Happy New Year!

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

It’s time to ring out 2016 here at Novel Readings. Here’s some of what I have to look forward to in 2017 — and thus some of what you are likely to read about here:

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Thanks as always to everyone who came by to read and, especially, to everyone who left a comment here or chatted with me on Twitter. As I approach my 10th anniversary as a blogger, I continue to be cheered and motivated by all the other readers I’ve gotten to know this way and by the good conversations we have. Best wishes for the new year! See you in January.

2016: My Year in Writing

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

2016 was an odd year for me as a writer. On the one hand, I wrote a lot of literary criticism, for a wider range of venues than ever before. This experience was challenging, educational, exhilarating, and occasionally frustrating: in some cases, I had to write shorter and faster than I ever had before, and in others I had to find an angle on books or writers that weren’t immediately congenial or intelligible to my critical sensibilities. I also had to work with new editors and adapt to their different styles and priorities. Overall, I’m very proud of the results.

On the other hand, I also got the clear message from my employer (and many colleagues) that this is not the kind of writing they value, and that if I hope to advance professionally, I’d be better off giving it up, scrambling back into the ivory tower and devoting myself to a very different model of literary criticism. I actually wrote thousands of words in 2016 trying to turn this judgment around — attempting to persuade people on campus (none of them, ironically, actually literary critics of any kind) to recognize my essays and reviews, and the other elements of my diverse portfolio of projects and publications, as worthwhile contributions to my academic discipline. Of all the writing I did this year, this was the least pleasant, and ultimately the least rewarding.

Where does this leave me? Well, mostly it leaves me wondering how much more writing about literature I could have done in 2016 if I hadn’t wasted so much time (and, perhaps even more relevant, so much angst and energy) on a futile quest to change academic priorities — even if it did initially seem as if I was just urging everyone to live up to their oft-stated commitment to outreach, public engagement, and innovation. It certainly hasn’t persuaded me to do as I was told: I’m not against academics doing specialized research leading to peer-reviewed publications in academic venues, but I strongly believe enough academics in my field are doing this already and that it is both right and imperative that universities loosen their grip and encourage, support, and even reward faculty who do other kinds of work as appropriate to their disciplines.

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Institutional issues aside, I feel as if I made a lot of progress as a writer this year. Book reviews are not the be-all and end-all of my writing ambitions: I would particularly like to write more, longer, better, wider-ranging essays. I wasn’t able to do much of that this year, but the reviewing I’m doing is both honing my skills and helping me build up my credibility (one interesting and humbling thing about writing outside the academy is that my formal credentials and my academic c.v. mean very little “out here,” where authority is something you have to earn in other ways). I hope that in 2017 I will keep moving forward — both as a reviewer and as an essayist. This includes hoping that I make more progress compiling my existing essays on George Eliot into a book: now that I’ve self-published one e-book, I feel emboldened about doing another.

There’s a complete list of my publications under the ‘Other Writing’ tab above. Here I’ll just mention a few from 2016 that stand out to me, for one reason or another.

At Open Letters, I was particularly pleased with “Our Editions, Our Selves,” which was ostensibly a review of the lovely new Penguin Deluxe Classics edition of Middlemarch but which also gave me a chance to ruminate about my personal history with my favorite novel. Writing this review of Mary Balogh’s Only Beloved brought me some comfort and joy, and it was also my first attempt to write something thoughtful about romance fiction.

At The Quarterly Conversation, I wrote about David Constantine’s The Life-Writer and In Another Country, which I already mentioned in my previous post as some of the best reading I did in 2016. Because Constantine was new to me, and because his fiction is so elegant, I was a bit intimidated when I started working on the review, but in the end I felt that I had found something interesting to say and said it pretty well.

I published four reviews in the Times Literary Supplement in 2016. My favorite was of Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder — to me, anyway, this little piece reassured me that I am starting to be more at home in shorter reviews, that I can still sound like myself in a more compressed form. (I think my forthcoming review of Danielle Dutton’s Margaret the First is actually better, though; it will be out in January, I expect.) I was proud of my only longer piece in the TLS (so far), which discussed three recent scholarly books on Victorian women’s writing: this was not as much fun to do, but (again, to me, anyway) it seemed like a good example of my academic expertise being used in the service of a wider public.

I was very happy to write about Maurizio de Giovanni’s Bastards of Pizzofalcone novels for 3:AM Magazine: these were two of many good examples of crime fiction I read and/or reviewed in 2016. And I also appreciated the reviewing opportunities I got from Quill and Quire, including two neo-Victorian novels (Smoke and By Gaslight) that, again, let me draw on my academic background a little while nudging me out of my comfort zone.

