I haven’t been doing well blogging my reading lately. Here are some brief comments on recent selections.

I had high expectations for Graham Swift’s Waterland. Before I read it, in fact, it was a leading contender for my upcoming survey course on “British Literature Since 1800,” for which I figure I can asssign a maximum of two novels, one Victorian (of course!) and one modern or contemporary. As I’m leaning towards Dickens (of course!) for the Victorian novel, I thought, from what I’d heard about it, that Waterland might make a great pairing with Great Expectations. But I was quite disappointed in the novel. Conceptually, it seemed very dated, for one thing: all that historiographical metafiction stuff felt really innovative in the 1980s but now seems to belabour the obvious (and I should know from obvious in this area, as I wrote both my undergraduate honours thesis and my Ph.D. thesis on relationships between history and fiction as narratives). I found the whole “wow he has a really big penis” plot extremely tedious, the family saga stuff uncompelling, and though I can see lots of ways the watery elements lend themselves to metaphorical play, I just wasn’t drawn in enough to want to think it through. This novel has been so widely and highly praised that I’m prepared to assume the fault lies in my reading, not the book, but there we are, or at least there I am.

I was also disappointed in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, though there at least I did not have such great expectations. The narration is all very smoothly handled, and I thought the ambiguities of the set-up were clever–it does become suspenseful as you try to gage who the listener might actually be and just what purpose underlies the speaker’s story-telling. But the absolutely crucial part, the moment in which the narrator turns towards not just fundamentalism but (or so we are led to believe) active hostility towards the U.S., or “the west,” seemed to be wholly unearned by what came before: the smile on September 11 does shock the narrator himself, but much of the rest of the novel seemed like retroactive justification for it. The edition I read made comparisons to The Remains of the Day, but the developing self-awareness there is far more convincingly supported by the accidental revelations we receive along the way.

I’ve been trying to read Midnight’s Children. I’m bored by it! It’s too digressive, too full of extraneous descriptions (yes, I know, I love Dickens). It lacks momentum. Again, my problem, no doubt, not the novel’s. I’ll keep trying. But I needed to be reading something for myself that I enjoyed, so I’ve started Ann Patchett’s Run. I’m liking it so far, though it is certainly not capturing my reader’s imagination the way Bel Canto did.

I’ve also been reading more on my Sony Reader. Though I am still a bit disappointed that you have to choose your reading location a bit carefully, I do find that in the right conditions, it is very easy to read on, and I really like the bookmarking and annotating functions. I’ve just gone through a glossary of terms in post-colonial criticism (sounds like fun, doesn’t it?) and I’ve marked it up so I can quite easily find the bits that I think will be helpful in my analysis of Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun. I am reading a book on Islam and feminism now. I definitely like being able to carry a range of books with me, as I shuttle between home and office all the time and am always debating what to carry along in case I get the chance to squeeze in a little research-related reading. I can certainly imagine reaching a point where it seems annoying that a book is “only” on my shelf somewhere and not on my handy machine.

Looks nice, doesn’t it? I’m reading through the page proofs this week and they look nice too–though it’s hard not to be anxious about whatever stupidities of mine will be revealed when the whole thing finally goes public.

Much of my February “break” time has been spent marking papers. It’s not my favorite part of my job, but it has its good moments. This batch, one bright spot was finding this note attached to a late assignment:

[This student] has been impaired above the neck for the past 2-3 weeks, and this has interfered with her school work.

I’m sure it has.

Announcing: Write Here in Plain Sight 2009

Dalhousie Writers Offer WHiPS

Yeah, yeah, we know what they tell you about writing. But have you ever wondered how it is actually done? Today you can witness one of the most secretive of all human behaviours – writing. Come for ten minutes or come for seven hours. Come and go from venue to venue.

First introduced to the world in 2007, Write Here in Plain Sight (WHIPS) is a bold adventure in teaching. The project is based on the premise that, as with other skills, learning how to write an academic paper can be significantly enhanced by observing expert behaviour.

