Category Archives: Fiction

Many thanks for all the well-wishes offered in response to my existential crisis post — I find your comments very comforting!  True to my nature, I suppose, instead of going to see the upbeat Slumdog Millionaire today, I chose instead to see the much more serious and sad Doubt.  But it was a wonderful movie, and I find myself convinced that while sometimes escapist books and movies are what’s called for, at other times, meaty, serious works can help make a person feel less alone.

And I am very glad I read Bernard Malamud’s novel The Assistant, even if it is incredibly sad.  It’s a beautiful novel, and a nearly perfect one.  What’s memorable about it is the emotions it evokes in the reader — you come to care about the characters and the hardships they experience and you find yourself unable to put the book down even as you’re ready to cry at what’s happening.  The novel is also important for what it says about America and the immigrant experience in the 1950s (it was published in 1957).  In this book, America is not the land of promise for immigrants; instead, it’s a place where a lifetime’s hard work can land a person with exactly nothing.  The characters spend their entire lives mistrusted and viewed with suspicion, at the mercy of hostile strangers.  They are particularly vulnerable because they are Jewish and are surrounded by anti-semitism.

The novel tells the story of Morris Bober and his family; Morris owns a small grocery in Brooklyn, which he and his wife run, with some financial help from their 23-year-old daughter, who has a secretarial job in Manhattan.  The business has had its ups and downs, but lately business has been particularly bad, especially since a bigger grocery opened just around the corner.  Even the tenant living upstairs from the Bober’s cramped apartment sneaks out now and then to visit the new grocery.  Morris and his wife Ida work incredibly hard, keeping the shop open 16 hours a day, seven days a week.  Only occasionally on Jewish holidays did the family ever take an excursion together, but in recent years, Morris has stayed almost entirely on his small block, and almost entirely in his small store.

It’s a lonely, isolated, narrow life, but Bober sees little choice but to keep on living it.  Ida has been urging him to sell the store, but he despairs of finding a buyer and isn’t sure what he would do with his life if he could find one.  Their hope lies in their daughter, and specifically in their daughter making a good marriage.  She would like to go to college, but can’t afford it, although she has managed a couple night classes.  She is uninterested or uncertain about the few men she knows; she would like to get married and have a family, and she would also like to please her parents, but she also has dreams of finding a relationship based on intellectual equality and respect, and no such prospect has yet offered itself.

Into this situation walks the assistant, a young man named Frank Alpine, who looks as though he has seen some very rough times.  No one knows where he came from, although he has a vague story which later turns out to be a lie.  He starts hanging around the neighborhood looking for odd jobs and eventually Morris takes pity on him, although he soon enough learns that Frank has been stealing bread and milk from him.  But Morris is good-hearted and understands that Frank’s life has been hard, and soon enough, although Ida resists this as strongly as she possibly can, Frank becomes an assistant and works for room and board and very little pay.

From here on out, the novel’s tension builds, as Morris comes to depend more and more on Frank, but Ida never gives up her suspicions of his motives.  She is particularly worried about Frank’s interest in the daughter, Helen — she is terrified that Helen might fall in love with a non-Jewish man, and her fears seem to be confirmed when she catches the two of them spending time together.

I won’t describe the plot any further, except to say that Malamud does a wonderful job with Helen’s character; he describes her complicated feelings very well as she is drawn to Frank but aware of how little she knows about him and how little reason she has to trust him.

The feelings the characters have for each other and the situations they find themselves in are heart-wrenching, but it’s a satisfying kind of emotional roller-coaster, as everything about the book feels vital and true.  Reading this book you can’t help but feel that you’re in the hands of a master storyteller.

My mystery book group read two Arthur Conan Doyle novellas for its last meeting: A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four.  I think I read some Sherlock Holmes when I was a kid because I remember the volume my father owned, and I remember  pulling it down off the shelves and reading at least some of it.  But I have no memory of the actual stories, so this is essentially a first reading.

It’s interesting to read the books now that I know at least a little something about the Victorian era, because they seem so much of their time.  They are obsessed with rationality and order, with list-making and codification and analysis, which suits a culture undergoing industrialization and running an empire.  But they are also obsessed with all that they feared could undermine these things, most especially with the dangerous, uncertain colonial periphery — a good chunk of A Study in Scarlet is about the Mormons out in the wild west of America (not colonial, obviously, but a threatening boundary area) and The Sign of Four uses the 1857 Indian mutiny as a backdrop.  I was interested in the fact that so much of A Study in Scarlet is given over to the Mormon story; in an abrupt, disorienting shift, you all the sudden find yourself whisked away from London out to the hot desert and suddenly you are reading a romance or what could be the plot of a western movie.  It’s as though the book didn’t quite know what it wanted to be, as though it’s trying to bring in as much material as it possibly can and tame it all and make it all make sense, and it only partially succeeds.

The books also seem very much of their time in terms of their narrative structure — the focus of the books seems to be Sherlock Holmes, but he isn’t the narrator and we don’t have an anonymous third person narrator who focuses closely on him.  Instead we have Watson, who, with the exception of the American section, tells us about Holmes from his own first-person perspective.  There is a distancing effect from what seems to be the main show, so instead of getting Holmes directly, we get him filtered through another character.  This reminds me of the structure of The Great Gatsby, but all the other models for this type of narrative that come to mind are 19th century — Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Jekyll and Hyde. This structure puts more emphasis on the relationships among the characters, so what is interesting about the Holmes books becomes the relationship between Watson and Holmes, rather than just Holmes himself.

And without Watson, Holmes would seem even odder and more bizarre than he already does.  He’s a manic-depressive drug addict, after all, and although his drug use was perfectly legal at the time, it still is a striking feature of his character.  He makes it clear that he solves mysteries in order to keep from falling into boredom and depression, and when he doesn’t have a case to keep his mind active, his drugs keep him from despair.  When Watson asks him if he is currently working on a case, this is his answer:

None.  Hence the cocaine.  I cannot live without brainwork.  What else is there to live for?  Stand at the window here.  Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world?  See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the dun-colored houses.  What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material?  What is the use of having powers, Doctor, when one has no field on which to exert them?  Crime is commonplace, existence is commonplace, and no qualities save those which are commonplace have any function upon earth.

Fortunately, right at that moment, the doorbell rings, and a young woman (a young woman Watson finds most interesting) enters with a new case.

Not only is Holmes someone who today would be on medication and in therapy (or at least someone would strongly encourage it), he has some very peculiar quirks, such as the fact that he is so focused on his work that he blocks out everything else that could possibly distract him from it.  So he knows next to nothing about literature and philosophy, because those won’t help him solve cases, but he knows everything there is to know about chemistry and law and footprints and the various types of cigar ash.

But Watson, who perhaps has his own peculiarities but is someone we can actually imagine knowing, instantly takes a liking to Holmes.  The two of them room happily together and work on cases together, and it’s this relationship that makes Holmes seem a little more approachable.

The more I think about this book, the odder it seems, and now as I’m writing this, I’m realizing that this quality of oddness-that-creeps-up-on-you is one I prize highly.  I turn to Sherlock Holmes expecting to find something that matches the cultural image many of us carry around in our heads, but instead I find something a lot stranger.  Fun.

I’m a bit behind on my reviews, which is odd for me, as I don’t usually read enough to have trouble writing about everything I read, in one form or another.  Part of the problem, though, is that I need to write about Gabriel Josipovici’s extremely short novel Everything Passes, and I find myself at a loss for words.  I’m tempted just to link to Litlove’s post on the book and leave it at that — her review does the job wonderfully well and I’m not sure what I can add.

But, I suppose, in addition to linking to Litlove’s post, I can also describe the book a bit.  It’s incredibly short — really short story-length rather than novel or even novella-length.  It’s 60 pages, but there is so much white space that the text itself is quite short.  I read it in maybe half an hour, and that was taking it slowly.  I read it twice in the same evening.  Added to the book’s brevity is the fact that there is a lot of repetition, which means that Josipovici uses even less space to tell his story than is immediately apparent.  The repetition takes the form of a refrain returned to again and again, with some variations:

A room.

He stands at the window.

And a voice says: Everything passes.  The good and the bad.  The joy and the sorrow.

Everything passes.

It’s in between repetitions and variations on this passage that Josipovici finds a way to tell his story.

In spite of its brevity, the book gives you a full picture of the main character, Felix’s, life.  We know something about his children, his wives, his friends, and his work.  Josipovici gives hardly any detail about Felix or his family, but he still creates a sense of fullness, as though we have seen and understood all we need to know about the full sweep of the character’s life.  This book shows that you don’t need a lot of nitty-gritty detail to create that sense of completeness and fullness — you can tell a story that feels rich by using broad brushstrokes and letting readers use their imaginations and their emotions to complete it.

It’s no surprise that a book that departs so radically from general expectations of what a novel or a novella is takes up the issue of the purpose and form of fiction directly.  Felix has thought much about Rabelais and his fictional innovations.  Rabelais, he claims, is the first to realize that the innovations in printing and publication of his time meant that he was no longer writing for an audience he knew, but instead was writing for strangers.  Given the growth of mass publication, he couldn’t know his audience personally as Shakespeare might have or as anybody who wrote for a patron might have.  This meant he wrote in an entirely different way:

Rabelais invented modern prose fiction.  And no one really understood what he was up to for the next four hundred years, except for a few kindred spirits like Cervantes and Sterne.  I want to make our culture aware of what he sensed and how he responded to the crisis of his time, which is also the crisis of our time.  I want to sweep away the popular image of Rabelais as a writer of bawdy stories and nothing else.  I want to make people aware of the issues he faced and so clear the ground for a genuine renewal of fiction writing in our day.

These are Felix’s thoughts, but it seems as though Josipovici is asking his own readers to consider what Rabelais accomplished and how he himself is trying to respond to changing circumstances by creating a new kind of fiction.

Josipovici’s own fiction is quiet and spare — he has pared down a story as far as it can possibly be pared down and yet it still has the power to move and surprise.  He shows how a writer, with the help of sympathetic, willing readers, can do so much with so few words.

I finished Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s 1862 novel Lady Audley’s Secret and felt that I had enjoyed every minute of it.  I described it to someone as trashy Victorian fiction, but that description can too easily be misleading — the book is an example of Victorian sensational fiction, dealing with deception, bigamy, madness and a whole bunch of other exciting things, but it’s not a throw-away novel meant merely to titillate.  There are a whole lot of interesting ideas that come out of the book too.

I was surprised at one aspect of the book’s structure — the fact that Lady Audley’s secret isn’t much of a secret and you figure out what it is very early on.  There are some things you don’t find out until the end of the book, but the basics of the plot are no surprise at all.  What makes the book interesting is not what the secret is, but how the characters go about discovering the secret. This sounds like it might be dull, but it’s not at all — the hunt for the truth is exciting in and of itself.

That secret has to do with Lady Audley’s past — before becoming Lady Audley she worked as a governess and before that, nobody knows much at all.  The other part of the plot has to do with George Talboys, a young man without any money who left his wife and child, both of whom he loved dearly, in England to go find his fortune abroad.  This takes him much longer than he expected, but eventually he returns only to find his wife recently dead.  Except the circumstances of this death turn out to be strange.  Putting these stories together, it’s not hard to figure out who is who and what the secret really is.

But the revelation of that secret is so much fun!  It’s George Talboys’ best friend Robert, who just so happens to be Lady Audley’s nephew (by marriage), who becomes the detective.  He’s a fun character — he’s a very lazy man who is a lawyer without ever taking on any cases and who can’t even find the energy within himself to fall in love with the charming, beautiful woman who loves him.  He is so taken with George Talboys, though, that when things go dreadfully wrong and George disappears, he finds himself goaded into action.  Soon enough he is tirelessly searching for clues to George’s fate and desperately fearing the worst.

The characterization is a big part of what made this novel fun for me.  First of all, there is a definite edge of homoeroticism in Robert’s obsession with George.  Nothing else in his life has inspired Robert to exert himself except this friend.  When he does meet the right woman, she turns out to be not so different from George himself, in all kinds of ways.  But Lady Audley is the most fascinating character — I found it interesting the way she was never able to transcend her lower-class roots.  She is captivating and charming, and she has her husband wrapped around her finger, but she betrays herself in her vulgar love of finery and her penchant for spending time talking closely with her maid.  It’s possible to read her as a character who admirably refuses to live up to the Victorian ideal of passive, accepting womanhood — she manages to create a good life for herself out of some very difficult circumstances, after all — or it’s possible to read her as a dangerous, violent, thoroughly-unreliable upstart who needs to be put back in her place.  Of course, she manages to be both of these at once, and by making her both of these Braddon gets to have all kinds of fun — she can create a powerful female character who, as the back cover of my edition puts it, makes “an unabashed bid for freedom from the constraints of Victorian womanhood,” but she can also keep herself out of danger as a writer by making sure the ambitious upstart gets properly punished.

This is the perfect book if you like Victorian novels but are in the mood for something that’s lighter than Eliot or the Brontës.  You can read it for the pleasure of the story and you can also, if you want, read it for the ideas about gender and class.  It’s fun to read a book that allows you to do both.

Mark Mills’s novel The Savage Garden is an entertaining comfort read, the sort of book that you don’t have to take seriously and one that can help you while away a cold winter evening (or a hot summer afternoon, or whatever).  I wrote on Litlove’s blog recently that all I ask from comfort reading is that it not annoy me with bad writing, and this one didn’t (okay, there were a couple awkward moments during the love scenes, but nothing unforgivable).

The novel tells the story of Adam Stickland who is beginning to write his thesis at Cambridge and finds himself invited to Italy to study the garden at the Villa Docci, just outside of Florence (all thesis subjects should be that easy to find! and they should all involve Italy!).  Upon arrival, he finds himself introduced to an entire cast of characters — the old Signora Docci, who is ailing but charming and flirtatious; her beautiful granddaughter Antonella, who, of course, is mysterious and captivating; their various relatives; the suspicious servant Maria; the attractive and sexually frustrated innkeeper Signora Fanelli; and assorted townspeople, each with their own uncertain past.

The novel takes place in 1958, and the town and the villa residents are still grappling with the aftermath of World War II, and especially with what happened one disastrous night as the German army retreated and violence unexpectedly broke out at the villa.  Adam learns that Signora Docci’s son Emilio was killed by the Germans under circumstances that are not quite clear.  Although the novel doesn’t read as a traditional mystery (it’s too desultory with the mystery aspects of the plot and it doesn’t have a real detective), there are two secrets at the heart of the story — one of them is the question of what exactly happened to Emilio, and the other concerns the garden Adam is set to research.  It’s a formal garden with statues of classical figures, and Adam finds it strangely unsettling.  It was created in the Renaissance by a grieving husband as a tribute to his dead wife.  Except there is more to the story, and it soon becomes Adam’s job to find out what that is.  He reads Ovid and Dante in an attempt to figure out the message the statues are meant to send, and it’s fun to watch Adam use literature to piece the clues together and solve the puzzle.

These two plots, these mysteries, keep Adam busy — when he’s not already busy pursuing Antonella or glaring at her suspiciously surly uncle or trying to manage his out-of-control artistic brother.  This book is such a fantasy — attractive, smart, insightful but not too bookish protagonist travels to Italy, meets beautiful women, solves mysteries, uncovers material for thesis, and generally has a good time.  What’s wrong with a little fantasy now and then?

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.

Fanny Fern’s 1855 novel Ruth Hall surprised me a little bit, partly in terms of its plot, but even more so in terms of how it is written.  The plot has a fairly traditional structure to it — a heroine happy but precarious, a heroine in trouble, a heroine in more trouble, a heroine in new kinds of trouble, a heroine saved — although within the traditional structure are some innovations.  The novel begins with a marriage rather than ending with one, which is a twist on the coming-of-age novel so popular at the time.  Fanny Fern actively resists ending the novel with a marriage, in fact, as she could easily have had Ruth accept Mr. Walter’s hand, but instead Ruth insists on staying single and supporting herself.  Also innovative, of course, is the way that Ruth engineers her own salvation, instead of relying on a suitor or a family member to save her.  The very point of the novel is her claim of independence and the success she has at insisting on it.

To me, the novel’s style is most striking, though, particularly the short chapters and the juxtapositions of varied scenes and character sketches.  The style is disjointed, with abrupt transitions from one character to another. Fern’s newspaper writing must have influenced the development of this style, as the chapters are similar in length to the essays Fern published (my book has a sampling of these essays, although I haven’t yet read them), the type of essay her character Ruth Hall became famous for.

This disjointedness works for me because of the way it offers a kaleidoscope view of the story, all the little pieces fitting together to create a sense of the society Ruth moved in.  The style also fits with Fern’s relative lack of interest in extensive detail or psychological depths; instead of long sections of text that delve into the details of a scene or the depths of a character’s mind, we get a quick sketch of a conversation or a dramatic moment, and then we are on to the next one.  Fern is very good with the telling detail and the revealing conversation that informs you of everything you need to know without belaboring the point.  This is not to say that the characters have no depth or that the narrative isn’t fleshed out, but what depth and complexity there is (and really Ruth is the only character that is coming to mind right now that has some psychological substance to her — or am I missing something?) is created through quick flashes of insight.

The book has some odd moments.  I couldn’t quite figure out the point of the phrenology chapter, one of the longest chapters, in fact, except that Fern wanted to make a joke about phrenology, which seems like an odd thing to in the middle of a novel.  And I didn’t understand the characters’ obsession with puns either.  The fact that Hall’s daughter Nettie likes puns makes sense, since this is possibly a way of indicating that she has inherited her mother’s facility with language, but Mrs. Skiddy likes puns as well, and she’s not exactly one of the sympathetic characters.

But I like the book’s oddness; it seems to fit with its comic tone, and it does have some wonderful comic scenes, especially those describing just how horrid Ruth’s family and her in-laws are.  You could not possibly have a worse extended family than Ruth has — they are people you can rely on to behave in as selfish and mercenary a manner possible.  Even though these people cause much of Ruth’s suffering, their ridiculousness is so unbelievable that they provide a kind of comic relief to all the gloom of Ruth’s life.

In a way, Ruth’s story is at odds with the rest of the book — her story is about suffering, hard work, sacrifice, and triumph; it’s very serious and sentimental stuff.  The rest of the book, though, is about the humor and the folly of humanity, with Hyacinth and his narcissistic preening, Mr. and Mrs. Skiddy and their marital battles, and those letter writers who foolishly hope Ruth will write their school compositions for them.  For me, all these disparate parts work together to create a lot of energy; in formal terms, the book is a bit of a mess, I suppose, but it’s a fun mess.

If you like, feel free to follow and contribute to the discussion of Ruth Hall over at the Slaves of Golconda blog and the discussion board at Metaxu Cafe.

Thomas Bernhard’s novel Frost is a strange and difficult book, and I’m not entirely sure what I want to say about it.  It was a book with very little plot, which I often like, and it wasn’t much like a novel, which I also like, but this one … I wasn’t sure I enjoyed what it had to offer in place of the usual things.  It was bewildering and unsettling.  It’s beautiful in places, dark and despairing much of the way through, with uncomfortable truths about life that I often agreed with but didn’t much want to think about.  It’s the kind of book that’s a challenge — it never lets you get comfortable or lose yourself in it.

In some moments I liked the challenge and was glad to grapple with its difficult ideas, and in other moments I just wanted the book to end.  I thought about quitting with it several times, but the insights I got now and then were enough to keep me going.

The novel centers around two characters, one of whom, the narrator, is a medical student who accepts a mission to travel to the little Austrian village of Weng to observe his mentor’s brother and to report back what he sees.  The mentor’s brother is a painter named Strauch, although he hasn’t actually painted anything in a long time.  Instead, he spends his time taking walks in the forests surrounding the village and talking with the locals.

The two quickly become friends — friends of sorts, at least — and take many walks together; most of the time on these walks the painter talks and the narrator takes it in.  The novel consists mainly of the narrator’s reports of these conversations, jumping back and forth between his own words and long stretches of quotation from the painter.

What the painter talks about is not always clear — sometimes he’s coherent and other times his long ramblings are full of quick, confusing transitions, vague quasi-philosophical musings, and rants against the people in the village and against humanity in general.  I haven’t decided if it’s better or worse that the narrator frequently declares himself confused as well — it makes me realize maybe I’m not meant to understand the painter’s speeches but then I can’t help but wonder what the point of it all is.

The plot, such as it is, concerns the way the narrator becomes more and more drawn into the bizarre world of the painter.  He is both attracted to and repelled by the strange man. He struggles to report back to the painter’s brother as he is supposed to do, but he loses the ability to think objectively about the painter and can barely find the words to describe his experience.  He starts to lose his sense of the boundary between himself and the painter, wondering if his feelings about the situation are his own or are actually the painter’s feelings that he has internalized.

I might have hated this book, but there is some great (though gruesome) writing in it; here are the opening sentences:

A medical internship consists of more than spectating at complicated bowel operations, cutting open stomach linings, bracketing off lungs, and sawing off feet; and it doesn’t just consist of thumbing closed the eyes of the dead, and hauling babies out into the world either.  An internship is not just tossing limbs and parts of limbs over your shoulder into an enamel bucket.  Nor does it just consist of trotting along behind the registrar and the assistant and the assistant’s assistant, a sort of tail-end Charlie.  Nor can an internship be only the putting out of false information; it isn’t just saying: “The pus will dissolve in your bloodstream and you’ll soon be restored to perfect health.”  Or a hundred other such lies.  Not just: “It’ll get better” — when nothing will.  An internship isn’t just an academy of scissors and thread, of tying off and pulling through.  An internship extends to circumstances and possibilities that have nothing to do with the flesh.

The book is fearless in the way it talks about ugliness, despair, and death; it’s bracing in the steadiness of its gaze at the dark side of human experience — or perhaps “the dark side” isn’t the right way to say it, but rather the dark truth of human experience.  I suppose some might see in the book some grisly humor; it isn’t all heaviness and seriousness, although the humor is pretty dark indeed.

I may have picked the wrong Bernhard novel to read; this is his first one, and from what I understand his later novels follow similar formats (one character reporting on the thoughts of another character) but are shorter.  This one could have benefited from some cutting; I would have been much happier (so to speak) reading 150 pages about existential angst and despair than I was reading 300.

I might be open to reading another Bernhard novel if anybody convinced me it would be worthwhile; I have nothing against reading dark, difficult books now and then, and it would be interesting to see what else Bernhard has done with his unusual method and style.  But I think I’ll need a while to recover from this one …