Monthly Archives: May 2009

Well, as much as I enjoyed the last two Somerset Maugham novels I read — Of Human Bondage and The Painted Veil — my latest one, The Razor’s Edge, just didn’t work for me. I started out surprised and intrigued by it, ready to like whatever it was Maugham was trying to do, but as the book went on, I enjoyed it less and less. It suffered from two major flaws that I couldn’t get past — the pieces of it never came together into a coherent whole, and I came to like the narrator less and less. Unfortunately, the narrator claimed to be Maugham himself, which means that I’m left with some unpleasant feelings directed at Maugham, which should rightly be directed at the narrator. I’m trying to keep the two separate in my head, but it’s difficult.

There are a lot of interesting elements to the book (and in the comments on a previous post, a number of readers said they really liked it, so perhaps you might take their word for it!). There’s Maugham as the narrator; I haven’t looked up information on Maugham’s life to see if it matches the narrator’s life, but the narrator refers to novels he’s written, which are Maugham’s, and he generally seems to be writer-like and Maugham-like. I liked his method of drawing attention to himself in ways you’re more likely to see in eighteenth-century novels, for example, saying that he’s going to give the reader a break by starting a new chapter in the middle of a long scene. He also frequently refers to the decisions he’s making as a story-teller, such as when to embellish a bit and when to stick to his memories closely. I like this kind of self-reflexivity and openness about narrative and found the whole idea of the author writing himself into the story intriguing.

There are also various characters and narrative threads I enjoyed. The story takes place during the 1920s and 30s and has a lot to say about America’s place in the world, specifically about the American national character (full of seemingly endless energy and possibility) and its relationship to Europe. One of the main characters, Larry, is an American who fought in World War I and saw some brutal things that left him psychologically damaged. Or, perhaps it’s possible to say that the violence he saw opened his eyes to what really matters in life and left him completely uninterested in material values and social snobbery. He starts off the novel rather mysteriously refusing to take a plum job that’s been handed to him and slowly, as the novel goes on, starts on a spiritual quest that takes him to unexpected places.

There is also Isabel, the woman Larry plans to marry, although soon enough this relationship fails, as the values Isabel and Larry hold are incompatible. Isabel and her family come to stand for conventional values, as Isabel had the chance for a different life with Larry, but rejected it for a much more socially-acceptable marriage. It’s Isabel’s uncle Elliot, though, who is Maugham’s masterpiece in the novel. Elliot is pure, 100% snob, so calculating and ruthless that the narrator has to keep reminding us that he’s really a very nice man — just a nice man who is determined to climb the social ladder at whatever cost. Elliot has never met a titled person he didn’t like or a person of questionable origin he couldn’t snub in the most effective manner possible.

Between Isabel and Elliot on the one hand, and Larry on the other, Maugham gets to critique the social system in two ways — by satirizing Elliot’s snobbishness and Isabel’s conventionality and by admiringly narrating Larry’s rejection of their values.

All this should be a lot of fun, or, when it comes to Larry’s story, it should be moving and inspiring, but I didn’t think it was. One problem is that the pace of the narrative drags too much. Maugham really takes his time, and even I, generally a very patient reader, got antsy. The various stories seem too loosely linked as well; what holds all the characters together is the fact that they all know the narrator, who wanders in and out of their lives now and then. Maugham’s theme of materialism vs. spirituality also links the various stories, but this doesn’t feel like enough either.

Another problem is that I found the narrator less and less likeable as the novel went on. To clarify, I don’t actually expect to like every narrator I encounter and am fully prepared to enjoy an irritating, unreliable narrator, but I don’t think that’s what Maugham was offering. My dislike stems partly from the fact that I never found out much about him and yet had to spend a lot of time with him and his consciousness, and so eventually got bored. I also thought his attitude toward women was questionable. He has an irritating habit of drawing what I thought was undue attention to their physical flaws, would occasionally come out with a judgment based on stereotypes, and was dismissive of women generally. If I thought this unpleasantness added up to something, I wouldn’t mind it, but I didn’t think it did.

I’m certain I’ll read more Maugham at some point; The Razor’s Edge didn’t work for me, but I liked his other books enough to go back again.

The Odd Women is the first George Gissing novel I’ve read, and I’m now ready to learn more about him and read more of his work. What an interesting book this turned out to be! I wrote a post on the book when I was a third of the way through it, and everything I wrote there about how much I was enjoying it stayed true until the end.

It’s a good story with interesting characters, but for me the best parts were the debates the characters had about what women’s liberation means and how people should go about trying to advance it. What I liked best is that Gissing acknowledges how complicated the “woman question” is all the way through and never descends into preachiness or over-simplification. Two of the main characters, Mary and Rhoda, have long conversations about what approach feminists should take toward marriage: should they encourage young women to stay single because marriage is so often oppressive? Or should they acknowledge that women are going to want to marry anyway and instead focus on making sure they have some education and training so they can support themselves if need be? Should they reject marriage in favor of long-term relationships that don’t have the sanction of church and state?

The book gives a range of types of women with different life experiences, to illustrate some of the most common trajectories for women of the time. There are Mary and Rhoda who, even though they disagree now and then, are united in their revolutionary zeal and who devote their lives to improving women’s lot. There is Monica, who has the chance to receive the benefits of Mary and Rhoda’s education, but who rejects them in favor of marriage with a man she doesn’t love but who offers her a comfortable life. And then there are Virginia and Alice, Monica’s sisters, who never had the opportunity to marry, and when their father dies, find themselves on their own with no way to support themselves. The only skills they have are caring for children, so they take jobs as governesses and companions. They are lucky to find work at all, as there are many, many women in exactly their situation who desperately need work too, but the jobs are awful — ill-paid (if paid at all; sometimes they worked just for room and board) and with families who mistreat them. The other option is to work in a factory or a shop, another miserable life in exploitive conditions. This is what Monica does until the opportunity for marriage saves her — or so she thinks.

The forthright and complex treatment of feminism interested me and I was very much a sympathetic reader, but I found myself reading critically — meaning negatively — as well. For one thing, Gissing has some odd class issues. One bizarre conversation sticks in my mind, where two characters with whom I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to sympathize agree that many women need to be beaten now and then. The idea behind this is that those women of the lower classes who are foolish and uneducated and can’t control themselves need husbands to keep them in line. Their ideal of womanhood — and I think Gissing’s too — is seldom found in real life. Rhoda, in particular, looks down on the vast majority of women, those who can’t or don’t want to live up to her very strict standards of womanly behavior. Because of this, she is capable of harming the very people she claims to want to help. But Rhoda’s extreme views are balanced by Mary’s greater compassion and understanding, and these two characters together show just how difficult it was for women to figure out how to improve their lot in a world so thoroughly dominated by men.

There’s a lot to think about in this book. It’s not a perfect novel by any means, but it is a great way to get a glimpse of what life was like for women at the time and to think through just what it takes to launch a social revolution.

My mystery book group met again last Friday to discuss P.D. James’s first Dalgliesh novel Cover Her Face. The meetings are always good, but this time was extra special, as Emily made a surprise visit. And we had a fun novel to discuss. I’ve enjoyed James’s Dalgliesh series before, having read or listened to three other of the novels in the series, and I was glad to go back to the beginning.

As far as there ever is a consensus at these meetings, it was that Cover Her Face is a good first effort, well-written, if a little sketchy in the plotting. My feeling was that while I enjoyed it, it didn’t blow me away — as, truthfully, the other James novels didn’t either, but I don’t always need to be blown away. Sometimes it’s just fine to read a competent but not brilliant book.

I was a little surprised to find out how little the book says about her detective Dalgliesh. The later books aren’t terribly forthcoming either, but here there were maybe two or three facts about the character that James offers, the most important being that his wife and first child died a few years earlier. The other fact I remember is that he likes plain English food. Otherwise, all we know about him we have to infer from his words and actions. This does tell us some important things, though — chiefly, that he’s supremely competent, professional, and dispassionate. Interestingly, the book contains no hint of his future career as a poet. Here, he’s all about work and little else. We get hints that he knows something about art and culture, but they are only hints.

The group couldn’t decide whether James was most likely setting up a series here or whether the idea for the series came later, but all this makes me think the idea came later. Most first mysteries in a series do a lot more to set the character up, at least in my limited mystery reading.

As far as the plot goes, it’s standard mystery fare — it takes place on a family estate in a small town in the English countryside; there is a small group of suspects, each with a plausible motive; much of the book is taken up with transcripts of suspect interviews; and it closes with a drawning-room scene where everything is revealed. Not surprisingly for this sort of setting, class issues are a major factor in the plot. The victim is a housemaid, Sally, who had a child out of wedlock, and has become a kind of charity case; she works for the Maxie family who feel that they have taken a risk by hiring her, and the novel opens with everyone on edge, hoping it will work out. But when Sally appears in the same dress as the Maxie daughter, they know that something is wrong, and when she announces her engagement to the Maxie son, their lives are thrown into disorder. The mystery is as much about Sally herself as it is about who killed her — questions about her motivations and her strange behavior drive the plot as much as the murder does.

I’d like to read more Dalgliesh books, because they are enjoyable, but even more so because I’m curious how the series develops. I think it’s an interesting exercise to see how a writer develops over the course of multiple books with the same character, and James has been writing Dalgliesh books for decades (Cover Her Face came out in 1962), so she’d make an interesting study. And I’m interested in seeing how Dalgliesh develops as well. But I didn’t love this book so much that I’m going to rush out and find the rest of them right away. James is somebody to pick up when I’m in the mood for writing that’s predictably, reliably competent, somebody who may not surprise but who probably won’t disappoint either.

I’m about a third of the way through George Gissing’s 1893 novel The Odd Women and am enjoying it immensely. I had little idea of what to expect, except what the title might indicate, and the title could mean a whole range of things. But the “odd” of the title turns out to mean “not even,” as in not part of a couple, or in other words, the problem of the many, many women who have no means of support because they haven’t been trained to support themselves and don’t have a husband or father or some other male to take care of them. There are five women at the novel’s center, three of them sisters who unexpectedly lose their father, who was always intending to save money but never did. These three are left to fend for themselves, without any inkling of how to do this.

