Oops….I Forgot the Spoiler Alert!

The other day I made the kind of mistake no reader likes others to make: I gave away the ending of a novel to someone still reading it. I can’t believe I did that! I was talking with my daughter, M, about Jane Austen’s novel “Emma,” which she has been reading on her commute to work. (And I won’t make the same mistake again here, so if you, dear reader, haven’t read “Emma” and think you might read it someday, please stop reading this post now.) This is how it happened: Our discussion of “Emma” reminded me to tell M about my 7/31/11 post on how the author of the book “Agewise” theorized that Austen’s character Emma’s father had early dementia. I went on to say, as I did in the post, that Emma accepted her responsibility to take care of her father, despite knowing that it would probably keep her from marrying; I obliviously continued, saying that only because Knightley was willing to move into Emma’s house with her and her father was it possible for Emma to marry. Just as I made that last point, my daughter looked at me exasperatedly and pointed out that she had not finished the novel yet, and I had just given away the ending! I felt terrible, and apologized profusely. She was mildly annoyed with me, but took it well; she said she could see the ending coming, but wryly remarked that she would have preferred to discover it on her own. I think I am so immersed in the world of the Austen novels that I forget -- even though I knew it perfectly well in this case, and we had JUST been talking about it! -- that not everyone already knows the plots of the six novels backwards and forwards. I am thankful that my daughter wasn’t too upset, and I will try not to ever do that again! (Note that my book reviews, like all book reviews, describe a few plot points, but do not give away endings.)

"The Spoken Word: British Writers"

I saw an magazine ad for a CD set that included Virginia Woolf's voice, and was surprised and excited that her voice had been preserved....I had to have it! So I ordered the British Library's 3-CD set, "The Spoken Word: British Writers" (2008) containing excerpts from speeches and interviews from BBC radio shows. The earliest of these date back to the mid-1930s. The 30 authors on the CDs include (in chronological order of their birth dates, as they are arranged on the CDs) Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Somerset Maugham, E.M. Forster, P.G. Wodehouse, Virginia Woolf, J.R.R. Tolkien, Aldous Huxley, Noel Coward, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Nancy Mitford, William Golding, Anthony Burgess, Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, and Harold Pinter. As I knew I would be, I was thrilled to hear Virginia Woolf speaking. I also thoroughly enjoyed hearing many of the other writers. They speak about their writing, their lives, their reputations, and more. One of the most inspiring was, to my surprise, Rudyard Kipling, who spoke eloquently about how "the word" is the one way that human experience is carried from one generation to another. Also inspiring was E.M. Forster, who gave a timeless message: laissez faire is a bad concept for the economy and a good concept for "morality" (meaning, for example, that it prevents censorship and laws restricting individual freedom). I highly recommend this fascinating and literarily significant CD set. It is available from the British Library Online at http://shop.bl.uk/.

"Ladies and Gentlemen: Stories," by Adam Ross

The short story reading continues....I just finished a new collection of stories, each of which burst out and grabbed my attention. The book is "Ladies and Gentlemen: Stories" (Knopf, 2011), by Adam Ross. The stories are gripping and immediate. Most of the narrators are male; reading the stories, I alternated between feeling I was able to get inside the characters' minds, and then suddenly feeling I didn't know them at all. The latter feeling is partly due to the surprise endings of some of the stories. The writing is vigorous and at the same time intimate, with even the tough male characters showing their vulnerabilities. My favorite story was one of the longest, "Middleman." The narrator and main character is a 13-year-old, Jacob, who lives in New York City and tells of his relationships with his two best friends, the sister of one of the friends, and his own father. Although it is not foregrounded, the relationship with his father is particularly touching. Jacob also explores what it means to be Jewish; although his family is non-observant, he is drawn to learn more about the Jewish part of his identity, especially when he sees how others position him as Jewish, and his father tries to give him information and help him understand. Jacob is also learning about girls through his infatuation with his friend Kyle's older sister, Elsa, who alternately ignores him and uses him for his ability to introduce him to the world of modeling for commercials. Some of the other stories, with adult characters, are more fraught in different ways, focusing on male longing, awkward relationships among men, the nature of marriage, connections and misunderstandings across social class divides, what we don't know about our relatives and friends, violence, betrayal, and more. Interestingly, the author gives the last word, in the last story, "Ladies and Gentlemen," to a female character. Sara is a busy journalist, wife, and mother in her late thirties who is trying to decide whether to drop everything, at least for a brief time, to have an affair with a man she almost had an affair with in college. A part of her feels this is her last chance, in a life that has grown too predictable, to make up for the missed opportunity 20 years earlier, and to do something daring and intense, something just for herself. On her way to meet her prospective lover, she has a conversation with another man on the plane that makes her hesitate. This story is a fascinating meditation on marriage, connections, choices, missed opportunities, and commitment. Ross is a writer who has complete control of his material; his writing is strong and sure. Finishing the collection, I feel I have just visited a very different and yet strangely familiar world.

