It’s a busy time at work, with papers and midterms piling up a bit, so it’s still a bit quiet over here at Novel Readings.
I have been doing some extra-curricular reading, but the serious stuff has been for reviews, which I don’t usually anticipate with commentary here. I’ve been filling in the interstices with some light reading, mostly romances. I’ve been trying out some more recent “historicals” to see if I can find more writers among the many, many there are to chose from that I can reliably enjoy. I have had pretty mixed success with historicals up to now: a lot of them seem really thin and formulaic, and only a few authors so far (notably Cecilia Grant and, sometimes, Loretta Chase) have become personal favorites. I read Rose Lerner’s Sweet Disorder and quite liked it (I’d read her In For a Penny before, and liked it too). Then, encouraged by having mostly liked My American Duchess, I also read another of Eloisa James’s, Any Duchess Will Do, and I enjoyed it as well, enough that I’ll probably keep poking around in her vast back catalog. Both of these books, however, did add to my sense that, for me, the pacing, or maybe the balance, is off in a lot of modern romance novels: when the hero and heroine have sex fairly early on, instead of as the culmination of their developing relationship, the book becomes (again, for me) too much about their lusty goings-on and the romantic tension is lost. Other forms of angst are typically introduced, something to tear them apart before they can finally have it all, but I usually find that angsty part tedious and the final resolution belated. This is one reason I often skim the last third of these books: the fun part seems to be over before then. In contrast, I just reread Heyer’s Venetia and it seemed to me perfectly balanced: just sexy enough, just tense and surprising enough, and just charming enough to be thoroughly satisfying.
The “literary” book I’ve been reading “for fun” is Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Long View, which I bought after my book club read and enjoyed The Beautiful Visit and, in the same week, Hilary Mantel coincidentally published a persuasive essay about Howard in which she singled out The Long View as exceptional. It is very good of its kind, I think, and yet I am bogged down about half way through it because right now that “kind” feels claustrophobic. It’s an emotionally intense, scrupulously nuanced examination of an unhappy marriage — well, it’s unhappy when the novel begins, but because of the novel’s ingenious backwards-chronological structure, the relationship is building towards happier beginnings. Howard’s prose is wonderful and the psychological, social, and sexual complications of the couple’s life together are exquisitely, if painfully, drawn, but the novel feels airless to me: it doesn’t seem to be offering me any sense of the broader view of their life — of its impersonal contexts. The novel feels too personal, too minute, and it makes me restless for a narrative, or a narrator, that looks around and draws connections between these small complicated lives and the bigger world they’re set in. I may be missing ways in which Howard’s subtleties do exactly that, and of course since I’m not finished the novel yet, I can’t say whether things change in it, either. But my boredom (shocking! but true) with the novel got me thinking about the books that have really excited me lately and they have tended to be books with wider scope, often (though not always) historical: Dunnett’s King Hereafter, Nicola Griffith’s Hild, Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son. Is it because I already live a narrowly personal existence (and spend enough time scrutinizing the complex nuances of marriage on my own behalf) that right now I want fiction that does something, goes somewhere, else? Or maybe it’s just that when I’m busy and distracted, I lack the patience for novels that are all about the finely-wrought sentence and the emotional minutiae of daily life.
Also, when I’m busy and distracted, the lure of television is very strong! And, conveniently, Netflix recently dropped two tempting series — the fourth season of House of Cards and the second season of Happy Valley — both of which we’ve now seen. In retrospect, I’m actually kind of sorry I watched House of Cards. After the third season, I wasn’t sure I wanted to see any more of it, and this season will almost certainly be my last. The show is just so unpleasant: the people are loathsome; the acting is … well, it has its moments, but mostly it’s uninspiring; the plot is absurd; and the show overall is so cynical, not just about the world it depicts but also, I think, about what its viewers want or will tolerate. I did admire the color palette and cinematography, but otherwise, it’s a show that made me feel bad about myself for wanting to see what would happen next. Happy Valley, in context, though very grim in its own way, is brilliantly acted and tells stories about richly human individuals trying to bring some sense and order into their lives, with a protagonist whose anger and toughness are offset by compassion and a strong, if often thwarted, desire for justice. Even the crimes, horrific as they are, come out of contexts that are believable and morally complicated. It’s also almost absurdly refreshing to see women play prominent roles without having to look like stick insects and wear ridiculous stiletto heels.
