Book Review: “The Wife” by Meg Wolitzer

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book review, meg wolitzer, the wife

Amazon recommended “The Interestings” by Meg Wolitzer to me, but $12.99 is too much to pay for an e-book, by my lights, unless it’s by an author whose work I already know. I’d never heard of Wolitzer (I had maybe heard of her mother, also a novelist, whose books may or may not have been on a vast recommended reading list handed out by the creative writing teacher I had as an undergraduate; I don’t remember — or maybe I saw them at a bookstore once or something).

I did click through to Meg Wolitzer’s other books, and found a few that were less than $4, including this one, “The Wife.” I happened to be in the “contemporary literary” notch of my rotation (it goes like this: contemporary literary, science fiction or fantasy, non-fiction, free Gutenberg classic, then back to contemporary literary), so I decided to give it a shot.

My contemporary lit reading was most intense in the late eighties. My touchstones: John Irving, Raymond Carver, Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson. So you see that I’ve got a lot of catching up to do. “Catching up” means understanding the field at large, not just enjoying things I already know I am going to enjoy. Reading random writers whose work is critically acclaimed but whose names are unknown to me is one way to do that. Right? So.

“The Wife” is about a successful, womanizing, Philip-Roth-like “big novel” writer, and his second wife, who had at one time wanted to be a writer, but gave it up to support his ambitions. The conflict comes out of the husband’s serial infidelity with college-age fangirls, and the wife’s professional resentment. The milieu is decidedly privileged: they meet at Smith College, where she’s a student and he’s a professor. They move to the Greenwich Village of the 50s, where they briefly live a “penniless” Bohemian lifestyle, hanging out with famous writers and roustabouts, until the husband’s career kicks into high gear. After that: dinner parties, academic functions, award banquets, and highballs. In the first few pages of Chapter One, the wife, now in her sixties, decides she wants to get a divorce, while sitting beside her husband in an airplane on their way to Finland, to pick up his biggest award yet. Most of the rest of the book is a flashback detailing their marriage history.

In a lot of ways, this is the “Wide Sargasso Sea” version of the kind of novels the husband undoubtedly writes, the feminist counter-narrative: what about that faithful, loyal (or crazy, bitter) wife (or ex-wife) who’s always there, off to the side, locked in the figurative attic, in any given Roth or Updike or Cheever book about a successful middle-aged-crazy man? Here’s what’s about her.

If Wolitzer wanted to sell us on the idea that female writers are not taken as seriously as male writers (which she does appear to want to do), then setting it in the 50s is kind of self-defeating. To discover that a Roth manque lives in a delusional world of male privilege is not surprising. Much more interesting if the husband and wife had been from our generation — how would a Jonathan Franzen or a Michael Chabon look to us from his wife’s (or ex-wife’s) perspective? I don’t mean to pick on those guys in particular. I’m just saying. As it is, we get to dismiss the sexism, if we are of a mind to: “Look at those silly ‘Madmen of literature’ from the middle of last century, ignoring the talented women in their midst. I’m glad that gender equality in the book world has been solved!” Which — I don’t think I even need to say this to you, but I will — it has not. Not even close. Yes, we have our Toni Morrisons and our Margaret Atwoods, just like the 50s had its Lillian Hellmans and Mary McCarthys, but for the most part the books women write get ignored, or praised faintly, dismissed as meditations on gender.

Which is kind of what I’ve done here, for example.

Despite all that, I didn’t mind reading it. I liked it okay. I doubt that I’ll read a lot more by Meg Wolitzer, but maybe.

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Books: My Notes on “The Sisters Brothers” and My Notes on Everybody Else’s Notes on “The Sisters Brothers”

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book review, patrick dewitt, self-help, sisters brothers, western

I enjoyed Patrick deWitt’s “The Sisters Brothers” quite a bit. It is fun to read in exactly the same way that “True Grit” (the Coen Bros. version) is fun to watch, or “Red Dead Redemption” is fun to play: no more great, no less great, than those things. It is the story of two hired guns who find themselves in a slightly slipstream-y, slightly steam-punky kind of situation, in the midst of the California Gold Rush, and their subsequent adventures and misadventures. The narrator speaks in exactly that blend of plainspokenness and stilted formality that I’ve always loved in certain stories about the rural US (think of John Goodman as the Bible salesman in “O Brother, Where Art Thou” for example). I enjoyed it a great deal. That’s all I did: enjoy it.

“The Sisters Brothers” by Patrick deWitt

In other words, despite being a very fine, high-quality piece of writing that was marketed as “literature,” this book is, in fact, an entertainment. It is not a font of great wisdom and guidance. It is not something to use as a guide for living. It will not change your life.

But yeah. When you’re reading on the Kindle app for iPad (and probably when you’re reading on the Kindle proper, I dunno), anything that somebody else has underlined or noted in the book shows up, for you, as having been underlined and noted. I can probably turn this feature off, but I’m lazy. Anyway, what I’ve noticed, about this book and every other damned book, is that people seem to zero in on the most banal, self-help-y sentences to highlight, regardless of the context in which the banal, self-help-y sentences were originally presented. Do people really read specifically to find, surgically, these nuggets of received wisdom? Wouldn’t they be better off just looking at needlepoint samplers or Hallmark cards? Seems like it would be a more efficient way to achieve the goal.

For example, one of the characters, a pompous windbag who has lived a very bad life very recklessly, makes some portentous statements about the purpose of life and the way to live it, during his long, extended, theatrical death scene — and I’ll be damned if people didn’t underline those obviously empty statements, like dogs in Pavlov’s lab, just because they fit the cliched form of wisdom, even though the author clearly intends us to feel contempt, or, at the very least, pity, regarding this man and his words.

I suppose seeing a palimpsest of what other people have found notable in a book does add a new dimension to the reading experience. I wish those other readers were as smart, as sensitive, and as articulate as I am, is all. Ha!

Books: “Marvel Comics: the Untold Story” by Sean Howe

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book review, history, marvel, Marvel Comics, sean howe

One of my friends complained to me about this book that it gave “short shrift to the really interesting years at Marvel” — which years were, by his lights, the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby years, essentially the 1960s, give or take a few years on either end. I disagree. Yes, those years are really interesting, but they’ve been pounded into the ground, in the fan press and elsewhere. I’ve heard that song, over and over and over and over. That song had already played out several times by the time I even got to the dance floor.

“My” Marvel was 70s Marvel, post-Stan, post-Jack, an era when every other month, it seemed, there was a new editor-in-chief, and the company sold itself a few times, to a few weird-sounding other companies. “My” Marvel culminates in the Jim Shooter era, with most of the talent that fans had always associated with Marvel — even Rascally Roy Thomas! — decamping for DC, the cross-town competition, and the company falling into bankruptcy. I’ve always found that era fascinating, and not just because it coincided with my fanboy years. What was Marvel without Stan Lee (who remained nominally in charge, but nobody, nobody, nobody — not even a 12-year-old kid in Alabama — believed that)? What was Marvel without Jack Kirby? What was Marvel without what had made it Marvel? That’s the question those people — Roy Thomas, Marv Wolfman, Steve Gerber, Steve Englehart, Sal Buscema, Klaus Jansen, etc., etc., etc. — had to try to answer for themselves, and for the fans. It could be a tremendous story: keeping the dream alive when the primary dreamers have woken and walked away.

This book covers all that stuff more systematically than I’ve seen it covered elsewhere, though I personally had already read quite a bit of Howe’s source material. And that’s maybe the thing about this book that ultimately disappoints a bit: it’s not a massive undertaking of original, dispassionate, even-handed research, the way that Gerard Jones’ history of DC Comics, Men of Tomorrow, was. Howe collects and summarizes information that was already publicly available, mostly from interviews in The Comics Journal. Having someone comb through all that fan cruft (yes, TCJ, I still think of you as a fanzine) and create a step-by-step narrative of the disparate and contradictory pieces is helpful, though. And that, along with conducting a bunch of interviews with many of the still-living primary figures himself, appears to be the extent of what Howe has done. Which is a lot. Let me be clear. I liked it, and I recommend it, but the definitive history of Marvel Comics — the one that steps past public statements and the self-aggrandizing memories of comic book creators talking to sympathetic fan interviewers, and gets down and dirty into real historical research — has yet to be produced.

Elsewhere on the Web

Robert Stanley Martin reviewed the book in more depth than I have, for The Hooded Utilitarian:

Howe is also apparently a fan of several 1970s and early ‘80s Marvel titles, such as Doug Moench’s Master of Kung Fu and Steve Gerber’s Howard the Duck, and he loses all perspective when it comes to them. His discussion of the events leading up to the 1982 cancellation of Master of Kung Fu is the low point of the book: poorly researched, manipulatively written, and borderline libelous. (The passive-aggressive effort to blame Marvel for the death of artist Gene Day is repugnant.) The amount of attention given to Howard the Duck co-creator Steve Gerber is excessive, to say the least. And ironically, the most historically significant aspect of Gerber’s relationship with the company–his 1981 lawsuit to regain ownership of Howard–is only referred to a few times in passing. A reasonably detailed account would seem essential. …more

Panio Gianopoulos interviewed Howe for Salon Magazine:

In an interview with Salon, Howe discussed his landmark account of American mythmaking — along with his quasi-Shakespearean portrayal of Marvel as it moves from spirited upstart to ruthless corporate colossus. We also chatted about more lighthearted topics, such as Stan Lee’s prophetic powers, the noir-ish appeal of Daredevil and how the X-Men were conceived in the Apple store. …more

NBA Finalists 2012: A Hologram for the King

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2012, book review, dave eggers, Fiction, finalists, king abdullah economic city, national book awards, novel

I only knew Dave Eggers’ work by reputation, so I was surprised by how clean and controlled this book — especially its prose — turned out to be. I had expected something mawkish and self-celebratory. Eggers attracts a lot of ironically detached venom online. One would like to say it’s simply because of his success, but other writers who are at least as wildly successful (let’s say Junot Diaz) don’t cause eyerolls when their names are mentioned. Maybe he’s still living with the consequences of the cheek of titling his first book what he did.

Not much happens in the first two-thirds of A Hologram for the King, which is fine. Stasis has been baked into the conceit. A fifty-something washed-up salesman for a large IT firm, and his much-younger team of technicians, have been sent to camp out in a tent in Saudi Arabia waiting to give a flashy sales presentation to King Abdullah, who, Godot-like, continually fails to show up. While waiting, the salesman muses on his successes and failures in life, which seem to revolve around the theme of globalization, conveniently enough for the efforts of a “serious novelist.” He also explores the nearby desert, where a multibillion-dollar Dubai-like “planned city” boondoggle is attempting to come to life. This is a real thing, apparently: the King Abdullah Economic City. That boondoggle, of course, is precisely what has driven our hero and his company to the desert. In the last third of the book, he has a set of surreal, semi-violent adventures with some of the locals, then makes the sex with a lady doctor, and then he realizes that he is doomed. The end.

I liked it well enough.

It’s definitely in the “middle aged crazy” genre that my college friends and I used to make fun of. All the earmarks are there: formerly successful man who is now struggling after a recent divorce; clueless offspring who completely depend on him and whose disappointment in his failure is the motivating force that keeps him trying to succeed; unlikely sexiness to women he has just met; utter, irrevocable regret and failure dogging his every step, etc. It could easily be a mid-eighties Irving, Updike, Roth, or Ford. The only difference is that I didn’t read those books when I, myself, was middle-aged. That’s a big difference, though. I find I have more compassion for the befuddling failures of middle-age now than I did when I was in my twenties and planning to rule the world.

Elsewhere on the Web:

Because, I think, of the timeliness and trendiness of his topic set (globalization in this book in particular), as well as his brashness and whatever, Pico Iyer of the New York Times believes that Eggers may be “our new-millennium Norman Mailer.” I wasn’t aware that each millennium had to have one, and (what’s more vexing) the distribution pattern seems wonky as fuck (the last-millennium Norman Mailer occurring so near the end of the cycle, the new one occurring so near the beginning, means that they came only a few decades apart, leaving a gap of a thousand more years or so before the next, whose work will surely be much more difficult due to the delay). But what do I know? I know nothing.

Like Mailer, he’s almost underrated precisely because he’s so ubiquitous and dares us to mock him with his unapologetic ambitions. Yet where Mailer was consciously working in a deeply American grain, with his talk of revolution and transcendence, Eggers speaks for a new America that has to think globally and can’t be sure where the country fits on the planetary screen. And where Mailer was bent on showing us how America could remake the world, Eggers, with ferocious energy and versatility, has been studying how the world is remaking America. … more

Cressida Leyshon’s interview with Eggers for the New Yorker’s “Page Turner” blog is worth reading:

It started with thinking about this businessman, Alan Clay. He’d been kicking around in my head for a couple years—his state of mind, his background, his place in the economy and in his life. He was a salesman, and was then in manufacturing, and like so many in that line of work, his place now is unclear, his expertise superfluous. I always knew the book would find him adrift, but when I heard about the King Abdullah Economic City, it seemed inevitable that Alan would be there, not exactly knowing why, but waiting for the king to determine his fate. … more

NBA Finalists 2012: ‘The Round House’ by Louise Erdrich

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2012, book review, Fiction, finalists, literature, louise erdrich, national book awards, round house

Louise Erdrich was one of a small handful of contemporary writers whose careers were superhot when I was in creative writing school back in the mid-to-late-80s. The others were Raymond Carver, Toni Morrison, and, oh, I don’t know, let’s say Bobby Ann Mason. These were the days before DFW and Eugenides and Lethem and Chabon and all their clever cohort. Minimalistic language outlining short, pithy narratives featuring underprivileged (or, at best, lower-middle) characters were the order of the day. That’s the context in which I originally discovered her. Love Medicine, her first, was on every teacher’s suggested reading list, was wedged under the armpit of every graduate student’s plaid flannel shirt. I don’t much remember Love Medicine, except to remember that I liked it, but I was playing catch-up in those days, trying to compete with students who had grown up in, it seemed to me at the time, much more literary and literate contexts than my pipeline-welder family had been able to provide. I was reading three or four books a day. I’d go to the library, check them all out, then go home and sit in the bathtub, taking them one at a time off the pile beside me until I was done with all of them, and pruny to boot. I had dropped out of school, but I was still living on my student loans. I figured this was what I was supposed to be doing: read everything worth reading. Maybe it was. A little bit later, I got snagged into my dotcom career and lost track of the literary thread until just recently.

I don’t have quite as much free time as I did back then, but I have embarked on a similarly ambitious reading project: I’m trying to read all the National Book Award finalists, which were announced October 10, before the winner is revealed on November 14. The Round House is the third of five that I’ve read. It’s the only book on the list by an author I had read before. (It’s kind of weird and surprising that I haven’t read Dave Eggers, and maybe I have — something short and online, probably — but I’ve never read one of his books, for sure.)

The Round House starts with the rape and attempted murder-by-immolation of an Ojibwe woman on a reservation in North Dakota by someone who knows enough about the complexities of the law relating to tribal autonomy to deliberately confuse and cloud the issue of where, how, and who should prosecute him — meaning that he gets off scott free, as far as the law is concerned. The family of the victim commences to try to find whatever justice it can, and then, eventually, does. If that sounds like the setup for a crime thriller, it should. This is sort of a crime thriller, except that it has much more going on from a character and cultural perspective than most crime novels. What really sticks out in the reader’s mind is not the plot, though the plot is as present in the book as it needs to be. The real reason to read the book is to spend time with the characters and the milieu and the language — which I guess, ultimately, is what defines it as “literary” in the traditional sense. Right?

As for the book’s value as an entertaining read (even when I read literary novels, I want them to entertain me, and that’s why I read them): I’d say it’s the strongest of the three so far, the one I’d vote for if I had a vote, with the caveat that I still have two more books to go, so that judgement could change.

At first, I was afraid it would be nothing but depressing, but it was not nothing but depressing. There are books about rape that just circle the pain, understandably, understandably — but unpleasantly. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to subject myself to a book like that. I’m glad that that’s not what it turned out to be. I’m not saying that those books shouldn’t exist, or that I never want to read them. But I hardly ever do want to read them. I wanted to read this one. It didn’t drill me with the unpleasantness of its subject matter so hard that I felt violated myself. (And, again, I’m not saying books should never try to make me feel that way; I’m just saying that that’s not the way that I wanted to feel).

But it’s not the other kind of rape story, either: the uplifting, inspirational kind. There is no self-help vibe. Erdrich doesn’t sentimentalize her character’s response to the horrible thing. While it’s true that the characters put the horrible thing behind them by the end of the book, their recovery feels inevitable and organic, not forced or exemplary. It kind of happens in the cracks and corners of their lives, despite, not because of, what they do — like the trees that grow up through the concrete foundations of the house, in the first few paragraphs of the book. Their recovery is a relief to them, and to the reader, but it does not feel like a victory. It just feels simply like living. The characters, especially the protagonist, are too lively, too full of mischief and reality, to succumb to malaise, and so, eventually, they just refuse to. Maybe they end up a little more bent and weirdly-souled than they would have otherwise. But they make it anyway. It’s like that. That’s all it is.

The characterizations are really, really strong, especially the protagonist, the 13-year-old son of the woman who was raped. These people invaded my nighttime dreams while I was reading the book. My subconscious mind wanted to continue to interact with them, have conversations with them, wondered what they were doing. That’s always a good sign of a good book, at least by my standards, which are not strictly “literary” but overlap, sometimes, with “literary,” I guess.

I’m sure my professors and classmates would be horrified by my standards of judgement these days. Ah well.

Two more to go before the announcement: This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz, a collection of short stories, and Eggars’ A Hologram for the King. I might just finish in time!

Elsewhere on the Web:

Erdrich herself has gone through some nightmarish family drama as an adult — drama that really, no-lie, reached tabloid levels of sensationalism and sadness and scandal. Bookslut’s summary of what went down is fascinating, in a want-to-but-can’t-look-away kind of way:

What really happened may forever be a mystery to outsiders, but it began when Louise brought in a therapist to help their kids deal with Dad’s depression. That therapist contacted the authorities, stating she suspected child abuse. … read more

In this interview with a New York Times blogger, Erdrich talks about the legal and political realities at the heart of the story.

Right now tribal courts can only prosecute tribal members. The problem is that over 80% of the perpetrators of rapes on reservations are non-Native. Most are not prosecuted. The bill went forward only to stall in the House, blocked by Republican votes. Hate to say it, but that one’s on them. … more

NBA Finalists 2012: Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

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ben fountain, book review, Fiction, iraq war, literary, national book awards, nominees

I’m trying to read all the National Book Awards finalists in the fiction category this year before the winner is announced (which doesn’t give me a lot of time, so I may not make it). I just finished the first one, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain.

It’s about a group of soldiers who were in a firefight in Iraq that was captured on tape by an embedded Fox News reporter. They’ve become “heroes” in the media, but their fucked-up real lives haven’t changed much. The book takes place on the last day of a “victory tour” they have been sent on by Army PR, shaking the hands of wealthy and famous people — right before being sent back to the war for another year. On this last day, they are to be part of the halftime show at a Dallas Cowboys football game along with Destiny’s Child (the descriptions of the pop group — their inhuman cool, their bizarre way of walking, their alien demeanor — are some of my favorite in the book). “Bravo Company” (as they have been inaccurately labelled by the media) are also in the throes of negotiating a Hollywood film deal with a character who manages to be both shady and sincere-seeming at the same time (which strikes me as very true). And one of them, our POV dude, falls in love with a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader, who falls in love with him back. And so on. Did I say that their lives haven’t changed much? Despite all of the above, they still seem like fuckups to me, and to themselves. I think that’s one of the points.

There’s some really good stuff here, complicated by some overly literary stuff. The POV seems to be hovering within/on the shoulder/close to the consciousness of a 19-year-old grunt, the titular Billy Lynn, whose lack of education is a plot point, but the narrator comes up with some outrageously sophisticated whoppers of metaphors (football shoulderpads stacked like bodies in ancient Christian catacombs beneath Rome) that the grunt would never imagine. I know the narrator is not necessarily the very same voice as the POV character, but I’m used to the two being more close to one another, and the difference jars, until you get used to it.

On the plus side: this book features one of the funniest portrayals of what it might be like to feel a PTSD rage coming on (in the middle of that halftime show, with fireworks and marching bands and shuffling people on every side — the kinds of stimuli that scream “ambush” to a soldier) and choosing to tamp it down because, dude, that would be embarrassing.

I may write a longer blog post about this book after I’ve thought about it some more, or maybe after I’ve read all the rest of the finalists.

I did like it better than most literary books I’ve read lately. But I’ve hated most literary books I’ve read lately, so that’s not saying a lot. I’m not feeling it as a National Book Award winner. If it does win, I suspect that that will be at least partly because of Subject Matter rather than Literary Merit. The judges want to nod in the direction of something we should all be thinking about. And, yes, we should all be thinking about our veterans as they return from these wars. So I don’t blame the judges. These awards need to serve some kind of function, and I guess a political/civic function is more useful than their stated aim anyway. Right?

Speaking of: I guess I’ll read the other Iraq war one, The Yellow Birds, next.

Elsewhere on the web:

Everything is Political, an Interview with Ben Fountain (The Millions):

From the start — beginning with the first impulse for the story — it seemed that the book needed to have a particular attitude in the language, a hopefully headlong, borderline reckless mashup of high and low, ineffable and vulgar, etc. If it was going to happen, it had to happen at the level of the sentence and build from there. There was a sound, as much as anything, that the book needed to have, and that’s what I went after in the writing, trying to home in on the sound of it and find the words for it on the page. Usually I had to work it over and over to get it right, but that’s true of pretty much everything I do. Even the “simple” sentences seem to come hard. … more

Ellen Wernecke’s Review of “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (The Onion AVClub):

Writer Ben Fountain was introduced to the world through a 2008 Malcolm Gladwell essay about artistic talent. In it, Gladwell questions the model of the young prodigy, juxtaposing Fountain—who wrote full-time for 18 years before the publication of his short-story collection Brief Encounters With Che Guevara—and wunderkind Jonathan Safran Foer. But Gladwell’s questions about the ebb and flow of creativity won’t be settled by Fountain’s first novel, which is great fun until it gets bogged down in its own meaningfulness. … more

Trawling Gutenberg: A Hazard of New Fortunes

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book review, free ebooks, iBooks, literature, new york, William Dean Howells

William Dean Howells

Most of us are familiar with the great figures of 19th century American fiction: Twain, Melville, Hawthorne, Poe. We know less about the context in which they wrote, and in which they were read: the other writers on the scene, the competition they snarked about and the cliques they joined. It’s like being presented with a map showing Oslo, Paris, Dublin and Athens all by themselves, and then trying to imagine the rest of Europe, the spaces and cultures in between, and how these very, very different places fit together enough to be considered part of a single whole.

William Dean Howells was perhaps the most important literary figure in his day, to those who lived his day with him. To the rest of us, though, he’s just another moustachio’d dude with three names, wearing uncomfortable-looking woolen clothes. No, he’s not the one who wrote “Thanatopsis” (that’s William Cullen Bryant), nor is he the one who made the famous “Cross of Gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic National Convention, in favor of bimetalism (that’s William Bryan Jennings). This one, William Dean Howells, was the longtime editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and then, later, Harper’s Magazine. He was the first president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and widely feted as the “Dean of American Letters.” He was a personal friend of Sam Clemens. He was the publisher, maybe even the discoverer, of Henry James. And so on.

I chose A Hazard of New Fortunes for this first “real” installment of Trawling Gutenberg because I’m still on my New York City reading kick, and this one nicely fills the chronological gap between Washington Irving and Henry James. Also, Howells was kind of cute, in a Chelsea bear bar kind of way. I am not above informationally stalking the attractive male dead (ask me about the hot, hot, hot but unfortunately-named and ultimately ill-starred Harry Bolles someday, for example; I know all there is to know).

On to the book itself. I’m sorry to report that it’s a difficult slog.

Henry James famously admonished fiction writers to “show, don’t tell.” We can hardly fault Howells for not following the future advice of his own young discovery. But still, as a modern reader, it’s hard to get through all the telling that goes on here, undramatized and hypercompressed information that we are much more accustomed to seeing played out anecdotally rather than summarily. For example, try choking down this big old clot of expository, action-free prose:

They often accused each other of being selfish and indifferent, but she
knew that he would always sacrifice himself for her and the children; and
he, on his part, with many gibes and mockeries, wholly trusted in her.
They had grown practically tolerant of each other’s disagreeable traits;
and the danger that really threatened them was that they should grow too
well satisfied with themselves, if not with each other. They were not
sentimental, they were rather matter-of-fact in their motives; but they
had both a sort of humorous fondness for sentimentality. They liked to
play with the romantic, from the safe vantage-ground of their real
practicality, and to divine the poetry of the commonplace. Their peculiar
point of view separated them from most other people, with whom their
means of self-comparison were not so good since their marriage as before.
Then they had travelled and seen much of the world, and they had formed
tastes which they had not always been able to indulge, but of which they
felt that the possession reflected distinction on them. It enabled them
to look down upon those who were without such tastes; but they were not
ill-natured, and so they did not look down so much with contempt as with
amusement. In their unfashionable neighborhood they had the fame of being
not exclusive precisely, but very much wrapped up in themselves and their
children.

The main thing this book has going for it, to the contemporary reader, is the long sequence in which Mr. and Mrs. March, the protagonists, look for an apartment in New York City. It was apparently as difficult and frustrating an experience immediately after the Civil War, and in exactly the same ways, as it is today. If you’ve ever made that search yourself — as I have — you can’t help but enjoy those parts of the book.

But even that stuff is marred by, um, other stuff:

One of those colored men who soften the trade of janitor in many of the
smaller apartment-houses in New York by the sweetness of their race let
the Marches in, or, rather, welcomed them to the possession of the
premises by the bow with which he acknowledged their permit. It was a
large, old mansion cut up into five or six dwellings, but it had kept
some traits of its former dignity, which pleased people of their
sympathetic tastes. The dark-mahogany trim, of sufficiently ugly design,
gave a rich gloom to the hallway, which was wide and paved with marble;
the carpeted stairs curved aloft through a generous space.

“There is no elevator?” Mrs. March asked of the janitor.

He answered, “No, ma’am; only two flights up,” so winningly that she
said, “Oh!” in courteous apology, and whispered to her husband, as she followed
lightly up, “We’ll take it, Basil, if it’s like the rest.”

“If it’s like him, you mean.”

“I don’t wonder they wanted to own them,” she hurriedly philosophized.
“If I had such a creature, nothing but death should part us, and I should
no more think of giving him his freedom!”

“No; we couldn’t afford it,” returned her husband.

I know that these kinds of conversations probably happened among middle-class couples in the wake of the Civil War in America, even among sympathetic, educated, north-eastern, probably Republican (meaning: liberal and elitist) couples. To pretend otherwise would be to do a disservice to our history and to the people (which is to say, all of us) still living with the consequences of the choices our ancestors made (or had forced upon them) vis a vis race, and slavery, and human rights, and war. I’m not asking for a Politically Correct purge here. It’s not that I hold this kind of stuff against Howells personally.

But, dude, it jars.

It jars in a way that Huckleberry Finn’s racism does not. Huck’s racism, or, to be more specific, his belief that he should be racist, even though his actions (his “sins,” as he calls them) prove that he is not, is very much the point of the book, the real journey. Here, casual racism is just local color thrown in at random and forgotten, as if it didn’t matter. And for these characters, it didn’t. Which, in turn, makes them feel completely alien to me, and keeps me from wanting to hang out with them.

I wouldn’t recommend this book to be read for pleasure. As a historical artifact, or even as an object of literary study, sure. But not for fun, or enlightenment, or any other reason I can think of. I haven’t given up on Howells himself, though, and reserve the right to return to his body of work at some date in the future. I think maybe his literary criticism or other non-fiction might be worth looking into. We’ll see.

Trawling Gutenberg, an Introduction

Tags

book review, books, gutenberg, literature, public domain

The first time I stumbled upon the Gutenberg archive, in 1995 or so, using my ISP’s proprietary browser, on my brand new “486 computer” from the JC Penney catalog, I thought it would be awesome, reading all these free books. I downloaded some of them (well, okay, hundreds) in text format. Maybe imported them into Word and messed with the formatting a little bit, to try to make them more readable on my monitor. And I remember not reading the ones I downloaded. Not any of them. Nothing. The first few pages of The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf, and that was it.

Now that I have an iPad, I’m finally taking advantage of Gutenberg in a more meaningful way. Since iBooks uses the epub format, one of many formats available from Gutenberg, I was able to slurp down hundreds (well, okay, thousands) of books to my device, representing hours upon hours of subway reading, in one browsing session. Took me a couple of days to delete most of them unread. I still have a hoarding problem when it comes to free ebooks. I did, at least, read a few of them this time, and plan to read a few more.

Johannes Gutenberg

Here is a fact. Most of the books in Gutenberg are utter crap. There are the classics you’ve heard of. There’s Cory Doctorow. And then there’s the treacly, sentimental, smug, pompous, (usually) Victorian crap. Now don’t get me wrong. I love Gutenberg, the idea of it and, yes, the execution of it. These books need preservation and distribution. No question. But let’s face facts. Even at the free price point, it’s a less-than-optimal consumer experience. So much stuff. So little of it worthwhile to even the most intellectual of general-interest readers. What we need is somebody willing to read everything — or as much of it as is possible to read — and report back on what’s worthwhile, skipping the obvious classics, of course (because everybody already knows that Moby Dick is worthwhile). The goal would be to find underappreciated gems in there.

Ladies and gentlemen, I propose to give it a go. I’ll dive in and read stuff that I’ve never heard of, and then report back here on what I thought about it. Some of the stuff will probably be more famous than I realize it is (“stuff I’ve never heard of” doesn’t mean nobody has). Some of the stuff will be less famous than it deserves to be. And most of it will be crap. I’ll probably spare you my thoughts on the crap. Which means it may take a long, long, long time for my next post in the “trawling gutenberg” category. We’ll see.