Monthly Archives: September 2009

I picked up Antonia White’s Frost in May not knowing at all what it is about, and I was amused to find that it’s about a young girl beginning life at a Catholic boarding school — I say I was amused because it seems that nearly everything I’m reading these days has a religious or spiritual theme to it. I’m still slowly reading through Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart, which is about a spiritual approach to suffering, and then there is Elizabeth Strout’s Abide with Me, about a pastor and his relationship with his congregation. And now Frost in May, which is all about intense religious devotion. But White’s book is harsher and darker than the other two, and much more critical of organized religion.

The main character, Nanda, comes from a family that converted to Catholicism, and Nanda feels an ardor and devotion to her new religion that perhaps is unique to converts. It means she is an outsider in her new school, however, The Convent of the Five Wounds, where most of the students come from families who have never been anything but Catholic. She is an outsider for other reasons as well: she doesn’t come from money as most of the other students do. This is a very common set-up for a novel, I suppose — young child struggling to find her way in a new environment that she finds bewildering, surrounded by people who aren’t like her at all — but White does an excellent job making a frequently-told story fresh and fascinating.

The novel’s opening scenes show Nanda trying to find her way through a bewilderingly complex set of rules that governs every part of the girls’ lives. It’s shocking to discover just how circumscribed and controlled the girls’ lives were. Nanda is told how she should walk and eat, and in what position she should sleep at night (on her back with her arms crossed on her chest). She and her schoolmates are not allowed to have “particular friendships,” and if they are caught spending too much time with any one girl, the two are separated. Their reading is almost entirely limited to devotional works, with only occasional indulgences in the most serious and uplifting fiction available. And the list of limitations and requirements goes on and on.

Nanda accepts all this, for the most part, because she really and truly wants to be a good Catholic, and although she is secretly terrified of receiving a call to be a nun herself, she adores the disciplines and practices of her religion.

But she starts the book as an outsider, and she remains one; she struggles and struggles to be the kind of person the nuns think she should be, but she never quite gets it right, and eventually the seeds of rebellion are sown.

White does an excellent job capturing the feeling of the convent school; the book is focused almost exclusively on the school itself, so that it becomes its own world, impervious to everything outside it. The convent is somewhere outside London, but that hardly matters; all that matters is the atmosphere of the school itself. When Nanda’s parents visit, she feels horribly awkward and unhappy at the way her mother does everything wrong — she is too loud, too happy, too willing to mock what Nanda holds dear. She is relieved when her parents leave and the familiar order is restored. Even though the nuns can be cruel, and they do what they can to rid her of her pride and individuality, she rejoices in all her sacrifices and deprivations — until the point when she doesn’t.

The book isn’t perfect — I thought some sections in the middle languished a bit and some of the plot and character maneuverings seemed awkward — but still, it’s a wonderful portrait of what it’s like to be a serious, idealistic, devout child and then teenager, caught up in an intricately-structured and carefully-controlled world, trying to live up to everyone’s high expectations, including her own. And it’s a fascinating picture of one version of the religious life — a particularly harsh and harmful one, although one that’s full of beauty too.

I mentioned the other day that I listened to Elizabeth Strout’s novel Abide with Me, and that book has convinced me that I should probably take a look at her other books as well. It’s a quiet, thoughtful character study, and I liked its insights into small-town life and what it’s like to try to be a spiritual leader when one’s life is falling apart.

The novel is set in a small town in Maine in the late 1950s, and the main character is the pastor of the Congregational church, Tyler Caskey, who just a year ago lost his wife and is now trying to cope with his grief and take care of his two young daughters. In a long flashback, Strout tells the story of how Tyler met his wife, Lauren, a woman from a much wealthier, more stylish family, and how the two of them settled into their new life in town. The congregation fell in love with Tyler, but could never quite accept Lauren, with her monied, Massachusetts background, her suspect love of fashion, and her complete disinterest in leading prayer groups. Tyler and Lauren were deeply in love, but it was a young, sudden, and inexperienced kind of love, and it quickly becomes clear that the two of them are headed into trouble, until one day Lauren gets sick and soon she is gone.