OK, that gets me about caught up! Now, back to the next book I’ll be reviewing, if I can just get it all read, and then to Hard Times, which I start with my 19th-century fiction class tomorrow. Now there’s a classic that still has something to say “for these times.”
Great news: New Directions is putting out a new edition of 
One of the most fascinating explorations of this in the novel is the story of the pianist Kenzo Yamamoto, who becomes obsessed, not with how to play a particular note or phrase or piece, but with how else you could play it, or how else it could sound:
Not for them — for me!
Another reason teaching is a tonic for me, though, is precisely that I am not faking my interest in the course materials, and time spent really focusing on them brings me back in touch with the things that brought me into this profession in the first place. I loved being an English student myself (well, I loved being an undergraduate student – I mostly hated being a graduate student), and it’s in the classroom that the reasons for that are most present to me: the books themselves, of course, but also the open-minded engagement with them — teasing out what is most interesting, looking at the details and trying to put them into patterns that illuminate the whole, thinking and talking about the ideas that animate them, and all this, best of all, in conversation with other keen readers who bring their own questions and ideas to the process. This week’s readings are very purposeful, too, which gives our work on them extra urgency: in Mystery & Detective Fiction, we’ve just wrapped up 
Valdez himself is an interesting character: though he feels no ambivalence about his specific conflict with Tanner, he is less certain about his own role in life more generally, and the relationship he develops with Tanner’s fiancée Gay (whom he kidnaps as leverage) adds more nuances. It’s to be expected, though, that the protagonist will have some depth, so what I appreciated more is the way key secondary characters also have their own motives and their distinct roles to play in the denouement, including Gay herself but also Tanner’s “segundo.” One of the best bits in the novel is wholly inessential to its plot but adds a great deal to the atmosphere and to our sense of the kind of world its characters live in. Valdez shoots one of Tanner’s men and sends him back with a message. He delivers it and then lies dying, and we spend nearly two pages with him as he reflects on Valdez, and on his own life and immanent death:
I don’t want to leave the impression that frustration with the rigidity of academic practices is all I took away from my Louisville conference experience. There was definitely value for me in the work I put into my own paper, as well as in hearing and discussing the papers my co-panelists presented. So I thought I’d follow up 
Mendelsohn’s article was one of the sources I cited in my paper, in which I explored some questions about what we mean by “critical authority.” As he notes, once you move outside the academy degrees are neither a necessary nor a sufficient measure of the relevant expertise. But it’s not easy to pin down what does count, how authority is established, especially in a field of inquiry where there are no sure or absolute standards of judgment. Literary critics know that their authority is unstable because the history of criticism teaches us how judgments change over time, while simple experience shows us how much they differ among individuals. We can call variant assessments “gaffes” or “errors in individual taste,” as Mendelsohn does in his recent 
If critical authority is not something you simply have but something you have to earn and maintain by your own participation in a dialogue — if it is best understood not so much as a top-down assertion of superiority (“the critic’s job,” Mendelsohn proposes in his recent review, “is to be more educated, articulate, stylish, and tasteful … than her readers have the time or inclination to be”) but as a process of establishing yourself as someone whose input into an ongoing conversation is sought and valued — that helps explain why “expertise” is such a tricky thing to define for a critic. Mendelsohn’s original formal training is as a classicist — despite his wide-ranging erudition and critical prestige, he would almost certainly not qualify for an academic position in any other field — but obviously he has written with considerable insight on a wide range of subjects, from Stendhal to Mad Men. That so many of us read Mendelsohn’s criticism with interest and attention no matter what he writes about is a sign that we have come to trust him, not as the last word on these subjects, but as someone who will have something interesting (“meaningful,” to use one of his key terms) to say about them. If we disagree with him, we are not challenging his authority but continuing the conversation — and in fact one thing I’ve been thinking a lot about is how little disagreement really matters to this kind of critical authority. If what we go to criticism for is a good conversation, then engaged disagreement can be seen as a sign of authority — a sign that you care enough about the critic’s perspective to tussle with it, if you like. I can think of a number of critics in venues from personal blogs to the New Yorker whose views I would not defer to, but which I want to know because they provoke me to keep thinking about my own readings — which (however definitive the rhetoric I too adopt in my more formal reviewing) I always understand to be provisional, statements of how something looked to me in that moment, knowing what I knew then, caring about what I cared about then.
