“What Are These Pages?”: Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

unnecessaryI really enjoyed reading Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman. How could I not, being who I am? The novel is custom-made for its inevitable audience (readers!): not only is it about an avid reader but one of its central themes is the transporting exhilaration of reading itself. Its voice is wry and ironic,  acerbic and occasionally even acidic — because these are the qualities of its heroine and narrator, Aaliya. It is also, as Aaliya is not (or, only very rarely), sympathetic: it prompts us, implicitly, to understand Aaliya and to be on her side, despite how prickly and anti-social she is. It’s hard to be this close to someone, to see things from her point of view, and not end up, if not her friend, at least her ally. And for a lot of readers, being prickly and anti-social is probably pretty familiar anyway: if we’re reading An Unnecessary Woman in the first place, there’s a better than zero chance that we too like being in a book better than being in most rooms, being with our favorite authors and characters better than being with many of the people we know in real life. So Aaliya, though she is not particularly nice or likable, is perversely “relatable.”

Is reading a way of engaging with the world, or a way of taking refuge from, or just avoiding, it? This seemed to me the novel’s fundamental question. Aaliya’s story actually reminded me (if in a considerably more highbrow register) of Kathleen Kelly’s line in You’ve Got Mail: “So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book; shouldn’t it be the other way around?” For most of the novel, and most of her life, Aaliya retreats to literature; it isolates her, but it also comforts her in her isolation. “I have adapted tamely,” she says, “but not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books.” She lives intensely but vicariously; despite her solitude, her books keep her from feeling solitary. Her translation projects giver her a purpose — but not a public or communal one, as she keeps her work to herself. The irony, of course, is that translations can open up or further conversations, making communication possible across boundaries. But that’s not what Aaliya wants from hers, and so they get boxed up and stored as she finishes them: unread, useless, unnecessary, except to Aaliya herself.

leavemealoneUp to a point, then, Aaliya’s tale is a celebration of the intrinsic pleasures and challenges of literature. Reading is, after all, a fundamentally individual activity: it’s your mind alone with the words on the page. From the outside it can look like a form of self-absorption. It is certainly a kind of self-sufficiency: as long as I have a good book, I don’t need anyone else. Someone reading intently projects (usually without meaning to) a tacit hostility — a wish to be left alone, to be uninterrupted. Every avid reader has probably, at one time or another, been teased or hassled about this, which may be one reason Aaliya is (for all her faults) such an appealing heroine to other readers: she’s a dedicated, unrepentant reader who relishes (and fights quite selfishly for) her lonely apartment with its stacks of books. Her life epitomizes a reader’s life (which is a loner’s life), perfected but not idealized.

But reading isn’t just a way of being apart from life: it can also be a way of understanding life, a way of finding or thinking through the narratives that make sense of our experience or help us give it meaning. “We live our lives through texts,” as Carolyn Heilbrun writes in Writing a Woman’s Life;

 Lives do not serve as models; only stories do that. And it is a hard thing to make up stories to live by. We can only retell and live by the stories we have read or heard.

That’s another value Aaliya finds in her books: they help her sort through her life, indirectly, perhaps, but still with an outward, rather than an inward, glance.

Also, as bloggers well know, books don’t have to isolate: they can also build connections, provide impetus for conversation, bridge distances between people otherwise separated by the “unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.” When, eventually, Aaliya is compelled out of her self-imposed exile from fellowship, it’s not necessarily the epiphany she claims to scorn (“There should be a new literary resolution: no more epiphanies”), but it is at least an opening up, like the unfolding of a reluctant rose, still thorny but touched by some warmth and light. It’s not a big transformation, just a sense of new possibilities. But we wouldn’t want Aaliya or her life to be changed utterly anyway, not if we have stood by her so far. She’ll still be a reader, above all — but maybe not such a lonely one.

She’s also a writer: she calls the novel her “tale” and refers to it every so often as a work in progress (“If this were a novel,” “What are these pages,” “As I write this”). The question of what exactly “these pages” are is never directly addressed, though, and I felt as if this was a lost opportunity. Not all first-person narrations explain their own textuality directly, of course, but Aaliya is such a self-consciously literary character that it would have been interesting to know why she is writing, and for whom. The form of her “tale” seems deliberately opposed to some kinds of fiction, for instance: it’s a relatively plotless book, and occasionally seemed almost too meandering to me, not quite stream of consciousness but not organized in a clear way, not building to any climax. It’s primarily a study in character, but it proceeds more through revelation than through self-reflection or analysis.

These strategies do seem appropriate for Aaliya — they suit her personality as well as her literary preferences. “Causation extraction makes Jack a dull reader,” as she says caustically; also, “One reason we desire explanations is that they separate us and make us feel safe.” So, no explanations; we have to infer her motivations, including for writing. But what about the question of language? I wondered for some time what language we were to think she was actually writing in, until a remark about her pen moving from right to left across the page gave it away. What we are reading, then, is actually an invisible, or imaginary, translation, and in a novel so much about translation — as the promise, or the possibility, or the buried hope, of connection — isn’t that another lost opportunity to make overt (to thematize) the narrative itself? Instead, the pretense is of perfect transparency. I realize that this is to take the words on the page literally in a rather stupid way, but I still ended up feeling very slightly dissatisfied with the book as a result of fretting about this question.

the-library-by-sarah-stewartFor all the enjoyment I took in the novel, I also ended up feeling that perhaps it’s too pat: that it plays too neatly into my hands and the hands of other readers who like nothing better than to have their passion for literature confirmed in an interesting and non-platitudinous way. For people who like this sort of thing, is An Unnecessary Woman too deliberately exactly what they like —  is Aaliya too ready-made a literary heroine? She was certainly easy for me to side with, so cosmopolitan and secular and apolitical. A lot goes on around her while she reads and reads and reads (in this respect, An Unnecessary Woman reminded me of another irresistible fictional reader, Elizabeth Brown in Sarah Stewart’s The Library), but while she’s endlessly and intimately affected by it all, she also refuses to see herself as an engaged part of it:

I may be able to explain the difference between baroque and rococo, between South American magical realism and its counterparts in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, between Camus’s nihilism and Sartre’s existentialism, between modernism and its post, but don’t ask me to tell you the difference between the Nasserites and the Baathists. I do understand that this neighborhood can’t be Baathist; Sunnis are anti-Syria these days, and the need to belong to a party, any party, is greater than the fear of appearing stupid once again, hence Nasser is the hero du jour. However, I can’t figure out what the terms mean.

People are dying around her over these differences, but the only thing she fights for — the thing she actually acquires a gun to defend — is her apartment, her private space to read. Is this, in the end, the answer to the novel’s question about art and life? “The end of woman (or of man) is not a book,” concludes Aurora Leigh in Elizabeth Browning’s epic verse-novel, but for Aaliya, maybe it is. And why not? “Belief is murderous,” as she says. She writes with passion about the morals and politics and tragedies of others, and cares passionately how history is written, but by keeping her own eyes on the page, she avoids (and so we too avoid) having to confront any of this too directly.

