Monthly Archives: January 2007

I have very mixed feelings about this book; at times I hated it and at others I laughed or admired the writing or felt I could appreciate what Schulz was doing. Sometimes I was horrified by it.

It’s a series of short stories, sort of — I think of the chapters as being on the boundary line between stories and sketches. Some of them actually told a story with a plot, while others were more descriptive, without much, or any, narrative. They are about a young boy’s family and his city; I think we are safe in assuming that the main character is at least partly based on Schulz himself.

These stories are often fantastical. They might start off in a realistic mode, but most of them eventually veer off into the dream-like and the impossible. I wasn’t expecting this, and so I spent a lot of time figuring out what Schulz was doing and how I supposed to approach his stories. I found the reading experience to be disorienting — which isn’t a bad thing, really, although it wasn’t purely pleasure, either. As I was describing the stories to the Hobgoblin, he asked if they might be called “magical realism,” and I thought not, because to me magical realism is more about describing the fantastical or the magical as though it were real — to treat it matter-of-factly — when what Schulz does is the opposite; he takes the real and makes it strange and otherworldly.

My favorite chapters were the ones that had more narrative, such as “Birds” or “Cinnamon Shops.” The more descriptive chapters drove me crazy; I felt like I was drowning in Schulz’s incredibly dense language. As I look over the book trying to find a passage to show you what I mean, I realize that this isn’t bad writing really, not bad in the sense that Schulz loses control of it and his meaning gets away from him. Here’s an example:

Once Adela took me to the old woman’s house. It was early in the morning when we entered the small blue-walled room, with its mud floor, lying in a patch of bright yellow sunlight in the still of the morning broken only by the frighteningly loud ticking of a cottage clock on the wall. In a straw-filled chest lay the foolish Maria, white as a wafer and motionless like a glove from which a hand had been withdrawn. And, as if taking advantage of her sleep, the silence talked, the yellow, bright, evil silence delivered its monologue, argued, and loudly spoke its vulgar maniacal soliloquy. Maria’s time — the time imprisoned in her soul — had left her and — terribly real — filled the room, vociferous and hellish in the bright silence of the morning, rising from the noisy mill of the clock like a cloud of bad flour, powdery flour, the stupid flour of madmen.

I’m fine with the passage for the first two sentences, and even the third, although I do wonder what kind of “chest” Maria is lying in. I like the description of her as “white as a wafer and motionless like a glove.” Then we get the silence talking, and I feel like we’re entering into deeper waters, but I like the idea of silence talking, and even arguing and being loud. The last sentence begins to lose me, though — Maria’s time is filling the room? I sort of get it, if I stretch a bit. I like the image of the cloud of flour filling the room, but why the “stupid flour of madmen”? This book is full of language you can struggle with for a long time, if you want. Or, I suppose, you can refuse to struggle with it and just let it wash over you.

The sections that describe the father were the most powerful; it was these sections that horrified me. He goes back and forth between sanity and insanity, and during his insane times, he does things like keeping a flock of birds in the attic and crawling across the floor like a cockroach. And the family can’t really do anything about it. They often act as though he’s not there, as though there weren’t a completely insane man living in their midst. I wonder if some of the book’s mixing of fantasy and reality is the boy’s response to his father’s madness; in the world the boy lives in, how is he supposed to distinguish what is real and what is not? What does he have to hold on to that’s solid and certain?

Preparing myself for the one ride on the indoor trainer I’ve done so far this winter (mentioned in yesterday’s post), I went to the library to get an audiobook to listen to while I pedal. I picked up Tobias Wolff’s Old School, which I’d read an excerpt of a while back in the New Yorker, and which has stuck with me all this time. Alas, it didn’t make riding on the trainer any easier — I was hoping I would get caught up in the story and forget I was pedaling, but no such luck — but it has been an excellent book to listen to. I’ve taken it with me to listen to in the car a couple of times now and am about halfway through.

It’s hard for me to separate what I’m liking about the book and what I’m liking about the reader and having the book read to me; I didn’t like the reader’s attempts at a southern accent all that much, but otherwise he’s done such a good job I’m finding myself laughing out loud as I’m driving along, something I rarely do when I’m reading, rather than listening to, a book. I often respond more emotionally to books I’m listening to as opposed to books I’m reading, and I’ve decided I must keep up the habit of listening to audiobooks, a habit I dropped when I stopped doing my ridiculously long commute of a couple years ago. I find it troubling that I have a stronger response to audiobooks than regular books, since that makes it seem like my response to regular books is weak, and I wonder what this says about me. But I suppose there’s nothing to do about it except listen to audiobooks regularly.

In the novel, Wolff’s first person narrator describes life in a boarding school, and at least for the narrator and his friends, literature and writing are very important. The school has a regularly-held contest where a famous writer comes to campus, reads student fiction or poetry, and selects a winner; that winner then gets to have a private audience with the famous writer. So far, the school has held two contests; for the first one, Robert Frost came to campus, and for the second, Ayn Rand.

What I love about the novel is the humor with which these visits and all the excitement they provoke are described. The narrator’s voice is wonderfully well-done, very sympathetic to his boyhood naivete and earnestness, but also able from the adult perspective to point out how funny he could be — how funny all the students could be. With each author’s visit there’s a set-piece where the author gives a speech or does a reading and the students and teachers challenge him or her and the authors talk back in a characteristic manner, Frost waxing eloquent about the value of poetic form, and Rand getting huffy and haughty and insisting that the best American novels ever are The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

And the boys’ attempts at writing are funny — I don’t mean that in a mean way, but they are typical productions of adolescents who take themselves very seriously. The boy who wins the Robert Frost contest writes a poem in a very earnest Frost-like manner, but apparently it’s so bad Frost thinks it’s a send-up of his style and chooses it as the winner because he thinks the boy is brave for making fun of him. When the narrator finds out that Ayn Rand will be visiting campus he reads The Fountainhead and becomes a convert, looking with contempt at the silly, self-sacrificing, weak people surrounding him who so foolishly fail to appreciate the value of selfishness. If you’ve ever gone through an Ayn Rand phase, you will find this section hysterically funny and just a little bit painful.

And I’m only halfway through the book. I’ll be sure to report back on the pleasures to be found in the second half.

A couple days ago I finished Mary McCarthy’s novel The Groves of Academe, and found it just the thing I needed back when I needed something fun to read. I must say that I’m fonder of her essays than I am of her fiction; her fiction is good but her essays are great. That said, I recommend this book, especially if you like academic satire. This book didn’t make me laugh out loud in quite the same way Richard Russo’s Straight Man did and it’s not as comprehensive a picture of college life as Jane Smiley’s Moo, but the writing is smarter than in either of those two novels, and more wicked. McCarthy is someone that, if I knew her when she was alive, I’d make sure I stayed on the good side of. She’s got one of the sharpest wits of any writer I know.

The story is about English professor Henry Mulcahy, who, we learn on the novel’s first page, has just been fired. He immediately jumps into action to get his job back, dragging his department into a controversy that soon engulfs the whole school. At issue here is Henry’s communist past (was he a member of the party earlier in his life and might he still be today? The novel was published in 1951 to give you some idea of why this is such a big deal) and his sick wife whose health might be irreparably harmed if she found out about the firing — a fact Henry claims the college President was fully aware of when he wrote the letter of dismissal. But most of all it is Henry’s personality that becomes the focus of the novel’s controversy.

For Henry truly is an awful human being. One of the chief pleasures of this book is the way McCarthy presents Henry to us; she recounts his thoughts with little editorializing, so that we get Henry’s self-justifications directly and can see the extent of his selfishness by watching his mind at work. I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a character as self-absorbed as this one. Other faculty members make great sacrifices for him to try to save his job, and rather than being grateful, he gets angry because they did not make the sacrifices in precisely the way he wanted them to, and he pouts because by making great sacrifices in their own particular ways these people are shifting the attention away from him, where it should properly be. He is incapable of recognizing that he has ever done something wrong or that he has flaws and has responsibilities to people that he often fails to meet; everything he does it right, or at least it deserves justification and defense.

But he doesn’t come across solely as an awful human being; he also comes across as someone with great energy and great intelligence — admittedly, the sole use of which is to make life more comfortable for himself. But what makes the book so enjoyable is watching the characters respond to these positive things in Henry — the energy, the life, the color — and then watching them recover as they realize that he hasn’t told them the complete truth about his life. Henry is the riddle the book offers to the other characters and to readers: How come he has succeeded as much as he has in academia and what does it say about academia that he has done so? Is he worth defending? Should he stay at their school? Just when, if ever, is he telling the truth?

McCarthy’s portrait of college life is delicious, complete with academic in-fighting, competition, gossip, lying, and betrayal, and also intelligence, loyalty, great conversations, and, sometimes, the sincere desire to educate young people.