Does Kawabata's novel recognize the horrors of the Geisha system?

Yasunari Kawabata's novel Snow Country (1937, must later English tr.) focuses on a 30-something man, Shimamura, probably married (I think there was a reference to his wife, but not much is made of that), traveling into the eponymous snow country, which is a mountainous region w/ ski resorts in northern Japan, where he will stay at an upscale inn in the small village, a little ahead of the ski season. He indicates that he's just spent 10 days in the mountains - some kind of rustic vacation, perhaps?, it's never really clarified - and now, settling into his room at the inn he seeks the company of a Geisha. He receives a young geisha-in-training, Yomako, and indicates that all he wants from her is some companionship, but the relationship soon becomes sexual (YK, who won the Nobel prize in literature about 40 years ago) is extremely circumspect about this; he's a long way from the the open writing about sexual relations in his Modernist contemporaries). Further complications ensue as S learns that Y has become a Geisha in order to pay for medical care for her gravely ill fiance (though it's not clear whether they actually are engaged). So in some ways this is a novel about the exploitation of women in Japan right up to the modern era: the lack of social (and medical) services, the few opportunities for women to earn a decent living, the horrible lives of the Geishas, as we see that Y, just start out down this path, already tends to drink herself into a stupor, and who can blame her? Yet in another, more disturbing way, this novel is very much from the man's point of view: ordering a Geisha to be delivered to him in the inn, his indifference to his wife and family back in Tokyo, and the expectation that the young woman will not only be his sexual partner but that she might even fall in love w/ him; he's completely unable to recognize the horror of her position in life, the danger, the exploitation, the sheer grossness: he's an OK guy and young and healthy, polite and maybe attractive, but imagine some of the types this poor woman must have to endure. At about 1/3 through this novel, it's not yet clear which way the narrative will balance and still an open question whether the man will recognize the horrors that his young partner must and will endure.

The significance of Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival

V.S. Naipaul concludes his 1987 novel, The Enigma of Arrival, with a short section that makes no claim to being anything but a personal essay in which he recounts the unexpected death of his younger sister, his journey to his homeland, Trinidad, to witness the traditional Hindi cremation service, and his reflection on how he began to write the novel - the autofiction we would call it today - that we have just finished reading. He describes his several failed attempts to begin writing his impressions and memories of his 10 years in a cottage (later a house he purchases) in Wiltshire, a retreat from the pressures of the literary scene in London. Only the death of his sister and the Hindi ideas about reincarnation provide him with the genesis of an idea and enable him to embark on this interior journey. In essence, his novel illustrates and illuminates an idea he expressed near the beginning, in reflecting on the famous de Chirico painting of the title; VSN thought about a man who arrives in a strange, foreign port, wanders around the city, loses his way at times, eventually returns to the port only to see that the ship that brought him to shore has departed: What he had thought of as an adventure or excursion - a "vacation" from his life or a version of the pastoral - was in fact his whole life. He has led his life and finds himself at the end of the journey. So it is, or was, with VSN's retreat to Wiltshire - not an escape or break from life, but his life itself. And in the process, his life intersects w/ that of many others - his "landlord" (a distant, silent, Godlike figure) and the various employees of the estate and other inhabitants on what were once the manor grounds. Each has his or her life story - some of which he recounts for us - and they become over the course of time more rounded, more real - not as characters in a novel but as people living ordinary lives in conjunction w/ one another. VSN's condescension toward his neighbors, so evident and troubling at first, diminishes over the course of the novel; he will never be a warm and comforting presence, but he does come to understand that his idea of a successful life might have no meaning or significance for his neighbors; they seem unaware of his literary status - whereas he, at least at first, is highly judgmental of most of his neighbors and of his friends and acquaintances from London: his refusal to write back to Angela, his indifference toward the overtures of friendship from his landlord, his casual dismissal of the death of his literary friend Alan: VSN seems, at least at first, to believe that his is better than others because he has stayed true to his vision and has overcome so many obstacles on route to his success. But at the end we sense that his vision has broadened, that he has "led his life" without realizing it (like the man in that James story, waiting for something great to happen to him and it never does) - yet we also wonder: Was his actual life different in any significant ways from the life of his narrator? Why is he  seemingly alone throughout his time in Wiltshire? Did he ever know love, or even companionship? This is a powerful novel, but dreadfully sad at its heart.

Powerful story though not for the faint of heart in current New Yorker

Bryan Washington's story, Waugh, in current New Yorker, is not for the faint of heart or the squeamish and seems a pretty edgy story - unimaginable to see this kind of piece in the NYer in previous generations - but here we are, and it's a powerful piece of writing about an omnipresent but mostly ignored social segment. Washington - a writer I know nothing about, possibly this is his debut story? - focuses on a small crew of male homosexual prostitutes living in a dismal rental in Houston (a city w/ almost no literary profile, as far as I know); BW focuses on one of the men, Rod, who's basically the pimp but also tries to look out for the well-being of the men who work for him and on a young man whom Rod recruits into the crew, picking him up in a shelter and offering some kind of stability in this troubled life. The young man - can't remember his name, all the men have pseudonyms or handles such as Nacho and Google - meets a customer who seems to want more than paid-for sex, and they slowly build a relationship; at the same time, Rod reveals to the young man that he's been diagnosed w/ AIDS - even though he is strict w/ his crew about using protection. Over the course of the narrative, as the young man builds his relationship w/ his "sugar daddy," but with the faint hope that he may be building for himself a normal life, Rod slips into deeper obscurity and in the end disappears from view - like a cinema dissolve, not an expected or typical ending for a short story but somehow exactly right for this material and milieu, where life is short and crude and cruel and hope is dim.

Major themes in V.S Naipaul's Enigma of Arrival

V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival (1987) narrows its focus in part 3 (Ivy) to a set of three characters/couples living on the manor/property in Wiltshire where VSN/the narrator (pretty much one and the same at this point; for simplicity, I will identify this character as VSN) rents a cottage for about 10 years: Pitton, the gardener, not especially effective as such, tending a property that in the height of the manor's glory required a team of 16; now Pitton, working alone, does primarily clean-up chores and occasional odd jobs as requested (ordered) by the "landlord," the last vestige of what was once a prosperous clan; the Phillipses, a someone elderly married couple who more or less manage the estate, apparently somewhat friendly with Pitton (they have tea together every day, although this seems more like an obligation than a friendly ritual; the P's gossip to VSN about Pitton and his pretensions); and a 3rd whose name eludes me at the moment, but he's basically a one-man chauffeur service, driving the landlord and others (including VSN) on errands and on various airport and train-station shuttles. Each of this triad is scarping by during the obvious decline of the estate; none has a secure future in any sense - the Phillipses have never had a permanent home and they have the Micawber-like idea that they'll eventually lose this job but that "something will come up"; the driver extremely proud of his son in the Army, assigned to an artillery unit nearby, thus a participant in the artillery training and various military operations that VSN believes are part of the degradation of the countryside; and Pitton, who near the end of the Ivy section of the novel gets sacked, evidently at the orders of the estate agent, always on the lookout for economies that will enable the manor to produce more income (for the benefit of the landlord, who's virtually never seen). Pitton reacts w/ great bitterness, as is to be expected; each of these characters depends for the sense of self-worth on the maintenance of a close relation and confidence w/ the landlord - whom we see is indifferent to those around him - except for his continued odd reach-outs to VSN himself, sending him poems and evidently decent sketches, obviously aware of VSN's literary status, though VSN offers virtually nothing to establish a friendship w/ the one he calls only "my landlord." Is the landlord symbolic of an attenuated God, elusive and mysterious and just out of reach? Readers must wonder why we should care so much about the fate of these elderly employees of a once-grand estate; of course, the novel is not exactly a Marxist tract, but VSN does show us a miniature version of a class struggle, with the aristocrat living off the labor of other and accumulated wealth for which he has done nothing - and of course the need for better social services and entitlements. But on another level it's a mournful look at life gone by, and a novel about missed connections and missed perceptions, assumptions about the pastoral life that prove at every turn to be wrong.

