Author: Rohan Maitzen

Must Be Funny: Martin Amis, Money

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

money coverMoney, money, money,
Must be funny,
In the rich man’s world.
-ABBA

My book club met this week to talk about Martin Amis’s Money, which we chose as a follow-up to Hernan Diaz’s Trust—though I think it would not have come to mind so quickly if Amis hadn’t died relatively recently, meaning we had been hearing a lot about him. None of us had read Amis before, which is perhaps not that surprising: we are all avid readers, but we are also all women, and mature women at that, so not what you might call his target demographic. (I actually can’t think of another book we have read for which our all being women has mattered so much, except perhaps—though for pretty much the opposite reason—Lady Chatterley’s Lover.) Also, then, probably not surprising: none of us liked it. Most of us really disliked it, or at any rate we really disliked reading it, which may or may not be the same thing. There was even some talk of burning our copies after the meeting . . . hyperbole, of course, but suggestive of people’s strong reactions!

It’s not (just) that we really disliked Money‘s obscene, offensive, ridiculous, pathetic protagonist John Self. We are good enough readers not to conflate the book with its first-person narrator, especially when it is as obvious as it is in this case that we are meant to despise him. (Also, Amis is not at all subtle about this distance, almost as if he wants to be sure we don’t think he approves of John Self: “The distance between author and narrator,” his avatar in the novel ponderously explains, “corresponds to the degree to which the author finds the narrator wicked, deluded, pitiful, or ridiculous.”) We got that point early on, though—but still had to persist in his insufferable company for another 400+ pages. Yes, there are some plot twists that complicate (maybe) our relationship with him. He does (arguably) become more sympathetic as it becomes increasingly clear that he is not just Amis’s fall guy for the greed and ostentation and misogyny of money men in the 1980s but the fall guy for the other scheming characters. Yes, too, there are signs of self-awareness, even self-criticism, if not necessarily self-knowledge, that (could) soften us towards him. “Look at my life,” he says;

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: But it’s terrific! It’s great! You’re thinking: Some guys have all the luck! Well, I suppose it must look quite cool, what with the aeroplane tickets and the restaurants, the cabs, the filmstars, Selina, the Fiasco, the money. But my life is also my private culture—that’s what I’m showing you, after all, that’s what I’m letting you into, my private culture. And I mean look at my private culture. Look at the state of it. It really isn’t very nice in here. And that is why I want to burst out of the world of money and into—into what? Into the world of thought and fascination. How do I get there? Tell me, please. I’ll never make it by myself. I just don’t know the way.

Yes, the novel is subtitled “A Suicide Note” so we know he’s on a downward trajectory, with despair and abjection awaiting him. Yes, sometimes his exploits are LOL funny, and yes, “at the sentence level” (as some kinds of readers and critics like to say) Amis’s writing can be virtuosic.

money-penguin-inkBut 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?

money-3Our 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.)

I thought we needed a feminist palate cleanser after this, so I nominated Diane Johnson’s The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith, inspired by how much I enjoyed the Backlisted episode about it. Everyone was on board, so that will be our next discussion, probably in the new year.

Chartres Cathedral, Redux

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

I taught Joyce’s “Araby” recently in my first-year class, the first time in years I have done so in person. I love the story, but I’ve never reacted to it as intensely as I did this year: I found myself sobbing over it as I prepared my notes because the boy’s plight—standing anguished in the wreckage of his dreams, clutching his bright but tragically inadequate coin in his hand—reminded me so much of Owen bringing his gifts and his talent and his humor to the world only to end up feeling there was no place for them or him in it. Anguish indeed.

I think this is why this old post on teaching “The Dead” has been on my mind. What is—what can or should be—the relationship between such intensely personal responses to literature and the work I do every day? I had put the last paragraph of “The Dead” on one of my slides for my “Araby” lecture, just to show them how beautiful Joyce’s prose can be; I told the class I wouldn’t read it aloud, both because it deserves better than I can do and because I feared I might start crying. I don’t know if that meant anything to them, but I do know that our discussion of “Araby” was a lot like the sluggish session on “The Dead” that prompted me to write this post in 2010. That was a long time ago; I’ve been trying to think about what, if anything, has changed since then. I think I try harder, now, when I’m teaching to hold the cathedral doors open, but I also still believe that analysis is not just pedagogically essential but intrinsically valuable.

Standing in Chartres Cathedral Unmoved

I’ve been thinking more about this passage from May Sarton’s The Small Room that I quoted in my earlier post on the novel, from Lucy’s irate speech to her students on returning their woefully inadequate assignments:

Here is one of the great mysterious works of man, as great and mysterious as a cathedral. And what did you do? You gave it so little of your real selves that you actually achieved boredom. You stood in Chartres cathedral unmoved. . . . This is not a matter of grades. You’ll slide through all right. It is not bad, it is just flat. It’s the sheer poverty of your approach that is horrifying!

I’ve been marking assignments myself (in my more benign moments, I call it ‘evaluating assignments,’ which sounds less adversarial). But that’s not actually what has had the line about standing in Chartres cathedral unmoved running through my head. Instead, it’s our recent class meeting on James Joyce’s “The Dead,” which I know I am not alone in finding one of the greatest pieces of modern fiction: smart, patient, subtle, powerful, poignant. My very smart talented teaching assistant led the class, and as always happens when I hand over the reins, I learned a lot and was reminded why I ended up where I am today, namely, because I loved being an English student. (I had the same treat today because another of our very smart and talented graduate students kindly took over the class on T. S. Eliot. Boy, we can pick ’em!) Because I was sitting among the students, I couldn’t see their faces, so I had less than my usual sense of whether they were engaged or listening, but there was certainly not a flurry of responses in answer to Mark’s questions about the story.

Now, it’s not a hugely forthcoming group anyway,  and for that I partly blame both the style in which I have decided to teach the course (basically, lectures, with some Q&A, which seemed to fit the purpose of the course) and also the room we were assigned (quite a formal tiered lecture hall, narrow but deep, which exaggerates the distance and difference between the front of the room and the back and makes the prospect of throwing up your hand to volunteer an idea more intimidating, I expect, to any usually reticent students). Anyway, I sat listening to Mark and looking at the moments on the page he called our attention to and filling up with the old excitement—but also simmering a little at what seemed to me an undue lack of excitement in the rest of the room. ‘Aha!’ I thought. ‘This is what Lucy was talking about! Here they are, in Chartres cathedral, unmoved!’

chartres

But the more I’ve thought about that moment and my reaction, the less satisfied I am—not with them (though come on, it’s “The Dead”!), but with myself and with the unfair lose-lose situation I am (silently) putting the poor students in.

