Confessions of a (Former) Non-Romance Reader; or, Everything I Know About Romance Novels I Learned on Twitter

Rohan Maitzen23 Comments

spaniardLife is short, I’m busy, my TBR list is long and endlessly proliferating — so why would I waste my time on books that are shallow, badly written, and pander to silly, juvenile fantasies of finding Mr. Right? They’re so formulaic as to be essentially interchangeable and so numerous they are clearly also disposable. And their covers are so embarrassingly lurid!

Yes, I admit, these are things I have always (casually, without much reflection) thought about romance novels. Though I am not particularly interested in several other kinds of “genre” fiction (science fiction or fantasy, for instance), I have never dismissed these categories as, well, categorically beyond the pale, the way I have romance novels. I figured there were good or bad, trivial and significant, examples of science fiction and fantasy, and over the years I’ve tried some samples, but there is so much else to read that is more to my taste that I never felt motivated, much less obligated, to pursue them. Still, I always knew that was about me, not them. I’m not a voracious reader of mystery fiction either, but I know my way around the field and need  no persuasion to agree with Raymond Chandler’s famous proclamation that “an art which is capable of [The Maltese Falcon] is not ‘by hypothesis’ incapable of anything”–indeed, I’m on record making my best case for the arbitrariness of the genre fiction / literary fiction distinction in general and the literary potential of the police procedural in particular.

But romance? Not only have I always assumed that there’s nothing in it for me, but I’ve assumed too that there’s not much in it for anybody. Chick-lit is bad enough. I have hung out with lots of readers my entire life, and nobody I know reads romance novels! Enough said!

Well, maybe not.

I’m not about to make a big pronouncement in defense of romance novels. I’m hardly qualified to, having read approximately five from cover to cover. But I will say that I have recently been through a process of re-education about them that has been very interesting to me as a reader and a thinker, and also, not incidentally, rather revealing to me personally. If I were going to pronounce on anything at this point, it would be on the value of keeping an open mind, and on the value of Twitter and blogging for enabling unexpected conversations. It has been frequently remarked that the internet makes it too easy for us to seek out and corral knowledge that suits our existing ideas and preferences, ignoring or filtering out disagreement and contradiction. That’s true. You can friend and follow and subscribe to and like as select a group as you choose, eventually operating in a self-perpetuating bubble of the like-minded. But the internet in general, and social media in particular, can also bring you into contact with a much wider range of people and ideas than you ordinarily would, and even if you make those contacts initially because of some common interest, that one point of intersection may be the beginning of a more dynamic relationship in which both similarities and differences are important and valuable.

I have found this to be especially true of Twitter, perhaps because of the very large and constantly shifting network of connections every tweeter is part of. Through the mechanisms of linking and retweeting, for instance, I see not only the tweets directly from those I follow (a wide assortment of academics, journalists, critics, writers, quilters, publicists, bloggers…) but RTs from those they follow, which are sometimes themselves RTs from those they follow. Looking to see where a tweet or link originated, I often find myself following someone new, either on Twitter or through my Google Reader subscription. Connections proliferate! It’s overwhelming at times, not because of the triviality often ascribed to Twitter by those who haven’t used it or haven’t found a way to use it that serves their interests–but because far too much of interest and substance goes by than I can ever realistically hold on to.

Anyway, back to romance novels. Through the various intricacies of Twitter relationships, I have ended up with some wonderful “tweeps” who, among other things, are happy un-closeted romance readers. (One thing I’m now  aware of is that many romance readers are, in fact, in the closet about this particular reading taste–hence, as often reported, their rapid and enthusiastic embrace of e-reading.) My Twitter friends write and talk about romance novels in ways that made me first realize and then reflect on my careless assumptions about both the books and their readers. My curiosity piqued, I started peering at the romance titles available electronically from my public library–and though by and large what I saw of them seemed to confirm my prejudices (tawdry covers! cheesy-sounding plot lines with 2-dimensional characters!), I kept in mind and puzzled over the satisfaction books of this kind gave these strong, intelligent women who know perfectly well the challenges and rewards of other kinds of reading.

1995-lord-of-scoundrelsOn Twitter, in the meantime, my tweeps joked, good-naturedly, about actually persuading me to read a romance novel someday, and they batted around titles they thought might be my “conversion” novel–so finally I took the bait and borrowed Loretta Chase’s Lord of Scoundrels, apparently known to some as one of the best romance novels of all time, from the library. Well, that was a setback. I thought the novel was ridiculous! In fact, it was so much like what I had always snidely imagined romance novels to be that I wondered if it was a parody! Egad. Then I tried Georgette Heyer’s Sylvester–not a genre “romance,” exactly, but in the romance tradition. That wasn’t much more successful.

We went back and forth and gradually clarified that historical romance was not the right direction for me (I don’t much like generic historical fiction either, after all): I should try “contemporary” romance. This development was very educational for me. For some reason I hadn’t thought of romance as a genre that (like mystery fiction) comes in well-defined subgenres among which readers make informed choices. Because I didn’t really know how else to search the library’s online catalogue for samples, for instance, the romances I’d scanned were all Harlequin titles, of the ‘Billionaire’s Virgin Bride’ type, while the ones being recommended to me were “historicals” (including one about the Crystal Palace that I haven’t been able to find so far–I expect I’ll hate it, but I’m curious to see it anyway! Victorians and hot sex, always a good combination, right?). They seemed more alike than different, and not in good ways. (I realize some of this is the effect of marketing, not content.) If I’d been taking the whole genre more seriously from the start, of course, it would not have come as such a revelation to me that it is not one more or less silly thing but simply a form that (again, like msytery fiction) can contain multitudes. At this point one of my Twitter tutors suggested I look up Jennifer Crusie, and so I read Anyone But You next–and quite enjoyed it! And now I’ve also read Getting Rid of Bradley and am about half way through What the Lady Wants, and they’ve been amusing and entertaining as well.

crusieThinking about why I liked Anyone But You (not loved, mind you, but liked–to the tune of 2 stars on Goodreads), I realized that it is really a prose version of a romantic comedy, a movie genre I enjoy.  I actually have a collection of favorite romantic comedies I own on DVD, including Moonstruck (the best!), When Harry Met Sally, Notting Hill, You’ve Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle. These are not high art films–but then, almost none of the films I watch are! I don’t reject these films for being “only” what they are. I appreciate how well I think they do what they set out to do, which is tell a romantic story about people I can be brought to care about, with humour and a touch of grace. They indulge happily-ever-after fantasies, yes, but with just enough realism to be engaging and just enough tongue-in-cheek self-consciousness about their own love stories (sometimes, with overt meta-commentary on it, as with the invocation of Pride and Prejudice in You’ve Got Mail or of An Affair to Remember in Sleepless in Seattle) to give a little tartness to their sweetness. As mystery novelists work within but manipulate conventions, these films follow formulas but succeed insofar as they tweak them to make them new. There’s comfort in knowing how things will turn out (again, as in mystery novels, with the reassurance of order restored). They are feel-good movies. What’s wrong with a feel-good book? Anyone But You is exactly that. In fact, it would make a nice little rom com. I can totally see Meg Ryan in it! It even has the quirky secondary characters. If it’s perfectly OK with me to enjoy Sleepless in Seattle even though I know it is not a great, profound, or innovative film–just a charming one–then why shouldn’t there be a place for charming, light-hearted romance in my reading life?

