Laughing Boy: A Chat

Posted in Laughing Boy, Oliver LaFarge, Thornton Wilder, Willa Cather on October 9, 2009 by Diablevert

Diablevert: When you get a chance check this link out. I was struck by the passage about Momaday (the three paragraphs or so starting with “the absorption of fiction,” excerpt here). I was interested in that bit as a launching off point for Laughing Boy

Dreadful Penny: “authenticity is a snark”… damn. I feel like I’d really have to read this to absorb it.

Diablevert: Don’t feel you have to read the whole thing (most of the article is about creative writing programs qua creative writing programs). But I thought it was interesting that Menard points out that Momaday was criticized for writing modernist Indians. And I thought that was especially striking because here’s La Farge writing modernist Indians, three decades previous.

Do you any of think the other Pulitzers were modernist?

Dreadful Penny: I don’t think that any of the Pulitzers we’ve read to date have been particularly modernist until Laughing Boy. Maybe One of Ours was, in that Cather’s style is fairly internal.

Diablevert: Bit odd, isn’t it? That the anthropologically-based one set on a Navajo reservation in 1915 should be he most stream of conscious-y, with the old “the angst of modernity overwhelms and tortures me” bit, eh?

Or maybe not odd….Laughing Boy is centered around a conflict between old and new ways

Dreadful Penny: The Bridge of San Luis Rey isn’t really modernist, but it does feel the most contemporary in style out of all of them. I think you’re onto something there.

Diablevert: I guess, but if I were to play Devil’s advocate I’d say that’s because nouveau-fabulist is a recent fashion

Dreadful Penny: I don’t know that I would call it fabulist… no early fantasy or science fiction that I know of reads like that.

Diablevert: Fabulist like, Aesop’s fables. Like the Grimm Brothers.

Dreadful Penny: It’s more like Borges than George MacDonald or H.G. Wells or anything like that. I think that’s conflating content with style slightly. Fables don’t have that level of specificity and attention to place… they can’t, or they don’t function particularly well as fables. Anyway…. Bridge isn’t modernist, either, but Laughing Boy certainly seems to be.

Diablevert: Sure. But there’s still and aspect to that style…a kind of dreamy far-awayness where every character is less person than archetype. Everything is mythic and monumental, that’s what enables strange or fantastic things to happen and pass unremarked on in the story-–like Garcia Marquez’s characters living to be 100-bajillion or whatever it was in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Dreadful Penny: Yeah… Bridge could have been written by Borges or Marquez, I think, and it would pass completely for their other writing.

Diablevert: Whereas Laughing Boy is deliberately, stiltedly simplified, but Laughing Boy and Slim Girl are modern people underneath the mythic language. La Farge follows the petty streams of thought, more like a modernist than a fable writer.

Dreadful Penny: Exactly. It’s the first Pulitzer that I think deploys stream-of-consciousness with any regularity or success.

Diablevert: Mmmm. So does that make it late or just in time? Cather probably comes closest otherwise – there’s a lot of time spent in Claude’s head – but there’s still the old structure, the hand of the author, visibly holding everything together.

So discounting Cather, is 1930 late for a major book to show modernist influences?

Dreadful Penny: Well, the major modernists were writing only slightly earlier in Europe, right? Joyce and Woolf notably…But we haven’t hit the high modernism of Faulkner chronologically, right?

Diablevert: Contemporary, almost. A little earlier. I forget exactly when the saga of Ulysses’ ban took place, but it’s a little before or right around this time. Of course, the hip heads had been reading excerpts for ages. And Portrait was out

Dreadful Penny: Strike that… Sound and the Fury came out in 1929, followed by As I Lay Dying in 1930. Oh, man, that makes the Pulitzer committee look like schmucks for picking this book.

Diablevert: Well, they look like schmucks a lot of the time anyway

Dreadful Penny: Good call… so I’d say this is nearer the leading edge of American modernism than European, anyway… so La Farge might not be super-behind-the-times for this side of the pond. It might be, perhaps, unfair to compare the poor guy to Faulkner.

Diablevert: Yeah, Pulitzer felt guilty over it, too…

Dreadful Penny: I think this passage from the link you sent is most relevant here: “And though some readers are devoted to fiction about ethnic minorities because it tells “their story,” there is a degree to which such literature is for outsiders, a variety of anthropology in which natives “inform” on their own cultures to literary tourists. The rest of the natives are often not thrilled to find their practices paraded before the gaze of outsiders.”

Diablevert: Word.

Dreadful Penny: So Laughing Boy is an anthropological study written by an outsider in a new-wave European literary style?

Diablevert: I think you could say that. It reminds me of the brief reminiscence I linked to from Tony Hillerman they other day. He talked about how he knew these two New Mexican writers who had this wider reputation, and how one loved the land and one–La Farge–the people. It was a matter of interest as much as style; the landscape was just a pile of trees and rocks, the inside of people’s heads, he cared about deeply.

Dreadful Penny: That’s a great observation… the landscape writing in Laughing Boy seems perfunctory to me, but the characters are very carefully drawn.

Also, this isn’t a book with a great supporting cast. It’s like he only had room (or scope) to get into two people’s heads.

Diablevert: but I guess what gets me is, is that right? Even in La Farge’s book he acknowledges that the Indian way of metaphor is very different from a white man’s when he talks about poetry and song. So does a modernist rendering of their inner lives make sense? Is modernism a “truer” representation of a universal human experience of thought, or is it just a filter, a flavor?

Dreadful Penny: I feel like modernism is a pretty accurate representation of the average state of mind, or maybe just my state of mind most days. But I couldn’t quote you chapter on verse about whether or not that’s a widely held critical opinion.

Diablevert: I dunno, do you think the book is successful in its attempt at Indianess?

Dreadful Penny: That I don’t know if I can say.

Diablevert: Fair enough.

Dreadful Penny: I don’t know enough about “Indianness” or the Navajo or any of these cultures to judge La Farge’s authenticity here. What do you think?
(I mean, I think Sherman Alexie is a great representation of “Indianess,” but maybe that’s because I love his style and HIS sense of his own culture, not that it’s an accurate representation of anything.)

Diablevert: I’m not sure. I think the book is criticized for not being authentic.

Dreadful Penny: To be honest, I just can’t imagine that it is authentic, just because of the circumstances of its creation. That a first-time novelist from outside a culture would be able to capture it with any sense of authenticity seems like trapping lightning in a bottle.

Diablevert: It’s funny, I just came across an article in my background googling that appears to be making the argument that Momaday isn’t authentic with his Pulitzer Prize–winner, because he’s Kiowa and the characters are Navajo or something. But I’m afraid to read it so I don’t ruin the book before I come to it.

That’s a bit of what Menard is getting to in his aside in the writing workshops article – to an extent, is it not the case that any attempt to “make literary” such a experiment has an inauthenticity?

