Serendipitous Literary Connections

One of the serendipitous pleasures of wide reading is the unexpected connections that I so often come across as I read. For example, on 5/11/10 I posted about the author Fanny Burney, and a couple of days later on a standardized test my students were taking, there was -- to my surprise -- a paragraph about Fanny Burney's novel "Evelina." Another example: Yesterday I was reading in Vanity Fair an excerpt from Christopher Hitchens' new memoir, in which he mentioned how much he and his writer friends were influenced by the poet Philip Larkin, and today I started reading Anna Quindlen's new book, "Every Last One," and found it began with a poem by Larkin. I also have a special place in my heart for Larkin because he was the one whose praise of Barbara Pym's work brought her books back into print; I hate to think of not having known Pym's wonderful, wry, and very English novels.

StephanieVandrickReads Slows Down

Dear Readers, I have been posting daily (with a couple of exceptions) on this blog for three and a half months, and have thoroughly enjoyed doing so. However, for reasons of time and other commitments, I have decided to post less frequently now. I will aim for approximately two to four times a week. I hope you will keep checking in regularly. Also, please tell your reading friends about the blog; one way to do that is to click the little envelope after a post, and forward the post by email to your friends; it's easy! And do comment, or if you prefer not to sign up to comment, please just email me directly (vandricks@usfca.edu) with any responses you have; I am always happy to hear your views on particular posts, or in general on books and reading. Thanks again for reading my blog! -- Stephanie

Am I Old-Fashioned?

I am somewhat conservative, even old-fashioned, about which novels I like to read. I generally don't read "experimental" fiction. I don't like genre fiction, except for the occasional mystery; I especially don't like science fiction, fantasy, spy fiction or thrillers. I don't generally read historical fiction, especially if the history involved is more than a hundred years old. I don't mean that I do not respect novels in these genres or of these types; I know that there are excellent examples of each of these types. I simply do not prefer them, or generally choose to read them myself; after all, our choices of what to read are very personal, very individual. What I like best are good old-fashioned story-driven, character-driven, idea-driven novels, in the tradition of the great nineteenth-century British novels by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Thomas Hardy, as well as of early twentieth-century authors such as Henry James, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and E. M. Forster. I do love Virginia Woolf's novels; although at the time they were published they were considered experimental, they still contain strong stories and characters, as well as incredibly beautiful use of poetic language. The mid- and late twentieth-century and current novels I choose to read embody these same basic characteristics.

Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth

Although many may think of Jane Austen as the first major woman novelist in English, there were some others even earlier who were very popular in their time. Then they fell into obscurity, until scholars rediscovered them in the last 40 years. Two of these who wrote just before Austen were Frances (Fanny) Burney (1752-1840) and Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849). Both cared about and wrote about women's lives and women's rights. Burney's fiction often dealt with the constrictions of women's lives; she also bravely wrote about her own unanesthesized mastectomy. Her best novels are "Evelina" (1778), "Cecilia" (1782), and "Camilla" (1796). Edgeworth was Irish, and wrote about the need for better education for girls and women; she was a businesswoman, serving as property manager for her father's extensive holdings. Her best novel is "Belinda" (1801). I was very happy to find these novels some years ago, and enjoyed them thoroughly. They are gripping stories, deeply steeped in women's lives.

Los Angeles fiction

I was just in Los Angeles for a few days, and its gorgeous weather, abundant green foliage, vivid bougainvillea, and stretches of stunning beaches were all so appealing, and so evocative of all the Los Angeles novels and movies we have all read and seen. (We won't talk about the terrible traffic and the smog....) Even the street names are so familiar, so intensely L.A.: Sunset Boulevard, Laurel Canyon Boulevard, Mulholland Drive.... And the different parts of L.A. have such magical names: Venice, Santa Monica, Hollywood.... When I was there this past weekend, for some reason I started thinking about Nathanael West's novel "The Day of the Locust," which portrays the best and worst about L.A. I also thought of Joan Didion's novel "Play It As It Lays," and her essay collection "The White Album"; both of these evoke a sort of part-dreamy, part-alien, part-scorched, part-fertile Los Angeles - all the stereotypes, all the contradictions we all know, but so beautifully expressed as only Didion can. I also remembered living in Glendale for a few months as a child, near the famed Forest Lawn Cemetery, and so thought too of Evelyn Waugh's "The Loved One," the satirical novel about the funeral industry set in L.A. and featuring a very Forest Lawn-reminiscent cemetery. Although it has been many years since I read any of these books, each of them sticks with me - not the details or even characters or plots, but the feelings, the atmospheres, the tones. Although as a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, I occasionally criticize Los Angeles, there is something seductive about it, something mythic, something that draws you in.

Louisa May Alcott

As a child, I loved, and reread many times, Louisa May Alcott's books: Little Women, Little Men, Jo's Boys, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, An Old-Fashioned Girl, Under the Lilacs, and Jack and Jill. Of course Little Women and its two sequels were my favorites. I loved the strength of the girls, especially Jo; the warmth of the family scenes; the relationships among the girls; Jo's writing; the innocent but fraught romances; the pathos of Beth's illness and death; and so much more. I couldn't get enough of these books. However, when I reread some of them with my daughter, and again when I taught Little Women in a Women's Literature class, I noticed what I had mainly missed or perhaps overlooked as a child: the heavily didactic aspect of Alcott's novels. Almost every chapter in Little Women has some kind of explicit, spelled-out lesson about life: be good to those who are poor, don't hold a grudge, control your temper, don't be vain... I think Alcott felt that a book during that time period -- especially a book that was, very subtly, a bit subversive about female roles -- had to prove its moral worth through these lessons; she was probably right. Still, despite the heavyhanded didactic aspect, I will always love these books, especially Little Women.

"The Lake Shore Limited"

It is hard to judge the place of Sue Miller's novels. They have elements of the popular, of the middlebrow, and of the literary. They are well written, but seem to be aimed at a popular audience. In any case, they are always enjoyable to read, and often thought-provoking as well. I just listened to her latest novel, "The Lake Shore Limited" (Knopf, 2010) on CD (Books on Tape, 2010); the author reads the novel herself, which adds to listeners' enjoyment. The foundation of the story, which takes place mostly in Boston and New Hampshire, is the death of Gus - a young teacher - on one of the doomed planes on September 11, 2001. Gus' sister Leslie, who has been almost like a mother to him, mourns him deeply, and becomes even closer than she had been before to Gus' girlfriend, the playwright Billy, assuming they share the same sorrow. But Billy's feelings had secretly been more ambivalent before the tragedy, which makes her uncomfortable with Leslie now. She feels trapped into pretending to something she doesn't feel. Billy's true feelings are indirectly revealed in her latest play, which is attended by Leslie, her husband Pierce, and their friend Sam, whom Leslie hopes will develop a relationship with Billy; Leslie feels it is time for both Sam (who is divorced) and Billy to find love again. After the play is over, we are taken backward in time to various histories of each character, and forward in time to see what happens after the night of the play. The characters are engaging, and we become involved with their stories, feeling pity, dismay, and hope. Some of the characters are less likable than others: Leslie is the one everyone likes, while Billy is more reserved and prickly, perhaps understandably so, but is ultimately sympathetic. I recommend this novel.