Reading in the New Year: Love and Death

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

love-letteringRing out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

As anticipated, my first two books of 2020 were Kate Clayborn’s Love Lettering and Tana French’s The Witch Elm. They could hardly be more different, but of their kinds, they are both, I think, excellent.

Love Lettering has many of the same qualities that have made Clayborn’s previous books–the ‘Chance of a Lifetime’ trilogy–my favorite contemporary romance series. Interestingly (to me, anyway!), these are qualities that actually dulled the books’ impact at first. Clayborn gives her characters a lot of specificity, both in their personalities and in their activities. This means a lot of backstory and also a lot of neepery (which, as I’ve figured out, is one of my favorite things). In Beginner’s Luck, for instance, one of the protagonists, Kit, is a lab technician, which I suppose might sound a bit dry, but Clayborn does a good job conveying the interest and satisfaction she finds in her job, as well as explaining the scientific work she is also involved in. In the same novel, the other lead character, Ben, helps out at his father’s salvage business–again, maybe not the first thing you’d think of as a romantic setting, but I really enjoy the details about the bits and pieces of lights and fixtures and furniture and their restoration. All this stuff isn’t just background, though: Clayborn is really deft at assembling elements that both further her story and work symbolically within it. In Beginner’s Luck, Ben is puttering away at re-assembling an elaborate chandelier: by the end of the novel it’s clear that putting things back together is what both he and Kit are struggling to do, in their different ways.

luckThe first time I read Beginner’s Luck I felt that there was so much going on that it got a bit distracting. Maybe this has something to do with my expectations for romance: though there is a lot of emotional intensity in Clayborn’s novels, the central relationship is embedded in a lot of what seemed like padding. It turns out, though, that for me anyway this is exactly what makes her books fun to reread, as more of the novels’ patterns–the connections between their parts–become clearer over time. At the same time, it’s the emotional intensity that means I give a pass to what might otherwise bother me about them, which is that the love story relies (more so in the second and third books in the trilogy than the first) on an initial set-up that seems, if you think about it hard at all, pretty contrived or unlikely. This is especially true of Luck of the Draw, which has nonetheless turned out to be my favorite of the trilogy. luck-of-draw

It is also definitely true of Love Lettering, where the relationship between the main characters, Meg and Reid, depends on his implausibly accepting an invitation that I can’t quite imagine anyone actually extending to a virtual stranger. However! Once they get started, their slow-growing friendship plays out in a beautifully nuanced way, their uneasy unfamiliarity teetering bit by bit into trust, pleasure, and of course, ultimately, love. Here too there’s a lot going on in context and character development, especially around Meg’s work doing hand lettering. Clayborn gives us a lot of detail about that work, but it never feels like she’s doing the dreaded “info-dump”: instead, Meg’s interest, her vocation, permeates her first-person narration. She sees lettering everywhere, both literally and when people talk to her–or when she and Reid kiss for the first time:

He shifts, lets his lips rest softly against my cheekbone, and instead of pressing them there, he rubs them back and forth once, as light as a strand of my own hair in the wind, and I see that word, too, drawn in the same pink that’s the color of my natural blush, the pink I turn when I’m warm or embarrassed or aroused. The t, the w, the o, all of them a heavily sloped italic. All of them on the way to somewhere.

It’s a kind of sensual synesthesia that is also elicited for her in a more aesthetic and intellectual way by her relationship with New York–which the novel is also a love letter to, as Meg and Reid’s romance unfolds as they explore the streets in search of inspiration in its billboards, awnings, and facades. Love Lettering turns out to be a novel all about reading signs, literal but also metaphorical and personal; this concept ties together its various subplots, as does the characters’ related struggle to express themselves clearly–to signal their own meaning. My only complaint about the novel is that the ending, which includes a long-deferred revelation about Reid, seemed both a bit rushed and a bit out of sync with the mood or style of the rest of the book. That revelation is also the reason we don’t get the alternating points of view Clayborn used in all three of her previous books. I liked Meg a lot, but it felt a bit odd for a romance to be so completely one-sided. Now that I know everything, however, I will be able to infer a lot more about what is really going on with Reid when I reread it, which I am bound to do before long.

witch-elm The Witch Elm has been written about a lot elsewhere; of the reviews I’ve read, I think Laura Miller’s in Slate comes closest to what I thought about it. I know some people have found it too long or too purposeless, for its first half at least, and so not particularly gripping. Maureen Corrigan in the Washington Post concludes her actually fairly positive review a bit crushingly: “I’d say that without any “bang, bang” for hundreds of pages, “The Witch Elm” becomes “boring, boring.” I definitely did not find it boring! Toby’s voice worked for me from the start, though having read Tana French before I knew better than to take him completely at face value. I liked the patient progress of the story through the initial harrowing attack on Toby to the muted Gothic atmosphere of the Ivy House. Once the skull turned up I had (unusually, for me!) lots of theories about how it got there and who was implicated–and French teased me with plenty of hints and possibilities that fit and then contradicted each of them. Toby’s wavering sense of self brought layers to the novel, both philosophical and psychological. “They’re unsettled and they’re frightened,” Uncle Hugo says about the people who hire him to research their genealogies after unexpected DNA results; “They’re afraid that they’re not who they always thought they were, and they want me to find them reassurance. And we both know it might not turn out that way.” That’s Toby’s situation too, eventually, trying to figure out the truth about himself when other people’s accounts of him don’t square with his own. For him too, the result may not be reassuring–but what French conveys so well is that his very craving for stability, for confirmation, for certainty about his own identity, is itself a potent destructive force.

My only quibble with The Witch Elm is that the story about the skull in the tree eventually comes out in a really dull way (narratively speaking – the facts are plenty shocking): Toby just gets told it all in a long and inadequately motivated ‘reveal’ scene. I expected the case to be ‘solved’ in some more subtle and artful way. I realize that the novel is not, really, centered on that whodunit aspect but is actually about Toby–who he is, what he has done or not done, what has enabled him to live and think and ignore and forget the way he has. Still, that bit fell flat for me. Things took another dramatic turn soon after, though, and the novel’s denouement overall was very satisfactory.

So there we are: two new books for the new year, both good ones. What’s next? Well, for one, Pride and Prejudice, which I start with my 19th-century fiction class on Friday.

 

 

 

2019: My Year In Reading

Rohan Maitzen8 Comments

melmoth-coverFor some reason I had it in mind that 2019 had not been a very good reading year for me. Then I went back through my blog posts and discovered that, while there isn’t really one stand-out “best of the year” the way there sometimes is, there have been plenty of reading highlights, and hardly any outright duds. (That in itself is a good enough reason to keep blogging, if you ask me.) According to my book math, that means that overall 2019 has actually been a better than average reading year! Here’s a look back at some of its greatest hits, some also-rans, a few minor disappointments, and some failures (maybe mine, maybe the books’).

The Best Books I Read in 2019

Sarah Perry’s Melmoth was definitely one of my favorite reads of the year, a perfect balance of propulsive suspense and philosophical gravitas. I found it “a thoroughly entertaining novel of ideas.”

smiley-people-1John Le Carré’s Smiley’s People was less fun, I suppose, but it was a moving and thoroughly satisfying conclusion to the saga of Smiley and his longtime adversary Karla. At once triumphant and mournful, it leaves us with the lingering dissatisfaction of knowing that “some wars can only be won by losing, by giving up your allegiance to the very thing you are fighting for.”

Anna Burns’s brilliant Milkman  may be a historical novel about the Troubles but–in part through its idiosyncratic narration, which gives the story an allegorical cast–Burns ensures that that “we aren’t left with any comfortable sense that the kind of trouble they were about, or that the novel is about, is safely in the past, or only in Ireland.”

milkmanAndrew Miller’s Now We Shall Be Entirely Free was a slow burn but (like Melmoth, but in a much quieter register) it effectively combines taut suspense with deeper reflections about “the kinds of choices we all have to make in our lives about where to go and why, and … what we hope to find if we ever get there.”

lucy-gaultWilliam Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault quietly but powerfully “settles us into the day-to-day possibilities of grace without insisting that a life without more than that is a failure”; both Trevor’s beautiful prose and Lucy’s usettling story convinced me that this is an author I want to read much more of.

wolf-borderSarah Hall’s The Wolf Border was another book that made me want to read more of the author’s back catalog. It has the same “cerebral energy” that appeals to me in Sarah Moss’s fiction; “it’s a novel that is clearly motivated by ideas but it isn’t overwhelmed by them.”

Vera Caspary’s Laura turned out to be that unexpected thing for me–a noir novel I thoroughly enjoyed: “it has as much literary flair as anything I’ve read by Hammett or Chandler, and it pulls off its tricks without glamorizing violence (as Hammett especially often seems to) and with a woman at its center who is herself, not just an object for male fantasy.”

Other Books That Were Also Very Good

drummer-girl3Reading John Le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl, I missed Smiley–not just the man but what he brought to his books–for all their melancholy, “there’s something lovable as well as admirable about Smiley, something comforting, even, in what he stands for (and fights for).” Still, Charlie turned out to be, if not admirable, at least interesting and sympathetic–“torn to pieces,” as Le Carré said, “by the battle between two peoples who both have justice on their side.”

I really liked Rachel Malik’s Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves, a “reticent and unassuming” novel about two equally unassuming women who want only “to live quietly and honestly, and together.”

220px-Miss_Boston_and_Miss_HargreavesI found Emma Healey’s Elizabeth Is Missing immediately gripping and ultimately very poignant. In different hands Maud’s voice or story could have felt contrived or manipulative, but while Elizabeth Is Missing “is certainly a clever book, … it is never clever at Maud’s expense.”

elizabeth-is-missing-1

Lissa Evans was a happy discovery for me in 2019, largely thanks to Dorian‘s recommendations. I enjoyed all three of her novels that I read, but especially Crooked Heart, which for some reason I did not write up here!

grant-c0verJessica Grant’s Come, Thou Tortoise was an unexpectedly delightful treat–it looks twee, but it turns out to be a comic novel suffused with tenderness (and, as a slightly disdainful review by Lucy Ellmann indicates, the anti-Ducks, Newburyport, about my experience of which see below). I can imagine rereading Come, Thou Tortoise regularly, just for the fun of it–and also because I know I didn’t pick up on all the novel’s twists and tricks the first time through.

I loved George Saunders’s “Tenth of December.” No, I didn’t format that incorrectly: I mean the story, not the collection, because it was the only one in the book “that seemed to me clearly written by the author of Lincoln in the Bardo.”

van-esI really admired–and was ultimately quite moved by–the careful self-effacement of Bart Van Es’s The Cut Out Girl. His family history project has broader significance as “part of the larger responsibility we all have not to look away, and then to reflect on the meaning of what we have seen.”

Some Books That Were Perfectly Fine

magpieI had fun reading Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders and The Word Is Murder (which, I agree with Dorian, is better than Magpie), but I think that might be enough Horowitz for me (except for rewatching Foyle’s War, which I am very keen to do). I admire his ingenuity and envy his brio and productivity, but I missed the sense of heft–of moral depth and complexity–that I get from the crime writers I like best.

Tessa Hadley’s Late In the Day was one of several highly polished, conspicuously competent novels I’ve read in the last few years that left me wanting more–more risk-taking? more energy? Or maybe wanting less–I find it hard to get excited about novels so well-crafted that I’m aware at every moment of the author crafting it. That’s why Melmoth (for one) was a favorite of mine this year and Late In the Day (good as it is) wasn’t. Ditto Joan Silber’s Improvement–also smart, well written, and (as I read it, anyway) a bit soulless.

akinMy review of Emma Donoghue’s Akin will be in Canadian Notes and Queries in the new year. I enjoyed reading it quite a bit: even though I found it somewhat contrived, Donoghue is a good enough storyteller to carry me along. It made me think, though, about why The Wonder was (I thought) so much better–not just fine but genuinely good. Maybe Donoghue (like Ann Patchett?) should write fewer novels, so that her ideas for each one have longer to deepen?

Some Books I Expected To Be Better

whippleI absolutely love the idea of Persephone Books, and it is thrilling in principle to see so many publishers devoting themselves now to bringing back “lost classics.” Dorothy Whipple’s Someone At A Distance did not, however, convince me that she has been unduly neglected. It was OK–but it rather reinforced than subverted Carmen Callil’s insistence that Virago’s books not dip below “the Whipple line.” That said, while Elizabeth Jenkins’s The Tortoise and the Hare (published by Virago) is (in my opinion, of course) a better novel, is it a much better novel? I called it a “small gem,” so I guess I think the answer is yes.

jones-1

I had high hopes for Tea Obreht’s Inland–I’m not sure why, in retrospect, as I did not really love The Tiger’s Wife. Obreht does a lot of things really well in Inland, but I didn’t think they added up to as much as they could have, especially as an intervention into the Western as a novel.

I also had high expectations for Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage, which has been very widely and effusively praised. I found it “a very readable novel, perfectly pitched and crafted to provoke discussion about Celestial’s choice,” but for me “the whole was, somehow, less than the sum of its parts.”

Some Books I Found Especially Challenging (In A Good Way)

oup-the-yearsI am not a very good reader of Virginia Woolf’s fiction, and The Years was actually harder for me to make sense of than To the Lighthouse. On the other hand, I found my struggle with it very productive intellectually: for once I felt that I understood something of what Woolf was trying to do, which I read quite a bit about in her diaries and in the original version of The Pargiters, and I was fascinated by thinking about it in the contexts that Woolf’s comments made relevant. My reading of The Years so far has confirmed for me that Woolf was right to call it a failure–but I think it is an interesting, even a revealing, failure, which is a point I plan to come back to in 2020.

odyssey-wilson

2019 was the year I finally read The Odyssey. I read it in Emily Wilson’s lauded translation–and in retrospect I’m not sure if that was the best or the worst choice for me. It was very crisp, fast-moving, and graphic–“nothing, in her version, really gets in the way of the story-telling”–but was it epic?

Some Books I Found Especially Challenging (In A Bad Way)

ducks

Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport may be as brilliant as everyone says it is: I won’t know until or unless I finish it! I waded through the first 100 pages and hated it–not every minute of it, but that unevenness was part of the problem for me. Every time I started to fall into the propulsive rhythm of its stream-of-consciousness narration, the narrator would trip into random word associations that completely broke up any developing logic or momentum for me. More than the novel’s (nominally) unbroken single sentence–which, as others have commented, simply substitutes the narrative tic “the fact that” for conventional punctuation–the unbroken single paragraph also proved an obstacle because it offers no visual cues to one’s reading at all. If I dared to look up from the page, I had a hopeless time finding my place on it again, which meant a lot of frustrated rereading.

Both of these complaints of course say as much or more about me as a reader as about Ducks, Newburyport as a book. Still, I find it both funny and frustrating to hear people suggest any negative reactions are somehow about a woman “daring” to write a long or difficult book–or a long book about domestic details. You can be (as I am) all for those things and still find a particular book inaccessible or unappealing. I think for me the stumbling block is that I don’t go to fiction to find the chaos of everyday life reproduced: I go to fiction to find it shaped into something artful. Maybe Ellmann does that–as I said, I can’t be sure unless I read the whole thing. Will I finish it in 2020? Maybe.

rooney

I also did not finish Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends. Boring!

I did manage to finish rereading Wuthering Heights. I still don’t like it.

A Few New or Renewed 19th-Century Friends

penguin-kim

Dombey and Son has long been at the top of my list of “Dickens novels I should probably read instead of just rereading Bleak House.” It is good–but not as good as Bleak House.

I found Rudyard Kipling’s Kim was a strange, entertaining, and baffling novel. I’m glad I finally read it, but I can’t imagine teaching it.

Rereading New Grub Street confirmed that it is at once a very good novel with lots of relevant themes, especially about literary value and the literary marketplace–and that if I’m going to assign anything by Gissing, I’ll stick with The Odd Women. Everything about New Grub Street just seemed too obvious, somehow: what would we interpret about it?

love-letteringThe End!

And that’s it–not everything I read in 2019, of course, but the books that, for better and for worse, seem most worthy of note. I feel as if I learned a lot from my reading this year and also, more often than I’d remembered until I did this review, had a lot of fun. I’m not sure what accounts for the misimpression that 2019 was a bit of a reading slump. Maybe it’s because often, by whatever chance, I read the very best book of the year at the very end of the year, and that creates a retrospective glow that was missing this time.

That said, I’m about to read two very different books I’ve been really looking forward to: Kate Clayborn’s Love Lettering and Tana French’s The Witch Elm. Unless my hopes are thoroughly dashed (which I really don’t expect they will be), this means 2020 will begin on a high note!

 

 

 

2019: My Year in Teaching

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

broadview2019 began with a lot of thinking about teaching, because I was on sabbatical for the first half of the year and that meant the great luxury of time away from teaching itself. Sometimes in the past the result has been a whole new class. This time it was about ways to refresh the reading lists for classes I teach in regular rotation: 19th-Century Fiction, Women & Detective Fiction, and British Literature Since 1800, with some thought given also to mixing things up in Pulp Fiction.

In the end I did not make a lot of changes, though it wasn’t for want of ideas. More often than seems reasonable books I thought would work really well turned out to be unavailable–Andrea Levy’s Small Island, for instance, for the Brit Lit survey, or Vera Caspary’s Laura. None of the Victorian novels I (re)read inspired me to replace tried and true favorites on my syllabus, though I may reconsider Wuthering Heights for next year’s iteration of the Dickens-to-Hardy class. I’m not sorry I read Kim or Dombey and Son, and in fact thinking about Kim did encourage me to include a Kipling story in the Brit Lit survey (“The Man Who Would Be King”) as part of an effort to address questions of empire and colonialism more directly than my reading list had in the past.

remains-coverI finally settled on Great Expectations and The Remains of the Day for the representative Victorian and 20th-century novels in the survey course, partly because I love them both and feel confident about teaching them and partly because along with Three Guineas (which will be a new teaching text for me), I could imagine a range of thematic continuities within this set of readings that would work well for final essay assignments–ideas of class and social mobility; social insiders and outsiders, deference, domination, and political power; the relationship between money, privilege, and moral freedom; art and language as vehicles for advocacy or subversion; social order, resistance, and fascism. We’ll see how it goes!

Women & Detective Fiction had the most new titles: In A Lonely Place, Blanche on the Lam, and The Break. I thought they were all good additions: they brought both different styles and different voices into our readings and discussions, they raised pressing questions about women and crime, about the sometimes problematic intersections of gender, race, and class in women’s crime fiction, and along with our other readings they helped us generate a lot of ideas about the relationship between criminal justice (or legal forms of justice) and social justice.

the-breakOne of the questions I struggled with as I finalized my book order was whether The Break was properly addressed as ‘crime fiction’. We ended up discussing this issue a few times in class. We came back every time to ways in which, while the novel is not structured like a conventional whodunit, its structure can be read (especially in the context of our other novels) as a deliberate subversion of those expectations: the novel operates both as an implicit critique of the detective form (with its tendency to identify single crimes, specific suspects, and clearly demarcated criminals) as reductive, and as a model of a different way to think about wrongdoing that is part of a complicated history and pattern of historical and social problems not really amenable to being “solved.” While many of our novelists directed our attention to social or political problems beyond the scope of the crimes at their centers, Neely and Vermette both made those problems much more than context. Both Blanche on the Lam and The Break also notably resist feel-good resolutions: one thing the class especially liked about Blanche herself is that she is not interested in playing out anyone’s fantasy of restoration or reconciliation, and though the ending of The Break is more uplifting in tone than Neely’s conclusion, it too is about healing and persistence within the family, on their own terms, not using them and their ongoing trauma as a device for reconciliation.

The-Big-SleepI thought Women & Detective Fiction went well. I feel less satisfied about Pulp Fiction, mostly because I found the change from 90 (which already felt too big) to 120 students pushed the class past a tipping point for the kind of pedagogy I want to and tried to practice. Part of the problem was just logistical: much as I believe in the value of doing lots of small-stakes exercises to maintain engagement and give frequent opportunities for writing and feedback, I don’t think I can continue with some of my habitual versions of this (such as regular reading journals). The thing about scaling up class sizes is that while the regulations for Writing Requirement classes mean that we have TAs for every 30 students, in practice this only means that we hold steady in terms of the number of finished essays we mark. Everything else remains the responsibility of the professor, from recording attendance and marking exams to handling accommodations and plagiarism cases. As a result there’s no question that larger classes (despite superficially maintaining that 30:1 ratio) are more work for the instructor. (Also, despite my best efforts to address the issue in more effective ways, subbing in The Big Sleep for The Maltese Falcon, while a nice change for me, did not dramatically decrease the rate of plagiarism for those assignments–I guess there’s something about noir that subverts morality!)

escher12The worst part of the increase in class size for me is that I don’t like teaching (especially teaching first-year students) in a large lecture hall. This is not just about my personal comfort–in fact, I am reasonably confident when giving formal lectures, which have the advantage, from a purely self-interested perspective, of ruling out the unexpected! But my preferred teaching style is interactive, because the back and forth between us reflects the way I think we actually learn to do (and improve) the kind of analysis central to literary studies (through coduction). I continued to incorporate discussion into our class meetings, but inevitably only a fraction of such a large class participates–and to my frustration and sometimes visible annoyance, many of their classmates clearly tuned out or, worse, started packing up, when these engaged students were talking. Because there’s no hope that class sizes will go down any time soon, I’m going to have to give more thought to overcoming these challenges so that next year’s intro class goes better.

woman-writing-1934

It’s not that Pulp Fiction went badly overall: enough students showed interest in and satisfaction with the course that I know I reached a lot of them, even if unfortunately I couldn’t see their faces very well from the front of the room. I just think I can do something better, though I’m not sure what or how. If you have ideas or strategies that work for you in (specifically writing) classes of around 100, I’d love to know. One good thing is that next year I am taking a break from Pulp Fiction and teaching “Literature: How It Works”–a more standard kind of introductory course that will relieve me of the sense that I am arguing with myself about the canon (and losing). I will probably approach this class more or less as I did “Introduction to Prose and Fiction” (which it sort of replaces in our curriculum)–only with some poetry too! Book orders for the fall will be due uncomfortably soon in the new year, so you can look forward (?) to ruminations about that before too much longer.

Overall, then, it was an okay term, made better by the time I’d put in during my sabbatical. Even if I didn’t end up making big changes to my reading lists, my choices were more deliberate because I’d considered alternatives. While there’s a risk of things getting stale if you repeat yourself, there’s something to be said for the confidence and pedagogical freedom that comes with really knowing your material–and it can backfire, too, if you change a lot all at once. I felt lucky to have just two courses: for various reasons including ongoing difficulty sleeping, I didn’t always feel as on top of things as I usually do, including sometimes getting a bit overwhelmed with the logistics and the paperwork (something else that is affected a lot by class size).

waverleyAnd now, on to next term. It is finally time to actually teach the Brit Lit survey and see how my decisions work out (including which readings to include in the nice custom reading Broadview Press put together for us); I’m especially looking forward to covering some poetry, which I rarely get to do. My other course this winter is 19th-Century Fiction from Austen to Dickens: this year’s books are Pride and Prejudice, Waverley (look at that handsome new edition!), The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Mary Barton, and Hard Times. I’m actually eager to get started: both are small-ish classes (around 35) and I know there will be at least some familiar faces in both as well.

2019: My Year in Writing

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

oshaughnessyI am trying not to feel dissatisfied with the writing I did in 2019. For one thing, I deliberately took a step back from a certain kind of ‘productivity’ in order to develop ideas about what I hope will turn into some worthwhile projects. This kind of “fallow” time is rare and valuable and I think it is important not to accept the quantitative logic about “output” that treats it as unproductive. I had hoped to publish an essay about George Eliot in honor of her bicentenary, but in the end that pitch went nowhere; on the bright side, I was pleased to be given a bit more room than usual in the TLS for my review of Kathy O’Shaughnessy’s In Love With George Eliot, which could thus incorporate (albeit still briefly!) some of my broader ideas about how we think about Eliot today.

norrisIn any case, as it turned out, all of my publications in 2019 were reviews. For Quill & Quire, I wrote about Antanas Sileika’s Provisionally Yours (in March) and Laurie Glenn Norris’s Found Drowned (in June). For the TLS, I reviewed Tessa Hadley’s Late In the Day (in January), Joan Silber’s Improvement (in April), Jessica Howell’s Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire (in June), and Evelyn Toyton’s Inheritance (in November), in addition to O’Shaughnessy’s novel (also in November). I have one more review done and forthcoming in January (Emma Donoghue’s Akin, for Canadian Notes & Queries) and one more in progress, also forthcoming after Christmas (Marjorie Celona’s How A Woman Becomes A Lake, for Quill & Quire). Finally, I wrote a review of Tea Obreht’s Inland on spec; by the time I knew the publication I wrote it for did not want it, it was too late for any of the other editors I contacted about it to be interested. (Note to me: writing reviews on spec is a bad investment of time, energy, and angst!)

ghost-wallThis isn’t really a bad run of reading and writing: there wasn’t any point in 2019 when I didn’t have a review underway in addition to whatever other work I was doing. I think one reason I nonetheless feel disappointed about what I have to show for 2019 is that although many of these books engaged and interested me, none of them excited me the way that, for example, Ghost Wall and Dear Evelyn did in 2018. While there is always some satisfaction in figuring out what to say about a new book (I sometimes think of it as contributing to the ‘contemporary reception’ section of some future ‘critical heritage’ volume!), some books offer more literary or intellectual rewards than others. This year’s list had no dreadful lows, but it also (for me) had no dramatic highs. In this respect, the books I read “just” for myself were a better bunch. (Stay tuned for my regular ‘Best of Novel Readings’ round-up about them!)

Cover2I did publish one more substantial thing this year: Widening the Skirts of Light, my collection of (non-academic) essays about George Eliot. It was a hard but (I still think) sensible decision to self-publish them. I wanted to create something a bit more stable and lasting from all that work than links to online publications that sometimes seem discouragingly impermanent; doing this also helped me with my plan to refocus my energy on different material by providing some sense of closure about that run of writing. The e-book has sold over 1100 copies on Amazon (for those who avoid Amazon, it’s also available on Kobo, or you can just let me know you’re interested and I’ll happily email you the file in the format of your choice). That’s a pretty tiny number, but when I consider what a niche topic it is, how few copies sell of most academic books, and how little sustained effort I have put into publicizing the collection, I’m actually pleased and surprised that it has found even that many readers. I know it is not a publication that will earn me any professional credit, but it made me happy to hear myself described as its author when I was interviewed about George Eliot on CBC: it represents writing and thinking I am proud of.

I consider my blog posts publications too, though of a different sort than the others I’ve tallied up here. Because of my sabbatical in the first part of 2019, I wrote quite a few ruminations on pedagogical and research goals, and as always I wrote (though not as often as I once did) about my teaching when I went back to it in the fall and about my reading throughout the year. There’s more to be said about all of these things so they’ll get their own posts. For now, though, it’s useful for me to see what 2019 looked like for me as a writer–and to think about how I can make 2020 a year that I look back on with more satisfaction.

“This Fantastical Museum”: Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

dutch-house

The driveway wasn’t as long as I remembered but the house seemed exactly the same: sunlit, flower-decked, gleaming. I had known since my earliest days at Choate that the world was full of bigger houses, grander and more ridiculous houses, but none were so beautiful. There was the familiar crunch of pea gravel beneath the tires, and when she stopped the car in front of the stone steps I could imagine how elated my father must have felt, and how my sister must have wanted to run off in the grass, and how my mother, alone, had stared up at so much glass and wondered what this fantastical museum was doing in the countryside.

I really enjoyed reading The Dutch House. Its brisk intensity kept me turning pages more quickly than the modest scale of action in the novel quite justified; its main characters, siblings Danny and Maeve Conroy, are convincing creations, both, in their own ways, quietly forceful; the ‘family saga’ elements had an understated fairy-tale quality to them–absent mother, wicked step-mother, loss and recreation of fortune, all perfectly plausible but also just a bit too pat, as if they were all part realism, part magic trick, the kind all novelists rely on but done overtly, with a bit of a flourish.

At the same time, the novel made no sense to me at all, or at least its ostensible central premise did not. It’s not just that the Dutch House is too good to be true, with its elaborate moldings and frescoed ceilings and luxurious decor, but that it seems to have far more agency in the plot than a building should: it figures too largely in everyone’s decisions, loves, hatreds, and grievances.

Something about it, and thus about the novel, fell into place for me near the end, though, when Danny and Maeve return to the Dutch House decades after their step-mother ruthlessly evicted them. “The house looked the same as it did when we walked out thirty years before,” Danny says wonderingly:

Maybe a few pieces of furniture had been rearranged, reupholstered, replaced, who could remember? There were the silk drapes, the yellow silk chairs, the Dutch books still in the glass-fronted secretary reaching up and up towards the ceiling, forever unread. Even the silver cigarette boxes were there, polished and waiting on the end tables, just as they had been when the VanHoebeeks walked the earth . . .

Maeve and my mother floated into the room in silence, both of them looking at things they had never planned on seeing again: the tapestry ottoman, the Chinese lamp, the heavy tasseled ropes of twisted silk, blue and green, that held the draperies back.

hopper-houseThe emphasis on the house’s stasis tripped me up: in thirty years, things must, surely, have been rearranged, reupholstered, replaced. If it’s a house, not just a literary device, then it should have changed over time, reflecting the lives lived in it and the wider life outside of it. Danny and Maeve have certainly changed, even finally giving up their frequent trips to stare at their former home with a potent mixture of nostalgia and resentment about their disinheritance. This visit should figure–and in fact it does–as a chance to measure that change and to put their memories of the Dutch House into perspective.

The house works fine in this way, but the odd quality it has throughout the novel and especially in this scene made me ask myself whether it was ever supposed to be a real house at all. I don’t mean whether Patchett based in on an actual house, but whether in the novel it really does work primarily, maybe even exclusively, as a metaphor. What Maeve and Danny are really contemplating when they park across the street from it all those times is their past, their family, their story, and in a way, isn’t that what we all do when we return, mentally or literally, to the places we used to live and the people we used to be? The particulars of the Conroys’ story are well detailed–Patchett is always a good storyteller–but in the end The Dutch House makes most sense to me not as a story about them but as a cautionary tale about how much we define ourselves by our pasts and how far, as a result, our lives are either limited or liberated by the space we imagine them in.

sargentI realize that this is a perfectly obvious reading of The Dutch House: I’m sure I’m not the only reader to fixate on the house itself as symbol rather than setting. Perhaps reading it near Christmas is what made me feel that backwards pull so strongly–at this time of year especially I recognize in myself a similar temptation to dwell in (or on) a childhood space that may have been imperfect but in retrospect seems so certain, so much a part of my current identity even though it is no longer the setting for my life. Because Danny and Maeve are shunted unceremoniously out of their home, the abrupt transition makes it particularly hard for them to move on. Even as they make new homes and family ties they seem somehow stunted or unfinished as adults, while they keep going back and back again to brood about a place where they no longer belong.

Yet it’s their long-deferred return to the Dutch House itself that allows them, finally, to make it part of their present instead of an imposing embodiment of their thwarted past. On this visit they retrieve the portrait of Maeve that has stayed through the years, “hanging exactly where it always had been”:

Maeve was ten years old, her shining black hair down past the shoulders of her red coat, the wallpaper from the observatory behind her, graceful imaginary swallows flying past pink roses, Maeve’s blue eyes dark and bright. Anyone looking at that painting would have wondered what had become of her. She was a magnificent child, and the whole world was laid out in front her her, covered in stars.

The portrait, belatedly detached from the Dutch House, becomes its own symbol of forward-looking continuity, in contrast to the static relics that the portraits of the house’s former owners, the VanHoebeks, have always been. Lives should be movement and change, not museums, seems to be the novel’s idea–or one of its ideas, anyway. It’s not just that houses get new owners, but that we all need to work on living as best we can wherever we are.

Images: John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Elsie Palmer (1890) ; Edward Hopper, House by the Railroad (1925)

 

“The Printed Word”: Ruth Rendell, A Judgement In Stone

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In those moments the words they cried and their pleas passed over her almost unheard, and by some strange metamorphosis, produced in Eunice’s brain, they ceased to be people and became the printed word. They were those things in the bookcases, those patchy black blocks on white paper, eternally her enemies, hated and desired.

“Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write” is the chilling first line of Ruth Rendell’s 1977 thriller A Judgement In Stone. I’m not sure “thriller” is the right word, but “mystery” seems wrong, as obviously it is not a whodunit–and if you take that opening sentence at face value, it is not a “whydunit” either, as Rendell immediately gives away both the name and the motive of her murderer. The only suspense in A Judgement In Stone comes from wondering exactly how the massacre will happen, and it is a testament to Rendell’s skill as a storyteller that the novel is in fact gripping in spite of our already knowing who, what, when, and why.

A Judgment In Stone relies heavily on narrative devices that could easily turn into gimmicks: dramatic irony and foreshadowing. Rendell uses dramatic irony to cast a grim shadow over the lives of the Coverdale family: one of the most effective things about the novel, I thought, is how we read it doubly, as a very ordinary story of a well-to-do English family going about their privileged but otherwise basically inoffensive lives. There’s handsome George, “as trim of figure as when he had rowed for his university in 1939”; there’s Jacqueline, his second wife, “fair, slender, a Lizzie Siddal matured,” unfortunately for all of them overwhelmed with the work of maintaining Lowfield Hall; and there are the children of this blended family, including eccentrically bookish Giles and sweet-tempered Melinda. They all contribute to their eventual violent deaths by the way they treat Eunice Parchman when she becomes their housekeeper, but until the very last minute–their very last minutes–we are the only ones who know how it will all end. The effect is to infuse their commonplace activities–shopping, dining, listening to music, going to parties–with pathos, to make their cheerfully unexceptional characters accidentally tragic. “I’ll be two minutes,” says George as he goes to check what the noise is in the kitchen;

He went to the door where he paused and looked at his wife for the last time. Had he known it was the last time, that look would have been eloquent of six years’ bliss and of gratitude, but he didn’t know, so he merely cast up his eyes and pursed his mouth before walking across the hall and down the passage to the kitchen.

Rendell adds extra shots of menace occasionally with moments of explicit foreshadowing. When her parents have offended Eunice by banning her only friend from visiting Lowfield Hall, for instance, Melinda decides to intervene by being kind:

So that evening Melinda began on a disaster course that was to lead directly to her death and that of her father, her stepmother and her stepbrother. She embarked on it because she was in love. It is not so much true that all the world loves a lover as that a lover loves all the world. Melinda was moved by her love to bestow love and happiness, but it was tragic for her that Eunice Parchman was her object.

There is so little out of the ordinary about the Coverdales that they could hardly be the subject of fiction if it weren’t for what happens to them. Shortly before their deaths, they eat out, and “afterwards the waiters and other diners were to wish they had taken more notice of this happy family, this doomed family.”

rendell-2Is it true that Eunice Parchman–and her accomplice, the same friend the unknowing Coverdales tried to keep away from their home–killed this hapless family “because she could not read or write”? Rendell’s striking opening is as much provocation as declaration, I think. It is certainly true that Eunice’s illiteracy haunts, shames, and distorts her life. It is easy to imagine a version of her story in which, as a result, we pity her and direct our antipathy at a society that repeatedly fails her–fails to educate her, fails to support her, fails to make it safe for her to overcome this debilitating disadvantage–while she retreats into the safety of suspicious solitude:

When she was a child she had never wanted to read. As she grew older she wanted to learn, but who could teach her? Acquiring a teacher, or even trying to acquire one, would mean other people finding out. She had begun to shun other people, all of whom seemed to her bent on ferreting out her secret. After a time this shunning, this isolating herself, became automatic, though the root cause of her misanthropy was half-forgotten.

There are lots of painful and potentially poignant scenarios as which she struggles to hide her inability to read the family’s grocery list or to identify which papers George needs sent from home to his office. There’s something sad, too, about her absorption in the television the Coverdales provide for her room. She’s finally happy there:

She drew the curtains, put on the lamps and then the television. Her evenings were hers to do as she liked. This was what she liked. She knitted. But gradually, as the serial or the sporting event or the cops and robbers film began to grip her, the knitting fell into her lap and she leant forwards, enthralled by an innocent childlike excitement.

It’s not much, but it’s all she wants.

But this sad story is not quite what Rendell gives us–and surely that’s as it should be, unless we really do believe illiteracy leads inexorably to homicide! Instead, Eunice is a completely unsympathetic character. It’s not just the shell she has withdrawn into for fear her inability to read will be discovered. By the time she starts work at Lowfield Hall she has already committed murder: she killed her own father, who was taking a bit too too long to die: “She took one of the pillows from behind her father’s head and pushed it hard down on his face. He struggled and thrashed about for a while, but not for long.” It’s the combination of her heartless personality with the shame and anxiety of her illiteracy that’s toxic–that, and the influence of her friend Joan, who is out and out deranged, “daily growing more and more demented.” I think I would actually have liked A Judgement In Stone better if it vested responsibility for the Coverdales’ deaths squarely in Eunice and explored the ramifications of her illiteracy in a more nuanced way, rather than having it shade into moral and psychological deficits. Joan’s role is especially disappointing in this respect, as there is no “good” explanation for her behavior, no cause beyond her own unreason for the violence she instigates.

AjudgementinstoneRendell’s opening line is thus a bit of a feint, I think: it seems to set up a novel about the consequences of social and educational failures, but unlike, say, Dickens’s account of Magwitch’s history in Great Expectations, she doesn’t really account for Eunice’s criminality on those terms alone, leaving us to point the finger at ourselves for creating an uncaring system that generates criminals where there should have been (and still could be) a caring human being. Eunice seems irredeemable; Rendell doesn’t make a convincing case that she would have been a different person–and the Coverdales would have lived–if only she could read the printed word. It’s hard to be sure, though, and maybe that’s the question Rendell means to leave with her readers.

“Out of the Turbulence”: Jessica Grant, Come, Thou Tortoise

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grant-c0ver

Welcome to Qantas flight 123. This is your captain speaking.

Okay, so we just stared at the pale green wall when we were flying, but we were flying for Chrissakes. We flew all over the world. We flew to China and France and I played with the knobs and said, Ladies and gentlemen, we will be experiencing some turbulence. When we were out of the turbulence, Uncle Thoby headed for the beverage cart. My dad said, Anywhere but London. Uncle Thoby, when he walked down the aisle, pretended to lose his balance. Steady on, Airbus 320.

After I finished reading Come, Thou Tortoise, I went poking around for reviews of it and was interested to discover a thoroughly unsympathetic one from Lucy Ellmann, currently basking in critical acclaim for her recent novel Ducks, Newburyport. If for some reason you think that two novels with animals in the title are likely to have something in common, you are wrong: based at least on my reading of the first 100 pages of Ducks, Newburyport, Come, Thou Tortoise is pretty much the anti-Ducks, Newburyport — and so it makes perfect sense that Ellmann didn’t like it:

We’re warned of this on the back: “A novel of love and lettuce … a warm-hearted, funny and wise book.” People who prefer unwise books, not about lettuce, may find themselves begging by the end – like the guy stuck all night in the perfume section of the department store – “Quick, give me some sh*t!”

It also makes perfect sense, then, given how much I enjoyed Come, Thou Tortoise, that I didn’t like those 100 pages of Ducks, Newburyport at all. (I might like them better eventually — we’ll see.) The two books represent profoundly contrasting sensibilities: assuming Ellmann in 2009 was about the same kind of writer she is in 2019, assigning her to review Come, Thou Tortoise is a bit like using sandpaper to clean a window.

love-lettuceMaybe the Grant – Ellmann (dis)connection is a red herring. Certainly I’m not in a position to sort it out definitively until (unless) I finish Ducks, Newburyport. For now I really just want to report how much fun I had reading Come, Thou Tortoise, a book I never would have picked up if a wise and witty student hadn’t recommended it to me. It looks twee, for one thing, plus it’s about Newfoundland and I don’t usually get along well with Canadian regional fiction. A comic novel with a talking turtle, a narrator named Audrey but known (fondly and, as it turns out, appropriately) as “Oddly,” and an eccentric cast of Newfoundlanders? It sounds all wrong for me, and yet I loved it, even though there are some things about it (including Winnifred, the hyper-articulate tortoise) that I’m not sure would stand up to the kind of strict scrutiny that demands a thematic porpoise, sorry, purpose, for every detail. That kind of wordplay is another  possibly indefensible but persistently charming feature of the novel — Audrey’s father, for example, has fallen into a comma, sorry, coma:

Uncle Thoby is stepping up the sinking stairs. Oddly. I am hugged into his noisy coat.

You said it was a comma.

I know, but it’s over.

Period.

Audrey has returned to St. John’s because her father was struck by a Christmas tree that was sticking out of a passing truck. Back home with Uncle Thoby, she has to adjust to the reality of his death while surrounded by places, objects, and people that remind her of their life together. The novel moves back and forth between that painful present struggle with grief and her family history, including Uncle Thoby’s arrival and incorporation into their eccentric household.

Come, Thou Tortoise (the title, as Winnifred discovers on our behalf, is a line from The Tempest) is certainly a quirky novel, with lots of comedic “bits” that might well irritate a dour or cynical reader, such as the swans constantly dipping their heads into the purportedly bottomless pond: “When the swans lift their heads, they look surprised. Did you see the bottom? No. Let’s check again. They have been checking for years and continue to be surprised.” I can be dour and cynical myself, but I loved the swans, and the Christmas light guy, and Winnifred, and the airplane Audrey’s father and Uncle Thoby create in their basement to help Audrey overcome her fear of flying. Audrey’s voice was the magic trick that made it all work for me. She’s a complicated narrator, part naif, part–I’m not sure exactly what! There is definitely a gap between the childlike whimsy that makes her endearing and the ruthless determination that forces her as well as others to confront uncomfortable truths. In the opening scene, she disarms an air marshal: she is also metaphorically disarming throughout, which is cute, but in any case that is not the opening gambit of a weak or truly innocent character. At one point we learn that Audrey’s school sent home a report indicating she has a “low IQ””

IQ is not even a real acronym, Uncle Thoby was saying. GOLEM is a real acronym. SCUBA is a real acronym. You can’t even pronounce IQ. Don’t take it personally.

You can too pronounce it, I said. You can pronounce it ick.

“Mine was more than a bit disappointing,” she later tells her friend Judd, who replies, “That’s because they can’t measure what you are.” “What am I?” Audrey asks. “I don’t know,” replies Judd, “but I wish there were more of you out there.”

come-tortoiseEllmann’s main complaint about Come, Thou Tortoise is that “somewhere along the way, any real feeling for people goes astray.” Though I can see why Ellmann isn’t able to go along with what she uncharitably calls the novel’s “swill of sweetness,” I think she is just wrong about its lacking real feeling. There is a great deal of tenderness in it, for one thing–though perhaps that’s too close to sentimentality to be what she means. More than that, for all Audrey’s oddities and the comic delights they provoke, the novel is quietly profound about grief. Looking for her lost mouse Wedge (a refugee from her father’s research on longevity–a motif with its own emotional weightiness in the context of his premature death), Audrey goes into her father’s room for the first time since she came home:

Why did I come in here.

For Wedge.

Well, that was stupid. He’s not here. And now you have made your dad dead in this room. And you will keep doing this. Every new room you enter, you will make your dad dead in it. Now he is dead on the second floor. He is dead on the ground floor. There is only one floor left.

The true story of her father and Uncle Thoby and their English arch-nemesis, whom Audrey knows only as Toff, is also much more complex and emotionally fraught than Audrey (and thus we) understand at first, and as Audrey’s quest to find Wedge turns into a mission to understand who they all really are and what their lives have been, there is plenty of turbulence that shows us how precarious and also how precious the comic side of life really is.

Happy Bicentenary, George Eliot!

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GE DuradeThough I suppose in a technical way the bicentenary year really ended with George Eliot’s birthday on November 22, why stop celebrating before we have to? My only regret is that I’m not actually teaching any of her novels this term–in fact, because of my sabbatical, I haven’t taught any George Eliot in 2019 at all! Shocking! So I haven’t been able to integrate any bicentenary activities into my classroom time. I did point out to the students presenting in Women & Detective Fiction on November 22 that it was an especially auspicious day, but they didn’t seem convinced or otherwise excited. 🙂

My own contributions to the bicentenary since attending the big conference in the summer have both come to fruition in the last week or so. The edition of the TLS that recognizes George Eliot’s 200th includes my review-essay on novels about or inspired by her, including Kathy O’Shaughnessy’s new In Love With George Eliot, as well as essays by renowned Eliot biographer Rosemary Ashton and scholar Gail Marshall; it also reprints Virginia Woolf’s well-known TLS essay from 1919. That’s excellent company to be in!

Middlemarch 5-smallAnd speaking of excellent company, also in honour of the bicentenary I was invited to be a guest on the CBC Radio show ‘Sunday  Edition,’ to talk to host Michael Enright about George Eliot and Middlemarch. You can listen to the interview here if you are interested, or just read the story, which includes some highlights as well as a photo of me post-interview looking perhaps a bit flustered but also genuinely happy to have my battered teaching copy of Middlemarch in hand. Inevitably, no doubt, there are a few questions I wish I had answered a bit differently (including being a bit more precise about ‘the Catholic Question’ – but on the other hand, would anybody really have wanted me to get into the weeds about it?), but overall I think I represented Team George well. I only wish I had taken more opportunities to quote directly from the novel. I really do think the best advocate for Middlemarch is the novel itself.

OUP MiddlemarchAs I browsed through it in preparation for the interview, I stopped to reread many of the moments I love the best–the description of Lydgate’s discovering his vocation in Chapter XV, with its poignant commentary on “the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats,” for instance:

there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardor in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardor of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change! In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly: you and I may have sent some of our breath towards infecting them, when we uttered our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions: or perhaps it came with the vibrations from a woman’s glance.

Or the passage in which Mr. Casaubon, having met with Lydgate about his prognosis, confronts his own mortality:

Here was a man who now for the first time found himself looking into the eyes of death — who was passing through one of those rare moments of experience when we feel the truth of a commonplace, which is as different from what we call knowing it, as the vision of waters upon the earth is different from the delirious vision of the water which cannot be had to cool the burning tongue. When the commonplace “We must all die” transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness “I must die — and soon,” then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first. To Mr. Casaubon now, it was as if he suddenly found himself on the dark river-brink and heard the plash of the oncoming oar, not discerning the forms, but expecting the summons.

This is the scene that leads first to his cold rebuff to Dorothea’s proffered sympathy and then to this moment, one of the most quietly moving in the novel but also one that shows us both the beauty and the cost of its doctrine of sympathy:

“Dorothea!” he said, with a gentle surprise in his tone. “Were you waiting for me?”

“Yes, I did not like to disturb you.”

“Come, my dear, come. You are young, and need not to extend your life by watching.”

When the kind quiet melancholy of that speech fell on Dorothea’s ears, she felt something like the thankfulness that might well up in us if we had narrowly escaped hurting a lamed creature. She put her hand into her husband’s, and they went along the broad corridor together.

penguinmiddlemarchI don’t know if Middlemarch is, as the CBC headline proposes, “the greatest English novel of all time.” I think Eliot (for reasons I discuss in the interview) can reasonably be called the greatest Victorian novelist, and Middlemarch is certainly her greatest book, but there are other models of the novel and other ideas of greatness: as Henry James said, the house of fiction has many windows. One of the things I said to Michael Enright during our conversation was that our judgments of any given novel will depend on what we think the novel (both the particular example and, I think, the genre as a whole) is for. I’m not (much) interested in defending Middlemarch to people who don’t like it, but I am always happy to explain what I think is wonderful about it. I wouldn’t be much good at my job, also, if I didn’t believe we can all learn to read books–all books, any book–better than we do, if someone will just help us along. I hope my interview does some of that work for listeners, and of course for readers who want even more help, there are lots of resources at my Middlemarch for Book Clubs site.

But, as I often say and said in the interview too, I loved Middlemarch when I read it as an ardent teenager with really no understanding of the multiple layers I see in it today. In fact, it is possible that the pressure to declare it, defend it, or dethrone it as “the greatest English novel” hinders rather than helps, by making it seem less accessible than it really is. In any case, I loved it then and I love it now, and any book that withstands multiple rereadings over more than three decades is surely worth celebrating, as is its brilliant author. So, happy 200th birthday to George Eliot, and I can’t wait to teach Middlemarch again in 2020.

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This Week In My Classes: It’s November.

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scare-careAsk anyone on campus — student, staff, or faculty — how they are doing and it’s likely you’ll get some version of “hanging in there.” It is ever thus, in November! The weather has turned grey and the unrelenting chill of winter has set in, deadlines that seemed far off loom, work piles up. It can be hard to keep one’s spirits up! One of the things I try to do is stay as positive as possible in the classroom, exuding as much enthusiasm as I can manage for our work in the hope that I can give a bit of a boost to my students’ understandably flagging energy. It’s sometimes a bit tricky, especially because for them I am one of the people setting the deadlines and demanding the work: I can’t really just play nice, at least not all the time. But at least I can try to show them that I scare because I care!

neely-blanche

The last time I posted a teaching update, we were just getting back to normal after the strange incident of the contaminated water in my building; in Women and Detective Fiction we were reading Sue Grafton and in Pulp Fiction we had just started our unit on romance. Today in Women and Detective Fiction we had our third session on Barbara Neely’s Blanche on the Lam — the seventh of our eight readings. I worried while I was planning the class that it might seem like too many books, but I think the pace has been pretty reasonable overall, as most of them are quite fast-paced. The benefit has definitely been variety: although of course we keep circling around related questions about crime and gender and genre, we have now read books that treat them in quite different voices and versions as well as books that explore intersections between gender and class as well as gender and race. Reading Agatha Christie’s “The Blue Geranium” is a very different experience from reading Dorothy Hughes’s In A Lonely Place, which in its turn has little in common, on the surface at least, with Neely’s book.

In A Lonely Place and Blanche on the Lam are both books I hadn’t taught before–The Break, which we start next week, is another. Although it is always a bit nerve-wracking leading discussion on books I don’t know as well, it is also somewhat freeing, especially with as good a group of students as I have this term. I may not always be able to find the right example or remember the exact details of some twist in the plot (though I do try hard to be ready!), but at the same time I’m not stuck on any previous interpretation or looking for any particular outcome. I come in with ideas about how things fit together, of course, but I enjoy the work of puzzling through questions with the students, who bring their own different experience and expertise to the table.

lonelyBoth of these books seem to have gone over well. Hughes in particular seems to have been a favorite, so much so that I am contemplating assigning In A Lonely Place in the Mystery & Detective Fiction survey class next year instead of my usual hard-boiled options (The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep). But Neely too has provoked really engaged conversations: I think we all appreciated the bluntness of Blanche’s critiques as well as Neely’s resistance to feel-good outcomes. Today, for example, we talked about Blanche’s decision not to accept the position she is offered after the case has wrapped up. It would have been sentimentally gratifying for her to stay on as Mumsfield’s caretaker, but throughout the novel she highlights how condescending as well as burdensome she finds the expectation that she’ll play the “Mammy” role, and fond as she is of Mumsfield (and generously as they promise to pay her) it makes sense that she can’t say yes. More broadly, too, an ending in which she stays on with the family after everything that has happened and everything she knows–not just about them but also about the world she lives in–would endorse an optimistic but facile vision of racial reconciliation that the rest of the novel has rejected as at best naive.

1995-lord-of-scoundrelsWe are well along in our romance unit now in Pulp Fiction, and about two-thirds through Lord of Scoundrels. I think it’s going OK. Today I got peevish towards the end of class because we were working collectively through some passages–it was going pretty well, from my perspective, with a reasonable number of students participating–and as the end of our time approached quite a few students started packing up and then sat poised on the edge of their seats, clearly impatient to get away. I try not to take this personally (it happens, to some extent, almost every time): I know they are busy and anxious and for all I know the ones who were most visibly disengaging had a big midterm in their next class or something. Still, I never go over our time, and not only is it rude to me and to the students who are talking to have all that rustling going on, but it’s demoralizing to see them visibly not caring about the work we’re doing. It undermines that positivity project I mentioned! It also frustrates me that they clearly see class discussion as expendable in a way that lecture time isn’t. From my perspective, that’s the most important thing we do! I’ve made this point to the class more than once, of course. See? Peevish.

But that’s the thing: it’s November. We’re all struggling a bit to be our best selves. It doesn’t really help knowing the term will be over soon, either, because that just reminds us how much we have to get done before then!

“Blind Terror”: Mary Stewart, Wildfire at Midnight

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wildfireatmidnight

The foot of this buttress was lipped by the fog, which held the lower ground still invisible under its pale tide. The glen itself, the loch, the long Atlantic bay, all lay hidden, drowned under the mist which stretched like a still white lake from  Blaven to Sgurr na Stri, from Garsven to Marsco. And out of it, on every hand, the mountains rose, blue and purple and golden-green in the sunlight, swimming above the vaporous sea like fabulous islands. Below, blind terror might grope still in the choking grey here above, where I stood, was a new and golden world. I might have been alone in the dawn of time, watching the first mountains rear themselves out of the clouds of chaos. . . .

But I was not alone.

Mary Stewart’s Wildfire at Midnight is exactly what I expected from both the author and the genre: atmospheric, suspenseful, fast-paced, and predictable–not in the details of the murder plot but in the overall arc, which takes us from innocence through fear and suspicion to a pat romantic happy ending. I thoroughly enjoyed it, because Stewart performs all of the necessary maneuvers for romantic suspense so well and also so briskly (it’s just over 200 mass market paperback-sized pages) that it never feels overblown or self-important the way I sometimes feel more recent thrillers become. She isn’t trying to “transcend the genre”: she’s entirely at home in it and as a result, so was I.

Stewart is also a fine stylist–not as elegant or original as Daphne du Maurier, but in the same vein. Here, for instance, is one of many vivid evocations of the Isle of Skye, where the action takes place:

Above us towered the enormous cliffs of the south ridge, gleaming-black with rain, rearing steeply out of the precipitous scree like a roach-backed monster from the waves. The scree itself was terrifying enough. It fell away from the foot of the upper cliffs, hundreds of feet of fallen stone, slippery and overgrown and treacherous with hidden holes and loose rocks, which looked as if a false step  might bring half the mountain-side down in one murderous avalanche. . . .

I stopped and looked up. Streams of wind-torn mist raced and broke round the buttresses of the dreadful rock; against its sheer precipices the driven clouds wrecked themselves in swirls of smoke; and, black and terrible, above the movement of the storm, behind the racing riot of grey cloud, loomed and vanished and loomed again the great devil’s pinnacles that broke the sky and split the winds into streaming rack. Blaven flew its storms like a banner.

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The mountains are not just the setting for the malevolence that unfolds but (in a rather absurd but still chilling way) the motive for them–a nice touch, I thought. And they also set us up for a thrilling denouement played out against their crags and crevices:

I went up the end of that buttress like a cat, like a lizard, finding holds where no holds were, gripping the rough rock with stockinged feet and fingers which seemed endowed with miraculous, prehensile strength. . . .

The enormous wing of rock soared up in front of me up to the high crags. Its top was, perhaps, eight feet wide, and strode upwards at a dizzy angle, in giant steps and serrations, like an enormous ruined staircase. I had landed, somehow, on the lowest tread, and I flung myself frantically at the face of the next step, just as the ring of boots on rock told me that he had started after me.

The particular terrors of rock-climbing, hardly a safe or relaxing sport under ordinary circumstances (at least to a risk-averse person like me), give the necessary cliche of a chase scene some fresh excitement.

I picked this old copy off my shelf somewhat randomly and am glad I did: it was a perfect afternoon’s diversion, better, perhaps, than This Rough Magic, which I read a couple of years ago with my book group. I have a couple other vintage Stewart paperbacks on the same shelf and I also picked up some ebooks of hers when they were on sale a while ago: this is a good reminder to me to actually read them! I was also reminded on Twitter of her Arthurian novels, which I am fairly sure I read years ago and would like to revisit.