Birthday Wishes for a Great Reading Friend

My friend B. has a "big" birthday today -- Happy, happy birthday, dear B.! On 2/16/10, I wrote about my friend C., with whom I have been having book conversations for the longest. B. is a friend I have been discussing books with for almost as long: 35 years! B's and my typical get-together is a long lunch or afternoon tea, at which we discuss many things, always including books: what books we are currently reading, what we think about them, what we saw reviewed in The New York Times or The San Francisco Chronicle or elsewhere, which books other friends have recommended, which favorite novels we have returned to (yet again!), which books have been made into movies, whether the movies did justice to the books, and more. We often give or lend each other books, feeling happy when one has found "the perfect book" for the other. Our mutual love of literature is deeply woven into our long and close friendship. Again, dear B., have a wonderful birthday and a wonderful year!

"Mr. Bridge" - Trapped in His Time and Gender

On 5/3/10 I wrote about the book "Mrs. Bridge." Today I write about the companion book, "Mr. Bridge" (North Point Press, 1981; originally published 1969), by Evan S. Connell. The couple's story is now told from the husband's perspective. Mr. Bridge is the quintessential man of his time, the mid-19th century. He knows his duty as a man: to work hard and to support his wife and children. He takes pride in doing so, but he almost never expresses understanding or love to his wife, leaving her feeling lonely. He is austere, rigid, upright, or to use the 1960s term, uptight. He has a great deal of integrity, and tries to treat people well, yet he seemingly cannot help his somewhat racist and anti-Semitic attitudes, common at the time. He lacks imagination, but has occasional flashes of self-examination and self-knowledge. In "Mrs. Bridge," Connell showed us the way women were (are?) trapped in their roles; here he demonstrates that men were (are?) also trapped. Mr. Bridge sees no honorable way out: "Early tomorrow, I must get up again to do what I have done today. I will get up early tomorrow to do this, and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and there is nothing to discuss" (p. 106). The novel ends rather heartbreakingly, as Mr. Bridge tells himself that "If he had once known joy, it must have been a long time ago"(p. 367). Connell's style in both novels is flat, almost matter of fact, and all the more devastating for it.

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.