The incredibly sad and misunderstood life of George Apley

John P. Marquand's The Late George Apley, a fictional bio of a Boston Brahmin in which the narrator, a contemporary of the eponymous Apley, tells the life story mostly through surviving documents (letters, a diary, other notes and memoranda) with his interpolated commentary, remains one of the most sorrowful accounts of a man's life - largely because of the disjunction between what the obtuse Willing presents and what we can know and understand about Apley's life. Yesterday read the section covering his Harvard years and his European tour between graduation and law school. the narrator, Willing, tells of A's life at Harvard as a wonderful time when A became popular and engaged in numerous activities and made lifelong friends - but we can see, from the material he quotes, that Apley was constantly hounded by his parents to associate only with the right people, that his parents believe the entire purpose of his Harvard years was to get into the right club, the one his father (and fathers before him) had joined, pushing him not to work too hard - all of which reaches a culmination in Apley's falling in love with a girl from a prosperous but working-class Boston Irish family, a relationship that Apley's parents promptly crush. Willing has no understanding of this at all, and about allhe can do is praise Apley for being a "gentleman" and not "taking advantage of" this by all accounts lovely and intelligent young woman. The family sends Apley on a European tour (w/ aunt and uncle) when he's clearly despondent after graduation, and the sum of his observations, it seems, is to compare everything he sees in Europe w/ Boston - which Willing thinks show Apley's intelligence. The culmination is a little passage Apley wrote, looking up a country road in England, and wishing he could walk up that road and just be alone w/ his own thoughts - perhaps the most poignant and insightful things we've read from Apley so far, and Willing completely misses the point, has no comprehension of Apley's suffering and loneliness.

What's your level of interest in Ferris story in current New Yorker?

Your tolerance for Joshua Ferriss's story in current NYer, The Abandonment, will depend on your levle of interest in millennials behaving like narcissistic and irresponsible brats. Story in brief tells of a 30-something TV star (in some kind of mid-level sitcom it seems) who panics that his wife has abandoned him after she goes out of bagels after a minor spat and doesn't return for several hours. Tearfully, he leaves their (beautiful) Manhattan apartment, desultorily looks for her, then in tears starts heading "south" eventually crossing into Brooklyn and buzzing the intercom of a nice young would-be artist he'd met - 4 days back! - at some kind of fundraiser. She lets him in, they have a meandering conversation, each complaining about his/her life - she wishes she had more time to paint but is consumed with child care, he romanticizing her cluttered apartment as "real life," unlike the sterile, clean life he lives at home. He declares that he loves her, they begin some passionate kissing on the couch - but, ouch, the baby wakes up, her husband - believe it or not - is soon to return, any minute, with kids and dog - so he breaks it off, heads back home, where his wife awaits, snidely asks whom he's fallen for this time, and they resume their married life. Ferris writes really well at times, as evidenced esp by his first novel (less so by his next, which was great at times but didn't hold together well for me), but this story is truly off-putting and not really credible: really? she would fall for him so easily jut because he's on TV? What this material says about Ferris, who knows? Whether he knows people like this or in some way envies the sexual prowess of TV stars (as compared with writers, semi-amateur artists?), who knows. He can do better, and he has done better.

The sly intelligence of Marquand's The Late George Apley

Reading John P. Marquand's seldom-read novel The Late George Apley from circa 1930 - it makes a good bookend w the novel I just finished reading, the likewise forgotten The Rise of Silas Lapham. Both are about the Boston Brahmins, though Lapham is more specifically about the clash between old money and the wealth of the new industrialist class - whereas Apley is about old money entirely. Lapham was written and set in the 1880s; Apley begins with the eponymous Apley's birth in or near that same ear and will apparently follow him through the course of his life. It's a much more sophisticated novel that Lapham, as one would expect, emerging among all the great modern novels of the US and England - so many more narrative tools and ideas were available, at Marquand's fingertips so to speak. The novel is incredibly sly: it's the life story of Apley told by a friend and compatriot, named Willing (hah!), urged on to the task by Apley's adult son after Apley's death. He uses many pieces of Apley's own writing (how he got so many letters that Apley sent is never explained) to tell the tale. At first glance it seems to be encomium to a time and to a caste long vanished, but the beauty and intelligence of this novel is that we gradually realize - more than Willing himself does - that he is skewering the Boston aristocrats by telling their story in their own language and venue. For ex. a lot is made of what a great grammar school (private, on Beacon Hill, or course) Apley attended and of the success of so many of his childhood friends  and it takes a bit of reflection before we realize that, wait a minute, all of these guys got into Harvard even tho some were dolts, how could that be? And the so-called famous among them and great successes were authors of completely ridiculous books probably published by a vanity - none was as smart, successful, or imaginative as he (all men) imagined himself and his cronies to be. Many other similar examples, all subtle - Apley's mother described as a great aesthete and artistic soul, which is fine until Willing quotes a passage of her verse. We can see around the edges of this novel and know far more than the narrator knows (or reveals).

Howells's place in literatue then and now

Evan Connell's intro to the Library of America edition of William Dean Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham niecly delineates the two aspects of WDH's career: among the most popular writers in America at mid-life, in teh 1880s and 90s, say, ranked up there w/ Twain and close friend of Henry James, but in the later years - he lived to about 1920 and continued writing into his 80s it seems - he was completely out of touch and largely forgotten (Connell notes that WDH received an unsolicited invite to take a correspondence course in writing!). In the 19th century, he was looked up to as a realist, interested in ordinary people and their lives, a great fan of Turgenev, often compared w/ Balzac, and looking back you can see that, yes, these were his influences (although Silas Lapham was not exactly about ordinary Bostonians) but you also see that his characters are flat, two-dimensional, easy to see around their edges, never surprising to us nor strikingly human and vulnerable - they are pieces on a board of a plot that he works out, slowly and carefully. As noted in an earlier post, his characters to wrestle w/ moral and ethical dilemmas, which gives the novel its value, but the characters feel like illustrations, examples, types (the ambitious businessman, the old-money blueblood, etc. - the women even less distinct though they often get the best lines!) - not like people. As we moved farther away from the word in which WDH lived, his fiction seems lost in its era, unlike Twain and James, both eminently readable a century later. And in fact that's what happened - literature moved so rapidly away from WDH and his placid style: he seems a thousand years away from the American writers who emerged at the end of his life or just after: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, to name just the major triumvirate: they're plots so much more inventive and ambitious, their characters so much more fully delineated, their language so advanced. At the end, Howells is a little dull and probably always was, even to the well-mannered readers of his day.

Why Howells earned a spot in Library of America

I'll give William Dean Howells props for this - he's a serious writer interested in ideas and, in particular, with characters who face moral or ethical dilemmas that they must resolve. The Rise of Silas Lapham, while stylistically a mess, is still in print (though seldom read) because it's not just a "story," a lot of gossip about a lot of rich characters who are quirky or cynical or naive, to varying degrees, in other words, a typical popular novel of its time (and ours, to a degree). It's about characters in crisis: two crises, in fact. First, the personal-romantic story line: daughter Penelope is in love with Tom Corey, whom the whole family believed to be in love w/ P's sister, Irene. What should she do? Should she give up her love to preserve her relationship w/ Irene? This dilemma consumes many chapters and involves all of the member of the Lapham family. Second crisis, the social-economic: Lapham desperately needs $ and has an opportunity to sell some property to a group of English businessmen who are clearly acting as a front for a group of investors back in England - they will pay a ridiculously high price for the property (taking a percentage as their earnings), and then the property will prove to be almost worthless, bilking the investors. Lapham realizes that there are many in the consortium, so the loss will be spread out, and that all of the members are wealthy and can afford to take the loss - and he needs the $. But should he get the $ through trickery and deceipt? The laws of capitalism would say: of course. But what should be his course? It's issues like these, which Howells grapples with, via his characters, that raise this novel up a notch and earned it a spot in the Library of America.

If ever a writer needed a Maxwell Perkins it was Howells

Inevitably, the Rise of Silas Lapham becomes the fall of Silas Lapham, as any half-awake reader has known for 200 pages - he makes some risky investments, goes in against his better judgement with his one-time antagonist - at the urging of his wife, to make good the time when he cut his former partner out of the business - and loses a lot of money in the process, is left with a few mills alongside a rr, knows he can probably sell them at a profit but only if he hides what he's discovered about the rr plans to eliminate the line (or something like that), which he refuses to do - and the world of finance is cruel (in those days no one was too big to fail, it seems) and he has to cut back and even stop construction on the mansion he's building on Beacon St., the symbol of his success. So what will this mean - in particular, for the potential link by marriage to the old $ Corey family? The novel teeters between a Balzac-Zola like expose of class and finance in the Industrial Age and a Lifetime romance - wold money guy falls for the ugly duckling sister (rather than the beauty) in the new $ family - can cash make up for lack of cash? I'm predicting at this point that the Lapham fortune gets restored - possibly through the marital alliance? or a sudden rise in the price of mills? - and that Tom Corey's friend from out west suddenly shows up in Boston and falls for the beautiful sister, Irene, and all is well. Or am I selling William Dean Howells short? I know he can be a serious writer - didn't he co-author a novel w/ Twain that was clumsy as literature but a dark and sensational view of American politics? - so maybe he'll surprise me. Much that's good here - and it's not every 19th-century novel(ist) that can keep my attention right through to the end - but if ever a writer needed a Maxwell Perkins it was Howells - at half thelength this would have been twice the book.

One reason why William Dean Howells is largely forgotten

Strangely, William Dean Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham becomes, following the dinner party at which Lapham disgraces himself by turning into a voluble drunk, more of a Lifetime movie than an expose of social class, American capitalism, and the clash of old v new money. After the dinner party, Tom Corey finally and at last tells Lapham's older daughter, Penelope, that he loves her; she's overwhelmed, obviously loves him too, but knows that her sister and her entire family had thought he was interested in younger sister, the beautiful Irene. She orders him out, says she never wants to see him again - but we know the love each other, and so? Next morning after a sleepless night she tells her mother all, and then the Lapham seniors face the difficult decision of what to tell Irene. After much trepidation, dialog, and even some counseling with a minister whom they slightly know, they decide it's best to break one heart rather than three - and mother tells Irene. All this would be much, much more interesting if, a, we hadn't known so much more than any of the rather unperceptive characters all along, and, b, if WDH could write with an degree of economy. He repeats himself - repeatedly! As if he was being paid by the word (maybe he was). I love long, complex, highly developed dialog, esp if it advances the plot (though not necessarily) but his dialog just covers the same ground over and over - the main reason, I think, that he is largely forgotten and his peers - Twain, James - are still read widely, at least among English majors.