Category Archives: Books and literature

Book review: Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust

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Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West. Highly recommended.

Miss Lonelyhearts, set on the East Coast in New York City, and The Day of the Locust, set on the West Coast in Hollywood, are the two grim but brilliant gems of Nathanael West’s too-brief writing career.

In Miss Lonelyhearts, the title character — who has no other name to either the reader or the book’s characters — is an advice columnist subsumed by the countless letters of despair he reads every day. His editor is named Shrike, appropriately, for the species of bird that impales its victims on thorns. While he seeks escape from “Desperate, Broken-hearted, Sick-of-it-all, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband”: in the idealism of Religion, Art, Sex, and Nature, Shrike is always there to puncture his every attempt.

Miss Lonelyhearts’ trouble precedes his career, however. During his college years, he tries to participate in a ritual sacrifice of a symbolic lamb (Religion) that is transformed into a cruel butchery and finally into a mercy killing. Later, Miss Lonelyhearts returns again and again to the image and idea of Christ, “the answer,” whose figure he has removed from its cross and nailed to the wall at the foot of his bed (taking over the sacrifice from Romans and history and making it his own).

For sex, he tries (unsuccessfully) to subdue the “virginity” of Shrike’s wife (named Mary); takes on the offering of “an admirer,” Fay Doyle, “unhappily married [sacrificed] to a cripple”; and finally sacrifices the real virginity of Betty, whose order and sureness were “based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily.” Until she encounters him, she is not a candidate for a Miss Lonelyhearts column, but he and his “sickness” make her likely to become one. Throughout, Shrike is there to tell him, “Soul of Miss L., glorify me. Body of Miss L., save me . . .” In the end, Miss Lonelyhearts finds humility and calls on Christ, not in his illness, “but in the shape of his joy.” When he is happy “and the rock had been thoroughly tested and been found perfect,” when he gives up his humanity for Christ-like beatitude and detachment, he sacrifices himself.

In The Day of the Locust, set designer Tod Hackett has entered the world of Hollywood, where nothing is real, where even everyday clothes consist of personality-altering costumes (“the man in the Norfolk jacket and Tyrolean hat was returning, not from a mountain, but an insurance office”). Here, the slopes of the canyon are lined with “Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles.” Two types of people populate this set: the “masquerades” and those who “had come to California to die,” whose “eyes filled with hatred.”

Tod himself leads an unreal life as an unwanted extra in the love life of Faye [fairy — unreal] Greener, daughter of Harry Greener, who manages to make his own death seem no more than an act — and not always a good one.

After Harry’s death, Tod and Faye’s lives connect through two men who can be considered “masquerades”: Earl the cowboy with his two-dimensional face and Miguel the Mexican, as well as Homer Simpson, a man who thinks he has come to California to recover his health and who doesn’t realise he has come here to die.

Faye teases Earl, lusts after Miguel, and holds Tod at bay while living with Homer in a nonsexual business arrangement designed to keep her clothed, fed, and living well until she gets her big acting break, which, like all else in Hollywood, is an act and an illusion.

As Homer falls for Faye, she resents both his simplicity and his sincerity. Only when Homer finds her with Miguel (after mistaking her moaning for sickness) does he realise the truth of what Tod has told him: “She’s a whore!” Like the Hollywood she wants to be part of, she is empty and bored — an illusion that cannot last. Even when Earl fights Miguel over her, the conflict is less real than that between two of Miguel’s cocks, during which the weaker bird dies a harrowing, bloody, and genuine death that evokes more compassion and sympathy than Harry’s final act.

Throughout, Tod sees the masses finally turning to apocalyptic violence, which he portrays in his painting-in-progress, “The Burning of Los Angeles.” Faye, naked and smiling, chased by the mob, is a bird released and in flight.

The violence comes, however, when a nearly catatonic Homer attempts to leave this never-never land and to return to Wayneville, Iowa, on a night when the crowd has gathered for a movie premiere. Finding himself under attack by a bored neighbor child, he finally strikes back in a murderous rage, giving the crowd the impetus it seeks.

It is not “The Burning of Los Angeles,” but rather a fusion of Art, Sex, Religion, and Violence. Here, West returns to Miss Lonelyhearts and the attempted ideals of Art, Sex, and Religion ending in violence; he says of the womb: “Better by far than Religion or Art or the South Sea Islands” — an exact parallel to the idealist scenarios Shrike creates for Miss Lonelyhearts, only to puncture them with the fury of his cold, emotional violence.

Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust are short, beautifully crafted masterpieces in which nothing is wasted. West captures Hollywood perfectly, where, in 1939, there were already New Age cults like that of the “raw-foodists”: “We eat only raw [vegetables]. Death comes from eating dead things.” In today’s world, where millions turn to the Dear Abby columns and to Oprah, and where the cult of the celebrity is built on movies featuring easy sex and special-effects violence, Nathanael West might feel right at home — in time and place.

6 October 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: On the Rez

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On the Rez by Ian Frazier. Highly recommended.

If you are looking for structure and pat solutions to contemporary Native American problems, you won’t find them in On the Rez by Ian Frazier. Like the reservation life and stories it reveals, On the Rez is rambling and spontaneous.

Frazier uses his sometimes problematic friendship with Le War Lance, a Sioux from Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota whom he meets in New York City, to explore Pine Ridge life today along with past and present injustices. Le seems to have no home, no permanent job, no wife, and no children. He does have family on the reservation — as well as a bottomless taste for inexpensive beer. Frazier recounts their many days spent together, whether it’s watching TV while drinking beer, driving around the reservation looking for people, or facing a propane leak and potential explosion — and death. Frazier is genuinely fond of Le, but not of his drinking, and he repeatedly says how much easier it is to be around Le and his brother Floyd John once Floyd John undergoes rehab and gives up drinking. Alcoholism, diabetes, fatal car accidents, and more are part of day-to-day life on Pine Ridge.

Frazier also devotes several chapters to the life of SuAnne Big Crow, an Indian high school basketball star who led Pine Ridge’s Lady Thorpes basketball team to a state championship and traveled to Europe and Australia as part of an Indian all-star team before her death in a car accident. SuAnne serves as a uniting force between Indians and their often-prejudiced white neighbors, between the lingering Red Cloud and Crazy Horse factions, and between American Indian Movement (AIM) traditionalists and “goon” progressives on the reservation. Through her athletic feats, fame, and sheer force of personality, she becomes bigger than life.

Between describing the day-to-day adventures he has with Le, Floyd John, and their family and friends and SuAnne’s career and influence, Frazier turns to history in a broad sense to put life on the rez in perspective. He discusses the rivalry between Red Cloud and Crazy Horse (which lives today); the conflict between AIM, led by Dennis Banks and Russell Means, and then-tribal chief Dick Wilson and his “goons” (which Wilson turned into “Guardians of the Oglala Nation”); and the U.S. government’s still-unresolved theft of the Black Hills from the Sioux. He covers topics as wide ranging as Iroquois history and Mohawks as high-rise construction workers to the storied past of famous Indian bars. He covers the rise of Indian casinos and their current status in legislative limbo.

While many Americans comfort themselves for the wrongs perpetrated against Indians — from physical violence and culture destruction to land theft — with the idea that the white man rescued the Indian from primitivism and stagnation, Frazier points out Native contributions to Europeans, such as a host of agricultural riches (failing to mention the medicinal wonders being mined in South America by ethnobotanists such as Dr. Mark Plotkin).

More importantly, Indians passed on to settlers seeking escape from European political, religious, and economic tyranny their “all-around skepticism about who and who was not great” along with some basic principles of democracy. Today, however, Frazier says, “The freedom that inhered in Powhatan, that Red Cloud carried with him from the plains to Washington as easily as air — freedom to be and to say, regardless of disapproval — has become a luxury most of us can’t afford.” The Indian influence could not prevent the reinvention of Europe — “early American was European culture reset in an Indian frame.” Frazier quotes Thomas Jefferson: “It will be said, that great societies cannot exist without government. The savages, therefore, break them into small ones.” Where Frazier errs is in being too broad — while the free-ranging Sioux of the plains valued individual freedom, less nomadic groups such as Powhatan’s and the tribes of the Iroquois confederacy placed more emphasis on leadership. Powhatan’s freedom was that of a leader, while Red Cloud’s was that of a Sioux.

Today, there is Le War Lance, representing Trickster — cunning, dishonest, unpredictable, selfish, manipulative — a freedom-loving survivor. There is, or was until her death, the Indian hero SuAnne Big Crow, to whom nearly every inner-city and suburban teenager and adult alike can look — sports legend, academic star, role model for peers, and point of unity among a disparate people, even today through “Happytown, USA” — the SuAnne Big Crow Health and Recreation Center founded in her memory by her mother, Chick Big Crow.

Then there are the rest of the Sioux — struggling with poverty, unemployment, alcoholism, disease, and a host of social ills that cannot be fixed through this program or that legislation. They, like Le, are survivors.

I recommend that you read On the Rez in conjunction with American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings by Zitkala-Sa and edited with an introduction and notes by Cathy N. Davidson and Ada Norris. Zitkala-Sa was a turn-of-the-century Sioux educator, musician, writer, and activist who addressed many of the same issues Frazier raises — nearly 100 years ago.

13 September 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: A Virtuous Woman

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A Virtuous Woman by Kaye Gibbons. Not recommended.

