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.