Category Archives: Fiction

I think I may be a new Patrick Hamilton fan. I found his novel The Slaves of Solitude (which is the latest Slaves of Golconda pick) really dark and sad, but in a satisfying kind of way, the kind of satisfaction you feel when you’ve faced something difficult head-on, without flinching. The picture the novel paints of life generally, but especially life during war-time, is of isolation, irritation, boredom, misunderstanding, and deprivation.

The novel tells the story of Miss Roach — we learn in the middle of the novel that her name is Enid but the narrator never calls her this — who is 39 and single and has moved from London to the outer reaches of the suburbs to escape the bombings of World War II. She lives in the Rosamund Tea Rooms, a boarding house, and commutes to her secretarial job in the city.  The atmosphere in the Rosamund Tea Rooms is depressingly claustrophic, and most of the novel is set here, or, when the scene changes, it’s to take us to a nearby pub where people drink to escape or to take us out on the streets where Miss Roach walks, again, in order to escape.

What she’s escaping, besides the general claustrophia, are her fellow boarders, one of whom, Mr. Thwaites, is an absolutely horrible person. He terrorizes Miss Roach and intimidates everybody else. Here’s how the narrator describes him:

In his large, flat, moustached face … in his lethargic yet watchful brown eyes, in his way of walking and his way of talking, there could be discerned the steady, self-absorbed, dreamy, almost somnambulistic quality of the lifelong trampler through the emotions of others, of what Miss Roach would call “the bully.” That steady look with which as a child he would have torn off a butterfly’s wing, with which as a boy he would have twisted another boy’s wrist, with which as a man he would have humiliated a servant or inferior, was upon him as he now looked at Miss Roach; it never entirely left him.

Miss Roach hates Mr. Thwaites, but it never does her any good; he can always win any argument they have and can always get a reaction out of her and force her to answer his questions even when it’s the last thing she wants. He’s a nightmare — the kind of person you wouldn’t mind strangling, and who knows you feel that way and enjoys it.

Into this situation come two new people who offer a chance for some diversion and change, and possibly even improvement. Given the darkness of the initial scenes, though, we should be suspicious. One of these is Vicki, a young woman born in Germany who has lived in England for many years now, but who is still under suspicion because of her accent and her origin. Miss Roach stands up for her and befriends her, and then brings her into the boarding house, thinking that not only can she help Vicki, but Vicki might help her by changing the atmosphere in the the Tea Rooms.

The other is an American soldier who flirts with Miss Roach and soon enough becomes “her” soldier, implying that he wants her to return to America with him and help him run his laundromat business. Miss Roach is uncertain what she thinks of all this, but so little has happened to her of any interest at all, that she goes along with it in a bemused kind of way, just to see.

But her hopes are dashed as she figures out what kind of people Vicki and her American soldier really are. The rest of the novel charts just how bad these relationships can get.

What I particularly loved about this book is the way Miss Roach is such a careful observer of the people around her and the way the narrator takes time to describe the characters’ words and emotions so closely. It’s a story told through small scenes and little conversations, the kind of novel where tone of voice and word choice and facial expressions carry most of the plot. It’s a novel about war, but not about battles and armies; in fact, Miss Roach avoids hearing war news whenever she can. Rather, it’s about how war infects everything, right down to the words people use in everyday conversation and to the words on street signs:

To the endless snubbing and nagging of war, its lecturing and admonitions, Miss Roach was subjected from the moment she left the Rosamund Tea Rooms in the morning to the moment she returned at night, and these things were at last telling upon her nerves and general attitude.

Immediately she stepped forth into Thames Lockdon … the snubbing began with:

No Cigarettes

Sorry

in the window of the tobacconist opposite.

And such was Miss Roach’s mood nowadays that she regarded this less as a sorrowful admission than as a sly piece of spite. The “sorry”, she felt certain, had not been thrown in for the sake of politeness or pity. It was a sarcastic, nasty, rude “sorry”. It sneered, as a common woman might, as if to say “Sorry, I’m sure”, or “Sorry, but there you are”, or “Sorry, but what do you expect nowadays?”

This passage indicates the book’s sensitivity to language, which is another thing I loved about it. Miss Roach is always thinking about the language other people use and how that language tells her something about who they are. This is especially true of Vicki, who irritates Miss Roach horribly by using out of date slang in an effort to keep from sounding too German. And Miss Roach is very sensitive about the language people use to describe her, hating it when people imply she is an “English Miss,” too prim and proper and uptight to have any fun. And she can’t stand it when people make fun of her name. One of the book’s worst moments is when Mr. Thwaites says,

“Enter Dame Roach! … Dame Roach — the English Miss! Miss Prim. Dame Roach — the Prude … the jealous Miss Roach.”

The thought that Vicki might have overheard this horrible string of words is enough to make her sick.

So, no, this is not a happy book, but it captures the hardships of wartime, and also of loneliness and sadness and solitude, beautifully, brilliantly well.

Well, as much as I enjoyed the last two Somerset Maugham novels I read — Of Human Bondage and The Painted Veil — my latest one, The Razor’s Edge, just didn’t work for me. I started out surprised and intrigued by it, ready to like whatever it was Maugham was trying to do, but as the book went on, I enjoyed it less and less. It suffered from two major flaws that I couldn’t get past — the pieces of it never came together into a coherent whole, and I came to like the narrator less and less. Unfortunately, the narrator claimed to be Maugham himself, which means that I’m left with some unpleasant feelings directed at Maugham, which should rightly be directed at the narrator. I’m trying to keep the two separate in my head, but it’s difficult.

There are a lot of interesting elements to the book (and in the comments on a previous post, a number of readers said they really liked it, so perhaps you might take their word for it!). There’s Maugham as the narrator; I haven’t looked up information on Maugham’s life to see if it matches the narrator’s life, but the narrator refers to novels he’s written, which are Maugham’s, and he generally seems to be writer-like and Maugham-like. I liked his method of drawing attention to himself in ways you’re more likely to see in eighteenth-century novels, for example, saying that he’s going to give the reader a break by starting a new chapter in the middle of a long scene. He also frequently refers to the decisions he’s making as a story-teller, such as when to embellish a bit and when to stick to his memories closely. I like this kind of self-reflexivity and openness about narrative and found the whole idea of the author writing himself into the story intriguing.

