Category Archives: Nonfiction

I haven’t had much time to read further in Claire Tomalin’s bio of Jane Austen (my limited reading time lately has gone to finishing up Gaudy Night for this Sunday’s mystery book group meeting), but there are still a few things I found interesting I wanted to share with you.

The first is about Tomalin’s treatment of Austen’s relationship with Tom Lefroy, her potential love interest.  The main evidence we have about Austen’s feelings comes from a few references to Lefroy in letters she wrote to her sister Cassandra.  The story is simple in outline — she met Lefroy at a ball when she was 20, she dances with him on a few separate occasions, they have conversations about books, she makes a few jokes about it in her letters, his family gets nervous about this and arranges to send him away, and they never see each other again.

What all this means, though, is another issue.  I’ve read interpretations of Austen’s letters that play down her feelings for him, arguing that her tone is so ironic and joking that it seems unlikely her feelings were very strong, but Tomalin argues unequivocally that Austen was in love with Lefroy, and also that he was in love with her.  In reference to the letter in which Austen says she and Lefroy have done “everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together,” Tomalin says this:

… it is also the only surviving letter in which Jane is clearly writing as the heroine of her own youthful story, living for herself the short period of power, excitement and adventure that might come to a young woman when she was thinking of choosing a husband; just for a brief time she was enacting instead of imagining.  We can’t help knowing that her personal story will not go in the direction she is imagining in the letter … but just at that moment, in January 1796, you feel she might quite cheerfully have exchanged her genius for the prospect of being married to Tom Lefroy one day, and living in unknown Ireland, with a large family of children to bring up.

Thank goodness for our sakes that she didn’t have the large family of children, but it’s very sad to think of the heartbreak Austen might have experienced after she realized the relationship was going nowhere.  The problem was money.  Lefroy needed to marry a woman who had some, and Austen was basically penniless.  It’s not that Lefroy was mercenary, but that he was dependent on an uncle who had provided for him and that he had siblings who were dependent on him for their livelihood.  It’s unromantic but entirely true that his life ran more smoothly without Austen in it.  And her heartbreak means that we have the novels.  But it’s still a sad story.

The other interesting thing I discovered was that Austen’s younger relatives thought of her as unrefined and a tiny bit embarrassing.  I was aware that the Victorians sometimes thought of Austen’s novels as a little crude, a little too open and honest for their prudish tastes in fiction (although I wish I knew exactly what the offending passages were, as it’s hard to imagine seeing her novels as anything but models of propriety).  Austen’s niece Fanny wrote that she:

was not so refined as she ought to have been from her talent … They [the Austens] were not rich & the people around with whom they chiefly mixed, were not at all high bred, or in short anything more than mediocre & they of course tho’ superior in mental powers & cultivation were on the same level as far as refinement goes … Aunt Jane was too clever not to put aside all possible signs of “common-ness” (if such an expression is allowable) & teach herself to be more refined … Both the Aunts [Cassandra and Jane] were brought up in the most complete ignorance of the World & its ways (I mean as to fashion &c) & if it had not been for Papa’s marriage which brought them into Kent … they would have been, tho’ not less clever & agreeable in themselves, very much below par as to good society & its ways.

Fanny was fond of Austen, Tomalin makes clear, but Austen was still very much the poor relation.  On the surface, Austen’s life seems so calm and quiet, but after reading Tomalin’s description of how often Austen must have felt insecure and on the margins of society, I can see that it really wasn’t calm and quiet at all.

My book group met today to discuss Jeannette Walls’s memoir The Glass Castle.  I have this idea about myself that I don’t like horrible-childhood memoirs, but I’ve read two of them recently and liked them both (this one and Jenny Diski’s Skating to Antarctica, although Diski’s book is a travel book as well as a memoir).  Perhaps I need to revise my opinion?  I don’t like the idea of these memoirs, but the secret truth might be that I really do enjoy reading about other people’s difficult lives.

Walls’s book is a fantastic read.  She is a good writer who knows how to tell a story, and I had trouble putting the book down.  The “stars” of her story are her parents, both of them highly intelligent, capable, imaginative people who never should have had children, although they wound up having four of them.  The father has a wealth of knowledge and a genius for mechanical things, but he’s also an alcoholic and can’t seem to hold down a job for very long.  Soon enough he is stealing money from the family to spend at the bar.  The mother is a painter.  She has a teacing license, which she uses occasionally, but she really wants to devote her time to her art — and she believes she has a right to do this, no matter what is going on in the family.

Walls spends her early years moving from place to place, but the family eventually settles for a while in Phoenix, and later in West Virginia.  It’s the West Virginia part of the story that’s the most harrowing.  Here they buy a place that might charitably be called a shack, which slowly deteriorates from very bad to much worse.  It’s tiny, the roof leaks, they only occasionally have electricity, and their toilet is a hole in the ground.  Walls tries to improve the place by painting it bright yellow, but she can’t reach the whole house and no one will help her out, so she ends up making everything look worse.  The stairs to the front door fall apart until they can no longer use them and have to enter the house through a window.

I could go on and on with the harsh details — I haven’t mentioned any of the worst ones — but what is so memorable about this family is that the parents seem completely unbothered by all the troubles.  The mother transforms all their problems into opportunities for adventure or for learning experiences or for character-building.  She is supremely self-absorbed, angry when she is pulled away from her art.  The father escapes partly by dreaming impossible dreams about the future (the book’s title refers to the castle he plans to build for the family), but mostly through drinking.  Neither of them are able or willing to face up to and take responsibility for their children’s suffering.

It’s easy to get angry at these parents, but they evoke a more complicated response.  They both, especially the mother, have a free-spiritedness about them that is admirable, and they are counter-cultural in all kinds of good ways — they are anti-consumerist, they value creativity and art, they are willing to be brave and take risks, and they raise very smart, creative, and talented children who are years ahead of their classmates (whenever they are in school to actually have classmates).  They are happy living on very little, being squatters in an abandoned building in New York City, for example, finding all they need from dumpsters.  I, at least, admire people who can happily live on the margins of society in this way.  They spend a good chunk of their lives homeless, but it’s by choice — they have the skills and resources to live solidly middle-class lives if they wanted, but they don’t care about how the middle class lives.

But my God, if people want to live this way, they shouldn’t have children!  It’s not just that the children led unconventional lives — which would be difficult enough but not uncommon or unbearable — but their lives and health were regularly in danger.

Walls sticks to fast-paced story-telling and rarely stops to reflect on her experience.  I understand why she has done this — it makes for a tense and exciting reading experience and it allows the story to speak for itself, making it even more gut-wrenchingly powerful.  I did want to see some more reflection, though, if only because I’m fascinated by how people process their childhood experiences and integrate them into their adult selves.  What I liked about Jenny Diski’s suffering-childhood memoir was the way she told the childhood story but also described how she’s dealt with it (or failed to deal with it) as an adult.  But this is asking Walls to have written an entirely different book than what she wrote.  Actually, it strikes me as possible for Walls to write a second book on the subject, this time telling how her adult self has dealt with this childhood legacy.

I also can’t help but wonder if Walls feels that she has exploited her family’s eccentricities and her siblings’ suffering for her own gain.  I’m not criticizing Walls for telling her story; it’s just that I felt odd at times reading about her harsh life with a certain amount of enjoyment, and it’s strange to sit around a table with solidly middle-class friends chatting  pleasantly about just how awful those poor people had it.

But, on the other hand, I’m glad that Walls has found success and made what is probably a fortune on her book, after all she experienced, and I’m glad for the opportunity to think a little with friends about parenting and childhood suffering and materialism and free-thinking.  Maybe I won’t become a fan of childhood memoirs, but I should recognize that there are very good ones out there.

I just began Claire Tomalin’s biography of Jane Austen, and so far it’s been great fun to read.  I was surprised to find just how much Tomalin emphasizes Austen’s energy, spirit, and attitude in her life and in her youthful writings.  She was no quiet, solemn figure at all — quite the opposite.  An important influence, Tomalin claims, were the young boys her family took in as students for her father to teach:

Jane Austen was a tough and unsentimental child, drawn to rude, anarchic imaginings and black jokes.  She found a good source for this ferocious style of humor in the talk she heard, and doubtless sometimes joined in, among her parents’ pupils, bursting out of childhood into young manhood.  If she was sometimes shocked as she listened, she herself was learning how to stock by writing things down.

I’m imagining Austen surrounded by rowdy boys playing their rowdy boy games, and thinking about her observing what went on and taking part now and then.  I never thought of her as drawn to black jokes, but I kind of like the idea.  I can certainly see her being unsentimental, especially when I think about the sharply satiric tone she uses in her novels.

I haven’t read much of Austen’s juvenalia, but I’m curious about it after reading Tomalin’s descriptions.  Comparing Austen’s stories to the moral tales of Arnaud Berquin, some of which Austen owned, Tomalin says:

Where he sought to teach and elevate, she plunged into farce, burlesque and self-mockery, and created a world of moral anarchy, bursting with the life and energy Berquin’s good intentions managed to squeeze out.  Berquin’s plays are dead on the page; some of Austen’s juvenile stories could go straight into a Disney cartoon.

She wrote stories with all kinds of bad behavior; her characters are rebellious and do things like steal, get into debt, have affairs, drink too much, gamble, and elope with married people.  Her stories sound wild and fun.

I was also interested to read more about Austen’s own reading and influences.  One of the most important books she read is Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, which unfortunately isn’t easily available today.  Apparently history has judged it not as good as Pamela and Clarissa, but Austen valued it highly, and there has to be a reason for that.  She also read a lot of Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson (especially his essays and his novel Rasselas), and Charlotte Smith, whom Tomalin calls the Daphne du Maurier of the 1780s and 90s. (I’m very happy to have a copy of her novel Emmeline on hand.)  Frances Burney was also very important, especially Evelina. Here is what Tomalin says about Burney’s influence:

She admired Burney’s comic monsters and her dialogue, but most of what she learnt from her was negative: to be short, to sharpen, to vary, to exclude.  Also, to prefer the imperfect and human heroine to the nearly flawless one.

Tomalin argues that even with these influences, Austen never wrote anything in the style of these authors — she kept her own voice and her own vision.  I’ve enjoyed reading Burney’s novels, but I can see what Tomalin means about learning a negative lesson — Burney has some great social satire, just like Austen does, but her main characters tend to be models of perfection, and Austen’s imperfect people are much more interesting.

I’m now moving into the sections of the biography that get into her adult life, and I’m curious to see what I’ll learn.

Elizabeth Hardwick’s collection of essays Seduction and Betrayal is fascinating reading.  She has essays on the Brontës, three women from Ibsen’s plays, Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Jane Carlyle, and she finishes the book with the title essay, an examination of the figure of the betrayed woman in fiction.

Hardwick’s style is clear and direct; she writes forcefully, in sentences that seem to get straight to the point.  I’ve read Hardwick’s novel Sleepless Nights, and while the prose style may be similar (I don’t remember well what the sentences were like), the novel seems much more diffuse, more wandering and suggestive, than the essays.  I have to say I like the style of her essays much better.

Hardwick’s sentences are direct, but she still takes time to build up her argument about each author; she tends to make her case slowly, looking at instances from the life, some examples of the writing, and then slowly putting together a picture of how the life and writing fit together.  It’s as you reach the end of an essay that the picture comes into focus, and one of the most satisfying parts of the book is how this picture is both crystal clear and complex.

One of my favorite essays is about Dorothy Wordsworth.  In this essay, Hardwick describes Dorothy as extraordinarily dedicated to her brother, William; her life was focused on helping him write his poetry — taking long walks with him, reading and talking about poetry together, sharing descriptions of local landscapes and people:

Dorothy Wordsworth is awkward and almost foolishly grand in her love and respect for and utter concentration upon her brother; she lived his life to the full.  A dedication like that is an extraordinary circumstance for the one who feels it and for the one who is the object of it; it is especially touching and moving about the possibilities of human relationships when the two have large regions of equality.

As the essay goes on, Hardwick adds to this description of Dorothy a more troubling picture — she could be peculiar and intense and something like a Brontë heroine.  She was vulnerable and needed an outlet for her great amounts of energy.  We learn from De Quincey that she sometimes stammered and that her education had large gaps in it; he implies that she might have been happier had she not been quite so dependent on William to be the center of her life.  Hardwick ends the essay discussing the very impersonal tone of Dorothy’s journals, questioning why it was Dorothy revealed so little of her inner life:

One of the most striking things about the record she left of her life is her indifference to the character of her “dear companions.”  She could not, would not analyze.  There is more to think about the poets in a paragraph of De Quincey’s Reminiscences than in all of Dorothy Wordsworth …. We cannot imagine that she was incapable of thought about character, but very early, after her grief and the deaths, she must have become frightened.  Her dependency was so greatly loved and so desperately clung to that she could not risk anything except the description of the scenery in which it was lived.

And so we end up in a very different place than where we started, with a full and complicated understanding of what motivated Dorothy to write what she did.  Many of the other essays proceed in this manner, including essays about real people and about fictional characters.  Hardwick argues that Nora from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House is wrongly seen as foolish and flighty and suddenly turning serious at the play’s end, when really she is full of energy and a love of life and freedom all the way through.  Her carefree attitude at the play’s opening is an expression of this energy, as is her final dramatic decision at the play’s end.  Hardwick’s conclusions about Sylvia Plath are powerful and convincing:

In the end, what is overwhelming, new, original, in Sylvia Plath is the burning singularity of temperament, the exigent spirit clothed but not calmed by the purest understanding of the English poetic tradition.

Hardwick is also good at dealing with literary groups; she captures the spirit of the Brontë family and of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury set very well.

All in all, if you like reading well-written literary criticism, this is an exellent book to pick up, and if you are unfamiliar with the genre and want to get a taste of it, this is a good place to start.

John Kelly’s The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time is a very good book in a horrifying kind of way.  I suppose that’s what inspired me to read it — to see just how horrifying a horrifying event can really be.  Much of the interest this book held for me came simply from learning a little more about what life was like during the middle ages.  There’s something disturbingly enjoyable about learning how people in earlier times lived, especially in times as far from ours as the 14th century — to think about the isolated villages, the stinking cities, the primitive homes, the sharing of houses with farm animals, the near-complete absence of bathing, the lack of modern medicine.

But learning about the plague itself was fascinating too.  Kelly gets repetitious at times, but generally he does a good job telling the story of how and where the plague developed (or at least our current theories on the subject) and how it spread through Europe and Asia.  He covers the science of it pretty thoroughly — how the virus works, what it does to bodies (horrifying), how it travels — and then looks at various regions of Europe, telling how the plague affected each place differently and describing the various ways people responded to it.  Often this meant vicious anti-Semitism; Kelly tells of groups of people called Flagellants, for example, who traveled around whipping themselves and killing Jews, in the hope that this would somehow save them.

I was glad for all the information Kelly offered on what life in the 14th century was like, but I found myself particularly fascinated by the larger sweep of history he described.  He told the story of collapse after the fall of the Roman Empire, a period when the population dropped and plague was uncommon because it was harder for the virus to travel when fewer people were around.  This was followed by a period of resurgence, when the population slowly grew, more and more farming took place, more food was grown, and living standards rose.  But by the 14th century, the population was becoming too large for the amount of food people could produce and things began to stagnate.  Not only that, but temperatures began to drop and the climate became unstable.  These developments caused a lot of death and suffering themselves, and then the plague came along to make an awful situation that much worse.  Kelly talks of mortality rates as high as 60-70% in some places.  He says that many areas of Europe lost so much of its population that the numbers didn’t get back to their pre-plague levels until the 19th century.

I found this history of the up and down fortunes of Europe to be so compelling partly because we are living in such uncertain times ourselves and it’s interesting to think about how people in earlier times handled the uncertainty.  It makes me wonder how people will write the history of our times (and it makes me annoyed to realize I’ll never know).  It’s also easy to think of the vast sweep of human history as moving generally in the direction of improvement — the population steadily goes up, science and medicine steadily improve, we gradually become more and more tolerant and enlightened.  But that’s not true, obviously, and something as out of our control as climate (oh, wait — something that used to be out of our control) can easily disrupt our always-tenuous civilization.

I seem to have a knack lately for choosing depressing books — I’m glad I read this one, and I generally have no problem whatsoever with depressing books, but with doom and gloom in the news these days, it’s probably not the best time for them.  I suppose I could be grateful that we’re not experiencing anything as horrible as the mass deaths of the plague, but my mind doesn’t work that way.  Instead, I just get sad at all the suffering out there and the senselessness of it all.  I will never go back to being a believer, but there are times I miss the sense that there’s a God out there watching over everything.  But the idea that there’s a God out there watching over everything makes no sense at all, so I don’t really want to believe it.

Okay, time something light to read, right?

Skating to Antarctica has confirmed for me that Jenny Diski is a writer I really love, one of those writers I’m incapable of being objective about and whom I will enjoy reading no matter what she writes.  I read Stranger on a Train earlier this year and loved it and this book was great too.  If I had to choose my favorite, I’d choose Stranger on a Train, although this may be for no better reason than that I prefer reading about America to Antarctica.  But both books have a similar structure and accomplish similar things: they are a mix of travel and memoir, and they tease out connections between her difficult childhood and her adult character.

I described this book to a friend, and as I was describing it, I realized that it sounds exactly like the sort of book I wouldn’t like.  I don’t normally go for reading about difficult childhoods.  While I like certain kinds of life writing, personal essays in particular, the word “memoir” makes me think of dull, self-indulgent books that are more about exorcising personal demons than creating art.  So I suppose this makes Diski’s accomplishment that much more impressive — in spite of my biases, I am ready to read about Diski’s difficult childhood in book after book.

What makes the book so good is her voice.  Diski creates a persona I can happily spend time with, no matter what she is writing about.  That voice is of the type I wrote about in an earlier post — brutally honest and not out to please.  She is who she is and you can take her or leave her.  She’s a contrarian, taking pleasure in seeing the world a little differently than everyone else, and this is an attitude I can appreciate, as long as the writer is witty and genuinely insightful, which Diski invariably is.  Done badly, this kind of attitude can be incredibly annoying, but done well, it’s delightful.

Skating to Antarctica is a book about whiteness — Diski’s desire to be surrounded by nothing but shades of white, which to her means a state of nothingness and oblivion.  She wants to get to the point where she has no tasks and obligations, where no one is making any demands on her, where there aren’t even any colors to look at.  I know this feeling, not about whiteness in particular, but about nothingness.  I feel that as long as I have things I need to do I can’t rest, and I want nothing more than days and days ahead of me with absolutely nothing going on.  Never mind that achieving this state would make me miserable (although I’m not sure this is true for Diski) and never mind the more important point that this state of nothingness is really nothing but death — I want rest and this seems like the only way to get it.

Spurred on by this feeling, Diski decides she wants to visit Antarctica, the whitest, most desolate place on earth, the place where she can get closest to her dream of nothingness.  Unfortunately for her, the only feasible way of visiting the continent is on a cruise ship, which means she has to share the experience with dozens of other people.  But since it’s the best she can do, she sets off on the trip, determined to find as much oblivion as she possibly can.

At the same time she is planning and executing her trip, however, life threatens to intrude into her dreams of peace — her daughter has decided she wants to find what happened to Diski’s long-estranged mother.  Diski has spent many years not knowing whether her mother is alive or not — and living in a state of happy ignorance.  In order to explain why it is she really, truly does not care to know whether her mother is alive or not (if you’re thinking it’s impossible not to care at all, Diski has a lot to say to you before admitting you’re right), she tells the story of her childhood, of her horribly mismatched parents, her tumultuous relationships with them, her time in and out of mental institutions, and her knack at getting kicked out of schools.

So Diski moves back and forth between her dream of escape — the whiteness of Antarctica — and the unfortunate fact that the dream is impossible to reach.  The choice is either to commit suicide, which while it was an option earlier in her life is not one now, or to stay enmeshed in the complications and obligations of life, however unwillingly.  I admire Diski for facing this vexing, impossible situation so bravely, and for writing about it so well.

One of my book groups is reading Diane Ackerman’s The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story, and I found it an engrossing read, although I do wonder how much we will find to say about it.  We’ll say things like, “wow, that was a great story” and “wasn’t it well-written?” and “can you believe how brave those people were?” and I’m not sure where we will go from there.  Maybe I’m wrong, we’ll see, but this book seems to find its power in narrative rather than in ideas, and ideas give you more to say in a discussion.

Anyway, it is a very powerful narrative.  The book tells the story of Jan and Antonina Zabinski, the zookeeper and the zookeeper’s wife of the title, who are in charge of the Warsaw zoo during World War II.  They survive the initial attack on Warsaw by the Germans and then witness the atrocities committed against the Jews in the city, first the imprisonment of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto and then their transportation to the death camps to be murdered.  Jan quickly becomes involved in the Polish resistance movement, taking risks whenever he can to undermine the German forces and to help save people’s lives.  Antonina manages their home, which she turns into a underground way station for escaping Jews and other people whose lives were at risk.  They often had crowds of people in their home, hiding during the day and moving around only at night.  Jan would smuggle people out of the ghetto and bring them to Antonina, who would then hide them and make sure the Germans who frequently patrolled the area never knew they were there.  Jan and Antonina — and many other people Ackerman describes — put their lives at risk countless times to help others.

Ackerman herself stays well in the background through most of the book, discussing herself directly only briefly toward the end to describe meeting some of the people involved in the story.  Rather than intruding herself into the narrative, she keeps the focus on her subjects, letting them take center stage.  This is a wise move, as the story needs no embellishment or authorial commentary and can stand very powerfully on its own.

In addition to telling the story of Jan and Antonina, Ackerman also describes the history of European zoos and the debates that were waged at the time, about, for example, whether animals should be expected to adapt to their new zoo environment as best as they can or whether zookeepers should try to create habitats as close to their natural ones as possible.  Ackerman also recounts the fascinating history of Nazi ideas about animals, in particular their attempts to recover extinct breeds of animals that they believed best represented Aryan culture.  By back-breeding — mating animals who held traits characteristic of extinct breeds in order eventually to recover those breeds — Nazis hoped to create an animal culture that mirrored their ideal human one.  They wanted pure-bred animals, particularly ones like wild horses and bison that demonstrated traits they valued — wildness, ferocity, and courage.  Just as they hoped to strip the world of human diversity, so they were devoted to a natural world that reflected their beliefs about racial and genetic purity.  It’s an ugly, not to mention unscientific, picture.  German scientists took advantage of their access to the Warsaw zoo to help advance their projects, and Jan and Antonina had to see many of their animals killed or carted off to Germany.  The story of human suffering the book tells is intensely moving, but animal suffering has its place too, and Ackerman’s descriptions of terrified, confused animals who didn’t understand what was happening to them were hard to read.

Ackerman’s writing is beautiful; it doesn’t draw undue attention to itself, but it does capture the landscapes and people and emotions of the story wonderfully well.  I have been planning on reading Ackerman’s Natural History of the Senses at some point, and The Zookeeper’s Wife is confirmation that I should do so as soon as possible.

I finished David Foster Wallace’s collection of essays Consider the Lobster last night, and am ready to pick up more of his work soon.  In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been raving about this book for a while now, which you can read about here, here, and here.

The last essay in the collection is a memorable one.  It’s called “Host,” and is about the conservative talk radio host John Ziegler who, at the time the essay was written, had a show at the Southern California radio station KFI.  The essay describes the environment in which Ziegler works, the ways his show gets put together, the kind of person and talk show personality Ziegler is, the state of contemporary talk radio, and the state of conservativism in America.  The essay does what a great essay should do — it tells a good story, combines personal narrative with larger social/political/cultural issues, and has something smart to say.  One of the points (among many, many others) Wallace makes is that conservatives dominate the radio talk show world because they tend to have a simpler, more straightforward black and white view of the world which is easier to talk about and easier to understand and therefore makes better radio.  Liberals are more inclined to be nuanced and about shades of grey, and that’s just not as exciting.

What makes the essay memorable, though, is the way this liberal nuance and shades-of-grey type of thought is represented in the essay itself.  Instead of using footnotes, which all the other essays in the collection have in abundance, Wallace puts what might be footnote material in boxes that are scattered across the pages, with arrows that point from the word that would normally have a footnote next to it to the appropriate box.  Sometimes there are arrows leading you from one box to another, and sometimes to another one after that.  There isn’t a page in the essay that is laid out in the usual way, with one interrupted block of text; instead, each page has at least one inset box with accompanying arrow.  Many of these boxes begin with labels such as “Editorial material” or “Rather less editorial than it might be” or “Informative + Editorial” or “Just the sort of paralytic dithering that makes the moral clarity of ‘we’re better than they are’ so appealing.”

