Summer Plans: Adding Things Up

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

Finally, the winter term is well and truly concluded (our annual May Marks Meeting was yesterday). As my last few posts show, I wallowed in aimless reading for a while after classes ended (aimless in the sense of “not in service of anything else,” not pointless or useless: it was certainly a very interesting run of books!), and then this past week my parents have been visiting, so I’ve been spending less time on social media and more time being sociable in person. (I had written “actually being sociable” but then realized how much that would misrepresent how I feel about my time online and the relationships I’ve formed here, which are just as “actual” to me as any of my “F2F” ones!)

And now it’s time for another end of term ritual, which is sorting out what I hope to accomplish in the next couple of months, while the fall term is still remote enough not to demand any attention beyond monitoring my waiting lists. I have mixed feelings as I look back at last year’s post about this. I did get the Middlemarch for Book Clubs site completed, but I haven’t really figured out how to get the word out about it. I’ve made some tentative efforts on my own, and I had some dim but disappointed hopes about possible synergies with the Middlemarch readalong at The Toast, but the biggest boost has certainly come courtesy of the generous mention of it by the Atlantic’s 1book140 Twitter book club. This month I’ve also been invited to participate in a Twitter “party,” so if you’re on Twitter, feel free to join in! I’ll post a notice here when I know the details. I may make some changes to the site this summer based on my observation of what actual book clubs talk about when they talk about Middlemarch, though I remain determined that the site will reflect the kind of conversations I like best and want to promote, not the more solipsistic kind that still seem to be typical of the guides included with new releases.

This time last year I also had aspirations to get a lot done on my phantom book project: “the final, most ambitious but at this point most amorphous plan is to think about where I’m going with the various George Eliot essays I’ve written over the past few years: do they, could they, add up to something larger, perhaps some kind of cross-over book project?” That question of what my “various” publications add up to has been fraught to me since a dispiriting interview last year at work about my prospects for promotion. Now, I knew perfectly well that if I chose to apply, mine would be (will be) a tricky case, and I wasn’t at all sure that I was in a position to make a strong application, which is why I set up the meeting in the first place. (Getting promoted to full professor is not a high priority for me anyway: if it were, I would be doing different kinds of things with my time, for just this reason!) But as my list of non-traditional publications and projects grew, it seemed like it was worth having a chat about how my c.v. looked to someone who would have to make a supporting case if I did apply … and the response (to put it mildly) was dismissive: “All this [with a wave of the hand towards the Open Letters and LA Review of Books essays] doesn’t really add up to anything.” There are ways and ways to deliver negative judgments, of course, and that one could have been made in a less deflating way. It might have been worth considering the possibility that they do add up to something (knowledge dissemination, anyone?), if not the usual thing. Still, that was a good preview of the challenges I would face if I chose to pursue promotion without a c.v. that looks more like what academics expect. If there were a book there, however — even a different kind of book … well, academics really like books.

Now, the book I aspire to write is not an academic book. And the reason I want to write it is not that it might help me get promoted. But the observation that my work wasn’t adding up to much is the kind of thing that mattered anyway because it made me think about what I hoped “all this” would add up to, or, indeed, whether I thought it already did add up to something. A body of work is a cumulative something, isn’t it? So there’s that, which isn’t nothing. And yet it isn’t a whole lot, compared to some (as bodies of work go, mine is petite, we might say!) and it’s not as if I’ve established myself in the non-academic world in some marked way. Indeed, the challenge of making yourself known in the broader book world is pretty overwhelming!

It would be nice if I was learning from the process, though, as if the small steps I have taken so far were building up to some kind of greater insight, if not some separate and larger-scale accomplishment. Who am I, as a critic? What can I do? That’s the kind of question that my book project will help me answer, for myself if for no one else. I did not get as far on it last summer as I hoped, but I did do some ground-clearing work, including a survey of everything I’d written so far on George Eliot and a stop-overthinking-it post on why I like George Eliot “so very much.” I got caught up in smaller writing projects over the fall and spring, but one of those was my review of Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch, so that kept me thinking about how to write about George Eliot for a broad audience. I have also started several files and documents to help me conceptualize the project. It helps me to believe it will all actually come to something that last summer I began talking informally with an agent interested in helping me get it done; this summer I am determined to ward off the distraction and temptation of other reviews and essays (for instance, I was really thinking about pitching a Robert B. Parker piece to the LA Review of Books to follow on from last year’s Dick Francis essay! that would be so fun to do!) and start turning the brainstorming into actual readable writing.

In the last couple of weeks, and especially the last couple of days, I have just begun doing this…and here’s an interesting thing I’ve noticed. I have already looked up several old blog posts of mine to draw on ideas or references in them that bear on the critical framework I am trying to set up. Yes, the ones explicitly on George Eliot are among them, but so too are some of the ones I’ve written about principles of criticism more generally (such as, just today, this one on Ronan McDonald’s The Death of the Critic,). Will this material end up in the final version of whatever it is that I’m writing? I don’t know. But it was encouraging to realize that my previous work (unofficial and informal as it may seem in some contexts) was relevant and helpful: ideas I’ve been working out here, both explicitly and implicitly, are shaping the way I am now thinking and writing. The critical voice I’ve been practicing, too, here and at OLM and LARB, is the one I want to write the book in — not the much dryer, drearier tone of even my most recent academic papers. This scattered work may not add up to a single thing that’s tangible or measurable, then, but it may do that eventually, and in the meantime what it adds up to is, quite simply, the intellectual sum of all of its parts. Looked at that way, it seems like quite a lot.

“Glassy Malignity”: Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

hollinghurstThe Line of Beauty joins an illustrious line of novels I’ve read that I admire but am unable to like. It makes me feel better about saying this that I’ve recently been reminded of Henry James’s admission, in “The Art of Fiction,” that “nothing … will ever take the place of the good old fashion of ‘liking’ a work of art or not liking it; the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test.” Like him, I accept that ‘liking’ is a primitive form of criticism (hence the need for appreciation, which at least begins to substitute rigor and objectivity for impressions and idiosyncrasy) but believe we can’t and shouldn’t expect to do without it. A lot of the best literary conversations, in my experience at least, begin there — though they never end there.

It is useful that I can lean a little on James here. For one thing, James’s The Golden Bowl is at the top of the list of novels I’ve read with admiration but no pleasure (along with Madame Bovary and Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels — oh, and I mustn’t forget The Good Soldier — I told you it was an illustrious group!). It’s nice to know that James accepts, in principle at least, that some readers will not like his novels. Further, The Line of Beauty is a kind of explicit homage to James — or, perhaps more accurately, an invocation. Its protagonist, Nick Guest, who is repeatedly identified as an “aesthete,” is himself an admirer of the Master, a post-graduate student at work on a thesis about style in the English novel (for which James, of course, is a central case study), and eventually a collaborator in a mostly-pretend project to produce a film adaptation of James’s The Spoils of Poynton.  You can hardly turn a page of the novel, or turn around in the world of the novel, without bumping up against James somewhere.

I understand that for some readers that would be a cause for celebration, not complaint. The annoyed claustrophobia I experienced while reading The Line of Beauty vividly reminded me of the intense months I spent with The Golden Bowl as I worked on my essay critiquing Martha Nussbaum’s fixation on it in Love’s Knowledge. In particular, I recalled an essay by Robert Reilla on “Henry James and the Morality of Fiction” which sums up the adulatory smugness evident in the nickname ‘the Master’:

For the Jamesian, the work of James is really above and beyond most other fiction; it is a high palace of art which he enters with genuine reverence, by virtue of those qualities which James himself required of the ideal critic—perception at the pitch of passion, insight that is only once removed from the original creative act.  In James’s work the Jamesian perceives the quintessence of conscious art; he learns to delight in the process of total artistic consciousness presenting, or projecting, vessels of consciousness nearly as full as its own. . . For the Jamesian, only James is really satisfactory—other fiction seems fumbling and accidental, or easy and obvious, or simply gross.  The Jamesian nearly always speaks from heights; it is impossible for him not to judge by Jamesian standards, because in order to become a Jamesian he has had to ascend to these standards.

For people who like this kind of thing, The Line of Beauty is unquestionably the kind of thing they like: there’s nothing fumbling or accidental here! The Line of Beauty is as elegantly designed and impeccably stylish as a novel about selfish, greedy, superficial people could possibly be. But as Nick thinks about the gorgeous luxury magazine he has edited (named, with perfect self-referentiality, Ogee), “its splendour had a glint to it, a glassy malignity. No,” he goes on, “it was very good. It was lustrous. The lustre was perfected and intense — it was the shine of marble and polish.” It is, in other words, beautiful, but dubiously worthwhile — the magazine, that is. I am not so sure about the novel. Is it possible to lavish such well-crafted sentences on a  morally compromised world without glamorizing it? The novel is a satire on the moral and emotional hollowness brought on by the thoughtless pursuit of wealth, power, and gratification, but does its self-consciousness mean that it offers or embodies any kind of alternative? Does it achieve what the magazine — with its full-page ads from Bulgari and BMW —  does not? Asked about The Spoils of Poynton, Nick explains,

It’s about someone who loves things more than people. And who ends up with nothing, of course. I know it’s bleak, but then I think it’s probably a very bleak book, even though it’s essentially a comedy.

That is also a pretty good description of The Line of Beauty, but does its presence turn the novel into metafiction? I didn’t think that Nick was sufficiently detached from the life he lives with his wealthy friends (for all that they see him as the outsider, the aesthete) to stand as a critique or to add the missing dimension — call it love, or perhaps humanity. Its absence is felt, and sometimes poignantly conveyed, by the characters, but nothing in the novel fills that space. A vacuum remains where another novelist would have put the contrasting elements, the story that looks beyond the way we live now to the way we could, or should, live tomorrow.

A novel in that spirit, however, or with that form, might not be Jamesian enough for Hollinghurst. It might, for instance, be called Our Mutual Friend. I would  like it better — but as James also reminds us, ““the house of fiction has not one window, but a million.”

Broken Heart of Darkness: Hilary Mantel, A Change of Climate

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

mantelclimateA Change of Climate is an odd book. I didn’t love it, perhaps because I didn’t know quite what to make of it. It reminded me a lot of Joanna Trollope’s earlier novels — the “aga saga” ones, like A Village Affair, or Marrying the Mistress. It has a small cast of intertwined characters, all more or less eccentric, all more or less needy or damaged or just muddling along. The plot is essentially a family drama, its focus on the ebb and flow of people’s feelings (love, resentment, antagonism, yearning). But the resemblance is only superficial: though Trollope’s novels are not necessarily comfortable or reassuring, Mantel’s is built around a core of trauma so devastating that Ralph and Anna, the main characters, barely name it. The particular event takes place long before the novel’s present and far from its present location. Mantel explains it (naturally) better than I ever could:

…they’ve buried their experience, which they can do because it is something that happened in Africa, a place which, to their friends in England, is in any case the realms of the inexplicable. Africa becomes a metaphor for what we do not explore; in the novel it’s no longer a solid place that one can travel to, but somewhere consigned to the subconscious.

It’s a tricky game, turning the cliché of how Africa has so often been imagined (as the Other, as the heart of darkness) against itself like that. For a while, reading the novel, I thought Mantel had, unwittingly, fallen into the trap — but even her characters are self-conscious about it. When they get home, that’s one reason they try not to talk about their experience: “if we tell them what we think has happened, we will pander to their filthy prejudices, we will seem to traduce a whole nation: savages, they will say.”

