Category Archives: Books and literature

Book review: Nothing But You: Love Stories from the New Yorker

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Nothing But You: Love Stories from the New Yorker ed. by Roger Angell. Not recommended.

Earlier in 2002, I had read Victorian Love Stories: An Oxford Anthology edited by Kate Flint, a wonderful, imaginative anthology that covers the gamut of love, from earnest and longing to the impulsive and painful, from gritty realism to the fantastic and the supernatural. I had had Nothing But You for a while, and it seemed natural to read it as a follow-up to the Victorian anthology. This proved to be a mistake; the contrast between the two highlights the shallowness of the New Yorker stories.

There are a few gems, such as “Marito in Città” by John Cheever, “The Diver” by V. S. Pritchett, “Eyes of a Blue Dog” with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magic surrealism, “The Kugelmass Episode” with Woody Allen’s characteristic offbeat humour and angst, and “Here Come the Maples” with a touch of irony by John Updike. One story by a lesser-known writer, “In the Gloaming” by Alice Elliott Dark, stands out for beautifully conveying the tragedy of loss and alienation, not through death, but through the chains and barriers that life erects to prevent insight and truer love between the mother and son and between them and the distant, unloving father. Impending death finally begins to break down those barriers and reveal the humanity of mother and son to one another.

For the most part, however, these highlights are overwhelmed by the blandness of the rest of the selections. Somehow, this collection about “love” seems to miss many of love’s elements — affection, depth of feeling, passion (depth of emotion of any kind), perception, dedication. Instead, many of the stories read as pointless, plodding, surface tellings of things that happen, with an amazing attention to mundane and unrelated detail, and revolve around featureless, interchangeable characters with no depth and no interest. “The Nice Restaurant” by Mary Gaitskill, with its generic yuppie characters Evan and Laurel, their meaningless relationship, and endless detail such as “Evan picked at his pork-chop bone. He downed his glass of wine” and “Laurel shifted in her chair” that is meant to convey the flat emotions of these flat people contrasts badly with the underlying passions and conflicts subtly portrayed in Lucy Clifford’s “The End of Her Journey” and Hubert Crackenthorpe’s “A Conflict of Egoisms” from the Victorian anthology. Later, the same cardboard characters, with different names, will appear in “Ocean Avenue” by Michael Chabon, where, nine yawning pages of yuppie angst over coffee later, the predictable happens.

How modern authors have reduced one of humanity’s deepest, most elemental, and disturbing emotions into a painfully superficial detailing of everyday functions is, perhaps, a reflection of modern love and life. I would like not to think so, however. I would like to think that we are still capable of passion, even cartoon characters like Evan and Laurel and Chabon’s California counterparts, Lazar and Suzette.

At the end of the Victorian collection, I felt elated, disturbed, empathic, inspired, and despairing. At the end of the New Yorker collection, I felt nothing but bored.

3 November 2002
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Stories of John Cheever

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The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever. Highly recommended.

John Cheever has long had a reputation as the quintessential American writer of the 20th century, and this collection, which he edited, is illustration of why he is a favourite of the American literati.

Cheever’s stories are populated by mostly mundane people in mundane settings — the corporate executive and rising stars who go home every night to an affluent suburb like Shady Hill, with its unforgettable recurring cast of characters (the Beardens, the Farquarson, the Parminters) who live on such unforgettable streets as Alewives Lane; the New York City elevator operator whose life consists of going up and down all day and whose mind and imagination never leave their comfortable paths; other apartment building workers, half of whose lives are spent on the fringe of luxury and the other half in grimy poverty; the thoughtless affluent who cannot conceive of any other life; the downwardly mobile who have no choice but to lower their level of existence closer to that of their former servants and who cannot seem to grasp that things will never be what they once were; the social outcasts, like Mrs. Hewing, who is “kind of immoral”; the former duchesses and other members of the old European elite who wear their rags with grace while their estate homes crumble around them; the expatriates who fit in neither where they come from nor where they live; and the travelers who find tragedy awaits at the end of the trip with the death of their child — or even the beginning of the journey of their doomed marriage.