Overall, then, on my own terms 2016 was a productive year for me as a writer and a critic. A key goal for me in 2017 is to stop seeking validation on other people’s terms!

2016: My Year in Reading

Rohan Maitzen8 Comments

van-gogh-still-life-french-novels2016 has been a somewhat unusual reading year for me because quite a few of the books I read were ‘assigned’ for reviews — or else were books I chose not entirely because I wanted to read them but because they looked like books I could pitch for reviews. Although at times I ended up feeling a bit stifled as a result, because it felt as if reading obligations were crowding out reading pleasures, at other times it meant a thrill of discovery, as a book or author I wouldn’t otherwise have read turned out to be wonderful. This was also a sign that as a writer I was being pushed in new directions and, as a result, learning new skills and finding (I hope) new strengths — about which, more in my next post on my year in writing!

Looking back on 2016, here are some of the books that stand out.

moby-dick-penguinBook of the Year: Moby-Dick. Really, how could it not be? I’m not saying I read it particularly well, but hey — it was my first time! And I read it with a great deal more pleasure than I expected, and also a sense of expanding horizons. Yes, it’s about whales, the way War and Peace is about Russia — it’s not only about so much more but it just does so much more that’s surprising and amazing and, yes, occasionally tedious, or just plain baffling. I was just reading an earnest article about the importance of revising and revising and revising to perfect every last word: though I don’t actually know what Melville’s own writing process was, it seems to me that this is the kind of well-intentioned advice for novelists about their “craft” that yields books as impeccable but somehow lifeless as Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena while guaranteeing us no more fearless Moby-Dick-like masterpieces.

Runners-Up:

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth and Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady. Together with Daniel Deronda, these make a remarkable trilogy of variations on a theme. Each of them features a young woman of great intelligence and high spirits hemmed in on every side by social and personal contexts that deny her suitable outlets for her energy. My love-hate relationship with James’s prose continues; Wharton, on the other hand, proved much more congenial, and I’ve got The Custom of the Country on my list of books to read in 2017.

Other Highlights:

L132AInspired in part by The Portrait of a Lady, I finally read  Colm Tóibín’s The Master — and loved it. I’d put it off because I was so underwhelmed with Brooklyn (an impression that was basically confirmed when, inspired by The Master, I reread it), but The Master is artful and tender and brilliant. I expect it’s even better to a true Jamesian, who would get all the subtle allusions and nuances, but it’s a sign of Tóibín’s skill that even a James-skeptic like myself could become totally absorbed in his character.

I loved David Ebershoff’s The Danish Girl. Above all, it is a story about the kind of love and acceptance we all dream of, but it’s also about art and beauty and identity, about how we see ourselves and each other.

A friend recommended Kent Haruf’s Plainsong and I’m so glad she did: I ended up reading three of his novels and being touched and impressed by all of them. I think Plainsong is the best (most complex, most ambitious) of them, but my personal favorite was Our Souls At Night: something about its evocation of loneliness, and the delicacy with which it explores the possibility of overcoming it, really spoke to me.

constantineAnother author I discovered thanks to a prompt from someone else was David Constantine: Scott Esposito asked me to review The Life-Writer and In Another Country for The Quarterly Conversation, and as he predicted I was really impressed. Constantine is a writer’s writer, meticulous and nuanced, but like Alice Munro he embeds both plot twists and emotional surprises into his understated but beautiful prose.

I read Andrea Levy’s Small Island soon after the U.S. election, and it turned out to be unexpectedly timely and somewhat comforting in the tenderness with which it shows disparate people doing their best to live together.

With an eye to my upcoming ‘pulp fiction’ class, I dipped into westerns, a genre I previously knew almost nothing about. I sampled quite a few but the only ones I read attentively all the way through were Charles Portis’s True Grit and Elmore Leonard’s Valdez is Coming. I enjoyed them both thoroughly, but I can’t really see myself reading many more westerns for my own pleasure: reading about them will probably do. Lonesome Dove, maybe? And speaking of genre fiction, I read some good new crime novels this year too, including Phonse Jessome’s gritty Halifax noir Disposable Souls and Maurizio de Giovanni’s Bastards of Pizzofalcone books.

dutton-margaretFinally, Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals was an absolute tonic as this rather depressing year drew to its close. And one more last-minute success was Danielle Dutton’s Margaret the First, which turned out to be a small, glittering jewel of a novel. (My review will be out in the TLS early in 2017.)