The thing is, my classroom is nothing like Chartres cathedral. And I don’t mean just in the look and layout, though here’s a picture so you can imagine the scene for yourself:

[2023 update: the classroom for my current intro class is at least as grim.] No, the dissimilarity I’m thinking about is one of atmosphere. Or, perhaps more accurately, attitude. As I remarked in my write-up of The Small Room, Sarton seems to me to be appealing to “an old-fashioned view of literature as a kind of secular prophecy,” imagining a world in which “the professor’s scholarship giv[es] her the wisdom to speak ‘from a cloud,’ a ‘creative power,’ a ‘mystery.'” I wasn’t—and I’m not—lamenting that this is not my academy. I’m not a secular priest; I have no special creative power, no authority to speak to them from some mysterious height– no interest, either, in evoking spiritual revelations. That’s not my business. We can’t just stand there and emote, after all. There’s not much point in their bringing their “real selves” to their work in the way Lucy seems to want it: what would I grade them on? Failure (or success) at having their own epiphanies, rather than failure (or success) at explaining the concept of ‘epiphany’ in the context of Joyce’s fiction in general and “The Dead” in particular? As Brian McCrea writes,

People who want to become English professors do so because, at one point in their lives, they found reading a story, poem, or play to be an emotionally rewarding experience. They somehow, someway were touched by what they read. Yet it is precisely this emotional response that the would-be professor must give up. Of course, the professor can and should have those feelings in private, but publicly, as a teacher or publisher, the professor must talk about the text in nonemotional, largely technical terms. No one ever won a National Endowment for the Humanities grant by weeping copiously for Little Nell, and no one will get tenure in a major department by sharing his powerful feelings about Housman’s Shropshire Lad with the full professors.

And as I wrote in response to McCrea in a (much) earlier post,

While we can all share a shudder at the very idea, to me one strength of McCrea’s discussion is his admission that marginalizing affect, pleasure, and aesthetic response is, in a way, to be untrue to literature, and that the professional insistence on doing so also, as a result, marginalizes our conversation, alienating us, as McCrae says, “from our students, our counterparts in other academic departments, our families [unless, he allows, they include other professional critics–otherwise, as he points out, even they are unlikely to actually read our books and articles], and, ultimately, any larger public” (164-5). (In Democracy’s Children, John McGowan makes a similar point: “There remains a tension between the experience of reading literature and the paths followed in studying. . . . To give one’s allegiance to the academic forms through which literature is discussed and taught is to withdraw [at least partly] allegiance to literature itself” [65]).

They aren’t standing in Chartres cathedral unmoved. I’m slamming the door of Chartres cathedral in their face. They might well have been feeling all the excitement I could hope for, or at least those who actually did the reading for the day might have. But it wouldn’t be their fault if they thought the CIBC Auditorium was no place to bring it up. It wouldn’t be Mark’s fault either, or mine. We do show enthusiasm and appreciation for the literature we’re covering, to be sure, but it’s not of the viscerally rapturous variety, or even the aesthetically transcendent variety. It’s a heavily intellectualized variety, and while I don’t think that makes it inauthentic, it isn’t something they are quite ready to emulate, not yet. I want them to feel the readings, and to show that they feel them, but there’s really no appropriate way for them to express that feeling in the ways they would find natural.

But what are we to do?  I’m not a fan of the unreflective response, and taking down the nets would open up our class discussions (at least potentially) to a particularly banal and subjective kind of verbal tennis (“I really like this” / “Can you say more about why?” / “Not really, I just thought it was nice / beautiful / relatable”). Nobody learns anything from that. I usually just hope that my enthusiasm (however peculiar its variety) catches their interest and makes them read more, and more alertly, then they otherwise would. I try to give them tools to notice and think about their more personal responses, too: how they might have been achieved by the formal strategies of the work, and what their implications might be. I was remembering, though, a conversation of my own with one of my undergraduate professors. We had been reading Matthew Arnold, including “To Marguerite—Continued,” at a time when a lot of emotionally difficult things were going on in my life, and after our seminar (in which, as I recall, we talked about things like faith and doubt, and modern alienation, and verse forms, and metaphors) I very tentatively went up to the professor—one of my favorites, a wry 18th-century specialist who always looked faintly sardonic (as is only fitting, of course, for that period). “But don’t you think,” I remember saying (and those who know me now would not, probably, believe how nervous it made me even to stand there and ask this kind but intimidating man anything at all) “don’t you think that life is like he says? that we are isolated like that?” “Perhaps,” was his only reply—that, and a quizzical lift of his eyebrow. Well, what else could he say? What did my angst have to do with his class?

But (I’m full of these equivocations tonight, apparently) I can’t help but think that, for all the gains involved in professionalizing the study of literature, one of the reasons our students don’t graduate and go out into the world and absolutely trumpet the value and significance of the work they did with us is precisely that we have given up that prophetic role. We stood with them outside the cathedral, perhaps, and told them it mattered, and explained its history and architecture and social role and so forth, but left them to stand inside, moved, on their own. To be sure, they might have ignored it altogether if it weren’t for us (how many of these kids would pick up Joyce on their own?), but no wonder they are left thinking that when it came to the things that really mattered, we weren’t there for them.

Originally published November 10, 2010

“To Face the Enemy”: Anita Brookner, Look At Me

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Brookner2Once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten. And, in a way, that bends time, so long as it is remembered, it will indicate the future. It is wiser, in every circumstance, to forget, to cultivate the art of forgetting. To remember is to face the enemy. The truth lies in remembering.

I decided to read Anita Brookner’s Look At Me after hearing Trevor read an excerpt from it on the Mookse and Gripes episode about favorite passages. This is what he read:

And I did not write for many evenings that followed. In my new security I began to see it all in a different light. I began to hate that inner chemical excitement that made me run the words through in my head while getting ready to set them down on the page; I felt a revulsion against the long isolation that writing imposes, the claustration, the sense of exclusion; I felt a thrill of distaste for the alternative life that writing is supposed to represent. It was then that I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and to make them love you. It is your instinctive protest, when you find you have no voice at the world’s tribunals, and that no one will speak for you. I would give my entire output of words, past, present, and to come, in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to state ‘I hurt’ or ‘I hate’ or ‘I want.’ Or, indeed, ‘Look at me.’ And I do not go back on this. For once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten. And writing is the enemy of forgetfulness, of thoughtlessness. For the writer there is no oblivion. Only endless memory.

Who could hear or read that and not be devastated by it? It’s an absolutely ruthless declaration of bitterness, alienation, and loneliness. Maybe it’s perverse that I wanted to go to this place, to meet this person for myself, to find out how her story surrounds this moment, to understand what kind of life encompasses it. Probably I would not have been tempted down this sad path by any other novelist, but Brookner is a maestro of misery—not the screaming or wailing kinds but the stealthily accumulating, erosive kinds—and in other novels she brings to her exploration of this grim territory a faint redemptive sympathy for her sad characters.

brookner1Does she do this for Frances, the wary, lonely narrator of Look At Me? Do we—should we—find compassion in our hearts for her? There’s definitely something pathetic about her, as we follow her through her unexpected and initially life-affirming friendship with Nick and Alix Fraser, who are so much brighter and more beautiful and more exciting than she is:

I slipped into the routine of dining with the Frasers, scarcely believing my good fortune. I registered with amazement the fact that Alix seemed to have taken to me, and that Nick accepted my presence in their flat without comment . . . I don’t think I was forcing my company on them, although I was avid for theirs.

