Stop Here, by Beverly Gologorsky

I find it hard to get interested in most new novels, and feel guilty about this because I aspire to write such books myself, and can easily imagine a reader coming across my unwritten novel and thinking, “Jesus, more of this stuff.” American literary fiction, written and read largely by the comfortable, is a net that keeps hauling up far more than can be healthily consumed of certain species of story.

Meanwhile, if you want to find out about the reality of life for most black Americans (and happen not to be black yourself); or the collapse of our small towns and the despoiling of their land; or the burgeoning prison state, you mostly have to read nonfiction, or track down a handful of decent documentaries and television shows. To readers who are interested in these “social justice” issues only in the most abstract sense, I say—wait a little while, their problems will soon be yours, and you will have much to learn from the ways that the poor, poised on the lip of the great American meat grinder, have always managed to cope with them.

There are many burrs in this grinder, but one of the biggest is war, and ours are still fought mostly by lower-class whites. (Joe Bageant covered his portion of this ground, in essays and a memoir, as well as anyone.) Beverly Gologorsky, in her novel Stop Here, focuses on the toll of war for women—raising young children with husbands gone, dead, or returned with what was once known as “soldier’s heart” and is now blandly known as PTSD. Whatever one calls what they return with, these men are just a piece of a bad luck or some internal axe-blow away from collapse. Meanwhile, someone has to keep stringing together inconvenient shifts, pouring the coffee and putting out the meals, and Stop Here is about them.

The book revolves around the waitresses and cooks at a Long Island diner. Almost every character—except for their boss who vociferously supports our troops and the people who send them into danger—has been intimately affected by one of America’s recent engagements. (Lest this seem unrealistic, or like an exercise in sociology, I encourage you to read this article by Gologorsky, which first drew me to the novel, on the effect of war on the people in the neighborhood where she grew up.) One mother is trying to dissuade her daughter from joining up, another has a husband falling apart from worry about a child in Afghanistan, another is a widow raising a young son with the father dead in Iraq.

The repetition of themes frankly made some of the characters hard to keep straight. After I finished the book, I was talking about it with my wife, but couldn’t remember exactly which problems Mila and Darla and Shelly and Ava were having. And indeed, Gologorsky is not brilliant at individual portraiture. One problem is she has little knack for realistic dialogue. I kept coming up short against lines that it was unlikely these characters would say, and a few that absolutely no one would say (the word “hauntingly” actually comes out of one fictional mouth). The most finely differentiated characters—Sylvie, a former actress in an unhappy marriage to the diner owner, and Rosalyn, a waitress who earns extra money as an escort—are also the ones who feel like they could easily belong in hundreds of other novels.

It is the swirl of other women that, for me, set Stop Here apart—the ones I had trouble keeping straight, all similarly hemmed in by not having much money, only a few types of available work, and obligation after obligation to handle with only modest help from each other and a family member or two. But they are by no means powerless, because they know from long experience how to manage decently with very little, and handle heartbreak as a matter of routine. Gologorsky’s dialogue, I think, stems from the desire to make her characters as eloquent as they deserve to be, so even if it doesn’t always sit easily on the page, the impulse is honorable and I can let it go.

One scene gets at everything that is working and not working in this short book. A cook at the diner, Bruce, is terrified because his liberal daughter has gone off on what seems to be a fairly pointless peace mission to the Middle East. His daughter has promised to e-mail him every few days to tell him that she’s OK, but a week has gone by now without a message. The father, living in a community where disaster is being continually braced for—and with good reason, because it will eventually arrive—goes to visit the wealthy parents of one of the boys on this trip to see if they have heard anything.

The parents are ludicrous caricatures from some 30s comedy of upper-class society, and address each other by “Mr.” and “Mrs.” They haven’t heard from their son either and aren’t at all worried—he regularly doesn’t write, and after all, it’s quite unlikely that something would happen. And if something did, of course, it would be a tragedy, not an utterly expected blow. Bruce can’t even be angry at these people. When he is telling his girlfriend this story later, he says that it felt like these people are, somehow, innocent.

I went to a wedding recently filled with people who were, either by birth or by passage through a handful of elite universities, from the approximate stratum of Mr. and Mrs., and this word—innocent—kept ringing through my mind. Gologorsky had gotten, not the particulars, but the larger truth of the situation just right; these people really did live in a world where disaster was not a possibility. The worst that could happen to a person was the somewhat untimely death of a parent. (You need to be from certain strata to even have the concept of an untimely death.) And as I spent time in this crowd—with their intelligence, and energy, and enterprise, and loveliness—something about them actually scared me, because it seemed like they had no idea how much had to be sacrificed to keep their lives going on in this way; and also—this is the scary part—no idea how fragile it all was, and is, because such sacrifices by their very nature cannot be demanded from other people or the earth for long.

Stop Here is a book about people who are conscious of fragility, because for them the brink is always in plain sight, and they have no illusions that this country is running in any way for their benefit. Spend some time in this situation and you develop certain skills.

Here are a few of the important ones from the novel: How to keep dignity and sanity alive when mostly powerless, how to stay awake and hopeful enough to notice an opportunity for escape when it arrives (Gologorsky knows this one well, and it keeps the novel from being merely depressing)—and, finally, how to keep going when you lose something that you didn’t think you could live without.

You can sense, in certain people you meet, that while healing from wounds that have incapacitated others, something has been figured out about how and why to keep going. These people can be found anywhere, but for simple statistical reasons are often present in the social classes that America has decided to maim in the course of its ordinary economic and military functioning. There, in the gray neighborhoods, along with the innumerable victims, you can find a few people quietly picking their way through the wreckage and living on what can be salvaged, from the Haitian woman foraging greens by the drainage ditch (who was a little bemused by my interest) to the old man who collects the furniture that people are throwing away for want of a little work with a hammer.

Notice them—that is one of thoughts I carried with me after finishing this fine novel—they are more interesting than you imagine, and might know some things that you badly need to learn.

War with the Newts, by Karel Čapek

This review appeared first on the Dark Mountain blog, but it fits with what I usually publish here, so I thought I would post it again. Robert Wechsler, who publishes the novel as well as several other excellent volumes of Czech literature in translation, did point out in the comments that Čapek's last novel, which I thought had never made it to English, was completed by his wife and published in 1941 as The Cheat. Čapek is an author I've felt very close to recently, so I'm sure the book is worth seeking out.

The best way for this 1936 Czech novel to find its readers is simply to describe the plot.

In an isolated corner of the South Seas, a Dutch captain discovers an unknown species of newt swimming in the shallow waters of a cove which the locals have always avoided. When the captain docks on a neighboring island, the newts seem fascinated by him and strangely able to decipher his signals. The adults, who are almost four feet tall, have a build something like human children, and when on land walk on their hind legs. From the captain’s instructions, the newts bring up some pearl oysters, and the creatures even prove able to use his blade to open up the shells themselves.

Despite these skills, the newts have remained trapped in the cove for untold centuries, because they cannot swim in the open ocean and their population is kept in check by the sharks who come by regularly to devour them.

A scheme occurs to the captain, based both on greed and what seems to him like compassion. With the help of a Czech industrialist, the captain begins to transport the newts out of their cove using a tank on his boat. He spreads them to other local shallows where they can thrive unmolested. In return, the newts collect the pearls that human divers have been unable to reach.

Without frequent visits from sharks, the newts multiply at an astonishing rate (one female can release hundreds of viable eggs). Soon, predictably, they have gathered so many pearls that the bottom drops out of the market. By this point, though, it has been discovered that the newts, given tools and a bare diet, are excellent at a variety of underwater work: excavating harbors, shaping and extending coastlines, and other tasks useful for modern nation states.

Under the direction of a syndicate, huge numbers of newts are now bred and shipped around the world. Countries with coastlines begin rapidly expanding their borders, dredging and reclaiming enormous stretches of land. Fantasies of new continents rising out of the waters begin to circulate—why, after all, should so much space in the oceans and seas be wasted when it could be put to man’s use?

Troubling moral questions arise as the worker newts show increasing levels of sophistication. Scientists maintain that newt behavior is mere mechanical imitation, but soon this becomes impossible to accept. Expert opinions in the novel are constantly, drastically wrong, but no one ever admits a mistake. Instead, people simply move forward into a world where everyone now believes the opposite of what was once maintained.

Things move so quickly that the reshaping of the planet is far along before people can even begin to absorb what has happened. Is it defensible to use newts as slaves? Might there be problems with changing the shape of coastlines? Do these creatures have souls? (Čapek’s invented reply for George Bernard Shaw: “They certainly have no soul. In this they resemble man.”) Newt questions are hotly debated, and these discussions change things a little (schools for newts, more humane working conditions) but the reformers are a few people rowing chaotically on a ship in full sail intent on moving in only one direction. Anxiety only reaches a noticeable level when there are newts blanketing the coastline of every nation, with tools and underwater explosives at their disposal.

