The Store: Second Chat

Posted in T.S. Stribling, The Store with tags , on March 15, 2010 by Dreadful Penny

The Store chat part deux, covering about 100 more pages, in which we open with a Sunday brisket having been obtained from the local butcher by one party and a well-mixed dark & stormy in the hand of the other…

Diablevert: Are you still hating it [The Store]?

Dreadful Penny: I don’t hate it so much any more, but it really irks me, and I feel REALLY bad reading it on the train, since there’s an n-bomb on nearly every other page.

Diablevert: Are you worried that people might read it over your shoulder or something?

Dreadful Penny: I dunno… occasionally I get a glance at what my neighbor is reading. It just feels wrong.

Diablevert: Your superego is perhaps larger than mine. On the other hand, the Boston commuter rail is considerably more whitebread than the Brooklyn subway, plus the seats are bigger.

Dreadful Penny: I should probably be less paranoid. I’m developing a larger appreciation for Stribling’s plotting… I’m at the part where the Col. is in jail for the night, and there was definitely some pleasure in watching him try to ineptly figure out his crime.

Diablevert: Yeah, I couldn’t believe he nicked the stuff! I thought that was well done, the whole in-for-a-penny-escalation of the situation with the bargeman, plus the subsequent self-justification.

Dreadful Penny: Every misstep just gets compounded. It’s like the Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead of early Pulitzers.

Diablevert: Word. But compounded in an interesting way; it’s never entirely awful, there’s always some ambiguity there.

Dreadful Penny: At this juncture, it looks like the Col. might actually pull it off!

Diablevert: I’m a little past you, so I wouldn’t care to comment on that. Suffice it to say there are consequences, but not perhaps the ones one might immediately expect, which I really quite like. I like this book, O erstwhile co-blogger. I like moral ambiguity an authorial reserve in a novel and I think Stribling’s really very good at painting a picture of this whole town–he knows this place cold, and is adept at showing every angle of it. So far I’m finding it a fascinating place to observe in that sense–the way Stribling teases out, say, the persistance of the near-familial bonds between former slaves and former slave owners.

Dreadful Penny: The lingering owner/slave dynamic is really interesting… since you’re farther, don’t spoil it, but I can’t help but hope Gracie will hightail it out of there with the money… turning the whole thing into a madcap caper! There is something vaguely condescending about the way he so clearly demonstrates the inner hypocrisy and blindness of a lot of these characters, though. Something a little Tarkington-esque with the superior tone? It’s not really in the narrative voice, as much as the way we’re consistently seeing into people’s heads.

Diablevert: I don’t think I find it so; the characters aren’t necessarily punished for their hypocrisy, and even the flawed ones are given many moments of compassion and complexity. I don’t think I’d want to live there or anything, though. But take say, Jerry, the other character’s whose viewpoint we get quite a lot of–he has these boyish vanities which are silly on one level, which Stribling makes clear, but he also makes clear the essential innocence and naivete which drives them.

Dreadful Penny: I did love the scene where the Col. convinces him to go back to chapel and they’re speaking nearly completely at cross-purposes, but still feel entirely sympatico.

Diablevert: And I think that’s very true, and I like that ….he does a lot better at letting things lie there and speak for themselves than Tarkington ever did in approaching almost the same material. Like, BT has to give you a two page riff on Hamlet in order to dress down George Amberson for his self-involvement; Stribling’s content to write a few lines of dialogue between Jerry and the country boarder to show you basically the same thing. It’s a pat on the head, not an overhand blow with a mallet.

Dreadful Penny: I do care what happens next, and to see what character we’re going to follow next, and that’s pretty good for a Pulitzer.

Diablevert: See, I knew I’d get you over to the dark side.

Dreadful Penny: Poor fat Ponney, though… and I don’t think I’m going to be able to handle the scene when Sydna inevitably finds out that the Col. is kind of a tool.

Diablevert: Ah, you don’t know the half of it….so far I think the Sydna thing has been adeptly handled, though there may be more too come from where I am. I think going into this after some of the other Pulitzers i was braced for this fraught subject matter to be rather ineptly handled, but so far I’m surprised and pleased.

Dreadful Penny: That’s a welcome sensation on our Pulitzer journey!

Diablevert: For all that Stribling uses dialect, and I think he does show some definite class and color biases here and there, I think so far he’s been quite good at treating the black characters with as much depth as the white characters. Do you have any take on that?

Dreadful Penny: I suppose. My white guilt has mostly been showing and I shut down a little when I get to the dialect. I’ll try to think about that in the next block of pages… I do feel great pity for Gracie (as implied earlier) and I’d like to hear more about her. Oh, and Landers! The sad lonely postmaster who doesn’t walk alone! I like him too.

Diablevert: Toussaint, too, I think has just as much inner life as Jerry, although we get much briefer snatches of him. And the scene where Miltiades goes back to his family far and discovers he has a namesake who can write his name. That brief little thing was, I’d venture, one of the best written bits in all the books so far.

Dreadful Penny: Awww. I liked that too.

Diablevert: Just in the sense that Stribling is juggling a hell of a lot symbolically there and manages to bring it off.

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The Store: First Chat

Posted in T.S. Stribling, The Store with tags , , , , on March 2, 2010 by Diablevert

(….a common refrain, I know, but we’re trying to post a little more regularly round these parts, so we’re chatting weekly, as we go. We were about 6 chapters into The Store by T.S. Stribling when we had this chat.

Since we haven’t finished the book yet, I can’t direct you to the summary, but for context’s sake, The Store is set in 1880s Alabama in the small town of Florence, with a large cast of characters, the most central of which, thus far, is the ex-Confederate Colonel Miltiades Vaiden, a former Klan leader now living off the income from his much diminished family estates, getting by in a broke-down rental house where he endures a childless and loveless marriage with a wife, Ponny, who physically repulses him and whom he feels to be his inferior.)
Dreadful Penny: I think my stomach flu was caused by the first 100 pages of The Store.

Diablevert: I’m on p 72 of The Store, so I think you must be a little ahead of me. I’m kind of warming up to it a little.

