A Review of Benjamin Lytal’s A Map of Tulsa (by Bethany)

Posted on May 7, 2013 by lfpbe

I acquired this book in a funny way. At the end of March, Jill and I spent a day in the quiet, upscale northern California town of Danville. We had lunch, browsed in a bookstore, and toured Tao House, the mountain retreat where Eugene O’Neill spent several years near the end of his life and wrote several of his most famous plays: Long Day’s Journey Into Night, The Iceman Cometh, A Moon for the Misbegotten, and others. I’m sure that one day soon one or the other of us (or both) will put together a blog post about this trip – if only to show you our photos of Eugene O’Neill’s pajamas and tell you about our eager-beaver tour guide, Tad.

Before our literary field trip, however, we spent time in a wonderful independent bookstore called Rakestraw Books. I had read several positive reviews of A Map of Tulsa, which had just been released the previous Tuesday. Earlier that week I asked for it in a Barnes and Noble and was told they didn’t have it in stock. I asked for it in Rakestraw Books, which looks like (and is) exactly the sort of place that would have the sort of books that Barnes and Noble doesn’t keep in stock, but I was told that they didn’t have it either. The person behind the counter – who was also the owner, I think – hesitated a minute and said, “I thought we did have that book – I know I’ve seen it somewhere,” but the computer said it wasn’t in, and computers don’t lie. Jill and I each bought a couple of books and were ready to go, but first we needed to use the bathroom.

(You’re surprised – I know. I’m sure it must seem to you that bookbloggers lead such glamorous lives and surely must never need to use the bathroom like ordinary mortals. You must think that when we need to eliminate waste products from our bodies, one of our servants just appears to do it for us. But alas, we poop and pee just like everyone else. You might as well know. We even use deodorant and, like, breath mints and stuff.)

Jill used the bathroom first, and while I was waiting for my turn my eyes scanned the books on a shelf that was located right outside of the bathroom, and they almost immediately landed on A Map of Tulsa. “Excuse me,” I said to the owner. “Remember that book I asked you about, but you said you didn’t have it? You actually do have it. It’s right here. Is it for sale?”

We exchanged a chuckle over the coincidence. “You can have it,” he said, handing the book to me. The books on the shelf near the bathroom were advance copies for reviewers and bookstore owners and librarians, and of course he received it for free and was not allowed to resell it. It doesn’t contain any of the usual information that appears on the title pages of books, and inside the front cover a letter from Alison Lorentzen, an editor at Penguin books, praises the novel hyperbolically and begs us to love it as much as Ms. Lorentzen does. She includes her phone number, too. Maybe I’ll call her someday and direct her to our blog. I’m sure she would enjoy Postcards from Purgatory as much as you all do.

This book is okay. I didn’t enjoy it as much as the reviews I read led me to believe I would. Its first-person protagonist is Jim Praley. In Part I of the novel, Jim is nineteen years old and home for the summer after his first year of college. In lieu of a summer job, he has assigned himself an ambitious reading list and a secondary project to fully embrace his hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma for the first time. As a child and teenager he was always focused on amassing a series of achievements with the goal of leaving Tulsa, and his plan to reconcile himself with his native city is the sort of half-artsy-half-cynical thing that precocious nineteen year-olds do, and it strikes me as consistent with Jim’s character.

Jim meets up with a high school classmate who takes him to a party at the home of another high school classmate, where they meet up with Adrienne Booker. Adrienne was in Jim’s high school class, but she dropped out before they graduated. Jim barely remembers her. She is an heiress to the Booker Petroleum fortune, and her aunt Lydie is one of the wealthiest and most powerful businesspeople in Tulsa. Adrienne is estranged from both of her parents and has only a civil relationship with her aunt, but she lives in a penthouse apartment at the top of the Booker Petroleum building and lives a rambling life as an artist, musician, and general angst factory. She and Jim begin a romance that involves spending time in her studio, where Jim pretentiously gives Adrienne art history lessons out of his college textbooks and halfheartedly scribbles poetry while she paints. They take a series of aimless walks and drives through Tulsa, attend parties, and experiment with drugs. Ho hum. If someone had offered to pay me a bunch of money to write the quintessential novel about the summer after a person’s first year of college, this is the novel I would have written. Except that I wouldn’t have set it in Tulsa, because even just thinking about Tulsa in the summer gives me heatstroke. I’ve been to Tulsa in the summer. No, thank you.

Don’t get me wrong – this novel is well written. In terms of its language and Jim’s identity as a narrator, this novel is an original, and I can’t think of any other books or authors from which it seems derivative. It also strikes me as emotionally honest, at least insofar as Jim is a pretentious nineteen year-old who is starting to suspect that maybe the process of understanding himself has to involve understanding his native city, but his sense of irony is directed so aggressively outward at the world that he fails to notice that the lens through which he chooses to view Tulsa – i.e. Adrienne – is such an anomalous lens that he will never succeed in coming to terms with Tulsa as long as he is experiencing Tulsa with her. He can, of course, learn more about himself through his romance with Adrienne, and he does. Overall, though, the characters and situations in this novel do not strike me as especially original. They are plausible, but they’re clichés. Real people can often seem like clichés, of course, but they’re not – not when you spend enough time getting to know them. One of the hardest jobs that the fiction writer has to do is to write characters that mimic the very human tendency to be almost clichés, and I don’t think Lytal really reaches that mark here.

Part II of this novel takes place five years after Part I. Jim has graduated from college and has a low-paying job at a prestigious magazine (which seems based on The New Yorker, where Lytal worked after his own college graduation). One day he receives an email from a high school listserv and learns that Adrienne was in a motorcycle accident and is in the ICU with a spinal fracture. He has lost touch with Adrienne, who returned his lengthy emails after he returned to college with one-word or one-sentence replies and soon stopped returning them at all, but on an impulse he races to the airport and buys a ticket to Tulsa. At the hospital he finds Adrienne’s aunt Lydie and estranged father, Rod, whom Jim has never met. Everyone is baffled to see Jim, who after all was a part of Adrienne’s life for only a couple of months. Jim’s parents have moved away from Tulsa by this point, so he is back in his home city for the first time since the summer he dated Adrienne. Jim roams the streets of Tulsa on foot and in his rental car, sits by Adrienne’s bedside for hours on end, reacquaints himself with some of Adrienne’s friends, and begins to court the idea of quitting his job in New York and moving back to Tulsa.

This novel is obviously supposed to be about the power – the almost gravitational pull – of home, and of course, this highly subjective feeling is hard to write about. Shortly before he is supposed to fly back to New York, Jim abruptly asks Lydie if she would hire him to work at Booker Petroleum. She is a little taken aback, but she is convinced by his explanation that this visit to Tulsa has made him aware of how profoundly he doesn’t belong in New York and how much he wants to return home. I find this kind of capricious relationship to one’s home city plausible and have experienced it myself – have been experiencing it myself, as a matter of fact, for my entire life. But while I was so ready to be convinced by Jim’s change of heart toward Tulsa, nothing that Lytal does on the page convinces me that his feelings are real. Depicting a spontaneous change of heart in a fiction character is very hard, of course – an author has to prepare the reader for it almost from page one, through a chain of actions and thoughts that seem unobtrusive when we encounter them for the first time but highly portentous on a second reading – and I don’t think Lytal succeeds at setting Jim up for this kind of transformation. I had to supply too much of the emotional connective tissue of Jim’s decision from my own experiences, and I shouldn’t have had to do that. This novel is about Jim, not about me (at least insofar as any book is not fundamentally about its reader as much as it is about its protagonist. As Tad the Tour Guide from the O’Neill house would say: Whoa. Deep.)

The end of this novel reminded me of a lesson I learned in the senior seminar in fiction writing that I took as an undergrad. The lesson came from an arrogant, obnoxious classmate – exactly the kind of person that I did NOT want to be learning life-changing lessons from, but whatever. Sometimes we have to take wisdom where we can find it. I was workshopping my third or fourth story of the semester, and this obnoxious jerk of a kid thought he had the measure of me (and, OK, he did). “Your endings are always beginnings,” he said. It took me a minute to figure out what he meant. I tended to end my stories either with nasty confrontations or with my protagonists making important decisions, and what my classmate meant was that my stories should have begun in the aftermath of these confrontations and decisions. Fiction about the consequences of our actions is more compelling than fiction about the prelude to these actions. I thought of this advice (which was absolutely, 100%, correct, and I became a better writer as a result of it) when I was reading the last twenty or thirty pages of A Map of Tulsa. What I thought, specifically, was that I want to read the book about the twenty-four year-old graduate of an elite east-coast college who quits his New York publishing job on a lark to move to Tulsa to work as the personal assistant (for that is the job that Lydie offers Jim) to the imperious oil-magnate aunt of his comatose ex-girlfriend. Think of the possibilities: what kind of bizarre tasks will Jim face as Lydie Booker’s personal assistant? How will Adrienne react when she comes out of her coma? Jim would, of course, have to immediately meet another woman to rival Adrienne as his love interest – and how would he choose between them? You see what I mean, right? We all live through periods in our lives when we embody various clichés, but these periods of our lives end, and it is in their aftermath that stories are born.

A Review of John Updike’s The Centaur (by Bethany)

Posted on April 8, 2013 by lfpbe

One might expect a novel like Updike’s The Centaur to be to a novelist what the Iran-Contra hearings were to Ronald Reagan: one last entertaining gasp of semi-lucidity in what will later be recognized as the early days of his unfortunate Alzheimer’s. In other words, this novel is kind of nuts. But it was written in 1962, when Updike was only fifty years old, and he went on to write another 23 novels, 15 collections of short stories, dozens of collections of poetry and essays, and the odd play here and there. So we’ll think of The Centaur as a playful experiment in what was really still the early stages of Updike’s remarkable career.

Here’s the premise: George Caldwell is a high school science teacher. At the same time, though, he is also Chiron, the “noblest centaur.” His son Peter is a fairly ordinary mid-century American high school kid interested in art and in his classmate Penny, but Peter is also Prometheus. The psoriasis that covers his back, chest, and arms in angry scabs prefigures the wounds Prometheus bears when he is chained to his rock and pecked at by birds for eternity. Caldwell’s lascivious and power-hungry boss, Zimmerman, is Zeus, and the girls’ gym teacher, Vera Hummel, is Aphrodite and is married to a local mechanic who stands in for Hephaestus (I was hoping that in creating the voluptuous Vera and her staid mechanic husband that Updike was going for a Great Gatsby reference, but that was before I realized JUST HOW MUCH Greek mythology was at work in this novel. And besides, Vera doesn’t die like Myrtle Wilson. She’s Aphrodite after all; she’s immortal). Updike includes an index of mythological references at the back of the book under this italicized heading: “Compiled at my wife’s suggestion. Chiron and Prometheus, being ubiquitous, are omitted. Not all characters have a stable referent; Diefendorf, for example, is now a centaur, now a merman, and sometimes even Hercules” (301). This explanation really made me sit up and pay attention: Diefendorf is a thoroughly minor and forgettable character in this novel, and if a character like Diefendorf can play three different mythological roles without my even noticing them, well sheesh. Just sheesh.

I am a B- student of Greek mythology. I studied it in elementary school and enjoyed it, and when I was teaching The Odyssey to ninth graders I needed to reacquaint myself with the basics, but I never really mastered all the familial relations between the various gods and goddesses and demigods and humans – the endless sagas of who raped whom while wearing what kind of disguise and that sort of thing. When I was teaching, there was usually a student or two in each class who either had been inundated with Greek mythology in middle school (middle schools seem to specialize in inundation: most 9^th graders come to high school having been inundated with something in middle school English: either Greek mythology or grammar or the writing of trite autobiographical poetry. Balance is not something that middle schools do well) or had gone through a phase at some point when they were obsessed with Greek mythology themselves. All I had to do was pose some basic general questions and then sit back while these expert students taught the class. Then I got to say “Good job!” so it looked as if I had the matter under control all along.

I responded to this novel the way I’ve responded to each of the six or so novels I’ve read by John Updike, which is to say that I found the first hundred or so pages to be absolutely captivating, and then I more or less lost interest without ever losing my admiration for what Updike was doing. In the first chapter, Caldwell is teaching astronomy to a rowdy class of misbehaving teenagers when one of his students shoots him in the ankle with an arrow. Caldwell is so stunned by the pain and by the audacity of his students that he leaves class and walks across the street to the shop of Hummel the mechanic, where Hummel uses his tools to remove the embedded arrow, urging Caldwell to go to Zimmerman and complain about the incident. Caldwell declines, citing the fact that Zimmerman is out to get him. Sure enough, when he returns to his class, Caldwell finds Zimmerman in the room, ready to reprimand Caldwell for leaving class. Zimmerman ends up deciding to sit in on the rest of class, during which the class is rambunctious and Caldwell is stressed and distracted. The day ends with a written reprimand from Caldwell, who assumes that Zimmerman is out to get him fired.

There are mythological parallels to everything that happens in this first chapter. Google them. Or better yet, find a sixth grader to explain them to you.

Updike is a master of detail. As a result, parts of this novel are painfully slow. Chapter 2 details Peter Caldwell’s struggle to get out of bed on a cold morning. Plenty of characterization happens here: Peter’s closeness with his mother and their Oedipal tendency to band together to ridicule George, his anxiety over his psoriasis, his obsession with art (studying it, not creating it), his determination to leave his small Pennsylvania town for the big city, and the physical strategies he uses to cope with rising from bed on a cold morning in an isolated rural house that lacks heat and indoor plumbing. While he is trying to summon to courage to throw off the covers, he overhears his parents talking about the fact that George is convinced that “something” is growing in his stomach. He thinks he has cancer or some other kind of serious illness, and he makes plans to go to the doctor that afternoon.

