American Pastoral (Philip Roth)

I strongly believe that life is too short to waste on bad reads. This one, however, was complicated by the fact that a) it won a Pulitzer so it must be A Good One, and b) it’s my book group’s pick for this month and we’re meeting on Tuesday to discuss it. There have been other times when I’ve not finished a book in time for the discussion, but this is the first time I’ve ever deliberately decided to do so.

So, what’s so bad about American Pastoral? Well, first of all, there’s the uninteresting subject matter, which I described in last week’s post. I was so happy to get so many comments in response to that post, and a lot of people mentioned books they liked despite not liking the characters or subject matter. Clearly, good storytelling and taut prose can overcome a lot. Too bad American Pastoral doesn’t have either.

Always in the back of my mind while I was reading, I kept thinking “Okay, okay, I get it!” (I had the same problem with Roth’s The Plot Against America, by the way.) For example, when the wife wants to sell the house but the husband wants to keep it — because it reminds them both of their departed daughter — we don’t need descriptions of every damn detail of the house and what the daughter used to do there. I’d give you a quote to show how long and boring and repetitive it is, but I don’t want to waste the bandwidth. ;)

What I Loved (Siri Hustvedt)

I’ve gotten into the habit of skipping over to my library’s website and placing holds on books whenever I read a good review. Which is very often these days, thank you Sunday Saloners and Weekly Geeks. The problem is, I haven’t done a good job of keeping track of which book comes from which blogger. So, please, who do I have to thank for Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved?

I’m not very far in yet, but so far I’m fascinated and impressed and in a hurry to finish this post so I can get back to reading it before the rest of my family wakes up.

I love it when writers do a good job of describing art (in this case) or music. That’s because, by definition, those things are non-verbal modes of communication. Eww, that sounded pretentious, but you know what I mean. How can you write about a painting? People do it all the time, of course, but I am always pleased and impressed when it’s done well. What’s Bred in the Bone falls in that category (of course) and also Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood. Are there any others you can think of?

I have a lot of complaints about this book but I’ll just write about one of them for now. It was a total rip-off of one of my all-time favorite books, Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business. I boldly told Doulicia, who happens to be in my book group, that if Robertson Davies was still alive, and in a litigious mood, he could probably sue Irving for plagiarism. She answered with a challenge. “Is it plagiarism,” she asked, “or homage?”

Good question! Let’s compare the two novels. I made a little table listing some of the things the two books have in common, with differences in boldface. It’s been a while since I last read Fifth Business so this may not be an exhaustive list, but these are the things that jumped out at me:

That’s a lot, don’t you think? Any one of those might be mere coincidence, particularly the themes — “guilt,” “redemption,” and “forgiveness” aren’t unique to Fifth Business, of course — but in the aggregate, that is a lot. If it isn’t plagiarism, it’s mighty close.

Owen Meany also has similarities to another Davies book, Tempest-Tost. Tempest-Tost, you may recall, is Davies’ viciously funny send-up of community theater productions. The ludicrous Christmas pageant scene in Owen Meany — baby Jesus with a visible erection, the fat boy left dangling in the wire harness, the cows with floppy antlers — that is pure Robertson Davies. Think Professor Vambrace with the grapes, the elderly and blind-as-a-bat makeup lady, the electrocuted horse: only the details differ. The subject matter, style, and humor are the same. (Aside: if I were going to write an homage to Davies, Tempest-Tost is not the book I’d choose to emulate. It’s my least favorite of his books. It’s hilarious, but too vicious: you can’t always tell if you’re laughing or crying. I did name my best-ever D&D character after someone in that book, however.)

I had that conversation with Doulicia right after the accident, when I still had those 150 pages to go. When I resumed reading I kept thinking about it. How would you know if it was intended to be homage? True, the narrator actually does mention Robertson Davies, about two-thirds of the way through. He says “If someone ever presumed to teach Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy or Robertson Davies to my Bishop Strachan students with the same, shallow, superficial understanding that I’m sure I possess of world affairs — or even American wrongdoing — I would be outraged.” When I got to that sentence I thought hmm, if Irving is grouping Davies with Dickens & Hardy, well, that would indicate admiration, wouldn’t it?

