The Blogg

Henry James likes to stuff as many clauses, appositives, interjections and the like into each sentence as is possible, which makes reading and understanding his text a chore. I have been accused of over-using commas myself, but I could not begin to compare with this text. See, for example, two sentences taken from early in the book when I was especially frustrated.

The woman in the world least formed by nature, as she was quite aware, for duplicities and labyrinths, she found herself dedicated to personal subtlety by a new set of circumstances, above all by a new personal relation; had now in fact to recognize that an education in the occult — she could scarce say what to call it — had begun for her the day she left New York with Mildred. She had come on from Boston for that purpose; had seen little of the girl — or rather had seen her but briefly, for Mrs. Stringham, when she saw anything at all, saw much, saw everything — before accepting her proposal; and had accordingly placed herself, by her act, in a boat that she more and more estimated as, humanly speaking, of the biggest, though likewise, no doubt, in many ways, by reason of its size, of the safest.

Of course, the differences between my English and idioms and Mr. James’s makes this worse. It was not uncommon for me to read a paragraph (which might span several pages) and find that while I had been lexically scanning the text, I had no idea what I had just read. This was less of a problem than might be expected because many pages go by without anything of importance happening or being said. A long story almost exclusively about interpersonal relationships can be enjoyable if the characters are interesting, but I did not find this to be the case.

I do appreciate that James took two effective and unusual risks. First, at least half of the major characters, with whom the reader would be inclined to sympathize, can be quite monstrous. Second, while I was excited just to reach the end, the ambiguous last paragraph leaves much to think about. In spite of these features, I believe I will be putting off The Ambassadors for some time.

The writing is fine and the plot interesting, but I enjoyed this more as an illustration of life in a colonial, apartheidic regime than as a novel. I am always amazed when I realize how recently institutionalized discrimination has been the norm, both in the United States and abroad. While most of Forster’s British characters are unabashedly prejudiced against native Indians, even the author reveals what I presume to be his own less offensive stereotypes in expository sections. Most characters in the book are one-dimensional, which is a shame. Surely it could have better pointed the reader toward his own biases if we could see any Anglo-Indians other than Miss Quested, Mrs. Moore, and Mr. Fielding as sympathetic. I do appreciate the fact that no perspectives of Indian women are given, nor are any even named. Perhaps this was not intentional, but it nicely symbolizes the purdah system. I had much difficulty understanding what actually happened in the story’s climactic moment. Apparently critics see it as a symbol for the shock of Western minds understanding Hindu philosophy, but I do not see that at all in the text.

For a time I enjoyed the rambling, conversational prose of Henderson The Rain King as a sort of stream-of-consciousness-lite, but it eventually became annoying as the narrator would jump to past events that may have not been previously discussed to draw analogies with his current situation. This and the philosophical tone of much of the dialogue and reflection make the non-narrative parts of the story difficult to follow. I cannot shake the feeling that Bellow has some powerful thesis about life, love, personality, suffering, and the relationship between man and beast. Unfortunately, I cannot reconcile Henderson’s character with my own and am at a loss to explain the understanding that he finally seems to gain. If I am going to follow a man into deep Africa and catastrophe, I’ll take “the horror, the horror” over “I want, I want, I want”.

I described the U. S. A. trilogy as more a collection of mostly unrelated narratives than my conception of a novel, but I should have saved that description for Winesburg, Ohio, which is a collection of short stories about the inhabitants of a small town. While dos Passos usually followed his subjects through enough of their lives to develop significant characterizations, we see only a few minutes or a day in the lives of most of Sherwood Anderson’s characters. While the people are not unimportant, this is more a book of events and moments in time. Some of the individual stories are quite captivating, but most did not interest me.

Through much of Anathem I believed that Stephenson had fallen into the trap of many authors of speculative fiction do: creating a fantastically rich setting but a relatively uninteresting plot. I would probably have been happy to read 1000 pages of exposition of the Mathic world. As I continued, however, the plot drew me in, and I ended up reading the last 400 pages or so in the span of two days.

Stephenson writes in a language that is primarily English, but includes a smattering of invented words for which English ones would have been perfectly suited. I generally tend to despise this kind of behavior, but at least he helps the reader out by including a glossary and often using words that are suggestive of their English near-synonyms. At times this does get way too cute for my taste: “Reticulum: (1) When not capitalized, a [network] formed by the interconnection of two or more smaller [networks]. (2) When capitalized, the largest reticulum, joining together the preponderance of all [networks] in the world. Sometimes abbreviated to Ret.” Fortunately, it is eventually revealed that all of this is quite intentional and important to the story.

