On Henry James and Proust, Finally

I have mentioned a few times a fondness for this poem by Ezra Pound--

I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman -
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root -
Let there be commerce between us.

--despite liking neither Ezra Pound nor Walt Whitman, for capturing the feeling of maturing taste. Pound once hated Whitman for being too close to what he himself wanted to do, and thus making him the thing to rebel against in order to assert his own identity. It's not a rejection of his old attitude towards Whitman, just a recognition that Pound's own situation is different now, and he recognizes he should act and feel differently.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I have, finally with some measure of success, started in on Henry James and Proust. I have no difficulty, when reading either, identifying those components that made me reject them when I was younger. James is perfectly happy to write eight long sentences around a situation without ever bothering to describe it directly; Proust finds his own thoughts fascinating and follows them without seeming care to edit. In both, nothing much happens at the page or approximate-chapter level.

And yet. Ever since tackling 2666 back in 2009, I have been reading longer, more complex novels, where the action subsides in favor of Proustian digressions and Jamesian sentences. With each thing I have read where one or the other author--or both--are mentioned as points of comparison, I have drawn closer. A half-read of Turn of the Screw two years ago affirmed the point--"I will like this, but now's not the time to read it," and we've finally opened up enough reading space to bring it about.

In books, in movies, in music, there's too early and too late. I would've hated Pavement at 18, but loved them at 28; I could've gotten into Jean Cocteau's movies much earlier, but had I waited any longer for Woody Allen, or even Ingmar Bergman, they would've passed me by. My attempt to read The Fellowship of the Ring in grad school fell flat--by then I could only see the flaws in the story, which are many.*

Too early is a special kind of pleasure, though: assuming the experience with James goes well, there are a dozen or two novels waiting out there for me; assuming Proust goes well, a few thousand pages of enjoyment. Nick Hornby wrote once about discovering Jackson Browne in his middle age--a guy with a long a pretty good recording career whom he had never listened to, and could approach new--new being that rarest of things for someone who professionally listened. Reading is an adventure, a lifelong adventure for those who take it seriously. If you read quickly and seriously, the question always remains what's next. And, at least for now, I know.


*Which is not to denigrate the love or respect that other people have for it as a fictional work. I merely assert that it has considerable flaws: starting out with 50 or so pages of historical backstory, for example, before introducing characters or a plot. If one reads it with charity--which is to say, with love--then these are not flaws but essential components of the whole. That sort of reading isn't possible for me--it's not the right sort of book, and I'm not the right sort of person. But if it makes you, dear reader, feel better, I can assure you I thought equally poorly of the grand excursus on history that ended War and Peace.

Reader, I Think She Probably Should Have Taken a Few More Months to Think Over Her Options

Jane Eyre

Though I'm generally of the view that arguing over details of the plot is not a particularly interesting way of reacting to a book,* and better analyses involve considerations of structure, pacing, voice, composition, etc, here we go:

I don't see how anyone could possibly root for Rochester.

The absolute worst thing one could say about St. John would be to make him equal to Rochester in ill-treatment of Jane. Both are attempting to use her for their own ends, and want to cultivate her responses to them without informing her about what is going on. St. John, however, reveals his motivations much faster, of his own volition, and at least has them aimed toward a noble purpose. As Jane herself admits, but for his insisting on marriage without love, there's nothing wrong with his plan. (A significant 'but,' of course, though it seems less a fault of an unforgiving nature than a crucial mistake made by someone focused on his vocation/too young to think through all the consequences involved.) Rochester, by contrast, holds his peace until he is forced to reveal all, and would implicate Jane in a crime without her knowledge or consent--I presume his requirement that she wait a year and a day after the wedding to ask about the other woman in the house to be one that would make annulment impossible. He is, in other words, willing to run her great legal and social risks without informing her. That's not to say St. John is better--I think the obvious best outcome for Jane is to live at Moor House with Diana, and never marry.**

The novel itself is lively and modern, and the direct narration a good deal more sophisticated than, say, David Copperfield. It's rather, in its own way, a good commentary on the action delivered by one of its players, not unlike All About Eve. That it unfolds as a combination of the most unlikely happenstance is not a matter of great concern to me as a reader--Jane is discovered in the end by the family she did not know herself to have, but the knowledge is not at all essential to the action as it is happening.


*Not interesting because it involves arguing over a stipulated and limited set of facts (the text), which then involves one in the equally difficult games of guessing the author's intention (as something distinct from the actual words the author chose to write, and retained after editing; for which there might be supplementary evidence in notes and letters, but for which none often exists) or reading facts and relationships not written into those stipulated, an endless game. It is also almost always an exercise in wish fulfillment or enforcement of orthodoxy--making the novel into The Thing The Reader Wants It To Be, which is flattering to their own beliefs and prejudices, rather than The Thing That It Is.

**And, yes, I get that the point of the novel is that circumstances come about wherein Jane can freely choose Rochester, and we are meant to acknowledge it as a free and unforced choice, and that is a good thing. But we've also probably all had the experience of dealing with friends who make free and unforced decisions that are nevertheless poor.

Beyond Criticism

Franny and Zooey

Other families have a 'family novel,' right? This is ours. It's been a large part of my consciousness since I first read it in seventh or eighth grade, including a number of years of attempting, with little success, to distance myself from it when I saw--and was dismayed by--the reactions of many of the other people who read it. Despite this, and despite having read the final ten pages several dozen times, I am not actually certain I have re-read it at all in the last 20 years, though if there had been some additional cover-to-cover reading, it would have had to take place before 2000.

It's a difficult novel to speak about critically for the same reason I find it difficult to speak critically about all the R.E.M. albums prior to Up: some things are formative of one's notion of the world, and this is one for me. Zooey's criticisms of television, for instance, are mostly the same as I might write into any post on the subject (tv "mistaking brutality for realism" has been a repeated theme), and its criticisms of academic types are also well-observed.

Over the years I have wavered about the novel's view of Christianity, especially in light of Salinger's own feelings on Eastern religions. On this re-reading, Zooey's point about the Jesus Prayer is quite orthodox: religion is not some magical enchantment that gives you peace and mystical visions--or at the very least, Christianity is not that religion. Franny, if she wants to say the Jesus Prayer, has to say it to Jesus, on the basis of the things she knows about him from the New Testament's reportage. And that Jesus, as Zooey says, is not someone particularly interested in making anyone's life easy and convenient, which constitutes the difference between the holier-than-thou piety Zooey sees Franny attempting to slip into and actual religion. The upshot is remarkably Calvinist: act responsibly in the situation of life in which you find yourself because that is the one and only obligation anyone has: to act in accordance with duty, not quite regardless of expectations, but in spite of them all the same.

In Which I Remember That I Have a "tl;dr" Tag For A Reason

A reader asks:

"Do you have any practical advice for how to develop into a more sophisticated reader? You mention practice and I was wondering if you meant a high volume of reading or something more?"

The end idea of reading is to notice things systematically as part of an organic and comprehensive experience of the act of reading. In my old days of teaching I would suggest to my students that liking a piece of writing or not liking it--or agreeing with something or disagreeing with it--is not much of a reaction; a good opinion needs to be concrete and specific, or at least be capable of becoming concrete or specific.

How does one reach this point? It requires both a plan and at least one guide. The nature of the plan and the identity of the guide hardly matter, because good readers revise their plans and end up finding multiple, partial guides. My first plan was a list of 'classics' prepared by my local library, and my first guides were the large volumes of literary criticism that were, for inexplicable reasons, in my high school library. I poked around the list to find the books that seemed most initially interesting to me, read them, read some reactions to them, and picked subsequent books off the list that seemed to match what I liked in the first ones. I was fortunate in that the list and the books of criticism were old: there's nothing that matches the old view of Great Books whose value can be known and measured. Not all of them are great, not all of them are still great, but it gives a useful outside measure for one's own reactions: "this book has been known and appreciated for 300 years, but I seem to think it's boring. Perhaps I'm missing something." And from these readings one goes looking for influences and disciples. It helps if the guides one chooses are willing to name-drop those authors they find especially noteworthy. Fortunately, almost all of them do. This should provide a framework in which individual acts of reading happen according to mood, interest, etc.

Once I've finished a book, I have a set of tentative reactions to it. At this point, I find it helpful to go and read criticism of the book, both positive and negative. Good criticism will give you a sense of what is important to notice and how the book works as a unified whole. It can cause you to correct your opinions by pointing out things you did not notice on your initial reading, and can confirm when your instincts are pointing in the right direction. I read a large number of Graham Greene novels, and enjoyed them, until I read a Christopher Hitchens essay that pointed out Greene's serious novels tended to repeat the same plot elements, themes, and structure; what I was responding to was less the quality of his writing than the fact he was producing certain outcomes and conclusions I found agreeable. I still think of Greene as a good writer, but only a good one, and one who writes novels that beg the question on his own most cherished beliefs. Alternatively, the criticism of Roberto Bolaño's 2666 confirmed for me that a number of its technical and structural features, which I had found essential to appreciating the book as a whole, were indeed functioning as I had suspected. Given enough time, this will trickle down into opinions about various people who write in a critical capacity: Zadie Smith, for example, is a very wise writer talking about the technical act of writing, but her literary recommendations are strongly colored by what she finds useful as a writer, and are not generally what I like to read.

The trick in working through a book is to think of writing as those critics do, as something other than the neutral content through which a story is transmitted. Structure matters, style matters; any act of writing is a collection of individual decisions about what to do--it is almost always phrased this way instead of that way for a reason. Write down individual passages you like, and figure out what you like about them, paying attention to the really boring stuff you hopefully learned in Freshman Comp in college: how is the paragraph structured? Are the individual sentences the same, or do they vary, and how do they vary? What's the cadence of each line? Where do the important words in the sentence end up? What unusual things does the writer do? It's often simply a matter of noticing what works and what doesn't: everything in Zola's Therese Raquin is good except for the passages in which he allows himself to present his psychological theories, which are dull, not insightful, and make the story lag; this plays out in the rest of his books: it's hard to think of a more insightful cataloguer of the range of human emotion who so poorly understands the nature of his own gift.

When you find yourself reacting strongly in a positive or negative manner, the important thing to sort out is why. Reading, reading criticism, and a reasonable attentiveness to your own reactions go quite far. I sometimes make the cooking analogy: if you never cook, cooking will be quite difficult; if you cook a bunch of disconnected things, you'll have individual spots of knowledge; if you supplement by reading the non-recipe portions of cookbooks, and working through a bunch of different options within one cookbook, you'll see the way the ideas and techniques repeat themselves.

It's also important to read mediocre books with some regularity. Occasionally finding novels one dislikes is a sign of being adventurous enough, either guessing wrong or finding an unanticipated weak spot in an author's oeuvre. Books less than classics also make the method of their composition much plainer; the various imperfections are easier to see, and this is one easy way to recognize what constitutes excellence, and how vertiginous the gap is between those things that are written at all (hard enough to do), those that are merely good, and those that are classics. That's the real value of grad school: one reads so much that is written for a wide variety of reasons, and in the social science, with so little emphasis placed on the elegant expression of ideas, that one gains many, many examples of how one can go off-model.

On plans: reading over a list of classics with a long historical scope makes for a good starting point. Doing so allowed me to make a few first tentative cuts into literature: Greek drama, medieval and renaissance literature, poetry, French and Russian 19th century novels. All but the last two eventually faded away, and 20th century literature came on quite strongly, especially British novelists of the second rank and, eventually, Spanish and Latin American literature. But the general idea is to read enough in any niche one favors to be able to offer some elementary comparisons amongst its figures, and some comparison between niches (T.S. Eliot talks about this quite helpfully in one of the first lectures in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism).

The Dry Bones

The Soldier's Art

The Military Philosophers

I would like to attempt to outline something from the fifth book in this series, The Soldier's Art, to give a sense of Anthony Powell's tremendous attention to structure, and how it allows him to do certain things that might otherwise seem melodramatic in perfectly understated ways. In the book, Powell arranges for the members of an estranged marriage to both be killed in separate incidents on the same night, when it looked like a reconciliation between them might begin to be possible.

The key structural decision is to compartmentalize them within the narrator's (Nick's) evening. The husband, Chips Lovell, pesters Nick to have a drink to talk about unrelated matters, but only just before Nick is to have dinner with a friend who once carried on with Chips' wife. Thus Chips has to go, and early, and mentions in passing a party he was going to attend in the faint hope his wife might also attend, and they could reconcile. The dinner with the friend begins, is interrupted by his current mistress, and is then intruded upon by the wife, Priscilla, and the man she is currently carrying on with, who also happens to be known to Nick. She makes a great show of being unperturbed by the situation until Chips and his faint hope of reconciling are mentioned, at which point Priscilla announces a desire to go home, alone. Later that evening, at a pub, Nick receives word that the club Chips was at had been hit by a bomb from the Blitz, and Chips was killed. The phones are out, so Nick resolves to go and break the news to Priscilla directly, where he finds that house to have been destroyed later that same evening, and Priscilla and her mother killed.

It works as drama and not melodrama because the deaths are, in the compass of World War II, random and explicable. And it works because the details are simple and affecting. Nor is it merely the confluence of detail, but the scope time time involved: Chips Lovell, Lady Molly, and the rest were introduced in At Lady Molly's, published nine years before The Soldier's Art. Their deaths are not  melodrama because their deaths are not put in for shock--they're not even the central events of the novel; the characters are all given narrative lives independent of their ends. There is no great gush of emotion, either: the two most affecting moments are Nick having to tell the friend that Chips is dead, and the reminiscence of Chips first taking him to the place where he'd meet his wife. No great indulgence in emotion, no pointing out they could never reconcile, just a pair of stories that have stopped. It has the elegance of understatement, a quality sorely lacking in fiction these days.

On Reading and Re-reading

Reading, aims and purposes
We read for the pleasure of it. At bottom, there's no other reason to do it. If reading is eating vegetables, and vegetables are an un-integrated side element of one's diet included only for nebulous reasons of promoting good health, then the enterprise is doomed. Many other pleasant and edifying pastimes exist, and there's no shame in preferring one of them.

Pleasure is not a sufficient reason to read. It can serve as a worthwhile guidepost in youth and in full maturity, but it can be deceptive. We read those books that do not come naturally to us, all the better to expand the range of future reading; there is no pleasure so delightful as realizing a previously foreclosed world has now opened. (I hestitate to say this because it can give off the wrong impression, but I go back to Zola and Anthony Powell and Márias because I find them to be relatively easy, which is not, I gather, the general feeling about any of them as writers. Difficult for me is Pynchon and the bleeding edge of experimental fiction, Thomas Bernhard and the like.) Reading also can claim the results ascribed to it: we read to learn, we read to see the ways in which other people are different, we read to see the ways in which we are the same. Those who write will read to pilfer tricks and techniques.

I have always been an avid reader, but I became a more sophisticated reader in grad school. There I learned the fine art of reading a great deal of text at high speed with good retention; none of these are unusual skills, all of them are learnable through practice. Once one begins reading at that clip, a number of things become evident: I can read for structure, read for style, read with a knowledge of context, debate the minutiae of word choice and sentence construction. I learned, very importantly, that there is such a thing as reading too fast. I read texts somewhere between the death of the Author and the author's intention, with the knowledge of what it means to write, and how the practical limitations of assembling a long text manifest. When I turned these skills towards fiction, it made a substantial difference in the books I chose and how I approached them.

Reading is, then, not about identifying themes or motifs, identifying symbolism, and all the other things generally taught in high school English curricula. A book--true of fiction, true in its own way of theoretical and philosophical reflections in a number of fields--is more than this. If a work of art is good, it exceeds any of its individual elements. To reduce it to its individual components--assuming one has a complete list of them, an unlikely possibility--is like thinking that a finished recipe is the same as its ingredients. When they are pulled out of their context within the work as a whole, something is lost. Reading only for thematic content is the way that people surround themselves with a chorus of voices that agree with their biases, and allows the reader to brush aside any moments of unpleasantness a novel might bring; worse yet, it encourages people to select books to read based on whether they are likely to be agreeable.

Re-reading, aims and purposes
In my old teaching statements, I would sometimes include a paragraph about reading a text four times: once for class, once in the act of having the reading discussed in class, once to produce a paper, once again for the final exam. The idea was that one reading is insufficient: one can get first impressions and some crude idea of what is going on. The second allows the reader to see something of the structure of the whole and how that structure might illuminate the various parts of the text. The third and fourth readings allow one to begin looking at particular recurrent elements in the text. One re-reads, in other words, because new things appear with each subsequent reading. (An old professor of mine once proposed a course centered around Machiavelli's Prince, which would consist of reading The Prince and then a famous book-length commentary, then reading The Prince again, then another commentary, with the idea that whatever the book meant would change radically from beginning to end of the semester.) We accept this as a given with songs, tv shows, albums, movies: periodic or traditional or obsessive re-consumption is a given. Novels are often made an exception for the tremendous time investment involved, but in an age of auto-streaming 13-to-24 episode seasons of prestige drama, the idea of limited time looks like an excuse. Re-reading shows the ways in which we have changed over time, always a useful corrective to our feeling of one continuous and unbroken reality of the self.

Books of the Year:

Javier Márias, A Heart So White

Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

Two novels whose central theme is the unknowability of marriage: one's own, anyone else's. It seems fair to say, as My Dinner With Andre would also tell you, that coming to know someone better is also a process of finding them increasingly mysterious, a fair and charming trade-off that makes things comfortable and intimate and also forever new. A Heart So White focuses on the strangeness of marriage as an entrance to a certain kind of adult life, the need of making things new when moving in together, the odd light it throws on one's understanding of other peoples' relationships. It is a familiar mode of reflection for Márias, but it is also the peak of his execution. 

Casanova is defined more by its most intense structural choices. It begins with a post-war visit to the site of the titular restaurant, now a bombed-out shell in London, that sets an appropriate tone of melancholy; it announces right away its belief that marriage is an institution it is impossible to adequately explain, and then observes the manner in which several couples attempt to manage it; the narrator follows through on this belief by almost never talking about his own wife. I find this restraint, especially given the pseudo-autobiographical nature of the series, admirable: Nick the narrator gives almost nothing to Isobel, his wife, to do or say, and it's made clear that this is an act of fidelity of Nick towards Isobel, and of Powell to his wife: one can hardly imagine a new, current novel (or movie, or tv show) that could resist the urge to spill all the details, good, bad, and mundane, and think that divulgement constituted a noble commitment to reality--I take this to be the entire appeal of Knausgaard and My Struggle--whereas the reality is that these details are hard to explain and to give an accurate picture of.

The Year In Reading

In the last couple years, I've been working around two long-term reading goals: reading all of Emile Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart, and reading all of Javier Márias' novels. The two emerged slowly and accidentally. Picking up a novel and liking it naturally leads to looking for another novel by the same author, but since I read by mood and time of year, and with some variation of time period and author nationality/gender, the initial stages are slow. I was probably five novels into Zola's series before it seemed practical and of interest. At the end of this year, I'm in good standing with each goal: nine into Zola, at a steady rate of three a year now, and having completed all of Márias except a couple on the border of juvenilia and the newest, not yet translated to English.

Having a plan of reading suits my habits quite well. As a reader I like to constantly be reading. But as a person who likes to vary what I'm reading, I fall into periods of indecision several times a year, not entirely sure what the next thing to read should be. The plan gives me a fallback option that will be at least somewhat well received: both authors write with varying quality, being human, but neither the style nor the structure pose any significant problems anymore. They'll get me back reading.

This year, I added Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. Sometime in January I found a review of the series that made it sound as though it touched subjects of interest and was considered by many serious readers to be difficult to master. The latter of these is, of course, a siren song to me. Three-quarters of the way through, I've found it to be rather the opposite. Powell's habit is to begin each novel with new supporting characters and a context not necessarily made clear, but many years of Russian novel reading have taught me the art of waiting a hundred pages for everything to sort itself out, especially on names. (A well-written novel will eventually make clear who the important people are, and allow you the means to track them.) Little tends to happen in the novels--though the World War II ones have been comparatively action-packed--and I suspect this is their most significant obstacle for most readers. It is not the accumulation of small detail, which is the mode of the novel at the moment, but the big structural parallels and recurrences that make the series s gripping. (I have been personally most tickled by the war novels' continued references to Balzac's Lost Illusions, never referred to by name, rather as "that book with the long digressions about how to manage interest on a loan given the state of printing technology in the early 19th century," a description I can only describe as dead on.)

For the coming year, I am thinking of adding a goal or two. It seems time to tackle Henry James and Proust. I had a good, though unfinished, experience with The Turn of the Screw in 2013, and the authors I like to read so often make reference and homage to James and Proust as influences. I do, however, suspect that it makes sense to set a more modest goal for next year, so I may just return to the mature novels of Dostoevsky--The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Demons, The Idiot, The Adolescent, House of the Dead, and maybe Notes From Underground. It would have the advantage of being a list I have almost entirely already read, a few of which I have come to think I perhaps read too quickly the first time, unlikely to be an issue this time around. George Eliot also beckons, and a return to Elizabeth Taylor, but these are perhaps better saved for other years.

The Fifth Business
The Manticore
World of Wonders
Robertson Davies

A most curious thing: three books that I liked but would not recommend, in general. I have been cautiously dipping my toes into Canadian fiction, on the premise that southern Ontario is not that different from the Michigan where I grew up.* For Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant this appears to be the case, for Robertson Davies even moreso. The beginning of The Fifth Business depicts the world of small-town Ontario in the early 1900s, but read to my eyes as essentially the same kind of place central Michigan was in the 1980s: still defined in rigid terms by where in Europe one's ancestors hailed from, preference being given to northern and western Europeans, and the church one attended, right down to the same general stereotypes about Presbyterians, Baptists (a little wacky but all right), and Catholics. Add in to this Davies' extreme interest in Calvinism, which appears and reappears throughout the books, and it's a series as tailor-made to appeal to me as one could imagine.

The central narrative pull of the books is a murder mystery that turns out, at the end, to be no mystery at all. The events which start the story are, in the eyes of the narrator of the first book, of titanic and life-long importance, while for the others they are of no real concern at all. The murder mystery collapses into an observation about the way people pick up or let go of moments in their life, but the collapse is no kind of deflation, the most impressive of narrative accomplishments. It's for this reason that I tend to think there's no reason not to spoil a plot: the answer to the question "Who killed Boy Staunton?" is "no one, really," but the way in which that answer is reached is the remarkable thing.


*My wife's family hails originally from upstate New York, and they appear to be (and have been) much the same.

"First of all, it’s not my job to make people feel better about liking something that is really, really popular"

Agree wholeheartedly:

There may be another kind of friendly fascism at work here too, but let me at least try to say some nice things first. I realize that there’s no way to mollify the devotees of the Marvel movie universe, who not only demand total box-office domination (which they’re definitely going to get, at least this weekend) but also total toadying subservience to the tide of Irresistible Marvel Fun. First of all, it’s not my job to make people feel better about liking something that is really, really popular. There are a whole lot of places you can get that, and honestly that desire for universal affirmation is kind of bizarre.

I found that bit of the review to be accurate, and the worldview it describes a bit confusing. Through many years of reading, watching movies, listening to music, etc, I'm not sure that I've ever had the coercive expectation that people like the things I like. I can remember being an R.E.M. and Rolling Stones fan in high school and carrying around the expectation that I'd be the only one and that was fine. In some ways better, of course, for all the usual reasons of snobbery, which has its own pleasures.

This is not to say I don't have opinions--any reader of this blog will know better than that--nor that I don't have an internal hierarchy of aesthetic pleasures. I just can't imagine having my day ruined because someone disagrees, because most people will probably disagree. And that's fine. Roberto Bolaño's 2666 seems to me a masterpiece, and I am happy to put together an argument to that effect. But I can just as easily imagine thinking it good but not particularly liking it, or envision those technical and substantive choices in constructing the book that I find compelling not being the sort of thing to which someone else might respond, and I can even conceptualize rejecting 900-page books on principle. I like the book for objective reasons and for subjective reasons about the point in my life when I read it. That combination won't be replicated for anyone else, so even someone who thinks well of the book will do so for different reasons.

If there's a cause for this sort of attitude (see also what happens when I mention to certain people never having seen The Wire or Breaking Bad), it's the idea of a aesthetic object as a cultural signal. It's hard to get worked up about someone's feelings on any one particular book when your universe is "books, obviously, though some and not others"--any particular one is fungible, and not liking one book may be balanced by liking another--or many others.

Adventures in Cultural Consumption, Metaphysics Edition

Neil Gaiman, American Gods

Propulsive and difficult to put down. Not, perhaps, the most finely written of novels, but enjoyable. As the distance from reading it grows further, I am more dissatisfied with the way in which the novel resolves itself by side-stepping its central question about the relationship between the old gods and the new.

A metaphysical quibble: as I understand it, the book is agnostic on the god-iness of the gods. It is sufficient to say that gods gain their power from worship, especially in the performance of certain sacred rites; this is how Easter can be strong even though no one knows who she is or the relationship of their celebrations to her worship. The underlying idea is that America is a hard place for gods to exist, because they are too easily forgotten and left behind, the new technological gods as easily as the old cultic gods.

All of which is fine, except that Gaiman ignores the elephant in the room: Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. If all that matters in performance of the rites, then the gods associated with each of these should be quite strong, even dominant, certainly much more than Wednesday or Loki or anyone else. But to admit this would undermine the central tenet of the book, that America is hostile to the gods. Nor can one argue that the Norse gods, et al, are real and the Christian God, et al, are not, since it seems to be the case that worship is constitutive of the reality of the thing worshipped. So it seems like the book has to fail on its own terms.

Adventures in Cultural Consumption, Marías for Nobel edition

Javier Marías, A Heart So White

If ours is an age dedicated to realism, and realism as verisimilitude, the verisimilitude we seek is in the collection of a million tiny data points. It was there in embryonic form in David Foster Wallace, who conceived of daily life as an unending stream of information constantly bombarding the individual person, too much to handle. It has blossomed into everyone's favorite complaint about the internet containing too much new content to possibly read. It is there in the fetishism of violence and destruction in comic book movies--one must be real even in the unreal--and in the lavish praise for TV shows that can manage impossible fidelity to nearly-past historical recreations. Its apotheosis as of the moment is Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, the 6000-page listicle of things its author has thought, thinly disguised as a novel-memoir.

Marías, thank goodness, swings as far as possible in the opposite direction. The essence of reality cannot possibly be the welter of information, most of which is instantly discarded by our brains and the rest of which gets minimally processed. (A favorite example from philosophy of mind: what's going on with the bottom of your feet right now? Your brain is constantly receiving nerve signals from them and almost always ignoring them unless conscious attention is placed (or forced). So also everything else in life.) Reality is not information-rich but narrative poor. In the average day, nothing of much consequence happens, even in those parts of life when exciting things are supposed to be happening all the time. As a friend of mine one remarked: "I was prepared for how challenging college would be. I wasn't prepared for how boring it is." Those things that happen are few, and the challenge we face on a daily basis is making some narrative out of those events, from which we can anticipate the future or make decisions about how we will act. Marías is the novelist of that reality.

All Souls is the archetype here: a novel chronicling an affair over the course of an academic year, which intersperses its brief moments of action with long reflections about what, if anything, that action is supposed to mean. In A Heart So White, the narrator is recently married, and is reflecting, in a variety of circumstances, on what that change is supposed to mean, and how to best integrate it into his life. There are, as typical in Marías, unexpected things and narrative twists, but he mostly takes up his idea and examines it from all sides.

On the twists: he is the master of never wasting material. All references are intentional. Any threads that appear to have been left unresolved will be brought up again at the proper time. This is most remarkable in the 1000+ page Your Face Tomorrow, but never not impressive.

He may be the only novelist I've read who has not written a bad book--a judgment I feel safe making with two novels left to go.

On adding and removing books from one's own collection thereof

One of the more basic family traits I inherited is to be an inveterate pile-maker of books. When working on a project, I take the books I will need to directly reference and make them into a pile, then a second pile of books that might be useful. I make a pile when attempting to pick out a new novel to read, and keep the pile around in case I change my mind. They multiply, get rearranged and re-sorted. I refer to this as an "organic" organizational style. I'm not Jean Piaget-level, but it gives the general idea:

Consequently, it can be difficult to judge when the books I own have exceeded the shelf space that I have. Thus approximately every year, things get re-sorted.

The good news from this year was that, after removing one banker's box of books I was unlikely to read, I seem to have fewer books now than I did last year. That I managed this seems impossible as I did not remove very many books and seem to have new ones coming in all the time, but so it seems to be.

Leaving aside non-fiction, which is curated under different rules, I finally disgorged a large portion of fiction. Historically I have been reluctant to do this under the general principle that I can hardly predict what I will want to read at some point in the future, and following my rule of taking a flier on any under $1 used book on Amazon that I have some other reason to be potentially interested in. Thus went a few novels I have been unsuccessfully attempting to get myself to read since college--Saul Bellow probably never going to happen--some false starts in grad school--other people might like Coetzee a lot, but not me--and people for whom my affection waned--Ian McEwan, whose Saturday I liked when I first read, but which I came to view as less humanistic and more cynically formulaic (full of belief in one's own fearless truth-telling and hopelessly sentimental: the worst of all possible combinations).

None of this was surprising, exactly. I last attempted Herzog in college, and regularly passed it over in favor of anything else, and so on down the line. What interested me was why I insisted on carrying around books through many moves even after I knew I was never going to read them. The obvious explanations can be discounted: I am not a hoarder by nature (see adding approximately one shelf's worth of books in a year), I try to only speculate on books I might read in the near future, the percentage of books I've completed on any given shelf is never less than 50% and sometimes as high as 80%. I am also quite comfortable with the fact that there are given genres, authors, etc to whom I do not respond, and for which it is not worth making the effort involved in attempting to read.

To buy a book, for a book person, is to speculate about the sort of person you would like to be, are going to be. Sometimes this process is lazy and unfocused, but there are also times when the project of being a reader takes on quite definitive purposes and zeal. Sometimes one tries on different personalities, attempts recommendations given by others, or (a common failing of the young and conservative) attempts to cultivate tastes one believes one should have. Time passes and many of these goals are unfulfilled, as with the making of reading lists. There is yet nothing definitively tragic here.

To give up those books is to admit of a kind of failure, perhaps the worst: failing at a task you decided you didn't want to finish in the first place. It's a renunciation of one set of possibilities. It is an admission of a certain kind of mortality: vita brevis longa ars. Robert Nozick, somewhere I cannot locate at the moment, talks about aging as the closing off of life's possibilities, and that each closed possibility comes to have a cumulative effect greater than its original importance. Maybe it'll be different in ten years and I'll make a go of Bellow, or McEwan, or Coetzee, but I am also forced to concede that it may never happen.

When I started reading seriously at the age of 16 (give or take), I had read few books that qualified as serious literature and had an unfocused desire to have read them all. Thus I made a lot of plans: read all of my library's list of classic literature (a pretty good list, it must be said), read all of Shakespeare, read all of Charles Dickens, read the Great Books, read the Harvard Classics, read all of Balzac, read all of Dostoevsky. There were many lists and many goals because I was composing them abstractly, attempting to bind the actions of a person who did not yet exist, and on the erroneous assumption than my as-yet-undeveloped taste would remain the same. As it turns out, I do not respond well to Shakespeare or drama in general; my problems with Dickens are well-covered here; lists and collections tend to be put together by a group of people, and so represent the collected reading experience of many rather than any realistic program of reading for one person.

The goals that have persisted in spite of this tend to be more limited in scope. No one's juvenilia is any good: the dream of reading all of an author's work died hard at Auden's and Dostoevsky's: the latter's early novels and stories are fine but no better than other novels of the period. One might as well go read a minor, but mature, George Eliot, since the young man whose novels I would be plodding through was not yet Dostoevsky in the relevant sense. The lesson would have applied to Bolaño, but the juvenile and the unfinished is sometimes better than his early prose work--The Third Reich is superior to The Skating Rink by any measure, and the desire to snap things up when published made it harder to also listen to critical judgments of each work. Left to me is moving through the mature work of authors I like in a systematic way: Cesar Aira, Javier Marias, Emile Zola, George Eliot, Mario Vargas Llosa, Dostoevsky, others certainly forgotten at the moment. A novel or two by each every year, a handful of new books that seem interesting, a handful of older novels that have come to me by recommendation. Round out with a re-reading or two of an old favorite, a re-visitation of an author previously dismissed, and that's a year.

In that planning, and eventually setting up a working equilibrium, I never quite anticipated that I might reach any of those goals. I have one major Dostoevsky novel left (The Adolescent), only two more by Marias, though with the hope that he keeps writing, one last Fitzgerald (The Last Tycoon) and so it goes further down the list. I'd like to keep up with Flaubert, but I suspect there are only two or three novels of his left that are worth the effort, and the same applies to many others. This was brought home for me after finishing Zola's Belly of Paris, which is now the eighth of the Rougon-Macquart that I've read. If I maintain my non-stressful pace of two or three a year, I will be done in four years. He has other novels and there are other writers, but there will simply be nothing else there. It will have been read. The pattern repeats down the line, and my graduate education crossed off a significant portion of my list. I wanted to have read the major developments in western thought on these topics, and I have: I can pursue this down to increasingly minor figures, or find something else to do with my time.

I'm beginning to grasp something of the second lives that I've seen in many of the serious adult readers I've known, a shift that seems to happen in middle age, a plausible response to the "what now?" that comes from matching as many youthful reading goals as might have been established. I suspect my own long and fruitful excursion into Latin American literature is a first sign of this, as a way of varying and responding to the limitations of the 19th-century realist novel that I first found so captivating.