The Beauty of Sherwood Anderston's Winesburg, Ohio

 Winesburg, Ohio is a quirky, beautiful, strange little book.  It is a collection of short stories, each one focused on a different character living in the town of Winesburg, Ohio in the 1910s.  There is no real overarching story although the characters and tales have some overlapping, and we get a particular focus on George Willard, the boy who is becoming a man.  Sherwood Anderson began writing the short stories that would comprise Winesburg, Ohio, in 1915 and published the slim volume in 1919.

I first read the book in the mid-1990s during my graduate studies at Boston University.  I had moved from studying the British Romantics and was trying to find what part of American literature I wanted to focus on. I don’t remember who exactly pointed me to Sherwood Anderson’s book, but I’m glad it wound up in my hands.  It was one of those texts that struck my in the heart instantly, like it was an aesthetic and perspective I had been hungering for.  My Oxford World’s Classics edition is full of marginalia and underlining (both from my initial reading and from when I taught parts of the book in a composition class).

The basic thematic thread running through the stories is the pain of loneliness and isolation that we each feel by virtue of our very humanity.  We are all necessarily isolated in our own heads, experiencing the world and our thoughts and our emotions alone, trying to understand who and what we are.  Each character is looking for a way to connect with others around them, to communicate what’s inside them, to open their heart and their soul, to be seen and heard and understood.  That desire is checked by the coexisting fear that they will be rejected, railed against, laughed at, and feared.  The author shows us their humanity and what moves them.  He makes sense of the odd ways they attempt to tolerate the unbearableness of living alone among others.  And of course, we understand because we recognize the truth of this beautiful and cursed human condition.  I imagine that readers either love the book or reject it entirely.

In the first short story, The Book of the Grotesque,” an old man has a dream that he then wakes up and writes about:

That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague throughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful.

The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his book. I will not tr to tell you all of them. There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and profligacy, of carefulness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.

And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.

It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood. (9)

This provides a lens with which to view the other stories and the grotesques that populate Winesburg, Ohio, each lifting a concern or thought above all others, believing that one thing to be central to their life.  But of course that is more reductionist than the rest of the novel.  The characters sometimes threaten to become two-dimensional in their desires and pain, but the love that Anderson feels for them each, and the love we as readers are encouraged to feel for them, saves them from such a fate.

The book is important, historically, for a number of reasons.  According to the forward in my edition, written by Glen A. Love, this book marks a major change in the focus of short stories in American literature.  Before this point, short stories were often built around plot, like those of O. Henry or Edgar Allen Poe.  Anderson’s short stories look inward, built instead of the emotional situation of the lead character.  Thing happen, most certainly, in the stories, but those happenings are about the inner journey of the character, their mental and emotional landscape.  Anyone who reads contemporary short stories knows that this is still the prevailing way to structure short stories.

In addition, as you can see from the passage I quoted above, Anderson uses simple sentence structures and a plain affect as narrator.  You will not be surprised to learn that Anderson influenced Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver.  And while syntactically his writing is nothing like William Faulkner’s, he also influenced the southern author.

But for me, the historical importance of the novel is not the reason I treasure it or reread it.  It is the writing that I enjoy.  Anderson’s prose may appear businesslike, but it is laced with poetry. Looking through the book to find an example, I’m a bit stymied, because the poetry is contextual.  It’s not like grabbing any passage from Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, where every line is poetry disguised as prose.  No, here, even as Anderson has some beautiful turns of phrase, the poetry is in communicating the profound with an unassuming simplicity.  For example:

Their bodies were different as were also the color of their eyes, the length of their noses and the circumstances of their existence, but something inside them meant the same thing, wanted the same release, would have left he same impression on the memory of an onlooker. (182)

I am of course a different person than the one who first discovered the powerful beauty within these pages 30 years ago.  Revisiting the book now, I found those moments of aching beauty, but without the strength that I felt in my 20s.  I am aware of how much more complicated life is than I once thought.  I see cracks in the beauty, such as the sameness of the pain that plagues the women in the book, while the men have a greater variety.  I see something dark in the story of Wing Biddlebaum.  The work is entirely fiction, of course, and what the author says must be regarded as truth, but characterization of the “half-witted” “loose-hung lip[ped]” boy who “imagined unspeakable things and in the morning went forth to tell his dreams as facts” (15) smacks of ableism and a standard defense given to so many who have actually victimized children.  Similarly, so many of these stories dismiss the mental health of the characters, confusing neurodiversity with the same longing that someone like George Willard has.  George’s mother needs love, understanding, and connection, certainly, but I can’t help but feel that she is equally in need of pharmaceutical and professional support.  Of course I don’t expect Sherwood Anderson to write anything other than he wrote, but from my perspective now, the enjoyment of the narrative is complicated by my wider view of these things.

Even with those complications, I love this book.

The Time Machine

 

After reading the collection of H.G. Wells’s short stories, I wanted to revisit a couple of his longer pieces.  I had read The Time Machine a while back, and I remember reading it quickly.  It was a short book, and I knew it was an adventure story, and I wanted it to move quickly, so I moved through it as such.  My other memory of reading the book last time is that my head was filled with what I already knew about the book, and those images and ideas covered the very words I was reading like a translucent layer of onion skin, allowing me to read but not to clearly see.

 

I have often said that the least wonderful part of any work of fiction is the plot.  What happens happens, and it’s interesting and even gripping, but it’s rarely the rich and rewarding part of any given reading experience.  You can get the plot from hundreds of sources on the internet (bound to be close to accurate), or from one of the many cinematic adaptations (bound to be wildly inaccurate in some places).  What is compelling, rather, is the language of the text.  What the author actually says and how they actually say it, that is the actual meat of any reading experience.  For me, at least.

 

For this read, I slowed down, and I didn’t worry about where the story was going.  The first two chapters have all the fun theory about time, and the scientific foundation for the wild tale.  These are gripping chapters, like short stories unto themselves.  In spite of the many characters gathered around the time traveler, the conversation is easy and fun to follow.  The richness really kicks in with chapter three. Wells possesses an unusual gift for bringing his imagined physical world to life.  Here’s his description of moving forward in time:

 

I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensation of time travelling. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback—of a helpless headlong motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash.  As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing. The dim suggestion of the laboratory seemed presently to fall away from me, and I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a day. I supposed the laboratory had been destroyed and I had come into the open air. I had a dim impression of scaffolding, but I was already going too fast to be conscious of any moving things. The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me. The twinkling success of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue.

 

We are used to seeing movie magic today, used to someone turning a concept into a brilliant visual to amaze us.  Again and again I am stopped by Wells’s ability to do that same thing with words—and to do it in a time when no one had ever seen special effects in films.  He had to come up with those details himself and then paint the picture such that we could see it with him.  He applies his skills to moments of drama, like the movement through time, but also to the quiet descriptions of the landscapes of the future.

 

If you care about the plot and spoilers, I would stop reading here.

 

The plot itself is interesting and moves well.  Like most great classic plots, it moves forward with a simple, driving arc.  The narrator, stuck in the future because his time machine has been seized, needs to locate his machine and find a way to get it back.  He investigates, gathers resources, endures a few close calls, all of which educate him about his antagonists, makes a daring attempt for his machine and narrowly escapes danger.  In his desperation while fleeing he flies further into the future and comes as close as one can to the death of the planet before returning home.

 

The philosophical argument is not nearly as gripping as the writing or the plot.  There is a warning that the comfortable class is getting to comfortable and will become effeminized and infantilized until they are defenseless and little better than lambs.  The fate of the working class is not much better.  They maintain some ingenuity, but they become beastlike and not much better than predatory animals themselves.  There is a whiff of political concern about class division, but Wells’s sympathies are so clearly with the sad fate of the rich and well-off that I can’t even muster the interest or strength for any thorough analysis.  I’m sure many such analyses already exist out there.  There is also the stench of racism surrounding the Morlocks, but I didn’t see any need to prod into that either.

 

Even more problematic for me, on this read, are the parts of this sociological construction that don’t make any sense. The structures built to house the Eloi are, if not sophisticated, elegant and pretty.  We don’t see the Morlocks displaying any such interest in architecture beyond these homes.  Similarly, the narrator suggests that it’s the Morlocks who make the clothing for the Eloi, but again, we don’t see them displaying any other textile skills or interests.  And why both to clothe and elegantly house the Eloi instead of creating a simple pen in which they could sleep.  The narrator suggests that the houses give them some genuine protection from the Morlocks, but why would the Morlock’s do that, instead of building a structure that allows them easy access without traumatizing their livestock.  As easy as it was for me to see and feel the physicality of Well’s world, it was difficult to swallow the social structures existing within the physical ones.

 

All in all, I enjoyed the book less than I expected, mostly because of the political and social beliefs (or lack of beliefs) that failed as tentpoles to hold everything aloft.  

The Princess and the Goblin

I learned of this book when reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s Words Are My Matter, which is in part a collection of her writings about other people’s writings. I trust Le Guin not only as a writer but as a reader, and I decided to make a list of the works she chose to write about and decided to work my way through them over the next couple of years.  George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, published serially in 1870 and 1871, and published as a novel in 1872, is the oldest book she wrote about, so I decided to start with it.

 

First thing I did, after re-reading Le Guin’s Introduction, was Google George MacDonald. He’s not an author I ever remember hearing of, so I was surprised to find that he had inspired so many writers that I had heard of.  C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, Frank Baum, Richard Adams, Lloyd Alexander, Madeleine L’Engle—what?!  It’s an all-star list of authors of the best children’s and young adult fiction we have.  And once I began reading, I saw it immediately.  There’s so much about MacDonald’s voice that you can see picked up and carried forward by the author’s mentioned above, and that has become a mainstay in the category of literature that MacDonald himself practically created.  As a result, very little about the book feels 150 years old, even though the story is unabridged, changed, likely, in spelling only.

 

The narrator adopts moments of uncertainty and familiarity.  In spite of the fact that the narrator is clearly omniscient in the classic narrator sense, he speaks as one telling a story of which he has imperfect knowledge.  For example, he notes in the opening chapter, “The princess was a sweet little creature, and at the time my story begins was about eight years old, I think, but she got older very fast.”  That little “I think” appears in touches throughout the novel.  The effect is to make the narrator a character, with a specific voice, and to align that character with you, the reader, very much from the same world with the same expectations and sense of wonder.  But the narrator is in a position of privilege, both in the sense that they know more than you, but also in the sense that they are parental or avuncular.  When the princess meets a magical old woman seemingly living in the attic of the princess’s grand home, the narrator says,

 

That the princess was a real princess you might see now quite plainly; for she didn’t hang on to the handle of the door, and stare without moving, as I have known some do who ought to have been princesses but were only rather vulgar little girls. She did as she was told, stepped inside the door at once, and shut it gently behind her. (12)

 

It is hard to read that without feeling the nod and wink to the audience.  At the end of that same chapter, the narrator promises to tell us more in some following chapter about what the magical old woman was spinning at her spinner, and he concludes the chapter with, “Guess what she was spinning” (18).  Again, this breaks down that fourth wall between the narrator and their audience.  In fact, the title of that same chapter is “The Princess and – We shall see who.”  Above that title is an image, included in the original publication, of a woman at a spinner.  The reason I know this is that once or twice the narrator refers to one of the accompanying pictures to report on its accuracy and reliability.  Pulled altogether, these techniques create a playful and friendly tone that is immediately familiar to anyone who has read Alice in Wonderland; The Hobbit; The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; The Black Cauldron; etc.

 

One of the effects of this tone is to make the reader always feel safe, assured that no matter what horrors or brushes with the grotesque lie before us, there is nothing to be afraid of.  Everything will work out alright in the end.  This allows the author to put Curdie, the little mining boy who is our model of heroism in the story, in deep danger in the tunnels of the Goblins without ever making us or our young charges sweat.

 

The writing itself is warm and easy, aiming for clarity first, but taking occasional dips into the poetic.  To take an example again from early in the book, I’ll quote from the narrator’s first description of the princess: “Her face was fair and pretty, with eyes like two bits of night sky, each with a star dissolved in the blue.  Those eyes you would have thought must have known they came from there, so often were they turned up in that direction” (2).

 

The characters are every bit as warm and lovely as the narrator and the writing.  Except for Lootie—the princess’s nursemaid, who loves the princess deeply but lacks the maturity and self-awareness to govern her feelings and fears—every grownup in the book is an impressive person.  They treat the children like people with respect and understanding, and they model behaviors of love and trust.  While the story has a princess and her father the King, Curdie and his parents are every bit as regal and admirable.  The Goblins are fun foils, treated with the same playfulness and affection, even though they are clearly the antagonists of the story.  Although they are set up as the unnatural and twisted versions of humans after living generations below ground (a nod to the popularity of Darwin’s evolutionary theories), they are not presented as the inversion of all that is good and human.  They live in families and have pride in themselves.  They are certainly not always nice to each other, but they are not reduced to caricature as Roald Dahl tends to do with his comical villains.  A full and proper analysis could be made to look at what the Goblin’s represent to the author.  They have notions of conquest, an ability to long nurse a grude—one that goes back so far the narrator is uncertain of its origins, proposing legendary theories instead of offering us anything concrete--, a sense of righteousness in their own actions in violating another’s autonomy, prejudices, and ambitions.  But they want their children to thrive, they care for their families, and they have a government that parallels the kingship above ground.  When the queen is revealed to have toes (Goblins in this world do not have toes), the Goblin King uses that information as leverage against her, but he is not appalled and certainly doesn’t subject her to torments or even demotion because of it.  I’ll be tinkering around with ideas, but I haven’t developed any solid thoughts yet.  If and when someone does that analysis, I’d love to see it. 

 

Instead, I’ve been thinking about that magical old woman in the attic.  She might look initially like a fairy godmother, and she certainly has those trappings.  The princess even calls her grandmother.  But the old woman doesn’t just show up for a deus ex machina or two; she saves the day many times.  She leads the princess home when she is lost at night.  She leads the princess to Curdie to save him from the Goblins. She leads the princess out of the house when the Goblins attack, and then again she leads Curdie to the princess when he thinks she might have been kidnapped by the Goblins.  Nothing happens without grandmother’s knowledge or approval.  The issue, narratively speaking, surrounding the grandmother is faith and belief, who can see her and who can’t, and who having seen her can believe in her.  It seems pretty clear that grandmother is a stand in for God.  I remember reading in an article about MacDonald that he was a pastor for some time, but that his parishioners booted him because of his unusual teachings.  I wonder if his understanding of God was a little to maternal and not enough Angry Father to make his fellow Scotsmen happy.  Grandmother definitely likes people to behave properly and with good manners, but she is loving and comforting and understanding.  She prepares the princess for her adventure, but doesn’t stop it from happening.  She is proud of the princess. Supportive. Nurturing.  She lets the princess learn for herself that not everyone will believe in grandmother, and then comforts her with the knowledge that that’s okay.  Believing must come before seeing for grandmother, and God.  Interestingly, grandmother is associated with the Moon—which the lamp in her room emulates.  It seems odd that she is not associated with the sun, but of course that is for the masculine he-God.  But then the moon is a much more fitting image for this deity, the light that guides you when the world is dark, the sliver of thread that leads you through the darkness if you have faith that it is taking you where you should go, the little snippet of daylight when the easy comfort of the sun is gone.

 

There is generally a rejection of masculine solutions throughout the book.  Yes, the princess’s father is a manly, armored king, and the queen is absent entirely, but we never see that king as anything other than her King-Papa.  His guards are humbled by the strange creatures, the Goblin’s pets who slip past them and frighten them.  Martial solution is limited.  Even in the battle with the Goblins, the main power Curdie wields is song and poetry, not a stick.  He stomps on soft feet, but he mostly wins by avoiding battle, singing his rhymes and not taking the Goblins especially seriously.  And while Curdie needs rescuing by the princess, the princess never needs rescuing by Curdie, which narrative expectations set us up for and then deny us.  Grandmother has already taken the princess, not to the protection of armed men, but to the protection of a loving mother who can hold her.  The traditionally feminine arts of spinning and homemaking are the heroes of the story.  Even the Goblin Queen is protected not by armor, but by cobbling.

 

This was a delightful book to read, and an important one.  MacDonald has been called the father of modern fantasy, which is a well-deserved title in his influence of J.R.R. Tolkien and others.  I am only surprised that it took me so long to discover this treasure.

On the Road Again with Cormac McCarthy

 I read The Road initially sometime after it came out in paperback, in 2007, maybe?  It knocked me over and has stayed with me.  I heard the book referenced in some podcast I was listening to and decided it was time to re-read it.

 

This is just me yammering about the book, so I’m assuming that you’ve read it too.  If not, you’re going to find a ton of spoilers ahead, so if I were you, I’d go read it for myself first.

 

Jesus, this novel is amazing. I love everything about it: the writing, the characters, the world, the story, the subject, the pacing, the tone—it’s all gripping and stunningly beautiful and horrifying.  This novel walks the seemingly impossible line between minimalism and richness.

 

Let’s start with the structure, at the level of sentences on up.  The syntax is predominantly simple.  Often subordinate clauses are just made into a freestanding sentence fragment, as though the narrator was too winded to put it all into one sentence or too malnourished to think more complexly.  If you’ve read Blood Meridian, you know that McCarthy is skilled in the construction of a beautifully complex sentence.  The book has frequent section breaks but no chapter breaks.  The latter feature makes all the bits and fragments flow together like the calendarless days of the protagonists.  The former feature gives us the experiences in small chunks.  While this serves the obvious function of letting us jump between the dreary sameness of days in the post-apocalypse, it also creates the effect of fading in and out, missing time.  Sometimes only seconds pass between sections. Sometimes whole months. Sometimes we get a flashback.  Time within those section breaks is elastic and mysterious, and we readers never know where we are going to land.

 

I also love that the dialogue is without quotation marks, stripped down to these short exchanges that can be said in single breaths.  This is a world without the finery or such things as quotation marks or fancy adjectives and verbs telling us how the words were said.  Everything is presented in flat, grey tones like the ashes they lie in.  This presentation also comes with a great sense of vulnerability.  They only speak when necessary, and the exchanges are painfully tender or desperate, declarations of fear or assurances that there is no danger.  Then there are the repeated phrases, such as “I know” and “okay.”  In another book, these little words feel like filler, without weight or aftertaste.  Here, they are laden with emotions that can’t be spoken out loud, hit-and-miss efforts between the boy and the man to connect.

 

The boy and the man, our two protagonists, make this book simultaneously a coming-of-age story and a coming-to-death story, and they get at the heart of what The Road is about.  The Road is one of the bleakest books I’ve ever read or could ever imagine.  In many post-apocalyptic narratives, the protagonists are heading to some rumored or dreamed of safe haven where society can possibly rebuild itself.  Here, there is no hope of that.  Every day is a struggle for survival, but as you look down the titular road, there is no possible safe haven, no place where the sun is not obscured by ash, no hope that green grass will grow anew in time to revitalize the food web that has been laid to waste by the unnamed ecological disaster.  Death, either by other humans or lack of resources, is inevitable at whatever scale you choose.  At the heart of the novel, then, is what are we living for?  I imagine that in our answering that question, the book can serve as a kind of Rorschach test, as we each bring our own current views about life to the book.

 

The man’s wife doesn’t see a reason to go on, and we get that confrontation early in the book. The man declares that they are survivors, to which she responds “What in God’s name are you talking about? We’re not survivors. We’re the walking dead in a horror film” (55).  She says that her “heart was ripped out of me the night he was born” (57), presumably because his life made living necessary, and his life was necessary to live.  As she says to the man. “The one thing I can tell you is that you won’t survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body” (57).  Without something to fight for, to defend, to take a stand for.  For the man, that’s the boy, of course.  But even the boy needs something to live for.  The boy expresses the desire to die several times in the novel, but he is given two things to live for: first, his father, and second, the “fire” they “carry” (83).

 

That fire is obviously the symbol of hope and rebirth, the promise of a new civilization, or the goodness in humanity.  In the morality play of his father’s telling, they are the “good guys,” looking for other “good guys” and avoiding the “bad guys.”  The tension between the man and the boy grows as that cosmology crumbles in the face of lived reality.  Seeing his father kill one man, leave a seemingly-abandoned boy behind, steal from a camp, resist feeding and warming an old man on the side of the road, and finally leaving another old man naked and without possessions in the middle of the road, the boy cannot resolve the tension between the stories he’s been told and the actions he’s witnessed. He sees his father,s failure as a betrayal of the fire they carry, but instead of disbelieving the tales he’s been told, he concludes that the preservation of the fire is entirely up to him.  After they leave the old man naked and alone, the man tries to explain his actions, saying “You’re not the one who has to worry about everything,” to which the boy responds, crying, “Yes I am. . . . I am the one.”

 

The father’s plan, all along, is to kill himself and the boy should the get into an inescapable danger.  If the boy dies, then he plans to kill himself, having no reason to go on.  In both cases, he wonders at different times, does he have the will to do it.  It’s a beautiful and painful question, and it gets right to the question of what we are living for.  To stop living takes more determination than living. We are wired to survive, the try to find someway to carry on.  Is it strength in him to soldier on with his son day after day, or is it weakness, exposing his son to danger and misery for the sake of seeing another day?  We will never know what he would have done had the boy’s sickness had claimed him, but we do know that, in the end, he was unable to have his son die with him.  He left his son alone with a few directions, a few belongings, and not nearly enough training.  Very likely, the boy could have met the same fate as the man left naked at gunpoint.  We see him do nothing in an effort to survive.  We feel how lost and heartbroken he is.  But someone stops for him as his father did not stop for that other boy.

 

And what does that ending mean?  How do we interpret it? What questions does it settle?

 

I don’t know. It gives the sense of hope, but that seems like a false sense to me.  We must ignore everything else we know about the world in order to interpret it hopefully, and the book gives us every opportunity to do so. The book ends so quickly after the boy connects with this other family, that it doesn’t let us dwell on the ash-covered world and the baby-eating survivalists who have been threatening our protagonists the whole novel.  Instead, there is talk of the “breath of God” and the image of a “brook trout in the streams in the mountains” (286).  And that last sentence: “In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of a mystery.”  What the fuck is that about?  “[H]ummed of a mystery” is a phrase brimming with life and wonder, a drastically different tone than what we’ve had up to now.  Is it a sign that things will be okay?  Is it a kind of life-preserver for those of us who have traveled all this way and need some sign or hope before we close the book?  Could McCarthy not stomach his own bleakness at the end?  I don’t know.  I can’t read it hopefully, personally, because I’ve seen too much in the previous 280-some pages.  But maybe you can.

 

Oh, and speaking of hopeful, there’s something potentially hopeful in the vocabulary of the book.  While the syntax is simple, the vocabulary is not, or at least it’s not always simple.  McCarthy has an impressively large vocabulary, but the choice to bring it into this book and this setting is exactly that: a choice.  Words like “salitter,” “bollards,” “crozzled,” “loggia,” “palladian,” and “tidewrack”—just to name a few—had me running to the dictionary every couple of pages.  Why do that?  Are they just reminders of the lost world, like the burned ruins our protagonists travel through?  Or are they reminders of the fire itself, traces of cultures and society, the ingenuity and determination of humankind?  Likely both, I say, but whatever the reason, it feels ripe with meaning and possibility.

 

I didn’t even get to touch on such amazing scenes as Ely, the old man who is compared to the gods and Buddha; or the plantation on which human being are repeating history by holding captive and consuming victims for the plantation-occupiers’ own well-being; or the caravan of pregnant women and soldiers, like a scene out of a Mad Max film—the only thing in the book that resembles the Mad Max vision of a post-apocalyptic future; or the finding of the sextant, the only thing that the man finds beautiful in the whole book, an ancient tool used to guide wanderers when there were no shores, a perfectly apt tool, redolent with symbolic possibilities.  There are so many wonderful scenes and moments to talk about, analyze, and mine for meaning.

 

I will undoubtedly be returning to this book again someway down the road.  I can tell that my brain and heart aren’t done with it.  I’d love to hear about your own thoughts about and experiences with it.

Master of Atlantis: Charles Portis and the Absurd

 As I’ve said before, I first read True Grit after I learned that the Coen Brothers had begun production on a film adaptation of the book.  I thought that if the Coen Brothers found the book interesting enough to adapt, it was worth a read. I loved the book. But when I finished it, I didn’t feel any need to seek out Charles Portis’s other endeavors.  On the True Grit DVD (of course I have all the Coen Brothers’ films on DVD), there is a feature on Charles Portis and his other books.  It was that feature that made me put Portis’s collection on my Christmas list that year.  I’ve been reading through the books at a leisurely pace in chronological order (as is my wont).  Masters of Atlantis, then, is Portis’s fourth novel, and the fourth one I’ve read.

Portis has always had elements of the absurd in his novels, but the absurdities have always existed at the fringes of the tale.  Certainly, there is some absurd feature to all his protagonists, some obsession, or some set way of looking at the world, but the protagonists are a kind of hard center the reader holds on to as we travel through the absurdities of the world and the other characters the protagonist bounces off of. In Masters of Atlantis, Portis leans fully into the absurd at every level of his storytelling.  The tale is full of ridiculous people wanting ridiculous things and behaving in ridiculous ways.

Published in 1985, Masters of Atlantis tells the story of the rise and fall of the Gnomon Society, a secret society (that is often anything but secret) claiming to hold the sacred truths of the world collected by and known to the Atlanteans.  Lamar Jimmerson, a young American soldier in France at the end of the Great War, meets what is to the reader obviously a con man taking advantage of Jimmerson’s naivete and desire for something important and sacred.  This encounter sends the believing Jimmerson to Italy where he believes he’ll meet up with other Gnomons to partake in their society.  Instead of feeling had when he finds no trace of the society there, he decided he was being tested and must wait to be contacted.  From there, he meets another man, Sydney Hen, an Englishman, who, when told about the society and the text Jimmerson had received from his first encounter, wants in.  The two men take the study of that text—the Codex Pappus—seriously and create a full interpretation of the scribblings there.  More men come to them and they essentially start up the Gnomon Society.  The book follows the organization from 1917 to what must be the late ‘70s or early ‘80s. At their finest moment, Jimmerson can afford to live in a grand home in Burnette, Indiana that doubled as a Gnomon Temple.  Jimmerson married Sydney Hen’s sister, Fanny, and had a son, Jerome.  There were Gnomon branches (called Pillars) across the US, and the news was obsessed with them as both possible heroes and possible villains of the age.  But the new grew tired of the Gnomons and people grew uninterested in secret societies.  The Pillars dissolved.  There was a schism in the order with Sydney Hen split off from Jimmerson in their interpretations of the Codex Pappus.  Fanny found a career and moved away from Jimmerson, and Jerome, who never felt comfortable with his father, went with her.  The Burnette temple fell into disarray and the elevated freeway that was built to connect Gary to Chicago went up around the temple itself, the peak of the tower showing through the divided roadway. The novel ends in Texas, where Jimmerson and Hen are brought together again in the compound of one Morehead Moaler, the last Master of the last standing Temple, which is really a doublewide trailer.  The three old men are content with their lot, and there’s always the possibility of the Gnomons rising once more with the new cycle.

There are of course a host of characters who all find a place within the Gnomon Society, or in the case of a few permanently outside the Society in tension with it.  The absurdities lie in the way these characters feel about and respond to the Society and its goings on.  Jimmerson is a true believer, and he has little interest in how the Gnomons fair, though he does have enough of an ego to be played upon by other characters, primarily the mover and shaker, Austin Popper.  He has decided the Codex Pappus is truth, and he spends his life interpreting and building upon that truth with books and papers.  But his pursuit is silliness in terms of the book, and clearly no one reads his writings as we learn that one book was published without every other page missing, and no one notices for decades even though the book has been reprinted several times.  In fact, it seems that everyone involved in the Society are equal believers even as they claim absurd revelations about their own past lives as leaders in the Society. 

So what seems like a nest of conmen is never confirmed to be such.  Portis never steps in and tells us what “the Truth” is even though we are left to infer much.  The man in the opening who gives Jimmerson the Codex Pappus is only presented to us by what he says and does.  What seems obviously a ruse is never laid out for us as a certainty.  And Austin Popper is another case.  We do know that some of his statements are lies, and his ambition is clear to us, but what does he really do with that ambition and those lies?  He is content to sit in the dilapidated Red Room without luxury.  And at the end of the novel, his grand scheme is to live in a doublewide trailer with three old men.  There is obviously a core belief in the Society and its teachings. The absurdity comes in these characters having grand ambitions and cunning social interactions for what are the most meager ends.

However, this approach can make reading the book difficult, in that you don’t have a solid character to hold on to.  Even if you’re interested in following the course of this Society, you aren’t in a position to root for anything—you are along for the ride.  If you’re the kind of reader who is cool with being along for the ride (and in the hands of a skilled writer—which Portis certainly is—I am), then the journey through this absurd world is fun.  But I can see a number of readers having a problem with the narrative, either dropping out some ways in or making it to the end only grudgingly.  Judging by some of the reviews I’ve seen of the book, that seems right.

To me, the absurdities are not offputting because they are so perfectly human.  The Gnomon Society is often seen in light of other secret societies and cults, but how is it really any different than major religions and their major texts.  The texts are written by people, often cobbled together by other people, and then declared by a third group to hold all the answers and knowledge we need.  The gentle mix of con artist and true believers is the exact combination necessary to fuel the expansion of such a religion.  And to be clear, Portis is not mocking people who embrace religions, because those who are critical of them are just as absurd.  I loved the scene of the Texas committee hearing in which Popper is grilled about Jimmerson and the Gnomons.  The committee members are every bit as ridiculous if not moreso.  The fact is, we are a ridiculous species and the more we insist on knowing the truth about anything the more ridiculous we are.  If there is not grand meaning in the mysteries around us, then there are only absurdities in our insistence on their being grand meanings.

What I think makes the book enjoyable to read instead of painful, is the gentleness with which Portis approaches his subject.  I could see the argument that Portis is almost loving toward his creations, laying their absurdities bare and open to critique, but doing so without malice.  If it’s not love, then there is at least a feeling of camaraderie, an acknowledgment that as ridiculous as these people are, they are not especially ridiculous, no more than the rest of us.

Tehanu and Power in Earthsea

 *As usual, this post is filled with spoilers and the assumption that you have read the novel already—proceed at your own risk.*

 

I have been excited to get to Tehanu ever since I learned that we would be reuniting with Tenar from The Tombs of Atuan.  I don’t know what I expected, but I most certainly could not have predicted the story Le Guin has created.  Of course, that’s one of the things I love about Le Guin as a storyteller.  In all the novels of hers I’ve read, I have never been able from the half-way point in the novel to predict where it was going.  She accomplishes this feat not through trickery and twists and turns of plot, but through having a desire to tell stories that lie outside conventional norms.

 

As I’ve said in some of my other posts, I often read books to my wife before we go to bed, and Tehanu was one of these nightly readings.  Unlike the other Earthsea books, however, this one made for difficult pre-sleep reading.  We begin with a child maliciously burned in a fire after being beaten nearly to death and raped.  Good jesus, that’s a sobering note to begin on and a clear signal that Le Guin will be dealing with an aspect of Earthsea’s that we have not hitherto seen.  Shortly thereafter, Tenar and Therru are menaced by a group of men on the trail to Ogion’s home.  This is a clever way to place the novel within the time frame of The Farthest Shore, but seeing our protagonist threatened is unnerving.  We most certainly have never seen Ged threatened like that, in a way that made us genuinely concerned for his safety.  The of course Ogion dies, and Ged comes home, not triumphantly, but in crisis over who he is now that he has been drained of his powers.

 

This is heavy stuff, and while it made for rocky bedtime reading, I loved it.  As Le Guin says in her afterward to my edition:

 

By the time I wrote this book I needed to look at heroics from outside and underneath, from the point of view of the people who are not included.  The ones who can’t do magic.  The ones who don’t have shining staffs or swords.  Women, kids, the poor, the old, the powerless.  Unheroes, ordinary people—my people.  I didn’t want to change Earthsea, but I needed to see what Earthsea looked like to us.

 

That theme of power and powerlessness are laced throughout the story, of course.  Tenar meditates many times on what it means to be a middle-aged woman beyond her child-bearing years.  She sees women’s power as residing in their sexual power and maternal power, and once they are beyond that, what power do they have left?  Like Ged, she has found her cup of power, what litter there was, emptied, and she was wondering how to define herself as well.  And this theme of power is directly related to why this story has to be violent and threatening as it is, in a way that none of the other Earthsea books before it have been.  How do you show powerlessness so you can discuss it?  To truly show the power lacking, you have to show her at the mercy of others’ powers, threatened by them, degraded by them, attacked by them, and terrified by them.

 

Looking back, it seems only fitting that this would be Le Guin’s focus once she turned her attention back to Tenar.  Tombs of Atuan is equally about power, and its crisis for Tenar lies in the moment she realizes that she is treated as though she has power when she in fact has none and is at the mercy of the other priestess who had no respect for the Nameless Ones.

 

The book questions the patriarchy and anti-feminism that lies at the foundations of Earthsea’s hierarchies and political structures.  In her long conversation with Ged about power over the winter, they speculate what just power might look like, and it might resemble parental power, in that the parent knows that their child is obedient only because they choose to be.  And they will only choose to be obedient for as long as they trust you.  I loved when Tenar wished that Ged had killed Hake with his pitchfork, because now the King’s justice would demand that hake be punished.  Tenar rebels against the idea of someone meting out punishment because punishment is an act of power, remember how Handy wanted to punish Therru and Tenar.  They both wish Ged had just killed Hake and both cannot stand idly by and let him die, even though they both want it.  That complication and impossible position is so relatable and achingly painful.  And everything then comes into stronger focus with the return of Spark, her son.  She realizes she has “failed” because she has repeated the sexism and hierarchy in him instead of using what influence and power she had to make him different, and in doing so make the world different.  Spark was once an underdog, struggling to survive, but he has returned home with a firm position of power, and nothing about his previous status has taught him how to wield that power, let alone to give it up.

 

In the other novels, I feel like Le Guin had philosophical positions about life and death and how one should live that she wrapped her narratives around.  Tehanu is not that.  There is searching and struggling in Tehanu.  There is an unresolved attitude, a wish that is at odds with the way we have experienced life so far.  There is a knowledge of right and wrong but still no easy answer to lay before.  Ged laid things bare for Tenar in Tombs of Atuan.  He explained the crisis clearly and succinctly to Arren in Farthest Shore.  But here, he’s got nothing.  Just some observations and feelings.  This Ged is not a mystic full of power.  He’s a mess of a man, and he’s lovelier for it, struggling with Tenar instead of leading her to safety.

 

I also love how names take on a different meaning in this book.  We know that names hold power in this world, that they name a reality that can be obscured by the world around us.  But here, Le Guin goes beyond the division of real names and use-names.  Tenar has a wealth of names: Arha, Tenar, Goha, Mother, and Wife.  At one point Tenar has a conversation with herself and Le Guin frames it as Goha talking to Tenar.  This isn’t a use-name talking to the real thing.  This is two different aspects of Tenar’s character and life debating with one another.  Likewise, Ged has become Hawk because he is a different person than his old use-name Sparrowhawk.  In the worlds of the powerless, everything is less clear, and even use-names have power.  The power of the mage is the power of reduction: reducing the world to what seems and what is.  Tehanu blurs those lines and asks if that division is even any good to begin with.  Such a division is only useful if we all stand on an equal footing, and the world of Earthsea, like our own, is anything but equal.  When Aspen has the power, he forgoes both Tenar’s real name and her use-names and assaults her afresh with the word Bitch.  We see evil in Aspen (good lord did I hate that motherfucker), but Tenar is also frustrated with the wizard on Lebannen’s boat who for all his knowledge is blind.

 

In my review of Farthest Shore, I said I’d leave analysis of the relationship between humans and dragons to someone else, and I’ll continue to pass the buck here, where Therru/Tehanu is concerned.  Ann believes that Therru’s dragon-personhood came about because she was pushed into that fire and it burned away her human part.  I suspect she was born that way, speaking the words of the Making as all dragons are.  The fact is, I don’t think Le Guin could answer that question if she were still here to have it posed to her.  One of Le Guin’s magical qualities is that she brings together intense intellectualism with fierce instincts and always seems to know when one should yield to the other.  When she decided that dragons were closely related to people in the Farthest Shore so that they were affected by Cob’s actions, she didn’t know why that was the case, she just knew it was right.  And here we can see her prodding those instincts farther, growing the legend and the connection out. There’s great analysis to be done about these dragon-people, but I’m not the one to do it.  I’m just here to gush about how cool it is.  How much did I love that fan detail?!  So much!

 

This is a book I will definitely revisit when we finish the next two books.  There’s a lot here to unpack and think about, and I don’t think I can do so fully without a full re-read.  For now, my love for this book rivals my love for Tombs of Atuan.  Something about Tenar pushes Le Guin to do her best work.

The Demon in the Teahouse

I’ll keep this short as it builds off my thoughts on The Ghost in the Tokaido Inn.  As I did before, I’ll assume that you’ve read the book if you’re reading this.  If you don’t want anything spoiled, go read the book for yourself and come back.  It’s a great read.

This is another wonderfully told story, with great, clear writing; excellent world depiction; and compelling characters.  The mystery in this book is more like a classic whodunit than the first book, although it is still enriched by the setting choices.  One thing I love in particular is that Seikei and others readily believe in the existence of demons and will gladly attribute to them all the things that puzzle us.  It makes for an exciting element in the fiction.

My main thoughts now are about the politics of the book, and just as I was in my thinking about the last novel, I’m uncertain about where the book lands ideologically.  This book deals in many ways with the powerlessness of women in Edo period Japan.  That, I think, is a wonderful focus for the novel.  Young girls are sold by their fathers for an extended indentured servitude.  Geisha appear to have “power” over men, but they are clearly entirely dependent upon those same men.  Oba Koko has a place of business, and Tsune wishes to own a business for herself someday, but those options are plainly limited.  So the novel does an excellent job depicting those limitations.

At the same time, the women characters are set up rather unsympathetically.  Even as you understand that Umae is genuinely powerless in spite of her allure, we get Seikei observing that he “had never met anyone like Umae, so heartless, so calculating.  She was as much a demon as the person who set the files” (pgs 155-156).  That line slapped me in the face as a horrendous and unfounded line of judgment.  And since we as readers are aligned with Seikei, the authors don’t appear to question or undermine Seikei’s statement.  Nui begins as an interesting character, exploring her powers over Seikei, but by the end of the novel, she is a caricature, worried about Seikei getting blood on her robe even as she’s about to be burned alive in a fire.  Oba Koko is another character of comic relief in a lot of ways.  She has reasons to be a hard-nosed woman, and I like that she doesn’t take shit from anyone, but there is no real understanding thrown her way.

If anything, the presence of all the women in this novel draws attention to the fact that the first book was practically bereft of female characters.  Except for Machiko, all the women were played by Tomomi.  And what good are a series of educational books for an American audience about Edo period Japan if it is trapped in the perspective of masculinity and wealth.

I really like the series, and I wish I could really like its politics as well.  I will keep reading what has been published to see if my feelings topple in one direction or the other.

Revisiting Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre is the first novel I remember reading at college.  I was 19 years old, and I remember being struck by how enjoyable it was to read.  I made a concerted effort to engage with the text and underlined passages and made marginalia throughout the book.  I know this not only because I have specific memories of doing so but because I still have the book in my collection.  Even more enjoyable, Ann used the same book when she read the novel for a graduate school class, so we have her marginalia layered on top of my own.  Rereading the novel now, together, it is clear that she was the much more astute reader, not only because she was much older when she first read it but because she is just a smarter literary scholar than I.

It is ridiculous for me to give an analysis of the text, primarily because the book has been analyzed by scholars throughout the 20^th century, but secondarily because I have already read the essay that aligns with my own reading.  In this Norton Critical Edition is an essay by Adrienne Rich called “Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman,” which was printed in Rich’s On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, Selected Prose, 1966-1978.  The unique and important thing Rich does in her essay is look at the entirety of the novel.  That sounds like something every reader should do, but she is right in her observations that most people only focus on Jane’s time at Thornfield when discussing the novel, but Bronte has nearly 150 pages that take place away from Thornfield, and it is only reasonable to assume that those 150 pages are just as important to Bronte as the rest of the novel.  Every movie adaptation I have seen runs through Eyre’s childhood as a quick overview, as though it were unimportant.  Helen Burns is given a bare appearance, Bessie is almost always elided, and Ms. Temple is more often than not overlooked.  And when Eyre gets to the heath, most movies focus on Eyre’s relationship with St. John, giving her relationship with Diane and Mary short shrift at best.  But all these relationships with other women are critical to the story Bronte told, and to reduce the narrative to a love story between Jane and Rochester is to only tell half the story. So if you’re looking for an essay to make sense of Bronte’s choices, seek out Rich’s essay and enjoy.

Instead I want to focus on a few things that struck me in this reading. 

I remember thinking that Rochester and Jane’s relationship was fucked up when I was 19.  I couldn’t understand why anyone would swoon over Rochester, Jane or Bronte or her readers.  But damn, did it make sense this time, but not because I found Rochester to be awesome.  What occurred to me on this read is that there is some soft domination pornography going on in this novel.  Ann and I kept saying, “#NotMyRochester” in reference to the #NotMyChristian that swelled up surrounding the film adaptations of Fifty Shades of Grey.  I imagine that Jane Eyre was passed around from reader to reader in part for the same reason Fifty Shades was.  If you were into the master-servant dynamic existing between Jane and Rochester, I imagine the charged interplay between them would ring with sexual energy and titillation.  That was a fun thing to realize reapproaching the novel as an adult.

I really like Jane as a character, even as there’s plenty about the novel and the character that I find maddening.  Jane doesn’t take shit from anybody, and to see her passionate and aggressive in defense of herself is incredibly satisfying.  Jane is no Helen Burns, even as she learns from Helen.  She will not lay down and be a martyr as Helen was.  It felt in fact like Helen was there to drive home that Jane is not that kind of character, whom we have met as a heroine in other educational novels about how women were to behave.  So in all those respects, Jane is awesome.  On the other hand, Jane is obnoxiously pleased with herself, her learning, and her behavior.  To listen to her attitudes about her students at the school in Morton is to strain my eyes with all the rolling.

More importantly, Bronte’s unending love for Britain’s colonial mission is an unpleasant pill to swallow.  Her admiration for St. John’s desire to bring Christ to the heathens in India (and to bring them liberty by getting rid of their caste system, no less) is offputting, and Rochester’s tale of his time in Jamaica is disgusting, especially when the thing that spurs him on is when the fresh European breeze blows upon him, uplifting him from the oppressive ways of the native Jamaican people.  I know criticizing Bronte for her belief in the colonial project is nothing new, but the lack of novelty does nothing to alleviate the displeasure I felt in moving through those passages.  Gypsy racism is not cool either.

But if Bronte is unquestioning in her love of colonialism, she is incredibly perceptive in the way we relate to each other as people.  One of the most stunning passages to me was Jane’s conversation in the moor with St. John when he proposes to her and asks her to come with him to India.  She analyses St. John’s desires and her own internal pressures so beautifully that it put into words the feelings I myself have felt when negotiating with a strong personality.  It’s wonderfully written and incredibly insightful.  And beyond that particular passage, I really like the way Charlotte Bronte writes.  It’s clear to me that she hears the music of her language because her sentences are really easy to read out loud, even given their 150-year-old sentence structure. 

I was excited to revisit this classic, and I was not disappointed.  And now I have the opportunity to reread Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which I have done twice before, but never in proximity to Jane Eyre.  So yay for that.

The Unknown in The Turn of the Screw

*Spoilers dot the landscape of this post like ghosts in a Gothic horror novel.  Be warned.*

I had read Henry James’s Turn of the Screw back in my graduate school days in the mid-1990s, and I enjoyed it thoroughly then.  I picked it back up after seeing Floria Sigismondi’s flawed cinematic interpretation of the novel earlier this year.  In criticizing the film, I wanted to reread the novel to make sure I understood the source material. So here we are.

While I enjoy reading James’s prose, I found myself having a rather hard time following the action of the novel.  In part, it was due to James’s long sentences filled with subordinate clauses.  But confusion arising from his sentences was short-lived as a rereading readily cleared things up.  In part, it was due to my reading the book aloud to my wife at night before sleeping, which made me want to reread as little as possible for her listening enjoyment, though I admit I had to anyway just to find the cadence of the sentence which I sometimes lost amidst his clauses.  But of course, the real difficulty comes from the narrator’s desire to speak delicately of her subject.  Much is left alluded to and unstated in the novel, which invites the reader to fill in those blanks, just as the narrator herself fills in the blanks of the mystery that she finds herself in the center of.

It occurs to me this time around that this notion of holes in a narrative and our eagerness to fill in those holes is central to the novel.  Admittedly, when I first read the novel, I was really into it _as_ a ghost story.  I aligned myself fully with the narrator and enjoyed her worries and speculations as though they were my own.  (And that was as a graduate student of literature?! I am as surprised as you.)  But on this read, I was acutely aware of all the leaps the narrator takes in unraveling the mystery before her.  In fact, her leaps actively create the mystery that she is determined to unravel.  When she first spies Quint on the crenelated towers of Bly, she knows nothing about him.  That chapter, the third chapter, ends thus: “He walked away; that was all I knew.”  That matter of knowing is central to the tale.  When Quint appears to her again, this time looking through the dining room window, we are told: “On the spot there came to me the added shock of a certitude that it was not for me he had come. He had come for some one else. The flash of knowledge—for it was knowledge in the midst of dread—produced in me the most extraordinary effect.”  When she knows Quint is looking for another, she calls it first a “certitude” and then goes out of her way to label that knowing as “knowledge” as opposed to a suspicion.  She makes her leaps of knowledge again and again in the novel.  She is certain that Flora sees Miss Jessel, without any indication.  She is certain that Quint and Jessel want the children.  She is certain that Miles distracts her so that Flora can get away to meet Jessel.  And at each of these leaps, the narrator gives no basis for her insight, only that she _knows_ it to be true.  If it happened once, it would be a convenient plot device.  The repetition speaks of purpose.

Of course the central debate about the book is whether there are really ghosts or whether it is all in the narrator’s mind.  The debate at this point is as traditional as the debates concerning Hamlet, so I see no reason to retread that ground here.  Instead, I’ll say that we as readers are put in the same position as the narrator, faced with a bunch of mysterious holes and the need to fill them in for ourselves.  As nature abhors a vacuum so we humans abhor uncertainty.  The unexplained is precisely where our minds grasp at any and all evidence to create meaning and a consistent narrative.

There are a few holes that the narrator refuses to fill in spite of all her certainty.  The central hole, of course, is the reason for Miles’s suspension from school.  This is the central mystery that pre-dates Quint’s appearance on the tower, the moment that sends the narrator’s mind skipping over possibilities.  How could an angelic boy like Miles do anything wrong.  The suspension must either be the fault of the schools, because Miles is innocent, or evidence that Miles is morally compromised.  That uncertainty the narrator cannot brook, but cannot solve either.  Quint and Jessel are manifestations of the corruption stalking the innocent souls.  (Yes, see me filling holes and creating narrative?)  The striking part of the novel is that it never fills in that hole at all; we never know why Miles is suspended from school.  So if we are to find satisfaction in the ending, we need to fill that hole in for ourselves, or at least entertain what it might be.  So let me offer my reading.

Miles says his major error was that he “said things” to “only a few.  Those I liked.”  The narrator cannot make heads or tails of that, but Miles conjectures that those he told “must have repeated” his words “to those they liked.”  I am assuming that Miles was either at an all-boys boarding school (oh, the holes keep getting filled!), and that the people he “liked” were fellow boys.  It seems to me (with my backhoe) that Miles must have expressed love and affection for “those [he] liked,” and his words of love were received by the headmasters as a homosexual threat to be rooted out.  Miles is treated disturbingly sexually by the narrator throughout the book (“We continued silent while the maid was with us—as silent, it whimsically occurred to me, as some young couple who, on their wedding-journey, at an inn, feel shy in the presence of the waiter.”—ew), so it seems fitting to make the logical leap that other adults view the 10-year-old's actions through the lens of adulthood as well.

The book is a quick and satisfying read, not one that can be undertaken in a distracted state.  It requires a lot of attention, but it rewards a lot of close reading, since the holes are everywhere with piles of literary dirt just waiting to be shifted about.  If you can find a copy of Tor’s 1993 edition, I highly recommend it—the cover rocks.

Pridejudice

*Everything is spoiled below, so be warned*

I haven’t read Pride & Prejudice since I was a grad student in the mid-90s, and it was fun to come back to Austen as a seasoned adult. Austen’s writing is always enjoyable, and what I learned this time around is that it reads pretty easily out loud as well.  (I read the novel to my wife, Ann, each night before bed.)

Austen’s wry sense of humor is always a joy, and it’s easy to see why her books still resonate today.  In many ways her books lay the foundation for the modern romantic comedy, creating its tropes and standards in a way I never appreciated before.  (Of course, I say lay the foundation, but I don’t know what books she was inspired by, so there are likely a whole set of books that precede her, though I believe the popularity of her own books set us up for what we see today.)

Coming to the book as a 47-year-old in 2019, the age of Trump and a crushing disparity between the wealthy and the poor, made it difficult for me to take an uncomplicated pleasure in the trials and tribulations of the Bennet sisters. Hearing sympathy for someone who only has 300 pounds a year when you know that governesses at that time made only 30 pound a year got under my skin. And Elizabeth’s love affair with Pemberley is stronger than her affections for Darcy. Yes, I realize that part of the point is that women in this society were entirely dependent on marriage for their financial well-being and that Austen is critiquing and working within those restraints, but Austen never questions the social structure that so well benefits her and her characters.  The concerns of money and reputation make for excellent dramatic constraints and define the stakes facing the characters, but I had a hard time buying into them at this point in my life, even for the sake of the narrative.  The pearl-clutching surrounding Lydia’s running off with Wickham requires you as a reader to accept terms in order to share in the concern.  The same goes for the Bennet girls losing ownership of Longbourne. Yeah, it’s painful to think of losing your family home, and yes, it’s a horrible system that can allow an estate to be entailed, but to worry about these women who have hundreds of pounds a year even without the estate when you know that working women in the class below them live off a fraction of that amount, it’s hard (or at least it was hard for me) to not let that willful suspension of disbelief sag and think these women need to not fear working for a living.

That said, I enjoy Austen’s writing immensely.  The scene in which Elizabeth rejects Collins’s proposal of marriage is one of my favorite scenes in literature.  Austen is an expert at mocking people, and I don’t think I ever appreciated fully how snarky and vicious she was.  I also never noticed how relentlessly she pushes the plot forward in this novel.  There could be Law and Order-style “donk donks” between the chapter breaks, especially in the first volume of this book.  Austen is an expert at getting to her point and then moving to the next scene.  Most impressively, she keeps at this pace while giving the impression of moving more leisurely.

Austen’s critique of Mr. Bennet struck me on this read through as well.  The criticism of her mother is readily known and typically delighted in, but she has really harsh words for her father too who she criticizes for abdicating his role as moral contributor to the family.  It feels like an oddly modern critique to say this loving father let his girls grow wild.  But having just stated Emma, I expect that blaming the parents will be a regular part of Austen’s storytelling.  That’s something I’ll be paying attention to going forward to see if some kind of analysis presents itself.

As a love story, I give the book lower marks than as an entertaining work of fiction.  I have never found Darcy particularly inviting, and my opinion didn’t change on this read through.  Elizabeth is bowled over by his moral rectitude once she realizes she had been treating him unjustly, but as she observes to Jane, the real point at which she fell in love with him was when she saw Pemberley.  Now, the book makes it clear that that statement was a joke, but it feels like a true statement, especially as we see that as she wanders through Pemberley she marvels at the idea that all of this could be hers instead of merely being stops on a tourist’s travels.  If Darcy’s prospects were grimmer, he would not have been a romantic interest let alone a romantic lead.

Austen seems skeptical of people who are socially adept because they are so good at winning favor. I’ll be looking to see if that holds true in her other novels as we re-read through them.

Regardless of the bumps and difficulties for me personally, I am glad I got to re-read the work and am looking forward to the remaining five.