Of Books and Bicycles

Cakes and Ale is the fourth Somerset Maugham novel I’ve read, and with each book I keep changing my opinion of him. I really liked Of Human Bondage, which was my first book, and then I listened to The Painted Veil, which I loved. So far so good; I thought at this point that I should eventually read everything he wrote. Then I got to The Razor’s Edge, which I didn’t like at all. It felt dull and ponderous. I like idea-driven novels, but in that one, I didn’t care about the ideas and didn’t like how they were presented. With Cakes and Ale, I’m beginning to think Maugham may not be quite as good as I thought. There were interesting aspects of the novel and enjoyable moments — particularly the discussions of authors and writing — but I was hoping to love it and I didn’t.

The novel tells the story of the Driffields — Edward Driffield, a famous author, and two Mrs. Driffields, his first wife, Rosie, and his second, Amy. (My edition has a preface by Maugham that says Edward Driffield is most emphatically not Thomas Hardy, in spite of what anybody says, which meant that I spent the entire novel thinking of him as Thomas Hardy, of course.) It’s narrated by William Ashenden, a writer himself who knew Edward and Rosie at various points in his life. There’s another writer involved as well, Alroy Kear, who is planning on writing a biography of Edward, who in the present tense of the novel has passed away. Alroy approaches the narrator in an effort to gather information about Edward’s life, which sends him off on long reminiscences of his time with the Driffields.

The difference between what the narrator remembers about the Driffields, what he chooses to tell Alroy, and what Alroy will actually put in the biography is the novel’s source of tension. The Driffields — Edward and Rosie — were…not quite proper. The narrator first meets the couple when they move into Blackstable, his hometown. Edward’s father was a bailiff and Rosie had worked as a bar maid, which was a big part of the problem, but they also never quite followed the rules as they were supposed to, and everyone knew it. Eventually Edward’s fame as a writer comes to make up for his social deficiencies, but Rosie was always a bit of a scandal.

The novel is really Rosie’s story in many ways, in part because of the narrator’s fascination with her and her bohemian ways that stayed with him all his life. But there’s also the problem of what to do about the troublesome, sexually-suspect first wife after she is gone and the second wife is trying to establish her husband’s reputation as a respectable, important writer. How should that first wife be portrayed in the biography, and what to do about episodes such as the time the Driffields skipped town with debts and servants left unpaid? And what about Rosie’s sexual history?

It’s all a question of class, of course, about how Alroy and Amy Driffield try to transform Edward from his working-class roots into a solid bourgeois, respectable writer and how the narrator questions and resists them. It’s also about writers and writing. Alroy Kear is the object of much scorn from the narrator; not only is he going to whitewash Edward’s past in what is sure to be a bland biography, but his writing, at least according to the narrator, sounds blandly boring as well:

I could think of no one among my contemporaries who had achieved so considerable a position on so little talent. This, like the wise man’s daily dose of Bemax, might have gone into a heaped-up tablespoon. He was perfectly aware of it, and it must have seemed to him sometimes little short of a miracle that he had been able with it to compose already some thirty books. I cannot but think that he saw the white light of revelation when first he read that Thomas Carlyle is an after-dinner speech had stated that genius was an infinite capacity for taking pains. He pondered the saying. If that was all, he must have told himself, he could be a genius like the rest; and when the excited reviewer of a lady’s paper, writing a notice of one of his works, used the word … he must have sighed with the satisfaction of one who after long hours of toil has completed a cross-word puzzle.

There is no room in Alroy Kear’s world for the exoticism that someone like Rosie Driffield can offer, and so the narrator scorns him.

I was disappointed in part by Rosie as a character; the back cover of my edition promises that she is Maugham’s “greatest heroine,” but she never quite came to life for me. It was the moment when the narrator tells us what she wasn’t a big talker that did it: I had pictured her as vivacious and voluble, and when I tried to picture her being quiet, I couldn’t do it. Then I began to doubt that I had really understood her at all. I’m also not entirely sure I like the narrator. There are times his mildly ironic tone is amusing and I can’t help but agree with his dismissal of Alroy Kear, but there’s something off-putting about the voice, something distancing. I suppose the mildly ironic tone gets a little wearying after a while. I don’t think that we are meant to read the narrator uncritically; as a writer himself, he is not exactly a disinterested observer of the fates of Driffield and Kear, and his detached, judgmental attitude toward his subjects seems self-serving. But critiquing the narrator in this way wasn’t enough to make the book a satisfying read.

I read this book for the Slaves of Golconda and am jumping over to join the discussion right now. Please feel free to join in!

My mystery book group met this past weekend to discuss Josephine Tey’s mystery The Daughter of Time. In a way, I’d like to write simply that while it’s not a historical novel, it’s all about Richard III, that you have to be prepared for some serious history, and that it’s really good and I liked it a lot, and leave it at that. Because that it wasn’t historical fiction but was all about Richard III is all I knew about it when I picked the book up, and I’m glad I didn’t know more. So if you’re interested in reading this book, you might stop here.

I was glad not to know more because I was delighted to discover the structure of the novel: the fact that it takes place solely in a hospital room and that nothing happens action-wise except people coming and going, bringing books and having conversations about them. What an unusual structure for a mystery novel, and how cleverly done! I love that the mystery is entirely historical, about the question of whether Richard killed the two princes in the Tower and if he didn’t, then who did. (As a side note, I was in the Tower just a few weeks ago, and now I wish I’d read this book beforehand. They had an exhibit about the question of Richard’s guilt, and you could vote on who you think the murderer was. Alas, I can’t remember who the other options were.) I love that the mystery is solved solely through historical research and logical deduction. Although there’s a lot of intuition involved as well, as the whole mystery gets going when Tey’s detective, Grant, decides that Richard does not look like a murderer. He has this feeling, based on his years working with criminals, that Richard isn’t one.

I also loved how the mystery branches out from the question of who killed those princes to questions of history and history writing. As much as the characters research historical events, they also think a lot about how we learn history, what we remember and don’t remember from our history classes in school, the various ways history gets written, and why historical untruths get perpetuated. Tey is great at covering a whole lot of ground answering these questions without making it seem formulaic or contrived. Grant and his fellow researcher, Carradine, get a hold of history textbooks, historical fiction, scholarly tomes, and contemporary accounts and documents, and they survey various types of people on what they remember and what they believe about history, all without awkwardness in the narrative. And it turns out that history is shockingly unreliable. People believe things they’ve heard from authorities they no longer remember, and often those “authorities” turn out to be biased or lazy researchers or too busy looking at the larger picture to get the details right. And once people believe a certain thing, they resent finding out otherwise. Rather than accepting correction and being grateful for the truth, they get angry at the person bringing the news.

The book’s epigraph is “Truth is the daughter of time.” Wikipedia just told me that the full sentence is “Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority,” from Francis Bacon. That explains the title — the idea that time will eventually lead to truth and will win out over so-called authorities — but I wonder how much the book really backs up that idea. Grant and Carradine are on a quest for truth, and at least within the frame of the book they find it, and yet theirs seems a lonely crusade in a world that seems determined to cling to falsehood. Carradine has decided by the end to write a book against “tonypandy,” their term for received versions of events that turn out to be false, but who can really win against common opinion that’s been passed down for generations? I’m not quite sure if this book is undermining the idea that time will bring us closer to truth, or, more simply, celebrating Grant and Carradine as savvier, smarter seekers of truth than most other people. What it certainly does do is celebrate the joy of research and discovery. Rarely in a novel is scholarly research shown in such detail and made to seem so much fun.

Grant is very suspicious of the way history gets written as narrative. He wants facts, concrete bits of information gleaned from primary sources, not the stories woven around those facts — or woven around no facts at all, which is often the case. But we can’t do without narrative — without turning history into a story. All Grant is doing is creating a counter-narrative to the one historians and textbooks have been telling all along. And that is what Tey is doing as well, of course, making the argument that by delving into facts and turning those facts into a narrative, the detective and the novelist — neither of whom are “authorities” — can reveal something true. Whether we believe it or not is another matter.

The opinions in my book group were generally positive, although not everyone liked Grant’s rather arrogant manner. The question arose of whether this book works well the second time around, and I’m wondering as well if I would like it as much if I were to read it again. Once you understand the premise and the trajectory of the book, it might not be as much fun to wade through all the historical details, which do take quite a lot of wading through. Anybody out there who has read this multiple times have opinions?

This is the second Tey mystery I’ve read, and both have done such interesting things with the genre that I’d like to read more. This one has practically no action directly described, and Miss Pym Disposes only turns into a mystery in the last 1/4 of the book and is as interested in psychology as an academic discipline as The Daughter of Time is interested in history. I’m looking forward to seeing what other unusual things Tey has done with the mystery genre.

I read this book (courtesy of NetGalleys) while in London and on the way home, so it was a while ago now, and it’s high time I say something about it. It tells the story of a couple, Sabine and George Harwood, who move from England to Trinidad in order to advance George’s career. They don’t know it at the time, but they are on the last ship to bring British colonials into the country (Sabine is French, but has married an Englishman). Shortly after they arrive, change begins to happen: Trinidad eventually gains its independence under their charismatic although ultimately disappointing leader, Eric Williams, and the white colonists will lose their status and power.

The novel has an interesting structure: for the first third or so, it takes place in 2006 and portrays an elderly George and Sabine, describing how their marriage has evolved, how their children have turned out, and what their lives have become. After this section, we move back in time to read about their arrival in Trinidad in 1956, and we follow them in later sections through the 1960s and 70s. This backwards structure works well to show how George and Sabine end up where they do: we see the results of their lives in Trinidad first, and then we look back to the causes. So we read about their unhappiness — their overwhelming feeling of listlessness and pointlessness, their estrangement from their children, their isolation, their sense that it could have been completely different — and then we turn to their younger selves and read about the series of decisions that led to their remaining in Trinidad even when nearly all other British families left. They never intended to stay longer than a couple years, or at least that’s what Sabine believed. She was always eager to go, but George fell in love with the place and resisted a move. Eventually, they become part of the island and could no longer fit in back in England if they were to return.

The novel tells the story of their marriage, and also of the political and social changes happening in Trinidad, and the two stories come together in the figure of Eric Williams, the first Prime Minister. In the 2006 section, George finds a collection of letters Sabine has written to Williams — tons of letters, describing her life, her marriage, and her feelings about Williams’s administration. These letters bewilder George — why did she write him so much? Did she know him? It turns out that she met him a few times and they had a couple conversations, but mostly the relationship was carried on in her head. Writing the letters was her way of making sense of the changes happening in her life and in the country, and also of getting a little bit of revenge on George, who was unfaithful to her. Williams is one of the book’s main symbols: a symbol of hope at first, of possibility, and then of disappointment and disillusionment. He becomes a way for Sabine to focus and express her hopes and then her anger.

The other main symbol is the green bicycle of the title: the bicycle Sabine used to ride to explore the city and meet her husband after his day’s work. This was a highly unconventional thing to do, although Sabine didn’t know this at first; she thought she was just enjoying herself and being free-spirited, when she was getting a reputation that stuck with her for being different from all the other British women. As Sabine loses her youthful energy and happiness, the bicycle appears less and less until it is abandoned.

Roffey does a very good capturing the complexity of the situation and telling the two stories — the personal one and the political one — so that while they are connected, they are not conflated or collapsed into each other. The Harwood marriage is powerfully affected by the political context, but it’s not simply a way of making a political point, and the political context takes on a life on its own and is not merely a device with which to tell the story of a marriage. And Roffey also describes the landscape of Trinidad beautifully. In fact, both George and Sabine personify that landscape and talk to it so that it becomes a kind of character in its own right.

Roffey does so much well here, and I enjoyed the book, but I didn’t have that feeling of excitement about it that I always hope for. I didn’t fall in love with it, and it’s hard to pinpoint why. I think I’m feeling some boredom with contemporary fiction — not all of it, but with more straightforwardly realistic contemporary novels. I suppose that while Roffey’s use of language is accomplished, it didn’t bowl me over in the way I want. But there is much to praise in this book, still, and it kept me good company while I was traveling.

I just finished Teju Cole’s recent novel Open City last night, and although I had some doubts about it early on, it ended up winning me over and by the time I finished, I was loving it. Open City is often compared to W.G. Sebald’s books, and I felt about Cole the same way I feel about Sebald: I love the idea of the books but am not always sure about the execution. What bothers me at times is the reticence and emotional distance of the narrators. That is exactly what bothered me about Peter Stamm’s novel Seven Years. At times the writing in all these books crosses the line from being calm, quiet, and meditative into being dull.

But I do admire much in Sebald, and Cole’s novel finally won me over. It is about a man in his 30s, Julius, who is a psychiatrist in training and who spends his free time walking around New York City and, briefly, Brussels. The novel has no plot, but simply describes the narrator’s experiences and thoughts as he observes and interacts with people and with the city’s art and history. His thoughts keep returning to similar themes, so the various stories, descriptions, and meditations, rather than a plot line, provide the book’s coherence. Julius is fascinated by cities and the way their history is built in layers, with traces of the past existing underneath the present, like a palimpsest. As he walks, he notices traces of history: monuments and plaques and old buildings that don’t fit in their new neighborhoods. He describes the changes shops, buildings, and blocks have undergone. He is also interested in how people interact in cities, the way the crowds look and what it feels like to walk down streets and in and out of shops. He is extremely observant but is not only an observer; he often strikes up conversations with people or finds people talking to him. Although he comes across as reserved, he makes friends, or at least acquaintances, easily.

He also thinks about issues on a larger scale: the long and sad history of human violence, religious  and racial conflicts, the way identity is constructed and how that construction can lead to social and political tension. He has conversations with a recent acquaintance in Brussels about orientalism and east/west tensions, and the anger many immigrants in Europe feel at their often unwelcome reception and uncertain status. Inevitably, back in New York, he thinks about the World Trade Center and everything the empty space where the towers used to stand says about human conflicts that just won’t go away.

We also get his thoughts on his own history and personal experiences:  his relationships with his German mother and his Nigerian father, what it was like going to his boarding school in Nigeria and moving to America at 17, the racial tensions he experienced in both places, the grandmother he would like to reconnect with but can’t find. It’s in search of this grandmother that he goes to Brussels, but he only looks for her halfheartedly, and he doesn’t explain this reasons for his halfheartedness. I got the feeling as I read along, that there were a lot of things Julius wasn’t really explaining. He and a girlfriend have just broken up, and he describes his ambivalent feelings about her and his sorrow at their ended relationship, but there’s a sense he is not plumbing the depths of his feelings with us. He tends to stay on the surface of things, as one walking around a city observes from the outside and only gets brief glimpses at the life going on inside the houses and shops.

What makes this novel work is the way its themes and motifs weave their way in and out of the text, creating repetitions and echoes that resonate the whole way through. It’s easy to miss these connections if you read too quickly; this is a book that asks you to slow down and savor its images and juxtapositions. There is often a quietly ironic tone as one anecdote contrasts or obliquely comments on another one, and it’s a pleasure to follow the path of Julius’s thoughts, which are as suggestive as his walks, even if they are the same time disorderly and directionless.

Or perhaps the thoughts and the walks only seem directionless. There’s certainly a craft to creating the impression of drifting while at the same time actually getting somewhere. We don’t arrive at any new place or at some new realization or lesson, but we end up at a feeling of completion, of the pieces fitting together, the ideas connecting to one another. The novel reminds me of one of my favorite essays, “Street Haunting” by Virginia Woolf. Woolf’s tone is much lighter than Cole’s, but both writers use the occasion of a city walk to meditate on subjects large and small, moving (seemingly) effortlessly from the mundane to the philosophical in the space of a paragraph. It’s quite a trick to do that, and it’s a trick I admire very much.

My Ireland trip is fast approaching (this coming Thursday), and I’m losing my motivation to do anything but read and nap in preparation for vacation sloth. But I wanted to write something at least about Peter Stamm’s novel Seven Years before too much time passes. This novel is written in a distanced, emotionally-detached style while taking as its subject matter emotional detachment. It makes me wonder the extent to which those two things necessarily go together. Perhaps it is possible to write a heated, passionate novel about emotional coldness, but Seven Years is written in the first person from the point of view of someone who doesn’t know much about what he feels and wants, which makes a certain amount of detachment and distance in the writing inevitable.

The story is about a love triangle involving the narrator, Alex, his wife, Sonia, and Ivona, a woman with whom Alex has an inexplicable attraction — inexplicable to him as well as to everyone else who knows them — ever since he met her. Alex and Sonia meet in architecture school in Munich and go on to run an architecture business together. Their relationship begins in a halting, uncertain manner. There is more awkwardness than passion between them; it is as though they know intellectually that they are suited for one another rather than feeling it emotionally.

Alongside the development of this relationship is Alex’s conflicted, on-again, off-again obsession with Ivona, an illegal immigrant from Poland who works in a bookshop. Ivona is unattractive, everyone seems to agree, and also uninteresting. She has nothing of Sonia’s intelligence, style, and poise. She is described in harsh, unforgiving terms as lumpish and bovine. And yet Alex can’t forget her, and he keeps returning to her again and again through his courtship of and marriage to Sonia. Alex is cruel to Ivona and doesn’t seem to care much about it; he knows that she has latched onto him and pinned her hopes on his leaving his wife for her, but still he keeps coming back, not caring much what emotional turmoil she experiences.

This, as you can see, is one of those books where none of the characters are likable and there is no one to sympathize with, except perhaps Ivona, although even there I found her naivete and stubbornness irritating. I don’t mind at all not having anyone to like in the book, however, since the intellectual puzzle of the characters is interesting enough. Alex himself is the biggest mystery, both to himself and to the reader, but Sonia is a puzzle as well, what she knows about Alex and how much she cares. Both characters are living out the life society expects of them, running their business, acquiring a home, raising a child, but they do all this listlessly, carelessly, and only slowly and in the smallest steps do they discover who they are and what they want.

What I found disappointing about the book was that it was hard not to feel as detached and uncertain about the characters as they felt about each other and themselves. Detachment is interesting as a concept, but it doesn’t make for very engaging reading. Here is Alex thinking about Sonia’s past and her personality:

Sonia never did talk much. It often felt as though she had no previous life, or whatever it was had left no traces except in the photograph albums on her bookshelf, which she never took out. When I looked at the pictures, I had the sense that they came from another life. Now and then I asked Sonia about her time with Rudiger, and she gave me monosyllabic replies. She said she never asked me what I’d done before either. It doesn’t bother me, I said. After all, you’re mine now. But Sonia was stubbornly silent. Sometimes I wondered if it wasn’t that there was just nothing to say.

That there might be just nothing to say is an interesting proposition, although a sad one, but it’s interesting — in this novel at least — only in an abstract, analytical way. Still, Stamm captures well the state of not knowing oneself and the consequences that result. At the heart of the book is an emptiness that is frightening. It surely took some courage to try to capture that emptiness on the page.

For another take on the novel, see Michelle’s review of it at the journal Necessary Fiction.

Arthur Phillips’s new novel The Tragedy of Arthur was great fun. I’ve seen comparisons of this book to Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and the comparison works to a certain extent — they have a similar structure, both made up of a primary text and a commentary on that text — but it’s a rather unfortunate comparison for Phillips’s sake because who can compare to the great Nabokov? This book doesn’t have the insane brilliance of Pale Fire, but there’s a charm and wit to it that are appealing.

The text in Phillips’s case is a “newly discovered” long-lost Shakespeare play, printed in its entirety in the back of the book. The commentary takes the form of a memoir and fills up the first 250 or so pages. This commentary/memoir was supposed to be a standard critical introduction, but the guy who owns the manuscript, a character named Arthur Phillips, agreed to publish the introduction himself and decided to do it exactly as he wanted. It takes the unusual form of a long self-justification including his entire life story and an argument about the play’s authenticity. This question of authenticity is at the heart of the book, and it’s a particularly vexed question because the man who “discovered” the play, Arthur Phillips’s father, is a notorious con man who spent much of his adult life in jail for various forgeries (another book hovering in the background is William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, which is also about artistic forgeries and a difficult father/son relationship).

In this memoir of sorts — which describes a life at least superficially resembling the real Arthur Phillips’s life, both people having published the same novels and lived in at least some of the same places — Phillips tells the story of what it was like to grow up with a criminally unreliable father. This is a father who woke his two children up in the middle of the night, Arthur and his twin sister Dana, and dragged them around a field with strange, heavy machinery for hours and hours in order to convince people that aliens had left crop circles. Arthur grows up not knowing whether anything his father gives him — a signed baseball for example — is real or a forgery. As you can imagine, Arthur has some psychological issues to work out.

His father’s legacy wasn’t all about forgery, however. The cons and forgeries had at their root — or at least this is how the father would explain it — a certain creativity and love of creating experiences of wonder. Thinking about the crop circle and the farmer who originally found it, Arthur writes,

My father didn’t want to make people stupider or mock stupidity or celebrate stupidity. When the farmer said, “The shape. The shape is so … beautiful, so …” and trailed off, my father was right there with him in spirit. I suspect that he wished, of all the participants in this whole enterprise, to be that farmer, to be fooled. My father had given him (and the world) this glimpse of something hidden. He was only dissatisfied to be the giver and not the recipient.

The father is also, along with Dana, thoroughly obsessed with Shakespeare. Arthur grew up with Shakespeare’s language forever in his ears. But this also is a complicated legacy. Arthur decides early on that he doesn’t like Shakespeare much, and while he correctly points out that this isn’t at all unusual, in his case it has at least something to do with the fact that Dana and their father bond over a love of the playwright and Arthur feels left out. He loves his sister dearly and feels he has some very weighty competition for her attention.

So, when his father bequeaths Arthur the lost Shakespeare play, Arthur has some serious thinking to do. Is it possible that this one time his father is telling the truth?

The memoir part of this book is a mix of a whole bunch of things — in addition to memoir, it’s also an anti-memoir, as Arthur complains about the genre every chance he gets, although it’s clear he needs the genre in order to make his point about his father and thus about the Shakespeare (?) play. It also contains a synopsis of the play, because that’s what an introduction is supposed to do, of course, and in that same spirit, it discusses the play’s themes and background. In addition to being all mixed up with the personal stories, however, this critical material is shaped in such a way as to further Arthur’s arguments about his father. It all ultimately revolves around Arthur himself — is the character Arthur in the play The Tragedy of Arthur supposed to be him? Was his father sending him a message?

Arthur writes notes for the play as well, and here it’s personal too: some of the notes speculate on where his father might have gotten his material from, if indeed he did write the play himself. In addition to Arthur’s notes, there are notes from a Shakespeare scholar, and these two voices contradict each other. In addition to everything else going on in this book, it’s also about the uncertainty of scholarship and the impossibility of finding a truly objective point of view. Arthur is obviously a biased reader — given the circumstances there is no way he could be anything else — but the scholar’s readings struck me as questionable as well. It’s clear that he wants the play to be authentic  and some of his justifications and explanations seemed just as unreliable as Arthur’s speculations.

As for the play itself, it’s not bad. Those who claim it’s authentic say that it’s clearly very early Shakespeare, which means readers should not expect greatness of the Hamlet level and that is most certainly not what you get. But for what it is — whatever that is — it’s entertaining, with some fine speeches, interesting action, and a little bit of humor.

This is a playful book — complete with author biographies and publication lists of both Arthur Phillips and Shakespeare, because Shakespeare deserves credit, of course! — and I love that spirit. Give me a highly literary, self-reflexive, self-aware book that’s good but doesn’t take itself too seriously, and I’m a happy reader.