Monthly Archives: June 2008

Edith Wharton’s novel The Glimpses of the Moon was an immensely satisfying read; it’s a good story that moves along at just the right pace, and it offers much to think about: it deals with love and marriage, money and society, ambition, work, children, novel-writing, travel, class, isolation, loneliness, and probably more things that I’m not thinking about now.  I don’t think the book is quite on par with The Age of Innocence or The House of Mirth, maybe because it is more narrow in focus than the other two and perhaps because I’m biased towards books with a tragic rather than a comic structure.  But still, I felt a depth and heft to this book that I too often feel is missing in more contemporary fiction.

The novel tells the story of Susy Branch and Nick Lansing, both of whom have no money but have found ways of living comfortably in high society — they have been sponging off of friends in order to support the lifestyles to which they have been accustomed.  When they meet and hit it off, they decide to marry and live as long as they can off the wedding presents they receive and the offers of houses to visit that come from their rich friends.  The novel opens with the couple beginning their honeymoon at a friend’s villa on Lake Como.  The catch, though, is that they have agreed to end the marriage if one or the other finds someone rich who will marry them.  Their marriage is opportunistic through and through, although they are, without a doubt, quite fond of each other.

With this precarious situation at the novel’s opening, things are bound to unravel, and unravel they do.  First of all, Nick and Susy discover that their intense focus on money is bound to warp their relationship.  It turns out they have different ideas about what manipulation and deception, what “management” — an important term in the novel — is acceptable when it comes to securing money or a house to live in.  They quarrel about whether Susy should take a box of cigars left by their friend, and this quarrel causes a rift that won’t soon heal and that hints at the even greater struggles the two of them will soon face.

This conflict is interesting because of the way it’s gendered; as a woman Susy is more vulnerable than Nick is and therefore needs a moral code that is more flexible to maintain her position.  Nick has the luxury of being a little more discriminating.  Wharton describes this conflict in satisfying detail, especially the way Susy regrets that she has disappointed Nick and longs to attain a higher moral standard, but at the same time fully understands the reasons for her behavior and is able to forgive herself.

From here things fall apart further; friends and their friends’ children intrude into their honeymoon bliss, jealousies flare, misunderstandings arise.  Nick and Susy have much to learn, both about themselves and about the world they live in.  They eventually are faced with the demoralizing realization that the world they worked so hard to maintain their place in is ultimately frivolous and shallow.  Their friends lead silly, pointless lives and are intensely selfish.  They only care about Nick and Susy to the extent that they have something to gain from them.

In contrast to their wealthy but frivolous friends are the Fulmers, a family of struggling artists and many children who lead honest lives but have no money.  Susy and Nick are horrified by these people, by their obliviousness to fashion and their unsophisticated happiness.  But they are innocent and relatively unspoiled by the idleness and silliness of the other characters (at least at first).  Eventually Susy and Nick will learn something from these people; their changing attitude towards the Fulmers will mark changes within themselves.

The novel’s structure is satisfying too (although perhaps a trifle too neat?  I enjoy this kind of neatness though).  I’m going to be discussing plot events from later in the novel, so take care — after Nick and Susy split they each find another love interest and another family to take care of them, and each of them have lessons to learn about themselves and about each other.  Only after they have learned these lessons apart from one another are they able to find a way to come together again.  I found the ending plot twists exciting, although a tad unrealistic, but I was willing to get over this for the sake of the pleasure the ending brought.

Overall, what a satisfying book this is!  Check out the Slaves of Golconda site for other posts and discussion.

Charlotte Jay’s novel Beat Not the Bones manages an unusual feat: it is interesting and boring at the same time.  It has a lot of ideas, a lot of good things to discuss, but the experience of reading it was dull.  Surely you’ve had that experience before?  I kept wondering why I wasn’t enjoying myself more; I felt I should have enjoyed it, but I found it too easy to put the book down.

I was relieved to read that Emily found it boring too, and to hear that many of the members of my mystery book group agreed (Hobgoblin’s take on the novel is here).  One member wondered if he was reading it under poor circumstances, which might explain why he found it hard to get through, but when others said that they had a similar experience, it seemed clear that it’s a fault of the book and not of the reader.

The book is marketed as a mystery and it won the Edgar Allan Poe award in 1954, but it felt to me like it could just as easily be considered literary fiction as mystery.  There is a mysterious death that gets explained by the novel’s end, but the heart of the novel is really in the changes that take place in the main character, Stella, and there is no way for the reader to figure out how the plot will resolve itself — there are no clues to follow and there is no detective.  I wondered if I would feel differently about the book if I approached it as literary fiction rather than as mystery — when I pick up a mystery, I expect a fast-moving plot at least, but with other kinds of fiction I’m more tolerant of slowness.

The story is about the death of Stella’s husband which took place in the colonial outpost of Marapai in New Guinea.  Stella, who had been living apart from her husband in the time leading up to his death, travels to Marapai to discover what happened to him.  People have told her that he committed suicide, but she believes he was murdered.  In the novel’s opening chapters we are introduced to a potential suspect, Alfred Jobe, who has discovered gold in the jungle village of Eola.  Stella’s husband has blocked his claim to the gold, providing him with a motive for murder.  Stella’s quest is initially to find Jobe, but she soon learns that the situation is much more complicated than she originally thought.

The novel’s colonial context is one of the most interesting things about it; there is the inevitable tension between the white colonialists and the Papuans, and it quickly becomes apparent that most if not all of the colonialists are incapable of seeing the Papuans as human beings.  Racial inequality is a given; the colonialists are there to bring “civilization” to the natives and the natives are there to gratefully accept it — and to work as servants.  The atmosphere is even darker than this description implies, however, as the whites have largely stopped believing in their “mission” and are focused on survival and perhaps on making some money.

All this raises the question of Jay’s own take on the colonial situation and on race relations.  I couldn’t help but feel that the book is meant as a critique of racism and colonialism and that the bleakness of the situation is a reflection on what inevitably happens when one group of people tries to control another.  As the novel progressed, I was overwhelmed by the ugliness of it all, the horror of what the colonizers were willing to do to maintain their position and to protect themselves from any culpability, and I think Jay meant the reader to feel that way.

On the other hand, I’ve been struggling to figure out exactly what to make of Jay’s portrayal of the Papuans.  The book is a little like Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil (many thanks to Becky for pointing out this comparison) in the sense that both novels use a colonial setting as the backdrop to the tell the story of a woman’s growth and self-realization, and I can’t help but wonder whether the plight of the natives gets a little lost.  Is this another example of a colonial setting functioning mainly as the spur to change in the colonizers?

And yet while Jay largely keeps her focus on the white characters and their struggles and challenges, she does offer a complex and powerful Papuan character in Hitolo, and in a way it makes sense for her to focus on the colonizers rather than to try to get into the minds of the Papuans, which might feel presumptuous and arrogant.  And what I think ultimately matters is the sense a reader almost inevitably leaves the novel with that the colonial project is hopelessly corrupt and doomed.  The ugliness of it pervades every page.

So with all this interesting stuff going on, I’m sad that the novel wasn’t a more absorbing read.  Part of the problem was that the characters weren’t developed enough to be believable — they tended to do strange and unexpected things, and I never found a way to fit all the pieces of each character together.  The pace was too slow as well, and it had abrupt and uncomfortable transitions that unfortunately invite a reader to set the book aside.

I am interested, though, in the combination of mystery novel and colonial setting.  Can you think of other books that do something similar?  Hobgoblin mentioned The Moonstone as a possibility.  Any others?

The Loving Couple is written by Virginia Rowans, who is really Patrick Dennis, the guy who wrote Auntie Mame. The authorial gender switching makes the book that much more interesting because it is split in half, one part from the perspective of a woman and the other from that of a man — in fact, the two parts each have their own cover complete with a title page and publishing information so you can’t tell which part you are supposed to begin with. You just pick one side, read to the middle, flip the book over and start with the other.

I started with the woman’s story, and as I was reading I found it jarring when I remembered that a man wrote it. I felt as though it were written by a woman. But then when I got to the man’s story, I found it hard to believe that the same person had written the woman’s version I’d just finished. It felt like two different people wrote the book. This is pretty impressive, I think.

The novel covers one bad day in the life of a marriage — it begins with a horrific fight and a breakup, and then follows the man and the woman as they have one of the worst days ever. They meet awful people, get caught up in awful parties, get tracked down by angry family members, feel trapped, get betrayed, learn things about other people, and learn things about themselves. The structure is interesting as the characters go through parallel events; for example, each character meets someone who tempts them into a possible affair, and they have to decide how they will respond.

The parallel narratives cover the same day, but for the most part they don’t cover the same exact events, so we don’t get the psychologically-interesting technique of having each character’s perspective on the same conversation or event. Instead what we get is a more exterior view, a satirical look at what happens to two people as they try to recover from their vicious fight by running away to fascinating new people and places.

The book is light and entertaining, as it was meant to be, and yet it offers a contemporary reader a lot to think about, as it is very much a book of its time, 1956, in terms of the way it portrays social issues. My God, is this a snobby book. Rowans has all kinds of fun lampooning the awful suburban culture the characters have moved into — the elite development somewhere on the Hudson that cross-examines potential members to make sure they are the right sort, although the right sort can be pretty horrid, as we learn when we meet the neighbors. Opposed to this stuffy suburban life is the wild city where you can meet bohemians and artists deep in the heart of Greenwich Village. Part of the plot is the characters’ need to figure out just where they belong — who are their real friends and where is their real home?

The city/suburb conflict is amusing, but the pervasive sexism and racism is not. I’m not sure how much of this Rowans is satirizing or how much is simply a reflection of the way people, including the author, thought at the time, but it’s hard to read casual comments about, for example, how one family was excluded from membership in the development because of a Jewish ancestor and to see that the only African-Americans are servants and are very stereotypically portrayed.

It’s a good reminder of all that has changed in the last fifty years, which isn’t that long, really. As I read I went back and forth between enjoying myself and wincing at some new dismissal of women or some other detail offensive to modern readers. It’s not as though in 2008 we’re so terribly enlightened, but a book like this can show that we’ve made some progress at least.

So all in all it’s an interesting read, and for a number of different reasons. I’m glad I picked it up.

Tomorrow I am leaving to go visit Emily in Pennsylvania; in addition to the pleasure of seeing Emily herself, I have something else to look forward to: she has promised to leave a stack of books on my nightstand for me to look through and perhaps borrow.  I’m very curious to see what she chooses.  I’ll be back on Monday.

For now I want to write a bit about my Anne of Green Gables rereading.  As much as I admire Kate’s plan to read the book slowly, I can’t follow suit; if I hadn’t had a busy couple of days and if I weren’t reading a few other books I would have finished the novel already.  I don’t think I’m capable of showing any discipline when it comes to that book; I can’t resist reading just one more chapter.

I’ve been trying to figure out what the source of Anne’s appeal is for me.  I’m not at all like her.  I don’t talk much, I have little imagination (at least of the sort Anne has), I’m not artistic, and I am not, as the narrator describes Anne, “feminine to the core.”  But of course I don’t have to be like a character to feel drawn toward her.  I suspect I’m much more like Diana Barry, who is different from Anne in a lot of ways too.  Diana doesn’t have Anne’s imagination or talent for coming up with ideas (or for getting into trouble), but she is willing to go along with whatever Anne proposes and is ardently devoted to her.  I could see myself happily being Anne’s sidekick.  As I read along I find myself wondering if Anne would consider me a kindred spirit if I met her in real life, and I can’t help but hope she would.  Perhaps that’s part of her appeal too — the reader can’t help but want to be a part of her inner circle, one of the chosen, one of those people who really gets her.

I’ve also been thinking about religion in the novel, something I’m pretty sure I didn’t pay much attention to as a kid, although perhaps I absorbed some important lessons without being aware of it.  I’m struck by Anne’s irreverence and her determination to stick to her own view of God and of people, no matter how much Marilla rebukes her.  This comes up, of course, in Anne’s doubtfulness about the value of prayer when Marilla first asks her to say her prayers at night (“Mrs. Thomas told me that God made my hair red on purpose, and I’ve never cared about him since”), and in her response to the minister’s prayers in church (“He was talking to God and he didn’t seem to be very much interested in it, either.  I think he thought God was too far off to make it worth while”).

It’s not that Anne doesn’t believe in God, exactly, but that God seems kind of beside the point in her life.  As Marilla describes her, she is a “freckled witch of a girl who knew and cared nothing about God’s love, since she had never had it translated to her through the medium of human love.”  She also seems to value her own perceptions of the world most of all, and she will admit to the existence and importance of God only to the extent that this makes sense to her. I don’t get the sense that Anne would ever subordinate her own instincts about life in order to conform to traditional piety in the name of religious faith.  She trusts herself too much to do this.  I find this attitude appealing; it’s a confidence I myself have developed only very slowly and mostly as an adult, but I wonder if I didn’t learn a little bit of it from Anne.

I also am struck by one particular way Anne talks about imagination; in the Aunt Josephine episode, the one where Anne and Diana incur her wrath by jumping into her bed in the middle of the night, she says this:

Have you any imagination, Miss Barry?  If you have, just put yourself in our place.  We didn’t know there was anybody in that bed and you nearly scared us to death.  It was simply awful the way we felt.  And then we couldn’t sleep in the spare room after being promised.  I suppose you are used to sleeping in spare rooms.  But just imagine what you would feel like if you were a little orphan girl who never had such an honor.

Anne is asking Josephine Barry to empathize with her and to do so through an act of imagination.  Here is one aspect of Anne’s imagination I care a lot about and hope to share — to be able to understand people, to put myself in their place, by thinking creatively and thereby, maybe, to refrain from judging them or from getting angry at them.  There is an ethical aspect to imagination, and I admire Anne for drawing on it here.

Catherine O’Flynn’s novel What Was Lost (my copy sent to me by the publisher) is a good read, not perfect, but absorbing; it’s a mystery, sort of, not a traditional one with a detective who solves the crime, but a mystery nonetheless — it tells the story of a young girl who one day disappears and of the people left behind who after 19 years discover what happened.

The novel begins with a 70-page section on that young girl, Kate Meaney, an orphan living with her grandmother.  Actually when I said the novel doesn’t have a detective, that’s not quite true; this novel’s detective is the one who disappears, Kate herself.  Armed with her book How to Be a Detective, she sets up her own detecting business, although so far it’s had only one customer, her friend Adrian, a young man who works at a nearby shop.  This section of the novel is utterly charming, and that’s because Kate is such a great character — smart, lively, full of ideas, serious and unselfconscious in that way only children can be.  Kate has lost much — she doesn’t remember her mother who left when she was very young, and she found her father’s body after he died from a stroke — but she seems to have found ways of coping, her detecting work perhaps chief among them, with its focus on putting the world to rights.

The next section, which makes up the bulk of the book, shifts 19 years into the future, and here I felt some dissatisfaction, as I didn’t want to leave Kate’s company, and I thought the pace slowed and dragged in some moments.  Kate had done most of her detecting work in the Green Oaks Mall, and in the second section the scene settles here permanently, introducing us to a number of new characters, most importantly Lisa, Adrian’s sister who knew Kate slightly and who works in a music store, and Kurt, a mall security guard.  Both of these characters, who don’t know each other at the section’s beginning, although they eventually meet, are unhappy in their jobs and with their lives, but they haven’t yet found any way of changing their situations.  The novel spends a good deal of time introducing us to their families and their lives.

The two sections intersect when Kurt notices a mysterious young girl on the security camera; his efforts to track this girl down lead him toward Lisa and toward solving the mystery of what happened to Kate.

The book is about lost people — not only is Kate lost, but her friend Adrian also disappears when he is accused of complicity in Kate’s disappearance — but it’s also about lost communities and lost dreams.  The Green Oaks Mall becomes the concrete symbol of these more nebulous losses; after its construction the city center disappears, its shops forced to close because of the mall’s power to lure their customers away.  The mall was built over an abandoned industrial site and so in its very being tells the story of the loss of solid manufacturing jobs and their replacement by service positions.  Kurt’s father was laid off by one of the now-abandoned factories, and he refuses to shop at the mall or to allow his family to shop there, the symbol of their lost economic security.

O’Flynn is particularly good at describing the horrors of the mall (and I’m particularly open to hearing about how horrible they are, as there are few places I hate more than a mall); an institution that bleeds the life out of its employees, who work low-wage jobs with abusive bosses and equally abusive, sometimes insane, customers.  The mall seems to bleed the life out of the customers as well, who often appear as zombie-like creatures, wandering around buying things because they have nothing better to do.  It’s a nightmarish place, symbolizing a society that has lost its way and perhaps lost its soul.

This is not an entirely sad book, as its ending does have glimmers of hope and promise, and the mystery does get solved, but the novel does such a good job of showing loss on many levels that I closed it feeling sad for the people and the world it describes.  The novel’s structure and pacing left me a little dissatisfied, but there are lots of other things to admire in the novel, and if the subject matter sounds interesting to you, I would recommend it.