From the Archives: “Janet’s Repentance”

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

For the first time ever, I have assigned Scenes of Clerical Life in one of my classes—more accurately, a scene of clerical life, “Janet’s Repentance.” My re-reading of it some years ago had lodged the possibility of assigning the story (novella?) in my mind, but I hadn’t found what felt like the right opportunity until this term’s all-George Eliot, all the time seminar. We are discussing “Janet’s Repentance” in the seminar this week, so I thought that was a good enough reason to lift this post out of the archives.

I’m not sure when I last read George Eliot’s first published fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life. It might have been as much as 15 or 20 years ago that I read any of the stories right through, though I have certainly dipped into “Amos Barton” once or twice when thinking or writing about her realism and her intrusive narrator. I picked the book off my shelf again this week because I have been thinking (and will be writing) about scenes of visiting in Eliot’s novels. So many of her climactic moments are set up that way, with a sympathetic visitor bringing comfort or guidance to someone in crisis: Dinah visiting Hetty in prison in Adam Bede, for instance; Lucy visiting Maggie near the end of The Mill on the Floss; perhaps most notably, Dorothea visiting Rosamond in Chapter 81 of Middlemarch. The key thing, of course, is that these are human, rather than divine, “visitations” and thus neatly encapsulate her ongoing translation of religious beliefs into secular practices. As I was collecting examples, I had a vague memory of Edgar Tryan visiting Janet in “Janet’s Repentance,” so I thought I’d go back to the story and see what it adds to the pattern I’m exploring.

“Janet’s Repentance” is interesting for lots of reasons, including its grim account of Janet’s abusive marriage, which has driven her, in her misery and shame, to drink:

‘I’ll teach you to keep me waiting in the dark, you pale, staring fool!’ he said, advancing with his slow, drunken step. ‘What, you’ve been drinking again, have you? I’ll beat you into your senses.’

He laid his hand with a firm grip on her shoulder, turned, her round, and pushed her slowly before him along the passage and through the dining-room door, which stood open on their left hand.

There was a portrait of Janet’s mother, a grey-haired, dark-eyed old woman, in a neatly fluted cap, hanging over the mantelpiece. Surely the aged eyes take on a look of anguish as they see Janet — not trembling, no! it would be better if she trembled — standing stupidly unmoved in her great beauty while the heavy arm is lifted to strike her. The blow falls — another — and another. Surely the mother hears that cry — ‘O Robert! pity! pity!’

“Do you wonder,” asks our narrator, as the sordid tale unfolds, “how it was that things had come to this pass — what offence Janet had committed in the early years of marriage to rouse the brutal hatred of this man? . . . But do not believe,” she goes on,

that it was anything either present or wanting in poor Janet that formed the motive of her husband’s cruelty. Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside itself — it only requires opportunity. . . . And an unloving, tyrannous, brutal man needs no motive to prompt his cruelty; he needs only the perpetual presence of a woman he can call his own.

“A woman he can call his own”: that remark is strongly reminiscent of Frances Power Cobbe’s powerful 1878 essay “Wife-Torture in England,” in which Cobbe emphasizes the corrupting effect of presumed “ownership”:

The general depreciation of women as a sex is bad enough, but in the matter we are considering [spousal abuse], the special depreciation of wives is more directly responsible for the outrages they endure. The notion that a man’s wife is his PROPERTY, in the sense in which a horse is his property . . . is the fatal root of incalculable evil and misery. Every brutal-minded man, and many a man who in other relations of his life is not brutal, entertains more or less vaguely the notion that his wife is his thing, and is ready to ask with indignation (as we read again and again in the police reports), of any one who interferes with his treatment of her, “May I not do what I will with my own?”

 (If you’re interested in reading more on this aspect of Victorian marriage and its treatment in Victorian fiction — try Lisa Surridge’s Bleak Houses and Kate Lawson’s The Marked Body, both of which discuss “Janet’s Repentance.”)

millIt’s also interesting how recognizable George Eliot is here. Many of the things she does better (or at least more fully, or with greater finesse) in her later novels are here already, such as the patient unfolding of social context — the “thick description” within which her plots acquire so much more meaning than their simple actions might indicate — and the pulsation between individual moments and philosophical ideas, facilitated by the narrator’s commentary on the action. Just as, despite her protective camouflage, Eliot’s friends “IRL” knew her when they read her earliest fiction, any readers of The Mill on the Floss know they are in familiar company when they see this anticipation of the famous “men of maxims” passage:

Yet surely, surely the only true knowledge of our fellow-man is that which enables us to feel with him – which gives us a fine ear for the heart-pulses that are beating under the mere clothes of circumstance and opinion. Our subtlest analysis of schools and sects must miss the essential truth, unless it be lit up by the love that sees in all forms of human thought and work, the life and death struggles of separate human beings.

And Janet’s appeal to Mr. Tryan — “It is very difficult to know what to do: what ought I to do?” — is one that has echoes across Eliot’s oeuvre, including in a passage in Middlemarch that has long been central to my thinking about the broader question of religion in Eliot’s fiction: “Help me, pray,” says an overwrought Dorothea to Dr. Lydgate; “Tell me what I can do.”

The big difference, though, is that in Middlemarch the appeal may have the same impulse as a prayer (“an impulse which if she had been alone would have turned into a prayer”) but it is directed at a doctor, and it’s not even really his medical advice she wants but something more fundamentally human, some guidance about how to be in the circumstances. The transformation from sacred to secular is even more distinct in the climactic encounter between Dorothea and Rosamond much later in the novel. But in “Janet’s Repentance” not only is Janet asking a clergyman (and an Evangelical one, at that) for help, but his advice is religious advice — and it is not undercut, or translated into humanistic terms, by the narrator. David Lodge notes in his introduction to my Penguin edition that “Janet’s Repentance” is “a completely non-ironical account of a conversion from sinfulness to righteousness through the selfless endeavours of an Evangelical clergyman.” He goes on to suggest that Eliot’s “religion of Humanity” is just below the surface, but it’s certainly not visible the way it is in her later works. It’s true that Tryan’s kindly fellowship is essential to his success as a religious ambassador: “Blessed influence of one true loving human soul on another!” says the narrator. But it’s trust in God that Tryan recommends, and that brings Janet peace.

Durade GEThe ending of the story is a bit of a disappointment: like Anne Brontë’s Helen Huntingdon, Janet feels obliged to stand by her man as he pays the final price for his cruel and self-destructive behavior. I think that in both cases this affirmation of ‘proper’ wifely devotion is important to direct our attention to the sins of the husbands. Brontë has a more political point to make, though, about the structural as well as ideological failures of marriage, while Eliot’s story focuses us more on the internal moral life and on the redemptive value of compassion and faith. Janet also does not get the hard-earned Happily Ever After that Helen enjoys, at least, not in this life: as Lodge points out, Eliot “even compromised with her belief in immortality to the extent of allowing her hero and heroine a ‘sacred kiss of promise’ at the end.” Disappointing, as I said, and surprising, from an author who wrote so stringently about the immorality of acting on the basis of future expectations rather than immediate consequences:

The notion that duty looks stern, but all the while has her hand full of sugar-plums, with which she will reward us by and by, is the favourite cant of optimists, who try to make out that this tangled wilderness of life has a plan as easy to trace as that of a Dutch garden; but it really undermines all true moral development by perpetually substituting something extrinsic as a motive to action, instead of the immediate impulse of love or justice, which alone makes an action truly moral.

Was she catering to her as-yet unconverted audience, do you suppose, in setting Janet up as a memorial to “one whose heart beat with true compassion, and whose lips were moved by fervent faith”? Or practicing what she herself preached by inhabiting, as fully as possible, a point of view different from her own?