In A Virtuous Woman, Kaye Gibbons tells the story of the daughter of Southern gentry, Ruby Pitt Woodrow Stokes; her tenant farmer second husband, Jack Stokes; and those who affect their lives most — Burr, his wife Tiny Fran, her delinquent son Roland, and their daughter June.

Gibbons uses a technique of alternating chapters, with the first written by Jack, the next by Ruby, and so on, until the last chapter. Chapter sixteen is written in the third person omniscient, with characters’ thoughts sprinkled throughout in italics. This method is effective in the beginning, where Jack talks about his reaction to the news that Ruby has been diagnosed with lung cancer and her silent, selfish request for a cigarette, while next she talks about her response to his reaction and her own motivation. Further into the plot, however, this method loses its impact as the reminiscences become more random and less structured.

Although the idea of alternating chapters, most flashbacks except Jack’s chapters toward the end, lends itself to a more dynamic approach to time, Gibbons keeps it virtually linear, from Ruby’s youth and disastrous first marriage to a drunken, controlling migrant worker named John Woodrow and his death to her marriage to Jack, the notable events of their lives, Ruby’s death, and Jack’s life after Ruby.

A Virtuous Woman is well written and in a few instances somewhat insightful. The characters, however, often seem to lack interest or depth; some, like Woodrow, Tiny Fran, and Roland, are little more than stock rural characters (no-good man, no-good teenaged girl, no-good bastard). They appear primarily to fulfill a standard a role and have little interest — they exist only to explain such things as Ruby’s path toward Jack and the Stokes’s unusual interest in Burr and Tiny Fran’s daughter June. When Woodrow is critically injured in a drunken brawl, the wives of the other migrant workers feel Ruby should “stand by her man” no matter what, which also seems to perpetuate a type rather than offer any real insight.

Above all, A Virtuous Woman feels forced and unnatural. It is out of character for a barely literate man like Jack Stokes to document his memories, including quoted conversations, in such detail and with such care. This would have been a stronger story if presented as an oral history rather than a written one.

The unlikely love story and marriage of Jack Stokes and Ruby Pitt Woodrow Stokes has potential, as do the characters. Unfortunately, Gibbons does not have the depth as an author to uncover it.

19 August 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Virgin and the Gipsy

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The Virgin and the Gipsy by D. H. Lawrence. Recommended.

Discovered in France after D. H. Lawrence’s death and never finalized by the author, The Virgin and the Gipsy is the fairy tale-like story of Yvette Saywell, a 19-year-old rector’s daughter chafing against the moral “life unbelievers” that make up her family.

Although the “virgin” of the title, Yvette is no demure maiden. She is temperamental, strong willed, and aware of her father’s “degrading unbelief, the worm which was his heart’s core” — just as her fallen mother was. She enjoys being contrary and openly contemptuous of her middle-class, overtly moral, covertly disturbed family. Her every exposure to life leaves her harder; “She lost her illusions in the collapse of her sympathies.” She loathes the rectory “with a loathing that consumed her life.”

The most hated person in the Saywell family is the rector’s ancient, blind mother, called “The Mater” or “Granny.” Yvette hates her. Her sister Lucille hates her. Their aunt Cissie hates her. She is compared to a toad, a reptile, a fungus. Like the toad that snaps its jaws on all the bees exiting the hive and devouring all life around it, The Mater, who gave literal life to the family, absorbs the entire family’s energy and life force. The gardener smashes the toad with a stone in oblique foreshadowing of The Mater’s fate.

Yvette is keenly aware of her status as a “moral unbeliever” (like her mother, who ran off with young man when Lucille and Yvette were children) and her virgin power. When she finds herself in the company of a virile gipsy man and his “lonely, predative glance,” she finds herself in his virile power, “gone in his will.”

The gipsy represents her “free-born will,” which separates her from the rest of the Saywells. He is an outsider, “on an old, old war-path against such as herself . . . Yes, if she belonged to any side, and to any clan, it was to his.” Under the influence of the absent mother, an adulterous couple she encounters, and the defiant gipsy who “endures in opposition,” Yvette is forced into a confrontation with her sneering father — a confrontation that brings out his hidden evil and self-righteousness.

The Virgin and the Gipsy is an odd novel, much of it written in the style of an adult fairy tale. “The Mater could be a variation of “The Wicked Queen,” while “She-who-was-Cynthia,” the “white snowflower” of a myth or tale, blooming in perpetuity, could be the prodigal Princess whose transformation into a degraded nettle threatens the self-satisfied and lethal stability of the Saywells. The deluge that puts an end to this uncomfortable status quo is at first mysterious in origin, purging the world as it does on a clear, sunny, rainless day. The gipsy could be the Prince or the traveler, come from afar and finally fulfilling his role in the tale as rescuer — literally and figuratively.

Lawrence was known for rewriting and editing many times over, and clearly The Virgin and Gipsy lacks his revision. Yet its themes of female sexuality, male power over it, the immorality of conventional morality, and the sacredness of vitality that are explored in depth in Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Women in Love, are here presented in a beautifully distilled form — perhaps more haunting for its very simplicity.

18 August 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Victorian Love Stories

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Victorian Love Stories: An Oxford Anthology edited by Kate Flint. Highly recommended.

Coincidentally, I happened to read this collection of Victorian short stories focused on love relationships concurrently with a book of Victorian erotic short stories and George Eliot’s Middlemarch(set earlier in the 19th century). Although there are occasional hints of the erotic or sexual in many of the love stories, most of them are about love and romance disconnected from the physical — love with all the proprieties. It’s almost as if the Victorian erotica fills in the missing pieces in the love stories that would be private and not observable (those things the characters truly think and feel but which is unacceptable to reveal or acknowledge in public, along with the erotic).

The love stories are, for the most part, about acceptable if not always successful relationships, whereas the erotica is largely about questionable or illicit relationships. Middlemarch made an interesting companion, since at least one of the key relationships, Dorothea and Causabon, appear to experience neither love nor Eros. In the end, both the love stories and the erotica may seem unbalanced because each seems incomplete — as though one can have love or sex, but not both. Is the balance as difficult to achieve in life as it is in literature?

Flint’s collection is outstanding in its scope, including stories by authors who are not well known to today’s average reader as well as stories by such authors as Anthony Trollope, Henry James, Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy, Somerset Maugham, Rudyard Kipling, and Oscar Wilde. The stories include young love, middle-aged love (a welcome change from today’s focus on youth), deception, fantasy, fairy tale, class issues, religious differences, urban and rural life, changing mores, rejection and pain, and the proper and improper. There is even a touch of silliness in W. S. Gilbert’s “An Elixir of Love” and a surprise ending in Ellen T. Fowler’s “An Old Wife’s Tale.”

The settings range from urban London to rural villages; from rough coastal areas (Anthony Trollope’s “Malachi’s Cove”) to mythical locales ( Christiana Rossetti’s “Hero,” Laurence Housman’s “The Story of the Herons”); from hints of the supernatural (Wilkie’s “The Captain’s Last Love” and Amelia B. Edwards’ “Salome”) to other worlds (Olive Schreiner’s “In a Far-Off World”); from the urban (A. St. John Adcock’s “Bob Harris’s Deputy”) to the bucolic (James’ “A Day of Days”); from the familiar (stories set in the United Kingdom) to the exotic (Ernest Dowson’s “The Statute of Limitations,” Kipling’s “Georgie Porgie,” Flora Annie Steel’s “Uma Himavutee”). The one thing all the stories have in common is love — happy love, unrequited love, frustrated love, deceptive love, miserable love, tragic love — love and what passes for love in its complex facets.

Despite the subject matter, there is little that is sickly sweet in this collection. Love is not always touching or uplifting; sometimes it is deeply bitter. Most of the stories are memorable; some are unforgettable (Lucy Clifford’s “The End of Her Journey,” Hubert Crackenthorpe’s “A Conflict of Egoisms”). No matter how you feel about love, you are sure to find a beautifully written story here that will resonate with your experiences.

16 June 2002
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Reef

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The Reef by Edith Wharton, with an introduction by Louis Auchincloss. Recommended.

In his introduction to The Reef, Louis Auchincloss notes modern readers may not appreciate a moral climate in which a woman opposes her stepson’s engagement to a girl who had an affair with the man the woman is about to marry. The Reef, however, is as concerned with morality as with class.

On his way to France to see his beloved, the widowed Anna Leath, George Darrow receives a telegram telling him not to come “till thirtieth” due to “unexpected obstacle.” When he doesn’t receive an explanation for the delay, he experiences growing feelings of disappointment and humiliation. He imagines the umbrellas and elbows of his fellow travelers saying, “She doesn’t want you, doesn’t want you, doesn’t want you.”

As he waits undecided whether to return to London or to press forward, he encounters Sophy Viner, the recently unemployed servant of a woman whose dinners he once attended. She is on her way to Paris to look up old friends and to pursue a theatrical career. Darrow, who feels sorry for himself and the loss he thinks he is about to suffer, manipulates Sophy into staying with him to attend the theatre, then into a short liaison. He is unaware she has fallen in love with him and his kindness in her hour of uncertainty.

A year later, Anna Leath eagerly anticipates Darrow’s arrival. They are to be married and begin an overseas stint as part of his diplomatic career. Her stepson, Owen Leath, wants to do something both know will upset his aristocratic, old-fashioned grandmother. He wants to marry Anna’s daughter’s governess, who is none other than Sophy Viner.

Darrow and Sophy’s secret is safe with one another. Darrow, however, is uncomfortably aware Anna wants him to support Owen’s choice of a woman he knows to be unsuitable but whom he pities. He tries to convince Sophy that Owen is not right for her. “You’d rather I didn’t marry any friend of yours,” she says “not as a question, but as a mere dispassionate statement of fact.” Darrow’s lack of feeling and poor conduct make Sophy an undesirable wife for Owen. She is a painful reminder that both of them have broken social conventions.

Auchincloss calls Sophy a “fallen woman” in the context of the times, but this is too simplistic. Sophy’s problem, before and after Anna finds out about her relationship with Darrow, is her class and lack of social background. After all, in The House of Mirth, extramarital liaisons are commonplace, understood, and accepted if they are discreet and do not upset the social balance. Within the correct parameters, such affairs become a comfortable topic of gossip and speculation.

Once Anna divines there had been something between Darrow and Sophy beyond a casual acquaintance, he says simply, “She has given me up.” He refers to Sophy’s expectations, not her feelings. In the world she inhabits, she has learned the Darrows seek temporary solace from the Sophys and permanence and stability from the Annas.

Anna keeps returning to the idea that Sophy has been there before, whether it is to the theatre with Darrow or in Darrow’s arms. She is bothered that the liaison happened while he was on his way to her, but is more disturbed that the kiss he places on her neck has also landed on Sophy’s — and that Sophy has been more intimate with him.

Anna asks Darrow, “Do such things happen to men often?” (phrased passively, as though Darrow had been the pursued rather than the pursuer). “I don’t know what happens to other men. Such a thing never happened to me . . .” The “thing” here is not the physical aspect of the relationship. Even the “fine” Anna knows that he has indulged because one of his relationships, with a mutual acquaintance named Kitty, drove her away from him in their youth. This relationship outside their social sphere reflects a lack of discretion that may make him an unsuitable husband and stepparent.

With her finely tuned perceptions, delicacy, generosity, and genuine feelings, Sophy does not deserve her fate. Darrow assures Anna that she is no adventuress, which Anna wants her to be. She returns to the service of Mrs. Murrett in India. In one of the weaknesses of The Reef, Anna’s encounter with Sophy’s fat, frowsy, common sister and her equally common lover, Jimmy Brance, puts the noble Sophy in her proper place for both Anna and the reader.

The Reef is in shallower waters than The House of Mirth or The Age of Innocence, its structure weakened by a forced reliance on dialogue. In the final third, various characters talk to Anna in her room, coming and going through what may as well be a revolving door.

Sophy’s fate further weakens the drama. Yet who but Wharton could write, “Her frugal silence mocked his prodigality of hopes and fears”? Such elegant prose and insights alone distinguish The Reef.

7 July 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

As an aside, it would be interesting if, in the same fashion Jean Rhys gave Bertha Mason from Jane Eyre “a life,” a writer were to do the same for Sophy, whose viewpoint is not shown.

Book review: A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash

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A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash by Sylvia Nasar. Recommended.

The prologue to Sylvia Nasar’s biography of Nobel Laureate John Nash, Jr., summarizes the mathematical marvel’s life thus: genius, madness, reawakening.

Nash, who was awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize for Economics in a controversy that would ultimately change the nature of the prize, is the child of mostly unremarkable parents. His father, John, Sr., held a middle-manager position with the Appalachian Power Company inspecting power lines, while his mother, Virginia, was a “public-school thinker.” Despite his mother’s efforts to push him, he remains socially isolated, without any close friends. In the fourth grade, he begins to demonstrate the original approach to problems that will become his hallmark as a genius. Interestingly enough, it will be an extensive network of friends and peers that helps to ensure Nash’s place in academic and Nobel history.

Nash may have a “beautiful mind” with a unique way of looking at difficult problems, but Nasar does not portray him as a likeable man in his pre-mental illness heyday. Lacking in social skills and graces but not in ego, he is a class snob. Like many boys and young men, he plays pranks — but many of his have pathological undertones. Some cause serious physical pain and embarrassment. Others have the potential to cause death (one person recounts how a Nash prank might have resulted in electrocution of the victim). As a student and young academic, he delights in one-upmanship and in the humiliation of less-gifted men. In a recurring theme, he will flirt romantically with other bright young men. Much is forgiven Nash by his mentors and peers, however, because of his unquestioned mathematical gifts and because such behavior (at least, to some extent) is expected of great mathematical minds.

At the peak of his career, Nash succumbs to what is diagnosed as schizophrenia, which Nasar implies may have been the result of stress brought about by concerns about being drafted and Nash’s insistence on tackling near-impossible problems and the resulting frustrations. Whatever the cause, Nash becomes delusional, thinking aliens are speaking to him through The New York Times and feeling a compelling need to renounce his U.S. citizenship and to become a world citizen. For the next 30 years, Nash — and his genius — will be lost to the world, which, if it thinks of him at all, thinks him dead.

It is only a few years before he is nominated for the Nobel Prize in Economics (for his contributions to game theory) that Nash will slowly emerge from his illness. During this time, much of the mathematics community, including friends and rivals who were uncomfortable with his illness, rally behind him. Through most of his adult life, his wife, Alicia, is there to take care of him — even after marriage, divorce, and remarriage.

To write A Beautiful Mind, Nasar read and interviewed dozens of mathematicians, physicists, economists, and other academics as well as psychiatrists and mental health experts, making the book more than just a biography of John Nash, Jr. It is also an insightful overview of the tightly knit mathematics worlds of Princeton, MIT, and RAND Corporation during the 1940s and 1950s. Nash’s treatment at several private and public mental health institutions is revealing and sometimes horrifying, especially when he is treated with insulin shock therapy. The political climate — the draft for the Korean conflict, anti-Semitism, McCarthyism and its chilling effect on American academia, and the arms and space races with the Soviets — are all vivid parts of Nash’s story.

It is probably in the nature of biography that the author cannot be entirely subjective toward his or her subject; after all, he or she must have enough passion about that subject to research and write hundreds of pages about it. Nasar is clearly a fan of Nash’s; she often excuses or glosses over his youthful bad behaviour, his capacious ego, his poor treatment of those he considers inferior (including his girlfriend Eleanor and their son John David Stier), and his obsessive competitiveness. She describes him repeatedly as “handsome” with an “Olympian body” and “finely modeled” or “chiseled” features. (The photos included show Nash to have an average face and body.)

Nasar speeds through the 1970s and 1980s, no doubt because they were uneventful for the “Phantom of Fine Hall.” This leaves the reader to wonder what Nash’s official position was at Princeton (he tells a visitor he shouldn’t go into the faculty club). At this time, he appears to have had an office and is tolerated by students and staff alike.

I am always interested in genius, especially genius derailed by an enigmatic mental illness such as schizophrenia. A question (not to be answered) might be: Is Nash a genius despite schizophrenia, or is the schizophrenia an inherent part of what makes him a genius? Are the two conditions distinct, or are they inseparable? At any rate, while Nash may not have what I would consider a “beautiful mind,” it is certainly a gifted — and cursed — one.

25 June 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Ethan Frome

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Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton; afterword by Alfred Kazin. Highly recommended.

Ethan Frome is a powerful story about powerless people. The title character is held in thrall by his parents, his land, his poverty, and his lifeless and loveless marriage. His wife, Zenobia (Zeena), cannot escape the confines of her narrow mind; her imaginary illnesses and the status they give her in a small village like the aptly named Starkfield, Massachusetts; and the meanness of her own life (symbolised by her attachment to her pickle dish and her refusal to use it, even for visits by the minister). Finally, there is Mattie Silver, the relative who has come to help care for Zeena and the house and who has nowhere to go. Interestingly, the three prisoners are related; Zeena is referred to as a cousin of Ethan’s, while Mattie is Zeena’s cousin. Zeena is, literally and figuratively, the central figure who connects them all and who keeps Ethan and Mattie apart.

From his youth, Ethan’s impulsive, reactive nature leads him into trouble. When Zeena helps him out with the care of his mother, who dies and leaves him alone and lonely, “before he knew what he was doing, he had asked her [Zeena] to stay there with him.” It is soon thereafter that he discovers that his loneliness gave him selective vision and that Zeena is more than a good nurse; she’s an excellent hypochondriac. When someone asks him if he lacks money, “‘Not a bit,’ Ethan’s pride retorted before his reason had time to intervene.”

Ethan is hindered from all he desires, whether it’s his technical education, his potential career as an engineer, or the arms of Mattie Silver, by his prevailing sense of duty and honor. Although he feels trapped on his land and in a farming life with which he is not happy because he has had a succession of people for whom to care — first, his father, then his mother, then Zeena — Ethan tells Mattie, “I want to be there when you’re sick and when you’re lonesome.” Later, his last thought before unconsciousness will be about his responsibility to his horse: “I ought to be getting him his feed . . .” He struggles constantly with his need to be free of Zeena and his obligation to take care of her.

Zeena and Mattie are contrasted throughout; Zeena’s lashless lids are nothing like Mattie’s fully lashed lids, which Ethan observes “sinking slowly when anything charmed or moved her.” Her laughter is seen “sparkling through her lashes.” While Zeena is thin and hard, Ethan sees Mattie (in Zeena’s overnight absence) as “taller, fuller, more womanly in shape and motion” than when she is under Zeena’s watchful eye. Light, which brings out the sharp hollows of Zeena’s face as in a horror film, “threw a lustrous fleck on [Mattie’s] lips, edged her eyes with velvet shade, and laid a milky whiteness above the black curve of her brows.” Is this Mattie as she really is, or is this Mattie as Ethan’s loneliness and imagination need her to be?

Around Mattie, Ethan is often overcome by the strength of his emotions. When she serves him dinner, with the cat lying drowsily by the stove in a carefully drawn domestic scene, “Ethan was suffocated with the sense of well-being.” This sense of being overcome recurs throughout their encounters. He doubts that he inspires such a glow. “Could it be his coming that gave her such a kindled face?” He is jealous of every man Mattie encounters, particularly the wealthy Irish grocer’s son, Denis Eady.

Whether Wharton is writing of society New York or rural New England, such an illicit romance cannot succeed, and Ethan’s fails spectacularly — leaving behind people who are emotional and physical wrecks. Zeena is transformed into reluctant caregiver, while Mattie is transformed into yet another part of the trap that keeps Ethan on the farm, impoverished financially, intellectually, and emotionally. His emotions about his fate and that of his would-be lover are never revealed other than through an indescribable look that haunts those who witness it. In life, all are more dead than the Fromes in the graveyard. Ethan Frome is the literary embodiment of Wharton’s quote, “Life is the saddest thing, next to death.”

Ethan Frome‘s framework is awkward; a narrator from outside Starkfield manages to get into Ethan’s home and learn the whole story, which then is improbably told in great detail in third-person omniscient. This detracts only slightly from the novel’s wintry, claustrophobic atmosphere and evocative powers. In her introduction, Wharton calls the reader “sophisticated” and the people of whom she writes “simple” — as stark as the New England backdrop. Yet Ethan Frome, for all his “simplicity,” is a rich, fully realised person as memorable as Newland Archer (The Age of Innocence) — and as tragic as Lily Bart (The House of Mirth).

14 June 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Madame Bovary: Patterns of Provincial Life

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Madame Bovary: Patterns of Provincial Life by Gustave Flaubert; translated by Francis Steegmuller. Recommended.

Surprisingly, Madame Bovary begins with a look at the painful childhood of the seemingly dull and plodding man who will become the title character’s longsuffering husband, Charles Bovary. The novel commences with a mysterious “we” — the identity of the narrator who tells the story of Bovary’s ignominious entry into school is not known — but then changes to third-person omniscient. Charles is a conscientious, yet average, student, whose school, career, lodgings, and even first wife are selected by his mother. His marriage to Emma Rouault, the daughter of an apparently prosperous farmer, is the first major decision he makes for himself about his life and borders on an act of rebellion. That this act of independence should have such tragic consequences only adds to their effect.

Like many of her class, Emma is a romantic dreamer — but one who expects others to make those dreams into reality. Within a short time of her wedding, perhaps even on the day after, “the bride made not the slightest sign that could be taken to betray anything at all.” For Charles Bovary, however, marriage to Emma — following as it does on the heels of his first marriage to a thin, complaining huissier’s widow whose financial assets prove to be negligible — seems to be the culmination of happiness. “He was happy now, without a care in the world.” Every moment spent with her, each of her gestures, “and many other things in which it had never occurred to him to look for pleasure — such now formed the steady current of his happiness.”

When her marriage proves to be a plunge into a provincial life devoid of the romance promised by books, arts, and a naïve imagination, Madame Bovary blames her average, unambitious husband, Flaubert writes, “. . . following formulas she believed efficacious, she kept trying to experience love . . . Having thus failed to produce the slightest spark of love in herself, and since she was incapable of understanding what she didn’t experience, or of recognizing anything that wasn’t expressed in conventional terms, she reached the conclusion that Charles’s desire for her was nothing very extraordinary.” With that inescapable conclusion in mind, Emma is free to find “love” elsewhere — for example, in a recurring fantasy about a count who dances with her at an aristocrat’s party; with the worldly Rodolphe Boulanger for whom she is little more than another in a string of mistresses; and for the young student-clerk Léon Dupuis for whom she is a brilliant, sympathetic flower among the colorless bourgeoisie.

Although in the “Translator’s Introduction” Steegmuller mentions, “Flaubert’s supposed conception of his heroine as a character too sublime for this world,” Emma is neither sublime nor sympathetic. Rather than seek happiness within or to improve herself, or to appreciate the value of even her uninspiring husband, she blames others for the monotony of her life and its lack of excitement and passion. She cannot find consolation in her daughter (“she wanted a son”), and neglects and even mistreats her. She tries to bolster herself through Charles’s position, at the cost of a young man’s leg. The village abbé, Bournisien, is oblivious to her emotional turmoil and pain and advises her to “drink a cup of tea” as a remedy. His nemesis Homais, a pseudoscientific pharmacist who is the archetype for the petit bourgeoisie, drowns out all around him with his droning theories and ideas, including Madame Bovary and his hapless assistant Justin. There are no kindred spirits for Emma in either Tostes or Yonville l’Abbaye.

