Reading 2666 by Robert Bolaño -- Week 2

For the coming week we are supposed to have read up to page 102 in the Group Read of 2666. (Yes I copied the above “Bolaño” from the site to get that little squiggly thing above the n. Windows Live Writer should give us a way to make it ourselves.)

I can’t say that I have any great insights into this novel at this point but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing in a novel this long. It would be like having great insights into your typical 300 page novel at about page 30. On the other hand, the introductory remarks said that RB wanted to publish each part of the novel separately. If so, I’m more than halfway through what would be the first novel (novella?).

It isn’t like anything I’ve ever read before. I can’t at this point compare it to other long novels I’ve read.

I still think it isn’t that difficult to read. I mean this in a very simple sense. It is certainly a difficult novel to understand. But the physical act of reading isn’t difficult. The structure, while it contains some flashbacks, isn’t confusing. In some ways it has been too linear, too much a history of the relationship of these four academics in chronological terms. The lookbacks mostly occur only when one academic needs to be filled in on something that occurred when all four weren’t together. Sometimes I’ve felt that the story hasn’t really started yet. These pages have had the feel of background and I keep expecting that, at some point, we will reach the present and the story will begin. I’m ready for the story to begin.

I haven’t found the vocabulary difficult although the official read site has a post with a glossary so maybe some people do. In terms of a basic who, when, where, why and how I’m not spending any time trying to figure out the who, when and where. I consider that a mark of a novel that is an easy read; being able to focus on only the what, why and how is a luxury. In Hillary Mantel’s novel, Wolf Hall, I spent a lot of time working on the who because of her (apparently intentional) ambiguous use of the pronoun “he”. I’ve had trouble keeping track of who in the Russian novels I’ve read simply because the characters use multiple names. In science fiction novels the where is often unclear. And sometimes the when. Not in this novel. And the what is only unclear in the larger sense. There is no lack of clarity about what each character is doing at the time.

I wonder if other readers have had trouble with the where and when. The group read site has a person keeping track of locations and another keeping track of chronology. Maybe locations become more important later in the book. Maybe this is one of those novels that, when you get to the end, you must immediately re-read simply for structure and not plot elements. But so far I haven’t been confused, while reading, about where they were or when it was.

In short, these second 50ish pages went by almost as fast as the first 50 pages. I did, however, find myself flipping ahead a couple of times to see where my ending point was going to be. I’ll get to that later. And I can’t say at this point I like or I’d recommend this novel. But, again, we’re 100 pages into a 900 page novel.

Early on in this 50ish page segment, the Italian, Morini, decides to visit Liz Norton in London. Morini is not sexually involved with Norton, unlike the other two scholars Pelletier (the Frenchman) and Espinoza (the Spaniard). Morini is in bad health, he has multiple sclerosis, and he is in a wheel chair. He was involved in an unspecified accident that was referred to in the first 50 pages but never described.

That part went by fairly fast for me. Morini is my favorite of the four scholars and I think RB wrote him with that intention. Although I suspect that he only seems deeper than Pelletier and Espinoza because RB lets us into his mind less often than he does with Pelletier and Espinoza. Morini does, however, seem to have more common sense than Pelletier and Espinoza.

Norton has now broken off her affairs with Pelletier and Espinoza and they are even more obsessed with her than before. They are also intrigued by a new man who has appeared in her life. For pages (and pages and pages and pages, it seemed) they obsessed over him and what his relationship with Norton was. Finally they spill their guts to Morini who very sensibly suggests that they ask her. Truthfully, Morini is my favorite simply because Pelletier and Espinoza seem to me to be so transparently unreliable. Whenever the author is omniscient with those two I figure we’re being led down the wrong path. The author is seldom omniscient with Norton and is less omniscient with Morini. But he spends time describing Morini. The way Morini’s reactions to events are portrayed seem either more natural to me than the reactions of the others or, if not natural, worthy of investigation.

I find myself completely bored with Norton. I think that’s because I don’t trust Pelletier’s and Espinoza’s view of her (and their views are always sexual, whether they are thinking of her sexually or wondering if she is thinking of someone else sexually). I thought that when Morini finally visited London we would see the real Liz Norton. I don’t know if that happened. But, in any event, when she is with Morini she seems less interesting than him.

There were only two incidents in this segment that intrigued me. First, while Morini visits Norton she tells him the story of a painter named Johns who cut off his own hand, had it embalmed and incorporated it into one of his art works. Johns is now committed in an asylum. Toward the end of the 50ish pages Pelletier and Espinoza visit Norton and tell her that Morini has become obsessed with a painter named Johns who is in an asylum. They do not realize that Morini heard the story of the painter from Norton. Morini, with the aid of Pelletier and Espinoza, tracked down the painter and visited him in the asylum.

They describe the entire odd experience and how Morini disappeared without saying goodbye and didn’t appear for a long time. They were quite worried about him. Norton tells them that he came to London to tell her his theory about the painter. (She also tells them that she promised not to reveal this to anyone; so she is breaking that promise to Morini).

I have no idea if this part of the story has significance. While I was reading the part where Norton tells Morini the story of Johns (and Morini feels sick to his stomach as he listens) I didn’t find it that interesting although I found Morini’s reaction interesting. But I found it intriguing that Morini would actually track down Johns and I found his reaction to him intriguing. But as I say I don’t know if it has any significance other than as a look into Morini’s psyche.

It’s hard to know what, if anything has any significance, in this novel.

The other incident that intrigued me was a brief discussion that Pelletier and Espinoza had with the new mysterious man in Norton’s life. He tells them to watch out because she is a Medusa. They try to interpret this in their usual scholarly “let’s over-think this” way. Medusa was the only one of the Gorgons who was human and, therefore, could be killed, and if Norton is a Medusa they should feel sorry for her. When Medusa died the winged Pegasus sprang from her head and Pegasus is a symbol of love. I won’t go into the whole theory but let’s just say that it makes them feel tender toward Norton and sure that they are the key to her happiness. Or at least one of them is.

This is one reason I find them unreliable. Yes, all of these things are part of the Medusa myth. But Pelletier and Espinoza are obsessed with Norton and will interpret anything about her in the light that is best for their relationship with her. I found it striking that they didn’t even begin to consider the most obvious meaning.

A Medusa would be a danger to them because she would turn them to stone. Metaphorically. In reality their obsession would mean that they would cease acting – they would become unable to go forward with whatever they were working on. And in fact that is what happened to them. For a very long time they stopped doing much about Archimboldi and simply skated on their reputations. They obsessed about Norton. Each obsessed about his relationship with Norton. Each obsessed about the other’s relationship with Norton. Then Norton dumps them and they obsess about the new guy and her relationship to (or with) him. The story slowed down to a crawl. It was like it was turning to stone.

Of course there are other interpretations. But they didn’t even really consider that Norton could be BAD for them. They also didn’t consider the interpretation that the only way to really understand Norton is not to look directly at her (her looks, her direct actions, her direct words) but to look at her indirectly. In other words, not to take her at face value. (Perseus defeated Medusa by looking at her in a mirror while he slew her. That way she couldn’t turn him to stone.) I don’t know if that’s a good interpretation because not enough about Norton has been revealed. She may, in fact, be a very simple person and her glamor (in the true sense of the word) may be something they have imbued her with because of their own competition.

And the whole thing might mean nothing because we know next to nothing about this mysterious man and he may just have been saying something he thought was insulting to Norton.

Other than that I found nothing too intriguing in these 50ish pages.

