Monthly Archives: August 2009

I haven’t done this in ages, but for the first time this year and for who knows how long before that, I’m setting aside a book I’m not getting along with. I should give up on books I’m not loving more often, I know that, but I generally don’t anyway. I want to give a book a chance before I quit reading it, and once I’ve done that, I usually find myself far enough into it that it doesn’t seem too hard to just carry on.

But I was reading Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children before I left on vacation, and while I found it interesting on some levels, I also found myself on page 150 or so out of 500+ pages wondering if I was ever going to be able to finish the thing. I felt like I’d already plowed through a lot, but that tons more was waiting for me, and I wasn’t sure the book was going to change or develop much to make the plowing on worth while. And then vacation intervened, and I had a lot of other books to read, and I haven’t picked it up in a few weeks now and will put it back on the shelf soon.

The book is a family story. It’s about a woefully mismatched couple with a large brood of children, and it describes the family dynamics, including the horrible fights the parents have and the way the children try to keep peace in their family. It captures the father’s highly imaginative use of language and the games he plays with his children, as well as the mother’s longing for a different kind of life and refusal to accept the circumstances she finds herself in. The eldest daughter, Louisa, is a child from the father’s previous marriage, a fact her step-mother never lets her forget. Louisa, in the heartbreaking way of children, accepts this and doesn’t question it, although she has also begun to explore the world outside the family more and is retreating into the private world of adolescence. There is cruelty in the way the parents treat the children, but, somehow, there is also love and moments of happiness. What else can young children do but make the best of the situation they find themselves in?

I liked the way the book explored this dynamic —  the problem of children trying to understand what is going on in their family when it both nurtures and harms them, in ways they aren’t grown up enough to comprehend. Certain kinds of dysfunctional families are very interesting to read about, and this family reminded me very much of the family in Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle. In both cases, the parents have wonderful things to offer to their children, but they can’t seem to grow up enough themselves to be capable of taking care of others.

The problem, though, is the pacing. I read and read, and not much happened, and there wasn’t enough narrative tension or tension among the characters to make me want to keep going. I think I can be a patient reader, but there wasn’t enough to reward my patience.

It’s a memorable book, though. Even if I never pick it up again, I’ll remember the family. Maybe I’m missing a really great ending, and if you have read this book before, you can let me know if I have, but I think with some books you don’t have to read the entire thing to get something from it.

There are two books from before vacation I haven’t yet written about here: Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives and Chandra Prasad’s On Borrowed Wings. My memory of these books is getting a bit hazy, but I don’t want to ignore them entirely here.

So first, Gertrude Stein. I’ve been meaning to read Three Lives for a very long time; in fact, I’ve probably owned the book for well over a decade. Stein is a fascinating figure, but I’ve always found her intimidating and need to work up a bit of courage to pick up one of her books. Three Lives is certainly one of the easier, more approachable books she’s written; it may take me another decade or two to work up to reading something more challenging, if I ever decide to do it at all. I don’t feel that I’ve ever really understood Stein, but then again, lots of people feel that way, I know for a fact, and my tendency with writers I don’t quite understand is to keep returning to them to see if one more try will make a difference.

Three Lives is a straightforward read, not intimidating at all it turns out, with simple sentences and vocabulary, without much plot and with just a few characters. In fact, it’s such a simple, straightforward, non-astounding read that one might reasonably wonder why Stein is read at all, if it weren’t for the time period she lived in and the contrast between what she was doing and typical novels of the time. The book was published in 1909, and the contrast between her writing and other novels of the time is sharp. She has taken the sentence and pared it down, often using a series of simple sentences or short phrases strung together with conjunctions. She also uses a lot of repetition, repeating words from sentence to sentence and repeating ideas from page to page. For example:

Melanctha Herbert had not made her life all simple like Rose Johnson. Melanctha had not made it easy with herself to make her wants and what she had, agree.

Melanctha Herbert was always losing what she had in wanting all the things she saw. Melanctha was always being left when she was not leaving others.

Melanctha Herbert always loved too hard and much too often. She was always full with mystery and subtle movements and denials and vague distrusts and complicated disillusions. Then Melanctha would be sudden and impulsive and unbounded in some faith, and then she would suffer and be strong in her repression.

Stein piles bits of information on top of each other to build portraits of her characters; I suppose this is what every author does in order to create a character, but Stein draws attention to the piling on by repeating her character’s full name and using “and” in her lists, instead of commas. She uses repetition on a larger scale too. Her story moves forward in a jerky back-and-forth motion; she will tell you new information, and then she will circle back and repeat old information, perhaps with some variations, before moving on again.

It’s not a very exciting style, and at times I felt bored with the book, but she does manage to capture something that feels true about her characters. It’s an incantatory style; it’s almost like she’s chanting her way through these characters’ lives, conjuring them up and capturing their full history in a fairly short number of pages.

The book does exactly what the title promises: it tells the story of three women’s lives, none of which connect to the others in any way except that all three of her subjects live in the same town. She tells their full life stories, although most of the information we have on their childhoods comes through flashbacks. All three are ordinary working- or middle-class women, and the focus in all three stories is on their relationships — friendships, and in the case of the middle story “Melanctha,” romantic relationships. The Melanctha section is the most famous one, partly because of how it deals with race; Melanctha is a black woman and some see it as a sympathetic portrait of blackness, arguably forward-looking for its time (it’s a controversial point, though).

So, Three Lives is an interesting read, a good book to analyze stylistically and think about contextually, although it’s not engrossing or emotionally compelling, at least for me. I’m very curious and I wish there were some way of knowing how Stein’s reputation will fare in decades and centuries to come. I suspect she’ll remain known, at least for a while, although it’s hard to tell whether that will be because of her writing or because of her life story. I’m looking forward to reading Janet Malcolm’s book Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice to learn a little more about that life.