Every word, every typo, every moment of writer’s block will be projected on large screens in four different rooms. Audience members witness the horror, the struggle, and the triumph of writing as it is practiced.

Watching the writers will reveal exactly how messy and idiosyncratic the writing process is and how it actually happens. The writers will share their inner-most thoughts as they plow through the process. The audience will get to question what they see as it evolves. In Sunny Marche’s case, the audience will choose the topic, and then be witness to the research, thinking and writing as it happens.

Among the writers wielding their pens at WHIPS are:

• Carolyn Watters, Dean of Graduate Studies, Computer science
• Ian Colford, award winning creative writer
• Lyn Bennett, Early modern poetry and rhetoric
• Sunny Marche, Information systems
• Rohan Maitzen – dedicated blogger and expert in the Victorian novel
• Carol Bruneau – award winning writer-in-residence. She writes for adults and for children; now she writes in front of you.
• Jacob Posen and Seamus Butler – student voluntees for you to compare yourself to!

WHO, WHEN, AND WHERE

Killam G70
* 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. Lyn Bennett
* 12:00 – 1:00 p.m. Carolyn Watters
* 1:00 – 4:00 p.m. Rohan Maitzen
Killam 4106
* 9:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. Jacob Posen & Seamus Butler (students)
* 11:00 – 1:30 p.m. Ian Colford

KC Rowe building – Room 3089
* 9:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m. Sunny Marche
* 2:00 – 4:00 p.m. Carol Bruneau

Open to anyone who needs to know more about writing! Enter and leave whenever you want as long as you do it quietly.

Yes, that’s right: you can come and watch me work on my book review. I think we’re supposed to proceed as we normally would, which means I’ll need snacks, drinks, lots of breaks, some nice music playing, and an internet connection for procrastinating making sure I’m up-to-date on all the latest blogs I follow relevant scholarship.

1. Winter’s here.
2. We spent a fair part of today with no power. Brrrr.
3. Happily, I got some of these for Christmas and they are very cozy.
4. Also happily, I had this to read.

My “Things To Do” list for today:

• Prepare notes on Alice Munro, “The Found Boat” for tomorrow morning
• Prepare notes on Bleak House (up to Chapter 36) for tomorrow afternoon (still some work to do here, but class isn’t until 1:30…)
• Review Reading Responses and Reading Journals from two classes
• Write as many as possible of seven six five reference letters (needed a.s.a.p.)
• Grade as many as possible of a batch of papers on Jane Eyre
• Comment on a Ph.D. thesis prospectus (needed a.s.a.p.)
• Comment on an undergraduate paper proposal (needed a.s.a.p.)
• Comment on two draft SSHRC proposals (needed a.s.a.p.)
• Review a paper resubmitted by a dissatisfied customer student
• Prepare notes on departmental hiring priorities for a committee meeting tomorrow (I’m thinking mental notes are good enough here)
• Prepare notes on how best to use money that may be donated for graduate scholarships
• Pick up important groceries and prescriptions
• Attend parent-teacher interview
• Collect children from after-school program trip to Natural History Museum
• Dinner: cook, feed to children, eat (sitting down if possible)
• Oversee homework, eke out some ‘quality time,’ do bedtime reading and cuddles
• Read some of book for review (now past deadline)
• Fold laundry, empty dishwasher
• Feel guilty about items left undone from this list while watching U.S. election coverage on TV
• Call it quits for the day (but not before staying up until 1:20 a.m. to watch Obama’s victory speech!)

Maybe going public like this will help me stay on task! (11/5: Also, this list is an interesting historiographical example, in that it records the completely mundane nature of this day from an individual perspective, even as it acknowledges its glancing intersection with ‘world-historical’ events.)