Originally published January 7, 2015. The writing I was doing on visitations in George Eliot became (more or less) the essay “Middlemarch and the ‘Cry From Soul to Soul,'” published in Berfrois in August 2015. Sadly, Berfrois is no more, but the essay can also be found in my collection Widening the Skirts of Light, available as an e-book from Amazon & Kobo for the lowest price I was allowed to set.

This Term In My Classes: Breadth, Depth, & Reflections

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

Another January, another new term! I’ve got two classes this term of two quite different kinds. The first is our second-year survey course British Literature After 1800, so its aim is to cover a broad sweep of territory; the other is a combined Honours and graduate seminar on George Eliot, a rare opportunity to zoom in on a single writer—a privilege rarely accorded, in our program anyway, to anyone besides Shakespeare!

I led off the survey class today with what I called “explanations and excuses”: I talked in general terms about the traditional model of the historical survey in literature programs; I gave a potted overview of what the standard story of “British Literature After 1800” would have been, moving from the Romantics through the Victorians to the Modernists and beyond; then I raised some questions about oversimplification, inclusion, periodization, and ‘the canon’; and then I made some arguments in favour of nonetheless looking at things in chronological order, at least some of the time. (Showing my age, I used the example provided by David Lodge in Small World of the student who claims he is doing his thesis on the influence of T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare, much to the delight of the hip deconstructionists around him.) Because, if only for my own sake, I like to have some sense of unifying themes beyond chronology, I explained that one thing we would be talking about across the course was what our various authors thought literature was for or should or could do, and I quoted some statements they had made about this, from Shelley’s “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” to Ishiguro saying “I like to highlight some aspect of being human. I’m not really trying to say, so don’t do this, or do that. I’m saying, this is how it feels to me.” And that, besides a bit of logistical stuff about requirements and schedules and getting the books, was that! Friday we get going more specifically with Wordsworth.

Something that was very much on my mind as I prepared for this particular class meeting was the last time I taught this course, which was the winter term of 2020. In early March of that term, we were all sent home; my notes leading up to what turned out to be our last day in person have a number of references to contingency plans, but none of them (none of us) anticipated the scale of disruption. It came on so quickly, too, as my notes remind me. We were part way through our work on Woolf’s Three Guineas on our final day; quite literally the last thing I wrote on the whiteboard was “burn it all down.” I got quite emotional many times while revising the course materials for this year’s version: that term stands out so vividly in my mind as “the before time,” before COVID, which is also, for me, before Owen died. We were still essentially in lockdown, after all, when he died in 2021; we had only just been able to start coming together as a family again. I don’t usually have a lot of emotional investment in my course materials, but it was unexpectedly difficult revisiting these and thinking of how much has changed. Tearing up over PowerPoint slides: it seemed absurd even as it happened, but it did. That said, because of COVID I ended up cutting The Remains of the Day from the syllabus in 2020, and given that it is in my personal top 10, that I rarely have the opportunity to assign relatively contemporary fiction, and that I am running out of years to assign anything at all, I am stoked about being able to read through it with my class this term. If only it didn’t feel so timely!

I am also super stoked about getting to spend the whole term reading and talking about George Eliot with a cluster of our best students—not just our brightest but honestly, I know most of these students from other classes and they are some of the nicest and keenest and most engaged and curious people you could hope to work with. I felt so much good will from them today as we did our ice-breaker (nothing too “cringe,” just everyone’s names and anything they wanted to share about their previous experience, or lack of experience, with George Eliot). I hope their positive attitude survives Felix Holt, not to mention Daniel Deronda! Knowing that a number of them had read Adam Bede and/or Middlemarch with me in other recent courses, I left both of these off the reading list for this one. Middlemarch especially feels like a gap, but on the other hand, I don’t think I could have realistically asked them to read both Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda in the same term (unless I didn’t assign anything else), and Daniel Deronda is pretty great. I had quite a debate with myself about Felix Holt vs Romola: just for myself, I would have preferred to reread Romola, but I’ve taught Felix Holt in undergraduate courses before and it is actually pretty accessible. Sure, Felix is so wooden he makes Adam Bede look lively and nuanced, but, speaking of timely, a book about the pitfalls of democracy when the population is not (ahem) maybe sufficiently wise to make good choices seems on point. Along with those two, we will be reading “Janet’s Repentance,” The Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner. I’m already a bit worried that it’s going to be too much reading . . .

The last time I taught this class was 2015, and then it was a graduate seminar only. I had stepped back a bit from teaching in our graduate program: we get at most one seminar a year, and my favourite classes to teach have always been our 4th-year or honours seminars, so I made them my priority. OK, that’s not entirely truthful: I had also felt increasingly uncomfortable with graduate teaching, both because of my own loss of faith in aspects of academic research and publication (amply documented here over the years) and because it seemed so clear that an academic path was not a viable option for our graduate students and I wasn’t sure what else we were really doing. These reservations made me much happier focusing on undergraduate teaching, though I missed graduate students themselves: we get such lovely ones! Now we mingle undergraduate and graduate students in some of our seminars, which was the model for last year’s Victorian Women Writers seminar—which I thought went really well. (There was at least one student who disagreed, judging from the evaluations, but you can’t please everyone!) I have high hopes for this seminar as a result, which includes a number of the same students, at both levels.

It is a crazy time in the world and has been a pretty difficult time at work as well, with budget cuts and government interference and all kinds of discouraging internal administrative moves. I have never felt so strongly that I might actually be getting tired of the whole thing, that retirement, scary as it is to me for other reasons, might be welcome just so I don’t have to deal with all this nonsense—the persistent devaluing of the work we do, and the degradation of the conditions in which we nonetheless strive to do it well. I have to say, though, that one day back in the classroom with students has made a difference: I don’t exactly like “the job” at the moment, but I really like the work, the part I think of as the real work. The question will be whether the changes and complications and cuts make it impossible for me to do that work, or to do it well, or just start to outweigh the value I find in it.

Believe it or not, I’ve been posting here about my teaching since 2007. At that point I had already been at Dalhousie for 12 years. These posts are a record, then, of almost two decades in a 30-year teaching career (more if you count the teaching I did as a graduate student). In their own idiosyncratic way, they tell quite a history themselves, including the rise and decline of academic blogging, the (thankfully burst) MOOC bubble, the Great Online Pivot of the COVID years, the encroachment of generative AI (may that bubble burst soon). Through it all, my colleagues and I have just kept on showing up to class. It is common, even among academic administrators, to champion “innovation” as a good in itself and to chastise people or systems that continue to work in more or less the same way. The substance of what we do as English professors changes constantly: we are not asking the same questions or bringing the same methods to bear on the texts we study and teach as professors were 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. But it is not a bad thing that our pedagogy stays true to some essential practices and values. I wish more people with decision-making powers would acknowledge that sometimes things stay the same because they work. Today I sat with students around a table and talked. I have tried all kinds of things over the years (again, as amply documented here!) from class wikis to Pecha kucha presentations; I have used PowerPoint and recorded videos and done letter exchanges instead of essays and on and on. After all this time I am convinced that there is no better pedagogy for the kind of learning I believe in for my students than sitting around a table and talking. Second best (still pretty good!) is leading a robust discussion from the front of the room. That kind of teaching can’t be monetized, surveilled, or sold to tech moguls, though, so nobody gets excited about it—except those of us in the room. We are fighting to be able to keep on doing it. If you care about it yourself, vote for politicians who don’t dismiss it because it doesn’t clearly serve “government priorities.”