Yet something still strikes me as particularly slight or insubstantial about my small sample of romance novels, and I’ll keep on thinking about this as I read more. I’ve been thinking, for instance, that one of the reasons it’s easier to take mystery novels seriously is that they trade in “important” things like law, justice, and, of course, death. Romance novels seem more trivial because they are “just” about falling in love. But then, the same is true of many literary novels, and falling in love–not to mention deciding to marry someone–can reflect as many complex and important aspects of character and society as crime. The romance novels I’ve read so far don’t really do this–but just as there’s no reason in principle why detective fiction can’t be as literary as The Maltese Falcon or the Martin Beck books, there’s no reason in principle why romance novels can’t be great literature too. In fact, many novels we already acknowledge as great literature follow that same basic plot. Is there a continuum, then, from (say) Jane Austen or George Eliot to Jennifer Crusie? Maybe, though the differences in both style and substance seem conspicuous and significant!

As for the personal revelations hinted at above, all I’ll say is that thinking through my assumptions about and reactions to romance novels has involved thinking about my own experience of and thoughts about romance, love, and marriage. Few of us (happily) have personal experience of murder, but most of us (happily or not) have been through our own experiences of relationships. It’s a commonplace in fiction that we get ideas about life from books. We also bring our life to our reading, and the things we find unrealistic, sentimental, naive, or foolish are as potentially revealing as the things we find admirable, desirable, dreamy, or delightful. Detection is something we are distanced from, and its various literary forms also typically emphasize and reward detachment. Romance, on the other hand, is a very intimate genre–and I don’t mean just the sex scenes!

My education is ongoing. I’m sure there will be some follow-up discussion on Twitter and elsewhere.

And yes, if you were wondering, I am ‘X.’

More Ph.D. Puzzlement

Rohan Maitzen9 Comments

The leaders of the American Historical Association (AHA) recently published a mini-manifesto, “No More Plan B,” that has received quite a lot of positive attention. As reported in Inside Higher Ed, the authors want to stop seeing non-academic careers as “alternatives” (a term they see as usually implying “bad alternatives”) to tenure-track professorial appointments. They argue for a change in both the rhetoric and the emphasis of doctoral programs:

Grafton and Grossman cite data from the last year (and the last several years before that) in which more history Ph.D.s are entering the job market than there are tenure-track openings. Despite the talent of the new history Ph.D.s, “many of these students will not find tenure-track positions teaching history in colleges and universities,” they write.

Further, they say that people cannot simply wait for the economy to improve. “As many observers have noted, this is not a transient ‘crisis,’ ” write Grafton and Grossman. “It’s the situation we have lived with for two generations. And it’s not likely to change for the better, unless someone figures out how to work magic on the university budgets that lead[s] administrators to opt for flexible, contingent positions rather than tenure-track jobs. AHA supports and joins in efforts to convert contingent to tenure-track jobs — but it’s unrealistic to expect these to pay off on a large scale. We owe it to our students and to our profession to think more broadly.”

In this environment, Grafton and Grossman write that the idea of working outside academe needs to be basic to all discussions with graduate students, from the time they look at programs to their dissertation defenses. But history departments also need to consider “bigger” changes than just talking about options, and those changes, the statement argues, should include adjustments in the doctoral curriculum. “If we tell new students that a history Ph,D. opens many doors, we need to broaden the curriculum to ensure that we’re telling the truth. If the policy arena offers opportunities, and we think it does, then interested students need some space (and encouragement) to take courses in statistics, economics, or public policy,” they write. “Accounting, acting, graphic design, advanced language training: students thinking at once creatively and pragmatically have all sorts of options at our research universities. And of course there’s the whole exploding realm of digital history and humanities, and the range of skills required to practice them.”

Throughout the time students are in graduate school, they need to feel that their faculty members will support their choices to work in or outside of academe, they write.

I endorse wholeheartedly the call for faculty members “to stop looking down on those who build careers elsewhere.” I find it hard to imagine any advisor having such an outdated, narrow-minded, short-sighted and belittling attitude–but the anecdotal evidence does seem to be strong that many Ph.D. students run into this kind of silliness.

Where I still find myself puzzled, though, is over how  (and, to some extent, why) Ph.D. programs should be “broadened” to take into account the wide but at the same time rather nebulous list of other careers for which specialized academic training in a particular discipline is said to prepare people. It’s not that I don’t think Ph.D.s learn valuable skills: it’s that Ph.D. programs are also about content and about discipline-specific expertise as much as (if not more than) transferable skills of the kind invoked when the AHA’s James Grossman  cites investment banking as “the perfect example” of an overlooked match between training and career prospects:

“You have people who as part of their occupation need to be able to assess how two companies will get along in a merger. What does that require? It requires exactly the same conceptual framework historians use when we think about structure, human agency and culture,” he said.

Aside from the depressing notion that we should promote studying “structure, human agency and culture” on the dubious grounds that it prepares someone to facilitate corporate mergers, surely there is some difference in the conceptual frameworks involved? And even if there isn’t, to what extent are the time-consuming, intellectually demanding, and discipline-specific aspects of Ph.D. programs that are designed to professionalize–in the richest sense of that word–someone as a historian actual requirements for those other careers? Why, to put the question another way, would someone actively interested in a non-academic career chose the long and possibly circuitous route of getting a history Ph.D. on the way? An M.A., sure, but a Ph.D.? As one of the Inside Higher Ed commenters remarks,

While I applaud the AHA for acknowledging that there are good jobs for Ph.D.s outside academic departments they are still not quite getting it. If you take a look at those non-academic jobs, for how many of them would you say that the History Ph.D. is the best path to getting the skills and credentials needed to be hired in them? How many require a History Ph.D. Not many, I suspect. Almost all History Ph.D.s earned their degree because they wanted to become academic historians, not because the skills they developed would help them be good at something else.

From the perspective of graduate students,” another comments, “‘No Plan B’ is self-centered. If the objective is no longer a tenure-track teaching job (preferably at a research university) why not enroll in a graduate program (not history) whose purpose is to prepare students for these other livelihoods?” It has certainly been my experience that 100% of students I talk to who are applying to Ph.D. programs have academic careers in mind, and so I agree that there’s something awry in the way these arguments for seeing non-academic careers as something besides “alternatives” are being set up.

That said, it might be true that if Ph.D. programs were sufficiently redesigned, people would head into them with a wider range of intentions and expectations. It’s not clear to me, though, how we could reconcile that broader agenda with the standard demands of Ph.D. programs as they are currently constituted–which is, with a persistent focus on preparing students for academic careers. Indeed, in the 20+ years I have now been involved in graduate education, the strongest trend I’ve seen is towards academic “professionalization,” with workshops on everything from conference proposals to fellowship applications to academic job interviews, and ever-rising pressure to publish, attend conferences, and participate in professional groups and activities. Students whose first priority is an academic career need (or they certainly expect, and even, in my experience, demand) this kind of “support” to an extent that was barely imaginable 20 or 30 years ago. What would the new, multi-purpose Ph.D. look like?

The AHA’s proposal seems to be to re-tool Ph.D. programs, not by redesigning them from the ground up, or by streaming requirements based on intended outcomes, but by preserving all the essential academic elements while adding yet more requirements for both students and departments:

Yes, time is a problem. It already takes a long time—a very long time—to obtain a doctorate in history. We don’t advocate narrowing the historical work that constitutes graduate education in history. Nor do we agree with the well-meaning observers who suggest that graduate training in humanities fields could be made less onerous, and attrition reduced, by easing the requirements: for example, by cutting the dissertation down from the grub out of which a book should emerge into three or more articles that can be researched and written in one to two years. We leave the feasibility of shorter dissertations in other humanities disciplines for our colleagues to assess. In history, the dissertation is the core of the experience. It’s in the course of research that historians firm up their mastery of languages and research methods, archives and arguments; and it’s while writing that they learn how to corral a vast amount of information, give it a coherent form, and write it up in a way accessible to non-specialists. Most students learn the challenges and satisfaction associated with extended narrative and/or complex analysis only at this final stage.

Instead of cutting down the dissertation, departments need to find ways of keeping dissertation writers attuned to the full range of opportunities that their work opens. Why not incorporate preparation for the future into the later years of doctoral training? This might be the time for an additional course or two, adventures into new realms of knowledge that build skills for diverse careers. That such diversification offers an antidote to melancholy and writer’s block is merely a bonus, even more so if these explorations can also add texture or new insights to a dissertation. Departments might also consider workshops that explore the world of work, bring in speakers from government and other areas where many historians find jobs, and mobilize their networks of contacts as advisers for their students. Internships could provide even deeper experience, although care would have to be taken to integrate them into dissertation writing calendars.

 If they aren’t going to “ease” requirements by decentering the dissertation (as the MLA has already argued we in literary studies should ‘decenter’ the monograph in tenure and promotion cases), how are students going to manage to do more courses or internships in “the later years of doctoral training,” also known as “the years in which you try to finish your thesis before your funding runs out”? “Care would have to be taken,” indeed.

It’s true that disciplines vary, and it’s easier in some ways (even for me) to be “attuned to the full range of opportunities” that history students’ work might open to them than it is for me to see obvious alternative (sorry) applications for the specialized expertise acquired in an English Ph.D. program. (This is not, to be clear, meant to say I don’t see value in that expertise, just that I don’t find the ‘transferable skills’ argument very compelling as a reason to do the things a literature Ph.D. has to do.) Maybe, too, Ph.D. theses in history do train students to write up their research “in a way accessible to non-specialists,” which would certainly make them a better bridge to non-academic jobs than the English thesis usually is. Maybe a lot of things about the “Ph.D. Conundrum” are different in history. Still, When I read the AHA statement, I felt, no doubt cynically, that there is an elided step in the logic, a step where they say “we want to keep Ph.D. enrolments up.”

This Week in My Classes: Amidst the Mess, Three Mysterious Morsels

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The past week or so has just felt crazy with tasks and details to keep on top of. When we’re planning courses, we (or maybe it’s just me?) tend to focus on big picture issues, like which books to assign and which assignment sequences to use. Once that’s all decided, there’s filling in the syllabus, usually a happy task full of dreams of lively discussion prompted by clever juxtapositions (like this week’s cluster of ‘poems by women poets about women poets’ right before we start Aurora Leigh!) and supported or solidified by informal and formal writing. What we (or maybe just I) tend not to prepare so well in advance are things like spreadsheets for record-keeping or evaluation forms for seminars, or attendance sheets–which it is nearly pointless to get to organized about anyway, at least until the add-drop period ends and the list has some stability! I’ve reached the point in all of my classes where I needed all these things firmly in place, as assignments have been coming in, quizzes have been written, students have given seminar presentations, and so on.  Luckily I do have templates for all these kinds of things, or at least a set of best (or usual) practices, so I’m not dreaming them up from nothing, but I am drawing them up or finessing them to suit this year’s particularities. And of course this administrative stuff (plus the marking of quizzes and evaluation of assignments and so on) has to happen in addition to the other aspects of class prep, so just when you are starting to think “see, the teaching term isn’t that busy after all–I’m getting all my readings and class notes ready in plenty of time!” you are reminded why the teaching term actually is quite intense.

Then as if this year’s classes aren’t enough to be worrying about, the deadlines for course proposals and timetabling for next year have been moved way up, and in fact we were asked to submit our teaching preferences for 2012-13 by last Friday. I’m reasonably certain that this deadline has nothing to do with program planning or pedagogy (heaven forbid we should think about next year once we have some kind of idea how this year is going) and everything to do with recruiting: Dal’s big fall Open House is October 14, and it probably helps to be able to point prospective students to at least tentative course listings. This process was further complicated for us this year by bad budget news in the faculty that had repercussions for our TA allocation and thus, potentially, for our graduate student funding–which meant rejigging much of our curriculum on the fly to ward off various worst-case scenarios. Once again, program planning and pedagogy were given short shrift because of external imperatives! This is not to trivialize the budget difficulties, but it’s a real shame the timetable for figuring out how to deal with them was not different. Book orders for the winter term also came due, though luckily I had made most of my decisions about that already. Still, I’ve been stymied by discovering, to my great surprise, that a book I had counted on assigning (Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day) appears not to have a Canadian edition available at the moment. Seriously? The bookstore and I are working on this, but if we can’t find a workaround, I’m going to have to decide on something else in something of a hurry.

