Of Books and Bicycles

One more review before I write some wrap-up posts about the year. I’ve owned a copy of Josephine Tey’s book Miss Pym Disposes for quite a while and finally got around to pulling it off the shelves. I very much enjoyed the book, but I spent much of my time reading it wondering why it’s called a mystery novel. By the end, it began to make a little more sense, but it’s best to think of this book as a regular old novel with some crime in it. Those of you who have read other Josephine Tey novels, is she always like this?

But that’s not to say I didn’t like it. The setting is very interesting, first of all: it takes place in a women’s physical training college. The young women learn dance, gymnastics, and various types of sports, as well as anatomy and the basics of medical training. They keep to a very rigorous schedule of physical and mental training, of the sort that, athletic as I can be, would wear me out in no time. They will leave the school ready to teach physical education and to work in medical clinics. It’s a close-knit school, where the smallness and the rigors of the training bring the students and teachers close together.

Miss Pym is friends with the school’s headmistress, and she has been invited to give a lecture on psychology. Lucy Pym became an expert in psychology largely by having enough leisure to read everything published on the subject (Tey’s novel was published in 1946, so perhaps the field hadn’t grown that much by then?), to have an idea of her own, and to turn that idea into a best-selling book. The best-seller part was a complete surprise to her; she had merely wanted to express her opinions. But now she is an expert, and in demand for lectures, and so she finds herself at the college, rudely awakened by the 5:30 wake-up bell.

She is so horrified by that 5:30 bell that all she want to do is to get home immediately, but the students beg her to stay, and when she does, she finds herself more and more caught up in the life of the school. She’s fascinated by the question of what type of young woman would thrive in such a school and how each one keeps up the energy and spirits to make it through the program.

The early parts of the book explore college life and Lucy’s increasing attachment to it, and they do so at a leisurely pace, although never one that is dull. The excitement begins to build, however, when Lucy observes one student attempt to cheat during an exam she is proctoring. Around the same time, everyone learns that a post will be available at the prestigious school of Arlinghurst, the girls’ equivalent of Eton. These events quickly destroy the school’s peace, and Lucy finds herself in the middle of it all.

Lucy’s status as an expert in psychology becomes a way for Tey to explore the value of the discipline; in this close-knit community where the tensions are rising, Lucy is perfectly situated to observe the mental and emotional turmoil around her. And yet, as it turns out, people are much more mysterious and unknowable than the discipline allows for. And here is where the real mystery of the book lies: not so much in the question of who committed the crime — although that is a very interesting question — but in the question of how much it’s possible to know about another person.

I recently finished David Mamet’s novel The Old Religion, published in 1997. As you might expect if you know Mamet’s films, the novel is dark. It is a reimagining of the true story of Leo Frank, a factory owner who lived in Georgia in the early twentieth century and who was falsely accused of rape and murder. He was sentenced to life in prison, but during a hospital stay was abducted by a mob and lynched. He was a victim of an anti-semitic culture looking for an outlet for its rage.

The point of the novel isn’t what happens, which is a good thing since the book’s publishers tell you everything (as I have done here) on the back cover. The point is to explore what goes on in the mind of the main character, Leo Frank, and to capture from that perspective what it might feel like to be falsely accused. The book is made up of very short chapters that explore scenes of Frank’s life and give you his thoughts on whatever is occurring, serious or mundane. The book begins before the accusation and trial, so we see Frank among his friends, relaxing, talking, pondering philosophical and political questions. He is a very thoughtful, sensitive, analytical person, and when we finally learn about the rape and murder charges and the trial begins, it’s a shock to see him so badly misunderstood and villainized.

This is the point: to show the humanity of a man whom the world had turned into a monster. Mamet makes this point well, and what’s so effective about it is that he stays inside Frank’s mind with very little narration. We learn about what is happening only indirectly, as a result of Frank’s attempts to process it. As Frank’s world is falling apart around him, he remains the same thoughtful, analytical person, but now his analytical bent becomes a way to try to handle the insanity he is experiencing, a way to stay sane himself. As time goes on, he has to try harder and harder to find ways to occupy his mind, until he ends up looking for meaning in the manufacturers’ names stamped on the bars of his prison cell. Right up until the end, his thoughts are calm and rational, in contrast to the virulence of the people who want to see him dead.

The Old Religion is an intensely uncomfortable book: it’s hard to read about Frank’s downfall and the extremity of the hatred he experienced, and it’s also hard to read Mamet’s portrayal of Frank’s accusers, which is ugly. But Mamet’s stream-of-consciousness style works effectively to capture Frank’s experience. It’s a good thing the book is short, and I say that not because I didn’t like it, but because brevity works well both with Mamet’s subject matter and with his style: he can capture so much in so few words, and that kind of intensity needs to be short-lived.

After seeing Stephen King a few weeks ago, Hobgoblin suggested that I read one of his books. This thought hadn’t occurred to me because horror is not my genre at all, but Hobgoblin and other people have assured me that King writes more than just horror and that a lot of his books are more about psychology than anything else. So I picked up his latest book Full Dark, No Stars (although not one of the two copies we got signed!). I ended up liking it quite a bit. The book has three novellas and one short story, and yes, there was violence in each one, but the stories were more about character and psychology, just as people had promised.

The first novella was good — gripping and hard to put down. But it was a complicated reading experience that reminded me of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley in the way both books have psychotic narrators who commit atrocious crimes. In King’s story, it’s a first-person narrator, and in Highsmith’s it’s a third person narrator who stays so close to Tom Ripley’s consciousness that I keep forgetting it’s not actually in first person. In both cases, I got so wrapped up in the stories and identified with the narrators to such an extent that I started feeling obscurely guilty, as though I were the one who had committed the crimes. I had to remind myself that no, there was nothing I needed to worry about, no fear that anyone would come and arrest me for the horrible thing I did.

I started the second novella relieved that the mood was lighter, at least initially. That story is about a semi-famous cozy mystery writer who is asked to do a reading for a literary society when Janet Evanovich cancels on them. But then on her way home she gets attacked and raped, and I began to worry about what I’d gotten myself into by reading this book. The first story was about a man murdering his wife, and then here was another story about violence toward women, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to read about it anymore. But I kept on and realized that King wasn’t simply using violence toward women as a plot device, but was making a point of exploring its cultural meaning. The cozy mystery writer, Tess, spends a long time thinking about how she is going to deal with the attack, and a big part of her worry concerns what the public will make of it, since inevitably the press will seize on the story. She is a bit of a public figure, after all. She imagines someone insinuating that she invited the attack somehow, and she delays calling the police. She is agonizingly alone, a victim another time over, since she knows how hostile the world can be toward rape victims. I won’t give away the rest of the story, but I’ll just say it’s satisfying and Tess ends up with a little bit of the support she deserves.

Next was the short story, which was good but didn’t quite fit with the rest of the book. And finally, the third novella once again takes up violence toward women and once again handles it well. Reading about the violence in all four pieces was uncomfortable at times, but once I figured out that King was exploring violence as an idea, I began to enjoy the reading more. I have to say this is not what I expected, to read Stephen King for the ideas. But I think I’ve been unfair to him. I can’t say I’ll read him again very soon, since even with the psychological focus, violence and horror really aren’t my things. But I’m much more interested in him than I was before, and that’s a good thing.

Lately I’ve been in a mood to read more contemporary fiction than I usually do (a mood that’s probably fleeting and influenced by people raving about new books on Twitter), and so I picked up Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies. I’m grateful to the people on Twitter because I enjoyed this one quite a lot.

The novel tells the story of Seabrook, a boys’ school in Dublin where Skippy is a student. In the opening pages, we witness Skippy dying a horrible death in a doughnut shop, and then the narrative backs up in time to tell about his life. The novel tells his story, and the story of his friends, classmates, and teachers. Skippy is a quiet, seemingly-normal kind of kid, the kind whose friends are much more colorful and memorable. Ruprecht, for example, is Skippy’s roommate (there are a few boarders at Seabrook, although most students commute) and is considered a scientific genius. Mario can think of one and only one thing, sex, and is capable of talking about it only in the crudest of ways. But Skippy is thoughtful and sensitive, and also in love with Lori, a student at the nearby girls’ school. Unfortunately for Skippy, Lori is way out of Skippy’s league, or everyone thinks so, and she has become involved with Carl, a drug-using, manipulative, thuggish bully.

The novel also tells the stories of the adults, most notably Seabrook’s history teacher Howard, who is unhappy in his current relationship and attracted to the beautiful substitute geography teacher (who is the only teacher who can really capture the boys’ attention in a school with very few women in it). Howard graduated from Seabrook and never thought he would end up there again, but his life has gone in unexpected directions. There is also Tom, another teacher and former Seabrook student whose relationship with Howard is long and complicated. And then there is the acting principle, whose devotion to Seabrook and its reputation is extreme to the point of being frightening.

Murray moves back and forth between these various stories, and in doing so, captures the feeling and mood of the place. The novel a reminder of just how hard it is to be a teenager — and how hard it is to teach teenagers. The kids aren’t in the least interested in learning anything, with the exception of Ruprecht, and only want to be free to hang out with each other and to dream about meeting girls, or, in some cases, to actually meet them. There’s a lot of longing, a lot of angst, and a quite a lot of drug use.

And, actually, the lives of the teachers aren’t so different. Howard can’t figure out what he wants out of a relationship and what he wants to do with his life, and he spends his time obsessed with the geography teacher, to the extent that he keeps teaching World War I beyond its allotted length of time because she expressed an interest in Robert Graves, a World War I poet. The novel is largely about dissatisfaction and longing, and this takes many forms: Howard’s obsession with a woman whom he hopes will transform his staid, boring life, for one. It’s also about Skippy’s hope that Lori — the beautiful girl who seems so far out of reach and whom he falls in love with while gazing at her from afar — will notice him. And it’s also about Ruprecht’s obsession with the possibility that other universes exist and that he might be able to make contact with aliens. Everyone hopes for something from outside them to transform their lives, when reality is boring at best and quite possibly very painful.

The story is an absorbing one, especially once it’s clear that the novel is going to tell how Skippy got to the horrible death scene in the doughnut shop. I found it hard to believe that Skippy really was going to die, and I kept rooting for him. Murray does some interesting things with narration, beginning many of the chapters about Skippy with a description of the video game he is playing, so that we are thrown into the world of the game and only eventually return to the story once again, mimicking the way Skippy loses himself in an alternate world and is reluctantly forced back into reality. Murray does a good job making us feel as though we know these characters and how their minds work and that we have something at stake in their decisions. The world he portrays is dark; he makes being a teenager seem like a curse and being an adult not a whole lot better. But the energy, compassion, and humor with which the story is told keeps some hope alive.

May Sarton’s The Small Room was a satisfying, thought-provoking read. I’m a sucker for academic novels, so I was delighted to find out that this book is about a young woman who travels to small-town New England to begin her first college teaching job. Lucy Winter is fresh out of grad school, although she wasn’t your typical grad student: she went through her Ph.D. program merely because she wanted a reason to stay near her fiance who was in medical school. But now the engagement is over and she unexpectedly finds herself with a job. As the novel opens, she is on the train heading north to Appleton, a women’s college.

What she finds is a small, close-knit community that appears to be sleepy and peaceful. She goes to a beginning of semester cocktail party to meet fellow faculty and teaches her classes for the first time, all the while trying to figure out her role in this new place. She opens her first class with a long account of her educational life, hoping to make an impression on the students, but she immediately doubts herself afterward. She wants to do a good job and is willing to take risks in the classroom, but she knows she is not entirely sure what she is doing.

Of course, she can’t stay on the outside of this community for long, and, of course, it’s not nearly as sleepy and peaceful as it seems. She gets pulled into its dramas and intrigues through one of her students, a star pupil of the campus star professor. When she discovers this student has plagiarized, she immediately reveals it to a colleague, an act that sets a whole train of events in motion, events that not only cause controversy, but that make the college think hard about what it is and what it stands for.

The novel is fundamentally about teaching — what it means to be a teacher and a student and the ways the two can interact. Lucy struggles with the question of how much of herself she should share with her students. Her opening speech about her education starts things off on a personal note, but she is reluctant to respond warmly when a student shares her private troubles. She feels there should be boundaries between teachers and students, and she also knows that allowing those boundaries to drop away can be exhausting. Teaching demands a great deal of energy, and teachers need to protect themselves from giving up too much of themselves to others.

And yet strict boundaries are impossible to maintain: students are persistent in their efforts to get a personal response from Lucy, and once she stumbles into the plagiarism scandal, she is drawn even further into their lives.

The novel is also about what it means to be a woman who teaches. Early on one of the characters says, “Is there a life more riddled with self-doubt than that of a woman professor, I wonder?” The novel was published in 1961, and the question of whether it’s worth while to educate women who will just get married and raise children lingers in the air. The faculty at Appleton take a strong stand on this: as one character claims, “We don’t teach domestic science; we are not interested especially in producing marriageable young ladies.” Lucy wonders, though, what her own commitment to the intellectual life is, and what it would mean for her to stay on at Appleton. She wants a family, but with her engagement over and her life established in a quiet town full of married couples, she is not sure that will be possible. She considered her Ph.D. program as a joke, after all; does she really want to devote her life to scholarship and teaching, at the possible expense of other relationships? As I read this, I kept thinking about Dorothy Sayers’s novel Gaudy Night, which is also about women intellectuals struggling with the sacrifices the intellectual life can demand. In a culture that expects women to be wives and mothers or, if they want to take work seriously, to give up those roles, what is a smart woman supposed to do?

The novel is short and is a quick read, but it takes up a lot of great questions and offers some interesting answers. It’s satisfying to watch Lucy figure out who she is as a teacher and what she wants her place in the Appleton community to be. It’s also interesting to think about teaching generally — what really helps students learn and what roles a teacher can and can’t play. The novel shows well what a complicated job it is to try to inspire other people with the love of learning and at the same time to remain a satisfied, whole person oneself.

Posting will most likely be light around here for the next few weeks, as I get myself through what feels like the busiest part of the semester. Once I reach Thanksgiving, things begin to wind down a bit. For now, I need quiet evenings for reading more than I need to keep up-to-date with the blog.

But I did want to write at least a little bit about what I’ve read over the last month or so. That includes Sam Savage’s novel Firmin. I’m not entirely sure what to think about this book. I want to say I’ve been in a little bit of a fiction slump and haven’t liked things much for that reason, but I just picked up May Sarton’s A Small Room and am loving it, so I wonder whether it’s my own reading that’s at fault or whether I just haven’t found books that work for me.

The short version is that I hoped to love this book, and I only ended up responding to it in a vague and not particularly enthusiastic way. It should be a book I enjoy, since it’s all about reading and loving books. That it’s about a rat who can read should have made the book quirky and charming. I think it’s the voice that didn’t quite work — it’s jaded and slightly bitter, worldly-wise but also able to remember youthful enthusiasm fondly. That all is fine, but it’s also a bit pompous and affected in a way I don’t like. Even though I liked the first sections of the book and it took me a while before I began to sour on it a bit, it’s passages such as this one, near the beginning when he is describing difficulties writing his life story, that capture what I mean by tone:

This is the saddest story I have ever heard. It begins, like all true stories, who knows where. Looking for the beginning is like trying to discover the source of a river. You paddle upstream for months under a burning sun, between towering green walls of dripping jungle, soggy maps disintegrating in your hands. You are driven half mad by false hopes, malicious swarms of biting insects, and the tricks of memory, and all you reach at the end — the ultima Thule of the whole ridiculous quest — is a damp spot in the jungle or, in the case of a story, some perfectly meaningless word or gesture. And yet, at some more or less arbitrary place along the way between the damp spot and the sea the cartographer inserts the point of his compass, and there the Amazon begins.

Somehow, and this is a vague thought, it doesn’t feel like the narrator has earned the right to get all poetical and metaphorical on us in this way. There’s a self-dramatizing quality and a self-consciousness about it that began to grate a little.

But the narrator — Firmin himself speaking in the first person — can certainly claim to have a very sad story to tell. He is the runt of the litter and takes to reading books in consolation for losing the battle with his siblings for food. Somehow by eating the pages, he learns to read them, and soon becomes a voracious reader. He lives in a building that houses a bookstore and spends his time gazing down at the books, the people browsing through them, and most especially the store owner. He feels he has found a kindred spirit in this man who loves books so much too. Alas, when the store owner spots Firmin staring down at him from a hole in the ceiling, all he does is put poison out. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for Firmin to communicate his intelligence and sympathy to the people around him. His reading fills his mind with longings and romantic images, but then he glimpses his rat face in a window and despairs. He seems doomed to loneliness.

The story should be touching, and it sometimes is, but the narrator’s tone kept me feeling distanced from it. I do like its exploration of the dangers of reading — that reading can cause unhappiness and dissatisfaction as well as pleasure is an old, old story, and this is a potentially interesting twist on the idea that reading and education can lead to isolation. And yet I’m not sure that making the main character a rat really takes us in a new direction with the theme. It simply makes the isolation deeper and the barriers to communication higher. So he pours his energies into communicating with readers in the form of the book itself. It’s an understandable move, and yet, sadly, his self-portrait failed to win me over.