And of course not all people, not all novels, have to be out on the front lines, and most of us live more or less like Aaliya, getting by as well as we can from day to day. At best, we find a way to live with integrity and dignity according to what we have decided really matters. An Unnecessary Woman is a sharp, touching, but unsentimental portrait of a woman who is “unnecessary” to any larger narrative about the world, but central, as she must and should be, to her own. That’s not necessarily an uplifting thought. “Giants of literature, philosophy, and the arts have influenced my life,” she reflects,

but what have I done with this life? I remain a speck in a tumultuous universe that has little concern for me. I am no more than dust, a mote — dust to dust. I am a blade of grass upon which the stormtrooper’s boot stomps.

I had dreams, and they were not about ending up a speck. I didn’t dream of becoming a star, but I thought I might have a small nonspeaking role in a grand epic, an epic with a touch of artistic credentials. I didn’t dream of becoming a giant — I wasn’t that delusional or arrogant — but I wanted to be more than a speck, maybe a midget.

There’s inevitably something melancholy in realizing how small a part you play in the drama of life. But if, like most of us, you are destined to rest in an unvisited tomb, there’s surely nothing wrong with its being one well-lined with books.

“Janet’s Repentance”: Revisiting a Scene of Clerical Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Steps to Literature”: Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

ghost

Sometimes, at dawn or at dusk, I pick out from the gloom — I think I do — a certain figure, traversing those rutted fields in a hushed and pearly light, picking a way among the treacherous rivulets and the concealed ditches. It is a figure shrouded in a cloak, bearing certain bulky objects wrapped in oilcloth, irregular in shape: not heavy but awkward to carry. This figure is me; these shapes, hidden in their wrappings, are books that, God willing, I am going to write. But when was God ever willing? And what is this dim country, what is this tenuous path I lose so often — where am I trying to get to, when the light is so uncertain? Steps to literature, I think; I have tottered one or two.

I was engrossed in Giving Up the Ghost from beginning to end, but I was also disappointed with it almost as consistently. Why? Because I thought it would be a different kind of book, and I had a hard time reconciling the book it was with the book I wanted it to be — namely, a memoir about a writer’s life.

I know what you’re thinking: But it is a memoir about a writer’s life, isn’t it? Yes, of course it is. But it says so little — almost nothing! — about Mantel’s life as a writer, even less about her actual books. I find her such a distinctively intellectual writer: even when I don’t quite like or get her novels, I enjoy the thinking that I can feel has gone into them, and I don’t mind that the result can be a certain coldness of affect (the same happens in Ian McEwan, I think, because the mental precision tidies away some of the messiness of emotion). So I was really curious to hear from her about what it’s like to be that kind of writer, to get some reflections on what she wants from fiction, why she has written the particular books she has, what she thinks of them … I wanted to read her memoir because of her books, after all. So I was disappointed that she hardly mentions them at all. “I started to write a book. I wrote and wrote it. Time passed. I moved to another country, another continent. Still I wrote it and wrote it.” That’s A Place of Greater Safety, I know, because in the one further paragraph we get about it, she describes her research:

I sat behind the insect mesh of my veranda frowning over my card index, documenting the fall of the French monarchy, the rise of the Committee of Public Safety. I had pressed the juice of meaning from every scrap of paper I had brought with me, every note on every source. The book was finished now.

About 20 pages later, we get this:

I went home, to the dark, enclosed rooms of our city apartment. I cut my dose by a third. Bald, odd-shaped, deaf but not defeated, I sat down and wrote another book.

That’s all we get there. And then about 20 pages later, again, “I sat in my stifling upstairs room, coaxing out of my computer the novel concealed somewhere in its operating system.” These are “steps towards literature,” sure, but what kind of steps, to what kind of literature? Why doesn’t she even name the books?

wolf-hallClearly Mantel did not consider Giving Up the Ghost the place to talk about her books — at least, not directly. Perhaps the most revealing thing she says about being a writer is a passing remark about Jane Eyre: “I remember the first time I read Jane Eyre: probably every woman writer does, because you recognize, when you have hardly begun it, that you are reading a story about yourself.” But again, she just moves on, so it’s not just her books she’s not talking about, it’s her whole experience of being a writer, a woman writer, a person writing, a person thinking about books, which — though we know they are integral to her life — seem oddly peripheral in her life story.

Giving Up the Ghost is not a book about the life of the mind. There’s nothing in it that helps me understand how, much less why, this particular woman wrote A Place of Greater Safety, much less how she would come to be the author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. Giving Up the Ghost is not a kunstlerroman, then, as far as I can tell; it offers no clear insight into Mantel the artist. (It also does not tell an uplifting story of becoming a writer as a way of transcending the social and physical hardships she recounts so vividly — this is not an Oprah-friendly “rising above it” book.) Maybe Mantel believes her novels should speak for themselves; maybe she’s deliberately frustrating attempts to connect the writer and her work, (not entirely unreasonable for a woman writer).

It’s not a book about the life of the mind — but it is very much a book about the life of the body, or her body, and that’s one of the reasons I found it compelling as well as frustrating. From her waif-like young body to her adult body so dramatically reshaped by the drugs with which she treats her illness and pain, Mantel is ruthlessly specific about what it is like physically to be her, to be in her space, to interact with the world through her flesh. “I never was a size 16,” she notes;

I shot past it effortlessly. Soon there was nothing in the secondhand shop to fit me; bigger women don’t discard fashions so lightly. The assistants — and hadn’t I been their best customer all summer? — began to give me the smirk, half commiserating and half condescending, that would soon become the usual expression of shop girls when I went to get clad. My skin turned gray, shading to slate blue as the autumn came on. My legs swelled and ached. Fluid puffed up my eyelids. Some mornings my head looked like a soccer ball. I was glad when my husband’s job took us to Saudi Arabia, where women wear drapery rather than clothes, and where no one knew me, so that no one could stop me in the street to say how well I looked; where, in fact, I was more or less prohibited from going out on the street at all. I could stay indoors, under artificial light, waxing like some strange fungus.

“We can be made foreign to ourselves,” she observes, “suddenly, by illness, accident, misadventure, or hormonal caprice.” These extreme side effects, though, only exacerbate an alienation she seems always to have lived with: there’s something slightly disconnected about her self and her body from the beginning, as if she never entirely recognizes herself (one of the more interesting aspects of her childhood is her discomfort with her gender, her belief that at some point she will turn into a boy, then her disappointment as she realizes that she’s stuck being a girl, even though she never can see the point of dolls or tea sets). Her memoir is literally visceral: it’s the story of her guts gone awry.

But maybe that means it is in fact a book about the life of the mind, since endometriosis is a disease in which cells from the lining of the uterus make their way to other parts of the body, including, she tells us, “the heart, the head.” One of Mantel’s symptoms is “the prodromal aura of migraine headaches,” which brings on “invisible presences and the echoes of strangers’ voices . . . morbid visions, like visitations, premonitions of dissolution.” These are mental but also physical phenomena; this is, we could say, the irrational life of her mind — the mind that sees “the ghost of my stepfather coming down” the staircase and other things that “aren’t there.” Isn’t seeing things that aren’t there precisely what a novelist does?

