Review: Stoner

Stoner by John Williams

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is among the class I call ‘Goodreads Books,’ because so many of my friends here have read the book, whereas nobody I know in the real world has even heard of it, much less read it. Among a certain niche of readers, this book is quite highly regarded; some have even gone so far as to dub it the ‘perfect novel.’ I would hate to be the dissenting voice in this chorus of praise; so I am happy to report that I liked the book, even if I did not find it ‘perfect.’

The novel follows the life, from birth to death, of William Stoner, a farm boy turned man of letters. It tracks the few successes and many disappointments in his long and fairly undistinguished earthly career. What makes the novel special is not the character of Stoner—a rather bland and colorless fellow—nor anything that happens to him. Rather, it is the tone with which Williams narrates Stoner’s life—a sort of tender melancholy, searching for the beauty and sadness in ordinary things.

For me, the strongest parts of this book were the beginning and the end (which are very good parts for a book to be strong). We first see Stoner emerging from his drudging life of farm work into the halls of academe, and witness his discovery of literature. Any devoted reader will naturally appreciate this. The book ends with a striking narration of Stoner’s confrontation with his own mortality, and his acceptance of his deeply flawed life.

The middle parts of the book were dominated by a series of interpersonal conflicts, and I enjoyed these somewhat less. The dominant relationship of this novel is that between Stoner and his wife, Edith. Shortly after the marriage, it becomes clear that Edith has been emotionally (and perhaps physically?) abused, and is traumatized from this abuse, which turns her into an abuser. This makes the marriage hellish for Stoner; and the dynamics of a dysfunctional relationship are described quite expertly. However, I was frustrated by Williams’s portrayal of Edith, which is almost entirely without sympathy. As a character, she has no interiority, no real perspective, but is merely a kind of wounded automaton that goes on wounding. As a result, I found her actions incomprehensible and even unbelievable.

I would lodge a similar complaint about the novel’s other villain, Hollis Lomax. Stoner’s academic rival and eventual boss, he is possessed by a kind of vindictiveness that is never fully explained, or even investigated. The third major relationship in the book—the affair between Stoner and Katherine Driscoll—is far more sympathetic. Still, I was baffled by its eventual end. (Spoilers here.) Lomax threatens to have Driscoll fired, so Driscoll quits? Stoner ends the relationship to preserve his non-existent family life? This did not square.

It is fair to say that the only character granted interiority is Stoner himself. Judging from the reviews, many readers seem to have found in Stoner a certain nobility—seen him as a fundamentally decent man borne down by circumstances—and thus interpret this book as a tragedy of a good man in a bad world. And while I agree that Stoner is decent enough, I read this book as a case study of the pathetic man. To say this in a slightly more cultivated way, I interpreted Stoner as a prime example of what the existentialists call ‘bad faith.’

By that I mean that Stoner never seems to consciously choose what he wants from life. Even in the book’s beginning, when Stoner switches from studying agriculture to literature, this is narrated not as a conscious choice but as a kind of instinctual impulse. The same goes for his marriage, and for virtually everything else. Very often, Stoner seems hardly aware of what is happening, and most often he decides to simply go along with the current. The only time he really goes against the prevailing wind was in his attempt to prevent a bad student from obtaining a Ph.D., and even then he frames this decision as an attempt to defend the university from the world ‘out there.’ Indeed, Stoner’s whole attitude towards the university is that of a diver’s towards a shark cage. It is a shield from life.

My point is that Stoner is largely responsible for the way his life turned out. He could have divorced his wife, or have tried far more vigorously to have protected his daughter from his wife’s abuse. After Lomax decided to torture him, Stoner could have simply left the university and gone to another one. He could have eloped with Katherine Driscoll—why not? In each of these instances, Stoner simply did nothing, staying in a bad marriage, relinquishing his daughter to his wife’s power, bowing to Lomax’s schemes, and cutting it off with the only person he ever loved.

The best example of Stoner’s decision making may have been his refusal to enlist to fight in World War I. When it finally dawns on him that he would have to decide, for himself, whether to fight, he seems absolutely dumbstruck. He asks the people in his life to tell him what to do. And then, he does nothing, merely continuing on with his routine—not because he is against war, and not even because he is afraid of dying on the battlefield, but simply because it is the null choice. This, to me, is bad faith.

Now, all this is not to say that I did not like the book, or that I did not find any value in reading it. To the contrary, I think there is a great deal of value in exploring such a character. But I do not blame the world for Stoner’s problems.

Stylistically, I could not make up my mind whether I liked or disliked Williams’s writing. There were times when the prose swelled into beautiful lyricism, but mostly the narration is deadpan, often dreary, and occasionally even dirge-like—a kind of funeral procession for Stoner’s life. As for the story, I wish Williams had focused far more on Stoner’s relationship with literature, rather than simply narrating it from a distance. We never experience Stoner, say, savoring a poem; most of his energy is expended in rather dry academic work—though this, again, accords with his use of literature as an existential shield rather than a way of enhancing his life.

Regardless of one’s take on Stoner, or William’s prose, or the untapped veins in the story, it is evident that this book evokes strong reactions from its readers, some negative and mostly positive. And that, if anything, is a mark of a good book.

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Review: Sons and Lovers

Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My reactions to this book veered from extremely positive to quite negative, so it is difficult to know how to begin. If you have an ear for prose, then Lawrence will seldom completely disappoint. At his best, Lawrence’s prose is lush, caressing, and aching. He evokes a kind of aesthetic tenderness that I have seldom experienced elsewhere—an intimacy between the reader and himself, a vulnerability that is disarming. In his strongest passages Lawrence is as meditative as Proust and as lyrical as Keats.

But this book is, unfortunately, not exclusively composed of Lawrence’s strongest passages. And as it wore on, I felt that Lawrence had exhausted his limited emotional range, and was overplaying his thematic material.

The premise of the book is quite simple: a woman in an unsatisfying marriage pours her emotions into her sons, who then become so dependent on her that they cannot form satisfying relationships for themselves. For me, there is nothing wrong with this (arrestingly Freudian) idea; but I did think that Lawrence beats the reader over the head with it. In general, I think it is unwise for any book to be too exclusively devoted to a theme. It does not leave enough room for levity, for spontaneity, for fresh air to blow through its pages. Sons and Lovers certainly suffers from this defect.

But the book’s faults become apparent only in the second half. I thought the beginning of the novel was quite astonishingly beautiful. Lawrence wrote of the sufferings of a young wife with amazing sympathy. He manages to bring out all the nobility and strength of Mrs. Morel, while avoiding portraying Mr. Morel in an unnecessarily harsh light. The miner is a flawed man in a crushing situation, and his wife is a resolute woman with few options. Their tragedy is as social as it is personal, which gives this section of the novel its great power.

When the focus shifts from Mrs. Morel to her son Paul, then the quality generally declines. Paul is not as interesting or as compelling as his mother; and his problems seem like sexual hang-ups or psychological limitations, rather than anything diagnostic of society at large. Perhaps our own social climate is just not ripe for this novel. Nowadays we are little disposed to care about the inability of a young man to find complete satisfaction in his relationships.

In fairness, there are charming and insightful sections in this second part of the novel as well. I liked Miriam as a character and I thought the dynamic between her and Paul was compelling, if a touch implausible. (On the other hand, I disliked the reconciliation between Clara and her pathetic husband.) Even so, I thought that the writing became noticeably worse as the book went on, as Lawrence inclined more and more to repetition. The characters speak, desire, recoil, hate each other, relapse, and so on. It is tiresome and it begins to wear on the reader, who longs for someone to do something decisive and bring all this emotional dithering to an end.

I am hopeful that Lawrence’s later novels have more of his strengths (his sympathy, his lyricism, his tenderness) and fewer of his weaknesses (his lack of range, his lack of humor). As for this one, I will end where I begin, with a confused shrug.

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Review: Winesburg, Ohio

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book did not conform to my expectations, and this is often a cause of bitterness with me. I opened Winesburg, Ohio thinking that it would be a series of carefully-plotted, intersecting short stories illustrating the reality of small-town life in America. And I was excited for this hypothetical book, since it seemed like a wonderful concept. But Anderson had quite different ideas, and his were far less to my taste.

For one, the stories in Winesburg, Ohio have very little in the way of plot, and so they can hardly weave an intricate tapestry. The effect is not that of a carefully worked-out machine, but if a simple accumulation. What is more, this is hardly a work of realism in any meaningful sense. Anderson is not one for sensory details, nor for social analysis; his world is composed of individual souls residing in a shadowy world. The stories could have taken place just as easily in Winesburg as in Warsaw, since Anderson’s fundamental concern is something much more universal.

The insistent message of these stories is that people are bound up within themselves, their inner passions shut off from the world, and they have little idea how to rectify their situation. Thus, the stories follow a characteristic pattern: The protagonist’s frustrated dreams and desires are narrated, and then a crisis follows in which the character tries, unsuccessfully, to disburden herself of this frustration. This usually takes the form of a frantic encounter with George Willard, the young town reporter. The story ends as soon as the crisis is shown to be unsuccessful.

I have many criticisms of these stories. Anderson is as guilty as any author can be of telling and not showing. His stories consist almost entirely of narration. What is worse, I often found the narration unsuccessful, as Anderson seems allergic to the use of vivid, concrete details. We are never in the moment with a character, never able to watch a scene unfold in our mind’s eye. Someone extremely sympathetic to Anderson’s style may argue that this creatures a distance between the reader and the story which mirrors the emotional distance between Anderson’s characters. In my case, however, the result was often apathy or bemusement.

As an example of his style, consider this passage:

There was something biting and forbidding in the character of Kate Swift. Everyone felt it. In the schoolroom she was silent, cold, and stern, and yet in an odd way very close to her pupils. Once in a long while something seemed to have come over her and she was happy. All of the children in the schoolroom felt the effect of her happiness. For a time they did not work but sat back in their chairs and looked at her.

This passage is characteristic in its almost total lack of sensory information. Indeed it seems intentionally vague: “in an odd way,” “something came over her,” “felt the effect”—these phrases suggest that Anderson himself was not interested in really picturing to himself how this strange scene could actually play out. It also shows a kind of curious anti-realism when it comes to describing human behavior. As somebody who has worked as a teacher, I can scarcely imagine the reaction of young pupils to a mysteriously happy teacher being to simply look at her. Has Anderson ever been around a child?

Of course, an author is under no obligation to describe people as behaving realistically. Nevertheless, I think that this oddity is symptomatic of one of the paradoxes in these short stories: though they are about the innermost struggles of different individuals, Anderson seems rather uninterested in his characters as individuals. The persons in this book can hardly be called individuals, in fact, but are mere points of tension. They have problems but no personalities, and once their crisis is over they have no further interest. The way that Anderson writes dialogue is particularly infelicitous—unnatural to the point that it must have been intentional, but which nevertheless struck me as jarring. Luckily, there is not much of it.

What perhaps struck me most about these stories is how strongly they reminded me of a lot of contemporary writing. The idea that we are all silently suffering, or that, in Anderson’s own words, “everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified”—and, most importantly, that emotional expression will fix this problem—this strikes me as a profoundly limited worldview. For my part, I do not think that emotional connection alone is enough to solve any problem, unless it is supplemented by a thoughtful empathy—the ability to see humans in the round and not as simply balls of frustrated passions.

Indeed, as Lionel Trilling argues in his excellent essay on Anderson, the paradox of this philosophy is that it can lead to a world just as cold and brutal as one of repressed desires. And yet, this is an idea that I encounter again and again: that all we need is emotional expression. Expression is easy, however, while understanding is infinitely more difficult.

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Review: The Ambassadors

The Ambassadors by Henry James

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

He had spoken in the tone of talk for talks sake, and yet with an obscure truth lurking in the loose folds…

One would think that, of all the people living on this good green earth, I would be especially prone to loving this particular work of literature. After all, it is about a young American who moved to Europe, fell in love, and then resisted his family’s entreaties to come back and make more money. If you know anything about me, you will know that this has a special resonance. I am also, as it happens, a lover of fancy prose and classic novels. Clearly, in my case, the book’s prospects were extremely favorable.

It is with mild surprise, then, that I report that my feelings are mixed. This is not a novel that one can easily love. It is, rather, a product of James’s infamous late style, which divided critics at the time and has continued to do so ever since. There are many ways to characterize this style—dense, laborious, obscure—but I think that the keynote here is vague. Both in his descriptive passages and his dialogue, James maintains a kind of studious vagueness that can be either delightful or infuriating, depending on your mood and taste. In everything from his sentence structure, to his dialogue, to his descriptions, to his plotting—vagueness reigns.

To indulge in highfalutin terminology, I would say that this is an aesthetic triumph at the expense of humanistic value.

First, the triumph. James, at his best, achieves something like that achieved by the impressionist painters. The strokes of his pen are suggestive rather than illustrative. He asks much of the reader; and this means that the reader becomes an active part of the story. Virtually nothing—not the book’s resolution, nor the personality of the major characters, nor even the meaning of some knotty sentences—is unambiguous, which means that each reader can make the book her own. In other words, James’s late style is quite like the Ostomachion of Archimedes: a set of puzzle pieces that can be assembled in a myriad of ways.

I say that this is an aesthetic triumph because James achieves an effect that is unique, distinctive, novel, and demanding. He creates, in other words, his own aesthetic realm. The cageyness, the uncertainty, the self-referential quirks of this book—we can clearly see, in retrospect, that James was paving the way for literary modernism. And like much of modernism, I think that this aesthetic triumph comes at a great cost to humanistic value.

To simplify matter somewhat, you can describe this loss at the emphasis of form over content. The novels of Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Elliot, Tolstoy—say what you will about them, but they have an awful lot of content. Putting aside whatever explicit messages these novels may carry, they introduce us to concrete places, to remarkable individuals, to unforgettable stories. They capture, in other words, a human reality; and in so doing they help us to come to grips with life itself. Now, do not get me wrong: all of these authors also have aesthetic merits. If they did not, they would not be artists at all—merely columnists. My point is that their artistic style was entirely compatible with a definite view of the world, a view that is communicated in their works. This I call their humanistic value.

My main criticism of this book, then, is that James’s remarkable aesthetic sense overpowered whatever message he wished to transmit. Based on a straightforward reading, the intended message is this: American culture is narrow and materialistic, and it leads people to give up enjoyment for superficial, conventional reasons. We are, thus, presented with a cast of characters who embody this difference. Strether and Chad are exquisitely sensitive to the charms of Europe, and improve under its influence; while other Americans, such as Waymarsh, insistently stay within their narrow horizons.

The problem is, again, the vagueness. James is insistently vague on every detail. How exactly is life in Europe more liberating than life in America? And how exactly have Strether or Chad improved? These may seem like superficial questions, but the entire weight of the plot hinges on them. We cannot come to any moral conclusion without knowing the details. Indeed, James is so impressionistic in his portrayal of the main characters that we can hardly come to any conclusions at all. Do we even like these people? Even the ending is veiled in vagueness. Will Chad return to America? And why does Strether decide to return? And is his return a failure, or a success, or what? It is simply impossible to answer these questions.

Perhaps I would have been able to stomach all of these irresolutions if I had absolutely adored James’s style. But I do not. Indeed, I confess to finding James’s prose quite ugly—laborious, convoluted, and dry. There is hardly a passage in this book that one can read aloud without sounding like an alien. The following is entirely typical:

Nothing could have been odder than Strether’s sense of himself as at that moment launched in something of which the sense would be quite disconnected from the sense of his past and which was literally beginning there and then. It has begun in fact already upstairs and before the dressing-glass that struck him as blocking further, so strangely, the dimness of the window of his dull bedroom; begun with a sharper survey of the elements of Appearance than he had for a long time been moved to make.

A few sentences of this may be fine; but pages of it are painful. Granted, James is capable of quite lovely writing. I was enchanted, for example, by his description near the end, of Strether’s venture into the French countryside. Yet, all too often, the book is like this passage: opaque. His dialogue is only slightly better—readable, and yet still plagued by the strained and unnatural cadences of James’s prose. Besides this, James’s characters have the same tendency to vagueness as James himself, and never spell out what they mean.

Obviously this will come down to taste. I like things to be clear and unambiguous. That is my taste. James clearly did not agree. That I liked this book in spite of this divergence is a testament to James’s aesthetic power. He was an artist in the highest sense of the word.

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2020: New Years Resolutions

I ended my resolutions post last year by promising I would not diet or exercise. Well, I broke the last part of the resolution when I took up running in February. This confirms my suspicion that the best way to motivate yourself is to resolve to do the opposite. So this year I resolve to stop exercising, eat poorly, be very unkind, and just be generally irresponsible and unpleasant.

My travel writing aspirations were only half-successful. Admittedly, I did compensate somewhat by writing long posts on the big NYC museums, but the list of travel writing keeps growing. Here are the big ones:

Asturias
Chartres
Istanbul
Marseille
Monticello
Naples & Pompeii
Normandy
Padua
Paris Cemeteries
Venice
Versailles
Washington D.C.

And this is not all.

In books, I got through most of my resolved reading from last year. My main omissions were the works of Archimedes, Apollonius, and Sir Thomas Heath’s book on Greek mathematics. Apart from this, one of my big goals this year is to read more about economics. I have a large biography of John Maynard Keynes sitting on my shelf. I also have a few scattered books and lectures to guide me. Hopefully I can make some headway in this most dismal of sciences.

In literature, these are the authors in my sights: Lord Byron, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence. In the history of science, here are the big names: Lavoisier, Lyell, and Faraday. And in philosophy I hope to finish reading the works of Plato.

I will do at least one more season (10 episodes) of my podcast. But my big goal is to put more energy into getting published. This includes short stories, articles, and hopefully my old novel. Wish me luck!

Review: The Red and the Black

The Red and the Black by Stendhal

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Good heavens! Is being happy, is being loved no more than that?

Few books have so totally engrossed me as this French novel written nearly two hundred years ago. Stendhal has aged very well. The novel is just fun to read: with short chapters, simple prose, and a plot that keeps the reader constantly wondering. That the novel was not widely appreciated during Stendhal’s own lifetime shows how much literary taste has changed. Whether this change has been for the better is difficult to say. But at least we can now appreciate Stendhal’s masterpiece.

For me, Stendhal’s signature effect is the interplay of Romantic idealism and deflating realism. Like his contemporary Balzac, Stendhal catches the world in his net. Every character, scene, and situation is carefully realistic. Though hardly a political novel, Stendhal succeeds in painting a subtle and compelling portrait of his age—the dynamic between the provinces and Paris, the political clashes between liberals and royalists, the relationship between the peasants, the clergy, and the old aristocracy. His characters, while individual, are also recognizable types, which he uses to dissect and analyze the social realities of his age.

Yet acting as a great counterweight to the ballast of detail is Stendhal’s famous psychological acuteness. This turns what would potentially be a dated social study into a gripping story of universal import. For his protagonist, Stendhal creates Julien Sorel—passionate, brilliant, stubborn, naïve, calculating, ambitious, and manifestly unfit for his social station.

Stendhal, a liberal himself, could easily have written a kind of morality tale about what happens when a man of great gifts is born in the lower ranks of society, with hardly any legitimate way of advancing. This is indeed Julien Sorel’s position. This morality tale would show us a good-hearted man, doing his best to be recognized for his genius, but overcome by circumstances. Yet Julien is infinitely more interesting for being both flawed and devious. Stendhal does not only show us how society makes his lot difficult, but, far more subtly, shows us how society deforms his psyche.

Deprived of any external encouragement, Julien’s motivation must come from worldly ambition and an egoistic pride. Since his only path to advancement is through people he despises—the clergy and the aristocracy—Julien must be dishonest, hypocritical, and ever-cautious. Forced to suppress his own emotions so constantly, and forced so frequently to act against his inclinations, whenever Julien is given a taste of kindness, love, or happiness, he loses control and threatens to undo all that his calculating subtlety had accomplished.

This psychological portrait is so perfectly realized that we both sympathize with, root for, and yet see through Julien Sorel. He is extraordinary, and yet painfully limited by his surroundings. His tragedy is that circumstances deprived the world of what he could have been had he been born in a different time and place. That Stendhal could create, at the same time, a universal morality tale, a realistic sketch of society, a vivid psychological study, and a thrilling novel—complete with a burning love story—all in the simplest prose, is a testament to the author’s high art.

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Review: Fortunata y Jacinta

Fortunata y Jacinta by Benito Pérez Galdós

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Evil breeds, and the good are annihilated in sterility.

Here is a real masterpiece of Spanish literature, one of the seemingly endless landmark novels of the nineteenth century. Benito Pérez Galdós, an intensely prolific author by any standard, cranked out this enormous work in two year’s time. This was a long time for Galdós. The vast bulk of Galdós’s dozens of other novels are not even half as long as this work, and many are not even a quarter in length. He went to such lengths because his creative ambition had been spurred on by the publication of Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta, another enormous novel, in 1885. By 1887, Galdós was ready with his reply: this book.

As the title indicates, the story is basically a love triangle, consisting of the respectable Jacinta, the poor Fortunata, and the privileged cad, Juanito Santa Cruz (called “el Delfín”). The main outline of the story is familiar: Santa Cruz marries the wealthy Jacinta, but has a dalliance with the lowly but beautiful Fortunata. Scandal ensues. This could easily be a trite and uninteresting story. Yet Galdós turns this basic plot into a lens, focused on the middle-class life in Madrid. Galdós documents this life with extraordinary finesse. We meet so many different sorts of people—pharmacists, priests, saintly nuns, military men, café intellectuals, chatty maids, arrogant housewives—each of them with their own quirks of speech and their own peculiar forms of mild insanity. It is a thorough and relentless dissection.

Galdós’s portrait of this world is not flattering. Like so many novels of this time, the plot focuses on the impossible plight of women. But Galdós is quite different from any of his English, French, or even Russian counterparts in his remarkable frankness. He is merciless in portraying the moral hypocrisy of this world, which basically leaves no option open for happiness to the lowly Fortunata. Here there are no dramatic heroes who fight duels, no heroines who throw themselves in front of trains or swallow poison. Instead Galdós gives us the crushing weight of custom, slowly grinding down the characters trying to navigate the morally bankrupt social conventions. In this way, the novel is rather more frightening than the operatic stories of Dickens, Tolstoy, or Flaubert—since it requires no suspension of belief to be believed.

Casting about for a comparison, the writer closest in style may be the great realist, Balzac. Galdós is also a realist of a high order. His endlessly animated prose is heavy with quotidian detail, making every scene photographically vivid. This also makes his novel feel rather modern and easy to read. There are no philosophical asides or extended descriptions of scenery: just action. In fact, if there is one main shortcoming of this book, it is that there is simply too much of it. Galdós is brilliant in the small scale; but at times one feels that he has been carried away with his loving portrayals of various Spanish types, his fascination with certain mannerisms, or his obsession with extreme realism. There are times that one wishes the book to swell into a crescendo, but Galdós stays at a steady volume.

The real star of this book is, undoubtedly, Fortunata. The title notwithstanding, Jacinta disappears for much of the story, only really the protagonist during the first quarter. The shameless lover, Santa Cruz, is also surprisingly absent from these pages. Jacinta and her unfaithful husband serve as the background for the tragedy of Fortunata, an unfortunate woman of high spirit and deep passion—a woman who, in other circumstances, could have become a saint, but whose actual circumstances forced her to become a scandal. Sharing in her tragedy is Maximiliano Rubín, a well-meaning, idealistic, and extremely naïve young medical student who falls in love with Fortunata. He, too, may have become a saint, if not for the ridiculous ideas of female honor holding sway at that time.

As the openning quote shows, a major theme of this work is fertility and sterility. Jacinta, the faultlessly faithful wife, is unable to have children; Rubín, the idealist obsessed with honor, is also sterile. Only Fortunata, the disgraced woman, and Santa Cruz, the philanderer, are capable of bringing life into the world. I cannot help but be reminded of The Departed, wherein only the good men can father children. The situation in Galdós’s novel is ostensibly the reverse. His point, however, is not that evil is somehow more fecund, but that the societal conventions of marriage virtually guarantee that people end up in disfunctional marriages (with divorce illegal, of course). It is society itself, then, that is sterile, and this respectable society would implode if not for the constant breaking of its social code—moral lapses that are ignored or excused in the men and ruthlessly punished in the women.

It is a brilliant metaphor, in a brilliant book briming over with vitality. Certainly the novel is too long and, at times, messy and rambling. But as a portrait of life at this time, it can hardly be surpassed; and as a portrayal of societal hypocrisy, it is definitive.

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Review: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reading this book was an illustration of the dangers of watching the movie first. I could not get Jack Nicholson out of my head, and heard all of the dialogue in his voice. This is, in part, a testament to the quality of the movie, which I think in many ways improved upon the book—both in plot and characterization. And though of course Kesey deserves credit for dreaming this whole thing up, I found his own version to be less compelling.

This is not an insult, however, since the movie is masterful and the book is almost as good. Both McMurphy and Nurse Ratched are iconic characters, and their clash is wonderfully realized. The list of strong secondary characters is too long to go through. As for plot, Kesey has managed to create a perfect parable for the countercultural narrative: that society cruelly forces people into conformity, and rebellious laughter and rule-breaking is the only way to stay sane and human.

All this being said, this is not simply a story about society in general. Now, I must preface these remarks by saying that I generally do not focus on issues of representation in novels. Not that representation is unimportant, but I think that literary merit is independent of social enlightenment. However, I think that the racism and misogyny in this book is so forward and so consistent that it cannot be passed over in silence. Indeed, I think that the issue of gender specifically was so strongly emphasized that it must have been an intentional choice on Kesey’s part, not an incidental attitude of an author from another time.

In short, all of the heroes of this book (aside from the narrator) are white men, and they are oppressed—in a bizarre mirror of real life—by black people and women. The narrator, Chief Bromden, fixates on the orderlies’ blackness, mentioning it at every point. They are the “black boys” with hands “big and black as a swamp” and faces of “slate.” They are rarely referred to by their names and never seen as fully human: just stupid soldiers for the hospital.

But I think that the misogyny runs deeper than the racism and is, indeed, one of the novel’s main themes. Kesey emphasizes it again and again. One of the most famous quotes from the book is: “Man, you lose your laugh you lose your footing.” But what is usually left out is what follows: “A man go around lettin’ a woman whup him down till he can’t laugh any more, and he loses one of the biggest edges he’s got on his side.”

Not to be too Freudian, but Nurse Ratched is the empodiment of the castration complex: a joyless, sexless woman intent on castrating the men. The idea of growing balls and having your balls taken away is repeatedly mentioned. In fact, one of the patients in the “disturbed” ward kills himself by cutting off his own testicles. When Nurse Ratched threatens to have McMurphy lobotomized, he jokes that she wants to cut off his nuts. And so on.

Nurse Ratched’s carefully concealed breasts are also one of the novel’s main metaphors: her attempt to be completely sexless is equivalent with her attempt to control the men and make them weak. McMurphy’s definitive revenge comes when he strips off the nurse’s uniform, exposing her breasts. She thus loses her power because “she could no longer conceal the fact that she was a woman.”

The drama of Billy Bibbit also falls into this pattern, and seems to indicate that, for Kesey, the proper relationship of men and women is for women to sleep with men, and that’s that. Bibbit is momentarily cured by finally getting laid (and the prostitutes are the only women portrayed positively) and is driven to desperation by the idea that his mother—another old, sexless woman—might find out. The entire reason that our hero, McMurphy, is committed in the first place is for statutory rape—a fact seen as heroic, not depraved.

Now, to repeat myself, this misogyny is so constant and so explicit that I do not think it is incidental to the book’s message. As Harding, the most articulate character, says: “We are victims of a matriarchy here, my friend, and the doctor is just as helpless against it as we are.” The whole story, then, becomes a kind of metaphor of the struggle of men to resist the enfeebling force of women: And social conformity itself is seen as primarily the doing of womankind.

I am unsure what to think about this. It is just possible that Kesey intended this as a kind of satire on misogyny, though the text did not read that way to me. In any case, despite this rather glaring theme, I still thought that the book was compelling. Kesey did, indeed, raise awareness for how psychiatric patients are mistreated. And the novel is undoubtedly a classic of the counterculture movement. The movie wisely toned down this prominent misogynistic aspect, which is yet another reason why I think it is superior.

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Review: Fathers and Sons

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

He has no faith in princeeples, only in frogs.

Turgenev has a reputation of being a novelists’ novelist—admired by such fastidious readers as Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad—and now I can see why. Though quite different in temperament, he reminds me of Jane Austen or E.M. Forster in his seamless mastery of technique and his delicate touch. Apart from the epilogue (a 19th century staple), this novel makes do with very little of the cranking plot mechanics used by so many Victorian novelists. Rather, Turgenev weaves naturalistic scenes together in such a way that the plot, though orderly indeed, is tactfully concealed, like a skinny mannequin under a billowing dress.

But what is most impressive about this book is that, amid the sweetly flowing prose and the keen descriptions, Turgenev has inserted one of literature’s great characters: Bazarov, the nihilist (a term he popularized). On the one hand, Bazarov is the quintessential insufferable college graduate, pointing out the flaws in society without suggesting any remedies. On the other hand, unlike most of these brave young souls, Bazarov is actually a man of genius with an oddly compelling worldview. At the very least he has charisma. And history has only made Bazarov more fascinating. He is, by turns, a proto-Bolshevik and a proto-existentialist—calling for revolution amid the absurdity of existence. Turgenev must have been quite the observer to so effectively anticipate the political and intellectual revolutionaries of the coming century.

Turgenev’s winning touch is his ability to make the reader switch sympathies. At times Bazarov is little more than an arrogant lout; yet at other moments he is admirable and almost heroic; and at still others he is pitiable and deeply human. The same goes for every other character. Arcady’s uncle, Paul, is exemplary in this respect: a man of elegance, tact, and civility, who is at times commendable and at times an outrageous buffoon. Few novelists have such an prodigious ability to render complex yet believable personalities. In sum, the very fact that Turgenev wrote a novel about generational conflict that managed to deeply offend both fathers and sons shows the truth of his portrayals. This is a classic in every sense of the word.

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Review: Howards End

Howards End by E.M. Forster

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It is the little things one bungles at. The big, real ones are nothing when they come.

The last time I reviewed a novel by E.M. Forster, I wound up blubbering with praise; and now I find myself in similar circumstances. As with A Passage to India, I find Howards End exemplary in every respect: the themes, characterization, the prose, the pacing, the plot. I ought also to mention Forster’s versatility. Though rarely funny, Forster is capable of romantic lyricism, gritty realism, and flighty philosophy. Most convincing of all is his control. Nothing is overdone or heavy-handed—which requires a mixture of technique and taste. While exploring social problems, one never feels that the novel is being unduly interrupted; while constructing a character into an archetype, one never feels that the individual is lost; and the story, though carefully plotted, rarely feels predictable or contrived.

Yet Forster is not a great novelist for his skill alone. He is great because of his insight. More than any novelist I know, Forster is able to connect the inner with the outer life (which is the theme of this novel, and the source of its most famous quote: “Only connect”). Forster is able to show, in other words, how social and economic circumstances breed characters; and how even intelligent and well-meaning characters fail to escape the bounds of their class and nation. He shows, for example, how the money inherited by Margaret and Helen allows for their mental freedom; how Mr. Wilcox’s life of business molds him into a well-meaning shell; and how, despite his best efforts, Leonard Bast cannot help but be shaped by his poverty.

However, if the novel has a message, it is this: even if the inner life is powerless to change material circumstances, it is ultimately the more important aspect of life. This is because, when a tragedy strikes, and mere business acumen or worldly knowledge will not suffice, it is emotional fortitude that is required. Mr. Wilcox has a sort of false strength—a fragile ego he hides behind, a sort of masculine bluff which is easily shattered. Margaret, by contrast, is able to endure tragedies because of her self-knowledge. She is not afraid of the darker aspects of her mind; thus she can look with equanimity upon herself and others, accepting their flaws while seeing their potential. This is what Forster means by “connect”: connecting “the beast” with “the monk”—that is, admitting one’s desires instead of hiding behind a false screen of decency. Only so can we achieve self-knowledge.

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Lotz in Translation

Saving the world—one long, pretentious blog post at a time.

Tag: novel