The final week of the year is a still week. The calendar counts down the days of December, and although there is always work to be done, people might be able to enjoy a day or two of recreation.

The Prophet Elijah learned that God speaks not in a heavy wind nor in an earthquake nor in a fire, but a “still small voice” (1 Kings 19:11-13), and so I’ve tried to be a bit more attentive to finding wisdom during this still week. As you might expect, this attentiveness has come in the form of reading, and the latest works of two great scholars have been my guides. It is nearly impossible to do justice either to Harold Bloom or to Wm. Theodore de Bary, and so I won’t even dare to write about them together. For today, then, I’ll focus on Bloom’s latest book The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life, and I’ll have to leave de Bary’s edited collection Finding Wisdom in East Asian Classics until next week.

In the Anatomy of Influence, which Bloom describes as his “final reflection upon the influence process” (ix), the gnostic of New Haven writes that “the art of literary criticism for the present time” is to “read, reread, describe, evaluate, appreciate” (24). A key component of Bloom’s description, evaluation, and appreciation is his argument is that all literary influence is labyrinthine. He writes, “Belated authors wander the maze as is an exit can be found, until the strong among them realize that the windings of the labyrinth are all internal. No critic, however generously motivated, can help a deep reader escape from the labyrinth of influence. I have learned that my function is to help you get lost” (31). It all depends, I suppose, on how you define “lost.” Read the rest of this entry »

‘Tis the season for “Best of” lists, so here is my personal list of the best books of 2011.

Best Fiction Published in 2011

Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding

My admiration for Harbach’s first novel has only grown since I first read and reviewed it. Harbach writes as intelligently about curveballs as about undergraduate life as about nineteenth-century American literature. Well plotted and beautifully written, The Art of Fielding was the book I most enjoyed reading this year.

Edward St. Aubyn, At Last

I’m sort of cheating here—the novel came out in the U.K. in May, but won’t be published in the U.S. until February—but I couldn’t not include At Last, the final installment in St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose cycle. (The first four novels, Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother’s Milk, will be published as a single volume by Picador next month.) These novels have dark source material, ranging from run-of-the-mill social cruelty to child rape and drug abuse, but St. Aubyn has been able to turn this incredibly disturbing stuff into something that is funny, engaging, philosophical, and, in At Last, surprisingly warm. St. Aubyn is often compared to Evelyn Waugh, and it’s easy to see why: there’s the lancing wit (“Of course it was wrong to want to change people, but what else could you possibly want to do with them?”), the snobbishness (“There was no doubt about it, he was a fattist and a sexist and an ageist and a racist and a straightest and a druggist and, naturally, a snob, but of such a virulent character that nobody satisfied his demands. He defied anyone to come up with a minority or a majority that he did not hate for some reason or another.”), and the ability to seemingly throw off aphorisms at will (“To a man of the world, the universe is a suburb.”) At Last is really a stand-alone work, and can be read on its own; it’s also one of the best novels I’ve read in the last several years. Read the rest of this entry »

Alan Hollinghurst is to me that rare find, a novelist in total control of his material. His latest novel, The Stranger’s Child, stretched over most of the twentieth century and taking up the perspectives of multiple individuals as the scene moves from one era to another, tests this capacity to its utmost. The book begins in the years just before the First World War at the middle-class suburban London home of the Sowles, where the fifteen-year old Diana awaits the arrival of her slightly older brother George with a guest, an up-and-coming poet. Immediately, class comes into play as Cecil Valance, the poet, hails from minor aristocracy and has in Corley Court a much grander home to show for it. Before long the scene switches to the Valance home some years later, where Diana has married into the role of Lady Valance, though not to Cecil as we might have anticipated in the earlier pages. A third segment, set in the 1950s, brings us into the later fortunes of the Valances and the Sowles through two new sets of eyes, those of Paul Bryant and Peter Rowe. Bryant is a bank clerk with literary ambitions,  Rowe a schoolteacher in what the British call a prep school—a boarding school for junior high boys—now occupying Corley Court. Again we jump, this time to London some years later as Bryant struggles unsuccessfully to extract information for his biography of Cecil Valance from the now impoverished Diana, and once more to a concluding scene at a memorial service at which Bryant’s shabby pretentiousness and evident literary success are equally apparent.

What keeps the novel together is a poem, written by Cecil Valance on that first visit to the Sowle home. The poem is named for the house, “Two Acres,” and becomes a much-anthologized piece which schoolchildren learn as a matter of course. Everything else about it is matter for speculation. We never see the whole poem, though snatches of it are quoted here and there throughout the text. We are not even sure for whom it was written. Diana certainly thinks it was for her, and Cecil allows this, but our suspicion is that George may have been the real inspiration since he is surely Cecil’s romantic attachment. But as the century progresses both houses and the families that occupied them decay, while the poem persists. Written in a moment long ago by a long-dead minor poet, it continues just as the memory of Cecil is kept alive, less because of its or his essential significance, but just because it is there in the anthologies like Cecil’s white alabaster funeral monument in the chapel of Corley Court. Read the rest of this entry »

Ruth Franklin begins her review of Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel The Marriage Plot in the December 1 New Republic with a “truism”:

Women write about love and marriage; men write about everything else. Like all truisms, this one is best served with a heaping spoonful of caveats, but they don’t alter its essential flavor.

She cites evidence, drawing on the reading list of Eugenides’s main character:

Dickens, Trollope, the Brontës, Austen, George Eliot, Edith Wharton, Henry James: with one important exception, they break neatly along the gender divide. Dickens and Trollope wrote about society, history, religion. For Wharton, Austen, Eliot, and the Brontës, the primary drama is a woman’s choice of husband—“the marriage plot.”

Henry James is the exception she mentions, and the other ladies can fend for themselves, but I must register an objection on behalf of George Eliot, whose name, I feel, is being taken in vain here. Dickens writes about “society, history, religion,” but Eliot writes about “a woman’s choice of husband”? Really? You could say that Middlemarch is largely concerned with young women and their marital choices, but you can’t say that Middlemarch is not about “society.” You could perhaps say that Adam Bede‘s “primary drama is a woman’s choice of husband,” provided you had a flexible notion of “primary” and “woman” and “husband.” But if you’re looking for a novel about “society, history, religion,” what about Daniel Deronda? Or Romola? Or Felix Holt? Would they get filed under “choosing a husband” if George Eliot’s pseudonym had never been cracked? And then there’s The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, no more principally focused on “a woman’s choice of husband” than is, say, Great Expectations. In short, I think Franklin might need to check her bookshelf again.

There’s nothing wrong with writing principally about marriage and love, I should add. Dismissing domestic matters as unworthy of great fiction is an old excuse for marginalizing women’s writing (as we’ve already discussed). Franklin’s description is certainly true of Jane Austen, to take another of her examples, and there’s no need to pretend otherwise; a great novel about a woman’s choice of a husband is a great novel, and it need not stand aside for a mediocre one about world history. But I think this demonstrates why breezy generalizations about women writers vs. men writers are insidious even when they’re not inherently disparaging. Franklin brings this one up so that she might go on to say that Eugenides is an exception (the review’s title is, heh heh, “The Hermaphrodite”). The categorization of Eliot et al. was not meant to be controversial. I believe it goes to show that, even if you think you’ve applied a sufficiently heaping spoonful of caveats, a truism like this one may start doing your thinking for you, to the point where you can stumble on a significant counterexample and never even notice it.

(For further reading on a somewhat related topic, I recommend the critical essay “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” by Mary Ann Evans, better known as George Eliot.)

It’s easy enough to enjoy a novel whose characters you love. While you read you can find yourself rooting for them, and after you finish the novel you might wish there was a sequel so that you could meet them again. The novel makes its own world, and you happily inhabit that world for a few days or a few weeks. You learn from it, and, one hopes, learn about yourself and your world in the process.

Here’s an honest question, though: what do you do with a novel whose characters you can’t stand? As I read Helen DeWitt’s latest novel Lightning Rods, I found myself actively rooting against the main character. Joe, a failed salesman of the Encyclopedia Brittanica and of vacuum cleaners, realizes that he needs to sell something he can believe in. And he decides what he can really believe in is selling anonymous sexual encounters in corporate America. Read the rest of this entry »

Last month, with the New York University Creative Writing Center, we sponsored a panel discussion featuring Paul Elie, Alice McDermott, Valerie Sayers, and Rand Richards Cooper. They wrestled with the question of the hour: How does the faith of a writer — or her subject — influence her creative process? Here’s a video of the event:

Commonweal Conversations 2011 – The Writing Life: What’s Faith Got to Do with It? from Commonweal Magazine on Vimeo.