Monthly Archives: July 2009

I don’t have nearly enough books, so Hobgoblin and I checked out a library sale yesterday evening, and I came home with five new novels. It’s a good thing I don’t hear about all the library sales in my area, because there must be dozens of them, and if we knew about them, we’d visit them, and then … well, then we’d be in trouble.

Here’s what I got. It was an evening for women’s fiction:

• Barbara Pym, An Unsuitable Attachment
• Barbara Pym, A Glass of Blessings
• Elizabeth Von Arnim, The Enchanted April
• Monica Dickens, Joy and Josephine
• Anita Brookner, A Family Romance

But that’s not it. From Bookmooch I recently got or will soon receive these:

• Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
• Jessie Fauset, There is Confusion
• George Gissing, New Grub Street
• Elizabeth George, Payment in Blood

I didn’t particularly enjoy the first Elizabeth George book I read, but enough people said the series gets better and enough people I respect have enjoyed her books that I thought I’d give her another try.

But that’s still not it. Oneworld Classics sent me a copy of Victor Hugo’s The Last Day of a Condemned Man, and I bought Chandra Prasad’s On Borrowed Wings (based on Danielle’s post) and Dawn Powell’s Dance Night (for the Slaves of Golconda) at local bookstores.

Oh, dear. I’m probably going to Manhattan with Hobgoblin this weekend, where we will probably venture into some bookshops, and I’m going on vacation starting next Thursday, during which I will probably visit some bookshops, and then there are a couple more library sales coming up, which I will almost certainly visit. Time to buy some more book shelves?

E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice is an intriguing read, largely because of the time period it was written in and the way it treats its subject matter, homosexual love. Forster wrote it in 1913 and 1914, but he resisted publishing it, and it didn’t appear in print until 1971 after he died. He was worried that people would have a hard time accepting what turns out to be a vexed but positive portrayal of homosexuality.

I’ve also read Forster’s Howards End and Passage to India, and if I’m remembering correctly what those novels were like, this one is more psychological and emotional in its focus. The other novels are psychological as well, but this one emphasizes interior worlds even more than the others, capturing the mind and emotions of a young man as he struggles to figure out the world and his place in it. Maurice is more abstract, taking less time with context and setting, and spending more time describing emotional states.

It tells the story of Maurice Hall, a schoolboy at the beginning of the novel, whose teacher introduces him to sex by drawing pictures in the sand during their last conversation together before Maurice heads off to public school. He dreams two highly symbolic dreams, and finds himself unexpectedly emotional when he learns one of their servants, a young man named George, has left their service. These early experiences haunt him as he moves through public school and then university, trying to understand his complex reactions to his classmates. His most significant relationship at university is with Clive, a young man much more worldly and more intelligent than he is, but one who returns his interest and, soon enough, his love. The novel charts their relationship as the two make their way through Cambridge and then move out into the larger world. The Cambridge scenes are particularly enjoyable to read, as campus life is endlessly interesting, for me at least. Once the characters leave university, their lives become broader, but also much more uncertain, and Maurice is finally made to take stock of who he is and to act upon that knowledge.

I was interested in the way the novel keeps a certain amount of critical distance from Maurice. He is largely a sympathetic character, but at the same time, we see the limits of his intelligence; Clive can talk circles around him, and Maurice is not the best abstract thinker out there. He is also unpleasantly obsessed with class and uncertain about his own status. Here is Forster’s description of him:

In Maurice I tried to create a character who was completely unlike myself or what I supposed myself to be: someone handsome, healthy, bodily attractive, mentally torpid, not a bad businessman and rather a snob. Into this mixture I dropped an ingredient that puzzles him, wakes him up, and finally saves him.

I like the fact that Forster makes his protagonist so obviously flawed, while at the same time showing so much compassion and understanding. It would be easy in a book that explores such a vexed and complicated subject as sexuality, particularly homosexuality in the early part of the twentieth century, to make the protagonist more admirable and heroic and pioneering than this one is. Instead, Maurice is just an average person, flawed in perfectly normal ways and no more heroic than most of us are.

I read 20 pages of Infinite Jest today and now I’m all caught up with the Infinite Summer reading schedule, which is to say, I’ve read up to page 232 (out of over 1,000 pages). I continue to love the experience. A lot of what I said in an earlier post remains true: there are lots of short sections that introduce us to many different characters, some of whom know and interact with each other and some of whom don’t. Everything is going to connect up with everything else eventually, I’m betting, and in a way, everything already does, if only in vague and tangential ways, such as shared themes or tropes or images.

There are a few plot threads that we return to again and again, such as the story of the students at the Enfield Tennis Academy (Hal, whom I wrote about in my earlier post is a student there), the family saga of the Incandenzas (including Hal; the adults in this family run the academy and the children attend it), and the residents of the Ennet House, a halfway house for recovering drug and alcohol addicts. The Ennet House is located right next to the academy, which is appropriate, because one of the major themes of the book is drug use and abuse, and many of the students at the academy spend their free time getting high.

And then there are other plot lines as well — a political thriller thread with two comic characters whose loyalties are nearly impossible to figure out, a couple different stories of drug dealing and violence, a really harrowing story of a deeply depressed woman, and lots more. There are also sections that don’t advance the plot much, but are informative or funny or there for some other reason, including one really great section on why video-phones failed.

I think the best way to read the book — at least for me — is to enjoy each section without getting too worried about how everything fits together and whether I’m remembering everything or not. Sometimes beginning a new section can be bewildering, but soon enough I find myself getting oriented to what’s happening and then I can enjoy it, almost like I would a really great short story.

I love the variety in this book, and not just the variety of characters and situations, but the variety of styles and points of view. Wallace takes on different voices now and then, using dialect or giving us a monologue by a particular character, or including transcripts of emails and articles and a paper that Hal wrote for school. There is just such abundance here.

The book is also laugh-out-loud funny (and I don’t usually laugh out loud at books), and also heart-wrenching in moments. And it’s really not that difficult of a read, in spite of the many characters and stories. I find it a much, much easier read than The Recognitions was.

Lots of people on the forums have said that you just have to make it through the first 200-250 pages or so, and then the stories and and ideas begin to come together more and it gets easier to read. If that’s the case, I think I’ll be doing just fine for the next 800 or so pages!

Mary Brunton’s 1814 novel Discipline turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. I’ve really enjoyed other early nineteenth-century novels such as Susan Ferrier’s Marriage, Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, and Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray, and I was hoping Discipline would be equally good. The novel has some good things to recommend it, but I found it too long, too predictable, and too moralistic. Although, to be fair, a lot of novels from the eighteenth and early nineteenth century feel too long to me (nothing against long novels at all, but some seem too long for the story they have to tell), many are predictable (if you know the conventions, you will not be surprised by any of Austen’s plots), and lots of them are moralistic. And what else should I expect, picking up a novel called Discipline?

The novel tells the story of Ellen Percy, a young girl who has been both dismissed and spoiled by parents who are generally well-meaning but make some serious mistakes. Upon observing her intelligence, all her father can say is:

“It is a confounded pity she is a girl, If she had been of the right sort, she might have got into Parliament, and made a figure with the best of them. But now what use is her sense of?”

Her mother responds:

“I hope it will contribute to her happiness,” said my mother, sighing as if she had thought the fulfilment of her hope a little doubtful. “Poh!” quoth my father, “no fear of her happiness. Won’t she have two hundred thousand pounds, and never know the trouble of earning it, nor need to do one thing from morning to night but amuse herself?” My mother made no answer: — so by this and similar conversations, a most just and desirable connection was formed in my mind between the ideas of amusement and happiness, of labour and misery.

Ellen’s father never finds much time for her, and her mother is too passive to try to rein her in. Her mother soon dies, leaving Ellen with a close friend who has the patience of a saint, but who also fails to instill Ellen with sound principles. Ellen grows up, goes to school, and learns to love luxury, idleness, snobbery, and gossip. In spite of this behavior, she is lucky enough to draw the attention of Mr. Maitland, a number of years older than she and a model of Christian gentlemanly behavior. He falls in love with her, but she is too busy enjoying her first taste of social success to pay him much attention.

This dynamic continues on for a while, Ellen growing more and more insufferable and Mr. Maitland looking more and more sorrowful. Ellen finds herself drawn into a flirtation with a man of uncertain principles who tries to lure her to Scotland where marriages are quick and easy. Before this can happen, though, disaster strikes — her father, it turns out, has just lost all his money and shot himself in despair. Now Ellen finds herself in an entirely new situation — she has no family, no money, and little idea what to do. Absolutely nothing in her life so far has prepared her in any way for this.

So Ellen is finally required to learn something about the world outside her former privileged social circle, and finally she is forced to learn some discipline. There are some interesting elements to this plot, in particular, the portrayal of how difficult it is for a woman to survive on her own and how little society prepares women of the monied classes to do anything useful with themselves. Ellen goes through some harrowing experiences that show exactly how vulnerable, powerless, and abandoned women without family and without money are. This is an idea that comes up again and again in novels of the time.

Also interesting is the portrayal of Scotland. Brunton is Scottish, and her heroine ends up there towards the end of the novel. There is a marked difference between the way the English and Scottish scenes are portrayed: London remains a rather vaguely defined and described place, but the Scotland scenes are described in lavish detail, the Scottish characters are given lots of space in which to tell stories about their family heritage and their culture, and the Scottish sections even have footnotes documenting the historical background of the novel. It’s no surprise that it is here where poor Ellen finally finds some peace and reaps the reward of her hard-earned discpline.

But I was disappointed by the way the characters’ motivations were often vaguely-defined and difficult to believe; in particular, it makes no sense to me why Mr. Maitland fell in love with Ellen in the first place, and Ellen’s behavior in the early parts of the novel is so foolish and so stupid, it’s hard to sympathize with her when things begin to go badly. And although I know that people of the time didn’t necessarily feel this way, as a 21st-century reader, all the moralizing gets old pretty quickly (and surely some 19th-century readers felt that way too).

But I’m glad I read the book anyway because I’m fascinated by the time period and I like to read as much as I can from and about it. Brunton was popular, at least for a short while (you can read Jane Austen’s brief comments on her here), and the Victorians liked her strongly moral writing, so the book gives a good idea of what people of the time were drawn to.

My mystery book group met again this past Sunday to discuss Benjamin Black’s novel Christine Falls. As usual, it was a good discussion, although people had negative or mixed opinions of the book, which interests me, because from what I’ve read of blog reviews, a lot of people liked it. A common opinion in the group, though, was that it was an enjoyable read, but when we stopped to think about the plotting and Black’s use of mystery novel conventions, the book began to fall apart.

It was an odd reading experience for me because I had already read the sequel, The Silver Swan, and so I knew some of the major revelations that came in Christine Falls. In a lot of cases with a mystery series, it doesn’t seem to matter a whole lot if you read the books out of order, but in this case, I think it makes a difference. The two books felt less like two individual books, each with their own separate stories even though the characters are the same, and more like one novel with two different parts. So knowing what I did about what happens to the characters later, I had some of the major plot points spoiled for me, and that took some of the pleasure out of it.

That aside, I did find other things to enjoy in it, particularly in the main character Quirke, a pathologist who, in the novel’s opening scene, finds his brother-in-law Mal tampering with some documents in a highly suspicious manner. Quirke is compelled by forces in himself he doesn’t really understand — in that way so many characters in mysteries are — to find out exactly what Mal was up to, and from there he winds up embroiled in a plot that involves powerful people in the Catholic Church and extends all the way to America.

Quirke is a stereotypical mystery hero in a lot of ways — he has a troubled personal life and a drinking problem — but I liked him anyway. I suppose there’s no reason being stereotypical should make a character unlikeable, and there’s a reason such characters are popular. It’s interesting to think about the dynamic between the troubled personal life and the type of work these characters do. Quirke can be brutally honest about a lot of things, particularly about death, which makes sense since he is a pathologist and works with corpses all the time, but in other areas, he’s an expert at dodging painful truths and uncomfortable conversations. He’s a damaged guy trying to make his way through life with a minimum of fuss and trouble, but outward circumstances and, even more so, something in himself won’t let him off so easily.

A number of people in my group didn’t like the rather uneasy relationship this book has with mystery conventions, for example, the way it’s not entirely clear what the mystery is, even near the end of the book. The plot Quirke is uncovering isn’t terribly interesting as a plot, and some of the characters and events just don’t need to be there. I am less concerned about mystery conventions than others, as I don’t really care whether authors follow “the rules” or not, but I was bothered by the way so much seems nebulous in this book — the relationships among the main characters weren’t explained as well as I would have liked and the motivations among the bad guys for doing what they did seemed obscure. The novel is set in the 1950s, but this never felt real to me. Somehow, Black doesn’t make the time period concrete enough.

But I will say that I enjoyed myself as I read the book, even though I had some doubts later; it’s well-written with engaging characters, and I was curious to know what was going to happen to Quirke. I may have liked it even more if I hadn’t read The Silver Swan first.

We are reading Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone next (my selection). I’m excited to return to an early mystery story and to think more about the genre’s roots.