| |
September
2006
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
Everyone
present loved this 1961 book, recently reprinted by Methuen, the
tale of the Wheelers, a young American couple trying unsuccessfully
to lead intellectually-fulfilled lives and ‘find themselves’ in
a barren, suburban post-war America. Everyone’s breath was taken
away by the acute observation, the concise, satirical prose, and
the sheer humanity… Everyone marvelled that they had never heard
of Richard Yates before, and that nor indeed, apparently, had Clare’s
friend, a university teacher of literature.
The
book was not published in Britain until 1986, and people suggested
that one reason was Yates’s very prescience: the suburbia he describes,
with cocktails before dinner each evening in the little box houses
of a modern housing estate, and neighbours coming round for drinks,
did not come into being in England until the late sixties at the
earliest, and so the world he describes would have been alien to
Britons at the time of the book’s first publication. It is surprising,
though, that even on its 1986 British publication it made no lasting
stir.
John,
introducing the book, pointed out how carefully constructed and
unified the book is, and that although it has a veneer of realism
it operates on a sophisticated symbolic level: the path which Frank
Wheeler is having such trouble building across his lawn at the start
of the novel, which ends up going nowhere, symbolising the characters’
existential floundering, the community play with which the novel
begins symbolising the fact that each character is constantly ‘acting’
a role, unsure of who they really are.
There
were two points of disagreement. Although everyone agreed that the
novel was satirical most disagreed with my claim that it was actually
funny. I read out a section to prove my point, a description of
Shep, the Wheelers’ neighbour, escaping into machismo from the prissiness
with which his mother has tried to smother him, a section which,
to me, ends in a wry comic image: his eighteenth birthday sent
him whooping and hollering into the paratroops. Everyone’s face
remained straight and they all protested that that was sad,
not funny! The situation is sad, I said, but what about the language
(the comic image, the hyperbole in whooping and hollering),
but people protested that the language wasn’t funny, just
clever. Doug alone did agree with me that the descriptions of Frank’s
workplace were comic, and especially the depiction of General Sales
Manager, Bart Pollock, lunching with Frank:
He went on talking as he ate but he was quieter now and more
dignified, using words like "obviously" and "furthermore" instead
of "fart" and "bellybutton". His eyes no longer protruded; he had
left off being the backwoods tycoon and was resuming his more customary
role as balanced, moderate executive.
This to me comes from a wry, satirical authorial eye. Since everyone
had already agreed that the book was satirical, though, I guess
we were talking at cross-purposes: the humour I see in the book
is wry rather than laugh-out-loud and always underpinned with the
sadness of the situation. (Everyone did laugh, however, when I mentioned
the spoonerism of Bart Pollock’s name, and indeed all of the names
are similarly wryly symbolic.)
Our
second point of disagreement was over the depiction of the women
in the book. Everyone agreed that Yates is far more understanding
of women than his contemporary John Updike, and indeed way ahead
of his time in this, but most people felt that the book was nevertheless
more weighted towards the men. Doug and I strongly disagreed. If
more words are devoted to the men, then far more of the satire is
devoted to the men. The sections devoted to the points of view of
the women characters are extremely moving, and in terms of the structure
of the book very important: they come later, undercutting the earlier
reality of the men. It is April Wheeler’s tragedy, seen from her
point of view, which forms the crux and denouement, and thus, it
could be argued, the last word.
Very
rarely do we discuss at such length a book about which basically
we all agree. There was so much to comment on, the book was so rich.
And it sent us off onto an animated discussion of the issues, and
on into politics, until finally someone looked at their watch and
found it was twelve-forty-five – the latest we have ever stayed
for a book group meeting.
Click
here to add your comments
October
2006
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Where
is everybody? Only five of our huge group made it to Mark’s new
house through a damp October evening so oddly warm that Mark’s little
boy was waiting at the door in his bare feet and pyjamas, and it
mattered not a jot that Mark had not yet had the boiler installed.
