Half-Way!

We finally made it to the half-way marker on our list of 100 novels! The books read so far are as follows:

1. A Passage to India (E.M. Forster)
2. An American Tragedy (Theodore Dreiser)
3. Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)
4. The Great Gatsby (Scott Fitzgerald)
5. The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway)
6. Death Comes for the Archbishop (Willa Cather)
7. The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Thornton Wilder)
8. To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)
9. Red Harvest (Dashiell Hammett)
10. The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)
11. Light in August (William Faulkner)
12. A Handful of Dust (Evelyn Waugh)
13. I, Claudius (Robert Graves)
14. Tropic of Cancer (Henry Miller)
15. Appointment in Samarra (John O'Hara)
16. Call It Sleep (Henry Roth)
17. Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
18. Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston)
19. At Swim-Two-Birds (Flann O'Brien)
20. The Death of the Heart (Elizabeth Bowen)
21. The Big Sleep (Raymond Chandler)
22. The Day of the Locust (Nathanael West)
23. The Power and the Glory (Graham Greene)
24. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
25. The Man Who Loved Children (Christina Stead)
26. Native Son (Richard Wright)
27. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Carson McCullers)
28. Loving (Henry Green)
29. All the King's Men (Robert Penn Warren)
30. Animal Farm (George Orwell)
31. The Berlin Stories (Christopher Isherwood)
32. Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh)
33. Under the Volcano (Malcolm Lowry)
34. 1984 (George Orwell)
35. The Heart of the Matter (Graham Greene)
36. The Sheltering Sky (Paul Bowles)
37. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (C.S. Lewis)
38. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
39. A Dance to the Music of Time (Books 1-4) (Anthony Powell)
40. Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison)
41. Go Tell It on the Mountain (James Baldwin)
42. The Adventures of Augie March (Saul Bellow)
43. The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien)
44. Lucky Jim (Kingsley Amis)
45. Under the Net (Iris Murdoch)
46. The Recognitions (William Gaddis)
47. Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
48. Lolita (Vladimir Nabakov)
49. The Assistant (Bernard Malamud)
50. On the Road (Jack Kerouac)

Whew!  Only 50 more novels and probably 3.5 years to go!  If you want to jump in, I'm diving into James Agee's A Death in the Family next!

On the Road to Nowhere

I first read Kerouac’s On the Road when I was 20 years old.  I had just transferred from UCLA to UC Berkeley, and it was one of my first purchases at Cody’s Books.  In fact, my copy still has the original receipt in the pages, so I know that I bought the book for $9.74 on August 3^rd, 1992.  I remember riding along on the Bart reading in the sunlight as I leaned upon the glass puttering above the neighborhoods south of Berkeley.  I was excited by the adventures I was reading and would have loved to have had some crazy cross-country travels with friends and strangers and see capital-A-America from the dirty back roads and torn-up highways.  Berkeley’s liberal past and San Francisco’s Beat history made it the perfect environment to romanticize what I was reading.

Actually, I didn’t have to do much romanticizing, because Kerouac did most of that for me.  Coming back to the novel now, twice the age I was when I read it the first time, I was rather disappointed with it.  To be sure, there are some great characters and Kerouac does a great job creating the world of the novel and the kids running through it.  The extent to which I enjoyed the book was as an historical document, the capturing of a post-war generation of youths who rejected materialism and sought spiritual ecstasy among the culturally disenfranchised.  These are kids who want more from life than a nine-to-five job that pays the bills and supports a family.  They don’t want to be stable and steady, seeking instead “the purity of the road,” and embracing “the one and noble function of our time, move.”  I can dig that.  But Kerouac believed so unwaveringly in the philosophical direction of “the beat generation” that the novel very rarely looks beyond its own corridors. 

J.D. Salinger dealt with a very similar topic in Catcher in the Rye, only he was able to see Holden’s struggles and see beyond them at the same time.  As I noted in my blog about Catcher, a sixteen-year-old reading the book will have a different experience than a forty-year-old because Salinger so masterfully handles his subject.  For Kerouac, there is no looking above and beyond.  William Gaddis is also concerned with the emptiness of society in The Recognitions.   Kerouac lacks the intellectual intensity to try to understand the ins and outs of what’s bothering him.  He is happy to have Dean’s hip nonsense stand-in for a true analysis—“There was nothing clear about the things he said, but what he meant to say was somehow made pure and clear.”  The book is trapped in its own mysticism and the antics of the “holy goof” and “American saint” that is Dean Moriarty.  A novel is of course under no obligation to do more, but to fail to do more is to become locked into a time and place and moment, to become an historical document.

