Bianca Steele

Lemony Snicket on the Midwestern Novel

While I’m hung up writing something about Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, occasionally remembering that I have a couple of months of movies backlogged, including, now, Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, here’s a quote relevant to both of those titles, from Daniel Handler in the New York Times Book Review this past Sunday:

“[C]alling a writer ‘Midwestern’ seems like a way to start up that familiar and imaginary battle between Plain Novels Full of People With Integrity and Dirty Fingernails versus Showoffy Books About People Having Martinis in Penthouses.”

That’s obviously relevant to Franzen, and also to Eugenides, both of whom offer up contrasts between humble men of the Midwest and more sophisticated Easterners, but also to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

(I’ve actually never read any Lemony Snicket.  I guess I should remedy that.)

More on Women Novelists and “Likability”

Commenting on the Messud kerfuffle, Rohan Maitzen points to this article by Meredith Maran.  Maran writes about women she knows, or has heard of, who’ve been asked to revise their novels to make characters more “likable.”  She’s specifically talking about “literary” novels.  This generally means the more sophisticated reaches of the “mainstream,” books that are reviewed in the ordinary books pages of papers like the New York Times, instead of being banished to the one paragraph per book “crime” or “mystery” section (unless they’re best sellers or by seriously big-name authors like Stephen King, in which case they’re promoted to the front page and get extra space).  Some genre writers, notably China Miéville, an English writer of literary-tending science fiction, have argued against the “mainstream” definition itself, on the grounds that “mainstream” is just another kind of genre, like thrillers or “chick lit.”  Be that as it may, in the US, at least, it seems to be the case both that “mainstream” is treated as the default (or “unmarked”) variety of fiction, and also that the dividing line between literary and mainstream is not clear and bright.

Look at two “women’s” books that my mother lent me more than a year ago (neither of which I’ve yet been able to read more than a dozen pages of).  The Help is billed as literary fiction, and clearly has literary aspirations, but I’d call it basically “mainstream.”  The way it plays with point of view and with dialect is unusual for a genre novel, but somehow it seems to be aiming squarely at the middle—if not at “what will sell,” then at least at what by far the majority of people wouldn’t object to—and it seems odd to call that “literary.”  Lisa Scottoline’s non-legal thriller, Look Again, strikes me as a kind of Sue Grafton novel with the focus on an ordinary person, rather than a professional detective; and on her personal journey, rather than on catching whodunit.  It’s very well written, hitting all the creative-writing class marks, making none of the mistakes that are sometimes allowed to true crime or science fiction authors, but it’s clearly a mainstream, almost a genre novel, not highbrow or literary.

Mark McGurl’s The Program Years talks about the rise of the creative writing program in the United States, and the resulting professionalization of the American novelist.  Most working writers in the US today have MFA degrees, and make their living teaching college students to write.  But this means, also, it seems, that all writers—mainstream, as well as literary—are coming out of the same programs, for the most part (the most prestigious programs excepted).  Is it not until after the first novel is accepted and published that it becomes clear whether a writer will be “literary” or “mainstream”?

This seems to be a problem especially for men, because the market for “mainstream” men’s novels isn’t really there to the same extent as the market for women’s novels is.  There are Brooklyn-literary novels, maybe (say, Keith Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men), but it seems difficult to make a career of that.  There are novelists who mark themselves out as “literary” by their style, like Paul Auster or David Foster Wallace.  There are writers who at first might have seemed to mark themselves out for a kind of mainstream men’s market, by apparently masculine subject matter, like Neal Stephenson (who, after his first novel, moved on to science fiction), or Richard Powers (also science fiction), or Bret Easton Ellis (ultra-violence), or Tom Perrotta (who actually does comfortably straddle the line between mainstream and literary, I think).  There’s Jay McInerney, but he seems to be an exception.  Similar writers seem inexorably to be drawn back from the initial celebrity of their youth into a more literary obscurity, like Tobias Wolff, possibly making a pit stop in a different kind of career, as Ethan Canin did.  On the other hand, a Gish Jen, Allegra Goodman, or Mary Gordon can continue publishing novels that earn out their advances by straddling the line between “popular” and “sophisticated”; and a Jennifer Weiner or Kathryn Stockett can publish blockbusters (which also might happen to get decent reviews in places like the Times) by appealing to the extremely large market for classy women’s novels.

But it’s a problem for women, too, that the line between mainstream and literary is so ill-defined.  Women novelists, like those Maran cites, presumably face pressure to become more mainstream, in order to find a market.  If a few changes, here and there, can double or triple the number of readers a book might find, why would a publisher not want to make them?  There are very few young female writers I can think of who seem likely to have their manuscripts read as aspiring to literariness (which, in any case, can be a matter of prestige more than sales).  Someone like Vendela Vida or Heidi Julavits can rely on her association with an established literary circle (in their case, around Dave Eggers and The Believer).  There are probably some women who can gain a reputation within their grad school programs for being literary.  Other than that—especially if they have no interest in science fiction type themes or in postmodern stylistic tricks (or in the kind of intellectuality displayed by, say, A.S. Byatt, who wrote her first novel as an imagined encounter between D.H. Lawrence and F.R. Leavis, and who in any event is British)—I don’t know what space there is for a first “literary” novel by a woman, unless it really tries hard to also appeal to a more “mainstream” market.

Silly Novels Interviews by Lady Novelists, by George Eliot Katie Roiphe

Claire Messud’s latest novel, The Woman Upstairs sounds interesting, certainly more so than her previous one, The Emperor’s Children (oh no, another novel about young people obsessed with David Foster Wallace!).  The title makes me think of Hilary Mantel’s early novel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, which is one of my favorites, an Orwellian gaslight mystery set behind the walls of purdah, but it could also fit well into my next “Boston-area novels” series, if there ever is one.  But on the Internet, there’s been much brouhaha over the interview Messud did with Publisher’s Weekly, part of which, presumably edited down from something a bit longer, they published online.  As the interview presented, the interviewer, a woman, asks Messud, “What are we to make of Nora Eldridge, [the protagonist]?  Because she is angry, really angry.”  Messud answers at length, talking about the kind of novel she intended to write.  The follow-up question is, “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you?”  To this, Messud replies, in essence, that the question is a mistaken one.

Writing a brief piece in Salon, David Daley characterizes Messud’s response as a statement that the interviewer’s question was sexist.  Let’s leave aside the definition of “sexist.”  Obviously what is meant is that the question wouldn’t have been asked of a male novelist, and that it’s wrong to have different standards for women and for men.  Messud alludes to this question herself, earlier in the interview: she explicitly says that she had decided she wanted to see a book about a woman who has characteristics she only sees in novels (which she thinks are very good, and in fact loves) that are written by men about men.  In other words, she recognizes that there’s a kind of novel that’s generally written only by men.  She also explains that she doesn’t believe that fact equates to a prescription that has to apply to her.

At this point in the interview (as it was published), the interviewer suggested that she thinks characters in fiction ought to be likable, and that Messud’s character isn’t.  Messud responded by objecting to the question.  She listed, again, some of the same novels she’d mentioned earlier: those she’d already identified as the kind only men, and not women, are thought to be able to write.  There are two ways of taking this.  First, she could be saying, “Surely you think Sabbath’s Theater is great?  Then why do you criticize me?  It must be because I'm a woman.”  Or, she could be saying, “You must think Sabbath's Theater is bad, too, and it isn't.”  I think it’s more likely she intended to say the second of those, which is a common enough sentiment.  But it was actually Messud who’d brought up the question of gender in the first place, and it’s not that surprising if people took her to be saying the first.

But then Katie Roiphe chimed in, linking to Daley’s piece.  Where Daley had mildly noted that Messud implicitly criticized the reviewer’s question for being sexist (Daley mentions Laura Miller’s review of the novel in his own publication, though he doesn’t link to it[1]), Katie Roiphe attacks Messud for implicitly criticizing the reviewer’s question for being sexist.  It’s worth noting that Roiphe doesn’t only attack Messud for the accusation of sexism, Roiphe actually goes on to attack Messud for being insubordinate towards the interviewer.

([1] For that matter, it’s odd that Slate has a column called “Double X,” which is written by Roiphe, and a blog called “XX Factor,” which is written by a slate of four women.)

And as is usual for Roiphe, she gives a whole pseudo-Freudian explication of why Messud might do that and why it’s wrong.  What she says about Claire Messud is, in short, this: that she displays a “tendency to blame the world for a blanket, raging sexism that only partly exists,” that she unfairly “devour[s] her interviewer with her superior, more sophisticated literary approach,” that she throws a tantrum at the injustice of being subjected by a journalist to “indignities, like being asked if you would be friends with your character.”  This is vaguely less insufferable, actually, than Roiphe’s columns so often are.  Here, at least, she’s attributing to Messud attitudes that other writers have laid claim to, in similar situations.  She simply describes those attitudes in a one-sided way that makes them and Messud all look like whiny adolescents—that misunderstands the situation entirely (as if the idea that novelists might know more about literature than book-journalists do, for instance, was entirely novel)—and sets Roiphe up, if only for the amount of time it takes the reader to finish her column, as a voice of reason, almost as a saint.  No one will ever blame Katie Roiphe for seeing sexism where it doesn’t exist, especially if she accuses every other woman of that failing first (though you’d think she’d already secured herself on that point by now).  The most infuriating among Roiphe’s columns, at least for me, are those where she attacks women she simply doesn’t like, for some reason she doesn’t bother to articulate, but has something to do with some domestic task they do and she doesn’t herself think is necessary.  Then, she tars them with the “probably a man-hating feminist” brush, not to mention the (I am not making this up) “probably watches TV with her husband instead of having sex with him, which is a thing I’d never do” brush.  This one is just barely normal enough that many readers, following the link from other mentions of the column, won’t know why Roiphe’s name arouses such outrage.

The really bizarre thing in this case is that Roiphe goes on to give Messud publishing advice.  I suppose what’s going through her mind is, “She’s a writer (a little like me), I have a newspaper column, maybe she would like to someday have a newspaper column, so I’ll tell her what she would need to change if she’d like someday to be me.”  And the advice that Roiphe gives Messud, who’s just published her fifth novel (and is two years older than Roiphe is), is based on Roiphe’s experience with her first book of nonfiction, which she published when she was twenty-five.  Roiphe made such and such mistakes, she says, she learned some lessons in such and such a way, and made such and such changes, and she’s sure Messud can profit from making exactly the same changes.  What it comes across as, however—at best—is tribalistic defense of a journalist (the Publishers’ Weekly interviewer) against a perceived attack from an outsider.

