarily the most violent (though I wonder how exactly we would measure that!) but because, as Cordelia reflects, it comes from something “stronger than wickedness, cruelty or expedience. Evil.” “Evil” is a strong word, and a powerfully moral one. It also has theological connotations, but it’s a strictly, and shockingly, human form of evil that plans and executes Mark Callender’s horrible death. Monday, when everyone should have read to the end, we’ll focus on the confrontation between Cordelia and the murderer, which continues a very Victorian theme of love countering calculation — the language of the killer is explicitly utilitarian, though in the narrowest sense of that philosophy. We’ve been talking about Cordelia’s youth and what will be required for her to grow up into a successful private investigator: will she have to outgrow things like compassion, give up getting personally involved, in order to become professional? Does a P.I. have to be tough? I find James’s exploration of this problem (an ongoing one for female private investigators especially) subtle and interesting. Unsuitable Job is one of my favourite books on the class list — but it is typically the least popular one (well, next to The Moonstone) on class evaluations. I might swap it out next year for something new, not because I don’t think it works well in the course but because of all the books assigned it’s probably the least integral to the overall history of the genre we trace out over the term. If I took it out, maybe I could also take out Knots and Crosses and then replace the two together with a longer, more complex Rebus novel. On the other hand, there is a strong preference among students in this class for shorter books, so that might be risky. (Why am I already thinking about next year? Because we’ve already had to work out our offerings, which means the call for class descriptions and at least tentative reading lists can’t be far away.)

*As an aside, I asked if they had heard of Nick Hornby and they didn’t recognize him at all until I linked his name to a couple of film adaptations of his books. I seem to draw blanks all the time now when I try to make connections from our readings to other books — in class but also one on one with students. This has me wondering, since a lot of my references are not (I don’t think) to particularly obscure writers: what are they reading? Perhaps (as they often say) they don’t have time to read outside of class, but I don’t get the impression that they are much engaged with books in kind of a general way, or with the ‘book world’ reflected through reviews or prizes — much less blogs. This is only a very cursory impression, of course, but it has me thinking about how we could do more as a department to connect what we do with what goes on with books elsewhere, which is of course the ongoing motivation of this blog!

“As if she were a governess in a book”: Elizabeth Taylor, Palladian

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palladian2I can’t take any credit for interpreting Elizabeth Taylor’s strange, gloomily elegant Palladian as a pastiche of Austen and Brontë. Not only does the back cover of my Virago edition baldly state that the novel “examines the realities of life for a latter-day Jane Eyre” and explicitly compare Taylor’s method here to Austen’s in Northanger Abbey, but the main character is named “Cassandra Dashwood” and criticizes her own flustered greeting to her new employer on the grounds that “Jane Eyre had answered up better than that to her Mr. Rochester.” Subtlety about its intertextuality, in other words, is not the most striking feature of Palladian … and yet what do we really know about the novel once we’ve identified those obvious connections? I’m not sure that thinking of it as a twist on the “governess novel” — or on the romance, or the gothic, plot — helps me out very much, because we still need to figure out to what ends Taylor has repurposed such familiar materials.

Having just worked through Jane Eyre with my 19th-Century Fiction class, I should be primed to consider what Taylor is up to. There’s not actually much that’s the same besides the bare outline: unprepossessing orphan accepts governess position at remote, slightly creepy country house, falls in love, endures trauma that threatens happy resolution, ends up safely married. Cassandra couldn’t be less like passionate, rebellious, creative, principled Jane, for one thing: while I lament the number of times my students (despite explicit instructions not to use the word!) called Jane “relatable,” I agree that it’s hard not to root for her — even as her novel (through her own retrospective narration) cautions us not to champion her uncritically. Cassandra, on the other hand, is a limp wanna-be, moping and hoping to live out a more interesting destiny, like a good fictional heroine. “He will do to fall in love with,” she thinks on meeting Marion Vanbrugh; “Meeting him,” she reflects later, “had merely confirmed her intention, made possible what she had hoped.” Jane is a fighter; she spends her book learning what she values most and how to stand up for it. Cassandra spends her book … hmm. Well, she spends it being in it, anyway, but that’s about as much as can be said for her.

