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| # | cover | title | author | isbn | isbn13 | asin | num pages | avg rating | num ratings | date pub | date pub (ed.) | rating | my rating | review | notes | recommender | comments | votes | read count | date started | date read |
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date purchased | owned | purchase location | condition | format | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 087795707X
| 9780877957072
| 3.83
| 6
| 1985
| May 01, 1985
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) (In November 2012 CCLaP auctioned off a signed first-edition copy of Sherwood Anderson's Kit Brandon through our eBay account [cclapcenter.com/rarebooks]. Below is the description I wrote for the book's listing.) Sherwood Anderson is better known these days for what he inspired than what he did; like fellow Chicago-connected writer Theodore Dreiser, he came of age as an artist at the end of the Victorian Age but didn't make his name until the decades after, for writing proto-Modernist tales that bridge these two eras just in time to profoundly influence the next generation of Modernists in the '20s and '30s who really cemented the tropes. His most famous is the rough, conceptually experimental story collection Winesburg, Ohio, but he has others that are actually better; take for example 1936's Kit Brandon, a nearly forgotten title now from near the end of his career, when society at large considered him somewhat of a has-been (except for the academic crowd, who never stopped adoring him), but when in hindsight we can now see that he was actually at the peak of his powers. A slippery "oral history" that sounds real but is ultimately fiction, done in the Social Realist style that was so popular at the time, it tells the story of our eponymous hero, a tomboy-beautiful hillbilly girl who at first tries to have a traditional career in the booming new industrial landscape of Appalachia, but who is eventually seduced into the sexy, dangerous world of Prohibition-era bootlegging, eventually becoming a folk legend among locals for the sheer number of times she's able to outwit and out-run the law. As such, then, the main reason to treasure this novel is for the unflinching way it looks at Prohibition itself, informing us of the realities behind both the ban and subsequent rise in moonshine hooch that have now become forgotten in our present nostalgic haze; for as this book makes clear, almost nobody who supported Prohibition back then really thought that the ban would get rid of liquor altogether, but rather that it would simply make it so expensive that the working poor would no longer be able to afford it, thus eliminating the violence and crime among these mostly Irish and German unruly crowds that was the main selling point of Prohibition in the first place. But little did anyone realize just how scarily efficient these working poor would become at first producing mass quantities of cheap grain alcohol in the unwatched back woods of the vast American heartland, then easily shipping it nationwide through a sophisticated corporate-type network that would eventually come to be known as "organized crime;" and that's essentially what this book is, a complex and layered look at all these subjects through the prism of our "Bonnie without Clyde," including the acknowledgement that it was the changing landscape of the Midwest from agricultural to industrial that fueled a lot of this gray-market entrepreneuralism in the first place, and that Prohibition failed essentially because east-coast liberal elites vastly underestimated just how crafty and clever the working poor could actually be when they had to. It's a shame that Anderson never rose to the heights in his own times of such contemporary peers as John Steinbeck and Richard Wright, because his works are more nuanced and have a longer shelf life than most of the Social Realist writers of the period; so let's be grateful that the proper respect has finally been afforded to him in our own times, with this signed first edition being a great addition to any fan's library. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Nov 27, 2012
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Nov 27, 2012
| Paperback
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| 0451525981
| 9780451525987
| 3.83
| 428
| 1929
| Apr 01, 1995
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) (CCLaP's rare-book service [cclapcenter.com/rarebooks] recently auctioned off a first edition, first printing copy of Sinclair Lewis' 1929 Dodsworth. Below is the write-up I did for the book's description.) Poor Sinclair Lewis! Once one of the most celebrated writers on the planet, for an unprecedented string of commercial hits in the 1920s making vicious fun of the bored, corrupt, empty-headed middle class of the American Midwest, all of them turned into bestsellers precisely by the self-hating middle-classers he was making fun of, Lewis' career went quickly sour upon the start of the Great Depression, when these suddenly broke middle-classers found themselves being punished enough by life in general, and no longer needed his finger-wagging to produce the painless punishment that was assuaging their guilt throughout the "Roaring Twenties." But now that we're about to approach the centennial celebrations of these early hits, it's time that a new cultural assessment of Lewis be made, and that he be acknowledged as a sharp futurist who has a lot to say about our own times; because in reality you can strongly argue that he was the Jonathan Franzen of his times, a critically adored author (the first American writer in history to win the Nobel Prize, for example) who nonetheless heavily employed the pop culture and slang of his day in order to create devastating indictments against the consumerism, celebrity worship and herd mentality surrounding him, eaten up in the millions by the very people most guilty of the behavior, because they're able to recognize in these indictments every single person they know besides themselves, the problem that led to the Great Depression just as surely as it did in our own times to the 2008 Economic Meltdown. Dodsworth was the last of these great hits, released just a few months before the stock market crash of 1929, and in a nutshell can be called "Lewis meets Henry James;" centered around Sam Dodsworth, the fifty-something founder of the hugely successful car manufacturer in Zenith* who has just sold the entire thing to a thinly disguised General Motors, now that he's "retired" his forty-something wife convinces him to go on an old-fashioned Grand Tour of Europe, just like rich Americans have been doing since the Victorian Age if they want to consider themselves truly cultured. (And note, by the way, that this would be the last period in history that this would be true, one of the many elements that makes this almost more important now as a historical document than as a piece of popular fiction; after the destruction of Europe and the ascendency of America at the end of World War Two, the global headquarters of culture quickly shifted to the US and specifically New York, and it suddenly became passe among rich Americans to take European grand tours anymore.) The simple plot, then, follows the same structure as so many of Lewis' novels from the '20s; our narrator starts as the living embodiment of whatever Lewis is trying to criticize (in this case, the business-focused, proudly ignorant American, forced on an unending parade of interchangeable cathedral visits and appalled by the lack of modern creature comforts now taken for granted in nearly every large American city), but after being exposed to the good things from that new environment (including, as always, the potential love of an enticingly independent modern woman) he slowly becomes a convert, just to be shunned by his former peers as pressure to "return to the fold." And as mentioned, this is perhaps why collectors are best off thinking of this as an important historical document, rather than to focus on its admittedly only so-so quality as a novel; because given that Sam's payment for Dodsworth Motors would've likely been just a little cash but a whole lot of stock, it's fascinating to realize that in the real world, he would've been bankrupted just a few months after the events of this book take place, and that he suddenly would have a whole lot more to worry about than pompous Brits, brash expats, and how all those dirty artists in the Left Bank were always getting in his way. That's the treasure of this book in general, that it's a snapshot of a moment in history right before an unexpected period of tremendous upheaval, with none of the characters (nor even the author) even remotely aware that such upheaval is about to take place; note for example Sam's ho-hum attitude towards the pre-power Fascists he meets in Europe, or how one of the biggest sources of conflict is whether Sam is going to accept the high-powered VP position of the new conglomerate at home next year, or blow another million on staying at five-star hotels across the Continent for yet another year, a much more historically naked treat than any revisionist "winds of change" novel written after the fact. Lewis' fans in his own lifetime turned on him for this, but it's time that we restore the respect and fame he deserves for being such an astute prognosticator; and with this copy of Dodsworth being auctioned at a deliberately low starting bid to encourage an actual sale, this is a fine choice for a collector who wishes to "beat the odds" before this re-lionization of Lewis takes place next decade. *For those who don't know, Lewis set many of his novels in the fictional Midwestern state of Winnemac, which was supposed to be sorta southish of Michigan and sorta northish of Indiana and Ohio; and Winnemac's version of Detroit or Cleveland or St. Louis was the industrial powerhouse of Zenith, where so many of his stories specifically take place. In fact, in Dodsworth Lewis makes almost a science-fiction author's amount of insider references to his now expansive alt-reality, name-dropping in casual conversations such former characters as George Babbitt and Elmer Gantry. (less) | Notes are private!
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1
| Sep 20, 2012
| Oct 16, 2012
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Sep 20, 2012
| Paperback
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| 0140449337
| 9780140449334
| 4.14
| 12,749
| 174
| Oct 31, 2006
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called literary "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label Essay #67: Meditations (160-180 AD), by Marcus Aurelius The story in a nutshell: Written essentially as a private journal from around 160 to 180 AD, by one of the better leaders in the history of the Roman Empire, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations (a title given to this manuscript almost randomly, in that Marcus never meant for it to be published) can be thought of along the lines of any great military strategist's memoirs, a combination of practical information, an explanation of their larger philosophy about life (Stoicism in Marcus' case), and official acknowledgement of all the mentors of their youth they owe their success to. A working soldier-emperor who was handpicked by the previous Caesar when he was just a child, the upper-class Marcus was subsequently put through the finest education that was humanly possible on the planet at that time, which is what makes his otherwise workaday journal so historically important; for by studying under the finest minds of his age, his surviving notes give us a rare look at what it was like to be a student of these masters, and what kinds of practical knowledge was actually being culled by these students when it came time for them to start their day jobs. Not really "literature" per se, nor even in any kind of coherent order, this should be read much more like one of those punchy advice books from famous corporate CEOs, full of bullet-point Twitter-like messages that can be quickly scanned and absorbed. The argument for it being a classic: As with most books this old, the main argument for this being a classic is its massive historical importance, a hugely informing snapshot of its times that is even more valuable for being private and therefore more candid. Plus, historians generally agree that this is perhaps the third or fourth most important book about Stoicism to survive those years; certainly not groundbreaking in its own right, but definitely an easy-to-follow primer on the subject (think "The Ancient Roman Idiot's Guide To…"), a philosophy which for those who don't know advocates a type of "living as one with nature" that is translated here as meaning a clean and minimalist lifestyle, one that largely avoids empty pleasures for the crippling vices they are. (After all, as Marcus reminds us, the only way your enemies can hurt you is by you yourself deliberately cultivating a weakness they can exploit; if you instead lead a virtuous life devoid of physical addictions and moral compromises, there's no way for these people to attack you for being weak or hypocritical.) And so by doing so, Marcus almost accidentally established a long and proud tradition of Stoicism among the military, the third main argument for why this is a classic, a "body is a temple" mindset that is still the main guiding force behind even such 21st-century military commanders as David Petraeus. The argument against: There seems to be two main arguments for why this should not be considered a classic, starting with the most obvious; that much like many of the books from this period being reviewed for this essay series, its age and outdated writing style simply makes it an awkward choice for everyday reading by a general audience, certainly historically important but with information that can now be found in modern books in a much more nuanced and contemporary way. And then there's the people who are simply in disagreement with the fundamentals of Stoicism itself, a sort of "philosophy for Republicans" that encourages a simplistic, joyless, black-and-white interpretation of the world, and which while not necessarily harsh unto itself is absolutely practiced in a harsh way by its most famous and vocal fans; for example, famed modern moral relativist Bertrand Russell thought that Stoicism was a big pile of hogwash, a "sour grapes" view of the world that argues that none of us will ever be happy, so we should pretend instead that "acting good" is just as important. My verdict: So setting aside the argument that a book should automatically be disqualified from being a classic simply because one doesn't personally agree with its philosophy (an argument I find inherently invalid no matter what the situation), otherwise I have to admit that I mostly side with Marcus' critics today; for while I found it interesting to flip through this light tome, or at least as interesting as one of those aforementioned bullet-point advice books from famous corporate executives, I also got tired of this manuscript rather quickly, and didn't really get much out of reading the original text that I didn't already get merely from its Wikipedia entry. (And also, I have to agree with several of the angry sentiments I found at Goodreads while researching this essay; that even though there are over 200 meditations here, it seems that Marcus really had no more than a dozen or so original thoughts, the rest of these text blasts essentially repeats of the same information over and over again.) In fact, now that I have recently reached the two-thirds point of finally being done with this CCLaP 100 series (four and a half years down! only two years to go!), I find myself once again reflecting on what the biggest surprises have been since starting these essays back in 2008; and certainly one of the most unexpected surprises of all is just how thoroughly and cleanly the entire idea of "literature" (and by this I mean "storytelling via book-length written tale") was single-handedly invented during the rise of Romanticism in the late 1700s, and how before this moment there were largely no book-length written stories at all (with a few exceptions, of course), most storytelling instead taking place via plays and formal poetry. I've always known that when these pre-1700s citizens wanted to "sit down with a good book," it was generally nonfiction they were picking up; but it wasn't until I started reading a fair sampling of this pre-1700s "literature" that I started profoundly realizing how little this work conforms to the modern definition of the word, and that the very concept never even existed until well after the Renaissance. Although it's been a valuable learning experience, it can be safely said that when it eventually comes time in another few years to compile the reading list for the "CCLaP 200," I will most likely be starting with 1719's Robinson Crusoe and exclusively making my way forward in time from there. Is it a classic? No (And don't forget that the first 33 essays in this series are now available in book form!) (less) | Notes are private!
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| not set
| Jul 18, 2012
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Jul 18, 2012
| Paperback
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| 0394756959
| 9780394756950
| 3.93
| 2,578
| 1944
| Mar 12, 1988
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(As of July 2012, I am selling a first-edition copy of this book through the rare-book service at my arts organization, the Chicago Center for Literat...more
(As of July 2012, I am selling a first-edition copy of this book through the rare-book service at my arts organization, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com/rarebooks]. Here below is the description I wrote for its listing.) Written in the middle of World War Two and the winner of the 1945 Pulitzer Prize, this was just one of the many high points of the fascinating John Hersey's life, over the course of a long and eventful career. A missionary brat who learned to speak Chinese before he could speak English, he was eventually a Yale football star and once a private secretary to Sinclair Lewis, experiences which made him almost perfect to be a TIME magazine correspondent in Asia as well as Europe during the war, where among other heroics he survived four plane crashes and was commended by the Navy for evacuating freaking soldiers in Guadalcanal. He was most known in his own lifetime for the groundbreaking, hauntingly poetic reporting he did from the aftermath of Hiroshima, eventually assembled into an entire standalone issue of The New Yorker that officially kicked off both the term and era of "New Journalism," a public sensation (once read out loud by ABC Radio over two hours because the printers literally couldn't keep up with demand) that led directly to the first successes of other storytelling journalists like Truman Capote, Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson a decade later. (Interestingly, New Yorker founder Harold Ross once called the publication of the Hiroshima issue the happiest moment of his professional life, while the event ruined Hersey's relationship with TIME co-founder Henry Luce, who felt that he should've offered it to sister publication Life magazine first*.) But before all that, though, was his first novel, 1944's A Bell for Adano, a thin fictionalization of an actual situation he stumbled across as a war correspondent during America's liberation of Italy. Set in one of the tiny Medieval fishing villages that dot the southern Italian coast, crucial as launching and resupply posts for the inward-bound Americans during the invasion, the book largely follows the fate of one Major Victor Joppolo, back home an Italian-American sanitation-department clerk in the Bronx but here the "temporary mayor" of Adano, essentially the mid-level officer in charge of such medium-term goals as rounding up all the remaining fugitive Fascists, replacing draconian local officials, getting the local judges and police working again, re-establishing infrastructure, food distribution, open commerce, etc. And that's essentially what the story is -- a charmingly slow-paced look at Joppolo's work in this chick-lit-worthy, impossibly magical little Mediterranean town, Hersey's point being to show people back home how the natural "get 'er done" resourcefulness of the average American, combined with the democratic freedoms that so many of us were dying for at that point in the war, repeated over and over in thousands of little situations like this one, was the key to the slow turn in tide that was happening in the war right around this time period. Although certainly "rah-rah U-S-A" in tone throughout, the obvious explanation for its Pulitzer win a year later, popular Broadway adaptation a year after that, and popular Hollywood movie a year after that, the book definitely has its fair share of darkness as well, moral ambiguity over how the town should even start approaching the job of punishing next-door-neighbors for being on the losing side of the war, and plenty of self-critical comments about the lousiness of some Americans over there; see for example the blustery "General Marvin," plainly modeled after real war hero General Patton but here presented as the story's main villain. An amazing start to an amazing career, and a war novel admired by both troops and citizens of the time, its low price here makes it a perfect acquisition for Hersey fans, WW2 buffs, and those compiling a collection of Pulitzer-winning first editions. *Oh, and yet more fascinating trivia about Hersey, a man who's been sadly forgotten by the culture at large and deserves to be re-discovered: he once won the National Jewish Book Award despite not being Jewish; a critical essay on the dullness of grammar school literary samplers directly inspired Dr. Seuss to write The Cat in the Hat; and in the late '60s Hersey became a passionate champion of anti-war protestors, the Black Panthers and other countercultural movements, all while serving as a Yale dean, owner of the school's bulldog mascot, and overseer of the campus's antique letterpress program. Wow!(less) | Notes are private!
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| not set
| Jul 05, 2012
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Jul 05, 2012
| Paperback
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| 1417998180
| 9781417998180
| 3.70
| 10
| Jan 01, 1949
| Apr 01, 2005
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(As of spring 2012, I have a first-edition copy of this book for sale at my arts center's rare-book service [cclapcenter.com/rarebooks], so I thought...more
(As of spring 2012, I have a first-edition copy of this book for sale at my arts center's rare-book service [cclapcenter.com/rarebooks], so I thought I would repost here the description I came up with for it, part review and part historical overview.) Although sadly now nearly forgotten, at one point Arthur Meeker Jr. (1902-1971) was one of the most successful authors Chicago ever produced, a co-founder of the local chapter of PEN who had two national bestsellers in his nine-book career. The son of an Armour executive who was raised among the high society of the Edwardian Age, even after becoming a journalist he remained a fixture among the elite, traveling Europe widely and becoming known for his witty, Ward-McAllisteresque reports. It's no surprise that this second-most popular book of his career would come just a few years after the death of his parents, because in many ways it seems to be an autobiographical roman-a-clef about the years as a child he spent with them: set in stages between the 1880s and World War One, it looks at the comings and goings in Chicago's infamous Prairie Avenue neighborhood where Meeker himself was raised, featuring a main protagonist who also travels Europe widely and eventually becomes a journalist as well. (In fact, the book itself is set at the very specific street address of 1817 S. Prairie Avenue, just across the street from the now historical Clarke and Glessner Houses, although I don't know if this matches up with Meeker's real-life address from those years; if anyone on the internet is coming across this in the future and knows, please drop me a line and let me know too!) Just like the Indianapolis neighborhood featured in Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons, the Prairie Avenue district of Chicago went through a fascinating transition between the Civil War and World War One, the progression of which is the main point of Meeker's own novel. The city's very first neighborhood for old-money blue bloods, and located just two miles south of the downtown Loop, the entire reason it was so important to be that close to downtown in the Victorian Age was precisely because it was so difficult to travel long distances then, making the sprawling estates immediately surrounding central cities extremely valuable, and turning this entire southside neighborhood into a wonderland of moody Gothic mansions, adjoining servant quarters, horse stables and fruit orchards; but as bridges and improved infrastructure started making the city's northside more and more popular in the following decades, and suburban trains drove more and more of the rich out into the wilderness altogether, neighborhoods like Prairie Avenue quickly became discarded slums, with no one left who wanted to buy the crumbling mansions and with more and more of them knocked down to make way for industrial factories and warehouses. Meeker follows both the highs and lows of this progression in his own book, delightfully dropping in literally hundreds of references along the way to long-closed Chicago institutions, famous real families, restaurants, pubs, gentlemen's clubs, local landmarks and a lot, lot more; and he really brings alive the sense of what it must've been like to stroll the sidewalks of this neighborhood in its turn-of-the-century height, a foggy gaslamp-lit amusement park of Victoriana as can only be seen through the wide eyes of an overly eager child, a virtual paen to a way of life that had already disappeared by the time this originally came out in the 1940s, and now of course the stuff only of fanciful dreams and a handful of federally protected landmarks. (For those who don't know, the fight in the 1950s to save the smattering of mansions left in this neighborhood virtually kickstarted the entire national architectural-preservation movement; so in that sense, you can see this popular novel and Book Of The Month Club selection as partly to thank for the US having historically preserved urban landmarks in the first place.) Called a "light and colorful entertainment" by the New York Times upon its original release, this perhaps does not take into consideration the numerous dark corners contained in Prairie Avenue, including frank depictions of suicidal depression, drug addiction and infidelity among our very proper characters, the efforts to hide and corral these problems fueling much of the melodramatic plot; and indeed, it's widely believed that Meeker himself was gay (but see his Wikipedia page for more on that), so it's certainly possible to argue that this novel's various plot machinations were actually a clever pre-Stonewall way for Meeker to explore the entire issue of being The Other, in a society that doesn't tolerate Otherness. An author who deserves to be rediscovered, at least by a grateful local literary community here in Chicago, it's CCLaP's intention to attempt to put together an entire set of first-editions of all of Meeker's books over the years (including his apparently Max Beerbohm-like 1955 memoir Chicago, With Love: A Polite and Personal History), with Prairie Avenue serving as the perfect gift for anyone interested in Chicago history, the Victorian Age in general, or the various developments in urban living that took place here in the early 20th century.(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| not set
| Apr 04, 2012
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Apr 04, 2012
| Paperback
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| 1406935735
| 9781406935738
| 3.72
| 3,405
| 1918
| unknown
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label Essay #65: The Magnificent Ambersons (1918), by Booth Tarkington The story in a nutshell: Originally published in 1918, Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons tells a story familiar to that time, about the vast changes that had happened in America between the Civil War of the 1860s and then, as the nation first turned from an agricultural to an industrial economy and then brought resulting things like public education, indoor plumbing and electricity to the interior "heartland" of the country for the first time. Set in the fictional city of Midland but in reality a thinly veiled version of Tarkington's hometown of Indianapolis, we follow this history by basically following the fate of one super-rich family over the course of these decades -- one of the "founding families" of this city who helped maintain the genteel, agriculture-based aristocracy that used to run such little civilized patches out in the middle of the rural wilds of the Midwest, until the Industrial Revolution replaced them wholesale with an entirely new upper class of brash entrepreneurs, and with their former wealth of desirable land and vast farms quickly made worthless by the invention of cars, highways, public transportation and the very idea of suburbs. As such, then, our particular story concentrates on just one member of this family, poor George Amberson Minafer (carrier of his father's name but heir to his mother's fortune), who ends up getting the short end of the stick from both sides of the historical ruler -- prepared by an overly doting mother for an old-money life as a spoiled blue-blood, blowing off his college years because of feeling like his real adult job will be to look after his family estate (not to "hold" a "job" like some commoner), it's his arrogant, unwavering belief in the unchanging nature of this old system that leads to so many problems when the changes actually occur, with the author cleverly using the rise of the automobile as an ongoing symbol of this change all through the course of this manuscript. (When given a chance to invest in the industry when they're first invented at the beginning of the book, George blows them off as a fad for the bored elite, and declares that nothing will ever beat the financial stability of large estates near the the center of town; while by the end of the book, it's precisely the explosive popularity of these 'horseless carriages' that have made his family's land a virtually worthless slum area of the rapidly growing city, exactly the same thing that happened for example in Chicago's Prairie Avenue neighborhood in those same years.) Throw in an on-and-off relationship with a feisty, independent neighbor, a kowtowed aunt who seems to be the only sane one of the entire family (and hence the one most completely ignored), and wistful descriptions of a slow-moving 19th-century "golden age" for the American Midwest (based on Tarkington's real-life childhood as a member of one of these ruined old aristocratic families), and you're left with a story in turns infuriating and pity-provoking, a simultaneous paen to progress and elegy for what is invariably lost in the process. The argument for it being a classic: Well, for starters, it was the winner of the 1919 Pulitzer Prize, with Tarkington in general one of only three people in history who have won the Pulitzer more than once; plus there's the celebrated 1942 movie version by no less than Orson Welles, the fact that it made the Modern Library's "100 Best Novels of the 20th Century" list, and the fact that this was in the top-ten bestselling novels in the nation every year for an entire decade after first getting published. And that's because, fans claim, this is a blessedly clean and straightforward look at one of the more important periods of American history, essentially a period much like India is going through right this second -- when the US went from basically a big mass of mostly lawless rural villages to a legitimately unified and industrialized nation, with both all the good and all the bad things that come with such a transition, the "Great Change" that basically turned the American Midwest into the modern collection of industrial powerhouses and bland surrounding suburbs that we now know it as today. If you want an entertaining, plain-spoken look at this transition, without all the head-scratching experimentation that bogs down so many of his peers' works from those same years, just turn to what was for a long time one of the most popular novels in this country's history, the very definition of literary classic. The argument against: Critics of The Magnificent Ambersons tend to take the same facts its fans do but then posit the opposite argument; that the reason this hasn't held up very well over the years is precisely because it's missing all the "fancy-schmancy experimentation" that his peers in the 1910s and '20s were including; or put another way, the phenomenon known as Modernism, which would quickly become the singlemost defining trait of the American arts for the entire rest of the 20th century. While not exactly Victorian in nature, critics argue, Tarkington certainly missed the boat when it came to the grand tide of history that the arts were going through during his lifetime; and while his Henry-James-inspired Realist tone was rightly loved by his contemporary audiences, hungry for work that spoke in the same language as them and discussing the hot issues of the day, it's this same tone that made his work fall so flat almost the exact moment his original audience died out, leaving us with what is certainly a fascinating historical document but nothing you could reasonably argue that every single person should one day read before they die, the way that we're defining "classic" in this particular essay series. My verdict: Oh, have you never actually heard of Booth Tarkington before? Yeah, same with me until first putting this CCLaP 100 list together, and including in that list a few completely random and forgotten Pulitzer winners from the past, simply to see for curiosity's sake why they had won the Pulitzer and why they were then forgotten again so quickly. And indeed, this reading experience surprisingly ties in nicely with something making the rounds of the blogosphere just this week, when a professional book collector over at BookRiot.com controversially declared that in a hundred years, no one's going to have even the slightest clue who Jonathan Franzen is; because The Magnificent Ambersons in many ways made me exactly think of a 1920s Jonathan Franzen, and made me realize a lot more what this essayist at BookRiot was trying to say. Because the fact is that the book is really not that bad at all, a quickly paced and not too challenging generational story, that feels more important in the heat of the reading moment than it probably is because of taking on such a grand theme, and using the exact same kind of slang and dialogue style that was popular among real society at that exact moment in history; and these are all great things when it comes to contemporary audiences seeking contemporary works that speak directly to them, and we should rightly celebrate Tarkington for once literally being more popular in this country than Mark Twain, just as we should celebrate Franzen for having no less than the President of the United States quietly ask one day for an illegal early copy of Franzen's newest novel a few years ago, at a random bookstore while on vacation. But if you compare The Magnificent Ambersons to just two other novels in the same years and exploring the same issues, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, it's impossible to deny that Tarkington comes up woefully and profoundly lacking; and that in a nutshell is the danger of declaring a book a "classic" at too early a moment in history, the whole reason we find it important to even make classics lists in the first place, because it's only the process of time and future generations that can tell us what history ultimately finds most important about our own era, and which of the artists of this era were to contain the strange spark that went on to define the entire generation after them. That's what makes it so fascinating right this exact moment in history to be exploring this particular literary time of just about a century ago, because this is the exact last moment in history that many of these books will even be argued as classics by anyone in the first place; and that makes it extremely interesting to read up on such people as Tarkington, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair and more, in that who knows whether anyone will even remember these writers at all in another fifty years from now. Although I definitely recommend reading it, since it's a quick and easy read that nicely illuminates this particular period of history, I can't in good conscience declare The Magnificent Ambersons an undeniable classic, and in fact suspect that in just another couple of generations this debate won't even be taking place at all. Is it a classic? No, but read it anyway (And don't forget that the first 33 essays in this series are now available in book form!)(less) | Notes are private!
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label Essay #64: The Jungle (1906), by Upton Sinclair The story in a nutshell: (Much of today's plot recap was cribbed from Wikipedia, for reasons that will become clearer below.) Originally published in 1906, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle is a sprawling look at the typical immigrant experience in America back then, before most of the laws regarding things like workplace safety, minimum wage and city zoning had been created; following a family of twelve who have recently arrived in Chicago from their troubled home of Lithuania, Sinclair's main point is to show that, unlike the rose-tinted tales of gold-paved streets and self-determination that were the common narrative among capitalists back then, in fact an unregulated free-market system is designed from its very core to exploit the poor and uneducated, that in fact such a system wouldn't even work if it wasn't for the ease in which such people can be manipulated and taken advantage of. And so do we watch in growing horror as our hapless English-challenged hero Jurgis Rudkus first gets swindled out of all his money, then gets evicted from a slum, then faces a living nightmare in his job at the infamous Chicago Stockyards, then has his wife die during childbirth because they can't afford a doctor, then has his son die by literally drowning in mud in the middle of a public street, then becomes a bitter drifter and hobo, before finally having his soul saved by almost accidentally falling in with a group of socialist agitators, the book ending on a bright note as our author stand-in envisions out loud a future world that is fair and equal to all. The argument for it being a classic: There's a simple argument to be made for why The Jungle should be considered a classic, claim its large cadre of passionate fans, which is the massive influence it had on the real world -- namely, people at the time were so horrified by its stomach-churning accounts of the meatpacking industry, the US formed the Food & Drug Administration directly because of it, which over the decades has become one of the most important and powerful government agencies in the entire country. That's an astounding reaction to a simple, small melodrama by a semi-obscure writer, the equivalent perhaps of a random tech-blogger in North Dakota singlehandedly convincing Congress to declare the internet a public utility and ban all private cable companies; and the reason the book managed to accomplish this, they say, is because of being so powerful and heartbreaking, one of the best examples you'll ever find of the then-new "Social Realist" literary style which would go on to inspire pretty much an entire generation of politically motivated authors in the 1920s and '30s. A book that does exactly what it aims to do -- that is, make its readers angry and disgusted at the appalling way blue-collar workers were treated in an age before social-welfare laws -- The Jungle is a prime example of the novel format's ability to do things besides just tell an entertaining tale, an ability that was only being seriously explored in this format for the very first time in these years, yet another reason this groundbreaker should be considered an undeniable classic that every person should read before they die. The argument against: To understand the problem in general with The Jungle, say its critics, simply look at that specific tale its fans tell about it inspiring the formation of the FDA, and how that's not really all of the story when you stop and examine it; how as even Sinclair himself lamented many times in his later years, the whole point of his book was supposed to be to show off the inherent evil of a capitalist middle class and to inspire a violent socialist revolution to overcome them, while the reaction from the actual capitalist middle class was to be horrified at the condition of the food they were putting into their mouths, while continuing to not give a toss about the people who actually worked at these factories, or about any of the other 75 percent of this novel that doesn't have to directly do with the subject of workplace cleanliness. And so while it's admirable that the book had the kind of real-world influence that it did, its critics claim, that's really something more for history class than the world of the arts; and that the novel taken just on its own is actually pretty terrible, an overly serious doom-n-gloomer that never just makes its points when it can instead write those points down on a wooden two-by-four and then beat you in the back of the head repeatedly with it as hard as humanly possible. ("CAPITALISM IS BAD!" WHACK!!! "CAPITALISM IS BAD!" WHACK!!! "CAPITALISM IS BAD!" WHACK!!! And sheesh, the less we talk about the twenty-page literal sermon on socialism that Sinclair uses to end the book, the better.) A writer who these days would be just as unknown as the hundreds of other hacky schlockmeisters churning out "poor lil' immigrant" stories in those same years, if it hadn't been for its accidental success in exposing the meatpacking industry at the exact moment in history when it needed to be, The Jungle is certainly a book to be admired but not necessarily to be read anymore, say its critics, and it's the perpetual assigning of this badly-written book in high-school lit classes that's partly to blame for so many Americans despising literature by the time they're done with school. My verdict: So leaving aside today the question of their actual politics (which to be clear, I'm also not a fan of), I've discovered over the years a big common problem with most of the artistic projects made by radical liberals, an issue that came up yet again while I was reading John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath for this essay series last year; namely, that radical liberals tend to lack even the slightest understanding of subtlety or humor, which makes nearly every artistic project ever made by a radical liberal (from Great Depression novels to Michael Moore documentaries) a joyless, patronizing chore, not enjoyable on its own but something we're usually literally forced to endure, because it's supposedly important and good for us and beneficial to society. (Although to be fair, most artistic projects by radical conservatives suffer from the exact same problems; it's not the left or right I have a particular problem with, but rather those who claim that a political purpose excuses an artistic project from needing to have any artistic merit.) And so it is with The Jungle as well, which I plainly confess is one of the handful of books in this essay series I eventually gave up on long before actually finishing, after first spending an entire month reading it and still not being able to choke down even fifty pages of the dreck. And to make it clear that I'm not the only one who feels this way, let's remember that no less than TIME magazine once called Sinclair "a man with every gift except humor and silence;" because that in a nutshell is what reading The Jungle is like, a ponderous accidental self-parody that is just so unrelenting and overly obvious in portraying the inner sweetness and outer misery of its main characters, you can't help sometimes but to laugh at inappropriate moments at its sheer sense of outrageousness. Like I said, there used to be literally thousands of such writers, and hundreds of them once nationally famous, back when the entire "Social Realism" movement reached its height in the 1910s through '30s, and now with all but a handful of them completely forgotten by society and history at large; and that's for the same reason that only a handful of poetry slammers from the 1990s and early 2000s will be remembered a hundred years from now, the same reason that we humans compile these kinds of "classics" lists in the first place, because ultimately what entertains a crowd of contemporaries in the heat of the original moment is far from the same thing that makes a piece of writing stay relevant for years and decades afterwards. The simple fact is that The Jungle is not even an ounce better than any of those other hundreds of forgotten melodramas that were cranked out in those same years, and that it really is only remembered at all anymore because of the effect it had on the real topic of workplace hygiene; and I agree with its critics that this isn't nearly enough of a reason to consider a book a timeless classic, which is why I firmly come down in the negative on the subject today. Definitely check it out if it sounds up your alley, but feel more than free to skip if you don't and still consider yourself a decent human being. Is it a classic? No (And don't forget that the first 33 essays in this series are now available in book form!) (less) | Notes are private!
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The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label Essay #66...more The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label Essay #66: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), by Robert A. Heinlein The story in a nutshell: Conceptualized in the early 1950s, but not written and published until 1961 (supposedly so that "society could catch up with it," according to the author), Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land is a classic example of a science-fiction (or SF) novel acting as a premonition to its real-world times, only moderately successful when it first came out but eventually a must-read touchstone among the hippies of the Countercultural Revolution a decade later. It starts with the first-ever manned mission to Mars, which because of its length was crewed only by couples, which ended tragically with the unexplained deaths of all on board; but when a second team finally arrives twenty years later, they discover that one of these couples had secretly had a baby, one Valentine Michael Smith, and that the lone survivor was raised by the insanely unhumanlike native Martians as one of their own, guaranteeing his re-introduction to the human race being as awkward as Tarzan being returned to Greystoke Manor. And in fact, surprisingly the entire first half of this long novel is dedicated merely to the complicated legal questions that have arisen by Smith's appearance, including what powers he exactly has to grant property and mining rights to individual nations or even to commercial interests, cleverly reflecting the real debates that were going on at the time over these same questions in regards to the Soviet/US race to the Moon. And so this is how the gentle, confused man-child eventually becomes friends first with the feisty nurse Gillian Boardman at the hospital where he's being kept; then her sometimes lover, brash journalist Ben Caxton; and then Caxton's friend and one of the most memorable characters in all of modern American literature -- lawyer, doctor, curmudgeon, millionaire hack author, angry libertarian, proud sexist, sculpture collector, Poconos-mansion-owning octogenarian Jubal Harshaw*, who eventually invites the whole party to an extended stay at his secluded Austin-Powersesque compound (including a household staff straight out of a James Bond parody -- three beautiful women who also happen to be experts at office management, cooking, engine repair, high diving and more). And indeed, there's a good reason that it turns out to be such a complex battle to get Smith away from the draconian "protection" of the US government; because hey, it turns out that such "psychic abilities" as mind-reading and telekinesis are actually ho-hum scientific principles, as easily accomplished when you know what you're doing as solving a hard math problem is, just that no human had been smart enough to "crack the code" until Smith was basically raised from birth with the knowledge by the evolutionally superior Martians, skills that the US Army are awfully anxious to learn themselves. It's when the action switches to this compound, then, that the much more famous second half begins; because with Smith being the curious, inquisitive soul that he is, of course the first thing he wants to do once gaining his "freedom" is to tramp across the country vagabond-style, exploring as much as he can about human life and sampling a wide variety of traditional and mystical religions, trying to find something that can adequately explain the curiously hippie-like belief system the Martians adhere to, and especially the all-important concept in their culture of "grokking" (not quite the simple act of understanding something, not quite religious revelation, not quite a profound connection between two living creatures, but a sort of combo of them all, impossible to fully understand unless you can actually speak Martian yourself). And indeed, this is exactly what Smith ends up doing, is creating his own religion (the Church of All Worlds) dedicated to teaching humans to speak Martian so that they can fully grok this new, enlightened way of living, which apparently also includes a nudist lifestyle and lots and lots of hot group sex…or, er, communal free love, I mean. (Man, those Martians are some real swingers.) Needless to say, this doesn't sit well with most of the other religions of the world, including the suspiciously Scientologist-like "Fosterites" who Heinlein also explores in depth in the book's second half, leading to an easily anticipated martyr-like death for our perpetually misunderstood hero; but not before Smith has a chance to let his followers know that what he's really done is kickstart the next step of human evolution, and that those who refuse to learn the new ways will eventually become as obsolete and then extinct as the Neanderthals are to us. The argument for it being a classic: Well, for starters, it won the prestigious Hugo Award the year it came out, with Heinlein himself the very first winner of the Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America (in fact, when people refer to the "Big Three" SF authors of the 1960s, Heinlein is one of them, along with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke); plus the Heinlein estate claims with some authority that this is the biggest selling SF novel of all time, with it certainly undeniable how much of an influence it's had on the culture since, including the introduction into the general lexicon not only of "grokking" but the phrase "Thou art God"**. And that's because, fans claim, Stranger in a Strange Land is a perfect example of genre fiction as metaphor, of a fantastical story that actually helps guide us in our everyday lives; that its perfect combination of humor, drama, action and philosophy preaches important lessons about self-determination, loving your neighbor (in all sorts of ways), and the facile nature of so many traditional religions, to say nothing of fringe cults that prey on the weak-minded. A landmark publication in the history of Libertarianism (and with Heinlein in general the originator of the "Libertarians in SPAAAAAACE!" trope now so common in science-fiction), fans say that its lessons of thinking for yourself and rejecting bureaucratic BS couldn't be more timely, the rare book that can be positively cited by both the Tea Party and the Occupy movement; the fact that it almost single-handedly pushed the entire SF industry into mainstream respectability is mere icing on the cake, simply an external sign of just how important this novel is. The argument against: Ahem. "Oh, are you freaking kidding me, you stupid grokking hippie trash?" That's an attitude you heard from a lot of people in the years after this book first came out; and while the vitriol has calmed down some in the 51 years since, it still remains the most effective argument against it, that this silly ode to long-hair orgies and Stickin' It To The Man isn't nearly as well-written or as important as its fans claim, and that it mostly has the reputation it does merely because Heinlein was damned lucky to have put it out right at the exact moment in history when mainstream society was most clamoring for a story like this (an accusation we've heard before in this essay series, don't forget, when we were discussing Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer). And this didn't get any better at all, they claim, even after Heinlein's widow in 1991 managed to get over 60,000 words from the original manuscript put back into the official bookstore version, after originally being cut in the early '60s for being "too scandalous;" because almost all of this cut material happens to be from the novel's infuriatingly repetitive and digressive second half, with literally hundreds of pages in the modern edition now dedicated to dated, rambling explanations of this group's adherence to free love, public nudity, water-based sharing rituals, and the importance of being "one with the universe" (that is, when you're not violently raging against the commies, capitalists, and other SOBs who are trying to steal away all your personal liberties -- oops, sorry, Heinlein apologists, did I just poke a hole in your precious little peacenik logic? Sorry about that!). And besides, say his critics, Heinlein was a cantankerous sexist and military booster who may or may not have been a fan of certain ideas commonly associated with fascism (but see Starship Troopers for a lot more on that), so you're officially forgiven for not buying into his luvey-duvey New Age charlatanism. My verdict: So for those who aren't familiar already with the fine points of SF history, perhaps it's best to start with the following to understand my thoughts today about Stranger in a Strange Land -- that between the early days of this genre, when it was considered good for not much more than empty kiddie crap, and our own post-Star Wars age when we just take it for granted that a genre project can have millions of fans and generate billions of dollars, there was a perfect storm in the 1950s and '60s (aka "Mid-Century Modernism") when an obsession with rationality and philosophy, a weariness over dogma-fueled wars, the explosive birth of the Electronic Age, and the sudden maturing of American literature all came together in a glorious mess in the world of science-fiction, a "coming of age" moment in which the genre was suddenly the single hottest thing in the entirety of the arts; and Heinlein had a huge role in helping to make this happen, demonstrably the very first genre author in history to get published regularly in conservative, mainstream, middle-class publications like The Saturday Evening Post, and also one of the first people in history to write SF stories where the fantastical science was simply a given, the stories themselves exploring the more underlying human-interest subjects that would naturally come with such innovations (now known as "social science fiction," and again not reaching its true apex until the Countercultural Era a decade later). So for Heinlein to put something as shocking and subversive as this out in the Kennedy years, after having a following of millions for his generally suburban-safe post-WW2 "juvenilia," was very much like the Beatles putting out "Sgt. Pepper" a mere three years later; a game-changer, in other words, not just a new project but a literal gauntlet that forced other writers to catch up, a line in the sand that served as an easy litmus test in those years to determine whether someone could "dig it" or not. And indeed, reading it for the first time a half-century later, this is still a very funny, thought-provoking and above all highly entertaining novel, full of intelligence and wit and great surprises; and sure, its critics have a point, that the second half does get bogged down occasionally with Heinlein's love for pontification (plus overly detailed descriptions of hippie orgies), but in an era that gave us Walden Two and Atlas Shrugged, it's important that we be more forgiving of this than we would with a contemporary novel, and understand that overblown philosophical treaties disguised as genre actioners are actually one of the most charming things about Mid-Century Modernist literature in general. Granted, this book inspired a lot of awfulness after the fact, not least of which is the entire trope of "Brilliantly Advanced Space Alien Who Acts Like Sweet Guileless Mentally Challenged Man Child Merely Because He Doesn't Yet Understand The Dirty Ways Of Our Flawed World" (see E.T., Starman, K-PAX, The Man Who Fell to Earth, ad nauseum); but in general, this is exactly as groundbreaking and still inspirational as its fans claim, and I have no hesitation today in declaring it a literary classic that everyone should read at least once before they die, a title that I'm convinced is just going to become more and more important as the years continue. It comes strongly recommended to one and all, as long as you approach it with a little patience and forgiveness, just as you should with all Mid-Century Modernist genre novels. Is it a classic? Yes (And don't forget that the first 33 essays in this series are now available in book form!) *And hey, yeah, just how autobiographical is good ol' Jubal? He sure looks and talks like Heinlein, after all; and in fact many have argued that the main character in this novel is not Smith but rather Harshaw himself, and that the entire Martian premise is just a thinly veiled excuse for Heinlein to essentially rant for several hundred pages on the subjects of women's lib, artists who receive state money, out-of-control central governments, and how much he hates each and every one of them. But on the other hand, genre editor and Heinlein friend David G. Hartwell has said before that Harshaw was based on mystery author and "Perry Mason" creator Erle Stanley Gardner, who like Jubal was a prickly former lawyer who got filthy rich off an endless series of hacky pulp novels. **And speaking of its impact on the real world, here's an amazing piece of trivia I came across that didn't fit well into the main essay: that a year after the book first came out, a man who now goes by Oberon Zell-Ravenheart started a very real church modeled after Smith's fictional one, which like the novel adhered to a strict policy of hedonism and Do What You Want. And they're still in operation! (less) | Notes are private!
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) Regular readers will remember that I'm in the middle of a long-term literary project right now, to read all eleven novels making up Philip Roth's autobiographical "Zuckerman cycle" in order to better understand the Postmodernist Era they discuss, from its start (right around Kennedy's assassination) to its end (9/11); but since so many of at least the early novels in the series concern themselves so directly with Roth's first big mainstream hit, 1969's filthy and funny Portnoy's Complaint, I thought it would be instructive to read that as well, to better understand the way that Roth's life changed because of it. For those who don't know, after an early start as a traditional, academic-style Late Modernist writer who was getting published in The New Yorker in the early '60s, this hilarious look at the sexual dysfunctions inherent in the New York Jewish lifestyle, and its inherent clashes against the prevailing "let it all hang out" countercultural mood, was exactly what mainstream America needed at the exact moment they needed it, just like Woody Allen was providing in cinemas at the same time; and so not only was it a hit with the usual intellectual crowd, but it broke through to become a massive general hit, an eventual Hollywood film, and even a tittering codeword among the culture at large, right at the same time that his fellow young New Yorker author John Updike was doing the same thing with his saucy novel Couples (the very first mainstream book to discuss the topic of suburban wife-swapping, after obscenity laws in the US getting relaxed just a few years earlier). And to be fair, this is still a dirty, dirty book, with it easy to understand why merely carrying a copy around back then was enough to signal to anyone else that you could "dig it," which much like Woody Allen takes the image of the nebbish, self-deprecatory Jewish city boy and almost accidentally turns it into a new type of nerdy sex symbol, as we follow poor Portnoy's adventures as first an onanistic teen and then a goy-obsessed young man, flailing about in the high-minded hippie atmosphere around him but still managing to have crazy sex on a regular basis anyway. And it's easy to see why so many older Jews got so upset by this book too; because not only does it lay out a lot of the quiet little dysfunctional moments of the Jewish community to a large Christian audience, a direct predecessor to Seinfeld that I've discussed in more depth in my Zuckerman write-ups, but indeed a lot of its humor derives explicitly from all the neurotic hangups that were created among Roth's generation by all their uptight, obsessed-with-appearances, Holocaust-surviving parents, making it not just a funny sex comedy but an astute look at the first generation of Jews to grow up after World War Two, and the clashes that occurred when they first came of age in the countercultural '60s, which I'm sure made it even more of a must-read among the young hipsters of the time. A great, moving, blush-inducing novel that still holds up really well to this day, read it to understand what was getting your parents all squirmy in the years that they were having you. (less) | Notes are private!
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label Essay #62: A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), by Daniel Defoe The story in a nutshell: Although not actually written until sixty years later (but more on that in a bit), Daniel Defoe's 1722 A Journal of the Plague Year is pretty much what it sounds like -- a purportedly true account of London's Great Plague of 1665, the last outbreak of the bubonic plague the city would ever see, supposedly written by an average middle-classer who decided to wait things out instead of fleeing to the countryside like so many others. As such, then, the book doesn't really have a three-act plot per se, but is more a rambling collection of observations, anecdotes, and actual hard data -- from an examination of the religious fervor that overtook the city during the worst months, to a detailed look at how home quarantines actually worked, to second-hand accounts of the equal amount of trouble awaiting poor peasants who tried living illegally in the rural wilds of England that year, to horror stories of people literally bursting into goo in the middle of public streets, or of cemetery workers who would literally die while on their way to mass graves with a cart full of corpses, leaving the city full of wandering teams of horses dragging dead bodies randomly to and fro. Although almost 300 years old by now, be warned that this is still not for the faint of heart! The argument for it being a classic: The case for this being a classic is a pretty simple one -- it is arguably the very first "historical novel" in human history, and in fact it was the centuries of passionate debate about whether this should be considered fact or fiction that even led to the term in the first place, and to this genre eventually becoming as popular as it now is. (For example, although not proven, it's widely believed that our narrator "H.F." is based on Defoe's relative Henry Foe, who actually was a young adult craftsman in London during the '65 plague, and who may or may not have left a detailed journal where Defoe culled many of these stories; and for another example, Defoe even went to the trouble of including slang terms and intentional misspellings from the 1660s that had fallen out of favor by the 1720s.) On top of this, though, say its fans, the book's simply one freaky nightmare of a read, a surprisingly plain-spoken and readable book (befitting the Enlightenment times when it was actually written) that has had an enormous impact on not only historical novels but the horror genre and post-apocalyptic fiction, and that has directly influenced everyone from Albert Camus to Cormac McCarthy to even Monty Python and the Holy Grail. (That movie's famous line "Bring out yer dead!" was lifted directly from this book.) The argument against: There seems to be two main arguments against The Plague Year being a classic, although admittedly both of them weak ones: first, that as a mere prototype of a genre that didn't acquire its main tropes until a century later, the book's digressive nature and outdated language is hard to read and follow; and second, that although this book may be good enough on its own, it's Defoe's much more famous and important Robinson Crusoe that should actually be considered the indisputable classic, in that that's the book widely considered to be the very first three-act novel in the history of the English language. My verdict: As I've said in this essay series before, I think to truly enjoy books that are this old, it's important to understand the context in which they were written, and to know what kinds of things were influencing both the author himself and the original audience he was writing for; and so in the case of The Plague Year, understanding this context makes the book much more fascinating than simply its writing quality may make it seem, and is crucial for understanding why I found this such a surprisingly fantastic read. Because, you see, Defoe was not only one of the first novelists in British history (a format he came to know and love during his travels in southern Europe as a businessman in the late 1600s), but he chose to use this format specifically to comment on the hottest, trendiest issues of the day, making him essentially the Michael Crichton of the Enlightenment; and it just so happens that just a year before this was written, the French city of Marseilles went through a major new outbreak of the bubonic plague, which inspired the British public and its newfound "journalism" industry to obsessively look back at their own plague of 56 years previous, and to examine all the ways that their society had profoundly changed since then. Now combine this with the Great London Fire just one year after this 1665 plague, a one-two knockout to the city that left it largely empty of people and burned to the ground, and was the very thing that transformed it in those years into the post-Medieval modern infrastructure we now know; when you take all these things into consideration, then, The Plague Year suddenly becomes not just a horror story and important precedent in the development of historical fiction, but indeed serves as no less than a grand epic look at the transformation of Britain in this 60-year period, from the last vestiges of the Middle Ages to the "Age of Science" of Defoe's own times. I mean, certainly a lot more of this book suddenly starts making a lot more sense when you assume that this was Defoe's actual goal; he goes on and on in it, for example, about the shamefully superstitious way that 1600s Londoners actually reacted to this plague (a common criticism among Enlightenment citizens about the generation before them), and also takes the trouble to point out all the faulty ways that people medically tried to deal with this plague, outdated hokum that had been disproven by the "modern" doctors of Defoe's own time, and one of the many sneakily brilliant things that Defoe gets away with by writing this in reality half a century after the events that it describes. I mean, don't get me wrong, the book just by itself is pretty great on its own; it's unusually easy to read compared to books written in the same time period, and really does have a kind of slasher-flick mentality that makes it still so engaging even three centuries later. But I have to admit, what makes it truly delightful is to imagine yourself as an average Enlightenment intellectual in the early 1700s yourself, to picture the ways that science and reason and philosophy were utterly transforming society at the time, literally wresting power away from the mysticism, fear and superstition that had mostly driven British life up to that point (because let's never forget, it actually took several additional centuries for the principles of the Renaissance to truly catch on in Britain, after it first became popular in southern Europe in the late 1400s); and then to imagine reading The Plague Year within such a context, the point not really to talk about plagues at all but rather to examine all the ways that British society had changed in the 60 years since, and to thank God that modern biological science was rapidly bringing an end to such plagues in the first place. When read in this spirit, it makes The Plague Year one of the most surprisingly great books in the entirety of this essay series so far, and it comes strongly recommended to those who can maintain this attitude themselves. Is it a classic? Yes (And don't forget that the first 33 essays in this series are now available in book form!)(less) | Notes are private!
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) It's said by some that Chicago might have the most vibrant literary community in the entire United States right now; and if that's indeed true, it'd be due in part to the remarkably popular "One Book One Chicago" (OBOC) program run by the Chicago Public Library (CPL), one of the many things that makes it such a treat to be a book lover in this city. Inspired by similar experiments in smaller towns, the CPL essentially twice a year picks an interesting book, stocks up on a thousand percent more copies than usual (done many times via a promotional tie-in with a particular publisher), then tries to convince as many people in the city as possible to all read the book in the same thirty-day period, through things like an informative study guide, a series of events around the city, discussion groups in every single of the 150 branches of the CPL system, encouraging local bookstores to put the book on sale and do their own front-room displays, and many times even getting the author to actually come to the city and appear in a number of events as well, if they're still alive. And I have to say, there's something almost unbelievable and magical about stepping onto a random el one day with one of these OBOC books, and to spy ten or fifteen other strangers just on that car alone who are all reading it too, which is one of the things that the various artistic government agencies here are so good at, adding a little magic to everyone's lives. This fall's pick is Saul Bellow's 1953 rough-and-tumble masterpiece The Adventures of Augie March, one of the first great novels about Chicago ever written; and that's especially appropriate here, in that this fall just happens to be the tenth anniversary of the OBOC program as well, and the CPL is putting a kind of energy into this particular cycle that they often don't with others. And in fact, this pick is a great example of another big benefit that comes from the OBOC program, which is simply learning more about books that were once important but have started becoming obscure; because as someone with no academic background in literature myself (instead, I studied photography), I have to admit that Bellow was one of the many important writers in history I knew almost nothing about before opening CCLaP, and in fact it seems that he's rapidly falling off the cultural radar just in general these days as well. And that's a shame, because as I've discovered in the last year (not only from reading this novel but also Humboldt's Gift for the CCLaP 100), Bellow was profoundly more important to the 20th-century arts than a lot of us realize anymore, a smart and funny blue-collar intellectual who not only helped define Late Modernism and Postmodernism, but was literally one of the first Jewish authors in history to gain a global following, paving the way for the post-Holocaust "mainstreaming" of Judaism, leading eventually to Mel Brooks and then Philip Roth and then Jerry Seinfeld. And the irony, of course, is that this "most American" of American writers is an immigrant twice removed; a first-generation Ukrainian whose upper-middle-class family was forced to flee in the early 1900s, he grew up in Canada under a mother who was never able to let go of how much they had lost from their forced relocation, a scrounging day laborer who was ironically raised with a fine appreciation for classic literature and philosophical thought. It was only after moving to America, though, going to college, being drafted into World War Two, then holding a series of odd jobs all over the various neighborhoods of Chicago that it first hit Bellow to try combining these high- and low-brow elements of his life into complex works of fiction; and after a couple of overly serious, not very popular novels in the late 1940s, it was Augie at the dawn of Late Modernism that established the sort of meandering tone and almost absurdist humor that was to mark the rest of his extremely long and productive career. (Bellow lived until his nineties, dying just a few years ago, was still publishing award-winning new fiction into his eighties, won both the Nobel and the Pulitzer at various points in his life, is the only person in history to win the National Book Award three times, and is also the only person in history to be nominated for it six.) And indeed, when I first sat down a few weeks ago to read Augie myself, I quickly found myself just really entranced and addicted to the loose, anecdotal, causally connected style that Bellow establishes right away, a book that's just as famous as everything else for being one of the first great odes to the American immigrant experience, not a wish-fulfillment morality tale about assimilation and becoming a good little docile citizen (like virtually all stories about immigrants had been before then), but rather a loud, messy celebration of the chaos and shady dealings that marked most immigrants' real experiences, a full-armed embrace of the idea that a man literally defines himself in the US using any criteria he wants, versus the pre-ordained class and caste and serf systems that still existed in so many other parts of the world at the time. And that's really the main thing to know about Augie before reading it, that it doesn't really follow a traditional three-act structure at all, a Modernist academic experiment that made its explosive commercial success such a huge surprise to nearly everyone involved; instead, it's written as if Augie were simply sitting at an older age and reminiscing about his youth, moving organically from story to story and with there being no big beginning, middle and end to his tale. Instead, Augie lives a life of random starts and stops that is much like ours, albeit much more bizarre and exciting than most of ours will ever be, an autobiographical element that was the singlemost biggest reason for its initial bestseller status; tackling the same mesmerizing 1930s Great Depression events as were being looked at by actual 1930s Social Realist authors like Richard Wright and Nelson Algren (two of Bellow's co-workers at the Chicago WPA office during the New Deal years), but in his case written twenty years later when a more even-handed look could be taken, Augie is full of such derring-do as riding the rails hobo-style, getting involved with bootleggers and gangsters, sneaking around high society under false pretenses and more, but with a kind of rascal/scamp humor that the dour, politically motivated Social Realists of the '30s were never able to bring to their work*, a textbook example of the "picaresque" novel that both exposes the kinds of injustices and hard-scrabble lives that so many Americans were living back then, but also kind of gleefully celebrates this life too, arguing that it at least made them as young men feel really alive, really in charge of their own destinies. But of course, as mentioned before, don't underestimate how profoundly important this work has been to the development of 20th-century Jewish-American culture as well, and specifically how the sometimes exotic ins-and-outs of daily Yiddish life have been acknowledged and dealt with by the vastly larger Christian population around these people since the end of World War Two. As regular readers know, this is an endlessly interesting subject to me, that I've dealt with in much more detail in my essays on Philip Roth's "Zuckerman" series that I'm in the middle of reading; how important it is to remember, for example, just how anti-Semitic the US in general was before the rise of Nazism (as was the rest of the world), and how it was the shocking events of the Holocaust that first started changing millions of Americans' attitudes towards Jews for the first time, an easing of discrimination that many weary post-war Jews wanted to encourage by never reminding Christian-Americans of their Jewishness ever again, making it a scandal when someone like Bellow delved so matter-of-factly into it in a national bestseller like Augie, not just acknowledging the strange-sounding Yiddish parts of his culture but also daring to admit that the Jewish community sometimes sees dysfunction, dark humor over its own foibles, and yes, sometimes even voluntary reinforcements of lazy Jewish stereotypes. A lot of assimilation-oriented, Holocaust-surviving Jews did not like Bellow at all for doing this; but for people like Roth, Brooks, Woody Allen and Neil Simon, who were all in their teens and twenties when Augie first came out, it showed them that it was possible to address the details of their Jewish lives with candor, humor and self-deprecation, that it was even possible to win over Gentile audiences with such work, without the usual Shylockian "they're laughing AT you, not WITH you" worries of pre-war Jews. And thus did a novel like Augie in the '50s begat something like Roth's Portnoy's Complaint in the '60s, which begat Annie Hall in the '70s, which all eventually led to a sitcom in the '90s about seder and Hanukkah and the Catskills and rye loaves becoming one of the most beloved artistic projects in American history. The Adventures of Augie March is all of these things and more -- for example, also a meditation on extended families, additions and losses to such families, truth, beauty, and all kinds of other deep subjects -- and it's a shame that Bellow's reputation is starting to wane a bit among the general population, because after reading him it's easy to see why so many people count him as one of the top three influential writers of the entire 20th century. And like I said, the CPL's embrace and promotion of Bellow is just one of the things that makes it so great to be both a writer an a heavy reader in Chicago in the 2000s, and why I'd be willing to compare this city's literary community against almost any other in the world and bet that ours will at least match it if not come out on top. I'll be attending many of the related events going on this month for this book's promotion, and writing up little field reports for the blog; but for now, I strongly encourage you to pick up a copy of this remarkable novel and give it a read yourself, and of course I congratulate the Chicago Public Library for ten fantastic years of bringing the city's book lovers together in the unique, powerful way they have. *And in fact, I think it no coincidence that, of the dozens of radically left, communism-friendly Chicago writers being published in the 1930s, the only three we've still heard of (Wright, Algren and Bellow) were all deemed more Trotskyist than Stalinist, all balked at the Stalinist idea that art should always serve a serious political purpose, and all eventually quit these communist-friendly groups in disgust long before the Red Scare of the 1950s. I think it no coincidence at all that out of all those writers back then, these are the only three still worth reading. (less) | Notes are private!
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[Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (cclapcenter.com). I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
[Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (cclapcenter.com). I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.] The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label Essay #68: Middlemarch (1874), by George Eliot The story in a nutshell: Written in the middle of the long reign of Queen Victoria but set at its beginning, Middlemarch by "George Eliot" (the masculine pen name taken by Marian Evans so that she'd be taken more seriously as a writer), published serially in 1872 and then as a single volume in 1874, is a sweeping and multifaceted look at a fictional town in roughly the center of England; so as such, it can be thought of in very similar terms to such modern historical television dramas as Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey, an uber-story that tracks half a dozen interlocking small plots taking place among literally dozens of related characters. Chief among them is that of haughty wannabe intellectual Dorothea Brooke, who glibly blows right over a seemingly perfect romantic match with neighbor James Chettam to instead marry a doddering, antisocial professor named Edward Casaubon, because of believing that his perpetual work-in-progress The Key to All Mythologies must be brilliant (why else would it be taking him so long, after all?), and that it's important for her to marry a brilliant scholar so that she can actually learn from them; but then we also have the running story of young medical reformer Tertius Lydgate, his financial patron Mr. Bulstrode with a secret past, and the bad marriage he enters with Bulstrode's niece Rosamond Vincy; and let's not forget the adventures of Rosamond's brother Fred, headed against his will into a career in the church, under financial pressure from bad investments and in hot water with his childhood sweetheart Mary Garth; and then there are the efforts of Dorothea's father to enter Parliament as a radical liberal, the sudden appearance of a shady figure from Bulstrode's past, and all kinds of other digressions both large and small, the whole thing ending in good Victorian "and then here's what happened to all of them thirty years later" style. The argument for it being a classic: Middlemarch, its fans argue, mostly should be considered a classic because of the enormous effect it had on the shaping and maturation of the novel format itself; for while up to her time, novels had been seen as not much more than vehicles of escapist fluff for bored housewives and overactive kids, Eliot was one of the people in these years (along with Henry James, Leo Tolstoy, Emile Zola and more) to start bringing a grown-up sensibility to the medium, and to use the full-length three-act format to talk in a subtle and nuanced way about character, the human condition, and the latest political developments of the day. As such, then, it paved the way for the full academic bloom of literature in the Early Modernist period, and the development of all our current literary awards and university MFA programs; without writers like Eliot and books like Middlemarch, its fans claim, novels to this day might still be seen with the kind of juvenile disdain that we currently look at first-person-shooter videogames. The argument against: Ironically, the main argument this book's critics make is essentially the one its fans make, that Middlemarch was one of the first popular novels to introduce an academic sensibility to the format; but far from this being a good thing, they claim, it was instead a blow to what had been up to then an always fun and lively artistic medium, basically the first time in the novel's history that large amounts of people started having to say to themselves, "When is this punishment finally going to freaking end?!" And indeed, as much as this novel is loved (and believe me, it's much loved), there's still a large smattering of people at Goodreads.com who find this book an unreadable chore, and find it indicative of what's now an entire unfortunate wing of literature; and that's "MFA literature," not to put too fine a point on it, the kind of banal yet convoluted messes that seem to be so inexplicably popular among the NPR crowd. Fine for what it is, these critics argue, that's still not enough to call it an undisputed classic that everyone should read before they die, making Middlemarch important historically but not a part of the official canon. My verdict: As I've come to realize while doing this essay series, even during the Victorian Age there were actually a whole series of different kinds of book lovers, and that writers of the period can be generally categorized like they are today based on what kinds of crowds they appeal to; so if you want to compare it to our modern era, you might think of someone like Charles Dickens as the Victorian Stephen King (massively popular among the mainstream, and with only a grudging respect among a few academic intellectuals), while someone like Mark Twain is more like Michael Chabon or John Irving (equally popular among the mainstream and academes), while Eliot here might be thought of more like John Updike, certainly with her mainstream fans but by and large only loved by college-educated fans of philosophy and political subtlety. And so while that absolutely makes Middlemarch the classic that its fans claim it is, a historically important and well-loved title that really did have a profound impact on the entire future of the arts, I have to confess that I myself was personally not much of a fan of it; and in fact, if you look at the various writers over the decades who have declared Middlemarch one of the most important English-language novels in history -- including Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes -- I tend not to be much of a fan of any of these other writers either, all of them belonging to a wing of the arts that is absolutely a valid and important one, but just not my particular cup of tea. Definitely a title to pick up if you are one of these people, and certainly a undeniable classic that's worth trying out if you're curious about it, it can also be fairly safely skipped by those who feel like it wouldn't appeal to them. If you're feeling that way before even picking it up, chances are most likely that you're right. Is it a classic? Yes, but you might want to skip it anyway (And don't forget that the first 33 essays in this series are now available in book form!) (less) | Notes are private!
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether they deserve the label Essay #57: The Brothers Karamazov (1880), by Fyodor Dostoyevsky The story in a nutshell: Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1880 The Brothers Karamazov (first published serially in the two years previous) is what's known as a "philosophical novel," using a stripped-down and highly symbolic storyline to instead mainly pontificate on a whole variety of weighty subjects in our lives, like God and Death and Love and whatnot. In this case, it's a look at a miserable SOB named Fyodor Karamazov, and the three grown sons who each dislike him in varying degrees -- Dmitri, a fellow sensualist (i.e., like his father, he enjoys abusing the proverbial wine, women and song), who starts the novel literally trying to wrest his inheritance away early; Ivan, a bitter rationalist and nihilist, like so much of Russia's intelligentsia was in those years; and angelic monk Alyosha, meant to represent the radically liberal Christian theology that Dostoyevsky so passionately believed in by this point in his life. (And these are only the three sons he will admit to in public; there's also the sullen houseboy Pavel, who may or may not be Fyodor's illegitimate son by way of local crazy woman "Stinking Lizaveta.") As such, then, the actual plot of the book reads many times like a mere skeleton, presenting just enough twists to drive the story forward between long (and I mean long) discourses on philosophy -- Fyodor and Dmitri fall in love with the same woman, for example (who deliberately strings them both along literally for no other reason than to be petty, yet another dig by Dostoyevsky against modern lifestyles and moral relativism); and eventually Fyodor is killed, and a large amount of money stolen from his house; and Dmitri ends up being accused of the murder and goes through a lengthy trial; then eventually the real murderer confesses to Dmitri at the very end, then kills themselves before Dmitri can prove his innocence to anyone. Oh yeah, and Alyosha befriends a group of tough orphans, just to have them mess with him for the entire rest of the book; and there's this priest who's beloved by the locals, but who ironically turns a bunch of them to atheism after his death, because of his body having the audacity to start rotting, instead of staying perfectly preserved like the locals had been taught happen to saints; and then there's the million other digressions and subplots buried in this doorstop of a manuscript, all of them helping to establish the now proud stereotype of the wrist-slashingly depressing dysfunctional-family thousand-page Russian epic (which believe it or not is still only a third of the length Dostoyevsky originally envisioned -- too bad he died only a few weeks after this first volume came out). The argument for it being a classic: Treasured by a whole series of intellectuals in the years since its release, fans of The Brothers Karamazov claim that, much like Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, it was one of the first books in history to prove that novels can be legitimate works of art (a premise much more hotly contested in the 1800s, when novels were mostly thought of the same way we currently think of first-person-shooter videogames), a sort of perfect blending of character, plot and philosophy that displayed a kind of sophistication simply not seen in other books of the period (and indeed, few books since); and though its style is all over the board, one of these styles he uses constitutes an important early example of "Realism," the anti-flowery school of thought that first started gaining steam here in the last twenty years of the Victorian Age, and which eventually became such a common way to tell stories that most of us don't even realize it has a special name. Now combine this with what Dostoyevsky has to actually say, a message ultimately of compassion and optimism (despite all the doom and gloom) that many people respond to in this very visceral, profound way, and it's easy to see why so many of his fans call this not just a classic but literally one of the greatest novels of all time. The argument against: Of course, not every intellectual loves this book -- his countrymen Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Nabokov, for example, both found Dostoyevsky to be a mediocre writer at best, and the review pages for this book at Amazon and Goodreads are littered with horror stories of people trying and failing to get through this monstrosity, over and over throughout the entire course of their lives. And that's because The Brothers Karamazov not only suffers the same problem as a lot of other serially published 19th-century projects -- that is, it's simply way too freaking long -- but as a "philosophical novel" it contains sometimes entire novellas worth of purely dialectic discourse instead of narrative fiction, a book that reads as slow as drying paint and is just about as much fun. (And besides, this book set the precedent that eventually gave us Atlas Shrugged, and shouldn't we dislike it a bit just for that alone?) A book much more to be admired than actually read, critics of this novel seldomly deny its importance to literary history, but instead argue that it's much more for scholars only, and that most of us are better off reading about the book than reading the book itself. My verdict: Today's one of those days where one of my original rules regarding the CCLaP 100 has come back to haunt me -- namely, the decision early on to include only books I've never read before, in that this project first came about as a personal learning opportunity; because the fact is that I already read Dostoyevsky's more famous Crime and Punishment my freshman year in college and remember really enjoying it, while unfortunately I found The Brothers Karamazov both a bore and a chore, and just barely managed to choke my way through enough of it to do a write-up in the first place. And although I have nothing but the works themselves to support this theory, I suspect that this is a case of something that happened as well to his American contemporary Henry James; that is, as men born at the beginning of Romanticism, their popular early novels helped set the tone for what mainstream literature even looked like in the mid-1800s, but by old age both had grown much more abstract and experimental, not just because they could now get away with it but also as a natural reflection of the Modernist times just around the centennial corner. So in a way, I suppose we should admire Dostoyevsky for staying "with it" all the way to the end of his career, unlike all those thousands of now forgotten writers who peaked at middle age and were never relevant again; and for sure this is a smart, beautiful, insightful novel, full of all kinds of things to mentally chew on for those looking to do so. But I suppose I was spoiled by reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina first; for while it's just as thought-provoking as Dostoyevsky's novel, it also has a much more engaging and fascinating storyline to go with it, making the entire experience that much more pleasurable and easy to go down when all is said and done. (So in modern terms, think of the difference between reading, say, William Gaddis and Michael Chabon, two writers both adored by academes but the latter with a huge mainstream fan base as well.) Although it's certainly worth some people's time, I can't in honesty say it's worth everyone's time, one of the criteria by which we're determining 'classic' status in this essay series; and while I unhesitatingly recommend it to heavy readers who are interested in seeing 19th-century literature at its headiest and most dense, I believe The Brothers Karamazov falls far short of being the proverbial "book to read before you die." Is it a classic? No (And don't forget that the first 33 essays in this series are now available in book form!) (less) | Notes are private!
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label Essay #55: Babbitt (1922), by Sinclair Lewis The story in a nutshell: The follow-up to his surprise smash bestseller Main Street, Sinclair Lewis' 1922 Babbitt is basically a continuation of his searing indictment regarding the hypocrisies inherent in middle-class Midwestern society in the years between World War One and the Great Depression, known to us now as the "Roaring Twenties" and which conjures up images of flappers, illegal hooch and fur-coat-wearing undergraduates. Set in the fictional mid-sized industrial powerhouse of Zenith, Winnemac*, it tells the story of one George Babbitt, a pudgy, milquetoast, pink-faced realtor who's the very living embodiment of everything Lewis hated, as we watch during the first half of this novel while he bumbles his way through a typical work week -- where appearances and superficialities count for everything, chamber-of-commerce boosterism has become the new state religion (and the Elks and Kiwanis the new churches), and even the slightest hint of labor reform is treated as a city-destroying godless communist threat that must be extinguished at all cost. Ah, but in the second half, we watch as a series of events call into question for Babbitt the infallibility of these former bedrocks in his life, including his best friend having a mental breakdown and shooting his wife, as well as an affair Babbitt himself embarks upon with a left-leaning bohemian; so when Babbitt starts appearing in public with these menaces to society, needless to say that his fellow community leaders don't react well at all, essentially forming a McCarthyesque morals organization for the sole purpose of bullying Babbitt back into the fold, or else face a near-total boycott of the properties he's currently trying to sell. His spirit broken, the dimwitted Babbitt is indeed brought back to the status quo by the end of the book, convincing himself that his former excursions into the wild side of life were foolish and that he had given them up voluntarily; but at least the novel ends on a hopeful note, as Babbitt ends up sticking up for his son's right to lodge petty protests against various details of his upcoming wedding, showing a spark of rebellion still buried deep in our genial antihero, leading us to only guess at how this might have manifested itself in him as the good times of the '20s gave way to the horrors of the '30s and '40s. The argument for it being a classic: Well, for starters, Lewis was one of the first Americans to ever receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, mostly for a string of unprecedented successes he had all through the 1920s, a whole series of bitter screeds about middle-class Protestant conformity that were (to the shock of everyone) eagerly eaten up in the millions by the very self-hating middle-class Midwesterners he was trashing, a whole string of bestsellers that each had a more contentious relationship with academes and especially the Pulitzer committee than it might seem at first. (Main Street actually won the award the year it came out, but then was revoked at the last second by conservative judges on a technicality and given to Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence instead; so when Lewis' next novel after this one, Arrowsmith, actually did win the Pulitzer for real, in a self-righteous huff he turned it down.) And indeed, as we approach the hundredth anniversary of his most well-known novels, it's becoming clear that Lewis drew the virtual blueprint for so much of the 20th-century literature that came after him, with a strong argument to be made that neither Tom Perrotta nor Jonathan Franzen would've even had careers if not for books like this one paving the way. An astute and slyly funny look at the psychologically corrosive nature of the safe and bland, and of just how much violence must be used to actually maintain this bland safety (a theme Lewis would ratchet up even more in such later novels as Elmer Gantry and It Can't Happen Here), fans argue that it's time we stand up and finally acknowledge just what an impact on the 20th-century arts Lewis had, a tremendously influential writer in his day who fell into obscurity during the Postmodernist era, but who deserves now to be acknowledged for the way he so deftly predicted how the rest of the "American Century" would proceed after his own time. The argument against: Critics of Babbitt -- and there's a lot of them -- would snort derisively after reading the above paragraph, and ask if they had actually read the same book that its fans had; because as far as they're concerned, the novel is nothing more than a tawdry bit of badly dated pop-culture, nearly impossible to even read just 89 years later because of the ridiculous amount of period slang used in its dialogue. (And indeed, it was this slang that made Lewis such a huge hit in Europe, where his books actually came with glossaries in the back.) And besides, they ask, should we really be honoring Lewis in the first place for inventing the now overused genre known as the Big Bad Suburbs? Hasn't this in fact turned into one of the most tired, hackneyed cliches in all of modern literature, and shouldn't we actually be cursing both Lewis and the snotty academes of Early Modernism (the first generation of academes to even acknowledge novels as actual art forms) for legitimizing something in the "serious" arts that should've never been legitimized in the first place? A sneakily commercial writer who was merely spoon-feeding the light punishment that a spoiled, corrupt, overly rich American middle-class wanted to foist on itself in the 1920s, in order to make itself feel better for being so spoiled and corrupt in the first place, critics claim that there's a very good reason Lewis' career collapsed and never recovered after the onset of the Great Depression, which is that his early hits were merely what people at that exact moment in history wanted to hear, not great works of literature unto themselves, making the idea of Babbitt being a timeless classic laughable at best. My verdict: Of the many surprises I've learned about literary history since starting this essay series, definitely one of them is just how far back the tradition goes of angry artists denouncing the sleepy, conforming nature of middle-class societies living on the edges of large urban centers, which if this were the Bible you could express along the lines of, "And thus did Gustave Flaubert begat Thomas Hardy, and thus did Hardy begat Sherwood Anderson, and thus did Anderson begat Lewis, and thus did Lewis begat John Cheever, and thus did Cheever begat American Beauty;" and that just unto itself makes Lewis fascinating and worth paying attention to, precisely because this was so thoroughly forgotten about him during the countercultural upheavals of the 1960s, '70s and '80s, when his scathing critiques disguised as white-guy rah-rahs fell out of favor with an artistic community seeking something radically different. But that said, what critics posit about Lewis' actual writing style is definitely true as well, and I confess that I found it a chore to even make it through Babbitt, despite being amazed at how relevant the storyline itself is to the exact times we're currently living in. So how exactly does one judge all this in the end? Certainly Lewis is an author just on the cusp of a big new historical reassessment and appreciation, as the slow increase of mentions of him you see these days in artistic circles attest; but certainly you should take the books themselves with a grain of salt, and understand that they were so fawned over at the time by academes and Europeans simply for the newness of the language he deployed, a running theme of Early American Modernism whether it's William Faulkner, Henry Miller or Ernest Hemingway you're talking about. And that's why today I am declaring Babbitt with a bit of hesitancy to indeed be a classic, at least for now, although caution readers that some of you might dislike this book rather intensely, yet another truism regarding so much of the work from this experimental period of arts history. All of these Jazz Age novels of Lewis' are worth visiting if you never have before (and especially Gantry, which virtually defined the tropes of every televangelist parody that's ever been written since), but don't complain to me if you get tripped up in his endless "23-skidoo" dialogue. Is it a classic? Just barely (And don't forget that the first 33 essays in this series are now available in book form!)  *And in fact, it's the invention of the fictional Midwestern state Winnemac that might very well turn out to be Lewis' most lasting legacy, his brilliant solution for getting to trash the Midwest without any actual Midwesterners becoming offended; the setting for all his novels following Babbitt as well, it's located in a space that in real life comprises upper Indiana/Ohio and lower Michigan, with its largest city "Zenith" being a stand-in for any number of large Midwestern industrial centers around it, from Detroit to Cincinnati to Milwaukee to St. Louis. Ironically, despite how terribly he portrayed the citizens of Zenith, Midwestern cities in the 1920s used to have actual bragging contests over which of them was its real-life inspiration. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Jan 28, 2011
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Jan 28, 2011
| Paperback
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| 014044906X
| 9780140449068
| 3.83
| 59,670
| 1872
| May 04, 2004
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) A couple of years ago, when I did a write-up of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for the "CCLaP 100" essay series, I heard from a number of his fans that part of the reason I found it rather lackluster was because of the free but ancient translation I had read, and that Verne is one of those cases where it really pays to seek out and even purchase the most recent translations that you can find. And that's because it's only been in literally the last 20 or 30 years, since genre work has really started gaining academic respect, that we've even wanted to go back and explore the beginnings of things like science-fiction or crime novels, and to apply a scholarly eye to such original material; but for a century before that, the dozens of fantastical titles put out by someone like Verne were considered by most to be the literary version of throwaway kiddie shows, pumped out quickly and cheaply to soon part an adolescent from his allowance money at the corner drugstore on a Saturday afternoon, and usually translated on the fly by overworked copyeditors who could care less if they were successfully capturing the subtleties of the original text. So I was glad to recently come across Amazing Journeys: Five Visionary Classics by Jules Verne, a new collection of some of his most famous novels, edited and translated by the quite obvious slavish fan and full-time scholar Frederick Paul Walter, put out in a plain but professional oversized edition and containing all the books' original illustrations. And indeed, as I learned while reading through these 'Anglicized' new translations (i.e. they feature standard measurements and Fahrenheit temperatures), Verne's work at its best contained a kind of dry humor and political awareness that we in the English-speaking world rarely equate with the French speculative pioneer, with dialogue that's not nearly as histrionic as we've come to think of it in books like these, which to be fair really were pumped out originally on a fairly quick basis mostly for the amusement of children and the working class, a series of 54 novels known as the "Extraordinary Voyages" that publisher Jules Hetzel built an entire little commercial empire around, and just like today with most of the duo's revenue coming not from the books themselves but rather the lucrative traveling stage adaptations that were often made of them. And in fact, a full reading of Verne's entire oeuvre remains a personal challenge that I will only tackle much later in life if at all, so I decided not to read even the full five tales collected here, and especially like I said since I had already read 20,000 Leagues and didn't relish the thought of slogging through the entire thing again. So instead I read just two of the titles in this collection, starting with 1864's Journey to the Center of the Earth, one of Verne's first speculative tales after first being an opera librettist for years, while lying to his father the whole time and claiming that he was establishing a fine career in Paris as a young urban lawyer. And indeed, this early thriller shows off what I consider one of the modern main weaknesses of Verne's work, no matter how good the translation; that many of the fanciful scientific theories he proposed in his books have turned out over the decades to be just flat-out wrong, which means that we no longer have the ability to enjoy his work in the same way his contemporary audience did. (Don't forget, readers in the 1800s thought of Verne not so much as a sci-fi author but more like Michael Crichton, a brilliant futurist writing day-after-tomorrow tales about what life would really be like for their children.) Essentially the tale of an eccentric German professor, his nephew assistant and their silent Icelandic guide, as they literally climb down a volcano and discover a vast continent-sized system of caves below the Earth's surface, complete with their own bodies of water and rainclouds, it's hard not to roll one's eyes when watching our heroes stumble across forgotten dinosaurs and house-sized mushrooms, or ride a lava eruption back out to the surface at the end as if they were Victorian surfers; although the story definitely has its charms as well, especially when thinking of it now as pure fairytale fantasy, and with there being lots to enjoy in the cartoonish stereotypes that come with each of our various characters. Ah, but then after that, I skipped straight to the last story in this collection, and undoubtedly the most famous of Verne's career as well, 1873's Around the World in Eighty Days, which has been made into high-profile films several times now over the years, and which turned out to be a much better reading experience. Basically a gentle satire of British stiff-upper-lip determinism in the height of their Empire years, it starts with a group of upper-class gentlemen at a private London club discussing the latest innovations in world travel, with the reclusive and unflappable Phileas Fogg quietly insisting to his peers that a globe-spanning trip could now be realistically accomplished in a flat 80 days, even wagering what today would be two million dollars on the deal and agreeing to leave on such a journey that very night, armed with nothing but an overnight bag and his loyal French butler. And thus starts a rollicking adventure that indeed takes us around the world, spiced up by a British P.I. in Raj India who mistakes Fogg for a fugitive bank robber and tries to trip up his plans the whole rest of the way, and with the incredible journey involving such details as an elephant ride across central Asia, a sudden alliance with Chinese acrobats, a deliberately planned mutiny on a British sea vessel, a shootout with Native Americans on a train ride across the American Midwest, and a whole lot more. (Although let it be noted that the original book features no hot-air balloons, an invention of Hollywood that has become a famous trope of its own by now.) And in fact, I'm sure that a big reason why this succeeds so much more than Journey to the Center of the Earth is that, unlike the outdated speculative nature of the former, Eighty Days is a faithful and now historical look at just what it was like to really pull off world travel in the late 1800s, the first time in history it became commercially viable for anyone besides pirates and explorers to even do so. (And indeed, just a year before Verne wrote his novel, Thomas Cook led history's very first trip around the world designed specifically for tourists, only in their case taking seven months to complete instead of Verne's three.) And that makes the book charming and fascinating instead of eye-rolling, and especially when adding Verne's astutely funny comments regarding imperial aspirations, and of the self-satisfyingly civilized way the British liked to think of themselves during the height of the Victorian Age. (Unlike his reputation in later movies, much of the humor in the original book comes from the conservative, adventure-hating Fogg maintaining such complete composure in the face of such globetrotting chaos, spending the majority of his 80-day trip not enjoying the scenery but playing an endless series of card games with his fellow steamship and railroad passengers.) And that's a delight to read about even today, no matter how dated the actual mechanics of the story itself. (And in fact, gonzo journalists have been recreating the trip in a period-faithful way almost since the publication of the book itself, from an 1889 newspaper reporter to most recently comedian Michael Palin, just a few years ago for a BBC television mini-series.) So it was nice, I admit, to see what all these Verne fans were talking about, as far as the surprising loveliness of his original texts, that for so long have been hidden from us English speakers by shoddy translations; but also like I said, I'm not sure just how much of a general interest I have in Verne even with the new translations, making a sampler like this nearly perfect for the casual fan. It comes highly recommended, but be prepared for it to be one of those volumes you read in little doses here and there for years to come. Out of 10: 9.1(less) | Notes are private!
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| Jan 13, 2011
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Jan 13, 2011
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 1438432380
| 9781438432380
| 4.41
| 61
| Apr 23, 1995
| Feb 01, 2010
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) A couple of years ago, when I did a write-up of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for the "CCLaP 100" essay series, I heard from a number of his fans that part of the reason I found it rather lackluster was because of the free but ancient translation I had read, and that Verne is one of those cases where it really pays to seek out and even purchase the most recent translations that you can find. And that's because it's only been in literally the last 20 or 30 years, since genre work has really started gaining academic respect, that we've even wanted to go back and explore the beginnings of things like science-fiction or crime novels, and to apply a scholarly eye to such original material; but for a century before that, the dozens of fantastical titles put out by someone like Verne were considered by most to be the literary version of throwaway kiddie shows, pumped out quickly and cheaply to soon part an adolescent from his allowance money at the corner drugstore on a Saturday afternoon, and usually translated on the fly by overworked copyeditors who could care less if they were successfully capturing the subtleties of the original text. So I was glad to recently come across Amazing Journeys: Five Visionary Classics by Jules Verne, a new collection of some of his most famous novels, edited and translated by the quite obvious slavish fan and full-time scholar Frederick Paul Walter, put out in a plain but professional oversized edition and containing all the books' original illustrations. And indeed, as I learned while reading through these 'Anglicized' new translations (i.e. they feature standard measurements and Fahrenheit temperatures), Verne's work at its best contained a kind of dry humor and political awareness that we in the English-speaking world rarely equate with the French speculative pioneer, with dialogue that's not nearly as histrionic as we've come to think of it in books like these, which to be fair really were pumped out originally on a fairly quick basis mostly for the amusement of children and the working class, a series of 54 novels known as the "Extraordinary Voyages" that publisher Jules Hetzel built an entire little commercial empire around, and just like today with most of the duo's revenue coming not from the books themselves but rather the lucrative traveling stage adaptations that were often made of them. And in fact, a full reading of Verne's entire oeuvre remains a personal challenge that I will only tackle much later in life if at all, so I decided not to read even the full five tales collected here, and especially like I said since I had already read 20,000 Leagues and didn't relish the thought of slogging through the entire thing again. So instead I read just two of the titles in this collection, starting with 1864's Journey to the Center of the Earth, one of Verne's first speculative tales after first being an opera librettist for years, while lying to his father the whole time and claiming that he was establishing a fine career in Paris as a young urban lawyer. And indeed, this early thriller shows off what I consider one of the modern main weaknesses of Verne's work, no matter how good the translation; that many of the fanciful scientific theories he proposed in his books have turned out over the decades to be just flat-out wrong, which means that we no longer have the ability to enjoy his work in the same way his contemporary audience did. (Don't forget, readers in the 1800s thought of Verne not so much as a sci-fi author but more like Michael Crichton, a brilliant futurist writing day-after-tomorrow tales about what life would really be like for their children.) Essentially the tale of an eccentric German professor, his nephew assistant and their silent Icelandic guide, as they literally climb down a volcano and discover a vast continent-sized system of caves below the Earth's surface, complete with their own bodies of water and rainclouds, it's hard not to roll one's eyes when watching our heroes stumble across forgotten dinosaurs and house-sized mushrooms, or ride a lava eruption back out to the surface at the end as if they were Victorian surfers; although the story definitely has its charms as well, especially when thinking of it now as pure fairytale fantasy, and with there being lots to enjoy in the cartoonish stereotypes that come with each of our various characters. Ah, but then after that, I skipped straight to the last story in this collection, and undoubtedly the most famous of Verne's career as well, 1873's Around the World in Eighty Days, which has been made into high-profile films several times now over the years, and which turned out to be a much better reading experience. Basically a gentle satire of British stiff-upper-lip determinism in the height of their Empire years, it starts with a group of upper-class gentlemen at a private London club discussing the latest innovations in world travel, with the reclusive and unflappable Phileas Fogg quietly insisting to his peers that a globe-spanning trip could now be realistically accomplished in a flat 80 days, even wagering what today would be two million dollars on the deal and agreeing to leave on such a journey that very night, armed with nothing but an overnight bag and his loyal French butler. And thus starts a rollicking adventure that indeed takes us around the world, spiced up by a British P.I. in Raj India who mistakes Fogg for a fugitive bank robber and tries to trip up his plans the whole rest of the way, and with the incredible journey involving such details as an elephant ride across central Asia, a sudden alliance with Chinese acrobats, a deliberately planned mutiny on a British sea vessel, a shootout with Native Americans on a train ride across the American Midwest, and a whole lot more. (Although let it be noted that the original book features no hot-air balloons, an invention of Hollywood that has become a famous trope of its own by now.) And in fact, I'm sure that a big reason why this succeeds so much more than Journey to the Center of the Earth is that, unlike the outdated speculative nature of the former, Eighty Days is a faithful and now historical look at just what it was like to really pull off world travel in the late 1800s, the first time in history it became commercially viable for anyone besides pirates and explorers to even do so. (And indeed, just a year before Verne wrote his novel, Thomas Cook led history's very first trip around the world designed specifically for tourists, only in their case taking seven months to complete instead of Verne's three.) And that makes the book charming and fascinating instead of eye-rolling, and especially when adding Verne's astutely funny comments regarding imperial aspirations, and of the self-satisfyingly civilized way the British liked to think of themselves during the height of the Victorian Age. (Unlike his reputation in later movies, much of the humor in the original book comes from the conservative, adventure-hating Fogg maintaining such complete composure in the face of such globetrotting chaos, spending the majority of his 80-day trip not enjoying the scenery but playing an endless series of card games with his fellow steamship and railroad passengers.) And that's a delight to read about even today, no matter how dated the actual mechanics of the story itself. (And in fact, gonzo journalists have been recreating the trip in a period-faithful way almost since the publication of the book itself, from an 1889 newspaper reporter to most recently comedian Michael Palin, just a few years ago for a BBC television mini-series.) So it was nice, I admit, to see what all these Verne fans were talking about, as far as the surprising loveliness of his original texts, that for so long have been hidden from us English speakers by shoddy translations; but also like I said, I'm not sure just how much of a general interest I have in Verne even with the new translations, making a sampler like this nearly perfect for the casual fan. It comes highly recommended, but be prepared for it to be one of those volumes you read in little doses here and there for years to come. Out of 10: 9.1(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| not set
| Jan 13, 2011
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Nov 17, 2010
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0451528611
| 9780451528612
| 3.98
| 183,716
| 1877
| Nov 05, 2002
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label Essay #49: Anna Karenina (1877), by Leo Tolstoy The story in a nutshell: One of the novels to cement Russia's reputation for thousand-page epic family sagas, Leo Tolstoy's 1877 Anna Karenina (originally published serially in the three years previous) centers around a series of generally liberal upper-classers living in the aristocratic outskirts of St. Petersburg: there is the couple who start our story, for example, roguish fratboy and charming lothario Stepan "Stiva" Oblonsky and his wife Darya (or "Dolly"), infuriated by his constant flirting but not willing to give up her upper-middle-class lifestyle; then there is Stiva's sister Anna, a married "bohemian bourgeoisie" living in the big city, and Dolly's sister Kitty, bubbly-headed and just out of school, who happen to both form new romantic relationships at the same time -- in Kitty's case, a traditional on-and-off courtship with family friend and "gentleman farmer" Kostya Levin, while in Anna's case, a torrid affair with haughty intellectual Alexi Vronsky, which they both admit is wrong but go ahead with anyway, because of the popularity at the time among their Romantic-Era friends for passionate, wrong-headed affairs in the name of "true love at first sight." The rest of this enormous book, then, is essentially a look at how all these situations pan out -- how for example Kitty and Levin's relationship has its ups and downs but generally proceeds in a traditional and forward fashion, while the act of betrayal that marked the beginning of Anna and Vronsky's relationship eventually casts more and more of a pall, the two eventually shunned by their circle of friends and even finally turning on each other, and with Anna eventually becoming one of those bitter martini-drinking housewives zonked out by lunchtime every day on Valium (well, okay, morphine in her case), leading to this novel's infamously tragic ending. Meanwhile, there are grand European tours to be organized, obsessions to be formed over trendy spiritual advisers, obscure wars to be fought in Serbia, and much intellectual hand-wringing to be done among these upper-class liberals over the future of Russian peasantry, agriculture, and regional political systems, delivering by the end a nearly perfect example of what today we would call a "prestige television series," much like watching the entire complex run of a show like Mad Men or The Sopranos. The argument for it being a classic: Well, it's not for nothing that, after a downturn in popularity during the 20th century, there are more and more people in the 2000s now proclaiming Anna Karenina to be not only great but literally The Greatest Novel In Human History; and that's because, they argue, along with such other 19th-century proto-Realist pioneers like Gustave Flaubert and Henry James, Tolstoy virtually wrote the rules by which nearly every modern long-form narrative tale now adheres -- the third-person omniscient narration, the equal concentration on character and plot, the habit of using small incidents from real life in a long series of short installments to tell by the end a grand and memorable saga ironically about everyday people, the literal blueprint from which nearly every television drama in history has been based. (In fact, despite being named after her, this book is actually about a lot more than just Anna herself; and much like his other epic masterpiece War and Peace, this domestic version might be better described with a more grandiose title as well, like Love and Hate or Babies and Funerals.) And he does this, his fans say, using a remarkably light and playful prose style as well, which let's not forget was done right during the height of popularity for the flowery, overblown Victorian/Genteel style of writing, a style that had fallen completely out of favor not even 50 years later but with Tolstoy's naturalistic style still the industry standard even in the 21st century. And then there's the nice formalistic elements that Tolstoy brings to this -- for example, the symmetrical way that the book starts with an introductory chapter followed by a death at a train station, while ending with another train-station death and a chapter of denouement -- plus the precursory version of experimental stream-of-consciousness he inserts into bits and pieces of this manuscript, a self-confessed big influence among such Modernist masters as William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf (in fact, Woolf once called Tolstoy the greatest novelist of all time) -- which when added together makes you easily understand why the argument is so strong for Anna Karenina being one of those fabled "books to read before you die." The argument against: There seems to be two main arguments among this book's critics: that it is way, way too long (a fact that even most of its fans will admit is true, and a common problem among serial publishing projects of the 1800s); and that its characters are simply too reprehensible to care about, an unending collection of cold, stupid, uppity rich douchebags who spend all their time whining about pointless self-imposed false crises (which interestingly enough I have a response for -- but more on this in a bit). Other than this, the main complaint about Anna Karenina seems to be the same general one made about all these barn-burning epics of the Victorian Age -- that although it's a decent enough book for those who want to commit the extra time and patience to read it, it certainly shouldn't be considered a classic that everyone should read. My verdict: So after decades of having it drilled into my head that 19th-century Russian literature is some kind of obtuse monster, full of comically tragic scenes of gaunt peasants dying in blood-soaked snowy fields, it was a pleasant shock to read Anna Karenina and realize just how everyday and relatable it actually is, and how in fact it's still incredibly easy to this day to transpose the cultural details of the story into modern-day vernacular without losing any of Tolstoy's original gist. (In my case, for example, I kept picturing this taking place among the upper-class liberals of Chicago's contemporary far northern suburbs, who instead of the opera and horse races all maintain their social circle through an endless series of green-issue fundraisers and cancer runs, with Stiva for example being the head of a wealthy but earnest NGO instead of a government official, and with Levin one of those "trust-fund activists" who decides to build a self-sustaining eco-house and organic farm on his own semi-rural Wilmette property, and who writes one of those nerdy self-righteous blogs about the experience then is surprised when he can't get anyone to read it.) And that, I've come to realize, is the big thing that's been forgotten about Tolstoy in the 135 years since this was first written -- that the whole reason he became so beloved in the first place is because he was such a magically astute observer and recorder of the human condition, able to weave together the complexly inconsistent behavior of most people in a way so that we understand why some others might despise them for it and yet others love them for the same reason. That's why, for example, the facile nature of these characters doesn't bother me nearly as much as others; because yes, although the elaborate code of inherently hypocritical etiquette that the upper class have been imposing on themselves for centuries now is certainly silly and pointless, it's fascinating nonetheless, and in the right person's hands it can be riveting to see how such made-up issues can affect the very real emotions and life decisions of the people involved. And when it comes to this, by the way, please know that Tolstoy had a very specific agenda in mind: after all, this was written right at the beginning of the author's later phase in life as an ultra-radical liberal activist, anarchy pioneer, and born-again Christian, pushed in this direction in late middle-age among other reasons because of his growing disgust over the tolerance and outright encouragement among the bored upper-class for moral relativity and bad behavior, and with the highly autobiographical "real-world romance" of Kitty and Levin clearly meant to be a better choice than the "screw you, we're in love!" histrionics of Anna and Vronsky. And it works, too, which is the real genius of Tolstoy, and why he's still so surprisingly relevant even two centuries later; just to cite one of dozens of examples I could mention, just look at that whole section in the middle where Levin's drug-addicted bohemian brother ends up messily dying of consumption in a squalid hovel deep in the city's artistic district, of how it brings out this fearless, surprisingly headstrong side of Kitty that Levin never knew she had, an understanding of and tolerance for the dark side of life that he never realized she was capable of, and of how this single week-long event profoundly and permanently changes and deepens the formerly surface-level "put her on a pedestal" attraction he has for her. If this isn't one of the most brilliant looks at the random, unexpected ways that intimate relationships mature and grow over time in the real world, I don't know what is. Ultimately I found myself agreeing with what another reviewer at Goodreads.com had to say about this overlong but highly worthwhile novel, how it's much like visiting Paris for the first time: that despite probably having heard a lot already about the city before going, and even recognizing most of the major landmarks during the train ride in, you never truly experience Paris until the first time you actually take a walk in one of its neighborhoods, turning a random corner at dusk just to stumble accidentally into a forgotten millennium-old sun-kissed plaza full of ball-playing kids and seniors sipping coffee. And that's why it's ultimately still worth reading Anna Karenina, even if you do have my official permission to skip straight over any section that starts debating the relative modern worth of the feudal serf system as a legitimate economic model; because it is literally one of those proverbial "great books to get lost in," one of the novels that helped inspire that term in the first place, an exquisite if not quiet pleasure that you will never experience simply by reading a plot recap and character list. It's a chore to be sure, but I found this to be a fine example of a traditional literary classic, a book still well worth your time whether you're eighteen and new to the world of complex adult emotions, or eighty and a weary veteran of them. It comes highly recommended today, despite admittedly having some problems. Is it a classic? Yes (And don't forget that the first 33 essays in this series are now available in book form!) (less) | Notes are private!
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| Oct 08, 2010
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Oct 08, 2010
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0679749020
| 9780679749028
| 3.66
| 1,062
| Nov 01, 1983
| Jan 30, 1996
|
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) As regular visitors know, I'm in the midst of reading all nine of the autobiographical "Nathan Zuckerman" novels that author Philip Roth has penned over the decades, from 1979's The Ghost Writer to 2007's Exit Ghost. And that's because, as a newish book critic (only three years full-time now), I'm continually trying to educate myself more about the periods of literary history I know the least about, which would definitely include the Postmodernist Era, which lasted roughly from Kennedy's death to 9/11 (deliberately depressing touchstones chosen because of this period mostly marked by a preoccupation with the downfall of America, or more generally the downfall of all post-industrial Western lifestyles); and many say that one cannot get any better of a dense yet simplified look at that era than to read all of Roth's Zuckerman books, since he not only spent most of his adult life in this period (in his thirties at the beginning, in his seventies by the end) but is also one of the more revered artists of this period, as a result living a very typical Postmodernist life (as dutifully recorded in these lightly fictionalized true-life tales) even while helping to shape what those "typical" issues were for society as a whole. I've already covered his first book, The Ghost Writer, Roth's look back at his twenties as a hot young star of very late Modernism, publishing his first New Yorker stories at the same time as his fellow Postmodernist pioneers as John Updike, Norman Mailer and more, in the case of this book looking at it all through the filter of the naive Zuckerman attending a boozy "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" type dinner in rural New England with a Saul Bellow stand-in, an older and more successful writer who is ambivalent about his status as a 20th-century trailblazer in Jewish literature, actually written twenty years after the relevant events described; and I've already reviewed his second novel in the series as well, the highly popular Zuckerman Unbound, a frank and sometimes self-scathing look at Roth's thirties, when his funny and filthy Portnoy's Complaint became an accidental international bestseller, and helped kick off an entire countercultural series of nebbishly "sexy" young urban Jews like Woody Allen and the like, fictionalized here into Zuckerman's Carnovsky and which has ignited a mostly generational fiery debate among the Jewish community, for laying out in a funny yet revealing proto-Seinfeld way all the foibles and personality tics of that community, tropes we now generally find endearing (the guilt-inducing Jewish mother, the crazy uncle full of anti-Semite conspiracy theories) but that were highly controversial to talk about at the time that Roth did. And the reason I mention this in such detail is that today's book under review, 1983's The Anatomy Lesson, is in many ways about the same subjects, just with Zuckerman now in his forties (the book's set in the Ford/Carter years of the mid-'70s), and how time and further revelations have now changed the way he look at all these topics. Because this is a sadder and more complicated Zuckerman we're seeing here, one whose parents have recently died and whose brother accuses Carnovsky of killing, which Nathan thinks of in a complex way -- sometimes wishing that he had done things differently, sometimes angry over the fact that his parents could've "gotten it" if they had tried, but had chosen instead to be deliberately insulted by him airing their community's "dirty laundry" to the cackling laughter of a Gentile audience. And like I said, this does two things at once; because since so many of Roth's fellow baby-boomers had similarly contentious relationships with their parents over their countercultural beliefs, and since it's so common to lose one's parents in one's forties, Roth ends up speaking to his entire generation in this novel, even as it also exists as a specific roman a clef about the ups and downs of intellectual fame, of being a reluctant sex symbol in a "let it all hang out" age, and more. But let me also make it clear that, of the five Roth novels I've now read (the three mentioned, 2004's The Plot Against America, and 2009's The Humbling), this is the first one to make me regularly giggle out loud in public all the way through it, and I mean to the point where it was annoying my neighbors at the cafe; and that's because this is also a very funny look at the Male Mid-Life Crisis, and all the ridiculous attitudes and actions that come with it. That's actually where the name of the book comes from -- because as it opens, we find a 40-year-old Zuckerman suffering from a mysterious back pain that has nearly hobbled him, which a dozen different doctors haven't yet been able to diagnose, even as he is also becoming more and more aware of his rapidly corroding body (thinning hair, softening belly), eventually requiring just to get through his day his "harem of Florence Nightingales," a cadre of four women who play different roles in his life but in one way or another help to take care of him, some of whom also regularly have kinky sex with him despite his injuries. (He props up his head during oral sex with a thousand-page thesaurus, given to him by his proudly blue-collar immigrant father in the 1940s as he headed off for college at the University of Chicago; and that single sentence right there gives you a pretty good snapshot look at Roth's entire career.) Tired of his role as a public intellectual and scourge of feminists and conservative Jews nationwide, on the spur of a moment one day Zuckerman decides that what he really wants to do is move back to Chicago and go to medical school (yet another development the novel's title alludes to), figuring that he'll be ready to have a nice quiet practice completely out of the limelight by the time he's fifty; but this is where the zany part comes in, as it often does with humorous Postmodernist Jewish artists, because Zuckerman happens to be self-medicating for his pain at the time, through a combination of vodka, weed, and Percodan overdoses, which makes him come to believe that a spur-of-the-moment trip to Chicago is in order, to hit up an old college friend who's now a doctor for a med-school recommendation, the surrealism upped more and more through the continual cocktail of controlled substances he downs all the way there, which by the time he's in Chicago has him babbling in morphine-fueled monologues to anyone who will listen about how he's actually a Larry-Flynt-type publisher of hardcore smut who is there to kick Hugh Hefner's ass, proudly proclaiming his name to be actually the name of a Jewish book critic who has panned all of Zuckerman's books. (And for my fellow Chicagoans, don't miss the amazingly nostalgic and detailed reminisces about the city in the 1950s that Roth offers up in this section, including fantastic descriptions of a run-down Mid-Century-Modernist Loop, and getting drunk with Thomas Mann in the still-existing Hyde Park dive-bar institution Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap.) The whole thing culminates, then, with a series of wonderful little surprises which is why I won't spoil things, but suffice to say that things end on a somber note but that has interesting things to say about the aging and maturation process. It's Roth really at the top of his form for the first time, coming into his mature voice here in the early '80s just in time for his most revered work, award-winning novels like American Pastoral and The Human Stain that he will be best remembered for; but at the same time, it's also a timeless look at middle-age and the issues that all people in their early forties go through (although especially nebbish, oversexed intellectuals in their early forties), which on top of simply being a good history book now gives you triple the usual reasons to read it yourself. I have to say, three titles in now, I'm really glad so far that I decided to take on the Zuckerman novels, and this latest has me looking that much more forward now to the next in the series, 1985's provocatively titled The Prague Orgy, an experimental novella in which we follow Zuckerman's journal as he travels to Communist Czechoslovakia to seek a missing manuscript from a martyred Yiddish writer. Here's hoping it'll be as good as the first three volumes. (less) | Notes are private!
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label Essay #47: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), by Erich Maria Remarque The story in a nutshell: Originally published serially the year before, Erich Maria Remarque's 1929 All Quiet on the Western Front concerns the events of World War One a decade previous, and in particular the insanely long battlefront running almost the entire length of western Europe that the war became most known for, in which both sides lined up millions of soldiers along an unmoving border that stretched literally from The argument for it being a classic: Well, as mentioned, according to its fans, there's a pretty simple argument for why this book should be considered a classic; it's demonstrably the very first novel to establish so many of the tropes now found in almost all modern creative projects concerning war, including not only the examples already mentioned but also the older rah-rah schoolmaster who gets all the boys whipped up for combat in the first place, and the concept of a returning soldier finding it almost impossible to reconnect with his old life once getting home from active duty. Plus the book has a strong connection to both Hollywood's past and future, with the 1930 adaptation being the very first non-musical "talkie" to ever win the Best Picture Oscar, and with a brand-new big-budget adaptation in the works as we speak, starring Daniel "Harry Potter" Ratcliffe; plus it's an important landmark of the Early Modernist arts as well, say its fans, the book that inspired the term "Lost Generation" through Baumer's remarkable monologue about halfway through, on how he and all his school buddies left for the war as naive children who thought they understood the way the world worked, but were returning as scarred adults who have lost the ability to understand how polite society even works, shades of the Tropic of Cancer "Jazz Age" times just around the corner. And then there's the fact that the Nazis were so threatened by this book, it was one of the first they banned after gaining power in the 1930s, even going so far as to cut off Remarque's sister's head in retribution for Remarque himself successfully escaping to America; and if the Nazis hated it this much, there's gotta be something to it almost by default, right? The argument against: Not much, to tell you the truth; although like most books that are considered classics, you find a fair share of people online complaining about being forced to read this in high school under unpleasant circumstances, which pretty much ruined whatever chance they had to enjoy it. But that's not really a complaint about the book so much as it is about their old high-school lit teacher, so am not sure how appropriate it really is. My verdict: As regular readers know, after three years we're finally approaching the halfway point of the CCLaP 100, at which point I plan on writing a long essay about everything I've now learned from the process, including a series of lists such as the titles I've been most enjoyably surprised by; and All Quiet on the Western Front definitely earns a spot on such a list, a shockingly powerful book to this day which is not exactly the anti-war screed its fans claim it is, but rather becomes one by default for so unflinchingly detailing the random, utterly unglamorous brutality that comes with war. And indeed, this was one of the many surprises I had with this novel, was learning just how many military veterans love it themselves, precisely for being one of the most realistic depictions of life along an actual battlefront ever written, which when combined with its poetic Modernist elements makes it still such an affecting winner, even 81 years after its original publication. (And for an excellent example of the "poetic Modernist elements" I'm talking about, see the whole section near the end where Baumer gets caught in an enemy foxhole during an artillery attack, is forced to kill a French soldier at close range, then is stuck with the corpse in the hole for four straight days without food, which drives him so insane that he starts holding conversations with the dead man and promising to deliver his personal effects to his widow after the war is over, a temporary insanity that he quickly comes out of again once being reunited with his buddies. If that isn't one of the most effectively bizarre war anecdotes ever written, I don't know what is.) Although not exactly a textbook example of Early Modernism when it comes to style, and in fact displaying at points more of an affinity for the now-hated Genteel literature of the same period ("Ah! Mother, Mother! How can it be that I must part from you? Here I sit and there you are lying"...sheesh), this is very much a touchstone of Modernism in terms of expanding the scope of what was allowed to be discussed in "polite company," and it's hard to imagine how we would even have such modern classics as Saving Private Ryan and the like without this trailblazer paving the way. It's not only an undeniable classic, but will probably end up as one of my ten personal favorites of the entire series once it's all over, and it comes strongly recommended today for just about everyone out there. Is it a classic? Yes (And don't forget that the first 33 essays in this series are now available in book form!) (less) | Notes are private!
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.) The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then decide whether or not they deserve the label Book #30: The Call of the Wild, by Jack London (1903) The story in a nutshell: One of the first-ever anthropomorphized children's books, Jack London's 1903 Call of the Wild tells the tale of "Buck," a cross-bred dog (part Saint Bernard, part Scotch Shepherd) who begins our story as a pampered family pet in northern California*; what made this book unusual for its time, however, is that this story is actually told from the viewpoint and mindset of the dog itself, as Buck finds himself first kidnapped and then sold as a sled dog in the Yukon, right in the middle of that region's Industrial-Age gold rush, when hearty dogs were at a premium. The rest of this short book, then, is essentially a look at what happens to Buck within this environment, and how his formerly tame nature is slowly replaced with his inborn animal instinct, as we readers are introduced one at a time to the legitimate horrors that came with this lifestyle back then (starvation, exhaustion, cruel owners, hostile natives, bloody infighting for both survival and pecking order), with Buck by the end joining a pack of rogue Alaskan wolves and becoming a semi-mythical legend, among both the civilized humans and dogs who he leaves behind. The argument for it being a classic: Well, to start with, it's one of the most popular children's books in history, with adaptations of the tale that continue to be created to this day (for example, a popular 3D movie version is being released on DVD the same exact week I'm writing this review); and then there's the fact that this was one of the first animal tales ever to be written from the point of view of the actual animal, a popular technique that in our modern times has become an entire subgenre unto itself. It can also be argued that this is a highly important historical record of the Alaskan gold rush, detailing the ins and outs of daily life there back then in a way that only a local could've (for those who don't know, London actually lived there himself for a time** starting in 1897); and let's not forget, its fans say, that this remains one of the few titles of the prolific London to still remain popular, out of the nearly hundred books he actually wrote, an author who was immensely important to the development of American literature in the early 20th century (not to mention insanely popular when he was alive), and who deserves to not be forgotten. The argument against: Like many of the children's books included in this essay series, the main argument among its critics seems to be that this book is only still considered a "classic" in the first place because of tradition; that if you take an actual close look at the book itself, it is neither superlative in quality nor even that popular anymore, one of those titles more apt to be nostalgically reminisced upon by middle-agers than an actual good book to be read again and again in our contemporary times. This is part of the problem with the term "classic," after all, is that our definition of it is constantly changing from one generation to the next; and children's literature is particularly susceptible to this change in definition, in that it's children's books that have most changed in nature in the last hundred years. Although no one seems to be arguing anymore with the idea that this is a historically important book, there seems to be a growing amount of people saying that it isn't a timeless gem either, and that it's maybe time here in the early 2000s to retire its longstanding "classic" status. My verdict: So out of the thirty books I've now reviewed for this essay series, this may be the hardest time I've had yet determining whether to classify a title as a "classic" or not. Because on the one hand, it's an undeniably thrilling book, a real page-turner that was a joy as a nostalgic middle-ager to read, and like I said is a fantastic look not just at the nature of the animal spirit but all the historical details of life in the Yukon during the gold-rush years. But on the other hand, the book is much, much more violent and dark than what most of us consider appropriate anymore for modern children, and parents deserve to know this before just handing a copy over to their kids; in fact, there's enough blood and death in this book to give just about any kid nightmares for weeks, making it ironically much more appropriate anymore for adults than contemporary children. Also, like any book that's over a hundred years old, there are big sections of Call of the Wild that simply feel outdated, and I question whether people would actually enjoy a title like this anymore if they're not reading specifically for historical reasons. As I mentioned, this is a big problem among a growing amount of children's literature that we once considered "classics," that in fact they're much more useful anymore as simple historical documents detailing a specific period in time, and aren't nearly as appropriate anymore for just handing to a modern kid, who after all has grown up with just a plethora of profoundly more sophisticated tales than such simplistic stories like these, and who aren't going to enjoy such stories nearly as much as a misty-eyed older adult looking back through the haze of nostalgia. It's for all these reasons that today I come down on the "no" side of the classic equation, although like I said, let it be known that I was right on the fence in this particular case. Is it a classic? No (VOYA code: 4Q/3P/J) *And a little piece of trivia, by the way: London based this book on his landlord's pet dog, back when he lived in northern California himself during the height of the Yukon gold rush, a Saint Bernard that the families would regularly hook up to a wagon and have help perform household chores. **And if you really want to read something fascinating, check out sometime the actual derring-do life of London himself, who had real adventures in his youth twice as crazy as any of the stories he wrote: the illegitimate child of an astrologer and a mentally insane spiritualist, as a teenager he bought his first boat (borrowing money from the ex-slave who raised him) and became an oyster farmer, then after high school became a seal clubber in Japan for awhile; then during his years as a Yukon gold miner he developed scurvy and almost died, becoming a socialist by the end of his time there because of a liberal doctor who saved his life, and eventually becoming one of the first Americans in history to be able to make his entire living just from creative writing alone (and indeed, one of only a few handfuls of Americans to this day to become a millionaire from his creative writing). Sheesh! (less) | Notes are private!
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.) The CCLaP 100: In which I read a hundred so-called "classics" for the first time, then write essays on whether or not they deserve the label. The Age of Innocence is book number 29 in this series. The story in a nutshell: To truly get the full implications of The Age of Innocence, it's of crucial importance to understand the following: that although it's set in 1870 (during the height of Victorianism), it wasn't written and published until fifty years later, in 1920 (the beginning of Modernism), an older Edith Wharton looking back on her youth but with a thoroughly contemporary eye. And the reason that's important is that the novel itself is a look at a New York that didn't exist anymore even in the year the book first came out, thus making it enjoyed from the first day for the same historical reasons we do here in the 21st century -- an impossibly quaint and provincial Manhattan that was still barely developed above 25th Street or so, where the only people to be found in the area now known as "Midtown" were a small incestuous circle of the upper-class, an American version of the old British aristocracy held together through such Atlantic Seaboard touchstones as business associations, Ivy League schools, summering in Newport, and family names that stretch back to the Mayflower. Back in the late 1800s, the area around what is now Central Park was still considered a far suburb of New York "proper" (that is, everything below Houston Avenue), the only people there this inbred group of old money, living in their gigantic mansions tucked within what was still at the time half-wilderness, and coming up with an elaborate set of rules and unspoken etiquette to determine how their entire complicated society would work (with the worst fate imaginable being collectively "snubbed" by the members of this clique, suddenly losing access to all the resources that made up your lifestyle in the first place, party invitations and club memberships and private boxes at the opera). It's within this environment that we watch the fate of young forward-thinking chap Newland Archer, a true Victorian gentleman if there ever was one: educated, cultured, with a natural head for both business and science, even with a perfect if not old-fashioned fiancee, the bubbly and slightly dimwitted May Welland (youngest adult member of the Mingott clan, one of the "major families" holding this convoluted upper-class society together, with the grouchy and headstrong Mrs. Manson Mingott as its matriarch, holder of all the family's money and therefore all the family's power). But, see, Newland and his pals have been talking a lot recently about this so-called "New Woman," the redefinition of femininity that was taking place among educated youth during this period in history; a new understanding about marriage where young wives were expected to be not only as educated as their husbands, but also as political and as bawdy, spending their days protesting in the streets for suffrage and bringing their uninhibited desires to the boudoir at night. It's not that Newland doesn't love May, a fact that Wharton goes out of her way to show throughout the book; it's just that when he meets her cousin Ellen one night, aka "Countess Olenska" -- one of these New Women who ran off to Europe and married into the actual Prussian nobility, just to have the marriage fall apart and come slinking back to New York -- Newland suddenly realizes how much better a woman like her would be for his life, and how she sparks in him the kind of intelligent, world-weary passion that the domesticated, gender-role-believing May simply cannot. And this is another reason why the publishing date of this book is important, because the Modernist women at the beginning of the "Roaring Twenties" Jazz Age were dealing with this issue all over again -- the relationship between independence and personal identity and traditional romantic happiness -- and you can see this novel as just as much a comment about their situation as the one of the late Victorian Age, kind of like how Robert Altman's M*A*S*H is actually about Vietnam although set during the Korean War. The majority of the book, then, concerns itself with the situation that develops between all these people in this hothouse environment, as Newland and Ellen come to realize their attraction to each other but hardly ever acknowledge it out loud, and also as the rest of this society comes to realize it too, and starts quietly deciding behind closed doors what exactly they're going to collectively do about it. And this is yet another reason that it's important to know about the schism between this book's setting and its publication; because instead of impulsively running off together and "living happily ever after," as would've happened in the breathy Victorian romances actually being written in the late 1800s, here all the parties involved come to a much more Modernist yet heartbreaking conclusion, that ultimately it just isn't fair of Newland and Ellen to destroy the lives of not only May but the entire Mingott family, just because there was bad timing involved as to who exactly met who in what exact order. Not only do Newland and Ellen come to realize this, but even May herself comes to understand just what kind of sacrifice the two make for her sake, leading to a resolution not exactly sad but not exactly happy either; so a thoroughly Modern story, in other words, even as at the end they watch this old elaborate caste system around them fall apart during the first few decades of the 20th century. The argument for it being a classic: Well, for starters, it was the first-ever novel by a woman to win the Pulitzer, and is also mentioned in just about any list you come across of the greatest novels of all time (plus was adapted into a high-profile Martin Scorsese film in 1993, a controversial production among the book's fans, which doesn't hurt either). But awards and platitudes aside, argue its fans, there are two main reasons why The Age of Innocence should be considered a classic: because of the aforementioned complex way it combines Romanticism and Modernism, both nostalgically presenting the former while ingeniously mixing in the latter; and also because it was one of the first-ever truly perfect Realist stories ever written, a style of writing favored by such turn-of-the-century authors as Wharton and her good friend Henry James, which believe it or not was actually considered a cutting-edge literary theory at the time. After all, it was the immense popularity of this novel (almost from the day it was released) that was a big factor in Realism becoming such a dominant form of storytelling in contemporary novels, so dominant in fact that most of us no longer realize it even has a special name. (For those who don't know, Realism simply means "a story told in a way so that it sounds and feels like it could've actually happened in real life," and is the way that 95 percent of all contemporary novels are now written; this is compared to the habit during the Victorian Age for all novels to be either fairytales or to sternly preach a moral lesson impossible to actually live up to, or perhaps be a ridiculously unrealistic bosom-heaving love story.) The argument against: Ironically, the biggest argument against The Age of Innocence seems to be just how much of an understanding one needs to have about the circumstances behind its publishing in order to grasp its full power; because if you don't know all the details I've thus far described, it's incredibly easy to see this book as just some outdated potboiler about how rich people suck, the exact attitude you tend to find among online reviews from people who didn't care for it. No matter how powerful the book itself might be, argue its critics, to drag around this much historical baggage violates the spirit of how we're defining "classic" in this essay series; that in order for a book to truly be considered such, it needs to transcend its specific original time period, so that anyone can pick it up randomly at any point in the future and still enjoy it for what it is. Even less than a hundred years since its original publication, argue its critics, The Age of Innocence threatens to no longer do this; and that's why it should certainly be considered both a historically important and well-done book, but not necessarily a timeless classic. My verdict: So if you've ever asked yourself, "I wonder what the absolute oldest novels are to establish the kind of specific English we use today," a strong argument could be made for The Age of Innocence being one of them; that's what I kept thinking while reading it, anyway, that it's so far the oldest book in the CCLaP 100 to feel like it could've actually been written yesterday. (I mean, yes, Madame Bovary comes close, as far as capturing the literary spirit of our contemporary times; but Wharton's novel is so far the oldest to feel like you could literally slap a fake 2009 copyright notice on the front page and not make people even blink.) And that's because of a whole series of what turns out to be some pretty subtle details, things you see mentioned in essays about Wharton again and again: not just this brilliant mix of Romanticism and Modernism she pulls off, for example, but also an incredibly dry and dark sense of humor (this book is surprisingly funny, but only to those who like, say, 30 Rock or Arrested Development); the resigned acknowledgment among all the characters as to the cruel ironic nature of the world; even the plain-spoken language and simple sentence structure used (which after all was a major hallmark of the Realist writers, the insistence that language itself stay out of the way as much as possible of the actual story being told, versus the flowery purple-prose messes of the Victorian Age and older.) The biggest secret, though, as to why The Age of Innocence is so enjoyable is because of the various levels at which it can be enjoyed; for example, one of the first and most obvious pleasures of the book is simply the sumptuous visual images of Old New York that Wharton conjures up, and if one wants they can easily enjoy this novel simply as a melodramatic piece of historical fiction, to lose oneself in the exquisitely remembered finery of Wharton's actual youth (although make no mistake, this is not an autobiographical novel -- Wharton was only ten or so in the years this book takes place). But then if you want, you can also enjoy the novel for the complex way it neither condemns nor approves this ridiculously elaborate code of behavior among this circle of upper-class acquaintances; this was the world Wharton herself quite happily lived in her entire adult life, after all, and there's a reason that she used to call this book her "apology" for her earlier, much more damning House of Mirth. (In fact, one of this book's strongest arguments is that maybe it's not so bad after all to stop yourself from ruining the lives of everyone around you, just because you get a boner from cynical girls with short haircuts who make bad life decisions and have spent time in Europe, and that there's maybe something actually to this elaborate set of etiquette that marked the "civilized height" of the Victorian Age.) Now, that said, I also agree with the book's critics in at least one respect -- that if I hadn't studied up beforehand on both Wharton and the history of this book, I wouldn't have nearly enjoyed it in the nuanced way that I did, a clear violation of the spirit behind this CCLaP 100 series in the first place. Although it's still a small enough problem here in the early 2000s for me to confidently label the book a classic for all of us, I have a feeling that it's in its last days in history of being considered such, and that a mere fifty years from now it will be considered as badly dated as the work of such early Victorians as Nathaniel Hawthorne is now starting to more and more seem to us Obamian-Age citizens. After all, if there's one big surprise I've learned since starting this essay series, it's just how fluid our entire concept of "artistic classic" actually is; and although I happily call The Age of Innocence one at this particular moment in history, I'm not sure exactly how much longer this will be the case. Do yourself a favor and read it soon, since as a "grandchild of Modernism" you will be one of the last people in history to fully be able to appreciate it in all its subtle glory. Is it a classic? For now (less) | Notes are private!
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Mar 27, 2009
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label Essay #44: The Canterbury Tales (~1380-1400), by Geoffrey Chaucer The story in a nutshell: Written in stops and starts from roughly 1380 to 1400, Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales takes as its framing device an event that was common during its Late Medieval times, but that no one had ever thought of doing a story collection about before -- it's set among a group of unrelated tourists, making a pilgrimage from southern London to the Cathedral of Canterbury (one of the most important Christian sites in England, and home of that country's oldest Archbishop), during which the tour organizer suggests a story competition to while away their time, the winner of which will receive a free dinner at the end of their trip, and with the stories themselves bouncing from chivalrous tales by the nobility to pious tales by the clergy, to bawdy tales from the commoners present. (Although be aware that over 80 slightly different handwritten versions of this book exist from the century following Chaucer's death, because of movable type still technically not existing yet, none of which are in Chaucer's original hand, making it impossible to determine the stories' true original order; and in fact we don't even know whether the infamously "unfinished" tales are in that state accidentally, or were done on purpose by Chaucer as a sly joke about how boring they are.) And indeed, this is what made the Tales so widely reproduced and passionately loved once printing presses did finally make it to England, a century after Chaucer's death, for being clever to the point sometimes of laugh-out-loud funny, and with it not just being a story collection but no less than a grand satire of all the different ways stories were even told back then. Don't forget, before the rise of "Modern English" during the Early Renaissance, there were actually a dozen different types of "Middle English" used throughout the country, each of them with their own idioms and slightly different grammar rules, all of which Chaucer manages to ape at one point or another; and of course don't forget the already mentioned differing expectations among social classes of what stories were even supposed to be about, not to mention the sometimes even different language that existed between the rich and the poor, making this one of the first times in English history that a writer makes fun of specific groups by creating puns out of their local dialect. (Just to cite one good example, among the nobility, to "take pity" meant a selfless act of sympathy, while among the lower classes it was slang for having sex, a double-entrendre that Chaucer makes great use of in his book.) Less an interesting literary story and more an interesting literary exercise, The Canterbury Tales profoundly helped shape not only the modern English language we use today, but how we even think of the proper role and structure of the narrative format in general. The argument for it being a classic: The ways that this single volume has had an impact on society is almost innumerable, say its fans, the most important being many of the things already mentioned -- how by being one of the first books to be widely printed and distributed during the Renaissance, for example, it not only became the very first English "bestseller," but profoundly helped spread and normalize the use of so-called "chancery standard," the form of English invented by the government's then-burgeoning civil service, of which Chaucer was a well-paid veteran his entire adult life. (In fact, Chaucer in many ways was a precursor to the fabled "Renaissance Man" just around the historical corner -- he was a well-educated master of not only language but also math and proto-science, even while being an accomplished politician, office manager and sociologist.) Then there's the fact that Chaucer subverted the very way that stories were even told, bypassing the usual pecking order of the Middle Ages (in which it was expected that knights go first in all public endeavors, from telling stories to using the bathroom, then priests, then aristocrats, then merchants, then laborers, etc), mixing up his own story order between high-class and low-class tales and often having them be angry reactions to the story just told, ironically making this an early example of our modern notion of moral relativity; and by consciously inserting witty "fourth wall" references to the act of writing itself -- including the aforementioned "unfinished" stories that may or may not be deliberate jokes, as well as making himself an actual character in his own book, albeit a self-deprecatory version of himself who is often berated by the rest of the group for being a nerdy, unimaginative bookworm -- Chaucer also turns in a fine early example of metafictional postmodernism, only half a millennium before the term was first invented. And on top of all this, say its fans, it's simply an entertaining manuscript, full of fart jokes and pointed barbs at both corrupt clergy and dumb white-trash, the final element in the equation for elevating a book from merely "important" to a full "classic." The argument against: There's really only one main argument against this book that you see online, a huge problem that stops its haters from even reading it and coming up with other criticisms, which is the dense, obtuse Middle English that the original is written in, an outdated form of the language that literally hasn't been used in 600 years now; and indeed, you are in for a chore if you try to read the book this way yourself, despite your pretentious friend's insistence that Middle English is easy to follow once you "get the hang of it." (Liars! LIARS!) But I myself happened to read a modern translation of the book, making this criticism not really applicable to my specific review. My verdict: So yes, it's important to know that I read a modern translation of The Canterbury Tales, which I'm sure has purists foaming at the mouth even as we speak; and I gotta plainly admit, I highly recommend that you do the same unless you're specifically studying Middle English, in that otherwise you won't even have a chance of getting the full gist of what Chaucer is trying to say. If you do read the modern version, then, like me you'll realize that its fans are correct, that this is a much smarter and more contemporary book than what you thought could ever be accomplished during its time period, which as a side benefit offers a treasure trove of supplemental information about such period events as the 1381 Peasant's Revolt, the Great Schism of the Catholic Church, the Hundred Years' War and the invention of tree-based paper. (Of course, this then brings up the question we often seem to be debating among older titles here, of whether a book can truly be called a "classic" if it requires a week of homework beforehand to even understand what's going on; and along those lines, I highly recommend doing a close reading of this book's long Wikipedia entry before tackling the manuscript itself.) It really is surprising to see how readable and sometimes even lowbrow filthy this book actually gets at points; and although a little of this stuff goes a long way (I only read about half the book myself, then read simple recaps of the second half as a way of "finishing"), it's also an unexpected delight, and about the closest you'll get to a book this old still feeling fresh and relatable. Like most pre-Victorian books being reviewed in this series, it comes with a limited recommendation only, and I'll warn you that you need to strongly be in the mood to read this book in order to actually read this book; but certainly I think it's safe to call The Canterbury Tales a classic, a designation I don't envision it losing for a long, long time. Is it a classic? Yes (And don't forget that the first 33 essays in this series are now available in book form!) (less) | Notes are private!
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Mar 27, 2009
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| 0451527402
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| 3.35
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| Sep 01, 1999
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Mar 24, 2009
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| 0312330871
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| 4.17
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| May 03, 2004
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| 0141185465
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| 3.83
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| 1947
| Nov 01, 2000
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| 1594561869
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| 4.05
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| Nov 1846
| Feb 02, 2004
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