The book is dense with mathematics, physics, and philosophy presented through dialogs between characters. I find all of these topics enjoyable, but the explanations are at times ham-handed with multiple analogies to explain something that I had groked pages earlier. Although I have seen him do so well elsewhere, Stephenson does not seem to be as comfortable or competent writing about relationships and romance as he is technical details. This is not a book that has much emotional impact, but it is a damn interesting workout for the mind. Most of the technical content seems correct / plausible to my mind, but I find the explanations regarding oxygen near the end wholly unsatisfactory. (Those who have read it will likely know to what I am referring, while those who have not should not find anything spoiled.)

At first I intended to write that this was my least favorite Stephenson work, though still very good by other standards. Now that I have completed it and seen how everything fits together, I am not so sure that it does not belong to the same class as Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon.

It was with some trepidation that I followed The 42nd Parallel with the remaining two books in the series. To make the task a bit less onerous, I stopped reading the “Camera Eye” sections entirely and only skimmed through the “Newsreel” chapters. Dos Passos took up a new frustrating habit of inserting paragraph breaks seemingly arbitrarily in the middle of sentences. I am sure there was some poetic purpose behind this, but its effect was to remove any interest I may have had in reading something else “artistic” in the near future. The cast of disparate characters fractured enough over the rest of the series that by the time I reached a chapter about some particular character I had forgotten entirely which of the stories thus far applied to them. As I expected, there was nothing to eventually tie the stories together. Both books end around momentous events — the signing of the Treaty of Versailles and the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, but these cannot be seen as real resolution since most of the characters are involved peripherally or not at all.

I can say a few good things about the books. They have indeed painted a broad picture of life in the United States in the first 30 years of the 20th Century. I learned more about the socialist movements during those times than in any study of history, and have seen more clearly how the transfer from government by/for/of the people to government by/for/of the corporations was already well underway before even my grandparents were born. In the one Camera Eye that I did read carefully after the fact, Dos Passos wonderfully turns around the anti-immigrant sentiment that fueled the Red Scare to note that it was the men who sailed from distant shores to find a land where all men were created equal who were Americans in spirit:

America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have turned our language inside out who have taken the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul
their hired men sit on the judge’s bench they sit back with their feet on the tables under the dome of the State House they are ignorant of our beliefs they have the dollars the guns the armed forces the powerplants
they have built the electricchair and hired the executioner to throw the switch
all right we are two nations
America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp and turned our pleasant cities into slums and sweated the wealth out of our people and when they want to they hire the executioner to throw the switch
…
we stand defeated America

(Lack of punctuation, capitalization, and sensible structure preserved in case you somehow find it meaningful.) Now, time to pick up a book from someone who knows how to tell a story.

I want to appreciate stream of consciousness writing, but I cannot find any artistic merit in it. Thankfully, John Dos Passos restricts that style to certain short sections of The 42nd Parallel, 27 mini-chapters intended to give a broader perspective than those of the expository characters. Perhaps for other readers it serves that purpose. The narrative is also interspersed with 19 “newsreels”, in which he cuts short phrases from the headlines of various contemporary news stories. Unfortunately, for a reader far removed from the time in which these events took place there is rarely enough detail to have more than guess at what is actually happening. I do enjoy the stories of Mac, Janey, J.Ward, Eleanor, and Charley, but even here Dos Passos manages to annoy by being cute with language, inventing his own compound words with no discernible rhyme or reason for their selection. Each of the narratives are interesting in their own right, but while a few of the main characters do have chance encounters there is no overarching plot holding them together. This is almost more like a collection of short stories written to together paint a picture of American life at the beginning of the 20th century than a traditional novel. I cannot say that this is among my favorite reads, but it has shown enough to convince me to give 1919 a try.

It is surprisingly enjoyable to read a novel about places you have been (Reading, Harrisburg, Allentown, Philadelphia), events you have attended (the annual Lehigh-Lafayette football game), and in general the culture in which you have lived. Appointment in Samarra is a bit like The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter in that the characters and relationships matter much more than the plot, even though three major events within 48 hours propel the book. If this were solely a book about Julian’s self destruction, there would be no need for chapters told from the perspective of Al Grecco, Lute Fliegler, and so forth. Yet these are important to the narrative, for the insights they give us into the variety of lives lived in Gibbsville and the collective societal climate. O’Hara seems to have a gift for the way people think and talk about each other in private. This was not one of the best novels that I have read recently, but it was one of the most enjoyable. I must admit that I care for the Maugham quote from which the novel takes its name more than the book itself.