Of Books and Bicycles

Many thanks for all the well-wishes offered in response to my existential crisis post — I find your comments very comforting!  True to my nature, I suppose, instead of going to see the upbeat Slumdog Millionaire today, I chose instead to see the much more serious and sad Doubt.  But it was a wonderful movie, and I find myself convinced that while sometimes escapist books and movies are what’s called for, at other times, meaty, serious works can help make a person feel less alone.

And I am very glad I read Bernard Malamud’s novel The Assistant, even if it is incredibly sad.  It’s a beautiful novel, and a nearly perfect one.  What’s memorable about it is the emotions it evokes in the reader — you come to care about the characters and the hardships they experience and you find yourself unable to put the book down even as you’re ready to cry at what’s happening.  The novel is also important for what it says about America and the immigrant experience in the 1950s (it was published in 1957).  In this book, America is not the land of promise for immigrants; instead, it’s a place where a lifetime’s hard work can land a person with exactly nothing.  The characters spend their entire lives mistrusted and viewed with suspicion, at the mercy of hostile strangers.  They are particularly vulnerable because they are Jewish and are surrounded by anti-semitism.

The novel tells the story of Morris Bober and his family; Morris owns a small grocery in Brooklyn, which he and his wife run, with some financial help from their 23-year-old daughter, who has a secretarial job in Manhattan.  The business has had its ups and downs, but lately business has been particularly bad, especially since a bigger grocery opened just around the corner.  Even the tenant living upstairs from the Bober’s cramped apartment sneaks out now and then to visit the new grocery.  Morris and his wife Ida work incredibly hard, keeping the shop open 16 hours a day, seven days a week.  Only occasionally on Jewish holidays did the family ever take an excursion together, but in recent years, Morris has stayed almost entirely on his small block, and almost entirely in his small store.

It’s a lonely, isolated, narrow life, but Bober sees little choice but to keep on living it.  Ida has been urging him to sell the store, but he despairs of finding a buyer and isn’t sure what he would do with his life if he could find one.  Their hope lies in their daughter, and specifically in their daughter making a good marriage.  She would like to go to college, but can’t afford it, although she has managed a couple night classes.  She is uninterested or uncertain about the few men she knows; she would like to get married and have a family, and she would also like to please her parents, but she also has dreams of finding a relationship based on intellectual equality and respect, and no such prospect has yet offered itself.

Into this situation walks the assistant, a young man named Frank Alpine, who looks as though he has seen some very rough times.  No one knows where he came from, although he has a vague story which later turns out to be a lie.  He starts hanging around the neighborhood looking for odd jobs and eventually Morris takes pity on him, although he soon enough learns that Frank has been stealing bread and milk from him.  But Morris is good-hearted and understands that Frank’s life has been hard, and soon enough, although Ida resists this as strongly as she possibly can, Frank becomes an assistant and works for room and board and very little pay.

From here on out, the novel’s tension builds, as Morris comes to depend more and more on Frank, but Ida never gives up her suspicions of his motives.  She is particularly worried about Frank’s interest in the daughter, Helen — she is terrified that Helen might fall in love with a non-Jewish man, and her fears seem to be confirmed when she catches the two of them spending time together.

I won’t describe the plot any further, except to say that Malamud does a wonderful job with Helen’s character; he describes her complicated feelings very well as she is drawn to Frank but aware of how little she knows about him and how little reason she has to trust him.

The feelings the characters have for each other and the situations they find themselves in are heart-wrenching, but it’s a satisfying kind of emotional roller-coaster, as everything about the book feels vital and true.  Reading this book you can’t help but feel that you’re in the hands of a master storyteller.

My mystery book group read two Arthur Conan Doyle novellas for its last meeting: A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four.  I think I read some Sherlock Holmes when I was a kid because I remember the volume my father owned, and I remember  pulling it down off the shelves and reading at least some of it.  But I have no memory of the actual stories, so this is essentially a first reading.

It’s interesting to read the books now that I know at least a little something about the Victorian era, because they seem so much of their time.  They are obsessed with rationality and order, with list-making and codification and analysis, which suits a culture undergoing industrialization and running an empire.  But they are also obsessed with all that they feared could undermine these things, most especially with the dangerous, uncertain colonial periphery — a good chunk of A Study in Scarlet is about the Mormons out in the wild west of America (not colonial, obviously, but a threatening boundary area) and The Sign of Four uses the 1857 Indian mutiny as a backdrop.  I was interested in the fact that so much of A Study in Scarlet is given over to the Mormon story; in an abrupt, disorienting shift, you all the sudden find yourself whisked away from London out to the hot desert and suddenly you are reading a romance or what could be the plot of a western movie.  It’s as though the book didn’t quite know what it wanted to be, as though it’s trying to bring in as much material as it possibly can and tame it all and make it all make sense, and it only partially succeeds.

The books also seem very much of their time in terms of their narrative structure — the focus of the books seems to be Sherlock Holmes, but he isn’t the narrator and we don’t have an anonymous third person narrator who focuses closely on him.  Instead we have Watson, who, with the exception of the American section, tells us about Holmes from his own first-person perspective.  There is a distancing effect from what seems to be the main show, so instead of getting Holmes directly, we get him filtered through another character.  This reminds me of the structure of The Great Gatsby, but all the other models for this type of narrative that come to mind are 19th century — Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Jekyll and Hyde. This structure puts more emphasis on the relationships among the characters, so what is interesting about the Holmes books becomes the relationship between Watson and Holmes, rather than just Holmes himself.

And without Watson, Holmes would seem even odder and more bizarre than he already does.  He’s a manic-depressive drug addict, after all, and although his drug use was perfectly legal at the time, it still is a striking feature of his character.  He makes it clear that he solves mysteries in order to keep from falling into boredom and depression, and when he doesn’t have a case to keep his mind active, his drugs keep him from despair.  When Watson asks him if he is currently working on a case, this is his answer:

None.  Hence the cocaine.  I cannot live without brainwork.  What else is there to live for?  Stand at the window here.  Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world?  See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the dun-colored houses.  What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material?  What is the use of having powers, Doctor, when one has no field on which to exert them?  Crime is commonplace, existence is commonplace, and no qualities save those which are commonplace have any function upon earth.

Fortunately, right at that moment, the doorbell rings, and a young woman (a young woman Watson finds most interesting) enters with a new case.

Not only is Holmes someone who today would be on medication and in therapy (or at least someone would strongly encourage it), he has some very peculiar quirks, such as the fact that he is so focused on his work that he blocks out everything else that could possibly distract him from it.  So he knows next to nothing about literature and philosophy, because those won’t help him solve cases, but he knows everything there is to know about chemistry and law and footprints and the various types of cigar ash.

But Watson, who perhaps has his own peculiarities but is someone we can actually imagine knowing, instantly takes a liking to Holmes.  The two of them room happily together and work on cases together, and it’s this relationship that makes Holmes seem a little more approachable.

The more I think about this book, the odder it seems, and now as I’m writing this, I’m realizing that this quality of oddness-that-creeps-up-on-you is one I prize highly.  I turn to Sherlock Holmes expecting to find something that matches the cultural image many of us carry around in our heads, but instead I find something a lot stranger.  Fun.

I’m a bit behind on my reviews, which is odd for me, as I don’t usually read enough to have trouble writing about everything I read, in one form or another.  Part of the problem, though, is that I need to write about Gabriel Josipovici’s extremely short novel Everything Passes, and I find myself at a loss for words.  I’m tempted just to link to Litlove’s post on the book and leave it at that — her review does the job wonderfully well and I’m not sure what I can add.

But, I suppose, in addition to linking to Litlove’s post, I can also describe the book a bit.  It’s incredibly short — really short story-length rather than novel or even novella-length.  It’s 60 pages, but there is so much white space that the text itself is quite short.  I read it in maybe half an hour, and that was taking it slowly.  I read it twice in the same evening.  Added to the book’s brevity is the fact that there is a lot of repetition, which means that Josipovici uses even less space to tell his story than is immediately apparent.  The repetition takes the form of a refrain returned to again and again, with some variations:

A room.

He stands at the window.

And a voice says: Everything passes.  The good and the bad.  The joy and the sorrow.

Everything passes.

It’s in between repetitions and variations on this passage that Josipovici finds a way to tell his story.

In spite of its brevity, the book gives you a full picture of the main character, Felix’s, life.  We know something about his children, his wives, his friends, and his work.  Josipovici gives hardly any detail about Felix or his family, but he still creates a sense of fullness, as though we have seen and understood all we need to know about the full sweep of the character’s life.  This book shows that you don’t need a lot of nitty-gritty detail to create that sense of completeness and fullness — you can tell a story that feels rich by using broad brushstrokes and letting readers use their imaginations and their emotions to complete it.

It’s no surprise that a book that departs so radically from general expectations of what a novel or a novella is takes up the issue of the purpose and form of fiction directly.  Felix has thought much about Rabelais and his fictional innovations.  Rabelais, he claims, is the first to realize that the innovations in printing and publication of his time meant that he was no longer writing for an audience he knew, but instead was writing for strangers.  Given the growth of mass publication, he couldn’t know his audience personally as Shakespeare might have or as anybody who wrote for a patron might have.  This meant he wrote in an entirely different way:

Rabelais invented modern prose fiction.  And no one really understood what he was up to for the next four hundred years, except for a few kindred spirits like Cervantes and Sterne.  I want to make our culture aware of what he sensed and how he responded to the crisis of his time, which is also the crisis of our time.  I want to sweep away the popular image of Rabelais as a writer of bawdy stories and nothing else.  I want to make people aware of the issues he faced and so clear the ground for a genuine renewal of fiction writing in our day.

These are Felix’s thoughts, but it seems as though Josipovici is asking his own readers to consider what Rabelais accomplished and how he himself is trying to respond to changing circumstances by creating a new kind of fiction.

Josipovici’s own fiction is quiet and spare — he has pared down a story as far as it can possibly be pared down and yet it still has the power to move and surprise.  He shows how a writer, with the help of sympathetic, willing readers, can do so much with so few words.

I finished Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s 1862 novel Lady Audley’s Secret and felt that I had enjoyed every minute of it.  I described it to someone as trashy Victorian fiction, but that description can too easily be misleading — the book is an example of Victorian sensational fiction, dealing with deception, bigamy, madness and a whole bunch of other exciting things, but it’s not a throw-away novel meant merely to titillate.  There are a whole lot of interesting ideas that come out of the book too.

I was surprised at one aspect of the book’s structure — the fact that Lady Audley’s secret isn’t much of a secret and you figure out what it is very early on.  There are some things you don’t find out until the end of the book, but the basics of the plot are no surprise at all.  What makes the book interesting is not what the secret is, but how the characters go about discovering the secret. This sounds like it might be dull, but it’s not at all — the hunt for the truth is exciting in and of itself.

That secret has to do with Lady Audley’s past — before becoming Lady Audley she worked as a governess and before that, nobody knows much at all.  The other part of the plot has to do with George Talboys, a young man without any money who left his wife and child, both of whom he loved dearly, in England to go find his fortune abroad.  This takes him much longer than he expected, but eventually he returns only to find his wife recently dead.  Except the circumstances of this death turn out to be strange.  Putting these stories together, it’s not hard to figure out who is who and what the secret really is.

But the revelation of that secret is so much fun!  It’s George Talboys’ best friend Robert, who just so happens to be Lady Audley’s nephew (by marriage), who becomes the detective.  He’s a fun character — he’s a very lazy man who is a lawyer without ever taking on any cases and who can’t even find the energy within himself to fall in love with the charming, beautiful woman who loves him.  He is so taken with George Talboys, though, that when things go dreadfully wrong and George disappears, he finds himself goaded into action.  Soon enough he is tirelessly searching for clues to George’s fate and desperately fearing the worst.

