Reads
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Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (review posted February 1, 2009)
Last night, I sat with vintage dresses draped across my lap, remembering the moment the bottom seam came loose on the brown velour, thinking about the scene in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway where Clarissa Dalloway sits in her drawing room mending her party dress, recalling the instance of the tear.
The silvery-green dress folds spill over her while she stitches and sorts through the morning’s moments, completely mistress of the room and the household being polished and primped in anticipation of her guests that evening.
All of a London June day somehow fits in Virginia Woolf’s crisp text, and even the doors are about to be taken off their hinges as Clarissa strides into the book’s opening pages and the morning, exhilarated with the day’s possibilities. Her thoughtful musings interrupted with the bombastic Hugh Whitbread’s, “Where are you off to?” She deflects breezily; “I love walking in London,” and carries on toward the shops, reveling in even her errand run.
Though bounded by the “leaden circles in the air” as clocks chime the hour and increments between, Clarissa radidates “on waves of that divine vitality.” And like the flowers in the flower shop, Woolf’s beautiful phrases wait for us to admire, inhale, and gather up as we walk from one basin to another with Clarissa.
How fresh like frilled linen clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays the roses looked; and dark and prim the red carnations, holding their heads up; and all the sweet peas spreading in their bowls, tinged violet, snow white, pale—as if it were the evening and girls in muslin frocks came out to pick sweet peas and roses after the superb summer’s day, with its almost blue-black sky, its delphiniums, its carnations, its arum lilies was over; and it was the moment between six and seven when every flower—roses, carnations, irises, lilac—glows; white, violet, red, deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly, purely in the misty beds…
If Clarissa repeatedly mentions her lack of knowledge, gesturing at a life experience limited by class, sphere, role, that combined with the nearness of death throughout (especially appropriate in this post-war novel) brightens the shine around her small triumphs and actions connecting people, one to another. While Virginia Woolf stated Mrs. Dalloway’s double is the doomed war veteran Septimus Smith, Clarissa’s opposite is zombie Lady Bradshaw, who infects others with her stupor as she entertains.
Our heroine Clarissa pours out courage, quietly affirming the extraordinary capacity to give and forgive as we press on into our days, buying the flowers, mending the dresses ourselves. And she is the perfect hostess (a role she both embraces and refuses), standing at the top of the staircase welcoming and wishing us safe passage.
As Peter Walsh, the old flame who truly sees her, notes, she perseveres; “there being in her a thread of life which for toughness, endurance, power to overcome obstacles, and carry her triumphantly through he had never known the like of.”
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The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank (review posted January 8, 2009)
If nothing else, former lovers should give good fodder for brunch conversations. Laughter (and mimosas and cosmopolitans) mitigates the grieving process for relationships, particularly important for a the “chick lit” cottage industry that Melissa Bank is said to have spawned with her Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing in 2000.
Much like her previous collection of short stories (the format perhaps best suited for her style), this novel opens with a protagonist of biting wit, cigarette gestures, and composure beyond her teenage years. Plot details are in service of protagonist Sophie’s one-liners, and aside from college roommate Venice (who counts herself lucky she wasn’t named ‘Gondola’ or ‘Canal’), the book settles into the yawning heteronormativity of this genre.
The difference being, the significant affair is between the city and Sophie—the narrative drives toward Williamsburg and Pennsylvania (and back) instead of a ring. In the penultimate story, she is rescued from party drama and a suitor who will disappear before the next episode with a wonderful line of prose that stretches out to lift her from the loft’s balcony.
In the midst of another party with an indie rock date, Sophie thinks:
The women are young, young, young, liquidy and sweet-looking, they are batter and I am the sponge cake they don’t know they’ll become. I stand here, a lone loaf, stuck to the pan.
Sophie’s baking line reminded me of one of my favorite exes, who hung a large poster of that incorrigible loafer-poet Walt Whitman on a wall and winked at me; “Isn’t he handsome?” he said.
“Mm,” I replied; alone with the poster’s self-satisfied grin, I rolled my eyes. Sure, this old man could call himself large, contain multitudes—in this younger man’s apartment, I felt like a floufy sponge cake, bloated with age.
Connecting the reader with those interior moments—like when we turn social unease into a self-deprecating food metaphor—demonstrates the promise good work in this genre still holds. Sophie and the musician pick up milk and the paper on their way back, closing the narrative with a small, habitual New Yorker moment that might lead (as all those airbrushed magazine covers in late-night corner grocers guarantee) to the discovery of the wonder spot.
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Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (review posted December 20, 2008)
About a month ago, online buzz surrounded a “gender analyzer” tool designed to determine whether a Web site was written by a man or a woman.
I was reminded of the flurry of indignation and amusement caused by the tool (on my personal site: “We guess http://kthread.com is written by a man (58%), however it’s quite gender neutral. Is this correct?”) in the review my friend David posted of Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex the other day:
Despite the fact that the author of the book is male – as is the narrator – I often thought of the narration as neither male nor female. As if the writing itself – like Cal – somehow transcended the very concept of gender.
For me, the story’s gender play nestles in poignant details—the unexamined mention that Uncle Pete’s suspect chiropractic practice in a 1959 Detroit wasn’t for clients “to free up their kundalini,”; that the narrator’s grandfather chooses Sappho’s glyconic poetry to translate for decades.
Less playfully, the narrator observes restrictive male desire:
Jerome was sliding and climbing on top of me and it felt like it had the night before, like a crushing weight. So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.
Eugenides channels earlier, Italian postmodernism to write an epic novel that undercuts the epic, grandiose authorial fashion of recent years. Middlesex is, at moments, a heartbreaking work of staggering genius because the reader watches as grandparents Lefty and Desdemona create their genealogical fictions (as the narrator “dutifully [oozes] feminine glue”).
Piscine metaphors stream through the text, schooling Callie/Cal in gender assertion—key scenes include bathing suits, sea anemones in locker rooms, battles between gravity and bodies of water, faked menstrual cycles marked by catacomb fish symbols on a calendar.
While the protagonist’s childhood years are charted by a procession of family Cadillacs (the ‘boys & toys’ model), the novel scolds Dr. Luce (and by extension, the reader) for wanting to read straight toward one event in Callie’s life without the greater familial context.
The future is in bed in Schöneberg, but that’s not the end of the book. There must be a return to the matriarchal line first, a presentation of self in a book about self-presentation. The scratchy intercoms in the Middlesex house without walls reconnect mother and child: outmoded technology delivers comic relief.
And harkening back to the reverberating rustles of her silkworm chorus, the reader joins the vindicated Desdemona in the last spoken word of the text, as she looks at Cal and says, “Bravo.”
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Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig (review posted December 6, 2008)
Larry Lessig beckons us in his new book, Remix, to think about the future of a generation weaned on pirated media. In his usual elegant style, he clears the bramble around thorny issues of gift economies, fan labor (though he doesn’t use the term), and what he calls the “Copyright Wars.” (Here’s video of the author reading the book’s introduction.)
If you regularly read books in this genre you will recognize many of these examples; accordingly, Lessig works to reinvigorate the Potter Wars anecdote by focusing Warner Bros.’s continued waffle acknowledging profit margins from fan sites dedicated to Harry, Hermione, and the Weasley brood.
The young creator network that fought in the Potter War skirmishes are part of Lessig’s most interesting argument: deregulating amateur creativity. The distilled argument begins chapter nine—the chapter that will appear on syllabi and circulate online (especially as it’s a list, which bodes well for bookmark-sharing site Digg, and a list that ends with decriminalizing filesharing, a topic dear to Digg users)—and Lessig defines amateur creativity as different from professional creativity. A silly family video would be the former, the remix artist GirlTalk the latter, and he proposes flipping the model so a site host like YouTube absorbs responsibility for copyright fees in uploaded files instead of the user. Sexy, though I’m not convinced Big Brother aspires to be Daddy Warbucks.
Think of Clay Shirky’s work on cognitive surpus and how he argues it was masked for decades (“Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up.”) and about how Shirky argues that the internet runs on love. Lessig teases out some (he could go further) of the legal usage implications of these production/consumption patterns–ceding that money pollutes gift economies, but pointing out absurd “user-generated content” sites for commercial entities like the Star Wars franchise that own the remixed fan products added to the “community” site.
On page 248 of Remix, he writes “the agreement between media companies, or media companies and artists, are not love letters. They do not express mutual respect.” Lessig is not a copyright abolitionist–the movement concerns him greatly; neither does he promote filesharing (he responded to a filesharing question last night in this way). Respect for the laws governing copyright will work, he suggests, when the laws reflect the current culture (read his distinction between thin-sharing and thick-sharing). Without alteration, the regulations will continue to be ignored and this disregard may bleed into other areas of regulation, a dangerous trend for an entire generation.
At an event last night near Los Angeles, Lessig spoke on protecting use of amateur performance and the dangers of read-only societies:
And speaking of silly family videos, last week I posted a Thanksgiving dance clip, a Taylor tradition we now share with friends by posting online. As the cruise director of this particular family activity that was destined for YouTube, I made sure we used a remix of a Jackson 5 song, one I like better than the original, spun by a Japanese DJ.
We researched the original choreography on YouTube–the 1972 head bobs, the 1977 spinning Spaceship Earth moves. And instead of dubbing over, I left our voices and the scuffles of our shoes, adding a layer that adds value for the audience of this video: the small circle of family and friends who enjoy watching five white kids wear Afro wigs and dance around the garage.
I agree with Lessig that trying to live without the love of amateur remixers in an online world filled with video will be one long sleepless night. Let’s hope the new copyright czar will know wrong from right.
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Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (review posted November 30, 2008)
I think of Malcolm Gladwell books as a sophisticated guilty pleasure.
He Who Must Name Patterns is the darling of airport bookstores (which I think amuses him; there is a part on airplane crashes in Outliers that is difficult to read on a flight, similar to beginning Ian McEwan’s Saturday while in the air), and the chapters are nicely organized for casual reading–each extended anecdote about the length of a New Yorker article, come to think of it.
Gladwell’s books belong in the self-discovery section of a bookstore that I imagine next to the self-help aisles, their cheerful covers in contrast to the signature manilla Gladwell titles with serious serifs and a centered object (Outliers has a colored orb, Blink an asterisk that makes me think of Vonnegut’s infamous doodle in Breakfast of Champions, and Tipping Point a match). Whereas in the previous books you might be able to slot yourself into one of the three special groups of people (Connectors, Mavens, Salespeople) or note your snap judgments, this recent book has fewer lessons that can be easily applied–aside from his 10,000 hours thesis.
Of more interest, Gladwell takes the signature Stewart Smalley line to pull apart specific examples of success; beyond the “smart enough” threshold, social savvy makes key figures (read: connectors) in your life like you enough to bend the norms and let 10,000 opportunity hours bloom.
The epilogue is an explanation of how Gladwell explains the community figures who paved his path to success, and I couldn’t resist marking the page lauding “divergence tests”–an alternative way of measuring intelligence through timed creative responses. In elementary school, I put in a good thousand hours or so solving problems with my Odyssey of the Mind teams, the brainiac Olympics for entitled children (Gladwell mentions entitlement as a key skill for success), and I do want to think those Saturdays spent designing PVC pulley systems and blurting out ten spontaneous uses for pipe cleaners will serve some larger purpose.
After spending years at a top ten U.S. university in a graduate program with disturbingly smart people, I will cite Gladwell’s book in this season of cocktail parties and feel entirely justified in my prediction that the wittiest of my friends are marked for success in that field. Comprehensive knowledge as well as a keen sense of timing in impersonations on John’s part, snarky classroom literary dissections on Ben’s, obscure musical categorization references from art historian/XML geek Dana, appreciation of rap and West coast culture from ascot-wearing Miltonist Eric, and Jordan’s inspired nudges in the Charlottesville underground arts recommend them for future renown.