Perhaps one lesson might be that they ought not to have gone, taking their naïve will to do good, their pragmatic but inevitably ignorant and intrusive mission to help, to a country they cannot understand or belong to. Perhaps they should just have stayed home. But to see their suffering simply as a punishment for colonial presumption would be reductive. They do help, for one thing. And one of the layers of the novel is an inquiry into the value of doing good. The catastrophe comes upon them because they opened the door to it: “I decided to do a good action, and by it my life has been split open and destroyed.” Is it really better not to do what you think is good, though? “In choosing evil,” thinks Ralph, puzzling over the meaning and the implications of free will,

we collude with the principle of decay, we become mere vehicles of chaos, we become subject to the laws of a universe which tends back towards dissolution, the universe the devil owns. In choosing to do good we show we have free will, that we are God-designed creatures who stand against all such laws.

So I will be good, Ralph thought. That is all I have to do.

Yet in doing so, he lets in evil — or, as he comes to think, “malign chance.” The result is a horror, and then a hollow at the center of their moral and emotional lives. What do you do, after that? How do you live? Ralph and Anna raise a family and continue doing good, opening the door to every “sad case” that comes their way, but there’s no foundation for the new life they build, and so it is much more fragile, its misadventures more frightening, than either the village setting or the specific plot would lead you to expect. But to what end? What does it all mean? In the interview notes with Mantel at the end, she talks about A Place of Greater Safety, which was her first completed novel but wasn’t published until after she had had some success writing “contemporary novels.” She says that when it was published she saw it as a way of letting her readers know “I was something else as well: an accumulator and sifter and sorter of facts, dates and research.” I did love A Place of Greater Safety; maybe my problem is that I first came to Mantel through what she calls the “other side to my writing personality.” I enjoy well-dramatized facts, dates and research; for me, the elliptical quality of this novel was tantalizing but also somewhat disorienting.

Amateur Hour: Alan Rusbridger, Play It Again

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

rusbridgerI first learned about Play It Again, Alan Rusbridger’s account of his quest to learn Chopin’s great Ballade No.1, from Robert Winter’s recent review in the New York Review of Books. It’s a convincingly positive review, which is why it sent me out to get the book, but as I worked through Play It Again I found myself thinking that Winter had oversold it. The book does contain lots to interest, entertain, and inspire anyone who has ever puttered away at a keyboard. (As I’ve written about here before, that  includes me.) But it’s also formally slapdash, with related information — such as the rich analyses of the Ballade gleaned from conversations with a slew of great pianists, including Murray Perahia, Alfred Brendel, Daniel Barenboim, and Emanuel Ax, or meditations on the value and beauty of amateurism, or on the effects of the recording era on classical music, or about the neuroscience of music and memory — scattered across a relentlessly chronological and surprisingly dull (considering Rusbridger’s job) account of his day-to-day activities.  (Rusbridger is the Editor in Chief of The Guardian. To be fair, the non-musical bits might be of greater interest to someone keen to get an insider’s view of things like the phone-hacking scandal.) Winter describes it as “a limp diary format” and rightly notes that “the parts themselves provide little structural mooring.” But later he seems to excuse it, calling it “a conceit, a stream-of-consciousness platform for exploring the challenges of remaining human in a world that moves at the speed of Twitter.” I think that’s putting it kindly, if not grandiosely: to me, the “conceit” felt more like laziness, as if Rusbridger was not willing or able to put in more than 15 minutes a day on his book any more than on the Ballade — though there’s no doubt that the book reflects his genuine passion for music and his remarkable dedication to the Quixotic project of learning a piece Perahia warns him is “one of the hardest pieces in the repertoire.”

Winter also notes that “it is the author’s journey rather than his destination that we remember”: I didn’t think the journey was very compellingly told (again, a real narrative rather than a bit-by-bit accounting would, for me, have been more satisfying), but I also think Winter’s assessment may reflect a marketing trend as much as anything, that is, the apparently widespread preference for the personal angle (see recent related discussions at Wuthering Expectations). I didn’t really mind following Rusbridger’s journey, but one reason the destination is not very memorable is that he doesn’t in fact triumph (his final performance is OK, but not by any means flawless or inspired, by his own report), and a lot of what we hear along the way is kind of dull reiteration of his difficulties with one passage or another (“The section that still falls apart a bit is the big A major / E major section” etc.). The real substance is everything he learns around the project, and I ended Play It Again thinking that there must be other books that do a better job synthesizing and narrating this kind of information and offering more insight. In fact, Rusbridger’s own list of “Further Reading” gives me a few ideas, including Charles Cooke’s Piano for Pleasure. I’m also  reminded that I’d meant to look up Charles Rosen’s Music and Sentiment, brilliantly reviewed by Greg Waldmann in Open Letters Monthly a couple of years ago. And Tom at Wuthering Expectations reminds me that Wayne Booth also wrote about his own efforts as an amateur cellist: I’ve put his book, For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals, on request at the library.

One effect Play It Again had on me (besides making me wonder if I shouldn’t do a little practising this summer) was to make me pay much more attention to the Ballade: I’ve been listening to it a lot, including while I tried to follow along the annotated score that is my favorite part of Rusbridger’s book (he includes many of the specific comments made about the piece by the pianists he interviews). I’ve always thought it was a spectacular piece, but it’s not until you imagine trying to play it, or watch someone else physically engaged in it, that you appreciate just what a daunting thing it is. There are a lot of recordings of the Ballade on YouTube but not a lot of them are videos, and I love to be able to watch the pianist’s fingers. (After a childhood of always being reminded about this, it is an ingrained habit for me to sit on the left side of any theater, even when no piano is on the program!) Here’s Vladimir Horowitz in a bravura performance.

“The truth that’s fixed in the heart”: Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and In Shadow

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helprinThe only thing that’s really true, that lasts, and makes life worthwhile is the truth that’s fixed in the heart. That’s what we live and die for. It comes in epiphanies, and it comes in love, and don’t ever let frightened people turn you away from it.

In Sunlight and In Shadow is surely one of the riskiest novels I’ve read recently – riskier by far, at any rate, than Ian McEwan’s smart but pat Sweet Tooth, or even the ambitious but cumulatively disappointing Sacred Games. The Murderess is perhaps equally defiant of expectations , though it’s at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum: where The Murderess is grim, ruthless, and cruelly ironic, In Sunlight and In Shadow is radiant, romantic, and hopelessly idealistic. In his Wall Street Journal review, Sam Sacks called it “a sublime anachronism,” and now that I’ve read it I see what he meant: even though I can’t actually think of another novel with quite the same qualities, it reads like a throwback to another era, less because of anything it actually does or says but because it embraces nostalgia so openly. Yet somehow — perhaps because it never allows us to forget the price to be paid for a life worth remembering — it avoids cheap or simplistic sentimentality. It’s a novel that invites an unfashionable critical vocabulary: it’s aspirational, ennobling, inspiring, morally serious, beautiful, heartfelt.

In Sunlight and In Shadow has a simple (though dramatic) plot that is elevated to something very special by the language in which its told. In its insistence that we pay attention to it as something crafted deliberately out of words, the novel reminded me incessantly (and unexpectedly) of Cormac McCarthy’s fiction. Again they’re at opposite ends of a spectrum: McCarthy’s language alienates and defamiliarizes, while Helprin’s illuminates and rhapsodizes; McCarthy’s approach is relentless and unforgiving, though he offers us glimmers of grace, while Helprin is lovingly attentive, though as his title indicates, he does not spare us darkness and pain. Different as they are, though, both writers make the artifice of their writing constantly apparent, and thus they make readers constantly aware of their presence, much as an intrusive narrator does in a Victorian novel. I think this is risky because it exposes their idiosyncrasies and values as writers in a way that, say, McEwan’s deceptive directness does not: in McEwan’s prose (which is of course highly stylized in its own way) every word drops so crisply into place that the result feels inevitable and somehow impersonal, as if he has magically found the right word, of all possible words. I admire McEwan’s prose very much, but at the same time there’s something cold about it. In their very different ways, both McCarthy and Helprin seem more exposed through their writing: this is who I am, they seem to say; this is what I think a novel should do; this is my vision, my vocabulary, my art . . . are you with me? The risk is that the answer may well be “no” — an answer many people have certainly made to McCarthy, and that I suspect many people would also make to this novel.

I had moments of wavering myself. For one thing, the novel definitely requires a suspension, not of disbelief, but of cynicism. You have to accept (more than accept — believe in) the coup de foudre that launches its central love story, though it is less credible than any “meet cute” from romantic comedy: “he was oblivious of everything on account of a woman who then vanished, and left him as if struck by a blow.” You have to accept the lovers, Harry and Catherine, in all their youth and beauty and sublime confidence in each other and in love. The first time we see Harry his doorman tells a young boy “Now watch this guy. Watch what he does. He can fly.” Harry has, in fact, flown through the air, during his service in the 82nd Airborne during the war. Now he only appears to be flying because the watchers can’t see him land after he jumps. But the unreality of Harry is that he does seem to be above it all in some far less literal way. He’s not perfect, but he is elevated.

Harry has come back safely, though not unharmed, from the war. In coming back he believes he has brought with him a responsibility to live the life he fought for and his comrades died for. Some of the most memorable (and least mannered) parts of the novel are those set during the war. Stirring and significant in themselves, these sections are also essential to our understanding of why, in peacetime, Harry acts as he does, setting out on a quest to defeat the mobsters who are destroying his family business:

It was possible to lose everything in an instant or over time. It was possible to be confronted by forces, natural or otherwise, that one could not overcome by virtue. Courage, greatness, honesty, all could be defeated. He had understood this on the field of battle as it was illustrated by the way death chose among the soldiers. But after such a war, in which scores of millions had died, how could anyone tolerate corruption? . . . How could such a thing, after so much sacrifice, in a country where millions of men were now hardened soldiers, be allowed?

It’s a mission that is at once understandable, admirable, and infuriatingly quixotic, but Harry knows all this about it too, and that layer of self-consciousness was, for me, crucial in insulating In Sunlight and In Shadow against naïveté. Harry has had enough of people who think “they’re wise and worldly, having been disillusioned,” people who “mock things that humanity has come to love,”

things that people like me — who have spent years watching soldiers blown apart and incinerated, cities razed, and women and children wailing — have learned to love like nothing else: tenderness, ceremony, courtesy, sacrifice, love, form, regard. . . . They don’t have the courage to embrace or even to recognize the real, the consequential, the beautiful, because in the end those are the things that lacerate and wound, and make you suffer incomparably, because, in the end, you lose them.

He left a soldier, in other words, but has come back a knight — that speech tells us that Harry deliberately and defiantly embraces a chivalric ideal. It also tells us, I think, that Helprin too is making his stand against cynics masquerading as realists: In Sunlight and in Shadow tells exactly and unapologetically the kind of story (consequential, beautiful, lacerating) that Harry’s principles evoke.

But lurking in that romantic ideal is another source of my occasional unease with the novel: it seems to share Harry’s conviction that women are special sources of grace and inspiration, especially through their physical beauty: “women,” says Harry, “are the embodiment of love and the hope of all time”;

And to say that they neither need nor deserve protection, and that it is merely a strategy of domination, would be misjudge the highest qualities of the world. This is what I learned and what I managed to bring out with me from hell.

 It’s possibly that there’s some irony in the way his “deep consideration, devotion” plays out. When he carries out an elaborate scheme to rescue Catherine from her pending engagement to the society boor who, when she was 13, laid claim to her by raping her,  it turns out she does not need his intervention. Her courage in her own sphere is time and again shown (and often announced) as equal to Harry’s in his. She has wit, intelligence, moral rectitude — and yet even though we are assured that for Harry beauty is not, strictly speaking, an external trait (“because his sight was clear, the world was filled with beautiful women, whether the world called them that or not”), her physical loveliness is stressed again and again, with a strangely elegaic kind of voyeurism:

Even had her hands not been so beautiful, had her hair not been so glorious, had her face not been of breathtaking construction, had her youth not enveloped her like a rose, had her eyes not been so lovely, even had all this been different, the way she held herself, and her readiness to see, her fairness of judgment, and her goodness of heart would have made her beautiful beyond description. She was, like many, though not everyone by any means could see it, beautiful, just beautiful, beyond description.

In fairness, Harry is described as resembling a young Clark Gable, so they are meant to be well-matched in every way, but  it’s his physical presence, not his physical perfection, and certainly not his charm, that’s most often remarked. Harry himself insists that there’s nothing demeaning or controlling in his vision: “All I want is to be with you.” Clearly Catherine is persuaded, but I retained some hesitation about whether their love story might, if treated in a different register, have foundered on these rocks. To be adored is not quite the same as to be equal, after all, and putting women back on their pedestal could be seen, not as romantic, but as retrograde. And nothing in In Sunlight and In Shadow suggested to me thought we were meant to resist Harry, in this or anything else. Forget that usefully neutral term “protagonist”: he is every bit the novel’s hero.

But that faint disquiet aside (and I’d love to hear from other readers what they thought about that aspect of the novel), I loved In Sunlight and In Shadow. Rather than rehearse the plot, I’ll give a few more short samples of Helprin’s style, which is, as I’ve said, what I think makes the novel more than the sum of its parts — more than a love story, and a war story, and a quest plot. From the war story, a glimpse of a winter landscape:

Daylight revealed a nation of crows on the snow-covered plain. Thousands were in the sky or on the ground — flying in tightening circles, breaking off to glide down, running to take off, or walking like old people trying to dance. They fell from a white sky as if they had just been created, and their spirals echoed the columns of black smoke beyond them.

 From the love story, which is inseparable from the novel’s love affair with New York:

She wandered, overwhelmed by images — by thousands of faces, each telling of deep or despairing lives; by clouds garlanding the great buildings; by the engines of the city’s commerce; the wind lifting briefly the hem of a woman’s cream-colored coat as she glided south at the edge of Madison Square; the sun in blinding flashes upon a hundred thousand windows; bridges sailing high above blue waters and whitecaps; pigeons rising in almost exact synchrony from sidewalks darkened by rain, banking in a mathematically perfect curve, wings still, their perfection the gift of the omnipresent and invisible air.

And from the formally elegant, emotionally wrenching conclusion:

Had the story come full circle in the way that stories end, they would have walked quietly, Catherine and Harry, into the rest of their life, knowing that in the end the whole world is nothing more than what you remember and what you love, things fleeting and indefensible, light and beautiful, that were not supposed to last, echoing forever — golden leaves swept across the Esplanade, wind-polished bridges standing in the winter sun, the sound of Catherine’s song.

A tangled net of links: Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

sacredgamesEvery action flew down the tangled net of links, reverberating and amplifying itself and disappearing only to reappear again. . . . There was no escaping the reactions to your actions, and no respite from the responsibility. That’s how it happened. That was life.

Everything and everybody is connected, somehow, somewhere: this is the structuring principle of Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games. In that respect, at least, this door-stopper of a novel deserves its inevitable comparison to Dickens, as its multitude of plots and characters crisscross and converge in a manner reminiscent of Bleak House. It’s also Dickensian in its tendency towards self-indulgence: there are long stretches that seemed to me to have no real necessity or justification except the author’s own pleasure in including as many details as possible. And it covers Dickensian extremes of horror and tenderness, and juxtapositions of farce and tragedy.

And yet — Sacred Games didn’t move, engross, or delight me in anything like the way Dickens’s novels do, and for all that there were parts that I did really appreciate, by the end there were longer stretches that just bored me. My like/dislike line runs pretty much along the Sartaj Singh / Ganesh Gaitonde divide: I would happily read another whole novel about Sartaj, but I had had more than enough of Gaitonde by the time he finally shot himself in the head — which is not a spoiler, by the way, as it happens very early in the novel, which then takes us back through the tortuous story of how he ended up where we first meet him, in a concrete bunker in a vacant lot on the outskirts of Bombay.

The part of Sacred Games that focuses on Sartaj is a rich, gritty, humane version of a police procedural. It’s very much a story of Bombay, just as Ian Rankin’s novels are as much about Edinburgh as they are about any specific case or character, and Sartaj sees his world through the same jaded, cynical, but affectionate eyes that Rebus sees his, always aware that behind the bright lights, the business or the festivities, are the shadowy possibilities of crime:

Navrati nights are good for pickpockets, certainly. Chain-snatchers and that lot. And a lot of cash gets handled, you know. At five hundred rupees per ticket in some places, that’s a huge amount. People get tempted, the people who are handling the money.

Also like Rebus, he may work for the law but he’s not entirely bound by it — instead, Sartaj operates in a complex economy of bribes and threats, favors and retribution. The lines between crime fighter and criminal are hardly easier to draw here than in any classic of noir fiction, but Chandra’s canvas is not restricted to shades of black and grey: the novel overflows with characters who bring touches of humor or grace, and overall, despite its ugly violence and constant reminders of death and sorrow, the novel (this part of the novel) hums with quiet optimism about the value and beauties of ordinary, struggling, erring human lives:

We are all already lost to each other, he thought. In the moment of our possession we lose those we love, to mortality, to time, to history, to themselves. What we have are these fragments of generosity, these gifts of faith and friendship and desire that we can give to each other. Whatever comes later, nothing can betray this lying in the dark, this breathing together. This is enough. We are here, and we will stay here.

By the end of the novel, we can’t help but feel the fragility of this hopeful contentment, but the chaotic ugliness of so much of the novel also makes it seem just that much more precious.

The part of the novel that focuses on Gaitonde, on the other hand, seemed to me to take us into a tediously artificial world — that it’s based on Chandra’s first-hand research, including meetings with real-life gangsters including “Hussain the Razor,” doesn’t help me get past its glossy amorality. The contrast between the two parts — each about a journey but one heading towards quiet fulfillment while the other collapses into solipsistic disaster — is obviously deliberate, but once he’s reached the pinnacle of power and wealth Gaitonde becomes  as tedious as Shakespeare’s Richard III does at the height of his success, but without the poetry to make the downward spiral worth following to the bitter end. Gaitonde’s flat affect may be meant to convey his distance, his difference, but that doesn’t make it any less flat.

My favorite part of the novel was one of its several “inset” parts, the one called “A House in a Distant City.” This tells the story of Sartaj’s mother Prabhjot, who is something of a mystery to her son: he sees that “she was not telling him everything, there were things she wouldn’t speak of.” We know of these things from this set piece, which tells with powerful understatement of her family’s flight during Partition from their home in what became part of Pakistan. When Prabhjot visits the Golden Temple at Amritsar with Sartaj near the end of the novel, she sits “closed off in some private world of memory and grief and prayer.” Those memories, that grief, is surely for her sister Navneet, “beloved and best of all, and now lost forever.” Prabhjot learned to carry on: “Carry it all, the small dissatisfactions of every day and the huge murderous tragedies of long ago.” For me Sacred Games was at its best when it left the melodramatic world of international crime, terrorism, and film stars and focused on this kind of modest but intensely moving everyday heroism.

This Week in My Classes: Not with a bang but a whimper

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

Classes wrapped up for the term on Monday. Usually I feel deflated, if also a bit relieved, after my last class meetings. For all that the ongoing pressure to be ready and keep on top of everything can be wearing, the energy I get from actually being in the classroom more than makes up for it. Last term, 19th-C Fiction certainly had its challenges, and students were not as forthcoming in discussion as I would have liked, but overall I thought the course went well, and at least judging by their course evaluations, so did the students. But it was Mystery and Detective Fiction that felt like the most fun: it had great energy and a higher participation level than I have usually had in it, and I usually left the room feeling a dizzying blend of exhaustion and exhilaration. (I wonder if any of that was really due to how fiercely overheated our classroom was.) This term, however, the adrenaline buzz was rarely there after either class, and so now it feels more like stopping than concluding, if that makes sense — more like “we made it” than “we did it!”

This is not to say there wasn’t a lot of good, smart discussion in both classes, and in Intro especially there was a small core of students who seemed to be really present and engaged in all the ways I always hope for. But, as I’ve complained about before, attendance this term — in both classes — was erratic to poor, and in the 4th-year seminar, a context in which I’m used to the students really carrying the ball, it often felt like I was working awfully hard to coax any contributions out of them … which was especially odd because I know (from other classes and from one-on-one meetings) that you couldn’t wish for a nicer or brighter bunch of students. And in our seminar it’s not that they were (as far as I’m aware!) unhappy or bored or being sullenly uncooperative. They were just — on average — kind of quiet. In retrospect, I wonder if it would have helped to have assigned specific critical articles along with our primary readings. I don’t typically do this in undergraduate classes, because I’m usually assigning such a lot of reading to begin with (though for 4th-year seminars I always put a range of articles and books on reserve or on Blackboard) . In this case, though, the novels on their own were not that demanding, and I felt at times as if that had led the students to underestimate the critical work they could (should) be doing. When (if) I offer this particular seminar again, I may build that component in.

In contrast, I think that the next time I teach Intro I will dial back the amount of assigned reading and allow more time for in-class workshops, writing exercises, and group activities — more hands-on practice for everything from punctuation and citations to close reading. Last year I taught a full-year section, and for this half-year course I more or less just adapted the second term of last year’s syllabus. But even without the full week’s worth of classes we ended up losing to storm days, we were a bit rushed because I always forget how much time the logistics take up when you’re starting a course from scratch. Also, over a full year it’s possible to do more repetition and rehearsal of key concepts so that there’s more chance they will sink in, whereas with just one term I think different strategies may be called for. I don’t think we covered an unreasonable amount this term (and I think in many ways the variety keeps things interesting for us all); it’s more a question of shifting the emphasis a bit more next time from reading to writing.

We aren’t entirely done with this term’s classes, of course. I’ve received one set of final essays, which I’ve begun working my way through, and the other batch arrives Friday. Then the final exam for Intro is April 23: the one perk of having it so late in the exam period is that I’ll certainly have time to grade and return all the essays before then. After the exams are marked and final grades calculated and filed, it will be time for my favorite end-of-term activity: cleaning my office! And after that, it will be mental housekeeping time: sorting and setting priorities for summer research and writing projects.

This Week In My Classes: Endings and Beginnings

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

We aren’t quite done with classes here, at least not those of us on a MWF schedule – my last meetings are Monday. It’s hard to believe we are so close to finishing, though, mostly because today is the first day there’s any hint of spring at all, and usually I strongly associate the last couple of weeks of classes with the lifting of the winter gloom. Two big storms in the last 10 days certainly knocked out that possibility. But whatever the weather, the last few classes of the term do have their own seasonal rhythm: paper proposals sprout; new material gives way to review; editing worksheets and exam review handouts compete for their time in the sun.

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In Intro today it’s our second editing workshop: last time the students did a peer editing exercise, but I’ve opted for a self-editing exercise today in which they will go through their own papers and produce reverse outlines. It can be harder to look critically at your own work than at someone else’s, so I think it’s useful to have some concrete strategies for checking whether you have accomplished what you want and need to. They are writing on Carol Shields’s Unless but the topics they are choosing from are generated by lines in A Room of One’s Own — I wanted to highlight the idea (integral to both books, too) that writers are in conversation with each other and that we, in turn, enter into that conversation when we try to understand and interpret their works. My impression is that Room was (again) quite difficult for a lot of them to make sense of, so I’m glad for their sakes that I didn’t set this up as a straight comparative essay. That said, Unless poses its own challenges, not least because of its somewhat fragmented and episodic form. One good thing about assigning a book structured like that is that it’s harder to fall into plot summary: when you have to collect evidence and examples across a broad and scattered territory, I think you’re more aware of the details as adding up to something, rather than just moving along in linear fashion. We have one more session to come, for exam review and closing perorations, and then a couple of weeks until the final, so I’ll have plenty of time to comment on and return the essays. I think I may have been a bit cranky in my comments on the last set. That did have the beneficent side-effect of getting more people than usual in to see me. This is a not-unfamiliar phenomenon for me as a parent as well – say something temperately and you are likely to end up repeating it, but jump up and down about it and somehow it sticks. But even if yelling sometimes seems to work better, that doesn’t make it ideal!

primesuspectIn Women & Detective Fiction, we’ve just wrapped up class discussions of Prime Suspect I. The series seems to have gone over unusually well this year: people who hardly talked at all up till now have been pitching in, and the overall energy has seemed good. We lost (another!) Wednesday to last week’s blizzard, so I’ve had to give up a planned final round-table to discuss people’s term paper projects: I usually make time for this in the schedule and when it has actually happened, it has always been very interesting and, I think, productive as a way to wrap up a seminar. But instead we’ll be having our last group presentation (on Prime Suspect) — which should also be a way to go out on a high note, given how creative and informative the presentations have all been this term. Though there is no requirement that the presentations incorporate a game (just that they include some form of class activity), I think every group has made one up! And that means there are usually prizes in the form of sugary treats.

This was also the week that book orders were due for the fall term! I always try to meet these deadlines — partly because I’m dutiful, partly because I know the bookstore sets them early so that they can work out their buy-back arrangements for students, and partly because I like to have this done and not have to worry about it any more. It’s possible to spend a really long time waffling over book choices but there really are no right answers, so sometimes just making the call and clicking ‘submit’ on the form is better than dithering any longer. I wasn’t waffling much over the next iteration of Mystery and Detective Fiction, which will be pretty much the same book list as this year. The only change I’m making is swapping out An Unsuitable Job for a Woman and putting back a short story anthology. That lets me ease up the pace intermittently, and it also simplifies the logistics of assigning the stories I always use (some Poe, some Sherlock Holmes, etc.).

I did run through a lot of variations on the book list for 19th-Century Fiction from Dickens to Hardy, though. I used to just pick five (or, once upon a time, six) ‘representative’ novels without much concern for an overarching theme. Lately, though, I’ve been experimenting with more deliberate groupings and liking it: last time I did this course, I chose all books dealing one way or another with troublesome or rule-breaking women (Bleak House, Cranford, The Mill on the Floss, Lady Audley’s Secret, Tess). Then this fall in the Austen to Dickens course I did variations on the Bildungsroman (Persuasion, Waverley, David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, North and South). For next fall I decided on the theme of vocation, or (as these are two persistent concepts of vocation in the 19thC novel) on love and work. I had three sure things (Middlemarch, Great Expectations, Jude the Obscure) so my dithering was all about which other books to include. Most years I would fill the list in with something by Trollope, something by Gaskell, and/or an example of sensation fiction. This year I decided I’d like to include The Odd Women, which I’ve rarely assigned in lecture courses, and it occurred to me that though I usually keep the Brontës in the earlier course, Villette would be a really interesting contrast in its treatment of women and work and love and solitude … so I cut short the dithering and put it on the list. I’ve never lectured on it, and I haven’t even assigned it since maybe 1998, so that gives me something new to work on for the course, which is always a good thing.  I think the students will like it (and be surprised by it), and the more I think about it, the more provocative I think it will be in juxtaposition to our other readings. Also, much as I love Trollope, I don’t usually get much enthusiasm for him from students (Barchester Towers is boring?!), and I’m feeling a bit tired of sensation novels at the moment, so all in all, I feel good about this impulsive choice. And even if I didn’t, too late now! villette

Once again it’s just two courses for me in the fall. One’s big-ish (90) and one’s kind of medium-sized (40), and both are likely to be full, or very nearly so — but I plan the assignments carefully knowing I’ll be doing all the marking myself, and as both are classes I’m quite comfortable in I think it will be an energetic and not overwhelming term. But it’s still far off on the horizon: now that the books are ordered, I’ll be turning my attention back to the here and now, which means wrapping up this term and lining up my writing priorities for the summer. As always, the academic work cycle epitomizes Eliot’s wise remark that “every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.”

Open Letters Monthly: April 2014!

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cotterleader

Does anyone who reads Novel Readings still need to be reminded to check out the new issue of Open Letters Monthly every month? Surely not! Love me, love my friends, right? But just in case, here’s the regular notice that we did it again: a new issue is live.

This seems like a particularly rich month. There’s a good showing from “the masthead,” with our editors all playing to their strengths: John Cotter on Peter Matthiessen’s In Paradise, Greg Waldmann on The Struggle for Iraq’s Future, Steve Donoghue on Bart Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God, Maureen Thorson on two new books of poetry, Elisa Gabbert with this month’s “Title Menu” on 10 books that might be poetry. Dorian Stuber weighs in on yet another contribution to the never-ending ‘crisis in the humanities’ (“wasn’t it always thus”?) and finds it opportunistic and clichéd; my Dal colleague Jerry White looks at the remarkable institution that is the Irish Presidency; Steve Danziger explores William S. Burroughs’s notorious Cut-up Trilogy; our own foreign correspondent Michael Johnson feels some déjà vu as he watches events unfold in Ukraine. And that’s not all, so I hope you’ll check it out.

“The bare outline of a useful story”: Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth

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sweettoothIf Sweet Tooth were not by Ian McEwan (author, as is stressed on the cover of my edition, of Atonement — one of my very favorite recent [that is, post-2000] novels) would I have been disappointed in it? How unfair, in a way, that the burden of great expectations should interfere with my appreciation of this well-crafted, elegantly told tale with its clever premise so smoothly executed. If only books could be read “blind,” as orchestral auditions are sometimes done now — with the author’s identity concealed and so no preconceptions or biases to come between us and the words on the page. And yet I’m not sure that pristine anonymity is quite what we want. When writers raise the bar, isn’t it only fair to test their subsequent efforts not just against the books they already outmatched but against their own previous personal best? Once an ice skater has included a quad, doesn’t every program without one seem just a tad safe, no matter how perfect the triple axels?

And I’d say “safe” is a good word for Sweet Tooth, along with “flat” and “smart” — and, again, only for McEwan would that last term not be entirely praise — smart is the least I expect of him. Knowing Sweet Tooth was “an Ian McEwan” I read along in full expectation of a big twist, a surprise, a treat that would throw everything I thought I knew about the book into some new perspective, or draw together its elements into a shape I hadn’t seen before. By page 300, I was getting downright impatient for this revelatory moment, as on its own surface terms the book I was reading wasn’t giving me much of a thrill. Then when the long-anticipated game-changer arrived, it was so obvious that I realized that in one way or another I had already predicted it. (In case you’re wondering why I didn’t know all about it from reviews, I typically avoid reviews of books I know I’m going to read until after I have a chance to read them for myself. I suppose that’s my own modified version of the audition screens. Now that I’ve finally read Sweet Tooth, I’ll be looking up what other people have said about it.)

The revelations of Sweet Tooth are actually not that different from the writerly twists in Atonement, but the payoffs seemed much slighter to me. It’s true that I didn’t see until I did some careful rereading just how artful Atonement is (one of my favorite details is that Briony turns out to have made the changes recommended by Cyril Connolly at Horizon). Maybe if I reread Sweet Tooth, I’ll find the experience a similarly stirring literary treasure hunt. But I’d need some extrinsic motivation to do that (maybe the other reviews will provide it?) because Sweet Tooth never gripped me: it lacks the gutsiness that lies beneath Atonement‘s opening aestheticism and that comes out into the open during the war sections. Where is the equivalent in Sweet Tooth of the Dunkirk sequences? What here even approaches the wrenching pathos of Atonement‘s elegaic conclusion? The cruelty and devastation we see in Atonement are greater than anything in Sweet Tooth, the people in it at least as guilty of selfishness, greed, and betrayal — but they also love passionately. Sweet Tooth, in contrast, seems all head and no heart; its people (like, as it turns out, the narrative itself) are just petty and manipulative. “I was a novelist without a novel,” Tom reflects, “and now luck had tossed my way a tasty bone, the bare outline of a useful story.” He just hasn’t filled that outline in with the richest tints of humanity.

The novel’s “duplicitous point of view” (in McEwan’s — or rather Tom’s — own phrase) is an escape clause for these complaints, of course. How much of the dully plodding quality of the narrative is excused by the revelation that it’s not as it first seems (or as it seems for 300+ pages)? In particular, how many of Serena’s deficiencies as a narrator and protagonist can be blamed on the actual storyteller? Are her limitations really his limitations — he can’t read her, much less convey her, as a more complex character? In that case it’s not McEwan who’s in any way deficient. If anything, he’s doubly clever because he can play at being someone who’s not as good a novelist as he is, and his imitation is pitch perfect! And the lengthy “reveal,” which  lacks both the urgency and and the beauty of Atonement’s conclusion (“I like to think that it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end”) and offers instead only dreary petulance (“I told you that it wasn’t anger that set me writing the pages in the parcel in front of you. But there was always an element of tit for tat”) before its final, understatedly flamboyant, flourish — any letdown we might experience is attributable to the same cause. But isn’t McEwan ultimately still accountable for inflicting his imperceptive (and somewhat artless?) doppelganger on us through the fictional author he’s created? How can we credit him with knowing better (and somehow also doing better) if he doesn’t give us a sign? I didn’t pick up on any evidence of metafictional distancing, though maybe I didn’t put the clues together: it’s true there are a number of debates about fiction embedded in the novel that perhaps are meant to reflect sardonically on the kind of novel Tom has finally written.

One way in which McEwan never disappoints is his forensically precise diction: who else would describe oysters as “glistening cowpats of briny viscera”? If I somehow hadn’t known the identity of the author of Sweet Tooth –if he were concealed behind that opaque screen — I think that at that moment, I would have started comparing him to McEwan nonetheless.