“What’s the good of fighting critics? Mind you, some of them are very able… But only a few can form any opinion of a new work. Most of them are simply on the lookout for novelty. They hear too much, and they hear it the wrong way. They get like children who are peevish from having too many toys…”
“Nothing, nothing whatever really stands in the way of a creative artist except lack of talent.”
—Robertson Davies, A Mixture of Frailties
Charles Bock was more fun to hear speak than to read; alas, I began Beautiful Children with anticipation that went unfulfilled. Problems manifested early: descriptions of video games modeled on Doom sounded vaguely off, and I’ve never seen “hard drives the size of mini-fridges.” Yet I could ignore linguistic problems when I find also find a perfect description of many would-be artists: “He had aspirations to nothing less than the creation of sensitive, artistic, emotionally honest pictures that, just maybe, would get him laid.” In another section, evocations of common ground seem strained, as when the father of lost boy Newell Ewing says that “He got […] trapped in another Politics of Marriage Conversation.” Status is everywhere in Beautiful Children, but more often stated than shown, or shown via consumption. But whenever I was about to stop reading, I’d find something like this:
Propped up against the base of the casino wall like an abandoned doll, the body was bulky in places, but still frail enough to look as if it might be carried along by a good wind. Electricity glossed over its mess of hair—kinked and matted strands of indistinct, artificial colors, clumped in all directions.
Er: it’s almost right, but “electricity” feels wrong because it’s not electricity but electric light that illuminates hair. This is a microcosm of Beautiful Children: it feels like it should be more right than it is. Clichés distract—someone “was bleeding like a stuck pig” and elsewhere a stripper named Cheri goes on “about character arcs and emotional journeys until the friggin’ cows came home.” Perhaps this is how the character would think, but the problem of how banal, uneducated characters think and speak versus the literary needs of the author is never really resolved*. If teenagers sound like teenagers they’re often boring or vapid; if they sound like adults, they don’t sound real. If there is a satisfactory solution to this problem, it is not obvious in Beautiful Children; in other novels it involves a “precocious” or abnormally literary narrator. Instead, Beautiful Children opts for long transcriptions of teenage argot that eventually had me flipping pages in a quest for substance. It was hard enough to find when a character thinks, “You cannot possibly fathom an end to your observations about the status of your physical decline, a final finality. Such things are beyond you, as they are beyond anyone; and yet the evidence permeates your days, unavoidably present, oozing from the southwestern decor of a master bedroom […]” I can’t see Robertson Davies going into such despair. Perhaps John Banville would, but much more artfully.
Banville and Davies, however, wrote many novels over the course of their careers, and, at least in Davies’ case, his early novels were not as masterful as his later ones. Beautiful Children is a first novel that Bock says took 11 years to write and, presumably, publish, and I can’t help but thinking he would’ve been better served to finish it or have otherwise built his skills elsewhere. Beautiful Children is not a bad novel and perhaps it is even good, but not 11 years good. It has an admirable range of cultural references, from Blake to The Outsiders (a “young adult” novel assigned to me in middle school) to visual media detritus. Like Richard Price’s Ladies’ Man, Beautiful Children heralds better things to come. Now that Price comes to mind, Lush Life covers ground not dissimilar from Beautiful Children and does it better. And he wrote it in four years. Bock said Beautiful Childrentook so long because it was an “ambitious book, and I just didn’t know what I was doing for a lot of it.” Many novels gestate for a long time, and he rattled some off: Catch-22 stayed with me, but there were many others. Alas, I don’t think Beautiful Children will have the lasting power of Catch-22 or Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, another superb first novel. And in those novels, I doubt anything is “unceremoniously rejected,” as something is at the beginning of 3.3 in Beautiful Children.
Bock seems to have better novels in him; in Seattle, he said, “[Beautiful Children is] a dark book, but I believe the darkness is there to illuminate some of the wonderful parts of humanity […] also, I think there’s some pretty good jokes in there too.” There are, and he was wonderfully candid when someone asked why the dialog seemed so good and, by implication, authentic: “I have no idea.” Although he elaborated, I suspect the real truth came first. Still, I’m not sure I agree with the premise of the question: sometimes the dialog clicked and sometimes not, like much of the rest of the novel.
In another answer, Bock said he used Ponyboy because he’s an “iconic young adult character” and that he intentionally “recycles—Vegas is a place where they fake the Eiffel Tower and the great monuments of the world and turn them into casinos.” There is “no end to the uses of pop culture,” though he tries not to name drop. The recycling theme is heavy in Beautiful Children and perhaps a topic for some future graduate student. Today, someone looking for pleasure and depth could do worse than Beautiful Children—but they could do better. In “Books Briefly Noted,” the New Yorker has its own take on the novel’s problems, starting with praise and then moving to: “Yet [Beautiful Children] doesn’t quite achieve its intended emotional resonance; there is too much shaky dialogue and improbable Vegas kitsch (breast implants with candle-wax-filled nipples, for a pyrotechnic striptease), and the boy at the center of the plot is thinly drawn and so obnoxious that his disappearance is not unwelcome.” I read “Books Briefly Noted” after writing the first draft of this post, and realized that I structure my commentary the same way the New Yorker did its.
* The best description of I’ve read of this issue comes from James Wood’s How Fiction Works.
The Book of Ebenezer Le Page is the kid you didn’t really want to befriend in middle school but liked well enough as a harmless oddity. The novel is a long account of Ebenezer Le Page’s life , a resident on Guernsey, a Channel Island. Le Page’s glory days, such as they are, occur mostly in the first half of the twentieth century and come slightly before the author’s, as G.B. Edwards died in 1976 with his only novel unpublished. This edition comes from The New York Review of Books, which appears to be using the story as part of the novel’s appeal.
Le Page is an insular man with some folk wisdom; he notes that “I have never known the rights and the wrongs [of some Guernsey residents…] That’s the trouble of trying to write the true story of my relations; or of myself, for that matter.” On the page opposite, he is merely strange: “I like my two china dogs. When I write down anything wicked, one of them look very serious; but the other one, he wink.” This lack of pluralization is apparently an example of the Guernsey patois, and it becomes comprehensible and even normal over the course of the novel. As for the china dogs, their symbolic appeal is obvious, though whether the narrator understands is not.
Among these bursts of ideas, however, are along recitations of occurrences on Guernsey. They become tedious as we learn about the couplings (mostly in marriage) and uncouplings (mostly not) of the people of Guernsey, and the results of this action. But I could never come to care about either, and to me the land itself and how it shaped the people seemed more interesting than its inhabitants. Oddly enough, I saw Guernsey mentioned in The Wall Street Journal not long after finishing the novel:
Though it’s registered in Guernsey, U.K., and trades in Amsterdam, Carlyle Group runs Carlyle Capital out of its New York offices. Early Thursday in Amsterdam, the shares plunged 70% to $0.83 each. The stock has lost around 83% since the company first disclosed its funding problems last week.
These would be the financial types Le Page rails against for changing his island from a rural, inward focused area to a hot tourist and financier destination. Guernsey’s former dialect seems to have been absorbed into general English and French since the events of the novel, and the destruction of its linguistic character seems unfortunate if inevitable. But maybe it will also reduce some of the smug satisfaction of residents like le Page, who learns he can’t sell his gold easily because of restrictions placed by Britain. In response, he says: “‘The balance of Credit? […] I haven’t the vaguest idea what that mean; but I do know whoever it was made that law are a lot of rogues and vagabonds! I worked for every penny of those sovereigns!’ I was real angry.” Maybe so, but even justified ignorance is seldom attractive, it should also be noted that the dropped words are in the original. On the same day, le Page says: “I slept like a log and woke up late.” The somewhat pleasing alliteration is not enough to make up for the cliche. It’s one I don’t think I’d see in Robertson Davies, who is an obvious comparison to Edwards in content and, to a lesser extent, style. In content the two share an interest in the rural and somewhat isolated products of Britain. But Davies became the better writer, though his Salterton Trilogy was weaker than much of his later work. Had Edwards produced later works, he might have shown the same upward trajectory, but we are left with an original novel that makes me wish it had led to second, third, and fourth novels that rendered this one a footnote in Edwards’ career.