Dreadful Penny: Yeah, I got going on The Store and thought I’d round up to an even hundred.

Diablevert: No bigs.

Dreadful Penny: Getting past the first 20 pages of this book has to have been the greatest challenge of this project, to date. Once I realized we’re gonna spend this book on the losing side of the Civil War, that is.

And I don’t think you even get to the dialect at that point.

Diablevert: I am totally there with you. Call it shallow of me, but I too was not particularly enticed by the prospect of spending 300+ page in immediate post-reconstruction Alabama. ‘Scuse me, 511 pages, in my edition.

Dreadful Penny: Yeah… I hope Stribling manifests a Tarkington-esque contempt for his (ex-plantation overseer/Klan leader) main character.

Diablevert: Stribling is a lot more reserved than Tarkington; a lot less willing to tip his hand and reveal whose side he’s on. I’d say he’s the better writer for it.

Dreadful Penny: I don’t know… I think it’s too early for me to judge his relative merits as a writer. I do like his adeptness with interweaving storylines and characters’ motivations. He seems very capable of juggling a large cast (all one-note characters, but still, there are a lot of them.)

Diablevert: yes. I suppose that’s why I’m more willing to cut him a break, at the mo — he’s still doing setup, and I’m unsure where he’s going with this, but i am curious to know.

Dreadful Penny: I’m curious, I guess, but I’m finding it really hard to suspend dislike… we’ve already mentioned the racism and then there’s his constant references to his “fat wife Ponny.” Ugh.

Diablevert: See, I dunno. I do find Miltiades hard to like at those points. But I think they’re in there deliberately to cut against the reading of him as a noble, tragic figure; his slights against his wife make him seem petty. Makes him more of a sad sack than an Ashley Wilkes figure. Also it shows him failing to live up to his purported code of the gentleman.

As for the racism…..yeah, when he first introduced the group of black people watching the political meeting, I cringed, like, “oh, god, here we go again with the dialect.” But I would say his treatment of the black characters as characters has been about as in depth as his treatment of any of the others. I feel like the thoroughgoing racism of this society is something he’s portraying more than participating in, at this point.

Dreadful Penny: Well, I’m going to reserve judgment on the race issue until we’re farther in… but I’m not optimistic.

And I don’t think constantly denigrating his wife is Miltie’s sole flaw, at all… in fact, he seems to have almost no virtues at this point in the book. He’s thrown his lot in with the wrong side, he’s superior, condescending, snide, manipulative, and self-deluding. And he’s racist, and he’s nasty to his wife.

Diablevert: I don’t know if I’d go that far. We’re not really given an action scene of him in the past, at least so far as I can see, but from what the characters think/say about him, he does seem to have been a respected and superior figure in the pre-war world, and a good soldier and leader of men in the post war-world, and he acts to get Charlie Hot Hands, the shop keeper’s son, to lay off his girlfriend. So far it seems like, in the pre-war South Milt fit in and could have been successful; in the post-war world he’s lost an adrift.

Leaving aside our own contemporary values on whether it was in fact admirable to be a success in the antebellum system — and subbing in for them the values of 1930 or 1880 — I think Milt could have been read as a sympathetic figure, but the petty faults Stribling gives him are there to deliberately cut against that

Dreadful Penny: That’s fair, I guess, but he over-identifies with a social class he wasn’t a part of. He was an overseer, but sees himself as a gentleman… I don’t think he was ever part of the world of Southern gentility that he thought he was.

Diablevert: Possibly. Seems like he was on the line; both him and Drusilla seem to think that at one point it would have been both possible and desirable for them to marry, and she seems to have been at the upper end of this town’s society. Even now, before taking the clerk job, he’s been living on his income, the very definition of a gentleman.

Dreadful Penny: Yeah… I wonder where that income is from? Did Confederate officers get war pensions? If so, what government paid them? That’s probably a good research question for the week.

Diablevert: Ooh, if you want to find that out that would be interesting…

Dreadful Penny: I’ll see what I can do.

Diablevert: It said somewhere that he married his wife for her money; possibly she has an inheritance of some sort. And it’s not clear to me whether he lost the family land or if it was diminished or if it just doesn’t pay that well in the 1880s economy as it did in the pre-war.

Dreadful Penny: Oh, that’s right. I remember that now.

Diablevert: I feel like I’m defending the book more strongly than my enjoyment of it thus far warrants.

Dreadful Penny: Ha! I knew it! You devil’s advocate, you! I mean, I’m willing to argue that it probably has some merits, but I would never ever ever read this “for fun.”

Diablevert: I dunno; in this case I seem to be experience the lawyerly tendency to have my argument turn my mind. I do feel as we go on that we’re in better hands with Stribling than with some of the other authors.

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The Good Earth: A Chat

Posted in Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth with tags , , , , , , , on February 23, 2010 by Diablevert

(Editor’s note: I’m late with this chat; we originally had it online while I was watching the Patriots lose a playoff game, thus Penny’s opening remark….)

Dreadful Penny: I’m fully prepared for this chat to be peppered with profanity unrelated to The Good Earth

Diablevert: Heh. This is painful to watch. Ooof. Dude. So anywho. I’m not as hepped up about The Good Earth as I was when I first read it. Did you read it when you were a kid?

DreadfulPenny: Had to read it freshman year of high school, and I hated it then.

Diablevert: so what did you think of it now?

DreadfulPenny: I liked it more this time around, but I was a little predisposed to think better of it, since I knew you were already into it. What a vicious circle!

Diablevert: Hah!

Dreadfulpenny: I think the writing is really solid, and it seems like a sensitive portrayal of the culture for the time, and from an outsider’s point of view, but I still didn’t care for the plot much.

Diablevert: I don’t think I would have liked it as a teenager either. I think it improved on me this time because I was expecting it to be sort of pious and glurgy – missionary’s daughter, wholesome, peasants—but it was actually more non-judgmental muddy 30s realism. On the other hand, though, it was a little pat, the plot. I mean, was it really possible for the average peasant to rise like that, in one generation? Felt a little forced.

DreadfulPenny: I never quite put my finger on that being suspect, but now that you mention it, it does seem unlikely.

Diablevert: What bugged you about the plot?

DreadfulPenny: It’s like the His Family of China. Protagonist that you’re supposed to sympathize with being a jackoff with ungrateful offspring stepping all over him. I hate hate HATE everything that happens after he meets Lotus and throws over O-lan. I bought it, but reading it was painful.

Diablevert: Ah. Yeah. In a way I appreciated that though…I was expecting his taking a concubine to bring him down. But it didn’t really; it cause some friction, but nothing that seriously disarranged his life, and eventually he grew tired of her just as he had of O-Lan. It felt much more like what would actually happen in a culture where taking a concubine was pretty normal and women were close to chattel. I appreciated that.

DreadfulPenny: Taking a concubine did seriously rearrange his life, though… if I remember correctly, it was the impetus to shift from saving everything he had to spending and spending and led to his loss of control over his money and his family. After that, Wang Lung lost track of all his earlier values and became prideful (and even more insufferable).

Diablevert: Yeah, I see that, but I suppose I was expecting him taking the second wife would be his downfall, and cause him to lose everything he had gained. Which it didn’t really; it was more of a mo’ money mo’ problems situation.

DreadfulPenny: I felt that his problems changed in nature after Lotus and Cuckoo moved in… before, the acquisitiveness seemed born out of self-preservation and after like the road to decadence. Also, everyone in the book besides O-lan and the steward who died struck me as a total asshat. Oh, and the little fool. I was cool with her too.

Diablevert: I was more mesa-mesa on Wang Lung. There were moments when I was like, “Oh, you douchebag,” and then there were other moments where he seemed quite sympathetic; when he arranges O-Lan’s burial, for instance.

DreadfulPenny: I often had sympathy for Wang Lung, that’s true. But, still, asshat.

Diablevert: I suppose I saw him more as flawed but sympathetic rather than pure asshat.

DreadfulPenny: What did you think of all the business with the extortionist uncle and bandit cousin?

Diablevert: It was interesting. Seemed pretty realistic. A tough situation to deal with, certainly. What was your take?

Dreadfulpenny: It was hard to imagine that Wang Lung was so isolated from his other neighbors and the rest of society that he had no other recourse than to put up with them. On the other hand, I know absolutely nothing about Chinese history, so I have no way to judge its accuracy.

Diablevert: Well, by that time he was one of the wealthiest people in the area; most everybody else wasn’t worth stealing from. And it doesn’t seem like there was much in the way of what we would conceive of as local police.

DreadfulPenny: You’re right… the governing family wouldn’t have cared when they were prosperous, and couldn’t do anything afterwards. I guess a big question for me was: when did Wang Lung’s desire for land/wealth turn into greed? And was it necessarily wrong for him to be greedy in that time and place?

Diablevert: It’s interesting, I don’t think the book forces the reader to any conclusions on that point….

DreadfulPenny: It felt like we were supposed to get the sense that Wang Lung’s reach had exceeded his grasp, and that he was suffering for it. I found the ending to be incredibly sad… the idea that the one pure thing he had held through his life–love of the land–was being erased by his sons.

Diablevert: It is totally sad. But the plot of the novel seems to reflect in miniature a larger cycle; the landed family in the beginning sells that first plot of land to Wang Lung because they need the money to support their lifestyles, and the sons live far away in the city and don’t care about the estate.

Dreadfulpenny: I suppose we’re not given many textual clues that the original landed family had held their position for generations… only Wang Lung’s utter subservience makes it seem as if they had held that position since the beginning of time.

Diablevert: I dunno, I definitely got the sense that they had been around quite a while; that’s what made it seem a little dubious, about this whole cycle begin repeated in one man’s lifetime. Like, the grandma figure who Wang Lung appears before when he goes to pick up O-Lan; this did not seem like a woman who had come up the hard way. She had been born into privilege.

DreadfulPenny: I agree… that’s what made me see it less as a cycle of growth-wealth-decadence-decline than a story protesting the nouveau riche. Oddly, the more I think about it, the more I think we’re gonna see some strong similarities in the writing style of Buck and Steinbeck when we get to The Grapes of Wrath, at least in the rapturous love of land passages.

Diablevert: So far almost all the 30s books have been more realistic.

DreadfulPenny: That’s fair, so far.

Diablevert: I appreciated that, in this instance. I was all stealing myself for something condescending and idealized, and I don’t think this was at all. For all Wang Lung loves the land and whatnot, the book does not portray being a Chinese peasant as anything but backbreaking.

Dreadfulpenny: I agree… you got a strong sense of their crushing poverty in the beginning, and how scary the city was to the poor. There are moments that stand out to me very strongly–Wang Lung’s love of the little fool, O-lan giving birth then immediately joining him in the fields, hiding the jewels in her clothes, the barmy old grandfather… Pearl S. Buck definitely has her moments. Oh, and lots and lots of starvation.

Diablevert: Yeah, I liked it. In a way what I particularly liked are the moments when he fucked up, when you knew he was going to make the wrong choice – those moments were very vivid, and they made sense, they were a progression of the character’s development. Like when he makes her give up the pearls.

DreadfulPenny: Or the first time he enters the brothel, and he’s so awkward, and you just know desire is going to club him over the head and make him stupid.

Diablevert: Exactly. And even that you can understand; this is a guy who has basically never experienced beauty or luxury in any form, and here it’s being dumped in his lap for the first time, with this beautiful woman who’s sweet to him, and charming, and classier than any other person he’s ever met…like, you can see how the fuck up is going to occur, but it all makes sense.

DreadfulPenny: Yeah, and the reader knows that she’s probably going to be shallow or difficult or awful in some other way, but you’re watching a slow-motion train wreck. Totally believable.

Diablevert: Right. So in that sense I like it. I also like that I felt Buck was pretty non-judgmental about the cultural differences she presents here.

DreadfulPenny: I’d agree with that. She seems very sympathetic to Wang Lung’s original way of life (meager, but close to the land) and VERY taken with its natural beauty.

Diablevert: Mmmm…but I wouldn’t say she glorifies it, really. The very first bit is him waking up and kicking the snow or whatever out of his three inch mud window and then his dad bitching him out for putting actual tea leaves in the hot water. The land, literally, is bountiful and miraculous; but everything else is grim grim grim. Which I why I think I would have hated the book when I was younger.

DreadfulPenny: I don’t think she glorifies it so much as she is able to record its grimness while granting it a certain dignity…. and I’m almost certain it’s why I hated it in high school. Oh, and I’m sure I hated everything about the way he treats O-lan… I mean, I still do, but I’m better able to contextualize historically and culturally and not become an absolute ball of seething rage over these things. I’ve come a long way, baby.

Diablevert: Aw, you grew a callous!     I feel bad, like I’m not doing this book justice; I was all fired up about it when I first finished it, but I can’t remember it with the necessary specificity now to discuss its subtleties.

DreadfulPenny: I dunno… I wouldn’t feel too bad. I mean, it’s solidly written and parts are pretty good, but it’s still not Woolf or Nabokov or anything. I definitely enjoyed it more than the average Pulitzer, though.

Diablevert: Me too. Alright, then. Pearl S. Buck, I’m glad I gave you a chance.

DreadfulPenny: Awww. Pearl S. Buck, I hereby give you more props than my 14-year-old self did. But I still will probably never read another of your books, and certainly not this one again.

Diablevert: And so we end.

DreadfulPenny: Go Patriots?

Diablevert: Oh, they lost, dude. It was pretty terrible. Well, technically the game’s still going on, but there’s not enough time for them to come back.

Dreadfulpenny: Sorry, lady. That sucks.

Diablevert: Ah, well.

DreadfulPenny: At least you had a 1930s Pulitzer to keep you warm. (Not helping, huh?) One more thing….Have you noticed that the women writers seem to have held up better over time than the men? Wharton, Buck, Ferber, Julia Peterkin. (We’ll leave The Able McLaughlins out of this one.)

Diablevert: No, that hadn’t struck me. I think you’ve got a couple ringers in there. Lewis and Tarkington are still spoken of, but neither has the reputation that Wharton and Cather do.

DreadfulPenny: Cather! (Which I didn’t like so much, but you did.) Maybe it’s just a weird accident of history.

Diablevert: Your fave was Wilder, who was a dude.

DreadfulPenny: Thornton Wilder is the heaviest hitter so far on the men’s side. But Wharton was a pretty close second, for me.

Diablevert: I think it’s more of the luck of the draw. Talk to me in a couple decades.

DreadfulPenny: That’s fair, but I’m gonna end this one singing “Ladies First” anyway.

Diablevert: The Queen Latifah version?

DreadfulPenny: Long live the Queen! Have you obtained The Store by esteemed author T.S. Stribling yet? The title alone sends chills down my spine.

Diablevert: “The Store”?

DreadfulPenny: The internets could not contain the depth of my sarcasm on that one, I’m afraid. The title, not Queen Latifah. (Respect the Queen.)

Diablevert: Oh, phew. I thought you were stepping to Queen Latifah there for a minute.

DreadfulPenny: I’d never.

Diablevert: Damn straight.

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Years of Grace: A Chat

Posted in Margaret Ayer Barnes, Years of Grace with tags , , , , , on December 3, 2009 by Diablevert

Diablevert: So, Years of Grace. For a book where nothing happens a lot happens, you know? Do you remember the name of Jane’s friend, ol’ what’s her face? Who marries the guy Jane has the hots for?

Dreadfulpenny: The rumpled bluestocking? Agnes. It’s in my notes. I jotted some stuff down because I knew my time with the book was limited — I didn’t quite finish. The last part I got to was when Jane’s eldest daughter had her twins.

Diablevert: Let me fill you in — a few years after having her kids, her oldest hooks up with her best friend’s husband, the son of Jane’s mildly skanky friend with the curls, the two couples divorce, and Jane’s daughter marries the new guy. Also, all three of Jane’s kids unexpectedly inherit a big chunk of change from their grandfather, and each uses it to finally take off and do whatever their little heart desires. For the oldest, that means marrying her lover, and him rejoining the foreign service (they get divorced and married in Paris, his new post). For the son, he moves to Boston, buys a townhouse, and commits to some serious antiquing. For the younger daughter, she buys, with her “friend” a farm where they raise dogs and an apartment in the city where they hang out in silk pajama with playwrights and interior designers, if you get my meaning.

Dreadfulpenny: Awesome. How does Jane feel about all that? Does the artist first love ever reappear a la So Big?

Diablevert: Ah. Well, when they go to Paris for the daughter’s wedding, he shows, and Jane ends up going to see him at his studio, alone. Where he basically tells her that he’s not in love with his wife anymore, and hey, at least that didn’t happen to them, because it likely would have, people get old and bored with each other, god I’m French and cynical.

Dreadfulpenny: And they make wild passionate monkey love?

Diablevert: Not so much.

Dreadfulpenny: Damn. (I didn’t think so.)

Diablevert: Yeah. So what was your impression of this book?

Dreadfulpenny: A resounding meh. I actually found the beginning extremely readable (you compared it in an email to a young adult novel, and that’s pretty spot-on), but then it seemed like a poor quality Xerox of some other Pulitzer winner…. maybe Early Autumn?

Diablevert: Your unexpected affection for Early Autumn is a form of Stockholm syndrome.

Dreadfulpenny: At this point, it’s not so much affection for it as a striking similarity. (And I feel I’ve been beaten up for my rankings quite enough already.) I don’t really LOVE that book or anything, like I wouldn’t MARRY IT marry it…I just thought it was marginally better than some other ones.

Diablevert: Sorry, I didn’t mean to be a big meanie

Dreadfulpenny: No, it’s fair. But, there’s just no accounting for taste.

Seriously, though, look at the parallels: the American aristocratic family, the tension between the boring husband and the dashing lov-ah…Throw in a dash of So Big and you kind of have Years of Grace. It seems like the Pulitzer committee was getting pretty incestuous at this point, choosing books more for their similarities to previous winners than for their own individual merit.

