An Ode to Composition

My university recently switched to an institutional version of gmail. One small but significant detail that I noticed and like about it is that for creating a new message, it asks us to “compose message.” I like the idea that it uses the word “compose,” which reminds us that all writing requires composing. Even if we only take a minute or a few seconds to think about how to word an email message or a text message, we are composing. We are putting words together in a particular way; we are framing our messages; we are thinking about our various audiences and purposes for our various messages. These are all the things that those of us who teach writing tell our students, which is why writing classes are often called composition classes. Often people think of writing as a skill, and in a way it is, but not in the way typing or programming or gardening are. Most of all, writing is thinking, and then composing those thoughts into effective combinations of words to form sentences, of sentences to form paragraphs, and of paragraphs to form letters, emails, memos, essays, chapters, and books. When I hear the word “compose,” I am also of course reminded of composers of music, who put together notes, sounds, and instructions about orchestration and about volume, in order to create glorious music. Both cases -- composing writings and composing music -- are marvelous, complex processes that create something new in the world, something unique and valuable. Obviously some writings, and some musical offerings, are better than others, but all are worth celebrating, even if only for the good intentions and the effort. And when the composing succeeds, what wonders are sent out into the world!

"By Nightfall"

“By Nightfall” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010), by Michael Cunningham (best known as the author of “The Hours”), is a strange, intriguing, and at times faintly creepy novel. It is set in New York City’s artsy Soho, and features a very odd trio of main characters. Peter owns an art gallery, loves his wife, and ponders the place of beauty in his life. His wife Rebecca edits a literary journal. Ethan, Rebecca’s much younger brother, breathtakingly beautiful but lacking direction, with a history of serious drug-taking, comes to stay with Peter and Rebecca for a while. Peter finds himself drawn to Ethan’s beauty and his resemblance to Rebecca when she was younger; this attraction, and Ethan’s casual duplicity and self-protection, combine to cause a major upheaval in the lives and marriage of Peter and Rebecca. Interwoven with this story are Peter’s meditations on art, beauty, love, aging, romance, and more. Cunningham captures the contradictory desires that often appear at mid-life: on the one hand, the enjoyment of a comfortable, happy, reasonably fulfilling life, and on the other hand, the yearning for something “big” and dramatic – a passionate romance, a huge, brave yet somehow effortless change in one’s life – to happen before it is too late. He understands the mid-life fear of having allowed life to pass one by, the fear of having “settled.” These are all serious issues, obviously, but Peter's sudden preoccupations with them seem rather superficial and even melodramatic. “By Nightfall” certainly keeps the reader’s attention, but there is something a little too facile, a little too self-indulgent in the character of Peter that put this particular reader off a bit.

On Reading More Male Writers Again

I just realized that the last three novels I read were all by male authors. That realization made me reflect on how I have fluctuated over the years regarding the gender of novelists whose works I have read. Like everyone else of my age (Baby Boomer), in school and in college days I read mainly male authors, with a few notable exceptions (Austen, Bronte, Eliot, Woolf, Cather, and a few more recent female novelists); they were the ones considered the “best”; they formed the “canon.” Not only were most of the novelists male, but most of their main characters were male as well. I, like most female readers then, had to do what some feminist literary critics later described as suspending reality in order to identify with the mostly male main characters of most novels. But along with the women’s movement of the late 1960s and the 1970s came a glorious increase in novels (and short stories and poetry and plays) by women writers being published. For the avid reader I was, this development was manna from heaven. For many years afterward, I read mostly works by women, with women as the main characters. Now that there are as many women writers being published as there are men (although there is still the issue of how seriously women writers and “women’s topics” are taken; see my posts of 8/26/10, 9/4/10, and 9/15/10), I have gradually, in the past few years, begun reading more novels by male writers again. This has not been a conscious decision, as much as a natural evening-out process. Also, I give much credit to the women’s movement, not only for the increased number of novels by women being published, but for the fact that the worlds of women and men are now less separate than they were, and therefore the subject matters and styles of novels by males and females are less different, more overlapping than they were. I still read many more women writers than men, but the proportions are less starkly different than they were for a long time.

