Of Books and Bicycles

I read 20 pages of Infinite Jest today and now I’m all caught up with the Infinite Summer reading schedule, which is to say, I’ve read up to page 232 (out of over 1,000 pages). I continue to love the experience. A lot of what I said in an earlier post remains true: there are lots of short sections that introduce us to many different characters, some of whom know and interact with each other and some of whom don’t. Everything is going to connect up with everything else eventually, I’m betting, and in a way, everything already does, if only in vague and tangential ways, such as shared themes or tropes or images.

There are a few plot threads that we return to again and again, such as the story of the students at the Enfield Tennis Academy (Hal, whom I wrote about in my earlier post is a student there), the family saga of the Incandenzas (including Hal; the adults in this family run the academy and the children attend it), and the residents of the Ennet House, a halfway house for recovering drug and alcohol addicts. The Ennet House is located right next to the academy, which is appropriate, because one of the major themes of the book is drug use and abuse, and many of the students at the academy spend their free time getting high.

And then there are other plot lines as well — a political thriller thread with two comic characters whose loyalties are nearly impossible to figure out, a couple different stories of drug dealing and violence, a really harrowing story of a deeply depressed woman, and lots more. There are also sections that don’t advance the plot much, but are informative or funny or there for some other reason, including one really great section on why video-phones failed.

I think the best way to read the book — at least for me — is to enjoy each section without getting too worried about how everything fits together and whether I’m remembering everything or not. Sometimes beginning a new section can be bewildering, but soon enough I find myself getting oriented to what’s happening and then I can enjoy it, almost like I would a really great short story.

I love the variety in this book, and not just the variety of characters and situations, but the variety of styles and points of view. Wallace takes on different voices now and then, using dialect or giving us a monologue by a particular character, or including transcripts of emails and articles and a paper that Hal wrote for school. There is just such abundance here.

The book is also laugh-out-loud funny (and I don’t usually laugh out loud at books), and also heart-wrenching in moments. And it’s really not that difficult of a read, in spite of the many characters and stories. I find it a much, much easier read than The Recognitions was.

Lots of people on the forums have said that you just have to make it through the first 200-250 pages or so, and then the stories and and ideas begin to come together more and it gets easier to read. If that’s the case, I think I’ll be doing just fine for the next 800 or so pages!

Mary Brunton’s 1814 novel Discipline turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. I’ve really enjoyed other early nineteenth-century novels such as Susan Ferrier’s Marriage, Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, and Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray, and I was hoping Discipline would be equally good. The novel has some good things to recommend it, but I found it too long, too predictable, and too moralistic. Although, to be fair, a lot of novels from the eighteenth and early nineteenth century feel too long to me (nothing against long novels at all, but some seem too long for the story they have to tell), many are predictable (if you know the conventions, you will not be surprised by any of Austen’s plots), and lots of them are moralistic. And what else should I expect, picking up a novel called Discipline?

The novel tells the story of Ellen Percy, a young girl who has been both dismissed and spoiled by parents who are generally well-meaning but make some serious mistakes. Upon observing her intelligence, all her father can say is:

“It is a confounded pity she is a girl, If she had been of the right sort, she might have got into Parliament, and made a figure with the best of them. But now what use is her sense of?”

Her mother responds:

“I hope it will contribute to her happiness,” said my mother, sighing as if she had thought the fulfilment of her hope a little doubtful. “Poh!” quoth my father, “no fear of her happiness. Won’t she have two hundred thousand pounds, and never know the trouble of earning it, nor need to do one thing from morning to night but amuse herself?” My mother made no answer: — so by this and similar conversations, a most just and desirable connection was formed in my mind between the ideas of amusement and happiness, of labour and misery.

Ellen’s father never finds much time for her, and her mother is too passive to try to rein her in. Her mother soon dies, leaving Ellen with a close friend who has the patience of a saint, but who also fails to instill Ellen with sound principles. Ellen grows up, goes to school, and learns to love luxury, idleness, snobbery, and gossip. In spite of this behavior, she is lucky enough to draw the attention of Mr. Maitland, a number of years older than she and a model of Christian gentlemanly behavior. He falls in love with her, but she is too busy enjoying her first taste of social success to pay him much attention.

This dynamic continues on for a while, Ellen growing more and more insufferable and Mr. Maitland looking more and more sorrowful. Ellen finds herself drawn into a flirtation with a man of uncertain principles who tries to lure her to Scotland where marriages are quick and easy. Before this can happen, though, disaster strikes — her father, it turns out, has just lost all his money and shot himself in despair. Now Ellen finds herself in an entirely new situation — she has no family, no money, and little idea what to do. Absolutely nothing in her life so far has prepared her in any way for this.