There are also various characters and narrative threads I enjoyed. The story takes place during the 1920s and 30s and has a lot to say about America’s place in the world, specifically about the American national character (full of seemingly endless energy and possibility) and its relationship to Europe. One of the main characters, Larry, is an American who fought in World War I and saw some brutal things that left him psychologically damaged. Or, perhaps it’s possible to say that the violence he saw opened his eyes to what really matters in life and left him completely uninterested in material values and social snobbery. He starts off the novel rather mysteriously refusing to take a plum job that’s been handed to him and slowly, as the novel goes on, starts on a spiritual quest that takes him to unexpected places.

There is also Isabel, the woman Larry plans to marry, although soon enough this relationship fails, as the values Isabel and Larry hold are incompatible. Isabel and her family come to stand for conventional values, as Isabel had the chance for a different life with Larry, but rejected it for a much more socially-acceptable marriage. It’s Isabel’s uncle Elliot, though, who is Maugham’s masterpiece in the novel. Elliot is pure, 100% snob, so calculating and ruthless that the narrator has to keep reminding us that he’s really a very nice man — just a nice man who is determined to climb the social ladder at whatever cost. Elliot has never met a titled person he didn’t like or a person of questionable origin he couldn’t snub in the most effective manner possible.

Between Isabel and Elliot on the one hand, and Larry on the other, Maugham gets to critique the social system in two ways — by satirizing Elliot’s snobbishness and Isabel’s conventionality and by admiringly narrating Larry’s rejection of their values.

All this should be a lot of fun, or, when it comes to Larry’s story, it should be moving and inspiring, but I didn’t think it was. One problem is that the pace of the narrative drags too much. Maugham really takes his time, and even I, generally a very patient reader, got antsy. The various stories seem too loosely linked as well; what holds all the characters together is the fact that they all know the narrator, who wanders in and out of their lives now and then. Maugham’s theme of materialism vs. spirituality also links the various stories, but this doesn’t feel like enough either.

Another problem is that I found the narrator less and less likeable as the novel went on. To clarify, I don’t actually expect to like every narrator I encounter and am fully prepared to enjoy an irritating, unreliable narrator, but I don’t think that’s what Maugham was offering. My dislike stems partly from the fact that I never found out much about him and yet had to spend a lot of time with him and his consciousness, and so eventually got bored. I also thought his attitude toward women was questionable. He has an irritating habit of drawing what I thought was undue attention to their physical flaws, would occasionally come out with a judgment based on stereotypes, and was dismissive of women generally. If I thought this unpleasantness added up to something, I wouldn’t mind it, but I didn’t think it did.

I’m certain I’ll read more Maugham at some point; The Razor’s Edge didn’t work for me, but I liked his other books enough to go back again.

The Odd Women is the first George Gissing novel I’ve read, and I’m now ready to learn more about him and read more of his work. What an interesting book this turned out to be! I wrote a post on the book when I was a third of the way through it, and everything I wrote there about how much I was enjoying it stayed true until the end.

It’s a good story with interesting characters, but for me the best parts were the debates the characters had about what women’s liberation means and how people should go about trying to advance it. What I liked best is that Gissing acknowledges how complicated the “woman question” is all the way through and never descends into preachiness or over-simplification. Two of the main characters, Mary and Rhoda, have long conversations about what approach feminists should take toward marriage: should they encourage young women to stay single because marriage is so often oppressive? Or should they acknowledge that women are going to want to marry anyway and instead focus on making sure they have some education and training so they can support themselves if need be? Should they reject marriage in favor of long-term relationships that don’t have the sanction of church and state?

The book gives a range of types of women with different life experiences, to illustrate some of the most common trajectories for women of the time. There are Mary and Rhoda who, even though they disagree now and then, are united in their revolutionary zeal and who devote their lives to improving women’s lot. There is Monica, who has the chance to receive the benefits of Mary and Rhoda’s education, but who rejects them in favor of marriage with a man she doesn’t love but who offers her a comfortable life. And then there are Virginia and Alice, Monica’s sisters, who never had the opportunity to marry, and when their father dies, find themselves on their own with no way to support themselves. The only skills they have are caring for children, so they take jobs as governesses and companions. They are lucky to find work at all, as there are many, many women in exactly their situation who desperately need work too, but the jobs are awful — ill-paid (if paid at all; sometimes they worked just for room and board) and with families who mistreat them. The other option is to work in a factory or a shop, another miserable life in exploitive conditions. This is what Monica does until the opportunity for marriage saves her — or so she thinks.

The forthright and complex treatment of feminism interested me and I was very much a sympathetic reader, but I found myself reading critically — meaning negatively — as well. For one thing, Gissing has some odd class issues. One bizarre conversation sticks in my mind, where two characters with whom I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to sympathize agree that many women need to be beaten now and then. The idea behind this is that those women of the lower classes who are foolish and uneducated and can’t control themselves need husbands to keep them in line. Their ideal of womanhood — and I think Gissing’s too — is seldom found in real life. Rhoda, in particular, looks down on the vast majority of women, those who can’t or don’t want to live up to her very strict standards of womanly behavior. Because of this, she is capable of harming the very people she claims to want to help. But Rhoda’s extreme views are balanced by Mary’s greater compassion and understanding, and these two characters together show just how difficult it was for women to figure out how to improve their lot in a world so thoroughly dominated by men.

There’s a lot to think about in this book. It’s not a perfect novel by any means, but it is a great way to get a glimpse of what life was like for women at the time and to think through just what it takes to launch a social revolution.