By the end we have finally gotten to Mexico, but only through a story related to the scholars about a person who met the mysterious Archimboldi there.

I was less tolerant of this 50 pages than I was with the first 50. There was a lot of ink expended on Pelletier’s and Espinoza’s obsession with Norton and, as I’ve said, RB hasn’t given me enough about Norton to understand this obsession. She seems ordinary and boring to me in all ways except that she was willing to carry on affairs with two friends simultaneously. And that just made me think she had bad judgment. Combine that with her story of her unhappy marriage to someone she describes as abusive and the obnoxious way that she allowed the mysterious new man to treat her in the one scene where they are together and she seems to have really bad judgment when it comes to men.

In any event, she isn’t actually in the many pages that are spent describing the obsession of Pelletier and Espinoza. RB spent pages (and pages and pages) on a long (I assume) digression about how they go whoring once she breaks up with them and the different effects this has on them. It was around this time that I started looking to see how many pages were left in this assignment.

I’ve never found stories of men’s obsession with sex and thoughts of women as sexual objects that interesting. I get even less interested in men’s thoughts about women they are using as sexual objects but whom they think they are interested in as a person. I can only get through this type of story if the writing is beautiful. I was, for instance, bored by the subjects of many of John Updike’s novels but I read them for his prose. A wonderful use of the English language will make me read novels about subjects that don’t personally speak to me (and not being a man, this subject just doesn’t speak to me).

In this case I have no idea if the writing is beautiful because this is a translated novel. As I said in my previous post the style seems clunky. So I really, REALLY hope that this entire novel isn’t going to be about the internal workings of the mind of men in the midst of sexual obsession. I think that’s why Morini seems interesting to me. If he has a sexual obsession it isn’t at all apparent.

At the main group read site, there is an interview with Lorin Stein, the editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux who edited the translated versions. The last question and answer concerned me:

MB: Without going into too many spoilers, but looking at all the plotlines and characters, what would you say is the overall theme or main idea behind 2666? What is Bolaño trying to achieve here?

LS: If there’s an overall theme or main idea, I don’t know what it is. The murder of women in northern Mexico is clearly central to the book. More generally, 2666 strikes me as preoccupied with death–specifically, with the fear of death. One’s own death, the death of people one loves. That fear erupts throughout Bolaño’s work. It is a kind of existential terror. In most of the books it’s an undertone. But in 2666 those murders make the fear concrete.

No overall theme or main idea. In a 900 page novel. Not a good sign.

I am enjoying some of the posts on the official site and I suspect I will enjoy them more as we get deeper into the novel.

Reading 2666 by Robert Bolano

A few weeks ago I said that I was considering doing the group read of Robert Bolano’s novel 2666. I’m not sure why. It wasn’t as if I had been dying to read it. I knew nothing about the author or the novel except I knew that it won an award (I wasn’t sure which one) and I had a vague idea that it was about murders in Mexico. But even though I’m on hiatus from my own reading groups the idea of reading a novel at the same time (and same pace) as a group of other serious readers appealed to me.

I gave it some thought and decided I would read the novel along with the group but I would not officially participate. I could change my mind about either one of those decisions. (Yes, I have issues with commitment. You aren’t telling me anything I don’t know about myself.)

So first I finished An American Tragedy, which was the big novel I was currently working on. I needed to do that so 2666 could be my “work read” at lunchtime. Then I went out and got the novel. It is big. My paperback version is 898 pages long. (This would be the perfect time to try out a Kindle but apparently it isn’t available on Kindle.)

I didn’t read the back of the book so I still don’t know what it is about. The cover art is some strange religious looking imagery. There is a label on the front that says it won The National Book Critics Circle Award.

The group read begins the week of January 25 and the group is supposed to have read through page 51 by the beginning of that week. So I took it to work with me last week to read during lunch if I could. I ended up having two days free for lunchtime reading and that turned out to be plenty of time.

I thought before the whole group discussion starts I would post my initial thoughts so I could later compare them with what other people thought.

1. I flew through the first 51 pages. Compared to Tolstoy and Dreiser this is an easy read. I’ve been thinking about why and I can’t quite put my finger on it because the story is not as straightforward as theirs were and the writing style is also not as straightforward. Truthfully I think it’s because there are no chapters. I find chapters to be natural stopping points and sometimes I stop when I could very easily go on. Tolstoy has a lot of short chapters. Dreiser also had a lot relatively short chapters. RB has no chapters (I can’t make that little squiggly mark over the “n” in Bolano so I’m just going to call him RB).

2. For many pages I wondered if I had been confusing this novel in my mind with another novel because it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with murders or Mexico. But finally, on page 43, one of the characters (Morino) read an Italian news story about killings in Mexico. It is a two paragraph aside and so far has gone nowhere. I have no idea how the story is going to even get to Mexico since so far it is taking place in Europe.

3. The story (so far) is about academics studying an obscure author and I’m a sucker for stories about academics studying authors. This may be why I’m finding it an easy read.

4. I’m not sure I like RB’s style but I can’t decide if it is him that is the problem for me or the translator. I tend to stay away from books in translation and one reason is because of this very question. On the one hand, I think he was going for a somewhat conversational style. The narrator is not a character, yet the authorial “voice” is that of someone verbally telling a story. And just as people telling a story verbally ramble all over the place and have run on sentences and begin lots of phrases with the word “and” …. so does RB. I’ve never read any of his other works so I don’t know if this is typical of his style or if he chose it for this novel. Maybe this will become clear in the commentary for the group read.

An example: There is a sentence that starts on page 18 and I think it doesn’t end until page 22. It is a summary of a story that is told by a visitor and listened to (with bated breath) by the academics. It works perfectly in so far as that is how people really relate stories that they heard to someone who wasn’t there. On the other hand, I read novels because I’m looking for a bit more formality than I get in my everyday life. I found it annoying to a certain extent and I remember thinking in the middle of it that I certainly hoped this wasn’t going to be a regular occurrence. I assume this is RB and not the translator.

Another example: In one paragraph the word “paltry” is used twice and in neither case is it a word I would have chosen. “They spent the free time they had, which was ample, strolling the paltry (in Pelletier’s opinion) sites of interest in Augsburg …” “… Morini wasn’t in the best of health this time, but rather in paltry health …” I probably wouldn’t have noticed the first paltry if the second hadn’t occurred two sentences later. Paltry health? Is this RB? Or is this the translator?

I dislike when word choices and structure choices get in the way of my enjoyment and twice in 51 pages is a lot for an award winning novel.

5. I really dislike the way RB writes women so far. There aren’t many women but there is one key woman character, Liz Norton. The peripheral women characters seem very stereotyped in a male nightmare or fantasy type of way (there’s even an older German woman with a Marlene Dietrich body. good god). Liz Norton has already become an object of desire for two of the other academics and she is carrying on an affair with both of them with full disclosure to the other one. Maybe men think this makes a female character interesting but so far I think it just makes her a stereotypical male fantasy. Add to that the discussion about the familiarity or not by the two other (otherwise boring) academics’ participations in a menage a trois and familiarity with the works of the Marquis de Sade and – well it all just seems like a fantasy created for a novel. We’ll see if RB redeems himself by doing something unexpected. If he doesn’t, this is going to be a real problem for me because my eye rolling is interfering with my reading.

By the way, the plot so far concerns a mysterious German author named Archimboldi (which, yes, doesn’t sound German) who is the object of study of the four academics. Archimboldi is, apparently, still alive but mysterious in more than a JD Salinger kind of way. No pictures, etc. RB has spent pages of detail going through the history of how these four academics (French, Spanish, Italian and British) began studying Archimboldi and got to know each other and become friends (and lovers). Lots of detail on all the conferences they attended and papers they gave. But although that could be dull I thought RB managed to make it work. Again, I have no idea how any of this relates to murders in Mexico.

6. I don’t know why this is called 2666, which doesn’t bother me. That will become clear (I assume). What bothers me is that I don’t know how to pronounce it. I realized this when I told someone I was going to read it. Do you pronounce each number: Two Six Six Six. Or is it Twenty-Six Sixty-Six? Or Two Thousand Six Hundred Sixty Six? Or Two Thousand Six Sixty Six? Or Two Six Sixty Six? You see the problem? Again, I assume all will become clear. But an online reading discussion isn’t going to clear up THAT point unless someone decides to write about it.

I look forward to reading the discussions next week. And despite my complaints about it, I’m still looking forward to the next 50 pages.

An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

Last Saturday, after a full morning and early afternoon of running errands, getting my haircut and all the other Saturday things I usually do, I settled down to read as much of An American Tragedy as I could before it was time for bed.   I decided that enough was enough and I needed to finish it.   I was a little more than half-way through the novel.   By 11:00 that night I had finished.  

One of the problems that I’m finding with reading Really Long Books is that by the time the novel ends I feel ready to move on and not spend more time thinking about it.   In this case, throughout the novel I felt like there was a lot to say but now I’m past being able to say it in any coherent way.

Here, then, are my perhaps incoherent and certainly jumbled thoughts about this novel.

The world is a better place with the invention of a safe, (mostly) reliable, easy, (relatively) inexpensive form of birth control like the pill and, indeed, almost all the problems in this novel could have been avoided if the pill had been available.   Roberta would not have gotten pregnant and Sondra could have had a sexual fling with Clyde, tired of him and dropped him when she figured out that they would make a terrible match.

I’m sure there are moralists who would say that all the problems would have been avoided if no “pre-marital sex” would have occurred.   Sure.  But this is the real world.    Sex happens.   Dreiser knew that and didn’t shrink from it.

I’ve always thought that the religious aversion to pre-marital sex has its roots in the same practical considerations that produced the rule against eating fish on Fridays.   And this novel bears that out.  Take away the availability of the pill and the equal rights movement that brought changes in the workplace, a girl who has sex without the “protection” of marriage is more likely than not going to get pregnant and be unable to support herself and her baby.   This is still true in many parts of the world.   It makes sense that faced with a world where the pill is not invented, the best way to help girls avoid this very bad situation is to try to change behavior.  The availability of the pill changes that reality.  Too bad the moralists didn’t change too.

Of course, moralizing against sex doesn’t really change behavior, which is what Dreiser shows.  And of course consequences never matter if you have enough money to avoid them.   They never do.    Another way to look at the novel is to say that all the problems would have been avoided if abortion had been safely available to all instead of just to the wealthy who had connections.   Compare the story of Roberta and Clyde with the story of Clyde’s lawyer who has much sympathy for Clyde because of his own past.

For once, in his twentieth year, he himself had been trapped between two girls, with one of whom he was merely playing while being seriously in love with the other.   And having seduced the first and being confronted with an engagement or flight, he had chosen flight.  But not before laying the matter before his father, by whom he was advised to take a vacation,  during which time the services of the family doctor were engaged with the result that for a thousand dollars and expenses necessary to house the pregnant girl in Utica, the father had finally extricated his son and made possible his return,  and eventual marriage to the other girl.

A thousand dollars in the 1920’s (or earlier).  I can’t even begin to imagine what that is in today’s terms.   But where there is money there is always a way.   Of course no one would have had need of an abortion if the pill had been available in the first place.  And anyone who thinks that making abortion illegal will make it disappear should read this novel.  It has always been available but not to all.   Even when it was illegal.

Another way to look at it is that Roberta wouldn’t have needed to even consider an abortion if there had been other options available to her.  If, for instance, a society that prohibited abortion had, instead, services available to help pregnant women give birth without stigma and either raise their children or give them up for adoption.  But that didn’t exist for Roberta.  The stigma was great and would devolve on the entire family.   And there were no services available.

Girls who got pregnant and were abandoned by the men who were integral to that process were left on their own or to the mercy of their families.   It says something good about Clyde’s mother that her own daughter, Esta, could turn to her for help in the same situation and Clyde’s mother did help her.  I never completely understood why Roberta felt that she couldn’t turn to her own mother who certainly had no resources but, then, neither did Clyde’s mother.  The only difference I can think of is that Roberta was never forced to totally face her situation because Clyde was always there for her to think she could turn to even though she knew he was unreliable.  Clyde’s sister Esta was left high and dry and, perhaps, was forced to acknowledge to herself that she had nowhere to turn.

Of course, all of this could have been avoided if Clyde had followed the rules of the workplace.  There would have been no sex if there had been no fraternizing.  I thought it was interesting that Dreiser created a factory that had strict rules against fraternizing with the girls (which many did) and in which there is no “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” to show that no one followed these rules.   He gave Clyde no “out” and in many ways the situation is similar to what goes on today with supervisor/supervisee fraternization rules that arose out of sexual harassment law.   But  Clyde flat out broke the rules.    And Clyde knew he had issues in looking to have a woman in his life based on his experience in Kansas City, and he knew that if his uncle found out he’d be fired and lose his best hope of advancement in this society, but he was still unable to stop himself.

Of course the real problem is Clyde.   I thought Dreiser did a good job of creating a character that I never really liked but never completely disliked.   Dreiser even made the death of Roberta ambiguous as far as Clyde’s intent went.  Mostly I felt that Clyde was weak willed and somewhat naive while at the same time begin somewhat grasping – which I think is what I was supposed to think.   He certainly isn’t someone I would want to go out of my way to associate with; on the other hand I recognized him.   I know that I do associate with people like him (male and female). 

I liked that Dreiser didn’t make Clyde a lothario who seduced Roberta by sweeping her away.  I like that he created a realistic situation in which both are attracted to each other and biological urges get the better of Roberta’s common sense.  It seemed very realistic to me and I never thought that Dreiser treated the character of Roberta with anything except respect.  Although Clyde has his bad points Dreiser made sure it was realistic that Roberta would fall for him and think he was better than he was.  He also didn’t make her perfect.  She is the one who chooses her new boarding arrangement in the knowledge that it may lead to something.  She does think of Clyde as her ticket out even while she does genuinely like him and is genuinely attracted to him.  Roberta is a real woman, in many ways much more real to me than Sondra who of course isn’t real to Clyde either.  He never sees her as she is.   The situation between Roberta and Clyde and between Clyde and Sondra is obviously meant to be parallel.  It highlights the differences between being a man and being a woman on the lower social end of the relationship.  It also highlights the difference between being a woman with money and resources and being someone in Roberta’s shoes.  Is there any doubt that Sondra’s family would have taken care of everything if Sondra had found herself pregnant? 

I also liked that Dreiser took his time with the few months of Roberta’s pregnancy.  This is a long book and it covers Clyde’s entire life (short though it is).   But Dreiser intentionally slows down the pace once Roberta discovers she is pregnant and the novel begins its slow, inexorable way toward the terrible conclusion.   

