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July 11
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New comment on Grant's review of
Loving
(see all 5 comments)
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July 10
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Grant
gave
 
to:
Loving (Paperback)
by Henry Green
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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Grant said:
"It’s always fascinating to read a book and be at odds with other critics. The questions span from “Am I simply the wrong reader for this book?” to “Do I have too many kids and soccer games going on to thoughtfully assess this book?” to “D...more
It’s always fascinating to read a book and be at odds with other critics. The questions span from “Am I simply the wrong reader for this book?” to “Do I have too many kids and soccer games going on to thoughtfully assess this book?” to “Did these critics have too many damn kids and activities to decently evaluate the book?”
Elizabeth Bowen said that Henry Green’s novels “reproduce, as few English novels do, the actual sensations of living.”
W.H. Auden called him the finest living English novelist.
Francine Prose put Loving on her list of “Books to Be Read Immediately.”
John Updike praises Green for “this surrender of self, this submersion of opinions and personality in the intensity of witnessing ‘life itself.’”
It’s this consistent emphasis on “reproduction” and “objectivity” that troubles me. Green is too frequently a stenographer when I want him to be an author.
Sure the dialogue is, well, realistic, true to life, etc., but it doesn’t hold nearly the same subtext as, say, Hemingway, who also privileged the author as an objective witness. In fact, the reason Hemingway reads better than Green, and is more illuminating, is because he never truly dared to actually surrender himself (thank God!).
Henry Green said that he aimed to “create ‘life’ which does not eat, procreate, or drink, but which can live in people who are alive.” Updike praises Green as a “saint of the mundane,” which is unfortunately accurate: Green bathes in the mundane, breathes the mundane, eats the mundane—and procreates in the mundane. In fact, my reading experience was so mundane that I kept getting distracted by the dishes, the laundry, and the bills, but not by any of the big life questions and thoughts I like to read for.
Updike writes that Green’s “observations of the world appear as devoid of prejudice and preconception as a child’s.” I only wish he could have presented a scene from a child’s point of view, with the jarring perspective that children so often provide simply because they are not “saints of mundane,” but steeped in the kind of authorial personality that continually demands interpretation and reinterpretation.
I do agree with one of Updike’s comments. He calls Green’s novels “photographs of a vanished England,” which is my overwhelming response to Loving. I felt as if I were walking through an odd sort of literary museum, observing some of the interesting details of class differences in England, eavesdropping, but never quite experiencing the high points of dramatic intrigue, a story that is shaped with a point of view—the fundamental characteristics of a meaningful narrative.
I’m sure that Green’s novels served a more forceful and urgent purpose in the era he wrote them (from approximately 1920 to 1950), and he’s a capable author in certain ways. He does create a polyphony of voices in the novel, so that life sounds like a hammering dialogue of competing needs. He’s just not the stylist I desire—or more accurately, he doesn’t convey the necessary transmutation that defines art. I don’t want novelists to just be witnesses, after all—the idea of aspiring to pure and faithful mimesis in a literal sense was essentially exhausted by Zola. Novelists need personality because they need a point of view.
But then again, I might be the wrong reader for Henry Green. Or I was too distracted by things like school auctions to give him his proper due....less
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May 12
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Grant
gave
to:
Skid (Pitt Poetry Series)
by Dean Young
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in May, 2008
Grant said:
"Dean Young is an easy poet for me to like. His congenital, sometimes twisted, joie de vivre leaps off the page. He’s a prankster, a Dadaist, a writer whose words and images juke, jab, dash, pirouette, and jump—just when you think you know where o...more
Dean Young is an easy poet for me to like. His congenital, sometimes twisted, joie de vivre leaps off the page. He’s a prankster, a Dadaist, a writer whose words and images juke, jab, dash, pirouette, and jump—just when you think you know where one of his poems is going, it changes course like a dare.
He’s one of the few writers who can surprise with each phrase, if not each word, tossing coarseness into a highbrow thought, switching from the sanguine to the lugubrious in a snap of the fingers. He rarely settles for a single note in his poems, in fact, but allows a playful, discordant, dreamy contention of words to define his universe.
You could read Young’s poems as a series of ornery winks, but he’s really trying to find a way to balance himself in this precarious universe, these precarious systems of meanings, whether he’s grasping on to Lorca or Love. His poems, which can be erudite, don’t lend themselves to academic essays—they’re not supposed to be illuminating as much as they are meant to be felt.
A friend of mine says that Young needs to edit himself more, to pause a bit, not trust his instincts so much. That could be true, but I think of what is lost with such restraint rather than what is gained with his recklessness. I don’t think Young is questing after the perfect poem, after all. He doesn’t want to be anthologized, even if he was nominated for the Pulitzer a couple years back.
Within all of Young’s shim sham—within all of his posturing even—there is a fundamental sadness, a fundamental pondering that grounds everything, as he asks ye’ olde question, ‘What is the meaning of life?’
But we can do no more than pass through
these rooms and their sudden chills
where once a plea was entered almost
unintentionally that seemed at last
to reveal ourselves to ourselves,
immaculate, bereft, deserving to be found.
His opening quote for Skid gives a macabre, yet funny tone to all that follows: “The main thing is not to be dead.” True, but Young’s poetry makes me think there’s more. Young is a romantic who has no business trusting romanticism. He’s somehow a buoyant tragedian, a believer who’s trying to figure out why he believes. It’s the “trying to figure out” that seems much more important than the “not being dead” in the end....less
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New comment on Evan's review of
Shortcomings
(see all 3 comments)
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March 07
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Grant
gave
to:
Shortcomings (Hardcover)
by Adrian Tomine
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in February, 2008
Grant said:
"I've never been a comic book guy. Perhaps I was brainwashed by trappings of "high culture," the elite traditions of an English major, or perhaps I just never trusted anything that wasn't so dense with words that it had to provide deeper mea...more
I've never been a comic book guy. Perhaps I was brainwashed by trappings of "high culture," the elite traditions of an English major, or perhaps I just never trusted anything that wasn't so dense with words that it had to provide deeper meaning.
When I was waiting tables way back in the early '90s, a scrubby cook who looked as if he'd walked straight out of a comic book—bushy red hair, skin and bones, a hopeless music nerd—gave me a wadded-up copy of some stuff by Adrian Tomine (jeepers, he must have been 18 or 19 then). I read it and thought it was great, unlike any other cartoonist I'd read, a poet of small, lonely moments, a minimalist who could fill the mundane with meaning.
I Xeroxed that wadded-up cartoon and never forgot Tomine's name, so I've taken pleasure in watching his rise in stature.
I recently read Shortcomings and thought, in short, that it packed as much punch as any novel I've read. Although graphic novels might not be able to offer the depth and texture of a classic like Anna Karenina, they certainly match a short story or a film's ability to excavate and reveal meaning in the tiny moments of life.
In fact, the graphic novel probably suffers from its comparisons to a novel. It's more like a film—I read Shortcomings in about an hour and a half and felt like I'd seen a film when I put the book down. His panels combe the precision of line drawings with the gentle pacing of art-house film. The facial expressions and gestures are subtle, and his dialogue is sharp and true whether he's portraying a squabble in a dive bar or the negotiations that precede a kiss.
The main character, Ben Tanaka, is struggling with love and self—as an Asian-American, but primarily as a human being. Tanaka, a 30-year-old movie theater manager in Berkeley, treats his girlfriend Miko poorly, alternating between bitter criticism and sullen withdrawal. She's a beauty, but he doesn't seem to realize this, and takes her for granted—like many men, unable to figure out that his sour, caustic comments aren't appealing.
After tolerating his increasingly churlish behavior for too long, and then discovering his all-white porn stash, Miko suggests they "take some time off" and moves to New York City.
Ben is crushed but in time he begins to pursue a series of blondes. Following a failed attempt to kiss the artsy punk girl who takes tickets at his movie theater, he has a brief affair with a bisexual graduate student who soon dumps him with the sendoff, "I could be totally brutally honest about why I'm doing this, but I'm going to restrain myself because I'm not sure you'd ever recover."
Shaken, Ben flies to New York City, where, spying on his own girlfriend, he discovers that she has been sleeping with a white man.
Yes, it's time for Ben to grow up, to view himself through a different lens, to think about being less negative and more appealing—but we know he's not going to do this for a good, long while. Ben has too many "shortcomings."
Beyond his"weird self-hatred issues" and "relentless negativity" that Miko points out to him, he has a pathological fear of change. Tomine depicts these flaws almost too faithfully in Ben's consistently sullen expression, which stands out all the more among the other characters' precisely inflected faces.
Ben does have a half-redeeming friendship with Alice, a serial-dating Korean dyke who is something of a narcissist and a hypocrite herself. And he has his tender moments. But he seems consistently clueless about his many flaws.
You might say that Ben is the perfect character for a an adolescent reader, if only because he's trapped in the shortcomings of his own adolescence. ...less
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Grant
gave
to:
The Comfort of Strangers (Paperback)
by Ian McEwan
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in March, 2008
Grant said:
"I read The Comfort of Strangers as part of my exploration of travel/expat fiction. I'm interested in the overwhelming tendency of these novels to put the main character in peril simply because he or she is abroad. The inherent premise of the "ge...more
I read The Comfort of Strangers as part of my exploration of travel/expat fiction. I'm interested in the overwhelming tendency of these novels to put the main character in peril simply because he or she is abroad. The inherent premise of the "genre" is that one somehow loses an important bit of equilibrium when traveling, or that a new country's otherness is fundamentally threatening—so the characters seesaw back and forth between these two antagonistic forces.
The Comfort of Strangers is a textbook case for this genre. A couple on holiday, Colin and Mary, the force of their love and affection on the wane, yet eddying to and fro as with the tide, find themselves being led by a local who plans to harm them.
The duty of an author in these novels is to make sure the characters get lost—the winding streets of a place representing the winding streets of their souls. There's an idea of a destination, but it can't be reached. Indeed, McEwan punishes his characters, making them traipse through a city that must be Venice (the city is unnamed), in search of food when the restaurants have closed. The city is free from traffic and other signs of modern living, suggesting an older world, or a deeper and less fathomable one in the case of human desires.
To make matters worse, they've forgotten to bring their map along—of course! They are hapless in their capriciousness.
The reader becomes immersed in the characters' hunger, their need for a few simple bites of food and a drink of water becoming a quest, as if they were walking across a desert. The fact that they're on holiday—and bad things aren't supposed to happen to you when you're on vacation, right?—allows them to drift in aimlessness, to pause and try to figure out where they are in their disorientation (Colin even looks to the sun at one point to guide them in their treks, as if he's out in the wilderness instead of a city).
The reader feels their passivity, their inability to take control of their environment, which makes them vulnerable. This is essentially the foundation of the travel novel: the characters have lost their moorings in this new, strange land, so birds of prey and vultures circle above them the minute they step out of their hotel.
Robert is such a bird. He takes them under his arm—literally—and under the auspices of finding them nourishment, guides them into his strange lair that he shares with his inscrutably submissive wife, Caroline.
What's interesting in McEwan's narration is his lack of explanation. He doesn't probe deeply into any character, so their motivations, not to mention the essence of who they are, remain a mystery.
This approach has both good and bad effects. On the good side, it allows McEwan to keep the action moving. For example, the second time Colin and Mary encounter Robert, they are near their hotel, and given the fact that they don't particularly like him and only want to rest and get something to eat, one wouldn't think they would go along with him. They do, however, and the reader is forced to accept their bad decision—to trust that being on holiday has made them so passively desultory that they will go wherever a hand guides them.
The lack of explanation keeps the novel cloaked with mystery. How can we possibly understand the cruel perversities of Robert and Caroline except as living metaphors of strangeness? They are others in extremis. How can we even understand Colin and Mary? McEwan doesn't allow it. Colin's passivity can even be interpreted as a strange, perhaps unconscious complicity in Robert and Caroline's murderous scheme. Does he allow the events to occur, as Robert would have us believe? Is Colin simply a naive innocent?
McEwan's insistence on gliding on the surface of actions and characters might work well to create suspense, but in the end, it limits the novel. It's impossible to understand the characters beyond the fact that they're living relatively unexamined, shallow lives (because of laziness of a holiday?) and sleepwalk into their demise.
To be fair, McEwan does provide signals of the characters' inner states. They revert to a sort of childhood, sleeping in the afternoon, lacking the energy or motivation to tidy their hotel room, becoming dependent on their hotel maid: “They came to depend on her and grew lazy with their possessions. They became incapable of looking after one another.”
Like children, they're susceptible to trusting the wrong person....less
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Grant
gave
to:
Burning the Days: Recollection (Paperback)
by James Salter
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in February, 2008
Grant said:
"Well, I'm a bit biased since I like Salter's short stories so much. This was the book I read when I had pneumonia, and it was a good one to fade in and out of. I find that I don't have to concentrate so much with memoirs or biographies, but just pay...more
Well, I'm a bit biased since I like Salter's short stories so much. This was the book I read when I had pneumonia, and it was a good one to fade in and out of. I find that I don't have to concentrate so much with memoirs or biographies, but just pay attention to the juicy parts--and Salter could have supplied more juicy parts given the number of affairs he hinted at.
The thing that fascinates me about Salter is that he was in the military, even if it was sort of an accident. He's such a sensitive, elegant guy that I can't imagine him being the slightist bit brutish or macho. Perhaps the military gave him the discipline to "wrestle with words" as he puts it.
Anyway, there are some nice moments of Salter's elliptical, imagistic prose. As with most memoirs of this sort, it's worth reading if you're a fan....less
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New comment on Grant's review of
Burning the Days: Recollection
(see all 7 comments)
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February 19
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New comment on Grant's review of
The Sleepwalkers
(see all 5 comments)
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