Novel Readings 2025

Rohan Maitzen9 Comments

2025 was a less chaotic year for me—literally and psychologically—than 2024. I wish I could say that this meant I read more and better, but instead both my memory and my records show that it was a pretty uneven reading year, with a lot of slumps. The summer especially, which used to be a rich reading season for me, had almost no highlights: the best books I read in 2025 were at the very beginning and the very end of the year.

Best of 2025

Three books I read this year were truly extraordinary experiences. One was Anne de Marcken’s astonishing and heartbreaking zombie novel (yes, you read that right) It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over. I have thought about this novel over and over since I finished it. How much can we lose, it asks, before we lose ourselves? In a world characterized by loss, what makes us keep on moving? If you are sure, as I was, that a novel about zombies is not for you, maybe think again.

A wind comes up to me in the empty morning like someone I’ve met before or seen before but don’t know, and a feeling comes over me. It is sadness. Not a sadness, but sadness. All of it. The whole history of sadness. Everything in me is sad and everything around me is a part of it. The cracked pavement, the moon, the abandoned cars, the gravity that holds them to the road. It is total. I am taken, or taken down. I drop to my knees.

Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book could hardly be more different in topic, style, or tone, but it too is about loss and death and persistence. It is a historical novel but also a time-travel novel; mostly I find the illogic of time travel too much of an impediment to emotional commitment, but in this case the framing added layers of historical and philosophical ideas that added to rather than distracted from the immersive storytelling of the 14th-century sections. Reading it reminded me of Raymond Chandler’s remark that once a detective novel is as good as The Maltese Falcon, it is foolish to say it can’t be even better: speculative fiction is not a go-to genre for me, but Willis showed me that it’s not the genre itself that’s the barrier. (That said, I stalled out in my subsequent attempt to read her novels about the Blitz, which I started to find tedious—they are staying on my shelves, though, so that I can give them another chance at some point.)

I read both of these books in January; although I read some other good books over the year, the third really exceptional one was Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, which I finished in December. I suppose it too is a kind of speculative fiction, an eerie “what if” scenario that leads to a novel that if I were a drunk publicist I would pitch as “May Sarton’s existential wilderness adventure.” Once again a key theme is persistence: in this case, literal and physical—she has to feed herself and take care of animals and stay warm—but also metaphysical, as inevitably she asks questions about why she should do any of that, and about the value of everything people do. It is hard to describe this book in a way that captures why it is engrossing and exhilarating rather than dreary but it is.

Also Very Good

My ‘also rans’ list is strong this year, if not that long.

Non-Fiction

The best non-fiction I read was Claire Cameron’s memoir How to Survive a Bear Attack. Yes, it is actually about how to survive a bear attack, but it is also about confronting fear and illness and death.

Yiyun Li’s  Things in Nature Merely Grow is as hard-headed and devastating as her previous writings about  suicide—more so in a way, because this is about her second son to die by suicide. Ordinarily I don’t dislike sentimentality, and there’s a coldness to Li’s voice that is sometimes alienating, but there is also something bracing about her clarity and her refusal to cater to people’s desire for there to be meaning where she finds none, or for grieving parents to offer those around them implicit solace by seeming to get over it, “as though bereaved parents are expected to put in a period of hard mental work and then clap their hands and say, I’m no longer heartbroken for my dead child, and I’m one of you normal people again.” The line from this book that has echoed in my head since I read it is so simple and obvious it might seem strange that it has so much power for me: “children die, and parents go on living.”

An honourable mention definitely goes to Chloe Dalton’s Raising Hare.

Fiction 

Other novels that really stood out to me this year:

Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional

Salena Godden’s Mrs. Death Misses Death

Rumer Godden’s Black Narcissus

Helen Garner’s The Spare Room

Carys Davies, Clear

Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

A near miss: Sarah Moss’s Ripeness. As I said in my post about it, “I would not say I loved the novel, but I have never read anything by Moss that isn’t both meticulously crafted and convincingly intelligent.” Moss remains an auto-buy for me; perhaps anything would have been a bit of a let-down after the extraordinary memoir she published last year, My Good Bright Wolf.

I did a fair amount of what I call “interstitial reading” in 2025—books I can easily pick up and put down in between work or chores, or before bed. This year these were mostly romances or ‘women’s fiction,’ writers like Abbie Jimenez and Katherine Center. I didn’t read many mysteries, except for the occasional comfort read of a Dick Francis or Robert B. Parker. I read for work, of course; this is always rereading, which has its own challenges and rewards. This year I found myself wondering what my relationship will be to some of these books when I eventually retire. Will I stop rereading Jane Eyre or Bleak House or North and South? It is hard to imagine that I would never read Middlemarch again.

And on that faintly elegiac note I will add that I reread my year-end post from last year in which I talked about having to “downsize” my book collection when I moved, and it continues to be the case that my relationship to books has changed as a result. It’s not just that “my attachment to (most) books is just lighter” but that sometimes I stare at my shelves and wonder why I am hanging on to most of the books on them! I’m not about to live without any books, and it still means a lot to me to browse in them and remember reading them—or make plans to read them, as yes, I do have books that remain, shall we say, aspirational! (Hello, War and Peace.) The yellowing paperbacks of Elizabeth George mysteries, though, which my aging eyes tell me I will never read in those copies again? or even some of the newish books I was excited about and then kind of disappointed in? Why shouldn’t they go back into circulation, so that other readers can enjoy them (or be disappointed in them) in their turn? Also, speaking of eventually retiring, when that happens there are a lot of books now in my campus office that will come home with me. (Will I keep all of my different editions of Middlemarch? Maybe.)

And that’s a wrap on another year of reading and blogging here at Novel Readings. Thanks to everyone who read and commented or chatted with me on Facebook or Instagram or Bluesky, and also to those who keep up their own blogs. I keep up with them via Feedly these days and I realize this has meant a decline in my own commenting. I am wary of making bold resolutions, so I won’t promise to do better in 2026, but I love reading your posts and I continue to cherish the online community we have sustained for so many years.

All Nature: Chloe Dalton, Raising Hare

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

I have still not deciphered the mystery of the hare. She remains the elusive, indefinable core that explains, perhaps, why we humans have projected so many of our fears and desires onto the species, investing hares with supernatural powers from the most evil to the most inviting, confirming our tendency to either worship or demonise those things we struggle to understand. The hare lends itself as a symbol of the transience of life and its fleeting glory, and our dependence on nature and our careless destruction of it. But in the hare’s—and nature’s—endless capacity for renewal, we can find hope. If it is possible, as William Blake would have it, ‘to see a world in a grain of sand’, then perhaps we can see all nature in a hare: its simplicity and intricacy, fragility and glory, transience and beauty.

Probably the most important parts of Raising Hare, Chloe Dalton’s memoir of how she took in an abandoned leveret and, in helping it survive, found her own way to a new relationship with nature, time, and life itself, are the ones in which she turns from her immediate experience and its personal resonance to larger issues of environmentalism and conservation. “From hunting to farming and the destruction of habitats,” she observes,

we have done so much harm to hares over the centuries. For sport—in other words, for idle amusement—and in our drive for economic efficiency, putting more pressure on the land than it and its wild inhabitants can bear. The turn of the seasons and our capacity for adaptation means there is always hope that we can do things differently. But in this, as in so many areas, our practices and our methods incline towards depletion: reducing the dwindling stock of nature that remains to us, today’s needs always outweighing our aspirations for tomorrow.

Raising Hare arrives rather than begins here, though, and so rather than feeling hectoring it feels urgent: Dalton spends most of the book sharing the gradual process of her getting to know the little leveret, eventually an adult hare who gives birth to her own babies, and so we are drawn in until we are as invested in its flourishing, as interested in its mysteries, and as fearful of its possible fate as she is.

Dalton is aware from the beginning that her involvement is problematic: hares are not domesticated, and even with the best intentions, interfering with wild animals can make things worse rather than better. Still, she is unable to leave the leveret where she finds it, alone, freezing, on a track where it is vulnerable to both natural predators and vehicles. Throughout her time caring for it and then living alongside it, she does her best to let it still be wild—refusing to treat it as a pet or even to name it. She does not attempt to train it; in fact, it seems fair to say that it is the hare that trains her, over time reshaping Dalton’s habits, attitudes, and expectations. “I felt a new spirit of attentiveness to nature,” she says,

no less wonderful for being entirely unoriginal, for as old as it is as a human experience, it was new to me. For many years, the seasons had largely passed me by, my perceptions of the steady cycle of nature disrupted by travel and urban life. I had observed nature in broad brushstrokes, in primary colours, at a surface level. I had been most interested in whether it was dry enough to walk, or warm enough to eat outside with friends. I could identify only a handful of birds and trees by name. I hadn’t observed the buds unfurling, the seasonal passage of birds, the unshakeable rituals and rhythms of life in a single field or wood.

 A busy professional addicted “to the adrenaline rush of responding to events and crises,” Dalton has already had her usual life disrupted by the pandemic, which has “pinned” her in the countryside, her work life shifted (as for so many of us) to hours spent at her computer. The presence of the hare brings a new element of calm into her life:

I couldn’t help but compare its serenity and steadiness to the sense of frenetic activity that had pervaded my life for years, marked by constant vigilance, unpredictability and stress.

Observing the hare’s very different existence leads her to rethink her longstanding priorities, to wonder “what else I might enjoy that I’d never considered” rather than to assume that what she wanted was “for life to go back to normal.”

It is not an idyll: lovely as Dalton’s descriptions of the fields and woods are, the hare’s world is still that of nature “red in tooth and claw,” full of hazards and threats, violence and death, hawks and stoats and foxes. The worst carnage, however, is wrought not by nature but by man’s machinery. One day a pair of huge tractors harvest potatoes from the field next door. When they are finished, Dalton walks the furrows and finds them (in a scene worthy of Thomas Hardy) littered with dead or injured hares:

I stood at the edge of the fourteen-acre field and wondered with a sinking heart how many other leverets, or indeed ground-nesting birds, had been crushed beneath those implacable wheels and now lay within the ridges or lost to sight against the rutted brown earth. It was just another day just another harvest, a scene replicated up and down the land and across the world.

By this point in the book, she has earned our companionship in her anxiety for the one particular hare she knows, which serves in turn to draw us in to her horror at the scale of destruction. Noting that the whole process was designed for one particular kind of efficiency, she asks why we cannot put our ingenuity to work to reduce the harm done:

If it is possible to create robots and drones to reap our fields for us, could we not use technology to detected the presence of leverets, and fawns, and nesting birds, and could reasonable efforts not be made to relocate them, rather than simply leaving them to be crushed beneath our machines?

I think a lot of us are asking, with growing anger as well as despair, similar questions about many of the technologies that are doing so much harm to our natural world, often without offering a compensating good anywhere near as defensible as a more abundant and affordable food supply.

Most of Raising Hare is in a different register, though, so it never feels either didactic or despairing. Dalton learns about and from the hare by observing it and sharing space with it, and eventually with some of its offspring. She writes with care and tenderness about what she sees. The animals come and go from her house (she eventually gets a ‘hare door’ built to be sure they are never confined, even when she’s not there to open or close the entrances); she comes to see the boundary between her life and theirs as similarly artificial and porous. She has to accept that it is not her place to protect them, even if she knew how; the death of one of the hare’s babies from no evident cause is a reminder of the limits of her control as well as her knowledge. It is sad, but it is also part of what it means for an animal to be wild. “My lasting memory of the little leveret,” she says, “is of a small, graceful figure, staring at the setting sun.”

One reason Raising Hare resonated with me is that over the past six months, since Freddie came to live with me, I have been experiencing on a small scale some of the same adjustments to my own sense of time and priorities. Living close to the hare helps Dalton better understand people’s bonds with their pets:

I had come to appreciate that affection for an animal is of a different kind entirely [than for people]: untinged by the regret, complexities, and compromises of human relationships. It has an innocence and purity all its own. In the absence of verbal communication, we extend ourselves to comprehend and meet their needs and, in return, derive companionship and interest from their presence, while also steeling ourselves for inevitable pain, since their lives are for the most part much shorter than ours.

I spend a lot of time playing with Fred, and there is something so refreshingly simple about it: it’s not just that her antics often make me laugh, but that what she wants is just to play, and taking a break from my own work or chores to play with her forces me—or, to put it differently, gives me a chance—to put aside the “regrets, complexities, and compromises” and stresses and confusions and griefs that so often preoccupy me and just to  be for a while. Sometimes it feels at first like an interruption, like something that takes patience, but the satisfaction of seeing her stalking and pouncing on her favourite dangly fish toy or rocketing through her tunnel always brings me around. And when she’s not playing, she’s napping, as often as possible on my lap; much like Dalton feeling inspired by the hare’s tranquility, I am calmed and soothed by Fred’s warmth and purrs. Because of her, I get up earlier now than I used to—but this means I can ease into the rest of my day, which I have come to love. I’m also very aware that while I decided to adopt her for my own reasons, now that she’s here, she has her reasons too, and she both needs and deserves my care and respect. That’s not quite the scale of revelation that comes to Dalton by way of the hare, but I think it’s related, part of the same recognition that we are, all of us, nature.

“How to Live”: Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

There is more to life than great chess. Okay, great chess is still a part of life, and it can be a very big part, very intense, satisfying, and pleasant to dwell on in the mind’s eye: but nonetheless, life contains many things. Life itself, he thinks, every moment of life, is as precious and beautiful as any game of chess every played, if only you knew how to live.

It’s a real challenge—one that I’m sure Sally Rooney is more aware of than anyone—to read a novel by Sally Rooney without being distracted by the Sally Rooney phenomenon. That seems hardly fair to Rooney, who doesn’t seem like a writer who set out to be a phenomenon, to be taken up as some kind of representative or generation-defining voice. At the same time, it doesn’t seem right to feel sorry for someone because of their success! But there’s a kind of haze or buzz around her books that strikes me as similar (if obviously on a smaller scale) to the hype around every new album Taylor Swift puts out. A lot of people seem to be responding to how they feel about what they think about the phenomenon, rather than to the new work in front of them. How does an artist keep creating, with that kind of spotlight on them, never mind keep trying new things? And yet both of these women somehow do just that.

I am neither a Rooney-ite or a Rooney hater. As I’ve written about here before, I didn’t finish Conversations with Friends and I had a mixed experience with Normal People; but then I really liked and admired Beautiful World, Where Are You, which was enough to make me want to read Intermezzo when it came out. I have started it a couple of times in the past year, but the reason I’m only just posting about it now is that each of those times I had to put it aside: for all my determination not to practice “avoidance” in my reading because of Owen’s death, the character of Ivan made me think of my brilliant, loving, socially awkward chess-playing son too much, too intensely. This time I persisted, and now that I’ve read the whole book I see Ivan as being quite different from Owen; for one thing, Ivan is what we might call ideologically problematic (one reviewer described him as an “incel,” which I did not pick up on and which seems unduly extreme, though perhaps I missed some signals or clues), whereas Owen was very far left, very passionately (if ultimately pessimistically) progressive. Even so, following Ivan’s story, which turns out to be very tender, uneasily and then eventually unapologetically romantic, made me so sad for the hopes and the chances for happiness Owen had and lost.

