Tag Archives: James Wood

Links: Penelope Fitzgerald, How Fiction Works, and blogger ethics

July 22, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , 3 Comments

* The L.A. Times is cutting its stand-alone book review. Mark Sarvas covers the protest of its former editors. I wonder if there will be any newspaper book coverage worth reading outside of the New York Times.

* I’ve never wanted to read Penelope Fitzgerald, but after reading A.S. Byatt discussing her former colleague, I feel compelled to.

* Slate discusses James Wood’s How Fiction Works, and in doing so, succumbs to the problem of writing a summary that makes the book seem pale and flat when it is anything but. I wrote about such problems here (see more links in that post).

* The good news is that Salon has a much better review, which observes:

And as delightful as that sounds, I can’t help noticing what’s missing — namely, anything to do with story. This is no accident. Wood has always been impatient with what he calls “the essential juvenility of plot,” an attitude that comes through most clearly when he deigns to review genre writers. In “How Fiction Works,” he uses a not very representative sample from le Carré’s “Smiley’s People” to damn the whole school of “commercial realism,” its bloodless efficiency, its famished grammar of “intelligent, stable, transparent storytelling.” Even when he finds a genre writer he likes, he acts a bit like Gladstone among the whores. In a recent New Yorker review, for instance, he writes admiringly of Richard Price’s “Lush Life” but wonders why the author doesn’t “free himself from the tram track of the police procedural.”

I like the criticism but think it uses a bad example: the problem with Lush Life is that for all its artfulness, it makes the same point most modern thrillers do—the cops and crooks aren’t so different and the ways of the world don’t change much regardless of the side you’re on. That’s nice, but it’s been made about a thousand times before and is the central weakness of modern thrillers and one refreshing thing about Elmore Leonard, who doesn’t generally fall into this trap. I wrote these problems with Lush Life in my review of it.

* A question of blogger ethics: should one post e-mails without permission? In general I’d say no, unless one uses a short excerpt as an example of a general trend and it’s done anonymously. For example, in Science Fiction, literature, and the haters, I quoted two literary agents but didn’t put their names or identifying information about them in the post. In a follow-up post, I paraphrased what some e-mailers said. But I would never post an e-mail with someone’s name without permission because I think it violates their expectation for reasonable privacy. If they wanted to write in a public place, comments are open, and to dash that expectation isn’t fair.

The only exception to this is egregious behavior—for example, threats to sue, gross cruelty or crudity, and the like might merit an exception to this general policy. With luck I’ll never have to do so, but reserving the possibility seems prudent.

(Hat tip Books Inq.)

The Cider House Rules — John Irving

July 16, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Philosophy, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

I go back and forth about John Irving, sometimes marveling at him, as I did through much of The World According to Garp and, now, The Cider House Rules, and sometimes rolling my eyes, as I did at A Prayer For Owen Meany. He gets at the multifaceted aspects of life and somehow contains a strong, uncertain moral bent without (usually) sermonizing. He has a tendency to delve into character background and explanation at the expense of action, giving overly elaborate details about characters who remain flat anyway. Yet his gift for keeping forward moment despite any obstacles from his own verbosity is amazing, as is his almost Henry James-esque ability to nail an idea, as he does when he writes, “Society is so complex that even Heart’s Haven had a wrong part to it.”

The Cider House Rules moves seamlessly between the narrative action and overarching generalizations with more skill than a 19th Century novel and so much dexterity that they don’t seem unnatural or forced, as such abstractions or general life lessons often can—in, for example, The Spies of Warsaw. Rarely does the novel devolve into Steinbeck-land moralism and sentimentality, as when Wilbur Larch argues that Homer has a duty to help those who cannot help themselves—in this case by performing abortions. Granted, the argument has some logical fallacies for careful readers to see, but it’s nonetheless jarring in a book that’s otherwise carefully evenhanded. Problems exist, such as the aforementioned biographies of minor characters, and Irving is more a fan of the sledge hammer than chisel. Perhaps this rambunctiousness is the subject of some attacks against him: Irving doesn’t have the cool and cutting quality that seems in vogue among many critics today, the aesthetic preference for a single sentence summary of a person rather than paragraphs of background designed to bring a character to the foreground. But whatever faults John Irving has, failing to live is seldom one: his best characters usually have the differentiated roundness that brings them alive. James Wood thinks not: in a recent post, he said:

The review I just wrote about Joseph O’Neill’s superb novel,”Netherland,” in “The New Yorker,” praises the novel both for its deep and wise interest in life and lives, and for its high degree of artifice and style. That doubleness is entirely in keeping with my attacks on people like Tom Wolfe, John Irving, the more formulaic elements of John Updike, and so on.

