This was originally meant as an amazon.com review — I was incensed to see that all reader reviews of this book were positive, someone had to warn the unwary browser! — but it was not accepted. At first I thought this was because I refer to other reviewers, so I took out those references. Then I realized I was above the 1000 word limit, so I trimmed and pruned until I got down to 999 words. Admittedly, one editing strategy was to jam words together. After all this it still was not published. Either my agglutinations didn't make it past some clever computer, or my review was deemed spiteful (one of many the prohibitions). I'm still too angry to keep it to myself, but maybe some day I'll regret my intemperance. Not yet.
(I know it's a mess, a rant more than a review; I wrote it in one go giving no thought to structure, and have not been able or willing to muster the loving delicacy necessary to edit properly.)
A monstrous unbearable stale perverse book
Faulkner's sentences are very long, but they're not constructed; rather, they're piled on. He throws mud, lumber, and nails into a heap and calls it a house. "But where's the door?" asks the poor reader. "There's no way in." His prose doesn't create a world; rather, he uses the same twenty words over and over again, clumsily and without, one suspects, really knowing what they mean: maybe wind can "chuckle" (though it's hard to imagine) but what does it mean to say that the wind is "risible"? Yet he says this again and again, for several pages. In another passage, lasting about ten pages, he uses the word "derision" in a similarly blunt and insensitive way. He injects these words into the reader, forcing a mood upon one that he cannot achieve by legitimate means.
You too can write like Faulkner if you pepper your writing with the following words:
immemorial
profound
violent
unbearable
monstrous
sober (a word that, one suspects, held depths of meaning for an alcoholic, but fails to impress the non-alcoholic)
furious
grim
stale
stagnant
perverse
derisive
frenzy
incredible (a word for lazy writers if there ever was one; "incredible" to whom?)
immolation
savage
And be sure to use unnecessary suffixes, as in "abstractional" and "outragement." (What's wrong with "abstract" and "outrage"? Nothing, except that Faulkner needs the suffixes to hide the fact that he has nothing to say.)
Elsewhere he writes: "The coffee was weak, oversweet and hot, too hot to drink or even hold in the hand, possessing seemingly a dynamic inherent inexhaustible quality of renewable heat impervious even to its own fierce radiation."
"impervious even to its own fierce radiation": just what does that mean? That the heat of the coffee cannot penetrate ("even") the hot coffee? Explain, please. And what's the result of lavishing all these big words on a cup of coffee? Locally, it makes even the words that make some sense meaningless, like "inexhaustible quality": we know it's not inexhaustible, but even that bit of hyperbole has to be topped by something completely meaningless. A cup of coffee simply collapses under the weight of so many words that do more to overwhelm the reader, as she tries to make sense of them, than to make anything vivid. And page after page of this fog, this contempt for meaning, this laughably portentous bombast simply numbs the reader. So that when someone is described as being "incredibly calm" I could only think, "Nothing in this book is incredible, because nothing is credible."
One character says, a propos of nothing, "Set, ye armourous son, in a sea of hemingwaves." I just couldn't believe it. Are we supposed to think, "How clever"? Are we supposed to laugh? But this is a book that has banished laughter, so one is left with the assumption that this neologism is meant to be clever and somehow profound.
Here's another excerpt:
"We got to get somewhere."
"Dont I know it? A fellow on a cottonhouse. Another in a tree. And now that thing in your lap."
"It wasn't due yet."
Those last two sentences make it seem as though the woman had given birth. This comes as a surprise, because we've been with her the whole time and nothing was said about her being in labor. But a few pages later it becomes clear that she hasn't given birth yet. Is this confusion deliberate? If so, what would the point be? Or is it merely careless?
The characters are either dull, blank, and impenetrable, or they're hysterical cardboard caricatures straight from pulp fiction; it's hard to say which is more boring.
One of the messages of the novel is that women with husbands are desirable, whereas women with children are not. Faulkner would probably call this a perverse paradox, a stagnant immolation. (Charlotte might seem to be an exception, but she is redeemed by her utter indifference to her children.) Wild Palms takes a tragic turn when Charlotte becomes pregnant and insists on having an abortion: "It's not us now. I want it to be us again, quick, quick." The convict has to leave a job he likes when he seduces, or rapes — we never know, and it's characteristic of the novel that it hardly seems to matter, either to the benumbed characters or to the reader, who has been brutalized by Faulkner for 200 pages — anyway, he gets into trouble with the wife of another worker. His fellow convicts are surprised that he never made any advances to the woman who has gone through thick and thin with him for several weeks and has made no attempt to rejoin the father of her baby, and the fact that she has a child is offered as an explanation.
I'm perplexed by the reviewer who says that this is a pro-life novel; I see no implied criticism of the lovers' justification that a child would be unaffordable (because they prefer not to work), and would put an end to their passion. To the end Charlotte and Harry are presented as anti-heroes bravely challenging bourgeois conformity.
Many of the reviewers assume, and Faulkner would have us believe, that the lovers are "doomed" from the start. Whatever this might mean, their only problem for the first 150 pages is that Harry refuses steady work, and forces Charlotte to quit her job, out of a fear of becoming bourgeois. He looks for a job, sporadically, and when he finds one, or even talks about finding one, Charlotte screams at him. It's hard to be patient with these people.
The last line of the novel is
"Women, shit," the tall convict says.
The whole novel is full of similarly unintelligent statements about women (aka "female meat"), generalizations about unreasoning instinct, etc etc. Here's one:
Not thrift, not husbandry, something far beyond that, who (the entire race of them) employed with infallible instinct, a completely uncerebrated rapport for the type and nature of male partner and situation, either the cold penuriousness of the fabled Vermont farmwife or the fantastic extravagance of the Broadway revue mistress as required, absolutely without regard for the instrinsic value of the medium which they saved or squandered and with little more regard or grief for the bauble which they bought or lacked, using the presence and absence of jewel or checking account as pawns in a chess game whose prize was not security at all but respectability within the milieu in which they lived, even the love-nest under the rose to follow a rule and a pattern…
I'll spare you the rest of that sentence. But it's typical of Faulkner that he has to coin a useless, ugly word — "uncerebrated" — to express a cliché.
"Up the corridor, beyond an elbow, he could hear the voices of two nurses, two nurses not two patients, two females but not necessarily two women even… two nurses laughing not two women…"
What kind of distinction is he drawing between "females" and "women"? We never meet these two nurses, but I imagine he means that they're unattractive. It's a characteristically random and clumsy bit of nastiness, and it seems to issue more from Faulkner than from Harry, who at the moment has other things to worry about.
On the next page two doctors come "…up the corridor and [talk] to one another in clipped voices through their mouth-pads, their smocks flicking neatly like the skirts of two women, passing him without a glance and he was sitting down against because the officer at his elbow said, 'That's right. Take it easy' and he found that he was sitting, the two doctors going on, pinch-waisted like two ladies, the skirts of the smocks snicking behind them…"
The hatefulness of the doctors seems to have everything to do with their effeminacy.
In the same scene doors "clash" "soundlessly." If you insist on cancelling the connotations of words, sooner or later all your words will lose connotations. For me this happened on page 2 of this awful novel.
Sunday, September 17, 2006
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
From Richard Eder's review of Edward Mendelson's The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life:
"His prismatic evocations of the Mrs. Dalloway who is defined by her position, obligations and party preparations and her inner Clarissa — that essential being she glimpses for a moment at the end, thanks to the suicide of Septimus and the steadfast love of her childhood friend, Peter — implant the life and breath of one masterpiece in a masterly work of criticism. The same magic is worked with Mrs. Ramsay in “Lighthouse.”"
It was a pleasant review, and the book sounds perhaps worth reading, but the first sentence of this paragraph seems very wrong. The essential Clarissa is defined by her party preparations; if anything the two novels offer a critique of the notion that there's an invisible world that matters, and a visible world that's mere illusion. Clarissa's party matters to her, and to think so is to embrace life (after her long illness). In contrast, Peter's impatience with convention is the root of his unhappiness, and while he no doubt thinks he suffers for some truth, we know he's simply wrong. ("We know": I can't speak for everyone. But I was very convinced of this when I read it.) There's more to frivolity than meets the eye.
Likewise, in To the Lighthouse "This is a table, this is a chair, this is an ecstasy, this is a miracle." — this is what Lily Briscoe knows. Only a pathetic person like Mr. Ramsay's student would think that the visible world is an illusion.
There are moments (in To the Lighthouse & in the essays) when ordinary people fleetingly seem archetypical. But this is because the colors of the visible world brighten and deepen, not because we see through any veil of illusion (which seems, frankly, an anti-literary impulse.)
Maybe I'm overreacting, maybe Mr. Eder meant nothing in particular by that sentence. I don't, unfortunately, have Woolf's novels at hand (otherwise I would quote at length), but I've just read Annie Dillard, who quotes Teilhard de Chardin: "The souls of men form, in some manner, the incandescent surface of matter plunged in God."… '"Plunge into matter," Teilhard said — and at another time, "Plunge into God." And he said this fine thing: "By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers."…There is only matter, Teilhard said; there is only spirit, the Kabbalists and Gnostics said. These are essentially identical views.'
I've just finished reading this, so I'm alert to suggestions of dualism.
"His prismatic evocations of the Mrs. Dalloway who is defined by her position, obligations and party preparations and her inner Clarissa — that essential being she glimpses for a moment at the end, thanks to the suicide of Septimus and the steadfast love of her childhood friend, Peter — implant the life and breath of one masterpiece in a masterly work of criticism. The same magic is worked with Mrs. Ramsay in “Lighthouse.”"
It was a pleasant review, and the book sounds perhaps worth reading, but the first sentence of this paragraph seems very wrong. The essential Clarissa is defined by her party preparations; if anything the two novels offer a critique of the notion that there's an invisible world that matters, and a visible world that's mere illusion. Clarissa's party matters to her, and to think so is to embrace life (after her long illness). In contrast, Peter's impatience with convention is the root of his unhappiness, and while he no doubt thinks he suffers for some truth, we know he's simply wrong. ("We know": I can't speak for everyone. But I was very convinced of this when I read it.) There's more to frivolity than meets the eye.
Likewise, in To the Lighthouse "This is a table, this is a chair, this is an ecstasy, this is a miracle." — this is what Lily Briscoe knows. Only a pathetic person like Mr. Ramsay's student would think that the visible world is an illusion.
There are moments (in To the Lighthouse & in the essays) when ordinary people fleetingly seem archetypical. But this is because the colors of the visible world brighten and deepen, not because we see through any veil of illusion (which seems, frankly, an anti-literary impulse.)
Maybe I'm overreacting, maybe Mr. Eder meant nothing in particular by that sentence. I don't, unfortunately, have Woolf's novels at hand (otherwise I would quote at length), but I've just read Annie Dillard, who quotes Teilhard de Chardin: "The souls of men form, in some manner, the incandescent surface of matter plunged in God."… '"Plunge into matter," Teilhard said — and at another time, "Plunge into God." And he said this fine thing: "By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers."…There is only matter, Teilhard said; there is only spirit, the Kabbalists and Gnostics said. These are essentially identical views.'
I've just finished reading this, so I'm alert to suggestions of dualism.
The New York Times has published a letter I sent them:
To the Editor:
Re “In Elite Schools, a Dip in Blacks and Hispanics” (front page, Aug. 18): I teach at an after-school enrichment program in an Asian immigrant neighborhood in New York City. There, by studying English and mathematics in depth and at an accelerated pace, students in effect start preparing in elementary school for the entrance exam for the specialized high schools.
Well over half of the academy’s students are admitted every year.
Perhaps if the Specialized High School Institute were expanded into the lower grades, instead of prepping students for a mere three months before the exam, its students would achieve similar results.
New York, Aug. 18, 2006
'"Nearly all" are admitted' would have been more accurate, but I didn't want to sound too cocky.
They didn't publish this letter, which I sent a few weeks ago:
To the Editor:
I'm baffled by the hostility of your letter writers to an academic program in kindergarten ('Can't We Let Children Be Children,' July 31). While my kindergarten classmates and I played in the afternoons, in the mornings we had a rich program of reading, writing, and arithmetic. I don't think it made me "deficient" in "social and emotional skills," or "derailed [my] ability to think for [my]self," to quote your readers. In fact I would probably have been bored if I'd had to play all day. And best of all, I had learned to read fluently by first grade.
Bologna, Italy, Aug. 2, 2006
I remember when Sr. (then novice) Helena-Marie handed out our phonics workbooks she told us that by the end of year we would be able to read absolutely any word in the dictionary; most pupils gasped in amazement, but not me. “Of course we will! It’s about time,” I thought, but couldn’t help feeling very pleased at the prospect as I tried not to smile.
First thing every morning she read us a portion from the Iliad or the Odyssey; after our work was done she'd read other Greek myths. I remember as if it were yesterday Sr. Helena Marie showing us how an oboe worked, how it differed from a flute, or exhorting us to lift the spirits of those who are sad. (I pictured someone levitating.)
To the Editor:
Re “In Elite Schools, a Dip in Blacks and Hispanics” (front page, Aug. 18): I teach at an after-school enrichment program in an Asian immigrant neighborhood in New York City. There, by studying English and mathematics in depth and at an accelerated pace, students in effect start preparing in elementary school for the entrance exam for the specialized high schools.
Well over half of the academy’s students are admitted every year.
Perhaps if the Specialized High School Institute were expanded into the lower grades, instead of prepping students for a mere three months before the exam, its students would achieve similar results.
New York, Aug. 18, 2006
'"Nearly all" are admitted' would have been more accurate, but I didn't want to sound too cocky.
They didn't publish this letter, which I sent a few weeks ago:
To the Editor:
I'm baffled by the hostility of your letter writers to an academic program in kindergarten ('Can't We Let Children Be Children,' July 31). While my kindergarten classmates and I played in the afternoons, in the mornings we had a rich program of reading, writing, and arithmetic. I don't think it made me "deficient" in "social and emotional skills," or "derailed [my] ability to think for [my]self," to quote your readers. In fact I would probably have been bored if I'd had to play all day. And best of all, I had learned to read fluently by first grade.
Bologna, Italy, Aug. 2, 2006
I remember when Sr. (then novice) Helena-Marie handed out our phonics workbooks she told us that by the end of year we would be able to read absolutely any word in the dictionary; most pupils gasped in amazement, but not me. “Of course we will! It’s about time,” I thought, but couldn’t help feeling very pleased at the prospect as I tried not to smile.
First thing every morning she read us a portion from the Iliad or the Odyssey; after our work was done she'd read other Greek myths. I remember as if it were yesterday Sr. Helena Marie showing us how an oboe worked, how it differed from a flute, or exhorting us to lift the spirits of those who are sad. (I pictured someone levitating.)
From Yumi:
i didn't get a chance to call you earlier tonight -- sorry! but i wanted to retell the lemon story before i forgot. because you're right; it really is a pretty unbelievable story. i mean, it's teacher training! this is how they teach teachers to teach! argh.
in the first part of the activity, the instructor put a row of lemons up on the chalk tray and asked us for "observable qualities" about the lemon. we were aiming to get to twenty. the qualities named included things like "yellow" "indented" "casts a shadow." she wrote these qualities up on the board and asked us to write them down. this took about twenty minutes.
then, we broke up into groups of three. she came around and gave each group a lemon and asked us to repeat the activity, but in our small group and with our particular lemon. a lot of the students got bored enough at this point to do things like bounce their lemons on the table, rip off pieces of the skin, and so on. surprisingly, everyone was well-mannered enough to actually follow directions and participate. (some people even appeared to be sort of "into it." god help us.) this part took about half an hour.
we then returned our lemons to the instructor, who put them back at the front of the room. each group elected a "representative" to read our list of qualities back to the class, reflect on the process, select our lemon from the group at the front, and explain how he or she found "our" particular lemon. each quality was written up on the board very slowly by the instructor, who couldn't spell to save her life.
we finished with a group discussion on how this activity related to a class on human development. replies: that all humans look alike from far away but are unique upon close observation. that you can see people/things better from up close and with a "hands on" approach. that even though everyone is an individual, we all have certain things in common as well.
i was sort of offended, not just at the inanity of it all, but also at being asked to think of my fellow human beings as, you know, LEMONS.
Kaveri commented:
the unintended message of this excercise seems to be that only microscopic examination enables discernment of human singularity-- our differences are tiny and insignificant.
i didn't get a chance to call you earlier tonight -- sorry! but i wanted to retell the lemon story before i forgot. because you're right; it really is a pretty unbelievable story. i mean, it's teacher training! this is how they teach teachers to teach! argh.
in the first part of the activity, the instructor put a row of lemons up on the chalk tray and asked us for "observable qualities" about the lemon. we were aiming to get to twenty. the qualities named included things like "yellow" "indented" "casts a shadow." she wrote these qualities up on the board and asked us to write them down. this took about twenty minutes.
then, we broke up into groups of three. she came around and gave each group a lemon and asked us to repeat the activity, but in our small group and with our particular lemon. a lot of the students got bored enough at this point to do things like bounce their lemons on the table, rip off pieces of the skin, and so on. surprisingly, everyone was well-mannered enough to actually follow directions and participate. (some people even appeared to be sort of "into it." god help us.) this part took about half an hour.
we then returned our lemons to the instructor, who put them back at the front of the room. each group elected a "representative" to read our list of qualities back to the class, reflect on the process, select our lemon from the group at the front, and explain how he or she found "our" particular lemon. each quality was written up on the board very slowly by the instructor, who couldn't spell to save her life.
we finished with a group discussion on how this activity related to a class on human development. replies: that all humans look alike from far away but are unique upon close observation. that you can see people/things better from up close and with a "hands on" approach. that even though everyone is an individual, we all have certain things in common as well.
i was sort of offended, not just at the inanity of it all, but also at being asked to think of my fellow human beings as, you know, LEMONS.
Kaveri commented:
the unintended message of this excercise seems to be that only microscopic examination enables discernment of human singularity-- our differences are tiny and insignificant.
Thursday, August 17, 2006
Monday, August 7, 2006
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.
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