Bassani and Italian neo-realistn

Giorgio Bassani is an Italian novelist in the neo-realist tradition - the great post WWII boom in Italian literature and, in particular, film (de Sica, Rossellini, early Fellini) - who has slipped into obscurity and who's best known for his great novel The Garden of the Finzi Continis (which most people know through the excellent film adaptation). I haven't yet read deeply into his 1968 novel, The Heron, which I think came toward the end of his writing career - 40 pages or so - but even from this small sample we can see the insight into character, the beautifully controlled narrative, and the interest in society and class structure so important to his work - in particular the examination of the rise of fascism in Italy, the anti-Semitism during the war, the postwar anxiety about reconstruction and the potential rise of Communism. The first several chapters of this novel follow the early morning routine of the main character, Edgardo (?), over the course of about an hour - and it may be that the entire novel follows him over the course of a day?, we'll see, a la Ulysses; we learn in these first chapters, as E rises at about 5 a.m. and prepares to head off for a day of hunting, that he is Jewish and to protect family property he and his mother an sister transferred all ownership to his Christian wife; the two of them are estranged emotionally and sexually but bound to each other through this financial arrangement. Having protected his estate through this maneuver, he also is in danger as a movement among the laborers and peasants, inspired by Communism, has made all of the wealthy into targets of wrath and potential violence; E had faced a workers' uprising on his estate and had agreed to terms in re sharing of profits - but his lawyer persuaded him to cheat the workers on the deal. E also spends some time with Romeo, the loyal household servant (concierge) who has his own troubles with his daughter, who is living w/ (married to?) and unemployed worker/communist who demands money and support from her family - so, lots a themes and tensions build up right away. To say that this insightful, thoughtful novel, in its opening chapters, brings to mind that other great neo-realist, Lampedusa, is a pretty high compliment; we'll see if Bassani maintains that level of writing and style over the course of the narrative.

Notes on Shirley Jackson and New Yorker story by Greg Jackson

Two notes: Greg Jackson has a story, Poetry, int he current New Yorker that shows this writer - unknown to me, and it's nice to see the NYer on a run of publishing stories by little-known/debut writers - to be super-smart, an excellent stylist, a wielder of a daunting vocabulary (sent me to my online dictionary a few times). In essence, the story is about a young man and his partner - I think they're married - on a vacation to what seems to be a French-language Caribbean island: They spend a difficult morning climbing the island volcano, which exposes many of the flaws in their testy relationship, then some hours on the beach that give the narrator/protagonist ample opportunity for reflection on a variety of topics and on the tenuous and perhaps unraveling relationship w/ wife/girlfriend, and finally a near-disastrous encounter with illness. All told, Poetry is one of those stories that has many fine moments and apercus, that really gets at the tensions and hidden fault lines in a relationship, that has some beautiful passages as well as some that are hard to decipher, and suffers from one grievous flaw: Much of the story entails their eating tropical apple that has fallen onto the beach (he begins eating it and passes it to wife/girlfriend, a reversal of Adam/Eve?), which makes them both violently ill. So you have to wonder: Who in the world picks up and eats fallen fruit on a Caribbean beach? Wouldn't there be warning signs or at least wouldn't his solicitous island host have said that the fallen apples are poisonous? And once, back in their rental, he looks up the fruit and finds that it can be not only poisonous but fatal - who in his/her right mind would just go off and go out for some drinks? Who wouldn't get immediate medical attention? Seriously.

On another matter on another Jackson, the always-perceptive Laura Miller writes a fine introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, noting, as I did in yesterday's post, that the novel entirely centers on the consciousness of Eleanor, so much so that we have suspect that the ghostly visions may be in her own head (although this does not explain the handful of visions that other but not Eleanor see). LM notes correctly that this novel is a descendant of Turn of the Screw, w/ many similarities, including the uncertainty about haunting and the vulnerable young woman as protagonist. Miller has some smart things to say as well about the relationship between the two women leads - Eleanor and Theo - including a discussion of Theo's likely lesbian sexuality. She emphasizes, more than I did, and I think she's right, the deperate loneliness of Eleanor and how the entire journey is her (failed) attempt to break free from an enclosed, unhappy life as an outsider.

Possible explanations for the meaning and the ending Haunting of Hill House

What is the haunting in The Haunting of Hill House (Shirley Jackson, 1959)? Some possibilities: The House is actually haunted by the spirits of those who died there or those whose led miserable lives there; the "haunting" is actually the product of the rich imagination of the quartet  of observers who agree to spent a week or so in the House; the "haunting" is a trick that some of the visitors have concocted to torment the others (or perhaps only one other, the central character, Eleanor) and observe how they react to the door knocking etc.; the haunting is all in the head of the main character, Eleanor. Perhaps there are other possibilities, too. Jackson never definitively states what the haunting represents, which in a way is the strength of this novel. She turns the ghost story on its head; most if not all readers are skeptics, and we watch w/ benign amusement at Dr. Montague's scientific approach to the haunting (measuring the area covered by the cold patch of air, for ex.) and in particular by Dr. M's wife who believes inmessages received from the "planchette" - but if we don't believe in ghosts, then what sense does the novel make? And why are we scared when reading it (I wasn't truly scared on re-reading, but remember being frightened reading it in my youth, particularly reading it late at night in a run-down Baltimore rowhouse)? In the end - obvious spoilers here - the group asks the obviously disturbed and troubled Eleanor to leave, and as she does so she plows her car into the basse of the turret, killing herself; in a sense, then, the house is truly haunted - the very idea of specters and spirits is enough to attract mentally unstable visitors and to hasten them toward death. The ending does seem to tip the novel one of the possibilities outlined above: It's all in her (Eleanor's) head, perhaps. And of course E's plight is the most moving and troubling aspect of this novel - her sense of having no friends, no home, no life, of being the one observed, the object of the snide and condescending comments of others. She is the true outsider - much like Jackson herself, as we now know - and in that sense Hill House isn't a ghost story at all but a story of loneliness. As the first and last pages note: whatever haunts Hill House "walks alone."