I mentioned one of these novels, briefly, before: Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park, describing it as “a very angry book, bitter even,” and asking whether its manifest bitterness arise from “the realization that social and material privilege make anger seem petulant (such spoiled children, her women seem!).” My retrospective reflections on it have not led to answers about how far it is in fact angry and how far it is a satire on unearned anger. It’s certainly an uncomfortable book and one wholly lacking in sentimentality about either marriage or motherhood:

She was in her car, cruising through the rain along the High Street while the turbid seas of Arlington Park parted before her. It was nine-fifteen. Her husband had left the house punctually at eight, and her daughter Jessica was at school by nine; she had a feeling of rapid ascent, as though the members of her household were sandbags she was heaving one by one out of the basket of a hot-air balloon.

It is also an intensely written book, to borrow an expression I recently read used to describe the language of Bleak House–and in fact, Arlington Park at times displays a verbal quality that approximates the Dickensian, in the elaborate opening set piece describing the rain that falls all night across the tony suburb, for example:

The clouds came from the west: clouds like dark cathedrals, clouds like machines, clouds like black blossoms flower in the arid starlit sky. They came over the English countryside, sunk in its muddled sleep. They came over the low, populous hills where scatterings of lights throbbed in the darkness. At midnight they reached the city, valiantly glittering in its shallow provincial basin. Unseen, they grew like a second city overhead, thickening, expanding, throwing up their savage monuments, their towers, their monstrous, unpeopled palaces of cloud.

Perhaps fortunately, though (as this kind of thing is really hard to do persuasively, if you aren’t actually Dickens and a genuis), the style is much sparer for most of the novel, though still frequently striking in its images. I was struck by the praise for Cusk’s “fearlessness” and “honesty” in the reviews, and I think one thing that drew me to the novel was interest in just what she was being so brave about. I guess I don’t really see it. Is the myth of either maternal or marital bliss still potent enough that it takes courage to imagine women inhabiting their domestic roles angrily or selfishly? I suppose it’s a kind of anti-chick-lit novel, in which materialism is neither benign nor entertaining and neither Mr. Right nor the right address brings a fairy tale ending–and it acknowledges moments of exhiliration, enough, perhaps, to leaven the whole.

Penelope Lively’s Perfect Happiness is written much more delicately–it seems less of a performance. Moon Tiger has been on my top-10 list for many years, but I think this may be the first of Lively’s other novels that I’ve read. It actually surprised me by seeming indistinguishable in tone, scope, and what I might call “depth” from the better novels by Joanna Trollope (Marrying the Mistress, for instance): it focuses on a momentous time in a particular small cluster of intersecting lives and neatly, with precision but without flourish, works through the nuances and complications. I expected something more, somehow, and yet I thought it was both sensitive and intelligent.

I really wanted to like Jennifer Chiaverini‘s The Quilter’s Apprentice. (Why, you ask? Well, I’m an amateur quilter myself, and also it’s almost winter, so I will need comfort and distraction–something to read that’s cozy but not romantic sounds perfect, and there’s a whole series of these, plus actual quilting books.) I almost succeeded in liking it, too, but I had to work against the bad writing (Chiaverini explains too much, for one thing, as if she thinks her readers can’t infer anything at all or need to be walked from one piece of furniture to another every time her characters move across the room). There’s nothing wrong with the structure in theory, including the division of the narrative into present-day action and reminiscences, but the back story felt incredibly laboured to me. The explanations of quilting seemed forced, though maybe to someone who knew absolutely nothing about the processes or patterns it would be interesting to learn about all this. Would it have been more effective, maybe, to include a ‘Quilting Primer’ as an appendix rather than incorporating quilting lessons so literally and in so much detail into the body of the novel? The characters, too, seem well-enough conceived and organized, but the characterization seemed so forced. Oh, and while I’m complaining, the language is surprisingly unimaginative: eyes shine, resentments smolder, stomachs tighten, memories are recalled with pangs. Maybe Chiaverini hits her stride further along in the series–and in fact I like the general idea here enough to try another one or two, and without quite the cringing feeling I sometimes get from other kinds of chick-lit (which this undoubtedly is, though of a more domesticated variety than Sophie Kinsella or her ilk). The focus on women’s friendships (quilting bees, of course, lend themselves–or could–to nice metaphorical development with respect to women’s support networks as well as other kinds of social cooperation) and women’s arts (also a theme here, also laboriously developed) just seems less … icky … than the other stuff often does. (Quick update: I pulled ‘How to Make an American Quilt’ from my shelf on my way out this morning–I have only vague recollections of reading it before, but the critical praise it received makes it sound more like the ‘great American quilting novel’ than this one.)

So: a rather miscellaneous group of books, but they’ve all been sitting in a “TBB” pile for a while (To Be Blogged, of course) so I thought I’d write them up. The artificial exercise of working with them as a group has made me think a bit about the arbitrariness of categories such as “women’s writing,” or “women writers,” ones we often have recourse to in the academy (for instance, I regularly teach a graduate seminar on “Victorian Women Writers”). I usually draw attention to the problem of that arbitrariness, not least because many of the women writers I teach explicitly wished for their sex not to be a factor in the consideration of their artistic accomplishments. And why should we assume that writers have anything in common because they are of the same sex? At the same time, with the 19th-century writers, I propose there is some justification for grouping them together because, after all, as women they did have some things in common, including the social, legal, and political conditions of their lives and work, and their inevitably vexed relationship with literary traditions (sweeping statements, I know, but useful, and certainly true in their broad outlines). I don’t know if I could make any such claim about this little cluster of more contemporary writers, or if my sense that doing so would be misleading (and pointless to boot) reflects back in any way on how I approach the 19th-century material. Something to think about, maybe. Or maybe this is just too random a selection of reading to mean much anyway.

First, a proposal I worked very hard on even though I had a lot of other things to do was flat-out rejected–no explanation given. But it was in a new area, so you expect some failure at first. Then I saw a CFP that seemed promisingly close to things I know something about (George Eliot, realism, and sympathy)–but it was in a language I didn’t understand (something about how “bodily practices inculcate cultural dispositions”) so I let that one go by. And now there’s a conference I’d really like to go to, because it has great plenary speakers and all kinds of interesting panels and workshops, but its general theme is the kind of work I stopped doing a few years ago in order to explore the kind of thing I did (or would do, if I could) for the other two conferences–so I don’t think I can generate a legitimate proposal. I’m actually developing a distaste for conferences with themes. I suspect they inspire a great deal of spurious scholarship, given that most of us can’t get funding to attend unless we’re presenting and so you have to write up whatever your current research actually is in a way that suits the purpose–which is often defined in ways so broad as to invite all kinds of cute applications of it. And yet my most recent experience with a very open-ended conference program was very discouraging, as the sessions were so many and so disparate that most were badly attended and no sense of scholarly community emerged. (My own paper that time, over which I sweated bullets, was heard by a grand total of about 8 other people.) I do wish I could afford (or get funding) to go to a conference just to learn things and talk with people and get excited about ideas–without having to be on the program myself.

OK, I’m done complaining for now. Time to go do something productive, like trying to describe my current research in a way that fits the conference parameters. After all, rightly understood, what isn’t about “Past vs. Present”?

This is just in case my regular readers (both of them…) wonder why things are quiet around here.

I’m in beautiful Vancouver for my little brother’s wedding (OK, he’s not so little anymore). Though I hope to get in some book shopping, I doubt I’ll do much steady reading, novel or otherwise, and I don’t expect to do much blogging either. Soon it will be September, however, so I should be posting again regularly. I’m thinking about doing a new season of ‘This Week in My Classes’–though I might try a slightly different approach, if I can think it through.

In the meantime, it seems as if lots of other bloggers are back from their breaks, so if you scan my blog list (on the left), I’m sure you’ll find something interesting to read.

(originally posted June 15, 2007)

Since writing this post I haven’t read any more Joanna Trollope, but I have read Anne Tyler’s Digging to America and basically enjoyed it–though not as much as some of my old favourites. And I have continued to worry about the problem of reconciling duty to self with duty to others, certainly one of the central difficulties of George Eliot’s novels. (Is this a particularly female theme, I wonder?)

