Worth a Look or Listen: Louis Menand, Philosophers and Fiction, and the Dangers of Theism

I haven't been keeping up my "Weekend Miscellany" posts for a while, so here's a bit of a miscellany for a Tuesday evening instead:

At Open Letters Monthly, Laura Tanenbaum reviews Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas:

The basic facts will likely be familiar to current or recent graduate students: graduate school takes longer to complete than ever before, especially in the humanities, nearly half in some fields like English drop out before completion, and many of those who do finish will not find tenure-track positions. To his immense credit, and unlike many critics, Menand recognizes that making graduate school more demanding or raising barriers of entry will only exacerbate the problem. Instead he suggests a shorter time to degree, with the completion of an academic article taking the place of the dissertation. He argues this on humanitarian grounds, but then notes the institutional pressures that demand a large pool of graduate students and underemployed PhDs as cheap labor.

At A Commonplace Blog, D. G. Myers writes about philosophers and fiction:

Philosophers want to show that a possibility is valid; novelists try to make it plausible. The distance between validity and plausibility is the distance between philosophy and fiction, but it does not follow that the one is sharp while the other is fuzzy. They are, instead, as Putnam suggests, merely different approaches to knowledge.

Further to his comments, I'll add that I've done some work myself at the intersection of philosophy and literary studies, and I've found that many philosophers cannot, or at least do not, understand the textuality of literature. Even Martha Nussbaum, whose Love's Knowledge is a kind of manifesto for making philosophy literary, or reading literature philosophically, sometimes lapses into readings that extract dicta about how to live rather than finding literary form itself, and the experience of that form, meaningful. Interdisciplinarity, in other words, is harder than it sounds. There are, unsurprisingly, a number of essays on or around this topic in the excellent journal Philosophy and Literature.

And at Common Sense Atheism, another Professor Maitzen is interviewed on, among other things,

• how many theistic defenses don't make sense given the demographics of theism
• how Christian theism leads to twisted morality
• the problems with free will theodicies
• the incoherence of 'Ultimate Purpose'

In my wholly unbiased opinion, the interview is well worth a listen, not least for its articulate explanation of why, "though it's an extremely popular view that atheism is bad for morality, ... it seems pretty clear that theism is what's bad for morality," for its crushing judgment of a recent Christian best-seller ("it's the most intellectually shallow, childish, morally frivolous novel I've ever read"), and for its Utopian vision that "maybe the blogosphere can help us where the schools evidently have failed us."

You all keep busy with these while I go put together my lectures for tomorrow! I hope to be able to do some book blogging myself again soon; I just finished Hilary Mantel's Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, for instance, and am about half-way through Rebecca Goldstein's 36 Arguments for the Existence of God.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weekend Miscellany & Recent Reading

Weekend Miscellany: some things that have caught my eye in recent Internet ramblings:

Joseph Epstein reviews Gertrude Himmelfarb's new book, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot (via). I agree with Open Letters's Sam Sacks that Epstein's generalizations about the Victorians are tired ("The Victorians had a comprehensive and confident view of human nature"... ), though I think Epstein may to be trying to convey what the Bloomsbury-ites thought of them, rather than what he himself takes to be the case, as he moves on to praise the progress we have made from such Bloomsbury-inspired stereotypes. Sacks suggests that "when Epstein moves on to discussing George Eliot, he does fine"; I'd say there too, though, Epstein could do better. It's tedious, for one thing, that he leads with a discussion of her appearance, complete with Henry James's infamous insults (imagine a sentence along the lines of "A short, homely man with bulbous eyes, Charles Dickens nonetheless charmed audiences with his impassioned readings..."--why do so many people feel it necessry and appropriate to lead off with comments on her looks?). What can he mean by his remark, after noting that George Eliot was not a supporter of female suffrage (she was not much of a supporter of universal male suffrage either, it's worth keeping in mind), that "George Eliot's feminism was of a superior kind"? Superior to what? It sounds as if he might mean she wasn't one of those shrill political types. He refers to Eliot as a "Zionist," but as the work of Nancy Henry and others shows, it is tricky to use that term as if it applied in her moment as it came to later on.

George Eliot goes on Oprah: I've often thought Oprah should take on Middlemarchfor her Book Club, but its emphasis on failed ambition and entangled idealism would rather undermine her show's relentless emphasis on overcoming obstacles and triumphing over "this petty medium." As I always figure that the more people who read it the better, I'll be interested (in sort of a "bystander at an accident" way) to see if this producer and those who read along find the expeience rewarding.

At ReadySteadyBlog, Mark Thwaite asks his readers to name "academics who manage to retain their rigour, but speak beyond the academy, if only to a quite self-selecting and small audience." As he asks, "who is doing it for you?" I think in principle any academic could "speak beyond the academy" if you follow Mark's lead in looking to academic books for insights on literary figures or topics of special interest; academics who write deliberately for a non-academic audience would be a much smaller group.

Reviews are piling up of Sarah Waters's new novel, TheLittle Stranger. I don't need to read any of them to know I want to read the novel, but this piece by Waters herself on the novel's background and relationship to Josephine Tey's classic The Franchise Affair really whetted my appetite for it. (via)

N+1 takes a couple more shots at bloggers ("Bloggers on the whole write carelessly, their ideas are commonplace, they curry favor with readers and one another, and their popularity is no index of their worthiness.") even while admitting that there can be a "special eloquence" in the "speech-like qualities" of on-line writing (though that eloquence doesn't really count, it turns out, as "the same discovery is made by bloggers and texters and chatters in a minor and disposable way all the time"). With 76 million blogs ongoing (or whatever the current estimate is), any claims about what they are like "on the whole" must be a difficult thing to ascertain. I wonder how many blogs the author read to come up with this generalization.

Recent Reading

Two of the books I finished recently are so dissimilar in tone and style--indeed, in almost every way--that it comes as a surprise to me to discover, on reflection, that I think they are pursuing a very similar idea. The books are Nawal El Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero, first published in 1973, and Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac, which won the Booker prize in 1984. El Saadawi's novel is the fictional equivalent of repeated slaps in the face, if such startling, painful moments could also somehow be imagined as poetic. Brookner's novel, in contrast, is subtle, patiently nuanced, and faintly sardonic. How can I say that the blunt first-person narrative of an Egyptian prostitute on death row for murder and a cool first-person account of a British romance novelist vacationing in Switzerland after leaving her fiance at the altar have anything in common? Perhaps the connection is a tenuous one, but both books seem to be fundamentally about the relationship a woman has with herself, and how that relationship is compromised and challenged by the sexual politics--the distribution of power, including physical and economic but also social and cultural power--of her world. Both bring these compromises and challenges into focus by emphasizing their protagonists' struggles to discover their own identities and maintain their integrity, even when (especially when) that means disregarding how they are looked at by others.

El Sadaawi's protagonist, Firdaus, fails: her courageous attempts to reinvent herself, to believe in herself and the possibility of her own economic, moral, and sexual freedom, are repeatedly--relentlessly, shatteringly--defeated. The cyclical structure of the novel, in which the same language (assuming the translation is accurate) is repeated for different incidents as if to prove no real progress has been made, that the core crisis remains literally identical, gives a formal pattern to this defeat. It would be an understatement to call this an angry book: to borrow from Matthew Arnold, it is full of "hunger, rebellion, and rage." It is an activist book, a book designed to smack you out of your complacency. It is interesting to compare it, as I inevitably did, with Ahdaf Souef's novels, which seem to speak from another world entirely. The timing makes some difference, though I wonder how much: is Firdaus's experience impossible two decades, three decades, later? Today? How much of the difference between Soueif's confident, ambitious women and El Sadaawi's Firdaus is economic or class-based? The novel has been described as fable-like; it may also be that it is meant to transcend its time and place, to speak very fundamentally to the subjection of women, or of the roots and effects of all oppression.

Brookner's protagonist ends her novel with no triumphant resolution but with a questing sense of possibilities. She has rejected two relationships that promise her social security, protection from the slights and indignities she faces daily and fears will overtake her as she ages: now she must discover what it is like to live on her own terms. To be sure, her situation is dramatically more secure than Firdaus's, though in both cases money is seen to be key to both security and autonomy ("money is what you make when you grow up," she tells a less independent companion). She faces no physical violence, no overt discrimination--but nonetheless she has difficulty imagining happiness for herself without love.

Hotel du Lac is the first Brookner novel I've read. I enjoyed the language a lot: it was descriptive but restrained. It opens with shades of grey that become thematically apt too, for the repressions that limit its protagonist's expressiveness. I liked the "vast grey lake, spreading like an anaesthetic towards the invisible further shore"--that image of anaesthetic is proleptic of the life Edith might have. The novel surprised me repeatedly, not with big shocks or twists, but just by not being or saying quite what I expected. It felt like an Edwardian novel; I kept picturing its characters dressed like those in The Enchanted April (they use words like "smocks"--do people say that anymore?). But then someone said something about deconstruction and signifiers and I was reminded of its more contemporary moment. I wonder if the historical ambiguity created by its tone was deliberate, or if I just missed some basic clue as to when exactly its action takes place.

I've also recently read Emma Darwin's The Mathematics of Love, a novel which weaves together a historical with a modern plot. I thought both parts of the novel were individually well done, though the more contemporary (late 70s, so not really contemporary) part was more compelling. The 19th-century part was written in a more formal style, but that seems like an unnecessary artifice. Perhaps one reason Sarah Waters's neo-Victorian novels read so well is that although she seeks out 19th-century slang and provides plenty of allusions and contextual details, she does not try to sound "Victorian" (which to so many seems to mean "stuffy"). I didn't think Darwin brought the two stories together effectively: the interest of her 20th-century protagonist, Anna, in her 19th-century protagonist, Stephen, was never well-motivated. I liked the way she used photography as a device for evoking the strangely palimpsestic character of historical sites and stories, caught in time, leaving impressions that may be sharp or blurred, suggestive or specific, visible or even tangible to successive generations of viewers. The battlefield reminiscences are vivid, and the aftershocks of war provide another common element between the two plots, as do the various love stories that ask us to consider why we love who we do, what love is, and how we suffer for love. Just because I also read it recently, Emma Donoghue's The Sealed Letter is the inevitable comparison for this book: with Donoghue's novel, I couldn't see what it was about beyond the story it told, while with Darwin's, I felt it was about a number of things but not integrating them in a fully satisfying way. But I liked it enough that I might try her second novel, A Secret Alchemy--also because it has been a long time since I read any Richard III-related novels.

Catching Up

Somehow I always forget how busy May is! There's a lull after winter term grading is finished and then administrative tasks need doing--year-end committee reports and so on--and then the current crop of MA students heads into their thesis-writing phase, meaning draft chapters start coming in for comments. Last week we also had two Ph.D. students doing their comprehensive exams; I was involved in one as the student's supervisor, so there was the exam itself to write and then the written portions to read, followed by the three hour oral exam; as Graduate Coordinator, I also chaired the second exam. Graduate admissions is an ongoing process, too, still involving an assortment of calls and emails and paperwork. In between these tasks I've been working on my paper for ACCUTE. Then there's family life, too: a highlight last week was going to the Neptune Theatre's production of High School Musical with my daughter--that was a lot of fun (Maddie was especially excited that the cast hung around in the lobby after the show to sign autographs). Last but not least, we've been watching the third season of Deadwood, which of course is "just for fun," but I defy anyone to make it to Episode 6 or 7 without feeling a pretty strong compulsion to see how it all turns out. (It's an extraordinary show, though I think I still rate The Wire higher.)

Anyway, no wonder I haven't felt I could afford time for blogging, though I have been keeping an eye on my blogroll and in particular on this discussion at The Valve because one of my ACCUTE events is a lunch-hour session on academic blogging. (It strikes me that hopes or expectations for the potential of this form to shake things up in academic publishing have declined since The Valve was launched with this post--the premises and arguments of which I still find important and convincing.)

I've done a little reading, too (you always need something on the go to read with your morning tea, waiting for appointments, and so on!). One regrettable choice was Kate Jacobs's The Friday Night Knitting Club. I wanted to like this one--just as I want to like the Elm Creek quilting series, and just as I do like leafing through quilting magazines, especially the kind featuring profiles of shops and the women who gather there. It's some kind of fantasy of community and creativity, I think, of working all day with friends and having something beautiful to show for it. I do a little inexpert quilting, and have tried my hands at knitting too, and there is a simple satisfaction for me in the tangibility of the work; perhaps that's part of the appeal too, as a contrast to the vagaries of academic and intellectual work. In any case, The Friday Night Knitting Club will teach me never again to buy a book with an endorsement from Glamour ("The book's great--worth reading now!"). The best word I can think of for the writing is "cheap." The plot pulls every predictable ploy: someone gets cancer, someone gets pregnant (guess which two major events are poignantly juxtaposed...), someone visits a wise old Scottish grandmother--who doesn't talk anything like a wise old Scottish grandmother, unless unbelievably platitudinous advice is somehow authentic Scots wisdom:

'You'll have lots of questions to answer as you get older. Who you are. Who you want to be. What you think about things. Like politics. And romances. And whether you'll speak out or keep your mouth shut. It's always a challenge to work out the best way to live your life, and as much as everyone tells you what to do, ultimately how you do things is up to you.'

Offset short sentences bearing nuggets of painfully obvious insight or laboriously heavy-handed emotion are the author's trademark:

It was only when the job was almost done that it hit her: a person didn't return home to the Upper East Side from a building site in Park Slope, Brooklyn, via the West Side.

James must have made a special trip.

Just to see her.

Phew. That stinks.* I actually find this kind of book obliquely insulting to women (to whom, of course, it is exclusively marketed, I'm sure). And yet, apparently it was a New York Times bestseller, so I suppose I can only lament the laziness of taste and discrimination that makes something like this a success.

Now I'm reading Emma Donoghue's The Sealed Letter. I wasn't wild about Slammerkin, but the premise of this novel is a good one and the reviews (including this one in the Globe and Mail) made it sound both intelligent and entertaining. So far, it's just OK. One problem for a Victorianist is that much of what is provided as context in the novel (a bit woodenly, at times) is pretty familiar stuff, from the members and activities of the Langham Place group to the peculiarities and injustices of Victorian divorce law. Donoghue also does not seem to be using her historical materials to any strong thematic purpose: the novel is about the Codrington case, but what else is it about? As a chronicle of a broken marriage, The Sealed Letter is a pale shadow of Trollope's He Knew He Was Right (see, for instance, here, here, or here), in which the breakdown of the Trevelyans' marriage becomes part of a complex commentary on Victorian gender relations and marriage in the context of larger problems of distribution of power and authority. Also, who needs Crocker when they have Bozzle? As for neo-Victorian predecessors, well, (so far, again) Donoghue does not seem to have the gift of either Michel Faber or Sarah Waters for evoking the period in a profoundly contemporary but yet deeply convincing way. The greatest specific weakness I feel in the book is the friendship between Emily "Fido" Faithfull and Helen Codrington: they seem wholly dissimilar, and their interactions have a forced intensity that I find unmotivated by what we know about them (so far). Still, it is an interesting and fairly well-written book.

Next on my TBR pile: Emma Darwin's The Mathematics of Love. But in the meantime, I'll be grappling with the details of In the Eye of the Sun as I put the last parts of my argument into (I hope) coherent form for the conference. Note to me: there's no shame in writing about short books...

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*Does this count as the kind of "evaluative criticism" Nigel would like us to do more of? :-)

Weekend Frivolity: Saturday Afternoon at the (Muppet) Opera

Commentary is probably redundant.

Weekend Miscellany: Richard III, Lit Crit, Lit-Blogs, and Zombies

At the Globe and Mail books site, Margaret Cannon reviews a new Ricardian novel that sounds like it might be a fun addition to my collection: A Secret Alchemy, by Emma Darwin ("yes, an offshoot of that Darwin").

Also at the Globe and Mail, P. D. James answers readers' questions; here's a reply that is pertinent to the discussion I'm having in my class on mystery and detective fiction about Golden Age puzzle mysteries and their limitations:

P.D. James I agree that few contemporary mysteries concentrate on logical deduction from physical clues. This was much more popular in the so-called Golden Age of Agatha Christie. Today we concentrate more on clues arising from character. In The Private Patient, Dalgliesh discovers such clues when he visits the victim's house and has access to her papers. Even so, I doubt whether he would have been able to make an arrest if the killer hadn't acted so spectacularly at the end of the book. But what does remain important is fair play. The reader who concentrates on solving the mystery should never be left feeling that some vital information was available to the detective and not to him. We should never need to ask, "How on earth was I expected to know that?" But I think that today, for many readers, solving the crime is less important than being engaged in an enthralling and well-written novel.

At (or in, depending on your medium) the TLS, Josh Cohen reviews Enthusiast!, by David Herd:

Woven into the book’s readings is a potent polemic against the assault daily perpetrated against enthusiasm by the bureaucratic mindset of the modern university. The imposition on literary study of alien measures of output, quality and aims blocks creative modes of circulation and exchange, insinuating bureaucracy into the very heart of the pedagogic relationship.

At Blographia Literaria, Andrew Seal has some interesting reflections on tendencies in 'lit-blogging,' particularly about the way its strengths ("the diversity of its members and the diversity of their interests, the ability to stage open-ended dialogues or discussion") could be channelled to do more than increase awareness and thus choice. Perhaps, he proposes, lit-bloggers could provide more guidance, or at least more reasons for different choices:

Instead of just aggregating choice, we can aggregate real knowledge; instead of bald lists which give the reader lots of options which she must sort out, an actual attempt to create something which will help a reader understand how to go about ordering a set of names or titles, how to turn a reading list into knowledge.

The Little Professor helps us see the full potential of adding zombies (though I admit I share Steven Beattie's feeling that this may be going too far.)

At the Guardian, Ian McEwan writes eloquently on John Updike:

The Updike opus is so vast, so varied and rich, that we will not have its full measure for years to come. We have lived with the expectation of his new novel or story or essay so long, all our lives, that it does not seem possible that this flow of invention should suddenly cease. We are truly bereft, that this reticent, kindly man with the ferocious work ethic and superhuman facility will write for us no more.

(And yet the excerpts he quotes fail to persuade me to read more Updike than I have already.)

Weekend Miscellany: Wisdom, Paul Auster, Chess Novels, and the NYTimes 100 Notable Books

Update: Further to my remarks on tiring of over-hyped new books, hooray for the folks at The Millions for these remarks, and for their plan to have their contributors share "the best book(s) they read in 2008, regardless of publication date":

There will be plenty of lists in the coming days assigning 2008's best books (and movies and music and everything else you can think of), but it is our opinion that these lists are woefully incompatible with the habits of most readers. As it does with many things in our culture, what we call "the tyranny of the new" holds particularly strong sway over these lists. With books, however, it is different. We are as likely to be moved by a book written 200 years ago as we are by one written two months ago, and a list of the "Best Books of 2008" feels fairly meaningless when you walk down the aisles of your favorite bookstore or library. (bookmark this post to follow the series)

Morris Dickstein is eloquent on "why literature still matters" (though I wonder about the rhetorical valence of that "still"):

We readers and critics do what we do because we love it, but also because it disquiets us, throws us off balance, unsettles our easy assumptions. No two readings of a genuinely significant book, no performances of a living play, are ever quite the same. When they work their spell, they enfold us in an action that is radically provisional, not easily paraphrased, open to interpretation — and therefore to the unexpected. Since literature resists closure, our work — which is not exactly work — remains open-ended, with no real endgame. Always provisional, never definitive, this wisdom is our special form of knowing. (read the rest here)

Just in time to help me prepare for teaching City of Glass next term, Michael Dirda writes up Paul Auster in the NYRB:

Auster himself has emphasized that he is fascinated by "certain philosophical questions about the world," in particular aspects of identity and human psychology. His art, in its serious playfulness, aims to heighten our awareness of life's overall unreality, to recreate on the page some of its wondrous serendipity and strangeness. . . .

Some of Auster's tics or techniques—the incestuous literary connections, the skewed autobiography, the ambiguous blurring of fact and fiction, the pervasive fatefulness—might sink any ordinary novel from sheer portentousness. And portentousness, as well as sentimentality, has been a criticism regularly leveled at his work. At its best, his tone is unruffled, meditative, intelligent, yet sometimes it does grow gravely august, both orotund and oracular. His characters are all too often the playthings of invisible forces; and the most trivial action—answering a telephone, buying a blue notebook—can bring about the most improbable and dire consequences. What may look like chance is usually kismet, and to Auster New York really is Baghdad on the Hudson, an Arabian Nights world of omens, shifting identities, unexpected windfalls, improbable meetings, wildly good and bad luck, and all those sudden peripeteias that seem more the stuff of melodrama than of modern fiction. (read the rest here)

As my earlier post on Auster reveals, I'm not sold on ingenuity and metatextuality as a basis for great literature. I was recently exposed to another "novel" that made me even more dissatisfied with what seems like the substitution of intellectual games and hyper-cleverness for the humanity of art....Well, for people who like that sort of thing, I'm sure this is just the sort of thing they like.

The yearly orgy of "best of" lists is underway; the New York Times offers its list of "100 Notable Books of 2008" here. Pat Barker's Life Class, Kate Atkinson's When Will There Be Good News and Richard Price's Lush Life are three from the fiction list that I hope to get around to. I'm actually feeling a bit tired of reading much-hyped literary newcomers that disappoint (more about that when I get around to writing up my own "year in reading" post). My Christmas wishlist this year is heavy on more classic titles (like a little thing called War and Peace that I really should have reread in a good translation long ago).

And in a more idiosyncratic vein, at the Washington Post we get a list of novels for "chess enthusiasts (and those who love them)." My son is an avid chess player (and former provincial champion), but at 11 I don't think he's quite ready for any of the books described here. Still, it's worth noting them down in case the enthusiasm endures. A commenter already mentioned Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union, which was the one book I could think of with a chess-driven plot. Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles all feature chess-y titles, and some chess games are played (one, memorably, with live 'pieces'), but they aren't really about chess in any particular way.

A Gentle Weekend Meme (Pass It On!)

I've never done one of these before, but I saw this little Q&A going around at a couple of other blogs (e.g.) and thought it was a nice way to find out about what people are reading. So here are my answers; maybe some of you will post yours, either here in the comments or over at your own blogohomes.

What was the last book you bought?

The (New) Quilting by Machine. Crafty Christmas projects loom, and I recently had to give back the (old) version of this to its real owner. At $4.99, who could resist?

Update: Make that Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk. Note to me: All children's birthday parties should be held just across the business park from a large bookstore, so that parents have an excuse to browse for two hours before picking their kids up again. On the other hand, I see that if I had bought it online, I could have saved $5.

Name a book you have read MORE than once.

Since I reread books for a living, I'll recast that question and name some books I consider my 'comfort' books--ones I reread often because I like where they take me. Actually, even that could be a long list, but here are some perennial favourites: Anne Tyler, Ladder of Years; Alison Lurie, Foreign Affairs; Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night; Lynn Sharon Schwartz, Disturbances in the Field.

Has a book ever fundamentally changed the way you see life? If yes, what was it?

I'm not sure about the "fundamentally" part here, but every time I read Middlemarch it challenges me to approach my life differently--better, I'd even say.

How do you choose a book? e.g. by cover design and summary, recommendations or reviews?

Recommendations play the largest part for me now, as I've become a bit cynical about reviews.

Do you prefer fiction or non-fiction?

Fiction. But I like fiction that has the ring of truth (whether historical, personal, psychological, moral, or other), and I also have a long interest in the instability of the distinction between fiction and non-fiction.

What's more important in a novel - beautiful writing or a gripping plot?

Yes, exactly.

Most loved/memorable character?

Dorothy Sayers's Harriet Vane, and Dorothy Dunnett's Philippa Somerville.

Which book or books can be found on your nightstand at the moment?

Defining "nightstand" a bit broadly to include the table by my favourite reading chair, the extra little shelf on my desk at home where I stash my overflow "TBR" pile, and my literal nightstand--and ignoring books that are there only because I have to read them for work--I see Claire Messud, The Emperor's Children; Frank McCourt, Teacher Man; W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz; Penelope Lively, Perfect Happiness; Ahdaf Soueif, Mezzaterra; and Vikram Seth, Two Lives.

What was the last book you read?

I finished Richard Price's Clockers last night. I didn't actually like it that much. I wonder if it would have captured my imagination more if I hadn't watched all five seasons of The Wire so recently.

Have you ever given up on a book halfway in?

There are a couple of books I've started recently and not persevered with, but usually I don't like to think of it as "giving up": sometimes it's just not the right time to read a particular book, so it goes back on the shelf to ripen. Recent examples include When We Were Orphans and A Suitable Boy: I look forward to reading all of both of them eventually. I did give up on a few of the books that I tried out for my mystery class, including Helen Tursten's Detective Inspector Huss and both Henning Mankell books I started. I can think of at least one book I sort of regretted reading through to the end: Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin.

Weekend Miscellany

For some reason, this weekend has felt particularly miscellaneous--something about the combination of a clutter of family chores and projects (groceries, laundry, a trip to the library, a swimming lesson, a chess tournament) and a clutter of 'homework' (tests and reading responses to mark, handouts and worksheets and overheads and lecture notes to prepare, emails to answer, and of course books to read). And yet there's still time to look around a bit, and even read a little just for fun.

I've been really enjoying the back issues I ordered of The Reader. I got No. 17 (especially on women writers) and No. 27 ("The Reader Tries for Happiness"); highlights for me include, in No. 17, Josie Billington's "Why Read Mrs Gaskell Today?" and Jane Davis's "Letters from the Hidden Life" (primarily on reading George Eliot's letters," in No. 20, Raymond Tallis's "Concerning Saturday: Does Implausibility Matter?" (though I disagree with his criticisms), and in both, the "Ask the Reader" Q&A section. I've just downloaded No. 30 and look forward especially to reading Philip Pullman on "The Storyteller's Responsibility" and Tessa Hadley on "Crying at Novels" (download it for yourself here).

I just finished Rachel Cusk's Arlington Park. I'd like to write more about it than I have time for, as it raised many questions for me--some of them about myself, as it struck me as a very angry book, bitter even, and yet even as I chafed at how improper the anger seemed in some ways (given how privileged the protagonists all are), I sympathized with it too. Does the bitterness arise from the realization that social and material privilege make anger seem petulant (such spoiled children, her women seem!) even when there is genuine cause? Is the book satirizing its women for wanting even more than they already have, which is considerable? Or is it acknowledging dark truths about what lies beneath the surface of privilege? It's interesting how many of the critics quoted in the blurbs use words like "fearless" and "frank," as if the stories resonated with them as well, spoke out in some way they think others (other women in particular, I suppose) are too polite, too self-conscious, too shamefaced, or too repressed to do.

I'm reading Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children now as my "fun" book--alternating it, quite jarringly, with Clockers. The Emperor's Children is leaving me a bit cold so far.

I've ordered Auster's City of Glass for my detective fiction course. I conferred with a helpful colleague who has more 'postmodern' experience and expertise than I, and he says it has been very popular with students when he has taught it--including in his first-year class. Now I'm looking forward to the intellectual challenge of learning about it and making it work in my own class, especially since I know I can go next door and get ideas from him. I really appreciate all the suggestions I got while I was thinking about this. If I do the course again in 09-10, I may revamp the reading list altogether to incorporate more of them.

Weekend Miscellany: P. D. James, Persephone Books, James Wood

Some articles and reviews of interest:

At The Times, there's an interesting interview with P. D. James, who has a new Adam Dalgleish novel coming out. James has often remarked that she sees herself working in the tradition of 19th-century domestic realism as much as the detective novel; her interest in the Victorians shows up again here, as does her conviction that writing mystery fiction frees up an author to focus on character and theme:

“There’s huge fascination in examining the human personality under the trauma of a murder investigation. All of us present a carapace to the world that conceals things we wish to keep to ourselves. In a murder investigation, these defences are often torn down.” This gives a novelist “a huge opportunity”, one particularly valued by this writer, who, besides filling notebooks with “plotting and planning”, sets store by knowing her characters intimately. “I move in with them. I sympathise with the view Trollope expressed that you have to get up with your characters and live with them all day.” (read the rest here)

Also at The Times, there's a piece on Persephone Books:

There can be little doubt that Persephone, which reprints lost or forgotten women's classics, has filled a gap left by the bigger Virago. Quieter, more interior and less obviously feminist than the latter, it celebrates its first decade as the champion of the kind of book trendy that literati like to dismiss as dull and domestic.

Virago's founder, Carmen Callil, when recently describing how her team chose whether or not to reissue a particular author, would dismiss rejects as “below the Whipple line”, referring to what she called, with withering dismissal, “a popular novelist of the 1930s and 1940s whose prose and content absolutely defeated us”. Persephone, as it happens, has Dorothy Whipple as one of its star authors, alongside Virginia Woolf, Mollie Panter-Downes and classic children's authors such as Noel Streatfeild and Richmal Crompton, whose adult novels have long been out of print.

“I think Dorothy Whipple is compulsively readable and perceptive, and the 20th-century Mrs Gaskell,” Beauman says. “I'm passionate about her work.”

So, indeed are Persephone's customers, who have fallen upon its 78 reissued novels with joy and ensure sales of between 3,000 and 10,000 a book. As the shop - which sells Persephone mugs, dressing gowns and cards behind a window dressed with a felt cloche hat and an old typewriter - suggests, being a Persephone reader is almost a lifestyle choice for intelligent women who want to settle down with what has been described as “a hot-water-bottle novel”.

Yet alongside bestselling nostalgia collections such as Kay Smallshaw's How to Run Your Home Without Help are darker tales, such as Penelope Mortimer's Daddy's Gone A-Hunting, and wholly enchanting adult fairytales such as The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

These are the kind of tremendously English books often enjoyed (and parodied) by the heroines in Nancy Mitford and Stella Gibbons. They do, however, have a serious readership, and Persephone's list of those who have written prefaces for the reissues include Penelope Fitzgerald, P.D. James and Valerie Grove. (read the whole story here)

I don't remember seeing any Persephone titles in bookstores here, but now I'll have my eyes open. And if they don't have Canadian distribution, there's always the excellent Book Depository (free international shipping!).

Better late than never: the New York Times weighs in on James Wood's How Fiction Works:

The grosser elements of fiction — story, plot and setting, as well as the powerful drive of certain authors to expand or alter perception by exalting the vernacular, absorbing the anarchic and ennobling the vulgar that has impelled such messy master­works as “Huckleberry Finn,” “On the Road” and Denis Johnson’s “Jesus’ Son” — intrude not at all on Wood’s presentation, which proceeds in the steady, dark-gowned, unruffled manner of a high-court judge. Wood seems firm in his conviction that accounting for How Fiction Works needn’t involve bewildering digressions into Why Writers Write or Why Readers Read. For him, that matter seems settled. They do it to perfect the union of Wood’s vaunted “artifice and verisimilitude,” two virtues he treats as though carved on a stone tablet, and thereby to promote the cause of civilization; not, as is so frequently the case outside the leathery environs of the private library, to escape the constrictions of civilization, redraw its boundaries, decalcify its customs, or revive the writer’s or reader’s own spirits by dancing on its debris. (read the whole review here)

This review (which concludes with blog-worthy snarkiness, "there is one question this volume answers conclusively: Why Readers Nap") is not nearly as favorable as Frank Kermode's in The New Republic a little while back. How Fiction Works has certainly received a great deal of attention, in print and on blogs: here are a few more links, in case you just can't get enough criticism of criticism. You have to give the man credit for getting a lot of people talking about what makes good literary criticism.

Weekend Miscellany: Mr Whicher, James Wood, Reader Online Poll

It's 'Halifax Natal Day' here (also known as 'we want an extra day off in August too') and thus still in some sense the weekend, so here's my semi-regular round-up of interesting things:

At The Little Professor, there's a typically thoughtful review of Kate Summerscale's much-discussed The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, the story of the infamous Road Hill murder case and its lead investigator:

Summerscale's project wears a number of intellectual hats: it aspires to be, simultaneously, a popular microhistory of a scandalous murder case, a literary history of modern detective fiction, and a sort of detective "faction" in its own right. Summerscale's story doesn't just analyze the Road Hill case, but actually tries to be the kind of narrative the murder inspired; the reader is invited to watch as new forms of story-telling coalesce into recognizable genre conventions.

LP isn't entirely sold on the project: for her reasons, read the rest here.
Open Letters Monthly features Daniel Green's review of James Wood's How Fiction Works. Not surprisingly, given the differences between their critical agendas and the resulting history of contention between Green and Wood, the review is not particularly enthusiastic:

Wood is currently the most well-regarded generalist literary critic in the English-speaking literary world, and it is discouraging to say the least that such a figure uses his influence to conduct a rearguard action against the forces of change in literary practice, against those who, like William Gass (Wood’s bête noire in this book), want to transform our perception of fiction as the effort to depict “people” and “life” to one that can encompass that goal (with many provisos) but can also capture the reader’s attention in other ways, ways more responsive to the possibilities of fiction as imaginative manipulation of language and form. Wood makes his case for realism always within a context in which it is endangered by postmodernists and other stylistically immoderate writers who don’t appreciate its subtleties and are tearing fiction away from its proper relationship to “the world." . . . .

Ultimately the most disconcerting thing about How Fiction Works, and about James Wood’s criticism in general, is that while Wood on the one hand expresses near-reverence for the virtues of fiction, the terms in which he judges the value of fiction as a literary form implicitly disparages it. He doesn’t want to let fiction be fiction. Instead, he asks that it provide some combination of psychological analysis, metaphysics, and moral instruction, and assumes that novelists are in some way qualified to offer these services. He abjures them to avoid “aestheticism” (too much art) and to instead be respectful of “life.” (read the whole review here)

I find it interesting that Green repeatedly faults Wood for an over-zealous commitment to realism while my own reading of How Fiction Works expressed frustration rather at his tendency to emphasize aesthetics and form over plot, character, and "moral instruction," and to universalize this priority and talk as if the novel really began with Flaubert.

At The Reader Online, they have a winner in their poll to select a classic novel to recommend for the Richard and Judy book club, which I gather has something of the force across the pond that Oprah's book club has here. Their favored selection is Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a recommendation I would certainly second. In retrospect, I actually wonder if it wouldn't have been a better choice for our summer reading project at The Valve: though I've certainly been pleased overall at the discussion we've had of Adam Bede, something a bit sexier might have kept more people engaged once summer really arrived.

Weekend Miscellany: Feminist Lit Crit, New Age Libraries, Chick Lit

Here are links to some things I've found interesting in recent hops, skips, and jumps around the web:

In Dissent, Judith Walzer on the pioneering feminist literary critics of the 1970s:

In the 1970s a number of books were written to reappraise women authors and the literature they produced. For the most part these books focused on nineteenth-century Britain (to a lesser extent on the United States and France) and they clearly “started something.” The work of women writers was taken far more seriously in this criticism than it had been before. Its sources and content were examined with the assumption that they had both literary and cultural value. After these critical works it was no longer possible to claim that women’s literary work was tangential to the “tradition” or marginal or derivative. At the same time, and even more important, it became impossible to maintain that you did not have to pay attention to the gender of an author to understand her work, that you could pretend that she had not had characteristic experiences as a writer and as a woman. It became harder and harder to sustain habitually dismissive and narrow responses. In effect, these critical works created a new field. The field asserted itself on the literary scene, and after that, work in this area grew so rapidly and with such vitality and scope that it seems unfair to focus on only a few books written at the start of this period.

But four books seized my attention—then and now—and seem of major importance. They were published from 1975 to 1979: Patricia Spacks’s The Female Imagination (1975), Ellen Moers’s Literary Women (1976) Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1977), and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). Each of them respected the works and lives of women writers without question, describing the ways in which their circumstances affected their creativity and analyzing what they had accomplished. With differing definitions of their subject and different perspectives, they shared a conviction that much of the greatest literature of the nineteenth century—British, American, and French—could not be fully grasped without a consideration of the position of women and women writers in society, their views of the world, and their literary preferences and practices. Literary study had been missing a good deal of fundamental significance. There was more here than most of us—the common reader and the scholar—were seeing and acknowledging. Not only would this new perspective add to and deepen our views of these writers, but it might substantially change our understanding of the periods in which they wrote and of the structure of literature in general.

I've long believed myself to be a feminist, but I have never defined myself explicitly as a feminist critic. I also came to literary criticism just too late to appreciate first-hand the novelty and daring of these works. But I have always appreciated their fruits--they are, as Walzer says of The Madwoman in the Attic, "endlessly suggestive," and I have demonstrated their influence in my own work in various ways and especially by always considering questions and constructions of gender in my reading and teaching. Indeed, perhaps my doing so without considering it a specifically "feminist" move is among the more significant changes in critical attitude they made possible. At the same time, I've realized that many students in this "post-feminist" age do not take such considerations for granted the way I do, and some certainly perceive politics or bias when confronted with them. Thus Walzer's concluding reflections were of special interest to me:

ONE WONDERS if these books that “started something” are read anymore. If we find them basic, even foundational for the understanding of women’s writing and for a way of reading it, do they have any standing today? Sometimes a message has been so fully absorbed into the literary culture that the work of the messengers no longer exists as a separate resource. These books may be the ones that “started something,” but now we may take them for granted. A re-reading, however, can provide more reflections—that there really are perspectives through which we can give an equality of consideration to works by women and by men, that one can take gender seriously instead of pretending that it doesn’t exist, and at the same time that we don’t have to think of gender as a totalistic determinant of artistic achievement. This view in turn may direct us to a new thoughtfulness about how we conceive of what life and history have to do with the work of a writer, whether a woman or a man. What these four critics did was not simply to “start something”—create a new field—but to take a crucial step forward in the practice of criticism. In their work they reestablished the idea that the social environment surrounds us all—writers, too—and that it is different for genders, groups, and individuals. (read the rest here; thanks to Patrick Leary of the VICTORIA listserv for the tip)

In last week's New York Review of Books, there's a thought-provoking article by historian Robert Darnton on "The Library in the New Age":

Each change in the technology has transformed the information landscape, and the speed-up has continued at such a rate as to seem both unstoppable and incomprehensible. In the long view—what French historians call la longue durée—the general picture looks quite clear—or, rather, dizzying. But by aligning the facts in this manner, I have made them lead to an excessively dramatic conclusion. Historians, American as well as French, often play such tricks. By rearranging the evidence, it is possible to arrive at a different picture, one that emphasizes continuity instead of change. The continuity I have in mind has to do with the nature of information itself or, to put it differently, the inherent instability of texts. In place of the long-term view of technological transformations, which underlies the common notion that we have just entered a new era, the information age, I want to argue that every age was an age of information, each in its own way, and that information has always been unstable. . . .

Information has never been stable. That may be a truism, but it bears pondering. It could serve as a corrective to the belief that the speedup in technological change has catapulted us into a new age, in which information has spun completely out of control. I would argue that the new information technology should force us to rethink the notion of information itself. It should not be understood as if it took the form of hard facts or nuggets of reality ready to be quarried out of newspapers, archives, and libraries, but rather as messages that are constantly being reshaped in the process of transmission. Instead of firmly fixed documents, we must deal with multiple, mutable texts. By studying them skeptically on our computer screens, we can learn how to read our daily newspaper more effectively—and even how to appreciate old books. (read the rest here)

Darnton, who calls himself a "Google enthusiast," intelligently avoids either utopianism or fear-mongering about the possibilities of the digital age for reading and libraries. He concludes with a compelling list of eight reasons for us not to abandon research libraries, including that "the totality of world literature—all the books in all the languages of the world—lies far beyond Google's capacity to digitize," "Google will make mistakes" (for an excellent supporting example, see here), and Google "will fail to capture crucial aspects of a book"--including its tactile and material features.

At the Guardian, Joanna Trollope makes a case for "chick-lit." Appointed a judge for a new prize in "comedy romance," Trollope describes the judging process as "a revelation":

The thing is, it's hard to write good romantic fiction, and it's much, much harder to write funny good romantic fiction. One of the criteria we judges were given was that if we hadn't laughed, or been really beguiled by the end of chapter one, we should hurl the book away from us (and yes, a lot of books deserve hurling, but that's the fault of their quality and not their genre). . . . comedy romance works for readers because the jokes are underpinned by recognisably real people in recognisably real situations - disappointment, frustration, loneliness, anger, sadness and all the grim old daily human carry-on. In fact, without the gravitas, the jokes wouldn't work. (read the rest here)

I read "chick-lit" myself sometimes, and I completely agree that it's a genre that's very hard to do well. So hard, in fact, that I'm not sure I've read any books falling squarely into that category that I'd be willing to give any kind of prize to. "Funny" and "beguiling" just don't seem like very high standards do me: just by themselves, these terms encapsulate the limitations of the genre Trollope seeks to elevate. Most of the time my complaint is that those "recognisably real situations" are rendered too superficially, and with too little historical or other reflection, for them to offer any actual insights into those situations, at least any beyond the platitudinous. I've written about some of Trollope's own books: I think that at her best, she is certainly capable of more than a superficial, beguiling charm.

Weekend Miscellany: Orientalism, Psychology of Fiction, Frowning on Smiley

At the TLS, Robert Irwin (the author of Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents) reviews two other recent works of Orientalist revisionism, Daniel Martin Varisco's Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid and Ibn Warraq's Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism:

So many academics want the arguments presented in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) to be true. It encourages the reading of novels at an oblique angle in order to discover hidden colonialist subtexts. It promotes a hypercritical version of British and, more generally, of Western achievements. It discourages any kind of critical approach to Islam in Middle Eastern studies. Above all, Orientalism licenses those academics who are so minded to think of their research and teaching as political activities. The drudgery of teaching is thus transformed into something much more exciting, namely “speaking truth to power”.

It is unlikely that the two books under review, both of which present damning criticisms of Said’s book at length and in detail, will change anything. (read the rest here)

A new blog, OnFiction, will focus on the psychology of fiction. Contributor Keith Oatley (author of the very interesting re-vision of Middlemarch, A Natural History, as well as a great many scientific papers and books) offers this interesting suggestion for what makes a 'great' novel:

From the point of view of the psychology of fiction, one of the criteria that may distinguish great novels from those that are merely entertaining, is that a great work is not about persuasion. There is no mental coercion of the reader to run only on rails laid by the writer. Of course there is structure, with settings, characters, conversation, and events, but along with these a great novelist offers what D.W. Winnicott, in his book Playing and reality, called a "potential space between the individual and the environment," a space in which the reader's imagination can expand, and in which, as the reader takes up the words of the writer, the experience of the book can become the reader's own. George Eliot's Middlemarch is one of the world's great novels because the author offers the reader exactly this kind of space-in-between.

(Looking up A Natural History at Chapters in order to insert the link, I find that my tentative plan to assign it for a graduate seminar on "Middlemarch in/and the 21st Century" (along with Soueif's In the Eye of the Sun) will be complicated, if not foiled, by finding it apparently out of print.)

I happened upon a site called Open Letters Monthly; one of their reviewers really hated Smiley's 13 Ways of Looking at a Novel:

Great Books was a bestseller, and many more books have since sprouted in the rut it plowed, with names like Book Lust, The Literary 100, The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books, and so on, each offering go-get-‘em homilies about Western classics, and each, it more and more appears, aspiring in a ponderous, paginated way to be a blog. We can vainly hope that the low point of this trend was realized in 2005 with Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, in which the author reads 101 randomly chosen books and then, for no special reason, tells you what she thinks is wrong with them. This book is solely predicated on Smiley’s environmentally unsound conviction that whenever she happens to write something, no matter how trivial or self-involved it is, trees should die so that it may see print. One of the unexplored virtues of the blog may be its role in obviating bad or negligible books by acting as a valve for our more egregious writerly chatterers—in any case, if ever anyone needed a benignly ignorable blogspot account, it’s Smiley. (read the rest here)

A much more favorable review of Smiley can be found on this "benignly ignorable blogspot account," right over here. In the meantime, I have ordered the Michael Dirda volume also mentioned in the Open Letters review, Classics for Pleasure, and will eventually review it here in my 'books about books' series.

Weekend Miscellany

At the Guardian, Jane Smiley writes about Trollope's The Kellys and the O'Kelly's:

The Kellys and the O'Kellys was not a commercial success. It was published - perhaps unluckily - in the same year as Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Dickens's Dombey and Son and Gaskell's Mary Barton, all addressing the issue of what was wrong with life. The Kellys and the O'Kellys evoked much that was right. It must have seemed bland. It failed, selling 140 copies and earning Trollope no money. Although it was written in a wholly different tone from his first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, its author gained no points for exhibiting his versatility. Both novels, scholars now feel, suffered commercially from being about Ireland - the famine was raging, and the English reading public did not want to think about it. It was destined to be a sleeper - a thoughtful, subtle novel published in an anxious year.

But one of England's greatest novelists had laid out his tools for all to see - the grace of his writing, the worldliness of his vision, the variety of his characters and scenes, the expansiveness of his geography. The story itself is the important thing, not the satiric tone, as in Thackeray, the social criticism, as in Gaskell, or the stylistic exuberance, as in Dickens. He delivered the whole package, but it was a modestly wrapped package and got lost. (read the rest here)

I have written before about how well I think Smiley talks about Trollope.

At the TLS, critic and novelist David Lodge writes with both pathos and humour about his hearing loss:

You might think that of all the professions a novelist is least affected by hearing loss and, up to a point, that is true. We compose books in silence, consumed in silence by solitary readers.

However, deafness restricts and thins out the supply of new ideas and experience on which the novelist depends to create his fictions. That former nun’s life story might have been priceless “material” and I regret its loss. I miss opportunities to eavesdrop on humanly revealing conversations on buses and in shops and to keep up with new idioms, coinages and catch-phrases that give flavour and authenticity to dialogue in a novel of contemporary life. (read the rest here)

Hmm: "it’s a cast-iron excuse for declining to serve on committees"? That might offset a lot of the disadvantages...

In the Globe and Mail's book section, Cynthia MacDonald reviews Emma Donoghue's latest, a neo-Victorian novel focusing on the 1864 Codrington divorce case:

It's amazing to think that 150 years ago, the British Empire was ruled by an actual married woman. As Emma Donoghue reminds us in her marvellous new novel, wives in the Victorian era were usually classed with "criminals, lunatics and children": devoid of legal identity, stripped of property, limited in their opportunities for paid work.

By way of illustration, she has chosen a thoroughly riveting courtroom drama. The Sealed Letter is a fictionalized version of the Codrington divorce case, which had le tout London squirming in its pantaloons over several months in 1864. Juicy, vicious, elegant and thoughtful, the book is a valuable addition to Donoghue's growing corpus of fine historical novels (including Life Mask and Slammerkin). (read the rest here)

I wasn't that taken with Slammerkin when I read it about a year ago (as George Eliot remarked a long time ago, historical fiction is a particularly demanding genre, though the risks are often underestimated). But I'll probably give this one a try, just to keep up-to-date on my neo-Victorian options.

Finally, the little comment-spat I've been involved in at The Reading Experience has led me back to this earlier post by Dan Green:

After eighty years of experimenting with the study of literature as an academic subject, those carrying it out (myself included) have made a complete hash of it. Literature itself is held in contempt not just by the majority of ordinary people but by those professing to teach it. "Literature Professor" has become a near-synonym of "lunatic." That literary study would come to such an end was probably inevitable, since the primary imperative of academe--to create "new" knowledge--is finally inimical to something so difficult to dress up in fashionable critical clothes as serious works of fiction or poetry. Once it was perceived that "aesthetic complexity" was a spent force (at least as the means for producing new monographs and journal articles), approaches to literature that essentially abandoned its consideration as an art form were practically certain to follow.

Nearly three years later, a conversation touching on many similar points is unfolding in a comments thread at The Valve even as Ronan MacDonald is announcing the death of the critic. Well, give us credit, at least, for not going gentle into that good night! Indeed, critics appear to have co-opted the story of their impending demise as yet another subcategory of metacriticism.

Weekend Miscellany

A few things of interest I've come across while browsing this weekend:

Margaret Atwood on Anne of Green Gables in the Guardian:

"God's in his heaven, all's right with the world," Anne whispers in the very last lines of Anne of Green Gables. She's fond of Victorian poetry, so it's appropriate that she ends her story by quoting from a song sung by the optimistic heroine of Robert Browning's dramatic poem "Pippa Passes"; doubly appropriate because Anne Shirley herself acts a kind of Pippa throughout the book. Pippa is a poor Italian orphan girl who slaves away in a silk-spinning mill, yet manages to preserve a pure imagination and a love of nature despite her lowly status. Like Pippa, Anne is an unselfconscious innocent who, unbeknownst to herself, brings joy, imagination and the occasional epiphany to the citizenry of Avonlea, who are inclined to be practical but drear. (read the rest here)

Keith Oatley on Middlemarch for the Globe and Mail's '50 Greatest Books' Series (once again, a novelist scores the good gig in the book section):

Middlemarch is a generous book. It is one of the world's great books because, between the three streams of writing, George Eliot enables a space to grow: a space for the reader's emotions and thoughts. You feel things you have not felt, think things you have not thought. It's a book for grown-up people. (read the rest here)

Charles Nickerson proposes an obscure 'inspiration' for Miss Havisham in the TLS:

Much discussion has arisen over Miss Havisham’s genesis. The numerous sources proposed – including, most frequently, a theatrical skit by Charles Mathews, articles in Household Words and The Household Narrative of Current Events, and Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White – have been ably surveyed by both Peter Ackroyd and Harry Stone. Although a good case can be made for Miss Havisham’s evolution from a mix of these sources, none of them contains anything like the intense psychological dynamic that develops between Miss Havisham and Estella. One work in which Dickens might have found the germ of that dynamic is Disraeli’s seventh novel, Venetia (1837), a thinly disguised fictionalization of various episodes in the lives of Byron and Shelley. (read the rest here)

And one more knock against James Wood (keeping in mind that in many respects, I'm a fan!): he's a spoiler!

I like destroying the tyranny of plot. I always ask people who are recommending me a novel to tell me the entire story right out, and I make a point in my reviews of describing the entire book. I don't think I need a plot to sustain my enjoyment. Formally speaking, if you really did believe in plot you'd say, "I can't re-read Anna Karenina because I know what happens." But it's obvious that there are deeper, more sustaining beauties underneath. (emphasis added; read the rest here)

Of course, he's right about re-reading, and about the "beauties underneath" that sustain multiple readings, but I believe sometimes plot and the surprise, suspense, confusion, pleasure, and emotional and other reactions it can generate are more meaningful than he allows. Consider the ending of The Mill on the Floss, for instance (and no, I'm not going to give it away here!). Our shock and surprise provoke all kinds of important social and moral questions for us. Re-reading and re-thinking both help us answer them, but our demand that this result be accounted for motivates us to interpretation. Also, I encourage my students to question plot elements: after all, things could always have unfolded in some different way, so how is this plot element suitable for this project? What do we learn from it about the underlying ideas of the novel? (Useful classroom exercise: try tweaking the plot and see how fast the whole book begins to change its shape...or, for The Mill on the Floss, try coming up with an alternative ending that satisfies all the pressures developing from the beginning of the novel...) We read better in some ways once we know the book's whole shape, and knowing the plot helps us attend to other elements, but plot is often where the social, political, and moral aspects of the novels have their strongest presence. Further, there's a readerly experience (for lack of a better word) that is simply spoiled by spoilers.

Recent Reading (and a little Recent Watching, too)

Despite He Knew He Was Right (currently on the table in my Victorian 'Woman Question' seminar), graduate admissions, and the ordinary middle-of-term business (incoming assignments, class preparation, committee meetings, and so on), I have been able to do a little 'pleasure' reading lately. Here are some 'thumbnail' responses.

Reginald Hill, Death Comes for the Fat Man. I find this series reliable: literate, well plotted, with its main characters well enough developed that the prospect of Dalziel's demise had some poignancy. This particular novel did not blow me away, though (for those who have read it, sorry for the pun). Although I appreciate Hill's attempt to engage with big issues and international conflicts as they register on a local scale, his Knights Templar seemed like foolish medieval joust re-enactors rather than a genuine force of menace worthy of their intended opposition. On the other hand, I wondered as I was reading whether that was Hill's point: that secret societies, blood vengeance, beheadings, and so forth are relics of medieval concepts of justice, religion, and warfare--that the Islamicist movements the Knights imitate represent anachronistic, regressive forces that are incongruous with contemporary mores.

Benjamin Black, Christine Falls. I expected more from this much-touted 'crossover' work by Booker-Prize winner John Banville. It is elegantly written, and some of the characters--especially his dour protagonist, the pathologist Quirke--are compellingly portrayed, but I didn't find that was true of all of them (Rose and Josh Crawford, for instance, or even Phoebe, who seems to be supposed to carry a pretty heavy thematic burden). Quirke's love for Sarah seemed based on nothing in particular (maybe I just miss fuller exposition?). The central 'crime' had few surprises for a novel set in 1950s Ireland (corruption in the Catholic church? unwanted babies? no kidding!). Atmospheric, I guess, but a thin atmosphere unless the people live in it intensely, and Banville's spare style did not establish that kind of intensity for me. I suppose I would sum up the novel's theme as 'being orphaned' (literally, but also emotionally and metaphysically). It did not bring home to me what the costs of such a condition are, maybe because on closer inspection pretty much all of the characters are in it together--which in itself is a potentially powerful (poignant, frightening) vision. I'll probably re-read it, as I admit my immersion in baggy Victorian novels that tell me everything (sometimes over and over) does not always make me the best reader of novels that leave more out.

On Friday I rented The Jane Austen Book Club. I found the book OK, if a bit gimmicky, but I thought it would make a decent movie. It did, but also an odd one: I can't imagine anyone getting much out of it, for instance, who doesn't know all six of Austen's novels pretty well--well enough to take an interest in watching other people debate, say, Fanny Price's character, or Emma's marriage to Mr Knightly. Superficial as the movie's book club discussions are (in fact, maybe because they are so superficial and rapid), non-Janeites seem likely to tune out, and then the plot that surrounds these scenes is itself not particularly rich. It's striking that only rarely did the book club scenes turn on issues of construction or literary technique: they were pretty much all about the characters all the time, generally in the spirit of "these people seem real to us, so let's debate their motives and choices." I have almost no personal experience of book clubs, but my sense is that this is indeed typical. Of course, this is also precisely the kind of conversation I think most English professors eventually shut down in class. And yet working my way through He Knew He Was Right with my students, I have been finding that it seems like the most natural and appropriate approach, because Trollope's most notable literary technique is precisely characterization, and his primary concern is what his characters do, with what motives, to what ends, and with what consequences. Also, as my students have pointed out, in many crucial cases he does not take sides, or if so, only equivocally, so that we are poised ourselves on the cusp of decisions or moral judgements and prompted to keep weighing the pros and cons of actions, the honesty, self-knowledge, or self-deceptions of his people, and so on. Who is right, Emily or Louis? Is Priscilla right to want Emily and Nora to leave the Clock House? Should Dorothy accept Mr Gibson? We spend so much time thinking about these questions with the characters that backing off into other kinds of interpretive questions sometimes seems like missing the point. In Middlemarch we know Dorothea's first marriage is an awful mistake. We are pressed to understand it, even to sympathize with it, nonetheless, and we may perhaps acknowledge the beauty of such an error: there's plenty of room for nuance and ambivalence. But somehow in that case a spirited discussion on the relative merits of Sir James and Mr Casaubon seems out of place, because clearly there are larger philosophical and historical and moral issues being brought into focus by Dorothea's choice. In Trollope, the choices seem more literal, more ordinary, and no less important--perhaps even more so in a way, because you have no confidence that the wise narrator will resolve or even analyze the full significance of the options for you. As many of the characters keep discovering, you may have to rely on your own judgment.

Weekend Miscellany II

It's Sunday afternoon again after a weekend filled with bits of this and that: grocery shopping, taking my son to the optometrist, taking my daughter to a birthday party, and so on. In and amongst household errands, I'm reading about six different things, some for classes (East Lynne and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd), some for fun or personal interest (Death Comes for the Fat Man, Soldier's Heart), some as a gesture in the direction of research (Orientalism, Dangerous Knowledge). And when all of these are out of reach, I've flagged a number of essays and posts online that I take a look at when family activities allow:

In Prospect Magazine, William Skidelsky's essay "Critical Condition". Here's an excerpt that raises some questions I'm interested in:

There is a third, perhaps less obvious reason for the diminishing importance of book reviews: the declining authority of academic criticism. This is a subject that Rónán McDonald—an English lecturer at Reading University—explores in his satisfyingly chewy new book The Death of the Critic (Continuum). In the past, McDonald points out, although by no means all successful critics were academics, there was a fruitful interplay between literary journalism and scholarship—something that has dwindled in recent years. There are exceptions: journals such as the London Review of Books and the TLS; the book sections of the Independent and, to an extent, the Guardian. But on the whole, journalists increasingly dominate the literary review pages of newspapers—and since an increasing number of books are written by journalists too, this results in a kind of circularity (which bloggers, quite reasonably, often moan about). But if literary journalism is increasingly feeding off itself, then, McDonald contends, that is largely because academic criticism has withdrawn from the field. In the last two decades, English literature has both tangled itself up in arcane and inaccessible debates about theory and emasculated itself by allowing itself to become a handmaiden to other disciplines, through its embrace of historicism and cultural studies. McDonald traces this retreat to a paradox that has always bedevilled the study of literature: the more Eng lit tries to prove that it is "rigorous," the more it cuts itself off from aesthetics—the original source of its attraction. The discipline has, in effect, worried itself into irrelevance.

Dan Green and his readers have been discussing this piece already, though with a primary emphasis on Skidelsky's dismissive remarks about bloggers--given which it does seem a bit ironic that directly under the essay's headers is an invitation to discuss it at the magazine's own blog. I hope to have another go at writing up some considered thoughts on the state of criticism (and/or the role of academic critics) after I get my hands on the Ronan McDonald book mentioned in Skidelsky's essay.

Also of interest, here's an excellent piece by James Wood at the Guardian on characters in literature--and by excellent I mean thoughtful, wide-ranging, thought-provoking, well-written, the kind of piece that makes me want to sit down and talk to him (not a typical reaction from me when I read criticism). That's not to say I don't disagree with him at various points (for instance, I'm not sure he gives Scott's Waverley enough credit--come on, you have to love a 'hero' who can't go 20 pages with tripping or passing out!). Further to this, and also sparked by his new book How Fiction Works, there's an interview with Wood at the Financial Times. A&L Daily tipped me off to both of these pieces initially. As previously noted, I'm looking forward to seeing what Wood does in How Fiction Works.

Perhaps as a result of the jumble of things coming in and out of focus for me this weekend, I also keep thinking about two (quite different) connections, perhaps parallels, that raise questions for me. First, I've been mentally connecting the various struggles to know how best to speak of or think about the late chess genius Bobby Fischer, given the nasty ideas he came to espouse, and the disgust expressed on some blogs not long ago at the revelation (to the bloggers concerned) that in his day, Dickens had expressed some pretty repulsive racist (even, some would say, genocidal) sentiments. I defended Dickens the writer on the grounds (basically) that his books have a life independent of Dickens the man. I'm not as comfortable putting Fischer the man to the side, but I'm not sure why. I suppose his achievement in chess has as much right to be considered apart from his personal failings as Dickens's accomplishment in literature--doesn't it?

And, quite unrelated to this little question, we've just finished watching the first three seasons of House on DVD (finally, we're all caught up!) and I'm trying to decide what I think about Dr. Cuddy as a representation of a woman in authority. Initially I was hugely irritated by her tight, revealing clothing--no successful professional woman would actually dress so provocatively except to provide ammunition for the endless succession of sexist jokes House makes at her expense, or so I thought. But I've been reading some of the stories about Hillary Clinton's anxieties about appearing too feminine (and thus unelectable, presumably) and I'm rethinking my first position. After all, she stands up to those "jokes" and maintains her authority (except, arguably, over House himself), getting taken seriously by everyone else in the hospital. OK, I still doubt the wisdom of some of the outfits, but perhaps there's something to be said for letting her actually be 'womanly' in her job without implying that it costs her all of her power. That said, I still think C. J. Cregg in The West Wing is the best attempt so far to depict a strong, smart, sexy, professional woman (though there are some weak moments in this depiction, especially early in the series). Allison Janney is amazing, of course, which helps.

Miscellaneous, as I said.