Random Bullets

·    I hardly ever do bullet points – you know concision is not my greatest suit, and they seem to have made the formatting go crazy. But I’m really tired in a brain-dead sort of way. It’s been a busy and demanding couple of weeks and whilst I have things to say, they are mostly incoherent.

·    For instance, I saw a blog post (and can’t even remember where) about what prompts readers to buy books. The blogger wrote that the less she knew the better. A few lines of appealing premise or a strong recommendation were more powerful than a detailed account of a novel. She put this down to a divining instinct for passion, but I would put it down to the romance of the imagination. It’s like relationships – the more you know about a person, the more reasons you have not to become involved with them. These days what makes me buy a book is a combination of the storyline and the style of writing; I’ve come to recognize the kinds I like and a quick read of a paragraph or so in the store is generally revealing. I also have stretches where I like to take a punt on an author I’ve never heard of before, particularly when recommended by a friend, virtual or real. And I like to read some of the prize winning books, but rarely at the time when the prize is awarded.

·    I keep meaning to tell you that I met Gabriel Josipovici, finally, at a party a couple of weeks ago. I hardly ever go to parties, but it was thrown by a friend in the English department who I like very much and who has long wanted to engineer a meeting between us. So I made a special effort. Gabriel was completely charming, as you may imagine, and managed to add substantially to my tbr list in the half hour or so we spent chatting, as well as telling me all kinds of wonderful literary stories. He was so clearly someone who has devoted his life to writing and teaching. My husband asked me what he was like afterwards, and the best I could say was that he was like the condensed spirit of literature.

·    I was sent a copy of Mary Beard’s book It’s A Don’s Life, one of the first true crossover blog books. It’s a selection of posts from her long-running blog, which is regularly featured in The Times newspaper. Interestingly, someone made the decision to include (selected, I think) comments. They sound to me like the questions you have to field at academic conferences – all concerned with intellectual one-upmanship, often tangential, always revealing more about the questioner’s prejudices than the content of the speech. I felt very glad to have such a wonderful audience here at the Reading Room, who never, ever let their egos get in the way of a discussion. It’s a hard book to write about, not least because I didn’t love it when I would have liked to. I’m thinking a lot about the differences between reading on screen and on the page, the particularities of the genre of blogging and what makes a good compilation book.

·    I’m also struggling with another review book, and a real disappointment as it sounded fantastic in principle. It’s called The Invisible City by Emili Rosales and is one of those split narratives that intertwine past and present. The main character is an architect who stumbled as a child across the remnants of a lost city. One day he is sent, out of the blue, information about the city that leads him on a quest to discover what happened to it. The other strand of narrative is the contents of the manuscript that tell the story of the city’s creation. I am finding the narrative very hard to follow, and don’t know whether it’s the fault of the translation, or a kind of generic difficulty for me with Spanish texts. I have had trouble with all the Spanish writers I’ve ever read; I find their work tends towards incoherence and is always a little overblown. Latin America, I have no problem. But Spain, and the lacunae and skips and hops in the story have me all confused.

·    A little while back, I gave my first literary supervision in about five years. I felt extremely nervous and realized I had fallen completely out of practice. I simply couldn’t remember the vocabulary; the way I used to ask questions or the way I used to explain things and express myself. You’d think all these years of blogging about books might have kept me in touch with book-speak. But academic discourse is such a particular thing. It alarms me how quickly I forget; other people seem able to spread themselves over all kinds of different competencies, but I’m only able to do the one thing I am currently practicing doing.

·    I’m about to embark on a long, momentous campaign to update and improve teaching practices across the board in my college. Educationally, there is absolutely nothing to dislike, but this is going to be a long, hard battle of diplomacy. Telling teachers we could be teaching better is always taken as a personal insult, even though it is by no means intended that way. I’ve been meeting with the development director, who is the man who might be able to get hold of some cash to ease the proposals through. A colleague had told me he was tall, dark and handsome and I said ‘great!’ not believing a word of it. But guess what – he is most certainly those things. And yesterday he was wearing a lovely black velvet jacket. As I said goodbye to him and we shook hands just outside his doorway, I was startled to suddenly see my own dear husband crossing the courtyard, on his way to a different meeting. I would have believed it was a hallucination, but no, it really was him. Later on, I told him all about the handsome development director, and then his unexpected appearance and he said to me, ‘That money I paid the white witch all those years ago was well worth it.’

Moral Universes

It’s been a hectic week or so, what with my son’s birthday, which coincided with him coming down with a flu-ey cold, and a lot of work at college. And so I was very happy to sink into a comfort novel, The Whole World Over by Julia Glass. It’s a novel that sprawls over a number of protagonist’s lives as they connect and intersect, moves between New York and New Mexico, and ties the personal in with the historical. It’s also well-written and engaging and for once I really enjoyed the fact that it was long and detailed, a book to get lost in.  But it also made me wonder a great deal about the difficulties that arise if authors refrain from passing judgement on their characters, and try to let their actions speak for themselves.

The main focus of the story is on a troubled marriage between Greenie, a talented chef whose career is on the up, and Alan, a psychotherapist whose client numbers are dwindling. They have a four-year-old son, the precocious George, who holds them just about together, whilst becoming the vehicle for their subtle competitiveness and for the excess love they can’t manage to give each other. The story begins as Greenie’s restaurant-owner friend, Walter, tells her he’s recommended her for a job with the Governor of New Mexico. At first, Greenie thinks this is a wind-up, but then the call comes for her to audition her culinary skills and, in a kind of whirlwind career romance, she finds herself agreeing to become his personal chef and break her small family apart, moving down south and taking George with her. Alan, as one may imagine, is not best pleased at what he sees is a unilateral and hostile decision, particularly when Greenie wants to sell it to him as a fresh start.

But Alan has worries of his own, beyond a crumbling marriage and a practice in the doldrums. Five years ago, after a row with Greenie, he attended a hometown school reunion alone and had a misguided one-night stand with an old crush. Now it looks as if that event may have had dramatic consequences in the form of another child. And whilst Alan rushes around trying to get to the bottom of this muddle, Greenie finds herself caught up with an old crush of her own and the possibility of a second chance at a relationship her mother nipped in the bud. This is a novel about venturing out and coming home, about taking risks in order to be safe, about the return of the past and the complete unpredictability of the present. Most of these concerns are played out through the prism of relationships and the search for dependable love. Revolving around the central nexus of Alan and Greenie are a number of other lonely or dislocated hearts. Walter, the restaurant owner, longs for the kind of settled relationship that the gay community doesn’t easily provide, although his attempt at this involves an affair with a man who is currently in such a long-term couple. This newfound love, Gordie, turns up with his partner, Stephen, in Alan’s consulting rooms as they argue over whether or not to try adopting a child. Also intertwined in the network of New York lives is Saga, a young woman who has suffered long-term damage as the result of a freak accident and can no longer manage numbers or her memory. Saga has been taken in by her Uncle Marsden, whose own children are less than happy about the arrangement, having a weather eye on their inheritance. Saga, however, simply wants to rebuild her life and gain some measure of security.

I must stress again at this point how much I enjoyed this novel. It was a really good read. But that doesn’t prevent me from becoming curious about its moral universe, which is to say its internal reward system for good and bad behaviour. All novels have a moral universe that is unique and powerful, and it is most clearly visible in the twists and turns of the plot and their ultimate conclusion. Who wins and who loses? Which actions make a difference? What constitutes happiness or success? What are the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) moral messages that the novel sends out? Part of the difficulty in grasping the morality of this novel lies in the fact that Julia Glass gives very little indication as to what we are supposed to think. Things just happen, and then happen some more, and she avoids scenes in which characters contemplate their actions or are seen from the outside by their fellow protagonists. But the unwillingness to judge goes deeper than that and makes for some odd interactions.

For instance, the issues that drive Alan and Greenie apart are never properly resolved, or even discussed. It seems strange that a man who is a relationship counselor should let himself fall into the trap of a one-night stand, unless of course he is not a good counselor, which would account for the falling-off practice and his own discontent. But that’s not the interest here. When Greenie finds out about his other child, she takes it calmly, too calmly, and returns to New Mexico instantly to commit to her relationship with her childhood sweetheart. The novel records her free indirect speech, assuring herself this is not an act of revenge, and yet are we to believe that? At the very least, Alan’s actions have released her from her marriage bond, or given her license to redress the balance. And then, shortly afterwards, George gets himself into a scrape, the kind of silly, foolish action that’s typical of his age, but his parents completely overreact. Alan rushes down to New Mexico, blames Greenie for not paying enough attention to him, and actually takes the child away from her. What are we to make of this? Except perhaps to see that if Alan and Greenie directed their anger and distress at one another, where it belongs, it would not have to be played out on the child. There are various hints in the story that the prank was wholly of George’s creation, that he may be developing an evil streak due to his parents’ estrangement, but George himself is always depicted as utterly self-contained and cheerful. And his father, the counselor, makes no attempts to get to the bottom of his behaviour. Later on, in a scene that is meant to be touching, George gets given a pocket knife. He’s five years old and with a history of recklessness. How can this be wise?

Although this is a novel with a definite plot, I had to wonder whether it wasn’t also episodic on the sly. While the events linked up, made patterns and echoes, the emotions surrounding them were compartmentalized. What happened in one part of a protagonist’s life was left quite separate from their feelings in another, which is I suppose what happens if we ignore the deep psychological dimension that binds all our actions, thoughts and feelings together. My experience suggests to me that our lives are all of one piece, all cut from the same cloth that is our soul and subject to the repeating flaws in its warp and weft. Events that happen to us may well be random, but our responses to them are consistently coordinated from the bedrock of the self. So I was most intrigued by a novel that turns this about face, finds pattern in events and eschews comment on the personal.

This is the first novel I’ve read that incorporates 9/11 into its structure, and coming as it does at the conclusion, I wondered what would be made of it. It functioned as a wake-up call, and again, I felt unsure. Is it right to use these great historical events as triggers for personal development, or is it right to leave them in their senselessness and waste? I couldn’t decide whether this novel was the result of an individual perspective by Julia Glass that invited her readers to do all the figuring out, to see her characters as driven by motives and emotions they were simply not in touch with. Or whether it was part of a wider, broader development in the moral universe of the contemporary novel, that looks outwards at the world, over and again, to find meaning and validation, whilst quietly side-stepping the internal configurations of the emotions as too complex, too hidden and too capricious to be meaningful?  I think it matters to think about this, because this kind of novel works hard to reflect a world we know intimately and recognise as being somehow ‘real’. What it tells us has much to say about who we think we are.

And I must repeat once again – I did enjoy reading this novel! I know it can be hard to separate out a literary critical reaction from a purely critical one, but it made me think and question and want to challenge it in a way that did not detract from my reading pleasure.