What Shirley Jackson is trying to convey in Hill House

I'm nearly dine reading Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and am still puzzled by the relationship between the central character, Eleanore, and the other young woman who's part of the team staying at HH for a week or so to see if they detect any manifestation of ghosts, Theodora. At times the two women seem to need each other and to get along like sisters or cousins, and at other times they seem hostile and disconnected; I know that relationships can often be that way, on and off, oscillating between extremes, but in a novel that doesn't work as well as in life - it's hard to ground myself into their relationship At times I've even wondered whether the novel is a vast plot against Eleanore, to see if they can trick her into believing there are ghosts and to see if that will detail her fragile personality. At other times, though, I think it's just some inconsistent writing on SJ's part: Some terrific scenes in which the two women huddle together in bed frightened by knocking noises in the hallway, or when they drift away from HH in a walk on the grounds and they oddly experience the entire landscape becoming a bright white light, almost as it it's bleached of all color. (It's typical of SJ to make bright white a color of haunting - she upends so many conventions of the horror genre throughout this narrative.) Toward the end of the novel, the wife of Dr. Montague - who had set up this entire observational experiment - turns up (with her chauffeur in tow!) and expects fine accommodations and tries to take over the mood of the group. She's not, as convention would have it, a skeptic whose sanity is about to be overturned but the opposite - a believer in spirits, but one who approaches them in the most conventional manner: through a ouiji board and through "automatic writing"'; it's as if SJ is saying: All of your presuppositions, dear reader, about the nature of spirits and how they contact with us, are wrong; disbelieve this narrative at your peril.

Shirley Jackson

I think what makes Shirley Jackson's The Haunting if Hill House so creepy and effective as a ghost story is: first, her direct approach to the issue of specters, gathering a group (4) of interested skeptics, people willing to believe in ghosts but needing to be convinced through evidence or experience, which is to say much like her readership - we can identify w each of the participants and we can say, like them, that we're not afraid of ghosts but that's because e don't believe in them. What would our reaction be if we came across evidence of a spirit? Probably much like theirs - shock and fright to the degree possible only because of our initial disbelief. Second, she's great at indirection. She doesn't condescending does she have physical manifestations of a ghost appear in the night (at least not in the first 2/3 of the novel); rather, the 4 are wakened in the night by banging noises and the evidence seen afterwords are words written in chalk and a strange area of coldness that the men fruitlessly try to measure. The working principal is that things not seen or barely perceived are the most frightening (and most credible - who hasn't heard a mysterious banging in the night?). Similarly, they're not "locked in" to the haunted house - there's a sense they could leave at any time, which just makes it more frightening because we sense if they did try to leave something would go wrong - car won't start or gate will be frozen shut. We want to tell the to get the hell out of this creepy house but we know they will not and should not run out into the night - and in the daytime everything looks ok anyway: that's when their courage is up and when they think, sure, what's another night, nothing's happened - yet.

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The characters in Shirley Jackson's Hill House - which one is like the author?

As the 4 characters who are visiting Hill House to see if there is any evidence that the place is, as legend has it, haunted settle in for the weekend, we get a long section in which the man who's brought them together, Dr. Montague, gives us the back story on the house and the families who lived (and died) there. Nothing special, really - just a lot of back story, and as Dr M says all these old Victorian mansions had witnessed a lot of deaths - people died younger, and at home, back in those days. The main point that Shirley Jackson is working (in The Haunting of Hill House) is the development of the character who is the general focus of the story, though it's told in "close" third person: Eleanor. She seems by far the most emotionally fragile and must suggestible, the one most likely to see, hear, or imagine the presence of spirits, or to fall the victim of a hoax, if that's what this "experiment" is about. What's particularly striking to readers who know anything about Jackson's work is how close Eleanore seems to the author, who felt always like a shunned outsider in her small Vermont academic town; we see much of that in Eleanore. She seems to enjoy, at first at least, the companionship of three others in this social experiment, but there's also something too clingy and dependent in her attitude, and there's something bizarre and childish in how she even arrived at the house - more or less purloining her sister's car - and in her weird ride in her ability to make this long drive by herself. She acts in many ways like a child, and we sense that she is extremely sensitive to disapproval and judgment and that she is fragile and unstable - an unsuitable participant in this social experiment that would seem to require cool dispassion and skepticism among the observers. Overall, I can't imagine why anyone would agree to participate in this experiment, led by a "Dr" about whom they know nothing - but that may be part of the point: Only the insecure (Eleanor), the egotistic (Theodora), or the oblivious (the nephew of the house owner) would come aboard.

Why Shirley Jackson's novel is better than the Netflix film v of Haunting of Hill House

As noted in previoius posts on her work (see index on "web-based" full version of this blog), I read Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House many years ago and all that I really remember is that I was pretty much terrified. I'm brave enough to come back to this novel, at last, and I'm not disappointed. Few writers do a better job of establishing a mood of menace and creepiness - even w/in the struct confines of the "haunted house" novel: In this case, 4 strangers come together to spend a weekend in the eponymous house to investigate reports that the house is haunted by ghosts or spirits. The 4 - Dr. Montague, the researcher who brings them together, Eleanor (who experienced and incident of haunting in her youth and now is a single woman of about 30 living w/ her sister and bro in law),Theodora (also single about 30, an artist who has psychic abilities she can't explain), and the nephew of the owner of the house, a spendthrift and ne'er do well, we're told (he hasn't appeared yet, some 60 pp in). We mostly so far focus on Eleanor and her arrival, and SJ does a great job establishing her first reaction - repulsion - to the Gothic monstrosity: She's the first to arrive, thinks about chucking the whole project, but is rejuvenated when Theodora joins her and the 2 begin to explore the grounds. SJ really excels in establishing the setting; the house is in the remote hills around a small town that seems modeled on Bennington, Vt., where SJ lived for many years. Most find the small towns of Vt to be charming, but not SJ, who always, apparently, felt unwelcome by the locals who were put off by a NY Jewish eccentric writers/faculty wife. The scene of Eleanor in the diner drinking vile coffee and scrutinized by the waitress and the 1 customer establishes a sense of gloom and malice. The characters clearly don't know the rules of horror fiction: don't go into a ruined Gothic mansion, distrust creepy servants who respond roboticly to all questions, never go for a weekend to a cabin (or house) in the woods or hills), if the town is creepy, turn back. All told the novel is off to an excellent start, and by the way the recent Netflix film v of the novel takes a completely different tack, opening w/ a family inhabiting the house - a narrative structure that diminished the whole work - I'm glad I didn't watch beyond the first episode.)

A tentative interpretation of Stevens's Sunday Morning

I posted about a year ago on the poetry of William Carlos Williams, comparing him, mostly favorably, to Wallace Stevens - noting that I appreciated WCW a lot more when I was young (college, grad school) probably because his poetry was more accessible, at least on a superficial level (Paterson is not so accessible, on any level) and found WS to be in the "dead end" of language poetry, I noted in the post, that wins prizes and is published in the NYer but that nobody reads, but also noted that his work requires multiple readings and becomes more profound, if not more accessible, following many readings. (Whereas WCW you can get - or least get something out of it - on first glance.) I guess I've been reading Stevens's major poems on and off for 50 years (!) and have probably read Sunday Morning 20 times or so and am still just starting to get it - whether that says something about the poem or about me I'm not sure. Even on first reading you should be able to see that WS is a master of blank verse (iambic pentameter, the most classic meter for the English language) and that some of his embedded sentences are beautiful and elegaic. You'll also see some recurring imagery - especially in the use of birds, a trope throughout his work and line cast back across the history of Englsh poetry, to Keats and Shelley of course but also the Shakespeare himself (who had many aviary references throughout the canon). But what is Sunday Morning about? A few observations: It has taken me years to see this, but the poem is in some ways an argument or debate between the poet and the "lady" depicted in the poem. As it opens she is enjoying the beauty and serenity of a Sunday morning, but she also recognizes that she's skipping out on church. Over the the dozen or so stanzas she tries to build a case that appreciation of nature's beauty and of art is a form of devotion; the poet - or the exterior voice - begins to question that and suggests that our "blood" demands a greater sacrifice and engagement than mere passive appreciation (I honestly have no idea what WS means when he says "blood"; several passages in this poem need a lifetime's devotion from a critic such as Helen Vendler and Ed Mendelson - and even then they are obscure or opaque). The woman thinks that only in nature can seh find perfection, but the poet's voice says that beauty in nature occurs only because things change, decay, and die (Death is the mother of beauty - which is stated twice in the poem). But what bout in paradise, the woman asks, and the voice says that yes, in paradise, too, there is death. That we get to the strange penultimate stanza in which a group of men seem to be engaging in some kind of pagan form of worship (why only men? and what's w/ the blood references again?) - but that seems to be a false idolization, and in the final stanza the woman again appreciates the beauty of nature but recognizes its transience, as the flock of birds descends to darkness "on extended wings" - so in a sense we have completed a full day's cycle, beginning w/ a bright morning and at the end descending to darkness, perhaps like life (or like humanity?).

Unusual story, Cut, with a strange ending in current New Yorker

An author new to me and I think new to the New Yorker, Catherine Lacey, has an unusual story in the current edition, Cut, which refers to a severe cut that the narrator identifies as an unexplained laceration in her vaginal/anal area that causes her of course much pain and anxiety. Her desultory efforts to get medical treatment get her nowhere, so she endures the pain and worry over the course of the few weeks or so that the narrative encompasses. Through these weeks we learn that the narrator is a 30-something playwright and professor at a college in the (unnamed) city where she lives; two of her students seek her out in office hours and seem to be deeply disturbed, even suicidal, but she offers no real solace aside from extended deadlines for assignments. We also see her difficult relation w/ her oblivious and callous husband and her friendship w/ a woman twice her age (i.e. ca 70) who offers her bits of cynical wisdom based on her 2 difficult marriages. Lots of anti-male stuff here, and justified, but what makes the story fly is Lacey's quirky humor and many odd turns of phrase, especially in dialog (wondering if she herself is a playwright?) and a few really odd moments: For one, her husband comes home one night with this phase bloody and swollen. He gives her a ridiculous story that he was attacked by a pit bull. She just lets this go by, so what's going on here? My only guess is that the husband is involved in some rough trade and the wife just silently tolerates that - each has his/her own problems and secrets. Second, the ending is truly unusual and daring: the narrator rightly notes that nobody wants to hear a stranger's (or a narrator's) dreams - dreams must be used sparingly if at all in fiction - and then goes on to describe a dream of he bifurcated body - and extreme extension of the eponymous "cut" - make what you will of the choice of that word, by the way - in which one half of her body walks through the world and the other half clings to a wall, tho I may not have this precisely right, but the idea is that she is leading a double life and that the pain of doing so and the psychological cost is unbearable and not sustainable.

Woman on the verge of a breakdown - in Territory of Light

Continuing with thoughts from yesterday's post, as we near the end of Yuko Tsuchima's collection of linked stories, Territory of Light (1979 - and I really dislike this abstract and uninformative title) we feel increasingly sorry for the young woman narrator, for for reasons that we wouldn't have expected at the outset of this work/collection/novel. Of course from the set-up - single mom sets out on her new life w/ 3-year-old daughter as they move into apartment on their own - we anticipate a story of a woman in some ways abused of abandoned by her husband and struggling w/ finances, fears, and the stress of combining work and motherhood w/ little family or social support. And, yes, that's all there, to a degree, with the possible exception of abusive or indifferent spouse - her ex may not be the perfect mate, as the two spat about mediation and parental responsibilities, but he's far from villainous and the break-up of the marriage may have more to do w/ the narrator's needs that w/ any malfeasance by the ex - but we really find ourselves sorry for the woman because of her painful incompetence as a mother: drinking too heavily, neglectful at times, unaware of signs of distress on the part of the daughter. Stories/chapters near the end show mother's painful attempt to treat her daughter to an xmas dinner in a nice restaurant when clearly the daughter just wants to be at home; riding a train to the end of the line, some distant station, while daughter is in daycare. Her strangest action, however, concerns her brief sexual affair with a 23-year-old who had been one of her husband's students: The young man visits a few times on Sundays but then seems to break of the relationship. The woman eventually calls him at his home - he is still living w/ his parents, and suggests that he move in w/ her and her daughter, a completely bizarre and awkward suggestions that shows how entirely out of touch and even desperate she may have become. He flatly turns her down and tells her not to callh im again, which is probably all for the best - but may have dire consequences for her and for her troubled child.

Yuko Tsushima

The deeper you get in Yuko Tsushima's collection of linked stories, Territory of Light (1979, Harcourt tr 2018) the more obvious it becomes that the narrator is a deeply troubled young woman and a frighteningly irresponsible mother. At first our sympathies are all w her and she seems like a brave young mother making the best of things as she moves w her 3-year-old daughter to a new apt. But that sympathy for the character may arise from a few factors: our predisposition to think kindly and sympathetically of a single mom in a fix, our expectations about based on numerous single-mom narratives in print and film and tv, and even our presuppositions about Japanese culture. Over the course of reading these stories tho we check and abandon these presuppositions. We see that the mother takes completely irresponsible actions w her daughter- letting her run off and be out of sight for hours in a park, leaving her alone while going out for a night of drinking w a friends, to cite just two examples, and we also see her personality flaws excessive drinking, high-risk sex. She seems indifferent to or unaware of the signs her daughter is showing of distress - acting out at daycare, hurling objects from the roof of their building - and, to her credit, YT does not take the easy path of blaming the ex: yes, he is in a new relationship, but it seems their breakup was a mutual decision and he is a least to a degree still involved in their daughter's life. So this collection is subtle and defiant of convention - and rich w mystery, as there are many moments when there is ambiguity about the borderlines between actual experience, the narrator's dreams (there are many), and the narrator's delusions (abetted by alcoholism and perhaps by her emotional distress).

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The strange world of Tsushima's stories

Yuko Tsushima's Territory of Light (1979, translated from the Japanese in 2018 by Harcourt) is a set of "linked stories," a genre just emerging at that time and now a little out of date (there was a time when every grad student in a writing program was working on "linked stories") that's unusual in several ways. The set of I think 12 stories constitute a narrative account (I'm only about halfway through the book) in the life of a young woman, mother of a 3-year-old girl, in the year or so following her separation from her husband. That in itself is not unusual - in fact, it's a major literary subset (from Sue Miller to Elena Ferrante, w/ many stops in between). YT's book is notable in that it's not a condemnation of an evil, selfish spouse; in fact, it's not clear (to me at least) who wanted to end the marriage - but husband does not seem abusive in any way and he seems to support the young woman in her search for a new apartment that she can afford. The two, as best I can make out, just seem to have become tired of each other; the man is now in a new relationship, but it does not appear that this was the cause of the breakup. The young woman on the surface seems competent and stable, holding down a decent job in an archive/library attached to a radio station (they don't have such things any longer) and, w/ some help from her mother and from a day-care center, taking good care of her daughter. The apartment they've found is appealing and pleasant - the top (4th) floor of an office building, with light from all four sides and a rooftop deck. But things start to go awry: a massive water leak, for which tenants blame the woman; a visit to a park that leads to an argument w/ her daughter, who runs off alone into the park and the mother can't locate he for what seems like hours!, the mother leaves the daughter alone, sound asleep, and heads off for a bar where she meets a woman her age and they proceed to get blindingly drunk and sick - and her husband finds her on the sidewalk, the mother has dreams or visions of falling from a height (and her daughter has been tossing origami papers from the rooftop) and then learns that a boy in the day-care center fell from the 10th floor of a building - and she thinks she actually heard him scream. And so forth - these are dreamlike elements, and we're not sure if they really occurred as such, which would be alarming in itself, or if they're part of the woman's dream or fantasy life, and thus troubling in another way - but all of this against a background of placidity and tempered emotions and the outward appearance of good mothering. It's a book of secrets, as she struggles to keep from others at work (she has few other friends) the break-up of the marriage and of the cost of keeping secrets.

Thoughts about the conclusion of Morte d'Urban

The concluding chapters of J.F. Powers's Morte d'Urban (1962) feel a little rushed - and looking back it's astonishing how little information we receive across the course of this novel, tightly focused on the life (not the death) of Father Urban, about his background and early life - but the closing chapters do include important and dramatic events: First, at last Father Urban stands up to his wealthy benefactor, the nasty, self-centered Billy Cosgrove, and their relationship breaks apart (I won't give away the details of this excellent passage); second, the unconventional daughter of his other benefactor tries to seduce him, unsuccessfully - this scene would have been better had the woman played a larger role in the novel up to this point. This attempted-seduction scene hits a highlight, as the woman notes that Father U does not have any friends, which seems to hit the mark, and causes him ponder - in a several powerful and significant pages of prose - about what his life would have been like had he not joined the Church - this section is painful and completely believable and in fact we never get a direct answer as to why he did join the Church except that maybe it was because he feared the life he would have led and wanted to settle for much less, petty political decisions and a thousand speeches to small church groups that haven't made a bit of difference, a quieter and safer life. At the end, we see that he finally received the promotion he had longed for and a return from rural Minnesota to Chicago - but he's burned out and ineffectual and he looks back at his time in the rural outposts - here I'm inevitably reminded of the end of Sentitmental Education - as the best time in his life.

Father Urban's failings in Morte d'Urban

It's pretty clear, now about 3/4 through reading J.F. Powers's Morte d'Urban (1962) that the eponymous Father Urban is a pompous suck-up and not nearly as clever or well-respected as he imagines. Father U has spent much of his time in the priesthood traveling a circuit centered on Chicago, giving talks about his order (the Clementines!) and supposedly inspiring people to support the church. His superiors remove him from this cushy job and assign him to a remote parish; he sees this as jealousy and internal politics - but it may be that they have seen what we readers begin to see, that Father U is far too attracted to the comforts of the good life and that he is a windbag, with few or no original ideas, and that perhaps they're getting bad reports about his speechifying. In particular, Father U sucks up to the wealthy donor Billy Cosgrove, who has all the markings of a Chicago gangster trying to buy penance through his donations - but maybe he's just a rich businessman. Either way, he's extremely rude and bossy to his subordinates and to just about anyone else who crosses his path - and he spends his $ like a plutocrat. An example: He didn't like the old pickup truck that Father U borrowed to take them on a fishing trip, so he decides on the spot to buy a car. He goes into a dealership, points to a car on the floor, and says he'll take it. When they say it will take a day or so to get plates and papers he insists they do it in an hour or the deal's off - making everyone else miserable just so he can show his (his money's) authority. This is not the sort of good Christian whom the priest should befriend - he should see through that attitude and try to raise Billy to a higher level of morality or just walk away, but Father U is too drawn to the good life that Billy's $ puts on offer. He's a man who struggles w/ the internal politics of the daily life of running a diocese, but he misses the whole point of being a man of the cloth.

A fine Pat Barker story with a puzzling conclusion

I'd say Pat Barker, well known for her excellent trilogy on British soldiers in and after the first World War, has a story, Medusa, worth reading in the current New Yorker. The story marks a change for Barker (I think; I haven't kept up w/ all her recent work) in that it's a first-person narrative in contemporary setting (northern England, Northumberland specifically). The story (up to a point, which I'll get to in a moment) is entirely credible and extremely painful to read: A young woman walking home at night after laying out works in a gallery for what will be her first solo art exhibition, is assaulted by a man who bursts into her apartment, threatens her w/ a kitchen knife, and rapes her. Much of the first half of the story encompasses a narration of this attack, with the narrator's recollection of her frenzied thoughts as she struggles for survival, in particular afraid, of course, of the kitchen knife the man is holding. Then we follow the narrator through several months of recovery, including some sessions of therapy, as she tries to resolve her anger, her fear, to some degree her guilt. She feels increasingly isolated, and eventually decides she needs a change of scenery and heads off, alone, to Florence. There she spends a lot of time in galleries and museums (of course), and is particularly taken by a portrait of the eponymous Medusa, decapitated, her hair a mass of squirming snakes. While at this painting, a young man approaches her. They chat, go out for a coffee, and their conversation continues over dinner. When his order comes - steak, with steak knife - she flips out and heads to the ladies' room - completely understandable and sad, as he seems like a thoroughly nice and honorable young man - which brings us to the strange conclusion of the story (spoiler alert): She returns from the laides', sits at the table, and looks at her partner and turns him into stone (as per Medusa). Obviously this is not meant to be taken literally, but what exactly is Barker's point here? That she can no longer ever trust a man, that she will freeze every potential relationship? That there is something evil about this man, or maybe all men?, that only she perceives? That he is freaked out by her power and authority and he loses interest? I'm not sure how to interpret the closing line of the story, but it does provoke thought and it seems to strike the correct note: This story should not, could not, and did not end as a romance, that much is clear.

Some quetions and observations about Powers's Morte d'Urban

Some questions and observations about J.F. Powers's Morte d'Urban (1962), such as: Is this novel in any way allegorical (given that it's about the life of a small group of priests in an obscure, fictional order)? The central figure, Father Urban, is torn between two poles of his calling: priestly duties and development of the order (the Clementines!). Is that an analog for the struggle for his soul? The "development" work, which sends him to various locales across the country, where he is taken care of very well (first-class train accommodations and hotels, fine dining, lots of drinking and cigars), compared w/ the priestly duties, lonely and unappreciated. Struggle between God and Mammon? And, is Father Urban as good a public speaker as he likes to think he is? The examples show that he's intelligent and clever, but his dreams of being a Catholic v of Billy Graham are rather ludicrous: his speeches are to small groups of the faithful in a community hall in the basement of some rural parish church. Yes, he gets fine ovations and utters some wise quips - but really it's like a slugger on a weekend adult softball team thinking he could play in the Majors. In short, Father Urban is full of himself (his most notable rhetorical flourish is "not a-tall," such as when he denies an accusation of subterfuge or when he refuses the take an honorarium following one of his speeches - a grandiose flourish that others must see through and laugh about, in private. And what about his relationship w/ the wealth donor (who seems like a gangster, though that has not been state directly), Billy Cosgrove, who provides money for Urban's small order to buy land for a golf course to help w/ development of a retreat for the laity. Does the golf course represent some version of purgatory (the ultimate retreat is salvation after death)? Or does it represent the worldly and the commercial encroaching on sacred grounds? Father Urban takes w/out question or compulsion many gifts from Billy. Is Father Urban being corrupted? Or do the gifts represent the benevolence of Jesus in a way that Father Urban doesn't understand? In short, why is Father Urban a priest, after all? does he really care to save souls or to bring comfort to the afflicted? Or is it a safe profession - removing him from the struggle most adults endure? Oddly there's not even a hint of sexuality - homosexual or hetero - anywhere in the novel (through p.. 200 or so) - an omission that would be impossible in any work  today about the Catholic clergy.

The role of media on Powers's Morete d'Urban

The tension, such as it is, in J.F. Powers's Morte d'Urban (1962) centers on the conflict that (some of) the priests feel between serving as parish priests (leading mass, hearing confession, et.) and development (currying potential donors, giving speeches to various community groups), w/ the eponymous Father Urban clearly in the latter camp - he enjoys the high life and the perks of socializing w/ big donors, even w/ a mobster donor and he's particularly good at speechifying - and is both troubled by and envious of the recent success of such televangelists as Billy Graham. But he's also a "man of the cloth" and recognizes the hierarchy and the need to obey those in authority over him, no matter how stupid and narrow-minded they may be. Powers gets a surprising amount of comedy out of these configurations and tensions; as noted previously, I'm surprised to be enjoying this novel and would never have read it based on the kinds of plot summaries that I've been offering over the past few days. Go figure. It's interesting to see how the arrival of a new medium - television - is changing the way the priests think about their work and go about their lives; Urban and the 3 others in the decrepit old mansion that they're supposedly renovating to supposedly attract those lay Catholics interesting in paying $ for a religious retreat, receive a TV (color!) from the mobster who has befriended Father Urban. W/out looking closely at the source of their beneficence, the men begin to build their entire social life around the TV screen (they even rely on the TV tube for light and for some heat!), and we watch the decay of their minds as the fixate on "what's on" each night. (We also meet an elderly, decrepit benefactor who lives in a room w/ 2 TVs, both on all the time - she'd get a 3rd if there were a 3rd station.) Obviously this dependence on an all-consuming and potentially destructive medium resonates today - as we see so many social relations changed by media, and as some w/ vision see the potential for media to reach beyond the scope of face-to-face communications and to spread the "gospel" over the air, for better or, in most cases, for worse.

Morte d'Urban

Ever has so much been made from so little - in fact I'm glad that I never read a description of J F Powers's novel Morte d'Urban (1962) because I never would have read it, or started to. You'd think there 's no way a novel about a priest reassigned from Chicago to a remote site in Minnesota where he works w three others, each his his own version of incompetence, to turn a wreck of an old mansion into a religious retreat for devout laity. The project is so obviously doomed and the protagonist, Father Urban, is so obviously smarter and more shrewd than the other priests and so obviously out of place - in his previous assignment he traveled the country giving rousing and entertaining speeches and he befriended a slick mobster and enjoyed the perks of his lifestyle - that the novel is an exercise in high comedy from base materials, as in say Don Quixote. Father jack is an especially obvious target for humor at his expense , including his devotion to checkers and the episode in which he thinks he lost both of his wallets , as is father Wilf w his false economies as he leads the futile efforts to spruce up the beyond repair church property and his ridiculous attempt to draft a brochure advertising the never to be religious retreat .

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A novel with a lousy title that's off to a great start, against all odds - Morte d'Urban

J.F. Powers's Morte d'Urban (1962?) is another one of those once well-known novel now plunged into obscurity, probably because Powers' had a limited output as a fiction writer and was never connected w/ any particular movement or school; plus he lived far from the center of literary (taught for many years at a small college in rural Minnesota) plus - what a terrible title for a novel! That said, the great NYRB press once again comes to the rescue and publishes several volumes of work by Powers - and his work has recently been mentioned along w/ that of another writer in the naturalist tradition from about the same era (and same level of obscurity and safe confinement to the hinterlands of literature and same resurrection by NYRB), John Williams (esp Stoner). And this novel, from the first 75 pp or so, does have some echoes of Stoner - the story of a priest, of all things, who works out of Chicago where he clearly enjoys the high life, top restaurants and clubs and even palling around w/ a known mobster. His job, kind of glamorous for a priest, is to travel a circuit and give inspiring talks about his order (the Clementines!, ha); his superiors, smelling a rat, reassign him to a remote site in Minnesota where he joins a barely competent and fully under-staffed crew in the thankless task of rebuilding an old estate to serve as a retreat locale for devout laity. I know - you'd think this would be the most uninteresting set-up for a novel in all of time. And yes I can't imagine this novel's being published today. But it's actually, so far, a profound and thoughtful examination of the psycho of a man - Father Urban - at a Dante-esque crossroads in his life, and in fact the novel is full of sharp wit (amazingly, one of the hilarious passages is the "minutes" of a meeting of the 4 priests about how to "market" their forthcoming "retreat") and some great descriptions - including another hilarious section as the priest on location shows Father Urban around this dilapidated mansion - clearly, someone's major tax write-off - trying to make the best of things as Father Urban grits his teeth. We'll see how this novel goes, but it's off to a great start - against all odds. (Have there been other good novels about priests? Maybe A Month of Sundays? Alice McDermott has written well about the novitiates.)

Was Nightwood ahead of its time?

Honestly I see no reason to read any further (little more than halfway through, about 90 pp.) in Djuna Barnes's novel Nightwood (1936), once a cult novel much admired by avant-garde readers and writers, at least in the 60s abd 70s, but today just a weird curiosity. Yes, DB does create some scenes and moments - for example a harrowing description of Doctor Matthew's sixth-floor walkuip apartment, where his visitor finds him dressed in a woman's flannel nightgown and wearing a woman's wig - shocking! - but DB does little with the scenes she establishes - in a way she's a classic example of telling not showing, her descriptions of scenes and personalities are just that - but they never evolve before us, never develop into any recognizable semblance of a narrative or plot - and in the end, or at least in the middle - I don't understand any of the characters, I don't understand their inter-relationships, if any, and I don't care what might or might not be developed or revealed in the 2nd half of the novel. As noted yesterday, this novel comes with a foreword by none other than T.S. Eliot, who notes that this book is best read as poetry rather than fiction. Maybe so, and there are some affinities w/ The Waste Land, but as a poem it lacks nuance and precisions; I think it's best read as a satire, and readers may see a similarity to the highly comic novels of Flann O'Brien - though not as funny, too much "in earnest." TSE famously supported the work of many of his friends, and perhaps he was friends w/ DB or perhaps his publishing house was hers as well, I'm not sure, but there is a sense of log-rolling here. His praise was overdone (which he may have subtly recognized in the second, one-paragraph intro he wrote to a subsequent edition). Nightwood is one of those peculiarities that once seemed ahead of its time and now seems behind the times, without ever quite pausing in the middle.

Why people once read Nightwood

Djuna Barnes's Nightwood (1936) is one of those novels that everyone (except me, aparently) read in college in the 60s or 70s - one of the first 100 New Directions pb w/ its distinctive untra-cool b/w cover. What's more, it merited not just one but 2 forewords from TS Eliot! Offhand one would not suspect this book - surreal and sexual and hip - to be high on the reading list of the cerebral, devout, snobbish, Anglophile, but there you have it. And on reading the novel, at least the first half or so, I can now see that there are Eliot-like elements: The long journey through various night haunts (jazz clubs, the circus, salons) is somewhat like the Waste Land, and one of the lead characters, Felix, with his attempts to distance himself from this Jewish ancestry by becoming a devotee of rank and a collector of antiquities, seems a little Prufrock-like. And it's easy to see why this novel was popular back in the day: Hallucinogenic and, to be honest, nearly incomprehensible, at least on first reading. It's like a prose version of a poem (or book of poems) by Rimbaud. I imagine thousands of would-be poets and artists reading through the novel for its hypnotic mood alone - not really following the story line, if there even is one, just "tripping." Today, the novel looks quaint and pretentious; some of the once-shocking elements, most notably the lesbian relationships among some of the key characters (as well as their Pynchon-like names - e.g., the American woman Robin Vote) are no longer shocking or even amusing. I'll read a little further to see if Nightwood starts making sense, but it seems to me so far that this novel, today, is mostly a historical curiosity.

Why I'm reading no further in Arturo's Island

Sorry to say that 100 pages in (about 1/3) I'm through with Elsa Morante's 1957 novel, Arturo's Island. It started w/ such promise - a classic work by a well-respected Italian author, the "namesake" of the even more famous Elena Ferrante - but there are so many things that have troubled me about the first third of the novel, notably the mean-spirited contempt for women on the part of all of the major characters and in fact a father who criminally neglects and care for and education of his child (Arturo), that I just can't go on. And in fact, though we "must not say so," this novel, "friends, is boring" (I'm re-purposing a line from Berryman, just for kicks). I've just finished a long section in which A gets to know the new teenage wife of his father and engages her in long discussion about such, to me, uninteresting topics as Are there ghosts? And if so should we be afraid of them? The plot, after the initial set-up - boy living on his own on an island - is getting nowhere and the characters, are flat and dull. What this novel needs, IMHO, is a push in one direction or the other: either a realistic narrataive about the struggles of a young, neglected boy  (and for that matter a not-much-older, also neglected woman who happens to be his stepmother) to understand themselves and to survive in their world - and maybe include some jeopardy or obstacles to overcome - so far there are none - or make it more of an allegory or fantasy, with island as a representation of a deracinated world, a world without women, and a study of the effect of the introduction of a woman to this society, maybe something like a Garden of Eden story or a parable about dominance and oppression. So far I see none of these developing and I'm moving on to another novel. For anyone who wants to weigh in - please tell me what I'm missing.

Excellent New Yorker story about life in a dictatorship (contemporary China): Lulu

The story in the current New Yorker, Lulu,  by Te-Ping Chen, comes across as quite a surprise, w/ little to no information about the author other than that she (I had thought the author was male, in that the story is entirely narrated and envisioned from the POV of a young man - a quick look for info about Chen online shows nothing other than that the author is female and lives in Phila.).Did this story just come in over the transom? It doesn't seem to be part of any forthcoming novel or collection, and I'm not sure if Chen has published any other fiction. And it's really good - a piece that I can't imagine any editor turning down (though you never know - I've been surprised before). In the story, set in contemporary or near-contemporary China, a young man tells of his lifelong relationship w/ his twin sister, the eponymous Lulu. Born as the only children into a modest family in city far from Beijin, the story or their lives has been that the sister is the genius and the family's great pride and hope, while the brother is more of a typical young guy of his generation, kind of coasting through a local college and spending most of his time gaming. While in college, Lulu becomes increasingly drawn to political activism, posting provocative video clips and obscure messages on her various online profiles - and over time we watch her descend into mental illness, breaking w/ her boyfriend/fiance and estranged from her parents. The brother, ever conventional, is deeply troubled by his sister's fate - his love for her never wavers - and he eventually gains some recognition as one of the leading gamers in the nation - but it seems that for all his success he can never compensate for the disappointment and sorrow and shame that his sister has brought on the family. The story feels true to life, although that could be just Chen's skill as a writer; either way, it will give most American readers a new and necessary understanding of everyday life in an authoritarian dictatorship; I can't happen here, can it?

Could a male author get away with this? And why would anyone want to?

The late Italian novelist Elsa Morante comes w/ the strongest cred as a feminist and inspiration for other women writers; the extraordinarily popular "Elena Ferrante" in fact took her pen name as a tribute to Elsa Morante, and the translator of EM's novel Arturo's Island (1957), Ann Goldstein, is also EF's translator. So it's strange to me that Morante's novel should, at least on the surface, be so misogynist. Yes, the narrator is the eponymous Arturo, looking back on his youth as an unsupervised waif on the remote coastal island, but the whole ethos of the island is that it's a male society and that women are looked on not only w/ contempt but actually as objects of loathing. The men on the island gather for many drunken binges, no women allowed, and in fact in the house where Arturo was raised no women are even allowed the enter the premises, with the exception of A's mother, who died in childbirth at age 18, and, in section 2, the 2nd wife of A's father - we're uncertain of her age, except that she's most likely late teens (Arturo is at that point 14). His father/her husband treats her with utter contempt, and both he and Arturo think that she's ugly (they think the same of all women!), although Arturo recognizes something attractive in her when he decides that she looks somewhat like his late beloved dog! Enough. I think it's obvious that over the course of the novel these views will change, somehow, yet I wonder how Morante can get away with such writing and avoid being pilloried. Much will depend on what she does w/ this set-up, yet one has to wonder: Could a male author get away w/ depicting women in this manner? And why would anyone want to do so?

The strange narrative of Elsa Morante's Arturo's Island

It's hard to get your mind around the strange novel by Elsa Morante, Arturo's Island (1957, 2019 tr. by Ann Goldstein). On the surface, the novel is quite easy to read: clear prose, and imaginative use of extremely short chapters, each one just a page or two, maybe 4 at the most. There is no clear time setting and no reference - at least for the first 50 pp or so - to any event outside of life on the eponymous island. Arturo is the narrator, seemingly looking back on his childhood from a vantage point of middle or old age. And his childhood is bizarre; I will try to summarize: A's grandfather came to the island, off the coast of Naples, after wealth and success in the U.S. and settles into a Spartan life in an abandoned fortification; he think he has no children or heirs, but learns that he has a son born out of wedlock to a German woman. The son comes to live on the island and is immediately befriended by an old man who has gone blind; the man makes A's father his sole heir when he dies, and A moves into his run-down but vast island estate. He brings his young wife with him, and she dies in childbirth at age 18; the child is Arturo. A's father leaves him to grow up on the island w/ no supervision, guidance, or instruction, very much like a wild child, A somehow educates himself - not really believable - and builds his life around the anticipation of his father's occasional and never announced visits. The father seems particularly cruel to A., but A s so in need of affection that he makes his father into his hero. But this is not a simple "wild child" narrative, which have become fairly popular of late - see My Absolute Darling or the TV series Hanna, for 2 examples; the undertext of this narrative involves a horrible hatred (and fear?) of women: Women have never been allowed in the the estate that A's father inherits - at least until his pregnant wife, who paid the price. There are many vast parties and gatherings of carousing men, and A's father's benefactor has all the makings of a homosexual who develops a passion for a much younger man, who takes advantage of his generosity - yet there is no explicit mention of sexuality of any sort, so I have no idea what to make of this strand of the story line.

The death of a father seen from a child's point of view in A Death in the Family

First, yes, unsurprisingly James Agee's novel A Death in the Family (1957) is based on events of his own childhood: He grew up in Knoxville, father died when he was young, so it would seem that Agee puts all his thoughts, memories, and confusions into the mind of the young boy, Rufus. As noted in yesterday's post, this novel is told in extreme close-up; we see the various family gatherings and fallings over the course of two or three days after the father's death, as the large family comes together for the funeral service and the burial. A lot of what happens is never made entirely clear to readers, but that is intentional and highlights the close narration, which remains w/ the point of view of the child, who observes many things that he can't understand or explain, such as the strange scene when Rufus and his younger sister, Catherine, listen outside the bedroom door as his mother and aunt, led by a despicable priest whom the children hate and fear, recite prayers in Latin. Agee holds nothing back in his condemnation of the church, as Rufus's Uncle Ralph goes off on a tirade about the church and the priest's refusal to administer last rites because Rufus's father had never been "confirmed." Everything Rufus can piece together about his father's death is by indirection; people tell him very little, but he observes a lot - even some information that's painful and difficult for him to comprehend (notably, the boys on his street relating that their parents said the father's car accident was a result of his drinking - probably correct, but we know nothing about this directly, as the POV stays w/ Rufus and does not step back into omniscience). The family tries in various ways to shelter the children, but this adumbration just confuses the children even more; it's obvious that Agee must have spent a lifetime trying to recollect and understand and, at last, communicate his lifetime of pain (dulled, apparently, with his own heavy drinking) and his memories of this fateful time.

The best example in literary fiction of unexpected death fromt the child's point of view

As we near the conclusion of James Agee's novel A Death in the Family (1957) we come upon the painful chapters in which Mary must inform her two preschool-age children that their father has died in a car accident. These chapters comprise one of the finest examples of close narration: the narrative seemingly takes as long to unfold as the incidents it contains. Agee gives us in microscopic detail the way in which Mary explains death to the children - God wanted their father so he took him away - and the finality of death: We are going to see his body and then we will never see him again until we're in heaven. The older child, Rufus - the emotional center of the novel (and perhaps a version of the young Agee? - I don't know much about his life and background) - rebels against the information - why would God do that? - and his questions are truly unanswerable. We then follow the children through the morning of the funeral, as they are shunted aside, treated with almost sadistic cruelty by a visiting Catholic chaplain; Rufus picks on his sister and acts out - understandably, the kids are both completely confused and uncomfortable, witness to all this sorrow and their mother's near breakdown; in a climactic scene, Rufus goes outside to tell the group of older boys who have picked on him and teased him, that his father is dead. At first they're skeptical, but it turns out that one or more of the boys have heard about this death as their parents read of it in the morning paper (not really possible to get that much in print so quickly, but set that aside) and they confirm his account. Surprisingly, the boys don't tease Rufus, for once - though one or two of them report comments from home that suggest that the father had been drinking That's clearly something we readers have suspected, and Agee has a sly way of bringing that information to the fore, in the same way that there are intimations that the children may be of mixed race, though there's no narrative voice of authority to give us background or perspective - again, this is close narration, strictly limited to the characters' (esp the son's) POV, without an external narrative authority for verification and context. There's probably no better example in literary fiction of the unexpected death of a parent from the child'd point of view - w/ all of the attendant sorrow, confusion, anger, and strange nuances, such as the use of the father's death to gain stature and credence among other children.

Excellent short fiction from Colson Whitehead in current New Yorker

Colson Whitehead's story, The Match, in current NYer is another fine piece from this always-worth-reading author who continues to surprise w/ the variety and range of his work and with his paritcular focus on issues of race and class across the history of the U.S. This piece, evidently a section from his forthcoming novel, is set at a so-called "reform school" in rural Florida in what seems to be the 50s or early 60s. The "school" for wayward and often orphaned or abandoned boys is rigidly divided by race - one dorm for white boys, another for "colored." All of the boys are brutally abused, mistreated, and exploited, physically and sexually. They live in constant fear, and are prepared for nothing beyond their stay in the school, Nickel Academy (named after the brutal and hypocritical founder). This particular piece of fiction involves a planned - and rigged - prize fight between the top black child, a bully who is feared by all, and the top white child, an event much anticipated and attended by a large contingent of (white) men from the area who bet heavily on the (rigged) outcome. The story will remind readers of the famous Battle Royale episode in Ellison's Invisible Man and of course of Sillitoe's Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner - both of which involve grown (so-called) men getting their kicks through the torment and trial of young male athletes in their control. This story - although challenging to follow at some points because so many characters are quickly introduced - is graphic and dynamic, building to point of conflict and to a surprising, dramatic, and sorrowful conclusion. White head is a writer w/ vast imagination and skill at historical research; I don't know how much of this story is based on the records of an actual institution - perhaps none of it - but it feels vivid and contemporary, especially as we think of the many holding pens even today on the southern border and the brutality (and racism) that is no doubt still practiced and tolerated in so many prison settings.

The utter sorrow of Agee's Death in the Family

The italicized chapters or sections in James Agee's A Death in the Family (1957) represent ncomplete passages that Age left as part of his unfinished manuscript on his death in 1955; later editors determined whether to include these materials and if so where to place them. Probably not all should have been included except as appendices - all of the italicized sections are out of sequence w/ the rest of the narrative - but some represent some of Agee's best writing. In particular, I was moved almost to tears by the section at the end of part 2 about the 4-year-old Rufus, son of the man who died, who is teased unmercifully by older kids in the neighborhood. The whole section is quite horrifying (though not in any gruesome or sadistic way) because it's so believable: The older boys keep asking Rufus to tell them his name; he knows that they know his name, but their repeated inquiries lead him to tell them his name, at which they burst out howling. In particular they taunt him w/ racist epithets. They don't harm him physically, but the psychological torment is almost worse. Even more painful, all of us have either been part of such bullying - on one side or the other, or both - or have silently witnessed such ill treatment, which is extremely painful to read of now. Agee (or his editors) follow with 2 sections that build on this teasing: One involves a visit to elderly relatives in the country, and Rufus is asked to tell his great-great-grandmother who it is. When he tells her his name, this echos against the teasing of the previous chapter; we see that this young boy has been so tormented that it's hard for him to say his name - though the elderly woman seems touched by his speaking to her. There is a hint that he may be of mixed race, though this plot point is not clarified at this point - end of section 2. In the final passage of this section some friends of R's parents note is gullibility and tease him in a playful way, but we can see that this teasing deeply hurts Rufus, obviously because of the more painful teasing he's endured by other children. Knowing, as we do, that this young boy is now bereft of his father - we have not yet had a scene in which the children are informed about the death - further builds the tension and sorrow regarding these passages.

A further observation about the fantastic chapter in James Agee's A Death in the Family (1957), in which the young mother, Mary receives a late-night call informing her that her husband has been in a serious accident and that she should send one of her "menfolk" to the scene; she awaits word from he brother-in-law as to her husband's fate. In a weird and intriguing way, Agee has made us participate in the agony and suspense of this moment. Clearly, from the nature of the phone call and the taciturnity of the man who gives her the information, she knows that her husband is dead; were it any other outcome, the man on the phone surely would have told her so directly (for example, if he were badly injured they would rush him to a hospital and told Mary to get herself there). But she goes through the agony of waiting for final word desperately thinking of other possible outcomes and preparing herself for both the worst, Jay's death, and the best - preparing a first-floor bedroom where he could rest and recover. Similarly, we readers await final word; we know - from the circumstances and above all from the title of the novel - that Jay is dead, but we exist in a state of anxiety and agony, waiting for the "final word" from the author - our experience is much like Mary's, over the course of this long and complex chapter at the heart of the novel