Later on, Robertson Davies pops up again. And, interestingly, not just Robertson Davies but the two specific novels that I’d been obsessing about. He says:

And now — in my very own English Department — I must endure a woman of an apparently similar temperament, a woman whose prickly disposition is also upheaved in a sea of sexual contradictions . . . Eleanor Pribst!

She even quarreled with my choice of teaching Tempest-Tost; she suggested that perhaps it was because I failed to recognize that Fifth Business was “better.” Naturally, I have taught both novels, and many other works by Robertson Davies, with great — no, with the greatest — pleasure. I stated that I’d had good luck teaching Tempest-Tost in the past. “Students feel so much like amateurs themselves,” I said. “I think they find all the intrigues of the local drama league both extremely funny and extremely familiar.” But Ms. Pribst wanted to know if I knew Kingston; surely I at least knew that the fictional town of Salterton is easily identified as Kingston. I had heard that this was true, I said, although — personally — I had not been in Kingston.

“Not been!” she cried. “I suppose that this is what comes of having Americans teaching Can Lit!” she said.

“I detest the term ‘Can Lit,’ ” I told Ms. Pribst. “We do not call American Literature ‘Am Lit.’ I see no reason to shrivel this country’s most interesting literature to a derogatory abbreviation. Furthermore,” I said, “I consider Mister Davies an author of such universal importance that I choose not to teach what is ‘Canadian’ about his books, but what is wonderful about them.”

Now that’s homage!

I’m curious, by the way, to know if Davies does get taught in high school English classes in Canada. Personally, I can’t imagine teaching Tempest-Tost. The book is so mean-spirited and catty, plus it doesn’t have a lot to offer in terms of literary “depth.”

And I’m even more curious to know what you all think about the idea of homage. If you’ve read these particular novels, or judging from my table, do you think Irving went too far? What are some other examples of books that pay tribute to others?

1. I had the theater experience of a lifetime. God bless the University Musical Society, for bringing the Royal Shakespeare Society to Ann Arbor, Mich. They didn’t just come and do a couple of shows, either. They were in residence for three weeks, giving talks and lectures and demonstrations and so forth. And we saw Julius Caesar and The Tempest. In the car on the way to The Tempest, I must admit Steve and I giggled over the fact that while we would be watching Patrick Stewart (as Prospero) in the flesh, our kids would be back home with the babysitter watching him in X-Men 3. And The Tempest was, well, I can’t even come up with an adjective. All I can say is, at the end, during the applause, people were shouting not Bravo but Thank you to the actors. And Steve and I were quite literally trembling as we left the theater.

2. The first thing I did when we got home after The Tempest was pull out the Shakespeare. Steve and I both distinctly heard the word “yare” in the opening scene, to our great delight, and we had to look it up for the pleasure of seeing it in print. And the second thing I did was find my battered copy of the Salterton Trilogy and indulge in a delicious re-read of Tempest-Tost, Robertson Davies’ viciously funny novel about an amateur theater production of guess which Shakespeare play.

3. Watched the football game at my sister’s house. A sad day. Still reeling from the loss of our beloved Bo Schembechler.

4. Steve and I watched the new biopic about Bob Dylan, No Direction Home. I was a little nervous because it’s happened more than once that I read a warts-and-all biography of an adored hero and then found my admiration subsequently, uh, lessened. James Herriot is a notable sad example. (Hen-pecked husband? Invented some of the supposedly-true events? I was happier not knowing!) But I am pleased to report that Dylan is still as mystifying as ever. What a complex, fascinating, puckish creature! And Joan Baez is SO cool.

5. Between Shakespeare, Roberston Davies, Bob Dylan, and U-M football I somehow managed to start next month’s book club book. We’re reading The French Lieutenant’s Woman and I am loving it. I mean, jeez, what’s not to love about a main character of this description:

Laziness, was, I am afraid, Charles’s distinguishing trait. . . . He knew he was overfastidious. But how could one write history with Macaulay so close behind? Fiction or poetry, in the midst of the greatest galaxy of talent in the history of English literature? How could one be a creative scientist, with Lyell and Darwin still alive? Be a statesman, with Disraeli and Gladstone polarizing all the available space?

You will see that Charles set his sights high. Intelligent idlers always have, in order to justify their idleness to their intelligence. He had, in short, all the Byronic ennui with neither of the Byronic outlets: genius and adultery.

A protagonist after my own heart. :)

6. And you may have noticed Magic for Beginners listed in my sidebar. Slowly — it’s short stories, therefore easy to set down for long periods — but surely I’m making my way through this wonderful collection. She reminds me of Joan Aiken, but for grownups. If you loved Aiken’s marvelous short stories when you were a kid, especially if you ever read the collection called Not What You Expected, you will feel right at home with this one. Not What You Expected was, for me, what Kate would call a signpost book, a book that “helps the reader to better understand what language can do, how a story or a novel or a poem works, thereby enhancing that reader’s appreciation for literature as an art form, and sending him or her off into the next reading experience equipped with a more discerning eye.” I love Kate’s idea of signpost books, and I’ve thought a lot about books in those terms ever since she wrote that post. Anyway, this book, Magic for Beginners, has a style and flavor very reminiscent of Joan Aiken’s, and I recommend it highly.

This book was tremendous. I don’t know if I’ve ever read a book that was simultaneously so sad and so entertaining. I know a few of you are also reading it right now, so I won’t give any spoilers. I’ll just say that it’s about many things, but mostly it’s about the myriad ways in which people fail to communicate with each other. And Foer is unbelievably creative in the kinds of failures he thinks up. So sad and so entertaining.

And it’s about the ways in which people deal (or don’t deal) with horrors like the bombing of Dresden and 9/11. So sad, and not so entertaining. Before I read this book, I must admit, 9/11 was an abstract horror to me. Dresden, on the other hand, has been horribly vivid to me ever since the time at Interlochen when we played this piece of music about the bombing — cacophonous and scary, with members of the band having to shout out “help!” and “firestorm!” in German at various points, and ending with a solo flute that was supposed to represent the weeping of an orphaned child. And I have often thought about the ways in which members of my own family bear the imprint in their very souls of the horrors they lived through in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. Living out here in Michigan, not being personally acquainted with anyone who lost someone on 9/11, not even seeing any of the WTC video footage until fairly recently, I never thought of 9/11 in the same vein. I do now.

[Mental head shake. Ok. Back to the review.] I was very impressed with Foer’s ability to write in different voices. The main character is a nine-year-old boy, a very bright, eccentric, polymath of a nine-year-old boy with the soul of a poet. Oh, how he can turn a phrase! I will never again say I am sad or depressed. No, from now on I’m going to say that I have heavy boots. Isn’t that absolutely marvelous? Heavy boots. And when something isn’t so great I’m going to say it’s not one hundred dollars. The boy, Oskar, reminded me a bit of the boy in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (which I wrote about here) and Foer does an equally amazing job of putting the reader in this kid’s head. But we also get the separate voices of both of the boy’s grandparents, each as distinct and poignantly poetic as the boy’s. If I hadn’t returned my copy already I’d give you a stunning quote from the grandmother, a meditation about things that moved her deeply when she was a girl (a dog following a stranger was one of them) and how growing up means feeling less. The way the author plays with language (and even typography, yes, he uses typography to convey meaning) — wow!

It’s one hundred dollars, baby!

Work is going really well. I have some projects in the works that I’m very excited about, including some print stuff (flyers, letterhead). I just can’t believe people actually pay me to do this work that’s sooooo fun! That’s how I used to feel about babysitting. I used to babysit for this family with three lovely kids who were so much fun to hang out with. I’d take them to this fancy country club that they belonged to, we’d spend the day lounging around the pool and laughing our heads off, and then the parents would pay me! Nice work if you can get it, huh.

I’m also working on a complete redesign of my professional site, which is embarrassingly plain. I originally designed it as my first experiment after reading this book, and it was all about the coding. Pilcrow 2.0 will be much prettier, and I’m also experimenting with a new (to me) content management system, Textpattern. It’s a little weird but it has definite possibilities. I’m pretty excited about it, actually.

And! Oh! *gushing* I am in the middle of THE MOST AMAZING book right now. It’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer. This might be the number one best book I’ve read this year. That’s all I’m gonna say about it right now. My book club is meeting to discuss it next week. I’ll post about it afterwards.