Lucky Jim: So Wrong but So Well Done

I want to sing the praises of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim because there are many things to praise in this novel.  Before I can find the right key to sing in, however, I need to quiet the criticisms that are simultaneously harping in my brain.  The two most distracting elements for me were the lead character’s ugliness of character and the sexual politics of the novel.

Dixon, the protagonist of Amis’s tale, is a first year lecturer of history in an unnamed university.  Dixon is beleaguered by the absent-minded chair of the history department whom Dixon needs to impress if he wishes to keep his job.  Why Dixon wants to keep his job is a mystery, and why we would root for him to succeed in keeping his job is no less of one.  He hates teaching, he hates academic research, he hates academic writing, he hates the one student who seems interested in his class, and he can’t stand anyone who takes the university setting seriously.  Now, I have been an academic, and I can relate to the things that Amis wanted to poke fun at, but Dixon is so full of vitriol and misery that I found no pleasure in his frustrations.  As readers, we are clearly aligned with Dixon, cheering for and siding with him as he stumbles through his daily struggles.  Most of the time, I found him to be just petty and annoying in his hatefulness.

My edition has a forward by David Lodge, who explains the cultural moment of Lucky Jim and the post-war class issues of London and its environs that made me understand Dixon differently, but without that explanation, I would never find a way to make Dixon especially palatable.  Now I can have an intellectual appreciation for what Amis is doing, but I can’t wash the bad taste out of my mouth where Dixon is concerned. 

At the heart of the novel is a love triangle between Dixon and the two women he courts.  Margaret is a fellow instructor whom Dixon is entangled with even though he doesn’t like her all that much.  She looks alright, though she looks a little to “mannish” for his comfort.  One night, drunk, he makes an advance on Margaret, and she lets him at first.  Part way in, she appears to change her mind and kicks him out.  Later, he thinks on the encounter: 

 But he wouldn’t have tried, would he? or not so hard, anyway, if she hadn’t seemed so keen.  And why had she decided to seem so keen, after so many weeks of seeming so not keen?  Most likely because of some new novelist she’d been reading.  But of course she out to be keen anyway.  It’s what she really wants, he thought, scowling with the emphasis with which he put this to himself.  She doesn’t know it, but it’s what she really wants, what her nature really demands.  And, God, it was his due, wasn’t it?  After all he’d put up with.  

  Yeah.  That’s what it really says.  Still later in the novel, when he breaks it off with her, Margaret goes into full blown hysterics, causing Dixon’s neighbor to slap “Margaret several times on the face, very hard” and then shake her “vigorously.”  This cure is just what she needed, and when she comes too, Margaret apologizes.  The neighbor refers to her as “girlie,” and she responds to him by sincerely saying, “Thank you so much, Mr. Atkinson; you’ve been wonderful.  I just can’t thank you enough.”  Ha!  That killed me! 

I actually liked Margaret, but I was clearly in the wrong.  Before Dixon can get together with the proper girl, he has to have good grounds for ditching Margaret.  Just walking away, an act that Margaret seems to condone, is for some reason unacceptable to Amis.  Apparently that is another cultural moment that does not translate to a 21^st century American reader.  So how does Amis create the necessary schism?  We learn in the penultimate chapter that Margaret is dangerous and damn near insane!  She’s a liar and a manipulator and a harmer of innocent menfolk.  No one could blame Dixon for walking away from that!  Ugh.

Meanwhile, the greatest thing that Dixon can say about Christine, his bona fide love interest, is that she is really pretty.  The sexual politics of the novel suck.

After all that, it is going to seem strange that I still say that this is an excellent novel.  I can’t help but admire Amis’s deft handling of the plot, which while relatively simple is also extraordinarily tight.  The scenes begin and end excellently and progress naturally.  The writing is sharp and witty. The comedy (when I am not wincing at the characters’ characters) is solid.  Take this description of waking up hung over: 

Dixon was alive again.  Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but the summary, forcible ejection.  He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning.  The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again.  A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse.  His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.  During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police.  He felt bad.