Dreadful Penny: I don’t believe that you need to be of a certain ethnicity to write about that ethnicity, but I do think it’s an enterprise that should be undertaken with great care. But, essentially, folks is folks.

Diablevert: Sure. But how do you know if you did it right?

Dreadful Penny: If you don’t get strung up by the public and lambasted by critics?

Diablevert: Gotcha.

Dreadful Penny: I don’t think Laughing Boy is a great work of art, but I don’t think it’s an ill-intentioned one, and all I have to base that judgment on is the quality of his prose and his characterization, and how it resonates with my sense of human experience and my personal boundaries of how one should approach another culture (which are themselves, of course, culturally constructed).

Diablevert: Yeah, I’d agree with that. I did like the scene in the trading post where all the Indians just dick with the newbie. That felt authentic, and that guy, the shop owner, felt like–-of course that guy would have existed, but I just hadn’t imagined him before. The guy who goes out west thinking he’ll put one over on the dumb Indians.

Dreadful Penny: That felt authentic to me, too… maybe humor adds to a sense of authenticity? Like, for a joke to be good, it needs to be plausible? (That would be a decidedly unliterary way to ascertain authenticity… is it funny?)

Diablevert: Might still be a good way, though. Anything else bugging you about Laughing Boy?

Dreadful Penny: We’ve already come up with much more than I ever thought I would have to say about Laughing Boy. You?

Diablevert: Nah, I’m good

Leave A Comment »

Rankings in Review

Posted in Booth Tarkington, Edith Wharton, Edna Ferber, Ernest Poole, Historical Context, Julia Peterkin, Louis Bromfield, Margaret Wilson, Oliver LaFarge, Sinclair Lewis, Thornton Wilder, Willa Cather on October 3, 2009 by Diablevert

So we finally finished our first decade, and it seemed like a good time to take a quick look back and start an argument with my co-blogger by making sweeping statements about which books were best. Here’s my list:

1. Age of Innocence
2. Bridge of San Luis Rey
3. One of Ours
4. So Big
5. Scarlet Sister Mary
6. Magnificant Ambersons
7. Alice Adams
8. Arrowsmith
9. Early Autumn
10. His Family
11. Able McLaughlins

I think I may be going soft. Looking back at this first decade of the Pulitzers, I am struck by the virtues of the first batch of books that we’ve idly slogged though, even though at the time I whinged again and again about their flaws.

Succumbing — as we all must sometimes — to my inner Nick Hornby, I found I met in the middle while making my rankings.

Age of Innocence deserves its reputation as a classic, and The Bridge of San Luis Rey’s contemporary reputation could use a little dusting and buffing; I enjoyed both those books thoroughly. And while the plots of each had their flaws, both One of Ours and So Big had passages of quite fine writing (though I’d hand the laurel clearly to Cather over Ferber).

Meanwhile, down the other end of the scale The Able McLaughlins was plumb terrible, elevated, I must imagine, more for its wholesomely exotic frontier setting that for it style or its story, while His Family was frequently, leadenly awkward and Louis Bromfield hadn’t ever met a subtext he didn’t feel like explicating at tedious length.

The middle patch — Ambersons and Alice Adams and Arrowsmith — were more dull and irritating than bad, exactly; united in their snobbishness. And Scarlet Sister Mary is the odd duck; parts of it were charming, but the thorough racism of the whole text always left a sour taste beneath the sweet idyll of its island setting.

Looking at the books as a group, I’m also struck by how large a theme the Frontier is. The high prairie turns up as a literal setting in One of Ours, So Big, Arrowsmith, and Able McLaughlins. But many of the other books describe people pushing at the boundaries in other ways: Alice Adams and Ambersons describe the transformation of a small town into a big city. More metaphorically, His Family, Early Autumn, and Scarlet Sister Mary all share characters who rebel against sexual constraint, and try and strike out new roles for themselves, while Arrowsmith charts a doctor pushing the envelope of his field. Again and again, we find characters trying to cope with a world transformed from the one they knew in youth, to seize the new opportunities opened to them thereby, and not get stuck and crushed by the past.

Actually, after a memory-refreshing google and and a little bit more thought, I don’t know that Frontier is quite the word I want. Post-frontierism might be better, if that were a real word. These books aren’t really all that interested in cowboys and Indians and Conestoga wagons, about conquering the wilderness. They’re more interested in what happens when we’ve finally hit the end of the road. Picture a tired pioneer on a bluff over the Pacific, in that moment after the journey’s end, when, having drunk in its blue vastness at last, with the tang of the salt still in her nose, and the ocean breeze whipping her hair, she turns around to look back over how far she’s come, searching the land with troubled eyes: What is this place we have created? Does it have room in it for dreamers? For love? Who are these new people who have scrambled to fill the empty spaces? What has the scrambling made of them? For what do they scramble still?

Maybe it’s an odd thing that the books I like best and frankly think were best were the ones which don’t share this sense of tackling a new world of new mores; the Age of Innocence is set thirty or forty years before it was published, while Bridge is set in a half-fantasy world a continent and two centuries apart from the 1920s. Perhaps the seeming oddness explains itself: Only very fine writing could have put these books at the head of the pack when the judges were so otherwise swayed by the attempt to take on contemporary social concerns.

It looks like we might be getting a wider picture of the world in the decade to come, what with books set in China, on a Navajoh reservation, in Civil War Atlanta, and among the migrant workers of California. But after the first batch, I’m cultivating a sneaky hope that some of them won’t fit in at all, and will have bashed their way onto the list in all their frivolity on pure style alone…I think I may be turning into Oscar Wilde. Bit of a terrifying prospect, but maybe I’ll get to shag Jude Law.

Leave A Comment »

Laughing Boy and “Laughing Man”?

Posted in Laughing Boy, Oliver LaFarge with tags , , , , , , on September 9, 2009 by Diablevert

As we get closer to the present I think we’re gonna find more flickering traces of these books, even the ones that are themselves not as well known today. For instance, Laughing Boy and La Farge generally has been cited as an influence on J.D. Salinger; I found an interesting old post on a Salinger discussion board that argues that Salinger’s story “The Laughing Man” was influenced by and parallels La Farge’s novel.

The Laughing Man—which is excellent, and you should follow the link and read it if you haven’t—concerns a group of boys who are picked up after school and ferried about by a young college student, to play baseball in the park and so forth. The boys call themselves Comanches, and their leader, The Chief; in foul weather when they can’t go outside and play The Chief often passes the time by telling them stories of “The Laughing Man” a disfigured half-Chinese international thief and spy. The Comanche’s afterschool idyll is broken up when a woman, Mary Hudson, starts dating the chief and accompanies the lads on some of their outings.

