Category Archives: Books

I was struck by a passage in The Recognitions about art and religion (p. 34 in the Penguin edition).  Can you imagine if you were a child and took your first drawing to your aunt with whom you live and who is doing most of the work to raise you, only to get this response?

Don’t you love your Lord Jesus, after all? … Then why do you try to take His place?  Our Lord is the only true creator, and only sinful people try to emulate Him … Do you remember Lucifer? … Lucifer was the archangel who refused to serve Our Lord.  To sin is to falsify something in the Divine Order, and that is what Lucifer did.  His name means Bringer of Light but he was not satisfied to bring the light of Our Lord to man. He tried to become original … original, to steal Our Lord’s authority, to command his own destiny, to bear his own light!  That is why Satan is the Fallen Angel, for he rebelled when he tried to emulate Our Lord Jesus. And he won his own domain, didn’t he.  Didn’t he!  And his own light is the light of the fires of Hell!  Is that what you want?  Is that what you want?  Is that what you want?

It’s astounding that poor Wyatt went on to draw anything at all ever again, but he did, burying his drawings in the back yard and feeling terrible guilt over it, doing it in spite of terror at his own damnation.

The religious argument is astounding as well (not to mention the level of the aunt’s fury) — that it’s sinful to try to be original and creative because that is the same thing as trying to take God’s place. It puts one on the same level as Lucifer and condemns one to hell.  I have had many quarrels with the religion of my youth, but this, fortunately, wasn’t one of them; I was taught not that creativity is an attempt to take God’s place but that creativity is one of the ways that we are made in the image of God and by exercising our creativity, we are expressing our true natures and following in God’s footsteps, in a respectful, loving way, not a proud, ambitious way.  How much nicer this idea is!

I’m very curious to see just how poor Wyatt, who will grow up to become an artist, is going to deal with this legacy of guilt about the very thing he will spend his life doing.  Surely the words “Is that what you want?” must have been lurking in the back of his mind for years afterwards.

Cross-posted here.

I am an entire 26 pages into Gaddis’s 950-page novel, and I thought I’d let you know how it’s going so far.  So far, so good.  I can tell it will be a slow read, but that’s okay — slow reading seems to be the thing these days anyway.  The story (as much of it as I’ve gleaned) is interesting, and while the writing can be dense — or maybe I should say that it can shift registers in a way that’s mildly disorienting — it’s enjoyable and entertaining.

I’m especially intrigued by how saturated in religious themes the book is.  You have the Reverend Gwyon who travels with his wife Camilla from America to Europe and poor Camilla dies on the way, leaving very strictly Protestant American relatives outraged that Gwyon is not bringing her body home.  Instead, he comes back with Catholic relics and icons (and also a Barbary ape) after having Camilla buried in a ceremony that would have shocked the relatives more than they could have handled, if they had known about it.  Gaddis’s description of these Christians is delicious:

Anything pleasurable could be counted upon to be, if not categorically evil, then worse, a waste of time.  Sentimental virtues had long been rooted out of their systems.  They did not regard the poor as necessarily God’s friends.  Poor in spirit was quite another thing.  Hard work was the expression of gratitude He wanted, and, as things are arranged, money might be expected to acrue as incidental testimonial.

Yes, that’s one form of American protestantism, all right.  As I understand it, the story is really about Reverend Gwyon’s son Wyatt, who at the age of four is already “finding the Christian system suspect.”  I’m curious to find out how he will respond to these religious roots.

I’m very grateful to Litlove for posting about the annotations to the novel.  Already I have made use of them and found out useful information like the fact that Gaddis doesn’t know how he would pronounce the name “Gwyon”; when asked, he said he doesn’t know because he had never said the name out loud (I find that hard to believe — surely he had to be saying it in his head all the time?).  The annotator says that the name should probably “be pronounced as one syllable, like ‘Gwynne,’ its modern form.”  I was relieved to hear that advice because a two-syllable “Gwy-on” doesn’t work very well.

But more seriously, the site has wonderful notes on all the references and also a plot synopsis that I’m sure will come in handy.  As a matter of fact, I feel a little ambivalent about using the plot synopsis regularly.  On the one hand, I’d prefer just to deal with the text directly and not depend on something like a plot summary to help me through any rough spots (the annotations are another matter — they are just footnotes in a different form).  On the other hand, I’m sure a plot synopsis will come in handy somewhere down the road when I’ve forgotten characters and events from earlier in the novel.  I think I will give up on the idea of having some kind of pure encounter with the text and gratefully use all the help I can get.

Cross-posted at Reading Gaddis.

Brian Lynch’s novel The Winner of Sorrow (kindly sent to me as an ARC from Dalkey Archive Press) was originally published in 2005 in Ireland, and is now going to be released in the U.S. this coming February. It’s a fictional retelling of the life of William Cowper (pronounced Cooper), an eighteenth-century British poet.  My studies in the field never took me very far into Cowper’s work, so I came to this novel ready to learn more about the poet and his times, which I did, and I also found a very enjoyable novel, all personal interest in the eighteenth century aside.

Cowper doesn’t get read a lot today, but he was influential and popular in his time and afterward (Jane Austen quoted him in several novels) and in a lot of ways he’s a typically Romantic figure — the poetic genius suffering from depression and teetering on the edge of madness.  In other ways, he’s not at all: he was a devout evanglical and wrote many hymns.  He lived from 1731-1800 and so is solidly an eighteenth-century writer, but many of his interests and preoccupations were picked up by later Romantic writers (a love of nature and animals in particular).

Lynch does a good job of squeezing an entire life into a novel that’s around 360 pages; he begins with Cowper as a old man suffering from insanity, and then he shifts back and forth between old Cowper and young Cowper, eventually settling into the story of the younger man and moving us forward in time.  These shifts require some careful attention, and in fact the novel is full of jumps in time of various sorts without a whole lot of connecting material, but these jumps help you see connections among the various episodes in his life.

In Lynch’s telling, Cowper’s life was shaped by a few important events, including the early death of his mother and his sexual impotence.  In 1763 when he was 32, he had a mental breakdown, attempted suicide several times, and was sent to an asylum to recover.  Afterwards, he settled with the Unwin family and spent much of the rest of his life with Mary Unwin, whose husband died early, leaving the two of them to form a socially suspicious alliance that never quite ended in marriage.  Mary Unwin, according to Lynch, was a mix of the long-lost mother figure and the forbidden bride, a version of the cousin Cowper was once engaged to but couldn’t quite marry either.  Unwin was fiercely loyal to Cowper, longing for a more passionate relationship with him but making do with the affection he was able to offer.  She did her best to fend off the other women who were drawn to Cowper, including a Lady Anna Austen and Lady Hesketh, sister of the beloved cousin.  There was clearly something powerfully attractive about Cowper, because in spite of his depressive tendencies and his complex relationships, he was surrounded by people who desperately wanted to be a part of his life.

As you can see, Cowper is a psychoanalyst’s dream, but Lynch never beats you over the head with facile explanations or easy conclusions.  He also recreates a feeling of the time without going overboard with period detail; this is historical fiction, but it doesn’t feel like a lot of the historical novels I’ve read that pack the detail in to make sure you smell every authentic smell.  Rather, you get a sense of the time from the characters themselves — their thoughts and conversations and letters.  You can tell that Lynch is a poet himself from the way the writing is spare and beautiful, capable of communicating so much in a small space.  He leaves room for you to make connections and put ideas together.  The novel tends to work through juxtaposition; its short chapters ask readers to situate themselves in the story again and again, without providing much to ease the transition into a new scene with new characters.  This can be jarring, but it’s also exhilarating — this is a novel that asks something of the reader but has much to offer too.

I’m never going to be a huge, huge Trollope fan — George Eliot will probably always remain my favorite Victorian novelist — but I’m very glad there are all those Trollope novels out there for when I’m in the mood for a good long story.  Sometimes I want nothing more than to immerse myself in a novel that will take two or three weeks to read, and it’s just fine that that novel isn’t written by my favorite Victorian novelist.  Too much George Eliot could weigh a person down after a while.

As I think about The Eustace Diamonds, I’m struck by how much it had to say about the darker side of human nature.  There aren’t many characters worthy of admiration, and those who are worthy of admiration are dull.  Lucy Morris is an absolutely angelic character, of the sort you see a lot in eighteenth-century novels where having an angelic heroine was practically a requirement — for respectable novelists at least — but Lucy is by no means the center of attention.  She is a foil for the more complicated female characters and a plot device that highlights the foolishness of her love interest, but she is hardly interesting in and of herself.

