Tag Archives: Novel

Thoughts on the first 100 pages of Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot

October 12, 2011 By in Academia, Books Tags: , , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

1) I would have stopped reading The Marriage Plot if it weren’t also related to some of my academic work. It captures the feel of slogging through a 19th Century novel. As you might imagine, this isn’t a compliment.

2) Until about 100 pages in, no characters have real problems. They have fake, rich-college-student problems. I’m not opposed to such problems for the people experiencing them—I remember having similar ones and thinking they were significant at the time, too—but the real problem in the form of Leonard’s psychotic breakdown should arrive closer to page 40 or 50. Madeleine’s minor undergraduate affairs are much less interesting and hilarious than Karen Owen’s “An education beyond the classroom: excelling in the realm of horizontal academics” (which is a PowerPoint document). Owen’s work feels more honest.

3) If you want a better but less hyped novel about the undergraduate experience in an Ivy-League setting, try Tom Perrotta’s Joe College. Notice that you can also get the hardback for $4, shipped, from Amazon. Notice too how Danny in that novel has real problems: he’s a fish-out-of-water, his father’s business might be falling apart, and his actions have real consequences for him and others around him. He has to master a skill (being a lunch-truck driver) and understand that skill. Failure may result in his ejection from Edenic Yale. So far no one in The Marriage Plot has a real job; they’re like characters in Jane Austen. There may be consequences coming in the latter sections, but based on the dust jacket (a trip to India to find one’s self, a possible stint in grad school), I’m not optimistic.

4) Eugenides’ earlier novels both have major conflicts and problems from the beginning: Middlesex asks how to survive and adapt as a transexual (who as a group still have major problems in contemporary society, compared to average heterosexuals) and how to flee dictator-encumbered countries, while The Virgin Suicides (probably my favorite of Eugenides’ work) asks about what really happened to the Lisbon sisters—and, because of the very clever narrative structure, we can never really find out. It’s teasing yet effective, melancholy and happy, a meditation on how we understand the past, deal with love, grow up, don’t grow up, and much more. That last bit sounds grandiose and stupid, but in the context of the novel it’s not.

5) Given the timeline in the section I’ve read so far—late 1970s, early 1980s—I keep thinking about the most consequential thing happening in the world at that time: the personal computer revolution in Silicon Valley. Jobs, Wozniack, Gates, and millions of other, less famous names were building the future. This is an insanely unfair criticism of a novel, but it’s stuck in my mind anyway, like a background process that occasionally pops an alert into my consciousness: some people are doing real things. I dismiss the alert, but it’s set to go off occasionally anyway, and I don’t have the heart to sudo kill -9.

EDIT: I was reading Hacker News this morning and found this:

The offices of Zelnick Media were packed on a recent evening for #DigitalWes, an alumni gathering for the graduates of Wesleyan University who had made their way from jam bands and cultural theory to the warp-speed world of Silicon Alley. Guests nibbled shrimp and steak skewers while taking in a sumptuous view of midtown Manhattan from the roof deck. The hosts were Strauss Zelnick and his partner, Jim Freidlich, both class of ’79, whose Take Two Interactive has produced some of the best-selling and most controversial video games of the past decade.

Same demographic, same timeline, note the mention of “cultural theory.”

6) Reading The Game has spoiled me on excessive beta-male behavior. Watching Mitchell around the beautiful and distant Madeleine mostly makes me want to tell him what he’s doing wrong. The Game was published in 2005, so saying this about a novel set before The Game’s publication isn’t fair, but the book still crystalized for me a) what not to do, b) how to eliminate certain kinds of obviously unsuccessful mating behavior, and c) how to think systematically about useful principles in men dealing with women. Being a whiny hanger-on to a person with relatively high dating market value is not good for Mitchell or for Madeleine, the object of his desire. Note that this is not limited to men: I also have low tolerance for women who spend long periods of time throwing themselves on distant alpha males who at best hook up with and then dump them. Don’t want to be hooked up with and dumped? Don’t chase alpha males whose primary attraction appears to be their unattainability. I don’t love novels whose characters’ primary problems can be solved with a simple, one-line piece of advice that, if followed, will result in the solution to said problem.

7) Nineteenth-century novels are not good guides to behavior in the 21st century. Hell, they’re not even good guides to behavior in Brown in the 1979 – 1983 period. This is as true for Madeline and for others. Literary theory is also a pretty crappy guide to real life, which may be part of the reason theory’s hold on English departments has loosened in the last 30 years. Still, perhaps the most hilarious and best scene involves Madeleine throwing Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, which alleges that there is no such thing as love, only the speaking of love, at the boy she loves.

8) I can follow the inside-baseball parts of literary theory (Barthes, Derrida, and other English-department heroes appear, mostly as signals of what various characters believe), but I doubt such things would be of great interest to anyone not in English departments. This relates to #5: it turns out that the really important stuff happening in this time period is happening among tech people, not among grad students in the humanities. A novel about someone who jumps from the one to the other might be interesting, and it could dramatize events with real consequences that don’t automatically revolve around sex and death. Intellectual curiosity is an underutilized motivation in fiction.

9) Another book to read if you want campus-war stuff: Richard Russo’s Straight Man, which is also much funnier.

EDIT: 10) See my full review here.

Never the Face: A Story of Desire — Ariel Sands

August 6, 2011 By in Books, Culture, Fiction, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , 8 Comments

Never the Face starts with the narrator recalling a dream. Or, rather, the dream seeks here, and she “found myself hurtling back across the years, back to a spring morning in California when I was—
Awake.”

This implies she isn’t awake while she’s writing. Notice too how she’s abrogated responsibility for her actions: she “found [herself] hurtling back across the years,” instead of going there willingly. She doesn’t make the choice, implying that she’s metaphorically asleep, waiting for someone to wake her again because she can’t awaken on her own. Dreams run throughout the novel (although this novel feels more like a memoir, given its intimacy and tone). On its penultimate page, the narrator is “Afraid that those fabulous, shimmering dreams he had dreamt for me—for us—were about to shatter.” She’s right, since dreams can’t last forever outside of science fiction. Even at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the characters must leave Titania’s forest. The same is true of Never the Face, but maintaining the dream isn’t the responsibility of the protagonist—notice how David, the “he” of this love story, is the one who “had dreamt for me—for us.” He does this through sexual bondage. The details are interesting but essential; read the book if you want them. Read this post if you want some of them and some idea of what they might mean.