My mystery book group met again last Friday to discuss P.D. James’s first Dalgliesh novel Cover Her Face. The meetings are always good, but this time was extra special, as Emily made a surprise visit. And we had a fun novel to discuss. I’ve enjoyed James’s Dalgliesh series before, having read or listened to three other of the novels in the series, and I was glad to go back to the beginning.

As far as there ever is a consensus at these meetings, it was that Cover Her Face is a good first effort, well-written, if a little sketchy in the plotting. My feeling was that while I enjoyed it, it didn’t blow me away — as, truthfully, the other James novels didn’t either, but I don’t always need to be blown away. Sometimes it’s just fine to read a competent but not brilliant book.

I was a little surprised to find out how little the book says about her detective Dalgliesh. The later books aren’t terribly forthcoming either, but here there were maybe two or three facts about the character that James offers, the most important being that his wife and first child died a few years earlier. The other fact I remember is that he likes plain English food. Otherwise, all we know about him we have to infer from his words and actions. This does tell us some important things, though — chiefly, that he’s supremely competent, professional, and dispassionate. Interestingly, the book contains no hint of his future career as a poet. Here, he’s all about work and little else. We get hints that he knows something about art and culture, but they are only hints.

The group couldn’t decide whether James was most likely setting up a series here or whether the idea for the series came later, but all this makes me think the idea came later. Most first mysteries in a series do a lot more to set the character up, at least in my limited mystery reading.

As far as the plot goes, it’s standard mystery fare — it takes place on a family estate in a small town in the English countryside; there is a small group of suspects, each with a plausible motive; much of the book is taken up with transcripts of suspect interviews; and it closes with a drawning-room scene where everything is revealed. Not surprisingly for this sort of setting, class issues are a major factor in the plot. The victim is a housemaid, Sally, who had a child out of wedlock, and has become a kind of charity case; she works for the Maxie family who feel that they have taken a risk by hiring her, and the novel opens with everyone on edge, hoping it will work out. But when Sally appears in the same dress as the Maxie daughter, they know that something is wrong, and when she announces her engagement to the Maxie son, their lives are thrown into disorder. The mystery is as much about Sally herself as it is about who killed her — questions about her motivations and her strange behavior drive the plot as much as the murder does.

I’d like to read more Dalgliesh books, because they are enjoyable, but even more so because I’m curious how the series develops. I think it’s an interesting exercise to see how a writer develops over the course of multiple books with the same character, and James has been writing Dalgliesh books for decades (Cover Her Face came out in 1962), so she’d make an interesting study. And I’m interested in seeing how Dalgliesh develops as well. But I didn’t love this book so much that I’m going to rush out and find the rest of them right away. James is somebody to pick up when I’m in the mood for writing that’s predictably, reliably competent, somebody who may not surprise but who probably won’t disappoint either.

I’m about a third of the way through George Gissing’s 1893 novel The Odd Women and am enjoying it immensely. I had little idea of what to expect, except what the title might indicate, and the title could mean a whole range of things. But the “odd” of the title turns out to mean “not even,” as in not part of a couple, or in other words, the problem of the many, many women who have no means of support because they haven’t been trained to support themselves and don’t have a husband or father or some other male to take care of them. There are five women at the novel’s center, three of them sisters who unexpectedly lose their father, who was always intending to save money but never did. These three are left to fend for themselves, without any inkling of how to do this.

The other two women are similarly on their own, but are lucky to have enough money to live independently. They make use of their comfortable position to devote all their time to helping women such as the three sisters get the training they need to find jobs or start businesses for themselves. They also have long conversations about whether women should get married or should refuse marriage in favor of complete independence, and are generally at the forefront of the feminist movement of the time.

There are some odd issues with class in the novel, but so far I’m impressed at how forward-thinking and sympathetic Gissing is about “the woman problem.” I love how open, relatively speaking, the book is about sexuality and marriage and gender dynamics, and also about money and work. I’m also pleased that I’m reading this book right after finishing a Barbara Pym novel, since Pym also writes about a version of “the woman problem,” in her case, about the uncertain social role of single and married women after World War II.

As for other books I’m reading, I finally finished The Recognitions! I’m very pleased about this. I feel as though I should write a wrap-up post about the book, and I may do it at some point, but the truth is, I don’t really feel up to it. I’d feel as though I needed to write something smart about it, and I don’t have the energy to try to sound smart right now. At any rate, I’m glad I read the book, and I’m also glad it’s over.

So for now I’m sticking to two books, the Gissing novel, and the complete Montaigne, which I recently picked back up again after ignoring it for a month or two. I’m contemplating starting another nonfiction book, but I’m wary of taking on what might come to feel like too much. I’ve been so busy, and although my schedule is easing up a bit, I’ll still be busy for a while, and I’d prefer to have fewer books on the go, so I can focus what reading time I have a bit better.

But, I may feel tempted … I’ve considered picking up Ann Fadiman’s At Large and At Small, or perhaps one of the several science books I own, or maybe a Richard Holmes biography. We’ll see.

Barbara Pym’s novel An Academic Question turned out to be an interesting read for unexpected reasons. I didn’t realize this when I first picked up the book, but it’s an unfinished novel, written and abandoned in the early 1970s, that editor Hazel Holt pieced together and published in 1986. It’s not unfinished in the sense that it doesn’t have an ending; rather, Pym never finished revising it to her satisfaction. Holt writes that Pym’s first draft was written in the first person, and she was in the process of changing it into the third person but was unhappy with the results. Here’s how Holt describes her editing process:

In preparing this novel for publication I have amalgamated these two drafts, also making use of some notes that she made and consulting the original handwritten version, trying to ‘smooth’ them (to use Barbara’s word) into a coherent whole.

This is all we know about how this particular version of the novel came into existence; there are no further notes about what changes Holt made or what sections came from which draft. The novel Holt published keeps the first person voice.

I enjoyed reading the book, but I think ultimately it’s best for committed Pym fans, not for someone who is just getting to know her work, because it’s clear it’s a rough draft. There are sections that feel rushed and unpolished, with some abrupt transitions and scenes and characters that seem to come out of nowhere.

But the themes the book explores are interesting and are similar to those of Excellent Women, the other Pym novel I’ve read. The story is about a “graduate wife,” a term which makes me think of a graduate student wife, but refers — I think — to a woman with a college degree who isn’t making use of it because she’s married. The heroine, Helen, has a child but isn’t particularly interested in her and would kind of like to do something more with herself and her education, but at the same time, she isn’t terribly ambitious. She’s adrift, considering taking a part-time job like many other wives she knows, but she’s less than thrilled with the available possibilities. She could help her university professor husband with his research, maybe do some typing, but her husband does his own typing and never seems to want assistance.

She ends up getting involved in her husband’s research anyway, though, in an entirely unexpected manner — while visiting an elderly man in a nursing home, she comes across a stash of papers that would help her husband publish the article that could make his career. How she obtains these papers, what she and her husband do with them, and the intrigues they lead the characters into form the basis of the plot.

What makes the book interesting, though, is the world it describes — the academic world generally and women’s place within it. And — no surprise — it’s very much a man’s world. There are female professors, but their personal lives are complicated and most people have trouble seeing them as fully feminine. Faculty wives spend their time doing their husband’s typing, doing good deeds such as Helen’s visits to the elderly, and working part-time in genteel and not too demanding jobs, such as doing filing in the library.

Nobody seems interested in challenging this status quo, including Helen herself, who feels a vague unhappiness with her life but isn’t ready to do anything about it. She’s no rebellious spirit, and she’s not the type to think methodically and analytically about what she’s experiencing. But while Helen offers no direct critique of this stultifying world, Pym illustrates the consequences indirectly, in Helen’s uneasiness and dissatisfaction with her life and her marriage. Although there’s a whole series of funny scenes and a collection of comic characters, the mood of the book is darker than that; there’s an atmosphere of hopelessness and ennui that never fully dispells. Conflicts may find resolution and relationships may heal, but life is never exciting and nothing really new happens.

I’ve only read two Pym novels so far, one of which is definitely not her best work, but these two books strike me as similar in theme and mood. I’ve got more Pym books on my shelves (No Fond Return of Love and Jane and Prudence), and I’m curious to see if this pattern continues.

Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is an excellent read, and I’m glad I’ve finally read the third Brontë sister, but I also found a few things dissatisfying and puzzling. First the good: I loved that this book deals with some topics I don’t often see treated with such openness in Victorian novels. Certainly there are other novels of the time that are suspicious of marriage and sympathetic toward mistreated wives, but the amount of detail this book devotes to such problems as alcoholism and physical and emotional abuse I found surprising. There is a whole series of harrowing scenes in the middle of the novel that describe the heroine Helen’s sufferings at the hands of her awful husband, who spends his time carousing with friends and openly having affairs. There are other women who suffer because of their husbands’ gambling problems and abuse of alcohol. It’s not that the women are all martyrs, though; they are also capable of their own vice and casual cruelty.

The novel doesn’t entirely despair of marriage, but it does show just how hard it is to find the right kind of partner, and how easily even smart and good-hearted people can make very foolish decisions. There are men who suffer because they are trapped in bad marriages, but the brunt of the suffering falls on the women, who have very little ability to change their lives when they decide they are unhappy with them.

I liked the ideas the book takes up, and I also thought it was a well-constructed story, one that grabbed my attention immediately and kept me avidly reading all the way through. It has a fairly complicated structure involving stories within stories, in a manner similar to Wuthering Heights, although perhaps it’s not as well-done as Emily’s novel. It starts with Gilbert Markham’s letters to a friend, telling the story of the mysteriously attractive new tenant, Helen, with whom he soon develops an infatuation. Helen treats him kindly but remains aloof until Gilbert catches her in a compromising conversation with his neighbor Mr. Lawrence, at which point he completely freaks out, attacks Mr. Lawrence, and confronts Helen. In order to defend herself, she hands him a large packet of papers, which contains her diary. Much of the rest of the novel is made up of this diary, which tells the story of Helen’s earlier life.

All this is satisfying and fun (as much fun as a harrowing novel about domestic abuse can be), but I found Gilbert to be a troubling character. After reading his letters for a while I began to think that while he could sometimes be a sympathetic character, he was also conceited, self-satisfied, and comically pompous. It seemed clear to me that Brontë was presenting him as an unreliable narrator, and we were meant to see him as a good-intentioned but bumbling and foolish man. But as I read on, I began to sense that Brontë wasn’t taking this characterization anywhere, and I began to wonder if I weren’t wrong about reading him as unreliable, at least intentionally so on Brontë’s part. This led to some disappointment when the novel’s characters took him more seriously than I thought he deserved.

Spoiler alert! You may want to stop here if you plan to read the book — I was disappointed that Helen ended up marrying Gilbert. She’s not a perfect person and has made her share of mistakes (the main one being to marry Arthur Huntingdon), but she struck me as a lot smarter and savvier than Gilbert, and I couldn’t see why she fell in love with him. I can see that Gilbert’s kindness and loyalty would look attractive after how awful her first husband was, but that doesn’t seem like a good basis for a marriage.

It’s nearly impossible not to make comparisons among the Brontë sisters, since I’ve now read them all, and I don’t think Tenant is as good as Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights.  It doesn’t feel as powerful as the other two novels and its structure and characterization aren’t as complex. But there still are plenty of reasons to read the book, particularly for its detailed look at just how much women could suffer from poor marriages and how ill-equiped they are — more because of social conventions than through their own personal failings — to make a wise choice of whom to marry.

I began Anne Brontë’s novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall a week or so ago, and so far it’s been great. I do love nineteenth-century novels, and I miss them if I go too long without reading one.  I love their length and the way the best authors can string a story out so it lasts a long time but never feels slow or dull. I’m having an experience with this book that I used to have all the time, which is that it’s the main book I’m reading (I dip into The Recognitions now and then, but mostly it’s Brontë), so I find myself absorbed in it at various points in the day and I feel like I’m immersed in its world. I like reading multiple books at once, but it does diffuse that feeling of absorption.

The story so far is good — it’s got all the typical elements of a 19C novel, a frame narrative, stories within stories, women of uncertain reputation, a marriage plot, intrigues about money. It also has an amusingly unreliable narrator, one who strikes me as silly and petty and foolish but who is absolutely convinced of his own rectitude and wisdom. And now I’m in a section with another narrator entirely, one who strikes me as much more reliable, but about whom I still have some doubts. I like unreliable narrators very much, if only because they offer a reader so much food for thought.

And yes, I’m still plugging away at The Recognitions, at least now and then. I have about 110 pages left to go, and yes, I’m counting. I admire the book and I’ve enjoyed reading at least parts of its, but at this point I have to admit I’m ready for it to be over. I might have fared better with it if I’d read it faster in order to stay immersed in its world, but I’ve put it aside now and then, which has meant I’ve forgotten some of the characters and plot events, and this really isn’t a book where things are easy to keep track of even in the best of circumstances. There’s even a website that offers a plot summary, and yet it’s still hard going. But I will persevere. There’s no way I’m quitting this 950-page book with only a little bit left to go!

And now for a cycling update. Things were going very well right up until about 1 1/2 weeks ago; up until that point, I was riding hard, doing fine in races, and having lots of fun. But then I caught a cold and missed a race because of it. I was hoping to recover quickly, but I spent a week feeling tired and achy. I’m back on the bike now, but I’m not sure how much fitness I’ve lost, and I still haven’t quite shaken the cold.

What interests me about this is how much my feelings shift over time. At the end of March I was completely and utterly enthralled with the riding I was doing. I was determined to find time for it no matter what the cost. After I got sick, that feeling evaporated, and I found myself grateful I couldn’t ride, so I had the chance to get a little more work done. I was grateful I could use the cold as an excuse to sleep in and spend more time lounging around. Now that I’m back on the bike, I’m enjoying riding, but also not quite feeling my former enthrallment. I expect, however, that the enthrallment will return soon enough. Isn’t it odd the way, over the course of a short week and a half, so much can change? I feel like I don’t recognize myself half the time.

What stands out most to me about Stefan Zweig’s novel from the 1930s, The Post-Office Girl, is rage. The novel starts off calmly and meticulously, however — extremely so, with careful and precise descriptions of the Austrian post office where the main character Christine has worked for many years. Every item has its proper place and every item, down to every pencil and every sheet of paper, has been accounted for. The governmental bureaucracy knows everything about this place and controls everything. Stuck in the post office for the foreseeable future, Christine feels like an old woman with nothing to look forward to in her life. The tragedy is that she is only 28.

Into this stultifying atmosphere comes a surprise telegram, and it is one that will transform Christine beyond all recognition. It is from her aunt who wants Christine to join her at a posh Swiss hotel for a two-week vacation. Christine is initially reluctant — what’s the point? she thinks — but she goes and what she sees there is a revelation. She has known she is poor — she has spent her life barely scraping by trying to support herself and her sick mother — but she realizes it now in a visceral way. She sees so much money so carelessly spent, and she realizes that just the tiniest fraction of the money swirling around her would have set herself and her mother up comfortably for the rest of their lives. Quickly, she’s caught up in the social whirl, enjoying the attention brought by her youth and beauty, augmented by the fashionable clothes her aunt buys her.

She has become a new being, and it now seems impossible to return to the old life. But, of course, she has to return, and it’s here that the anger starts to seep in. Why should Christine slave her life away? Why should some people have so much money and others so little, for no discernable reason except for luck? What’s the point of working so hard, day after day, for nothing but the chance to keep doing it until the day she dies?

It’s largely the war, World War I, that has caused Christine so much suffering. By the time we meet her in the novel, she has achieved a small amount of stability, but the path that led to this point was very rough. She has had to watch family members die as a direct result of war and has had to push herself to the breaking point just to survive. And now she looks around her and wonders just what the point of it all is.

The second half of the book takes us in new directions that I don’t need to describe here, but it follows the ideas the first half introduces to their logical — and chilling — conclusions. One of the things I admire about the book is the way Zweig takes Christine through some remarkable transformations, and yet they all feel plausible and right. I was willing to believe everything that happened, even the startling conclusion.

The book asks some difficult questions — about inequality, about struggle, and about whether the value we place on hard work and honesty really makes any sense in a world where those who deserve happiness often don’t get it and those who enjoy wealth and comfort often haven’t done anything to earn it. The book also describes the devastation war can bring to people who never wanted war in the first place and who had no say in the matter. There’s a lot of anger here, but every bit of it seems justified.

I’m coming out of my blogging break momentarily to send you over to a review of Brian Lynch’s novel The Winner of Sorrow I published over at The Quarterly Conversation. I’ve written about the book here, but I wanted to do a more formal review and The Quarterly Conversation seemed like the perfect place. Check it out!

I hope to be back soon to write about Stefan Zweig’s The Post-Office Girl for the Slaves of Golconda group, but it’s been so busy around here, I may be a little late …

Well, this one didn’t work out as planned. Several people whose taste I respect recommended Elizabeth George to me, so I was happy to pick up the first installment of her Inspector Lynley series, A Great Deliverance. There are lots and lots of books in this series, and I thought it would be fun to have a series to read that I could turn to whenever the mood struck. I’m not in the habit of reading through a series of mystery novels in an orderly way, and I thought it would be fun to try.

So what am I missing? I’m willing to admit in other circumstances I may have liked this book more, but as it is, I just never got caught up in the story. Those of you in the know, does she get better as she goes along?

The main problem is that I just never really “bought” the characters. I didn’t feel as though I was given enough information to make them come alive. Inspector Lynley struck me as annoyingly perfect. (But really, “annoying” is a word I’ve been using a lot lately, so perhaps I’m not being fair, and I can see that in another mood I might not mind unrealistic perfection at all.) He’s the 8th Earl of Asherton, and not only is he an earl, but he’s smart and charming and handsome and understanding and a great detective, etc., etc. He has some experience of suffering, but rather than making me pity him, this makes him seem even worse — he seems even more annoyingly perfect because his less-than-perfect life means he’s capable of compassion and a deeper understanding of other people. I think if I’d had a chance to get to know him better, his charm might have worked on me, but the novel’s introduction to him seemed too rushed, so I was left feeling distanced and unimpressed.

Given all of this, I might have been drawn to the other main character, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, who resents Lynley’s perfections with a passion. She comes from a troubled family and a difficult past, and she is solidly working class. She is also very, very angry at the world, an anger she takes out on nearly everybody, but especially on Lynley. When she is assigned to work with him on a case, she is certain disaster is about to happen.

But I wasn’t particularly taken with Barbara either. Again, I didn’t have enough information about her to be able to care all that much about her pain. Instead, her self-sabotaging behavior just got irritating and her anger seemed excessive. Her psychological problems seemed overly obvious and contrived.

The story seemed fine, but the truth is, I never care all that much about the story; I look, instead, for some interesting people and ideas to think about. I’ll admit, things did start to get interesting right at the very end with the resolution of the mystery, but that’s much too late. The interesting ending makes me wonder if her later books take off in good directions — it seems there’s some potential there — but I’m not sure I want to take the time to find out.

I wonder if this is a matter of a new writer not having everything figured out yet, or perhaps the problem of getting a series underway — surely, if you envision a series based on your characters, it’s not easy to write a book that is complete on its own but also paves the way for future books.

Oh, well — if Elizabeth George isn’t for me, that’s okay! There are surely other mystery series that I will find more satisfying.

Muriel Barbery’s novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog has me thinking about the ways plausibility and realism aren’t necessarily that important in fiction.  Sometimes, with certain kinds of books, yes, they are important, as some books set up an expectation that the events they describe could possibly happen and the characters in them are ones you could possibly meet. But sometimes all that is just beside the point, and I think that’s true in Barbery’s book.  As I read the first few pages I felt some resistance because the voices were unfamiliar and the feelings the characters described struck me as odd and unbelievable. But as I read on I began to change my mind, and by the time I reached the middle I was entirely won over and stayed won over all the way through.

There are two narrators in this novel, and the book moves back and forth between them. We start with Renée, a woman in her 50s who works as a concierge for a building populated by wealthy families. She looks and behaves exactly as people seem to expect a concierge will look and behave — dumpy, unattractive, slow, uneducated — but secretly she spends her free time reading literature and philosophy and watching art films. She is remarkably intelligent and knowledgeable, but is determined no one will ever find that out. She is lonely, with only one friend who visits her regularly, but she prefers to be lonely than to risk the kind of meaningful interaction with other people that terrifies her. So she puts on a blank face and mangles grammar whenever any of the building’s residents are nearby and labors her way through Edmund Husserl and phenomenology when she is alone.

The other narrator is one of the building’s residents; she is 12 year-old Paloma, also utterly brilliant, who hates her family, hates her prospects in life, and plans to kill herself on her thirteenth birthday. She has thought this through carefully and sees nothing else for it but suicide. She is a much-smarter version of Holden Caulfield — she sees the phoniness of the world around her and loathes the phony adults in her life, most particularly her mother and sister, and refuses to join in. Her narrative sections take two forms; one is made up of her “profound thoughts,” in which she records her best thinking so she can do something valuable with her life before it’s over, and the other is called “The Journal of the Movement of the World,” in which she makes a point of focusing on the body so as not to get too caught up in the mind. Here, she records moments of physical beauty.

Until fairly late in the book, these two characters know of each other only in the vaguest way, and they could hardly be more different in their place in life and their age and appearance, but they turn out to have similar preoccupations and ways of thinking. And here is where we get to the book’s real charm — the ideas these two characters explore and the meaning they try to make out of life. This is really a philosophical novel about the quest to understand how best to live, how to make meaning and find beauty, and how to reconcile the coexistence of beauty and suffering. What makes these ideas so interesting is that you come to care about the people thinking them — over the course of the novel their struggles move from abstract philosophical problems to vital personal ones that you feel you yourself have a stake in solving.

I loved the fact that this novel isn’t afraid to be a novel of ideas — it’s unabashedly philosophical. One of the things that makes it so interesting, I think, is that it combines passages of abstract thought with a focus on the physical world and sections that capture the comedy of bodily life. It never gets so abstract it leaves its real people with their real bodies behind. Renée is particularly amusing in this way; as long as she is caught up in her thoughts, she is comfortable, but as soon as anyone reminds her of her physical being, she is flustered and lost and messes everything up. Both narrators are exquisitely aware of the physical world around them, even if they aren’t always comfortable in it, so the book manages to be both cerebral and down-to-earth at once.

And the book is beautifully-written as well. The only criticism I’ve heard of this book that made me pay any attention at all is that its characters aren’t realistic, but given all the wonderful things to be found in this book, I don’t think that matters one bit.

My mystery book group had another fabulous meeting this past Sunday to discuss Dorothy Sayers’s novel Gaudy Night.  I can’t recommend highly enough having a specific theme or genre for your book group; I have limited experience with book groups I’ll admit, but with this one, having a focus has made the discussions so rich and interesting.  We’re not looking at the books in isolation, but instead, with every book we read, we’re building a basis of comparison and a body of knowledge about the genre that we can draw on when reading and discussing.  Each meeting is as much about the genre and how each example fits into it as it is about the book itself.

I’m beginning to think that there’s actually very little that clearly defines the mystery genre.  We’ve seen such a wide range of subjects and styles in the eight books we’ve read so far that it’s hard to make generalizations about them, except for basic ones, like the fact that there is some sort of crime in each of them (often but not always a murder) and some figure who tries to solve the crime (maybe a police officer or maybe an amateur detective or maybe just some random person who gets caught up in the plot), and some solution to the crime offered at the novel’s end. That’s not a whole lot to hang a genre on, but I suppose that’s why the genre does so well — it allows authors to take those basic elements in so many different directions that the genre continues to feel fresh and interesting. The best books we’ve read are about much more than a mystery, reaching beyond the basic plot to say something else.

Gaudy Night pushes the mystery genre in the direction of philosophical treatise, asking questions about duty and where our ultimate loyalty lies, and social commentary, specifically on the question of prospects for women who are smart and would like a career and family both. What I love about the book is that Sayers is unafraid to include long passages of complicated dialogue — long scenes where Oxford dons debate matters of ethics and social policy or conversations where the protagonist Harriet Vane ponders what it means to write mystery novels.  There is a plot, but at times the plot seems almost beside the point. What matters are the ideas, and even more so, the changes Harriet goes through as she grapples with those ideas.

Harriet is a marvelous character.  I’ve read one other Sayers novel, The Nine Tailors, and I liked it, but it didn’t have Harriet in it and so wasn’t quite as fabulous.  I now see that sooner or later I will have to read every Harriet Vane book Sayers wrote. In Gaudy Night, Harriet is interesting because she is conflicted in a dozen different ways.  We see her first as she is on her way back to Oxford for a reunion — the gaudy — and it is all she can do to drag herself back.  She goes only because she doesn’t want to disappoint classmates who have invited her.  The trouble is that she has made a career out of mystery novel writing, which she thinks some in Oxford might not consider a worthy use of her excellent education; she has also offended traditional morality by living with a man she was not married to, and, worst of all, she was a murder suspect herself and only narrowly escaped conviction and hanging.

She finds, however, that the Oxford dons are interested in her writing and are fans of her books, and when disturbing events start happening on campus — threatening letters arrive, lewd pictures and messages appear on walls, property gets destroyed — the dons invite her back to help them solve the mystery.

This turns out to offer her a little retreat in which to think about some of the things that have been troubling her. While working on the case — and also helping an English scholar edit a manuscript and doing some research on Sheridan Le Fanu — she talks with the dons about what it means to live a life of the mind, tucked away in isolation from the world of families and children and domestic responsibilities.  She has the chance to think about whether a satisfying life is possible for a woman who has brains and a heart both — one who wants to do more than care for a family but doesn’t want to let a career keep her from experiencing love and romance.  She worries that she will have to choose one or the other, career or love, and she worries with good reason, as all she sees around her are single women purely devoted to their scholarly lives on the one hand, and on the other, women who have found themselves caring for a brood of children and have lost touch with their intellectual ambitions.

And then there is Peter Wimsey, the charming, attractive amateur detective who keeps proposing marriage to her, and whom Harriet feels she could care for, if only they didn’t have a singularly unfortunate past.  It turns out that Peter is the one who saved her from conviction in the murder case, and now she feels she is on unequal footing with him, owing him her life, in effect, and she is convinced those are the worst circumstances in which to fall in love with somebody. She would like to fall in love, but she would like even more to maintain her independence and her pride.

The book moves back and forth between Harriet’s investigation of the mysterious happenings on campus and her conversations and thoughts about what kind of life she wants, and she also interacts with undergraduates, both men and women, so we get a picture of Oxford life, with all its traditions and habits.  As Emily writes in her post, Oxford itself becomes a character.

The book does all these things and more.  In our meeting, my book group listed all the book types or genres Gaudy Night references, and we came up with a long list: academic satire, mystery, romance, social commentary, comedy of manners, philosophical exploration, feminist manifesto, novel of personal growth, künstlerroman, literary criticism, even political thriller, as Peter Wimsey is always dashing off to Europe on diplomatic missions and it’s clear that World War II is on its way (the book was published in 1936).

So Gaudy Night accomplishes a whole lot in its 500 or so pages, and yet Sayers manages to make it all hang together. It’s a mystery novel and also an illustration of just how much a “mere” mystery novel can do.

I’m trying to warn you that this post says very little about Winterson’s book Sexing the Cherry, so if you want a discussion of the actual book, as opposed to an analysis of my feelings about it, I would check out the posts over at the Slaves of Golconda blog.  There is just something about this book, and about Jeanette Winterson’s writing generally, that doesn’t sit very well with me, and I suspect this problem has more to do with me than with the writing itself.

To back up a bit, I first read Winterson during my very first semester in grad school when we were assigned her novel The Passion.  I liked the book, and I decided to write a paper on it, one which made some connections between Winterson and Virginia Woolf and drew some conclusions about modernism and postmodernism.  That was interesting, and I was pleased to be able to write about Woolf, whom I had fallen in love with just a couple years before.  And then I read a couple other Winterson books, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Written on the Body, and while I liked Oranges, I liked Written on the Body a little bit less, and then as time went on and I thought about Winterson now and then, I started to like her work less and less, and then I became profoundly ambivalent about it, and now after reading Sexing the Cherry I’m beginning to think Winterson is just not a writer who works for me.

I now think I was trying to like what I felt I was supposed to like, back when I read The Passion in grad school.  I did experience some genuine pleasure in reading the book, but I felt some uncertainty about it too, and I didn’t listen to that part of my response because … well, because everyone else loved it and because it seemed so smart and hip.  Winterson has a lot to say about our unstable identities, the uncertainty of space and time, the mixing of past and present, and all that stuff is so very postmodern, and I was all into postmodernism, and so of course I was going to like this book.

But … there’s something about Winterson’s writing that doesn’t work for me, and I’m trying to pinpoint what it is.  It has something to do with the fact that her books seem like they are written for the sake of the ideas rather than for the sake of the characters or plot, and I’d prefer it if they all fit together seamlessly.  But this can’t be the entire story, because I do like idea-driven novels very much, and if the ideas are interesting enough and the writing is good, I don’t mind if characters or plot are sacrificed.  And, actually, Sexing the Cherry has some great, memorable characters (I liked Dog-Woman quite a lot) and is mainly lacking plot, and plot is most often the last thing I care about in a book.

Another factor is that I’m not really fond of the fantastical, magical-realism stuff in Winterson’s work.  I’ve read some Rushdie and Garcia Marquez, and now that I think about it, I felt the same sense of queasy uncertainty when I read them.  Yes, they are smart, yes, they are great writers, and yes, they are important, but no, I can’t say I love their work.  I guess — and I kind of wish I didn’t feel this way — that I want realism to be realism and fantasy/science fiction/fables/fairy tales to be their own thing.  Generally I’m all for people breaking the rules, but it appears there are limits to my tolerance of disorder and rule-breaking and boundary-crossing and genre-bending.

And then there’s the mean-spirited, grouchy, cynical side of me that doesn’t like the light-hearted, playful, celebratory tone of the book.  The moments I liked best were the darker ones — the passages about how Dog-Woman and Jordan misunderstand each other or the descriptions of religious violence.  I wasn’t so fond of Jordan’s fantastical travels or the twelve princesses or the speculations about the fluidity of identity and the centrality of love.  And I don’t really like the prettiness of the language either.

But here I’m starting to go off the deep end a little bit, and you can see how I just don’t get along with this book and should probably just stop now.  I do understand, in an abstract, detached kind of way, how other people can like it; maybe this is just one of those matters of taste, kind of like the way I don’t like potatoes but I understand that most people do, and I’m fine with that.

Check out other people’s  posts here and the group discussion here.

First of all, the dramatic reading of Edna O’Brien’s play about Virginia Woolf was very enjoyable.  It took place in a little theater in the basement below the Drama Bookshop, and I got to chat with some students who are in the grad program I graduated from.  Anne Fernald started off the program by reading a beautiful personal essay connecting her family reading history, her scholarly interests, and Virginia Woolf.  And then three actors read the play, which basically covered important events in Woolf’s life, most memorably her relationships with Leonard Woolf and Vita Sackville-West.  I would like to read the play, partly because this performance didn’t include the entire script, but mostly because it was beautifully-written, capturing Woolf’s spirit and her brilliant use of language.

I recently finished a book by Woolf herself — her short story collection Monday or Tuesday.  It doesn’t feel quite right calling it a short story collection, because many of the works are more like sketches or essays, and only one or two have anything like a plot (and that’s a bit of a stretch).  The book is very short — less than 60 pages in my edition — and it contains eight stories, some of which are only a page or two.  Each piece is experimental in some way; some of them are like prose poems and others, my favorites, follow a character’s thoughts or Woolf’s own thoughts, as they move from subject to subject.  The story with the strongest sense of narrative, “A Society,” is a humorous take on patriarchy.  It tells of a group of women who agree that “the objects of life were to produce good people and good books,” and decide they will go out into the world to see just how well men have done with these tasks.  They meet periodically to discuss their conclusions. Monday or Tuesday is very short, but I like the way it reveals many of Woolf’s preoccuptions — feminism, consciousness, and the power and beauty of language itself.

As I read along, I thought about how I would have reacted to the pieces if I’d read them when they were first published or if I had read them without knowing anything Woolf.  It’s impossible to know what I would have thought, but my guess is that I would have fallen in love with a few of the pieces and found others bewildering or off-putting.  The shorter, more poetic pieces (“Blue and Green,” “Monday or Tuesday”) left me a little cold.  I can see that Woolf is experimenting with language, but I had trouble piecing together exactly what was going on in them.  The feminist tale “A Society” is amusing and light, although with a serious point to make, and “Kew Gardens” interestingly widens its focus to describe the world from the perspective of a snail.  There are people in “Kew Gardens,” but they don’t have their usual privileged position and have to share the spotlight with the natural world.

The ones I liked best, though, the ones I would have fallen in love with even if I hadn’t known a thing about Woolf, are the stories specifically about consciousness.  There is “The String Quartet,” which follows the thoughts and perceptions of a person at a musical performance.  The narrator offers her own wandering thoughts, interrupted now and then by the conversations of others.  There is also “An Unwritten Novel,” a story about a train trip where the narrator observes a fellow-passenger and creates an entire life story for her, one that would explain her strange twitch and the unhappy look on her face.  The story is about the power of the imagination and of sympathy — and it’s about the way life is sometimes very different from what our imaginations conjure up.

The masterpiece of the book, though, is “The Mark on the Wall,” a personal essay that tells of Woolf’s thoughts as she sits near the fire and notices something on the wall, something she can’t quite place.  As she sits there wondering if it is a nail or a smudge, her thoughts roam from the small — wondering about the people who lived in the house before her — to the large — the mystery of life itself.  She wants to lose herself in her thoughts and so starts to tell herself a story, which she soon abandons to consider the complications of identity, and soon she returns to the mark again, wondering what it is, but too happily lost in thought to get up and investigate.  I love the way Woolf follows the stream of consciousness — this requires such a carefully crafted, contrived style and yet Woolf makes the flow of thoughts on the page seem utterly natural — and the way she uses the stream-of-consciousness style to contemplate thought itself.  As she records her thoughts, she makes an argument for the multiplicity and complexity of identity and the way art will reflect this in the future:

As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror; that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes.  And the novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more out of their stories, taking a knowledge of it for granted …

After reading the stories, I turned to the relevant chapter in Julia Briggs’s book Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, and she talks about how the stories in Monday or Tuesday are like warm-ups for Woolf’s later experimental fiction.  “The Mark on the Wall” is more than that, but it does indicate what Woolf hoped to do in her own work and it helps us understand how to read what came later.

I’m slowly reading my way through Woolf’s fiction, which means that Jacob’s Room is next.  I’m a little frightened of this book, as I tried to read it a long time ago and didn’t do very well, but I’m counting on greater age and experience to help me out.  I’m excited to see what the second time through will be like.