The other two women are similarly on their own, but are lucky to have enough money to live independently. They make use of their comfortable position to devote all their time to helping women such as the three sisters get the training they need to find jobs or start businesses for themselves. They also have long conversations about whether women should get married or should refuse marriage in favor of complete independence, and are generally at the forefront of the feminist movement of the time.

There are some odd issues with class in the novel, but so far I’m impressed at how forward-thinking and sympathetic Gissing is about “the woman problem.” I love how open, relatively speaking, the book is about sexuality and marriage and gender dynamics, and also about money and work. I’m also pleased that I’m reading this book right after finishing a Barbara Pym novel, since Pym also writes about a version of “the woman problem,” in her case, about the uncertain social role of single and married women after World War II.

As for other books I’m reading, I finally finished The Recognitions! I’m very pleased about this. I feel as though I should write a wrap-up post about the book, and I may do it at some point, but the truth is, I don’t really feel up to it. I’d feel as though I needed to write something smart about it, and I don’t have the energy to try to sound smart right now. At any rate, I’m glad I read the book, and I’m also glad it’s over.

So for now I’m sticking to two books, the Gissing novel, and the complete Montaigne, which I recently picked back up again after ignoring it for a month or two. I’m contemplating starting another nonfiction book, but I’m wary of taking on what might come to feel like too much. I’ve been so busy, and although my schedule is easing up a bit, I’ll still be busy for a while, and I’d prefer to have fewer books on the go, so I can focus what reading time I have a bit better.

But, I may feel tempted … I’ve considered picking up Ann Fadiman’s At Large and At Small, or perhaps one of the several science books I own, or maybe a Richard Holmes biography. We’ll see.

Barbara Pym’s novel An Academic Question turned out to be an interesting read for unexpected reasons. I didn’t realize this when I first picked up the book, but it’s an unfinished novel, written and abandoned in the early 1970s, that editor Hazel Holt pieced together and published in 1986. It’s not unfinished in the sense that it doesn’t have an ending; rather, Pym never finished revising it to her satisfaction. Holt writes that Pym’s first draft was written in the first person, and she was in the process of changing it into the third person but was unhappy with the results. Here’s how Holt describes her editing process:

In preparing this novel for publication I have amalgamated these two drafts, also making use of some notes that she made and consulting the original handwritten version, trying to ‘smooth’ them (to use Barbara’s word) into a coherent whole.

This is all we know about how this particular version of the novel came into existence; there are no further notes about what changes Holt made or what sections came from which draft. The novel Holt published keeps the first person voice.

I enjoyed reading the book, but I think ultimately it’s best for committed Pym fans, not for someone who is just getting to know her work, because it’s clear it’s a rough draft. There are sections that feel rushed and unpolished, with some abrupt transitions and scenes and characters that seem to come out of nowhere.

But the themes the book explores are interesting and are similar to those of Excellent Women, the other Pym novel I’ve read. The story is about a “graduate wife,” a term which makes me think of a graduate student wife, but refers — I think — to a woman with a college degree who isn’t making use of it because she’s married. The heroine, Helen, has a child but isn’t particularly interested in her and would kind of like to do something more with herself and her education, but at the same time, she isn’t terribly ambitious. She’s adrift, considering taking a part-time job like many other wives she knows, but she’s less than thrilled with the available possibilities. She could help her university professor husband with his research, maybe do some typing, but her husband does his own typing and never seems to want assistance.

She ends up getting involved in her husband’s research anyway, though, in an entirely unexpected manner — while visiting an elderly man in a nursing home, she comes across a stash of papers that would help her husband publish the article that could make his career. How she obtains these papers, what she and her husband do with them, and the intrigues they lead the characters into form the basis of the plot.

What makes the book interesting, though, is the world it describes — the academic world generally and women’s place within it. And — no surprise — it’s very much a man’s world. There are female professors, but their personal lives are complicated and most people have trouble seeing them as fully feminine. Faculty wives spend their time doing their husband’s typing, doing good deeds such as Helen’s visits to the elderly, and working part-time in genteel and not too demanding jobs, such as doing filing in the library.

Nobody seems interested in challenging this status quo, including Helen herself, who feels a vague unhappiness with her life but isn’t ready to do anything about it. She’s no rebellious spirit, and she’s not the type to think methodically and analytically about what she’s experiencing. But while Helen offers no direct critique of this stultifying world, Pym illustrates the consequences indirectly, in Helen’s uneasiness and dissatisfaction with her life and her marriage. Although there’s a whole series of funny scenes and a collection of comic characters, the mood of the book is darker than that; there’s an atmosphere of hopelessness and ennui that never fully dispells. Conflicts may find resolution and relationships may heal, but life is never exciting and nothing really new happens.

I’ve only read two Pym novels so far, one of which is definitely not her best work, but these two books strike me as similar in theme and mood. I’ve got more Pym books on my shelves (No Fond Return of Love and Jane and Prudence), and I’m curious to see if this pattern continues.