“Better than the truth”: The Orphan Master’s Son

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

Orphan-Masters-Son-with-Pulitzer-Burst

It is a true story of love and sorrow, of faith and endurance . . . Sadly, there is tragedy. Yet there is redemption, too! And taekwondo!

What would it be like to live in a world where it is better not to know what happened to someone you love — where lies becomes the truth and truth lies, where props and costumes are interchangeable with the elements of real life? How do you find a way to make your life worth living when you don’t even know for sure who you are? What story do you tell about that life, or about yourself, when what you need is not a story “anyone could really believe” but “a story they can use”?

This is the grim, terrifying, funny, surreal world of Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, which is the best book I’ve read all summer. (It may be the best book I’ve read all year.) That the world Johnson conjures up so memorably is not a fictional dystopia but, as far as his research and his imagination can determine, the actual world of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea makes his novel only more painful and affecting. In the author interview included with the novel, Johnson notes that “most of the shocking aspects in my book are sourced from the real world,” but, he adds

I felt I actually had to tone down much of the real darkness of North Korea, as in the kwan li so gulags, the reports of which were so harrowing — forced abortions, amputations, communal executions — that I invented the blood harvesting as a less savage stand-in.

Yet many of these details are in The Orphan Master’s Son, if only in passing, and it’s hard to contemplate what a darker version might read like, never mind be like:

When I first arrived at Division 42, the preferred method of reforming corrupted citizens was the lobotomy. . . All you needed was a twenty-centimeter nail. You’d lay the subject out on a table and sit on his chest. . . . Careful not to puncture anything, you’d run the nail in along the top of the eyeball, maneuvering it until you felt the bone at the back of the socket. Then with your palm, you gave the head of the nail a good thump. After punching through the orbital, the nail moved freely through the brain. Then it was simple: insert fully, shimmy to the left, shimmy to the right, repeat with other eye. . .

We were told there were whole lobotomy collectives where former subversives now knew nothing but good-natured labor for the benefit of all. But the truth proved far different. I went with Sarge once . . . to interrogate a guard at one of these collectives, and we discovered no model labor farm. The actions of all were blunted and stammering. The laborers would rake the same patch of ground countless times and witlessly fill in holes they’d just dug. They cared not whether they were clothed or naked and relieved themselves at will.

Part of the brilliance of the novel, I think, is that Johnson neither lays out these horrors in prosaic exposition — more explanation would not make more sense of them, after all, and might only smother their human impact — nor overwhelms us  with the scale of the national trauma that is his underlying subject. The novel is full of individual trauma, both directly represented and indirectly indicated, and the layers of meaning Johnson builds up prompt us to scale up their ruinous experience without losing ourselves in abstractions. Eventually it’s clear that the protagonist, the orphan Jun Do, is (as his name suggests) a kind of John Doe, an everyman, who stands in for all the lost individuality of his countrymen; his dreams, his love, his desperation, and his courage are the distilled essence of the humanity of a population forced into lives of near-total artifice and repression. But Johnson makes him too much himself to be reduced to an allegorical figure or for his story to be read only in such formulaic terms.

The first part of the novel proceeds chronologically, taking us along on Jun Do’s journey from the orphanage to Prison 33 and, less literally, from an unquestioning servant of the state to a man who “hated his small, backward homeland, a land of mysteries and ghosts and mistaken identities.”  The second part begins with the arrival at Division 42 for interrogation of a man known as Commander Ga; we gradually reconstruct the events that brought him there.

What is the truth of this man’s identity? Earlier in the novel, Jun Do told a story about his life that caused him to be mistaken for Commander Ga. Like all stories in this unsettling world, this one is as true as its effects make it, as authoritative as those who believe in and act on it. When people can disappear and then simply be replaced, no identity is authentic or lasting — you become who you are said to be. “Where we are from,” explains an older comrade to Jun Do,

stories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he’d be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.

“If they say you’re an orphan, then you’re an orphan,” Jun Do explains in his turn, to a puzzled American handler during an unlikely visit to Texas that is among the sadder and more surreal sequences in the novel:

If they tell you to go down a hole, well, you’re suddenly a guy who goes down holes. If they tell you to hurt people, then it begins. . . if they tell him to go to Texas to tell a story, suddenly he’s nobody but that.

In this world, once “the Dear Leader has declared you the real Commander Ga,” you are Commander Ga . . . until someone declares it otherwise. After all, what matters is not that the story be either true or believable, but that it be useful. The result is not always destructive:

“People find your movies inspiring,” he said.

“Do they?”

“I find them inspiring. And your acting shows people that good can come from suffering, that it can be noble. That’s better than the truth.”

“Which is?”

“That there’s no point to it. It’s just a thing that sometimes has to be done and even if thirty thousand suffer with you, you suffer alone.”

Though the first part of the novel is gripping reading, with flawless control over tone and pacing, I found Johnson’s technical accomplishment most impressive in the second part. As we shuttle between the narrative of the otherwise unnamed Interrogator, the continuing story of Commander Ga, and the official version of events (told as if installments of the ‘Best North Korean Story’) the novel never loses its coherence or its momentum. Indeed, during the final sections, as the pieces fall into place and the Casablanca allusions take on their full relevance, I found the suspense entirely nerve-wracking. Johnson is as masterful at different voices — and as fluent in multiple genres — as David Mitchell, but reading Cloud Atlas the display of writerly ingenuity distanced me from the novel, whereas reading The Orphan Master’s Son I just felt pulled deeper and deeper in. He’s especially artful with the sanitized banality of the official communiqués: while these initially seem like comic interludes, they become increasingly sinister because we realize they will overpower the other stories (the true stories, the human stories) they subsume. The ebullient doublespeak is particularly revolting because we know what it denies — for instance, that there are no “retired” people at the “resort” of Wonsan:

“Please,” she said. “Give me the joy of seeing my mother at the premiere.”

Citizens, citizens. Ours is a culture that respects the elderly, that grants them their need of rest and solitude in the final years. After a life of labor, haven’t they earned some remote quietude? Can’t the greatest nation on earth spare a little silence for the aged? . . . But we throw up our hands. Who can deny Sun Moon? Ever the exception, so pure of emotion is she.

“She’ll be sitting in the front row,” the Dear Leader told her. “I guarantee.”

Citizens, if the Dear Leader says it, that settles it. Nothing could prevent Sun Moon’s mother from attending that movie premiere now. Only an utterly unforeseeable occurrence — a train mishap, possibly, or regional flooding — could stand in the way of this joyous reunion. Nothing short of a diphtheria quarantine or a military sneak attack could keep Sun Moon’s dreams from coming true!

It’s not just that we know the train mishap or military sneak attack need not actually happen to be the excuse for  Sun Moon’s mother never reappearing: it’s that everyone knows it, and there’s no recourse against the abusively cheerful tissue of lies. Johnson tells us that “much of the propaganda, especially the funnier lines, I pulled straight from the pages of Pyongyang’s Rodong Sinmun Workers’ Party newspaper.” When the line between satire and realism disappears, we don’t know whether to laugh or cry. How can intolerable suffering be made so absurd?

It isn’t really absurd, of course. The juxtaposition of stories and voices allows us to realize the many dimensions of pain and grief, and how people’s suffering is exacerbated by its denial and by the state’s relentless revisionism. Our laughter is initially at the transparent and self-serving dishonesty of the state communiqués: their buffoonery defies belief. By the end, though, those jaunty narratives filled me with unsettling rage: that they have the last word seems the ultimate violation of the people whose lives they have made a mockery of. That it’s true, though fictional, is the most appalling thing of all.

The Interrogator’s library of confessions is one form of resistance within the novel to these offenses against human dignity. In creating his “citizen biographies” he believes he is preserving something otherwise lost, and certainly not present in the Central Records office, as he realizes when he looks at his parents’ files:

the files were filled with dates and stamps and grainy images and informant quotes and reports from housing blocks, factory committees, district panels, volunteer details, and Party boards. Yet there was no real information in them, no sense of who these two old people were, what brought them from Manpo to be line workers for life at the Testament to the Greatness of Machines factory.

 But even his meticulously bound confessions, which contain “an entire life, with all its subtleties and motivations,” are worth less than intimacy, a concept that is initially hard for him to understand:

“Intimacy? What is that?”

“It’s when two people share everything, when there are no secrets between them.”

I had to laugh. “No secrets?” I asked him. “It’s not possible. We spend weeks extracting entire biographies from subjects, and always when we hook them up to the autopilot, they blurt out some crucial detail we’d missed. So getting every secret out of someone, sorry, it’s just not possible.”

“No,” Ga said. “She gives you her secrets. And you give her yours.”

At the end, the Interrogator has “finally been intimate,” and in that voluntary sharing of what he knows to be true he finds the most precious freedom of all: the freedom to be himself. That in his world this epiphany is no prelude to a happy ending is the ultimate and grimly predictable catastrophe of The Orphan Master’s Son. The only hint of grace is that in his final suffering, though he does not know the real identity of the man he’s with, at least he is not alone. That’s not much, but perhaps it’s better than the truth.

Rose Tremain, Restoration

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restoration

I really enjoyed Rose Tremain’s Restoration, which an excellent friend promptly posted to me when I needed a bit of cheering up. (Everyone should have a friend like that!) Not that Restoration is very cheerful, but a good novel is always a tonic, isn’t it? And Restoration is awfully good. Like Wolf Hall, it’s a historical novel that is less about history than about character — which is not to say that these aren’t books steeped in research and full of marvelously tactile historical details, but that the detail never seems decorative (or pedantic) because it is so integral to the lives into which we enter. In both novels, also, those lives are not just individual characters but embody the character of their age.

Restoration‘s structuring idea is right there in its title, which is both the familiar name of the era during which the novel is set (the restoration of the Stuart monarchy under Charles II) and the encapsulated story of its protagonist, Robert Merivel. Merivel’s personal flourishing, fall, and reinvention represent (on Tremain’s telling) the larger struggles of an age marked by both gaudy materialism and earnest moral striving (embodied in Restoration by Merivel’s Quaker friend Pearce). The vacuousness of a life with no aim but luxury, and with no occupation but idle amateurism, brings Merivel little substantial happiness — and no reconciliation between his literal heart and his true heart, a dichotomy literalized for us early on when, as a student, Merivel has the opportunity to hold a living heart in his hand:

My hand entered the cavity. I opened my fingers and, with the same care I had applied, as a boy, to the stealing of eggs from birds’ nests, took hold of the heart, Still, the man showed no sign of pain. Fractionally, I tightened my grip. The beat remained strong and regular. I was about to withdraw my hand when the stranger said: ‘Are you touching the organ, Sir?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘don’t you feel the pressure of my fingers?’

‘No. I feel nothing at all.’ . . .

Ergo, the organ we call the human heart and which is defined, in our human consciousness, as the seat – or even deified as the throne – of all powerful emotion, from unbearable sorrow to ecstatic love, is in itself utterly without feeling.

A selfish lout — a buffoon, even — for most of the early action of the novel, Merivel is brought low only to be restored — not to riches but to human dignity.

It’s not a euphoric redemption story, however, but something more difficult and uneasy: Merivel’s progress is halting, his character imperfect, his actions often despicable. Merivel says it best himself: “I am erratic, immoderate, greedy, boastful and sad.”

Rembrandt_van_Rijn_-_Self-Portrait_-_Google_Art_Project

His account of his own life hides none of these unattractive characteristics: aptly for the period, it’s a ‘warts and all‘ portrait. Tremain neatly incorporates this theme into the novel itself through the painter Finn, who begins by training Merivel in artistic idealization and ends a successful painter of “merchants, barristers, schoolmasters, drapers, cabinet-makers, clerks.” Finn’s new method is actually Merivel’s idea: “do not paint me as a rich man, dressed up in satin or with a sea battle going on behind my head; paint me as I am, in my old wig and in my shirtsleeves and in this simple room.” This idea, which “had only that second entered [his] mind,” is a sign of how far Merivel has come from his earlier ostentatious luxury and preening self-indulgence.

Merivel’s medical training is his one truly useful skill. He tries to dissociate himself from it because it interferes with his pleasures – on his wedding night, for instance (a vexed occasion anyway, as his new wife is the king’s mistress and the marriage designed to be a sham) he is overcome with horror during a musical performance:

I stare at Sir Joshua’s face, looking down towards his viola, and, layer by layer, in my anatomist’s sadness, I peel back skin and muscle and nerve and tendons, until I can see only the white bone of his skull, the empty sockets of the eyes . . .

All my anatomical studies seem to have brought me to a great sadness. When a man plays a viola da gamba, I want to share in his joy, not see his skull. For where will such visions end? . . . Such a perpetual and visible awareness of mortality would, I am certain, bring me to despair in a very short time. . . .

I must avoid, then, coming to despair and madness. I must try to forget anatomy. Forget it utterly.

But though he doesn’t understand this for some time, it’s precisely this attempt to forget what is real that sends Merivel close to madness and despair: close in both senses, as he ends up, at his lowest ebb, assisting Pearce and a group of other Friends at a hospital for the insane, and also ends up himself on the verge of what might be madness — seeing things and hearing sounds that aren’t really there, lost in “a colossal epidemic of dreaming.”

Tremain is too wise to make medicine a simple cure for Merivel: he does not, for instance, discover a miraculous cure for the plague and rise up heroically sure in his vocation — instead he ends up peddling what he himself considers a quack remedy for it. He doesn’t save anybody with a brilliant surgery — instead, he sits by largely helpless while two people very close to him die. There’s no inspirational turning point or epiphany. But his experiences strip away the pretense in his life as surely as they strip away his excess body fat:

I had grown most peculiarly thin. The waist of the breeches was too large for me by more than two inches, so that the wretched things would not stay up, and, when I put the coat on my back, it hung out from my body like a cape. . . .

For the whole of my life I had never been thin. . . . Now, all the flesh was falling away and every bone in me being slowly unsheathed and made visible.

“I began,” he concludes, “to consider the possibility that I was dying.” This moment seems to me to bring us back to his horror at the viola player’s skull: in acknowledging his own mortality, Merivel is finally ready to begin living a life in which his body and his spirit work together. And so he returns to the home he once prized (and over-decorated) so greedily and is given a chance to start again.

Barbara Messud: The Excellent Women Upstairs

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

She’s an ordinary woman leading a quiet life – no thrills, no romance, few expectations, just her work, her friends, and the comforting knowledge that everyone relies on her common sense. In a crisis, she can be counted on to make tea. All this changes when the new couple comes on the scene. The wife is an energetic professional in a whirl of commitments and contacts; the husband is a suave charmer. As she is drawn into their circle, our heroine finds herself both energized and resentful. What, exactly, is her role? What does she mean to these new people? What has happened to her life since they came — and what will happen when they leave?

messudAs my mash-up title suggests, this is the basic plot outline of two very different novels: Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs and Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women (1952). I read The Woman Upstairs a month or so ago and though I found it a page-turner, I ended up not liking it very much. It’s not that I minded the “unlikable” narrator: as I said in my piece on Olivia Manning (apparently quite an unlikable woman herself), “the chief obligation of a writer, . . . as of a character, is not that she be nice but that she be interesting.” The problem I ultimately had with Messud’s Nora was that I did not find her very interesting: she was too much up in my face all the time about how angry she was, and so the novel gave me no sense of discovery about her. The novel was a page-turner because I wondered what would happen and why exactly she was in such a rage. But the answers to both questions were rather disappointing. Nora’s anger especially seemed confused — which is fine for her as a character (she has no obligation to be crystal clear about her own emotional state, and anger does tend to mess things up) but not for the novel, which to me seemed to be trying to make a broader political and feminist case for anger out of one woman’s very personal neuroses and bad judgment.

But it was the artlessness of Nora’s narration that I found particularly tedious after a while: there’s no revelation to it, no subtlety compared to, for instance, Villette, which was the Brontë novel I kept thinking of as I read The Woman Upstairs. The explicit inter-text for Messud’s novel is Jane Eyre, which is a pretty angry novel, to be sure. But Jane’s retrospective narration adds a controlling layer of meaning, and Jane is more admirably assertive than Nora in pursuit of her own selfulfilment. That’s the Victorianist in me coming out, perhaps, but I got quite irritated at Nora’s complaining: stop moping (or ranting, which is just a louder version of the same thing) and get on with your life! Villette, in turn, is a much darker, twistier novel about the differences between calm surfaces and tormented desires, about repression and resentment and bitterness. And Lucy Snowe (cold, like her name, and coy, and judgmental, and yes, angry) makes us figure her out — and she doesn’t make it easy! There’s a readerly excitement in working out just who Lucy is and what she’s feeling that for me has no equivalent in The Woman Upstairs. For all its cleverness (and there are lots of smart things about it), Messud’s novel ultimately seemed kind of obvious (the big surprise at the end – who didn’t see that coming the minute they knew about Sirena’s cameras?).

pymI think this is why I liked Excellent Women so much better. It’s so understated that a lot of it nearly slips past unnoticed, but as a result, while it lacks the driving forward momentum of The Woman Upstairs, its rewards are both more subtle and more surprising. We almost don’t know that Mildred is ever angry at the way those around her treat her as an accessory to their lives or assume they know what she needs or (most annoying of all) whom she loves. “Perhaps,” she observes dryly at one point, “I really enjoyed other people’s lives more than my own,” but over the course of the novel we can’t help but realize how tired she is of being one of the “excellent women” — the women who are always depended on but are somehow never part of the action on their own behalf – “excellent women whom one respects and esteems” but never truly sees. “I always think of you as being so very balanced and sensible,” says her friend William, “such an excellent woman.” “It was not the excellent women who got married,” Mildred reflects a bit later, “but people like Allegra Gray, who was not good at sewing, and Helena Napier, who left all the washing up.”

It’s Helena and her smoothly flirtatious husband Rocky who play the Shahids’ role in Excellent Women. “Things were much simpler before they came,” Mildred thinks. They stir things up, but in doing so they bring things to the surface that might have been better off left undisturbed. When they go, she’ll still have her old occupations, but the Napiers are more blunt than the Shahids ever are to Nora about how her options look to them:

‘What will you do after we’ve gone?’ Helena asked.

‘Well, she had a life before we came,’ Rocky reminded her. ‘Very much so – what is known as a full life, with clergymen and jumble sales and church services and good works.’

‘I thought that was the kind of life led by women who didn’t have a full life in the accepted sense,’ said Helena.

‘Oh, she’ll marry,’ said Rocky confidently. They were talking about me as if I wasn’t there.

‘Everard might take her to hear a paper at the Learned Society,’ suggested Helena. ‘That would widen her outlook.’

‘Yes, it might,’ I said humbly from my narrowness.

Right there we see the genius of Excellent Women in microcosm: if you weren’t already enraged on Mildred’s behalf at the complacent condescension of her supposed friends, that moment of self-deprecating bitterness ought to do the trick.  She doesn’t have to yell at us about how angry she is, but we don’t have to be in her company long to understand that there’s a lot going on in her head that isn’t “excellent” at all.

Unlike Helena, Mildred spends a lot of time washing up – often, Helena’s dishes. After one particularly dramatic incident at the Napiers’, she finds herself in their flat, “with the idea of making some order out of the confusion there” — but also, really, to get some time to herself. The scene beautifully literalizes her discomfort and frustration at the life she’s living:

 No sink has ever been built high enough for a reasonably tall person and my back was soon aching with the effort of washing up, especially as yesterday’s greasy dishes needed a lot of scrubbing to get them clean. My thoughts went round and round and it occurred to me that if I ever wrote a novel it would be of the ‘stream of consciousness’ type and deal with an hour in the life of a woman at the sink.

She feels “resentful and bitter towards Helena and Rocky” but she also admits “nobody had compelled me to wash these dishes or tidy this kitchen. It was the fussy spinster in me.” They aren’t altogether wrong, that is, in their assumptions about her, and yet (as her struggles through the novel with her hair, make-up, and clothing tell us) there’s nothing inevitable about the woman she is or is becoming. At the end of the novel she finds herself trapped once again in a part she doesn’t want to play but can’t seem to escape.

Messud’s novel suggests that anger is a necessary stage on the way to freedom, and in some ways its ending is triumphant: Nora has broken free of the Shahids’ spell and perhaps (though her narrative doesn’t convince me of this) gained some self-knowledge in the process. She is certainly fired up to do … something. There’s something infinitely sadder (if also, perversely, funnier) about Mildred’s conclusion, but I ended up a lot with a lot more invested in her fate, and feeling a lot more admiring of the art with which she was drawn.

Excellent Women is this month’s selection for the Slaves of Golconda reading group – look for more posts about it there in a few days.

The Reader as Writer: Giraldi and His Gratuitous Grumblings

Rohan Maitzen16 Comments

giraldiI don’t teach creative writing classes or attend MFA workshops or writers’ conferences, so I have no first-hand experience of the lamentable species William Giraldi is so annoyed about in his recent essay at the Los Angeles Review of Books: wannabe writers with “no usable knowledge of literary tradition [who] are mostly mere weekend readers of in-vogue books.” For all I know, his generalizations are entirely accurate, and speaking as someone who will almost certainly never write any novels but certainly does love reading them, it does seem wrong to assume (if anyone does assume this) that “writing doesn’t demand special skills” and right to urge (or even demand, if you’re in a position to) that aspiring authors read both widely and deeply.

I’m not quite so sure that I would second Giraldi’s specific prescription, however: “decades [of] training … in canonical literature” and “an unflagging religious immersion in the great books.” As Giraldi’s own examples show, there has always been disagreement about which books are “great” or what literature is or should be “canonical.” He is confident that Henry James underestimated Middlemarch (and I, obviously, concur entirely), and it’s obvious to him that the key to writing “the next great social novel” is to study “Stendhal, James, and Austen’s half-dozen” and that Keats represents “the perfection of craft.”  But these are evaluative claims to be debated, not absolutes to be declared. Moreover, the ideal of the “important writer” as one who “kneels at the altar of literature” has its conservative as well as its elevating aspect. That the many names he drops are so predictable seems to me a symptom of the limits of his own approach: he’s so much a product of his own canonical literary education (as, of course, we all are) that it doesn’t occur to him to mention Scott, Pope, or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or to mention Elizabeth Gaskell or Winifred Holtby as great social novelists. Which is fine in a way, as of course he can’t mention everybody, but he also should not imply that we all know just what books really deserve our attention.  And this is all before we even get into the discussion about whether someone aspiring to write about contemporary society might not learn something from the novels of Jodi Picoult. Giraldi apparently reads Jeffrey Eugenides without regret (at any rate, he quotes from The Marriage Plot): who is he to turn his nose up at other people’s choices? (And if people want to write like Dan Brown, well, neither Giraldi nor I will buy their books, but not all bestsellers are “lobotomized,” and before we conflate “popular” and “worthless” let’s pause to think about Dickens for a moment.)

Still, I think that discussions about which books we value and why are important ones to have. I feel fortunate to have had some very stimulating conversations about this kind of thing here at Novel Readings, usually to my own edification. Giraldi’s tone strongly suggests he isn’t interested in having a conversation – his piece is a polemic. However, it does quite rightly, if only implicitly, challenge us to think about how far we agree with him, who we might rather, or also, cite, and what we think books are for anyway. That’s all good, then. The bone I really want to pick with him is about something else – something tangential, it seems to me, to his main purpose, and gratuitously insulting to a lot of people who actually share his evident passion for reading and writing about literature.

You see, among his litany of complaints about “troubled twenty-somethings who have been bamboozled by second-raters such as Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski and have arrived to molest you with spontaneous prose which ought to remain incarcerated inside their diaries” (see, I told you it was a polemic!) he includes swipes at things I do have first-hand experience of and indeed invest a good deal of my own time and energy on: blogs and “‘literary’ websites” (his ‘scare quotes’). “The abracadabra of the internet,” he explains,

 has transformed us into a society of berserk scribblers; now anyone can have a public voice and spew his middling stories and thoughts at will. Forget that blog is just one letter away from bog, or that the passel of burgeoning “literary” websites is largely a harvest of inanity with only the most tenuous hold on actual literature. Our capacity for untamed, ceaseless communication has convinced us that we have something priceless to say.

Seriously, William: why did you have to go there? The whole ‘bloggers are ruining everything’ trope is so old, for one thing (see, just for instance, here, here, and here). If the best you have to bring to this particular game is “blog is just one letter away from bog,” it’s actually hard to know how to respond – some old line about “what’s in a name” comes to mind. But of course it’s easier to spew hasty generalizations than to explore the literary blogosphere with an open mind and rejoice that so many people care enough about books to write about them (or to write their own). Sure, some book blogs are middling or worse, but I have always found the same to be true of an awful lot of more formally published writing in forms ranging from peer-reviewed academic journals to the pages of mainstream newspapers. For range, originality, and enthusiasm, blogs can’t be beat: if you want to read about something more than “in-vogue books,” you’re much better off exploring some of the sites on my blogroll, for instance, than reading the New York Times Book Review, and if you enjoy hearing from different voices and getting surprised by what you read, well, you’re better off reading a lot of those “literary” websites than New York Review of Books. Further, as an editor at one of those literary websites (and I’ll abandon those condescending scare quotes now!), I feel pretty good about our “hold on actual literature,” and I feel very proud of what we accomplish every month with no resources but our own deep commitment to just what Giraldi claims to be defending — that is, the art of taking literature seriously.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not countering Giraldi’s sweeping dismissal with a blanket endorsement. The challenge of the internet, as I’ve often said, is filtering. But it’s not an impossible task, and I genuinely believe it is a worthwhile one. I just wish more professional critics would not just follow Daniel Mendelsohn’s lead and acknowledge the presence of “serious longform review-essays by deeply committed lit bloggers” but also curate blogrolls of their own. And since it seems that Giraldi exempts the Los Angeles Review of Books from his indictment of online inanity (else why publish in it?), wouldn’t it do more for the cause of literature to find and encourage and promote other sites (or at least individual pieces) that live up to his standards, instead of ranting about kids these days and their dang computers?

LARBI actually hesitated to write any kind of response to Giraldi. When I mentioned his essay on Twitter, a wise friend counselled me to “skip it, not worth the stress!” And in some ways he was right. Whenever someone goes off on an anti-blogging, anti-internet rant on the internet, you know you’re being trolled, and “don’t feed the trolls” is almost as important an online rule as “don’t read the comments” (though happily that last rule mostly doesn’t apply in my corner of the blogosphere, where the comments make the whole exercise worthwhile!). Giraldi has just enough qualifiers (“largely a harvest of inanity”), too, that he can shield himself from the fall-out (“hey, I didn’t mean you guys! some of my best friends are bloggers / run ‘literary’ websites!”).

But I guess I’m just a slow learner. I don’t see why things have to be this way: I don’t see why slagging off about bloggers has to be part of anybody’s defense of criticism or literature, or why people who should know better insist on conflating form (or platform) with content…except that it’s more work to draw finer distinctions. Giraldi has said this kind of thing before (worse, really):

If you’ve ever attempted to read a review on Amazon or on someone’s personal blog, you know it’s identical to seeking relationship advice on the wall of a public restroom.

The bottom line is that I don’t think he should be able to get away with it. Frankly, I don’t think his editors should let it go by either: though I’m sure they appreciate the link-bait, they might keep in mind that some of their other contributors write “personal blogs” — or, to take it less personally, they might at least insist on some specifics and some qualifying nuances. I happen to agree with Giraldi’s summary of a critic’s ideal credentials: “the assertion of an aesthetic and moral sensibility wedded to a deep erudition.” He just needs to stop belligerently proclaiming that these qualities aren’t to be found “on the Net.” He needn’t become one of the “online coddlers” he so despises, but there’s no special virtue in being sloppily vitriolic either.  He could at least take his own advice and read widely before writing.

Weekend Reading: I laughed, I cried, I’d read it again!

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

And that was just the first book I read this weekend …

Maclise DickensI was right that David Copperfield not only gave me great pleasure while I was reading it but restored my flagging enthusiasm for reading more generally. I finished it over the weekend and loved almost every minute of it.

The big setback for me is always Agnes. Dora is insufferable, but the poor thing is set up as a mistake, not an ideal, which is some compensation — and her final chapter still makes me cry, which is kind of embarrassing, but there we are. Agnes, on the other hand, with that damn finger pointing ever upwards: what kind of an alternative is that? Agnes had me wondering, actually, where the (good) sexy is in Dickens. He’s good at lechery, here exemplified by the horror that is Uriah Heep (and there’s the pedophiliac Bounderby in Hard Times as another example of just how creepy Dickens can make lust). He’s good at treachery, here epitomized by Steerforth’s fatal seduction of Little Emily. And he’s brilliant at childish innocence (Dora) and shining purity (Agnes). But healthy adult sexual desire (you know, the kind both parties are pretty excited about) is harder to spot. It’s pretty broadly hinted at that Agnes is wounded by David’s long insistence on seeing her as a sister, but there’s nothing like Dinah’s blush to make sure we understand the nature of her feelings, while David’s feeling for Agnes never seem other than worshipful admiration. Even though they seem better matched than David and Dora, there’s still something awkward about them as a married couple.

However. Whatever reservations I had about the women in David Copperfield were more or less overwhelmed by the many hilarious and touching and vindictively gratifying parts we are treated to as the novel draws to a close–Mr. Micawber’s denunciation of Uriah Heep, for instance, which (like so much in Dickens) is absolutely best read aloud. And the chapter “Tempest” is just splendid, with no “Dickens being Dickens” apologia required.

Unfortunately, though I was energized by David Copperfield to do a lot more reading this weekend, it was just this book that really excited me. I skimmed through Tina Fey’s Bossypants, which I had picked up at the library because it is supposed to be very funny and at the time I felt I could use a good laugh. Meh. At most I got a couple of chortles out of it. Since I have never liked Saturday Night Live and never been tempted to watch 30 Rock, I guess I should have known better.

faultinstarsThen I read John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. It went very quickly and I quite enjoyed it: I was engaged from the beginning by the narrator’s voice and the quick pacing and the blend of humor and pathos. But though I thought it was quite good, it also seemed to me a little too self-consciously smart — not just Hazel and her hyper-articulate friends (after all, such teenagers do exist — around here, most of them end up enrolling in the King’s Foundation Year Program, where they continue to talk pretty much like Hazel and Augustus) but the novel as a whole, including the metatextual interaction with An Imperial Affliction. That layer (along with the wry humor of the characters) kept the book from descending into bathos, but it also kept me at kind of an emotional distance: I was not one of those who wept copiously through the final chapters. In fact, a bit to my surprise it didn’t make me cry at all, and here I’ve just confessed to crying over Dora! After I finished it I reread a lot of the discussion of it in this year’s Tournament of Books. I haven’t read many of the other contestants, but I admit I share the feeling expressed by some commenters there that YA literature, however good of its kind and for its intended audience, shouldn’t really compete in the grown-up leagues. And yet it made it to the finals, so what do I know, right?

Finally, I tried a few more chapters of May Sarton’s The Magnificent Spinster. Though I’ve loved everything else I’ve read by Sarton, it just has not been going very well: I’ve been finding it prosy and portentous. The narrator insists a great deal that Jane, the spinster of the title, is magnificent, but I’ve been getting no authentic sense of that myself. I like the formal conceit, with the attention to Cam’s problems writing Jane’s life story as a novel. And I like the idea of taking us through so many important historical moments from the perspective such an unusual and individual experience. But with my time running out for summer reading, and with the new term looming along with deadlines for reviews and essays and book clubs, I’ve decided to put this one back on the shelf for now. It’s just not ripe yet (or I’m not). I’m certainly not giving up on Sarton, though: I long to get my hands on Journal of a Solitude.

Saved by the Inimitable!

Rohan Maitzen14 Comments

Judging from a few recent blog posts and twitter updates I’ve seen, a lot of us have fallen into reading slumps lately. I blame my own partly on a phase of duty reading: I was sampling books with an eye to assigning them for a course, which means a lot of them were books I would probably not have picked up otherwise, and while that can lead to some exciting discoveries, it can also just be frustrating, which is what I was finding. As a result I was putting down a lot of books unfinished, which always makes me feel a bit shabby. I have had some fun with a couple of lighter books, including Cotillion, but I’ve been hoping for a book to exhilarate and challenge me the way, say, The Once and Future King, The Paper Garden, or the Patrick Melrose novels did last summer, and this summer seems to have been light on that kind of reading. I thought May Sarton’s The Magnificent Spinster might be the magic bullet, but I’m about half way through and frankly, it’s kind of dull and prosy so far.

copperfieldWhat a fool I’ve been. It turns out that the solution was right there next to my reading chair all this time: the handsome Oxford World’s Classics edition of David Copperfield I’ve ordered for my fall class on the 19th-century novel. This too is duty reading — or, properly, rereading, as of course I haven’t made it this far without having read it before (including out loud to my husband, years ago when this was the kind of thing we did). But I haven’t read it in a long time, and I’ve also never actually assigned it for a course. My go-to teaching Dickens has been Great Expectations (it’s very good, after all, plus it’s short, for Dickens), with Hard Times a frequent alternate and Bleak House a favorite in terms when I’m not also assigning Middlemarch. Oh, and once or twice, A Tale of Two Cities. But I finally felt kind of tired of Great Expectations, and I did Bleak House last term, and it seemed like a good time to mix things up a little, so I put David Copperfield on the book list for next term and on my summer reading list so I could get started on my class prep. It’s been sitting there looking reproachfully at me for weeks (I mean, look at that cover — it practically screams “you’re not doing your duty!”) and I’ve puttered away at it a little, but only yesterday did I put everything else aside and just read it for a few hours — and I feel all my reading mojo coming back.

I’ve never been personally passionate about Dickens the way I am about George Eliot. If for some strange reason I had to choose between them, no question: she gets my vote. But happily, as I’ve said before, literary greatness is not a zero-sum game, and it’s also not something for which there are or need to be common measures or standards. (There are also people who don’t think either of these writers is great — and while I feel kind of sorry for those people, I’m sure they are perfectly happy with their Proust or their Henry James or their Virginia Woolf or their precious Jane Austen, and we’ll just leave them be.) For me personally, Dickens is fabulous precisely for all the things he does that aren’t what Eliot does, and that’s the magic of it all. Dickens is fantastic at being Dickens, and if you get caught up in that Dickensian spirit (which, I know, not everybody does) it’s sheer delight. And sheer horror. And sheer pathos. And … well, you get the point — his is not a particularly subtle world, but gosh, it’s such a lot of fun.Maclise Dickens

That’s what I’m recovering with the help of David Copperfield: the sense that reading is about how fun it all can be. Even if you aren’t a Dickens-lover, I think you have to admit that his books radiate delight in words and stories and imagination. Their excess is not a mistake: it’s the point. As Nick Hornby says, these days we seem to take it as given that “spare is good,” but why?

Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where.

What a loss that would be! Not a loss to the tautness of the storyline or the unity of the themes, but if that’s what you’re reading Dickens for, you need a little re-education. (OK, yes, I don’t want to underestimate the unity of his themes, but brilliantly coherent as they can be, both conceptually and aesthetically, still, I think we all get the point long before we’re done with the novels.) Hornby’s example is a great one: “Dickens being Dickens, he finds a bit part for a real rogue of a secondhand clothes merchant, a really scary guy who smells of rum and who shouts things like ‘Oh, my lungs and liver’ and ‘Goroo!’ a lot.”

One thing I’d forgotten is just how laugh-out-loud funny David Copperfield is. I cherish Eliot’s humor, but my marginalia in Middlemarch, though it frequently includes little smiley faces, rarely says “LOL.” There are a few really funny bits in Great Expectations (Joe’s hat on the chimney piece  being one) — none, though, in Hard Times. Aunt Betsy and the donkeys, though? Hilarious! Barkis’s courtship of Peggotty? Spit-take warning: not safe for e-readers! Mr. Dick and Charles the First — irresistible.

CopperfieldPhiz

(illustration by ‘Phiz,’ scanned by Philip Allingham)

And in contrast, while I hadn’t forgotten how pathetic David’s early childhood is, I hadn’t read about it since I had children of my own, and his loneliness and abandonment and desperate yearning for love hit me really hard this time:

I was not actively ill-used. I was not beaten, or starved; but the wrong that was done to me had no intervals of relenting, and was done in a systematic, passionless manner. Day after day, week after week, month after month, I was coldly neglected. I wonder sometimes, when I think of it, what they would have done if I had been taken with an illness; whether I should have lain down in my lonely room, and languished through it in my usual solitary way, or whether anybody would have helped me out.

And the suspense! Dickens loves his foreshadowing, and it’s pretty heavy-handed, but the mounting sense of dread is still wonderfully effective:

 ‘I’m not afraid in this way,’ said little Em’ly. ‘But I wake when it blows, and tremble to think of Uncle Dan and Ham and believe I hear ’em crying out for help. That’s why I should like so much to be a lady. But I’m not afraid in this way. Not a bit. Look here!’

    She started from my side, and ran along a jagged timber which protruded from the place we stood upon, and overhung the deep water at some height, without the least defence. The incident is so impressed on my remembrance, that if I were a draughtsman I could draw its form here, I dare say, accurately as it was that day, and little Em’ly springing forward to her destruction (as it appeared to me), with a look that I have never forgotten, directed far out to sea.

    The light, bold, fluttering little figure turned and came back safe to me, and I soon laughed at my fears, and at the cry I had uttered; fruitlessly in any case, for there was no one near. But there have been times since, in my manhood, many times there have been, when I have thought, Is it possible, among the possibilities of hidden things, that in the sudden rashness of the child and her wild look so far off, there was any merciful attraction of her into danger, any tempting her towards him permitted on the part of her dead father, that her life might have a chance of ending that day? There has been a time since when I have wondered whether, if the life before her could have been revealed to me at a glance, and so revealed as that a child could fully comprehend it, and if her preservation could have depended on a motion of my hand, I ought to have held it up to save her. There has been a time since-I do not say it lasted long, but it has been-when I have asked myself the question, would it have been better for little Em’ly to have had the waters close above her head that morning in my sight; and when I have answered Yes, it would have been.

    This may be premature. I have set it down too soon, perhaps. But let it stand.

And the betrayal, all the more devastating because we, like David, have been warned:

I was up with the dull dawn, and, having dressed as quietly as I could, looked into his room. He was fast asleep; lying, easily, with his head upon his arm, as I had often seen him lie at school.

 The time came in its season, and that was very soon, when I almost wondered that nothing troubled his repose, as I looked at him. But he slept-let me think of him so again-as I had often seen him sleep at school; and thus, in this silent hour, I left him.

 -Never more, oh God forgive you, Steerforth! to touch that passive hand in love and friendship. Never, never more!

Looking at these excerpts, I can readily see why (to paraphrase Miss Jean Brodie) people who don’t like this sort of thing don’t like this sort of thing. It’s too much! It’s sentimental, and manipulative, and he uses exclamation points! But I’m loving it. What a relief! Like David, I am once again “reading as if for life.”

Pleasure, Guilt, and Pizza: Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments
One of the writing projects I’ll be turning to in the near future is a review of Elizabeth Gilbert’s new novel, The Signature of All Things. I thought that made this an appropriate time to revisit her earlier work. I also wrote a bit about Committed, which I ended up not liking as much as Eat, Pray, Love.

eat-pray-loveEat, Pray, Love was not one of the books I specifically had in mind to read this month. In fact, until recently it wasn’t a book I ever intended to read–but the positive reviews of Committed at Tales from the Reading Room and Of Books and Bicycles made me curious, so I put holds on the digital copies of both of Gilbert’s books at the public library and lo and behold, this weekend, just as I was despairing at the difficulty of reading Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, I got to the head of the queue for Eat, Pray, Love. Rescued! Because after all, I own The Man Who Loved Children, so there’s no rush there, whereas Eat, Pray, Love will expire on my Sony Reader in just a few (well, about 12) more days! So I simply had to put everything else aside and read it. Right?

And you know, the thing that surprised me (because of various prejudices I had going into this) is that once I’d started reading it, I really did want to put other things aside and keep going. One reason is that Gilbert makes the reading so easy: her prose is lively, conversational, personal, colloquial. It’s also full of vivid details, entertaining anecdotes, and genuinely funny quips–for some reason I didn’t expect the book to be quite so funny, but for the first time in a while (since Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, I think) I was chortling merrily through a book, which actually was a nice change after all the gloomy Catholics and grim police inspectors I’ve been hanging out with this term. La Vendée is no laughing matter either, and as for Agnes Grey, which I whisked through last week–why, the kid who likes to torture baby birds is delightfully cheering, really!

To be sure, there is some serious stuff in Eat, Pray, Love. Gilbert’s struggles with divorce and depression are not, in themselves, funny at all, and though I had trouble taking Gilbert’s spiritual quests and episodes of transcendence quite as seriously as she does, they too are not intrinsically comical. But Gilbert has a gift for finding the irony or just the plain old silliness in any situation, and she relates even her most profound spiritual experiences with enough self-deprecation and unpretentiousness that it didn’t matter much to me that much of what she said about religion was pretty much all feel-good evasions and platitudes.

It’s not altogether complimentary, of course, for me to say that I basically gave the book a pass on this because it was fun to read. Usually I’m more stringent than that! So why aren’t I railing at Gilbert for peddling comfortable truisms? I did do a little rueful head-shaking, but mostly I just moved on to the next “good” part, mainly because Gilbert is really just talking about herself, and she seems perfectly sincere. She comes across as someone who is smart but kind of flaky, and the book–which is a memoir, after all, not a a treatise, not even really a self-help book (since she’s too smart to insist that what worked for her will work for anyone else)–speaks in her voice and tells her story. She is who she is, so the book is what it is.

But that doesn’t quite do justice to the book: it sounds more condescending than I think is altogether fair. Though the book is not a deep intellectual or philosophical exploration of the meaning of life in general, I did find it unexpectedly thought-provoking about life more particularly. In her review of Committed, litlove remarked that the book “makes you consider your own life, and those of the friends and family around you. Her vivid emotional honesty encourages you to look clear-sightedly at yourself, and the range of information she provides, as well as the stories she tells, provide a rich tapestry of experiences against which to measure your own.” I haven’t read Committed yet (I’m still in the queue!) but this description really fits Eat, Pray, Love as well. For instance, Gilbert talks about her (first) marriage and her reasons for finally leaving it in terms that probe the nature of the demands and expectations of marriage and family (an encouraging sign for Committed, which obviously continues these themes). I doubt that anyone who is or has been married can read someone else’s frank analysis of their own relationship without holding the mirror up to themselves. But some of the more abstract issues that arise as Gilbert makes her own voyage of self-discovery and self-affirmation were ultimately the most interesting to me.

One thing she talks about a lot, for example, in the context of her four months in Italy, is pleasure or beauty. She learns Italian in the first place because she thinks the language is so beautiful, and her Italian experience (the “eat” part of the book!) is full of sensuality (but not, as she repeatedly reminds us, sexuality, or at least not shared sexuality, as she has committed to celibacy–no easy commitment to keep, as she also often reminds us, when surrounded by beautiful Italian men). A lot of this sensuality is expressed through food. I particularly relished her description of the pizza she and her Swedish friend eat in Naples, which may well be “the best pizza in the world” –because the pizzeria is the best in Naples, which has the best pizza in Italy, which has the best pizza in the world:

I love my pizza so much…that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair. Meanwhile, Sofie is practically in tears over hers, she’s having a metaphysical crisis about it, she’s begging me, “Why do they even bother trying to make pizza in Stockholm? Why do we even bother eating food at all in Stockholm?”

…I always thought we only had two choices in our lives when it came to pizza crust–thin and crispy, or thick and doughy. How was I to have known there could be a crust in this world that was thin and doughy? Holy of holies! Thin, doughy, strong, gummy, yumy, chewy, salty, pizza paradise. On top, there is a sweet tomato sauce that foams up all bubbly and creamy when it melts the fresh buffalo mozzarella, and the one sprig of basil in the middle of the whole deal somehow infuses the entire pizza with herbal radiance, much the same way one shimmering movie star in the middle of a party brings a high contact of glamour to everyone around her. . . . really, the pizza is so good we can barely cope.

But pizza, even the best pizza in the world, is still pizza. Her most amazing meal is in a little trattoria in Sicily:

It’s pasta, but a shape of pasta I’ve never before seen–big, fresh, sheets of pasta folded ravioli-like into the shape…of the pope’s hat, stuffed with a hot, aromatic puree of crustaceans and octopus and squid, served tossed like a hot salad with fresh cockles and strips of julienned vegetables, all swimming in an olivey, oceany broth.

And the next night, in another “little restaurant with no name,” “the waiter brings me airy clouds of ricotta sprinkled with pistachio, bread chunks floating in aromatic oils, tiny plates of sliced meats and olives, a salad of chilled oranges tossed in a dressing of raw onion and parsley. This is before I even hear about the calamari house specialty.” (Mmm, calamari!)

Gilbert is in love, enraptured, with the sights and smells and flavours of Italy; her pleasure is palpable. But what is it worth? She’s perfectly aware that what she’s doing might seem–might actually be–sheer self-indulgence. “A major obstacle in my pursuit of pleasure,” she herself remarks, “was my ingrained sense of Puritan guilt. Do I really deserve this pleasure?” And in Sicily especially, where “you can still find yourself picking your steps through World War II rubble, … is it maybe a little shallow to be thinking only about your next wonderful meal?” The meditation on the human value of pleasure and beauty thus provoked was, to me, one of the most thoughtful and convincing parts of the book.  Gilbert understands how privileged she is to be able to seek pleasure deliberately, exclusively, as she is doing, but it still seems fair to propose that “the appreciation of pleasure can be an anchor of one’s humanity,” a reflection of “individual human dignity.” The juxtaposition of beauty and degradation does create a tension, one she is honest enough to admit, but to turn away from beauty out of guilt would be what Will Ladislaw calls, in Dorothea, “the fanaticism of sympathy.”*

zinnI was less convinced by her yogic experiences–or I guess I should say, since I can hardly dispute her experiences, by their underlying philosophy of acceptance. Gilbert talks a lot about her battle to overcome discontent and dissatisfaction, and she can be eloquent or, again, very funny about the damaging effects of these negative emotions on her life and her relationships. But there’s a fundamental passivity in all that embracing the wrongs and the injustices and the hurts and the insults and the failings–letting them into your heart and just living with them, or letting go of them. At a difficult time in my own life, someone recommended the book Full Catastrophe Living, which preaches a similar philosophy. But what if you don’t want to accept the things that are wrong, but rather to change them? to fight against them? I’ve long been a believer in the importance of dissatisfaction: it drives political change and social transformation, after all! Without people who refused to accept things the way they were–well, we can all put together a catalogue of the advances in social justice that would never have been made. Isn’t something similar true at a personal level? Acceptance may be the path to mental quiet, but it has always seemed to me the path, also, at least potentially, to self-suppression (which is, I suppose, actually the point), and also, again at least potentially, to unacceptable levels of self-sacrifice. It’s just not an ethos I can embrace. As a consequence, I have not found lasting mental quiet, and I continue to struggle against and complain about and be dissatisfied with some aspects of my life that I may ultimately never be able to change–or maybe I shouldn’t even aspire to change, who knows. Of course I’m always conscious that all things considered, I have it pretty good (I must say that seems especially true in a week full of overwhelmingly bad news from all corners of the globe). So I often feel guilty about my own mental chafing (meta-self-criticism!), and I wondered, as I read Gilbert’s rapturous accounts of learning meditation (and of the aftermath, in which she is both happier and, of course, much prettier) whether I should go down that road and seek contentment and inner peace through acceptance. I still have Full Catastrophe Living, after all. Gilbert isn’t really that specific, though, about the long-term benefits, or even about the real-world implications of her training. Maybe Committed will clarify for me what learning to just live with (or even embrace) life’s imperfections and disappointments means for her in practice. How do you find the balance between that acceptance and standing up for what you (or others) want, need, or deserve?