(Link added by me).

The Cider House Rules might not have the lifeness Wood prefers, but it has the engaging quality I love and too infrequently find. It had long been sitting on my bookshelf, waiting to be read, and so I decided to try it. As this introduction shows, I liked it more than not, even if some parts revealed too heavy a hand and showed, I think, what Wood meant. Still, the whole—with Wilbur and Homer Larch at the center of a novel about the discovery of what it means to assume the terrible weight of responsibility while still laughing at the lunacy of the world—carries any weaknesses along with it in a flood, as Irving’s best novels do. They forge their own eccentric morality and philosophy, but though I think of them often I can’t immediately define those traits that I can feel. One day, maybe, but one mark of a good novelist is, I think, the inability to corral all their themes and ideas without a great deal of study, and by that standard, too, Irving succeeds.

Mid-July links

July 12, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* More Wood here, by way of a few blogs. See my last post here. Find How Fiction Works here.

* I’d love to think that reading helps one become less socially awkward, as argued here. Repeat after me: correlation is not causation. But the article gives an example of how readers of a New Yorker story did better on social reasoning tests than those given a random essay, and this research complements that done on fiction and empathy.

As for the original claim, I will say that, speaking from experience, if reading helps one become less socially awkward, it certainly took a long time for the effect to kick in around these parts.

* I’d forgotten about The Literary Book of Economics: Including Readings from Literature and Drama on Economic Concepts, Issues, and Themes, but it complements the econ-for-dummies books I like and gives numerous examples of the intersection of economics and literature, since the two express one another more often than many of their respective practitioners think.

* Maybe I was too quick to dismiss the possible value of film as an agent of social change. This link courtesy of Freakonomics. Besides, in my post on The Devil’s Candy, I went into an extended rhapsody about Friday Night Lights, so perhaps I should be wary of too much bashing, despite Twilight of the Books.

(Before I concede too much, however, I’ll ask for the the paper detailing people’s tendency to protest the government thanks to T.V., or how T.V. is a medium easily monopolized by the powerful, as in Russia.)

* Speaking of film, this time combined with politics, Frank Rich in The New York Times has a great column that further explains why it’s hard for me to get ideologically attached to political parties in the U.S. or excited about politics:

You have to wonder what these same kids make of the political show their parents watch on TV at home. The fierce urgency of now that drives “Wall-E” and its yearning for change is absent in both the Barack Obama and McCain campaigns these days.

* You might notice that links having little if anything to do with books go at the bottom of link posts, today isn’t an exception. Clive Crook writes about education and immigration idiocy. Fortunately, this is an issue both parties can be wrong about, further explaining why I find it impossible to affiliate with either.

More on How Fiction Works and someone else's review doesn't

July 10, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links, Philosophy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

In The Australian, a nominal review of James Wood’s How Fiction Works is really a discussion of Wood’s work more generally. It also shows why I shirked writing a deep review of How Fiction Works, as I I have more than a few quibbles:

If Wood doesn’t “get” the overall trick of an author’s writing he tends to dismiss it. This was most evident in his notorious Guardian review (reworked in The Irresponsible Self) of “hysterical realism”, a term Wood has coined to sum up the work of a whole slew of contemporary novelists that includes Don DeLillo, Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, Salman Rushdie and Thomas Pynchon.

Is this an issue of not “getting” the works, or of getting them too well and not liking or caring for what they represent? To me, DeLillo and Pynchon in particular have long been overrated. I remember trying to read them in late school and early college and thinking, “why are these awful writers so highly praised?” At the time I didn’t realize that they were a reaction against earlier literary trends and that they were trying to be stylistically unusual merely for the sake of being stylistically unusual, or for obscure philosophical points without writing actual philosophy. Paul Graham seems to have had a similar experience with actual philosophy. Wood gets this, and probably better than I do, and I’m not the only one who’s noticed the overpraised and under-talented; one thing I very much appreciate about A Reader’s Manifesto is its willingness to engage with writing, rather than politics surrounding writing, or whatever propelled DeLillo to fame.

To return to the review:

While another critic might see the impulse towards jam-packed, baroquely hyperreal novels as a legitimate and thoughtful, albeit varyingly skilful, response to our postmodern world (a mimetic reflection of the different status of information in an age of instant and indiscriminate communication, say, or an attempt to “wake up” a form whose traditional gestures are now the cliched staples of Hollywood cinema) […]

The problem is that these techniques aren’t mimetic: in trying to mimic the supposed techniques that they implicitly criticize, they don’t reflect information, but chaos; they aren’t hyperreal, but fake. And I’m not convinced modern life is so different in terms of “the different status of information in an age of instant and indiscriminate communication.” Information isn’t indiscriminate: I still choose what to read and what to watch most of the time; if I’m exposed to ads, it’s because I choose to be. In some essays, Umberto Eco discusses how he sees ideas and battles from the Middle Ages underlying much of everyday life, and the more I read, the more I tend to trace the lineage of intellectual and personal ideas backwards through time. Although our technological and physical world has changed enormously in the last two hundred years, I’m not sure the purposes to which we put technology and power (conquest, sex, etc.) has much. That isn’t to say literary style hasn’t evolved, as it obviously has, and my preference tends toward novels written after 1900. Ideas have shifted and evolved too. Still, techniques used by modern authors like the hyperrealists just because they can be used doesn’t make them an improvement. Furthermore, not all of Wood’s loves are mine—I just finished Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady and wouldn’t have if I didn’t need to. But I have seldom read a stronger argument for the capital-N Novel than I have in How Fiction Works, and even when I sometimes don’t find Wood persuasive, the power of his argument and depth of his reading always compels me to think more clearly and deeply about my own positions and thoughts.

More on How Fiction Works and someone else’s review doesn’t

July 10, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links, Philosophy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

In The Australian, a nominal review of James Wood’s How Fiction Works is really a discussion of Wood’s work more generally. It also shows why I shirked writing a deep review of How Fiction Works, as I I have more than a few quibbles:

If Wood doesn’t “get” the overall trick of an author’s writing he tends to dismiss it. This was most evident in his notorious Guardian review (reworked in The Irresponsible Self) of “hysterical realism”, a term Wood has coined to sum up the work of a whole slew of contemporary novelists that includes Don DeLillo, Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, Salman Rushdie and Thomas Pynchon.

Is this an issue of not “getting” the works, or of getting them too well and not liking or caring for what they represent? To me, DeLillo and Pynchon in particular have long been overrated. I remember trying to read them in late school and early college and thinking, “why are these awful writers so highly praised?” At the time I didn’t realize that they were a reaction against earlier literary trends and that they were trying to be stylistically unusual merely for the sake of being stylistically unusual, or for obscure philosophical points without writing actual philosophy. Paul Graham seems to have had a similar experience with actual philosophy. Wood gets this, and probably better than I do, and I’m not the only one who’s noticed the overpraised and under-talented; one thing I very much appreciate about A Reader’s Manifesto is its willingness to engage with writing, rather than politics surrounding writing, or whatever propelled DeLillo to fame.

To return to the review:

While another critic might see the impulse towards jam-packed, baroquely hyperreal novels as a legitimate and thoughtful, albeit varyingly skilful, response to our postmodern world (a mimetic reflection of the different status of information in an age of instant and indiscriminate communication, say, or an attempt to “wake up” a form whose traditional gestures are now the cliched staples of Hollywood cinema) […]

The problem is that these techniques aren’t mimetic: in trying to mimic the supposed techniques that they implicitly criticize, they don’t reflect information, but chaos; they aren’t hyperreal, but fake. And I’m not convinced modern life is so different in terms of “the different status of information in an age of instant and indiscriminate communication.” Information isn’t indiscriminate: I still choose what to read and what to watch most of the time; if I’m exposed to ads, it’s because I choose to be. In some essays, Umberto Eco discusses how he sees ideas and battles from the Middle Ages underlying much of everyday life, and the more I read, the more I tend to trace the lineage of intellectual and personal ideas backwards through time. Although our technological and physical world has changed enormously in the last two hundred years, I’m not sure the purposes to which we put technology and power (conquest, sex, etc.) has much. That isn’t to say literary style hasn’t evolved, as it obviously has, and my preference tends toward novels written after 1900. Ideas have shifted and evolved too. Still, techniques used by modern authors like the hyperrealists just because they can be used doesn’t make them an improvement. Furthermore, not all of Wood’s loves are mine—I just finished Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady and wouldn’t have if I didn’t need to. But I have seldom read a stronger argument for the capital-N Novel than I have in How Fiction Works, and even when I sometimes don’t find Wood persuasive, the power of his argument and depth of his reading always compels me to think more clearly and deeply about my own positions and thoughts.

How Fiction Works, and how this review doesn’t

June 20, 2008 By in Books, Links, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

I keep citing James Wood’s How Fiction Works without writing about it directly because the book feels so whole that it lacks the typical cracks that offer handholds. It asks the right questions and, inevitably, can only offer partial answers, but those answers are far more illuminating than almost anyone else’s, and its contents are encapsulated by the epigraph: ‘There is only one recipe – to care a great deal for the cookery.’ Henry James said, and James Wood lives it.

For reasons opaque to me this book hasn’t come out in the United States yet and won’t in July, yet it seemed essential enough to buy it from the U.K., and now I perceive that decision as a wise one. How Fiction Works joins good company stretching back at least to E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, which is addressed, and it goes beyond that—the book is part how-to, part criticism, part literary theory, and part history, and all the whole is greater than their sum, offering much to almost every reader. If that weren’t enough, it also comes with potential reading list—for example, the affection Wood, along with Jane Smiley and others, shows toward Henry Green makes me realize I should read him. Some writers—like Dawn Powell and William Maxwell—seem destined to be remembered only by other writers, their secrets moving through the years with only thin strands connecting them from person to person, forgotten by teachers, academics, and other keepers of the past. I wish I had more than two short paragraphs to say, but this is the rare book that I can only recommend you read, and then perhaps you will understand why. The reviews I’ve seen so far—representative samples are here and here, though this is better—so miss their target, or at least so fail to really engage it, that I hesitate to add to clamor, rather than music. The critic whose writing is consistently music instead of bombast is too rare, and consequently, I encourage you to listen.

How Fiction Works, and how this review doesn't

June 20, 2008 By in Books, Links, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I keep citing James Wood’s How Fiction Works without writing about it directly because the book feels so whole that it lacks the typical cracks that offer handholds. It asks the right questions and, inevitably, can only offer partial answers, but those answers are far more illuminating than almost anyone else’s, and its contents are encapsulated by the epigraph: ‘There is only one recipe – to care a great deal for the cookery.’ Henry James said, and James Wood lives it.

For reasons opaque to me this book hasn’t come out in the United States yet and won’t in July, yet it seemed essential enough to buy it from the U.K., and now I perceive that decision as a wise one. How Fiction Works joins good company stretching back at least to E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, which is addressed, and it goes beyond that—the book is part how-to, part criticism, part literary theory, and part history, and all the whole is greater than their sum, offering much to almost every reader. If that weren’t enough, it also comes with potential reading list—for example, the affection Wood, along with Jane Smiley and others, shows toward Henry Green makes me realize I should read him. Some writers—like Dawn Powell and William Maxwell—seem destined to be remembered only by other writers, their secrets moving through the years with only thin strands connecting them from person to person, forgotten by teachers, academics, and other keepers of the past. I wish I had more than two short paragraphs to say, but this is the rare book that I can only recommend you read, and then perhaps you will understand why. The reviews I’ve seen so far—representative samples are here and here, though this is better—so miss their target, or at least so fail to really engage it, that I hesitate to add to clamor, rather than music. The critic whose writing is consistently music instead of bombast is too rare, and consequently, I encourage you to listen.

Literature and science fiction redux, with taste as a bonus

June 17, 2008 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 8 Comments

Science Fiction, literature, and the haters spawned great comments and e-mails, including responses from both the agents I referenced. The one who gave a minimum word count said that the agency he and a partner founded is relatively new, and the advice regarding word count and sequels comes from editors, and until they have more experience, they’re hewing to those guidelines. The other agent said that calling Pearle Transit “too literary” was a poor choice of words and that, although he admired aspects of it, the novel didn’t get him excited. Both replies, in other words, were reasonable and show that the agents care. Other would-be authors might want to take note: rejection is rarely as personal as it might seem. In addition, I’m reminded of this passage from Orwell, who discussed the problems with book reviewing:

[…] the chances are that eleven out of the twelve books will fail to rouse in [the reviewer] the faintest spark of interest. They are not more than ordinarily bad, they are merely neutral, lifeless, and pointless. If he were not paid to do so he would never read a line of any of them, and in nearly every care the only truthful review he could write would be: “This book inspires in me no thoughts whatever.”

Most agents probably feel like that about most books. I just wrote a post expressing how Doctor Faustus roused nothing it me, though I perceive its technical merits. The latter can’t even be said of A Confederacy of Dunces, though it’s widely admired.

In other reactions, several people, including Big Dumb Object and agent Colleen Lindsay, pointed out the Clarke Awards shortlists. Thanks for the tip, and I’ll be reading some of them, although 2008 winner Richard Morgan’s first book, Altered Carbon, embodied some of the negative qualities discussed in my post. Still, very few authors write first books that are their best, and Thirteen is in my queue. I also noticed that Cryptonomicon was on the shortlist for 2000, but it’s not really science fiction.

One other thing I noted was the absence of any correspondents who said, “This is a great book that deserves a spot in the literary pantheon.” Likewise, I’d hoped for citations or links to essays that get deep inside great books. Where is the James Wood (see here too) of science fiction? Perhaps he already exists in Stanislaw Lem—his book Microworlds should arrive soon—but if the genre has as much material as some of the commenters and e-mailers say, it should also have its great critics. To paraphrase Saul Bellow without his racial connotations, I’d love to read them.

One commenter went in the opposite direction and said: “The reason as I see it that almost all science fiction writing falls short of literary merit is that its audience wants it that way.” I’m not convinced: although I pointed out a general trend toward the lack of literary merit in science fiction, it’s a law, and if it is, I’m wary of making correlation into causation. Furthermore, plenty of bad literary fiction exists, just like bad science fiction—but the literary canon pushes the upper bounds of knowledge and language in ways and volumes that science fiction hasn’t, at least to my knowledge so far. That’s in part why I’m writing these posts: it’s a process of searching, and I’m trying not to assume the very opinions I’m asking about it.

A few correspondents wrote that I had no idea what I was talking about and, implicitly, that there is no such thing as literary merit. I suppose both are possible, but they seem highly improbable; stating that there is an element of opinion in every artistic judgment is not the same as believing that every opinion is the same, and I also referred those writers to the “big three” books I’d mentioned about art and writing, which are the best reflections on what makes great literature and what makes great literature great I’ve found. Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel belongs there too. Alas, there is no short checklist that can be easily explained, and so the stack of reading necessary to really enter this conversation is intimidatingly high, and many of the accusers do not appear to have done it; such correspondents might not see the river because they’re in a valley and don’t have the fortitude to climb the mountain. Granted, at the top of the mountain they might look in the opposite direction I do, in which case I’d like to hear their opinions. Along these “everything is relative” lines, I once argued to a professor that Shakespeare and Joyce were way overrated and only read for historical reasons and because other people had read them.

Oh, how I want to take that back.

In Richard Feynman’s hilarious Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, he writes about his lessons in art and his visit to the Sistine Chapel, when he recognizes the masterpieces and the lesser works without a guide:

This was a terrific excitement to me, that I also could tell the difference between a beautiful work of art and one that’s not, without being able to define it. As a scientist you always think you know what you’re doing, so you tend to distrust the artist who says, “It’s great,” or “It’s no good,” and then is not able to explain why, as Jerry did with those drawings I took him. But here I was, sunk: I could do it too!*

To be sure, there is an element of opinion in virtually any form of art and criticism, and just as there is in some fields more scientific: in economics, should we value making the resource pie larger through public policy like lower tax rates and flatter tax rates, or should we try and distribute what we have more evenly? Nonetheless, some people simply know much more about the trade-offs involved, and by the same token, some know far more about books and literature than others. The closer you get to hard sciences that are describing rather than interpreting the world—math, physics, chemistry, and the like—the farther you get from pure opinion, but as soon as you reach the application phase, judgment calls arise again: what would be more useful to sell—product derived from X or from Y? What would be a more useful use of physicists during World War II: having them build mechanical calculators and the like, or having them work on the atomic bomb? Someone had to make those decisions, and they’re closer in some respects to artistic choices than to ones regarding proof and experimentation.

In art and literature, there aren’t experiments, but taste exists. Not everyone’s is the same but not everyone’s is equal, either. Mine is well-developed enough to have some opinions of at least some validity, I hope, and I’m looking for others who can say the same, and who know something of science fiction—hence my appreciation of those who pointed out the Clarke Awards and made other suggestions. If I read through the Clarke books and decide I’m wrong, you’ll probably hear about it in a year or two. Although I’m not a scientist, I do have interest in all intellectually honest fields and all intellectually honest practitioners in those fields, and so I turn again to Feynman, who described what he wants to instill in Caltech grads and what they should inculcate in themselves: “It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards.” Literary critics should hold themselves to the same standards, and I strive to. How well I succeed I will leave to others to argue.

* Although I quote poetry sometimes, I almost never analyze it here because I’m like the person without a real sense of what great visual art is: not having read widely and deeply enough in poetry to have developed my sense for what makes it bad, mediocre, good, and great poetry, I’m mostly silent, though appreciative.

EDIT: Added Feynman quote to the last paragraph.

To the Lighthouse

June 16, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Are people afraid of Virginia Woolf, per the Edward Albee play, because she’s got the reputation of being a big tough writer, or because she’s genuinely hard to read and understand? As a a relative latecomer to her, the issue was at the forefront of my mind as I read To the Lighthouse, as was how glad I am to have come to her now as opposed to earlier, when I don’t think I would’ve been prepared. Now, I see To the Lighthouse as it was intended: as a vast artistic statement with much history behind it, which makes it a writer’s novel, or an intense reader’s; it reconciles so many opposites, being both fluid and structured, artificial and real, and yet at the cost, I suspect, of being easily understood through one’s first reading. To the Lighthouse demands such familiarity with what conventional narration is that to comprehend it with any fullness requires wide and deep reading as initiation. In Reflections on the Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco describes how he came to structure The Name of the Rose:

After reading the manuscript, my friends and editors suggested I abbreviate the first hundred pages, which they found very difficult and demanding. Without thinking twice, I refused, because, as I insisted, if somebody wanted to enter the abbey and live there for seven days, he had to accept the abbey’s own pace. If he could not, he would never manage to read the whole book. Therefore those first hundred pages are like a penance or an initiation, and if someone does not like them, so much the worse for him. He can stay at the foot of the hill (41).

Such a process isn’t built into To the Lighthouse, and without preparation, I suspect reading it would be like trying to understand trigonometry without knowing algebra. That might be an unfair comparison, especially given the hackles I’m sure it raises in the math phobic, but I make it for good reason: Woolf is built on understanding why and how she uses her great strength and technique: free indirect speech or limited omniscient narration, depending on the term you prefer, which allow her to peer into all her characters’ minds, allowing each to perceive the other’s limitations, weaknesses, foibles, and problems. Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Those who wonder: Am I smart enough? Do I not get it? Am I like one of the characters, each of whom is shown with flaws more glaring than those of most hardboiled detective fiction?