What do they see in her? It is difficult (rightly so, it eventually proves) to take their interest in her at face value, as genuine friendship: she’s an audience, a useful hanger-on, a pet, a project, an object of quizzical condescension. Perhaps there is kindness there, but the Frasers (and Alix especially) are so self-centered that Fanny’s groveling readiness to accept any terms they offer becomes increasingly depressing.

villette-charlotte-bronte-paperback-cover-artAnd yet Fanny’s motives and character also seem uncomfortable: she is manipulative, jealous, reticent to a fault. I’m not sure she’s meant to be an unreliable narrator, strictly speaking, but she’s certainly not a trustworthy one. She reminds me very much of Lucy Snowe in Villette, cast in the role of a spectator to life, showing strength and resilience but also stubbornness, bitterness, and even malice as she endures her marginalization and denies her own desires, even to herself. Just as Lucy watches Dr. John fall in love with Ginevra, insisting all the while that her own heart is untouched, so Fanny refuses to admit her love for James Anstey, only eventually to realize that if he did ever have romantic feelings for her (which I’m not sure of, really), the moment for claiming them has irrevocably passed. Lucy and Fanny also both endure an absolutely nightmarish walk through their city, so overcome with their own emotions that it makes them physically ill. Here’s Fanny, making her way home across London late at night after seeing James in love (or lust, anyway), with another woman:

I was not very fast now, and my feet stumbled from time to time. I went past the sex shop, and the television rental company, past the ethnic hairdresser, whose fluorescent tube in the window blinked weakly, lessening my feelings of total desertion. I greeted the wax nurse in her spectral uniform like an old friend. I passed the banks and the supermarkets and the mysterious shops which seemed to have an air of dereliction about them and whose normal purposes I could now no longer remember. The rain had stopped but my coat was damp and it impeded me. I felt intimations of nightmare; I seemed to be making no headway. It was as if I were trying to wade through some viscous substance wearing an old-fashioned diving suit. There was no one in sight. There was no sound, apart from a distant rumble, which I could not identify. I was breathing harshly now and I could feel a pain in my chest; my hair stuck to my damp face in wisps, and I was very thirsty.

At the end of the walk she is home again, but there is no sense of comfort or reassurance: her flat is the life she doesn’t want, with its stasis and isolation and memories of illness and death. She tries to sleep, and waking up brings new pain as she forgets for a moment how bad everything is (“as if I were on holiday, being cared for, with a day full of surprises and treats ahead”) and then remembers again: “I think this is one of the cruelest tricks we play on ourselves,” she reflects, “this inability to banish early expectation.”

brookner3Writing, for Fanny, is no balm, no refuge, only a retreat—though I think we are meant to take Look At Me as a sign that it can also be revenge. I find myself wondering (not knowing much at all about Brookner herself) how she talked about her own writing. The passage Trevor read is such a crushing statement about writing as the last resort of the outcast. I’m reminded of a passage from Hotel du Lac that I often think about, spoken by Edith, the “romantic fiction” writer who is the protagonist of the novel:

In my books it is the mouse-like unassuming girl who gets the hero, while the scornful temptress with whom he has had a stormy affair retreats baffled from the fray, never to return. The tortoise wins every time. This is a lie, of course . . . In real life, of course, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. Axiomatically . . . hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game. The propaganda goes all the other way, but only because it is the tortoise who is in need of consolation.

Look At Me offers no such consolation, especially if you recognize anything of yourself in “Little Orphan Fanny.” Fanny is a tortoise to the end, but her only victory is having the last word.

“The Light of the World”: Nicola Griffith, Hild

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hildThe publication of Menewood, the long-awaited sequel to Hild, made this seem like a good time to re-run this earlier post on Griffith’s wonderful novel.

I found Hild shelved in the Fantasy and Science Fiction section at Bookmark, which means I almost didn’t realize they had it in stock, as I don’t usually browse that section. (I was poking around in case they had John Crowley’s Little, Big, which Tom had got me interested in.) I can see why the staff had put it there: the front cover blurb compares it to The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones. But it isn’t fantasy: it’s historical fiction, if based, Griffith says in her Author’s Note, on a particularly scanty record: “We have no idea what [Hild] looked like, what she was good at, whether she married or had children.” “But clearly,” Griffith goes on, “she was extraordinary,” and that’s certainly true of the protagonist Griffith has created from the sparse materials available.

Maybe, though, considering Hild “fantasy” is not altogether a category mistake. “I made it up,” Griffith says about her story, while explaining that it is also deeply researched: “I learnt what I could of the late sixth and early seventh centuries: ethnography, archaeology, poetry, numismatics, jewellery, textiles, languages, food production, weapons, and more. And then I re-created that world . . . ” — that is, she engaged in “worldbuilding,” which is a fundamental (perhaps the fundamental?) task of the fantasy or science fiction author. Of course, her world is built out of real pieces, but it’s an artificial construction nonetheless. I suppose this could be said of any historical fiction, or any fiction at all, so maybe I’m trying to blur a line that’s already indistinct. But there’s something about Hild — the strangeness of its world, but also  of Griffith’s evocation of it — that makes it haunting and uncanny, as if we are not so much in an earlier version of our own world but in an alternative version.

It’s mostly Hild herself who’s responsible for that sense that we’re looking through, rather than at, the world: she is the king’s “seer,” the “light of the world,” and thus it is her job, her destiny, her “wyrd” or fate, to perceive the world differently than others. She is constantly seeking patterns, in nature and in the shifting relationships of the court and the kingdom. Her powers of perception set her apart: she is admired, revered, and feared. Her gifts are not necessarily supernatural, though: her “visions” are the results of long thought and sharp intelligence, and sometimes they are also simply predictions shaped to suit what her listeners (especially the King) want most to hear or do. Signs and omens must be interpreted, and that too requires political savvy and deft diplomacy more than any preternatural insight. Hild’s status as the King’s “light” defines her from birth and shapes both how she is treated and how she must behave: it is a burden, a responsibility, a terrible risk and a great liberation, because it exempts her from the ordinary constraints of a woman’s life. Menewood

Hild is an extraordinary character: strong, charismatic, intelligent, intensely physical, remarkably whole and convincing. One of the most interesting aspects of her characterization is the novel’s certainty about her woman’s body: it’s a central fact of her life and Griffith makes that clear without apology, voyeurism, or special pleading. I can’t think, for instance, of another novel in which starting to menstruate is a plot point in quite the way it is here — incorporated with perfect naturalness into the ongoing story of the heroine’s physical and psychological maturation, experienced as an initiation into an alliance of other women, associated with independence from authority rather than readiness for male sexual attention. That’s not to say that sexuality isn’t also an important part of Hild’s story, but though there is a love story of sorts running through the novel, her desires are hers, physical feelings she can satisfy on her own, or with women: they are not (or not just) ties that bind her emotionally to a man, and they certainly do not define her ambitions or determine the arc of her story.

The shape of that story is only partially revealed by the end of Hild. (Griffith is working on the sequel now, but I almost wish she’d waited and published one epic novel, as Hild so obviously stops rather than concludes.) Hild eventually becomes Saint Hilda of Whitby, but she isn’t there when we leave her this time. What we have seen to this point, though, is her development from an uncanny child into a fierce woman. The overall trajectory of Hild is all upward in that way: not just Hild herself, but the world she lives in is taking on a different form over the novel. The most important change is the rise of Christianity, which is gradually replacing the old forms of worship which Hild, as a seer, initially represents and serves. The transition is an uneven and not entirely welcome one. For one thing, people are reluctant to give up their old beliefs, and the representatives of the new God are not altogether persuasive. The God they represent, too, is very different from the old gods, who were more personal and more fun. “They don’t like jokes,” says one of Hild’s women about the Christians; “I don’t think their god does either.” And the new God is demanding in unfamiliar ways, insisting on obedience and reverence, and preoccupied with the unfamiliar notion of original sin. He’s also “squeamish,” inexplicably hostile to women’s bodies: “No blood in the church. No woman with her monthly bleeding. It makes no sense,” says Hild’s friend.

Will this new God diminish or invalidate Hild’s power, as a seer or as a woman? Will He punish her, perhaps, for the evils she has committed as a warrior or a prophet of other gods? Hild approaches her own baptism with trepidation, but then feels renewed courage:

She breathed deep. She was Anglisc. She would not burn. She would endure and hold true to her oath. An oath, a bond. A truth, a guide, a promise. To three gods in one. To the pattern. For even gods were part of the pattern, even three-part gods. The pattern was in everything. Of everything. Over everything. . . .

Her heart beat with it, her tears fell with it, her spirit soared with it. Here, now, they were building a great pattern, she could feel it, and she would trace its shape one day: that was her wyrd, and fate goes as ever it must. Today she was swearing to it, swearing here, with her people.

I wondered (given that she becomes a Christian saint) whether Hild’s baptism would stand as an epiphanic moment of faith — as a revelation. While the language and the mood here is uplifted, though, the strongest sense is one of continuity: “she was still herself,” the scene concludes. Christianity never seems to be the one right way: it’s just another way, and one that is as prone as the old ways to express the will, greed, and ambition of its adherents rather than any divine plan. Hild’s strength continues to be herself — her limbs, trained for fighting, and her mind, astute and endlessly observing.

The other thing that’s rising in the world of the novel is literacy. This is tied to Christianity, in that it’s the priests who are usually the most ‘lettered’ of the characters. But Hild quickly perceives the value of writing as a way of maintaining networks across distances. Her ability to read and write is valuable to her politically, as her success and survival as a seer depends on good and abundant information. But it means most to her personally, as the typical fate of women is to be sent far from home and family in their roles as “peaceweavers,” cementing alliances as wives then securing kingdoms with their heirs. Hild realizes that if she could write, for instance, to her married sister Hereswith, Hereswith “wouldn’t be lost to her”: for someone in Hild’s anomalous and therefore lonely position, letters would be a lifeline, bringing her news and also preserving her own private identity while living among those to whom she is “the maid who killed, the maid who felt nothing. The maid with no mother or sister or friend.”

kinghereafterThe novelist Griffith most reminds me of is Dorothy Dunnett. She luxuriates in tactile details the way Dunnett does, for one thing, as in this description of a waterfront marketplace:

Rhenish glass: cups and bowls and flasks. Wheel-thrown pottery, painted in every colour and pattern. Cloth. Swords — swords for sale — and armor. Jewels, with stones Hild had never seen, including great square diamonds, as grey as a Blodmonath sky. Perfume in tiny stoppered jars, and next to them even smaller jars — one the size of Hild’s fingernail — sealed with wax: poison. . . . A six-stringed lyre inlaid with walnut and copper, and the beaver-skin bag to go with it. A set of four nested silver bowls from Byzantium, chased and engraved with lettering that Fursey, peering over her shoulder, said was Greek. But Hild barely heard him: Somewhere a man was calling in a peculiar cadence, and he sounded almost Anglisc. Almost. Instead of the rounded thump of Anglisc, these oddly shaped words rolled just a little wrong. Not apples, she thought. Pears. Heavy at the bottom, longer on the top.

The extraordinary complexity of the created world is also reminiscent of Dunnett — the intricate family trees, the tangled web of alliances, the unfamiliarity of the names and vocabulary, and thus the associated down side of such authorial mastery: our (or at any rate, my) difficulty keeping track of who’s who, of who’s doing what to whom and why. Like King Hereafter, for example, Hild is full of passages that perplex rather than clarify the action:

As the weather improved, messages began to come in from all over the isle. Two, from Rheged and from Alt Clut, said the same thing: Eochaid Buide of the Dál Riate was sending an army to aid the Cenél Cruithen against Fiachnae mach Demmáin of the Dál Fiatach, and chief among the Dál Riatan war band were the Idings — though the man from Rheged thought two, Oswald and Osric, called the Burnt, while the messenger from Alt Clut thought three, Oswald, Osric the Burnt, and young Osbald.

Or how about this one;

The murdered Eorpwald had been the godson of Edwin. Sigebert was of a different Christian lineage. he had spent his time across the narrow sea at the Frankish court of Clothar, and now Dagobert. If Sigebert was bringing threescore men, they would be Dagobert’s. If he won with their help, he would be obliged to align himself with the Franks. What would that mean for Edwin? Where was Dagobert in relation to the growing alliances of the middle country and the west — Penda and Cadwallon — and the men of the north: Idings, Picts, Scots of Dál Riata, Alt Clut, perhaps Rheghed?

Where was Dagobert, indeed? It helped a bit when I found a partial guide to pronunciation in the back of the book, and a glossary, and there’s a family tree too, but my experience reading Dunnett helped the most, particularly my conclusion that I don’t need to keep up with all the details to stay interested. Both authors are good enough story tellers that the necessary drama rises above the morass of confusing specifics. If I didn’t always know exactly why Hild was fighting someone in particular, it was enough to know that she had her reasons: the heat and blood of the battle was no less intense because I had to suspend, not disbelief, but my desire for perfect comprehension. The absolutely key characters — her mother Breguswith, her best friend, sparring partner, half-brother, and eventual husband Cian, or her “gemaecce” (“female partner”) Begu, for instance — are wholly distinct, and above it all is always Hild herself, “the pattern-making mind of the world.”

