Of Books and Bicycles

It seems about right to be writing about Rosy Thornton’s campus novel Hearts and Minds on a day my students have given me a headache.  Yes, the end of the semester is terrible, as usual.  It’s too bad I’ve already finished this novel, because reading it would provide some comfort after a long day, whereas the book I’ve just begun, Against Happiness, will not.  But maybe it will make me feel better to write about somebody else’s problems with faculty politics and student drama rather than dwelling on my own.

Hearts and Minds is a thoroughly entertaining novel.  It takes place at Cambridge, specifically at an all-women’s college, St. Radegund’s, which has recently hired a male Head of House, to the consternation of many of the faculty.  James Rycarte is his name, and although he’s an able administrator and knows how to deal with difficult people, he finds himself with some formidable opponents, especially faculty member Ros Clarke, who is determined to undermine his leadership and see him gone.

The other main character is Martha Pearce, an Economics faculty member and Senior Tutor, an administrative post that is due to end at the close of the year, leaving Martha without a job.  Because of the demands of the Senior Tutor position, she has neglected her research, which will make it difficult to find another post.  In addition to this looming problem, her husband has been more and more distanced of late and her daughter is showing signs of serious depression.  She is left to manage this all on her own.

The plot thickens when a potential donor appears, a friend of Rycarte’s, whose money could save the library, which is sinking into the mud at an alarming rate.  This friend appears to be the college’s savior, until he declares that his daughter will be applying for admission and implies that he expects the donation and his daughter’s acceptance to go hand in hand.  Here is an issue that could potentially divide the faculty and give Ros Clarke the ammunition she needs to force Rycarte out.

I enjoyed the story and liked spending time with the characters, but another of the novel’s pleasures is reading about the college itself, with its traditions and oddities.  Very near the beginning of the novel Rycarte arrives on campus for the first time since his interview, and so readers can learn about the college at the same time he does, watching him figure out details like the powers of the Head Porter and the lack of copy machines, and can follow along with him as he figures out who’s who amongst the faculty.  It’s a good introduction to a place that in a lot of ways sounds charming — nearly everyone travels around on bicycles, which sounds wonderful — but which has its share of troubles, not least of which is a severe shortage of funds. The signs of financial hardship are everywhere, from the decision to stop offering the college’s residents breakfast to the existence of research fellowships that offer no stipend whatsoever.  The college has been limping along for quite some time now, and Rycarte hopes the potential donation will turn things around, but he is unsure at what cost.

One aspect of the book bothered me — Martha Pearce’s relationship with her husband was hard to take.  Martha is an extremely hard-working, extremely dedicated person, one who cares deeply about the college and is willing to do whatever it takes to serve the school and to keep her family going.  Her husband, though, spends his days lounging around, napping, and claiming to be working on his poetry.  He offers her very little support, most distressingly when their daughter is obviously suffering.  There were moments in the novel when I wanted Martha to walk out on him immediately and not look back.  Martha’s self-sacrifices happen in real life quite often I’m sure, so it’s not a failure of realism, but still I couldn’t help but get annoyed at this character that readers are clearly meant to sympathize with.

But this issue aside, I read the novel with great enjoyment; it’s a good book for when you want something that’s both smart and plot-driven, and I think lots of people would enjoy it, even those who haven’t set foot on a campus for decades.

I’m not sure I’m going to do justice to Cristina Garcia’s novel Dreaming in Cuban for a couple of reasons, one of which is that while I’m slowly emerging from my reading funk I still don’t feel like I’m reading well, and the other is that I’m particularly tired this evening but I’m also not willing to put off writing this post any longer. So I’ll just have to make the best of things.

I did enjoy reading this book, and I’m happy that the Slaves of Golconda chose it because otherwise I doubt I would ever have picked it up. It’s a good read — an entertaining and smart novel about the intersection of family, politics, and religion. I’ll admit that I’m generally not fond of the kind of point of view switching that goes on in the novel — it shifts not only from character to character, which I have no problem with, but between first and third person, which does irritate me a bit — but
since having multiple voices speaking throughout the novel is so obviously important to Garcia, I can see why she chose to do it. Part of the point of the book is to get multiple perspectives; not only does the narrative focus shift from character to character, sometimes rapidly, but we see at least some of the characters from the inside, where they sometimes speak for themselves, as well as from the outside. Interspersed throughout the novel are one character’s letters as well, offering another perspective on the story. All this has the effect of capturing a great amount of complexity in relatively few pages (240 or so); the technique mimics the interconnectedness and the web of relationships it seeks to describe.

The story is about a Cuban family as it changes throughout the politically turbulent years of the mid-20C. At its heart is the matriarch Celia, a self-sufficient woman living on the Cuban coast who gets caught up in the furor of the revolution headed by Castro, who is never named but is a powerful presence in the novel. Her two daughters (she has a son as well but we don’t learn much about him) follow very different paths as adults; one of them, Lourdes, emigrates to the U.S. and becomes a proper American capitalist, working hard and eventually owning two successful bakeries. Her daughter, Pilar, isn’t impressed by this success, however, and finds ways to rebel against her mother’s strident pro-Americanism and moral conservatism. She becomes a painter and attends art school; one of the novel’s best scenes tells of a painting she completes for her mother’s new bakery, which is supposed to be patriotic in its message and ends up being something quite else.

The other daughter is Felicia, who remained in Cuba and who struggles throughout her life with mental illness. Her story is a sad one, as she is caught up in a difficult marriage and has trouble raising her three children; one summer, the summer of the coconuts, she and her young son survive on nothing but coconut ice cream. Her children are torn between their need for and love of their mother and their curiosity about their estranged father; they suffer from their mother’s bouts of illness, but she, too, is a victim. Celia does what she can to help her grandchildren, but her interventions can only do so much good.

The novel is ultimately about the ways our families shape who we are — they define us, whether we live in close proximity to them or thousands of miles away. Several of the characters are haunted by the ghosts of dead relatives or are able to communicate telepathically with far-away family members. Others, such as Pilar, are haunted by memories of the lost home in Cuba; while her mother wants only to live securely in America, Pilar wonders what life is like on her lost island and what kind of relationship she could have with her grandmother Celia. No one can escape the influence of family, whether it be the memories they create for us or the standards they set against we can try, often unsuccessfully, to rebel.

No one can escape their political context either; the Cuban revolution divides the family both ideologically and physically, causing a rift that is symbolized by Celia’s picture of Castro which she has placed over a picture of her husband and which Lourdes flings into the sea in a fit of rage. The picture symbolizes how political and familial forces blend in intricate ways to shape each of the novel’s characters. They can’t change the circumstances of their birth; they can only respond to them in the best way they can.

Margery Allingham’s Sweet Danger was the novel under discussion at my latest mystery book club meeting; once again it was a great discussion that went on for nearly four hours. We talked a lot about the details of the novel, of course, but also about the mystery genre itself, and we made comparisons between Sweet Danger and the club’s previous novel, Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key. On the surface these two novels couldn’t be more different — one is light and comic and the other is darkly violent without a ray of hope in it anywhere — but they do have some similarities, including main characters who are appealing largely because of the way we learn to trust them as the novel progresses, but who remain mysteries themselves, never described in detail and never given much of an inner life.

I’m glad we’re focusing on one genre, as it makes this kind of comparison possible, and it means that each time we meet we’re building common ground that will make future discussions that much richer. It feels a bit like a really good graduate class with a group of smart, enthusiastic people who have a lot to say. Except, of course, that we don’t have a professor, and we don’t have to write a course paper or give a presentation, and the topic is more fun than grad class topics usually are, and the reading load is lighter. And no one is showing off by dropping names of obscure theorists, or obnoxiously dominating the conversation in order to impress anybody, or using big words just to sound smart. Okay, it’s not like a grad class at all. Forget that.

Anyway, the group’s response to the book was mixed. Some people hated it and could barely finish it, others loved it, and others were somewhere in the middle. Those who didn’t like it complained about its lack of realism and its lack of depth — it didn’t seem to have any larger purpose and didn’t offer much entertainment to make up for that lack.

I was one of the ones who loved it, however. It took me a while to get in the spirit of the book — I wasn’t expecting its plot to be so complex and its tone to be so light and at times silly — but once I began to get a sense that this is what it would be like, I relaxed a bit and decided to enjoy the ride. Sometimes I resist when a book does something I don’t expect, but I like to try to take it on its own terms if I can and enjoy it for what it is, so with this book I began to appreciate the humor and the eccentricity of the characters and to appreciate the main character, Albert Campion, a man who is constantly described as “vague and foolish-looking” or as having an expression “vacant almost the point of imbecility” and yet who never fails to figure everything out. He doesn’t mind looking foolish either, at one point in the novel dressing up in women’s clothing for a purpose I can’t remember now but with hilarious results. The narrator describes him this way:

that was the beauty of Campion; one never knew where he was going to turn up next — at the third Levee or swinging from a chandelier …

I also loved the other main character Amanda (Emily has praised her highly too), an amazingly smart, talented, resourceful, and funny 17-year-old girl who single-handedly runs a mill to keep her family going. She’s easily a match for Campion, and it’s a delight to watch them work together to solve the mystery. I particularly liked her physical energy; as the narrator says, “Mr. Campion was fast learning that association with Amanda always entailed strenuous physical exertion.” She is beautiful, but poverty and general carelessness mean that “her costume consisted of a white print dress with little green flowers on it, a species of curtaining sold at many village shops” — and this is her nice outfit.

I haven’t told you much about the story, and I don’t think I will, as it’s a very complicated one, but, briefly, it’s about a tiny country in Europe (although it’s not set there); a lost inheritance; an uncertain family tree; a crazy country doctor; a fabulously wealthy and powerful corporate villain; a mysterious inscription on a tree; a drum, a bell, and a crown; and a whole crowd of trouble-makers. How all these fit together you’ll have to read the book to find out.

I don’t know yet what our next book will be, but I’m looking forward to it already.

I’ll be discussing the Thomas Hardy short story “On the Western Circuit” with my class this week; I’ve always liked Hardy, in all his darkness and gloom, but I fell in love with him when I came across this sentence while preparing for class — at this point the story’s heroine is riding on a carousel, having just met the handsome Charles Bradford Raye:

Each time that she approached the half of her orbit that lay nearest him they gazed at each other with smiles, and with that unmistakable expression which means so little at the moment, yet so often leads up to passion, heart-ache, union, disunion, devotion, overpopulation, drudgery, content, resignation, despair.

When I read this long list of the results of one smiling gaze, I couldn’t help but laugh — it’s not really funny, of course, but it’s just so perfect and so much like Hardy to have one eye on the story and one eye on universal despair. I love how he mixes the positive in with the negative — it’s not just heartache and drudgery but also union and content we experience — because the presence of these positive experiences makes the overall despair seem even worse in contrast. And I love how he mixes the personal with the impersonal; it’s not just heartache and despair but also overpopulation we’re dealing with. Personal tragedies lead directly to social ones.

No, this is not a happy story. It’s about Anna, a country girl who has come to the small city of Melchester to live with Edith, a woman who has offered to train her as a servant. While riding the carousel, Anna meets Charles; they fall in love and he “[wins] her, body and soul.” Hardy describes this “winning” very briefly and without judgment. It’s something natural Anna has done, and although society might judge her for it, Hardy won’t. Work takes Charles away, and when he writes her a letter, Hardy reveals Anna’s dilemma: she is illiterate and cannot read the letter. She begs Edith to write a letter for her, which she does, and they fall into a regular correspondence, Charles and Anna/Edith. Anna begins by dictating the letters, but soon Edith edits and embellishes and even writes entire letters without Anna’s knowledge. Charles is astonished that an ill-educated country girl could write so well, and he begins to fall in love with the letter-writer. Then Anna finds herself “in a delicate situation,” as they say, and the plot thickens.

The moving thing about this story is that everyone does something wrong and yet no one is really at fault, and the story doesn’t judge them, but rather presents their actions and the consequences dispassionately, as though nothing could possibly have been any different. Charles should not have seduced an innocent girl, Anna should not have allowed herself to be seduced, Edith should not have deceived Charles by writing Anna’s letters, and yet each of the characters finds him or herself in much deeper trouble than any of these actions would suggest. Each one is portrayed sympathetically. They are trapped, caught by nature and by fate, and they suffer undeservedly. Such is the universe.

I’ve read five Hardy novels, some of them twice; I guess I’m drawn to this kind of clear-eyed pessimism, as well as to a well-told story. I read these novels quite a while ago, however; perhaps one day I’ll reread some of them or pick up ones I haven’t experienced yet. This short story has certainly whet my appetite.

I wrote earlier about not exactly loving Rosamond Lehmann’s novel The Echoing Grove; I was interested in the book in a sort of detached, intellectual kind of way, but it never grabbed my attention and made me love it.  I did love her book A Note in Music, and I was hoping for more of the same but didn’t quite find it.  This has something to do with my mood; I’m not in a mood to think very hard about my fun reading (I picked up a Georgette Heyer novel, Venetia, after finishing Lehmann), and The Echoing Grove was more challenging than A Note in Music.  But I’m not sure it’s just a matter of mood.  I suspect that even if I’d wanted a challenge this book wouldn’t have satisfied me, and I would have still preferred the other.

In both cases, Lehmann works with a small group of characters, describing in great detail their mental and emotional states and their relationships with one another. She writes about friendships and love affairs, about desire and longing, and about shifting moods and emotions. So what makes The Echoing Grove more challenging than the other? She does interesting things with point of view, which can sometimes make the book a bit hard to follow; while the novel is written in third person, she will suddenly slip into first person and give us a character’s thoughts directly. There are passages that slip into stream of consciousness narration, with shifts in time and topic that are disorienting. There’s a particularly long example of this early in the novel, and I began to wonder just what I’d gotten myself into, but the novel returned to more straightforward narration eventually, and I decided to keep plugging along. There are also long sections of intense, emotionally-draining dialogue, of the sort that made me wonder whether people really talk that way (I felt similarly when reading Elizabeth Bowen). There is also a complicated time structure in the novel – the narration jumps around in time so much that I had a hard time figuring out what took place when.

So what is the story about? Simply put, Madeleine and Dinah are sisters; Madeleine is married to Rickie and Dinah has an affair with him. You can imagine, I’m sure, the family tension this creates. Madeleine is a fairly conventional woman, raising a family and participating in an acceptable social circle, while Dinah is more adventuresome and bohemian, getting caught up in love affairs with questionable men and disappearing for long stretches of time, doing nobody knows what. The novel begins with a meeting between the two long-estranged women, an awkward meeting where they seem to want to discuss their past but are hesitant. It then moves back in time to tell their history with occasional returns to the present moment to chart the sisters’ attempts to make amends. Although other characters make appearances, the interest of the novel is in the nature of these three main characters – Rickie’s haplessness when it comes to women, Dinah’s free-spiritedness countered by her suffering, and Madeleine’s calm patience and longsuffering.

My struggle with the novel was simply that I never came to care a whole lot about these people, and the formal elements, while interesting, weren’t enough to make up for my lack of emotional connection. I certainly don’t need to be emotionally connected to every book I read, but something has to catch my attention and either make me feel or make me think or, ideally, both. Now, if my description of the book intrigues you, don’t be scared away by my doubts – you may find a way into this book that I couldn’t. And I certainly am not turned off of Lehmann forever; I plan on reading more of her work, and I fully expect to like it.

I have recently finished listening to W. Somerset Maugham’s novel The Painted Veil on audio, and I had a fabulous time with it. Now, I do tend to enjoy books in a simpler, more visceral kind of way when I listen to them, so I can’t say what my reaction would have been if I’d read the book, but I’m pretty sure I would have liked it that way too.

Its charm comes from the simplicity of the tale — generally speaking it charts the course of a marriage — combined with the complexity of the characterization. It tells the story of Kitty, a foolish, vain, and inexperienced woman who panics when her younger sister marries well, and in response immediately becomes engaged to Walter, a man below her social ambitions but one who has asked her to marry him when other once-plentiful suitors have stopped appearing. After the marriage, they head off to Hong Kong where Walter works as a bacteriologist; here Kitty meets Charles Townsend, an attractive, flirtatious man who quickly seduces her. This is the point where the novel begins, with Kitty deeply in love with Charles and afraid that her husband has learned about the affair.

Once the truth has come out, Walter forces her to accompany him to a province in mainland China where a cholera epidemic is raging. His ostensible reason for traveling here is to put his medical training to use to help stop the epidemic, but Kitty fears – with justification – that the real reason is to ensure that she catches cholera, as a punishment for her unfaithfulness. Kitty is terrified of the new place, seeing things she earlier had no inkling of – poverty, death, bodily decay, political unrest. The sisters of a nearby convent invite her to visit them, and she soon begins to help them with their charity work, raising young girls cast off by a society that sees them as a burden.

So, as you can guess by now, the story is about Kitty’s growth from a selfish and inexperienced person to one who begins to look outside her own small concerns to see the larger world around her. She learns something of the true worth of her lover Charles and also of her husband, who, though he is ready to commit an indirect sort of murder, is not portrayed in the novel as a monster, but as a man who is passionate and foolish in love. The pleasure of the novel, for me, lies in following the twists and turns of Kitty’s growth, as she comes to realize exactly what she has done to her husband, her lover, and herself. Maugham sticks to Kitty’s point of view, so we see the world through her eyes and watch it open up for her.

Another pleasure to be found comes from the relationship of the novel to the novel’s prologue; in the prologue the narrator (or Maugham himself) tells the story of traveling in Italy and learning Italian from a young woman who uses Dante in their lessons. From Dante he learns of the story of a man who suspected his wife of having an affair and took her off to a place where she was bound to catch an illness and die. When she fails to die soon enough, he arranges to have her pushed out of a window. The narrator broods over this story for weeks until he decides to use it in a novel of his own. I won’t tell you the extent to which the plot of The Painted Veil follows the story from Dante, but the effect of the prologue is that you know, or suspect you know, the plot events that are coming, and you can observe how Maugham leads you toward the conclusion, hoping all the while that what you suspect is coming won’t come after all. There is something enjoyable about watching an author lead you towards a known – or suspected – conclusion.

As much as I enjoyed these aspects of the novel, though, I was bothered by the portrayal of China and the Chinese. The English colony in Hong Kong is guilty of a kind of racism that is disturbing – they simply don’t see China or the Chinese, as though they don’t exist except as a source of servants – but the novel makes clear the hideousness of this attitude and one of the things Kitty must learn is to see the humanity of the Chinese people. More bothersome for me was the way China became merely the backdrop for a tale of western spiritual growth. China in the novel is a place westerners travel to in order to learn something about their own spiritual emptiness, at which point, the lesson learned, they move on. It becomes a source of enlightenment, a place where, with the aid of its beautiful landscapes and mysterious ancient religious traditions, people are able to question who they are and what they are seeking in life. It’s important for what it can teach westerners, not for what it is in itself.

So ultimately I had mixed feelings about the novel. This, too, offers its own pleasures. In my experience so far, Maugham has not let me down (Of Human Bondage is a great novel), and I’m looking forward to reading more of his work in the future.