Another car would have come along, a family car for which she had said she was waiting, or even another man, a white man. Most travelers, like most men, were intrinsically decent. The end result for Iris would have been the same, cruelly the same. But he needn’t have been involved. He was the wrong man to have played Samaritan, and he’d known it, known it there on the road and in every irreversible moment since.
By the time I finished The Expendable Man, I was pretty sure I wanted to include it in the reading list for my survey course on mystery fiction next time around, probably in place of Walter Mosley’s Devil In A Blue Dress. It’s not that I think it’s better than Devil, but I’ve assigned Devil so often I would like to take a break from it, and Hughes’s novel deals with some very similar thematic issues. Both are astute and thought-provoking variations on noir conventions; both use specific individual crimes as devices for examining much bigger questions about social justice and especially about, as the NYRB cover text puts it, “the greatest of all American crimes.” The Expendable Man is also really gripping reading: its first chapter especially is an absolute masterclass in atmospheric unease. My profound relief when Hugh finally rid himself of Iris was compromised only by knowing that of course this was not really going to be the end of it for him—and by knowing already what the narrative itself so coyly withholds for as long as it can, which is that Hugh is a Black man in a racist world, and so he is never really going to be either free or safe.
There are many interesting aspects of the investigation that unfolds as Hugh (with painful inevitability) ends up the prime suspect in Iris’s death. I haven’t spent enough time with the novel at this point to be sure what to make of all of them, but one thing I’ll want to think more about is Ellen’s role, which doesn’t fit any of the usual restrictive hard-boiled parts for women to play. It seems tied to the novel’s attention to class, which, as Mosley notes in his Afterword to the NYRB edition, does not protect Hugh the way he hopes it will: his education and career path, his family’s money and social standing—none of it insulates him from hatred or suspicion. But Ellen’s money and connections are sources of strength, as is her prompt and unequivocal commitment to being on Hugh’s side. If Iris can be seen as a version of the damsel-in-distress turned femme fatale (intentionally or not), Ellen is an ally and partner for Hugh, one who refuses to sit on the sidelines while an injustice is perpetrated. There are other details worth considering about who helps Hugh and who doesn’t, too, including the white lawyer whose motives are primarily political, rather than principled.
The aspect of the novel that I liked the least was its vilification of abortion providers. At least on this first read, I didn’t get any sense that Hugh considers reproductive rights worth defending. What sympathy he feels towards Iris is about her as a murder victim – which is related, of course, to her abortion, but I didn’t pick up any compassion for the secrecy and the risk specific to it, any sense that if only she could get a safe and legal abortion she would have been less vulnerable to other kinds of predation. And Doc Jopher comes across as wholly repugnant, including to Hugh, who reflects with disgust that whatever sentence he serves, he’ll be back before long “to carry on with his butcher’s business.” I don’t think this matters to my interest in assigning the novel: books don’t have to align with my politics to be worth discussing, that’s for sure – otherwise I couldn’t possibly assign The Big Sleep, which I find both misogynistic and homophobic. It’s also possible there are details that would complicate or even change my reading of Hughes’s novel as aggressively anti-abortion (not just grim about its realities at the time). I’d be interested to know what other readers of the novel think about this element of the novel. Does it just seem “of its time”? (And yet, of course, abortion rights were not universally condemned in 1963, so even if so, that’s a particular stance to take on an ongoing controversy.) If I keep Sara Paretsky’s Indemnity Only on the list, there would be an immediate contrast with V. I. Warshawski’s friend Lotty Herschel, whose commitment to providing safe abortions (even when they were illegal) is part of that novel’s feminist framing.
The thing that does make me hesitate is the oddity (arguably) of assigning a novel that is fundamentally about race, and that is told from the point of view of a Black man—but which is written by a white woman. “A white woman writing of a young black man’s problems with the law was a certain kind of gamble,” Mosley comments in his Afterword—but Mosley himself doesn’t seem to consider it problematic, moving immediately on to remark Hughes’s general interest in writing “from perspectives far from her own.” It is clear from the afterword that Mosley greatly admires Hughes in general and The Expendable Man in particular. What kind of representation is more important, in a class like mine that tries to show the range of uses to which the forms of detective fiction have been put since its emergence as a distinct form? It seems as if Mosley would consider it most important to address “the darker reality” (as he puts it) that lies behind more “glittering versions of American life.” Presumably he thinks the gamble paid off for Hughes because the result was a very good novel.
This term is the first one since I began posting about ‘this week in my classes’ in 2007 that I haven’t posted at all about my classes. What’s up with that, you might wonder? Well, more likely you hadn’t noticed or wondered, but I’ve certainly been aware of it and pondering what, if anything, to do about it.
It certainly isn’t anything to do with this term’s classes. At least from my perspective, both of them—Mystery & Detective Fiction and The Victorian ‘Woman Question’—have gone very well. Of course there have been the occasional sessions that dragged a bit, and we had an unusually high number of snow days that created a lot of logistical headaches, but in general discussion was both substantive and lively. I continue to try to wean myself from my lecture notes. This gets easier and easier in the mystery class, as I am pretty confident now both about how I want to frame the course and readings in terms of ‘big picture’ issues and about the specific readings. (I mix in new options quite regularly, because for various reasons I have been teaching the course basically every year for ages, so this definitely keeps it fresh and interesting for me: I just finished reading Dorothy B. Hughes’s The Expendable Man and I’m 90% certain I’m putting it on the reading list for next year, for one!) The ‘woman question’ class is a seminar, so I don’t lecture there anyway; I so looked forward to our class meetings all term, both because the readings are all favorites of mine and because we always had such good conversations about them. The only slight exception was with the excerpts from Aurora Leigh, from which I learned both that assigning excerpts is a bad idea (something I already believed but overrode, for practical reasons)—when it comes to long texts, do or do not, there is no try!—and that narrative poetry is hard, or at least it takes a different kind of preparation and attention than fiction, and that if I’m going to assign any of Aurora Leigh I need to take that into account.
So what’s my problem this term? I think it is rooted in my uncertainty about how to address some big changes that have taken place in my personal life. When I wrote up my 
In my current circumstances, this principle, if that’s what it is, runs up against the principle that I shouldn’t talk about other people’s business here: it feels wrong not to acknowledge that my life has changed significantly, but I have felt—rightly, I think—constrained from going into any detail that might cross the line, which has also meant I have felt constrained from talking about some of my recent reading as frankly and completely as I would have liked to, because I couldn’t address how something like, say, Maggie Smith’s 
Obviously I have reached a point at which it seems fine and reasonable to say what has been going on, though I don’t expect I will ever consider Novel Readings an appropriate place to talk about how or why things have unfolded in this way, or even how I feel about it all! That’s nobody’s business but ours, by which I mean mine and my (truly excellent) therapist’s. 😉 Seriously, though, I do believe we bring our whole selves to our reading, so what I want to work on is how to acknowledge how my new reality sometimes does affect my engagement with books. I can say already that nothing about Diane Johnson’s Le Divorce, which I just read for my book club, seems relevant or resonant at all in that way (though I did enjoy it on its own terms)—though there were moments in 
After college, for a period of two years and eight months, the “real world” became a room at Beth Israel Hospital and Tom’s one-bedroom apartment in Queens. Never mind that I was starting out at a glamorous job in a midtown skyscraper; it was these quieter spaces that taught me about beauty, grace, and loss—and, I suspected, about the meaning of art.
The individual sections of All the Beauty in the World are organized, more or less, around Bringley’s assignments to particular rooms or wings or exhibits; the larger framing is his gradual reconciliation, if that’s the right word, with the “real world” outside the museum as he learns to live with Tom’s loss. Both the people he works with (who come from all parts of the world and all have their own stories about how they came to be standing guard over Van Gogh’s Irises or the tomb of Perneb) and the people he encounters as visitors all play a part in this emotional journey, but it is the art that matters the most, in ways that are better suited to samples than summaries. Here, for instance, is Bringley’s description of a silk scroll hand-painted by Guo Xi, a “Northern Song Dynasty” master:
And so he leaves this job too. From now on when he returns to the museum it will be as a visitor, just another person stepping inside for a moment to be reminded of the obvious, and to be reassured
Everything goes back to normal. Peter Manuel becomes a scary story people tell each other. Just a story. Just a creepy story about a serial killer.
One reason that to date I have not pursued this idea is that true crime, as a genre, makes me uneasy, squeamish, even—ethically, but also more literally. My experience with it is limited and mostly from television, where, for example, I have watched both the TV serial and the documentary The Staircase, as well as both The People vs O. J. Simpson and O. J.: Made in America — and also one season of Netflix’s Making a Murderer. If you can criticize made-up crime fiction for treating imaginary violent deaths as good subjects for an evening’s entertainment, how much worse is it to take the suffering and brutality and tragedy of actual murders and engage us with it in the spirit of a whodunit? Obviously, in both cases everything depends on the treatment: plenty of detective fiction does a lot more than offer us a puzzle, and I’m sure it is possible for true crime writing (or podcasting or dramatizations) to avoid the pitfalls of sensationalism, speculation, and grisly voyeurism. But it can’t help but be a grim kind of reading, writing, watching or thinking, and for my own forays into the already unhappy territory of murder I have just always relied, however naively, on the insulation that seemed to be provided, morally and imaginatively, by knowing that none of what I was reading about ever actually happened to anyone real.
Mina talks in the interview about people’s fascination with serial killers (a point that reminds me of another ‘true crime’ series I’ve seen, “Mindhunter”—which itself walks a fine line in its treatment of its subjects) and notes that people usually want to see them as anomalous. The version of Manuel that her book gives us is hardly “normal,” but at the same time there’s something small, petty, even pathetic about him, rather than monstrous. He represents himself at the trial and one factor in his favor, we’re told, is that
The best of them was undoubtedly Herbert Clyde Lewis’s Gentleman Overboard, which I was inspired to read by listening to Trevor and Paul talk about it on the Mookse and the Gripes podcast. It is a slim little book with a simple little story, but it contains vast depths of insight and feeling, and even some touches of humor, as it follows Henry Preston Standish overboard into the Pacific Ocean and then through the many hours he spends floating and treading water and hoping not to drown before the ship he had been traveling on comes back to pick him up. We also get to see how the folks on board react when he’s discovered to be missing, and we follow his thoughts and memories, learning more about him and how he came to be where he is—not in the ocean, which is easily and bathetically explained (he slips on a spot of grease at just the wrong moment when he’s in just the wrong place), but sailing from Honolulu to Panama in the first place.
I also really appreciated Molly Peacock’s A Friend Sails in on a Poem, which is an account of her long personal and working friendship with fellow poet Phillis Levin. It is a blend of memoir and craft book, which might not work for every reader, but I found the insider perspective on how poems are created and shaped fascinating and illuminating. Peacock includes some of the poems that she talks about; this was my favorite:
I was more ambivalent about Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful. At times I found its fragmentary structure annoying in the way I often feel about books that read to me as unfinished, deliberately or not. But I also thought some of the rhetorical devices Smith uses to structure it were very effective, especially her reflections on the questions, usually well-meaning, people have asked her about the breakdown of her marriage, her divorce, and her writing about it: there are the answers she would like to give, typically raw, fraught, and conflicted, reflecting the complexity of her feelings and experiences, which defy straightforward replies; and then there are the answers she does give, neater, shorter, sanitized. That rang true to me, as it probably does to anyone who has been through something difficult and knows that when people ask how you are doing, they are not really, or are only rarely, asking for the real answer.
Finally, I just finished Mick Herron’s London Rules, the third (or possibly fourth?) of his 
I hope to get back to more regular blogging about books, and about my classes, an exercise in self-reflection that I’ve missed. It has been a very busy and often stressful couple of months, for personal reasons (about which, as I have said before, more eventually, perhaps), but whenever I do settle in to write here I am reminded of how good it feels, of how much I enjoy the both the freedom to say what I think and the process of figuring out what that is! My current reading (slowly, in the spirit of Kim and Rebecca’s #KateBriggs24 read-along, though I am not an official participant) is Kate Brigg’s The Long Form, which I am enjoying a lot; I’m experimenting with having more than one book on the go, as well, so now that I’ve finished London Rules I will go back to my tempting stack of library books and pick another to contrast with Briggs, perhaps 
To anyone familiar with the rigid strictures women faced in the 19th-century, some aspects of Fayne will be predictable, even with the device of an intersex character to subvert the binaries they were based on. Fayne succeeds because MacDonald is a fine storyteller who has more to say than “the times were unfair to women,” or maybe more accurately more she wants to do than just offer this critique (which is not to say it’s not an important critique, or that through the character of Charles / Charlotte she doesn’t extend it significantly). Everything about Fayne suggests that MacDonald wants to have fun as a novelist by writing an unabashedly melodramatic novel with her own variations on the kinds of twists and surprises we get in Gothic or sensation fiction: mistaken or secret identities, false confinements, drugs, sexual secrets, lost heirs, treachery and deceptions of all kinds—but also true-hearted friends and allies pointing the way towards solutions to these mysteries and towards a future in which the people we come to care for will be safe and happy. Overall, it works! It is fun, gripping, surprising, infuriating, and often touching. And, not incidentally, Charlotte herself is a fine addition to the list of 19th-century literary heroines who put up lively resistance to oppressive norms: Jane Eyre, Maggie Tulliver, and Marion Halcombe, for starters. There are many moments in Fayne that are clearly nods to Charlotte’s rebellious predecessors.
Orbital does more, though, than indulge in this potentially saccharine vision of a perfect world spoiled, pointlessly, by human squabbles, greed, and violence. This is a common starting point, the novel proposes, including for the astronauts, initially overwhelmed by the invisibility of the borders and boundaries that motivate so much hostility and cause so much death:
The astronauts are also aware that their own astonishing vantage point is itself implicated in these forces; running through the novel is a debate, unsettled (perhaps impossible to settle), about the value of space exploration, about ideas of progress and the capacity of human invention to do as much harm as good. One of the astronauts, Chie, reflects on her own family history, including the accidents of circumstance that meant her grandfather and her mother survived the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. What story did her mother intend Chie to discern in the photograph she has given her labelled “Moon Landing Day”?
The last two months of 2023 have been so frantic (about which more, perhaps, some other time) that not only did I get very little reading done that wasn’t absolutely necessary for work, but the chaotic atmosphere drove almost all recollection of what I’d read or written earlier in the year clear out of my mind. It’s a good thing I keep records! Looking them over, it was nice to be reminded of what was actually a pretty good year for both reading and writing. I’ll run through the highlights (and also some lowlights) here, as has been my year-end ritual since I started Novel Readings in 2007.
When I was asked by Trevor and Paul at the wonderful Mookse & Gripes podcast to contribute to their “best of the year” round-up episode, the book that immediately came to mind for me was John Cotter’s memoir Losing Music. It deserved but didn’t get a blog post of its own, but you can read a bit about it 
A stretch of uninspiring reading early in the year was broken by Jessica Au’s 
Barbara Kingsolver’s 
I can’t say reading 
I wrote three reviews for the TLS in 2023, Toby Litt’s 
I wrote two other somewhat more academic pieces, though neither of them was, strictly speaking, a “research” publication. One was a review for Women’s Studies of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby’s correspondence in an excellent new edition by Elaine and English Showalter; the other was an essay for a forum organized by my friend and (nearby) colleague Tom Ue on ‘teaching the Victorians’ today, which is coming out eventually in the Victorian Review. I have written literally thousands of words about how I teach the Victorians today: this was a task for which almost two decades of blogging was exactly the right preparation!
That’s the book I expected The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith to be: Mary Ellen Peacock Meredith’s life story, with Mary Ellen herself placed, rightly, at its center. And that is what we get, sort of, in part. Usually what is known about Mary Ellen is what the figure Johnson calls “the Biographer” has said about her in passing, while telling the story of her famous second husband. “But of course,” as Johnson says,
And yet, Johnson considers, or imagines Mary Ellen’s contemporaries considering, her upbringing may have taught her to want things and to behave in ways incompatible with ordinary expectations for nice young ladies of the time. Johnson gives a brisk and basically sound overview of 19th-century gender roles and conventions, familiar to anyone who has read around in or about the history and literature of the period; she also rightly notes that the “ideal” woman (“innocent, unlearned, motherly”) was always a fiction, “encountered more often in the breach than in the observance,” although her image exerted powerful influence over how real women’s behavior was judged, as Mary Ellen’s history (meaning not her life, but the way that life would be told) was to show. Peacock’s good intentions may, ironically, have set Mary Ellen up for failure: “perhaps Mary Ellen Peacock would have been better off if she had not been so clever and educated.”
There is a lot about how things then unfolded that Johnson (like her antagonist “the Biographer”) can’t know for sure. The crucial undisputed fact is that Mary Ellen left Meredith, “eloping” with their mutual friend, the artist—and later 
The surprising thing about The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith, for me, was how much else it does besides reconstitute Mary Ellen’s biography. One fascinating aspect is Johnson’s self-consciousness about her own methodology, something that becomes explicit through her extensive notes. These turn out to be only incidentally about citing sources. A lot of them amplify or illustrate parts of the main text (for example, in the notes you will find many of the recipes associated with the cookery books by Mary Ellen or her daughter by her first marriage, Edith Nicolls). But others take on complex questions about how to do the work Johnson has undertaken, and particularly about how to understand the relationship between conventional biographical sources and information and the insights that are offered by an author’s writings, specifically in this case by Meredith’s novels. This is, as Johnson is clearly aware, a vexed issue: she raises the specter of what critics call the “biographical fallacy,” which can lead to “facile connections” between the life and the art, but also of the biographical tendency to chronicle the work “without imagining that there was much connection between that work and the writer’s ongoing life experiences.” She advocates what she calls, citing Frederick Crews, “a sense of historical dynamics,” recognizing that though a one-to-one correspondence is an implausible assumption, still there inevitably relationships between writers’ lives and what they write.
I actually found more powerful, though (perhaps, again, because this particular polemic has lost some of its urgency, though certainly not all of it), the sections of The True History that remind us that, from the right perspective, all lives are lesser. At these times Johnson’s book is less a literary history or biography and more a quirky form of momento mori, its attention to the leveling effects of death and time serving to puncture even the most inflated vanity even as it offers (perhaps) some philosophical consolation. “Whether Felix grew up to be like his Mama, or his Grandpapa, or his Papa,” she observes, in a passage characteristic of the book’s engaging yet disorienting blend of briskness and gravitas,
I recommended this book for my book club as a “feminist palate cleanser” after Money. (I was also inspired by 
Money, money, money,
But it matters (to me, at least) what those sentences are about, and also what they are for, and for me and most of the others in my book club, this was really the sticking point. What is it exactly that we are being invited to participate in when we read this novel? How far does “it’s for comic effect” excuse offering up the things Self says and does for our (presumed) entertainment? What kind of implied author (to let Amis himself temporarily off the hook) thinks that we will laugh, not just at how stupid Self is at the opera but at his attempts at rape? that we will be engaged and rewarded by a monologue that (however energetic and rhetorically ingenious) is relentlessly sexist and racist and bigoted? Again, we get it: John Self is an anti-hero, mercilessly exposed in all his vices; the novel is satirical, Rabelaisian, Swiftian, pick your poison. It is poisonous stuff, though, and—to bring Amis back into it—there’s such a sense of gleeful bad boy “look at me” about the whole thing, with all the metafictional cleverness deployed as back-up in case the whole “I’m only joking” excuse isn’t enough. That it is such a popular book among (as far we could tell, only) male readers is disconcerting: it’s as if an uncomfortable number of them enjoy a chance to vicariously indulge the kinds of demeaning, exploitative, offensive attitudes (towards women especially) that they know better than to express in propria persona. As we discussed, we have all had the tediously unpleasant experience, at one point of another, of calling out sexism in conversation with men we know, or in TV or movies we are watching with them, only to be dismissed or shut down or worse—often, again, with “it’s only a joke.” The feminist kill-joy is a role we’d rather not have to play, but the alternative is to shut up and take it. Between us, too, we’ve had enough of the other kinds of bad experiences John Self inflicts on the women in his life not to find his shamelessness about them entertaining. We don’t need any lessons in how bad this kind of s–t is, after all, so what social or moral or other revelation can possibly come our way from approaching them by way of John Self?
Our discussion wasn’t all negative. One member of the group noted that she felt John Self was a genuinely memorable, even iconic character, and we all grudgingly agreed that, hate him though we did, he was brilliantly executed: his voice (which is what Amis identified as the most important aspect of the novel, and fair enough) is distinctive and unforgettable. That we would like to forget it could, I suppose, be considered our problem, not the novel’s! Money also prompted a lot of discussion about the more general question of how far a novelist can or should go with an offensive character; we also considered why or whether Self is really so much worse than, say, the soulless ensemble of characters in Succession. We thought that Money would not have worked at all from the outside: what interest we took in Self, and any glimmering of sympathy we had for him, was entirely a product of our immersion in his point of view, which in turn became a test for us of Amis’s experiment, of how far he could go without losing us. We did all read to the end (though we mostly admitted having done some strategic skimming when it just got to be too much)—and our conversation was definitely lively. I don’t expect any of us will read anything else by Amis, though. (Years ago, I remembered, we read his father’s Ending Up, which we enjoyed thoroughly.)
Novel Readings 