As you might expect, I am very much looking forward to reading Menewood!

This post was first published on May 31, 2015.

“Little Failures”: Claudia Piñeiro, A Little Luck

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

pineiroluckLike Elena Knows, A Little Luck is a small book that packs a powerful punch. Now that the first impact of reading it has passed, I do find myself wondering: did it earn its effect? Is that even a fair question? But Elena Knows is about so much: so much is at stake in it. A Little Luck, in contrast, strikes me (though only after the fact, after the immersive experience of reading it) as founded on something slighter, something that maybe can’t quite hold up the weight Piñeiro brings to bear on it. But there’s no denying what an intense and gripping novel it is in the moment.

A Little Luck is about an accident. After the fact, again, I think the way Piñeiro spools out information about it is a bit too manipulative. We return over and over to the moment it happens, each time gaining a bit more information. On the other hand, that’s how traumatic memory works, and the strategy does force the reader into questions, not just about what happened, but about the role of the narrator, first introduced to us as Mary Lohan—about the way she is haunted by it, and the price she pays for it, which it also takes a while for Piñeiro to fully reveal.

Like Elena Knows, A Little Luck turns out to be about motherhood, and (also like Elena Knows) about ways it can go awry and lead to pain on both sides. “Most mothers,” Mary reflects,

never have to go through such terrible circumstances to prove they can be a mother. But life decided to test me, and I, in so many ways, failed.

Did she fail? I think that is one of the novel’s central questions, and Mary’s own answer changes over its course. Arguably, she passed the test with flying colors by unequivocally putting what she believed to be the best interests of her son Federico first by, paradoxically, abandoning him: “I knew I was hurting my child by leaving,” she says, “but by staying I might hurt him even more.” Was it the right decision? Was it the wrong decision? Or was it, like so many decisions we make, the only decision she could make in that moment, under those circumstances? “Motherhood is full of little failures that pass unnoticed,” Mary observes;

If the circumstances had been different, no one, not even me, would’ve ever known who I could become.

Some mothers have all the luck; life never puts them to any kind of test.

I only have a little luck.

Mary—or Marilé, to give her back the name she gave up along with Federico—made an innocuous-seeming decision, one she had made often before and that others also make just moments before she does, with no bad outcomes. The difference is a bit of bad luck, a series of small but incredibly unfortunate events, and thus a massive, irreparable catastrophe. One life is lost, other lives are ruined, and Marilé gives her own life up, which is the closest thing she can imagine to making some kind of restitution:

Not being there, that was the kind of suffering I deserved. To keep on living, without him. Much worse that suicide, without a doubt. An endless, bottomless pain. The agony of never being able to hug him again.

Piñeiro is really brilliant at immersing us in both moral uncertainty and psychic pain. The suspense of the novel comes eventually from wondering if Marilé has any chance at genuine redemption, but the overall emotional effect of it comes from inhabiting her tormented mind, or really her relentless grieving conscience. Happiness has come to her since she abandoned Federico and Marilé to become Mary—the storyline around this is kind of thin and relies heavily on complete coincidence or, to keep within the novel’s terms of reference, an enormous stroke of good luck. What she really wants, though, remains off limits, or so she assumes until she returns to the place she used to live, dreading recognition.

It’s recognition that brings about reconciliation, though, and I found myself wondering if I had been taken in a bit by Mary’s insistent attention to all the efforts she has gone to not to be known. Surely she is actually hoping for just such an outcome, even though she wouldn’t dare admit it to herself? As for the novel’s resolution, again the set-up itself is a bit thin or overelaborate, but it felt so true, and I was glad, given how agonized so much of the novel is, that it ended with a moment of happiness.

This Week In My Classes: Innumerable Bees

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

BEESI’ve always loved these lines from Tennyson’s The Princess:

The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees.

All those soft sounds: how gentle and enticing! But unfortunately they are on my mind right now because I’ve been feeling so overwhelmed with the start of term: it’s my head that seems full of buzzing bees, and that is not so pleasant.

The start of term is always chaotic, and really overall things are going fine, I think. Maybe it’s age that makes me more aware, in a worried sort of way, of just how many moving parts there are, of how many balls I have to keep in the air at all times just to keep myself and my students on track. I used to trust myself to do it all, but these days my executive function and memory just aren’t what they used to be. Announcements and assignments, lecture notes and handouts, attendance lists and spreadsheets, slides and quizzes and worksheets—oh my!

brightspace-logoActually, thinking about it now, maybe there are more moving parts than there used to be. Once upon a time we didn’t use an LMS, for example, and while there’s no doubt that Brightspace (formerly Blackboard formerly Web CT formerly DIY websites) is a useful back-up system for in-person courses—a storage facility available to your students 24/7 so they can never not locate their syllabus!—it’s also the case that expectations have gone up considerably around our use of them (and students’ reliance on them). Now I post my PPT slides on Brightspace after class, for example, something that requires multiple additional steps, assuming I remember to do it in the first place. (I never used to use PowerPoint, either, and I blame it and Brightspace, which both require incessant mousing, for my now chronic shoulder pain.) I used to give quizzes and midterms in class; now, they are all taken in Brightspace—but that too means many more steps than devising the questions and making copies, setting up all the many features just right and entering the questions in the optimal way. When we were all online, I posted weekly announcements for my classes: it turns out students really appreciated these, so I’ve kept doing them, but they take me (no kidding) hours to compose, both to make sure they are optimally clear and useful and because heaven forbid there’s a mistake in one, like a wrong deadline, that gets fixed in their minds or calendars in spite of any subsequent efforts to correct it! Recently, too, in a departmental discussion around class size and workload, one of my colleagues pointed out ruefully that “there didn’t used to be email” and that is such a good point, especially as our class sizes have gone up even as we became not just teachers but customer service representatives! (And yet somehow, without an LMS and without Outlook and without PowerPoint, we managed to do our jobs. Imagine that. Did we do a worse job? Maybe in some respects—accessibility seems like a key point here—but I really do wonder how much all of this apparatus actually helps, rather than hinders, us in our core mission.)

pride-and-prejudice-penguinHow are things going otherwise in my classes? So far 19th-Century Fiction seems great (I hope it’s not just me who thinks so!). It’s the Austen to Dickens version this term, and I took the risk of assigning Pride and Prejudice, which as regular readers will know I sometimes shy away from, not because I don’t love it but because it’s too popular! It is so delightful, though, and I figured that given <waves hand around> the state of everything, personally and generally, there couldn’t be such a thing as too much enthusiasm. Good call, is my current impression. There is so much positive energy in the room! Last year in Dickens to Hardy it sometimes seemed like such a struggle, despite there being so many keen students in the class; and it was so discouraging to watch attendance dwindle, especially during our time on Middlemarch, which I had been so looking forward to. I really hope we can sustain the current level of engagement when we move on to Jane Eyre next week. It can be self-fulfilling: if it’s fun to come to class, people keep coming. So that’s my goal!

1015StartHere-cropMy other class this term is a section of intro, once again the prosaically-named “Literature: How It Works.” But this time it’s in person, because I was so disheartened by the end of last year’s online version that I couldn’t face doing it that way again. I spent a lot of time this summer thinking about how to revamp my specifications grading model to incorporate in-person components. I feel a bit guilty about the amount of paper I’m using up as a result, but I am hopeful that it will pay off in terms of attendance and engagement and in building skills and instilling confidence so that they realize they don’t need to look everything up online but can learn to do the work of literary analysis themselves and get more out of it in the process. We’ll see! I always start with poetry, and we’ve done some bangers already, including Seamus Heaney’s “Digging” and “The Grauballe Man”; “My Last Duchess”; “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers”; and today, “Musée des Beaux Arts.” Judging from our class discussions so far, it does seem to me that not everyone (ahem) is actually doing the reading before class, something I hope the in-class exercises will encourage them to do more consistently. I wonder if the need to do that advance work seems less pressing when it’s “just one poem,” and so it gets shunted aside for “harder” homework.  There are definitely hands going up when I pose questions, though, and it’s early yet: my job here is to make it seem necessary to come prepared but also safe to try out preliminary or uncertain ideas, since so much of the real teaching and learning happens in those exchanges. collins

It was a bit of a rough summer, so in some ways I welcome the demands and distractions of the term. As it all settles into routine, the buzzing will hopefully subside into a manageable murmur. I have some other things on the go as well, most immediately a review of David Bergen’s Away from the Dead for the Literary Review of Canada—it’s my first time writing for them, so I’d like to do a good job! I also spent a couple of enjoyable hours recently in interviews with some folks who are putting together a documentary on Wilkie Collins for the CBC show Ideas. I’m just one of several interviewees, so I don’t know how much of me you’ll actually hear when it airs, which will be sometime early in 2024, in honor of his bicentenary. I don’t seem to be reading much (except for work, of course) but when I am, it’s either Loretta Chase’s Carsington series for relaxation (Mr. Impossible is still my favorite!) or Claudia Piñeiro’s A Little Luck, which seems likely to be every bit as good as Betty Boo. Maybe this weekend I can settle down enough to finish it, and then write it up properly here, the way a real book blogger should!

Summer (Reading) 2023

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

LastRose2013It used to be a ritual for me to post a recap of my summer reading once autumn rolled around again, on the theory that people’s online attention is (rightly!) spottier in the summer and there might be some folks who would like to see what they missed around here. I didn’t do that last year, not because I didn’t read anything last summer but because last year just moving forward from month to month was hard enough, with the backwards drag of grieving, not to look back for other reasons. I’m still mourning—I will always mourn—but as time passes I am more able to be here, now, in the moment, in my moments. I think often these days of Julia Copus’s “The Grievers,” especially these lines:

What we can’t absorb we carry in us,
a lumpish residue. It’s truly a wonder
we manage to move at all; let alone
as freely as this, with the ease at times
of our old and lighter selves . . .

That quiet qualifier “at times” is the key. I am grateful for those times; I have also learned that they take work, and that they can exact a cost.

Anyway, here I am, still, or again, with another new term unfolding in front of me and another summer of reading—some good, some not so good—behind me. I’ll mostly just walk through the highlights here; anyone who wants to do a deep dive can always use the ‘archives’ menu (on the right sidebar) to browse by month. (I don’t really imagine that anyone would want to do that! But you could, or use the “categories” tags, or the index.)Missing Word

Two of the best books I read this summer were about grieving mothers. I didn’t pick them for that reason, although one of them, The Missing Word, was recommended to me by a thoughtful friend who thought it might resonate with my own loss—which it did. The Missing Word is slight but powerful, a wrenching but delicate attempt to “say out loud, dry-eyed, the things that can’t be said.” The other, Valerie Perrin’s Fresh Water for Flowers, is more capacious and perhaps, as a result, a bit messier, less controlled. Thinking about the two novels together, I would say that this difference in scope and style reflects their aspirations: De Gregorio especially is trying to stay “dry-eyed” while saying unbearable things, while Perrin is making room for new, fresh possibilities.

Another couple of stand-out reads were two novels by Olivia Manning. I have written here and elsewhere about her Balkan and Levant trilogies, and about the excellent biography of her by Deirdre David, but I hadn’t really ventured into her other fiction before. I was not disappointed: both School for Love and The Doves of Venus are excellent, and both have something of the odd, unsettling quality that makes her more famous series so distinctively good.

Betty-Boo-SmallerLike everyone else I know, I was really impressed by Elena Knows; it was a treat to find that Piniero’s Betty Boo is also excellent, and to find Some Luck in stock at Bookmark last week—I am looking forward to reading it soon. And the last really good, or at least really enjoyable, read of this summer was Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake.

I read a lot of perfectly fine books this summer, including Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual, Elizabeth Lowry’s The Chosen, Daniel Mason’s The Winter Soldier, and Alice Elliott Dark’s Fellowship Point. I read some that I had high expectations for but that didn’t live up to them: Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, Hernan Diaz’s Trust, Kate Zambreno’s Drifts. I read a couple of books that unfortunately I just didn’t like at all, notably Hannah Kent’s Devotion and Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose. And I read some books for published reviews, including Christine Higdon’s Gin, Turpentine, Pennyroyal, Rue, which I quite liked, Elizabeth Ruth’s Semi-Detached, which I also quite liked, and Daniel Mason’s North Woods, which is very good (my review of this one will be in next week’s TLS).

Overall it was a decent reading summer. I read less than some years, but more than last year, and with more—more what? I want to say something like more capacity, meaning nothing about the quantity of books I read but something about the available space in me, space to receive them. That capacity is still not what it was (I am not what I was). I notice that I am less patient, and so sometimes less persistent. I hope that my grief hasn’t made me an ungenerous reader. I suspect that some of my current reactions are related to grief: I find in particular that I am allergic to magical thinking in books—including DevotionDevotion or Semi-Detached (or, in parts, North Woods)—that otherwise deal in wholly human or natural problems. De Gregorio doesn’t resort to wish-fulfillment or fantasy and that is both the pain and the strength of her treatment of love and loss.

I played Poetry Serendipity often this summer, as I passed through the library for one reason or another. I’ll close with some lines from an enigmatic poem by Marianne Moore called “Picking and Choosing” that is about (I think, and among other things) why and how we read what we read.

Literature is a phase of life. If one is afraid of it,
The situation is irremediable; if one approaches it familiarly,
What one says of it is worthless.
The opaque allusion, the simulated flight upward,
accomplishes nothing. . . .
We are not daft about the meaning,
but this familiarity with wrong meanings puzzles one.
Humming-bug, the candles are not wired for electricity.
Small dog, going over the lawn nipping the linen and saying
that you have a badger—remember Xenophon;
only rudimentary behavior is necessary to put us on the scent.
“A right good salvo of barks,” a few strong wrinkles puckering
the skin between the ears, is all we ask.

The Last Books of Summer

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

last-roses-of-summerMy last two reads of this summer were Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose and Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake. For me, one was a hit, the other a miss.

I began The Book of Goose with enthusiasm; sadly, it dwindled as the book went on. It’s often hard to put my finger on exactly why I don’t like a novel (as opposed to why I don’t like a particular feature of a novel, as with the ghostly illogic that put me off Devotion). When it happens, I always wonder if more time and effort would turn things around—but when I’m reading just for myself, there’s no real incentive to go to that kind of trouble, and there are enough books that do work for me more or less immediately that I don’t worry too much that I’m somehow missing out. A lot of readers I respect think very highly of Yiyun Li (in response to my “meh” judgment on Twitter, Catherine Taylor, for one, commented that “She’s an amazing writer”—though the novel she highlighted was The Vagrants, which I haven’t read but she said is, in her opinion, “pretty much one of the best novels of the last 20 years”). I was very moved (both before and after Owen’s death) by Where Reasons End, but I have DNF’d Must I Go twice now. Perhaps that should have been a warning sign, but I heard part of a podcast interview with Li about The Book of Goose and it intrigued me, and the premise seemed promising.

li-gooseAnother warning sign should have been how many reviews (including some quoted in the pages of “Praise for The Book of Goose” that lead off my paperback edition) compare it to Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. I am cynical about these tendentious excerpts so I don’t pay very close attention to them when I’m making up my mind about what to read. Maybe I should change my habits! Because the Ferrante comparison occurred to me not too far into Li’s novel, and not for good reasons. (I’m not a fan.) Mostly it’s because of Fabienne, the strange, fierce,  often cruel best friend of the narrator Agnès, who has the kind of willful wildness that Ferrante too seems to find, if not attractive, at least appealing, or compelling. I can’t imagine being friends with such a person in real life, and the recoil she caused made it equally hard to imagine why Agnès was so devoted to her in her world. Their friendship has a lot of the push-pull of Ferrante’s protagonists, and there are some similar themes about writing and identity and competition and contested narratives. (When people write about these books as if they reveal some essential truth about women’s friendships, I am baffled: is this really what their friendships are like?) For a while I was engaged enough in the graphic account of village life in post-war France, but the “game” of “let’s write a book” seemed forced to me, an awkward device to generate plot, conflict, and metafiction. Agnès’s time in England seemed similarly wooden to me; her correspondence with Fabienne and the fictional Jacques also seemed too much like a gimmick to stir up potential interpretation. Is The Book of Goose really a high concept novel, or is it trying (and failing) to be one? A lot of critics considered it the former, but I wasn’t convinced and (worst of all) before it was over I had lost interest in figuring it out.

tom-lakeTom Lake was a much more enjoyable read, although like the other Patchett novels I have read recently, it didn’t seem to me to go particularly deep. Still, there was something really satisfying about it: I liked it a lot more than either Commonwealth or The Dutch House (though not as much as I remember liking Bel Canto). It has in common with The Book of Goose an interest in how we look back at the past and use what we remember to give shape and meaning to the present. It’s also, I think, about the roles we play and how they can either trap or liberate us, a theme it literalizes through its theatrical contexts and plotlines. How do we know who we really are, or who we might be? How do we navigate a world in which people, looking at us but not really knowing us, cast us in their own ongoing dramas? Patchett has too light a touch to lean hard into these kinds of thematic or (at their deepest) existential questions: mostly, she just tells a story about people with interesting but also somehow very ordinary lives. A story like this one, about choosing family and farming over fame and fortune, might have been told as shadowed with complications, perhaps regret about the road not traveled, or yearning for lost love, but Patchett’s version is airy and confident: the path taken is unequivocally the right one, which makes the notes of nostalgia unthreatening to present happiness. For a pandemic novel, it’s actually remarkably sunny: there’s really no hint of danger, certainly no sign of illness. Is that escapism? If so, is there something wrong with it? Maybe it’s just one of the gifts fiction can offer us—a temporary respite, a refuge. It’s not that there isn’t trouble and heartache in the story Lara tells her daughters, but while they listen they are safe and loved. There’s definitely room for novels like that in my reading life.

“A deeper mystery”: Hannah Kent, Devotion

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

DevotionI was raised with the kind of faith that does not doubt. God had been as much a part of me as my own marrow, and when I discovered my bones to be empty, fluting music discordant to anything I had sung in church, my anguish was real . . . The understanding I have now, that the world spins on a deeper mystery than anything that might be set into language, was not with me then. Now I know that my mind is too small to hold the spirit. The spirit, I hope, holds me.

I had high hopes of Devotion. I really liked Hannah Kent’s moody historical mystery Burial Rites, and I also liked her next novel, The Good People, quite a lot (details here). Devotion has a lot of the strengths of Kent’s earlier books, especially in its evocation of a particular time and place and its imaginative entry into the lives and minds of people who live then and there, not here and now.

Devotion is about a community of 19th-century Lutherans who, marginalized and persecuted in Germany, emigrate to Australia. The first part of the novel introduces us to them and their village, and especially to our narrator, Hanne, and her family, and their new neighbors, Thea and her family. If I hadn’t lost patience so utterly with the novel (for reasons I’ll get to in a minute) I would go into more detail about this part, and then about the next part, when they are all crammed onto the ship making its arduous way to Australia. All of this is rendered in meticulous detail; Hanne, the first-person narrator, is an appealing protagonist, a bit of an outsider, yearning for things she can’t quite articulate; her relationship with Thea feels real, and meaningful, and precious. Kent is good at so many things! But.

OK, here’s the thing. I know you should not complain that a book is what it is, instead of what you wanted it to be or think it should have been. But. Devotion is (almost) a good historical novel and a compelling love story. But. It has this big twist—a twist which I am going to spoil and then complain about, so if you think you want to read the novel and want to keep an open mind, maybe go away and come back later if you want.

If you’re still reading, here’s the twist. About half way through the novel, Hanne dies. “But you said she’s the first-person narrator!” I imagine you exclaiming; “How can she keep narrating if she’s dead?” That’s it, exactly. She does keep narrating after her death: for the second half of the novel, she is an observer from the other side, except that she’s not really somewhere else, she is present (but she’s not present), she is in and of the actual world (but she’s dead). Nobody can see or hear or feel her (there are some sort of exceptions to this): she is non-corporeal, which is a crucial point because at one point she inhabits someone else’s body (remember Ghost? yes, exactly like this, and for exactly the same purpose). But. She also walks and sleeps and trips over things and falls down. She experiences rain and cold and heat (but she has no body). I could go on, but my point is really a simple one: it all makes no sense at all, if you take even a minute to think about it.

I don’t mind a twist or a ghost or even illogic, if I can tell what its purpose is. (Also, for the record, I really enjoyed Ghost, even though it too makes no sense.) I just couldn’t understand at all why this novel, this story, needed Hanne to be dead. The best explanation is offered by Hanne herself (and echoed in most of the rave reviews quoted on the cover): it’s a novel about how love is stronger than death. At the risk of sounding hard-hearted (and you know I’m a Victorianist, so that can’t be true—I mean, I even cry when Dora dies in David Copperfield and I abhor Dora), that’s trite and uninteresting, and it’s also not true. It’s true that love survives death in the living. But any claim about love keeping the dead alive in the kind of literal way that Hanne continues in the world is just magical thinking, or wishful thinking. If the novel means (as my epigraph suggests) to offer a rebuke to narrow religious ideas about the afterlife with some kind of spiritual idealism, it’s done (for me, anyway) in a pretty unconvincing and irritating way. The one other idea I had is that Kent was playing with the trope of the tragic queer romance—but killing off (as she eventually does) not just one but both of her lovers hardly seems subversive.

Kent can write so beautifully! But Devotion devolved for me into nonsense—heartfelt, even poetic, nonsense, but nonsense. I was so disappointed.

If you read it and can help me understand it in a more sympathetic way on its own terms, I’d be genuinely interested.

Recent Reading: Diaz, Mason, Piñeiro

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

My recent reading has included one book that is suspicious of story but clever (perhaps too clever) about plot and (for my taste anyway) shallowly dismissive about the possibility of meaning; another that is very conventionally plotted and pretty compelling reading but didn’t yield much deeper meaning; and then one more that I think really effectively combines plot, story, and meaning.

Trust-SmallerIf you’re a friend of mine on social media, it won’t surprise you that Hernan Diaz’s Trust is the first one. It is an inarguably ingenious novel, but I thought (and the other members of my book club agreed) that the payoff for its ingenuity in the second half wasn’t enough to make up for the extraordinary, if self-conscious, dullness of the first half. Even a novel that can only really light up on a second reading can (and, arguably, should) generate some excitement the first time through. For me, a case in point would be Atonement, which is a much more layered and complex novel on a reread but which is also exceptionally well written and engrossing to begin with—that’s one of the reasons its big ‘twist’ is so important. If you want to write a novel that is implicitly or explicitly about the power of fiction(s), shouldn’t it actually be powerful fiction? But Trust not only drags on (and on and on) but eventually fizzles out. I assume that it does so to prove its point that there isn’t really anything solid at the heart of the stories we tell—that authenticity and identity are both also fictions, the way money and narrative both are (this is one of the novel’s central conceits). OK, fine, but that’s not only an unsurprising (dare I say unoriginal?) idea but a kind of lazy one. What if narrative is precisely the way we explore and discover and create meaning? Meaning doesn’t have to be absolute to matter, either, and human stories of the kind Trust plays with do matter, even if they are bound together in some ways by artifice. The novel’s embrace of vacuity as a premise and theme left me shrugging, and (something we talked about quite a lot at our book club meeting) it also produced a novel in which even the most painful human experiences were fairly boring to read about, and that’s not just disappointing, it’s also disturbing. Plenty of critics found a lot to admire in Trust but it just wasn’t for me.

Mason-Soldier-CoverI picked up Daniel Mason’s The Winter Soldier because I’m writing up his latest novel, North Woods, for the TLS and it’s good enough that I wanted to read more by him. The Winter Soldier is quite unlike North Woods, mostly in ways that favor the newer novel—which suggests Mason is getting better at his craft! The Winter Soldier (2018) is a good old-fashioned historical novel. It is packed with concrete details that make the time and place of its action vivid in the way I want historical fiction to be vivid. It takes place mostly in a remote field hospital in the Carpathian mountains during WWI; its protagonist, Lucius Krzelewski, is a medical student rapidly converted to a doctor to serve the desperate needs of the Austro-Hungarian army. His time at the hospital is full of harrowing incidents; through them runs his growing interest in an illness that eludes physical diagnosis and treatment—what today we would call PTSD. There are chaotic battle scenes and idyllic interludes; there’s a love story as well. It’s good! It really immerses you in its world, and (unlike Trust!) makes you care about its characters. I ended it not really sure it was about anything more than that. Novels don’t need to be, of course, though the best ones are. Still, I liked it enough that I will probably also look up Mason’s other novels, starting with The Piano Tuner. North Woods is a lot smarter and more subtle, though. (I am not sure it’s entirely successful: in my review, I will say more about that, when I figure out how to!)

Betty-Boo-SmallerAnd then there’s Claudia Piñeiro’s Betty Boo, which I found a really satisfying combination of smart plotting, thoughtful storytelling, and ideas that matter. In some ways it is less ambitious than the other two novels: it is structured more or less conventionally as a crime novel, and there aren’t really any narrative tricks to it, unless you count the sections that are ostensibly written by the protagonist, Nurit Iscar, about its central murder case. Iscar is a crime novelist who has had a professional setback (a crushing review of her foray into romantic fiction) and is currently getting by as a ghost writer. A contact at a major newspaper asks her to write some articles about a murder from a less journalistic and more contemplative perspective; in aid of this mission, she moves into the gated community where the victim lived and died. She ends up collaborating with the reporters on the crime beat as they investigate the death and discover that it is a part of a larger and more sinister operation—about which, of course, I will not give you any details here! Betty Boo is an unusual book: it doesn’t read quite like a “genre” mystery, as it is at least as interested in Nurit’s life and especially her relationships, with her close women friends and her lovers, as it is in its crime story. Also, Betty Boo is about crime, reporting, and fiction as themes, though its attention to these issues is integrated into the storytelling so that it never really feels metafictional—unlike Trust, which is all gimmick and so no substance, Betty Boo seems committed to the value and possibility of substance, even as Piñeiro provokes us to think about the obstacles we face in achieving it, in writing or in life, especially now that the news as a vehicle for both information and storytelling has become so degraded. I appreciated how original Betty Boo felt, and how genuinely interesting it was: I haven’t read another writer who does quite what Piñeiro does, in it or, for that matter, in Elena Knows. Of the three novels I read recently, this is the one I’m most likely to recommend to others, and I’m definitely going to read more of Piñeiro’s fiction, probably starting with A Little Luck, when I can get my hands on it.