So Ellen is finally required to learn something about the world outside her former privileged social circle, and finally she is forced to learn some discipline. There are some interesting elements to this plot, in particular, the portrayal of how difficult it is for a woman to survive on her own and how little society prepares women of the monied classes to do anything useful with themselves. Ellen goes through some harrowing experiences that show exactly how vulnerable, powerless, and abandoned women without family and without money are. This is an idea that comes up again and again in novels of the time.

Also interesting is the portrayal of Scotland. Brunton is Scottish, and her heroine ends up there towards the end of the novel. There is a marked difference between the way the English and Scottish scenes are portrayed: London remains a rather vaguely defined and described place, but the Scotland scenes are described in lavish detail, the Scottish characters are given lots of space in which to tell stories about their family heritage and their culture, and the Scottish sections even have footnotes documenting the historical background of the novel. It’s no surprise that it is here where poor Ellen finally finds some peace and reaps the reward of her hard-earned discpline.

But I was disappointed by the way the characters’ motivations were often vaguely-defined and difficult to believe; in particular, it makes no sense to me why Mr. Maitland fell in love with Ellen in the first place, and Ellen’s behavior in the early parts of the novel is so foolish and so stupid, it’s hard to sympathize with her when things begin to go badly. And although I know that people of the time didn’t necessarily feel this way, as a 21st-century reader, all the moralizing gets old pretty quickly (and surely some 19th-century readers felt that way too).

But I’m glad I read the book anyway because I’m fascinated by the time period and I like to read as much as I can from and about it. Brunton was popular, at least for a short while (you can read Jane Austen’s brief comments on her here), and the Victorians liked her strongly moral writing, so the book gives a good idea of what people of the time were drawn to.

My mystery book group met again this past Sunday to discuss Benjamin Black’s novel Christine Falls. As usual, it was a good discussion, although people had negative or mixed opinions of the book, which interests me, because from what I’ve read of blog reviews, a lot of people liked it. A common opinion in the group, though, was that it was an enjoyable read, but when we stopped to think about the plotting and Black’s use of mystery novel conventions, the book began to fall apart.

It was an odd reading experience for me because I had already read the sequel, The Silver Swan, and so I knew some of the major revelations that came in Christine Falls. In a lot of cases with a mystery series, it doesn’t seem to matter a whole lot if you read the books out of order, but in this case, I think it makes a difference. The two books felt less like two individual books, each with their own separate stories even though the characters are the same, and more like one novel with two different parts. So knowing what I did about what happens to the characters later, I had some of the major plot points spoiled for me, and that took some of the pleasure out of it.

That aside, I did find other things to enjoy in it, particularly in the main character Quirke, a pathologist who, in the novel’s opening scene, finds his brother-in-law Mal tampering with some documents in a highly suspicious manner. Quirke is compelled by forces in himself he doesn’t really understand — in that way so many characters in mysteries are — to find out exactly what Mal was up to, and from there he winds up embroiled in a plot that involves powerful people in the Catholic Church and extends all the way to America.

Quirke is a stereotypical mystery hero in a lot of ways — he has a troubled personal life and a drinking problem — but I liked him anyway. I suppose there’s no reason being stereotypical should make a character unlikeable, and there’s a reason such characters are popular. It’s interesting to think about the dynamic between the troubled personal life and the type of work these characters do. Quirke can be brutally honest about a lot of things, particularly about death, which makes sense since he is a pathologist and works with corpses all the time, but in other areas, he’s an expert at dodging painful truths and uncomfortable conversations. He’s a damaged guy trying to make his way through life with a minimum of fuss and trouble, but outward circumstances and, even more so, something in himself won’t let him off so easily.

A number of people in my group didn’t like the rather uneasy relationship this book has with mystery conventions, for example, the way it’s not entirely clear what the mystery is, even near the end of the book. The plot Quirke is uncovering isn’t terribly interesting as a plot, and some of the characters and events just don’t need to be there. I am less concerned about mystery conventions than others, as I don’t really care whether authors follow “the rules” or not, but I was bothered by the way so much seems nebulous in this book — the relationships among the main characters weren’t explained as well as I would have liked and the motivations among the bad guys for doing what they did seemed obscure. The novel is set in the 1950s, but this never felt real to me. Somehow, Black doesn’t make the time period concrete enough.

But I will say that I enjoyed myself as I read the book, even though I had some doubts later; it’s well-written with engaging characters, and I was curious to know what was going to happen to Quirke. I may have liked it even more if I hadn’t read The Silver Swan first.

We are reading Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone next (my selection). I’m excited to return to an early mystery story and to think more about the genre’s roots.

What an odd and wonderful book Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature is. I enjoyed it very much, although I have some caveats to make, and I wouldn’t recommend this book unless you have read the books Nabokov discusses or you plan to read them alongside the lectures. He goes much too in-depth about his chosen books for it to be at all enjoyable if you’re not familiar with them.

What makes this book odd and unusual is the fact that it is a transcript of lectures Nabokov gave while at Cornell, so they are written with a classroom performance in mind and not necessarily meant for general readers. The course was called “Masters of European Fiction,” and covers Mansfield Park, Bleak House, Madame Bovary, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Swann’s Way, The Metamorphosis, and Ulysses. The book’s editor makes it clear that he had to do a lot of editing, as the text is based on written-out lectures that weren’t always complete and where the organization wasn’t always clear. But the text we ended up with is very readable and clear, and it includes lots of pictures of Nabokov’s notes and marked-up copies of novels.

Nabokov makes a very strong argument for looking at the novels themselves and not paying any attention to biographical, historical, or cultural context. He believes in close reading and nothing but close reading. He wants readers to focus on the novel’s details, noticing patterns and making connections and focusing on how those details are structured. Here is what he says about how people should read:

We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know.

“Great novels are great fairy tales,” he argues, and should be treated as independent worlds, following their own rules, and existing without any connection to the world we live in.

I think I may post more on this book later, as there are so, so many interesting passages to quote and discuss, but for now I’ll say that I find his argument intriguing but limited. I love reading novels closely and focusing on structure and doing all the things he thinks readers should do, but I also love to think about biographical, social, and historical context, and I think there is value in doing so. So I suppose I see Nabokov’s way of reading as one very good way that exists alongside other good ways.

At times I found this book utterly brilliant, and at times it was … a bit dull. Nabokov is focused on details to such an extreme degree that he sometimes gets bogged down in plot summary. In each lecture he follows the chronology of the novel, analyzing it as he moves through its sections, and sometimes this works well, and at other times he stops analyzing and begins summarizing. On the plus side, these summaries make the lectures an excellent way to review each book if the details have gotten hazy.

The lectures reminded me of one of my English professors in college who was fairly traditional in his approach to literature and focused on close reading in just the way Nabokov does, moving through each work we studied and analyzing its structure in a methodical way. This seemed like a reasonably good way to learn about the literature we read, but I didn’t love that class as much as I did others where the professors took a broader approach and looked at context and history and theory as well as looking at the texts themselves. Nabokov is best, I think, when he uses the novels as a jumping off point to discuss what literature is and how we can best read it — when the details lead him to some larger point.

Who knows what I’ll end up doing, but I would like to return to this book and close at some of Nabokov’s claims more specifically.

I began Infinite Jest the other day and am up to date with the Infinite Summer schedule, which means I’ve read up to page 63 — out of 981 pages, not including the lengthy endnotes section. So far things are going well, but I’m already aware that I’m not going to get everything going on in the book. I mean, I’ll be able to follow the plot and will understand the basics of what is happening, but I can already tell that there will be connections among characters and plot events and ideas that I will get some but not all of. A lot of characters have been introduced and I can already see some recurring themes and motifs that surely will be important, but I will have to carry a lot in my head over the course of such a long book to make sense of it all. This isn’t a book to understand fully in just one reading, I can see that already.

But I really am enjoying it. The opening section is brilliant. It describes one of the main characters, Hal, in an interview with a university admissions committee, the members of which are trying to understand some “irregularities” in Hal’s application. He’s a tennis star, and they really want to admit him, but while his grades are excellent and his admissions essays beyond brilliant (suspiciously so), his test scores don’t fit the profile. In the course of the interview, Hal just sits there, not saying anything, letting his uncle and his uncle’s assistant speak for him. Finally the committee gets Hal on his own, and finally Hal starts talking, and what he says sounds perfectly reasonable, but the committee starts to stare and look horrified and freak out, and finally they call an ambulance and get Hal taken away. It’s unclear what happened, but it explains why Hal was so quiet to start with — he knows that he can try as much as he likes, but what he says will be very different from what people hear. The scene is funny and sad both, and it’s a way to introduce what I’m sure will be a major theme of the book — the difficulty of communicating with others.

I’ve been following the discussions going on in the Infinite Summer forums as well, although I’m not participating (for no particular reason except I don’t feel like it — I have enough online writing to do already). It’s nice to read what others are thinking, and it helps me to see things I might otherwise have missed. Even though I’m observing and not participating in this reading group, I still feel like I’m benefiting from it.

I have now finished Henry Green’s novel Loving, and while I was tempted to continue reading the two other novels in my edition, Living and Party Going, I decided to save those novels for another time. I would very much like to read more Henry Green at some point, though, because I thought Loving was very good.

It’s the kind of novel where not a whole lot happens. People talk, mainly. In fact, much of the novel is written in dialogue, and the narrator remains aloof, telling us what things look like and who does what, but not digging deeply into people’s thoughts. At times it’s a little like a play where you have stage directions in place of a narrator. It’s not a play, of course — there is a narrator who tells you the basics of what’s going on, but it’s a very distant narrator who refrains from commentary or judgment.

The novel is set during World War II (it’s published in 1945) and tells the story of a family and its servants who are living in a castle in Ireland. Most of these people are English. They are at a distance from the war raging on the continent, but are worried about a possible invasion and also about the Irish Republican Army and are uncertain whether they should  remain in the mild anxiety they are currently living in or venture back to England, where they have family, but where they might be forced to join the military.

We get scenes of the family itself, a mother and daughter-in-law with her children, but spend most of the time with the servants. The story is made up of a series of small events that the servants gossip about: one of the children kills one of the estate’s many peacocks, an expensive ring has gone missing, two of the servants are flirting with each other, and others have fallen in love. The novel follows them around as one woman tries to hide her drinking habit and two young girls giggle at absolutely everything and the nanny gets sick so the children aren’t properly watched after. And then one of the servants finds the daughter-in-law in bed with a man who’s not her husband, and everyone is thoroughly scandalized. The butler spends his time learning how to cook the books and extort bribes so he can set a little money aside for the future.

It’s a quiet picture of how life really is, especially during wartime when there’s a nagging anxiety underlying everything. Conversations circle around the same subjects again and again, and more often than not, people fail to understand each other, especially the servants and those they serve. These two groups try to understand each other, obsess about each other, get frustrated and angry, and then work hard at trying to hide it so that life can proceed as quietly as possible.

The writing is beautiful. The dialogue is done perfectly, capturing the distinct voices of the characters and also the rhythms of typical conversations, the way people repeat things and jump suddenly from one idea to the next. And although the narration is extremely distant, the narrator now and then comes out with beautiful descriptive sentences: “The slow tide frosted her dark eyes, endowed them with facets,” or “He slipped inside like an eel into its drainpipe,” or “When he saw her face which was as it sometimes looked on her bad days so called, pale or blotchy as a shrimp before boiling, he cleared his throat.” He gets the rhythm of sentences exactly right:

She got no other answer than a wail. Then Miss Burch rolled over face to the wall. The cap twisted off her head. Edith gently put it back and because her shiny skull was sideways on that pillow she could only place the cap so that it sat at right angles to Miss Burch’s pinched nose, as someone lying in the open puts their hat to protect their face and terrible eyes.

John Updike wrote the introduction to my edition, and I am perfectly willing to believe him when he claims that insofar as one can learn to write, Henry Green taught him. I’m certainly looking forward to reading more of his work.

Salley Vickers’s The Other Side of You is a lovely, smart, beautiful book. I didn’t fall in love with it, as I thought I might, but that doesn’t keep me from seeing how others might love it and that it has an awful lot to recommend it. I suppose what this tells me that being lovely, smart, and beautiful isn’t enough when it comes to fiction; there also has to be some spark or sense of identification (and not of the easy “I identify with the characters” sort) that a person feels for a book to truly fall in love with it.

It tells the story of David McBride, a psychiatrist, who is treating a particularly challenging patient, Elizabeth Cruikshank, who has tried and failed to commit suicide and who is now resistant to David’s attempts to get her to talk. In the book’s early pages, we learn about David’s life at the same time that we read about his first sessions with Elizabeth. David himself suffered a trauma as a young child: he witnessed his brother’s death as the brother tried to lead him across the street and was hit by a lorry. The narrative is written in the first person from David’s perspective, and David is open from the very beginning about how this tragedy still haunts him, many years later. He has done his best to recover from it, but he knows that this is the sort of event one doesn’t really ever get over.

Eventually Elizabeth does open up and begin to tell her story, which David retells to the reader in a long passages that recreate the scenes Elizabeth lived through. At this point something magical begins to happen to David. He finds himself so profoundly moved by Elizabeth’s story that he begins to think again about his own past and his own wounds, and he begins to move beyond the role of a psychiatrist to relate to Elizabeth as a friend.

One of the things I particularly liked about this book is the way it questions the roles of analyst and patient, particularly the power dynamic that usually exists between the two, with the patient as the needy one and the analyst as the source of healing and guidance. David reveals to us — and eventually to Elizabeth — just how vulnerable and broken he is and how in need of help he is himself. During long conversations in which they both tell their stories, he breaks some of the rules designed to keep boundaries up between doctor and patient and shows as he does so just how complex doctor/patient relationships really are and how mysterious the healing process can be. The dynamic between living, breathing human beings can’t really be contained by professional rules.

Vickers weaves into her story a contemplation of the way art can shape one’s life. Art is what begins the deepening of Elizabeth and David’s friendship: Elizabeth had fallen in love with a man who studied Caravaggio, an artist who has been meaningful in David’s life as well, and it’s David’s mention of Caravaggio that gets Elizabeth to talk in the first place. So bound up in this exploration of love and loss there is also a role for art and beauty, for the way art can express what seems impossible to put into words and the way it can become an inextricable part of the bonds that hold people together.

I’m almost writing myself into liking this book more than I really did. The truth is that I admired all this in a detached kind of way. Reading the book was an intellectual exercise in seeing how Vickers brought her ideas together, rather than an experience of thinking and feeling all at once. I never came to care about the characters all that much, except as ways to explore ideas. I don’t need to identify with characters in the sense of liking them or being able to imagine knowing them in my own life, but I do want to feel that they are alive, that there is some spark there that makes them seem real.

I’m genuinely sorry about this one, because all the elements are there that might make me fall in love with it. But, alas, even when we want to fall in love, sometimes it just doesn’t happen.

So my education in detective novels continues. The latest book group selection was Ross Macdonald’s The Underground Man, published in 1971, which we discussed at our lovely noir picnic. It’s another hardboiled detective novel like the book we started out with, Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key. I’m surprised to find myself enjoying these books. When Hobgoblin told me the plot was convoluted I got a little worried, as I’m usually not fond of having to follow complicated plots. But as it turned out, I enjoyed the challenge (although I’m not sure I actually kept the relationships among all the characters straight).

Macdonald does his plotting very well, and it’s a pleasure to watch it all unfold. He introduces you to a couple characters who then lead you to a few more, and then some more, and then you learn that a couple of the characters know each other, and then that a few others know each other or had an affair or hated each other or some such, and then you learn about more people and more relationships, and the next thing you know, you’ve got a entire web of people and relationships that fits together beautifully. Or rather, not so beautifully, as very, very few of the relationships described are good ones.

This leads me to another thing I liked about the novel, which is that it creates a picture of late 60s/early 70s California in which what’s happening to the people happens also to the landscape. The novel is set in southern California where a forest fire is raging, threatening to destroy houses and neighborhoods. This is a place where people have begun to build where they probably shouldn’t, in areas that nature is going to try to reclaim in one way or another. As the fire rages and mudslides threaten and people try to figure out how to respond, this gets echoed by chaos on the social and moral level in the stories of cruel and incompetent parents, deceitful spouses and lovers, and the general atmosphere of secrets and lies.

There’s something deeply wrong at the core here, and the detective, Lew Archer, can only do so much to help things out. In fact at times he seems to cause more harm than good by dragging to light old secrets that end up causing more conflict. As he is zipping around California trying to find a young boy who’s been kidnapped and trying to piece together everyone’s story, the police and firefighters are busy trying to contain the fire, and all of them seem at the mercy of forces much larger than they are. The firefighters can only hope that the wind blows in the right direction, and Archer can only hope people will tell him the truth and he can do his job without becoming a victim himself. My book group noted the fact that Archer doesn’t seem to be all that great at questioning people and hasn’t figured out much more than is told to the reader, so there’s little sense in the book of any comforting presence or of anybody who has things under control. All anybody can do is to keep trying to figure out the truth and keep trying to straighten things out and hope for the best.

Several people in the book group said that while they liked Macdonald, Raymond Chandler is better. I have yet to read Chandler, and I see that I should, particularly since he often comes up in our discussions. The relative merits of Macdonald and Chandler are obviously up for debate, but at the very least I will have something equally good to look forward to when I finally get around to reading one of Chandler’s books.