As with most tragedies, I have a hard time relating to the tragic figure.   That seems right to me; tragic figures bring about their own demise through their own weakness, their own tragic flaw.  It is easy to be scornful of them.  I never really liked Hamlet.  Where Dreiser succeeds with Clyde is in showing how one bad decision leads to another bad decision.  The reader can be yelling “STOP!” but Clyde is on the path and will not be able to stop himself.

In some ways, although Roberta is the victim, I had an easier time relating to her as a tragic person which I’m not sure Dreiser intended.  She too was brought down by much of the same flaw that Clyde had:  she saw him as a path to upward mobility and she was not capable of standing firm against her own biological urges.   The real tragedy of Roberta is that she finally saw herself clear of him … and then discovered she was pregnant.  She could have made a better life for herself that was based on the reality of her situation  if this fling had just been a learning experience.  But the fling brought on the pregnancy which led to her death.   I liked that Dreiser had Clyde’s mother, near the end, think about the fact that Roberta was also to blame for the situation she and Clyde found herself in because she had free will and she could have chosen not to become involved with Clyde. She made choices along the way and many of them were bad choices.  Of course, she had no choice over her own demise.

As far as Dreiser’s actual writing style, I found it slow going.  In a way, it reminded me of Tolstoy.   The translators Pevear and Volokhonsky admitted that Tolstoy is known for having a “clunky” style and they didn’t try to smooth it out in their translations.  Dreiser’s style is clunky too.  And, like Tolstoy, he gets inside his characters’ heads and lets the reader in on the sometimes incredibly dull decision-making process whereby a character spends pages deciding on a course of action only to have another character show up and suggest something entirely different and the first character finds himself swept along in a direction he never intended.    But also,  like Tolstoy,  Dreiser finds the essential truth in his characters which makes them essentially timeless.  This novel may have been published in the 1920’s but the characters can be found today on the streets of any major city.

And like Tolstoy’s War and Peace the ending was just a little too drawn out for my taste.

I admit that I read the later portions that described Clyde’s  trial so fast as to be almost skimming.  I dislike most novels that describe trials.   In order to catch my interest they need to be told not from the point of view of any participant but from the view of an observer – as in To Kill a Mockingbird.   Everything in the trial needs to be new and not rehashed.    But that’s my own personal issue.  I imagine that when the novel was released the trial portion was seen as a sensational part of the novel.    The parts where Clyde is in the death house brought me back into the novel and I thought were rendered very well.

On the whole I’m happy I read this novel.  I can see why it, and not Sister Carrie, is held up as the Dreiser novel and why it is considered a classic.   But I liked Sister Carrie better.  In the same way that I liked Anna Karenina better than War and Peace even though I understand the importance of War and Peace. 

Another Look at To Kill a Mockingbird

Charles McNair, in Paste Magazine, recently asked whether To Kill a Mockingbird is too good. Is the success of To Kill a Mockingbird keeping other southern writers from writing about race relations in America?

I sometimes wonder if To Kill A Mockingbird states our racial situation so successfully…well that’s it—what more can be said? What writer wants to sit down and write a book about race that will never, ever be so celebrated?

I have no idea, not being a writer, much less a Southern Writer. My first thought was that surely others have successfully written novels about race in America since Harper Lee. And McNair addresses this:

Don’t get me wrong—we’ve had some great fiction about race. Toni Morrison’s Beloved, for instance. William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner. But it seems to me that race relations were, are and will be the great theme of Southern life. And with a triumph like To Kill A Mockingbird as the ultimate declarative statement on race, how easy is it for readers to simply shrug off newer, sharper and more provocative novels?

In other words, why should a modern writer write a newer, sharper, more provocative novel about race relations if it will simply be ignored? I don’t know – maybe because the novel is in them and they have to write it even if no one wants to read it? Again, the criticism seemed off base. If anything it might be better leveled at publishers who aren’t out there seeking (i.e. paying for) these types of novels and/or marketing them.

In fact, McNair’s ultimate question seems a question that should be put directly to publishers: “I’m not disrespecting Harper Lee’s great book. All I’m asking is this: Isn’t there room for other points of view—less comfortable, more challenging—in Southern fiction?”

I agree with him. I fully endorse the idea that novels with other points of view – uncomfortable, challenging points of view – need to be out there. Any writer who has it in him/her should let it out and write it. And publishers should be looking for these novels.

But let’s get back to To Kill a Mockingbird.

Is it too comfortable? Is it not challenging enough? By the standards of the year it was published? By today’s standards? McNair “suggests” that the novel has a “comfort level” that “allows certain readers” to resist “testing their attitudes about race”. He says:

I think too many Southerners wishfully identify with the goodness of Atticus Finch…and actually come to believe, somehow, that they were really like Atticus all along. The truth is that we weren’t—too many white Southern men and women simply sat rocking on the porch as changes came.

This is interesting and bears some thinking about.

Let me make a confession. I’ve always been a bit bored by discussions of Tom Robinson, Atticus Finch and the trial. It isn’t that I want to ignore the trial – it is the plot- turning, heart of the novel, after all, it cannot be ignored. But discussion of the injustice done to Tom Robinson seems too easy in 2009. There is no challenge to understand what Lee was saying about it. And she never made it difficult to understand the facts of what happened if a reader was willing to admit to them. This isn’t the problem in 2009 that it probably was in 1960. I can understand how discussion of this issue would have been novel and difficult back in 1960 but the issues and conclusions seem so self-evident in 2009 that the conversation mostly seems repetitive to me.

Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving

The first John Irving novel I tried to read was The World According to Garp.  I got to the point where someone (I don’t remember who) had an eye poked out and I stopped.   I didn’t try another John Irving novel for a long time, not until someone whose reading judgment I trust recommended A Prayer for Owen Meany.   I loved it.  (Someday I’m going to re-read it.)   A few years ago one of my reading groups chose A Widow for One Year as  the selection and I enjoyed it too.  I saw the movie Cider House Rules, but I never read the novel.   And that’s been about it for me as far as John Irving goes.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

I was prepared to dislike Wolf Hall, or at least be bored by it. Just between the two of us, Dorothy Dunnett ruined the 16th century for me. Oh sure, I pick up novels set during that time period, but I often end up putting them down before the end. And even if I finish them my conclusion is always: "That was just not as good as Dunnett".

Wolf Hall won the 2009 Mann Booker prize though so I thought maybe it was worth the risk. But I was doubtful. Does the world, I thought, really need yet another book about England in the 16th century? Does the world really need yet another novel involving Henry and Anne Boleyn? And even if the answer to both of those questions were "yes", I still wondered if the world needed a novel about, of all people, Thomas Cromwell?

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Towards the end of September I read this post by Matt Yglesias about his experience reading Infinite Jest this summer. His conclusion?

But in a fundamental sense it struck me as very unsatisfying. Not just in terms of the weird ending, but in terms of definitely not feeling like I got more out of reading it than I could have gotten out of reading three books that were one third the length. That in turn is really making me glad that I was made to read Anna Karenina and Moby Dick in high school. I really loved both those giant honking books, but does it really make sense for a busy person in the modern world who maybe doesn’t care to dedicate all that much time to classic novels to read them? Seems like it might make more sense to read some short Tolstoy like “Family Happiness” and “Hadji Murat” and then move on to other things.

Adding new possible ways to entertain ourselves naturally starts to squeeze out the viability of some old ways. And maybe the long novel is among the squeezed. Which seems in some ways regrettable (which I take it is part of the point of Infinite Jest) but at the same time to really be a feature of the world.

There was a time when I might have disputed this. After all, what difference is it if you read three 300 page novels or one 900 page novel - if you enjoy the story, or the characters or the style or something about it? The problem, it seemed to me, was the 900 page novel that you don't enjoy in any discernable way. But mostly I felt sympathy for young Matt because at the moment that I read those paragraphs I was, after enjoying the first 1000 pages of War and Peace, only 200 pages from the end but wallowing and stuck just as surely as the French army was wallowing and stuck in the Russian mud and snow. I was afraid that my ability to read long novels was suffering the same destruction as the French army. And I kept wondering why (why?!) I was insisting on finishing the damn thing.

Other Things I've Been Reading

Over the last couple of months I've read a few books that I haven't blogged about.  It isn't that I didn't enjoy them; I just didn't have much to say about them. 

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

In Robert Altman's 2001 award winning film Gosford Park, Altman and screenwriter Julian Fellowes open the story with a surprise.  While the credits unfurl, the audience is following the progress of Lady Trentham's car to Gosford Park.  We watch the car arrive at the great house; we watch the family come out to greet Lady Trentham at the door; we watch them welcome her to their home for the weekend.  But we do not follow Lady Trentham in through the front door.  Instead, we watch the butler tell Lady Trentham's new servant, Mary, to follow the car around to the back and we unexpectedly enter the house through the servants' entrance with Mary.  Once through the door we see the underground bowels of the house: the great vaulted kitchen, the gun room, the wash rooms.  We see hordes of servants racing frantically around preparing for the big weekend, doing all the hard work necessary to keep the house running smoothly and efficiently. 

Sarah Waters’ latest novel, The Little Stranger, opens with a scene that reminded me of the beginning of Gosford Park.  The narrator of the story, Dr. Faraday, is recalling the first time he saw Hundreds Hall, an estate in Warwickshire.  It was "the summer after the war", he was ten years old and the owners of Hundreds Hall were hosting Empire Day festivities for the locals.  Although he remembers his hosts, Colonel and Mrs. Ayres and their little six year old daughter Susan, what Dr. Faraday remembers most about that day is the house itself. 

(Spoilers below the fold.)

Re-Reading A Whistling Woman

"And that," said Agatha to the assembled listeners, "is the end of the story."
There was an appalled silence.
Leo said, "The end?"
"The end," said Agatha.

AS Byatt's novel, A Whistling Woman, picks up where her novel Babel Tower left off. Frederica Potter, now in legal possession of her son Leo after a bitter divorce trial, is still renting a garden flat from government bureaucrat and single mother Agatha. As the novel opens Agatha is still (still!) spinning the fantasy tale begun in Babel Tower for Leo and her daughter Saskia . But the audience for her weekly story session has expanded to include the two children from across the street as well as Frederica, Frederica's new lover John Ottokar, John's twin brother and Frederica's brother-in-law.

The opening chapter of A Whistling Woman is the final chapter of Agatha's fantasy tale and the adults are as appalled as the children at the way the story abruptly ends. As Byatt says: All these people were both shocked and affronted by Agatha's brutal exercise of narrative power." But Agatha is adamant that it is the end of the story. "That is where I always meant it to end, " she said.

This is, perhaps, a foreshadowing of the end of A Whistling Woman, the fourth and, apparently, the last in the quartet of "Frederica" novels written by Byatt. And just as Leo complains to Agatha, "That isn't an end. We don't know everything," we the Byatt readers don't know everything at the end of A Whistling Woman. But maybe that's ok because, as Frederica remarks, "What's a real end? ... The end is always the most unreal bit ..."

Literary Potato Pie

One of the few novels I finished when I was on vacation was The Guernsey Literary and Potato Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. I admit it: I resisted this book. Every time I saw it in a bookstore under signs saying that it was perfect (perfect!) for a book discussion group, I resisted it. Sometimes I just don't want to read what everyone else is reading.

Alexandria

Earlier this week I saw that it was the 1,928th anniversary of the day (September 14) that Domitian, the last member of the Flavian Dynasty, became Emperor of the Roman Empire. The Flavian Dynasty lasted not quite thirty years, beginning in A.D. 69 when the Roman Senate declared the soldier Vespasian emperor and ended with the assassination of Domitian, his son. The only other emperor in the dynasty was Vespasian's other son Titus.

Petty Details

Reaching into the bag of "Brit Lit" last July I was surprised to find a novel that took place in Canada.  Camilla Gibb was born in London but grew up in Toronto and still lives in Canada.  Her second novel, The Petty Details of So-and-So's Life, was published in 2002 and I'm sorry I missed it and didn't read it earlier.   

The story could have been very depressing.  Gibb creates a pair of siblings, Emma and Blue Taylor, and takes us through their early lives into young adulthood.  They are the children of dysfunctional (to say the least) parents.  Their father is a dreamer of dreams that never pan out - inventions that never get invented.  Their mother is ... depressed.  The children have only each other and develop a very close bond.  They communicate in their own language.  They even try to communicate without words.  But in some ways their bond is also dysfunctional because in many ways they don't understand each other and as they grow older they realize that they react to the earlier abuse by their father (and mother) in very different ways.

This could have been a very depressing novel but Gibb's witty writing relieves the grimness of the narrative.    For instance, when the family moves to Niagara Falls there is no room in the fully packed car for the children, so the mother puts the four and five year old children on a bus by themselves with a sign:  "Niagara Falls or Bust".  And they make it there safely.

The day that their father leaves the family and disappears is the day their lives diverge.  Blue's life becomes an ongoing search for his father.  Emma tries to live her life but realizes that she is a dreamer like her father.  She becomes an archaeology student and discovers that nobody wants to hear the big theory - in archaeology it is the petty details that matter. 

This is the story of two children who are too close to each other and who have to become separate.  In the end Blue makes a strange sacrifice that he thinks is to save his sister.  But far from seeming the pointless act that it, in fact, is, the reader can recognize it as an act of love.

Barbara Trapido

AndiF's bag of "Brit Lit" included two novels by Barbara Trapido:  The Travelling Hornplayer and Frankie & Stankie.  I had never read anything by Trapido before and, after reading the The Travelling Hornplayer,  I was happy to have another of her novels to start immediately.

The Travelling Hornplayer is an ensemble story but it revolves around a cast of characters that knew the deceased Lydia Dent who died, suddenly, as a teenage girl in London.   Her only sister Ellen Dent is profoundly changed by the death.   One of her college roommates, Stella, is the daughter of novelist Jonathan Goldman, outside of whose flat Lydia was killed.  But none of these characters seem to put the connection together, at least not at first.  

Private View

Private View by Jean McNeil is another book I pulled at random from AndiF's "Brit Lit" sack.  The protagonist is a woman named Alex who is living in a London loft with an artist named Conrad, although they are not "living together" in a relationship.  Alex was once an artist but she can no longer create.  McNeil tells the story mostly in linear form but with flashbacks at the end of each chapter to a traumatic incident that Alex experienced when traveling in Central America.  Alex's lack of creativity dates from the incident and, as a result of the incident, she has suffered some memory loss.

Time Keeps Slippin'

I didn't get much reading done on vacation but a few months ago AndiF lent me a sack of Brit Lit.  I intended to take it with me on vacation but actually ended up reading quite a few of the books before vacation time even arrived.  I just never got around to writing about it in the rush to get all my work finished so I could get out of town.

Falling, by Debbie Moon, is the story of Jude, a woman living in some future version of London, who is a "Retracer".  Through a freak of genetic code she is able to jump backwards in time to any point in her life and change things.  "Rarely enough to change history, but sometimes enough to shift the details of a conversation, change the routine of a working day."

Stone's Fall

Back in 2002, as the world was dealing with the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and there were rumors of retaliatory measures to be taken in Iraq and before news of Guantanamo hit the papers, I picked up a new novel by Iain Pears called The Dream of Scipio.

First the story.

I was familiar with Pears' work.  Readers will know that I love a good mystery series and Pears had, in the 1990's, written a series of mysteries involving an art dealer named Jonathan Argyll and a colleague who was a member of the Italian art theft squad.  They were fun, they were erudite and they were slightly more literary than the average mystery story .  Then in 2000 he had written his first "serious" novel, The Instance of the Fingerpost, a long novel told from multiple points of view set in the 1600's.  It was an unexpected success.  I read it but I don't remember much about it other than that it was long, must have taken a ton of research and it kept my attention.  So, when I picked up The Dream of Scipio I expected I might enjoy it.  I did not expect, however, to encounter a novel so suited to its times and so thought provoking.

A story involving three men living in three different periods (none of them the present time), The Dream of Scipio examined how otherwise good men responded, sometimes in bad ways, to the idea that civilization was falling apart and that there were people "out there" who were threatening a way of life.  It asked the reader to consider what "civilization" meant and whether it was reasonable to betray core values in the name of preserving civilization.  What, in the end, are you left with if you lose your soul or those most dear to you and yet save  "civilization"? 

As Pears said in a rare interview, the idea that there are barbarians at the gate can bring out the barbarian in otherwise civilized persons. It is not the outside barbarians who truly threaten a civilization. Civilizations crumble from within and only when they are weak enough can an outside force topple them. 

It seemed unlikely that Pears began to write a novel of the length and complexity of The Dream of Scipio after the September 11 attacks and manage to have it written, edited and published in just a few months, so I assumed he just had incredible good luck in choosing to write on this theme at exactly that time. 

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Iain Pears has more than simple good luck and is, in fact, prescient.  How else do I explain that his new novel, Stone's Fall, is a novel about financial crises that arrives in the midst of the greatest financial crisis we have seen since the 1930's?

Stone's Fall is a long book (about 600 pages) and I couldn't put it down.  I had to force myself not to read too late into the evening because I wanted it to have my full attention.  The story begins in the 1950's in Paris at the funeral of an elderly woman.  One of the funeral goers is told that a mysterious package is to be sent to him that has been held by a firm of London solicitors since the 1940's.  It was to be delivered only upon the death of the woman. 

The man, Matthew Braddick, is a retired radio newsman and the first part of the novel is his recollection of the year 1909 when he, a young newspaper reporter, is asked to search for a missing person who may or may not be alive and the clues to whose existence lie in some papers that have mysteriously disappeared.  The second part of the novel is the contents of the mysterious package delivered to Braddick in Paris, a memoir of Henry Cort that takes place in the year 1890 when he was beginning his life as a spy in the service of the British Foreign Office.  The third part of the novel consists of the mysterious papers that Braddick was originally looking for in the first part.  It is a memoir of John Stone recounting the year 1867 when he was a youngish, wealthy man trying to figure out what to do with his life.  He will eventually become (we have learned in the other two sections) a fabulously wealthy and influential businessman who controls most of the defense industry in Britain and eventually is knighted, becoming Lord Ravenscliff.

The person who connects all of these stories is John Stone's wife Elizabeth, Lady Ravenscliff.  It is she who commissions Matthew Braddick to discover the missing person, a child of John Stone's who is named in his will.  She is a key person in the early career of Henry Cort and of course she marries John Stone.  But although she draws all three parts of the novel together it would be, I think, a mistake to think that this is a novel about Elizabeth.  This is a novel that is, in part, about the effect that Elizabeth had on these three men and on their obsession (in their different ways) with her and how that affected their lives.

It is also a novel about the incestuous relationship between finance, politics and industry: between war and commerce where a war can make millionaires and the lack of a war can threaten ruin for companies that make the means of engaging in war; between politicians who are investors in companies that also need their political support; about how a financial crisis in one bank can threaten to bring down the entire financial markets and, with them, governments and empires; about how a good idea or invention is not enough without the financial wherewithal and the organization to get it into production.   All of these relationships can bring great benefit but they can also bring destruction.

On a personal level it is about human relationships and how they can become commodities and business arrangements too:  sex as a way to support oneself whether as a simple whore or a courtesan; persons who are forced into family businesses; marriages that are partnerships and those that aren't; money as a weapon and a tool.

This novel has so many pieces that I'm going to have to read it again, perhaps when I go on vacation, to truly appreciate how Pears constructed it.   But on top of all the themes that he has woven into the novel, he also tells a story that keeps the pages turning.  Part of me didn't want to reach the end and part of me wanted to get there to find out "all the answers". 

If there was one weakness in the novel I think it is Elizabeth, who is also the novel's greatest strength.  Pears simultaneously made her fascinating enough that the reader is swept along, wanting to know more about her, while at the same time he constructed her mostly of archetypes.   This is somewhat similar to what he did in The Dream of Scipio in which the three women play important roles in the lives of the three male characters and yet are also "types".   The difference I think is that Scipio was written in the third person and that lent a certain authority to the descriptions of the women characters.  I didn't feel that I knew everything about them but I felt that they were real and that I understood enough.

Stone's Fall is written by three (very) unreliable male narrators who notice only what they want to notice about Elizabeth.  She cannot be completely real to the reader because she is not, I think, completely real to Braddick or Cort who narrate most of her story.  They are besotted the way men become besotted (and maybe she wanted it that way) and are unable to think of her in an objective way.

In general I think this is not a bad thing to do, but she is so central to the story told by Braddick and Cort  that I think a reader can make the mistake of thinking the novel is about her.  When it is not.  And I admit that I was, at first, a little taken aback by the end which may be thought to explain certain things about her but doesn't really.  I won't give it away, but my immediate reaction was to wonder if Pears simply wanted a sensationalized ending to draw the story to a close.  But after a few moments I realized that of course the ending fit in perfectly with the entire theme of the novel and that if a reader hadn't understood the theme prior to that ending, the reader was going to be hit over the head with it so he didn't miss it.

At least that's what I think Pears intended.  On the other hand, after I wrote the above I finally read some of the reviews that I had been avoiding (I like to do that on books that I know I'm going to read so as not to read any spoilers) and found that not a soul wrote about the major themes of the novel and they all focused on the story of Elizabeth.   I find that odd.  But when Scipio came out I also found that not a single reviewer that I read wrote about the themes of that novel either and all focused solely on plot.  So maybe I'm just an odd reader of books.

In any event, I heartily recommend Stone's Fall to those who are looking for a novel of substance and who want food for thought.  I will be feasting on this novel for months as I think about it.

The Bean Trees

I wish someone would have told me that Barbara Kingsolver was born in Kentucky.  I would have read one of her novels sooner.  It's not that I've never wanted to read any of her novels, it's just that I always put it off.  I thought they would be well written but dense and erudite and, well, east coast. 

But she was born in Kentucky.  And in The Bean Trees you can tell. 

"How do," one of her characters says in greeting to another character.   Exactly how my great-aunt Mary (who was born in rural Kentucky) would say it.  And other phrases that I could hear rolling off the tongue of my rural Kentucky bred kin.  And the odd combination that her characters have of loving the state and being perfectly ready to leave it behind.  Just like my own grandma.

Kingsolver left Kentucky behind and now lives part time in Appalachia and part time in Tucson.  Most of this novel is set in Tucson.  I wondered why the characters weren't constantly complaining about the heat - until I realized it was set mostly during winter when, apparently, Tucson is a paradise.  It made me want to visit.  In the winter.

Published in 1998 The Bean Trees is Kingsolver's first novel and it seems both very timely and out-of-date.  The main character, Marietta Greer has moved away from rural Kentucky, where girls her age are expected to get pregnant and get married (most of the time in that order).  She doesn't want a baby, she wants a new life.  So she leaves and changes her name to Taylor and decides to drive until her car breaks down. 

She ends up in Tucson with a baby, a child given to her by a stranger as she drives through the lands of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma.   The little girl, whom Taylor christens Turtle, has been abused and Taylor doesn't know what to do except to keep her.   Needing a place to live she rents rooms from a woman whose husband has just left her.  The woman is also from Kentucky.  So, in a way, Kingsolver seems to say that no matter how far you travel you really can't leave your past behind or escape your future.

Part of the story involves Taylor's decision to help smuggle a couple from Guatamala out of Arizona.  The plight of undocumented aliens is very timely but I couldn't help but think that it is unlikely that Taylor would have been able to so easily have smuggled them out of Arizona in this day and age.  That's why I felt that the novel was out-of-date.  The militarization of immigration had not yet occurred when this novel was written.

What Kingsolver does best in this novel is give the reader a sense of what it is like to not belong and the intense desire to belong and feel safe.   This novel is filled with characters who are "other".   Taylor of course is new to Tucson but she never really felt she fit in with the people in Kentucky. Her new roommate Lou Ann Ruiz is also a newcomer to Tucson and must decide if she wants to stay in Tucson or follow her ex-husband on the rodeo circuit. Estevan and Esperenza are immigrants whose lives would be in danger if they were deported to Guatamala. 

This is also very much a novel about women and how they deal with situations that they find themselves in.  It includes how they deal with their children.  Lou Ann has a son, Esperenza had a daughter that was taken from her and Taylor has Turtle who the state is threatening to take from her.   It is also about how women can support one another and help make each others' lives better.

I picked this novel up at my local bookstore because it was on a shelf marked "summer reading list".  The books were on the summer reading list of the next door girls' high school and this was on the sophomore reading list.  I figured if sophomores were reading it, I should too. 

The week I read it I was riding public transportation to work for the first time in 20 years and it was a joy to have something good to read during the commute and not only at lunch.  I would read it on the light rail train in the morning and evening.  This was the first novel I've read in a long time that I would count the minutes until I could get back to it.  And I was sorry when I was finished.

Down the Garden Path

How can you resist a memoir that begins like this:

I bought my cottage by sending a wireless to Timbuctoo from the Mauretania, at midnight, with a fierce storm lashing the decks.

I couldn't.  But, then, I already knew what I was getting when I purchased Down the Garden Path by Beverly Nichols.  Years ago I had read his memoir trilogy in which he described his efforts to rehabilitate the house and gardens at Merry Hall:  Merry Hall, Laughter on the Stairs, and Sunlight on the Lawn.

I'm not a gardener but even I loved his accounts of gardening exploits and English country living in the years after World War II.  I was excited when I saw that my favorite little local bookstore carried the Merry Hall trilogy.  When I realized that they were carrying even more of Nichols' books I decided to treat myself to Down the Garden Path, his initial foray into garden writing. 

Published in 1932 it unexpectedly became a great hit.  Nichols was already an established writer who had a reputation throughout the 1920's as a partying playboy, friends with Noel Coward and Anita Loos. So it was somewhat of a surprise when he published a book about gardening.   He expected it would be mostly ignored, but it wasn't.  According to the new forward, written by Nichols' biographer Bryan Connon, The Gardening Club of America declared it "one of the most delectable and diverting garden books ever published."

Nichols has a wonderful way with words, although his turns of phrase are old fashioned early 20th Century phrases.  And of course he is describing another time, 1928-1931, a time when master-servant relationship existed, when people like Nichols had to deal with "the servant problem".   By the time Nichols wrote the Merry Hall books, World War II was over and upper class Britons were more or less resigned to the fact that life had changed.  (They didn't know how to move on to "post-servant"  phase, but they realized they were going to be servantless.)  But at the time this book was written the landed class was still in denial.

I'm not much of a gardener (ok I'm not at all a gardener) but even I could have a beautiful garden if I could employ ... a gardener.   Nichols has a gardener to do the heavy lifting and that leaves him time to putter in the garden.  And write books about it.  Which is marvelous for we readers.

I've already lent it to my best friend H who is the possessor of the complete set of Merry Hall books.  It probably will make the rounds of the book club too.

Cold Comfort Farm/Thursday Next: First Among Sequels

One of the problems with having a love of reading but no formal education in literature is not knowing how to classify novels within genres.  To the extent that we covered genre in my high school literature courses or my college freshman English courses (which I actually mostly took in high school), it was only in a cursory way.  So I tend to classify literature in a cursory way.

What I've found is that "real" English majors are always correcting me when I try to classify novels.  Cursory isn't good enough for them.  I understand that; it's how I feel about generalized discussions of the law.  But since, most of the time, the genre really isn't necessary for what I want to talk about when I talk about novels (and since the "correction" often takes the form of an extended lecture that forms a huge digression from the topic at hand) I tend to avoid mentioning genre.

But that's hard to do when talking about novels that fall into genres like, for instance, satire. 

I'm just going to admit right off the bat that I know next to nothing about satire as a genre.  I recognize that there are all kinds of genre classifications that may fall within satire or may well be slightly (or majorly) different from satire.   I've never figured out how those classifications work and, inevitably, whatever I decide to call something, I'm told it is WRONG! 

Maybe that's why I think I don't like satire.  I do think that I don't like satire.  I don't think I hate it.  But I do think I don't like it.

So with all those caveats ...

As I said the other day, I was not fond of Tom Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities.  I remember that, mostly, I was bored by it but I kept reading because "everyone" said it was so great.   It took me a while to figure out that it was supposed to be satire and that was partly because it didn't seem all that over-the-top to me, a girl from the midwest.  As far as I was concerned, people from New York really were like that and the things that happened to them really happen to people in New York.  Where was the satire?  Eventually I got it.  But I didn't like it.

My formal introduction to satire (wasn't everyone's?) was Jonathon Swift's A Modest Proposal.  But I had read Huckleberry Finn before that.  I liked Huck Finn. No one told me it was satire but I understood that Twain was playing with me.  On the other hand, I've never wanted to re-read Huck Finn.  I've never wanted to re-read A Modest Proposal.  I've never wanted to re-read anything satirical that I can think of.   The way I look at it, once you "get it" there isn't any point in reading it again.  And that's how I've always looked at satire - as something that is meant to convey a message (usually with blunt force) and once I get the message I can discard the medium.

I sometimes think that the reason I avoid satire is because I'd rather just "get it" by reading a book of non-fiction and really learning about the subject.  The kinds of satire that I like are the short humorous kind that make me laugh.  A Modest Proposal, for all it's cleverness, isn't going to make anyone guffaw.  The Onion, on the other hand, makes me laugh quite often.  But I wouldn't want to read a novel-length version of an Onion story. And is The Onion satire?  I think it is.  But it is also a parody. 

I like parody. And here we get into deep waters because I have no idea if parody is a sub-genre of satire or is it it's own genre or is a technique that is sometimes used in satire?  I'm sure someone will enlighten me.  

I think I like parody because the key to understanding and "getting" parody isn't knowing any fact about society in general (political or religious etc.) but knowing something about the works that are being parodied and what their strengths and weaknesses are.  The Onion is a parody of a newspaper.  It may satirize the news, but it only works because people are familiar with newspapers. The Daily Show  is wonderful because it is a parody of a news broadcast.  It uses that parody to satirize the political news of the day but it only works because people understand news broadcasts and their strengths and weaknesses.

Most parodies that I like have nothing to do with politics but are strictly parodying a particular type of work of literature or film or television.  For instance, I thought the film Galaxy Quest, a parody of the Star Trek franchise, was fabulously funny.   There are certain elements of parody in Buffy the Vampire Slayer that make the entire concept work.  As far as I'm concerned, a good parody is written by someone who loves the underlying work being parodied and is enjoyed most by people who love that underlying work too.  I think that's why I liked the film Australia but other people didn't.

That leads me to Cold Comfort Farm, which is a parody. (Is it also satire?  Google it and you will see it associated with satire.)  I read Cold Comfort Farm because a number of people recommended it.  It took me a while to realize it was a parody and not just some other form of 1930's comic novel (although I was fully on board with the fact of parody by the time that the protagonist got to the farm). 

Cold Comfort Farm is the story of Flora Poste ("Robert Poste's daughter") who is left an orphan after finishing an expensive education that prepared her for nothing.  She has not enough money to support herself so she decides to do what all orphans do in novels, go live with relatives.  She chooses some mysterious relatives who live at a place called Cold Comfort Farm and who owe her father some mysterious debt.  When she arrives she finds that she has stepped into a situation much like a 19th century novel not only in the living conditions but in the mindset of the inhabitants (or, apparently, much like early 20th century popular British fiction).  This pleases her because she can work to change the lives of the people for the better.  And she does.

I never read the popular British novels of the day that Gibbons was parodying, but I have read the Brontes and DH Lawrence and that was enough to "get it".   One of the interesting things to me was that Gibbons wrote the novel in the 1930's (obviously before World War II) and yet the story is set at a later date (the early 1950's?) while the life of the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm is right out of Lawrence or Bronte.  This gives the novel an unpredictable feel that is, I think, essential to keeping the reader turning the pages.  I kept being pulled into the 19th century aspects of Cold Comfort Farm only to be jerked away by the appearance of telephones and aeroplanes and chevy vans and "talkies". 

I think this is important because one of the reasons I don't go out of my way to read parodies is because I fear being bored.  If you are familiar with the underlying work that is being parodied then you essentially know what is going to happen.  Humor can only go so far in keeping my interest.  What I need is a "new" problem for the author to solve.  And in Cold Comfort Farm the problem that Gibbons set for herself was how to integrate this "modern" woman into a 19th century setting without destroying the subject that was being parodied and while still keeping the woman "modern". 

I think she succeeded in part by making Flora Poste (the heroine) not really very likeable.  I didn't become invested in Flora for a very long time.  In fact, at the beginning, I wondered how I was going to tolerate her long enough to follow her through a novel.  But Gibbons uses some of the characteristics of Flora that could be annoying (her self-assuredness, her insistence on having things her way, her refusal to listen to naysaying) as a counterpoint to the people at Cold Comfort Farm who are stuck in their 19th century life simply because they can't bring themselves to act to change their lives.

In 19th century and early 20th century novels the heroine who brings change to the people "set in their ways" doesn't do it through force of character.  Jane Eyre is constantly described as quiet and unassertive.  Mary in The Secret Garden gets nowhere when she is assertive in her temper tantrums, it is only when she becomes a "good child" that she is able to work change.

Flora has no interest in being like those kinds of heroines.  She is a "modern" woman. And that is what makes this an interesting parody.  She is, in some ways, a parody within a parody.

I admit that it took me about half of the novel to really begin enjoying it.  It was only when I saw that Flora really was going to follow through on her intention to force changes that I became interested in what was going to happen and how she was going to make it happen.  I feel that it is a novel that I will read again some day because I know that I missed a lot on first reading.  But when I put it down I didn't think much about it and I did not intend to even write about it.  (Partly because of the whole parody/satire connection /dichotomy.)

Then I picked up Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next: First Among Sequels.  As Fforde says, fiction is "strange, unpredictable and fun!" 

In this novel, there is an agency known as Jurisfiction that patrols BookWorld and keeps plots in order and stops rogue fictional characters from leaping from novel to novel or worse, leaping out into the real world (or Outland, as it is referred to).  As an Outlander, Thursday Next works with fictional characters (mostly from books that are seldom read anymore, because those characters have more free time to do other things).  They meet in locations that are "back story", for instance the ballroom of the Dashwood estate in Sense and Sensibility.   It is a difficult concept to explain but by this, his fourth book in the series, it is understood by his readers.

Think of books as you think of them when you read them - as a small universe that you enter and that really exists.  Or at least exists in the sense that a television set with actors playing the characters exists.  In Fforde's fiction a few chosen people really can enter into books and walk among the characters, as long as they stay in the back story so that the reader doesn't "see" them.

But a book in Bookworld doesn't have all the detail that readers imagine when they read a book.  As Thursday ponders:

Reading, I had learned, was as creative a process as writing, sometimes more so.  When we read of the dying rays of the setting sun or the boom and swish of the incoming tide, we should reserve as much praise for ourselves as for the author. After all, the reader is doing all the work -- the author might have died a long time ago.

In Bookworld, each book floats in the great Nothing in which text cannot exist.  But the books also exist in clumps (maybe like galaxies) that are composed of genres. (Groan.  Genre again) Characters have learned how to communicate and jump from novel to novel (except no one can get into Sherlock Holmes yet) and they have, collectively, formed their own type of government complete with a legislature and an enforcement branch.  Thursday and the fictional characters on her team do the monitoring as well as keeping the peace between genres.

For instance, in this novel one of the subplots involves a border dispute between the Racy Novel genre and its neighbors, Feminist and Ecclesiastical.  The senator for Racy Novel reveals they have developed a "dirty bomb", a "tightly packed mass of inappropriate plot devices, explicit suggestions and sexual scenes of an expressly gratuitous nature" and threatens to detonate it.  This is of great concern to the Feminist and Ecclesiastical genres. As Thursday  explains:

A well placed dirty bomb could scatter poorly described fornication all across drab theological debate or drop a wholly unwarranted scene of a sexually exploitive nature right into the middle of Mrs. Dalloway.

I can't really classify Fforde's novels.  They are fantasy.  They are comic.  They are mysteries.  Are they parodies?  Maybe Fforde tries to answer that in this novel.   

At one point Thursday is cast out of her own Thursday Next novel into the great Nothing.  Because she is not text she can survive where a fictional character cannot (that part of the novel is a graphic novel - no text, get it?) and she eventually manages to make her way to the next book ... Cold Comfort Farm.   (Where she incidentally discovers there really is something nasty in the woodshed.)

So Cold Comfort Farm and Thursday Next. Neighbors.  Linked by genre. At least in the mind of Jasper Fforde.   Is it because they are both in the parody genre?  Or is it because they parody multiple genres?  As I said, I avoid those discussions. :)

By the way Thursday Next was one of the books I was going to read this year in What's in a Name Challenge.  Two down.