by Ken Kesey, 1962
My encounter with Kesey was long overdue. One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest has been on the To Read list for as long I as can remember, at least since my freshman year of college and, given my long association with flower parents, probably longer. And in spite of the fact that I didn't read Kesey then, and have always found myself far too busy to read him since, he has ended up exercising a profound influence on the course of my life. The ways in which this happened are complex and oblique: for example, Kesey was a personal friend of a certain Professor F., and it so happened that Professor F. was the man who exposed me to literature in the first semester of my first year of college, a heady, vulnerable time, a time of peak sensitivity and maximal openness to the rapture of experience, lived or read. Some kernel of Keseyian sympathy must have been born in Composition 101. But there was more to it, for Professor F. also served as both mentor and taskmaster to my bosom buddy S., and it was in this mentoring capacity that F. (and by extension Kesey) exercised his real influence, for whichever spiritual or intellectual heights S. would climb, there too would be Cocodrilo, huffing and puffing at his side and gasping in the heady views of The World Below. And even before meeting Professor F., the literarily precocious S. had been a Kesey fan, had read all his stuff, sympathized with the drug culture, plumped for the dropouts and derelicts and dispossessed, and generally led a life in which success was assured as long as failure was achieved early. This conviction has dogged my tracks for many a year.
So it should come as no surprise that in reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I felt a strange sense of homecoming. The book is a delight to read, and reminded me of the heady days of undergraduate literary decadence, when to read was to indulge in the worst excesses of pleasure, scholarly neglect, and self-indulgence. The characters (caricatures, really) are huge, vivid, and marvelous, and the lines of conflict are drawn cleanly over the class and gender concepts burned deep in my sympathies by the machista upbringing of a boy-heavy household. McMurphy is a man’s man, hairy as an ape, smarter, stronger, and more likeable than anyone in the ward, while Nurse Ratchet is a perfect ogress, power-hungry, manipulative, vindictive, and cruel. The patients are lovable victims of a warped institution that advocates its own power and control over those of its interns, and the eventual defeat/triumph of McMurphy and his disciples is as gratifying as it is obvious.
In some sense, the book is too easy: everyone is either likable or detestable, and the usual muddied middle ground where most of us pass our lives is passed over in favor of cruder archetypes. But in his broad and sometime cavalier passage through this microcosm of society, Kesey touches on themes that are dear to me: the meaning of sanity, the struggle for freedom, the importance of community. It is important to remember that not every text can or should attempt to fulfill every function: this is a black comedy, and it succeeds in raising exactly the sort of powerful, laughter backed elation that only comedy can hope for.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Oblivion
by David Foster Wallace, 2004
Technical thinking and technical speaking are two very different things. Technical thinking is creative play with consequence, the delicate fusion of concepts whose very precision makes them hard to join and even harder to fashion. Technical speaking, on the other hand, involves a lot of numbers and acronyms and long words with Latinate endings. The fruits of technical thinking can usually be expressed with very non-technical language: even the most arcane mathematical theorem can often be explained in simple words, and if economies of space and expression recommend the use of variables, there variables can be clearly defined, intelligently applied, and suggestively qualified by a few well placed words. When these words themselves become number and symbol heavy, the intelligibility of the technical thought usually suffers as a consequence.
I found David Foster Wallace unreadable. He uses technical language in ways I consider superfluous, inelegant, and distracting. Worse: I think he uses technical language to snow the general reader into believing that what he has to say is ‘technological’, or ‘scientific’, and thus, in accordance with some weird cultural norm, true, relevant, and important. But though science certainly plays a fundamental role in any broad assessment of the human condition, there is a huge difference between the aesthetic, moral, and spiritual dimensions of living with technology, and the easy attacks on attention that attend bad writing. When I read scientific paper, what I feel has to do with the content, not the language.
Here’s an example Mr. Wallace in action: in his story Mister Squishy, we find that the frosting was injected with a ‘high pressure confectionery needle into the 26x13mm hollow ellipse in each Felony’s center (a center which in for example Hostess Inc.’s products was packed with what amounted to a sucrotic whipped lard), resulting in double doses of an ultrarich and near-restaurant-grade frosting whose central pocket…seemed even richer, denser, sweeter, and more felonious than the exterior icing, icing that in most rivals’ Field tests’ IRPs and GRDS was declared consumers’ favorite part. (Hostess’s lead agenc y Chiat/Day I.B.’s 1991-2 double blind Behavior series’ videotapes recorded over 45% of younger consumers actually peeling off Ho Hos’ matte icing in great dry jagged flakes and eating it solo, leaving the low-end cake itself to sit ossifying on their tables’ Lazy Susans, film clips of which had reportedly been part of R.S.B.’s initial pitch to Mister Squishy’s parent company’s Subsidiary Product Development Boys.)’
Mr. Wallace seems to delight in dwelling on precisely those elements of fact that I don’t care about. Measured against Kafka’s criterion that a book should be an ‘ice axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul,’ Oblivion seems a dull, lightweight, and fragile instrument. I did not finish this book, and don’t intend to: perhaps I am denying myself a great pleasure, or failing to recognize the genius of Wallace’s art, but first impressions are just as crucial for books as for job candidates, and I foresee no earthly circumstance that could induce me to pick up this text again. Perhaps the best thing I can say about this collection is that it is aptly titled--would that Wallace had stopped there.
Technical thinking and technical speaking are two very different things. Technical thinking is creative play with consequence, the delicate fusion of concepts whose very precision makes them hard to join and even harder to fashion. Technical speaking, on the other hand, involves a lot of numbers and acronyms and long words with Latinate endings. The fruits of technical thinking can usually be expressed with very non-technical language: even the most arcane mathematical theorem can often be explained in simple words, and if economies of space and expression recommend the use of variables, there variables can be clearly defined, intelligently applied, and suggestively qualified by a few well placed words. When these words themselves become number and symbol heavy, the intelligibility of the technical thought usually suffers as a consequence.
I found David Foster Wallace unreadable. He uses technical language in ways I consider superfluous, inelegant, and distracting. Worse: I think he uses technical language to snow the general reader into believing that what he has to say is ‘technological’, or ‘scientific’, and thus, in accordance with some weird cultural norm, true, relevant, and important. But though science certainly plays a fundamental role in any broad assessment of the human condition, there is a huge difference between the aesthetic, moral, and spiritual dimensions of living with technology, and the easy attacks on attention that attend bad writing. When I read scientific paper, what I feel has to do with the content, not the language.
Here’s an example Mr. Wallace in action: in his story Mister Squishy, we find that the frosting was injected with a ‘high pressure confectionery needle into the 26x13mm hollow ellipse in each Felony’s center (a center which in for example Hostess Inc.’s products was packed with what amounted to a sucrotic whipped lard), resulting in double doses of an ultrarich and near-restaurant-grade frosting whose central pocket…seemed even richer, denser, sweeter, and more felonious than the exterior icing, icing that in most rivals’ Field tests’ IRPs and GRDS was declared consumers’ favorite part. (Hostess’s lead agenc y Chiat/Day I.B.’s 1991-2 double blind Behavior series’ videotapes recorded over 45% of younger consumers actually peeling off Ho Hos’ matte icing in great dry jagged flakes and eating it solo, leaving the low-end cake itself to sit ossifying on their tables’ Lazy Susans, film clips of which had reportedly been part of R.S.B.’s initial pitch to Mister Squishy’s parent company’s Subsidiary Product Development Boys.)’
Mr. Wallace seems to delight in dwelling on precisely those elements of fact that I don’t care about. Measured against Kafka’s criterion that a book should be an ‘ice axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul,’ Oblivion seems a dull, lightweight, and fragile instrument. I did not finish this book, and don’t intend to: perhaps I am denying myself a great pleasure, or failing to recognize the genius of Wallace’s art, but first impressions are just as crucial for books as for job candidates, and I foresee no earthly circumstance that could induce me to pick up this text again. Perhaps the best thing I can say about this collection is that it is aptly titled--would that Wallace had stopped there.
Dubliners
James Joyce, 1914
On a first reading, Joyce’s stories seem to end with strange abruptness, as if halfway through the story the man got tired and decided to tell no more. Understanding why Joyce chose to end his stories exactly where ended them is an exercise in narrative dissection, and illuminates not just Joyce’s motives as a chronicler of the human condition, but also some of the basic structural elements that form the backbone of the story genre.
The Sisters is a wispy little tale of a defrocked priest and his relation to a boy I take to be young Joyce. The boy narrates the story, and in some ways the tale is the story of how the boy comes to terms with the priest’s death, though the epiphany, when it comes, is both the priest’s realization that faith has failed, and the boy’s realization of the social and psychological distortions that accompanied that failure. None of this is stated: the priest’s breakdown is related by one of his spinster sister’s, who may or may not be aware of how it relates to a crisis of faith, and the boy’s reaction to the news is never revealed. “She stopped suddenly as if to listen. I too listened, but there was no sound in the house: and I knew that the old priest was lying still in his coffin, solemn and truculent in death, an idle chalice on his breast.” But this act of knowing has something willful about it: it is an affirmation of the facts, over the superstitious listening of the aunt, who knows that the priest is dead but is still checked from speaking honestly by some deep impulse towards caution, and impulse so deep it extends throughout her life and on into the very heart of death. And we know that boy, young, inexperienced, and naïve as he is, sees this, for this is where he stops the tale: “Eliza resumed: ---Wide-awake and laughing-like to himself…so then, of course, when they saw that, that made them think that there was something gone wrong with him…..” End of story. What more need be said? Just as the priest recognized religion as an elaborate compromise with the basic emptiness of worldly existence, so the boy has understood that the aunts have compromised with some core honesty, and are thus reduced to speaking in whispers and holding to forms they no longer believe in but are powerless to change.
Most of the other stories follow the same mold: they sketch a tale, inevitably set in turn of the century Dublin, in precise and transparent language, and end at the moment of epiphany, which often seems the middle of the story. An Encounter is about two young boys who skip school and meet a pederast. Araby is about first love, missed opportunity, self-respect, and the dynamics of power. The idea that we choose our own form of suffering is the ostensible content of Eveline, which chronicles the tale of young woman who balks at eloping with her lover, in spite of the fact that holding the course at home entails certain doom. Two Gallants, which Joyce apparently felt to be one of the best stories in the collection, recounts the petty depredations of two penniless young men as they dream of respectability and stability while preying on a young servant woman for money. It reveals the dehumanizing dimensions of urban poverty, and the corrupting influences of Dublin. The Boarding House is about a tyrannical beancounter of a woman who has driven her husband to drink and dupes a poor chap into marrying her dowry-less, unsophisticated, and drab young daughter. Both A Little Cloud and Counterparts illuminate the connection between domestic violence and professional dissatisfaction, while Clay tells the story of a women whose life has been squandered in the relentless attempt to meet other people’s expectations. A Painful Case details the solitude, despair, and subsequent alcoholism of a woman whose attempts to connect with a fellow citizen shatter on the man’s basic boorishness. Ivy Day in the Committee Room is a political tale, or a tale about Dublin style politics, at least, and perhaps the story I least understand in the collection. The talented but petty Ms. Kearney, whose insistence on “getting her own” leads to her humdrum marriage, her social marginalization, and eventually the ruin of her daughter’s artistic career, is the subject of A Mother. Grace is a strange story about a drunk whose friends attempt to rehabilitate him by dragging him to a church retreat. In the process, the spiritual bankruptcy of the advice givers, both in the circle of friends and in the church, becomes apparent.
The final story, The Dead, is fowl of altogether another feather. Not only is it much longer than any of the preceding stories, it enters a kind of interiority that the sheer brevity of its predecessors can’t allow. Gabriel is the first fully rounded character in Dubliner’s, we see him not just at the moment of epiphany, but before and after as well, context which richens and refines the awakening. As with the other stories, however, the Dead is ultimately an indictment on Irish culture, its characters are sleepwalkers, compromisers, boors, rejects, and failures. There is a hint of nobility that runs through all this humanity, there is a sense that at root is something good, ‘the magnificent hospitality of the Irish’ as evidenced in the lavishness of the aunts, Gretta’s passion and sensitivity, Garbiel’s basic decency and competence. But all are corrupted, either by having settled or having chosen the wrong path or having spent too damn much time in Ireland. The recurring image of the snow suggests Ireland is ripe to be buried.
Dubliners is the third book by Joyce that I have read, having begun with Portrait and then moved directly to the monster that is Ulysses. Though an argument could made that the works of Joyce are best read in the order in which they were produced, the advantage of coming to the lucidity of the stories last is they immediately and profoundly open up the more obscure later works. They illuminate not just Joyce’s power as a storyteller, but also the limits of what Joyce could achieve within a conventional narrative framework. As Frank Conner notes, it is telling that Joyce never again wrote a short story. The move into the interior that we see at the very end of Dubliners, the emotional, symbolic, and psychological richness of The Dead, would prove too tempting, and Joyce would limit himself from then on to the sprawling, open forms of his last works as he sought to set down on paper the words that would ‘forge the conscience of his race’.
On a first reading, Joyce’s stories seem to end with strange abruptness, as if halfway through the story the man got tired and decided to tell no more. Understanding why Joyce chose to end his stories exactly where ended them is an exercise in narrative dissection, and illuminates not just Joyce’s motives as a chronicler of the human condition, but also some of the basic structural elements that form the backbone of the story genre.
The Sisters is a wispy little tale of a defrocked priest and his relation to a boy I take to be young Joyce. The boy narrates the story, and in some ways the tale is the story of how the boy comes to terms with the priest’s death, though the epiphany, when it comes, is both the priest’s realization that faith has failed, and the boy’s realization of the social and psychological distortions that accompanied that failure. None of this is stated: the priest’s breakdown is related by one of his spinster sister’s, who may or may not be aware of how it relates to a crisis of faith, and the boy’s reaction to the news is never revealed. “She stopped suddenly as if to listen. I too listened, but there was no sound in the house: and I knew that the old priest was lying still in his coffin, solemn and truculent in death, an idle chalice on his breast.” But this act of knowing has something willful about it: it is an affirmation of the facts, over the superstitious listening of the aunt, who knows that the priest is dead but is still checked from speaking honestly by some deep impulse towards caution, and impulse so deep it extends throughout her life and on into the very heart of death. And we know that boy, young, inexperienced, and naïve as he is, sees this, for this is where he stops the tale: “Eliza resumed: ---Wide-awake and laughing-like to himself…so then, of course, when they saw that, that made them think that there was something gone wrong with him…..” End of story. What more need be said? Just as the priest recognized religion as an elaborate compromise with the basic emptiness of worldly existence, so the boy has understood that the aunts have compromised with some core honesty, and are thus reduced to speaking in whispers and holding to forms they no longer believe in but are powerless to change.
Most of the other stories follow the same mold: they sketch a tale, inevitably set in turn of the century Dublin, in precise and transparent language, and end at the moment of epiphany, which often seems the middle of the story. An Encounter is about two young boys who skip school and meet a pederast. Araby is about first love, missed opportunity, self-respect, and the dynamics of power. The idea that we choose our own form of suffering is the ostensible content of Eveline, which chronicles the tale of young woman who balks at eloping with her lover, in spite of the fact that holding the course at home entails certain doom. Two Gallants, which Joyce apparently felt to be one of the best stories in the collection, recounts the petty depredations of two penniless young men as they dream of respectability and stability while preying on a young servant woman for money. It reveals the dehumanizing dimensions of urban poverty, and the corrupting influences of Dublin. The Boarding House is about a tyrannical beancounter of a woman who has driven her husband to drink and dupes a poor chap into marrying her dowry-less, unsophisticated, and drab young daughter. Both A Little Cloud and Counterparts illuminate the connection between domestic violence and professional dissatisfaction, while Clay tells the story of a women whose life has been squandered in the relentless attempt to meet other people’s expectations. A Painful Case details the solitude, despair, and subsequent alcoholism of a woman whose attempts to connect with a fellow citizen shatter on the man’s basic boorishness. Ivy Day in the Committee Room is a political tale, or a tale about Dublin style politics, at least, and perhaps the story I least understand in the collection. The talented but petty Ms. Kearney, whose insistence on “getting her own” leads to her humdrum marriage, her social marginalization, and eventually the ruin of her daughter’s artistic career, is the subject of A Mother. Grace is a strange story about a drunk whose friends attempt to rehabilitate him by dragging him to a church retreat. In the process, the spiritual bankruptcy of the advice givers, both in the circle of friends and in the church, becomes apparent.
The final story, The Dead, is fowl of altogether another feather. Not only is it much longer than any of the preceding stories, it enters a kind of interiority that the sheer brevity of its predecessors can’t allow. Gabriel is the first fully rounded character in Dubliner’s, we see him not just at the moment of epiphany, but before and after as well, context which richens and refines the awakening. As with the other stories, however, the Dead is ultimately an indictment on Irish culture, its characters are sleepwalkers, compromisers, boors, rejects, and failures. There is a hint of nobility that runs through all this humanity, there is a sense that at root is something good, ‘the magnificent hospitality of the Irish’ as evidenced in the lavishness of the aunts, Gretta’s passion and sensitivity, Garbiel’s basic decency and competence. But all are corrupted, either by having settled or having chosen the wrong path or having spent too damn much time in Ireland. The recurring image of the snow suggests Ireland is ripe to be buried.
Dubliners is the third book by Joyce that I have read, having begun with Portrait and then moved directly to the monster that is Ulysses. Though an argument could made that the works of Joyce are best read in the order in which they were produced, the advantage of coming to the lucidity of the stories last is they immediately and profoundly open up the more obscure later works. They illuminate not just Joyce’s power as a storyteller, but also the limits of what Joyce could achieve within a conventional narrative framework. As Frank Conner notes, it is telling that Joyce never again wrote a short story. The move into the interior that we see at the very end of Dubliners, the emotional, symbolic, and psychological richness of The Dead, would prove too tempting, and Joyce would limit himself from then on to the sprawling, open forms of his last works as he sought to set down on paper the words that would ‘forge the conscience of his race’.
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
The Plot Against America
Principal characters:
Phillip Roth
Sandy Roth
Mr. and Mrs. Roth
Alvin Roth
Rabbi Bengelsdorf
Uncle Marti
Aunt Evelyn
Seldon
Lindbergh
Like many things about which I know nothing, Judaism fascinates me. I want to believe that in a different incarnation I grew up the uncouth, street-smart son of secular
Why do I desire this? I suspect that the answer has something to do with my native sympathies for groups that are marginal, colorful, or both. I distinctly remember that in the sixth grade I desperately wanted to swap places with Jerome, the funny-as-hell black kid whose dad worked at the power plant on the outskirts of Shandon. Jerome was faster, smarter, and funnier than any of the rest of us, but that wasn’t why I wanted to be Jerome. My interest sprang from something a little more twisted, perhaps my father’s indelicate jokes, snide comments about black people that to my tender ears drifted dangerously close to racism. I wanted to be Jerome in order to be the man whose mere personal excellence could assume moral and political dimensions, the man who could trigger conceptual shift by being the specific thing that didn’t fit the mold. My destiny as a privileged white kid came without a worthy mold to break.
Phillip Roth’s book about a hypothetical Roth subject to the slings and arrows of an alternative history is not a book about longing to be something else. It is a book about the fear that goes with being the thing itself. Whimsical wandering through the rich catalogue of possible identities is a fine game, but what to make of a history in which men have forcibly denied this pleasure to a huge but arbitrary subgroup of the population? What to make of the fact that there is grisly historical evidence that this youthful sense of personal invention can be institutionally snubbed out, erased with a government decree that member of group X are henceforth and in perpetuity only members of group X and thus will die? Identity angst would strike any sane member of that group, no matter how many miles separated them from the offending regime.
This book tells the fictional tale of
The book was lovely. I immediately gave it to Andrew, but will set about expanding my Roth collection directly.
Monday, May 7, 2007
The Europeans
by Henry James, 1878
Henry James was 35 when he wrote this novel. This is of interest to me because I have just turned 35, and like many men d'une certaine age, I find myself wondering what sorts of things a man's life might profitably produce. Of course the comparison is misplaced for several reasons, not the least of which is that Henry James is Henry James, blessedly inimitible in both style and subject. He is also that rarest of creatures, the man of both talent and priviledge who was able (au sense plus grande du terme) to devote his life exclusively to his art. My life, in contrast, is a bastard affair, my art a poridge of disjoint passions, and my children sickly: a man torn between theorems and book reviews.
By the time he wrote The Europeans, James had been going great guns for a while. At an early age he had made the courageous decision to withdraw from law school and pursue a life of letters, thus deviating from the path of power and wealth for the much more uncertain route of the literary arts. It is not clear to me to what extent James' material well being was ever in doubt: his grandfather was one of the first American millionaires, and money ran in the blood line. But it was a family of uncommon accomplishment, and I have no doubt that the fear of failure ran as deep in James as in any other man: there are no guarantees with writing, regardless of who your kinfolk are.
The novel is a light hearted affair. It sketches the attempts of the brilliant but aging and physically unremarkable Eugenia to secure a wealthy American husband. She fails, though her younger brother, Felix, secures a mate, an inheritance, and true love to boot. The novel reads like a comedy, with just deserts handed out like party favors at its conclusion. Formal plot structure not withstanding, the novel is psychologically penetrating and, like all of James' works, constructed with considerable craftsmanship.
On a basic level, the novel examines the ways certain European attitudes, ideas, and mores differ from their American counterparts. For all her Machiavellian intent, Eugenia is basically virtuous: she knows what she wants and sees no moral dilemma in devoting all her considerable charm and cunning to its pursuit. She is basically honest, in particular with herself, though her honestly is sorely taxed, and begins to fall apart, at the end of the book, when it becomes increasingly clear that a marriage proposal shall not materialize. Never a particular stickler for literal truth, it becomes expedient for both her pride and her project to massage the facts: she tells Acton she has sent off her divorce note, though she tells Felix she has not. She claims to be considering a marriage offer from Acton, and when the offer does not materialize, she tells Felix that she has turned him down. But this is the response of a woman in extremity, a woman whose beauty is fading and whose natural hopes for a comfortable marriage are fast crumbling. Having failed with Acton, she makes one more desperate play for the puerile Clifton, and when he manages to scuttle off, she is left, at last, alone with the brutal question: "Was she to have gained nothing?"
Felix is by far the more likeable of the European siblings, though his breezy good cheer and relentless humor render him rather two dimensional. It seems unlikely that he should have inherited nothing of the dark intention of his sister, or at the very least his normal human portion of that character. Still, he such a delight that we wish to accept him as real and model our secret selves on this whimsical Bohemian. His 'European' penchant for pleasure is tempered with a strong sense of social decency that refuses (at least at first) to allow him to court Gertrude, and when he finally does, and announces himself to Mr. Wentworth, it is with great apology and a regretful though unembarassed recognition of his own lightness. It is this character of open honesty that in some sense makes him more American than the Americans, and helps explain the success of his suit.
The Americans themselves are less well drawn. Wentworth is a charicature, Lizzy a placeholder, Charlotte a type, and Clifton a foil. Acton is a bit more complex than the others. Indeed, his competent blandness is in keeping with the character of a successful middle aged businessman: he is a profoundly safe man, a man who has already made his forture and now need only hold on to it, dallying his days over afternoon tea in the floral veranda of his country estate. Ultimately, it is Acton's failure that he can't fall in love with Eugenia: he recognizes a part of himself that craves exactly the niggling kernel of doubt that attachment to this European sophisticate would entail, but though he can intuit the pleasures, he cannot bring himself to actually live them. He ends up marrying a nice young girl and allows his brilliant, amusing, but perilously challenging Eugenia to escape back to the old country.
Main Characters
Eugenia
Felix
Mr. Wentworth
Charlotte
Gertrude
Rev. Brand
Robert Acton
Clifford
Lizie
Henry James was 35 when he wrote this novel. This is of interest to me because I have just turned 35, and like many men d'une certaine age, I find myself wondering what sorts of things a man's life might profitably produce. Of course the comparison is misplaced for several reasons, not the least of which is that Henry James is Henry James, blessedly inimitible in both style and subject. He is also that rarest of creatures, the man of both talent and priviledge who was able (au sense plus grande du terme) to devote his life exclusively to his art. My life, in contrast, is a bastard affair, my art a poridge of disjoint passions, and my children sickly: a man torn between theorems and book reviews.
By the time he wrote The Europeans, James had been going great guns for a while. At an early age he had made the courageous decision to withdraw from law school and pursue a life of letters, thus deviating from the path of power and wealth for the much more uncertain route of the literary arts. It is not clear to me to what extent James' material well being was ever in doubt: his grandfather was one of the first American millionaires, and money ran in the blood line. But it was a family of uncommon accomplishment, and I have no doubt that the fear of failure ran as deep in James as in any other man: there are no guarantees with writing, regardless of who your kinfolk are.
The novel is a light hearted affair. It sketches the attempts of the brilliant but aging and physically unremarkable Eugenia to secure a wealthy American husband. She fails, though her younger brother, Felix, secures a mate, an inheritance, and true love to boot. The novel reads like a comedy, with just deserts handed out like party favors at its conclusion. Formal plot structure not withstanding, the novel is psychologically penetrating and, like all of James' works, constructed with considerable craftsmanship.
On a basic level, the novel examines the ways certain European attitudes, ideas, and mores differ from their American counterparts. For all her Machiavellian intent, Eugenia is basically virtuous: she knows what she wants and sees no moral dilemma in devoting all her considerable charm and cunning to its pursuit. She is basically honest, in particular with herself, though her honestly is sorely taxed, and begins to fall apart, at the end of the book, when it becomes increasingly clear that a marriage proposal shall not materialize. Never a particular stickler for literal truth, it becomes expedient for both her pride and her project to massage the facts: she tells Acton she has sent off her divorce note, though she tells Felix she has not. She claims to be considering a marriage offer from Acton, and when the offer does not materialize, she tells Felix that she has turned him down. But this is the response of a woman in extremity, a woman whose beauty is fading and whose natural hopes for a comfortable marriage are fast crumbling. Having failed with Acton, she makes one more desperate play for the puerile Clifton, and when he manages to scuttle off, she is left, at last, alone with the brutal question: "Was she to have gained nothing?"
Felix is by far the more likeable of the European siblings, though his breezy good cheer and relentless humor render him rather two dimensional. It seems unlikely that he should have inherited nothing of the dark intention of his sister, or at the very least his normal human portion of that character. Still, he such a delight that we wish to accept him as real and model our secret selves on this whimsical Bohemian. His 'European' penchant for pleasure is tempered with a strong sense of social decency that refuses (at least at first) to allow him to court Gertrude, and when he finally does, and announces himself to Mr. Wentworth, it is with great apology and a regretful though unembarassed recognition of his own lightness. It is this character of open honesty that in some sense makes him more American than the Americans, and helps explain the success of his suit.
The Americans themselves are less well drawn. Wentworth is a charicature, Lizzy a placeholder, Charlotte a type, and Clifton a foil. Acton is a bit more complex than the others. Indeed, his competent blandness is in keeping with the character of a successful middle aged businessman: he is a profoundly safe man, a man who has already made his forture and now need only hold on to it, dallying his days over afternoon tea in the floral veranda of his country estate. Ultimately, it is Acton's failure that he can't fall in love with Eugenia: he recognizes a part of himself that craves exactly the niggling kernel of doubt that attachment to this European sophisticate would entail, but though he can intuit the pleasures, he cannot bring himself to actually live them. He ends up marrying a nice young girl and allows his brilliant, amusing, but perilously challenging Eugenia to escape back to the old country.
Main Characters
Eugenia
Felix
Mr. Wentworth
Charlotte
Gertrude
Rev. Brand
Robert Acton
Clifford
Lizie
Billy Bathgate
by E. L. Doctorow, 1989
Characters:
Billy Bathgate
Dutch Schulz
Drew (Lola)
Irving
Lulu
Berman
Mickey
Bo
In an interview on NPR's Talking Volumes, Doctorow made the mildly provocative claim that the novelist writes to find out what he is writing about. I think many writers would agree: tidiness, cohesion, and design are largely fruits of a second draft. Billy Bathgate provides an excellent example of this exploratory technique at work. The novel apparently had its origins in a picture Doctorow saw hanging on a wall, a dark scene of a tugboat by the wharf with a few moustached men. What were they doing there? The first fifty pages gives the answer: fitting a gang member with a pair of concrete boots and sending him off to the great hereafter.
In rereading the first several pages of the novel, I can see the process of discovery at work, in ways that I could not when I read the book the first time. For the book holds together very well: objects, scenes, characters casually referenced at the beginning build and resonate, transmuting into symbols, motifs, key personages. To plan this pastiche in advance, to conceive in one overarching artistic vision the complex interrelation between the people, the places, the material objects, to understand how they naturally blend and support one another: this would be a major achievement. But to give free reign to a fecund imagination at the beginning, populating ones scenes with as many names, mannerisms, and quirky references as one's natural creative imagination can support, and later letting a judicious sense of word and world dictate which of these to develop, where to do it and how to blend them, this seems to me a comprehensible and effective process.
A new concept: narrative evolution. Stories, like ecosystems, can stably support species only in certain numbers and mixtures. Too many jackelopes? They get hungry, breed less, their numbers decline, and the snow tufted marmosets bounce back. To many moustached toughs named Gus or Mugs or Stubsy chopbreaking and roughtalking and fistcudgeling the natives? The story will bog, the toughs will turn to cardboard, and if the author is an attentive and knowledgable steward, she can ween them from the landscape: a proper narrative can support and develop only so many characters. The task of the writer is to exercise a kind of landmanagement, both to encourage propagation of species and to prune the excess. The overflow can be repopulated: a new chapter, a different novel. Slaughter is not the only solution. But balance is key.
So what I have learned from this book (at least in principle) is that rather than storyboarding, one can just write, and if the writing goes well, one can work backward to build both complexity and cohesion. It is an obvious but easily forgotten fact that the public has no access to the formal origins of a work of fiction, and whether it evolve by accident or design is immaterial, provided it evolve well.
A few technical notes:
1. The book is divided into four sections, corresponding (roughly) to the four locations: new york, the burbs, the track, and back to new york. Section breaks are a nice divide: they give the reader some coordinates, a frame in which to measure position. Structurally, however, they seem to me quite pointless.
2. The voice is odd: at once brash street urchin and free wheeling flower poet. There is almost something Whitmanesque about this rough, lumbering rhythm that moves from the crude syntax of the Bronx to the lofty prolixity of pastural poetry. At the end of the story the voice is explained: Billy has gone to an Ivy League school, made good, holds now a position of some distinction. As the story of this boy's ascent, his meteoric rise through the chain of power, his first jarring collisions with love and responsability, it makes sense that the voice should reflect the full semantic range of american speech, from the very lowest classes to the very highest. The occassional excursion into poetry provides a lovely parallel to the upward movements of Billy's own consciousness. I think the fact that we accept this voice, find it odd and elegant and seductive, is one of Doctorow's principle achievements in this book.
3. Sex is deftly stiched in--the quickies on the rootop, the scene where Drew dresses while Billy watches, the odd cock in hand of the cuckholded husband, the romp in the swamp. Doctorow doesn't dwell on sex, but in the book, as in life, it is always there, forming and defining the flow of action. I like the range of language Doctorow uses: from crude statements of fact (the rooffucks, the whorehouse) to a restrained syntax that just flutters on the cusp of strong feeling.
4. The violence is at once explicit and distant. An interesting trick: many of the more greusome acts (e.g. the braining of the firemarshall) are described without judgement. Billy observes how these acts are viewed by other men, but he himself makes no pronouncement. This restraint is logical: a precondition of Billy's apprenticeship is the total submission to the ethos of the circle, and he needs to observe people's reactions to understand this ethos. But though Billy plays the game well, one of the great movements in the book is how he begins to develop his own moral standard. Though he feels bad about the killing of Bo and the fire marshall, he consents to the logic of their deaths, he becomes complicit. But later, he takes it upon himself to risk his own life in saving Drew from the lethal hand of Lulu, and at the very end he takes responsability for a child and his mother and his life as a respectable citizen. It is this honest, naive, emperical sense of ethics that ultimately exposes the bankruptcy of Dutch Schulz' twisted moral scheme.
5. Numbers myths are propogated shamelessly. Berman, the genius accountant, with his puzzles, his predictions, his odds: lovely way to fuse mysticality with the gritty calculus of the street.
Characters:
Billy Bathgate
Dutch Schulz
Drew (Lola)
Irving
Lulu
Berman
Mickey
Bo
In an interview on NPR's Talking Volumes, Doctorow made the mildly provocative claim that the novelist writes to find out what he is writing about. I think many writers would agree: tidiness, cohesion, and design are largely fruits of a second draft. Billy Bathgate provides an excellent example of this exploratory technique at work. The novel apparently had its origins in a picture Doctorow saw hanging on a wall, a dark scene of a tugboat by the wharf with a few moustached men. What were they doing there? The first fifty pages gives the answer: fitting a gang member with a pair of concrete boots and sending him off to the great hereafter.
In rereading the first several pages of the novel, I can see the process of discovery at work, in ways that I could not when I read the book the first time. For the book holds together very well: objects, scenes, characters casually referenced at the beginning build and resonate, transmuting into symbols, motifs, key personages. To plan this pastiche in advance, to conceive in one overarching artistic vision the complex interrelation between the people, the places, the material objects, to understand how they naturally blend and support one another: this would be a major achievement. But to give free reign to a fecund imagination at the beginning, populating ones scenes with as many names, mannerisms, and quirky references as one's natural creative imagination can support, and later letting a judicious sense of word and world dictate which of these to develop, where to do it and how to blend them, this seems to me a comprehensible and effective process.
A new concept: narrative evolution. Stories, like ecosystems, can stably support species only in certain numbers and mixtures. Too many jackelopes? They get hungry, breed less, their numbers decline, and the snow tufted marmosets bounce back. To many moustached toughs named Gus or Mugs or Stubsy chopbreaking and roughtalking and fistcudgeling the natives? The story will bog, the toughs will turn to cardboard, and if the author is an attentive and knowledgable steward, she can ween them from the landscape: a proper narrative can support and develop only so many characters. The task of the writer is to exercise a kind of landmanagement, both to encourage propagation of species and to prune the excess. The overflow can be repopulated: a new chapter, a different novel. Slaughter is not the only solution. But balance is key.
So what I have learned from this book (at least in principle) is that rather than storyboarding, one can just write, and if the writing goes well, one can work backward to build both complexity and cohesion. It is an obvious but easily forgotten fact that the public has no access to the formal origins of a work of fiction, and whether it evolve by accident or design is immaterial, provided it evolve well.
A few technical notes:
1. The book is divided into four sections, corresponding (roughly) to the four locations: new york, the burbs, the track, and back to new york. Section breaks are a nice divide: they give the reader some coordinates, a frame in which to measure position. Structurally, however, they seem to me quite pointless.
2. The voice is odd: at once brash street urchin and free wheeling flower poet. There is almost something Whitmanesque about this rough, lumbering rhythm that moves from the crude syntax of the Bronx to the lofty prolixity of pastural poetry. At the end of the story the voice is explained: Billy has gone to an Ivy League school, made good, holds now a position of some distinction. As the story of this boy's ascent, his meteoric rise through the chain of power, his first jarring collisions with love and responsability, it makes sense that the voice should reflect the full semantic range of american speech, from the very lowest classes to the very highest. The occassional excursion into poetry provides a lovely parallel to the upward movements of Billy's own consciousness. I think the fact that we accept this voice, find it odd and elegant and seductive, is one of Doctorow's principle achievements in this book.
3. Sex is deftly stiched in--the quickies on the rootop, the scene where Drew dresses while Billy watches, the odd cock in hand of the cuckholded husband, the romp in the swamp. Doctorow doesn't dwell on sex, but in the book, as in life, it is always there, forming and defining the flow of action. I like the range of language Doctorow uses: from crude statements of fact (the rooffucks, the whorehouse) to a restrained syntax that just flutters on the cusp of strong feeling.
4. The violence is at once explicit and distant. An interesting trick: many of the more greusome acts (e.g. the braining of the firemarshall) are described without judgement. Billy observes how these acts are viewed by other men, but he himself makes no pronouncement. This restraint is logical: a precondition of Billy's apprenticeship is the total submission to the ethos of the circle, and he needs to observe people's reactions to understand this ethos. But though Billy plays the game well, one of the great movements in the book is how he begins to develop his own moral standard. Though he feels bad about the killing of Bo and the fire marshall, he consents to the logic of their deaths, he becomes complicit. But later, he takes it upon himself to risk his own life in saving Drew from the lethal hand of Lulu, and at the very end he takes responsability for a child and his mother and his life as a respectable citizen. It is this honest, naive, emperical sense of ethics that ultimately exposes the bankruptcy of Dutch Schulz' twisted moral scheme.
5. Numbers myths are propogated shamelessly. Berman, the genius accountant, with his puzzles, his predictions, his odds: lovely way to fuse mysticality with the gritty calculus of the street.
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