Low Points:

This is 100% about a failure on my part, and also my own disappointment — with myself, though also (however irrationally) with the novel: I tried and failed to read To the Lighthouse. I did read it, in the sense of turning every page, but I could not seem to find the novel I knew was in there somewhere, waiting to transform me. I will try again, after a decent interval.

Curtis Sittenfeld’s Ineligible made me swear off Austen pastiches forever. And I vehemently disliked Dinitia Smith’s The Honeymoon, which I reviewed for the TLS. I saw another novel about George Eliot in the bookstore not long ago and shuddered away from it: though it would be nice to be pleasantly surprised, I have yet to read a really good example of this particular species.

Ian McEwan’s Nutshell was the worst book I may ever have read by an author I fervently admire.

Not Reading, Exactly, But:

buffyI finished my first full viewing of both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel this year. I’ve been rewatching both shows intermittently ever since, which tells you a lot about how interested I got in them. It also indicates something that those who’d seen both series before already knew: both reward rewatching (which is a kind of reading, really) more than many television shows: they reveal layers and connections and themes that aren’t always obvious at first when you’re caught up in the immediate drama. Even when I found the particulars absurd, which did occasionally happen (maybe more for me than for people who are more at home in fantasy as a genre), I never stopped caring about the characters, and now that I’ve seen how all the story arcs turn out, I’m finding myself even more emotionally involved with them.

My 2017 TBR List:

There are a lot of books I look forward to reading in 2017, including (as already mentioned), more Edith Wharton. I have David Ebershoff’s The 19th Wife standing by, along with volumes 2 and 3 in Jane Smiley’s “Last 100 Years” trilogy. In the same stack is Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, partly because of my questions about My Name Is Lucy Barton and minimalism in fiction, and partly just because; Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing With Feathers is there too, and Sarah Moss’s Body of Light, and China Mieville’s The City and the City. My success with Moby-Dick has had me wondering if I should stop being scared of Ulysses and give it a try in 2017. Part of what’s exciting about a new year, though, is not knowing yet what great books lie in wait that I haven’t even thought of reading yet!

Happy Holidays!

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It has been quiet around here again! And what’s my excuse, since I turned my grades in so long ago? Well, in my infinite wisdom I had committed to three book reviews to be done by the end of the year, so while I have been reading and writing, it hasn’t been for Novel Readings. I’ve sent along two of the reviews now, though (one of Jean McNeil’s The Dhow House, for Quill & Quire, and one of Danielle Dutton’s Margaret the First, for the TLS), and started on the last one, of Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project, which I hope will be ready for the January issue of Open Letters Monthly (where my byline has been sadly scarce recently).

We’ve also been enjoying our traditional (and entirely secular) Christmas celebrations, which today include pancakes for breakfast and roast pork for dinner, along with some presents and perhaps a family Christmas movie tonight — it’s shocking, actually, that we’ve made it all the way to December 25th without having seen The Muppet Christmas Carol!

I will be back soon with my traditional look back at highs and lows of my reading — and writing — in 2016. I always get so many good books as Christmas presents that I don’t like to start these posts too soon. Who knows: the best of the year may be yet to come! Until then, my best wishes for the season for all those who also mark it in some festive way.

“The Magic of the Island”: Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

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Gradually the magic of the island settled over us as gently and clingingly as pollen. Each day had a tranquility, a timelessness about it, so that you wished it would never end. But then the dark skin of night would peel off and there would be a fresh day waiting for us, glossy and colourful as a child’s transfer and with the same tinge of unreality.

Last night my book club met for our holiday potluck and a discussion of Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals — which we all agreed had been a great choice to cheer us up at the end of what has been, for all of us, a pretty challenging year. Reading it in between our other obligations and distractions had been, as someone said, like slipping away on vacation, just for a while, to a place full of sunshine and laughter and, of course, amazing (if often disconcertingly anthropomorphized) animals.

What is it exactly about My Famly and Other Animals that makes it so delightful? When I mentioned I was reading it, a number of my friends responded enthusiastically that it had been one of their favorite books as children, which at first I found a bit puzzling: I’m not sure that as a child I would have enjoyed it, with its long descriptive passages and its anecdotal shapelessness. Reading it now, though, I loved Durrell’s word paintings:

The moon rose above the mountains, turned the lilies to silver except where the flickering flames illuminated them with a flush of pink. The tiny ripples sped over the moonlit sea and breathed with relief as they reached the shore at last. Owls started to chime in the trees, and in the gloomy shadows fireflies gleamed as they flew, their jade-green, misty lights pulsing on and off.

durrell2Lovely as Durrell’s scenery is, he’s at his best (as you’d expect) with animals:

The inhabitants of the wall were a mixed lot, and they were divided into day and night workers, the hunters and the hunted. At night the hunters were the toads that lived among the brambles, and the geckos, pale, translucent with bulging eyes, that lived in the cracks higher up the wall. Their prey was the population of stupid, absent-minded crane-flies that zoomed and barged their ways among the leaves; moths of all shapes and sizes, moths striped, tessellated, checked, spotted and blotched, that fluttered in soft clouds along the withered plaster; the beetles, rotund and neatly clad as business men, hurrying with portly efficiency about their night’s work. When the last glow-worm had dragged his frosty emerald lantern to bed over the hills of moss, and the sun rose, the wall was taken over by the next set of inhabitants. Here it was more difficult to differentiate between the prey and the predators, for everything seemed to feed indiscriminately off everything else. Thus the hunting wasps searched out caterpillars and spiders; the spiders hunted for flies; the dragon-flies, big, brittle, and hunting-pink, fed off the spiders and the flies; and the swift, light and multi-coloured wall lizards fed off everything else.

Maybe the appeal lies in the imaginative way he brings these communities to life, giving the players so much character and purpose: there is something childlike about that blurring of lines between “us” and “them,” so that (as the title of the memoir declares), people and animals are all part of the same vibrant landscape, humming and buzzing and barking and talking. There’s no sense in the book of adult Gerald watching or judging or second-guessing his younger self, but instead he seems to have done his best just to recapture the wide-eyed curiosity and patient attention of a boy set free on an enchanted island to follow his bliss.

durrell3Perhaps, then, the child’s point of view (though of course the sophistication of the writing subtly belies it) is one reason children have loved this book. Another would be its humor: when things do happen, they are usually very funny. There’s some high drama, as well: the epic battle, for example, between the gecko Geronimo and the giant mantid Cicely:

His speed and weight told, for he crashed into the mantis and made her reel, and grabbed the underside of her thorax in his jaws. Cicely retaliated by snapping both her front legs shut on Geronimo’s hind legs. They rustled and staggered across the ceiling and down the wall, each seeking to gain some advantage. Then there was a pause while the contestants had a rest and prepared for the second round, without either losing their grips.

“I wondered,” Gerald comments, “whether I ought to interfere; I did not want either of them to get killed, but at the same time the fight was so intriguing that I was loath to separate them.” This detachment surprised us a bit: of course in some ways it is the necessary attitude of the scientist, watching but not intervening, but at the same time Gerald takes all of his animals very personally and often seems more interested in their well-being than in his family’s.

We were also surprised that, at the end, Gerald took his collection of animal friends with him back to England — we had all expected he would set them free. One of the group said that this brought home to her one way in which the memoir seemed somewhat dated: she thought there was something colonial in the Durrells’ expedition, heading off to a foreign country to observe it curiously and then collect what they wanted to take back with them. I can see her point, but the book didn’t strike me that way, mostly because the curiosity and interference is quite reciprocal between the Durrells and the Greek residents of Corfu (their guide and mentor Spiros, for instance, who adopts and manages them at least as decisively as they take any part of the island as their own). Here again, I think the book’s point of view may be the real issue: we can’t help but put this “English abroad” story into the context of British colonialism, but it never occurs to (young) Gerald, and why would it?

We wondered more about the absence of any shadows of impending war: though the reason he gives for their return to England is the need for him to go to school, apparently the real reason was the outbreak of war, and it’s unusual to read a retrospective narrative about the 1930s that doesn’t include even the faintest hint of what is to come. Is this, too, part of a determination the book will be bathed in childlike innocence — and is that resolution one of the reasons it reads like such a lovely escape from reality? It would certainly be a very different book if it let history or politics, or even adulthood, play a larger role. As it is, it has a combination of buoyancy and beauty that we all found irresistible.

This Week In My Classes: Whither the Apostrophe?

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

escher12In case you were wondering why it has been so quiet here at Novel Readings, I’ve been grading papers industriously, trying to get through them as efficiently as I could consistent with still paying really close attention. I did well at sticking with it, partly thanks to my students, many of whom wrote really good essays! Not only does that speed things up, but it makes the whole process more enjoyable.

I finished with the essays yesterday and now my final grades are all filed as well. It feels good to have wrapped up the term’s work, not least because next term is already looming on the horizon and I still have a lot to do in preparation for it. I also have some book reviews to get done before January — I filed one today, in fact, and hope to get a good start on the next one soon. But it’s also the holiday season, and that means some fun and relaxation as well, including my book club’s annual pot luck dinner tomorrow, at which we will discuss Gerald Durrell’s delightful memoir My Family and Other Animals.

apostropheBefore I put this term completely behind me, though, one question lingers after hours spent poring over student writing: what’s up with apostrophes? Actually, I have two questions, because my follow-up to that one is, should I care about apostrophes?

