Among the strangest, if not the "saddest," novels of the 20th century

I don’t know that The Good Soldier (1915) is the “saddest story,” as Ford Madox Ford has his narrator (whose name we don’t even learn until the last page!) opine at the outset, but it’s among the strangest stories and maybe the best example in 20^th-century literature of a “naïve narrator,” that is, a work in which we the reader know or understand much more than the narrator does himself. Ostensibly, this is a story centered on 4 people – the narrator, his wife (Florence), and couple whom they befriend (Capt. Edward and, his wife, Leonora Ashburnham. Throughout, the narrator praises the other 3, the Captain (the “good soldier” of the title) in particular for his manners, bearing, and taste. Over the course of the novel, Edward betrays his wife through a # of extended affairs with married women of their acquaintance, in particular a decade-long affair with the narrator’s wife, Florence, which he never suspects until its tragic demise (her suicide by poison). In fact, she’d been unfaithful to him from the start, and their long marriage seems to have been without sex and definitely without affection. The story ends in suicide and madness for each of the main characters, except for the narrator – with the final blow occurring when the young woman whom Edward and Leonora had been raising as a niece is packed off t Ceylon after Edward makes clumsy passes at and proposals to her – and she loses her mind. What makes this otherwise melodramatic and over-the-top novel so strange and unsettling is the narrator’s complete acceptance of all of the illicit love affairs and betrayals, some of which border of child abuse – but all seem, to him, OK and even tragic because Edward was such a good sort, mannered, cultured, educated, generous to a fault; the narrator never sees or recognizes Edward’s (and Florence’s) cruelty and infidelity – it’s all OK because his they are all so well-mannered. Looking at the novel as a whole, while the characters are despicable and narrator is naïve and perhaps unreliable, we see that none of the foursome really had a chance; they married too young, with any experience of love or sex, with little or no affection, just giving in to the social expectations of the day; the narrator himself, for example, “eloped” with Florence, climbing to her bedroom via a rope ladder: What a cliché! – yet that’s part of the point, the characters are all bound by the clichés they’ve read of or heard of (their lives destroyed by “bad fiction,” much like Emma Bovary’s).

Could any realistic narrator be such a fool?

I’ve started (re)reading Ford Madox Ford’s novel The Good Soldier (ca 1915) and am not sure why I remember it as a “great novel.” The writing is fine and clear, a first-person narrative (I don’t think we even know the narrator’s name; does someone call him “John” at one point?) in which we are much more aware than the narrator is about what’s going on. He recounts what he notes in the first sentence is the “saddest story” he’d ever heard – a great way to start a novel, by the way – and slowly puts together the pieces of his unhappy marriage (to a fellow American blue-blood, Florence) and their 11 year friendship w/ a wealthy and self-centered English couple, Capt Ashburnham and his wife, Leonora, whom they meet at a German health spa. We learn, in the first third or so of the novel, that the narrator’s marriage has been a disaster: He married her in haste, hardly knowing her, inexperienced in love and in sex, and on their “honeymoon” sea voyage to Europe she becomes “ill” on the boat and for the next 11 years suffers from heart issues, leading to numerous stays in various European clinics and to a loveless (and sexless) marriage. But guess what? – over all this time Florence has been carrying on an affair w/ Capt. A. – and the narrator never knows or notices anything strange? Come on! Moreover, he’s well aware that the Captain has been involved w/ numerous affairs and scandals, including at least one notorious liaison that led to his leaving his post in India into what seems to be an enforced retirement. In short, the narrator cannot put 2 and 2, or even 1 and 1, together; he entered into a marriage doomed from the start, and he’s either to stupid (which does not seem to be the case, based on his writing/story-telling ability) or afraid and embarrassed to see what’s happening in his life and the lives of those closest to him. I don’t know how to explain this wilful blindness.

What happens to Mrs. Dalloway (spoilers, probably)

A really smart guy in one of my college English classes – I don’t remember his name, but Columbia scholar Ed Mendelson probably does – came up with the novel idea that at the ending Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Clarissa Dalloway dies. It seems an odd interpretation, but going back over the novel there are a # of ominous hints about CD’s ill health and her feeling of exhaustion and depletion. More notably, and more unusual, she seems to disappear from the narrative in the final section, which is to say she disappears from the party that she’s been so invested in managing – a huge success, apparently I part because the Prime Minister makes an appearance. But over the 40 or so pp. that constitute the party, we move – in the moving, fluid “stream of consciousness” into various perspectives – Clarissa’s old friend and lover Peter Walsh, ditto Sally (now a matronly mother of 5 boys), with touches of the old blowhard Hugh with his sinecure job “polishing the royal boots” or some such jab, the aging Parliamentarian and career-stymied husband Richard, plus some new characters such as the woman who stays till the end and is eager to report the goings-on and who-was-there’s to her friend . We also get a visit from the eminent psychiatrist who was unable to prevent Septimus’s suicidal leap and his gruesome death. But where is Clarissa? For some unexplained reason she absents herself from the party and goes into her bedroom where she looks from her window to on older woman across the way getting ready for bed. But is she really across the way, or is the window pane reflecting back to Clarissa her own image – old, and ready to “retire”? That seemed to me exactly the correct interpretation, that is, until we get to the last sentences of the novel and several of her admirers gaze up at the staircase and there is Clarissa. VW ends this novel abruptly and with no fanfare, leaving many readers, I imagine, to think: So what. Is that all there is? Woman gives party? Though I have to say the evidence in the text for Clarissa’s death just doesn’t hold up – but the image of death is at the heart of this novel. It would amount to nothing, or at least to much less, except for the death of Septimus, and what his (mis)treatment says about the culture and its inability to recognize and rectify the suffering of others.

The open question the colors every aspect of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

Nearing the end of Virginia Woolf’s fantastic and challenging novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925) I’m thinking of the major characters in the novel and their interceptions and inter-relationships, as each navigates the streets of London over the course of a single bright, sunny day: Clarissa Dalloway, preparing for an evening party at her home, concerned with being perceived as trivial – is playing hostess all her life amounts to?; Peter Walsh, at one time in love with Clarissa, now suddenly turns up in London after a long absence in India announcing he’s there to get legal council and to divorce his wife and marry (presumably) his new crush – his life a wreck and a waste, and would he have been better off had hem married Clarissa; her husband, mostly absent, busy w/ government work of some sort – is he involved with someone else as well? – yet despite his coldness and lack of originality and spark at least doing some good in his government work; Hugh (?), a lightweight who’s drawn to some kind of Buckingham Palace job and called upon to write an elegantly crafted but essentially stupid letter to the Times; most of all: Septimus Smith, suffering from what today we know as PTSD, after seeing close friend killed in the war, begin cared for by his devoted “war bride,” Rezia, but becoming over the course of the day – plagued by visits to 2 doctors, who have completely opposite treatment proposals – sinking ever more deeply into depression, delusion, and suicidal ideation. Of all the characters, he seems to be the only one whose social circle doesn’t intersect w/ Clarissa’s (although maybe that will happen by the end, perhaps through his high-priced physician?). An open question remains: To what extent are the two polar opposite characters – perfect host Mrs. Dalloway and suicidal Spetimus – different poles in Woolf’s own personality (sadly, we cannot read of Septimus’s suicidal thoughts w/out thinking of Woolf’s death), or even two opposite poles in British society of her era:

The strange career of Katheine Dunn

A note on Katherine Dunn’s posthumously published story, The Resident Poet, in last week’s New Yorker: Dunn had a really unusual literary career. Apparently she published two experimental novels in far-from-mainstream press in the 60s or 70s, but she rose to national attention in the 80s with the publication of her novel Geek Love. That novel was known for Dunn’s compassionate portrayal of a troupe of sideshow performers, though of course part of the appeal/success/notoriety of the novel was that it played to the lurid curiousity of many readers. Dunn then disappeared from the publishing world, and she died in 2016. She apparentlyleft a trove of unpublished manuscripts, which is kind of amazing – you’d think many publishers would want to publish her and build on the fame and attention of Geek Love, but, no. I’d encourage anyone interested in Dunn to read the piece on the Nyer online about her archive; apparently one reason she wasn’t more widely published was that she lived in Portland, Oregon – and not in the heart of the literary world (NYC), which is a sad and shameful commentary about the publishing industry. As to her posthumous NYer story, The Resident Poet, I think it’s fair to say that no story about sex has ever been less sexual. The protagonist, a college freshman in what could be Reed College?, sneaks off for weekend w/ one of her professors, the eponymous (though unnamed) poet, and from the get-go their interactions, her observations about his clothing, driving, eating habits, drinking, and sexual performance make him entirely repulsive. He’s a scoundrel and a creep, but she’s no angel, either – why’d she get into this situation? What’s in it for her? Grades, credits, stature? In the end, neither character in this duet is likable or even sympathetic in the least. Sure, the writing is great – and you can’t stop reading it – but you wonder, in the end, why you read it.

How could I possibly have understood Mrs. Dalloway when I read it in college?

Yesterday I started (re)reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and what amazes me the most is that I actually read this novel in college (and then again much later, maybe 30 years ago?). I could not possibly have understood it when I was in college; in fact, I must have read through it quickly, looking only for the essence of the plot – a London woman prepares for a give a dinner party; the first line, in fact, is something about Mrs. D’s buying flowers – and I probably thought, who cares?, what a trivial novel. And looking at it now – I read about 70 pp or roughly the first third of the novel – there is so much in this complex, subtle work, much more than I could possibly have recognized or understood. How could my class – it was a course in the “modern” British novel, lectures by a famous scholar, the actual teaching done by grad students – have understood this book? We were young – and we were all guys. I am certain that the class discussions never talking about feminism, women’s suffrage and suffering, Lesbian love – all key themes in this book – that a group of 20-year-old guys way back then could possibly recognize (I am pretty sure this was one of only 2 works of fiction by a woman novelist that I read in any course in college, the other being Wuthering Heights). So just based on the first third of the novel we see Clarissa Dalloway’s unhappiness in her marriage (to Richard, some kind of indifferent government minister), her sorrow at the fate of her multiply married and unhappy friend who’d at one time proposed to her (Peter), her memories of her sexual dalliances with her friend Sally, the comfort of her life – wealth, social status – and her sense of the trivialities of her life and her wasted opportunities, the oddness of the skywriting airplane noticed by people across London, her brush against the mentally ill and suicidal Septimus, her difficult relationship w/ servants, the near invisibility of her daughter – so much; it’s a feminist novel of course, though w/out polemics or didactics, but also a personal tragedy and a portrait of a society still wracked by the first World War, and w/ smoldering class resentments that just lightly brush up against the lives of the protected class.

The importance and signficance of Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys

Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel, The Nickel Boys, just anointed with a Pulitzer Prize (his 2^nd!), is a terrific and sorrowful document about the mistreatment of young men/boys by the criminal justice system, which in many states – the setting of this novel is Florida but the source material, which CW cites in the epilogue, comes from several (mostly Southern) states – considered the youths entrusted to their care to be not only worthless and dispensable but, worse, as opportunities to play out their sadistic and homosexual behaviors and their abject racism (most though not all of the mistretment came down upon the black boys) and to plunder through a system of corruption that was sidely known and about which the so-called authorities and overs-seers turned a blind eye. Whitehead’s novel focuses on one fiction institution, the Nickel training school, but it’s closely modeled on a real Florida institution; the horrors of that place have been written about by investigative reporters and by researchers at a Florida university. CW’s accomplishment is to make these stories into a narrative by focusing on a small cast of abused boys, notably Elwood, one of the most intelligent of the young men whose life was disrupted by a ridiculous frame-up arrest for which he had no competent legal defense. I have to say, though, that despite the good intentions and vital mission of this novel, CW doesn’t develop any of the characters to a full extent and he resorts to a weird narrative trick, which I won’t reveal, in the final section, which I think does little to advance the story. Painful as it may be to read, however, this novel helps us see the horrors of the past and makes us wonder to what extent they remain unmitigated and unexposed today.  

The sorrowful account of the juvenile "justice" system in The Nickel Boys

Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel, The Nickel Boys, is a terrifying and sorrowful account about the system of juvenile “justice” in Floriday in the early 20^th century under which the unwanted and unruly youth, sometimes those accused/convicted of petty crimes though just as often boys and young men in state “care” w/ nowhere else to go, were sent to the Nickel school, basically a work farm to house, punish, and exploit the young men. The school, like all others in Florida in that era, was strictly segregated, with the black “boys” getting far worse conditions, treatment, and opportunities – though the entire school was exploited and pillaged in return for various political favors and kickbacks. The novel – I’m about half-way through – focuses on on young man, Ellwood, convicted of car theft (he’d hitched a ride and the driver turned out to be driving a hot car) and sent off to Nickel without a thought for his well-being; he’s highly intelligent and had plans to take college courses during his senior year of h.s.; sent to Nickel, where he is abused and mistreated (no worse than any of the others, however), his hopes are dashed, and we follow him through his torment and evolution. The novel has the usual front-of-the-book disclaimer that this is a work of fiction, etc., but it’s obvious that it’s a near-documentary; apparently there is much about the “real” Nickel and about Elwood online, which I will look at after I finish reading this novel, which has just been honored w/ a Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Why I've stopped reading White Noise

I read further yesterday in Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) but have reached the end of my patience. As noted yesterday, the 2^nd section of the book, in which the narrator (Jack) and his family are evacuated from their home and go through treacherous drive in a snowstorm to escape from a deadly toxic cloud, is a powerful and a weirdly prescient stretch of writing. But then in part 3, the toxic spill behind them (and 9 days of living in an emergency shelter dispatched in one sentence) , DeLillo’s back to his old bag of tricks and the novel veers off course: lots of eccentric dialog, fun to read up to a point but what’s the point. The point is that Jack’s wife, Babette, has secretly been taking off-the-grid, unapproved medication called Dylar. Jack goes to unusual lengths – enlisting the help of a scientist who’s a colleague in his college – to find out what Dylar does. At last, Babette begins to explain everything to him. She has, she tells him, developed a mordant fear of death; she saw in a supermarket tabloid an ad for willing participants in a medical trial of a drug to alleviate this condition. She’s been taking the drug for years, and as part of her “treatment” has for years been engaged in a sexual tryst w/ the doctor leading the experiment. Nothing, nothing about this makes any sense on a literal level; no woman in her right mind – no woman like this shrewd and hyperintelligent Babette – would engage in such harmful and ludicrous behavior, and no husband as vigilant and faithful as Jack would miss the signs. I could accept all this is there were a point to it, but so far as I can see it’s just more vamping and hyperventialting about an all-pervasive dread that permeates life in the late 20^th century – today as well in some respects, but at this point I’ve just lost patience w/ this novel, which has so many excellent passages but which seems to me to have no shape or direction. DeLillo has his passtionate devotees, but I find that the characters, with their dark, sometimes idiosyncratic world view, obstruct the plot rather than ground and advance it.

Why DeLillo's White Noise feels strangely contemporary and prophetic

I’m glad that I stayed a little longer w/ Don DeLillo’s break-out novel, White Noise (1985); yesterday I read part 2 (of 3 – incorrect in yesterday’s post, on which I said there were 2 parts to the novel). Part 2, unlike the others, is a single long (40 or so pp) chapter/section, and it’s the heart of the novel and the part that stays in one’s mind and memory (mine, anyway) and that drew attention and praise for the work. This section begins as the oldest son in this weirdly dysfunctional family, Heinrich, is perched on the roof outside the attic dormer, in a snowstorm, observing through binoculars the gathering of emergency vehicles, choppers, floodlights as what we soon learn to be an accident involving a train tanker loaded with insecticide, leading to an “airborne toxic event.” As the poison cloud builds and spreads, parts of the city are evacuated and the family (Gladney?, can’t remember and patronym) takes off – 6 of them – in the family car – and embark on a night of terrifying delays and car crashes, nightmore like confusion and fear, and the discomfort of all evacuees and refugees, culminating in a frightful containment in an abandoned Boy Scout camp. This section reads vey well on its own, and I don’t know why DeLillo spent so much time developing the eccentric characters in this family in the first 100 pp or so of the novel; they’re in essence unlikable and, in fact, not credible – nothing about them seems like a real family - though DD’s great use of quirky dialogue and his academic satire provides many laughs. The second section, though – the “airborne toxic event” – while it’s quite inaccurate in its account of how such an event is covered by the media and how the emergency crews respond (for example, they don’t set up emergency shelters literarlly w/in minutes; and the news media do not boradcast live from the accident and present reports replete with detailed technical info about the contaminent – these things take days, and are limited to a few breif news conferences at least at first) – is eerily prophetic, a year or so before Chernobyl and accurately and acutely provides the sense of fear and dread that can permeate a community in time of disaster or catastrophe. Though the toxic spill differs in many ways from our current health crisis, the fear of disruption and of the unknown, the struggle for survival at an cost and risk, feels eerily contemporary as well. <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-fareast-language:JA;}size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;}

Taking a while to get the plot going in White Noise

At this point - finished the first (of two) parts of Don DeLillo's novel White Noise (1985) - I'm pretty much just exasperated. As noted in previous post, DD has his devotees and has been mentioned and touted as a possible Nobel Prize honoree, but I'm finding this novel, which was clearly his break-out though not his most ambitious work (that would be the very long and sometimes inscrutable Underworld) to be a puzzle. On the one hand, it's obvious in the first section that DD is an excellent satirist - who can forget his conception of a small liberal-arts college (unnamed and to me unidentifiable - DD is one of the few writers who so far as I can tell never did an academic stint) with a Department of Hitler Studies? - and some fantastic stretches of dialog; he's also a fine creator of aphorism and at times can do a terrifically powerful description of an action or event, such as the people disembarking from an airplane that lost all its power in mid-flight, people who looked so to speak into the jaws of death. All that said, no matter how appealing or unusual his writing is on any given page or in any given chapter, ultimately, what's the point? 100 pages in, I don't have any feeling for any of the characters and no plot has been set in motion; what we have is a set of self-centered eccentrics (not exactly realistic characters, to put it mildly) and a looming sense of dread; it's as if DD was vamping for cover until he could get his plot in motion in part 2 of the novel. I will read further - I remember from my previous reading of the novel some 35 years ago (gulp!) that there is a natural (of man-made) disaster at some point and the characters are forced to flee for safety and they encounter various obstacles along the way; DD was prophetic about environmental catastrophe but less so about the progress of technology; it's amusing to see in this novel the numerous swipes at families focused on the "TV set" - how quaint, and off the mark.

Should Don DeLillo win a Nobel Prize?

Over the past few years there have been some murmurs hinting or hoping that Don DeLillo will be or should be the next U.S. writer to win a Nobel Prize for literature - perhaps as a make-up for bypassing both Updike and Roth! DD is +80 years old, so his time may be not that long. My guess is that Louise Erdrich will be the next from the U.S. - you heard it here first - but I did want to check on DD's status, so as part of my (re)reading stay-at-home project I'm re-reading his 1985 novel, White Noise, pretty much his break-through work; it received strong reviews, won a couple of prizes, and moved DD to or near to the epicenter of contemporary American writing. How's it hold up? In some ways, pretty well. I'm only about 1/3 through reading the novel, but from the start today's readers will note DD's prescience in anticipating a time of climate change and environmental disasters. The firs section of then novel focuses on a college professor, Jack (the narrator) and his blended family (4 kids by two different marriages; both he and his wife, Babette, leave a couple of marriages behind them - details left intentionally vague), and though the outer circumstances of the novel are kind of mundane - lots of academic politics and cross-marital flirtation - an aura of dread permeates the novel. For example, the school the children attend has been shut down because of some detected environmental hazard, and nobody agrees on the cause or source. Likewise, an elderly couple in a nursing home disappear and are located after a few days in a shopping mall, where they have lived in terror and confusion, unobserved. Jack's children, especially his oldest, Heinrich, seem strange and disturbed. DeLillo is excellent at creating a sense of dread and impending doom. He's also great at lists (in Roth's league there) and, to some degree, at dialog: his long passages of dialog are oblique and amusing, though sometimes it's difficult to know who's saying what (he seldom of never uses the standard "said Jack/Murray/Heinrich" to guide readers). Sometimes, though, it feels as if DD is just vamping, and he has a tendency to go after easy targets: Jack is a professor of "Hitler studies" and his friend on the faculty hope to emulate Jack by creating a department of Elvis studies; ha ha, but other than a shot at an easy target - academic politics and pretensions - what's the purpose here? Who would major in Hitler, and what college would enable such a perversion? DeLillo, though, has a lot of fun spinning out these absurdities, and they're often fun to read, but I have to say he's taking his time at getting this novel into gear. We're stuck in First.

Cathers's extraordinary and unusual historical novel set in the Southwest

Today we would call Willa Cathers's Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) a book of "linked stories," as the novel is a series of adventures and encounters experienced by the Jean Latour - from his time as a young man in southern France, his posting as a missionary priest in Ohio (ca 1840) and then Santa Fe, his rise through the church hierarchy to the rank of Archbishop, his retirement and death. It's a work of historical fiction; I'm pretty sure Letour and his lifelong close friend, colleague, and alter ego, Father/Bishop Jean Vaillant are fictional, but many of the incidents, locations, and secondary characters (e.g., Kit Carson) are real and in fact you can visit the sites of many of the events in this novel today, and they are relatively unchanged (e.g., the Santa Fe cathedral, the Acomo pueblo, Canyon de Chelly), but this novel never feels like the product of research and scholarship. The characters are as alive and "rounded" as any in 20th-century literature; they grow and evolve over the course of the novel to the point where, at the end of his life, the final section of the novel, Latour reflects on his life,his successes and failures, and we feel a strange mixture of sympathy and sorrow about his life. Cather vividly portrays the hardships of the life of a missionary priest, particularly in the Southwest with the clash of multiple cultures: A young French Catholic priest sent to establish the Roman Catholic church in a territory rife with violent cultural, historical, and relgious clashes and conflict: American settlers, Mexican/Spanish control (the territory had just been annexed/purchased from Mexico), Native American (tribes that were fighting among themselves, Navajo v Hopi for example). Travel and communication with the home base in Europe was slow, dangerous, sometimes impossible. Yet these priests - each in his own way, and the 2 were opposites in some ways - gave up his entire life to establishing the church on such hostile ground. You have to admire their faith, bravery, and commitment - yet there are points in the novel where we can judge the missionaries harshly, for example when Father Latour helps a young woman who is being kept more or less as a slave for a wealthy family in Santa Fe: he gives her some blankets, but he does nothing to confront the family that is abusing her, as they're too powerful and he fears the hostility of the Protestant community. Should he spend less time planning the building of a cathedral, which will be his memorial, and more helping the poor and oppressed in his community and care? We think about this the whole way through this unusual novel, a novel of the most unlikely heroes and the most extraordinary episodes and anecdotes, many it would seem based on actual accounts of the early days of the Catholic church in North America.