Shel’s Comments (group member since Mar 05, 2009)

Shel’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

And when, pray tell, will the novelist of the year be visiting Chicago?

I'll be there next year.

I haven't given up... I've just been a partying maniac this weekend. I will get back to it on Tuesday when the buzz wears off. ;)

No, I'm kidding. I do have company this weekend, though.

This would have fallen into a "comedy of manners" as it was commonly referred to at the time. But it turns the conventional expectations of that kind of novel on its head.

It was new enough to have a woman writing novels of any sort other than bodice rippers.

I will agree with you on that count but I guess I feel like there is a rhythm to it, that way, that is similar to the rhythm of life. Boring, with hot spots.

For Whom The Bell Tolls -- Ernest Hemingway

(You know, I would love to read a Hemingway with you people one day.)

Right now I'm re-reading Dracula for Infinite Summer.

I love that book.

So far I think that the main difference is that I'm picking up more on the social issues in the book.

I mean, I understood the sexual politics, the xenophobia, the drug addiction, the fall of the Western Empire stuff when I was in college the first time around.

But I don't think I understood what I know from the first chapter -- Jonathan Harker, in what appears to be a feeble-minded submissiveness to his circumstances, actually represents the naivete of the scientific method. Of Western reliance on "observation" and the dismissal of "superstition." The deliberate turning away from the magical, the superstitious.

He only believes what he observes and even then doesn't have much to say about that, other than he has a strong sense of foreboding.

I read Catcher In The Rye recently. Also, Lolita.

Catcher is quite a different book this time around. The first time around I was busy trying to figure out what was going on, and relating to Holden's everyone's-a-phony thing. The whole brother dying trauma thing didn't connect for me quite as much.

This time I was reading it more for the writing itself and the family drama side of it - how we are drawn into his world, not whether or not I bought into the vision.

I read Franny & Zooey right before and think it's a far superior work, actually.

Who was it that told me Salinger has been writing all this time and hiding it from the world. I forget.

I read Lolita for the first time when I was in college. It was an academic exercise in puzzle solving for me at the time. I remember being repulsed by the idea but no strong visceral reaction, really.

This time around, I have a daughter who is 10. Some of the passages were nauseating. But I also read it for the skill of the art itself. It is such a tightly woven tale.

These days, when I revisit a book -- and when I read it for the first time -- one of the major things I'm looking for is craft, particularly if the book was recommended by someone I respect. That's why my to-read shelf reads like a list of what people here are reading. It is a list of what people in our group read.

You know what's striking me as I read?

These people have all this freedom. But how claustrophobic it feels!

(I'm beginning to feel genuinely sorry for the men in this book.)

I can't think of a weird place.

I read everywhere when I was a kid, there is no one place I remember - maybe because we lived in so many different homes - I moved almost every year of my life from the age of 5 to the age of ... hmm... 15? Yeah, just about, with one or two 2-year stints.

I do remember that I used to read out loud, all the time, just to annoy my brother. We read in the same room - me in some kind of yellow wicker rocking/easy chair kind of thing, my brother on the floor: "Moooom, can you please tell Shelby to read to herself?"

I even read comic books out loud. God, that used to piss him off.

Mrs. Peniston. Ah, Mrs. Peniston. This is where we get to see some of Wharton's pointed wit and sarcasm.

I don't believe we are meant to hate these characters - they simply are what they are, a product of what surrounds them, and Edith is pulling back the curtain.

I sometimes wonder if the point is not to show those of us who "live like pigs" that their existence is not ideal, either. Kind of like the Oprah show with Whitney (which I did not see) or Robin Givens?

I love this characterization of her:

She belonged to the class of old New Yorkers who have always lived well, dressed expensively, and done little else; and to these inherited obligations Mrs. Peniston faithfully conformed. She had always been a looker-on at life, and her mind resembled one of those little mirrors which her Dutch ancestors were accustomed to affix to their upper windows, so that from the depths of an impenetrable domesticity they might see what was happening in the street.

So we have a few things happening here. First, that she is a member of one of the older Dutch families, old money, old New York. Second, that her mind is nothing but a reflection of life, seen from a distance, and third, her life is this way because she can afford it, from the caverns of her old, gorgeous house.

I love every word. We don't find out what Mrs. Peniston looks like but we know her type. Or at least, I do. I live around a whole bunch of people with mirrors on their gates, gates which serve absolutely no purpose other than to establish that a home rests here large enough to require... a gate.

Of her husband's death we are told it is "a remote event -- which appeared to dwell in her memory chiefly as a dividing point in the personal reminiscences that formed the staple of her conversation."

OK, it's time to move things forward. It's time to talk about Daddy and Mumsy.

Wharton paints a picture that is not totally unsympathetic to either parent, but it seems as though Lily's mother is a devouring monster of a person, and her father is barely a human being to her.

Once her father announces their financial ruin, "In the dark hours that followed, that awful fact overshadowed even her father's slow and difficult dying. To his wife he no longer counted: he had become extinct when he ceased to fill his purpose...the fact that he was unconscious... made him even more of a stranger than in the nursery days when he had never come home til after dark. She [Lily:] seemed always to have seen him through a blur -- first of sleepiness, then of distance and indifference -- and now the fog had thickened till he was almost indistinguishable. ... Every look and act of Mrs. Bart's seemed to say: "You are sorry for him now -- but you will feel differently when you see what he has done to us.""

Wow. What a statement. How'd you like to be married to her?

As to Lily's feelings about her mother, I thought they were sort of... well, a testament to the time. Meh, neither here nor there. Mrs. Bart is a complete product of her time and circumstance: Lily "was secretely ashamed of her mother's crude passion for money" and believes that Lily's looks are what will save Lily - and her. But "After two years of hungry roaming Mrs. Bart had died -- died of a deep disgust. She had hated dinginess, and it was her fate to be dingy. Her visions of a brilliant marriage for Lily had faded after the first year."

To Mrs. Bart there is living the way she lives, and there is "living like a pig." There seems to be very little in between.

The end of Chapter 4 or 5 (look, it's a Kindle) contains this stunning little passage about Lily clawing her way out of "dinginess":

Ah, no -- she was too intelligent not to be honest with herself. She knew that she hated dinginess as much as her mother had hated it, and to her last breath she meant to fight against it, dragging herself up again and again above its flood till she gained the bright pinnacle of success which presented such a slippery surface to her clutch.

The Pit and the Pendulum - Edgar Allan Poe (ok. not a novel. but a short story!)

I was about to say... how can we give someone as dear and wonderful as Patty a hard time about anything?

Neil wrote: "I'm familiar enough with many of the local trails that I have been known to read while hiking, which has been known to offend others on the trail."

If I did that I'd face plant into the book about every ten seconds. How do you not fall?

Antonia Saw the Oryx First, by Maria Thomas.

And then, Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood

(if I'm allowed consecutive entries)

HOW did I miss this song. Thank you!

More HoM thoughts soon. Once I get my brain installed.

Happy birthday, Martyn and Jonathan!

I'm reading it on my Kindle.

I can create highlights *and* make notes... fancy schmancy.

I think one of the points Wharton is trying to make with Lily is that her theatricality, so thoroughly ingrained, is not in tune in any way with what she wants or who she is, but she cannot escape her own upbringing. This gets more interesting by Chapters 4/5.

Selden is, I think, Wharton's more true eye, if a cataracted, bitter one, on the society she is writing about. Only someone from the outside looking in would be able to see it for what it is. Someone who could traverse worlds, who would have seen what life was like outside the gilded cage.

Selden is dangerous for her. Literally - without giving anything away:

It was rather that he had preserved a certain social detachment, a happy air of viewing the show objectively, of having points of contact outside the great gilt cage in which they were all huddled for the mob to gape at. How alluring the world outside the cage appeared to Lily, as she heard its door clang on her! In reality, as she knew, the door never clanged: it stood always open; but most of the captives were like flies in a bottle, and having once flown in, could never regain their freedom. It was Selden's distinction that he had never forgotten the way out.

That was his secret way of readjusting her vision.

Schedule

Book One
Chapters 1-5: through the 27th
Chapters 6-10: Sept. 28-Oct 4
Chapters 11-15: Oct. 4-11

Book Two
Chapters 1-5: Oct 12-18
Chapters 6-10: Oct 19-25
Chapters 11-14: Oct. 26-Nov 1*

(*Halloween is one of my favorite holidays... so I might wrap it up early, depending...)

Will do. Just have to dig it all up.