“My assignment is what every writer’s assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.”
—Leslie Fiedler in an interview for Salon, “The critic in winter”
Books, culture, and life
Two articles not directly related but nonetheless dealing with similar issues regarding American culture caught my eye. The first, Ron Charles’ Harry Potter and the Death of Reading, recites the now-familiar statistics about the relatively small number of people who read and how their ranks thin among the young. The articles details the usual litany about illiteracy and slips in an important sentence that struck me: “Perhaps submerging the world in an orgy of marketing hysteria doesn’t encourage the kind of contemplation, independence and solitude that real engagement with books demands — and rewards.” If we no longer want contemplation or independence and indulge in marketing hysteria, perhaps novels are truly being marginalized. One reason I still love the form is that it’s among the few means of entertainment in which one isn’t constantly being advertised at. The reader usually isn’t overtly manipulated toward a particular view, whether of products or politics, and in the novel I find the kind of expansiveness that comes from unfettered stories.
That ties into Dana Gioia’s recently piece in the Wall Street Journal, The Impoverishment of American Culture, which argues that the arts—music, dance, painting, and, yes, literature—are worth experiencing and saving, the implication being that most people believe otherwise. I’m struck by how a paragraph of Gioia’s resonates with what Charles wrote: “But we must remember that the marketplace does only one thing–it puts a price on everything. The role of culture, however, must go beyond economics. It is not focused on the price of things, but on their value. And, above all, culture should tell us what is beyond price, including what does not belong in the marketplace. A culture should also provide some cogent view of the good life beyond mass accumulation. In this respect, our culture is failing us.” I ask whether our culture fails us or we fail our culture—the arts he’s describing continue to be created even as their supposed deaths have been lamented for years if not decades. Their wide availability for those who choose to seek them continues, and the Internet only makes finding books, music, or performances easier. While I don’t agree with all of Gioia’s article—another problem is his eagerness to create binary categories of people who experience art and those who don’t—it’s an interesting reading reading, especially because it argues for the value of the independent thought available through the arts.
The main problem with both is that, to the extent they speak to anyone, they are in a conversation being carried on by a self-contained elite, much like the readers of this blog. The T.V.-loving majority probably knows little if anything of the debate and knows less of the pleasures of Cryptonomicon or The Mind-Body Problem. If they are not engaged, do the shrinking number of participants have a duty to reach them, as though we’re saving souls? In writing about Ravelstein I recounted something from How To Be Alone: “[…] Jonathan Franzen made a similar point [when] he admits that he has mellowed since his apocalyptic treatise on why the decline in reading is also a sign of End Times and compares his love for words to the beliefs of religious fanatics.” Maybe we aren’t living in the end times and the times are just changing; poets might have wondered the same thing in the first half of the twentieth century, when poetry began its long slide toward society’s margins.
If people no longer read, perhaps subversive writers will not be as feared. I watched the film The Lives of Others three nights ago, and the insidious East German police extensively monitored writers, as dictators have long feared the power of words. They blacklisted, tortured, and killed writers to achieve ends that, to hear Charles and Gioia, may be accomplished in the West without guns or terror. he culture may be heading in that direction anyway. What the Stasi and an army of censors through the centuries could not accomplish may come through torpor or sloth. Both articles say we need to protect reading and arts, but neither asks a question that may be more important: what happens when no one cares?
Life
“Nobody knows the beginning of anything.”
—Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
The Yiddish Policemen's Union
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a good novel—good even without the modifier “crime,” in front of “novel” though not quite as good as some think. Like The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, it’s slightly too long and goes mushy two-thirds through (how again did Landsmen end up in a training camp for religious terrorists in the middle of Tlingit country in Alaska? And is it bad that I give nothing away by saying so?), but I forgive because I like Landsman. I forgive because Chabon never stops playing with words, with dialog, with ideas, even while his characters make improbably erudite references or use literary terms—”‘You need me to hold your hand,’ she says. ‘In a deep dark nasty old tunnel.’ ‘Only in the metaphorical sense,’ he says.” Detectives refer to tautologies and adverbs, and very occasionally professorese slips into the cursing and backbiting I normally think of as the detective’s domain. The rare one-liners that misfire are still more than compensated for by the ones that work: “She leaves the door open and Landsman standing there on the thick coir mat that says GET LOST. Landsman touches two fingers to the mezuzah on his way in and then gives them a perfunctory kiss. This is what you do if you are a believer, like Berko, or a mocking asshole, like Landsman.”
Chabon sometimes stays lowbrow, classic detective, but also goes much higher than Chandler, whose shadow stays on the page even when I read in direct sunlight, and who also sometimes left one confused (who killed who and why?). The Chandleresque metaphors appear—”[…] its coffee fresh from a stint as a barium enema at Sitka General […]” Then again, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is more political than Chandler, and it criticizes the fanaticism of our time by mixing some religious conspiracy elements into a detective novel, making a pastiche of genres that disoriented at times and, towards the end, made me roll my eyes as events reached an unlikely confluence. Chandler never went that route, but then again Chandler arrived in a time blessedly before The Da Vinci Code.
Chandler is not just on my mind, and Chabon mentioned him, though not explicitly the anxiety of influence detective writers feel regarding master, when Chabon visited Seattle recently. During his initial comments Chabon delivered like a standup comic or TV show host, with a speech pattern unlike the professorial tone many if not most authors adopt, and what his characters sometimes hit by accident. He wore a pink shirt and was well-coifed in an unruly, Bohemian sort of way, the young intellectual king who has conquered a small territory in the land of literature, yet turned into something closer to a cantor or rabbi in reading his own work. He spoke slowly compared to most authors. Hearing him roll with his languid sentences made them gorgeous, or sound more so than they already are, and the crowd, myself included, loved his elocution, “The rest of Sitka’s homicides are so-called crimes of passion, which is a shorthand way of expressing the mathematical product of alcohol and firearms” on page eight, causing even more laughs than his opening routine.
At the reading I also I realized what’s so odd about book readings: they’re often not really about the book so much as the apparatus around the book, or the way the book was formulated, or what kind of computer the writer used. The same is true of weaker interviews, which is one reason I liked so many of the pieces from Conversations with Robertson Davies, a book I mentioned, perhaps not coincidentally, regarding John Banville’s visit for Christine Falls.
This time, the questions directly about writing habits and where Chabon got his idea were mostly preempted—the former in the Author’s Note of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, where we learn it was composed on Macs using Nisus Writer Express and DevonThink Pro (I like DevonThink Pro, but prefer Mellel for obscure word processors), and the latter when he described finding a travel guidebook of Yiddish phrases published in the 1950s. World War II demolished any communities where such a guidebook would be of any use, and so he began to imagine an alternate universe where a Yiddish-speaking community might have grown. The ultimate result he signed at the end of the night, impressed with the number of stickies festooning the long edge. “A future graduate student’s compulsion,” I said before the line moved. During his talk Chabon did have one great bit about writing, instead of what he had written, which was paraphrased advice from a former teacher: “If you want to write a novel you have to sit on your ass.” I can testify that the same is true of writing a blog.
I wish he had been able to talk more about the religious aspects of the novel and how he employs chess as a metaphor. Religion played an enormous role, to a much greater extent than his earlier big novels, and Landsman goes from the specifics of him as a Jew to the general problems of being a Jew to back to the specific again, making him the microcosm of the larger issues. The novel also discusses his family, or lack thereof, and how the Jews have been forced into being peripatetic, contributing to the feeling of being lost that is so prevalent in many detective novels but seldom as well-supported as it is here. Landsman is lost because of his absent family, while the Jews are lost because they cannot find a home. For Landsman, as if it’s not enough being left by a woman (a standard detective fiction trope) and being an alcoholic and being cynical (as we’re too often explicitly reminded), he also has to contend with being kicked out of Sitka with the rest of the temporary residents. The people don’t belong there, and Landsman is the detective, so he doesn’t belong either, and he’s trying to find a home through solving his case, just like John Wayne was trying in some sense to belong through his adventures in his Westerns, like The Searchers. Being Jewish makes for unusual references, though, as when “The daily sight of [Bina, Landsman’s ex-wife] is going to be torment, like God torturing Moses with a glimpse of Zion from the top of Mount Pisgah every single day of his life.”