I’m not saying we can’t or shouldn’t defend our critical assessments, but awash as we are and always have been in such a variety of them, it would be naively arrogant at best and solipsistic at worst to imagine ourselves as “getting it right,” no matter who we are or where we publish. Blogging very often reflects that open-endedness in its tone, and its form is based on just the process Booth describes as “coduction”:
I’m back from Louisville, where 
Even taking these good things into account, though, I left Louisville feeling more than ever that, as a profession, we need to rethink how we do things. One of the main incentives for me to participate in this panel was that I have recently been given emphatic notice that I haven’t been going to the number of conferences expected of someone in my position. A significant number of academics apparently consider frequent conference-going a key measure of scholarly productivity and knowledge ‘dissemination.’ Frankly, I thought this was bollocks when it first came up as a criticism of my record, and my experience in Louisville only confirmed me in that view. Here’s why: Under pressure to show I am doing the “right” things professionally, I traveled a long distance at great expense (a significant amount borne by me personally, as the funding available did not cover nearly the full cost) to present a 20 minute paper to an audience of 8 people. All around me, hundreds of other academics were there doing the same, sometimes to even smaller audiences (the smallest I saw was 3 people plus the panelists, the largest, excluding keynotes, was about 16 — for a panel on Joyce — and one of the keynotes itself had an audience of maybe 15). Though there’s no doubt that some of the attendees were genuinely engaged with the papers they heard, most of them will take little concrete away besides a vague sense of the argument. One questioner at a panel I attended prefaced his remarks (as usual, questions were usually of the discursive rather than inquisitive variety) by saying that he’d heard a paper at another conference by someone whose name he couldn’t remember making an argument he dimly recalled had been somewhat similar to the one he’d just heard: though I’m sure there are some exceptions, that impressionistic result seems to me pretty typical, at least of a conference as diffuse as this one.
The small audiences and inchoate overall experience is in part a function of the kind of conference this was: papers were collected under a very large umbrella, and (I suspect) accepted somewhat indiscriminately, perhaps with the admirable goal of being inclusive. But when there are 10 or more concurrent sessions in every time slot, there’s little chance of robust numbers at any given panel, and even less chance of a sizable cohort of conference-goers having much of a common experience and thus much deep, shared conversation. My experience of 
Once upon a time going to conferences really was our best option for letting a wider audience know what we are working on, for getting feedback on work in progress, and for networking with colleagues in our field. But while I think it is possible for a conference experience to be genuinely valuable, particularly if the conference has a narrower focus and a different format (a friend of mine speaks very highly, for instance, of the 
I think I personally would have found the Louisville conference more intellectually stimulating if I were a modern literature scholar myself: I had a harder time even than usual latching on to the papers’ arguments because they were typically quite specialized contributions to scholarly inquiries I know little about. I went mostly to Woolf panels because at least there I knew the primary sources a bit! (I was interested to note that there were no papers, much less panels, on Winifred Holtby or Vera Brittain at all; there was one paper on Sayers, but I saw no sign of Rebecca West or Rosamond Lehmann or Mollie Panter-Downes or Elizabeth Taylor or Olivia Manning or any of those I think of as the ‘Virago’ set. Eliot, Pound, Woolf, Joyce, a bit of Lawrence and Forster — this was a pretty canonical outing. You 20thC people can tell me if that’s typical or just Louisville.)
It’s an image that is specific to Lily’s situation and history, but it’s also the familiar refrain of women seeing the myth of their influence, and the perfection of their weakness, exposed as lies that serve everyone but them. It’s not just Becky shamelessly marketing herself, but Amelia, trying to scrape together enough money to keep her son at home, and Gwendolen presenting herself to Klesmer in the vain belief that she can be a great singer just by wishing it so, and Isabel imagining she has not just the freedom but the wisdom to choose her future.