What sets the stories and the characters — and Cheever — apart is the surreal nature of so much of what happens in the course of these vignettes. Instead of addressing an addiction like alcoholism directly, Cheever tells of an ordinary woman who cannot stop listening to her neighbours as their lives, their arguments, their loves, and their passions are voiced over a new radio her husband has bought for her in “The Enormous Radio.” The birth and course of the affliction are seamlessly revealed through Irene Westcott’s inability to withdraw from vicariously living through her neighbours’ conversations.

“The Five-Forty-Eight” reveals how an ordinary event — sexual relations between executive and assistant — can lead to the humiliation of a confident, secure man, who finds himself falling into the filth, while the disturbed and wronged ex-assistant is finally free of the demons he helped to feed while ignorant of their existence.

In “The Swimmer,” which takes place on a Sunday where the recurring refrain is, “I drank too much” can be heard at every home, Neddy Merrill decides to go home from a party by swimming across the county through all the pools in between his host’s home and his own — a novel idea taken to its surreal level as the weather and the trees change, and Neddy finds himself lost in a world where he knows what has become of himself but not how or why.

The world of John Cheever is primarily male; the vast majority of the stories are told by a man in the first person. The women whom they encounter range from their tired wives to their enigmatic lovers — and, in the case of the third of “Three Stories,” an enigmatic wife. Sex is central to many of the tales; the happily and the miserably married are in many cases equally open to sexual adventure and excitement if occasionally afraid of the consequences. It is the rare protagonist who would voice the thoughts of one incidental character: “After sixteen years, I still bite her shoulders. She makes me feel like Hannibal crossing the Alps.” (“The Country Husband”)

It is fascinating to watch Cheever’s subjects and style evolve from the 1920s and ’30s to the 1960s — from an era of elevator men, fedoras, ubiquitous cigarettes, Martinis (with a capital “M”), and “affairs” to a time when “Artemis, the Honest Well Digger” can refer to the sexual act by its most unacceptable term and be whisked off to Washington, D.C., for making the mistake of falling in love in the U.S.S.R.

The surfaces here are untroubled, but the depths roil with repressed thoughts and emotions that are typical of Shady Hill and its ilk — but are neither acknowledged nor acceptable. Nearly everyone, whether they live in New York, Shady Hill, or Rome, is desperately seeking something — love, sex, passion, something — anything — to lift them above the towers of the city skyline where they work and the chimneys of the suburban trap they cannot — and really do not wish to — escape. An empty life is still a life of social acceptability.

1 September 2002
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Middlemarch

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Middlemarch by George Eliot. Highly recommended.

It seems that it’s nearly impossible to talk about Middlemarch without mentioning its breadth and scope. The irony is that the entire novel takes place within the confines of this small community and within the sometimes-small minds of its various citizens.

Although a vast number of characters populate Middlemarch and its environs, each who speaks has a distinctive voice, yet does not fall into being mere type only. The horse dealer sounds like a horse dealer — but one with a particular background and perspective. The setting itself represents every type of town, suburb, village, or neighborhood where you’ll find the complacent, the critical, the aspiring, the intellectual, the earthy, the wealthy, the poor, and the worker in between. As with many English novels, the setting, in this case Middlemarch, becomes as much a central character as any other, whether it’s Dorothea or Lydgate.

The tapestry Eliot weaves is complex; one character’s actions can affect the lives of others he or she may rarely meet, while the unknown behavior and works of Bulstrode in his youth decades ago eventually touch nearly all.

How the characters come together is sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle. Dorothy’s interest in Causabon, although a puzzle to her friends and family, is painted in broad strokes to the reader; her later interest in Will Ladislaw, grows somewhat more delicately if based in the same altruistic roots. Mary Garth and Fred Vincy have, in their way, come together in their childhoods; they are still struggling with mutually agreeable terms that will allow both to acknowledge the love and affection that are already there. Lydgate and Rosamond are both more of a puzzle and less of one — a case of two opposed personalities with opposing views, opposing goals, and opposing personalities drawn together by that most capricious of matchmakers, proximity and circumstance, to form a union that will frustrate both and satisfy neither.

Against the background of these four sometimes difficult relationships (Dorothea and Causabon with its lack of love or eros, Dorothea and Will with the barriers set by Causabon’s will and that of the Middlemarch society who frown on Will and Dorothea’s association with him, Fred and Mary with her imposed restrictions to set him on the correct course in life before she can make a commitment to him, and Lydgate and Rosamond with their diametrical oppositions) is the long, happy marriage of Nicholas Bulstrode and his Vincy wife Harriet. Unlike the others, there are no visible barriers to their happiness, and they are happy as a couple — except for the events in Bulstrode’s past that haunt him in the back of his mind and then at the front with the appearance of Raffles. The marriage survives the ensuing scandal, but the individuals — Nicholas and Harriet — become poor shadow of their former selves.

It is in a town like Middlemarch that a woman like Dorothea will find it impossible to find approbation for her plans and Bulstrode will find the antagonism of those who have come to terms with their own worldly desires. It is in a town like Middlemarch that merely the raving words of a delirium tremens-afflicted Raffles can upset the respectable work of a respectable lifetime. The downfall of Bulstrode validates the town and its modernizing secular culture.

Middlemarch is a novel of insight into personality, motivations, social behaviours, and history. In the end, even the happiest characters have failed at most if not all of their youthful aspirations and have become variations on the Middlemarch theme — husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, day-to-day toilers rather than dreamers and achievers. Middlemarch is Everytown, where you will find an example or two of Everyone — and their dreams or lack thereof.

If you intend to glean the utmost from it, begin with an annotated, critical edition; while Eliot enjoyed a high enough level of erudition to reference the current events of 1830s England along with mythology, religion, quotations, and developments in science and medicine, most of us today cannot begin to follow them without assistance. Knowledge of these references will enrich the rich text of a rich mind.

1 September 2002
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: A Confederacy of Dunces

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A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. Highly recommended.

He’s egotistical, erudite, ejaculatory (literally), and explosive. He’s “emptily verbose” (Merriam-Webster’s definition number 3 for “gassy”). He’s also that — gassy, a man with a flux. He’s Ignatius J. Reilly, a monster of a man with a master’s degree, a faulty pyloric valve, a love for Boethius and The Consolation of Philosophy, a hatred for modern life, a passion against anything to do with sex (at least sex involving a second person), and a distinctly lower-class New Orleans lifestyle. He’s also a man about whom his own pet phrase could apply: “Do I believe what I am seeing?”

Set in the New Orleans of the 1960s, A Confederacy of Dunces begins with an incident with an overzealously inept policeman that leads Ignatius, one of the most unforgettable characters of American fiction, into a world with which he is unfamiliar and ill-equipped-work. As a result, he encounters a cornucopia of characters — from the cynical female owner of the laughably named “Night of Joy” to the wizened owner of the equally ill-named “Paradise Hotdogs” — who are as unforgettable as Our Hero. The most memorable is undoubtedly the generically named Jones, who, behind his dark glasses and his cloud of cigarette smoke, manages to see the world, its people, and the ironies of situation all too clearly. There are also Ignatius’s wine-loving mother, his irascible neighbor, and “Myrna Minx” — the closest Ignatius has ever had to a girlfriend.

Ignatius, taken away from his magnum opus (written on a series of Big Chief tablets strewn everywhere in his room in his mother’s house) and the modern movies he so likes to deride, touts the value of The Consolation of Philosophy and bemoans the work of Fortuna while attempting to leave nothing to chance. To feed his laziness and lack of desire to work, he works hard at being sly, devious, and manipulative. He carefully plans and plots his efforts from the perspective of a man who has little perception of human nature; the results are hilariously unexpected — the whims of Fortuna. In the end, Ignatius’s life, such as it is, will never be the same thanks to his forced interaction with the outside world.

A Confederacy of Dunces will make you laugh out loud and, at the same time, you will probably detect an undertone of sadness, even hopelessness. As Walker Percy notes in his introduction, perhaps this is due to the knowledge that author Toole committed suicide. But perhaps it is equally due to the absurdity of modern life that the adventures of the larger-than-life Ignatius reveal at every turn.

2 June 2002
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

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A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson. Recommended.

Bill Bryson is known for his wry humour, and this is my first experience of it. Bryson gets it into his head to walk the famous Appalachian Trail. He is joined in this venture by Stephen Katz, an alcoholic, troubled, overweight friend who’s an unlikely candidate as a hiker/mountain man but who, with his many foibles, adds a much-needed personal touch.

Bryson covers a lot of territory — literally and figuratively. He talks briefly about the birth and history of the trail, hazards that range from bears and lethal viruses to unforgiving weather and deranged murderers, the decline of forest species, acid rain, the maps developed of the trail, its disputed length, the shelters along the way, the Forest Service’s love affair with road building, the National Park Service’s love affair with inefficiency and mismanagement, the people they meet on the trail and off the trail in small towns and tourist trap cities, pack weight, food, and how what you do is walk. We also learn a great deal about Katz that make him both likeable and not at all likeable. I suspect he is someone who is interesting and funny to read about, but who is infuriating in real life. His nonchalance when Bryson is convinced there are bears nearby is a high point.

Bryson is charming, witty, aggravating, and snobbish. If you can see the humorous side of bureaucracy, small-town and rural America, and what was once known as Yuppiedom, you will appreciate his running commentary on The downside of the book is that it hits an anticlimax shy of 2/3 through and never recovers. Perhaps this is symbolic of how walking the trail is.

This is not an Appalachian Trail “how-to” book, nor is it for the serious hiker or nature lover who expects to find out vicariously what it’s like to hike the trail. It’s a dryly funny commentary on humanity that happens to be a walk in the woods.

16 March 2002
Copyright © Diane Schirf

Book review: Zitkala-Sa: American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings

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Zitkala-Sa: American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings edited with an introduction and notes by Cathy N. Davidson and Ada Norris. Highly recommended.

Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin), a South Dakota Sioux (through her mother; her father was white) born in 1876, the year of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, was an educator, musician, writer, and activist. She served as the secretary and treasurer of the Society of American Indians (SAI) and as editor of SAI’s American Indian Magazine.

This collection of Zitkala-Sa’s work includes background information about the author; a chronology of contemporary events; selections from “Old Indian Legends” (retellings of oral story traditions); “American Indian Stories”; selections from American Indian Magazine; and some of her poetry, pamphlets, essays, and speeches.

“Old Indian Legends” introduces Sioux traditions, including Iktomi (a trickster who often takes the form of a spider), Iya the glutton (able to consume whole villages), and the characters of the Sioux world — coyotes, ducks, the terrifying Red Eagle and the stranger who slays it, turtles, toads, mice, bears, badgers, and more. While at first these traditions and stories may strike the outsider as different and alien, to some extent they can evoke some European fairy tale traditions (which also may seem alien to modern sensibilities). Some of the most charming, like “Dance in a Buffalo Skull,” are written in human terms but have no human characters. “Dance,” with its “two balls of fire” growing “larger and brighter” and building of suspense, is an excellent short horror story as well.

The editors note that Zitkala-Sa “makes significant changes to the traditional tales in order to address key political and social issues . . . specifically, land infringement, challenges to tribal sovereignty, and the effects of missionary boarding schools on Yankton or Sioux culture more generally.” Careful in her use of her second language, English, Zitkala-Sa makes a telling transposition in her preface to “Old Indian Legends”; the Indian is the “little black-haired aborigine,” while the European-American is the “blue-eyed little patriot.” Can the people who subjugate and destroy the original natives of the land be anything more than “little” patriots? How great can their patriotism be? The answer is implicit, but Zitkala-Sa believed the old Indian legends belong as much to him simply because of “our near kinship with the rest of humanity” and because “After all, he [the Indian] seems at heart much like other peoples.”

Several of “American Indian Stories” (which established Zitkala-Sa’s literary reputation) are mostly autobiographical. Some describe her representative experience at a Quaker boarding school in Wabash, Indiana. In these, Zitkala-Sa masterfully makes the reader feel how shocking and horrifying our comfortable culture was to children who grew up in a different — but comfortable — culture, beginning with the cutting of her hair. There are the “loud, metallic voice” of the bell and the “annoying clatter of shoes on bare floors.” There is always a “clash of harsh noises” — but mostly there is the “murmuring of an unknown tongue.” Zitkala-Sa and others are lured to the school by the promise of “red apples” — a clear reference to Genesis. She refers to her own culture for her revenge on the devil.

The most poignant tale, one that is frequently anthologized, is “The Widespread Enigma Concerning Blue-Star Woman,” in which a woman must obtain rights she never would have needed but for white man’s law through the trickery of two Indian men who have learned dishonesty in the white men’s schools. “A Warrior’s Daughter,” also often anthologized, tells of an Indian woman who takes action and therefore fate into her own hands — Zitkala-Sa’s prescription for women and for her people.

“Selections from American Indian Magazine” and “Poetry, Pamphlets, Essays, and Speeches” are largely exhortations and expositions of Zitkala-Sa’s viewpoint. In “The Red Man’s America,” she satirizes “My Country, ’tis of Thee” to reflect the Indian’s disenfranchisement — a favourite theme. Although her advocacy of Indian citizenship was not shared by all Indians (for example, the tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy), Zitkala-Sa felt that, without that right in their own country, Indians would continue to languish unnecessarily as wards of the state, without power or basic rights in a democratic land. Other topics include warnings against the use of peyote; the bravery of Indian soldiers during WWI as well as the place that bravery should have earned the Indian in American society and the brotherhood of man; the need for Indians to become educated and to learn English (her own painful school experience notwithstanding); and the Black Hills claim and similar injustices, such as theft of Ute grazing land, the laws against Indian dance, and the lost treaties of the California Indians. To Zitkala-Sa, Indians were not on an even playing field with whites and, until they took action to educate themselves, secure their rights, and obtain the power of legislative and legal representation, they would continue to be helpless to manage their future.

I recommend that you read Zitkala-Sa together with On the Rez, Ian Frazier’s description of today’s life on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Together, they tell a tragic tale of the past 130 years that does not bode well for the “brotherhood of man.”

22 September 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before

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Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before by Jean M. Twenge, Ph.D. Simon and Schuster Free Press. New York: 2007. 304 pages.

Jean Twenge’s mouthful of a subtitle says it all — after taking a look at her generation and its issues, she finds reams of data to support her assumptions. According to Twenge, “. . . this generation has never known a world that puts duty before self.” This is an astonishing statement given the number of young Americans who have found their way to Iraq and Afghanistan or whose origins lie in cultures where duty remains an accepted obligation, as well as the response to the 9/11/2001 attack on the United States and the natural disasters of the past couple of decades. What Twenge dubs “Generation Me” (“GenMe”) seems to have responded to these crises nearly as enthusiastically and generously as their parents and grandparents.

Perhaps every generation likes to think life is tough compared to that of its predecessors. The Silent Generation endured the Great Depression, World War II, and the Korean conflict, while the Baby Boomers lived through the Cold War, assassinations, Vietnam, and Nixon (not to mention the horrors of disco and leisure suits). According to Twenge, GenMe is plagued by the high self-esteem uncorrelated to merit inflicted on them by their elders combined with the concomitant high expectations and the harsh realities of a world in which good jobs are scarce and higher education, housing, and child care costs are high. GenMe, says Twenge, has been taught to think it can do and have anything, but is discovering that getting into and attending college is competitive and expensive; that a typical career path begins with an unsatisfying, low-paying job; and that achieving the lifestyle their parents have — the suburban home with two-car garage and two cars — takes time and lies at some indefinable point in the future.

Twenge and her associates have pored through countless surveys to see how this generation’s expectations, attitudes, and mores compare to those of its predecessors. Because most of these data are from the Baby Boomers, the “Than Ever Before” of the subtitle is debatable. If we had data for each generation of Americans from the entire history of our nation, we might be surprised by how attitudes have not only evolved, but sometimes reverted to a previous state. We tend to stereotype eras, too. When you mention the 1950s, most people envision the nuclear family, Leave It to Beaver, and innocent pleasures such as the Hula Hoop and roller skating. In reality, sex was hot (think Marilyn Monroe and From Here to Eternity); censorship was losing its influence to the changing mores of the masses, especially those of the young; and sexy, antiestablishment rebels like Marlon Brando and James Dean were redefining antiauthoritarianism as “cool.” Note that Monroe, Brando, and Dean would belong to what Twenge calls “Generation Prude” (with GenMe in the role of “Generation Crude”).

Twenge peppers her selected statistics with a generous number of illustrative quotations and anecdotes. While these are entertaining, they’re also meaningless; anyone could find quotations and anecdotes that support a contradictory point of view. Indeed, Twenge contradicts herself on occasion. After asserting that GenMe is more tolerant of gays, she mentions a teenage boy who is afraid of what his classmates would do to him if they knew of his orientation. That doesn’t sound “more tolerant” to me.

Undoubtedly Twenge cherry picks the data, and there’s no way for a reader to know how valid the studies and surveys are. She also doesn’t take into account regional and socioeconomic factors. My guess is that, for example, students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, living and studying in an urban, multicultural setting, are more tolerant than either the parents or teens of the Itawamba County school district in northern Mississippi, now infamous for their treatment of a lesbian classmate who wanted to bring her girlfriend to the prom. Like other generations, GenMe isn’t a uniform mass.

The world and the workplace don’t operate optimally for GenMe, so Twenge devotes “Applying Our Knowledge” to her solutions. For example, under “For Employers,” she says, “. . . realize that younger employees may have a very different outlook in life . . . the times that shaped GenMe’ers as children are very different from those experienced by older generations.” Surely she knows that for millennia each generation or two has had a different outlook and that the solution isn’t for the older to adapt to the younger, but for society to evolve as views and values blend and evolve, then change.

At this point, Twenge becomes a self-parody. While deploring the self-centeredness she has tried to document, she exemplifies it by suggesting solutions that require catering to the expectations of GenMe. There is no meeting halfway. Because GenMe doesn’t accept authority automatically (does youth ever?), it’s up to you to earn their respect. And they expect praise, so Twenge says, so you’d better be prepared to deliver it. Note what’s missing — what GenMe, whose members take great pride in their critical thinking skills, can expect and how they can adapt to meet their employers halfway. It’s our way or the highway, it seems.

I’ve seen some of the attitudes and behaviors Twenge outlines and been among the first to shake my head over them. On the whole, however, when GenMe enters the sphere of work, relationships, and family, they do what everyone does — they grow up. They alter what they can, for example, life/work balance, and adapt to what they can’t. In every generation, youthful idealism succumbs to adult pragmatism. In the end, Twenge makes only the case that GenMe is different from the Baby Boomers, who were different from their parents. That they are different, and the ways in which they are different, is hardly a revelation, and that they are “more miserable than ever before” remains to be proven. Twenge’s information and her interpretations are interesting, and some of her concerns may be valid, but don’t be surprised if in 20 years someone is writing about how “prudish,” uptight, and intolerant GenMe is.

22 March 2011
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Pagan’s Crusade

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Pagan’s Crusade by Catherine Jinks. New York: Collins. 2004. 272 pages.

I learned about Pagan’s Crusade on a medieval history list, where a poster recommended it for young adults. Pagan, a 16-year-old product of war rape who arises from the grimy underbelly of 1187 Jerusalem, finds himself desperate to join the Knights Templar for both the money and protection from the lowlifes to whom he’s indebted. Life as a Templar squire won’t be easy, he’s told. “Lord Roland’s last squire was disemboweled by the Infidel and his guts were tied across the road to the fortress,” to which Pagan mentally responds, “Hip hip hooray.”

It’s Pagan’s irreverent commentary and metaphors that may hook the young adult reader. In Pagan’s world, those who aren’t rotting from disease and poverty are rotting from corruption and cynicism, with one remarkable exception — the man to whom he’s hired himself as squire.

Like many teenagers, Pagan nicknames individuals based on their appearance, so for example the sergeant who interviews him becomes “Rockhead” (“face like a fort, eyes like arrowheads”).  When Pagan learns that his Knight Templar, Lord Roland Roucy de Bram, is a paragon of looks, strength, and virtue, he dubs him “Saint George” (“like something off a stained glass window”). If Pagan can’t stand Rockhead, he’s not too sure about Saint George, either, as they set about protecting pilgrims and then defending Jerusalem itself.

Pagan sounds like the teenager he is, but his voice is that of an alienated loner who’s come of age in the era of video games, not the twelfth century. Young adults may relate to his running, clipped commentary on everyone and everything, but I found it to be tiresome, especially as it is not leavened by a sound, suspenseful plot or even historical context. The anticlimactic, predictable denouement didn’t leave this older adult reader wanting more of this series about the “misadventures of a squire in peril,” a young man surrounded by war, violence, starvation, disease, and death who whines, “Lentils again. Terrific.”

19 March 2011
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson

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The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson by Kevin J. Hayes. New York: Oxford University Press. 2008. 752 pages.

While I was visiting my aunt in Washington, D.C., in the early 1990s, she suggested a road trip: first, to Luray Caverns, then down Skyline Drive to a town where we’d stay overnight, then over to Charlottesville for the triple play of Monticello, Michie Tavern (lunch), and Ash Lawn. Off we went, stopping in Charlottesville first at the Thomas Jefferson Visitor Center. It was at the center that I first started falling in love with founding father and American sphinx Thomas Jefferson. Here and at Monticello, Jefferson’s inventive mind and hands-on applications are revealed in a variety of ways, including the oddities he imagined and the nails he made.

In The Road to Monticello, Kevin J. Hayes explores that Enlightenment mind set through the books Jefferson read, acquired, and cherished and through his writings, from personal letters to his major works, from his “Head and Heart” letter to Maria Cosway to the Declaration of Independence, Notes on the State of Virginia, and the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom. The biography is more or less chronological, from his early life under the tutelage of George Wythe, during which he developed his interests in law and languages, to his design for his epitaph and his death on July 4, 1826 — followed five and one-half hours later by that of friend and foe John Adams.

Hayes covers Jefferson’s many advanced interests and everything that can be known or conjectured about his library, his passion for books as objects, his political and religious beliefs, his travels, his family and friends, and the influences and experiences that informed his views and convictions. By the end, Hayes seems to have created that which he set out to: a comprehensive portrayal of Jefferson’s life and mind gleaned from his books and intellectual pursuits.

Hayes falls short in two areas, one of which he concedes at the beginning. Like Adams and Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson was keenly aware that he would become a historical figure and that future Americans would pore over his words and life story. Adams and Franklin wrote their letters and messages accordingly, knowing that they would become part of posterity. Adams in particular seems to have held little back; both wanted to be understood. In contrast, Jefferson worked to efface his personal life and feelings from the record. The “Head and Heart” dialogue, and the form in which it’s written, reveal Jefferson’s discomfort with emotions as well as his apparently inability to express them directly. Perhaps he found this frustrating; “Head” poses a hyperbolic argument against forming attachments, but “Heart,” according to Hayes, gets in the last word and “rejects the pleasures of solitude and upholds the value of friendship.”

The second problem is Hayes’ lack of objectivity and the skewed picture that results. While he lavishes attention on such details as the backgrounds of the booksellers from whom Jefferson acquired his books, he mentions little that is controversial or negative about Jefferson. He glosses over his attitude toward his slaves and his refusal to free them, his relationship with Sally Hemings, his proclivity for overspending, and the financial straits in which he left his family. The uninformed reader won’t learn from Hayes about the unapologetic Jefferson’s secret collaboration with Benjamin Franklin Bache to smear John Adams’ character or how deep was the bitterness that grew between the two men. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought they merely disagreed on some key issues, become estranged over them, and reconciled late in life. Jefferson’s duplicity and manipulations are as protected from public view as he would have wished them to be.

The Road to Monticello is a solid if lopsided biography that delivers part of its promise, a glimpse into the life and mind of Thomas Jefferson, but only in idealizing soft focus. His heart and soul are missing, and so are the negative traits that round out his character and make him more than just an Enlightenment thinker; they make him a human being as flawed as the rest of the species. You can’t go wrong reading The Road to Monticello; knowledge of the breadth and depth of Jefferson’s readings and interests alone will expand your mind and thought process. But you would do yourself — and, dare I say it, Jefferson — a real disservice if you stopped here and didn’t dig deeper to explore the darker aspects of his enigmatic nature. For all its length and the research behind it, The Road to Monticello is just a detailed sketch. Supplement it with a full portrait, shade and shadows included.

11 March 2011
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf