I enjoyed reading Commonwealth: I was engaged all the way through. But I was never gripped by it. I kept waiting for it to go deeper, or get darker, and it just stayed the same: the prose is cool, almost detached, the diffuse ingredients assembled with that air of meaningful randomness that seems to govern a lot of contemporary novels. Why this detail, this memory, this connection, right now? Why tack back into the past at this point, and then skip forward again? Where are we going? The transparent assumption is that simply laying out the story in chronological order isn’t interesting or artful enough, and that can certain be true. Also, sometimes things are dispersed like this so that the climax or revelation comes upon us unexpectedly, or so that the crisis is discerned in its effects before it actually breaks over us, the readers. That’s sort of what goes on in Commonwealth, but maybe because I’m rereading Bleak House right now, I felt a lack of central purpose in Patchett’s novel: I’m fine with a lot of moving parts, but I didn’t feel hers were in service of a deeply felt meaning.
To be fair, I don’t actually think Commonwealth is a swing and a miss at a more profound type of novel. It’s a novel about family drama, so relatively small in scale, and it is sharp in its insights into the ways people come together and move apart. Even allowing for that, I do think Commonwealth isn’t really excellent of its kind. There is a crisis at the heart of Commonwealth — two, I suppose, a tragedy and its exposure — but Patchett never made either of them feel urgent to me. I was interested, sometimes amused, sometimes touched, by the tangle of family relationships Commonwealth presents — and nothing more. This can be enough, of course: there are plenty of books I like a lot that are similar. Is that the real problem, maybe? that Commonwealth slots in too easily in among many similar novels by, say, Anne Tyler or Joanna Trollope? To me, it didn’t really seem to stand out either stylistically or thematically: its effect on me is already fading.
I don’t mean to sound unduly negative about it. I did think it was a good novel; I was just hoping, even expecting, that it would be better than good. Probably it’s another case of my expectations being raised unreasonably by the generally effusive reception it got, or maybe I just read it too soon after A Spool of Blue Thread to appreciate another novel more or less in the same tone and vein. (Or maybe I just read it badly and missed whatever made it special.) Because Commonwealth turns in part on the death of child, too, I can’t help comparing it unfavorably to my favorite novel in the ‘family saga’ genre, Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Disturbances in the Field. I hardly cared at all about the loss in Commonwealth, while the tragedy in Schwartz’s novel still breaks my heart every time I read it — really, every time I think about it. There’s an emotional intensity in Schwartz’s novel that for me was completely missing in Commonwealth: the whole thing had a more or less flat affect, which felt a little too safe to me, as if Patchett was deliberately steering away from the rapids, or the depths.
I’m uneasy about my own experience of Commonwealth, as you can probably tell, especially as I only just wrote a much more forgiving post about A Spool of Blue Thread. In that post I explicitly welcomed the familiarity of Tyler’s novel — and here I am complaining, if mildly, because Commonwealth didn’t provoke, startle, or particularly delight me. There’s nothing with perfectly good novels! I like family dramas, too: we need them, and not just because a steady diet of books like The Orphan Master’s Son, or King Hereafter, or Hild, or Wolf Hall would be debilitatingly rich. I’m a firm believer in the significance of small-scale stories. Their importance can be harder to discern at first, though. I didn’t really appreciate Unless until I reread it: maybe it will be the same way with Commonwealth.
ll of these activities and interests infused my listening life. I didn’t have any sense of disdain for whatever the top 100 might be; I just didn’t pay that music much attention. I knew and liked some older stuff: when Simon & Garfunkel did their reunion tour in 1983, for instance, I lined up overnight with a friend to get floor tickets, and enjoyed their B.C. Place concert from our spot maybe 3 yards back from the stage. I got to be good friends with Veda Hille (now 
But there really isn’t a list of 10 albums that for me made up a distinct soundtrack of those years, at least not one that really speaks to who I was. Instead, there are particular songs or albums that now have astonishing power to summon up different periods of my life. It’s remarkable how music can do that, isn’t it? A song comes on and suddenly there you are immersed in a whole set of feelings, as if you are being dunked into a vat of memory. These are often not songs that are personal favorites – what matters is that for some reason they became part of a moment in time for me. I was in the grocery store yesterday, for example, and Billy Joel’s “I’m Moving Out” came over their annoyingly loud sound system — and I was instantly back in the New Kent Hotel in London, where my sister and I stayed at both ends of our 6-month tour of Europe in 1986. (I just looked it up, and what do you know: 
Sarah McLachlans’s “
Although I listen to music almost all the time now, there’s little that has the same emotional power over me: I have to go deeper into my past to get the same effect. I wonder if it’s just that the more immediate events and their associations haven’t yet distilled into part of my history. There is certainly some music that is fundamental to my life — that I have loved for so long, that has given me so much pleasure, that when I hear it it restores me to myself. At the top of that list would be Joan Sutherland’s 1962 recording of La Traviata: my parents gave me the highlights LP as a birthday gift in 1972 and I cherished it even before I had the honor of getting Sutherland’s autograph on the cover years later. (Richard Bonynge’s autograph is on the back: I still feel a bit embarrassed about how indifferent I was to his offer to sign it too, but I was 9 and Sutherland was my idol.) No piano music has ever displaced Chopin’s in my heart since I first tried to learn some of his easier waltzes as a student: practicing 
It starts to feel as if I have written a lot of these ‘start of the term’ posts: I’ve used up every variation I can think of for titles! It’s in the nature of academic work to be cyclical, though, and on the bright side, this term I am doing one all-new course, so at least you can look forward to some novelty in my teaching posts!