Guest Post: Podcasts of Short Stories

In response to my noting with a bit of surprise how many short story collections were included on my list (8/1/11) of "Highly Recommended" recent books, my friend Sonja e-mailed me as follows (I post her e-mail here with her permission):

"Stephanie, thanks for your interesting reviews and blog. I do prefer novels to short stories, which is strange because I have written short stories (unpublished) myself and enjoy the form as a writer. I just wanted to say however that I have gotten a new appreciation for reading short stories through the New Yorker's podcasts of stories read by various writers. I have discovered some writers I want to read through listening to these fabulous stories (some of the writers are on your list). You can get the podcasts for free from itunes. I found the listening and the discussion afterwards to be excellent experiences."

(This is Stephanie writing again): You can also get the podcasts directly from The New Yorker, and either listen to them online or download them; either way they are free. Each month a contributor chooses a story from the New Yorker archives and reads it. For example, to tie these podcasts in with this blog's two recent posts on John Cheever: you can listen to one of my favorite contemporary writers, Anne Enright, reading Cheever's "The Swimmer." The Guardian UK has a similar collection of podcasts of short stories. The two web addresses are below. These are wonderful resources, and it is a pleasure to hear the stories read aloud. Thanks, Sonja, for drawing our attention to this great way of experiencing terrific fiction!)

http://www.newyorker.com/online/podcasts/fiction

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/short-stories-podcast

Sorry, But They Really Are Boring...

The New York Times Book Review (7/31/11) had a brief paragraph (p. 22) about a 1950 Columbia University Press survey that asked about the most boring classics of all time. Topping the list were "Pilgrim's Progress," "Moby-Dick," "Paradise Lost," "The Faerie Queene," and Boswell's "Life of Johnson." So far, so good...I can't disagree on any of these, even if it makes me feel like a bit of a traitor to my English major identity to admit it! But continuing on, I read that "George Eliot placed four books in the top 30," and I was incensed....no, no, no, no! My beloved Eliot's books boring? Serious, sure. Mature, yes. Sometimes slow-moving, true. Let's call them stately. But so wonderful, and so NOT boring! Ask me which other classics are boring, and despite my fear of being labeled a Philistine, I will admit that although I greatly admire Joyce's work (while greatly preferring Woolf's), I struggled through both "Ulysses" and "Finnegan's Wake," and yes, they were definitely boring through most of their many pages. Creative, yes. Breakthrough, yes. But still boring. A couple of other classics that bored me were "Don Quixote" and "The Old Man and the Sea." Again, I admire them both, I see their virtues, but I can't lie: I had to drag myself through each of them. I hope I haven't forfeited my book blogger credentials with these true confessions!

Guest Post: On Reading John Cheever as a Young Man

When my friend "Z" said he liked my recent (7/22/11) post on John Cheever, and had read a lot of Cheever at one time, I invited him to write a guest post on this author. What follows is his thought-provoking and vivid take on Cheever, in the context of "Z"'s own life, with some comments on what Cheever's work shows us on that so important but seldom openly discussed topic, social class. Thanks, Z!

From "Z":
I began reading John Cheever’s work when I returned to New York after living in New Orleans for a short while. I was glad to be back in New York even though I was broke and a bit dispirited. I’d just gotten a job at a news-photo agency, and I was living with my parents at the time. Riding into the city on the Long Island Rail Road into Penn Station, I would fantasize I was one of Cheever’s characters who lived in the suburbs and rode the train into the city. However, I understood that I lived in the wrong kind of suburbs – the fairly typical ‘middle-class’ one that might be best characterized as Levittown Lite – not quite row after row of identical box homes filling up the landscape, but since my family lived in what was called a “model home”, it was close enough.

There was also the issue of arriving at and departing from Penn Station. As anyone who was alive at the time could tell you, it was a criminal travesty that the city demolished the original structure in 1963. It was an irreplaceable architectural and cultural loss. What I remember of the new Penn Station as a young man was seeing drunken New York Ranger fans after a hockey game finished at Madison Square Garden – which sat on top of the now subterranean Station like some hideous toad – running amok through the ghastly narrow corridors of the Station. Worse was when they boarded the same train as me, full of fan-fueled testosterone and shoving horrible hot dogs and other noxious substances passing for food into their gaping mouths, ready to vomit.

No, this was not the aptly-named Grand Central of Cheever-land, where, albeit similarly inebriated beings also lurched onto the trains – the Metro North (even the name bespoke of its connection to the city unlike the regionally distinct “Long Island Rail Road”) going to the suburbs of which he wrote: leafy green neighborhoods where none of the houses were identical, and many considerably older than the “model home” of my adolescence. These passengers might have been as drunk as those hockey fans, but they held their liquor.

And there it is – the inescapable, the big unsaid in American culture: the issue of class. Not ‘class’ as in ‘classy’, but the real issue of class – the kind which gives lie to the American narrative of equality and opportunity. It was as big a divide as I can remember, seeing those people – the kind Cheever wrote about in his magnificent short stories and the worthy “Wapshot Chronicle.” Those people. You know, them. WASPs. I forgot exactly when I learned of this word and what it meant, but I came to know what it really meant in college. I attended a small, private East Coast one (how and why I ended up there is another story for another time), where I first met people with names like “Prescott” and “Suzanne,” and who played squash but never looked particularly sweaty afterward. They had of course been going to private schools their whole lives, and so by this time, they had figured out the academic and social game a long time ago. I was the interloper, the kid from Long (hard ‘g’) Island (the South Shore of course), not from the City or its leafy green suburbs to the north.

What was it about them that fascinated me, and why did I find similar characters in Cheever’s novels equally fascinating at the time? Besides the quality of his writing and his careful observations of what actually lay beneath those well-worn exteriors, looking back, I can now perhaps attribute it to a perverse kind of longing to belong – a not altogether unexpected desire stemming from my status of being seen as a “stranger from a different shore” despite my having been born here, but also something else: a budding scorn for what I perceived to be their conducting their public lives with a certain style that has been named as displaying “class,” but which kept the rest of us looking in and left out.

I haven’t read Cheever since that time, but I recall an old joke from the Marx Brothers which seems to be a good summary of his work, and why I liked it so much:
“Say I used to know a fellow who looked exactly like you, by the name of Emanuel Ravelli.”
- - But I am Emanuel Ravelli!
“Well, no wonder you look like him!”

Difficult Decisions about Thinning One's Book Collection

I have written (4/1/10) about the struggle to know when to keep books and when (because of space issues, mostly) to get rid of (give away) books. I had this discussion with my friend and professional colleague P when I visited her recently; her house is crammed with books and journals and she doesn’t have enough space to put them all. She said that she knew she should thin her collection, and was making some halfhearted efforts to do so. But as a prolific academic writer, she uses her books more regularly than most of us do. Many of us say about books or other items that we keep, despite not having used them for years, that “you never know when you might need them.” In her case, this statement is actually apt. Despite that, I urged her to trim her collection a bit, saying that there must be books and journals that she really would never use again. She said she would try, but clearly she was hesitant. Soon after my visit, P let me know in a humorous email that not only once but twice the day after my visit, she had needed to find a passage or reference and had been able to find them in books she hadn’t looked at for years. And then, ironically, she suddenly found she needed an article that happened to be in the one journal she had managed to get rid of, as she seldom used material in the subdiscipline it represented. This matter of deciding what to keep and what to let go is a tough one!