Three Guineas

About a week or so ago, my Read More Woolf group met for the last time, to discuss Three Guineas. I had to miss a few meetings during the semester (Orlando and Between the Acts), but I made it to more than I missed, and having this introduction to Woolf’s work was absolutely wonderful for me. I do plan to make up the Woolf reading I missed, and in addition, to read Mrs. Dalloway. I don’t think I could stop now if I tried. Many thanks to my colleague, who led the group, and to the students who were so insightful.

Three Guineas is the only piece of Woolf’s nonfiction we discussed this semester. It was written in 1938, looking forward to the imminent second World War. In it, Woolf takes up a man’s request for her to send money to help him prevent war. How, she asks, can a woman do such a thing? What power can women possibly have, to prevent war, if men cannot do it? She looks at the notion that perhaps if women were educated, as they currently were not, they might be able to help. But men were educated, and they still wanted to make war; so women’s education would have to be along quite different lines. I’ll quote at length because I found it marvelous:

Let us then discuss as quickly as we can the sort of education that is needed. Now since history and biography–the only evidence available to an outsider–seem to prove that the old education of the old colleges breeds neither a particular respect for liberty nor a particular hatred of war it is clear that you must rebuild your college differently. It is young and poor; let it therefore take advantage of those qualities and be founded on poverty and youth. Obviously, then, it must be an experimental college, an adventurous college. Let it be built on lines of its own. It must be built not of carved stone and stained glass, but of some cheap, easily combustible material which does not hoard dust and perpetrate traditions. Do not have chapels. Do not have museums and libraries with chained books and first editions under glass cases. Let the pictures and the books be new and always changing. Let it be decorated afresh by each generation with their own hands cheaply. The work of the living is cheap; often they will give it for the sake of being allowed to do it. Next, what should be taught in the new college, the poor college? Not the arts of dominating other people; not the arts of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital. They require too many overhead expenses; salaries and uniforms and ceremonies. The poor college must teach only the arts that can be taught cheaply and practised by poor people; such as medicine, mathematics, music, painting and literature. It should teach the arts of human intercourse; the art of understanding other people’s lives and minds, and the little arts of talk, of dress, of cookery that are allied with them. The aim of the new college, the cheap college, should be not to segregate and specialize, but to combine. It should explore the ways in which mind and body can be made to cooperate; discover what new combinations make good wholes in human life. The teachers should be drawn from the good livers as well as from the good thinkers. There should be no difficulty in attracting them. For there would be none of the barriers of wealth and ceremony, of advertisement and competition which now make the old and rich universities such uneasy dwelling-places–cities of strife, cities where this is locked up and that is chained down; where nobody can walk freely or talk freely for fear of transgressing some chalk mark, of displeasing some dignitary. But if the college were poor it would have nothing to offer; competition would be abolished. Life would be open and easy. People who love learning for itself would gladly come there. Musicians, painters, writers, would teach there, because they would learn. What could be of greater help to a writer than to discuss the art of writing with people who were thinking not of examinations or degrees or of what honour or profit they could make literature give them but of the art itself?

Once Woolf establishes that women’s education, done rightly, can help prevent war, she sends them one of her three guineas, and moves on to women in the professions. Surely, she says, in her quiet, sly voice, surely women in the professions do not need my guinea? They ought to be making enough money of their own. But of course, in 1937, they were not and could not. That is not Woolf’s deeper concern, however. As in education, so with the professions: a man can earn a lot of money in the professions and still want to make war; perhaps he must want to make war. Woolf’s question then becomes, “How can we enter the professions and still remain civilized human beings?” If there is something to be gained, some benefit from being in a state of inequality — as Woolf puts it, the hard teachers of poverty, chastity, derision, and freedom from unreal loyalties — she wants women to hold on to those benefits with all their might as they enter a state of equality. If those in charge can manage this, they will have Woolf’s second guinea.

And now, back to the original gentleman who asked for Woolf’s money to help prevent war. Having educated women rightly, having supported them in the professions in such a way as to preserve their liberty of mind, Woolf is prepared to send this gentleman her third guinea, because her aims are the same as his. But she will not join his society. Instead, she proposes an Outsiders’ Society, that will work by different means toward the same goals.

This piece struck me deeply with Woolf’s quiet, linear thought, her passion, her humor. Her tone at the beginning of the letter — oh dear, what can we women possibly do? — is utterly belied by each careful incision, made by her intellect and wit. The quirk at the corner of her mouth when she says that men’s uniforms and hoods and gowns are a sign of their barbarity made me laugh out loud. (“A woman who advertised her motherhood by a tuft of horsehair on the left shoulder would scarcely, you will agree, be a venerable object.”) And yet she leaves the reader in no doubt of her gravity. Proving step by step that she has no more reason to be “English” than any other nationality, she proclaims, shockingly, “As a woman, my country is the whole world.”

It made me think carefully to realize that this essay was written within three years of Gaudy Night: the fictional Shrewsbury College, always cheese-paring and scraping for money, always watching its reputation and begging for recognition from the rest of the University, always wondering what the men would think, was Woolf’s home ground. It was to Shrewsbury, essentially, that she wanted to send her first guinea. The world tottered into war nonetheless. I wonder what we could do about it now.

L’homme à l’envers (Seeking Whom He May Devour)

I should probably save this piece of trenchant analysis for the end of my post — this is backwards blogging — but I feel the need to say it up front. A lot of critics have observed that mystery fans like to read mysteries because they create order: something deviant happens (usually a murder), and by the end, through logic and/or rule of law, justice and social order are restored. There’s nothing wrong with this formula, and Fred Vargas’s mysteries do roughly adhere to it. But within that very wide scope, they are, ‘ow shall I say, weird as eff, and follow no prescribed order at all.

In Provence, some terrible beast has been slaughtering sheep in the night. There are wolves in the area — Lawrence, a Canadian who used to make documentaries about grizzlies, is there to study them — but whatever has been killing the sheep is bigger than his beloved pack. When the animal tears the throat from Suzanne, a larger-than-life woman who ruled the district, rumors begin to fly of a loup-garou, a werewolf, a man with no hair on his skin because all the hair, as well as the brutality, is on the inside. Are the rumors true, or are they causing terrible trouble for an innocent man? An unlikely trio — an elderly shepherd, an African teenager who was Suzanne’s adopted son, and Camille, a plumber with a past —  set off to find the truth, eventually with the help of Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, the unusual police commissaire from the first of these novels.

The atmosphere set up in the novel is genius. The sheep-killings are at first troubling, then disturbing, then outright horrifying as the news of one slaughter follows another. The notion of a werewolf begins to seem almost rational. No — not quite — he can’t be a werewolf really — but he could think he was a werewolf, couldn’t he? In the pitiless heat of the summer in Provence, it begins to seem logical that he could, and the night draws in darker, full of eyes.

Adamsberg is the most astonishing creation. He is the anti-Holmes, a completely nonlinear thinker, unable to understand a word of any language save his own, working completely off of dream and intuition. He has feelings and hunches, and when he retreats into himself to follow them, doodling in his notebook, they lead him to conclusions he never otherwise would have reached. The only thing that makes him bearable to his fellow officers is that he is deeply human, as aware of his own failings as he is of anyone else’s. In this particular book, there’s a side plot in which Adamsberg is being tracked by a woman who wants to murder him; he shows a particular delicacy over this that is not to be missed. I should say, too, that these books are full of a dry, dry humor. I read this in French, and I learned a lot of new vocabulary (Lawrence, the Canadian, thinks the French are “cradingue,” which means “grungy,” for instance.) It’s funny even while it’s tense; not so easily pulled off.

So yes, in the end, justice is restored. But the process, as in The Chalk-Circle Man, is just so charmingly weird. These police procedurals, which contain no procedure and some very unusual police, are a complete delight. I absolutely recommend them.

The Lion’s World: A Journey into the Heart of Narnia

Despite growing up bookish in a Christian home, Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, did not discover C.S. Lewis until he was in his teens, when he read several of his apologetic works. When he eventually turned to the Narnia books, he was nonplussed, finding the theological message too obvious (a feeling that he says was partly the result of seeing a 1967 television production of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe). It was only upon rereading that he realized that the books provide much of what he loved about Lewis’s other books—”a doorway into a simple intensity of feeling about God that was able both to register all the range of ambiguous and confused human feeling and still evoke an almost unbearable longing for that fullness of joy which Lewis points to so consistently in his best writing.”

The Lion’s World builds on a series of lectures that Williams gave at Canterbury Cathedral in Holy Week 2011. In the book, he answers some of Lewis’s critics and shares some of the ideas in Lewis’s writing, especially the Narnia books, that he has found especially meaningful.

Although I grew up as a voracious reader in a Christian home, I, like Williams, didn’t read the Narnia books as a child. After seeing a cartoon version on TV, I did read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but I stopped there, mostly because the descriptions of the later books that appeared on my copy of Lion did not mention Aslan, and a Narnia book without Aslan seemed like a waste of time. (I did not, I should add, get the religious symbolism, being only seven years old and reading the book entirely on my own.) So it wasn’t until college that I returned to C.S. Lewis, and at the time, I was newly invested in questions of faith and wanted overt religious teaching. I wasn’t bothered by the obviousness of the message. Today, I’d prefer more subtlety, but in this book, Williams shows that the Narnia books are more subtle and complex than they may appear at first.

He begins, however, with a discussion of the books’ critics, who are many. J.R.R. Tolkien, for instance, didn’t like the mixture of mythologies, but Lewis wasn’t interested in creating an internally coherent alternate world, as Tolkien did. Nor was he interested in creating a systematic theology in a form palatable to children. Williams writes,

To try and map the entire set of stories on to a single theological grid is difficult. As I hope to show, there is a strong, coherent spiritual and theological vision shaping all the stories; but this dos not necessarily mean that they must all be read as self-conscious allegories of theological truths … Lewis repudiates the idea of reading the stories as allegory and instead suggests that they answer the question of what sort of Incarnation and redemption would be appropriate in a world like Narnia.

If you press the theological questions too hard, you’ll end up in a mess. What’s important are the stories. It’s theology through narrative and imagination, through thinking of what it’s it like to be in the presence of great power and great good, to know you’ve done wrong in the face of such power, to be part of a world that’s bigger on the inside. These are stories about seeing the truth about yourself and being given grace and love even when you don’t deserve it. Williams writes that Lewis “wants his readers to experience what it is that religious (specifically Christian) talk is about, without resorting to religious talk as we usually meet it.” It is true that Lewis uses a great deal of Christian imagery, but some books have surprisingly little obvious Christian symbols, are there’s also a lot of pagan imagery. It seems like Lewis uses whatever works for the story, and even if it’s sometimes heavy-handed, those moments don’t predominate.

As for some of the criticisms regarding depictions of foreigners and of women, Williams doesn’t let Lewis off the hook, but he does put those depictions in context, pointing out that Lewis was a man of his time, and he was drawing upon literary traditions from before his time, with all their flaws. In writing about the much-discussed problem of Susan, Williams notes that Lewis wrote to a reader that he did have hope that Susan would find her way back to Narnia, and he encouraged her to try to write how it would happen. I found the idea of C.S. Lewis encouraging Narnia fanfic back in 1960 to be utterly charming. I wonder if anyone has written that story.

It’s been a long time—probably about eight years–since I’ve read the Narnia books, and I’ve worried that they would lose their luster for me now that my own theology has become more complex and I’ve become more aware of the criticisms of the books. But Williams helps me see that even a jaded adult like me can find a lot of value in a good, imaginative story.

There but for the

In our blogiversary post, we invited readers to suggest a book for us to read and review together. You all came up with such great suggestions that we had a hard time choosing, but we eventually settled on There but for the by Ali Smith, which was recommended by CJ. We’d both been wanting to try something by Ali Smith, and this was a very good choice!

The book is set in Greenwich, where, during a posh dinner party, one of the guests, a man named Miles Garth, locks himself in the spare room, refusing to leave and communicating with his unwilling hosts only through notes passed under the door. The hosts, Genevieve and Eric Lee, take great pride in their annual alternative dinner parties, to which they always invite a few strangers to liven up the proceedings. One year, it was a Muslim couple; another year, it was a Jewish couple and Palestinian couple. Miles is there as the plus-one of another guest, Mark, a friend of the hosts’ neighbors who was, we assume, invited because he is gay.

The book is divided into four sections, each focuses on someone connected, often remotely, with Miles. Anna met Miles when they were both on a tour of Europe as teenagers and has hardly heard from him since, despite her name being in his phone. The aforementioned Mark met Miles at the theater and invited him to dinner without knowing much about him. The connection between Miles and May, an elderly woman in the hospital, isn’t clear at first. And ten-year-old Brooke was at the dinner party and has hovered around the Lees’ home ever since. In each section, we are taken inside the characters’ minds as they look back over their histories and consider their futures.

Teresa: One of the things I kept thinking about as I was reading this was its title, There but for the, to which I mentally added “… grace of God go I.” I felt like Smith was showing how even though every person’s life is unique, we’re all a hair’s breadth from doing something that seems utterly preposterous but makes complete sense. Miles’s decision to move into the Lees’ guest room is obviously against all convention and a ridiculous thing to do, but that desire to just take leave of it all has its appeal, as Anna describes here:

Imagine the relief there’d be, in just stepping through the door of a spare room, a room that wasn’t anything to do with you, and shutting the door, and that being that.

There’d be a window, wouldn’t there?

Were there any books in there?

What would you do all day?

What would happen if you did just shut a door and stop speaking? Hour after hour after hour of no words. Would you speak to yourself? Would words just stop being useful? Would you lose language altogether? Or would words mean more, would they start to mean in every direction, all somersault and assault, like a thuggery of fireworks? Would they proliferate, like untended plantlife? Would the inside of your head overgrow with every word that has ever come into it, every word that has ever silently taken seed or fallen dormant? Would your own silence make other things noisier? Would all the things you’d ever forgotten, all layered there inside you, come bouldering up and avalanche you?

As appealing as a retreat like Miles’s may be, there’s no retreating from our selves.

Jenny: I loved how each self was slowly revealed. Sometimes it was difficult to see the connection to the main story, at first, as with May Young’s chapter, but the narration was so fresh and original that I didn’t fret at being taken away from the plot, such as it turned out to be.

I, too, was interested in the way that Smith takes the behavior in the book well over the top — makes it implausible — and yet manages to stop short of caricature in order to show us something real and interesting about people. Miles’s flight to the spare bedroom is only one example of bizarre behavior. What about the excruciating dinner party he’s fleeing? Surely, surely, no one, however stupid, would ask a black couple from York if they’d “seen any tigers where [they're] from”? Or proclaim that a few mundane exchanges about musicals made for “the gayest conversation [he'd] ever heard”? But Smith’s fizzy, poignant dialogue reveals as much about those who are being silent as about those who are speaking.

Teresa: That dinner party was so terrible—I could absolutely understand Miles wanting to flee! I think one of the things that makes it work is that a lot of the ridiculousness involves people speaking or acting on the fleeting thoughts we occasionally have but know better than to utter or act on. At one point, Mark even does exactly that, when he describes the images he found when he typed “something beautiful” into Google and discovered that being connected to everything, as we are today, is “a whole new way of feeling lonely” as we drift from site to site in “a great sea of hidden shallows.” That paradox of increased connection and greater loneliness in the 21st century gets talked about a lot—to the point that I’m tired of the conversation—but Smith’s approach to it is so clever and fun that it feels new in her hands.

Jenny: That’s a great observation, because of course Miles’s pivotal act is also one of those things that occasionally crosses everyone’s mind but that we never actually act on. (At least, I hope not.) This comes out, too, in some of the other characters who have less filter, but in a positive way: May, who can’t quite control what she says, and Brooke, who loves jokes and puns and wordplay, and says exactly what she thinks, even though it’s gotten her into trouble with a nasty, bullying teacher.

Of course, a lot of the book is about the disparity between appearance and truth, just as it is about the gap between connection and loneliness that you mentioned, Teresa. Time, place, and even names shift back and forth, and the end of the book makes the gap greater than ever, yet brings us right back to the prologue. What did you think of that opening story? What is it telling us?

Teresa: It’s an odd little vignette, one of several that appear between the main sections. The man on the stationary bike is moving but not going anywhere, which seems significant. Then there are the bars over his face, hiding his identity, until they’re removed by a child. Perhaps it has something to do with hiding from ourselves, just pressing on and making no progress because we’ve lost our sense of who we are. And we, like the folded paper, are more substantial than we appear at first glance. But how does that play out through the whole book? Have all the characters lost something of themselves?

Jenny: I tend to think the image of the bar over the man’s mouth is just as significant, censoring him. So the characters have lost some sense of who they are (or some way of seeing others, which is just as important), and they have also been silenced. And Miles’s outrageous act changes this for all of them, not least for Miles himself: brings them back to themselves, and frees them to speak.

I thought this book was wonderful. It’s not every author who can write a sentence that is funny and poignant at the same time, but Ali Smith achieved it in almost every paragraph. She doesn’t get stuck in the rut of writing about the same kind of characters, either: she writes, purposefully, about old and young, black and white, annoying and rather wonderful (and sometimes both in one, as many human beings are.) For me, the over-the-top, tight-wire-act nature of the central plot device made the book even better.

Teresa: I enjoyed it very much too. One of the things I liked best about it was that, despite taking on some big ideas, the book also has a wonderful sense of whimsy. There are the puns that Brooke and Anna exchange and the little language gaffes various characters (intimate instead of Internet was a favorite of mine). It is rare to find authors who manage the balance between serious and silly so well. I look forward to exploring what else Ali Smith can do.

The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place: The Mysterious Howling

One of my most cherished tenets is that it takes a long time to civilize a child, from the state of barbarity in which it is born, to the kind of adult who listens to elderly people tell stories about their youth and reads voluntarily and receives gifts they already own with every evidence of real pleasure. Sometimes I look at my own children and the detritus that inevitably surrounds this process of civilization, and I say to them in mild despair, “Look at you! Were you raised by wolves?”

In this book by Maryrose Wood, Miss Penelope Lumley, recent graduate of the Swanburne Academy for Poor Bright Females, gets to answer that question for herself when she becomes a governess to three children mysteriously found in Ashton Forest. These children can’t speak English, can’t read or write, don’t know how to put on clothes properly, and can’t… well, to be honest, they can’t refrain from chasing squirrels.

None of this daunts Miss Lumley, who is a Swanburne girl through and through. (None of this nonsense about falling in love with the dark, brooding lord of the manor for her.) She adores animals, and she begins with gentleness and treats for Alexander, Beowulf, and Cassiopeia (soon abbreviated by the children themselves to Alawoo, Beowooo, and Cassawoof.) Under her care, the children are soon reading, writing their own poetry (chiefly about the moon) and quivering with restraint around squirrels.

But why is Lord Frederick Ashton interested in these children in the first place? And why is he so attached to his battered Farmer’s Almanac? And what is the mysterious howling behind the wall in the attic? And why do all Lord Frederick’s friends seem to believe that the children are savage animals, incapable of speech? Penelope uncovers many mysteries during her brief time at Ashton Hall, including how to dance the schottische, but there are many more in store for her.

I really enjoyed this book. It’s funny and self-aware — it’s got hilarious segments in which Penelope reads aloud to the children from her favorite children’s books, the “Giddy-Yap, Rainbow!” series — and it plays with its governess tropes beautifully: the red-faced and selfish master, the spoiled mistress, the various servants, the children. But nothing is exactly what it seems at first glance. This was wonderful fun, and stars an intelligent, composed, and capable heroine. I’ll definitely be looking for the others in the series.

Sunday Links

Looking for bookish links? We’ve got them! Enjoy these stories we’ve found in the last few weeks:

• Claire Messud asserts that “if you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble.”
• Project Bookmark Canada is placing “bookmarks” (large ceramic plaques) with text from Canadian stories and poems in the exact physical locations where the literary scenes take place, helping Canadians read their way across the landscape.
• Sasha Weiss writes for the New Yorker Page-Turner Blog about how the Oxford English Dictionary has been crowdsourcing definitions and quotations long before “crowdsourcing” was ever in the dictionary.
• Tobias Buckell ponders what happens as a book blogger when our voracious reading inevitably changes us as a reader, and therefore as a writer.
• Smart posts on The Hunger Games and Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins from Litlove at Tales from the Reading Room and Nic at Eve’s Alexandria.
• The trailer for the film version of As I Lay Dying isn’t funny enough. It should seem like a Coen Brothers film.
• Amy at My Friend Amy on how our TBR lists reflect the person we want to be.

The Ionian Mission

For me, this blog is as much about keeping a record of my reading to serve as a memory aid as it is about sharing my reading with an audience. (Not that you dear readers aren’t lovely, but I don’t like that so many of the books I read in my 20s fell right into a black hole.) Never is the memory aid purpose of blogging more evident as when I write about yet another installment in a long series. The book in question today is The Ionian Mission, the eighth in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series of sea-faring novels set during the Napoleonic Wars.

What can I say about this book that would be new to someone who has been following my posts about the series? Not much. It’s a good book, but not a favorite in the series so far. It contained some wonderful character moments and amusing incidents, typical of the series. It’s a little slower than the other books; part of the point of the story is to demonstrate how tedium wreaks havoc on a person’s morale and even health. But on the whole, you could read just about any of my posts about the series to get a sense of what these books are like and how I reacted. It’s an O’Brian book, and I got what I expected out of it.

So I must turn to the memory aid portion of my post. What kinds of things would I like to recall about this book? What are the “this is the one where …” moments?

Well, this is the one where Captain Jack Aubrey is sent on the Worcester to the Mediterranean to assist with a blockade of the French fleet. Stephen Maturin, having settled into a seemingly contented but unconventional marriage to Diana, almost misses the ship’s departure to Plymouth. Diana has, to my surprise, is determined to see that Stephen has all he needs at sea. She’s given him a fine but wholly impractical dressing case and more shirts than he’s ever had when setting sail.

In Plymouth, there’s a wonderful bit of business in which Stephen declares that a man who’s been pressed into service and terrified of losing his business is unfit to sail because of his health. Jack obtains some cheap gunpowder that causes the cannons to emit colorful explosions when fired.

Jack is annoyed to be taking a group of clergymen as passengers, although it turns out that one of them, Graham, is actually a moral philosopher. This leads Jack and Stephen into some lively banter about the difference between moral philosophers like Graham and natural philosophers like Stephen. Could one say that Stephen is an immoral philosopher and Graham an unnatural one? Stephen befriends Graham, only to lose his good will when he pranks him with some fake nautical terminology. Another potential parson friend for Stephen, Martin, is enthusiastic about naval service, despite Stephen’s warnings about its harshness. Seeing naval punishment in action finally dampens Martin’s feelings.

The blockade is unbearably dull, and it’s taking a toll on Admiral Thornton, who is in command of the blockade ships. Stephen goes off on some spying trips, and Jack nearly gets into a couple of much-desired skirmishes during some brief missions away from the blockade. To alleviate the boredom, the men on the Worcester prepare a production of Hamlet, but the spread of mumps gets in the way. Many of the men are terrified that, not having had mumps as children, they’ll be rendered impotent now, and Stephen reassures them that eunuchs experience great peace of mind and that “very little time is spent in coition” over the course of a lifetime. It doesn’t help, much to his surprise.

Speaking of which, there’s the return of the Surprise! And Jack eventually is sent on the titular mission to the Ionian Sea, where he is to forge an alliance with one of three Turkish Beys. One of the Beys is unhappy with the result, and a vicious battle ensues and closes out the novel.

The standout moments for me were the smaller incidents, like the poetry competition and the oratorio costumes and the banter. The book is filled with little moments that break the tedium of the overall story. That must be what blockade life was like. You sit and wait for action, have some near misses, and wait some more. The men aboard ship had to create fun for themselves, and thus for me, the reader.

Trauma

In Patrick McGrath’s Trauma, Charlie Weir is a psychiatrist in New York in the 1970s, dealing with veterans coming back from the Vietnam War. In his spare time, he counsels victims of rape and abuse. “In my work,” he says, I deal with the effects of trauma, but I am never there when the damage actually happens.” The reader, looking on, thinks, “Yeah, right.”

Because none of this valiant work with victims makes Charlie any happier. He is the son of an alcoholic and depressive mother and a violent but mostly-absentee father. He’s in constant, acrid competition with his brother Walt, whom he both despises and helplessly envies. He’s divorced from the only woman who could give him a larger perspective on the world, and he’s trying to resurrect that marriage by meeting his ex-wife for sex in hotel rooms. Into this dynamic steps a beautiful woman, Nora Chiara, who falls for Charlie but is prone to terrible nightmares: Charlie draws victims to him like iron filings to a magnet, but when he does, the consequences can be horrific. It’s not looking good for Charlie. Psychiatrist, heal thyself.

I read McGrath’s Asylum a few years back, and found it wonderfully twisty and neo-gothic. I admit, I hoped that Charlie would be a fantastically unreliable narrator: that the events of his life as he narrated them would turn out to be nothing like the truth. (I had a whole theory based on Nora’s name.) Instead, he turns out to be simply duplicitous, of himself as much as of others, and a bit mean-spirited. His brother Walt accuses him of being “not truly alive,” and this is true: among other things, he can’t see the consequences of his own actions. When he offers Nora “an intensive fixed-limit, goal-directed program of no more than twelve sessions over a period of six weeks” as a condition of their staying together, he doesn’t seem to understand that his position of power corrupts their relationship hopelessly. When he tries to get his wife to remarry him, he doesn’t understand why she would refuse.

As a result, the book limps a bit, even on its own terms. It’s good as a character study, a man caught in the paradoxes of his work, but it can’t build toward any kind of climax. Charlie experiences dread, but we don’t; there’s no there there. The ending, which takes us out of New York and into an old hotel in the Catskills, provides a minor surprise, but certainly not trauma.

After Asylum, this is a bit of a lightweight disappointment, but I’d try McGrath again, to see if others are better. Any recommendations?

Some Assembly Required

Last year, Teresa went to a book signing with Anne and Sam Lamott (she gets to do things like that all the time, because she lives near Washington, D.C. and not in the Inland Empire – no, I am not jealous, why are you looking at me that way) and she was kind enough to get me a signed copy of Some Assembly Required. Teresa knows that Anne Lamott’s book Operating Instructions, a generous, moving, funny and wide-open account of her pregnancy and first year as a single mother, is probably my favorite of her books (closely followed by Bird by Bird). Some Assembly Required, subtitled A Journal of My Son’s First Son, is a sequel of sorts — the sort of sequel life provides, anyway, which is messy, unplanned, and full of grace when you let it be so.

Some Assembly Required tells the story of how Sam Lamott — to whom we were introduced as a newborn in Operating Instructions — becomes a father at the age of 19, and perhaps just as importantly, of how Anne Lamott becomes a delighted (if extremely anxious) grandmother. The formation of this family, with Sam’s fierce girlfriend Amy finding her role, Anne’s friends adding their strength and wisdom, family members dying, Anne’s struggles with her newly grown-up son, and church friends fighting over the baby, Jax, feels real, as real as love.

If you’ve read anything else by Anne Lamott, you know she doesn’t hide what she’s thinking. She says things the rest of us don’t dare to, on the understanding that concealing her opinions will lead only to dysfunction. She doesn’t hide her belief that she knows better than Sam and Amy what will benefit them and Jax — or her real understanding that she has to take her hands off their lives; that they are adults now, and her letting go is the only way any of them can be in relationship, as much as that hurts. She’s sarcastic about it, and she sheds tears, but she does what it takes. Her constant jokes about her “tiny opinions” and her foolishness and vanity might cover up real courage sometimes.

I didn’t love this book as much as I loved Operating Instructions, maybe because the first book caught me at just the right time of my life. But Lamott’s voice comes through loud and clear, on faith and love and muddling along when nothing seems like the right thing to do. It’s a challenge and a comfort, funny and poignant, and I enjoyed it very much.

NOS4A2

Charles Talent Manx roams the country in his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith, stealing children. He doesn’t want to hurt them — oh, no! He wants to take them to Christmasland, a place not on any map, where the children will stay young and innocent forever, and it is Christmas every day of the year. Of course, the children will not be quite… themselves when they get there. They’ll be cold, and their teeth will be sharp and numerous. And Manx himself gets something out of the deal: he is older than anyone knows, and still looks like a young man. Hence his license plate: NOS4A2.

When Victoria McQueen was a little girl, she was good at finding lost things. Costume jewelry, stuffed animals, pets — anything anyone lost track of, Vic could find it. She, too, had a place not on the map, a road she could follow in her mind to get where she needed to be. Once, that road led her to Christmasland, and she was the only child ever to escape Manx’s clutches. But Manx is not one to let go easily.

Jenny: This is the third book I’ve read by Joe Hill, after 20th Century Ghosts and Heart-Shaped Box. I thoroughly enjoyed his other work — I found it sharp, original and scary — and this doesn’t disappoint. It’s a long book (almost 700 pages in hardcover!), and so it’s less intense than the other ones I’ve read of his, but it also gives him some room to spread out in the way of characterization. I especially loved some of the supporting characters, like Vic’s boyfriend Lou and her ally Maggie Leigh. They are both so vivid and flawed, I felt I could have pointed them out on the street.

Teresa: The only other of Hill’s books that I’ve read is Heart-Shaped Box, which I found vivid and exciting, but too claustrophobic and intense. So much so that I’ve been hesitant to try again, but I’m very glad that I did. This was so much better! As you say, the length lets him stretch, and the characters benefit. Lou and Maggie were so utterly my kind of people–an overweight comics geek and an eccentric librarian–but they’re bigger and more vivid than the stereotypes other authors might reduce them to. Vic, too, is a great heroine, also not easily reduced to a stereotype. Hill lets her be many things at once—vulnerable, aggressive, maternal, detached—yet she comes across as coherent.

Jenny: Here’s a question, though: did you think that coherence also applied to Charlie Manx? He was a very nasty villain, of course, but I wound up unsure in some ways what Hill was trying to do with him. Is he really just a man whose capacity for empathy has been sucked away by the Wraith, and someone we should ultimately feel sorry for? Or is he a monster, a vampire (well, a Nosferatu — there are a lot of quiet hat-tips to the film in this book), and we need feel no emotion about his fate? I was interested in the way Hill had Manx justify his child-stealing, for instance. If he were merely a monster, why would he do that? But instead, he uses his misogyny to mask his hunger, explaining that the children’s mothers (whores to a woman) would undoubtedly abuse and exploit the children if he did not “rescue” them. I thought it was an interesting conceit, but did you think it worked?

Teresa: That’s a good question. I felt like Manx believed what he wanted to believe. It was convenient to think these mothers were the monsters, so that’s what he chose to think. But I’m not convinced he ever really believed it. He needed to believe it, which I suppose shows that he has a shred of human decency—or at least an idea of what human decency should be. Is that just an artifact of a time before the Wraith? It wasn’t enough to make me feel sympathy for him, but it does make me wonder what he was before. If he ever had any humanity, it’s been thoroughly eaten away by now.

One thing that wasn’t clear to me, and it’s related to your question, is how the relationship between Manx and the Wraith works. He needs the Wraith to stay alive and get the kids under his control, but which came first? Is the Wraith like Vic’s bikes, one in a line of just-right vehicles? Unless I missed it—and it’s possible I did, so much happens in this book!—the mechanics of it aren’t really explained.

Jenny: That’s right. Hill makes it clear that there are a number of ways into the worlds of thought — inscapes — and that some of those inscapes are better places than others to be. Manx can’t get to Christmasland without the Wraith, which is fueled by the unhappiness of the children it carries; Vic can’t get to her bridge without her bikes. It made me wonder whether Christine, the Plymouth Fury Stephen King wrote about in 1983, could have gotten to Christmasland!

That, of course, brings up one of the delightful things about the book (at least for a King fan.) Joe Hill is, of course, King’s son, and King is a big and obvious influence he’s wise enough not to try to escape. The novel is original — not imitative at all — but there are several nods to King’s work in this book, and I found it great fun.

Teresa: I’ve sometimes wondered how Hill feels about the inevitable comparisons to King. The fact that he writes under a pen name made me wonder if he wants to avoid the comparison, but if that were the case, he’s in the wrong genre. Relative or not, the King comparisons are going to come if you write horror. But it was fun to see him honor King’s influence with the references to Mid-World and the Good Man and all that. The geeky characters mean the book abounds in references to all sorts of geeky pursuits, but the King salutes were different. It’s not that his characters read King; King’s world is adjacent to Hill’s somehow. I enjoyed seeing that!

Jenny: The very last page of the novel (even past the acknowledgments page) hints at the possibility that characters from this book may show up again. If that’s the case, I wouldn’t be sorry to see it. Joe Hill is well launched on an intense, interesting, scary writing career, and I’m with him for the ride!