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.