Please see the following notice from Micol Ostow, whom I met a billion years ago in Hamilton Cain's creative writing class. Sadly, I am going to be at the NY Philharmonic that night, exploiting my new membership for the first time.

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I thought I would take the opportunity to remind you of the upcoming reading I have scheduled at KGB Bar. The details:

Friday, 10/20
KGB (4th btw 2nd and 3rd Ave)
7pm

I will be reading from EMILY GOLDBERG LEARNS TO SALSA, and the lovely Judy Goldschmidt will be reading from one of the three installations of the RAISIN RODRIGUEZ series (if you want to know which one, you will have to ask her). Please join us. And feel free to forward along to any literary-minded friends and/or boozehounds.

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Micol says there will be some giveaways!

INDEX OF ALL REVIEWS

This summer I read some early novels by writers I liked. A lot of first novels aren't very good; this may be what happens when very intelligent people don't quite know how to produce fiction, and they try to think their ways into their stories by setting aside sentiment, and blandness, and easy assumptions, without knowing how to produce anything stronger or better. These three writers all produced unattractive characters who behave badly, in a mild way, especially toward ugly or stupid characters, and then fail to be redeemed, or else are redeemed in flat, ironic ways. All of which can be said about my own first novel, which, I'm happy to say, is now only a few chapters away from being finished (i.e., the bulk of the writing will be done, and all I'll need to do will be a final read-through and revision), thanks to a major writing jag this week. However.

Anyway, you all know how much I love A.S. Byatt. But before she was A.S. Byatt The Very Smart and Amusing Novelist of Ideas, she was A.S. Byatt Who Was Very Young. So, in 1967, she produced her second novel, The Game, in which she didn't, quite, have game, yet. The novel is clever, and full of unexpected depths, and well written, and strangely flat, unmoving, and unsatisfying. I tried to get into this novel two times before and wound up putting it down, this time I finished it, and my only real satisfaction was to reach the point at which there was only one Byatt fiction (Shadow of the Sun, her first novel) that I hadn't yet read. (After publishing The Game Byatt published two books of criticism, and then eleven years later, published her third novel, the gorgeous The Virgin in the Garden. The growth between the two novels is really astonishing.) Anyway, back to this one. In case you're interested, it's about two sisters who have, since childhood, been competing in an imaginative game that spills over into the adult lives, encloses them in its power struggles, and effectively spoils them for dealing with "real life," whatever that is. It's a little too conceptual to be interesting, though there are some vivid scenes of social embarrassment (of which Byatt has always been a merciless observer). The younger sister, a novelist, is also at her best when writing scenes of profound social embarrassment involving her sister. That kind of parallelism is mildly clever. Don't read this unless you too are a Byatt completist.

I also love M.F.K. Fisher. In 1947 she produced the very odd novel Not Now but Now, of which I was dubious, but excited by the jacket flap's mention of the lovely meal descriptions to be found within. Well, there weren't enough meals. What there is is the story of Jennie, a beautiful, selfish, absolutist kind of woman with tiny feet, who appears in three or four different places and eras and behaves selfishly and absolutely in all of them. It's got a kind of Jean Rhys-ian appreciation of the soulless despair of the very beautiful woman. Yet the whole time, you get the feeling that M.F. was sitting in her study, scribbling away, and thinking to herself, "What rubbish." Even in the afterward, which I believe she wrote in the '70s when the book was reprinted by North End Press, and which I could verify if I hadn't traded in my copy at Seventh Avenue Books, she remarks that she'd only written the novel because her third husband bullied her into it, and, as for the novel's quality, whatever. The novel is an expression of the kind of personality that, in her nonfiction works, M.F. says was frequently ascribed to her by men she had known. So there it is. Don't read it; it is silly and rather embarrassing.

Peter Carey's first novel Bliss (1981) is much better than either of the previous two novels. While it may actually be a good novel, I didn't particularly like it. In it some normal, bourgeois people--an ad exec, his partner, his wife--get their lives reassessed when the ad exec, Harry Joy, comes back from the dead and realizes he's in actually in hell. The novel's got that seamy-underside-of-suburban-life feel, but what saves the novel from being just banal is that Carey really enjoys depicting character and plot absurdities and major and minor depravities. You can get a real thrill out of the evil and the ugliness and, occasionally, the grossness. The worst bits happen when Harry Joy meets a vegetarian whore named Honey Barbara (ugh), a Beatrice figure who *spoiler* yack redeems him. I don't mind the redemption so much as the ooginess--everything oogie you can imagine about a character named "Honey Barbara" is in there, including the oogie eroticism. The only good thing about it is that she cooks, and I was interested in the cooking descriptions (which disappointed me in the Fisher novel). While on the whole I didn't really like Bliss, Carey delivered on the vigorous writing, the sufficiently complex plot, and the refusal to deliver neat moral homilies. And those are all things that only got better in some of his later novels.

So much time has passed that I don't know how I should be reviving this blog. I have a little difficulty recalling the books I've read, especially the ones I didn't care all that much for to begin with. So I guess I'll just take them on bird by bird....

Ever since Torie introduced him to me, I've been working my way through Jim Crace's novels, and this past spring I read the best one yet, Quarantine (1999). I was a little leery of it at first, because all the descriptions I'd read talked about its being about Jesus's forty days in the wilderness. In fact, the novel is not really about Jesus's forty days in the wilderness; those other reviews suffer from the inability to conceive of a novel featuring Jesus as a character as being about anything besides him. The novel begins with an informally assembled community of people trapped in or voluntarily quarantining themselves in the wilderness, including a mean, boastful, deceitful merchant on his deathbed, his long-suffering soon-to-be-widow, an infertile woman praying to conceive, some other people I don't remember, and a preening, aimless youth who happens to be from Galilee. We see what happens to the community as a whole when faced with the rigors of forty days' fasting, especially when the merchant suddenly wakes up from his death throes and takes over the camp. Among other things, the Galilean dies. The writing is smooth, spare, and rhythmic. You can tell that something interesting is happening, but you don't quite know what it is. And then, once you realize what Crace is doing, it becomes extremely exciting indeed, and you race to the finish to see how he'll pull it off.

SPOILER: I once had a conversation in which two conflicting models of Christianity emerged: one, that Jesus Christ is a historically verifiable person who performed at least some version of the events in the Gospels, and that the existence of such a person was necessary to the formation of religious belief in his divinity; the other (my belief), that there is no evidence of the existence of such a person, so proof/evidence/historical documentation can be entirely irrelevant to the formation of stories about his acts or religious belief in his divinity. What one gradually realizes is that Crace is using the form of the novel to demonstrate how the second model could come about: that a cult might form around the figure of a person who never did anything interesting at all, who in fact died before he could even complete a vision quest. Crace suggests that all it takes to start a new religion is a noisy, lying, boastful man--a storyteller--and somebody to believe the story.

I don't know how a Christian would read this novel. I found it delightful and smart and very, very satisfying. Especially after The Da Vinci Code. One of the things that I dislike about the Da Vinci Code revival is its insistence on there being a true, repressed history of Christ as feminist, radical, liberatory, and so forth, because this so-called alternative reading still maintains the centrality of Christ and Christianity. I don't believe in a radicalized good-guy Jesus because I don't believe in Jesus. It was very exciting to me to read a book that appears, at first, to be about Jesus, but radically decenters both Christianity and the documentary religious view that seeks to provide proof for its beliefs. It also strengthened my approval of Crace, which was shaken by the intermittent afterlife stuff in Being Dead.

INDEX

I enjoyed Cold Mountain, notwithstanding its several factual errors about domestic culture (e.g., errors about preserves, and how to make potato salad, and women's dress). And then when I got to the part where Ada imparts the whole "thrilling plot" of Little Dorrit to Ruby, I thought, not very reasonably: come on, a book called Little Dorrit can't be that exciting.

But it was!

Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit, serialized from 1855-57, is now my favorite of his books apart from Great Expectations. In its day it was relatively unpopular and unsuccessful because it was deemed too depressing (which, if you consider much of the rest of Dickens' oeuvre, must have been very depressing indeed). That reputation has dogged the novel, which hasn't enjoyed the popular revival of Oliver Twist or A Tale of Two Cities, is too long for most English classes, and is plagued by a dreadful soppy title. But what a novel! Once you get past the fabulously boring first few pages describing the hot, dusty, dissolute and largely irrelevant seaport of Marseilles, a location barely revisited in and serving no purpose to the rest of the novel (I think his editor must have said, "Give me a story that isn't set in a London slum, Chuck") you get a savagely satiric, intricately constructed story about how bad families can be--and indeed these families are so very bad that even after the 700th page you (that is, I, and Ada) still don't want the novel to end. The angry bits, where Dickens excoriates the cruel, selfish, and hypocritical, are among the best of his angry bits: see how Little Dorrit's awful, snobbish father rebukes her for all her loving care! See how weak and useless gentlemen prey on their plucky offspring! See how sweet but spoiled girls marry rotten selfish men--and *SPOILER* never get rescued! The tender bits are unfortunately a bit too sentimental, but not as sentimental as some of his worst stuff (Bleak House), and Amy Dorrit (called "Little" because she's been starved and deprived into, uh, midgethood--I don't know if Dickens meant to make this funny or not, but it kind of is) makes a wonderful heroine: smart, practical, good to the core, but not stupid about it. The funny bits are howlers: I sat on the couch laughing and sobbing and forcing Karl to listen as I read the funny bits aloud--though they didn't seem so funny out of context, without the benefit of knowing who each of the 36 characters referenced in each joke were. The Marshalsea debtors' prison in which much of the action is set is a wonderful location whose atmosphere, inhabitants, culture, and language Dickens employs to marvelous effect.

I highly recommend this book to everybody, including Dickens newbies. It restored my faith in Dickens that had been somewhat shattered by Oliver Twist and Bleak House: I was beginning to think that I'd read all the books of his that were worth reading. I am very glad to say that I was wrong, and that I feel energized to tackle Our Mutual Friend and a whole bunch of others now.

FYI: The film version of Cold Mountain was awful, but just in a boring way, not a ferocious enjoyable way. Speaking of which, did anybody else see the Zeffirelli version of Jane Eyre with the oddly miscast William Hurt as Rochester? And the oddly invented scenes in which Jane returns to Gateshead at the end of the novel to find that St. John Rivers is the doctor (?) attending her Aunt Reed? St. John was played by Sam West, who had last been seen as the ill-fated Leonard Bast in Howards End. I have this Leonard Bast moment every morning when I walk past my bookshelves: they've been wobbling lately. I should keep up with the blogging, so that if I should be crushed under a bookshelf, at least people will notice I'm missing.

INDEX

How could I have abandoned this blog on such a depressing note as the Norton Book of Women's Lives? Well, I've got a lot on my mind. And I get intimidated by my growing list of neglected titles. This means that it's time for another set of mini reviews. Not very good ones, either, but I've got to keep my hand in.

1. Hotel Bemelmans, by Ludwig Bemelmans (1946). Karl loves this collection of Bemelmans' writing about working in hotels. The writing is swift and funny, but I had the same reaction as I had to A.J. Liebling and Calvin Trilling: I'm just not all that interested in restaurants, and particularly not in the kind of people who enjoy going to restaurants, so many of the stories about hotel patrons were wasted on me. I did enjoy reading about the kitchen work, and the banquet work, and...uh, I guess the key word here is "work"; that's what I like. You, however, may feel differently, so I would recommend that people flip through and look for the kinds of stories that amuse them, because Bemelmans provides a variety of them.

2. Dancing Girls, by Margaret Atwood (1979), is not one of her better collections. A few of the stories, notably the much anthologized "Rape Fantasies" and the title story, are very good, very funny and insightful. But now that a few months have passed, I find that I can't really remember any of the other stories. Bluebeard's Egg is a much stronger collection.

3. The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of The Marquis de Sade, by Peter Weiss (1963, trans. Geoffrey Skelton 1964). Several years ago I sat through half of the dull (notwithstanding the actors' magnetism) film version, which left me in a bad state for reading the play. But if you're in the right mood, you can finish it in an hour and enjoy it very much indeed. I found myself for the very first time ever interested in Sade. But I don't think I'll read him, because I suspect that the satisfactions of reading the fictionalized Sade in the play will outweigh any pleasure I might get from his books. Something that vexed me greatly was the appearance at the end of different English translations of a song which had nothing in common with each other. How, then, am I supposed to trust that the English translation I read was at all faithful to the German? Maybe it doesn't matter, woo!

4. Fierce Attachments, by Vivian Gornick (1987). I loved the excerpt that appeared in the Norton book so much that I ran out to Bobst to get the full memoir. Disappointment! As seems to happen in so many books about rebelling against one's parents and striking out on her own, Gornick comes off as self-pitying, vacant, and convinced that she invented the orgasm. Her rebellion is boring, because it is commonplace. What makes the Gornick's coming of age particularly bad reading is that it suffers in comparison with the depiction of her mother. Her mother was also a self-pitying, vacant, self-regarding person--but she knew how to elevate the possession of a bad personality to an art form, and Gornick exploits all these characteristics to great effect. Those parts of the book are wonderful, intelligent, scathing, and oddly compassionate stuff, and it's too bad that she couldn't be as insightful and strong (not to mention selective) when describing herself.

5. Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya (1972). I started reading books by writers whose last names ended in Aa-As, so that I could solve the Margaret Atwood problem on my bookshelves by breaking up my collection of her books across two different shelves. So I picked out this famous coming-of-age story of a Chicano boy in the 1940s, whose family invites an aging curandera (healer) to live with them. But I'm sorry to say that I won't be buying a copy. It is not a terrible book. But it is simplistic and lacks cohesion. It feels like a first novel. And I don't have time for first novels unless they're pretty damn good.

6. Night Train, by Martin Amis (1999). Yet another in the Aa-As reading series. What I don't understand is how someone who wrote a novel as good as Time's Arrow wrote a novel as bad as this one. I thought I'd be riveted: the story of a hard-boiled female detective who investigates the suicide?/murder? of a young woman who had it all, and discovers.... Well, I'm not going to tell you, even though I don't think it's worth your time to read it, because the discovery is interesting, even if the rest of the book lacks a certain something--depth of character? Convincing dialogue? Interest? I do have some standards, even if Amis doesn't.

7. Cast in Doubt, by Lynne Tillman (1993). Hard on the heels of Night Train (and totally disillusioned by my bookshelf project), I read this literary mystery about an expatriate gay writer's investigation of the disappearance of the party girl next door. This was my first Tillman since the hilarious, lovely No Lease on Life, and I was sorry to be disappointed. Again. I had a feeling similar to the Gornick feeling: I simply could not interest myself in the party girl--I don't find that kind of person attractive in real life or in literature, and, despite Tillman's immense literary talent, she failed to show me why I should be interested in this one too. This novel isn't really about the investigation; it's about the discovery of the self, and mimesis, and all that smarty kind of stuff. But.... I couldn't warm to the smarty stuff, all the allusions and literary references, because I was too familiar with them. To my way of thinking, a smarty book whose characters are discussing books I've already read can't be that smart, because *I'm* not that smart. The literati in a novel should be reading things that I haven't read, but ought to read. Is that unfair? Maybe. Probably. But there it is.

8. Oracle Night, by Paul Auster (2003). At that point I hadn't yet given up on the detective genre, but I almost did. This is an entertaining book and, though I didn't mention it in reviews #6 and 7, just as readable as the Amis and Tillman. But that was about it. Yadda yadda yadda detectives and Brooklyn and stuff. The genre had nearly done me in, but then I read a GOOD one, to be reviewed at a later date.

9. The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair (1906). This is a socialist novel, still relevant today, about the dreadful lives suffered by the immigrant working poor. Sinclair was deeply bothered by the fact that when his book started to attract public attention, the only reforms made were about food hygiene for the consumers, while nothing was done to improve working conditions for the laborers. It is an important book, and even a well written book, and I wish that I had read it in high school or college, because its conclusions would have been very educational to me at the time. The book is marred by racism and by some really bad, and wholly unnecessary, utopian prosing at the end. (Besides which, the predictions Sinclair made about how corporate agriculture would benefit American farmers proved totally wrong over the course of the 20th century.) But, you should still read it, if you haven't already.

10. The Road to Wellville, by T. Coraghessan Boyle (1994). Boyle did it again. A supremely entertaining novel about quackery, set at Kellogg's sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, at the turn of the century (incidentally, the Sinclairs appear sporadically as guests at the sanitarium). Boyle always treads a fine line for me in attacking both the things that I like to laugh at (self-improvement, interest in health, people who go to the doctor) and the things that I passionately defend (vegetarianism, activism). I spent most of the novel laughing (Boyle is just about one of the funniest writers I know), but angry, too. Yet, as always happens, *SPOILER* I got my validation at the end, and felt that he and I were on the same side. Is this a jejune way to read? To require validation? Yes. But it's one of the reasons I enjoy Boyle so much. Now, this novel is not so finely crafted as the collection of his stories I liked, so it wasn't quite a keeper, but I am glad I read it.

Next time, I'll review some books I really liked.

INDEX

I don't know where I found my copy of the Norton Book of Women's Lives (ed. Phyllis Rose, 1995). I think I may have picked it up for a quarter at a library. But after reading bits and pieces of it over the years (it turned me on to M.F.K. Fisher several years ago), I finally sat down and read the whole thing. It is 817 pages of selections from 20th century women's memoirs and diaries. Although I thought there were too many pieces by Russian writers, and many of the selections for writers I like were insufficiently representative of their work, and, for that matter, I would have liked to learn some important details from the introductions to each selection such as that Le Ly Hayslip and Billie Holiday didn't actually write their stories, for different reasons--still, I did find the anthology valuable as a guide for further reading. Here are my notes:

Those whom I don't want to read more of after reading their excerpts, but am willing to entertain encouragement about from other readers:

• Nina Berberova
• Vera Brittain
• Eleanor Coppola
• Natalia Ginzburg
• Billie Holiday
• Tetsuko Kuroyanagi
• Audre Lorde (up until now I've loved Audre. But while rereading Zami, I was appalled by parts of it. It is an important book, but sometimes it is also a bad book. This is very upsetting to me)
• Kate Millett (poor Kate)
• Eleanor Munro
• Anais Nin (honestly, who ever told the world that Anais Nin had anything important to say? Can somebody explain this to me?)
• Vita Sackville West
• Marie Vassiltchikov

Those I already knew were great:

• Maya Angelou
• Joan Didion (though the excerpt here wasn't particularly important)
• Isak Dinisen
• Zora Neale Hurston (I now want to read Mules and Men)
• Helen Keller (anybody else read The Story of My Life? It is an intensely weird book--among other things, Keller describes the colors of landscapes she travels through. Keller, as you probably know, was blind. So how did she know from color? Because Annie Sullivan--who was partially sighted--told her. The book asks subtly how you can know anything is true, whether you think you've learned it yourself or you've had it signed into your hand)
• Maxine Hong Kingston
• Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
• Gertrude Stein (did you know that Karl and I almost didn't go on our first date because of dear Gertrude?)
• Virginia Woolf

Those whom I want to read more of (if any of you have, please give me your input):

• Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life (I once saw a wonderful bit of footage in which Simone was talking about Jean-Paul: "Sartre thinks all the time. Now, I think a lot, but I don't think all the time, I'm capable of doing other things too--but Sartre, he just thinks." Jean-Paul sat there with his Rodney Dangerfield face, blinking as she talked.)
• Nien Cheng, Life and Death in Shanghai (if ever you think you're having a bad day, try this out)
• Colette, My Apprenticeships (everything else I read by her was just kind of fizzy and disgusting. But this stuff was good.)
• Jill Ker Conway, The Road From Coorain
• Annie Dillard, An American Childhood (I hated Pilgrim at Tinker Creek so much that I tried to throw myself under the LIRR, but this stuff was really enjoyable. Hmm.)
• Marguerite Duras, The War (all of us have a friend who can't manage her emotions and just kind of pukes her feelings out on the rest of us. Marguerite, though, takes the cake--but beautifully, beautifully)
• Eugenia Semyonova Ginzburg
• Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments (currently borrowed from Bobst and waiting to be read)
• Emily Hahn, Times and Places (I didn't think I could find a dope fiend so interesting.)
• Le Ly Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (did anybody see Oliver Stone's "Heaven & Earth"? I haven't, but it's based on this book. Le Ly told about being a child Viet Cong. It's amazing stuff.)
• Lillian Hellman, Pentimento (any Lillian fans here?)
• Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters (a refreshing Beat, for once)
• Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea
• Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
• Margaret Mead, Blackberry Winter
• Jessica Mitford, Hons. and Rebels (the excerpt was so addictive that I rushed out to read it. To be reviewed soon. A gloriously fun book!)
• Nisa, The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman (I'm not sure I actually want to read this--it's grueling--but would like to hear if anybody else did)
• Cynthia Ozick, Art & Ardor (I'd stopped reading this, but now I'm wild to get back to it)
• Sylvia Plath, Diary (I was thankfully over the Sylvia thing. Then I read these excerpts about being a terrible teacher, and not getting any writing done, and wanting to DIE DIE DIE because you know you suck so horribly at anything involving the written word.... Did any of you know that the Mr. Fisher who was Sylvia's most important mentor at Smith, over whose margin comments she agonized, was the same Al Fisher whom M.F.K. divorced because he didn't like sex? Everything comes back, in the end, to The Gastronomical Me.)
• Sara Suleri, Meatless Days
• Sophia Tolstoy, Diary (can somebody please tell me more about Sophia? I am now terribly fascinated.)

Well, that's it for the Norton Book of Women's Lives, except for a few selections that didn't make any impressions on me either way.

Recently I read two 19th century English novels that meld the genres of domestic drama and mystery rather nicely. Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868) was a delightful surprise. If you read the back cover, you will be told that it is a mystery about a cursed diamond (those of us who've spent too much time perusing New Age jewelry on ebay--anybody here own an Evenstar pendant?--will be confused at first) that is inherited by a beautiful headstrong girl, stolen under mysterious circumstances, and stalked by three predictably exotic/scary Asians, causing a lot of family problems and death and chest-beating. However, if you actually read it, you'll see that the book's true merit is as a collection of narratives by very amusing Victorian characters who are mostly incidental to the plot: the coddled family butler (the strongest section); a religious zealot spinster cousin (the section in which she sneaks around the house planting missionary pamphlets near the tub and in the sewing boxes is hilarious); a city detective who's more interested in roses than in the case; and a poor country doctor who is universally hated for no better reason than that he's got mysterious two-toned hair. SPOILER: If you want to read a satisfying mystery plot, don't pick this up. Although Collins does a nice job of wrapping up a lot of details that look like they'll be loose ends, and I was absolutely hooked for the three days it took me to finish it, the solution to the case was plain silly. At first I was angry. Then I forgot about the plot and just concentrated on my enjoyment of the characters, who will remind you of Dickens's. If you like Dickens, or are interested in Victorian fiction, or just want a fun, funny light read, then I definitely recommend it. If you're a mystery buff, probably not.

Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (revised 1803, published posthumously in 1818) has an overstated reputation as 1. a gothic novel, or 2. a spoof of gothic novels. The heroine, Catherine Morland, who is inauspiciously unpretty, unsmart, and unromantic, loves a good Radcliffe novel, and, when she is invited to stay at an abbey, becomes convinced that her host has locked up his wife in a wing of the house. Northanger Abbey is an early Austen novel, and at first, she dwells too heavily on the parody. She was more interested in stating what her novel was not (not romantic, not melancholy), and contrasting her characters' behavior with that in gothic novels, than in actually developing plot or characters of her own. Once past the first hundred pages, though, the novel picks up and shows all the things that Austen is justly famous for: savage characterization of the stupid, selfish and cruel; a dim view of the human capacity for goodness; a delight in embarrassing her heroines; and really terrible, shattering realizations about one's own bad behavior. I recommend this one only to Austen completists. A side note that doesn't really belong in this paragraph: I believe that the scene in Foucault's Pendulum where Lia explains the conspiracy as a laundry list might be a tribute to a scene in Northanger, in which Catherine finds a mysterious frightening document that turns out to be indeed a laundry list.

Now that I have finally read all six of Austen's major novels (Lady Susan's hanging out in my to-read pile), I can state that everything I said about Mansfield Park in my 11/10/04 review was correct, and I can now rank them: Emma (best), P&P (most beloved), Mansfield Park, S&S, Persuasion, Northanger.

I read George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) back in college London semester, and I hated it. It is a largely autobiographical novel that reads like a memoir. I was deeply irritated by the protagonist's slumming, by his presumption of equality with and understanding of people who truly had nothing, and by his blithe, unthinking anti-Semitism and sexism. Those things still deeply irritate me; however, on this rereading I also found myself enjoying many aspects of the book. The book consists of two parts describing our hero's experiences going broke and working restaurant jobs in Paris, and staying broke and becoming a tramp in London. I like a book about real things--jobs and meals and lodgings and survival strategies--and not just the characters' feelings about...whatever. Orwell's prose style is crisp and funny. But more to the point, knowing in advance what I would dislike about the book gave me time to concentrate on what I did like, such as his indictment of charitable organizations that fail to show compassion and that humiliate the recipients of their charity, and his championing of the people he meets as individuals, not in that false chummy "we're all human beings regardless of how much money we have" way, but acknowledging that people express individuality in how they respond to poverty and danger as well. And I was glad Orwell wrote the book at all, because books like this need to be written and read.

Ironweed, a novel by William J. Kennedy (1984, winner of the Pulitzer Prize), is about Francis Phelan, an ex-ball player who's accidentally killed a scab, accidentally dropped and killed his own baby, and been on the lam ever since, feeling guilty and tramping. The novel takes place over the course of a couple days in 1938 when Francis returns to Albany and meets up with his friend Helen, another tramp. I thought I would enjoy it, but didn't, and am having a difficult time figuring out why, exactly, especially given what I just said about books "like this" needing to be written and read. I think perhaps that it is because regardless of my interest in what the characters do (like dropping babies and staying at the Salvation Army shelter and being attacked by the American Legion), I have little patience for any book about anybody that goes on and on in flowery language about the quality of the characters' souls. There's a whole lot of transcendence going on here, and I've got no use for transcendence. Hm.

Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris (A.J. Liebling, 1986) is a collection of essays, mostly published by The New Yorker in the '50s and '60s, reminiscing about Liebling's first year in Paris in the '20s, mostly what he ate when he ran out of his allowance. It is an okay book. But it failed to grab my attention for the same reasons as Calvin Trillin's The Tummy Trilogy (reviewed 8/2/05): every day I become a little less interested in dining at restaurants, and a lot less interested in hearing or reading about it. When I read food writers nowadays, I want them to know how to cook.

I'll finish up this set of reviews with Jean Rhys's After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1930), which I also hated during London semester. Now, I know that I hated it because it's very difficult for an ambitious 20-year-old to sympathize with a novel about a pretty woman who's fading faster than she can find another man to make her his mistress. Now that I'm 31 and like to think I've matured sufficiently as a reader to get past the need to sympathize with characters in order to appreciate them, I found this book dazzling and chilling and impossible to put down. The novel takes place over a couple days, as Julia Martin is abandoned by one lover in Paris and travels to London to try to pick up another. Julia asks why someone who wants more out of life than to work for too little money, live in a drab depressing town, and never have love, art, conversation, travel, or any of the beautiful things that many of us take for granted when we get jobs and "independence," should have to go without those things simply because she is born without them, marries and is widowed without attaining them, and cannot work to earn them. Rhys perfectly described the desperation of a person who sees that the only asset that can bring her happiness--her beauty--is being marred with every frown and every missed meal as she runs out of money. Yikes!

INDEX

A non-literary moment:
If you have been feeling weary and worn and lacking in fizzy champagne feelings, then you should drop everything and ink into your calendars an appointment to see Mozart's Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), designed by Julie Taymor, at the Metropolitan Opera. That is, an appointment next winter, because, unfortunately for you poor suckers, the run closed shortly after Mozart's birthday this season. Start saving your latte dollars now to spring for tickets as close to the stage as you can get, because if you buy a nosebleeder, you'll regret not having been closer. It is one of the very few 3-hour experiences for which I would be willing to spend over $500 for two orchestra seats, but I chose the cheapskate route and am now regretting it. Yes, I could have booked a vacation in Paris for the same price, or paid the rent. But it would have been worth every penny.

The Magic Flute doesn't bear plot analysis. In fact, the longer synopsis you read, the less you will understand, but the gorgeous visual spectacle supplies the deficiency of plot and then some. The story follows dream logic, the way dream logic goes on a really good night ("and then I was naked but not naked and in high school but not really high school and a whale flew out of a grapefruit..."--except that it's a birdcatcher who's naked, and a Masonic temple, and headless ostriches and charming bearded children and violent bald ladies and polar bears flying out of glass boxes). I'm sure it's the only opera with a song called "Hm! Hm! Hm! Hm!" and that begins with a man being chased by a dragon. And so there's the music.... I don't think I've seen or heard anything as beautiful on the stage as the first shimmering starlit winged appearance of the Queen of the Night singing "O Zittre Nicht" (Erika Miklósa, whose voice was achingly gorgeous and sweet. We haven't heard any recordings that can match her. Miklósa goes around playing Queen of the Night at different opera houses). Or charming as Papageno's delight in finally meeting his own Papagena. Or eerie as the Queen of the Night's famous rippling aria that hits a high F, whose lyrics consist pretty much of the words, "You must kill Sorastro, or be disowned! Ahahah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ahh!" over and over again. It is ravishing and funny and makes absolutely no sense at all.

Well, books, then.
I read Joyce Carol Oates' We Were the Mulvaneys (1996), because the BBC4 book club guy interviewed her, and I found out the novel takes place partly on a farm, and I hoped there would be some chicken lore. This is perhaps not the best reason to read a novel, especially when the farm in question is not a chicken farm. Ah well. The novel is about the dissolution of a family when it decides to sacrifice one of its members to preserve the rest. In this case, the sacrificed one is the only daughter, of whose rape at the prom the others are so ashamed that they banish her from the family. Oates' great imagination, ambition, and willingness to demand sympathy for hateful characters should have equipped her to handle a story like this. However, she hobbled herself by allowing all the members of the family to narrate. When four of the family members are inchoate, incoherent children, and one is an inchoate incoherent adult, and the last one likes to avoid things, you can't get very far into exploring ideas. The book doesn't even begin to be truly interesting until more than halfway through, when the children have grown up and begin to try to rebuild their senses of family and personal identity, and when Marianne, the pivotal figure, is really given her say. And sometimes, the prose is simply not very good, though when she's in form, it's intelligent and moving and sad. Overall, not dreadful, but disappointing.

David Leavitt's A Place I've Never Been (1991) is unfortunately not as good as the witty, charming, and hideously sad Arkansas (Review #60, 4/12/05). But that's okay, because he was a newer writer then. In this book, Leavitt was beginning to gear up his parodic powers ("Chips Is Here"), and beginning to be able to write good scenes about women ("Gravity" provides notable examples), and beginning to be a very good writer indeed. But he wasn't there yet! One story about upward mobility from a working class family of doubtful taste to hanging out with privileged polished richie types--in Italy--and feeling very alienated from them, is, maybe, okay. Two stories is pushing it. But three? Not recommended.

A film moment: I saw another movie that made me cry. Out and out bawl. King Kong. I cried for about 45 solid minutes. Not just misty. Tears streaming down my face, couldn't breathe. Brokeback made me cry too. But if it had been about two silverbacks who fell in love, I probably wouldn't have been able to walk home.

Well, welcome to the latest incarnation of the blog! Thanks to Gunnar for making it nice and new and dealing with my 300 questions. For the time being I can't figure out the comments thing, so you can email comments to me, and I'll post them. I did create a searchable index of all the reviews written here, and posted them at the bottom of the archive for 9/30/2003, though I'm sure there's a better way to do it.

I finally got around to reading Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor (1979) and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1988, the two essays reprinted together in 1990), which I picked up off a stoop in Jersey City. The first essay is an exploration of how the language with which we speak of illness (Sontag focuses on TB and cancer) affects the treatment--medically, socially, politically, artistically--of people who have illnesses. The second essay, a response to and elaboration of the ideas in the first, focuses on AIDS metaphors.

I particularly liked her excoriation of self-help language as a means of blaming people with cancer for their disease, her treatment of the dual nature of TB metaphors (as a disease of the poor/foreign, or of the artist/romantic--and how this latter characterization has shifted in the 20thC to discussion of mental illness), and much of what she had to say about AIDS (the ghettoizing of it as a gay men's disease and drug users' disease at the same time as it was decimating the population of Uganda, for example). Much of what's good in these essays will confirm any thoughtful person's approach to the language of disease: why do we assign personalities, as it were, to illnesses, and seek to impose moral judgments on people with illnesses? Why do we call some people with illnesses "victims," and some people "survivors" or "fighters," and does it make a difference which word we use? (Though the latter might be thought to be "empowering," does it actually empower people to have them "fight" to "vanquish" or "eradicate" cellular happenings in their own bodies, as in the case of cancer? Does the cancer-riddled body need to be destroyed utterly in order to kill the cancer, at the cost of the patient's life?) Where do you draw the line between the patient and the disease? Before reading this, I knew already how self-help language seeks to blame people for their cancer by accusing them of eating the wrong things, living the wrong way, etc. etc. But I wasn't aware that up through the 80s there was a lot of pop wisdom--and medical belief--about how cancer was caused by the repression of feeling: you get cancer because you didn't express yourself properly, so it's your own fault. I was shocked--but since then, I've read about this in Peter Carey's Bliss (to be reviewed soon), too, and become even more shocked. In the interest of full disclosure, I suppose that I am partly motivated to mention this by my great dislike of psychology, but there it is.

Sontag reminds us that these metaphors are not mere linguistic tricks: survival depends on them, because they influence treatment: they determine where funding goes for cures, how and to whom cures are administered, and how the patient can be encouraged or discouraged from participating in his or her own healing.

On the other hand...I'm not sure that I would recommend this book. When she bothered to document, as in the section on TB, her writing was interesting and enlightening. But I was deeply frustrated by the lack of footnotes, sources, or any other kind of substantiation of her claims, particularly in the sections on cancer and AIDS. Her preference for cutting broad swathes of generalized cultural criticism did not impress or amuse me--I wanted facts.

Also, the fact that Sontag herself had cancer complicated some of her claims. Despite all the evidence she had compiled to shake up one's faith in the medical establishment, she had absolute faith in medical science's ability to completely, utterly cure cancer: by the time she wrote the first essay, she herself had lived through Stage 4 breast cancer that had spread to 31 of her lymph nodes. Later she was to survive uterine cancer as well, before finally dying at the age of 71 of complications from leukemia. In the essay her attitude toward people who felt hopeless about recovery, or who searched for alternative methods of healing, was unstintingly scornful. She was opposed to the absolute equation of death and cancer--a useful and provocative idea, considering how many people survive a great many varieties of cancer--but took it to the extreme of denying any equation at all--and this, I think, only because she happened to be alive at the time she wrote the essay. Which suggests, to me, an unwillingness to examine her own use of certain metaphors of illness, based entirely on her own experience and no one else's. As Karl is fond of reminding me, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data." For a critic of cultural metaphors not to examine her own metaphors, and to use her own experience as a way to rebuke every other cancer patient who didn't make the same choices she did--in effect, to blame people who actually die of cancer for their deaths--is kind of ghastly.