Lily’s life does end on a “tragic yet sweet” note: tragic because she is hopeless and, she believes, loveless; sweet because she spares herself (or is spared — Wharton carefully avoids the specificity of suicide) the further — perhaps even worse — compromises she sees in her future, and also because at least in death she is loved for herself, not just for the market value of her beauty. I don’t think Wharton means to leave us in despair, despite Lily’s catastrophic decline: Selden’s belated arrival is one sign that something better is at least imaginable. As he thinks, kneeling by her death bed, “at least … if the moment had been fated to pass from them before they could seize it, he saw now that, for both, it had been saved whole out of the ruin of their lives.” That such a moment is even possible is a slim but real victory for optimism. That its promise is unfulfilled leaves us with the dissatisfaction that we also feel finishing Daniel Deronda and The Portrait of a Lady. Surely something better should be possible for these remarkable women: what a waste their worlds have made of them!
I got a bit snippy with the tweeters from Oxford World’s Classics a couple of days ago. Poor things: they were just doing their job, spreading some news about great books and trying to get people to click through and read it. How could they know that I was already feeling grumpy, for reasons quite beyond their control, and that this particular gimmick pushes my buttons on a good day?
But (and you knew it was coming, right?) if for some absurd reason I absolutely had to choose, not which novelist is in any absolute sense “the greatest” but whose team to play on, it would be Brontë all the way — and I say that having only just enjoyed Pride and Prejudice entirely and absolutely for about the 50th time. We’ve just started working our way through Jane Eyre in the 19th-century fiction class and what a thrill it is. I know it’s a cliche to associate the Brontës with the moors, but it does feel as if a fresh, turbulent breeze is rushing through, stirring things up and bringing with it a longing for wide open spaces. The freedom and intensity of Jane’s voice, the urgency of her feelings, and of her demands — for love, for justice, for liberty — it’s exhilarating! I brought some excerpts from contemporary reviews to class today to demonstrate the shock and outrage with which some 19th-century critics received the novel: it’s striking how much the very qualities that enraged and terrified them are the same ones that make so many of us want to cheer Jane on. By the end we know that we should not have allied ourselves so readily with Jane’s violent rebellion, and we may even be equivocal about the conclusion to her story, but I think it’s impossible to read the novel and not be wholly caught up in her fight to define and then live on her own terms.
I started rereading Emma recently and had to put it aside. I appreciate that it is aesthetically and morally complex and infinitely nuanced, but I felt smothered by it: I found it claustrophobic. Brontë’s criticism of Austen is well known: she told G. H. Lewes that in Pride and Prejudice she found only “an accurate daguerrotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen,” she went on, “in their elegant but confined houses.” I think she underestimated the novel — a lot of people do, still, who see just the delightful characters moving on the surface and not the currents of social and historical change carrying them along. I’m also sure that my trouble with Emma is about me, not Austen. But I understand Brontë’s reaction, and it is just the one you would expect, too, from the author of such an entirely different book, one that opposes itself in every way to both literal and mental confinement. I think that’s why Jane Eyre refreshes my soul: it rushes with us out into the hills. Jane is so defiant, so passionate, so forthright: she speaks up so fearlessly, for herself and for the right! I wish I could always do the same: I admire her principles and envy her courage. So much as I would miss Elizabeth Bennet if for some reason I had to give her up, Jane’s the one I really couldn’t do without.
I used to read about them in my mother’s old, cherished copy: I discover, peering around online, that it was the “Illustrated Junior Library” edition from Grosset and Dunlap, with an original copyright date of 1947. The cover alone is immediately evocative of my childhood! I loved the novel and reread it often; I had been feeling mournful that I didn’t have a nice copy of my own, so I put the Penguin Threads edition on my Christmas wishlist this year and was thrilled to get it. It’s very satisfactory: not only is the cover delightful to an embroidery buff like me, but the whole volume is tactile in all the right ways, from the raised graphics on the artwork to the heavy, deckle edged pages. It feels the way a classic should.
Novel Readings 