"The Rain Before It Falls"

I just finished listening to “The Rain Before It Falls” on CD (BBC Audiobooks, 2008), by Jonathan Coe (one of “The Jonathans” that I posted about on 11/2/10). It is a family saga, about a dysfunctional but -- mainly, although at times tortuously -- loving family over many years and many (mostly sad) events. The conceit of the novel is that the elderly Rosamund, who is dying, dictates her own life's story and the family story, and the ways in which they intersected, onto cassettes for Imogen, the long-lost but much-loved granddaughter of her cousin and best friend. Beatrix. She organizes her memories by choosing and describing 20 photographs taken at various times in her and the family's lives. Her taped narration is framed by the narration and stories of her niece and grandnieces, who when they cannot find Imogen after Rosamund's death, listen to the tapes themselves and add their own stories, thus creating a story-within-a-story effect. Consequently, the novel is somewhat schematic, but the structure mainly works. Rosamund’s voice, and some of her digressions, sometimes grow a little wearying, yet most of the time the story is compelling. Rosamund is and always has been neurotic and needy, but is nevertheless a sympathetic character. Overall, I enjoyed the book, not surprisingly, since this kind of character-driven, relationship-enmeshed, psychologically intriguing story is exactly the kind that I most like to read. Added attractions are the English setting, and -- for those listening on CD as I did -- the lovely English accent of the reader, actress Jenny Agutter.

Finally (Foolishly?) Finished Franzen's "Freedom"

I did it! I finished Jonathan Franzen's 562-page novel, "Freedom." If you read my interim reports on 11/8/10 and 11/11/10, you know that I was not enjoying, and was not impressed by, this novel, but because of all the critical attention it was getting, and at a certain point because of all the time I had already invested in it, I felt compelled to continue to the end. So I won! I wrestled the novel to the ground! I was able to leave Walter, Patty, Richard, Joey (although I kind of liked Joey), Jessica, Carol, Connie, and Lalitha behind with relief and no regrets! Hurray! On the other hand, I spent many, many hours on a novel that was pretty unsatisfying and that I had to struggle through, so maybe I actually lost? In any case, maybe I have saved some of you from spending time on this vaunted but disappointing novel.

Still Wrestling with Franzen's "Freedom"

I posted 11/8/10 about trying to get into Jonathan Franzen's new book, "Freedom," but having mixed success. However, I have persisted, and am now up to page 400 (162 to go...). My interest continues to be intermittent. The big chunks of prose about Walter's genuine struggle to do good, and the terrible compromises he is making, are of interest but somehow undigested and trying-too-hard-to-be-great-moral-struggles-of-our-time. I have the feeling that Franzen tried to write a great sprawling novel of ideas and full of interesting characters, like the wonderful nineteenth century novels of Eliot, Dickens, etc., but somehow just doesn't engage our interest on either level -- characters or issues -- as those novels do. As B. R. Myers writes in the October 2010 Atlantic, Franzen's characters are mediocre and uninteresting, and he seems to believe that "The more aspects of our society he can fit between the book's covers, the more ambitious he is considered to be." Myers concludes that "the novel is a...monument to insignificance." Now that I have invested this much time and energy in the novel, I will strive to finish it. It is, after all, the "big" novel of the year, both critically and saleswise, and has engendered widespread talk about Franzen's possibly being the greatest writer of the new generation; thus, I feel I should at least finish it before passing judgment. But it is not looking good....

Novels with LGBT Themes

Some good novels with LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender) themes:

Alther, Lisa. Other Women. Kinflicks.
Baldwin, James. Giovanni's Room.
Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood.
Colette. Claudine.
Donoghue, Emma. Landing. (which I posted about on 7/31/10)
Forster, E. M. Maurice.
Grumbach, Doris. Chamber Music.
Hall, Radclyffe. The Well of Loneliness.
Holleran, Andrew. Dancer from the Dance.
Hollinghurst, Alan. The Line of Beauty.
Lorde, Audre. Zami.
Mann, Thomas. Death in Venice.
Maupin, Armistead. Tales of the City.
Miller, Isabel. Patience and Sarah.
Millett, Kate. Sita.
Monette, Paul. Halfway Home.
Renault, Mary. The Persian Boy.
Richardson, Dorothy. Pilgrimage.
Sarton, May. Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing.
Selvadurai, Shyam. Funny Boy.
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple.
Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited.
White, Edmund. A Boy's Own Story. The Beautiful Room is Empty.
Winterson, Jeannette. Oranges Are not the Only Fruit.
Woolf, Virginia. Orlando.