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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.