The coldness at the heart of The Enigma of Arrival

The 3rd section - Ivy - of V.S. Naipaul's 1987 novel, The Enigma of Arrival, largely concerns the neglect and decay that has turned the once-prosperous farm and manor in Wiltshire, where VSN's narrator (and VSN for that matter) rented a cottage for about ten years. The ivy, ever encroaching on the once-important farm buildings, is a symbol of the neglect and the transformation - from vibrant enterprise to a locale provide quaint, cheap housing to workers in the nearby superfarms or the nearby towns and to the rare person such as VSN, escaping from the literary life of London. What's really strange about this section is the narrator's obsession w/ his landlord - he always calls him my landlord, rather than by any proper name, perhaps to protect the privacy of a real person, but the effect is to almost make the landlord his personal possession: "my landlord." He is many other things beside, as the narrator informs us. We learn that most such "landlords" pretty much abandon their country property, as farming changes to a more mechanized, large-scale enterprise, and rent out the various manors and outbuildings and take the profits and live elsewhere, perhaps London or Switzerland. But this landlord differs, and prefers to retreat to his childhood home; the narrator tells us that the landlord suffers from "acedia," a medieval notion, which today we'd probably call severe depression. In his ten years on the property, he sees that landlord only twice: once observing him from the back (with a strange fixation on his fat legs!) and the other time passing in a car, when he (thinks) he sees the landlord diffidently waving hello. That's it. OK, so the landlord likes his privacy - but later we learn that the landlord has repeatedly sent the narrator copies of poetry on the theme of India, some of them signed with a broad flourish. Aren't these attempts to strike up a friendship with the writer/narrator/VSN himself? How could VSN, or any normal person, not respond in some way? Sure, VSN wants his privacy as well and specifically rents this property to get away from the literary life, but surely a touch of human kindness, a response to a friendly overture, would be a normal and a correct thing to do, without taking on the obligation of establishing a literary society or correspondence. Seriously, why is this narrator (why is VSN himself?) such an unfeeling man? He's a brilliant writer, full of insight and observation, clear and elegant in his story, but there's a coldness, a meanness even, at the heart of this novel, and other works (tho not all - House for Mister Biswas is free from this misanthropy) as well.

The coldness of V.S. Naipaul's narrator (and of VSN?)

In the second section, The Journey, of his 1987 (sorry, had date off by a year in earlier posts) novel, The Enigma of Arrival, V.S. Naipaul presents in summary the life story of the narrator (who seems to match in all known details VSN himself) insofar as his life story is constituted of his "arrival" as a writer - that is, this section is the back story of the man whom we meet in the first section as a successful writer who has moved to Wiltshire in part to get away from the pressures of life in the literary circles of London. Just as the first section (Jack's Garden) delineates the narrator's initial misperceptions about the lives of simple "country folk" and farm laborers - which turn out to be more complex and melodramatic than he had anticipated - the 2nd section show how in some ways the narrator got the facts but missed the story: From his arrival in London, he tries to write about a London based on his preconceptions and fails to recognize that the lonely people in the boarding house where h spent his first few months were a great source of material themselves. Similarly, it takes him some time to realize that his best "material" as an aspiring writer came from this childhood in Trinidad (which became the subject of his first 4 novels, in particular his breakout, A House for Mister Biswas). His fear is being pigeonholed as a regional writer, an exotic - and to counter this fear he embarks on travels in the U.S. and in Africa, without any real assurance that these adventures will pay off; in fact, a publisher turned down a piece he wrote on commission about several Caribbean nations - the publisher wanted more of a travel guide, and the narrator aka VSN wrote a scathing history, not neglecting the poverty, the racism, and the harsh living conditions. The section ends w. narrator/VSN ensconced in his Wiltshire home and working on his African novel (A Bend in the River), with the surprising revelation that he lived in Wiltshire for 10 years; the last pages in the section consist of a letter from a woman named Angela who helped manage the boarding house and to whom the young narrator was attracted; she tells of her marriage and her difficult relation w/ grown daughter and asks narrator for some kind of help, possibly financial. The narrator had not heard from her for about 30 years; coldly, he notes that he never responded to her lengthy, heartfelt letter (though he uses her as "material": further evidence that narrator/VSN is a misanthrope who hardens himself when approached by others, contemptuous of those not his intellectual or literary equals, carefully guarding his hard-earned independence and renown. Halfway through this novel, we have come to sense that VSN is a brilliant writer, as thoughtful and observant as Proust, but w/ a more direct and aggressive style - but also a man without feelings, with no sense of empathy, with few friends or companions (if VSN was ever married, his narrator gives no hint and appears to live a solitary life).

A journey to London and the enigmatic nature of arrival in Naipaul's novel

The second section of V.S. Naipaul's 1988 novel, The Enigma of Arrival, is "The Journey," which is accurate enough; the narrator describes his travel from his homeland, Trinidad, through NYC to London (and later to Oxford) where he will study on a scholarship. He in fact won a highly competitive scholarship, and he is pretty much the only person from his family or from his community - Asian/Indians who settled in Trinidad and now mostly run shops and small business enterprises - to travel abroad, much less to England to study, mush less to study to become a writer. Obviously the fact-details so closely match what we know of VSN's life that this might as well be considered a memoir; if there are elements here that have nothing to do w/ VSN's life, that's too bad because I think most readers will never make that distinction and these fictive elements have now become part of what we "know" about VSN's early life. He does a terrific job recounting not only the feelings and emotions attendant on his first days in London - a mixture of awe, pride, anguish, loneliness - but also the status and surface details of life in London in the 50s and 60s: the look and feel of the cheap boarding house, dark, with dusty and "cockroachy" odors, the old Metro stations w/ their decommissioned vending machines, the strange site of the bombed-out ruins of some houses and buildings right in the middle of a neighborhood or block untouched, the Dickensian expectations - for how else would he have known London other than through that lens, and isn't that true of all Americans who traveled there up through the 60s (when TV and movies and now streaming video give us plenty of images on life in London). He also gives us insight into the subtle or not-so-subtle racism he encountered: the bursar on the ocean liner who put him in a single berth and then tried to put another passenger - a black American - in the berth, a man who immediately saw through the ploy; the cold reception at a social club, the dreary isolation and loneliness in the rooming house. Seeing himself as a writer, he thinks about a story he will work on - focused on a night watchman aboard the ocean liner (a good idea, actually); the story gets nowhere, but he obviously remembers his journey in intimate detail, which he is mining successfully now, 20+ years later - which may be part of the enigmatic nature of arrival.

V.S. Naipaul and autofiction

V.S. Naipaul's 1988 "novel," The Enigma of Arrival, is a precursor to what today we call "autofiction," that is, a first-person narrative that adheres or appears to adhere as closely as possible to the facts of the author's life - a work that straddles the border of fiction and memoir and draws from the advantages of both modes. VSN wasn't the first - clearly, Proust laid the groundwork for this type of fiction - though close first-person narration wasn't identified as a mode unto itself until recently - with Knausgaard and Ferrante being two of the most successful contemporary practitioners. Of course all novelst draw on their life experience to some degree - that's inevitable; what other material does a writer have to work w/: experience, imagination, learning, and feelings, pretty much that's it. VSN's Enigma differs slightly from his next-gen successors in that he already had a well-known and publicized life as a writer at the time of its composition. That is, few, especially in the English-language world, knew much about Knausgaard or Ferrante until reading their novels; we didn't read them to be filled in about an author whom we already "knew." In VSN's case, part of what draws us along is our knowledge about and interest in his career (maybe that's especially true as we read this work after his death). The narrative tells of a writer in all known respects exactly like VSN (with a peculiar reticence about discussing any aspect of his emotional or sexual life): young man from Trinidad, scholarship student to Oxford, struggling writers, successful writer, seeking retreat in the countryside to work on a challenging novel. The 2nd section in particular - The Journey - tells in what feels autobiographical about his first travel abroad from Trinidad to his arrival and early life in England (Oxford, London). Would we be as interested if there were no connection between narrator and author, if somehow we could imagine this being written by, say, a 30-year-old American writer? Obviously in writing a novel as opposed to a writer's memoir (see for comparison Roth's The Facts of Updike's Self-consciousness), VSN has more freedom to create, elude, or elide as much as he wishes, but I still have to wonder why he didn't lay it all on the table and identify this work as his attempt to tell the story of not just a writer's life but of his own.

A murder, and the narrator's peculiar indifference in The Enigma of Arrival

It seems that the first section of V.S. Naipaul's 1988 novel, The Enigma of Arrival, concerns perception and misperception, especially on the part of the narrator, an unnamed character who in every particular seems to be VSN himself. The narrator (like VSM), a writer from Trinidad who has been established in England for 20 years and has recently moved to a small rented cottage in the country, was raised from childhood w/ many perceived ideas about life in England, and at this point in his life he clearly recognizes that the childhood textbook illustrations of the glories of England - country manors, cathedrals, et al - was a sanitized myth. We don't know (yet) exactly why he left London, but he clearly wants to find some beauty, peace, and serenity in the countryside - but he becomes disillusioned, or at least educated, about that pretty quickly - the many intrusions of the modern world on the sites of ancient pagan rituals and burials, the newcomers to the country village, displacing the traditional, old farmers who have been shoved aside by modern farming methods, the pretty cottages either left to ruin or rented out to newcomers who won't tend the garden, drive too fast for the small lanes, and generally have an air of hostility or indifference, unlike the friendly country folk he'd imagined (of course the narrator himself is a "newcomer," and probably not an overly friendly sort himself, in his search for solitude). The first section of the novel, Jack's Garden, takes a strange twist when there's suddenly a dramatic story: A new couple in the neighborhood squabble, the wife leaves the husband to run off to Italy (such a cliche, the narrator opines) with the local repairman, returns home (he kicked her out, it's said), teases her feckless husband and taunts him w/ her infidelity, and he murders her. There's amazingly little discussion of this crime - the narrator gives us no idea what happened to the husband, there's no sense of fear or horror or outrage, no inquiring reporters, no arrest and trial, nothing - it's treated like a bit of gossip, except that the narrator helps the victim's sister gather her sister's few belongings. Is the narrator shocked that a crime of violence and of passion could occur in this rural setting? Or is he indifferent - in particular because he's indifferent to his neighbors; there's something snobbish in this whole section, as if the narrator imagines himself to be better than his neighbors, more cultured and worthy of the landscape, attentive, in ways in which others are not, to the beauty surrounding him and its demise. He gives us little insight into the minds of any of the other characters - because he has no such insight. He doesn't really care about anyone else. We'll see what kind of character unfolds as the novel progresses - there is surely something painful in his past that led to his retreat and isolation. 

The fallacy of the pastoral in Enigma of Arrival

May be even the 3rd time I'm reading V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival, though have not read it for at least 10 years, and it continues to bring pleasure and surprises. What an unusual novel! The first section, Jack's Garden, is presented as a first-person narrative by an unnamed narrator who in every way seems to be VSN himself: a writer, living and working in England, recently moved to a cottage near Stonehenge/Amesbury, childhood spent in poverty in Trinidad and raised to revere and yearn for the cultured life of England. Readers have to wonder why exactly VSN calls this a novel, and why he didn't just set forth to write a memoir or essay - why does he need this distance between the narrator and himself? Perhaps that will become clear in later sections. In fact, VSN's narrator says little about his personal life; we suspect he is living alone as there is no mention of a wife nor of any other companion - but this may not be s (or maybe that's an element of his personal life that VSN wants to cut loose from this narration); mostly, the novel so far is about his conceptions and misconceptions about life in the English countryside. This novel is an anti-pastoral: It begins w/ some beautiful if conventional accounts of walks in the country near the cottage into which he has recently moved, but soon we see that his preconception of the peaceful and "simple" life in the countryside was all wrong and mixed up, based on sentiment and desire alone. He climbs a hill for a view of Stonehenge and sees fields marked with many targets used for Army artillery practice; he also sees in the distance crowds of tourists - about whom he is snidely contemptuous - stopping to see the mysterious monument. He imagines that in the country he can settle into a simple life among villagers, but over time realizes that his preconceptions - based on his reading (Wordsworth in particular) were all misleading and inaccurate: the villagers are often cruel, to animals and to one another; they do not choose to live in rural isolation but are forced to do so because of housing costs and the requirements of agricultural labor, the yards are mostly left to ruin, the one exception - Jack's Garden - is a tribute to his care and labor and not something that can endure after he dies, Jack's widow has no desire to maintain their life in the countryside and will relocate to a housing development as soon as possible. In other words, the pastoral retreat is an indulgence accessible only to those, such as the narrator and VSN, with their own set of preconceptions and with the means to escape from the pastoral at will.

Whu the moral outrage is missing in the Oresteia

The Eumenides, the 3rd part of Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy, is probably also the least accessible to contemporary readers (or viewers, if this is ever staged anywhere); Orestes, pursued by the eponymous Eumenides, or The Furies, who hound him about his assassination of his mother to avenge her killing of his father. As noted yesterday, there is a psychological aspect to this drama, as the Furies represent the torment in the mind of someone guilty or shamed about his action. The hounding and pursuit of O becomes a cause celebre among the Gods, as, if I have this right (and I probably don't) Athene comes to his defense arguing that the killing was a justified act of revenge and Appolo supporting the Furies, arguing that killing one's blood kin is a more treacherous act that a spousal murder. The matter is handed over to a jury - a silent chorus, in this play - that ends up split 6 to 6. Faced with this dilemma, the Gods agree to free O and to act in consort from then on in support of the House of Atreus - in other words, this play is political, and dramatization of the greatness of Athens, founded on a base of bloody murder but blessed by the Gods, a feel-good show for the B.C audience. So dramatically, the problem with this play is that the protagonist takes no action, he's the passive benefactor of a decision that the Gods make about his fate. The problem morally or ethically is that the whole spree of murders begins with Agamemnon's sacrifice of his daughter to appease the Gods as he sets out for the war in Troy. Can we blame is wife, Clytemestra, for exacting revenge even 10 years later? What kind of man kills his own daughter for any reason, and what kind of God will demand and accept a human sacrifice? This element of the trilogy seems just pushed aside by the end, never even, as far as I recall, mentioned by either the Furies or by Orestes. At least in the O.T., God calls it off; here, human sacrifice is part of the royal household cost of living. But for the benefit of whom?

The evolutoin of tragedy as a dramatic mode - from Aeschylus to today

As noted in earlier posts, classic Greek tragedy (Aeschylus) was not focused on "character" but rather on "action," so A's Oresteia (sp?) trilogy presents (off-stage) several highly dramatic actions - two sets of regicides, including a wife murdering her husband and a son murdering his mother - but the people who generate these actions are really just sketched in, they have no distinct characteristics other than their drive to avenge a perceived wrong. In the 3rd drama in this trilogy, the Eumenides, Orestes, having killed his mother to avenge her murder of his father, is pursued by an eponymous Chorus - Eumenides is sometimes translated as The Furies - that literally hound him (that is, pursue him as if he is an animal on the run) about his actions. This pursuit and the turmoil the Furies create in his mind are, I think, the first hint of the possibilities for developing a character in Greek tragedy: The Furies set Orestes apart from other characters by generating his tormented mind. These Furies are the beginning of the dramatic use of psychology in establishing character, they represent guilt and struggle, even as O believes and recognizes that his matricide was necessary and inevitable. Over the course of centuries, these external psychological forces would be integrated into the consciousness of tragic heroes, who will express their torment directly - through soliloquy, as does Hamlet and, to a degree, Othello and the Scottish king, to cite obvious examples, and through action and behavior (Lear is a good example). Later Greek tragedians, and even A in his later works, also built on the framework of the Eumenides, giving some of the characters the rudiments various psychological conditions - guilt, shame, remorse, suffering (see Philotetes and the Oedipus trilogy, for ex.). Tragic drama as a literary form has evolved and developed, up to the present day (is the Godfather trilogy a tragic drama?, the Sopranos?), probably more than any other dramatic mode.

Greek Tragedy - or bad Netflix series?

So let's go over the "action" (3rd of the 3 unities in classic Greek tragedy) in Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy (including a bit of the back story): Agamemnon, bound for Troy to avenge the kidnapping of Helen (his wife's sister) sacrifices his daughter as a prayer to the Gods - the first killing (even the Greeks, I think, don't have words for all the "-cides") - can you imagine anything for gruesome and sadistic? Wisely, A included this "action" only as back story. He's gone 10 years and then he comes home victorious, and with the King of Troy's (Priam's) daughter, Cassandra, in tow; there's the clear implication that he had been having an affair w/ C., at least on the return voyage. Greeted by wife, Clytemnestra, has been preparing her vengeance for years (and also having an affair with a local "hero," Aegisthes (I will definitely misspell or misremember many of the names), who's been sharpening her swords and practically at the moment of arrival assassinates her husband Cassandra (I think?), as he/they are taking a bath after their long journey. A regicide and spousicide (?) in one. When the children - Electra and Orestes - hear of this slaughter they join forces and assassinate mom and her new paramour (regicide + patricide), and that's as far as I've gotten, though I know that O will spend the rest of his life trying to escape the hell of the Furies, one of the Greek choruses, until his final absolution (in the 3rd play of the trilogy, the Eumemides). So does this sound like a bad Netflix series or what? Obviously, what makes this play world famous is the intensity of the emotions and the vivid language; the plot, such as it is, and the characterizations, remain just a substructure upon which to build. Of course this narrative has been retold and adapted by many writers over the past 200 years (and more), one notable example being O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra. The Greek tragedies are almost laid down as the first markers in a game, challenging all who follow to build upon this foundation. I am not one who thinks the great age of literature has passed; I think literature has matured and evolved over the past millennia, and writers now have resources - in both style and mode - available that were unimaginable to the Greeks. As has been often said, we stand on the shoulders of giants.

The Three Unities and Greek tragedy

Elliot Krieger <elliot.krieger@gmail.com>

Thu, Oct 18, 1:54 PM (21 hours ago)

Sent yesterday (October 18), did not post successfully, reposting this a.m.

The three unities - time, place, and action - were proscribed by Aristotle as the foundational elements for tragic drama, and he based this diagnostic description on the most classic of all tragedians, Aeschylus- and I particular on his famous trilogy, the Oresteia, which recounts the tragic demise of the House of Atreus. I’m now about halfway through reading the Lattimore translation and thinking about what the 3U’s and what they add to drama and where the obviously do not. Clearly part of the power of A’s tragic drama is the clarity and focus: only there or four characters in conversation primarily w the Chorus, a group character speaking in unison and representing the Athenian public, and really only one central action in each drama tho it’s of the highest political and historical consequence - the assassination of a king, which in these tragedies is variously and act not only of regicide but parricide (or in the first of the trilogy spousal murder). But the extreme focus on one place, time, action means that there is no need or even license to develop character: each of the speakers has a clearly defined role, which would be well know to all in the audience (these were their history plays so to speak) but which does not present any of the characters w nuance, ambiguity, or back story. No A character is anything close to a hamlet or an other little - which may be why a prof I had in grad school steeped in the classic (foolishly) held that there is only one true Shakespeare tragedy, the Scottish play. Reading the A trilogy is a powerful experience and perhaps a great director today could bring them to life on stage (I was amazed once to see a English company do a drop-dead performance of one of the Mystery Plays), but we can’t help but feel today that they have no sense of character, much less the growth and evolution. Of character when faced w conflicting obligations and emotion

A strange comparison between Greek drama and a current short story

Sometimes when I'm reading a few different literary works on and off at the same time odd juxtapositions of themes and ideas appear. On and off I've been reading the Oresteia (sp?), the Aeschylus trilogy about the tragedies of the House of Atrius (sp?). Why would I be reading this? A recent conversation among friends, several of whom have advanced degrees in lit, showed me how little I recall about the Greek epics and dramas - couldn't remember what exactly started the Trojan war and little or nothing about the fate of the combatants other than the wrath of Achilles and the travels of Ulysses. OK, so I went back to the source and have been reading Agamemnon and The Libation Bearers on and off for a few weeks, including yesterday. Plus, yesterday I picked up the 2018 O.Henry Awards collection and read the first story, the oddly title The Tomb of Wrestling, by Jo Ann Beard (I don't know anything about her other work). This story is bone-in-the-throat engaging and difficult, describing in excruciating detail how a middle-aged woman fights off a brutal attack by an intruder, told in small segments, some of which tell of her difficult upbringing and some of which tell of his, including much sadism. Very hard to take this story, impressive though it may be, and I wonder about the effect of it: Is it empowering to women, showing how through their strength and guile they can survive a battering? Or in some way, obviously not intended by Beard, does the story promote victimization, dwelling lasciviously on the gory details of the assault? Put another way: Could a man have written this story and won an award for it? That said, I found myself comparing this story with Agamemnon, which, in case you like I had forgotten, the King returns from the war on Troy to be greeted by his wife, Clytemnestra, and than, lured into the palace to relax after battle and sea voyage (cf the Odyssey) she stabs him to death while he's in the bath and anoints her long-time lover as the new king. Amazingly, compared w/ today's literary conventions, the assassination and all of the attendant gore takes place off stage; the play is made up of many lamentations, prophecies, cries of anger and vengeance - every line is great and powerful - it's like a  poem start to finish - but as a drama, well, we can see why it's seldom performed today (not counting adaptations). The power of the Aeschylus drama come in large part from its suggestion of brutality rather than its depiction: We fear and tremble at that which is hinted and suggested, more than at that which is depicted.

Fine story in current New Yorker that echoes Trevor

Good story, with a bad title (at least for American readers!, The Coast of Leitrin - which is the small Irish province where most of the story takes place) by Kevin Barry in the current New Yorker; superficially, it's a love story, boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, I won't divulge the ending but will say that the last movement of the story felt rushed and more a matter of the author bringing his narrative to a conclusion rather than a conclusion that seems to develop organically, as a natural outcome of the interaction of the characters, background, style, and setting. That said, Berry does a great job establishing these characters, especially the protagonist, Seamus, 35, who seems like a next-generation version (coffee shops instead of pubs, the internet and Google searches instead of pub talk and gossip) of one of William Trevor's Irish "hill bachelors." He's living alone in a small farmhouse left to him by an uncle, despairing of ever meeting friends much less a girlfriend, and developing a huge crush, which for some time he does nothing about, on the Katarina, Polish barista (baristo?) in the local coffee shop (seems to be a Starbucks, yes, even in remote Ireland). At first this reminded me of one of the great Onion headlines: Source, barista is not flirting with you. But in this case, though she isn't flirting, it turns out that once Seams gets up the courage to ask, she's eager to go out on a date with him. Things work out surprisingly well, until they don't, and Berry is smart and insightful in his charting of their relationship, of giving us enough insight in the S' thoughts, fears, and obsessions and keeping K enigmatic enough to maintain our interest (and his). Berry is not well known yet in the U.S., but he's published a few fine stories in the New Yorker and it looks as if they're grooming him to fill Trevor's shoes, so to speak.

The two phases and the singulare achievement of Starnone's Trick

I have some quibbles about the conclusion to Domenico Starnone's 2016 novel, Trick, where it seems to me he opts for a soft ending (no spoilers) when he could, and should, have been more harsh and dark - but that said, and not all will agree w/ me on that point - Trick is an excellent short novel and has a truly dramatic, nail-biting sequence in the 3rd (of 3) chapters. This novel is getting some attention in the U.S. largely because that polymath Jhumpa Lahiri has translated it into Italian - has that ever happened before, Americans reading a novel because of the translator? - and she has a few good points to make in her somewhat pedantic (sample vocabulary: recondite? heterodox? ontological? - she hasn't lost her command of English) intro., in which she encourages readers to examine the James short story that the narrator of Trick is hired to illustrate (the story is The Jolly Corner - my guess was right - and it's not one I would recommend on its own; see much earlier posts on that story), but to me her most salient point is her observation that this novel oscillates between two phases: clear direct writing - sharp dialogue, straightforward observations about the apartment and the neighborhood in Naples where the novel takes place, clear delineation of the action - and long, almost Joycean internal monologues about the big issues: mortality, art, life, fate. Yes, she's right, and Starnone, w. an assist from JL, navigates us through these transitions seamlessly - even at its darkest and most esoteric the novel is easy to read, in part because the simple plot - 75-year-old artist whose talent is waning sitting, against his wishes, for precocious and somewhat spoiled 4-year-old grandson, whose antics force the narrator to come to terms w/ the status of his life, his vocation, and his family - a lot going on in a 160-page novel. I knew nothing about Starnone, but see from this novel that he has published extensively in Italy and is considered one of the leading living writings in Italian; I'll probably check out more of his work.

Starnone does in a few pages what Knausgaard and Ferrante do in thousands

In the second chapter (of three) in Domenico Starnone's 1016 novel, Trick, the narrator, a 75-year-old artist/illustrator who fears he is out of touch w/ the contemporary art scene and losing his talent, tries to get through the three days of caring for his 4-year-old grandson - various games, walks, and other distractions. This is 100-percent not a novel about a cute grandparental bonding or bonding across generations or cranky old man made sweet and sentimental by attentions of youth - not Up, not Man Named Ove, et al. This grandfather is suffering through a physical and emotional crisis, and he's bitter and resentful that his daughter has imposed this task on him. Strangely, he keeps telling the young boy that he has to work - he's a facing a deadline on submitting some illustrations for an edition of a H James story - and expects the boy to amuse himself w/ his own toys and distractions, for hours on end. Anyone knows this will never work; Starnone gives this dynamic a little twist, however, as the grandfather becomes weirdly jealous of the nascent artistic talent (and judgement) that the young boy evinces: the child recognizes right away which of the old man's sketches are on point, an through his simple line drawings in pencil shows the grandfather a direction to follow. Rather than build a bond of love and admiration, however, these realizations and perceptions make the grandfather (we do learn his name, quite late in the novel, it's Mallarico I think - evil wealth?) morose and depressed - and the lead to an absolutely stunning section - section 4 of chapter 2 - in which the narrator reflects in a few pp on the course of his life (the apartment where he is staying is the one in which he was raised from childhood), the anger and vulgarity of this touch Naples neighborhood and how that shaped him and how he escaped from the tough life that would have been his fate but for his unusual artistic talent, a talent he senses now wasting away: Starnone does in this brief section of the novel what Knausgaard and Ferrante (another Neapolitan) do in thousands, delineate the struggles, personal, political, aspirational, of the life of an artist.