Marion is an equally pallid recreation of Mr. Rochester: reclusive, scholarly, haunted not by a raging mad wife in his attic but by memories of his beautiful first wife, Violet. Why does he fall in love with Cassandra? Is that even what happens? Like Cassandra, he seems compelled by his implicit awareness of how their story must turn out. There’s no spark, no passion. Like Jane and Rochester, they kiss as a storm thunders, but while Brontë’s lightning, splitting the great chestnut tree, reflects the dangerous immensity of their love, it just seems ironic that nature surrounds limp Marion and passive Cassandra with such tumult:

Still holding the candles high, he drew her closer to him and kissed her. She received his kiss, but did not return it, for she did not know how, nor did it occur to her, so netted up in bliss was she, so content to be held by him not stirring, heedless of the next day and the next minute.

In their world, it seems that the most they can hope for is to go through the motions.

And even that isn’t easy, partly because they aren’t the only people there, and everyone else gets in their way somehow. Taylor populates her desolate manor with an assortment of characters, all in their own ways damaged or grieving, their paths day-to-day criss-crossing in an uneven pattern of tension and disappointment: Tom, holding the sins and regrets of his past at bay with drink; Margaret, awaiting the birth of her child, wandering the musty hallways hungry, always hungry; their fretful mother Tinty, always “full of little worries”; Nanny, grimly hanging on to her position in the family; little Sophy, the unknowing crux of the family’s unhappy plot; Mrs. Veal at the pub, pathetically needy for Tom’s attention and affection, resentfully in awe of the family at the ‘Big House.’ Only Margaret, a doctor, has any sense of purpose in her life; the rest of them seem cut off, somehow, not just literally by their isolated setting but mentally, from a world in which they can’t imagine, or find, direction or comfort. While the ending of Jane Eyre brings Jane to the end of her journey of self-discovery, nobody in Palladian gets anywhere. When Cassandra returns to the manor as its mistress, it is more decrepit than it was before.

It’s not an arch or satirical rewriting of those canonical stories: it is too fraught and specific for that. Paul Bailey’s introduction proposes that Taylor sets up the literary homage deliberately to collide with “that other, larger world out there, in which hurt and humiliation take their daily toll.” But he concludes that the result is “a fairy-story of sorts, with a happy ending for only two of its participants.” I’m not convinced, because I don’t believe in their happiness: it seems so baseless, so formulaic, so unearned. The prospect of the book seems more desolate to me even than that limited a fairy-story. When Cassandra arrives at Cropthorpe Manor, she’s warned to stay away from the greenhouse, as the glass panes have become precarious. Near the end of the novel, it has collapsed:

Like a cataract gathering speed, the sheets of cracked and splintered glass had come down a night or two ago, started by some small thing, something never to be known, a twig falling, an owl flying, or merely the last imperceptible change of quantity, a foreshadowing of what might happen to the house itself, how, after a long process of decay, one day it would suddenly not be a house any more.

Marion and Cassandra, married, go out to survey the wreckage and consider repairs: could this be an image of the future, a symbol of renewed possibilities? Why should we be so optimistic? “Marion wonders what can be done with it,” says Tinty, watching from the house. “He will never get beyond wondering,” replies Tom.

No, the pleasures of Palladian are not emotional, or not in an uplifting way. There are no romantic gratifications, beyond the artificial ones of seeing the cliché carried to its conclusion. There’s no social analysis or critique that I can discern — unless you count the general presentation of modern life as a malaise, a blight. What’s left? Literary pleasures, of course, or perhaps I should call them aesthetic ones. Palladian is only Taylor’s second novel (and it’s only the fourth of hers that I’ve read), and it’s just as distinctive as the others for its direct yet resonant sentences. They carry a moment, a mood, a mind, with few overt flourishes but many interesting choices, so that you read them once and then look again, to be sure, or to appreciate.  She’s particularly good at laying out how what seems simple — love, marriage — is actually unbearably complicated:

His head felt as if someone were doing knitting in it. Nothing was simple. He believed that he loved Cassandra tenderly; but marriage is not simple. It brought with it, Nanny had reminded him, so many complications which were beyond his energies. Tinty stood before him, and Tom, Nanny with her talk of refrigerators and change, the thought of beginning a new life in that fast-crumbling house, of leaving a smouldering and rank corner of earth to sons, perhaps, and then engaging servants, spending money, laying down wine, planting and clearing. In the library last night, no one, nothing, had stood between him and Cassandra. Now so much interposed. She was a child merely, to be led into so dark, so lonely, a wilderness as his heart. For her, so much unravelling of people, so much sorting out of possessions would have to be done. He might draw her to him and ease the passion which lay under her silence, lead her into the circle of ice which encompassed him: but the obstacles were still outside, where the world was, and even within him, there was Violet.

This Week In My Classes: Hunkering Down!

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

Ah, the holiday weekend, with its leisure reading! It’s just a fond memory right now … Well, I exaggerate slightly, as I’ve certainly had more hectic terms than this one (this time last year, just for instance, I was teaching three courses, including one entirely new one), but I have been pretty busy with class preparation, grading, and meetings in the last couple of days, and so far I haven’t really focused on another fun book to read in the interstices.

The-Big-SleepToday I finished marking the 75 midterms for my Mystery & Detective Fiction course (which means, in case any students are reading this, that the grades should be checked and posted to Blackboard tomorrow afternoon). In class, we’ve just started working through The Big Sleep. It’s my first time teaching it, after going endless rounds with The Maltese Falcon. I’ve been thinking about making this switch for years but it took me a while to get over my initial aversion to The Big Sleep (soon after that 2009 post, however, I did add The Hound of the Baskervilles to the syllabus, where I have enjoyed it ever since). There are a few things I already miss about Hammett, but I think Chandler is going to give us plenty to talk about, and now that I have the plot more or less sorted out and some interpretive threads to follow, I am relaxing enough into the book that I almost like it a little bit! (Hard-boiled fiction is never going to be my favourite thing, but note to David Gilmour: teaching outside of your comfort zone is good for the brain as well as the character…) Yesterday was mostly warm-up stuff, with background on hard-boiled detection, Black Mask, “The Simple Art of Murder,” and so on. Then we started in with some consideration of the title: how does the gently euphemistic The Big Sleep suit the novel in a way that, say, Stone Cold Dead would not? (“Why this, not that?” is one of my favourite conversation starters for class discussion.) We had time for a few preliminary comments on Marlowe and that’s where we’ll pick up tomorrow: what kind of knight-errant is he, what kind of candidates for his version of chivalry are the Sternwoods, what’s the world like that he moves in, what hope does a lone hero — however untarnished and unafraid — have against the kinds of crime and corruption he’s up against? I would like to be able to talk about Spenser, but there’s just no room for Robert B. Parker on this syllabus: if I were ever to propose a 4th-year seminar on this subgenre, it would be to have an excuse to assign him. Actually, a course like that would be a great complement to the one I already offer on Women & Detective Fiction (coming up next term). Hmmm…something to think about. It wouldn’t play to my own tastes the way the other seminar does (oh, how I’m looking forward to reading Gaudy Night again) — but given how hard it sometimes is to be scholarly and objective about books I really love, that might not be a bad thing.

In 19thC Fiction we’re done with Waverley (to everyone’s relief, I think) and on to Jane Eyre, which is always a much easier sell. I’m not as passionate about Jane Eyre as I once was. It’s partly that I’ve gone through it so often (though reiteration doesn’t seem to diminish my enthusiasm for Middlemarch), but this time I’m also finding its relentlessly high emotional pitch tiring and somewhat artless (can I say that? is it heresy, for a Victorianist?). And yet I suppose that’s kind of the point (one point, anyway) of the novel itself — that our passions need to be checked by reason, that rage (however justified) quickly becomes self-destructive. I find myself coaching my students in quite the opposite way than I was doing with Waverley: instead of saying ‘try to throw yourself into it more,’ I’m saying ‘be careful about identifying with Jane too quickly or easily.’ She gives us lots of clues that she herself has grown up since she was thrown into the Red Room for fighting back against John Reed’s oppression. My favourite parts of the novel are the sparring matches she has with Rochester: so much of their dialogue is just so unexpected. By tomorrow everyone should have read through to Jane’s discovery of her inheritance and her relationship to St. John and his sisters: I want to start with some discussion about why she doesn’t marry Rochester (not the plot reasons, of course, but the reasons that marrying him at that point would be risky even if he weren’t already married) — that means looking at the shopping spree, probably, and talking more about Bertha and whether she’s a cautionary tale for Jane, an ally of some kind, or an antagonist. Then we can consider what Jane gains at Marsh End, as well as what risks she faces there, too, to her personal development.

oxford jane eyreI’m feeling a bit mad at myself for not learning the lessons of last term about the assignment sequence I’m using in 19th-Century Fiction. I’m doing reading journals again, and I’m also repeating the strategy of allowing students to choose which of our first novels to write their short essay on. Last time I worried that the journal entries were not well distributed across the term, and I’m seeing the exact same pattern this year — I didn’t change the instructions and rules because the degree of micromanagement required to key credit to specific stages of the reading seemed too much, but I’m not sure I can justify (to myself) doing the same thing again, given what actually happens (as opposed to what I’d like to happen). It’s a process-vs.-product problem again: mostly, they want credit for doing the journals, not the benefit the journals could be to their learning experience. (As always, there are exceptions who are absolutely making the most of the journals.) This term, I’m also seeing really uneven distribution in the essays: fully a third of the class wrote on Persuasion, nobody at all on Waverley, and it looks like the remaining two thirds are planning to write on Jane Eyre, which means nobody is writing on David Copperfield. (They all have to write ‘mini-midterms’ on each novel, though, and then a final exam with an essay question on our last book, North and South.) I want them to write on the books that interest and motivate them, but one effect of this uneven selection is to unbalance my workload. Before I design next year’s 19th-C novels class, I’ll revisit the great coercion conundrum. Maybe I’ll do a different assignment sequence altogether — though at this point I don’t think I can go back to the letter exchanges that I used to like so much. They had just become too much of a logistical nightmare!

But it’s too soon to fret about 2014-15 when 2013-14 isn’t even half over yet.

Holiday Reading

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving! It is a beautifully crisp sunny fall weekend here: I treated myself to an amble through the Public Gardens on Saturday, where the gold-tinged foliage provided a lovely backdrop for the remaining bright flowers. The Gardens are my favourite spot in the city, a perfect place for “a green thought in a green shade.”

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For one reason or another, I was feeling pretty grim by the end of last week, so I decided to treat the holiday weekend like actual time off from my day job. This means that although today I have had to turn my attention back to reading for work (The Big Sleep and Jane Eyre are up next week), I managed to get through two books just for fun. They are polar opposites, too, which made it just that much more entertaining to read them one after another.

venetiaThe first was Georgette Heyer’s Venetia, which a number of Heyer fans I know have identified as one of their favorites. It also came up in a discussion here in the summer about whether Heyer’s books ever get sexy, as opposed to romantic. I thoroughly enjoyed Venetia: it is brisk and witty, which is typical, but also full of lines of poetry (which is not quite so typical). It also has a more adult heroine,  and it does have more of that frisson that I was wondering about: “She had not enjoyed being so ruthlessly handled,” Venetia reflects after the first, quite improper, kiss,

but for one crazy instant she had known an impulse to respond, and through the haze of her own wrath she had caught a glimpse of what life might be. . . . if Edward [her dull suitor!] had ever kissed her thus! The thought drew a smile from her, for the vision of Edward swept out of his rigid propriety was improbable to the point of absurdity. Edward was sternly master of his passions; she wondered, for the first time, if these were very strong, or whether he was, in fact, rather cold-blooded.

Meeting her morally problematic mother, Venetia is struck by her lacy lingerie:

It was not at all the sort of garment one would have expected one’s mama to wear, for it was as improper as it was pretty. Venetia wondered whether Damerel would like the sight of his bride in just such a transparent cloud of gauze, and was strongly of the opinion that he would like it very much.

Well! Hardly the ruminations I’m used to from a Heyer heroine! And much later, when the usual convolutions of the plot have been managed, she “melts” into her rakish lover’s arms:

He held her in a crushing embrace, fiercely kissing her, uttering disjointedly: ‘My love — my heart — oh, my dear delight! It is you!’

It was a bit of a relief to be able to enjoy the courtship plot without any shadow of concern that the heroine seemed just a bit too young and naive to play her part in it. But it was Venetia’s smart independence that made the book particularly delightful for me: she doesn’t appreciate anyone making decisions or speaking for her, and she doesn’t hesitate to do what she thinks is best to orchestrate the outcome she desires.

brokenMy other book was Tana French’s Broken Harbour. It seems odd to call it ‘fun,’ as it is just as dark and intense and frightening as the other books in her Dublin Murder Squad series. It’s also just as well and artfully written, with just as convincing and distinct a narrator and just as complex and psychologically fraught a plot. By the end, though, I found I was actually a little weary of the melodrama and the self-consciously brooding interiority, the heavy-handed revelations and insistent reminders of just how much the case resonated with (and screwed up) the detective. Rattling off my first impressions on GoodReads, I found myself wondering if my problem is related to the subgenre of crime fiction French is working in: I don’t usually read suspense novels or psychological thrillers, and Broken Harbour is as much of that kind as it is a detective  novel or police procedural. I found myself eventually skimming a bit through the confessions and backstories just to find out what had actually happened and what would come of it. This is my way of saying “it’s not you, it’s me,” I suppose! But the novel did seem too long (not unlike some of Elizabeth George’s more recent ones). There is an awful lot French does brilliantly though: setting, in particular, and the theme of people becoming desperate as they try to hang on to their dreams, or to reach the futures they yearn for — at whatever cost, it often turns out. French is definitely the best new crime writer I’ve tried in a long time — so thanks especially to Dorian for bringing her to my attention!

And now it’s back to work, though I will pick out something to read in the interstices. My book club has chosen The Talented Mr. Ripley for our next meeting, so it might be that, though I also recently picked up Beautiful Ruins (which looked like it might be refreshingly different).

What P. D. James Talks About When She Talks About Detective Fiction*

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

pdjamestalkingaboutI finally picked up P. D. James’s Talking About Detective Fiction, which I’ve been mildly interested in reading ever since it came out in 2009. I say ‘mildly’ because I’ve read all of James’s novels (some of them multiple times) as well as her autobiography and numerous interviews with her, not to mention essays, critical articles, and reviews about her work. I’ve also read quite a bit of historical and critical material on detective fiction more generally. So I didn’t expect any revelations from this little volume.

And there really aren’t any, although (because after all, James is both sharp and experienced!) her potted history of the genre is enriched by some interesting digressions on issues or writers of particular interest to her. She opens with a disclaimer — that she has “no wish to add to, and less to emulate, the many distinguished studies of the last two centuries,” aiming only at a “short personal account.” I actually wished her account had been more personal, as the survey material was so very familiar to me, whereas her commentary on, say, Ngaio Marsh, was more idiosyncratic and thus more thought-provoking:

Reading the best of Ngaio Marsh, I feel that there was always a dichotomy between her talent and the genre she chose. So why did she pursue it with such regularity, producing thirty-two novels in forty-eight years? . . . Marsh was a deeply reserved, indeed in some respects a private person, and she may well have felt that to extend the scope of her talent would be to betray aspects of her personality which she profoundly wished to remain secret.

 Her chapter on “four formidable women” of the Golden Age was in fact one of the most interesting parts of the book for me, along with her remark – made quite in passing – that if she’d begun her own series today “it is likely that I would choose a woman [detective]” as the main character. I find James somewhat evasive (here and elsewhere) on the gender politics of crime fiction. She says very little here about the woman detective she did create, Cordelia Gray (I think the only explicit reference to An Unsuitable Job for a Woman is in her discussion of setting), but I think it is widely agreed that in the second Cordelia Gray book she backed away from the feminist potential of the first, making Cordelia a much more conventional character and also much less effectual as an investigator. In the context of Kate Miskin, James has talked about the Met being a “very masculine organization,” though, and about the different experience women have of policing than men. In her chapter on the “four formidable women,” she emphasizes their work as “social history,” but also what they tell us of “the status of women in the years between the wars.” Then about Sara Paretsky (whom she calls “the most remarkable of the moderns”) she says,

No other female crime writer has so powerfully and effectively combined a well-crafted detective story with the novel of social realism and protest.

To me, James seems tempted towards a more explicitly feminist approach, but her Dalgleish novels, rich as they are as examples of social (and especially moral) exploration, have no air of “social protest.” It’s fun to imagine what kind of books — what kind of female protagonist — she would have given us if she had, as she imagines, started writing today!