So as you read, your eye gets drawn across the page in unusual ways, and as you work your way toward the end of a sentence, your progress is interrupted by this box and that box — by a clarification or an elaboration or an objection or a complication — and you find yourself in a jumble of ideas that is as exciting as it can be disorienting.  What is all becomes, I think, is a representation of complicated thought, a picture of a mind working its way through a maze of ideas.  It’s kind of the anti-talk radio.  (I see, interestingly enough, that there is an audio version of this essay collection available, but it’s abridged, and I don’t know if it includes this essay.  I do wonder how anyone would read it and what it would be like to listen to it.)

At first I found this layout distracting and I wasn’t sure I would like it, but as I got further in the essay, I got into the rhythm of moving back and forth from the main text to the boxes.  What reading this essay requires is the ability to hold a bunch of stuff in your head at once, because if you read all the boxes that accompany each sentence, it can take a very long time to get from the beginning to the end of each one.  Sometimes you have to read the equivalent of a page or so of boxed text to get to the end of one single sentence.  This can be mentally taxing, but it’s also exciting.  You could even say it’s stimulating — a word that happens to be very important for John Ziegler and his talk show world.  Ziegler’s goal is to be as stimulating as possible, to get his listeners so riled up they won’t move away from their radios and may even be inspired to call in to the show.  But while Ziegler wants to stimulate your emotions, particularly feelings of anger and outrage, Wallace would much rather stimulate your brain.

Writing an essay like this is dangerous — it’s easy to dismiss as gimicky and contrived.  But I think it works.  It’s clear that Wallace is appalled by much of what he sees in the talk radio world, but the essay doesn’t critique it directly.  Instead, he lets the evidence speak for itself, and he lets the organization of the essay speak for itself too — and what it says is that careful, nuanced, layered thought is a very good thing.

I’m sorry to say I was disappointed by Kenko’s Essays in Idleness. I loved the book’s prologue, which I’ve quoted on my sidebar, and I had high hopes that I would enjoy reading Kenko’s “nonsensical thoughts,” but too often I found them inscrutable, dull, or annoying.

I couldn’t help but compare Kenko’s work (from the 14th century) to Sei Shonagon’s earlier (10th century) Pillow Book, and find it lacking.  Everyone else makes this comparison too, or at least the writer of the introduction to my edition did, and Kenko himself had Shonagon in mind when he wrote his work.  The writers are doing something similar — they both record their observations of society, their thoughts about political and religious figures, the interesting gossip they have heard.  But Shonagon is witty in a way that Kenko is not, and her occasional mean spiritedness is highly entertaining, while Kenko is more inclined to be serious and a little stuffy.  Shonagon has her odd moments too, but the rest of the work more than made up for those.

I am glad I read Kenko, however, if only for a glimpse into a society radically different from ours.  Kenko was a Buddhist priest, and many of his essays touch on Buddhist beliefs such as the impermanence of all things and the pain caused by attachment to the material world.  Some of the better essays describe the beauty to be found in impermanence and imperfection:

Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when it is cloudless?  To long for the moon while looking on the rain, to lower the blinds and be unaware of the passing of the spring — these are even more deeply moving.  Branches about to blossom or gardens strewn with faded flowers are worthier of our admiration.  Are poems written on such themes as “Going to view the cherry blossoms only to find they had scattered” or “On being prevented from visiting the blossoms” inferior to those on “Seeing the blossoms”?  People commonly regret that the cherry blossoms scatter or that the moon sinks in the sky, and this is natural; but only an exceptionally insensitive man would say, “This branch and that branch have lost their blossoms.  There is nothing worth seeing now.”

I would have liked the book more had there been more passages like the above, and fewer about, say, the uselessness of women.  But even harder to deal with than the misogyny, which is part of the culture, after all, is that so many of the essays simply don’t make sense to me.  They too often tell stories the significance of which I don’t grasp, and I’m left shrugging my shoulders and thinking that it must have meant something to people at the time.  Perhaps I could have found an edition with better notes that would fill in some of the information I’m missing, so this could simply be an editorial problem, but I fared better in this respect with The Pillow Book, which also didn’t have extensive notes.

But then there are essays like this one (“essay” isn’t the right word, since the passage is so short, but it will have to do), quoted in full:

A certain hermit once said, “There is one thing that even I, who have no worldly entanglements, would be sorry to give up, the beauty of the sky.”  I can understand why he should have felt that way.

And I can understand this too.  Reading a book that is so far removed from our day and time as to be completely incomprehensible would make no sense, but there is surely a value in reading a book that has its beautiful moments but its bizarre and disorienting ones too.  Even if I sometimes got frustrated at what I wasn’t following, I was aware at getting a glimpse into a world far from mine, and I’m glad I could experience that.  There has to be a reason, after all, that this book remains in print and that people still read it.

I may end up writing about a lot of the essays in David Foster Wallace’s collection Consider the Lobster; at the very least, I’ve come across another fabulous essay I want to tell you about.  It’s called “Up, Simba” and is about John McCain’s run for the Republican nomination for president in 2000.  It’s an interesting essay in and of itself, but it takes on a new significance after what happened in this year’s campaign.  Knowing what’s in store for McCain in the future makes reading this essay from 2000 a complicated experience.

Wallace covers a week of McCain’s 2000 campaign, from February 7 – 13, which is the week right after he won the New Hampshire primary and just before he lost South Carolina.  McCain and Bush had promised each other they wouldn’t go negative, but during this week those promises get shot to hell — Bush makes the first negative move, McCain retaliates with something harsher, Bush accuses him of breaking his promise, and pretty soon the campaigns are negative through and through.

Wallace gets to follow along and watch all this happen close up; while McCain and his team ride around in the Straight Talk Express, members of the press travel in buses called Bullshit I and Bullshit 2, and it’s here that Wallace observes the reporters and tech people as they file their reports and keep the press machinery running.  It’s a great story he tells, a fun inside look at just how horrid the campaign trail is, with its repetitiveness, its frequent dullness, and its awful food and few opportunities to sleep.

It was Rolling Stone who asked Wallace to write about the campaign, so Wallace shapes the essay for young people, wondering as he writes why young people are so disengaged from politics.  He argues that it has to do with their anger and sadness at being lied to, compounded by the fact that not only are they lied to by politicians, but are also lied to by the media on a constant basis, and so they see no reason to believe anybody about anything.  There are also no real leaders, people who can inspire them in a genuine way to care about anything beyond their own lives.

The basis of the essay is Wallace’s question about whether McCain might possibly be such an inspirational leader himself.  This question isn’t answered — it’s more of a puzzle Wallace works at through the entire piece and doesn’t quite solve — but it seems like a possibility to him, given McCain’s reputation for forthrightness, and also given his heroic actions in Vietnam, which Wallace recounts in chilling detail.  It’s seems just possible that McCain might be the kind of candidate who can also be an anti-candidate, someone who runs for office but insists on doing it in his own unconventional way and who challenges the basis on which most campaigns are run.  Wallace is tempted to believe in McCain … but he has niggling doubts too, doubts about whether actions that seem honest and even impulsive aren’t really calculating and cold.

So, knowing what we now know about how McCain ran his campaign this time around, you can see how this essay has morphed into an entirely different thing.  Instead of being an essay about possibility (however briefly held — McCain’s 2000 campaign was just about over when Wallace wrote the essay), it becomes something much sadder.  Whatever it was that made McCain decide to run such a nasty campaign this past fall, that campaign seems like a betrayal of the earlier version of McCain who at least could possibly have been an inspirational and transformative figure (I’m setting party politics aside here — obviously he’s not going to be inspiring if you don’t agree with his policies).  It’s hard to imagine the 2008 version of McCain making anybody even a little less cynical about politics.  But maybe after all the 2000 version of McCain was just as capable of running a nasty campaign as he was this past fall, and maybe he tried to take the high road back then for tactical reasons rather than out of conviction.  It’s impossible to tell.

If anybody these days seems capable of taking some of the cynicism out of politics, of course, that would be Obama.  It remains to be seen how Obama’s presidency will work out, but I can’t help but hope that he really will be — will continue to be — the kind of inspirational figure Wallace was looking for.  It makes me wish Wallace had had the chance to follow Obama and write brilliantly about him too.

Hermione Lee’s collection of essays on biography, Virginia Woolf’s Nose, has a number of good stories to tell about the disagreements and controversies that crop up when biographers try to piece together people’s lives.  The more I read about biography, the more I realize just how hard it is to write one — not just because of all the painstaking research involved, but because of the many, many decisions a biographer must make about what to emphasize, what to put in and leave out, how to interpret facts that can have multiple meanings, what to do with the legends that crop up about famous people that might have little to do with reality.  Really, accurately telling the story of someone’s life is impossible — accurately telling your own life story is impossible too, I suppose.

Lee’s essays describe controversies that have sprung up about Percy Shelley (with a brief anecdote about Samuel Pepys), Jane Austen, and Virginia Woolf, and she closes the book with a chapter on the ways biographers narrate the story of their subjects’ death.  The stories are fascinating, including various versions of what happened to Shelley’s corpse as it was burned on a beach in Italy (his heart supposedly did not burn; Edward Trelawny plucked it from the flames and it ended up with Mary Shelley who kept it in a glass jar).  The story about Jane Austen concerns uncertainty about whether she fainted when learned she would have to leave her beloved home and move to Bath.  Lee charts the way versions of this story have changed over time and the way they reflect beliefs and biases of each biographer.

The essay on Virginia Woolf was my favorite; it describes what happens to her image and reputation and to her masterpiece Mrs. Dalloway in the hands of Michael Cunningham, who wrote the novel The Hours, and in the movie version of that novel where Nicole Kidman puts on a fake nose to play Woolf.  She charts what happens to the political content of Mrs. Dalloway in the later novel and movie, and also describes the dismay of Woolf’s critics and biographers at the way Woolf and her life and death are portrayed.  Lee expresses her own reservations about the movie, particularly its sentimentalization of Woolf’s death, but she realizes there is little to be done about it:

Does it matter if the film’s version of Virginia Woolf prevails for a time?  There is no one answer.  Yes, because it distorts and to a degree misrepresents her, and for any form of re-creation, of any significant life, in any medium, there is a responsibility to accuracy.  No, because she continues to be reinvented — made up, and made over — with every new adapter, reader, editor, critic, and biographer.  There is no owning her, or the facts of her life.  The Nose is her latest and most popular incarnation, but she won’t stay fixed under it for ever.

The book is short, at 120 pages, but it is rich with ideas about how biographies get written and reputations shaped.  She is particularly good on the ways stories take on a life of their own and become requirements for any biographer to deal with, even if the story has little to do with the facts.  And her closing chapter has a fascinating argument about the way biographers can’t resist becoming novelists at the moment they write the story of their subjects’ death: they find ways of turning the deathbed scene into highly significant and metaphorical moments, moments that sum up the subjects’ life or reflect on the work they have done.  Given a widespread loss of religious belief, we might expect modern-day biographers to take a more practical view and see death as simply another incident that is part of the life, but they persist in seeking out a larger meaning.

As far as books about biography go, I must say that I am more excited about and moved by books that have a more personal element than this one does; Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman and Richard Holmes’s Footsteps take up issues similar to Lee’s, but the personal aspect of these books makes them, in my view, richer and more compelling.  As much as I enjoy thinking about biography on an intellectual level, which Lee’s book expertly invites readers to do, I enjoy even more thinking about it on an intellectual and personal level both.  I want to see and feel what it’s like to grapple with the problems of biography rather than just contemplate the finished product.

But I don’t want to accuse this book of not accomplishing something it doesn’t ever claim to do, and it does what it does excellently well.

My edition of Ruth Hall has a generous selection of Fanny Fern’s newspaper columns, which are exactly the sort of thing her character Ruth Hall becomes famous for.  I haven’t read many of them, but I did skim through them and read the ones that sounded interesting, and I thought I’d share an example.  I found that her journalistic voice is very lively and entertaining and funny; this is the voice I liked best in the novel — the comic rather than the tragic parts.

This is an essay called “Male Criticism on Ladies Books”; it starts off with a quotation from the New York Times (given below) and then proceeds to comment on it:

“Courtship and marriage, servants and children, these are the great objects of a woman’s thoughts, and they necessarily form the staple topics of their writings and their conversation.  We have no right to expect anything else in a woman’s book.” — N.Y. Times

Is it in feminine novels only that courtship, marriage, servants and children are the staple?  Is not this true of all novels? — of Dickens, of Thackery, of Bulwer and a host of others?  Is it peculiar to feminine pens, most astute and liberal of critics?  Would a novel be a novel if it did not treat of courtship and marriage?  And if it could be so recognized, would it find readers?  When I see such a narrow, snarling criticism as the above, I always say to myself, the writer is some unhappy man, who has come up without the refining influence of mother, or sister, or reputable female friends; who has divided his migratory life between boarding-houses, restaurants, and the outskirts of editorial sanctums; and who knows as much about reviewing a woman’s book, as I do about navigating a ship, or engineering an omnibus from the South Ferry, though Broadway, to Union Park.  I think I see him writing that paragraph in a fit of spleen — of male spleen — in his small boarding-house upper chamber, by the cheerful light of a solitary candle, flickering alternately on cobwebbed walls, dusty wash-stand, begrimed bowl and pitcher, refuse cigar stumps, boot-jacks, old hats, buttonless coats, muddy trousers, and all the wretched accompaniments of solitary, selfish male existence, not to speak of his own puckered, unkissable face; perhaps, in addition, his boots hurt, his cravat-bow persists in slipping under his ear for want of a pin, and a wife to pin it (poor wretch!) or he has been refused by some pretty girl, as he deserved to be (narrow-minded old vinegar-cruet!) or snubbed by some lady authoress; or, more trying than all to the male constitution, has had a weak cup of coffee for that morning’s breakfast.

But seriously — we have had quite enough of this shallow criticism (?) on lady-books.  Whether the book which called forth the remark above quoted, was a good book or a bad one, I know not; I should be inclined to think the former from the dispraise of such a pen.  Whether ladies can write novels or not, is a question I do not intend to discuss; but that some of them have no difficulty in finding either publishers or readers is a matter of history; and that gentlemen often write over feminine signatures would seem also to argue that feminine literature is, after all, in good odor with the reading public.  Granted that lady-novels are not all that they should be — is such shallow, unfair, wholesale, sneering criticism (?) the way to reform them?  Would it not be better and more manly to point out a better way kindly, justly, and above all, respectfully? or — what would be a much harder task for such critics — write a better book!

Take that, Mr. Critic!  What a satisfying revenge, and how great to point out that criticism which can seem objective and detached and passionless is often motivated by emotion, sometimes ugly emotions like jealousy and anger.  I love the way she twice puts a question mark after the word “criticism” to show her doubts that this sort of writing really qualifies.

I’ve now finished John Mullan’s book How Novels Work, and I enjoyed it, with only a few reservations.  The book is a survey of the various technical aspects of fiction-writing; it has chapters on “Beginning,” “Narrating,” “People,” “Voices,” “Genre,” and so on, and each chapter is broken down into smaller sections on, for example, the various types of point of view, different character types, or various literary techniques such as the use of epigrams and novels-within-novels.  The book is a thorough and systematic introduction to the basics.

As someone who has studied literature for many years and taught it for quite a few as well, there wasn’t much that was new to me here, although some of the vocabulary I’m not sure I could have defined (I can never remember words like “prolepsis” and “ekphrasis”) and I had to look up the term “roman-fleuve” (which, oddly, Mullan doesn’t define).

But I think anyone who wants to know more about how novels work will enjoy this book and learn a lot from it, and for me, much of the pleasure of reading the book came from the way Mullan deploys his examples.  Mullan’s procedure in each chapter is to take one or two contemporary novels and analyze their use of the relevant formal element.  In fact, the book came out of a series of Guardian articles meant to explore contemporary novels that might be popular with book groups.

Mullan doesn’t draw solely on contemporary fiction, however; what I like about the book is the way he makes connections between contemporary novels and older fiction, particularly from the 18C, showing how recent writers are part of a tradition.  For example, in a section on “Addressing the Reader,” Mullan moves from Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones to Martin Amis’s Money, showing how each novelist tries to establish a certain kind of relationship with the reader by addressing him or her directly.  He talks about the rather strange continuing reliance on letters as a plot device in fiction, a reliance that made perfect sense in Jane Austen’s day, but not as much in ours.  It’s easy to think that writers are working in entirely new ways these days, and Mullan reminds us of the continuity of forms and techniques.

I did get a little tired of seeing the same books appear again and again as I worked my way through the book.  Mullan has his favorite writers (Ruth Rendell, Michael Cunningham, Mark Haddon and others) who make multiple appearances in different chapters, and while I can see how finding new examples might have been difficult (particularly since Mullan had that material from the Guardian articles already ready to go), the book does get a tad repetitious in places.  This problem may stem from the book’s source in those Guardian articles; the articles were organized around particular novels that Mullan used to elucidate a number of different literary techniques, so in the migration to a book organized by technique, the insights about particular novels necessarily got spread around into different chapters.

Still, I liked this book more than Francine Prose’s Reading like a Writer (which I posted on here and here).  The books both attempt to dissect fiction into its parts in order to help readers understand it better, although Prose’s book is more focused on helping people who want to write, while Mullan’s is aimed more toward an interested, general reader.  Both books are most interesting in the way they use examples and both books offer a useful overview of the basics.  But Prose’s advice-giving tone bothered me at times — she’s clearly trying to get you to read in a particular way — while Mullan’s mode of analysis rather than didacticism suits me better.

Given my last two posts, you can see how obsessed I am with what makes a novel a novel.  It’s part of the reason I love studying the 18C, as it gives you a chance to see how it all began (unless, that is, you think the novel actually began much earlier!).

A.J.A. Symons’s The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography is forever linked in my mind to Janet Malcolm’s book about Sylvia Plath, The Silent Woman.  The books are different in many ways, but the subtitle “An Experiment in Biography” could serve equally well for them both; both of them attempt to lay bare the experiences that go into creating biographies — the moment of inspiration, the research, the interviews, the wrangling over permission to quote, the exciting discoveries.  Both authors describe the emotions involved in researching a person’s life — the obsession, the frustration, the determination, as well as the complicated mix of feelings they develop toward the person him or herself.

Symons’s book was published in 1934, and it opens with the moment a friend hands him the novel Hadrian the Seventh, Baron Corvo’s most famous work.  He falls in love with it, whereupon his friend hands him some of Corvo’s letters, which produce an entirely different reaction — he is horrified by decadence and corruption he finds in them.  The combination of these two entirely different pieces of writing from the same person troubles and fascinates him, and his quest begins.  He discovers that not much is known about Baron Corvo, whose real name is Frederick Rolfe, so he follows what leads he has and soon is uncovering the details of Corvo’s life — some of them inspiring, but many of them pathetic and sordid.

The Quest for Corvo tells multiple stories — it outlines Symons’s research into Corvo’s life, it tells the story of the life itself, it tells of Symons’s response to that life, and it attempts to account for why Corvo is who he is.  Symons soon finds he has become obsessed with a very wonderful and strange man:

… nearly everyone who knew Rolfe thought him the most remarkable man of their acquaintance.

Corvo could certainly charm people and was quick to make friends and persuade people to help him — but he was the type of person who always needed help.  He tried to make his living in various ways, including painting and writing, but he always failed and was always in financial trouble.  His charm would inevitably fade, and a darker side would appear; Corvo was one of those people who seem to be working toward their own success while they are actually in the process of undermining it.  He would misuse money until his current benefactor lost patience and then would be horribly shocked and hurt when that benefactor began to ask questions and make demands.  He would end up in misunderstandings — somehow or other — with the friends he depended on, and would then react in a manner violently out of proportion to any perceived slight he received.  If his friend tried to make amends, he would refuse to consider the appeal as being beneath his dignity, even though he depended on this friend for the very food he ate.

In short, the man was completely insufferable, and yet — and here is the question at the heart of the book — he managed to write works of genius.  (At least, they were works of genius in Symons’s mind; not very many people have agreed, obviously, since Baron Corvo is not a well-known name, and I suspect that if I were to try to read even his most famous work, I wouldn’t like it.)  How does it happen that someone with mental problems we wouldn’t have too much trouble diagnosing these days, someone who made such a mess of his life, someone who managed to alienate every single person he interacted with in his life, could write so beautifully?  Symons offers some answers to the question of what made Corvo the strange person he was, but he acknowledges that the larger questions about art remain unanswered.  Art and creativity and the ability to work magic with words remain a mystery.

I loved this book because of its strangeness — the unusual structure as well as the unusual subject — and I loved it in spite of the fact that I became convinced I would disagree, probably vehemently, with Symons’s assessment of Corvo.  Symons tries very hard to be fair and to acknowledge what a horror Corvo was to his friends, but he is clearly fond of him and wants readers to be fond of him too.  I, however, would stay far away from Corvo if he were still alive, and I found it hard, not having had the experience of falling in love with his writing, to see what could possibly make the man appealing.  But it’s a testament to the strength of Symons’s writing that I found the book fascinating in spite of my distance from Corvo — or perhaps the truth is that this disagreement with Symons made for another interesting layer in an already very rich book.

Thanks for all your comments about how you choose books; I enjoyed reading about people’s methods.  In addition to the Nam Le book of stories (which I’m now half way through and am enjoying a lot), I picked up Adeline Mowbray, a novel published in 1804.  I figured if I’m going to read something from 2008, I should also read something from an earlier century.  Both choices have turned out well so far.

But I never gave you my final thoughts on Janet Malcolm’s book about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, The Silent Woman (first thoughts here).  In short, it was wonderful.  Litlove talked about enjoying nonfiction with “a bit of a twist to it,” and this book fits that description perfectly.  It takes familiar genres — biography and memoir, mainly, but also philosophy and literary criticism — and turns them upside down.  It’s a book about biographies, the various ones written about Plath and Hughes, and also a book about biography itself, the paradoxes of the genre and the trouble it can get people into.

Malcolm places herself in the middle of the book, describing her experiences interviewing the various people involved in shaping the Plath myth.  Each meeting becomes a little story, a vignette that reveals something about Plath or Hughes, or more often about the interviewee or about Malcolm herself.  By placing herself in the center of things, she acknowledges that biography is far from an objective form of writing, and that the biographer shapes the story almost as much as a fiction writer does.

The book is actually a little like a novel in the way that it sets out to tell a story and then keeps your attention so well you can’t wait to find out what turn the action will take next.  I usually read nonfiction slowly, but I flew through this book, drawn in by the fascinating characters — particularly Ted Hughes’s sister Olwyn, a woman you might see as a villain if you find yourself sympathetic to Plath or wanting to write a book about her (she was in charge of the Plath estate for many years), and Anne Stevenson, a writer who had a disastrous time working with Olwyn to produce a biography of Plath only to find herself villainized by Plath advocates (“libbers” as Olwyn calls them because most of them are feminists).

Malcolm says that any writer, including biographers, must take sides, and that she has taken the side of Hughes, defending him against those who have turned his life into a living hell by invading his privacy and pronouncing judgment on his most intimate moments.  But my sense is that in spite of her claims about the impossibility of objectivity and her obvious emotional involvement in the story she tells, she has produced a book as close to objective as is possible.  She may take Hughes’s side at times, but she also describes moments when her feelings toward him harden, and while she writes about how difficult and disturbed a woman Plath is, she also portrays her with great understanding and sympathy.  By being honest about her personal reactions to the players in this story, Malcolm earns the reader’s trust, or at least she earned my trust; I couldn’t help but feel that here was a writer doing her very best to tell the story as accurately as possible, and while she might fail now and then, she has succeeded as much as any writer can.

To give you a sense of what her writing is like (extraordinarily vivid, I thought) and what kinds of conclusions she draws about biography, here is a passage on the subject (lengthy, but worthwhile):

Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world.  The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away.  The voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biography alike are obscured by an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of banklike blandness and solidity.  The biographer is portrayed almost as a kind of benefactor.  He is seen as sacrificing years of his life to his task, tirelessly sitting in archives and libraries and patiently conducting interviews with witnesses.  There is no length he will not go to, and the more his book reflects his industry the more the reader believes that he is having an elevating literary experience, rather than simply listening to backstairs gossip and reading other people’s mail.  The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography’s status as a popular genre.  The reader’s amazing tolerance (which he would extend to no novel written half as badly as most biographies) makes sense only when seen as a kind of collusion between him and the biographer in an excitingly forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down the corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole.

Even if you are not remotely interested in Plath and Hughes (I am interested in them, although not enough to read traditional biographies; this book does, however, make me want to read more of their poetry), there is much to enjoy here.  Even if you aren’t interested in biography as a genre (which I suppose I am, although that fact surprises me, as I never realized it before), you will still like the book — in short, unless my description leaves you completely cold, read this!