So that’s eating, and praying. The final part of the book is, of course, about loving–including her eventual abandoment of that vow of celibacy. Though I found her account of life in Bali as lively and entertaining as the rest of the book (at least, the rest of the travel and eating parts), the happy romantic conclusion seemed pretty pat to me. If it were a novel, I would have been disappointed at the descent into cliché, and at the way yet another story ostensibly about a woman’s self-discovery ends with her finding Mr Right. But I guess it really happened that way! And in the end, it doesn’t much change my overall response to the book. It made me laugh and it made me think. Both are good things in a book!

*For some interesting comments about Eat, Pray, Love as an example of “priv lit,” see these posts from zunguzungu and MillicentandCarlaFran about the film adaptation. I haven’t looked into the wider debate they reference–but I did follow up the link in the comments to Historiann’s post “Selfish! Selfish! Selfish!” which is well worth a read in this context.

Originally published March 16, 2011.

Georgette Heyer: Romantic but not Sexy?

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

heyer cotillionI’ve just finished Cotillion, which is one of my favorite Georgette Heyer novels so far. Like The Grand Sophy (which was the one that helped me finally “get” why people enjoy Heyer so much), it’s laugh-out-loud funny, but it’s also very sweet. I was so pleased with the resolution to the romance plot, which turns on its head the expectation that the dashing rake will settle down under the influence of a good woman — or just that the dashing rake is in any way the best marriage prospect. Sure, he’s the sexiest one . But this time sexy just means  trouble — and in fact, so far I haven’t read another Heyer that is as explicit about someone’s rakish behavior, including his intention to make a beautiful young innocent his mistress (or one that is as blunt that this young girl’s mother will happily prostitute her daughter if she can’t score a rich husband for her). In this one respect, Cotillion is not just one of the funniest Heyers I’ve read but also, in the interstices, one of the darkest.

It got me thinking, though, that while Jack’s sexiness is set up as a particular kind of problem in Cotillion, due as much to his particular character as to the behavior itself (he’s quite the smug amoral rascal, is Jack), I have found Heyer’s novels generally much more romantic than sexy: in the ones I’ve read (still a relatively small sample, I realize), there’s been really no perceptible acknowledgement of desire, little of the frisson of physical attraction. And I’m not thinking just in comparison to other more contemporary Regency romance novelists I’ve read (Mary Balogh, for instance, whose books are both much less funny and much more sexually explicit, or Cecilia Grant, whose books conspicuously up-end conventions), but in comparison to 19th-century novelists including Jane Austen (the obvious comparison) or George Eliot.

I’m thinking, for instance, of the intensity of the scenes between Anne and Wentworth in Persuasion. Remember when he helps get her naughty nephew literally off her back?

In another moment, however, she found herself in the state of being released from him; some one was taking him from her, though he had bent down her head so much, that his little sturdy hands were unfastened from around her neck, and he was resolutely borne away, before she knew that Captain Wentworth had done it.

Her sensations on the discovery made her perfectly speechless. She could not even thank him. She could only hang over little Charles, with most disordered feelings. . . .  neither Charles Hayter’s feelings, nor anybody’s feelings, could interest her, till she had a little better arranged her own. She was ashamed of herself, quite ashamed of being so nervous, so overcome by such a trifle; but so it was, and it required a long application of solitude and reflection to recover her.

Persuasion-coverAFOr, a bit later, when he assists her into Admiral Croft’s carriage:

Yes; he had done it. She was in the carriage, and felt that he had placed her there, that his will and his hands had done it, that she owed it to his perception of her fatigue, and his resolution to give her rest. She was very much affected by the view of his disposition towards her, which all these things made apparent. This little circumstance seemed the completion of all that had gone before. She understood him. He could not forgive her, but he could not be unfeeling. Though condemning her for the past, and considering it with high and unjust resentment, though perfectly careless of her, and though becoming attached to another, still he could not see her suffer, without the desire of giving her relief. It was a remainder of former sentiment; it was an impulse of pure, though unacknowledged friendship; it was a proof of his own warm and amiable heart, which she could not contemplate without emotions so compounded of pleasure and pain, that she knew not which prevailed.

She’s so overcome with her feelings that “Her answers to the kindness and the remarks of her companions were at first unconsciously given.”

Or the equally intense encounters between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, when for all their hostility they can hardly take their eyes off each other? Their deliciously awkward encounter at Pemberley is quite erotic enough without a wet shirt: “They were within twenty yards of each other, and so abrupt was his appearance, that it was impossible to avoid his sight. Their eyes instantly met, and the cheeks of each were overspread with the deepest blush.”

And speaking of blushing, what about Dinah, in Adam Bede? She can’t be in a room with Adam without becoming suffused with feeling: “It was as if Dinah had put her hands unawares on a vibrating chord. She was shaken with an intense thrill, and for the instant felt nothing else; then she knew her cheeks were glowing, and dared not look round.” The details of Arthur Donnithorne and Hetty’s affair may have been specified to what some contemporary readers found a shocking degree, but we know what they do (and what consequences it has), not what they feel in the moment.* It’s impossible to miss, though, that Dinah’s attraction  Adam is both physical and nearly irresistible.

millflosspaperbackAnd speaking of physical attraction, what about Stephen and Maggie in The Mill on the Floss?

 Who has not felt the beauty of a woman’s arm? The unspeakable suggestions of tenderness that lie in the dimpled elbow, and all the varied gently lessening curves, down to the delicate wrist, with its tiniest, almost imperceptible nicks in the firm softness. A woman’s arm touched the soul of a great sculptor two thousand years ago, so that he wrought an image of it for the Parthenon which moves us still as it clasps lovingly the timeworn marble of a headless trunk. Maggie’s was such an arm as that, and it had the warm tints of life.

A mad impulse seized on Stephen; he darted toward the arm, and showered kisses on it, clasping the wrist.

Are there “mad impulses” in Heyer? There may be, but so far I have yet to detect any such erotic undercurrents. More, I have sometimes felt mildly uncomfortable at the romantic resolutions precisely because the relationship considered as a sexual relationship seems inappropriate given the heroine’s youth — not just in years, but in outlook and behavior. This was most conspicuous to me in The Corinthian, but I had a similar reaction, if milder, to Sylvester, and even to Cotillion — where things are not improved in that respect by Kitty’s openly thinking of Freddy as a big brother pretty much until they finally kiss. Even Esther squirreling away Alan Woodcourt’s flowers in Bleak House seems more like an adult awareness of sexuality than anything I’ve read in Heyer.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that! I’m not complaining: just observing, and then wondering what, if anything, the novels’ aura of innocent fun might have contributed to their enduring popularity. Unlike the 19th-century novels I’ve quoted, her novels surely would not “bring a blush to the cheek of a young person.”

I’ll be interested to hear from those of you who’ve been reading Heyer longer than I have. Do you think I’m right that her novels give us love but little or no desire? Might it be Heyer, not Austen, who fits G. H. Lewes’s remark that “there are worlds of passionate existence into which she has never set foot”? Or am I missing something (see fn below!), or have I just not read the sexy Heyers yet?

*This is arguably not true. It hadn’t occurred to me until I read the notes to the Broadview edition of Adam Bede, for instance, that in this scene after he kisses Hetty in the woods, we may be meant to understand that Arthur has an erection:

Arthur too was very uneasy, but his feelings were lit up for him by a more distinct consciousness. He hurried to the Hermitage, which stood in the heart of the wood, unlocked the door with a hasty wrench, slammed it after him, pitched Zeluco into the most distant corner, and thrusting his right hand into his pocket, first walked four or five times up and down the scanty length of the little room, and then seated himself on the ottoman in an uncomfortable stiff way, as we often do when we wish not to abandon ourselves to feeling.

I may just be being equally obtuse about the sexiness in Heyer — there may be signifiers I’m just not attuned to.

Why Do I Like George Eliot So Very Much? My Top Ten Reasons!

Rohan Maitzen9 Comments

82780-eliotdrawingA wise man once told me that the introduction to my long-imagined book should represent “the passionate peroration you’d deliver verbally about ‘Why George Eliot?’ if it came up in intelligent company.” After drawing up my inventory of everything I’ve written about George Eliot over the years, I started to feel a bit overwhelmed by the particulars, and so I thought I’d get back to basics of that kind, without a lot of second guessing about what counts as a unifying idea or what I’d be able to make an appealing ‘pitch’ for.

For some reason, in my head the peroration is always in response to the question “Why do you like George Eliot so very much,” which is of course a modified version of Charlotte Brontë’s challenge to George Henry Lewes to explain his admiration of Jane Austen. Though I enjoy and admire Austen’s novels, this question still seems perfectly reasonable to me, though given the extraordinary heights of contemporary Austen-mania, it’s one that sounds more contrarian now than it would have in 1848! What I appreciate most about Brontë’s question is the interesting conversation it begins: the clarity of Brontë’s catalog of complaints about what she saw as Austen’s limitations, and Lewes’s intelligent acknowledgment of those limits even as he concluded that Austen was “the greatest artist that has ever written, using the term to signify the most perfect mastery over the means to her end.” Given her own very different experiences and sensibilities, it’s no wonder that Brontë could not see greatness in a writer who had, she thought, no poetry. And Lewes’s answer, and his more extensive commentary on Austen in his essay on “Lady Novelists” (included in this collection, if you’re interested!) both point us towards yet another standard of excellence — one realized in the novels of the woman who became Mrs. Lewes.

GE DuradeConversations about authors we love should not be approached in a competitive spirit. After all, there’s no need to rank writers, or to pit them against each other; happily, literary greatness is not a zero-sum game. As Henry James says in “The Art of Fiction” (included in that same collection),

There is no impression of life, no manner of seeing it and feeling it, to which the plan of the novelist may not offer a place; you have only to remember that talents so dissimilar as those of Alexandre Dumas and Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Gustave Flaubert, have worked in this field with equal glory.

“Nothing, of course,” James also observes, “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.” But establishing the grounds of our admiration — clarifying them both for ourselves and for others — may contribute to appreciation, which is a more complex, or at least more self-conscious, response than that “primitive” liking. The process is inevitably self-revelatory, because our preferences convey, implicitly at least, something about the kinds of people we are — or aspire to be. But that, again, is no grounds for either discomfort or disagreement: if (James again) “the house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million,” so too the community of readers can, happily, contain multitudes — those who, say, admire Flaubert above all others, and those who … don’t.

OUPMm

This has become rather a long preamble! My reluctance to launch willy-nilly into simplistic lists is one of the many, many reasons I’ll never be a contributor to BuzzFeed or BookRiot. But enough is enough: time to get on with it.

Here’s what I’ve come up with: the top ten reasons I like George Eliot so very much. These are not the only qualities I value in a novelist — not a definitive list of what I think makes a great novelist. Nor are they qualities I think she has exclusively – coincidentally (!), other novelists I greatly admire share many of them. They are simply an outline of the qualities of this novelist that make this reader so appreciative. They are, in point form, my “passionate peroration”!

  1. Her intellectual richness and breadth. Her novels are full of complex ideas about many aspects of human experience and society. I always learn from them, and they always give me a lot to think about. This is not to say that I always agree with what I think she’s saying, but it always seems worth trying to follow her thinking.
  2. Her emphasis on sympathy for our imperfect fellow humans. I find her vision of how we can make life better for each other both beautiful and morally valuable.
  3. Her insistence on the moral significance of art — her understanding of fiction as both an artistic and a philosophical form.
  4. The importance she places on historical and social contexts for people’s behavior. We can’t understand people unless we understand their circumstances, and understanding is a crucial part of sympathy. Understanding and sympathizing are not the same as excusing and forgiving, though.
  5. Her use of literary form to support as well as convey her ideas. Her books are profoundly artful, not just ‘philosophy teaching by examples.’ Reading them is an entire experience.
  6. The sophistication and beauty of her language. All this talk of philosophy and ideas should not be taken as indicating that she isn’t worth reading just for the quality of her prose. It’s also striking to me how varied its cadences are, both within and across books. She has her leaden moments, to be sure, but she is capable of both poetry and inspiration as well.
  7. Her humor, which ranges from sly wit to deft irony to outright comedy.
  8. Her tenderness and pathos. Though at times there is a certain ruthlessness to her, or at least to her narrators, at others she can, with the utmost delicacy (and sometimes with sheer Dickensian sentimentality) rend your heart.
  9. Her people. Amos Barton, Mrs. Poyser, Maggie Tulliver, Tito Melema, Dorothea Brooke, Gwendolen Harleth, Grandcourt: they are distinctly, memorably, themselves, complete with their own histories and families and, my favorite thing, voices. Sure, Adam Bede is a bit too upright, and Felix Holt is wooden in his virtue, but the number of her amazingly good characters (and characterizations) completely overwhelms the weaker ones. Her dialogue is every bit as sharp as Austen’s (and less confined to drawing rooms), and her psychological insights are often astonishing.
  10. Her emphasis on people as members of families and communities. Both her stories and her morals urge us to see ourselves as connected to others — to turn away from egotism and selfishness and to ask, as Dorothea eventually does, “Was she alone in that scene? Was it her event only?” Though I sometimes think this principle has its dark side, I still find it truthful and inspiring.

Lists are artificial things, and 10 is an arbitrary number, but there’s actually a useful discipline in trying to isolate the things that really matter to me in this way. Some of these items certainly overlap, many of them are intricately connected, and there’s plenty more to be said about all of them, but looking over the list, I’m satisfied: imperfections of presentation aside, yes, these are the reasons I like her so very much. What do you think — did I miss any of your favorite things about her?

Most Seriously Displeased! Robert Hellenga’s The Sixteen Pleasures

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

pleasuresI was very restrained in Hager Books on my recent trip to Vancouver: I picked out a modest two books there. One, Gift from the Sea, I chose because I’d heard so much about it. The other, Robert Hellenga’s The Sixteen Pleasures, I chose for the opposite reason: I’d never heard of it at all! That may seem like a risky strategy, and right now, when I reflect on my decision to put Rose Tremain’s Restoration back on the shelf and take The Sixteen Pleasures instead, I feel like an idiot. But I have felt betrayed by buzz often enough not to think that my having heard a lot about a book is any kind of guarantee that I’ll like it (cough cough The Woman Upstairs cough cough), and who doesn’t enjoy discovering a hidden gem? Also, there were four of Hellenga’s novels on the shelf, suggesting that somebody likes them, and not only does The Sixteen Pleasures sound interesting, but one of Hellenga’s other novels is a sequel to it — again, suggesting some kind of success.

Obviously, I’m leading up to some bad news here. I didn’t hate The Sixteen Pleasures, but it gave me very little pleasure. It was mildly interesting, especially the neepery about book binding and art restoration. But the main character’s story is a hodge-podge, her big romance is almost unbelievably dull, and the “sensual life-altering journey” the cover blurb announces that she’s on? I think I missed it.

There were some bits early on in a convent that seemed promising, and the premise — a quest begun by the discovery of a volume of erotic drawings from the Renaissance — also seems full of potential. But here’s what doesn’t happen: “Inspired to sample each of the ineffable sixteen pleasures, Margot embarks on the intrigue of a lifetime with a forbidden lover and the contraband volume.” Doesn’t that description make it sound like a kind of sexy, cerebral Eat, Pray, Love? But though that is the jacket copy, that does not describe the book at all. Margot does in fact experience some of the “pleasures” shown in the drawings. But there’s nothing like a quest to try them out, and they’re handled pretty perfunctorily. Then, nearly 300 pages into the book, Margot does decide that the book is “my handful of magic beans, it was my magic ring, my talisman” and that somehow it will help her figure out who she is and where she’s going. At that point there are 60 pages left and during them she does finally take charge and, I guess, decide who she is. She even has some kind of epiphany – a “mystical experience” – but it’s in the auction room at Sotheby’s and consists of her taking a big risk in order to drive up the price on the book. This is not the “sensual, life-altering journey of loss and rebirth” I was looking for.

If I sound uninspired about it, I really am, and I’m annoyed at having fallen for an unusual premise and some misleading if obviously effective marketing (who was it in the New Yorker that said “everything about the narrator and heroine of this novel is appealing,” anyway? and how dare Kirkus Reviews declare it “absolutely compelling”!). To think I could have been reading more Barbara Pym or Georgette Heyer instead.