A levee breaks in New Orleans, flooding the city. There are other accidents, new inundations, and a sense of things falling mysteriously apart, but no one suspects the newts are behind the problems until they release a statement. They bear humans no ill will; they simply have needs of their own.

No need for alarm. We have no hostile intentions towards you. We only need more water, more coasts, more shallows to live in. There are many of us. There’s no longer enough room for us on your coasts. That’s why we have to dismantle your continents. We shall turn them all into bays and islands. In this way the overall length of the world’s shoreline can be increased by a factor of five. We shall construct new shallows. We cannot live in the deep ocean. We shall need your continents as fill-in material.

The newts still require humans, of course, for surplus food, metals, and other land-based raw materials (perhaps they also find us charming, like pandas, and wouldn’t want to be entirely without us). When denied these materials, the newts are quite willing to use violence.

On one level, they have learned these habits from years of human tyranny, but the novel also hints at another explanation, the same one that Leopold Kohr would advance a few decades later in The Breakdown of Nations—once a certain critical mass of power has been reached, in terms of numbers and technological sophistication, power-hungry, expansionist behavior seems to develop almost spontaneously. It is the only way that massive systems can absorb the resources they need to keep functioning.

As with lemmings and arctic grass, the planet’s ecosystem in Čapek’s world has become so simplified (newts, humans, and the things they eat and need) that it can only be moving towards a pattern of seesawing crashes. Most countries, nevertheless, keep selling the newts weapons and food. It would, after all, be an economic catastrophe not to. Water begins to spread across every continent, and the remaining humans are pushed higher and higher into the mountains...

When War with the Newts was published in 1936, it was seen as a simple parable about the Nazi threat. As a writer in Czechoslovakia, which had existed precariously as a republic for less than two decades, Čapek was acutely conscious of this danger—but if the newts began as the Nazis in his imagination, they soon sent branches in all directions to become one of literature’s great protean symbols. At different points in the novel, for example, the newts call up both the people on whom the Nazis conducted their experiments and the torturers themselves. Every time the book threatens to become schematic, it slithers away and turns into something else.

I have ruined nothing by describing the plot. The delight of the novel lies in the little eddies and swirls around the narrative—from the mating rituals of the newts, which Čapek catalogs in a few magical pages, to the pamphlet welcoming newt dominion in which I saw a few of my own ideas perceptively mocked.

War with the Newts is not all sophisticated parodies of Spengler, though; in addition to being smart, it is also quite engagingly stupid, with jokes about Hollywood starlets and various farcical footnotes. Part of this is a canny narrative strategy where the book slowly lifts itself out of the frivolity in which prosperous humanity has been drowsing—but it is also something simpler: why not make a silly joke, even in your serious book, if one occurs to you? Unlike the largely humorless, almost oppressive greatness of writers who feel that they speak for nations—like, say, Thomas Mann, a contemporary who admired this novel—Čapek’s pages are lit with a kind of elfin spirit.

As I was reading this book, I kept being reminded of Leopold Kohr, that defender of little states who grew up a few hours from the Czech border. In both writers I recognized the same unwillingness to keep delight out of their pages, even when the ideas within point again and again to an impending collapse—the shared conviction, useful for sanity in bad times, that the most natural and becoming expression of the human face is a smile.

While reading his books, I find it worth remembering that Čapek was often in immense pain—he suffered from severe inflammation of the spine from the time he was a child. In the last story of Tales from Two Pockets, Čapek’s brilliant collection of mystery stories, a narrator who suffered in this way writes:

“I’ve had such respect, such a reverence in me; everything seems more important to me now…each little thing and each human being, do you understand? Everything has enormous value. Whenever I see a sunset, I tell myself it was worth that incredible pain. And people, their work, their ordinary lives…all of it has value because of that pain. And I know it’s a terrible and unspeakable price to pay—but I truly believe that it isn’t some evil or punishment; it’s only pain, and it serves to…to give life this enormous worth—“ Mr Skrivanek stopped, not knowing how to go on.

As the country’s best-known writer, Čapek lobbied for the great powers to resist the Nazis’ demands for Czechoslovakia’s border territories. After Munich, he told a friend, “My world has died. I no longer have any reason to write.”

I can believe that, in a dark mood, he said this and meant it, but it wasn’t true. Čapek knew he would be arrested as soon as the Nazis invaded (he was, in fact, second on their list), but spent the days before the inevitable invasion trying to rescue his beloved garden from heavy autumn rains. He also worked for long stretches on his last, unfinished novel, which has never been translated into English, and spent late nights talking with friends. What else, after all, are you supposed to do?

Čapek caught a bad cold in the garden and didn’t bother to rest. A few days before the Nazis swept into his country, he died at home, spared an execution or a likely death in one of the camps—like this novel, one of literature’s small mercies.

Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt

A few weeks ago, I was browsing the shelves at Goodwill when a wave of sadness came off a familiar yellow spine. It was Tuck Everlasting, which I had read as a child, fairly soon after I came to America. It was the same edition, with the same misty watercolor on its cover. A student (the front cover identifies her as Tatjana) had been through the little novel already, circling vocabulary words and identifying similes and metaphors. Her resolution petered out around page fifty; I like to think that she started enjoying the book at this point.

The little I could remember from childhood: there was a family that drank from a spring in the woods and became immortal. I couldn't bring back anything else or place the source of that sadness. A glance at a few pages indicated, though, that the prose was worthy of adult respect. Here is a character sketch of the mysterious stranger that comes to town: "His tall body moved continuously; a foot tapped, a shoulder twitched. And it moved in angles, rather jerkily. But at the same time he had a kind of grace, like a well-handled marionette."

(SMILE, wrote Tatjana next to this passage, successfully identifying one of the few actual reasons to read, none of which -- teachers take note -- involve spotting similes.)

I wonder why we so rarely return to early favorites. Maybe the fear of unraveling the memory of enchantment. There is a beautiful passage in John Crowley's novel The Translator, about a woman coming across a box of childhood art that she had made with her brother Ben:

She was surprised years later to find that her mother had kept a lot of the writings they had done, the drawings and the models, the chronologies and the maps. Most of the work was Ben's, which was maybe why she had kept it. When Kit took it all from the cardboard box, she felt a strange vertigo: she recognized and remembered these things and at the same time saw them shrivel and shrink; what had once been big and vivid to her became small, and not only in size. He had done it all on little pieces of shoddy paper, in colored pencils; he had been just a child. It was like picking up the body of a bird, and being surprised to find it nearly weightless.

What a pleasure, then, to feel none of this vertigo in the first few chapters of Tuck Everlasting, but instead writing of enduring charm and beauty.

One of the wonderful things about childhood -- I remember very faintly -- is a sense that everything is alive and can be communicated with: animals and plants, houses and roads. And one can see this sense of the world in Tuck Everlasting, as well as most books that speak to children. In the first few pages of the novel, the grass is described as cut "painfully to the quick" (how many adults would consider the suffering of cut grass?); the house where our heroine Winnie lives "was so proud of itself that you wanted to make a lot of noise as you passed, and maybe even throw a rock or two"; and the wood where the spring is hidden "had a sleeping, otherworldly appearance that made you want to speak in whispers."

Winnie is a lonely ten-year-old. Most of the time, she only has a toad for company (the toad, as one would expect in such a book, seems to be able to understand much of what Winnie says). One day, Winnie decides to explore the wood, which her family owns, and she comes across a beautiful boy, Jesse Tuck, drinking from a spring by an oak tree. She wants a drink too, but he won't let her, and she becomes understandably curious about why.

When the rest of the Tucks come to meet their son, they realize that the little girl might be a problem for them, and they grab her and take her to their house. There, they try to explain their situation -- how they drank accidentally from the spring once almost a century ago and have been alive ever since, unable to age or even get hurt, moving from place to place to avoid scrutiny. Angus, the wise and gentle father, tries to convince Winnie that no one else should ever know about the spring. There is a lovely conversation about the continuous flow of water in the pond, and how the Tucks have somehow been removed from this cycle.

Soon after this point, though, an adult reader begins to feel that this is indeed a book for children. A stagy plot gets underway involving a man who wants to sell the spring water. The plot moves rapidly in three- to four-page chapters, with virtually no summary narration; it's one tiny scene after another, a kind of eternal present that felt thin and rushed. The whole action of the book, including an unexpected act of violence and a late-night jailbreak, takes place in about two days.

Here is "a kid's review" from Amazon: "I read 'Tuck Everlasting' in sixth grade, and while reading it, noticed that it lacked the basic elements of a good book. The first thing I noticed that the book seemed to be -if I may- condensed."

Indeed you may, junior reviewer and sophisticate-in-training! Thankfully I had no such complaints when I was young; my imagination filled in whatever might be missing and turned a pencil sketch into a painting. As an adult, though, I was beginning to feel the shrinking that Crowley describes. I couldn't believe anymore that so much would hinge on Winnie, or that people would consider her quite so important. I was still glad I read the book, but felt like it belonged to my past.

