I realize that starting with these older texts can be challenging and will probably scare off a number of people who were scarred by high school and college instructors, but there is a huge benefit to doing it this way.
Namely, we get a picture of a larger culture. When Peter Walsh reflects on his time in Britain, that means something to us because of our experience with A Passage to India. And in these novels concerned with class and class structure (An American Tragedy, Mrs. Dalloway, The Great Gatsby) we have a context that is created from these companion texts. Novels and stories all exist within a particular time and place regardless of their being called "timeless." Reading the books together and in order, we can see them existing together.
We are not far enough along the timeline to see books referring to each other, commenting upon each other, building off each other, but I will not be surprised to see that in the future too.
So far I find this to be a very rewarding project. Thank you, Ann, for making this happen!
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Mrs. Dalloway - Brought to a SPOIL, then Left to Simmer
This was the most fascinating of the three novels so far to me. I found the first 10 pages to be VERY difficult. I am used to things opening in media res, but this took that to a whole new level. I must have reread each paragraph two or three times before moving to the next one, waiting for something to become clear. From the back of the book, I knew that the story took place in one day and that it followed Mrs. Dalloway as she prepares for an evening party. That knowledge helped very little to anchor me.
When we first jump outside of Clarissa to Scrope Purvis, who drives past her while she waits to cross the street, I was shaken. That paragraph got four or five reads. It wasn't until we left Clarissa and started wandering through all the people on the street that the book came into any real focus for me. Ah! We are going to be sitting in these heads and bouncing off of people as they pass, interact, and comment upon each other. We are in a novel of thoughts more than action. Then it all became delicious.
It felt to me like a poem forced into the suit of prose. I had to read slowly, digest each sentence both for appreciation and for meaning. Once I committed myself to this deliberate pace I loved it. Every sentence feels like its meaning is supposed to echo throughout the novel, just like the "leaden circles" of Big Ben tolling away the hours and tying all the players together. How different from the overwritten prose of Dreiser, to feel like every sentence demands your attention.
As for meaning, I am not smart enough to digest this novel. I will be chewing on it for a long time to come.
I loved being in each person's head, hearing Peter Walsh view the world and himself, struggling with Mrs. Kilman as she says things that she knows she shouldn't say. Every character here is respected, has something internal. I feel like we glimpse through our various viewpoints an entire culture, or at least an entire cultural moment. These characters are both self-aware and self-delusional.
I will point to a passage that I believe Ann will expound upon because it struck us as the center of the novel. This is from the ponderings of Peter Walsh restating Clarissa's youthful theory "to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said . . . not 'here, here, here' . . . but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them, even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to . . . ."
How apt then that the novel should be called Mrs. Dalloway and follow all these people, most of whom she knows and some of whom she does not, namely Rezia and Septimus. To know Mrs. Dalloway (or any other character here) we need to know them all.
No one exists in a vacuum. Just as important is that we all exist alone. At one point I thought the novel was downright existential as no one could communicate with anyone else effectively, Dalloway couldn't even tell his wife he loved her (not in so many words). We were stuck in minds, never getting satisfactory exchanges. We jump from character to character; there is no bridge, no connection. So, no one exists in a vacuum and no one exists together. Ouch. That is a tough bind for the human race, or at least for post-war Britain.
When we first jump outside of Clarissa to Scrope Purvis, who drives past her while she waits to cross the street, I was shaken. That paragraph got four or five reads. It wasn't until we left Clarissa and started wandering through all the people on the street that the book came into any real focus for me. Ah! We are going to be sitting in these heads and bouncing off of people as they pass, interact, and comment upon each other. We are in a novel of thoughts more than action. Then it all became delicious.
It felt to me like a poem forced into the suit of prose. I had to read slowly, digest each sentence both for appreciation and for meaning. Once I committed myself to this deliberate pace I loved it. Every sentence feels like its meaning is supposed to echo throughout the novel, just like the "leaden circles" of Big Ben tolling away the hours and tying all the players together. How different from the overwritten prose of Dreiser, to feel like every sentence demands your attention.
As for meaning, I am not smart enough to digest this novel. I will be chewing on it for a long time to come.
I loved being in each person's head, hearing Peter Walsh view the world and himself, struggling with Mrs. Kilman as she says things that she knows she shouldn't say. Every character here is respected, has something internal. I feel like we glimpse through our various viewpoints an entire culture, or at least an entire cultural moment. These characters are both self-aware and self-delusional.
I will point to a passage that I believe Ann will expound upon because it struck us as the center of the novel. This is from the ponderings of Peter Walsh restating Clarissa's youthful theory "to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said . . . not 'here, here, here' . . . but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them, even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to . . . ."
How apt then that the novel should be called Mrs. Dalloway and follow all these people, most of whom she knows and some of whom she does not, namely Rezia and Septimus. To know Mrs. Dalloway (or any other character here) we need to know them all.
No one exists in a vacuum. Just as important is that we all exist alone. At one point I thought the novel was downright existential as no one could communicate with anyone else effectively, Dalloway couldn't even tell his wife he loved her (not in so many words). We were stuck in minds, never getting satisfactory exchanges. We jump from character to character; there is no bridge, no connection. So, no one exists in a vacuum and no one exists together. Ouch. That is a tough bind for the human race, or at least for post-war Britain.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Watching the Movies that Go with the Books: An American Tragedy
For purists, seeing a movie after reading the book can be downright harrowing. The actors have the wrong hair. The script eliminates four of the best scenes - and irreverently changes two more. High on rubber cement, the script writer creates a whole new subplot to replace the three other ones he mutilated like the sick serial killer he is. Frankly, if not for some popcorn and the great reward of fuming after the fact, the whole experience would be too much.
Of course, there is another option - or so I'm told - which is to take the same faith I would give to the book and loan it to the film, assuming that the director has a viable story s/he wants to tell. It may not be the same story that appears in the book, but it was inspired by the book, and it can be interesting (instead of irritating) to compare and contrast the two. You know, theoretically.
Testing this whole notion, last night we watched A Place in the Sun, the 1951 Columbia Pictures adaption of An American Tragedy. The director - who won an Oscar for his efforts - decided that the story he wanted to tell was a tragic tale of a love that could not be. The marketing department definitely got the memo, billing the movie as "The Screen's Most Powerful Love Story," which naturally takes place between Clyde and Sondra, renamed George and Angela for the film and played by Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.
To tell the screen's most powerful love story, it becomes necessary to make a few changes to Dreiser's novel, and by a few, I mean scores, including changing the setting to post-war America.
- Roberta, renamed Alice, becomes a dowdy, unattractive, whiny, grating shrew who does everything but boil George's pet bunny. Seriously, when he goes to spend the week with Angela and her parents (!) at the lake, Alice sees a picture of him in the paper with Angela and hops a bus, calling George at Angela's house and demanding to be picked up at the bus station NOW and married IMMEDIATELY; otherwise, Alice will go to Angela's house and tell her parents everything.
- Angela's parents, meanwhile, seem more or less prepared to allow George into the family - even after George discloses fully his poor (and embarrassing) background. Marrying Angela is not a dream in this version of the story, and entering the upper crust is not a tantalizing possibility. It's all real, and it's all going to happen, provided George can somehow get rid of the shackle that is Alice.
- Instead of planning Alice's murder, however, George decides to kill her rather spontaneously. Once he's out on the water, he loses his nerve (because he is a really good guy, after all), and Alice falls into the lake because she stands up and overturns the boat.
- Despite all of these changes, George in the end decides that he must be guilty, because while Alice was drowning, he wasn't thinking of her. He was thinking of Angela. In his prison cell, he bids Angela farewell (she will love him forever, though), and he goes to the chair, presumably meant to have our tears as he fades from view.
In an odd way, seeing this romantic version of the story increased my admiration for Dreiser's novel. In the book, Clyde is an ass - in no small part because Roberta is not. The book doesn't simplify Roberta; the book makes her an attractive, intelligent girl whom Clyde woos, pesters, and finally seduces, only to abandon her even before her hour of need. Clyde is an ass. And to put us in his head, to make him sympathetic to us in spite of that, is a serious accomplishment.
The book also encourages us to think in ways that I did not fully credit. By giving us two very clear characters to root for, the film makes us unwittingly complicit in the murder of Alice. We want Alice dead, if only to make Shelley Winters stop whining! In the book, however, we are meant to question much of what we read. Jason realized this just from reading; for me, it took seeing the film to help me see the book.
Of course, there is another option - or so I'm told - which is to take the same faith I would give to the book and loan it to the film, assuming that the director has a viable story s/he wants to tell. It may not be the same story that appears in the book, but it was inspired by the book, and it can be interesting (instead of irritating) to compare and contrast the two. You know, theoretically.
Testing this whole notion, last night we watched A Place in the Sun, the 1951 Columbia Pictures adaption of An American Tragedy. The director - who won an Oscar for his efforts - decided that the story he wanted to tell was a tragic tale of a love that could not be. The marketing department definitely got the memo, billing the movie as "The Screen's Most Powerful Love Story," which naturally takes place between Clyde and Sondra, renamed George and Angela for the film and played by Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.
To tell the screen's most powerful love story, it becomes necessary to make a few changes to Dreiser's novel, and by a few, I mean scores, including changing the setting to post-war America.
- Roberta, renamed Alice, becomes a dowdy, unattractive, whiny, grating shrew who does everything but boil George's pet bunny. Seriously, when he goes to spend the week with Angela and her parents (!) at the lake, Alice sees a picture of him in the paper with Angela and hops a bus, calling George at Angela's house and demanding to be picked up at the bus station NOW and married IMMEDIATELY; otherwise, Alice will go to Angela's house and tell her parents everything.
- Angela's parents, meanwhile, seem more or less prepared to allow George into the family - even after George discloses fully his poor (and embarrassing) background. Marrying Angela is not a dream in this version of the story, and entering the upper crust is not a tantalizing possibility. It's all real, and it's all going to happen, provided George can somehow get rid of the shackle that is Alice.
- Instead of planning Alice's murder, however, George decides to kill her rather spontaneously. Once he's out on the water, he loses his nerve (because he is a really good guy, after all), and Alice falls into the lake because she stands up and overturns the boat.
- Despite all of these changes, George in the end decides that he must be guilty, because while Alice was drowning, he wasn't thinking of her. He was thinking of Angela. In his prison cell, he bids Angela farewell (she will love him forever, though), and he goes to the chair, presumably meant to have our tears as he fades from view.
In an odd way, seeing this romantic version of the story increased my admiration for Dreiser's novel. In the book, Clyde is an ass - in no small part because Roberta is not. The book doesn't simplify Roberta; the book makes her an attractive, intelligent girl whom Clyde woos, pesters, and finally seduces, only to abandon her even before her hour of need. Clyde is an ass. And to put us in his head, to make him sympathetic to us in spite of that, is a serious accomplishment.
The book also encourages us to think in ways that I did not fully credit. By giving us two very clear characters to root for, the film makes us unwittingly complicit in the murder of Alice. We want Alice dead, if only to make Shelley Winters stop whining! In the book, however, we are meant to question much of what we read. Jason realized this just from reading; for me, it took seeing the film to help me see the book.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
An American Tragedy - SPOILED but not Rotten
Oh how different are the writing styles of Forster and Dreiser (and Woolf too for that matter, but that will be saved for another blog). Some will prefer Dreiser to Forster, but I belong to the other camp, preferring Forster's direct, poetic, and insightful prose to Dreisers cumbersome and unedited prose.
Both these stories, Passage to India and An American Tragedy, do not end where I expect them do. I expect Passage to end shortly after the trial and Tragedy to end shortly after Clyde is caught. The dramatic impulse does not dictate that we follow Clyde all the way to the moment of his execution, but it is important to Dreiser to take us there. It was Forster's determination to include the entire final section that led Ann to draw her brilliant reading about what is actually at the heart of Forster's novel, the friendship of Aziz and Fielding. Here the American tragedy is not simply Roberta's murder. The novel is about two murders: Roberta's and Clyde's, and for Dreiser, Clyde's murder seems every bit as tragic and pointless as Roberta's.
The thing that strikes me about the third book of the novel is Clyde's inability to feel fully guilty for murdering Roberta. He's not a sociopath insofar as he knows that what he did was not good, I believe. There's much made, as Ann notes, about whether or not Clyde actually killed Roberta or if in the end it was an accident, but again I agree with Ann and that Clyde is clearly responsible for Roberta's death. So why does Clyde want to split hairs here, and to the point that he cannot make any such confession of his guilt even to McMillan and God? Because, I propose, for Clyde, his actions were not wrong. The personal beliefs born in Clyde is that the search of material goods and ease are a reasonable and necessary quest. Roberta was going to ruin that irreparably. What is immoral then? Getting rid of an obstacle to pursue what he must pursue or accepting defeat and living a miserable life. Clyde does not deal with a moral vs. immoral decision, but with two moral decisions.
This books seems to me to be a response to Horatio Alger novels, in which our plucky young hero rises up from obscurity due to hard work and moral righteousness. Clyde never stands a chance to truly rise. He makes a million bad decisions and suffers from them, but if he were born privileged like Gilbert or Belknap, his decisions would have been in no way disastrous. Belknap faced the same problem, but his rich father bailed him out. If Gilbert reached the same point that Clyde did and got someone pregnant, Dad would be there. Hell, even Dr. Glenn performed abortions for the rich and privileged but not for the poor. And let's say Gilbert murdered Roberta for the same reason Clyde did, the entire legal force of the Griffiths would have been there to aid him.
Please forgive the rambling nature of this post.
If Clyde's murder is a parallel with Roberta's, and if Roberta was murdered because she stood in Clyde's way, then why was Clyde murdered? What was Clyde pregnant with and how did his pregnancy (metaphorically speaking, of course) threaten to derail the social world in which he lived? I think that is the central question of the novel.
How do morality and social progress/personal improvement meet and shape each other? Another central question.
This novel is widely considered a piece of Realism in which environment, not nature determine the course of events and character. Here, Clyde's desires and concerns are innate, not created by culture. So much so that he is constantly searching for understanding, understanding that his mother and society at large cannot have for him. He is something like Frankenstein's monster not knowing why he has been made so monstrous. How can others behave so well? How can they avoid the troubles he does? What Clyde never connects, because no one admits, Clyde's desires are not monstrous, but human, or rather "American." Others have the same problems, but they are either comfortably stuck in their caste or they are privileged enough to avoid the ramifications.
To murder Clyde, society addresses nothing, examines itself and its structure not at all. The deathhouse sequence continually refers to the mechanical nature of things here. Everything is ritualized and automatic and meaningless. The only examination expected is to be made by the prisoners trying to come to peace with the end of their life. Our social structure need examine nothing and can move on, leaving Clyde and his trial to be what it always was: entertainment for the masses, a reality TV show before TV, a Jerry Springer circus of pain and outrage.
And though I feel all that intellectually, I can't say I had much sympathy for Clyde, myself. He was a whiny prick. I have no idea what that says about me.
Both these stories, Passage to India and An American Tragedy, do not end where I expect them do. I expect Passage to end shortly after the trial and Tragedy to end shortly after Clyde is caught. The dramatic impulse does not dictate that we follow Clyde all the way to the moment of his execution, but it is important to Dreiser to take us there. It was Forster's determination to include the entire final section that led Ann to draw her brilliant reading about what is actually at the heart of Forster's novel, the friendship of Aziz and Fielding. Here the American tragedy is not simply Roberta's murder. The novel is about two murders: Roberta's and Clyde's, and for Dreiser, Clyde's murder seems every bit as tragic and pointless as Roberta's.
The thing that strikes me about the third book of the novel is Clyde's inability to feel fully guilty for murdering Roberta. He's not a sociopath insofar as he knows that what he did was not good, I believe. There's much made, as Ann notes, about whether or not Clyde actually killed Roberta or if in the end it was an accident, but again I agree with Ann and that Clyde is clearly responsible for Roberta's death. So why does Clyde want to split hairs here, and to the point that he cannot make any such confession of his guilt even to McMillan and God? Because, I propose, for Clyde, his actions were not wrong. The personal beliefs born in Clyde is that the search of material goods and ease are a reasonable and necessary quest. Roberta was going to ruin that irreparably. What is immoral then? Getting rid of an obstacle to pursue what he must pursue or accepting defeat and living a miserable life. Clyde does not deal with a moral vs. immoral decision, but with two moral decisions.
This books seems to me to be a response to Horatio Alger novels, in which our plucky young hero rises up from obscurity due to hard work and moral righteousness. Clyde never stands a chance to truly rise. He makes a million bad decisions and suffers from them, but if he were born privileged like Gilbert or Belknap, his decisions would have been in no way disastrous. Belknap faced the same problem, but his rich father bailed him out. If Gilbert reached the same point that Clyde did and got someone pregnant, Dad would be there. Hell, even Dr. Glenn performed abortions for the rich and privileged but not for the poor. And let's say Gilbert murdered Roberta for the same reason Clyde did, the entire legal force of the Griffiths would have been there to aid him.
Please forgive the rambling nature of this post.
If Clyde's murder is a parallel with Roberta's, and if Roberta was murdered because she stood in Clyde's way, then why was Clyde murdered? What was Clyde pregnant with and how did his pregnancy (metaphorically speaking, of course) threaten to derail the social world in which he lived? I think that is the central question of the novel.
How do morality and social progress/personal improvement meet and shape each other? Another central question.
This novel is widely considered a piece of Realism in which environment, not nature determine the course of events and character. Here, Clyde's desires and concerns are innate, not created by culture. So much so that he is constantly searching for understanding, understanding that his mother and society at large cannot have for him. He is something like Frankenstein's monster not knowing why he has been made so monstrous. How can others behave so well? How can they avoid the troubles he does? What Clyde never connects, because no one admits, Clyde's desires are not monstrous, but human, or rather "American." Others have the same problems, but they are either comfortably stuck in their caste or they are privileged enough to avoid the ramifications.
To murder Clyde, society addresses nothing, examines itself and its structure not at all. The deathhouse sequence continually refers to the mechanical nature of things here. Everything is ritualized and automatic and meaningless. The only examination expected is to be made by the prisoners trying to come to peace with the end of their life. Our social structure need examine nothing and can move on, leaving Clyde and his trial to be what it always was: entertainment for the masses, a reality TV show before TV, a Jerry Springer circus of pain and outrage.
And though I feel all that intellectually, I can't say I had much sympathy for Clyde, myself. He was a whiny prick. I have no idea what that says about me.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
An American Tragedy: I'm Done
It is a mighty thing to read a book of 814 pages, and mightier still when the prose gropes and fumbles at you like a 16-year-old boy from the very start to the very end (horny little bastard). I feel slightly proud that I survived it all, although I do confess to having enjoyed at least 200 pages of it. Despite my objections to the prose, however, I feel a bit flummoxed when I try to consider what I think about the story.
The rumor on the street is that this is a story about the American Dream, here understood to be the idea that a person of humble beginnings and low means can, through hard work, become wealthy and rise to a new position in the social order. In this novel, of course, people do nothing of the kind. They are born into their social class, and though they might kill to escape it, they cannot - and most know better than to try. The poor certainly know their place; in Lycurgus, they trudge to the factory and back again without any sign of greater aspirations. Apart from Clyde, we meet only one person who dares to be a class climber, and that is Walter Dillard, a fellow boarder at Mrs. Cuppy's who is shortly dismissed by Clyde as being too crass and too far beneath the family name to maintain as an associate.
And then there is Clyde, our lower-class protagonist. Clyde does succeed in entering the social world of his wealthy relations, but decidedly not through his own industry. He has the family name, and he resembles his cousin, Gil, for which reason, the fabulous Sondra Finchley stops her car and offers him a ride. Dreiser takes great pains to show that Sondra invites Clyde into her world - at least initially - just to irk Gil, who detests Clyde. There is no more to it than that. Sondra falls in love with Clyde's devotion to her, and after his lower-class girlfriend becomes pregnant, he literally kills to be with Sondra, which then leads to his apprehension, incarceration, and eventual execution.
Apparently, by the way, there is a whole school of readers who believe that Clyde did not murder Roberta, a notion I find strange and amusing. He plotted to kill her. He took her to a remote location to kill her. He committed so thoroughly to killing her that she lost her corporeality in his eyes. Yes, at the last second, he shrank from the odious business of killing her, but when he hit her with the camera, his object was "to free himself . . . forever." That doesn't seem terribly innocent to me.
Another odd notion I gleaned from the criticism is that Clyde is the victim of a social paradox - namely, that he is encouraged by society to seek wealth, but when he does, he is punished. As an abstract idea, I love that. I agree that capitalism has many tricks like that. But is the idea dramatized in the text? I don't think so. We do not see Clyde being encouraged to pursue wealth, neither by advertisements, nor by people.
And finally, this work has been praised as a triumph of naturalism, with the core idea being that people are shaped principally by their birth and environment, with no real free will. I don't see that in the text either.
Textual evidence, dammit!
And there it is.
The rumor on the street is that this is a story about the American Dream, here understood to be the idea that a person of humble beginnings and low means can, through hard work, become wealthy and rise to a new position in the social order. In this novel, of course, people do nothing of the kind. They are born into their social class, and though they might kill to escape it, they cannot - and most know better than to try. The poor certainly know their place; in Lycurgus, they trudge to the factory and back again without any sign of greater aspirations. Apart from Clyde, we meet only one person who dares to be a class climber, and that is Walter Dillard, a fellow boarder at Mrs. Cuppy's who is shortly dismissed by Clyde as being too crass and too far beneath the family name to maintain as an associate.
And then there is Clyde, our lower-class protagonist. Clyde does succeed in entering the social world of his wealthy relations, but decidedly not through his own industry. He has the family name, and he resembles his cousin, Gil, for which reason, the fabulous Sondra Finchley stops her car and offers him a ride. Dreiser takes great pains to show that Sondra invites Clyde into her world - at least initially - just to irk Gil, who detests Clyde. There is no more to it than that. Sondra falls in love with Clyde's devotion to her, and after his lower-class girlfriend becomes pregnant, he literally kills to be with Sondra, which then leads to his apprehension, incarceration, and eventual execution.
Apparently, by the way, there is a whole school of readers who believe that Clyde did not murder Roberta, a notion I find strange and amusing. He plotted to kill her. He took her to a remote location to kill her. He committed so thoroughly to killing her that she lost her corporeality in his eyes. Yes, at the last second, he shrank from the odious business of killing her, but when he hit her with the camera, his object was "to free himself . . . forever." That doesn't seem terribly innocent to me.
Another odd notion I gleaned from the criticism is that Clyde is the victim of a social paradox - namely, that he is encouraged by society to seek wealth, but when he does, he is punished. As an abstract idea, I love that. I agree that capitalism has many tricks like that. But is the idea dramatized in the text? I don't think so. We do not see Clyde being encouraged to pursue wealth, neither by advertisements, nor by people.
And finally, this work has been praised as a triumph of naturalism, with the core idea being that people are shaped principally by their birth and environment, with no real free will. I don't see that in the text either.
Textual evidence, dammit!
And there it is.
Monday, March 8, 2010
An American Tragedy: It Does Get Better
Reading the first chapter of An American Tragedy was something akin to eating a large bowl of dry dog food. The second chapter did little to improve the experience, but by perhaps the fourth, I could agree - at least theoretically - that reading this tome might prove more enjoyable than a doing hard labor in a Siberian prison in a bikini made of nails.
According to Amazon.com, An American Tragedy "was called by one influential critic 'the worst-written great novel in the world.'" Amen. Jason and I have at least consoled ourselves that we can laugh together at the descriptions, which are long and convoluted yet also lengthy but not altogether without that brevity and concision which might otherwise render it charming. (Now excuse me, I have to rinse my brain out with Scope.)
I believe as we work our way through this list, we will benefit by remembering that these novels exist in a historical context, that their literary value is measured not necessarily by the enjoyment that we find in the characters and their stories but by the contributions their authors have made to the body of works we agree to call Literature.
As it goes along, an American Tragedy does get more gripping, and I look forward to our discussion of it.
According to Amazon.com, An American Tragedy "was called by one influential critic 'the worst-written great novel in the world.'" Amen. Jason and I have at least consoled ourselves that we can laugh together at the descriptions, which are long and convoluted yet also lengthy but not altogether without that brevity and concision which might otherwise render it charming. (Now excuse me, I have to rinse my brain out with Scope.)
I believe as we work our way through this list, we will benefit by remembering that these novels exist in a historical context, that their literary value is measured not necessarily by the enjoyment that we find in the characters and their stories but by the contributions their authors have made to the body of works we agree to call Literature.
As it goes along, an American Tragedy does get more gripping, and I look forward to our discussion of it.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
An Inauspicious Start?
I am going to start out my thoughts on Book 1 in the same way Ann did: A Passage to India is a book about...150 pages too long. This was really a grind for me to get through, not because it was difficult but because it just couldn't keep my attention. It had its moments, a few passages in which I found myself saying "finally, some insight," but there just weren't enough of those.
As I was getting close to the end, I realized that there wasn't a single character in the book that I was pulling for. Aziz was clearly getting a raw deal from the most abhorrent character in the book, Miss Quested, but I found him to be very inconsistent in character. He was a likeable guy in the early going and during the trial, then he seemed bitter in his dealings with Fielding, then he was Joe Johnny Nice Guy again at the end. I suppose you could argue that anyone would be bitter having gone through what Aziz did, but he was bitter with the only Englishman that stood up for him.
Maybe I'm just not well read enough, or smart enough, to "get" A Passage to India. But maybe I am, and I can't imagine why this book is on any 100 Greatest Novels List when names like Mailer and Dos Passos are absent. Notwithstanding my poo-pooing of the first book, I am 100% committed to the project. What I am hoping is that in the next few years, as we all read through the List, we can have some good discussions over some good beers why certain books should be out and why others should be in.
As I was getting close to the end, I realized that there wasn't a single character in the book that I was pulling for. Aziz was clearly getting a raw deal from the most abhorrent character in the book, Miss Quested, but I found him to be very inconsistent in character. He was a likeable guy in the early going and during the trial, then he seemed bitter in his dealings with Fielding, then he was Joe Johnny Nice Guy again at the end. I suppose you could argue that anyone would be bitter having gone through what Aziz did, but he was bitter with the only Englishman that stood up for him.
Maybe I'm just not well read enough, or smart enough, to "get" A Passage to India. But maybe I am, and I can't imagine why this book is on any 100 Greatest Novels List when names like Mailer and Dos Passos are absent. Notwithstanding my poo-pooing of the first book, I am 100% committed to the project. What I am hoping is that in the next few years, as we all read through the List, we can have some good discussions over some good beers why certain books should be out and why others should be in.
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