Of Books and Bicycles

I finished Joshua Ferris’s 2007 novel Then We Came to the End recently and found it a pleasure to read. A friend recommended it to me because of its portrayal of the workplace and because of its interesting point of view, and I liked the book on both counts. The novel takes place almost entirely in an advertising agency and is about a group of “creatives,” or the people who dream up ideas for ads. It tells about workplace habits and rituals, crazy colleagues, scary bosses, endless gossip, and, after a while, layoffs. Most of my jobs haven’t been typical 9-5 office jobs, but still I could recognize the world Ferris describes, and he’s captured it perfectly.

It starts off at a leisurely pace, describing the main characters and their quirks and telling some of the most famous stories, as though author and reader were taking part in one long gossip session. All this is funny and insightful. The characters do their work but have plenty of time left over for hanging out in each other’s offices, dreaming up jokes and pranks, and sometimes carrying on flirtations or trying to recover from workplace love affairs gone wrong. You don’t get a whole lot of information of the lives the characters lead outside of work, just brief summaries. Instead, work seems like their whole world, even though they see their time outside the office as precious. Work is what gives them a feeling of belonging and purpose, and even though they love their weekends, in this novel, it’s the weekdays that are full of life.

Once the layoffs start, the tension picks up, as everyone wonders who will be next and how they will manage to fill their time and look busy, when there isn’t much work. There are other sources of tension as well, particularly with their boss, Lynn, who may or may not be desperately ill. Everyone begins to wonder whether some of their more unstable colleagues who have been laid off might not return to revenge themselves on the people who cast them out. There’s a clear dividing line between the days, set in the boom years of the 1990s, when success and money came easily, and the harder times at the turn of the century where worry and suspicion began to take over. This isn’t really a 9/11 novel, but Ferris deals with the day in an understated way that’s powerful and effective.

Besides all the workplace stuff, the other thing the book is interesting for is its point of view, which is first person plural. The narrator says “we” and “us” all the way through, as though it were the collective voice of the agency speaking. This captures the sense of community — even a troubled one — that exists in the office and also the feeling that gossip is what unites the place more than the work they do. Reading “we knew,” “we heard,” “we believed,” “we gathered” over and over again makes it feel like the people don’t so much have individual identities as that they find their identity through participation in the group. As more and more people quit or are let go, this sense of the group becomes strained — it’s their world falling apart.

I don’t imagine it’s easy to use this unusual point of view so consistently through an entire novel, but Ferris pulls it off perfectly.

I was a little worried when I began Sarah Caudwell’s Thus Was Adonis Murdered for my mystery book group because Hobgoblin had not liked the book at all. We don’t always agree on books, but we agree often enough to give me reason to worry. And the critiques he made sounded like ones I might make too. But as it turns out, this is one of those books we don’t agree on, and I ended up liking it a lot. The book has a very strong and distinctive voice, which means that if you don’t take to the voice, you will hate the book. Fortunately for me, it was a voice I found amusing.

The book was published in 1981 (although I kept feeling it was set in an earlier time — it didn’t feel like the 1980s), and is about a group of young barristers in London, one of whom, Julia, travels to Venice on vacation with a group of art lovers, one of whom is murdered. Julia has been taken in for questioning. The barristers back in London worried about Julia traveling to Venice because of her extreme lack of practicality and street smarts. They were right to worry, but nobody expected she would be accused of murder.

The book never actually takes us to Venice, however, except in letters. The main action all takes place back in London and is narrated by a person named Hilary whose gender is never specified (although I sort of forgot that men can be named Hilary and assumed it was a woman until I read Emily’s post on the book). It’s Hilary’s voice that you will most likely either love or hate; Hilary is an Oxford don and is friends with the London barristers, although not really a part of their group. Hilary is obsessed with scholarship and the logical and investigative skills that come with being a scholar, although also curiously willing to forgo actually doing scholarship when something more exciting comes along. You can catch a bit of the novel’s tone and its humor from one of my favorite passages:

On my first day in London I made an early start. Reaching the Public Record Office not much after ten, I soon secured the papers needed for my research and settled into place. I became, as is the way of the scholar, so deeply absorbed as to lose all consciousness of my surroundings or of the passage of time. When at last I came to myself it was almost eleven, and I was quite exhausted: I knew I could not prudently continue without refreshment.

Hilary is self-obsessed and self-important, but is a willing and able guide through the story, and in fact takes on the role of guide self-consciously, telling us early on who solves the murder (Hilary) and speaking to us directly to give clues as to how the story is put together.