Tied to these limitations of Kerouac’s intellect and perspective is his desire to “know” the world without doing any of the work required to know it.  Sal skips through experiences like a stone and then claims to have knowledge about entire peoples and cultures.  The first such experience is when Sal is living in central California with Terry and her son.  After spending afternoons getting drunk with Terry’s brother, Rickey, Sal decides he needs to find work to support this new family of his.  He gets a job as a migrant worker picking grapes alongside refugees from the dust bowl nearly 15 years ago.  After a short while picking grapes and being lousy at it, Sal “looked up at the dark sky and prayed to God for a better break in life and a better chance to do something for the little people I loved.”  This made me laugh.  Having just read The Grapes of Wrath in this list a little while back, we’ve read of the real hardships of the Oklahoma migrant workers who fought against a broken system to feed their family and maintain their dignity.  Here, little Sal is a tourist who is playing at migrant working, and he doesn’t have the self-awareness to know this.  Not two pages later, Sal is wiring his aunt for $50 so that he can get back home to New Jersey to begin the next semester of school.  Sal’s aunt hovers on the horizon of all his adventures, and as a reader, I never worried for Sal because he could always wire for $50 and get home to his aunt’s and work on his novel.  If Sal showed even the slightest awareness that he was in fact not like those alongside whom he “struggled,” I would respect the character (and his creator) a hell of a lot more.

“Negroes” and “colored folk” of all colors are present throughout the novel.  This has been a source of pride for those who see the novel as embracing the down-trodden and marginalized Americans.  Early in my reading of the novel, I was pleased to see the variety of the people that walked in and out of the novel.  But the deeper I read, the more aware I became that these characters were more caricature, that Sal (and Kerouac) skips off the skin of these characters as frictionlessly as Dean’s tires fly over the ribbon of highway.  At one point in the novel, Sal is living in Denver and all his friends are living elsewhere.  Sal is lonely and feels “like a speck on the surface of the sad red earth.”  As he wanders through the streets of Denver, he says,

At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27^th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.  I stopped at a little shack where a man sold hot red chili in paper containers; I bought some and ate it, strolling in the dark mysterious streets.  I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a ‘white man’ disillusioned.  All my life I’d had white ambitions; that was why I’d abandoned a good woman like Terry in the San Joaquin Valley.  I passed the dark porches of Mexican and Negro homes; soft voices were there, occasionally the dusky knee of some mysterious sensual gal; and dark faces of the men behind the rose arbors. . . . I was only myself, Sal Paradise, sad, strolling in this violet dark, this unbearably sweet night, wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America.

It’s so sad and hard to be the white man and so ecstatic to be a Negro of America!  Sal’s (and again, Kerouac’s) awareness of what it is to be black, Mexican, or Japanese is horribly lacking.  He might like them, but he certainly doesn’t know them and doesn’t show any interest in getting to know them or understand them.  The cultures he’s cut off from are romanticized and idealized—never real or understood.  Kerouac can’t see beyond his own white skin.

Nor can he see beyond his own maleness.  The women in this novel are enough to make a feminist scream.  The men are mad and impassioned, tearing off across the country in search of God and America, staying up all night having deep conversations about the world and the way to live in it.  The women, meanwhile, will gladly wait in a hotel room all day for a couple hours of sex with Dean.  They will tolerate his marrying two other women just to share a bit in his madness.   Or they are prostitutes reveling in the boys’ madness.  Or they are aunts and saintly mothers who finance and support the boys’ craziness.  At one point, Sal and Dean encounter a black man named Walter in San Francisco.  Walter’s wife makes no fuss, even as they keep the light on over her bed and talk all night as she tries to sleep.  She just smiles and “never said a word.”  Upon leaving Walter’s apartment, Dean says, “Now you see, man, there’s real woman for you.  Never a harsh word, never a complaint, or modified; her old man can come in any hour of the night with anybody and have talks in the kitchen and drink the beer and leave any old time.  This is a man, and that’s his castle.” 

Yeah.  That’s the world of On the Road.  It’s interesting as a slice of history, the presentation of the beat philosophy of life and how to live it, but it doesn’t have the intellectual strength or intuitive awareness to make it something more. 

Benard Malamud's The Assistant

In the middle of The Assistant, Helen, the grocer’s daughter, gives a stack of books to Frank, the titular assistant.  She has checked out a number of books from the library for him: Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Crime and Punishment.  Frank, not an educated man, struggles through these texts, reading, “at the start, in snatches, then in bursts of strange hunger.”  He read them because he wanted to impress Helen, and

[a]fterward Helen suggested other novels by the same writers, so he would know them better, but Frank balked, saying that he wasn’t sure he had understood those he had read. ‘I’m sure you have,’ she answered, ‘if you got to know the people.’ ‘I know them,’ he muttered.  But to please her he worked through two more thick books, sometimes tasting nausea on his tongue, his face strained as he read, eyes bright black, frowning, although he usually felt some relief at the end of the book.  He wondered what Helen found so satisfying in all this goddamned human misery, and suspected her of knowing he had spied on her in the bathroom and was using the books to punish him for it.  But then he thought that it was unlikely.  Anyway, he could not get out of his thoughts how quick some people’s lives went to pot when they couldn’t make up their minds what to do when they had to do it: and he was troubled by the thought of how easy it was for a man to wreck his whole life in a single wrong act.  After that they guy suffered forever, no matter what he did to make up for the wrong.

This passage encapsulates the spirit of Bernard Malamud’s novel and all the strands that come together in what is really a simple story, as far as plot goes.  First, it is all about the characters—if you get to know them, then you understand the novel.  Through them you will see “all this goddamned human misery” and you will see suffering at the heart of the story.  Malamud places his book in the tradition of Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment—these epic, “thick books,” even as he penned a short novel.  What impresses me is the epic scope that is covered in such brevity.

The Assistant is about Morris Bober, a Jewish grocer in his sixties whose store is struggling to produce enough money to support Morris, his wife Ida, and his daughter Helen.  Helen has dreams of going to college, but she has had to work full time to help support the family.  The grocery store is described by the family as a “pit” and a “trap,” a thing from which they can’t escape and that is killing them.  It can’t support them and they can’t sell it.  While we meet many other characters who live and work on their same Brooklyn block, the other major character of course is Frank Alpine.  Frank is from the West coast and has been a drifter his entire adult life.  He is of Italian descent and feels like he keeps making bad decisions, blown along by life instead of creating his own future.

When we first meet Frank, he is loitering around the neighborhood and begins helping Morris drag in the heavy milk bottles in the morning.  Ever since a duo of “holdupniks” beat Morris in the head with the butt of a gun and emptied the already empty register, Morris has been weak.  He appreciates the help, and while he doesn’t trust the goy, he feels sorry for him when Frank tells him of his past.  Morris is an honest and trusting man, believing other people are good at heart.  When Morris pushes himself too quickly and must lie in bed for weeks on end, Frank inserts himself in the grocery, working for no pay in order, he says, to learn the business.

Frank’s intentions are good.  He was one of the two men who held Morris up and he has been wracked with guilt about it.  He has returned the money he stole to the register and seems to be making amends. Frank helps grow the business and makes it more profitable, and Morris feels Frank is good luck.  Because I don’t want to spoil the plot, I will leave off there and say that Frank spends the whole novel doing things he regrets and trying to make up for it.  He is warned by many to stay away from the grocery, that it will suck out his life and entomb him as it did Morris.  Even Helen, whom Frank has fallen for, tells him to get out while he can.  But in spite of everyone shoeing him away and the Bobers outright forbidding him at points from being there, Frank will not leave, paying back a series of debts that he can never repay.  Frank is a wonderfully complex character whom you admire, pity, and despise in turns. All the characters are equally rich, admirable and pitiable.

At the axis of all these characters, Malamud balances a host of themes.  The Assistant is about immigrants.  It’s about America.  It’s about post-holocaust Jews.  It's about the meeting of Jewish and Christian culture.  It’s about fathers and sons, generations in America.  It’s about poverty.  It’s about assimilation.  And more than anything else, it’s about suffering and redemption. 

Being a Jew in this novel has nothing to do with religious practices.  The Bobers are not kosher.  They don’t attend a synagogue.  We don’t see them observing any religious holidays.  Instead, there are only fleeting conversations between Frank and Morris about what it is to be Jewish.  Morris says that to be Jewish is to treat other people well, to help other people, and to suffer for them.  Frank has no love for the Jews when the novel opens, and he suspect that they are a people of victims who suffer out of weakness.  In the end it is Frank’s story as he grows not only to respect Morris but to take his place.  He takes his place not only physically in the store but as a sufferer.  At any time, Frank is free to leave town and not worry about the Bobers, but instead he stubbornly haunts them, taking their punishment and abuse because he sees his only hope as sticking it out and getting the forgiveness he needs.  It is a story of redemption in which redemption is never finally achieved.  The act of seeking redemption is more important than the redemption at the other end, and I had never seen that dramatized in a work of art before.  The prodigal son is always welcomed with open arms in the end, isn’t he?  He is restored to his proper place in the household when he humbles himself and confesses to his wrongs, isn’t he?  Here the prodigal son is turned away only to insert himself as a house-servant by the force of his will.  The novel does not have traditionally happy ending (I am sure you are shocked to hear) but neither is it a hopeless or depressing ending.  Frank has gone through an impressive change, but as he says, “he could see out but nobody could see in.”

