He closes his eyes. What does God see? Cromwell in the fifty-fourth year of his age, in all his weight and gravitas, his bulk wrapped in wool and fur? Or a mere flicker, an illusion, a spark beneath a shoe, a spit in the ocean, a feather in a desert, a wisp, a phantom, a needle in a haystack? If Henry is the mirror, he is the pale actor who sheds no lustre of his own, but spins in a reflected light. If the light moves he is gone.
As I made my way through The Mirror and the Light, I found I was nearly as preoccupied with two questions about the novel’s form as I was with its detailed and sometimes mesmerizing chronicle of Cromwell’s last four years: why is the novel so long, and how would it end?*
My question about its length is a genuine one, not (or not exactly) a complaint or criticism. The novel is very long. I think possibly, if there is any way to measure such a thing, it is too long, by which I mean longer than it needed to be–but obviously it is exactly as long as Hilary Mantel thought it should be, and there’s a part of me that finishes that sentence by saying “and she should know.” She’s too smart and too artful a novelist to have left in anything that didn’t serve her purpose as she understood it, and she’s the kind of writer (meticulous, deliberate) who has earned my trust. That, arguably, shifts the burden to me: if the novel seemed too long to me, what was I missing?
My question is not well-posed, perhaps. After all, it’s never actually length that’s the problem when a book seems too long, is it? It’s our experience of that length. Many of my favorite books are as long as or longer than The Mirror and the Light (its pages are not even that densely packed) and sometimes a book with relatively few pages or words can seem slack or be tedious to wade through. My question is really more about what Mantel includes than about how much. Compared to Bring Up the Bodies, The Mirror and the Light felt loosely woven: its nearly 900 pages do at once too much and too little. For around 300 pages in the middle of it, I shifted into what I think of as “maintenance” reading: scanning, rather than scrupulously studying, each page, so as to maintain momentum without (I hope) missing anything significant, slowing down when the action or the prose seemed to intensify. There is a lot happening throughout The Mirror and the Light, but much of this action is on a small scale, like individual threads fraying or breaking on a vast tapestry. Cumulatively, every little bit matters because it contributes to the large-scale catastrophe that is Cromwell’s eventual and inevitable fall, but that big pattern (the final phase of the remarkable rise that began in Wolf Hall and accelerated in Bring Up the Bodies) is what’s important, not the minutiae.
Why, then, does Mantel include so much of it? Or (to set aside the tired and unhelpful question of authorial intent) what is the effect of her decision to include every little thing–to reject the taut intensity that made both earlier books in her trilogy feel so much shorter, go by so much faster, in favor of this more expansive process? One answer that occurred to me as I neared the novel’s conclusion is that our immersion in the daily nitty-gritty of Cromwell’s life at the peak of his power–the constant demands that he do something, fix something, say something; the endless petty but also perilous contests for political dominance with his rivals and enemies; the fraught delicacy of his dances with Henry’s needy vanity–made his death feel shockingly sudden, even though his eventual fate has always been the one absolute certainty of Mantel’s story. Right to the very moment that he finds himself surrounded, arrested, and imprisoned–the moment that he knows too well is the beginning of the end of his life–Cromwell is in the midst of the complicated business of living. While the dramatic irony that is an inevitable feature of historical fiction always hovers over the novel’s action, the steady hum of everything that’s happening in the moment made me less aware of it, papering over the gap between my knowledge of what’s coming and Cromwell’s ignorance. This effect really heightened the emotional power of the last 200 pages, when his efforts prove (as we knew they would) insufficient to save him.
Another way I came to think about the novel’s length: The Mirror and the Life is very much a novel about middle age, a time of life in which (as I am learning) present experiences share mental and emotional space with intense memories of the past and a heightened awareness of the finite future. One reason The Mirror and the Light is longer than Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies is that it contains (or Cromwell’s consciousness contains) both of them within it. In this final novel Cromwell is not just living through his present but constantly recalling his past, reaffirming his history and identity, puzzling out continuities and discontinuities between the boy he once was and the man he now is–and at the same time he is anticipating what will come next, always with a sense of being surrounded by the ghosts of his past actions and (not incidentally) his past victims. Also, like many middle-aged people he has reached a professional plateau: The Mirror and the Light is about a man at the height of his career but with no options for lateral movement and no possibility of a graceful retirement. All he can do is hang on and try to enjoy the rewards his many years of hard work have brought him, while others eye his accomplishments, underestimate the price he paid for them, and dream of succeeding him. There’s less intrinsic drama in maintaining power than there is in either winning or losing it–hence the feeling, at times, that both Cromwell and the novel are spinning their wheels and getting nowhere. When the likely next step is disgrace and death, though, just staying in place has its own particular kind of dramatic tension, and again, this set-up made the ending all the more
Thinking about the novel’s length in these ways reminded me of George Eliot’s comment about Middlemarch: “I don’t see how the sort of thing I want to do could have been done briefly.” It is hard to tell a story that captures the whole scope of life–or, in Mantel’s case, of a particular life–without somehow reflecting that inclusive ambition in your formal choices. Still, my attention and interest did sometimes flag during the frequent scenes of Cromwell and his (few) friends and (numerous) rivals and enemies plotting and nattering and jockeying for position. In contrast, I was riveted by many sections that actually contributed comparatively little to the plot but showcase Mantel’s marvelous writing. Her long sentences are intricately shaped and ornately detailed but always completely controlled:
He used to think that the plums in this country weren’t good enough, and so he has reformed them, grafting scion to rootstock. Now his houses have plums ripening from July to late October, fruits the size of a walnut or a baby’s heart, plums mottled and streaked, stippled and flecked, marbled and rayed, their skins lemon to mustard, russel to scarlet, azure to black, some smooth and some furred like little animals with lilac or white or ash; round amber fruits dotted with the grey of his livery, thin-skinned fruits like crimson eggs in a silver net, their flesh firm or melting, honeyed or vinous; his favoured kind the perdrigon, the palest having a yellow skin dotted white, sprinkled red where the sun touches it, its perfumed flesh ripe in late August; then the perdrigon violet and its black sister, favouring east-facing walls, yielding September fruits solid in the hand, their flesh yellow-green and rich, separating easily from the stone. You can preserve them whole to last all winter, eat them as dessert, or just sit looking at them in an idle moment: globes of gold in a pewter bowl, black fruit like shadows, spheres of cardinal red.
Some readers might love the political maneuvering and find a long paragraph on plums extraneous, digressive–but I’ll take the plums every time: it’s like a still-life painting in prose, resonant with feeling but under perfect control. Here’s another characteristic example:
Don’t look back, he had told the king: yet he too is guilty of retrospection as the light fades, in that hour in winter or summer before they bring in the candles, when earth and sky melt, when the fluttering heart of the bird on the bough calms and slows, and the night-walking animals stir and stretch and rouse, and the eyes of cats shine in the dark, when colour bleeds from sleeve and gown into the darkening air; when the page grows dim and letter forms elide and slip into other conformations, so that as the page is turned the old story slides from sight and a strange and slippery confluence of ink begins to flow. You look back into your past and say, is this story mine; this land? Is that flitting figure min, that shape easing itself through alleys, evader of the curfew, fugitive from the day? Is this my life, or my neighbour’s conflated with mine, or a life I have dreamed and prayed for; is this my essence, twisting into a taper’s flame, or have I slipped the limits of myself–slipped into eternity, like honey from a spoon? Have I dreamt myself, undone myself, have I forgotten too well; must I apply to Bishop Stephen, who will tell me how transgression follows me, assures me that my sins seek me out; even as I slide into sleep, my past pads after me, paws on the flagstones, pit-pat: water in a basin of alabaster, cool in the heat of the Florentine afternoon.
For me, passages like these (and the novel is full of them) more than made up for the parts that failed to hold or reward my attention to the same extent, even though, or maybe because, they do little to propel the novel’s plot.
The plot of The Mirror and the Light is important, of course. Its most significant and decisive event is Cromwell’s negotiation of Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves: Henry’s disappointment in her, his fourth bride, was Cromwell’s ruin. This is a story I know well from other treatments, especially Margaret Campbell Barnes’s in her lovely 1946 novel My Lady of Cleves, so I was curious to see how Mantel told it. Like Barnes, she highlights the very plausible point that if either partner in this ill-fated marriage was entitled to disappointment or worse, it was Anne, trundled across Europe to marry a diseased and aging king known for ruthlessly discarding wives he didn’t want. Mantel’s Cromwell does his best to befriend Anne and coach her to please her irascible husband, but Henry’s antipathy (sparked by their unfortunate first encounter at which Henry, in disguise, took her by surprise as she traveled towards London) was worsened by his fascination with pretty young Catherine Howard. One reason I actually would have been happy for The Mirror and the Light to have gone on even longer is that I would have loved to see what Mantel did with Catherine: her Anne Boleyn is the best I ever met in any novel, and her doomed cousin’s fate is at least as grimly fascinating. (They are treated as a pair in Jean Plaidy’s 1949 Murder Most Royal, one of the most-read in my battered childhood collection of Plaidy’s novels.) We don’t get to know Anne of Cleves as intimately as we did Anne Boleyn: Mantel allows her some dignity, but she remains (as she was historically) a fortunate bit player in the larger drama.
We can’t get close to Catherine, or follow her story to its bloody end, for a very simple reason: chronology. Cromwell’s execution preceded hers, though by barely 18 months. This returns me to the second of my questions about the novel’s form: how would it end? This is obviously not a question about plot; my interest was in the novel’s narration. One of the most discussed aspects of Mantel’s trilogy has been her use of a particularly close form of limited omniscient narration: it is in third-person but as if perched on Cromwell’s shoulder, barely acknowledging that it is not in fact first-person narration, never using the license Austen (to give one example of someone who also loves close third person) sometimes uses in her novels to change point of view once in a while to show us the story’s focalizing character from the outside, or to introduce a bit of information she’s not privy to. (I’m thinking of the rare but vital glimpses we get of Wentworth’s point of view in Persuasion, for example.)
Given her obvious interest in perception, consciousness, memory, and identity, and her obvious desire to bring us as close as she could to the mind whose outward manifestations she’s chronicling, why didn’t Mantel use first-person narration? She set herself the challenge, after all, of making a pretty unsympathetic historical figure–one who made many others his victims–into a character who is engrossing enough for us to care how he lives and dies, and first-person narration is a well-established trick for creating intimacy–sometimes sincerely, sometimes to exploit it to ironic effect (as in Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day). The obvious answer is that then The Mirror and the Light would have had to be a ghost story. It is very much a novel about ghosts, and towards the end Cromwell feels their presence as vividly as that of any of his living companions, but it matters that they are dead while he is not, not yet. The novel, and its central subject, are profoundly interested in what happens when you cross over that line, both as a personal question (“He thinks of his daughters Anne and Grace; perhaps he will meet them as women grown?”) and as a religious one. Following Cromwell across the threshold would force answers to these questions and move us into territory that is beyond even Mantel’s exhaustive research. She’s not beyond imagining those answers (see, for example, Beyond Black), but I didn’t find her approach to them very convincing and I’m glad she let our awareness seep away with Cromwell’s, “going out on crimson with the tide of his inner sea.” She ends it as she should, with the very last of what “he”– long our eyes and ears, our whole consciousness caught up in his hands–can see, and hear, and feel.
The Mirror and the Light starts in the immediate bloody aftermath of Anne Boleyn’s execution, making Cromwell’s own, less refined ending (“they don’t write words on the head of the axe”) a neat formal symmetry. The trilogy as a whole achieves something similar, beginning with Cromwell beaten to the ground by his father Walter, “pulled downstream on a deep black tide,” and ending with Walter’s voice still challenging him to “get up.” Even at the very last, the force of personality Mantel has created for Cromwell is so strong I almost expected that he would, like the case he recalls even as he mounts the scaffold: the Earl of Arundel “was axed down on this spot and his corpse leapt upright to say a Pater Noster. All headsmen … talk of it as a fact.” He doesn’t, of course, and at the last moment Mantel’s third-person narration proves its value as well as its logic, because he slips away and we are left behind. It is hard to mourn a man like Cromwell, but she has made it impossible not to miss him now that he’s gone.
* A postscript to this post: I realize I never really got around to discussing the basic features of the novel–stuff like its plot and characters and religion and politics–with much specificity, but it has been reviewed widely, so if those things are of more interest to you than these ramblings, it’s easy to find someone talking about them. That’s one reason I decided to address these particular aspects of the novel (which for better or for worse are the ones I was thinking most about as I read it and after I finished it) rather than doing more of a standard review post. In case I haven’t quite made this clear, I think it’s a really good novel, even though I ended up skimming some portions of it–not as good as the first two in the trilogy, where I was never tempted to skim, but still better than most novels. If I had to choose, I’d probably pick Bring Up the Bodies as the best of the three. You?
In spite of everything, our academic term here is wrapping up on schedule: we are now in the middle of our exam period, final grades are due May 1, and a week or two after that my department will hold a remote version of our annual “
I guess that’s a sort of peroration, isn’t it? Apparently I’m working them in wherever I see an opportunity. Anyway, it’s odd and a bit sad to be wrapping up a term and feel so deflated about it. I think one reason it hits hard is that I spent so much time planning for this one, especially for the Brit Lit survey class–and I was so excited about Three Guineas and about moving from it to The Remains of the Day. Ordinarily at this point I would be throwing myself into choosing the readings for my first-year class in the fall, as instead of doing Pulp Fiction again I am taking on a section of “Literature: How It Works”; I’m finding that hard to focus on, though, both because there’s a lot I still don’t know about what kind or size of class it will be and because I have lost some enthusiasm for advance planning given how much I had to toss out this term. I did put in an order for the books for 19th-Century Fiction from Dickens to Hardy, but for whatever reason, for the first time I can remember it is not filling well (and it’s not, or not obviously, a coronavirus thing, as many of our other courses at that level seem to be filling up just fine) so that’s a bit deflating as well. But there’s time for all of this to get sorted.
All of this is told in Miss July’s own voice. In some ways this is one of the most appealing features of The Long Song, because July is sharp, funny, and ruthless and because the interplay between her and her son Thomas (at whose prompting she is recounting her life story) draws attention in a clever way to the mediation required between the story she wants to tell and the story he wants her to tell — and also, more generally, to the layers of mediation that were part of how many actual slave narratives reached their audiences. (One of the works cited in Levy’s bibliography is The History of Mary Prince, which I read with my British Literature survey class this term.) I admit, though, that I really struggled with her narration: its cadences and idiom were hard for me to follow, which of course is a reflection on the limitations of my own reading ‘ear.’ The differences from ‘standard’ English are actually pretty subtle most of the time, but they tripped me up surprisingly often, frequently forcing me to go back and start a sentence again to be sure I caught its meaning properly.
“We’re not members of Molotschna,” Salome bursts out at one point, challenged to consider whether the women owe the imprisoned men any loyalty because they belong to the same colony.
Peters’s literal absence, and the absence of most of the other men of the colony, is what creates the space in which these women can talk, and that itself is one of the novel’s critical interventions. For most of their lives these women have not been in control of their own stories; their illiteracy has also prevented them from knowing first-hand the terms on which they have understood and lived their lives. “My point, says Salome,”
I’m not sure whether I’m surprised that it has already been three weeks since we began extreme social distancing here or surprised that it hasn’t been even longer — normalcy itself seems so distant now! It seems remote in both directions, too: hard as it is to think back on the relative simplicity of ordinary life before, it is even harder to look ahead because there is so much uncertainty about when and how those conditions will return. That’s as good an argument as any for trying to take this massive disruption one day at a time, which is certainly what I have been trying to do. My success varies, as does my ability to get through each day with anything like the (again, relative) equanimity and focus I used to have.
Stitching has been used for commemoration, solace, and survival, to record personal losses and as a means of political protest and consciousness raising. The NAMES Memorial Quilt became a focal point for raising awareness about AIDS: “it played its part in raising funds for research, better sex education, preventative measures and effective drugs.” Under Pinochet’s harsh rule in Chile, women created arpilleras (“embroideries sewn on burlap”) telling “of their own experiences, of kidnapped sons and daughters, of their search to find them, of the loneliness of not knowing what had befallen loved ones.” At first the regime overlooked these deceptively cheerful-looking crafts “as tools of subversion”–sexism providing women protective camouflage. But once their subversive intent was clear, “the women were followed, their homes raided.” Esther Krintz and her sister survived the Holocaust by pretending to be Catholics; the rest of her family was murdered by the Nazis. “We know this story,” Hunter tells us, “because Esther sewed it down”:
Threads of Life covers so much it would be better for you to read it yourself if you’re interested, rather than for me to keep giving more examples! But there are two others I want to just touch on, because I found them so interesting, and because they represent the two poles of needlework that Hunter’s book moves between: the intensely intimate and personal keepsake, and the deliberately calculated public display. The first, of the former kind, is the “billet book” she looks through from 
My last example, at the other extreme, is Hunter’s discussion of 
Hatshepsut is also the subject of one of my longtime favorite historical novels, 
Slowly she set off in the direction of the Rosenlund Canal. In order to make herself look a little shorter and older, she stooped over her walker. She had pulled on a white fabric sunhat with a wide brim, which hid her hair and part of her face. No one took any notice of the elderly lady. . . . The best thing was that none of the people bustling about took any notice of her. An elderly lady out and about in the lovely weather didn’t attract much attention.
I suppose Maud’s ability to get away with her petty crime spree is a cautionary tale about the dangers of ageism and sexism, which contribute to obscuring the truth about people. But compared to the moral and psychological layers that emerge from Janina’s murders in 
So I packed up and went home–but still, I realized later, without having quite focused on what was happening. For example, I brought home not just the books we were in the middle of but the books that are (were) next on the class schedule, because it still seemed plausible that we would be doing something like actually finishing the courses as originally planned. And I did not bring home a stack of books that it might just be nice to have copies of at home–any of my Victorian novels, for instance. I own around a dozen copies of Middlemarch, and right now every one of them is out of reach! We are still allowed into our building, and I’ve been thinking I should go get one, and maybe some Trollope. I can’t tell if this really makes much sense, though. I mean, it’s not like I don’t have a lot of books to read right here with me, and I also have e-books of a lot of 19th-century novels because when I bought my first Sony e-reader, years ago, part of the deal was a big stack of free classics to go with it. So what if I don’t like reading long books electronically: I could get used to it. It would be a pretty low-risk outing, given that the campus is basically a ghost town at this point, but I think it’s really psychological reassurance I would be seeking, not reading material, and what are the odds that seeing familiar places I can’t really go back to for who knows how long would actually be comforting?
Anyway, it quickly became clear that the right strategy (and, to their credit, the one our administrators have been urging) is not to try to replicate electronically all of our plans for the last few weeks of term, including the final exam period, but to smooth students’ paths to completion as best we can: dropping readings and assignments and giving them options including taking the grade they have earned so far but still also allowing another chance to do better in as painless a way as we can think of. I think the options I came up with for my classes are pretty good, in these respects, but it may be that they don’t go far enough, because this is all turning out to be so much harder than it sounded a week ago–and of course however we might (or might not!) be managing, our students have their own specific circumstances which may make even the most “reasonable” alternatives too much. I have been feeling a lot of regret about the books we won’t get to, especially The Remains of the Day, which I was increasingly excited about as the capstone text for the survey class–what a good book to read right after Three Guineas! As for Three Guineas itself, I was so excited about teaching it for the first time. It’s definitely going back on my syllabus the next time it fits the brief. Sigh.
One of the most emotionally painful parts of all of this has been the abrupt severance of personal relationships, which is what teaching is really all about. I have put course materials together to get us to the end of our current texts, but it is much less rewarding scripting them than it is taking my ideas and questions in to meet them with and seeing what comes of our encounter. Sure, it doesn’t always go swimmingly, but that just means you try again, or try something different. I know there are ways to include more personal and “synchronous” interaction (as we’ve quickly learned to label it!) in online teaching, and of course as someone who spends a lot of time online I already believe that you can cultivate meaningful relationships without meeting face to face. There just isn’t time for that now, though, and also the demands those tools put on everyone to be available and attentive at the same time are all wrong for our immediate circumstances. It isn’t just about finding ways to get through the course material together either: there are students I have been working with for years who it turns out I saw in person for maybe the last time that Friday without even knowing it. I have been thinking about them, and about all of my students, so much since that hectic departure from campus and hoping they know how much I have valued our time together and how much I already miss them!
And now, I guess, it’s time to settle in to what people keep euphemistically calling “the new normal.” Here in Halifax we are under strong directions for social distancing; I’ve heard rumors that something more rigorous might be coming, in the hope of really flattening that infamous curve. There are lots of wry jokes and memes about readers or introverts or others whose habits and preferences mean they have been “preparing for this moment our whole lives.” We live a pretty quiet life ourselves, so to some extent this is true of us as well (though not of Maddie, who like many young people is going to be very well served by the various ways she and her friends can stay in touch virtually). It’s pretty different having to stay home, though, and also worrying whenever you go out, even if it’s only for essentials. It’s also not spring yet here–I envy my family in Vancouver the softening weather that makes walks and parks and gardens good options. I am grateful, though, that we are comfortable and together and, so far, healthy. I am also glad I did pick up An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good, because I finished reading it this morning and it is a nice bit of twisted fun…about which more soon, I hope!
It is,” as the narrator says, “the old, old battle of the room with the view,” and the joy of the novel is that even as we feel the horror of violence and death and the lesser but equally inexorable horror of everything Lucy must overcome, we see the view open up, we see the light and the violets and the sunshine, we heed the driver’s cry of “Courage and love!”
Lately I have found myself both gripped and soothed by a particular genre of television, and happily for me there turns out to be a lot of it–in fact, since I brought it up on Twitter I’ve learned of many more options, which means that even at my current rate of consumption I won’t run out for months. The shows I’ve been binge-watching (as much as I can binge-watch anything in this busy time of term!) are all examples of what you might call ‘gamified creativity’: shows in which dedicated amateur practitioners of some art or craft compete through a series of challenges in the hopes of being recognized as the best of the bunch.
The well-known Great British Baking Show is one such show; over the past few years I’ve greatly enjoyed both the original series and the Canadian version. I didn’t initially think about it as showcasing creativity because in some ways baking is such a practical and also such a non-negotiable skill: the cake either rises or it doesn’t, the bottom of the pie is either soggy or it isn’t. Watching Blown Away, Next In Fashion, and some of The Great Pottery Throw Down, however, has clarified for me that a big part of the appeal of TGBBS always was the combination of that practicality with ingenious concepts and creative designs and decorations. That’s what these other shows highlight as well: it’s not enough to be able to sew a hem (or a whole jacket), or throw a pot–you also have to come up with a concept for the project and execute it in a way that (if all goes well) sparks both admiration and pleasure. “Fit for function” is an essential standard on the pottery show, but if all your teapot does is pour, it’s not going to 
I’ve been wondering what it is about these shows (which have been around for years, after all) that is so appealing to me right now. Certainly part of it is that they are not particularly demanding to watch, and also that overall they are quite cheering: the very idiosyncrasy of the participants combined with their shared passion for their craft is just so heartening, so humane, at a time when there seems to be so much anxiety and inhumanity going around. These shows also celebrate qualities that are often devalued in the wider world, including not just creativity but also beauty, originality, and mastery outside the domain of the relentlessly technical and utilitarian. Sure, there’s something artificial about the competitions themselves (must everything be turned into a game show?) but I actually find the judging process fascinating: speaking as someone who recoiled from Elizabeth Gilbert’s “all that matters is that you made anything at all” pitch in 
I think too that I am engaged by these shows because I have been feeling restless in my own work. What I feel, often, watching the participants demonstrate their plans and then do their best to carry them out, is envy. I think it must be wonderful to be able to do the things they can do–and also to be passionate about doing them, so much so that you never question why you are doing them and are happy to keep trying and trying and trying again to do them better. I especially envy the leap of imagination that takes them from “here’s the task” to “here’s my idea for that task”: bread that looks like a lion, a toilet that looks like a turtle. (That turtle toilet filled me with such irrational joy when it turned out so well! Who would ever think of such a thing? Who would ever make it? And yet isn’t it just delightful?) By comparison, my relationship with my own work is often much more uncertain, and the work itself–whether it’s teaching, grading, researching, or reviewing–doesn’t really feel creative, or at any rate it doesn’t really satisfy my vague desire to be creating something. That’s one reason I took 
And yet there are creative aspects to my job. As I was starting to write this post, for example, I was also working on my class notes for some new (to me) material I’m teaching next week, including Woolf’s “Kew Gardens” and Three Guineas, both of which I’ve read before, of course, but which I’ve never assigned. This means that I have to come up with a teaching strategy for them, which means figuring out what story I’m going to tell about them: where I’ll begin, what background exposition I’ll include, what plot (for want of a better term) I’ll try to shape our experience of them into. I also think of book reviewing as a kind of storytelling: what might look to a reader of the review “just” like a bit of plot summary, for example, is actually a highly selective retrofitting of the book’s own elements in order to tell my story of what the book is about. The hardest part of writing every review is spotting that story and figuring out how to tell it (and one of the freedoms I most enjoy when writing blog posts, by comparison, is being able to discover it as I go along rather than having to shape the piece around it from the beginning).
Is it because the building blocks of these particular processes are someone else’s stories that, for all the pleasures they really can offer, they don’t quite satisfy the craving for creativity in my own life, the underlying hunger for it that I am feeding with the vicarious experience of it offered through these shows? Perhaps. So what to do about that? I don’t particularly want to change up my approach to either criticism or teaching: I don’t much like criticism that crowds out its real subject (as I see it) with too much other stuff, and though I know my approach to teaching isn’t the only one (I have colleagues, for instance, who incorporate creative writing and other activities into their classes), it is one I believe in and feel comfortable with. I do have some hobbies–crochet and quilting–that give me the satisfaction of actually creating something, but it’s interesting that they are both (for me, anyway, at my limited skill level) pattern-following crafts; my self-expression in both is limited to choosing a pattern and choosing the materials. That’s not nothing, of course! (Also, crochet in particular is perfect to do while watching TV shows of other people making amazingly creative things. 😊)
Novel Readings 