The true center of the novel is Lizzy Eustace, a young woman who, the narrator makes clear, should never, ever be trusted.  She is beautiful and charming, but she tells lies and manipulates people and deceives even herself.  Her husband, Sir Florian Eustace, has died, leaving her in possession of the extremely valuable Eustace diamonds.  The Eustace family says that the diamonds belong to the family as an heirloom and they would now like them back, but Lizzy doesn’t want to return them, and so she claims, falsely, that her husband gave them to her as a gift.  When she learns that he bequeathed her everything in his home in Scotland, she claims, again falsely, that he gave them to her while they were in Scotland and so they are part of her inheritance.

And thus begins a struggle between Lizzy and the Eustace family lawyer that will take up the rest of the book.  In one extraordinary scene, Lizzy travels to London carrying the diamonds in a heavy, cumbersome safe.  While she and her traveling party are staying overnight in a hotel, the safe is stolen, but what Lizzy doesn’t tell anybody is that she had taken the diamonds out of the safe and hidden them under her pillow.  At first her reasons for keeping this secret are relatively innocent — she is initially confused and then she feels silly for carrying around an empty safe — but she quickly realizes that she might benefit by making people believe that her diamonds had been stolen.  This might be a way to win the battle with the Eustace family.  So she keeps her secret and her deceptions become worse and worse.

Lizzy’s deceitfulness is only the worst example of flawed humanity in a book that’s full of such examples.  Lizzy’s so-called friends take advantage of her as much as she takes advantage of them.  Lucy Morris’s lover finds himself almost irresistably drawn toward Lizzy and is in danger of betraying the woman he has asked to be his wife.  And in one of the novel’s most interesting subplots, a penniless young woman who would like nothing more than to never marry anyone ever, is pushed and threatened and badgered into an engagement that drives her insane, literally.

In the world of this novel, unless you are an angel like Lucy, you are most likely hopefully foolish, heartlessly mercenary, or stupidly obedient to the dictates of a corrupt society.  There are hardly any happy marriages or true friends in this book.  Lucy Morris’s example only highlights everyone else’s corruption.

I prefer to think that the world is not as Trollope describes it, and that if people like Lucy don’t often exist, as least people like her lover, who does show signs that he can overcome his foolishness and selfishness, are common enough.  But I’m uneasily aware that I can be a little naïve.  I don’t want to become jaded and cynical, but The Eustace Diamonds is a good reminder that there are plenty of reasons to be a little mistrustful now and then.

I finished listening to P.G. Wodehouse’s novel Hot Water the other day and became further convinced that listening to a book is fundamentally different than reading it, because while I loved listening to this book, I’m not sure I would have liked it any other way.  Perhaps this is because Hot Water is not Wodehouse’s best — it doesn’t have Wooster and Jeeves — but I suspect that even at his best a little Wodehouse would go a long way for me in book form.  On audio, though, he’s highly entertaining and funny.

I won’t bother to tell you much about the plot, except that it contains two sets of lovers who are woefully mismatched, a group of scoundels and thieves, a group of aristocrats who are scoundrels and thieves, one aristocrat pretending to be a servant, and an assortment of servants, some of whom are not servants at all.  They all eventually descend upon a chateau in France, some in search of jewels to steal, others in search of an incriminating, blackmail-worthy letter, and others simply in search of fun.  It all culminates in a funny scene where some people get what they want, while others slink off in shame, and the lovers get themselves properly sorted out.

It’s all funny and satisfying and completely predictable.  You’ll find lots of clichés — the impossible-to-please father; the greedy social climber who is hiding a secret past; the high-minded, cultured, snooty young woman who is thoroughly dull; the young athletic American who can’t keep himself out of trouble; the hard-drinking brutish French aristocrat; the burgler with principles and delicate scruples.  In book form, all this might have irritated me, and I might have wondered why I was spending my time on it.  When I want light reading, I don’t usually go for this sort.  But it was perfect for listening to in the car.  Everything is funnier when I’m listening as opposed to reading it, and a brisk pace and lots of action is always good.

The quality of an audiobook usually comes down to the quality of the reader, and this reader was excellent — it was Jonathan Cecil, and he did a marvelous job with all the accents, which included not only various sorts of English people and a standard American accent, but also a Brooklyn accent and a number of different faked French accents.  It was fun just listening to him switch from voice to voice (which makes me wonder how exactly these things get put together — do they read it all straight through, do they do bits and pieces and splice them together, do they do one character’s lines at a time?).

I’m not sure if my library has any more Wodehouse, but if they do, I’ll probably be checking them out.

Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder was a bit of a puzzle for me; I felt lots of conflicting emotions as I read.  Underlying all of it was pleasure in the reading — let me make it clear that I enjoyed this book very much — but it was difficult to know what to make of it.  The book made me feel wonder and horror at the same time, if such a thing is possible, and also joy and disbelief and amazement, and I don’t know what else.  It was confusing, but in a good way.

But enough of generalities.  The book is about a man who has had something, we never learn what, fall from the sky and hit him.  When he comes to, he has lost his memory, and slowly regains only some of it.  He finds himself with £8.5 million as a settlement from the accident and now must figure out what he wants to do with it.  He has little idea until he has a vision of what might be a memory, although he’s never sure where the memory came from.  It’s a vision of an apartment building that comes to him with vivid details — the smell of liver cooking in the kitchen downstairs, the sound of a pianist practicing, the noise of a motorcyclist tinkering with his bike outside.  He now knows what he wants to do — recreate the vision exactly as he experienced it.  He buys a building, redesigns it from top to bottom, hires actors and buys props to fill the space, and then he relives the vision or the memory or whatever it was over and over and over again.

The problem he struggled with before he settled on this bizarre way of spending his money was that after the accident he began to realize just how inauthentic and unreal he had always felt, as though he weren’t really living out his life, but were an actor acting it.  He couldn’t really inhabit his body and his actions and the world around him but always lived at a remove from it.  He thinks about actors he has seen, Robert De Niro, for example, who can move around the world with complete unself-consciousness, doing what he is doing single-mindedly:

I’d always been inauthentic. Even before the accident, if I’d been walking down the street just like De Niro, smoking a cigarette like him, and even if it had lit first try, I’d still be thinking: Here I am, walking down the street, smoking a cigarette, like someone in a film.  See?  Second-hand.  The people in films aren’t thinking that.  They’re just doing their thing, real, not thinking anything.

His vision seems to rescue him, then, because in that vision he realizes he felt perfectly authentic.  It was a memory of a time he wasn’t distanced from himself, wasn’t hyper self-aware, and could just do what he was doing, without thought.  He thinks that if he can recreate the exact circumstances of that memory, he can recreate the experience of authenticity.

And he succeeds in doing this, at least for short periods of time.  He runs a reenactment of the vision again and again — which is a huge production, with a large staff to watch over all the details — living out one part of it and then another and another, lingering over brief moments and moving through them in slow motion.  He’s happy, at least for a while.  But then he moves on to another reenactment, and another and another, all in his quest to try to capture reality and live in it authentically.  Eventually these reenactments take him in some bizarre and deranged directions.

What was so puzzling about this book, causing all of my mixed emotions, is that I both admire this quest for authenticity and find it profoundly disturbing.  I think we all know what it’s like to feel inauthentic, to feel estranged from ourselves and as though we aren’t really living out life but are acting it out on a stage or with a narrator in our heads telling the story as we live it.  It’s a wonderful thing to be able simply to do something, without the self-awareness and without the narrator in our heads.

And yet this man is incredibly selfish and self-absorbed. He wants to lose himself in the moment, but to do so requires that he become even more wrapped up in himself.  Rather than do something useful with his money like donating to charity organizations, as another character suggests to him that he might, he spends massive amounts of money on buying buildings, creating sets, and hiring actors and staff to create his fantasies.  He loses the few friends he formerly had and comes to live in a bubble, surrounded only by those who will pander to his increasingly outrageous whims.

And losing himself in the moment to gain that elusive feeling of authenticity comes to mean losing himself in more profound ways — he starts to fall into trances that come to last for days, where he will simply stare at the wall or a spot on the ground and lose consciousness.  He starts to lose a sense of what it means to be a human being and what it means that other people exist, outside of his mind.

So as much as the idea of living without self-consciousness and self-awareness is intensely appealing, McCarthy seems to be saying that living with a sense of inauthenticity and distance from ourselves is part of what it means to be human.  The narrator never seems to realize that Robert De Niro, as much as he appears to be moving about with complete unselfconsciousness in his films, is an actor, and is intensely aware of what he is doing at every moment.  What he is doing is the opposite of living in the moment — he is pretending to live in the moment.  Losing that sense of inauthenticity is a hopeless dream that takes the narrator to nightmarish places.