Giving Up the Ghost tells us very little overtly about Mantel the novelist. But it shares many of its preoccupations with her novels, including ghosts, or just the uncanny, such as the mysterious apparition that haunts her life with shame as if she’s committed a sin (“I should not have been looking“) for which she must somehow answer. It’s also, and this is endlessly evident in its language, by Mantel the novelist: it’s smart, strange, surprising, sideways, grim, tactile (“waxing like some strange fungus” indeed). Maybe that’s the point at which the two books (the one I wanted, the one she wrote) actually converge: Giving Up the Ghost isn’t a memoir about being a writer, but it’s very much the memoir of a writer, one whose cerebral life is self-consciously embodied. I wondered, as I reached the end of the book, why I wasn’t at least as curious about her physicality as I am about her intellect, why it kept seeming to me that she was focusing on the wrong thing. My mistake.

Novel Readings 2014

Rohan Maitzen11 Comments

I didn’t realize what a good reading year 2014 was until I started going back through my blog posts. I think the slump I fell into in the late fall unfairly cast its shadow back over the rest of the year!

kinghereafter

Book of the Year: The high point of my reading in 2014 would have to be Dorothy Dunnett’s King Hereafter. It wasn’t the easiest book to get through, but I was completely engrossed by the end. It doesn’t have the grand melodrama of the Lymond books I have loved so long, but it has both an intellectual reach and an emotional depth that are rare to find together. Dunnett has the special gift (shared by A. S. Byatt and Hilary Mantel) of making her historical research abundantly manifest without wearing us down with it.

Other novels I’m especially glad to have read and written about:

Another Dunnett novel is high up on this list: I finally read Niccolo Rising, and while it did not sweep me away the way King Hereafter did, my trust in Dunnett (and in the many readers who have recommended this series — some of whom regard it even more highly than the Lymond chronicles!) helped me press on through what seemed like a slow beginning (one I had in fact tried two or three times before, only to stall) — until this time I eventually found I was thoroughly interested in how things were developing. I’ve got the next two  lined up to read in 2015.

I relished both novels I read this year by Daphne du Maurier. I can’t imagine that romantic suspense gets any better than Jamaica Inn (which was a selection for both of my book clubs), and My Cousin Rachel is more subtle but every bit as deliciously twisty.

Also twisty, if not altogether delicious: Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games. I didn’t end up loving it, but I loved parts of it, and since I’ve owned it for ages it feels very good to have read it at long (long) last.

helprinOne novel I did love – in a headlong, romantic, uncharacteristically uncritical way – was Mark Helprin’s In Sunlight and In Shadow. It’s such a heartfelt book I think you have to hang up your cynicism at the door or not even bother. If you can accept it on its own terms, though, it’s just a really, really beautiful book. And yet I’m still hesitant about reading Winter’s Tale . . .

The year’s most strange and memorable book for me was Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I still hardly know what I think about this book! But for sheer provocation (mental, not sensual – it’s a weirdly unsexy book, if you ask me), it had no real competition.

Another book that really made me think, but that I enjoyed much more, was Howards End. Like Lady Chatterley, this book made me feel both confused and frustrated at times as I tried to figure out what its different aspects meant or added up to. Unlike Lady Chatterley, however, Howards End is one I look forward to revisiting, for another chance to make sense of it but also just to appreciate it again.

behaSometimes the whole is more than the sum of its parts: that’s what I concluded as I read Christopher Beha’s What Happened to Sophie Wilder and Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair in close proximity. They are books in conversation with each other, and while neither of them is likely to become a personal favorite of mine, both on their own and together they really made me think — about fiction, about characters, about love, about religion.

I really liked Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. And then, almost as much as I enjoyed the book, if in a different way, I appreciated the conversation it started, first in my head then in the comments to my post, about why we like some books and not others, or why others don’t like books we love and vice versa.

Finally, I made my belated acquaintance with Brother Cadfael this year, with the first of Ellis Peters’s medieval mysteries, A Morbid Taste for Bones. I was fortunate enough to inherit the complete run of the series; I’m hoarding the rest for the dreary snow-bound days I know are sure to come this winter. What could be more comforting when a blizzard rages than hot chocolate, biscuits, and books this deft and smart?

Memorable Non-Fiction

gourevitchI read a lot more fiction than non-fiction, but I read three stunning and memorable works of non-fiction in 2014: Sonali Deraniyagala’s heartbreaking Wave, Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, and Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes. All deal with unspeakable tragedies, but all do so with such intelligence and care that the results, though rarely uplifting in any simple way, are remarkably beautiful, and sometimes even hopeful.

Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch also deserves a mention here. As some of you know, I approached it with skepticism, because I am wary of criticism that subordinates works of great literature to our own petty private lives. I didn’t much like the New Yorker essay that was Mead’s trial balloon for this project, but the book won me over with its lovely writing, tender reminiscences, and thoughtful attention to Middlemarch as a book that changes and grows with its readers.

The Low Point

The only book I actively disliked this year was Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment. I can’t say for sure that it’s a bad novel, but it is certainly a very unpleasant one, and I’ll say just one more time (in 2014, anyway) that I think people effuse about Ferrante because she offers them something they are looking for from a woman writer, not because her novels are self-evidently brilliant. Is The Days of Abandonment “honest,” as critics keep insisting? Perhaps, though what that means applied to a work of fiction I’m not really sure. But the harsh truth it’s taken to trade in isn’t the whole truth, and just because something is or feels raw doesn’t necessarily mean it’s artistic.

Happy New Year!

Thank you as always to everyone who read and commented on Novel Readings in 2014. Special thanks as well to the many bloggers and tweeters who have engaged, interested, and encouraged me this year — it is such a pleasure knowing you all and talking about books (and so much else) with you every day.

Some of the books I’m looking forward to reading in 2015:

2014XmasBooks

 

2014: My Year in Writing

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

IMG_2655There’s still time to get a bit more reading done in 2014, but as with last year, I don’t expect to finish any more writing projects before January, so I thought I’d do another year-end round-up of my essays and reviews.

It’s not as long a list as last year — how did I manage to do so many pieces for Open Letters in 2013? — but I also looked back on some of those pieces with a bit of regret, since I didn’t think all of the books I reviewed were worth the effort I put into them. Thinking about that, and then reflecting on this year’s output, it becomes clear to me that being a busy book reviewer is not really what I’m interested in. I do like writing about books (obviously!), but if I dared to articulate my real ambition, it would be to become a good literary essayist — to do the kind of criticism that is not (or at least not necessarily or incessantly) dedicated to keeping up with, or evaluating, the latest thing. “Most books aren’t very good,” a sage friend and experienced reviewer once said to me. Blogging gives me the freedom not just to read what I want but to write about it however I want, which often means not walking through the patient steps of summary and analysis you find in a good standard review but meandering through ideas and associations I find interesting. Essays should probably be more purposeful than that, but they too are free from some of the obligations of reviewing, especially the obligation to put a lot of effort into talking about books that “aren’t very good.” I’m still going to write reviews! I have two books on my desk right now that I’ll be writing up in the next month or so. But other things will be higher priorities.

mylifeinmiddlemarchFor Open Letters this year I did write one review of a new book, Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch. I approached it with skepticism but ended up both enjoying and admiring it. It is not the kind of book I want to write, and its success therefore made me uneasy, but at the same time, it’s nice to know that I haven’t been scooped, and maybe (just maybe!) the friendly attention she drew to a great novel that for many people comes across as intimidating will soften readers up for a different kind of book about its author. I also contributed to our monthly ‘Title Menu’ feature, with a list of “8 more George Eliot novels” — not more novels by George Eliot, but novels about or inspired by her, from Deborah Weisgall’s The World Before Her (which I wrote up in more detail here) to Edith Skom’s The George Eliot Murders. If I concluded that really, you’d be better off rereading Middlemarch than reading any of these others — well, what did you expect?

