The Store: An Old Review

Posted in T.S. Stribling, The Store with tags , , on May 13, 2010 by Diablevert

This is a bit like the 70-year-old Pulitzer version of the lurkers support me in email, but hey, look! A review of The Store from Time magazine back in the day:

Written in the great tradition of well-peopled novels, the book successfully commingles impartial observation and ubiquitous sympathy, tinged with a faintly subacid humor. In pitch, scope, execution it is easily the most important U. S. novel of the year. Col. Miltiades Vaiden, a vastly human character who should walk straight into the U. S. Pantheon, is more than the central figure of the story. He is the focus in which the town of Florence reflects its earthen realities, its haunting bright potentialities.

Really, I should have been lazy and just linked to their summary, it’s better than mine. And they largely agree with me, so what’s not to love. But seriously, anyone who’s read the book might want to check it out for contemporary take on the novel.

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The Store: Summary

Posted in T.S. Stribling, The Store with tags , , , , , , on May 12, 2010 by Diablevert

As I liked this one better than my erstwhile partner, I feel guilty for neglecting poor Stribling. But on the other hand, my feeling that I ought to write something substantive has tempted me into delaying doing anything at all (….there’s a disturbing allegory there….) and meanwhile, I’ve left the summary to rot. So here it is in brief:

The Store, by T.S. Stribling, is the second book in a trilogy concerning the fate of the Vaiden family. It’s set in Florence, Alabama — a city Stribling knew well — in the 1880s, or in other words, the rise of Jim Crow and the aftermath of the Civil War.

This is a novel with a sizable cast and a few prominent players, but the main attraction is indisputably Miltiades Vaiden. Milt is Col. Milt, a former Confederate army officer, plantation overseer, and leader of the Klu Klux Klan. When we meet him, though, he’s hit a very tough patch: Headed into his late 40s, he’s married to a wife, Ponny, he isn’t attracted to and whom he thinks beneath him in class and understanding; they have no children, though Ponny desperately wants one. His family farm is barely making any profit, and has fallen into disrepair, and he himself is living in town in rented rooms, with nothing much but a pension to get by on.

It wasn’t always meant to be this way; before the war, he had ambitions of moving from plantation overseer to plantation owner, and was engaged to Drusilla, the beautiful daughter of one of the most prominent families in town. Drusilla ditched him at the alter (runs off with a dashing young officer named Crowninshield who’s killed in the war, leaving her with one daughter, Sydna). His marriage to Ponny was supposed to bring him enough scratch to get him back on his feet, but that all fell through when the store owner to whom he had sold his whole cotton crop, one J. Handback, declared bankruptcy without paying ol’ Milt. In the years that have passed since the Reconstruction, Handback has opened a new store and done well with it, and now owns many of poor farms surrounding the town, but Milt’s never recovered from the loss.

Milt’s desperate for one last chance to reverse his fortunes, and he seizes it when he runs into the aforementioned J. Handback, walking through town late one night, drunk as a lord and bragging about his mulatto mistress. Armed with blackmail ammo, Col. Milt demands a job from Handback. After a few months go by, Handback sends Milt to supervise the transport of 500 bales of cotton from his farms to storage so it can be shipped to New Orleans for sale — and that’s when Milt comes up with a scheme that will really let him get his own back, conceiving a clever plan that will allow him to nick Handback’s whole shipment, netting him about $25,000 — if word doesn’t leak before he gets the profit in his bank account.

While Milt schemes his way back to the good life, his young nephew, Jerry Vaiden, dreams his way though his last years of high school, mooning over Sydna and groping toward Nirvana with the help of a dusty library book on Bhuddist mysticism. To say that Stribling nails Jerry’s characterization is too blunt; he pins him, more like, as an entymolologist spikes and spreads a beetle on a corkboard, penetrating right to the heart of a certain type of too-sensitive adolescent, and displaying all his flaws to best advantage: Jerry’s self-obessesed (though unconscious of their self-obsession), inspired by high ideals — of valour, asceticism, self-sacrifice, romance — and utterly oblivious to the ways in which he fails to live up to them. His depiction of Jerry may be remorseless, but it is not unkind; you get the feeling there’s a fair bit of self-portrait in him. Jerry’s a bit of an outcast—attempting to adhere to the practices of Zen Bhuddism doesn’t win your too many friends in small-town Alabama in the 1880s, even if you do keep it on the down-low. But he preservers, strengthened by his belief in and yearning for a life beyond his current circumstances, and always hoping to be given an opportunity to prove his own goodness.

Stribling also follows the fortunes of one of the town’s black families, the mother-son pair of Gracie and Toussaint. Gracie is the beautiful mulatto mistress Handback couldn’t help bragging on; what’s more, she used to be a Vaiden family slave. Her son, Toussaint, is so pale he could pass for white — if he ever moved far enough away to be among people who didn’t know his family and his history, and that is Gracie’s dream for him.

I’ve realized in writing this much, I’ve barely sketched out the background to the actual plot, the central characters and the major event that sets all the others in motion. Seeing as it took my 750 words just to get that far, I’m going to Cliff notes the rest, with spoilers galore: Milt gets his money, gets caught, and then gets off, cash intact, but only because of a tragic technicality — sherrif’s men, sent at the behest of Handback to roust him from his house, frighten his wife so much she dies of a heart attack, and Handback’s afraid his suit for the profits on the cotton will be met by a counter-claim for wrongful death. With lots of other bills coming due, and creditors putting the squeeze on him again, Handback faces bankruptcy a second time — and kills himself.

Newly free and only half-mournful, Milt is blamed for both deaths and widely shunned by the townsfolk, all except for one, however — Sydna, the young daughter of his ex-flame, who remembers the tales of his battlefield valor and kindness to her family, and still idealizes him as a noble and fallen warrior. She is at first unconscious of the true depth of her affection — but her mother’s not. And when the Col. shows up at the Crowninshield door, his old dream of owning a big house and having a beautiful wife to grace it newly revived with the stolen money, Drusilla turns him down and then turns him lose on Sydna, who accepts him.

That tears up Jerry’s heart, of course, and he becomes a little meaner and more orney in his heart-brokeness. Meanwhile, Milt’s actions have also harmed Gracie and Toussaint — Gracie had helped Milt hide his cash asked her to, betraying her lover and revealing her true loyalties, to her own self-disappointment. Now that Handback’s out of the picture, she’s been forced to take up Milt’s offer of a place as a tenant on a newly-bought property of his. Locked away in the remote countryside, she loses all hope of herself or her son ever escaping Florence to a better life when Toussaint marries a young local school teacher.

Toussaint has never managed to attain the level of necessary self-abnegation to survive in the Jim Crown South, as will be proved when a conflict arises between him, a poor white sharecropper and Col. Milt over the use of some farm equipment. Toussaint decides to stand up for his rights, leading to the final tragedy of the book….to bring across the true flavor of the dramatix climax Stribling constructs, a mixture of fated doom and chance ill luck, of the accidental lack of information and deliberate, Peterine denials and failures to act, would take nearly as long as it does to read it; suffice it to say that it ends with three men hung from a tree in the village square, Jerry having unknowingly failed a great moral test, and Milt having lost one precious thing he never knew he had.

So that’s basically what happens in the book. Why should you care what happens in it? Stribling’s not the greatest stylist we’ve run into in this quest; a little dipping into his bio reveals that he spent years as a hack writer for the pulps before attempting more serious work, and it shows in spots. (Such as the end of chapters, which are nearly always cliff-hangers.) Some of the characters are thin, some coinciendences a bit contrived. I can’t say I’d tell you to read it for style.

Nah, I’m going to say that you should read this book for the thing I thought least promising about it when I picked it up: Its setting, post-reconstruction, pre-Jim Crow, small-town Alabama.

See, I think the reason I feared this place and people was that, have read a decade plus of other Pulitzer winners and noted their batting avergae, I was afraid it we’d get a ham-handed portrayal of race relations and small town tensions, or some Gone With the Wind-like paen to the gracious, glorious Old South.  (Which is awaiting us quite soon.) A cuddly nostalgia-fest, or a red-faced moral jerimiad.

What you get instead is cold. Cold in the sense that Stribling knows this place, these people: The things they say, the things they think, the minor and the major hypocricies that get them through the day. In respect to this particular time and place, I’d say he’s got as keen an eye for the delusions people allow themselves as Flaubert. (Though he doesn’t, perhaps, take as much visceral joy from totting them down.)  

But also cold in the sense that’s that’s how he serves up the characters to the reader: He presents their actions, their reasoning, and he gives them to you flat, with no real indication of where his own sympathies lie in respect to those actions. (I can think of a few spare, swift moments which are an exception to this, where he lets slip a sentence or two that suggests his judgement — Handback’s death scene is one.)  This too, is different from most of the Pulitzers; Penny and I have complained copiously of the snideness, contemptuousness, even arrogance that many of the other authors display toward thier characters (Lewis and Tarkington spring to mind). Even with the better writers, it’s been clear who their favorites are: Cather is quite fond of Claude, and Ferber approves of Selina. Peterkin ain’t a great writer, but she is clearly delighted with Mary. Being able to step back and let the reader form their own judgement entirely is difficult, and I think many writers wouldn’t even attempt it. It’s also the cause in part, I think, of why Penny and I disagreed so strongly in the beginning about this book. I was inclined to favor Stribling more clearly from the first, while she was more doubtful of his intentions (especially in regard to whether he was commenting on racism or actually being racist). And that I think is an interesting affect to be able to achieve, and vitally necessary one for him to be able to do the thing he does so well in this book, which is tease out the web of moral conflicts and obligations that entangle every character in this town. The things that stick with me about The Store aren’t the big, dramatic climactic scenes. It’s the little ones, which skip across the surface of the plot: Milt returning to his old family home and learning that the child of a free slave is being taught to read by his sister, and has been named after him. Handback’s brief visceral repulsion at the thought of Toussaint leaving town and passing for white — at the same time as Toussaint’s mother, Gracie, is the love of his life, whose betrayal he cannot survive. Jerry, watching over the body of his aunt the night before her funeral, and harshly turning away a black man who begs for some part of the funeral feast, his honor insulted by having his knighltly vigil disrupted and his family’s grief intruded on—though he knows the same man had saved his uncle’s life the day before, and lost his job because of it. These things gave me a deeper understanding of what it must have been like to live in that time and place than I had heretofore ever know, the compromises people had to make with themselves and with the world, and for that I’ll always be grateful for having read The Store.

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Bridge of San Luis Rey: Final Chat

Posted in Louis Bromfield, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder on May 5, 2010 by Diablevert

Dreadful Penny: I think Wilder is able to like — I think it is possible to write a book that is not about sex. And I think Wilder does that pretty well, with this book. He does that pretty well with Our Town, too. And the criticism of it, that it just doesn’t include the whole of human experience, is perhaps a little unfair. Because what work does contain the whole of human experience? Works which are pre-occupied with sex can often ignore many other things. I think this book does talk about faith in a pretty meaningful way. I don’t think that Wilder really skirts away from the issue of sex in this book, I think it’s just beside the point. In that a lot happens offstage, or….

Diablevert: It’s not that — I don’t demand that there be boot-knocking before I give it my A++…

Dreadful Penny: “Sex or else! There must be bodices ripped on the cover!”

Diablevert: But even though it’s not a book about sex it is a book about love. Do you know what I mean? All these characters are in love one way or another. And some of it’s more familial, the love of a brother, the love of a mother and a daughter, but Uncle Pio loves the actress, even though he knows from the beginning they’re never going to get together. And granted she’s very young at the beginning of the relationship, it’s quite clear that he loves her when she’s an adult and yet that sexual issue…

Dreadful Penny: It’s never going to happen.

Diablevert: Exactly. And it’s the same with the dead twin and the actress, he’s like, this is never going to get to happen. And even if it were able to happen, even though I do have this deep love, I would give it up in order to stay tight with my brother. Do you know what I mean? It’s all about love being thwarted….it’s interesting, what do you make of the end when Pietra, the servant girl is writing the letter.

She’s writing the letter to the nun, and the letter is all about her confusion and her sense of hopelessness, like, “I’m trying to do what you want me to so here, and I’m not even sure I know what that is, and I just wish you would give me some advice, give me some sense, of how to serve you, because even if I knew—just if I knew that, then I’d be able to go on.” And that’s the turning point for the Marquesa…

Dreadful Penny: Essentially to me that letter is like a prayer. That’s the way people pray in desperation. That you pray not even for an act to happen, but you pray just for this idea of being given some kind of guidance. “If I were set an impossible task, I would do it, just give me a sense of what this task is.” Not that I’m a great pray-er, — prayer-er? Pray-er-er? — not that I’m very prayerful, but I think that that is such a good metaphor of allusion for the act of loving, the act of offering prayer. The nun is able to give what she can give but doesn’t know how to do it. The Marquesa would do anything she could do for her daughter, if her daughter would only tell her what it is. And that essential, batting your head against a wall, not knowing what thing is proper to do and running yourself ragged.

Diablevert: But what does it mean that the Marquesa, on seeing this letter and reading this letter, what she takes from that for her own like is she looks at that and says, “My daughter is never going to love me.”

Dreadful Penny: Yeah

Diablevert: And decides, like, “Okay. Fine. That’s never gonna happen.” Do you know what I mean? Like,

Dreadful Penny: Maybe she sees Pepita as a kindred spirit? Or is inspired that the girl is able to love with such passion? The girl clearly has a great maternal love, for the Abbess. And the idea that maybe the Marquesa has forgotten that children could potentially even love their parents. The idea that she’s just internalized that all kids are difficult and ungrateful, all teenagers are awful, and this idea that she’s so moved by the fact that any—that this love is possible, and gives her the idea that she could possibly redirect her energies into some font of actual, potential, not even reciprocity, but just acceptance. She’s so stonewalled, the whole time. Her daughter’s a bitch, by the way.

Diablevert: Yeah, her daughter is kind of a bitch.

Dreadful Penny: My mom sometimes makes a scene in a mall, but I’m still nice to her.

Diablevert: No, totally. Though you can make a pretty good case for her mom being a little nuts.

Dreadful Penny: Oh, she’s totally nuts.

Diablevert: But yeah, her daughter is totally a bitch.

Dreadful Penny: The letters take like two months to arrive! Is it really that aggressive?

Diablevert: Yeah. But that’s a whole nother thread we could take up….I dunno, I’m still stuck on this, I’m not sure what the meaning of it was, with all those people. It seems so sad to me, this whole idea. That upon reading [the letter], upon seeing that this exists in the world and realizing that that’s what she doesn’t have, and is never going to have, she comes to some kind of acceptance that she is never going to happen with her daughter, and that’s what’s so sad. A lot of the other people — in a way, the story of the twins is a much more hopeful story. The idea that this guy was going to go on and move on and have a different life, even though he’s so sad that his brother was no longer there, that he was going to be able to keep going—-

Dreadful Penny: I don’t know. When he has that conversation with the captain about the captain’s daughter, the captain has this line, like, “All this is is just marking time. The rest of your life, just marking time. Find something to occupy your time and don’t worry, it won’t take that long.” I thought that was really sad, and really tragic. When he leaves the inn, where the boy is, and the apparition of the girl, he sees her and she follows him everywhere. That’s pretty fucking tragic.

Diablevert: No, you’re right, I think I had forgotten a little bit of that. That is a more hollow future. But still, he dies before any of it even fucking happened, in the bridge accident. And the other one, Uncle Pio and the little kid — first of all, poor little kid. He didn’t do dick, and he died.

[Skipping another brief sidebar on sick kids and Bromfield.]

Diablevert: But for this—I mean, we ought not to overlook the simple explanation, which was that medicine was not so advanced back in the day, and a lot of people got sick and it was a much more common experience back then —

Dreadful Penny: In rural Peru.

Diablevert: Yeah, exactly, so it was pretty commonplace and perhaps didn’t seem like such a strained device, but at the same time….it’s so handy.

Dreadful Penny: It’s convenient to have a sick child?

Diablevert: Well, yeah. Because it’s so dramatic. It’s like any other life and death situation. That’s why trials continue to be described. To be sick, is to be on the precipice between life and death, and people love their kids more than anything, and so the sickness of a child is the most traumatic event ever, and that’s why it comes up again and again.

Dreadful Penny: Maybe the artistic tension in this book is, I think essentially it has a hopeful tone, but it is a pretty pessimistic take on the futility of love. And the futility of desire, and change. The tension is what keeps it going, maybe. Maybe that’s its gift, is that it’s able to be sort of beautiful and hopeful and be very complimentary of love, but also fundamentally in plot be very negative.

Diablevert: See, I don’t know. It’s entirely possible that there can be no real answer to this question. And that that’s part of the gnomic puzzle of the book. And maybe it just comes down to your temperament, how you approach the story, whether you see it as something that’s essentially life-affirming or deeply pessimistic. But it does seem to line up with this idea of having your deepest impulses to love someone else not be able to be fulfilled, and somehow coming to accept that.

Dreadful Penny: I think that’s kind of a biographical reading of the book. But.

Diablevert: Yeah…Yes. One hesitates to be too glib with that sort of thing, but it just sort of lines up very neatly.

Dreadful Penny: Maybe that’s what gives it that sort of fable, poignant quality. It quality as a fable is that it’s able to be both those things at once.

Diablevert: Well, I think oftentimes a book is the author’s argument with himself.

Dreadful Penny: I think this is a book where the author’s arguing with himself much more than in other books. The project of a Tarkington, or a Bromfeild, or a Sinclair Lewis, is very much straight ahead. Pushing the message on. Whereas I feel like this is a book where Thornton Wilder is asking himself a question that he doesn’t quite know the answer to. The book is an exploration of that.

Diablevert: Yeah, I know, totally. And one of the reasons it’s a much better book than most of the other ones that we’ve read is that it’s so much subtler. He’s a better reader of people, and he understands people a lot better, than some of the other authors we’ve dealt with. And is just much more subtle about the kinds of things he can bring in, and the kinds of nuances that he can attribute to the character’s emotions. Like with the Marquesa, he’s able to show you that she is batshit crazy and that if you actually knew her you would probably find her irritating, but yet she’s also a very sympathetic and poignant figure, and so the daughter is a total bitch, but the daughter is not wrong to be annoyed, and you can find her [ridiculous], and yet she’s very witty…

Dreadful Penny: Well, he’s also able to do that thing as a narrator that Bromfield can’t do, where Bromfield just tells you the internal thoughts of a character, whereas Wilder is more able to let events or past anecdotes, or things — it’s not that book is so much more dialogue-heavy, I don’t think it is, it’s that he’s able to use a lot of different techniques to get you inside a character’s head, and I think they’re much more mysterious, or enjoyable, and less, “I’m just reading what the narrator thinks that person is thinking,” for 100 pages.

Diablevert: Oh, I think he’s the better writer. But the fact that he’s using this more fabulous tone helps him, because he’s able to make these sort of more broad, profound statements, and it doesn’t seem — it fits in with the tone of the entire book and so it seems okay. But the other thing is that he…there is a lot of third-person omniscient stuff in here, as in Bromfield, but the other thing in Bromfield is that a lot of the interior thoughts that the characters are having is him just underlining dialogue. Do you know what I mean? Just tons of stuff you could just rip out wholesale, and have the dialogue in there, and [the reader] could pick up, like, 95 percent, of everything he’s just spent fifteen pages writing out.

Dreadful Penny: Yeah.

Diablevert: It’s imperative in the dialogue and you should be able to see it. One of the things, when they always talk about show-not-tell, to my mind, is that the way that works is that in real life you have to observe how people act and infer. And if you’re writing the characters and you have them set up so that people know something about them, they can infer so much for speech. That was the whole problem with Bromfield. He didn’t trust you; he thought you were a dumbass, and he had to tell you exactly what the characters were thinking.

Dreadful Penny: Which is not fair. Bromfield, history will find you to be a fucktard.

Diablevert: Yeah. Whereas Wilder — the scene with the two brothers, where the one brother is really sick and the other brother is trying to take care of him —

Dreadful Penny: He gets stabbed in the knee and dies, P.S. It didn’t seem like a very big injury to kill you.

Diablevert: Oh, no, I disagree, actually. Rural Peru back in the day? People died of that shit all the time! There was no tetanus.

Dreadful Penny: I guess so.

Diablevert: One my distant cousins died of appendicitis, and that was in the 50s. If I’d have been born like twenty years ahead, I’d have died on my ninth birthday —- no, really. My appendix ruptured.

Dreadful Penny: And they wouldn’t have been able to do anything. I’ve often thought that if I had lived in the 18th century, my asthma and chronic pneumonia as a child would have killed me. There was no amoxicillin back then.

Diablevert: Maybe. Or you could have been one of those people like in Heidi, where you were a convalescent or whatever.

Dreadful Penny: That’s true.

Diablevert: Maybe you would have died, though, because I don’t know, maybe your family wouldn’t have been wealthy enough to —

Dreadful Penny: They probably would not have been wealthy enough for a mountain retreat.

Diablevert: Yeah. More of a Secret Garden deal. You needed a Dickon.

Dreadful Penny: Yeah, exactly. Who doesn’t? Who doesn’t.

Diablevert: Where were we? Wilder, Bromfield…. I lost my train of thought. That’s what happens when you bring up certain strapping Yorkshire lads.

Dreadful Penny: And now you go home now to write Secret Garden fan fic.

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Bridge of San Luis Rey: Yet more.

Posted in Early Autumn, Louis Bromfield, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder on May 1, 2010 by Diablevert

(ed. note: I, too, can hardly believe it, but there is yet more of our chat on Bridge. DP has voted for completism, so here’s part 4, with *gulp* more to come once I get done transcribing it.)

Diablevert: But what did you think about this idea of it being all about love being thwarted? It seemed so sad to me, that none of these people ever came close to achieving that fulfillment. And that seemed to be part of the point somehow.

Dreadful Penny: It is, it’s a very sad book. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say it’s tragic, because it might be too slender to be tragic, but it is. Even the characters who are left behind — the actress who enters the convent, or the daughter, who ends up sort of sad and remorseful for her scorn — there are a lot of characters in this book who end up sort of sad. But it’s not a hopeless book. It feels like a book that’s very full of hope.

Diablevert: I dunno, I think a lot of it was about all the characters accepting that they’re never going to get what they want. You know what I mean? That kind of happens to everybody. It’s like the actress’s idea…her face is ruined and she’s never going to attain that fame, and her art doesn’t mean anything to her anymore, and so she throws herself into good works, but that’s kind a limited, and a very different thing from what she had hoped to achieve. And even the nun, who had hoped to see her work carried on, is like, okay, her protégé is dead, and that’s never going to happen for her, [and she comes to accept], I’m not going to change this society permanently, but I can do this little thing that I can do, I do that the best I can and that’s it.

Dreadful Penny: And Uncle Pio has this great love for the actress, and he’s killed, and the twin, nobody gets any in this book, or you’re right, it’s all offscreen. I mean, it’s not so scared of sex as, say, the Bromfield, where people literally went batshit insane of, you know…

Diablevert: Sidebar on Bromfield: Did you ever see Cold Comfort Farm?

Dreadful Penny: Yes, I did see that movie, yes.

Diablevert: Do you know Stephen Fry’s character in the movie*?

Dreadful Penny: Yes. Yes, I do.

Diablevert: I think Bromfield might be a bit like that.

Dreadful Penny: Oh no! <She dissolves into giggles.>

Diablevert: Do you know what I mean? Because Stephen Fry’s character is very much — it’s a very good book, also, Stella Gibbons — but his character is like, “It’s not that you don’t like me, it’s that you have these tremendous hang-ups about sex, and if only I, this virile gentleman, could just get you to get over this….”

Dreadful Penny: Which is so funny because Stephen Fry, I mean, that character…

Diablevert: Oh, I know, exactly….but the whole idea of this pig-headed, blind, “God, these sheltered, hopeless, foolish, blocked people! If only they would just Embrace the Life Force!” Bromfield just struck that note for me, and I mean…the [Courant] review had a good headline, ‘Pummelling the Puritans’—

Dreadful Penny: “Pummells the Puritians….with his weiner.”

Diablevert laughs.

Dreadful Penny: Good job, Bromfield.

Diablevert: Yeeeah….

*Note: He show up 2:39 into the clip.

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The Store: Final Chat

Posted in T.S. Stribling, The Store with tags , on April 12, 2010 by Dreadful Penny

Dreadful Penny: The Store! I was not expecting shit to go all wrong in quite… nay, at all… the way that it did.

Diablevert: Oh, really? Hunh. There was definitely a point in the book where I was like, “Is it possible that we’re going to read a novel set in the Deep South in this period that doesn’t have a lynching?” And I was kind of like, “possible…but not probable….” Felt like an undropped shoe to me.

Dreadful Penny: I pretty much assumed that everything would go horribly awry with the Col.’s business dealings and his marriage would shatter and Jerry would be crushed and everyone would sadly fade into the sunset. Then again, I can never figure out the end of a mystery either, so I’m probably more gullible than the average reader.

Diablevert: I think I might have thought that if I hadn’t read somewhere along the way that this book is the middle in a trilogy.

Dreadful Penny: It is? I so wish I didn’t know that.

Diablevert: Sorry.

Dreadful Penny: But I think I got all my OCD completism out with all that Bromfield.

Diablevert: See, I think I’d be much more inclined to read the rest of this series. Probably if I merely sit here a rest a while the fever shall pass, but I’m definitely way more curious about what happens to Stribling’s characters than I was with Bromfield’s. E.B. always felt a bit paper-mache; Stribling’s seem likely to have been ripped off from real life, but at least they feel real.

Dreadful Penny: I would agree with that. Just plain more happened in this book than the average Pulitzer…. I was actually reading to see how everything was going to play out after the first 100 pages, in a pretty enjoyable way.

Diablevert: Agreed. I’ve been reading a bit about Stribling; apparently he made his living in the pulps for years before getting more serious work published (and even during) and I think you can feel that in this – the plot is twisty, but neatly twisty, if you see what I mean.

Dreadful Penny: I do. Everything and everyone is interconnected… oh, before I forget, I want to correct an earlier misreading of mine… I don’t know why I thought this, but a few chats ago, I think I described Landers (the postmaster) as black, which he totally isn’t. In retrospect, I don’t know why I thought that, but it became totally clear later that he’s white, and, anyway, just wanted to publicly show that I know how to read and stuff. (Also, poor Landers.)

Diablevert: Really? I don’t think you did, but maybe I’m remembering wrong. For me that neatness was where it fell down a little, in the end – did you find the ending shocking?

Dreadful Penny: The lynching shocked me. It felt pretty inevitable once Lucy wanted to bring lawyers into the deal, and Cady was released from jail, but I wasn’t quite expecting everything to go down like it did, more on coincidence and bad luck than anything else.

Diablevert: Mmmm. Thinking about it now: as I was reading there were points were I half-thought, or half-hoped, that Stribling might let him get away…yet when it did come I wasn’t shocked. All along I’ve had a feeling that part of what Stribling was doing was trying to show how fucked up this all was, and inasmuch as that is the author’s project then you can’t skip the lynching. So it felt more ironic that tragic to me, not tragic with extra irony dolloped on top, which is what I think he was going for.

Dreadful Penny: I’m also not 100% sure that Stribling wasn’t using Toussaint’s death as a way to deepen a tragic ending for the Col. (losing the son he never knew he had). The weird supernatural element at the end seemed like an off note also.

Diablevert: I think that’s part of what he was doing, sure. And I think he backs away from Toussaint at the end of the book….in order to elevate this properly, we should have had a chapter from Toussaint’s point of view explaining his decision to go to court over the wagon, etc., in parallel with the Col.’s decision to steal the cotton. An echo of the obsessive idea leading to a fateful, seemingly small decision which then becomes and all-encompassing, life-changing event – except instead of choosing to become a scoundrel Toussaint decides to risk his life to stand up for his rights. You could have kept all the random irony in – the fact that he’s lynched as an afterthought, along with the thieves (although that also seems like a clear JC reference) and it would have been much more heart-wrenching

Dreadful Penny: Have you read Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow? A similar plot line happens in that book…. trying to get justice for a vandalized car gets the man’s wife killed, and then he becomes a domestic terrorist, and it just all goes south.

Diablevert: Nope, never read it.

Dreadful Penny: Well, the Ragtime plotline and Toussaint’s storyline are similar… a quest for a small act of justice with property blows up in the man’s face. Word to the JC reference… I thought that was a bit much. Also, was there a lingering bit of plot weirdness in the fact that the Col. invents a thief in the beginning of the book? I kept thinking that people were mentioning/looking for them throughout the book.

Diablevert: No, he invents a companion – says he was travelling with a beater to account for the time when he was selling Handback’s cotton downriver, and the guy who gives him a ride gets all psyched and is like, “I bet the guy who gave you a ride was the thief that’s been plaguing the county!”

Dreadful Penny: That’s right… so are the thieves at the end that same thief? Because that would tie up neatly.

Diablevert: I think so. It’s the country. There’s not so many. It’s mentioned again, I think, when the Col gets arrested – at one point the Sheriff has to leave to go follow up on something, and I think it’s suggested that it has to do with the thieves. But whatevs, let’s skip plot. What’s your take on Stribling, at the end?

Dreadful Penny: Liked it much better than I expected to, almost in spite of myself.

Diablevert: In spite of yourself?