Then I came to the Epilogue. It takes place many years after the main action of the book, and involves a choice that was presented to Winnie as a child. The Epilogue is only six pages long, but it transforms everything that has come before. It's an absolutely beautiful piece of writing, not just for children but for anyone. Here, as I read, I understood the wave of sadness that came off the book when I first picked it off the shelf. The end was still thought-provoking, still powerful.

So, perhaps the bird is light in one's hand at times, but it does wake up and fly again. It was nice to discover that my reaction as a child was authentic and lasting, and more to be trusted than my taste as an adolescent (most of my high school favorites, like Catch-22, I've never been able to finish again). I think most adults, even ones who didn't love this book as a child, would find the novel worth reading by the end. It is a lovely fable, and its resonance only grows, I think, once one has become more closely acquainted with death.

Paul et Virginie, by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

I became interested in this largely forgotten novel because of a passage in Edward Goldsmith's The Way, which I wrote about a few months ago. In response to arguments about the essential randomness of nature, Goldsmith quotes a passage from Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Etudes de la Nature:

If snails, nay bugs, caterpillars and locusts ravage our plains, it is because we destroy the birds of our groves which live upon them; or because on transporting the trees of foreign countries into our own, such as the great chestnut of India, the ebony and others, we have transported with them the eggs of those insects which they nourish, without importing likewise the birds of the same climate which destroy them. Every country has those peculiar to itself, for the preservation of its plants.

This seemed like an unusually wise man, both for our own time and the late 18th century. My French is bad, so I decided not to take on the multi-volume Etudes, which were once famous. At the end of these volumes, though, Bernardin placed the small novel Paul et Virginie, which he considered a distillation of his ideas about the natural order.

The book must still be read in France, because I found several new editions in a foreign language bookstore, although the introduction indicates that it is regarded by French critics as an embarrassment, something like Uncle Tom's Cabin in American literature. Paul et Virginie was an enormous popular sensation in its day, and admired by everyone from Napoleon (it was apparently his favorite book) to Alexander von Humboldt, who had it virtually memorized.

A copy also made its way into the room of little Emma Rouault, who would grow up to become Madame Bovary. This paragraph is probably the only place where English-speakers regularly encounter the book. Saint-Pierre's novel is mentioned at the beginning of the famous fourth chapter -- which, incidentally, I have always found very unconvincing as psychology -- where we hear about the reading that gave rise to Emma's dreams of romance:

She had read Paul and Virginia, and had dreamed of the bamboo cabin, of the Negro Domingo and the dog Fidele; and especially she dreamed that she, too, had a sweet little brother for a devoted friend, and that he climbed trees as tall as church steeples to pluck her their crimson fruit, and came running barefoot over the sand to bring her a bird's nest.

The story is simple. Two women end up alone with young children on the Île de France, a colonial name for modern-day Mauritius: one's husband has died, and the other has been abandoned by her lover. The two decide to live near each other and raise their children together, along with their faithful slaves Marie and Domingue, who grow to love each other. The novel's attitude to slavery seems to be that it's fine as long as the masters are nice to them.

Their son and daughter are Paul and Virginie. They are beautiful little children, in touch with the natural world, free from the corrupting influence of civilization, healthy and vigorous. The earth provides everything they need, and they care for their little piece of land and make it blooming and beautiful. As they get older, possibly from lack of other options, they begin to fall in love with each other. Their mothers want them to marry one day, but Virginie's mother -- in one of those refreshing bits of openness often found in French novels -- is worried the girl will get pregnant too young. She is also concerned that the two will have no money when they grow up. So, when a rich aunt in Paris offers to make Virginie her heir if her mother will send her back to France, the girl is put on a boat. As you can imagine, things begin to go wrong when she leaves the island.

It is, in many ways, a silly novel. In addition to its offensive depiction of slavery, long conversations are devoted to dated social criticism, people burst into tears on virtually every page, and its depiction of natural morality is often ludicrous. Virginie, for example, is unwilling to be saved from a foundering ship because it would require that she strip off some of her clothes in front of a male sailor. And this modesty, which she apparently learned from wandering around the forests of a tropical island, is presented as quite noble and right; only a corrupt, civilized woman would expose herself so shamelessly to save her life.

And yet, as easy as it is to mock, the book, somehow, is not dead. Many parts, to my surprise, are still extraordinarily beautiful. For one, the descriptions. The forests are painted with wonderful felicity, heightened for me by the lovely feel of certain French words: "La rivière qui coule en bouillonnant sur un lit de roche..." ("The river which runs foaming over a bed of rock..." but how inadequate "foaming" or "bubbling" feels in the face of a word like "bouillonnant"!) I loved the image of the palms rising above the other trees, and looking from above like a second forest planted on the ground of the lower canopy.

So -- if you wipe away the lugubrious melodrama and all the criticism of civilization -- which none of Saint-Pierre's city readers, from Napoleon down, seem to have taken very seriously -- something genuine still remains, and that something is a sense of reverence for the tropical landscape. Virginie, for example, will never eat a fruit without making sure that she places its seeds in good soil. Her intuition, her natural sense of gratitude, tells her that this is somehow part of the arrangement. When she writes a letter to her family from France, she makes sure she includes some European seeds, which, despite Paul's attentions, don't flourish on the climate of the island.

As you can tell, Bernardin's sense of realism is much better with plants than people -- none of the characters in this little novel are particularly real, but the sense of integration between their lives and the world around them, the respect for the terms on which the gift of abundance is given -- all of these still feel genuine, and continue to give the myth of Paul et Virginie a certain power.

D. H. Lawrence mentioned Saint-Pierre in the chapter on Hector St. John de Crevecoeur from Studies in Classic American Literature. He names him in a list of all of the other back-to-nature writers. "I used to admire my head off," he writes, "before I tiptoed into the Wilds and saw the shacks of the Homesteaders ... Poor haggard drudge, like a ghost wailing in the wilderness, nine times out of ten.

"Hector St. John, you have lied to me. You lied even more scurrilously to yourself ... Jean Jacques, Bernardin de St Pierre, Chateaubriand, exquisite Francois Le Vaillant, you lying little lot, with your Nature-Sweet-and-Pure!"

Lawrence, I must admit, is right. There is lying in this book, which is why every type of person from dictators to dreamy little provincial girls have found what they were looking for in its pages. But, as Lawrence continues, "Crevecoeur was an artist as well as a liar, otherwise we would not have bothered with him," and the same can be said of Bernardin. What remains true in this book is worth more, for me, than all of the dry ironies of Madame Bovary.

Randall Jarrell once wrote that "Soon we shall know everything the eighteenth century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us." Well, it is worth blunting your sense of the ridiculous (temporarily), finding your inner Emma Rouault, and trying to rediscover some of what Paul et Virginie has to teach.

Orley Farm, by Anthony Trollope

I was once having an imaginary conversation with a real friend, a political scientist, and trying to defend the value of novels, poetry, and plays. A sentence came into my mind -- I was pleased with it for a second. "Literature," I said, comparing it in my mind to various other disciplines, "doesn't pretend to have answers that it does not actually have."

I checked myself, though, thinking of all the great works that would contradict this statement. It might not have been the most airtight aphorism, but while I was reading Orley Farm, it struck me as a good description of the appeal of Anthony Trollope's novels.

"He confounds me with his mastery," Tolstoy once wrote of Trollope. It is a hard word to associate with Trollope's baggy, seemingly improvised books, with their repetitions and occasionally paint-by-numbers romances, but mastery it is to have to written so much and lied so little. In scene after scene of his novels, you think, "yes, that's the way it would go." And Trollope's people -- unlike, say, Dickens's -- always feel like they could have existed in the real world, rather than being brilliantly designed to produce an effect.

It is a commonplace to say that, to make a piece of writing seem effortless and natural, you have to work quite hard at it. Trollope, somehow, sat down every morning at five and, keeping an eye on the clock, produced at least 250 words every fifteen minutes and spooled off dozens of immense novels that are probably the most lifelike books I have ever read. Nathaniel Hawthorne gave one of the best descriptions of the atmosphere of these books:

[Trollope's novels] precisely suit my taste, -- solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were being made a show of.

In Orley Farm, one feels that one is getting close to the actual lives of city lawyers in their chambers and commercial travelers selling their cheap iron furniture from door to door. Trollope, as he hews his lump out of Victorian society, can move between classes with no sense of strain, and also little sense of animus. When he does feel anger, as in the satirical chapters of The Way We Live Now, it tends to throw the book off track.

He is a hard writer to point to when defending the dignity of literature. He has no social agenda and doesn't seem to care much for art as a form of spiritual transcendence. But he has another quality which is unusual in a novelist and seems to me to be rather noble: he respects the privacy of his characters. He refuses to wander through the private rooms of their minds, tracking down every last thought. Even writing from an omniscient standpoint, one of Trollope's characteristic moves is to stop at a certain threshhold and declare that beyond this point he isn't sure what the character is thinking.

"What the lady's intentions were I will not pretend to say..." he writes, in some form or another, every few chapters. It is a bizarre thing to say about a person that you have made up, whose thoughts, on other occasions, you have been quite willing to detail. Even when he writes "she thought," he is often prone to add a qualifier like "we must presume," as if there is a limit beyond which his knowledge does not go. Another of his strategies is to detail several possible states of mind, and then declare that the truth is some unknown admixture of all of them. Basically (and this is rare for writers) he has manners, and won't extract more knowledge from his characters than they want to give. Another way to say this is that he respects the central mystery of each person, and in this sense -- and probably only in this sense -- he strikes me as a spiritual writer.

In Orley Farm, for example, which centers around the question of whether a will was forged by the widow of a dead landowner, he withholds a certain corner of a character's mind in a way that would be aggravating if he didn't also grant a similar margin to other characters: the attorneys on either side of the case, one in love with a judge's daughter, another infatuated with one of his clients; servants at various houses; a couple of witnesses -- one easily cowed by the crafty barristers, another not -- and a handful of gentry and commercial people who take sides with the various parties in the case.

It is an enormous canvas; several characters are quite needlessly introduced, and then sketched in detail only to disappear. It is not, like Dickens, a beautiful pattern, but somehow I never complained while reading. Encountering the people is itself a pleasure, and you never know when Trollope will have them become part of the story again -- it often seems that he doesn't know himself, and simply calls them back on stage when he starts to miss them.

One of the marks of his respect for characters is that he treats them like they are all living a life apart from the book they happen to be in. Even though he tends to write from a fairly fixed moral position, and is willing to declare that someone has acted badly, he never presumes (one of his favorite words) to make a final judgment on anyone. In short, he doesn't pretend to have answers that he doesn't actually have.

This is one of the reasons that, unlike the other novels of his era, Trollope's retain their interest to the last page. Normally, when the main action has been settled, it is a bit of a slog to get through the chapters of family happiness and the sorting-out of fates. Trollope refuses to sort people out in this way; it would be akin to passing judgment on the rest of a character's life. People go on; even if their characters may incline them in certain directions, who knows what might happen to them next.

Here, for example, is one of my favorite passages in the book, involving Lady Mason, the widow at the center of the trial, after her affairs have been decided:

Of her future life I will not venture to say anything. But no lesson is truer than that which teaches us to believe that God does temper the wind to the shorn lamb. To how many has it not seemed, at some one period of their lives, that all was over for them, and that to them in their afflictions there was nothing left but to die ... For Lady Mason let us hope that the day will come in which she also may once again trick her beams in some modest, unassuming way, and that for her the morning may even yet be sweet with a glad warmth. For us, here in these pages, it must be sufficient to say this last kindly farewell.

Let us hope. This is the broad-minded note that Trollope's novels tend to strike, even with their villains. They are wonderful, generous books. Orley Farm was apparently one of Trollope's personal favorites, and along with The Way We Live Now is probably the best of his free-standing novels. I still have several of the Barchester and Pallister novels ahead of me, and am perfectly content that Trollope woke up religiously every morning and kept his pen moving.

Stephen King's Misery and the Uses of Horror

Stephen King has been lobbying for respectability for a while, and the literary world seems to be coming around to him. Unlike most of the celebrated novels from the last thirty years, people are still reading King’s old work, and some of it seems likely to survive. I haven't read his other novels, but just going off the movie adaptations, there seem to be a wealth of narrative ideas in King's books. He isn’t, like most successful pulp novelists, simply writing to formula.

Misery, published in 1987, feels like a particularly personal book. It’s hero, Paul Sheldon, is a writer of historical romances who wants to be thought of as a serious writer, and even with all of his success has been hurt by the dismissiveness of critics. One day, drunk, having finally written what he thinks is a great book, he crashes his car in a Colorado snowstorm. When he comes to, his legs are shattered, and a large, strange woman named Annie Wilkes is taking care of him in her house. This care includes dosing him with powerful pain medication, on which Sheldon soon realizes he has become entirely dependent. Wilkes, an ex-nurse, is a huge fan of Sheldon’s work. She recognized him when she pulled him out of the car and hasn’t told anyone he is up in her house in the mountains.

Little by little, Sheldon realizes that his caretaker is deeply deranged. Annie becomes furious when she reads his latest romance, because Sheldon has killed off the series' main character, Misery Chastain, whom he desperately wanted to be rid of. Annie also forces Paul to burn his latest stab at literary respectability, Fast Cars, which she doesn’t think is worthy of his talent (too much profanity). Finally, trapped in his room, Paul is forced to write another novel that brings Misery back to life, while continually dealing with Annie’s rages and his own humiliating dependence.

This is certainly a gripping idea, and King develops it with great skill. It met, for me, the simplest test of a good novel: except for some pages from Sheldon’s ongoing captive manuscript, I never skimmed or even had the urge to skim. I was as interested in how things happened as what happened.

King also respects the tradition that he’s working in and has clearly read an enormous amount. Both Dumas and Fowles, past masters of the captivity narrative, come up in the novel, along with a number of other good writers. The book’s psychology is convincing, and the push and pull of power between Annie and Paul is ingeniously handled. King also has a fine sense of what needs to be left out to maintain his claustrophobic atmosphere – we get almost no backstory about Paul, and certain questions, like what became of Annie’s brief marriage, are pointedly left unanswered. There is a great deal of artistry in the book, and I think King deserves, in some ways, the respect he is looking for.

There are, however, several things about it that bother me – and they bother me not only about King but about all of his much less talented imitators working in pulp and television. Misery is about as good as the modern Gothic novel gets, so I think it is worth exploring how it works on a reader.

First, to quote one of Annie’s objections to Paul’s first draft, King cheats a little. He never cheats on plot; he knows all about how locks can be picked and how drug dependencies are created. But there are certain aspects of reality that he simply refuses to explore, and at a certain point this becomes an evasion instead of a narrative choice. For example, Sheldon can’t get out of bed for much of the book, and there is no bathroom where Annie has locked him up. A bedpan is mentioned near the end, but this obvious and intimate element of their relationship – with Paul probably wearing an open gown, and having to be bathed and cleaned and wiped everyday if he isn’t to smell – is never mentioned (their relationship would feel very different, I think, if it was). This aspect of Sheldon's plight is probably much more horrifying than anything else King describes – it is also something that everyone, at some point, is probably going to have to experience or watch someone else experience – but it is entirely outside of the realm of King’s interests.

The obvious objection is that King’s primary concern in Misery is not the body’s breakdown, but the nature of evil. Because Annie turns out to be not just a slightly addled fan but an actual psychopath. Paul is not her first victim; she has been killing people ever since she was an adolescent, and then repeatedly, quietly, and pointlessly ever since she became a nurse, until she was finally dismissed from her post. There is a long tradition of remorseless characters in literature, from Iago to Rigaud in Little Dorrit to Kate in East of Eden, whose motiveless malignity is, I suppose, meant to personify the same force that causes the tumor to metastasize, the stair to be not quite where we thought it was.

King is clearly trying to recreate this same sense of an implacable and unreasonable force bearing down on each of us. The Goddess never dies, Paul thinks, even when he is finally free of Annie, because she has become more than a human being for him; she is, like Iago, a demon.

Demons, though, to retain their power, must exist outside of psychology. And this is where Annie fails as a character, and in a profound way. Like so many modern villains, her actions are explained using the latest research from the abnormal psych people. We learn about Annie’s depressive states, her sense of paranoia, her inability to feel anything for all the infants and terminally ill patients she has killed as a nurse. When Annie suddenly feels bad about buying Paul a terrible typewriter than has hurt his hands – she actually cries – Paul, for the first time, considers why his captor might be this way:

Paul thought that the occasional moments like this were the most ghastly of all, because in them he saw the woman she might have been if her upbringing had been right or the drugs squirted out by all the funny little glands inside her had been less wrong.

This is not real empathy, and it also manages to kill the demon. The line about Annie's upbringing is disingenuous, because we never find out anything, good or bad, about her upbringing, and, like Kate from East of Eden, she began killing when she was still a child. All we have left as an explanation, then, is her glands. Annie is a typewriter with a piece broken; there is no hope for her, no possibility of an understanding than is more than mechanical. And there is absolutely no grandeur to her evil.

Such a person doesn’t produce the dread of a great villain like Iago, or the true sympathy that one can feel for, say, Mr. Falkland in Caleb Williams – instead, Annie just makes people scared. During the week I read this novel, I remember sitting in a bathroom stall in a library and being convinced that a man who walked in was going to burst through the doors and kill me. I even waited a second to buzz up a friendly census taker because I thought he was part of some murderous scheme.

There’s something unhealthy about this. A great book should make you feel more at home in the world, not less – the truth always does this, even if it’s unpleasant. But books like this, and the thousands by King’s much less talented followers, ignore genuine and universal anxieties – like Sheldon’s inability to clean himself or go to the bathroom – to create fresh and stupid ones. They succeed largely based on manufacturing false unease – a world filled with terrors that are, at best, immensely rare.

To some extent, this obsession with psychopaths reflects a natural interest both in the macabre and the extremes of human experience. People have always wanted to hear about murderers. There’s a difference today, though. Our fictional killers, like Annie, are less and less driven to crime by money or passion or revenge, and more often are actually wired wrong. They kill and torture simply out of some error of the brain. I suspect that anyone who watches even a little bit of TV could put together a psychological profile of one of these killers, representing the latest state of criminological science (I am tempted to put quotation marks around that last part).

Brain chemistry, glands: these are the explanations that the times demand. Some of the reasons are obvious: people who are simply, fundamentally, wrong, are the only ones who could possibly justify our fiercely punitive system of justice. We have to believe that such people not only exist but are quite common: the incorrigible, the unreachable. Not many people consider, though, what follows if we consider someone beyond hope. Tolstoy talked about this in The Kingdom of God is Within You. He discusses John Chrysostom’s arguments that some men are fundamentally bad, and must be restrained by force if the world is not to come to ruin:

This is ill grounded, Tolstoy writes, because if we allow ourselves to regard any men as intrinsically wicked men, then in the first place we annul, by so doing, the whole idea of the Christian teaching, according to which we are all equals and brothers, as sons of one Father in heaven.

Tolstoy also points out that there is no “perfect and unfailing distinction by which one could positively know the wicked from the good,” but he didn’t think then of the false certainty provided by brain chemistry and psychology, with which modern juries and modern readers are easily convinced that the death of a certain person is an unmixed blessing.

I am not a Christian, and I am not sure if there is such a thing as a soul, but I know that, if we are truly convinced that there is even a single person who, from birth, is completely impervious to love and incapable of empathy, we have to throw out even the possibility of one, because by what mechanism would some people receive a soul and others be denied one?

I’ve never meet one of these supposedly soulless individuals, though, so I’m not willing to do this, and I think there is something profoundly unhealthy about narratives like Misery and all of its screen siblings that present such people to us again and again. Faulkner talked about the modern author who writes “not of the heart but of the glands” – those same funny little glands that control Annie’s behavior – and saw it accurately as an assault on the dignity of man. This has to be a consideration when we try to measure the value of a book. King has an abundant imagination and a fine sense of craft – he is also, quite probably, a perfectly humane and intelligent person – but his books encourage an ugly and easy view of the world that I find inconsistent with real writing. Certain tasks, even done well, are better not done at all.

Back, by Henry Green

I’ve only read a few books in my life with awe: Anna Karenina was one, when I was 19, and Party Going was another, a few years later, read at a single sitting in a dark corner of the college library. I’d discovered an ugly paperback in a used bookstore a few days earlier containing three of Henry Green’s novels: Loving, Living, and Party Going. The cover was filled with praise – extravagant praise, not the polite bookjacket variety – from people like W.H. Auden and Rebecca West, and I bought the book because I was curious why I’d never heard anything about the author.

Within three pages of Party Going I couldn’t stop. Not because of plot, because there was almost none, and not because of fine writing, because Green’s sentences were often baffling, and certainly not because I liked the characters, because they were virtually interchangeable, not particularly bright, and had few apparent concerns other than sleeping with each other. But I knew almost immediately that this was one of the great reading experiences of my life. Like Tolstoy – and this is the only similarity – ordinary life seemed to be taking on an intensity and strangeness that it had never possessed before on a page.

In Anna Karenina, though, I had some sense of how Tolstoy was doing it. There were insights to admire, huge passages where you could see how the spell was being cast phrase by phrase. With Green I had no idea, and still don’t. I’ve never even recommended Party Going to anyone because I’m at a loss to explain why I think it’s such a great book, and I’m not sure who else it would appeal to.

Over the years, Green has accumulated an odd coterie of admirers – Updike, Eudora Welty, Tim Parks, Terry Southern – and, as far as I can tell, very few readers. Each admirer also tends to connect with a different set of Green’s books because they are extraordinarily dissimilar. Despite some obvious stylistic similarities – the preponderance of dialogue, the occasional dropping of articles, strange word orders – each novel takes on a different method of storytelling and an entirely new set of narrative problems. And unlike, say, D.H. Lawrence, Green doesn’t have a stable set of moral concerns, and occasionally appears to have no concerns at all: his books don’t seem to be making points or pushing any view of the world on the reader. At first, it’s hard to see what drove Green to write them, and indeed Green wasn’t too sure himself. He had plenty of money and a job available to him running his family’s factory, and he apparently wrote novels because he couldn’t help it. He once said that he was no more proud of producing his books than growing fingernails.

Green's books are the work of a genuine savant. He never seems to have struggled through a derivative phrase, and his earlier books (the first was published when he was 19) are just as singular, in different ways, as his later ones. All of his novels, plus one extraordinary memoir, seem to casually shrug off the entire history of the art form – every familiar narrative device, every piece of emotional shorthand that we’ve come to expect as readers – and cut closer to the truth of lived experience than any writer I’ve come across.

Which is not to say that everything he wrote is a masterpiece. None of the four other Green novels I’ve read has given me the same sense of finished perfection as Party Going, but each has its wonders. Loving is probably the most charming of Green’s books, the most filled with characterization and plot and the sort of satisfactions one expects from novels, but it’s also a little sentimental, too broadly comic, the tiniest bit predictable.

It’s still a great book, though, and so are the others. Slowly, people are bringing them back into print (the Penguin edition with the three novels, and a fantastic introduction from Updike, was the only one available for a long time). Dalkey Archive Press has just re-issued Back, one of Green’s least-known novels, with the ugliest, most dashed-off cover I’ve ever seen on a modern book. Oh well. What’s inside is wonderful. I picked it up after reading Philip Hensher’s review of Jeremy Treglown’s dull biography of Green, which I slogged through several years ago (Hensher’s review is also a fine appreciation of Green’s work).

Back is about Charley Summers, a veteran returning from a German prison camp, and now using a wooden leg. The war is almost over and the streets are still filled with bombed out ruins. The woman Charley loved – who married someone else before he even left – died while he was in the camp, but not before having a child that Charley thinks might be his. Then Charley runs across a woman who looks exactly like his dead lover, a resemblance which is eventually explained, and he begins to lose his already disordered grasp on reality.

Already, this is like no other Green novel I’ve read: the focus on a single protagonist, the exploration of irregular mental states, and also the huge amount of plot covered in the first fifty pages. The book gets a little bogged down in the beginning, because Green dislikes narrative summary, and has to provide all of this information through conversations and little wisps of thought and suggestion. So there are some rickety scenes that seem to exist only to give us plot cues. But one survives on the touches. Here is a fairly ordinary passage, early in the book when Charley goes to visit his lover’s graveyard:

His felt thoughts began to wander. Of course he was lucky to have a job, his seat kept warm. There were plenty still over on the other side would give the cool moon to stand in his shoes. And they would get on with it if they were here, not spend as he was doing a deal of money on travelling to old places.

Start reading any of Green’s books and some long dormant faculty in the brain becomes alert. The words are simple enough but the phrases never seem to slide into their usual slots, to be skimmed and forgotten – you have to read slowly, but it feels like an engrossing conversation rather than work. Why is “as he was doing” tucked into the middle of that sentence, comma free? And what in the world does he mean by “felt thoughts”? (I’m still not sure about the latter.) In this heightened state of attention, awake but slightly disoriented, strange bits of poetry come floating to us down the sentences – “would give the cool moon to stand in his shoes.” Not showy lyricism, but ordinary speech at its most expressive.

Those words aren’t Charley’s, but society’s voice echoing in his head – “the cool moon,” a folk phrase – telling him how lucky he is to be back from the camps with a job to support him. Even when Green’s characters are alone, they are always talking to each other, as we all do, imagining what some person or group will think of us. This is why, despite the small casts of Green’s novels, their slim length, and the virtual absence of historical detail, they feel as dense and comprehensive as the great Victorian triple-deckers; society is still present in these books, talking to and through the characters.

Back, in particular, strikes me as having the literary sensibility of an earlier time. What other writer of Green’s era would feel comfortable taking a step back from a character and saying, simply, “She was a good-hearted girl”? And in the conversations that make up the majority of Green’s later novels, a narrative presence will suddenly leap up after a “he said” to mention that the previous remark was a lie. Green cannot entirely abandon the prerogatives of the 19th century novelist, and he hovers over his books and gestures now and then towards a world of stable truth that most other modernist writers became uncomfortable with and finally abandoned.

The book, for a time, shifts back in tone further even than the Victorians. Green introduces a long extract from an 18th century French court memoir, a parallel narrative about a woman becoming obsessed with a man who looks like a long dead lover. This interpolation, only thinly integrated into the narrative, wrecks the world of the book a little, but it is interesting enough for me to forgive its presence, especially since it sets up the second half of the novel, which is masterful.

Green has gotten the plot setup out of the way, and what follows is one of the most moving and strangely convincing love stories I’ve ever read, alive with pain and sex and a little dementia. The two people don’t come to gradually appreciate each other's fine qualities in the usual manner; the process is much more mysterious and true to life, with feints and turns and sudden irrational changes in mood and then the final coming to terms – and through it all the charge of sexual energy that drives all of Green’s best work.

Here is another passage. Charley’s secretary at the office, Miss Pitter, has been invited to a house in the country. She is sure Charley will come visit her at night, and she is waiting in bed, listening for him:

So they came back to the house with her, and she’d slipped upstairs, got into a smashing pyjama suit bought specially the day before, put out the light and, quaking with wonder, she’d lain there. She could hear them talk in the kitchen. And how they’d talked. Then they came up. And she’d wondered some more. Her own worst enemy would not have laughed at her that half hour. Even if it wasn’t the first time, of course. But nothing. She was all ready, pretending to be asleep, spread out like butter on bread. But nothing. She knew it was Charley when he went to the bathroom. For just that minute it was delicious to wait. But what all this added up to, she felt at the time, was that these repatriated men came back very queer from those camps. So in the end she’d gone to sleep alone, unvisited.

This is all done effortlessly, but so many voices have swooped in and out, taking us inside the character’s mind in her own words ("smashing pyjama suit") and the narrator's ("quaking with wonder"), and then moving us into the world of larger truth – where we learn that Miss Pitter has done this before – and then that marvelous phrase, “spread out like butter on bread,” where we get her thought, the warmth of the bed, and sexual anticipation all at once. And look at how the rhythms of her heartbeat have been embedded in the prose.

Then there is the oddest line of all: “Her own worst enemy would not have laughed at her that half hour.” I think much of Green’s spirit, his generosity, is in that line. He is deeply truthful writer, often a dark one, but he never enjoys inflicting disaster on his characters and makes allowances for every human weakness. His dialogue is filled with such affection for people and their peculiarities - "We're not talking of me, this instant minute, thanks" - as well as the peculiarities of class and region and profession, all of which may blur but will never disappear.

I'm not sure why Green stopped writing. He died in the early 70s, without publishing a word after 1952. Apparently he spent much of that time drunk. I don't want to pretend that I have any explanation for this, but I wonder if part of his dryness came from the loss of the vernacular culture from which he drew so much of his inspiration. Synge wrote that "All art is a collaboration; and there is little doubt that in the happy ages of literature, striking and beautiful phrases were as ready to the story-teller's or the playwright's hand, as the rich cloaks and dresses of his time. It is probable that the Elizabethan dramatist took his ink-horn and sat down to his work he used many phrases that he had just heard, as he sat at dinner, from his mother or his children." In Pack My Bag, Green has wonderful samples of working class British talk: "When they describe," he writes, "as everyone knows, they are literally unsurpassed in the spoken word." And one can imagine him listening to maids and workers and the office typing pool, all of their words mixing with his imagination and becoming art.

Much of that world was already going after the war, and maybe Green was himself withdrawing from what was left of it. In any case, it survives in the books - nine novels and a memoir - and it is among the great fictional universes left by any writer this century, a happy age of literature all by itself. The Penguin volume is probably the place to start, but this is another great one for those that fall under the spell.

Liars and Saints, by Maile Meloy

Most serious modern novelists, having committed themselves to a marginal medium, feel the need to defend the virtues of prose against the film camera. So they tend to write books that show off what words can accomplish - with labyrinthine plots that could never be put on screen, for example, or long essayistic passages; baroque prose, language games, individualized 1st person voices - all ensuring that no one ever accuses them of writing glorified screenplays.

Which is fine and understandable, and some great work has been done – but there is also a self-consciousness about this attitude that robs readers of one of the primary pleasures of stories: escapism, immersion. Immersion itself seems, for many writers, something to be wary of, since it is one of the things that film can accomplish so easily, a lazy and dangerous pleasure.

So it’s good to remember sometimes that prose doesn’t need too hysterical a defense; its virtues can be apparent even in ordinary storytelling by a good writer. Here is a paragraph about a third of the way through Maile Meloy’s wonderful first novel, Liars and Saints. It is about a crumbling marriage. The husband, Henry, has run for a position in the California state legislature, won, and moved to the state capital. His wife Clarissa has been stuck in the house with their baby, Abby.

When Henry came home, with drafts of bills to read, she said that if they were going to make this marriage work, they couldn’t live apart. He was too busy and too tired to argue very long, so she went with him to Sacramento, and moved into the tiny apartment he kept there. She took Abby to watch the debates, and made friends with Henry’s colleagues, and met lobbyists in the halls. Henry accused her of flirting with them, but she was only talking about the bills – and if the lobbyists liked her, so what? It could be useful. They said she had good ideas. She thought about becoming a lobbyist, too; she might be good at the research and the persuasion. But on three different afternoons she wanted to listen to important hearings, so she left Abby playing on the lobby carpet, just outside the chambers, perfectly safe. And each time, someone found Abby crying in a marble hallway somewhere else, with a full cloth diaper, and took her to Henry in committee, and Henry came out of his committee to find Clarissa. The first time it happened he smiled and said, “I have a job, Clar, and it’s to stay in that meeting.” The second time he just said, “Diaper.” The third time he handed Abby over silently, with a dark look, and that was the end of Clarissa’s lobbying career. She moved back to Sebastopol, less happy than ever.

This is the story of several months in a paragraph. Films have tried jumps like this – think of Kane and his wife at the breakfast table, the marriage dissolving in three cuts – but these scenes inevitably come off as a sort of glib shorthand; we never really understand what happened.

Here, along with the three filmable scenes, we get Henry’s mood and the texture of Clarissa’s mind – “perfectly safe,” she thinks about the baby left in the hallway – along with some of Clarissa’s naiveté, written in just the words she would use herself: “she might be good at the research and the persuasion.” Still, obviously, a kind of shorthand – that’s what art is, after all – but for me much more satisfying. The marriage is inhabited, and the story is told with a naturalness that makes it clear that this is the only medium in which to tell it.

Much of Liars and Saints moves at this same pace, and with the same sense of ease. The novel manages to cover three generations and more than fifty years in 260 pages; I can't imagine it being successfully filmed, even with its tight and involved plot. But I was lost in it; I read the book in great gulps over three days, anxious to find out what happened, and only stopped occasionally to let out little shouts of admiration. (How did Meloy write something this good this young?) The book is the story of the Santerre family: Teddy and Yvette, the father and mother, their two daughters Margot and Clarissa, and their marriages and children. Over the course of the story, which treats the points of view of various characters in short chapters, Meloy writes convincingly as a WWII pilot (Teddy), an old French-Canadian woman (Lenore, Yvette’s mother), and a fidgety adolescent boy, along with several others.

The story moves at a breakneck pace – with pregnancies and incest and deaths – and covers so much time that the events don’t feel as unlikely and melodramatic as they otherwise might: wait long enough, after all, and something huge will happen to you. The book doesn’t feel formless or arbitrary, either – there is a sense that the writer has discovered the shape of the narrative while writing; certain connections suggested themselves and pushed the book where it needed to go.

The story's disturbing implications only become apparent slowly; Meloy rarely steps in and spells anything out. As things go increasingly haywire for all of the characters, one gets the sense that – for all of the decisions these people get to make – the actual control that they have over their lives is pretty minimal. Genetic inheritance, family decisions, the historical moment, their own compulsions, bequeathed to them from God knows where – one starts to feel the truth of just how compelled most actions are.

Even the simple fact that Yvette passes on her beauty to her two daughters – as Clarissa, in turn, passes it on to hers – entirely changes the course of all of their lives: they are constantly in the path of other people’s desires, and so many of the events in the book would not take place if someone’s face happened to be differently proportioned.

That’s a terrifying thought, isn’t it? And this sort of determinism tends to make for dark and not entirely satisfying books; people expect (quite reasonably) change and personal agency from characters. And Meloy gives us some near the end, and it doesn’t feel wholly implausible – after all, I hope some sort of growth is possible over the course of a long life.

But still, something feels off about the later parts of the book, although the galloping plot certainly maintains interest. Meloy introduces the rather annoying voice of a child struggling with religious concerns (the whole family is Catholic, which is significant throughout) and can no longer hold back the urge to lay some ideas on us: evil is inextricably tied to good in life, etc. There is also a confrontation between two characters that has been waiting to happen for half the novel and comes off as completely false. The whole last chapter is a bit of a life-goes-on shrug.

But enough complaints. It's been a long time since I read a new first novel that was this good. Everyone should go out and read it and feel happy that such good stories are still being written.

A last note: Meloy wrote a sort of sequel to this novel called A Family Daughter, where one of this book's characters, from a similar but not identical family, turns out to have written Liars and Saints. The novel is not quite a disaster – she is too good a writer for that – but it is a real step down in inspiration. I gave up about halfway through. I felt like Meloy was blowing on embers that had already burned themselves out quite brilliantly in this novel. And A Family Daughter ends up scrambling the world that Liars and Saints creates so memorably.

The book, along with her collection of stories, also showed how Meloy's interest in the ramifications of beauty - so well-handled in Liars and Saints - can become limiting. Throughout her work, she seems to be almost exclusively interested in lovely people and their various entanglements. She likes things to happen quickly and it's easier with good looking people, I suppose. Meloy's primary obsession as a writer is sexual desire and the mess it can make of things - a worthy theme, certainly - but I'll admit that, as I've read more of her work, I've gotten slightly jealous and then occasionally bored with how monotonously desirable all of her people are. Even her older characters were invariably once beautiful, so the only loneliness in her books is the kind people feel when they've done everything and haven't found what they were looking for - and this is certainly not the most common variety.

Anyway, I'm hoping the sequel was an aberration, because if Liars and Saints is representative of her talent - and if Meloy can broaden her interests to include some different sorts of people - I think she will be one of the great writers of this generation. I’m looking forward to her new book of stories, which is coming out in a month or so.

On Wings of Song, by Thomas Disch

I was an occasional reader of Thomas Disch's blog, Endzone. Most of the posts were just ordinary musings, but there were also some brilliant bits of verse and an obviously immense intelligence on display. When I was looking at John Crowley's website a few weeks ago, I found out that Disch had committed suicide in his apartment.

Something about following a person's life online and then hearing this was really disturbing, maybe even more than when I heard about David Foster Wallace. Which was also tremendously sad.

This is the best of the tributes to Disch that I've read online. The story of his last days is pretty awful. I'm sure that money wasn't the only problem, but it's depressing to think that such a great writer might have been even partially compelled to end things because of a lack of resources.

Because he was, it turns out, a great writer. I picked up one of Disch's old novels, On Wings of Song, after I found out what had happened to him, as an ineffectual form of tribute. The book is out of print and I had to request it from library storage.

It is a brilliant novel, one of the weirdest and most imaginative I've ever read. Any description of the plot is going to sound a little silly, and I was resistant at first, I'll admit. I was never a big reader of science fiction growing up, and I'm still much more susceptible to silliness when it's wearing some armor and swinging a sword. But this book won me over quickly and entirely.

On Wings of Song is set in the near future. Most of the book takes place in Iowa, which has become a severely repressive place, both by law and convention. There is a faction known colloquially as the "undergodders" dictating most social policy, such as the availability of certain newspapers and radio stations. (Realistically, however, most of these media do end up getting into the state through surrounding, more progressive areas like Minnesota.) The undergodders save their most virulent hatred for the practice of flying -- I guess you could call it a "wedge issue" in this world -- which is the process by which people, using music, can escape their physical bodies and become creatures called fairies.

These fairies cannot actually be detected, although there are devices to trap them using sound and other stimuli. Fairies can, however, re-enter their bodies after flying and give accounts of their experience, but the experience of flight is often so intoxicating that many people abandon their bodies and leave them to die -- in a corporeal sense, at least, since fairies appear to be immortal.

I know, I know, it sounds silly! But trust me, give this book about forty pages and you'll be completely hooked. Its protagonist is Daniel Weinreb, the fairly ordinary son of a dentist who ends up, through a venial crime, in one of the state's prison camps.

After hearing a man sing in the camp, Daniel becomes obsessed with flying, which is actually quite difficult and requires both musical skill and something like depth of soul -- it takes complete involvement in a song that one is singing (along with, sometimes, the help of various devices) to achieve the escape velocity required to leave the body.

Along the way, Disch throws off some brilliant and terrifying details of this particular future. What makes his world so endlessly interesting is that it isn't monopolar. Unlike a fair amount of science fiction, everything in his world doesn't follow from one central conceit, with the rest of the author's energy going towards tracing obvious consequences and inventing bits of technological embroidery. Disch's world is actually alive and random and in flux; policies change and become more or less repressive, and there are economic and technological and social changes that don't all cut in a single direction.

I'll leave the disturbingly plausible P-W lozenge for readers to discover themselves, but here is an example of what I'm talking about. This is a description of part of Daniel's job at the prison camp, which involves:

.. the breeding of a specially mutated form of termite that was used as a supplement in various extended meat and cheese products. The bugs bred at Station 78 in all their billions, were almost as economical a source of protein as soybeans, since they could be grown in the labyrinthine underground bunkers to quite remarkable sizes with no other food source than a black sludge-like paste produced for next to nothing by various urban sanitation departments. The termites' ordinary life-cycle had been simplified and adapted to assembly-line techniques, which were automated so that, unless there was a breakdown, workers weren't obliged to go into the actual tunnels.

This horrific passage might not even be forward-thinking anymore; the book was written in 1978, and for all I know this is already happening in some form, at least for animal feed. But the primary appeal of this book -- for me, at least -- is not in futurological details, as impressive as they might be. And it isn't even the passages of extraordinary psychological perceptiveness scattered throughout the book. For example: "Grandison Whiting listened to the exposé [Daniel is talking about the abuses in the prison camp] with a glistening attentiveness behind which Daniel could sense not indignation but the meshing of various cogs and gears of a logical rebuttal."

With so many phrases in the book -- "glistening attentiveness" -- I thought yes, yes that's exactly right. (I also loved the line, "She was already, at fifteen, a fanatic in the cause of her own all-conquering good looks.")

So what is wonderful about this book? I'm not sure I know. Maybe its unpredictability, its ability to expand in the mind. Flying -- which Daniel keeps unsuccessfully trying to do as the plot winds its way through several twists and changes in perspective and location -- is obviously a metaphor for transcendence: artistic, athletic, religious, whatever. And even though the book stays true to its reality and doesn't seem like an exercise in connecting allegorical dots, the idea of flying becomes, by the end, incredibly charged and resonant.

It might especially connect with people (I am one) who are more moved by music than any other art, and enjoy singing and playing instruments, but have never quite been able to get good enough -- in technical terms and in terms of complete internal commitment -- to lose themselves in the process of creating music.

There is something, it is true, that is a little juvenile in this obsession with losing inhibitions. And, in a wonderful interview, Disch acknowledged that "science fiction, in our culture, is basically intended for children, or young adults, as they say, and a certain amount of science fiction has to fulfill the emotional and intellectual needs of 13, 14, 15-year olds."

He obviously wasn't trying to describe his own work, but there were parts of On Wings of Song where I felt like this was still true. There is a character named Barbara, for example, in the prison camp, who chides Daniel for not running away from Iowa at fifteen like his friend did: "In any case, Daniel," she says, "age has nothing to do with anything. It's the excuse people use till they're old enough to acquire better excuses--a wife, or children, or a job. There are always going to be excuses if you look for them."

Deep inside, I heard a little cheer from myself at 15, who is still in there somewhere. Because the emotional and intellectual needs of young adults don't actually go away; they just get wrapped in layers of complexity and compromise and tolerance (and wisdom?) But they can still be reached -- and should be, every once in a while, because they are legitimate needs and we muffle them at our own peril.

There are some things, though, that I do feel I've outgrown. I'm more bored than thrilled by sacrilege at this point, and the book's satire of fundamentalism didn't do much for me. Also, it doesn't end that well. In a scene near the end, when Daniel is singing a song about honeybunnies on stage after dyeing his skin to look like a black man (I think he might have been in a bunny costume, too) the old spectre of silliness finally re-emerged. Part 3 of the book in general, where this scene takes place, didn't click for me except in parts, and the conclusion is surprising but not really satisfying.

But On Wings of Song is at least two-thirds of a masterpiece, which is more than enough for me. It should really be back in print. I'm going to read Camp Concentration and 334 next, and maybe some of Disch's essays and poetry. I'm sorry I didn't find them sooner.

Ask the Dust, by John Fante

I was on a plane when I came across Robert Towne's film of Ask the Dust, with Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek. I remembered the movie getting bad reviews and was surprised to find that the portion I managed to see -- roughly the middle half -- was actually good. Or at least it exercised a certain fascination. This fascination was mainly born of the fact that something about the relationship between the two main characters -- Arturo Bandini, a struggling Italian writer in Los Angeles, and Camilla Lopez, a local Mexican waitress -- simply didn't make sense. Since most movies make entirely too much sense, this cloud of irrationality that hung over the two of them was weirdly alluring.

Here's what I mean. Arturo is obviously attracted to Camilla, and she essentially offers herself to him on several occasions, but what could have been glorious or at least reasonably satisfying sexual encounters dissolve into fury and abuse and violence, for no reason that I could make out.

Several months later, I picked up the novel -- it is widely acknowledged as a California classic -- and it quickly became clear that there is an explanation for this strangeness. The novel, unlike the movie, is not mainly about writerly ambition or racial self-loathing: it is about Catholic sexual guilt.

The strange thing is that Bandini is a nonbeliever -- a fairly virulent one, at times -- but he simply can't escape the habits of his upbringing. He is constantly thinking about mortal sins in which he does not actually believe. He is desperate for sex but so estranged from his desire that he can only experience arousal when alone. He goes to a prostitute and then runs away in terror, after throwing all of his money at her just so she'll leave him alone.

Bandini is finally only capable of being with a woman when he is pretending that she is Camilla. And this other woman -- his only sexual partner in the book -- is grotesquely scarred around the loins, so can barely bring himself to look at her.

Eventually, despite being unable to touch Camilla except in rage, Bandini declares that he is in love with her, and as far as I can tell he is sincere. He sends Camilla some conventional, mostly plagiarized woman-on-a-pedestal poetry. She is understandably amused and then annoyed by Bandini’s courtship, which alternates between declarations of love and racist insults.

Camilla, in any case, is already in love with someone else at the restaurant, a bartender named Sammy who has no particular respect for her and is occasionally abusive (he gets more and more hateful towards her as the book goes on). There is a telling passage when Arturo finally gets why Camilla wants to be with Sammy:

I understood it. She did not hate Arturo Bandini, not really. She hated the fact that he did not meet her standard. She wanted to love him, but she couldn't. She wanted him like Sammy: quiet, taciturn, grim, a good shot with a rifle, a good bartender who accepted her as a waitress and nothing else. I got out of the car, grinning, because I knew that would hurt her.

"Accepted her as a waitress" -- that's one of the key lines in this book. Arturo cannot honestly be with any woman, because he refuses to accept people as they wish to be accepted. The prostitute, for example, has no interest in talking, but Bandini (before he flees) insists on conversation to assuage his guilt over his own desire. All Camilla wants is a night or two of companionship, but this prospect is intolerable to him, and he ends up hating her for even making the offer.

This warped view of people is, I think, a problem for the book. Since Arturo narrates, there is not a single character besides him that feels real. And the author doesn’t give us enough in the dialogue to see through the cracks in Arturo’s perspective. The crucial relationship in the book is Sammy and Camilla: why does she keep going back to him? Why is her attachment to him so deep? But Camilla is given no chance to explain herself and Sammy is barely present, so we never understand the crisis that drives the last third of the novel.

What we have left, then, is Bandini and his obsessions. The sexual stuff is frankly not that interesting to me. In this particular way I think the world has gotten saner for most people. Bandini’s other focus –- his desperation to make it as a writer –- is a more durable and entertaining set of neuroses. The alternation between messianic arrogance and deep self-loathing that dominates the first part of the book is pretty hilarious. Bandini distributes copies of his single published story all around the motel where he lives, even putting them on chairs so people will have to pick them up to sit down. No one touches them. “It was disheartening,” he writes. “A big woman in one of the deep chairs had even seated herself upon a copy, not bothering to remove it.” And Fante makes (for me) more interesting use of Bandini’s religious preoccupations in relation to his writing:

My plight drove me to the typewriter. I sat before it, overwhelmed with grief for Arturo Bandini. Sometimes an idea floated harmless through the room. It was like a small white bird. It meant no ill-will. It only wanted to help me, dear little bird. But I would strike at it, hammer it out across the keyboard, and it would die on my hands.

What could be the matter with me? When I was a boy I had prayed to St. Teresa for a new fountain pen. My prayer was answered. Anyway, I did get a new fountain pen. Now I prayed to St. Teresa again. Please, sweet and lovely saint, gimme an idea.

The prose throughout the novel is filled with the same nervy energy, which seems easier to write than it actually is. There are several great passages and a lot to admire, but by the end I felt like something had gone badly wrong with the book. Around the middle of Ask the Dust there’s an earthquake, one character disappears from the narrative, and from this point on everything starts to feel increasingly arbitrary. Events happen faster and more chaotically, and there's an apocalyptic conclusion that has a certain power but finally feels artificial to me.

What is it about Los Angeles that seems to demand such endings? The L.A. novels I've read usually contain a small group of isolated characters, all from somewhere else, all without family. There isn’t a society behind them that represents any kind of continuity, so when the slim connections between these characters break, the entire world of the novel falls apart, and the author needs increasingly heightened and histrionic consequences –- deaths, madness, natural disasters -– to give these broken ties a sense of significance (or he needs to be indifferent to the actual idea of significance). It often makes for a great deal of vitality without anything approaching tragedy. I liked this book but it pretty much disappeared from my consciousness the second I finished it. It's definitely worth the day or two it takes to read, though.

Swami and Friends, by R.K. Narayan

I have so far read five of R.K. Narayan's fourteen novels. Every one contained beautiful moments, but in almost every book, at some point or another, I had an unpleasant sense of arbitrariness. Why is this happening, I thought, instead of something else? Plot developments seemed to fall from the sky, and the books meandered their way to conclusions that felt almost random. It was like the characters were being moved around by some inscrutable fate, and not by either the intelligence of the author or the dictates of their own characters. Many of Narayan's books strike me as reflecting a deep belief that no one is really in control of their lives. Of the books I have read, only The Painter of Signs has a certain sense of inevitability – the heroine has a very narrowly defined personality, and she follows it to the end – but it is also one of the dullest of Narayan's novels.

The one book of Narayan's that I am sure is a masterpiece is Swami and Friends. It is definitely the best book about childhood I have ever read. The feeling of arbitrariness that bothers me in Narayan's other novels now seems like it simply reflects the texture of pre-adolescence, where life hasn't developed a coherent narrative yet, only a series of mini-narratives: what happened on a certain weekend, a certain day in school. The world of childhood also frees Narayan from writing about sexual desire, a subject that he cautiously approaches in some of his other books with consistently unconvincing results.

Swami and Friends is Narayan's first book, the one that he struggled so much to get published in India until it made its way, through friends in England, to Graham Greene, who immediately recognized its value. The novel bears the marks of an early effort; the beginning is a little shaky (it gets better and better as it goes on) and the inspiration comes in fits and starts. There are little stories in chapters of five of six pages, and although elements sometimes carry over from one chapter to another, there is no real plot. A ten-year-old boy named Swaminathan (Swami for short) is going to school in the 1930s during the early days of the Indian independence movement, in a sleepy medium-sized city somewhere in Tamil Nadu. There is nothing extraordinary about him; he is not particularly bright or stupid, dull or spirited. He gets in trouble occasionally. He makes friends but is basically a follower of other stronger and more assertive children.

Narayan's conviction of randomness, of life simply happening to people, seems absolutely right for the world of children. One day, for whatever reason, father is angry, so Swami avoids him (the anger is never explained). A boy who was once a close friend moves away. The boy sends a card telling everyone in the class not to forget him and to write, but forgets to put down his address on the letter. In a few pages he is entirely forgotten. The book is so funny that the melancholy only seems to catch up with it at the very end, and it is easy to overlook the amount of insight and intelligence that go into even the simplest paragraphs. Here is an example:

Father was standing in the small courtyard, wearing a dhoti and a banian, the dress which, for its very homeliness, Swaminathan detested to see him in; it indicated that he did not intend going out in the near future.
"Where are you going?"
"Nowhere."
"Where were you yesterday at this time?"
"Here."
"You are lying. You were not here yesterday. And you are not going out right now."
"That is right," Mother added, just appearing from somewhere, "there is no limit to his loafing in the sun. He will die of sunstroke if he keeps on like this."

I think the heart of Narayan's gift is in that little phrase "just appearing from somewhere." I didn't even notice it until I read the book the second time, but it so perfectly describes the feeling of being yelled at by your parents. One parent starts, and then the other person just seems to show up - from where? who knew they were even involved? - and begins to heap on more complaints that are not quite the same as the first set of complaints, making it difficult to find any way to respond. There are beautiful moments like this scattered throughout the book. And although the comedy can sometimes be excessively genial for my taste, Narayan is too honest a writer to ignore the cruelty of children to each other. Near the end of the novel, there is a moment of callousness that is all the more chilling for being small and unremarkable. And the book concludes with one of my favorite scenes in all of literature.

Greene said something about Narayan that I have always found pretty silly - "Without him," Greene wrote, "I could never have known what it is like to be Indian." Ignoring the question of whether being Indian is a single thing that can be figured out - let alone through reading! - Narayan's books strike me as a very odd sort of guide to India. I have spent a great deal of time in the part of India that (approximately) Narayan wrote about, and it is not a place that I recognize in his pages. Other than the little details of food and clothing, one would have a completely different vision of what life is like for most people in India from these novels. The sheer crowdedness is largely gone, and the hunger and desperate poverty seem to have completely disappeared. Now, the last thing I am interested in is pages of useless hand-wringing, but it seems odd that something that is so much a part of the texture of daily life - the beggars, the people living everywhere on almost nothing - merits almost no mention in Narayan's novels.

The only book where this doesn't seem odd is Swami and Friends. Because children are the one group that absolutely accepts life as it is, no matter how bad it might be for other people or for themselves. I was in New Delhi until I was eight; I'm sure there were people all around the city living in plastic tents or sleeping on the street, and I don't remember them being a source of any reflection for me. They were just another part of the world, like the air and the heat. My rather hazy memories mainly concern good and bad days at school, mean teachers, and games of cricket, which are exactly what fill up the pages of Swami and Friends. It is a shame that the book is no longer independently in print in the U.S., but you can find it in this collection. It is a great little book, one that I don't think I will ever get tired of re-reading.