The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath
read: circa 2008
Guardian 1000 Novels

"Franny," the short story about Franny Glass' mental breakdown that begins Franny and Zooey, brought to mind The Bell Jar, another story about the mental disintegration of a young woman who is sick of the shallow world around her.  Lane going on about the brilliance of his paper on Flaubert mirrors the superficial conversations Esther Greenwood had in New York bars while interning at Ladies' Day magazine.  A possibility both books raise is that what we think of as insanity is in fact a rational response to the meaninglessness and falseness of Life In the Real World.  It's hard not to see Sylvia Plath's suicide and J.D. Salinger's reclusion as ultimate endorsements of this mentality, and it's hard to read The Bell Jar (like Infinite Jest or Nirvana's In Utero) without seeing omens foreshadowing the artist's eventual destruction.

Franny and Zooey

Franny and Zooey
by J.D. Salinger
read: 2012

Another book for Professor Hungerford's class on the American Novel since 1945.  Like Wise Blood, it has a lot of religious themes and features a lot of unlikeable characters - the short story "Franny" that opens Franny and Zooey is painfully and deliciously cynical in its treatment of Franny's boyfriend Lane Coutell and his pomposity - but it feels closed in, almost like a play (a point Hungerford makes in her lecture).  The story is almost all dialogue, and it can be didactic at times.  Franny and Zooey don't come to any ultimate epiphanies through actually living life - they do it through the mere power of words.  Hungerford suggests this is part of the point, emphasizing that it is the shared language of the Glass family  that has the power to change minds, but it still feels a bit hollow.

That said, the message of the story is really profound: a major part of the human experience is doing one's best even when one doesn't know why.

Moby Dick

Moby Dick
by Herman Melville
read: 2011
Guardian 1000 Novels

This past weekend I drove along the Pacific Coast Highway with my wife and her parents.  We stopped at the beach at Half Moon Bay and stood for a while looking at the forbidding waves and rip-tides.  Then we went down to Carmel, where the water is still and almost impossibly blue.  We drove to Big Sur, stopping periodically to see where the ocean meets the rocky crags of the West.  At each point the ocean stretched on infinitely in the distance, so much bigger than man and our problems and concerns.  And I thought of Moby Dick:

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

Moby Dick is really three books in one: a comic and touching buddy story between narrator Ishmael and noble savage Queequeg, a textbook treatment of the whaling profession from the roles on the ship to the types of whales to the process of extracting sperm from the whales, and the dark tale of Captain Ahab's obsession for revenge.  I think most people think of the third story, but I actually enjoyed the first story most, as silly as it was at times.  Underlying the whole novel, all three parts, is a kind of love letter to the sea, and that's what I thought of this weekend, staring out into the vast Pacific.

Midnight's Children

Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie
read: 2012
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #90, Guardian 1000 Novels, James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Man Booker Prize

The one word that comes to mind when I think of Midnight's Children is "rich."  The novel is long and suffused with symbolism.  The prose is big and bold, and the narrator has a lot of personality.  The world is an imaginative interpretation of our own, with elements of "magic realism" poking out at the seams.  Themes and symbols appear and are repeated in patterns throughout the novel - religious symbolism, "nose and knees," jewelry, a center part, bodily functions, impotence, parents, etc.  Even though Midnight's Children is a long novel, there's little fat here; the book is intense, page after page.

But how do you analyze a book that gives away all of its secrets?  Saleem, Midnight's Children's narrator and protagonist, is born at the exact instant India acquires its independence, but as if the parallels between his life and that of his country are not obvious enough, Saleem as narrator interrupts the story halfway through to share with the reader four different ways this parallel works.  When Saleem introduces a new parental figure into the story, he explicitly calls it out and notes how it's just another in a long line.  One could write an a long, long book about all the symbols and parallels in here, but Rushdie takes all the work out of it.  But the transparency of the symbolism doesn't make the novel less interesting or less of an intellectual challenge.

The style is very rich and fun, with Saleem writing with a manic energy that gives the impression of a train about to run off the rails.  There's magic and humor and absurdity, but upon finishing Midnight's Children I came to realize that it is fundamentally a pessimistic book.  The story is a tragedy told in a comic style, which distracts you from the progressively more terrible things that are happening.  Is India, despite all its potential, all its fathers and mothers, all its natural beauty and greatness, all its diversity and spirit, ultimately doomed to collapse under the weight of its very worst elements?

The Road

The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
read: 2010
Guardian 1000 Novels, Pulitzer Prize, James Tait Black Memorial Prize

The Road is the story of a father and son, surviving together on a doomed post-apocalyptic Earth against the elements, starvation, and rampaging hoards of cannibals.  Death is an inevitability, not just on an individual level but for the human species.  The air, sea, and land is drained of color and replaced with a lifeless gray.  Of the three Cormac McCarthy books I've read, The Road is by far the most optimistic.

The protagonists are an unnamed man and his son, who travel alone through a ruined America.  There is no chance that the boy will grow up to live a normal life, the kind of life the man had before whatever terrible event or series of events left the world so desolate, but they press on anyways.  They flee from death, though they recognize some fates - like being captured by the cannibals - are worse than death.  They take brief joy in simple pleasures like finding good shelter for a few days, or a can of Coca Cola.  Most significantly, the man impresses upon the boy that there is a right and a wrong, and that he cannot compromise his humanity in the effort to survive.  This is the real struggle of The Road - not survival, but maintaining some sort of moral code in a world where society has collapsed.

That said, it is a stark book.  That's undoubtedly by design, but it can make it hard to read; every few pages the major characters get in a dire situation - starvation, disease, marauders - manage to survive, only to be plunged into another life-threatening circumstance a few pages later.  McCarthy has stated in interviews that he doesn't think much of literature that doesn't "deal with matters of life and death."  I disagree with him on this front; once we move past concerns of life and death, we can engage what Faulkner called "problems of the human heart in conflict with itself."  My issue with The Road, and with McCarthy in general, is that he doesn't take us there.  He has no intention of taking us there.  The struggle for basic human decency underlies the novel, but McCarthy rarely lets you inside his character's heads, so the feelings underlying the actions of the characters and their reactions to what they see are largely a matter of the reader's supposition.  

No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men
by Cormac McCarthy
read: 2010
Guardian 1000 Novels

I could not disagree more with Cormac McCarthy's world view.  I've read three of his novels, and each is a dive into the worst that humanity has to offer: violence, cruelty, murder, and an almost casual psychopathology.  This is epitomized in No Country for Old Men's villain Anton Chigurh, who thinks nothing of killing innocent people.  He accepts no higher power but chance, and frequently flips a coin to decide whether others will live or die.  Bizarrely, he has an ethical code, going to great lengths to honor his word, and abiding by the results of the coin flip.  This only makes him more frightening and sinister; his ethics are in the service of nothing.  He is an apex predator in a completely nihilistic world.

What makes No Country for Old Men (and McCarthy's other books) so disturbing is that Chigurh is not seen as an aberration; he's seen as the herald of a new kind of man, a new breed that will define the future of humanity.  Humanity is always on the downswing in McCarthy's works.  The worst elements among us will prevail in a dark future with no room for innocence, mercy, love, or hope.

I don't agree with any of that ... but McCarthy is a heck of a writer, and No Country for Old Men is a gripping read.

Lord of the Flies

Lord of the Flies
by William Golding
read: circa 2003
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #41, Guardian 1000 Novels

Lord of the Flies is another book I read a while ago that I remember liking but don't remember a lot of the specifics of.  Conch shell, Piggy, boys run amok, trapped on a desert island, darker side of human nature, etc.  It's one of those works where you probably know several things about it even if you've never read it.

To the Lighthouse

To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf
read: 2011
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #15, Guardian 1000 Novels

Modern Library named To the Lighthouse the number 15 book of the 20th century, making it the greatest book written by a female author over that time period.

The novel is considered an example of "stream-of-consciousness," but that doesn't mean it's the incoherent internal ramblings sometimes found in Faulkner or Pynchon.  Woolf's prose is very readable; she just takes us into the heads of the various characters in the book, exploring the inner workings of their psychologies in a way even they don't understand.  The characters in To the Lighthouse are flawed and insecure, not in overt damaging ways but in subtle ways the undermine their own happiness and that of those close to them.

The novel not only has very little plot, it's almost deliberately anti-plot.  The story takes place over two days years apart, and little of significance happens either day, while events like the deaths of major characters and the dissolution of marriages occur almost in passing.  The effect is interesting; To the Lighthouse is almost more of a prose poem than a story.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
by Mark Haddon
read: 2004
Guardian 1000 Novels

This was the last book my grandmother ever read.  In her later years, she lived with my parents for a time.  I was also living with my parents and got to see her daily routine: every day, she would get up, have breakfast, move to the couch (in the room we to this day call the new room, even though it is 20 years old now), watch her game shows and soap operas, read the paper, do the cryptoquote and the crossword, eat dinner, watch more TV, and go to bed.  It was remarkable how little she would deviate from this agenda.  Day after day, it was the Boston Herald, lunch, Family Feud, Days of Our Lives, dinner, the Red Sox, and bed.  But one day, I had left a copy of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time in the living room.  She saw it on her way to the "new room," sat in a sofa in the living room, and read the book in one sitting.

I never had a real conversation with her about the book; she said it was interesting, but I don't think she really formed too strong an opinion on the novel.  I don't even think she knew why she read it, and for all the time we lived together she never expressed an interest in reading anything other than her daily newspaper.

Coincidentally, I read the book in one sitting also.  I was in London Heathrow airport, and had all day to kill before my afternoon flight.  As soon as the bookstore in the airport opened I went in and bought Curious Incident, having selected it based on the criteria of "looks interesting based on the back of the book."  I sat down and decided to try to read it before boarding the plane.  I didn't quite succeed, but I finished the book before the pilot switched off the seatbelt sign.

I liked the book, or I should say that I remember liking the book.  Now when I think of Curious Incident, I think about it being the last book my grandmother ever read.

The Good Soldier

The Good Soldier
by Ford Madox Ford
read: 2011
Modern Library #30, Guardian 1000 Novels

"This is the saddest story I have ever heard."  I was flipping through a few of the Modern Library Top 100 books (having downloaded several of the free public-domain ones), looking for something that grabbed me, when I came across that opening line to The Good Soldier.  Needless to say, I had to read the book after that.

The most notable aspect of The Good Soldier is the narrative voice.  The story is narrated in first-person by  John Dowell, an American whose wife Florence was having an affair with Captain Ashburnham (the title character), who is also married (to the somewhat-manipulative Leonora).  Dowell is often used as an example of an unreliable narrator, but what's interesting to me is what the imperfect narration does to the tone of the novel.  The story takes on comic elements at times, as the reader is plainly able to see what is going on even as Dowell remains ignorant.  But The Good Soldier is not a comedy; true to the opening line, it is tragic.  This tension between the comedic and tragic elements make it an interesting read.

The Great American Novel

The Great American Novel
by Philip Roth
read: circa 2002

What a crazy book.  I've read quite a few Philip Roth novels, but The Great American Novel wasn't like any of the others.  It's not an rich, internal dive into human psychology; it's a romp through a silly fictional baseball league.  I don't remember much of the plot, but I remember quite a few of the images and situations:

• Casts of misfits that put the Major League movies to shame, like players with missing limbs or a superstar player whose father insists he bat ninth to teach him humility
• A near-perfect-perfect game, as pitcher Gil Gamesh tries to register 27 Ks on 81 pitches
• The owner's son taking over the team with his spreadsheets, eschewing bunting and calling for constant hit-and-runs, which along with (now-manager) Gamesh's intense style carries a crappy squad to .500 ball
• Narrator "Word" Smith calling women "slits"
• The umpire rendered speechless by an intentional pitch to the throat, seeking his revenge years later

Is The Great American Novel great literature on the order of American Pastoral?  No.  Is it a really fun book, especially if you're a baseball fan?  You bet!

A Room with a View

A Room with a View
by E.M. Forster
read: circa 2008
Modern Library #79, Guardian 1000 Novels

A Room with a View is as close as a man gets to writing Jane Austen.

A Passage to India

A Passage to India
by E.M. Forster
read: circa 2010
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #25, Guardian 1000 Novels, James Tait Black Memorial Prize

I've been in India this week (hence the sporadic posting)!  It feels appropriate to review E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, his thoughtful criticism of the Imperial British presence in India in the early part of the 20th century.  I say "thoughtful" because Forster sets up a tale without real good guys and bad guys; the major characters come to realize that the bad intentions they ascribe to each other are sociologically ingrained; they are rooted in a fundamental distrust between Indians and British imperialists.  The story walks a fine line, suggesting that on an individual level, Indians (such as Dr. Aziz) and British (such as Mrs. Moore and Mr. Fielding) can relate as equals, and show mutual affection and respect, but the shroud of imperialism that hangs over everything will poison any efforts to really become friends.

Naked Lunch

Naked Lunch
by William S. Burroughs
read: 2011
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels

Naked Lunch doesn't make any sense, but there's no pretext of it making sense at any point.  There are sort of some characters but not really any plot to speak of.  I'd probably liken it more to something like T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" than any novel I've read; the book is full of impressionistic scenes of decay, addiction, perversion, and paranoia.  It's an interesting read.  I'd also recommend the movie version, which is a David Cronenberg film and appropriately David-Cronenbergy (including typewriters that turn into metallic beetle-like creatures).  It's just coherent enough that it's a movie while keeping the spirit of the novel.

On the Road

On the Road
by Jack Kerouac
read: circa 2006
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #55, Guardian 1000 Novels

On the Road is the latest novel Professor Hungerford discusses in her class on the American Novel since 1945.  Her lectures on the book are interesting; she discusses, among other thing, the novel as a (platonic?) love story novel between Jack Kerouac / Sal Paradise and Neal Cassady / Dean Moriarty, the role of consumption capitalism in Kerouac's American Dream (as represented by the stunning quantity of pie Paradise eats), and the beat language.  But the thing that's always fascinated me about On the Road is whether it is really fiction at all; Kerouac's first draft used his name and those of his beatnik partners-in-crime (Cassady, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, etc.), suggesting it is really more autobiography.  Professor Hungerford expresses some cynicism about the literal truth of the story, almost in passing, and I wish she'd gone into that in a little more detail.

If we assume that the bulk of On the Road is, after some basic find-and-replace functions, literally true, there are interesting questions to ponder.  What does it tell us about Kerouac's life?  Is he living the way he's living because he needs to do so in order to write the way he wants to write?  Is he writing the way he is because he's mixed up in this crazy life and feels the need to document it?  Or are both the way he's living and his need for writing caused by some third drive, and inescapably intertwined?  Did Kerouac know what a vivid character Cassady would make?  Is that part of what drew him to Cassady in the first place?  How blurred is the line between On the Road as an autobiography and On the Road as a novel?

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
by John le Carre
A George Smiley novel
read: 2012
Guardian 1000 Novels

Mystery stories are funny; you almost can't evaluate them until you're done reading them.  I linked to an article a few weeks back suggesting that readers (and, for that matter, writers) do not need to finish books, but that mindset clearly doesn't work for a book like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.  There's a mole in the Circus (British Intelligence).  But who is it?  Well, if you never find out, it's not much of a story, is it?  The conclusion to a great mystery has to be foreseeable in hindsight but far from obvious.  Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy does a fine job here.

The story is more complex than The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the other le Carre novel I read, with a bigger scope and more characters.  The ending is perhaps not quite as satisfying, but I think that is part of what makes the book interesting.  The various "good guys" characters have different reactions to the ultimate ferreting out of the mole, but whether they are angry or sad or relieved, none of them are happy.  None of them feels like, "Yeah, we just nabbed the bad guy!  Woohoo!"  That's one of the elements that make le Carre novels a bit deeper than your run-of-the-mill thriller.