I’ve sometimes wondered if I should have had a plan, or developed one, in order to give Novel Readings a more definite identity. In the decade since I launched this blog, I’ve seen quite a lot of articles or posts giving advice on blogging, and the key to success is apparently having a mission, or filling a specific niche — along with posting on a regular (and frequent) schedule, and keeping your posts under 1000 words. (Hey, I’m 0 for 3!) I do think the hybrid identity of Novel Readings — which is not really, or at least not just, a book blog, and not really, or not altogether, an academic blog — has probably limited its appeal, because for some bookish people there’s no doubt too much academic stuff here, while for some academics, there’s too much book talk (or, too much book talk that’s not sufficiently academic).
So: what’s up for this winter term? Something old and something new. I’m doing another iteration of 19th-Century British Fiction (Dickens to Hardy), beginning, this week, with Bleak House, which I haven’t taught (or read) since 2013. I was so sad to read Hilary Mantel identifying Dickens as 
A Spool of Blue Thread is chronologically wider-ranging than some of Tyler’s novels, which means it has a wider range of characters and some sense of being not just a personal story but also an American story — not as overtly as Smiley’s Some Luck and its sequels, with their relentless chronological march through American history, but still, we get a sense of people shaped by different eras, from the Depression through the Sixties and into the 21st century. I liked the novel’s structure, reaching back into the past and then back yet again, so that we first meet the characters and then learn more about how they came to be who they are, or to be with who they’re with (a process that turns out, in some cases, to be much more fraught than the cherished family stories reveal).
I think that’s what, for me, makes Tyler an author whose new books I always seek out, in spite of (or maybe because of) the strong family resemblances between them. They are all books about people coming to terms with life, which is, after all, what most of us are doing ourselves, most of the time — and the wry, resigned tenderness of her storytelling seems to me a model for how we ought to approach both ourselves and others: with honesty, but also with kindness and humor.
We don’t stay up until midnight on New Year’s Eve anymore. I can’t remember when we gave up on this tradition, exactly. The last New Year’s Eve I specifically remember was 1999-2000: remember the Y2K panic? We didn’t really expect a dramatic catastrophe on the stroke of midnight, but it was hard not to wonder just what would go wrong. I think we rang in the New Year a few times after that, but there came a point at which it was just too obvious that nothing significantly changed with a new date, and also while the children were small, staying up late on purpose when we were already tired all the time didn’t make much sense. This is one way in which I have broken with my upbringing: to this day my intrepid parents and whoever’s celebrating with them stand out on their front porch in Vancouver and listen for the ships in the harbor to tell them when it’s officially midnight, then bang enthusiastically on pots and pans — a ritual I participated in with glee for many years. (To my knowledge, none of our neighbors ever complained.) I don’t think they still have Pêches Flambées for dessert, though: that used to be the showy finale to our elaborate New Year’s Eve dinner.
Anyway, here we are now, writing 2017 instead of 2016 but otherwise puttering along more or less as usual. For me, that means getting things in order for my winter term classes, which begin on Monday — a week later than is typical, which has been a real boon. The campus itself, including the administrative offices, opened up this week, so I’ve been able to get handouts printed and copied and all kinds of other preparatory business done, including a trek across campus to scout out the room where I’ll be teaching ‘Pulp Fiction,’ which is in an unfamiliar building. Will that preemptive action ward off anxiety dreams about getting lost en route? Here’s hoping.
The very first reading we’re doing, though, is a nifty little short story by Lawrence Block called “How Would You Like It?” I often begin the fiction unit in an introductory class with Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”: it’s really short, but also full of things to talk about, so it makes a great warm-up exercise. It didn’t really fit ‘Pulp Fiction,’ though, so I hunted through my anthologies looking for something else equally brief that would help us get some key literary terms on the table right away while also (hopefully) catching people’s interest. I found the Block story in an excellent anthology called A Century of Noir; though it actually isn’t exemplary of noir, I liked that it was twisty as well as short, so I thought I’d try it out. One of the topics I always address early on is point of view, along with the different options for narrators; the story will work well for that, and it also provocatively introduces questions about vigilante justice that we will be discussing with both our Westerns and our mystery readings.
My other course this term is 19th-Century British Fiction from Dickens to Hardy. As regular readers will know, I do this class (or its prequel, 19th-Century British Fiction from Austen to Dickens) 
2016 has been a somewhat unusual reading year for me because quite a few of the books I read were ‘assigned’ for reviews — or else were books I chose not entirely because I wanted to read them but because they looked like books I could pitch for reviews. Although at times I ended up feeling a bit stifled as a result, because it felt as if reading obligations were crowding out reading pleasures, at other times it meant a thrill of discovery, as a book or author I wouldn’t otherwise have read turned out to be wonderful. This was also a sign that as a writer I was being pushed in new directions and, as a result, learning new skills and finding (I hope) new strengths — about which, more in my next post on my year in writing!
Book of the Year: 
Inspired in part by The Portrait of a Lady, I finally read Colm Tóibín’s 
Another author I discovered thanks to a prompt from someone else was David Constantine: Scott Esposito asked me to review 
Finally, Gerald Durrell’s 
I finished my first full viewing of both 
