This Week in My Classes (October 16, 2009): Aurora Floyd

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It’s all Mary Elizabeth Braddon all the time, this week. Having just finished discussions of Lady Audley’s Secret in my upper-year seminar on Sensation Fiction, we’ve begun our work on it in my ‘regular’ 19th-century fiction course. In the meantime, in the Sensation Fiction seminar, we’ve moved on to Braddon’s second blockbuster success, Aurora Floyd. Judging from the students questions coming in for their letter assignment in the novels class, LAS is as popular as always: there’s a reason, or two or three, that it was a bestseller in its own day, after all, and perhaps readers haven’t changed that much in the intervening century and a half.

I’ve written before in this series about Lady Audley’s Secret, including as recently as last week, so I’ll focus on Aurora Floyd for this instalment. It’s a novel I don’t know nearly as well myself as LAS, having read it only a couple of times all through and taught it only once before. It’s an odd book, uneven, even somehow ungainly. It seems to want to be something more than it is: where LAS rushes ahead with a sort of gleeful pleasure in its own tawdry excesses, Aurora Floyd manifestly aspires to something more than straight sensation, and even its sensational elements are conceptually more complex and thus more interesting than those in its famous predecessor.

What I mean by that is that while LAS makes the most of the shocking inconsistency between Lucy Audley’s angelic appearance and her fearful capacity for deceit and violence, the most surprising thing about Aurora Floyd is that she is depicted as strong-willed, passionate, even sexual, and yet not villainous. Her youthful error of running off with her father’s handsome groom (“wonderfully and perfectly handsome–the very perfection of physical beauty, faultless in proportion, as if each line in his face and form had been measured by the sculptor’s rule, and carved by the sculptor’s chisel. . . yet it is rather a sensual type of beauty”) does not disqualify her from marriage to an excellent husband (of course, it should have, seeing as how the result is bigamy and all, but my point is that other than that small technical problem–which, to be perfectly fair, is accidental, as Aurora believes her first husband to be dead–Aurora is a good wife for John Mellish). Sure, she loves riding horses, and even betting on them, more than is strictly proper, but again, this aberration from conventional feminine propriety does not signal her incompatibility for the role of “heroine” of the novel. To some extent, she is tamed and chastened by the disasters that follow from her early indiscretion, but she is only “a shade less defiantly bright” at the end. So while in LAS Braddon panders to, or at least takes advantage of, fears of powerful women who pursue their own desires rather than subduing them, in AF she tries, I think, to complicate questions of feminine nature and identity by creating a protagonist who is neither angel nor demon, but something more complexly human.

That said, there are many irritating features of the novel, though I have had a hard time deciding why I don’t tolerate , from this author or in this book, literary strategies I don’t object to in others. For instance, I find Braddon’s narrative intrusions too intrusive in Aurora Floyd; they strike what seem like false notes, creating awkward shifts in register. Is there something inept about them, or is my response conditioned by my expectations for ‘sensation’ novels–e.g. that they should not even try to be realist or philosophical novels? Braddon is not an exceptionally gifted stylist in any case: there’s nothing distinctive about her prose, though as I remarked last week about LAS, it can be very effective in creating certain kinds of moods or pictures. She can’t resist heavy-handed foreshadowing (“That home so soon to be desolate! — with such ruin brooding above it as in his darkest doubts, his wildest fears, he had never shadowed forth!”). Still, it’s a perpetually interesting book, not just at the level of plot (it develops into a murder mystery) but in terms of its manipulations of literary and social conventions and tropes.

Book Reviews

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As it happens, just before I read Peter Stothard’s post about the ‘decline’ of the book review I had finished my weekly browse through the book section of the Globe and Mail and wondered aloud to my husband what it is that makes this, which should in theory be my favourite section of our “national” paper, so unengaging for me week after week. Or, to look at the question from a slightly different angle, what makes me read a review? I don’t pretend to have a theory about the big picture, but I’m a reasonably bookish person, after all. I wonder, if enough of us bookish types went through this mental exercise and wrote about it, if we might be able to provide some suggestions for those poor struggling editors!

Basically, I think there are really only two reasons I read a book review.

The short version:

  1. I’m interested in the book.
  2. I’m interested in the reviewer.

The long version:

I will pretty much always read a review of a book that’s somehow on my radar, a book I’m already interested in. This, however, is a useless principle to guide the editor of a book review section. Given just how many books are published and just how diverse individual readers’ interests and tastes are, it is impossible for a book section to cater to every reader’s idiosyncratic taste on a regular basis. Indeed, from this perspective, we should probably be more surprised when there is a review we want to read than when there isn’t! Further, while it would be nice for me, in a way, if there were a review section that perfectly reflected my existing taste and interests, on the other hand it would discourage me from challenging my taste and trying new things: my reading life would stagnate. Still, choice of books is surely an issue; I was struck by Stothard’s comment that the TLS reviews a lot of books nobody else does, and perhaps the predictable focus of so many mainstream publications on the same ‘best-selling’ titles is one of the problems. Stothard touches on debates about including ‘popular’ titles along with the more seriously (or at least aspirationally) literary; I’m too much of an outsider to the realities of publishing to know for sure, but I wonder if Dan Brown (to give just one example) is worth reviewing in the NYT, not just because, well, because, but because the vast majority of his readers surely don’t care what the NYTimes has to say about his books anyway, while the majority of NYTBR readers don’t care about Dan Brown. But here, I’m just guessing. If I had any suggestions, it would be, aim higher, not wider. If you try to be all things to all people, you become something like the horrible mish-mash that is now CBC Radio 2. People will tune in–or browse your pages–to see if there’s something they like, but they won’t love and value and (most important) fight for you if you don’t stand for anything in particular.

The second reason I’ll read a review is that it is by a reviewer who has caught my interest and earned my respect by his or her critical (or other) work. Given the impossibility (and undesirability) of a review section focusing exclusively on books I already know I want to know more about, I need the lure of good writing and good thinking: a distinct, engaging critical voice. I want a lot less plot summary than I’m usually offered, and a lot more critical reflection on the book, whether it’s providing historical or literary contexts or doing a more thematically-focused close reading. While I can be caught up in a critic’s more personal approach, I generally prefer to read criticism that does not tend towards the autobiographical (as I’ve said before here, I don’t like critical approaches that assume it’s all about the reader). In the past I have pointed to some of the early work of James Wood as exemplary. Here’s a bit of what I wrote about his review of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go:

He also takes Ishiguro’s offering and gives it a different kind of life: the conversation is not over when the book ends, and Ishiguro’s is not the final word. Now we see something that Ishiguro has shown us, or as he has perceived it, and we can talk about it too. Ishiguro has described the novelist’s work as a way of saying “It’s like this, isn’t it? Don’t you see it this way too?” (I’m paraphrasing)–and so when he’s done talking, we see what we think, or say something back. But Wood is also interested in the novel as an art form, in how and why specific kinds of narration, for instance, create certain effects, or generate (or control) affect and emotion. The trained eye sees better, understands the alternatives better. In the mini-series “From the Earth to the Moon,” there’s a wonderful episode in which a geologist is assigned to train the astronauts to collect rock samples from the moon. The crucial step is getting them to see, not just undifferentiated rocks, but specific kinds of rocks that tell their own stories and accrue meaning and significance through their shapes, composition, and location. Critics (any experts, really) help less experienced readers in the same way, telling them some of the things they can look for and why they might be interesting. They train you in appreciation and make you excited about the aesthetic and intellectual experience of reading attentively.

A great review has the effect of bringing something into focus for you, like a microscope bringing out the details on a biologist’s slide. Mind you, this effect is most powerful in retrospect, once you have read the novel for yourself, though a compelling review also gives you a preliminary (not definitive) guide to carry with you on your first reading, a sense of what you might be looking for, or at, against which to test your own perceptions. A good review gives you a lively sense of what it is like to be involved with the book. Strong subjective opinions or idiosyncratic taste are fine– and certainly preferable to the unbearable blandness of something like the Globe and Mail‘s weekly survey of recent crime fiction, which basically tells you over and over that this book is (or, occasionally, is not) a lot like the author’s other books–provided those idiosyncracies do not simply stand as dogmatic and limiting assertions but provide the motivation for searching and self-conscious analysis (not, again, of the critic, but of the book).

As I concede the point about which books are reviewed, then, for me the success or failure of a book review section really hangs on the quality of the writing and thinking it offers. On average, I find the Globe reviews trivial and uninteresting. I wonder about the wisdom of their apparent editorial policy of inviting so many creative writers to review each other’s work. There is such a thing as expertise in criticism, and it does not necessarily coincide with the skills and experience (or interests) of novelists or poets. (On the other hand, as I’m well aware, those with the most expertise about literature, namely academics, can be woefully bad at the journalistic skills of brevity–ahem–and wit, not to mention clarity.) I wonder too if the editors sell their audience short, or if their fundamental mistake or futility is just trying to be all things to all people, trying to find that elusive ‘common reader’ with no distinctly defined tastes or preferences and no patience for the kind of (sometimes excessively) specialized coverage of the TLS.

In any case, I don’t find there is any shortage of good reviewing going on. It’s just that not much of it is going on in newspapers, from what I can tell. I read all of Adam Roberts’s reviews at The Valve, not just out of team spirit, but because even when he writes about books I’ll almost certainly never read, he’s interesting about them (see his recent comments on Wolf Hall, for instance, or on Byatt’s Booker contender The Children’s Book). I’m looking forward to Steve Donoghue’s forthcoming full-length review of Wolf Hall at Open Letters, too, not least because his brief but pithy posts on the excerpts which appeared in the New York Review of Books in the summer were what first put the book on my own radar. Both writers convey a strong sense of their own reading personalities (which are, I think, quite different) while giving me plenty of ideas about the book in question. There are all kinds of smart, interesting people writing about books informally in blogs and more formally in online publications: the downside here is the difficulty of finding the kind of informed, substantial commentary that rewards careful attention, the way the best print criticism also does. I don’t have a suggestion here, except perhaps that print editors should keep exploring online reviewing, as the rest of us do, looking for voices that are distinct and engaging and well-informed. At the very least, they could expand their blogrolls. Bookslut and Maud Newton are not the only games in town.

So, the rest of you? Any ideas about what book review sections could or should do differently? How do you feel about the review section of your local paper–if it even still has one?

William Boyd, Any Human Heart

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heartI almost didn’t finish reading William Boyd’s Any Human Heart. By about 200 pages in, I was tired of Logan Mountstuart, his personality, and his life. He seemed archly insouciant, pretentious, insubstantial–as did the novel’s conceit of following this unappealing person through the 20th century, punctuating his episodic memoir (the novel consists of his journals, ‘edited,’ complete with footnotes, editorial commentary, and an index) with encounters with Woolf and Joyce, Hemingway and the Duke of Windsor and Picasso. Here’s a typical diary entry:

Tuesday, 4 MarchWe dined at Luigi’s and went on to the Cafe Royal. It was busy, full of unfamiliar faces. Spotted and spoke with Cyril [Connolly] and Jean who were with Lyman? Leland? [unidentifed]. They left shorty after. Then Adrian Daintrey[22] came in with a party in evening dress–which included Virginia Woolf[23], smoking a cigar. I let them have our table and during the general milling around that took place I introduced Freya to Woolf. ‘Are you two here alone?’ she said to Freya. ‘What a ghastly crowd. How it’s changed.’

‘We were here with Cyril Connolly, a moment ago,’ Freya said.

‘Was his black baboon with him?’ VW asked.

Freya didn’t know what she was talking about.

‘His little gollywog wife.’

I turned to Freya. ‘Now you understand Mrs Woolf’s reputation for charm.’ Back to VW. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’

We strode out and when we reached home had our first serious row. Freya was a little shocked at VW’s spite. I said you would never imagine the person who wrote all that lyrical breathy prose was steeped in such venom. ‘At least she writes,’ Freya said, without thinking. But it cut and so we looked around for something to fight about and duly found it. Now I’m writing this, about to go to sleep on the sofa, and I can hear Freya sobbing next door in the bedroom.

And so it goes, documenting Logan’s haphazard journey across the century. He’s a novelist, a journalist, a sort-of spy, an art dealer, a husband, a philanderer, a father. He meets Joyce in Paris, Hemingway in Spain, Frank O’Hara in New York. He is a kind of picaresque Rosencrantz (or Guildenstern, take your pick), always present, always involved, never really very important or impressive. He spends two years as a prisoner of war–in Switzerland! Somehow, that detail of his WWII escapades seems to me to capture something fundamental about how his life is conceived and presented in this novel, that he should parachute into Europe on a secret mission but to a neutral country, and end up so unheroically, and so diverted from the course of history that he doesn’t even know when the war has ended. It would be a comic incident (even Logan, mystified as he is by his internment, never seems to fear he will meet a terrible fate at the hands of the Swiss), if his return to action weren’t marked by a family tragedy. His story oscillates between such turns of good and bad fortune…and that uneven, unpredictable alternation of good and bad, happiness and grief, begins after a while to reveal itself as the underlying logic of the novel. As Logan reflects, near the end of his life,

That’s all your life amounts to in the end: the aggregate of all the good luck and the bad luck you experience. Everything is explained by that simple formula. Tot it up – look at the respective piles. There’s nothing you can do about it: nobody shares it out, allocates it to this one or that, it just happens. We must quietly suffer the laws of man’s condition, as Montaigne says.

As I realized Any Human Heart was not going to shape its protagonist’s life into something more definite, but would just keep on going with it, right to the end, I began to fall under its spell. I didn’t like Logan much more later in the novel than I had at first, and certainly he never achieved the level of moral self-reflection you might hope for if the novel were of a different kind (a Bildungsroman, for instance). The novel is a bit like David Copperfield, but without the benefit of hindsight in its narration, or of real personal growth in its action. But at the same time, the relentless forward movement of time itself has a kind of narrative to it. At one point Logan heads “to the passport office to collect [his] new passport, valid for another ten years”:

In 1965 I’ll be fifty-nine and the thought makes me feel faint. What’s happened to my life? These ten-year chunks that are doled out to you in passports are a cruel form of memento mori. How many more new passports will I have? One (1965)? Two (1975)? Such a long way off, 1975, yet your passport life seems all too brief. How long did he live? He managed to renew six passports.

heart2I thought that was a beautiful moment; it was certainly the moment at which I began to read without impatience, with a quickened interest in following Logan’s life the rest of the way. He has no great epiphanies. He just keeps on living, one way or another, sometimes better, sometimes worse, in comfort and in poverty, in sickness and in health. He makes and loses friends and lovers; he has good ideas and bad ones, successes and failures. His most lasting relationship is with himself (he dies alone), but he has the great gift of “genuine love” for three other people, a love that brings him to another brief but beautiful insight:

As I write this I feel that draining, hollowing helplessness that genuine love for another person produces in you. It’s at these moments that we know we are going to die. Only with Freya, Stella, and Gail. Only three. Better than none.

I finished the final journal entry, which is touching but unsentimental, very happy to have persisted with the novel. I was with Logan emotionally in a way I never would have predicted from my initial response. I’m not convinced, though, that the set-up, the elaborate pretense of authenticity, was necessary. The apparatus (explanatory prefaces, footnotes, index) seems gratuitously metafictional. We can suspend our disbelief readily enough when reading a novel cast as a diary (or as letters, for that matter); we don’t need to pretend we can read it because it was prepared for publication. I suppose this framing material does enhance the novel’s emphasis on Logan as a witness to history, something he himself becomes more self-conscious about, naturally enough, later in his life when having known Hemingway, or met Woolf, or been sketched by Picasso, confers on him a kind of status, as if he’s a walking relic. But it still felt artificial to me and even, at times, detracted from my unfolding sense of commitment to the individual voice speaking through the journals.

This Week in My Classes (October 5, 2009): It’s Sensational!

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In 19th-Century British Fiction, we’re wrapping up our discussions of Great Expectations this week. I’ve written before about teaching this novel. Here’s a bit from that post, in which I focus on Pip’s moving speech to Estella after he learns Magwitch is his true benefactor and Estella, though she “cannot choose but remain part of [his] character, part of the little good in [him], part of the evil,” is not destined for him after all:

Contemporary novelists are often described as “Dickensian,” usually for writing long, diffuse novels with lots of plots and characters and a bit more emotional exhibitionism than is the norm in ‘serious’ fiction. I rarely think they deserve the label, because to me it’s moments such as this one, combining dense symbolic allusiveness, rhythmic and evocative language, high sentiment, and urgent moral appeal–all bordering on the excessive, even ridiculous, but, at their best, not collapsing into it–that distinguish Dickens from other novelists. I’m not sure any modern novelist takes such risks.

I’ve been thinking even more this time about the “risks” Dickens takes, his excesses of both language and imagination. They press us so far beyond the realistic, in almost any sense of that elusive term. Take Miss Havisham, for instance. There’s really no excuse for Miss Havisham: to be confronted with her is to be challenged to forget plausibility–to abandon, not just suspend, disbelief. Less a woman than a grotesque embodied symbol of life without love, a kind of moral and emotional zombie, she is also a key agent of the plot, with completely commonplace control over money and property. What kind of undead figure has its own lawyer? So she exists in a strange liminal zone between human and inhuman, until woken to her own tragedy, and the tragedy she has spawned in Estella (“I am what you have made me!”) by witnessing Pip’s suffering:

‘What have I done! What have I done!’ She wrong her hands, and crushed her white hair, and returned to this cry over and over again. ‘What have I done!’

I knew not how to answer, or how to comfort her. That she had done a grievous thing in taking an impressionable child to mould into the form that her wild resentment, spurned affection, and wounded pride, found vengeance in, I knew full well. But that, in shutting out the light of day, she had shut out infinitely more; that, in seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will reverse that reverse the appointed order of their Maker; I knew equallywell. And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world?

Miss Havisham cannot survive this ordeal by moral revelation, which, in truly Dickensian fashion, leads to a literal conflagration of the “rottenness” and “ugly things” that made up her perverted identity. Pip’s ability to feel compassion for this creature who has captured and ruined his own best hopes and feelings is one of the signs that he is on his way to being, not the Pip who turned his back on Joe, but the Pip who has the ethical sensibility to narrate Great Expectations.

In Victorian Sensations, we’ve finished with The Woman in White and are nearly done with Lady Audley’s Secret. When I wrote about this novel before (in the context of a different course), I remarked, “It is always a bit discouraging to me how popular this novel is with my students, full as it is of cheap tricks and thoughtless language.” My feelings are a bit more complicated this time. Lady Audley’s Secret is certainly in the category of ‘novels I teach largely for reasons other than their overt literary merit’: even acknowledging the difficulty of defining that quality with any specificity, I do chafe at the excesses of Braddon’s writing–they aren’t the imaginative or linguistic excesses of Dickens but the novelistic equivalent of using a lot of exclamation points or TYPING IN ALL CAPS in an email. “We get it!” I want to say (no doubt, of course, many readers feel the same about Dickens). Here’s a sample, for instance, from a conversation between Our Hero, Robert Audley, and his BFF George Talboys. Robert has recently convinced George to come and visit Audley Court to meet his uncle, Sir Michael Audley, and his pretty, young, golden-haired new wife. George has been feeling melancholy since learning that his pretty golden-haired wife died (hmmmm) just before his return from three years in Australia.

‘I’m not a romantic man, Bob,’ he would say sometimes, ‘and I never read a line of poetry in my life that was any more to me than so many words and so much jingle; but a feeling has come over me since my wife’s death, that I am like a man standing upon a long low shore, with hideous cliffs frowning down upon him from behind, and the rising tide crawling slowly but surely about his feet. It seems to grow nearer and nearer every day, that black, pitiless tide; not rushing upon with with a great noise and a might impetus, but crawling, creeping, stealing, gliding towards me, ready to close in above my head when I am least prepared for the end.’

As Miley Cyrus might say, d’ya think something bad might lie in his future? And is it just me, or is it hard to maintain literary decorum with a hero named ‘Bob,’ as in this immortal line, “‘I trust in your noble heart, Bob'”?!

And yet there are sections of this novel that are as good as most others I’ve read. In particular, this time through, I was struck by how effectively Braddon evokes the psychological restlessness, even instability, of Lady Audley as she waits for what she hopes (or possible, just a little, fears) is the news of Robert’s death. Spoiler alert: she has double-locked his door at the inn and then set the place on fire, and we get this striking image as she leaves the scene of the crime:

Sir Michael’s wife walked towards the house in which her husband slept, with the red blaze lighting up the skies behind her, and with nothing but the blackness of the night before.

It’s a nice touch to identify her by the status she has risked so much to achieve, but also to hint, with the “blackness” ahead of her, that despite the devastation she has now wrought, her future contains nothing “but the blackness of the night.” Then follows a long chapter of waiting, a damp listless day with no outlet for Lady Audley’s energies by “to wander up and down [the] monotonous pathway” in the courtyard of her luxurious home. The day ekes itself out:

Sir Michael’s wife [again, nice] still lingered in the quadrangle; still waited for those tidings which were so long coming.

It was nearly dark. The blue mists of evening had slowly risen from the ground. The flat meadows were filled with a grey vapour, and a stranger might have fancied Audley Court a castle on the margin of a sea. [This image ominously echoes Robert Audley’s earlier dream of Audley Court ‘rooted up . . . standing bare and unprotected . . . threatened by the rapid rising of a boisterous sea, whose waves seemed gathering upward to descend and crush the house he loved.’] Under the archway the shadows of fast-coming night lurked darkly; like traitors waiting for an opportunity to glide stealthily into the quadrangle. [Again, this image harkens back to an earlier one, in which the history of Audley Court is associated with secrets and conspiracies. Traitors to what, we might ask at this point?] Through the archway a patch of cold blue sky glimmered faintly, streaked by one line of lurid crimson, and lighted by the dim glitter of one wintry-looking star. [In Robert’s dream, the only stars are those in the eyes of ‘my lady, transformed into a mermaid, beckoning his uncle to destruction. See how completely this very suspenseful moment builds on images and ideas from earlier in the novel?] Not a creature was stirring in the qudrangle but the restless woman, who paced up and down the straight pathways [ones she has, metaphorically, strayed from quite a bit by this point!], listening for a footstep, whose coming was to strike terror to her soul. She heard it at last!–a footstep in the avenue upon the other side of the archway. But was it the footstep?

To find out whose footstep it was, you’ll have to read the book yourself! My point here is that this seems to me very effective writing–effective, that is, as a means to its end, which is suspense, to be sure (and if we are too easily dismissive of plot when we make up the terms for ‘literary merit,’ what, if any, room do we make for suspense?) but also the elaboration of a range of images, symbols, and ideas–that Lady Audley’s very presence on those “straight pathways,” for instance, represents a catastrophe for the ‘house’ of Audley. This section also effectively complicates the previously two-dimensional morality of the novel: the anxious activity of Lady Audley shows her to be more than “just” a villain, no matter how resolutely Robert seeks to contain her in that role. An actress, an infiltrator, a subversively ambitious woman who will not stop at anything to keep the gains she has made–but still capable of feeling “terror” in her soul as she awaits confirmation of her crime. Shortly, she will also give an account of her life and motives that forces the reader (if not necessarily her audience within ‘story space’) to entertain the possibility that she acts in self defense, or at least, like Becky Sharp (an obvious progenitor), she is simply using the limited means available to her, as a woman in a profoundly patriarchal world, to get–and stay–ahead. It’s provocative stuff, and entertaining, and if it’s inconsistently crafted (and, as I tend to think, inconclusively ‘argued’), it succeeds at what it seems to set out to do. I suppose that’s one definition of ‘well-written.’ Indeed, that’s George Henry Lewes’s definition: he describes Jane Austen as the “greatest artist that has ever written, using the term to signify the most perfect mastery over the means to her end.”

And that idea of “mastery over the means to her end” brings me to something I hope to write more specifically about soon, namely, how fast I think we (should) move, when the question of “literary merit” comes up, from the aesthetic to the ethical. Even supposing we could arrive at some resilient definition of good writing, it would have to (I think) make something like Lewes’s dodge here from the suggestion of universality implied in “mastery” to the issue of writing suited to a particular “means.” That’s why we can call both Dickens and Ian McEwan “good” (accomplished, skilfull, successful) writers. But at some point in that discussion, the question surely arises: how do we judge the ends? As Orwell famously said, “the first thing we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up”:

If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, “This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman [well, OK, that makes me uncomfortable, though he does go on to suggest this book burning may be a mental, rather than a literal, result]. Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.

Weekend Miscellany: Niffenegger, Dickens, P. D. James, and Dracula

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I’m definitely interested in reading Audrey Niffenegger‘s new novel, Fearful Symmetry. I began The Time Traveler’s Wife with some trepidation, worried that it would be something along the lines of Diana Gabaldon’s (to me, mysteriously) best-selling ‘Outlander’ series–escapist romantic fiction in with people in historical Hallowe’en costumes (admittedly, I read only the first one). I was taken aback by the gritty realism of Niffenegger’s novel, and indeed how she managed to make a story with such an implausible premise seem so intensely believable I couldn’t say. The central love story itself had, perhaps, the wish-fulfilment aspect of any story about a love that endures for all time (or through all times), but it didn’t strike me as at all sentimental in its presentation. Here’s an excerpt from the New York Times review of Fearful Symmetry, which sounds similar only in refusing conventional (real) limits on our present existence:

Highgate Cemetery, which opened in 1839, is perhaps the most famous of these parklands and a popular tourist attraction now. It is home to the remains of Karl Marx, Radclyffe Hall, Michael Faraday and the Pre-Raphaelite model Elizabeth Siddal Rossetti, among many other luminaries. It represents lives, secrets and stories jumbled together, the path through them determined by proximity and the tastes of the individual tour guide. In that way, it is like a novel.

Audrey Niffenegger makes the most of Highgate in a bewitching new novel, “Her Fearful Symmetry,” which proves that death (as one currently popular saying goes) is only the beginning. That’s true for Elspeth Noblin, who dies of cancer at age 44 after declaring: “A bad thing about dying is that I’ve started to feel as though I’m being erased. Another bad thing is that I won’t get to find out what happens next.”

A lot happens next, and a very unerased Elspeth participates in much of it, for there is a ghostly and passionate life after death: conflicts, like spirits, live on. Buried in Highgate, just over the fence from her former apartment, Elspeth’s corporeal self has left behind an estranged twin sister, a younger lover whom she promises to haunt and a valuable estate that now belongs to her nieces, also twins, living in America. She stipulated that they can collect only if they move into her flat for a year and keep their parents out. Her reasons will be explained if Elspeth’s lover, Robert — a neighbor and Ph.D. student writing an obsessive history of Highgate — can bear to read the diaries she’s left him. (read the rest here)

On another topic, some time ago in the Guardian Jon Varese (of the Dickens Project, and also a Ph.D. candidate at UC Santa Cruz) wrote a little piece asking why we still read Dickens (his answer comes by way of one of his students: “My search for an answer continued but never with success, until one year the little flicker came – not surprisingly – from another high school student, whose essay I was reviewing for a writing contest. ‘We need to read Dickens’s novels,” she wrote, “because they tell us, in the grandest way possible, why we are what we are'”). I was looking over that post again for other reasons (among them, that I’m currently teaching Great Expectations) and I was struck by the high quality of the comments thread that followed. One factor may have been Varese’s generous and patient responses: it’s obvious that he wasn’t doing a ‘post and run’ but was attentive to and genuinely interested in the debate he had begun–which ended up being, I think, quite a bit more interesting than the original post.

Sarah Weinman alerted me to these interviews with P. D. James, who apparently has a non-fiction work on detective fiction forthcoming (Talking About Detective Fiction). Though I found The Private Patient uninspiring, I am an admirer of James’s approach to detective fiction and regret having taken An Unsuitable Job for a Woman off the syllabus for this year’s round of Mystery and Detective fiction, not least because I appreciate the opportunity to discuss James’s idea that you can root genre fiction in the work of the great social realists of the nineteenth century (she points to Trollope and George Eliot as key influences) as well as in the more obvious progenitors of detective fiction (Poe and Wilkie Collins, for instance). For some time there was a lecture of hers available through the Smithsonian Institute (sadly, last time I checked the link was disabled) that was a delightful mix of erudition and wit. James has never offered any apologies for writing genre fiction, instead speaking often and eloquently about the liberty that choice has given her, by providing a clear scaffolding for the plot, to explore other aspects of fiction including setting, theme, and character. I’ll certainly be looking out for Talking About Detective Fiction. Here’s a snippet from the Telegraph article:

She has a crack at explaining the genre’s appeal in Talking about Detective Fiction, an idiosyncratic and entertaining primer written at the suggestion of the Bodleian Library, which is publishing the book and to which James is donating hardback royalties. It is not a comprehensive history – she does not read much contemporary crime fiction apart from books by Ian Rankin and her old friend Ruth Rendell – but an imaginative response to some of her favourite authors.

The 89-year-old Lady James is trying to recall what first drew the teenage Phyllis, along with millions of other readers in the Thirties, to the so-called Golden Age detective stories.

“Those books suggested we live in a moral, comprehensible universe, at a time when there was a great deal of disruption and violence at home and abroad, and of course the ever-present risk of war. And we live in times of unrest now, so perhaps we may soon enter another Golden Age.”

Finally, at InfiniteSummer.Org, the organizers of this summer’s mass (?) reading of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest are turning to Bram Stoker’s Dracula for their next group read, I guess in the spirit of “and now for something completely different”! I’m not sure how I’m going to manage reading along, what with the readings for my classes and the other usual rush of teaching tasts that pile on in October, but the recent flurry of discussion here and at The Valve about literary merit, the alleged “extra-literary” priorities of academic critics, and so on–much of it begun with some snide remarks about Dracula–has piqued my interest in rereading the novel, which I haven’t read in probably 20 years and never officially ‘studied.’ I’ll put up some remarks, if I can, as I read along. It looks as if there will be some quite interesting material posted at the host site; they began with an introduction by well-known Dracula expert Elizabeth Miller. I’m on Chapter 3 so far and if I had a complaint, it would certainly not be that the book is dry, boring, or badly written, but that its literary investment is made in prurience and what (with a hopelessly high-Victorian prejudice, I suppose) I consider “base” emotions.

Trollope at Open Letters

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I wrote a little piece on ‘reading Anthony Trollope’ for Open Letters Monthly which has now gone ‘live’ in their October issue. Come check it out (the folks at the New Yorker’s Book Bench did and liked it!)–and while you’re over there, read around in the rest of the issue, which, as usual, is full of lively and interesting material.

“Yale Called Me On the Phone”

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Dan Green pointed me to William Chace’s recent article on “The Decline of the English Department” (on which more eventually), which in turn led me to look up Chace’s memoir, 100 Semesters, which turns out to be quite interesting reading, not least for its matter-of-fact portrayal of what must seem, to anyone who graduated with a Ph.D. in the last 20 years, like a complete fantasy of the academic job search. Here’s Chace’s experience as an ‘ABD’ at Berkeley in 1968:

But before I did [finish my dissertation], I knew that I had to find a job teaching English at a college or university. In those halcyon days, a few years before the iron gates clanged shut and the job market for the humanities became the hugely depressing spectacle it is today, many departments were looking to enlarge their rosters of assistant professors. Colleges and universities had money, and the arts and humanities still enjoyed the considerable prestige that today they have seen ebb away. The reasons for this good news had to do with large national patterns. In the 1960s alone college and university enrollments more than doubled, from more than three million to eight million. Those getting Ph.D.s each year tripled; and more faculty were appointed than had been appointed in the earlier three centuries of American higher education. Places like the State University of New York at Buffalo, Indiana University, and even exclusive and insular Yale, were hiring. I wrote to them all and was happy to receive the warm encouragement of the professors— Tom Flanagan, Ralph Rader, Alex Zwerdling, and John Traugott—who had taught me. They wrote recommendations for me and thought my prospects good. Owing to such support and to the fact that many jobs seemed available in those days, my return mail brought happy tidings. One institution—the University of Virginia—used a string of Edgar Allan Poe stamps on the envelope mailed to me, hoping that I would make the connection between his one-time presence there and the university’s devotion to poetry. Yale, in the person of the illustrious scholar and Sterling Professor Maynard Mack, called me on the phone. Few people at the time had a greater reputation in English literary scholarship than Mack. He was an expert on Shakespeare, and had overseen the Twickenham edition of the poems of Alexander Pope. From New Haven, he announced that a job awaited me at Yale. This appeared to be great news indeed, but I was bold enough to ask, given what I already knew of Yale’s pattern of only rarely giving tenure to assistant professors, what my chances of a permanent position there would be. With practiced disingenuousness, he quickly replied: “Oh, Bill, we will always have a place for you.” I thanked him but knew better than to believe him. Many years later, Yale would approach me with another kind of job in mind.

Two institutions with offers for me—MIT and Stanford—seemed more attractive than the others. The first had the advantage of being in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had established a wide-ranging department of the “Humanities” rather than just an English department, and had powerful intellectuals like Noam Chomsky on the faculty. The second had a singularly attractive attribute in its favor: it was in the Bay Area, where JoAn and I wanted to remain. But I knew little about the place and, almost to a person, my Berkeley teachers spoke of it with enormous condescension. It was, they said, “the Farm,” a school for rich and lazy Californians, a place where nothing political ever happened, an “unreal” university. But I turned aside all this advice and chose Stanford. The person who interviewed me there, Ian Watt, the distinguished scholar of the novel, the eighteenth century, and Joseph Conrad, had earlier taught at Berkeley. JoAn had been one of his students, and he thought highly of her. He told us that we would be happy at Stanford. He was right. Stanford turned out, over the years, to be good to me and to JoAn. It had no nepotism rule, and she also was given a position as a lecturer in the English department.

I think we all have heard stories about “those halcyon days,” but it’s still astonishing to contemplate someone who has not yet even finished writing his dissertation fielding calls from Yale, Stanford, and MIT.

This Week in My Classes: September 28, 2009

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My recent venture into list-making brought something into focus for me about my reading habits: left to myself, I incline towards the kind of fiction defended by Wilkie Collins in one of his Prefaces to The Woman in White:

I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story; and I have never believed that the novelist who properly performed this first condition of his art, was in danger, on that account, of neglecting the delineation of character — for this plain reason, that the effect produced by any narrative of events is essentially dependent, not on the events themselves, but on the human interest which is directly connected with them. It may be possible, in novel-writing, to present characters successfully without telling a story ; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters : their existence, as recognisable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can be effectively told. The only narrative which can hope to lay a strong hold on the attention of readers, is a narrative which interests them about men and women — for the perfectly obvious reason that they are men and women themselves. (see here for the rest)

Of course I recognize that there are, in fact, other ideas of fiction that have produced great results, many of which I have enjoyed. And of course I would not want my larger conception of (or my work in) literature to be framed or limited by this admittedly quite conventional theory…though I suppose it’s worth pointing out that telling a story can be done in many different ways, as can presenting characters, and even the idea of characters as ‘recognisable realities’ is surely amenable to the kind of recognition we get from, say, a character in Dickens whose outrageous exaggerations nonetheless strike us as somehow fundamentally truthful about how people live in the world. Even the ways in which we can be interested ‘about men and women’ are manifold. So it’s not, I think, as narrow an idea of the novel as it might initially seem. But its commitment to some kind of human interest at the heart of the novel is one I share, and I falter and sometimes stall reading novels that don’t offer the forward momentum of a well-constructed plot. Of course in the best of all possible worlds, and the best of all possible books, plot and character are used in support of deeply considered philosophies and the whole is composed in well-crafted prose (though just try defining that in a way that makes room for both Dickens and McEwan, Austen and Rushdie!). But if I had to choose, I’d take the novel with story and heart over the novel with beautiful words or experimental form. If I wanted to pause a lot and think, “how deft and original!” or “what a striking image!”–well, I’d be reading poetry.

Now, again, this is what I do left to myself; this is what I like best, which is really a reflection of who I am as a person as much as who I am as a critic or a scholar or a teacher. At the same time, this reading personality of mine inevitably affects these aspects of my life and work, though cause and effect may be hard to distinguish. Am I a Victorianist because these are my reading preferences, or have my reading preferences been shaped by many years of rereading a certain group of Victorian novels and working out how best to explain them so as to engage the attention, the interest, and finally (I always hope) the hearts of undergraduates?

In any case, for someone like me, this is a good week, because I’ve been reading The Woman in White with one class and I’m heading into Great Expectations with another. Now, there are passages of great expressiveness and even beauty in Great Expectations: Dickens is a writer who knows how to turn a phrase, who can go from blunt force to arresting image without slowing down. The Woman in White, too, has some marvellous description: the moonlit quiet of Hartright’s Hampstead walk, for instance, on which he has his first thrilling encounter with the mysterious woman in white. But in neither case is it really appropriate, or even possible, to linger over these aesthetic effects. These guys are masters of plotting, and their people! Once you’ve read them, they become part of your mental life–Fosco and Marian and Pesca, and even tediously insipid Laura, and Jaggers and Joe and Wemmick, who teaches us all the invaluable lesson not to grow up to be a mailbox. And though both novels deal, at bottom, with serious questions about values, social relations, power, prejudice, love, hate, and death (!), they also both communicate a great sense of fun. Pleasure in reading can come from many things, many effects and styles and devices and voices. For sheer imaginative exuberance, these novels would have to rank right up near the top.

My Best of the Decade: An Idiosyncratic List

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The Millions has just finished its countdown of the “Best of the Millenium.” Through their polling processes, they’ve ended up with two lists, one representing the top picks of their panel of “pros,” the other representing the results of a Facebook poll of their readers. There are lots of potentially interesting aspects of both lists, including which books were favored by readers but not by the ‘pros’ and vice versa. I was interested that of the thirty unique titles listed, I have read only nine: The Corrections, The Known World, Never Let Me Go, Atonement, Middlesex, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, White Teeth, and The Known World, plus half each of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and Austerlitz. A lot of the other books on the lists seem tilted towards a somewhat different readerly sensibility than my own (the kind that finishes Austerlitz, for instance). And that’s fine, of course…but the sense that even those on the lists that I had read weren’t all really among my ‘best of the millenium’ (Middlesex and White Teeth, for instance, neither of which I thought really deserved quite the hype it got) prompted me to browse my bookshelves to see what my own list would be. Here’s what I came up with–but because one of my very favourite recent reads was published in 1999 and so just missed the millenial cut-off, here’s My Best of the Decade, 1999-2009. The list is in alphabetical, not ranked, order, and I’ve linked to any corresponding reviews, though several of these I read before I started blogging. I’ve cheated a little and included one work of non-fiction, only because if I had to rank the new books I’ve read in the past decade, it would be at or very near the top.

  1. Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil
  2. Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White
  3. Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
  4. Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime
  5. Yann Martel, The Life of Pi
  6. Ian McEwan, Atonement
  7. Ian McEwan, Saturday
  8. Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost
  9. Ann Patchett, Bel Canto
  10. Vikram Seth, An Equal Music
  11. Carol Shields, Unless
  12. Sarah Waters, Fingersmith

It’s an odd exercise, doing this. For one thing, it reminds me just how many of the books I’ve loved recently were not in fact recently published (The Enchanted April, for instance, or The Balkan Trilogy).

So? Which recent favourites of yours are missing, both from my list and from the lists at The Millions, or which listed titles would you heartily endorse–or dispute?