Dubliners

I just finished reading Joyce's Dubliners. I'm not really sure why I've waited this long to read it -- I love Ulysses, and I enjoyed Portrait. Maybe I was worried about being let down -- after all, Joyce matured considerably as a writer between Dubliners and Ulysses.

But I needn't have worried -- Dubliners was fantastic. Joyce is very different here from in Ulysses. In Ulysses, Joyce is largely inward-focused, even, I think, in the most impersonal chapters (the catechism chapter and the Circe section). In most of Dubliners, though, what we get is mostly impersonal. In "Clay", for example, Tom is moved almost to tears at the end of the story, but Joyce doesn't tell us why. Even the first-person narrative stories don't tell us much about what the protagonists are actually feeling.

The exceptions are "Eveline", "The Little Cloud", and "The Dead." I think "Eveline" was one of the weaker stories precisely because it is so inward-focused. It's just so obvious where it's going, and so the epiphany doesn't feel like a true sudden awakening. "The Little Cloud", I think, is starting to move in a different direction from "Eveline". It's true that we see most of the story through the main character's eyes, and we get to see some of his thinking, but it's clear that a lot of what he's seeing isn't necessarily true (for example, he's envious of his friend Gallaher's life, whereas I think the audience is supposed to see Gallaher's lifestyle as meretricious.)

This is a move toward the Joyce of "Portrait", and "The Dead" moves even closer toward the style of that book. "The Dead" is relatively inward-focused -- we largely see things through the protagonist Gabriel's eyes, and get his opinions of people. As in "The Little Cloud," we readers may draw different conclusions from Gabriel's, but "The Dead" is more tight-fisted in giving away non-Gabriel information. Overall, I found "The Dead" exhilirating to read, and the most hopeful story in the book. We see that Gabriel may have the self-awareness and ability to change. Most of the characters attain the self-awareness that they're stuck in a bad place by the end of their stories, but they lack the ability or desire to actually change. Gabriel shows that he's willing to think about his life and others outside of himself. Can he actually make the jump to changing his life?

I've spent most of this post talking about three stories, but what about the others?

It seems to me that in the other stories, Joyce was working with a very flat style of story-telling. He gives us the facts, almost as an impartial observer, and lets us readers decide our relationship to the story. He stacks the deck a bit in his word choice, though. For instance, in one story he uses the word "artistes" several times, till it sticks out like a sort thumb, but he never uses the word elsewhere. Clearly, he's setting up the protagonist as a bit of a poseur, without actually telling us in so many words.

Even though Joyce moved on to other things in Portrait and Ulysses, I think the stories in Dubliners are really wonderful examples of how great a writer Joyce could be, even when not playing with the pyrotechics of Ulysses or Finnegans Wake.

Gorky Park

The first book I read on the trip was Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park, which aims very high, even if it doesn't quite hit its mark. The book is about a Russian detective, Arkady Renko, who gets drawn into a plot to smuggle sables out of Russia and create a new sable industry in the US.

It seems that Smith is aiming for the lofty territory of le Carre, drawing equivalences between Americans and Russians (everyone's after money, loyalties shift very freely, and so on), with a world-weary hero. But Gorky Park doesn't have the moral bite le Carre often has. In le Carre's books, people have principles, and the drama is in how much they'll compromise them, or even undermine them while ostensibly promoting them. For example, the way that a democratic government will try to prop up dictators, or even undermine fledgling democratic movements, if it seems to be in the national interest.

In Gorky Park, so many of the characters are venal, that there's no real tragedy; it becomes a game of watching how the pieces move. As it happens, Smith has put together a fascinating game to watch, and it's an excellent novel, but I kept hoping for just a little bit more.

New York Trilogy

Just got back from our honeymoon to Belize. Great trip! Also great for my reading -- I got through 6 books on the trip. Too many to write about right now, so I'm just going to talk about the most interesting one, maybe with a line or two about the others some other time.

Most thought-provoking was definitely Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. The trilogy consists of three odd short stories, City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room.