The characterization is a big part of what made this novel fun for me.  First of all, there is a definite edge of homoeroticism in Robert’s obsession with George.  Nothing else in his life has inspired Robert to exert himself except this friend.  When he does meet the right woman, she turns out to be not so different from George himself, in all kinds of ways.  But Lady Audley is the most fascinating character — I found it interesting the way she was never able to transcend her lower-class roots.  She is captivating and charming, and she has her husband wrapped around her finger, but she betrays herself in her vulgar love of finery and her penchant for spending time talking closely with her maid.  It’s possible to read her as a character who admirably refuses to live up to the Victorian ideal of passive, accepting womanhood — she manages to create a good life for herself out of some very difficult circumstances, after all — or it’s possible to read her as a dangerous, violent, thoroughly-unreliable upstart who needs to be put back in her place.  Of course, she manages to be both of these at once, and by making her both of these Braddon gets to have all kinds of fun — she can create a powerful female character who, as the back cover of my edition puts it, makes “an unabashed bid for freedom from the constraints of Victorian womanhood,” but she can also keep herself out of danger as a writer by making sure the ambitious upstart gets properly punished.

This is the perfect book if you like Victorian novels but are in the mood for something that’s lighter than Eliot or the Brontës.  You can read it for the pleasure of the story and you can also, if you want, read it for the ideas about gender and class.  It’s fun to read a book that allows you to do both.

Mark Mills’s novel The Savage Garden is an entertaining comfort read, the sort of book that you don’t have to take seriously and one that can help you while away a cold winter evening (or a hot summer afternoon, or whatever).  I wrote on Litlove’s blog recently that all I ask from comfort reading is that it not annoy me with bad writing, and this one didn’t (okay, there were a couple awkward moments during the love scenes, but nothing unforgivable).

The novel tells the story of Adam Stickland who is beginning to write his thesis at Cambridge and finds himself invited to Italy to study the garden at the Villa Docci, just outside of Florence (all thesis subjects should be that easy to find! and they should all involve Italy!).  Upon arrival, he finds himself introduced to an entire cast of characters — the old Signora Docci, who is ailing but charming and flirtatious; her beautiful granddaughter Antonella, who, of course, is mysterious and captivating; their various relatives; the suspicious servant Maria; the attractive and sexually frustrated innkeeper Signora Fanelli; and assorted townspeople, each with their own uncertain past.

The novel takes place in 1958, and the town and the villa residents are still grappling with the aftermath of World War II, and especially with what happened one disastrous night as the German army retreated and violence unexpectedly broke out at the villa.  Adam learns that Signora Docci’s son Emilio was killed by the Germans under circumstances that are not quite clear.  Although the novel doesn’t read as a traditional mystery (it’s too desultory with the mystery aspects of the plot and it doesn’t have a real detective), there are two secrets at the heart of the story — one of them is the question of what exactly happened to Emilio, and the other concerns the garden Adam is set to research.  It’s a formal garden with statues of classical figures, and Adam finds it strangely unsettling.  It was created in the Renaissance by a grieving husband as a tribute to his dead wife.  Except there is more to the story, and it soon becomes Adam’s job to find out what that is.  He reads Ovid and Dante in an attempt to figure out the message the statues are meant to send, and it’s fun to watch Adam use literature to piece the clues together and solve the puzzle.

These two plots, these mysteries, keep Adam busy — when he’s not already busy pursuing Antonella or glaring at her suspiciously surly uncle or trying to manage his out-of-control artistic brother.  This book is such a fantasy — attractive, smart, insightful but not too bookish protagonist travels to Italy, meets beautiful women, solves mysteries, uncovers material for thesis, and generally has a good time.  What’s wrong with a little fantasy now and then?