You Don't Love This Man, DeWeese

You Don’t Love This Man

Dan DeWeese

2011

USA

“Among the million images of my daughter that had passed through my eyes, why were these the ones that lingered? Asleep during a toddler nap, aloft above the playground, laughing at the table: each was of Miranda alone, I noticed. Or alone, save for the presence of the mind recording the moments, of course. Save for me. “

Why do things happen the way they happen? Is life merely a series of meaningless coincidences? Do our actions or non-actions play any kind of role in the outcome? Do some people have control while others stand by, waiting and stewing? These are some of the questions raised by Dan DeWeese’s novel, You Don’t Love This Man. Another question might be who is “this man,” anyway? On the surface the title seems to refer to Grant, the protagonist’s one-time friend and future son-in-law, but it’s possible that it also refers to the main character himself. As a quiet, mild-mannered bank manager, Paul does not make a particularly exciting hero, after all. In fact the author himself refers to the character, in the afterward, as a “sidelined” person. It makes sense: Paul is in many ways only coincidentally and peripherally involved in the plot itself, but this book is not about the plot. It is about the mind at work observing the plot as it unfolds. These seemingly trivial, yet weighty, observations of the main character – a spider building a web outside his office window over the course of several days, the disappearance of his co-worker’s freckles when she wears makeup, and his recognition that he does not want them to disappear – were some of my favorite parts of the book.  

In my MA degree I studied “British Modernist” literature with particular care, and it seems to me that DeWeese’s novel has several of the elements that I attribute to work in this genre. You Don’t Love This Man is modernist in the sense that it interrogates one man’s thoughts and actions over the course of a single day (two of the most famous modernist works, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Joyce’s Ulysses, also fit this profile), which just so happens to be the wedding day of his only daughter. Though the action of the novel takes place in the present tense, the past haunts it at every corner. Paul has taken the day of his daughter’s wedding off from work, but ends up being called in when his branch gets robbed. Paul realizes that the man in the robbery photos is the same one who robbed him twenty-five years ago, an event which was instrumental in solidifying his relationship with the woman who would be the mother of his only child, as well as the man who would be his friend until he started dating his daughter. The investigation of the robbery, as well as a missing bride, provide the author plenty of opportunity for explanatory flashbacks, all of which seem to propel the book forward towards some kind of grand conclusion.

             

It is this aspect of pacing, I think, that makes the novel seem different to me: it’s slow and steady, yet seems to build towards a crescendo which, most likely purposefully, never arrives. I won’t give the ending away (part of the book’s beauty is this feeling of moving towards something big) except to say that DeWeese does not provide easy answers, or concede to readers’ desires for all the threads to tie up (with one exception). What emerges is a pattern. Life has one, DeWeese seems to say, but its particularities may or may not mean anything. This idea reminds me of what I took to be Somerset Maugham’s message in Of Human Bondage, another modernist text. The notion of life as “a Persian rug,” passed on to Philip by a drunken painter he reveres as a kind of sage, seems to fit DeWeese’s book quite well. The novel is “modernist” in this sense, then, too: life may not contain a meaning, but it is full of beauty and worthy of our curiosity. For Paul, that seems to be enough. After all, what choice do we have but to live?  

To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee

1960

USA

“All the little man on the witness stand had that made him any better than his nearest neighbor was, that if scrubbed with lye soap in very hot water, his skin was white.”

I have to tell you something that might upset you: Until now, I had never read To Kill a Mockingbird. 

 Don’t stop reading! I know you might find my confession shocking, appalling even. Many do (though not so much as the news that, until very recently, I had also never seen Star Wars). But please, don’t hold it against me. As I often tell people, “I was never made to read a book in high school” - a true, if not altogether fair, statement.

            Now I have read the famous book thanks to my friend, Turner (find his excellent blog about being an “adjunct” librarian at deweysnotdead.blogspot.com) who bought it for me on one of our recent jaunts to a local organic – I mean independent – bookstore. (I said the Bay area had superior indie bookstores and Turner is attempting to prove me wrong, with lots of fun, if little success). So, for the past couple weeks I’ve been falling asleep with a chapter or two of Scout, Atticus, and Jem Finch’s adventures in Maycomb County.  Now that I’ve read the book I’m no longer surprised that it was not an assigned text in my hometown. It uses the “N word” a lot, for one thing. For another, I think most folks in my town would probably not appreciate the insinuation from the author that the Finches, due primarily to Atticus’s education, are better than the average, everyday Joe. I mean, they don’t even go to church.

            My take on the book, at least the one I feel most interested in pursuing right now, is that it is about class, much more so than race. Of course it is. “The thing about it is, our kind of folks don’t like the Cunninghams, the Cunninghams don’t like the Ewells, and the Ewells hate and despise the colored folks” (229). The problem is not just racial prejudice, it’s prejudice in general – How can her teacher hate Hitler for killing Jews when she herself despises the black people in her own town? Scout wants to know. This is a complex question without a simple answer or a happy ending for (most – the altruistic Finches, of course, being the exception) white people – not the kind of thing I was taught to think about in high school. In fact, many of Scout’s observations about education might well be applied to my own, and while her experience is presented with humor rather than overt criticism, it is by no means held up as a shining beacon of truth and tolerance. “Why [the teacher] frowned when a child recited from The Grit Paper I never knew, but in some way it was associated with liking fiddling, eating syrupy biscuits for lunch, being a holy-roller, singing Sweetly Sings the Donkey and pronouncing it dunkey, all of which the state paid teachers to discourage” (247) – an indictment of small-town social/moral indoctrination if I ever heard one.

            The problem with the book, for me, is that Atticus is too perfect. I found myself admiring him, as the author clearly wants me to, but grudgingly. He’s too calm, too heroic. He’s the Jesus figure of the novel, a secular Jesus for the bleeding heart liberals on the coasts (is what some people I know might have said). Scout is too smart, her eyes too keen. What child understands and notices as much about the paradoxes of humanity as Scout does? Even the mysterious shut-in, Boo Radley, is unrealistically selfless and caring. (Boy, I sure do sound cynical, don’t I?) In fact, everyone in the book is pretty damn wholesome, despite the author’s frequent protestations to the contrary. Everybody, that is, except Bob Ewell; the villain of the novel ultimately gets his just desserts by “falling on his knife” and dying (Did Boo kill him? Or was it really Jem? Am I supposed to know?), a reasonably satisfying ending, I suppose, and certainly one with a clear moral message: prejudices kill not only the victims, but the perpetrators, too.           

I enjoyed the novel, and getting to know the characters in it. I think it is a good book that raises important and interesting questions in a charming and unexpected way. These are all excellent accomplishments. But I can’t help thinking that I would have appreciated it more had I read it when I was younger, less informed, and more hopeful.

            Please don’t stop reading if by this post I’ve cut a tiny hole in one of your favorite literary memories. Instead, tell me why I’m wrong and what I’m missing here. Thanks for reading. :) 

To the Lighthouse, Woolf

To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf

1927

England

“No, the other was the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing. The other Lighthouse was true too.”

            The essence of the book is that everything one thinks, feels, and sees is real, at least for that moment. One wants to sum the book up with some definite truths – either there is connection among people, or there is not connection among people and we all, as Mr. Ramsay says, “perish, each alone.” Come on, Woolf, make up your mind already! a reviewer might be inclined to shout. But the flashing in and out is, of course, the point. Can people connect, the book asks? Yes. When, how? Seldom, it answers; the how changes all the time.

            The book has three parts: The Window, Time Passes, and The Lighthouse. The first sets the scene of the Ramsay family at what might be considered the height, or heyday of their communal happiness. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are staying at their house at the seaside along with their eight children and several family friends. Though the story comes to us primarily through the consciousness of Mrs. Ramsay, the thoughts of a few of the children and several of the guests are also conveyed. The overall impression is of a cozy life of pleasure, marred by only fleeting disturbances of emotion.  

In the Time Passes section we are told, in small, bracketed paragraphs, that Mrs. Ramsay and two of her children have passed away in separate incidents. The beautiful and melancholic descriptions of nature, light and shadows here reminded me a little of Housekeeping by Marilyn Robinson, which I have reviewed on this blog before.

Finally, in The Lighthouse, a few of the family members – Mr. Ramsay and two of his children – and two of the guests return to the seaside house. This section is primarily told through the still (happily) unmarried painter, Lily Briscoe.

            “Was there no safety? No learning by heart the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life? – startling, unexpected, unknown?” 

            These thoughts of Lily’s hint at one of the central themes of this book, and of all of Woolf’s fiction – Time. How do we, and how do others, change? Why does everything always change? Perhaps most importantly, what remains? All of the characters in To the Lighthouse ask themselves these questions in different ways. What they do not do, however, is ask each other. This brings us to the next most important theme in the book – Connection. Everyone here seeks connection with others, and all find moments of it. For no one, though, does this sense of connection to humanity last longer than a few brief, blissful moments. This remains true. The characters’ understanding and acceptance of that truth changes.

            All of the typical Woolf elements are here: waves, the seaside, rocks, light, shadows, parties, artist characters. And, as I said, so are her usual preoccupations – Time and Connection. It’s tempting to judge a writer, such as Woolf (or Robbins, or Auster, or Austen, or Huxley, etc etc) for getting stuck on a theme or a particular set of questions. We could dismiss these writers as “one trick ponies,” but I contend that in so doing we would miss out on each of their beautiful attempts to convey what haunts and inspires them.

            What do you think? If a writer always comes back to the same themes, do you get bored? Do you stop buying their next books? Or do you find that you love their voice, style and particular way of looking at the world so much that you don’t mind the repetition, instead enjoying journeying along with them on a new, slightly different foray into their obsessions?

Our Man in Havana, Greene

Our Man in Havana

Graham Greene

1958

England

“There are many countries in our blood, aren’t there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?”

            What I like about Graham Greene’s novels is the flavor of exotic locals, that sense of armchair travel to foreign times and places. Greene really did travel to and live in the places he writes about, and he is more than willing to divulge the bad along with the good, conveying settings that seem real precisely because of their confusing mix of beautiful scenery and repulsive humanity. Since I, too, am a lover of world travel and have spent time living outside my home country, I also appreciate that Greene doesn’t varnish the truth of what ex-pats are like abroad. He paints us in all our drunk, detached, sentimental glory, and explores, albeit in an offhand, sardonic way, our reasons for leaving, for staying away, and for every step in between.

            Our Man in Havana follows Wormold, a (horrendously named) English vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana. Wormold’s wife left him long ago and he has had to raise his now-teenage daughter, Milly, by himself. This plot twist allows Greene to show that Wormold is a better guy than many we’ve encountered in the stories of other British humorists. He’s not just trying to get along for his own sake, but for his daughter’s, who he raises Catholic in spite of not being a Catholic himself (his wife was). Concerned with mustering enough wealth to provide for his daughter, who has expensive tastes, Wormold accepts a position as a spy with a British intelligence agency when an agent from the London office somewhat randomly offers him a job in a bar bathroom. Of course, he has no idea of how to be a spy, so he makes up stories and invents fake agents, whose salary and expenses he then collects. It’s fraud, yes, but the reader feels more sympathetic twoards the meek and unassuming Wormold than the “intelligence” agency. This is not surprising considering Greene’s depictions of the men at the top in his “Interlude in London” sections: “Hawthorne, I believe we may be on to something so big that the H-bomb will become a conventional weapon.” “Is that desirable, sir?” “Of course it’s desirable. Nobody worries about conventional weapons.”

            The ideas and questions Greene raises in this novel are interesting, but the way he raises them is often so heavy-handed that one loses the sense of discovering something for oneself. There is hardly a question of meaning here: Greene lets us know what we are supposed to think. “A family-feud had been a better reason for murder than patriotism or the preference for one economic system over another. If I love or if I hate let me love or hate as an individual. I will not be 59200/5 in anyone’s global war.” What our countries do should not define us as individuals, even though that’s exactly what they hope to achieve, subsuming our individuality in order to bend it to their own purposes. We may be tempted or conditioned to believe that our countrymen and women are closer to us than people from other cultures but, as Wormold finds out, it doesn’t matter where someone comes from, it’s what they do and how they live that counts.

            Greene’s books are short, quick reads that transport you to another time and place without ever leaving dear old England very far behind. I enjoy traveling to these places with Greene and I will continue to do so, even though I know I’ll have to look further to move beyond the important but somewhat basic idea that England just doesn’t have all the answers.

Don Quixote, Installment Uno, Cervantes

Don Quixote

Miguel Cervantes

translated by Tobias Smollett, revised by Carole Slade

Spain

1605-1615

            Lately I’ve been reading a book of criticism called 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, by the novelist Jane Smiley. It’s a huge book, and though I’m making slow progress, I’ve been enjoying it very much. The final chapter of the book is Smiley’s collected musings on 100 novels, kind of like what I’m doing here. One is Don Quixote. Smiley references Cervantes’ novel many times throughout her text, calling its creation “the invention of the novel-of-a-man-at-odds-with-his-world” and claiming that “it is hard to overestimate the influence of Don Quixote on the subsequent history of the novel.” You can understand, then, why I was intrigued.

            I want to offer two ideas to consider before doling out my thoughts on the book to this point (400 pages in).

1) As a writing teacher, it bugs me when students say “but that’s obvious” or “everybody knows that” when they read work produced at any point in the past. For example, I live in Portland, OR, where everybody recycles, rides their bikes to work in the rain, and eats local, organic food at every meal. When I assigned an excerpt from one of Michael Pollen’s books to my writing class, 80% of my students were bored out of their minds. It was so obvious, they told me. We already know this! Of course we do, I replied, because Michael Pollen started writing about it. The point is not always the content: what can we learn from the way messages are conveyed? How can we learn to do research and write in ways that also change the world, and what people believe is common knowledge?

2) For my Master’s degree in English I was required to take two classes in English literature prior to 1600. One of these ended up being Arthurian Literature: knights of the Round Table, Merlin, Camelot, Lancelot and Guinevere, etc. At first, I hated it. It was sexist and shallow and banal, I thought. Worst of all, it was poorly written. After a while though, as I grew more knowledgeable about the history and tradition of this type of literature, I began to appreciate the class for what it was (and, incidentally, what my university had intended when they created the requirement): an education in English, and how it has evolved and changed over time. The stories we read today are shaped by those “transcribed” by long ago writers (writers of antiquity usually claimed that their tales were true, and that they were translated from an ancient source known only by the author). My understanding of this truth helps me appreciate Don Quixote and realize that Smiley is absolutely right: Cervantes has indeed shaped our understanding of what it means for something to be a “novel.”   

            Don Quixote is “about” a landed gentleman who reads so much chivalric literature that the stories pickle his brain. Under the influence of these tales of heroism, he decides to take up the “profession” of knight errantry. He outfits himself and rides off on his sorry old nag, picking up the peasant Sancho along the way. Sancho is sane, where Quixote is not, but he’s not terrifically bright, and so Quixote is able to convince him to travel along as his servant by promising to bequeath to him an island kingdom (which the reader understands Quixote does not possess) upon the completion of their adventures. Together they get into all kinds of scrapes, and meet a good many people, all of whom almost immediately understand Quixote to be crazy. Perhaps cruelly, the people that he meets all go along with Don Quixote’s foolhardy attempts at chivalry, just to see what will happen. Maybe that’s one of the themes or questions at stake here – how do we treat the mentally ill? What connection is there between mental illness and art? Don Quixote provokes some of the same questions that our famous artists and/or crazy people do today – i.e. which comes first, the art or the crazy? Do the books he reads make Don Quixote crazy, or do they merely give him an outlet through which to filter and conduct his infirmity? Is it an infirmity? Is fiction dangerous? Is art useful?

            As I said before, it’s hard to judge a text so old on its own terms, without letting modern thinking color our understanding. Is Don Quixote making a statement about chivalry? Violence? The position of women in the world? The Crusades? I think one could make any of these arguments convincing. It seems obvious enough, at least, that one of the things Cervantes definitely wants to talk about in Don Quixote is fiction itself. Smiley says she doesn’t know if Cervantes is making fun of the idea that fiction is dangerous, or whether he aims to illustrate exactly that. But to make use of the very form you intend to deride seems to me at best naively ironic and at worst ludicrous. Judging by what I’ve read of the book so far I feel certain that Cervantes must be making fun of the public’s concern about fiction as a kind of “dangerous lie.” To make his point – that fiction is enjoyable, not harmful – he uses a very convincing rhetorical device: gentle self-mockery in combination with humor at society’s expense.

That’s all I’ve got so far. Hopefully I’ll know more after the next 600 pages!

For All the Tea in China, Rose

For All the Tea in China:

How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History

Sarah Rose

2010

USA

“[Sugar, coffee, tobacco, opium, and tea] rearranged the axes of power all along their supply chain, each step of the way from mountain farms to British homesteads.”

I like tea, and I liked the title of this book. So in a California-sun and independent bookstore induced haze, I picked it up on a shopping spree in which I spent a whopping $60 on books in one hour. (If that doesn’t sound like a lot to you, perhaps I should mention that this happened last month, when I was not “working,” at least not at a job that paid.) I also chose the book because I’ve been thinking I should write more non-fiction, and hoped this would guide me in how to write informatively for a popular audience. Did it accomplish that goal? Yes and no.

The subject of this history is Robert Fortune, a botanist hired by the East India Company in the mid 1800’s to travel to China and steal tea plants and botanical knowledge in order to transport them to British-controlled India. It was fun to read about a subject as seemingly commonplace as tea. I would flip the pages with a steaming cup beside me, sipping milk-cooled Earl Grey while I learned that before Fortune’s expeditions, Britons believed that green and black teas came from two different plants, when in fact that are of the same botanical origin but are prepared differently. The text is chock full of fascinating information along these lines, but it’s also told in a narrative style that’s engaging and quickly paced, and Rose’s investigations into the psychologies motivating the actors in this drama give the book something of the flavor of a novel. Using Fortune’s memoirs, letters, and historical documents from the East India Company, Rose portrays a China newly opening to the West. The pictures she paints of misty hillsides lush with tea plants, gun battles at sea, and Fortune’s misguided interactions with his Chinese servants transport one to an ancient civilization, and offer a glimpse into the history and relationships which have shaped the way we live today.

I respect the fact that Rose doesn’t waste time with general condemnations of the morality of Britain’s quest for tea/economic power. Instead, she focuses on the details of the personalities at play. What we get is a picture of individual actions resulting in huge societal changes. We’re not told whether it’s “good” or “bad,” “moral” or “immoral.” And that makes for pleasant reading, because certainly one could easily get mired in such considerations. It’s because of this lack of analysis however that, though I enjoyed the book for the imagery and history, I’m not sure about how much I can take away from it in regard to my own writing. Rose offers objective history, and I can’t help but feel pulled toward a deeper analysis, especially when she seems to introduce such questions in the very last paragraph of the book. The absolute last sentence is: “Entire islands have been overrun as the result of the kind of botanical frontiersmanship that Fortune and his contemporaries routinely practiced.” Does the author suppose that such a fact hasn’t been on my mind throughout the entire reading? Why bring it up now? Why as the last sentence? Wouldn’t it be better to tie things together somehow? To offer a defense of Fortune, to whom the writer is clearly sympathetic? This ending bothers me because it seems to unnecessarily beg these questions. It’s a question of objectivity over making an argument. Perhaps a student of history would feel comfortable with this. I, whether fortunately or not, am a student of rhetoric.

On Writing Well, Zinsser

On Writing Well

William Zinsser

6th edition, 2001

USA

“Writers who write interestingly tend to be men and women who keep themselves interested. That’s almost the whole point of becoming a writer.”

Until now, I had never read a book about writing non-fiction, except when made to by a teacher. Now that I’m the teacher, however, I need something good to assign my students. I picked up On Writing Well at the suggestion of a fellow composition instructor, and I’m extremely glad I did. Not only have I found many snippets of useful tips to share with my students, but I’ve also learned and been reminded of oodles of crucial truths about what makes good writing that I myself had forgotten (either accidentally or willfully). I just finished the book and have already found it beneficial; in revising a short story this morning, I heeded Zinsser’s advice to suss out overly ornamental language and extraneous information, and take care to locate exactly the right word for every job. My story is better already!

On Writing Well is organized into four sections: Principles, Methods, Forms, and Attitudes. I admit that I did not read every single chapter in the Forms section; sports, business, and science and technology just aren’t my areas of interest. Travel, memoir, and criticism are. I only wish I’d heard of this book sooner; I very likely would have assigned the entire thing to my WR 323 class this fall, and I certainly would have been improving as a writer earlier myself. Oh well, luckily for you all, I’ve found it now!

Apart from the practicalities (have I mentioned it’s extremely useful?) I found the book interesting from a philosophical, ethical, and/or psychological standpoint as well (my own psychology, and the author’s). As I read Zinsser’s exhortations to do this and not that in my writing, I felt compelled, almost constantly in the early chapters, to ruthlessly analyze his writing, searching hopefully, expectantly, perhaps even maliciously, to find the very flaws in his work that he warned his readers against. Probably if you take enough time and care to find such shortcomings you can. After all, writing is a subjective art, and when Zinsser claims that the word he has chosen is the absolute best one the reader is free to disagree with him. If we interest ourselves instead, as Zinsser claims to do, with the qualities of “humanity, warmth, and aliveness” in writing, then we can find all of that here, on every page of this helpful and enjoyable book.

Many sections of On Writing Well seemed to speak directly to me, and I expect this would be the case with anyone who is passionate about improving their writing. As one who has fallen prey to the cynical game of trying to please an imagined audience or editor rather than myself, Zinsser’s words of advice on balancing the (seemingly) conflicting concerns of audience satisfaction and personal pleasure were especially compelling. “You are writing primarily to please yourself,” Zinsser reminded me. Oh yeah! “When your zest begins to ebb, the reader is the first to know it.” And so, Zinsser says, when you’re done, you should just get out. So here comes the end of the post.

On Writing Well is an excellent book and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in writing anything, not just non-fiction. Here are some others I've read and enjoyed (mostly all about writing fiction):

Bird by Bird by Anne Lammott

Page after Page by Heather Sellers

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg

Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway 

Plot by Ansen Dibell

I'm hungry for more! What other books on writing should I read?