Scott Esposito and D.G. Myers have literary responses to the fracas.  Myers’ is colored by the fact that he habitually defends exactly the kind of novel Messud would seem to be defending in the interview, as here, in a discussion of Roth’s The Human Stain, which happens to be just about at the point in Roth’s career where I started questioning my ability to go along with what he seemed to be up to. -via  For that matter, so does Mr. Claire Messud, James “hysterical realism” Wood.

"Face to Face" on Anarres

Somehow I had become convinced that I’d read lots of books by Ursula Le Guin, and only had to catch up on a few of them, like the young adult Earthsea trilogy.  It looks, however, like I’ve read barely any of them: a lot of essays, a couple of non-SF young-adult novels, The Lathe of Heaven (just a few years ago), and something set in a Central European city that I now can’t find at all .  More recently, I read the linked stories in Changing Planes (which I’m happy to see has apparently been moved back to the adult section, if only for the illustrations).  I began catching up with The Dispossessed.  Instead of writing one big post on The Dispossessed (I may write a big post or two about it later), I think I’ll post short pieces, from time to time, about various things in the novel that I think are interesting.

The novel is about a two-planet system, one of the planets of which has been colonized by anarchists fleeing the other one.  The story follows Shevek, a physicist from Anarres, the anarchist planet.  He has chosen to be the first one from his home world to visit Urras, their ancestral home.  Urras is much like earth, and the nation Shevek ends up visiting is a totalitarian version of a typical capitalist (or late-capitalist) society, much like North America or any country in Europe.  There are two interleaved storylines.  One begins at the moment Shevek leaves Anarres.  The other begins with his childhood and leading up to that moment.

Near the end of the novel, Shevek’s friend Bedap watches him enter a room.  Le Guin writes that Bedap “saw him as one occasionally sees a very old friend . . . like many others among the Anarresti, a people selected by a vision of freedom, and adapted to a barren world, a world of distances, silences, desolations.”

This reminded me of Adrienne Rich’s poem, “Face to Face,” which appeared in 1974, the same year that The Dispossessed was published.  One stanza of Rich’s poem runs as follows:

How people used to meet!
starved, intense, the old
Christmas gifts saved up till spring,
and the old plain words

This seems a good description of Anarresti culture generally and of Shevek in particular, as do the lines that follow: “with his God-given secret, spelled out through months of snow and silence.”  Developing and articulating his brand-new theory, understood as yet by nobody else on Anarres, alone and justified only by his personal understanding of his society’s belief system, is exactly what Shevek does for most of the book.  His great dream is to be able to publish his work, and then to be able to live among people who appreciate it, because they do similar work.  And the Anarresti are subject to frequent job reassignments, which can be anywhere on the planet, separating even spouses from each other, and parents from their children.  The poem could equally well describe their reunions after long sojourns in the wilderness and wearying voyages home.

Anarres, however, is a society very unlike our own, and not necessarily an unambiguous utopia.  (In fact, the title has the subheading “an ambiguous utopia”!)  For that matter, Rich’s feelings about “the old plain words” and the effort to work out an idea “through months of snow and silence” don’t seem to be unambiguously positive.  She begins the poem, “Never to be lonely like that,” and as the poem goes on, it reads like a lament: modernity is a loss, because the way we live now means, unfortunately, never to be lonely like that.  But in the end it is a wish: I shall live my life so as never to be lonely like that.  The poet associates the will to live that way with patriarchy and narrowness: “one’s will to be law and prophet for all that lawlessness.”  And she associates the will to work out such an idea with madness: she compares the mind of the man who works it out—unduly influenced, perhaps, by “the prairie wolves in their lunar hilarity circling one’s little all,” now approaching his neighbors after long absence and preparing to share it with them—to “a loaded gun.”

I don’t think Le Guin would accept this comparison for her protagonist.  Shevek, after all, is bound and determined not to allow his discovery to be used for building weapons.  But I think she might welcome the suggestion that Anarres, at the stage of development it’s reached at the time The Dispossessed is set, is to be compared with the United States at the time of the settling of the frontier.  The novel is by no means a straight allegory, and the laws and customs of Anarres are not those of the United States.  But the two societies, real and fictional, are similar enough in some aspects that the one is perhaps a commentary on the other.

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

I’d been putting off buying Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, D.T. Max’s biography of the recently late David Foster Wallace.  But also I was nearly obsessively returning to the Amazon page to reconsider it.  Eventually, needing something nonfiction to read, I gave in.  At one point, I’d seek out and read anything Wallace wrote, but eventually gave that up—the nonfiction first, a lot of which I haven’t read (in this, I’m the opposite of many of Wallace’s fans, especially among journalists, who really adore the nonfiction, and especially the pieces I tend to like least), and eventually the fiction, too—Oblivion doesn’t fall into the category of books I’m going to borrow from the library enough times that I really ought to buy them[1], though actually there are only three stories in the collection that I don’t already have in magazine form.  I’d gone through the same nearly obsessive process with The Pale King, which, similarly, I eventually broke down and read.

It’s not too surprising that the biography itself raises the question whether it really needed to be published, and whether anyone really needs to read it.  The book ends with what for many readers, most probably, will be the starting point from which they decided to pick it up: Wallace’s suicide and what led up to it; and what he had in mind for The Pale King, the unpublished and uncompleted manuscript that would be his final novel.  Most of this material appeared already in Max’s 2009 New Yorker piece. 

The penultimate and antepenultimate chapters, similarly, cover material that is already somewhat familiar to many readers: Wallace’s publications after his blockbuster (in literary terms), Infinite Jest, and the editing process and publicity tour for that novel.  Max actually has little to say about the many stories and magazine articles Wallace wrote after Infinite Jest.  The origin of the Harper’s pieces, which it’s known were much longer in manuscript—and as later published in collection—than as printed in the magazine, if they ever appeared at all—is described; but the editing process is not.  The origin of Wallace’s Dostoevsky piece, a review of a biography by Joseph Frank, is dealt with in some detail, but not the fact that it never appeared in print in any magazine (nor the rumors that it was included in a galley version of Wallace’s first nonfiction collection, which appeared in 1997, and circulated in quasi-samizdat form among some insider fans, but was removed before that book went to press—in fact, no rumors at all of this kind make an appearance in this book[2]).  It’s with the publication of Infinite Jest that the “accepted” biography of David Foster Wallace begins.  As far as what comes after that goes, we know all this, or think we do, and there’s not much a biographer can add.  Max recounts a lot of correspondence between author and agent, or agent and editor, all of it pretty much the same as all the rest.

Wallace’s worldview was pretty much set by that point.  What’s more interesting, or was for me, at any rate (and maybe also for the biographer, who counts The Broom of the System, written while Wallace was still in college and published before he got his MFA, as his favorite book), is what comes before.  Max devotes lots of space to the genesis of Wallace’s early stories and nonfiction articles, and to the interactions with university programs and fellow writers they grew out of, as well as to (in passing) debunking certain myths.

Maybe we really didn’t need to know these things, and so didn’t really need a biography of David Foster Wallace.  His life isn’t really history; it took place very recently, so a book about him is inevitably going to fall into the category of journalism, even of publicity hype.  Looking at it feels a little prurient, like wanting to satisfy our curiosity about any individual person, who deserves their privacy.  We don’t have to satisfy our curiosity about where the novelists writing now are coming from, what they studied at school, who mentored them, or what obstacles they encountered, any more than about their political ideas or whether they consumed illegal substances.  But then again, we really don’t need novels, either.

As far as David Foster Wallace’s early life, influences, and development go, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story is a good, basic biography that gives you all the facts (for the most part).  Wallace was born in New York State and moved to rural Illinois as a small child.  He grew up in a university town and attended public high schools where only some of the students were, like him, faculty kids.  He played competitive tennis.  He watched a lot of TV.  He read a lot.  He drank and smoked pot.  His father, a philosophy professor[3], taught him about philosophy.  He had a complicated relationship with his younger sister, his only sibling.  His mother, a teacher of college composition, really was very insistent on good grammar, and really did cough at the dinner table every time one of her children made a grammatical mistake.  He really did go to Amherst College, and considered going to Oberlin (viz. The Broom of the System, in which a girl rejects Amherst’s sister college for Oberlin after visiting her elder sister there).  He really was in recovery.  He was really hospitalized for depression.  He did take a dual summa in English literature and philosophy.  He did know Mary Karr and Elizabeth Wurtzel.  He went to Yaddo twice.  “E Unibus Pluram” was commissioned by Harper’s but not published by them.  He wrote a good number of book reviews early in his career.  Etc. 

There’s some attempt to place David Foster Wallace as a writer, but Max isn’t a literary critic, and there’s blessedly not too much of it.  There’s no attempt to diagnose him or to subject him to commentary.  Only once does the biographer allow himself to wonder whether a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, rather than depression—which would have necessitated, presumably, a drug different from the Nardil he was prescribed—had been called for, and the question whether Wallace was in therapy for most of his adult life, and if not, how he was getting his prescriptions refilled, is not considered.  The book is sympathetic to the twelve-step movement, in a vague kind of way, and respectful of Wallace’s and his friends’ privacy.

The genesis and development of each of the stories that went into Girl With Curious Hair is described to a significant level of detail.  So is the kind of work that was expected at Amherst and at the University of Arizona.  The classes Wallace took at both places are described, and the kind of work Wallace turned in for them.  His struggles with the curriculum, when it pulled against his intuitions, is described, as well.  Every one of his emotional collapses (as an earlier age would have termed them) is narrated, in its genesis, phemonenology, and eventual resolution.  All of this leads up to the completion of the magnum opus, Infinite Jest, and the apotheosis (whatever his feelings about it) of David Foster Wallace as a teaching writer, albeit an occasionally blocked one, with complex feelings about that blockedness.

Where the book is also useful is in debunking (assuming you think that kind of thing is necessary, or desirable) some of the rumors that swirled around Wallace’s persona—what he called “the statue”—while he was alive.

The “standard, accepted” biography of David Foster Wallace during the time of his greatest fame included the following “facts”: that he had never held a teaching job until after around the time Infinite Jest was published, that everything he wrote about AA was based on research and he was not himself in recovery, that he was a cradle Catholic; that the manuscript of The Broom of the System was accepted at Amherst as a thesis in the department of philosophy, as a text about Ludwig Wittgenstein.  Max’s biography shows all these “facts” to be, in fact, false, and it’s helpful for other areas, too, that simply were never very clear.  On the other hand, other questions, such as the pseudonyms mentioned above, aren’t addressed at all.

On the literary side, the following additional facts, I think, were generally largely accepted: that Wallace’s understanding of literary theory (Derrida, De Man, and so on) was one that had been inculcated in him in the standard undergraduate English literature sequence (and not in philosophy classes, which tend to take a different tack); that he had rejected philosophy for literature and that, if he hadn’t done so, he had certainly rejected technical formal logic and Anglo-American analysis in favor of a more literary and subjective philosophical style; that the beliefs held by the faculty of the University of Arizona writing program were his own (in fact he disagreed with them vehemently and was somewhat miserable there); that the best parts of his early published fiction were written by an author who despised Mark Leyner (in fact, he was a fan, and only turned against Leyner’s kind of writing a bit later).  Some might feel that knowing whether these “facts” were true or false is important for understanding what Wallace wrote.  To my mind, Max’s biography casts them in doubt (even for readers who didn’t already doubt them, as a consequence of having read the texts themselves).   To be fair, Wallace did change his mind (or at least nuance it) about, especially, the purpose of fiction and the best way of writing it; but it is not obvious that he made a complete about-face and came to fully embrace the writing preferred by the MFA program that he attended.  And to my mind, it’s an important fact that for Wallace, unlike many of his peers who came out of English-literature programs, De Man belonged to philosophy and not to literature.

It would be too much to say that this book is going to give ambivalent (or even mourning) readers closure about Wallace and the manner of his death.  It did help me come to grips with the earlier stories, again, after I’d become frustrated with his later ones and with the way he’d become given to speaking about them.  It helped me better appreciate The Broom of the System, which never was one of my favorites.  And it helped to explain why there were parts even of his best work—Infinite Jest and Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, in particular—that eventually came to rub me the wrong way, and why the parts I liked best were so often the parts that Wallace himself seemed to disown.

 

[1] Now that I have an e-book reader, though, the criterion has moved from “don’t really really have to have it, but am about to borrow for the third time,” to “would consider borrowing again just for reference, because it looks pretty interesting.”

[2] This is reasonable, actually.  The book is about the writer, not about his readers.  But all except the bare facts of the publication histories of many of the stories that would be collected in Oblivion is excluded here.  And even that’s an exaggeration, unless the fact that some of them appeared under pseudonyms is excluded from the category of “bare fact.”  For instance, “Mr. Squishy,” one of the best stories in the collection, first appeared as the work of “Elizabeth Klemm,” but the name “Klemm,” like the words “pen name” and “pseudonym,” appear nowhere in the book.

[3] If it were my book, I’d have mentioned the fact that one of James D. Wallace’s books (on open stacks in the Boston Public Library in Copley Square) is about the philosophical implications of fiction.  Maybe also the fact that another of his books is on virtue ethics. But it’s not.

Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree: The Year of the Gadfly

This novel, by Jennifer Miller, got a few minor mentions in major media outlets, but I picked it up because it had been placed on the top of the New Books shelves at the local library.  It’s a fun little first novel about the high school years, by a woman who also has a journalistic book under her belt, and has master’s degrees in both journalism and fiction writing. 

The main story follows Iris Dupont, a high school freshman from Boston and a budding journalist, who’s been moved from Boston by her parents, to a small town just east of the Berkshires, to attend the local exclusive private day school, after they find her having a conversation with Edward R. Murrow in her room (he’s not visible to them, of course, being quite dead).  They take this to be a symptom of impending depression after the suicide of her best friend.

The Duponts end up living in the house of a former headmaster of the school, and the rest of the novel revolves around the aptly named Lily Morgan, the headmaster’s daughter and an albino.  (One of the few false notes in this very status-conscious novel—think of a condensed, significantly more fun version of Prep—has Lily’s classmates shunning her because of her physical appearance and social awkwardness, instead of sucking up.)  Eventually Iris begins to investigate Lily’s life, through the intermediary of her extremely unconventional biology teacher, Jonah Kaplan.  Jonah’s twin brother, Justin, was Lily’s boyfriend, and he died under mysterious circumstances.  Lily becomes obsessed with Jonah, and equally obsessed with writing a sensational exposé about a secret society called Prisom’s Party,which claims to bully people in the name of justice and truth, and in the name of exposing the hypocrisies of the Community Code, the student honor system.

For the most part the characters, except for Iris and Lily, are types, but most of them are portrayed sympathetically.  Iris is maybe a little too cynical and distanced to be the primary narrator and for the reader to accept her thoughts as an authoritative way of understanding the events of the book.  The way she automatically judges everybody and everything comes from a place of disconnectedness and isn’t believable in a character who's very nearly an adult (even Harriet the Spy must have grown up a little bit by fourteen).  The Kaplan twins, too, as depicted, seem excessively negative.  We see only a small proportion of their lives, missing almost all their classes, their family lives, and their hobbies.  Just a little of this might have pulled the novel off-track, but it also might have removed the sense that the author her thumb on the scale in favor of characters who really aren't worth it.

The novel is built up journalistically, by accumulating examples.  There are multiple instances, for example, of bullying or emotional violence; of secret societies and social cliques; of references to dark works of fiction like 1984 and The Dead Poets Society; of outside events like Columbine and the rise of the Internet (and 9/11, implicitly, given the dates).  While the teenaged characters discuss what they think of these and in what ways they’re a comment on adult society, there’s no authorial attempt to tie them together or to think about them.  All the scandals could have occurred in a pre-Facebook, pre-Photoshop world, in a private or a public school, among the wealthy or the working class.  None of them requires the secret-society, honor-code, popular-kid culture in which the story happens to be set, or for that matter the heavily emphasized contrast between scientific and humanistic manners of thought.  This is just the milieu in which the author, knowing it well, has decided to place her young characters.  Kids are cruel, she implies, and will find any opportunity that presents itself to exercise their vices.  Rumination about larger topics is almost rigorously excluded, presumably on the principle of “show, don’t tell.”  Unfortunately, the effect is to make the novel a bit YA-ish, while still too linguistically difficult for the majority of teenagers, who probably need a little more guidance in following the story and figuring out its emotional and moral resonance.  It’s not atypical of “genre” novels—science fiction or murder mysteries—but actually there’s no genre called “literary coming of age novel (directed toward non-literary readers).”

There is, however—almost—a genre called “hipster literary  Brooklyn twenty-something,” and that’s where The Year of the Gadfly falls.  It’s a bit Girls meets The Hour (Jonah Kaplan, the novel’s most important male character, is introduced as looking quite a lot like Ben Whishaw with red hair) meets Foucault’s Pendulum (there’s a bit of Atonement in there, too, I think).  The important characters are either high school students or underemployed recent graduates who’ve returned, quite literally in this instance, “to the scene of the crime,” the town where they grew up and the friends they had while living with their parents.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  But attempts to figure out the moral and political point of view of the characters—and there must be one, in a novel so fixated on unrespectable behavior, nonconformity, corruption in high places, and even democratic action of a sort—will probably run aground in the same way they might, for any other young writer of that budding proto-genre.

About two-thirds of the way through, I got that sinking feeling when I thought, “Oh no, all the setup has been done, and all that’s left is to chunk methodically through the windup of the plot, step by step, in all its fully articulated detail.”  But I was wrong.  The end of the book was consistently engrossing.

The Love of My Youth, a novel by Mary Gordon

This is quite a good book, and I didn’t really enjoy it.  I first heard of Mary Gordon many years ago, probably when Spending came out.  I have a distinct memory of reading a review of Spending in the New York Times Book Review, and of thinking I’d heard of her already, but I may have been confusing her in some way with Mary Gaitskill.  I didn’t have any idea, until after I’d picked up The Love of My Youth, what kind of novels Gordon writes.  I’d gotten the idea they were more or less “literary,” and expected something at least a little “edgy,” in the manner of Gaitskill—whose Two Girls, Fat and Thin, I’d read when it came out, twenty years ago, and liked.  I could see this was an older woman’s book and somewhat milder and more reflective than something like that would have been.  Yet the review of Spending had given me an impression of something rather racy.

Instead, I found a really very mild women’s novel, as respectable as respectable can be.  It seemed to be the kind of novel I’d be reading in my fifties and sixties if I’d gone on reading the same kind of books I’d read as a teenager, novelists like Helen van Slyke, Belva Plain, and Madeleine L’Engle.  Like Van Slyke’s and L’Engle’s novels, The Love of My Youth presents characters, mostly female, who are respectably bourgeois, self-critical, and concerned about the world around them in a generally “liberal” sort of way.  Like L’Engle’s, in particular, it concerns itself with religion, with music and the nature of a life devoted to it, with the amount of submission that’s properly due from a woman towards a man and towards their family, and with the world of music—though it deals with them in more attractive, or some might say “politically correct,” ways than L’Engle does (as was discussed in Mari Ness’s re-read of some of her books at the Tor Publishing site).  But I didn’t go on reading that kind of novel, and I’m not yet fifty.

It would be interesting to compare Gordon and The Love of My Youth to Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers or to Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, both of which I recently read, and each of which it has something in common with.  It’s interesting even that the styles of these books are so different.  The fact is that I think Gordon’s style here is impossible.  At one time, it might have seemed more normal, but these days only an incredibly well-established writer could get away with it, and even on its own terms, it just doesn’t really work.  The end of the novel especially conforms to ideas like those of John Gardner (the novelist and writing instructor, and author of several well-known books for writers), with a deeply emotional and almost “musical” denouement that quite literally “ties up” the novel’s still-loose strands.  But it is much too neat.  It’s not popular enough and it’s not arty enough.  It owes nothing to the more postmodern constructions of an A.S. Byatt, a Hilary Mantel, or a Jonathan Franzen.

The story begins in the present, with a visit to Rome, separately, by two people who have some as yet unspecified past between them.  Day by day, they visit with one another and think about their lives, and the missing pieces are gradually revealed.  Then there’s an extended flashback to the 1960s, when they first met, in incidents that have already been described in part.  The story moves back to present-day Rome, with two more flashbacks.  The novel is very “talky,” with a lot of thinking and very little dialogue, even very little narration: people and events are talked over and around, then finally, in a flashback, disposed of in a couple of sentences.  The reader who isn’t familiar with the landmarks of Rome will need a guidebook or the Internet to get some idea of where they are walking and what the buildings they’re visiting look like. 

One of the novel’s themes seems to be rebellion against old-fashioned values generally, and sex in particular: loss of virginity, infidelity, unplanned pregnancy.  (I picked up Gordon’s first novel, Final Payments, to see if the peculiar style is something she’s always had, and found that it isn’t, but that these themes are the kind of things she’s always written about.)  The book clearly appeals to women, to older readers, specifically to people who came of age in the 1960s.  Readers who think Baby Boomers are generally narcissistic will find lots of evidence in The Love of My Youth.  The characters can come across as oh-so-precious.  It’s not that they’re especially full of themselves, so much as the fact that their good qualities are heavily pronounced, while their faults are considered, recognized as such, and overcome.  The novel does nicely present two different kinds of paths that people might have felt, in the 1960s were newly possible—maybe they’re paths that are always possible, but in the 1960s seemed especially hopeful, and potentially revolutionary—but which turned out, sadly, to be incompatible. 

I Have Never Liked "Les Miz"

In the New Yorker’s blog, movie critic David Denby has a piece on the new film version of the musical version of Victor Hugo’s bloated nineteenth-century French novel, Les Misérables.  Denby says he hasn’t seen the stage version, but from what he writes, all its flaws are carried over nearly in full to the cinematic one (and with a few more added, which I can’t speak to, since I haven’t seen it yet).  The show has been so ridiculously popular for nearly thirty years that it’s nice to see someone who feels about it the same way I do.

Denby writes:

It’s terrible; it’s dreadful. Overbearing, pretentious, madly repetitive. . . . I couldn’t help wondering what in the world had happened to the taste of my countrymen—the Americans (Americans!) who created and loved almost all the greatest musicals ever made.

And:

The music is juvenile stuff—tonic-dominant, without harmonic richness or surprise. Listen to any score by Richard Rodgers or Leonard Bernstein or Fritz Loewe if you want to hear genuine melodic invention. I was so upset by the banality of the music that I felt like hiring a hall and staging a nationalist rally. “My fellow-countrymen, we are the people of Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin! Cole Porter and George Gershwin, Frank Loesser and Burton Lane! We taught the world what popular melody was! What rhythmic inventiveness was! Let us unite to overthrow the banality of these French hacks!” (And the British hacks, too, for that matter.) Alas, the hall is filled with people weeping over “Les Mis.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Les Miz (as it’s called, for short) just isn’t a “musical.”  It’s a spectacular.  The show’s creators, Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, are from France—not a country that had given us a large number of Broadway shows.  (The same writers went on to create Miss Saigon.)  It was adapted for the London stage before being brought to New York.  At the time, Broadway was struggling, and the traditional style of musical play was having difficulty finding producers and audiences.  Into the vacuum spilled new large-scale productions from London, often by Cameron Mackintosh, and eventually corporatized productions, often by Disney.  The British shows, by Andrew Lloyd Webber, for example, were not in the American-music tradition.  Webber began by writing rock operas, from the standpoint of which the American songbook appeared musically old-fashioned, but which were themselves old-fashioned in form, more like operettas than like the American form that had grown from the operetta.  It helps a little, in appreciating Les Misérables, to recognize that it is definitely not a Broadway musical, but more in the operetta tradition.

I saw Les Miz onstage in the late 1980s.  I didn’t like it.  Like David Denby, I thought the only number that seemed a real musical number was “Master of the House,” performed by an innkeeper and his familiars.  It had a bouncy tune, it had dancing, it had characters who seemed to be having fun.  It was reminiscent of some of the songs in the 1960 English musical Oliver!  The rest of the show is ballads and musically formless spectacles, both of which are okay in small doses, but not enough to sustain a Broadway-style musical.  The plot alternates between the pathos of a young orphaned girl and the pathos of revolutionary students at the barricades of a revolt that’s never clearly defined.  In my memory, the students lose, very badly, and in my memory, they’re also joined by a small boy who is shot by the government forces.  I may have made him up, though, conflating the baggage carriers in Henry V with Fantine, the tiny waifish girl on the theatrical posters and the cover of my Signet paperback.  The rest of the plot, as everyone knows, is The Fugitive, more or less, with Jean Valjean as Harrison Ford, and Inspector Javert as Tommy Lee Jones.  And for my money, the South Park movie (Bigger, Longer, and Uncut), though unwatchable in parts, is worth the price of admission just for the parody of Les Misérables, in the song “La Resistance Lives On.”

However, for the past few years I’ve been listening to XM Radio’s Broadway channel in my car, and they fairly often play songs from Les Miz.  Obviously, these were recordings of the casts from the stage versions.  At first, I would change the station whenever these came on, but over time, the show’s biggest hits started to grow on me: rousing ensemble numbers like “Do You Hear the People Sing?” and “Red and Black,” fairly typical musical numbers like “At the End of the Day” and the comic “Lovely Ladies,” and even (to a lesser extent) the ballad, “A Little Fall of Rain.”

On the same channel I’d hear songs from Miss Saigon, and although these really aren’t as good, I began to hear the way melodic lines, vocal types, and plot elements echoed back and forth between these plays and, especially, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s.  So there’s a comparison to be made between “The Heat is on in Saigon,” where the virginal hero wanders through the fleshpots of the city, and “The Temple,” where Jesus reacts badly to the moneylenders and other merchants in the temple at Jerusalem.  Schönberg-Boublil gained by the comparison.  Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s attitude toward “superstars,” and the degree to which they distinguished between Jesus Christ and Evita Peron, was never very clear.  Miss Saigon made more sense than those plays, even if it was not as good as them, theatrically or musically.

But when I saw the full set of trailers for the film, I remembered how painful the show really was to watch.  Three minutes of a rousing ensemble number, or six, is one thing.  Moment after moment of emotional “peak” is another.  It’s not usual for a Broadway number to be especially intense, emotionally.  This may be why they seem silly to many people these days.  It may also be why the songs from Les Miz sounded better on the radio.  The repetition of motifs was overbearing, the orchestration was overbearing, and every moment seemed designed to evoke strong emotion (which I knew, from my memory of the show, would eventuate in pity for the very piteous ends suffered by almost all the main characters).  “Castle on a Cloud,” sung onstage by a small girl, can sound sweet and honest, and out of context, not very kitschy at all.  But the film version (featured on the trailer) is intensified until it sounds like something from a horror movie.

And “Master of the House,” for me, has aged poorly.  I saw the play on tour, at Boston’s Colonial Theater.  The acoustics at the Colonial were terrible every time I saw a play there.  Spoken or sung, you were lucky if you could hear five words in a row.  Amplification still seemed new at the time, and it didn’t seem to work well.  (This was one reason I was willing to assume the show was better than I’d thought after I saw it in person: the fact that it sounded terrible, muddy, and unmusical might not actually have been the composers’ fault at all.)  I had no idea what most of the lyrics even were, beyond the much clearer tags like “master of the house, ruler of the inn.”  Then I heard it on the radio, with the London cast.  The innkeeper was clearly the butt of the song, a grasping letch whom all the lodgers hated, and his wife was Patsy from AbFab.  The number turned out to belong to the cruder kind of BBC comedy.  I don’t look forward at all to seeing it done by Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen, two Brits who I expect to perform it in a similar way.

The Cookbook Collector, by Allegra Goodman

Here is the final installment of “Summer Boston Books,” a semi-review of The Cookbook Collector, by Allegra Goodman.  I’ve already written a little about The Cookbook Collector here and here.

As I mentioned in those posts, The Cookbook Collector is an overstuffed novel of a type that could be called a “social novel” (though see below), or, about equally well, a “women’s novel.”  The central plot strands revolve around two sisters, now living in Berkeley and Silicon Valley, but originally from Massachusetts.  Jessamine, or Jess, is a graduate student in philosophy, struggling to keep on top of her school work, her relationships, and her job at an antiquarian bookshop.  Emily, her older sister, is the CEO of a software startup.  Both women are marked by the death of their mother, so early that Jess has hardly any memories of her.

Emily’s fiancé is also a software executive, at a company in Cambridge, founded by friends of his from graduate school at MIT, on the basis of a project they began there.  They’re tenuously carrying on a long-distance relationship.  Jess has recently begun dating a celebrity in the world of environmentalism, and trying to fit into his way of life.  Her boss, George, doesn’t approve of him—or of her, much of the time, though he finds her paradoxically charming.  George was once a sort of hippie, then a graduate student and ultimately Ph.D. in physics, then a Microsoft employee and ultimately millionaire, and now an independently wealthy bachelor with eighteenth-century tastes.  (The reader might be reminded of Douglas Coupland’s novel, Microserfs, in which a similar life arc is taken by much younger characters.)  In politics, he tends libertarian.  In culture, he prefers the tried and true, especially the eighteenth century.  In lifestyle, he prefers the expensive.

The plot’s set in motion when Jess needs a few thousand dollars to invest in the “sure thing” represented by the Friends and Family program for the impending public stock offering of her sister’s company.  She ends up going to her neighbor’s rabbi for a loan.  The Bialystokers are an outside-looking group apparently modeled on the Lubavitch.  Eventually, unable to pay the money back, she’ll feel compelled to keep visiting the Bialystokers, if only out of politeness.  At about the same time, George is approached by a woman with a large collection of antique books on cookery.  He’s initially wary, but eventually is drawn in.

If you’ve guessed the ending already, you’re probably right.  But the journey there is enjoyable and the included side trips are worth the fare.

The software-startup strands of the plot are forward-looking.  George, on the other hand—computer guy that he is—is entirely backward looking.  He has renovated his house, which is an architecturally significant example of the Arts and Crafts style, so that everything but the kitchen is appropriate to the time at which it was built.  He collects old books and counts himself a connoisseur of the best things of the past.  He’s a recognizable type: someone who’s made a lot of money in technology and uses it to finance a lifestyle that’s as close as possible as he could come to a fairly traditional one (a privileged version of a traditional lifestyle, that is).

(There are MINOR SPOILERS below this point.)

The writing style is elegant, but fairly dry (a welcome change from the British novels I’ve been reading, which tend toward the extreme of the strictures set out by writing-instruction books, heavy on concrete images and shy of the more leisurely kinds of prose).  Thus, in so far as there’s a love story embedded in this novel, there end up being two ways of reading that love story.  In other words, some readers will feel that the characters who get together are pretty amazing, that they’re essentially made for each other, and that it’s totally understandable why they fell; but others may feel that they’re acting on a whim or another irrational emotion, and that things will never work out.  In this way, The Cookbook Collector is like the Jane Austen novels that George loves.  Can a modern reader really believe that Mr. Darcy (in Pride and Prejudice) or Mr. Knightley (in Emma) is such a good catch?  Are we simply used to thinking of a marriage as the happy ending to this kind of story, or can we show that Darcy and Knightley are, as depicted by their author, really good?  (There’s an interesting connection here to Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, which begins with Madeleine’s student preoccupation with this traditional novel form, which she’s been taught is nowadays impossible.)

The novel builds to the economic problems that began, in high-tech industries, in 2000.  Some characters get out of that crisis okay, some more than okay.  Some end up in something close to dire straits.  Whether or not this was the novelist’s intention, it’s difficult not to see the causes of these different ultimate fates in their differing individual choices.  The Cookbook Collector is not a “social” novel in the sense of telling us about society.  Goodman doesn’t detail elements of the software industry that link it up with the wider society (with minor exceptions like the East Coast MIT-venture capital link), or the elements in that wider society that impact on the people who work in the industry (again with exceptions like global terrorism and yuppiedom).  The novelist is concerned, rather, with the human factors—virtues and vices, greed, pride, lust—that affect their ability to cope, to work together, and generally to live their lives, without unbearable angst.

I would have liked to see the business elements of the novel placed in some kind of context, though.  We start the book in medias res, with two of the major characters already highly placed in different software startups on different coasts, in 1999.  We end it in 2002, when the principals’ dreams of outrageous fortunes have become a little less rosy.  What we don’t see is the recession.  Noticing that the rest of the economy is missing brings to the foreground the fact that the rest of the high-tech industry is missing too.  The novel focuses on what’s interesting or “sexy.”  That means the rich and fabulous, on the one hand, and what’s in the news, on the other.  Goodman seems to want to make large statements about what it’s like to work in that economy, however, and the missing pieces make for a misleading whole.

The overall effect is to connect the characters’ reversals of fortune to their personal failings alone.  A focus on individuals and their personal growth into (or out of) the environment that surrounds them is appropriate to the traditional social novel.  On the other hand, the attempt to convey a larger message, which is also present here, is undercut.  And there were plenty of people who were also in dire straits by 2002, merely because they had associated themselves with companies that later failed, and not through any vices of their own.  Those people are missing, and to the extent one assumes that they’re present implicitly, the implications are more than a little insulting to them.

Nor does Goodman manage to avoid—entirely—the literary cliché by means of which science and engineering types (or those who inadvisedly associate themselves with such) are rescued from the commercial world, either through art or through their recognition of the horror that world seems to them to entail.

At first, Goodman’s novel seemed to make a refreshing change from books like Diane Johnson’s L’Affaire or Ellen Ullman’s The Bug (the latter by a former programmer herself, the former by a literature professor).  Both of those are framed as events that have already happened, to a protagonist who has already abandoned the field for less specialized pursuits.  Johnson sets her character’s newly found (American) wealth against the context of the mostly European, mostly leisure-based society in which she’s beginning to move.  In Ullman’s novel, the pressures of the commercial-industrial world compel the narrator’s break with that world, to preserve her own sanity.  The Cookbook Collector, a little more novelistically, externalizes that kind of conflict by displacing it from within the protagonists’ psyches to inter-sibling conflict within a family.  Yet by the end of the novel, more than one of the characters (pretty much all the sympathetic ones) has similarly left in disgust.

I like this novel and would recommend it without reservation.  I think the questions Gabriel Brownstein raised about why The Cookbook Collector was not generally discussed as on a level with Freedom and The Marriage Plot are valid.  That it left me wishing for more is not necessarily a bad thing.

Is The Cookbook Collector Literary, or "Only Mainstream"?

I mentioned in an earlier post that during the summer I had read both The Cookbook Collector, by Allegra Goodman, and 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, by Rebecca Goldstein, and that I would have more to say about these.  (I noticed I still haven’t given even capsule plot summaries of the kind I wrote, in my previous post, for the other books I mentioned.  I’ll include these in a later post.)

In the same post, I noted that the novels that were by men, among those I’d read over the summer, pretty consistently were more narrowly focused than those by women.  They concentrated on the personal journey of a single character, and paid little attention to social context, whether “social” is taken to mean the interactions within a group of people, or the operations of the larger society.  Their plot was simple and straightforward, and minimal by comparison with the number of pages it took up.  They seemed to find it difficult to pay close attention to a second character within the pages of the same novel, let alone more than two.  But on the other hand, they did find room for ideas, sometimes in the form of allegory, but as often in the form of abstract discussion.

In part, this seemed to be because those novels happened to be genre novels, namely science fiction or fantasy, and thus to appeal to a specialized audience, who in many cases don’t read “mainstream” novels at all.  Goodman’s and Goldstein’s books, though novels of ideas, were resolutely “mainstream,” and thus followed the patterns expected from most reasonably accomplished long fictions.

However, it’s not by any means the case that “mainstream” or “literary” novels have to be dialogue-heavy, plot-heavy “social” novels with lots of characters.  In fact, most “literary” novels by men, especially (though also novels by women that are more “literary” and less intended for a general audience), are to some degree more similar to the genre or mainstream-genre hybrid novels I read over the summer: as narrowly focused as they are on a single character, with a relatively simple plot that tracks that one character’s education—maybe two, at an absolute maximum three.  In fact, “women’s” or “social” novels, like The Cookbook Collector in particular, are considered not only old-fashioned, in literary circles, but outright unfashionable, associated with popular novels, more like The Help, and with the formally staid, a kind of novel that hasn’t advanced much in the past hundred and fifty years.

And it’s true that there are plenty of books that fit this description that are not very good, although they can be entertaining enough.  What allows them to be published, and to sell, is the entertainment value they possess: value that derives from their being heavy on plot and on their failing to surprise most readers very much, either by what they include and what they say, or by how they are put together.  They don’t need the qualities that make a different kind of novel “literary.”  Yet coming back to “mainstream popular” novels after spending a lot of time reading more literary fiction, the novels that are merely entertaining can start to seem a little boring.  It starts to feel as if they are all the same.  They don’t seem interesting enough to read as slowly as I’ve become used to doing, I end up wanting to skim them. 

On the other hand, however, it’s not at all fair to apply this description to The Cookbook Collector or to 36 Arguments for the Existence of God.  I think Allegra Goodman, especially (who doesn't draw sophistication from explicit discussions of philosophy, as Goldstein does) is aiming at something that one might with reason describe as literary.  She’s aiming at a kind of social novel that used to be considered—and arguably in some highly respected quarters still is considered, regardless of how old-fashioned it seems to others—the paradigm case of a novel.  That this is her aim is demonstrated by the accomplished prose, the careful use of secondary characters and settings to indicate a theme, and the unobtrusive, natural-seeming way in which ideas and social questions are introduced into the narrative.  And the themes themselves are quite similar to what, for example, Jonathan Franzen (in The Corrections) and Richard Powers (in Gain) have treated.

What is missing from Goldstein’s and Goodman’s novels is subjectivity: specifically, subjectivity in the language.  The language in these books is flat.  The treatment of ideas is superficial: not in the sense that the ideas are unsophisticated or that they’re treated in unsophisticated or uneducated ways, but, in the sense that there is no depth to them.  Ideas are glanced at, disposed of in one sentence, and abandoned so that novelist and the reader can get on to the next thing.  Nothing appears thought through.  No striking thought makes its presence known behind the text; no striking thinking is laid out within the text itself.  Moreover, the flat absence of anything that serves consistently to distinguish the language and thoughts of one character or narrative point of view from another (more in The Cookbook Collector than in 36 Arguments) overpowers the slight indications of subjectivity that might arise from implied differences in attitude or belief between them.

As it happens, the question of literariness has been raised before, with respect to The Cookbook Collector.  A year and a half ago, at The Millions, an online books, arts, and culture site, Gabriel Brownstein asked why Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom “was sold as ‘The Great American Novel’ (that’s what Esquire called it), while The Cookbook Collector was (I guess) just another good book by Allegra Goodman.”  In part, the answer seems obvious.  Franzen’s writing is “literary”—in the ways outlined above—in a way Goodman’s isn’t.  Literariness is Franzen’s goal, and because The Cookbook Collector lacks some of the obvious markers of most high-literary novels, it doesn’t seem as obviously to be  Goodman’s goal.  Brownstein relates this to “difficulty,” which Franzen has said a lot about, and to “his attempt to wed whacked-out and dark postmodern irony to sympathetic humanist realism.”  And though this is part of it, I don’t see that either of these is really at the root of the difference.  Brownstein also mentions the controversy over why “women’s novels,” supposedly, aren’t taken as seriously, considered for awards as often, and publicized as widely, as are men’s.  I’d suggest that it is, in part, because what they lack, by comparison with novels like Franzen’s, has come to be considered more important than what more typically men’s literary novels (The Corrections and Freedom aren’t actually entirely typical, I think) lack by comparison with the women’s or old-fashioned social novel.

In his essay at The Millions, Brownstein quotes a passage from Freedom to illustrate the difference.  I haven’t read Freedom yet, however, and I’ll quote one from Franzen’s previous novel, The Corrections, which he could as easily have used instead:

“Six days a week several pounds of mail came through the slot in the front door, and since nothing incidental was allowed to pile up downstairs—since the fiction of living in this house was that no one lived here—Enid faced a substantial tactical challenge. She didn't think of herself as a guerrilla, but a guerrilla was what she was. By day she ferried matériel from depot to depot, often just a step ahead of the governing force. By night, beneath a charming but too-dim sconce at a too-small table in the breakfast nook, she staged various actions: paid bills, balanced checkbooks, attempted to decipher Medicare copayment records and make sense of a threatening Third Notice from a medical lab that demanded immediate payment of $0.22 while simultaneously showing an account balance of $0.00 carried forward and thus indicating that she owed nothing and in any case offering no address to which remittance might be made. It would happen that the First and Second Notices were underground somewhere, and because of the constraints under which Enid waged her campaign she had only the dimmest sense of where those other Notices might be on any given evening. She might suspect, perhaps, the family-room closet, but the governing force, in the person of Alfred, would be watching a network newsmagazine at a volume thunderous enough to keep him awake, and he had every light in the family room burning, and there was a non-negligible possibility that if she opened the closet door a cascade of catalogues and House Beautifuls and miscellaneous Merrill Lynch statements would come toppling and sliding out, incurring Alfred's wrath. There was also the possibility that the Notices would not be there, since the governing force staged random raids on her depots, threatening to "pitch" the whole lot of it if she didn't take care of it, but she was too busy dodging these raids to ever quite take care of it, and in the succession of forced migrations and deportations any lingering semblance of order was lost, . . .”

or from Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot:

“Jet lag added to his slight delirium. It was morning by the clock but deepest nighttime in his body. The rising sun forced him to squint. It seemed unkind somehow. And yet, at street level, everything had been arranged to please the eye. The trees were thick with late-summer leaves. They wore iron grilles around their trunks, like aprons. The broadness of the sidewalk accommodated newspaper kiosks, dog walkers, chic ten-year-old girls on their way to the park. A sharp scent of tobacco arose from the curbside, which was the way Mitchell had thought Europe would smell, earthy, sophisticated, and unhealthy, all at once.”

or this, from the same novel:

“The shelves near the fireplace held Alton’s favorites, biographies of American presidents and British prime ministers, memoirs by warmongering secretaries of state, novels about sailing or espionage by William F. Buckley, Jr. Phyllida’s books filled the left side of the bookcases leading up to the parlor, NYRB-reviewed novels and essay collections, as well as coffee-table volumes about English gardens or chinoiserie. Even now, at bed-and-breakfasts or seaside hotels, a shelf full of forlorn books always cried out to Madeleine. She ran her fingers over their salt-spotted covers. She peeled apart pages made tacky by ocean air. She had no sympathy for paperback thrillers and detective stories. It was the abandoned hardback, the jacketless 1931 Dial Press edition ringed with many a coffee cup, that pierced Madeleine’s heart. Her friends might be calling her name on the beach, the clambake already under way, but Madeleine would sit down on the bed and read for a little while to make the sad old book feel better.”

or from Philip Roth’s most recent novel, Nemesis:

“And then he hurled the javelin.  You could see each of his muscles bulging when he released it into the air.  He let out a strangulated yowl of effort (one we all went around imitating for days afterward), a noise expressing the essence of him—the naked battle cry of striving excellence.  The instant the javelin took flight from his hand, he began dancing about to recover his balance and not fall across the foul line he’d etched in the dirt with his cleats.  And all the while he watched the javelin as it made its trajectory in a high, sweeping arc over the field.  None of us had ever before seen an athletic act so beautifully executed right in front of our eyes.  The javelin carried, carried way beyond the fifty-yard line, down to the far side of the opponent’s thirty, and when it descended and landed, the shaft quivered and its pointed metal tip angled sharply into the ground from the sailing force of the flight.”

And here’s a passage from The Cookbook Collector:

“Working at the store, she had become a connoisseur of sorts, someone who knew the difference between a first printing and a latter-day edition.  She had come to appreciate white rag paper and color plates with tissue over them and marbled endpapers and gilt titles.  Once, she had insisted that content was all that mattered.  Now form began to matter too, and her eye delighted in elegant type, and her hand loved thick creamy pages.  She treasured what was old and handmade, and began to enjoy early editions more than new.  George had influenced her this way, not so much by what he said, but by example.  His passion and his knowledge inspired her.  When he acquired a new book, he called her over.  ‘Jess, come quick!’  Sensing her interest, he explained what made the volume scarce and fine.  At those moments, she wished she could work longer hours at Yorick’s.  The trouble was that she had so little time.”

There is nothing in The Cookbook Collector that is like Enid’s emotionally tinged sense that her inability to keep on top of the bills and the less essential mail is the equivalent of waging a war, and that her conflict with her husband over the mess puts her in the position of a guerilla fighter vis-à-vis his Governmental Force; or Madeleine’s irrational feeling that books need her to rescue them; or Mitchell’s experience of Paris as a physical environment that somehow makes him think about how he’s been approaching his life in the wrong way; or Arnold Mesnikoff’s intimations of a deeper reality in the execution of a perfect athletic maneuver.

The more subjective, more obviously literary writers spend a lot of time on minutiae.  They write a lot of words that go over and over the same ground, again and again.  They write descriptions that take up entire long paragraphs that don’t advance the plot in any way at all.  Yet with all those words, they rarely include any that stand above the events as they’re viewed by the character who experiences them; he doesn’t judge them, evaluate them, or set them in any kind of generalized context.

In The Cookbook Collector, on the contrary, there is lots of commentary.  What The Cookbook Collector has, instead of subjective dwelling or brooding on minute observations and the emotions they give rise to, is plot; and its plot is advanced by straight narration and dialogue in alternation.  All the available space is taken up with dialogue, with scenes, and with a large number of characters who need to be characterized, followed for some period of time, and then caught up with after some time has passed.  Given the choice (which I’m assuming here) to make this novel plot-driven and objectively narrated, the only way in which ideas or differences in characterization could find their way into the text is by the author’s stating them outright.  Some people find getting through a novel like Goodman’s (or Goldstein’s) to be quite difficult, I’m sure, and for exactly this reason: they find large passages of straightforward commentary to be boring.  Yet difficulty, in itself, doesn’t push these two novels towards being literary in the same way it does Franzen’s.

In part this is because—beyond their having different aims than his novels do—they really don’t succeed, I think, even on their own terms.  In The Cookbook Collector, already by the 150-page mark, a large number of strands have been introduced and developed.  True, each of these strands makes its own independent contribution: either developing plot points that either are essential to the main storyline, or illustrating secondary characters in ways that enrich the depiction of the main characters and of the theme.  And the scenes do move the main narrative forward, and each one that is chosen for inclusion is developed fully.  (Incidentally, perhaps, they also distinguish the central “people-centric” narrative from the more peripheral and less fully narrated business and technical stories, indicating what the reader should understand as most important.)  But the full development of so many narrative points, with dialogue included in full and nothing summarized, takes more time than is strictly needed to move the story forward, and isn’t always interesting in its own right.  And this is, in part, because the emotional and psychological depth that might engross the reader, make the text interesting, isn’t there.  Each of the characters is fascinating—I want to see so much of these people—but for each of them we don’t get a whole lot more than a four-page character sketch and the sense that the author believes people like them are important.`

In The Marriage Plot and The Magician King, alike, the reader gets the sense that people are different: that they believe different things, have different goals, and are at times incomprehensible to one another and to themselves.  In The Cookbook Collector, the plot implies this multifariousness of humanity, but the language and the form suggest the opposite: that if we don’t all think the same way now, not at the level of the everyday but at some deeper level of our souls, we should, and someday will.

I’m not sure that, all told, this makes The Cookbook Collector a less worthy novel than those other books (which I admit can be boring themselves in places).  In Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino does praise “velocity” as a desirable characteristic for literature, and in refusing to brood or to dwell on events longer than they deserve, Goodman’s novel does achieve this kind of carrying speed.  Yet I think it could have been a 600-page novel that delved more into the subjective and paid more attention to language than this one does; and the longer novel would have been a better one.  I don’t think it needs to have most of its character and plot stripped away to make it “difficult” (that is, unlike the kinds of novels people read for fun), or to have its dialogue replaced or interspersed with authorial commentary on the economy and the state of the world.  I wonder whether a “subjective” novel about the same topics could treat its characters, who are far from typical for a literary novel, with the sensitivity and charity that Goodman allows to them.  On the other hand, while I was reading The Cookbook Collector, I did wish that it could have been more thoughtful, more often.

Boston Area Books

In my last post, I mentioned that I had spent the summer reading novels by people who live in the Boston area.  First, I’d read Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford, to try and keep up with the book seminar at Crooked Timber.  Then, in June, I had picked up Son of a Witch, the first sequel to Wicked.  Then I borrowed Rebecca Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of God and Allegra Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector.  Both of these had been on my to-read list for a while.

UPDATE: The other posts on "Boston Area Books" are here, here, and here.

I knew Goodman has lived in Cambridge for many years, but I noticed from the book jacket that Gregory Maguire also lives near Boston.  So does Goldstein, who now teaches at Harvard.  So the idea occurred to me of reading more books by writers who are in the area.  I figured I could move on to novels by Dennis Lehane, Gish Jen, and Stephen King.  I could finish On Beauty, which Zadie Smith set outside of Boston and wrote during or after her stay here.  There were the first novels of Richard Powers and Jonathan Franzen, which they wrote when they lived in Boston.  In a pinch I might finally read Rabbit, Run, or re-read The Witches of Eastwick.  Or I could read Norumbega Park, which was set in Massachusetts the Boston suburbs but not written here written in the western part of the state, and which I’d successfully recommended to my husband as vacation reading, picking it off my list, but which I haven’t yet read myself.

I took out World and Town, Gish Jen’s most recent book, after The Cookbook Collector, but decided they were too much alike to read right in a row, and I downloaded The Magician King and The Leftovers instead.  After I’d started the first of these, I remembered that Lev Grossman doesn’t live in Massachusetts anymore.  However, part of the book is set here (in the fictional town of Chesterton, which is either Lexington or Chelmsford, or both, though it hardly matters—the town is a typical New England town, beloved of tourists, and scorned by the right-thinking young man who knows that to swan about old architecture is unseemly).  So whatever; I kept reading it.

Finally, I read a few pages of The Leftovers, but I’ve put it aside until I can finish some blog posts I’ve already started writing.

Quick thoughts on these novels:

Red Plenty:  Somehow this got plugged as a science fiction novel.  It isn’t.  It also isn’t primarily about the technical issues involved in developing linear algebra as a method for industrial planning, or about scientists confronted with those issues.  One character is such a scientist: Leonid Kantorovich, who’s credited with priority in developing linear algebra in this way.  Other characters include Nikita Krushchev, the Soviet premier; a woman scientist and single mother in Akademgorodok, the new “science city” that was built in Siberia, and a couple of young, up-and-coming Commnist Party bureacrats.  It’s structured like a series of linked short stories, in partial chronological order.  The plot is a sympathetic account of the attempt, pursued in different ways by each of the characters, and finally a failure, to develop the Soviet Union so as to equal and then surpass the material comfort enjoyed in the West (the U.S. particularly).  It’s very well written—Spufford has found some clever ways of circumventing the limitations on novel writing that make writing historical fiction and fiction about ideas so difficult to do well—and it’s a good story, with engaging characters.  Of course, if you find it impossible to think of Krushchev sympathetically, you’ll have a difficult time enjoying it.

Son of a Witch isn’t quite as enjoyable or as tightly written as Wicked was.  It’s focused more narrowly, on Liir, who is probably Elphaba’s (the Wicked Witch of the West’s) son, and his quest to find out what happened to Nor, who is probably his half-sister.  It’s a kind of picaresque novel, as Liir encounters various people and groups—the convent where he was most likely born, the two peoples at war in the convent’s environs, Glenda and various bureaucrats within Oz’s government, the inhabitants of an underground prison from which few if any escape, the Army and the peoples of the empire it keeps down, his old Nanny and his mother’s flying monkey companions—who help him to figure out who and what he really is.  And what magic really is, too.  Son of a Witch, though, isn’t as invested in world-building as Wicked was; we’re to take the reality of Oz for granted, perhaps, and see Liir through the lenses it offers, in the humanity he shares with those of us who aren’t from Oz and aren’t Munchkins.  As the kind of thing Wicked is, this book was a little too much Young Adult personal journey for me; and as a Young Adult novel, it was a little too long.

I've liked several of Rebecca Goldstein’s novels over the years.  She’s now primarily a philosophy professor, but she’s been writing fiction for over two decades now.  My favorite among her books is Mazel, which moves back and forth in time over three generations of women, beginning in a small village in Europe and moving from Vilnius to New York to New Jersey.  It’s the one of Goldstein’s books that’s most like an A.S. Byatt novel.  36 Arguments for the Existence of God is one of her better ones, but I didn’t find it as engaging as Mazel.  The characters were fascinating, and I’d like to have seen more of them, but the reader is rushed from one character to the next in order to get on with the plot, and to leave space for plentiful intellectualizing.  Part of the plot seemed strangely to be a reworking of the more sentimental parts of Chaim Potok’s 1967 novel The Chosen, made even more sentimental than they seemed in Potok’s telling.  It’s also, possibly against Goldstein’s intentions, a “women’s novel.”  I’ll probably write more about this in a later post.

The Cookbook Collector is definitely a “women’s novel.”  I haven’t read any of Goodman’s books before, although I’ve given at least one of her earliest books as a present.  This was a very enjoyable multi-threaded novel about two sisters, one a corporate executive and the other a graduate student, and two software companies, one on the East Coast and the other on the West.  The time is the last years of the twentieth century.  The novel is filled with secondary (and tertiary) characters, love interests, ideas, subplots (including, coincidentally, an encounter with Hasidism that’s slightly reminiscent of the one in Goldstein’s novel), and just lots and lots of stuff.  The software industry part is described very closely; I didn’t detect any false notes or condescension, and this is very unusual in a “mainstream” novel about engineers.  It’s a fast-moving novel.  While there are ideas and emotions and all that jazz, things move along.  Compared with something like Wolf Hall, which has twice the pages and a small fraction of the characters, really, the brevity of The Cookbook Collector is actually quite striking.  I think it could have been even better at twice the length, but it would have been a very different kind of novel.  I’ll probably write more about this one later, too.  And I’ll probably read some other books by Allegra Goodman eventually.

The Magician King is a sequel to The Magicians, Lev Grossman’s adult fantasy novel that’s set in a world where the fantasy milieus of C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling are real.  The Magicians was mostly a college novel, or a novel of college and its aftermath, recalling the young literary lions of the 1980s like Donna Tartt and Jay McInerney.  The Magician King follows Quentin, the main character of the earlier book, into his “real life” (King in the fantastic realm of Fillory), interleaving his story with that of his friend from the neighborhood, Julia, whose luck came short of sending her to magicians’ school.  For me, these books are really fascinating.  They’re not as perfectly accomplished as Spufford’s or Goodman’s, but there are things about these books that I really love, images that totally grab me.  There are characters that are terrific (I’m inexplicably fond of Penny).  On the other hand: I don’t like the main character, and I think I’m supposed to.  And—though I’m probably overthinking it—I find it inexplicably annoying that I can’t get a handle on the allegory. 

It’s interesting to compare the books by men on this list with the books by women.  The men’s books are less accomplished, for the most part (this doesn’t include The Leftovers, which from what I’ve read so far is entirely “professional,” or other books I’ve discussed on this blog, such as The Marriage Plot).  They seem narrower, less well written, and less thought through.  In part, this is because the men’s books I’ve chosen are “genre” books, and the women’s books are “mainstream.”  If I’d chosen books by Richard Ford or Anthony Giardina (Norumbega Park, mentioned above), my results would likely have been different.  The Magician King is decidedly a genre book, and it’s an excellent example of one.  There’s little here to annoy either a dedicated fantasy-series reader or a reader of “mainstream” fiction.  But it has only some of the other little things that help to make a really good novel, things that can appeal to the usual readers of novels (stereotypically, women—especially women who read women’s novels—and other people who have a strong dislike for “genre”).  Others of these things are missing.

True, to some extent, what science fiction and fantasy readers (and genre readers generally) find appealing is the lack of those elements, which “mainstream” readers have learned to expect.  The need to find room for ideas, and to find a point of view that’s congenial to ideas, may push them out.  But I don’t think the pattern is entirely limited to novels that can be termed “genre.”  Even many “mainstream” or “literary” novels by men under fifty-five or so—though by no means are they “narrow”—can often share some of the traits that in these novels do seem to create a sense of narrowness, like a small cast of characters or a tight focus on the personal growth of a single character without much social context.  It’s more unusual for a novel published by a woman to fit this description.

And the women writers in this list are writing about ideas, as much as the SF and fantasy writers are.  For the most part, though, I think, when a woman writer writes a novel that deals with ideas, she begins by writing a fairly traditional novel first, and puts the ideas second.  They’re doing it a different way.  It could be argued that they’ve thought more than the men have about how to incorporate nontraditional elements, like ideas, into a work of mainstream fiction.  It could also be argued that the men’s novels have something they’re missing.  More on this too, eventually.

Another Scandal: Excessively Nice Critics (UPDATED)

I learned a lot about writing about other people’s books from Daniel Mendelsohn, especially his early essays in the New York Review of Books.  Here, in a blog at the New Yorker, he takes on the recent “niceness” scandal in literary reviewing.  Mendelsohn provides a useful overview and gives all the relevant links, but he also kind of glibly runs through a series of views that he obviously doesn’t have sympathy with.

Mendelsohn asks what is the function of criticism.  Again, he doesn’t really engage sympathetically with the other, mostly younger critics he whose views he discusses, and with which he disagrees.  One doesn’t have to think of critics as “harmful parasites” (an idea he attributes to his colleague Richard Brody, at the New Yorker) to recognize that their writing has a secondary function, while the works they discuss have the primary one.  Sure, you could come up with a theory whereby critics play the leading role, with artists existing only to give critics something to do, but you would be pretty silly to do it.  I suppose you could think of critics as engaged in exactly the same practice as, say, novelists (composers and choreographers seem to me a harder sell), only doing it in a different way.  But where do you stop?  Are science fiction writers engaging in science?  Is Ben Mezrich (author of Bringing Down the House and The Accidental Billionaires) engaging in applied mathematics research, casino security, and business administration?  Why not say readers are engaging in the same pursuit as novelists and literary critics, every time they read a novel?   (That’s a nicely Talmudic idea, in fact: reading as prayer as work.) There’s a point, it seems to me, when you have to stop doing one thing and start doing the other one, when you have to realize that there’s a limitation that applies to one pursuit that doesn’t apply to the other.  If criticism is the same as art, then a critical essay can do everything a novel does.

Dale Peck is the poster child for the harsh review; Dave Eggers—as much as his wife, Vendela Vida, and their colleague at the aptly named The Believer magazine, Heidi Julavits—is the poster child for “niceness.”  (Mendelsohn describes the Eggers who said he’d never write a bad review as “youthful,” which is true, but misleading, as Eggers was at the time the most important publisher and editor in circles that decidedly were not important only to the young.)  Dale Peck rose to broad notoriety when he published a review of Rick Moody’s memoir/essay, The Black Veil, which he began with the indelible words, “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation.”  In my opinion, however over the top he was, Peck is more right about Moody than Eggers has ever been right about anything.  The Black Veil, which I read largely on the strength of Peck’s own review, was engaging and fascinating—but like so much of what Moody writes, reading it was (as Gloria Steinem said of seeing Marilyn Monroe on the big screen) like being suffocated with a Baked Alaska.

Dale Peck swore off writing negative reviews after the controversy following his piece.  I read Daniel Mendelsohn’s review of Peck’s collection, aptly titled Hatchet Jobs, when it first appeared (Mendelsohn links to it in the post linked above, though it’s paywalled), but I honestly don’t remember it.  I liked the old Dale Peck.  I like—though I often don’t agree with—Edmond Caldwell’s Contra James Wood blog.  I almost never agree with anything printed by a Dave Eggers publication, and almost never enjoy reading them.  That’s not an argument that Peck’s and Caldwell’s styles guarantee good criticism, but it is an argument to rethink any previous automatic agreement with what Eggers says.

Laura Miller, at Salon (linked by Mendelsohn), puts forward some more practical arguments.  Her editors, she says, have statistical proof that nobody wants to read anything that isn’t entirely positive.  But that’s not a moral argument of the kind Dave Eggers made.  It’s not an argument that should apply to someone discussing a novel on BoingBoing, and it’s not an argument that should apply to the amateur blogger discussing fiction for his own amusement, with no intention of becoming a professional literary critic someday.  It's not an argument that should apply to the dedicated literary blogs like The Millions.  It’s not an argument that people should be, as Jacob Silverman put it in the post Miller’s discussing, “nice.”  Then Miller herself says something that sounds not very nice at all: "for God’s sake, take it to the classroom, workshop or specialty publication.”  This is the kind of thing I wish Mendelsohn would have engaged with.

UPDATE: Fixed the spelling of Julavits's name; and here's another link.

Literary Modernism Against the Intellect

In the New York Review of Books’ blog, novelist Tim Parks elaborates what might be called the Standard Model of Literary Modernism: the theme of the distress of an educated person when faced with the possibility that “an excess of intellectual activity” is a cause of wickedness or at least despair, the dilemma of the smart person who envies (to put it crudely) what he sees as the stupidity of the masses, or at least their lack of choice.  Like T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, who wishes he were as sure of his place in the world as a crab at the bottom of the sea.  Like Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway, who seems to admire the suicide of a depressed war veteran and intellectual, lest (as she seems to see it) he bother other people with his pathology and his worries.  Like Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, who (presumably) acquires some of his elder Leopold Bloom’s satisfaction, both sexually and generally, if only by osmosis.

You also find it in Saul Bellow: the Dangling Man faced with the impossibility of sharing a world with his relatives, who despise him because (as he sees it) they're too ignorant to understand what he’s about, yet to whom he continues to cling, in part because he depends on them for financial support.  Yet, in the form Parks describes it, it’s probably more English than American.

Parks is not, it turns out, talking about the intellect.  He’s talking about “mental chatter,” an obsessive focus on negative emotion, on irrational personal reactions to a situation that have nothing to do with what’s really going on.  He notes that Buddhism, like some other disciplines, provides a way to avoid being taken over by negative emotion, by, simply, refusing to acknowledge its importance.  That can seem healthier, but it’s at odds with much modern literature.

Many of the chracters in A.S. Byatt’s novel The Children’s Book are caught in this dilemma, wondering what it will mean for them to choose the intellectual or creative life, or what it has meant for themselves and their families that they made this choice decades before.  One of them is a medical student who sees herself faced by the choice whether to spend years of her youth studying to become a medical doctor, when she could help people just as easily, right away, without this training. 

“Did she want to know all that? . . .  She looked down at her moving fingers in her lap, and thought, after all, how interesting flesh and bone is, how interesting the growth of a child from a seed is—is knowing better than doing?”

She sees the conflict as one between theory and practice, knowledge and action.  For each character, the choice of the former, whether the subject matter studied is science or philology, whether the method of study is scholarship or artistic creation, requires a certain amount of sacrifice.  It is difficult; it requires lots of hard work.  It also involves neglecting possible calls to immediate action—neglecting, at many moments throughout one’s life, the emotional life and one’s responsibilities to other people.  The medical student will not be helping the poor or bandaging the wounds of soldiers on the front.  She will very likely miss the opportunity to get married.

On the other hand, whether or not Byatt’s medical student rejects “the life of the mind” for the life of helping others more directly, she won’t be called upon to use her mind to make decisions about her life.  In the one case, she’ll take her set courses (Byatt describes the course of study involved in detail), pass her exams in the manner required by the examiners, and take a job in one of the few hospitals that’s already decided to hire women.  In the other case, she'll volunteer for a group that already exists and is requesting the help of young women like her.  So, in either case, if she continues mentally “chattering,” the subjects of her silent discussions with herself are of no practical importance, and of no importance at all except to her.  She can consider them in the way Parks’ teacher did, as glorious examples of the human spirit, or in the way the Buddhist does, as unhealthy distractions, in both cases with no real impact on the more mundane aspects of her well-being.

In the same way (and unlike Joseph, the dangling man of Bellow's debut novel, who has no job and whom nobody can hire, because he's been called up for the wartime army and is waiting to learn when he's to begin his training), Ulysses's Stephen and Bloom, however unsure they are of their own minds, know exactly where they stand in the world of jobs and of paychecks.  (Stephen’s job as a teacher may be “unsatisfactory,” but it is steady work and a job he could keep for the rest of his life if he wished that—and that is exactly why it bothers him.)  If Ulysses is “a celebration of the inexhaustible fertility of their minds as they move through the commercial flotsam and jetsam of Dublin against the vast backdrop of world literature and myth,” as Parks describes it, their minds don’t enable them to affect or to change that social world through which they move. 

“What wonderful minds we have,” Parks goes on, “even though they don’t seem to get us anywhere, or make us happy.”  Well, probably the ability to reflect on the history of civilization won’t help one get on with other twenty-somethings, female or male, or teach a son how he should take care of his mother.  But this is something quite different from the claim that the intellect is of no practical use.  Imagine characters whose positions in society are less certain than Joyce’s are: they would surely feel entirely otherwise, and in their case, rejecting intellect might have serious, negative consequences for them.

Parks is certainly right in his analysis of modernist literature.  He goes on, though, from the individual preoccupations of Joyce, Woolf, and Eliot, to a sweeping judgment against intellect, one that covers everyone, not just the Prufrocks and the Dosteyevskyan Underground Men of the world.  He presents the choice as one between an unsituated, unstoppable chewing-over of one’s own thoughts (whether or not exacerbated by the unbridgeable distance between those thoughts and the situatedness of real life), and a smoothly wordless serenity.  He’s right that most readers would find only one of those choices makes for very appealing art.  But I think intellect is a poor word for what divides them.  Luck might be a better one.

The Big P: Elihu Rubin on the creation of Boston’s Prudential Center

This story, which discussed topics like the rebuilding of the city in the 1970s and the gentrification of several of its neighborhoods, was interesting overall.   But what got my attention was the fact that the building of the Pru, with its surrounding plazas and buildings, was tied to work on the Mass. Turnpike, which runs directly beneath it.  This reminded me—probably for no very good reason—of the university in Neal Stephenson’s first novel, The Big U.  The setting is based largely on Boston University, located a short distance from the Prudential Center, which Stephenson was attending when he wrote it.  (Some details of the school seem, however, to be more like a big state college, say the one in Ames, Iowa, where Stephenson’s father taught while he was growing up—and I’m not sure why the novel describes BU's surrounding neighborhood as “a slum.”)  One of the things I liked about The Big U was the way Stephenson reimagined the BU campus.  He took three or four separate parts of the campus: the science and engineering complex and the Nickolodeon movie theater that sat at its base; the Warren Towers complex, a huge freshman dormitory, and the retail stores and takeout places that sat at its base; “Football Field Towers,” a second huge dorm that sat right at the edge of the athletic fields; and the underground infrastructure that lay at the base of all of it; and he mashed them all up together into a single mega-multi-juxtaposition, so that the entire campus was one big complex, or “Plex.”[1]  The bottom layers were the infrastructure; the next-bottommost were science and engineering; then administration; then the towers of the dorms; and just outside the sheer battlements was the freeway.  He captured the sense of isolation and complexity of a big urban campus and of the university itself, with the logistics of bringing in supplies in the morning, and shuttling out waste at night, mirroring the intake of students, and outflow of graduates (or of dropouts).  It would be interesting if the sense of BU’s architecture that Stephenson based this on applied, as well, to the Pru.

[1] Not to be confused with Columbia’s “The Plex,” the oddly lame place that replaced The Pub in the Lion’s Den under John Jay Hall when New York’s drinking age was raised to twenty-one.  In the Pub you could wear jeans and hang out in the dark.  In the Plex, if you were over twenty-one, you could listen to cool music (I guess) and eat pizza in a brightly-lit space, separated by a big glass window from the disco where the youngsters, wearing dresses and suits, could dance to a selection of Latin music.

Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant; Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants

Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot is not the topic of this blog post.  My having finished the reading for the project I mentioned a little while back is.  I did start The Marriage Plot during a break in my reading when I couldn’t get the book I needed next from the library, and I wanted something new to read during an afternoon sick in bed.  I’m about halfway through it, but I put it down to finish the “project.”

I had picked up the first novel for the “project” in the library on a whim.  I thought it would be interesting to write about, but first I wanted to see what else the author wrote.  It turned out that while the first book was interesting (and brief), and the second was long and in a genre that was really not my kind of thing but a good read, the third was simply long.  The more I read it (and it took me a long time, since I could only read at most a chapter or two a day, which can’t have helped), the more I felt that (to paraphrase Wayne Booth) the implied author of this novel was someone I really did not want to spend time with. 

So when I finished, finally, the thought that passed through my head was, “I’m glad that’s over.”  That reminded me of the lines from T.S. Eliot (in the third section of “The Waste Land,” which he gave the title, “The Fire Sermon"):

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
"Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over."

The title of the post is from the same poem, and does almost seem appropriate (surely goatees are over by now).  And while Jeffrey Eugenides and his narrators are probably as far from being the young man carbuncular as can be imagined, I don’t think the idea of the author of a book as a person who is in the room with a reader, for as long as the book’s being read, is a bad one.  The idea of an author being a seducer, much less a rapist, maybe not, though.

Again looking for something light to read, I picked up a fairly recent collection of stories by Ursula Le Guin, Changing Planes, in the children’s section.  I like this passage, from the introductory story:

On the airplane, everyone is locked into a seat with a belt and can move only during very short periods when they are allowed to stand in line waiting to empty their bladders until, just before they reach the toilet cubicle, a nagging loudspeaker harries them back to belted immobility.  In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape routes from hell.  These rushing people are watched by people who sit in plastic seats bolted to the floor and who might just as well be bolted to the seats.

The passage is a good example of how Le Guin combines fiction that’s very interested in ideas with very precise, nearly pictorial descriptions.  She can sometimes be a little too abstract for my taste when she is narrating ordinary stories, but so far the pieces in this book are brief explorations of related ideas, for which her ability to describe people and places with pinpoint accuracy is very well suited.