Starnone's novel Trick off to a strong start

Off to a good start w/ Domenico Starnone's 2016 novel, Trick, recently translated into English by none other than Jhumpa Lahiri - a relatively short novel narrated by a 75-year-old Italian man, a successful artist now battling various health issues and  ailments, long widowed, who gets summoned by his 40-year-old daughter to come from his home in Milan to her apartment in Naples to sit for her 4-year-old son while she and her husband speak at a mathematics conference. Among the lines of tension in this narrative: first, the narrator has long lived away from Milan, and his daughter's apartment was actually his family home, where he was raised among a large # of cousins and siblings, so the apartment and neighborhood - now much more trendy than in his youth - have strong memories for him, not all good. Second, his health is not great and he's forgetful and impatient, not the ideal candidate to sit for a 4-year-old for several days - lots could happen. Third, the narrator, though he's lost none of his ability to communicate - the tells his story with great insight, pacing, and beauty - he is being forced to recognize that his career as an artist and illustrator may be near its end - he's working on a commission to illustrate a James story (I'm not sure which one, maybe The Jolly Corner?; I suspect Lahiri will clear this up in her intro, which I will read after I finish reading the novel) and the editor is disappointed in the first to plates he's sent - causing him to rage internally against this young editor but also to begin to recognize that he's no longer in synch with the times - even the grandson says grantpa's drawings are too "dark." Fourth, the daughter's marriage seems to be in tatters - she complains to the narrator that her husband is paranoid and moody, whereas the husband confides that he believes the daughter is having an affair w/ their department chair. So there's a lot up in the air through part one (of 3) in this short novel; it's a domestic novel, just a limited # of characters and a short time span (I'm guessing at that), but the characters are sharply delineated and the stakes are high.

Fiction, autofiction, and the essay in Lauren Groff's works

The last story in Lauren Groff's new collection, Florida, "Yporte," is a piece that seems close to autofiction, a current trend in writing that blends autobiography w/ fiction, a writer telling his or her life story using all of the elements of literary fiction - Ferrante and Knausgaard being two of the most prominent practitioners. Yporte is not by any means on the epic scope of their work, but it's long as far as stories go; Groff uses a 3rd-person narrator - always referring to the protagonist as "the mother," in this story/essay about a mom who takes her two young sons on a month-long August vacation in Normandy, ostensibly so that she can pursue some research on Guy de Maupassant, at one time in her life a literary hero whom she begins to see as a misogynist brute. From what we can glean about the status details of Groff's life, everything in this story feels factual, and we have the sense that she could have published this as a first-person essay or travel piece, has she wished to. Many small things happen over the course of this story, but there's no arc to the story and no grand conclusion; as w/ a # of her stories, there are hints of marital difficulties but an overall sense that she and her husband are a solid couple even if both are somewhat obsessive and eccentric (he, at least, is not a writer). It's interesting to see Groff's evolution: Compare this with the 1st story in the collection, Ghosts and Empties, which, also, feels like an essay (about the changing neighborhood in which she and her family live) but is more openly autobiographical, using the first-person narration, which up till this point Groff seems to eschew. Would Yporte be any different had it been told in first person? Not dramatically so, but the first person seems a more honest (if restrictive) mode for this material. I actually admire Groff's preference for third-person narration - 1st-person present tense, with its air of breathlessness and headlong rush of incident, is a terrible trend in fiction, I think - but I think it's great that she's pushing on the borderlines of fiction and wonder if she will do further exploration of the possibilities of autofiction and the essay. Florida, as a whole, shows her growth in style and narrative control in the short-story form, and it bodes well for her further writing and success.

Lauren Groff's breakout story?

Lauren Groff's story Above and Below, in her new collection, Florida, was probably her breakout story - it was published in the New Yorker, but some time ago and I don't remember reading it there - and it gives a harrowing account of the life of a homeless woman, in this case a somewhat atypical homeless person, one with whom many of Groff's readers could painfully identify. The protagonist is a grad-student/instructor in English at seemingly the U of Florida, whose boyfriend walks out on her and who seems to have no other friends or family to turn to for support, emotional and financial (over the course of the story, about 6 months, she makes to phone calls to her parents, each achingly unhelpful). She abandons her apartment and her debts and lives for a time in her station wagon, scrounging every day for food and a degree of cleanliness. Eventually, her car is trashed and she heads deeper into the life of the dispossessed, eating a soup kitchens and churches, eventually drifting into a scary campground for the homeless and undergoing a frightening yet entirely credible degree of sorrow and suffering. OK, perhaps it's unfair to present the life of the homeless through an unstable grad student - there but for fortune, many readers may think - rather than someone w/ fewer resources or options; the protagonist does emerge, at the end of the story, whether convincingly or not is another matter, but I think few writers have taken on this subject so directly and observed the life led by the homeless community with more acuity. Since this story, Groff has written many others regarding the conjunction of the intersection, or collision, of the intellectual community around the UofF community and the displaced populations, including the homeless and the uprooted - but this story set the tone and staked our her territory, which she claims directly in the title.

Muriel Spark and the death of the midlist author

Nearly finished reading Muriel Spark's 1988 novel, A Far Cry from Kensington - finding it entertaining and well-written throughout, and though it feels dated, that's part of Sparks's intention, as her narrator, Mrs Hawkins (Nancy, as we later learn), is looking back from the then-present on her days as a 29-year-old war widow trying to make a go in the publishing world. The novel centers on he complete disdain for a pretentious aspiring writer, Hector (can't remember his last name), whom she insults repeatedly, thereby earning the antagonism of his, what to call her?, amour and sponsor I guess, Emma Loy. She manages to get Mrs Hawkins canned from at least 2 jobs in publishing because of her insults - and as we later learn Emma is just as disgusted w/ Hector as is the narrator, but she wants a truce. Mrs Hawkins does not - she's a fighter. In fact, that's one of the 2 strengths of the novel, her asperity and her no-nonsense narration, full of sharp observations and pointed rebukes. The other strength is its inside dope on the clubby and sometimes shady workings of the publishing industry in England in the postwar years, and maybe much later. This aspect of the novel is, however, a bit faded - and probably of more interest to English readers, who will perhaps recognize some of the models for the various characters and institutions; I don't. Spark is one of the many British writers of her time who published a steady stream of mostly minor novels, all of them entertaining and probably successful within the range, but few of them truly great - and therefore few of them read today. (Sparks's career-making novel was Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.) This publishing niche - a stream of small but profitable books - is much more British than American and for that matter much more 20th and than 21st century, as we now find the midlist all but vanished. Kensington is worth reading for sure, but doesn't really seem a book for all time - and I wonder who else in the whole world might be reading it right now aside from me.

Florida, a collectoin that show us the maturation of a writer

The stories are not "dated" in Lauren Groff's collection, Florida, but it appears to me that some of the stories int the middle of the book are earlier works. I see this on two levels: First, they have some of the themes we see in Groff stories that I know to be recent (based on their appearances in the New Yorker) - e.g., woman in distress and suffering or about to suffer because of her mistake in judgement, female protagonists w/ strong personalities and opinions - so strong that they tend to alienate friends and even family, and portraits of a neighborhood, a real sense of place. But I ID some as earlier because they're less complex, their endings are abrupt rather than evocative, provocative, or open. A second clue as to story dates has to do w/ topical referents. For ex., one of the best of the "early" stories is Salvador, about an a attractive 30-something woman who's committed to providing full-time care to her mother, but, with help from her sisters (who feel some guilt that they cannot devote the same time to their mother) she takes a month's vacation every year in an exotic locale, i this case an eponymous city in Brazil. A clue as to date of composition: The woman, while on vacation, writes letters to her mother and sisters. Hasn't happened since about 1998, right? In this story, the woman uses her month's vacation to pick up various men - businessman, local artisans, et al - and have sex; this seems an extraordinarily risky behavior, which I expected would cause the protagonist great harm, but I was wrong about that. She does, however, have a close brush w/ violence, but not because of her sexual abundance (basically, caught in a torrential rain and rescued by someone who menaces her through the night). Though the story is fine and unusual, it seemed to me that there were too many red herrings (she sees a young girl seemingly held captive in a grocery store, but nothing comes of this, at least not directly), and the story ends without the protagonist changed or transformed in any significant way. Compare this with the first 3 pieces in the collection - in which Groff shows her characters - two women, one man - transformed by traumatic experience. It's great that these works come together in a single volume, as they show us the education and maturation of a writer; info on dates of publication, though, would be a plus.

A fine, naturalistic story by John L'Heureux with an odd conclusion

John L'Heureux has another in what appears to be a series of multiparty stories set in the 1950s in an I named small city - which seems to be in the NE, maybe a city like Lowell or even Boston? - and that examine issues of Catholicism and faith, particularly one working-class families- this one called The Rise and Rise of Annie Clark, in current New Yorker. The stories seem to be set in the era and locale of JL's childhood. In the store the eponymous Annie is introduced to us as a beset-upon 40ish woman treated unkindly by the world Andy finding little solace in her faith. She's bedraggled and looks 20 years older than she is. She has a husband who drinks and four teenage children who are crude and disrespectful - all in all not your typical protagonist esp for a story on the NYer! She seeks consolation from a priest, who offers some platitudes and pushes her off, dismissively. Finding her life intolerable , Annie leaves her family and seems to want to move in w her sister, who is much more conventionally successful and content. But her sister has her own life, and she laughs off Annie's troubles. Annie splits for Florida - a disaster - and returns to her home town, dejected and w a withered faith. The final scene of the story, as Annie is heading back to her abandoned family - which she learns has coped just fine during her absence - he stops to pray, anencephaly something strange happens, which will not divulge except to note the foretelling of the title.  Personally I cannot accept this ending, and I wonder what JL has in mind here: why have such a fine, naturalistic storyntake such an odd turn? I can't figure out if the author is devout or if he's mocking one of the characters for  his diminshed view of grace. Is the conclusion a revelation or a misperceptions? It depends in part on who's witnessing the final scene - us? A priest (with weak vision)? Annie herself? The Lord works in mysterious ways - but should writers?

Lauren Groff

Reading further in Lauren Groff's fine collection of stories, Florida, a few themes in her work become increasingly evident. First, she seems particularly drawn to narratives that involve abandonment and survival, in particular but not always involving a female protagonist and almost always a struggle against the elements and living w the consequences of a reckless decision: two children on an island abandoned by their parents who seem to be involved w drug trade, a woman who gives her husband the ok to leave her w kids for a few days in a completely isolated vacation home and who severely injured herself in a fall, a woman going it alone through a Florida hurricanes, and others. She really gets at survival strategies as well as at the need for human connection - we cannot endure alone despite best scout instincts. A perhaps atypical story involves a group of adults and one precocious style in a summer house in France and the awkward interrelationships that ensue - the story is of isolation of a different sort we might say, people isolated from the feelings of others and indifferent to the presence of a child. This story is a one of her novels in miniature and is impressive for how much ground Groff can cover without ever seeming superficial - tho it is hard at times in the 6-character piece to keep the characters straight: who's speaking now? This story could be adapted for the stage I think. A third Groff element is, eel, the elements; she's claimed a piece of geography - centra Florida - as her own, and she doesn't miss an opportunity to give us a sense of Florida at its gamiest and most elemental - the rot, the creeping foliage, the heat, the storms, the isolated lakes and ponds, the snakes and the predators, a place where human beings feel like intruders.

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Lauren Groff's strength may be the short story

I wasn't a huge fan of Lauren Groff's novel Fates and Furies but have come to think that her greatest strength is as a writer of short stories. The storynform today is somewhat out of vogue , which is too bad. In the 80s, under the reign of Raymond Carver, writers were turning out story collections - a natural outcome of  the rise of the graduate writing program - and publishers were looking for story collections; there was the strange idea in the air that the attention span of the next century would not encompass longer works and that the story was the way to go. Well that's proven half-true; attention spans are minuscule , but serious readers have not yet given up on the novel.  In fact the novel is still the only way to earn serious chops, even for writers who should stay w their greatest strength, e.g. lahiri, Saunders.  As to Griffin - jury still out, but I'm poking around in her new collection, Florida, and really liked the first entry, Ghosts and Empties, a tour of what must be a Gainesville neighborhood as seen by a young mom who has taken to walking the darkened streets at dusk and later. We see how the neighborhood declined and is now being "discovered," for better or worse, amid many strange scenes beautifully rendered by the paragraph - the gleaming white light of the drugstore, the old convent now housing only four elderly sisters, the homeless population including a couple that seeks shelter by night beneath the narrator's porch, and many moments glimpsed through lighted windows  - including moments of nudity and of an overweight young man on a treadmill. There's no plot here and maybe this could better be described as an essay , but whatever the form Grof does a great job capturing a moment and a mood. I have probably posted on this story before - when it ran in the New Yorker (I wonder if I liked it then), and have also posted on the second story in the collection, at the four corners of the imagined (?) world, which is like a novel in miniature, a portrait of a life. Will read further.

Strange similarities between 2 narrators in Mureil Spark and Charles Portis

I'm not sure how or even whether Muriel Spark will tie up the loose ends of the plot of A Far Cry from Kensington (1988), and at the half-way point it's beginning to look like there's some clunky and improbable explanation for who's sending the threatening messages to the narrator's neighbor, Wanda. It's too bad the plot's probably going nowhere, but the strength of the novel overall is the acerbic voice of the narrator, Mrs Hawkins (we don't even know here first name; she does appear to be a war widow - she's recounting events from 1954 - but she tells us literally nothing about her late husband; odd). She takes gruff from nobody, and is confident in her abilities and her poise. Strange how these things happen as these 2 books have little else in common and appeared on my to-be-read list for completely different reasons but Mrs Hawkins reminds me of the narrator of the book I previously read, Mattie Ross, in True Grit: both women in their 50s/60s looking back on events of their youth, giving little or no info about current life, and both establishing a tough persona and a subtle narrative wit, as they recount completely different worlds: bounty hunting in the Choctaw Nation ca 1880 and the publishing world in London in the 1950s. It would be tempting to say these worlds are also surprisingly similar, but they're not. The stakes are not life-and-death in publishing; in fact everyone seems to have a blase and casual attitude about their work, spending endless time reading mss and communicating with authors - how things have changed! The heads of the 2 publishing houses Mrs Hawkins works for (in first half of novel) strange and eccentric (though in different ways), and the whole world of publishing seems insular and clubby and upper caste. In fact, part of the fun of this novel, at least when it was published, was to figure out who if any of the characters was based on real people. I'm pretty sure the writer Emma Loy  (?) - whom Spark describes as a successful writer who insists that her publisher take on the dreadful work of her insufferable male companion, Hector, must be based on someone (as must Hector). The dish-aspect of the novel, though, is so far back in time now that few readers will really care. Still makes for a good read, though.

Plot, character, clear writing - what more could we want? - but hoping for a fitting conclusion

Muriel Spark's A Far Cry from Kensington (1988) - the title won't mean much to American readers, but in essence her narrator is a 50-something woman looking back on her youth (when she was in her 20s) living in the Kensington neighborhood (then a bit dowdy and unfashionable; not now!) and working in publishing and recognizing that she's come a long way since that time of life - is typical of MS's work as I know it: clear writing with little embellishment, a sharp wit, deft sketching of the secondary characters, and a driving plot. What more could you want? This novel tells of two crises that may or may not overlap and converge. The narrator, Mrs. Hawkins (a war widow; at this point - 1/4 through the book, we know nothing about her late husband nor her marriage - it's possible that the "Mrs" is a false ID) works for a publishing house that is failing, and in fact the co-owner is committing all sorts of bank fraud, for which he will eventually be convicted. He asks Mrs. Hawkins to cover for him regarding some forged signatures, which she declines. The other element: Mrs Hawkins lives in a small, cheap apartment complex - she gives us quick character sketches of most of the tenants, one of whom, a war refugee from Poland, receives an anonymous threatening letter. Mrs Hawkins makes it her business to try to track down the source of the letter; of course we are led to think that it may have come from her boss at the publishing house, as he's a known forger, but at this point we can see no possible motive for his writing such a note. This plot device - the anonymous threat and its effect - will remind readers of Spark's Memento Mori, which concerns death threats made to a # of people in the same social set. That book is often considered one of her best, though I remember be disappointed at the lack of conclusion - Spark never really solved her own mystery. I have higher hopes for Far Cry, but we'll see.

True Grit: A novel for all readers

Charles Portis's 1968 novel, True Grit, keeps up the tension, interest, and narrative voice right to the end, a novel that should appeal to all readers. Maybe not the most profound novel ever written - it's essentially a good Western yarn about bounty hunters in pursuit of an assassin, narrated by a 14-year-old girl who set the posse into action in a desire to revenge the shooting death of her father - but few novels give as good a sense of place, contain such vivid characters, bring the characters into conflict with one another, and maintain a brisk narration. Novelist Donna Tartt wrote the afterword in the Overlook Press edition, which revived this novel after abut 20 years out of print, and she, too, notes that this novel would appeal and has appealed to a wide range of readers, citing her own family as an example. She's particularly apt on Mattie Ross's narration, noting that Mattie is always dead serious and is never comic or intentionally witty - and that's part of the comic appeal of her voice: She stands up to men much older and tougher than she is, but she drives a terrific bargain and takes no gruff. She's also serious and devout - narrating her story from 40-year perspective, she cites scripture several times; she's terribly afraid when appropriate - particularly in the gruesome conclusion, which I won't divulge - but outwardly maintains her cool and never loses her bearings. Her counterpart, Rooster, the guy she hires to avenge the death of her father, is also a powerful character, quite different from Mattie: brave but deeply flawed, a problem drinker, but a man with a moral compass (Tartt reminded me of his treatment of two boys who were tormenting an animal), and of course he rises to the occasion at the end, saving Mattie's life. Again, I won't divulge the conclusion, but his fate is surprising and a bit mysterious.

Tensions among the characters build, and who will prove to be the one w/ True Grit?

The adventure of Charles Portis's 1968 novel, True Grit, continues as narrator Mattie (14-year-old girl) insists on accompanying the bounty hunter, Rooster (whom John Wayne memorably played in the movie) and the Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (sp.) as the ride through the Chocktaw Nation in pursuit of the man who shot Mattie's father (she has hired Rooster to get this man) as well as any other outlaws they can pick up en route (Mattie's not thrilled about this, but the two men are trying for as much bounty as they can acquire on this difficult journey). Much of the 3rd quarter of this novel concerns the difficult and dangerous pursuit of outlaws, culminating in a shootout that killed 4 men, wounded LaBoeuf, and recovered some valuables from a gang retreating from a train robbery. All of this delays the purpose that initiated the narrative - vengeance for the death of Mattie's father - but introduces us, through Mattie's eyes, to the risks and hardships of the life of a bounty hunter in the 1880s. Portis (via Mattie's trenchant and powerful voice) develops memorable scenes of ambush, difficult rides across unforgiving terrain, terrible provisions, and utter exhaustion - and the need for constant vigilance. Mattie proves herself tough and almost fearless (though she refuses to be alone tending the horses as the men stake out an area for an ambush), and he keeps the tension level high by building increasing hostility between the two men - while showing that the extremely tough Rooster has a dangerous proclivity for alcohol, all of which would make Mattie (and the readers) worry that he may not be as trustworthy in the clutch as he'd at first appeared. He has "grit," which is why Mattie hired him, but we suspect that the only one with true grit, in the end, will be the narrator. At least we know she survives into her 60s (the narration takes place ca 1930).

True Grit - written by a man but with one of the strongest female narrators

CharlesPortis's 1968 novel, True Grit, continues through the first half to be a great read (and obviously terrific material for a movie), based on its swift and concise action - the 14-year-old narrator hires a tough gunman to kill the man who shot her father to death and, against his wishes, she attaches herself to him (and to another bounty hunter) and forces them to take her on as part of the posse - and most of all on the wit and intelligence of the narrator, Mattie Ross. Of course her wit is by definition Portis's, and he fashions her into an amazing, brave, and determined character - amazing how much she (or he) knows about the law, bounty hunting, firearms, and horse trading. In fact, if I had to buy a used car in Arkansas I'd want Portis negotiating price for me. It's taken me a bit of time to "place" this novel, but based on Mattie's references to a few public figures, it seems the narrator is living in about 1930 (and much be about 65 years old) and is telling the story of events in her life in about 1880, when she was 14; the setting is Fort Smith, a city in NW Arkansas, and the three in the posse - Mattie, Rooster (played in the movie by John Wayne), LeBeuf (sp?) set off into what was then the Choctaw Nation (today mostly Oklahoma I think). The plot is, superficially, straightforward, as all three want to capture Tom Chaney, the man who shot Mattie's father, but they have various conflicting interests (LeBeuf, for ex., wants to capture him and deliver him to federal authorities to collect a large bounty; Mattie just wants him dead), which give the narrrative some tension. All told, so far, it's a really strong story - and though it's written by a man he's created one of the strongest female narrators since maybe Charlotte Bronte or Carson McCullers.