Introducing
this book which caused a sensation on its 1965 publication, Mark
outlined the circumstances of its writing. A ‘non-fiction novel’,
as Capote called it, it is about the real-life mass murder of a
comfortable ‘middle-class’ Kansas farming family, the Clutters,
the police hunt for their two ex-convict killers, the effects of
the case on the community, and the subsequent court trial and process
of law. Mark described how Capote, an established minor novelist,
was sent as a journalist to cover the case and ended up spending
six years researching it, interviewing hundreds of witnesses, aided
by his childhood friend Harper Lee, amassing hundreds of notebooks
and forming relationships with many of the people involved, not
least one of the young male murderers, Perry Smith.
The
novel famously marries an objective journalistic style with some
novelistic conventions, and Mark thought this brilliantly done.
He particularly admired the objective and non-judgemental stance
of the book, and the fact that nevertheless it was a compulsive
read, a book you couldn’t put down.
Trevor
agreed wholeheartedly, but to their surprise Doug and John and I
said that we had struggled a bit with the book, and did not find
satisfying the attempt to marry the two styles or forms. The police
investigation is dealt with in a journalistic way, and the book
opens with a journalistic account of the history, geography and
economics of Holcomb where the killing takes place. However there
follows the classic novelistic technique of alternating between
two sets of people we know are destined to come together: the Clutter
family going through their last day on earth, and the killers preparing
their raid on the house and making towards them in their Chevrolet.
Yet a journalistic distance nevertheless informs the portrayal of
the killers and their preparations, and we are provided with only
a partial insight into their psychology (more will become clear
later in reported interviews), so that to us this novelistic treatment
- the dramatised imagining of their conversations and journey -
seemed both tricksy and incomplete.
Mark
felt that the non-moralising tone prevented the portrayal of the
events from being prurient, but the rest of us felt that the preparations
for the murder especially did evoke prurience in the reader. Clare
- arrived late from a meeting - commented that what was interesting
about the book was that it buffeted your reactions - from prurience
and out again - in a baffling way which usefully conveyed the sheer
incomprehensibility of the killings, and their essential randomness.
(The Clutters were targeted, but unknown to the killers, who were
simply out to rob a rich household.)
Although
the champions of the book within the group, Trevor and Mark noted
that the psychology of Perry (the murderer with whom Capote developed
the closer relationship during his research) is ultimately given
more thorough and sympathetic treatment than that of the other murderer,
Dick, and they saw this as an oversight on Capote’s part.
Everyone
found somewhat tedious the legal and psychological reports at the
end of the book, and the case histories of the killers’ cellmates
on Death Row extraneous. John commented that these were novelistic
objections, whereas this belonged to the ‘sociological tract’ aspects
of the book. He thought that maybe this is how the book is read
nowadays: as a sociological tract and a record of the times, rather
than as an example of the ‘new literary form’ which Capote felt
he had invented.
All
of us also felt that there was something else missing from the book:
the significant effect, recorded elsewhere, of a novelist/journalist
spending years in a small community raking over such an event, keeping
it alive, developing relationships with the protagonists, including
the killers, and giving them all their fifteen minutes' (or rather,
lasting) fame.
Click
here to add your comments
November
2006
Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr
We
take it in turns to choose books for discussion, and when it’s a
person's turn they offer two and the rest of the group vote for
the one we’ll discuss. Trevor decided on two books the publishers
of which had, in the sixties, been prosecuted for ‘obscenity’: DH
Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Last Exit to Brooklyn
by Hubert Selby Jr. We voted for the latter.
Trevor,
renowned in our group for liking books others find too harsh or
distasteful, said that this book, which was new to him, had really
shocked him. This made us laugh but we all understood why. A depiction
of the lives of fifties New York drag queens, bisexuals, prostitutes
and drug addicts, it confronts unflinchingly the relentless violence
and hopelessness of those lives in a way which I feel is stunning
and unique.
John
said he thought it was a joke that the book had been prosecuted
for being likely to deprave: there was nothing erotic whatever about
the explicit sexual scenes, undercut as they were with violence,
sadness and a dreadful loneliness, and the rest of us agreed, apart
from Jenny who said that as a teenager she had found it titillating.
John said that indeed the book was utterly moral, more moral than
most, in the clear-eyed and empathic way it portrays the unhappiness
of the characters and their terrible spirals of degradation, and
Trevor and I agreed, saying we thought it was a truly great book.
At
this point there was some demurring. Anne and Clare said that they
hadn’t enjoyed the book at all, finding the relentless violence
quite off-putting. Clare said she dealt with people like this in
her work, which was quite enough thank you, she went to books for
light relief from all that, and, frankly, for more enjoyment. How
on earth could you enjoy a book like this? I said, But the book
is so brilliantly written: it is this, precisely, which I enjoyed
- no, actually, found thrilling - the prose. With an amazing
facility, Selby captures the differing linguistic registers of all
of the characters and operates a unique narrative technique of switching
between indirect speech and direct all within one sentence, the
effect of which is to create a fluid movement between more objective
observation of the characters and dynamic dramatic effects which
draw you into their experience:
The cop stepped up to the soldier and told him if he didn’t shut
up right now he’d lock him up, and your friend along with you.
(In an introduction to our Bloomsbury edition, Selby writes
of the care and time he took to develop his narrative techniques,
which, designed to make the language of his characters live, are
often mistaken for simplistic and untutored replication.)
Clare
said, But she didn’t read books in the writerly way I did and that
she hadn’t been able to get through the violence to appreciate the
prose, and Anne nodded. I felt pretty frustrated by this but I was
even more frustrated when Doug, whom I can usually rely on to agree
with me in general, supported them. He said he had been able to
appreciate the quality and cleverness of the prose, but he too could
not cope with the lack of redemption in the book, every character
ending up degraded or even dead, with no hope ever of happiness
for any of them. Jenny said, but this is the truth about many lives,
that there’s no redemption (and indeed, in his introduction, Selby
makes clear the efforts he went to to be true to this fact and not
to impose any writerly desires or choices on the story). Clare reiterated:
she knew it was a truth in life, but she didn’t need to get it from
books, and she wanted books to give her something else in compensation.
I said, But isn’t the compensation, and the redemption, in
the author’s stance of compassion: the way he makes us see that
the characters are indeed longing for exactly that, compassion and
love? There was more arguing: Doug felt that we didn’t understand
enough about what had made the characters what they were for this
to be so, which left me too gob-smacked to argue. In view of this,
I was even more frustrated by the fact that every other person in
the room said they had found the longest section of the book, dealing
with a strike, boring and skippable, and that frankly they didn’t
see why it was in the book at all - since this was the piece which
I felt really did give you social underpinning, and the section
which I thus found perhaps the most compelling (the others cried
out in amazement). And anyway, Doug said, these characters are just
so unremittingly immoral and cruel, and Jenny said, yes, what about
that group of housewives watching a baby on a high window ledge
and hoping it would fall? (Jenny and I did have to admit that this
was the one moment we didn't find psychologically convincing.) Doug
said, We are just presented with the callousness, we’re not given
any sense of its psychological effect on others. I said,
But what about the fact that we see inside the mind of the old woman
those housewives laugh at, and into the minds of women downtrodden
by the men (which in fact makes the book feminist way before its
time), and the others did then say, Oh yes.
Clare
then said that actually she could see now that the book was something
different from what she’d thought: it was observation with compassion.
I cried Yes! But Jenny (who also really liked the book) said: Well,
I don’t think much of that, observation with compassion, that’s
just patronising, isn’t it just observation full stop, and what’s
wrong with that? And we ended up having a long discussion about
what you mean by compassion.