The apostrophe is by far the most misused piece of punctuation in the writing I evaluate. This puzzles me, because (as I have often explained to my first-year classes) it is governed by pretty simple rules. There are no judgment calls with apostrophes, the way there are, say, with commas. For some reason, though, students have a terrible time knowing where (or whether) to use them. They are frequently missing when they are needed, and just as often they show up where they aren’t — this time, for instance, in discussions of Ishiguro’s protagonist, Mr. Stephens, who got apostrophed (yes, I verbed that) even worse than poor old Dickens usually does. verbing-weirds-language

Why should this be? Some errors are certainly due to poor proofreading rather than genuine confusion, but the sheer pervasiveness of the problem demands a deeper explanation. Are students not taught basic punctuation in school any more? Or do they just not retain it? How does it end up being my problem — or is it? I’m not supposed to be teaching punctuation: at least, not in upper-level literature courses — am I? Given that, should I even bother pointing out the errors? But evaluating essays does mean (doesn’t it?) taking into account how well they are written, and one aspect of that is (isn’t it?) how well they follow the conventions of standard written English. So even though the main course objectives are elsewhere, I do point out the errors, and I usually also quickly explain what’s wrong. I do this in a pedagogical, not punitive, spirit, so that they can get it right next time. Since I’m morally certain I’m not the first or only person to be doing this, though, I don’t have much reason to think that my corrections will have any effect: if they wanted to use apostrophes correctly, surely they would already be doing so. Maybe what’s missing is sufficient incentive. I certainly have never failed an assignment because of incorrect apostrophes: to me, that makes no sense, as they are just one small piece of a much larger and more complex effort. But if you can always do basically fine without fixing this small problem, why fix it, right?

I’m not about to start failing papers on such flimsy grounds, though — so what can I do? Fellow professors, what do you do?

A Romantic Interlude – with Ruminations

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dare-scotI’ve just finished two Scottish-themed romance novels — Sarah MacLean’s A Scot in the Dark and Tessa Dare’s When a Scot Ties the Knot — and they have enough similarities that the juxtaposition has provoked me to figure out why I enjoyed one so much more than the other, a question that quickly expanded, in my mind, to the more general question of why some romance novels work for me and others just don’t, including novels by the same authors. Of these two, for instance, I much preferred Dare’s, though I really enjoyed The Rogue Not Taken, the previous novel in MacLean’s “Scandal & Scoundrel” series, and I liked but didn’t love Dare’s most recent novel, Do You Want to Start a Scandal.

As so often when I ruminate on romance fiction, I ended up thinking that somehow things get more personal more quickly in this genre than in others, meaning not just that my romance preferences are about my personal taste but that my taste in romance writing is hard to separate from my feelings and beliefs about relationships — which in turn are likely to be influenced not just by principle but also by my personal experience. For me, these factors affect my reading habits as well as my evaluative judgments for romances in ways they don’t for, say, mysteries.

maclean-scotFor instance, I have mentioned before that I don’t always read right to the end of the HEA. This is partly because while I can enjoy the development of a romantic relationship, especially when it involves witty sparring and plenty of sexual tension, I don’t find unmitigated happiness (which is where, of course, romance novels always end up, sooner or later) that dramatically interesting. But it’s also because I don’t really believe marriage itself is necessarily a particularly blissful state. For both of these reasons, the rosier things get for the protagonists, the more disengaged I become from their novel. Thus I usually prefer romances that defer the protagonists’ happiness until the end of the novel, or very nearly. In a lot of Georgette Heyer’s novels, for example, hero and heroine don’t come joyfully together until pretty much the last page. That keeps things interesting! Our attention then is also less on how delightful they find each other and more on their learning about each other, and / or on wondering how they will ever discover how delightful they are to each other, or on how they will overcome the personal or social obstacles keeping them apart.

baloghI also often find with more recent romances that the protagonists get intimately sexy too soon and too often for my taste. I don’t think this means I’m prudish! No doubt it’s partly the result of many years spent reading Victorian novels, which are full of erotic undercurrents but have vanishingly few explicitly sexual moments. When feelings (and body parts) are usually kept covered, it’s that much more exciting when you finally get a glimpse! As well, I don’t think lust and love are the same thing, and sometimes — including in A Scot in the Dark — they get too quickly conflated. I suppose this is a variation on my preference for deferring their happiness, and it’s also about the sacrifice of tension involved. (I think there may also be some problems with realism — but I’m really not an expert on sexual mores during the Regency, so I may be quite wrong about what well bred men and young, “respectable,” unmarried women would get up to in their carriages without anxiety, shame, or repercussions.)

