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

Shel’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

I dunno Dan, you may have a future as a Jewish Mother. ;)

I'm reading it on my Kindle, which allows me to make highlights and take notes. 'Tis a beautiful little sliver of personal technology, this thing.

More food for thought in the opening chapters.

Lily

She began to cut the pages of a novel, tranquilly studying her prey through downcast lashes while she organized a method of attack. ... When the tea came he watched her in silent fascination while her hands flitted above the tray, looking miraculously fine and slender in contrast to the coarse china and lumpy bread.

I like this bit from my intro: "Lily Bart is as beautifully conceived, in her way, as the society in which and against she loses herself. Up to a point, she is perfectly equipped to play a lead part in the social gaming. No woman in her set is more adept at arranging herself in graceful and inviting postures... she possesses a fine dramatic instinct and "a vivid plastic sense"... Lily always knows the real from the histrionic, and she always hangs on to at least a portion of her real self. This is a main reason why, however exasperated one may become with her, one cares about Lily Bart, profoundly."

Selden

As a spectator, he had always enjoyed Lily Bart; and his course lay so far out of her orbit that it amused him to be drawn for a moment into the sudden intimacy which her proposal implied.

Spectator, indeed.

"The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth" --Ecclesiastes 7:4

Henry James once implored Edith Wharton to "Do New York! The 1st-hand account is precious."

Is there anyone else who does this New York quite like her?

Do not underestimate Wharton. This is no comedy of manners. She has a wit just as sharp and pointed as Austen.

The overarching themes of the book, as I see it, include (but are certainly not limited to)

Theatricality - it could be said that nothing much actually happens in the book, but as you read scenes unfolding, they are almost like blocked out scenes that should unfold on a stage. Visual language.

It turns out Wharton had recent, unsuccessful brushes with the theater around the time this book was written. There is a clear connection, the intro says, between what she thought of theater in America - that it was frivolous, pointless and ridiculous, a costume play - and the "insipid histrionics" of the New Yorkers Wharton portrays.

Old Money and New Money - There still exists something of a... division between those with old money and new money. In this novel Wharton is exposing both the tension and the mingling of these two groups of people.

Marriage - It wouldn't be a Wharton novel without marriage. Lily is masterful, beautiful, but not quite masterful enough to catch the right husband - I would posit because she is too much herself, like other Wharton women. She puts a toe or two outside the incredibly rigid lines drawn for her, and pays dearly.

Well, when you put it that way, now I feel badly. I'll repost. Apologies, everyone.

Copious notes? Oh man. It's like being in school again. :)

The great thing about reading a book for discussion is how much more attention I pay to what's going on.

Hope more people join in, etc.

Really, it's no big deal. I thought that if 7 people (the number who voted for it) would have joined the discussion we'd have a pretty good one, but I understand how schedules work, life gets away from us, etc. I only got 3/4 of the way through Of Human Bondage when we discussed it on MySpace because of time limitations.

I just think it's kind of a shame we've lost whatever it is we had before, over on MySpace (though we were losing it on MySpace too).

I don't know what happened - if the slowdown was inevitable, or if there is something about GoodReads that doesn't invite conversation, or maybe it's just that we're all talked out already.

I deleted it. It really was just me talking to myself for about a week, only one person posted to say that they had read it once, honestly, interest was just too low to keep going.

If interest picks up again maybe we can make it the October book?

And patriarchal.

Thanks, Patrick. It will probably never see the light of day but damn do I have some great trusted readers!

Guys, I think I'm going to retire this thread until interest or traffic picks up again.

Not because I have some kind of ego issue with the size of our little group, but because I would rather see more people in here, maybe some new blood, too...

I don't really know what to do about the interest level in the group as a whole other than try to generate content, and that doesn't seem to really be working.

So am I like a conversation killer or something?

Too much in one post?

Or do you all not share my enthusiasm for Mr. Anderson?

These signs are in England (I'm pretty sure)... That last place is where the birthday party is going to be. And the pig from hell will be roasted on a nuclear spit, nail polish and all.

I feel the same way about Shakespeare, Martyn.

I mean the guy was bawdy, and funny, as hell. No one could hurl an insult like him. And people are so freakin' serious about the rhythm and cadence and blah blah blah all the time. SO boring.

I think with Poe it's more that I feel like I get him better. I don't know if it's an American thing, or because he's just more accessible.

With Joyce I always have this feeling that I'm going to say something so "wrong" about his work... probably just scars I bear from being in an online group about Joyce years and years ago, full of humorless academics.

Martyn wrote: "Indeed. Bernice is grand!

What are you opinions of Poe? I really did mean that when I said he's the America's Shakespeare."

We had a lot of fun discussing the story. I think we felt more "ok" with discussing Poe than Joyce, actually. Joyce is such an undisputed master it's kind of hard not to look at it with wide eyes and not know where to begin.

So, the very first thing I thought about was this: is naked, undirected ambition as American as... hospitality is Irish?

And, the essential question of the story- which comes first, chicken or egg? Given all of the accidents that can befall a chicken, as we are told, it's amazing that a chicken grows to be a hen capable of producing a fertilized egg with a surviving rooster. Is this also what success is? An accident, made out of grotesque genetic ambition accidents? Is the narrator's family a casualty of this?

(But then I thought, I need to come up with a coherent set of thoughts on this story. (I am not a very good discussion leader, I know I need to work on it.))

"It was not written for you." is repeated twice in the same paragraph about "literature" around having a profitable chicken farm.

It seems to me that the entire first half of the story is really about natural selection - social darwinism as it relates to the disastrous effect of misplaced ambition in "country folk" who should simply be happy with their place in life, and natural selection of the chickens and grotesques kept by the father. Did anyone else see this?

Also, the eggs seem to represent the hatching of hare-brained schemes, like the one to make the restaurant a place of entertainment: "There was something pre-natal about the way eggs kept themselves connected with the development of his idea. At any rate an egg ruined his new impulse in life."

I found the father so pitiable and sad in that scene with Joe Kane - he may have had a bit of the showman, but not enough, certainly.

These are opening thoughts I had. Social Darwinism. Natural selection. Misplaced ambition.

Most teenagers I know--and they're a relatively sheltered bunch in my suburban private school--are a curious blend of jaded naivete. They know far more about the world than I did at their age--especially at 14 and 15--but they have no experience against which to judge the world, and so their views of the world are, necessarily, incomplete. Which is good, because they're only 14 or 15. The really bright kids--my AP students--are brilliant and love reading. I assigned Beowulf and Jane Eyre for summer reading and they ate them up, especially Bronte (though some of them loved Beowulf as well).

Great observation, Swanny. I think you're more in touch with that world than just about anyone here.

Jaded naivete. That about sums it up, even for me, if I look back at my teenage years. I recall having a lot of grown-up crap to deal with (some self-imposed, some not) but nothing to judge it against - is this good, bad? I didn't know and wouldn't have asked my parents if you had strapped me to a Clockwork Orange-style chair.

I escaped into books and music - which are better places to go than where other kids I knew went, places I flirted with but decided ultimately that being thrown in jail was not going to be good for the college apps.

I wonder if course work in "English" has changed at the college level. (Or maybe majoring in English these days no longer includes Literature courses?)

I had one semester with almost 30 novels... 17 in one class alone (African Lit)...10 novels in Victorian Lit... and graduate level literary criticism, back when I was considering an academic career. Thankfully I had a night job.

Oddly, it was probably my favorite semester in school.

I think she might switch her major, don't you? To something less demanding...

I hope you guys are psyched for House of Mirth.

Take a social convention. Any convention. Turn it on its head.

"Society is a revolving body which is apt to be judged according to its place in each man’s heaven; and at present it was turning its illuminated face to Lily."

Can't wait to start!

Oh, I'm sorry, did you Virgos expect to be let off the hook?

Happy Birthday to Hugh, Bonita and Brian, whose birthdays were/will be on the 1st, 7th and 10th, respectively.

And you thought you would get out from under my watchful MySpace eye. I can spot that little guy with the hat and blowy thingy from a mile away.

Hope you had/have a wonderful birthday...!

Then we can expect you to join us, of course. :)