But
then Doug said: as for the language, it had become too commonplace
in American gangster films to appreciate its freshness, and he’d
therefore even been a bit irritated by it at times, and even Trevor
agreed with him, at which point I gave up and poured myself a big
glass of wine.
At
which point also though Clare said suddenly that she was really
glad she had read this book, and that what our discussion this evening
had made her realise was that there are other things to read novels
for besides enjoyment.
Click
here to add your comments
December
2006
Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
Doug
had a beautiful huge Christmas tree, tastefully decorated wth red
baubles and tiny white lights, which made everyone exclaim as they
entered, and people brought Christmas food, mince pies and chocolates,
and Jenny had a bag of samosas left over from her other reading
group at Didsbury library which had had a Christmas gathering earlier
in the day. And no one was much inclined to get down to business
and discuss the book.
In
the middle of all the hilarity I asked everyone if they minded my
writing about our meetings on my blog,
and everyone said it was fine. But then Doug said suddenly that
that reminded him: he had a good mind to start a rival web report
because my last one (on
Hugh Selby Jr's Last Exit to Brooklyn) was totally biased
(towards my own view of the book) and ended on a yah-boo-sucks note.
(Trevor added that he's always shocked by how different my memories
of the discussion are from his.) Quite right! I retorted, refusing
to be chastened.
Anyway,
this is my memory of our discussion this time:
Anne
had chosen this 1938 novel in which, in a classic case of mistaken
identity, a naive aristocratic nature-features writer, Boot, gets
sent as a war reporter to the fictional African Republic of Ishmaelia,
and in which journalistic contempt for the truth is famously satirised.
Having read other Waugh novels and enjoyed them, she said she had
chosen it as a civilised and urbane antidote to the linguistic grimness
of Selby Jr. However, having expected to enjoy it without reservation,
she now wasn't so sure, finding it on the whole to be in fact more
of a farce than a satire. Everyone readily and strongly agreed,
although most had enjoyed it - though Sarah said she had given up
after the first seventy pages, for the very reason that she hates
farce.
John
pointed out that, while the overriding trope of mistaken identity
and that of the innocent abroad were in the realm of farce, there
was true satire in the treatment of the activities of the journalists
and their newspapers, and most people agreed that the telegrams
passing between them were very funny. Most were agreed too that
the book was in any case very clever, but John and Anne weren't
so sure since it wavered between satire and farce. Trevor said that,
having previously avoided Waugh because of his right-wing reputation,
he had been amazed to find how even-handedly Waugh had poked fun,
representing the aristocratic Boot family as dodderers mainly confined
to their beds. At which point Jenny expressed her oft-stated opinion
that aristocrats are anything but duffers, it just suits them to
have people think they are, and Waugh (who was not in fact aristocratic)
had fallen for that.
John
also noted that Boot is something of a psychological blank, and
he said that while this is part of the satirical or farcical point,
he found that it created a sense of something incomplete. We discussed
this - the fact that in a satire you don't really need psychological
complexity but that somehow here it seemed like a flaw - without
coming to much conclusion as to why this should be. I said it was
particularly noticeable in the 'love' interest (Boot falls innocently
in love with a young German woman who is quite cheerfully taking
him for a ride), and Trevor, who'd had quite a bit to drink by then,
explained to me their relationship. I said I understood what their
relationship was, I was talking about the treatment of it, and he
explained it to me again.
Anne
wondered how much more impact the book might have had in its day,
as we are now so much more used to the idea of not trusting the
press, but Doug said, haven't there always been satirical cartoons?
And
that was about it. A very short discussion (as far as I remember
it), and by the time Mark arrived, late from putting his kids to
bed, we'd long gone onto other topics which we stayed late discussing,
even though Doug had to go to London next day...
Click
here to add your comments
January
2007
The Sea by John Banville
Several
members couldn't make it to this meeting, so it was a small group
which gathered at Jenny's.
This
novel takes
the form of a diary-cum-memoir written by an art historian who has
retired, after the death of his wife, to the seaside town where
he once holidayed as a child, one year becoming fascinated and entangled
with another holidaying family: Connie and Carlo Grace and their
twins Chloe and mute Myles, and an older girl Rose. It is in the
house once occupied by the Graces, now a boarding house, that he
has decided to settle.
Doug
had chosen the book because, he said, he thought it might provoke
some interesting controversy. For his own part, he had mixed feelings
about the book. There was much he admired about it, in particular
the prose with its poetic flow and vivid descriptions, although
he felt there were moments when the prose went over the top and
wasn't so good after all, and the book was in fact flawed.
Jenny
then said with great contempt that she thought it a 'typical Booker
type novel'. What did she mean by that? Well, she said she had found
the prose really pretentious and there were at least fifteen words
she had never come across before in her life, the meaning of which
she couldn't tell from the context. I said yes, I had had to look
in the dictionary several times, often to discover that the unfamilar
words referred to obscure trades or professions, eg 'deckle' (papermaking)
and 'anabasis' (military). Usually these words were being used metaphorically
to describe something else. I said, to strong agreement from John,
that the point of a metaphor is to make things more vivid, but here
the opposite effect was created. Not only that, there were several
occasions when I came across words I thought I had known the meaning
of, only to be thrown into doubt by the context, then to discover
in the dictionary that they had been used in the book in an archaic
sense. More generally we found the language over-formal or inflated
(eg fingernails described as 'sanguineous red' rather than 'blood-red',
'refection' for 'meal', and the somewhat laughable 'At times the
image of her would spring up in me unbidden, an interior succubus,
and a surge of yearning would engorge the very root of my being').
While we accepted in theory that these linguistic characteristics
are those of a narrator who has consciously and defensively created
for himself a formal persona, we nevertheless found them alienating,
and people said that as a result they found it very difficult to
care about the characters. Ann, who had been nodding away but had
been quiet up till now, said that she had given up on the book without
finishing it.
Doug
now grinned and said he knew that I in particular would have this
reaction to the language, and this was why he'd chosen the book.
As he'd said, he agreed, but there were also wonderfully vivid passages,
and the book was brilliantly crafted and the story was stunning.
The
rest of us agreed that the observations were often vivid and acute
- Clare had been pulled up in amazement by the accuracy of a description
of 'the way women used to smoke', and I by one of a woman leaning
on a till, among others. Jenny said that the portrayal of the narrator's
childhood yearning to better himself (and be like the Graces) reminded
her of her own similar childhood feelings. We all thought the memories
of the illness and death of the narrator's wife moving and the aspect
of the book which rang most true. However, we didn't at all agree
with Doug about the way the book was shaped.
Ann
said that she found really irritating and confusing, and lacking
in true connections, the shifts between the various time levels.
There were situations and characters - the narrator's relationship
with his daughter, a visit with her to a local farm, the shocking
photographs taken by the dying wife - which were made to seem significant
but their precise nature or significance either never became clear
to us or indeed fizzled away. As for the story, John said, there
is none for most of the book, but then the story is packed in towards
the end in a way which he found contrived. Most of us were dissatisfied
by the revelation of the identity of the narrator's present-day
landlady. Looking back through this at the earlier representation
of their relationship, we found that earlier representation both
tricksy and psychologically unconvincing. None of us (apart from
Doug) was convinced, in the final analysis, by the final denouement,
the tragedy at the novel's heart, although it is most emotively
described, and, as Jenny and Ann said, although we were clearly
meant to accept that this was the narrator's formative experience,
there was no real sense of how it had made him what he was or informed
his other relationships.
And
Jenny said that she found the narrator's sexual attraction as a
boy to the mother of the Grace family 'disgusting', which made us
all hoot with laughter.
Click
here to add your comments
|