But Talking About Detective Fiction is not the place to look for sustained analysis of either feminism and detection in general or of gender issues in James’s novels — or, indeed, of any aspect of detective fiction. Overall, the book is just an amiably brisk tour of the genre, and not even a very thorough one, as it spends a lot of its time on Golden Age figures, a bit on the hard-boiled turn, but none explicitly on, say, the police procedural (the subgenre to which most of James’s own novels belong). The discussion of recent developments in the genre has a haphazard quality because James draws her examples only from the writers she happens to have read –she makes the disarmingly honest comment that “new novels are being reviewed with respect, many of them by names unfamiliar to me.”

Still, if you didn’t know anything about detective fiction beyond the examples you yourself happened to have read, this would be a fine place to start, and it would give you lots of leads to follow up for further reading. (She completely convinced me that one Father Brown story is not enough.) And I admit that the absence of surprises or revelations was actually reassuring for me: it means I’m probably doing a decent job sorting things out for my Mystery & Detective Fiction class. As it happens, it turns out I’ve actually been using an excerpt from the book as the epigraph for my syllabus for many years — because I transcribed it from a lecture James gave in 1995 at the Smithsonian (once available online):

In his book Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster writes,

‘The king died, and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot. . . . ‘The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king.’ This is a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development.

To that I would add, ‘Everyone thought that the queen had died of grief until they discovered the puncture mark in her throat.’ That is a murder mystery, and it too is capable of high development.

*I feel as if I should apologize for reworking this tired titling trope. That the book really is called Talking About Detective Fiction made the temptation irresistible, but I promise not to do it again. Twice is enough! And, as my penance for being so unimaginative, I also promise never to title a post with any variation on the “Keep Calm and Carry On” meme either — fair enough?

“Good novels, nothing else”: Laurence Cossé, A Novel Bookstore

Rohan Maitzen11 Comments

A_Novel_BookstoreWhat if Jonathan Franzen opened a bookstore, called it “The Good Novel” and refused to carry any of Jennifer Weiner’s books — not to mention Dan Brown’s, Tom Clancy’s, Jodi Picoult’s, or E. L. James’s?

It’s only too easy to imagine the brouhaha that would ensue, with cries of “excellence!” on one side and “elitism!” on the other, with one side proclaiming itself literary purists trying to break the cycle of commercialism that’s leading to the decline of Great Literature while the other side set itself up as democratic champions of the common reader, their store (call it “For Every Taste” ) selling pleasure rather than High Art. Who would be right? Which side would you be on? And, perhaps most to the point, where would you shop?

This is the basic premise of Laurence Cossé’s A Novel Bookstore, though the characters who establish “The Good Novel” bookstore are not set up as smug Franzen-style curmudgeons but as passionate idealists. When they come under attack for their governing principles, their patron issues a stirring defense:

For as long as literature has existed, suffering, joy, horror, grace, and everything that is great in humankind has produced great novels. These exceptional books are often not very well known, and are in constant danger of being forgotten, and in today’s world, where the number of books being published is considerable, the power of marketing and the cynicism of businesses have joined forces to keep those extraordinary books indistinguishable from millions of insignificant, not to say pointless books.

But those masterful novels are life-giving. They enchant us. They help us to live. They teach us. It has become necessary to come to their defense and promote them relentlessly, because it is an illusion to think that they have the power to radiate all by themselves. That alone is our ambition. . . .

We have no time to waste on insignificant books, hollow books, books that are here to please.

We have no time for those sloppy, hurried books of the ‘Go on, I need it for July, and in September we’ll give you a proper launch and sell one hundred thousand copies, it’s in the bag’ variety. . . .

We want splendid books books that immerse us in the splendor of reality and keep us there; books that prove to us that love is at work in the world next to evil, right up against it, at times indistinctly, and that it will always be, just the way that suffering will always ravage hearts. We want good novels.

Stirring, as I say, and because the founders of The Good Novel are A Novel Bookstore‘s protagonists, it seems pretty clear whose side Cossé is on and wants us to be on too. And it’s tempting, because after all, who wants to be on the side of insignificant books, hollow books, or sloppy hurried books?