The narrator says that she had dreams about David, and not about anything else. Still, there’s hesitation: “a dream was one thing. Did I want the reality? Assuming that it was real?” Judging by the 200 pages to follow, we can guess the answer is yes. She feels more real when she’s told what to do. When they begin having sex, David instructs the narrator to open herself. She does. He speaks to her like an animal:

‘Good girl. Now, what do you say?’
I said nothing.
‘You say, “Please fuck your bitch.” ‘
With the involition of someone in a dream, I heard my voice saying, ‘Please fuck your bitch.’

David “accepted the invitation.” The narrator is giving up agency, which gives the encounter its power. We have an effectively infinite array of choices. To have them removed is taboo, and in violating the taboo she feels pleasure. She is both dreaming and awake. Later, the narrator says that she “climbed into bed and surrendered myself to dark dreams, dreams I didn’t like to acknowledge even to myself. I am chained up, spread-eagled. But my lover is ignoring me. Another woman kneels in front of him, and he is fondling her breasts, he is about to—” We don’t know what. The “dark dreams” end, and the narrator “pulled my mind back.” It’s too much, which is strange, given what her fantasy life is like. She says, “I felt as if I was cradling a bomb that at any moment might explode and blow my head off. I pulled the blankets tight around my body.” Maybe she’s missing a sense of danger, and while some might fill that sense of danger with climbing mountains, she fills it with sex. One is socially valorized, the other socially castigated. The sentences the narrator ends with an em-dash represents those places even she feels she can’t go, the places where she needs to break off.

Those points of breaking off leave things to the imagination. At one point, David tells the narrator to “Tell me your fantasies.” She resists, momentarily, but that resistance feels perfunctory, like all or almost all of her descriptions of resistance. She says that she “took a deep breath, snuck up to my place of dark dreams, and opened the door. I am tied up, legs spread. Men, I cannot see their faces—” She says aloud that that she fantasizes about “Rape. Especially gang rape. That’s probably my most common fantasy.” Another metaphor appears here, this time about opening doors instead of sleeping / wakening. Such metaphors point to understanding, growth, development, knowledge, whatever word you want to choose. Of becoming by being.

The narrator notes that she doesn’t “really want to be raped,” and David says, “I know you don’t, Kitten. No one does. It’s the idea that’s powerful. Giving up control.” It’s not just giving up control, however, but giving it up to the right person; in their book Why Women Have Sex, David Buss and Cindy Meston describe some of the research around rape and say that “In erotic rape fantasies, the male is typically attractive, dominant, and overcome with sexual desire for the woman […] the fantasy typically contains no realistic violence.” Those are all traits the narrator sees in David. In addition, you don’t fully need fantasy to become reality; you need enough fantasy to alter your reality. It’s hard to imagine the narrator going back to the Bobbies of the world after she’s been with a David.

Bobby was the narrator’s former lover. While the narrator is speaking with a friend, she says:

A memory from years before came into my head. I am naked. Bobby is whispering, “I’m going to kiss you all over.” He begins kissing my neck, my shoulders, my ears. I know I am supposed to find this sexy, romantic. But while my body is lying there being kissed (now he’s at the small of my back, now at the back of my knees), my mind is thinking about calculus problems, and whether anyone might have taken my clothes out of the dryer.

Note the contrast between what the narrator is “supposed” to feel and what she actually feels. That conflict generates the narrator’s erotic tension; so does the way she wants to live in the radical present. David achieves that through pain. Bobby doesn’t: he lets her mind think “about calculus problems,” instead of jerking her mind into the now, away from the daily grind and towards the moment. She wants to live in the present tense, which is incredibly hard for some people. The narrator understands this to some extent: she says thinks it difficult “To generate a feeling of safe danger.” She’s looking for an oxymoron, and someone who can deliver it is special. She is “Exploring places you don’t normally go, scary places, with someone you trust. It’s very controlled.” The places are slightly physical but mostly mental; they’re about making the mind and body fuse. It helps that David has the traits of a romantic hero: he is self-assured, powerful, knowledgeable. She thinks, “I wonder if he’s good at [going down on women]. He’s good at everything else” (Emphasis in original). Being skilled and competent is attractive; he’s also conveniently rich, a man who “was on the waiting list” for a country club with “a joining fee of $70,000.” Maybe she thinks it easier to trust someone rich.

Regardless, his competence lets her trust. David tells her that what they’re doing “is about surrender, giving up control. It has nothing to do with liking pain or wanting to be hurt.” That’s specious: if it had nothing to do with pain, pain wouldn’t be the mechanism used to achieve the end David perceives as surrender. He would use some other mechanism. You can’t separate ends from means no matter how much you might want to. You don’t beat someone without that beating being somewhat about beating. In this case, the beating also serves as contrast, with poor Bobby being the punching bag. Midway through the novel, the narrator says:

I thought of Bobby, how he always fell asleep after he came. For a moment, I conjured him, sprawled on top of me as if I was part of the bed. He could sometimes manage sex twice a day. But David—

He’s superhuman. No: Superman. I’m fucking Superman!

Or, rather, she makes him into Superman. One wonders if Bobby could’ve been molded in the same way. Still, Bobby’s kisses are quite different than sex with David. When David comes in, he “twisted my hand in my hair, forced my face upward, and kissed me. The kiss was rough, violent.” He leaves, and the narrator’s body reacts in a way that will grow predictable but still perturbs her on some level: “Trying to ignore how aroused I was, I turned back to my books.” She can’t control the way her body feels, which is part of what she likes. It’s part of her divided mind. David has a theory about this: “Pain quiets your mind and opens you to pleasure.” Under this theory, pain is a borderland between normal existence and extraordinary existence. The question remains: how do we get to extraordinary existence? How can we travel there through experience? He says: “It’s that when you cry, I know I’ve got you. I know you’re completely present, a body reacting and responding. You’re not thinking about anything, or worrying: you’re just there.” It’s so hard to live in the present, especially among a certain segmented of the highly educated, highly repressed, highly skilled part of the population. It takes an effort to live in the specious present. You wouldn’t want to live there all the time, but for a while, it can be extraordinarily powerful because we do so so infrequently. Habit becomes stultifying: we need to break from it, at least if we’re unusually open to new experiences. This passage, a conversation between the narrator and her friend Sally, captures the idea:

“Well. I don’t know what your experience has been—do you find that sex with most guys is more or less the same?” I said.
“Yes,” she said, rolling her eyes slightly. “Yes.” She laughed. “Some of them like to carry you about more than others. But that’s about it.”
“This was different. Totally different.”

Difference can be scary; it also can’t be fully explained. Sally wants explanation; the narrator can’t fully give it. She prevaricates, because what else can she do? It’s a bodily experience unlike almost any other. The narrator knows how it would be judged, and she’s internalized her friends’ reactions; at one moment, she says, “I thought of what Sally would say if I told her, ‘You wore his wife’s skirt? To a restaurant? Are you insane?’ ” But that’s the point: to transgress. You aren’t supposed to have affairs, even with the wife’s blessing; you aren’t supposed to be a masochist, even if you are; if you do those two things, you definitely aren’t supposed to wear the wife’s skirt. The question starts to become, where are the lines? If you don’t have any, you become scary. Dangerous. The sort of person who might steal someone else’s mate, who is threatening the foundations of social order. Hence you have to be labeled as “insane.” The idea is hardy a new one: Hester Prynne gets her famous Scarlet Letter for transgression. She’s achieved the state David Axelrod describes in his article “Laws of Life:”

‘Internalization’ is the word psychologists use to describe the compliance with norms out of feelings of right and wrong. A norm is internalized if violating it is psychologically painful even when the consequences are otherwise beneficial. Thus, cheating on an exam might result in persistent guilt even if it were not punished and did succeed in raising the student’s grade […] if everyone [strongly] internalized a norm […], there would be no incentive to defect and the norm would remain stable.

Families and societies work hard to achieve exactly this effect, especially in educating the impressionable young, and they sometimes succeed. Still, it is rare for a norm to be so thoroughly internalized that no one in a group is tempted to defect.

Violation is psychologically painful but also satisfying. In Never the Face, the narrator’s main manifestation of guilt comes from the writing of the novel, and we can’t help but think that guilt is awfully minor. She doesn’t look into where that guilt comes from, but the usual suspects are out there: society, other women, religion, schools. In “Sexual Economics: Sex as Female Resource for Social Exchange in Heterosexual Interactions,” Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs posit that in many societies women are responsible for restricting female sexual agency. They might be right. But Ariel Sands isn’t asking those questions, even though they arise in my mind. Dan Savage said that “When it comes to human sexuality [. . .] deviation from imaginary and tyrannical ‘norms’ is the norm.” He’s probably right. Books like Never the Face make you think “probably” might not be strong enough.

The narrator says that “Those desires, those dark desires that lurked in the shadows of my mind—most of the time I tried to hide them, even from myself. I had never let myself speak of them.” She hasn’t, and relatively few others have. David has a theory, that at her “core,” the narrator is “Someone who wants to surrender, to be taken.” She “started to protest” but doesn’t. What is there to be said? This novel also arouses the fear that, if these “dark desires” lurk in the mind, others might too. What happens if they are awakened? What might we find there? The worst answer might be “nothing.”

While David leaves, the narrator “stood on the sidewalk, thighs and buttocks smarting, my body alive with desire.” If it’s alive with desire, is it dead the rest of the time? Or asleep? If so, then she should be glad: we like being woken up. It disturbs us to be asleep, to be unaware; that’s why so many stories deal with entering an unknown and previously unperceived world. In “The Unreal Thing: What’s wrong with the Matrix?“, Adam Gopnik writes that, in The Matrix, “reality is a fiction, programmed into the heads of sleeping millions by evil computers.” In this book, we get the sense that reality is, if not a fiction, then at least a tedious drag, programmed into the heads of sleeping millions by social convention that binds us without our knowing it. Notice how Gopnik, too, resorts to the language of slumber to convey his point. He goes on to point out the idea’s history:

The basic conceit of “The Matrix”—the notion that the material world is a malevolent delusion, designed by the forces of evil with the purpose of keeping people in a state of slavery, has a history. It is most famous as the belief for which the medieval Christian sect known as the Cathars fought and died, and in great numbers, too. The Cathars were sure that the material world was a phantasm created by Satan, and that Jesus of Nazareth—their Neo—had shown mankind a way beyond that matrix by standing outside it and seeing through it. The Cathars were fighting a losing battle, but the interesting thing was that they were fighting at all. It is not unusual to take up a sword and die for a belief. It is unusual to take up a sword to die for the belief that swords do not exist.

The idea of “what you see is what you get” probably goes back even further: hence the idea of what we might now term magical thinking among many pre-agrarian hunter-gatherers, who so often believe that spirits control and animate the world. Or contemporary people who send mental notes conventionally referred to as prayer, to a fellow who goes by various names but sits (if we imagine him being corporeal) in a cloud, seeing everything and noting down a demerit every time you masturbate. Whether you’r the narrator of Never the Face, Neo in The Matrix, a hunter-gatherer tribesperson, or a modern monotheist, you don’t want your everyday existence to be all there is. You want something more, but how do you get there? Through kinky sex, appeals to the spirits, gathering in a group of people and reciting chants / songs? Given the choice, I know which one I’d choose, but the similarity of the goal—transcendence, extra-normal power—makes me wonder what could connect all these practices, especially given how practitioners often dislike those using other methods. The highly kinky and heavily religious do not appear to have much overlap.

One thing that sets The Matrix apart from the innumerable comic book movies in which good guys and bad guys try to kick each other’s asses is the underlying idea that reality might not exist (Gopnik says the sequel “is, unlike the first film, a conventional comic-book movie, in places a campy conventional comic-book movie”). One thing that sets Never the Face apart from the innumerable books of erotica that describe, in detail, how things feel is the discomforting sense that maybe we never really will awaken from everyday life without the assistance of some activities described in the book; I shy away from using the book’s direct language—do I feel I haven’t earned it? Gopnik says that “the idea that the world we live in isn’t real is one that speaks right now to a general condition,” and I would posit that Sands feels the same way, or that her narrator does. But for her, the fake world is fake because it has been stripped of sensuality, of tactile sensations, of intensity; those feelings have been denuded by Big Macs, large personal spaces, telephones, and a social sense that forbids discussing erotic life for fear of any number of things, including political correctness. We don’t want to acknowledge what we might want if we really freed our minds.

It’s notoriously hard to look past our cultural and biological conditioning, even when part of our cultural conditioning is to recursively question our cultural conditioning. But we try anyway, because a certain number of us don’t like not being to think something that we could possibly think. To return to Gopnik, “In a long article on the first “Matrix” film, the Princeton philosopher James Pryor posed the question “What’s so bad about living in the Matrix?,” and, after sorting through some possible answers, he concluded that the real problem probably has to do with freedom, or the lack of it.” The “freedom” answer, however, still smells to me of cultural conditioning, but I buy it. Plus, it seems like cultures that value “freedom” appear to be better, on average, at getting along with their neighbors and not murdering their neighbors.*

And I buy the value of Never the Face not just for the dirty bits, but also because it seems like we should be free to want to be hit if we want to be hit, regardless of the important political and social convictions we might justifiably hold in other aspects of our lives. As Paul Graham says in his essay “What You Can’t Say,” “To do good work you need a brain that can go anywhere. And you especially need a brain that’s in the habit of going where it’s not supposed to.”** Freedom applies to sexual freedom too, and being able to explore your desires so long as those desires don’t hurt others.