Dreadful Penny: Yeah… I was a big naysayer in the beginning, with the dialect, and the Klan leader/Confederate general/overseer main character, and the general “being a 1930s Pulitzer winner” thing working against it. But, actually, it was a pretty good novel. Even if I wanted to smack all the characters upside the head at some point.

Diablevert: So far I’d say the 30s have a better batting average than the 20s, although that’s an argument for another day.

Dreadful Penny: And we will certainly have that argument later.

Diablevert: What did you think of the Sydna/Milt marriage? Sydna’s mother, Drusilla, surprised me right into being one of my favorite characters in the book. I think she felt a little too much like the author’s mouthpiece, at times, but I was surprised and intrigued by her…. resignation, her sort of desire to stay true to herself. Like, she could easily have married Milt, saved her house – everyone would have been pretty much happy, except her. And she wouldn’t do it, because she was like, fuck you, I don’t want to be the angel on the top of your Christmas tree, the final ornament adorning your fantasy

Dreadful Penny: The Sydna/Milt marriage was icky to the extreme. Her idolization of him, his sense of himself as a dirty old lech and her as an angel of youth, the weird fact that he could have been her father with only a small time slip. I found the whole Drusilla/Milt courtship a little odd… it seemed like there was a strong class barrier against it on the first go-round, then his pining for her seemed half-assed (and more running away from poor fat Ponny) and then the weird conflation of her with the manor house on courtship part deux. Plus Sydna’s idolatry of him.

Diablevert: Yeah there’s bound to be a letdown there at some point (re: Sydna/Milt) these are the kinds of things that make me curious to read the follow-up. If there was such a strong class barrier, how’d he nearly get up the altar with her?

Dreadful Penny: I actually have no desire to watch that fall apart. There is no plot line that makes me more uncomfortable than shame/embarrassment.

Diablevert: We are alike in that, but I didn’t really feel embarrassed for them so much.

Dreadful Penny: I wasn’t positive that the class barrier was actually in place… in fact, I thought it was kinda tough to figure out where the Col. fit into Southern white class structure. Being an overseer seemed like manual labor, but being a Confederate officer would elevate your status… it seemed like he ping-ponged between classes.

Diablevert: He was definitely upwardly mobile, and I agree he was hard to peg

Dreadful Penny: Anything else you’d like to cover for The Store? You seemed to like the book throughout… what was your end assessment?

Diablevert: Well, I am curious what you thought Stribling’s point was, in writing it. I have my take particularly after reading a bit more about Stribling personally. I definitely think he’s been one of the most withholding of our authors – Cather liked Claude, and Tarkington was condescending toward George; Stribling is harder to nail down. So I am curious what you think he was trying to do with this: does he think these people admirable? Contemptible?

Dreadful Penny: I know absolutely nothing about Stribling that isn’t in this book. I don’t even know what “T.S.” stands for. So I don’t feel like I can make a comprehensive claim that The Store is making a certain statement on racism, or the South, although I do think that he was appalled by racist violence and being kept from education. To me, the most consistent message of the book was to show the havoc that hypocrisy, or being willfully unaware of your own nature, will wreck in your life. Characters were constantly at cross-purposes with each other, or shocked at some desire in one person that they would display pages later, and they nearly always suffered for it. I felt that there was a lot of truth in the way he portrayed human motivation, and the thought processes someone goes through when they’re trying to justify something to themselves that they deep-down know isn’t right, or even the best idea.

Diablevert: Yeah. I think one thing I liked about it was that it made me feel the flip side, too – the sort of fundamental fear and presumption, of people having their power taken away… the how-dare-you-ness of the Toussaint trying to hold the Col. to his contract. To understand better what it was like to seethe world that way, which culminates in the lynching. Or in Handback’s death – he feels that too, briefly, when he realized Grace means for her and her son to escape to the North and pass as white.

Dreadful Penny: In those moments I would waver between feeling sympatico with the character and then reeling back when they crossed a moral line… like Jerry at the end, when after all that BS about enlightenment and spirituality, won’t go get Toussaint out of jail in an actual act of compassion. Or the scene you cite, when Handback was appalled when he figured out what Grace wanted for Toussaint. This seems like one of your favorites so far… yes?

Diablevert: At the moment I’d put it below Age and Bridge, probably above Cather. Maybe third?

Dreadful Penny: That’s pretty damn good for a dusty old book they had to haul out of the public library stacks for us.

Diablevert: I wouldn’t put it like, third all time or nothing. The writing itself lacks the lyricism I appreciated in those other books. But yeah, I like dryness, sardonic humor, irony, and making mixed up people with lots of good and bad in ‘em.

Dreadful Penny: All good with The Store? Do you have a copy of Lamb in Her Bosom? If so, does yours have a well-endowed Southern matron on the cover? BECAUSE MINE DOES!

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Bridge of San Luis Rey: Chat the Third, on lyricism, meaning, and Pulitzer beatdowns

Posted in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder with tags , , , , , on April 7, 2010 by Diablevert

Dreadful Penny: I think that the Franciscan friar’s opinion only really enters into the beginning and the end of the book, and the sections that are told about the individual characters that they focus on are not really at all colored by the perceptions of the Franciscan friar. Because they’re not particularly occupied with divinity at all. To me, those bits are really sort of essentially about the unknowability of the human heart. How you can feel you know a person’s desires but they’re essentially inscrutable and you can’t really predict a person’s actions based on that.

Diablevert: That’s interesting, I’m not sure that that’s what I took from it.

Dreadful Penny: I really think that this is about that idea that there is a mystery that lives in every person, and that mystery…while you can describe the actions of their life, you can’t essentially know their motivations. And you can’t, essentially, know how they would react in a situation. You wouldn’t expect such a doting mother to give up at the last moment and turn her affections towards a servant girl.

Diablevert: Yeah.

Dreadful Penny: So on and so forth. And that all of that is cut out before they actually have a chance to change. At the moment of change in their lives they’re cut short of that. So she’s going to change and not love her daughter and instead transfer her love to the servant girl but they’re both killed in a bridge accident. You know, the son is going to move out with – what is his name?

Diablevert: Uncle Pio.

Dreadful Penny: Uncle Pio. But in that moment of change, they die. All of this is like — the twin is going to finally have a separate life from his brother. But at that moment they’re cut out from it. You can’t essentially predict the actions of the human heart, because there are all these unforeseen circumstances, and nexuses of intersection between different people — one of the things I really like about the book is how intertwined it is. I find it very pleasing when plots are neatly tied up. And I find it that way in my own writing, that I like it when things line up, and are circular, and recursive, and I like that about the book a lot. Every character is involved in each person’s life. It’s like a Where’s Waldo book.

Diablevert: Mmmm. Yeah, that’s interesting. Now I’m just sitting here thinking about that, because I’m not sure if that’s what I thought about it. I can definitely see that side to the argument, but I’m not sure if that’s what I took from the book overall.

Dreadful Penny: I guess it doesn’t have to have an over-driving theme, a message.

Diablevert: No, it doesn’t have to. But it’s interesting thing to talk about, because we both think it’s an interesting book and it has some interesting stuff in it, so it’s interesting to think about what he might be driving at or what you can take from it.

If that’s the case though, if the whole point is that people are unknowable and it’s surprising that they would make an abrupt change in this way, what does it mean they they’re killed?

Dreadful Penny: Yeah.

Diablevert: Because I mean, he does bring in that whole element of discussion…that there’s a moral to their lives. That’s the whole thing that the Fransciscan friar is searching for, that there’s a reason that these people died, at this time and in this place, and it was to provide some kind of example.

Dreadful Penny: Was to be demonstrative of something.

Diablevert: Yes. And so if the idea is, you can make an abrupt change in all that you feel and react and act in response to the world, and then all the people who are trying to do that are killed, what does that say?

Dreadful Penny: It makes it sound like it’s advocating stasis. That people should essentially stay the same. Because change will kill you.

Diablevert: Yeah, kind of. I don’t know.

Dreadful Penny: Well, also the bridge itself is this kind of unchanging thing — I picture this rickety, sort of rope bridge, a la Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, this thing that’s so ephemeral but has lasted so long as to be past the point of even thinking it would collapse, and then it suddenly does.

Diablevert: Mmmm-hmmm.

Dreadful Penny: I like the end of the book where he says how it enters into their parlance, how they’d say, “oh, you live near the bridge,” like, the Sword of Damocles comparison. I like that book makes its own mythology in that way. But that’s beside the point.

Diablevert: That’s interesting.

Dreadful Penny: I mean, the bridge itself is an over-arching metaphor. This book is very metaphorically rich. I enjoy that. Because, Booth Tarkington? Not so much. With the metaphors. I liked that — to me, this is almost like a poet’s book. I mean, Wilder isn’t a poet, but it has that compression, that allusion, and it’s lovely to read. I finished the book and I wanted to re-read it. I finished the book and I wanted to re-read it again. I felt that it would be rewarding to re-read, that there were bits of it that I wanted to like, copy out, essentially, I liked it so much in that way. And I’m glad that the Pulitzers decided to reward something that has so much poetry in it in a sense, in its prose. Because the prose — I mean, Edith Wharton writes very good prose. But [other than her] we haven’t seen that style has been awarded any points in the Pulitzer, except for maybe some slight comic style. Satire has, I guess. You could say that parts of Arrowsmith are satrirical.

Diablevert: I think that much of the time, a lot of the novels have been more rewarded for having interesting or broad social ends. I guess you could say So Big had some style.

Dreadful Penny: No, it was. It was stylistically pleasing. But not that lyricism. We haven’t had a lyric novel. And I know they’re coming. I mean, I just recently — Toni Morrison was just awarded a Rooster, from the The Morning News Tournament of Books? And they were joking, saying, wow, the first writer to win a hat trick – a Nobel, a Pulitzer, and a Rooster. But I think Song of Solomon was her Pulitzer winning novel, and that I assume, will be a very poetic—

Diablevert: It’s Beloved.

Dreadful Penny: Is it? Dammit. I’ve already read Beloved. I never read Song of Solomon!

Diablevert: I’ve already read Song of Solomon. If you want we can trade off, and you can do Song and I can do Beloved.

Dreadful Penny laughs. But I know that Morrison is someone who writes with a lot of poetry, and Gilead is a book that is in our future that I know is very lyric, and I enjoy the lyric novel.

Diablevert: I know, I enjoy it too. You know, I think these books have kind of beaten me down.

Dreadful Penny: Oh no!

Diablevert: In the sense that I was very suspicious, and expecting that it was going to be mildly terrible, in some kind of way, and yet it wasn’t, so I still feel edgy about it. Like I’m still waiting to figure out the way in which it sucks.

Dreadful Penny laughs

Diablevert: And the rational part of my brain is like, “No, you liked it. It was good.” And I’m like, I did like it. It did seem good. Hmmmm.

Dreadful Penny: …..Or are they?

Diablevert: Yeah. I don’t know why I’m still suspicious of it. It’s kind of retarded.

Dreadful Penny: A prize should never have as its end result making people suspicious of the prize-winners.

Diablevert: True. But I guess you could say that the idea of going into this whole project was, are these books any good or not? I think a lot of them are kind of like….not.

Dreadful Penny: Yeah.

Diablevert: So with this I should probably just get down off my high horse and suck it up and be like, No, dammit. It was a good book. Suck it up.

Dreadful Penny: I think it’s a natural impulse to critique anything, you never just want to stand on your laurels and just say, “I enjoyed it.” You never want to give anybody total props.

Diablevert: The literary review equivalent of just flashing the devil horns and being like “It RAWKS!”

Dreadful Penny: Yeah.

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Bridge of San Luis Rey: Chat Part Two, or Consider the Narrator

Posted in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder with tags , , , on April 1, 2010 by Diablevert

Diablevert: I think, speaking of the ways in which this book is modernist, too — the narrator here is very weird. Because he leads off the book saying this priest is going to write a book about the accident, and then proceeds to say that that book has been burned—

Dreadful Penny: A book that we never see.

Diablevert: Exactly. And the book that we’re reading is being written by someone else, who says he knows more than the priest about these people, but we never learn who this person is, we never know who the narrator really is or how he knows the stuff he knows. He just stays in the background. And I wonder how conscious that is, do you know what I mean?

Dreadful Penny: That’s a good question.

Diablevert: Because sometime you read a book and you see the author start off with some sort of conceit, and it works, but then as the book goes on you don’t really need it anymore, and it just kind of dies off and you don’t really notice. And this felt a bit like that to me. But on the other hand it isn’t that I think he’s incapable of playing around with it consciously. It reminds me a bit of Nabokov’s — I don’t know if you’ve ever read his novella Pnin?

Dreadful Penny: No, I’ve never read Pnin.

Diablevert: It’s interesting because he kind of deliberately does that. He has this narrator who starts off seeming like a typical third-person omniscient narrator, but we gradually learn is actually a character in the book, who actually knows Pnin, and in fact is his replacement, a Russian scholar who has come to take his position in the department. It’s sort of vaguely hinted at in the book, but it’s pretty clear if you’re paying attention to the signals. And as you start to realize who the narrator is it becomes very weird to see the narrator write about Pnin in this third-person way—to speak in such terms about a person he maybe could have known, or been on the edge of knowing, and try to surmise from his perspective how Pnin might feel. It puts him on the edge of omniscience in an interesting way, and Nabokov plays with that. He uses this Narrator character to play with your emotions. Because if the book was written with a traditional omniscient narrator, then when something happens to the Pnin that makes him look kind of pathetic, you’d know that that was how you as a reader were supposed to feel — that the main character was kind of pathetic. But by sticking this sort of half-knowing Narrator in between you and the characters, when something pathetic happens to the characters, and it’s being told to you by such a narrator, you feel that same pity but at the same time you are aware of your own condescension.

Dreadful Penny: That you’re being a little holier-than-thou.

Diablevert: Yes. By having that intermediary character in there, that becomes clear to you. But I’m not sure if that’s how the Narrator was meant to work in this book. Because you could read the book just as the attempt by the Franciscan friar to determine the meaning of these events—

Dreadful Penny: Well, to try to use that accident to try to prove divinity I think was a pretty interesting idea. The end of the book where he goes into the statistics derived from his earlier studies of divinity, and he’s got the axis of goodness vs. piety vs. utility? Trying to figure out whether it proves or disproves all this — it’s a little twee, I guess, but it is kind of a fascinating matrix to try to figure out.

Diablevert: Mmm-hmm.

Dreadful Penny: But there’s no conclusions made in the book.

Diablevert: But I think that’s what’s interesting, because you have this Narrator that’s in-between them. It’s not just being told to you by a Franciscan friar, who thinks this way, and comes at it with this attitude of “I can determine the truth of this.” It’s being told to you by a Narrator, who says “There is such a person, [who thinks he can determine the truth],” but who does not himself seem to believe that [truth can be found]. That gets a little fuzzy to explain, but it’s interesting, because it’s pretty clear that the Narrator’s perspective on the events is different from the Franciscan friar’s perspective.

Dreadful Penny: Totally, completely.

Diablevert: And we get it filtered through both of their perspectives.

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Bridge of San Luis Rey: A Belated Chat

Posted in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder with tags , , , , on March 30, 2010 by Diablevert

(Eds. Note: We actually had this chat shortly after completing the book last year, but neither of us got around to transcribing it. Possibly because it’s super long. But as our erstwhile fellow-traveler on the Pulitzer path has now arrived at Wilder, I felt a surge of guilt and have set fingers to keyboard. Since it’s so long, I think I’ll break it up into parts — we had a lot to say about Bridge, actually.)

Diablevert: ….I thought it was weird how they just tossed that in at the end, in his biography in the back of the book, that he was this closeted homosexual. In a weird way it kind of made sense…all the various stories in the book had anything in common, it was that they all revolved around thwarted love. Thwarted in various ways, but all thwarted.

Dreadful Penny: It makes that story of him going up against Tennessee Williams and the bad blood between them, it makes Wilder seem a lot less priggish, in a way. I mean, it still could be considered priggish, I guess, but…

Diablevert: But it’s easier to see why they’d be oil and water.

Dreadful Penny: Yeah, it gives me much more sympathy for him. I really like Bridge of San Luis Rey. I was happy to read it. I can see how if it’s a common book that’s assigned to people, how it could be kind of a bitch to teach and read.

Diablevert: No, I enjoyed it also. It had such a weird style, it was written like a fable. That took some getting used to. But I would say I enjoyed it, definitely.

Dreadful Penny: It was like magical realism before magical realism. There was something truly magical about it. He does that thing that Marquez does, where you identify a character by some odd character trait, and that trait then comes to stand completely for them. Which I think is an interesting thing to do. Like in the beginning when the actress is identified just by her brashness in the theater, and that incident encapsulates her entire characterization.

Diablevert: There’s also the weird thing with the compression of time somehow, I don’t know how to explain…it’s like you meet this person and you see see a bit of their characterization in that one scene, and then the next time they show up, it’s like the book gaily skips through thirty years of their life until they get to another scene of that person. I feel like that’s something that happens in magical realism a lot too, especially because these books often deal with multiple generations of a family. But the actress is an good example of that. Because she first shows up in this one scene where the Countess attends a performance of hers. That feels almost near-contemporary to the time when the accident occurs, but then when you come to fully understand the story you see that that first scene must have been, like, 30 years before the main action of the story.

Dreadful Penny: Early in here career, yeah. I think that compression of time is what makes it more like a fable. Time is very fluid…..I just thought it was be very well written. It was lovely. A lovely book to read. It had beautiful bits. It was nice to see that attention to language. So nice to read a short book.

Diablevert: I definitely agree with that. It was one of the better books that we’ve read so far in this project, and so different from all the others.

Dreadful Penny: It feels very modern. It feels very fresh. Which is funny, because Wilder has a very bad reputation, from Our Town, of being very staid and stultified and given to traditional American values. And this felt totally contemporary.

Diablevert: Well, that was interesting. I don’t know, like, I don’t know that— I feel like my impression of Wilder was that he had this reputation for being very wholesome. And this book is fairly wholesome. Like, there’s some illicit sex in it but that all takes place off stage, you know, the actress has an affair with the Count, but really none of the main characters are involved in this in a direct and passionate way. There are no scenes between lovers, really. So it feels sort of neutered in that way, a little bit. And I feel like with Our Town — which I haven’t seen in it’s a production, but everyone knows its reputation — it’s all about this sort of perfect American town, and it’s this innocent, dark-Eden setting, just on the cusp of modernity.

Dreadful Penny: Well, Our Town definitely has some dark undercurrents but none of them are sexual. All the darkness in Our Town comes from the essential unknowability of another person, and the incredible fear of death and the swift passage of time. It actually is very dark, but not at all in a sexual way.

Diablevert: But I think that’s what’s interesting about it, because it has this very wholesome reputation. And because there’s very little sex in it, it’s something that can be done, and is done, by high school students and all kinds of community groups and things like that. And of course I’ve always heard that it’s also popular because it’s a production you can do almost entirely without scenery, without props, I mean you can basically do the whole thing with just the actors.

Dreadful Penny: Yeah, it’s like a ladder and some chairs and a graveyard.

Diablevert: And in a way that’s kind of avant-garde, especially because he’s writing this play in like the 20s and 30s, which is the age of the great Broadway musical, and the Zeigfield Follies, Busby Berkeley, that whole thing, these great stage sets were how you got the butts in the seats. And so to have a pure drama with just the actors is interesting.

Dreadful Penny: Well, recently in the string of drama Pulitzers, maybe in the past five or six years, somewhere in there was Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of An Author, which I think this was in line with that. That sort of modernist, breaking the fourth wall — you have the stage manager as a character in Our Town, who directly addresses the audience throughout. It is very modernist and groundbreaking in its way, just its subject matter is what makes it, gives it that wholesome reputation. There are parts of it that are certainly that sweet and saccharine reputation. Like when they address the envelope, and it’s like: ‘Grover’s Corners, Earth, The Universe, the Mind of God’…..

Diablevert: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dreadful Penny: ‘Does anyone really ever live it, every minute?’ All of that bit. But there’s also all of that sort of dark — Edward Arlington Robinson is a good comparison.

Diablevert: I have no idea who that is.

Dreadful Penny: Or like Sherwood Anderson. The attention to small-town grotesques. Kind of going back that tradition of Hawthorne, like what lurks behind these streets, these exteriors? Of American mores and means….

Diablevert: Well, that’s what’s interesting about Bridge. Our Town and all the other books have been completely concerned with that kind of thing. And this book is not. It’s pretty timeless, in a way.

Dreadful Penny: Oh, it’s completely timeless. It’s not even in America, which make it kind of interesting that it was able to win the Pulitzer. I’ll have to check the dates as to when they changed the charge. Because this doesn’t actually have anything to do with American life, except in the capacity of a fable.

Diablevert: Well, that an American wrote it. It’s like how Wilde is an Irish writer when the Irish talk about him and a British writer when the British talk about him. Maybe they grandfather you in.

Dreadful Penny: If you’re good enough.

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The Good Earth: Summary

Posted in Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth on March 29, 2010 by Dreadful Penny

We now interrupt our regularly scheduled discussion of The Store to catch up on some old business… a long-overdue summary of The Good Earth.

The opposite of a Shakespearian comedy, The Good Earth starts with a wedding. Wang Lung, a Chinese peasant farmer who lives with his crochety father, heads into town to purchase a bride from a family of wealthy landowners. He receives O-lan from them, a plain, but devoted and hardworking woman, who seems to bring prosperity with her into his house. She works tirelessly in the fields with Wang Lung, only interrupting her constant labors to give birth to four children (get it? labors? *sigh*). Alas, only two are sons; the elder daughter is malnourished from famine and becomes the family’s “poor fool,” and the younger daughter is killed at birth. During this punishing drought, the family flees by train to become beggars in the city, while Wang Lung finds meager work as a rickshaw driver, and then a porter.

Life in the city is marginally better: no one’s starving to death, but it’s crowded and violent and Wang Lung misses his green giving land. When a peasant riot breaks out, Wang Lung stumbles onto some fortune when a rich man offers Wang Lung all his wealth to spare his life. They use this money to return to their home, buy tools and provisions, and return their upward struggle with the land. Discovering some jewels that O-lan stole during the riot, Wang Lung is able to go on a land grab with the dissipated House of Hwang, taking fierce pride in the lowered circumstances of the rich family. This wealth allows him to send his sons to school or an apprenticeship, but it also makes him discontented with O-lan and turn to Lotus, a concubine.

O-lan “conveniently” dies from a stomach complaint, and from this point on Wang Lung is increasingly prosperous by outward appearances but becomes unhappier and unhappier by turns as more demands are placed on him and he watches his family become softened and turn from the land he loves. They move into town into the rented House of Hwang, and when the novel closes, we see Wang Lung’s sons conspiring to sell his land against all his wishes upon his death. Oh, and somewhere in there is a corrupt uncle and family who are a constant thorn in Wang Lung’s side, what with their laziness and thieving and general bad vibes, so he gets them hooked on opium to pacify them. And his aged father cackles and says crazy shit throughout and the poor fool plays with a bit of cloth in a patch of sun. Cheerful stuff, really.

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The Store: Third Chat

Posted in T.S. Stribling, The Store with tags , , , , , , on March 25, 2010 by Diablevert

Dreadfulpenny: So things really heated up in this week’s installment! (I’ve never watched soap operas, but I’m imagining reading melodramatic novels in bits like this mimics the effect.)

Diablevert: All kinds of stuff happened. Where did you stop?

Dreadfulpenny: Right before chapter 33. The Col. was in and out of jail, he got his cash, Sandusky dropped out of college, Handback is ruined, Jerry almost gets to second base, and we see the end of poor fat Ponny. Toussaint has just started the fireplace in the school and he had the scary run-in with the white sharecropper.

Diablevert: I didn’t read much past that. Although there was one nice scene in the next chapter. Have you been liking it better?

Dreadfulpenny: All the action made me like the book much better… I’m really reading for plot right now.

Diablevert: Cool. But it just grips you in a melodrama way without making you feel like it’s well written?

Dreadfulpenny: No, no, I’m thawing to Stribling’s style like a crusty old coot confronted with an estranged grandchild. I still hate 1930s dialect writing though… I’m never letting that die.

Diablevert: I’m so glad. I’m really warming to him. Dialect aside, though,I think race is his main concern in this book…

Dreadfulpenny: I feel like it’s pride, and hypocrisy… but racism’s big too.

Diablevert: I don’t know, I just find it interesting, in a way I don’t think we’re going to get with, say, Margaret Mitchell – Stribling seems acutely aware of how fucked up all this is, that’s what he’s trying to show you.

Dreadfulpenny: Yeah. The scene where Gracie resigns herself to Toussaint living as a farmworker instead of going to school is heartbreaking.

Diablevert: Word. Or the bit where Sydna leaves Jerry blue-balled on the hammock and there’s the servant girl, waiting, whom he turns to immediately. And then the scene where the poor bastard who saved the Col.’s life has to come begging to him, and Jerry turns him away…that recalled Hamlet a little to me to, in a way…in Jerry’s resentment there is a touch of the very beginning of that play. (Now while the funeral’s baked meats are not yet cold….)

Dreadfulpenny: Wow… that is not a Hamlet reference I would have caught. Kudos. I felt that the scenes you mentioned with Jerry were there to show how he couldn’t escape his Vaiden heritage, how he was more like Milt and less like a bodishattva than he thought of himself. But I do agree how they expose that thoughtless racism that permeated the South.

Diablevert: Thinking this over now, it occurs to me that the whole book can be seen as a parable of the death of reconstruction and the rise of the Jim Crow South — the Col. as the resurgent antebellum old order, willing to cut corners, break rules and laws to get back on top; Handback as the industrialist whose attempt to take possession of the top of the social order during the tumult after Reconstruction has failed, and his attempts at modernization along with it….the post master as the dreamy and disinterested North, bored and distracted and losing his grip…

Dreadfulpenny: Whoa…. that was deep.

Diablevert: Sometimes the old English major in me rises up and spouts off a monologue or two.

Dreadfulpenny: You’re much better at this, than I am, D. Although we should definitely compare Reconstruction in this book to Gone with the Wind, which has one of the craziest, most fucked up descriptions of Reconstruction possible (if I remember correctly).

Diablevert: I’ve never read the actual book, but for sure when we get to it. I dunno, what did you find yourself thinking about in this section? Was there a specific moment where you felt yourself begin to thaw a little toward the book?

Dreadfulpenny: Once the Col. actually stole the money, and then confronted Handback in that misplaced fit of honor, I thought Stribling greatly upped the stakes in the novel. Then I was getting that Lost-esque pleasure in colliding characters when Sandusky showed up with his bogus legalese to negotiate… and actually pulled it off. Then we lost poor fat Ponney, and I’m pretty much in for the duration.

Diablevert: Yeah, this book definitely took a while to get rolling. One think that did strike me – it’s one of the most sexually graphic book since So Big, I think. Characters have lustful thoughts and we get to know what they are!

Dreadfulpenny: Good point (although Scarlet Sister Mary was kinda hot in places). The botched tit-grab was pretty explicit, and utterly painful. TURN YOUR HAND OVER, JERRY! And then they laid there panting in the aftermath… I felt like I was reading a Harlequin paperback.

Diablevert: Word. I always find stuff like that interesting. Awkward. Let me rephrase – I mean, kind of in the sense we touched on way back when we talked about the Age of Innocence – because media from back then never really show this stuff, it’s hard to know what really went on, how innocent the average person really was. So for Mlle. Crowinshield to be so bold,, and for that actually to be depicted, was interesting.

Dreadfulpenny: And, prudish me, I was pretty shocked that the servant girl was just waiting in the wings, and that Jerry actually was capable of any sexual act after all his timidness. I could really live without any hot Colonel action, though, so I hope that isn’t in our future.

Diablevert: I was surprised by her appearance, too, for sure – but that’s what I mean, and maybe I’m reading to much into it, but I feel like the hidden subtext with this stuff is Stribling being all “This is so fucked yup, you guys!”

Dreadfulpenny: I still think Stribling’s most consistent theme is self-deception: Jerry’s lonely faith, Sandusky’s “law practice,” Sydna’s idolatry of the Col., Ponney’s false pregnancies, the Col.’s entire thought process. Do you think that it’s meant to be satirical?

Diablevert: Not satirical, no, that’s not exactly what I mean… I think you’ve hit on something quite important with that self-deception idea. I suppose I would link it to the larger historical context. I think Stribling is saying that the hypocrisy that people display in their personal lives is something that runs right through this whole society; it has to, that’s the only way for this society can continue to function with the imbalances of power that are straining it apart. And without just blankly condeming the characters, I don’t think Stribling thinks this is a good state of affairs….everybody here’s blind in some way.

Dreadfulpenny: OK, I like the book better, lady, but I’m still not ready to give it all that credit yet. Although by the next 100 pages I could be making out with the thing in a back alley, at the rate my opinion is changing.

Diablevert: I dunno, maybe I’m wrong, and at the end the Colonel will have regained everything and the clear moral will be thank god the natural order has been restored, let the choir sing Dixie, amen. But so far i think Stribling is one of our showiest authors, in the show-don’t-tell sense. I really really like that in an author, so maybe I’m giving him too much credit and reading too much in.

Dreadfulpenny: I agree with that (the show-not-tell-i-ness). It’s a little sad that I’m predisposed not to like these more obscure Pulitzers from page one. I will try to turn over a new leaf and approach the next one with a completely open mind.

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