milan-countessA specific romance-reading preference of mine that I know is about me more than about the novels is that I have a fondness for bluestocking heroines, or at least ones with an intellectual passion, who have a lot more on their minds than romance. I love Dare’s A Week to be Wicked and Courtney Milan’s The Countess Conspiracy for this reason, and of course my favorite romance of all — so far — is Loretta Chase’s Mr. Impossible. Madeline in When a Scot Ties the Knot, with her passion for illustrating natural history, is a good addition to this collection. I also prefer more mature heroines, and I have a fondness for prickly ones, like Claudia Martin in Mary Balogh’s Simply Perfect. I find ingenues annoying and get bored easily by heroines who are too nice. It’s not hard to see that I appreciate romance novels that show women at least somewhat like me as lovable!

I find it interesting that I consciously reject such personal standards for most other kinds of books. For example, I have very little in common (I think!) with Dorothea Brooke, or with Becky Sharp or Esther Summerson (I hope!), though I love and admire their novels greatly, and I am quick to caution students against valuing literary characters more highly because they are more “relatable.” Am I being implicitly condescending towards romance fiction when I pick and choose favorites on these grounds? Or is it in the nature of a genre based on fantasies of intimate feelings (rather than, say, lessons in otherness and alienation) to offer more satisfaction when you can imagine yourself in it a bit more easily? There are good reasons to diversify one’s romance reading — but should “heroine type” one of the ways? It matters, I suppose, whether you are reading something “just for fun” or for other reasons, but I read plenty of fiction for no reason except my own interest and amusement, and romance is the only kind that affects me (or that I approach) in quite this way.

This Week In My Classes: A Brief Lull!

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advent2016We had our last day of classes yesterday. Owing to a very peculiar scheduling plan devised (of course) by a committee, although yesterday was actually a Tuesday, it was designated an “extra Monday” to make up for “losing” a day of Monday classes to Thanksgiving (so much for the concept of a day off — must everything be weighed and measured?). Anyway, that meant two days of Monday classes in a row to bring us to the end of term. As I am not giving final exams in my courses, I now have a lull in immediately pressing teaching-related activities until the final essays come in, the first batch on Friday, the second on Sunday. Then I have to dig in and get through them all, and then do all the final record keeping so that I can compute and submit final grades.

I wrapped up my classes feeling pretty satisfied about how they had gone. In some ways it wasn’t a terribly demanding term, as I was teaching just two classes, and both were upper-level ones as well as ones I’ve done more than once before. That turned out to be a good thing, though, because it was a difficult term in other ways as I pursued the appeal of my promotion case and then waited for the outcome. More than once I felt, as I had back in the spring term when the case first started going badly, that teaching was my salvation. This term my seminar on the ‘Woman Question’ went particularly well (I thought, anyway) the first day I had to teach after learning the bad news: I was in a pretty deep funk when I came into the room, but the students were so well prepared and engaged and full of intelligence and humor that they just lifted me right up — and it meant so much to me that I told them so the next time we met, because I don’t know if students realize that, just as we can make a difference in their lives, so too they often make a difference in ours. I was a bit worried that it would be weird for them if I broke the frame in that way, but at the time I had rather had it with being “professional.” (Still, I didn’t tell them why I had been feeling so low–just that I had been, and that they had really helped.) They seemed to appreciate what I said. They really were a great group to work with, not just that day but all term.

Tree 2018Though the cessation of classes doesn’t mean there’s not anything else to do at work (just for instance, today I put some time in organizing the Brightspace site and readings for one of next term’s courses), I usually take advantage of any break in the schedule at this time of year to get some holiday shopping done, especially for things I want to mail out west to my family.  I was especially motivated to get as much done as I could today because so far (unlike my family out west, in a rare reversal!) we have no snow to deal with yet. Sadly, that can’t last, and everything gets harder once the roads and sidewalks are wintry. So once I’d taken care of some business at the office, out I went, and had a pretty nice time puttering around at the mall and in the rather more interesting shops at the Hydrostone Market. I’ve written before about the approach we take to presents in our house: to me they are partly symbolic, ways of making tangible the connections between us and the people we care about. I’m always full of thoughts of my friends and family as I look around for little offerings for them, which usually makes it both a happy and a faintly melancholy experience for me as so many of them are so far away. Here in Halifax we do have our own cheerful holiday traditions, though, which help ward off any gloominess that threatens: this weekend, for instance, we had ‘Advent Brunch,’ and I expect we’ll put our tree up next weekend.

