November 21, 2008

Arrowsmith: Still Not Done

Posted by Diablevert under Arrowsmith, Sinclair Lewis
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But here are some half-assed thoughts anyway.

Lewis’ style is like….it’s…put it this way, the sensation you get reading this is of a stoogie-clutching hand jabbing a square-tipped, callused index finger into your chest, kind of “Lemme tell you something, buddy —” I’ve never been hectored at for 70 solid pages, and to think there’s only 350+ more to go.

I can’t believe this dude won a Nobel. This is not his most famous work, and so maybe it’s simply not his best. But just for once I’d like to read an author in this little quest that didn’t seem to condescend to their characters. Lewis writes like a college sophomore discussing a high-school junior, there’s an undertone of “oh, aren’t you precious, and to think I used to be like that and take myself seriously.” All the characters are one-dimensional, which at least he has the balls to come out and admit. Still, I can sort of get an inkling of why this book might have seemed fresh and interesting when it came out — it is completely of its time, and thoroughly American. I mean, its descriptions of say, a frat house in a Midwestern University circa 1906 might seem a bit cliched today, down to the secret folder of test questions, but I’m thinking back in the 1920s Lewis was probably sketching out characters that hadn’t much appeared in literature before. Hell, the big midwestern colleges themselves only got started in the late 19th century. And he has a way—I’d hesitate before calling it a gift—with speech, and slang. His dialog is, if anything, more completely of its time than his descriptions, and reminds me in a way of Nabokov’s precise excerpts of Lolita’s “slangy speech,” which he uses so effortlessly to characterize her.

The trouble is, you don’t get much sense that Lewis even wants to poke below the surface. Even his main character, the doctor in training Martin Arrowsmith, you could sum up in a few words: Ambitious, impetuous, naive, blunt. And that seems to suffice for Lewis, because so far he doesn’t seem much interested in watching Arrowsmith mature but rather in using him as a living prop to illustrate what he takes to be the qualities of his time…

 

November 10, 2008

On a book called Lolita

Posted by Diablevert under Lolita, NaNoReMo, Uncategorized
[2] Comments 

So, this is a bit of a sidebar from the main goal — I promise I’ll have something up on Arrowsmith soon, but Matthew Baldwin at Defective Yeti has picked Lolita for his National Novel Reading Month book (NaNoReMo, for those in the know — a take-off on NaNoWriMo). And I volunteered in his comments to tag along as a fellow traveler, as Lolita’s my favorite novel.

I realize, perhaps too late, that this is a bit of an awkward thing to do — at this point, while I can remember clearly what it was like to read Lolita for the first time, I don’t think I can recall what it was like never to have read it. I am constantly struck and chagrined by people’s preconceptions of the book—even though if I think about it, I’m pretty sure the first time I heard it referenced was when the Amy Fisher case broke when I was in junior high. The wife-shooting mechanic’s paramour was called the Long Island Lolita by the tabs. People still have that impression of the book now — that the girl in it is a seductress, and that’s very far from the case. Plus there’s another whole subset of people that just think the book’s sick, that it’s a hair’s breadth from a crime to even write about such a topic.

But a lot of the first time readers—the ones who actually like the novel—there is perhaps and even more common take, one mentioned by one of the other commentators at Mr. Baldwin’s site: “My understanding is that when Nabakov wrote Lolita, his goal was to take the most vile subject matter possible and turn it into a beautiful love story.”

Upon reading that, I rushed to the battlements to fire back—because I think the book’s a good deal more complicated than that—and I think perhaps I was a little unfair. For when I think back to reading Lolita for the first time myself, Humbert’s quite genuine passion and grief are what stuck out to me, too. His voice has all the power that Nabokov is able to give it, and Nabokov was a genius. It’s hard to blame the reader for falling under its sway: Humbert is both brilliant and obsessed — and so people tend to forget he’s a bastard.

In part, too, I think Nabokov wants you to forgets, tempts you to forget. I remember the first time I read it I kept waiting for Humbert and/or Nabokov to slip up, to do the one thing that was clearly unconscionable, that would allow you to loathe him plainly, cleanly. But Humbert never does, quite — in fact Nabokov toys with this line in several places, deliberately. (Several examples come to mind — but too far into the book to discuss that this juncture, I think.) By sidestepping the obvious redlines, Humbert remains still capable of seducing the reader. And given the descriptive powers, the wit, the sensitive perceptiveness and depth of meaning which Humbert’s capable of — it’s easy to be seduced.