But the devil is in the details, of course, or, in this case, in the identification of these unworthy books — in discriminating decisively between the good and the bad. The Good Novel team orders their stock following lists submitted by a secret committee of writers, among whom there are in fact some differences of taste and interest, and all of whom (along with the bookstore staff) relish the opportunity to be advocates for lesser-known novels they believe deserve a wider readership. (One of the treats of A Novel Bookstore is noting the authors and titles that are batted around, many of whom were certainly unknown to me.) They are united against most bestsellers and prize-winners, however. Are they doing readers a disservice by refusing to stock books that, as they point out when challenged, are available by the thousand in every other bookstore in town? Is their insistence on exercising their own exclusive literary judgment heroic or, as one critic argues, fascistic?

This . . . is nothing more nor less than a totalitarian undertaking . . . What does good novel mean? Who are these kapos who have the nerve to place their seal of approval on this book and not that one? Where are they coming from? What gives them the right?

Those most offended, of course, are the excluded novelists as well as those in publishing who rely on highly commercial titles for their profits.  The actual plot of the novel is put in motion when some members of the selection committee are attacked. The investigating officer sums up his theory of who’s behind the attacks and why:

The Good Novel has caused every element of a fairly limited socio-professional group to break out in hives. Far be it from me to suggest . . . that this group represents everyone in publishing, the media, or criticism, or bookselling. They are a sub-faction of people who share the view that a book is a product that can make a lot of money and that literature can be a rich seam.

He goes on to compare the cabal working against The Good Novel to Al Qaeda — there’s not much middle ground in A Novel Bookstore, and that’s actually one reason I didn’t love it the way I expected to. The oppositions seem polarized in a way that suits this novel’s concept better than the novel as a genre, or novel readers.

The mystery plot is one of several facets of A Novel Bookstore: there’s a love story as well, and a number of subplots, really more like anecdotal digressions, about the various characters involved in setting up the bookstore. It all has a certain charm, and it is certainly executed with panache. But without the central debate about the value of ‘great’ literature, it would be a fairly insubstantial book, and even with it, it seemed somehow superficial, the working through of an idea for a novel more than a novel of the kind that The Good Novel would stock.

Yet I couldn’t help thinking about Cossé’s conceptual gambit as I was shopping in an actual bookstore myself yesterday. As I browsed the fiction shelves, I was frustrated as always at the crowding out of backlist titles (or just less mainstream titles) by stacks of the latest releases. What a different experience it is to shop at the London Review Bookshop, clearly curated on different principles! Yesterday I was also plagued by an over-enthusiastic employee who (when he wasn’t badgering me to see if he could help me, which he couldn’t, except by stocking more good novels!) was selling — by which I mean both promoting and taking money for– a lot of James Patterson and Tom Clancy. My inner literary snob cringed at his loud sales pitches even as my better angel (or was it?) reminded me not to look down on other people’s genuine reading pleasures. I wouldn’t be able to find everything I like to read at The Good Novel (yesterday I bought Tana French’s Broken Harbour, for instance), but I’d still rather browse there than at Coles.

A New Month, A New Open Letters Monthly!

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

danziger

Once again, a new month has brought with it a sparkling new issue of Open Letters Monthly. If you haven’t already, I hope you’ll go check it out. As always, there’s a wide range of coverage and styles. We’re spotlighting Steve Danziger’s review of Jonathan Franzen’s new translation of Karl Kraus (you know, the one in which he tells us ‘what’s wrong with the modern world’). You’ll also find John Cotter’s review of Jeremias Gotthelf’s very creepy sounding The Black Spider, Steve Donoghue on Korak, son of Tarzan, poetry editor Maureen Thorson on the ‘piercing unreason’ of Ange Mlinko’s poetry, my own unimpressed take on Elizabeth Gilbert’s much-hyped The Signature of All Things, Justin Hickey on Abominable Science, Spencer Lenfield on the enduring mystique of Pompeii, and much more. If you like what you find, do help us get the word out.

This month marks exactly four years since my first ever contribution to Open Letters Monthly, which was this little essay on Trollope. It has been quite a four years for me: I can’t imagine how else I would have found the courage to write, never mind a venue in which to publish, the range of reviews and essays that followed. Here’s to our next four years!