Elliot's Reading - November 2021: Middlemarch, The Netanyahus,Philip Roth, McPherson, Updike

 Elliot’s Reading - November 2021

Book6 (of 8) in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, The Widow and the Wife, focuses, obviously, on 2 of the marriages/families/couples in the novel, the “widow” being Dorothea, the driving force of the entire novel, who has been widowed by the death of her frail, elderly, domineering, and totally mismatched husband, Casaubon, and humiliated by the nasty codicil added to his will, ensuring that Dorothea will forfeit her inheritance should be marry Ladislaw (C’s great nephew?) - and of course the 2 are madly in love w/ each other but unable to express or even acknowledge this love, at least on her part. At the end of the section, Ladislaw is headed off for London where he hopes to study law and advance his career - a great scene at the end of the section shows Dorothea in a coach passing Ladislaw, walking along on the side of the road. The “wife” is evidently Rosamond Lidgate, nee Darcy, who alongside her husband, the young and rightminded but drive by class status physician, have worked themselves into debt - for which she seems to blame her husband though they are equally to blame. There seems no way out of their troubles; even an appeal to her once-wealthy father is in vain as he expects to go bankrupt himself. A terrific scene in the novel involves the encroachment of the railroads across the rural landscape, made manifest in a fight between the farmers and the rr workers, a fight broken up by Fred Darcy - who laments Garth, father of his beloved Mary Garth, that he has wasted time in studying to be a minister and he wants to work with Garth on land development - a noble cause - then but not today (this conflict echoes today w/ anti-fracking movements and other environmental causes. 

Excellent story in current New Yorker by writer David Means, about whom I know nothing, call The Depletion Prompts, which has all the markings of being a post-modern experimental daunting piece of fiction - the entire mid-length story consist of a series of “prompts” the writer might have noted down to himself as points of access to a story he wants to tell about, well, his sister and family tragedy and bullying of youth and suffering of mother and other salient points - and altogether, rather amazingly, these prompts constitute the story and by the very nature of their being an author’s struggle to write of his (imagined?) life they have all the more poignancy and credibility. This isn’t a technique that could or should be widely adapted as a technique - could easily become too mannered, for example - but as a one-off it’s quite astonishing and exceptional. BTW, providing prompts to a class cab be a great way to get a small group of writers going off in areas unexpected and unexplored; former NYT writer Rick Bragg, visiting my old newspaper for a workshop, provided the excellent starting prompt for the group: In my home town, … - take it from there! 

Yes, he’s smarter than Lerner, smarter than Franzen, even smarter than Powers, but does Joshua Cohen have any idea how to build a plot, to writer a novel? Reading The Netanyahus based on cover-story rave review on NYTBR, but aside from being blown away by how much arcana JC can warp into his story and how easily he seems to bear the weight of his scholarship/research, I’ve found nothing to appeal to me about this novel that, in the first 60 pp or so, just summarizes the character of Netanyahu senior, apparently a leading historian. There are a few scenes of the narrator, a junior prof at a university that’s much like Cornell, at home w/ wife and obstreperous daughter, but there nothing at stake here (second rate Rothiana). I admire the chutzpah of the title, which is almost designed to not appeal to an American readership. Ah, maybe it’s just me; I mean him no ill will, but will probably bow out early. 

Carson McCullers did a great job setting up a scene and a conflict in her short story The Jockey - during Race Week in Saratoga - which still goes on - an angered jockey approaches a group at dinner - another jockey, a gambler, a “rich man” - they’re obviously up to no good, and he threatens them regarding a race-course injury to his best friend - he’s menacing and especially frightening because he’s so small - yet fierce - all good - but in the end not much happens beyond the threat - the jockey calls the “libertines” (!?) and spits out part of his drink and that’s all. That’s all? It’s as if she didn’t quite know where to go with this compelling set-up. 

Another good New Yorker story appears this eek: Jamil Jan Kochai’s The Haunting of Hajji Hotak. I don’t know anything about the author; seems from the story that he may be of Aghani descent. The story, in brief, is told from the strange POV of an intelligence officer assigned to secretly monitor the lives of a family of Afghani refugees living in Southern California and perhaps maintaining some ties with militant groups. The narrator has access to round-the-clock recordings from bugs planted in Hotak household - all quite probable, and especially remarkable when you think that the eavesdropping narrator doesn’t differ from the omniscient   narrator of much, most?, contemporary fiction. The story builds to an intriguing, mysterious twist, so it’s worth reading to the end. 

As to Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus: I’m over and out. Lots to admire in this ambitious book, notably the range of knowledge and info JC summons to write about key figures in the history of Israel - but these long segments about Netanyahu sr. just aren’t that interesting at least to me and they fail to ignite the plot: a 20-page letter of recommendation? Not likely. The life of this novel comes, for me, mostly in the family scenes, including two long Rothian scenes of squabbles with visiting parents/in-laws - but that’s not enough to keep my attention alert through the long treks through the historical narrative segments. 

Catching up a bit: Have finished the 800+-page brick of a bio, Blake Bailey’s Philip Roth, and have been throughout impressed by Bailey’s work - it’s really like a novel covering the course over a lifetime of development and achievement of one of America’s greatest writers; most important it’s not a takedown, not a cynical note therein - it’s an appreciation and recognition: 31 novels, thousands of unpublished mss and drafts (some day in the future to be read), enormous network of communication to other writers and to friends and lovers. I was especially struck by how PR’s work matured - the earliest very readable and sometimes funny but often way over the top, ungrounded, the then after a rough period we move to the 2nd half of his career and his greatest works - Shylock, Counterlife, The Facts, American Pastoral, Human Stain, Sabbath’s Theater, and some others - then a few dreadful late-life mistakes and the surprising recovery to the final great work, Nemesis. What about Roth and women? He’s often been pilloried as a misogynist, but reading this bio we sense that he had a great many women friends and his animus was aimed at his two horrible spouses - to the question is, why? Why would a guy so smart, so sexually experienced, enter into these dreadful trysts? Shows that even the wisest and most talented can be blindsided, by sex or fantasy or something. Still, who isn’t make uncomfortable by his many, many affairs - often w/ married women - and his seduction of much younger women, often aspiring writers, often no doubt drawn to him as a great “career move.” Lots of log-rolling in this book as well: We see again and again how prizes and grants are a warded to friends and cronies. Above all, PR was a great son and brother - pace those who misread Portnoy - and a generous man to the extreme, not only with financial support to many friends (and their children) and to old buddies facing hard times in late life but in particular to the city of Newark, which now holds many Roth materials in the public library. What other great writer has ever done that? 

Finished reading a James Alan McPherson story A Solo Song: For Doc - a great and at times hilarious, and often sad, story about the Black men who worked as waiters on the cross-country express trains, a dying enterprise, or even a dead one, as these stories were written (the ‘60s). Some of the dialog is great, as in (from my memory) one of the waiters consoling an Doc, the “waiter’s waiter” (which is funny in itself!) as he’s being pushed out of the job and has no other life: Did you try women? I hate women. How about fishing? 

Yiyun Li’s story Hello, Goodbye in current New Yorker is admirable in her summary of the lives of two women friends across a 20 or so year span, each of them on the shoals of a terrible marriage, though their fates are dissimilar: One married to a dashing boor and sadist, the other to a gentle but totally boring man. Yes, we get the Tolstoy reference (All happy families…) - but the story does seem a bit sketched out, not sure why exactly. I’m probably not the ideal reader - though I do enjoy most of these course-of-a-lifetime stories - so much better than the “snapshot” stories with their open and seemingly profound endings. 

I’ve been reading (100+ pages in, about 25%) Adam Begley’s biography Updike, and it makes an intriguing contrast with the 800-page Bailey bio of Roth, which is a contrast both in the style and the substance (or the subject). Bailey starts off w/ an advantage: Roth was extremely attentive to how he would be viewed by posterity and took great pains to work with Bailey and to provide him with an enormous cache of unpublished material and private correspondence - and he encouraged as many of his friends, lovers, and acquaintances to participate in full (exception being ex-wife Claire Bloom). As for as I can see so far in Begley’s Updike, there is minimal input from those who knew Updike, only a few author interviews w/ Updike, very little sense that Updike cared about let alone participated in this project. both Updike and Roth seemed to have saved every scrap of material, but Begley focuses more on the published material than the obscurities and variants. And that makes sense, know what we do of the 2 authors (wary comrades if not exactly friends): Roth’s life was flamboyant, largely public, engaged (esp with his Eastern Europe efforts), and highly sexual (many, many encounters and liaisons all detailed); Updike was always the “gentleman,” calm, reserved, even withdrawn, his sharp wit and sense of humor more like a shield than (as in Roth’s case) a spear. I never met Roth, but I can vouch for this re Updike, as we were one evening side-by-side stablemates at a post-reading dinner. In short, the Roth bio is more about the man and the Updike bio more about the books - it’s much more of a work of literary criticism, whereas Bailey’s work can be criticized by at least some readers as too removed from the writing, rarely judgmental or probing about his many novels and stories - whereas Begley can perhaps be criticized for failure to probe too deeply into JU’s personal life (we learn so little about his first wife in the first 100 pages, for example) Each biographer works w/ what he’s got - and that’s plenty, esp as both JU and PR draw heavily and extensively on their life experience for many (not all) of their major works. 

Didn’t love the Gish Jen story, Detective Dog, in current NYer, largely because the first half was extremely difficult to follow w/ many characters introduced so quickly and so generically that it was hard to discern the plot; story picks up in 2nd half with the mother, in answering a series of questions from her younger son, fleshed out a dramatic story about the child’s birth and background: This all seemed like good summary of the plot of a novel (or a screenplay) rather than short-fiction material, but there it is. 

Elisa Shua Dusapin's debut novel, Winter in Sockcho (2016, tr. 2020) has won some attention some awards including National Book Award, lit in tro. tr Aneesa Abbas Higgins, from the Korean) but I guess I am not the right reader for this very short book, barely a novel - congratulations to anyone finishing/publishing his/her/their first novel, but really what’s happening in this one other than a few snapshots of contemporary life in South Korea (at the border with NK, in fact) and much mention of exotica concerning Korean food and diet? Transpose this novel, to, say, Oklahoma City, and it would get no notice or attention, I believe. The main problem - and I didn’t quite finish reading the work, so pardon me - is that nothing happens. The story line such as it is: A Korean woman working house at the front office a small hotel becomes friendly with one of the guests, a cartoon artist from France. They go on a few excursions, including highly controlled tour of NK - but no encounter leads to anything. I won’t belabor this point any longer, but have to note that the most notable feature of the writing is a scorn for complete sentences - which makes the novel feel static and flat, kind of like a gigantic text message. I’m sorry, I have some sympathy for all debut novelists, but ESD doesn’t really need my sympathy or support; she has obviously found her readership, and I step aside and recognize that not all books are for all readers. 

I liked a lot of things about Greg Jackson’s story in current New Yorker, The Hollow, in particular how he sketches in and then develops an unusual character, in this case a young man who is a football player in college, named Jonah Valente but who also has  a# of monikers, who give up football to pursue a passion and a career as an artist, in thrall to Van Gogh and Picasso. We don’t understand much about this character at first - and we learn of him, in fact of the whole story, from a distant first-person narrator - he seems to be one of the crowd of students but has no distinct personality of definition of his own - and we follow this student and one of his friends into the post-college years, where Jonah seems to lose his bearings and his friend, after initial marital and career troubles, seems to have found solid ground. In other words, there’s a lot packed into this story, which I admire, but it does feel like a novel waiting to be born, as we end up not with a bang but a whimper and still wondering about Jonah and his fate. That may be good - too many stories just end like a wisp of smoke - but I felt at the end as if this was a pretty long piece that didn’t bring me anywhere, not anywhere near a conclusion at least. Still, a nice accomplishment and a young writer worth watching. 

Elliot's Reading - October 2021

 Elliot's Reading Notes - October 2021

Thomas McGuane, in case you haven’t noticed, has become the #1 Chronicler of life in the contemporary American West, where the old-timers and many-generationed have either been boughtout and pushed to the wayside or have figured out how to make a buck through real estate and guest services. His story in the current New Yorker, Not Here You Don’t [?], touches on this theme so familiar now from McGuane and adds a twist, as the focal character is from an old NW family and has come back to visit the site of the homestead where he was raised - now of course part of a huge tract of land - vacation? resettlement? - of one of the new moguls - finance? film? entertainment? - who has menacingly posted numerous “No Trespassing” signs; the narrator figures these don’t apply to him, because of the provenance of the land, and risks, provokes, a confrontation w/ the land-owner, very nasty and menacing guy of course. Narrator gets his revenge in a way I won’t divulge, but makes a satisfying end to the quite short story - hewing, as we expect from McGuane, toward traditional form, beginning middle end - what a pleasant surprise. 

I’ve reached the midpoint in Blake Bailey’s enormous Philip Roth: The Biography with Roth on the verge of meeting/marrying Claire Bloom, a stage in his life post-Portnoy and the broadly comic series of novels (The Breast, Our Gang, e.g.), none of which bolstered his reputation and pre- the American trilogy and the quasi-autobiographical material and the journeys to Israel that marked his later career and that truly established him as a great American novelist, not just a “comic” novelist or a “Jewish” novelist. A few thoughts and midpoint:

Roth had a lot of friends, most of them in the literary world

Roth had a lot of sex with a lot of women, including some prostitutes and including on horrible marriage and at  least 2 up to this point long-term relationships that Roth unceremoniously ended

Roth was extremely devoted to his writing, very prolific, about 30 novels by my quick count

Roth was brave and devoted in his commitment to help writers living in an oppressive society, esp Eastern Europe

Roth drew on his own life for material - not quite the auto-fiction that we know of today, but many thinly disguised friends, enemies, and acquaintances populate his novels

Roth bravely faced criticism throughout his career, including charges of anti-Semitism and pornographic exploitation

Roth was strangely afraid of fatherhood and of long-term commitments to women

Roth was crude and anti-feminist in his treatment of many of his female characters, and perhaps of many of the women in his life as well

Roth was a really good teacher of literature and writing, though he left off most of his teaching after becoming wealthy via the success of Portnoy

Roth was a prodigy, first winer of the NBA for his debut book, a story collection no less (a few have followed that cause since Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, including Jhumpa Lahiri and, I think, McPherson?)=Despite all the speculation, Roth was a devoted son and enjoyed an excellent relationship with his parents and, maybe to a lesser extent, with his brother

By all accounts, Roth was a hilarious dinner-table guest and a superb mimic

Oddly enough, Roth seems to have gotten along well with children

Roth’s popularity was established early but his greatness as a writer was recognized only in late career

Roth should have won a Nobel Prize, ditto John Updike 

Bailey is a painstaking and thorough biographer who gives us both an unvarnished look at Roth’s public and private life and a clear sense of his excellence as a writer

Woe to everyone who becomes famous

Some books that I respect and that might be great for some readers but were not for me, at least not right now: first, “Cousin” Sallie Rooney’s  novel Beautiful World, Where Are You. The enormous popularity and success that she’s enjoying worldwide kind of puzzles me. Of course I respect and probably concur with most of her political ideas, expressed in various profiles in the press. But, seriously, what happens in this novel? First of all, we realize right off that her characters spend an incredible amount of their time on line or checking their messages, and, aside from its being somewhat of primer as to which apps and feeds are “hot” today, we do get the point that they relate to their world electronically. Take your eyes off the screen and look around you! But, wait, interspersed are a series of back-and-forth emails between to women friends - one of whom is a suddenly successful author who must to a degree be SR’s avatar? - and they write emails that read like chapters in a 19th-century novel. Who writes or reads any such emails? SR is the opposite of a best-selling author, in that she declines to “put the bone in the throat,” to so speak; this particular novel amounts, at least at the mid-point, to a lot of gnashing of teeth and pondering who’s in love with whom and so forth, without any obvious drama or crisis to kick the plot into motion, into action. It’s just not for me.

And second novel I couldn’t finish: Atticus Lish’s The War for Gloria. I loved his debut novel, Preparation for the Next Life, and this, his second, is similar in many ways: a highly dramatic plot centering on working-class characters in urban settings (the first in Queens, this section in Quincy, Mass.), good people struggling against all odds to stay alive and to love one another. But Lish’s 2nd novel is almost too good, and over the firs 100 or so pages it really saddened and upset me more than I could handle, or more than I wanted to handle - esp. the struggle of the eponymous Gloria who is diagnosed w/ ALS. I completely agree with the Andre Dubus III (like Lish, a successful writer son of a renowned literary figure) review in the NYTimes; Lish is a great talent and this is probably a great book, but too disturbing for me right now. 

Tove Ditlevsen’s story in current New Yorker - The Umbrella - written I’m not sure when: TD died own 1976 and her Copenhagen Trilogy was released in English earlier this year. There are actually two elements to this story. In part it’s the story of a young woman with poor self-image and delicate feelings who marries probably the first guy to show interest in her, a working-class man, and it’s obvious from the start that they’re mismatched and that the marriage will founder or worse, which in fact it does, leading to a violent outburst and an awkward and not promising reconciliation. That’s enough material for a great story of a sorrowful life and opportunities lost. Yet what about that umbrella? That’s the other aspect of the story, in which the woman yearns for only one gift, a bright yellow umbrella (such as she saw from her window in childhood, worn by a dashing and beautiful neighbor); this aspect of the story is heavy-handed and doesn’t work at all - a terrible example of the objective correlative. Does she really want an umbrella, or is it love, or perhaps a child, that she yearns for? Whatever it may be that she yearns for, the story would be much stronger without this forced “symbol” of her distress and emptiness and need for protection. 

Elliot's Reading week of 9-26-21 - Calligarich

Gianfranco Calligarich’s novel Last Summer in the City is a curiosity that may inspire or may discourage would-be authors; he wrote the work in the early 70s, his first novel, and sent to all of the publishers in Italy and was roundly rejected but one prominent reader gave it an extra push and it was thus published, 1973, to poor reviews and obscurity; now, for some reason, rediscovered in Italy and republished and it’s his first novel - out of many - to be translated into English. Is it any good? Yes, in many ways - especially for its capturing the mood of a young man just breaking from his home and family and trying to establish himself in Rome but waylaid by serious drinking, profligate spending, and, most important, by a tempestuous relationship w/ a beautiful and deeply troubled young woman. Some of passages are beautiful, especially the descriptions of Rome and environs in various lights - not surprising in that GC or at least GC’s narrator, Leo, is enamored of Proust. What’s troubling about this work, however, is the complete indifference of the characters and their fates, the complete waste of time and money, the contempt toward any serious kind of work or creative endeavors, the sense that the world owes him (and her) a living - culminating in a tremendously indulgent shopping spree and a surprising, at least to me, conclusion. It’s by no means a great novel, but it’s short and perhaps a harbinger for better works from this author when more established in his career and in his life. 

Elliot's Reading - Week of 9-5-21: Lawrence short stories

 Elliot’s Reading Week of 9-5-21

D.H. Lawrence wrote some great works (Sons and Lovers, Women in Love) and some mediocre works in just about every genre, which is to say: He wrote a lot. The short story seems like a less suitable milieu for him, as he was not known for his subtlety and concision. The 3 stories collected in the RV Cassill short fiction anthology represent a range of DHL’s work in the from; of the 3, The Horse Dealer’s Daughter is the best in my opinion: opening with an adult family, 3 brothers and a sister, in the wake of the death of the horse dealer/father who leaves them with no inheritance; the brothers joyfully more on as the sister remains in near-ruined farmhouse - and once the coast is clear, so to speak, she tries to drown herself in a mud-choked pond - and is rescued by the local vet., a friend of her brothers’, who finds himself overwhelmed by love for this unfortunate sister. The story’s worth reading for, if nothing else, the truly Lawrentian take on the passions that overtake the two, shocking them both with their suddenness and intensity. @nd story, Tickets, Please, is a pre-Feminist take on a group of women who team up to teach a brutal lesson to the man who’s been harassing them on the job - makes you want to stand and cheer for them, but as a story if feels kind of slight. 3rd story, The Rocking-Horse Winner, is DHL at his weakest, contemptuous of his characters, heavy-handed in his symbolism, and preposterous even as a moral fable. Kafka, about whom I posted recently, can get us to believe in almost any bizarre premise: A man turned into an insect? Let’s see how this plays out. DHL as always more of a moralist, a preacher, and how can we for a moment believe that this young child receives visions that enable him to foretell the fortunes of race horses? (There was a great episode of 77 Sunset Strip a million years ago about the attempt to call 6 out of 8 in an upcoming race event.) 

Elliot’s Reading Week of 8-22-21: Kafka's greatest short works

 Elliot’s Reading Week of 8-22-21: Kafka's greatest short works 

Cassill’s short fiction anthology wisely includes two of Franz Kafka’s greatest short works, The Hunger Artist and The Metamorphosis. Everyone knows the premise of Metamorphosis, and it’s Kafka at his weirdest and most uncanny best: One morning a young sales rep, Gregor Sama, wakens and recognizes that he’s been transformed overnight into a beetle of some sort, and the Kafka takes it from there. As is typical of his work, it’s a premise that is carried out as if it were in a realistic narrative; in fact, it is realistic, except for the absurdity of the central premise. Reading the story inevitably gives one the creeps; it’s repulsive and sorrowful, as the Samsa family tries to accommodate itself to this great and humiliating family circumstance. But what does it all mean? Kafka never writes proscriptively or didactically; but there are some hints. Perhaps Kafka recognizes himself in the mode of the “insect,” infesting his family dynamics with his oddity (the experimental writer), struggling against the murderous will of his father. Perhaps he posits that all families live with secret, repulsive histories. Or perhaps he is looking at how society treats the outcasts, the nonconformists, those with illness and disability. The Hunger Artists is a much shorter piece, but similar in structure: From the first sentence establishing a bizarre, almost inhuman premise and letting the story proceed from this “what if” to its dire conclusion. The terrific opening of this piece posits that at one time a great attraction, much like traveling circus acts or musical performers, were the hunger artists, who starved themselves almost to death while dwelling in a cage in the public square; apparently people would pay an admission price to watch the “artists” starve himself. Aside from, once again the uncanny aspect, leavened by a touch of dark humor (the lengths to which officials would go to ensure that the “artists” didn’t cheat on his starvation diet) and the odd historicity of the premise - the first sentence informs us that the hunger-artist fad is passe - it’s hard not to think of the hunger artist, metaphorically, as the “artist” ahead of or even behind his or her times - a misfit, misunderstood, engaged in his/her lonely pursuit, unrecognized, spurned perhaps by family or friends - in other words: Is this how Kafka viewed himself and his work? 

Elliot's Reading Week of 8-8-21: Short stories by Hemingway, Shirley Jackson, Joyce

 Elliot’s Reading - Week of 8-8-21

R.V. Cassill chose only one Ernest Hemingway story for his Norton Anthology of Short Stores - not sure why, as EH had, with the possible exception of Joyce, the greatest influence on American short fiction in the 20th century. That said, his selection, the much-anthologized Hills Like White Elephants, aptly shows EH’s enigmatic, terse prose style at its best. The story, in 3 or 4 pp., shows us about an hour in life of an American couple waiting for a train at a remote depot in Spain - an express bound for Madrid. The first half of the story, which EH tells mostly in dialog, seems mundane and uneventful, except that these two consume an enormous about of alcohol before boarding the train; the wife makes a observation that the hills in the distance look like white elephants, the husband notes that he’s never seen white elephants, no why should you?, his wife says. This becomes a mantra for them: We sense that their relationship is built on her awry observations and his dismissal of them - this will not end well. And then we get a hint as to where they’re headed and why: One of them, the woman I think, is to undergo some kind of medical procedure - it seems  like she’s facing an elective procedure that will render her sterile. This is obviously a huge, risky, life-altering decision and they seem to be doing all they can talk talk in enigmas and to deaden their sense w/ drink. An outsider waiting for this train would notice nothing awry, but EH brings us right into this marriage and in just a few lines we see everything that’s gone wrong for these two - yet leaving us, mysteriously - as he does in so many stories - with no clear answers or resolution: Who are they? What are they facing and why? What brings them to this place, this land? What will become of them? 

As everybody, at least of my age, has already read Shirley Jackson’s story The Lottery (in the Cassill Norton anthology), it’s impossible for the story today to have the same shock it would have had on its initial publication (1948), it’s still an amazing story of creepiness and fright - reaching back in style to of course Hawthone (the ostracism, the occultism, the community gone mad - see early post on Young Goodman Brown, ditto Scarlet Letter) and forward such dystopian/religio fanatic works at Handmaid’s Tale - but still it stands on its own, a terrific piece of writer economy. And what’s the point? I think there’s more to it than the frightening evocation of this deathly Lottery and its results; especially in light of the recent Jackson bio and more recent publication of her collected (selected?) letters, we see her as a writer who in many ways felt like a social and intellectual outcast, living as “faculty wife” in a small community in Vermont, far from her home (which maybe was a plus). She was great at creepiness and horror - Haunting of Hill House, the book not the limpid miniseries -was frightening to read and at just the boundary of the credible - but in light of what we know of her and her struggles for success and acceptance plus her rejection/exploitation by her husband - we can see this story as a psychological masterpiece, a look into the torment of an outcast soul. 

Cassill wisely included 3 stories by James Joyce in his Norton 

anthology of Short Fiction. Along w/ Hemingway, Joyce had the greatest influence on the course, style, subject matter of 20th century short fiction, and his work would be revered today (maybe even more so) had he stopped at the end of Dubliners, restless soul that he was. Two of the selections in the anthology are good representations of JJ’s style and mode: Araby, about a young man who wants to get to the local fair to buy a trinket for an (older?) woman on whom he has a secret crushing; nothing works out well. Didn’t Updike pick this theme up on one of his early stories? The second, A Little Cloud, is about a she and timid young man who goes out for drinks with his boisterous, self-important friend - a man who’s seemingly made it big in London journalism, who is bullish and condescending, and whom we can see through in an instant. The story ends with the timid man heading home to wife and children, feeling remorse and regret, but whose life is the better? The third story is unassailable, as The Dead is widely revered as perhaps the greatest short story (it’s not really that short) ever written. On the surface, its a richly detailed period piece, an meticulous account of an xmas eve gathering at the home of three elderly, unmarried, highly musical sisters - though the narrative focuses closely on Gabriel, the nephew, a big presence, an honored guest, a fatuous man who believes he’s much more dynamic, intelligent, and perceptive than his peers. For most of the story, it seems to be a cinematic re-creation of this one night of music, dancing, dining, and many little social cuts and insults - most notably the woman who taunts Gabriel for writing book reviews in an English-based newspaper and for failure to recognize or even take interest in his Irish heritage. She pierces his balloon so to speak, but she a bit nasty and self-important herself. The story emerges as truly great literature in the final section, when Gabriel thinks about the course of his life and his marriage, remembers shards of passion and ecstasy, obviously yearning to have sex with his wife, Gretta, as the head off for a hotel room; she is quiet and withdrawn, and she eventually confesses that she has been thinking about a man she’d known in youth and who willingly died of love when she left him. A musical passage made her think of this young man - and it’s interesting how all of the great modernist writers - think of Proust and Mann e.g. - recognize the important relationship between music and memory. In any event, Gabriel has completely misread her, feels despair and disappointment, and at the end reflects in unforgettable language, of his life, heading toward death, as are we all. 

Elliot's Reading Week of 8-1-21: Eliot (George) and Hawthorne

 Elliot’s Reading - Week of 8-1-21: (George) Eliot and Hawthorne 

Have reached the half-way point in my slow (re)reading of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and what’s left to be said? The section I just finished, Three Love Problems, moves the plot along on its several divergent - later to converge - tacks, with the typical GE insights that any reader will highlight while reading along. There are some passages too complex for me to discern and several on 1820s English politics are best skimmed, but most are insightful and original; no writer thought as much about her or his work as did GE. In essence, in the section we see the various relationships heading toward calamity: the young, ambitious Dr. Lydgate, clearly a central character in all plot lines, has married the beautiful Rose Darcy and we can see that he’s spending way too much money in setting up household and that his marriage may be a disappointment to him - he’s far more professionally and intellectually driven for her and he shows little attention to her: She’s his ornament, perhaps. Meanwhile, her spendthrift brother was bound for Oxford and, if I remember, an ill-suited career in the church and too unsettled to marry his beloved Mary Garth when her family fortunes change somewhat as her father unexpectedly gets hired to manager a couple of estates - so perhaps they can get together and marry (I am confused on some of these plot points, sorry). We readers also know that Mary may be due for a huge inheritance as the final portion of a will has yet to be read. Most important, Dorothea Brooke recognizes that her marriage to Casaubon was a terrible mistake, that he’s unable to love her in any way (including sexual - though this is hinted at only) and he likewise realizes that he will not live to complete his great scholarly enterprise - at the end of the chapter/section they both seem to recognize how their life together has been a failure and an illusion, and they sadly totter off together, he old and frail and lost and she providing him with at least some support. The question is: Will she be drawn into the world of politics (her uncle’s) and social change (her husband’s cousin Will)? 

The short stories of Nathanael Hawthorne aren’t read much today outside of intro American Lit courses (if those still exist), so, yes, his stories from the early 19th century feel at times a few centuries older than that - thanks (or no thanks) to his heavy use of allegory and Christian morality and fatalism. Two of the NH’s stories in the Casill Norton anthology are examples of his quaintness and of his still-enduring power as a fiction writer and innovator. The two - Young Goodman Brown and The Birthmark - are weird and mysterious and for that alone they might find some contemporary readers drawn to their otherworldliness: He’s not that far from Lovecraft Country, after all. YGB tells of a man who embarks on some unexplained overnight mission which entails his leaving behind his young bride, Faith (get it?), to traverse the forest en route to a neighboring town; across the span of his night journey he encounters the luminaries of his town engaged in some secret, Cabalistic, totally unChristian ceremony - and he returns a damaged and withdrawn man, and lives that way his entire life. It’s no coincidence that this story, like many of NH’s, is set in his town of Salem, with its dark, not-so-secret history. The Birthmark tells of a beautiful woman whose beauty is marred only by a birthmark shaped like a tiny hand on her cheek; her scientist husband has concocted a potion that, once imbibed, will erase the birthmark, making her beauty perfect. But there is not such thing as “perfect” in our earthly, made-of-mud existence; the potion works but takes not only the birthmark but also (spoiler, kinda) her life: Perfection is neither replicable nor human. 

Elliot's Reading Week of 7-25-21: Three short stories, Flaubert, Forster, Gallant

 Elliot's Reading - Week of 7-25-21

Gustave Flaubert’s short story, The Legend of St. Julian, is a surprise, at least to me, in that it’s such a break from the style of GF’s most famous (and best) works, naturalism - which to me is something like realism (art as the mirror held up to world) seen through the reaction of personal emotions and experiences of the author: see Madame Bovary or, especially, Sentimental Education. This story, however, is the recollection of a legend, the spoiled childhood of the young St. Julien who under his father’s tutelage becomes and expert hunter and killer, who over the course of his life accidentally kills his father, from which follows his long repentance and life in abject poverty and free of violence, and at last his ascension to heaven, and, in the final passage, Fl notes that St. J is the patron saint of his village and his story is memorialized in the stained-glass windows of his local church. So the writing itself, an improbable, impossible legend, is at the opposite pole from naturalism - but we do see in this story some of Flaubert’s great writing, not so much, in fact not at all, in the extended passages that show St. J slaughtering innocent animals for no purpose other than blood lust, but in the final sequence, as he runs a small ferry at a river crossing and helps, in particular, a dying leprous beggar - quite a stunning passage that encompasses tenderness and sympathy as well as great loathing and repulsion - which of us would similarly comfort the dying? 

 The E.M. Forster story The Road from Colonus is much-anthologized though it’s not a good example of EMF’s work at his best; the forced conclusion feels out of date even for its time, when the form of the short story had already moved from the surprise ending/ironic twist of the 19th century into the more open and emotive style of Joyce, Hemingway, and others. The Forster story tells of a group of well-to-do British folk on a muleback jaunt through Greece; they come to a small village and the elder stateman of the group dismounts, spends some time marveling at a mysterious, ancient tree and declares that he wants the group to spend the night at a rundown cabin in this village - which would disrupt their well-planned itinerary (involving catching a ferry boat and a timely return to England). His daughter and other traveling companions pretty much force him back onto his mule and they quickly depart, pursued by some nasty village folk who hurl rocks at the departing crew. That in itself makes for a slightly  weird and cynical short story - but EMF foolishly adds a coda, in which the cantankerous old man and his care-taking daughter learn that the tree he’d so admired had fallen in the night - the exact night of their visit! - and crushed to death the stone-hurlers. To me, that’s a ridiculous ending to story that adds nothing to our sense of who these people are or what the story might be hinting at regarding class relationships and cultural distances. A better approach to EMF’s work would be via his novels, Passage to India of course, one of the great naturalistic novels of the century, but also Howards End - both of which have much to say about class relationships and cross-cultural encounters. 

The Mavis Gallant story in the Cassill Short Stories (Norton) anthology, The Acceptance of Her Ways, is, for better or for worse, representative of MG’s writings. Gallant published regularly in the New Yorker through the 80s and even 90s I think, and, even then, she seemed a writer born too late - one who worked in the style and the milieu of an earlier generation. She was closer to Henry James than to her much more renowned fellow-Canadian short-story mater, Alice Munro. MG wrote primarily, exclusively?, about France, Europe, expatriate Americans - as in this barbed but finally inconsequential story: A young woman, having cleaned out her ex in a divorce and adopted a new name, lives as a boarder in the cheap pension on the Italian (not the fancier French) Riviera, in a strained relationship with the owner of the small rental property - she’s treated as a servant and largely dismissed whereas in fact she has plans to clean the landlady out of a bit of her money and to live it up, at least for a while, on the French side of the divide. There’s plenty of acrimony and bitterness throughout the story, but in the end, at least today, it feels distant, remote. Who are these people? Who lives this way any more? Why should we care about them today? MG’s work, insofar as this story typifies her work, feels passee - though I know there are gems among her stories as well (isn’t there a terrific story that begins with tossing the packet of wedding invitations into the Seine). Typical or no, maybe this story was a bad choice for an anthology.  

Elliot's Reading - Week of 7-18-21: Faulkner and Fitzgerald Stories

 Elliot’s Reading - Week of 7-18-21

I can see what R.V. Cassill was getting in his 3 Faulkner selections for the Norton Anthology of Short Stories; in a way, 3 he selected show the range of Faulkner’s style, which many readers think of in only one way: Southern Gothic set at the cusp of the South entering the modern age, i.e., the 20th century, the age of American predominance. These 3 selected stories show a bit of WF’s range. Two are well known. First, A Rose for Emily, justly famous for its depiction of the life of the South at a time when memories of the Civil War were fresh in the minds of the older characters and in which these of enforced slavery was over only de jure, not de facto. Miss Emily lives a secret life among the residents of her changing town; everyone knows, yet nobody knows, or admits, the strangeness of her prolonged existence in social isolation. The story is notable for its use of first-person plural narration - as if all that’s known and told is part of a group memory, thereby depicting the intricate and intimate nature of life in the South at that time. The 2nd story is by no means typical of Faulkner - Golden Land is about a dissolute wealthy man in early 20th century LA and his animosity toward the press and his obsession w/ drink. WF knew well the ravages of drink; and he knew a bit about life in LA from his brief stints as a screenwriter - but this story feels forced and distant, and we have to wonder why he didn’t take the subject of the film industry on directly (as did, for ex., FS Fitzgerald). The 3rd story, Barn Burning, is greatest of the 3, and it introduces into WF’s work the irascible Snopes family, the embodiment of “white trash” - but also a family whose stars may be in the rise. This story establishes the animosity between the upstart Snopeses and the old-South patricians who control, or try to control, their fate. The writing her is at time WF at his most difficult, but there are rewards for careful and studious reading - though in later years this style, so intricate, becomes mannered, in, for ex., the brilliant though largely inaccessible Absolum, Absolum (who can explain even the title?). 

The Cassill Norton Short Stories anthology (authors presented alphabetically - nice, as this prevents us from reading to much into the stories as a chronological phenomenon headed toward some ideal short story in the future, a process of continuous development rather than a collection of pieces the characterize and memorialize their time and epoch - contains the often-anthologized F. Scott Fitzgerald story Babylon Revisited (it’s the only FSF selection in the anthology, questionable perhaps). It’s a story whose protagonist, Charles/Charlie, is one of least likable protagonists of all time. He was a ne’er do well living in Paris like a monarch with paper profits from stock-dealing in the 20s and whose fortune crashed in the Depression - as did Charlie’s health (a serious alcoholic), his marriage (wife is dead, never said exactly the cause but he seems neglectful and at least in part to blame), and family - the whole point of this story is that he is in Paris to persuade in late wife’s sister to relinquish to him the custody of his daughter. None of us would or should trust Charle’s sobriety for 2 seconds; he has this absurd idea that one drink a day will cure him of his alcoholism - but we know he’s sure to slide - and that his ex-sister in law should never give up the child to him. And yet - she’s torn; the girl is his daughter, he’s seemingly well employed once again (though his employment, representing some businesses from Prague, in a vague way) seems sketchy and dubious. The story comes to its climax - I won’t give to much away - when two of his pals from the old days of debauchery and excess show up at his sister’s, sending her into a state and Charlie into despair. The sorrow that permeates this story is all the more poignant for what we know of FSF and his struggles w/ alcoholism and with the ill health of his wife, Zelda - we feel that FSF must be closely identifying himself as the mistreated prodigal Charlie, yet we also much feel that we have to side with his straight-laced sister-in-law. She’s right, after all. 

Elliot's Reading Week of 7-11-21: From Proust to Sally Rooney

 Elliot’s Reading Week of 7-11-21

Wallace Stegner’s monumental novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), which along with his great novels Angle of Repose and Crossing to Safety have or should have established Stegner as one of the finest writers of the century, is a family saga, following 30 years (roughly 1905-35) in the lives of the Mason family (mother Elsa, father Bo, sons Chet and Bruce). This novel can stand well beside other great family sagas - Buddenbrooks, Confessions of Zeno, The Leopard, to cite some examples - but BRCM is also a great Western classic (comparable in some ways to Lonesome Dove) that goes well beyond regionalism. Through this family, Stegner gives a sense of the entire Western consciousness and way of being: the West, in the early 20th century and maybe still, was about ambition, innovation, risk-taking, fortune-hunting, and the constant need for change - all in this case as depicted in the Mason family, driving largely by the ambitions, and the many failures, of the father: he seeks his fortune - and it’s always just beyond his reach. He aspirations encapsulate the driving forces of the frontier in his era: first farming, then ranching, then bootleg, then gambling, then mining - all of which at first seems to be his big success, all of which ending up as devastating failures. But Bo Mason is not Tom Joad: he’s a frightfully unlikable central figure, a dominating and tempestuous father and husband, and over the course of the novel we see how his rages and his irresponsibility destroy the lives of those closest to him. He would be a tragic figure were he not so unlikable, but he’s an emblematic figure. Stagner has been criticized for ignoring the lives of non-white cultures in his depiction of the West, and that’s true: there are no significant Black, Asian, Native figures in this novel, and the novel contains some unpleasant derogation typical of its time but cringe-making today (including some disparaging anti-Semitism as well, btw). Yes, the novel gets off to a slow start - Bo and Elsa’s courtship seemed awkward and clumsy, but stay with the story - readers will or should be completely caught up in the difficult lives of these the Mason family, the hardships, the struggles, the hatred, the violence, the aspirations, the ruins, and, especially in the end, the sorrow and the pity that drives these characters - and many others of their era - over the course of their lives.

And a note the next day: Robert Stone (who studied w/ Stegner), in his intro to the Vintage reprint of the novel, points out that the BRCM is highly autobiographical, that Stegner was recounting the difficult, nomadic life and the psychodynamics of his family of four; Stegner, according the Stone, had said in interviews that only the father figure, Bo Mason, was based closely Stegner’s family, but a Stegner bio apparently shed new light on the work and its origins and inspiration. 

Re-reading Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock in intervals over the past few weeks - and finished the re-read last night, and am convinced that OS is the most clever of all of PR’s many novels. The concept alone should bring readers into this work: a diabolical double with the name Philip Roth appears in Israel advocating for what he calls the “diaspora,” which is the return of Israeli Jews to their ancestral home villages in Eastern Europe. Obviously this is a crackpot and fatal proposal, and PR knows that his “double,” whom he names Pipik, is allowing/encouraging people to think he’s PR the novelist - and PR, the narrator of this work, goes to Israel to try to straighten things out - though things get more crooked. Over the course of this novel we get info about Roth the write (several scenes include his “real” interviews w/ the Israeli novelist Appelfeld), about the Demjanjuk (?) trial, about West Bank conditions (via PR’s friend of youth who arranges a visit to the Palestinian side), many encounters w/ Pipik, his sexy Christian girlfriend Jinx (a perennial Roth theme), and would-be diaspora believers, one of whom gives PR a $1million check meant for the “other” PR, and ultimately an encounter with the Mossad (Israeli secret police). The final chapter is a dizzying hall of mirrors, as Roth tells of his encounter with the Mossad, who pressure him to delete the entire chapter 11 from the novel - so what is it we are reading when we read ch 11? What does the final paragraph - everything in this novel is fictional except … - signify? It would take more than the 2 readings I’ve given this work to get one’s mind around all the complexities and nuances - yet it’s not a difficult novel to read. Roth’s wit and his acute eye for detail and his inventive plot and eccentric characters make OS a fun read top to bottom. 

How odd to see in the New Yorker 2021 fiction double-issue a story, Young Girls, from none other than Marcel Proust. Who knew he was still writing? Turns out, as explained in the note, a recent discovery from the files of his late publisher has unearthed several hundred manuscript pages, most of which are early Proust stories. The brief excerpt in the NYer is clearly an early attempt at what would become vol 2, Young Girls in Flower - the young Marcel’s encounter and eventual alliance with a group of attractive, athletic young women while on vacation in the (fictional) coastal resort of Balbec. This piece has nothing near the complexity or insight or emotion or broad context of the much-later vol 2 of the Search, but it’s worth reading, at least for Proust readers, to see how much his style (and self-image?) improved over time. The first-person narrator here is goofy and off-putting and sees himself as far inferior to the Young Girls; much of this brief story involves is histrionic efforts to attract the notice of two of the young girls. In the later working of the material, the developing relationship is far more subtle and extended and presents Marcel as a more mature and sensitive young man. 

Another story in the fiction issue is Sally Rooney’s Unread Messages; she’s become a go-to writer who has depicted well the social milieu of Millennials w/ particular interest in how those of her generation lead much of their lives through social media and messaging services. She takes some risks with this story - notably, a long passage that introduces many characters and plot elements - but the overall effect is not great; to me much of this story reads with a summary of a much longer, complex piece, with entire plot lines dealt w/ a dropped in the span of a sentence or two. The only part of this story that feels vivid and alive is when the young woman at the center of the story pays a surprise late-night visit to an old friend and asks if she can, literally, sleep with (beside) him, which leads to sex, which leads, where? To a church service that the attend together the next morning. Say, what? 

Elliot’s Reading Week of 6-20-21: An Ozick story and Appelfeld's first translated novel

 Elliot’s Reading Week of 6-20-21

I hate to say this but the New Yorker fiction this week, a longish short story by the nonagenarian writer Cynthia Ozick seems to be something of a pity piece. The story - initially about a small group of classmates studying library sciences agrees to meet for an annual (?) reunion, then becomes about the life of one of the women in the group as she takes her first library job and is courted and won over, after initial reluctance, by a library patron - is a mess structurally and topically. None of the characters seem real, and the plot just wanders around ending up nowhere. But, enough. It’s amazing that CO is still writing in her 90s. I admit, I’ve never been a huge fan of her Jamesian work, but I’m still impressed by her dedication - I am a long way from my 90s, but I know that I have no more novels of even stories in me, so good for her. But she’s had rough treatment lately: Her new novel received a significantly negative review in the NYTBR, which the author concluded with almost an apology but noted that she’s a “pro” and can take criticism. Apparently, no - as the review ran a # of how-dare-you letters, including one for CO herself. Hey, if you are a pro - then just take it! Wondering here, for the record, if the NYer publication is just a way to say: We’re on your side. (I’ve had my share of bad reviews - and rejections - and am no pro when it comes to taking solace.)

Aharon Appelfeld’s first novel translated into English, Badenheim 1939 (1978), tells of the Austrian summer resort/spa of the same name, same year - a strange novel in which none of the characters is clearly defined, each is a type (musician, hotel owner, bakery worker, prostitute, et al.), a cartoon, a stick figure - quite intentionally. The narrative opens w/ the various characters arriving at the spa for their summer vacation, though we quickly realize that things are not as they were in previous summers; the planned entertainments (concerts, mostly) never quite get off the ground. Shortly into the novel, those gathered in Badenheim are told that they must register w/ the Sanitation Division; it soon becomes clear that only the Jewish people (most of the characters in this instance), must register. Some people are wary about this, but others counsel patience and say that this registration is all for the good. Eventually the residents receive word that they’ll all be moving to Poland - and, again, some are dubious while others try to reassure their neighbors: Poland is beautiful, cultured, literary, a great place to live! Of course we can see what’s happening and we get, I suppose, a glimpse into the indifference and delusion of those who cannot even imagine what the future holds in store. What led me to this novel was my (re)reading of Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock, in which his journey to Israel was built upon his commitment to interview AA over a series of recorded sessions; Roth includes some of his Q&A w/ AA and thus makes him part of the story of Operation Shylock - and now, on reading Badenheim 1939, do I see that AA and his novel probably were an (or the) inspiration for Roth’s novel, which posits a Roth impostor who promotes scheme to encourage the Eastern European Jews to exodus from Israel and return to their Eastern Europe denizens, such as Poland, where they supposedly would be welcomed w/ open arms: AA’s novel shows us why no Jew in Israel would consider that scheme for a moment and, what’s worse, the fate that might await those returning from Diaspora. 

Elliot's Reading Week of 6-13-21: Two long stories an a Yehoshua novel

 Elliot’s Reading Week of 6/13/21

Stephen Crane’s long short story (oxymoron?) The Blue Hotel can’t quite stand up to his nail-biting, mysterious Open Boat but it’s a fine, engaging narrative that would do any writer proud; Crane is rarely taught or read these days, but he seems today to me at least a writer worth taking another look at. Blue Hotel is a Western (his writing shows the range of his journalistic experience), set (mostly) in the eponymous hotel on the Nebraska frontier in the early 20th century - a small town at a railroad junction. The story takes place on the night of a blizzard and focuses on three new overnight travelers checked into the hotel. It quickly becomes apparent that one of the men, the Swede as he’s known, suffers from paranoid delusions; he suspects that someone’s going to kill him - and he’s a scary presence to say the least in this tiny, out-of-the-way setting. The story culminates in a series of fights - no spoilers here - and though it wraps in the style of its era, with a neat conclusion and a twist of fate (unlike, say, the more fashionable and advanced open endings of Joyce and Hemingway that have come to dominate English-language short stories over the past 100 years) that not all will find satisfactory - too many loose ends and red herrings for my taste - the story evokes well its time and place and the interactions of a a group of men whose equilibrium has toppled and whose lives are in danger. 

Isak Dinesen’s famously weird story Sorrow-Acre (ca. 1940?), set sometime in the 19th century (I think…?) in ID’s native Denmark, is a story that shows the horrors of the false ideology of the class relationships in what amounts to a medieval, feudal, agrarian society. In essence a young man, Adam (a little heavy-handed there) return home to his family estate in Denmark (he’d been in England as part of the Danish delegation), in part to  maintain a relationship w/ his uncle whose son and projected heir has died after a lifelong health struggle. The uncle had arranged a marriage for the son - and now, surprise! - he takes the son’s place and marries the 20-year-old in hopes that she will provide the son and heir he requires. We certainly suspect, following the pattern of many such romances, that Adam will break up this loveless marriage and carry off the bride and the estate - but no, that’s not what happens. The uncle is about to punish a young man from among his many peasant tenants whom he suspects of arson; the man’s mother pleads for mercy, and the uncle sets up a condition: If she can harvest an entire acre of his corn in one day, before sundown, he will pardon the son - a task that all believe be impossible. She embarks, never the less, in what amounts to public torture; Adam intervenes, pleading w/ his uncle to go easy, but to no avail. So now we expect another ending - that Adam will take over by force, or that the peasants will do so, or someone at least will step forward and end this woman’s public torture. But - no - the uncle remains rigid, the peasants remain passive, and Adam is frozen; at the end, he declares that he’s going to America. Well, thanks for this vote of confidence in the U.S., and, yes, this story is powerful and sad - sorrowful, I almost wrote - but I think it’s terrible that the peasant farmers are so submissive and that Adam just turns his back on the suffering as if nothing can change, as if he can do nothing to stop this travesty, as if the horrible uncle has the right to determine the life and death of those who work his land. ID’s sympathies are in the right place, but her working of this material will, or should, make you angry. 

A.B. Yehoshua is one of several excellent writers living and working Israel today; he’s had some success in the U.S., but he deserves more - and sad to say despite his sympathetic portrayal of all cultures living today in Israel he will never win a Nobel Prize or any significant international literary award because of current attitudes toward the State of Israel. I should and will read more of his work, but will note that I was really impressed by 2 of his novels, Mr. Mani and Open Heart, and now have read a 3rd, A Woman in Jerusalem (2004) and will add it to the list. This novel, like his Open Heart in particular, involves a man on a quest or a mission, which ABY follows closely as the tales widens and then snaps shut. In this novel, we follow closely the efforts of an H.R. director in a commercial bakery (note that none of the characters in this novel is named; all are identified by their role in the story or their profession, e.g., the owner, the secretary, the woman … ) who is informed that a woman killed in a recent suicide bombing and who’d gone for some time as unidentified was in fact an employee of the bakery; a tabloid paper is planning to publish an “expose” showing that the bakery has been indifferent to the fate of one of its low-stature employees. The owner - a wealthy and seemingly generous man - assigned the hr manager to learn about the woman and ensure that she receives proper burial, which leads to an odyssey of a journey with the woman’s body toward burial in her native land (a former Soviet state, unnamed). This novel unwinds in the tradition of “burial” novels - obviously As I Lay Dying comes to mind; there also was a more recent novel about a family in Syria transporting the patriarch’s body across the war-torn land - looking it up right now: Death Is Hard Work, by Khaled Khalifa (2016). ABY’s take on this mini-genre is beautifully written, mysterious at times (various dream sequences and “voices” of a witnessing chorus) and surprising in its good will and generosity of spirit - about which whether that’s realistic at all others will have to decide; I have no idea. As a final note: It’s fun in reading this novel, set in the present in its day and now 17 years old, to note how much our technology has evolved: Among other innovations now passee note in particular the miracle of satellite phones that allow you to talk - with a crystal-clear signal! - with anyone on Earth, or at least in your area code. How far we’ve come. 

Elliot's Reading Week of 6/6/21: More on Roth's Operation Shylock and two classic long stories/short novels

 Elliot’s Reading Week of 6/6/21

A few notes catching up on this week’s reading, starting w/ Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock, about which one must wonder: Can Roth keep this plot aloft for the full length of the book (some 350 pp) or will it crash all around him? Every reader can appreciate the clever, intricate set-up of this novel, in which an imposter claiming to be Roth has turned up in the new in Israel where he is pushing a scheme to have Jews leave Israel and re-settle in their pre-war villages in Eastern Europe. Roth arrives in Jerusalem explicitly to complete a set of interviews with Israeli novels Appelfeld (this is real, actual) and is pursed and tormented in various ways by his alter ego, whom he names Moishe Pipik (Moses Bellybutton). The plot, as Roth is planning to put all this behind him and leave Israel, takes an odd turn as Roth is listed by MP’s paramour, who seduces Roth (or is it the other way around?), which makes MP a now-dangerous antagonist; Roth gives us about 20 pp. recounting the plot and explaining how ridiculous and improbable these events are - a weird post-modern divergence! I have read this novel before +20 years ago I think and can’t recall how Roth got out of this jam but at this point it seems he’s cut off various pathways. We’ll see.

Have also been reading a # of classic short stories (or short novels perhaps), notably Heart of Darkness and The Open Boat. Conrad’s HofD from the early 20th century today would require numerous trigger warnings, generally because of racist language; that said, however, it’s not a racist story. The entire piece is narrated by an old mariner, Marlowe, describing his early adventures as a young man on his first voyage as captain in an old “rust bucket” steamship traveling up the Congo on behalf of a Dutch trading company specializing in Ivory. We see from the start the cruel presence of these merchants and the terrible exploitation of black labor and disruption of an entire culture and way of life - all for a a material used for piano keys and billiard balls! At the apex of the novel, the steamer arrives at the most remote camp where they pick up the legendary merchant Kurtz - upon which Marlowe sees that K has created a system of brutality (partly by trading guns for ivory!) and hero-worship, which K., in his dying breath, renounces - a message that M is unable to deliver when he returns to Europe: a strange and enigmatic tale but in the end one of great sympathy for the tormented African people whose lives have been disrupted by European greed. 

As to Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat, from the same period: Crane is by no means a popular author today, written off as a “mere” journalist and author of potboilers. What a miscarriage! Sure, Open Boat has a few strained images and passages that feel odd and quaint today, but it’s a terrific account of four men in a lifeboat struggling to get safely to shore - in a day when there was none of the safety and survival gear mandatory today. It’s a complete nail-biter story - based apparently on Crane’s experience - and I don’t think anyone could or has ever surpassed this story for construction, vision, and empathy. 

I did pick up on a few other pieces as well, but none that held my interest for long: A real dry spell these past few weeks in NYer stories; a look at Robert Coover’s most-famous story, The Babysitter - Coover has been a favorite of mine and was a personal friend when I was a books editor, but this story, innnovative as it was inits day and as it still is (composed of a series of one-paragraph sections, out of chronological order, about the goings-on among various families on a Saturday night in an Everytown suburb) - but today this story is nearly unreadable because of its depicted crude, violent mistreatment of women. The recent well-reviewed novel, The Recent East, despite a rare look at life in former East Germany ca 1990, is definitely not a novel meant for me or my now-ancient generation. 

Elliot’s Reading Week of 5/23/21: Chekhov, Carver, Beattie, Eliot (George)

Elliot’s Reading Week of 5/23/21: Chekhov, Carver, Beattie, Eliot (George)

Chekhov’s famous story The Lady with a Pet Dog (of Little Dog, or Lapdog, depending on the translator) is a story of a doomed romance, but it’s not exactly Brief Encounter, which is a deeply emotional and sad film about two married people who fall in love and are torn by guilt and remorse. Chekhov’s story is far more dark and cynical, in that the man, the central character, is a cad and a nasty person who’s betrayed his wife and family with many different women  and for whom these illicit affairs are stages to boost his ego. The Lady with the Dog whom he seduces while on vacation in the Crimea - what’s up with that? his wife’s not even suspicious of these solo vacation trips? Of course she is! - is about half his age, unhappily married (though her husband has, as far as the story lets us in, is faithful but a bit of a bore, or as she calls him, a flunkey) and she feels guilt when he seduces her - but that quickly abates. They separate as she goes him to her dull provincial town and he to Moscow - but eventually he tracks her down and she agrees to sneak off from her husband - claiming she needs a medical treatment for a “woman’s issue” (some irony there) in Moscow. Thus begins a long period in which they meet in hotel rooms; the most damning passage occurs when the man walks his young daughter to school while he’s en route to a liaison. At the end, he notices that his hair is graying and that he has generally aged. Poor guy. He never has a word of sympathy for the woman who has tossed over her life for him. One mystery of this gloomy story is the dog: What happens to him? What’s his significance? Perhaps that she is to him a lapdog, jumping at his command, knowing her place. 

Raymond Carver’s story Would You Please Be Quiet, Please is a cautionary tale of a marriage in trouble. The couple seem so well suited to each other, especial in the brief summation of their lives together with which Carver begins the story - meeting in college, falling for each other, moving from so-cal to the northern California working-class city Eureka where each takes a job teaching English at the h.s. (how sweet!) and they raise two kids. All looks great until one evening, for some reason, the guy asks his wife about a fight they’d had several years back when he suspected her of sneaking out of a party and having drunken sex with one of their so-called friends. Why does he bring this up? And why won’t he let it go? Should he? Can he? No - he can’t, and he forces her into a confession: It meant nothing, it was just a fling, I was drunk, etc. Was she right to tell him? Would a little lie  and denial have been better? In any event, the guy takes off for downtown Eureka - you can only imagine the desolation, if you’ve never been there - where he spends too much $, gets drunk, gets rolled, slinks back home and is tenderly welcomed by his worried wife. So the message, on one level, seems to be: Leave well enough alone. But the real message, the deeper meaning, is that all (or at least most) relationships have within them lies, fibs, denials, guilt, shame, and recklessness. It’s a story of two worlds, in a way, and it’s obvious that Carver knows the 2nd world, the dark world of saloons and pool halls, much better: The account of the happy family/couple is a bit sketchy and hard to accept, but the account of the husband’s night of misery seems right on the money. We have to know or believe that Carver’s been there. The “open” ending - a story without a true resolution, in the Joyce tradition, may disturb some readers, who want a real answer - but life’s not like that. 

Ann Beattie’s story Janus plays a little trick on us. The story is about a realtor who’s running a successful business and is in a prosperous and seemingly happy marriage (cf Would You Please Be Quiet) - no mention of kids, as I recall, though they do have a pet dog (cf, Lady with a Little Dog?). The story, strangely enough, is about her enchantment with a bowl that, as she notes, would be unlikely to draw much attention at, say, a crafts fair; the bowl is attractive, though, and enigmatic, seeming to throw different shades of color in varying light (cf the realtor herself). The realtor is obsessed with this bowl, and uses it in as part of the “show” setting that she creates for every house visit for prospective buyers - she attributes almost magical powers to this bowl, and brings it home each night - even though once she forgot and returned to quickly retrieve her prize possession (cf the realtor’s marriage?). At the very end of the story, final 2 paragraphs I think, do we get the reveal: The bowl was a present from the man w/ whom she’d had an affair - brief? - some years back; the affair, it seems, is over, but not her feelings for the man. Keep in mind the title: Janus, the god who looks “both ways,” past and future, as with this character and this story - but also the god who is double-faced, which this woman, who stages houses and who hides things from her spouse, is Janus-like herself. So we see another story about an affair (quite different from the recently read Chekhov and Carver stories: one a lifelong sad relationship, on a drunken one-night fling, and this one a significant relationship but of the past, except for lingering feelings) and, in particular, about secrets kept from families, partners, spouses, children. All of these secrets can lead, it seems, to disaster - and in these 3 stories we see varying ways in which the secrets can be suppressed (Chekhov), revealed (Carver), and hidden in plain site and always in danger of being “cracked open” (Beattie). 

Prompted by recent excursions into short stories, I re-read Chekhov’s “A Visit to Friends,” in which a 30-something man with a successful law practice in Moscow agrees to visit a set of friends he’s known since you: a woman and her husband, the woman’s sister, and a 3rd friend. They used to pal around together; now, the relationship is tainted because the woman (Va?) is soon to be forced to sell her estate; the man (I wish I could remember these names!) has for years helped them out of various financial straits, but the husband is a hopeless libertine and spendthrift. There is longer any way that the an can help these friends out - and the husband, whom he particularly dislikes, keeps pressing him for a loan, which they both know will never be repaid. Meanwhile, the 3rd woman, Na?, seems to be a likely match for the man, and in some beautiful passages we see how stands outside in the moonlight, and the man struggles with the idea - should he come over to her? What would this lead to? And, eventually, he turns away from this offer of love and slinks back to Moscow and to his work. Has he wasted his life, or avoided a terrible mistake and inevitable heartbreak? We have to believe, in today’s terms, that he’s “just not into her.” But “matchmaking” was quite different then (1898); the social network was narrower. There’s a beautiful and similar scene in Tolstoy’s AK, when, if I remember, a man and a woman are part of a mushroom-hunting excursion and everyone expects the man to propose to her and he doesn’t, and the two life courses diverge (to her sorrow, it seems). 

The third “Book (of 8) in George Eliot’s Middlemarch is titled Waiting for Death, and this section is framed (sort of) by the illness/deathwatch of two totally different characters/personalities: the elderly Causubon, now back in England after the disastrous honeymoon post-marriage to Dorothy Brooke, discussing her desire to play a more vital part in advancing his going-nowhere scholarship, has an apoplexy and seems to be near death. D. summons the new, dynamic, advanced-thinking (i.e., the exact opposite of her husband) Lydgate to manage the case (by-passing the long-established, barely competent docs in the region - which makes L really uncomfortable as he tries to follow protocol and not make enemies in the profession); it’s obvious that L and D have sparks, but for the moment D is simply frightened about her husband’s malady. At the other end of this section, the wealthiest guy in town, the miserly and miserable Featherstone, is on his deathbed - naturally attracting a hive of visitors, mostly relatives whom he hasn’t seen in years. He pretty much refuses all their overtures; many of them camp out at his estate (Stone House, or something like that - hard and unmoving), eating the ample comestibles. The only person he’ll see is Mary Garth, the young, somewhat sharp-tongued woman who’s like his caretaker - the most mature and sensible character aside from Dorothy, maybe more so when we consider D’s disastrous marriage; F commands her to destroy his will and retrieve a secret will that he’s signed and stashed in the closet; he also tries to give her a purse full of gold. Wisely, she refuses these commands - as she’s already hated by the jealous relatives who fear the worst from her. the character she seems destined for is Fred Vincy, the charming spendthrift - and we see him in the first pages of this section engage in some preposterous scheme to trade one horse for another and sell the 2nd at a big profit - but he’s a kid and sort of a dope and playing with pro horse traders - so of course he loses his shirt, and as a result stiffs Mary Garth’s nearly impoverished family on money he’d borrowed. What matters so much to them is of indifference to him. Nice guy - but charming. His sister, Rosamond, is the town beauty - and she becomes engaged to Lydgate, and we can see where that’s headed: She is no intellectual match or companion for him, and everyone but he can see that. On a side track, Causubon (and Dorothea) receive word that C’s nephew, Ladislaw, the errant poet and painter, is coming back to England; D fears the effect this might have on her weakened husband and, to make matters worse, her father, a local pol., invites L to stay with them and hope to make him a candidate for office: So what effect will this have on the unhappily married D? Or on the nearly defunct C? Or, for that matter, on the proper match for D., Lydgate?