Not all the religious references are Jewish: “Berko comes back to the table, looking like he has just liberated a soul from the wheel of karma.” We’re dealing with Jewish intellectual detectives, evidently, but this is a bit much, as with some of the intellectual matter I talked about above. Chabon also has Landsman speaking for the people when “Landsman’s voice comes out sounding every bit as hollow and hopeless as he feels […]” He feels hollow, and so do the people; they feel frustrated, and so does he: “[Landsman] tries [to drive the game he found at the murder scene] from his mind, to expunge it, to sweep aside the pieces and fill in all the white checkers with black. An all-black board, uncorrupted by pieces or players, gambits or endgames, tempo or tactics or material advantage, black as the Baranof Mountains.” I like the use of chess and color to describe Landsman’s existential frustration, and the reversal of white and black as traditional symbols of good and bad. Reverses like that occur throughout the book, as does commentary on politics, which only become more explicit as it goes on and work at many levels. Landsman could be describing an individual, a state (especially Israel), or humanity here: “Men tend to cry, in Landsman’s experience, when they have been living for a long time with a sense of rightness and safety, and then they realize that all along, just under their boots, lay the abyss.”
The Elegant Variation beats me to the punch again with reporting on Chabon in L.A. Mark Sarvas wrote:
Chabon cited the influence of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald … determined that he needed an “unobtrusive conveying of information” about this alternate society, which could be handled via a detective … He “felt strongly that I wanted to keep the sentences short,” which he acknowledged is contrary to his more normal style.
Unobtrusive? In one scene, one supposedly blue-collar character remarks to another about the adverb used in the preceding sentence of dialog, and there is no way of “unobtrusively” mentioning an enema. I liked The Yiddish Policemen’s Union’s style, but it is not unobtrusive. Perhaps unobtrusive compared to The Amazing Adventure of Kavalier and Clay, but not at all compared to Elmore Leonard, or to the writers who seem to have one eye towards the screen.
In addition, The Guardian writes about Chabon and even mentions novels here.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a good novel—good even without the modifier “crime,” in front of “novel” though not quite as good as some think. Like The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, it’s slightly too long and goes mushy two-thirds through (how again did Landsmen end up in a training camp for religious terrorists in the middle of Tlingit country in Alaska? And is it bad that I give nothing away by saying so?), but I forgive because I like Landsman. I forgive because Chabon never stops playing with words, with dialog, with ideas, even while his characters make improbably erudite references or use literary terms—”‘You need me to hold your hand,’ she says. ‘In a deep dark nasty old tunnel.’ ‘Only in the metaphorical sense,’ he says.” Detectives refer to tautologies and adverbs, and very occasionally professorese slips into the cursing and backbiting I normally think of as the detective’s domain. The rare one-liners that misfire are still more than compensated for by the ones that work: “She leaves the door open and Landsman standing there on the thick coir mat that says GET LOST. Landsman touches two fingers to the mezuzah on his way in and then gives them a perfunctory kiss. This is what you do if you are a believer, like Berko, or a mocking asshole, like Landsman.”
Chabon sometimes stays lowbrow, classic detective, but also goes much higher than Chandler, whose shadow stays on the page even when I read in direct sunlight, and who also sometimes left one confused (who killed who and why?). The Chandleresque metaphors appear—”[…] its coffee fresh from a stint as a barium enema at Sitka General […]” Then again, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is more political than Chandler, and it criticizes the fanaticism of our time by mixing some religious conspiracy elements into a detective novel, making a pastiche of genres that disoriented at times and, towards the end, made me roll my eyes as events reached an unlikely confluence. Chandler never went that route, but then again Chandler arrived in a time blessedly before The Da Vinci Code.
Chandler is not just on my mind, and Chabon mentioned him, though not explicitly the anxiety of influence detective writers feel regarding master, when Chabon visited Seattle recently. During his initial comments Chabon delivered like a standup comic or TV show host, with a speech pattern unlike the professorial tone many if not most authors adopt, and what his characters sometimes hit by accident. He wore a pink shirt and was well-coifed in an unruly, Bohemian sort of way, the young intellectual king who has conquered a small territory in the land of literature, yet turned into something closer to a cantor or rabbi in reading his own work. He spoke slowly compared to most authors. Hearing him roll with his languid sentences made them gorgeous, or sound more so than they already are, and the crowd, myself included, loved his elocution, “The rest of Sitka’s homicides are so-called crimes of passion, which is a shorthand way of expressing the mathematical product of alcohol and firearms” on page eight, causing even more laughs than his opening routine.
At the reading I also I realized what’s so odd about book readings: they’re often not really about the book so much as the apparatus around the book, or the way the book was formulated, or what kind of computer the writer used. The same is true of weaker interviews, which is one reason I liked so many of the pieces from Conversations with Robertson Davies, a book I mentioned, perhaps not coincidentally, regarding John Banville’s visit for Christine Falls.
This time, the questions directly about writing habits and where Chabon got his idea were mostly preempted—the former in the Author’s Note of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, where we learn it was composed on Macs using Nisus Writer Express and DevonThink Pro (I like DevonThink Pro, but prefer Mellel for obscure word processors), and the latter when he described finding a travel guidebook of Yiddish phrases published in the 1950s. World War II demolished any communities where such a guidebook would be of any use, and so he began to imagine an alternate universe where a Yiddish-speaking community might have grown. The ultimate result he signed at the end of the night, impressed with the number of stickies festooning the long edge. “A future graduate student’s compulsion,” I said before the line moved. During his talk Chabon did have one great bit about writing, instead of what he had written, which was paraphrased advice from a former teacher: “If you want to write a novel you have to sit on your ass.” I can testify that the same is true of writing a blog.
I wish he had been able to talk more about the religious aspects of the novel and how he employs chess as a metaphor. Religion played an enormous role, to a much greater extent than his earlier big novels, and Landsman goes from the specifics of him as a Jew to the general problems of being a Jew to back to the specific again, making him the microcosm of the larger issues. The novel also discusses his family, or lack thereof, and how the Jews have been forced into being peripatetic, contributing to the feeling of being lost that is so prevalent in many detective novels but seldom as well-supported as it is here. Landsman is lost because of his absent family, while the Jews are lost because they cannot find a home. For Landsman, as if it’s not enough being left by a woman (a standard detective fiction trope) and being an alcoholic and being cynical (as we’re too often explicitly reminded), he also has to contend with being kicked out of Sitka with the rest of the temporary residents. The people don’t belong there, and Landsman is the detective, so he doesn’t belong either, and he’s trying to find a home through solving his case, just like John Wayne was trying in some sense to belong through his adventures in his Westerns, like The Searchers. Being Jewish makes for unusual references, though, as when “The daily sight of [Bina, Landsman’s ex-wife] is going to be torment, like God torturing Moses with a glimpse of Zion from the top of Mount Pisgah every single day of his life.”
Not all the religious references are Jewish: “Berko comes back to the table, looking like he has just liberated a soul from the wheel of karma.” We’re dealing with Jewish intellectual detectives, evidently, but this is a bit much, as with some of the intellectual matter I talked about above. Chabon also has Landsman speaking for the people when “Landsman’s voice comes out sounding every bit as hollow and hopeless as he feels […]” He feels hollow, and so do the people; they feel frustrated, and so does he: “[Landsman] tries [to drive the game he found at the murder scene] from his mind, to expunge it, to sweep aside the pieces and fill in all the white checkers with black. An all-black board, uncorrupted by pieces or players, gambits or endgames, tempo or tactics or material advantage, black as the Baranof Mountains.” I like the use of chess and color to describe Landsman’s existential frustration, and the reversal of white and black as traditional symbols of good and bad. Reverses like that occur throughout the book, as does commentary on politics, which only become more explicit as it goes on and work at many levels. Landsman could be describing an individual, a state (especially Israel), or humanity here: “Men tend to cry, in Landsman’s experience, when they have been living for a long time with a sense of rightness and safety, and then they realize that all along, just under their boots, lay the abyss.”
The Elegant Variation beats me to the punch again with reporting on Chabon in L.A. Mark Sarvas wrote:
Chabon cited the influence of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald … determined that he needed an “unobtrusive conveying of information” about this alternate society, which could be handled via a detective … He “felt strongly that I wanted to keep the sentences short,” which he acknowledged is contrary to his more normal style.
Unobtrusive? In one scene, one supposedly blue-collar character remarks to another about the adverb used in the preceding sentence of dialog, and there is no way of “unobtrusively” mentioning an enema. I liked The Yiddish Policemen’s Union’s style, but it is not unobtrusive. Perhaps unobtrusive compared to The Amazing Adventure of Kavalier and Clay, but not at all compared to Elmore Leonard, or to the writers who seem to have one eye towards the screen.
In addition, The Guardian writes about Chabon and even mentions novels here.
Günter Grass at Critical Mass
Critical Mass published a short interview with Günter Grass on the subject of memory. He recently published his autobiography, Peeling the Onion (translated from German by Michael Henry Heim). I responded with a comment reposted here:
The gap between the way we remember ourselves and the way we perceived ourselves at an earlier age can be vast, and this piece on Grass calls to mind a story published last year in the New York Times called Speak, Memory, about a woman given a diary she kept as a teenager. The article states: “[Florence Wolfson’s] reunion with her diary seemed to help her discover a lost self, one that burned with artistic fervor. ‘You’ve brought back my life,’ she announced at one point.”
Biographies — and novels — can do the same, and many novels ask question memory and its vagaries: In Search of Lost Time, The Sea, Ravelstein, all of the Ian McEwan novels I’ve read. They deal with the lost self as, it appears, Grass does, and though I’m not familiar with his work, I appreciate the point he makes in his answers and, apparently, his autobiography.
(Links added later.)
Life
“When they come across something wise or witty, or fond, or funny, or something obviously necessary to the whole, warmed readers make a little vertical mark on the page with their bookside pencils. Accordingly, then, the perfect novel would have perfect verticals running down the length of every margin. It never works out like that, because the novel is a tangled thing, and shifts its shape over the years.”
—Martin Amis, “Nabokov’s Grand Slam,” from The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971 – 2000
Ravelstein
Ron Rosenbaum’s laudatory article on Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein inspired me to pick up a book I skipped when it came out (Slate also hosts a discussion on it here). As Rosenbaum writes, “It’s a rapturous celebration of the life of the mind, as well as a meditation on the glory of sensual life and on the tenebrous permeable boundary we all eventually pass over, the one between life and death.” Is it that, or is it a meandering half-biography, half auto-biography, half-novel? (With Bellow, it’s safe to assume three halves, or some other unusual, impossible feat). “[M]editation on the glory of sensual life” is perilously close to “has no plot,” and Ravelstein doesn’t have much of one, but I didn’t miss in it because of its fundamentally strong conflict, with the narrator, Chick, confronting the death of his great friend and a greater human being, Ravelstein. Such a description does no justice to the novel’s beauty or its emotional anguish and power, which are there in full force and the reason the novel works.
Perhaps having an emotional conflict replace a plot is a good thing: Rosenbaum seems to think so, judging from his comments about earlier Bellow: “[…] the philosophical and the sensual in Bellow never fused in a convincing or satisfying way for me.” For me they sometimes did—Augie March, Herzog— and sometimes not—Henderson the Rain King. I’ve not yet read all of Bellow and may skip some of his novellas and stories, so I cannot completely judge him. Regardless, to me the sensual leads to the philosophical in Bellow, and without one the other doesn’t, and can’t, work. No wonder Rosenbaum had a problem with the one if he didn’t think it bridged the other. Like much of earlier Bellow, real life inspired Ravelstein.
The real life aspect didn’t impinge much on me, and I read the novel purely, as Rosenbaum recommends: “Read [Ravelstein] as if you didn’t know who Allan Bloom was.” I don’t (didn’t?) know much about Bloom save that he wrote The Closing of the American Mind. That book sounds too polemical for my taste, and having already read From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present, I’ve already experienced one jeremiad about how we are living in the End Times. I’m always wary of those who make such warnings; Jonathan Franzen made a similar point in an essay from How to Be Alone: Essays, where he admits that he has mellowed since his apocalyptic treatise on why the decline in reading is also a sign of End Times and compares his love for words to the beliefs of religious fanatics. Knowing more might actually have helped because my only problem with reading Ravelstein was not a problem with Bellow, but one with myself whenever I read Bellow: I feel like so much escapes me. I am apparently not the only one to feels this way:
Recently Sam Tanenhaus made an argument in the Times Book Review that Bellow’s work as a whole is “beyond criticism” because like Whitman it contains multitudes, it’s “a vision of the human universe as apprehended by a being of higher intelligence” and the “many defects—the longueurs and digressions, the lectures on anthroposophy and religion” don’t really matter when Bellow is considered as collective whole.
“A being of higher intelligence”—it might be gauche to compare Bellow to Shakespeare, and we know who has had and will have a greater effect on English and cultural history, but with both I cannot encompass them, their minds, their worlds. One key difference: Shakespeare wrote many convincing female roles, something that Bellow’s critics convincingly argue he seldom does. Certainly his best novels have women who are, at best, on the sideline or acting as support. The same is true of Ravelstein: Vela, the cold physicist, is a type and a slam against placing science on the alter of God without humanity to guide it—can she too be autobiographically read?—and Rosamund her opposite, a convenient young, angelic woman who saves the dying Chick from himself. Despite that, I still love Bellow for his ideas and expression, and his critics and supporters are right. Ravelstein’s weaknesses are also its strengths: the abstract ideas and flowering prose, the meandering digressions that are Proustian and precise, yet not in the service of a strong narrative, and I don’t even care much that the narrative is absent. Ravelstein is more a remembrance, but whether of Chick or Ravelstein is hard to say. But I’m glad I read it, and you don’t easily give up a creature like Bellow to death.
Life
“Since, of the charm, the grace, the forms of nature, the public knows only what is has absorbed from the clichés of an art slowly assimilated, and since an original artist begins by rejecting these clichés, M. and Mme. Cottard, being in this sense typical of the public, found neither in Vinteuil’s sonata, nor in the painter’s portraits, what for them created the harmony of music and the beauty of painting.”
—Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
Catch-22 and overrated novels
Lester Hunt thinks Catch-22 is the most overrated novel of the Twentieth Century, a stance I strongly disagree with (link originally via Marginal Revolution, which also asks what readers think the most overrated novel is).
The most pernicious aspect of Hunt’s post is that it misrepresents Catch-22: he writes, “But it consists of basically the same joke over and over again: military people are evil and stupid. They are also stupid and evil.” The joke is that military life—like much of life, especially in bureaucracies—is absurd, and made all the more so by its officiousness and self-importance and lack of awareness of its officiousness and self-importance. With this starting point, Hunt goes on to say that, “It’s a bad argument,” for Catch-22 to argue that military people are evil and stupid. But literature, even satire, is not necessarily written to make an argument: its point, if it has one, is to create art which exists for its own sake. Even so, and even if his initial point is correct, he’s dangerously close to making an argument like the one I attacked in The Prisoner of Convention, a post about Elmore Leonard: that you have to have the “good guys” in a traditional sense—white knight, armor, etc.—be more sympathetic than the “bad guys.” Novels should have the option of making one perceive a situation from other points of view, and one major point of a great deal of art, especially in writing, is that it is often difficult to tell who the bad guys are. (Saddam Hussein was a bad guy and always has been and always will be, right? So why did the former Secretary of Defense shake his hand? We’ve always been at war with Eurasia, right?) If art lacks this option it becomes propaganda.
Although I’d need to reread Catch-22 to cite textual elements for my criticism, I’d suggest Hunt start with some reading with regard to his fourth point, “[t]here is less than meets the eye[:]””Spindrift and the Sea: Structural Patterns and Unifying Elements in Catch 22” by Clinton Burhans, Jr., “It Was All Yossarian’s Fault” Power and Responsibility in Catch-22″ by Stephen Sniderman, both in the journal Twentieth Century Literature, and “War and the Comic Muse: The Good Soldier Schweik and Catch-22” by J. P. Stern in The English Journal. As far as books go, Critical essays on Joseph Heller by James Nagel is probably worth reading, and even big boy on the block Harold Bloom wrote in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.
My own choice for most overrated novel depends on whether one is dealing with the question of whether a novel is overrated by critics of the general public. As The Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels list shows, the two have substantially different ideas about what constitutes greatness. I’m more concerned with what “The Board” thinks, because its choices are more likely to stand up over time, but my choice overlaps: Catcher in the Rye, a novel that manages to combine spectacularly boring writing with a whiny, indulgent brat. Its only redeeming quality is that high schools assign it—or least mine did—despite the swearing and such, thus potentially moving out of the curriculum books like Ethan Frome—though mine made us read it. Read might be too strong a word—mind assigned it.
To Kill a Mockingbird is also a decent choice, but I doubt most scholars and critics take it seriously anymore, so it does no harm on high school reading lists, and probably a fair bit of good: it’s simple in language but still has enough to sink one’s ill-developed intellectual teeth into, and the symbolism is readily understandable even by 13-year-olds. Catcher in the Rye, on the other hand, still seems to have institutional support. I suspect that when the literature professors and teachers who came of age in the 60s retire, Catcher in the Rye will fade into a curio of its time. D.H. Lawrence I don’t love and can’t see aging well, but he is extremely important in terms of the novel’s history. On the Road is another vastly overrated novel, but I hesitate to call it the most overrated.
