Monthly Archives: January 2008

There are two books I’ve finished recently that I haven’t yet written about. I don’t put books away in their places on the shelves until I’ve written my final post on them, and these two have been lingering around next to my reading chair for too long.

The first is Mavis Gallant’s collection Paris Stories (I wrote about the first half of the book here). I felt the same about the second half of the book as I did about the first: some stories bored me and others were magical. Most of them I liked; there were just a couple that left me cold — I think, in these cases, the action went by too quickly, and I didn’t have enough time to come to care anything about the characters. Where the stories succeed, they give you the full sweep of a life, but they also linger enough along the way to give you time to get imaginatively and emotionally caught up in the characters’ lives.

One of my favorite stories from the second half is “Grippes and Poche,” a story about the author Grippes who regularly gets called in by the government official Poche to answer questions about his income and taxes. The story follows their meetings as they take place over the course of many years; Grippes is fascinated by Poche and gleans what information he can in the short time they have together. But Poche remains mysterious and distant. Grippes is so intrigued by Poche he turns him into a character in his novels, and it turns out that Grippes depends on Poche for his creative inspiration; when Poche no longer sends for him to inquire into his finances, he feels at a loss.

The story is interesting because of the surprising nature of this relationship — even though they seldom met and hardly knew each other, Grippes depends on the polite but still antagonistic relationship to feed his creative work. I admired the way Gallant could tell so much about Grippes solely through this one seemingly-unimportant relationship.

In another story, “Mlle. Dias de Corta,” the narrator writes a letter to the titular character, a young woman who has lived in her house but is unlikely now to come back, and the letter is unlikely to reach its destination. The narrator reminisces about Mlle. Dias de Corta and their life together, and as she does so, reveals much about herself, much that she probably did not intend to reveal.

There’s lots to enjoy in this book; although I thought it was uneven, the stories that worked worked very well.

The other book I’ve recently finished is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I’m not going to write anything like a regular review, partly because I feel like most people already know what this book is about if they haven’t read it already, but also because I don’t feel I have much to say about it. It’s a book that left me with strong feelings but largely bereft of words.

I will say, though, that it’s a near-perfect book for what it is — what it sets out to do it accomplishes, and it does so brilliantly. It’s a harrowing book, very difficult to take, but a beautiful one too, with gorgeous writing. It’s such a simple story — father and son walking south in a post-apocalyptic world — and not much happens in it, or, rather, the same thing happens over and over again, and yet I found it so compelling, so involving, that it was very hard to put down. I wanted to keep reading for contradictory reasons — because I was caught up in the world of the story and because I wanted to get out of that world as soon as possible. That’s how great books about horrible subjects make me feel I suppose — in awe of them and wanting to get some distance on them very fast.

As you will probably have guessed based on my post from a few days ago, I enjoyed Nicholson Baker’s novel Room Temperature. It’s his second novel, and it follows a similar format as his first, The Mezzanine: both take place during a small chunk of time — in the first novel the time it takes to ride up an escalator, and, in the second, the twenty minutes it takes for the narrator to feed his infant daughter — and they both range outwards and back in time to fill in details of the narrator’s surroundings and his life.

Both have narrators who, much like Baker himself (as evidenced in his essays at least), are extremely observant of and curious about the world around them, especially when it comes to the objects that surround them and fill their lives — the things that most of us take for granted. The Mezzanine’s narrator was obsessed with many things, but I remember, in particular, long passages on shoe laces and on drinking straws, and in Room Temperature, the narrator reminisces at length about glass peanut butter jars and the sound they make when first opened. The narrator is a former music student and aspiring composer and he once dreamed of writing a symphony that began with exactly that peanut butter jar sound.

If books about shoe laces and peanut butter jars sound boring, they are not at all. Instead of boring you, Baker inspires you to look more closely at the world you live in. There’s so much to see and learn, the books imply, so much we don’t even notice that’s right in front of our eyes. In fact, in Room Temperature Baker plays with the idea that we can reconstruct much of our own history and the history of the world if only we looked closely enough at the present. He makes this argument directly in at least two places in the novel:

I certainly believed, rocking my daughter on this Wednesday afternoon, that with a little concentration one’s whole life could be reconstructed from any single twenty-minute period randomly or almost randomly selected; that is, that there was enough content in that single confined sequence of thoughts and events and the setting that gave rise to them to make connections that would proliferate backward until potentially every item of autobiographical interest — every pet theory, minor observation, significant moment of shame or happiness — could be at least glancingly covered …

This passage sums up his aesthetic in both novels — to narrow down his focus and in the narrowing to see how his vision actually expands to include a whole life. But the passages continues:

… but you had to expect that a version of your past arrived at this way would exhibit … certain telltale differences of emphasis from the past you would recount if you proceeded serially, beginning with “I was born in January 5, 1957,” and letting each moment give birth naturally to the next. The particular cell you started from colored your entire re-creation.

You will not obtain an objective view following Baker’s method, but you wouldn’t obtain an objective view no matter what method you used anyway; any way you choose to look at the world or your life is going to shape the way you see it.

In a later passage Baker takes up this narrowing idea again, not to describe a life but to describe the world. Thinking about the miniscule currents of air moving through the room in which he’s rocking his daughter, he wonders:

If, using some as yet undeveloped high-resolution technique of flow visualization, I filmed the motion of a cubic yard of air … and if I studied that film for four hours a day, during Bug’s [the daughter’s] two naps — just looked at it, leaned into the idea of it with my entire self — at various speeds, and took the videotape from one international congress on turbulence to another, and made men of science look at it so that I could read in their polite expressions some of the particular complexities it offered their more geometrically manipulative minds, would I begin to feel that I could deduce from its veils of infinitesimal insurgence and reversion the objects in the room around which the air had flowed before it entered this domain of record? Would I deduce the shapes of the half-inflated plastic globe and the cheese grater on the rug, the superball in the fireplace, my dusty collection of mechanical coin-sorts on one of the bookshelves — and infer that a man breathing steadily through his nose in a rocking chair rocking at roughly one cycle every two seconds had held a baby also breathing through her nose on the verge of sleep?

And he goes on from there, wondering just how far he could take the information he’d gather from watching air flow through one cubic yard for twenty minutes. I thought that was rather wonderful — everything is connected to everything else, whether it’s through air or through memory, and one object or patch of air or memory will take us to another and another and another until eventually we’ve covered everything.

This book is intellectually interesting and it’s charming too. The narrator tells stories about Patty, his wife, as well as his daughter; he describes not only the air and the peanut butter jars in such great detail, but also his relationship with his family. The feeling that comes from all this is an infectious joy. This is a book about contentment; it’s curious and searching and about happiness and wonder. You can feel it in the long sentences and paragraphs Baker uses; it’s as though he’s trying to squeeze as much experience and as much life into his book as possible, and the sentences threaten to break apart with the energy and effort it takes. But they don’t — instead those Proustian sentences take you every which way, and you are happy to follow wherever they lead.

That said, I do think The Mezzanine is the better book of the two. Room Temperature takes a while to build up the kind of energy I’m describing; it has a beautiful but rather slow beginning, as though Baker needed some time to generate momentum. It does get that momentum, but overall, it’s a quieter book than The Mezzanine. The Mezzanine had so much of the energy I’ve described that it could hardly contain itself and burst out into those footnotes I wrote about a year or so ago. Still, Room Temperature is a beautiful book, and I’m determined to read more Nicholson Baker novels.

I’m reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road right now, and — people read this sort of thing for fun?? I mean, I’m glad I’m reading it, it’s great and all, but I’m more than a little freaked out. I saw the post-apocalyptic movie I am Legend not too long ago, and I’m still recovering from that. I’ll admit I scoot back to bed in a hurry at night, thinking about those horrible zombie monster things. At least that movie didn’t give me nightmares; now we’ll see if this book does.

After this, I’m reading something full of sweetness and light.

From Room Temperature:

But my mother’s informal punctuation in the op-ed letter came as a complete surprise; and the fact that my immediate instinctive response to it was to point out the misplaced commas so harshly that she wept (the only time, as far as I remember, that I ever hurt her feelings — for she understood and was even amused by my teenage request that whenever the two of us walked down the street together, she would please walk at least three yards ahead of me, so that people wouldn’t know we were related; and she even played along in her compliance, whistling, walking with a theatrical solitariness, checking her pocketbook, pausing abruptly to glance at a window display), as if these faulty commas called into question our standing as a family — the fact that I had been instinctively so cruel, made me double up with misery when, after I was married, I came across some sentences in Boswell that were punctuated just as hers had been. Boswell (and De Quincey, Edward Young, and others) had treated the sunken garden of a parenthetical phrase just as my mother had — as something to be prepared for and followed by the transitional rounding and softening of a comma. And such hybrids — of comma and parenthesis, or of semicolon and parenthesis, too — might at least in some cases allow for finer calibrations between phrases, subtler subordinations, irregular varieties of exuberance and magisteriality and fragile conjunction. In our desire for provincial correctness and holy-sounding simplicity and the rapid teachability of intern copy editors we had illegalized all variant forms — and, as with the loss of subvarieties of corn or apples, this homogenization of product was accomplished at a major unforeseen cost: our stiff-jointed prose was less able, so I now huffily thought, full of vengeance against the wrong I had done my mother, to adapt itself to those very novelties of social and technological life whose careful interpretation and weighting was the principal reason for the continued indispensability of the longer sentence.

The longer sentence, indeed. And the longer paragraph, the exuberance, the digressions, the obsession with the comma, the fact that he can write a novel about a man spending twenty minutes with his infant daughter …

So, back to James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. It’s interesting the way people shorten the title into Confessions of a Justified Sinner; I understand not wanting to repeat the whole thing, but chopping off the first four words makes the book sound more religious than it may be — there’s tons of religion in the novel, definitely, but there’s a more secular way of reading it that the “private memoirs” part captures.

But first, I think the introduction-writer made the rather ridiculous claim I wrote about the other day because of the complexity of the book’s structure, i.e. the two narrators and the ways their stories overlap and diverge. But this makes up a big part of the fun of reading the book and doesn’t mean it’s particularly hard to follow.

The story is basically this: Robert Wringhim is raised by his mother and her severely-pious friend (or “friend” — their relationship is ambiguous) to believe that he, according to a Calvinist belief in predestination, has been chosen as one of the elect — he has received salvation and is guaranteed a place in heaven. He is taught that salvation comes not through works but by faith alone. The novel, written in 1824, takes place during the end of the 17C and the early years of the 18C in Scotland, and in the context of religious controversy, which gets played out in Robert’s life through his pious mother and her husband who cares little about religion. Robert’s parentage is uncertain; many believe that his mother’s friend is his real father (and this seems likeliest), although, of course, the friend denies it.

Into this situation comes a strange figure who quickly enmeshes himself deeply into Robert’s life. Exactly who this figure is never gets clarified. He doesn’t want to reveal any information about himself; he only reluctantly tells Robert to call him Gil-Martin, although it seems clear this is not his real name. He prefers to see Robert only when they are alone.

With the entrance of Gil-Martin, the book only gets stranger and stranger; when Robert first sees him, he is astounded because he looks exactly like Robert. He looks exactly like Robert at that particular moment, but his appearance changes. He can look like whoever he wants to at whatever moment he wants to. He also holds strange powers of attraction over Robert:

I felt a sort of invisible power that drew me towards him, something like the force of enchantment; which I could not resist. As we approached each other, our eyes met, and I can never describe the strange sensations that thrilled through my whole frame at that impressive moment.

They soon begin to spend all their time together, devoting hours to deep theological discussions. Gil-Martin appears to hold many of the same beliefs as Robert, but soon he pushes them to extremes that make Robert uneasy; he begins to argue that since Robert is part of the elect and his salvation is assured, he can do whatever he likes with no consequences. He can even commit murder — in fact, he may have a duty to commit murder, according to Gil-Martin, because if humanity is divided into two categories, the saved and the damned, and if they can tell who is who, then why not murder the damned? Why not rid the earth of them and make it a better place?

Robert at some level knows how twisted this logic is, but he is under Gil-Martin’s spell and whenever he is in his presence he loses his ability to think clearly. He is trapped.

Robert doesn’t seem to understand who Gil-Martin is, at least at first, but the reader quickly realizes that he may very well be the devil, tempting Robert to commit horrible deeds. On the other hand, and here is the more secular reading, he may be Robert’s own creation, a product of a diseased, schizophrenic mind. The two figures blend strangely and Robert begins to lose hold of his sense of self:

I generally conceived myself to be two people. When I lay in bed, I deemed there were two of us in it; when I sat up, I always beheld another person, and always in the same position from the place where I sat or stood, which was about three paces off me towards my left side. It mattered not how many or how few were present; this my second self was sure to be present in his place; and this occasioned a confusion in all my words and ideas that utterly astounded my friends … The most perverse part of it was, that I rarely conceived myself to be any of the two persons. I thought for the most part my companion was one of them, and my brother the other; and I found, that to be obliged to speak and answer in the character of another man, was a most awkward business at the long run.

By this point, Robert is a complete wreck, and the reader is on shaky ground — who is who and what is happening and what does it all mean? And then there’s the business of the two narratives. The story is not told in a straight-forward manner; rather, an editor tells what he knows of Robert’s life — his information coming partly from research but largely from tradition and so therefore suspect — and then Robert tells his story, covering some of the same ground the editor already covered and branching off in new directions. So there’s an editor who claims to be reliable but probably isn’t entirely, and there’s Robert who clearly is not reliable but who has most of the information we want, if only we could believe him.

To add to the fun, Hogg includes a page of Robert’s handwriting in the front of the text; it’s a page supposedly from Robert’s confessions. Hogg had a friend imitate handwriting from Robert’s time period to give the book a greater air of authenticity. Detracting somewhat from this sense of authenticity, however, is an appearance in the novel by James Hogg himself and by a servant of Sir Walter Scott’s. It seems that Hogg is having a little postmodern fun with his readers, blurring the boundaries between fiction and real life, refusing to offer any solid answers, drawing attention to the unreliability of history and the artificial nature of any text.

The more I write, the more complex the book seems. I still do not agree with David Groves when he says that “no one will understand very much about Hogg’s Confessions on first reading,” but I do believe that the more you think about this book, the murkier it gets. Perhaps the true situation is that the reader understands the book best on a first reading, but subsequent readings only undermine that confidence.

I have finished James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: Written by Himself, with a detail of curious traditionary facts, and other evidence, by the editor. I love long titles! I couldn’t resist including the whole thing here. I won’t review the book tonight, but I did want to say a couple things. I loved it; it’s crazy and fascinating and weird. The long version of the title hints at its complexity: it’s got two narrators, and is a good example of the perspective-shifting technique Charlotte recently wrote about. It begins with an editor’s version of events, and then turns to the “confessions” of the justified sinner himself, and then closes with the editor again. They retell many of the same events, so part of the fun of the book is comparing their two versions.

Yes, the book is strange and weird, but I’m not sure that justifies this sentence from David Groves, the guy who wrote the introduction to my edition:

No one will understand very much about Hogg’s Confessions on first reading.

Am I wrong, or is that not the best thing to say in an introduction? It seems to me an introduction should get the reader excited about reading the book, not turn the reader off. And it’s not true. I’m sure I’d understand much more on a re-reading, but, still, I got an awful lot on the first go-round.

Okay, more on the novel soon …

I thought I might fall in love with this book, and it turns out I didn’t, but I don’t want to hold that against it. It is a very good novel; I’m glad I read it, and I’d like to read more Bowen. There’s something cold about the book, though, that made me admire more than love it. Its subject matter is rather depressing, and although I generally like depressing books, this one … well, it left me sad and didn’t dazzle me in a way that would make me feel better. But, really, I do admire it, and I believe I don’t need to fall in love with a book to recognize that it’s quite good.

It’s a story of lost innocence; Portia, a 16-year-old girl who is newly-orphaned comes to live with her much older half-brother Thomas and his wife Anna, and while she is there she learns some harsh lessons about the world. Her new family doesn’t really want here there; they took her in because it was Portia’s dying father’s request and because it seemed like the right thing to do. But Anna particularly resents having Portia in her home — the opening scene reveals that Anna has secretly read Portia’s diary and found that Portia has written some unflattering things about her and her friends. It’s as though Anna feels like she is competing with Portia; we learn that Anna had a love affair when she was much younger that ended disappointingly and it’s implied that Anna has never really recovered — now she sees Portia with her youth and beauty and attractiveness and resents the life she has ahead of her.

Portia meets a young friend of Anna’s named Eddie and the plot gets more complicated from there. The two quickly begin a relationship, but this relationship means something quite different for each of them. Portia in all her innocence believes she has fallen in love, but it’s clear that Eddie is merely interested in having some fun.

Poor Portia. She doesn’t fit in anywhere, and she clings to Eddie as the one she feels she can trust the most. She attends what sounds like a dreadful school and makes one friend there, but this friend doesn’t really satisfy, and she only gets in trouble while trying to make it through the school day. In the book’s second section, Anna and Thomas head off to France and leave Portia behind at the house of Anna’s old governess. Here, too, Portia feels like an outsider, and when she invites Eddie to visit her there, events head in a direction she never anticipated.

It’s Portia’s innocence that causes so much trouble, or, rather, it’s the world around her that causes the trouble, not knowing what to do with her innocence. Portia isn’t trained to deal with proper London society or with boys who make rash promises or with the isolation she endures. Anna and Thomas live dull, sterile lives; they have carefully cordoned themselves off from any real interaction with other people or even with each other:

Callers were unheard of at Windsor Terrace. They had been eliminated; they simply did not occur. The Quaynes’ [Thomas and Anna’s] home life was as much their private life as though their marriage had been illicit. Their privacy was surrounded by an electric fence — friends who did not first telephone did not come.

In this atmosphere Portia dries up; it’s no wonder she turns to other people, even harmful people, to try to find some liveliness and love.

Bowen is very much interested in psychological states. The back cover describes her style as Jamesian, and I think that claim holds true; Bowen describes her characters’ inner lives in depth, capturing the ebb and flow of their feelings and responses. It’s a thoughtful book, one that moves slowly — although not in a way that might bore — and tells its story with pleasing thoroughness. If you like books with emotional and psychological insight — ones that capture the complexity of character, then you may like this book.

On another note entirely, I began James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner last night and am enjoying it so far — the first 20 pages at least. I may begin another novel soon — The Road, most likely. I am also enjoying Mavis Gallant’s Paris Stories. So it looks like my indecisive period may be over — which is a relief.

Cross-posted here.