George Caldwell is a loving husband and father and is devoted to Peter, but he is so, so pathetic. Just as he is a total failure at controlling his students and refuses to complain even when a student shoots him with an arrow, his entire path through life is a passive one. He readily admits that he became a teacher because he knew he couldn’t have done anything else. He recognizes that he is not a very good teacher (although a lot of talk is thrown around about how beloved he is by his former students) and is a terrible coach of the school swim team. When his star swimmer, Diefendorf, loses a key race, Caldwell consoles him by saying, “If I was any kind of a coach, Diefy, you’d be king of the country; you’re a natural” (141). This is Caldwell’s general attitude toward Peter – he says and does whatever he can think of to elevate Peter while denigrating himself as a father. He also readily shares confidences with Peter about his professional failures, including his written reprimand from Zimmerman and the fact that he witnessed what he thinks was a romantic moment between Zimmerman and the president of the Parent-Teacher Association. Peter recognizes that his father is pathetic and inept but at the same time is overwhelmed by love for him and worry about whatever illness may be eating away at his body.

When Caldwell and Peter leave home in chapter 2, they end up being away from home for three days. First their car breaks down at night, after Caldwell’s medical appointment and his swim meet, and they stay in a terrible local hotel. Caldwell is able to use his status as a beloved local teacher to secure a room for them in spite of the fact that he can’t pay for it (he admits to Peter that he has only 22 cents in his bank account). Then, after a second day of school, more appointments (Caldwell needs to have a tooth extracted too; his body is literally rotting away), and a basketball game, it starts to snow and Caldwell isn’t able to drive his newly-repaired car up the steep dirt road that leads to their house, so they spend that night in the Hummels’ guest bed. Over the course of these three days, Peter becomes more and more consumed by worry for his father and by discomfort as he spends three days without bathing or changing his clothes, which makes his psoriasis worse. These days are marked by any number of encounters with friends, colleagues, medical professionals, and random strangers, all of whom draw out the same sorts of pathetic, self-deprecating remarks that have characterized George Caldwell since the beginning of the novel. George Caldwell is a sufferer. He endures. He’s not really a stoic, since he accepts and even wallows in his pain, but his outlook is a dark one nonetheless. Nothing bad that happens – not even being shot with an arrow by a student in the middle of class – really surprises him. On some level, he wants to die and almost welcomes the fact that his death might be upon him.

I had forgotten how bleak Updike can be. He is almost a modern-day Jonathan Swift in his disgust with the human body, which he portrays as very much the “dying animal” in which Yeats saw the soul imprisoned. All the details of this novel – the Caldwells’ freezing dog who isn’t allowed inside the house, the pain in George’s throbbing tooth, the horrible meanness and corruption of Zimmerman, the swim team’s pathetic defeat in a dingy YMCA pool – contribute to a picture of a mid-century America that is squalid and without hope: the opposite of the brightness with which the postwar years are usually portrayed. Even the town is described in prototypical Updikean terms like “The roofs seem greasily lustrous with sullen inner knowledge” (201). Just as Caldwell is dying (and he is; even though no diagnosis is ever reached, his obituary – which lists no cause of death – provides the full text of chapter 5), his world is dying too. In Greek mythology, there is often an affinity between individual gods and goddesses and the physical earth (Gaia and the land, Poseidon and the sea, etc.), and in this novel George Caldwell is part high-school teacher, part centaur, and part symbol of the decaying Depression-era landscape in which he lives.

I enjoyed this novel, but I don’t recommend it. Is that a weird thing to say? I appreciate the fact that what Updike is doing here is very unique. When you read a lot of novels, you become aware of how few of them are really unique, and you appreciate the ones that are when you discover them. At the same time, when I imagine myself recommending this novel, the first thing that happens is that most people would probably hate it. I think of the time my boss read a book that she thought I recommended (I didn’t) and accosted me in the parking lot at seven in the morning to scream at me for recommending a terrible book. I assume that if I recommend this book on the internet, I will be screamed at in a thousand cyber parking lots, and I don’t want to be screamed at. I guess I’m a little like George Caldwell: I just want to endure without conflict, even though I expect conflict to happen and will accept it without surprise when it arrives.

A Review of Diana Gabaldon’s An Echo in the Bone (by Bethany)

Posted on March 25, 2013 by lfpbe

This series is so exhausting. Its first four novels (Outlander, Dragonfly in Amber, Voyager, and Drums of Autumn) are relatively consistent in quality, and what I mean by that is that they are generally engaging and entertaining in spite of occasional dull stretches. Then The Fiery Cross is fifteen hundred pages of pure tedium. Then A Breath of Snow and Ashes is really quite good – as good as the first four and maybe even the best of the series except for Voyager. A Breath of Snow and Ashes was the first book in the series that I finished and immediately wanted to begin reading the next book. And then there was An Echo in the Bone – not quite as horrible as The Fiery Cross, but still disappointing and at times just riddled with what seem to me to be rookie storytelling mistakes. Like The Fiery Cross, this novel is dull up until its last hundred pages, at which point it becomes insanely action-packed. I’m so glad to be done with this book and with the series for a while, although I’m sure I’ll read the eighth and final book in the series when it comes out.

One of this novel’s few strengths is the fact that a lot changes in the lives of Jamie and Claire Fraser and their friends and family over its course. Brianna, Roger, and their children left the eighteenth century at the end of A Breath of Snow and Ashes, and portions of this novel concern their new life in the 1980’s. These sections are actually really compelling, and I wish they had made up more of the book. Brianna and Roger move back to Scotland and purchase Lallybroch, Jamie Fraser’s family estate, raising their children not far from the circle of standing stones that first launched Claire into the eighteenth century seven long novels ago. Soon after they move in, they discover a box of letters addressed to them from Jamie and Claire, and they read through these letters slowly, one at a time (as if anyone would ever do that – any real person in this situation would read all of the letters at once, right? Wouldn’t you?) to learn about what happened to their family after they returned to their own time. They deal with the challenges of readjusting to the twentieth century, as Roger reconsiders his call to the ministry and Brianna deals with gender discrimination at her new engineering job and Jem is punished for flaunting his repertoire of Gaelic curse words at his twentieth-century school. There’s more to say about Roger and Brianna’s storyline, which I expect will be featured more prominently in the next book, and I’ll return to them in a bit.

Back in the eighteenth century, the American Revolution is in full swing. Claire, Jamie, and Ian leave Fraser’s Ridge and catch a ship back to Scotland, but they are waylaid by a series of ridiculous incidents aboard a series of ships (I lost track of how many different shipwrecks and shipjackings and whatever the hell else happened during these chapters), and, long story short, they end up at Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York just before the battle of Saratoga. However, at least half of the novel doesn’t even deal with the Frasers and the MacKenzies at all, as Lord John Grey and William Ransom, Earl of Ellesmere have been given much more primacy in this novel than in the rest of the series. And here’s the deal: Lord John and William just aren’t very interesting. I very much enjoyed the lengthy backstory in Voyager that dealt with how Jamie Fraser and John Grey became friends, and the fact that Jamie has a secret illegitimate son who also happens to be the earl of Ellesmere and an officer in the British Army during the Revolutionary War is plenty interesting – for what it reveals about Jamie. For himself, though, William is dull as dirt. He is a non-character. He exists only to resemble Jamie and to give Jamie yet one more source of anguish in his life. He has no personality quirks, no excesses, and no vices. He’s a nice guy. At first it seemed as if Gabaldon was going for a comic effect by characterizing him as an inept and bumbling youth (as she did when she first introduced the teenaged Lord John back in Dragonfly in Amber), but she abandoned that strategy by page 200. And the thing is, creating a non-character is bad enough, but if you are going to create a character with absolutely no flaws or vices or quirks of any kind, what you really shouldn’t do is write a fifty-page scene in which that non-character is lost in a swamp and just wanders around for a really long time. But that is what Diana Gabaldon does. And I didn’t like it.

Gabaldon also seems to be developing a new thread concerning Claire’s ancestors, Fergus’ parentage, the French espionage underworld, and Lord John Grey. An individual named Percival Beauchamp appears early in the novel and makes overtures to Lord John, who knew the man by the name of Percy Wainwright in London several decades earlier. Wainwright has married into the Beauchamp family and is on an errand for his brother-in-law, who himself represents the Comte de St. Germain, whom readers might remember from Dragonfly in Amber. We know already that Claire’s maiden name was Beauchamp, and she knows that her ancestry is a mixture of French and English, so she begins to wonder if Beauchamp is an ancestor of hers (we know from Lord John that Beauchamp née Wainwright is a gay man, but Claire doesn’t know that, and the fact that he’s gay doesn’t preclude him from fathering children, of course). This mystery is never solved, and I suspect that it will play a role in the final book. We do learn that Fergus – whom Jamie found living in a whorehouse and working as a pickpocket back in Dragonfly in Amber – is actually the son of the Comte de St. Germain and one of the Beauchamp sisters, who was working as a prostitute when he was born but was actually of noble birth. And some noises are made about how Fergus stands to inherit a rather large chunk of upstate New York – but this plot point was left as well, to be developed further – I presume – in the series’ final installment.

Oh, and Benjamin Franklin is in this novel – naked. Benedict Arnold is in it too, but he has clothes on.

In the past, I’ve complained that Gabaldon wasn’t moving quickly enough in exploring and explaining how time travel works in the world of her novels. Well, in this novel, that complaint is out the window. In this novel, people are time traveling all over the place. First, we learn that Roger MacKenzie’s father likely time-traveled shortly before his death, when the plane he was flying during a World War II training mission was shot down over Northumberland. Then Brianna is inspecting some kind of cave-like thing for her new job as a cave inspector (I don’t think that’s really her title, but all the details of her job – excepting the fact that her co-workers are sexist pigs – are kept rather vague), when she starts to feel the weird feeling that she associates with going through the stones, and she thinks she just barely missed being sucked into another time. Then William Buccleigh MacKenzie – Roger’s ancestor, the one who caused Roger to be hanged back in The Fiery Cross (he survived the hanging, of course, but has a terrible scar and lost his once-beautiful singing voice) – turns up in the twentieth century to harass Brianna and Roger’s children. And then Jem is kidnapped, and his sister Mandy has a dream that he is being sucked into some “scweaming wocks” (here goes Gabaldon again with her appallingly overdone attempts to write the voices of children), and then Jem is held captive in the same cave that Brianna was inspecting, where she felt herself being sucked back in time, and then Brianna discovers that Roger’s study has been ransacked and that some of Claire and Jamie’s letters and other documents pertaining to time travel have been taken or rifled through, and then one of Brianna’s sleazy co-workers shows up and informs her that he has kidnapped Jem so that Jem can take him back in time to steal the gold that various characters have been hiding on various continents at various points in this series.

But for all that development of the time travel motif, not one word is ever said about what was supposedly a “movement” among twentieth-century Native Americans to go back in time and persuade Native Americans to ally themselves with the British rather than with the Americans in hope that the British will thwart the American Revolution and prevent the Americans from being able to exterminate the Native Americans as effectively as they in fact did. Remember Wendigo Donner from A Breath of Snow and Ashes? Remember Otter Tooth, whose skull Claire found back in Drums in Autumn and who appeared to Claire in a dream? Remember the implication, made more than once, that Monsieur Raymonde from Dragonfly in Amber is a time traveler and may have some connection to Otter Tooth and the other Native Americans? Well, none of this is ever mentioned. Gabaldon seems to be taking time travel and running with it in a completely different direction than the one she spent so much time preparing us for.

In spite of the fact that Gabaldon is known for ramping up the action of her books by about a thousand percent in their last thousand pages, most of her novels don’t really end with cliffhangers. This one, on the other hand, ends with about twelve cliffhangers. Nine year-old Jem is kidnapped and locked in a time-travel cave, waiting for his evil gold-hunting kidnapper to come back and take him to the eighteenth century. William Buccleigh MacKenzie is stuck in the twentieth century and may or may not be evil. There are various controversial love affairs popping up among the younger generation: Ian Murray and Rachel Hunter, Denzell Hunter and Dorothea Grey, Henry Grey and Mercy Woodcock, the African-American widow who nursed him after his multiple gunshot wounds (to give you a sense of how far this novel departs from its predecessors, all of these characters except Ian Murray are new in this novel. And we’re supposed to care about them. But we don’t, really).

Oh, and Jamie Fraser has just found out that Claire has had sex with Lord John Grey (WHAT?? you ask. I KNOW.) but has not reacted to it yet. This is the most exciting cliffhanger of all. I mean, considering how he reacted when Claire had sex with the King of France back in Dragonfly in Amber, we should expect some serious Scottish temper tantrums when the series resumes. Be ready.

As I look back over this review, I don’t think I’ve done the greatest job of explaining why this book is boring. It’s true that a lot of things happen (and there are even more plot points that I haven’t mentioned here), but as I’ve said before, the quality of this series seems to me to be directly related to how close the narration stays to Claire and how close the action stays to Claire and Jamie and their nuclear family. I really believe that Claire’s first person voice is the correct voice for this series, and while I suppose Gabaldon has to use the third person sometimes (when she tells us what’s going on with Brianna and Roger in the twentieth century, for example), the chapters upon chapters that focus on William and Lord John and the Hunter siblings and even Ian Murray are just not interesting. Gabaldon is a gifted storyteller, but there is something wrong with her instincts. She seems unable to discern the difference between chapters and scenes that are effective and those that are not – and I guess at this point her series is so popular and she has so many fans that will buy her books no matter what that her editors and publishers feel no need to reign her in. Hey, business is business, and I know that her books do sell well, but I find this narrative sloppiness to be so, so frustrating, because overall this is a series that could be much better than it is. I do feel invested in the characters and the story, and I will certainly read the last book when it’s published (and I have a feeling it’ll be pretty good – at least, it will if she really develops all the plot threads that she left dangling at the end of this book), but I also think I’ll feel pretty grateful that this whole long, meandering, inconsistent journey is over.

I Liked January So Much I Made It Last Through March: Finally Some Final Thoughts on The Portrait of a Lady (by Bethany)

Posted on March 23, 2013 by lfpbe

I finished The Portrait of a Lady on Tuesday, and when I did it occurred to me that I never really thought I would finish it at all. All this verbiage about the AP English challenge aside, there is a little voice inside me that generally has a pretty good measure of who I am and what I will actually do – it’s the same voice that knew when I was a little kid and said I wanted to be an astronaut that by thirty-seven I would most likely be an unemployed bookblogger who shares her scrambled eggs with the cat – and this little voice was absolutely shocked on Tuesday afternoon when, in a mostly-empty Starbucks in Redwood City, I finally conquered my high school nemesis. And you know what? I loved it – right up to and including its complicated, painful ending. And, as you might expect, I have quite a lot to say about it after so much silence.

Isabel Archer marries the wrong man, of course. She marries Gilbert Osmond, who at first seems appealing because he is unconventional: he is an American and an artist and allegedly very poor, although he is wealthy enough to sustain himself in relatively elegant surroundings in Italy and to educate his daughter in luxurious convents (I think Henry James’ definition of poverty is different from mine, but that’s a story for another day). More to the point, though, Isabel feels that in marrying Gilbert she is acting entirely on her own, doing what she wants to do and not what others think she should do – which would be to marry either boring American cotton-mill owner Caspar Goodwood or the wealthy aristocratic Lord Warburton, whose allegedly “radical” political ideas are always kept safely abstract. It also goes without saying that Isabel could easily have married her saintly, tubercular cousin Ralph Touchett, who loves her with a purity that is almost overdone. I’m not usually much of a sucker for deathbed scenes, especially nineteenth-century deathbed scenes, but Ralph’s death affected me. I kept writing SO SAD in the margins. SO SO SAD.

There’s so much to write about: The way Gilbert and Isabel’s wedding happens completely off-page between chapters 35 and 36 (the reader learns about it only because Madame Merle offhandedly mentions “Mrs. Osmond” to Edward Rosier, a knickknack collector who appears out of nowhere to court Gilbert’s daughter Pansy. It’s as if we’re expected to treat the wedding itself as – what? Boring? Irrelevant? An inevitability once the rituals of courtship and engagement are gotten through?) The way motherhood is treated in this novel as something almost poisonous, with all the mothers of the novel either dead, neglectful, or, in the case of Madame Merle, manipulative and shamed and hidden in the shadows of her daughter’s life. James mentions only in passing that Isabel herself had a baby boy shortly after her marriage and that he died when he was six months old – a tragedy that is never mentioned again but that was never far from my mind as I read about the pain and sorrow of Isabel’s marriage to Gilbert. The novel’s symmetry – the way it begins at Gardencourt when Daniel Touchett is dying and ends at Gardencourt when his son Ralph is dying, the great stasis of an English aristocratic estate spread out in all its splendor only to serve as a yardstick to measure everything that has happened to Isabel Archer over the course of the novel.

But what has happened to Isabel over the course of the novel? The title indicates that this novel is neither a tragedy (though it certainly sometimes resembles one) nor a comedy (in spite of the fact that every hundred pages or so Henrietta shows up and says something hilarious) but a “portrait,” and a portrait suggests stasis. To me in 2013, the word “lady” is a synonym (and sort of an obnoxious one) for “woman,” but I need to remind for myself that for Henry James and his readers a “lady” is a very specific thing, denoting social class and financial status and certain very firmly established pattern of behaviors. At the beginning of this novel, Isabel isn’t a lady yet: she’s a young woman from a respected but impecunious family who is still very much casting about for the role she will play in life. It is her semi-accidental encounters with the Touchett family (first Mrs. Touchett, who visits her in Albany, and later Ralph, who takes it upon himself to protect her and arranges for her significant inheritance) that set her on the path to becoming a “lady.” Part I of this novel is a story of growth, of forward momentum, of upward trajectory, and it shows signs of being a comedy in the manner of a Jane Austen novel. Part II, though, is definitely a portrait. Isabel has hardened and calcified and become a lady, and in spite of the fact that any number of people approach her, confront her about her unhappiness, and offer her a free ticket to a life when she can be happier, and she repeatedly rejects these offers. The message of most nineteenth-century novels seems to be that society is rigid; the message of this novel seems to be that sometimes individuals are even more rigid than the society that forms them. Ralph Touchett’s grief when he comes to understand how powerfully his generosity toward Isabel has hurt her is one of the reasons that his deathbed scene is SO SO SAD. And his grief is legitimate: he injected money into the life of someone who was healthy, active, courageous, curious, adventurous, and free, and his money led directly to her destruction. He is right to grieve, in spite of the fact that his intentions were perfectly good.

The central irony of this novel seems to be that the characters who seem to be the most unconventional and free (Madame Merle, Gilbert Osmond, Mrs. Touchett, Isabel) are actually the most hobbled and miserable, while the characters who have essentially followed all of the social rules and customs of their society (Caspar Goodwood, Lord Warburton, Ralph Touchett) are good, generous, strong, and at least somewhat capable of happiness. Henry James seems to be suggesting that open-mindedness and freedom of thought are healthy, but that freedom of behavior and a desire to flout convention are often dangerous. This novel seems to be saying that we have a choice: we can let social conventions make us miserable for a few years when we are young, or we can let our own mistakes make us miserable for the rest of our lives. I think I agree.

Of all the novels I have ever read, I think this one comes the closest to being a textbook for fiction writers. Even though this novel is long, Henry James is a very efficient writer. Every scene, every chapter, every passage of description has a purpose. At the end of chapter 41, I wrote in the margin, “GO is still very opaque. I don’t feel I understand his motives at all,” and then – what do you know? – chapter 42 is devoted entirely to the exploration and revelation of Gilbert Osmond’s motives. If I were teaching this novel (which I would only do if I were teaching at the college or graduate level – and even then only maybe), the essay assignment would be to analyze the significance of a single chapter. Each chapter in this novel has a clear purpose; nothing is superfluous. Yet, even though the structure of this novel is very transparent and obvious (though not “obvious” in a clunky or unpleasant way), the writing itself is extremely subtle. This novel is practically a textbook on how to imply things.

The relationship between Isabel and Pansy Osmond is one of the most fascinating elements of this novel. Pansy is passive, ethereal, loyal to her father, and entirely without an apparent will of her own. Isabel’s love for Pansy is genuine, I think, but it comes laced with a variety of ironies. Early in the novel, Isabel is the prototypical ingénue – marked by innocence, inexperience, and a sense of being untarnished by pain and experience. For a while, in the middle of the novel, I wondered at the motivations of someone like Osmond who was attracted to this kind of naïvete in a wife at the same time that he quite deliberately preserves the same quality in his daughter. Osmond seemed on some level to fetishize innocence. Later, James gives us a few passages that could be taken from the early chapters of The Age of Innocence, when Newland Archer thinks about the kind of wife he wants to marry. From James: “Her mind was to be his – attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer-park. He would rake the soil gently and water the flowers; he would weed the beds and gather the occasional nosegay. It would be a pretty piece of property for a proprietor already far-reaching. He didn’t wish her to be stupid. On the contrary, it was because she was clever that she pleased him. But he expected her intelligence to operate entirely in his favor” (481); and from Wharton: “She was straightforward, loyal and brave; she had a sense of humour (chiefly proved by her laughing at HIS jokes); and he suspected, in the depths of her innocently-gazing soul, a glow of feeling that it would be a joy to waken. But when he had gone the brief round of her he returned discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were only an artificial product. Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive guile. And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow” (chapter 6). These passages aren’t identical in spirit, but they both concern the same irony. Both Gilbert Osmond and Newland Archer (who live in very much the same Gilded Age milieu) want to be able to create their wives; their wives, on the other hand, end up stuck in the strange position of trying to preserve an artificial sense of innocence in order to please their husbands – and, of course, innocence that is artificial isn’t really innocence. In The Portrait of a Lady, this dynamic becomes all the more strange because of the presence of Pansy, whom Osmond literally locks away in a convent. For her part, Isabel is legitimately affectionate and kind toward Pansy, but she seems determined to view Pansy as a peer rather than a daughter. They are relatively close in age, of course, but Isabel’s determination to treat Pansy as a sister seems to have more to do with Isabel’s refusal to acknowledge the fact that she herself is no longer innocent – that in all the machinations she has to keep in place in order to live in her marriage to Osmond, Isabel has become crafty, manipulative, and adept at concealing her true thoughts.

The ending of this novel fascinates me. Caspar Goodwood – who has seemed like a bit of a caricature to me throughout the novel, and definitely not like someone worth considering as a worthy suitor for Isabel – reappears at Gardencourt a couple of weeks after Ralph Touchett’s funeral and confronts Isabel about how unhappy she is in her marriage. He points out that she has in effect already opened a rift between herself and Osmond in the act of going to England for the funeral against Osmond’s will, and he suggests that she might as well make that rift complete and leave for the United States with him. “Why shouldn’t we be happy – when it’s here before us, when it’s so easy? I’m yours forever – for ever and ever. Here I stand; I’m as firm as a rock. What have you to care about? You have no children; that perhaps would be an obstacle. As it is you’ve nothing to consider. You must save what you can of your life; you mustn’t lose it all simply because you’ve lost a part… You took the great step in coming away; the next is nothing; it’s the natural one. I swear as I stand here, that a woman deliberately made to suffer is justified in anything in life – in going down into the streets if that will help her! I know how you suffer, and that’s why I’m here. We can do absolutely anything we please; to whom under the sun do we owe anything? What is it that holds us, what is it that has the smallest right to interfere in such as question as this? … Were we born to rot in our misery – were we born to be afraid?” (634-5).

My margin note on this page says, “Here comes the twentieth century – in the surprising guise of Caspar Goodwood.”

This speech continues for a few more paragraphs, and there’s even what I’m pretty sure is a Paradise Lost reference – when Goodwood says, “The world’s all before us – and the world’s very big” in echo of the final lines of Milton’s epic. Goodwood is essentially asking Isabel to acknowledge that she has been booted from the Garden of Eden already as it is, so she might as well take advantage of the best part of the postlapsarian world, which is the freedom of choice. After this there are just a few paragraphs of the novel left, and Goodwood keeps pleading for a bit and gives Isabel a kiss that is “like white lightning” (635) (there’s even a reference to his “hard manhood” [636]). And then she gets up and leaves to go back to Gilbert Osmond, leaving Caspar bewildered in the garden, presumably to do something like go back to his cotton mill in America and invent boxer shorts.

Of course, none of this interested me when I was seventeen – although, like I wrote in my pre-reading notes, apparently I was more intrigued by this novel than I remember being back then. I know I didn’t make it all the way to the end, at least. I think on some level I was Isabel Archer when I was seventeen – SO determined to do things my own way and make my own mistakes – and maybe there is a force of some kind in us that prevents us from seeing our own doubles when we encounter them in literature. The shock would be too extreme. Even reading it now, as much as I enjoyed and appreciated it, I needed that six-week break that I took between Part I and Part II. I enjoyed each part while I was reading it, but even as I was enjoying it there was a force in this book that pushed me away, and I think this is something that great literature does to us in general.

Good books have an almost tidal pull, and reading them feels effortless. By “good books” think of The Kite Runner, The Help, A Prayer for Owen Meany, even To Kill a Mockingbird and A Separate Peace and those other books that people read in high school and continue to list as their favorites long after they have forgotten their particulars. When a teenager reads a good book, the book acts as an ambassador. Sure, the world is scary, these books say. All kinds of bad things can happen, but look – these characters have survived and you will too. Then the book fluffs up a bunch of pillows and puts on water for tea and bakes brownies from scratch.

Good books are, in other words, Oprah.

Great books, on the other hand, are trolls that guard bridges. They do sometimes pull us along, but they are oceans, not rivers, and their currents are complicated. They pull us in multiple directions at once, and sometimes they simply push us away. They are drill instructors in elite Special Forces units, and their job is to keep the weak and undisciplined and cowardly out of the inner circle. Great books spit in your face sometimes. They yell NO SOUP FOR YOU! and slam doors in your face and won’t let you join Fight Club until you’ve stood outside the house for three days and nights with no food or water or words of encouragement. When teenagers approach a great book, the book looks them up and down and shakes its head. No way, it says, chewing on an old toothpick or maybe a hank of Copenhagen. Don’t waste my time. Come back when you have some real problems, kid. Come back when you’ve SUFFERED.

I’m realizing that, for whatever you might think of the books we read in our A.P. English class, Fr. Murphy only exposed us to the greats. He had no time for books that were only good. And as a former teacher, I can say that putting together a syllabus like his took guts. Discussing literature with smart, motivated high school students is one of the greatest pleasures I have had in my life – but, I realize, I have always introduced great literature to my students in small, measured doses. A poem here, twenty pages of Thoreau there, Song of Solomon in April, when they’re rested after spring break. I cajole and wheedle and wisecrack my way through The Scarlet Letter, and mostly it works, and I do think that by the time they finish the novel, my students do feel that they came close to its greatness. But Fr. Murphy didn’t do any of that. He was an inspiring and eloquent lecturer, and we appreciated him for that at the time, but he didn’t try to make difficult literature any more palatable for us by digesting it for us or joking about it. He forced us to take it on its own terms, which is how all great literature should be taken. One of the lasting impressions that this A.P. Challenge has given me is that I can’t quite fathom how much Fr. Murphy trusted us, back then. I’ve never trusted my own students as much as he trusted us, I don’t think – and maybe I’m a little sorry for that.

The Portrait of a Lady is wise and beautiful and sad. It uses setting – stately Gardencourt and crumbling, decimated Rome – to better effect than any other novel I can think of. Its characters actively resist being pigeonholed for every single of its 637 pages, and at no time does it descend to the level of cliché. I don’t even want to think about the kind of life experience that gave Henry James the wisdom to write this novel. It also requires work from its reader, and it knows, I think, that almost everyone who picks it up will end up putting it down without finishing it. That takes guts too – for a novel to be what it is, even knowing that most readers will push it away and go read The Hunger Games instead. I’ll admit it – I’m kind of in awe of myself for having finished this book. I’m different now. I’m not sure how – but I am. And I like it over here, on this side of the divide.

A review of Jesse Browner’s Everything Happens Today (by Bethany)

Posted on March 18, 2013 by lfpbe

I’ll get right to the point: Jesse Browner’s Everything Happens Today has been, hands down, the absolute highlight of the month of March for me. Not that March of 2013 has been that great of a month for me: I didn’t win any major literary prizes or suddenly solve any of my medical problems, but I did eat some good sushi, and I did finally find a decent massage therapist west of the Mississippi, and nothing terrible has happened to my car in March, at least not yet. All of these things are good, but trust me – Everything Happens Today is better.

This novel’s protagonist is the thoroughly engaging seventeen year-old Wes – a high-achieving high school junior and aspiring novelist – and its action takes place over the course of a single Saturday. It begins when Wes walks sleeplessly home from a party through early-morning Manhattan streets, briefly encounters his father in the kitchen, slides silently past his invalid mother’s bedroom to avoid alerting her to his presence, takes a shower and sleeps for a few hours before waking up to face both the challenges of the day ahead and the consequences of the events of the previous day and night – events and challenges that are both monumental and ordinary and that are consistently very, very compelling. This novel is wonderfully written, and Wes is a fantastic protagonist; this is the finest contemporary novel that I’ve read in a long time.

Hours before the novel begins, Wes lost his virginity to the infamous sophomore vixen Lucy, in spite of the fact that the composed and dignified Delia, who is also Wes’ mentor in his forays into Buddhism, was present at the same party and has long been the love of Wes’ life. The details of how Wes meandered into his sexual intimacy with Lucy are revealed in pieces throughout the novel and involve the machinations of Wes’ friend James, an exchange of flirtatious text messages, and a series of framed pictures of Lucy’s family that Wes finds intriguing. On Saturday morning, he is consumed with guilt and dread as he imagines his next conversation with Delia, and he is also upset in a more existential way: this was his one change to lose his virginity, and he botched it. Wes is the type of person who worries about this sort of thing: he is an advanced literature student, and he has already started to do what most English majors eventually can’t stop themselves from doing: he sees his life as a series of literary tropes – metaphors and epiphanies, moments of foreshadowing and dramatic irony, characterization and symbolism and exposition and denouement, and he sees his previous night as a moment when his character was not so much revealed as destroyed.

In addition, Wes has an assignment looming over him as the weekend begins. Earlier that week, he had been assigned to choose any work of literature and write about the way the author “emphasize[s] [his] social and psychological themes as much through the use of language and narrative trope as they do through plot and characterization” (19). Never mind that this is exactly the kind of assignment that no high school English teacher would ever give in the 21^st century since it positively begs to be purloined off the internet, but never mind that. Wes did not plagiarize his essay; what he did instead was write it not about a novel or short story or play but about the U.S. Army’s M16 Operator’s Manual – a document that he had found recently during an unrelated internet search. “You thought I’d be so dazzled by your iconoclasm and wit that I wouldn’t notice that you’d barely gotten out of bed to write this” (19), his teacher says, confirming what Wes has already admitted to himself: “he also knew something about himself that his facility [as a writer] generally concealed from all but the most astute teacher – that he was a lazy and undisciplined thinker who too often relied on the shining surface of words to mask his disdain for academic pieties” (17). On Friday morning his teacher told him that he would have to rewrite the essay; by his own choice (probably perversely, as a way of thumbing his nose at his teacher in a somewhat less unacceptable way) he is planning to write about War and Peace, and he spends portions of Saturday flipping through Tolstoy’s novel (which he has read), considering its characters and themes (but not particularly considering its language, says the former English teacher reading the novel – but I’ll leave that to his teacher Mrs. Fielding to deal with), and engaging in various forms of essay-writing foreplay that I’m sure all of my readers remember from their student days.

The fact that Wes is contemplating War and Peace is only one way that this novel is very self-conscious in its allusions to other works of literature. Sometimes this kind of intertextuality can be a bad thing, but in this novel I think it works beautifully. For example, Wes’ relationship with his twelve year-old sister Nora is highly reminiscent of Holden Caulfield’s relationship with his sister Phoebe. Wes never thinks consciously of Holden and Phoebe – as far as I can remember, there are no references to The Catcher in the Rye on the page at all – but it’s hard for the reader to avoid making this connection when Browner gives us passages like this: “Wes couldn’t help himself. Every time he saw his sister he was filled with love for her. She was the most delightful, easy, dependable, kind, and intelligent child on the planet, and all he wanted to do was protect her from all this, have him call her ‘daddy-o’ forever and make sure that she didn’t grow up too fast or around the wrong sort of people. But then Wes remembered that he himself had become the wrong sort of person, precisely the kind of person that little sisters need protecting from, and maybe she needed protecting from him too” (10). Even the pace of the novel’s sometimes-frenetic syntax slows down here when Wes thinks about his sister, and he even sort of thinks about her in clichés, something he would be loath to do about any other topic. One of the saddest parts of the novel is the way that Wes does consistently let Nora down – he takes his mother’s side when she wrongly accuses Nora of forgetting to give her breakfast, and then he first takes Nora to a movie that he later realizes is inappropriate for her and then leaves the theatre to answer a text message only to become distracted and abandon Nora altogether – in spite of the fact that he has nothing but loving intentions toward her.

In addition to his own failures, Wes is also determined to protect Nora from the pain and corruption of their nuclear family, in which his mother wastes away in the late stages of M.S. in an upstairs bedroom while his father (a “failed novelist,” in Wes’ words) sleeps with his students in the separate in-law apartment in the basement. The scenes in which Wes visits his mother in his room, patiently helping her to the bathroom and watching the same episode of an insipid painting show over and over, are a wonderful counterpoint to the harder-edged Wes who contemplates sex and shame and failure and War and Peace and are a reminder of just how complicated this protagonist is. He even eventually introduces Lucy (his partner from the previous evening) to his mother – long story how that relationship evolves over the course of this eventful Saturday.

Any time a novel takes place over the course of a single day, I can’t help wondering if the author wants to draw parallels to Ulysses, and with all the allusions dancing all over the place in this novel, I was even more than usually on the alert for references to this novel. Certainly Wes is an “artist as a young man” in the manner of Stephen Dedalus; he is just as determined and stubborn and intense and confused as Stephen, and he is as hard on himself for his perceived failures as Joyce’s protagonist is. The tension between Wes and his father (and Wes’ clear contempt for his father, who for all his other failures is kind to Wes) resembles Stephen’s as well. But it wasn’t until Wes begins preparing sweetbreads for his mother’s dinner that I really began to sit up and pay attention. Here’s how it happens: Wes’ mother usually eats nothing but prepared cartons of rice pudding, but on this particular Saturday she is having one of her more lucid days, and she asks Wes for sweetbreads, confessing that she ordered them at a restaurant in Paris during her honeymoon, not knowing what they were, and she was horrified by them when they appeared and threw them away in her napkin when her husband went to the bathroom. She tells Wes that she wants to finally eat sweetbreads after failing to do so all those years ago, and Wes sees this as her way of trying to repair the rift in her marriage with Wes’ father. Wes dutifully goes to the butcher, buys a sweetbread (he doesn’t know what they are either, at first, and is horrified), and follows the complicated recipe for its preparation, a process that takes all day. By the time the sweetbread is ready, Wes’ mother has forgotten that she requested it and eats her rice pudding as usual, and Wes’ father and sister refuse to touch their portions. All of this works quite well in the novel and contributes to its pathos, but let’s face it: a novelist doesn’t just toss a sweetbread into a novel (especially a novel that takes place over the course of a single day) unless he is trying to suggest a parallel to Leopold Bloom, who famously cooks and eats kidneys in chapter four of Ulysses. I don’t mean to suggest that there is anything absolute about this parallel, and Everything Happens Today is a terrific novel in its own right even without the allusions, but there is something about the wandering quality of this novel – the way Wes is constantly acting with decision and purpose and yet never quite accomplishing what he sets out to do, as well as the centrality of New York as the novel’s stage (as a parallel to Dublin, of course, although the New York setting also suggests The Catcher in the Rye) and also the novel’s great sadness, the world-weariness that Wes feels in spite of (or even because of) his youth, the recognition that so many human endeavors are destined for failure – that feels like an intentional allusion to Joyce’s novel. Even Wes’ mother, languishing in bed, can be seen as a very ironic Molly Bloom: ill rather than sexual, a mother to the protagonist rather than a lover, but equally trapped in the prison of her own mind and equally a locus of confusion, hostility, and deep love for Wes as Molly is for Leopold.

As I’ve said already, this kind of heavy allusiveness could be a liability in a contemporary novel (and, for all its self-conscious placement of itself in the canon, this novel is also self-consciously contemporary, with tweets and Facebook posts and text messages and Google searches all very much part of its plot and texture), but in this case it isn’t. This is a novel about the way literature shapes us, so of course it is only right that we should see how literature has shaped this novel. Literature doesn’t shape everyone, of course, but it does tend to shape those of us who let it. The subject matter of this novel is not too different from the subject matter of this blog, come to think if it – it is about the way people who read (even people who read imperfectly and impatiently, like Wes and like me) sort of become books themselves, and after a while we begin to see our lives as equal parts War and Peace and The Great Gatsby, equal parts The Catcher in the Rye and Ulysses, equal parts Hamlet and The Odyssey, equal parts The Portrait of a Lady and the Outlander series.

I highly recommend this novel. Please, please read it. I haven’t felt this evangelical about a novel since We the Animals. I definitely haven’t delved into everything I wanted to say about it, but I want to know that other people are reading this book and thinking about it, and I want to talk about it soon with others who have read it.

***

Oh, and P.S. When I reviewed Wichita last summer, I spent a good bit of time on how poorly proofread it was. This novel is another Europa edition, and it is poorly proofread too. Its legion of word choice confusions (‘staunch’ and ‘stanch,’ for example), apostrophe errors, and other glitches is tremendously distracting and is an insult to the dignity of this novel. Europa Editions needs a new copy editor, STAT, and should be ashamed of itself.

A Review of Diana Gabaldon’s A Breath of Snow and Ashes (by Bethany)

Posted on March 4, 2013 by lfpbe

A Breath of Snow and Ashes is the sixth novel in Gabaldon’s Outlander series, and if you don’t know much about the series, you might want to read my reviews of Drums of Autumn and The Fiery Cross. In particular, the review of Drums of Autumn contains a lot of background information about the series and a quick summary of the first three novels.

This book is SO much better than The Fiery Cross. I enjoy this series (ridiculous and sleazy as it sometimes – no, often - is) and feel invested in it, but when I was reading The Fiery Cross I really lamented that something bad had happened to Gabaldon’s narrative judgment. That book was just unspeakably dull – and it was over a thousand pages long. I was so relieved to find Gabaldon back to her old self in A Breath of Snow and Ashes.

The central tension in this novel is the approach of January 21, 1775. When Claire Fraser was in the twentieth century at the beginning of Voyager (the third novel in this series), she did some research on her eighteenth-century husband Jamie Fraser’s past with the help of historian Roger MacKenzie, who later becomes her son-in-law, and Roger unearths a newspaper article stating that Jamie Fraser and his wife were killed in a house fire on January 21, 1775 and that they left no surviving children. When Claire returns to the eighteenth century, she shares this information with Jamie. They both fear this approach of this date – not only for themselves but for their daughter Brianna and her husband and son, since the article suggests that Brianna will die before this date – but Jamie, as always, remains confident that he can protect Claire and avert this fate.

This novel is full of fire. At its outset, bands of marauders are roaming North Carolina burning down houses. The reasons for these attacks aren’t always clear, but the people of the colony are certainly becoming more and more politically divided as the Revolutionary War approaches, and in some cases the fires seem politically motivated. In addition, Claire and Brianna are becoming more and more adventurous about trying to bring twentieth-century technology to Fraser’s Ridge, and every so often they get a shipment of raw phosphorous or oil of vitriol or some other ingredient for Claire’s homemade ether or Brianna’s homemade matches, and of course these items are flammable, and there’s a constant tension in this novel that the whole place (Claire and Jamie’s house, Brianna and Roger’s house, all of Fraser’s Ridge, all of North Carolina…) will soon go up in flames. I won’t tell you exactly what happens on the twenty-first of January; all I’ll say is that the predicted (or reported – the lines between journalism and prophecy are blurred thanks to all the time travel in these novels) fire both happens and doesn’t happen, and of course Claire and Jamie don’t die, silly, because there are still two more novels to go in the series. Brianna and Roger don’t die either. But you knew that.

One of the reasons I was so frustrated with The Fiery Cross was that it did so little to advance our understanding of how time travel works in Gabaldon’s world. This novel does a lot to rectify that problem. Over the course of the last two novels, Claire has become vaguely aware that at some point a Native American man from the twentieth century (called “Otter Tooth” for the fillings in his teeth) traveled to the eighteenth century and died there. Well, in this novel we meet one of Otter Tooth’s friends, Wendigo Donner. The moment at which Claire meets Donner and learns that he is from the twentieth century reflects Gabaldon at her best: this moment is dramatic, outlandish (no pun intended) and one hundred percent surprising. Here’s how it happens: Claire is in the middle of being gang raped (Gabaldon writes very flippantly about rape in many of these novels – ho hum, yes, there’s more rape going on – so I might as well do the same in my review, although I don’t mind telling you that I feel fairly strange about it), and after one of her assailants leaves, the next arrives, and he leans in as if he is about to begin raping her, but instead he whispers in her ear, “Does the name Ringo Starr mean anything to you?”

I mean, that’s great, right? Trashy as hell, but great – at least insofar as the word “great” can be used to describe a situation that involves gang rape. This moment is as electrifying as the moment in Outlander when Jamie is carrying Claire away from the scaffold where she was about to be burned as a witch and she looks back at her friend Geillis Duncan and sees that she bears a smallpox vaccination scar. It’s been a while – certainly not since Voyager – since Gabaldon surprised me in this way.

The more we learn about the mechanics of time travel, the clearer it is becoming that Gabaldon wants us to consider themes of predestination and fate. Predestination is part of this novel’s subject matter in part because Roger MacKenzie spends part of this novel preparing for his ordination as a Presbyterian minister, and he is expected to pledge his belief in the doctrine of predestination. This theme is important as Jamie and Claire prepare for the expected fire on January 21 as well – does the presence of the newspaper article in the twentieth century mean there is no way that they can prevent the fire from taking place? If the house catches on fire, can they at least save themselves? In Dragonfly in Amber, Claire and Jamie try to interfere with the actions of Prince Charles Stuart in order to prevent or at least mitigate the effects of the battle of Culloden and are totally ineffective – the battle is just as catastrophic as it was when Claire heard about it in the twentieth century. It does seem, though, as if there are small changes that Claire and her family can make from their vantage point as time travelers, and Gabaldon keeps this preoccupation with predestination at the forefront of Claire’s mind throughout the novel.

This novel is more contemplative than others in the series. The point of view sticks much closer to Claire than either of the last three novels, and I think this is a very good move on Gabaldon’s part. Jamie, Brianna, and Roger are still important characters, of course, and some chapters are told in the third person from their point of view, but these diversions are kept at a minimum. As she moves toward what might be the day of her death, Claire spends a lot of time looking back, and she contemplates many of the events of the earlier novels both in her thoughts and in her discussions with Jamie. I can’t tell you exactly why I enjoy this series and why I keep returning to it even after disappointments like The Fiery Cross, but I do think that both Claire and Jamie are fascinating characters and that their relationship – implausible and fantastical as it is, of course – is extremely well drawn. Jamie is both supremely competent at just about every task required of an eighteenth-century male and also inwardly wounded and vulnerable; Claire is smart, intuitive, assertive, and confident, but she also possesses the arrogance of the twentieth-century surgeon that she is: she thinks she should be able to solve every problem and manage every catastrophe, and she needs the eighteenth century to teach her that she too can be defeated. These characters complement and uplift and comfort each other beautifully, and their relationship is, in my opinion, Diana Gabaldon’s great gift to the world of escapist fiction.

Of course there is plenty of silliness in this novel too. The kidnapping and gang rape of Claire is impossible to take seriously; even though such an event would have been horrific if it had happened in real life, I mostly just snorted my way through it. The last hundred pages or so are devoted to the further adventures of Stephen Bonnet, who carries his amputated and bullet-holed testicle around with him in a glass jar and talks openly about his penis (named LeRoi) as if it were the first mate on his pirate ship. The Frasers’ servant Lizzie finds time between bouts of malarial fever to marry both Beardsley twins and bear a child by one or the other of them – no one involved knows which twin is truly the father – and set up house in this comfortable though bizarre threesome. Gabaldon continues her awkward attempts to write the voices of children, and I was just as happy when Fergus, Marsali, and their brood packed themselves off to the city to run a newspaper and the antics of lascivious six-year-old Germain became someone else’s problem. And then of course there are elderly Jocasta Cameron and Duncan Innes and their supposedly chaste marriage – which is chaste because both spouses are having hot and heavy affairs with the slaves.

But whatever. I hardly ever read books that are this silly, but I enjoyed this novel. I am both looking forward to the remaining two novels in the series and also sort of sad that the end of the series is in sight. This novel was just what I needed during a stressful couple of weeks in my life. I needed a book that could provide a true escape, and I most certainly found one.

A Review of Hanna Pylväinen’s We Sinners (by Bethany)

Posted on March 2, 2013 by lfpbe

I love it when novelists put their protagonists in really awkward, painful situations right from the start, and this novel scores quite high in that regard. Here’s how it begins: the Rovaniemi family – two parents and seven children – are moving into a new house, but they have to be out of their old house a month before their new house will be available. At the same time, their van breaks down. A cousin offers them the use of her apartment while she is out of town, but she instructs them to keep the children quiet and out of sight so the landlord doesn’t learn that they are there. It is the middle of the summer, and the entire family is hot, cramped, and miserable. They have no transportation and their budget is extremely tight. Then one of their children develops the chicken pox, and one by one all the children get sick. Exhausted and consumed with nursing the sick children, the Rovaniemi parents allow the healthy children to play outside quietly, with instructions to hide if they see the landlord. Soon, though, there is a commotion outside, and the family learns that Julia, who is about seven, was bitten by a dog. So much for keeping the children out of sight. But it gets worse: the dog belongs to the landlord. The situation is horribly awkward, because of course the landlord now knows the family is there, but of course he also can’t exactly kick them out since his dog has bitten one of their children. He sees that Julia receives medical care, and when he returns, he steps into the apartment to speak to the Rovaniemis briefly. Then, a week or two later, there is more commotion when the landlord’s dog starts barking uncontrollably from inside his apartment, and many of the other tenants are trying to find the landlord. Turns out that he has contracted the chicken pox after his contact with the Rovaniemis, and he is very sick with the more virulent adult form of the virus. He is rushed to the hospital, but very shortly thereafter he dies.

And all of this happens in just the first chapter of this novel.

As its first chapter indicates, this is a novel about awkwardness and closeness and guilt. It is a novel about the way we can hurt one another irreparably just by going about our daily lives with perfectly fine intentions, and this first chapter does a great job of preparing the reader for these themes. The first chapter is also quite a bit more engaging than the rest of the novel, which becomes predictable after a while (and after that it briefly becomes truly bizarre – but more on that later). But its language is clear and its pace is quick, and overall this is an enjoyable, fast-paced contemporary novel that is worth reading.

The Rovaniemis – who later have two more children, for a total of nine – are members of a Finnish fundamentalist Christian sect called Laestadianism (“a kind of Lutheranism where everyone is much more hung up on being Lutheran than all the other normal Lutherans” [154]) and live in twenty-first-century Michigan while keeping themselves largely separate from the rest of the twenty-first century, abjuring television, movies, alcohol, and “music with a beat” and socializing only with other members of their church. The tendency to have large families and to eschew any form of birth control is another quality that sets the Laestadians apart from their neighbors. In the novel’s second chapter, Warren Rovaniemi is chosen by his congregation as its new minister, in spite of his own hesitations about his ability to serve in this role – a role that he holds for the rest of the novel. Other than religion, the family’s defining characteristic is chaos. They can never really keep track of their children and possessions, and they live in a house where “a withered orange peel sat alongside a staling swimsuit in the same drawer as the old church songbooks” (125).

We Sinners is ALMOST a novel-in-stories, although with the exception of the first each chapter really doesn’t have enough structural integrity of its own to qualify as an independent story. In a way, I wish they did. The structure of this novel is a little baffling. It consists of eleven chapters, and for most of the novel it seems as if each chapter will be told from the third-person-limited point of view of a different member of the Rovaniemi family. The first chapter is told from the perspective of Brita, the family’s oldest daughter, and the second is told from the perspective of the patriarch, Warren. The novel seems to uphold this pattern until close to the end, when the ninth chapter is once again told from Brita’s perspective. This bothered me, although there’s really no reason that it should have. Once an author sets up a shifting point of view, she can shift back and forth between characters at will, I suppose, and of course there can be plenty of reasons to set up a pattern and then break it – but I still didn’t like it. I didn’t like knowing that there was at least one member of the Rovaniemi family who wasn’t going to get a chance to have the story told from his or her perspective, and – more so – I found myself becoming obsessed with the question of why Pylväinen felt that Brita needed a second chapter told from her point of view, and I really can’t think of a reason.

But then, when chapter eleven rolls around – only twenty pages from the end of the novel – something really weird happens. The perspective shifts back in time to 1847, and the story (not the Rovaniemis’ story, obviously) is told from the perspective of Gunnà, a woman in a reindeer-herding tribe in Finland who is married to a drunk. (WHAT, you ask? I KNOW! This is crazy, right?). Gunnà and her husband are contemporaries of Laestadius, a controversial minister among the nomadic herding tribes who, of course, is the founder of the movement of which the Rovaniemis are a member. Gunnà was undesirable as a bride for reasons I never quite understood, and the coarse, drunken pagan named Aslak is the only man who would marry her. She has a baby in horrible conditions – while her tribe is on the move following the migrating reindeer – and one morning she and Aslak wake up and the baby is dead. She blames Aslak for the death, thinking it likely that he rolled over and smothered the baby in his drunken sleep. Gunnà seeks comfort from Laestadius, who tells her stories of other women who suffered.

And that’s it – the novel ends there. Of course on some level it’s clear what Pylväinen is doing here: she presents her readers with the origins of Laestadianism, which, like most religions, attracted followers who wanted some kind of an explanation for why people suffer. The death of babies and children – much more common for most of human history than it is today – has always been harder to accept than other forms of suffering, presumably because children are so innocent. This final chapter also presents Laestadianism in its original social context, where it provided comfort for desperately poor people living tremendously harsh lives at the mercy of freezing temperatures. Twenty-first century Laestadians do not drink alcohol, refusing the ephemeral pleasure that comforted people like Aslak, and they also place great emphasis on bearing and raising lots of children. Their religion emphasizes community – the greatest sin a Rovaniemi child can commit is to leave the church – and a sense of community and of working for the common good is clearly necessary to the morale of a tribe of nomadic herders. Seeing the origins of Laestadianism helps reinforce the idea that the Rovaniemis and their fellow believers are truly out of context in twenty-first-century Michigan; they have held on desperately to a faith that they probably don’t need any more, given the circumstances of their lives.

The fact that I more or less understand the purpose of this final chapter does not stop me from finding it very, very strange. The first ten chapters of this compact novel are entirely ordinary – which is not to say that they are not well written and compelling; they are – and remind me of any number of contemporary novels that focus on family life. The novel I was most reminded of as I read was Justin Torres’ We The Animals (and it is only as I type this that I notice the similarities in the two titles – how interesting), but I could probably name another dozen that I’ve read in the last year that are part of this general subgenre. But the last chapter is something else entirely. Being something else entirely can be a good thing, of course, but in this case the effect of the last chapter is jarring and offputting, and I don’t like it.

What a strange journey this novel takes: from the young Rovaniemis as one unit, cramped and crowded into an apartment that is not theirs, suffering through the heat and illness and misery and guilt of the opening chapter; to the older, slightly more prosperous Rovaniemis of the novel’s middle chapters, which are largely devoted to the question of which of the adult children will stay in the church and which will leave (and, of course, to the many consequences of these decisions); and then, finally, to – um – nineteenth-century Lapland. It’s bizarre. It’s certainly unique. And, while I enjoyed the novel as a whole, it’s ultimately not effective, in my opinion.

Pre-Reading Notes on King Lear (by Bethany)

Posted on February 25, 2013 by lfpbe

We’ve already told you about the time the human cruelty in Light in August made Fr. Murphy throw up. Now I’m going to tell you about the time Fr. Murphy got angry because the human cruelty in King Lear DIDN’T make our class throw up. I can’t believe Jill didn’t tell this story. She said it was a Clockwork Orange story – but it’s not. It’s a King Lear story, and it’s been the first thing that came to mind for me whenever I’ve thought of this play ever since.

Most AP teachers that I’ve known in my teaching career make good use of the time after the AP test. They use it for oral reports or for teaching a short book or for covering topics that the rigidity of the AP curriculum hadn’t allowed them to discuss during the year. For some reason, though, when Jill and I were in high school, AP courses absolutely ground to a halt after the AP tests, and every teacher just showed movies.

I kind of hated watching movies in class in high school. For one thing, the experience was too passive. I functioned on about four hours of sleep at all times back then, and if the level of responsiveness that was required of me was eased, I had to struggle to stay awake. I was good at keeping up the frenetic pace of school, and of course I enjoyed vacations and breaks, but it made me uneasy to combine the two. If I was at school, I didn’t want to be sitting back and staring at a screen. It didn’t help that I went to elementary school during the Golden Age of the Filmstrip; I think on some level I associated the presence of screens in classrooms with that condescending filmstrip narrator voice. Did you ever notice that it was always the same voice narrating those things? And you could just tell that the voice thought that all children were very, very stupid. I hated the filmstrip voice.

I took five AP courses my senior year in high school, and that is how I ended up spending the most impatient weeks of my life – the weeks leading up to my high school graduation - watching five different movies. Some were loosely relevant to the course material – in Government we watched All the President’s Men, I think – and others were just silly (The Princess Bride in AP Physics). Fr. Murphy’s contribution to this little film festival was to show two different movie versions of King Lear, a play that we had not read during his course. He told us that reading the play was optional, which meant that I bought a copy and carted it around with me so it would look as if I was reading it, which is also what I did with books that were mandatory.

I didn’t pay attention to the movie at all. I remember that my mind was somewhere far, far away when all of a sudden Fr. Murphy was turning the VCR off and giving the class a very dirty look and saying something like “We know we must live in terrifying times when the young can look on such depravity with such composed impassivity.” I don’t at all pretend to be quoting him verbatim here, but this is the sort of thing he probably said. There is a line coming up that I do know for sure I can quote word for word, and I’ll tell you when we get there. It turned out that the scene we were watching was the one in which Gloucester gouges Cornwall’s eye out with the toe of his boot. And Fr. Murphy was railing on and on about the callousness of the young and what have you.

At some point, someone – and I have a very strong suspicion that it was me – said, “Fr. Murphy, we are watching movies all day long. They all start to run together after while. Two periods ago, in psychology, we were watching A Clockwork Orange. How can you expect us to – ”

At this point Fr. Murphy crumpled. He brought his hands up to his face and almost looked as if he would curl up in the fetal position. “Oh, that movie!” he said. “That terrible movie!” (These are the lines I remember verbatim.) “They’re showing you that terrible movie. Oh. Well in that case, you’re right. Never mind.”

And then he pressed PLAY on the VCR and we resumed our glassy-eyed acceptance of human cruelty.

As it happens, I don’t remember much about A Clockwork Orange either – just Malcolm McDowell prancing around with a big dildo and saying “Ludwig Van!” a lot, and then being strapped into some contraption that held his eyelids open and forced to watch violent movies, which, come to think of it, was a lot like what was happening to us during the disorienting final weeks of our otherwise-rigorous high school education.

Fr. Murphy was right of course, as he usually was. The eye-gouging scene in King Lear is absolutely terrible. The way I remember it is that Cornwall is on the ground, already defeated, and Gloucester – the winner of the battle – comes along and grinds out his fallen enemy’s eye with his boot as if it were a cigarette butt, taking away the man’s dignity as well as his sight. It’s awful. Thinking about it now, my first question is whether this scene is Shakespeare’s invention or whether it was part of his source material for the play. It is common knowledge that Shakespeare usually recycled the plots of earlier plays or stories; he was an innovator of language and of character, but he was not an innovator of narration. He did sometimes insert his own details into the plots he borrowed, and I am curious to know whether the eye gouging is one of them. It seems as if it should be.

For years, thanks to Fr. Murphy (and, I guess, thanks to The Clockwork Orange too), this scene was the first and only thing that I remembered from this play, with the exception of the fact that there is a character whose name is “Fool.” And the memory was powerful, even if it didn’t affect me much at the time. When I read the play again in graduate school, I was struck by how real it was. This play very much grasps the great horrors of being a member of a family. Shakespeare explores these same horrors elsewhere, of course – in Hamlet and in Henry IV, Parts I and II, to name just a couple – but I think King Lear might be his best depiction of the ways that human beings treat the people to whom they are closest. I remember a phone conversation with my friend Mary during my grad school years. I don’t remember if we were talking about her family or about mine – it could easily have been either – but one way or another one of us was relaying whatever frustrating nastiness was going on among the females in her family, and at some point the one who was listening interrupted to say, “You know what this is? This is King Lear. This is Goneril and Regan all over again.” At which the other one said, “Oh, my God. You’re right. You’re so right. How did I miss it?”

I also remember that conversation as the first time I ever wondered out loud (and, as far as I know, the first time I ever consciously thought) how people who don’t read ever manage to live their lives. I still don’t understand. The world must be a constant barrage of surprises for these people. How do people learn to die without King Lear? How do they understand the behavior of their nasty relatives? I guess they use Hallmark cards and maybe song lyrics, and those stupid cartoons that people are always sharing on Facebook, the ones where women in vintage clothing say snarky things about men and housework and alcohol.

It occurs to me that in reading King Lear I will be breaking a vow I made to myself a couple of years ago. After my mother died of Alzheimer’s in 2010, I promised myself that I would never read a book about dementia. It wasn’t a vow so much as a visceral state, really: I just found that when I browsed in bookstores and picked up a book to read its jacket, the word “Alzheimer’s” just acted on me like the drugs they gave the Malcolm McDowell character in A Clockwork Orange, and I almost retched. And I am aware that this play may affect me this way as well, because I think that among other things King Lear is very much a play about dementia, especially during Lear’s period of wandering with his Fool. There were lots of moments when my mom was dying when I thought that dementia was just another form of sanity – and maybe even an elevated one, a form of sanity that I couldn’t understand because I wasn’t there yet, in which emotion and memory and intuition take over the roles once played by trustworthy senses and by facts and reason and logic. I expect that I’ll see some of this quality in Lear’s wanderings, and I both look forward to this scene and dread it at the same time. To be honest, other than some general impressions, the only specific detail that I remember from this scene is the iambic pentameter line that is begun by the Fool and completed by Lear saying “No, no, no, no, no!”

It seems to me that of all of Shakespeare’s plays, King Lear is the one that most reminds me of the ancient Greek idea that theatre (and specifically tragedy) is intended to be a public means of catharsis and expiation. We bring our private struggles and private griefs to a theatre, where we sit in a densely-packed area with a lot of other people – mostly strangers – and see our own failures and sins and miseries played out by actors – who are themselves just vessels for the words of playwrights – and somehow we move forward in the acting out of our own emotions and struggles in ways that we would not be able to do in our homes, with our own family members. I don’t know – I’m not an expert on this stuff. But I don’t think I’m wrong that there is something magically real about King Lear – something that, yes, should have made me writhe with terror when I was eighteen, but that didn’t, of course.

Our One Hundredth Review, NOT in Solitude

Posted on February 21, 2013 by lfpbe

When I (Bethany) was a kid – say about six, seven, and eight years old – and would visit a friend or invite a friend over to play at my house (in an arrangement that Americans had thankfully not yet started to call a “playdate”), I remember that my friends and I would often spend most of our time DECIDING what to play. This was the age of the toy entourage; everywhere I went I was trailed by dolls and doll clothes and art supplies and plastic carrying cases full of crap. A typical get-together with a friend looked like this: 1) we were overwhelmingly happy to see each other, and there was shrieking and jumping around, 2) we identified a play area – a bedroom or playroom or living room, 3) we unloaded all the plastic crap into a pile on the floor, mixing the host’s possessions and the guest’s possessions willy-nilly, ensuring that clean-up would be as chaotic, time-consuming, and tearful a process as possible, 4) we began divvying up the dolls or horses or whatever other toys between us, conducting long debates about who would use which item, and which doll or other lump of plastic would “be the mother” (there always had to be a mother), trading and negotiating and bartering in a process that resembles nothing as much as the NFL draft, 5) we painstakingly laid out the play area into various territories, planning out rooms, houses, swimming pools, stables, and that sort of thing, and then 6) the guest’s parent would arrive to pick her up. And then every time – every single time – we would throw fits, complaining that we didn’t even get a chance to play and life was so, so unfair.

Jill and I didn’t know each other yet in those days – we didn’t meet until we were sophomores in high school – yet our joint review of One Hundred Years of Solitude bears a fairly close resemblance to these predictable play sessions. We planned it out weeks in advance and were excited about it. We had to reschedule our planned writing time at least once – my fault, I think – and when the time came to sit down and work, I still had a few more pages to read. Our plan was to discuss the book in a free-form manner, in hope that brilliance would emerge. This is our one hundredth review, after all, and brilliance seemed like an essential ingredient. What we ended up doing can best be described as talking about talking about One Hundred Years of Solitude. We generated a lot of cool ideas and said, “Let’s talk about this!” but then we moved right along to other things, like manna from heaven and substitute teachers from high school who just weren’t up to snuff.

The end result is below. Obviously we didn’t accomplish anything, although we enjoyed tossing some ideas around. This dialogue is edited a little bit for the sake of coherence, but mostly this is what we would sound like if you invited Jill and me over to your house for dinner and we ended up ignoring you and talking to each other about books the whole time. Which we probably wouldn’t do. But we might.

BE: I still have 11 pages to go… if you want, you can start with kind of an opening statement with an introduction to what we’re doing and some general thoughts, and I’ll join in as soon as I’m done…

JMH: Okay, here goes. In honor of our one-hundredth book review on Postcards from Purgatory, we decided it would be fun to read a book individually and then jointly write a review. We hear we are pretty entertaining when we dialogue, or at least we think so. The book we decided on was Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The one hundred in the title made it an obvious choice and the ability to riff on the title of the book with the title of our review was also appealing.

Bethany did a bit of an intro to her thought on this book on this week’s (Editor’s Note: This was about 3-4 weeks ago now) Yarn Along post. So here are my introductory thoughts. I recently made a shelf on Goodreads titled “books I really should’ve read by now,” and this book was one of the first ones I put on it. I’ve loved magical realism for years and years, since we read Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits in AP English. That book also began my love affair with Latin American literature. As such, it comes as a surprise to most people that I had never actually read One Hundred Years of Solitude. I’ll tell you why. I bought it at Green Apple Books sometime in the mid 1990′s but the only copy I could find was a pocket book with an ugly cover and very yellowed pages. I started it once, but couldn’t get past the aesthetics of my copy. When Bethany and I decided to do this project, I actually went out and bought a new used copy in the trade paperback format. This was also a bit tricky, because OHYOS was an Oprah’s Book Club book a while back, and I had to avoid copies with that horrible giant “O” sticker on them.

This book is the story of the Buendía family of Macondo, in an unnamed Latin American country, though we can assume it’s García Márquez’s homeland of Colombia, in an indeterminate time frame. Okay, it’s one hundred years in the life of the Buendía family, but it’s not clear when the hundred years begins or ends. This lack of determinate setting is one of the few things about magical realism that bothers me. I like to know the when and the where of things. I also enjoy knowing ages of characters. The ages of the characters in this book were generally pretty vague as well, until they got downright ridiculous. I mean, come on. Úrsula was supposedly one hundred and forty five when she died. That’s just silly.

BE: I’m done! I just have to go to the bathroom really quickly and then we can start. (should we include this part on the blog?)

JMH: Yes! We have to talk about potty breaks.

Correction of Úrsula’s age: she is supposedly between one hundred fifteen and one hundred twenty-two when she dies.

I swear someone was one hundred forty five….

BE: Pilar Ternera was 145.

JMH: And that is also ridiculous.

BE: This provides a good introduction to the point I wanted to begin with. Even though I do want to get into the details of the magic realism, I wanted to start with the fact that for me I was struck by how much this novel reminded me, in its language and its characters and its plot, of the Old Testament. Characters living to ridiculous ages is one example.

JMH: I haven’t read the Old Testament in a long time, so you’re going to have to elaborate more.

BE: There is also something very Genesis-like in the opening of the novel, when “the world was so recent that many things lacked names,” and there are babies that supposedly appear in baskets like Moses and all kinds of events that seem like versions of the Biblical plagues.

BE: The main purpose of the novel, though, other than to be beautiful and fascinating and introduce the world to a new form of storytelling (all of which it does beautifully) is to trace the lineage of the Buendía family down to the arrival of a new kind of creature (the baby with the tail of a pig), which may or may not be a new species (I believe it is referred to as a new “race”), while the purpose of the Old Testament is to trace the lineage of the ancient Hebrews through Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph and so forth down to King David, and if one’s perspective is Christian, the whole purpose of all THAT is to demonstrate how special the lineage of King David is because his is the lineage of Jesus.

JMH: It’s interesting that the baby that appears in the basket here, Aureliano (MeMe and Mauricio Babilonia’s son), was the end of the family, not the savior of the race like Moses was.

BE: Right – although Aureliano is the one who finally deciphers the parchments that reveal the secrets of his family, so if you think of knowledge as a form of salvation, then he does provide a sort of ironic salvation for his family.

The baby with the tail of a pig sounds horrible to us, of course, but like Jesus his birth was foretold for generations.

Oh! And also… there is a ton of crucifixion imagery surrounding the time when Colonel Aureliano Buendía faced the firing squad (wrong Testament, I know, but bear with me)

I was just surprised because I was expecting to see so much Faulknerian influence (as GGM himself has said that he couldn’t have written the book without Faulkner), and I did see some, but the primary influence I saw was Biblical, as if GGM was trying to rewrite the creation myth and the foundation myth of “his” people – who, of course are both Christian (his education was Christian) and pre-Christian, as he was raised partially by his grandparents who still held on to some pre-Columbian traditions.

JMH: But the new creature ends up being covered with ants and dragged away by the ants. Dead. Right?

BE: Yes, the ants carry him away.

JMH: The last few pages of this book got a bit weird. Do you think that it was a nod to this book on Allende’s part when Clara the Clairvoyant in The House of the Spirits refused to name any of her children after anyone else, because it made confusion in her notebooks that bore witness to life? All the Aurelianos and Arcadios got more than a bit confusing. I was glad for the family tree in the front.

BE: The confusion in the naming in this novel drives me nuts, and I do think the Allende reference is probably intentional. But I also think GGM does this on purpose to show how the patterns repeat themselves in each generation, that time is circular, etc.

JMH: I’m sure he did it on purpose for just those reasons. What was Faulknerian to you? I’m trying to think if I saw any of that.

BE: Mainly circular time. This novel really seems to embody Faulkner’s idea that “the past is not dead; in fact, it’s not even past.” Also, the tendency toward long wavelike sentences with subordinate clause after subordinate clause.

JMH: At one point I found a sentence that went on for like three pages.

BE: My least favorite thing about magic realism (at least at this moment) is the way it so often seems to serve as a substitute for real characterization. In this novel and others, including The House of the Spirits, I think, each character is known by only one or two characteristics, which are usually created through some form of hyperbole. I think of this as “tagging” rather than characterizing, and it is something that many authors do with their MINOR characters in order to cement them in the readers’ minds, but major characters are usually more fleshed out. This relates to the repetitive naming, I think, and I do think GGM does it on purpose – the idea that individual personalities don’t matter. But I don’t like it – although I like many other elements of this book. The biblical and mythological overtones actually helped me to like this book more, since I don’t expect traditional characterization in mythology and scripture.

JMH: That’s true. These characters are not true individuals to be known, more cogs on a wheel to demonstrate how things never actually change, etc.

BE: I’m going to toss a few other ideas out there – let me know which ones you think are interesting and worth talking about: 1) that this novel is not really about solitude but about loneliness, since most of the time the characters have plenty of company (there are a couple of exceptions), but the Aurelianos and certain other characters have sort of a melancholy or solitary air about them. Why do you think both GGM and his English translator chose “solitude” instead of “loneliness” for the title (other than the fact that it’s a more interesting word in my opinion)?

2) Does this novel have a protagonist? In some ways to me it seems to be “about” its women more than it’s “about” its men, since the men are the ones who embody the patterns. The women do have personalities that are more fleshed out than the men. The women also tend to become more energetic as they age, while the men tend to become shut-ins and are often dependent on the women in their old age.

JMH: Interestingly, “soledad” can be translated into “solitude” or “loneliness.” “Soledad” when it’s voluntary translates to solitude, when it’s involuntary means loneliness. I remember seeing the word “solitude” a ton in the book, but not loneliness. I wish I had been paying more attention now.

BE: That’s interesting about solitude and loneliness – now I really do wonder why GGM chose the word. “Solitude” of course contains the Latin root “sol” for “sun” – which is connected to the idea of a center (since the earth revolves around the sun) and also connected to the idea of a monotheistic god.

BE: Oh – and more ideas: 3) I also see a motif here that I see in other works of literature that are from or take place in equatorial climates – specifically in The Bend in the River and in The Poisonwood Bible – in which humans sort of have to race against nature in order to survive because plants grow so fast and insects and other small creatures come in uncontrollable swarms. I enjoy this when I see it, although it would never occur to me to use this motif myself since I’m so used to a natural world that humans feel fully in control of.

JMH: And the center of this book is, I think, the Buendía house. Everything comes back to it.

I think we should definitely address the concept of solitude/loneliness, and the idea of nature overcoming the town. The concept of a protagonist is also a good one, too….

BE: The language is amazing too. I have so many favorite passages: “Pilar Ternera let out a deep laugh, the old expansive laugh that ended up as a cooing of doves. There was no mystery in the heart of a Buendía that was impenetrable for her because a century of cards and experience had taught her that the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle.” (396)

“the house had plunged into a crisis of senility” (358)

“the chancre of blind obedience” (302)

JMH: Yeah, I didn’t mark hardly anything. I would have had to have marked the entire pook.

BE: I hate it when I have to mark the entire pook.

JMH: Shut up.

BE: Oh, and 4) The significance of sleep and 5) smells. And there is also a lot of poison coffee in this book. If I were a Márquez character, I would never drink the coffee.

JMH: Smells?

BE: All the smells in the book – Ursula finding her way around by smells when she’s blind, the various odors that are attached to different characters. These characters all have a sense of smell that is almost canine.

JMH: And what exactly is Melquiades? Maybe he is the protagonist.

BE: I don’t think Melquiades is the protagonist, since he doesn’t really grow and change as a result of the actions of the novel, but in a way he is sort of a god-figure, since he knew everything that was supposed to happen before it happens, and he is also the source of inspiration who keeps pushing various Buendía to continue to learn, create, invent things, study their world, etc.

BE: I think it’s amusing that there are “gypsies” in this novel set in south America.

JMH: Apparently the gypsies got around. God-figure. Yes. That’s what I meant.

BE: If anything Melquiades is sort of a catalyst for the story of the Buendía. He provides them with a Pandora’s box to open, a puzzle to solve. He sets them on their journey. Which raises interesting questions about fate: do we have a fate if no one is around to tell us what it is?

JMH: Ha. How about this: would the Buendía family have come to an end if Aureliano hadn’t translated the scrolls?

BE: Yes, I think that is more or less the same question I was asking. Since he was almost finished translating them when the winds finally came and blew everything away, you can say that the destruction would have happened anyway – but if he hadn’t spent so much time translating them in the years prior, maybe he would have done something to prevent the destruction of the town.

But back to the gypsies for a second – I think it’s both funny and significant that Macondo is simultaneously a tiny town in a swamp that is constantly being eaten by ants and some kind of destination for travelers from around the globe. The American banana company makes sense, since they would be looking for a remote location – but the gypsies are constantly showing up, plus there are a bunch of Turks and Arabs, and every so often “the latest Paris fashions” are mentioned. The town sort of seems to grow and shrink depending on the needs of the moment, which I think is “true” in an emotional sense when it comes to how people feel about their hometowns – which sometimes seem small and embracing and stifling and at other times seem infinitely rich with variety, regardless of how big or small they actually are.

JMH: Do you want to discuss the banana company as a symbol of North America/Europe colonizing/overrunning Latin America? The stuff with the banana company and the trains full of the thousands of dead bodies was interesting to me, mostly because it didn’t necessarily fit in with the rest of the book.

BE: Sure – I think there’s a ton in this novel about western encroachment into Latin America. The first paragraph of the novel is a wonderful mish-mash of European and pre-Columbian references: adobe, gypsies, Macedonia, alchemy, nails and screws, gold, a suit of fifteenth-century armor.

JMH: It’s this concrete tragedy (that is later denied) where the rest of everything that happens has this sort of flowing/hazy/not quite real feel to it. And then the banana company is gone and it’s almost like it never was there.

BE: Yes, the political elements seemed more like something out of Allende than out of this novel. Even Colonel Aureliano Buendía and his 35 unsuccessful civil wars taste of “real” Latin American politics in ways that the rest of the novel doesn’t.

JMH: But even the reality of Col. Aureliano Buendía having 35 different civil wars fits in with the feel of the book better than the mass killings at the train station. There’s a hyperbole to that many wars that makes it work. Does that make sense? But a mass killing at a train station just seems like it doesn’t fit. Of course, a living person waking up in a train full of dead bodies is appropriately placed in this book.

BE: I don’t know… I see what you mean about the hyperbole, but I think it applies in a similar way to the killings at the train station. And I think part of the point is that somewhere off in the distance is a corrupt government that is violent and terrorizing and not at all cute and whimsical like the rest of the novel and that has a great deal of power over people’s lives, even though most of the time the characters are oblivious to what it is doing.

JMH: Okay, I buy that. As I was typing it occurred to me that multiple train cars full of dead bodies was a bit hyperbolic, especially when the train cars were leaving a small town in the swamp.

BE: I also think that “love” in this novel is interesting – I am thinking of Ursula’s thoughts about Colonel A.B. when he is dying: “She realized that Colonel Aureliano Buendía had not lost his love for his family because he had been hardened by war, as she had thought before, but that he had never loved anyone, not even his wife Remedios or the countless one-night women who had passed through his life, and much less his sons. She sensed that he had fought so many wars not our of idealism, as everyone had thought, nor had he renounced a certain victory because of fatigue, as everyone had thought, but that he had won and lost for the same reason: pure and simple pride” (249.

There’s more in this passage that’s interesting that I want to get to in a minute, but first I wanted to connect this to a statement at the end that says that the final Buendía baby, the one with the pig’s tail, was the only Buendía ever conceived in love.

Also that for a while I was thinking that maybe Ursula is the protagonist, since she seems to be the only one who ever learns anything from the events of the novel (except for Aureliano at the end, maybe). But I’m not sure how valid I think that theory is anymore.

Also from that same passage on p. 249: “One night when she was carrying [Colonel A.B] in her belly she heard him weeping. It was such a definite lament that Jose Arcadio Buendía woke up beside her and was happy with the idea that his son was going to be a ventriloquist. Other people predicted that he would be a prophet. She, on the other hand, shuddered from the certainty that the deep moan was a first indication of the fearful pig tail and she begged God to let the child die in her womb.”

There is so much Christ imagery connected to Colonel A.B. (the idea that people thought he would be a prophet, the crucifixion imagery before his firing squad incident, when the sores in his armpits make him hold his arms out to the side, and the way he sort of becomes mythologized later in his life and after his death, when there are mysterious sightings of him and lots of people don’t believe that he exists. But this doesn’t fit in very well with the other Biblical imagery in the novel.

JMH: I wondered about those armpit sores. I meant to look up if they were representative of some sort of STD.

BE: One reader’s crucifixion imagery is another reader’s STD, I guess. Also, I meant to ask you – did you like it? Do you like it more than Allende, the same? How does this novel contribute to your already-well-developed feelings about magic realism?

JMH: I did like it a lot. I liked seeing it as the parent of The House of the Spirits. On some levels I like it more–I think Marquez is a better writer than Allende, and if it weren’t for him I doubt she would exist as a writer. But Allende is better at character development (not necessarily in The House of the Spirits, but in her later books), and then there’s the whole she’s a woman thing.

BE: Sexist.

JMH: Yeah yeah. I’m getting better. I do read books by men now, you know.

BE: By the way, I do think the characterization in The House of the Spirits is better than in this novel.

BE: But about the idea that this book is the parent of all magic realism: I don’t know – now I kind of think that the Bible is the parent of all magical realism. Am I allowed to say that?

JMH: But that stuff in the bible all REALLY HAPPENED.

BE: So they say. I seem to remember a certain 9th grade religion teacher at SI teaching us that the manna from heaven was really pigeon shit.

JMH: Who? Was that Mrs. O’Malley?

BE: Yes, Mrs. O’Malley. That may have been the only moment of her class that I enjoyed.

JMH: You know she went on maternity leave about two weeks into the semester I was supposed to have her. Leaving us with the horrible Mr. Wilson, nSJ. He was a prize.

BE: Was he only there as a maternity leave replacement? I remember the name but not the face.

JMH: Not sure. He wasn’t back the next year.

BE: Oh, and I take that back about the pigeon shit incident being the only moment in Mrs. O’Malley’s class that I enjoyed – I also enjoyed the day when she yelled at all five of her classes because someone had complained to his/her parents because she called him/her a “little shit,” and the subject of her rant was that you shouldn’t complain if someone calls you a little shit. You can complain if someone calls you a fucker, but not if someone calls you a little shit. With 23 years of hindsight, that actually strikes me as damn good advice.

JMH: I wonder if that’s why she went on maternity leave and never came back?

BE: I actually think she did come back after we graduated. She might actually still be there now (but even if she’s not, I’m pretty sure she was back for a while).

JMH: Oh that’s nice. I thought she was funny.

BE: Just checked the website – not still there now.

And that’s the end. There was actually a little bit more, about how we were both in the mood to read something light next and about how cool it would be if the religious right started to boycott our blog because of what we said about the manna from heaven (not that the religious right reads our blog now, but whatever. It was an offhand comment.) But there you go: our one hundredth review. Not bad for a blog that’s only been around for eight and a half months, staffed by two bloggers who are also busy doing things like working, moving cross country, taking cats to their acupuncture appointments, taking naps, knitting, shopping for new cars, following exercise regimens, taking pictures of cats, breaking up cat fights – and, of course, reading.

And thanks to all of you for reading, too.

Hulga, C’est Moi: Thoughts on Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” (by Bethany)

Posted on February 17, 2013 by lfpbe

A long time ago – I was in the seventh grade, I think – I was a part of a group of students clustered around our art teacher’s messy desk. Everyone was talking at once. I don’t remember what I said, but at one point our teacher spun around and stared at me in astonishment. After a long silence, he asked, “Have you ever read Flannery O’Connor?” I said I hadn’t. “Well, you have to,” he said, taking a scrap of paper and writing down “Flannery O’Connor” and “Collected Stories” in big block letters. I wish to God I knew what I said.

I did buy the book, but I couldn’t make much of the stories at the time. After scanning the table of contents and flipping through a few of the stories, I put the book back on my shelf, where it stayed for about eight or nine years, when I discovered Flannery O’Connor again through different channels. By then I knew that stunning a person into a speechlessness that can only be alleviated by gasping out “You must read Flannery O’Connor” is rather an alarming thing to do.

I think “Good Country People” – alongside two or three of O’Connor’s other stories – is close to a perfect model of the short story form, and I think it’s only fair to tell you that one of the reasons I love this story so much is that it sucker-punches me in the gut. Hulga, its protagonist, is ridiculous. She’s naïve and arrogant and superficial and judgmental and afraid of almost everything she encounters – yet I read this story and I sympathize with her without exception and without question. Her arrogance is my arrogance; her vulnerability is my vulnerability. And while I think in general it’s a tricky business to make pronouncements about the motives and thought processes of a deceased author – especially an author as squirrely as Flannery O’Connor – I can only believe that the way she so successfully knocks the wind out of me in a story like this is – at least in part – by taking aim at herself.

But I think I should back up a bit before I tell you more about what I mean.

This story begins at an oblique angle, with a lengthy passage of exposition not about Hulga or the Bible salesman who briefly becomes her paramour but about Hulga’s mother and the gossiping tenant who serves as her housekeeper. Like so many characters in O’Connor’s stories, Hulga’s mother, Mrs. Hopewell, is obsessed with the classification of human beings. Her conversation is peppered with expressions like “Nothing is perfect,” “Well, other people have their opinions too,” and “That’s life!” – expressions that are designed to suggest that she is reserving judgment but that in fact make tacit judgments in and of themselves. She’s sort of a proletarian Nick Carraway in that sense. Mrs. Hopewell is proud of the way she manages her tenants, noting that “the reason for her keeping them so long was that they were not trash. They were good country people… She had telephoned the man whose name they had given as a reference and he had told her that Mr. Freeman was a good farmer but that his wife was the nosiest woman ever to walk the earth… Since she was the type who had to be into everything, then, Mrs. Hopewell had decided, she would not only let her be into everything, she would see to it that she was into everything – she would give her the responsibility of everything, she would put her in charge” (272). Mrs. Hopewell sees herself as choosing to be passive in order to get along with domineering people – a judgment that I think is probably apt – and this is a technique that she likely picked up during her years of living with her angry, tortured, cynical daughter.

The story’s first sentence – “Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings” (271) – seems at first to be nothing but a red herring. It took me dozens of reads to begin to understand what this sentence about an altogether minor character was doing in such a central location. I think it serves two purposes. First, it sets up this paradigm of forward and reverse (or active and passive) movement that will end up playing itself out between Hulga and the Bible salesman, who is more like a guerilla who moves in circles and spirals. Second, it begins the process of introducing Hulga to the reader through a series of defensive barriers, which is how the characters in the story are forced to relate to her. Just as her family members and neighbors have to approach Hulga through multiple layers of cynicism, anger, defensiveness, and veiled insult, the reader as well has to wade through several paragraphs (taking up five of the story’s twenty pages) of peripheral information about Mrs. Freeman and Mrs. Hopewell before reaching the story’s true subject. In most other stories I would find this form of narration inefficient; in this story, though, the reader approaches Hulga with the same confusion and trepidation that she inspires in her poor, simple mother and her mother’s simple friends.

Hulga is a 32 year-old woman with a wooden leg, terrible fashion sense, and a Ph.D in philosophy. She’s sullen and angry and nasty, but most readers who have made it far enough along in their educational careers to encounter Flannery O’Connor can probably sympathize with her vitriol on some level. Her missing leg – which she lost in a hunting accident when she was ten, as we learn in the most abrupt parenthetical aside since Nabokov’s “picnic, lightning” – and a heart condition have kept her tied to her mother and her childhood home, even though in the absence of these handicaps Hulga would be “far from these red hills and good country people…in a university lecturing to people who knew what she was talking about” (276).

At some point in her life, Hulga (whose birth name was Joy – Joy Hopewell, no less; she had the name legally changed when she turned twenty-one just to spite her mother) learned to use what her mother calls “her ugliness” as a weapon. She “lumbers” and “stumps” around the house, making as much noise as possible in spite of the fact that she is capable of walking with her wooden leg without limping. She dresses herself in the most absurd clothing she can find, including “a yellow sweat shirt with a faded cowboy on a horse embossed on it” (276). Her mother notes that “sometimes she went for walks but she didn’t like dogs or cats or birds or flowers or nature or nice young men. She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity” (276). She is most certainly a virgin, and on some level it seems likely to me that she creates such an offputting exterior in order to pre-empt the possibility that a man will find her attractive and she will have to face the embarrassment of making her sexual ineptitude known to him.

Enter Manley Pointer – one of the best-named characters in literature. Manley Pointer arrives at the Hopewell home to sell bibles and quickly begins to show an interest in Hulga. He charms Mrs. Hopewell with stories of his impoverished backwoods childhood – Mrs. Hopewell who, over time, has become so badgered by Hulga’s aggressive intellect that she has trained herself to assume that all claims to simplicity must automatically come from a place of virtue and gentleness. Hulga largely ignores Pointer during this initial visit, but she does agree to meet him the next day, and during the night she begins to fantasize about a scenario in which she both mocks and seduces him at the same time: “She had lain in bed imagining dialogues for them that were insane on the surface but that reached below to depths that no Bible salesman would be aware of” (283). Even in fantasy, she can’t imagine a situation in which she would expose her own romantic vulnerabilities unless she were mocking another person’s inferior intellect at the same time. Startlingly, Hulga also lies about her age to Pointer, telling him that she is only seventeen instead of thirty-two – clearly as an attempt to hide the shame connected to her romantic and sexual inexperience as well as the shame of living in her mother’s home like an adolescent.

As you’ve probably guessed by now, Manley Pointer is no Bible salesman. He does sell Bibles for a living, but the valise he brings on his second visit – identical to the one full of Bibles that he brought to tempt Mrs. Hopewell – contains hollowed-out Bibles that conceal liquor, pornographic playing cards, and condoms. Preoccupied with her visions of “seducing” the apparently simple and innocent Pointer, Hulga lets his guard down and fails to notice his intentions as he lures her into the hayloft of a nearby barn, removes her glasses, and – in the story’s most brilliant, chilling, and comic moment – “lean[s] over and put[s] his lips to her ear. ‘Show me where your wooden leg joins on,’ he whisper[s]” (288).

It’s at moments like these that I am in awe of Flannery O’Connor, who has managed the perfect characterization of the grotesque and sexless Hulga (who under her “ugly” exterior presumably possesses the same sex drives and desire for love and acceptance as anyone else): she gives the stump of Hulga’s missing leg the status of a sex organ. Hulga is both shocked and titillated by Pointer’s request and refuses it at first, but with further coaxing she does in fact remove her wooden leg and allow him to reattach it and remove it once more. The intimacy of this moment – unsurpassed by anything in Hulga’s life experience – is captured in this fantastically complex passage: “The obscenity of the suggestion was not what shocked her. As a child she had sometimes been subject to feelings of shame but education had removed the last traces of that as a good surgeon scrapes for cancer; she would no more have felt it over what he was asking than she would have believed in his Bible. But she was as sensitive about the artificial leg as a peacock about his tail. No one else ever touched it but her. She took care of it as someone else would his soul, in private and almost with her own eyes turned away” (288 – italics mine).

This passage raises so many questions. Is the stump of an amputated limb really “obscene?” Does education really remove shame from a person’s character – and, if so, why and how does it do so, and is this a good thing? Is shame really a “cancer”? The simile about the peacock (and let’s not forget here that O’Connor was an accomplished peacock farmer) suggests that what Hulga really feels about her leg is pride, and it’s true that, along with her Ph.D, her wooden leg is the primary (and the only tangible) locus of Hulga’s Hulga-ness: the impenetrable selfhood that we share with very few people and that is hidden behind the door that people tend to open during sex. It’s her soul: but it is hard and wooden (is it a phallic symbol? Good God, Flannery O’Connor is brilliant) and an inert thing that has been inserted in a place once occupied by living tissue.

Once she has allowed Pointer to remove her leg, Hulga allows him a few more intimacies. She admits her atheism and the obvious, childlike pride she feels for it – thrilling him more than she knows – and says, holding his face in her hands, “There mustn’t be anything dishonest between us. I am thirty years old. I have a number of degrees” (288). Never mind that she is still lying about age – since she is thirty-two – but the fantastic comedy of this moment, as she gazes lovingly into his eyes and tells him about her Ph.D, belies the fact that she has essentially offered up all of her vulnerability to Pointer at this point in the story. This is a sex scene in which not a single genital ever comes into play, and serves as the final lowering of Hulga’s defenses. When Pointer refuses to give back her leg, Hulga falls back on her earlier assumptions of Pointer’s innocent exterior and appeals to his claims to pious Christianity, prompting his fantastic reply: “I hope you don’t think… that I believe in that crap! I may sell Bibles but I know which end is up and I wasn’t born yesterday and I know where I’m going” – a string of clichés that mirrors Mrs. Hopewell’s from earlier in the story – “And I’ll tell you another thing, Hulga…you ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing since the day I was born” (290-1). At this point Pointer tucks Hulga’s glasses and wooden leg into his valise and exits the hayloft via the ladder, leaving Hulga without vision, locomotion, and pride.

For all the sophistication of her intellect and the richness of her spirituality, Flannery O’Connor retains an uncanny level of access to the part of each person that remains forever an adolescent. “Adolescent” can mean a lot of things, of course, but in this case I think I mean the part of us that has never internalized the ways in which we are seen by others. When I was an adolescent, I was in some ways frightfully insecure, but I also recognized my capacity for infinite goodness and intelligence and wisdom and talent, and I became horribly frustrated when others did not recognize those qualities in the same way and related to be based on how I acted, not on the ideals that I knew existed beneath the surface. I think I was correct in thinking that those ideals existed within me, but what I didn’t understand is that they exist within everyone, and that none of us express those ideals in our daily lives in a way that lives up to how good we are in our minds and intellects and souls. When I looked at others, I saw only their imperfect surfaces, but I expected them to look at me and see the unlimited potential beneath my surface.

Presumably, most adults have outgrown this double standard, most likely because we get tired of the horrible ways that people react to us when we act on it. I don’t know about you, though, but for me this little voice inside me that both knows of my greatness better than anyone else and is ready to leap up in anger and defensiveness at anyone who threatens that greatness is still very much present. I can control this voice, but I’ve never succeeded in making it go away. Hulga’s snarliness, her contempt for her mother and for her mother’s tenants, and the fact that “every year she grew less like other people and more like herself – bloated, rude, and squint-eyed” (276) set off little waves of sympathy in me that I find very hard to justify. Sometimes I think there is no tension so great as the tension between that voice inside us that insists on our superiority to the rest of the world and simultaneously feels a terrible fear of the judgment of that flawed world. What is that voice – the id? the reptile brain? the immortal adolescent? For now I’ll call it the inner Hulga. I know I have one. I don’t think everyone’s inner Hulga speaks with the same voice or agonizes over the same trivia, but I suspect that everyone has one. And the kind of fiction that I like to read is the kind of fiction in which this tension exhibits itself on the page.

When I taught this story in my high school classes, I sometimes gave the following writing assignment: Write a story about yourself, in the third person, in which you come off as an unlikeable character. This was always given as one of several choices, since it requires a level of personal revelation that not every student will be ready for, and I have always believed in using a light touch when asking students to write about personal topics. In general, though, the students who did choose this option often did their best work of the year, soaring well beyond the assigned page limit and turning in work reflecting a newfound maturity. I don’t know exactly why this assignment works as well as it does, but I do have a few ideas. I think that most of us develop a series of unconscious strategies designed to suppress our inner selfishness and our inner meanness. Maybe we have a few friends with whom we let our mean streaks fly. Maybe we express our nastiness through writing or acting or art. Maybe we sign up for martial arts and unleash our aggression on punching bags and sparring partners. Maybe we turn that anger inward and hurt ourselves or become depressed or stay up all night cleaning our houses until they shine. Many beginning writers – whether they are high school students or well into adulthood – are operating with their inner Hulga switched off because, well, because they do everything in their lives with their inner Hulga switched off. This is a mistake, of course, since anyone who has read “Good Country People” knows that Hulga is the center of the story’s energy. Hulga is one of the most human characters I have ever seen committed to the page. She is human because she embodies the meanness that comes from our vulnerability and that is at its most mean when it turns on itself.

You know that old guy who called you sweetheart in Target last week? The one who wanted to know how you were going to carry that big flat of bottled water all the way out to your car by yourself? You wanted to kick him in the shins, didn’t you? In real life, it’s probably a good idea that you didn’t kick him. He was probably a veteran, for one thing, and he probably saves his dimes and nickels in a coffee can at home and has a wife who is dying of something. Your kicks would have left bruises: he might even have had to see a doctor. In real life generosity of spirit and restraint and forgiveness are admirable qualities that keep our lives from being even more nasty, brutish, and short than they already are. But when you sit down to write your story, kick him in the shins. Kick him in the shins – because he saw you only for your surfaces (never mind that you’re only seeing him for his) and was too short-sighted to see the Hercules within you who could not only carry the flat of water but could shot-put it out of the park if given the opportunity – and see what happens. Hell, forget the shins – those rubber running shoes you’re wearing would probably barely hurt him there. Kick him in the nuts. Kick him in the nuts, not at the end of your story, but at the beginning. Kick him when there is still plenty of time for the meanness of that act to sink in, both for the victim of the act and for its perpetrator, your protagonist. Let your protagonist feel both the glory and the terror of being powerful and ugly and mean. And don’t let the story end until she is trembling in the hayloft without her wooden leg.

It is common in creative writing workshops for students to be told to resist putting themselves on paper. In the workshops I’ve taken, the dirtiest words one could speak were but that’s the way it really happened; loyalty to real-life events was absolutely forbidden. In most cases I think this rule is a good one, and all writers should learn to fictionalize and transmute their experiences on the page. But fiction does have its origin in the real energies of our lives, and in my experience one of the primary human energies is the tension between who we are on the inside and who we appear to be to everyone else. It is good that you’ve learned to control that thirteen year-old voice inside you, the one that wants to thrust her acne-ridden face at the world and tell it once and for all how misunderstood she is. Keep that voice quiet at the grocery store, at the office, and in church. But when you sit down to write, you have to listen to it, because that voice knows something about you that the demands of adult life have pushed you to forget. No matter the circumstances or the target of its anger, that voice is always saying one thing – I am who I am – which, as Flannery O’Connor knew well, is what God said from the burning bush when Moses asked for his name.

Postcards From Purgatory

a blog about reading, friendship, and growing older with books

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