Walter – Beautiful Ruins

Posted on by January 24, 2014
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Beautiful RuinsRuins, Anyway

Walter, Jess (2012). Beautiful Ruins. New York: Harper-Collins

The first five pages of this book contain ecstatic reviews from major newspapers and published authors. I have to wonder how Harper-Collins managed that for an undistinguished novel like this.

In the words of the story’s villain, steepling his fingers in a Hollywood movie pitch meeting, “It’s a love story.” In a tiny fishing village in western Italy in the early 1960’s, the proprietor of the only hotel is astonished when a beautiful American movie star arrives to recover from an illness, and to wait for her man to rescue her. The hotel owner and the movie star have some tender moments as they struggle with each other’s language.

Cut to modern Hollywood, where a has-been producer is desperate for a hit movie, and his assistant, a recent graduate from UCLA film studies, despairs over the dreck scripts she reads.  In his glory days, the producer was in charge of the 1963 film, Cleopatra, which starred, besides Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, a minor character played by the actress who left the film to recover in the Italian fishing village.

Cut again, to the drug-and-alcohol-fueled ambition of a young singer-songwriter who travels to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, meets some girls, flames out, and is stranded penniless. He calls his girlfriend in the US for help, but she rebuffs him and tells him his mother is dying. And who is his mother? None other than the movie star who had been recuperating in the Italian fishing village, only now it is 40 years later.

Cut again, to the naïve ambitions of an earnest young screenwriter who pitches his movie idea to the producer’s assistant we met earlier. We are given the full text of his treatment (the pitch), which is an utterly dreadful a re-hash of the Donner Party cannibalism story. As the evil producer says, “It gives shit a bad name.” However, he options it, with a strategy taken straight from Mel Brooks’, The Producers.

Cut again. We’re back in 1962 and Richard Burton appears in Italy, blustery and drunk, searching for the recuperating actress. Alas, she has fled, possibly to Switzerland.

Cut again, to a failed American novelist… wait. Never mind; who cares? At some point, one’s brain is simply exhausted by all the time cutting, changes of scenery and huge cast of characters, which must be what it’s like to make a major movie like Cleopatra.

The last chapter of the book is a long epilogue in which all the characters are listed and the narrator simply tells what happened to them, in straight, uncreative exposition. It’s a strange way to end a novel but suggestive of the end-credits in a movie.

On the plus side, there is a wonderful sense of place in the tiny Italian fishing village. That was perfection. The love story? Its details are coyly held back from the reader until the penultimate chapter, where a murky denoument leaves the outcome ambiguous.

There was one good almost-idea, with the horrible Donner Party script as a metaphor for the evil producer’s life story, but that idea was only suggested and didn’t pan out. The satire of narcissistic Hollywood egomaniacs is old shtick. Drug-crazed singers? Been done. Richard Burton was a drunk? Who knew?  The message? Maybe, as the title suggests, that even lives passionately lived end badly.

The writing throughout is straightforward, not bad but not interesting either. There are some moments of wry humor when connotations are lost in multilingual conversations. The scenery is great in the early part of the book, but the last 100 pages just fall apart, making the title apt.

Lethem – Motherless Brooklyn

Posted on by January 24, 2014
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Lethem Motherless BrooklynAmateur Detective with Tourette’s

Lethem, Jonathan (1999). Motherless Brooklyn. New York: Random/Doubleday.

The “Motherless” of the title is a group of four teenage boys living in an orphanage in 1979 Brooklyn. They are hired out for odd jobs of questionable legality by Frank Minna, a local small-time thug and mobster wannabe. The first-person narrative is given by one of the boys, Lionel Essrog, a fifteen year-old who has Tourette’s syndrome, a neurological disorder characterized by outbursts of verbal free-associations and rhymes.

Frank gets killed and the rest of the book is Lionel’s story of searching for the murderer.  So it is nominally an amateur detective tale, but as such it is extremely weak. Instead, the novel should be read as a completely original character study and as a virtuosic display of literary writing talent.  Here are some samples:

[Frank’s mother,] Carlotta Minna was … a cook who worked in her own apartment, making plates of sautéed squid and stuffed peppers and jars of tripe soup that were purchased at her door by a constant parade of buyers… When we were in her presence Minna bubbled himself, with talk, all directed at his mother, banking cheery insults off anyone else in the apartment, delivery boys, customers, strangers (if there was such a thing to Minna then), tasting everything she had cooking and making suggestions on every dish, poking and pinching every raw ingredient or ball of unfinished dough and also his mother herself, her earlobes and chin, wiping flour off her dark arms with his open hand. …Carlotta hovered over us as we devoured her meatballs, running her floury fingers of the backs of our chairs, then gently touching our heads, the napes of our necks. We pretended not to notice, ashamed in front of one another and ourselves to show that we drank in her nurturance as eagerly as her meat sauce (pp. 70-71).

“Want one?” he said, holding out the bag. His voice was a dull thing where it began in his throat but it resonated to grandeur in the tremendous instrument of his torso, like a mediocre singer on the stage of a superb concert hall.
“No, thanks,” I said…
“So what’s the matter with you?” he said, discarding another of the withered kumquats.
“I’ve got Tourette’s,” I said.
“Yeah, well, threats don’t work with me.”
“Tourette’s,” I said…
He shoved me again, straight-armed my shoulder, and when I tried, ticcishly to shove his shoulder in return I found I was held at too great a distance…and it conjured some old memory of Sylvester the Cat in a boxing ring with a kangaroo. My brain whispered, He’s just a big mouse, Daddy, a vigorous louse, big as a house, a couch, a man, a plan, a canal, apocalypse. 
“Apocamous,” I mumbled, language spilling out of me unrestrained.  “Unplan-a-canal. Unpluggaphone.” (pp. 203-205).

Lionel’s verbal tics are creative and often funny, designed by Lethem with poetic rhythm and sonority. This keeps the recurring gag from getting stale as the novel wears on. Also, as the example shows. Lethem gives us access to Lionel’s thought processes so when he utters his verbal outbursts, we understand, as other characters in the story cannot, meaning the outbursts might have. I confess that after the first half of the book, the Tourette’s gimmick began to wear pretty thin for me. However, the quality of the writing remained very high, excellent narrative descriptions, snappy dialog, and interesting, quirky characters and settings. So even though the book is not entirely successful as a detective story, and not consistently funny as a humorous tale, the writing is so good the book carries you to the end.

Woolf – Orlando

Posted on by January 24, 2014
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orlandoLife is Poetry; Poetry is Life

Woolf, Virginia (1928). Orlando. Orlando, FL: Harcourt

This is one of Woolf’s most popular novels, partly because of its fascinating story. A young English boy (Orlando) loves poetry and adventure. The dying Queen Elizabeth (around 1600), takes a fancy to him and makes him a nobleman with a vast estate and a grand house. He grows up much pursued by the ladies. Eventually his career includes being ambassador to Turkey. There, he falls into a trance and awakes a woman. Just like that. No explanation.

There are clues prior to this point that Woolf was experimenting with magical realism, long before that term or that genre had been invented, but this moment, one third of the way into the book, will certainly be a surprise to the six readers on the planet who do not know it is coming.

Perhaps more surprising, the change is no big deal to Orlando. She feels the same inside, so what difference does outer appearance make? She is occasionally annoyed at having her legs restricted by petticoats, but there is no psychological upheaval. Her staff back home accepts the change. There are some legal problems, because women cannot own property and she has to fight that. But in general, life goes on. She meets people, has lovers, admires the flowers, and grows older, until the reader notices that it is the middle of the 1700’s. Orlando has aged perhaps 10 years while 150 years of history have gone by. But nothing has really changed for the ultra-wealthy Orlando, relatively isolated on her estate. She still goes to dinners and buys furnishings for the mansion. She has lovers, marries, and eventually has a male child who can inherit the estate, solving her legal problems.

She becomes a published poet in the 1800’s but gets bored with society and with love. We eventually see her going to a London department store in 1928, marveling at the horseless carriage. Over 300 years have passed. She despairs at the meaningless of life and the story ends. Just like that.

Some readers dislike the novel because despite the exciting premises of gender change and time travel, basically, “nothing happens,” and that’s because this is literary fiction, where what happens is never “what happens.” The purpose of the novel is to explore the meaning of gender and the experience of psychological time.

I found the gender theme disappointing. It was radical in 1928 to say that gender is an arbitrary social construction, not biologically determined, of no importance to the self. Woolf was saying also that there is no innate psychological difference between men and women. Love is about self and psychology, intuition and conversation, not about biology. Consequently, in the novel, Orlando has romantic relations with both men and women (as Woolf herself did). Today, most educated people agree that gender is socially constructed, but unless you are an ultra-wealthy, socially isolated aristocrat like Orlando, gender has very significant social and economic life consequences. In the novel, Orlando’s pregnancy and childbirth are barely mentioned in passing. Clothing is far more consequential than biology. It’s an interesting point, especially in 1928, but I didn’t buy it.

I found the time-travel theme equally frustrating. Woolf’s point is that psychological time is defined by the intellectual life you live, not by the clock or calendar. If you live in the world of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Milton, as Orlando did, and as Woolf herself did, then psychologically, you live in the Elizabethan age. Such is the power of poetry. If you also love Browning and Tennyson, you live in the Victorian age. If you live in 1928 and your autobiographical memories are those implanted by the poets and novelists of the past 300 years, then psychologically, you can say you have lived 300 years. It’s an interesting and true thesis, but like the gender identification thesis, it’s too one-dimensional to be compelling. Orlando in 1928 is dumfounded by the elevator, because in her life experience you always knew how things worked, but the elevator appeared to be magic. Well, that’s an interesting observation, but a lot of other things happened between 1600 and 1928, not all of them technological. Not even denting Orlando’s consciousness were the English civil war, many other wars and plagues, the great fire of London, the rise of scientific thinking after the Renaissance, the works of Newton, Locke, Bacon, Hume, DeFoe, Fielding, Walpole, Coleridge; and many other historical events. So the self-equals-memory thesis only works if you live in a cocoon.

The narration in Orlando is innovative in several ways. The book is presented as a biography, so the narrator is ostensibly “a historian,” as she calls herself, yet the narrator is also third-person-close, meaning, she can get right inside the thoughts of Orlando in an almost first-person way. Woolf plays with this technique creatively, abruptly changing the voice from intimacy to the objective reporting of a biographer, and sometimes even spills into a second-person voice speaking directly to the reader. The tone of the novel is light-hearted, and often sardonically funny, as if Woolf were just letting off some literary steam with a romp into what we would today call prose poetry. I’m no Woolf scholar but I think the book is significantly an autobiography, not a mock biography, and Woolf took the project seriously. Despite my overall disappointment with the ideas and insights presented, the novel is a paean to the power of human imagination and there is plenty of literary grist in Orlando to keep any reader completely engaged.

Zahavi – Subjectivity and Selfhood

Posted on by January 24, 2014
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Subjectivity and SelfhoodAdams, W. A. (2006). Is There A Knife That Can Cut Itself?  [Review of the book, Subjectivity and Selfhood]. PsycCRITIQUES- Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, September 20, 2006 Vol. 51 (38), Article 18.  Retrieved September 20, 2006 from the PsycCRITIQUES database (http://www.psycinfo.com/psyccritiques/).

This is one of the most exciting books I’ve read in a long time.  Philosopher Dan Zahavi takes a first-person, phenomenological approach to some questions that are dizzying to consider.  What is subjectivity?  Why are we self-aware?  What is the self?  How do we read each other’s minds?  Zahavi is a specialist in translating and explaining the works of Edmund Husserl, the founding father of phenomenology, and his arguments rely on Husserl’s writings.  The journey is a fantastic head trip and the destination actually has some practical considerations for personality theory, clinical and abnormal psychology, and consciousness studies. And the answer is yes: subjectivity is a knife that can cut itself.

Full Text of the Review: Review of Zahavis knife
(use the back arrow on your browser to return here after reading the full text).

Phillips – The Egyptologist

Posted on by January 24, 2014
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Egyptologist-PhillipsHidden Story of A Hidden Tomb

Phillips, Arthur (2004). The Egyptologist. New York: Random.

The epistolary novel is a difficult form, because written language uses a different diction from conversation, and is inherently less alive than real-time dialog and narration. Since a novel is already a written document, an epistolary novel that presents characters’ journals and letters is doubly dead, in the sense that it is a document about documents. But maybe that is a good format for a story of long-buried Egyptian kings.

Phillips presents the journals, letters, maps, drawings, and other papers of a 1920’s British explorer in Egypt, an ex-Harvard academic who hopes to discover vast treasure by finding the tomb of a little-known thirteenth dynasty king called Atum-hadu. Few other academics believe such a king existed, but Trilipush, the explorer, manages to raise funds from a Boston businessman to finance the expedition.  He is also engaged to marry the businessman’s daughter, despite her chronic “sickness,” which we eventually discover is a heroin addiction.

A second, parallel story, is told through the long, rambling letters of a retired Australian detective, Ferrell, written in 1957.  He tells of his decades-earlier investigation of a missing Australian orphan which brought him into contact with Trilipush, his rivals, and fiancé.  He reports that he uncovered at least two, possibly four murders in that context.

Neither story is very interesting in itself, because the epistolary form puts so much emotional distance between the readers and the characters, and renders the narration into the kind of telegraphic diction and limited information that documents have. But the parallel to discerning the meanings of obscure hieroglyphics on ancient tombs is obvious.  However, Phillips skillfully lets the reader discover that both Trilipush and Ferrell are self-deceived, unreliable narrators and that’s where the fun comes in.

Trilipush’s pompous,  self-serving comments eventually make us doubt his academic competence, character, and even identity.  One of the best passages is a series of translations of the Atum-hadu’s so-called erotic poetry.  Other scholars, who Trilipush derides, translate a sequence thus:

A beauty’s gaze and touch
Can rain down joy or sorrow
In equal measure

But “Pushy” is convinced those hieroglyphs should be translated as:

Atum-badu’s sweet lover
Strokes the royal member first with her eyes
Then with her claws, until they tear
And make bleed the rigid scepter of his power; and he sighs

The discrepancy is subtly hilarious, and reveals the extent of Trilipush’s narrow-minded obsession with a king who wrote “erotic” verse, because that’s a better story for fund-raising purposes.

Similarly, it becomes apparent from his letters that detective Ferrell thinks he is Sherlock Holmes and has his own wild ideas about all the characters involved.  The two narrators are distinct in voice and personality, and we can wonder if the ancient pharaohs were as petty beneath their grand hieroglyphics as our story characters are beneath their papers.

I found the book slow going, in part because the epistolary format is as dry as Egyptian sands. There is so little dramatic tension that I did not care enough. But I did admire Phillips’ skill. The characters are well-imagined and there is a pretty good sense of time and place for each story, and the story beneath the story is brilliant. The flaw is that once we realize both narrators are self-serving baboons, we’re not interested in their documents any further. That dynamic undercuts the project.  Still, it gets high points for creativity.

Broadie – The Scottish Enlightenment

Posted on by January 24, 2014
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Scottish Enlightenment-BroadieAlmost Tricked by David Hume

Broadie, Alexander (2001/2007). The Scottish Enlightenment. Edinburgh: Berlinn Limited.

The importance of the European Enlightenment, from 1500 to 1800, can hardly be overestimated in Western history. During that period, there was a sea-change in thinking among intellectuals, away from the authority of the Christian church, to independent thinking based on reason and observation. The Enlightenment promised that living by reason, rather than authority, would improve human welfare, reform society and government, guarantee human rights, advance knowledge, reduce the need for war, and much else. Those promises have been kept to a significant degree, and today, evidence-based reasoning, in large part, defines “the modern mind.”

When I think of the Enlightenment, I think of the so-called “French” Enlightenment, and figures such as Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, Descartes, Rousseau, Laplace, and many others. The Enlightenment was a comprehensive intellectual change, but in France, the emphasis was strongly anti-government and anti-church and maybe that’s why the whole movement is often referred to as the French Enlightenment.

Scotland participated in the overall European Enlightenment, contributing its own great thinkers, such as David Hume and Adam Smith. But according to author Broadie, there was a distinctive difference in Enlightenment thinking in Scotland, distinct enough be labeled “The Scottish Enlightenment.” He attempts in this book to explain what it means and how it arose.

The distinct characteristic of Scottish thinking at the time arose almost entirely from the mind of philosopher David Hume, supported by economist Adam Smith (“The Wealth of Nations”), and moral philosopher Adam Ferguson. Hume famously wrote, in his Treatise of Human Nature, “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them”

That contradicts the spirit of the French Enlightenment, which held that reason is necessary to tame the passions. Elevation of reason was the essence of the French Enlightenment. Yet here was Hume saying that reason can only serve the passions.

Hume argued that reason is just a tool of thinking and can never determine values. People can argue that the crops failed because of changed weather patterns, or because of God’s punishment. The basic assumptions of right and wrong, good and evil, virtue and vice, depend on human passions, not on reason. Reason can only be used to argue what is already believed through the passions.

That seems right at first, and does seem to contradict the French Enlightenment, a situation which caused me some concern. But after studying Broadie’s book, I can reject Hume’s idea. I will now use reason to explain why Hume was wrong and my passion is justified and correct. (Hume was a tricky guy!).

I spent over a decade browbeating college students about the benefits of using evidence-based reasoning, for their own good and for the good of humankind. I taught critical thinking, and the so-called “scientific method,” its gold standard; and I taught basic statistics, a wonderful abstraction of logical thinking and evidence-based reasoning. But after re-reading some Hume, it occurred to me that perhaps everything I was teaching was a lie! I turned to Broadie’s book for context. It helped me recover from my panic, and now I’m good again.

I think Hume’s error was his failure to discriminate between the context of discourse, and reasoning in general.  It’s true that passionate reactions are instinctive, emotional, pre-conceptual and pre-logical. Reason plays little or no part in formation of our passions.

But when you conceptualize an idea for communication, reason and evidence are the most persuasive forms of rhetoric, and can change minds. It’s true, as Hume said, that reasoned arguments are formulated after the fact, to justify beliefs we already hold, but what he failed to note was that those reasoned arguments can be persuasive, causing a listener to change his or her beliefs. If that were not so, there would be no point in science, or even education, because nobody would ever budge from their initial biases. As it is though, many people are persuaded by evidence-based reasoning and can, and do modify their initial passionate beliefs because of it. Hume was therefore incorrect in saying that reason is only a slave to passion. It has another role, persuasion.

There is an important qualification: Reasoned argument is only persuasive to others within a community that already accepts certain fundamental biases (“passions”), such as the validity of logic, the value of observation, the usefulness of of analysis, belief that perception is generally veridical, faith in elementalism, individualism, particularism, materialism, consensus, and many other basic values.  In other words, reasoned argument only works within a community of similarly socialized people. But in that context of discourse, higher-level passions, about government and education, for example, can be moderated.

Within an appropriate community, like a scientific community, a religious group, or a college classroom, reason can overcome overt passions, just as proponents of the French Enlightenment claimed. Minds can be changed; agreements can be reached. That is the whole point of valuing reason so highly. Reason is persuasive and highly effective in the right context. So I was not teaching my students lies, I simply was not giving them the full picture.

After reading Broadie’s book and giving it much thought, I am persuaded that the main themes of the Scottish Enlightenment were a unique contribution to European history, but perhaps not the direct challenge to the rest of the Enlightenment they are sometimes made out to be.  Broadie’s excellent book had enough depth and breadth of facts and reasoning to let me come to a reasoned conclusion.

Russ – The Female Man

Posted on by January 24, 2014
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Female ManA Kaleidoscope of Early Feminism

Russ, Joanna. (1975). The Female Man. Boston: Beacon.

Four women live in different worlds, and each world has a different definition of what it means to be a woman. Through some fantasy magic, they are able to visit each other’s worlds to see how women live and are treated there. This is the author’s technique for encouraging the reader to question the status quo on Earth (in 1975). The theme of the novel is ardently feminist, often angry, sometimes plaintive.

Joanna lives on Earth in the 1970’s, just when the women’s movement was erupting into mass media and popular awareness. In her world, men still attempt to exploit women, especially sexually, while women are becoming aware of the gender-based social games that presuppose women’s inferiority and vulnerability. Some of these games are revealed to us when Joanna invites Janet to a party.

Janet is from the distant future where there are no men. All the men died of a plague 800 years ago. Women reproduce by genetic engineering and live in a cooperative, technologically advanced, but bucolic society. Janet has no concept that women are inferior and does not understand the meaning of gender-based social games. At the party, Joanna says her friend Janet is “from Sweden” to explain her strange conversation. When a man tries to crudely seduce Janet, she decks him. Joanna hustles Janet out of the room. It’s one of the best chapters in the book. Janet is a bit of an anthropologist, fascinated by the 20th-century Earthlings. At her request, Joanna arranges for her to live a while with an Earth family, where she makes a big impression on the teenage daughter, leading to a sexual relationship that is taboo for both cultures.

In another episode of time-traveling, Janet pops into the world of Jeanine, a woman who lives in a place just like Earth during the Great Depression, except that the Depression never ended and the relative poverty and conservative values of that era persisted for generations. Jeanine isn’t the least bit “liberated” and all she wants is to find a man and get married. Trouble is, all the men she knows treat her badly. She has a sexual relationship with her boyfriend, Cal, but it is not satisfying. She hopes for Prince Charming. Janet is “discovered” by the media in Jeanine’s world, put on television and studied by scientists, who want to know what her world is like. They are incredulous that a society could get along without men. But there isn’t much on how Janet’s arrival specifically stirs up Jeanine’s gender role definition.

Through sci-fi magic again, Jeanine and Joanna get together and go with Janet to her home in the future world of Whileaway, where they meet Janet’s wife, but nothing very interesting happens there. Then Joanna visits Jeanine’s world with Jeanine, whose mother nags her about not being married yet. Jeanine explains that she can’t find the right man. There is little description of Joanna’s reaction to this, and no explicit dialog between the women about it.

In another episode, Janet, Jeanine, and Joanna are summoned (somehow) into the world of Jael, a world whose defining feature is that the “battle of the sexes” has been literal warfare for forty years. The women live completely apart from the men, and trade children to them in exchange for minerals and other goods. On the male side, young men are partially transgendered to satisfy older men’s sexual needs. Jael is a negotiator for the women, but also a professional assassin and in one of most coherent scenes in the book, we see her kill a man with her bare hands when he tries to sexually seduce her. Again, there is no discussion among the other three J’s about their reaction, a lost opportunity, it would seem.

Throughout the book I was frustrated by scenes, such as those described, presented without comment or evaluation, either by the narrator or by any of the the four women themselves. As a result, none of the women reacts to events in ways that reveal character, so they all remain two-dimensional placeholders. That made the book really only a collection of scenes, without a continuous narrative thread, without the characters becoming developed, and without the overarching feminist theme being articulated. I found it not only frustrating, but a tremendous lost opportunity.

On the other hand, one could argue that the whole point was the scenes themselves. They are self-explanatory, if heavy-handed: sexism is bad, gender-role freedom is good. But that’s not as engaging as discovering interesting characters. Characters usually are not interesting in the sci-fi genre, which is all about the intellectual idea, so maybe I just don’t appreciate the genre.

Also, there is the possibility that there was plenty of commentary and interpretation of the scenes by the narrator, but I just didn’t “get it.” Many of the so-called chapters struck me as utter nonsequiturs, possibly snippets dropped in from another text. The totally chaotic narration makes the book extremely difficult to read, to the point of it being literally nonsensical for the first 130 pages.  Or was that just me? This anti-novel has won many, many awards for fiction, so I should only say it was not my cup of tea.

Still, the book is consistently interesting, even when it does not apparently contribute to any story or character, such as Chapter VIII, apropos of nothing, in its entirety:

Men succeed. Women get married.
Men fail. Women get married.
Men enter monasteries. Women get married.
Men start wars. Women get married.
Men stop them. Women get married.
Dull, dull. (see below)

Walpole – The Castle of Otranto

Posted on by January 24, 2014
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Castle of OtrantoThe First Gothic Novel

Walpole, Horace (1769/2010). The Castle of Otranto. New York: Oxford World Classics.

This short book (115 pages), published in 1769, defined the Gothic novel form. It is full of murky castles, stormy weather, princes in disguise, swooning maidens, unbelievable coincidences.

It is a very bad novel by modern literary standards. The characters are stereotypes, the language is contrived and stilted, punctuation is lacking, and the third-person narrator’s shifting of point of view (“head-hopping”) makes it hard to follow who is speaking, in some places. The story is so disjointed, it is unintentionally funny at times, tending to a Monty Python sketch.  These literary flaws, by modern standards, highlight just how formal and proscriptive the modern literary form is.  In its time, the novel was immensely popular, and I’m sure nobody thought it was badly written.  The standards have changed.

Despite its literary badness, the novel is imaginative. For example, in an early scene, a huge armored helmet the size of a room appears out of nowhere and crushes the Prince’s son to death. This event is never explained. The disjointed surrealism is bizarre. This strange style raises a question: Why are so many modern novels realistically representational? Even sci-fi is expected to be plausible. What has become of the completely wild imagination creative writers are capable of?  Readers apparently demand realism, or at least, so-called “magical realism.” I wonder why the modern novel is so tame?

Walpole probably read David Hume (whose main work was published in 1740). In the first half, Walpole seems to be writing metaphorically about philosophy of mind. The giant helmet is reason (the head) and just beneath the thin floor on which the helmet lands is a labyrinth of murky underground passages (the emotions, sentiments; the unconscious 150 years before Freud?) Another strong theme is political: the arbitrary and capricious power of the state is represented by the Prince of Otranto. So despite its surface silliness, the novel does manage to present important thematic material in metaphor.

You wouldn’t read this novel today because it is a “good read.”  You’d read it to get an understanding of how much the novel form in English has changed, and to get a sense of how the “gothic” genre got its start.

Walter – Beautiful Ruins

Posted on by January 24, 2014
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Beautiful RuinsCollapsed of its Own Weight

Jess Walter (2012). Beautiful Ruins. New York: Harper-Collins

The first five pages of this book contain dozens of ecstatic reviews from major newspapers and published authors. I wonder how Harper-Collins accomplishes that for an undistinguished novel like this.

In the words of the story’s villain, steepling his fingers at his lips in a Hollywood movie pitch meeting, “It’s a love story.” There is wonderful local color in a tiny fishing village in western Italy in the early 1960’s. The proprietor of the tiny hotel is astonished when a beautiful American movie star arrives to rest while she recovers from an illness, and to wait for her man to rescue her. The hotel owner and the movie star have some tender moments as they struggle with each other’s language.

Cut to modern Hollywood, where a has-been producer is desperate for a hit movie, and his assistant, a graduate of UCLA film studies, despairs over the dreck she must read.  We eventually learn that in his glory days, the producer was in charge of the 1963 film, Cleopatra, which starred, besides Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, a minor character played by the actress who left the film to recover in the Italian fishing village.

Cut again, to the drug-and-alcohol-fueled ambition of a young singer-songwriter who travels to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, meets some girls, flames out, and is stranded penniless. He calls his girlfriend in the US for help, but she rebuffs him and tells him his mother is dying. And who is his mother? None other than the movie star who had been recuperating in the Italian fishing village, only now it is 40 years later.

Cut again, to modern times, and the naïve ambitions of an earnest young screenwriter who pitches his movie idea to the producer’s assistant we met earlier. We are given the full text of his treatment (the pitch), which is an utterly dreadful re-hash of the Donner Party cannibalism story. As the evil producer says, “It gives shit a bad name.” However, he options it, in a move taken straight from Mel Brooks’, The Producers.

Cut again. We’re back in 1962 and Richard Burton appears in Italy, blustery and drunk, searching for the recuperating actress. Alas, she has fled, possibly to Switzerland.

Cut again, to a failed American novelist… wait. Never mind; who cares? At some point, one’s brain is simply exhausted by all the time cutting, changes of scenery and huge cast of characters, which must be what it’s like to make a major movie like Cleopatra.

The last chapter of the book is a long epilog in which all the characters are listed and the narrator simply tells what happened to them, in straight, uncreative exposition. It’s a strange way to end a novel but suggestive of the end-credits in a movie.

There are few redeeming virtues in this mess of a book. One virtue is the wonderful sense of place in the tiny Italian fishing village. The love story? Its details are coyly held back from the reader until the penultimate chapter, where a murky denoument leaves the resolution ambiguous.

There was one good almost-idea, the horrible Donner Party script as a metaphor for the evil producer’s life story, but that idea was only suggested and didn’t pan out. The satire of narcissistic Hollywood egomaniacs is very old shtick. Drug-crazed singers? Been done. Richard Burton was a drunk? Who knew?  The message? Maybe, as the title suggests, that even lives passionately lived end badly.

The writing is straightforward, not bad but not interesting either. There are some moments of wry humor when connotations are lost in multilingual conversations. The scenery is great in the early part of the book, but the last 100 pages just fall apart, making the title apt.

Barbery – The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Posted on by January 24, 2014
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Elegance of the HedgehogThe Hedgehog Blog

The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Muriel Barbery. New York: Europa Editions, 2006

Two female narrators describe their lives in intermixed chapters. One is a fifty-four year old concierge at a condo for wealthy people, in contemporary Paris. The other is a twelve year-old rich girl, daughter of one of the tenants in that building. Both write in a first-person that is so intimate, it often verges on second person, addressing the reader directly. The girl’s thoughts are presented as entries into her diary, while the concierge more traditionally addresses the reader, but her entries also have a journalistic quality.

The chapters are about three pages each, some only one page, so the overall effect is like reading two online blogs, not diaries or journals. The chapters are formatted as traditional book chapters, but the reader has the sense of intimacy and fascination that one often feels reading somebody’s personal blog. “Today I gave the cat a new cat food.” “My sister is impossible!”  And so on.

The concierge’s “blog” reveals her “secret life.”  Yes, she is a humble caretaker who endures rudeness from the rich building tenants, but she is also secretly an erudite, self-taught intellectual.  She finds beauty in  Russian literature, European philosophy, Japanese film, Flemish painting, and English opera. She hides her learning and love of beauty from the world, and presents an outward persona of stooped, taciturn, gray-sweatered widow, an invisible nobody.  This is the “hedgehog” presentation that hides her underlying “elegance.”  Why does she live this way?  That mystery is revealed very slowly, and not fully until the end of the book.

The young girl is an emotionally troubled adolescent who has vowed to kill herself within a year then set fire to the building, for the usual age-appropriate reasons: because nobody understands her, her family treats her dismissively, she hates her arrogant older sister, people are so hypocritical and superficial, and life is meaningless anyway. In her blog entries, she records her attempts to find a redeeming reason to live, before the twelve months expires. At nearly the end of the book,  she makes friends with the concierge and begins to understand that there is more to life than what surface appearances reveal.

The writing is erudite but accessible, so it flatters the educated reader with its references to Edmund Husserl and Henry Purcell, without crossing the line into obscurantism. The concierge’s character of an autodidact is perfect for that technique. The language is elevated, in both blogs, with fine vocabulary and well-observed insights into French culture, the arts, and human nature. There is a bit of pretentiousness, but it is inoffensive because it comes from a self-taught concierge and an adolescent girl, so the well-educated reader can feel smug. 

There is a tiny bit of drama toward the end of the book, when a new tenant moves into the building and immediately sees through the persona of the hedgehog concierge and treats her as a person. Realizing her cover is blown, she begins to reveal herself.  But the dramatic moves at the end of the book seem contrived. They serve the literary function of causing the dénouement, but they also seem arbitrary and not convincing for these characters. But all the characters are thin, always in the background anyway, just as a blogger is hidden behind the blog and wants you to see only what has been chosen for revelation.  It raises some interesting questions about the motivations people might have for producing personal blogs. Who do they think they are addressing? What are they not revealing?

In the end, it is a “message” novel, with a plausible, if plastic moral about the meaning of life. The ending collapses into maudlin sentimentality however, and that is disappointing because it was not necessary. The message was implicit in every page prior.  How doe blogs end?  They don’t.  They are just abandoned, and that wouldn’t have worked for this literary form, so I guess some kind of an ending was needed. I have read that in France, it is common for writers of fiction to display their wares in blogs, and publishers troll these for talent, so the structure of this book also has a self-referential aspect.

Overall, it is a very pleasant, entertaining, thought-provoking, well-written book that keeps you turning the pages out of sheer voyeurism even if you are not deeply engaged.