The way we learn of those flaws also startles because of the novel’s shifting temporality: long paragraphs of thought explaining an interaction interrupt speech, so that the first statement and response to it are alienated. In later writers, like Raymond Carver, the speech and situation are simply assumed to be alienated from one another, the domestic situation strained or unspoken, and no longer interruptions necessary. But in Woolf, we have an explanation—but only from a character’s point of view. Here is one such passage, quoted at length because shortening it would defeat its purpose:

‘You won’t finish that stocking to-night,’ he said, pointing to her stocking. That was what she wanted – the asperity in his voice reproving her. If he says it’s wrong to be pessimistic probably it is wrong, she thought; the marriage will turn out all right.
‘No,’ she said, flattening the stocking out upon her knee. ‘I shan’t finish it.’
And what then? For she felt that he was still looking at her, but that his look had changed. He wanted something – wanted the thing she always found it so difficult to give him; wanted her to tell him that she loved him. And that, no, she could not do. He found talking so much easier than she did. He could always say things – she never could. So naturally it was always he that said the things, and then for some reason he would mind this suddenly, and would reproach her. A heartless woman he called her; she never told him that she loved him. But it was not so – it was not so. It was only that she could never say what she felt. Was there no crumb on his coat? […]
[This continues for much longer, until, finally—]
‘Yes, you were right. It’s going to be wet tonight.’ She had not said it, but he knew it. And she looked at him smiling. For she had triumphed again.

Triumphed? In what context? I hear Kurtz saying, “The Horror! The Horror!” and wonder, like an uncontacted tribe before a helicopter. The “triumph” comes at the end of To the Lighthouse’s first section, and it is as enigmatic as what proceed it. Notice that “he wanted something,” but it’s not clear that the thing he wanted or that she found so difficult is the love mentioned in the next part of the sentence. “Something” hangs ambiguously, like a writer trying to give the reader what the reader longs for but never knew they longed for.

Instead we long for something that we give imperfect names: depth of characterization, fastness of plot, reality, “entertainment,” symbolism, aesthetic experiences, or the other facets of a gem we call literature, or experience, or many other names. In Woolf, the mystery of that search comes from the deep internal lives of the characters and that contrast with their external lives—inside, they register knowledge, social orders, hierarchies, shifts, and even epiphanies, but all this happens beneath the veneer of social propriety and limited, clipped speech like “Yes, you were right. It’s going to be wet tonight,” ending an internal, gushing well of feeling that finds so little expression in speech. If someone like Robert Penn Warren strives to balance speech and internal monologue, making them reflect one another, abd Elmore Leonard pushes to strive almost entirely for description through speech, then Woolf, in contrast, pushes the seesaw almost solely on the side of the internal—which she can only accomplish through deft, extraordinary use of free indirect speech—otherwise we would have the hammering of a single and limited consciousness, which would deafen us with the repetition of its primary and perceptions, making us try to see through it rather than allowing the narrator to work. But the shifts aren’t easily perceived, making them different from novels where the narrators are clearly delineated, like Eliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity.

These traits make Woolf an acquired taste but one essential for writers to sample, and it’s also one usually acquired after tiring of novels driven solely by plot and novels without the depth of characterization Woolf has. Maybe Faulkner is the same way: I’ve never enjoyed reading his novels even as I recognize their importance. Yet I think I see a dividing line with Woolf and Proust—another modernist favorite more cited than read—on one side and Faulkner and Joyce on the other, with moving toward the former rather than the latter. This post in part articulates why, but there’s much more I can’t yet articulate. All four writers offer mystery above all, and not one that can be explained by finding out whodunit; therefore, I’m left describing without adequately explaining.

What would Woolf make of starting this problem? I’m not sure, as I complete this slippery review that too often uses the word “I,” establishing myself as a single perspective against the many “I’s” in To the Lighthouse. Still, Woolf influences how I now write posts: acknowledging myself, my biases, and the problems with my own reading, as well as what others would say to critics over-fond of “I”: narcissistic, obsessed with their own response, and the like. To them I have no perfect answer, though Virginia Woolf seems a good one.

More on-line sanctioned ignorance: in defense of Tom Wolfe and others

May 27, 2008 By in Books, Life, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

James Wood wrote a typically fascinating piece to Nigel Beale defending “lifeness,” or sophisticated realism. As mentioned in my recent link post, it’s worth reading in full. I have to quote at length to set up my response:

It is perfectly possible to agree with Roland Barthes that realism is a set of codes and conventions (for all writing is a set of such codes, after all) and still try to defend that element in fiction — what I call “lifeness” — that eludes the nerveless grip of code. This is a defence both of that evanescence called ‘reality’ and of the artifice that makes it — and makes it up — and there is no contradiction in this doubleness: we read fiction with two eyes, as it were, one world-directed and one text-directed.

The review I just wrote about Joseph O’Neill’s superb novel,”Netherland,” in “The New Yorker,” praises the novel both for its deep and wise interest in life and lives, and for its high degree of artifice and style. That doubleness is entirely in keeping with my attacks on people like Tom Wolfe, John Irving, the more formulaic elements of John Updike, and so on, and in keeping with my praise, in essays and reviews, of writers like Cormac McCarthy (when he is not trying to write a genre thriller like “No Country for Old Men”), Saul Bellow, Roberto Bolano, Muriel Spark, Jose Saramago, W.G. Sebald, Philip Roth, Alan Hollinghurst, Milan Kundera, Norman Rush, V.S. Naipaul, Edward P. Jones, Michel Houellebecq, Anne Enright, David Means, Peter Carey, J.M. Coetzee, Bohumil Hrabal, Harold Brodkey (I was an early and pretty isolated English champion of Brodkey’s), not to mention earlier writers like Henry Green, Italo Svevo, Giovanni Verga, Knut Hamsun, J.F. Powers, and many others.

(Link added by me).

I see this in part as a facet of the long-running debate between whether one should understand the exterior world as reflective of the interior or whether the interior is perpetually hidden and most revealed through its own, psychological terms. This tension manifests itself in literary periods: the exterior world was more popular in the 18th Century with writers like Pope and Swift, and naturally lends itself to satire, while the Romantics brought acute focus back to the interior world through their poetry, while many of the modernists tried to reflect this shift to the inside through the shape of their prose itself. Some contemporary novelists think they’re doing one when they’re actually doing the other; although I hadn’t realized this at the time I wrote my review, it’s a malady Bridge of Sighs suffers from. And the greatest novels can go one way (Ulysses, I would argue, is radically interior) or find a middle path, as I think Bellow often does, but even he often veers interior, as in Henderson and Herzog, as opposed to the exterior-focused world of The Adventures of Augie March; I’m not sure where Ravelstein fits, but I take that subject up again later.

To be sure, some of these generalizations are overly broad, as they almost must be when describing grant literary trends. But some writers—like Tom Wolfe—can subvert the code they appear to be hewing to, and at his best in The Bonfire of the Vanities Wolfe accomplishes this and is a more sophisticated and better writer than many critics assume through his use of examining how the exterior reflects the interior. Being just slightly off makes him misfire completely: I Am Charlotte Simmons is a bad novel that parodies itself, and Wolfe’s symbolic and social purposes are utterly transparent, some of his details are wrong, and the whole effect falls apart. Wolfe has more lifeness than Wood credits him with, though perhaps not so much as some of the later writers on his list.

One way of avoiding the interior and exterior problem is to have a narrator observing someone else, thus allowing one to see the interiority of the narrator and the exteriority of the person being observed. I want to write a dissertation on what I call the nominal object or nominal subject, in which you have a first-person narrator observing another person who is the nominal object or subject of the story: think Ishmael and Ahab in Moby Dick, Carraway and Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, or Jack Burden and Willie Stark in All the King’s Men. All three novels exhibit what I think Wood means by “lifeness,” and although they don’t achieve exclusively that effect through this technique, it can, when used well, give a sense of interiority from the narrator and exteriority in the object. Ravelstein has the same technique, alone as far as I know in Bellow’s novels.

Which is right, the interior or exterior focus? I haven’t the slightest idea and suspect the answer is “neither,” but the debate’s terms are so often manifested in specific examples but not often stated in more general form. To me, novels that elude codes, ideologies, formulas, and other kinds of algorithmic writing—the ones that are truly novel—are the ones most worth reading, provided that they don’t try to evade codes merely to evade codes, but rather as a way of advancing the story, expanding our understanding of reality, and the like. This is the distinction I draw between someone like Bellow and someone like Alain Robbe-Grillet, who seemed interested in difference only for the sake of being different.