Tag Archives: fiction

Book review: The Fox

words and images Posted on by

The Fox by D. H. Lawrence. Recommended.

One of D. H. Lawrence’s fable-like tales addressing gender roles and relationships, The Fox is developed based on the symbol of a female-centric farm beset by a “demon,” a marauding male fox. Owned and run by two women, the “small, thin, delicate thing,” Banford, and “the man about the place,” March, the farm is remarkably unproductive. One independent-minded heifer refuses to stay put, and the women, afraid of birth and responsibility, sell the pregnant cow before she can produce a calf. Because “Banford and March disbelieved in living for work alone,” it is clear that their farming venture, the nature of which requires commitment and hard work, is fated to fail.

Into this setting, where “fowls did not flourish,” comes a fox, a symbolic male, that carries off not only the hens, but March’s consciousness. As a male intruder in this female world, “he knew her.” The imagery is deliberately sexual; “her soul failed her,” and, too mesmerized to fire her gun, “she saw his white buttocks twinkle.” Having encountered the male, she determines to hunt him down. “She was possessed by him.”

Months later, March again threatens to shoot the real fox, a young man who comes to the farm from the outside world of men and war. As with the fox, the other male, “March stared at him spellbound.” Again, the symbolism is not meant to be subtle; Lawrence writes, ” . . . the boy was to her the fox, and she could not see him otherwise” and “she need not go after him any more.”

The fox and the man change March, who in the man’s presence becomes “pale and wan,” anxious not to be seen, “a shadow in the shadow” — almost like a fox herself. Throughout the novel, the man, Henry, has the same effacing effect on her. She is no longer the “man” of the farm, but a shrinking, passive, mesmerized female, speaking in a “plangent, laconic voice” when the real man is around. In her dreams, the fox and the man are powerful sexual images that take away her ability to articulate; the fox “whisked his brush across her face, and it seemed this brush was on fire, for it seared and burned her mouth with a great pain . . . [She] lay trembling as if she were really seared.”

As the story continues and Henry and Banford vie for March’s attention and loyalty, it is easy to see Banford and March as a lesbian couple, incomplete in the way the French writer Colette viewed such relationships. Henry, the man, carries the gun, hunts, and watches; he is “most free when he was quite alone.” With Henry’s arrival, Banford becomes more stereotypically female, strong-willed but physically weak, querulous, and manipulative. March is in the middle, the man to one, the woman to the other. Banford says of Henry, “He’s a boy like you are.” March is always indistinct to the soft-spoken, courteous Henry, who wishes to dominate her and to bring her into focus. When Henry kills the fox, March dreams of burying Banford wrapped in the fox skin — a thought that leaves her with “tears streaming down her face.” She does not want to let go of either woman or man, or the feminine or masculine in herself.

Events and choices leave March with “nothingness at last”; having hunted for the fox and reached for happiness, she is left with a “realisation of emptiness” that can be resolved only by being “alone with him at her side.” To be female is to sleep, a form of death, while to be male is to keep awake, know, consider, judge, and decide. In The Fox, as in other Lawrence novels, the man-woman relationship is one of strain between masculine values of dominance and possession and feminine desire to “stay awake” and for autonomy and self-determination.

Unpolished, repetitive, obvious in its imagery, and blunt about its messages, The Fox is flawed and pales beside Sons and Lovers and Women in Love. As a short study of the ideas surrounding gender, roles, and relationships that predominate in Lawrence’s fiction, The Fox is worth the attention of both Lawrence student and aficionado.

8 December 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe {and Other Stories of Women and Fatness}

words and images Posted on by

The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe {and Other Stories of Women and Fatness} edited by Susan Koppelman. Foreword by Alix Kates Shulman. Recommended.

In this anthology about “women and fatness,” fat women eat, exercise, laugh, cry, love, give birth, and are abused and exploited. In fact, they experience the joys and tribulations of women everywhere, but what defines them, or sets them apart, is their body size.

The American interest in fitness seems to have begun in the late 1800s, when urban sophisticate May Welland of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence was compared to the hunt goddess Diana and noted for her slimness and athleticism. By the 1920s, thinness was firmly established as the fashion, with characters such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jordan Baker (The Great Gatsby) representing the slender, athletic, almost boyish ideal. In Koppelman’s collection, Octavia Thanet’s “The Stout Miss Hopkins’s Bicycle” (1897) is an early example of how women suffered socially for their weight and how they began trying to manage it through exercise — an unthinkable notion for ladies of previous generations. One hundred years later, 1997’s “The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe” (Hollis Seamon) also pairs two woman who to the world appear to have eating disorders — Suzanne Brown, who prefers the fullness of flesh, and Theresa, a teenager with apparent anorexia.

Some stories, like “Fat” (Grace Sartwell Mason) play purposely to the popular stereotype. Mrs. Payton Tierney substitutes a constant supply of rich foods for the love that no longer exists between her and her husband. Food is the problem and the solution as “The prison of her flesh received her” and the story ends in a surprisingly predictable way.

Stories like “Good-Bye, Old Laura” (Lucile Vaughan Payne) and “Skanks” (Rennie Sparks) capture the respective times and experiences of their teenage protagonists. Laura and Janine are complex characters whose peers influence their feelings about themselves and their bodies, with disturbing results for both. “The Hershey Bar Queen” (Elena Diaz Bjorkquist) is a teenage revenge fantasy, although the protagonist’s food obsession and child-like simplicity and gullibility make the supernatural ending disappointingly ineffective.

If Mrs. Tierney, with her bonbons and distaste for exertion, is the stereotypical fat woman, the husbands in “The Feeder” (Maria Bruno) are alpha males whose wives fight back by taking control of their food, their bodies, and their weights — the thin wife consciously, the fat one less so. This story stands out for the disturbing image of a trapped, dying bird, wings broken, that is not worth saving to the insensitive husband.

“Perfectly Normal” (Lesléa Newman) is about the fat hatred and other prejudices of an anorexic wife. After making her promise not to get fat like her active, happy, lesbian sister, her husband sends her to a sanitarium before she wastes away even more. The combination of the wife’s first-person perspective and the extremities of her opinions (“The least she [sister] could do was rip out the labels [of her clothing] so she would not have to be embarrassed” [about her size]) puts this story at the border of two-dimensional for the sake of making a point.

That is part of the problem with any focused collection like this; the focus on food, fat, and fat attitudes casts a blinding glare on the issues rather than truly illuminating them. It’s interesting to see attitudes over the past 100 or so years, but questions arise, such as: How do those attitudes compare to those toward fat men, or to those who are different physically in other ways? If, as is claimed, only 10 percent prefer a fat partner to a normal-sized one, can the bias against fat be so definitively said to be social and cultural? Are those influences that widespread and strong? If the claim is true, are fat women really powerful erotic symbols to any but a few? It’s mentioned that Lillian Russell, at more than 200 pounds, was a sex symbol of her time — but is that because she was fat or despite the fact she became fat with age?

In her defensiveness about fat, Koppelman writes, “There is nothing in women’s fiction to affirm the calamitous claims of health risks made by the bariatricians, the exercise gurus, and the weight reduction mavens.” Koppelman cannot be so single-minded as to confuse what appears in fiction with what happens in reality. Obesity, like other extremes, not only comes with serious health risks (for example, diabetes and all its complications), but also can limit the fat person’s activities in ways that have nothing to do with societal bias (for example, I am too heavy for horseback riding, which I would love to be able to do). Koppelman’s logic seems to be that, until a woman writes fiction about obesity-induced illnesses, they are not an issue for women.

The big question here is, “What does fat mean?” To the 5’7″ patient in “Perfectly Normal,” it means weighing more than 100–115 pounds. “The Hershey Bar Queen” weighs more than 400 pounds, as must the sideshow attractions in “Noblesse” (Mary E. Wilkins Freeman) and “Even as You and I” (Fannie Hurst). Suzanne LaFleshe weighs a little over 200. It’s an important question because an active, confident, 200-pound woman, while fat by medical and social standards, may fall within the realm of normal deviation, while a girl like “The Hershey Bar Queen,” enormous and obsessed with food, is a clear case of pathology. People fear pathology, whether it’s morbid obesity, autism, or obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe {and Other Stories of Women and Fatness} is hampered by the restrictions and biases of its focus. A few stories stand out, but many are slices of life that lack depth, context, and subtlety. Another issue is that the book copy was not proofread; there are numerous typographical errors throughout, sometimes several on a page, so that the trustworthiness of the texts is in doubt — an unfortunate problem in a work produced by an academic professional like Koppelman. Still, it’s worth reading for the handful of gems.

11 November 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

words and images Posted on by

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. Highly recommended.

“It was 7 minutes after midnight.” Every detail matters in the solution of the mystery of the neighbor’s murdered dog, which is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. That’s partly because the detective on the case is Christopher John Francis Boone, a 15-year-old boy with autism, a penchant for numbers, a genius for math, and a determination to solve the mystery and write a book.

Clues abound, but Christopher’s strictly literal view of the world prevents him from seeing or understanding them, even as he records them. In his mind, metaphors are “lies,” and phrases like “raining cats and dogs” and “you’ll catch your death from cold” are incomprehensible nonsense. As the story behind Wellington’s death unfolds, Haddon masterfully gives the reader the clues that escape Christopher while allowing him to pursue the more logical details he does understand and to get help with the more subtle ones.

Along the way, Christopher offers insight into the autistic mind and people’s reaction to it. While he cannot read emotions or pick up on verbal cues and body language (unless they are explained to him; for example, he knows that a raised voice may indicate anger), his mind processes details the average person would miss. While we might see cows and some flowers in a field, he knows how many cows, he can draw each of their individual patterns, and he can name the species of flowers.