This is one of those novels that sneaks up on you: it's a decent story,  has excellent and riveting characters, has a modest plot arc.  But once the final cover was closed, I have spent a lot of time trying to find all the threads running through the story and look at them together.  There is a lot to chew on.  Of course, if you don’t like chewing, all you need to do is what Helen advises Frank: get to know the people.  That’s all it takes to enjoy The Assistant.

Dancing with Lady Molly

The fourth book in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time series is called At Lady Molly’s.  This novel picks up two or three years after the last one.  Our narrator, Jenkins, is now at the end of his 20s and entering his 30s.  He has moved from working in the publishing industry, where he published art books, to the film industry, where he now earns his keep as a scriptwriter.  It all takes place sometime in the latter half of the 1930s, as the characters discuss Hitler and the possibility of war on the horizon, but that larger social context is not particularly relevant to this episode of Powell's tale. 

Each book in the series focuses on a different stage in Jenkins' and his friends' personal lives and simultaneously in the national growing pains as Britain enters the modern period.  In the first book, Jenkins and his classmates were still in school, finishing up their undergraduate lives.  The country was also at the start of something new as the old class structure was wearing away and the middle class worker could rise as the aristocrats fell.  In the second, they were young men new to the world of business and relationships.  In the third book, the young men are more established and a few are beginning to stake out political grounds.  There is a great focus on the political forces working away in British culture.  The fourth book takes a step back from politics to focus on marriage. 

I have found each novel to be more enjoyable than the preceding ones.  I’m not sure if that is because I am each time more familiar with Powell’s style and world or because Powell’s writing gets sharper and more enjoyable itself.

One of the things I have come to appreciate through this project is the power of longer narratives.  I was honestly of the opinion not too many years ago that if a writer couldn’t tell her story in 350 pages or less, then she needed to reconsider what she is saying.  But from An American Tragedy to The Lord of the Rings to The Recognitions to A Dance to the Music of Time, there have been a number of 1,000 page stories that I have read and even more that clock in around 600 pages.  Some stories require the scope of all those hundreds of pages to make the characters and curves of plot ring true and have the proper weight and meaning. 

As I pointed out in my post regarding the first book in the series, A Question of Upbringing, Powell’s intention in composing this long story was to get at something real, to avoid the conventions of common plotting and describe something larger.  I think his method begins to pay dividends by this point in the series.  The characters of a long work have the potential to carry more flesh and bones than can usually be held together in a shorter work.  In shorter fiction, characteristics sometimes necessarily replace character.  Powell is in no danger of doing so here.  The danger of this approach is that the author may end up creating a soap opera that gets caught up in the daily personal dramas without ever going anywhere of value.  Powell adroitly avoids the pitfall by having a definite sense of what to include and what to exclude from his narrative.  In this book, for example, the narrator falls in love, courts, proposes, and gets engaged to a woman—and we never see ANY of it! 

Another thing that I love about this project is the effect of reading these books in chronological order.  When you realize that The Recognitions and At Lady Molly’s came out in the same year, you get a real sense of all the literary traditions and practices that overlap and interweave.  While it is true to say that literature moved from Victorian to Modern to Post-Modern, it gives a false impression of how non-uniformly things moved.  Stylistically, The Recognitions and At Lady Molly’s could not be further from each other.  In fact, I think there is a fantastic study to be made in comparing the two books, for for all their differences, the two books are dealing with a lot of the same cultural issues.  Every book from the 30s on makes some reference to Freud, Jung, and/or psychoanalysis.  In Gaddis’s world, everyone is casually getting analyzed to solve their problems (which analysis can never and will never solve).  In At Lady Molly’s, General Conyers speaks at great length about psychoanalysis and tries it out in his approach to understanding Widmerpool.  Moreover, the hipsters who are playing the social game in search of recognition and fame in Gaddis’s novel are every bit as socially eager in Powell’s.  Powell feels just as critical of their pretensions, though he is certainly a lot more charitable toward them.  Anyone want to work that comparative analysis out for me?  Anyone?

I am already looking forward to 1960, when I get to read the 5^th book, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant.