A Tale of Two Cities

 

Or at least, two tales of two cities, as I’ve happened to read two university novels recently, one set in Cambridge, one in Oxford. One I appreciated a great deal, the other, well, not so much. Let’s begin with the one I loved, Rosy Thornton’s Hearts and Minds. It’s the story of St Radegund’s College, one of the last bastions of single-sex education in Cambridge and something between a refuge and a lair for a formidable and utterly authentic collection of women dons. Alas, this great female fortress has been invaded, of necessity, by a new male Head of House, media man James Rycarte, who finds himself at the bottom of a steep learning curve at the beginning of the academic year. His predecessor, the ‘mother to them all’, Dame Emily, has recently suffered a debilitating stroke and is languishing in a nursing home, which only accentuates her loss to the college, and James is uncomfortably aware of some of the ruthless opponents to his appointment amongst the governing body, who may have been outvoted in the democratic ballot, but who are determined to do their best to oust him. Not only must he tread carefully through the intellectual minefield in which he must now do battle, but he has to contend with four centuries’ worth of arcane and irrational practices, which no one has explained to him. Worst of all, he can’t even find a kettle to make himself a cup of coffee. Like the vast majority of Cambridge Colleges, St Radegund’s is rich only in tradition. The research fellowships now come without salaries, the students are organizing a rent strike to protest against the raise in their room rents, and when a corner of the library turns out to be sinking into the Fens, the money to pay the £300,000 bill to fix it is absolutely nowhere to be found. At this propitious moment, an old friend and colleague of James’s turns up with a million pound donation to make, but only in exchange for a college education for his daughter. The stage is set for a terrific battle between financial expediency and the quasi-sacred principles of meritocracy that determine Cambridge selection procedures.

 

James Rycarte finds an unexpected but welcome friend in his Senior Tutor, Dr Martha Pearce. Martha has her own troubles, having backed herself up a cul-de-sac both professionally and personally. A decade in the job – one of the most prestigious on offer within a college, but so administratively demanding that it has prevented her from completing the publishing that might secure her career – finds her stagnating and uncertain what to do next. When the year ends, so does her tenure as Senior Tutor and she must move on. At home she has a depressed, drop-out daughter, victim of her mother’s time-consuming job, and a layabout husband who’s stopped engaging. Unquestioningly, Martha’s first loyalties are time and again to her college, but her outstanding loyalty seems to come at the price of her family life. What I loved most about this book is how incredibly accurate it is as a portrayal of Cambridge University from the college perspective. The way the college functions, the way the dons behave, and most of all, the crippling, workaholic atmosphere of the place are all brilliantly conveyed. It’s a very good story about the problems that beset an institute of higher learning when there’s no money, not always much compassion, and intellectual principles of reinforced tungsten.

 

One aspect of the book that isn’t overtly discussed but which intrigued me greatly, is the question of feminism. Many of Martha’s colleagues, and indeed Martha herself, belong to a group called RadFem whose intention is to educate young women on feminist issues so that they might change the world according to their needs. All this sits contrarily with Martha’s own life, so hidebound to her work obligations that her disintegrating family is simply one more nuisance to be filed along with difficult students and intransigent colleagues. Martha never once questions the unreasonable workload placed on the shoulders of a woman with a family and no family support whatsoever. She is so busy being professionally marvelous that even her guilt about her daughter’s depression never really scratches the surface of her work ethic. In fact, in two extraordinary, crux scenes, Martha insists that both daughter and husband should get jobs, as if this might be the solution to their problems. Now when a family has insufficient money, then jobs are the answer, but not when the issue is insufficient love. Martha’s libido is so firmly directed towards work that she cannot imagine how any one else could be different. I found this representation of life for women in a high-powered institute immensely intriguing, and certainly true of Cambridge, and it made me wonder how far feminism has really come, if university life is wholly unable to recognize the specific needs of its female academic employees, and those women are prepared to be complicit with its Kafkaesque authority.

 

Well, them’s fightin’ words, but Rosy Thornton’s vivid and lively account of Cambridge life makes one feel, if not quite ready to take on the world, then fired up enough to enter the fray. By contrast I had some difficulties with Charlotte Mendelson’s farcical tale of a dysfunctional Oxford family, Daughters of Jerusalem. Before I say anything else I should point out that as far as I have been able to verify, I am the only person on the planet who hasn’t liked this book. It’s had glowing reviews from the papers (The Guardian said it was ‘Superb…funny, exciting, lyrical, poignant, redemptive – it was a privilege to review this book’ which made it even more of a shame that the journalist got one of the main character’s names wrong), and on amazon all the customer reviews were enthusiastic. So we have to proceed here assuming that the fault lies entirely with me. The story concerns the Lux family: Victor, the ghastly, vindictive, eccentric, grudge-bearing father, Jean, his insubstantial, passive wife, Eve, a self-harming, unlovely adolescent destined for over-achievement, and Phoebe, the utterly spoilt younger daughter who is doing her best to perfect the art of manipulation. Over the course of the novel, Victor must face up to his nemesis, his arch-rival in academia, Raymond Snow, Jean will seek a very different kind of freedom, and the two daughters will deal with the fallout of their mother’s distinctive and harmful favouritism. I’ll say straight out that Mendelson’s writing can be delightful. As Jean bicycles to lunch one day, she decides she is sick to death of everything quintessentially Oxford, and her list includes:

 

‘the stringy-haired pedaling mothers like moulting hens on wheels, the damp, the incessant sound of violin practice […] the fact that every dowdy woman or soiled geriatric she passes is not her equal, but is likely to be one of the world’s cleverest people: a Nobel laureate, a pioneering biochemist, the head of a college whose furniture is five centuries old. She is sick of navy blue corduroy, Gothic arches, famous fig trees, shabby dons’ wives, cellars, rivers, genius children, stuttering and gold leaf.’

 

So this is also very much an insider’s view of Oxford and, I think, an equally authentic one, but informed in this case, not by mitigating compassion, but by a black and frustrated irritation with the blinkered oddities of the place. Where Rosy Thornton soft-pedals the tribulations of belonging to a don’s family, Charlotte Mendelson sticks a rocket under them, and her portrayal of damaged and self-damaging Eve is painful to read. Misunderstood by her mother, who thinks her sister’s lack of cleverness needs to be compensated by the bulk of her maternal love, and falling below the radar of her father’s gaze, pinned as it is on the heights of academic achievement, she has no solid parental love to base her security in, and has conflated her survival with the need to be perfect. Of course, this only leads to a series of disasters and an ever more murderous rage against her sister. I guess my problem with this book is that it seemed to me to be about a tribe of unsympathetic people who never won me over. Now I would be the first to dismiss lack of sympathy with the characters as a reason not to enjoy a novel, but I suppose I also felt that by the end none of them had any greater insight into their own situation, or that I had any satisfying understanding of their motivations. But let me stress again, I’m the only person to think that way, and critical support for this novel has been pretty unanimous. Oddly enough, Mendelson reminds me of Rachel Cusk, who is another much-praised author I personally do not like, so it’s obviously a certain subset that troubles me. I would love for someone else to read this book (or let me know if you’ve read it) and help me to see what I’m obviously missing. Not least because I have another book my the same author on my shelves and I was rather hoping I would enjoy her writing!

 

 

Oh and a big thank you to the lovely Kimbofo who introduced me to Rosy Thornton’s work. You can read her review of the novel here.

Playing with Stories

For the Sunday Salon

 

It’s Mothers’ Day here in the UK and I’m feeling very spoilt; one of my gifts was Claire Tomalin’s biography, Katherine Mansfield. A Secret Life and I couldn’t resist starting it this morning. Mansfield’s life makes a wonderful story and Tomalin is an outstanding writer. She has guided me though those early childhood years with clarity and aplomb, when all too often the reader can be lost in a sea of indistinguishable relatives. She turns a lovely sentence, too, and incorporates Mansfield’s writing in such an intelligent way. It made me think of the debate about biography that took place last week on Dorothy’s and Dan’s site (and here), and seemed to indicate to me that the life and the work can be brought together in very interesting ways, on the understanding that neither explains the other, but instead casts an intriguing pattern of similarity and difference that can be thoughtfully considered. Biography cannot properly be used in the analysis of literature, but speculation and curiosity are every bit as much a part of the pleasure of reading and loving books, and it would be unnecessarily reductive, I think, to limit what it is possible to do with literature, out of a perfectly decent desire to mark off the arena of academic literary study. Reading Claire Tomalin makes me aware of all the imperfections in my own style, however, and sharpens the desire I’ve been nursing for a while to do a writing course. The problem is I cannot find one that focuses on non-fiction (not journalism) and is a correspondence course. I don’t suppose any bloggers have any ideas or suggestions? I need a good critical eye on my writing if I’m to improve it; someone who’ll whip me into shape and not be indulgent over my tortuous sentences and sloppy planning.

 

The other book I ought to be reading today (and have not yet got to) is by Alain Robbe-Grillet, who died on February 17^th and has therefore featured in the newspapers recently because of his historical importance for European literature. Robbe-Grillet was one of the founder members of the ‘Nouveau Roman’ or the new novel that took the intelligentsia by storm in the 50s and 60s. Rather in the way that modern art explores the visual by challenging, subverting or simply abandoning all traditional strategies of representation, so the new novel dispensed in a cavalier fashion with plot, characters, orthodox description and conventional endings to see what happened to this thing called the story. You will appreciate that the new novel is not always the easiest comfort read, but I cannot help but like them. Much in the way mechanics take motorbike engines apart to figure out how they function, any student of literature can never look at narrative the same way again, once it has been systematically dismantled by these novelists.

 

The nouveaux romanciers were also notable for being caught up in what were probably the most vigorous and acrimonious debates over the purpose and meaning of literature that any artistic movement has ever encountered. And that is saying quite something. The new novel came out of the desire of these writers to break away from orthodox realism, believing it to be old-fashioned and politically entrenched. Realist novels (according to Robbe-Grillet) imposed an order on social and personal experience that was completely false and misleading, and even if they had a political point to make, it could only be fought on the same old terms and in the same old ways and were thus incapable of bringing about radical change. It is a formidable characteristic of French thought that the Revolution can only come about by changing the way we think, not just the contents of our thought. So, with this ostensibly revolutionary project in mind, the new novel became thoroughly enamoured with the notion of stories as existing in a self-contained arena, produced by the play of language but not really capable of referring to a world beyond themselves. This sounds outrageous, but think, if you will, of the classic designation of ‘a tall dark handsome stranger’. A very well-used and familiar textual coin, but what image would a reader exchange for it? A different one in the head of every individual who approached the story, I’d bet. We all know what a story means by introducing such a figure, but to say that they exist in reality, or perhaps more usefully, that we would all point to the same person in a line-up if called upon to do so, is far from likely. And so, bearing this in mind, the new novel flamboyantly pointed out to the reader the way it was constructed, and with a very heavy-hand, emphasized how language could offer multiple meanings in a way that made choosing ‘the right one’ impossible. For instance, one of Robbe-Grillet’s best-known novels, Jealousy, is written in such a way that the narrating voice could emanate simply from a recording machine, such as a close-circuit television, but it could also equally come from a man whose mentality is disturbed by the sheer intensity of his feelings. That sounds good, doesn’t it, but don’t get too excited about reading it: that one’s hard work. Far more accessible is his pseudo-detective novel, The Erasers, in which a hopeless detective investigates a crime that in fact has not been committed.

 

The Erasers also has a certain literary notoriety for the moment of the tomato segment. Robbe-Grillet’s style is marked by a fascination with objects and what we expect them to do in stories. Orthodox fiction has objects reflect the emotional and social world around them. Characters who possess Ming vases are old money elegant, but probably corrupt, characters who possess cheap supermarket vases are good and honest souls but open to some condescension, and characters who possess hand-fired, rustic earthenware vases are self-consciously bohemian and quite possibly maintain goats and green principles. What if, Robbe-Grillet wondered, an object could be placed in fiction as simply itself? His descriptions are marked by a certain forensic precision, often including measurements, and using terms designed to be accurate but which are often resistant to visualization. The tomato segment in The Erasers is described minutely and comprehensively, but of course in a detective novel, even one that is playing with the conventions of the genre, the reader spends her time wondering whether this is a clue or not, and what the tomato might ‘mean’. As is so often the case with the new novel, you end up watching a reflection of your reading mind, sifting and analyzing the information, trying and failing to process it in all the usual ways (which generally take place so smoothly and swiftly that we never notice them). The point that these descriptions end up making, is how dependent the reader is on the perspective of the narrator to assign sense to details. If we are being given a description of a tomato channeled through the mind of a detective, we might expect him to focus on the aspects of it that reflect his emotional state (curled up around the edges, limp and dried out, or ripe and bursting with flavour), or we might expect it by analogy or association to remind him of a vital piece of evidence in the case (a tomato red blouse worn by a suspect, a recently used kitchen knife), or it might be indicative of the way he takes care of himself, the lone tomato representing a solitary and unfulfilled social life. But we are utterly at sea when the tomato appears to mean nothing but itself. And in this way the new novel discovered that breaking the rules of fiction is a sure fire way of finding out what they are in the first place.

 

Can a truly anal description of a tomato segment bring about revolution? Well, no, not really. The nouveau roman found itself attacked on all sides, by traditional critics who couldn’t understand what they were being faced with, by social realists who were hostile to what they considered to be a lack of obvious politics, and in time, by the avant-garde Parisian left bank artists, who would discredit it for not being radical enough. Which just goes to show that if you try to do something startlingly different, the chances are you will end up pleasing none of the people most of the time. But given the newspaper articles and obituaries of Alain Robbe-Grillet, it is also quite possible that history will be kind. For my own part, much as I wouldn’t rush to read a Robbe-Grillet novel, I think that what he does with fiction is extraordinary, and I am very glad to have read him and written about his novels. They are a miniature masterclass in all the hidden expectations we bring to every act of reading.