Book|Daddy has a great essay on the otherwise (mostly) silly debate about blogs, books, and criticism. You can see evidence of its percolating here and here. What caught me is this quote:
As Jessa Crispin of Bookslut said during the panel on literary criticism that book/daddy moderated at the Texas Book Fesival in Austin over the weekend, the major review outlets keep reviewing all of the same authors, and few of the kinds of books and authors she likes were getting attention, so she started writing about them on her website.
Seriously. Who is writing about Robertson Davies, and who is commenting on B.R. Myers? Somehow I’ve never found a demand that I read The Name of the Rose, a novel that encapsulates why I read in the first place: to be so blown away that it’s hard to discover where I should start writing. I linked to some of the other books that come close to that effect here.
I noticed that Greg Harris linked to my post about Gail Pool’s Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America. Better still, he quotes approvingly from Robertson Davies on the subject of the clerisy (according to the Oxford American Dictionary, “a distinct class of learned or literary people: the clerisy are those who read for pleasure“), a word I had to look up too:
Who are the clerisy?…. The clerisy are those who read for pleasure, but not for idleness; who read for pastime, but not to kill time; who love books, but do not live by books. As lately as a century ago the clerisy had the power to decide the success or failure of a book, and it could do so now. But the clerisy has been persuaded to abdicate its power by several groups, not themselves malign or consciously unfriendly to literature, which are part of the social and business organization of our time. These groups, though entrenched, are not impregnable; if the clerisy would arouse itself, it could regain its sovereignty in the world of letters. For it is to the clerisy, even yet, that the authors, the publishers, and the booksellers make their principal appeal.
Finding the word you’ve been needing for a long time without realizing it is a wonderful sensation and one that Word Court often tries and fails to elicit.
The rest of Harris’ post is here. Its major weakness is propagating the tendency to divide bloggers and critics, amateurs and professionals, into an “us” versus “them” dynamic, which I continue to find silly. To be fair, Harris might just be reflecting his subject matter.
I’m tempted to summarize Conversations with Robertson Davies, a collection of interviews with the great author, but I can’t, and even if I could I’d probably do better to give a few thoughts stemming from a comment Davies made about reading. As you can probably surmise, I like Davies’s work, so I find his comments without a fictional scrim interesting too. One exchange particularly resonates:
Robert Fulford: Books are things to be studied, judged rather than experienced. I think you once said that the heresy of the critic is that he is a judge rather than experiencer of literature.
Davies: Yes. […] As for my own books, I hope that the readers will have to use their heads and be collaborators, which is a thing I stressed in that earlier book. They should be collaborators in creating the work of art which is the book.
I tend toward judgement, and my chief criterion for greatness is met when a book causes me to spontaneously stop judging and start experiencing. To be fair, I can’t fully stop judging, but to the extent that my reading becomes more experience and less judgment I am inclined to like and love the book that induces this sensation. The best of Davies’s books—The Deptford Trilogy, The Cornish Trilogy, The Cunning Man—all accomplish this goal. Cryptonomicon and Straight Man and Lord of the Rings achieve the same effect. I wish I could fully explain how and why they do, but part of writing about books is writing about the inexplicable. Criticism is an effort to reveal more of the mystery that can’t ever be fully revealed.
To intersperse Elmore Leonard:
[Q:] There’s this presumption that a book is somehow a higher form of art, of a higher form of expression, than a movie. Do you agree?
[Leonard:] I don’t think the book is a higher form at all. Because most books are not very good. They’re a chore to read.
Occasionally a worthwhile book is also a chore, but only very seldom, and usually because I don’t understand it at first, as I didn’t Romeo and Juliet when reading it as a high school freshman. Recently I described The Bad Girl with language that brings to mind duty. I think Davies felt similar to Leonard regarding bad books, or even books that aren’t essential (essential meaning different things to different people, of course, which might make the debate more a semantic than one getting at underlying truth). Elsewhere in Conversations, Davies recommends reading fewer books but reading them with more depth and feeling.
I hope to read with more depth and feeling, and part of the reason I write is to find both. Paul Graham explains the process well:
Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That’s why I write them.
Wow! I started the post writing about Robertson Davies, but along the way became more interested in the diversions than the original topic. And that is a good thing: one idea bumps into another, reminding me of something else, and off I go. I hope that is reading with feeling and intellect. The Elegant Variation, in discussing the maladies affecting book reporting, says “Too many reviews are dull, workmanlike book reports.” I agree, and think that many books are dull and workmanlike, so perhaps the reviews reflect them. That’s why I felt a sense of wonder at Davies’ books, as well as Conversations: they are not dull and workmanlike, and I hope my writing isn’t. After reading Mark Sarvas’s comments, I’ve tried harder not to write dull, workmanlike book reports. Is it working?
I hope so. Davies wrote many reviews of varying quality, but he was also a man who knew good work when he saw it. Conversations is filled with criticism (in the bad sense) of academic criticism (in the sense of commentary). I’ve heard James Wood (a TEV favorite) and others I know I’ve read but can’t think to cite at the moment say or write the same. So here’s to them, and to Davies, and to reading, and to experience.
I mentioned The Deptford Trilogy in relation to Brian Evanson, but the novels are worth an independent post. I have a bit of trouble with whether I should write “a novel” or just “novels,” because although they were published separately, their thematic and structural links means that severing one from the whole—though any one could stand alone—would lessen their combined power, which is greater than the sum of their parts.
Those parts are fabulous: finishing the trilogy leaves one with a sense of completeness, like finishing an excellent meal but not gorging. The books are realistic and yet steeped in the mythological. If this sounds like a difficult to feat, that’s because it is. And yet the blending of myth and commentary on myth into life is so smooth that the mythic overlay is never ostentatious. It is made explicit at times, but not in a way that seems like a lecture or, worse yet, a dissertation.
The books—though I do think of them as a single book than as parts—explain thought without being didactic, and their powerful story—they do tell a single story—allows the many quotable sections to flow without damming the work.
The skeptical but not cynical Dunstan Ramsay narrates and is the subject of, Fifth Business, but only narrates the third, World of Wonders. He is, among many other things, a teacher of the sort it would have been marvelous to have; Ramsay is never fanatical about anything but inquisitiveness, is serious and yet self-effacing, and possesses the quiet and stern humor mastered by the British, but perhaps also understood by their Canadian cousins. He felt a little like a provincial Gandalf stripped of overt manifestations of power but still possessing his wisdom—only Ramsay’s is infused with irony.
Ramsay takes himself seriously enough not to be a fool but laughs at himself enough to know his own limitations. That’s probably the sanest way to go through life without being as utterly ridiculous as so many of us are.
The irony keeps him from being a joiner or true believer. It is impossible to assign Ramsay a conventional political point of view, for what he knows best is human nature, and political views are most often adapted to whatever is most convenient for their holders. The holders, meanwhile, are often unable to perceive themselves, and instead leave to the marginal characters of a society to speak, if not the truth, something close to it:
… like so many idealists, [radical party members] did not understand money, and after a meeting where they had lambasted Boy and others like him and threatened to confiscate their wealth at the first opportunity, they would adjourn to cheap restaurants, where they drank his sugar, and ate his sugar, and smoked cigarettes which, had they known it, benefited some other monster they sought to destroy.
This reminds me of someone I knew who would type his anti-corporate screeds on a Dell computer and defend his choice of a Volvo station wagon as being “less commercial.” He did not perceive the webs that made him, like all of us, complicit in the schemes we disagree with. I do not approve of China’s record on human rights, yet I write this on a computer manufactured there, and I no doubt own clothes made there. China has benefited me—but I do understand the webs that the radical party members do not, and Ramsay, though he doesn’t say as much, probably does.
As such, Ramsay is not easy to co-opt. Ursula K. Le Guin, in receiving a recent Washington State Book Award , said: “most governments dislike [literature], justly suspecting that all their power and glory will soon be forgotten unless some wretched, powerless liberal in the basement is writing it down.” Governments dislike literature and idealists dislike money: Ramsay could believe both things and avoid being a fool by being observant.
That is his chief value as a speaker: the power of observation combined with self-reflection. David Staunton, fierce lawyer and uncertain man, narrates The Manticore, is also observant, but lacks Ramsay’s inner ballast. Still, his therapy sessions illuminate much beyond his inner self, or even the lives of the principal characters from Deptford. As Dr. von Haller says: “The patterns of human feeling do not change as much as many people suppose.”
So they don’t: we read The Odyssey and see the pattern it set—or noticed—in many lives, whether our own odyssey is conquering nanotech or just getting to work in the morning. We see it today as we did then, just as our own history is seldom so exceptional as we might wish it. Much of Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence, which synthesizes his lifetime of studying Western culture, focuses on history’s repetition (or rhyming). The similarity of so much of human existence is more astonishing than the differences.
For one thing, the capacity for self-deception seems eternal. As David’s therapist observes in The Manticore:
DR. VON HALLER: Yes, I think that would be best. You have got into your swing, and done all the proper lawyer-like things. So now let us get on.”
MYSELF: What do you mean, exactly, by “the proper lawyer-like things”?
DR. VON HALLER: Expressed the highest regard for the person you are going to destroy. Declaring that you have no real feeling in the matter and are quite objective. Suggesting that something is cool and dry which by its nature is hot and steamy. Very good. Continue, please.
In other words, the way one wants to appear and present oneself is perpendicular to the way one is, and we accept the deception as a way of continuing to function despite contradiction. It’s much like accepting mythic narrative: the specifics of any life or story will not completely conform to the arc, but the arc remains nonetheless. Dr. von Haller specifically talks about lawyers, but she could just as easily discuss a myriad of professions, occupations, or people.
The best part of the book is the language itself, which is so rich that I could post a quote of the highest quality for a month and still have more. I find it odd that I’ve never heard about Robertson Davies in newspapers, blogs or school. For all I know Davies is relatively famous, although this seems unlikely because I’ve seldom seen any reference. I wonder if literary politics explain why I hadn’t heard of Davies before pulling Deptford off the shelf of a bookstore. The school issue is understandable—Canadians are a tough lot for American schools: the “big” authors like Shakespeare and Joyce have to be covered, as do big American authors like Hawthorn, Emerson, and the like. Curriculums need some minority voices as well, which usually get covered by Richard Wright, Zora Neal Hurston, and whoever wrote Bless Me, Ultima. Then, if there’s room, they want a few European writers not from Britain and maybe even an author or two from the third world. The Canadians, meanwhile, are close enough to not to count as foreign or exotic but not actually part of the U.S., so their important authors don’t get stuck in the American lit sections. Therefore, they don’t get read, although if I recall correctly Margaret Atwood is Canadian, which would make her an exception. Australians are in a similar boat: they’re of British descent and mostly white, which means they don’t get minority points, and they’re not sufficiently foreign to make it in under the third world rubric.I’d like to think that’s a view Ramsay could hold about his author’s own relative lack of fame.
The Story's Story 