City of Glass sets the tone by its combination of literary story and detective story. Writer Quinn gets a phone call by someone looking for the famous detective Paul Auster, and gets sucked into the middle of a dysfunctional family relationship. He's hired to tail a man who tortured his son to test his theories of language development, but loses track of the man, and goes into this weird fugue state as he tries to find the man again.

Ghosts is the story of a detective, Blue, who's hired to watch a man, Black, who sits in his room all day writing. Blue eventually decides to take a more active role, and confronts Black directly, only to find that Black is actually the man who hired him, and that Black is writing the story of Blue's surveillance.

In The Locked Room, Fanshawe, a long-distant friend of the narrator's, suddenly disappears, naming the narrator his literary executor. The narrator then sets out to find Fanshawe.

It's been commonly noticed that all three novels share a detective-novel theme. I think that it's not so commonly noticed that all of them dwell on one aspect of the detective novel, namely shadowing a suspect. This is notable, I think, because following someone is the most passive common activity in what is generally thought of as an action-oriented genre. In the outer two books, the heroes are writers, which makes them natural observers. Blue, in Ghosts, is an actual detective, and he takes the most active steps in breaking out of the mold that someone else has set for him.

I found all three novellas somewhat disturbing, particularly The Locked Room, which rings so true to life in so many ways. They all deal to some extent with a breakdown in sanity -- when can you really tell that you've gone over the edge? For Quinn the fall is sudden and obvious -- but does Blue ever fall over the line? What about the narrator of The Locked Room?

History of Love, the Resurrectionist, the Limits of Enchantment

Three fairly literary books this time.

The History of Love is about a book called The History of Love and its author, although we don't actually learn that till near the end. Along the way, we meet Leo and Alma, the former a Jew who escaped the Nazis, the latter a young girl looking for a father figure. The actual story is very complex, maybe needlessly so -- Kraus does a lot of maneuvering to get everyone into the right places at the right times. I also felt that it was a book aiming to be uplifting -- Leo dies in the arms of someone who knows who he is, instead of anonymously, which was his great fear.

But I felt more depressed than uplifted at the end. To get to this blessed state, Leo has spend the last 20? 30? years friendless and alone, to the point where he had to make up an imaginary friend just to get by. Alma never really finds what she's looking for, and her brother is clearly autistic, and presumably undiagnosed -- he's seeing a therapist by the end, but it's not clear that that's going to help.

I'll probably have to read The Resurrectionist at least once more to understand what Jack O'Connell, the author, is saying. The novel starts with a clear delineation between reality and fantasy, but by the end, it's not really clear to what extent the protagonist is hallucinating. Overall, it was a really great mind-bending read, but I felt it was seriously marred by the noir elements. Unlike Will Baer, who uses the noir elements of his work as a background against which the more literary elements can work, O'Connell keeps foregrounding them, and it feels like the rest of the story is fighting against the more stock pieces.

Why is Sweeny the pharmacist not dismissed for beating up a co-worker on the first day of the job? How does Nadia the nurse get a job at a research hospital with no credentials? How can Buzz Cote be taken seriously as a father figure?

I'd read other books by O'Connell, because the good stuf was really great, but I feel like he just missed hitting the heights of, say, the Phineas Poe trilogy.

Lastly, I just finished Graham Joyce's Limits of Enchantment. Joyce is revisiting the same ground he visited in The Facts of Life, but I liked this one better. Mammy feels more real, less idealized. Some of her wacky ideas turn out to have sense, but she's not infallible. In Facts, Cassie just sort of floats through life, with no real consequences for her detachment. Here, we see that no-one can really get away with that -- the real world will reach in, regardless of how little you care for it.

Brothers Karamazov

At long last, I finished The Brothers Karamazov last night. It's been a looooong read, with a lot of ups and downs. It's a sprawling novel, with lots of characters, and covering something like 30 years, if you include the opening chapters about the birth and early lives of the brothers.