It’s Ivan’s older brother Peter who, under a gloss of charisma and professional success, is actually finding it hard to keep himself alive. I didn’t like the style of the Peter parts: if you’ve read the novel, you will know that Rooney alternates between a fairly conventional narrative close third person for Ivan’s sections and something like stream of consciousness for Peter’s. I didn’t dislike this as much as the reviewer in the TLS, who really hated Intermezzo—although it’s her review, which I reread after I’d read the novel for myself, that prompted my initial musings here about how people see Rooney. I have no objection to a negative review, and I can’t rebut any of Manov’s specific descriptions or criticisms, but the tone of her review is really hostile. From the outset, it reads more like an attack on the Rooney phenomenon than a critique of Intermezzo:

As in Sally Rooney’s previous novels, the main characters in Intermezzofall in love quickly, tidily and passionately. They meet, their outfits are described, they exchange clipped dialogue and are soon free to engage in ever so slightly masochistic (but mutually satisfying) sex, climaxing in perfectly symmetrical and somewhat juvenile confessions of affection. This is a pretty little world in which the girls wear lots of nice skirts and the boys are real softies and the worst thing that can reasonably happen is that it gets rainy in Ireland, as it tends to do at sad moments.

Then, later on:

Intermezzo is being trumpeted by the publishers as Rooney’s Great Leap Forward, and I suppose it will be seen as some sort of accomplishment that she writes about characters who are not literature students at, or graduates of, Trinity College.

OK, but why shouldn’t she write about characters like that? She isn’t the only novelist in the world, after all; she doesn’t have any obligation to cover the whole range of society in her novels. Can’t she write about what interests her? It’s a separate question how interesting we find it, or how well she does it. (Also, isn’t “write what you know” standard MFA advice? I don’t much like it, as it means constantly risking solipsism, which seems to be Manov’s chief grip about Rooney—but at the same time, writers can also get slapped around these days for venturing to write about people too much unlike themselves.)

Like Rooney’s other novels Intermezzo takes people’s intimacies and relationships and feelings very seriously. It is a novel on a small scale, about two brothers muddling through some deeply felt but inadequately processed grief for their recently dead father while also muddling through their romantic entanglements, Ivan with an older woman, Margaret; Peter with a younger woman, Naomi, as well as his ex-fiancee Sylvia. I wasn’t always interested enough in Peter to care about his struggles, though that might have been the fault of the awkward style of his sections (Manov: “more Yoda than Joyce”—ouch!), or maybe it was due to my own greater sympathy, just instinctively, for Ivan’s story. Compared to Beautiful World, Intermezzo seemed less expansive, not in length but in reach. It didn’t convince me that the problems of these particular little people amounted to more than a hill of beans—and yet something felt true about its preoccupation with their problems, which really just reflects their own preoccupation with their own problems. We do, mostly, live like that, right? Even those of us who in some sense are committed to “the life of the mind” spend most of our time immersed in the petty and personal.

Not much actually happens in Intermezzo. The biggest “event” of the novel is a quarrel between the brothers; it gets physically rough, but the serious violence is emotional. Ivan and Peter’s relationship is the most important one in the novel, although somehow it didn’t feel that way to me until nearly at the end, when I discovered I was more emotionally invested in their potential for understanding or reconciliation than I expected. I found the final section quite moving, so something about the novel was working for me.

I feel as if I’m not actually saying much about Intermezzo. I’m ambivalent about it: it didn’t enthralled me, but I was consistently interested in it, and that’s not nothing. I also liked that it did something different than Rooney’s other novels, that she was continuing to experiment stylistically as well as thematically. I thought it was pretty astute about grieving, too. Ivan starts to worry that his memories of his father will fade: “Sometimes,” he laments to Margaret,

an hour will go by and he won’t even come into my head. The honest truth. The hour is gone before I even think about him.

But that’s normal, she says. When someone you love is still alive, you don’t think about that person every hour of the day either.

Because a living person has their own reality, he says. The person who’s gone has no reality anymore, except in thoughts. And once they are gone from thoughts, they actually are completely gone. If I don’t think about him, literally, I’m ending his existence.

I understand Ivan’s fear: remembering is hard, but forgetting would be worse, which I suppose means it’s a good thing, even though it made me so sad, that Owen was so much in my thoughts as I was reading.

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Far From Myself: Marlen Haushofer, The Wall

Rohan Maitzen13 Comments

Now that I had barely anything left, I could sit in peace on the bench and watch the stars dancing against the black firmament. I had got as far from myself as it is possible for a human being to get, and I realized that this state couldn’t last if I wanted to stay alive. I sometimes thought I would never fully understand what had come over me in the Alm. But I realized that everything I had thought and done until then, or almost everything, had been nothing but a poor imitation. I had copied the thoughts and actions of other people . . . There was nothing, after all, to distract me and occupy my mind, no books, no conversation, no music, nothing. Since my childhood I had forgotten how to see things with my own eyes, and I had forgotten that the world had once been young, untouched, and very beautiful and terrible. I couldn’t find my way back there, since I was no longer a child and no longer capable of experiencing things as a child, but loneliness led me, in moments free of memory and consciousness, to see the great brilliance of life again.

Marlen Haushofer’s strange, haunting novel The Wall is without a doubt one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. It is such an unlikely book to be so good: I think that’s part of its power, that its premise doesn’t seem very promising, that it is such an odd mixture of elements. It’s May Sarton’s Plant Dreaming Deep if that reflective meditation on solitude were also speculative fiction, existential meditation, and wilderness adventure. It should never work! And yet I found it completely gripping, consistently thought-provoking, and deeply moving.

It is most gripping when you take it most literally: what if one day there was an invisible wall separating you from everything and everybody else, and as far as you can tell, nobody else has survived whatever the wall is a manifestation of? For the narrator, the inexplicability of the situation quickly becomes less important than what to do about it, how to survive, how to take care of the small family of animals that will be her only companions. Her sense of responsibility for them is what really motivates her to keep struggling along, and the love she feels for them—the cow Bella, the dog Lynx, the cat and her kittens—is beautiful and also terrible, as it makes any losses incredibly painful.

The reason The Wall will stay with me, though, is not because Haushofer does such a good job chronicling the gruelling practicalities of growing potatoes and scything grass and killing deer and cleaning floors but because the narrator’s plight so insistently raises, for her and for us, questions about why she should do any of this and not just give up, not just burrow under the wall to what she is sure will be an immediate end—questions that extend to why any of us persist in living at all. The narrator’s extraordinary loneliness is not, perhaps, really that extraordinary: we are all fundamentally alone, isolated, cut off in invisible ways from even those closest to us. Sure, we form relationships and surround ourselves with distractions, but Matthew Arnold wasn’t wrong when he described us as being “in the sea of life enisled.” What is all this effort for, then? What, if anything, makes it worthwhile?

In her extreme solitude, with no prospect of ever reconnecting with another human being, the narrator faces the world with no insulation between herself and everything else, from the vastness of the landscape to the equal vastness of these existential questions. Sometimes, of course, she is too worn out from the digging and scything and hiking and chopping and hunting to think about them, or about much of anything, but at other times she thinks back on her life before (or is it outside?) the wall, on “the woman I once was” and on the people she once knew:

I now knew what had been wrong, and how I could have done it better. I was very wise, but my wisdom had come too late, and even if I’d been born wise I couldn’t have done anything in a world that was foolish. I thought about the dead, and I was very sorry for them, not because they were dead, but because they had all found so little joy in life. I thought about all the people I had known, and I enjoyed thinking about them; they would be mine until the day I died. I would have to clear a safe place for them in my new life if I was to live in peace.

She is awed and moved by the beauty of nature, including the night sky that used to frighten her:

If I narrowed my eyes to slits I could see the infinite abysses opening up between the constellations. Huge black hollows behind dense star clusters . . . I had never really known it before, locked in stone houses behind blinds and curtains. The night wasn’t dark at all. It was beautiful, and I started to love it. Even when it rained and a layer of clouds covered the sky, I knew that the stars were there, red, green, yellow and blue.

Similarly, she realizes that in her old life she never really saw the other living things around her because she was moving too fast:

A running person can’t look around. In my previous life, my journey took me past a place where an old lady used to feed pigeons. I’ve always liked animals, and all my goodwill went out to those pigeons, now long petrified, and yet I can’t describe a single one of them. I don’t even know what color their eyes and their beaks were. I simply don’t know, and I think that says enough about how I used to move through the city.

It’s no paradise she is living in now, and all this time to think is a curse as well as a blessing, bringing bitter grief as well as epiphanies. Who even is she, anyway, with nobody else to be present for? In one particularly striking scene she sees her own reflection and wonders what her face is for now, if she even needs it any more. Her narrative, which she calls a “report,” is her one act of resistance against her own erasure: perhaps, when she is gone, it at least will persist.

Near the end of the novel, there is an episode of such grim and gratuitous brutality that it makes the eerie death zone outside the wall seem peaceful by comparison. I think I’m glad Haushofer does not explain this part to us anymore than she explains the wall; the novel would lose something if it relied more on plot. (I’m also glad there’s no clever framing device to cheapen it: we don’t know how we come to be able to read this report.) To look for meaning its violence might also be to make the mistake the narrator notes is typical of humans, in their “megalomania,” assuming significance where there is just accident: “things happen.” At the same time, she sees humans’ capacity to think and to choose as itself significant. “Maybe,” she considers,

people are more deserving of pity because they have just enough intelligence to resist the natural course of things. It has made them wicked and desperate, and not very lovable. All the same, life could have been lived differently. There is no impulse more rational than love. It makes life more bearable for the lover and the loved one. We should have recognized in time that this was our only chance, our only hope for a better life. For an endless army of the dead, mankind’s only chance has vanished forever. I keep thinking about that. I can’t understand why we had to take the wrong path. I only know it’s too late.

Is it too late, for her, or for us? We don’t know the end of her story, which does not conclude but simply stops, when she runs out of paper. Our story isn’t over yet. It’s not looking too good for us—but if Ian McEwan can find grounds for optimism, I’m not giving up hope for us yet.

A Vigorous Life: Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

It is a wonder that a poem, let alone an unread poem, could have such a vigorous life in the culture–and its story still had decades to run before the present day. In the late twenty-first century, even as wars broke out in the Pacific (China against South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines and others), vanished poem and vanished opportunities coalesced into a numinous passion for what could not be had, a sweet nostalgia that did not need a resolution . . . The Corona was more beautiful for not being known. Like the play of light and shadow on the walls of Plato’s cave, it presented to posterity the pure form, the ideal of all poetry.

I really liked the first half of What We Can Know. McEwan is always a meticulous stylist, and the persona he sets up to narrate this part is easy to follow and, as an academic, a good proxy for McEwan’s own analytical mind. But what I liked most about it was the concept—for better and for worse, McEwan’s fiction is always highly conceptual, and so I think (and a chat about the novel with a friend today confirmed) our experience of reading him is always going to be strongly affected by whether we buy the concept or not, whether for whatever combination of readerly reasons it strikes us as engaging and convincing, or as a gimmick.  In this case the scenario is an oddly optimistic post-apocalyptic one:  its narrator, Tom Metcalfe, is an English professor, about 100 years in the future, living on a planet that has built its way back after significant but not utter destruction. McEwan uses this premise to turn our present into a past that can be contemplated historically. How might we think about our situation if we weren’t actually in it? is the thought experiment, and it leads to some thought-provoking and, for me at least, surprisingly stirring reflections from Tom about the period he has chosen to specialize in:

What brilliant invention and bone-headed greed. What music, what tasteless art, what wild breaks and sense of humour; people flying 2,000 miles for a one-week holiday; buildings that touched the cloud base; razing ancient forests to make paper to wipe their backsides. But they also spelled out the human genome, invented the internet, made a start on AI and placed a beautiful golden telescope a million miles out in space.

Then came what the future calls “the Derangement,” which led to wars and climate catastrophes; large sections of the earth’s landmasses have been submerged, leaving islands connected by variously perilous seas.

McEwan has rigged the game in favour of a cautious optimism, based on what he notes in this interview has historically been the case: societies, like nature, have the capacity to recover, to regenerate, to fill in, to accommodate and adapt. What I mean by “rigged the game” is that he protected us, and Earth, from complete devastation. The losses are vast, staggering, but there’s enough left–including, especially, enough information–that rebuilding is possible. Even of universities! Which in 2119 occupy literally (if perhaps not metaphorically) the highest ground. They even still have English departments, something that doesn’t always feel likely about the very near future, so it was nice to be imagining that in 2119 people still have jobs reading and teaching about poems and novels.

The poem that preoccupies Tom is one that was read aloud at a party in 2014 and then lost forever. The content and context of the poem make up a lot of What We Can Know, which in a way is like a futuristic version of A.S. Byatt’s Possession, dramatizing the romance of research–a quest for a lost truth, a heroic rescue mission carried out in archives that, in this case, can sometimes be accessed only by arduous and risky sea voyages–while also highlighting the inevitable futility of the effort to find out ‘what really happened.’ Archives are incomplete; evidence is missing or misleading; interpretation is fallible. Even the quantitatively overwhelming material left by inhabitants of the digital age is not enough to lead the most diligent researcher to the truth–as Tom eventually finds out.

The first half of the novel follows Tom’s effort to reconstruct the night of the poetry reading and then to find, if he possibly can, the long-lost poem itself, which has had an extraordinary afterlife in spite of, or perhaps because of, the absence of the poem itself. By its non-existence, it has become “a repository of dreams, of tortured nostalgia, futile retrospective anger and a focus of unhinged reverence.” “The imagined lords it over the actual,” Tom reflects; perhaps once found the poem would lose, rather than gain, significance. Wisely, no doubt, McEwan does not include even fragments of it: he says it was because early readers found his poetic attempts inadequate, but it seems fitting in any case that it remains always out of our reach. Does Tom ever find it, though? Well, that would a spoiler, wouldn’t it?

The second half of the novel offers a first-hand account of the poem’s origins, including backstory on all the figures in the poet’s life that Tom has obsessed over throughout his career. It is more conventional, high concept only in its relationship to the futuristic framing. It’s well done, though predictable and occasionally (I thought) a bit too contrived in some of its details. When I reached its rather pat ending, I found myself wondering if I had missed something that would be apparent on a re-reading of the whole novel: I think of how the early parts of Atonement, for example, vibrate with new meaning once you have read to the end, including not just the metafictional twist but also the way Briony’s fictionalization turns out to have incorporated advice you later learn she got from readers and editors. Tom’s version of the story is, I think it’s fair to say, an idealization, a kind of wishful thinking, a story that fits the evidence he has together to suit his vision of the people and events. It is inaccurate, not just because his information is copious but incomplete, but because what he wants to do (as Dorothea Brooke would put it, to reconstruct a past world, with a view to the highest purposes of truth!) is always already impossible. OK, I get it! I got that before I read the ‘real’ version—which is also, of course, inevitably partial, perhaps dubiously reliable. But do we learn something more specific about Tom’s version, are there specific things he gets wrong, or (to consider another possibility) is there evidence he mentions that undermines the version that makes up the novel’s second half? I didn’t notice any such clever moments, but there’s a lot I didn’t notice about Atonement on my first reading.

My friend liked the second part of the novel better than the first, and I can see why. There are certainly parts of Tom’s narrative that aren’t completely convincing, and there’s a somewhat stiff or chilly quality to his voice that we (both academics) somewhat ruefully agreed might be a deliberate part of his characterization as an academic. I did think, though, that there was something passionate about him, something sympathetically melancholy about his preoccupation with the past, wrapped though it is in the language of professional obligation and advancement.  “I’ve spent a lifetime,” he says,

getting on intimate terms with people I can never meet, people who really existed and are therefore far more alive to me than characters in a novel. I have tried to embrace what is ‘beyond my reach in time.'”

He knows the past is inaccessible, but in retracing these lives, he feels a “fervent longing and melancholy” that is “my true sad sign of a last world that I have come to know too well.” All of us who study the past have got to recognize a bit of ourselves in that; what’s fresh in McEwan’s approach is that Tom’s past is our present, so even as we might resist his characterization of it, he also defamiliarizes it for us, giving us a chance to ask ourselves: is it really like that? What if we actually have it pretty good? “The Blundys and their guests” Tom observes,

lived in what we would regard as a paradise. There were more flowers, trees, insects, birds and mammals in the wild, though all were beginning to vanish. The wines the Blundys’ visitors drank were superior to ours, their food was certainly more delicious and varied and came from all over the world. The air they breathed was purer and less radioactive. Their medical services, though a cause of constant complaint, were better resourced and organized. They could have travelled from the Barn in any direction for hours on dry land.

OK, it looks good only by comparison with a world reshaped by global disasters, so while I have described the novel as shaped by optimism, I think it’s also fair to see that it also stands as a bracing kind of cautionary tale, a useful reminder that what we have is fragile, imperilled—that if it’s worth remembering nostalgically, it is also surely worth trying to preserve.

“On We Go”: Emma Donoghue, The Paris Express

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments
Engine 721 doesn’t take it personally. She is made of wood and metal, and her temperament is stoic. Besides, she recognizes something kindred in Mado Pelletier’s iron conviction and unstoppable momentum. The bomber believes the world men have made is terrible, and so it is. Nor can the train deny that there is a certain beauty in the idea of burning, since she runs on flame herself. That lunch bucket is an explosion waiting to happen. Its unstable elements sing out their longing so loudly, the train can hear them like a battle cry. All the force of combustion that makes the express the fastest vehicle on earth, this device has harnessed for instant havoc. It can take every part of an object, and every cell in the human body, and fire them in different directions. So, for now, on we go.
WARNING: GREAT BIG SPOILERS Since the railway disaster Emma Donoghue recreates in The Paris Express is a documented historical event, I think a spoiler alert is not really called for. That said, I did not already know what actually happened, and I suspect Donoghue is counting on our not knowing, which is what kind of spoiled the novel for me. If you knew that THE BOMB DOES NOT GO OFF and NOBODY ON THE TRAIN DIES, the sense of impending doom that she does such a good job of building up would reveal itself immediately as shameless manipulation, which it turns out it is. The Paris Express is not a bad novel. Donoghue is too adept for that. Given how it ends, though, I don’t really see the point of it. It’s just people on a train. She does a good job imagining them all for us (and if you like this sort of thing, there’s a long note at the end telling you who is real and which bits are made up). I got pretty invested in some of them, especially in the young anarchist who spends the whole trip clutching her homemade bomb, hoping there will be a big enough wig on the train to make detonating it the kind of political statement she aspires to. As the train raced along from stop to stop and the passengers met and mingled and shared quiet moments and lustful interludes and ate lunch and gave birth, there seemed to be a lot of potential ways their interactions could pay off. But even without climactic revelations or epiphanies (maybe assisting in a delivery would change Mado’s mind about blowing everyone up, for instance), there was power in the dramatic irony, this motley assemblage of different people all unknowingly hurtling towards disaster. BUT THEY ALL WALK AWAY FROM IT. Geez. I mean, that’s nice for them (and rough for the one person who does actually die in the accident), but what that leaves us with is a whole bunch of people on a train. A series of character sketches, vignettes. It’s so deflating! Also, she personifies the train. It makes some sense: apparently trains, like ships, are “she” to those who make them go. I like the idea that the train is a symbol: destructive technology, human ingenuity pushing too hard against the natural world, something like that. But the minute you say “You wonder how a train can read her passengers’ minds?” you’ve lost me. Keep it a metaphor, don’t over-literalize it, don’t tell me “she savours their memories and jokes, their doubts and rages, the way a worm tastes the earth.” Let us think for ourselves why a train might be antipathetic to something else that matters; let us experience the passengers’ humanity as something in tension with it. I’ve read quite a few of Donoghue’s novels. I thought The Wonder (which I reviewed for the TLS) was really good, and Haven (which I reviewed for Canadian Notes and Queries) was too. I think she’s a good enough novelist that I wish she would write fewer novels—something I realize I have said before. Obviously, it’s not nothing, to be able to write so many fine-to-good novels! She’s clearly very commercially successful, too. I bought The Paris Express myself, notice, gambling that even if it wasn’t great, it would still be fine, which it is. I don’t get why it has been nominated for the Giller Prize, though. My feeling about prize-winning books is that they should aspire to greatness.

Two Women Writing: Ditlevsen and Toews

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

I made my way to the end of Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy without ever deciding if I was enjoying it or not. Enjoying might be the wrong word in any case: it’s not really a fun or pleasant story, and Ditlevsen herself does not come across as likeable, so what’s to enjoy? The better question is whether I was appreciating or admiring it, or interested in it. I am undecided on these questions as well. And yet her account of her childhood, youth, and “dependency” (meaning addiction) did exert a kind of pull on me, enough that I persisted to the end. One of the rewards, as I mentioned before, is coming across passages that hit hard. Some samples:

I look up at [my mother] and understand many things at once. She is smaller than other adult women, younger than other mothers, and there’s a world outside my street that she fears. And whenever we both fear it together, she will stab me in the back. As we stand there in front of the witch, I also notice that my mother’s hands smell of dish soap. I despise that smell, and as we leave the school again in utter silence, my heart fills with the chaos of anger, sorrow, and compassion that my mother will always awaken in my from that moment on, throughout my life.

Or,

Wherever you turn, you run up against your childhood and hurt yourself because it’s sharp-edged and hard, and stops only when it has torn you completely apart. It seems that everyone has their own and each is totally different. My brother’s childhood is very noisy, for example, while mine is quiet and furtive and watchful. No one likes it and no one has any use for it.

Or this, which is such an uncomfortable kind of yearning, perhaps not completely unfamiliar to anyone who was a precocious girl in a world where that quality was not always welcome:

I desire with all my heart to make contact with a world that seems to consist entirely of sick old men who might keel over at any moment, before I myself have grown old enough to be taken seriously.

Or this, once she has grown into a writer:

I realize more and more that the only thing I’m good for, the only thing that truly captivates me, is forming sentences and word combinations, or writing simple four-line poetry. And in order to do this I have to be able to observe people in a certain way, almost as if I needed to store them in a file somewhere for later use. And to be able to do this I have to be able to read in a certain way too, so I can absorb through all my pores everything I need, if not for now, then for later use. That’s why I can’t interact with too many people . . . and since I’m always forming sentences in my head, I’m often distant and distracted.

As these samples show, there’s a hardness, a flatness, to the narrating voice: as often before, I wondered if that affect was intrinsic to the original or an effect of the translation. There’s also an intensity, and a ruthlessness, towards herself as much as towards others. It is a strong voice, but it does not inspire me to look up any of Ditlevsen’s fiction.

I also finished Miriam Toews’s A Truce That Is Not Peace, which is not really a memoir, I suppose, but I’m not sure what else to call it. It is about her life and about writing and about the death by suicide of her father and her sister—which is to say, it is about the same subjects as most of her other books, which is sort of the point, as it is written in response to a question she cannot clearly answer: “Why do you write?”

I did not like this book much as a book, though I admire and sympathize with Toews’s wrestling with questions about how or whether or why to keep returning to these deaths. It’s odd to think that long before I knew that her main subject would become, in a way, my own, I puzzled over my dissatisfaction with her highly autobiographical novel All My Puny Sorrows. One of my thoughts at that time was that she had stuck so closely to the personal that her novel had not offered something more philosophical, something more meaningful. That’s not an obligation for art or artists, of course, but reading AMPS that’s the dimension I felt was missing. In a way, I feel the same about A Truce That Is Not Peace, even as I understand better now how inappropriate it might be, or feel, to move from the personal to the abstract based on one’s own individual experience of this kind of grief or trauma. Certainly that would have meant writing a very different kind of book, and my sense from Truce is that it is not the kind of book Toews would want to write.

What this book communicated to me is a kind of stuckness, a kind of stasis, in her grieving and her thinking about her grieving. I am not complaining that she hasn’t “gotten over” these deaths: that (as I well understand) is not how this works. As she herself is clearly aware, she keeps writing because she isn’t over them, because they aren’t, in that sense, over themselves. Her loss is ongoing. That is a reason, not an explanation, for her writing—if that makes sense as a distinction. It would be nice if writing led to meaning. Sometimes it does, but not always. “Narrative as something dirty, to be avoided,” she says at one point,

I understand this. I understand narrative as failure. Failure is the story, but the story itself is also failure. On its own it will always fail to do the thing it sets out to do—which is to tell the truth.

I sympathize with her grief and anger and frustration, and also with her wish, which I think is implicit in her bothering to write this book at all, that maybe, possibly, hopefully, she can say something truthful if she just keeps at it. I was outraged on her behalf, too, when I read this part:

Is silence the disciplined alternative to writing?

A student of English literature, whose class I recently visited, has suggested that now is the time for me to stand back and listen. I’ve had a “platform” long enough.

But what then—if I stop writing? I don’t want a platform. I am listening. What an awful word! Platform.

I didn’t much like this particular book. I found it too fragmented, too random; I wanted Toews to actually write the whole book, not to give us what felt (to me) like scraps of it, a draft of it. I understand that its form reflects a refusal to impose order and meaning where she does not find them, but at the same time I am not sure that if anyone but Miriam Toews had written exactly this, it would have found a publisher. But never mind my personal taste, or what I personally go to memoirs about suicide hoping to find (words in the shape of my wound, to paraphrase a poem that still echoes in my mind). We (generally) want to read it because she wrote it and we believe she is worth listening to. Imagine telling the author of Women Talking that she should shut up now.

Here’s something true in it, something that I think Yiyun Li would appreciate for its bluntness, something Denise Riley also talks about. Toews recounts a conversation with a friend whose child died of cancer:

She hated some of the things people said to her afterwards.

I can’t imagine your sorrow. I can’t imagine your pain.

Yeah, you fucking can! You can fucking imagine it. Go ahead and fucking try.

My friend told me she’d never felt more alone and sealed off in her coffin of grief than when people told her, even lovingly, even with tender hugs, that they couldn’t imagine her sadness.

Try! Stay! Stay with me.

“What will happen if I stop writing, I want to ask the student of English literature,” Toews says, right after this anecdote. Maybe the answer to the question that launches this book is here: she writes so that we will stay with her. 

Recent Reading: Slump-Ish

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

I’ve been meaning to catch up on my recent reading for weeks now: it has been a month since I wrote up Sarah Moss’s Ripeness, and it isn’t as if I haven’t read anything since then! The problem (for posting, anyway) is that I haven’t read anything that made me want to write about it. I didn’t used to use that as an excuse: I just wrote up everything! And in the process I often found I did have things to say. Let’s see if that happens this time as I go through my recent reading.

I had put in some holds on some lighter reading options that all seemed to come in at once. The timing wasn’t bad, as I was too distracted by the rush to get the term underway when the lockout ended to dig in to anything very demanding. Even as diversions, though, none of these were particularly satisfying reads: Katherine Center’s The Love-Haters seemed contrived to me; Beth O’Leary’s Swept Away was (as Miss Bates had already warned me in her review) good until it wasn’t; Linda Holmes’s Back After This wasn’t terrible but it also seemed contrived—a reaction that I realize may be less about the books than about my chafing for some reason at the necessary contrivance of romance plots. But I’m rereading Holmes’s Evvie Drake Starts Over now and liking it as much as I did before, so maybe it is at least partly the books’ fault that they seemed so formulaic.

I read Patrick Modiano’s So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighbourhood for my book club, which met to discuss it on Wednesday. It was the first Modiano any of us had read, and we chose it because we wanted to follow up Smilla’s Sense of Snow with something that offered a more literary twist on the mystery genre. So You Don’t Get Lost certainly does that—maybe, we thought, it goes (for our tastes) too far in the other direction: it is so far away from being plot-driven that, as any reader of the novel will know, following the plot is like pushing on a cloud. I think I would have found it annoying if the novel had been longer, but it’s novella-length, and once I realized all the noir premises and promises of the opening were going to remain unfulfilled, I enjoyed just going where it took me. It is wonderfully atmospheric, and Modiano managed to keep me wondering about what had happened while also frustrating my curiosity at almost every turn. “In the end,” his narrator says, “we forget the details of our lives that embarrass us or are too painful. We just lie back and allow ourselves to float along calmly over the deep waters, with our eyes closed”—which is not a bad description of how I decided to read the book. I don’t think I want to read anything else by Modiano, though. For a better-informed commentary, read Tony’s post.

I read Kate Cayley’s Property, which I thought was well written and artfully constructed but (again, for my taste) too much so, too deliberate, never gripping until its final sequence, which then annoyed me by being manipulative and melodramatic. Kerry liked it better than I did. I didn’t dislike it; I just never really wanted to pick it up again when I’d put it down, and I also kept forgetting which character was which, which in a fairly short book with a tight cast of characters seems like it might not be all my fault.

I read Lily King’s Heart the Lover because I’m reviewing it for the TLS, so you’ll have to wait to find out what I think about it! (I’m still figuring that out as I reread it, anyway: I can say that it is a book that has so far elicited a lot of equivocation from me!)

I am currently reading Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy. This too I am not eager to pick up again after I put it down, but when I do pick it up, I keep coming across hard-hitting gems of sentences (is that a mixed metaphor?) “Wherever you turn,” says narrator Tove, “you run up against your childhood and hurt yourself because it’s sharp-edged and hard, and stops only when it has torn you completely apart.” On the brink of youth,

Now the last remnants [of childhood] fall away from me like flakes of sun-scorched skin, and beneath looms an awkward, an impossible adult. I read in my poetry album while the night wanders past the window—and, unawares, my childhood falls silently to the bottom of my memory, that library of the soul from which I will draw knowledge and experience for the rest of my life.

It seems unfair to characterize as a “reading slump” a period that includes both this and (in its very different register) the Modiano, and yet that is how the past few weeks have felt. Good thing that today in class we began what will be nearly a month of work on David Copperfield! Dickens has rescued me before and already, six chapters in, I can tell that whether or not I read any other books in the next little while that excite me, he’s going to show me all over again what a great reading experience is like.