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.

Alberto Manguel, A Reading Diary

I haven't entirely stopped reading 'books about books,' but this one sets me back almost as far as Book Savvy did, if for quite different reasons. Manguel is clearly a serious reader and intellectual in a way that the author of Book Savvy, alas, did not seem to be. But here is another case in which the books take second place to personal reminiscences, and while Manguel (to me at least) is more intrinsically interesting as a narrator than the author of So Many Books, So Little Time, for my project at any rate such a book rather misses the point (which is not autobiography but literary analysis). I also tired of Manguel's anti-war rhetoric (much of the diary is composed in 2003) which reaches the moral low point of stating that as Americans enter Iraq "under the banner of 'liberators,' freeing Iraq of a vicious dictator in order to install American control in the region" there "is no moral distinction between figures such as Saddam and Bush" (218). This is after he includes the following anecdote:

Saddam Hussein wrote a novel under a pseudonym, but everyone in Iraq knew who the real author was. An Iraqi journalist exiled since 1999 in Berlin told me that, after Saddam's henchman had ransacked his house, killed his father and brother and beaten him until he was almost unconscious, one of the men placed Saddam's novel by his side, telling him that now he could try reading "something good for a change." (207)

There may be lots of reasons to mistrust the public stories told by the Bush administration about reasons for invading Iraq, and the outrageous violence in Baghdad right now should sicken the whole civilized world. Were America and its allies naive, hubristic, mistaken about their chances of success? Apparently so (though as books such as Ajami's The Foreigner's Gift and Packer's The Assassin's Gate detail, not for entirely blameworthy reasons). But surely the happiest scenario all round would have been a complete triumph of American plans for Iraq, and even now--well, the suicide bombers may be motivated in part by the American presence, or the invasion may have made this kind of tribal and sectarian horror show possible by removing the appallingly violent regime that kept its crimes more or less indoors, but it's not Americans blowing up students or shoppers or reconstruction projects. And despite everything, haven't Iraqi readers in fact been liberated in ways that are worth celebrating? If an honest reckoning today has to acknowledge weights on both sides of the scales, how could it have been obvious in 2003 that it was not worth trying? (How differently might the effort have gone if the world's free countries, including Canada, had spent less time congratulating themselves--in their free press--on not taking the risk and stepped up? They could have taken advantage of American leadership and might to prove, among other things, that United Nations resolutions have some teeth in them. Also, humanitarian motives [which Manguel implies would have sat better with him than the profiteering, imperialistic ones he attributes to the U.S.] surely should have brought countries like Canada into the coalition, not kept them out: they are good reasons for 'regime change' even if the change is only possible through allying yourself with the U.S.) As I have written about before, McEwan's Saturday seems to me to do justice to the tangle of reasons for being for or against the invasion. Smart, thoughtful, well-meaning people really can be on both sides of this debate, and Manguel offers no defense of his own position, simply reporting it (as if it needs no defense?).

Historical Fiction (Again)

I'm still thinking about what makes some historical novels so much more convincing than others, and about my annoyance that the protagonist of The Linnet Bird was so predictably progressive in her attitudes. The problem can't be as simple-minded as not finding it believable that a 19th-century woman would be anti-imperialist; of course, on such issues there were contrary opinions in the 19th century, just as there were men and women who advocated women's rights and the abolition of slavery. These were attitudes that went against mainstream assumptions in many ways, and that is part of what gives them drama as fictional positions, as the characters who fight for such enlightened views get to be rebels for our causes: they are fighting for what we widely accept as right. But does this mean that it is impossible for historical fiction to appeal to modern audiences if its protagonists accept the mainstream attitudes of their time? This week I watched an interesting period drama called Far From Heaven, in which the main character is a "perfect" 1950s wife and mother with liberal views on race who gets into a sympathetic relationship and then a romance with her black gardener. It becomes clear to them that what they want is so far out of step with the norms of their community that they cannot persist: his daughter's safety is threatened, for instance, and both of their sets of friends condemn their attempt to cross the racial line. At the same time, the film explores the struggles of her "perfect" businessman husband with his homosexuality. The film makes very clear that both his love and hers are forms of impossible desire because of the historical moment in which they arise. I thought all of this was movingly presented; the highly stylized character of the film prevented it from being maudlin or cliched, as did the absence of heroism or simplistic happy endings. In the context of the thinking I've been doing about historical fiction, though, I found myself wondering if it would be impossible to do a sympathetic story in which a character who is not tolerant of such divergence from the norms was the protagonist: Kathleen's best friend, for instance, who feels sorry for her having a gay husband (but has no liberal views on homosexuality), and whose sympathy seems to dry up when Kathleen admits her feelings for a black man. Of course we do not accept or want to sympathize with those attitudes, but does her (historically typical) mindset put her outside the pale? Is this why Gone with the Wind is not an entirely respectable novel today--because, among other things, its main characters are almost all quite satisfied with racial discrimination and slavery? But isn't that realistic, in terms of majority opinion in the antebellum south? Can you depict that society as it was historically, depict its Weltanschauung without a layer of overt critique, and not appear to be (or really be) endorsing past values which we have learned to reject as immoral? Perhaps it's time I put aside the Lymond Chronicles for a while and took another look at GWTW.

Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings and Queen's Play

Reviewing these first two books in the Lymond Chronicles, I have confirmed both that they are exceptionally convincing and vivid historical novels and that it is nearly impossible for me to approach them with anything like critical detachment. Part of the reason is just how well-known they are to me after all these years; another part is how almost wholly concerned they are with historical context, plot, and character. If there are broad "themes," they arise from these fairly concrete elements, I think, rather than from abstractions or philosophies. One idea they explore through the protagonist is what I might call the burden of excellence, the expectations and responsibilities that arise for the possessor of extraordinary gifts, such as those with which Lymond himself is endowed. In their own quite different styles, Dorothy Sayers's Peter Wimsey novels and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda also investigate the challenges faced by people of outstanding abilities who sometimes resent the leadership or guidance others want from them. In this age of Forrest Gump and books "for dummies," we seem much more at ease withweakness and stupidity than with brilliance, but these protagonists show there is plenty of drama (and perhaps even more significance) in intelligence and strength.

The Lymond books do also engage with other 'issues' that are somewhat less personal or less tied to the main character, though he is the agent for their examination. Nationalism, for instance--the costs and benefits, beauties and absurdities--of love for country is a major problem in The Game of Kings and also, through the Irish connections, in Queen's Play, which also picks up questions about aesthetics and morality. But though I have not done a patient analysis, I would not consider any of these ideas central to the 'aboutness' of the novels. They seem more part of the cultural context of the characters, which is a world in which these ideas are being given new urgency (as borders and allegiances shift) and new forms. That is, it seems to me at this point that the characters debate because they need to, to be themselves at their time in history, not because Dunnett has a larger agenda about Scottish identity or the role of art in life.

But it's the charisma of the novels themselves that overwhelms me: they are remarkably wide-ranging, as daring as any of Scott's in their insistence on informing us about history and politics, and allusive beyond any other novels I've read--and yet all of this never oppresses or overwhelms. It also transforms plots that are improbable, melodramatic, and grandiose into narratives that (to me, anyway) never feel that way. It's remarkable, actually, how tawdry the novels can sound even in some of the blurbs that are meant to market them. Here's the cover copy from my old Popular Library edition of Checkmate:

Against the splendor and squalor of the dissolute court of France...amid the crosscurrents of political intrigues and passionate liaisons...through a labyrinth of danger and deceit...a bastard nobleman searching for his heritage, and the beautiful virgin bride he married but could not bed, move toward the climax that will mean greatmess and fulfillment, or else disgrace, destruction and damnation...

Any reader of Checkmate knows that in a way, that's an accurate description, but it is entirely unfaithful to the tone and quality of the novel, which is not at all the kind of bodice-ripping pathos-soaked costume drama evoked. I suspect that the publishers figured nobody would buy the book if it were described more accurately!

