Monthly Archives: June 2009

What an odd and wonderful book Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature is. I enjoyed it very much, although I have some caveats to make, and I wouldn’t recommend this book unless you have read the books Nabokov discusses or you plan to read them alongside the lectures. He goes much too in-depth about his chosen books for it to be at all enjoyable if you’re not familiar with them.

What makes this book odd and unusual is the fact that it is a transcript of lectures Nabokov gave while at Cornell, so they are written with a classroom performance in mind and not necessarily meant for general readers. The course was called “Masters of European Fiction,” and covers Mansfield Park, Bleak House, Madame Bovary, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Swann’s Way, The Metamorphosis, and Ulysses. The book’s editor makes it clear that he had to do a lot of editing, as the text is based on written-out lectures that weren’t always complete and where the organization wasn’t always clear. But the text we ended up with is very readable and clear, and it includes lots of pictures of Nabokov’s notes and marked-up copies of novels.

Nabokov makes a very strong argument for looking at the novels themselves and not paying any attention to biographical, historical, or cultural context. He believes in close reading and nothing but close reading. He wants readers to focus on the novel’s details, noticing patterns and making connections and focusing on how those details are structured. Here is what he says about how people should read:

We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know.

“Great novels are great fairy tales,” he argues, and should be treated as independent worlds, following their own rules, and existing without any connection to the world we live in.

I think I may post more on this book later, as there are so, so many interesting passages to quote and discuss, but for now I’ll say that I find his argument intriguing but limited. I love reading novels closely and focusing on structure and doing all the things he thinks readers should do, but I also love to think about biographical, social, and historical context, and I think there is value in doing so. So I suppose I see Nabokov’s way of reading as one very good way that exists alongside other good ways.

At times I found this book utterly brilliant, and at times it was … a bit dull. Nabokov is focused on details to such an extreme degree that he sometimes gets bogged down in plot summary. In each lecture he follows the chronology of the novel, analyzing it as he moves through its sections, and sometimes this works well, and at other times he stops analyzing and begins summarizing. On the plus side, these summaries make the lectures an excellent way to review each book if the details have gotten hazy.

The lectures reminded me of one of my English professors in college who was fairly traditional in his approach to literature and focused on close reading in just the way Nabokov does, moving through each work we studied and analyzing its structure in a methodical way. This seemed like a reasonably good way to learn about the literature we read, but I didn’t love that class as much as I did others where the professors took a broader approach and looked at context and history and theory as well as looking at the texts themselves. Nabokov is best, I think, when he uses the novels as a jumping off point to discuss what literature is and how we can best read it — when the details lead him to some larger point.

Who knows what I’ll end up doing, but I would like to return to this book and close at some of Nabokov’s claims more specifically.

I began Infinite Jest the other day and am up to date with the Infinite Summer schedule, which means I’ve read up to page 63 — out of 981 pages, not including the lengthy endnotes section. So far things are going well, but I’m already aware that I’m not going to get everything going on in the book. I mean, I’ll be able to follow the plot and will understand the basics of what is happening, but I can already tell that there will be connections among characters and plot events and ideas that I will get some but not all of. A lot of characters have been introduced and I can already see some recurring themes and motifs that surely will be important, but I will have to carry a lot in my head over the course of such a long book to make sense of it all. This isn’t a book to understand fully in just one reading, I can see that already.

But I really am enjoying it. The opening section is brilliant. It describes one of the main characters, Hal, in an interview with a university admissions committee, the members of which are trying to understand some “irregularities” in Hal’s application. He’s a tennis star, and they really want to admit him, but while his grades are excellent and his admissions essays beyond brilliant (suspiciously so), his test scores don’t fit the profile. In the course of the interview, Hal just sits there, not saying anything, letting his uncle and his uncle’s assistant speak for him. Finally the committee gets Hal on his own, and finally Hal starts talking, and what he says sounds perfectly reasonable, but the committee starts to stare and look horrified and freak out, and finally they call an ambulance and get Hal taken away. It’s unclear what happened, but it explains why Hal was so quiet to start with — he knows that he can try as much as he likes, but what he says will be very different from what people hear. The scene is funny and sad both, and it’s a way to introduce what I’m sure will be a major theme of the book — the difficulty of communicating with others.

I’ve been following the discussions going on in the Infinite Summer forums as well, although I’m not participating (for no particular reason except I don’t feel like it — I have enough online writing to do already). It’s nice to read what others are thinking, and it helps me to see things I might otherwise have missed. Even though I’m observing and not participating in this reading group, I still feel like I’m benefiting from it.

I have now finished Henry Green’s novel Loving, and while I was tempted to continue reading the two other novels in my edition, Living and Party Going, I decided to save those novels for another time. I would very much like to read more Henry Green at some point, though, because I thought Loving was very good.

It’s the kind of novel where not a whole lot happens. People talk, mainly. In fact, much of the novel is written in dialogue, and the narrator remains aloof, telling us what things look like and who does what, but not digging deeply into people’s thoughts. At times it’s a little like a play where you have stage directions in place of a narrator. It’s not a play, of course — there is a narrator who tells you the basics of what’s going on, but it’s a very distant narrator who refrains from commentary or judgment.

The novel is set during World War II (it’s published in 1945) and tells the story of a family and its servants who are living in a castle in Ireland. Most of these people are English. They are at a distance from the war raging on the continent, but are worried about a possible invasion and also about the Irish Republican Army and are uncertain whether they should  remain in the mild anxiety they are currently living in or venture back to England, where they have family, but where they might be forced to join the military.

We get scenes of the family itself, a mother and daughter-in-law with her children, but spend most of the time with the servants. The story is made up of a series of small events that the servants gossip about: one of the children kills one of the estate’s many peacocks, an expensive ring has gone missing, two of the servants are flirting with each other, and others have fallen in love. The novel follows them around as one woman tries to hide her drinking habit and two young girls giggle at absolutely everything and the nanny gets sick so the children aren’t properly watched after. And then one of the servants finds the daughter-in-law in bed with a man who’s not her husband, and everyone is thoroughly scandalized. The butler spends his time learning how to cook the books and extort bribes so he can set a little money aside for the future.

It’s a quiet picture of how life really is, especially during wartime when there’s a nagging anxiety underlying everything. Conversations circle around the same subjects again and again, and more often than not, people fail to understand each other, especially the servants and those they serve. These two groups try to understand each other, obsess about each other, get frustrated and angry, and then work hard at trying to hide it so that life can proceed as quietly as possible.

The writing is beautiful. The dialogue is done perfectly, capturing the distinct voices of the characters and also the rhythms of typical conversations, the way people repeat things and jump suddenly from one idea to the next. And although the narration is extremely distant, the narrator now and then comes out with beautiful descriptive sentences: “The slow tide frosted her dark eyes, endowed them with facets,” or “He slipped inside like an eel into its drainpipe,” or “When he saw her face which was as it sometimes looked on her bad days so called, pale or blotchy as a shrimp before boiling, he cleared his throat.” He gets the rhythm of sentences exactly right:

She got no other answer than a wail. Then Miss Burch rolled over face to the wall. The cap twisted off her head. Edith gently put it back and because her shiny skull was sideways on that pillow she could only place the cap so that it sat at right angles to Miss Burch’s pinched nose, as someone lying in the open puts their hat to protect their face and terrible eyes.

John Updike wrote the introduction to my edition, and I am perfectly willing to believe him when he claims that insofar as one can learn to write, Henry Green taught him. I’m certainly looking forward to reading more of his work.

Salley Vickers’s The Other Side of You is a lovely, smart, beautiful book. I didn’t fall in love with it, as I thought I might, but that doesn’t keep me from seeing how others might love it and that it has an awful lot to recommend it. I suppose what this tells me that being lovely, smart, and beautiful isn’t enough when it comes to fiction; there also has to be some spark or sense of identification (and not of the easy “I identify with the characters” sort) that a person feels for a book to truly fall in love with it.

It tells the story of David McBride, a psychiatrist, who is treating a particularly challenging patient, Elizabeth Cruikshank, who has tried and failed to commit suicide and who is now resistant to David’s attempts to get her to talk. In the book’s early pages, we learn about David’s life at the same time that we read about his first sessions with Elizabeth. David himself suffered a trauma as a young child: he witnessed his brother’s death as the brother tried to lead him across the street and was hit by a lorry. The narrative is written in the first person from David’s perspective, and David is open from the very beginning about how this tragedy still haunts him, many years later. He has done his best to recover from it, but he knows that this is the sort of event one doesn’t really ever get over.

Eventually Elizabeth does open up and begin to tell her story, which David retells to the reader in a long passages that recreate the scenes Elizabeth lived through. At this point something magical begins to happen to David. He finds himself so profoundly moved by Elizabeth’s story that he begins to think again about his own past and his own wounds, and he begins to move beyond the role of a psychiatrist to relate to Elizabeth as a friend.