I don’t expect I’ll be quite done with my grading by then, but my goal is to be industrious enough every day next week that I don’t feel guilty relaxing with some Baileys and a book (perhaps one of the three I’m supposed to be reviewing this month) in the evenings.

“Things I Could Not Say”: Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

lucy-bartonLater, after my first book was published, I went to a doctor who is the most gracious woman I have ever met. I wrote down on a piece of paper what the student said about the person from New Hampshire named Janie Templeton. I wrote down things that had happened in my childhood home. I wrote down things I’d found out in my marriage. I wrote down things I could not say. She read them all and said, Thank you, Lucy. It will be okay.

I loved My Name Is Lucy Barton at first, and really liked it probably until about half way through — maybe even up to the point when Lucy gets feedback from novelist Sarah Payne at a writing workshop that turns out to be about My Name Is Lucy Barton:

Never ever defend your work. This is a story about love, you know that. This is a story of a man who has been tortured every day of his life for things he did in the war. This is the story of a wife who stayed with him, because most wives did in that generation, and she comes to her daughter’s hospital room and talks compulsively about everyone’s marriage going bad, she doesn’t even know it, doesn’t even know that’s what she’s doing. This is a story about a mother who loves her daughter. Imperfectly. Because we all love imperfectly. But if you find yourself protecting anyone as you write this piece, remember this: You’re not doing it right.

I’m not against metafiction in principle. Some of my favorite books are metafictional — honest! But something about My Name Is Lucy Barton didn’t work for me: by the end, it felt awkwardly self-conscious, as if it were performing, rather than inhabiting, a certain fictional role, as if Strout wanted, rather than needed, to make certain moves to be clever, rather than to fulfill some idea about fiction, or about her fiction. The awkward appearance of a reading of the novel in the midst of its action didn’t create my unease, which had been building already, but it crystallized it: I was uneasy about the novel’s on-again, off-again relationship to its own story, which it sometimes tells with poignant detail and other times almost coyly conceals (“I thought of what I have — to myself — always called the Thing, the most horrifying part of my childhood”).

Payne understands the story Lucy is telling more clearly than Lucy herself, or at any rate she puts it more clearly. But there’s a lot she too doesn’t say, and I think it’s the hand-waving not-saying that ultimately distanced me from My Name Is Lucy Barton. I understand the consistency in withholding what Lucy herself finds too painful to put into words, but novels are words, ultimately, and though “spare” is widely used these days as high praise, My Name Is Lucy Barton ultimately isn’t just spare as in minimalist; it’s downright sparse, and also fragmented. Some of the fragments are individually marvelous, but they never cohered, and it felt less to me as if Strout was presenting perfected miniatures than as if she had used this dispersed form to let herself off the hook, the way some essay writers divide sections with asterisks rather than working out the transitions.hild

I know that some of this is just my own preference for novels that embrace telling: I was similarly dissatisfied, for instance, with Jenny Offill’s Department of Speculation, which I finished thinking she’d forgotten to actually include the novel. I love novels like Nicola Griffith’s Hild or Byatt’s The Children’s Book: novels that are immersive and luxurious, that don’t leave it up to me to do the work of story-telling, that don’t rely on my assumption that what’s in the gaps is meaningful. That’s not an absolute judgment of what is good, just a statement of what I like: as always, I invoke Henry James’s line that “nothing . . . will ever take the place of the good old fashion of ‘liking’ a work of art or not liking it.”

haruf_coverBut in fact it’s not always true that I don’t like “spare” novels. I read three of Kent Haruf’s novels recently, and the sparest of them all, Our Souls At Night, may have been my favorite. So even as I was articulating my reasons for not, ultimately, finding My Name Is Lucy Barton more satisfactory I was trying to figure out what else might be the problem. Here’s what I came up with: Haruf does tell his stories; he just doesn’t make a big deal about them. Strout, on the other hand, makes a big deal about not telling her story. Haruf does not insist on our emotional response: it arises (or doesn’t) from his people and their actions. Strout, in contrast, openly strives for emotional effect. Sometimes it works:

Always I screamed and screamed. I cried until I could hardly breathe. In this city of New York, I see children crying from tiredness, which is real, and sometimes from just crabbiness, which is real. But once in a while I see a child crying with the deepest of desperation, and I think it is one of the truest sounds a child can make. I feel almost, then, that I can hear within me the sound of my own heart breaking . . .

She strikes some notes that are powerful precisely because they withhold so much: “I thought, Pity us. We don’t mean to be so small. Pity us — it goes through my head a lot — Pity us all.” Too many such moments, though, can end up seeming not effective but affected, which is also too easily true of metafictional gestures. Both draw attention to themselves, which is an impulse that I think contradicts the simplicity and sincerity that initially drew me into My Name Is Lucy Barton.

For some reason it seems to me that Marilynne Robinson is someone who ought to be in this conversation. I’ve never read Housekeeping: maybe it should be next.

“No Such Thing As Air”: Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

ng-cover

All her life she had heard her mother’s heart drumming one beat: doctor, doctor, doctor. She wanted this so much, Lydia knew, that she no longer needed to say it. It was always there. Lydia could not imagine another future, another life. It was like trying to imagine a world where the sun went around the moon, or where there was no such thing as air.

Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You starts like a thriller: “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” It is structured like a thriller too, or at least like a mystery, with Lydia’s death the puzzle at its center and the novel moving bit by bit through the revelations that will ultimately explain it. I don’t say “solve it,” though, because Lydia’s death ends up feeling like a problem with no solution — or, more accurately, her life feels that way, so that by the time you arrive again at her death, you are weighed down, as Lydia is, by everything that led to it. The set-up is a feint, a bit of misdirection, that leads us to think knowing why and how Lydia died will matter.

It does matter, of course, intensely. It just doesn’t matter in the way that solving a crime matters to a whodunit, because Everything I Never Told You is actually a very different kind of book. It is a book about family above all, and particularly about the perverse and painful ways people who love each other can twist, bend, and even break their relationships with each other. It is also, and inextricably, a book about belonging. Lydia’s parents have come together from opposite sides of a great yearning: “more than anything, her mother had wanted to stand out; … more than anything, her father had wanted to blend in.” Her mother Marilyn, fair and pretty, dreads repeating her own mother’s life as a homemaker, inspired only by her battered copy of Betty Crocker’s Cookbook (“Make somebody happy today–bake a cake! . . . Is there anything that gives you a deeper sense of satisfaction?”); fitting in, for her would be easy but profoundly disappointing. Her father James, on the other hand, has stood out as different ever since his Chinese immigrant parents moved to Iowa and enrolled him in the private school where they had found jobs. “You’re the first Oriental boy to attend Lloyd [Academy],” his father reminds him on his first day; “Set a good example.” Though James wears the same uniform as his classmates, though, his difference is ineradicable: “he looked like no one they’d ever seen.” Later, at Harvard, James is still an outsider, even though he studies “the most quintessentially American subject he could find — cowboys.”

ng-cover-2Marilyn’s mother tries to talk her out of marrying James. “Think about your children,” she urges Marilyn; “Where will you live? You won’t fit in anywhere.” James and Marilyn believe they can — even in the small Ohio town where they settle and where their children Nath, Lydia, and Hannah are born and grow up. The children don’t really fit in, however, though they hide the truth, concealing their isolation and trying to placate the parental unease that, in the guise of loving concern, infects every aspect of their life. The burden of her parents’ hopes falls especially hard on Lydia: nothing is ever proffered that isn’t tainted with expectations that “drifted and settled and crushed you with their weight.” It’s because she loves her parents and wants them to be happy that she accepts, over and over, all the things they want for her that she does not want for herself. Only when it’s too late does Marilyn realize what this acceptance has meant to Lydia, who never told her because she never could.

Everything I Never Told You is full of things that haven’t been said, along with things said that haven’t been heard. There’s no single secret, no revelation, that causes or explains Lydia’s death — one of the things the novel does best, I think, is show how complicated lives are, by the circumstances that hem them in and shape them, and by the other lives that intersect with them. Ng is particularly interested in the complication of ‘otherness,’ including both who or what is perceived as different and how difference is acted on. How far is the kind of insidious, hurtful rejection James has experienced also to blame for the tragedy that befalls his daughter, who is described in the local paper, after her death, as “one of only two Orientals at Middlewood High”? How much of Lydia’s struggle is the result of Marilyn’s despair at her own thwarted ambitions, her own inability to be something more, or something else, than a wife and mother? Though Everything I Never Told You is a probing novel about the systemic problems of racism and sexism, it emphasizes that in individual lives these forces are not abstractions: they are also, always and crucially, personal experiences, refracted through the prisms of specific people’s needs, fears, and loves. That human element is where the novel’s drama and mystery ultimately come from, and also its glimmerings of hope.