May 2019 – Novel Readings

Rotten Branches: Sara Collins, The Confessions of Frannie Langton

May 29, 2019May 29, 2019Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

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All those rotten branches, growing from the same black root. – Frannie Langton

There’s a lot going on in The Confessions of Frannie Langton. In it, Frannie Langton tells, in her own voice, the story of her life and how it has ended up where the novel begins: with her imprisoned in the Old Bailey, on trial for the murder of her employers George and Marguerite Benham. Born into slavery in Jamaica, Frannie works on the sugar plantation of John Langton, who is not just her owner but also, we learn without much surprise (though Frannie is shocked and horrified when she is told) her father. Langton’s passion is investigating the “science” of race. Frannie herself was an experiment, educated and trained on a whim of Langton and Benham to test the limits of her “mulatto” intelligence. She becomes Langton’s apprentice, and over the course of the novel we learn just what Langton had her doing in the old coach-house that served as his laboratory. “How guilt has run through me, all this time” says Frannie near the end,

keeping time with my blood. How, even now to think of it, to write of it, makes both leap in my chest. How sorry I am.

Her complicity in his horrors haunts her even though she understands that she was never really free to do otherwise: “That’s what slavery is,” as she later says; “their minds, our hands.” “They might see me as the savage,” she reflects, “but didn’t Benham and Langton pull me into their own dark corners? Wasn’t it them who tried to make an animal of me first?” When she reads Frankenstein, it is impossible not to make the obvious (and obviously intended) connection.

A lot intervenes, however, between her monstrous apprenticeship and her trial. After an upset on the plantation Langton moves to England, taking Frannie with him only to present her to Benham as a gift. Though as Benham’s servant she is in some sense now free, Frannie cannot imagine her way to real freedom: “I kept forgetting,” she explains, “that I was no longer owned.” And as she eventually finds out, a poor black woman on the streets of London in the 1820s is hardly liberated.

langton1 Frannie’s early story has some elements of a slave narrative, though Frannie herself is somewhat disdainful of the form, “all sugared over with misery and despair”: “The anti-slavers are always asking me, what was done to you, Frances? How did you suffer?” She did suffer, and Collins does not spare the details, but the form Frannie wants for her story is the novel. “No one like me has ever written a novel in the history of the world,” she says, and the only hope she has as her end approaches is that her account of herself might “tempt a publisher.” All her life she loved only “all those books I read, and all the people who wrote them”:

Because life boils down to nothing, in spite of all the fuss, yet novels make it possible to believe it is something, after all.

Frankenstein isn’t the only literary touchstone in Collins’ narrative: pages of Candide are sewn into the skirts of the dress Frannie is wearing when she’s arrested; she cherishes Moll Flanders; she and her mistress, Marguerite Benham, both love Paradise Lost.

Frannie’s relationsip with Marguerite is at once the heart of her Confessions and, to me, the least interesting and convincing part of the novel. During her trial, Frannie insists over and over that what they had–that what she felt–was love: “I loved my mistress. I couldn’t have done what you say I’ve done because I loved her.” I think this part didn’t work well for me because Marguerite herself remains something of a cipher–defiantly unconventional but not clearly principled, elusive, slightly fey, and frequently manipulative, especially of Frannie. She treats her unhappy combination of boredom and oppression with laudanum, an addiction she eventually shares with Frannie. Haunting her, and her marriage, is her past relationship with Olaudah “Laddie” Cambridge, once a house servant, now a celebrity; one of the twists of the plot makes this connection a key point in Frannie’s final confession. Another plot twist puts Frannie out on the streets only to end up working in a “spanking parlour”:

Men like him were the ones who wanted scarring, always happier to let themselves loose under the whip hand of a black. That put the white girls’ noses out of joint. But we’d already been in the bondage business, no matter that it had been at the other end.

A lot going on, as I said–too much, I finally thought, and neither the “love” story putatively at the center or the framing murder plot is quite enough to hold it all together. Many of the novel’s individual components are very powerful, and the hideous moral contamination of slavery runs through all of the novel’s violence. Frannie’s love of fiction makes it seem as if she (and thus perhaps Collins as well) believes in the power of an individual narrative to counter the dehumanization so grotesquely literalized in Langton’s “research.” But this premise doesn’t really help me make sense of Marguerite’s role or some of the other particulars of this novel. To me The Confessions of Frannie Langton ultimately seemed miscellaneous, albeit in an ambitious way: it tries to include too much, to be too many things at once–slave narrative, Newgate novel, romance, murder mystery–and the result is not quite formally or aesthetically or thematically unified. There’s that famous line, though, about reach exceeding grasp: by and large, I’d rather read an ambitious but imperfect book than a perfectly but narrowly limned one.

“What a Thing!” George Saunders, Tenth of December

May 25, 2019May 25, 2019Rohan Maitzen19 Comments

What a thing! To go from dying in your underwear in the snow to this! Warmth, colors, antlers on the walls, an old-time crank phone like you saw in silent movies. It was something. Every second was something. He hadn’t died in his shorts by a pond in the snow. The kid wasn’t dead. He’d killed no one. Ha! Somehow he’d got it all back. Everything was good now, everything was —

Although I found several of the stories in it interesting and memorable, I didn’t much like Tenth of December until I read “Tenth of December,” the final story in the collection. Perhaps this is a lesson in the importance of reading to the end; it is certainly a reminder that abandoning books part way through brings the risk of missing what is best about them.

I was doing OK, if not great, with Tenth of December until I got to “The Semplica Girl Diaries.” Up to that point the story I’d appreciated the most was “Sticks”; I was gripped by both “Victory Lap” and “Puppy,” and “Escape from Spiderhead” moved quickly enough that I didn’t quite tire of the conceit before it ended. Then, unfortunately, I really bogged down in “The Semplica Girl Diaries”: it was obviously doing a lot, but the story’s concept was so aggressive, its execution so heavy-handed, that for me the whole exercise just drowned out any underlying humanity in the story itself. (I’m not saying it isn’t there: just that the style and conceit were very distancing for me.) This slowed my momentum in the collection to the point that I nearly didn’t pick it up again.

Nevertheless, I persisted with Tenth of December, both because of Lincoln in the Bardo and because of Saunders’ reputation, including with readers whose sensibilities I trust. “Home” was a better experience for me; “My Chivalric Fiasco” was worse. Then I read “Tenth of December.” This story put a lot less gimmickry in my way; it was the only story in the book that seemed to me clearly written by the author of Lincoln in the Bardo. I loved it. One in ten: not a great ratio, if you weigh every reading experience equally, but I don’t think art really works that way. Reading “Tenth of December” made reading Tenth of December more than worthwhile to me. That’s part of the trick of short fiction, isn’t it? The brevity of the form means writers can try a lot of things, take a lot of chances, be a lot of different things–if they want to (as Saunders clearly does). And one really solid connection is, really, everything that matters.

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My edition of Tenth of December includes a conversation between Saunders and David Sedaris. I enjoyed their discussion very much. I read it before I got to “Tenth of December” and I thought at that point that my blog post about the collection might end up noting that I liked what Saunders had to say about short stories more than I liked his short stories themselves! (As it turned out, that was only partly true.) Saunders comments that people often say his work is cruel or angry; he acknowledges the truth of this and suggests it is “a bit of a technical flaw” but one that reflects who he is and how he sees the world. I actually wouldn’t have thought to call the stories cruel, but I did think that they were mostly kind of cold: that they were driven primarily by whatever concept animated them and so they came off as technical, even virtuosic, but lacking in the quality I would call heart. This is not to say that they aren’t in their own way sympathetic and often poignant: it’s just that what tenderness they have towards the characters, or towards the human condition, seemed to me to be hard to feel under the performance of self-conscious cleverness.

tenth-3 Naturally, my mixed and sometimes vexed response to Tenth of December got me thinking about what contemporary short fiction I have responded to more readily and positively. Because I don’t read a lot of short stories, I really don’t have a lot of other examples to draw on. I was very impressed with Adam Johnson’s Fortune Smiles, but my favorite fairly recent short story is probably Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies.” I have but have not read all of the collection it comes from. I think I will go back to it now and see what else is there. For those of you who read a lot more short stories than I do: is there a writer in the genre you’d recommend to me, knowing that I’m a realist by instinct and training, that my favorite classic short story is (predictable but true) “The Dead,” and that I get irritable with stories that are more cleverly self-referential than they are committed to storytelling?

“That Was Her Tragedy”: Anita Brookner, Dolly

May 19, 2019May 19, 2019Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

Nobody loved Dolly; that was her tragedy. Nobody even liked her very much, and she knew that too. She was accepted as a friend by women inferior to herself because she was vigorous and clever, because she entertained and fed them, because she sorted out their affairs, and listened with every appearance of interest to their feeble gossip. Unnerved and enervated by years of this company she had succumbed to the first man to make a show of virility in her presence, and thus, like any victim, had cast herself under his spell. And he had partly compensated her for many humiliations by allowing her to reassert her right to be a normal woman, with a normal woman’s expectations, love, certainly, even marriage.

I’m not quite sure what to make of Anita Brookner’s Dolly. I didn’t like it that much as I was reading it, but it kept me interested and has left me puzzling over it, which is perhaps a sign that there is something to it. Well, it’s by Anita Brookner, so of course there’s something to it, and part of that is her trademark fineness of attention–to character, to social nuance, and to the potential for pathos, especially in women’s lives.

Though everyone in the novel is drawn with scrupulous detail, most of her attention in this case goes to the eponymous Dolly, who is shown to us through the eyes of her often skeptical, even hostile, niece Jane. To Jane, Dolly is at once repellent and magnetic. Where Jane is pale, reserved, and solitary, Dolly is intense, charismatic, and hungry for company, especially male company. Widowed by the death of Jane’s uncle Hugo, Dolly becomes parasitic on his well-to-do family, living off an allowance that Jane herself ultimately, after her parents’ deaths, takes over. Jane is not exactly resentful of Dolly’s willed dependence: in fact, much of the novel is spent explaining Dolly to us–her personality, her upbringing, her relationships– in such a way that it seems impossible, perhaps even unjust, to expect anything else of her. When Dolly takes up with the handsome but slightly sleazy Harry, Jane hopes he will marry her: dolly-2

for she was in many ways an old-fashioned woman, apt to hang on a man’s words, brought up in any case to flatter, to placate, to cajole, as if this were a profession in itself, as it must have been before women worked and earned their own money … Not only was it of prime importance to a woman like Dolly to have a man of her own, but that same man, if he were willing … would, in marrying her, confer on her a status which she had not enjoyed for many years.

Dolly, in other words, is a woman of a different generation, one defined by the narrow gender norms of an earlier time. I think one of Brookner’s goals in the novel is to trace how these norms have changed and what that means for allegiances between women now divided by conflicting values and expectations. In the last chapters especially, when Jane is a successful children’s author often invited to give talks to academics, she becomes almost defensive on Dolly’s behalf, as if mentally warding off contemporary criticisms of her type.

But this is where things get complicated, and also, for me, problematic. Jane herself has an ambivalent relationship to feminism:

I find them exhausting, these women of goodwill, with their agenda of wrongs to be righted, of injustices to be eliminated. I want to stand still in the dusk and contemplate the lake, seeing only mist, hearing only a brief ripple where the wing of a bird disturbs the surface of the water, but I must respond intelligently, employ a certain kind of feminised argument, feel myself to be the victim of a monstrous wrong which has been passed down to me from generation to generation.

This wish to be free of politics is itself, of course, highly political and also a symptom of Jane’s class privilege: though she has worked, for one thing, she never had to. She notes that her feminist interlocutors seem disappointed that she replies to inquiries about her “experience in the workplace” by saying she was “never happier” and never experienced any discrimination, but to her this is more a symptom of their determination to be aggrieved than of her own statistically anomalous good fortune. She is self-conscious about the advantages of her private wealth but does not seem to see how this might make her individual experience an unreliable measure of systemic problems.

Not least because these discussions appear so late in the novel and are not (that I noticed) convincingly anticipated, they felt to me like Brookner having her say, about feminism and academia, rather than developing something essential to Jane’s character or story. “Who really benefits,” she has Jane wonder,

from studies in re-reading gender in 1950s melodrama, or women’s revolutionary fiction in Depression America? Is there any chance that a feminist theory of the state will ever be taken seriously? Must we campaign for surrogate motherhood? Or review the legal representations of lesbians in cases of discrimination by employers?

These works pour out from university presses, and are produced by the most excellent of women, many of whom have welcomed me with great cordiality. I appreciate them for their fervour and their courage. And yet a doubt creeps in. I do not want to fight. I want, rather, to explore the world without prejudice, and to be allowed a measure of lenity in my dealings with the world. Sometimes I even long to take the coward’s way out and to live my life without benefit of any sort of agenda …

The assumption that ignoring “the legal representations of lesbians in cases of discrimination by employers” is “without prejudice,” that feminist analysis is an “agenda” that can be done without–these are not neutral statements, and neither is the model of female identity Jane claims to have rejected but says “opens doors on to older simpler longings, regrettable, no doubt, even deplorable,” but compelling to her nonetheless.

dolly-3 This is the model of Dolly: “Charm, Jane, charm!” Jane, or the novel, acknowledges that Dolly’s way of life has been discredited by feminism, but the idea sometimes seems to be that those “older simpler longings” are natural, essential, defining, not just of Dolly but of what women need and want. “I now understand,” Jane explains, reflecting on her own reactions to Dolly’s choices,

that what I wanted to be was not independent, but its very opposite: dependent. I now understood–but of course did not at the time–that Dolly and I had something in common, an age-old ache that may have been no more and no less than a longing to be taken in, to be appropriated, to be endowed with someone’s worldly good whosoever they might be, for in that extremity of longing it might hardly matter. But I was young then, and unfeeling, as they all thought, and so, although I was not shocked by Dolly’s behaviour I was sincerely disapproving.

Jane’s own choices do not win her uncompromised happiness. “Self-sufficient as I am,” she says, “I too feel a longing which I am reluctant to ascribe to the feminine condition alone.” When her friend asserts “personhood” as the most important goal, not being identified as “a wife or mother,” Jane finds this answer pat, “it has an obstinate sound, as if in keeping with the agenda.” The trajectory of the novel is not towards understanding Dolly as a product, even to some extent a victim, of a world that gave a woman with her resources and will to power few options or resources. It seemed to me to move towards criticizing the modern rejection of the values Dolly lives by, the kind of power she exercises, and the ends to which she dedicates her life. Instead of Jane historicizing her own modern judgment, that is (something I struggle sometimes to get my students to do when they discuss the heroines of 19th-century novels), Jane seems to see Dolly as embodying “true” femininity, an essentialized version of womanhood characterized by an “age-old” desire to be dependent, even dominated. There is something touching in the evolution of Jane’s feelings for Dolly, but the love she finally feels for her is explicitly in defiance of her “feminist friends,” who she says “would not recognise the woman I become in Dolly’s presence.”

It’s Jane’s unlikely love we are supposed to be inspired by, but for me Jane’s insistence on setting it up in opposition to feminism was both unconvincing and unappealing. I think it also impeded a genuinely sympathetic portrait of Dolly herself: at first unattractive as a predatory type, by the end she is standing in for a theory of “what women want”–normal women, as Jane says in my epigraph–that I just can’t like or accept. As a result, Dolly is my least favorite Brookner novel to date.

This Week in My Sabbatical: Puttering and Sputtering

May 17, 2019May 17, 2019Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

The_Years It has not felt like a very productive week, though it is hard for me to be sure right now as I am still in the “muddy middle” of the research I have been puttering away on since April. I am definitely out of practice at working without a narrowly defined goal and a specific deadline! While sometimes it still feels luxurious just to be reading and thinking, and while I am well aware that time to do that is literally a luxury, at other times it feels aimless or, worse, pointless. What will come of this effort? Will anything come of it? It isn’t nothing to learn new things, of course, but the other part of this job is to add to them in some way myself.

I’m trying to have faith that I will figure out what I’ve got to say eventually, and (at least as important) to what audience. I don’t think I want to write a strictly academic paper: I think I want to keep working in that interstitial space between academic criticism and literary journalism. I’m feeling a bit discouraged about doing that right now, though, because that will mean pitching my idea (whatever it turns out to be) and not only am I not very good at that but I am also a bit turned off at the moment about the kind of literary writing that seems marketable–the intensely personal (which, with rare exceptions, is the least interesting kind to me), the immediately relevant (which I have at least tried my hand at, though I felt a tad squeamish about it), or the “rescued from obscurity”. (One good recent essay about the pressure to generate a certain kind of story is this one by Joanna Scutts; another is this one by B. D. McClay.) Since I do not have to literally sell whatever essay I write, I have the luxury (another one!) of writing whatever kind of essay I actually want, but I would like it to be of interest and to be read by other people too, so I have to at least consider where it might fit. holtby-woolf

But I need to know what it’s about first — beyond what I know so far, which is that it will in some way be about Winifred Holtby and Virginia Woolf, especially The Years and Three Guineas, and maybe also Middlemarch and North and South, because what I’ve been thinking and reading about is the “novel of purpose” (one of the books I was recently taking notes on is Amanda Claybaugh’s The Novel of Purpose) and how Woolf does and doesn’t fit in to that 19th-century tradition. One sign that I’m not just spinning my wheels is that I am better able now to narrow the scope of my searches, and also some of the discussions in my sources are getting familiar: I know not just a lot of the basic context around the composition of The Years (starting with The Pargiters and ending with the two books we now have) but at least some of the main lines of critical discussion around both Holtby and Woolf. Not Woolf scholarship as a whole, of course: I have had to fight off discouragement brought on by its vastness, which a crude search on the MLA Bibliography suggests now overwhelms the scholarship on George Eliot–6784 entries vs. 3972. (What was I thinking, fleeing what seemed to me like an overpopulated field for one even more crowded?)

book sale haul My other reading has also felt relatively unproductive, though I suppose productivity is not really an appropriate measure for it (though I have long struggled with how or whether to make distinctions between reading and research). I have not actually finished a book since Iza’s Ballad. I have started a couple, and one of them, Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists, I nearly finished, but though I liked the concept (it tells a kind of history of the newspaper business across decades through a linked series of character sketches) and I can’t point to anything wrong with the execution (each sketch is briskly vivid), I just felt less and less motivated to go back to it and finally gave it up. Sometimes reluctant persistence just backfires: in this case, because I felt guilty about not reading The Imperfectionists I kept watching TV instead of picking up another book. As a result I have made great progress on rewatching The Wire (I’m nearly finished Season 4, which is as heartbreaking and infuriating as I remembered it). This morning I picked Anita Brookner’s Dolly off the shelf–like The Imperfectionists, it’s a recent acquisition from the ‘Women for Music’ book sale. I like it already, so here’s hoping it breaks the slump.

“Perfectly Alone”: Magda Szabó, Iza’s Ballad

May 10, 2019Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

Now she could see the picture that used to hang over her bed, the face of the little girl gathering strawberries, a face whose Old German sweetness vanished, replaced by a wreath of wheat-coloured hair from under which her own wrinkled face looked out, and she saw that, in place of the little basket the running girl had carried, there was now her own black string bag. At that moment she realised what she could do for Iza, the Iza that lived inside her, not the stranger rushing about in taxis or the one who talks in whispers to Teréz and looks up from her books with such a stern gaze. Vince was no longer at her side but this time she didn’t call him. This was a moment when she had to be perfectly alone.

It isn’t until nearly the end of Magda Szabó’s Iza’s Ballad that we learn the significance of the novel’s title. As a child, Iza–now a successful doctor–had stopped her father Vince from singing “a beautiful ballad from his student days” because she could not bear its sad story:

In the middle of the chamber
Raised up high on her bier
a lovely virgin bride
lies dead and cannot hear.

We find this out both belatedly and indirectly from Lidia, who nursed Vince on his deathbed. By the time we hear the story of Iza’s ballad, Lidia is engaged to Iza’s ex-husband Antal; Vince has been dead since the novel began. Lidia has been at most a peripheral presence in the novel up to this point, but it turns out that she is a keen observer, particularly of Iza, whom she once watched with awe and admiration but comes to regard with a mixture of pity and horror–as, I think, do we.

It’s not that Iza does anything horrible–at least not deliberately. Iza’s Ballad is a heartbreaking novel, but it is painful in large part because the central characters in its quiet unfolding tragedy, Iza and her recently widowed mother Ettie, want so much to do right by each other. After Vince’s death, the competent and self-sufficient Iza takes charge of her mother in ways that are paradoxically at once generous and ruthless: determined to do everything for Ettie, Iza fails completely to understand what Ettie actually wants or needs. In her turn, at once adoring of and intimidated by her daughter, Ettie suffers in silence as one after another of her modest attempts to retain her autonomy and preserve some sense of self, some continuity between her old life and her new, is stifled by Iza’s single-minded efficiency.

Immediately after Vince’s funeral, for instance, Iza packs Ettie off to a nearby resort town to “relax, have a lie-in, look at the trees, read, sleep and buy a couple of sessions at the baths because it looks as though your bones need it.” Iza pitches this plan as a kindness, so Ettie won’t have to deal with the difficult work of packing up for her impending move to Iza’s flat in Budapest. Ettie is “happy to think how much Iza loved and looked after her, but she had never been so sad in her life as when she finally went to Dorozos,” where she and Vince had “longed to go.” During her stay there, Ettie cheers herself by dreaming of how she will arrange her furniture in Iza’s flat:

She took great delight in the effort, drawing little semicircles for chairs, a square for the table and oblongs for the beds. She carefully put the plan away in her bag so she could produce it when Iza appeared and they could get straight to work. The furniture would have arrived by now, Iza will have sent it up by truck. There’d be plenty to do once they got to Pest. But it would be good work and it made her happy to think about it. Making a home.

But it turns out Iza has taken care of everything in her own way: “She was happy that once again, everything had been done for her, but she thought of the slip of paper in her handbag and tears came to her eyes.”

iza-nyrb This is how things go for Ettie and Iza once settled in Budapest as well. Iza does what she thinks is best, and Ettie’s attempts to participate are either thwarted or criticized. Ettie’s ways are not Iza’s; she does not belong in the modern world of the flat, the city, the trams, the markets, the technology. Her cooking, her shopping, her cleaning–none of it is right. She tries to make a friend and brings home the wrong sort of person. Eventually she realizes that she is an inconvenience, a burden, on both Iza and her housekeeper Teréz: “Teréz would get on better without her. Iza could never relax when she was around.” One of the strangest and saddest signs of Ettie’s growing isolation is the relationship she develops with Iza’s refrigerator, at once a symbol of the alien modern world and a stand-in for the old life from which she has been so completely cut off:

The old woman, who was frightened of all machines, found a curious way of making the acquaintance of the refrigerator. She discovered that the fridge made a sort of animal noise, a low purr. It startled her at first, but then she imagined having a conversation with it and would sit beside it, feeling she was not alone.

But then she spills soup on it and Iza, discovering that she cleaned it up without turning off the electricity first, warns her off, and “after that she no longer tried to make friends with the refrigerator.”

Ettie recovers some sense of purpose and will as she undertakes a trip back home to see to installing the headstone she ordered for Vince’s grave. It is there, back in the village where she once belonged, filled once more with memories of the life she once lived, reconnected to old places and friends, and full of love for her husband and daughter–who, alone again in Budapest, is relishing her restored space and privacy–that Ettie realizes there is something she can do to free both herself and Iza of the intractable unhappy tangle their lives have become. That Iza does not realize the deliberate sacrifice her mother has made is just one more sign of why Ettie made the choice she did.

izas-ballad Though it incorporates several people’s perspectives and stories besides Ettie’s, including Iza’s, Iza’s Ballad felt to me like Ettie’s book, which is why the novel’s title puzzled me at first. It’s Lidia, who looks at Iza and sees her clearly “for what she was,” who articulates why it is really Iza who is central, Iza whose “self-discipline” is also “a hardness of heart that dares not indulge itself by grieving over dead virgins.” Iza’s perfection is the result of a lack of imagination and empathy, a resolute clarity of purpose that obscures rather than illuminates. The things that made Ettie’s life vivid and meaningful to her are invisible or irrelevant to Iza. “The poor woman believes,” Lidia reflects,

that old people’s pasts are the enemy. She has failed to notice how those pasts are explanations and values, the key to the present.

This personal insight has historical implications too in a novel that is very much about social changes and their consequences. Though they are compellingly individual, the characters–Ettie and Iza and Vince and Antal especially–are also illustrative of these more abstract processes; their particular actions, such as Antal’s renovations to Ettie and Vince’s house after Ettie’s move to Budapest, carry symbolic resonance about change and competing ideas of progress and improvement.

Lidia’s comment about the significance of the past to the present also gave me a useful way to think about the novel’s attention to characters’ back stories, and to its somewhat circuitous organization. I found it slowly going and digressive at times: I was emotionally engaged with Ettie’s struggle and wanted the novel’s focus to stay there, with her. Thinking about the novel in broader terms, as an exploration of changing mores and competing values, not just family dynamics, gave retrospective significance to sections I wasn’t originally that interested in. What will stay with me, though, is the pathos and tenderness of Szabó’s picture of Ettie. “Maybe she was already dead and hadn’t noticed?” she wonders as her life shrinks and her spirits fade under Iza’s well-intentioned but murderous regime of care; “Could a person die without being aware of it?”

Incompatible: Sally Rooney, Conversations With Friends

May 5, 2019May 5, 2019Rohan Maitzen8 Comments

rooney I don’t typically post about books I didn’t finish, and I don’t want to make a big contrarian to-do about my having given up on Conversations With Friends, but it is what I’ve been reading lately and I have given up on it, so I might as well at least comment briefly on it here.

I began the novel with some skepticism but also, as always, with the hope that I’d be pleasantly surprised. I told the friend who kindly lent me her copy that I feared it was going to be yet another new novel that is “coolly underwritten,” and it is exactly that. I tried to keep an open mind, though, especially because books that are minimalist in some ways can sometimes be very powerful. For me, books like that would include all the ones I’ve ready by Kent Haruf, for instance, though not Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton, which I said ultimately read to me as if Strout had “used this dispersed form to let herself off the hook.”

It wasn’t exactly, or entirely, the spareness of Conversations With Friends that put me off it, however. It was something about the quality of the sentences, which seemed flat to the point of monotonous: not just the flat affect I’ve protested against before in highly polished contemporary fiction (even really smart fiction I admire, like Sarah Moss’s Signs for Lost Children) but wearisomely unvaried in their tone and rhythm. A sample, chosen (honest!) by just letting the book fall open anywhere:

When I arrived at the house all the windows and doors were open. I rang the doorbell anyway. When I got inside he was drying his hands on a tea towel, like he’d just finished washing up. He smiled and told me he’d been feeling nervous about seeing me again. The dog was lying on the sofa. I hadn’t seen her on the sofa before and wondered if maybe Melissa wouldn’t let her sleep there. I asked Nick why he was nervous and he laughed and made a little shrugging gesture, though one that seemed more relaxed than anxious. I leaned my back against the countertop while he folded the towel away.

I was bored stiff by the process of reading Rooney’s prose, and while I am open to arguments about how really this effect is all about the narrator’s own inadequacies in some way, I simply didn’t care enough about Frances–or anyone else in the novel, as they all seemed equal parts dull and insufferable–to press on past page 100. Whatever revelation or maturation or epiphany lies ahead for Frances, she’s going to have to go through it without me as a witness.

Is it me? Is it the book? It’s both, of course, as it always is.

Postscript: Now I’m reading Magda Szabó’s Iza’s Ballad. How much more interesting, in every way, is this little excerpt than that quotation from Conversations with Friends? “‘The yellow globes shone jovially through the mesh of the bag. ‘She’s trying to work magic,’ thought the doctor. ‘She wants to work magic with three miserable lemons. She thinks that if she shows death she is not frightened of it, it will run away. She thinks that if she turns up at the old man’s bedside with lemons she will find him still alive.'”

May Day: Sabbatical Update

May 1, 2019May 1, 2019Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

Arcimbolo Librarian The start of a new month seems like a good time to take stock, once again, of how my plans and projects for this sabbatical term are progressing. May is actually the point in a winter term sabbatical when being on leave stops meaning that much, as the regular teaching term is now over for everyone anyway. May is often very busy with meetings, though (including our department’s traditional ‘May Marks Meeting’), so my time is still more my own than it would be otherwise.

Looking back over the past four months, it does seem to me that I have been making pretty good use of that protected time. Since I placed my book orders for September, my early project to refresh my reading lists has been less of a priority, but it has definitely had results. The biggest change so far is to the approach and book list for Women and Detective Fiction, which I wrote about in my March update. Unfortunately, as I mentioned in my postscript to that post, I ran into problems with my revised book list for Pulp Fiction (specifically, True Grit turned out not to be available from a Canadian supplier), so I decided to go with Valdez Is Coming again and accept that the onus is on me to teach it differently to make it more accessible. Because I wanted at least something to change for this iteration of the course but had rather run out of enthusiasm for novelty, I switched out The Maltese Falcon for The Big Sleep, which I know reasonably well from teaching it in Mystery and Detective Fiction. My overall enthusiasm for Pulp Fiction is actually flagging right now; I hope that in 2020-21 I can offer a different first-year course, perhaps ‘Literature: How It Works,’ which would let me go back to the broader range of texts and topics I used to cover in our (now retired) courses ‘Introduction to Literature’ and ‘Introduction to Prose and Fiction.’

greatexpectations I have until the fall to settle on the book lists for my winter term courses, which are British Literature After 1800 and 19th-century British Fiction (the Austen to Dickens variation). I’ve spent quite a bit of time examining anthologies for the survey course and concluded that the most reasonable way to go is a slim custom text assembled from Broadview’s wide-ranging options. (Who is actually assigning these behemoth volumes? And how do they assign enough in one term to make it worth their students’ expense?) The down side is that for copyright reasons I can’t include much material past Joyce, but I think I can fill in a small number of contemporary poems and a story or two by other means. I have been playing around with a lot of different options for longer texts that I think would work well in combination, because the assignment sequence I am planning to use includes a final essay for which students would compare our last book with either of our previous ones. (One reason for this is that it means one way or another everyone has a stake in our final reading.) Right now the front runners are Great Expectations, Three Guineas, and The Remains of the Day: I can imagine a lot of interesting ways to connect Remains with the other two, including first-person narration, questions of class, dignity, money, and morality, and connections between personal and public politics. The 19th-century fiction book list is still uncertain: one of the big questions for me is whether Wuthering Heights will make it in or whether I’ll lose my nerve and fall back on old favorites. wuthering-oup

Since fall book orders went in, I have been dedicating most of my time to the more open-ended research I discussed in my earlier posts about the value of ‘uproductive’ time and re-learning patience. Although it still makes me intermittently anxious that I’m not entirely sure where I’m going with all this, I am relaxing more into the process of reading and inquiry–and I am also starting to get a sense of how the different things that interest me might eventually coalesce, though I am a long way from being sure about how to frame the central question, much less how to answer it. I am genuinely enjoying the luxury of just being interested: “curiosity-driven research” is supposedly fundamental to our work, but as I discussed in my post on ‘fallow time’ there are lots of professional disincentives to following your interests in new directions.

book Having said that, the more I read about Holtby and Woolf, and especially the harder I try to understand what’s going on with The Years, the more I’ve been identifying continuities between this material and longstanding interests of mine, including genre (my monograph was about history and fiction as means of telling particular kinds of stories about women’s lives) and the relationship between literary form and ethics (something I’ve addressed both explicitly and implicitly in a lot of my essays and academic articles). I had long casually accepted the image of Woolf as (to quote Janis Paul) “a kind of patron saint of inner vision and consciousness”; the books I’ve been reading on Woolf’s politics and cultural criticism have helped me see her differently, and especially as perhaps not so entirely unlike Victorian novelists in her interest in using fiction to make a difference in the “real world” (as Alex Zwerdling’s Virginia Woolf and the Real World has it). This week I’ve also been reading scholarship on Woolf’s connections to her Victorian predecessors, including Janis Paul’s The Victorian Heritage of Virginia Woolf and Emily Blair’s Virginia Woolf and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel, neither of which (though both are very interesting on their own terms) turned out to address quite the things I was looking for–but of course in some ways that’s encouraging, as it shows where there might be room for me in the conversation.

So that’s where I am now, at the two-thirds point in this six-month sabbatical. I have checked off a number of the concrete tasks I set myself, and I have made progress on the more amorphous but no less important task of refreshing my own intellectual engagement. There have been other things going on too, of course (including Maddie’s performance in Jesus Christ Superstar and, exciting in a different way, her acceptance of a place in Dalhousie’s Fountain School of Performing Arts for next year), and as always I’ve been doing other reading, most recently Lissa Evans’s Old Baggage and a reread of The Break for my book club (where it was a big success). My leisure reading right now is Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends, which I am not liking at all (my goodness, her sentences are dull!)–but that’s a subject for another post!