Recent Reading: In Brief

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

OK, I got the review in to those taskmasters at OLM and now I can risk doing a little fresh blogging–though at this point I’m just going to play catch-up. I feel as if I’m in another of those reading slumps, which inevitably lead to blogging slumps unless I’m very disciplined: it’s not much fun to write up books you don’t like, or think are OK, and it’s even harder to face giving the full treatment to a book that has been very widely acclaimed that you are luke-warm about. The latter, in this particular case, is Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead, and though I concede that the prose is beautiful and the consciousness of the narrator beautifully rendered, there seemed to be a mushiness at its intellectual centre that I couldn’t blame on John Ames. I had a sneaking suspicion, as I read through its limpid sentences and its celebratory passages about life, interspersed with evasive passages about mysteries and the dissatisfactions of demands for proof, that it was highly acclaimed precisely because of those feel-good evasions so elegantly packaged. It’s all very affirmative and small-town nice. I know I’m not doing the novel justice: this isn’t all it has to offer. Also, I know I am influenced by interviews I’ve read and seen with Robinson, which make it impossible for me to hear any delicate irony separating her nice old man’s perspective from her own. Despite some of the blurbs insisting it is not just a book for believers, I think it is, though for the currently trendy New-Agey ones whose religion is not defined by doctrine or scripture but by personal experiences and vague spiritual ideas about God. I did relish many individual lines (for instance, “Any human face is a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it”).

I finished Sue Grafton’s ‘U’ is for Undertow, which was OK except for the whole TMI thing I wrote about before. I’ve been trying to read The Girl who Played with Fire but I’m completely stalled in it. Do you think all the millions of people who are buying these are actually reading them all the way through? Maybe they skip along to find out what happened and don’t trouble themselves too much about how plodding the prose and plotting are. But I think my copy will go sit on the shelf now. I’d rather read the new Elizabeth George mystery, which I just got from the library–not because I really want to know about the case but because I want to catch up with Inspector Lynley and the gang. I did enjoy the first story in The Penguin Book of Crime Stories Volume II, ed. Peter Robinson, which is Reginald Hill’s “The Dog Game.”

As I only have This Body of Death from the library for another week, I’ll finish that up next. Then I think I’ll see how far I can get in Scott’s The Antiquary, which I’ve pledged to read as part of the Scottish Literature Challenge sponsored by Wuthering Expectations. And that reminds me: something else I’ve been reading recently, with pleasure and interest, are the posts at WE about my anthology The Victorian Art of Fiction. As I’d hoped and expected (unwutheringly), fresh eyes see things differently, and the posts and comments have been excellent so far.

Definitely better than not being talked about…

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

The book of the week at one of my favorite lit-blogs, Wuthering Expectations, will be my very own anthology The Victorian Art of Fiction: Nineteenth-Century Essays on the Novel (Broadview, 2009):

The authors range from major novelists (Eliot, Trollope, James, Stevenson) to the scintillating A. Nonymous.  The dates cover 1848 to 1884.  The essays are diverse but not comprehensive.  A story emerges, a debate takes place.  Are novels good or bad?  Meaning, novels as a whole – should one waste any time reading novels – and specific novels.  Perhaps Charlotte Brontë is bad for you and George Eliot is good for you.  Not that this debate has entirely ended, but we know which side won.  The Victorian Art of Fiction helped me see the path of the argument. . . .

The essays often work in pairs.  They are chronological, so Rohan will have to tell us how that worked. George Eliot’s sly “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (1856) is followed by W. R. Greg’s “False Morality of Lady Novelists” (1859), who at first sounds as bad as his title, but improves.  Anthony Trollope’s celebratory, even valedictory, “Novel-Reading” (1879) is followed by John Ruskin’s scathing, hilarious, utterly bonkers “Fiction – Fair and Foul” (1880), which functions in this anthology as the final scream of the “novels rot your brain” argument.  And we end with Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson civilly discussing what the novel can do (anything) and how, exactly, it can do it (now there’s the difficulty), two master craftsmen who could not take the novel more seriously.  They win.

I spent such a long time deliberating over what to include in the collection (of course, it was literally impossible to survey all the possibilities!) and then laboriously, and no doubt imperfectly, editing and annotating them, that by the time the book finally appeared in print I had lost any sense of perspective about how interesting the essays were and why, so I’m really looking forward to seeing what stands out to fresh eyes. I am glad, already, to see that the selections communicate the sense of ongoing debates–and that ‘Amateur Reader’ enjoys, as I did, the remarkable variety and often wild idiosyncrasy of the voices in them.

50 Greatest Books: Pride and Prejudice

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

From the Novel Readings archives: In 2008, the Globe and Mail ran a series on the “50 Greatest Books.” Though, quite mysteriously, they never asked me, a complete nobody, to weigh in (no, not even on Middlemarch!), I couldn’t resist opining occasionally off in my own corner of the internet. As I’m hard at work right now on a review of Claire Harman’s Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World for my hosts at Open Letters Monthly, I’ve been thinking a lot about Jane Austen, and since I don’t dare undertake a wholly new post here until I’ve met my deadline, I thought I’d dust this little piece off and put it on display in the meantime.

This week in the Globe and Mail‘s “50 Greatest Books” series, Joan Thomas weighs in on Pride and Prejudice. While I heartily endorse the choice, I felt Thomas sold Austen short in her essay, accepting as wholly unironic Austen’s famous remark about her “little bit of ivory (two inches wide)” and claiming that Austen “shoved aside” broader social and political contexts in order to focus on personal experience:

We tend to say that Jane Austen wrote about lives lived in drawing rooms because that’s all she knew. And yet … Austen’s family offered all sorts of other material: two brothers fighting in the Napoleonic wars, an aunt thrown into prison for stealing a piece of lace from a shop, a cousin’s husband guillotined in the French Revolution….Austen separated out the most poignant strand of her experience–the fact that a woman’s station in the world, her independence, her very survival, depended on the uncertain and often demeaning enterprise of attracting a man who could accept the size of her dowry. (read the rest here)

I agree entirely that “Elizabeth Bennet is a terrific heroine for any age” and that winning Mr. Darcy is, indeed, a great vindication for her insistence on acting “in that manner, which will, in [her] own opinion, constitute [her] happiness” (V. 3 Ch. 14) . I too love the “talky, civilized celebration of minds” that constitutes the Elizabeth-Darcy romance: it is, on both sides, an intellectual as well as a sensual seduction, which is no doubt the reason “this novel resonate[s] so powerfully with women who have so many other options in life.” But to describe Elizabeth’s achievement strictly in terms of “her fidelity to herself” is to forget how modern a value that is, and thus to lose much of the novel’s revolutionary charge. The line I quote above about seeking her “happiness,” for instance, is part of Elizabeth’s great confrontation with Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who represents the powerful forces arrayed against “the upstart pretensions of a young woman without family, connections, or fortune.” Class and gender politics permeate the novel, and Elizabeth’s ringing declaration that she owes no “reference” to Lady Catherine but only to her own happiness is, indeed, radical. Lady Catherine’s appalled demand “Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?” is comic in its extravagance, but especially so because behind it is a shade of truth. In a novel painted in more sombre tones, Elizabeth’s reward for so defying the class barrier might be far different: think Rose Crawley, for instance, in Vanity Fair:

Sir Pitt Crawley was a philosopher with a taste for what is called low life. His first marriage with the daughter of the noble Binkie had been made under the auspices of his parents; and as he often told Lady Crawley in her lifetime she was such a confounded quarrelsome high-bred jade that when she died he was hanged if he would ever take another of her sort, at her ladyship’s demise he kept his promise, and selected for a second wife Miss Rose Dawson, daughter of Mr. John Thomas Dawson, ironmonger, of Mudbury. What a happy woman was Rose to be my Lady Crawley!

Let us set down the items of her happiness. In the first place, she gave up Peter Butt, a young man who kept company with her, and in consequence of his disappointment in love, took to smuggling, poaching, and a thousand other bad courses. Then she quarrelled, as in duty bound, with all the friends and intimates of her youth, who, of course, could not be received by my Lady at Queen’s Crawley—nor did she find in her new rank and abode any persons who were willing to welcome her. Who ever did? Sir Huddleston Fuddleston had three daughters who all hoped to be Lady Crawley. Sir Giles Wapshot’s family were insulted that one of the Wapshot girls had not the preference in the marriage, and the remaining baronets of the county were indignant at their comrade’s misalliance. Never mind the commoners, whom we will leave to grumble anonymously.

Sir Pitt did not care, as he said, a brass farden for any one of them. He had his pretty Rose, and what more need a man require than to please himself? So he used to get drunk every night: to beat his pretty Rose sometimes: to leave her in Hampshire when he went to London for the parliamentary session, without a single friend in the wide world. Even Mrs. Bute Crawley, the Rector’s wife, refused to visit her, as she said she would never give the pass to a tradesman’s daughter.

(interest caught? read the rest here–you won’t regret it, all 90o pages of it…)

Austen’s delicious irony never conceals, though it treats lightly, the economic and moral precipice on which Elizabeth teeters. Consider, for instance the fearful compromise made by her friend Charlotte Lucas, whose pragmatic acceptance of the appalling Mr. Collins shows the proximity of respectable marriage (under the conditions Thomas alludes to) to prostitution. And only Darcy’s benevolent intervention saves Lydia from the price of her far more overt form of sexual fallenness. Is Lizzie perhaps more serious than Jane allows when she suggests her love for Darcy dates “from [her] first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley” (Vol. 3 Ch. 17)? How could she not be moved by such a prospect? Even if you are inwardly persuaded (as I am) that she loves him, not because he owns Pemberley, but because he deserves Pemberley, Austen never allows you to forget that money as much as love (or, as Thomas emphasizes, talk) is an inextricable part of marriage in her heroine’s world.

“How much more interesting their life together promises to be,” Thomas says of Elizabeth and Darcy, “than the lives of lovers on those turgid 19th-century novels, where passion and mystery (i.e. sex) rise like mist off the moors.” Ah, those novels, or rather, that novel, as what novel besides Wuthering Heights fits that description? And the genius of Austen is not to leave passion out of her books but to show that desire need not be “turgid”: it can be evoked and aroused by a glance, a word, a dance. Elizabeth and Darcy’s romance is not as manifestly erotic as that of Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth (or is it?), but it shows that intelligence can be sexy–again, surely much of the appeal of this novel to generations of book-loving young women hoping wit, spirit, and good conversation will bring them what Thomas aptly calls “payback.”

TMI

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

I’m still exploring options for my upcoming seminar on ‘women and detective fiction.’ Frankly, right now I’m feeling tired of the whole project and wouldn’t mind not reading any more mystery novels for a long time: after a while, the machinery just seems so creaky. Start with a prologue introducing the crime or the criminal. Sound an ominous note to create suspense (from the book nearest to hand, for instance, “If they’re the ones who killed Mary Claire, why wouldn’t they kill me?”). Introduce the detective, more or less alienated from work or partner or family or society. Start investigating. End lots of chapters with ominous notes, of the “little did she know how things would turn out” variety (“Things seldom went this swimmingly for me, which should have been a clue”). Reach putatively thrilling denouement. Fade out.  Repeat as necessary. I know, I know. The good ones are not like this, or do it well. Still, genre fiction is, inevitably, formulaic. A particular phenomenon I’ve been struck by lately, though, that actually bothers me more than the essential predictability of the form (which is, as P. D. James has argued, in some ways a strength of the genre as it establishes a firm structure within which the author is free to explore themes and characters as desired): there seems to be a trend towards overwriting, providing lots of unnecessary literal detail that contributes little to either plot or atmosphere but is just there. Now, I’m a Victorianist, and I like details: I’m not one to argue in favor of brevity for its own sake. But I like the details to be somehow resonant, whether with thematic or symbolic significance or with literary interest or pleasure. Dickens’s details, for instance, hum with life. But I don’t feel any life in this kind of writing:

I dropped my shoulder bag near the copy machine and crossed to the shelves where the yearbooks were lined up. The 1967 edition was there and I toted it with me, riffling through pages while I activated the On button and waited for the machine to warm up. The first twenty-five-plus pages were devoted to the graduating seniors, half-page color head shots with a column beside each photograph, indicating countless awards, honors, offices, interests. The juniors occupied the next fifteen pages, smaller photographs in blocks of four.

I flipped over to the last few pages, where I found the lower school, which included kindergarten through fourth grade. There were three sections for each grade, fifteen students per section. The little girls wore soft red-and-gray plaid jumpers over white shirts. The boys wore dark pants and white shirts with red sweater vests. By the time these kids reached the upper school, the uniforms would be gone, but the wholesome look would remain.

I turned the pages until I found the kindergartners. I checked the names listed in small print under each photograph. Michael Sutton was in the third grouping, front row, second from the right.

I’m no best-selling author, but I can’t see why a reader needs to know most of this. We’ve seen yearbooks, after all. The uniforms are, I suppose, period details and class markers, but the number of pages, or rows, or photographs per row, seems tediously irrelevant. How about this, instead:

I dropped my shoulder bag near the copy machine and crossed to the shelves where the yearbooks were lined up. I found Michael Sutton’s kindergarten picture in the 1967 edition . . .

The whole book is padded with this kind of excessive, and excessively literal, description of mundane objects and activities:

As long as I was downtown, I covered the seven blocks to Chapel, where I hung a left and drove eight blocks up, then crossed State Street and took a right onto Anaconda. Half a block later, I turned into the entrance of the parking facility adjacent to the public library. I waited by the machine until the time-stamped parking voucher slid into my hand and then cruised up three levels until I found a slot. The elevator was too slow to bother with so I crossed to the stairwell and walked down. I emerged from the parking structure, crossed the entrance lane, and went into the library.

I’m sure you’ll be interested to know that once she is actually in the library and has spent a couple of paragraphs explaining about the directories she’ll consult, she reaches into her bag and “remove[s] a notebook and a ballpoint pen.” The blow-by-blow description slows down the action without developing anything else–not atmosphere, character, or theme. In other ways, this particular book is well built: Grafton is clearly interested in experimenting with form beyond the journal-like first-person narration she has used in most of her novels, and here she varies her point of view and alternates between past and present events in a fairly effective way. Still, the novel  could have been much shorter and not lost anything valuable if someone had edited it more strenuously. I’m reading The Girl who Played with Fire and feel very much the same way about it: it just goes on and on and on.

Munro’s Books

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

I’m still on vacation in Vancouver, though I head back to Halifax tomorrow. Obviously, I haven’t had much time for blogging–in fact, I just spent two days in Victoria, at the elegant Empress Hotel, where they are far too elegant for wireless and so I went without the internet for as long as I have in ages! I was too busy playing sentimental tourist to notice, really, though it was odd not to be able to look things up when they occurred to me.

My trip has not been without benefit to my life as a blogger, though, because I am coming back with some good new reading material, mostly thanks to a long stop in Victoria’s amazing “indie” bookstore, Munro’s Books. I can’t think of a better use for a blog post than to put in a plug for them. What a treat it was to browse shelves crowded with such a fine selection; it was particularly notable to me, after being limited often to Coles and Chapters in Halifax, that they carry what I think of as the “catalogue of the recent past”: not just the blockbuster bestsellers and the latest releases by big name ‘literary’ authors, with a selection of ‘classics’ to round things out (and really, for all the miles of shelf space at Chapters, that’s still about what you find), but writers’ back catalogues and interesting works that are no longer new releases but haven’t, after all, expired, as you might think from looking for them elsewhere. Just as an example, they had about eight titles by William Boyd (whose remarkable Any Human Heart I reviewed a while ago), and about five by Hilary Mantel that predate Wolf Hall (I bought Beyond Black). Sure, you can usually get ahold of these older releases through Amazon (or Chapters online), but I like to take a look at books when making my selections, a luxury I have often had to forego in recent years. It was difficult to limit myself to three books (my other two, after much deliberation, were Anne Enright’s The Gathering and Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop), but I had to keep in mind that I would be packing and carrying them on the bus and ferry back to Vancouver and then stuffing them into my suitcase to come home as well (along with all the Kidsbooks purchases). That’s why I didn’t get, for instance, Mark Helprin’s A Winter’s Tale, or Laurence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, or . . .

Anyway, I’ll be home soon, with a few books and lots of memories. I have to say that a particularly fun, and particularly nostalgic, part of the trip to Victoria was a visit to Miniature World. This little museum was a childhood favourite, and the most remarkable thing about going back after a gap of probably 30 years is that it doesn’t seem to have changed at all. The displays, including a whole series of war scenes (under the heading “Fields of Glory”), a cross-Canada model train, several scenes from Dickens, and a great collection of doll houses (with all kinds of working lights and fireplaces and other moving parts), are the work of dedicated amateurs, as is evident in the hand-done calligraphy signs on the exhibits. The carpets are dingy, the ceilings are low, but the glass is so clean you frequently foget it’s there and bang your forehead on it as you lean in trying to see all the astonishing little details, done with so much loving care. In its own quirky way, it’s just as moving as the great hall of totem poles in the Royal B. C. Museum.

Being and Travelling: Susan Allen Toth, My Love Affair with England

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

I’m currently on holiday in Vancouver, the beautiful city in which I had the great good fortune to grow up. I have more or less reconciled myself to being unable to live here myself, but coming home to visit is always a mixture of pleasure and poignancy for me. Walking the sea wall around Stanley Park, or even just coming around the crest of the hill near 16th and Alma and seeing the skyline come into view, with the mountains rising behind it and the lush trees in front, I feel the truth of George Eliot’s evocative passages about the landscapes of our childhood, from The Mill on the Floss, for example:

The wood I walk in on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown foliage of the oaks between me and the blue sky, the white star-flowers and the blue-eyed speedwell and the ground ivy at my feet – what grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate fibres within me as this home-scene? These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes, this sky with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows – such things as these are the mother tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep bladed grass today, might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years, which still live in us and transform our perception into love.

Halifax has its charms (as shown, for instance, in my recent post about the Public Gardens) but they generally still seem to me slim compensation for the wintry grey drabness of the city for most of the year, and for the less tangible but more difficult effects of living apart from family and old friends, and from the landscape that is laden with the “subtle inextricable associations” of my past. It’s nourishing to my own “wearied soul” to be here again: sometimes I feel as if I’m literally drinking in the city through my senses, recharging some important internal source of energy.

At the same time, I can’t really imagine living here any more. It has been too long: my life has changed too much, and I have too. So being in Vancouver also has a disorienting effect, as I follow the footsteps of my former self and try to relocate myself in the world. Being in Vancouver now feels oddly like hanging around on the road not taken: it’s a beautiful place, but it isn’t my place.

I have been thinking about these issues because last year, instead of coming to Vancouver, I went to England. I hadn’t been there since 1986, and so the trip provided its own measures of how far I have travelled personally, internally, in the meantime. But mostly it was just exhilirating to step into a landscape that was not part of that cycle of  nostalgia and regret, and to regenerate or recharge different enthusiasms–some, admittedly, with their own roots in my past (like my childhood obsession with Tudor history) but also literary interests that were no part of my intellectual life in 1986 (when I had no intention of majoring in English) and a more open-ended pleasure in seeing different people and places, in seeing a much wider and faster current of life than usual.

I felt so renewed by last year’s expedition that I had initially hoped to return to England this year–so when scanning my parents’ vast and remarkably various book collection, my eye was drawn to Susan Allen Toth’s book My Love Affair with England. There aren’t a lot of personal memoirs in my library–or my parents’, for that matter. The memoir usually strikes me as a strange genre: unless you are someone who has a real claim on our attention, why would you presume to tell us quite so much about yourself? Why should I be interested in you? And yet (as blogging certainly demonstrates) often we are interested in other people’s lives, either because for some reason they resonate with our own or because their differences engage us, or sometimes just because they are good writers and storytellers.

Toth is a good storyteller. One thing she recounts in My Love Affair with England is in fact her own discovery of the value of that ability. Leading a group of students on a study trip to England, she finds herself answering their questions about herself:

those story-telling nights with my students were my real beginning as a writer. Until they gave me their eager attention, I had never realized that anyone might be interested in the anecdotes that seemed to form a narrative of my life. I was surprised that they could sympathize with stories that troubled or haunted me and that they could laugh at the odd or humiliating or ironic details I could now, at some distance, finally see as funny.

Just as the first paragraphs of this post don’t tell you anything, really, about Vancouver, considering the city instead in the context of my own life, Toth’s book is not really about England but about her feelings about England, her experiences of it and the personal significance of her travels there. She begins, in fact, with a series of disclaimers reminiscent of those often found in 19th-century travel books by women*: “I do not think of myself as an authority on contemporary English life,” she says, for instance:

My only gudes to society, politics, or economics are what I observe, read, or gather from casual conversations in gardens, on walking trails, in the greengrocers, or at bed-and-breakfast tables.

“Nor,” she adds a bit later, “am I a scholar of English history. How could I pose as one when I shamefacedly doze over almost any definitive volume of economic, social, military, or political commentary?” She has written the book not to elucidate the kinds of questions addressed in such “definitive” volumes, but to answer the question, “Why England?”:

What does it offer that I lack in my life? What in my background . . . has made England my country of choice for pilgrimage? What have I found there, what have I learned, what has nourished me?

In the book, Toth does not set out an explicit response or conclusion about these questions. Instead, she shares stories of her visits, from her earliest visit as a young college student in 1960 to a difficult stop-over on her honeymoon (her first husband’s lack of interest in her England foreshadows their eventual divorce) to many subsequent trips on her own and with her second husband, her daughter, and her mother. Interspersed with these more directly autobiographical chapters are themed ones: food, gardens, sheepdog trials. I particularly enjoyed “Up the primrose path,” about the English “national pastime” of walking and some of Toth’s own favorite rambles:

The joy of most English paths is how quickly anyone can feel alone on them. Just being able to disappear from a busy road between high hedgerows is wizardry. One moment, a straight cement line, whizzing cars and thundering lorries, acrid fumes and oily smoke. Another moment, a quick turn of the path, violets poking up through a hawthorn-and-hazel hedge, the gray flash of a disappearing rabit, and the tantalizing scent of unseen wild roses.

The best paths usually lead to the most remote places. After negotiating the hairpin curves of Hardknott Pass in the Lake District, James and I decided to unwind by taking a walk to Devoke Water, a small mountain tarn not far away. . . . Our path turned out to be a rocky track, an easy half-mile walk that took us gradually over a slight incline and then down to the shores of the lake. The track cut across the top of a moorland that seemed absolutely deserted, not even any sheep drifting over its barren slopes. It was late September, and under heavy gray skies, the grass looked almost brown, and the empty fells as if they had already fallen into a winter sleep.

Devoke Water lay in a shallow bowl formed by treeless gray-green fells. The surface of the lake was absolutely still, a steely gray that seemed a mirror image of the lowering sky. An old stone boat house, which seemed abandoned but was securely locked, looked as ancient as the landscape to which it now belonged. . . . Since dusk was just beginning to shadow thehills, we did not try to walk around the tarn. It looked forbidding, hidden away from the ordinary world among these treeless fells, bereft of any living presence. Slowly we followed the rutted lane back to our car. We did not talk much. Devoke Water had cast a spell, and neither of us wanted to break it.

It’s not showy writing but it’s good reading, clear, detailed, and evocative. Overall, though, the book is mostly about Toth; because she doesn’t offer much information or context about the sites she visits, my interest in her chapters ebbed and flowed depending on how interested I already was in their topics, or in how caught up I got in her personal life: England provided the occasion for building a relationship with her. Here I had a head start, as one reason her book is on the shelf here is that she was my mother’s college roommate (and remains a friend). Thus there are already points of connection between her life and mine, though none that make an explicit appareance here. Still, it’s easier to overcome the memoir skepticism when it’s someone you know, if only remotely. She’s also an English professor, so there’s some affinity there too, in the literary interests that underwrite some aspects of her ‘love affair’ with England. But I think I would have enjoyed this book anyway, for its companionable tone and lack of pretension, and for its interest in the ways places in the world are always, also, places in our lives.

*I know this because I am working with a PhD student doing very interesting analyses of travel writing by 19th-century English and German women travellers in Italy.

Happy Mother’s Day from Victorian Halifax

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

From the Novel Readings Archives: A bright, if cold and breezy, outing this morning to my favorite place in Halifax, the Victorian Public Gardens, inspires this re-post. I went with my lovely daughter, as a Mother’s Day treat. At this point the flowers and trees are not yet in full bloom, as they are in the pictures below, but the bulbs have opened and it’s exhilirating, after another long winter, to see the signs of spring.

First opened in 1867, the Public Gardens feature the most spectacular rhododendrons I’ve ever seen, as well as formal flowerbeds, a gazebo (with band concerts on Sunday afternoons), a large duck pond (with abundant ducks) and all manner of fountains and statues. It’s a green oasis in the middle of downtown: you can barely hear the hum of traffic, and as you stroll the well-kept walkways (no dogs, no joggers, and no bicycles allowed!), you can easily feel as if you have stepped back into a Victorian fantasyland.

There’s a Boer War memorial fountain, and a fountain commemorating Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Even the swans are named ‘Horatio’ and ‘Nelson.’

Diamond Jubilee Fountain
Horatio (or Nelson)

When Hurricane Juan struck Halifax in 2003, the Public Gardens were hit hard (though not with quite the devastating results seen at nearby Point Pleasant Park, which lost an estimated 70% of its trees). Since then, the Gardens have been beautifully restored. Here are a couple more pictures from [last year’s] trip, including a shot of the bust of Walter Scott that used to be right outside the front gates (during the restoration, it was relocated to just across the street, near the statue of Robbie Burns–we’re not called New Scotland for nothing).

Sir Walter Scott

Robbie Burns

Massive Rhododendrons

Victorian Gazebo

A Victorianist in Halifax today.

Happy Mother’s Day!

‘Not many girls would have used their wits the way you did’: Nancy Drew

Rohan Maitzen8 Comments

There’s one obvious candidate for inclusion in my seminar on women and detective fiction that I hadn’t thought seriously about before today. But if exemplarity and influence matter, surely Nancy Drew is right up there with Miss Marple–more important, perhaps, if you consider the number of high profile contemporary women, now role models themselves, who say they took some of their own inspiration from her. Students have asked about her before, but I hadn’t really followed up, mostly on the grounds that the books are ‘young adult’ fiction and thus unlikely to be of much literary interest. But once you’ve made the move into genre fiction in the first place, you’ve acknowledged the significance of other factors, alongside or, sometimes, instead of, more strictly literary ones–and these days it’s not obvious how you define the ‘literary’ anyway. So I thought I’d poke around a bit, and though I haven’t had time to read any of it yet, I quickly became aware that there’s quite a bit of critical work on the girl sleuth, including by feminist writers like Carolyn Heilbrun, and by other mystery writers, including  Sara Paretsky. She’s looked at as a feminist exemplar, a break-out figure in the genre of detection fiction, a “WASP” super-girl, and a “ballbuster.” There’s discussion of the novels in the context of other series fiction for young readers, and in a range of historical and political contexts. The series has a complex history (the current editions of the “original” mysteries, for instance, are in fact revisions of the 1930s versions which were revised starting in the 1950s because of their racist attitudes) and of course the figure of Nancy herself has a cultural currency that is probably about equivalent to that of Sherlock Holmes. I started thinking that maybe I should make room for Nancy on the syllabus! It seems as if we would have plenty to talk about.

So I borrowed my daughter’s copy of The Secret of the Old Clock and gave it a quick read–after all, it has been more than 30 years, probably, since I myself was an avid reader, not just of the Nancy Drew books, but the Trixie Belden series as well as the Hardy Boys. I was right about the language not being particularly sophisticated or subtle, but Nancy herself is certainly a dynamo. In this book alone she saves a young girl from drowning, fixes a flat tire and an outboard motor, chases down a gang of unscrupulous thieves, stares down the town snobs, and recovers a lost will, with the result that both money and justice are effectively redistributed. Her independence at the wheel of her car anticipates V. I. Warshawsky’s confident navigation of the streets of Chicago (down these mean streets a woman can go, untarnished and unafraid, provided she has a reliable set of wheels)–and now that I think of it, like V. I. she’s also always well turned out (“looking very atttractive in a blue summer sweater suit,” “dressed in a simple green linen sports dress with a matching sweater,” “becomingly dressed in a tan cotton suit”–I suspect these details were added in the 1950s revisions). Motherless, she enjoys the apparently unqualified support of her father, who never discourages her risk-taking, though he’s touchingly pleased when her exploits end safely. (She drives him around, which I thought was an interesting detail.) She doesn’t meet any opposition or skepticism from the police, either. There is something sort of inspiring about the freedom and rectitude with which she rushes through the story. I’m not sure yet if I’ll put her on the syllabus–I do think it would be a case in which the apparatus we’d put around the book would be more interesting, in many ways, than the book itself. But at the moment, I’m tempted.

Women and Detective Fiction: Update

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

I’ve been industriously rounding up samples of the various writers on my list of possibilities for the Women and Detective Fiction seminar (see here for the current reading list and parameters for my current search). What strikes me most at this point is that there’s a difference between a book you might want to read and a book you’d want to teach. There just has to be enough to talk about if you’re going to teach something. In a class focusing on genre fiction, innovation is one potentially important factor; hence my interest in Grafton and Paretsky, for instance, who took the well-established conventions of hard-boiled private eye fiction and did something different with them. But exemplarity also matters; we will read Agatha Christie, for instance, because she establishes and perfects so many conventions of a certain kind of ‘puzzle fiction’ or ‘cozy,’ and because Miss Marple is a crucial prototype for many women detectives who follow. Complexity of form or theme gives us more to think and talk about; for this particular course, novels that explicitly explore the relationship of women to crime and detection, or to power and justice more broadly, or that raise questions about the effect of gender on (mystery) writing can provoke particularly good conversations. Good writing matters, though it’s not an easy thing to define, and what we might typically think of as literary qualities are not always appropriate to genre fiction–or their absence may be outweighed by the other factors I’ve mentioned. This is all by way of saying, yes, there are dozens, even hundreds (maybe thousands!) of mystery novels that might fit the broad course description, but it’s difficult to find a half-dozen or so that can support the weight of our attention in the classroom. (I realize that this result reflects as much on the peculiarities of teaching literature as it does on the particularities of detective fiction; many historical accounts of English studies as a discipline have pointed out that, for instance, “close reading” as a critical practice arises coincidentally with modernist texts that need pretty painstaking analysis to yield their meaning. But that’s a subject for another post.)

To get on with it, since my previous post I’ve managed to get my hands on samples by a number of the authors we came up with as likely suspects. Here are the ones I’ve looked at so far. I don’t pretend to have read them all through; by a few chapters in, I could usually tell (or I thought I could, anyway) where things were going. If you think I missed a bet and should go take another look at one, just let me know: I’ve got them all for another couple of weeks.

Karin Alvtegen, Betrayal and Shame. These both look kind of interesting, but they just didn’t seem to be the right kind of novels–they aren’t detective novels. for instance, but are closer, I think, to thrillers.

Karin Fossum, Broken. Basically, ditto. This one looked literarily quite interesting, though, and others on her backlist look like they might suit better. I’ll keep looking.

Laurie R. King, A Grave Matter, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, and The Art of Detection. I thought A Grave Talent was pretty good but not, ultimately, that interesting (in that teaching kind of way). If I could find another in the Kate Martinelli series that had a more thematically relevant case at its center, that might be a reasonable option to displace ‘A’ is for Alibi, as the series combines two of my desiderata (police procedural, lesbian). The Beekeeper’s Apprentice was more entertaining than I expected (I often find historical mysteries unbearably tedious), at least for the first half, but I got a bit tired of Holmes (as usual) and having a female version of him didn’t really help after all. I would have liked it better if he had to face off against somebody who rejected his methods (and, for that matter, his annoyingly superior personality). The Art of Detection, which brings the two series together, lost me too.

Sandra Scoppetone, Everything You Have Is Mine. I read about half of this one and it seemed fine, very much in the Grafton / Paretsky / Muller line of female private eye novels. That’s the thing, though: it didn’t break out of that form and do something really different. Paretsky has said that when she began her V. I. Warshawski novels she meant to do a simple role reversal, with a woman in the private eye’s place–but she found that changing the sex of the detective affected too many other aspects of the story and she had to develop a more complicated model. Scoppetone seems to have found it quite easy to fit her lesbian investigator into an existing model; nothing in the novel (as far as I read) suggested that she was going to shape her book around a related inquiry into other challenges to or critiques of heteronormativity, for instance. That she doesn’t have to (or want to) do something more overtly political is fine, even good. But then if it’s just a book like ones we’re already reading but happens to have a gay detective, what would we talk about? We could talk about how times have changed…but then we are doing armchair sociology, not literary analysis.

Denise Mina, Still Midnight. I was looking for the Patty Meehan series but this was one the one that was in (in an e-copy, just by the way, so I downloaded it, oh-so-conveniently, right to my Sony Reader). This one I did read all the way through, because I simply found it more interesting than the other ones. It features a female cop, quite an interesting character, troubled and abrasive, struggling with authority at work and a tragic personal loss and disintegrating marriage at home. If more of the novel had been about her, this might have been the one. But about half of it is spent with a “gang” (they deserve the scare-quotes) of low-lifes who fumble their way through a kidnapping. I thought the account of the victim, haunted by childhood trauma, was very well done, perhaps the best part of the book, but there were too many pieces in the novel overall with no strong unifying connection between them. I couldn’t see what my teaching idea would be for the novel. Mina’s a good writer, though; I’m going to go ahead and order Field of Blood.

Still looking: Next up I hope to find some of Katherine V. Forrest’s Kate Delafield series, Val McDermid’s Lindsay Gordon series, a sample of the Sharyn McCrumb series Karen recommended, something by Asa Larsson, and Helen Tursten’s Detective Inspector Huss. Thanks for the suggestions!

Ian McEwan, Solar

Rohan Maitzen12 Comments

Solar is everything I expected of a new novel by Ian McEwan, who may be the smartest contemporary writer I read: clever, timely, acerbic, well-written, intensely readable. The problem is that those expectations are not, themselves, at a peak, by which I mean I had no expectation that a new novel by Ian McEwan would be humane, beautiful, or morally weighty. I believe Atonement to be all of those things; I believe Saturday to be all of those things at various points, though not as unequivocally so as Atonement. But after reading Atonement and Saturday I read some of McEwan’s other novels, and was alienated by what felt to me like intellect and skill divorced from humanity.  Enduring Love fascinated but repelled me; A Child in Time puzzled me. Amsterdam left me cold, notwithstanding its Booker Prize, and then so did On Chesil Beach. Of course it is not a universal prescription for excellence that a novel satisfy both heart and head, but that’s what I want, that’s what I think takes a novel from good to great, and Solar seems quite content to leave my heart untouched. I think this is a missed opportunity for a novelist with McEwan’s gifts. Why not set against the shabby opportunism of the protagonist (who is both brilliantly drawn and wholly unsympathetic) either some idealism not undermined by the general attitude of cynicism that permeates the novel–even if only to show it up as ineffectual against the absurd realities of political and scientific institutions–or some unembodied but evocative commitment to the beauties of the planet Michael Beard only pretends to cherish? Bleak House is an unforgettable critique of the stupidities of a system that serves, at most, only those who constitute it, because we see beyond it, unrealized, an idea of human flourishing, of love and justice, worth yearning for. Thus we find the yammering of innumerable lawyers both comic and tragic. Where is Miss Flite, or Lady Dedlock, never mind Jo the crossing sweeper, in McEwan’s universe?

But then, McEwan is not a reformer; he has not taken it upon himself to be–or to target–the conscience of a nation. Is he, in fact, a skeptic about global warming? I’m sure I could find out if I read around in the innumerable interviews he has given since the novel’s publication, but then I’m not sure how relevant that question is, really, to Solar, which I think is less about climate change or solar power in particular than it is about the fallibility and foibles of a particular scientist and, more generally, the peculiarities and contexts of scientific research, which is, inevitably, both constituted and compromised by structures and inividuals bound up in many interests besides whatever lofty ones they claim to serve. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that his skepticism is directed at our faith in science (and scientists). Both the much-cited “boot room” and Beard’s increasingly chaotic and filthy basement flat undermine our confidence that these are people who can clean up a whole planet:

Four days ago the room had started out in orderly condition, with all gear hanging on or stored below the numbered pegs. Finate resources, equally shared, in the golden age of not so long ago. Now it was a ruin. . . . How were they to save the earth — assuming it needed saving, which he doubted — when it was so much larger than the boot room?

OK, we get it (and in fact I think we would have got it even without Beard’s rather heavy-handed analogy). But we don’t get anything much beyond Beard’s perspective, and while that kind of intense ‘focalizing’ is very effective for some things (including, of course, characterization, but also, here, some comic effects) I think enough is potentially at stake, given the range of interests the novel has–science, love, marriage, the uncertainties of both guilt and innocence, even, to take the broadest possible perspective, the value (or not) of the survival of human life on earth–to contextualize Beard himself better. The open ending, similarly, felt to me like the wrong technical choice. It’s not necessarily shallow artifice to resolve the plot: if you have raised substantive questions, your conclusion is your chance to proffer answers to them. Do the solar panels work or not? Is Lordsburg illuminated? The answer to that question would, in turn, illuminate much more for us, such as whether the cynicism so much on display stems from frustrated idealism or an uncompromising realism (if it weren’t for Atonement, I’d assume the latter). I thought there was an element of cowardice in the novel’s ending as it did, a refusal to commit either way, to override Beard’s failings and force us to accept that progress may come from sources we despise, or to endorse, once and for all, the philosophy of the boot room: we came, we saw, we made a mess we couldn’t fix.

I also found the book’s architecture puzzling. Its three parts make good enough sense in a way, organized around key episodes in Beard’s development (if that’s even the right word). But I don’t understand why we get the back-story on Beard’s childhood and first marriage at the beginning of Part Three: it’s a bit late for introductions by then, after all, and in fact thinking back after that stumble it seemed to me that in each section there was some awkward coverage of information necessary to get us caught up with Beard: who he’s involved with, what project he’s on, and so forth. I wonder what kind of novel would have resulted from a more conventional chronological approach. A longer one, certainly–but might it also have been a richer one, if it had allowed itself to take on the shape of a scientific Bildungsroman? The only growth we witness is in Beard’s girth: does the episodic structure of the novel reflect a rejection of or an avoidance of the relationship between individual growth and historical, social, or moral change? Perhaps McEwan believes people in general don’t learn or change much over time (but, again, we have Atonement as a counter-example). Beard’s stunted self makes for some pretty funny bits (though the scene with the ‘crisps’ is very good, my own favorite is probably the bit on the snowmobile when he believes his penis has not just frozen, but fallen off and “nestl[ed] under the crook of his knee”), but it’s a humor untouched with either love or horror: we laugh at Beard but are never brought into human fellowship with him. Beard himself, of course, is incapable of such fellowship, but I think McEwan should not have let his character’s limits limit his novel.

(cross-posted to The Valve)