Bah humbug!

I tend to think I love Christmas but, more for myself than for you, I’m going on record right now as a newborn Scrooge. Instead of a lovely, luxurious time to lavish thoughtful gifts on loved ones, sing carols, and eat my favorite Scandinavian treats, Christmas has become time to languish at home with a stomach bug and fight and fret over the budget.

Ho! Ho! Ho!

War, Trauma, and the Real in The Farther Shore

I don’t suppose I’d pick up The Farther Shore if I didn’t have to read it as an assignment, if you will, for the LitBlog Co-op. I’m glad that it crossed my desk and that the prospect of a conversation about it kicked it to the top the pile of books. It’s a moving, lovely, spare book--both fast-paced and elegant. It should be a movie: it’s exciting and violent and dramatic with a simple, straightforward story arc. At 173 pages, it clips right along.

We begin with six American soldiers, all men, working the night lookout on a rooftop in an unnamed coastal African city. Stantz, Zeller, Santiago, Fizer, Heath, and Cooper, staunch off fear and boredom as they look down over a city they don’t understand. It’s a familiar scene. It comes as much from Hemingway and Hollywood as from experience. And even the protagonist, Joshua Stantz, is a familiar type: the sensitive young man, in over his head, smarter than his sergeant and counting the days until he can go home and apply to college through the G.I. Bill.

Things go wrong fast and suddenly a few of the characters you were just trying to keep straight, flipping back to see which one is the medic or the wiseass, are not characters but corpses. We have a situation. It’s serious. And the soldiers have to improvise a plan.

The prose is so elegant and thoughtful that this very familiar structure--of soldiers cut off from the army, working their way back--seems not formulaic but classic.

For example, early in the book Stantz thinks “there were close to a million people out there, and most of them had probably just been scared out of their sleep” (5). That’s just lovely to me: in imagining the people in the city as people, Stantz immediately complicates and humanizes his own presence as an American soldier. What is he doing there?

So sick from the heat he cannot eat for most of the book, Stantz always thinks of the Somalians as people. He’s never condescending and when he fumbles, we blush with him. He asks a man who’d studied in the States if he misses the U.S. Do I miss it? The man is dismissive. Americans always want to know if we miss America, he scoffs. Stantz is hang-dog and we can feel him making a mental note for better behavior on his next encounter. (I’d bet this is an autobiographical moment.)

As I said at the beginning of this post, I started off intending to write about The Farther Shore as a war book but, truth be told, my days of reading Hemingway, Vonnegut, and Tim O’Brien are in the past. Other greats of war literature--Crane, Remarque--are shamefully untouched. I never finished Catch-22. The war book that I know best is Mrs. Dalloway and reading Matthew Eck is like reading a prequel to the shell shock she depicts there. Again and again, Stantz consciously decides not to think about something, stuffing it down, knowing that his survival depends on his not dwelling on this or that horror or bit of grotesquerie. He must continue to run, to hide, to use his wits to move forward. This for me is what makes this beautiful little novel so moving: the pain of watching someone set himself up for a long, hard recovery.

READ THIS: Matthew Eck The Farther Shore

It's Matthew Eck week and we're doing something a little different this time at the LBC.

Rather than asking you to keep you eyes always on that site, we're posting stuff on Eck all over the whole web. It's our hope that you won't be able to read a litblog without coming upon mention of his book...

Of course, over here at Fernham, I've yet to do much to add to the general celebration. We've been felled by a range of rather dull ailments, deadlines, and tasks--mildly ill children, leading to extra loads of laundry, etc. But fear not. I hope to post on Eck before the week is out.

In the meantime, you might check out Levi's interview or Dan's review or, if you don't want to take Dan's word for it, then check out all the other reviews here.

Holiday Gift List

My friend who teaches at Hunter clued me in to this calendar on Lulu: A cool calendar to benefit scholarships for Hunter College students with cool, strange NYC photographs. 16 professors dressed up as famous literary characters in decidedly contemporary settings. Here's the product description:

What if Gulliver traveled to New York today? Would he hang out on Wall Street? Would Macbeth's witches romp in Central Park? Beautifully photographed by Ben Kelly, this calendar imagines major literary characters come to life in New York City. The photos feature English professors from Hunter College posing as characters such as Janie from "Their Eyes Were Watching God", Juliet from "Romeo and Juliet", and T.S. Eliot's "J. Alfred Prufrock," set against the vibrant backdrop of New York City.

All for only $16. A fun & unusual Christmas gift for a reader....

I'll leave it to you to guess which model is my dear friend!

READ THIS: Matthew Eck The Farther Shore

Well, the LitBlog Co-op took a quarter off (did you miss us? did you notice?) to regroup and sharpen our mission. But we're back, in time for the winter reading rush, if there is such a thing, with a new READ THIS selection, Matthew Eck's The Farther Shore.

It's a spare and gripping war novel, by a veteran and set in an unnamed Somalia.

I was dubious at first, but the prose is so expert. It's a compelling and moving read. I'm happy to urge you to READ THIS.

There will be posts over at the LBC site and all over the blogosphere about Eck's book all next week. In the meantime, get yourself a copy so that you can participate in the discussion.

Elizabeth Hardwick, R.I.P.

Strange and fascinating to hear that this Kentucky writer's goal was "if it doesn’t sound too ridiculous — my aim was to be a New York Jewish intellectual" because, for me, I suppose one of my strange aims, since I left Seattle, since I learned who she was at some point in graduate school, has been to grow into being her.

Pop Woolf: Art Education Campaign

Newsweek has now twice run an ad for Arts Education featuring Virginia Woolf. The headline is "Why some people think Virginia Woolf is the state's official animal."

And the copy goes on to explain the importance of funding arts education for kids.

You can see (and download) the ad here.

It's one of a whole series of punning ads--Whitman & chocolate, Duke Ellington & royalty, & my second favorite, the Spanish ad punning on Goya and canned beans.

The Woolf ad is on my offfice door now.

Clever

Seeing as I go to about one play a year, I feel it was quite clever of me to plan to go to a non-striking show tonight.

"Cymbeline": Shakespeare's very, very odd and beautiful late play. With Martha Plimpton as Imogen and that beautiful haunting dirge that haunts Mrs. Dalloway--

Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

One hour till curtain...stay tuned...

Notable

1. Written about, but unread
   THE ABSTINENCE TEACHER. By Tom Perrotta.
   
2. Thought about buying, but should probably read Drown first (since it’s on my shelf).
   THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO. By Junot Díaz,
   
3. Read but not written about
   DANCING TO “ALMENDRA.” By Mayra Montero
   
4. Watched my mom buy & discussed it with her, but still unread:
   EXIT GHOST. By Philip Roth.
   
5. Read and written about
   FALLING MAN. By Don DeLillo.
   
6. Reading
   THE INDIAN CLERK. By David Leavitt.
   
7. Read, written about, reviewed
   THROW LIKE A GIRL: Stories. By Jean Thompson.
   
8. Purchased in London
   AGENT ZIGZAG: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal. By Ben Macintyre.
   
9. Have no plans at all to read
   CIRCLING MY MOTHER. By Mary Gordon.
   
10. or
    THE DIANA CHRONICLES. By Tina Brown.
    
11. Watched my husband read
    HOW DOCTORS THINK. By Jerome Groopman.
    
12. Will happily discuss with you
    HOW TO TALK ABOUT BOOKS YOU HAVEN’T READ. By Pierre Bayard.
    
13. Read, written about, reviewed, disliked
    LEONARD WOOLF: A Biography. By Victoria Glendinning.
    
14. Still looking at the review copy from BookExpo of
    TWO LIVES: Gertrude and Alice. By Janet Malcolm.
    
15. Thinking about spending that Three Lives gift certificate in my wallet on
    THE GATHERING. By Anne Enright.
    
16. or
    MATRIMONY. By Joshua Henkin.
    
17. or maybe even
    THEN WE CAME TO THE END. By Joshua Ferris.
    
18. but probably will defy logic and actually purchase
    HOW TO TALK ABOUT BOOKS YOU HAVEN’T READ. By Pierre Bayard

That, in brief, is my brief version of the list.

George Orwell on Graham Greene

No real time to post or think, but time enough to share this little nugget, from Orwell's "The Sanctified Sinner," an essay on Graham Greene: “He [Greene] appears to share the idea, which has been floating around ever since Baudelaire, that there is something rather distingue in being damned; Hell is a sort of high class night club, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only.”

Happy Thanksgiving!

In my head, there are seven or eight posts--each the work of a moment.

In my life, there is an empty fridge, a visiting relative en route, and a couple beloved daughters with upcoming "vacations" from preschool and daycare.

It's time to face life and stop living in my head.

I'll look forward to "seeing" you all in a post-Thanksgiving triptophan haze.

Enjoy the holiday.

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master...

Elizabeth Bishop's great poem has been much in my mind these days. I haven't lost any "you," the devastating loss that ends the poem with a bang, but, boy, have I lost things.

And I am familiar with and tired of that feeling of panic when one does--the feeling that ALL is lost--not just the keys, but everything. I lost my keys yesterday. I was too tired to fully enter the vertiginous sense grief, but I still went through a cascading range of emotions. Losing a small thing makes me feel that I've lost control of the world and of my mind both. I doubt the many little tricks that keep the day perking along smoothly and, in doubting them, I see how much of my day depends on those little tricks (swipe your MetroCard and turn right down the stairs; walk up 58th if you're getting a latte, 60th if you're saving your money; always take your keys with you to the bathroom; remember to grab your keys on the way out). All these little habits give me the mental space to plan my class (or worry about it), to go over my list of the things I need to do, to listen to a song and release myself from those lists.

Babies struggle to learn about "object permanence." The "fort-da" game or peek-a-boo teaches them the big but ultimately gentle lesson that things that go away often return. But when we adults lose something, it reminds us of the dark side of that game: sometimes things don't return; sometimes they are lost. And, as Bishop's catalogue forces us to confront, sometimes it's not just keys that we lose.

I came across Woolf's version of this in Mrs. Dalloway the other day, lovely because it inverts the usual proportions: Clarissa's unhappiness, arising out of imperfect relationships, is as bad as the feeling of losing a thing. Or rather, her inability to remember why she feels unhappy is like being unable to find a pearl in the grass. Odd, dramatic, certainly contributing to Clarissa's tinselly self, but also wonderfully right:

But--but--why did she suddenly feel, for no reason that she could discover, desperately unhappy? As a person who has dropped some grain of pearl or diamond into the grass and parts the tall blades very carefully, this way and that, and searches here and there vainly, and at last spies it there at the roots, so she went through one thing and another.

I gave a big lecture yesterday--ill-attended, but stressful nonetheless. I left my keys in the bathroom just before--though, thank goodness, I only noticed them missing afterwards. Instead of being able to reflect on my performance, I had to trek to my husband's office, borrow his keys, and walk home, tired, wrung out, and a bit ashamed. Of course this is precisely when one does lose things. And it's precisely when one has the least elasticity to absorb the loss.

Someone turned the keys in to security. I picked them up this morning from the supervisor, running in late with oil on his hands--he had a flat tire on the way to work. So it goes. It's November. It's a wonder the world turns at all.

Katherine Lanpher’s Leap Days

I love memoirs. I love reading my friends’ books. I love meeting authors. When I met Katherine Lanpher at Lauren’s burlesque show/reading/fete for Girls Write Now, I wanted to befriend her, remembered listening to her on the radio with Al Franken, remembered reading about her fabulous West Village apartment in the Times (you can see it on her webpage, under “articles” [scroll down]) and begged her to send me a copy of her book.

Thanks to her publicist, she obliged.

I gobbled the book. I’ll admit that I hadn’t read it when it came out because our stories were too similar: she moved to the West Village in mid-life on February 29, 2004. (She was 46.) I moved to Jersey City in mid-life just six months earlier. (I was just shy of 37.) In those early days in New York, it was too hard to read about the seemingly footloose life of a single woman my age when I was slogging through the slush with a stroller on the wrong side of the Hudson.

But I’ve read it now and am so glad. It’s a lovely collection of essays, really, more than a memoir, about adventure and possibility and discovering that those things can continue on into one’s 40s, can continue even after one has “decided” that the time for adventure has passed.

That said, the weakest piece for me is the first. There, I think, she writes a very funny account of going through one of those trapeze camps where you overcome your fears by doing circus tricks. This seems like a gimmick to me; a pretty good column from O: the Oprah Magazine or More (where she is an editor). It’s as if someone wanted more justification of the title and asked for an essay that was literally about leaping. I get it, but it’s merely fine, where much else in the memoir is lively and moving and strong.

She writes, for example, about coming to terms with not having children--even though their inability to have a child contributed to her and her husband’s divorce, even though, as she acknowledges, it seems that any upper-middle class American who wants a child just “gets” one somehow.

She writes also, movingly and with great strength about the history of herself as a feminist: the minor indignities and outrages that lead to a deep and abiding commitment.

And, for anyone who moves to New York, she writes terrifically detailed accounts of the delights and minor humiliations of living in the city, and the constant question: are you a New Yorker yet?

Living in Jersey, I’ve opted out of that, still, I was fascinated to read her subway tales. She writes of her wonder at riding the train with a friend who insists on getting in just the right car: the car, it turns out, that will mean he has no walk when he gets off at Christopher Street. She writes, too, of being amazed that anyone can read on the train when the train itself is so amazing. And then, of herself now, reading away, and thinking back. As someone who now reads on the train (or fiddles with my beloved iPhone, listening to my hoarded “free” songs from Starbucks. How I lap up the opportunity to get a free song with my $4 coffee!), I loved the pleasure of seeing my own history of thought about the commute in print.

The thing that the book does not, and cannot, resolve, is the thing that keeps these chapters lively and interesting: it’s a memoir of a woman who loves adventure and homemaking. She became a journalist and married a French theater-guy because of that love of a adventure. But she settled into a lovely cottage in St. Paul with a huge kitchen and dining room out of her love of home. What surprised her--her courage to pick up stakes and move--is also, it seems to this reader, wonderfully in character.

One last bit of Stevie Smith

I first read this novel in 1991: I was single and young, but even then, I loved this little ironic passage on marriage. Now, Smith’s delight in those whose imperfect marriages become an interesting fact, a bit of running commentary, seems even more delicious:

There you are you see, quite simple. If you cannot have your dear husband for a comfort and a delight, for a breadwinner and a cross patch, for a sofa, a chair or a hot-water bottle, one can use him as a Cross to be Borne.
“It reminds me of our craft articles published passim, in all our so-very-much-alike women’s papers: How to make a knitting bag out of a top hat. May also be used for a beret or a tea cosy.

The Daily Show, Sunday edition

Taking my cue from New Yorkers everywhere (even on this, the other side of the Hudson), I try not to be star-struck.

Still, I'll say that when you're spending your Sunday in the toddler room of the Liberty Science Center, gazing at giant millipedes, helping the little ones poor uncooked rice from cup to cup or shoot plastic balls through a giant air cannon, the whole experience takes on unexpected glamour when Jon Stewart is there doing it with his wife and kids, too....

Stevie Smith and the Jews

Part of that pert and determined voice--and part of what makes Novel on Yellow Paper of continuing interest--is that Stevie Smith’s Pompey still has the power to shock. But when that shock comes in the form of garden variety 30s anti-Semitism, it’s hard to know how to take it.

If you do pick up Novel on Yellow Paper, you’ll find Pompey riding horses with her friend Leonie, “a Jewess, but slim” right in the opening pages. In spite of myself, I find this non sequitur very funny. Less funny but more interesting is her account of finding herself the only goy at a party:

Hurrah to be a goy! A clever goy is cleverer than a clever Jew. And I am a clever goy that knows everything on earth and in heaven. This moment of elation I am telling you about: the only living person in that room, the cleverest person in that room; the cleverest living goy.
Do all goys among Jews get that way? Yes, perhaps. And the feeling you must pipe down and apologize for being so superior and clever.

This nonchalant self-acceptance of her own prejudices is why I call her anti-Semitism “garden variety,” she seems to see her own opinions as utterly common to her context. But Pompey’s self-analysis is anything but ordinary. Even as she feels superior, she pursues that feeling, puts it under a microscope.

Not much more about Jews shows up for the next hundred pages though her thoughts about her German boyfriend Karl keep the topic close to mind. This is, after all, a 1936 novel, so knowing that Hitler is already in power, that the war is just 3 years away, gives her thoughts a special electricity.

She breaks up with Karl, goes to Germany, stays with some Jewish friends who already are keeping “a weather eye out for self-preservation” under Hitler. On the way home, she weeps on the train for fear of what may come and for shame at how her own thoughts might contribute to the general fund of hatred in the world, of mounting cruelty against Jews.

A hundred pages is a long time to wait for a character to redeem herself, and Smith doesn’t let Pompey completely off the hook here. Instead, just a few episodes later, Pompey finds herself thinking about a friend who’s just married a Jewish man, about how, for her, his Jewishness still conveys something meaningful about his personality: “she was married to a man that was—and after all I’ve said about Germany what black treachery and perfidy this is—well I’ll say it, got married to a man that is a Jew.”

I’m loving and admiring this more and more, and partly because it is shocking and partly out of historical interest but also because it really does seem to do something honest and kind of ugly but also really penetrating. What do you think? How far are you willing to go along with a text when it offends you?

Novel on Yellow Paper, 1936

Stevie Smith’s first novel, Novel on Yellow Paper, made a big splash in 1936 and I think it’s still worth your time. In the protagonist, Pompey Casmilus, Smith has created one of the most vibrant, funny, and specific voices in fiction that I’ve ever encountered. Anyone interested in voice would do well to study this one.

It’s not really a novel: there’s little plot--and what plot is there is buried in digressions and indirections--but it’s so funny and surprising that it does pull you through for quite a ways. (I do admit, however, that by around page 200, I am done and it can be hard going to read those last 50 pages or so.)

She is so pert and determined: “I think the two subjects about which there is most nonsense talked are sex, and how to bring up children,” she writes after a long section on her absurd sex education classes in school. Then, in a new paragraph, she boldly soldiers on, “So now shall we talk about how to bring up children?”

I love that wild irreverence, that bold female voice that somehow manages to be both utterly ordinary and colloquial and, at the same time, totally individual.

A nice page from her hometown university at Hull.

Smith on Hearbreak, Booze

“And I must say, and here never better, there’s nothing like the bar if you’re feeling a bit below par.”--Stevie Smith, Novel on Yellow Paper

Stevie Smith Week

I'm declaring it Stevie Smith week here at Fernham. I've just re-read the amazing, puzzling, exasperating, and hilarious 1936 Novel on Yellow Paper and my nerves are all jangled from the experience, so I'm going to inflict it on you.

We'll start with just a taste:

“And the people who say that children’s voices are the purest music certainly ought to be the people who sit near children’s playgrounds.”

As she says, "Read on, Reader, read on and work it out for yourself."

Victor was right

It was 1992 or so. I was in a stuffy apartment in New Haven at a party. Just a grad student party, but a good one. And a scary one: some young professors were there, too.

Victor Luftig, a young professor of British modernism, cornered me and pointed at Tom Perrotta with his beer bottle: you see that guy? Tom? Tom Perrotta? He’s the real deal. He’s going to be big.

No way.

Victor was a nice guy. Not mysterious or cruel. I could usually understand everything he said. These were not signs of future promise at Yale in the 90s. Aware of my own niceness, I tried to keep my distance.

Tom was nice, too. He was the only College Writing Tutor who was in my extended circle of acquaintances. He seemed like a good guy. Someone you’d like to watch a game with. Someone Victor probably did watch games with.

Tom was not going far. Victor was not the one to predict who would.

Oops!

Years later, I’m sitting in the basement in a neglected but grand campus building, working on one of five computers shared by the 40 of us who teach freshman writing at Harvard. Tom works there, too. He walks in with a new haircut and a black leather jacket. MTV is actually making his novel into a movie. I started to pay attention.

Now, he’s everywhere. I’m really happy for him. I thought Little Children was a good book, a smart book, And I remember loving Bad Haircut.

I suspect that Perrotta’s success comes out of his being a good guy and being a really smart guy: he never presented himself as someone out of the ordinary so he can write novels about ordinary people that aren’t condescending. This seems to me to get at the heart of some of the problems of literary fiction: in short, and to be totally bald about it, perhaps novelists often feel so alienated from the world that they end up writing about worlds which fail to reconnect with readers. This is more about class alienation than anything else. I’m tired of reading books about writers and teachers, books that seem to imagine writers and teachers as the only people whose inner lives are worthy of consideration. Even Virginia Woolf stretched to imagine the inner world of the wife of a Conservative MP. I keep thinking about Laila Lalami’s eloquent plea for more fiction about poor people and keep looking, looking, looking for examples. While Tom doesn’t do that, he isn’t writing about how hard it is to write a novel in Brooklyn…

So, I am proud to have known Tom and happy for him. His novels are really good--maybe he is our generation’s Jane Smiley or Richard Russo, writing really good, dependable books every other year and then, occasionally a great one, but pretty consistently capturing something about the zeitgeist.

They’re not the books that thrill me, however. That’s probably not surprising, given all the time I’ve spent reading British modernism. So it’s interesting to me to witness the little critical firestorm over the reviews he got last weekend.

Like Levi, I guess I would have been perfectly happy with the moniker “dependable” for Liesl Schillinger, who wrote the cover review for the New York Times. But why am I calling someone dependable whose review of the new DeLillo was so openly out of sync with his project? Hers wasn’t an informative, biting, or pleasurable bad review, just an anti-intellectual one. Still, like Carolyn, I would have felt a little intimidated to have my review up against hers--an inaccurate phrase, but that is how it must feel.

I was grateful, then, to Mark for taking the time to point out Schillinger’s inanities:

And perhaps this muddle makes sense to you but to us it's just, well, a muddle:

Usually, when you ask yourself, “What would a Perrotta character do?” you know the answer: he’d do the familiar, guiltily compromised, self-interested thing that any normal guy would do ... and you understand him, even if you don’t applaud him.

Back to the Style section, if you please.

Interesting, how the "strong silent type" line made Mark squirm with agony, made Carolyn wish she'd thought of it, and went right past me as a little lame and a little funny. In any case, kudos to Carolyn for her review in the LA Times. I liked this bit here:

Tom Perrotta ("Little Children," "Election") brings this world to life with a few strokes. He never condescends to modern suburbia -- instead, he mucks around its corners, opens closets and reveals oddball secrets. It's a kind, gentle satire -- one that gives equal time to its villains and its heroes. The evangelical pastor, for instance, believes he's doing the right thing, even when he shows up uninvited on a parishioner's doorstep to shield him from sin.

It veers toward cliché, perhaps, but that’s a hazard in trying to describe this Perrotta world of ordinary suburbia.

Updated to add what you already know: that Laila liked it pretty well.