Category Archives: Books

I finished Howards End last night. I very much enjoyed reading the book, although I made the mistake of reading some of the criticism that comes with my edition right away and therefore marring the original impression I had. I have a Bedford “Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism” edition, which has a lot of essays from different schools of theory. I didn’t read much, just skimmed a bit, but I read some criticisms of the book I wasn’t ready to hear. I like to just enjoy a book for a while if I can, and then think critically about it later.

Anyway, I thought it was an enjoyable read, plot-wise, and I liked the way Forster integrated his ideas and themes into the storytelling. This, however, is something Virginia Woolf didn’t like; she says Forster’s characters aren’t really characters but are simply ways of making his point. It didn’t feel that way to me – I thought the characters were interesting and believable, most of them; that the plot was engaging, although maybe clumsy in places; and that the ideas were important and ever-present, but that they didn’t threaten to turn the whole thing into a work of sociology or philosophy, as they might. I didn’t feel like I was being preached to.

I was interested in the ecological stuff going on in the book, about how people’s relationship to the land is threatened by the fast pace of life, how the automobile changes the landscape and our relationship to it, and how the city and suburbs are encroaching on the countryside. I liked the description of Margaret’s disorientation when she rides in a “motorcar” and loses her sense of space and place. She battles against a feeling of “flux”:

Margaret was silent. Marriage had not saved her from the sense of flux. London was but a foretaste of this nomadic civilization which is altering human nature so profoundly, and throws upon personal relations a stress greater than they have ever borne before. Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the binding force that they once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone. May Love be equal to the task!

I suppose one of the flaws of the book is the way Forster gets metaphysical in a vague way, like in that last sentence – what exactly does he mean by Love? But I was struck by how modern all this sounds. Trees and meadows and mountains are all too often a spectacle for us, one we see through our car windows as we speed along on highways.

Has anyone read his novel Maurice? I’m kind of curious about that one.

Or something. I’m dying to know what. I was intrigued by this passage from Howards End, spoken by Margaret to Henry Wilcox:

“Some ladies do without hotels. Are you aware that Helen and I have walked alone over the Apennines, with our luggage on our backs?”

But, alas, she gives no more details. Henry cuts her off with an assertion that she will never do such a thing again. I really want to know, though, what their trip was like. How far did they walk? How did they carry their luggage? Where and how did they sleep?

And, of course, Leonard Bast does his famous night walk. The walk that shows he has some kind of deep, romantic sensibility, in spite of his lower class origins. I’ve never walked the entire night, but I have gone hiking by moonlight once. It was beautiful, but frightening. Much better to walk without my flashlight on, and just let my eyes adjust to the dark; otherwise I was shutting myself off from the night rather than experiencing it.

I like what Leonard has to say about his experience:

“I’m glad I did it, and yet at the time it bored me more than I can say. And besides — you can believe me or not as you choose — I was very hungry. That dinner at Wimbledon — I meant it to last me all night like other dinners. I never thought that walking would make such a difference. Why, when you’re walking you want, as it were, a breakfast and luncheon and tea during the night as well, and I had nothing but a packet of Woodbines. Lord, did I feel it bad! Looking back, it wasn’t what you may call enjoyment. It was more a case of sticking to it. I did stick I — I was determined. Oh, hang it all! What’s the good — I mean, the good of living in a room for ever? There one goes on day after day, same old game, same up and down to town, until you forget there is any other game. You ought to see once in a while what’s going on outside, if it’s only nothing particular after all.”

Exactly. He gets it exactly — the boredom, the hunger, the determination, the needing to get out even if nothing happens, and being glad you did it in spite of everything.

I started to read The Tale of Genji the other day. This is something that will take a long time to read, and I plan on taking it slowly. It’s about 1,000 pages, a collection of 54 stories or chapters in one larger story, I haven’t figured out which, written around the early 11th century in Japan. Most of the chapters are about one character, I believe, but I think the book’s structure might be more like a collection of stories about that character rather than a having a traditional plot line like we might expect from something contemporary. It’s sometimes claimed to be the first novel, or sometimes one of the precursors of the novel. There are probably tons of books one could call the “first novel” out there.

The first chapter got Genji born and grown up and married, all really fast, so it seems that the focus of the stories will be on his adult life. The chapter was full of stories of court intrigue; the wives of the emperor competing, and the Minister of the Right competing with the Minister of the Left, etc. I am already grateful for the list of main characters that opens the book. Since I don’t know anything about 11th century Japan, I’m looking forward to learning about it. Actually, I should say, I’m looking forward to reading about court life in 11th century Japan, since I don’t think the book deals with people outside the court setting. I suppose this is one way The Tale of Genji differs from the novel that developed in the 18th century: that version of the novel is very middle class.

I finished Ha Jin’s novel Waiting last night; I wrote yesterday about reading the novel slowly as evidence that I’m not reading as much as usual these days, but the truth of the matter is that the novel rewards slow reading. It’s the kind of book that you can fly through – it’s 300 very quick pages with simple sentences and vocabulary – but it would be a shame to do so because those simple sentences are packed with subtlety and emotion. The writing is Hemingway-esque, with a main character, Lin Kong, who has strong feelings but isn’t entirely aware of them, so that those feelings hit him strongly on those occasions when he is forced to acknowledge them. Often they hit him through his body; he reacts to emotion viscerally, and I mean that literally – experiencing things through the gut.

The story is simple: it takes place in China during the Cultural Revolution, and explores the shift from village life bound by tradition to an urban world controlled by the Communist party. The prologue tells us that “out of filial duty,” Lin Kong agrees to an arranged marriage, so that his wife, Shuyu, can help take care of his ailing mother. This woman, Lin learns with dismay, turns out to look much older than he; she is uneducated, and has bound feet, a tradition which has largely died out, leaving Shuyu as one of the last to suffer from it. Lin was trained as a doctor, works in the city, and, mostly out of shame for his illiterate, old-fashioned wife, leaves her behind in the village, where she works on a farm, cares for his parents, and raises their one daughter.

In the city, Lin meets Manna Wu, and they quickly begin a relationship, which forms the heart of the story. Because of the tight restrictions on behavior in their hospital compound, Lin and Manna cannot spend much time alone, precluding a sexual relationship; they both agree that the risk of getting caught is too great. The “waiting” of the novel’s title refers to the couple’s wait for Lin’s wife to grant him a divorce. Every summer he travels to his wife’s village hoping she will grant him one, and every summer she first says yes, and then changes her mind and says no.

And so Lin and Manna spend their years looking forward to an uncertain event, the divorce, and growing bitter at the passing time. Their lives are hemmed in, both physically and mentally: someone is there to observe every move they make and any hint of unorthodox thought or behavior can mean banishment to the countryside, a life of poverty and hard labor. We see the enormously high personal costs of the Cultural Revolution; the characters lives are shaped by the need for social and intellectual conformity. Their access to books is limited, as is their access to beauty. One of the most moving scenes occurs when Lin discovers Manna has saved a dozen Chairman Mao buttons. Lin “realized that someday these trinkets might become valuable indeed, as reminders of the mad times and the wasted, lost lives in the revolution. They would become relics of history. But for her, they didn’t seem to possess any historical value at all. Then it dawned on him that she must have kept these buttons as a kind of treasure. She must have collected them as the only beautiful things she could own, like jewelry.”

The characterization is complex: we see why Lin abandons Shuyu – he was, in a sense, forced into the marriage – but we also sympathize with her. She is a relic, treated as a freak with tiny feet, and she has known very little pleasure or freedom in her life. Lin, Shuyu, and Manna are all caught in rapidly-changing times, and they all suffer for it, without having made any real mistakes themselves.

I liked this book for its portrayal of China during the Revolution, but also for its exploration of the costs of waiting – and of getting what you want.

There’s some interesting discussion over at The Valve of Nancy Armstrong’s new book, How Novels Think, a book on the novel and the “modern subject.” I read parts of her book Desire and Domestic Fiction, which I liked quite a bit, and this new one is on my list of things to read. The posts, however, aren’t increasing my interest – I feel like I’m getting the gist of her argument from the discussion, and, while the book’s details might be interesting, I would read it for the larger argument in the hopes that it would surprise me. The surprise is ruined.

And the argument seems a bit like what I read in Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking At the Novel: see this. I’m sure Armstrong is more nuanced and better researched, but they both seem to be arguing that novels have a particular way of describing the world, and, even more so, of shaping the world, through the kinds of people and behavior they include and exclude. Smiley was always talking about how novels work to create the idea of the individual and then set individuals in conflict with their community and in so doing shape our ideas of acceptable relationships between the individual and group. Now, probably Armstrong is much more complex. But I’m thinking that, at heart, the idea is quite similar to Smiley’s. But … maybe I should read the book before I say anything more about it.