One of Our Small Eggs Will Not Hurt You: Emma, Volume I

Posted on December 17, 2015 by Dorian Stuber under Emma200, Uncategorized

Dolce Belezza has organized a readalong of Emma to celebrate the 200^th anniversary of its publication on December 23, 1815.

I’m a notorious bailer on readalongs: they always sound so exciting, especially as they often legitimate my buying yet another book. Then the demands of life and my seemingly constitutive inability to follow a reading plan—which is pretty rich coming from someone who designs syllabi for a living—get in the way. But this one coincides with the end of the semester, so I’m crossing my fingers I’ll actually keep up with it.

Emma is divided into three volumes. Here are a few thoughts on the first.

I’ve read Emma before, quite a while ago now, thirteen years ago in fact. I know exactly because I read it in the weeks before I married my wife in August 2002. I don’t ever remember thinking it directly at the time, but now I fancy I must have made some unconscious connection between the weddings in Austen’s novels and my own. At any rate, I remember spending several pleasurable lazy days—of the kind available only to grad students, when you have almost nothing to do for years except of course for one big thing, a thing so terrifying it makes almost anything else seem a much better idea that must be pursued immediately—I remember several hot sticky air-conditioner-less days reading this novel on an old couch in the apartment that was about to become our apartment.

My memory of reading Emma is vivid. But my memory of Emma itself is not.

Maybe that’s because, as is clear to me now, Emma is a story about the failure of interpretation. It’s about missed clues and mistaken impressions. Which means it is made to be re-read even more than it is to be read.

It’s possible, of course, to see already on a first reading how closely the novel hews to its heroine’s point of view and that this point of view is dangerously misguided. It’s possible, in other words, already on a first go round to read against Emma rather than with her. But it’s impossible not to do so on a second.

That might seem a weird thing to say, since it’s not as though Austen is shy about Emma’s faults. Already on the first page, we read:

The real evils indeed of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself; these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived, that they did not by any means rank as misfortunes with her.

Here the narrative voice is unusually distinct from Emma’s. It practically promises a comeuppance. We feel the full force of that famous Austen wit, gentle and forbearing but with a sting to it. “Real evils” isn’t just the pleasant exaggeration it might first seem. Emma has the power to do real harm, as we see takes on as a kind of protégé the young and naïve Harriet Smith and urges her to turn down a proposal from one Robert Martin, a man Emma deems beneath Harriet. For someone like Harriet, an illegitimate child of unknown parents, the loss of such a match, not least to someone as seemingly good-natured and besotted with her as Martin, is a serious loss. I say “seemingly’ not because I suspect he is in fact a bad guy but because I can’t remember the novel well enough to know if our opinion of him is going to change—and I’m always wary with Austen because our opinions of her characters are often forced to change. First impressions are usually wrong in Austen.

Emma has someone else in mind for Harriet, Mr. Elton, the unctuous and prepossessing local vicar. Emma is emboldened in her matchmaking by what she takes to have been her success at marrying her former governess, Miss Taylor, to a kindly, middle-aged widower, Mr. Weston. (Their marriage, and her leaving the Woodhouse establishment, much to Emma’s father’s mournful chagrin, is the book’s precipitating event.) It’s unclear whether Emma really had much to do with the success of the match, and so we should be suspicious of her efforts this time around. She’s easily able to get Harriet to fall for Elton, but it doesn’t take too long for us to realize—at least it didn’t take me long, this time around—that Elton cares for Emma herself, not Harriet. She devises all sorts of ploys to get the two of them together and never realizes they aren’t working.

For example, she allows herself to be persuaded to take up drawing again, in order to make a portrait of Harriet while Elton watches. She’d given up drawing, she says, when her attempt to draw her brother-in-law failed, before adding: “But for Harriet’s sake, or rather for my own, and as there are no husbands and wives in the case at present, I will break my resolution now.”

What follows is a classic instance of Austen’s irony:

Mr. Elton seemed very properly struck and delighted by the idea, and was repeating, “No husbands and wives in the case at present indeed, as you observe. Exactly so. No husbands and wives,” with so interesting a consciousness, that Emma began to consider whether she had not better leave them together at once. But as she wanted to be drawing, the declaration must wait a little longer.

I can’t decide whether the last line makes me like Emma more, or less. On the one hand, her selfishness—she wants to be drawing—is such that it gets in the way even of her plan. But on the other, her interest in the match isn’t purely mercenary, hasn’t consumed her entirely. What begins as mere stratagem becomes something she loses herself in. Here as elsewhere we see that figuring out how to understand Emma is our main task as readers.

If we don’t see these critiques of Emma the first time around—and maybe we do, they seem so obvious to me now, but I fear I missed them the first time—we are eventually helped by the novel to see that Emma is, in fact, misled about Elton. Her brother-in-law, the one who fussed about having his portrait done, tells her that Elton is behaving as though he is love with her. Emma brushes off the suggestion:

she walked on, amusing herself in the consideration of the blunders which often arise from a partial knowledge of circumstances, of the mistakes which people of high pretensions to judgment [her brother-in-law is a lawyer] are for ever falling into; and not very well pleased with her brother[-in-law] for imagining her blind and ignorant, and in want of counsel.

The joke of course is on Emma and Volume I ends with a lovely set piece at Christmastime, when the characters spend the evening with the Westons. It begins to snow and in all the haste of a hurried departure—everyone wanting to get home before the weather gets bad—Emma and Elton find themselves alone in a carriage. He wastes no time in proposing and each is equally amazed and hurt to find how the other has understood matters.

Austen is not always so overt in her narrative irony—and part of me wonders whether the passage about “the blunders which arise from a partial knowledge of circumstances” won’t later be subjected to further revision. That is, will we be led to read this passage in yet another way, in light of events yet to come? Will Emma prove to be a better interpreter of the world than this initial interpretation suggests? How subtly Austen’s works open up to reveal a vertiginous landscape of dizzying epistemological uncertainty!

I’ll offer just one more example of how destabilizing her prose can be. In the early scene in which Emma talks Harriet out of accepting Martin’s proposal, we read this heartbreaking response to the scorn Emma heaps on the young farmer (“I had no idea he could be so very clownish”):

“To be sure,” said Harriet, in a mortified voice, “he is not so genteel as a real gentleman.”

It’s that “mortified” that gets me. Mostly this is the so-called omniscient narrator, gently but devastatingly pointing out how terribly Emma is behaving. (Famously, Austen said of the book, “I am going to take a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like.”) But it’s also possible that we’re still getting Emma’s perspective here: that Emma recognizes—and, presumably, approves of—Harriet’s mortification. It might be nice to take our distance from a character who is behaving badly. But are we allowed to?

I’m looking forward to seeing how the novel answers this question.

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Next time I’ll say more about some of the other characters, especially Emma’s father, Mr. Woodhouse, who is one of the most delightful characters in English fiction and, I increasingly suspect, central to making this novel work. Tom wrote some wonderful stuff about him here.

Mr. Woodhouse is a hypochondriac, a fussbudget, a man so thoroughly convinced of the rightness of his way of living that he could be a monster if he weren’t so gentle, or so gently portrayed. His constitution is so delicate that he’s frightened to eat almost everything, and he fears for the constitutions of others. Here he is advising an old acquaintance what she should take for tea:

Mrs. Bates, let me propose your venturing on one of these eggs. An egg boiled very soft is not unwholesome. Serle [their cook] understands boiling an egg better than any body. I would not recommend an egg boiled by any body else—but you need not be afraid—they are very small, you see—one of our small eggs will not hurt you.

I’ll have more to say about how the novel portrays Woodhouse. But for now the important thing to note is his relationship to Emma. She dotes on him—but also disparages him a little, makes a little fun of him, all while humouring him or seeming to. She quietly makes sure her guests get proper-sized portions of grown-up food. This is important because it makes us see Emma as shrewd and, more importantly, kind. Emma’s kindness opens up the possibility that we might follow Austen in liking her.

Boy, Interrupted

Posted on September 1, 2015 by Dorian Stuber under Uncategorized

My review of The Book of Aron, Jim Shepard’s novel of the Warsaw Ghetto, is up at Open Letters Monthly.

How Danish is It? Naja Marie Aidt’s Baboon

Posted on August 21, 2015 by Dorian Stuber under Uncategorized

Baboon–Naja Marie Aidt (2006)

Translated from the Danish by Denise Newman (2014)

Baboon, the debut collection in English by the Danish writer Naja Marie Aidt, has been getting a lot of buzz among bookish types. That was enough to get me to buy it, but not of course to read it. It had to compete for my attention with all the other books on my bedside table: books I had to read for work, books I had to read because they were coming due at the library, books I had to read so as not to face the books I had to read for work, books I had to read to satisfy obscure readerly projects of the sort I’m always setting for myself.

But Baboon spent only a short time in the purgatory of the TBR pile (most books sit there for years). I read it in two or three short sessions last weekend, impelled by the now inescapable fact that school is about to start up again. This year I am teaching a course on short fiction each semester and I always like to include a couple of recently published stories to help me decide what I really think about them. In this way I decided that I didn’t like Haruki Murakami or Etgar Keret as much as I thought I did, but that I liked Rachel Seiffert even more than at first. Although I’ve a few reservations about Aidt’s work, the collection impressed me enough that I’ve assigned the first story in the collection, “Bulbjerg,” for the first week of class.

“Bulbjerg,” named after a prominent limestone cliff in Jutland, reminded me a bit of a Margaret Atwood story. There’s the same sense that however threatening the natural world might seem it isn’t nearly as hostile as the people lost in it. And a similar tone: Aidt has Atwood’s asperity and intelligence. “Bulbjerg” opens with an expression of wonder—“Suddenly we found ourselves in the middle of an astonishing landscape: luminous, white sand dunes on all sides, wind swept, small trees twisting under the vast open sky”—but its dominant emotion is in fact fear. It’s fitting that “suddenly” is the story’s first word. A lot of dramatic things happen in its ten pages, just as they do in the other concise stories in the collection. But as PT Smith points out in an excellent review, eventfulness plus concision doesn’t equal clarity. As the story begins, the narrator, his wife, their six-year-old son, and their dog are lost in a forest. In the opening sentence they come up for air, but only by happenstance—note the passive construction “we found ourselves”—and not for long. They must plunge back into the forest to get where they are going. But where is that? And who are these people?

Aidt is good at menace, as in this scene from early in the story. The boy is tired, the family collapses to the ground. But time is passing. They need to get moving:

“Shouldn’t we get going?” you ask. I get up and suddenly notice how tired I am. My arms are completely limp and there’s an overwhelming feeling of weakness throughout my entire body. The water bottle is empty. The dog pants with its tongue hanging out of its mouth. You lift it into the cardboard box on the bike rack. Sebastian bravely picks up his bike and rides ahead of us. His bell rings with every bump on the road, and the flag he was so proud of when I mounted it on the rear mudguard looks cheap and shabby now. We ride on in silence.

The first time I read this, I was sure something terrible had happened, a catastrophe of some kind. A war, maybe, or a natural disaster. Maybe it was that cardboard box for the dog that got me thinking this way. Who takes their dog on a bicycle trip in a box? It seemed so desperate. Are they escaping something? Or maybe it was that bell, ringing its feeble warning, its futility only exacerbated by the cheap and shabby flag. What could have pushed this family to this point? They’ve run out of water, they’re tired, vacillating between barely restrained anger (“Shouldn’t we get going?) and silence.

But it’s not a catastrophe, at least not in the apocalyptic sense. It turns out that this is just a family outing gone awry, not life threatening, but dangerous nonetheless. Aidt captures perfectly that knife-edge between panic and exhaustion that sets upon you when you’ve lost your way in the woods. But she isn’t just describing that sensation—she’s also inciting it in us. In this story and in the others, readers are as lost as these characters. That’s because Aidt is always dropping us in the middle of things, leaving us to sort out who the characters are, how they’re related to each other, where they are and what they’re doing. And when we do figure these things out, we often have to wrestle with our feelings about them. There are not many likable characters in this collection, some are downright unpleasant, even disgusting. That’s true even in a story like “Interruption,” a kind of absurd experiment in the mode of Kafka or Gogol, when a middle-aged woman—a fugitive, it would seem, though this too is never made clear, from a newly opened “massage parlor” which is really nothing more than a brothel—bursts into the apartment of a graduate student, installs herself there (cooking and cleaning and offering other services besides) and refuses to leave. Our feelings towards the woman—the narrator thinks she is Thai or Filipino but can’t be bothered to find out for sure—remain unclear because we never get any access to her consciousness, and the narrator’s indignant and slightly revolted response to her is hard to get past. We know it tells us more about him than her, but she remains a cipher to us. I admire the way Aidt suggests the precariousness, even the danger of the woman’s life without using it to build sympathy. Similarly, I appreciate the way she makes the student, who in another story might seem sympathetically put upon, as much cold and calculating as bewildered and frustrated.

If I say these are confusing stories, then, I’m referring not to their style—Aidt’s sentences are straightforward, even plain—but to their emotional force. They refuse to offer us the consolations of protagonists that we can identify with and situations that we can embrace. Even when the characters threaten to become caricatures the stories wrong-foot us, as in the case of the self-satisfied hedonist of “Wounds,” whose life falls apart when an innocuous boil on his ass becomes a horrifying, life threatening, baffling disease. We can’t enjoy disparaging him, yet we don’t quite ever come to sympathize with him either.

So when I say these stories left a bad taste in my mouth you shouldn’t take that as criticism, exactly, but rather as recognition that they’ve done the work they set out to do. These stories don’t ask to be loved—they’re the opposite of ingratiating—so what’s left might be admiration. And I do admire them, certainly enough that I want to read Aidt’s first novel, also just out in English translation. And I’m curious how I’ll feel about “Bjulberg,” at least, after I’ve taught it next week.

Baboon is translated by Denise Newman. As always when I read translations from a language I don’t know, I’m at a loss as to what to say about her efforts, beyond expressing deep gratitude for giving me access to books I’d never otherwise be able to read. I could say the translation seems fluent and skillful, which it does, but in the absence of the original I’ve no idea. I do wonder, however, and this doesn’t have to do with the specifics of this translation but of its very existence in English translation (and thanks are due to Two Lines Press for publishing these stories, and in such a handsome edition). As I read the book, I thought about what Tim Parks has been saying repeatedly over the past few years—that “international” or “world” literature is increasingly governed by the unstated, free-floating, but no less powerful desire to be translated into English, such that a straightforward style (more Raymond Carver than Henry James, say) and a lack of cultural specificity have come, however unconsciously, to govern the production of literature already in their original form, let alone in the decision (always as much economic as aesthetic) to translate that literature into English. If I understand him right, Parks thinks there is a whole canon of world literature that is being written in ways that make it amenable to being translated into English.

Whatever one thinks of Parks’s claims—I like him because he’s kind of cranky and intemperate, our own D. H.Lawrence, even though I think he might be exaggerating the case—I think there’s a useful question to be asked about what we want from literature in translation. Another way to say what I mean is that I found myself wondering as I read this collection whether there was anything particularly Danish about it. Which in turn made me wonder, what the hell would that even mean and why would I want it? Was I expecting a landscape tastefully littered with Arne Jacobsen chairs? It’s condescending to expect the foreign to be exotic, or to correspond to one’s received idea of a place (these things usually mean the same thing). And yet the suggestion, made in a blurb on the back cover, that these stories are “universal” (which I take to mean, “could be American!”) seems similarly condescending and disrespectful. Maybe it’s knowing so little about Denmark other than a few television shows and crime novels (as well as an abiding conviction that it must be the loveliest place on earth) that makes me feel this way.

But I did decide, as I always do, not to include Babel on my short fiction syllabus, even though those stories are wonderful, because they strike me as likely to seem foreign to my students in ways my course doesn’t have the time to explicate. Aidt, on the other hand, will I suspect resonate strongly with students. The comparison could be better, I know: anything written a century ago needs context in a way something written today doesn’t (though I do teach plenty of early twentieth century texts in this course). But I can’t help thinking that the ready amenability of these stories to being translated into English is a kind of fault. And yet as soon as I do I remember the disreputable narrator of “Bulbjerg” and his desperate family, as lost to each other as they are in the woods, and unsettling to us. Perhaps I’ve been fooled in my thinking. Perhaps these are uniquely Danish stories. Perhaps there is no such thing as a Danish story. Perhaps the apparently assimilable style of Baboon is a false friend, only an apparent cognate. Perhaps I’m not giving these surprising and sly stories their full due.

A Summer’s Worth of Crime Fiction

Posted on August 5, 2015 by Dorian Stuber under Uncategorized

Summer isn’t over yet, of course, especially not in Arkansas. But my summer almost is. Administrative duties begin this week, and the first day of classes is only three weeks away. I’m sure I’ll dispose of a few more crime novels before the semester really starts to pinch, but for now here are a few thoughts about some I’ve read lately:

Gallows View—Peter Robinson (1987)

The first in the long-running Inspector Banks series, and a pretty good debut. For a while there I read the new installments of this series religiously. I’m a few behind now, not sure why, they’re always solid, often much better than that, and Banks is likeable enough, a kinder, less tormented Rebus. I don’t always need to know so much about the music he’s listening to, though. I’d never read the first five or six, though, and it’s interesting to compare the later installments to the first one. Robinson has become a better writer, but already here he shows a light touch in explaining the story of Banks’s move from London to Yorkshire. And his pacing is good, too. At 250 pages this book is the right length. I’ve bemoaned many times the bloat in crime fiction, with novels regularly topping 400 pages. In fact, Robinson himself has since succumbed to this tendency. Still, meeting Inspector Banks has reignited my interest in the series and I plan to read the next few.

The Strangler Vine—M . J. Carter (2014)

This first time novel by a historian begins what promises to be a very good series. Someone recommended this in the TLS Summer Reading series, and I’m glad I followed up on it. William Avery is a young soldier recently arrived in India in the 1830s. Languishing in Calcutta before joining his regiment, he is charged with accompanying Jeremiah Blake to find a well-known poet, the Walter Scott of Anglo-India, who has gone missing. Blake is a shadowy figure who is employed by the East India Company but lives in disrepute in the “native” part of the city, and in fact seems to have repudiated the Company altogether. Avery is naïve, a bit complacent and blustery, though a good sort. Blake is mercurial, expert in a dozen Eastern languages, an expert at tracking people who don’t want to be found. There’s an extended “meet cute” in which Blake is contemptuous of Avery and Avery horrified by Bake before each comes to appreciate the other, work as a team, etc. Avery is disabused of his faith in the Company; Blake regains some of his faith in the human race. So far, so conventional. Fortunately, Carter doesn’t push the Holmes/Watson comparison too hard. And her knowledge of the period is impressive. She describes the 1830s as a time when an earlier openness on the part of Company officials for India’s cultural traditions was hardening into something more dogmatic and oppressive, an incipient White Man’s Burden. The book drags a little at times, especially in the middle third, usually when Carter tries to burden her story with too much information. But the ending is genuinely moving and I look forward to the next installment, which, it seems, will be set somewhere quite different. (Already out in the UK—Book Depository order necessary? Hmm…)

Invisible City—Julia Dahl (2014)

I read this because it’s ostensibly about the Hasidic community in New York. But it’s actually about the newspaper business in the era of social media, which interests me a lot less. Dahl’s portrayal of an insular world in which wrongdoings are overlooked in a tacit understanding between community leaders and secular officials is fine as far as it goes. But Rachel Aviv’s New Yorker piece from last year explores the same topic much more probingly. It tells you something that a few later I can’t even remember the protagonist’s name, but she has a complicated back-story that allows her access to this relatively closed world. I didn’t find that story interesting enough to want to read the just-released follow-up.

Oblivion—Arnaldur Indridason (2014/2015 English translation Victoria Cribb)

Indridason is one of my absolute favourites and I always order his books from the UK since they come out a year earlier there. Some are stronger than others, of course, but this one is particularly good. A couple of years ago, Indridason concluded his series centered on his melancholy detective, Erlendur. But then he had the idea of writing about Erlendur’s early days. Last year’s Reykjavik Nights showed us Erlendur’s life as a traffic cop in the early 70s. In this follow-up, set a few years later, Erlendur has become a detective. He investigates two unrelated crimes, one recent and one from twenty years earlier. The resonances between them—they are linked only thematically, in relation to the American military presence in Iceland after the war—are intriguing but not hammered home. I’ve written before about my love of Iceland, so maybe this stuff interests me more than most people. But everyone ought to appreciate how almost insistently low-key these books are. Indridason is especially good at showing how awkward it can be to investigate crimes in a small country, where everybody almost knows everybody else.

Dissolution—C. J. Sansom (2003)

I’m not much of one for classical/medieval/Renaissance-era historical mysteries, but I quite liked this first installment of a series centered on Matthew Shardlake, a hunchbacked lawyer working for Thomas Cromwell in the 1530s who increasingly finds himself torn over his master’s methods. At least I liked it until I read Jenny’s damning but compelling complaint about the implausibility of importing what are essentially 19^th/20^th century narrative protocols on to the Early Modern period. After that I liked it less. I might continue with the series anyway, though: the first one was definitely readable, and I enjoyed the counter-perspective on Cromwell, who I only know from Hilary Mantel. This book is fine, but it’s no Wolf Hall! Think Sansom is tired of hearing that yet?

The Red Moth—Sam Eastlake (2013)

Found this while in Canada and it seemed like the kind of thing that might be hard to get in the US, plus I’m a total sucker for WWII crime/espionage fiction. The inspector is a Finn who once worked for the Tsar and then was recalled from Siberian exile and put to work for Stalin. It’s all most implausible—Stalin is even a character, which doesn’t work out too well: I get that the point is that he’s not a frothing madman, but the picture of him as simply a malign functionary is fairly preposterous. A perfectly adequate vacation read, but I doubt I’ll be getting to the rest of the series anytime soon.

Ngaio Marsh—A Man Lay Dead (1934)

Marsh is one of the most famous Golden Age British crime writers along with Christie, Allingham, and the utterly glorious Tey. This is the first of her Inspector Alleyn series. It’s not perfect—Marsh can’t quite seem to figure out what she wants Alleyn to be like: is he nice, is he brooding, is he a bit callous?—but it’s thoroughly enjoyable, a classic country house murder with a hint of espionage. Read it—it absolutely stands the test of time. Looking forward to reading more of her work.

One Night, Markovitch–Ayelet Gundar-Goshen (2012)

Posted on July 28, 2015 by Dorian Stuber under Uncategorized

Translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston

As part of my ongoing but not particularly diligently executed plan to get a handle on contemporary Israeli writing by authors not named Oz, Grossman, or Appelfeld, I was pleased to find Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s debut novel on my recent trip to Canada. (It’s published there by Anansi and in the UK by Pushkin, but not in the US, at least so far.)

One Night, Markovitch, which won a big Israeli prize, begins with twenty men boarding a ship in Mandate-era Palestine on their way to a clandestine mission in Europe. But why would Jews be going to Europe just when so many were trying desperately to get out?

The answer is as fantastic as many of the events in this fanciful novel: in order to circumvent British restrictions on Jewish immigration, each man has agreed to marry a woman active in the Zionist movement and then divorce her once the ship has arrived safely back in Palestine. I’m pretty sure nothing like this ever really happened—though the more I learn about the events of that period the more extraordinary things I learn, so who knows—but historical accuracy isn’t Gundar-Goshen’s concern. Nor is it even the mission itself, which is easily accomplished and cursorily described. Her concern is instead for the metaphor the conceit enables.

One of the men, the Yaakov Markovitch of the title, thoroughly plain if not exactly ugly, is paired up with the most beautiful woman in the group, named (not particularly imaginatively) Bella. For reasons that are never quite clear, Markovitch decides that he won’t divorce Bella. What to him is devotion is to her, not surprisingly, intransigence. Bella has no interest in or desire for Markovitch, yet even though the two live separate lives, sometimes in the same house and sometimes not, he continues to refuse her a divorce, a state of affairs that persists for years.

The novel explores the consequences of this refusal, not just on Bella and Yaakov but also on a handful of others associated with the voyage. This group, most of whom end up on a moshav (I think maybe in the Jezreel Valley, though I can’t be sure: Gundar-Goshen never tells us where it is though maybe it’s obvious to Israeli readers), is clearly intended to represent the generation that founded the state of Israel. Some reviewers—especially those in the German-language press—read the novel as an attempt by a member of the younger generation (Gundar-Goshen was born in 1982) to debunk the myths of tenacity and sacrifice that have long been used to characterize the pioneers who forged a Jewish homeland by making the desert bloom and by defeating a sea of implacable enemies.

I don’t think this reading is quite right, though. It’s not so much that Gundar-Goshen wants to disparage her forbearers or show them as less than heroic. If she did, she would surely have written her book in a less mythologizing style. I’ve always been suspicious of the term “magic realism” because I’ve never understood it. But I think it might be the right term to describe Gundar-Goshen’s book. Consider some of its events: a house become literally frigid as a result of the hostility between its inhabitants; a woman smells of oranges so strongly that the man who loves her unrequitedly banishes the fruit from his surroundings for the rest of his life; and a man willfully blinds himself by staring into the sun after receiving admittedly terrible news. Emotions are literalized in the world of the novel; feelings are so powerful they work on things in extraordinary ways. Here, for example, is Markovitch’s friend extolling the virtues of his soon-to-be wife: “At that point Zeev Feinberg burst into such roaring laughter that the train accelerated, and he finally sighed and said, ‘When we go back, I’ll marry her. Really and truly.’”

The language here—of admiration so strong it can make a train speed up—seems to support the mythology of the virile pioneer. It’s possible, of course, that the novel’s marvelous events are meant ironically. But I think we’re meant to sympathize with these characters, not disparage them.

It’s true that the magic realism of Garcia Marquez and Carpentier and others was developed as a response to the overwhelming vicissitudes of colonial experience, of a way of life so confounding that “mere” realism couldn’t make sense of it. As such magic realism isn’t quiescent or naïve but rather politically subversive. But Gundar-Goshen always subordinates public politics to private emotions, as her opening paragraph makes clear:

Yaacov Markoviotch wasn’t ugly. Which is not to say he was handsome. Little girls didn’t burst into tears at the sight of him, but neither did they smile when they saw his face. He was, you might say, gloriously average. Moreover, Yaacov Markovitch’s face was remarkably free of distinguishing features. So much so that your eyes could not linger on him, but slipped onward to other objects. A tree on the street. A cat in the corner. It required an enormous effort to keep looking at the barrenness of Yaacov Markovitch’s face. People do not enjoy making enormous effort, and so they only rarely looked at his face for any length of time. This had its advantages, and the unit commander was aware of them. He looked at Yaacov Markovitch’s face for exactly the amount of time he needed, then dropped his gaze. You will smuggle weapons, the unit commander said. With that face, no one will notice. And he was right. Yaacov Markovitch probably smuggled more weapons than any other member of the Irgun, and never came close to being caught. The British soldiers’ gaze slid over his face like oil on a gun.

Reading this paragraph in the bookstore I thought I was going to get a novel about the struggle to establish a Jewish state and I was intrigued enough to overlook those irritating sentence fragments and the repeated use of Yaacov Markovitch’s full name (a tic I still cannot explain charitably). But that’s not the book I got. The dangerous missions alluded to by the narrator are never described, the investigation of the terrorism at the heart of the founding of the state is never pursued. What is developed instead is the effect of Markovitch’s face on women, not just the little girls referred to here. But even the physical and emotional responses of distaste, even repulsion, that become so important to the book are confusingly presented. It’s not clear why the “gloriously average” face becomes, in the space of a sentence or two, an almost pathological “barrenness.”

One Night, Markovitch might not put politics at its center, but it doesn’t ignore the political events of the period entirely. Feinberg—the one whose laugh sped up the train—fights in the 1948 war and is psychologically traumatized when he accidentally kills an Arab woman and child. The novel doesn’t have much to say about Jewish-Arab relations, even in moments like this one where it directly references them. Instead, Feinberg’s guilt is depicted through the freezing of his relationship with his wife and child, an emotional disassociation only broken by the melodramatic series of events that follow from his decision to become a Nazi hunter in postwar Europe. One of his victims has an infant child, which he takes as his own, returning with her to Israel.

All of which might simply mean that Gundar-Goshen is more comfortable talking about the nascent Israel’s relationship to Europe than to the Arab-Israeli conflict. (Is the only way for Gentiles to overcome their enmity to Jews to become them, the only way for Jews to overcome their enmity to Gentiles to make them Jews?) But I think that the central tragedy of the Zionist enterprise—its willingness to repeatedly indulge its central fiction: that the land it bent to its will was empty—is never far from her thoughts.

In that sense, then, the split between politics and emotions I’ve been ascribing to the novel isn’t really there. Instead, the emotional warfare practiced by the characters on each other becomes an allegory for Israel’s political situation. This possibility is made clear in two extended meditations on Markovitch’s refusal to divorce Bella.

In the first, Feinberg has learned that Markovitch sleeps every night with Bella’s nightdress and upbraids him for thinking that eventually the nightdress will turn into a woman. “ ‘It’ll never happen, not in a year, not in twenty.’” Markovitch angrily responds:

‘So in another thirty, or forty. You know what, Feinberg, maybe never. But I hope, and that’s something too. And maybe if I hope enough, if I hope really hard, that hope will turn into something real. Look at us, look at this country. Two thousand years we’ve been hoping for her, waiting for her, sleeping at might with our arms around the sleeves of her nightdress, because what is history if not the sleeves of a nightdress that has no smell? And you think she wants us? You think this country returns our love? Nonsense! She vomits us up time and time again, sends us to hell, beats us down without mercy. With the Romans and the Greeks and the Arabs and the mosquitoes. So you think that someone here says, ‘If she doesn’t want me, I should go?’ Someone here says, ‘There’s no point in holding a country by force if she’s been trying to get rid of you from the minute you came to her.’ No. You hold on to her as hard as you can and you hope.’

History might be a lot of things, it might be a nightmare from which we are trying to escape, but nothing here convinces me that it’s the sleeves of a nightdress that has no smell. But just where is the narrator in relation to Markovitch’s outburst? How are we to take his claims? The hoary conflation of land and woman suggests that the answer is, skeptically, a reading supported by the second passage, in which even Markovitch himself comes to see that the rhetoric of oppression, coercion and domination does more harm than good. Feinberg and his wife have suffered a terrible loss; Markovitch catches them comforting each other:

[Markovitch] looked at Zeev Feinberg with wide-open eyes. Only a moment ago he was roaring outside the hospital, gripping his pain and anger with clenched teeth. Now he had let it all go at once, leaving the rotting carcass behind, and had returned to comfort his wife. And he, Markovitch, had been wallowing in his own pain for so many years, holding on to his protesting wife, refusing to let go…. Yaacov Markovitch had been holding on to Bella for so long, and she did not want him. He held her dress in his clenched fist and refused to let go. When he looked at Zeev Feinberg’s open hand on Sonya’s shoulder, he suddenly remembered the blessing of fingers spread wide. And he wondered if he could still open his hand. But the thought terrified him. Let go? Of Bella? How could he? His fist had been clenched for so many years that his hand was no longer suited to any other work. Refusal had been a way of life for him.

The description of the fingers spread wide refers to a line from the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai that stands as the novel’s epigraph: “Even a fist was once an open palm with fingers.” In her riff on Amichai’s image, Gundar-Goshen reveals Feinberg as the closest thing the book has to a hero because of his willingness to forgive, forget, let go, change.

The passage never makes it obvious but it’s hard for me to read Markovitch’s epiphany and not think about the Arab-Israeli conflict. What it might mean to fully unfold the metaphor—to imagine what it might mean for Israelis to unclench the fist against those they’ve refused to let go (which in turn would mean thinking that the Israelis at least believe they love the Arabs, a strange idea perhaps but one that would make sense in the Freudian theory that there is no opposition between love and hate)—is unclear. Perhaps the allegory is really about the Israelis themselves, and a part of themselves they’ve held hostage or forgotten in their decades of being clenched. I don’t know—the book doesn’t tell us. Maybe not surprisingly, it is better at diagnosing the perils of refusal than the implications of acceptance.

