A Death in the Family

A Death in the Family
by James Agee
read: 2017
Time 100 Novels, Pulitzer Prize

I have a beef with indie films: they never show anything. There is a tragedy, and the heroine gets a knock on the door, and she opens it, and the sheriff is standing there with his hat in hand and a grim look on his face, and then the camera cuts away. The audience has to imagine so much of the core emotional content. Movies are visual and auditory and we never really get inside the character's heads, so any reaction will probably feel forced and hollow, but I still feel cheated. A Death in the Family, by contrast, takes us into the heads of the people directly affected by Jay Follette's death, especially his wife Mary and small children Rufus and Catherine.

The role of religion looms large in the novel. Mary finds solace in her Christian belief, while her father and brother do not. At times, Agee shows religion as a negative force. Mary's retreat to her religious beliefs distances her from her children at a time when they need her support, and Father Jackson is perhaps the closest thing the story has to a villain. On the other hand, we see almost a dogmatic atheism from Andrew, who sees things he can't explain but won't accept them as being supernatural or spiritual.

A Death in the Family was published posthumously, and therefore there is some mystery about Agee's intentions around the order of some of the sections.

A Scanner Darkly

A Scanner Darkly
by Philip K. Dick
read: 2017

Philip K. Dick's novels always mess with the reader's mind The mindwarping of A Scanner Darkly boasts another layer to it, as protagonist Bob Arctor falls under the influence of powerful drugs that fracture and destroy his mind. In the afterword, Dick reveals that he himself suffered from drug addiction, making this the rare semi-autobiographical science fiction novel.

The Big Four

The Big Four
by Agatha Christie
read: 2017

Poirot doesn't work as well in a spy tale as in a murder mystery. The humor in Poirot's mannerisms and in his relationship with Hastings seems out-of-place, and the much more linear plot in The Big Four didn't provokes as much thought as in the other Poirot novels.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
by Agatha Christie
read: 2017
Guardian 1000 Novels

The memorable twist in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (I won't give it away) works because I ended up somewhat attached to the villain. The reveal startles but also provokes feelings of pity.

Wide Sargasso Sea

Wide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys
read: 2016
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #94, Guardian 1000 Novels

At one point in Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette Cosway and her husband have a conversation about how to him, living in the Caribbean feels like a dream, and to her, his tales of England sounds like a dream. That dream-like quality pervades the novel, from her oppressed childhood to his perceptions of island life, to her ultimate madness and imprisonment.

Mrs. Dalloway

Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
read: 2016
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels

I'm not a huge fan of stream-of-consciousness novels, but Woolf's prose style reads much more clearly than those of certain works or James Joyce or William Faulkner. Clarissa Dalloway, Peter Walsh, and Rezia Smith, among others, reveal their regrets and laments through internal monologues. Of the other novels I've read, it probably evokes American Pastoral more than anything else. 

Wieland

Wieland: or, the Transformation, an American Tale
by Charles Brockden Brown
read: 2016
Guardian 1000 Novels

At one point I thought that this might turn into a really interesting bit of psychological horror, with narrator Clara turning out to be the perpetrator of the gruesome murders, but Brown's narration downplays the mystery and suspense elements to the story. It doesn't quite come together, but given that it was published in 1798 it's easy to imagine the impact it had on horror writers to come. The beats and pacing of the genre had not been established yet.

One element I liked was the epilogue. She concludes the main narration by suggesting that she would die shortly after penning her tale, but she lives and is able to find happiness long after the harrowing events of the story. That's a phenomenon that is understood in modern psychology - I was first introduced to it in Stumbling on Happiness - and Brown's intuitive understanding of the effect more than a century earlier stands out:

Such is man. Time will obliterate the deepest impressions. Grief the most vehement and hopeless, will gradually decay and wear itself out.