What They Were Reading in Muncie Over 100 Years Ago

There's a fascinating essay in the 11/27/11 New York Times Book Review about the recent discovery in Muncie, Indiana, of old handwritten Muncie Public Library records. A researcher "discovered crumbling ledgers and notebooks identifying every book checked out of the library, as well as the name of the patron who checked it out, from November 1891 to December 1902." What a treasure trove! The researchers cataloged and digitized the information, with the resulting database providing "one of the few authoritative records of American reading." Some of what they found: "Women read romances, kids read pulp and white-collar workers read mass-market titles. Horatio Alger was by far the most popular author....Louisa May Alcott is the only author who remains both popular and literary today....The remaining authors at the top of the list...have vanished from memory." Some read the "classics," but not many. This is all not so very different from today....

Buy Holiday Gifts at Independent Bookstores!

I would like to urge readers, as I did last year, to buy as many as possible of your holiday gifts in independent bookstores. Books make great gifts, and we need to support our wonderful independent bookstores.

On another note: I have been posting less the past couple of weeks, as it has been a very busy time at work; in addition, I was finishing two articles with deadlines. I will be back to more frequent posting soon. Thanks for checking and reading the blog!

"The Marriage Plot," by Jeffrey Eugenides

Why I Have Just Read “The Marriage Plot” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011), by Jeffrey Eugenides:

1. I was intrigued by the originality of, and liked reading, the author’s two earlier novels, “The Virgin Suicides” and “Middlesex.”
2. It had been nine years since the author’s last novel, “Middlesex,” was published, so there was much anticipation of this new novel.
3. As I said in my 11/13/11 post, there has been much speculation about whether “The Marriage Plot” is based on the author’s real-life famous writer friends; is it a roman a clef? And if so, which character is “really” which writer friend? I am certainly not immune to this kind of literary speculation (gossip?).
4. I am a pushover for novels about a group of friends in college (or elsewhere) and how their ensuing lives and relationships play out in the years after college. In the case of this novel, the characters meet at Brown University; the novel focuses on the college years and on the eventful year immediately after they graduate.
5. Most of all, the title is irresistible to me; it refers to the common plot of Regency and Victorian novels, especially those by women writers such as Austen and Eliot. One of the main characters, Madeleine, is a classic English major type, enchanted and absorbed by the joys, complexities, and insights provided by literature, and eager to pursue a career of scholarship in English literature. This is a very familiar “type” for me! Soon Madeleine is involved in her own “marriage plot,” but it is very different from those in her beloved novels. How does this plot play out in our current culture? In the old novels, marriage often (with the notable exception of Eliot’s “Middlemarch”) concluded the stories; nowadays we want to know what happens AFTER marriage as well.

I was not disappointed by the novel. (Sometimes a novel that is hyped this much is a disappointment.) I was immediately caught up in it, from the first page, which consisted of a cataloging of the books in Madeleine’s room, including those by Wharton, James, Dickens, Trollope, Austen, Eliot, the Brontes, H.D., Levertov, and Colette. (Madeleine’s bookshelf looks a lot like mine....) The three main characters, with their complicated relationships, as well as the supporting cast of fellow students, parents, professors, and employers, are recognizable and compelling; the plot turns are both believable and at times surprising; the writing is engaging.

"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," Fifty Years On

It is hard to believe that it has been just under 50 years since Ken Kesey's novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was published in 1962. As an article by James Wolcott in the December 2011 issue of Vanity Fair points out, this novel "helped father the 60s counterculture." I, like a large portion of the Baby Boomer generation, well remember the huge impact of this novel, and of the film version that followed. Who could forget the way the mental hospital represented all the institutions in society that repressed and oppressed people, especially rebels and those who were a bit "different"? Who could forget the standoff between Randle Patrick McMurphy, played by Jack Nicholson, and Nurse Ratched, played by Louise Fletcher? Wolcott goes on to note that in January, Viking will publish a 50th-anniversary edition of the novel, and speculates that it "may inspire a whole new generation of agitators." A few months ago, I would have dismissed this last clause as hyperbole, but given the recent "Occupy" movement's rapid growth, and the great breadth and depth of outrage it represents, those words sound prescient.

Martin Amis Pronounces...and Provokes

The ever-provocative novelist and critic Martin Amis, in a review of Don DeLillo's new book in the 11/28/11 issue of The New Yorker, makes the point that "When we say that we love a writer's work...what we really mean is that we love about half of it." He goes on to say that Joyce's reputation relies mostly on "Ulysses." More controversially, to me at least, he asserts that "George Eliot gave us one readable book, which turned out to be the central Anglophone novel." As readers of this blog know, I certainly agree with the second half of that sentence, but not the first. Just one readable book? What about "The Mill on the Floss"? "Daniel Deronda"? But in general, I must admit, there is something to Amis' thesis. He goes on to say that "every page of Dickens contains a paragraph to warm to and a paragraph to veer back from. Coleridge wrote a total of two major poems...Milton consists of 'Paradise Lost.' Even my favorite writer, William Shakespeare, succumbs to this law...who would voluntarily curl up with 'King John' or 'Henry VI, Part III'?" But then Amis goes on to say that "Janeites will never admit that three of the six novels are comparative weaklings." Those are fighting words! It is true that some of Austen's six are stronger than others, but it is all relative; compared to other novels by other novelists, they are all gems, shining stars, treasures of literature! The world would be poorer if any one of them did not exist. So while I more or less accept Amis' main argument, I certainly reject some of his examples. (I am sure he knew as he was writing that his examples would be controversial and provoke exactly the type of responses I am giving here!)

Gratitude for My Colleagues Who Read My Drafts

We often hear about how great writers write multiple drafts, and get feedback from their editors, colleagues, friends, spouses, and others. Here I want to point out that far humbler writers, such as myself, benefit greatly from the same process as well: writing many drafts, and getting constructive criticism from colleagues and friends. I want to thank the colleagues/friends in my field who read my drafts and give me such helpful suggestions. It happens that right now two of my colleagues, one local and one not, are reading a draft of a chapter I am writing, and I thank them very much for it. Their input will make a difference; they help me to be a better writer. I wish for every writer such helpful colleagues and friends!

Revisiting "The Waves," by Virginia Woolf

Continuing my recent re-reading of, as well as my longtime fascination with, Virginia Woolf’s amazing, groundbreaking novels (see also my posts of 2/26/10, 10/22/11, and 11/1/11, among other mentions of her and her work), I have just finished re-reading “The Waves.” I am, once again and more than ever, awestruck. I am enthralled by the breathtaking explorations of individuals’ consciousnesses in “Mrs. Dalloway” and “To the Lighthouse”; in “The Waves,” this exploration is taken still further, as Woolf creates a chorus of overlapping, blending voices of the inner thoughts and feelings of six friends whom she follows from small childhood to old age. The group meets several times over the years, and each time we get glimpses -- but only glimpses -- of the changes in their lives. The “story” (and it is far from a traditional narrative; Woolf herself once called it a “playpoem”) is revealed through alternating and interwoven interior monologues from the six characters (Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda and Louis). Although the characters’ soliloquies flow together, we gradually get a sense of each character’s individuality. However, there is still some uncertainty about the line between the individuals and the group as a whole (this uncertainty is clearly Woolf’s intention) and there is even, at the end, a question: “’Who am I?’ I have been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do not know.” The effect of this purposeful blurring of boundaries is enhanced by the nine interludes between meetings --indicated by italics -- that indicate the slow rising and setting of the sun over the period of the characters’ lives, as if the dawns to the dusks of their lives represent one full metaphorical day. Each of these interludes portrays nature and the context of the characters’ lives, in sublime poetic language. And always, there are in these sections the sights and sounds of the waves. The waves are not literally part of the characters' meetings, but symbolize their advances and retreats toward and away from each other, and the eternal backdrop of their lives. Readers can connect to so much in the novel: the love and yet sometimes disconnection among the six lifelong friends, the stunning early loss of their dear friend and hero Percival, the ways they choose to live (single, married, with lovers, in business, in writing, in the country, in the city), their dependence on each other and yet sometimes wariness of each other, their insecurities, their epiphanies, their emotional fluctuations, the disjunctions between what they show the world of themselves and what they feel inside, and so much more. The overall impression given by the book is one of a symphony of sounds, words, feelings, events. There are many solos. Often instruments join in and then fade out. Most gloriously, sometimes the six stories and personalities blend in moments of divine transcendence.