When I decided to take a break from more “serious” reading with Joanna Trollope‘s A Village Affair, I wasn’t really expecting the novel to reach towards the serious itself. I had read it before, but what I had retained was admiration for the clarity with which Trollope gives us the people she has devised: many (though not all) of her novels that I have read have struck me as achieving an enviable quality in their characters: they are enormously specific and individual and often intensely, even poignantly, believable. Here, Alice’s father-in-law, Richard, seems especially well conceived. Everything he says communicates to us who he is and how he has lived, particularly in his marriage to a woman he persists in loving but who cannot, in her turn, recognize in him someone as complex and fully human as she is. He lives this hampered life in full knowledge of its limits, neither tragic nor stoic. Alice’s discontent is the stuff of cliches; her affair seems contrived (by the author) to break up the seemingly calm surface, the routines and compromises of daily life. In fact, this is how Trollope’s plots generally work: the ordinary people, the change or revelation, the repercussions. For me, it’s the repercussions she does really well. Having set up her experiment in life, she works out plausibly how it will play out, and she does not sentimentalize–as, in this case, Alice’s “coming alive” through a new and different experience of love creates more problems than it solves.

In this case, as in another of her novels that I think is very smart, Marrying the Mistress, Trollope sets her characters up to confront what is a central dilemma in many 19th-century novels as well, namely how to resolve the conflict between, or how to decide between, duty to self and duty to others. That she is aware of her predecessors in this investigation is indicated by the quotation from Adam Bede recited (OK, improbably) by one of the characters in A Village Affair. As that quotation forcefully indicates, George Eliot placed a high value on renunciation and on accepting (as gracefully as possible) the burden of duty: resignation to less than you want, or less than you can imagine, is a constant refrain, and this with no promise of rapturous happiness. Hence the melancholic tinge at the end of Romola, for instance, or Daniel Deronda, or, for all its lightning flashes of romantic fulfilment, Middlemarch. (Of course, famously, it is her heroines who must resign or, like Maggie Tulliver, die.)

Although much has changed socially and politically since George Eliot found it unrealistic to give Romola, Maggie, or Dorothea uncompromised happy endings, the struggle between what we want for ourselves and what is expected or demanded of us by others continues to be a staple of fiction. Though Trollope’s scenario is much more contemporary, she too accepts that one’s individual desire cannot (or not easily, or not ethically) be one’s guiding principle, because of the “visible and invisible relations beyond any of which our present or prospective self is the centre” (Adam Bede). So Trollope, with admirable restraint, refuses a fairy tale ending for her protagonist, though, with a different kind of insistence that perhaps George Eliot would respect, she also pushes her out of the unsatisfactory life that was her reality before, and into what, given this context, seems like a narrative limbo, or a waiting room. This is not to say that Alice’s single life is an incomplete one, but she herself acknowledges that it is not, in fact, what she really wanted–only what she was capable of achieving.

I think this novel makes an interesting comparison to another quiet novel about a woman reconsidering her life, Anne Tyler‘s Ladder of Years, which I have always admired. But Tyler, though far from offering simplistic fairy tales, offers her own version of the resignation narrative. In Ladder of Years, as in Back When We Were Grownups, it proves mistaken for the heroine to try to start a new life, however much she is, or believes she is, following the promptings of her innermost self. Again, the “visible and invisible relations” exert a powerful pressure, like the entangling webs of family and society in Middlemarch but perceived, overall, as more kindly, less petty and destructive. The plain litte room Delia takes and uses as a staging ground to reinvent her life is a room of her own, but her story is not rightly understood as being just about her own life (“was she alone,” Dorothea asks herself). In these novels Tyler’s women learn to appreciate the value of what they tried to leave, to see their own identities as having become inseparable from those of the others whose demands and complications hamper their desires. The vision seems starker in Trollope’s novel (“Aga saga” though it certainly is).