If success depends on your forbearing community, perhaps the next Gladwell treatise will be on how to sustain the communities you successfully choose later––
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Proof: A Play by David Auburn (review posted October 25, 2008)
“Proof” is ideal for the witching hours of the night, when you cannot sleep, idly flip television channels to idly flip television channels, and then toss the remote / click the laptop shut and wonder if you might be crazy.
Incidentally, that’s where Auburn’s play begins, and we are ushered into what I’d call Second City Gothic (sister to the Southern Gothic subgenre): a big, drafty Chicago house looms, complete with a clanking radiator, absent mother, ghost, tortured heroine wearing a key around her neck, and a supernatural object (the proof itself, which fairly glows).
While ostensibly about mathematics, the tense moments feature Catherine learning kindness—we cringe as she illuminates the shortcomings of her fellow players, but we forgive her impatience when she practices kindness with her father, too far gone to retort.
How far do you trust what you intuitively know?
When prowling our own houses where things go bump in the night, don’t we all grasp for someone who believes in our logic—that inelegant architecture we build to explain who we are?
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Which Brings Me to You: A Novel in Confessions by Steve Almond and Julianna Baggott (review posted October 3, 2008)
I have always thought the opening sentence of a book is the author’s best pickup line pitched at the reader.
More so, then, in a book where well-constructed paragraphs hold the explicit promise of intimate relations–that, at least, is the premise of this post-postmodern epistolary novel where the two hyperarticulate protagonists agree to reveal the nasty bits of their romantic pasts in letters before meeting up again in real life.
My former colleague Craig Stoltz put it best, I think, when he reviewed the book for the Washington Post:
This book is full of superb writing, and that is precisely its problem…The trouble is Jane’s letters sound an awful lot as if they’ve been written by an award-winning author and writing instructor with an MFA. So, alas, do John’s. To say this spoils the fun is to understate.
To return to the first line of the book, though, it reads: “I know my own kind.” I can only assume that many of the fine Goodreads members who give such lukewarm reviews below are not sympathetic to this kind. Whether the lack of sympathy for this kind is due to character, snark, or textual framing, the book’s prelude section remains a worthy meditation on a smushed boutonniere and contains a line of sexual absolution on page five that I have taken as a personal motto (curious? I thought so).
Moreover, how can you ignore the serious fun of keeping the conceit of a post-postmodern epistolary novel aloft for the length of a novel? I mean, really, our two protagonists always have stamps on hand?
And when one mails a drunken letter irretrievable from the postal carrier once deposited in the mailbox, a “remix” chapter follows with all the apology that comes after drunkdials and drunken texts/emails and none of the clarifying horror of the “sent messages” outbox (tell me the “sent messages” folder isn’t your favorite, and I will denounce you for the terrible liar that you are).
Perhaps I read this in one sitting because each chapter contains character details I covet. To have our hero admit he is a “marginalia junkie”; to be able to refer to a past lover as “the caramelized one”; to articulate an awareness of destructive tendencies and the wherewithal at seventeen to intuit that “boys were dangerous. Each one was shining, lit from within; their souls were torches.” Seemingly trivial and breathy at times, this is true stuff of the sort flawed, complicated, real relationships are built upon.
It’s worth remembering that epistolary works were originally “penned” by female characters (Aphra Behn, of course, used the form; male authors like Richardson would take pains to insist in the introduction that the female narrator’s story was “true”) when the novel was still crystallizing into a genre. Appropriately, the end of the novel careens a bit like its tipsy characters, and structurally, the multiple peaks within the letters throughout are followed by valleys leading to more peaks.
The very end comes together in that elegant way that always brings me to tears–not because it’s an emotional moment (it is), but because each reveals their understanding of the other’s most significant, sustaining source of pain, and those final admissions seal a narrative that the two characters share voicing–imperfectly, and, ultimately, full of hope.
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