So Tyler is left on his own to grieve and to figure out how to lead an entirely new kind of life. And things quickly begin to fall apart. His daughter Katherine has failed to make friends at school and mutters things like “I hate God” in church. His housekeeper disappears under suspicious circumstances. He has trouble writing sermons. His mother pesters him to find a new wife. His congregation has begun to distrust him. And Tyler doesn’t know how to respond to any of this.

The character of Tyler is the triumph of this book; he is wise, kind, earnest, slow but with charisma, and an excellent deliverer of sermons. He believes with all his heart in everything he preaches and tries as best as he can to be a good person and to do his job well. He’s also naive and afraid of conflict, and it’s these qualities that get him into trouble. When his congregation starts to turn against him, he can’t understand why, and he doesn’t grasp that he needs to act quickly to change their minds. He believes that being a good person and doing his best is enough. It’s heartbreaking that these beliefs just aren’t true, and it seems unfair that people like Tyler have to learn lessons in the really painful way he does.

The book’s other triumph is its portrayal of small-town life, particularly small-town life in rural Maine in the 1950s. Tyler’s wife Lauren is a foolish character in a lot of ways, but surely everyone would sympathize with her horror at the boredom and isolation she experiences. Her mother-in-law gives her a book on how to be a pastor’s wife, and when she playfully begins to read it out loud to Tyler, she soon stops, bewildered by the advice she gets. Many of the other women in town are just as bored and unhappy as she is, and when one woman tells another to “just make the beds, then you’ll feel better,” it’s hardly encouraging. The picture of small-town life and 1950s pre-feminist frustration Strout creates is a familiar one, but she treats the subject with subtlety and acuteness and it never feels stereotyped.

So now I’m eager to read more of Strout’s books. Olive Kitteridge would be a logical next place to go, as it won the Pulitzer, and there is also Amy and Isabelle. It’s fun to find another author whose work I’d like to follow.

Victor Hugo’s The Last Day of a Condemned Man is fiction written with a purpose, and when someone writes fiction in order to make a point, as opposed to wanting to create great art, I can’t help but have my doubts about quality (although does that great art/political purpose opposition really hold up? Not sure.). Hugo’s book (kindly sent to me by Oneworld Classics) isn’t great art, I think, but it does do some interesting things fictionally, and it makes its political point in a powerful way.

It’s a book about the death penalty, and this edition opens with a preface by Hugo outlining his objections to the practice, so there is no doubt as you begin the story itself where Hugo stands. The novel takes the form of a diary written by a man living out his last days before he faces the guillotine. We aren’t told immediately, but eventually we find out he has committed murder, and there is never any doubt about whether he is guilty or not. The man writes down his thoughts and feelings over the course of the days leading up to his execution, and we follow him right up to the point before he is led away to his death.

What is interesting about the book is the way it allows you to imagine what it must be like to know you are about to die, that you will have a particularly gruesome death, and that crowds will be watching and cheering as your head is severed from your body. Hugo captures the torments his character goes through with enough detail and vividness that you can’t help but get caught up in the fear and turmoil. Here’s an example of what I mean:

They say it’s nothing, that you don’t suffer, that it’s a gentle end, that death is much simpler like that…. are they sure you don’t suffer? Who told them that? Has anyone heard of a severed head covered in blood that got up on the edge of the basket and shouted to the crowds: “That didn’t hurt?”

Are there any dead people who have come back and thanked them, saying: “It’s well designed. Leave it as it is. The mechanism is fine.”

Was it Robespierre? Was it Louis XVI?…

No, not at all! Less than a minute, less than a second and the deed is done. If only in their minds, have they ever put themselves in the place of the one who is there when the heavy chopper comes down and bites into flesh, severs nerves, shatters vertabrae… What! Half a second! Any pain is avoided…

Hideous!

Hugo also does a great job of describing the settings in which the condemned man finds himself, particularly the crowd scenes as the man is shuttled about to various cells before his execution. He makes you feel what it is like to be the center of attention at the point when one of the worst things that could possibly happen is about to happen to you:

In the clamour all around me I could no longer tell cries of pity from shouts of delight, laughter from groans, voices from noises; it was all just buzzing in my head, like an echo in a cooking pot.

Unthinkingly my eyes read the shop signs.

At one point I was seized with a bizarre curiosity to turn round and see where I was going. It was my mind’s last act of bravado. But my body didn’t want to; my neck was paralysed as if in anticipation of death.

I’m against the death penalty, so I’m not sure how someone who thinks otherwise would respond to this book, but if imagining how horrible it must be to face execution could sway anybody’s opinion, then this book could do it. The argument seems to be that execution is too awful a penalty to impose on anyone, and while that may not be the best anti-death penalty argument out there, it certainly is an argument well-suited to fiction. Fiction is particularly good at helping us understand what it’s like to be somebody else and at inspiring us to imagine things we have never experienced, so why not use its powers to inspire pity and terror in readers in order to persuade them to be merciful?

In addition to The Last Day of a Condemned Man, the Oneworld Classics edition contains another anti-death penalty work, a short story called “Claude Gueux.” The story is about how the justice system turns a man who stole something out of desperation, we aren’t told what, into a murderer. Society is arranged in such a way, the story argues, that pushes people toward crime, and then once they have committed that crime, it punishes them cruelly. There are stronger arguments to make against an unjust society than these works offer, but they still accomplish a lot: they make you think and feel and imagine what it must be like to be condemned.

Wow, people. Infinite Jest is a great book, and it’s going on my list of favorite novels ever. I don’t know if it would be on my top 10 or top 20 or top 50 or what, but it’s up there somewhere. Many people on the Infinite Summer forums and other places talk about rereading this book, in some cases many times, and in some cases rereading it pretty much immediately after finishing it for the first time, and while I’m not ready to reread it right away, I think I probably will someday. It’s a book that would reward rereading, without a doubt. And it’s a book worth spending lots of time with.

I appreciated having the Infinite Summer blog and forums available to help me sort out the plot events and to help me remember things I would otherwise have forgotten, but as far as I’m concerned the chief pleasure in this book is not piecing together its intricate structure or following the plot. The book is so enjoyable because of the narrative voice. The trick to enjoying the book for me was not to get caught up in figuring out all the details, and instead to just let it all wash over me. I picked up on the major events, but mostly I came to understand, eventually, that I would be able to figure out enough not to get lost and so I could relax and not worry about details. And not worrying about the details freed me up to enjoy the intelligence, the cleverness, the humor, and the wisdom of that voice. It’s a voice that varies from section to section with each new situation and narrator, but the truth is, it’s mostly the same voice throughout, or maybe more accurately it’s the same sensibility. It’s a similar voice to what Wallace creates in his nonfiction, and if you like that voice, I’m guessing, you’ll like whatever Wallace writes.

I was surprised to find so much wisdom in this book, and so much heart. Before I began reading I thought it was going to be a dry, detached, ironic kind of book, the kind that’s all about thinking and not about feeling. I’ve heard people criticize this book for being cold, and I’m pretty sure we didn’t read the same book, because that’s just not true. The book is incredibly funny, it’s overflowing with linguistic inventiveness, it has so much energy it feels like it’s bursting at the seams, it’s hyperactive and show-offy, its sentences can go on and on, and it has odd quirks like Wallace’s use of the word “like” throughout the whole book pretty much no matter who the narrator is or what the level of formality is. But it also made me tear up, and I cared about the characters, more than I usually care about characters in fact.

So, I’ll try to get more specific. I thought it was wise about how difficult it is to live in one’s own head and how hard it is to communicate genuinely with other people. And it was wise about how easily we get into the habit of running away from everything that is difficult and painful and instead turn to diversions, whether they be drugs or alcohol or sports or sex or endlessly-entertaining movies or whatever. In this novel, it’s mostly drugs and alcohol. And it was wise about just how hard it is to overcome addictions and that overcoming addictions means facing those difficult things we were running from in the first place. And also about the incredible variety of ways people are hurting and hurt and damaged and deformed, so much so that pretty much nobody is whole and perfect, and everybody is trying to recover from something.

So what is the book about? I don’t think I’ll spend much time describing that because what it’s about is just so random and, frankly, doesn’t sound all that interesting. It’s got one set of characters who are students at an elite tennis academy, and another set of characters who are residents of a drug and alcohol addiction halfway house, and another set of characters who are involved in political intrigue. It’s set in our time, roughly, but in a world different from our own, with slightly different technology and wildly different political structures. You’ll recognize the world, but it’s not ours.

I’m afraid that people may be too easily intimidated by this book. Yes, it’s long and challenging, but it’s very readable, and while it does throw a whole bunch of characters and scenes at you right at the beginning and you have to orient yourself a bunch of times to new situations, it does settle down eventually and you begin to sort out who is who and what the main storylines are. I think if you are at all tempted to read this book, you should, and if you aren’t sure, then you might try Wallace’s nonfiction and see if you like that. You might try Wallace’s 2005 graduation speech given to Kenyon College, which I think is really wonderful and which gives you an idea of why I think he’s a wise writer.

And now I’m glad I have more of Wallace’s writing available to read; at this point I’ve only read one novel and one nonfiction collection and a couple things online, so there is much more to look forward to.

I’m SO close to finishing Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone that I will have no trouble finishing it tonight before I drop off to sleep. My mystery book group is discussing the book tomorrow, so I’m finishing it just in time. I believe this will be the third time I’ve read the novel. I think I read it first as a teenager, grabbing it off my dad’s shelf of classics. I read it again sometime in my twenties probably, just for the fun of it. This time around, it was my pick for the book group; we had been talking about the possibility of reading it for a while, so I decided that it was finally time. I think many people in the group had already read it, so it will be a reread for a lot of us. I’m looking forward to hearing what other people thought.

My memories of my previous experiences reading The Moonstone are a little vague (I wasn’t blogging back then and so don’t have a record — alas), but I do recall enjoying the book’s multiple perspectives a lot. In fact, that’s what struck me most strongly during my first reading, and I remember thinking that I wanted to read other books with similar structures and that that structure would probably remain a favorite of mine, which it has. If you haven’t read it, The Moonstone has multiple narrators who pick up the thread of the story when they have something important to contribute. These narrators often respond to each other and disagree with each other. The first two narrators are particularly entertaining, as they are strong characters with amusing quirks who happen to dislike each other severely, and it’s funny when they tell you not to believe a word of what the other says. I also like how these multiple narrators allow you to see many of the characters both inside and outside. We get to hear Gabriel Betteredge, the first narrator, explaining how important Robinson Crusoe is to him, which he does with such enthusiasm we almost come to agree with him and go look for a copy of the novel ourselves, and we also get to see a different character completely bewildered at the fact that Betteredge is pushing Defoe at him as a source of wisdom on par with the Bible. It’s all a lot of fun.

I enjoyed the multiple narrators this time around too, but I noticed Collins’s wonderful sense of humor even more. His characters are just so entertaining. There’s Betteredge with his Crusoe obsession, his digressions, his strong opinions, his dignity combined with his failure to notice or to comment when Franklin Blake treats him rudely. And there’s Miss Clack with her tracts and intrusiveness and insatiable curiousity disguised as piety. The scene when she watches from behind the curtains as Rachel and Godfrey Ablewhite get engaged, watching while pretending not to, is classic comedy.

I’m not entirely sure I want to read this book again; perhaps I’ll change my mind, but I feel right now as though I’ve gotten what I can out of it, and I’d like to move on and read other Wilkie Collins novels. But three good experiences reading any novel is a pretty good record, I think.