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?