My next piece for Open Letters was about K. M. Peyton’s Pennington series. I have wanted to write about these books for some time, because I think they are wonderful — I like them even better than her Flambards series (though that is wonderful too). I was working on it when a heated debate broke out in the online book world about the value – or shame – of grown-ups reading “young adult” fiction. I didn’t want my essay to be a polemical screed on one side or the other, but I felt (and said in its conclusion) that it made my case implicitly, which is that what matters is not the label on the book but how well it stands up to thoughtful attention over time. I suppose that was too temperate a stance for the piece to be of much interest to the people who were fighting so noisily about this — plus they would have had to read the whole essay about the books to reach that conclusion, and that really isn’t how these things play out online. Still, it would be nice if once in a while all my bleakest beliefs about the way click-bait runs the internet weren’t confirmed at my expense! I’m happy about the essay itself, though, which I thought was pretty convincing about the merits of the Pennington books. Maybe I should send it to NYRB Classics as part of a pitch for them to do a nice set of reissues.

my-brilliant-friend-ferranteMy last full-scale Open Letters piece of 2014 was another failure as click-bait, despite being pretty topical, but, again,  it was something I was pretty pleased with just for itself. We do a semi-regular feature called “Peer Review” which surveys and comments on the critical reception of a particular book or author, and after reading my way through the first three of Elena Ferrante’s much-acclaimed Neapolitan novels (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay) I decided that she (or they) would be an excellent candidate for this treatment — as, indeed, I found! The essay ran just as the third book was being released in North America; the novel has received a significant amount of critical attention pretty much entirely consistent with the outlines I gave. I remain somewhat baffled at the effusive praise Ferrante gets, and convinced that it is about what she stands for as much as it is about how or what she actually writes. Maybe the fourth book (if I read it) will persuade me that it all adds up to something spectacular.

I also wrote a few things that were published elsewhere this year. I was pleased to be asked to contribute two essays on George Eliot to the British Library’s new “Discovering Literature” site: “Realism and Research in Adam Bede” and “The Mill on the Floss as bildungsroman.” It’s a great site for exploring, as the essays are set up to showcase digitized materials from the British Library’s collection (such as the manuscript of Adam Bede or the letter from Eliot’s brother Isaac congratulating her on her marriage).

southridingI also wrote an essay on Winifred Holtby and Virginia Woolf that came out in 3:AM Magazine; it’s nice to have some tangible results from all my work on the Somerville novelists, and in fact I have another such result, a short piece on “10 Reasons to Love Vera Brittain,” coming out in the new year at For Books’ Sake — technically I guess it “counts” for 2015, but I did write it in 2014!

Another result from earlier work was my participation in the Atlantic‘s Twitter book club “1 Book 140” when they opted to give Middlemarch a try. It was really gratifying to get a generous shout-out to my “Middlemarch for Book Clubs” site and then to be asked to do a Q&A about Middlemarch with the scintillating Stephen Burt: I think he and I could have talked much longer, and I hope one of these days we can sit down and chat in person (about Middlemarch or anything else). Another stimulating conversational opportunity was being interviewed about “a critic’s role” by Matt Jakubowski for the series he’s running at his blog truce.

As always, the largest quantity of writing (and I hope, not the lowest quality of writing!) that I did in 2014 was here at Novel Readings. My traditional look back at my year in reading is coming up, so I’ll just highlight a few posts that weren’t about books.

I continued my series on ‘This Week In My Classes’; along with reporting on routine business I found myself reflecting on why students might find me intimidating, and on beginning my twentieth year of teaching at Dalhousie. I wondered what makes a novel “teachable”; and I asked how I could get out of my own way when teaching a novel I’ve got as many thoughts and plans about as Middlemarch. I didn’t write much about general academic issues, mostly because not much has changed about what I see or how I feel about it. Despite frequent resolutions to do otherwise, I couldn’t quite stop myself from brooding about how things add up, or about how my attempts to redefine my work as a critic have turned out so far, or  from wondering how much the ugly word ‘blog’ affects assumptions about this not-quite-academic activity. Self-consciousness and constant self-evaluation are just too deeply ingrained, I think, after all these years in an academic environment where keeping tabs on ourselves and others is a way of life.

Of all the posts I wrote in 2014, my farewell to critic, blogger, and great Twitter conversationalist D. G. Myers is the most heartfelt. He had a profoundly unsentimental approach to his own illness and impending death, but it’s impossible not to mourn for someone who was such a vigorous, challenging part of so many conversations I’ve been in over the past few years.

“A life entirely through objects”: Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes

Rohan Maitzen10 Comments

hare-coverIt is not just things that carry stories with them. Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina. I thought I had this clear, two years before I started, but I am no longer sure how this works. Perhaps patina is a process of rubbing back so that the essential is revealed, the way that a striated stone tumbled in a river feels irreducible, the way that this netsuke of a fox has become little more than a memory of a nose and a tail. But it also seems additive, in the way that a piece of oak furniture gains over years and years of polishing, and the way the leaves of my medlar shine.

“I really don’t want to get into the sepia saga business,” Edmund de Waal says in the Prologue to The Hare with Amber Eyes, “writing up some elegaic Mitteleuropa narrative of loss.” This self-consciousness about the kind of story he will, or can, or should, tell is one of the most interesting elements of the saga he eventually does write up. It is, inevitably, a narrative of loss — and why, really, should it not be elegaic? It’s nostalgia he wants to avoid, “about all that lost wealth and glamour from a century ago” — but why? Where, how, do we draw a line between treacly nostalgia and heartfelt lamentation? Or is it only what he would be nostalgic for that gives him pause? Is “lost wealth and glamour” not something to mourn? What about the art, the beauty, such wealth enables?

It is certainly not more tragic to lose everything when you have so much than it is to have nothing to lose. But The Hare with Amber Eyes prompts difficult questions about value and loss. Should the privilege of the Ephrussi family inhibit our sympathy for them when their luxurious world of beautiful objects is shattered? In Vienna after the Anschluss in 1938, the Palais Ephrussi is swarmed by men finally given license to act without restraint on their vindictive anti-Semitism:

They take the silver candlesticks held up by slightly drunken fauns from the dining-room, small animals in malachite from mantelpieces, silver cigarette boxes, money held in a clip from a desk in Viktor’s study. A small Russian clock, pink enamel and gold, that rang the hours in the salon. And the large clock from the library with its gold dome held up by columns.

They have walked past this house for years, glimpsed faces at windows, seen into the courtyard as the doorman holds the gate open while the fiacre trots in. They are inside now, at last. This is how the Jews live, how the Jews used our money — room after room stacked with stuff, opulence. These are a few souvenirs, a bit of redistribution. It is a start. . . .

They push Emmy and Viktor and Rudolf against the wall, and three of them heave the desk and send it crashing over the handrail until, with a sound of splintering wood and gilt and marquetry, it hits the stone flags of the courtyard below.

 The enumeration of the Ephrussis’ beautiful objects seems designed to make us feel their excess, and also to feel, as the desk hits the ground, “You can spare this — it is not the worst loss you could suffer.” After all, they themselves are spared, and what’s a desk, or a candlestick, or a clock, to their lives? I know that I feared, at this moment in the story, that much worse was to follow for Emmy and Viktor and Rudolf.

There is worse. Of course there is: for them, and for many, many others — unspeakably many, unspeakably worse. In the context of the Holocaust it’s absurd to mourn splintering wood, and equally foolish to celebrate the survival of the netsuke, overlooked in their cabinet beside the ornate desk and then preserved by the faithful servant Anna as the rest of the Ephrussis’ treasures are methodically plundered. As de Waal learns the fates of more and more of those who have made part of the history he’s painstakingly constructed, he feels “wrong-footed”:

The survival of the netsuke in Anna’s pocket, in her mattress, is an affront. I cannot bear for it to slip into symbolism. Why should they have got through this war in a hiding-place, when so many hidden people did not? I can’t make people and places and things fit together any more. These stories unravel me.

What sense does any of it make — what or who is lost, what or who is saved? De Waal is right to be squeamish about the “slip into symbolism,” and right not to make more sense of it than he does: all he can do is tell the story, up to the limits of what he can find out.

hare-amberBut the story he’s telling is a story of objects, and for all that we feel the impropriety of caring about the recovery of 264 tiny carvings when “65,459 Austrian Jews had been killed,” de Waal also emphasizes, across the book as a whole, that things routinely outlive their owners, are passed along, given away, inherited. Objects do last; art could perhaps be defined as objects that are meant to last. Every object that endures has a story longer than the story of any individual owners. That doesn’t make objects more important than people, but it creates an interesting counterpoint of caring, and raises many thought-provoking questions about how we understand what matters. It’s not as simple, de Waal’s book asserts, as choosing life over art, people over things — or, it seems simple until you try to explain why. The destruction of the beautiful desk, for instance, seems so gratuitous, until we recognize that the heave over the handrail is not really about gilt or marquetry but about power and anger and hatred: in its own way, that act is as disrespectful of life, of humanity, as any of the physical cruelties the Ephrussi family suffers — or it is, at any rate, part of the same spectrum of horror. To refuse to mourn that loss is to capitulate, at least a little, to the logic of the looters, who see around them only expensive “stuff” to which the watching family has no right. But the Nazis do value the art they loot, in a way: this chilling episode is followed by a very different, methodical pillaging that benefited museums all over the Reich. What they don’t care about is the kind of story de Waal is telling, the intertwining of objects and people. Or maybe they understand it only too well and know that by breaking up collections they are furthering their work of erasing identities, like the official stamps (“‘Israel’ for the men, ‘Sara’ for the women”) that finally make de Waal cry.

For me, de Waal’s book — though it is about other things too — was most thought-provoking and powerful when it dealt with this intersection between people and their things. It’s too easy to take the attitude that possessions are only material goods. Sure, we can do without many of the things we have, if we are fortunate enough to have many things that are, strictly speaking, excessive to our needs. Once those minimal needs are met, though, things we accumulate can play many different roles and can carry a great deal of meaning. I was reminded of The Mill on the Floss and “Mrs Tulliver’s Teraphim“: George Eliot understood, too, how our possessions can be tangible aspects of our lives and characters — not symbols, but actual pieces of our lives.

The Hare with Amber Eyes explores these meanings for the netsuke by embedding their story in a range of contexts: personal, political, literary, historical, art-historical, aesthetic. I was fascinated by the worlds de Waal evokes: 1880s Paris, fin de siècle Vienna, post-war Japan. De Waal has an artist’s eye: his descriptions are specific, tactile, admiring but always also inquiring, so that we look around, as he does, with curiosity rather than reverence. Here is his description of the Palais Ephrussi in Vienna, for example:

For rooms covered in gold, it is very, very dark. The walls are divided into panels, each delineated by ribbons of gilding. The fireplaces are massive events of marble. The floors are intricate parquet. All the ceilings are divided into networks of lozenges and ovals and triangular panels by heavy gilded mouldings, raised and coffered into intricate scrolls of neoclassical froth. Wreaths and acanthus top the heady mixture. All the panels are painted by Christian Griepenkerl, the acclaimed decorator of the ceilings of the auditorium of the Opera. Each room takes a classical theme: in the billiard room, we have a series of Zeus’s conquests — Leda, Antiope, Danaë and Europa — each undraped girl held up by putti and velvet draping. The music-room has allegories of the muses; in the salon, miscellaneous goddesses sprinkle flowers; the smaller salon has random putti. The dining-room, achingly obvious, has nymphs pouring wine, draped with grapes or slung with game. There are more putti, for no good reason, sitting on doorway lintels.

PalaisEphrussi“For no good reason” — and then, a bit later, still marveling at the lavishness of decoration, he wonders, “What was Ignace trying to do? Smother his critics?” It’s too much for de Waal, this cold marble opulence: he finds it unpleasantly slippery, with “nothing to grip onto.” This kind of display seems decadent, overwrought, excessive. What is the use of such splendour, in a family home? Or anywhere? Should the splendor of the Palais impress us, make us envious, or spur us to revolutionary zeal? Can we be both repelled (“I run my hands along the walls,” de Waal says, “and they feel slightly clammy”) and delighted — because this kind of wealth has prompted, supported, or preserved so much beauty for the rest of us? I was reminded, as I puzzled over this, of Trollope’s The Warden:

Who would not feel charity for a prebendary when walking the quiet length of that long aisle at Winchester, looking at those decent houses, that trim grass-plat, and feeling, as one must, the solemn, orderly comfort of the spot! Who could be hard upon a dean while wandering round the sweet close of Hereford, and owning that in that precinct, tone and colour, design and form, solemn tower and storied window, are all in unison, and all perfect! Who could lie basking in the cloisters of Salisbury, and gaze on Jewel’s library and that unequalled spire, without feeling that bishops should sometimes be rich!

Maybe it’s because the netsuke themselves are so small, so unassuming, that they carry us through this difficulty so well. Though they are worth a lot of money, they aren’t out of our reach — anyone’s reach — the way allegorical paintings and putti are. They are an intimate art form, and the story that de  Waal tells is also an intimate one, of parents and children and cousins, of friends as well as patrons, lovers as well as great artists.

