Monthly Archives: January 2010

Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper was an enjoyable book in moments and a puzzling book in others; it’s one of those books I can’t quite figure out how to respond to, and I’m not sure another reading would help. There’s a lot I liked in the book, but what puzzles me about it is that given the books that appeal to me most, I should love this one, and it turns out I don’t, quite.

I admire its form and structure most; it’s the kind of novel where not much happens and instead we have someone sharing her thoughts with us the entire way through. The main character is called Pompey, and she writes in a way that seems spontaneous, telling us whatever is on her mind at the moment. We hear about her job — she works as a secretary for a certain Sir Phoebus —  her love affairs, her friends, her family — especially her aunt, the “Lion of Hull” — and her thoughts about society, literature, and politics.

Basically, there is no form or structure (as far as I can tell), and instead it’s a loose-flowing stream-of-consciousness monologue. Novel on Yellow Paper reminds me most of Nicholson Baker’s novel The Anthologist, where there is a structure and plot, but these are so basic they hardly count and the real point of the book is the voice. The pleasure of the book comes from listening to the main character share his thoughts. That’s what we’re offered in Smith’s book — a chance to get inside the main character’s head a little bit.

However, now that I think about it a little more, I’m not sure how much we do get inside Pompey’s head. It’s feels a little more like she uses words to charm and entertain us and to tell us about herself, but in such a way that she hides as much as she reveals. Words are as much a shield for her true self, or a cloud in which to hide, as a way to reveal herself.

She certainly is amusing and charming, and she has funny quirks that make her voice very distinctive. This passage illustrates her use of repetition and rhythm and also shows how frank and open she can be (or appear to be):

Oh how I enjoy sex and oh how I enjoy it. There have been many funny things about sex in my life that have made me laugh and so now I will tell you.

There was once a woman called Miss Hogmanimy. That was certainly a queer name. That was a name you would certainly want to get married out of. But this woman was very queer and wrought up over babies and the way babies are born, and she gave up her whole life going round giving free lectures on how babies are born. And it certainly was queer how ecstatic she got about this way how babies are born, and always she was giving lectures to young girls of school or school-leaving age. And all the time it was mixed up in a way I don’t just remember with not drinking, not drinking alcohol, but just carrying on ginger beer, kola and popgass. And so well this Miss Hogmanimy she got up in our school, now I think it was our school, chapel and so there she was in this school chapel, giving a lecture with illustrating slides to young girls on how babies are born …

…to listen to Miss Hogmanimy you’d think just knowing straight out how babies was born was to solve all the problems of adolescence right off. You’d come out straight and simple and full of hearty fellowship and right thinking if you just got it clear once and for all how babies are born. There’d be no more coming out in spots and getting self-conscious about the senior prefect, nor getting a crush on the English mistress, nor feeling proud and miserable like you do at that time, before you get grown up. There’d be none of this at all if you just knew how babies are born. So there she was.

Pompey is great at this kind of amusing light satire. There is a wonderful section on women’s fiction where she describes the typical “Fiction for the Married Woman,” which is all about learning to be happy with housewifely duties. The section is funny, but there is anger underneath the light surface. She decides that describing fiction for the unmarried woman is just too painful:

I cannot tell you about the stories for unmarried girls, the ones that are so cleverly and coyly oh. And they are so bright and smiling and full of pretty ideas that are all the time leading up to washing-up. You will know how they go but I cannot tell you. I am already feeling: No, I should not have said all this. It is the ugliest thing that could ever have been conceived, because it is also so trivial, so full of the negation of human intelligence, that should be so quick and so swift and so glancing, and so proud. And you Reader, whom I have held by the wrist and forced to listen, I am full of regret for you, because I have forced you to listen to this.

As I type out these passages, I’m thinking about how much I like them and how much I liked quite a few sections of the book. The phrase “so full of the negation of human intelligence” is just great, as is the apology to the reader (I wrote about another great section here).

The problem is that in between these sections I felt impatient and occasionally irritated. I couldn’t follow the way her mind worked very well, and the picture of who Pompey is and what her life is like remained hazy. I wanted a more coherent picture to come together, even if that took a while. I love voice-driven novels where plot is not the focus, but I think I need just a bit more coherence, direction, and forward-movement than I got here.

I also just don’t know anybody who talks like Pompey does or who thinks like she does, and I found her a little hard to believe. I suspect, to be really simple and non-literary-critical about things, that Pompey and I probably wouldn’t be friends. With this kind of novel, I want to be able to imagine having a conversation with the main character, and I’m having trouble imagining it here.

So, to sum up, it’s an original, puzzling, strange, frustratingly quirky book I would have loved to love.

You can read other posts on the novel here and join in the discussion at the forums here.

Today was the first day of classes for me, and I’m still reeling from the day. The first day of classes is never difficult — just introductions and going over the syllabus and maybe an activity or exercise or something — but it’s always a shock to be back in school again. I suppose it didn’t help much that I went on a 50-mile bike ride before heading off to class. That’s maybe not the best way to get myself ready. But it was so much fun. I went with Hobgoblin and one other friend, and we stopped to get cupcakes halfway through the ride, and the whole thing was lovely.

But on to books … my mystery book group met last Saturday to discuss Raymond Chandler’s novel Farewell, My Lovely, and it was a great meeting, as usual. I was glad to read Chandler this time around because he’s such an important figure in the genre and someone I hadn’t yet read. We had already read a number of books you might call hard-boiled — Dashiell Hammett, Chester Himes, Cornell Woolrich — and it was time we got to Chandler.

I thoroughly enjoyed the novel and finished it feeling that I’d like to read Chandler again soon (although, of course, it probably won’t happen, given everything else I want to read soon). The funny thing is that this is SO not the kind of book I like. It’s plot-driven, first of all, and without much in the way of character analysis or direct discussion of ideas, and also without any complex, non-stereotypical female characters (well, arguably — there’s one who might count). It’s very stereotypically male and violent.

But still, it’s nice to read something different from the kind of thing I usually like. I won’t even try to tell you much about the plot, as that would be way too complicated. Basically, the main character Philip Marlowe follows a strange-looking, very, very large man into a bar, just because the situation looks interesting, and mayhem and murder ensue. In the course of investigating the violence — Marlowe isn’t actually hired to do this, but he doesn’t seem to have much else going on — he gets himself into a whole mess of trouble. He is attacked, drugged, warned away by the police, seduced (well, seduction is attempted, at least), attacked again, and attacked again.

The great thing about Marlowe is that he just keeps going. I think it’s his character and especially the way his character is portrayed through the first-person narration that I enjoyed so much about the book. There’s a bitterness and anger about how messed up the world is that keeps him going — that and the fact that he has to make a living somehow, although surely there are safer ways? As a private detective, though, he can work on his own, make his own rules, take the cases he wants, and look into things he wants to even if no one has hired him to do it. There’s a jaded, world-weariness about him, along with cleverness and surly quick-wittedness that seem to mask an inner, very well-hidden sentimental side. Why else would he put himself at risk for such an uncertain, ill-paid job, if he didn’t believe in the work, somehow, and think that what he is doing is worthwhile? Or maybe it’s just that he’d be bored otherwise. Or maybe he likes the danger and the excitement of it. There’s something mysterious about his motivation, and that mysteriousness is part of the appeal.

The other great thing about the book is the writing. Chandler gets the tone exactly right — lyrically bitter. He’s especially good with metaphor and simile:

I sat there and puffed my pipe and listened to the clacking typewriter behind the wall of my office and the bong-bong of the traffic lights changing on Hollywood Boulevard and spring rustling in the air, like a paper bag blowing along a concrete sidewalk….

I looked at my watch once more. It was more than time for lunch. My stomach burned from the last drink. I wasn’t hungry. I lit a cigarette. It tasted like a plumber’s handkerchief….

A girl passing me on the way from the elevators back to her work turned and gave me one of those looks which are supposed to make your spine feel like a run in a stocking.

He also has a great sense of humor, and I laughed out loud at a lot of passages. Here’s how one chapter opens:

I was sitting on the side of my bed in my pajamas, thinking about getting up, but not yet committed. I didn’t feel very well, but I didn’t feel as sick as I ought to, not as sick as I would feel if I had a salaried job. My head hurt and felt large and hot and my tongue was dry and had gravel on it and my throat was stiff and my jaw was not untender. But I had had worse mornings.

It was a gray morning with high fog, not yet warm but likely to be. I heaved up off the bed and rubbed the pit of my stomach where it was sore from vomiting. My left foot felt fine. It didn’t have an ache in it. So I had to kick the corner of the bed with it.

There’s something exhilarating about the language in the book — exhilarating as Marlowe’s adventures are, maybe. It’s such a pleasure listening to him wise-crack and swagger in such wonderfully poetic language.

First of all, check out the new Diversify Your Reading blog, a “a clearinghouse of blog reviews of books by authors underrepresented in English-language publishing today.” There are lists of authors and books from around the world with links to the blogs that reviewed them. You are welcome and encouraged to add links to your own reviews on the site. I just added a bunch of links today. I think it’s a great idea for a blog and a wonderful place to find out about books from a whole range of authors.

I want to write a review of Raymond Chandler’s novel Farewell, My Lovely and write about last night’s mystery book group meeting, but for tonight, I think I’ll post a long passage from Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper, which is the next Slaves of Golconda read (discussion to begin on January 31st).

I’m not entirely sure what I think about the novel, but it does have some utterly charming passages. This is one where the narrator talks about what kind of novel she is writing, and I’m a sucker for this kind of metafictional approach.

But first, Reader, I will give you a word of warning. This is a foot-off-the-ground novel that came by the left hand. And the thoughts come and go and sometimes they do not quite come and I do not pursue them to embarrass them with formality to pursue them into a harsh captivity. And if you are a foot-off-the-ground person I make no bones to say that is how you will write and only how you will write. And if you are a foot-on-the-ground person, this book will be for you a desert of weariness and exasperation. So put it down. Leave it alone. It was a mistake you made to get this book. You could not know.

And it is not to be proud I say: I am a foot-off-the-ground person; or to be superior that I say: Foot-on-the-ground person — Keep out. It is to save you an exasperation and weariness that have now already hardly brought you to this early page.

But if you do not know whether you are a foot-off-the-ground person or a foot-on-the-ground person, then I say, Come on. Come on with me, and find out.

And for my part I will try to punctuate this book to make it easy for you to read, and to break it up, with spaces for a pause, as the publisher has asked me to do. But this I find very extremely difficult.

For this book is the talking voice that runs on, and the thoughts come, the way I said, and the people come too, and come and go, to illustrate the thoughts, to point the moral, to adorn the tale.

Oh talking voice that is so sweet, how hold you alive in captivity, how point you with commas, semi-colons, dashes, pauses and paragraphs?

Foot-on-the-ground person will have his grave grave doubts, and if he is also a smug-pug he will not keep his doubts to himself; he will say: It is not, and it cannot come to good. And I shall say, yes, it is and shall. And he will say: So you think you can do this, so you do, do you?

Yes I do, I do.

That is my final word to smug-pug. You all now have been warned.

I appreciate an author who warns me about what I will find in the book I’m about to read. As for being a foot-on-or-off-the-ground kind of person, I don’t really know what I am, so I’m coming along to find out.

I didn’t love Miklós Vámos’s novel The Book of Fathers (I received a review copy from the publisher), but I admired it and felt like I learned something from it. It’s the kind of novel that can tell you so much about a culture and a country and how it changed over the course of centuries. It opens in the early eighteenth-century, and tells the story of the Csillag family who live in Hungary, although various family members move elsewhere temporarily. We hear first about Kornél Csillag, whose grandfather returned to Hungary from Germany and brought him along. What they find on their return, though, is a village under threat of violence, and soon that violence overtakes them. What follows is a harrowing tale.

But this is only the first chapter. The novel has an interesting structure: each chapter tells the story of a new generation of Csillags (or Sternovskys, Sterns, or Berda-Sterns, as the family is variously known through the years). The story gets passed down from father to son through twelve generations that bring us up to the present day. So as the family story is told, the country’s story is told too, and it’s a story full of war, uncertainty, and change. The family fortunes rise and fall; there are gamblers, singers, actors, businessmen. At times they have money and at other times they have nothing. Most of the time, the father dies young and violently, sometimes never knowing his son.

All this is very well done; it’s interesting to see how the fate of the country and the family intertwine. Although the Csillag family is not initially Jewish, one of the descendents marries a Jewish woman and converts, and from that point on, the history of the family becomes partly a history of Jewish persecution, on up to the Holocaust and beyond.

The Csillags are at typical family in a lot of ways, but they share an unusual characteristic: each father passes down to his son the ability to see the past and sometimes to see the future. The Csillag sons see visions during significant times or times of stress, visions that turn out to be glimpses into the lives of their fathers. Some of them inherit the whole body of knowledge their ancestors possessed and are able to sing songs and speak languages no one had taught them (no one living, that is). Others have visions of their future, which in some cases causes trouble, as knowing what will happen to them affects the choices they make. This special insight is as much a burden as anything else; the visions of the past and future they see are often troubling. These men do not lead easy lives.

The Csillag fathers also passes down a book — the Book of Fathers — to their sons. Each generation makes its own contribution to the family saga, writing down events, thoughts, and feelings, and the history of this book — eventually becoming multiple volumes — is as varied as the history of the people who write in it.

There was much to admire in the book, but I did find that once I figured out the structure and got into the rhythm of the story, it got somewhat repetitive. The events within each generation varied, but the overall structure of one generation moving on to the next stayed the same, and it was sometimes hard to care about what happened to each character, as I knew I would be reading about him for only one chapter. I prefer the kind of story that takes more time to develop each character and allows me some space to come to know the characters well. This isn’t necessarily a flaw in the book; it’s just that it sets out to do something different than what I most enjoy. This is a book about history and ideas, not so much about depth of character or plot. If you know and accept that going in, there’s a lot to enjoy in the book.

Those of you who read this blog regularly will know that I am a huge Nicholson Baker fan and that I loved The Anthologist enough to read it twice, one time right after the other. During the first reading I got caught up in the flow of the narrator’s thoughts and read quickly to the book’s end. But this is the kind of book I like to linger over to enjoy the ideas and the language, and so as I was zipping along during the first reading, I promised myself I’d read it again, this time more slowly, to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I enjoyed the second reading just as much as the first.

Baker tends to write books that focus on capturing a character’s thoughts, and they often cover a very short period of time, for example the time it takes for the narrator to ride an escalator from one floor to another in The Mezzanine. That book covers a whole lot more than the escalator ride, moving back in time to tell stories and explain ideas, but still the present action of the novel is very short. The Anthologist is another novel about a character’s thoughts, but it covers a longer period of time and has something you might call a plot, or something that borders on it at least. Things happen and there is a bit of narrative tension.

But those things are mostly beside the point (to the extent that the wrapping-up at the end feels perfunctory, almost an ironic, knowing nod to the idea of plot). What really matters is what is going on the narrator’s mind. That narrator is Paul Chowder, a poet who has had some success in his life — he’s published some poems in magazines and has several books out — but now he’s faltering. He’s putting together an anthology of poetry to be called Only Rhyme, the idea being that rhyming poetry is poised to make a come-back, and he now has to write the introduction. But he finds he can’t write it. It just won’t happen.

This means his editor is calling him regularly, sounding more and more ominous each time, but more importantly it has also meant that his girlfriend, Roz, has left him. She has decided that he is just too helpless, too silly, too disappointing, too foolish for not writing that stupid introduction, and she is also unhappy that Paul can’t manage money and doesn’t earn much and then wastes time getting all angsty about writing the introduction instead of sitting down and writing it. I’ll admit I have some sympathy for Roz — and I can also see why she fell for Paul in the first place. He is an utterly charming man who is probably both delightful and difficult to live with.

The book itself is a record of Paul’s thoughts as he tries to write the introduction and as he contemplates how to get Roz back. He thinks about a whole lot of things, and his thoughts sometimes wander rapidly from one thing to the next, often without much of a transition. It’s an attempt to mimic the way the mind works, and it captures perfectly the way thoughts will pop up suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, and the way the mind will keep returning to particular ideas again and again, even if we don’t want it to.

Paul thinks a lot about poetry, obviously, and he tells us what kind of poetry he likes, his history of reading poetry, the kind of poetry he writes (these days it’s free verse, even though he prefers poetry that rhymes), his tricks for getting poetry written, his favorite poetry anthologies, and his theories about why rhyme matters and how rhythm works. He’s convinced that poets and scholars get it all wrong when they say that iambic pentameter is the most natural rhythm for the English language, arguing instead for the importance of the four-beat line, and he explains his point in language that’s clear and funny. He hates teaching, but the way he explains his ideas makes it clear he could be an excellent teacher if he wanted to.

He also thinks about Roz, of course, and the upcoming poetry conference where he will give a talk (which he dreads doing), the process of cleaning out his office, the interactions he has with his neighbors, and anything else that will fill the space Roz has left and that he can’t seem to fill with his work. What keeps this from getting dull — who wants to hear about someone trying to clean out his office after all? — is the absolute honesty with which he records the path his thoughts take, and his wonderful sense of humor.

Here’s a taste of what his voice is like:

People are going to feed you all kinds of oyster crackers about iambic pentameter. They’re going to say, Oh ho ho, iambic pentameter! The centrality of the five-stress line! Because “pent” is five in Babylonian, and five is the number of fingers on your hand, and five is the number of slices of American cheese you can eat in one sitting. They’re going to talk to you about Chaucer and about blank verse — another confusing term — and all this so-called prosody they’re going to shovel at you. And sure — fine — you can handle it. you’re up to whatever mind-forged shrivelments they’re going to dish out that day. But just remember (a) that the word “prosody” isn’t an appealing word, and (b) that pentameter came later on. Pentameter is secondary. Pentameter is an import from France. And French is a whole different language. The real basis of English poetry is this walking rhythm right here.

Woops — dropped my Sharpie.

Right here: One — two — three — four. “Plumskin, ploshkin, Pelican jill. We think so then, we thought so still.” I think that was the very first poem I heard, “The Pelican Chorus,” by Edward Lear. My mom read it to me. God, it was beautiful. Still is. Those singing pelicans. They slapped their feet around on those long bare islands of yellow sand, and they swapped their verb tenses so that then was still and still was then. They were the first to give me the shudder, the shiver, the grieving joy of true poetry — the feeling that something wasn’t right, but it was all right that it wasn’t right. In fact it was better than if it had been right.

I don’t know about you, but that makes me want to go read some poetry.

I have no idea if Baker writes poetry himself (one would think so reading this book, but who knows), but his use of language is marvelously inventive and fun. Another passage — Paul is talking about old magazines that published poetry “back in the day”:

The magazine is going to have some kind of big thoughtful piece about Teddy Roosevelt, say, and then it’s going to have a bit of serialized fiction, and it’s going to have some “cuts” — that is, some art — and a few color pages tipped in, maybe, if it’s The Century magazine, maybe by Maxfield Parrish, and it’s going to have some poems. The long nonficton piece comes to an end, and it’s about being a stevedore in Baltimore, something like that. And then at the bottom of the page is this poem in two columns, with six stanzas, and each stanza has indentations, and the conventionality and vapidity of it will stun you. “The shades of summer’s bosky hue, o’erlie thy modest floobie doo.” The editors of The Century didn’t expect you to read that poem with your full mind. They knew it was just some rhymes thrown pell-mell together with some cornstarch. They knew full well, because this is America, land of bad poetry. Yes, sir! Bad poetry, sir! Loads of it in the back, sir! Just keeps coming. Tipped in. The shovel eases the soft tonnage of poetry over the rim, and it just pours into the pit, pluth. The pit of what has been said. And the lost gulls are flapping and calling — peer! peer!

And yet we still want more. There’s still that craving. Give us more, give us new. The hope. The hope that really does: it springs eternal. “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.” That’s clean crisp iambic pentameter. And I have some tips to pass on to you about iambic pentameter, how it’s all a misnomer, as I said. But that’s for later.

Sorry about the long passages. I just get caught up in the flow of the words, and I don’t want to stop …

I’m a poetry fan, so I’m not entirely sure about this, but I think that non-poetry fans would enjoy this book as well. There is an awful lot of poetry talk, but the narrator makes everything clear, and I’d guess he might inspire some non-poetry fans to give poetry a try.

I’m entirely uncertain what to think of Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories. There were moments I enjoyed it and moments it left me deeply troubled. The troubling moments were partly aesthetic — there were times, especially near the end, when I found what happened to the characters so unconvincing I laughed — and partly about subject matter I didn’t like. I’m not sure if I can hold this against the book or not, although I would like to.

The subject matter I didn’t like had to do with the way women in the book are constantly under threat and are victims of violence, and the way the men freak out about this to such an extent that one has fantasies of sending his daughter away to a convent. Now, a book that takes up the theme of violence against women sounds interesting to me, but in this case, the picture Atkinson creates is one that is so dark, it felt less like an exploration of the subject and more like a warning — a warning I don’t particularly want to hear.

Okay, but to back up a bit, this book is a mystery, although it’s marketed as literary fiction with mystery elements in it — a ridiculous distinction, really. It has an interesting structure, and Atkinson handles the plotting well. My uncertainties about this book aside, I found the story compelling the whole way through. It starts off with three different “case histories”: descriptions of crimes including kidnapping and murder. Then we are introduced to the detective, Jackson, a private investigator who spends a good deal of his professional time looking for lost cats. As is typical in mystery novels, Jackson has a troubled personal life; his wife has just left him for another man and he tries to spend as much time as he can with his daughter, but he worries he is losing influence over her.

Eventually he finds himself caught up in the three cases. All of the crimes happened years in the past, but in each case something has happened to inspire the survivors to want to look into it again. The police were unable to solve the crime in all three cases and Jackson has serious doubts he will be able to solve them himself, but he has been hired to do a job, and so he tries.

In the course of following Jackson’s investigations, the novel switches point of view frequently, moving from Jackson’s perspective to that of the various survivors. At first this rapid switching from story to story was distracting, but eventually it’s possible to settle into each of the plot lines and begin to enjoy each one. Atkinson does a good job of giving each story its due, and they all feel equally well developed. This doesn’t strike me as an easy feat, and I admire Atkinson for pulling it off, except for those moments where, as I mentioned above, events seemed contrived and I found myself jolted out of the story by some development that didn’t strike me as true.

Jackson is an entertaining detective, but I couldn’t help but feel that he is a rather pale imitation of Rebus from the Ian Rankin novels and of other detectives in other mysteries. The usual elements are there — the troubled love life, the complicated past, the tendency to get beat up regularly, the sardonic view of the world. Jackson spends a lot of time listening to female country music singers — Emmy Lou Harris, Gillian Welch — and this felt like an overly-easy shorthand method of characterization.

So, again, I don’t quite know what to think. At times I was entertained, at times I was irritated, and at times I thought the world Atkinson was painting was a much darker one than what I am willing to accept. I generally don’t have a problem with darkness at all, but here it didn’t seem genuine. It’s not as though all the men are aggressors and the women victims — in fact, one of the cases is about a woman who murders her husband. It’s more that we are reminded again and again that although women can commit acts of violence just as men can, they are still and always uniquely vulnerable and need to be eternally vigilant (and need men to be eternally vigilant in protection of them). That’s not an idea I’m willing to accept.