Joanna Trollope, A Village Affair

When I decided to take a break from more "serious" reading with A Village Affair, I wasn't really expecting the novel to reach towards the serious itself. I had read it before, but what I had retained was admiration for the clarity with which Trollope gives us the people she has devised: many (though not all) of her novels that I have read have struck me as achieving an enviable quality in their characters: they are enormously specific and individual and often intensely, even poignantly, believable. Here, Alice's father-in-law, Richard, seems especially well conceived. Everything he says communicates to us who he is and how he has lived, particularly in his marriage to a woman he persists in loving but who cannot, in her turn, recognize in him someone as complex and fully human as she is. He lives this hampered life in full knowledge of its limits, neither tragic nor stoic. Alice's discontent is the stuff of cliches; her affair seems contrived (by the author) to break up the seemingly calm surface, the routines and compromises of daily life. In fact, this is how Trollope's plots generally work: the ordinary people, the change or revelation, the repercussions. For me, it's the repercussions she does really well. Having set up her experiment in life, she works out plausibly how it will play out, and she does not sentimentalize--as, in this case, Alice's "coming alive" through a new and different experience of love creates more problems than it solves.

In this case, as in another of her novels that I think is very smart, Marrying the Mistress, Trollope sets her characters up to confront what is a central dilemma in many 19th-century novels as well, namely how to resolve the conflict between, or how to decide between, duty to self and duty to others. That she is aware of her predecessors in this investigation is indicated by the quotation from Adam Bede recited (OK, improbably) by one of the characters in A Village Affair. As that quotation forcefully indicates, George Eliot placed a high value on renunciation and on accepting (as gracefully as possible) the burden of duty: resignation to less than you want, or less than you can imagine, is a constant refrain, and this with no promise of rapturous happiness. Hence the melancholic tinge at the end of Romola, for instance, or Daniel Deronda, or, for all its lightning flashes of romantic fulfilment, Middlemarch. (Of course, famously, it is her heroines who must resign or, like Maggie Tulliver, die.)

Although much has changed socially and politically since George Eliot found it unrealistic to give Romola, Maggie, or Dorothea uncompromised happy endings, the struggle between what we want for ourselves and what is expected or demanded of us by others continues to be a staple of fiction. Though Trollope's scenario is much more contemporary, she too accepts that one's individual desire cannot (or not easily, or not ethically) be one's guiding principle, because of the "visible and invisible relations beyond any of which our present or prospective self is the centre" (Adam Bede). So Trollope, with admirable restraint, refuses a fairy tale ending for her protagonist, though, with a different kind of insistence that perhaps George Eliot would respect, she also pushes her out of the unsatisfactory life that was her reality before, and into what, given this context, seems like a narrative limbo, or a waiting room. This is not to say that Alice's single life is an incomplete one, but she herself acknowledges that it is not, in fact, what she really wanted--only what she was capable of achieving.

I think this novel makes an interesting comparison to another quiet novel about a woman reconsidering her life, Anne Tyler's Ladder of Years, which I have always admired. But Tyler, though far from offering simplistic fairy tales, offers her own version of the resignation narrative. In Ladder of Years, as in Back When We Were Grownups, it proves mistaken for the heroine to try to start a new life, however much she is, or believes she is, following the promptings of her innermost self. Again, the "visible and invisible relations" exert a powerful pressure, like the entangling webs of family and society in Middlemarch but perceived, overall, as more kindly, less petty and destructive. The plain litte room Delia takes and uses as a staging ground to reinvent her life is a room of her own, but her story is not rightly understood as being just about her own life ("was she alone," Dorothea asks herself). In these novels Tyler's women learn to appreciate the value of what they tried to leave, to see their own identities as having become inseparable from those of the others whose demands and complications hamper their desires. The vision seems starker in Trollope's novel ("Aga saga" though it certainly is).

Blogging Reservations

Today's New York Sun includes a short piece by Adam Kirsh on The Scorn of the Literary Blog. Kirsh is mostly writing about the much-noted rivalry between "professional" reviewers and literary bloggers, in the context of the also much-noted decline of book sections in print journalism. I don't have much to say about these broader contexts, but I am interested in Kirsh's remarks on the limitations of blogging as a form of literary criticism:

The blog form, that miscellany of observations, opinions, and links, is not well-suited to writing about literature, and it is no coincidence that there is no literary blogger with the audience and influence of the top political bloggers. For one thing, literature is not news the way politics is news — it doesn't offer multiple events every day for the blogger to comment on. For another, bitesized commentary, which is all the blog form allows, is next to useless when it comes to talking about books. Literary criticism is only worth having if it at least strives to be literary in its own right, with a scope, complexity, and authority that no blogger I know even wants to achieve. The only useful part of most book blogs, in fact, are the links to long-form essays and articles by professional writers, usually from print journals.

That last bit seems disingenuous, as the links in fact take us to electronic versions of the longer pieces which are themselves seamlessly integrated into the web versions of journals, which include many features typical of blogs, including opportunities to comment and links to other related materials.

I agree that it makes a difference that "literature is not news" and that this distinction has implications for the kind of criticism that works on blogs. Literature can be news, in the sense that new books come out all the time and one function of book reviews is to let readers know about them. But not all kinds of literary criticism serve this market-oriented function. It's not obvious to me that all blogs do either: many of the ones I've been reading don't aspire to that kind of timeliness, but rather offer commentary on a range of reading material. If a book is not news, does that mean writing about it lacks relevance? It lacks urgency, I suppose, but surely not interest.

It's also true that "bite-sized commentary" is common, but I've been reading a number of blogs that offer more of a mouthful--not in every post, perhaps, but often enough to make it seem unfair to dismiss all blogging as inevitably superficial. The literary posts on Amardeep Singh's blog, for instance, can be quite extensive and detailed, as can those offered by The Reading Experience or The Little Professor.

Not coincidentally, I've used as my examples blogs maintained by writers who are are highly trained as professional readers and writers (two of them are English professors, one is a 'reformed' academic). While academic credentials are not the only things that can establish someone's credibility as a literary critic, it's hard to argue that the opinions of these three lack "authority," even when offered in these less formal venues. Further, they set an example of thoughtful, historically-informed commentary that helps expose the inadequacy of the "anyone can say anything" culture of Amazon.Com reviewing and the many more slap-dash reading blogs. It's hard not to see their efforts as complementary to those of the "professional writers" whose work Kirsh prefers.

And precisely because, as Kirsh says, "the whole point of a review is to set one mind against another, and see what sparks fly," surely the bloggers who offer their expertise as generously as the three I've mentioned are doing us all a great service by putting their literary encounters out there for the rest of us to learn from and participate in.

Wish List and Back Lists

I haven't done much serious reading since finishing An Equal Music; I was so absorbed by that novel that I haven't been able to settle on what to follow it with, so I'm taking a break with a little Joanna Trollope. The problem is not lack of choice, though, but a surfeit of attractive options, including not just the books already ripening on my shelves but my wish list of books I'm eager to read for one reason or another but have yet to get my hands on. Currently leading this wish list:

1. Ian McEwan, Chesil Beach (is it just me, or between Saturday and his new novel, does McEwan have a bit of a "Dover Beach" thing going on?)
2. James Wood, Life Against God
   
3. Ahdaf Soueif, In the Eye of the Sun
   
4. V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas
5. Anne Tyler, Digging for American
6. Claire Messud, The Emperor's Children
7. Elizabeth von Arnim, Enchanted April
8. Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy
9. Laila Lalami, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits
10. Rachel Cusk, Arlington Park

A number of these are fairly recent novels I have been reading a lot about in review sections and lit blogs. Some of them are older novels that I have learned about or become curious about belatedly. In fact, one of the questions that has been on my mind as I explore the world of literary writing online is how to break out of the 'new releases' or 'hot properties' cycle and find out about books you did not hear about back when they first came out. I have been frustrated sometimes when I've been motivated by the hype around a new novel to snatch it up and read it with great expectations only to find it disappointing (this is frequently my reaction to books I buy on the basis of glowing reviews in The Globe and Mail, a caution I now take with me to the bookstore). But there seem to be factors in the book industry, and certainly in the big chain stores, that make it difficult to discern which books are standing the test of time.

I think this problem relates to a question I asked earlier about whether lit blogging must be a form of literary journalism. Are blogs in fact best or most useful if they are opportunistic or occasional, offering timely responses to new material? If book reviews are buying guides, then there's some reason for them to address primarily new options, and lots of reasons for them not to spend time on out-of-print options, though there are a lot of titles in between these two extremes. Blogs seem to be (or at least can be) less tied to the book market, more driven by literary than by commercial interests. Maybe this is even a particularly valuable thing bloggers can do, keeping "backlist" titles from going stale.

Vikram Seth, An Equal Music

What an extraordinary, intense, poignant book. The central love story is compelling as a romance but would be conventional, perhaps even trite, if it weren't entangled with another story about a different kind of love--for music. Michael's desire for Julia, which borders on the obsessive, is itself a musical passion, aroused by and motivated by her playing, or their playing together. But his desire for his violin comes to seem like a purer form of desire, for something that transcends the impurities of human relationships or even human characters, with their flaws and imbalances. People (alas!) cannot be tuned to accommodate different needs, to make new or different combinations, new beauties. How utopian chamber music comes to seem here, as the members of the quartet ease away from their messy lives through the simplicity of a scale played in unison, until they are ready and generous enough to take their turns, to share the work and the pleasure of the music. But though I felt it this way, the novel itself is never sentimental. In his "Author's Note" Seth remarks that he felt "gripped with anxiety" at the thought of writing about music, to him "dearer even than speech." Perhaps as a result, he uses a spare but high-pressure style, relentlessly paced, never indulgent; the moments of grace appear as just that, moments in a turbulent, complicated world, themselves achieved by hard work, constant rehearsal, trial and error. Even the risky conceit of Julia's hearing loss is handled coolly; like Michael, we shy away from pity even as we wonder how and why she can continue to make music she can hear fully only in her head. Beethoven too, we know, of course made music even after he could not hear it himself. In Julia's case (she's a fictional character, after all) we might ask if there is a metaphorical or symbolic dimension. Characters lose their sight in order to gain insight; is music here also a state of mind or perception from which sensory experience is a distraction? "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter"? But in the end it does seem to be the "heard melodies" that matter here, outweighing and outlasting every other desire, met or unmet, every painful, joyful love:

Music, such music, is a sufficient gift. Why ask for happiness; why hope not to grieve? It is enough, it is to be blessed enough, to live from day to day and to hear such music--not too much, or the soul could not sustain it--from time to time.

Some love stories leave us longing (no doubt in vain) for that "happily ever after" ending, the miraculously harmonious human relationship. This one has left me longing for Bach and Schubert.

Follow-up: To my joy, it turns out there is a companion CD for this novel. I eagerly await its arrival and, eventually, a second reading of the novel complete with soundtrack.

Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

I really did not like this book. I can see all kinds of literary things going on in it, some of the writing is beautiful, especially the elegaic concluding section, and all of it is artful. I can also see thematically interesting things going on, especially with the self-conscious inquiry into whether the suicides are symptoms of a historical malaise or a cultural decline. But none of that offsets how disturbing and morbid the basic premise is, how voyeuristic (falling just the wrong side of that fine line between exploring and representing male adolescent fantasies, and indulging them), and how exploitive and prurient. Among other things, Eugenides does seem to be challenging his readers to consider why or how they interpret stories, how information and observation is drawn on selectively as the narrator and his friends draw on their "evidence" about the lives of the Lisbon sisters. Again, interesting. But while I don't think the novel glamorizes or makes light of suicide (it is, I'd say, despite everything, a sad and even tragic novel), it uses it to do these arty intellectual things. All five girls are objectified in life and death, and again, for me, the novel falls just on the wrong side of being about objectification vs. being objectifying. We have no idea who these girls are or what actually motivates them: their deaths matter because of how they affect others and how they are read by others. Fairly early in the novel there's a comment about the hell of being a girl at that time, but these girls do not live anything like a representative life, so again, they are being used as symbols. Now, I know better than to talk as if the Lisbon sisters are real people somehow being abused by an unjust novelist...but there's something awry with the imagination that set up this story, something uncomfortable about taking this premise in the first place.

Kermode, The Art of Telling

Today again, I have time only to post a couple of short excerpts from my current reading:

Their ['licensed practitioners'] right to practise is indicated by arbitrary signs, not only certificates, robes, and titles, but also professional jargons. The activities of such persons, whether diagnostic or exegetical, are privileged, and they have access to senses that do not declare themselves to the laity. Moreover they are subject, in professional matters, to no censure but that of other licensed practitioners acting as a body; the opinion of the laity is of no consequence whatever, a state of affairs which did not exist before the institution now under consideration firmly established itself--as anyone may see by looking with a layman's eye on the prose its members habitually write, and comparing it with the prose of critics who still thought of themselves as writing for an educated general public, for la cour et la ville. (170)

We wean candidates from the habit of literal reading. Like the masters who reserved secret senses in the second century, we are in the business of conducting readers out of the sphere of the manifest. Our institutional readings are not those of the outsiders, so much is self-evident; though it is only when we see some intelligent non-professional confronted by a critical essay from our side of the fence that we see how esoteric we are. (182)

Literature and/as Faith

Excerpts from my recent reading in James Wood's The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief and Christopher Hitchens's god is Not Great:

Nervously aware that they have killed off Christianity as a faith, [Arnold and Renan] must reinstate it as a religion, as a guide to life, as a poetry ... the poeticizing of nondivine religion was a characteristically nineteenth-century gesture. (Wood 246)

We [atheists] are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books. (Hitchens 5)

The study of literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt and confected. (Hitchens 283)

The Hitchens comments would make provocative epigraphs for a seminar on literature and morality; Wood points to the genealogy of claims such as Hitchens's.

The Occasion for Blogging

There has been a lot of public discussion recently about blogs in the context of the decline of book sections and book reviews in newspapers; much of it has consisted of attacks on literary blogs from more traditional writers and sources and defensive responses from bloggers (see, for instance, this response on The Reading Experience to an LA Times column that promised contemptuously to write "in language even a busy blogger can understand"). I have sympathies on both sides of this fence, as I agree that while anyone can write a book review or literary commentary, not anyone can write one that has interest and merit. In general, my position is simply the more people out there reading books and writing about them, the better all round. The more specific issue I've been wondering about is whether blogging is really only suited to be a form of literary journalism, focused on new releases and current authors in the way that book reviews are, or whether it is possible or useful for blogs also to write more in the spirit of literary scholarship or criticism of past literature. I'm also thinking more about the nature of literary blogs more generally, while well aware that so far I have still become aware of only a fraction of the options and styles out there.

One typical feature of successful blogging is apparently that it is incessant: unless they are constantly updated, it seems blogs lose their currency, their momentum and, presumably, their readers. I have already found that, at least for someone with other work to do, the rapidity of thinking and writing required to put up new posts even once or twice a week makes drafting and polishing impossible, which inevitably affects the kind and quality of writing you can do. This situation would differ, of course, for someone working full-time on a blog. It could also be overcome, or ameliorated, by writing off-line and not posting anything until it has been tidied up, though this too assumes that blogging is not a sideline to a "real" job. It may be as well that depending on the kind of site and voice you are trying to establish, you can take your time and post longer, more thoughtful pieces. It's not as if there are deadlines, after all, and besides, who's really reading most blogs all that frequently anyway, much less one like mine that hardly anyone even knows about? I started quite deliberately writing without a lot of second thoughts, to free myself up from academic hyper-self-consciousness, but all those first impressions are starting to seem inadequate, especially when the book at issue (The Map of Love, for instance) is quite complex, formally and thematically. I'm reaching a point at which I need to consider what I hope to accomplish by writing my posts in the first place and maybe experiment with some more in-depth analyses. But to do that, I would have to take the time and justify it professionally.

Another notable feature of the blogs I am most familiar with so far is their focus on fairly new releases and on the state of the current book and literary worlds. A next step for me will be looking around for people who write about the literature of the past. Literary journalism differs from literary criticism, it is usually assumed, in being prompted by an occasion needing a fairly prompt response to give it relevance. Criticism takes more of a long view. But without that occasion, that immediacy, what appeal does criticism have for the non-academic reader, especially in a medium like the internet? Is there an audience online for writing about Dickens or George Eliot? And what could be said that would matter, or appeal? The kind of stuff that gets written for academic audiences apparently (unsurprisingly) alienates almost everyone else, while the kind of stuff that gets written for popular audiences often seems trivial or redundant to those who read the academic stuff. And yet...books such as John Sutherland's How to Read a Novel or Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer do get published, so there is presumably some interest out there in enhancing one's experience of reading "the classics." One approach might be to look for the contemporary relevance in past authors, as I attempted to do with my paper on George Eliot as "Moralist for the 21st Century." But that means only highlighting authors and texts that lend themselves to modern purposes, which gets pretty tendentious and unsatisfactory pretty fast.

A number of my posts have been in the spirit of "work in progress" notes, thinking aloud though (maybe oddly) in public--partly in the hopes, of course, of eventually getting some input (a fading hope). At this point, especially with my sabbatical coming to an end, I need to start putting my thoughts together about what I've been learning by reading and (in this modest way) writing outside the academic box.

Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love

For about the first half of this novel, I was tremendously impressed and moved by it. Whatever it takes to communicate what feels like an authentic, rather than contrived, sense of history (see previous posts on historical fiction), Soueif has; she makes both Lady Anna's past experience and the experience and perspective of Isabel and Amal in the (more or less) present seem alive, real. Isabel's exploration, while running a nice parallel to Anna's, turns out to be less important than Amal's; while Isabel is in her own way experiencing the exotic world of others, Amal is taking another look at her own world, in the illumination provided by her experience of Westerners, from her husband to Isabel and Anna. Soueif seemed especially good, to me, at showing the complexities of identity, the impossibility of pointing in any one direction and saying, "look, there, that is (or he or she is) truly Egyptian." But at the same time I felt the novel yearned for an idea of Eygpt, an idea of an Egyptian identity, that could endure the cataclysms as well as the slower erosions of history, cross-cultural conflict and change, and just time. Like Scott, Soueif avoids nostalgia, but in her landscapes especially there was a hint of something like it.

The two historical stories are interwoven artfully in ways that keep the reader thinking about relationships and continuities. Is Isabel looking for the same thing that Anna is? Anna looks for something like redemption, for her nation's sins including those committed, however unhappily, by her first husband; she looks for freedom from rules about who she can be; she looks (of course, this being a novel) for love. Isabel starts with love, with Omar, but how are we to read her being struck so fast with feeling for him? She goes to Egypt in part to understand "where he's coming from," as the saying goes, but in this case, literally, as if knowing his homeland will tell her his character--which, it seems, it does, because his sympathies and loyalties, his politics, are the result of his history and the history of the Middle East. One of Soueif's goals is clearly to educate her Western readers about international politics from a non-Western point of view, especially about the effects of colonialism in the early story, and the conflict over Palestine in the contemporary one. In the way novelists are often credited with, she puts human faces on what too easily become abstractions, such as redrawn borders. She also to some extent allows for the humanity on more than one side of controversies, showing up the inadequacy of single-minded advocacy on any one side.

By the end of the novel, though, I didn't think she was able to sustain the weight of the political and historical detail she included: the story began to suffer as conversations or descriptions of gatherings required long lists of names and allegiances, factions and parties (always unnatural, as in ordinary conversation we don't have to explain who everyone is). Sections seemed more like textbooks, and the momentum of the plot suffered. I also thought she did not use Anna well enough. Here she gave us an Englishwoman unconventional enough to ride across the Sinai dressed as an Arab man, whose very feistiness is part of what draws Sharif to her. But once she's married, she accepts entirely the life of an Egyptian wife, including a degree of segregation and dependence that would surely have galled even a more conservative Englishwoman of the early 1900s. Her one 'rebellion' is by mistake, when she withdraws her own money from the bank only to learn she has thereby shamed Sharif by implying he does not provide for her. Rather than resisting this implication as a misrepresentation of the facts, she apologizes abjectly. How much more interesting if she had continued to defy expectations and tested the compatibility of her "English" values with the tolerance of her new Egyptian family, especially as the intolerance of the English community for her is shown to be complete. Would her new kin have loved her so easily if she had not adopted their values and customs? It's true that Soueif is at pains to depict life in the haramlek as having its own kind of freedom, dignity, and beauty, and that Anna and Sharif become collaborators in the reports they send back to England. But Anna's rapid embrace of all things Egyptian seemed like a lost opportunity to me, and her story became fairly boring, until the melodrama of Sharif's violent death (leaving the killer's identity ambiguous was a nice touch that allowed, again, for the multiple complexities of politics and allegiances). Amal's struggle to negotiate the violent realities of contemporary Egypt held more dramatic interest and was movingly rendered. What are we to assume has happened to Omar at the end?

James Wood, Selected Criticism

Some years ago philosopher Martha Nussbaum lamented the state of contemporary literary (academic) criticism, observing that it does not communicate "the sense that we are social beings puzzling out, in times of great moral difficulty, what might be, for us, the best way to live." She hungers for "writing about literature that talks of human lives and choices as if they matter to us all." (Both quotations are from her essay "Perceptive Equlibrium: Literary Theory and Ethical Theory," included in Love's Knowledge.) A similar dissatisfaction with the nature of academic criticism motivates my own current efforts to find other ways and other examples of writing about literature. In the essays and reviews I have just read by James Wood, I have found what I was looking for. Wood draws on a rich knowledge of literary traditions and is not afraid to be erudite, or to use technical vocabulary to explicate literary styles and devices; anyone who can (so aptly, too) describe Isabel Archer and Fanny Price as "highly literate hermeneuts of the material that we, too, are reading" (in his essay "The Unwinding Stair") is not writing "Lit Lite" or "Classics for Dummies." But--or do I mean "And"?--he combines this kind of unabashedly intellectual analysis with reflections at once personal and philosophical, dispassionate and fully engaged with the conversations the books seem to him to get started. Though I have gathered up some examples of Wood's comments on literary criticism and theory more generally, I am most interested in how he deals with specific examples, and of these, I was most impressed with his reviews of McEwan's Saturday and Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. I thought these would make good test cases, as I have read the novels recently and thought about them a fair amount.

I'll give just a one long example, from the conclusion of his Ishiguro review. After a thoughtful discussion of the novel's story, its narration, and Ishiguro's "studied husbanding of affect" in this chillingly quiet account of clones raised, we gradually realize, to serve as organ donors for "normals," Wood asks, "what if we are more like Tommy and Kathy than we at first imagined?"

Everything they do is dipped in futility, because the great pool of death awaits them. They possess individuality, and seem to enjoy it (they fall in love, they have sex, they read George Eliot), but that individuality is a mirage, a parody of liberty. Their lives have been written in advance ... Their freedom is a tiny hemmed thing, their lives a vast stitch-up.
We begin the novel horrified by their difference from us and end it thoughtful about their similarity to us. After all, heredity writes a great deal of our destiny for us; and death soon enough makes us orphans. ... To be assured of death at twenty-five or so, as [these cloned] children are, seems to rob life of all its savor and purpose. But why do we persist in the idea that to be assured of death at seventy or eighty or ninety returns to life all its savor and purpose?

And from that he can return to Kafka, and Beckett, and Hardy ("When Dead": "This fleeting life-brief blight / Will have gone past / When I resume my old and right / Place in the Vast"). From the uncanny ordinariness of the narrator's voice, so seemingly unsuited to the extraordinary nature of her story, Ishiguro and Wood together make us look again at the whole idea of the ordinary, and in particular the most certain, "normal" thing of all, death. While the experience and the focus is explicitly textual, the meaning is intensely human. Something very similar happens in the end of Wood's review of Saturday: "At the last, the novel's literalist hero delicately gathers his very literal Saturday, and makes it metaphorical, emblematic; all our Saturdays will become Sundays, as all our yesterdays have lit the way to dusty death."

But what is Wood's contribution here? Why is anything further than Ishiguro's original telling (as Wood says, "curious, surprisingly suggestive and tender") necessary? Wood and Ishiguro meditate on the purpose of life, but what, on this example, is the purpose of criticism? (As my students sometimes ask, rather querulously, "if that's what the author meant, why didn't he just say so?") One thing I think Wood does is model a thoughtful, sensitive, well-informed reading, in the spirit of "did you notice this? what about this?" He also takes Ishiguro's offering and gives it a different kind of life: the conversation is not over when the book ends, and Ishiguro's is not the final word. Now we see something that Ishiguro has shown us, or as he has perceived it, and we can talk about it too. Ishiguro has described the novelist's work as a way of saying "It's like this, isn't it? Don't you see it this way too?" (I'm paraphrasing)--and so when he's done talking, we see what we think, or say something back. But Wood is also interested in the novel as an art form, in how and why specific kinds of narration, for instance, create certain effects, or generate (or control) affect and emotion. The trained eye sees better, understands the alternatives better. In the mini-series "From the Earth to the Moon," there's a wonderful episode in which a geologist is assigned to train the astronauts to collect rock samples from the moon. The crucial step is getting them to see, not just undifferentiated rocks, but specific kinds of rocks that tell their own stories and accrue meaning and significance through their shapes, composition, and location. Critics (any experts, really) help less experienced readers in the same way, telling them some of the things they can look for and why they might be interesting. They train you in appreciation and make you excited about the aesthetic and intellectual experience of reading attentively.

In an earlier post I quoted Denis Donoghue remarking that contemporary critics do not allow writers their own themes. Clearly, Wood takes a different approach. One way I might describe it is that he is thinking through the literature he is reading--not against it. One effect is that his own writing comes to sound like those he writes about (as in the example above from his Saturday review, which in turns has--fittingly and I'm sure deliberately--the beautiful cadences of the ending of Joyce's "The Dead"). It is a sympathetic, rather than symptomatic, reading, though this is not to say there is no room for criticism in the narrower sense of disagreement or evaluation. For instance, he thinks parts of Never Let Me Go lapse "from picture to diagram" (as GE put it).

I'm interested to see what a bad review from him looks like [update: I've seen one now, with his review of Updike's Terrorist--ouch], and I'm also very interested in reading more of his comments on the relationship between his work and that of academic critics.

The Company We Keep as Readers

Following through on the thread I outlined in my last post, I have been reading Jonathan Franzen's very interesting and thought-provoking 1996 Harper's essay. I actually feel that in some ways this piece (and the Marcus and Ozick that follow) are having a conversation that's not really for me, mostly because they are novelists, for one thing, and focusing on very contemporary texts and contexts about which, except as an ordinary citizen, I have no expertise and no vantage point from which I am comfortable making pronouncements. What I'm getting a better sense of, though, is how literature matters and how it is discussed outside the academic contexts these writers are so uniformly dismissive of. (Taking his turn at bat, Franzen, recalling his experience teaching creative writing, reports that some of his best students, "repelled by the violence done to their personal experience of reading, had vowed never to take a literature class again"--as far as I can tell, he is depressed, not by their solipsistic retreat in defense of their "personal experience," but by their having had to suffer such "violence." "Come to my classes," I am tempted to protest, and yet how can I be sure that my own efforts will not also offend against this amorphous personal standard? Other students make fun of the "patently awful utopian-feminist novel they were being forced to read for an honors seminar in Women and Fiction," but isn't there value in testing your ideas of what counts as "patently awful," even if in the end you don't change your mind? Isn't one reason to go to literature classes that you will read and learn about books beyond those that conform to your personal prejudices, including aesthetic ones? If they were being forced, not only to read it, but also to applaud it, that's a somewhat different problem, of course.)

I'm still thinking and learning about the larger issues at stake in all of these pieces. For now, I ll note that I found his report of the findings of linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath on "serious readers" fascinating. In particular, she talks (by his report) about the way in which books provide a community for their readers, especially for those who being their lives as "social isolates"--willing but not entirely able to share your perceptions and experiences and interests with those around you. What do the readers she studied find in, or feel they gain from, their books? Substance, she says: "Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive--my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity... Reading that book gives me substance." And their reading provides "a sense of having company in this great human enterprise, in the continuity, in the persistence, of the great conflicts." This is something like what moral philosophers like Martha Nussbaum theorize reading complex fiction does for us, so it is interesting to find readers recognizing it for themselves.

I'm not sure how any of this material helps me see why anyone would read literary criticism, academic or otherwise, or how the kind of expertise someone like me possesses might be put in the service of these serious readers. To hear these non-academic writers talk, you'd think nobody wants academics at all...

Academic Criticism Criticized (and Defended)

Recently, Daniel Green wrote a response on his blog to a piece by Cynthia Ozick in the April 2007 issue of Harper's. The Ozick essay, called "Literary Entrails," is itself a follow-up to two earlier discussions of the fate of the novel in the modern era: one by Jonathan Franzen (Harper's, April 1996) and a reply to Franzen by Ben Marcus (Harper's, this time in October 2005). So far I've read the Ozick and rounded up the Franzen piece, to be read soon. I've also been prompted, mostly by things Ozick says about him, to look up the work of James Wood, about which I expect I will be posting soon.

My main interest in this thread is that both Green and Ozick are roundly dismissive of academic criticism (as distinguished from literary criticism or reviewing). As noted in previous posts, I'm rounding up discussions and evaluations of these different modes of writing about literature. Also as noted in previous posts, despite my own dissatisfaction with much academic criticism, I bristle (and also wonder) at the harsh tone taken towards literary academics. Here's Ozick, after a paragraph on book clubs (she finds them sort of sweet, it seems, innocent amateurs) and then one on Amazon's anyone-can-do-it method of customer reviews ("a fetid sea, where both praise and blame are leveled by tsunamis of incapacity"):

(Academic theorists equipped with advanced degrees, who make up yet another species of limited reviewers, are worthy only of a parenthesis. Their confining ideologies, heavily politicized and rendered in a kind of multi-syllabic pidgin, have for decades marinated literature in dogma. Of these inflated dons and doctors it is futile to speak, since, unlike the hardier customer reviewers, they are destined to vanish like the fog they evoke.)

Green considers this desciption "accurate" and hopes her prediction (of our immanent dissipation) will be fulfilled.

There are many different possible responses to such sweeping polemical condemnations, as well as to the many other arguments and observations made in both essays. My own recent article in English Studies in Canada makes some related points, too--and also works a little with a fog metaphor. For now, though, I want to point out a contribution that at least some of the "dons and doctors" make to a project Ozick and Green support: the development of a thoughtful reading audience for literature, of readers (not just critics or reviewers) capable of engaging with literature responsibly and substantially, at the level of form (what I take Green to mean, more or less, when he asks for more attention to "aesthetics") as well as theme and plot. Ozick in particular talks at length about the decline of readers--and she quotes a passage from a recent essay by Denis Donoghue that I think would ring true for most English professors, as it certainly did for me:

When I started teaching ... many years ago, I urged students to believe that the merit of reading a great poem, play, or novel consisted in the pleasure of gaining access to deeply imagined lives other than their own. Over the years, that opinion ... seems to have lost much of its persuasive force. Students seem to be convinced that their own lives are the primary and sufficient incentive. ... they want to talk either about themselves or about large-scale public themes, independent of the books they are supposedly reading.

Franzen, Ozick says, believes the new generation of students "will never evolve into discriminating readers." Yet, though teaching can include this kind of dispiriting encounter with "egotism and moralizing politicized self-righteousness," literature classes also provide a great opportunity to challenge these limitations, to bring students into contact with not just "deeply imagined lives" but crafted forms that can startle them into looking again, at themselves, at their world, at language. I too find much recent published criticism pretty unappealing, and many aspects of professional academic discourse alienating, for a range of reasons. But I don't think what goes on in my classroom, or in the classrooms of a great many "dons and doctors," deserves to be so sweepingly ignored or distorted. Here's a similar bit from the "statement of purpose" with which Green launched his blog: "the academy, once entrusted with the job of engaging with works of literature, has mostly abandoned it altogether in favor of 'cultural studies' and other forms of political posturing." Again, however accurate this may be as a description of academic criticism (and that's surely arguable), "the academy" (not, of course, monolithic in the way Green implies) does a lot of other things too, much of which involves exposing students to a variety of writers and styles, thinking about literary history and the history of genres, learning a vocabulary to talk about how writers get different kinds of things done and to what ends--aesthetically, ethically, and yes, also (but not exclusively) politically. One thing those of us in "the academy" do is send at least some of our students out into the "real" world excited and inquring and serious about literature, and equipped with some knowledge and some expertise as readers. I like to point out to my students that they will be assigned "required" reading for only a small fraction of their reading lives--after that, the choices will be theirs, the engagement and the satisfaction only as deep as they choose to make it. It's my goal to give them some tools and strategies to go deeper if they want to, as well as to broaden their textual horizons. Ozick (rightly, I think) laments that "Amazon encourages naive and unqualified readers...to expose their insipidities to a mass audience." You don't need an English degree to be insightful about books--but some education as a reader is surely one way to become the kind of reader novelists such as Ozick (or, for that matter, critics such as Green) hope to have.

Margaret Oliphant, Hester

I am grateful for having been pointed to Hester by the anonymous responses to my earlier posting on Miss Marjoribanks It's true: Hester is a better novel, in the depth and interest of its characterization, in the unity and momentum of its plot, and in its treatment of women's roles and options. Catherine and Hester are both impressive characters--Catherine perhaps more so, if only in her divergence from the usual run of female roles and the non-ironic presentation of her power and business competence (can we consider her a kind of rebuttal or alternative to Lady Catherine in Pride and Prejudice?).

As with Miss Marjoribanks (and most Trollope novels that I've read), Hester leaves me feeling that thematic or philosophical interpretations are somewhat beside the point. The editors of my Oxford edition remark that Oliphant is "closer to the mysterious ordinariness of Trollope" than to George Eliot, Dickens, or Gaskell, and their introductory essay emphasizes the commitment of her realism to the ultimate complexity, inexplicability, and inconclusiveness of life. Things happen in the novel, they argue, in a sort of messy way as they do in real life, with people operating on mixed and often inarticulate motives and events unfolding in ways that reveal the limits of individual control over contexts and circumstances. On their reading, the form (or formlessness) of her stories replicates these qualities of real life and thus they have been underappreciated (as, indeed, Oliphant herself predicted). In Hester, much more than in Miss Marjoribanks, the structure of the story actually seemed quite tight, but at the end I did still feel uncertain what it was all ultimately about, just as in Trollope novels you read along (and along, and along) and end up feeling you've followed people's lives from one point to another with many incidents and excursions along the way but without any guiding idea except that people's lives are interesting and we can (and should) take a sympathetic interest in their details. To carry off such fiction and make it compelling is certainly an accomplishment-- but is it a great artistic accomplishment?

I still have two days to decide for sure which Oliphant novel I will use in my "Victorian Women Writers" seminar. Miss Marjoribanks has many elements that present interesting comparisons to the other readings I've chosen, especially Middlemarch, as Lucilla (like Dorothea) has ambitions to do something that matters with her life and even ends up living out something like Dorothea's philanthropic fantasy. I don't see Hester complementing the other readings quite as clearly, but then it seems fair to have Oliphant represented by the best of her novels that I've read. And Hester herself stands up well to Jane Eyre, Margaret Hale, and Dorothea as a feisty heroine trying to figure out how to make a life for herself, defying expectations and facing moral crises along the way.

Philosophy and Literature; or, Proof that Everything Old is New Again...

...even in literary criticism. Reading unsuspectingly along in David Masson's 1859 British Novelists and Their Styles, I came across this interesting bit:

Before novels or poems can stand the inspection of that higher criticism which every literary work must be able to pass ere it can rank in the first class, their authors must be at least abreast of the best speculation of their time. Not that what we want from novelists and poets is further matter of speculation. What we want from them is matter of imagination; but the imagination of a well furnished mind is one thing, and that of a vacuum is another. [RM: hear hear!] ... That a writer may be fitted to frame imaginary histories illustrating the deeper problems of human education, and to be a sound casuist in the most difficult questions of human experience, it is necessary that he should bring to his task not only an average acquaintance with the body of good current doctrine, but also an original speculative faculty. In such cases, the desirable arrangement might be either that our novelists were philosophers, or that philosophers were our novelists.

This is the first such explicitly "interdisciplinary" assertion of this kind I have come across in the 19th-century material I've been reading around in, although of course George Eliot's ideas as well as her novels (most of them later than Masson's book) work out just such an integration of speculation and aesthetics.

Trying to imagine more precisely what Masson (or anyone) might mean by (or how he might justify) putting such demands on a novelist raises what has always been a niggling question for me when I consider the whole project of literary analysis or criticism--just who do we think novelists are that we care so much about what they say about all kinds of big important issues? We put a lot of weight--or pressure--on the novels we study when we inquire into problems such as "does Charlotte Bronte advocate women's rights in Jane Eyre at the expense of racial justice?" or "can a middle-class novelist like Elizabeth Gaskell depict working-class grievances without being patronising?" (to give hasty examples of fairly typical approaches in my own field these days). We seem to have high expectations that what Bronte or Gaskell says or does will be significant and thus is worth explicating, and that these explications or interpretations are worth arguing over (and over and over). Is the working assumption that theirs are the offerings of "well-furnished minds"? How can we tell? Is that part of what we're trying to find out when we study them? What if we end up thinking otherwise? Can aesthetic judgments survive such a discovery? (My preliminary answer accords with what I think Masson would say too, which is, sure they can, but we have to then consider the writer below the first rank--for me, this would be what happens with Hardy, say, whose philosophy I find confused, or at least confusing, but whose novels move and interest me very much.)

In any case, I find I am quite sympathetic to Masson's emphasis on intellectual requirements for novelistic value. Earlier in British Novelists he remarks,

the measure of the value of any work of fiction, ultimately and on the whole, is the worth of the speculation, the philosophy, on which it rests, and which has entered into the conception of it. . . . No artist, I believe, will, in the end, be found to be greater as an artist than he was as a thinker.

He goes on to explain that the resulting novel need not be explicitly philosophical or speculative, and that the philosophy may express itself indirectly "through the medium and in the language of his art" (as we would say, through its form, not necessarily through its content) and that the artist need not be self-consciously laying out a theory (as GE would say, all the better, in fact, if the novelist does not "lapse from the picture to the diagram"). But that thought, that ideas, (and not just feeling or sound or colour or other aspects) should be granted priority seems to me an admirable standard for deciding which novels really are the most valuable.

Francine Prose, A Changed Man

I picked this novel up partly because I've been reading Prose's Reading Like A Writer with some interest, partly because its premise sounded interesting and provocative ('reformed' neo-Nazi goes to work at human rights organization run by Holocaust survivor), and partly, I have to admit, because how could I resist a novel that takes one of its epigraphs from Middlemarch? After I finished it I felt that this last impulse was the one least fulfilled by my reading experience. Prose's style is engaging, as is her story, but I was propelled along more by curiosity about what might happen (by plot, in other words, and to a lesser extent by character) than by any sense of unfolding moral revelation or insight. Perhaps that is too much to expect of a comic or satirical novel--but once you've invoked Dorothea's belief that "by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are ... widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower" you've rather raised your reader's expectations about the aims and ideals of what is to follow. I wonder if choosing to approach her topics through comedy was a mistake on Prose's part. I have some sympathy with the Victorian reviewer who was uncomfortable with Thackeray's depiction of vice:

We don’t say that a vicious or even a degraded nature is not a fit subject for the artist,—no doubt it is [says W. C. Roscoe]; we do not say it is an unfit subject even for comedy; but we do say it ought not to be comically treated.

My reaction to Raymond in particular is about the same: his habits of mind just don't strike me as funny, and yet they are used to comic purposes and treated with unseemly (there's a good Victorian word) humour.

My main source of dissatisfaction with A Changed Man, though, had to do with the characterization of Vincent. I don't think Prose motivated his initial journey to Laslow's foundation adequately. Over the course of the novel we get many versions of the epiphany that supposedly turned him from a lukewarm neo-Nazi (already a difficult category to imagine) to an opportunistic and finally a sincere advocate for moral regeneration. Most of these versions, we learn, are not the whole truth. But the drug-induced euphoria that seems to be the real inspiration doesn't explain enough, and just what he thinks he is doing when he first enters Laslow's lobby is not well enough explained. In a way, it doesn't matter all that much because we simply need to accept the premise of the book (his break from his skinhead past) and then appreciate the effects of his presence and his new role as poster boy for Laslow's "One Heart at a Time" project on him and the other characters. But since I didn't believe in him very fully anyway, I didn't believe in his transformation. If he was so half-hearted anyway, too, where's the real drama of his seeing the error of his ways? Raymond has no parallel moral breakthrough; to give him one would have put too much pressure on the novel's serious elements, perhaps, and been too idealistic for a novel that emphasizes imperfection and 'grey areas,' but Vincent seems a little too easily and conveniently cured by the cognitive therapy strategies he has picked up in his anger management sessions. Is it unreasonable of me to think that given what we do know about his past, including his past moral and ideological commitments, it's facile to set him up, even from Bonnie's perspective, as a better father figure for Bonnie's kids than their mid-life crisis fool of a father? In the interview material at the end of my edition of the novel, Prose remarks that the book requires us to set aside our preconceptions about the characters (based, for instance, on their histories and primary identities, e.g. skinhead, Holocaust survivor) and concentrate on who they are specifically or individually. For this approach to work for me, though, I need a deeper, better contextualized and more serious accounting of who they are. (Compare what GE does with Bulstrode's culpability and efforts to become a new man, for instance, and if you think it's an unfair comparison, well, Prose is the one who invokes GE in the first place...)

Is it Vincent or Bonnie who represents Dorothea's philosophy? Both? Or is it the novel overall, in which the people are basically blundering around but trying, with mixed success and often against their own weaker and more selfish impulses, to figure out what the right thing is and do it? What's the point about Laslow? It's daring, in a snide sort of way, to show his faults and capacity for selfish and petty behaviour--fair enough, surviving the Holocaust does not guarantee that you will be a saint or a moral giant. The "telescopic philanthropy" thread was clever, too, though the human rights work Laslow's foundation does is hardly comparable to the absurd efforts of Mrs Jellyby. Bonnie's well-drawn, as are her sons, but to what thematic purpose?

I think my overall reaction is that Prose had an original conception that has great potential for developing the "widening the skirts of light" theme, but the satiric presentation or treatment of the material and the relative superficiality of both characterization and context mean the novel is lighter, more trivial, less interesting, than the issues involved deserve.

Back to Work

It's not because I haven't been reading that I haven't posted anything here in a couple of weeks: I've been on vacation in my real home town, beautiful Vancouver, and talking about books with real live people for a while--kind of a nice change, since (absent any comments on my posts) writing things up for this blog seems like speaking into a void, or just talking to myself. Anyway, I'll be putting up some thoughts soon on The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which I finished just before I left (good book!), Goodnight Nobody, which I bought to read on the plane (mildly entertaining), and A Changed Man, by Francine Prose, which I am still finishing up (interesting, a bit quirky). It was a treat and a terrible temptation to browse in the many wonderful bookstores in Vancouver, especially my traditional favourites, Duthie's and Hagar Books--and, of course, Vancouver Kidsbooks.

What does a novelist do for us?

Partly prompted by a recent debate in the comments section of Bookninja over Yann Martel's recent challenge to the Prime Minister (which led some contributors to the site to debate the importance of literature)--and partly just by my own interest in the question, here's an excerpt from an essay by Leslie Stephen called "The Moral Element in Literature" that I have been editing for the anthology I'm working on. Stephen is considering, among other things, why (in his opinion) novelists fail aesthetically when they write too much "with a purpose." Such efforts as, to use his example, Dickens's attack on government bureaucracy by way of the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit "implies a confusion of function," he suggests. And yet "if a poet should not have the same purpose as the politician or the economist," the conclusion is "certainly not that he should have no purpose. To have no purpose is simply not to be a reasoning being." So if poets or novelists should have no direct practical aim or purpose, or not seek to prove particular theories about the world, what can they do for us? Here's part of Stephen's answer:

He shows us certain facts as they appear to him. If we are so constituted as to be unable to see what he sees, he can go no further. He cannot proceed to argue and analyse, and apply an elaborate logical apparatus. There is the truth, and we must make what we can of it. But, on the other hand, so far as we are in sympathy with him, the proof--if it be a proof--has all the cogency of direct vision. He has couched our dull eyes, drawn back the veil which hid from us the certain aspect of the world, and henceforward our views of life and the world will be more or less changed, because the bare scaffolding of fact which we previously saw will now be seen in the light of keener perceptions than our own.

Elegantly put. But how close is Stephen coming here to James's idea of being "one of those on whom nothing is lost"? The emphasis on perception over action (currently very trendy in ethical/philosophical approaches to literature) leaves me dissatisfied, for reasons I have discussed in some of my academic writing. Still, Stephen does suggest a role for the novel in the world, albeit an indirect one. After all, if we never changed our views of life, we would never seek to change our, or others', experience of it.

Zadie Smith, On Beauty: Disconnected

I did not 'connect' with this novel at all. After I finished it, I went back and read through the two or three pages of quotations from reviewers, all full of enthusiasm and praise ("wonderfully engaging, wonderfully observed"; "accomplished, substantive, and penetrating"; "an ambitious, warm and bending [bending??] portrayal"; "hilarious"; "ironic, acerbic and intelligent"...). Say what? The characters never came to life for me; each of them seemed like an embodied idea or function. It's true that Smith has a virtuosic ability to render different voices, dialects, cadences of speech--but the conversations lacked naturalness. The prose seemed stilted and full of details that didn't add anything to either its sound or its meaning. Here's one small example of the kind of thing that annoyed me: during what is actually one of the most important encounters in the novel (the 'bonding' between Kiki and Carlene Kipps), Kiki "felt in her purse for her lip balm" and then applies "a layer of colourless gloop to her mouth" (172). There's some motivation for her to put on the lip balm (awkward conversational moment) but "colourless gloop" is a phrase that doesn't belong to Kiki or the narrating voice--who would describe lip balm that way? Is there some reason we should look at lip balm problematically? Is it the lack of colour? Is there some implied anti-consumerism sub-text? Or is it just a sloppy intrusion of, maybe, Smith's own dislike of such products? (Why? What's wrong with them?) I realize this is a small detail, but overall much of the book had this effect on me: why is this happening? why are they saying or doing this now? why does this part belong with the other parts of the book?

I also found the whole depiction of the academic context wholly unbelievable. OK, it's meant satirically; it's a 'campus novel' (among other things) but not necessarily bound to capture the realities of professional life at universities today. But in this area too I was endlessly distracted and annoyed. How is it that Howard has been at Wellington for so long and neither received tenure nor reached the end of a tenure-track contract? Even at the most elite colleges, aren't there procedures and time-tables for these things? Part of the novel's denouement is his acceptance of a sabbatical, conveniently, to defuse the problems that have arisen--but sabbatical leaves are not just handed out anyplace I know about; again, there are procedures and regulations. His supposedly climactic PowerPoint presentation can't mean anything in relation to his tenure chances--does a public lecture ever? Am I missing the point of all these breaches of academic protocol in the plot? Are they confusions about the academy, versions of the academy that those of us in less privileged institutions don't share, adaptations of academic life to suit Smith's thematic purposes? (What exactly are these, by the way? They never coalesced for me in any striking moment or image in the novel.)

Some of the ways she worked up the 'culture wars' were sort of funny, but not particularly deep and, in their overall leanings, predictably left-liberal. Though she brought Kiki around to some kind of interest in Monty's "conservative" take on issues such as affirmative action, none of the characters that might have been used for a really probing case study were used that way after all, and the politics got sidelined, I thought, by the cliched sexual escapades of both Howard and Monty. Nothing really came of Levi's attempt to discard his actual class identity and the white part of his family background; Jerome's relationship with Victoria also goes nowhere in particular, simply getting diffused among the other miscellaneous plot twists. I could go on with complaints and questions, it turns out, but that's probably enough for now.

Now, given the praise heaped on the book by the reviewers, I'm open to ideas about how I might have read it better and enjoyed it more. I did find it mildly entertaining and readable, in the sense that I kept reading along happily enough waiting and hoping for it to come together in some stirring way. It just didn't, and while some novels leave me feeling I underestimated them on a first reading and would like to go back more thoughtfully (The Night Watch, most recently), On Beauty just left me disappointed.

Robert B. Parker, School Days

Works for me every time! There is a certain sameness about the Spenser novels, to be sure, but their consistency is usually a virtue. And in this case, there's a good dose of social relevance (school shootings) along with the usual psychological and social commentary--admittedly, elliptical to the extreme, but one aspect of these novels that I appreciate is how much work gets done in the silences and spaces, not in any postmodern sense of the important elements being absences or anything, but simply that when Parker's on his game, the situations and characters are conveyed strongly enough that we can fill in the blanks, come to the conclusions, ourselves. The influence of Raymond Chandler is strong, of course, with the whole "down these mean streets a man must go..." model, but Spenser's readiness to get mean himself when his code of honour requires it is usually the most interesting aspect of the plot. I have long admired the relationship Parker establishes for Spenser and Susan (who should surely be played by Terri Hatcher, if she can control her more gawky mannerisms?) and found the sexual and the racial politics of these novels a refreshing break from PC pieties (while insistently alert to inequities and injustices, both systemic and personal). (While I'm thinking about it, I'll just add that I've always admired Dick Francis for a similar ability to imagine equal, mature , independent women for putting into relationships with his male protagonists.) I do wonder, though, about Parker's fascination with assertively sexual women, such as Rita Fiore. Her intelligence and skill are never in doubt, and in some ways it seems a positive thing to create a character who is both a powerful professional woman and a sex kitten: women have struggled long enough with stereotypes that insist intellectual prowess is incompatible with femininity or allure. And yet I also feel that Rita plays into other cliches (fantasies?) about the qualities that make women attractive to men (OK, she's a smart lawyer, but look at those great legs!). Because I find the ethos of the Spenser novels overall so advanced, it feels carping to fret this detail, and I don't think Parker has any obligation to match his characters up to any specific standard in this respect. I guess I'm just surprised. Maybe this is a way to put a positive spin on the sexpot characters from the hard-boiled novels--kind of an updated, she's on our side now, verson of Brigid O'Shaunessy? Gorgeous dames aren't necessarily dangerous?

A Reader's Responsibilities

Ian McEwan's recent letter in The Guardian points to an aspect of criticism that is perhaps underestimated by those advocating a turn away from academic approaches towards more 'aesthetic' or 'literary' responses. In reply to a reviewer who attributed one of his character's views to him, McEwan writes,

As for Saturday - a character in a novel who expresses hostility towards novels in general should not be seen as an entirely trustworthy mouthpiece of his novelist creator. For example, the pro-Iraq war views Henry Perowne expresses in an argument with his daughter are not mine and nor, for that matter, are her anti-war opinions. On the other hand, I would agree with Perowne that some - not all - peace protesters are naive. Who can forget those daft and earnest English folk parading through central London last summer with placards that read, "We are all Hizbullah now"?

I sometimes wonder whether these common critical confusions arise unconsciously from a prevailing atmosphere of empowering consumerism - the exaltation of the subjective, the "not in my name" syndrome. It certainly seems odd to me that such simple precepts need pointing up: your not "liking" the characters is not the same as your not liking the book; you don't have to think the central character is nice; the views of the characters don't have to be yours, and are not necessarily those of the author; a novel is not always all about you.

The complaint that readers too readily conflate characters or narrators with biographical authors is a familiar one to students of the novel (Jane Eyre, anyone?); in part McEwan is asking that his artistic freedom be respected. But he is also demanding that his work be read properly, with due attention to its technical complexities, so that, to use his own example, it is not assumed that because his protagonist in Saturday is (cautiously) in favour of invading Iraq, either the author or the novel takes the same position. Particularly if a reader is going to make public pronouncements about a novel (as in a review), the reader should be skilled enough--knowledgeable enough--to avoid misreading. And it is possible to misread: a reader's response can be wrong, misguided, confused. All opinions are not equal: some represent a fuller, more careful, better-informed engagement with all the elements of the work. Henry Perowne, to stick with the Saturday example, is a compelling but flawed character: his world view has limits not shared by the novel overall, which, among other things, self-evidently values literature more highly than the neurosurgeon does. One of the things the novel is about is the limitations of Perowne's materialist view of the world--though at the same time, the novel is filled with respect for the "grandeur" in that view of things (a Darwinian phrase with rich implications for McEwan's novel). In some of the anti-academic discussions, the reader's responsibility to the text and author in question gets sidelined because of the emphasis on responding to, rather than analyzing, a text. A responsible (rather than just responsive) reading requires, just to give one example, attention to point of view, which can include recognizing when a thought or opinion not in quotation marks nonetheless represents the views of a character ("she was only Anne," we read in Austen's Persuasion, but a reasonably alert reader will promptly understand that this dismissive attitude belongs to Anne's foolish family, and one of the novel's main points is that their inability to appreciate her signals their broader moral disabilities). Unreliable narration is another technical issue that must be rightly understood for a good reading of many books: Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, for instance, would be radically misrepresented by a reader who accepted the narrator's deference for authority as the novel's own. While these days nearly anybody can read a novel, that does not mean everybody reads it equally well. Academic scholarship may be of questionable public value in its more erudite forms (though it may also be of intrinsic interest and therefore arguably worthwhile nonetheless), but in my own experience at any rate, English professors spend a lot of time trying to equip their students, not with politics or Theory but with the knowledge and tools to be better readers. If we do value literature, than this kind of expertise is surely worth promoting, even demanding.

Recent discussions about Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books That You Haven't Read prompt some of the same thoughts. While I can see many occasions on which you might be in a conversation about a book you have not read, I don't accept that there is any value in your pronouncing on it in any way. For example, I have not read Bayard's book myself, only reviews and commentaries on it, such as Leah McLaren's in this week's Globe and Mail. So I can talk about it in a limited way, and I might even get passionate about what I take to be some of its claims. But I can't responsibly judge or review the book without reading it for myself. I think it's outrageous if it is true, as McLaren's column states, that Bayard "admits to giving lectures on books he hasn't bothered to open"--unless (and you see, I can't know this without reading more) he lectures solely on context, literary relations, historical significance, or other issues that do not depend on specific textual evidence or close reading. If he talks about the specifics or the qualities of the books themselves, he is a fraud. As McLaren points out, we live in an "era of crib culture" in which people seem ready to accept "intellectual shortcuts" whenever possible. But substituting someone's report about a book for your own reading of it is shoddy as well as risky, and our readiness to give up on "heavy reading" is not necessarily something to be complacent about. Required reading lists have the merit of motivating students to struggle on with things they find uncomfortable, unfamiliar, even boring. As McEwan says, "a novel is not always all about you," and in that respect education differs substantially from other 'consumer' products. To consider my own experience again, it's remarkable how many students are capable of learning to like a novel, or (since 'converting' them to like things is not really the point of teaching them) learning to appreciate the merits, qualities, or significance of a novel, as a work of art and a contribution to pertinent cultural, social, aesthetic, or political discussions, even if their first response was boredom or confusion. Again, some expertise is required, some technical terms useful, some precision in analysis as important as visceral responses. And again I think that as readers, or as serious and responsible readers, we have an obligation to the texts and authors to study our primary source carefully before we arrive at (much less publish) our conclusions.

Denis Donoghue, The Practice of Reading

The Practice of Reading lies somewhere in between standard academic literary criticism and the more populist 'books about books' that I've been reading for my 'writing for readers' project. I suppose its main audience is an academic one, but its project and contents are quite miscellaneous and so it contributes more by modelling Donoghue's idea of good reading across varied examples than by intervening incisively or extensively into any particular critical or theoretical debate. That said, Donoghue does present his ideas about reading and criticism in some detail in the first few chapters, and his broad aim is to make a case for aesthetic criticism (according to his careful definitions) against the various ideological versions he tags as the "New Thematics." He advocates an aesthetic criticism that restores due emphasis to the 'lived experience' of reading texts, or to the element of 'performance' (qualities or properties that can't be sustained in a paraphrase or plot summary). He calls for a "recovered disinterestedness," a putting aside of our immediate selves and prejudices in order to release the imagination: "the purpose of reading literature," he says at one point, "is to exercise or incite one's imagination; specifically, one's ability to imagine being different"--an ability inhibited, he argues, by the pressures of identity politics, among other forces. While I am in sympathy with much of this strain of his argument, I have questions (answered, perhaps, in his other writings) about what knowledge, experience, or education he thinks is required to achieve a "lived experience" of a text that deserves being written up or shared with others. He points out himself that, for some texts, our selves are insufficient for good readings--"information is required." Some knowledge of literary history and genre is certainly necessary for the kinds of readings he offers, and yet at some points he seems to take sides against those who insist on the relevance of historical context. How well does his version of aestheticism work on texts that, themselves, look out to their historical world, novels such as Bleak House, for instance? (How far is his a "poetics" for poetry only, or literature of a certain kind only, that is not itself overtly social or political?)

I liked his breakdown of critical modes into Arnold, Pater, and Wilde (interesting that his prototypes are all from the 19th century), and he is convincing about the way much criticism driven by "High Theory" follows the 'Wilde' approach in which the work of art ostensibly under examination becomes a "suggestion for a new work of [the critic's] own" (here he is quoting Wilde's "The Critic as Artist"). He goes on to suggest that such criticism (including much of Derrida's, for example) is best understand as a separate literary genre--perhaps autobiography. In a slightly different context, he argues that recent critics of Macbeth "reveal what is happening in criticism more clearly than what happens in Macbeth." I think he is right, but both conclusions might prompt the student of literature to wonder why she would bother with this kind of criticism, the lives of critics or the history of criticism being rather separate inquiries.

Most interesting and potentially useful for me are the ways he distinguishes between criticism that (taking an Arnoldian approach) attempts to talk about what the text is overtly about ("the object itself as it really is"--admitting all kinds of complications, of course) and those whose critical goal is to "rebuke" the text for not being something else, or at any rate to evaluate it based on an external standard. His discussion of Marjorie Levinson on Wordsworth reminds me of the discussion of Spivak in Freadman and Miller's Re-Thinking Theory (also on Wordsworth), and his line on recent critics of Yeats's "Leda and the Swan" is my favourite in the book for the way it captures a particular (today, almost ubiquitous) approach to a literary text: "Yeats is not allowed to have his theme: he must be writing about something else." So too is Charlotte Bronte often not allowed her themes in Jane Eyre, or Jane Austen, lately, in Mansfield Park, or George Eliot in Middlemarch in some recent readings (Elizabeth Langland's, for instance).

I wonder if Donoghue offers the kind of aesthetic criticism Daniel Green (of "The Reading Experience") would like to see more of.

John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel

How to Read a Novel is an eccentric, miscellaneous, diverting, informative and annoying book. Its basic premise is that we can all use some help deciding which of the overwhelmingly many books around us we should read...but at the same time, Sutherland shies away from offering any specific guidance, rather providing readers with tools they can use themselves to make selections from the overabundant options that surround them. Hence his interest in the apparatus surrounding the novel 'itself' (titles, jacket blurbs, endorsements, copyright pages, etc.) and in the mechanisms of the book industry (bestseller lists and book prizes, for instance)--all things we can peer at and consider without too great an investment of our precious reading time. As you'd expect, though, Sutherland is also interested in distinguishing wheat from chaff once we actually get deep into a novel, and so throughout the book he includes information, judgments, comparisons, all modelling (rather than prescribing) ways we can understand an author's project, avoid oversimplistic or alienated readings that miss (or misrepresent, or just misunderstand) the point (see his discussion of John Banville's criticism of Ian McEwan's Saturday), and otherwise do better jobs of appreciating and contextualizing what we have gotten ourselves into. There are a number of plot summaries and quoted passages to illustrate or animate his ideas about why it is important to know the kinds of things he talks about; his selections are eclectic, and sometimes chosen, I suspect, for their shock value, to prove he is not simply another stuffy professor preaching that we should read "the classics." There are a lot of throw-away remarks on current political figures and events: it must be nice to reach the stage of your career in which you figure (and so, apparently, do your editors) that whatever you think on any subject is worth putting into print, however random or irrelevant to the work at hand. I'll be re-reading this book more carefully as part of my "writing for readers" project, but my first impression is that this is an idly interesting book that doesn't explore its ideas or examples deeply enough to be engaging or helpful to serious readers, while it deals lightly, even hastily, with too many erudite bits and pieces to be engaging or helpful to readers who aren't used to taking an analytic approach to books at all.

I was intrigued that Sutherland identifies Vanity Fair as his 'desert island' book. I know he's a Thackeray scholar and all, and I am a big Vanity Fair fan myself, but wouldn't you get depressed after a while if that was the only thing you had to read? Would you get something new from it on each reading, which is surely essential in that situation? Even Pride and Prejudice (that book that recent studies show most Britons could not live without) would probably wear thin if it were the only book you had. (Of course, my desert island book is Middlemarch, though I'd want a really well annotated edition--maybe the Broadview one, which has copious notes--so I could apply myself to all the scientific, philosophical, and historical aspects that there never seems to be enough time to comprehend fully under ordinary circumstances. Anyone else have a better idea?)

Margaret Oliphant, Miss Marjoribanks

According to the back cover blurb on my edition of Miss Marjoribanks, Q. D. Leavis hailed its protagonist as the 'missing link' between Austen's Emma and George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke. I can see the Emma connections much more clearly than the Dorothea ones, except perhaps as, towards the novel's conclusion, Lucilla rather abruptly decides she'd rather improve the tone of an impoverished village than the tone of 'society.' On first reading, Miss Marjoribanks seems a rather purposeless book, though pleasant enough. Lucilla's little crises offer no real drama and do not have any effect on her character (Elizabeth Jay's introduction describes Lucilla's constancy of character as one of Oliphant's goals--but is it a good idea?). She's the same self-satisfied optimist at the end as at the beginning. And the narration offers us no commentary to offset Lucilla's own limited perspective. On the other hand, as an account of abundant energy with no place in particular to express itself--no worthy purpose to serve--the novel is effective, though perhaps (a second reading will help me decide) the book itself is too much the same, that is, puts too much energy into something not very interesting or important. Jay seems to think the novel is a kind of expose of the limited options Lucilla faces (her example of Lucilla pacing out the drawing room for her new carpet is good), but I don't see evidence that the novel is aware of this problem or upset on Lucilla's behalf. In Middlemarch, in contrast, the absence of a suitable vocation to absorb Dorothea's energy and ambition to do good is explored self-consciously at many levels. Miss Marjoribanks is not at all an intellectual novel, and not one that imbues its social observations with much historical depth. I guess that's why I'm prepared to link it to Emma more strongly--except that Austen too seems much more aware of the problems with her protagonist, and Austen also educates both us and Emma about the risks of self-satisfaction, egotism, and interference without real sympathy or understanding. There's a strkingly concrete quality about Miss Marjoribanks, though, that I noticed also when I read Phoebe Junior (so far, these are my only two excursions into Oliphant's fiction). Material objects are what they are, for example, as they are in Trollope; the community and its ordinary habits have a specificity to them that makes thematic or symbolic readings seem to be missing the point. At least in this case, Oliphant's characters lack the depth, subtlety, and appeal of so many of Trollope's (some of them seem just gimmicky, such as Mrs Woodburn and her love of mimicry). But you do get a sense of having peered into a world that, for us, is more foreign than we usually allow. At the moment, I am inclined to put Miss Marjoribanks on the syllabus for my graduate seminar on Victorian women novelists. We will be reading Oliphant's autobiography, in which she famously expresses resentment about George Eliot's greater success. We will be reading both Jane Eyre and Middlemarch, two of the most celebrated 19th-century novels by women, so we will have a good opportunity to discuss why Oliphant has not considered to be in that top rank, and whether the critical tools and approaches we have honed on writers like Bronte and Eliot work applied to someone like Oliphant who seems to be doing something rather different. (This is a question I often consider with Trollope, whose novels seem to render a lot of our usual 'sophisticated' reading strategies absurd.)

Emma Donoghue, Slammerkin

Why are writers of historical fiction so drawn to prostitutes? Or is it some strange selection process of my own? Because I can think of four at least in my own recent reading: Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White, Sarah Waters's Tipping the Velvet, The Linnet Bird, and now Slammerkin. I knew from the book blurb, of course, what this protagonist's career path was going to be, but somehow it wasn't until the first few descriptions of her 'at work' that I felt strongly that I had already read all this--or near enough--and that for all that it sounded so promising (especially because I have heard such interesting things about Donoghue, though admittedly in the context of her other works), this novel was not going to surprise me by offering a new idea about it all, or even an especially gripping account. Mary Saunders never became a fully realized character for me; she seemed inconsistent, and once in a while said or did things that seemed like deliberate efforts to make the book more serious and thematically rich--but when you are struck with something as an effort, of course the implication is that the effort is not successful, or the whole would be better integrated, more compelling. It still seems like a very good idea to put a story like this together "from the headlines," as it were, and I thought the fabric / clothing motif had great potential, but again, it was brought up intermittently in a way that seemed effortful rather than inevitable. Mary's fate would have made first-person narration a bit problematic, perhaps ("as told to"?), but as the novel stands it suffers from uneven handling of point of view. Most of it, including the entire first section, is from Mary's, but in the second part, for no apparent reason we begin to get different perspectives. The result is a diffusion of our sympathy and attention--not that Abi, for instance, doesn't (again) have a lot of potential as a character, but why in this novel? Just because it's interesting to get in some material about black people in 18th-century England? One final comment is that the great novel about a woman on the make in 18th C England has surely already been written (Moll Flanders): I didn't see any evidence that Donoghue had looked to this obvious predecessor for the spirit or flavour of her own, markedly humourless version.

Lauren Weisberger, The Devil Wears Prada

I began a compilation entry on 'chick lit' novels a few weeks ago and lost interest in writing it, basically because I found that the novels themselves were uninteresting. They included two or three by Jennifer Weiner (In Her Shoes, Good in Bed) and one called The Wives of Bath (the title was the best part). The novels were not bad; they were literate and had recognizable and often sympathetic characters in realistic modern situations. But they struck me as completely lacking ideas--about those characters, for instance, and the historical and social factors that determined their situations. Still, they entertained me reasonably well, and the ones I actually bought can keep their spots on my shelf: they aren't as original and funny as Bridget Jones's Diary but I'm likely to reread them some dreary winter weekend in my future when I need something undemanding to pass the time. The Devil Wears Prada, on the other hand, is that rare item for me: a disposable book, one I actually regret having paid money for. It was not funny, interesting, or entertaining; its premise wore thin on about page 3; its occasional attempts to move beyond cheap parody into actual social satire or commentary were unconvincing; and the 'revelations' of its main character were unearned, in part because of the whole set-up was so extreme.

Sara Paretsky, Fire Sale

While writing a series of novels featuring the same detective allows an author to develop the main character (it's a requirement of detective novels, after all, that many characters remain opaque or two-dimensional enough that we aren't sure if they "dunnit" or not, so character development is typically quite restricted), it also risks repetition, especially if the writer is fixated on a very particular social and political vision. Paretsky's determination to use her novels to expose the evils of corporate capitalism means that you can pretty much predict the villains (big business) and their motives (profit) in every novel, and her continuing characters aren't that interesting to me anymore. The near-death escapes strain credulity, especially as V.I. ages (Sue Grafton's decision to keep Kinsey Millhone stuck in the 80s has saved her from this problem). The plotting is competent and the writing is OK, but it seems to me that this is a series that just doesn't have anything new or interesting to offer.

Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

I've been eagerly waiting for the paperback edition of this novel, as I am a big fan of Fingersmith (such a smart novel, artistically and intellectually) and was thoroughly entertained by Tipping the Velvet. The Night Watch too was easily readable, deceptively so, I've ended up thinking, as I moved through it smoothly only to arrive at the end feeling quite dissatisfied with how I had read it. The backwards chronological structure, for instance, seemed an artificial device, until on a bit of reflection and then with some help from some of the novel's reviewers, I began to think more about ways it suits the kind of character development Waters seems to be engaged in: it's a kind of up-ended Bildungsroman in which rather than seeing people growing into themselves, we peel back the layers of their past experience to see what lies beneath the people they have become. Now I wonder if there isn't a way in which Waters's approach has, perversely almost, a strong forward momentum for the characters, as we realize how complex and contingent their 'current' identities are and how much they (or their situations) have changed over time: instead of seeing them as having arrived, we see them as poised just ahead of their next transformation: their next relationship, their next disappointment or tragedy, their next moment of hope. At the same time, the glimpses of beauty and hope (such as Helen's face at the end/beginning) are so overlayed with our knowledge of change and (usually) destruction that the overall effect seems more disheartening than otherwise: it's too bad, I kept thinking, that this moment here had to turn out the way I already know it did. One reviewer commented that the novel needed to be read twice, and I certainly expect it will seem quite different on a second reading, as the characters' experiences that are presented so elliptically in the first section will feel much more concrete. I like the simplicity of Waters's prose--also deceptive, as the novel is clearly the result of much research and is effortlessly laden (if that's not oxymoronic) with period details. But I would also appreciate some exposition, a thicker layer of narrative commentary, even some philosophizing! Waters's touch is so light that I find it hard to be sure what she thinks is important about the moment she has chosen, or why she develops the kinds of characters and linkages she does. Why write about the 1940s now, for instance? 'Showing' is all very well, but (and perhaps this is just the Victorianist in me) I like the author to collaborate more actively with me on these questions; otherwise I have the sensation of having seen or felt a series of images and moments, but I have not grasped a strong idea. For this, a little 'telling' would be in order.

I'll just add that as historical fiction, The Night Watch struck me as wholly convincing.