As the fortunes of the Ephrussi decline, the world of the netsuke contracts and becomes less elite, more domestic: from Charles Ephrussi’s elegant Paris house, where they share the honors of display with paintings by Renoir and Degas and Monet, to the marble Palais Ephrussi on the Ringstrasse in Vienna, to a house in Tunbridge Wells and then to Japan, where we have first seen them in the cabinet in the Tokyo home of de Waal’s great-uncle Iggie. Finally, they take up residence in a vitrine de Waal salvaged from the Victoria and Albert Museum, “in [his] Edwardian house in a pleasant London street.” Is this a come down or a coming home? If de Waal had written the kind of story he feared, a “sepia saga,” we might see the netsuke as remnants of a lost golden age. But that would never have really been their story, which did not, after all, begin when Charles Ephrussi bought them as “a complete and spectacular collection from Sichel.” There’s so much that we still don’t know about them, such as how they came to be together in that collection. Through The Hare with Amber Eyes we’ve also never lost sight of what the title immediately emphasizes: their particularity. They are not 264 of the same thing but 264 different, highly individual, carvings. If I were to risk a “slip into symbolism” of my own, I might say that they represent the proliferating individuality of the people who have surrounded them — bought them, displayed them, but above all, handled them. Although the book ends, their story is not over: “the netsuke begin again,” de Waal concludes. From their perspective, he is only their latest custodian.

For a book that is rich with both human love and human tragedy, then, The Hare with Amber Eyes ends by making all that activity seem eerily fleeting: these tiny objects remind us to question our own self-importance, or perhaps to measure it by how we serve them, the objects that make up our lives.

I’ve worried how I would construct a life entirely through objects.

You take an object from your pocket and put it down in front of you and you start. You begin to tell a story.

Facing the Sunshine: E. M. Forster, A Room with a View

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

room

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won’t do harm — yes, choose a place where you won’t do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.

The pleasure I took in reading and thinking and talking about  Howards End was one reason I decided it was time to reread A Room with a View. Another was that I felt in need of cheering up, in a general kind of way, and A Room with a View is a novel that doesn’t just make me laugh but also fills me with a glow of what I can only call delight. Comedy alone (as I recently found with Mapp and Lucia) isn’t necessarily uplifting: too acid an undertone can compromise the pleasure and make you (or me, at any rate) feel a little smaller for having partaken. A Room with a View, however, is so humane, so forgiving — even in its satire — of the muddles we all make of our lives, that it always makes me feel better, bigger, more hopeful.

Zadie Smith quotes Forster calling A Room with a View “bright and merry,” and it is, but it never ignores shadows, darkness, or trouble. I was thinking, reading it this time, that its brightness really relies on its constant reminders that the light is always embattled, that its characters’ small struggles — to be, to do, to love, what is right and beautiful — are part of a wider struggle, the same one Dorothea invokes in Middlemarch when explaining her guiding belief to Will:

That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil — widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.

Though her struggles are longer and more painful than Lucy’s, Dorothea is more consistent in her pursuit of the light — less prone to deceive herself, or to lie to others. Wrong as she so often is, she at least sees more clearly through the stifling inadequacies of petty convention. Lucy, on the other hand, is constrained and inhibited by convention to the point that she is almost unable (and certainly unwilling) to recognize love and truth when they offer themselves. As a result, as Forster’s wonderful chapter titles itemize for us, she lies — to George, to Cecil, to Mr. Beebe, to Mrs. Honeychurch, to Freddy, to Mr. Emerson, but worst of all, to herself. Her lies put her among “the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words. . . . The night received her,” Forster intones solemnly. “I have been into the dark,” George tells her urgently, “and I am going back into it, unless you will try to understand.” “It is again the darkness creeping in,” exclaims Mr. Emerson, despairing; “it is hell.”

It is,” as the narrator says, “the old, old battle of the room with the view,” and the joy of the novel is that even as we feel the horror of violence and death and the lesser but equally inexorable horror of everything Lucy must overcome, we see the view open up, we see the light and the violets and the sunshine, we heed the driver’s cry of “Courage and love!”

It’s easier, in a way, to scorn a joyful ending, to belittle as unserious a novel that champions happiness, than to admire novels that rend our hearts with “all the troubles of all people on the face of the earth.” But just as Will cautions Dorothea against the “fanaticism of sympathy,” we shouldn’t shut joy out of literature even when – maybe, especially when – we are all too aware that the world is full of troubles. Sometimes it’s important to stand facing the sunshine.

Last Week In My Classes: Exams and What’s Next

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

The final exams for my classes were last Friday and Saturday, both at 8:30 a.m., both in Dalplex, our main athletics facility, which is converted during the exam period into, well, this:

dalplex

Looks depressing, doesn’t it? And it is, but it is also efficient: a cadre of assistant invigilators patrols the aisles, helping to bring extra exam booklets or escort students to the washroom, while an appointed Chief Invigilator works out the seating plan, makes announcements, and keeps track of the time. Though in some ways I prefer being in a smaller room alone with “my” students, the impersonality of this set-up is not all bad. And I always put out candy (toffees, this year), which I hope is at least very mildly cheering. (I was always too nervous to eat before exams, which meant my blood sugar would crash in the first half hour or so: a toffee or two would have really helped me out, which is why I do this. That, and because despite any rumors to the contrary, I’m a friendly person!)

Anyway, the consequence of having both exams back to back like this and quite late in the exam period is that I went from being completely caught up on work the previous Thursday night to having approximately 120 exams to mark. I decided not to start on them until Monday — I’m trying to reclaim my weekends, which is rarely possible during the term when you have a Monday morning class, but it seems like a good principle as far as work-life balance goes. So Monday morning I settled in, and Friday around mid-day I filed the second set of final grades.

It was not a pleasant week, and as usual it raised all kinds of questions for me about final exams. This is such familiar territory on this blog now that I’m reluctant to rehash the arguments for and against them. I wish I could do without them altogether, but experience teaches me that I can’t, at least not in classes that aren’t as self-selecting as 4th-year seminars (where I have never given exams). I’m almost as tired of fretting about exams as I am of marking them! The solution that seems most reasonable to me at this point — since the chief purpose of them in lower-level classes is to motivate work and attention during the term — is to change the kind of exams I give to make them less laborious for me to mark. I’ll be thinking more about that when I work out the assignment sequences for my next classes … which won’t be for months, because I’m on sabbatical as of the end of December!

Yes, that’s right, I have made it through to another teaching-free term. I was on sabbatical when I first started this blog, in 2007, then again in 2011. I got a lot done both times, but in somewhat miscellaneous ways. This time I am determined to be more deliberate about how I use my time, to get less distracted by small projects (essays and reviews that aren’t really part of anything, even if individually I’m proud of them). It has been very intellectually stimulating paying more attention to “that tempting range of relevancies called the universe,” but this sabbatical is about my “particular web” — which, yes, means that George Eliot book I keep talking about but not actually writing.

Actually, that’s not quite fair, since in the summer I wrote a kind of prospectus for the book — and since the five essays I’ve written on George Eliot (for Open Letters and the Los Angeles Review of Books) are all, in a way, trial runs at the kind of criticism I want the book to represent. That’s a long way from producing something longer and more unified, though, and I have been realizing how long it has been since I really thought on a larger scale than “essay” or “article.” I haven’t really worked at anything book-length since I turned my thesis into my first book; my second book was an edited collection, for which I did a great deal of work and wrote an introduction, but that’s not at all the same thing! The first challenges for me, then, are both conceptual and logistical. The prospectus really helped me with the former; now I have to face up to the latter by breaking down a large and still fairly vague plan into manageable first steps. And I have to make sure that I don’t let myself get too tempted away from this still frighteningly open-ended project to more concrete things I can finish up now. The short-term sense of accomplishment is like psychological toffee, really: you get a useful little sugar rush from it, but it won’t serve you well in the long term.

And that’s one reason I’m going to block off further thoughts, meditations, plans, and preparations for next fall’s classes. I love drafting syllabi! Choosing reading lists is fun! Even building Blackboard sites has its satisfactions, because it involves many discrete tasks that can be neatly itemized and checked off — but they really do not need to be done now. If you catch me working on them before July 1, when my sabbatical ends, rap my virtual knuckles, please! (Well, I will have to submit course descriptions and book orders in March or April, I think, but anything beyond that is not allowed!) I think this blog shows how seriously I take my teaching and how much time I put into it, but the point of a sabbatical is that you focus on the other things you’re supposed to be doing as a scholar.

Something I think may help me maintain a different kind of focus next term is spending less time in my office. We’ll see: it can be a very quiet, productive space for me. But it has been an emotionally very up-and-down term for me, especially where thinking about work is concerned, and there have also been a lot of specific work-related stresses. As a result, I’ve been feeling a strong desire to put a little distance between myself and the campus. I had been imagining I might take my laptop to our new library, which has finally opened to the public. But although it does seem to be a very exciting, vibrant space, my two visits so far have been discouraging about it as a potential workplace for me. We live close to the Atlantic School of Theology, which has a library with a pretty nice view; my guess is that it’s pretty quiet, so I might give it a try. Even just fixing on a different campus location for writing might be enough to break the mental cycle of weariness and discouragement.

The other thing I’m committed to is signing up for Jo VanEvery’s “Meeting With Your Writing” — for which, it occurs to me, I’d best be in my campus office, so I have a landline, but that’ll be fine for such a specific purpose.

So! That’s this term put to bed and next term planned out — in theory, at least. But now I’m taking a break to read, bake, and generally unwind and enjoy our quiet holiday traditions.Inspired by Howards End, I’m rereading A Room with a View, which I love as much as always; I’ve got a mental TBR list yards long; and I see several book-shaped parcels under the tree, which is always exciting. I’ll also be putting up a couple of year-end round-up posts here soon (here are last year’s).

Jo Walton, Ha’Penny: My Two Cents’ Worth

Rohan Maitzen20 Comments

waltonI didn’t love Jo Walton’s Farthing: in my brief review at GoodReads I admired the ingenuity of the premise and the “nice economy” of Walton’s development of her alternative history, but I thought the mystery itself wasn’t very interesting, and that it lined up too neatly with the predictions you would readily make about a crime story set in a Britain that has made peace with Hitler. But I know a lot of people who are big fans of Walton’s work, and “not loving” is not at all the same as “not liking at all,” so I thought I’d have a go at Ha’Penny, the second in the “Small Change” series.

And, again, I find myself a bit let down. It too is neatly executed, but again it felt obvious — not so much in the details of the plot, but in the larger story it’s telling us about the creeping moral paralysis of appeasement and the evils of tyranny. It is certainly possible in theory to introduce moral complexity into a novel about a plan to blow up Hitler, but I didn’t find any here, except, I guess, for the structural irony Inspector Carmichael recognizes at the end — that by doing his job as an officer of the law, he has preserved the very devil’s bargain under which so many (himself included) are suffering. But that’s not particularly subtle, and neither are the lessons our narrator Viola gets from the man fondly coercing her into violent resistance. “I don’t know if you’ll understand,” he says, with condescension that, unhappily, Viola deserves,

 but there’s a thing it’s hard to give a name. It’s what we fought for in Ireland when you wouldn’t give it to us, and it’s what’s been lost on the Continent — I could call it freedom, or self-determination, but that’s too abstract. It’s the idea that one man’s as good as the next, before the law, whoever he is. It’s the idea behind the French Revolution, but it’s lost now in France, where old Petain licks Hitler’s boots. It’s the idea that built America, but they’re too frightened over there now even to elect old Joe Kennedy instead of Lindbergh with his talk of keeping down the Jews and the blacks.

“This isn’t going in, is it, love?” he asks Viola, who replies, “I don’t know . . . I do care about individual liberty. . . . But I don’t think liberty is something you get by blowing people up.” This is all hardly breathtaking, either for the sophistication of the dialogue itself or for the depth of the moral and political insights on either side — and that’s how I felt about the book as a whole too. Tyranny bad, liberty good, appeasement corrupting: we get it!

To be fair, I think some of this simple-mindedness comes from Viola, who is another of the ingenue narrators Walton alternates with her third-person account of Carmichael’s investigation. Carmichael himself is a sympathetically rendered character whose personal situation nicely encapsulates the insidiously encroaching pressures of dictatorship. As Ha’Penny ends, for instance, he has resigned himself to running an English equivalent of the Gestapo — to be called, with nice historical resonance, “The Watch” — partly because he has little choice and partly because he hopes he might have “the chance to do some good — to turn judicious blind eyes, and to make it better than it might have been.” It’s obviously a deal with the devil (did I mention that the bad guys in these novels are Nazis, or near enough?) and the road to hell is paved with good intentions … and the temptation to lapse into cliches when explaining what’s up is symptomatic of the problem I have with these novels.

It’s not that Walton is wrong about tyranny or Nazism or appeasement, or that her vision of this alternative future isn’t both plausible and a kind of cautionary tale for our present — but she hardly needed to create an alternative history to demonstrate any of her points, and the scenarios she comes up with are much less interesting than so many stories of actual people who cooperated with the Nazis in different ways and for various good purposes, stories that swamp us with the kind of moral complexity that I think these two books have notably lacked.

“It feels ours”: E. M. Forster, Howards End

Rohan Maitzen18 Comments

MAO.7375.cvr compI know of things they can’t know of, and so do you. We know that there’s poetry. We know that there’s death. They can only take them on hearsay. We know this is our house, because it feels ours. Oh, they may take the title-deeds and the doorkeys, but for one night we are at home.

I have been in a real reading slump lately. For a while nothing I’ve started and stopped (or even the few that I’ve started and finished) has felt very satisfying, and one reason has been that they’ve felt too slight — that essential quality that (thanks to a friend who studied library science) I’ve come to call “aboutness” has been elusive, simplistic, or (as far as I’ve been able to tell) just missing. This is one way, I suppose, that my quest for novels that are “teachable” lines up with my quest for novels that really excite me as a reader: my ideal novel satisfies both head and heart, appeals to both the aesthete and the ethical explorer in me, gives me language and stories but also ideas that engage me.

I think Howards End is one of those ideal books for me. I hesitate only because I’ve just read it for the first time — astonishing, I know — and so I’m still thinking it over, and not feeling entirely up to the task. (I don’t think Howards End is a novel for beginners,* exactly, though it certainly offered some immediate readerly pleasures.) Until now I didn’t even really know what the novel was about, though I had miscellaneous tidbits stored away from having heard about it so often — “Only connect,” of course, and something about Schlegels and Wilcoxes, and a house that obviously stood for something more than a nice place to live. I probably knew a bit more about it than that, in some minimal sense of “knew,” because I’ve read and admired Zadie Smith’s essay on Forster in Changing My Mind and also researched Forster a bit myself when teaching A Room With a View (long one of my favorite novels). But unless I’m reading really purposefully, not much sticks with me when I read about a novel I don’t know myself. It’s a kind of self-protective selective amnesia, perhaps, so that I remain open-minded when I finally get around to it.

So I started Howards End with a lack of specific expectations that was at once liberating and, ultimately, somewhat disabling. It’s nice to read along and feel you are discovering for yourself what a book is about (notations on the back page of my edition include “politics,” “Beethoven!” “Monet vs. the umbrella,” “odd narrator,” “house = a spirit,” “Schlegels vs. Wilcoxes,” “men don’t know” / “his superiority,” and “only connect!”). But it’s also frustrating — if provoking, in a good way — to reach the end and know there has been more going on than you knew to keep track of from the beginning, and so this reading is, even more than usual, only a preliminary one.

Reading is always a work in progress, though, right? And you have to start somewhere. I’ll start with those notations, then, as they indicate the issues that revealed themselves to me during this first reading. It wasn’t hard to identify as the (or, perhaps, a) central conflict the difference between the world as the Schlegels see and experience it and the world of the Wilcoxes. “The truth is,” Margaret says to her sister, with a combination of surprise and confusion,

that there is a great outer life that you and I have never touched — a life in which telegrams and anger count. Personal relations, that we think supreme, are not supreme there. There love means marriage, settlements, death, death duties. So far I’m clear. But here my difficulty. This outer life, though obviously horrid, often seems the real one — there’s grit in it. It does breed character. Do personal relations lead to sloppiness in the end?

They do, in fact, and that sloppiness is one thing the novel makes (paradoxically) perfectly clear. I think this is part of what Zadie Smith means when she talks about Forster’s “infamous muddle,” that personal things (feelings, relationships, needs, demands, desires, love, jealousy, betrayal, even the passivity of indifference) don’t line up in organized ways, or lead to elegant solutions, no matter how good our intentions, or the novelist’s. It’s the outer life that has form and structure, and the interplay between these forces of order and disorder is the sum of life — though not of any individual life, since for Forster those mostly seem to fall on one side or the other.

I saw, then, though I’m sure didn’t entirely understand, this aspect of Howards End: the opposition between that Wilcox life of “telegrams and anger” and control, and the Schlegel life of art and ideas and impulses. What I didn’t see until fairly far along was that Howards End is a ‘condition of England’ novel: this didn’t occur to me until people in the novel starting talking very explicitly about England — its past, its future, its empire. The version of this question that I’m familiar with, from novelists like Dickens and Gaskell, is a much more literal one than Forster’s, at least in its framing. His questions seem more abstract or theoretical than material, though they do have practical dimensions (as shown by the elaborate game of “how should the millionaire leave his money,” or the eventual distribution of resources among the characters). The Wilcox / Schlegel antagonism embodies this social and political question, which is about which values will come to define “the way we live now.” It may be an extension of the Dickens – Gaskell version, actually, because they are also worrying about the attitudes and feelings that lead to social and political conditions and reforms. But I’m not used to Forster’s way of posing the question: there’s a good starting point for my next reading.

howardsendLeonard Bast seems like a key (if a cryptic one) to Forster’s “condition of England” question. Not that he’s the answer to it: far from it! He seemed utterly pathetic to me for some time, and then I recoiled from my own snobbery and, as a result, also from the Schlegels, who really treat him very oddly from beginning to end. Leonard makes sure that we don’t oversimplify the Wilcox – Schlegel conflict — by assuming, for instance, that, in contrast to the Schlegels’ free-spirited life of the mind, the Wilcoxes are the unequivocal villains of the piece. Again, far from it, which is something even Margaret acknowledges when she observes that the privileges she and her sister enjoy have been won and protected for them by Wilcoxes who have “worked and died in England for thousands of years.” I thought it would be Margaret and Henry’s son who became heir to Howards End, because that would neatly balance their two worlds. But it turns out it’s Helen and Leonard’s, and I’m not really sure what to make of that. I can’t see what Leonard brings to the future, to be honest! Another place, then, for further reflection.

I was interested that Forster’s critique of the Wilcoxes was so gendered. Clearly Margaret and Helen are liberated from some specific constraints of sex (is either of them a ‘New Woman‘?), and there are moments of direct feminist assertion (“A new feeling came over her; she was fighting for women against men.”). And Mr. Wilcox’s inability to “connect” (“you cannot connect,” Margaret exclaims in her wonderful denunciation) seems tied to the particular kind of masculinity he embodies: strong, decisive, pragmatic, but also unreflective, controlling, possessive (as literalized in the way he overrides his wife’s attempt to will Howards End to Margaret). We seem to be in Three Guineas territory here, with the intertwining of manliness, despotism, capitalism, and imperialism.

I seem to have said a lot already for someone who admits to being a novice with this famous novel! The last thing I’ll comment further on for now, then, is that scribbled notation “odd narrator.” There is something very casual, almost artless, about the way the story is told, from the shoulder-shrugging opening line (“One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister”) through the many equally haphazard intrusions, but also the apparent uncertainty of the narrator about what even happens (“The friendship between Margaret and Mrs. Wilcox … may perhaps have had its beginning at Speyer” — what, don’t you know? What kind of narrator are you?). The pacing is odd too: the plot moves ahead in fits and starts, building momentum then slowing for meticulous detail then jumping across crucial events with no explanation or transition (Mrs. Wilcox walks out of Chapter X just fine, only to turn up as the corpse at the funeral that opens Chapter XI). By the end, though, the novel turns out not to have been random or careless at all but to have a strong and quite balanced structure: what could be neater than that long-delayed revelation about Mrs. Wilcox’s thwarted will and the discovery by the Schlegel sisters that the house they have (from the Wilcox point of view) invaded and colonized, was always already, in some moral sense, theirs — not to mention always theirs in spirit? What’s at stake in Forster’s denial of the control he obviously has? What could be less muddled than the sense he gives us of being in a muddle? If, as Zadie Smith suggests, this is art in service of an ethical vision, it’s a far different one (I’m pretty sure) than Stephen Blackpool’s “‘Tis a muddle.'”

And with that, off I go to reread Zadie Smith, who seems to have sorted a lot of this out. Imperfect as my own understanding of Howards End is, I’m really glad I’ve finally read the novel for myself so that (with her help and others’ – including many of yours, I expect) I can begin the process of figuring out what it means.

*Update: It has been brought to my attention that this phrasing seems to suggest that I think you need to be some kind of expert to read Howards End — that only, perhaps, “superior” readers should attempt it at all. That is not what I meant (I hope readers who know me at all would not have thought so, either!), but I can see that my wording was inept. I meant that it struck me as a novel that, for first-time readers of it (beginners) like me, is hard to make sense of and maybe even, as a result, to take unqualified pleasure in. Other novels (A Room with a View, to pick another Forster example) seem to me much more immediately intelligible on a first reading. Obviously, with any novel YMMV, and no doubt there are readers who appreciated Howards End unreservedly on a first reading. I am not among them, as I often felt mildly thwarted by my own ignorance or uncertainty about what was going on. I was trying to articulate both what that experience felt like and what I thought its causes were. “I think Howards End is not a novel that’s very welcoming to newcomers” would perhaps have been a better way to put it.