Of Books and Bicycles

The form of the very brief review is working well for me these days, so I’ll do it again.

First, The Marriage Plot. I liked it just fine. But, but … I wanted to like it more than that and so felt a little disappointed. It’s a very absorbing story, and I read the novel quickly. Ultimately, though, I didn’t think it was doing anything terribly interesting. It was good but not great. I guess I don’t think the question the novel asks — what happens to the marriage plot in the modern age when marriage is so embattled? — is all that interesting. Forms of the marriage plot still exist, but it is radically changed and becomes something more like the relationship plot. But this is something tons of novels explore, right? I did like all the novel’s bookishness, Madeleine’s literature and theory courses and her obsession with A Lover’s Discourse. And I liked Mitchell and his religious explorations. I thought the ending was satisfying as well.

Also, Mariana, by Monica Dickens. Again, I liked it just fine, and again, it was good but not great. The story is episodic, recounting scenes from the main character Mary’s life from her girlhood up through her (early or mid?) adult years. She visits the country, she goes to school, she gets “engaged” as a child to a boy who takes the “engagement” much less seriously than she does, she slowly comes to face more grown-up worries. What makes the novel’s structure more interesting is the opening scene, which shows her as an adult during World War II waiting to find out whether her husband was drowned or not. After this, we move back into her girlhood and don’t find out what happened to the husband — or even who the husband is — until the novel’s end. This created enough suspense and interest to keep me going. The novel was charming and fun, but not something I was in a mood to fall in love with.

I’ve been in a mood to read fiction that’s a little more experimental and strange and not likely to be the kind of perfectly competent but not very exciting novel I’ve read recently, so I picked up David Foster Wallace’s short story collection Oblivion, and even though I’m not loving that book either, it is closer to what I’ve wanted. It is strange, certainly.

Like Danielle, I had mixed feelings about Molly Gloss’s novel Wild Life. To begin with the positive, there were times in this book where I felt thoroughly engaged. It’s in part an adventure story, and the main character, Charlotte, does have some great adventures. The novel takes place in the west, somewhere around the Washington/Oregon border, in the early 20th century. It’s logging territory, and a pretty wild, uncertain place. Charlotte lives with her five children, trying to carve out a writing career. Her husband is not in the picture, but she has a woman who acts as nanny, which allows her to sneak off now and then to get some writing done. The adventure begins when the nanny’s granddaughter disappears in the woods. When search parties fail to find her, Charlotte decides she needs to go search for her herself. She takes off into the wilderness and soon enough gets lost herself. These passages were exciting. I could imagine all too well what Charlotte was experiencing as she struggled to find her way back to civilization.

The book has fantasy elements to it, but they don’t become part of the story until Charlotte gets lost: while wandering around the woods nearly starved to death, she comes across a group of large human-like creatures, frightening-looking but kind animals, who slowly adopt her into their community. The creatures’ lives are endangered by the encroachments of logging; they need space in which to wander and forage for food, but that space is quickly disappearing.

All this works pretty well, although the fantasy element comes too late in the book to feel natural and properly-integrated. The book’s structure is odd in one way — the pacing is wildly uneven — but quite interesting in another: it is a mix of several genres. The main story is told through Charlotte’s diary, but interspersed throughout are fragments of her fiction, stories that are sometimes based on her own life and so rework the material in the diary, and also Charlotte’s essay-like ponderings on what it means to be a woman writer. These materials reinforce each other by exploring themes and ideas from different perspectives, so we can see Charlotte’s life told through her diary and also transformed into fiction.

What bothered me, and I couldn’t shake the feeling although I’m not sure how fair this is, was that Charlotte felt unrealistic, too much of a fantasy figure. For her to be able to write as much as she does without a husband and with five sons seems improbable, even given the nanny. But even more so, her feminism seemed fashioned purposely to please 21st-century audiences rather than to capture a truth about the time period. I know that feminism at the turn of the last century was well-developed and that people were making arguments about women’s writing similar to Charlotte’s, but Charlotte seems just too perfect. She defies stereotypes about women at every turn, in the way she dresses and acts, in her conversation, in the way she treats men, in her writing. I am all for strong female characters who defy gender stereotypes, but I don’t want to be jerked out of the world of the story by the feeling that I’m being presented with an argument rather than a character.

All in all, it’s a pretty odd book, although not entirely in a bad way. The book’s various elements — the wild west, the fantasy, the feminism, the theorizing about gender and writing, the experimenting with structure — don’t quite cohere, but it’s interesting in parts, and it’s fun when the story finally hooks you and you absolutely have to know how Charlotte is going to make it out of the woods.

Annabel Lyon’s The Golden Mean is the latest selection of the Slaves of Golconda reading group. The novel tells the story of Aristotle’s life, focusing particularly on his relationship with the future Alexander the Great. It’s told from Aristotle’s first-person perspective, and for me, this was the chief interest of the book: imagining what it might have been like to be Aristotle. We see him disagreeing with his former teacher Plato’s ideas about the nature of reality, developing his ideas about tragedy as a genre, and thinking about the danger of extremes and the importance of the middle way. We also see him dealing with a complicated relationship with his wife and facing disappointment in his career. He runs into political trouble because of his association with Athens at a time when he was living in Macedonia, Athens’s enemy. All of this makes it possible to conjure up an image of life as it might have been so long ago and to think of Aristotle as a real person with regular-person worries and needs, when generally I think of him as nothing more than a brain and a set of ideas.

I found the book disappointing, though. Like Stefanie, I thought it was a little dull. The main problem is the lack of narrative tension. I don’t need an exciting plot, but I do need some kind of tension to pull me through a book, or, failing that, I want some interesting ideas, beautiful writing, and/or characters I enjoy spending time with and thinking about. I didn’t find enough of any of these things. There are interesting things to think about, the tension between being a warrior and a scholar that many of the characters experience, for one. I was also intrigued by the way the first person perspective makes Aristotle come across as a sympathetic human being, one who treats the mentally disabled with tremendous compassion unusual for the time, but who also owns slaves and assumes that women have limited capabilities and value. There is something fascinating about getting into the mind of a person who thinks about the world in such a fundamentally different way than we do today.

But the ideas don’t seem to lead anywhere in particular. I was interested in Aristotle in a general and vague kind of way, but I wasn’t worried about what would happen to him — he was clearly going to get back to Athens eventually — and his thoughts and observations weren’t interesting enough to keep me happily reading. I think I would have preferred the book in the third person with some more insight into the culture of the time from an external narrator’s point of view. The advantage of first person, of course, is getting to see the world through Aristotle’s eyes, but perhaps an exterior view would have helped bring his character into sharper focus and would have allowed more commentary on the social and political values of the time. In the abstract I like the idea of historical fiction that doesn’t get bogged down in explaining all the details of the time and place — where the author isn’t showing off her research on every page — but in this case, I wanted a little more guidance.

At any rate, I started off the book with high hopes and did well at first, and then found myself less and less eager to pick it up. Other people have enjoyed it very much, though, and you can read Lilian Nattel’s very positive review here.

What an odd book this was! G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday is going to be tough to write about. The plot is bizarre, and describing what happens even a little way into the book is more of a spoiler than I want to give. There have been interesting discussions going on at various blogs about spoilers, and my feeling (at the moment) is that some books are more easily “spoiled” than others. The back cover of my edition of the book has the right idea when it says only this about the plot:

G.K. Chesterton’s surreal masterpiece is a psychological thriller that centers on seven anarchists in turn-of-the-century London who call themselves by the names of the days of the week. Chesterton explores the meanings of their disguised identities in what is a fascinating mystery, and, ultimately, a spellbinding allegory.

The description goes on, but the rest of it is focused on ideas rather than plot. But those ideas are the other thing that make this book difficult to write about, because … huh? What exactly is going on on the level of ideas is a bit of a puzzle. The book does move into the area of allegory, or, actually, probably not allegory in the strict sense of the term but more like fable or parable. Chesterton clearly has something to say about anarchy and government, about violence and order, about good and evil, and, ultimately, about the value of suffering (I think this is key to understanding the very strange final scene). It starts off as a political thriller pitting police against anarchists, but it ends up in religious or quasi-religious, mystical territory. By the time you get there, you feel as though you’ve gone on a long journey, even though the book is quite short.

But I’m making the book sound serious, when it’s really quite funny, until the very end when the seriousness takes over. It has a witty tone and a kind of joy in the absurd that makes it a pleasure to read. The novel begins with two poets at a party in a London suburb, one who claims to be an anarchist, and the other who claims to be a poet of law and order. The two of them spar over the nature of poetry and their political beliefs until one of them is goaded into proving he is serious about his anarchy, and the other into admitting that he is a police officer. The relationship gets a little crazy from there. But everything is described so briskly, and the main character, Syme, gets to be so clever and witty, that the craziness is fun. It’s enjoyable to follow all the plot twists and turns, to watch the characters undergo dangerous trials and perform amazing feats, and all the while keep their cool and get some good lines in. Obviously, this is not a realistic novel and it does not try to be; it’s more of an amusing romp that also has something serious to say.

So, obviously, I think there’s a lot to enjoy here. This is the kind of book where it’s good to know a little bit about the tone and the feel of the novel, but best to discover the plot on your own. Chesterton takes you on a long, crazy journey, and although I’m not entirely sure where we ended up, it was fun traveling there anyway.

Alias Grace is my first Margaret Atwood novel, and I liked it well enough, I suppose. Sigh. I want to fall in love with novels, but these days it doesn’t happen very often. I did enjoy reading the novel, though; it’s long, but it read quickly, and I got caught up in the story. It dealt with interesting ideas and had some good characters, and it was well-written. I liked the variety of voices it contained, including letters from several different characters. It was all good … just not something I fell in love with. I will read more Atwood, though, at least one more, because I want to read The Handmaid’s Tale. That seems like a book I should read.

Alias Grace is a historical novel, set in Canada in the mid-nineteenth century, and it tells the story of Grace, a woman convicted of murder and serving time in prison, although she is let out during the day to work as a maid, where people stare at her in fascination. Her crime was murdering her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and his housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery, who is also his mistress. She was believed to have worked in tandem with James McDermott to commit the murders, but he was hanged while there was enough doubt about Grace’s case to lead to a prison sentence.

But Simon Jordan, a young doctor out to prove himself in the as-yet-unidentified field of psychology, decides that Grace is worthy of investigation, and might just be the case to make his reputation. He is hired by some charitable church types to investigate her case and see if he can prove her innocence. So he spends many afternoons interviewing Grace, and her story as she tells it makes up the bulk of the narrative.

All this gives Atwood the chance to explore the beginnings of psychology, which she does quite well with dream sequences and free association exercises and attempts to understand rather than just condemn criminality. She also writes about the nineteenth-century fascination with spiritualism and little-understood mental phenomena: some of her characters participate in seances and some are eager to hypnotize Grace to see if they can discover her guilt or innocence through her unconscious self.

Atwood keeps the narrative structure varied; sometimes Grace tells the story in the first person, sometimes we follow Simon Jordan in a close third person, and at other times we get letters that Simon, his mother, and various other characters write. All these work together to give depth to the story, especially in the way the various perspectives clash and contradict one another. We get the letters Simon writes to his mother, which do not tell her much of what he is actually experiencing, and, more significantly, we get Simon’s and Grace’s very different accounts of their conversations as Simon tries to win her trust, and Grace resists him.

Atwood does a good job of keeping the tension up throughout the book. Grace is an enigma; even though we get her first-person narrative of the murder story, there is much about what happened that she doesn’t understand — that, or she isn’t telling us what really happened. We have no idea, really, how reliable she is. But her story of working as a maid, trying to make her way through a world very inhospitable to women unprotected as she is by a father or a husband, is interesting even if we don’t know to what extent we should trust her.

So there is a lot to enjoy and admire here. I was just hoping to love it more than I did. Other Atwood fans, is this one of her better ones, do you think?

I finished the Little House on the Prairie books a couple weeks ago, shortly after the hurricane craziness (it was comforting, somehow, reading The Long Winter during the power outage, because even though our lives had been thoroughly disrupted by bad weather, it was nothing like what the Ingalls family experienced. We weren’t in danger of starving!). I like the early books in the series, but I love the later ones, and those are the ones I reread most often as a kid. Laura gets more interesting as she gets older and starts to grow up. Now she has to confront the fact that she can’t do whatever she likes with her life; instead, she has to become a school teacher in order to put her sister Mary through college. She takes on sewing jobs that she doesn’t like. She deals with social difficulties such as Nellie Oleson’s competitiveness and general nastiness. Since Mary became blind, Laura has been responsible for “seeing” the world for her, and she has taken on the responsibilities and worries of the oldest child. She is still energetic and high-spirited, but she must hold these spirits in check because young ladies are not supposed to do things like play with the boys at recess. She has to fit the code of femininity that she does not like and that feels uncomfortable to her. Things are not as simple as they once were, and the stories become richer as Laura figures out how to negotiate the changes.

Reading the Wilder books was a whole lot of fun, but reading about the Wilder books in Anita Clair Fellman’s Little House, Long Shadow has been much more complicated. Fellman’s book, which I am about halfway through, is very good; it’s an academic book, but one that is jargon-free and extremely accessible to general readers. I find the ideas in it fascinating and the arguments convincing. But it’s uncomfortably self-revelatory. I’m seeing now just how influential Wilder really was for me and how much I learned from those books as a young person, without meaning to learn anything. I recognized some of these things as I was reading Wilder herself this most recent time, but it took a critical perspective for some of it to really sink in.

There’s the matter of being uncomfortable with femininity, for example. Laura was expected to be docile and quiet in a way I never was, but I still knew how she felt when she longed to be out playing in the sunshine rather than sitting quietly with the other girls during recess. I hated the thought of having to fit someone else’s expectations of proper feminine behavior. I also identified with her longing to be like Pa and keep traveling westward. Ma and Mary both wanted to settle down near a town and school, but Laura knew what Pa felt when he looked longingly west and wished he could have more adventures on the frontier. I thought I knew what that felt like too.

But more significant than those things is the description of the relationships among the family members. Members of the family obviously felt warmly toward each other and it’s clear that they loved and felt loyal to each other, but they are not verbal about their feelings. They don’t hug or say “I love you” or share many of their innermost thoughts. They are all very stoic; they keep their thoughts and worries to themselves for the most part, and they try not to show it if they are scared or angry. When Laura does show strong emotion, she gets reprimanded for it. And, interestingly, she reprimands her little sister Grace for showing emotion when Mary leaves to go to college. It’s startling the way she keeps repeating “for shame! for shame!” to poor Grace as she very understandably cries at losing her oldest sister. Fellman describes the difficult relationship Laura had with her daughter Rose, and part of the problem was Laura’s refusal or inability to show affection toward her daughter.

So, yes, all of this reminded me of my family very much, both strong the sense of loyalty and love and the fact that it was rarely acknowledged. And then there’s the extreme individualism that runs strong throughout the novels. This is really the subject of Fellman’s book, which argues that the Little House books and their conservative ideology were powerful although largely unrecognized influences on American conservatism of the 80s and onwards. The Ingalls family take care of everything on their own, thank you very much; they rely on each other and occasionally are helped out by friends and neighbors (and they help others), but they don’t need a community or a government to take care of them. They create who they are and are responsible to no one but themselves. As a young person, this appealed to me very much, as, I would guess, it probably appeals to many young people. I had an (exaggerated) sense of my own strength and independence and a reluctance to trust or rely on anyone else. Independence and self-sufficiency are certainly not bad things, but Fellman points out how Wilder and her daughter (who heavily edited the books) leave out details that show the importance of community in their lives. She argues that the two of them regularly exaggerated the isolation of the family in order to make them seem more self-sufficient than they actually were.

There are more examples, but I think I’ve given plenty to show just how much these books have made me think. I’m left wondering how much the books taught me vs. how much I loved them for reflecting what I already felt, or how these two possibilities worked together. I’m not entirely sure, but I have learned that rereading childhood favorites can be dangerous, so watch out!