For the narrator, sex and the activities around it let her live in the now. She says, “As usual after a savage beating, I was in a daze. My mind had gone blank; the internal monologue was silent. I as just there, in the now, without thought.” With Bobby, she thought about calculus; with him, she thinks nothing, which might be the greatest challenge for intellectuals. You wouldn’t want to go blank all the time, but for the moment it’s thrillingly, astonishingly different. In the novel’s rhetoric, it wakes her up, as discussed above.

Being awake lets the narrator see and feel things she wouldn’t otherwise. She sees the essential. She feels it. David says that beating someone is “Way more intimate than fucking. [. . .] Because it strips away pretense and self-consciousness, it reduces you to your essence.” The sex and bondage the narrator experiences isn’t, under this reading, about sex and bondage; they’re about understanding yourself and the world around you. The same thing that sports books say sports are about and that art books say art is about. The difference is that sports and art are valorized by society, while sexual exploration isn’t and probably never will be. It’s not just about the sex, either; as David explains in a perhaps self-serving way, the bondage “takes trust [. . .] You don’t need to trust someone to fuck them. But to put yourself in someone else’s power, to make yourself that vulnerable—that takes trust. [. . .] That’s why it brings such closeness.”

Is he right? The question is beside the point: he’s right in the narrator’s eyes. If he wasn’t, she wouldn’t stay with him. She wouldn’t want their relationship to continue when he breaks it off to stay with his wife, who knows about his relationship with the narrator. She encourages it. But the novel ultimately implies that such an arrangement can’t last. Society must be paid its dues. Plus, one challenge is simple: where does it end? Towards the novel’s end, the narrator says that David “had set upon me with if possible, a new level of ferocity.” Eventually, the logical conclusion becomes death, which I doubt the narrator wants. Neither does David. But you have to reach some maximum this side of the underworld.

Normally, I wouldn’t include spoilers in an essay about a book, but in this case “what happens” is besides the point, and the narrative tension doesn’t really exist. The book isn’t about what happens, but how and why it does. The answer is ultimately pre-verbal, like the reason for the adventure that propels Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. We can use language to approximate the feelings invoked by experience, but in this case the approximation is wider than most art. That, I think, is what feels so subversive: Never the Face suggests that you will never understand without trying it for yourself. If you do try for yourself, you will be indulging a set of possible desires that social life tells you you shouldn’t have, and if you do have them, they should be repressed, and if they can’t be repressed, they at least shouldn’t be spoken, and if they are spoken, they at least shouldn’t be written and distributed, and if you write and distribute them, you at least shouldn’t let others read it. The layers of taboo violation go deep.

She says that she had dreams about David, not about anything else. Still, there’s hesitation: “a dream was one thing. Did I want the reality? Assuming that it was real?” Judging by the 200 pages to follow, we can guess the answer is yes.

* Neal Stephenson discusses how our culture propagates itself visually in “In the Beginning was the Command Line,” which should be required reading for people who want to know how things work.

** Graham, later: “If you can think things so outside the box that they’d make people’s hair stand on end, you’ll have no trouble with the small trips outside the box that people call innovative.”

This Beautiful Life — Helen Schulman

August 4, 2011 By in Books, Fiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

I heard about This Beautiful Life in a New York Times review and immediately worried: the novel sounded similar to the novel I’m working on that doesn’t have a title (I’m referring to it as “The Teacher Novel”). But reading This Beautiful Life makes me happy because the Teacher Novel is definitely not worse and almost certainly better. This Beautiful Life is too frequently boring; it’s disconnected from itself (the very short first and last chapters are effective and engaging, however). Anita Shreve’s Testimony and Tom Perrotta’s Election cover similar territory far, far better.

Other comparisons work too. Reading the first long section of This Beautiful Life, which belongs to Liz, the mother, made me reread the first three chapters of The Great Gatsby, because Gatsby isn’t just better, it’s on a whole different plane, even though it’s also covering the banal problems of rich New Yorkers. Gatsby retains its ability to amaze, especially at how deftly Fitzgerald transitions from scene to scene. He’s so damn technically good that 1) I wonder / doubt if I’ll ever do anything as good and 2) Schulman looks unfortunate in comparison (funnily enough, Jake, the 15-year-old boy, reads Gatsby towards the end; I wonder if he learns anything).

Schulman avoids transitions by not writing much in scenes. There are some good sentences (one example: Liz, Jake’s mother, notes his height and says that “It was as if, suddenly, three extra vertebrae had been added to the staircase of his spine”) and amusing bits, but most of the novel isn’t composed of scenes, and the writing isn’t quite enough to make up for that. I feel like I’m reading weekend New York Times articles on overly yoga-ified Upper East Siders. The novel lacks the fiery pop at the end of Election‘s chapters, as it does tension. The father, Richard, has the strongest section, mostly because he actually does something, instead of sitting around being acted on.

Like Testimony, This Beautiful Life has the problem of having a single, main event, without any other plot points or subsidiary issues, but Testimony has more voice. It has more knowledge of itself. This Beautiful Life also got a moral problem: a 13-year-old girl named Daisy sends a 15-year-old guy named Jake a sex tape, and he forwards it to one person. Who cares? She did it willingly, and although she’s young it’s apparent she has sufficient knowledge and agency of what she’s doing to make the question of her agency unimportant. The novel is set in 2003, which is essential: if it were set closer to the present, the idea of a sex tape becoming a social conflagration beyond the confines of high school would be wildly improbable.

I feel like the New York Times reviewer, Maria Russo, read an entirely different book than I did, or hasn’t read This Beautiful Life’s predecessors. Schulman teaches in New York, and I wonder if getting the cover of the book review was a sweetheart deal with Russo, her agent, and/or the book review editor (if so, I’d love such a deal). Not everything that makes the NYT Book Review cover is aesthetically or intellectually interesting (here I’m thinking of Angelology, an utterly forgettable book). Russo assume that social and cultural mores are permanent (“What can the future hold for unformed, vulnerable kids who bumble their way into the lowliest realm of the permanent record that is the Internet? (Or, in Daisy’s case, reach it by simulating sex with a toy baseball bat.) Should their parents be held responsible, or are they equally victimized by the seductions and traps of digital life?”) instead of fluid. Russo gets to the idea that cultural mores, but not until the last paragraph. I would’ve liked a stronger historical sense. These criticisms may be due to the brevity of the venue: the NYT only allows so many words, and I think her review is in the neighborhood of 1,200.

I suspect that, if it hasn’t happened already, sexting will be pretty normal and not enough to drive plots in the near future. For guidance on changing mores, look to the past. In 1900 – ~1965, you could drive plots using the question of whether teenagers have sex, given how much of society was set up against that. Today, if you did the same, you’d have to use religious prohibition or something similar to drive the plot, which isn’t very satisfying because the solution (“stop being a religious wacko; your parents are unreasonable”) is obvious. Caitlin Flanagan get some, but not all of this—I’ve seen her work in The Atlantic. We’re seeing the phenomenon of “shocking” behavior becoming normal much faster than we used to, which makes me worried about the Teacher Novel, because it might not age well if behavior considered daring or inappropriate today becomes obvious tomorrow. Fortunately, I think the central questions avoid sex tape plots, but still: looking at changes throughout history make me wonder what’ll happen next.

For example, one grad seminar assigned Dreiser’s famous novel Sister Carrie, which was apparently shocking for its day (IIRC, it was published in 1900, though it might be a little later—1910?). Reading it now is banal. Who cares if a woman divorces one guy and marries another? I wonder if these narratives about teenage sex tapes will have the same effect in the nearish future, once people who’ve grown up with sending naked pictures of yourself as a standard practice; Penelope Trunk gets this, but she’s uncommonly opened minded, and I sense a generation gap (am I on the wrong side, I wonder?).

The first and last pages of This Beautiful Life are very good and describe Daisy. The sex acts that begin this novel (and Testimony) are effective attention-getters because most people don’t believe or want to believe that 12- and 14-year-old girls can be sexual (raising the question: have most people forgotten what it’s like to be 12 – 14?). The second paragraph is a single sentence: “Still think I’m too young?” It’s a provocation, but the description isn’t sexy: she has “a hunky ponytail” and “A little roll of ivory fat nestled above the waistband” of her skirt. The suggestion is powerful anyway, and the pages to follow are largely the lead-up and comedown from the two that begin the novel. This has the unfortunate side effect of draining narrative tension; Election avoids this problem through a shadow story about how the party happens, which isn’t revealed until the very end of the novel. This, along with the sheer diversity of voices, makes it a better novel.

Still, This Beautiful Life is a reminder that the novel as a genre is still going places movies and TV can’t or won’t. If a director portrayed a video of a girl who in this scene: “The breasts inside were small, and at first she covered them with her palms, fingers splayed like scallop shells. Then she unhooked the bra in front and they popped out as if on springs”, she’d be arrested for depicting someone under 18 in a sexualized circumstance with nudity. The director could hint and imply but couldn’t show what the novel describes.

I have to read the first paragraph of the second section ironically: “As with so many things of consequence, it all began with a party.” It seems highly unlikely that many “things of consequence” started with a party; an idea, a conversation, a scribble in a notepad, maybe, but a party? Seems improbable. Pages 10 and 11 of the hardcover have a lot of superfluous stuff. I took a picture of a page with my edits, where I remove sentences the book doesn’t need. In rereading of Gatsby, part of what’s so amazing is how essential most of it feels. So mysterious. We don’t even meet Gatsby until chapter three, and then by accident. One of the novel’s letdowns is in Chapter 6, where Nick suddenly regurgitates a bunch of stuff about Gatsby’s supposed background (this is similar to what Mark Sarvas mentioned in 2007: that it’s important not to become overawed by the great). Too much of the novel should be tightened like the face of the mothers Liz lives among. On page 100, “Richard felt the skin on his face tighten.” You could remove that sentence and lose nothing. There’s also a strange mistake: Schulman writes URLs as “feigenbaum/blogspot.com,” when Blogspot URLS are always in the form feigenbaum.blogspot.com. It’s minor, but it galls.

So do aspects of the characters. Take this early scene from Liz:

It’s your butt or your face—you can’t have both, Liz thought. Some movie star had said this; she’d read it or heard something like it somewhere, and had stored a smudged replica of the quote in the hash of celebrity trivia her brain had accumulated without effort, along with all the other stuff and nonsense that passed for knowledge these days from print magazines and whatever: TV, the Net, idle chitchat, the air . . . But it was true, about your butt or your face.

The “hash of celebrity trivia” is what’s so odd to me about Liz: she used to be an art historian. She got a PhD in art history. Yet little to no knowledge of art, art theory, aesthetics, or related subjects trickles into her thought. By now I’ve met lots and lots of academics, and the ones who stick it out to the PhD don’t do so for the money, which is practically nonexistent; they do do so for the love of their subject. It’s bizarre that Liz imparts so little of this in her thinking; she says that “her dissertation had distinguished itself because she’d focused on the synthesis of art, design, and dance in a new and radical way” {Schulman “Beautiful”@38}. But what way is that? How does it differ? Liz “couldn’t remember the subtitle” of that dissertation, which is understandable: titles are easy to forget. But much of the content appears to have gone the way of that subtitle. If art plays a real role in her present life, it’s well-hidden.

People’s professions cast shadows over their conversation, but Liz’s appears to be a veneer that lies no deeper than the letters after her name. What happened to all the knowledge she must have acquired? Why doesn’t she ever think in ideas? Characters content to surf on the world of everyday minutia are boring; one thing that sets science fiction apart from other kinds, at least in the view of Neal Stephenson, is its focus on ideas. He elaborates in this Salon interview, where he defines science fiction’s big tent as

Fiction that’s not considered good unless it has interesting ideas in it. You can write a minimalist short story that’s set in a trailer park or a Connecticut suburb that might be considered a literary masterpiece or well-regarded by literary types, but science fiction people wouldn’t find it very interesting unless it had somewhere in it a cool idea that would make them say, “That’s interesting. I never thought of that before.” If it’s got that, then science fiction people will embrace it and bring it into the big-tent view of science fiction. That’s really the role that science fiction has come to play in literature right now. In arty lit, it’s become uncool to try to come to grips with ideas per se.

Knowing something of celebrity gossip doesn’t automatically preclude one from having ideas, thinking about ideas, or thinking about what might go beyond the tiny halo of an individual life. Thinking about ideas also isn’t incompatible with worry about the body, sexual attractiveness, how others respond to the body, and so forth. But this moment is emblematic of why Liz, as a character, tends to be boring: she doesn’t have access to those ideas. The writing isn’t as crisp and mysterious as Fitzgerald’s (but then again, whose is?). The structure isn’t as sharp as Shreve’s or Perrotta’s.

If Liz had really been the house intellectual, the person who understands the deeper cultural structures underlying what her family is going through, she could’ve been a fascinating character. Instead she seems to have hung up her mind when she became a former. I suspect not all women do. The noun she uses in the passage above—”trivia”—is the problem: her life appears to have become trivia. This isn’t a fact that dooms her altogether, but if you can’t rise beyond trivia, then why bother? And I’m not asking that she cite Foucault or tedious theoretical windbags; I’m just asking for more awareness of her own situation. Give me some cool ideas about what things are about. Literature that endures has ideas; Jane Austen, whatever her faults, is constantly questioning how families and social relationships should work. Her characters are attuned to the minutest questions of status. I’d like to see the same here.

Liz has some faint idea of her problem, since she notes the “nonsense that passed for knowledge.” But it doesn’t pass for knowledge “from print magazine and whatever:” it passes for knowledge because she consumes it. Anytime she wants, she can skip US Weekly and pick up The Atlantic. But she doesn’t.

This passage isn’t bad on its own; if it were embedded in a story with more power, I’d take from it what I think Schulman was shooting for: Liz’s struggle with the wealthy but stultifying environment she’s in and can’t easily leave without harming her family and her husband’s work. It’s a worthy struggle, but a frustrating one because Liz should have the intellectual and financial tools to understand it. But she chooses not to use them, and a character who seems pointlessly helpless is a tedious character too. And Liz does have some real thoughts. In this scene of self-criticism, she’s looking at her ex-flings writing and says:

He was smart, funny, but still immature. He hadn’t seemed to have developed distance from his own dilemmas or learned how to structure a narrative. At what point did potential, budding and nascent, turn into stagnancy? At what point did stagnancy equal tragedy? Is that what made midlife unendurable for so many? Is that what made each and every day feel so damaging?

All this is plausible, and notice how she moves from the guy’s writing to her own life: she stats off talking with him, and by the second sentence you still think she’s talking about him. By the third—”At what point did stagnancy equal tragedy?”—you get the idea that she’s not talking about someone else. She’s talking about herself, as critics so often are when they write criticism. So she gets some self-analysis by the end of the story.

So does her son. Jake is uncommonly knowledgeable, like so many adolescents in fiction; he notes how teenagers mostly “walked around, calling out to one another, ‘S’up. S’up.’ It was rhetorical, not ever a question. Nothing was up, usually, unless something was. They were kids; they were terminally looking for something to do.” They don’t find it. At the very least, this passage feels dangerous, knowing what we know about the novel from the dust jacket and the first two pages. There’s a sense of a transgression. But you’ve read these scenes before, especially if you’re a regular young adult reader, but Jake’s crush on a girl of Chinese descent is endearing; he notices what she wears and “thought Audrey’s haircut made her look French, although he had no idea really what that meant.” Who does, really? Maybe someone who’s read La Seduction. That he wants Audrey drives him forward and toward Daisy, who wants him and sets about luring him via video. Lesson: people do strange things for love. Perhaps it’s a lesson we already know, but so it goes.

He understands Daisy slightly better than his mother does: Liz says of Daisy, “That poor, wretched, stupid girl. Marjorie says the mother’s always away somewhere, that even when she was little she was always picked up by a nanny.” As if someone who wasn’t picked up by a nanny would automatically never make a sex tape. Plus, Daisy presumably wouldn’t have made the tape if she didn’t think it was a good idea; perhaps she has a high discount rate, and adults, with lower discount rates, are thus unhappy because they’re judging someone they don’t understand. Her husband does the same thing, but intentionally, to a reporter. He says that of the video “It looked like a junior league Debbie Does Dallas. I don’t know where the girl learned this stuff.” The answer is obvious: the Internet. Of course, lots of people “learn” stuff of this nature from the Internet and turn out to be perfectly okay, as Daisy does.

But Richard understands something that he doesn’t want to define; he watches the video (all the adults do, and one gets a prurient swirl of surveillance). When he does, he uses standard moralistic language, but he also notes, basically, that it’s also hot, a way similar to some of the comments in Testimony, when either Mike or Rob is describing the tape of Sienna. If someone is being intellectually honest, they have to acknowledge that erotic power isn’t flipped on like a switch when one turns 16 or 18. In some people it develops early. When Richard sees the video, he also says:

And for all the video’s dismal raunch, its tawdriness, for all its sexual immaturity and unknowingness, there is something about the way this girl has revealed herself, the way that she has offered herself, truly stripped herself bare, that is brave and powerful and potent and ridiculous and self-immolating and completely nuts.

He’s right; the nuttiness, the sense of going beyond the bounds, gives the video its power (does this language sound familiar? It’s similar to how I described Ariel Sands’ Never the Face). In the end, there can be something about such a video. Richard doesn’t understand everything; he says that “It looked like a junior league Debbie Does Dallas. I don’t know where the girl learned this stuff.” The answer is obvious: the Internet. Of course, lots of people “learn” stuff of this nature from the Internet and turn out to be perfectly okay, as Daisy does. The novel needs to be set in 2003, because if it were set in 2011, a viral sex tape wouldn’t be so shocking, and I’m somewhat confident that high school students have developed antibodies for the event (from what students tell me, that’s true).

What’s normal today may not be normal tomorrow, and, thus, the worries about the tape might eventually be as strange to us as Seventeenth Century European schisms and wars. Manufactured drama around sex can make the amorality of Gossip Girl attractive by comparison. What would Blair say to Jake and Daisy?

Virtually everyone in this novel is reacting to things. Jake reacts to Daisy. Liz reacts to circumstances. Richard reacts to Jake. The only person who really acts on their own volition in the novel is Daisy; if anyone’s the hero, she is. That the hero gets to say so little is unfortunate. Notice how The Great Gatsby is driven by several great wants: Gatsby’s for Daisy; Daisy for excitement or some way out of her stultifying life with Tom (he who cites The Rise of the Coloured Empires), Nick’s for figuring out who Gatsby really is. Without all that want, like the voice of “I want, I want” in Henderson the Rain King, you wouldn’t have a story in The Great Gatsby. You’d have a series of still lifes. This Beautiful Life is more animated than a still life but less than The Great Gatsby. It shows so much promise, and The Great Gatsby keeps creeping up in it.

She’s gotten a lot of good press. The NYT review is above; the Paris Review blog interviewed her. The Washington Post has a banal review not worth linking to. Reading such reviews reminds me of why I like James Wood so much, even when I disagree with his assessments.

Slam — Nick Hornby

August 3, 2011 By in Books, Fiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

Slam starts with great promise: a list of bullets that show a lot of Sam’s life in a short space and show why it’s going well (“For example: Mum got rid of Steve, her rubbish boyfriend.”) It’s got a fun, fantastical conceit in that Tony Hawk talks to the narrator and comes to represent a kind of externalized consciousness, giving Sam a dialogic way of bouncing ideas off another person. But the novel itself meanders. I look for the great sentences and don’t find them. To be fair, there are strong sections.; for example, in analyzing (as best he can) his family, Sam says:

The story of my family, as far as I can tell, is always the same story, over and over again. Someone—my mum, my dad, my grandad—starts off thinking that they’re going to do well in school, and then go to college, maybe, and then make pots of money. But instead, they do something stupid, and they spend the rest of their lives trying to make up for the mistake they made. Sometimes it can seem as though kids always do better than their parents. You know—someone’s dad was a coal miner, or whatever, but his son goes on to play for a Premiership team, or wins Pop Idol, or invents the Internet. Those stories make you feel as though the whole world is on its way up. But in our family, people always slip up on the first step. In fact, most of the time they don’t even find the stairs.

Notice the metaphor at the end: most of the world “is on its way up,” without noting the transportation method (flight? an elevator?), but his family doesn’t “even find the stairs.” It’s a bittersweet passage, with him not exactly castigating his family but still fundamentally aware of social class. Yet why not start the metaphor at the beginning of the paragraph? His family’s story is always the same, with them looking up as other people go by, or being on the ground floor of a building whose top they can’t even conceptualize, or something to that effect? You could do much better than the ideas I’ve come up with in 30 seconds, but the point is that there’s no reason not to extend the metaphor—maybe throughout not just the paragraph but the book. We appreciate that Sam’s awareness is a step on the road to change, but he could be slightly more aware without harming the fundamental structure of the story.

Perhaps not surprising, some of the story’s tension involves whether Sam will continue the family tradition or break it. He meets a higher class, very attractive girl named Alicia. They talk music. He works to avoid being subservient to her, but later thinks that “I knew that I didn’t want to be [Alicia’s] friend, if you know what I mean, and I was worried that her being friendly to me meant that I didn’t stand a chance with anything else. I know that’s wrong. Mum is always telling me that friendship has to come first, before anything else.” Sam knows the score even when his mother doesn’t, or doesn’t want him to know. She is, in essence, pitching him the idealized version of romance, which he has internalized to the extent that he says he knows that not wanting to be Alicia’s conventional friend is “wrong,” imputing a sense of morality on an act that’s more about strategy than morality. In a different world, friendship would come first. If you search Google for “Friend Zone, you’ll find a wide array of articles with advice on how to avoid becoming “just a friend.” Sam’s Mum is trying to give him advice that isn’t highly applicable to the real world.

If you’re already aware of these dynamics, however, the novel will feel like old news. It’s not bad, exactly, but it’s not exciting, either. A lot of the book is fun. It just feels average, unlike Francine Prose’s Touch. I’m looking for ways that make it more than average and not finding them. Hornby’s best book, by far, is still High Fidelity. Maybe it always will be. I often think about it when writing contemporary novels that feature love stories; he fundamentally understands that such love stories tend towards comedy, that indecision is the great modern problem, and that love stories need more than just a should-I-or-shouldn’t-I plot. Whenever I read High Fidelity, I’m impressed again at how surprisingly well constructed it is. I keep trying his other books (A Long Way Down, How to be Good, Slam) in search of the same kind of mastery. I keep not finding it.

Lev Grossman's The Magician King arrives:

July 20, 2011 By in Books, Publishing Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

… alas, you won’t see any further comments on it until August 9—the publication date.

I’ve been getting more interesting books from publishers lately: Carolyn Cooke’s Daughters of the Revolution is sitting next to my bed, half-read and still promising, and now The Magician King.

Lev Grossman’s The Magician King arrives:

July 20, 2011 By in Books, Publishing Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

… alas, you won’t see any further comments on it until August 9—the publication date.

I’ve been getting more interesting books from publishers lately: Carolyn Cooke’s Daughters of the Revolution is sitting next to my bed, half-read and still promising, and now The Magician King.

Richardson proclaims Clarissa is boring before you even start the novel

January 13, 2011 By in Fiction Tags: , , , Leave a comment

Here’s what Samuel Richardson wrote about his novel Clarissa (1748) in its “Preface:”

From what has been said, considerate readers will not enter upon the perusal of the piece before them as if it were designed only to divert and amuse. It will probably be thought tedious to all such as dip into it, expecting a light novel, or transitory romance; and look upon story in it (interesting as that is generally allowed to be) as its sole end, rather than as a vehicle to the instruction.

I don’t think I’m a “considerate reader,” since novels that don’t “divert and amuse” on some level are, in fact, “tedious.” The novel is a 1,000-page deferral regarding whether and who with the title character is going to do it. Although I understand intellectually that this matter was of great import at the time it was written, I can’t quite build up the need to care. Reading about Clarissa is better than reading the novel itself.

Consider this comment, which Keith thinks in The Pregnant Widow:

It sometimes seemed to Keith that the English novel, at least in its first two or three centuries, asked only one question. Will she fall? Will she fall, this woman? What’ll they write about, he wondered, when all women fall? Well, there’ll be new ways of falling . . .

Notice that Keith doesn’t assert that the central question of the novel is will she fall: only that it “sometimes seemed to Keith,” implying that other times the central question might seem otherwise. But it also asks whether we should care: if she “falls,” that means she’s a person who makes her own decisions, and if she doesn’t—then so what? What’s at stake is a question that doesn’t matter all that much except to the extent the woman involved makes it matter. This brings up an uncomfortable point alluded to by that ellipsis: if it doesn’t matter, then the novel doesn’t matter. And this novel doesn’t matter. So why should we read it?

The “it” is deliberately ambiguous, as it could refer to Clarissa or The Pregnant Widow. Various answers arise: as a historical document; to understand shifting ways we understand sexuality; to trace how the novel developed as a genre.

Tender is the Night — Fitzgerald

April 1, 2010 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Early in Tender is the Night, we find this about a relatively minor character named McKisco:

“I don’t see what it’s all about,” he said helplessly. “I don’t see why I’m doing it.”

The context is a conversation putatively about duels, but one could take McKisco’s confusion as a synecdoche for the novel as a whole: no one see what it’s all about or why they’re doing it. Even Dick Diver, psychologist, doesn’t really; he’s supposed to have mastered the mind but hasn’t mastered his own. Some of the novel’s descriptions and transitions mirror this confusion or uncertainty, which makes Tender is the Night feel more Modernist than its predecessors. Take, for example, this:

When there were enough Americans on the platform the first impression of their immaculacy and their money began to fade into a vague racial dusk that hindered and blinded both them and their observers.

The description goes from a relatively literal rendition of the Americans’ surface into a metaphoric one of their souls. But I have no idea what “vague racial dusk” means, which is perhaps why it needs “vague” out in front, or why that would blind observers; perhaps those theoretical observers are used to judging based on categories that Americans defy, or think they defy. If so, the novel is a journey into the ways Americans are more ensnared by history than we might want to be, and why we might be more obscure than we’d like to imagine. In this way, the structure of the novel mirrors its themes: it cuts many of the “she shifted her attention to the fight” transitions that might otherwise make this easier to follow:

Nicole was glad he had known so many women, so that the word itself meant nothing to him; she would be able to hold him so long as the person in her transcended the universals of her body.
“Hit him where it hurts!”
“Yah-h-h-h!”
“Hey, what I tell you get inside that right!”

A chorus shouts after Nicole’s Deep Thought, and in re-reading Tender is the Night I see where Tom Wolfe got some of his techniques for representing speech.

Some of the stylistic tics, like the “vague racial dusk” are meant to make us poetically see something in a new light, but they often feel more like work compared to a novel like Gatsby. It feels more indulgent, too: this is Fitzgerald wanting to write a novelist’s novel, meaning that it should have enough strangeness to make it hard to figure out what’s happening and why. This brings pleasures of its own, especially on second reads, but the danger of obscurity for obscurity’s sake remains, as when a voice suddenly shifts from third person limited to first:

All that saved it [the offer of marriage? something else?] this time was Nicole finding their table and glowing away, white and fresh and new in the September afternoon.

How do you do, lawyer. We’re going to to Como tomorrow for a week and then back to Zurich. That’s why I wanted you and sister to settle this […] (166)

My confusion mirrored McKisco’s in this narrative jump. Eventually that confusion was (mostly) remedied, but not so remedied as to make the novel boring.

Continuing was worth it: Fitzgerald knows how to end a novel. Tender is the Night isn’t quite so overtly poetic as Gatsby, with its boats being beaten back into the past, but it has a sense of melancholy and emotion that few novels do. I’m being vague because I don’t know how to describe the feelings evoked; perhaps that is one definition of a powerful novel. Melancholy is a part, but like a good wine, it’s only a single strand of a complex weave, one cannot appreciate the whole without appreciating all its parts.

There’s one other thing that Tender is the Night reminds me of: the habit that literary history has of doubling back on itself. Received opinion—so received that I don’t know where I got it from—holds that people didn’t start really writing about divorce and affairs and torrid sex and so forth until Updike and Roth. Marriages were more stable, at least as depicted artistically, and the really great fireworks caused by social changes didn’t hit until the 1960s. But the more I read the less that narrative seems to fit: Tender is the Night encapsulates Updike’s Marry Me: A Romance and maybe even Couples. Middlemarch has marriages that end. Even Pride and Prejudice has its affair between Lydia and Wickham, although the sex they’re having is so powerful that it remains unspoken.

Madame Bovary doesn’t encapsulate Tender is the Night but at least presages it. The drama of adult relationships, which I’d thought a (relatively) recent invention in fiction, isn’t. Neither is the childishness that such relationships sometimes entail. More continuity exists over the course of history than I thought, and what seems new in terms of content no longer does. Even the style of Tender is the Night holds up: if it were published today, I’d not know the difference. one can see greater stylistic continuity from Fitzgerald to the present than from, say, Middlemarch to Fitzgerald (this is part of what James Wood discusses in his nominal discussion of Chang-Rae Lee’s The Surrendered, a topic that I will return to later).

I don’t know what to do with this idea concerning continuity and change save note its existence, at least in my reading. Perhaps the rhetoric of the love story hasn’t changed that much, except perhaps for the inclusion of overt female desire in a larger number of more recent novels; it’s hard to see a good precursor of Allison Poole in Jay McInerney’s Story of My Life. Poole feels a long way from Nicole Diver, but the feeling of a search for something that cannot be adequately defined continues, and the inability to find that absent something propels novels and stories forward.

Preview: Nick Hornby and High Fidelity

January 15, 2010 By in Books Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

I’m working on a post about Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, a novel that continues to impress. Last time, I read it chiefly for pleasure, but this time I’m also trying to figure how and why it works so well; I think the first line of my post will be: “There are two really remarkable things about High Fidelity: how funny it is and how well constructed it is, especially given that the subject matter (romantic entanglements and existential dilemmas for the aging man and relationship) could easily be a plotless mess.”

More to follow, obviously.

Commencement — J. Courtney Sullivan

October 20, 2009 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

J. Courtney Sullivan’s Commencement is a less accomplished version of Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, and it has all the narrative tension of an overcooked noodle. It shoots for modern-day Jane Austen and hits something closer to the chick-lit bulls-eye. I noted this to my girlfriend, who said that she could’ve told me it was chick-lit based on its teal dust jacket. I try not to judge a book by its cover, but in this case apparently my principles apparently wouldn’t have mattered.

The writing in Commencement isn’t bad, but it also isn’t good; I’m searching through pages, looking for a representative quote, or something that’s at least stylistically unusual enough to merit consideration and am finding… nothing. The prose conveys information effectively but without any pizzaz; it is what James Wood might call an efficient literary/commercial novel, having absorbed a few conventions of modernism while retaining a passionate eye and penchant for understatement. Wood says that “There is a familiar American simplicity, for instance, which is Puritan and colloquial in origin, ‘a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to the essentials,’ as Marilynne Robinson has it in her novel Gilead.” Sullivan doesn’t have that. She works for the New York Times, which might explain why Commencement reads like a long piece for the Sunday Styles or one of the other less rigorous sections.

I read Commencement based on a mostly positive review in the same paper. It says, for example, that “Sullivan’s characters are often motivated by urges that are taboo to admit in certain quarters: getting love and nurture from men, or staying protected in a cocoon of female friendship rather than confronting the larger world.” Outside of the Mormon church and some university Women’s Studies departments, I can’t imagine what those “certain quarters” might be. In an age of Sex and the City and Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl (And I Liked It),” taboos aren’t very strong. One notable thing about the review is that while it comments extensively on the novel’s social content, it says virtually nothing about its style or prose. Perhaps that’s because the reviewer drew a blank, just as I did, and therefore fell back on sociology when aesthetics failed to rouse any feeling whatsoever.