One of the things I particularly liked about this book is the way it questions the roles of analyst and patient, particularly the power dynamic that usually exists between the two, with the patient as the needy one and the analyst as the source of healing and guidance. David reveals to us — and eventually to Elizabeth — just how vulnerable and broken he is and how in need of help he is himself. During long conversations in which they both tell their stories, he breaks some of the rules designed to keep boundaries up between doctor and patient and shows as he does so just how complex doctor/patient relationships really are and how mysterious the healing process can be. The dynamic between living, breathing human beings can’t really be contained by professional rules.

Vickers weaves into her story a contemplation of the way art can shape one’s life. Art is what begins the deepening of Elizabeth and David’s friendship: Elizabeth had fallen in love with a man who studied Caravaggio, an artist who has been meaningful in David’s life as well, and it’s David’s mention of Caravaggio that gets Elizabeth to talk in the first place. So bound up in this exploration of love and loss there is also a role for art and beauty, for the way art can express what seems impossible to put into words and the way it can become an inextricable part of the bonds that hold people together.

I’m almost writing myself into liking this book more than I really did. The truth is that I admired all this in a detached kind of way. Reading the book was an intellectual exercise in seeing how Vickers brought her ideas together, rather than an experience of thinking and feeling all at once. I never came to care about the characters all that much, except as ways to explore ideas. I don’t need to identify with characters in the sense of liking them or being able to imagine knowing them in my own life, but I do want to feel that they are alive, that there is some spark there that makes them seem real.

I’m genuinely sorry about this one, because all the elements are there that might make me fall in love with it. But, alas, even when we want to fall in love, sometimes it just doesn’t happen.

So my education in detective novels continues. The latest book group selection was Ross Macdonald’s The Underground Man, published in 1971, which we discussed at our lovely noir picnic. It’s another hardboiled detective novel like the book we started out with, Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key. I’m surprised to find myself enjoying these books. When Hobgoblin told me the plot was convoluted I got a little worried, as I’m usually not fond of having to follow complicated plots. But as it turned out, I enjoyed the challenge (although I’m not sure I actually kept the relationships among all the characters straight).

Macdonald does his plotting very well, and it’s a pleasure to watch it all unfold. He introduces you to a couple characters who then lead you to a few more, and then some more, and then you learn that a couple of the characters know each other, and then that a few others know each other or had an affair or hated each other or some such, and then you learn about more people and more relationships, and the next thing you know, you’ve got a entire web of people and relationships that fits together beautifully. Or rather, not so beautifully, as very, very few of the relationships described are good ones.

This leads me to another thing I liked about the novel, which is that it creates a picture of late 60s/early 70s California in which what’s happening to the people happens also to the landscape. The novel is set in southern California where a forest fire is raging, threatening to destroy houses and neighborhoods. This is a place where people have begun to build where they probably shouldn’t, in areas that nature is going to try to reclaim in one way or another. As the fire rages and mudslides threaten and people try to figure out how to respond, this gets echoed by chaos on the social and moral level in the stories of cruel and incompetent parents, deceitful spouses and lovers, and the general atmosphere of secrets and lies.

There’s something deeply wrong at the core here, and the detective, Lew Archer, can only do so much to help things out. In fact at times he seems to cause more harm than good by dragging to light old secrets that end up causing more conflict. As he is zipping around California trying to find a young boy who’s been kidnapped and trying to piece together everyone’s story, the police and firefighters are busy trying to contain the fire, and all of them seem at the mercy of forces much larger than they are. The firefighters can only hope that the wind blows in the right direction, and Archer can only hope people will tell him the truth and he can do his job without becoming a victim himself. My book group noted the fact that Archer doesn’t seem to be all that great at questioning people and hasn’t figured out much more than is told to the reader, so there’s little sense in the book of any comforting presence or of anybody who has things under control. All anybody can do is to keep trying to figure out the truth and keep trying to straighten things out and hope for the best.

Several people in the book group said that while they liked Macdonald, Raymond Chandler is better. I have yet to read Chandler, and I see that I should, particularly since he often comes up in our discussions. The relative merits of Macdonald and Chandler are obviously up for debate, but at the very least I will have something equally good to look forward to when I finally get around to reading one of Chandler’s books.

I think I may be a new Patrick Hamilton fan. I found his novel The Slaves of Solitude (which is the latest Slaves of Golconda pick) really dark and sad, but in a satisfying kind of way, the kind of satisfaction you feel when you’ve faced something difficult head-on, without flinching. The picture the novel paints of life generally, but especially life during war-time, is of isolation, irritation, boredom, misunderstanding, and deprivation.

The novel tells the story of Miss Roach — we learn in the middle of the novel that her name is Enid but the narrator never calls her this — who is 39 and single and has moved from London to the outer reaches of the suburbs to escape the bombings of World War II. She lives in the Rosamund Tea Rooms, a boarding house, and commutes to her secretarial job in the city.  The atmosphere in the Rosamund Tea Rooms is depressingly claustrophic, and most of the novel is set here, or, when the scene changes, it’s to take us to a nearby pub where people drink to escape or to take us out on the streets where Miss Roach walks, again, in order to escape.

What she’s escaping, besides the general claustrophia, are her fellow boarders, one of whom, Mr. Thwaites, is an absolutely horrible person. He terrorizes Miss Roach and intimidates everybody else. Here’s how the narrator describes him:

In his large, flat, moustached face … in his lethargic yet watchful brown eyes, in his way of walking and his way of talking, there could be discerned the steady, self-absorbed, dreamy, almost somnambulistic quality of the lifelong trampler through the emotions of others, of what Miss Roach would call “the bully.” That steady look with which as a child he would have torn off a butterfly’s wing, with which as a boy he would have twisted another boy’s wrist, with which as a man he would have humiliated a servant or inferior, was upon him as he now looked at Miss Roach; it never entirely left him.

Miss Roach hates Mr. Thwaites, but it never does her any good; he can always win any argument they have and can always get a reaction out of her and force her to answer his questions even when it’s the last thing she wants. He’s a nightmare — the kind of person you wouldn’t mind strangling, and who knows you feel that way and enjoys it.

Into this situation come two new people who offer a chance for some diversion and change, and possibly even improvement. Given the darkness of the initial scenes, though, we should be suspicious. One of these is Vicki, a young woman born in Germany who has lived in England for many years now, but who is still under suspicion because of her accent and her origin. Miss Roach stands up for her and befriends her, and then brings her into the boarding house, thinking that not only can she help Vicki, but Vicki might help her by changing the atmosphere in the the Tea Rooms.

The other is an American soldier who flirts with Miss Roach and soon enough becomes “her” soldier, implying that he wants her to return to America with him and help him run his laundromat business. Miss Roach is uncertain what she thinks of all this, but so little has happened to her of any interest at all, that she goes along with it in a bemused kind of way, just to see.

But her hopes are dashed as she figures out what kind of people Vicki and her American soldier really are. The rest of the novel charts just how bad these relationships can get.

What I particularly loved about this book is the way Miss Roach is such a careful observer of the people around her and the way the narrator takes time to describe the characters’ words and emotions so closely. It’s a story told through small scenes and little conversations, the kind of novel where tone of voice and word choice and facial expressions carry most of the plot. It’s a novel about war, but not about battles and armies; in fact, Miss Roach avoids hearing war news whenever she can. Rather, it’s about how war infects everything, right down to the words people use in everyday conversation and to the words on street signs:

To the endless snubbing and nagging of war, its lecturing and admonitions, Miss Roach was subjected from the moment she left the Rosamund Tea Rooms in the morning to the moment she returned at night, and these things were at last telling upon her nerves and general attitude.

Immediately she stepped forth into Thames Lockdon … the snubbing began with:

No Cigarettes

Sorry

in the window of the tobacconist opposite.

And such was Miss Roach’s mood nowadays that she regarded this less as a sorrowful admission than as a sly piece of spite. The “sorry”, she felt certain, had not been thrown in for the sake of politeness or pity. It was a sarcastic, nasty, rude “sorry”. It sneered, as a common woman might, as if to say “Sorry, I’m sure”, or “Sorry, but there you are”, or “Sorry, but what do you expect nowadays?”

This passage indicates the book’s sensitivity to language, which is another thing I loved about it. Miss Roach is always thinking about the language other people use and how that language tells her something about who they are. This is especially true of Vicki, who irritates Miss Roach horribly by using out of date slang in an effort to keep from sounding too German. And Miss Roach is very sensitive about the language people use to describe her, hating it when people imply she is an “English Miss,” too prim and proper and uptight to have any fun. And she can’t stand it when people make fun of her name. One of the book’s worst moments is when Mr. Thwaites says,

“Enter Dame Roach! … Dame Roach — the English Miss! Miss Prim. Dame Roach — the Prude … the jealous Miss Roach.”

The thought that Vicki might have overheard this horrible string of words is enough to make her sick.

So, no, this is not a happy book, but it captures the hardships of wartime, and also of loneliness and sadness and solitude, beautifully, brilliantly well.