Category: Books

I’ve been listening to David Sedaris’ new book, Theft by Finding, a collection of journal entries beginning in the late 70s. We are roughly contemporaries, and Sedaris’ early adulthood resonated with me for its itinerancy, lack of direction, experience living in urban locales, and variety of odd jobs. It differed insofar as Sedaris, butterfly-like, emerged from his cocoon of indecision and chose a direction, polishing his writing early on. We are of course, different in many other ways as well. Sedaris came out as gay, was a heavy drug user (or claimed to be), and was, and is, of course, extremely funny. I am only occasionally funny.

Sedaris is a model of how one can write about literally anything and make it entertaining. He talked early on about his choice of subject matter, saying he would resort to the weather if no other topics presented themselves, but his writing is amazingly fecund, and it didn’t seem that he ever lacked for subject matter, and certainly never had to resort to meteorological events as a last resort. While all of Sedaris’ writing posits him as primarily an observer in the world, it is not rich in introspection; the majority of the writing, then as now, involves Sedaris’ reactions to other people, a cast of characters with some permanent players: i.e., his mother and father, sisters Lisa, Tiffany, Amy, brother Paul, and, later, his boyfriend Hugh; and the constantly shifting array of new faces that pop up for short-term guest appearances. I often wondered whether people actually said the things that Sedaris quoted them as saying; so many of the quotes seemed impossibly droll, or maybe it was Sedaris’ delivery (at the forefront on audiobook) that made them seem so.

Given the mundaneness of so many of Sedaris’ topics, I wondered why they were so humorous. I arrived at the following reasons:

• Concision – Sedaris’ writing is incredibly economical, and all of it goes toward the main idea.
• Creation of a unique world – Reading the writer’s world, one is sucked into a world view that informs all aspects of the writing. But it is not the predictable world of the middle-aged gay man. While the preoccupations are not uncharacteristic of such a person, in their details they are uniquely Sedarian.
• Lack of hyperbole – While the writing can be screamingly funny, nothing about it cries for attention. In fact, Sedaris seems to work hard at tamping down the antic, instead aiming for an understated effect, that amuses through surprise.
• Observation – Sedaris’ gift for observation is second to none. Having apparently spent large swaths of his life alone, or at least in some sense aloof from close contact with others, Sedaris has perfected the role of observer, capturing every tic and accent of his players, and recording them in his notebooks.
• Freedom from need – Sedaris writes from a position of almost complete emotional autonomy. This perfectly complements his observational skills, which are generally only used in the service of accuracy, not as vehicles for longing. The subject qua subject is the thing, not the ways in which it benefits or moves him. If the latter does occur, there is yet another layer of ironic distancing involved.

In the way it reveals a less than organic structure, Philip Roth’s early novel has some of the marks of a formative effort, but it is all in all, as James Atlas proclaims on the cover of my Vintage paperback edition, “A first novel of awesome maturity.”

In youth I’ve shared the following feelings expressed by Roth’s Gabe Wallach (and the mention of Holland as described in children’s books reminds me of the passage I read every December in our family’s red-backed anthology of Christmas writing):

 
At seven-thirty the next morning, the alarm sang out one stiff brassy note. Beyond my frosted window, it was a lithographer’s dream of winter; such Decembers they have in the Holland of children’s books. The snow covered the ground, and the sun the snow. With a happiness so intense that I saw no reason to question it, I rose from my blankets. Just living, sheer delightful breathing, had, in earlier periods of my life, convinced me that a man, like a dog, is most himself wagging his tail. … Four inches of snow, and life had changed back to what it once had been, what it should be forever. (p. 230)
 

 
But Roth is a realist. A few paragraphs later, humbled by a mis-dialed phone number (meant to show that, while he thinks of Martha, he longs for Libby), he provides the coda:

 
The moral: Don’t be fooled by the weather. Beneath the lovely exteriors, life beats on. (p. 231)
 

Just finished book two of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s seemingly endless autobiography. I do feel, as one reviewer said, that “even when I’m bored, I’m interested.” There is something about the confessional nature of the books, and about following Knausgaard’s restless and intelligent mind, even into the trivial details of life, that is interesting and addictive. On to book three.

William Maxwell’s remembrance of childhood and of an episode of violence whose effects rippled into his old age is a book too evocative and too tender even to produce tears. One hundred years ago in this country is, we come to realize, much longer ago than it sounds. This is a time foreign to us now, but still in our bones, an almost ghostly past, fey, yet firmly rooted in the well-chosen details of the text. Were things better then? Implicity, Maxwell says they were, but he does not write to produce nostalgia. Rather, longing, perhaps … a hopeless longing that hides behind sparse language. I remember, but cannot locate, an example describing a new childhood home, the transition into whose emptiness might stand in for what we discover moving from childhood to adulthood, or from early twentieth century to early twenty-first century America.

For the first 100 hundred pages of Jack London’s “must-read” (according to the Guardian, and seconded, implicitly, by its inclusion in Wendy Lesser’s list of 100 books to read for pleasure) novel, I could not figure out why Martin Eden has aroused such ardent support. It seemed, by turns, clumsily-written, painfully repetitious, and generally juvenile in its absorption with the budding intellectual life and Horatio Alger-like strivings of the book’s eponymous protagonist, as prompted and spurred on by his school boy obsession with Ruth, the cloistered and high-minded sister of Martin’s well-heeled friend.

But, at some subtly indefinable point, Martin’s love for Ruth comes to seem less the moonings of a credulous young man confusing something inattainable with the true source of his desires, and more the genuine story of two people falling in love. At nearly the same time, London’s writing also takes hold of the reader, and begins to show the sensitivity and complexity of a real novel, rather than the simplicity of a Harlequin romance.

Feeling that we are in the hands of a capable writer, it is easier now to drop our cynicism about the naivete of these two young lovers, and to feel genuinely moved when, two pages on from the above discription, they, for the first time, kiss.

Coincidentally, my three most recent reads (Lady, by Thomas Tryon; The Children of Dynmouth, by William Trevor; and The Mountain Lion, by Jean Stafford) have all featured youthful protagonists, described by three authors who, each in a unique way, attempt to recapture something of the simplicity of that time of life. In the course of this reading, I’ve naturally found myself hearkening back to my own youth and, in the process, trying to understand the feeling of nostalgia that inevitably accompanies such an exercise.

The trope of longing is prominent in Lady, a bildungsroman that traces Woody’s development from boy to man, with the eponymous Lady as his guide and touchstone all along the path to adulthood. As Woody enters adulthood, we feely keenly his internal stress at forging new life, with a wife and children, as he also quietly mourns the loss of what is past, and of those who inhabited that lost world. Lady is not only a real character, Woody’s ‘boom companion,’ but, in the symbolic capacity indicated by her capitalized and anonymous appellation, a figure for the knowledge that complicates our relationship with the world as we grow to maturity, inevitably causing us to view our earlier years as somehow more pristine and desirable.

Knowledge may sully the apparent perfection of our earliest ideals, in the same way that Woody’s growing awareness of Lady’s past troubles him. But, Tryon seems to be saying, greater knowledge should not lead to cynicism about the past; nostalgia is a legitimate sensation rather than a sign of vapid sentimentality, a window into a privileged condition that cannot be contaminated by subsequent events, but to which we cannot return.

Wisely aware of this Keatsian dilemma, Lady gives Woody a book, A Shropshire Lad, and points him to the fortieth poem in Housman’s volume. The older, nostalgic Woody, the writer, can finally appreciate the land, the past, as things of ‘lost content’ rather than ‘discontent.’

 
‘Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.’

Together we looked down along the valley, our eyes tracing the ‘happy highways’ where each of us, of different
generations, had grown up, the valley which was the land, not of my lost content, for I was too young to know that
then, but what seemed like the land of my discontent, and I was more eager than ever to leave it ….

[Lady, Dell paperback edition, p. 271]
 

 
William Trevor’s odd, slight novel, The Children of Dynmouth, provides an antidote for nostalgia. The bizarre antics of Timothy Gedge remind the reader of the awkwardness of adolescence; Gedge, adrift in a lonely life not of his own design, is yet too young for the adulthood with which he tries to connect but, sensing a future of seemingly inevitable bleakness, mocks himself and the grownups around him by constantly creating some parodic version of an adult self.

And, in The Mountain Lion, we encounter Ralph and Molly, two children who follow divergent paths into young adulthood: Ralph, by moving to live with his uncle in Colorado, escapes the stultifying life in Covina, CA, a “fat” life of disingenuous superficiality, to live with his Uncle Claude and sample a freer, wilder existence. In the process he gains skills that reinforce his sense of himself as a man. For Molly, the move to Colorado, while preferable to remaining in Covina, brings with it fears and neuroses that threaten her sanity. Perhaps foremost among Molly’s anxieties is a developing fear of sexuality, brought to the fore by a random remark from Ralph, which clouds and complicates their relationship. Not since Quention Compson’s relationship with his sister Caddie in The Sound and the Fury has there been a brother-sister dynamic in literature so fraught with guilt, fear, and complex emotions.

Ultimately, it seems as though Molly and Ralph leapfrog into adulthood. For Molly in particular, the post-Edenic vision comes quickly and harshly. There is no place for nostalgia in Stafford’s world.

Claire Messud’s 2013 novel, The Woman Upstairs, about a lonely middle-aged schoolteacher who becomes obsessed with the family of one of her students, is a compelling but puzzling read. The story itself is straightforward, presenting Nora Eldridge’s first-person account of her hum-drum existence teaching third grade in a Boston suburb, frustrated by goals unrealized, in her life, art and interpersonal relations, and enraged by what she perceives as American society’s marginalization of her kind: the unexceptional woman trained since birth to be “nice.”

Into Nora’s predictable existence comes the Shahid family, first in the person of her third grade student, Reza, then in Sirena, his mother, the beautiful artist, and, finally in Skandar, Sirena’s husband. Each member of the family bewitches Nora in some way and, by circumstance all are drawn closer to her. The book’s arc, however, traces the sad unwinding of her intimacy with the family. Ultimately, Nora feels the painful results of having invested herself too fully in her connection with the Shahids; she feels the sting of a final betrayal more keenly because she has, in different ways, given herself over to each member of the family, but particularly to Sirena, a proxy for the bolder, more cosmopolitan, more successful self Nora has never realized.

As readers we struggle to understand Messud’s view of Nora and, in turn, how to see the heroine ourselves. We know, if only from Messud’s biography, that this is fiction, not memoir. Yet there are few signs of separation between creator and creation. In this first-person narration, we have only Nora’s words, which are clean, often self-lacerating, and, for most of the book, convincing. She has few deficiencies which allow us to identify a gap between her intelligence and that of the author; the latter seems complicit in forgiving her unrelenting focus on the Shahids, granting her the excuse of love which, while always teetering on the edge of mania, for the most part feels warm and genuine.

Nora is such an acute observer of her own life that she catches and describes her weaknesses, wayward moods, self-deceptions, and unrealistic hopes even before we readers can mock her obsession or criticize her choices. For the most part, her story is taut, gripping, well-structured. There is no rambling, no ravings of a madwoman in the attic. Only toward the book’s end, do we begin to tire of her, begin to feel that her hopes are unrealistic, her Shahid-centered life a true madness. But, then, the climax is so devastating, and her response to it so reasonable, under the circumstances, that we find ourselves again at one with her, allied against her betrayer.

One conclusion we may reach, then, is that Messud’s Nora, like Updike’s Rabbit, in some sense the projection of a parallel self, an identity unrealized in the world, but alive in the mind, nurtured inwardly, until it flowers in fiction.

Upon reading further into AHoNF, it became clear to me that the early chapters, involving scene-setting and character-introducing, represent a weaker aspect of Howells’ craft. These chapters feel wooden and perfunctory because they were written only out of necessity. Once the plot structure has been established, and the players trotted out, Howells can proceed with the substance of his work, that which truly moves him, which is the questioning of the American capitalist ideal. That Dryfoos pere is so well-rendered in the scene when he and March first meet shows that Howells is certainly capable of creating realistic dialogue and three-dimensional characters, as long as it is in the service of his ideas;  as much as he seems to fancy himself a novelist of manners, Howells is occasionally guilty of allowing the struts of his underlying philosophy to poke through the overlaying artifice of real life he has constructed, making him seem more political didact than novelist.
Clearly, March is the mouthpiece for Howells. Speaking of the elder Dryfoos,

 
‘he has sharpened, but he has narrowed; his sagacity has turned into suspicion, his caution to meanness, his courage to ferocity. That’s the way I phlosophize a man of Dryfoos’s experience, and I am not very proud when I realize that such a man and his experience are the ideal and ambition of most Americans. I rather think they came pretty near being mine, once.’

[Modern Library Classics edition, pp. 224-225]
 

There is something raw in William Dean Howells’ novel of 19th century New York City life, the feel of a work handbuilt out of new materials. Perhaps the reader is observing the American novel of manners under construction. It’s not an entirely unpleasant experience, but one feels often the tentative character of the writing, the striving toward something that will be worthy of its European predecessors, yet will stand stoutly, independently, as a representative work for the developing land of America.

Most enjoyably, one feels the fresh air blown in with writing that is developing along with the yet new country of Howells’ day. Less enjoyably, one winces at the mannered naivete, the struggle to create a work of proportion and substance, and the author’s discomfort with a society whose culture is perhaps not yet worthy of the “high sentence” he wants to accord it.

Perhaps not surprisingly then, it is the social interactions among Howells’ characters that feel most stilted. While a competent painter of his characters’ interior lives, he often falls short of the mark when trying to create believable dialogue. See, for example, this interchange between Miss Vance and the painter Beaton, as they discuss newcomers to New York City:

 
‘Oh yes,’ said Miss Vance, fashionably, and looked down; then she looked up and said, intellectually: ‘Don’t you think it’s a great pity? How much better for them to have staid where they were and what they were!’
‘Then you could never have had any chance of meeting them,’ said Beaton. ‘I don’t suppose you intend to go out to the gas country?’
‘No,’ said Miss Vance, amused. ‘Not that I shouldn’t like to go.’
‘What a daring spirit! You ought to be on the staff of Every Other Week,’ said Beaton.

[A Hazard of New Fortunes, Modern Library Classic edition, p. 177]
 

 
Such dialogue, not only woodenly uninspired but unbelievable, is common in AHoNF; this excerpt also demonstrates a lack of finish which is often found in Howells’ writing: who knows after all, what it means to speak either “fashionably” or “intellectually,” or, for that matter, what it would contribute to our appreciation of this interaction between Miss Vance and Beaton if we did know.

Toward the end of Flaubert’s uneven but compelling work, we come around at last to that comfortable and well-worn theme, the consolations of age and experience. The older Frederic is somewhat more comfortable with himself, and marginally more attractive to the reader. After a lifetime of being motivated by the wrong sorts of things—money and vanity—Frederic finds that it is, at last, too late to achieve what he wanted, and in that takes a strange kind of relief, making some peace with his conflicted motives.

In the final pages, he and lifelong friend Deslauriers  try to face themselves squarely. “They had both failed, one to realize his dreams of love, the other to fulfill his dreams of power.” (Penguin Classic Edition, p.458).

Frederic, the lover, spent a lifetime pining for Mme. Arnoux, but “‘didn’t steer a straight course,'” as he himself says, always taking the opportunity to devalue the importance of love in favor of some more trivial, short-term aim, tangling himself in relationships with women who flattered and soothed his insecure nature.

The poignancy of his loss is captured in the book’s penultimate chapter, when he and Mme. Arnoux meet for the last time, and we see what is perhaps Flaubert’s central theme in the novel: character is destiny and, character does not, really, ever change.

In this final encounter, with nothing to lose, Frederic, as always, evades the reality of the moment, inwardly put off  by the fading of Arnoux’s physical beauty while outwardly singing her praises yet again. “Frederic, drunk with his own eloquence, began to believe what he was saying.” (p. 454). This is Frederic’s default mode, the sentiment of the book’s title, a self-love that mistakes itself for deep feeling.

Frederic, certainly narcissistic and self-deluding to the end, is perhaps redeemed a bit by a kind of Keatsian obsession with an untarnished ideal that has always been at odds with his “frenzied, rabid lust.” (p. 455). That final meeting does not feel like a love scene, but Frederic conjures up a passionate scene in his mind and tosses the fantasy away, all in an instant, repeating the pattern of his life up until the end. He is restrained by “the fear of being disgusted later. Besides, what a nuisance it would be!” Ah, this is the essential Frederic, precursor to Eliot’s Prufrock (“Would it have been worth it after all”), building his lifetime of regrets up until the very last.

 
And, partly out of prudence, and partly to avoid degrading his ideal, he turned on his heel and started rolling a cigarette.
She gazed at him admiringly.
‘How considerate you are! There’s nobody like you! There’s nobody like you!’ (p. 455)
 

 
Indeed!