So I guess, if I’ve a word at this point for the first time reader, first of all it would be to enjoy yourself — a few chapters in and you ought to be able to tell whether you delight, as I do, in Nabokov (and Humbert’s) style, and if you do there’s much yet to come that will be worth the savoring — picnic lightning, a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich, two flies beside themselves with a dawning sense of unbelievable luck. But remember too that Humbert is a bastard, that he lies and cheats, that in this as in much of Nabokov’s work another story is bubbling beneath the surface of the narrative. Most of VN’s books are narrated by madmen, and this one I would not except. In fact, in many ways I didn’t fully appreciate this book until I read it though the second time — but perhaps I’ll leave the explanation for that until later, and quit peering over your shoulder for now.

 

October 30, 2008

So Big… trails off.

Posted by Dreadful Penny under Edna Ferber, So Big | Tags: , |
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I actually liked So Big, for all its faults. I enjoyed its grown-up Little House on the Prairie-ness and the sly tone that Ferber took in her narration. (The winking at the characters didn’t bother me, even as it turns the book into an uneasy mix of snarky and genuine.) I’m waiting for all the Pulitzer Prize winners to stop being a retelling of the country mouse/city mouse dichotomy, though, and I think it’s fascinating how preoccupied they all are with the advent of the automobile. This is the first extended effort I’ve made since college in consistently reading books written before 1940–you just forget how other the past can be, how different the preoccupations and details of daily life were a hundred years ago.

That said, this book had one heck of a whimper for an ending. Is Ferber being angst-ridden, oblique, or just lazy? There’s neither any old-fashioned resolution (and this would have been a very easy book to end with a wedding, whether So Big’s or Selina’s) nor a particularly evocative question at the end… just a trailing off into the future, where before Ferber was all foreshadowing and trajectory. This was incredibly frustrating for a book that had been quite satisfying to read for the first 150 or so pages: rich in detail, narrated with good humor, full of colorful characters. This is a problem I often have with family-centered stories, to prefer the older generations to the younger, and to feel that there is something unsatisfying in the entropy or fall from grace that is common in multigenerational novels. Throw in as another negative the completely ridiculous character of Dallas O’Mara–Ferber, on this matter, I call “Bullshit”–as the center of the novel’s conclusion.

Dallas O’Mara: a more ridiculous Mary Sue I’ve never encountered, and Selina DeJong is a pretty bad one. At least Ferber paints Selina as a little flighty, a little deluded, and unafraid of the late-in-life frump to mellow her otherwise sterling character…. but Dallas is all paint-on-the-tip-of-her-nose, same-smile-for-the-busboy, exceedlingly-rich-but-unconcerned-with-money, author’s projection of perfection. It’s hard to stomach. Introducing this nauseating character so late in the game throws the novel off-center and contributes to the weak ending.

 

October 8, 2008

So Big: Summary

Posted by Diablevert under Edna Ferber, So Big
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At first I didn’t know how I was going to write this post, but then I realized all I had to do was the summary to start, and I could palm off a coherent reaction to the book’s themes and place in history to Penny. (Got that, babe? Give me half a blue exam booklet or so, and I’ll be watching for over-large margins.)

So Big: I should have known something was off when the gambler died in the first chapter. The back of the book, see, promises we get to follow the “travails of a gambler’s daughter” in early 20th century Chicago, and I was all set for something involving jet-beaded flapper dresses, cloches and handguns. We get two out of three — one at the beginning and one at the end, and in between them miles exactly the kind of prairie grass I’d thought we’d left behind with Willa and the McLaughlins.

I’m being a bit too metaphorical. Pragmatically, then: It’s the gay nineties, and Selina Peake is our heroine, mostly. She’s the daughter or Simeon Peake, a New England farmer turned High Plains grifter, a man who makes his money at the tables and who keeps his daughter at the Ritz in furs when he’d up and at a flop-house among the cabbage-eaters when he’s down. The only thing he manages to keep up steadily is Selina’s schooling, which comes in handy when he’d accidentally shot during an argument at a gambling den and dies leaving her “two fine clear blue-white diamonds…and the sum of four hundred and ninety-seven dollars in cash.” Left to her own devices, Selina buys herself a plain brown dress (and a wine-red cashmere) and sets off to a post as a prairie school teacher, with the light heart of an adventurer and the eye of an aesthete.

They don’t get her too far — her first burble of pleasure at the beauty of the ripening fields becomes a refrain of mingled ridicule and incomprehension on the part of the stolid Dutch farming community she’s landed among (“Cabbages is beautiful!’ …he choked a little, stuttered, overcome.”). Selina is doomed to remain an outsider among them — by turns pitied and mocked. Which makes the reader dread the results when she falls for one of the overgrown Dutch boys, a tall, good-lookin’ farmer named Pervus DeJong. He saves her from public embarrassment at a church fundraiser; she offers to tutor him in repayment. During the long winter evenings, they sit over a slate in the parlor as she teaches him his three r’s and thinks idly of how much she’d like to lick him in inappropriate places. (No, really. This is a twentieth-century book for sure, maybe the first we’ve read yet.)

Next thing you know Selina’s Mrs. DeJong, mistress of a run-down vegetable farm, whose day starts at three and ends at eleven, well on her way to becoming exactly the kind of work-worn, harried, bent farm wife who appalled her when she first arrived. She has her first child, a much-loved boy—named Dirk and nicknamed So Big—and then sets to wearing herself down to the bone wit’ a quickness, futilely trying to turn her ox-brained husband’s mind and revitalize the farm, and slowly having her spirit crushed for her troubles.

An aside: This was when, as a reader, I began to feel the book was a bit of gyp. I’d been hoping for gamblers and gangsters and big city hustle, and here we were again, stuck with mud and blizzards, the stern and the taciturn.

But not to fear! Pervus, rather handily, dies of pnemonia. Selina takes over the farm, and after one rather bleak and heart-breaking attempt to sell her wares in town, is spotted by an old and now wealthy friend from finishing school, who takes her under her wing, loans her the money to fix the farm up, and helps provide for Dirk’s schooling. Lest my summary seem glib, I must report that this entire sequence of events takes about forty pages, 30 of which concern the ill-fated attempt to go to market, and ten of which account for the whole turning-of-life-around. What’s more all this takes place about halfway though the book.

The second half concerns the fate of So Big, grown to manhood handsome as his father, smart as his mother but with little of her artistic bent. In a series of vignettes, he goes to college; becomes an architect; falls halfway in love with the daughter of his mother’s old, rich friend; bums around for a while not doing too much,; goes to war, -ish; becomes a rich bond trader; has a lengthy affair with the now-married-and-rich-herself friend’s daughter; and then falls for a commercial artist named Dallas who doesn’t love him but does want to paint a portrait of his mother. Selina herself has been wandering in and out of the story all this time, fretting over So Big and trying to prompt his rather pedestrian soul to be a bit more beauty-loving and hard-working, while meanwhile becoming, herself, a 1920s Alice Waters-cum-Dorothy Day, who works hard all day growing the best vegetables in town and spends her off-hours wandering the ethnic enclaves of Chicago, learning to love pirogues and collard greens. The end. (No really, that’s pretty much how it ends — there’s a big reunion dinner at the farm, where one of Selina’s proteges from her teaching days comes back, So Big’s artist friend offers to paint her portrait, and So Big has to leave early to go to a party in the city and mopes about the missed opportunities in his life. That’s how it ends. With a literal whimper.)

 

October 7, 2008

Twenty

Posted by Diablevert under Edna Ferber, So Big
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…Pages to go, or thereabouts. Soon. Tomorrow, in fact. I promise. But tonight sleep. G’night Edna.

 

September 30, 2008

A Word On So Big

Posted by Diablevert under Edna Ferber, So Big
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…I’m not quite done with it yet, but midway through I kind of want to grab Edna Ferber by the scruff of the neck an say, “Listen, lady, if you don’t can it with the foreshadowing there’s gonna be no plot left to reveal.”

So far it’s better than a lot of what we’ve been reading — Ferber has these glimmers of pure genius, like the description of how the a one-room prairie school house smells in the morning when you walk in the door — but there’s a glibness to her writing, and a remove. Subtle, but there. You find in Thackeray, as well — he loves Becky Sharp (as does the right-thinking reader) but whenever he forced to take up the thread of his nominal protagonist, Amelia, you can practically hear the sigh and see the moue, because she’s dull as a rag and empty-headed as a doll, and Thackeray knows it; a faint contempt bleeds through the ink in every line he gives her. Ferber isn’t bored by her characters, exactly, but she yet seems to hold herself above them. You picture her as if sitting in a chair off to the side, raising her eyebrows and giving a little shrug: “Well, what did you expect, after all?” It’s very different from the way, say, Cather writes about her Claude. He, too, is marked out as one of fortune’s fools early on in his book, but Cather, while seeing quite clearly his limitations and hang ups, yet sympathizes with him intensely as well, allows Claude to attain and us to shares with him moments of profound grace. Ferber so far, hasn’t done that, she pulls back a little even at her most expansive — she has the kind of eye that always notices the dirt on the floor.

 

August 28, 2008

This is All My Fault.

Posted by Diablevert under Margaret Wilson, The Able McLaughlins
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So, uh….We’re back. Or rather, I’m back. It was all my fault. I could go into it, but why bore? New job, new city, new lots of stuff, including, eventually, a new library which had…..dunh dunh dunh…the Able McLaughlins.

Which was terrible. Worse than Poole? Ah, now there’s a puzzler. If you expect me to answer that you’ll have to pony up for the cost of a six month sabbatical on the top of a Tibetan peak, whence I could curl up into the Lotus position and truly devote my mind to such and abstruse and ineluctable philosophical puzzle. It’s terrible in its own way, really.

What was so terrible about it? Let me list the ways:

It had no plot to speak of. It had a succession of incidents which occurred in roughly chronological order.

Its main character is named Wully. Which is Scottish for Willy, it seems. It’s not the book’s fault that the only other person named Wully I’ve ever come across is the numb-skulled pictsie [sic] Daft Wullie in Terry Pratchett’s kids’ books. But it didn’t help.

It uses rape as a glib plot device. The victim is understandably and justly traumatized by the event when the plot requires it, and pretty much over it when the plot requires that, shuttling back and forth between these states several times. (You could easily say the same of several deaths which occur in the book.)

It was twee. As twee as fuck. Twee avant la lettre. When the most accurate, precise, and perceptive passages of description — the bits in a book where you read and go, Lo, here at least the author knows whereof they speak — concern a roomful of adults goo-ing at a baby, you’re twee and nothing but it.

In fact, that was maybe my biggest problem with the whole book….the most interesting, original, true-to-life bits felt like a rip off — when you’d come across a striking detail or telling bit of psychological insight, you’d think, “I wonder how she met her” not “I bet she made that up. ” It’s hard to pinpoint, exactly, yet I’m sure most people have had that feeling, especially reading a bad book — all of a sudden a character suddenly pops up off the page, a bas-relief portrait in a stick figure drawing, and you have the distinct feeling that this is a person the author’s remembering, not one they’re assembling. They say you can catch a liar by watching their eyes, that people look up and to the right when remembering, and up and to the left when making stuff up. Maybe that comes through on the page somehow.

Everybody steals, of course, especially from themselves — their own experience —but the good writers steal bits, use a glimmer of thread and not whole cloth. I remember when I was on a big Nabokov kick in college, I read several of his books quite close together, including his autobiography. I was somewhat horrified when he mentioned his mother had, after her husband’s death, worn his father’s wedding ring over her own, tying them together with thread. For he had given that same detail to the mother of one of his characters, in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. (The mild-mannered protagonist of which was outfitted with Nabokov’s younger brother’s mouse-grey spats.) It seemed to me a violation, to steal such a gesture of sorrow from one’s own mother, and use it to make pitiable one’s fictional creation.

But that’s the thing — when I first read about the two rings in Sebastian Knight, I believed in them as fiction, because Nabokov’s a great writer. I believed him fully capable of imaging such a precise symbol of a widow’s grief, and it was a little shock to see he’d nicked it from reality. The observed detail enhanced the fictional world, and fit within it — Nabokov may have adorned his fictional widow with real jewelry, but the detail was selected to illustrate a character whose purpose and personality were known, and served the story.

Maybe that’s what the difference is with a bad writer, and a bad book — you read these sharp and particular descriptions about one character, and they don’t serve, they’re not leading to anything, they don’t snap like a puzzle piece into place, making the big picture that little bit clearer: They’re just there. That’s how you feel about a lot of Wilson’s best writing — it’s just there. She wants to cram it in, wants to show you these people she finds fascinating, the the plot of the story is just draped around them somehow, while they remain inert. Reading about the most interesting of them made me mildly curious about life on the plains back in the day, but if anything more contemptuous of the author.

So, in a word, blech. Onto So Big.

 

May 29, 2008

This is Just to Say…

Posted by Diablevert under Uncategorized
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…that I suck and it’s totally my fault we’re behind. The Able McLaughlins, she is not the most popular work, yes? I’m having some difficulty tracking down a copy….for a price I’m willing to pay, that it. There’s an online library site that wants to charge me $15 bucks for it, and Amazon has to for 20-30, which I may have to bite the bullet on as at the only library that has it near me it’s been overdue for a week now. So I offer my apologies. If it makes you feel any better, based on the 20 pages I’ve been able to read so far it promises to be sort of terrible.

In the meantime, would you like to read a bunch of parodies of William Carlos William’s “This is Just to Say“?

There are some here and some here and some here and some here (in act II).

Here’s mine:

I have neglected

the book

that is next

in this project

and which

you were probably

expecting

to read about

Forgive me

It was irritating

So hard to find

and so dull

 

May 23, 2008

The Able McLaughlins: Summary

Posted by Dreadful Penny under Margaret Wilson, The Able McLaughlins
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Dear lord, how many of these books are about callow young men? (And one young woman?) Seriously, people, I’m getting bildungsroman-ed out. Anyway, the following summary of The Able McLaughlins is rather extended; I found this book difficult to obtain and scarcely described online, so for the good of other intrepid Pulitzer readers, here are the full deets.

Our 1924 winner by Margaret Wilson is mainly about one son of a large Scottish clan that has overtaken the Iowa plains in the years surrounding the Civil War. Wully, the eldest of sixteen, has just arrived home from a stint in the Union army, determined to marry. He’s had his cap set for Chirstie McNair since they shared a tender moment during his convalescent visit home from the front, but when he rushes over to her home to propose, she dramatically avoids him, weeping and hiding in her house with her father’s old gun. After a few weeks of anguished confusion, he learns that, in his absence, Chirstie was raped by Peter Keith, the town ne’er-do-well. Wully drives Peter out of town, confronts his personal rage and shame, and pretty much strong-arms Chirstie into marrying him right away, even though she is pregnant with Peter’s child. Wully sets up house with Chirstie and her younger siblings (their mother is dead and their father has returned to the old country for a spell) and tells his family that the baby is his, suffering great shame from his mother because everyone’s doing the math between the baby’s expected date of arrival and their wedding date, and they just don’t add up.

Meanwhile, Chirstie’s absent father arrives back from Scotland with a new wife, Barbara. Barbara seems to be a bit of Glasgow society, for she has trunks of fine clothes and feels generally deceived by her husband for bringing her across the ocean to live “in a sty.” (In a fairly amusing diversion from the main plot, Barbara cons her cheapskate husband to build her an expensive new house that becomes the envy of the community.) Wully and Chirstie move in with the McLaughlins to await the birth of the baby, suffering the constant complaints of Libby Keith, Peter’s mother, bemoaning her absent son. Chirstie’s baby, wee Johnnie, is born, and he’s beloved by all despite the shameful circumstances of his conception.

Wully and family move into a new house with Wully’s younger brother, John, and begin to cultivate their own plot of land. Their peace is shattered, however, when Chirstie spots Peter Keith at their back door. She flips the script, and Wully decides to find Peter and kill him before he has a chance to do his family any more harm. In searching for him, Wully inadvertently alerts the neighborhood of Peter’s return home, and Libby Keith works everyone into a frenzied manhunt when Peter fails to show up at the family homestead. Even Wully is forced into the search for Peter, which drags on and on. And on

Eventually everyone must return to the harvest, but Wully decides to bring in his wheat and then leave the farm to sell lumber in town, thinking that Chirstie would feel safer in a less isolated spot. Irony of ironies, when he, Chirstie, and Johnnie are passing an idyllic day in town, Wully meets up with the dying Peter Keith, whom he refuses to transport back to his distraught mother. Chirstie, however, can’t handle having this sin on their collective souls, so in the end they load Peter into their wagon to bring him back home. It’s all good, though, because in the end Wully can gloat that Peter’s last earthly sights will be of Wully content with a beautiful wife raising Peter’s own son as his own. Sucka.

 

May 16, 2008

One of Ours: Now in Muxtape form!

Posted by Diablevert under Muxtape, One of Ours, Willa Cather
[4] Comments 

I don’t know if you’ve heard of Muxtape? (ed note: Muxtape died. It’s sad and complicated. See here.) It’s a neat internet ap that allows you to make virtual mixtapes. To amuse myself, I’ve made one on the theme of One of Ours. Check it out. These were my reasons.

1. Claude’s thesis, of course, is on Joan of Arc and his time in school is hopeful, joyful jangly time for him

2. …and then his father makes him go back to the ranch

3. Bored and lonely, he convinces himself he must be in love with Enid.

4. Who ditches him emotionally before she even leaves, really. Thus this song, in reference to this chapter in particular.

5. And so he goes to war, where he is finally feels a part of something…

6. And then dies. But dies pretty much happy, and loving France. So, only Edith Piaf could suit.

 

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