As her actions lead her into a downward emotional and financial spiral, Emma finds nothing around her to which to turn and no one to help, except if she is willing to prostitute herself. Her life, built on her dreams and her sacrifice of others, is doomed. By the end of the novel, she has been reduced to little more than a scheming adulteress and petty debtor. Ironically, her husband’s passion and grief for her bring out the personal nobility to which she was purposely blind. He has always had that to which she aspired.

Although Emma Bovary is certainly impossible to forget, equally memorable are all the novel’s supporting characters, from Tuvache and his lathe and the lovesick Justin to Homais, whose banality throughout may be summed up by his award of the cross of the Legion of Honor. This last is a suitable ending for this study of the patterns of provincial life.

13 June 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Collected Stories of Colette

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The Collected Stories of Colette by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, ed., and with an introduction by, Robert Phelps. Highly recommended.

According to the introduction, this collection represents 100 stories taken from a dozen volumes published during Colette’s lifetime. They are categorised as “Early Stories,” “Backstage at the Music Hall,” “Varieties of Human Nature,” and “Love.” Some, like the Clouk/Chéri stories, appear to be fiction, while many, like “The Rainy Moon” and “Bella-Vista,” seem to be taken straight from Colette’s varied life and acquaintances.

Whether writing fiction or chronicling fact, whether writing in the third-person omniscient or in the first person, Colette herself is always a character — rarely as an influencer, that is, one whose actions or choices drive the plot. Colette’s preferred role is as observer — and it is one for which she is well suited.

An inveterate sensualist and a former music-hall performer, Colette integrates her characters (real and fictional) with everything around them — their clothes (costumes); their abodes, dressing rooms, and haunts (sets); and their neighborhoods and towns (theatres). Much of Colette’s writing, no matter how mundane the surface subject, is about art — the art of living and, notably, the art of loving. In “My Goddaughter,” the subject tells her godmother how she injured herself with scissors and a curling iron and recounts her mother’s reaction. “She said that I had ruined her daughter for her! She said, ‘What have you done with my beautiful hair which I tended so patiently? . . . And that cheek, who gave you permission to spoil it! . . . I’ve taken years, I’ve spent my days and nights, trembling over this masterpiece. . . .'”

Colette is attuned to everything, every sense, every nuance. “A faint fragrance did indeed bring to my nostrils the memory of various scents which are at their strongest in autumn.” (“Gibriche”) “. . . set in a bracelet, which slithered between her fingers like a cold and supple snake.” (“The Bracelet”) ” . . . the supper of rare fruits, an orgy of ice water sparkling in the thin glasses, as intoxicating as champagne . . .” (“Florie”) “Peroxided hair, light-colored eyes, white teeth, something about her of an appetizing but slightly vulgar young washerwoman.” (“Gitanette”)

Colette does not pretend to be an objective observer of human behaviour; she does not hesitate to express to the reader her weariness with certain individuals or situations, and her stories of her vain, pretentious, overbearing friend Valentine reveal her jaded and waning affection. She knows this woman so well that she sees her almost as Valentine sees herself — a drama queen acting out stories, roles, and games without depth of feeling for them. “What Must We Look Like?” becomes Valentine’s driving philosophy, to which Colette responds with “a mild, a kindly pity.” In “The Hard Worker,” Colette says, “I can see she does not hate him, but I cannot see she loves him either.” What Colette sees — and does not see — is to be respected.

Some stories, such as “The Sick Child,” are vivid and imaginative and reveal Colette’s amazing ability to think and dream like a gifted child. “The Advice,” with its mundane beginning and premise and twisted, horrifying ending would enhance any collection of gothic or mystery tales. Other stories, like “Gibriche,” several of the other music-hall stories, and “Bella-Vista,” tackle topics that even today remain controversial. “Bella-Vista,” in which Colette’s moods seem to wane with every familiarity achieved with her hostesses, offers an ending that is heavily foreshadowed throughout but is surprising and gruesome nonetheless.

Most of the stories, whether fiction or nonfiction, seem to come from life in one way or another. The quantity of stories and the quality of the collection reveal the incredible scope of experience of Colette, the dry, often weary yet obsessive observer, interpreter, and chronicler of human nature. As Judith Thurman says in her introduction to Colette’s work, The Pure and the Impure, “This great ode to emptiness was written by a woman who felt full.” As well she should.

27 May 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf