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Tears of a Wallet: Latest Acquisitions

I accidentally ended up in an Oxfam bookshop today, and perhaps predictably, carnage ensued. They had a 3 for 2 deal on, and given that most books cost less than 2 quid...

Let's get the preconceived notions out of the way! Maybe if I write them down I can banish them until I've completed the book (this is part of my quest to honor Updike's Rule #6.)

I've been meaning to give Sawyer a go for ages, especially Flashforward. So when Oxfam offered me the choice of TWO Sawyer novels (the other being Frameshift, which sounded a little too Robin Cook for what I expect from Sawyer), I snatched Factoring Humanity.

What do I expect from Sawyer? Hard physics, multiple universe paradoxes, elegant human relationships. Basically I expect Fringe in book form.

I'm already 86 pages into it, and it's very good so far, if a bit heavy on scientific and psychological theory. It seems to be struggling to find the correct balance between it's science and its humanity, but I'm not far enough in to determine whether these currently disparate elements come together later.

I won't lie, this is the random pick necessary to complete the 3 for 2 deal. That said, I haven't read Garland before, and I have heard that his novels tend to be masterpieces of plotting and suspense without being airplane trash. So this was a curiosity pick.  (Basically I have little to write here because for a change I have few ideas of what to expect!)

It's no secret that I really did not like the movie. That said, I keep reading and re-reading about how impressively Burgess recharacterizes the English language in this novel. By all accounts, the themes that the movie seemed only to grasp at are given full attention in the novel.

Also, I have realized that if I really want to be at all authoritative as a blogger, I need to be open to different types of novels that go outside of my comfort zone. While I have no idea what that zone is (I have read multiple books in pretty much any genre you can think of), I thought that the novel inspiring a movie that I hate is firmly outside of it. So when I spotted it on the shelves, I thought it was time to put aside preconceived notions and give Clockwork Orange another try, and maybe to approach it with a more critical eye.

This one needs no introduction I think. Like Clockwork Orange, part of its reputation rests with its fluid use of the English language. But the plot interests me: the main character is a music and sci-fi nerd who is cursed by the Dominican Republican dictator responsible for his family's exile to the United States.

I have a slight concern, based on what I've read, that this book might turn out to be like Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude, a novel about teenage superheroes and jazz music that commits the unfathomable crime of being BORING.

But this one comes recommended to me by people I trust, so I look forward to it.

Again and again, I've read about how Henry James is one of the greatest literary stylists that America has ever produced. He is apparently one of the earliest experimenters with form and style, and is also considered a master of transnational social commentary, much like Twain or Moliere. All this is high praise indeed.

Given his reputation, I was shocked to discover I had never read ANYTHING by James apart from a few short stories. Filling the gaps, indeed.

I really look forward to this one as it's a ghost story (who doesn't love a good atmospheric scare), but once I'm done I'll delve into the Merchant-Ivory stuff.

(FYI, I do blame Merchant-Ivory for my lack of desire to read James until recently.)

I actually squealed when I saw this one. McInerney's been in my thoughts a lot lately. Bright Lights, Big City, considered his masterpiece, is a book I loved despite every expectation not to, and more surprisingly, it has stuck with me.

Like that novel, I understand this one is loosely autobiographical. But in a little bit of strange yet recently topical gossip, the model ex-girlfriend McInerney alludes to in this novel is based on *drumroll please* Rielle Hunter! AKA the temptress at the heart of the so-out-of-control-you-couldn't-have-made-it-up-if-you-tried John Edwards scandal.

I've always wanted to read this but never gotten around to it (actually, the same goes for the movie). When I graduated from high school and had that endless summer  anticipating college, it was my mission to be as well-read on the 'canon' as possible, so I could have late night conversations with like minded young aesthetes under romantic lighting in various parts of campus.  (This did happen, but 18th century classics were rarely the topic. Ayn Rand yes. Politics yes. But mostly I seemed to gravitate toward lovers of Dashboard Confessional and Jimmy Eat World. And Donnie Darko.)

But this was never top of the list, and it seems to be alluded to a lot more in recent times. But can I just mention how much I loath the cover? Basically I thought, "for God's sake, do we really need to put a bright chick-lit cover on E.M. FORSTER?!? Imagine my surprise when I found out that this cover was printed in 1990, well before the chick-lit genre existed. Still. Ew. Bergdorf font. The end.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is one of the most haunting books ever written, a tale of depravity right up there with Notes on the Underground, and a wantonly unreliable narrator to boot. Before I read Kevin, it had been a long time since I'd read a novel that made me want to shower every time I put it down.

So yes, please, more Shriver. That said, I don't know if she can ever live up to the brilliance of Kevin. But then we'll see.

Also this is a first for me, reading a novel about tennis players. Could hit me too close to home, or be a straight ace (PUN!)

Thoughts on John Updike's Rules for Reviewing

As any of you who have read the reviews featured on this blog know, there's a fairly intense struggle to determine exactly what should be the main approach, the reason for existence of this extra voice in the blog-verse. Of course, one of the beauties of the internet is that you can get published even without any overriding thesis, but I find that lack of direction to be analogous to stepping into a giant abyss.

For years, I have been interested in the philosophy and underlying ethics of any work of art, of its creation, of its presentation, of its place in the universe. So in keeping with that interest, I am going to start looking at different frameworks related to that. Today's debut will be thoughts on John Updike's Rules for Reviewing. I recognize that many of my comments might be internally contradictiory, but these are guerilla observations, and I look forward to arguing about them.

UPDIKE'S RULES FOR REVIEWING

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.
2. Give him enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.
3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.
4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (How astounded and indignant was I, when innocent, to find reviewers blabbing, and with the sublime inaccuracy of drunken lords reporting on a peasants’ revolt, all the turns of my suspenseful and surpriseful narrative! Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the author intends, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later, the blessed fool who picks the volume at random from a library shelf.)
5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s ouevre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?
6. To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in an idealogical battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never (John Aldridge, Norman Podhoretz) try to put the author “in his place,” making him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.

Ok, now that you've read the rules, let's look at them a little more closely. As you can see, there's a little touch of 'Updike's Golden Rule' about the whole thing, with more than a hint of self-preservation.

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

Taken on its own, this rule is ridiculous. Surely the choice of content can be just as disappointing as any technical failings within the book? After all, how many novels do we need that are written by White Male Narcissists about White Male Narcissist midlife crises? (Granted, Updike may not be the best person to ask that question of).

How many novels do we need about post-adolescence ennui? The triteness of this topic was more than enough to reduce my enjoyment of Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise. I couldn't get past the fact that I was 24 and still reading about Holden Caulfield, slightly older but infinitely less wise. Just because it was Fitzgerald's intent to write about post-college drift, doesn't mean I have to judge it purely as a member of the genre of 'novels about post-college drift.'

If an author cannot start with subject matter that is ambitious, or at least interesting, of course that would color my review of it. Just as I couldn't help but blame The Help for being flat when it had such rich potential. Stockett set out to give voice to the black maid whose personal life she knew nothing about. She succeeded in this 100%, and failed on almost every other level. Under Updike's rule, I should ignore every other one of those levels.

To me, this rule sounds too much like saying 'don't bring your life experience and philosophy into your reading and reviewing,' which is inane as an observation, and practically impossible.

2. Give him enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

This rule can only serve MFA style writers. Why is that? One word: NARRATIVE. While a quote is useful to illustrate the overall style of the novel, an extended passage serves little purpose, as it gives you no idea of the scope of the narrative. A novel needs a lot more than pretty sentences to be readable (in fact, novels written with such minute focus tend to drag). So while I agree that the reviewer's job is to give the reader enough information to form his or her own impression, recording extended passages is not the best way to achieve it.

Madame Bovary may now be considered the finest novel ever written, but that's not why it became a bestseller. Everyone who read it in 18th century France saw a version of themselves or their everyday problems in the novel. So in a sense, the job of the reviewer is to convey the relevance of the book to the reader, whether that relevance is cultural, moral, educational or strictly emotional.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

I had to read this five times before I could even understand what it meant. So he's saying you need to find a quote from the author's novel in order to validate your own review? What if your issue is with character, plot, setting, detail or any of those other things that influence the quality of a book? Surely a review is all about creating a fuzzy precis: you want to give a little bite, a slight taste of the novel, without giving away any of the surprises. Let's see if I can break this down by example.

Say I was reviewing Les Miserables. To put it simply (what Updike calls a fuzzy precis), I would summarize it something like follows. "Les Miserables is the story of one man's desperate attempt to find redemption after one life-changing mistake, a quest that involves challenging both the conventions of society and the strong arm of the law." Can there possibly be ONE QUOTE in the entire novel that encompasses that theme?

Granted, that's a very top-level description of the novel's themes. Let's move a little closer in. "Through the course of the novel, Valjean learns that there is no salvation for himself, only for those touched by his revolution against social norms and expectations." Again, same question.

Which brings me to my main point: how can a review that is normally 3 columns on one page provide anything more than a fuzzy precis? And more to the point, would you want it to?

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (How astounded and indignant was I, when innocent, to find reviewers blabbing, and with the sublime inaccuracy of drunken lords reporting on a peasants’ revolt, all the turns of my suspenseful and surpriseful narrative! Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the author intends, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later, the blessed fool who picks the volume at random from a library shelf.)

DO NOT GIVE AWAY THE ENDING. No arguing with that.

I also tend to agree about providing too much plot summary. Honestly, when I read a review, I want a holistic appraisal of a novel's merits, its themes, and whether the narrative ties together. That said, I do not want to know about exactly how the story arrives at its conclusion, I just want assurance that it does arrive in a satisfactory (and preferably unique) manner. Some reviews read like they're giving away the magician's tricks five minutes before the show.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s ouevre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?

I understand the point being made here; points of reference are the quickest shorthand for readers to determine whether a novel succeeds or not without reading anything but the review. But this also reminds me of the dominant creative writing teacher attitude: "Yes it's good, it's exciting, BUT WHY DON'T YOU WRITE MORE LIKE HEMINGWAY!" In which case the fault is absolutely with the reader.

Also, this rule is predicated on the assumption that one work can be objectively cited as more or less successful than another. How do you prove this, do you nitpick at sentences? In that case, see my response to Rule 2. If not, how do you judge the totality of a work against another? My opinion of Anna Karenina was tempered because I thought it had the same plot as Madame Bovary but wasn't executed as well. But I know a hundred people who would say the exact opposite, and I think both sides can justify themselves pretty well. So if I see a sentence in a review like, "The author would have been well served to refer to the exemplar of the female adultery story, Anna Karenina," then the trust is broken between me and the reviewer. And there's no reason for that sentence to really be there except to express the reviewer's own opinion on an unrelated work and then create false equivalences.

6 (ish). To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in an idealogical battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never (John Aldridge, Norman Podhoretz) try to put the author “in his place,” making him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.

Principally, I agree with this rule completely. Practically speaking though, I'm not sure how feasible it is, especially with books; so few make it to the level of societal conversation that I can imagine professional reviewers are forced to read them even if they are predisposed against them. Frankly, some books just fail to provide any joy in reading them, and if that is so, then it becomes the responsibility of the reviewer to convey that.

But I subscribe to the Nick Hornby theory of reading: if you really really don't like it, don't feel obliged to finish it, so then you don't feel resentful towards the author and the novel for taking up your time and preventing you from reading something else.

As for the point about never putting an author in his place to make an ideological point, I've already broken that in the course of this review by employing the phrase "White Male Narcissist." But in Updike's time, the majority of the literati were white men. Now, the majority of readers and writers are women. It is absolutely an ideological concern that novels about male midlife crises are considered "Great American Novels" while novels about female midlife crises are considered women's fiction, so often I am compelled to fight back against that. But should I be doing that as a reviewer? Probably not, but it's impossible to leave such concerns at the door.

I do agree that in an ideal world, you should surrender yourself to a novel free of any knowledge of its reputation, and review it on those merits. But in this era of universal media saturation, I don't always think that's possible.

CONCLUSION
What is the purpose of a review, at the end of the day? It is not the same as criticism. It serves to inform people's awareness of art that is being produced, and enable them to make their own judgment. If I were to follow Updike's rules, I don't think that I'd actually be providing enough information for a reader to make that decision, and would in fact be misleading them on multiple points. (Now off to find objective proof of this in reviews written by Updike, so I can discuss this in more than just abstract terms in a future post. I might even be proven wrong.)

Kathryn Stockett: The Help

The Help is a book I enjoyed despite a million reasons not to. The writing is clunky, the story frequently crosses the line into melodrama, there are many side plots that don't quite resolve, and it commits the ultimate sin - a blonde white woman writes in the voice of multiple African-American maidservants. The author's note goes some way in resolving these issues (obviously Stockett was aware that these elements might be dealbreakers). She makes clear that the white protagonist is a stand-in for herself, and the black protagonists stand in for the imagined lives of her beloved family maid. Like Skeeter, Stockett lost her maid very suddenly and realized, to her sadness, that she knew nothing about the woman who was the most important caregiver in her life due to the inattention of her blood family.

The explanation Stockett provides helped me to forgive the use (overuse!) of written dialect during the Minny and Aibileen chapters, which is jarring at best. But that's been covered extensively by other reviewers, so I won't dwell, except to say that by the end of the novel, this choice isn't as offensive as I thought it might be. Previously voiceless African-American characters are given rich, three dimensional attention. We come to love them, and the very threat of anything bad happening to them burns our hearts. But apart from Skeeter, the Stockett stand-in character, the white women in the novel are written with no such attention. The story of white trash Celia had so much potential but was ultimately wasted.

The book is tagged as 'the other side of Gone With the Wind,' but I thought it more accurately represented 'the other side of the Betty Draper household.' This period in the 1960s was as much a transforming era for white women as for black: the identities of many black women were sublimated by the needs of their white mistresses, whose identities were in turn defined only by their husbands' needs and ambitions. I'd say the biggest problem in the book lies in the lack of definition of that second disempowerment; there is absolutely nothing in the book to humanize the 'evil white mistresses,' nothing to explain or even contextualize their brutality. As a consequence, we end up with rubbish like "Oh, we love her like family, but can you imagine if she turned up at the DAR meeting?" The Help is not a social comedy, and such flippancy is not welcome.

If you took the book at face value, you would believe that the reason these 'evil white women' maintain these attitudes is snobbery and a particularly perverse version of 'keeping up with the joneses', downplaying the more insidious societal frameworks that actually entrenched these power structures. Again and again, the men in the novel (including the senators and governors who are actually responsible for segregationist policies) are shown to be more compassionate and to have a more thoughtful perspective on the issue, even if political reality prevents them from acting. The women, on the other hand, just follow what their friends do, and then brag about it. It's impossible to believe that an entire social structure could have been maintained on so flimsy a foundation.

This leads to a secondary problem, where plot threads dealing with the 'evil white mistresses' are not resolved in any satisfactory manner. Nowhere is the problem more evident than with the 'villain' of the piece, an ex-sorority shrew named Hilly. You can almost see her twirling her mustache in the last 3rd of the novel. Before that, she is certainly a horrible woman, but you can see that many of her negative aspects come from a limitless quest for power, coupled with a heinous lack of self-awareness. Then, all of a sudden, she becomes Dr. Evil, which makes absolutely no sense for a character who's entire reason for being is standing up as the voice of moral righteousness in the community. So Stockett's choice for Hilly to take this turn on the road to an evil mountain lair does not serve as a revelation of deep seated hatred so much as it becomes a magical plot cop-out.

But even that story does not peter out as badly as Celia Foote's. Celia is introduced as a white trash interloper who married the uptown boy that Hilly once had her eye on. Stockett repeatedly alludes to the horrors of Celia's home life that she would do anything to avoid, but never fills in any blanks beyond that. We learn at various points that she's a drunk, that she's unable to carry a baby to term, that she really could be the town slattern if she so aspired. That she looks like Marilyn Monroe. That she is the laziest human being alive. But all of these points are mere attributes, they do not amount to character. In every one of her scenes, I was waiting for some sort of point to the story that failed to materialize. If the only point is that indentured servitude is not the sorriest fate in the South, well that's pretty weak, and grossly undermines the stories of the black women.

But I suspect that the real problem is that there are too many characters and too many stories and too many points to make and so they all suffer in the end. So many characters are introduced, and then take up so many pages of the novel, and yet they don't change in the slightest. We see no development, no change in their attitude one way or the other, which should happen given how many words are devoted to them.

But, as I mentioned, the novel was not really intended to tell their stories, but to bring out the stories of the voiceless servants who have always been treated as background rather than foreground. But let's be honest, the book is short, and there is ample room to give enough detail for characters to be more than caricatures.

I think the most important thing to keep in mind for any new readers of the book is that in the end, it's a light book that's not really intended to take readers out of their comfort zone, but to remind them of the basic human compassion that can shine through even in the most humiliating of circumstances. It definitely succeeds in that, even though it doesn't have the socio-anthropological intrigue that it could have had.