Friday, December 30, 2011

Review: THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by Carson McCullers

McCullers was just 22 when this first novel was published in 1940. It centers on the relationships between a lonely deaf-mute, John Singer, and four other characters living in a small Georgia town in the 1930s. These are Mick Kelly, a sensitive, adolescent white girl; aged Dr. Copeland, the hurt and frustrated Negro; Jake Blount, a nervous and unbalanced whiskey-head; and Biff Brannon, whose consciousness is one mass of timid bewilderment.  All these characters and many more feel that the deaf mute alone understands them; they assail his deaf ears with their troubles and hopes, thereby revealing their intense loneliness and denied capacity for living. When the deaf mute's friend dies in an insane asylum, he commits suicide, and act which deprives the confessional of its priest.  The lives of Miss McCullers' characters are resolved thus:  Mick Kelly is doomed to a life of wage slavery in a five-and-ten-cent store; Dr. Copeland is beaten by a mob of whites when he protests against the injustices meted out to his race; Jake Blount stumbles off alone, wistfully, to seek a place in the south where he can take hold of reality through Marxism; and Biff Brannon steels himself to live a life of emptiness. Hovering mockingly over her story of loneliness in a small town are primitive religion, adolescent hope, the silence of deaf mutes - and all of these give the violent colors of the life she depicts a sheen of weird tenderness.

Sunday, December 18, 2011

Review: KIM by Rudyard Kipling

One of the particular pleasures of reading Kim is the full range of emotion, knowledge, and experience that Rudyard Kipling gives his complex hero. Kim O'Hara, the orphaned son of an Irish soldier stationed in India, is neither innocent nor victimized. Raised by an opium-addicted half-caste woman since his equally dissolute father's death, the boy has grown up in the streets of Lahore:
Though he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazar; Kim was white--a poor white of the very poorest.
From his father and the woman who raised him, Kim has come to believe that a great destiny awaits him. The details, however, are a bit fuzzy, consisting as they do of the woman's addled prophecies of "'a great Red Bull on a green field, and the Colonel riding on his tall horse, yes, and'--dropping into English--'nine hundred devils.'" In the meantime, Kim amuses himself with intrigues, executing "commissions by night on the crowded housetops for sleek and shiny young men of fashion." His peculiar heritage as a white child gone native, combined with his "love of the game for its own sake," makes him uniquely suited for a bigger game. And when, at last, the long-awaited colonel comes along, Kim is recruited as a spy in Britain's struggle to maintain its colonial grip on India. Kipling was, first and foremost, a man of his time; born and raised in India in the 19th century, he was a fervid supporter of the Raj. Nevertheless, his portrait of India and its people is remarkably sympathetic. Yes, there is the stereotypical Westernized Indian Babu Huree Chander with his atrocious English, but there is also Kim's friend and mentor, the Afghani horse trader Mahub Ali, and the gentle Tibetan lama with whom Kim travels along the Grand Trunk Road. The humanity of his characters consistently belies Kipling's private prejudices, and raises Kim above the mere ripping good yarn to the level of a timeless classic.

Friday, November 25, 2011

Review: MADAME BOVARY by Gustave Flaubert


Madame Bovary (1856) is Gustave Flaubert's first published novel and is considered his masterpiece. The story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. She has a highly romanticized view of the world and craves beauty, wealth, passion, and high society. It is the disparity between these romantic ideals and the realities of her country life that drive most of the novel, most notably leading her into two extramarital love affairs as well as causing her to accrue an insurmountable amount of debt that eventually leads to her suicide. In contrast, Emma's husband, Charles Bovary, is a very simple and common man. He is a country doctor by profession, but is, as in everything else, not very good at it. Charles adores his wife and finds her faultless, despite obvious evidence to the contrary. He never suspects her affairs and gives her complete control over his finances, thereby securing his own ruin. When Charles discovers Emma's deceptions after her death he is devastated and dies soon after, but not before frittering away the very last of the assets remaining after his bankruptcy by living the way he believed Emma would have wanted him to live.

While the story is simple, the novel is moving because of its profound humanity. Flaubert records dispassionately every trait or incident that can illuminate the psychology of his characters and their role in the logical development. Flaubert's realism is said to have been a reaction against the romanticism of the prior generation. Emma may be said to be the embodiment of a romantic; in her mental and emotional process, she has no relation to the realities of her world. She inevitably becomes dissatisfied since her larger-than-life fantasies are impossible to realize. As a whole, the novel is a commentary on the entire self-satisfied, deluded, bourgeois culture of Flaubert's time period. His contempt for the bourgeoisie is expressed through his characters, all of whom are seeking escape in empty church rituals, unrealistic romantic novels, or delusions of one sort or another.




Friday, September 23, 2011

Review: WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys

In Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Bertha is the madwoman locked in the attic by her husband Rochester, the simmering Englishman whose children Jane has been hired to tutor. In Bronte's novel we learn little about Bertha other than that she's a monster who must be bound with rope, a white woman from the Caribbean whom Rochester was long ago pressured into marrying for her money. But Rhys, who grew up in the French Caribbean colony of Dominica, presses on the silences in Bronte to give Bertha her own story. Caliban does not become Ariel here, but Rhys turns a menacing cipher into a grieving, plausible young woman, and one whose story says whole worlds about global mixtures, about the misunderstandings between the colonized, the colonizers and the people who can't easily say which they are.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Review: ALL THE KING'S MEN by Robert Penn Warren




I seem to recall not reading this book when it was on a summer reading list during high school. While missing a good story those 40 odd years ago, my procrastination was arguably to the good. Warren's compelling tale of power and corruption in the Depression-era South is more than just a great political story; it is a sustained meditation on the unforeseen consequences of every human act, the vexing connectedness of all people and the possibility—however slim—of goodness in a sinful world. I definitely related more strongly to these themes than I would have in my callow youth.

Willie Stark, Warren's lightly disguised version of Huey Long, the onetime Louisiana strongman/governor, begins as a genuine tribune of the people and ends as a murderous populist demagogue. The narrator, Jack Burden, is his press agent, who carries out the boss's orders, first without objection, then in the face of his own increasingly troubled conscience. And the politics? For Warren, that's simply the arena most likely to prove that man is a fallen creature. Which it does.




Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Review: FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS by Ernest Hemingway

For Whom the Bell Tolls is at once a love story, a compelling novel of the Spanish Civil War, and a grave and sombre tragedy of Spanish peasants fighting for their lives. But above all it is about death. The plot is simple, about a bridge over a deep gorge behind Franco's lines. Robert Jordan, a young American International Brigader, is ordered to blow up the bridge. He must get help from the guerrillas who live in Franco's territory. The bridge must be destroyed at the precise moment when a big Loyalist offensive begins. If the bridge can be destroyed, the offensive may succeed. If the offensive succeeds, the struggle of the human race against fascism may be advanced a step. The courage of the Spanish peasants is linked to the fate of all mankind. These Spaniards know they may be killed. Jordan senses it when he hears the orders. The general senses it when he gives them. So does Pablo, the pig-eyed, cunning guerrilla leader, when Jordan asks his help. So does Pilar, his big, ugly, wise, foul-mouthed wife. Pilar is a gypsy: she reads doom in Jordan's palm. She smelt death-to-come on the last dynamiter who went through, and he was killed. The greatness of this book is the greatness of these people's triumph over their foreknowledge of death-to-come if they blow up the bridge. Jordan goes through with it because he is intellectually convinced that he is helping to defeat fascism. Pilar goes through with it because she is part of the revolution and cannot stop. Pablo's strong instinct to live makes him desert at the last moment and destroy the detonator. Then he, too, realizes in his own way that "no man is an iland." He cannot stand the loneliness of desertion, returns to help dynamite the bridge.

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Review: ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac

Written in the early 1950s and published in 1957, On the Road is often considered a defining work of the postwar "Beat Generation" that was inspired by jazz, poetry, and drug experiences. The novel is purportedly a largely autobiographical work that was based on the spontaneous road trips of Kerouac and his friends across mid-century America. Its rambling style is said to be intended to reflect the improvisational fluidity of jazz.

Read more than 60 years after the events it portrays, the book has an other worldly quality as its characters crisscross a pre-interstate America by hitchhiking, hopping freight trains and scraping pennies together for bus tickets. The characters are suspended in time between the depression-era hobos (who were on the road because they had no choice) and the hippies of the sixties and beyond (who possessed, I would argue, a more articulated critique of the "establishment"). Kerouac and his friends are above all hedonists, high on the seeming freedom of the open road and a life lived without commitments. Despite all their frantic bonhomie, a sense of melancholy and loneliness pervades their travels. The world is not a particularly friendly or forgiving place, and neither sex nor drugs nor jazz (no rock-and-roll yet) ultimately satisfies their search for meaning.