But a book premised on the comparability of politics and emotions that cannot articulate what that comparison might enable or require is in bad faith. Gundar-Goshen’s revision of the narratives that have dominated Israeli history is based on the idea that our intimate, emotional relationships ought to predispose our political ones. But she seems unable to tell us how or to what end. And that makes the book more muddleheaded than anything else.

In the end, I just don’t know what to do with One Night, Markovitch. I didn’t read it with particular pleasure, found many of its characters irritatingly portentous and moony, grew exasperated with its magical events and histrionic prose—“Because Sonya’s eyes were identical to Bella’s and, from now on, one would not be able to cry without the other crying along with her.”

I was frustrated not because I disdain the thing that might go under the term “magic’ but because I believe in them so much. Gundar-Goshen’s magic of potent laughter, sentient houses, and inescapable odours is thin gruel compared to the real work that fantasy performs in our affective and social-political lives. Ultimately it’s the domestication of magic that bothers me about One Night, Markovitch.

Yet I can’t entirely dismiss it, either. I’m drawn to its belief that anyone who expects to be able to force another person to recognize their desires, even from what might seem good or noble motives, misunderstands the idea of what it means to enter into a relationship. And the reminder that a fist was always—and so might become again—an open palm and five dexterous, supple fingers resonates powerfully and beautifully for me. Still, when the bit that lingers most from an almost 400 page novel is its epigraph, maybe it’s time to search out the inspiration rather than invest more energy teasing out the contradictions of the work it inspired.

You can read the first installment of my encounter with contemporary Israeli writing here. I’m going to have to pick up the pace if I want to be able to come to any meaningful conclusions…

The Dead Secret–Wilkie Collins (1857)

Posted on June 30, 2015 by Dorian Stuber under Uncategorized

My (very slow) journey through the complete works of Wilkie Collins continued this weekend with The Dead Secret (1857). This was Collins’s fourth published novel, the one right before he hit the big time with The Woman in White. It’s really quite good, absolutely enjoyable if a bit soppy at times and a little baggy. But there are a number of wonderful characters and some genuinely creepy and atmospheric scenes.

In his preface to the one-volume edition of 1861, Collins describes the phrase of his title as if it were a familiar idiom (he mentions it couldn’t be translated into French). I’d never heard the phrase “a dead secret” before, but apparently it means an “absolute secret, not to be revealed under any circumstances.” In this sense, Collins’s title is ironic, since the secret the story revolves around is supposed to be revealed in the first chapter—and it sort of is, though not conclusively enough for readers, or at least this one, to be sure what it is—but the person who is supposed to reveal it chooses not to.

As I observed recently in regards to The Law and the Lady, Collins here too anticipates Freud’s belief that “no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips.” Collins is fascinated by the idea that whatever is buried will eventually come to light. The Dead Secret begins with the maid Sarah Leeson attending the deathbed of her mistress, Mrs. Treverton, in a remote and falling down Cornish mansion called Porthgenna. Mrs. Treverton writes a letter to husband revealing a secret only she and her maid have known about until now, and just before she breathes her last she is on the point of making Sarah swear that she will pass the letter to Captain Treverton. Instead Sarah—whose hair is shockingly gray even though she is still a young woman, a sign of some terrible thing in her past—hides the letter in a locked room in the disused wing of the house and runs away from the Captain and his five-year-old daughter.

We pick up events fifteen years later when that little girl, Rosamond Treverton, marries a young man, Leonard Frankland. Frankland is blind, blindness being a motif, I gather, that reappears in later works, and of course fittingly literalizes the figurative state of most of Collins’s characters. Collins uses Leonard’s blindness as a way to mediate the telling of the story even in the midst of the action. In this sense it seems an even more sophisticated version of his preference for shifts from third or first person narration to epistolary, or amongst various narrators or between various interpolated texts. These shifts emphasize the telling of the story over the events that are told. So for example Rosamond must describe everything she is doing to Leonard, especially once they find themselves caught up in trying to find the mysterious letter in a place Leonard has never been. This has the effect of slowing down the action while also ratcheting up the suspense, even in instances where there shouldn’t be any. We know where the letter is hidden, after all.

Although the mystery—which concerns them more than anyone—couldn’t be solved without them, Rosamond and Leonard are the book’s least interesting characters. The most interesting is Sarah—certainly she gets the most extraordinary scenes. She’s not really the heroine—the book’s attention is too diffuse, too decentralized among so many characters to have a heroine, and besides it’s unclear for the longest time whether or not we’re even supposed to like her: she’s continually rubbing other characters the wrong way—but she is at the heart of its enigma. Collins loves disguises, and in the scenes that most stuck with me Sarah hides her identity without actually lying about who she is. In the first, under the name Mrs. Jazeph, she becomes the nurse to Rosamond when the latter’s journey back to Cornwall is interrupted by the early arrival of her first child. The nurse, who has been nervous and flighty all evening, keeping herself at an unnatural distance which makes her charge increasingly uneasy, finally approaches Rosamond—but now she comes too close:

[T]he nurse was stopping midway between the part of the room from which she had advanced , and the bedside. There was nothing wild or angry in her look. The agitation which her face expressed, was the agitation of perplexity and alarm. She stood rapidly clasping an unclasping her hands, the image of bewilderment and distress—stood so for nearly a minute—then came forward a few steps more, and said inquiringly, in a whisper: —

‘Not asleep? Not quite asleep, yet?’

Rosamond tried to speak in answer, but the quick beating of her heart seemed to rise up to her very lips, and to stifle the words on them.

The nurse came on, still with the same perplexity and distress in her face, to within a foot of the bedside—knelt down by the pillow, and looked earnestly at Rosamond—shuddered a little, and glanced all around her, as if to make sure the room was empty—bent forward—hesitated—bent nearer, and whispered into her ear these words: —

‘When you go to Porthgenna, keep out of the Myrtle Room!’

The hot breath of the woman, as she spoke, beat on Rosamond’s cheek, and seemed to fly in one fever-throb through every vein of her body.

The creepiest part of this passage is the qualifying clause “as she spoke,” which seems initially redundant—did we think the breath came from anywhere else?—but which in the end focuses our attention on the almost animalistic quality of Sarah. Similarly disquieting is the ambiguous pronoun at the end, which makes it hard to distinguish Sarah from Rosamond. (Shrewd readers will guess already that this suggestion of symbiosis is fitting.)

The scene could easily have been risible—and depending on your appetite for sensation fiction maybe it is—if it weren’t so true to the proto-Freudian theory of the unconscious (later Sarah will marvel that she said the last thing she wanted to say, or at least the last thing she thought she wanted to say) and so well executed.

Similarly dramatic is the second scene with Sarah that impressed itself on me. Sarah and her uncle Joseph (more about him in a second) rush to Porthgenna in advance of Rosamond and Leonard and brazen their way into the house, but Sarah is unable to retrieve the secret letter because she is overwhelmed on the threshold of the nfamous Myrtle Room by guilt and anxiety and maybe a genuine ghost. I’m too pressed for time to cite the passage: suffice it to say Sarah confuses the flapping of loose wallpaper with the admonitions of her late mistress and collapses in a dead swoon. Collins shows his genius in making us feel anxious and upset even though we know the (ostensible) cause of the disturbing noises. You can see Collins figuring out how to unsettle readers, and two years later he’ll write a masterpiece in which the kind of scenes I’m talking about here, which here are scattered across the book, will be much more prominent.

But The Dead Secret isn’t just apprentice work. I was disappointed by Ira Nadel’s introduction to the Oxford edition (unusual for that estimable line). Nadel meanders through the novel’s motifs, content simply to point out similar instances in other books by Collins. He never tries to interpret this book on its own merits. I was especially let down because the blurb tells me Nadel is the author of a book called Joyce and the Jews. And my pet theory about this book is that Sarah’s uncle, Joseph Buschmann, is in fact Jewish. Collins never says so, and he never resorts to the typology of this and other periods (hooked nose, swarthy, lecherous, usurious, etc) that would telegraph to readers, even unconsciously, a character’s Jewishness. We do know that Joseph is German, though he proudly asserts that he is also a citizen of England. We know he loves music—his prized possession is a music box given to his elder brother by Mozart himself: this automaton is just part and parcel of the book’s fascination with the uncanny, the Gothic, etc. We know he’s not quite five feet tall. He’s endearing in his insistent guilelessness, and kind and loving to Sarah despite all her troubles. Basically he’s a total mensch and I really wanted him to be Jewish not just because he was my favourite but because he is so determinedly not characterized by negative stereotypes. But being musical and short and kind and a little schmaltzy isn’t enough to make someone Jewish—though it’s a pretty good start.

Can anyone who’s read this book help me out here, and support this fancy of mine?

Either way, The Dead Secret doesn’t deserve to be one. A great book for your vacation reading.

Listen to Britain: A God in Ruins–Kate Atkinson (2015)

Posted on June 17, 2015 by Dorian Stuber under Uncategorized

In A God in Ruins Kate Atkinson returns to some of the characters she wrote about in Life after Life (2013). That novel focused on Ursula Todd, who died many deaths navigating the perils of the twentieth century. I had reservations about the book, but I liked the way it valued sibling relationships over romantic ones. When I heard that Atkinson would be revisiting the Todd family, focusing this time on a younger brother, Teddy, I found myself looking forward to the book with an enthusiasm that surprised me. Recently I spent a weekend with it, engrossed happily enough, but already the book is fading for me, and I’m doubtful it will linger for me the way its successor did.

The great event in Teddy’s life, as for so many fictional characters and, who knows, maybe even real people, was WWII. He served as a bomber pilot, leading risky raids in his rickety Halifax bomber over Germany. Bombers were at constant risk—from anti-aircraft fire, from German fighter pilots, from the dangers of flying itself (taking off and landing were as dangerous as flying over Berlin). Teddy, bored stiff by his prewar job in a bank, comes alive in the air force. He loves the camaraderie, the white-knuckle combination of luck and skill needed to fly a plane, and most of all the terrible danger. Teddy is shot down twice: the first over the Channel, forcing a harrowing water landing and several terrifying days adrift in a life raft, and the second over enemy territory, which leads to his internment in a German POW camp (interestingly, the latter is only alluded to, not shown).

After the war, Teddy works at various provincial newspapers, marries his childhood sweetheart (who had at least as interesting a war as he did, as a code breaker at Bletchley Park), becomes an avid gardener, suffers the loss of his wife to brain cancer, and raises an increasingly difficult daughter with whom he is never quite reconciled but whose children he becomes close to. He has a good life, though maybe not a good death—at the end he is a centenarian who has lingered in a kind of half-life in a depressing nursing home. Atkinson never says so, but I think we’re to wonder if it hadn’t been better for him to die in the war. Teddy’s grandson overcomes a rough childhood to become a Buddhist-inspired guru of sorts. Perhaps this development is the novel’s way of insisting we must accept whatever happens to us, a New Age version of the English stiff upper lip. And yet even though the book is at pains not to glorify war, I think it can’t help but being in thrall to that time in British life.

The novel’s interest in the relationship of past to present isn’t only historical or political. It’s also narratological. The TLS review suggested that, unlike Life after Life, A God in Ruins is concerned with character rather than narrative structure. I don’t think that’s right. But I don’t think its narrative experiments are always successful. For example, the book is filled with flash-forwards that reveal almost as an aside the inevitably terrible fate of a minor character. Take the case of Julia, a peer’s daughter serving in the women’s auxiliary with whom Teddy has a brief but intense affair. Teddy arrives at their rendezvous to find only a scribbled note thanking him for everything. The narrator continues:

Not long afterwards Julia was posted to an Army ordinance base and was one of seventeen people who were killed when a bomb dump accidentally exploded. Teddy was already in the POW camp by then and didn’t find out about the incident until years later when he read about her father’s death in his own newspaper (‘Peer in sex scandal falls to death’).

Other writers have used this technique to marvelous effect, notably Proust, and, more pertinently to Atkinson’s literary lineage, Virginia Woolf in Jacob’s Room and Muriel Spark in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Atkinson’s glimpses into the future are much more heavy-handed than these other writers. After the paragraph quoted above, we are returned to the present in the most obvious way possible: “But all that was in the future.” Admittedly, the narration here is attached to Teddy’s consciousness, and he’s offered to us as a bit pedantic and dutiful, though all the more loveable for that conscientiousness. Which means that leaden transition could be Teddy’s own. But on other occasions the narrative asides are more obviously the narrator’s, even when expressed by a character. Ursula has a friend in the Air Ministry whose sole function is to provide the novel with war statistics, especially about the long odds that a bomber pilot would survive the war. The joke’s on her, as we learn during one of Teddy’s sorties. His rear-gunner has just seen a spectacular sunset:

As a rear-gunner, Kenny was the least likely of all of them to live to see a sunset in peacetime. Only a one-in-four chance of staying alive until then, Ursula’s girl said. In the end, of course, it was the girl from the Air Ministry who was living without a future, killed by the Aldwych V-1 rocket in June of ’44. She had been on the roof of Adastral House, where the Air Ministry was housed, sunbathing whilst eating her lunchtime sandwiches. (What were the odds against that, Teddy wondered?)

Serves her right for daring to disparage the fortunes of the protagonists of this book! That parenthesis is clumsy—it makes no sense either logically or narratively. When is Teddy thinking this? Certainly not in the plane over the North Sea. (He doesn’t yet know she’ll die this way.) At some later time? But there’s been no acknowledgement that we’ve left that moment in the skies, except perhaps that “of course” which might be taken as an indication of retrospective tsk-tsking: the irony of that girl with her grim statistics being the one who kicked off… and in such unproductive, hedonistic fashion (sunbathing!). Keep calm and carry on, indeed.

These narrative infelicities aside, though, the scenes in the bombers are terrific: vivid and exciting, filled with enough historical and cultural details that we understand what risks those young men ran and what they were asked to accomplish. But when Atkinson gets philosophic about the results of the bombing war—specifically, the firestorms that incinerated German cities, deliberately targeting civilians—her heavy hand returns. The culmination is a scene between Teddy and Ursula at a wartime concert of Beethoven’s Ninth where she asks him how he can justify bombing those civilians. Against the obstreperous backdrop of the Ode to Joy, the siblings discuss man’s inhumanity to man:

‘Alle Menschen werden Brüder,’ Ursual said. ‘Do you think it’s possible? One day? That all men could be brothers one day? People—by which I largely mean men—have been killing each other since time began. Since Cain threw a rock at Abel’s head or whatever it was he did to him.’

‘I don’t think the Bible’s that specific,’ Teddy said.

‘We have terrifically tribal instincts,’ Ursula said. ‘We’re all primitives underneath, that’s why we had to invent God, to be the voice of our conscience, or we would be killing each other left, right and center.’

In a scene we don’t see, Ursula returns to her rooms to continue reading Freud’s Totem and Taboo… Look, D. H. Lawrence is my favourite writer—I don’t mind a philosophical debate/disquisition in the middle of a novel. But this one is so pat: it considers whether German civilians are really civilians, whether they’re not also the enemy, culpable by association; it adds that awkward parenthetical about male aggression. The implied argument of A God in Ruins is that everything in Britain went downhill after the war, that nothing afterwards could ever do justice to its excitement and moral urgency. Indeed, war is exciting. As Freud put it in “Thoughts for the Time on War and Death,” written six months after the start of WWI, nothing quickens our appreciation for life than the imminent risk that it will be taken away. My sense is that in including set-pieces like this one between the Todd siblings Atkinson wants to question or qualify her own thesis about the terrible beauty of war. But its hastiness and triteness works against that aim. The moment feels dutiful, the prose especially lax. Only when Teddy is in the air does it come to life. In the end, then, the book feels like a hymn to the Greatest Generation, as evidenced by the number of times characters wonder how the cosseted and ineffectual postwar generations would cope in extremis, as if everyday life at any time didn’t offer up all sorts of emotionally rich, vital, and meaningful situations every day.

In the end, then, I hold two things against A God in Ruins. First, its self-congratulation about the seriousness of the enterprise of documenting twentieth century history, which comes across most fully in those heavy-handed exchanges between Ursula and Teddy about the possibility of a just war, a self-congratulation that folds into a conservative narrative about Britain’s decline. Second, the flatness of Atkinson’s prose, which holds no surprises, offers no resistance to easy digestion. It’s so inoffensive, so unlike the English fiction of the period it’s fascinated by (Bowen, Green, Lehmann, Taylor, etc). I can’t tell what’s more dispiriting: the vision of Atkinson writing a novel dedicated to each of the Todd siblings (even the eldest, the insufferable prig Maurice, might eventually get redeemed), or the vision of myself despite everything reading them all.

The Law and the Lady–Wilkie Collins (1875)

Posted on June 8, 2015 by Dorian Stuber under Uncategorized

The critical consensus is that Collins’s great period is 1860-68, when he produced the four masterpieces Woman in White, No Name, Armadale, and The Moonstone. A couple of summers ago I devoured the first three, and loved them all, especially No Name, which I think about often. I was fortunate enough to have read the fourth in college under the expert guidance of Rohan, but I think it’s time to read it again.

At any rate, for once, the critical consensus seems to be right, at least judging from this later work. The Law and the Lady is very good but not quite top-shelf Collins. It hasn’t the seat-of-your-pants excitement of his best work, but it’s perfectly enjoyable and spry enough to keep readers guessing. Plus if you’ve any interest in Freud, you will enjoy the novel’s uncanny prefiguring of the theory of the unconscious.

The book opens with Valeria Brinton having just become Valeria Woodville—except that in a slip of the pen (paging Dr. Freud…) she signs her maiden name. The mistake isn’t just an indication of Valeria’s independent mindedness, although that will be amply demonstrated in the book’s events. It’s also an unconscious recognition that something isn’t right about the name she’s taking on.

It isn’t long before Valeria learns that her husband’s name isn’t Woodville. Her husband implores her not to look into the matter further. But that’s just what she does. Could we possibly be interested in a book about any woman who wouldn’t have? Before long she learns that her husband, whose real name is Macallan, was tried in Scotland for poisoning his wife. The Scottish part matters because Scots’ law apparently still to this today allows a verdict of Not Proven, which is somewhere between acquittal and guilt. The accused is free to go, but not free of suspicion or innuendo. Insisting that no one, not even his wife, could believe entirely in his innocence, Macallan leaves for the Continent. Yet Valeria is undaunted by this dereliction and sets out to prove Macallan wrong by proving him blameless

Valeria’s first step is to read the trial proceedings. Collins first published his works in serial form, and like other writers of the period, most notably his friend Dickens, he was a genius with suspenseful chapter endings. Here for example is Valeria launching her career as detective:

I drew down the blind, and lit the candles. In the quiet night—alone and unaided—I took my first step on the toilsome and terrible journey that lay before me. From the title-page to the end, without stopping to rest, and without missing a word, I read the Trial of my husband for the murder of his wife.

After a paragraph like that, who’s not going to turn the page/buy the next installment/watch the next episode? Indeed, Valeria’s description of her reading experience—at once breathless and assiduous—is a good description of our own. But although she might have taken her first step unaided, she gets a lot of help the rest of the way. A friend of her husband’s, Major Fitz-David, an aging ladies’ man, introduces her to some of the people who testified at the trial. Her late father’s law clerk, Mr. Benjamin, together with a Mr. Playfair, the lawyer who represented Eustace at trial, support her inquiries and eventually uncover the crucial piece of evidence. And even her new mother-in-law, who at first refuses to speak to her, begrudgingly comes to her side, even though she insists to the end that Valeria must not tell Eustace what she has found.

It is true, though, that Valeria is the force that keeps the investigation going, even when it seems to flag and even when she has to leave England to nurse Eustace back to health. He lies unconscious for weeks after having been wounded in Spain (for the life of me I can’t remember why he went there or what the fighting was about—I can’t seem to find it by flipping though the book, either). His actions exemplify his character: he’s supposed to be gallant but he’s always making a mess of things—indeed, we learn that the same ambivalent mixture of righteousness and weakness characterized his relationship with his first wife, Sarah, whom he married because he felt sorry for her. (We’re supposed to think her nasty and shrewish, but it’s hard not to feel sympathy for her. Collins could have done a lot more with Valeria’s feelings about her predecessor—the way Du Maurier did so successfully in Rebecca.) The vacillation and general pain-in-the-assedness of Eustace’s character is a weakness in a novel that depends on Valeria’s profound belief in him. Any time Valeria seems to question her motives—to wonder what it means that she’s undertaking all this effort and risk for someone who has treated her so badly, or to acknowledge that what really thrills her is the investigation itself more so than the eventual exoneration of her husband—she pulls back. I don’t see much evidence that Collins wants us to do anything but take her at her word.

At times, the book gets distracted from its protagonist and her husband. In those other books by Collins I admired his unusual narrative structures—his shifts in points of view or in media (from third person narration to letters, for example) all within a single book. That play with structure doesn’t work as well here. The trial, for example, is presented to us indirectly, through the report Valeria finds. But the book chooses to summarize it rather than transcribing it as a “found text”, presumably because that would be more interesting than a lengthy legal document, but the result is just the opposite: all the momentum the book had built up gets killed and it takes a while to recover. Similarly, a lot of the detective work is done by Playfair and Benjamin, but we hear about it through their letters to her instead of seeing it first hand.

But the real distraction doesn’t lie in the narration—it comes from the introduction of the character Misserimus Dexter, an old friend of Eustace’s and a house guest at the time of Sarah’s death. Dexter is supposed to be a menacing yet magnetic character of the kind that appears elsewhere in Collins—Count Fosco of The Woman in White might be the best example. But where Fosco genuinely is magnetic Dexter is more irritating. We hear a lot about his eccentricity, his genius, his mania. He lives in an isolated half-lavish, half-dilapidated mansion with a cousin who herself is a grotesque figure, a lumpen simpleton who is nonetheless devoted to him and, come to think of it, in this regard acts as a mirror for Valeria’s relation to Eustace. Dexter is a dandy, an elegant and beautiful man despite what the novel calls his “deformity”: he is a paraplegic who is mostly confined to a wheelchair except in some dramatic moments that Collins clearly relishes when he slips its chains and propels himself along by only the force of his arms. Valeria coaxes from Dexter his memory of the events around Sarah’s death—yet in doing so brings him closer and closer to madness until, having mentioned a letter written by Sarah on the day she died, a letter that promises to clear up the circumstances behind her death, he lapses completely into insanity.

The last part of the book concerns the search for this letter, which, we learn, is a suicide note from Sarah to Eustace that fully exonerates him. (That isn’t much of a spoiler, since we’re led to believe from pretty early on that Eustace didn’t do it. But this is a spoiler: Sarah kills herself by taking arsenic she had had Eustace purchase because she is convinced that in small doses it could remedy the kind of skin conditions that disfigure her—and she does so because Dexter, who had loved her before her marriage and is still furious that she rejected his proposal, shows her Eustace’s diary, in which he laments having married her and complains of her incessant wheedling and general poor character.) The letter leads us to the best part of the book: its fascination with the permanence of objects, especially those we think to be junk.

That fascination is already evident when Valeria first visits Dexter at what her mother-in-law satirically calls his palace:

We had got out of the carriage, and we were standing on a rough half-made gravel path. Right and left of me, in the dim light, I saw the half-completed foundations of new houses in their first stage of existence. Boards and bricks were scattered about us. At places, gaunt scaffolding-poles rose like the branchless trees of the brick-desert. Behind us, on the other side of the high road, stretched another plot of waste ground, as yet not built on. Over the surface of this second desert, the ghastly white figures of vagrant ducks gleamed at intervals in the mystic light. In front of us, at a distance of two hundred yards or so, as well as I could calculate, rose a black mass which gradually resolved itself, as my eyes became accustomed to the twilight, into a long, low, and ancient house, with a hedge of evergreens and a pitch-black paling in front of it. The footman led way towards the paling, through the boards and the bricks, the oyster-shells and the broken crockery, that strewed the ground.

I’m intrigued by the bathos of this would-be Gothic scene (the ancient house amidst abandoned construction sites: it’s unclear whether the new will even have the vigor needed to replace the old). It reminds me of something from Dickens, maybe Our Mutual Friend, probably because of all the waste, the oyster-shells and broken crockery (where’s that come from?). Waste is central to the resolution of the plot. Before being called to her husband’s bedside in Spain, Valeria visits his former country house, the place where Sarah died. Wandering the “wilderness of weeds” that is the garden of the shut-up house, something catches her eye:

Beyond the far end of the garden, divided from it by a low paling of wood [Collins will never say “fence” when he can say “paling”—though admittedly it has that fitting resonance of shock and suspense—turning pale, etc—though maybe I’m doing him an injustice and “fence” is just an Americanism], there stretched a piece of waste ground, sheltered on three sides by trees. In one lost corner of the ground, an object, common enough elsewhere, attracted my attention here. The object was a dust-heap. The great size of it, and the curious situation in which it was placed, roused a moment’s languid curiosity in me. I stopped, and looked at the dust and ashes, at the broken crockery and the old iron. Here, there was a torn hat; and there, some fragments of rotten old boots; and, scattered around, a small attendant litter of waste paper and frowsy rags.

Litter here of course means trash, but the word can also refer to a vehicle, and in The Law and the Lady this trash becomes the vehicle for Eustace’s exoneration and Valeria’s triumph. Biggest spoiler alert of all: the torn pieces of Sarah’s letter are exhumed from this pile and pieced together forensically. There’s nothing frowsy about this waste after all!

Here’s where the novel got spooky for me. For these descriptions of waste, on top of or beside which life goes on, and which never fully decay, reminded me uncannily of Freud’s descriptions of the unconscious. Already in “The Aetiology of Hysteria” from 1896 Freud compared the analyst to an explorer who excavates a ruined site and is able to uncover from its remains whole vanished way of life. He never wavered from the image of the unconscious as a wellspring to be excavated (lest its unhealthy manifestations—its symptoms—continue to debilitate the patient) but towards the end of his career he modified the image. In the great Civilization and its Discontents (which could be the motto for Gothic and Sensation fiction) from 1930, for example, he returns to the image of the mind as a ruined city, even the Eternal City, Rome, yet admits that the image doesn’t quite work because unlike in Rome, where the present day covers up the past, so that only hints of its past strata are apparent, in the mind nothing ever goes away. If we wanted to think of the unconscious as a city, we would need to conceive of every era of its history as coexisting so that we would, for example, need to imagine new buildings superimposed over the old ones they replaced.

In The Law and the Lady the future is only possible because the past persists. But what would that mean for a crime novel? Can we speak of solving a crime when any resolution comes from the fact that nothing is ever settled? What else from the past might surface to trouble this marriage that seems now to have been saved? Interestingly, Eustace elects not to learn what his first wife wrote in the letter, preferring only to know that it is enough to absolve him of blame. The novel’s resolution is thus appropriately qualified, and Collins gives us a powerful image of that uncertainty in the envelope containing Sarah’s letter, which Eustace elects to save for his soon-to-be-born child. That’s a potentially explosive inheritance, maybe not quite the bombshell that Pinkie leaves his progeny at the end of Greene’s Brighton Rock (which I read as a modernist Gothic/Sensation novel), but pretty strong stuff nonetheless.

It must be significant, too, that this all takes place in Scotland, one of those Gaelic Gothic dark undersides to English modernity—right after the passage I quoted in which the dust-heap makes its first appearance, Playfair ruefully says to Valeria that something like that wouldn’t be tolerated in the grounds of an English house—though of course the passage describing Dexter’s wasteland “palace” suggests he’s not entirely right.

At any rate, it’s that ending that makes me think The Law and the Lady is more than merely competent and engaging. The whole time I wanted Collins to leave us in doubt as to Eustace’s innocence, the way Du Maurier or Patricia Highsmith would have. Making Valeria protect a murderer would just be more interesting, though perhaps more sadistic. But in the end there’s enough unsettling about The Law and the Lady to make it a fitting depiction of the past’s similarly unsettling refusal to go away.

Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most

Posted on June 1, 2015 by Dorian Stuber under Uncategorized

The Penderwicks in Spring—Jeanne Birdsall (2015)

I yelped with delight when I learned that the latest Penderwicks book was out.

The Penderwicks in Spring is the fourth book in a delightful middle reader series about the adventures of the Penderwick children and their friends and family. It’s a satisfying addition to the series, maybe the best since the first, The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy (2005). You could read it on its own, but I wouldn’t. One of the many pleasures of these books is watching what happens to the children as they age. More than most children’s series, the Penderwicks books, which jump ahead a year or two between each volume, are about the passing of time. Which means they are also about change and death.

In the great tradition of children’s literature, the lives of the Penderwick children have been shaped by the death of a parent, in this case, their mother, who died of cancer just after the birth of the youngest Penderwick, Batty. Batty is four in the first book, and unlike her sisters Rosalind (12), Skye (11), and Jane (10), she has no memories of her mother. What she has instead is the warmth of her family, starting with the girls’ father, an absentminded professor of Botany who manages to be just this side of cliché. Each of the Penderwick sisters has a role/incipient métier: Rosalind, as eldest and by temperament (though who can sort these things out?), is the caretaker; Skye is sporty, a bit sarcastic and difficult; Jane is dreamy, a writer and observer. And Batty is delightful, especially in her fierce attachment to the beloved family dog, Hound.

By the time of the latest book, Batty is in fifth grade and her role expands to more than just comic relief. She’s at the center of The Penderwicks in Spring, and she’s about to learn, as the old song has it, that spring can really hang you up the most. Batty has become musical, devoted to the piano and abruptly, in the new book, discovering that she has a fine voice too, which she puts to good work on a whole bunch of the Tin Pan Alley songs that with impressive (and precocious) taste she adores.

The book begins with Batty determinedly stomping on a patch of lingering snow in the backyard of the Penderwicks’ Massachusetts home because, she explains, spring can’t begin until the snow’s all melted. But this spring will prove particularly hard. Rosalind is at college (with an obnoxious new boyfriend) and Skye and Jane are lost to their high school world of friends who trawl through the Penderwicks’ kitchen with impressive ferocity. More worrisomely, a beloved neighbour has been deployed to Iraq. And (spoiler alert) Hound has died. Birdsall describes Batty’s grief and misplaced feelings of guilt and responsibility that she didn’t do enough to save him utterly convincingly. (Fear not: the possibility of a new dog arises by the end of the book—the book is often dark, but it’s not a downer). Most piercingly of all, Batty overhears Skye saying something hateful about her and her relation to their mother, something that sends Batty into deep despair, a depression lifted only when Skye’s words are revealed as a terrible misunderstanding. Lessons are learned, but lightly, and the lessons are pretty sophisticated (paternalistic adult protection can really hurt children), so the book never feels preachy.

And like its companions in the series, The Penderwicks in Spring is funny: there’s an exchange student who Jane insists on talking to in French even though she doesn’t actually know it; the aforementioned obnoxious boyfriend who bores small boys with his knowledge of Buñel films; and Batty’s pistol of a baby sister, two-year-old Lydia, always ready with a zinger—sometimes even in Spanish, which she’s learned a few words of at her preschool, as in this exchange when Batty, seeking pocket money for singing lessons, asks her elderly neighbours whether they have any odd jobs for her. To Batty’s surprise, they eagerly ask her to walk their dog:

“I didn’t think you had a dog, Mrs. Ayvazian,” [Batty] said, hoping this was all a misunderstanding.

“Duchess, dear, say hello to Batty and Lydia.” Mrs. Ayvazian lowered her voice, as if the invisible dog could hear her. “She arrived only last week. My brother moved to Florida and thought she would be better of here with us. I think she misses him something awful.”

“Well, she should miss him. He spoiled her rotten.” Mr. Ayvazian didn’t lower his voice. Since there was still no dog in sight, Batty didn’t know whether this was a good or bad sign.

Could it be the Ayvazians were losing their minds? This happened sometimes to old people, Batty had heard, although usually it made them do things like misplace keys, not hallucinate dogs. She was trying to figure out a polite way of getting Lydia safely out of the house when she heard a grunt coming from behind a blue armchair.

Then, slowly, while Batty and Lydia stared in amazement, an oddly shaped brown animal—like an overstuffed hot dog with teeny legs—dragged itself out into the open.

“Gato,” said Lydia uncertainly.

That “uncertainly” is pitch perfect, like everything else about these books.

Batty soon trims the overweight dachshund Duchess down. Here and elsewhere in the book we see Batty take on new responsibilities—not least because she’s no longer the youngest Penderwick: she has a step-brother (Ben, seven) in addition to her little sister Lydia (in love with Ben, to his horror) from her father’s second marriage, cleverly orchestrated by the children in an earlier book. Batty will always be Batty, but she is also becoming Elizabeth—her given name, and, she concludes, a fine one for a singer.

Birdsall knew from the beginning she would write five books about the Penderwicks. I’m eager to read the last one, to see how everything turns out, but I’m already saddened by the thought that—like everything else we value—the series will come to an end.

The way I came to these books in the first place—at that time I didn’t yet have a child and even now she’s still too young for them—is a triumph of the virtues of independent bookselling, and since I try to value that world without being sentimental about it let me praise the good people at Talking Leaves Books in Buffalo, NY. I was in town for a conference and spent a lovely afternoon browsing what was then at any rate an impressive store. The second book in the series must have just come out in hardback, and they had a whole display of the first one in paperback right by the cash. I picked up a copy and the clerk immediately said, solemnly, “You need to read that.” She was right. I’ve followed the series faithfully ever since, and I really hope that before too long my daughter will be as smitten with them as I am.

Hey, Jude

Posted on May 21, 2015 by Dorian Stuber under Uncategorized

A Little Life—Hanya Yanagihara (2015)

The first time I lived amongst people who loved to read was after I graduated from high school. Through circumstances too long to get into here I managed to get a job in the shipping department of a bookstore in Switzerland. I loved listening to the other booksellers talk about what they were reading. One of the things I learned is that a community of readers only arises from solitude. I remember one of my co-workers telling me about a book she was so absorbed in—it was by that titan of Swiss literature, Ken Follett—she didn’t want to do anything else but read. “We had friends over for dinner,” she told me ruefully, “and the whole time I just wanted them to leave so I could get back to my book.” No one had ever expressed this sentiment to me so baldly and of course I was so young with so few obligations that I could pretty much do whatever I wanted when it came to reading or anything else for that matter, yet even so I recognized with a throb of immediate familiarity that feeling of impatience with the rest of the world, that desire to return to another world, the one of the book in which I was so immersed.

Even then I knew this sort of immersion was rare, most reading experiences, even good ones, being more quotidian, more desultory, more broken into by the exigencies of the day, but I couldn’t guess how rare it would become, as my time became less my own and my attention span seemed to shrivel. (Lately I find myself setting aside whatever I’m reading to check my email, again, or twitter, again, or the hockey score, again.)

How wonderful then—how marvelous a tonic at the end of a difficult semester—to have spent the better part of the last week lost in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. I sped through its 700+ pages in satisfying 100-150 page chunks, and when I wasn’t reading it I was thinking about it, anticipating when I could get back to it, wondering not so much what would happen next as what its characters were doing, as if they were living beings going about their business. It’s not so much that I confused them with real people, but rather they had for me a kind of autonomous life more interesting to me than that of the people in my real life.

I can imagine someone calling A Little Life old-fashioned: with its emphasis on character, shifting third person narration, and clearly observed East Coast locations it could be seen as a literary analogue to the art of one of its characters, JB, a “classicist” figurative painter who feels himself to be fighting a rearguard action against performance and other non-figurative arts. But A Little Life isn’t defensive, and I’m not sure it’s old-fashioned. Admittedly, it doesn’t feel especially of its moment, the way books by, say, Ben Lerner or Teju Cole or Karl Ove Knausgaard do. (This means it is unlikely to date as badly as they surely will.) What struck me in reading A Little Life was how little it reminded me of anything else I’d read, which might be because its artistic touchstones are visual: painting, photography, film, architecture. Every so often I’d think of Proust, both for the book’s anatomizing of the vicissitudes of relationships—their shifts, both sudden and gradual, their reversals, their persistence, the way they loom out from the practicalities of everyday life even when they occupy less of our attention than those mundane matters—and for the uncertainty about when its events happen and even about the age of its characters, although the book becomes much clearer about that as it goes along.

But old-fashioned or of the moment or Proustian or something else entirely, A Little Life certainly is a melodramatic and sentimental book, filled with dramatic events. The words the characters most often say to each other are “I’m sorry” and the thing they do more than anything else is cry, or defiantly not cry, or wish they could cry. I can’t talk about this book without talking about some of these events, so if spoilers bother you as much as they do me (though the book isn’t particularly driven by plot) then you might want to stop here.

A Little Life follows four young men from the time they meet in college into early middle age. Even though one of them thinks only two are really ambitious, filled with what he calls “that grim, trudging determination… that gave them that slightly faraway look in their eyes that always made him think a fraction of them was already living in some imagined future,” in fact each becomes successful in his chosen field. JB, spoiled, petulant, irrepressible, becomes a painter. Malcolm, unsure, self-doubting, refined, rich, becomes an architect. Willem, kind, even-keeled, sensitive, a bit plodding or, at least, keen to think of himself that way, becomes an actor, even, to the surprise of everyone, a very famous one. And finally Jude, the center of the book, brilliant, secretive, haunted, filled with self-loathing, emotionally damaged, becomes a feared litigator.

JB and Malcolm are more or less wealthy New Yorkers (Malcolm more, JB less). Malcolm feels guilty about the advantages given to him by his very wealthy, very cultured, mixed-race family, while JB is cosseted by the many women in his extended Haitian family. Willem’s parents emigrated from Norway to be ranchers in Wyoming; at college he feels himself to be “a sort of unofficial poor-white-rural-dweller-oddity affirmative-action representative.” And Jude—no one knows where he comes from, how he made it to college in Boston. All he’ll say is that his parents died when he was small and that he was injured in a car accident which is why he limps and struggles to climb stairs and is sometimes laid out with mysterious, debilitating pain. His injuries lead him to Andy, a medical student who becomes his doctor, almost his personal physician, the only person who knows even part of what happened to Jude in his past.

Eventually, we learn Jude’s back-story. Abandoned by his parents when he was only an infant, he grows up in a monastery. This is no idyll. The monks educate the boy, who is an excellent pupil, but they also punish and abuse him, abuse that takes on even more sinister and sexual form when the one person who seems to care for him, the gentle gardener Brother Luke, spirits him away from the monastery and into a fugitive life on the run, through innumerable motel rooms and always in disguise, a life paid for by Luke’s prostituting the boy out to hundreds of men. As if this weren’t terrible enough, he compounds that abuse by also forcing the boy to have sex with him as a sign of what he insists is their love for each other. The physical, mental and sexual abuse continues at the orphanage Jude is sent to after Luke is finally caught. Managing to escape the orphanage, Jude manages to make his way half-way across the country, hitching rides with truckers who, more often than not, rape him as well. Eventually he is found, delirious with fever from a venereal disease, he is found by a psychiatrist, the sinister Dr. Traylor, who locks him in his basement, and waits until a round of antibiotics has run its course before abusing the boy himself. Traylor eventually “frees” Jude but only to hurt him one final horrible time: he runs over him in his car. Jude is found and taken to hospital, where the now fifteen-year-old meets the first good person in his life, his therapist Anna, but in keeping with the book’s punishing attitude, she dies of cancer, though not before helping him apply to college.

Writing this out, I almost want to laugh, it’s so over the top. But the book doesn’t play it for laughs. (A Little Life has many virtues, but humour is not one of them.) There’s a scene where Jude, on the run with Luke, sees some boys playing little league ball, their mothers waiting for the with slices of orange, and knows his life will never be like that, never be normal—it could be a kind of rewriting of Lolita from the child’s perspective, a version of that famous scene in which Humbert Humbert , with grotesque self-satisfaction but also real pathos, hears some children singing and knows Lolita’s voice will never be among their concord. But although A Little Life doles out Jude’s past in extended flashbacks, what it really cares about is the long aftermath of that terrible time. What kind of an adult could a person with no childhood be? In this way, the book always steers just shy of sadism. It punishes Jude, and it punishes us for our investment in Jude—an investment it works hard to create by making him such a complex and fascinating character—but it doesn’t manipulate just for the sake of manipulation. Its manipulation serves a number of ends—for example, by asking us whether knowing everything about someone is to condone or accept them.

The novel enacts this dilemma as part of its investigation of friendship. Arriving at college, Jude is immediately befriended by JB, Malcolm, and Willem, much to his amazement, and joy, and terror (he thinks he doesn’t deserve it, is sure the others have made a mistake about him). The bond between the four—some of which has to do with supporting each other in their desire to make it, and some of which has to do with forming a circle of protection around whatever horrors Jude has experienced: horrors that they know are present even though they don’t know what they are—continues throughout their adult lives.

For all its fascination with success and fame as particular forms of accomplishment, A Little Life is ultimately more interested in something less tangible, something that success and fame tend to work against—long lasting emotional connections between individuals. This is a novel of male friendship. Women barely factor into it: there are hardly any in the book and their perspective is never shared by the narration. Is it because Yanagihara is a woman that this decision never feels demeaning or exclusionary? Of the various implausible or fantastical elements to the novel, the one that feels most energizing to me is its ability to present its intense focus on the intimate and emotional lives of four men without any of the “bromance” anxiety about homosexuality that seems to govern so many representations of male friendship today (all that Hangover stuff). And that’s not just because some of the characters are gay. Rather it’s because the book is so queer, in the sense Eve Sedgwick gave us when she reminded us to remember that people are different and have different desires and that the straight/gay binary, which only normalized heterosexuality, couldn’t account for these seemingly simple yet enormously consequential facts. Of the central characters, JB is openly, we might almost say straightforwardly, gay. Malcolm, after some youthful hand-wringing, comes out as straight. But Jude has had sexual desire beaten out of him by the horrors of his childhood, although on the rare occasions in his adult life when he, unwillingly, has sex it is with men. And Willem prefers to sleep with women except that the person he really loves, and really desires, is Jude. The life Willem and Jude try to make together becomes the center of the book: this queer relationship, which cannot be contained by our habitual use of the term friendship, which is sexual but not, which is a gift to both men yet fraught with risk, given Jude’s past, is something that the book shows us at great length because it can’t name it and anyway naming it would reduce it. In this light, the opening page, in which Jude and Willem, fresh out of college and newly arrived in New York, try to rent an apartment that has only one closet, a closet that they realize they don’t even need, since they don’t have anything, in retrospect seems like a joke about limiting ideas of sexuality and identity.

I said earlier that I had a hard time deciding whether the book was conventional or unconventional in its structure. Now I see that this uncertainty comes from its challenge to conventional modes of intimacy that it nonetheless maintains (It is at once correct and false to say that Jude and Willem are friends. The novel wants to keep friendship as its central concept, but it also wants to expand and revise that concept. The closest analogue to what I mean in rhetoric is catachresis, a semantic “misuse” that bends or deforms a term from its habitual use.) Yanagihara mimics this catachresis in the structure of her novel. We begin by shuttling back and forth between the perspectives of the four main characters, as it develops a portrait of the group. But by and by JB and Malcolm fall by the wayside; they’re still in the book, but events aren’t narrated from their perspective any longer. Instead, Willem and, especially, Jude, and then Willem & Jude are at the center of things. I noted earlier that the book is in third person, but there are a couple of sections narrated in first person. I’m pretty sure these are limited to the perspective of Harold, a professor of Jude’s in law school who becomes so close to Jude that he and his wife eventually formally adopt Jude. (This allows Yanagihara to do for the child-parent relationship what she does at greater length with friendship: i.e. to renovate and expand it: Harold is Jude’s father, but he isn’t his father in any conventional sort—what, she asks, is the emotional tie between these two men?) Harder to figure out are shifts to present tense: I think these are used at times of particular emotional intensity, but I’m not sure—maybe someone can help me figure that out. Yanagihara’s style is neither showy nor unvarnished, nothing particularly daunting or knotted about the syntax yet with a perspicuity of word choice that befits these educated, accomplished, thoughtful characters. Every once in a while, the prose becomes more poetic, more metaphoric, but always anchored in something more plainspoken. Here, for example, is Willem thinking about his parents’ response to the death of his handicapped brother, Henning:

He wanted to scream at his parents, to hit them, to elicit from them something—some melting into grief, some loss of composure, some recognition that something large had happened, that in Henning’s death they had lost something vital and necessary to their lives. He didn’t care if they really felt this way or not: he just needed them to say it, he needed to feel that something lay beneath their impenetrable calm, that somewhere within them ran a thin stream of quick, cool water, teeming with delicate lives, minnows and grasses and tiny white flowers, all tender and easily wounded and so vulnerable you couldn’t see them without aching for them.

However unusual the images in this little aria—images we can just about believe are Willem’s: it’s only in the last clauses about the subterranean stream of water that we sense any distance between character and narrator—their subject matter, of emotion, is typical. We see here that same sense of difficulty in naming—that italicized something, those anaphoric phrases gesturing towards some evanescent thing that is tied to the more easily named forms of life in the extended metaphor by the concept of delicacy and value: things that are fragile and hurt are things we must open ourselves up to.

The book’s stylistic and formal choices, then, have everything to do with its interest in revising without fully destroying conventional forms of emotional connection or relationship. That same dynamic is at work in a philosophical and psychological register in the book’s interest in the relation between form and formlessness. It makes sense that so many of the book’s characters are creators—even Jude responds to the structure of the law, which he comes to as a way to become materially secure in a way he never was in his childhood after leaving behind his first love, mathematics. In the courtroom he is commanding and decisive, even cruel. Harold despairs of Jude’s decision to abandon his work with the public prosecutor in favour of corporate law, but the callousness or self-interested qualities he sees in Jude’s defenses of corporate malfeasance extends far beyond the law. Creation is always destructive, we see, not least of trust and human relationship, most famously in JB’s choice to paint only his friends, especially Jude, especially in moments of what to Jude is intolerable vulnerability. I think of JB’s paintings like Alex Katz’s, only without any women:

Alex Katz, “Round Hill” (1977)

In Katz’s “Round Hill” we see solitude, even vacancy in the middle of intimacy or closeness. There’s always something that threatens to destroy whatever connections we make with others. Even more paradoxically, sometimes the destructive element is the only thing that gives our lives shape, a painful contradiction we see most clearly in Jude’s self-harm, his need to cut. Perhaps this tension between form and formlessness explains why A Little Life is so long. The passing of time is essential to the making of a life. Friendships, emotional connections more generally, need repetitions and rituals in order to cohere, yet even then they are subject to so many changes, reversals, vicissitudes. Maybe that’s why there are so many parties in this book, so many birthdays, so many premieres, so many holidays—sometimes I think this book is about Thanksgiving—in its pages: the coursing of affect and sympathy between individuals is so fluid, so quicksilver, that we need these artificial touchstones if we want to have any hope of holding on to it, to turning these friable, fragile, evanescent emotions into a life, even a little one.

In this regard, the title of A Little Life can be taken as a modest claim about its accomplishments, an ironic contrast to its epic scope. A little life might be all any of us have, all any of us can aspire towards. Yet the term isn’t only (however modestly) aspirational. It also refers to falsity, artificiality, the worst aspects of performance. As far as I can tell, the only time that the titular phrase is actually used in the text is when Brother Luke instructs Jude how to act with the johns: he needs to act as though he likes it, he needs to “show a little life.” This life that we live in our vulnerable human bodies is previous because finite. But what the double meaning of the title suggests is that if life is a value it’s not because it’s synonymous with authenticity. Life is a force that manifests itself in pre-established forms: in this sense we are all actors filling a role (thus the characters’ insistence on “making it” takes the form of successfully inhabiting recognizable forms of being, not least certain careers or vocations). Acting can be enabling, as Willem’s career demonstrates. But it can also be punitive, a source of deprivation, as Jude’s enforced life as a rent boy suggests. Yet although established roles are powerful and hard to dislodge they aren’t definitively fixed. They’re open to being changed, and they are at their most powerful when they can’t yet be named, or when they deform or revise an established name (like “friendship”).

But what about those aspects of our experience that seem to force us into certain beliefs, actions, or identities? A Little Life is at its most interesting when it pits its theory of self or societal invention against the debilitating and stultifying effects of abuse and trauma. Can a damaged person change his sense of himself in relation to other people? I’ve been arguing that the novel believes that people can change each other, largely by changing the way they live and act together. But that claim has to be qualified by its investigation of people who cannot or will not change because their traumatic experiences make it almost impossible for them to do so. What, the novel asks, is the relation between physical and mental health? What does it mean to be psychologically deviant or abnormal? How can we respect the value of a person’s symptoms—the meaning, we might even say the sustenance, they give him—while still acknowledging how harmful they can be? If we love someone who is hurt or damaged, are we responsible for curing him, or making sure someone else cures him (and what would curing even mean in this context)? Or does our responsibility consist in letting him be who he is? But what if he’s someone who damages himself? How can we express love for people who hurt us? What kind of a relationship can we have with them? Does sex need to enter into every loving relationship? How can we renovate or expand our impoverished ideas about relationships? In what way is friendship a model for those new ways of being? Are there some experiences so powerful that they preclude the possibility of changing who we are?

Many of these questions were already posed a century ago by psychoanalysis, and this is yet another way in which the novel is importantly modern. Yet psychotherapy in general is given pretty short shrift in the book: Jude is terrified of it (which could be taken as an implicit acknowledgement of its power), and Willem comes to tire of it, even as he and Harold and Andy and everybody in Jude’s life urges Jude to unburden himself to a professional. Jude refuses, and it’s hard not to connect this to the fact that of the many men who harm Jude in his childhood, the worst is the psychiatrist Dr. Traylor. The characters’ opinions aren’t the same as the book’s, of course, but maybe this skepticism of the methodology that has set the very terms of the book’s premise—that the psyche of a person wounded in childhood, whether he remains wounded or not, is not just a meaningful concept but also a source of endless fascination—has to do with the desire of psychotherapy to answer these questions rather than to ask them. The book’s uncertainty about therapy is even more striking in light of its validation of traditional anatomical/physiological medicine, as incarnated in Andy’s over-the-top, devoted ministrations to Jude. No matter how inexorable the decline in Jude’s physical condition, no matter how much abuse his body suffers, thanks to these medical ministrations Jude always recovers, even when that means, as it does eventually, that his legs must be amputated.

But the novel’s understanding of the relationship between mind and body is more complicated than these opposing depictions of medical care would suggest. Jude fears that the body reflects the mind—his damaged body is a sign of his damaged mind. But that damage comes in two kinds—the harm done to him by others and the harm he does to himself, especially cutting. In the latter case, the body trumps the mind: physical pain takes him away from his problems, makes him serene and gives him the feeling of control. But in other ways the body seems to have no relation to the mind—for all his belief that he is hideous, and despite the mass of scar tissue on his back and arms, Jude is strikingly handsome. In this regard, the relation of body to mind fits with the disjunction we repeatedly find in the book between how others perceive a character and how the character perceives himself: Jude can never shake his conviction that he is fundamentally soiled and unworthy of love.

Whatever the book wants to tell us about bodies and minds is connected to the intense emotion that the book is not just depicting but also making us feel. A Little Life is relentless in its description of the terrible things that happen to Jude. It exploits our responses to them, but it doesn’t simply titillate us, or revel in the horror. But it does want us to be emotionally bruised by the things it tells us about. More than most books it elicits extreme emotional responses from us: we take joy in their success, fear with them that this success won’t last, get angry at them when their self-defeating tendencies make them unable to accept the love and attention they are offered, and feel fury when they are hurt, visceral pain and anguish at the suffering their bodies endure, and hurt when we see how quickly life and love can be taken away. The quickening of our emotional response has larger social-political ends, similar to the way the melodrama of Uncle Tom’s Cabin sought to further abolitionism, or the films of Douglas Sirk to explore the prison of women’s lives in 50s America. In Yanagihara’s case that end, I think, is the redescription or renovation of friendship as the most meaningful kind of emotional tie.

Extremes of emotion that suggest the possibility of new kinds of relationships the instantiation of which never overcomes the possibility of their failure, indeed, the failure of any relationship, the possibility of an isolation that might be enabling but which could also be terrifying—this convoluted knot of affective promise and threat seems encapsulated to me in the image on the cover of Yanagihara’s book, a Peter Hujar photo of a man with his eyes screwed shut and a hand (his own?—hard to say, though if so the posture is awkward, unnatural) touching the side of his face.

Peter Hujar, “Orgasmic Man” (1987)

Although he looks anguished to me, the jacket copy tells me the photo is called “Orgasmic Man.” Of course Barthes and others made plenty of hay about the estranging, even destructive qualities of bliss, so it’s not as if those terms are necessarily contradictory. My uncertainty about this image, my changing sense of what it might mean in light of its title has an analogue in the design of the cover. In the right light, a holographic double of the title and author’s name shimmers into life, as if in recognition of the subterranean life that courses beneath the surface of even those who are closest to us. The power of A Little Life is to be able to expose that duality so movingly, to make us immersed in the lives of these characters, to do what literature does, to let us live in a world that is not our world. Of course there are risks in that displacement. Thinking back to my Swiss co-worker, who wanted her guests gone so she could get back to her book, I see now that the greatest paradox of A Little Life is that to be immersed in this enormous, exhilarating book about what it means to relate to others is to risk being distanced, even alienated from the others in our own lives, the ones we love in whatever hesitantly articulable ways we love them.

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Eiger, Mönch & Jungfrau

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