What I particularly liked about the novel, in addition to the tone and the humor, is the fact that so much of it is made up of letters. Julia writes Selena, one of the barristers, long letters telling her experiences, and the group sits around while Selena reads them out loud. The letters are interrupted by commentary and discussion from the group, so we get not only the story as told by Julia, but also the reactions of the barristers who already know about the murder and can read the letters for clues. The mystery is solved from this reading, as Hilary smugly reveals to everyone at the end.

I also liked Julia’s character — she is bumbling and disaster-prone (or at least this is how the barristers characterize her; it’s possible to wonder how fair they are being), but she is a brilliant tax lawyer and a beautiful, sexually-forthright woman who hopes for some erotic adventures on her trip. It is clear that she is not looking for romance, but instead wants sex, and she is made impatient by the fact that men might actually want women to pay attention to their minds rather than just their bodies. In a letter to Selena, she writes:

It is your view, as I understand it, that when dealing with young men one should make no admission, in the early stages, of the true nature of one’s objectives but instead should profess a deep admiration for their fine souls and splendid intellects. One is not to be discouraged, if I have understood you correctly, by the fact that they may have neither. I reminded myself, therefore, that if I could get the lovely creature into conversation, I must make no comment on the excellence of his profile and complexion but should apply myself to showing a sympathetic interest in his hopes, dreams, and aspirations.

The bending of gender stereotypes is great fun, and one of the book’s interests is finding out whether Julia finds her wishes fulfilled.

I’ll admit there were parts of the ending I didn’t find convincing, but by that point it didn’t really matter — the fun of the book is in its humor and its structure and the plotting felt almost incidental.

I had hoped to post on Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novel Manservant and Maidservant in time for the Slaves of Golconda group read, but I didn’t get the book read on time and was on vacation anyway. But I wanted to write about it at least briefly. It’s kind of an odd book, in a good way, and it made me think a lot about dialogue and conversation. The book has tons of dialogue in it and much of it struck me as the sort of conversation you wouldn’t hear in real life. But I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. It seems to me there is a kind of novelistic dialogue that is unrealistic in a bad way — painfully awkward, stilted, florid, dull, etc. But there is a kind of unrealistic dialogue that is … interesting and that serves some larger point. I’m not entirely sure what the larger point here is, but somehow the dialogue, strange as it sometimes is, reveals important truths about the characters and gets ideas out on the page in a dramatic way.

The novel has a very tight focus — one main family with children and servants, one other family and a couple other characters and that’s it. The book is made up of conversations and some narration to connect all the talk. There is little context — little description of places, no historical or social background, not much but talk and internal conflict. This means that we are thrown into the world of relationships.

It’s the fact that these relationships are so interesting that makes this book work. As you would guess from the title, master/servant relationships are a big focus; the servants argue amongst themselves about their status relative to each other and also to their employers. The family gossips and worries about what the servants are doing. But the biggest source of conflict comes from the father, Horace Lamb, who terrorizes his wife, his cousin, his servants, and his five children. He makes their lives miserable through his miserliness, pestering, and suspicion. The novel’s plot lies in the telling of how the family responds to this abuse. What was so fascinating is that it captures little interactions between people in a way that seems perfectly true to life, even if the dialogue does not. It portrays jealousy, anger, sadness, suspicion, love, regret, hope, disappointment, and much else in a manner I don’t think I’ve seen in a novel before.

I wonder, though, about my claim that the dialogue is unrealistic. The number of people I have talked to or overheard in my life is very, very small compared to the number of people out there talking, so who am I to say that people don’t really talk that way?

There are a couple more books from this summer that I wanted to mention as being particularly good. First of all, John Williams’s novel Stoner was an excellent read. It’s not at all what you might think based on the title, having nothing to do with drugs and instead being about academia and midwestern American life. William Stoner is the novel’s protagonist, a man who grows up on a farm with limited prospects, until his father learns that Stoner can go to the University of Missouri to study agriculture and bring his knowledge back home to help improve the family farm. Stoner heads off to school with the best of intentions but — through a pretty harrowing class experience — decides he wants to study English literature instead. He graduates and goes on to earn a Ph.D., eventually becoming a professor and spending his life in academia. The novel charts the ups and downs of his career and his family life.

That all sounds straightforward, and the novel is written in a simple, realistic style that doesn’t draw attention to itself. But the story is devastating. Stoner marries a woman he shouldn’t and unintentionally makes enemies with a powerful colleague and finds himself struggling and unhappy. And there is not much he can or will do about it. It’s a novel of quiet struggle, capturing a time and a culture when people endured rather than rebelling or running away. An early scene in the novel when he tells his parents that he will not be returning to the farm but instead is going to go to graduate school captures this devastatingly: he hadn’t given his parents a hint of the blow that he was about to give them, and when they receive it they are shocked but mute — they don’t have the words to say what they are thinking and feeling. They have never really talked to each other and don’t know how to begin. So, they just quietly part, heartbroken.

This is an academic novel, but it’s unlike any other I’ve read. It deals with questions of the role of the university and the value of scholarship, but the point is not to skewer academia or to laugh at it, as so many academic novels do. Instead, it paints a picture of a man who is trying his best and who takes what opportunities come his way, but finds there is only so far he can travel, that he can’t leave his past behind, and that life can trap him, in spite of his best efforts. It sounds depressing, and I suppose it is, but the experience of reading the book didn’t feel that way. It has the ring of truth to it, harsh as it may be.

Today I finished my 12th book for Emily’s TBR challenge (you can see my list in the sidebar to the right). That is, I read my 12th book out of a planned 20, and I’m in the middle of a 13th. Considering the fact that the challenge goes until the end of this year, I’d say I’m doing quite well. I’m enjoying having a longish list of books to choose from, which gives some structure to my choices but also isn’t too limiting. We’ll see how I feel when I get down to just a couple books left, but since I have more than six months to read them, I have plenty of time and can read books off as well as on the list. I like this structure so much, I might compile another list of 20 when I’ve completed this one, just for the fun of it.

So the book I finished today is Samuel Beckett’s novel Molloy. Well, that was an interesting read. It was odd and wonderful in the way you expect from Samuel Beckett, if you’ve read him before. I could tell that this book was written by the same author who wrote Waiting for Godot and Endgame, two plays I’ve read and/or taught, and which I enjoyed in a bewildered, bemused kind of way. I responded to this novel in much the same spirit.

The book splits into two parts, and I’ll admit to liking the first part much better than the second. The first part is told in the first person from Molloy’s perspective, and it’s a stream of consciousness narrative of his journey through some unnamed territory. He’s no regular traveler, though; he’s a vagrant, with no money, very few possessions, and one simple quest — to find his mother. He’s not sure where she is, though, and he’s also not sure where he is; all he knows is that he wants to find his mother, but he keeps running into obstacles that keep him away. He’s physically decrepit, first of all, with one bad leg and a “good” leg that is in danger of going bad, and a whole host of other ailments. He travels around on a bicycle that he can’t move very well. He can’t remember much either, and he keeps running into people who arrest him or insist on taking him in, which he wants none of.

What makes this narrative appealing is the rambling voice, which is comic, bawdy, philosophical, and despairing by turns. He moves from a wonderfully funny meditation on how to store his 16 “sucking stones” — stones that keep him from feeling the full extent of his hunger — so that he sucks on each one equally and in order, to serious thoughts on death, to comic passages on the body, and back to seriousness again. It’s absurd and crazy and sometimes moving.

The second section is narrated by a mysterious detective-type named Moran who receives instructions to find Molloy. This part of the book is about his preparations for and execution of this mission (or his attempted execution of it). While Molloy is endearing in an odd sort of way, Moran is an ugly character: he treats his son and his housekeeper abominably, and he’s full of pride, hypocrisy, and cruelty. As he sets out to find Molloy, his world begins to fall apart around him until he becomes a lot like Molloy himself — lost, physically falling apart, despairing, hopeless.

While I didn’t enjoy the second half as much I did the first, I still loved the bizarreness of it all. This is the kind of novel where you have to get rid of your expectations of what a novel usually is and accept a completely different kind of world, with entirely different rules. I like the challenge of this, at least now and then. It’s not a difficult novel, really; it’s just off in its own corner far away from all the other novels, doing its own unique thing.

For my 13th book in the TBR challenge, I’m reading a collection of essays by the poet Louise Glück, Proofs and Theories. I’ve read only the first essay so far, which I thought was wonderful: it’s an autobiographical essay on the experiences that turned her into the type of poet she has become. The writing is thoughtful and smart, writing to take one’s time with.

And now I need to go choose another novel. I’ll probably pick something not on the TBR challenge list, just for a change of pace. But I have no idea what it will be.