Diablevert: I guess. I dunno, Years of Grace was just so mild. In So Big, Selena at least is taking some real risks, making some unconventional choices. You feel with her. And in Early Autumn, the man character comes close, at least, to breaking away.

Dreadfulpenny: Yes, Jane always makes the “correct” choice.

Diablevert: Exactly, so I think at some point, I was just like, nope. I don’t believe you, you’re never going to be stupid and impetuous. And so there’s nothing to root for, to bite your nails over.

Dreadfulpenny: Your life will be like an etiquette manual. It made it a hard book to get worked up over. It wasn’t BAD, per se (the prose was serviceable, the characters weren’t complete cardboard cutouts). I had hopes for the French boyfriend and the allure of college life. After that, it was hard to care any more.

Diablevert: So did I, and then when she gives those up without a whimper….I think it was the letter did me in.

Dreadfulpenny: The spiteful letter to Andre? Yeah, that was the worst.

Diablevert: I had a big soft spot for Andre. The relationship of his parents was the most idyllic in the book.

Dreadfulpenny: So true. He was pretty charming, with his smutty French books and courtship by set design.

Diablevert: And I was like, can you not see, girl? He will value you as a person and encourage and benefit from all your poetic sensibilities!

Dreadfulpenny: And you can ride bicycles built for two!

Diablevert: Right. And then he sends one letter, like “I still care for you deeply but I have this huge career opportunity and I can’t pass it up, but I still want to see you.” And she’s all, “What? You’re not willing to drop everything for love, right now? Fuck off, then! I’m-a marry this boring douchebag, he licks my boots! Plus he might die!”

And then…here’s the thing. If the marriage had changed her – this is the Anna Karenina set up, pretty much – if she’d done it and been like, “no. this is not enough for me,” if she could at least have been seriously tempted to chuck it all over, then I might have had some investment in the book. But instead even when that middle-aged bored patch crops up, you never think she’s really gonna ditch it all

Dreadfulpenny: Maybe that’s a fairly authentic response for a fit of pique though? I mean, it’s totally unsatisfactory from a narrative standpoint, but Jane was always fairly conventional and self-involved.

Diablevert: Oh, totally! That’s the thing, that’s why it’s so meh, as you said – it’s not like I don’t believe this. This all seems totally authentic and well-described and clear and sensible. It’s just like, yes, indeed, very realistic, but why should I want to read about it? You know? And part of me feels like that can’t be it, exactly. Because I think it should be possible to write about characters who lead ordinary lives and make it interesting.

Dreadfulpenny: I’m trying to think of a good example of that.

Diablevert: I really resist believing that there has to be soap opera, melodrama, for a story to work, like you have to have scandalous behavior in order to be interesting.

Dreadfulpenny: Well, the characters or narration could be super-witty, like in Austen? Or, y’know, there could be dragons or robots.

Diablevert: Heh. Or Zombies. But even Austen, now I think about it — I was actually re-reading her recently – she’s got a lot of scandal. Lydia elopes with a scoundrel she’s too dumb to see has no intention of marrying her, Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility turns mysteriously douchebag, there’s a secret engagement in that one, as well….

Dreadfulpenny: Not necessarily in a book like Persuasion (which is actually my favorite Austen).

Diablevert: That’s the one I haven’t read. Well, that and I mislaid my copy of Northanger Abby halfway through.

Dreadfulpenny: Persuasion is a pretty gentle book… minor scandal and misunderstandings, but essentially just about nice people. Anyway, I agree with you… but a richer internal life enlivens any book, and would have helped in Years of Grace. Otherwise, it’s just a James Herriot book without the animals, or a cozy cat mystery without the murder.

Diablevert: I guess. I dunno, I guess the thing I didn’t feel was lacking was internal life – Jane’s a very reflective character, and I felt like her observations could be quite subtle

Dreadfulpenny: Hmmm. I suppose. I guess her consistently conventional actions left me the impression that she was shallow.

Diablevert: well, what about her take on her friend’s mom, the chick who has the affair with the hot guy who later marries her mildly-skanky-only-in-a-Victorian-context friend?

Dreadfulpenny: Oh, you mean the lady who married Burt Lancaster (I couldn’t get over the name)?

Diablevert: Not the one who actually marries him, the chick who’s having the affair with him whom he ditches in order to get married, and then she kills herself.

Dreadfulpenny: Yep, the scandalous mom. I remember that she loved her and was protective towards her, but I thought that was more of a “ooh, shiny! pretty! free!” reaction.

Diablevert: I dunno – could you explain what you mean more by shiny, pretty, free?

Dreadfulpenny: I thought she had a bit of a childish infatuation with the mom… like preferring your friend’s prettier, more fun parents to your own dull ones. (Especially since Jane’s mom was so painfully correct.) And that she was in love with her brashness and freedom, but not in a way that she ever would have emulated.

Diablevert: Dido, in other words.

Dreadfulpenny: I suppose.

Diablevert: Well, I just mean that early on in the book she and Agnes have a couple conversations where they kind of moon over the romantic end of Dido… you’re saying you think her sympathy for the real woman is just as shallow and teenager-ish. I dunno, I was giving her more credit but weighing it in my mind I can easily see your interpretation.

Dreadfulpenny: I think the thing that makes me see Jane ultimately as shallow is the admission when she’s at Bryn Mawr that she could study and search for a job and push the boundaries of womanhood… or she could get married and let someone take care of her, because who really wants to work anyway?

Diablevert: Mmmm.

Dreadfulpenny: After that, I had a lot less patience for the character.

Diablevert: I see. Yeah, she does bail on that pretty easy-peasy. Although I don’t think that bothered me as much as you; she’s never portrayed as a woman of great ambition, just of moderate sensibility.

Dreadfulpenny: I just saw her both as a person who wanted to avoid any sort of conflict with another human being or someone who was a little on the lazy side. One of those traits I could empathize with, but both were too much for me. Again, I still think her views were totally in keeping with the time. I just vastly preferred Agnes.

Diablevert: Well, who wouldn’t? She’s portrayed as such a sad character, in a way.

Dreadfulpenny: Jane?

Diablevert: Agnes.

Dreadfulpenny: Agnes was a pretty tragic figure in the book…. she’s totally punished for her ambition and intelligence. Oh, and for being kinda plain and frazzled-looking all the time.

Diablevert: Her husband treats her mean.

Dreadfulpenny: I really felt like Barnes was trying to say to Agnes, “Well, dear, if you just conditioned your hair and used some toner, your husband wouldn’t have left you and you’d find a nice job as a typist.”

Diablevert: I don’t know if I’d go that far, but I’m not sure why

Dreadfulpenny: Well, I thought she was pretty beat-up on. I don’t remember Jane having much remorse about the affair, and it seemed that she always had a slightly condescending attitude towards Agnes.

Diablevert: Yeah, I can see that. Although I’d hardly call it and affair.

Dreadfulpenny: Didn’t they make out in the garden until dawn? Am I totally misremembering that?

Diablevert: that’s Early Autumn, dude.

Dreadfulpenny: Oh, wait, maybe they just held each other tenderly and talked about what it would be like to have an affair?

Diablevert: In this one he kisses her like, once and she gives him the boot.

Dreadfulpenny: Oh, yeah. Damn. Sorry. Anyway, no one got any, which has pretty much been the basic plot line since Age of Innocence (where at least there was all kinds of clutching in over heated rooms).

Diablevert: Stupid fucking “wholesome” requirement

Dreadfulpenny: I mean, I don’t need there to be hot action in every book I read… but once in a decade would be nice. It is part of the human condition after all. Anyway… my mind is clearly degenerating.

Diablevert: Did you have anything else in your notes about this one? Lesbians? Horse farms? Exaggerated parallelisms? Actually, on that last point – I do find it a bit weird how she goes to the trouble of setting up each of Jane’s kids as a near-perfect foil for one of the older generation, and has them make different choice…which then pretty much work out okay for them.

Dreadfulpenny: I probably can’t comment on that since I didn’t read the end. In fact, by the point where I stopped, I had trouble keeping the kids straight. All I remember is the icky feeling that they were somehow all marrying cousins.

Diablevert: That makes sense. Anything else bug you about it?

Dreadfulpenny: Nah. It was a pretty blah book. Not painful to read, but not meritorious either.

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Years of Grace: Sane, Good, and a Virtuous Influence on Her Acquaintances

Posted in Margaret Ayer Barnes, The Age of Innocence, Years of Grace on December 1, 2009 by Diablevert

Romantic comedies: Cliches. Ridden with them. Can’t seem to be made without them, it’s built into the DNA. For instance, the heroine’s always hooked up with this straight-laced guy who seems perfect on the surface, but she is secretly or not so secretly tempted by the exasperating, charming, cute slacker hero, and eventually Mr. Straight Arrow reveals himself to be a twerp in some fashion and she runs off with the unsuitable sensitive boy, who may not have a steady paycheck but does possess a heart full of love, etc. That’s nearly always the set up: Cary Grant v. Jimmy Stewart in The Philadelphia Story. Ben Stiller v. Ethan Hawke in Singles. Mikahil Barishnikov v. Mr. Big in Sex and the City. Etc. I could go on, you could go on. The movie industry has certainly gone on and on and on. Maybe I’m being unfair; maybe it’s just the rules of the road for romance, period, the tragic as well as the humorous: Tristan and Isolde. Madame Bovary. Anna Karenina.

Have you ever longed to see a version in which the heroine sensibly sticks with her solid Straight Arrow, where she regretfully doesn’t cheat on her husband but gently shows her potential lover the door, virtue intact, where late in life she absolutely does not get a wild hair and lit off for the territories, an equally gray old roué by her finally-liberated side?

Yeah, me neither.

Yet that, dear readers, is precisely what Years of Grace is the story of. A sensible woman acting sensibly. A woman who looks into the face of her deepest temptation and says, “Oh, I couldn’t possibly hurt my family like that.” Who comes to value companionship, steadiness and probity over passion.

Possibly someone could make an interesting book out of this. But Barnes gave it a hell of a go — Jane is prone to sympathy, capable of subtlety — and she just doesn’t bring it off. For me it was the letter from Andre — when Jane rejects it so soundly, deciding that their feelings were only puppy love after all, I realized that we were dealing with a woman who would never stray. And so there is no tension to her temptations.

It’s interesting to compare this with the Age of Innocence. That was another book where if you’d grabbed my arm as I was about to flip the first page and asked me to give my best guess as to its plot and its outcome, I think I could have come fairly close. Given a bare familiarity with its characters and setting, Newland’s cowardice was always a safe bet. But you don’t feel safe reading Wharton. You feel tortured, tempted, twisted, agonized, just as the characters do. You will then to be better than their natures—for that’s another important difference between Barnes and Wharton, Wharton clearly sees Newland’s cowardice as cowardice. Or at least, she sees his limits as limits, flaws that will forever bar him from true happiness. Whereas Barnes seems to see Jane’s compromises as acceptable, admirable; the passions she rejects flawed, the comforts she clings to a worthy reward. Let’s not forget the title, after all.

Yet in setting up the comparison of Jane’s choices with those of her children — who do seek personal happiness and fulfillment, even at the risk of estrangement from their family and class — Barnes leaves the ultimate outcome of those choices somewhat ambiguous. The kids seem happy for now, but Jane frets over whether they’ll stay that way, and the book doesn’t seem to offer a solid hint. Instead, she seems interested in spotlighting these differences mostly as illustrations of the changing tenor of the times. Jane, child of the 1890s, lives by one code; her flapper kids another. Barnes seems softhearted and nostalgic about Jane’s Victorian era, but does not quite condemn modern mores (particularly as they relate to her Jane’s younger kids, of which more anon). As a reader, I certainly wasn’t longing for a Sinclair Lewis-style broadside against the sclerosis of the upper classes, but Barnes’ periwinkle-to-dove moral spectrum leaves the book a muddle, with nothing much either to root for or to mourn. I admit I found myself skimming in the later sections, just to get the thing dusted, as I’d no longer any stake in learning the outcome. (Yes, she does see Andre one more time. No, it’s not worth waiting for.)

This is not to say that Barnes ever lost me, suspension-of-disbelief-wise; I bought Years, and Jane, till the end. I just wasn’t invested in her. This dishwater rinse of realism seems to be something we’ll seeing a lot of in the ’30s — no wonder Gone With the Wind was so popular.

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Years of Grace: Summary

Posted in Margaret Ayer Barnes, Years of Grace with tags , , , , on November 23, 2009 by Diablevert

A quick and dirty summary of this one, I think, so’s I don’t clog up my beautiful rant about what I thought of the book.

Years of Grace is about a young woman, Jane Ward, growing up in late-Victorian Chicago. Not a couple of words you see often paired, Victorian and Chicago, but trust me, here they fit. Jane comes from a well-to-do family; her soft-hearted father and prim mother both keep close tabs on her, and she’s allowed all the freedoms a respectable teenage girl would have had in the 1890s, which is to say, none. (She has a mild freak out when she finds herself on such wildly bohemian sprees as hanging out with two friends, one of them a boy, and cooking supper for themselves without any adult supervision, in the middle of the afternoon, at the age of 16.)

Said boy is named Andre; he has a bit better claim to bohemianism, being the son of a French civil servant with aspirations of becoming a sculptor. Jane, naturellement, falls in love with him. He does the honorable thing and—before they get past several longing looks and a smooch or two—goes to her father to ask for her hand. Jane’s mother hits the roof, goes right on through, and is last seen sailing over Lake Michigan, and even her doting father puts his grim face on. They lay down the law: Cease all contact for the next four years, and if by then you two crazy kids still keep in your breasts the eternal flame (at the ripe old ages of 21 and 23, respectively) well, then we’ll see.

Faced with the choice of eloping with her lover or being entirely cut off from him for the next four years….Jane basically never considers eloping with her lover and meekly accepts being cut off from him for the next four years. They part tearfully, and Jane grows a smallish pair and forces her mother to let her attend Bryn Mawr, in order to get out of the house and further her intellectual development, in that order.

Jane loves Brynn Mawr, flitting though some of her classes but digging up on poetry and history and generally being all stimulated and whatnot. She also enjoys rooming with one of her best friends from back home, Agnes, a whip-smart but regrettably plain girl who comes from a much poorer family than Jane’s. But at the close of her second year at college, Jane’s older sister gets married and moves out of the house. Jane’s mother, lonely and anxious that Jane should make her debut and hook up with a young man of the non-French, non-artistic, non-starving kind, asks her not to go back for her third. And Jane agrees.

After several months at home, Jane meets a young fellow named Stephen, from an old Boston family, newly arrived in Chicago to be trained up as a banker. Stephen’s making calf-eyes at her almost immediately, but Jane stiff-arms him for months as she waits for her 21st birthday to roll around, as she’s still carrying a torch for Andre. The pressure’s getting pretty intense for her to get hitched, however, as the Spanish-American War has broken out and Stephen’s signed up with the Rough Riders, and is pulling the ol’ faithful, “Perhaps, if I live,” routine. Her faith is not proved foolish however, as shortly after her birthday, a letter indeed arrives from her old flame.

It contents are less pleasing than its existence. Andre writes that he’s a bit nervous and ambivalent, as he not sure she still cares for him, but he would very much like to see her. But his sculpting career is actually going quite well at the moment, and he’s just been awarded a prestigious prize which comes along with a fellowship. He plans to accept, and as a result, he may not be able to get to America for many months. Kthxbai.

Jane, who’s left a doleful Stephen at the bottom of the stairs in his doughboy uniform in order to read the letter, throws a hissy. Basically, she’d been carrying this romantic ideal in her head that Andre’d drop everything for her, and when he choose his work over their reunion she decided upon the instant that she’s been a fool, and writes back a sniffy letter telling him don’t bother thanks, she’s going to marry Stephen instead.

And so she does. She then had three kids, two girls and a boy, and for the next fifteen years or so leads the quiet life of the wealthy wife of a staid banker. Stifled and bored, something finally comes along to break up the monotony: On a visit to her old friend Anges, now living in New York, Jane meets Agnes’s husband, Jimmy Trent, a n’er-do-well composer/critic who just happens to be planning an extended stay in Chicago to take a temporary post as a reviewer for a big paper there.

After a prolonged tête-à-tête on the train back, Jane begins to feel a little fluttery over Jimmy, and he mounts an earnest campaign for her heart and/or pants. He’s over the house all the time, charms the kids, hell, he even gets along with her husband. When he finally makes his pass, however, Jane gives him the boot immediately, horrified at the idea of disgracing her family. He mopes off to Europe (abandoning Agnes, and his daughter) and eventually ends up drafted into the German army and killed at the front early in WWI. Jane sheds a few tears and forgets ‘im.

That brief spark of romance is the last she is to have; while Jane remains our protagonist, the action now shifts to the younger generation, Jane’s kids and their cousins and friends, seen through Jane’s eyes. Her eldest daughter marries her first cousin, another young soldier about to be posted to the front. A few years go by, she has a few kids, and here things begin to take a turn.

A series of deliberate parallels are set up between Jane’s generation and that of her children, with her eldest daughter standing in for her, and her younger kids mimicking the lives of their aunt and uncle, Stephen’s sibling. Except when Jane’s daughter grows bored with her marriage and falls for a new man, she decides to chuck it all, divorce her husband, move to Europe and marry the new guy. And when her other two kids unexpectedly come into an inheritance, they seize their chance to break free of Jane and her set, with the son, rather Niles Crane-ishly, buying a town house on Beacon Hill and getting into antiquing while her daughter buys a farm, starting a dog-breeding business together with a “friend” with whom she also shares a pied-a-terre in the city where they can entertain their musical theater friends. While wearing bobbed hair and men’s silk pajamas.

Jane frets about all of these developments. She’s disappointed in her son’s decision to move away, confounded by her younger daughter’s smart set friends, and disappointed and ashamed of her eldest daughter’s decision to divorce. And though she knows it’s her and not them who are out of temper with the times, she worries that none of them will end up happy. As she has, pretty much, with Stephen. Bored, but happy.

Her acceptance of her fate and approval of her own decision is sealed by a reunion with Andre in the book’s final pages, when she travels to Paris to witness her daughter’s second marriage. For Andre, though he remembers her fondly, has grown old and cynical during his own unhappy marriage to a younger woman, and tells her ruefully that maybe it was better that they never got together, since they’d inevitably have wearied of each other. Jane takes his assessment as confirmation that she was right to write him off years ago, and rides back to Stephen, comforted, conventional, and safe as she was when she started the book.

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Age of Innocence Alternates, and a Thank You

Posted in Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence on November 10, 2009 by Diablevert

It’s been lonely, this wending our way through the wilds of the Pulitzer cannon, but things have been looking up a bit lately we’ve been joined on our pilgrimage by fellow bloggers, such as the estimable JW Rosenzweig of Following Pulitzer. (He had some kind words for us, too.) It’s been great fun to read along as someone else suffers throughenjoys some of these rare early winners.

But it was a recent post of his on a better known Pulitzer book, the classic Age of Innocence, that prompted me to post today. Rosenzweig writes that in Edith Wharton’s paper were notes on alternate endings for the Age of Innocence, with two possibilities mentioned — 1) Newland and May break it off, and he marries the Countess, but they grow apart and eventually seperate as she longs for the freedoms of Europe and he’s too stuck in New York society to ever live abroad, and 2) Newland marries May but eventually decides he can’t bear to be without the Countess, runs of to Florida with her for a desperate fling, but he comes to regret his rash action and the Countess comes to realize how boring he is, and again they go their seperate ways.

These alternate ending struck me as really interesting — playing them out in my mind gave me a better sense of how Wharton imagined these characters. Reading the Age that we have, one is left feeling that Newland’s great flaw is cowardice, that he won’t risk his and his family’s reputation even for his one shot at love. But in Wharton’s alternate versions, Newland risks, but ends up unhappy anyway, because love or no love, he’s still the same Newland, product of the same airless Society, still overridden with their concerns, still holding their values — in a word, boring, even as a giddy adulterer, a lover on the run.

And that makes sense to me. It suggests that Wharton considered his failure to bust out of the trap a symptom of his essential flaw, and not its essence, and in a way it makes the ending she went with the happiest possible, for it allows both Newland and the Countess the illusion that but for outside constraints they might have found in each other perfect comity. It reminds me of the character of Stephen in Years of Grace (of which more soon). He is happier than Newland, because he’s less sensitive, less perceptive, less full of yearning. But other than that they’re the same guy, content to spend summer vacation at the same resort they went to with their parents when they were kids, entering the same damn boat race every August. Because their essential question about any activity is “would stopping this tradition disappoint others?” not “do I enjoy doing this?” Contrast that attitude with that of the Countess, whose very entrance into the novel is a declaration that she cares far more for her own happiness than society’s censure, and that she’s willing to risk poverty and ridicule and scandal to obtain art, conversation, and most of all freedom. Newland and the Countess love the same things—and each other—but they value them quite differently, and I think Wharton’s probably right that that difference would always have been an obstacle between them, no matter what form their relationship took if they’d continued it.

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Ratings in Review

Posted in Booth Tarkington, Edith Wharton, Edna Ferber, Ernest Poole, Historical Context, Julia Peterkin, Louis Bromfield, Margaret Wilson, Oliver LaFarge, Pulitzer Winners, Sinclair Lewis, The Scorecard, Thornton Wilder, Willa Cather on November 9, 2009 by Dreadful Penny

After some delay, here are my rankings:

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

Some strong similaries between Diablevert’s rankings and mine, some minor shifting of one book slightly above another, and a large difference of opinion on Bromfield and Cather. (Well, this particular Cather. My Antonia is one of my favorite books. One of Ours, not so much.) I agree with d.v.’s assessment of the post-frontier theme (and why is it that she always manages to put things so eloquently and then I come in and bat clean-up? The perils of having an awesome co-blogger… and yes, I am sucking up since my rankings are mucho belated.)

Anyhoo, this is mostly a matter of taste here: The Age of Innocence is pretty clearly a better book, more layered and masterfully written, but The Bridge of San Luis Rey had a magical clarity about it, that oracular quality that good speculative fiction has, that made me really love it. Both were books I might not have picked up and I’m truly grateful to have read. So Big is uneven at best, but there was enough humor and charm to keep me genuinely engaged, and Selina still stands in my mind months later as an engaging character.

I think I’m giving Bromfield more credit than diablevert because I went on to read The Green Bay Tree and A Good Woman. Not that I think any of those individual books is particularly good, but the three together present Bromfield’s project pretty well: the degradation of proper New England families to industrialization and the rabble. Then it’s pretty much a race to the bottom: Scarlet Sister Mary is interesting but paternalistic, One of Ours is too emo, Arrowsmith is too long with too much science talk, Booth Tarkington is condescending in both of his winning novels, The Able McLaughlins is just plain bad, and His Family was even worse. Sprinkle a hearty dash of sexism over the lot and you just about have the final six.

I do think the Pulitzers are improving in general, if they have a tendency to memorialize the patrician, the schlocky bestseller, and the schmoopy. The 1930s bring us a bunch of books that neither of us have heard of (and may not even be physically available to us… I think we irreparably damaged the already-tattered sole surviving copy of Years of Grace in any of the NYC public library systems). But we do have Gone with the Wind, The Yearling, and The Grapes of Wrath to look forward to… oh, and The Good Earth. *le sigh*

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Laughing Boy: A Chat

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

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

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

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

Do you any of think the other Pulitzers were modernist?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diablevert: Word.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diablevert: Fair enough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diablevert: Gotcha.

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

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

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

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

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

Diablevert: Nah, I’m good

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Rankings in Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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