I won’t say too much more so I don’t ruin Salinger’s story for you, but I’ll say that I think that ancient forum poster may have something when he says this:

The Navajo/American conflict is key to LAUGHING BOY. It’s a love story – for sure – but the major stumbling block to Laughing Boy (LB) and Slim Girl (SG) are their cultures and transforming between them. Slim Girl sees Laughing Boy as “a light with which to see her way back to her people, to the good things of her people.” (58) However, she isn’t truly sincere in returning to all the ways — she doesn’t want to herd sheep or grow old and ugly — plus she’s sleeping with another man. Likewise, Laughing Boy becomes enthralled by parts of the American culture (like whiskey): “She observed to herself that this man, who was to bind her to The People, seemed to be driving her yet farther apart from them.” (140) Eventually Laughing Boy renounces the American ways (crushes a bottle of Whiskey) and then finds out about SG’s adultery. She also renounces American ways…and they ride off into the sunset. Slim Girl’s tragic death is difficult for Laughing Boy to accept but – unlike the Laughing Man – he eventually makes it through.

Salinger translates the Navajo/American conflict in LAUGHING BOY to the Salinger-esque clash between the ‘nice’ and ‘phony’ worlds (as French simplifies it in his review of Salinger’s works). Just as Laughing Boy represented the Navajo lifestyle, John Gedsudski represents the authentic, the true. [Another poster] noted that the Navajo lifestyle is similar to Eastern religions — perhaps Salinger presents Gedsudski as an unwitting characterization of the Eastern philosophies. Further, most Salinger characters that can relate to and understand children are always the special, rare, ‘nice’ ones. Similarly, Mary Hudson is obviously represented by Slim Girl in LAUGHING BOY. They’re both gorgeous. They are both educated. They are both rich. Slim Girl must change to Laughing Boy’s Navajo lifestyle, Mary must change to John’s lower class life.

The poster goes on to try and draw a number of other parallels between the story within the story of The Laughing Man and the novel Laughing Boy. If you ask me I’d say his thread breaks here, as a lot of the Chinese opium den, wily Parisian nemesis stuff that marks the Laughing Man’s milieu has a much clearer source in the movie and radio serials of Salinger’s boyhood than it does in La Farge’s novel: a Dante-esque one-for-one allegory the story is not. But it was an interesting take, and interesting to see a bit of evidence on how La Farge might have influenced other writers. (Tony Hillerman, the detective novelist who set his series in New Mexico with Navajo detectives, knew La Farge in person and had some interesting things to say about his also.)

Leave A Comment »

Laughing Boy: Summary

Posted in Laughing Boy, Oliver LaFarge on September 4, 2009 by Dreadful Penny

Laughing Boy. Oliver LaFarge. 1930 winner. The Pulitzer committee brings us back-to-back anthropological-ish studies of groups of marginalized Americans, in this case, the Navajo. Where Scarlet Sister Mary is lush, Laughing Boy is clean and spare, but both are far more modernist in style than preceding winners.

The plot of Laughing Boy is extremely straightforward: boy sees girl from afar, wants to marry her, his family objects, they get married anyway, they live together, conflicts ensue, she cheats, she dies, he moves on. All of this plays out across the cultural conflict of Navajo that live largely apart from white men and Navajo that were forced to assimilate in white schools and towns. We see inside Navajo horse races, dances, hogahns, and the hybrid home that Laughing Boy and Slim Girl make together that is truly part of neither world.

The book starts with a dance and the constellation of social activities that surrounds it: trading, visiting relatives, horse racing. Laughing Horse is a young silversmith and keeper of horses who becomes intrigued with Slim Girl, a slightly older woman who seems at the fringe of the gathering. He finds her more forward than other Navajo women of his experience and they agree to marry without the permission of their families and despite his uncle’s open misgivings about her virtue. They travel to the outskirts of Los Palos, a white settlement, where Slim Girl visits her white lover and makes arrangements to see him, setting up the double life that entangles her for the rest of the book. She introduces Laughing Boy to liquor and persuades him to build up wealth with her before they think of rejoining his family at T’o Tlakai. Meanwhile, she struggles with the traditional roles of a Navajo wife, most notably learning how to weave.

The couple takes a trip to a Night Chant in the middle of the book, giving Laughing Boy an opportunity to defend the “Indian-ness” of his wife and their way of life to his family. While she is heartened by this, upon their return home Laughing Boy’s doubts fester, sending him away from the home more often and questioning her decision to delay having children until they are wealthier. This balance is lost when he discovers Slim Girl with her love by chance and shoots them both with arrows, wounding his wife in the arm. Chastened, Slim Girl finally reveals her full history to her husband: her pregnancy, abortion, and subsequent life of prostitution before she met the man who brought her to Chiziai. They feel cleansed by this revelation, and Slim Girl finally agrees to join him at T’o Tlakai and live fully as a Navajo wife. This is tragically interrupted when an old rival for Slim Girl comes upon them in their travels and kills her in a fit of jealousy. Laughing Boy conducts a modified version of traditional funeral rites for her, keeping a four-day vigil over her body alone and then rejoining his people.

This story’s told through a lot of interior narration from Laughing Boy and Slim Girl and asides about white/Navajo interactions and the tension between the Navajo and other tribes. We get to learn a bunch about silversmithing and horse-trading and weaving and traditional dances and funeral customs and drinking and scamming white guys out of money and canned goods. It’s a little odd that all of a sudden the Pulitzer committee realized that there are non-white people out there in America and gave us Scarlet Sister Mary and Laughing Boy back to back, but I’m grateful for even this small stretch towards diversity. Too bad we’re going to have to wait a good long while for a book that’s actually by someone who’s not white… 1969, I think? N.

Leave A Comment »

The Scorecard: 1930-1939

Posted in The Scorecard on August 18, 2009 by Diablevert

I made a post, quite some time ago now, giving a rough scorecard of our knowledge of the books before we’d encountered them for this project, on the philosophy that, if we’re going to have the temerity to critique these fine authors, you ought to be acquainted with our level of expertise going into the thing. Well, a mere year and half later we’re done with this first decade, and so it seemed like an appropriate time for an update, as we launch ourselves into the ’30s. To recap:

Standards :

Heard of: Books: Have we heard of this book before?

Authors: Could we answer the question, “Who is X?”

Read: If we’ve heard of them, have we in fact read any of the books in question?

Love: Of the one’s we’ve read, did we love any?

Loathe: Did we loathe any?

Movie: And lastly, although this in no way counts toward the Books Read tally, did we see the movie version?

Books and Authors DV: Book DV: Author DP: Book DP: Author
1930 Laughing Boy by Oliver Lafarge No No No
 No
1931 Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes No No No No
1932 The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck Yes Yes Yes Yes
1933 The Store by T. S. Stribling No No No No
1934 Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller No No No No
1935 Now in November by Josephine Winslow Johnson No No No No
1936 Honey in the Horn by Harold L. Davis No No No No
1937 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell Yes Yes Yes Yes
1938 The Late George Apley by John Phillips Marquand No No No No
1939 The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Yes Yes Yes Yes

Diablevert :

Heard of: : 3 Books, 3 Authors

Read: 0

Movie: Once while folding laundry I stumbled onto a showing of Gone with the Wind right after the bit where Scarlett’s like, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers…” whilst standing silhouetted against the ruins of Tara. I thought to myself, ah, this must be near the end, I’ll just stick around and catch the last half hour. Two and a half hours later….

Comment: I am ashamed to discover that I am actually worse on this decade than the last. I am also lightly touched with trepidation as of the three books I have heard of, two are ones that I specifically remember wiggling out of reading as a kid. Every kid in the fourth grade class ahead of mine hated The Good Earth so much they had us read something different, and I recall The Yearling as a long book about the deer. I never did go through that horse phase all little girls are supposed to endure about age 9; I think too many well-meaning suggestions about Black Beauty may have put me off the whole boy-and-his-dog genre. I guess we’ll see if my distaste has lingered for a lifetime. Maybe I’m a bigger softy now.

Dreadful Penny :

Heard of: 3 Books, 3 Authors

Read: 2

Love/Loathe: I was assigned The Good Earth in high school, and being a good little girl, completed said reading. I do not have fond memories. Don’t even get me started on having to read Gone with the Wind again… this, much like my second go on The Magnificent Ambersons, may well prove to be my Pulitzer Waterloo. I wouldn’t say I loathe either book, but, as they say in Spaceballs, I thought we’d met again for the first time for the last time.

Movie: Seen Gone with the Wind twice, once in 5th grade (I remember it taking nearly a month to watch, but that can’t be right) and again when I first got Netflix and thought I should fill my queue with classic movies before I gave in and loaded that shit up with Battlestar Galactica episodes and Robert Downey Jr. movies.

Comment: *sigh* I really don’t want to enter the ’30s with trepidation, and yet… it just doesn’t look like this will be the shining decade of Pulitzer choices. But I can say that I’m actually looking forward to The Yearling, as it seems like a classic of kiddie lit that I’d never read otherwise (and, while I also hated horse books as a kid, and am still slightly creeped out by horses to this day, I had a special fondness at the time for “dead dog” books. So I’m ready for the one where *spoiler alert* the deer bites it.)

Leave A Comment »

Scarlet Sister Mary: A chat

Posted in Julia Peterkin, Scarlet Sister Mary with tags , , , , , , , , on July 14, 2009 by Diablevert

Diablevert: So, Scarlet sister Mary. I’m flipping through the old reviews I downloaded a while back to see if there’s one in there for this book – i can’t remember

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: I sent my copy back to the library all ready, so this is off-the-cuff and unscripted for me. (No holds barred!)

Diablevert: Me too.

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: Can I say that I liked the book better when I read somewhere that it was an inspiration for Zora Neale Hurston? Like, before I knew that, it just seemed like a racist time capsule (which it still kinda is) but seeing it as part of an evolutionary step in a literary movement made it easier for me to look at it as a piece of writing.

Diablevert: Sure, you can say that. Where did you read that?

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: Ashamedly, wikipedia…. Julia Peterkin’s page.

Diablevert: I found it quite odd to read this book because of the racism, like …..as if you thought something was real life, and then as you lean in closer, you bonk your nose on a pane of glass and realize it’s just a diorama, like at the natural history museum…. Like, you’d want to enjoy it, but then some line would come up about how much they shure do loves pickin’ that cotton, and you’re like, oh, wait. Maybe this purported bucolic idly is all wrong…

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: The shock of hitting a wall is a good metaphor here. I just couldn’t deal with the whole “see! they love hard labor! they were made for it!” angle. It feels tedious and disingenuous to continually be surprised by the racism in these early winners… and yet. It’s so pervasive. It reminds me of the way I felt when I started weeding my library at school… ….there were tons of books about “negros in america” bought in the 50s and 60s that were probably pretty progressive for the time, but the fact that they were still sitting on the shelves in 2005 was really offensive to me.

Diablevert: Did you not want to keep them in a box in the back, just for the history?

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: Oh, totally… I have a great shelf of shame. Some of the books were fine books, really (Famous American Negroes by Langston Hughes, for example), but just completely beyond my cultural comfort level to present to middle school kids.

Diablevert: I can see where that would be difficult. But maybe interesting. It’s hard for kids – anyone, really – to even conceive of how life was different before they were alive; it all seems like a story, a fable. Once upon a time there was such a thing as seperate water fountains…but it’s hard to feel how that must have been, in a way, to feel not the emotional impact but the reality of it. Contemporary books can kind of do that… But bringing it back to Peterkin, it’s weird because I felt like in and of its time, it’s attitude was almost anthropological….she includes all these scenes of ritual, all these lists of flora and fauna, habits, customs, all minutely described. There were some scene that felt more like an excuse to show you this stuff, that didn’t advance the plot much….lots of scenes like that, actually – but it didn’t feel judgy. It’s kind of funny, with a lot of the other authors we’ve both complained about them being snobbish toward the characters, looking down on them – but it feels like Peterkin quite likes these people, enjoys their company

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: I agree about the anthropological angle… I wonder if that had a certain appeal to the prize committee, also. And I don’t think Peterkin is snobbish, either. Racist, sure, but not snobbish about it. (Can there be such a thing or is that ridiculous cognitive dissonance?) She’s got a great deal of affection for Mary (in a “oh that crazy kid” roll-the-eyes way.)

Diablevert: I think so, definitely. You can have it so ingrained in you that someone is inferior you don’t even question it, realize that you think that, at the same time as you like them. Like fag hags in the ’60s. Or a lot of the 20s writers mention gay people in passing, in that way, not with hatred, sometimes with enjoyment, but always with the presumption of aberration, inferiority. Did your book about the prizes say anything about it? Why they gave this one to her?

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: Oooh, I’m not caught up in that book, actually. I should revisit it. From the Wikipedia article, there was some scandal here… … that a committee member resigned over its selection. “Dr. Richard S. Burton, the chairperson of Pulitzer’s fiction-literature jury, recommended that the first prize go to the novel Victim and Victor by Dr.John B. Oliver. His nomination was superseded by the School of Journalism’s choice of Peterkin’s book. Evidently in protest, Burton resigned from the jury.” And it was banned as obscene in South Carolina.

Diablevert: Really? Oooh, juicy.

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: Yep. This is a hot one.

Diablevert: It did feel like that ending was tacked on tail-on-the-donkey style.

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: You mean when the long lost cad returned? Yeah.

Diablevert: Not only that, but more her son dying and then her repenting.

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: Oh yeah.

Diablevert: Even after she repents, she keeps her earrings and voodoo charm…..it feels almost like the author’s a little disappointed too, to think of her resigned to celibacy. Like Peterkin felt she had to end the book with some kind of moral condemnation for Mary’s sleeping around, but it’s kind of half-hearted. Might as well not have bothered if she got banned anyway.

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: I think you can extend that idea of cute-ing up prejudice to include women who have sex with lots of people, or in anyway freely. It’s hard to override the cultural taboos against promiscuity in women. Or, as a 7th-grade girl once asked me, “Why are some girls hoes?”

Diablevert: I dunno, that’s real tricky. I’m not sure whether I think that Peterkin was secretly sympathetic with Mary in that sense, like the voodoo man – “Oh, go on, who’s she hurting, really?” – or whether it’s only because Mary’s black that she feels this way, like, shake-head-roll-eyes-amused-moue, “Oh, those hot-blooded oversexed Negroes! Can’t expect better!” What do you think?

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: Hmmm. I guess this is a place where knowing something about Peterkin’s biography would be helpful. I think she writes about Mary with genuine (if wry and condescending) affection. She certainly infers that promiscuity was something Mary was driven into by her caddish man (whose name completely escapes me now… wait! July?) and not at all a cultural norm of the community.

Diablevert: Generally so, yes. Although I think it’s more a baseline racism that a particular condescenion toward the character.

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: It’s the classic double stereotyping whammy: is it racist or sexist? Or a heady brew of both?

Diablevert: But she likes her, you know? Mary is driven into sleeping around, but Peterkin portarys her as heartbroken over July’s betrayal, and shows her deciding to knock boots with his brother as something that’s life-affirming, brings her back to her old self. Like, she seems to pity her more when she was being a good wife, getting beat up and slept around on, then when she decides fuck it, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Mary breaks the norms of her community but on some level Peterkin seems to be cheerleading for her to do so.

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: It’s an interesting book from a religious angle too. The church customs are described in a pretty anthropological way, and the church is didactic and autocratic throughout. (While also being extremely hypocritical… tossing out Buddha Ben on multiple occasions, that kind of thing.)

Diablevert: Word. But they take her back in the end…. and yet, for all the strictness of who’s in and who’s out, it also serves as a social occasion, even for the sinners…

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: It was pretty much the only entertainment they had (except for work and that wedding).

Diablevert: Well, and drinking and gambling and sex and music.

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: Well, the drinking, etc., was all for the people who got the cheap seats on Sundays.

Diablevert: It’s never quite clear whether the larger crowd was outside or inside the church.

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: That’s true…. they kept kicking so many people out that it had to be a small congregation some weeks. Oh, and there was the total fun of whitewashing everything and cutting out newspaper fringe to decorate shelves with (that totally blew my mind).

Diablevert: That was really interesting! I felt like that level of anthropological interest was the book’s biggest strength – those details were fascinating. You got this impression of such a peaceful, calm place, all these little niceties….and then something reminds you how biased it is, and the copious detail begins to seem less realistic. But yet I felt that shit was probably accurate….you got such an intense ground level feeling for what it was like to live in this place…digging sweet potatoes out of banked ashes for breakfast….

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: It’s more interesting as a historical document than as a piece of literature, I think. I mean, the characterization is pretty shallow, the themes are heavy-handed… it’s all about the setting, the backdrop, the ways of life.

Diablevert: Yet, I dunno, I don’t feel like it was badly written….the detail was good and judicious.

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: But I think there were more character types than characters.

Diablevert: I guess I’m just a sucker for good detail. Is there anything else about the book that stuck out to you?

Ms.Dreadfulpenny: Thinking… … not really. The dialect overwhelmed the rest of the experience for me in a lot of ways.

Diablevert: True. So, an anthropologically interesting, shallow, somewhat idealized book with maybe/possibly progressive views on women’s sexuality: Scarlet Sister Mary. Oh: Plus, it’s really racist.

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: I’m nervous that we’re entering the “softer, gentler, but still fucked up” years of early Pulitzers with the next selection.

Diablevert: What is the next one again?

Ms. Dreadfulpenny: Laughing Boy (or, the Navajo book) That sums it up for me.

Diablevert: Ah. Oddly, that book came up in something I was reading recently – maybe Louis Menard about writing workshops? – as having been criticized by a white Indian studies professor at the time as being too modernist to be properly Indian.

Leave A Comment »

Scarlet Sister Mary: Summary

Posted in Julia Peterkin, Scarlet Sister Mary with tags , , , , , , on July 8, 2009 by Diablevert

Scarlet Sister Mary is a bit of an odd duck of a book, Margaret Mead in Margaret Mitchell’s clothing. Set on one of the coastal islands off the Carolinas, round about the 1920s or 30s, it depicts the life of a black village though the story of one of its inhabitants, the title character.

She starts out as just plain Mary, a skinny, lively, pretty 15-year-old, orphaned at a young age and taken in by Maum Hannah, a respectable widow whose only son is crippled. Mary’s in love with July, the handsome n’er do well that’s the despair of the island’s mothers and the idol of their daughters. Mary acquires the Sister when she’s accepted into the island rather strict evangelical sect, but she soon falls off the wagon when July reveals he’s crushing on her too, promising to marry her and marking her as his own by nicking her earlobe with a pocketknife. (Outraged Maum Hannah forces him to allow Mary to nick his own earlobe to make things even.) July seduces Mary and then leaves to look for work on the mainland — but, in a bit of a shocker, returns and keeps his promise to marry her.

The signs and portents are a bit doomish from the get-go, however: Hannah notices a certain shameful swelling as she helps Mary to dress for the wedding, causing a bit of a row; a mouse gets into the wedding cake, necessitating a bit of last minute frosting spackling, and when it comes time for the reception, one of the town’s looser women drags July outside to dance. Mary, however, is not about to be shown up at her own reception and gets a bit of her own back by engaging in a solo dance routine that raises quite a few eyebrows (Baptists are forbidden to dance; publicly flouting church proscriptions means she won’t be able to attend services).

The ominous foreshadowing of the wedding day soon bears fruit, with Mary and July growing rapidly apart after their son is born. July soon takes up with another woman and then takes off, abandoning Mary completely to keep up their small farm and raise their son alone. At first Mary sinks into a deep depression, spending months in a funk doing little but crying and praying for July’s return. But eventually, she begins to come out of her funk a bit….with the help of June, July’s twin brother.

This is where the Scarlet part comes in. Because the book skips forward here about twenty years, with Mary’s oldest children nearly grown….and lots of other children, from various boyfriends who may or may not chip in for their care, having come after them. This part of the book is a rapid unfolding of consequences, with Mary’s eldest daughter dropping out of school and bearing her own child out of wedlock, while her eldest son returns from having worked up North, barely making it to his mom’s door before he dies of pneumonia. The death of her first, only legitimate, and much-beloved son sends Mary into a prolonged fit of repentance, and she ends the book having said goodbye to her scandalous ways and returning to the church.

Such a description of the book’s plot might the island community depicted seem quite a conservative one. But it’s quite a bit more complicated than that. For instance there’s quite a large contingent of folk, members of the community in good standing, who drink and dance and smoke and sing therefore don’t go to church, though they do sometimes hang around outside during services to overhear the preaching. The attitude seems to be, “well, yes, everyone understands what the godly path here is, but that’s damn hard and you can’t expect everybody to stick to it all the time, for goodness’ sake.” And so there’s a bunch of islanders who go to church and obey its strictures, and a bunch who don’t, but little enmity between them.

Little enmity, but lots of gossip. When Mary first takes up her life of sin, it works out, frankly, pretty damn well for her for twenty years, and she’s pretty shameless about it, with the book spending several whole chapters explaining over and over her “hey, man, I got lemons, and I used this fine ass to make some lemonade, and had a fine ol’ time doing it, too” attitude toward her situation. The ending and her repentance almost seem tacked on to get the book past the censors rather than a well-deserved moral come-uppance the author’s handing out. Speaking of which, the plot as a whole is rather thin for such a long book; July makes a re-appearance toward the end, but his finally confrontation with Mary is a whimper of a thing, a tiff on a doorstep, not a dramatic climax.

Indeed, the thing seems more like an excuse for the writer to show us the culture and rituals of this unique place — she spends far more time explaining what kind of food you’d find at a wedding reception, or who sits where in church and why, or how you spruce up a one-room cabin when you’re dirt poor (everything you can’t whitewash you wrap in newspaper), or what they have for breakfast (sweet potatoes baked slowly in the banked ashes of the fire overnight) than exploring the inner motivations of her characters. Mary herself we get to know; we learn a little about Maum Hannah; but everyone else is a rice-paper sketch. This semi-anthropological approach seems to be born of a genuine love for the place; indeed, Peterkin comes close to making the island seem like an earthly paradise.

Which is actually kind of troubling, you know? Because if you step back a minute this is a book set among a black community in the Jim Crow south. A perhaps uniquely independent black community —- there’s barely a mention of white people in the book — but still one with, presumably, their fair share of troubles in real life. But all such darker themes are carefully expunged here — the characters are depicted, basically, as dirt-poor-and-loving-it. In dialect, also. All of which is to say, there are plenty of times in reading the book when the overt racism just slaps the modern reader upside the head, to the point where other passages—-passages that when you read them seem lovely, lyric, pastoral — in retrospect are troubling for their glib joy (“Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh”). But that seem a shade too unfair — for all the complexities of the relationship between the author and the characters she’s writing about — it seems too harsh, just as unfair the other way, to decide that her depiction of all the lovely things about this community which seems to fascinate her so must be false. So it’s a bit of an odd duck, and I’m not sure what I think about it, in the end.

2 Comments »

Bridge of San Luis Rey: Summary

Posted in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder, Uncategorized with tags , on May 27, 2009 by Diablevert

An overlooked classic! Jesus, Mary and Joseph, willya look at that! The Bridge of San Luis Rey is that thing I’d been partly hoping all these old Pulitzers would be: awesome books unjustly forgotten. I say partly because — if I’m honest — I was all along suspecting that some of these novels would be a bit terrible, this justifying the choice of title for this blog. But having read about ten and having most of them terrible and a few mediocre, with one outright classic (Age of Innocence), it was a real relief to find that there’d be a book I’d like before we got to, say Kavalier and Clay, 80 (god help us) books or so from now.

Of course, it might be a bit much to call Bridge overlooked; it’s been made into a movie several times, once fairly recently, and the library where I checked it out had about a dozen copies on hand; apparently it’s a poplar — that is, short — book for high school English classes. Still, though I’d heard of Wilder before thanks to Our Town, I had no real idea what the book was about. Perhaps I had a vague idea of a cross between the Treasure of the Sierra Madre and A Bridge Over the River Kwai.

Turns out it’s more like a cross between One Hundred Years of Solitude and Ship of Fools. In colonial Peru, a rope bridge over an Andean gorge collapses, killing five people. A young priest witnesses the accident and sets out to discover what led to those five people being on the bridge at that time, viewing it as a natural moral experiment, a sort of cryptogram from God. The book is the result, although there seems to be a distinction between the narrator of the book and the good friar; more than once the narrator says that he is privy to facts the priest never uncovered, and the book frequently delves into the thoughts of the characters in a way a strict third person narrator could not.

Said characters are: The Marquesa de Montemayor; her servant, Pepita; Esteban, a scribe; Uncle Pio, a man about town and manager of the famous actress Camila Perichole, and La Perichole’s young son, Don Jaime.

The Marquesa is elderly and eccentric, a well-known figure about town who is estranged from her only child, a daughter now living in Spain. The Marquesa devotes the whole of her life to writing letters to her daughter, going out into society strictly for the purpose of collecting material, seeking to win by her wit her daughter’s admiration, and soften her heart by the sheer power of eloquence.

Her servant, Pepita, is an orphan, raised in a convent, where she was the apple of the abbesses’ eye. The mother superior deliberately placed the girl in the Marquesa’s service as a kind of training exercise, hoping to get the Marquesa to donate to the convent and also grooming Pepita to move in upper class circles and gain the persuasive skills she will need to take over the running of the orphanage. Pepita, however, is not privy to the Abbess’ plans and is often overwhelmed in trying to care for the slightly cracked Marquesa.

Esteban was also an orphan, but he had a twin brother, Manuel. The two had been inseparable, until and illness (brought on, indirectly, by love) killed Manuel, leaving Esteban so bereft he contemplates suicide. A kindly Captain in the merchant marine takes pity on him and persuades the young man to take a berth on his boat.

Uncle Pio has spent the last few decades of his life making Perichole a star, after spotting her singing on the street as a young kid. So wrapped up in her does he become that it’s unclear whether he wants to be her father or her lover or what. As it turns out, he ends up neither: They suffer a falling out after the actress catches smallpox, bringing her stage career to an end. Pio, however, offers to help bring up her boy, Don Jaime, an offer La Perichole takes up.

Such scanty paragraphs suffice to describe the motives and much of the action of the book; given that the bugger leads off with the conclusion, and so there can be no mystery as to how it ends, it must be difficult to get an inkling of why I’d call the book a classic. That’s because it’s a book of mood and not motion, scene upon little scene that tries to tell you who the characters were and how they felt while leaving rather blurry what they did and when they did it: The exact period when it’s set, precisely how many years elapse between given events, the ages of the characters, all this is merely hinted at rather than nailed down. It strives for timelessness, for the qualities of a fable, and mostly achieves them, without being overwrought. This is quite a difficult trick; Jorge Luis Borges managed it time and again, but usually for ten pages, always for fewer than 30, often for just four. To pull it off at book length without getting cutesy or faux-mystical is quite an accomplishment. Instead, the tone is of restrained sadness, lyric, mournful, dry. By changing the question of the book from the more usual “What happens to these characters?” to “Whether or not the characters get what they deserve,” Wilder manages to drive the reader onward using cool-eyed ambiguity rather than the spur of revelation followed by resolution.

2 Comments »

Louis Bromfield, Early Autumn, Part 3

Posted in Early Autumn, Louis Bromfield, Uncategorized with tags , on April 27, 2009 by Dreadful Penny

DP: I don’t get the sense that the community is that affluent. I think the Pentland family is greatly wealthy—they bring this up later, that they take great pride in living off “the income of their income.” So I think they live quite poorly in a material sense, but just have great wealth saved up.

DV: That makes sense. There’s a crack about that in the Terry Pratchett books. He makes the observation that, if you’re really wealthy, you can afford to look like shit.

DP: When they start to describe the study and all the artifacts, at some point, they expressly label them as “kinda ugly.” “We have all this old ugly shit, but hey, Emerson sat there.”

DV: That relationship makes more sense to me as the lord of the manor to the village in an English or Continental setting than it would be in a relatively contemporary American setting. He doesn’t have it clear: either it’s a bustling town or ten houses and those guys.

DP: It’s not good world-building, to use a science fiction term. If he’s not talking about a real place, he hasn’t properly mapped his imaginary landscape. Although I do think—and this is one of the great mysteries of the book to me, and I do find it compelling, like an ugly woman wearing a veiled hat—I just want to see what’s under the veil—this book is the second book in a trilogy, right?

DV: Right.

DP: Does reading the first book make this book make complete sense? There are so many characters here that I can imagine their youths were explored in the first book, even though I could totally be making this shit up and they have no connection to each other. But the whole thing with the Pentland father and the widow…

DV: That he’s macking on?

DP: Yeah! Like, is there a youth explored in the earlier books? This is the weird thing about the Pulitzer awarding books in a series, because when you’re reading them years later, obviously this is the one that history has remembered even this much. The Green Bay Tree is lost to the memory of history. But does it contain, partially, the key to this book? Later (and I hate to keep bringing them up) but when we get to the Rabbit novels, Rabbit, Run: not nominated. But you really need to understand what happened in it to get the other two. Like when Shadow Country was re-released this year and it won the National Book Award, which some people were angry about, but in a sense, well, you need to appreciate it as a unit, so… I don’t know. I have great, actual, genuine curiosity about The Green Bay Tree, whether it has all the mysteries solved.

DV: That’s interesting. I do not share that curiosity.

DP: You shan’t read the rest of A Bromfield Galaxy?

DV: I doubt it.

DP: I will probably press on nobly. I’ll keep you updated.

DV: If anything completely scandalous and awesome happens, I’d read.

DP: But in the highly likely event that it kinda sucks?

DV. Yeah, I can live.

DP: Maybe it was like the Oscars this year, in the sense that, aside from Slumdog Millionaire, everything else was a bit crap. So maybe that’s how this won.

DV: I should refer to the Stuckey. I still have a book out from the library: W.J. Stuckey’s retrospective of the Pulitzer prize winners up to, like, 1972, and he pretty much says if that year was a bit crap. Like The Able McLaughlins year was total crap.

DP: I would hope so.

DV: It wasn’t like there was a diamond in the rough that should have won that year. That was a crap year. Not like the Age of Innocence/Main Street showdown year. So know (if I remember correctly) that American literature was not overlooking something grand that year. This was just the most of the mediocre.

DP: It does feel so soap opera-y.

DV: It’s kinda trashy. Not trashy enough to be modern trashy, but it’s pretty trashy. And it gets trashier. It’s not really fun like Jacqueline Susann trashy… well, maybe it would have been at the time.

DV: Maybe it’s just scandalous enough, traipsing that border between genuinely scandalous and a little spicy. Like Norman Mailer in The Naked and the Dead, where people swear a lot. Like “You said fuck. In a book! Oh my word. Who is this young man?” I would say that D.H. Lawrence is similar, but he believes his own bullshit. I’m not a big D.H. Lawrence fan, These ideas were true important ideas in society, if only people weren’t so repressed. He honestly felt that way.

DP: And Bromfield doesn’t go that far. I could honestly see this ending in tragedy, pretty clearly, but maybe there’s a neat happy ending somewhere. But there’s a third book—again, knowing that it’s part of a trilogy, maybe there has to be tragedy. Maybe this is like the Empire Strikes Back of the trilogy, and it’s gotta end with someone encased in carbonite.

DV: It does feel like Bromfield is alluding to other books. We keep mentioning D.H. Lawrence, and it reminds me of Becky Sharp a lot, that cunning and cynical character.

DP: It’s rocking the Jane Eyre, with the madwoman in the attic, and it has to have Wharton in mind. It’s not so far removed, and Wharton was known in her day, so I wouldn’t doubt that.

DV: If he ends the book with Olivia jumping in front of a train, we’ll know he’s literally ripping off the great authors.

Leave A Comment »

Louis Bromfield, Early Autumn, Part 2

Posted in Early Autumn, Louis Bromfield with tags , on April 16, 2009 by Dreadful Penny

DP: (skeptically) I’m discovering that I actually kinda like the Bromfield… in a weird way. How far along are you?

DV: Sabine just finished thinking that she was going to fix everyone’s life, and Olivia’s having a conversation with her daughter about…

DP: … people she might marry?

DV: Yeah. Trying to figure out how she’s going to get them out of this hell hole to where there’s actually an attractive man.

DP: (laughs) This book is actually a lot like Spinal Tap’s song “Hell Hole.” As in “You know where you stand in a hell hole. Folks lend a hand in a hell hole.” Like, their place is kind of a hell hole, but they love it, and it has its charms. They want to get out of the hell hole and meet attractive men, but in the governing system of the society, it’s a rather nice hell hole. It’s an upper-middle-class hell hole. Even an upper-UPPER-class hell hole!

DV: I’d say. I keep wondering where this actually takes place. I mean, they keep saying they’re in New Hampshire, but I know of no place in New Hampshire that has mills filled with Polish people.

DP: There’s a later reference to something about Vermont.

DV: Yeah, but he goes into Boston every day.

DP: Maybe they’re in southern Vermont? Because southern Vermont isn’t far from Boston…

DV: (waving hands) No, no! Southern Vermont’s left… on my imaginary mental map of the United States.

DP: Maybe, to you, everything’s to the left of Boston, except ideologically.

DV: Indeed. (persisting) No, but New Hampshire is above the northern part of Massachusetts. New Hampshire’s on the coast and then Vermont is above the Berkshires, so you could probably get from the corner of Vermont to Boston… oh man, that would take a couple hours.

DP: Drive. In cars. So I guess it must be in New Hampshire then.

DV: Yeah, I guess it’s supposed to be, but he jets off to Boston to go to work in the morning, which is dumb, so it must be in Massachusetts somewhere. But they keep mentioning New Hampshire. It’s very strange.

DP: I didn’t think about the geography of the book at all.

DV: It’s a minor quibble—I kinda knew what he was getting at—but it bugged me. There are a couple of sloppy things like that. He was specifically talking about the characters’ ages… he has Sabine thinking that she left when she was twenty, and that was twenty years ago, but then she’s more than ten years older than a guy who’s thirty-six. So, wait, was this supposed to be thirty years ago?

DP: She can’t be more than ten years older than O’Hara, because I thought she was a contemporary of Olivia, and Olivia’s only…

DV: Thirty-nine. But in that passage, he says that she [Sabine] is more than ten years older than him.

DP: Unless Sabine is supposed to be a contemporary of Anson, and Anson is greatly older than Olivia, which I didn’t think was the case.

DV: Actually, that makes more sense because it talks about them [Anson and Sabine] both being kids at the same time. Yeah. But, still, it’s weird.

DP: The math doesn’t quite add up.

DV: It’s sloppy… The book turned out to be very stiff and lockjaw-ish, and I keep getting the feeling that he does not quite know whereof he speaks. It doesn’t feel like…. like, Henry James actually grew up in a higher class and stature…

DP: Whereas Bromfield’s just talking out of his ass.

DV: Yes. I just get this talking-out-of-his-ass feeling.

DP: Like when he describes the room. The drawing-room, where there’s the desk where dear old Mr. Lowell sat… with a very vague sense of what that would actually look like and what this sort of life would actually be like.

DV: I can’t tell if that’s authentic or not, because we’re too far removed from it. There are other bits where it seems like he’s just throwing in the props that would be typical of such a thing. It feels very stage-y.

DP: Well, I really really really would like to read a book where there’s some showing and not telling because I think a lot of these books have this in common: it’s just all internal monologue and third-person omniscient narrators. So long swaths of the book are just descriptions of what the characters are thinking. It doesn’t help the staginess of it. It’s all stage directions and no action. Although, I do have to say, I’m farther along than you are, and it’s starting to get spicy. In a completely predictable way. There’s general hook-up-er and Pentland scandals are revealed. (DV speculates as to the nature of the scandals.)

DP: Oh, don’t worry, the scandals aren’t close to the main characters in any way. They’re more historical, genealogical. There’re some spicy love letters in your future. Things start to get a little funky. And in fact, there’s one plot development—is it worth it for me to tell you this or do you just want to find out on your own?—where you find out why John Pentland’s wife went mad. Because she lost her virginity.

(DV cracks up)

DP: No, honestly. She was apparently a “tender, simple woman” who was wooed “too ardently” and then went batshit crazy after she lost her virginity. Well, became a little off after she lost her virginity and went batshit crazy after she had Anson and had to be retired to the attic. Sex is like a squall in this book: it just fucks shit up. It makes the book so much weirder.

DV: Well, remember how we were talking before, that we really just wanted one of the books to not be a bildungsroman? And finally, for the first time, that’s happened. The thing it’s closest to is The Age of Innocence (which I think is a much better book) but it’s about people bursting to get out of society.

DP: And the same sort of obsession with sex and the sexual tension and the fear of class and the money. Yes.

DV: The show-y/tell-y bit struck me most in the dialogue. There’s this big long passage where Sabine and Aunt Cassie are having their showdown…

DP: Evil aunts are also a theme in these books. I keep thinking of the aunt in The Magnificent Ambersons, who maybe wasn’t evil as much as manipulative.

DV: The lonely spinster woman.

DP: Yeah. Nobody likes their aunts, man.

DV: P.G. Wodehouse did hate his aunt… like “barbed wire next to skin.”

DP: (laughs) I’ve never read Wodehouse.

DV: Oh, he’s very funny. Sidebar on Wodehouse: reading him the second time is sometimes better than reading him the first time because he constructs these incredibly elaborate farce plots, very well, but the pleasure you get is from the language.

DP: The plot is beside the point?

DV: Yeah, the fact that it’s nagging at you to find out what happened next is almost irritating. Because what’s so enjoyable about it is like playing Mousetrap: watching the whole contraption go, rather than not knowing what’s going to happen. Plus the immense pleasure you get out of the references. Like one of his aunts: he always describes her as “wearing barbed wire next to skin.”

DP: That’s an apt comparison. There’s nothing more reprehensible than these aunts.

DV: Yeah, now that you mention it, the fact that she Did It (with capital letters) is pretty interesting, because he pretty much implies that Aunt Cassie got married, decided she was an invalid, waits until her husband dies, and now she’s fine. The clear implication that she’s trying to avoid… well, no naughty-naughty for you.

DP: The book is very preoccupied with sex without ever actually saying the word. There’s the weird ruination in Sabine’s past where she had the husband but I guess the husband played around, which she let him… I don’t quite understand that, but there’s something there. Then she’s got her weird daughter who’s all scientific and into frogs.

DV: I was thinking earlier it’s like D.H. Lawrence filtered through nine layers of schmuck.

DP: Then there’s the thing with the groomsman too. You’re so right! That just gets stranger and stranger and stranger as the book goes on. Higgins is a recurring character. In fact, at one point, Higgins develops this conversational affection with O’Hara, and he is trying to imply to O’Hara that Olivia’s a fine pick of a woman, and he calls her a “thoroughbred.”

DV: Ooh, that’s nice.

DP: And the implication is clear that he means “thoroughbred” in the breeding sense, because if she had been paired with a better mate, she wouldn’t have produced such a sickly son as Jack. And at one point Higgins is described as a centaur. There’s something very D.H. Lawrence about him, with him peeking over the bushes.

DV: So you’re saying there are a lot of “subtle” allusions to horseflesh?

DP: (laughs) It’s a book about horseflesh. Sort of. Kinda. It’s a weird book cloaked in a very normal book.

DV: I like that about it, though. I could be down with that. Oh, to go back to the showing/telling thing in the dialogue, so in the big showdown scene, I’m reading the actual dialogue, the stuff between quotes, and it’s perfectly fine. They’re not lighting the world on fire, but they’re getting across the characters’ viewpoints. Every single line of dialogue then is followed by three lines of what the characters are thinking. A good writer would have just put the dialogue and we would have inferred their relationships to each other, which is more fun for the reader.

DP: It’s just a different definition of good writing. It must have to be.

DV: No. Remember when we were talking about The Age of Innocence and the whole point of it was that you had to infer too much? And at some point Wharton cracks and is like, “There’s no way they’re going to get this. I’m going to have to write something down here.” If Wharton had done this, Sabine would have known that Aunt Cassie was offering her pity to humiliate her, but she only would have said, “I see.”

DP: It’s all just describing the subtext. The subtext is rapidly becoming text.

Leave A Comment »

Next Entries »