Follow-Up: Historical Fiction

Since I don't currently own a copy of The Eagle and the Raven, I've been looking around at other historical novels which I have found compelling over the years. As historical fiction was one of my earliest passions (according to my mother, I took my copy of Jean Plaidy's The Young Mary Queen of Scots to class with me in first grade) I have a number of sentimental favourites still in my collection. Yesterday I browsed through about half of Child of the Morning, the other Pauline Gedge novel that used to enthrall me. It certainly looks a lot better than The Linnet Bird, and one reason is that Gedge seems to have tried hard to make her people not just act but think like Ancient Egyptians (I think that was actually the draft title of the Bangles song...). Hatshepsut really considers herself the daughter of the god, and this belief drives her actions and shapes her character, including what in a different telling might have been a false pseudo-feminist assertion of her right to the power usually accorded only to men. The novel teeters on the brink of romantic cliches in the central love story (some might think it falls over that edge) and it does not strike me as terribly literary or at all innovative in its form, but OK, for the most part, I was willing to say yes to it (see previous post).

But the real touchstone in 20th-century examples has to be Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond chronicles, and I don't know that I'll be able to resist turning this inquiry into why some historical novels work and others don't into an excuse to reread the whole set--something I have not done for too many years. I took my old copy of The Game of Kings down this morning and realized it is more than 25 years since I first read it (I know because it is inscribed to me on my birthday in 1979). I had not realized until recently that my enthusiasm for these novels is actually part of a much wider phenomenon. I have still never met anyone else who has read them. Here's a testimony from Scottish novelist Linda Gillard (you'll notice I have learned how to use the 'insert link' function):

The Chronicles are my literary Forth Bridge. I re-read the cycle perpetually and when I come to the end of Checkmate, the final volume in the series, I always feel a need to return to the beginning again. With every re-reading I admire Dunnett’s achievements more, marvel at how she dared to write books that could not be appreciated fully in one reading or even two. She didn’t care if you couldn’t immediately grasp a point of plot or motivation. She refused to simplify. She expected you to work hard and knew that many readers enjoy working hard

Just starting The Game of Kings has quickened my reader's pulse, but also I realize that these novels are among those that I'm reluctant to approach in a critical or technical way. Still, that's how many of my students feel about Pride and Prejudice or Jane Eyre and I always assure them that such an approach won't spoil the fun.

Linda Holeman, The Linnet Bird

I managed to finish The Linnet Bird, but frankly it was a struggle. The author has clearly done a lot of homework on historical and cultural details, but then I don't really want to feel while reading a novel that the author has done a lot of homework--this, of course, has been the frequent objection to Romola, though for me anyway, George Eliot's homework is always worth our while to contemplate, as it is never at the level of 'talking points about the English in India', which is about where Holeman's seems to stay. I have been working with Henry James's essay "The Art of Fiction." At one point, discussing a novel he has recently read that attempts to trace "the development of the moral consciousness of the child," he sums up his judgment of the attempt as follows:

For myself (since it comes back in the last resort, as I say, to the preference of the individual), the picture of the child’s experience has the advantage that I can at successive steps ... say Yes or No, as it may be, to what the artist puts before me. I have been a child ... and it is a simple accident that with M. de Groncourt I should have for the most part to say No. With George Eliot, when she painted that country, I always said Yes.

I can sum up my reaction to Holeman's novel in a similar way: for the most part, I said no to it. Besides the lack of historical sense that I commented on in a previous post (particularly in the characterization of Linny Gow herself), I found the predictably PC plot incredibly tiresome. The English in India are all stupid, shallow imperialists--except Linny herself, who has a remarkably 21st century perception of their stupidity and insensitivity, and does not struggle at all to reconcile that perception with her shock at witnessing suttee. And surprise: she falls in love (well, sort of--she discovers 'desire,' as she tells us) with a Pashtun horse whisperer and finds in his primitive camp in Kashmir the sense of community and acceptance she has never found in uptight, pretentious, British society, where she was never allowed to be fully herself....

I really wanted to like this novel, partly out of an odd sense of loyalty to a Canadian author, but on finishing it, my overpowering feeling was relief that I had waited to read it before picking up Holeman's second novel, prominent on new release shelves everywhere. I think I'll reread A Passage to India: maybe what Holeman did not do as homework was study her literary predecessors. I'm also curious to take another look at another historical novel by a Canadian author, Pauline Gedge's The Eagle and the Raven, which years ago was such a favourite of mine that my copy fell completely apart. Would I say yes to this novel, after all this time, and if so, why? (Why, too, are other novels set in the 19th-century so much more persuasive, including Sarah Waters's brilliant Fingersmith and Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White?)

Thoughts on This Project--and a Question for You

I began writing up my quick 'notes on current reading' about a year ago , partly for fun, partly as a way to answer questions from friends and family about what I'd been reading lately and what I'd thought about it, partly as an exercise in non-academic writing about books. I didn't (couldn't) take a lot of time over my comments, and indeed I decided not to allow myself to rethink and revise, to free myself from the many forms of self-consciousness endemic in professional criticism. For some years, though, in my professional capacity, I have also been brooding about the nature and purpose of that professional criticism. I wanted to increase the value and relevance of the research I was doing, and to bring to my scholarship the kind of excitement and motivation I feel about my teaching. On my sabbatical this term, I have been continuing to think about this issue, and trying to imagine an alternative form of literary writing that might be of interest and use to a wider audience than the narrow readership of a typical academic article or monograph. As my previous posts here indicate, one way I have been pursuing this question is through reading books about books aimed at general audiences. I have also begun exploring web resources, including online magazines and literary blogs. Of course, there are hundreds, probably thousands, of such sites now; every one I arrive at points me towards more and more.

On one hand I have been finding all of this very stimulating. It's wonderful to see how lively and widespread the virtual conversation about books is, as well as to see that there is a big market for intelligent books about reading. It is also a salutary reminder, as if I needed one, of how small the academic literary world is, or can be, and how specialization works against the kind of general knowledge and broad cultural awareness that characterize the best of the sites and books I've looked at so far. It's even a bit shaming to realize how oblivious I was to all this activity.

On the other hand, I am starting to get something of the same sense of futility here as I did with academic criticism, though for different reasons. If academic criticism fails to engage a wide audience because it is too specialized, too professionalized, too removed from the interests of 'common' readers, all this other material seems unlikely to engage a wide audience because there's just too much of it. How can someone filter through it all, especially when much of it is updated daily? While the academic peer review system serves very different purposes than those embraced by reviews and blogs, out in cyberspace it's an intellectual free-for-all, and the ease of setting up a place to comment (even I could do it!) makes it possible for anyone to put forward an opinion as if it should be considered on an equal footing with anyone else's. Further, even supposing someone has the smarts and the training to offer insightful commentaries, how likely is it that blogging is the best way to express them, given the apparent pressure to say something pretty much every day? What really are the expectations here? What is the purpose of all this chatter?

I'm not about to retreat to my Ivory Tower, but I do feel a certain queasiness setting in. I've found a number of sites that strike me as worth keeping an eye on, but it's hard for me right now to imagine making a great effort on, say, my own blog--because it's hard to imagine it standing out, whatever approach I took, among all the others.

One other note here: In my reading around, I have noticed that my own impatience with literary criticism is echoed emphatically by a lot of writers out there, many of whom are not just impatient but positively vitriolic about English professors. Daniel Green of the blog The Reading Experience, for instance, writes about "academic schoolmasters, who now only serve to inflict the miseries behind the thick walls of their suffocating scholastic prisons" (see his article "Critical Conditions" at the Center for Book Culture). Ouch. While I find a lot of lit crit dreary to read, I do think there's something to be said for expertise. Green talks about seeking a middle ground for "sustained and careful, but also lively and accessible criticism," to which I say "hear hear" and let's not underestimate the training and education it takes to be truly "careful."

This post actually represents a break from another resolution I had made, which was to keep my blog about books, not about me. I'm curious though, in case anyone does read these pages: what does a widely read, intellectually serious lover of literature want from literary criticism? What makes a review, or a blog, or any commentary interesting and useful to you?

Sir Walter Scott, The Bride of Lammermoor

This novel, like Wuthering Heights, is on my list of "alternates" to consider for my 19th-century fiction course--it would replace Waverley, which I have persisted in teaching for over a decade, despite its inevitable status as least-popular-book-on-the-reading-list. I thought I'd review Bride in particular because not only is it relatively short (OK, by 19thC standards) but its tragic plot and gloomy drama seem likely to have more crowd appeal. I did, mostly, enjoy reading through it this time: it's relatively fast moving (again, by 19thC standards) and there's plenty of thematically interesting material to work with, especially about fate vs. individual choice or agency, women and power, aesthetics, and also some of the same historical and historiographcial problems explored by Waverley. But--though this may be because I have not worked with Bride carefully at this point--Waverley just seems much more useful for demonstrating what Scott means to the history of the novel...plus (though I usually have trouble convincing all but a few students of this) Waverley is a very funny novel, and except for the tedious Caleb, Bride is pretty slim on humour.

Thinking about Scott while also beginning Linda Holeman's The Linnet Bird has helped me clarify a bit what I mean when I say I find a book "thin." Holeman's novel, while entertaining so far, does not give a rich sense of why, historically, its people are as they are: what are the social, economic, intellectual, and other structures that shape (if not necessarily determine) the options they have and the ways they understand them? Both Scott and George Eliot are particularly good at presenting their stories of past times so that you understand that a plot just like this particular one would not unfold in the same way, not just with different characters, but at a different historical moment. Other Victorian novelists have been described as writing 'histories of the present,' because they perceive their own time with a similar commitment to understanding its complexity and contingency. My dissatisfaction with Quindlen's Black and Blue can be traced to a deficiency in its historical sense as well, I think: though unlike The Linnet Bird it is not deliberately a historical novel, it might have done much more to explore violence against women as a phenomenon manifested in a particular way at a particular time. What are the forces and systems that enable a husband's violence, a wife's shame and submission, in that place at that time, so that at some other point along the way things would have developed differently? What are the ideas of masculinity or femininity that are at stake? Many more specific questions would fill in this list (for instance, questions about the significance of Fran's job). Quindlen focuses much more on the psychological, individual factors--on personalities--than on these broader issues, but her novel thus stands more as a case study than a social analysis, taken from a late 20th-century context it does not attempt to understand. In that sense it is written for its own time (contemporary readers will fill in that context based on their own sense of how things work today) rather than to offer insights (rather than snapshots) for later generations of readers. Is it fear of exposition (of the dreaded 'telling,' instead of 'showing') that limits how much explanation authors writing for a general readership are willing to include? In Waverley, Scott apologizes for his lengthy accounts of history and politics but protests in his defense that his story will not be intelligible without them. In the deeper sense--that is, beyond the simple action of the plot--every story relies on that kind of context, and I appreciate novelists able to integrate it in some engaging way, thus offering the reader a fuller picture of what the world looks like from their perspective. (I'd say this is one of McEwan's accomplishments in Saturday.)

Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

I thought it was about time I re-read Wuthering Heights, not least because I am a little tired of teaching Jane Eyre in my 19th-century novels course and wanted to consider the obvious alternative. What a grim, unpleasant novel it is, though. The people in it are almost universally awful, and those that are not, like Edgar Linton, are weak and ineffectual, as if soft feelings just make you vulnerable. I remember at one time finding the passions of Heathcliff and Cathy romantic, but on this reading I found it impossible to associate either of them with any positive or sentimental feelings. The teacher (and critic) in me sees all kinds of stories to tell about the novel's structure and themes, but I wonder how much enthusiasm I could muster for lecturing on it without something (or somebody) in it to root for. I have often made the argument to my students that the disappointments we are left with in George Eliot's novels stimulate us to action: we wish for a realistic ending that is more satisfactory, for Maggie Tulliver, say, or Dorothea, and thus turn a critical eye on the real world that let them (and us) down. I can't see taking this approach to Wuthering Heights, though, because the novel's characters don't really seem to deserve better than they get. Still, there's no denying the raw power of the book, and its gloomy gravestones would certainly provide a contrast to the more conventional 'marriage plot' endings.

Anna Quindlen, Black and Blue

I picked this novel up in the library because I have been reading Quindlen's How Reading Changed My Life (as part of my exploration of the genre of 'books about books for actual readers') and mostly enjoying it. It's a gripping novel but I thought it was also manipulative, in the way We Need to Talk About Kevin is manipulative, that is, you are carried along by a fearful prurience about how bad it might get before it's over. As a dramatization of domestic violence, it's very effective, and its realistic assessment of Fran's vulnerabilities, especially as a cop's wife, was enraging, but she and the other characters never seemed particularly complex, and the analysis of her motives for both staying and leaving carried no surprises. Maybe the most poignant part, for me, anyway, was the portrayal of her son's struggle to reconcile his mother's experience with his own loyalty to his father. For lots of reasons, I would have preferred a different ending, but I have a strict 'no spoilers' policy so I won't discuss that issue any further...

Cynthia Lee Katona, Book Savvy

According to its jacket blurb, Book Savvy is "an effective guide for the burgeoning book-club community as well as a tool for literature teachers struggling to spark the interest of their students." I certainly hope book clubs and teachers will choose better guides than this volume. For one thing, it is superficial, even shallow, in its approach to literature and to readers: do people literate enough to join book clubs really need icons indicating whether a book is one to be read "for information," "for suspense," or "to know oneself"? The author also rates each book for its "level of challenge"--at 5 we find "challenging masterworks of literature" (Madame Bovary or Hamlet, for instance, at 4 "works of literature with enduring qualities" (The Merchant of Venice, for example, or ... The Robber Bride?), at 3 books that, while "thought provoking," can be "read by almost anyone" (Sister Carrie or Bleak House...??), etc. Well, OK, the categories are idiosyncratic and the application of her standards sometimes suggests the author has not herself read the books in question very carefully, but I suppose for really insecure readers, it is helpful to be guided so as not to set your sights too high. And maybe, just maybe, it is odd but not unthinkable that The Picture of Dorian Grey should be brought up as an "example of a book to read primarily for thinking, writing, and conversational skills"; after all, as she goes on to say, Wilde "was a well-known wit and man-about-town" (p. 33), and wouldn't we all like to be so quotable? Never mind what the novel is actually about! But when I came across this bit, I lost patience with amateur hour in the reading room: "One of the great innovations of twentieth-century literature was a movement away from telling the stories of kings and queens and other quite extraordinary people to the telling of stories of average people..." (p. 49). Innovations of twentieth-century literature? You see why I'm not sure she has read Bleak House, never mind, say, Moll Flanders? If Book Savvy does spark a student's interest, then that's all to the good, but it won't take most savvy readers long to figure out that they need to look elsewhere for real insight and reliable information.

This book has set me back a bit in my enthusiastic quest for ways to write about literature that fall in between the dreary erudition of professional criticism and the free-for-all of Amazon.Com reviewing. On the other hand, I suppose I could view it as motivating--inquiring readers deserve better. I've started Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer, which looks much more promising. It interested me that early on she registers her own antipathy towards literary criticism academic style: "Only once did my passion for reading steer me in the wrong direction, and that was when I let it persuade me to go to graduate school...." (8).

Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

Middlesex is a compelling read with memorably distinct and eccentric characters and a rich blend of comedy, pathos, and social commentary. At the same time, however, it seemed hollow to me at the center: what was the thematic principle drawing its various elements together? Though the premise of a narrator who shifts genders is intrinsically interesting, why do that for this particular story about a socially mobile Greek-American family? At first I thought the Greek-Turkish divide of the Smyrna sections was setting up an argument about the arbitrariness of the lines we draw between ourselves and others, but it did not seem to me that this was ultimately how wthe ethnic aspect, or the cultural aspect, of the novel played out. Why have Calliope declare herself "really" a boy, as well, as if reasserting biological determinism instead of exploring the limits of the social construction of gender? why is her desire for women the primary device for asserting her male identity, rather than a way of showing the complications of desire--the potential for sexual identity to challenge or conflict with gender identity? The novel's writing shifts registers unevenly as well: the extraordinary scenes of the sacking of Smyrna near the beginning, for instance, with the heart-stopping account of the fate of the doctor's family, turns out to be incongruous in a novel that is much more social comedy despite its other serious elements. So (like White Teeth) Middlesex seemed to me exuberant, brilliant, but intellectually undisciplined, almost as if it could use another round of revisions to give its elements the feeling of necessity that makes a book great rather than a great read. Still, I was impressed enough that I've ordered The Virgin Suicides to see what else Eugenides can do.

Sara Nelson, So Many Books, So Little Time

Unlike Nick Hornby's Pollysyllabic Spree (see previous post), Sara Nelson's book is really a memoir. Because she is a book enthusiast, she talks a lot about what she reads (or, sometimes, does not read, or reads only part of), but she does not seem to know very much about books, or to be able to put her own reading experiences or tastes into any besides personal contexts. Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, for instance, lead her to reflections on unreasoning passion, marriage and infidelity in her own life (no, she does not confess to having been unfaithful--except figuratively, as she concludes what I thought was a laboured conceit about her relationships with books, which are "the affairs I do not have"). The chronicle of her attempt to read and write about a book a week for a year is moderately entertaining, and Nelson's style and personality are generally engaging, but for someone looking for literary insight, this book has little to offer.

Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree

In addition to the reasons laid out in the introduction to this blog (see left), I wanted to try writing up informal notes on my reading because of my ever-increasing dissatisfaction with the kind of writing about books I am expected to do professionally, namely literary criticism. Although I believe that literary criticism has its own kind of interest and value, as an avid reader I often find it frustrating and bizarre when the conversation about a book becomes remote in both form and feeling from the conversation I think the book itself is supposed to be a part of. My own area of academic expertise, for example, is the Victorian novel, and if any one quality could be said to be typical of so many books so widely varying in subject and style, it would be a sense of engagement with the world--not that they aspire to represent it mimetically (any reader of Victorian fiction knows there is nothing naive about what often gets called its 'realism'), but that these books challenge their readers to think and care about all aspects of social, political, economic, and romantic life. "Dear reader!" Dickens concludes his polemical anti-Utilitarian novel Hard Times. "It rests with you and me, whether, in our two fields of action, similar things shall be or not. Let them be!" And of course his "Let them be!" is a call to action, not to complacency or passivity: let the world be the way you and I can imagine it to be, better, more just, more loving, more humane. But current literary criticism communicates little of this urgency, and none of Dickens's humour, or, as he would have it, fancy.

My concern is not so much that literary criticism is often written in difficult, obscure prose (after all, every specialization requires its own jargon)--although I have finally achieved the courage and professional security to adopt Nick Hornby's poetry-reading philosophy for my own reading of criticism and theory ("If something doesn't give you even a shot at comprehension in the first couple of readings, then my motto is "F--k it" [p. 91, my polite hyphens]). My objection is more that we have distanced ourselves so completely from ordinary conversation about books that we have become irrelevant to all readers but ourselves. Of course, there are some exceptions, academics who have produced the textual equivalents of cross-over albums. But most of us know that when we write and publish even our most supposedly ground-breaking article, it is destined straight for the dustbin of other scholars' footnotes. Most of us are presumably OK with this result, or there would be a revolution. Or perhaps the necessity of publishing such material to secure and keep our jobs and our professional credibility drives doubts away. But Dickens, to stick with my example (not least because he is one of Hornby's favourite examples as well), certainly hoped his words had more life in them than that.

All this is by way of saying that I wanted to experiment a little with writing in a different way about books, a way that would reflect my experience of reading them and thinking about them in a more immediate, personal way than academic writing allows without letting go altogether of the analytic habits built up by years of professional training. Surely there can be an informed, educated conversation about literature that allows, for one thing, for judgment, for values, for affect, for liking and disliking. And, of course, there is such a conversation--indeed, there are many such conversations today, just not in the pages of academic journals. One contribution that I have just finished re-reading is Hornby's Polysyllabic Spree.

I first read sections of this book last year, when a graduate student passed it on to me thinking (rightly) that I would enjoy Hornby's infatuation with David Copperfield (thanks, El!). Since I began thinking about alternatives to academic criticism, partly through my work on 19th-century literary reviewing, I have begun looking for examples of contemporary writing about books that achieves something like the balance I am interested in between analysis and immediacy, and going back to Hornby's collection this week, I think he gets fairly close. Unlike those in Sara Nelson's So Many Books, So Little Time, for example, which I am reading now, Hornby's commentaries, though engagingly personal and idiosyncratic, focus primarily on the books and not on himself. He attends to questions of craft, though my academic side wishes he would introduce some technical terms here and there for greater precision, and he thinks about the books in terms of the means they use to their ends while still considering also the value of those goals. For all his breezy style, he has a knack for summary judgments, as when, after recounting a particularly horrific detail from a rape scene in Pete Dexter's Train, he objects that it seemed to have happened "through a worldview rather than through a narrative inevitability" (97). For me, the great charm of this collection is its combination of these moments of intense literary and moral scrutiny with irreverence and humour. Who says you can't be both serious and funny? I loved his idea of the "Cultural Fantasy Boxing League" in which, he supposes, "books would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. 'The Magic Flute' v. Middlemarch? Middlemarch in six..." (58). Of course!

But Hornby really won me over when he articulated what I think book lovers everywhere feel: the extent to which our own libraries are extensions or reflections of our identities. This is why we recoil from well-intentioned and practical advice to 'clear some space' on our existing bookshelves to make room for new purchases! "I suddenly had a little epiphany," he says, as he files away some volumes: "all the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. . . . with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not" (125).

Ian McEwan, Saturday

I approached Saturday with caution because of its rave reviews, but I found this novel entirely engrossing, genuinely interesting, original, and moving. Part of the surprise it held for me was Henry Perowne's cautiously supportive attitude towards the war in Iraq. I've become so accustomed to anti-war perorations from literary luminaries that I had no expectation that McEwan would offer anything different (I should have known better); the enormous uncertainty, the high stakes, the intolerable complacency of a pacifism that is content to leave Saddam in power, the difficulty of separating ends from means when responding to the call to arms made by leaders whose real motivations are surely mixed...I think McEwan did justice to the complexity of the judgments--the mental and moral balancing acts--called for by these circumstances. I thought the use of "Dover Beach" as a frame and model was brilliant: I can't believe I didn't recognize Perowne's situation at the beginning as analogous to that of Arnold's speaker until the poem appeared directly in the action. I'm curious about how or whether the initial encounter between Perowne and Baxter stands as its own analogue to the international situation: surely it does, and so Perowne's feelings of responsibility for the violent consequences also have some application to the wider issues, including perhaps his stance towards the invasion of Iraq. Why is he a neurosurgeon? At what level is the fascinating issue of the relationship between physical and mental states raised by Perowne's work on the brain also part of either the problem or the solution he posits for the world that lacks 'certitude' or 'help from pain'? The turn from the window to the lover in "Dover Beach" has been criticized as an objectification of the companion, sought not as an individual but as solace, as a solution to the ignorant clash of armies. Has McEwan avoided that solipsistic impulse on the part of his protagonist? Does his family have the solidity Arnold's love lacks? It is not credible in a simple realistic way that Baxter should be turned aside from violence by poetry, but how far is McEwan appealing to us to see some poetic essence (yearning, as Henry considers it?) as the saving grace in a world racked with 'confused alarms of struggle and of flight'? The novel seems far too political to be satisfied with an aesthetic turn away from the clash itself. McEwan's writing here seemed flawless to me, with all the richness of detail that made Atonement dazzling in its own way, but without the tendency I felt in that novel to abstraction or aesthetic self-indulgence: this book reads as if all of its details are necessary, and as if it is equally necessary that they be clear and concrete.