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 o 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.

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.

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.

• 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.

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.

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 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.

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!

Little Dorrit

Little Amy Dorrit was born in the Marshalsea Prison, where her father has been imprisoned for debt for the last twenty-three years. She is, therefore, twenty-two years old when the story begins, a grown woman, but often mistaken for a child: “little” because she has been emotionally and physically malnourished during her time devoting herself to her egregiously ungrateful family. Arthur Clennam, recently returned from China, meets Little Dorrit in his grim mother’s home, and immediately suspects that his parents may have wronged her in some way; he sets about to right the suspected injustice.

Dickens plays with his ideas like so many tiles in a game. Characters both major and minor are imprisoned in various ways: sometimes in an actual prison, like Little Dorrit’s father; other times, like Clennam’s mother, in her own disabled body; other times by social class or expectation. Dan Doyce and his invention are imprisoned for a while by the Circumlocution Office (a near, dear relation of Jarndyce and Jarndyce) and their eternal red tape, but some prisoners are clever enough to escape.

Characters gain wealth and lose it, both materially and psychologically. Miss Wade, for instance, is a character entirely built to take riches and turn them into rags: the chapter in which she narrates her own life story is as chilling a description of a personality disorder as I’ve read in some time. Henry Gowan is another such: he taints the happiness, talent, and tranquility of everyone around him with his careless nihilism. Even Arthur Clennam, our hero, is more complex than many Dickens heroes: he goes in for typical Dickensian benevolence, to right a wrong, and he fails, and riches turn to poverty in his fingers, and sunshine into shadow. (The entire concept of benevolence is a mini-theme in this book. Mr. Casby, the Patriarch — anti-figure of the Father of the Marshalsea — is like a wicked Santa Claus, and we all know how Dickens felt about Christmas. The fact that he gets his comeuppance is infinitely satisfying.)

The novel teems with outstanding minor characters that help bring out these themes. My own favorite was Flora, with her hilarious run-on sentences, and Mr. F.’s aunt, with her mysterious but settled antagonism toward Clennam (“Bring ‘im for’ard, and I’ll chuck ‘im out ‘o winder!”) But Mr. Pancks, Tattycoram, Fanny, Mr. Meagles, and the Merdle clan (the name of whom reminded me of Mr. Murdstone, from David Copperfield, so I was warned in advance of the dreadful fate that awaited me) are all marvelous. The only truly insipid character is the horrid Pet Meagles, and she’s just your ordinary Dickens girl, like a Hitchcock blonde.

I must admit that I had expected Little Dorrit to be a splendidly null Dickens girl, too, and in fact for the first part of the book, she more or less is. She has been trained up in the way she should go: self-denial to the point of disappearance. Toward the end, Mr. Meagles shows Little Dorrit to Tattycoram as an exemplar of duty, and it would be easy to mistake her constant attendance on her family for her sense of duty. But Mr. Meagles is not always the clearest-eyed character, is he? Little Dorrit does not do what she does from duty, she does it from love, and it is love (and Dickens’s genius) that makes her into an interesting character in the second half of the book. She, too, goes from poverty to riches to poverty (to riches, to poverty); from shadow to sunshine. But unlike her father, she is always free. Her choices are her own, and when her duty is taken from her — she is no longer able to be a caretaker for her father — it is her love that sustains her, makes a vivid human being out of her, and gives her a voice and power she lacked at the beginning of the novel. By the end, we can see she always had intelligence and integrity, but now she can stand in the light.

I wanted to note that back when we did our blogiversary post, someone asked whether Teresa and I ever disagreed on books, and if so, what we did about that. I couldn’t think of anything we disagreed on at the time, but in fact, Dickens is probably the answer. Teresa has never really been much of a Dickens fan, though she generally loves 19th-century literature. I can’t put it down to her not having read much Dickens, either, because I think she’s read several of his novels, and they just haven’t clicked with her. She prefers Eliot, Hardy, the Brontes, Trollope — you know, trashy stuff like that. I, on the other hand, love Dickens. I haven’t tried to convince Teresa! I can have Dickens all to myself!

I don’t know why Little Dorrit isn’t more… what? More read? More popular? It’s one of Dickens’s later novels, like my very favorites, Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend, and in some ways (in its themes and imagery) it is quite like it. It is wonderful, complex reading. I now have only a few Dickens novels left to read: Hard Times, Barnaby Rudge, and Martin Chuzzlewit. (I have attempted The Old Curiosity Shop, but haven’t finished it; I’m leaving that one out of my reckoning for now.) Any suggestions?

Let me state that without my notes Shade’s text simply has no human reality at all since the human reality of a poem such as his (being too skittish and reticent for an autobiographical work), with the omission of many pithy lines carelessly rejected by him, has to depend entirely on the reality of its author and his surroundings, attachments and so forth, a reality that only my notes can provide. To this statement my dear poet would probably not have subscribed, but, for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.

Sensing that Kinbote was not to be trusted, I went ahead and read Shade’s 999-line poem without Kinbote’s assistance. It’s a nice enough poem, sometimes sad and sometimes lovely. Kinbote’s notes, however give it an entirely new life as Kinbote uses the poem as a launching pad for his own stories, one in which he and John Shade are close friends and another in which a dethroned king of a nation called Zembla escapes from prison and is pursued by an assassin.

Kinbote and Shade are in reality characters created by Vladimir Nabokov for his 1962 novel Pale Fire. The book comprises Kinbote’s introduction, Shade’s four cantos of poetry, Kinbote’s extensive and rambling commentary, and an index in which Kinbote’s own entry fills more than two pages and Shade’s barely more than one page.

At first, reading Kinbote’s commentary is a little like reading an extremely far-fetched close reading. The words gradual and gray bring to Kinbote’s mind a man named Jakob Gradus, or James de Gray. Kinbote acknowledges that Shade knew nothing of Gradus when he wrote his poem, but that doesn’t stop Kinbote from sharing a brief biography of the man and details on his movements throughout the commentary. As a reader, Kinbote sees what he wants to see. He tells us that he urged Shade to write about his beloved homeland, Zembla, and even though Shade’s domestic and autobiographical poem mentions Zembla only once, in passing, Kinbote looks for hints of it everywhere. His readings are obviously strained and implausible, but I had to chuckle at how easy it can be to fall into Kinbote’s way of thinking. We bring to literature our own perspectives and often see what we want to see in the books we pick up.

Gradually, however, Kinbote’s quirky readings start to feel sinister. He writes in the introduction that Shade scholars didn’t want him to edit the poem and taunts them for their misunderstandings of Shade’s work. Is this just scholarly infighting, or is there more going on? As Kinbote writes of his friendship with Shade in the commentary, that friendship with Shade seems more and more one-sided, with Kinbote’s expectations appearing much too high for a relationship that may be little more than neighborly and collegial cordiality. So why is he editing this poem?

Despite his declaration in the foreword that Shade’s poem needs his commentary, Kinbote’s story would have no venue for existence if Kinbote didn’t have Shade’s poem to build on. Kinbote needs Shade. Perhaps Kinbote believed that Shade was writing about Zembla and is trying to make the poem fit his desired interpretation—the interpretation that must be true if his friendship with Shade is true. Nabokov keeps you on your toes about the connection between the two men and their writing, to the point where you start to forget what is real. Kinbote’s story imbues Shade’s fate with meaning that it wouldn’t otherwise have. His story is the one you want to believe, even if you can’t.

Pale Fire is a dizzying accomplishment, with all the components intricately stitched together in way that I suspect only becomes more complex and rewarding on second and third readings. Jenny, who has become a massive Nabokov fan, read and reviewed it back in 2011, and she had me read it this year. I’ve been meaning to try Nabokov again after a moderately successful attempt at Lolita back in college. (I say moderately successful because I liked reading it and found it fascinating to study but didn’t entirely grasp it without a lot of professorial support—and even then I didn’t entirely grasp it, it’s more like I grabbed a tenuous hold on it.) I’m glad to have finally taken another look at his work, and I’m sure there will be more in my future.