The novel employs a very tongue-in-cheek tone that is fun to play in when the nasty attitudes don’t get in the way.  In the end, it’s a romantic comedy that could have starred Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant, and when I think of Dixon being portrayed by Grant, I could see myself enjoying the story a lot.  It’s well worth the read, even if you get hung up on the politics like I did.  If your political views are less intrusive than mine when you read, then I would think that you would find the novel a very rewarding read.

Lords and Ladies of the Ring

I begin with a confession:  this is the first time I have ever read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

I know.  It’s crazy that a 40-year-old self-professed nerd has never read the granddaddy of all fantasy fiction.  I’m not proud.

While we’re being honest here, I have to admit that I was a little afraid to read it now.  I grew up hearing all the stories from the novel thanks to my older brother and my various geek friends.  I played D&D when the game was first published in the 70s, and my first wizard was named Gandalf.  I have read and loved The Hobbit.  I have seen the movies many times and loved them.  What if, given all this indirect exposure, I read the thing itself, the center of so much nerdy fun, and found that I didn’t like it?  What if I stumbled over literary faults or found the plot dragging and leaving me wishing for the films?  What if Tolkien’s voice, so easy and charming in The Hobbit, became overworked and pretentious with the epic nature of The Lord of the Rings?  It would be devastating.

My worries were of course entirely unnecessary.  I loved the novel.  It read with all the easy and joy of The Hobbit, and I never felt the story sag, in spite of its tremendous length.  Tolkien is a master of his craft, and his place in the literary canon (of both fantasy and literary fiction) is well founded.  It is, of course, a wonderful story, wonderfully told.  And those appendices! Oh my goodness!  I never understood why some people insisted on rereading then novel every year, but now I get it.  I embarked on the appendices solely because I promised myself I would read the whole book, but I was shocked to learn how engrossing the appendices were.  The scope of Tolkien’s universe is staggering.  The energy he put into creating the world lying under his tale—incredible!  With every page, I wanted to reread the novel and see how much more I understood.  One could spend 20 years studying, reading, making connections, and making sense, all to understand a mythical world.  What an accomplishment!

Early in the novel I found myself disappointed with the dialogue because so much of it is all surface.  The characters say exactly what they mean with no subtext.  And all the characters recognized each other’s greatness, so friendships could form in ridiculously short times.  But in the end, these disappointments were minor and had no lasting impression; the story and scope of the world are so grand that the lack of subtleties in character can be painlessly overlooked.

I don’t have much to say about the novel analytically, but I will leave off with some thoughts about the lack of women in the novel.  Frodo and Bilbo have no woman in the house, Sam’s mother has apparently passed on, both the kingdoms of Rohan and Gondor are without a queen, as is Rivendell, and of course the Ents have lost the Entwives entirely.  There is a serious dearth of mothers and wives at the end of the Third Age of middle earth.  Obviously, this is no accident on Tolkien’s part.  Moreover, Eowyn’s roll and speeches make it clear that Tolkien didn’t remove all the women because he felt that war was no place for such gentle creatures.  Nonetheless, women do act as a kind of symbol in the novel, a symbol of growth and stability and healthy times.  The three main female presences in the novel are Lady Galadriel, Arwen, and Eowyn.  The last two becomes wives and a promise of generational growth and prosperity in the Fourth Age, the Age of Men.  Eowyn is tamed by Faramir, giving up her desire to fight in order to be with him. Arwen sacrifices eternal life to rule with Aragorn.  Meanwhile, the other creatures will dwindle, like the wifeless Ents, the dwarves with their low population of women, the orcs, who seem to be entirely without females.  Lady Galadriel has been doing all the work of womankind for the last half of the Third Age, and she is ready to retire her position and sail from Grey Haven with a boat full of broken and used-up men.

When this reading adventure is complete, I expect I'll be coming back to Lord of the Rings and travel through Middle-Earth once more.

Augie Marches On and On

My experience reading Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March was a mixed bag.  There were several aspects of the novel that I truly enjoyed and admired, and there were several things I learned about myself and what I want out of a reading experience.

What I really enjoyed in the novel was Bellow's entire cast of characters.  The novel is narrated in the first person by the titular Augie March.  Augie tells the story of his life from his early childhood on the South side of Chicago during the depression to his time in Paris as a married man in his mid- to late-twenties.  His adventures are filled with many wonderful odd and fantastically-sketched people who run in and out of his life.  And all these characters have their own motives, desires, and designs that dictate what they do.  Bellow has an excellent eye for characters.  None of them makes a false move or does something solely for the movement of the plot.  Each action is true to that character, and that is an impressive feat.

Augie himself is drawn with precision and consistency, and given how long the novel is, that too is impressive.  Unlike most first-person narrators, Augie is reliable in his account of his actions, motives, thoughts as well as those of others.  The continuous theme in Augie's life is that he is someone who "other people are always trying to fit into their schemes":

External life being so mighty, the instruments so huge and terrible, the performances so great, the thoughts so great and threatening, you produce a someone who can exist before it.  You invent a man who can stand before the terrible appearances.  This way he can't get justice and he can't give justice, but he can live.  And this is what mere humanity always does.  It's made up of these inventors or artists, millions and millions of them, each in his own way trying to recruit other people to play a supporting role and sustain him in his make believe.  The great chiefs and leaders recruit the greatest number, and that's what their power is.

Augie keeps running into people who attempt to "recruit" him, as he says.  But Augie also knows that he's "got opposition in" him too, and after being pulled in by these recruiters, he continually pulls away, giving up what he has been given for freedom to decide things for himself.  Aware of this tendency in others to recruit, Augie goes out of his way to avoid recruiting his readers.  Augie openly discusses his ugly impulses and his noble ones.  There is not a character that crosses his path in whom Augie doesn't find something admirable, something ugly, something good, and something bad.

Those moments of analysis and insight are some of the novels most enjoyable passages and rewarding parts.  Augie himself, in his even-keeled approach to others and honest reporting of his own actions, is a very likeable guy.

But in making such a likable and even-keeled character, Bellow has a hard time putting Augie into compelling situations.  As a reader, I never once worried about Augie.  I always had the same distance that he did and I never really felt like anything was risked.

For example, when Augie is engaged to Lucy, his brother's wife's cousin, he is on tenuous ground with Lucy's family.  Lucy has money and is a possible escape from poverty for Augie.  Meanwhile, Augie's neighbor Mimi becomes pregnant by her boyfriend and relies on Augie to help her obtain an abortion.  As Augie joins her in a trip to the doctor, Augie is seen with Mimi leaning against him by another one of Lucy's cousins who has it in for Augie.  His goose is cooked.  He can't possibly expect Lucy's family to believe the truth.  But there is zero point zero drama in this entire exchange.  Augie doesn't really care all that much for Lucy anyway, and he doesn't really care all that much for money either.  He's not even really bothered that he's going to be accused of something that isn't so.

The only time Augie even cares about a major change in his life is when Thea leaves him.  But by this point, Augie's resilience is so well established that I was never worried about his well being.  I knew that he would make it through with no real sense of loss or pain, that he would keep on keeping on and find love again. 

There was nothing to pull me on other than idle curiosity (and my desire to have read the book for the sake of this project).  It took me three months to read The Adventures of Augie March.  Now that's not all Bellow's fault, of course.  Part of the slow-going was because I am a slow reader.  Another part was because my October, November, and early December were incredibly busy, and my work ate up all my spare time.  But I imagine I would have made more time to read had the movement of Augie's story been more compelling.  I didn't try to sneak in a paragraph here or there to see what happened, because even when something was happening (and a lot did happen) it didn't hold any emotional weight. 

(As a side note, I discovered reading this novel, that I am a big fan of meaty scenes in a novel.  I love when a scene takes place and characters, grounded in a physical location, act and react to each other and move the story on by their exchanges and interactions.  So much of The Adventures of Augie March is about thoughts and theories and large actions that there are very few scenes that hold much weight.  The scenes that do take place give us bits of dialogue and interesting exchanges but nothing much to chew on.)

For all the things the book had going for it--character, sharp writing, interesting observations about life and purpose--this lack of propulsion and emotional contact undercut my ability to enjoy the novel.  If you read it, I hope you are able to get more out of it than I did.

Go Tell It on the Mountain

There are live wires when dealing with any political (or politicized) topic in art.  When discussing race, religion, and sex, an author runs the risk of oversimplifying the issue, of sacrificing honesty to present the topic in a falsely positive or negative light.  Moreover, when two of these topics appear in the same work, one may be sacrificed to the other.  For example, Ralph Ellison is interested in race and power in Invisible Man, and he has little to no interest in how gender plays into that mix.  As a result, the female characters make fleeting appearances at best and generally fall flat, skipped over for the Ellison's larger interest.  Any one of these topics, then, is difficult to handle honestly, and with each added topic in the same work, the difficulty increases exponentially.

James Baldwin pulls off the amazing feat of handling not one, not two, but all three issues of race, religion, and sex without sacrificing any issue to the other two, all the while being honest about all three.  The result is an incredibly insightful representation of the lives of African Americans in the mid-20th century.


Go Tell It on the Mountain is the story of John Grimes.  It is a coming of age story as John travels from boyhood to manhood all in the course of the day of his 14th birthday.  In the first chapter, we meet all the major players of the novel: John, his brother Roy, his father Gabriel, his mother Elizabeth, his aunt Florence, and a young man at the church whom John greatly admires, Elisha.  We learn that Gabriel is not John's birth father, but that he has helped raise John since John was a baby.  We learn that John is a quiet boy whose heart is filled with anger towards his father, who is a deacon at their church and a strict disciplinarian.  We learn that Gabriel does not seem to like John, preferring his natural son Roy (short for Royal), though Roy has as much contempt for his father as John does.  In the final section, while at a church prayer service that night, John finds himself on the threshing floor having the religious experience that brings him into adulthood in the eyes of the church. But it is the middle section that colors our understanding of and hopes for John, for it is in the middle section that we learn the histories of Florence, Gabriel, and Elizabeth.  These stories are like overlapping short stories, and they provide the context for John's climactic experience.




In another novel, John's rising up from the threshing room floor would mark a moment of transition symbolizing a great rebirth.  But in Baldwin's hands, John's entrance into adulthood and religious revelation are not simple moments to be celebrated.  Nor are they defeats for John.  They are complicated experiences, and we are all too aware of the complexities.  When John goes home after the service, we do not expect his life to change.  We are all too aware of the rough road ahead.


One of the things I admire about this book is how it has a cumulative effect, like when your eyes adjust to a darkened room:  you find certain objects and lights immediately, and then bring more and more into view as you understand the objects you see and search to make sense of the shapes that are only just coming into view.  The first thing you see in this book is religion.  Every character in the novel struggles with the Christian faith and the Baptist church.  For every character, the religion provides both moments of anguish and moments of peace.  Baldwin sees the church as a powerful force, as destructive as it is positive, and for his black community, it is the center of power.  Gabriel himself is powerful, physically and spiritually.  But that show of power is coupled with the powerlessness of his actions--Gabriel cannot control his son, couldn't save his first son Roy, couldn't lift Deborah up as he imagined, and can't stop John from having his revelation.  This powerlessness masking itself as power is echoed by the presence of White America in the novel.  In both the South and the North, Baldwin's focus is on African American communities, but on the outskirts of those communities are the violent actions of whites:  Deborah's rape, Richard's brutalizing, Roy's stabbing.  These events are never the focus, but their pressure is felt in every thing else that happens.  Baldwin captures all this seamlessly, and it's only in actively thinking about the stories of the various characters and where their lives meet that the connections start revealing themselves.


I was most struck by Baldwin's depiction of his female characters, Florence, Elizabeth (and even Esther and Deborah).  They are every bit as complex as the men, and they are crucial to Baldwin's complete depiction of the black community he is discussing.  These women are not cowed by the threats thrown at them in the guise of religious guidance.  They are strong and insecure and looking for something they can't find.  You feel for everyone, even when you don't like them.  The book is, in short, a perfect study in character.

This is the first Baldwin novel I have ever read.  I have read and loved many essays and always respected him as a thinker and as a writer with the ability to get at the heart of things in a poetic and profound manner.  His novel writing is every bit as impressive, and I look forward to reading more of his novels when this project has come to its completion.

Man Oh Invisible Man!

When Ann and I first started this project two and half years ago, we looked through the list and noted which books we had already read.  When I got to Invisible Man, I hesitated.  I thought I had read the book, but I wasn't sure.  If I had read it, I thought I liked it.  If I hadn't, then it was something I always wanted to read.

I know for certain now that I had not read it, because if I had, I would have remembered such an incredible novel.  Holy moly!  Like Grapes of Wrath, this is a perfect novel in my eyes.  Even though the book is nearly 600 pages long, it never once sags or drags.  It comes out firing with a riveting and poetic prologue, introducing us to the narrator, smart, angry, and possibly a little bit crazy, living in his secret hole beneath New York City. We are instantly aware that this is a book about character, about politics, about race, about the relationship between individuals and organizations.  And like Orwell, Ellison never lets his political art become more political than art.  This is first and foremost a work of imaginative fiction, beautifully written and constructed with the tightness of a drum skin.

In an ideal work of fiction, character is plot and plot is character.  What happens is decided by the character we follow and the decisions he makes (as well as the decisions that are made for him).  Similarly, the character is constructed by the events that unfold around him and batter him about.  In Invisible Man, plot and character are inseparable.  On the one hand, it is an intricate character piece, and on the other hand, it is a heavily and tightly plotted story.  Moreover, it is the very specific story of one specific character, but the novel resonates because it is simultaneously the story of a generation of American black men in the 1940s and '50s, and beyond that it is also simultaneously the story of all Americans.  In the end, Invisible Man is a story about the individual and his place in society.  (I use the male pronoun there purposefully, since the novel is not overly concerned with the struggle of women.)  The Brotherhood is a specific organization, but the narrator's experiences with the Brotherhood are laden with meaning beyond that specific relationship.  The narrator is on a search for self-discovery, because "if I discover who I am, I'll be free," and like one of his professors said of Stephen Dedalus,

[his] problem, like ours, was not actually one of creating the uncreated conscience of his race, but of creating the uncreated features of his face.  Our task is that of making ourselves individuals.  The conscience of a race is the gift of its individuals who see, evaluate, record . . .  We create the race by creating ourselves and then to our great astonishment we will have created something far more important:  We will have created a culture.

Ralph Ellison tackles exactly how difficult it is to create "the uncreated features of our face" in a world where we are not seen for who we are, in a world where people don't see beyond your clothes or the color of your skin.  We are all invisible to each other when our inner eye tells our physical eye what to see.  And on top of that, the organizations and groups that exert their forces upon us don't care at all who we are.

That problem, the problem of discovering who we are, sounds airy and philosophical, but Ellison keeps his novel grounded in details and the specific world that scrapes against the narrator.  But the theoretical, the philosophical, hovers right behind the physical in all things in this novel.  Every description does double duty, both anchoring us in the physical moment of the scene and alluding to the meaning of the image.  Take this passage, in which the narrator finds himself alone with a beautiful white woman who has designs on our protagonist.  She is on the phone and they are standing in her bedroom:

I nodded, seeing her turn without a word and go toward a vanity with a large oval mirror, taking up an ivory telephone.   And in the mirrored instant I saw myself standing between her eager form and a huge white bed, myself caught in a guilty stance, my face taut, tie dangling; and behind the bed another mirror which now like a surge of the sea tossed our images back and forth, back and forth, furiously multiplying the time and the place and the circumstance.

Ellison wastes not a single moment, not a single image, and not a single word.  It is truly stunning to read, and I found myself wanting to read slower and slower to feel each word and image move between the fingers of my mind just to admire their texture and power.

Finally, this book, perfect in its execution and elocution, would fall flat were it not for its unflinching honesty.  This novel tackles so much about our world, and it does so with a crazy sense of control.  I never once doubted that Ellison had thought this novel and its subject matter through down to every detail.  But for all that confidence and deft handling of his material, Ellison has no pat answers to the dilemmas his narrator faces.  The mystery of life is perfectly articulated and poignantly unsolved.

If you are only going to read a handful of books from this list of 100, Invisible Man should be at the top of your list.

The Dance Continues - Book II of A Dance to the Music of Time

The second book of A Dance to the Music of Time is called A Buyer's Market.  This novel follows Nick's first few years out of college.  He is living in London and working at a publishing house that publishes art books. 

I found the second book much more enjoyable than the first, probably because I knew what to expect and was not holding it up against Catcher in the Rye.  Taking it for what it was, I was able to slow down and enjoy the clever controlled phrasings of the author and submerge myself in the narrator's world.  The characters from the first novel continue to dance in and out of Jenkins's life, and there is a definite sense of building.  These first three novels appear to be Act I, in which the world and characters are being established before the second act comes to rattle them all up.

I can't say that I have any clearer idea what the novel is about, or what Powell is saying about the world around us.  I have the vague notion that Powell is pointing to the time between the two World Wars as a transitional time in modern culture.  The upper-class propriety of the university-educated boys in the first novel was punctured by the upward mobility of Sunny Farebrother and Widmerpool, and those issues of class seem even more prominent in this second book.  Sunny and Widmerpool were still part of the dinners and dances of culture in the first book.  Here, the main figure who frames the novel is Mr. Deacon, a painter who had some exchanges with Nick's parent when Nick was a boy.  Running into him as an adult, Nick gets on friendly terms with Deacon and their worlds overlap, bringing Nick into a more solidly middle-class environment.  Deacon and Gypsy Jones are like characters out of a Dickens novel, fun but not entirely scrupulous, and they make the sense of the social order seem less stable and more fluid than before.  I feel, in short, that class is at issue in the novel, but what in the end is Powell's interest is still a mystery to me.

I do love the idea of making an epic story out of what seems a rather mundane set of circumstances.  Due to Powell's careful construction, I have full faith in his ability to bring all the disparate narratives (which will certainly be getting still more disparate) together in meaningful ways down the road.  There is an impressive tightness in the layering of incidences that suggests a formidable discipline at the core of the novels.  Just as an example, the figure of E. St. John Clarke is raised by Widmerpool in the opening chapter when he discusses a bit of art criticism published in the papers.  Clarke is again mentioned in passing at a party in a following scene, and crops up one or two more time before we learn that Members (one of Nick's acquaintances from university) is a secretary to Clarke.  So even though the man himself never makes an appearance, he haunts the conversation of the novel.  By doing so, along with similar careful references, Powell feels in complete control of his story, like a Pynchon without the added level of absurdity.

I am also interested in the sense of time in the novel.  The past and present co-exist like a picture book with overlays.  As Jenkins encounters a new experience he tells us both what he thought at the time and that such thoughts were the product of the too narrow experience of youth.  Later, he assures us, he will be able to look back at this moment and understand what was really at issue.  As he says at the end of the second book,

This is perhaps an image of how we live.  For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected; so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity.

This is one of the reasons, I think, that the novel feels weak in plot at this stage.  These are moments that have gained significance only in latter years of the narrator's life.  These were not the tales he would have told a year after their happening, but they are the tales that lay the groundwork for where his life is to take him.  At this point, I can gladly be patient for the story to build and take me someplace meaningful.

Before I go, I would like to pose a question to my non-existent co-readers.  What is up with the individual titles in this series?  How is the second book A Buyer's Market?  Who is buying?  Who is selling?  And what is being sold?  Deacon's art?  His antiques?  Memories?  And what was questionable in the first novel, A Question of Upbringing?  These titles make no direct reference to what's happening in the novel, and I can't help but feel that they are some type of clue to Powell's root concerns in the novels.  Any help would be appreciated.

I will pick up the series when I reach 1955.  For now, it is on to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

A Dance to the Music of Time - Twelve Times!

The '50s look to be a hard decade on this list.  I don't mean that the books look more challenging than usual, but that there are a few surprises.  First, I saw that The Lord of the Rings was listed as one book, even though it was published as three.  But I suppose that is a fair grouping, since Tolkien intended it to be one book and wrote it as such. So, the authors of this list managed to fit 102 books, into their list of a hundred.  Imagine my surprise then, when I was looking up the next book on the list, A Dance to the Music of Time, and discovered that this title is actually an epic collection of 12 books!  Moreover, they were not written as one book.  Volume One, A Question of Upbringing, was published in 1951, the second book in 1952, the third in 1955, all the way up to the last book being published in the mid-70s.  So now we are up to 113 books.  They are tricksy!

 The whole of the novel, I am told, follows our narrator, Nick Jenkins, throughout 50 or so years of his life.  The books appear to follow strict chronological order, and this first book, A Question of Upbringing, begins somewhere in the 1920s at Oxford for the three years Jenkins is at university.  And while Jenkins is a first-person narrator, and while the book follows his life, it is less about him than about all the people he encounters.  He is very much like Isherwood's camera in The Berlin Stories.  (Actually, that's another book that was built out of two books!  That puts us at 114!).

According to an interview with the Paris review (http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3475/the-art-of-fiction-no-68-anthony-powell), Powell knew he wanted to write a very long piece of fiction.  Here's how he explains it:

 Well, this is rather a long story. You see I haven't any great talent for inventing plots, and indeed it seems to me that even the best writers are inclined to churn out the same stuff in eighty thousand words, although it's dressed up in a different way. And so I thought that there would be all sorts of advantages for a writer like myself to write a really long novel in which plots and characters could be developed, which would cover this question of not doing short-term plots—doing rather larger ones, in fact. But of course I didn't know at the beginning quite how long all this was going to be . . . I knew there would be a great number of novels, and about, I suppose, halfway through I realized that I should have to do at least three about the war. Well, having done six before, it seemed the obvious answer to do three to end it up with, because I think it's quite a good idea to have some sort of discipline imposed on yourself in writing, and therefore I deliberately wrote the last three with the idea of ending it up and doing the neat twelve volumes. But I have to admit that in 1951 I didn't know there'd be exactly twelve.

 He is right about this novel not having much to do with "plots."  There are only four chapters in the book, each about 60 pages long, and each acting like something of a short story.  We follow his encounters, mainly, with three other boys who were friends or acquaintances his first year at school:  Stringham, Templer, and Widmerpool.  There are things that happen (and some stories are quite amusing unto themselves), but for the most part, Powell focuses on the interplay between characters.  And I'm wishing I had more to say about that interplay.

My enjoyment of this novel suffered somewhat from following fast upon Catcher in the Rye.  Caulfield's narration in Catcher is so alive and fresh and wild, that Jenkins's proper English and detached tone felt leaden.  Both novels were about young men away from home at school, but Holden's adventures and encounters were much more gripping.  As it is, I'm not even sure what the significance of A Dance to the Music of Time is, and I have not grasped its greatness yet, or why it is considered such a literary achievement.  Something tells me that I need to read much more to appreciate what the book is doing, so I will leave analysis to later books, which I will read in the order they were published with the rest of the list.  I am about to embark on the second book, A Buyer's Market, and should get a better sense of what Powell is doing from there.

This is what I know for now.  The first novel opens with the narrator watching men work on a street corner where they had made a kind of camp as they work by the hurricane lamps in the growing dark.  The images of these men moving in and out of and around the light makes the narrator think of Poussin's painting, A Dance to the Music of Time:

These classical projections, and something in the physical attitudes of the men themselves as they turned from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin's scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing Outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays.  The image of time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.

And that is the image and theme that ties together the next twelve books.  And while I am not in love with the first book, I am hopeful that their will be a reward over the course of the novels, a power built up over time.