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Review: TROPIC OF CANCER by Henry Miller

I ran into a number of references to Henry Miller in my wanderings this spring and decided to turn to his TROPIC OF CANCER from my alternates list. It is a meaty book, very graphic in sexual language, to be sure, but quite matter-of-fact in its sexual content and less titillating overall than many a prime time offering on cable these days. Of greater interest is Miller's use of words: a queer combination of unrestrained rhetoric and dry Yankee humor with which he records grotesque doings in dirty bedrooms and communicates feverishly moods of despair and disgust. Miller discourses on his life and lowlife in Paris, fashioning his experiences, reflections, orgasms and philosophizing into a shambling narrative. Is it misogynous? Yes, but misandrous as well; no one comes off well in this lurid world pervaded by a sense of hopelessness.

Monday, February 14, 2011

Review: MRS. DALLOWAY by Virginia Woolf


Mrs. Dalloway is one of those modern classics (published in 1925) that I somehow managed to bypass in the course of my reading. I actually started it once before but became bogged down after only 20 pages or so. This time, I found myself caught up in the story’s unfolding through the thoughts and memories of the heroine, Clarissa Dalloway, over the course of a single June day in London. She is preparing for an important party that evening. The novel travels forward and back in time and in and out of the various characters’ minds, constructing an image of Mrs. Dalloway’s life and the social milieu of post-Great War England. A complementary character is Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shock veteran who has retreated into a private world and ends the day by committing suicide. Mrs. Dalloway and he never meet, but their lives are connected by external events and news of his death is casually mentioned at Clarissa’s party. Richly observed, it is a story that stays with you.

Monday, February 7, 2011

Review: BATTLE HYMN OF THE TIGER MOTHER by Amy Chua

It’s been hard to miss this book in the month or so its release. Several days before it came out, The Wall Street Journal ran an article about it under the headline “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior: Can a regimen of no play dates, no TV, no computer games and hours of music practice create happy kids?” At once, it seemed, Tiger Mom and her views on parenting became the subject du jour in the media, as the book cruised to number 2 on the New York Times Best Sellers list.

I decided it was worth a listen. In hearing Chua read her own book for Penguin Audio, one gets a sense for her intensity. The memoir itself is not nearly so confrontational as the media storm would have you believe. Yes, she advocates a child rearing style that accepts “nothing but the best” from children and refrains on principle from saturating them with praise. Yes, she takes to that philosophy to an extreme, e.g., “the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child.” Yet there is an underlying wistfulness to her account of applying these methods to her own daughters. Despite years of playing the manipulative bully “for the sake of the children’s future,” Chua ends up meeting her match in the forcefulness of her younger daughter’s teenage rebelliousness.

As father of a sixteen year old myself, I am sympathetic to the pressure parents feel these days to ensure our kid’s futures in what often feels like a downwardly mobile society. From offering the best possible education to over-scheduling “free” time to early specialization in sports, the seemingly rational response to making one’s way in a meritocracy can create a sort of collective cultural madness. What distinguishes my friends and I from the Tiger Mother is more a matter of degree than of kind.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Review: DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA by Alexis de Tocqueville


I felt a rare virtue slogging through the 834 pages of Tocqueville’s classic account on the democratic system of the United States, originally published in two volumes, the first in 1835 and the second in 1840. I was motivated to take the work on by my recent reading of Parrot and Olivier in America, a novel by Peter Carey which entertainingly imagines an American tour during the same historic period by a Tocqueville-like French aristocrat and his hardscrabble English sidekick. To my disappointment, Tocqueville’s work lacks the sort of anecdotal detail suggested by Carey’s book. Clearly reasoned, it is nevertheless quite dry.

Democracy in America is essentially a political science treatise, analyzing why republican representative democracy has succeeded in the then 50 year old United States while failing in so many other places. He is particular concerned to compare the functional aspects of American democracy with what he sees as the failings of democracy in his native France. Tocqueville speculates on the future of democracy in the United States, discussing possible threats to democracy and possible dangers of democracy. These include his belief that democracy has a tendency to degenerate into "soft despotism" as well as the despotism of public opinion, the tyranny of the majority, conformity for the sake of material security, the absence of intellectual freedom—which he saw to degrade administration and bring statesmanship, learning, and literature to the level of the lowest. Democracy in America predicted the violence of party spirit and the judgment of the wise subordinated to the prejudices of the ignorant.

Tocqueville observes that the strong role religion played in the United States was due to its separation from the government, a separation all parties found agreeable. In contrast, he perceived there to be an unhealthy antagonism between democrats and the religious in France, which he relates to the connection between church and state.

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Review: The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Stockett's novel (her first) tells the engaging story of a young white woman in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi who convinces two black maids to share secretly their stories about raising white children. Narrated by these three distinctive voices, The Help alternates between humor, outrage and pathos as it explores the complex dynamics between white women in the Mad Men-era South and the black women who raised their children. The characters are well-rounded and believable without becoming cliched. I listened to the Penguin Audiobooks version, whose vocal characterizations of the three narrators were very well done indeed.

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Review: The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson


British author Jacobson won last year’s Booker Prize for this novel. Reviewers have compared his work to Jane Austen (a novel of manners) and Philip Roth (exploring male-female relations, the dark spaces of the male psyche and the dilemmas of Judaism—all with a biting wit). It is an easy and highly enjoyable read even as Jacobson probes many sides of polarizing issues such as modern day anti-Semitism, Zionism and self-loathing Jews.

Story highlights from audible.com: “Julian Treslove is an unspectacular television producer of arts programs and a celebrity impersonator, with two failed marriages behind him and two distant, resentful sons. A gentile convinced that a Jewish identity would offer asylum from his identity crisis, Treslove is acutely envious of his old school friend Sam Finkler, now a highly successful author of glib pop-philosophy best sellers with titles like “The Existentialist in the Kitchen”. For Treslove, Finkler comes to represent Jewish identity: The ‘Jewish question’ (in all its loaded historical ambivalence) becomes the Finkler question, at once sanitized and personalized. Both men regularly meet with their former teacher, Libor Sevcik, a colorful Mittel-European transplant who serves as the book’s heart…He is crotchety, funny, and touching in his devotion to his dead wife, even while on hilariously awkward dates. Jacobson has great fun in pitting his characters’ different approaches to Jewishness against each other…There is a sense that the three male leads are facets of one personality with a schismatic approach to Jewishness.”

Monday, January 17, 2011

Review: The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer


The Naked and the Dead was published in 1948, when Norman Mailer was just 25 years old. It became a best seller, winning great acclaim as one of the earliest and best personal accounts to come out of World War II. It established Mailer’s reputation, as well as various themes that he would pursue throughout his writing career.

The book is a naturalistic account of a platoon of foot soldiers who are fighting for the Japanese held island of Anopopei. The battle scenes are vivid, but the deeper drama of the novel derives from the wars swirling between characters, personal histories and worldviews and within the psyches of the men themselves. Mahler recalls through flashbacks the civilian lives of thirteen of the men and shows how they are burdened by their respective pasts as much as by the heavy packs and military equipment they bear. The more ambitious of the men struggle with how to impose their will on their comrades and the great events swirling around them. The more passive struggle to accept their position as followers and scapegoats. In the end, however, all are pawns of the indifferent unfolding of Events, wherein the best laid plans can be “balked” (a favorite Mailer word) by nature or chance. Finally, the campaign is successful without the benefit of either General Cumming’s cunning strategy or the heroism of the platoon.

Mailer’s cynicism about postwar American society, which would come to fuller flower in his later writings, is already in view. His General Cummings is contemptuous of the democratic spirit and determined to mold his subordinates into automatons. He struggles with Lieutenant Hearn, a rich, educated and confused Midwesterner, whose hopefulness about liberal democratic values ultimately proves impotent against both the General’s proto-fascism and the deviousness and determination of Sergeant Croft, the grasping common man. The problems of pluralistic American society are mirrored in the gritty, contentious life together of this small group of mismatched men: Jews and anti-Semites, intellectuals and illiterates, womanizers and family men.

At 721 pages, the novel is long—perhaps too long. Mailer himself, in an introduction to the 50th anniversary edition that I read, muses that “the words came too quickly and too easily” in many parts and that his writing suffers from “over-certified adjectives.” I enjoyed the vigor of Mailer’s language, however, and the audacity of his accomplishment. At 25!