Month: March 2014

“The bare outline of a useful story”: Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

sweettoothIf Sweet Tooth were not by Ian McEwan (author, as is stressed on the cover of my edition, of Atonement — one of my very favorite recent [that is, post-2000] novels) would I have been disappointed in it? How unfair, in a way, that the burden of great expectations should interfere with my appreciation of this well-crafted, elegantly told tale with its clever premise so smoothly executed. If only books could be read “blind,” as orchestral auditions are sometimes done now — with the author’s identity concealed and so no preconceptions or biases to come between us and the words on the page. And yet I’m not sure that pristine anonymity is quite what we want. When writers raise the bar, isn’t it only fair to test their subsequent efforts not just against the books they already outmatched but against their own previous personal best? Once an ice skater has included a quad, doesn’t every program without one seem just a tad safe, no matter how perfect the triple axels?

And I’d say “safe” is a good word for Sweet Tooth, along with “flat” and “smart” — and, again, only for McEwan would that last term not be entirely praise — smart is the least I expect of him. Knowing Sweet Tooth was “an Ian McEwan” I read along in full expectation of a big twist, a surprise, a treat that would throw everything I thought I knew about the book into some new perspective, or draw together its elements into a shape I hadn’t seen before. By page 300, I was getting downright impatient for this revelatory moment, as on its own surface terms the book I was reading wasn’t giving me much of a thrill. Then when the long-anticipated game-changer arrived, it was so obvious that I realized that in one way or another I had already predicted it. (In case you’re wondering why I didn’t know all about it from reviews, I typically avoid reviews of books I know I’m going to read until after I have a chance to read them for myself. I suppose that’s my own modified version of the audition screens. Now that I’ve finally read Sweet Tooth, I’ll be looking up what other people have said about it.)

The revelations of Sweet Tooth are actually not that different from the writerly twists in Atonement, but the payoffs seemed much slighter to me. It’s true that I didn’t see until I did some careful rereading just how artful Atonement is (one of my favorite details is that Briony turns out to have made the changes recommended by Cyril Connolly at Horizon). Maybe if I reread Sweet Tooth, I’ll find the experience a similarly stirring literary treasure hunt. But I’d need some extrinsic motivation to do that (maybe the other reviews will provide it?) because Sweet Tooth never gripped me: it lacks the gutsiness that lies beneath Atonement‘s opening aestheticism and that comes out into the open during the war sections. Where is the equivalent in Sweet Tooth of the Dunkirk sequences? What here even approaches the wrenching pathos of Atonement‘s elegaic conclusion? The cruelty and devastation we see in Atonement are greater than anything in Sweet Tooth, the people in it at least as guilty of selfishness, greed, and betrayal — but they also love passionately. Sweet Tooth, in contrast, seems all head and no heart; its people (like, as it turns out, the narrative itself) are just petty and manipulative. “I was a novelist without a novel,” Tom reflects, “and now luck had tossed my way a tasty bone, the bare outline of a useful story.” He just hasn’t filled that outline in with the richest tints of humanity.

The novel’s “duplicitous point of view” (in McEwan’s — or rather Tom’s — own phrase) is an escape clause for these complaints, of course. How much of the dully plodding quality of the narrative is excused by the revelation that it’s not as it first seems (or as it seems for 300+ pages)? In particular, how many of Serena’s deficiencies as a narrator and protagonist can be blamed on the actual storyteller? Are her limitations really his limitations — he can’t read her, much less convey her, as a more complex character? In that case it’s not McEwan who’s in any way deficient. If anything, he’s doubly clever because he can play at being someone who’s not as good a novelist as he is, and his imitation is pitch perfect! And the lengthy “reveal,” which  lacks both the urgency and and the beauty of Atonement’s conclusion (“I like to think that it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end”) and offers instead only dreary petulance (“I told you that it wasn’t anger that set me writing the pages in the parcel in front of you. But there was always an element of tit for tat”) before its final, understatedly flamboyant, flourish — any letdown we might experience is attributable to the same cause. But isn’t McEwan ultimately still accountable for inflicting his imperceptive (and somewhat artless?) doppelganger on us through the fictional author he’s created? How can we credit him with knowing better (and somehow also doing better) if he doesn’t give us a sign? I didn’t pick up on any evidence of metafictional distancing, though maybe I didn’t put the clues together: it’s true there are a number of debates about fiction embedded in the novel that perhaps are meant to reflect sardonically on the kind of novel Tom has finally written.

One way in which McEwan never disappoints is his forensically precise diction: who else would describe oysters as “glistening cowpats of briny viscera”? If I somehow hadn’t known the identity of the author of Sweet Tooth –if he were concealed behind that opaque screen — I think that at that moment, I would have started comparing him to McEwan nonetheless.

This Week In My Classes: Canons and Complications

Rohan Maitzen10 Comments

unlessMy classes aren’t meeting at all today, thanks to the “weather bomb” we are currently enjoying. It is uncanny how many storms have come through on Wednesdays this winter! And it’s an unpleasant surprise to get a big one this late in the term. The bright side seems to be that it’s supposed to warm up significantly by the weekend, so we can hope that all this snow will just be a bad memory before too long.

What is it interrupting? Well, in Intro to Prose and Fiction we’ve moved on to Carol Shields’s Unless, a novel I appreciate more and more the more time I spend with it. It’s not an in-your-face kind of novel, but (appropriately, given its themes) its sharp edges can take you by surprise: a modest-seeming story about a woman writer rethinking her life and work because of a family crisis, it’s also a commentary on women’s writing and the literary canon, and on women writers and literary culture. Reta is seeking an explanation for her daughter Norah’s decision to drop out of ordinary life and sit speechless on the curb holding a sign that says only ‘GOODNESS.’ In a series of increasingly acerbic letters to intellectuals, writers, and critics (never actually sent) Reta connects Norah’s rejection of the world with the world’s indifference (or worse) to women. To the magazine that has run an advertisement for a series called “Great Minds of the Western Intellectual World,” for instance, Reta writes,

I have a nineteen-year old daughter who is going through a sort of soak of depression . . . which a friend of mine suspects is brought about by such offerings as your Great Minds of the WIW, not just your particular October ad, of course, but a long accumulation of shaded brown print and noble brows, reproduced year after year, all of it pressing down insidiously and expressing a callous lack of curiosity about great women’s minds, a complete unawareness, in fact. . . .

I realize I cannot influence your advertising policy. My only hope is that my daughter, her name is Norah, will not pick up a copy of this magazine, read this page, and understand, as I have for the first time, how casually and completely she is shut out of the universe. I have two other daughters too — Christine, Natalie — and I worry about them both. All the time.

To the author of an article on “The History of Dictionaries,” she observes “there is not a single woman mentioned in the whole body of your very long article (16 pages, double columns), not in any context, not once.” In wry anticipation of the VIDA counts (and their critics), she notes,

Bean counting is tiring, and tiresome, but your voice, Mr. Valkner, and your platform … carry great authority. You certainly understand that the women who fall even casually under your influence (mea culpa) are made to serve an apprenticeship in self-denigration.

 And later, addressing the author of a book review who calls women writers “the miniaturists of fiction,” she says,

It happens that I am the mother of a nineteen-year-old daughter who has been driven from the world by the suggestion that she is doomed to miniaturism. Her strategy  is self-sacrifice.

The letters punctuate the story of Reta’s reconsideration of her own writing: in particular, she is working on the sequel to her earlier work of light fiction, My Thyme is Up; in our class reading, we’ve just arrived at her conclusion that her new novel, “if it is to survive, must be redrafted,” so when we meet again on Friday I hope we’ll be able to have a good discussion about how and why Reta wants to write a different kind of book, with different kinds of options for her heroine, Alicia. Then next week we’ll consider her editor’s advice that she rework it to make it “one of those signal books of our time” — by making Alicia’s fiance, Roman, the central character:

‘I am talking about Roman being the moral centre of this book, and Alicia, for all her charms, is not capable of that role, surely you can see that. She writes fashion articles. She talks to her cat. She does yoga. She makes rice casseroles.’

‘It’s because she’s a woman.’

‘That’s not an issue at all. Surely you — ‘

‘But it is the issue.’

‘She is unable to make a claim to — She is undisciplined in her — She can’t focus the way Roman — She changes her mind about — She lacks — A reader, the serious reader that I have mind, would never accept her as the decisive fulcrum of a serious work of art that acts as a critique of our society while, at the same time, unrolling itself like a carpet of inevitability, narrativistically speaking.’

‘Because she’s a woman.’

‘Not at all, not at all.’

‘Because she’s a woman.’

Clipping these bits out on their own makes the novel sound more didactic than the experience of reading it actually is, partly because Shields plays around with the form of the novel, partly because the other anecdotes and memories Reta shares with us implicitly raise the questions these more pointed sections address explicitly, so that the book reads like an ongoing dialogue — internally, for Reta herself, and then with us — about what we look for in fiction, how we judge what we find, and how those questions are affected by gender. We’re reading it right after A Room of One’s Own, and many of the questions are the same: what (where) is the women’s literary tradition, what is the place or effect of anger in literature, how are our notions of literary greatness tied to ideas about scale? (Shields said “Jane Austen is important to me because she demonstrates how large narratives can occupy small spaces.”)

forrestIn Women & Detective Fiction, this week’s reading also raises questions about literary canons and standards, and how we decide what is worth reading and discussing, but in this case it does so more accidentally. I’m not someone who believes that we should assign only the books we believe to be The Greatest (even if we individually felt we could be confident about our standards). Universities are in the business of education, not adulation, and plenty of works that we might feel falter on some grounds are plenty interesting and significant (historically, theoretically, formally) on others. Courses vary in their purposes, too, and the best and most relevant conversations don’t always emerge from the most elegantly crafted narratives. Still, I do sometimes find my principles conflicting with my actual reading experience, and that’s how I’ve felt with Katherine V. Forrest’s Murder at the Nightwood Bar, which has been our class’s reading for the past week.

Murder at the Nightwood Bar is one in a series with inarguable significance (“First, first, first,” emphasizes Victoria Brownworth in her recent profile of Forrest), and it deals explicitly with questions of sexual identity and systemic discrimination both through its closeted detective (alienated, thus, both from her follow officers and from the lesbian community she engages with during the investigation) and through the crime itself. It sets up lots of good points of comparison with our other books, from the detective’s struggle over getting too personally involved with the case (or people involved in it) to the connections it makes between individual crimes and systemic injustices. As far as all that goes, I have no regrets about having added it to the syllabus this year. I just wish it were better written — yes, that awkward evaluative measure! Better at what, to what ends, as I’m always asking? In this case, I just mean “better at the words”: especially during the patient rereadings required for class prep, it has seemed stilted and inartistic, sometimes tediously so. I’ve felt no temptation to discuss anything that’s not literal about it: not its form or its style, not its voice, its attention to setting, none of those “literary” aspects. Mind you, it’s not the first of our readings to make that kind of reading seem beside the point: Agatha  Christie is also not particularly literary. But Christie’s prose has a clarity and economy that gives it its own (superficial?) elegance. That said, while Forrest may not be as good a stylist, her materials are more challenging — her agenda is more ambitious, and she gave us much more to talk about than Christie did, even though Christie is, of the two of them, the one who is obviously part of the ‘canon’ of detective fiction. Not every course can or should be a tour of “the best that has been thought and said” (as if we could be sure what those examples are — as Woolf says, “where books are concerned, it is notoriously difficult to fix labels of merit in such a way that they do not come off”). My goal is always to find the readings that are the best for my purposes, which in this case include considering a wide range of different examples of detective fiction by women as well as examples that are in fruitful conversation with each other when collected on the syllabus. My hope is that they will also reward close reading and rereading. At this point, then, I’m ambivalent about Murder at the Nightwood Bar, then, which certainly serves the first purpose but doesn’t quite fulfill my hopes for the second.

“Torn by the claws of reality”: Alexandros Papadiamantis, The Murderess

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

papadiamantisMy book group’s last read was Mary Stewart’s This Rough Magic. We like to follow some thread from one book to the next; we got to Mary Stewart from Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn  by way of romantic suspense, and decided to make Greek islands our next connection. The obvious choice would have been Zorba the Greek (and I wouldn’t be at all sorry if we read that next), but we were also looking for something relatively short this time, and so we fixed on Alexandros Papadiamantis’s novella The Murderess. (I blame Tom.)

If the setting of This Rough Magic is, as I proposed, the Greece of tourists, the setting of The Murderess is the Greece of your nightmares. Not that it’s ugly — quite the contrary! The beauties of the scenery are lovingly evoked by Papadiamantis (via his translator, Peter Levi):

It was a sweet May dawn. The blue and rose clarity of heaven shed a golden colouring on plants and bushes. The twitter of nightingales could be heard in the woods, and the innumerable small birds uttered their indescribable concert, passionately, insatiably.

But this beauty only makes the harshness of the story more shocking. Though not a mystery novel, The Murderess is definitely a crime story, and this aspect of it reminds me of P. D. James’s comment that setting “enhances the horror of murder, sometimes by contrast between the beauty and outward peace of the scene and the turbulence of human emotions.”

The turbulent emotions in this case are those of Hadoula, known also as Frankojannou, and the plot is what a canny publicist might describe as “Hardy meets Gissing meets Stephen King.” Like Father Time’s in Jude the Obscure — and with a similarly parable-like resonance — Hadoula’s crimes are “Done because we are too menny”; as in Gissing’s The Odd Women, it’s women who are present in excess, their value as individuals weighed as nothing against the burden they represent to the families that must struggle to marry them off and maintain them if this effort unsuccessful. Add in the pressures of the Greek dowry system and a general climate of ignorance and superstition, and you have the ingredients of a real witch’s brew of cynicism and desperation. Thus Hadoula, sleep-deprived from tending to her infant granddaughter, reflects, “The minute girls are born a person thinks of strangling them!’ “Yes,” says our narrator,

she did say it, but she would certainly never have been capable of doing it. Not even Hadoula herself believed that.

 After all, Hadoula is a healer, a brewer of ‘medicines,’ someone whose mission is to sustain life, not destroy it. But just as Hadoula does not really believe in the remedies she peddles, she is inconsistent about whether the right thing is to nurture or murder little girls:

But I ask you, do there really have to be so many daughters? And if so, is it worth the trouble of bringing them up? ‘Isn’t there,’ asked Frankojannou, ‘isn’t there always death and always a cliff? Better for them to make haste above.

It only makes sense to hasten girls out of life: after all, religion teaches that “grief is joy and death is life and resurrection, that disaster is happiness and disease is health. . . . Would it not really be right,” she plausibly argues,

if only humans were not so blind, to assist the scourge that fluttered in the angels’ wings, instead of trying to pray it away? . . . Ah, the more one works things out, the more one’s brain goes up like smoke.

And sure enough, overcome by the imponderable cruelty of a world in which wanted sons die and unwanted daughters give their parents “a forestaste of hell in this world,” Frankojannou’s brain does “go up in smoke,” and, “out of her mind,” she begins her career as a murderess.

If only she clearly were out of her mind, The Murderess would be a simpler novel and the judgments it brings to bear on its protagonist would be easier to identify and take sides on. The Murderess is not a simple book, though. The murders are shocking, no question, but they make perfect sense, not just in Hadoula’s crazed mind but as a literalization of the many ways in which (according to her own life story and experiences) women are degraded and devalued by the world they live in. Hadoula is wracked by her conscience, tormented by “the lamenting voice of the infant, the tiny girl unjustly slain”; she runs from man’s justice “but prison and Hell were within her.” At the same time, at the next opportunity she finds herself once more with her hand’s at an infant girl’s throat and remembers the context of her cruel acts:

Then the baby daughter began to cry very softly, moaning unbearably. Frankojannou forgot all the remorse she had felt so deeply under the black wings of her dreams. Once again she was torn by the claws of reality, and began to think inside herself,

‘Ach, he’s right, poor Lyringos . . . ‘all little girls, her bad luck, all little girls!’ And what a consolation it would be for him now, and for his unhappy wife, if the Almighty took her straight away! While she’s small, and leaves no great sorrow behind her!’

Is it Hadoula who is really murderous? Or does the blame go to a society that has made such reasoning plausible? Why should she be held accountable for her attempt to short-circuit the tragic cycle these little girls, by their very existence, perpetuate?

But Frankojannou’s own despair at her actions is enough to show us the inhumane flaw in her reasoning — which is in any case more unreasoning intuition than logic, maybe even (as the narrator has said) madness. She seems ultimately, to be running from herself as much as from the “regulars” who pursue her; the voice that haunts her with the cry “Murderess! Murderess!” is as much hers as anyone else’s.

The final sequence of the novel is an extraordinary set piece as we follow her to her death “midway between divine and human justice.” Was she in some sense an agent of justice? Is she herself a victim? Or is she only an unleashed terror, acting on hatred in the guise of mercy? I am caught, myself, in this ambiguity, unsure of my interpretive footing. I expect our discussion next weekend will be a lively one!

You can read more about The Murderess from Steve here and from Tom here. Iagree with Steve about the effectiveness of Levi’s translation: at first I found the book uncomfortable and stilted, but it finds its rhythm, and there are many grimly, hauntingly unforgettable passages. Tom calls it “a hardboiled feminist crime novel.” I think I agree that it is feminist, even though witch-like homicidal Hadoula plays into misogynistic stereotypes: perhaps (as with some women in the original hard-boiled tradition) she upsets those stereotypes even as she inhabits them. Like Tom, I couldn’t resist looking up something about Skiathos: it looks beautiful.

Recent Reading Round-Up: Mysteries, Romances, and Feminists

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

It isn’t that I haven’t done any reading since I posted on Elena Ferrante’s The Story of a New Name; it’s just that none of the reading has felt really notable, or else it has been reading for work and thus not something I necessarily have more to say about here. I’m actually looking forward to getting into a book with a bit of heft to it (it doesn’t have to be literally weighty, just something that matters when I read it): I have a number of candidates lying around. At a minimum, I’ll be starting on Alexandros Papadiamantis’s The Murderess soon for my book club, which meets at the end of the month. But that’s so short: surely I can read something else before then! In the meantime, here’s a quick catch-up post on my recent, and quite miscellaneous, desultory reading.

rebus

1. Saints of the Shadow Bible. I’m not quite as enthusiastic about Rankin’s latest as Steve, who called it “rippingly good” in his review at Open Letters Weekly. It is good, but for me it was predictably so: it has all Rankin’s characteristic virtues, and now that I’ve gotten over my pleasure at having Rebus back in action, I feel (perhaps unfairly) a bit blasé about it. Rankin is very good at this kind of book, but as a result it doesn’t impress me very much when he does it again. This particular installment of the series is reliable but doesn’t take the characters or the genre in any new directions. I liked the ambition of some of the books from a few years back (Fleshmarket Close or The Naming of the Dead, for instance), which had a social and political agenda that broadened their scope. Here we’re just hunkered down with Rebus again. We are seeing Siobhan grow in stature: to me that remains the most promising direction Rebus could take the series in.

2. Mr. Impossible. Back in Ye Olden Days when I knew not what I was missing by not reading romance novels, Lord of Scoundrels was proposed as a possible conversion book. That did not go well (though the experiment as a whole was ultimately successful). I think that if Mr. Impossible had been proposed instead, it might have won me over, because it’s funnier. For some reason (OK, because I’m cynical), I prefer romance that doesn’t take itself too seriously. This was my second read of Mr. Impossible and I enjoyed it just as much. Actually, technically it was my second almost-read, or mostly-read, since I don’t read to the very end of many romance novels. The last pages (in some, the last chapters) almost always turn too cloying for my taste. Sure, all the way through I know pretty much how things are going to end, but often a lot of the energy goes out of the plot by the time the characters have overcome whatever is keeping them from their HEA. (Is that wrong or unusual of me? I can’t think of another genre in which I have fallen into this DNF habit. If I’m quite interested in the characters or the plot sustains some tension to the end, I’ll read it all, but sometimes I’ve just had enough. I also get most of my romance reading from the library, so I don’t feel any anxiety about dabbling in it rather than committing fully to it.)

3. Along those lines, I’ve been reading Nora Roberts’s Happy Every After, which is the 4th one in her “Bride Quartet.” It is hard to imagine a more anodyne series, really: sure, all of the main characters have tortured backstories of one kind or another, but there’s a bland formulaic simplicity to the novels that belies this attempt to give them depth. As a result, they are kind of relaxing, but the main thing I like about them is their “neepery.” Each protagonist in this quartet has a particular job, and there are lots of specifics about how it gets done. For whatever odd reason, I like that (I learned the wonderful term “neepery” from Victoria Janssen in a thread about the Dick Francis novels, which are full of it). I’m about half way through but I think I’m already about to DNF it for the reasons noted above. Plus, I already watched The Wedding Planner (speaking of predictable) so the neepery here isn’t as novel to me as the stuff about cakes or flowers in the other books.

paretsky

4. Now that I’ve finished with the new Rebus, I’m catching up on V.I. Warshawski with Critical Mass. I’m not very far along in it yet, but like Saints of the Shadow Bible it feels familiar: these are the people, these are the moves, this is the style I expect from Paretsky. In neither case is this a bad thing! I wrote in some detail about Paretsky in a review of Body Work in Open Letters a couple of years ago. I teach her often (we just finished discussing Indemnity Only in ‘Women & Detective Ficton’ today, in fact) and admire her principled determination to use the form of the detective novel to advocate for social justice. If the results are occasionally somewhat didactic, more often than not she integrates her political with her artistic purposes pretty effectively.

5. How to Suppress Women’s Writing, by Joanna Russ. This too came to me by way of Victoria Janssen, and again I’m grateful! I was mentioning on Twitter that I’m working on A Room of One’s Own with my class, and she wondered if I’d ever paired it with Russ’s book. I haven’t, since I’d never read or even heard of How to Suppress Women’s Writing before, but I found it in our university library and have just finished reading it through. It certainly does pair up well with Woolf: I can imagine a lot of conversations that the juxtaposition would spark, not least because Woolf is a major figure in Russ’s own meditations on ways women writers have been opposed and discouraged through the ages. Her approach is (as she says herself) not systematic or scholarly but anecdotal and epigrammatic: she lines up examples under categories such as “Prohibitions,” “Bad Faith,” “False Categorizing,” and “Anomalousness.” Many of her earlier examples were familiar to me, especially those from the 19th century, but she carries her topics forward to her present (the book was published in 1983). At the same time I was preparing my lecture on women and writing and Woolf for my class and reading Russ’s book, an excellent essay by Anne Boyd Rioux on “Women’s Citizenship in the Republic of Letters” appeared at the VIDA site: while it would have been nicer to explain all this to my class as a historical phenomenon, it is good to be able to show them how the conversation we are having in class, through Woolf, is part of a larger ongoing one they might take an interest — and a part — in. And yet things have definitely changed. We read Woolf now in the context of decades of scholarship filling in the absences that preoccupy her; reading Russ I was happily struck by at least a few improvements, such as the availability of works such as Villette (which she recalls being unable to order for a class in 1971 because no US edition was in print) — or the impossibility (surely) that anyone at a university today would read Woolf’s novels “secretively and guiltily like bonbons,” as she describes herself doing, “ashamed of them because they were so ‘feminine.'”

This Week In My Classes: Writing and Talking

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

escher12“‘It’s the season when the s–t hits the fan,” I observed to the students in my Intro class on Monday. And that’s the truth for all of us: from this point on in the semester, if we want to stay in control it’s all about setting priorities, managing time, and getting things done. For this class in particular, this week they turn in the first fairly heavily weighted essay (they’ve already done two short warm-up assignments, for practice and to clarify expectations). Today they brought in drafts and did a peer-editing exercise. I was pleased that everyone seemed to be taking it seriously. As I told them several times, even professional writers have editors, and editing is a crucial part of the writing process. I think it’s also interesting for them to see how their classmates have approached the same assignment. Sometimes it seems that students believe there’s One Right Way and if only they could guess what it is they could get one of those magical A things, but of course there isn’t, and that’s exactly what makes this kind of work both challenging and interesting. In any case, even those who might think they got little out of the workshop itself will benefit from having almost three more days to review and revise their own essay. I hope they take advantage of it!

The essay they’re working on is a comparative one on Night and The Road. This wraps up our mini-unit on horror and despair. Friday we start on A Room of One’s Own, which we’ll follow up with Unless: I was very pleased with this pairing last year, despite some fretting about the particular challenges of teaching feminism, and I hope it works as well again this time around.

In Women & Detective Fiction, we’re part way through our discussions of Sara Paretsky’s Indemnity Only. Discussion was so sluggish on Monday that I left class feeling quite fed up with everything! I even came up with a cunning plan for today in case I had the same pulling teeth sensation and decided drastic measures were called for … but they weren’t, which is definitely the happier outcome of the two. Still, there is a much larger cohort of non-talkers in this group than I’m used to in a seminar, which is an ongoing frustration. I have long had an explicit policy of not doing cold-calling in seminars: there are incentives built in for participation, and usually that’s enough even for quite shy students. Also (despite what some people may think) I go out of my way to be receptive and respectful: I hope students feel that when they do contribute to discussion, they are listened to and encouraged. I suppose that being really listened to may itself be a bit intimidating!

In this class too, deadlines are looming: they will be submitting paper proposals next week, so if I’m smart I’ll mark the first-year papers very promptly so I don’t have two sets of assignments on my conscience. The past couple of weeks have been very busy with administrative work, but after this Friday the schedule of meetings will lighten up, which will help me keep my mind on these tasks. I’ve also more or less completed two short-ish writing projects I agreed to do for a website being created by the British Library (I’m pretty excited about being involved with something for them!). They were harder than I expected, but also interesting. I was actually working on one of them last night, and as I struggled to fit in all the parts I wanted while not going too wildly over the proposed word limit, I felt a real kinship with my students, out there somewhere laboring over the drafts of their essays! I don’t know if it means anything to them, but I often mention in class now that I too have writing deadlines and challenges and editors. I even pass on little tricks I’ve developed that help me work through the frustrations of producing that “shitty first draft” — putting stuff I’m not happy with in different colored fonts, or surrounding it with XXX’s, or including editorial questions to myself in brackets, for instance, all of which frees me (at least a little) from thinking that because it’s not perfect yet I shouldn’t move on to write the next part. I know that for me it has been helpful to realize that I’m surrounded by writing that did not in fact magically appear in all its current erudition and elegance but had to be done by someone, worked on by someone, edited by someone … In our own ways, we’re all in this together, just trying to put words in the right order and contribute to the big, disorderly, kaleidoscopic conversation about literature!

“For Myself Only”: Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

ferranteI’m glad I kept going with Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan trilogy. I wasn’t bowled over by My Brilliant Friend: I described myself as interested but not emotionally gripped. To some extent, I felt the same about The Story of a New Name, but now I’m more interested: having spent this much more time with the characters, I’ve caught the “I want to know how this all turns out” bug.

This second book takes the central characters, friends (and antagonists) Elena and Lila, through the first phases of their lives as young adults. For Lila, this means through the years of her marriage to Stefano Carracci. There’s a literal but also a symbolic way in which her transformation into “Signora Carracci” is the source of the novel’s title:  it’s the story of her experiences as a young married woman, but also the story of her ceaseless struggle to retain control of her identity. A crucial sequence involves her remaking an enlargement of her wedding photo — made to use as a promotional image for the shoe line she has helped create. When she’s finished with it, Elena realizes, Lila has managed “to erase herself”:

With the black paper, with the green and purple circles that Lila drew around certain parts of her body, with the blood-red lines with which she sliced and said she was slicing it, she completed her own self-destruction in an image, presented to the eyes of all in the space bought by the Solaras to display and sell her shoes.

This act of paradoxically simultaneous construction and destruction is characteristic of Lila’s energy, which seems always to be at once positive and dangerous. Somehow she is more fiercely herself the more she rejects, repels, or opposes attempts to name her or in any way fix who she is. Later, watching Lila deliberately slicing at the bonds of her stifling and violent marriage, Elena remembers “what she had done to the wedding-dress photograph” and thinks that now “she is behaving in the same way  . . . with the very person of Signora Carracci,” trying “to tear off her condition of wife.” Later still, when Lila has left her husband and imagines that she is starting over, “she was again fascinated . . . by erasing herself.”

In contrast, over the same period Elena is resolutely creating herself, determined to “live for myself only”:

In the past there had been Lila, a continuous happy detour into surprising lands. Now everything I was I wanted to get from myself.

Elena ended My Brilliant Friend despairing that she might never find a way out of the grimly claustrophobic neighborhood of her childhood, and her path is certainly not a straight or easy one. Even as she moves on from high school to college, she feels she cannot escape her upbringing, which — through her accent as well as her ignorance of more sophisticated mores — marks her as a misfit in the more cosmopolitan circles she enters:

I arrived at the university very timid and awkward. I immediately recognized that I spoke a bookish Italian that at times was almost absurd . . . I began to struggle to correct myself. I knew almost nothing about etiquette, I spoke in a loud voice, I chewed noisily; I became aware of other people’s embarrassment and tried to restrain myself.

Gradually, she learns to speak and act like someone who belongs, particularly by downplaying the very intellectual abilities that made her move possible in the first place: “by never appearing arrogant, by being ironic about my ignorance, by pretending to be surprised at my good results.”  She becomes a promising student, gets involved with a well-to-do but militantly Communist boyfriend who takes her to Paris and thus expands her mental horizons as well as her literal ones. Then she takes another step: she begins to write about her life, in a novel, which is immediately accepted for publication. Elena feels, understandably, “very pleased with myself.” Surely this proves that she has an identity of her own, one that will carry her away from her past. But this, too, is not so simple, for no sooner has she written herself into her new existence than she comes across an old manuscript of Lila’s, a story called “The Blue Fairy” that Elena had admired so devotedly as a child. On Lila’s behalf, she had given the story to their teacher, her mentor, Maestra Oliviero, who had never returned it. But there it is among her papers, the pages “full of her wonderful, goods, very goods.” Elena rereads “The Blue Fairy” and discovers that once again, her life and Lila’s are entangled:

Lila’s childish pages were the secret heart of my book. Anyone who wanted to know what gave it warmth and what the origin was of the strong but invisible thread that joined the sentences would have had to go back to that child’s packet, ten notebook pages, the rusty pin, the brightly colored cover, the title, and not even a signature.

No signature: again, Lila has cut herself out, but Elena can no longer imagine that she is the sole author of her own identity.

The interplay of their two characters and stories is intricately developed, and Lila is a fuller presence here because a significant section of Elena’s narrative draws on Lila’s notebooks to present events more or less from her point of view. The emotional intensity of their lives is probably the quality of the novels that strikes me the most . . . and yet, as before, I’m not myself emotionally gripped. The prose itself has a somewhat flat affect: this may be the effect of the translation, of course, but I’m almost tempted to call it plodding: one thing after another is recounted, with no conspicuous change in register. I’ve been reading some of the reviews I linked to last time, trying to see what I’m missing. James Wood’s description of My Brilliant Friend is disconcertingly unlike my own experience of the book: he calls it “beautiful and delicate,” for instance, when I would have said it is ruthless and raw; he calls it “amiably peopled” and thus makes me wonder if he met the same people in it that I did (find me one “amiable” character!); he talks about the “joy in the book not easily found in [Ferrante’s] earlier work.” If My Brilliant Friend is joyful by comparison, I’m not sure I’m up to reading the earlier books! Catherine Morris’s discussion in the TLS comes much closer to what I thought about the novels, and she helped me appreciate what she calls Ferrante’s “forensic attention to psychological states.” But she likes the flat writing style more than I do: “Scenes of high emotion . . .  are all the more powerful for being simply rendered.” Morris praises Ferrante’s “doggedness in unearthing – and fearlessness in articulating – thoughts that usually remain unspoken.” Ivan Kreilkamp’s essay on Ferrante in the LARB is called “A Rage That Had No End.” I wonder if the critical enthusiasm for these novels is connected to the current anxiety about niceness in female characters: is anger the new obligation of the “serious” woman writer, or the new touchstone for critics of women’s writing? Claire Messud’s much-hyped The Woman Upstairs was also all anger, all the time: I found it tedious, and also not all that innovative (Charlotte Brontë was doing anger a long time ago, after all).

That said, I’ve spoken out myself in favor of books, writers, and characters who are interesting: that isn’t everything I look for in a novel, but it’s a lot (and a lot better than boring, that’s for sure). When the third volume in the triology comes out, I’ll definitely read it.

The First Ever Novel Readings Book Giveaway!

Rohan Maitzen34 Comments

When I put up my last post, I realized that it was #899 – making this my 900th post at Novel Readings. That seemed like a milestone that ought to be recognized with something a bit out of the ordinary! But what? As I was musing about options, I remembered that not long ago I had contemplated holding a book giveaway for my anthology, The Victorian Art of Fiction, to put a more positive spin on its rather sluggish sales. (OK, “sluggish” is putting it nicely: my last royalty statement shows it selling -3 copies in Canada!) Clearly this is the perfect opportunity for just such a special event. It can also double as my way of celebrating World Book Day!

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Lest the sorry story of my book’s recent sales makes you skeptical that you even want a free copy, let me tell you just a little bit about it. (You can also read more about it at Wuthering Expectations, where once upon a time it was the book of the week!) It’s actually the project I was working on in 2007 during the same sabbatical that I launched this blog, making it the perfect prize for this occasion. (The first person to joke that “second prize is two copies” is banned from Novel Readings forever.)  I had been reading quite a lot of Victorian essays about and reviews of fiction — partly because I was asking questions about the kind of criticism we do and how it sometimes seemed to me to fit the primary sources uncomfortably. I wanted to get a better sense of the contemporary conversation into which the Victorian novels actually emerged. I found this material fascinating but also diffuse, and I thought a collection of the choicest examples would be a nice thing to make available, for interested readers as well as for students and teachers of the history of criticism; happily, Broadview Press agreed.

My introduction to the volume that resulted sums up some key themes across the various readings as well as what seemed to me some notable and thought-provoking differences between the way they did criticism then and the way we do it now. But the real fun is in the essays themselves. There are some that are canonical (as far as that concept can even be applied to 19th-century essays about the novel): George Eliot’s “Silly Novels By Lady Novelists,” for instance, and Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction.” There are some by writers whose names are certainly familiar to readers of Victorian fiction: Margaret Oliphant’s “Modern Novelists – Great and Small,” or Anthony Trollope’s “Novel Reading.” There are some by people who, though not widely known today, were major critical or intellectual figures at the time: David Masson’s “Thackeray and Dickens” or Walter Bagehot’s “The Novels of George Eliot.” There are essays on “lady novelists,” sensation fiction, and the morality of fiction; there are discussions of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë by writers including George Henry Lewes and Leslie Stephen. The essays are perceptive, idiosyncratic, sometimes puzzling, often surprising, and occasionally profound. Above all, they reflect a common conviction that fiction is an art form worth talking about, which is a feeling I think is likely to be shared by anyone stopping by a blog called Novel Readings.

So here’s the plan. If you’d like a chance at a free copy of this elegant, entertaining, and edifying volume, just say so in the comments below, in the next 24 hours (it’s 10:00 a.m. Atlantic time here in frosty Halifax, so that will be the cut-off time tomorrow). As an extra incentive, I will also include a pretty bookmark in an appropriately bookish pattern made by a local paper artist! Then I’ll put all (both? the only?) names in a hat and Maddie will draw out one winner. I’ll identify the winner in the comments and invite him or her to contact me by email to sort out mailing information. (With regret, after looking at international shipping rates on Canada Post, I do have to limit this offer to US, Canadian, and UK addresses only. Maybe for my 1000th post I’ll go completely global.)

I hope someone is interested. If it turns out that I can’t even give copies of the book away, just think how depressed I’ll be: what could be sadder than so much ardent labour all in vain? And so, as James says in the exuberant conclusion to “The Art of Fiction,” go in!

UPDATE: It’s heartening to see so much interest in the book! I wish I could send everyone a copy – but I can’t. The ‘contest’ is now closed. I promised Maddie she could do the actual drawing, so it will have to wait until after work. Then I’ll make the big announcement of the winner. Thanks to everyone for joining in!

AND THE WINNER IS …

This Week In My Classes: Marching Along

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

February break is only a memory now: even this short distance into March, it feels as if we’re hurtling towards the end of term. I usually find this an invigorating time in my classes, as all the ‘getting to know you’ stuff is over, we’ve developed some routines and, ideally, some rapport in the classroom, and we’re far enough along in the material that usually students’ confidence for engagement is greater.

I’m not feeling quite this surge this term. One reason is that the attendance in my Introduction to Prose and Fiction section has not been … robust. I’m trying not to take it personally; it helps that I’m hearing plenty of anecdata suggesting that absenteeism is a conspicuous issue for my colleagues and maybe more broadly around campus these days (“I’m glad it’s not just me,” said yet another colleague as we chatted about this on the stairs on Friday). I have been speculating that a discussion-based class might seem particularly expendable to students because of the excessively results-oriented culture they are currently steeped in: if they aren’t intrinsically drawn to the material (which is likely, in a course often taken to fulfill a requirement) and the results of attending (or not) aren’t overtly quantifiable, other things might well take priority. Naturally, I think that’s a shame: one day they may look back and realize that they missed a fairly rare (and potentially transformative) opportunity to get involved in a conversation with at least one person guaranteed to be “listening very intently to everything” they say. But who knows: maybe I (inevitably, egotistically) overestimate the value of spending that time in the room with me following my lesson plan! I have tried hard in recent years to make quite explicit the ways I see our classroom work feeding into the assignments on which they will be evaluated (and the skills and objectives both of these aspects of the course serve). But if they don’t see the pay-off  (or they aren’t even present to hear the peroration) and don’t care about the discussion for its own sake, there’s not much more I can do. Once again the gym analogy seems apt.

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For those Intro students who are coming to class, we’re working our way through The Road. I put a lot of work in preparing materials when I taught it for the first time last winter, so it’s nice to have a file of ideas and notes and handouts to draw on this time around, and to feel more certain what are useful lines of inquiry. For tomorrow’s class, where we’ll be focusing on McCarthy’s style, one of the most useful resources I have is my own blog post from last year, in which I asked (not disingenuously) whether McCarthy is a terrible writer – working through the post and then keeping up with the discussion that ensued was very stimulating, and as I’ve been rereading the book this year I’ve kept trying to figure out if there’s any way to answer the question more confidently than I could then. I’m still not sure, but I will say that on this rereading I’m taking what I can only describe as a tactile pleasure in his writing: I pause to read individual words or phrases out loud and enjoy their crunkly feeling, their resistance to easy reading — “rachitic,” “gryke,” “kerfs,” “claggy” — or, more rarely, their rhythmic poetry: “Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.” I also found, a bit to my surprise, that having spent more time intellectualizing the novel has not distanced me from it: rereading the final section this afternoon I found myself weeping uncontrollably. As I remarked on Twitter, I realize that crying over the book does nothing to settle the question of whether McCarthy’s a “good” writer. I wonder what value, if any, does attach to this kind of visceral response. There’s a way in which being moved to tears by a book is inarguable proof of at least something — but is it something about the reader or something about the book? It’s about the connection between reader and book, I suppose, that mysterious alchemical combination by which language becomes meaning and feeling of a particular, and sometimes particularly personal, kind. I value that kind of emotional connection: surely you would hardly choose to specialize in Victorian literature if you didn’t! But at least when I’m wearing my ‘professor’ hat I try to retain some skepticism about it too. Just because you can make me cry doesn’t make you right!

In my Women and Detective Fiction seminar, I’ve also been fretting a bit, not so much about attendance (though this group has not been as reliably present as I am used to in upper-level seminars) as about participation. Last week’s classes were pretty sluggish. But yesterday there was an up-tick in energy, so for now I have deferred my cunning plan to use some of the strategies I’m more accustomed to deploying in lower level classes: “think-pair-share” exercises, break-out groups, and so on. We are currently reading Sue Grafton’s ‘A’ is for Alibi: I had the sense on Friday that they mostly hadn’t even tried to do more than just read it, and I wonder if at first they were lulled into passivity by the fast-paced prose and suspenseful plot and forget to apply the critical frameworks we’ve been developing. By tomorrow we’ll have read to the end, so I expect we’ll talk a lot about [spoiler alert!] what it means that Kinsey turns out to have been sleeping with not just a suspect but one of the murderers: the novel raises all kinds of interesting questions about the temptations and risks of submission and the ways sexual desire can undermine a principled commitment to independence. The novel focuses especially on sexual politics as played out in marriage, but Kinsey’s role as a detective also prompts us to consider how these “private” issues intersect with wider questions of justice and accountability. I haven’t taught Grafton in a while and I’ve appreciated getting reacquainted with her tongue-in-cheek approach to the genre. I kept up with the series for a long time, but my interest in it has flagged over the years, partly because the humor that keeps this first one so fresh gives way to a much more sententious style. I should probably hunt up the latest ones just to see where things have gone. We start Indemnity Only next week and at this point I’m one Sara Paretsky behind as well.

Open Letters Monthly, March 2014

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The March issue is up! Please come on over and take a look. And while you’re there, wish us a happy birthday: now we are seven! In internet years, I think that’s about eighty, but all in all we’re still feeling pretty spry. We didn’t do a special birthday issue this time, but for our fifth anniversary, in 2012, we put out our Criticism issue, which I still think is one of the best we’ve ever done.

In case I haven’t said this often enough, we are always keen to work with new contributors, so if you have ideas for essays or reviews, just get in touch with me and we can confer! One of my favorite things about Open Letters is that we aren’t constrained to the newest, shiniest literary things but also relish pieces for our ‘Second Glance‘ or ‘Absent Friends‘ features. Basically, if you want to follow your (reading) bliss and are willing to expose yourself to the editing process we fondly call “the shark tank,” we’re interested.

But if you just like to read what we put up every month — or much more often, if you also consider Steve’s astonishing output at Open Letters Weekly and the regular posts from our four affiliated blogs, including this one — do help us get the word out by sharing links with your friends. Finally, if you really like us, consider contributing a little through our PayPal button to help cover our operating costs.