Books:

May
A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863-77 (Foner)

June
The Tiger in the Well (Pullman)
The Tin Princess (Pullman)
The Dust Diaries (Sheers)

July
The Procedure (Mulisch)
Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury)
The Martian Chronicles (Bradbury)
A Lost Lady (Cather)
A Month in the Country (Carr)
Roman Fever and other Stories (Wharton)
The King Must Die (Renault)

The Pullman books: good, very good, but not as good as The Ruby in the Smoke and The Shadow in the North. The whole series, so rich in detail and atmosphere, so clever and thrilling and well-written, is Pullman's attempt to deal with politics and sex in children's literature. I think he succeeds brilliantly with politics: he shows how seemingly disparate events and circumstances are linked, how this affects real people, and how individuals are complicit in, or struggle against, forces beyond their control. As for the sex, I noticed this only when I read Pullman's criticism of C.S. Lewis: Lewis never lets his characters grow up, witness his treatment of Susan in The Last Battle. (Everything Pullman says about Lewis is terribly unfair.)* In the Lockhart quartet and, of course, in His Dark Materials Pullman shows that he can let his characters grow up. Well, OK. He does a good job, though better in the quartet (especially the first two books — I liked Sally's and Frederick's banter) than in the trilogy. But I don't think this should be a requirement for fiction for older children, as he seems to think.

*Anyway, hostility toward grown-ups and their ways is one of the hallmarks of great children's literature. I felt that hostility myself, and with good reason: every day brought fresh evidence of the stupid things grown-ups were capable of doing. They seemed, the lot of them, unkind, unimaginative, incurious, and it was a banner day when I found one I could talk to.

The Dust Diaries are a biography of the author's great-uncle, a missionary to Zimbabwe 100 years ago, and at the same time an account of the author's travels in the missionary's footsteps. It's admirably unmannered, and earnest without making a fetish of earnestness. Of course, he has such a meaty subject he doesn't need to perform arabesques around it. On occasion the language was a bit too rich, and unnecessarily drew attention to itself, but for the most part the pieces fit together perfectly.

The Procedure: this is one of the worst books I've read in a long time — trendy, glib, incoherent, bullying. That's what I wrote on the last page, and I don't remember enough of it to say much more. The author just plunks down the two halves of the novel, one on the Golem, the other on stem-cell research or cloning (we never find out exactly), and makes no serious attempt to link the two. I loathed the crowd-pleasing magical realist bits about the Prague rabbi ("crowd-pleasing" may be unfair to his readers — I hope no one is taken in) and the embarassingly clumsy, hollow attempts to impress us with the star power of Berkeley's faculty, which just felt like pages and pages of name dropping. As if Mulisch realized that no matter what happened to his main character, we wouldn't care, he includes not one but two birth scenes (not counting the Golem's creation). And all right, these scenes are exciting, but in a way that feels contrived and manipulative and that's entirely unearned. This book was a gift, and the person who gave it to me hadn't read it; she said she had wanted to get Mulisch's Discovery of Heaven, but couldn't find it. The Procedure was so disappointing I'm not sure I can give him a second chance.

Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles: I read these because I thought I might assign the first, and parts of the second, to my students. I could complain — Bradbury's characters are stuffed shirts, vehicles for his predictable ideas, his style is often overwrought and somehow cloying, his sentence structure monotonous — but what matters is that his stories make twelve-year-olds think, and that's all I'm asking for. I loved him when I was twelve. Some of his images are memorable, some of his plots are clever and skilfully executed, and his use of science fiction as a vehicle for his revulsion against consumer society (and almost everything else in postwar America) is pretty interesting. David Bromwich calls Fahrenheit 451 "affecting," and says it embodies "high Enlightenment" values, and I suppose that's fair. It's a good introduction to dystopian fiction, and I think they need that before they're confronted with Brave New World. The ending of Fahrenheit 451 reminded me of We, which is the only really good work of science fiction I've read. (But I haven't yet read Olaf Stapledon; Jennie thinks the world of him. I really haven't read much science fiction at all.) It's as if Zamyatin and Bradbury didn't want a completely tragic ending (as in Brave New World and 1984), but a happy ending wasn't really possible, and so the ending is no ending. There's a kind of honesty in the shambolic inconclusiveness of both novels.

A Lost Lady: very fine, though not as rich or as moving as The Professor's House or Lucy Gayheart. But then it's so much shorter — it's a novella really. It reminded me of Wharton's novella "New Year's Day": both are told from the point of view of a young man growing up observing an older, married woman who at first seems to define feminine charm, and trying to figure out what exactly the quality of her feelings for her invalid husband is.