Just as Christopher doesn’t understand why everyone won’t or can’t notice these important details, the people he encounters, while quickly picking up that he is different, can’t figure out how and adjust themselves. His working-class father tries to, but his understanding of his son seems limited to an intellectual rather than an emotional one. He knows that Christopher hates to be touched and is wise enough to develop a hand signal that signifies love in lieu of a hug, but he doesn’t understand at an emotional level the pain that touch causes his son. Not surprisingly, he can become frustrated when Christopher can’t behave in the normal way. If Christopher’s perception is limited by autism, his father’s is limited to what he knows and can see. He cannot feel what it’s like to be Christopher any more than Christopher can figure out that his father’s quiet, slow speech indicated tightly controlled anger.

As Christopher works on the mystery and his book, he learns how to do things he may not have thought possible; for example, he survives the ordeal of going to a crowded train station and traveling alone. More significantly, he learns how to twist and withhold the truth when necessary. When his father makes him promise not to do something, Christopher rationally determines what he can and cannot do within the very literal sense of the promise, thereby breaking it in spirit. As he pursues his investigation, he seems to grasp that he is on questionable ground according to his own standards, even as he senses that the mystery is important enough to justify his rationalizations. By the end, he can say with pride and with some truth, “I can do anything.”

Haddon uses a simple technique to convey the linear, mathematical nature of Christopher’s mind and thought process; as the story builds, Christopher begins many if not most of his sentences with “and.” “And I bent down . . . And I walked after him . . . And someone said . . . And I said . . . And the man . . . And then I heard . . .” The use of “and” not only sounds genuine, but it is also additive — that is, mathematical. For someone who squares numbers in his head to stay calm, “and” is one way to manage the sensory and emotional overload he encounters in his quest to determine the killer.

Only someone who is autistic can say whether Haddon has captured the thought process and emotions accurately. Even if The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is not a complete insight into the autistic mind, it is a valuable one, and a reminder that not everyone sees the world we see in exactly the same way we do.

7 October 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Wives and Daughters: An Every-Day Story

words and images Posted on by

Wives and Daughters: An Every-Day Story by Elizabeth Gaskell. Introduction and notes by Pam Morris. Highly recommended.

With its fairy-tale beginning (“In a country there was a shire, and in that shire there was a town, and in that town there was a house . . .”), the subtitle of Wives and Daughters is gently ironic. While the basic plot is standard — boy and girl meet and overcome many obstacles, including themselves — Gaskell’s tale is as much about the rapidly changing Victorian world as about Molly Gibson and her provincial village of Hollingford.

Set before the 1832 Reform Bill, Wives and Daughters consciously brings together England’s aristocratic past, represented by Squire Hamley and the upstart earl and countess of Cumnor Towers, and the future, represented by Molly Gibson and Squire Hamley’s sons, especially Roger. The elder son, Osborne, puts his own interests and more modern sensibilities above those of his father, while Roger envisions a future of science, exploration, and expansionism. To Mrs. Gibson, who marries to avoid having to work and dependence on the aristocracy, Osborne offers her daughter an entrée into at least the landed gentry, whereas Roger is merely a second son demeaning himself by dabbling in the sciences. Although renowned in London for his travels and discoveries, Roger becomes worthy of her notice only when he is taken into the inner circle of Lord Hollingford and the Towers as a result of his personal achievements.

While the visible action takes place within the small circle of Hollingford, Cumnor Towers, and Hamley Hall, Gaskell encompasses the widening world of rural England. Cynthia attends school in France while the Hamleys are off to Cambridge. The Hamley home is filled with relics from India, while Lady Harriet advises the Miss Brownings on how to obtain the best-priced Indian tea. Cynthia returns from her jaunts to London fashionably dressed and with hints of admirers, while Roger comes back from Africa browned, bearded, and mature in aspect and mien. Even villagers like Miss Hornblower feel the pull of the larger world and the new technology. As Mr. Gibson tells Molly, ” . . . if these newfangled railways spread, as they say they will, we shall all be spinning about the world; ‘sitting on tea-kettles,’ as Phoebe Browning calls it.”

The spheres of the sexes are vastly different. Clare Kirkpatrick thinks “how pleasant it would be to have a husband once more; some one who would work while she sat at her elegant ease in a prettily-furnished drawing-room.” Even as Mr. Gibson thwarts the advances of Molly’s first suitor, he tries to keep his “little goosey” unprepared for anything but life under the protection of a man, either father or husband. He advises her governess, “Don’t teach Molly too much: she must sew, and read, and write, and do her sums; but I want to keep her a child, and if I find more learning desirable for her, I’ll see about giving it to her myself.” As men of science, he and Roger believe themselves to be dispassionate and rational, yet Molly senses their obvious mistakes before they do and that they are more deeply affected than they appear to be. Gaskell’s characters, however, do not follow stereotypes. Lord Cumnor, a garrulous gossip, and Squire Hamley, an openly emotional man, are “womanly” in their ways, while Lady Cumnor and her daughter, Lady Harriet, are models of independence and detachment. Rather than assert her own independence and risk upsetting her excitable, patriarchal husband, Mrs. Hamley wastes away, ironically depriving her husband of her management of his emotions and their expression.

Molly is raised to suppress her feelings. As Mrs. Gibson’s values clash with those of Mr. Gibson and Molly, he is able to ride off and immerse himself in his work, while Molly can only swallow her emotions or, as a last resort, hide them in solitude. There is hope, however, that Molly can avoid the life for which Mr. Gibson is preparing her, that of an obedient wife. Her life as companion to Mrs. Hamley shows her impressionable mind the folly of pride and the lasting harm it causes as it separates Mr. Hamley and his elder son. Her natural curiosity and intelligence, consciously discouraged by Mr. Gibson, are encouraged by Roger Hamley, who bridges the ancient Hamley past and the future of science and discovery. This future will be built on achievements, not family name, which makes young Osborne’s parentage significant only to traditionalists like the squire and Mrs. Gibson. Their vision of the possibilities never extends beyond their own desires and concerns.

In Wives and Daughters, Gaskell addresses myriad issues important to her and her contemporaries — medicine, science, marriage, the family, gender roles, monetary wealth and land wealth, rural mores, the perception of English heritage and strength and French decadence, exploration, and change. Her characters are so richly drawn that the reader begins to anticipate Mrs. Gibson’s “infinite nothings” and Mr. Gibson’s searing irony. Gaskell imbues some of them with an enticing air of unsolved mystery. What are Mr. Gibson’s origins? Who was Jeanie, his first love, and why did he not marry her? How does that and his other early relationships influence his behavior toward Molly? Why, at age 28, does Lady Harriet refuse a good match and seemingly scorn romance? Gaskell does not judge her characters — even Mrs. Gibson has redeeming qualities — nor does she reveal all their secrets. Wives and Daughters is an enlightening, captivating, and, despite its unfinished state, satisfying look at Victorian life and society, the influence of which is still felt.

30 September 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre

words and images Posted on by

The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre. Edited with an introduction and notes by Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick. Highly recommended.

With the shift from agriculture to industry and advancements in technology and scientific understanding, the 19th century was one of rapid change. This collection of horror stories, anchored by John Polidori’s “The Vampyre,” reflects the popular tastes and issues of the the times.

A sense of vice, moral ambiguity, and lawlessness pervades many of the stories. Polidori’s vampyre does not simply drain blood and life in the literal sense; he tempts the innocent, further corrupts those who are debauched, and supports the sinner financially whenever he can. He is known for his social and emotional vampirism because even the most rational members of mainstream society can witness these evident depravities.

Criminals, living and supernatural, appear in stories such as “Sir Guy Eveling’s Dream,” “Confessions of a Reformed Ribbonman,” “The Victim,” and “Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess.” A contemporary fascination with madness manifests itself in “Monos and Daimonos,” “The Red Man,” “The Curse,” and “The Bride of Lindorf.” The interest in medicine and medical research, exploited in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, appear here in “The Victim,” “Post-Mortem Recollections of a Medical Lecturer,” and, less successfully, “Some Terrible Letters from Scotland.” “Life in Death” touches upon one of Frankenstein‘s themes: man’s imperfect and arrogant attempts to mimic or best God and nature.

The most horrifying of these stories rely strongly on either realism or fantasy. “Confessions of a Reformed Ribbonman,” based on an actual event, takes the reader into the inner circle of a criminal brotherhood for whom brutality mocks and replaces morality and spirituality. William Carleton’s description of the group’s meeting and the atrocities it subsequently commits resonates of a satanic mass and hell itself, complete with a ring of fire. In “The Victim,” coincidences are stretched, but the murder of people for medical research specimens was headline news fresh in the minds of readers.

On the other side, “Monos and Daimonos” is written in a dark fairy-tale style, narrated by a giant rejected by society, yet unable to shake his sociable tormentor. The supernatural tale of “The Master of Logan” is wonderfully spun, with the forces of good and evil engaging in near-comic repartee and an exchange of witty compliments before the unmasking. “The Red Man” may be the most disturbing of the tales, as it blends recent history (the French Revolution) with medieval horrors, and tortures.

Some stories, like “The Bride of Lindorf” and “Passages in the Secret History of an Irish Countess,” are weak because the short story format seems to rush and constrain the narrative. The novel form of Uncle Silas allowed LeFanu to explore themes such as murder, religion, alcoholism, drug abuse, sexuality, and incest while developing a greater sense of the Gothic mystery, atmosphere, and shadows surrounding the title character and the terror of the heroine’s helpless situation. For example, the shady French maid of “Countess” is replaced in the novel by the sadistic and depraved Madame de la Rougierre, a memorable accomplice.

The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre is a fascinating and varied collection of stories published in the UK in the early 1800s. For today’s reader, the language and style may present an obstacle to enjoyment and even understanding. To me, however, the writing creates a sense of time and place that enhances the richness and even the timelessness of these tales, best read late at night by candlelight.

26 August 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Lois the Witch

words and images Posted on by

Lois the Witch by Elizabeth Gaskell. Foreword by Jenny Uglow. Highly recommended.

The well-educated wife of a Unitarian minister in Victorian Manchester, Elizabeth Gaskell must have understood the dangers of misused Christianity and religious intolerance in a closed community. In Lois the Witch, uncertainty surrounds Salem — deep forests, wild animals, and Indians who are thought to be savage pawns of Satan. In the midst of that untamed wilderness is a town full of people trying to be what they believe to be godly, each of whom lives in fear that he or she may not be among the chosen, the predestined of God.

Into this repressed, volatile setting arrives Lois Barclay, a young, attractive, pious English Anglican whose parents have died and who has come to live with her Puritan uncle and his family. Lois is different from her new family in every way. While she is warm, affectionate, empathetic, and genuinely and effortlessly godly, she soon discovers that her aunt is cold and proud (“Godly Mr Cotton Mather hath said that even he might learn of me; and I would advise thee rather to humble thyself”). Her older daughter, misnamed Faith, for she is agnostic, is both obsessive and unexpressive, and her younger daughter, misnamed Prudence, is sadistic and vicious. More disturbingly, her son, in his early twenties and unmarried, sees visions and hears voices, and not surprisingly, focuses his long-repressed sexuality on the gentle, attractive newcomer.

Haplessly, Lois becomes the focal point for this family’s frustrations, fears, desires, jealousies, and, finally, hatred. She, like many of the “witches,” is a victim of being different in a conformist society that is both filled with unfulfilled desires and afraid of the unknown.

In Gaskell’s Salem, selfishness is rife. Lois’s uncle “cried like a child, rather at his own loss of a sister whom he had not seen for more than twenty years, than at that of the orphan’s [sic] standing before him, trying hard not to cry . . .” The son, Manasseh, is interested only in his own visions and “his own sick soul,” while Prudence “only seemed excited to greater mischief” by the attention generated by her cruelties. This selfishness seems to be the natural result of a belief system in which the fate of one’s soul is painfully uncertain and in which one is surrounded by evil. Selfishness and a desperate sense of self-preservation help to explain the moral blindness and the inability to look objectively within as the accusations start to flow and are willingly, almost eagerly, accepted as fact.

Sexual repression leads to fascination with the very subject. When Lois goes to the common pasture (on the edge of the forest where evil dwells), her thought is of a story in which a double-headed snake, “in the service of the Indian wizards,” lures white maidens “to seek out some Indian man, and must beg to be taken into his wigwam, abjuring faith and race forever.” To the white maidens of Gaskell’s Salem, such tales hold terror and promise.

In the 86 pages of Lois the Witch, Gaskell succinctly sets the stage, defines the characters and the critical relationships, and shows how every innocent act and word are used against the bewildered Lois, whose fear is that she will have to share her cell with a real witch — because she too succumbs to the general paranoia. Selfish to the end, her aunt “summoned her to meet her at the judgement-seat, and answer for this deadly injury done to both souls and bodies of those who had taken her in, and received her when she came to them an orphan and a stranger.” Ironically, it is the selfless Lois, who left England so she would not be the cause of a quarrel between her lover and his wealthy father, who, like Christ, pays the price for the sins of others.

Gaskell has taken a complex sociological matter, the Salem witch trials, and humanized it. This is a tiny gem of a story that leaves a deep impression.

29 July 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide

words and images Posted on by

The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide by Douglas Adams. Highly recommended.

If finding out your house is about to be bulldozed to make way for a highway bypass is unnerving and life changing, imagine finding out the same is about to happen to your planet. Thus begin the adventures of human Arthur Dent in The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide by Douglas Adams.

Of course Adams is not the first writer to use science fiction to satirize the foibles of the human race and its institutions and culture (including science fiction), but he does does so with a rare combination of sophistication, style, and humor. His description of why the bypass is being built and why Arthur doesn’t know about it alone starts the series off on a scathing note. In the universe of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (the book within a book), people sometimes survive government and corporate bureaucracy and personal greed and thoughtlessness, but more often destruction and waste seem to result.

Throughout his post-Earth adventures with Ford Prefect, the two-headed Zaphod Beeblebrox, fellow human Trillian (Tricia McMillan), and Marvin the perpetually downcast robot who takes lows to new highs, Arthur is the proverbial Everyman, whose struggles to make tea (and thus achieve some sense of ordinariness) in his new life result in near-destruction. At one point, he happily serves as “Sandwich Maker” on a pre-technological world that views this skill with awe.

Adams is perhaps strongest in his numerous asides in which he talks about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the publication for which Ford Prefect researches and writes, and the Encyclopedia Galactica; the nature of improbability; the humorously and seemingly invariable and inevitable tragic histories of various planets and races; and various theories surrounding such things as time, space, and infinity, almost always with a slyly serious wink about the absurdity of it all. These digressions allow his imagination and his intellect to soar and in many cases are more interesting than the story itself. This may go back to how The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy begins—that people want to move between Points A and B very fast, and that people at Point C in between (Everyman Arthur Dent) “often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be.” There seem to be no Points A and B in Arthur’s new universe; there are infinite points and lines and continuums, most of them absurd in one way or another.

With the exception of Trillian, Arthur’s fellow travelers are well drawn. The most amusing is, sadly, Marvin, whose programmed depression is annoying and whose perception is accurate.

There are ingenious ideas scattered throughout the six stories, including the irony of a lorry driver who hates the perpetual rain that follows him no matter where he goes because, unbeknownst to him, he is a Rain God.

The problem is that many of these ideas, like life events, crop up randomly, play themselves out, and then seem to fall flat in the end. Undoubtedly, this is part of the universe as Adams sees it; it is made up of absurdity upon absurdity, which may not have neat Point A to Point B progressions. Some of this lack of cohesion also may be the result of transforming material written for episodic radio into book form; a certain sense and continuity may have been lost as the author diverts his tale to Points E, M, and T.

The first two books, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, are the best in the series. Life, the Universe and Everything is, almost as the title promises, too contorted and meandering. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, which takes place on Earth, lacks an engaging focal point, which makes it seem long and tedious at times. “Young Zaphod Plays It Safe” appears to be a throwaway story reflecting the author’s views. Mostly Harmless, written at what Adams admitted was a bad time in his life, lacks the élan of the earliest books; it is more downbeat in attitude than its predecessors and borders on determined and grim. Marvin is long gone as comic relief; the weakest character, Tricia/Trillian, now moves to the forefront but without further development; and even Ford Prefect has sobered up, quite out of character. It as though Adams wanted his characters, most notably Random, to reflect his anger and depression and his universe to end without possibility of resurrection—in the same way that Arthur Conan Doyle tried to kill off Sherlock Holmes.

Underneath the satire, the humor, and the bitterness, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide is imaginative and thought provoking, revealing a rare story-telling and writing gift that is brilliant both on the surface and in the depths.

Saturday, 28 July 2007.
© 2007 by Diane L. Schirf.

Book review: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

words and images Posted on by

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë. Edited by Herbert Rosengarten with an introduction by Margaret Smith. Highly recommended.

The elaborate Victorian prose style of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall does not obscure a story that is recognizably modern—that of an idealistic young woman who wants to save her brutish, alcoholic husband from himself.

Reviled for its “morbid love for the coarse, not to say the brutal,” The Tenant of Wildfell Hall continues the theme Brontë began in Agnes Grey—that nurture’s role in shaping in a person’s character and future is more important than parents and other authority figures realize or take responsibility for. As Helen says of Arthur, she wants “to do my utmost to . . . make him what he would have been if he had not, from the beginning, had a bad, selfish, miserly father . . . and a foolish mother who indulged him to the top of his bent . . . doing her utmost to encourage those germs of folly and vice it was her duty to suppress.”

Helen’s background is also revealing. Raised by her uncle and aunt, she exemplifies the modern concept of the adult child of an alcoholic—self-righteous and controlling. Knowing that Arthur is flawed, she marries him with the objective of changing him and saving him for God. It can be speculated that Arthur, intrigued by Helen’s youth, beauty, passion, and apparent demureness, envisions making her a more worldly woman. Neither knows the other beyond the surface, and each seems to want to transform the other into his or her own image. This is not the basis for a happy or durable union, as Helen learns.

Failing to control the father, Helen turns her attentions to her son. Quite rightly, she is horrified when Arthur makes his son a pawn in their marital battle, teaching him the manly Victorian arts of sport and predation, love of drinking and carousing, camaraderie without friendship, and disrespect for and the subjugation of women. Even Brontë seemed to be aware that Helen’s approach is also disturbing in its own way, for the child-rearing debate between Helen and her new neighbors is the basis for an entire chapter before we learn her history. While many of Brontë’s contemporaries would have agreed with the vicar’s argument that experience builds character, Helen slowly reveals how experience of the wrong kind without a moderating influence can destroy character.

The structure of the novel is undoubtedly awkward; it is unlikely that anyone would share such intimate details and thoughts as well as another person’s entire personal journal with even the dearest friend without a compelling reason. Gilbert, who is introduced, perhaps symbolically, as a hunter of predators (hawks), disappears from the story as he reads Helen’s tale. This diminishes him, relegating him to Helen’s redemption and reward. On occasion, for example, in “Domestic Scenes,” Brontë’s tense changes and irregularities make Helen’s journal lose its currency and distract the reader with lapses into a novel-like tone.

The structure does, however, allow the reader (and Gilbert) to meet the reclusive, protective, guarded, almost-grim Helen before we find out about the life that has shaped her and her inflexible opinions. The revelation of her character, and the strength she has to flout convention when her conscience and sense of duty require it, helps to complete Gilbert’s growth from sarcastic village wit to the kind of mature man more worthy of her.

Brontë’s stated purpose was “to tell the truth, for the truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it . . . Let it not be imagined, however, that I consider myself competent to reform the errors and abuses of society, but only that I would fain contribute my humble quota towards so good an aim . . . .” Helen’s story, like that of Agnes, reveals the uglier aspects of Victorian family life, usually idealized, that resulted when women had few rights, men abused theirs, parents did not take responsibility for instilling healthy values (such as respect for life) in their children, and divorce was out of the reach of most. Beyond the impressive gates and parks, within the stately estates, behind the closed doors, lurked family and social problems that could not be hidden or denied away. Helen’s story was disturbing not because of her depiction of Arthur’s demeaning, childish, and amoral behavior, but because she exposes the falseness of the idyllic family life her society held dear and because she is willing to abandon what society considers her duty to her marriage to perform her real duty to herself and her son.

Anne Brontë’s work has been compared unfavorably to that of her sisters, Charlotte and Emily. Yet its psychological insights, including the very coarseness and brutality of which contemporary critics complained, make up for Brontë’s lack of literary finesse. Her portrayal of Arthur, the fun-loving, amoral, pettish, selfish hedonist, and his boorish social circle resonates today. Despite his country gentleman status and his debt-supported wealth, Arthur is recognizable in all times and classes. Helen, too, is familiar as the long-suffering wife who finally takes action when her child is threatened.

Although much has changed since Brontë’s time, her characterizations and insights on family life hold true today, making The Tenant of Wildfell Hall a classic in its own right.

Sunday, 15 July 2007.
© 2007 by Diane L. Schirf.

Book review: The Lost World

words and images Posted on by

The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle with an introduction by Michael Crichton and Diane Johnson and notes by Julia Houston. Recommended.

By Arthur Conan Doyle’s day, advances in scientific method and technology had broadened our knowledge and shrunk our world. The popularity of novels such as Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe and The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne lay in part in the mystery of the unknown and inaccessible places in which they were set and their effect on a human imagination that probably felt crowded and claustrophobic. The Lost World continues the tradition with a wry nod to the reality that events recounted by narrator/journalist E. D. Malone were no longer possible or even imaginable.

The reader is privy to the humor long before the narrator, who is sent to seek adventure by the woman he loves. “It is never a man that I should love, but always the glories he had won, for they would be reflected upon me,” Gladys tells Malone.

Malone seeks adventure to impress his ladylove, while Professors Challenger and Summerlee aim to distinguish themselves in the crowded field of zoology, and Lord John Roxton desires to set himself apart from his fellow big-game hunters. In his world, anyone can hang a rhino head on the wall, but how many have the chance to take a dinosaur?

They are extraordinary men, like those of The Mysterious Island. Intentionally or not, Conan Doyle pays homage to Verne when Malone writes, “I have as companions three remarkable men, men of great brain-power and of unshaken courage” and “Man was always the master.” In the post-Darwin age, Verne and Conan Doyle were ready to demonstrate that nature was at the service of resourceful man.

The humor in The Lost World, such as the resemblance of the ape-men king to Professor Challenger and their subsequent treatment of him, is balanced by scenes such as the narrator’s vivid description of a pit into which he falls. “This bottom was littered with great gobbets of flesh, most of which was in the last state of putridity.” The addition of, “The atmosphere was poisonous and horrible” is gratuitous for the imaginative reader, whose mind pictures “these lumps of decay.

The Lost World is strongest when it is focused on the characters, the plateau, and the dinosaurs, especially the pterodactyls, and weakest when attention is turned to the plateau’s anthropomorphic life. While Challenger believes it to be a watershed in evolutionary history, the battle that determines supremacy is anticlimactic compared to the descriptions of the swamp of the pterodactyls, the glade of the iguanodons, and Malone’s death trap.

The amount of time spent on the plateau is short, but seems tediously prolonged by some of Conan Doyle’s plot choices. The ending is predictable, as it was meant to be, and only the surprise prepared by Challenger for the Zoological Institute adds interest to it. While Verne wisely destroyed his creation, thus making it possible, Conan Doyle leaves his plateau intact, with conflicting hints from the narrator that it is impossible to find and that it will someday be exploited by hunters, adventurers, and other men.

When man finds undisturbed nature, he is bound to ruin its very character. Within a week of their arrival, the four adventurers and their technology have altered a longstanding balance of power. A paradise that never was is no more.

As with Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle’s strength is in creating characters with a handful of memorable traits — the pompously arrogant Challenger, the acerbic Summerlee, the courageous and bluff Lord John, and the young Malone, whose naivete and powers of observation make him a suitable stand-in for the reader.

Despite its weaknesses of plot and its Eurocentricity apparently bolstered by Darwin’s work (the Europeans are clearly the fittest, with Indians and Africans serving as subject races and “half-breeds” as a treacherous one), The Lost World is still a good adventure story, even if dated. Suspend your modern sensibilities and beliefs and enjoy the possibilities of an impossible tale.

2 June 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Custom of the Country

words and images Posted on by

The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton with an introduction by Diane Johnson and notes by Benjamin Dreyer. Highly recommended.

In The Custom of the Country, Edith Wharton creates one of the most unlikable, even despicable, characters I know of in American fiction. Undine Spragg is not a murderer, sociopath, or monster, but an ambitious young woman determined to climb New York’s social ladder to the very top. The ambitions in themselves are not inherently bad, and other characters clearly share them. It is Undine’s utter lack of regard for anyone else, from her aging parents to her neglected son, that makes her contemptible. What makes her chilling is the odd combination of ingenuousness and its opposite; with rare exceptions she is oblivious to the rights, aspirations, and feelings of others if they do not pertain to her own objectives.

In Wharton’s world, choosing the right man was as important to a society woman’s future as selecting the right college, graduate school, or first job is today for a professional woman. For Undine and her friends, divorce carries no more significance than as a means to get out of the wrong job. As she tells her fiancé’s shocked traditional New York family, “I guess Mabel’ll get a divorce pretty soon . . . They like each other well enough. But he’s been a disappointment to her . . . Mabel realizes she’ll never really get anywhere till she gets rid of him.” This dinner conversation foreshadows the rest of the novel.

Wharton reveals Undine’s competitive nature through her childhood rivalry with Indiana Frusk, and her unsatisfied, reaching one through her travels with her parents. Undine will never be happy because there will always be someone with something she doesn’t have, whether it is greater wealth, fame, or a title or position.

By marrying Undine, Ralph hopes to save her from “Van Degenism,” which helps to set up the irony after irony found throughout The Custom of the Country. Ralph doesn’t know that Undine not only desires “Van Degenism,” but she wants to define it. A would-be poet, Ralph cannot seem to separate surface beauty from inner ugliness. “When she shone on him like that what did it matter what nonsense she talked?” Raymond de Chelles, who reminds Undine of Ralph, first sees her on an evening when, as even the cynical Charles Bowen thinks, ” . . . she seemed to have been brushed by the wing of poetry, and its shadow lingered in her eyes.”

More than greed, selfishness, or hedonism, Undine’s defining characteristic, lack of empathy, shapes her actions. “It never occurred to her that other people’s lives went on when they were our of her range of vision.” What dooms her relationships with Ralph and Raymond is not money, attention, socializing, or any of Undine’s numerous desires and complaints, nor is it simply the gulf between their values and her own. The failure lies in her inability to grasp that anything of importance exists outside her own system and their inability to see this in her until far too late. Because her parents cannot deny her anything, “. . . her sense of the rightfulness of her own cause had been measured by making people do as she pleased.”

Undine wants everything, but especially that which she does not have. Her counterpart, Elmer Moffatt, exhibits this “new money” behavior through collecting objects. “To have things had always seemed to her the first essential of existence,” while Moffatt says, “I mean to have the best, you know; not just to get ahead of the other fellows, but because I know it when I see it.” Raymond’s tapestries have no more deeper emotional value to Moffatt than last year’s dresses do to Undine; all are markers of money and success.

Ironically, Undine is little more than an attractive object to the people around her. As Madame de Trézac tells her, ” . . . they’re delighted to bring you out at their big dinners, with the Sèvres and the plate.”  Later, when she visits dealers with Moffatt, she saw that “the actual touching of rare textures — bronze or marble, or velvets flushed with the bloom of age — gave him a sensations like her own beauty had once roused in him.” To Moffatt, who knows and understands her insatiable hungers, she may be at least in part an object for his collection. He tells her, “You’re not the beauty you were . . . but you’re a lot more fetching.” The “oddly qualified phrase” could be used of Raymond’s tapestries and many of the other old valuables that Moffatt has acquired.

For Wharton, Undine and Moffatt represent those aspects of contemporary American society that she most disliked. As Charles Bowen says, ” . . . in this country, the passion for making money has preceded the knowing how to spend it . . .” Undine, like the Wall Street of Peter Van Degen and Elmer Moffatt, is voracious, self-centered, reaching, and without conscience or moral center (choosing to sell an ill-gotten string of pearls for the money rather than to return it). Unlike Mrs. Marvell, with her hospital committee activities, Undine does not contribute to society; she was born to take. Symbolic and symptomatic of the new America that Wharton left, Undine remains ignorant and without taste.

Wharton’s last paragraph is brilliant, for it cleverly shows how even an Undine who has achieved wealth, position, fame, and power can still find something to desire — something that she has put out of her own reach through her actions. ” . . . . she said to herself that it was the one part she was really made for.” Undine is a young woman; Wharton hints at the potential she still has to leave yet more misery in her wake as she yearns for yet more of what she believes she deserves. She is like a living Tantalus, but one whose every attempt to grasp destroys.

6 May 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf