February 2023 – Novel Readings

A Warm-Hearted Reading Update

February 23, 2023Rohan Maitzen11 Comments

strout-again After I finished Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms, I commented on Twitter that I was finding cold, meticulous novels wearing and asked for recommendations of good, recent warm-hearted fiction. Along with the understandable and spot-on nods to writers I already know well (such as Barbara Pym and Anne Tyler), I got a lot of good tips, which I am still working through. Here are the ones I have read so far. I have to say that while they have all been fine, none of them really got much traction with me: I don’t think it is necessarily the case that “warm-hearted” means lightweight, but that’s how these mostly felt. I don’t think I will remember much about them. The exception so far is Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow, which I found very moving; that’s why it got its own post!

Elizabeth Strout, Olive, Again. I read Olive Kitteridge years ago – long enough that I didn’t write it up here, that I can find. I remember enjoying it, but it seemed dispensable, so after a while I put it in my “donate” pile. I didn’t like My Name is Lucy Barton much, and that seemed like the end of my relationship with Strout. Still, she’s much beloved, and so I picked up Olive, Again to see if I’d underestimated her. My conclusion is “not really.” I liked it fine, but it felt incidental, meandering. The ‘linked short story’ effect irritates the novel reader in me: it feels lazy, as if the author couldn’t be bothered to do the work of actually integrating the characters and events into one more substantial and meaningful whole. I’m a lover of Victorian multi-plot novels, which I consider, at their best, a high form of art. If the whole is supposed to be more than the sum of its parts, I’d like the author to be the one who does the work of building that up. Don’t just give us the pieces and assume we’ll believe there’s more to it than that. onan

Stewart O’Nan, Emily Alone. I read this right after Olive, Again, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was still reading the same book. There was nothing (to my ear, anyway) to distinguish the voice or tone or prose of one author from the other; Emily’s story could easily have been one of the chapters in Strout’s book (see, I’m reluctant to call it a “novel”!) – except, of course, for being book-length itself. I liked Emily herself just fine, and “older woman living alone” is one of my favorite tropes (see Plant Dreaming Deep, for a cherished example) but the novel recounted day to day events in tedious detail. I like exposition, but I like it to be more than an accumulation of (fictional) facts.

Elizabeth McCracken, The Hero of This Book. I liked this one quite a lot except for the uneasiness it created in me about what kind of book it is, exactly. I realize that is one of the main points of the book, to destabilize assumptions about what constitutes a memoir or a novel or autofiction or whatever. I understood this because McCracken makes rather a lot of noise about it: “What’s the difference between a novel and a memoir?” she asks; “I couldn’t tell you. Permission to lie; permission to cast aside worries about plausibility.” “It’s not a made-up place,” she says about a trip she and her mother make to the theater (or do they?),

though this is a novel, and the theater might be fictional, and my insistence fictional, and my mother the only real thing, though this version of her is also fictional.

OK, whatever. I found these intrusions distracting. If I wanted to explore theoretical differences between genres in that kind of explicit way, I’d read critical writing; if you want to play with genre, you can do it without so much handwaving about it. And yet as a book about love and mourning, The Hero of This Book was sometimes quite powerful:

Was this grief? I could feel my mother’s joy on the London Eye, her love of heights and good views. That streak of daredevilry and thrill-seeking. I had once taken her on a helicopter tour of downtown Miami, after she’d seen somebody parasailing and had guessed aloud that she couldn’t do that. My mother laughed as the helicopter wove through skyscrapers; I believed that I would fall to the ground at any moment and thought, I’ve had nightmares like this. That was actual joy; the joy I could apprehend now had not occurred, was counterfeit, made of regret and set in regret. osman

Richard Osman, The Thursday Murder Club. When Levi Stahl recommended this, he prefaced it by asking if I read or liked “cozies.” I don’t, much, but this one sounded really charming – which it is, or at least the cast of characters is. By about half way through, however, I had completely lost interest in the actual murder case. (I also got irritated at the repeated device of revealing some key bit of evidence to the characters but withholding it from us: I get that it’s a provocation for us to figure out what it might be on our own, but IMHO it’s a bit of a cheap trick.) This had some ripple effects on the quality of attention I paid to the rest of the novel: I read just closely enough to find out what happened to the people I liked, but overall I wasn’t very invested, and I don’t think I’ll read on in the series.

The Decline of Reading (in My Classes)

February 9, 2023February 9, 2023Rohan Maitzen21 Comments

trollope-warden I’ve been ordering next year’s books — not because I’m that ahead of the game in general but because early ordering enables the bookstore to retain leftover copies from this year’s stock and students to get cash back at the end of term if they have books we’re using again. I’m teaching a couple of the same classes again in 2023-24 (my first-year writing class and Mystery & Detective Fiction) and so it isn’t too hard to get those orders sorted out. While I was at it, I thought I’d also make my mind up about which novels I’d assign for the Austen to Dickens course (this year I’m doing Dickens to Hardy — once upon a time I taught them both every year, but now I do them in alternate years) . . . and this has had me thinking about how my reading lists have changed over the past twenty years.

I don’t mean substantively, although over the years titles have come and gone and been offered in many different combinations. But going back over recent book lists to get ideas, what stood out to me the most is that in the early 2000s I routinely assigned six novels in these one-term courses, often including one really long one (Vanity Fair, Bleak House or Middlemarch, say). Then around 2008 I went down to five, which remained standard for my book lists until 2020, again usually including one of the big ones but often balancing it with one pretty short one (The Warden, Cranford, or Silas Marner, for example).

Then in Fall 2020, when we “pivoted” to online teaching, I took the widespread advice to reduce students’ workload, both because online pedagogy is more laborious for everyone (because of things like written discussion boards replacing more impromptu in-person discussions) and because of the additional stress of the pandemic. That term I assigned just four novels. I taught the 19th-century fiction class online again in Fall 2021 — and again I assigned four novels. Both times one of the four was a big one, but overall, there was less reading than I used to require.

OUP Middlemarch When I came back to in-person teaching last term, I was wary about going back to pre-pandemic norms. Things in general didn’t really seem normal, after all. So once again I assigned just four novels. OK, one of them was Middlemarch! (But again, I used to assign Middlemarch routinely as one of five or even six.) My impression was that for many of the students, this reduced reading load was a lot — overwhelming, even, for some of them — and so I have ordered just four novels again for next year (although one of them is David Copperfield).

What this has me wondering about is what has changed. Was I delusional, back in 2003 or 2004, thinking that most of the class was actually getting through six Victorian novels in a term? My memory of those years is that they included some of the best classes I’ve taught: lively, engaged, enthusiastic, with students often showing up again and again to work with me. Perhaps that was just a very self-selecting fraction of them; perhaps I focused too much on those who were keen and keeping up and the others coasted through somehow (SparkNotes, maybe?) without my being any the wiser. What about all those years I assigned five novels? Again, I always thought things were going fine, if not for everyone, then for most of the class. I certainly don’t remember complaints about the reading load in those days, but over the last two years I have had quite a few students contact me to express concern about their ability to get through, and also just to comprehend, the novels on my reading lists. new-austen

Did the pandemic make that big a difference, with its disruptions to students’ learning and study habits perhaps undermining their patience or capacity for sustained reading? Are students working a lot more outside of school now than they were in 2008 or 2015? Is it an ongoing generational shift, as the trend towards easier modes of media consumption continues? Or is it a question of my own lowered expectations lowering their expectations — of their classes and of themselves? If I put five novels back on the list, would they rise to the occasion? I do feel there have been losses as the number of titles we work on goes down, because there’s less variety, but I have heard the wisdom that less content actually means more learning. I could address the variety problem by replacing the one big novel with two shorter novels, I suppose, but I am reluctant to give up the chance to work through one of the long ones, not least because that kind of doorstopper is one of the literary glories of the period — and not many students are likely to try any of the really big ones on their own, so my class is a rare opportunity to offer them that experience.

I could still add a fifth book to next year’s list if I want to. So far, I’m committed to Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and The Warden. In 2017 I assigned Persuasion, Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, North and South, and Great Expectations for the same course; in 2013 the list was Persuasion, Waverley, Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and North and South (I remember that year distinctly, because it was the year of the Waverley intervention!). I wouldn’t dare add Waverley at this point, I don’t think (I last taught it in 2020, just before we all got sent home, and oh my goodness does looking back at that post make me nostalgic) but I wonder if Mary Barton or Adam Bede would break them, or maybe little Silas Marner. Or maybe I should accept that for whatever reason, at this point less really is more, or at least enough.

What about the rest of you who assign reading for a living? Do you find that the amount of reading you dare demand keeps going down? If so, do you mind, or do you think it is a net benefit? What do you think are the causes? Is it just reality catching up with us (after all, if we’re in this line of work, we do probably read more, and faster, than most) or has something really changed? Students out there — current, former, or prospective — what’s your perspective?

“No Longer Cold”: Jessica Au, Cold Enough for Snow

February 5, 2023February 5, 2023Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

The last train was in forty minutes. I pulled the sleeves of my jacket over my hands and wrapped my arms around myself as I sat on the bench to wait. Eventually, I got up and bought a bottle of sake from one of the vending machines. It was clear and cold, tasting at first of alcohol and something vaguely sweet, before evaporating into nothing. After a while, I was no longer cold, but only very tired. I had one vague, exhausted thought that perhaps it was all right not to understand all things, but simply to see and hold them.

Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow was one of the recommendations I got on Twitter when I asked for “warm-hearted” books as an antidote to the chilly forensic exactitude of Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms. It was a great suggestion: I loved it. Like My Phantoms, it is about the relationship between a mother and a daughter, and it has in common that things between them are a bit complicated. In Au’s slim, quiet novella, though, there is no hatred, bitterness, resentment, or resistance. There’s no friction, no hurt. There’s just the reality that even those you know best remain at some level opaque, separate, different—that you may never really know them, even if you love them. All you can know is what they do and what they say, which may leave something essential about them still out of reach.

Cold Enough to Snow follows its mother and daughter as they travel together in Japan. Travel is always a useful metaphor for other kinds of movement, and it’s clear from the beginning that where they are really going, or at least where the narrator, the daughter, wants them to go is towards greater closeness and understanding. She herself is preoccupied with trying to figure out things about herself and her own life, including whether she wants to have children, but she also seems sincerely interested in her mother, whose reserve and self-effacement (all of the gifts she buys, her daughter notices, are for other people) give her a remote, elusive quality.

The narrator plans outings and activities seeking connection, but often she looks around to find her mother is not with her but is sitting quietly on a bench, resting and waiting. When they talk, she often wants something from her mother that she isn’t quite getting, or she is disappointed in her own inability to respond to her mother the way she hopes to: au Fitz

When she was growing up, she said that she had never thought of herself in isolation, but rather as inextricably linked to others. Nowadays, she said, people were hungry to know everything, thinking that they could understand it all, as if enlightenment were just around the corner. But, she said, in fact there was no control, and understanding would not lessen any pain . . . She spoke about other tents, of goodness and giving, the accumulation of kindness like a trove of wealth. She was looking at me then, and I knew that she wanted me to be with her on this, to follow her, but to my shame I found that I could not and worse, that I could not even pretend. Instead I looked at my watch and said that visiting hours were almost over, and that we should probably go.

She wrestles with her sense that something is not right, that perhaps her expectations make her mother uncomfortable. Sometimes it seems that she is projecting her own confusions or frustrations onto her mother, as when she reassures her mother that it is okay not to understand what you are looking at in galleries, not to have an opinion about it: “The main thing was to be open, to listen, to know when and when not to speak.”

This receptivity seems to be what the narrator is striving for in her relationship with her mother, and as their journey continues I thought she succeeded, particularly as she contemplates what it must have been like for her mother, who moved long ago from Hong Kong to Australia, to live a life separated from her childhood and especially from her first language:

Perhaps, over time, she had found the past harder and harder to evoke, especially with no one to remember it with. Perhaps it was easier that way, so much so that after a while this new way became her habit, another thing she grew used to, like eating cereal for breakfast, or keeping your shoes on in other people’s homes, or rarely speaking to another in your mother tongue.

It’s not a novel of epiphanies or revelations or breakthroughs; there’s no drama. The tone is quiet, and the prose is careful, evocative, minimal. Sometimes I get impatient with novels that are so spare, but in this case the small acts of tenderness the mother and daughter show to each other say enough: the moment when they meet up after a day or two apart and the mother hurries towards her daughter, holding a supermarket bag with their dinner — “When she recognized me her face broke out with warmth. Here you are, she said, as if we had merely missed each other by minutes, as if she were welcoming me into her home. Come and eat, she said” — or when the daughter, seeing her mother struggling with her shoe, kneels down to help her pull it on.

Rooms of Their Own: Anne Tyler, French Braid

February 4, 2023February 4, 2023Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

For the next little bit, then, Mercy continued sleeping at home. She got up in the mornings and made Robin’s breakfast; she tidied and bustled around until he went to work. (Oh, leave! Just leave! she told him in her mind. How long can it take to just go?) Then, the instant he was out of the house, she was off to her studio. She didn’t have much to carry anymore. All the essentials were there now, and even those seemed excessive, because she’d envisioned her future life as taking place in an empty room.

Reading a new Anne Tyler novel always feels familiar, like coming home again—which is also, aptly enough, often the theme of her novels. I have heard the criticism that Tyler always writes the same novel. I don’t think that’s exactly fair, or at least it’s no more true of her than of many other writers who have found their voice, or their niche — “his subject, his idea, what the French call his donnée,” as Henry James puts it. (I was irked by Toby Litt’s snide comment in A Writer’s Diary that Sarah Waters always writes the same book?!) But I also have to concede that there is some truth in that complaint, because the scale and the tone and even, to some extent, the characters in Tyler’s fiction are pretty similar.

For that reason I don’t actually have much to say about French Braid. I liked it a lot, because it’s the kind of thing I like. Like many of Tyler’s novels, it’s a small-scale family saga, here the interwoven stories of three generations. There are no extremes in it (or in any of Tyler’s novels)—no real highs, no real lows. It’s just more or less ordinary people, with their quirks and aspirations and successes and failures and dislikes and loyalties, getting through their lives as best they can. As I read, they all felt very real and immediate to me, but I already can’t recall their stories with much specificity.

The thing that I expect will stick with me about French Braid is its variation on Tyler’s frequent theme of people thinking they want a change but then discovering that what they already have is actually what they want. This pattern is exemplified in my longstanding favorite, Ladder of Years, in which Delia walks away from her family and starts a whole new life for herself. Here’s what I wrote once about that escape fantasy and its results:

Much as I vicariously enjoy Delia’s escape and the cool, unsentimental way she sets about reinventing herself, it’s her return that makes the novel calming, something I turn to when I’m feeling fretful in my own life. We don’t really want to abandon the people we love, no matter how difficult or annoying or distracting they can be; without the elements we sometimes chafe against as complications or impositions, our lives would be thin and bare and joyless, like Delia’s spartan rented room. Delia tries to walk away, not just from her life, but from life itself. The novel unassumingly, with Tyler’s characteristic dry whimsy, returns her, and us, to where we belong.

It’s calming, but it’s also, in a way, deflating: you could read it as saying there’s no point trying to start over, or do better, or free yourself from disappointment, or maybe even as chastening, implying that there’s something awry if you can’t settle for what you have, which is probably better than you think it is.

In French Braid, Tyler envisions a compromise between escape and resignation. Mercy never explicitly leaves her husband Robin, but as soon as she feels free to do so, after their last child heads off to college, she sets herself up in what had been her painting studio, gradually moving her things there and sleeping over, first the occasional night, then more often, until it becomes her (unofficial) residence. It isn’t that she doesn’t love Robin—she continues to look in on him, even to look after him—but she wants something for herself, a degree of freedom or space or clarity, a kind of life that she can’t have living with him. Neither of them ever acknowledges that they are actually, in practice, separated. Nobody else in their family ever talks openly about it either. When her granddaughter Kendall says that she would like to live as Mercy does, doing what she wants when she wants to, Mercy responds that “it does have its pleasures,” adding,

“Sometimes people live first one life and then another life . . . First a family life and then later a whole other kind of life. That’s what I’m doing.”

For Mercy, this “semi-detached” marriage is a way to have that other life without dealing Robin too hard a blow. It’s not such a good deal for Robin, perhaps, but by the time it dawns on him that Mercy does not ever intend to settle back into a conventional married life with him, their new pattern is so well established that it’s not much of a shock. (And after all, must married couples live together forever, no matter what? I’m reading the newly collected letters of Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain, and one of the central issues of Brittain’s life is her “semi-detached” marriage, the result of many factors including her determination not to be the one who put family first and career second. Robert B. Parker and his wife were married for decades but lived for many of them in separate apartments under the same roof, preserving the things they valued about marriage while freeing themselves from the parts of it that chafed.) If Delia’s attempt to “begin again from scratch” is misguided because it artificially separates her past and her future, maybe Mercy’s studio apartment—a literal room of her own—works better because it meets her needs but remains anchored in her reality.