Add in the three tenure and promotion cases I’m involved in, the three Ph.D. students I’m supervising who persist (darn them!) in being industrious and thus giving me work to do, the two Honours students I’m now mentoring in preparation for our year-end Honours “conference,” the reference letters I’m already assembling documents for (and then writing, collating, addressing, and mailing), and the two other committees I’m on that persist in holding meetings or circulating materials for us to read (darn them too!)–and whew! My head has been buzzing, and my stress levels nasty, by the end of most days. The student union president who blithely commented in a recent Maclean’s story that “Professors have a pretty good gig . . . You put in some office hours, you teach for a few hours and then you end up with a decent paycheque” should maybe job-shadow a professor or two before concluding that it’s only reasonable for us to return all student emails within 12 hours. (Yes, that’s right: we were born knowing even the most recent developments in our field–amazing, eh?–and basically just sit around until it’s time to go pontificate. Assignments appear from nowhere, and magically reappear with comments and grades! Hmm: I just might contribute a little to that Facebook group mentioned in the article…)

Happily, at the center of all this you still do have those “few” hours in the classroom, and even more happily, it is often a treat getting ready for them because you are working on something you find genuinely interesting and exercising not just your expertise but your creativity in figuring out how to get your students equally involved in it. I’ve been teaching a lot of quite familiar material so far this term, but as always I’ve tweaked my syllabi here and there for variety and to keep me alert. One regular source for new material is whatever reader I’ve chosen for Mystery and Detective Fiction: it’s easier to change up smaller readings, and I’m often dissatisfied with an anthology for one reason or another so I have used quite a few over the years. This year, after much (much!) exploring, I settled on the inexpensive and perfectly suitable Dover collection Classic Crime Stories, and this week, much welcome relief from the other dull or worrisome things I’m taking care of comes from the three short stories we’re reading about “Great Detectives”: Jacques Futrelle’s “The Problem of Cell 13,” G. K. Chesterton’s “The Blue Cross,” and R. Austin Freeman’s “The Case of Oscar Brodski.” All of them are models of ingenuity in both the construction and the telling of the plot. All of them feature detectives who reason their way to solutions beyond the reach of us ordinary people, but each detective has a unique character and very particular gifts–and one of them, Father Brown, of course also has enormous endearing charm. Futrelle’s Thinking Machine is the least appealing of them, I think: his sheer arrogance is interestingly offset by the way his promise to think his way out of his solitary cell turns out to be, let’s say, misleading (of the three, he’s the one whose solution to his problem is ultimately most un-astonishing–though certainly surprising until explained–and relies the most on quite ordinary kinds of help from other people). The fellow-convict who believes his guilty conscience is driving him to confess provides another example of the Holmes-like trope of the seemingly unnatural element that has a perfectly natural explanation. Father Brown brings a new dimension to the uncomfortable proximity between the criminal and the crime-solver that we have been discussing from the beginning of the course: unlike many famous detectives, he manages to retain his innocence despite his deep understanding of guilt.  “The Case of Oscar Brodski” is the most formally interesting, with its first part (“The Mechanism of Crime”) telling us the crime going forwards, and its second part (“The Mechanism of Detection”) taking us backwards as each bit of evidence is traced to its source and the events are reconstructed. It is also the one with the most violent crime, and thus the one that most emphasizes another uncomfortable aspect of this kind of detective fiction, namely, the lack of human feeling so often displayed as the intellectual problem is given priority. Nobody is particularly upset by the decapitated corpse of poor Brodski! We’ll be spending a lot more time on this problem (if it is one) when we discuss The Murder of Roger Ackroyd starting Friday. Today, I have planned an in-class exercise designed to prompt the students to generate their own commentary on the stories: I asked them to read with an eye to “teachable” moments, explaining (as per my previous post) that they are supposed to be reading actively enough to get what’s interesting and relevant on their own. I’m going to put them in pairs and then larger groups and circulate transparencies for them to write up ‘lecture notes’ on, and then put them up on the overhead projector and see what they’ve come up with.

 

This Week in My Classes: Modelling the Process

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

We’re deep into the reading in all three of my courses now. On Monday we ‘wrapped’ The Moonstone in Mystery and Detective Fiction; we’re finishing up The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in The Victorian ‘Woman Question’ tomorrow; and in 19th-Century Fiction we’ve moved on from Persuasion to Vanity Fair. Those hours spent in the classroom actually talking with students about these fabulous novels are my favorite hours of the day–better even than the hours spent rereading the novels.

In recent years, and this term especially, I’ve been trying especially hard to make explicit what I think I (we) are doing in our classroom time. In particular, I’ve been commenting explicitly during class discussions on ways I see those discussions as models for the kind of work I want the students to do on their own. I have always thought of my class time as “exemplary” in this way — that is, as providing examples. When I lecture, sometimes I am delivering information and context, but more often I am offering an example of literary interpretation, building observations from the text into an organized “reading” of the text. In class discussion, we go through this process together: I pose questions and solicit the students’ observations and ideas, collecting them in a loose way on the whiteboard, often in the form of lists of words or phrases–and circles and arrows and many lamentable attempts at drawing. Then I encourage them to look over what we’ve come up with and think about what it means. My role at this point is to help the students appreciate the significance of what they’ve noticed, and to lead them to make explicit things they are already more or less aware of. I try to do this in an open-minded and open-ended enough way that it builds their confidence: they are noticing important things, they can discover patterns and connections, they can develop their own interpretations based on careful reading and thinking. At the same time, especially early in a course, I don’t proceed entirely randomly! I ask about aspects of our readings that I know will prove interesting and fruitful to analyze, and in that way I try also to model the kinds of questions and approaches that are appropriate to the class.

But until fairly recently I had basically assumed that it was obvious what we were doing and why. It isn’t, of course, at least not for students who aren’t already somewhat experienced in the process of moving from reading and taking notes about what’s on the page to finding an interpretive framework that makes sense of what they’ve noticed. Gradually (and perhaps I was just obtuse in not having realized this much earlier on) it occurred to me that the mismatch between my expectations and students’ work could be attributed to a mismatch between what they thought I / we were doing and what I understood us to be doing. The more I thought about this, the more I noticed that, for instance, lots of students busily write things down when I’m talking but not the rest of the time–waiting for me to deliver the information, rather than engaging in the process of analysis. In their written work, they often weren’t transferring ideas or practices from the examples “covered” in class to other characters or situations or features of the novel. Often, they were reiterating plot summary in answer to questions about why things are significant, rather than making that move from observing the plot to thinking about what their observations meant. In other words, many of them were approaching our class time as the time when I would tell them what things meant, rather than showing them how to figure out meaning. Of course, sometimes I do tell them what things mean, but the purpose is to show them how it’s done (when I lecture more formally) and to show them how to do it (when I summarize and synthesize their observations during more open discussion).

One factor in making me more aware that it would help to talk more explicitly about method and process was teaching a lot of non-majors in the Mystery and Detective Fiction class. I began to adapt for it some of the assignments but also some of the commentary I use in my first-year classes to orient students in the methods of literary criticism–not just addressing terminology but also things like how you identify what a theme is in a literary work, how you get from the literal words on the page to a reasonable idea about what else the book is about–and how you know when you’re going too far (not that there are strict rules for this, but I think all English professors are used to complaints that we are “reading too much into it,” so it’s helpful to be as clear as possible about how you legitimate an interpretation, about the kind of evidence as well as, frankly, the kind of experienced intuition that leads you to say that this, but not that, is a good “reading”).

I don’t know for sure whether my new meta-commentary is really that helpful, but I hope it is doing at least a little to clarify that literary criticism isn’t really that mysterious a process, and it’s certainly not something that I should do while they watch (and then write down the results). It’s what they are supposed to be learning and doing, as much as they are also learning what the contexts are for their readings and what the books are like as reading experiences.

John Williams, Stoner

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

I’ve finished Stoner, and I’m still uncertain how I feel about the way Williams handles his academic context. Far from ending it awash with nostalgia for an era before the intense professionalization of literary studies (and the academy more generally), I actually found myself thinking that it makes a case (albeit indirectly) for greater professionalism, given the ways Stoner’s career is hampered and diminished by the pettiness of colleagues and the lack of clear and consistently enforced policies about everything from graduate admissions to workload! And just what he does as a professor remains quite vague, though we are told repeatedly how hard he works, what long hours, and so on. But even though I couldn’t entirely shake off these concerns about the imprecision of this aspect of the novel, I did end up feeling that his academic life wasn’t really–or at least, wasn’t entirely– the point. I’m not sure the novel would have worked no matter what job he had, but it’s a story about one man’s life and death in a more abstract way, about the experience of being Stoner, of having his feelings and hopes and setbacks and disappointments. I suppose the academic job helps to establish him as someone whose hopes and expectations are of a particular kind: intellectual, perhaps also spiritual, though not religious. His conversion to English studies does, actually, have something of the aura of a religious conversion, as he listens to a Shakespeare sonnet and finds his perception of the world transformed:

The thin chill of the late fall day cut through his clothing. He looked around him, at the bare gnarled branches of the trees that curled and twisted against the pale sky. Students, hurrying across the campus to their classes, brushed against him; he heard the mutter of their voices and the click of their heels upon the stone paths, and saw their faces, flushed by the cold, bent downward against a slight breeze. He looked at them curiously, as if he had not seen them before, and felt very distant from them and very close to them. He held the feeling to him as he hurried to his next class, and held it through the lecture by his professor in soil chemistry, against the droning voice that recited things to be written in notebooks and remembered by a process of drudgery that even now was becoming unfamiliar to him.

Implicit in this (and perhaps throughout Stoner, though here again the vagueness of its treatment makes me uncertain) is an idea of literature that is at once elevating and profoundly anti-intellectual (there’s no mention of any analysis of the sonnet, any contexts provided for it, not even any commentary on its formal elements). The introduction to this edition quotes Williams objecting, in a “rare” interview, to the idea that “a novel or poem is something to be studied or understood rather than experienced,” but there’s no reason why these must be antagonistic approaches, and in his sympathetic portrayal of Stoner, who does, after all, dedicate himself to studying and teaching literature, Williams does not seem to rule out the possibility that analysis can further the “joy” he claims in the interview is the purpose of reading. Through Stoner’s relationship with Katherine Driscoll late in the novel, we are told that Stoner reconciles “the life of the mind and the life of the senses,” after having come to believe, “without ever having really thought about it, that one had to be chosen at some expense of the other.” This discovery motivates and enhances Stoner’s research as well as his teaching–but we have had only the most impressionistic sense of his work before this: this emphasis on a conflict between head and heart comes upon the novel somewhat belatedly, I think, and thus does not stand as an overall gloss on the novel’s presentation of academic life.

But as I said, I don’t think Stoner really is an “academic” or “campus” novel at heart (though I’d be curious to know what other readers think). It’s more a portrait or character study, of a protagonist whose life comes to be defined by his inabilities to transcend his petty circumstances or his vexed relationships with the people in his life who misunderstand and thus inhibit him (most notaably his parents) or those who actively hamper his attempts at happiness. The story is beautifully told, with economy and restraint but also, as the quotation above shows, with compelling details and often real and moving eloquence. I felt the novel’s power most strongly in the final chapter. I felt most distant from it as it told the story of Stoner’s marriage to the neurotic, unstable, passive-aggressively vindictive Edith. There seemed something tediously predictable about the tale of a man whose potential is hindered by his foolish infatuation with the wrong woman, a man whose path is beset with obstacles because of her unreasoning opposition and inability to love.  In its own way, I think Stoner represents yet another variation on what Nina Baym labels the “melodrama of beset manhood” (see here and here for some explorations of how this myth of what constitutes a “great” American novel may still be reflected in contemporary fiction, or in how contemporary fiction is received). Katherine Driscoll provides a foil to Edith, of course, but she’s used primarily to show a better but inaccessible option for Stoner, one more thing that his bad wife and nasty colleagues drive out of his reach. That Stoner’s working world is primarily masculine (Katherine, a visiting “instructor” who is finishing her dissertation, is the only academic woman we meet) is to a large extent a historical phenomenon, but it’s interesting to consider the contrast between Stoner and Private Life. Smiley’s novel covers much of the same chronological period but gives a very different impression of its protagonist’s relationship to the wider world. In Stoner the focus really is intensely singular. I enjoyed Private Life more, but Williams has the edge in eloquence and beauty of style. More than any of the other issues and ideas I have touched on here, a moment like this gets to what I ultimately felt was the heart of the novel:

There was a softness around him, and a languor crept upon his limbs. A sense of his own identity came upon him with a sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was himself, and he knew what he had been.

 

Reading Stoner: Another Time, A Different Academy

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I’m reading John Williams’s understated and fairly depressing novel Stoner (I’m only half-way through, so perhaps it gets less depressing, though I doubt it, the way things are going–and I’m reasonably certain the tone and style won’t change–but we’ll see). One of the reasons I have been very interested in reading it is that it’s a novel about an English professor, and who doesn’t have a prurient curiosity about seeing how their occupation looks in fiction? And the smattering of other academic novels I’ve read have been either satires (David Lodge, Kingsley Amis, Zadie Smith) or mysteries (Amanda Cross — and there’s a strong satirical element there too, especially in Death in a Tenured Position). The exceptions I can think of are Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, which I liked very much but can’t now remember in much detail because I read it in the era Before Blogging, and May Sarton’s The Small Room. I tire of the satires, because though I agree academics are prone to take themselves and their work a bit too seriously, at the end of the day a lot of us are at least really sincere about what we do, and the values that motivate us are not ridiculous, however bizarre or arcane their outward manifestations may seem to others. The flip side of this “look at the funny creatures” mode is idealism of the somewhat problematic kind found in The Small Room, or, in a way, in Gaudy Night (my favorite academic novel of all). What’s more elusive, in my experience of academic fiction, is straight-up realism. Perhaps writers fear that if they show the mundane business of academia they will bore everyone–my husband and I have often speculated that this fear lies behind the very odd distortions of university life that break out any time a television show goes to college (seriously, Friday Night Lights, a freshman class with a professor who holds weekly salons? and a TA who gives a student a C because–knowing basically nothing about her at all–he imagines she can do better?)–or any time a movie has a professorial character (I can’t remember how which one it was that showed a professor meeting with his agent and getting a large advance for his next book, but again, seriously?). Even when I know being realistic is not really the point, as in On Beauty, I find it distracting when issues like timetables for tenure and promotion or the granting of sabbatical leaves, never mind actual teaching and grading, are handled with no concessions to the way these things are actually done.

So far, Stoner seems to be more or less aiming at realism. Certainly, there’s little idealism beyond the traces of it in Stoner himself, and Stoner is too sincere for the novel to seem like satire–though the characterizations of his colleagues all trend towards caricature. But the English Department of Stoner’s experience is still far from my own, and in this case what is distracting me is trying to figure out whether the differences are just historically accurate–whether what Williams is trying to capture is just a sense of the way things used to be, that is, amateurish, vague, unregulated–or in service of some larger idea. Stoner begins his career in the early decades of the 20th century, and things definitely were different then. English itself was only recently professionalized as a field of study and was in the early stages of its development as an academic discipline. But there’s something disturbingly indistinct about the world Williams is describing. What I keep wishing for is some exposition, some active narrative work to contextualize Stoner’s academic experience as a historical phenomenon, or as part of Williams’s broader interests (which at this point I am finding elusive). Here’s Stoner being advised to go on to graduate school, for starters:

‘But don’t you know, Mr. Stoner?’ Sloane asked. ‘Don’t you understand about yourself yet? You’re going to be a teacher.’

Suddenly Sloane seemed very distant, and the walls of the office receded. Stoner felt himself suspended in the wide air, and he heard his voice ask, ‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure,’ Sloane said softly.

‘How can you tell? How can you be sure?’

‘It’s love, Mr. Stoner,’ Sloane said cheerfully. ‘You are in love. It’s as simple as that.’

It was as simple as that. . . . He went out of Jesse Hall into the morning, and the grayness no longer seemed to oppress the campus; it led his eyes outward and upward into the sky, where he looked as if toward a possibility for which he had no name.

I realize that I will have at least one further context for this kind of moment by the time I finish, namely the rest of the book. Perhaps as we follow the rest of Stoner’s career the tension between this naive, if lovely, idea of professing literature and its eventual professional realities will be developed. I’m not disavowing love as a motive for professing literature-I think it remains one of the chief motivators for anyone who starts down this path, and often shows through in our teaching, if not so often in our academic writing–only, nobody could end up as a professor now based on their love (or their teaching) alone. It is not as simple as that any more (though not without reason, and perhaps not without benefits either). I’m curious to see what the novel does about this, if anything.

There are little things too that distract me. At one point, Stoner heads off to a funeral and we’re casually told he gets someone else to take his classes. While this is not impossible, it’s a lot harder than it sounds, or so I’ve always felt–and found. For one thing, it’s not easy to find someone available to teach at a moment’s notice, but even putting aside logistics, it’s tricky to find a substitute who can carry on where you left off and leave things ready for you to pick up again: often, we are teaching things our colleagues know little or nothing about, and even when they do know the texts, their approach may be quite different–which is not a bad thing in itself, but can be confusing for everyone. This may reflect Stoner’s more canonical time, when expert knowledge was concentrated around a narrower body of material, or just my own no doubt disproportionate skepticism about having other people cover for me. (Now that I think about it, I have a serious scheduling conflict coming up that would be great to resolve by having someone else step in for at least one of my classes–I should explore that possibility further rather than assuming I’m going to have to cancel them!) There’s the way the appointment of a new dean and a new department chair is handled–in both cases, in ways radically unlike the elaborate and transparent process we would expect to go through in my own university. Again, things were different then–but I’m interested in some commentary on that, on how that kind of cronyism and inside politics and informality reflect not just different practices but also an idea of the university that has been superceded. Then there’s the impressionistic account of Stoner’s research, especially as he moves into work on his second book…

Probably everyone exposed to fictional treatments of their profession gets similarly hung up on whether the portrayal seems fair and accurate. I can only imagine what ER doctors and nurses think about ER or surgeons about Grey’s Anatomy, or lawyers about The Practice, etc. Is accuracy a legitimate thing to fret about, I wonder? Perhaps I’m especially sensitive about how English professors are depicted because these days there seem to be so many belittling, reductive, anti-intellectual assumptions about them in circulation that reflect at most only the extreme outliers. Somewhere there may be English professors who work only four hours a week from September to April, who farm out all their grading to teaching assistants in order to jet-set around, who spend what little classroom time they have on political indoctrination–but I don’t know any of them, any more than I know any, or at least many, who are starry-eyed idealists or absent-minded bores shuffling around in tweed jackets, lost in intellectual abstractions. It’s not a novelist’s job to counter these stereotypes with the specificities and complexities of our reality, but it’s hard not to bring your reality with you when you read a novel that is, ostensibly, in some way, about the work you do.

This Week in My Classes: Back in the Saddle Again!

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

Finally! I planned to write this post last week, which was my first full week of classes since last December. But the Evil Virus of Doom spoiled that plan. Here I am, though, ready to start my fifth year in this regular series. I began it as a defensive reaction to some truly vituperative comments about English professors I encountered back in 2007. I guess I was sheltered, because I was quite shocked to discover that people hated us so! And also quite puzzled by the caricature of our work that they offered. Now that I read a lot more mainstream journalism and other public commentary about higher education, I have, sadly, come to expect just such ignorant vituperation. No amount of reason, argument, or enthusiasm seems likely ever to make a difference. But I thought, in my early 2.0 days, that greater transparency would help, and thus the very imaginatively-titled series ‘This Week in My Classes’ was born. As I’ve written about regularly since then, the value of the exercise proved to be as much intrinsic as anything else, and I look forward to continuing to reflect on my teaching as yet another semester gets underway.

So, what does this term have in store? I have another round of Mystery and Detective Fiction. I spent quite a bit of time on my sabbatical reconsidering the reading list for this class, which I have offered almost every year since I first introduced it to our curriculum in 2003. I continue to find it a lot of fun to teach, which I think is the result of tweaking the book list regularly, of the open-endedness of the course agenda, and of the lively mix of students I typically get–it’s a popular class with non-majors, and an absolutely elective class for English majors (at least, as far as I know it doesn’t fill any of their specific requirements). By and large, everyone is there out of interest and with the hope and expectation that it will be a fun class. Sure, some of them are also hoping that it will be an easy class–which is why we do The Moonstone early on, to show them that they are going to have to put in time and effort to keep up. (Well, that, and of course The Moonstone comes pretty early in our chronology!) I have a good feeling about this year’s group. Right from the first day, when we read aloud and then discussed James Thurber’s delightful story “The Macbeth Murder Mystery,” there were plenty of hands up and plenty of appreciative chuckles, and quite a few people seem engaged with The Moonstone as well.

I’m also teaching 19th-Century British Fiction from Austen to Dickens again. I last taught this in the spring session of 2010, which is quite a different kind of teaching–very compressed and high intensity–and for which I therefore compromise somewhat on the reading load by assigning more short texts (“The Two Drovers” for Scott, A Christmas Carol for Dickens, and Silas Marner for Eliot). For this go-round I am back with my more traditional list of five full-length novels (when I started teaching these courses, I always assigned six, but somehow now that seems like too much). Here too I routinely shuffle my choices, sometimes to reflect a particular theme, but more often just to keep favorite books and authors in circulation. We have begun with Persuasion, and by next week we will be on to Vanity Fair–which I certainly did not try to assign in the 3-week version of the course! Austen is usually a pretty easy start; this year, as usual, many students have read Austen before, some of them a lot. Those who haven’t read her are usually predisposed to like and admire her (though I long for a student who dares to be contrary and call her “boring”–if only to see what kind of discussion follows). Also, her novels are quite short. Vanity Fair, on the other hand, demands a lot of everyone. I’ll do my best to carry them along. There’s always someone who loves it, and really, one a year is enough.

And my other fall course is a 4th-year seminar on The Victorian ‘Woman Question.’ The last time I offered this course was 2008, when I did a variation focusing exclusively on novels and, more exclusively still, on novels that take us past or beyond the courtship plot and the marriage ceremony: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, East Lynne, Middlemarch, He Knew He Was Right, and The Odd Women. It was an amazing course: I had a great group of students who really rose to the challenges of this rather daunting reading list, and we had some of the best class discussion I can remember. Before that, I always used to do more or less the readings we are doing this time: a mix of poetry, non-fiction prose, and fiction, including The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Aurora Leigh (all of it!), The Mill on the Floss, The Odd Women, “Goblin Market,” an assortment of short poems, Mill’s The Subjection of Women and various essays from the excellent Broadview anthology Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors. I’m looking forward to going back through this set again. The discussion has been quite good already, and today we already had our first group presentation. I always discourage the students from holding forth for very long in their presentations, and I require them to include some kind of game or activity that gets us all involved. It’s always fun and surprising to see what they come up with. Today, for instance, after learning some general context and then focusing on some passages from our readings, we played “Snag, Marry, Kill,” in which those playing women had to give up their share of the candy they won to those playing men when they married. The bluntness of this unjust process made us laugh at first, but in the end it stimulated some very insightful discussion about entitlement, resentment, and the effect of individual character on systemically unjust rules (for instance, those who had to give their candy to classmates who were already their friends felt better about it, which brought us back to what Mill and Cobbe say about how “well” unjust laws work if everyone involved is kind and honorable enough not to take advantage of them).

Although this term has gotten off to a rocky start in other respects and, as usual, I resent the administrative and pedagogical confusion created by our long add-drop period, it does feel good to be back doing the part of this job I like the best. This week has its share of further complications–Maddie was home sick today with a bad cold and may need one more day before she can go back to school, my husband is headed to Amherst College to give a talk and is anxiously keeping an eye on the Air Canada news, and tomorrow night I am giving a talk myself at the Halifax Public Library, which I am quite excited about. It all feels rather hectic after the more ambling pace of a sabbatical and of the summer months! I’m just so happy to have my laptop completely restored, though (as of today, I think I have reinstalled and reoorganized everything that needed installing and organizing), that I feel ready for anything.

Recent Reading: Wharton, Dickens, Pym, Heyer

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I have a backlog of books I’d hoped to write detailed posts on, but the time I lost to that evil computer virus–and then to reinstalling and reorganizing everything so that I could get back to work–makes that an unrealistic goal. Still, all of them deserve at least some discussion, so here’s a run-down of what I found most interesting, provocative, delightful, or uninspiring about each of them.

Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence. There’s no denying the elegance and acuity of Wharton’s prose, the fine touch with which she fills in the details of her social drama. My appreciation of this book was undermined, though, by my skepticism about Newland Archer and my uncertainty about how far we were being encouraged to find his thwarted romance with Ellen Olenska poignant rather than pathetic. He’s such a passive wannabe, reading his Swinburne and Pater and fancying himself so different from those around him even as, in all affairs except his own, he is utterly conventional and priggish. His passion for Ellen (and her professed passion for him) seemed based on nothing more than fantasy. It seems that he, too, is the subject (if unwittingly) of Wharton’s satire, but the final chapter suffuses his earlier experiences in a glow that replaces criticism with wistfulness. Is the irony enhanced here (because even at this point he does not recognize the shallow folly of his grand amour?), or are we brought into fellowship with him as he mourns the loss of the man he (thinks he) might have been? The world of the novel also felt very small to me, and while I realize that is consistent with the way Wharton depicts it, as a closed society resistent to change and outsiders, I missed the overt presence in the novel of a wider perspective. To me, it was claustrophobic reading the way Henry James is; I like the “cool draught” that James complained came in through the open door of philosophy in George Eliot’s fiction.

Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend. This is a wonderfully dark, funny novel. Reading it, I was struck by Dickens’s mastery of his own form and by the readerly confidence that I felt, knowing he knew what he was doing. The novel is splendidly diffuse and prolix, but it is bound together by Dickens’s brilliant, all-encompassing metaphorical imagination, the unifying motifs appearing and recurring with symphonic assurance. In the end, though, I was dissatisfied with the novel’s morality, which struck me as false in a highly problematic way. Central to the novel is its critique of the corrupting power of wealth, the insinuating bad effects of greed and vanity and social climbing and conspicuous consumption. And central to this critique is the exemplary story of Bella Wilfer’s reeducation from a shallow, selfish, materialistic girl into a “boofer” lady who learns the value of love, honor, and fidelity. But Bella is rewarded for her transformation precisely by being rescued from any threat of poverty and rewarded with wealth and status. There’s all kinds of thematic fitness to this, and of course all the elaborate machinations of the plot are required to bring about this triumphant conclusion, but it’s hard not to find it a dangerous moral that if you abjure riches, riches will be your reward–or, thinking of the other characters, that if you dedicate yourself to the self-interested pursuit of wealth, you will meet your come-uppance. But nobody can make me laugh or cry while I read the way Dickens can, and no other author that I have read gives off from his pages the same sense of ebullient, irrepressible joy in language. Dickens goes on and on, even when there’s no formal or thematic necessity to his elaborations, not because he is “paid by the word” or doesn’t understand novelistic form, but because he is loving it–how can we resist? Why would we want to?

Barbara Pym, Jane and Prudence. Jane and Prudence is a charming read, to be sure, but it doesn’t deserve the effusive comparisons to Jane Austen that litter its blurbs. In its wry social comedy, its limited range of characters and setting, and its precise prose, it resembles Austen’s novels, but I thought this stylistic resemblance was not matched by a similarly rich undercurrent of ideas.

Georgette Heyer, Sylvester. I believe that this is the first Georgette Heyer novel I’ve read, which surprises me a little. But the Regency was never “my” period (the historical fiction I devoured in adolescence was overwhelmingly Tudor, with a sideline in the early Plantagenets, and then of course there was Richard III). I enjoyed Sylvester OK, though I found the writing fairly stilted and the plot predictable–which was fine for most of the book, really, as another way to say “predictable” is that it is true to the conventions of its genre. Towards the end, though, I thought it went off the rails: though it had to happen, the “discovery” that Phoebe and Sylvester are in love was handled clumsily, with Sylvester’s first proposal really coming out of nowhere, and Phoebe’s outraged response seemed forced. I didn’t like Phoebe herself much, actually: she had a good feisty side to her, but I was really disappointed by the way she limped around the novel being embarrassed and apologetic for putting Sylvester in as the villain of her novel. (The heroine of the otherwise ridiculous Lord of Scoundrels, which I read over the summer, was at least more consistent and sure of herself.) I did appreciate this little metafictional moment:

‘But, Phoebe, you don’t suppose he will read your book, do you?’ said Tom.

Phoebe could support with equanimity disparagement of her person, but this slight cast on her first novel made her exclaim indignantly, ‘Pray, why should he not read it? It is going to be published!’

‘Yes, I know, but you can’t suppose that people like Salford will buy it.’

‘Then who will?’ demanded Phoebe, rather flushed.

‘Oh, I don’t know! Girls, I daresay, who like that sort of thing.’

 

Infected!

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

In my all happy anticipation about getting back into a regular routine for the fall, including getting back into the classroom, I did not imagine finding myself the victim of a truly evil computer virus that somehow (despite my anti-virus software)  got so deeply into my little netbook that after four days of intensive care with our tech people, it has proved impossible to clean out. Today they are wiping the hard drive, and I hope to have the computer back by tomorrow. Thankfully, it seems that they will be able to preserve a backup of most of my files, but there will still be a lot of reinstalling and reorganizing to do before I’m back in business. As a result, I haven’t been able to do either much work or any blogging in the evenings–hence the sudden silence over here. It has been interesting realizing how much I depend on being properly equipped, not just for my own interests and personal activities, but for getting done the array of work tasks, from e-mail to class prep, that can almost never be completed during regular work hours. As a result, I feel particular strain on my regular work hours right now, which is why this post will be short! As if heading into a three-course term and picking up all the other regular duties of the term wouldn’t be stressful enough without this added complication… and as if dealing with losing what feels like my life-support system doesn’t induce enough frustration without people commenting, “well, you do spend a lot of time online,” as if I somehow had this coming to me for my risky behavior. Anyway, here’s hoping that my next post will be about books or teaching and this will all be behind me.

Summer Reading Recap

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As the warm days dwindle down to a precious few, so too has time run out on our public library’s summer reading program, and Maddie and I have both tallied up our final scores. Neither of us quite reached the number we’d set as a goal, but we feel good that we read a lot, including a lot of books that we really liked. Since, as usual, the number of blog readers went into a bit of a slump over the summer, I thought I’d help people catch up with a look back at some of the books that were highlights for me, with links to the full posts.

At the top of my ‘best of the summer’ list would have to be the two books I read about the ‘troubles’ in Ireland, J. G. Farrell’s Troubles and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September. It’s hard to imagine two more different books dealing with such similar historical territory.  Farrell’s dry, acerbic absurdity was more immediately engaging, but Bowen’s prose, full of beauty but shot through with both pain and humor, made her novel linger in my mind well after I finished it. Both resist all temptation to melodrama; even the inevitable violence and suffering emerges perfectly (though in completely different registers) from the tone and form of each book.

I was pleasantly surprised by just how much I enjoyed and admired Jane Smiley’s Private Life. It’s a carefully paced, understated novel, a family saga without any of the grandiosity such books often rely on; it moves us through a tumultuous period of American history and deftly balances attention to the events and complexities of that context against its primary interest in the small-scale achievements and struggles of private life.

Testament of a Generation was everything I’d hoped it would be: sharp, intellectual, passionate journalism from Vera Brittain and Winnifred Holtby. It fed my enthusiasm for one day developing a seminar on the Somerville novelists. Brittain’s The Dark Tide, on the other hand, was a more … ambivalent … reading experience.

Rosamond Lehmann’s The Weather in the Streets took me completely by surprise with its strange, drifting prose and stark confrontations with different kinds of loss. If, as the introduction proposes, it was the Bridget Jones’s Diary of another generation, either I’ve been wildly misreading Bridget Jones’s Diary all this time or that generation had radically different expectations of itself and its books.

I, Claudius was ultimately more fascinating to me for the formal choices Graves made than for the story or characters. It wasn’t easy pushing through some of the longer paragraphs (and if you’ve read I, Claudius, you know that pretty much all of the paragraphs are pretty long!), and I admit I was greatly helped by having watched the BBC adaptation just previously, or I don’t think I could have kept the family tree sorted or felt the drama of the events, which come to us in such abundant yet muted detail.

I thoroughly enjoyed Jane Gardam’s Old Filth, though I wondered after just how much that pleasure came from Gardam’s pushing all the ‘right’ buttons for a reader like me. Yet I had similar expectations of Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn (that it was just the book for me), and didn’t like it very much after all, finding its flat affect ultimately too flat. I didn’t write up Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, as I finished it while in Birmingham and the moment for posting on it had passed by the time I got home, but I was similarly underwhelmed by it: though Patchett’s writing is wonderfully readable and the story had plenty of momentum during reading, somehow (and of course it’s possible this was in part the effect of reading while traveling) I was never deeply engaged by it emotionally, and at the end I couldn’t really decide where it had taken me intellectually. I’ll hang on to it, and to Brooklyn: I’ll reread them someday, I expect, and maybe I’ll find something more in them then. I haven’t written up The Age of Innocence either. It’s wonderful, of course, and yet I ended it a skeptic about it, feeling the brilliance of Wharton’s prose and the minuteness of her analysis was squandered on Newland and Ellen, neither of whom I liked or believed in at all. More about that, maybe, in a later post.

I read four more early Spenser novels, one of which, The Judas Goat, was so awful that, had it been my first experience of the series, I would not have read any more. But the other three were excellent of their kind. I’m still trying to get ahold of God Save the Child, the second in the series, in which Spense and Susan first meet. I read it many years ago, before I had quite the same interest in how their relationship is handled. By just a few books later on, they are very nearly into their lasting patterns, which in many respects have always epitomized to me the relationship between equals that is (or is it?) the ultimate romantic fantasy.

Finally, of the summer books worth any further comment, there’s Murder Must Advertise, an old favorite but one I haven’t read attentively in some time. I enjoyed rereading it, but the real fun came in writing it up, which was by far the best time I had doing any writing all summer. That’s the feeling I wish I could always having when writing: overflowing with ideas, enthusiasm, and energy, and just happy to be putting it all out there.

Everything else I read was disappointing to mediocre, really, or, in one case, laughably bad. Looking back, it doesn’t seem like a great reading season overall. Happily, I have just finished Our Mutual Friend, though. If I’d reached the end before the library’s deadline, the average would have been raised considerably.  I’m currently feeling a bit overwhelmed with the start of the teaching term, but I’m determined to get a proper post up on that dark, hilarious novel before too much longer.