So, in any book of this scope, there's going to be some less-effective parts, and I think they're very different for different people. For instance, I looked at the SparkNotes when I was done, and they look at the court scene as a long anti-climax, with the real climax coming in the chapter before, where we find that Smerdyakov is the criminal. But I found that the most infelicitous part of the book -- it's obvious from long before that Dmitri is innocent, which really leaves Smerdyakov as the criminal. More importantly, Smerdyakov's dialogue with Ivan is just painful to read.

Smerdyakov accuses Ivan of engineering his father's death by encouraging Smerdyakov to kill him. And Ivan sees this as a blow to his self-image. Thematically, of course, this is important -- Ivan has to feel somewhat responsible for his father's death. But, as a realistic character study, it makes no sense at all -- more likely that Ivan would just say, "Smerdyakov, you're a madman, I see no reason to blame myself for anything you might choose to do."

Whereas I find the courtroom drama fascinating. Fetukovich, the defense lawyer, mounts a decent defense of Dmitri, until all of a sudden he ends up endorsing parricide if the father was as evil as Pavlov Karamazov. Fetukovich is correct about so much of what happens, and yet he's morally off-course -- Dostoevsky puts the reader in a tough position to try to sort out which side to take.

And what do we make of the two primary female characters in the novel? Both contain extremes of nobility and baseness -- both have a great capacity for forgiveness in the right circumstance, but in both it quickly turns into a thirst for vengeance. And, yet, don't we see the same in Dmitri Karamazov? Do the two women appear more contradictory because we don't see them directly, we don't follow them through their thoughts the way we get to see Dmitri.

I definitely plan to re-read this novel; it's just too big to get a handle on in one reading. But it's always going to be hard to set aside the kind of time it takes to read it.

Jane Eyre, Kill the Lawyers, Caught Stealing

I finally finished Jane Eyre, which I've been listening to on the iPod for weeks.

It's always tricky trying to figure out what to say about a classic. On the one hand, to say it's fantastic (which I thought it was) ends up sounding facile. But it's hard to pick apart the different elements, especially with such a sprawling novel.

In some ways, I think, the novel is built around the different characters' religious viewpoints. I don't think that Bronte was trying to write an exploration of religious values, but it's striking how many characters have important religious views through the novel. In the early part of the novel, we see the hypocrisy of Rev. Brocklehurst contrasted against Helen Burns' Christ-like attitude (although, notably, Jane looks up to Helen, but can't emulate her). Rochester is, of course, almost anti-religious, willing to live in sin with Jane. St. John personifies the type who is as rough with himself in service to his religion as he is with others -- but, unlike Helen, he finds no repose in his belief system.

Helen Burns, I think, is a key character in this schema. If not, why is she in the book at all? She plays no plot role whatever. But she represents the religious ideal -- someone who finds comfort in her religion and uses it to comfort others. But it's also presented as something of an unattainable ideal; Helen dies within months of Jane's meeting her -- is this supposed to show that her ideas can't survive long in the earthly realm? And is that meant to be a critique of them? After all, Jane's morality tends more to the practical, although she still sets a high standard for herself.

Well, after all that lofty thinking, I wanted something nice and easy to read, so I read Kill the Lawyers, which was a fairly goofy entry in Paul Levine's Solomon vs. Lord series. I wasn't so blown away by this one -- Steve Solomon plays a huge part, and he's just not that interesting without Victoria Lord as a foil. I'm interested in the next one, though, because reviews say that she plays a much larger part.

Then I read Charlie Huston's Caught Stealing. It starts out a little arty, playing with perception and chronology, a bit like Baer's Kiss Me, Judas, but it soon settles down into a straight-forward noir story. But what a rush! The book doesn't even slow down for one second, from the opening line to the last paragraph. And there's nothing to jolt you out of the plot. Even though in retrospect there are some holes, Huston manages to move everything fast enough that you don't really notice. Maybe I'll pick up the next for beach reading in Belize...

soldier of sidon, Storm Front

Gene Wolfe finally got around to writing the third book after Soldier of the Mist and Soldier of Arete, and I've finally gotten around to reading it. I think it's tough to read a book that you've been waiting for so long -- almost 20 years, if memory serves. And then to have it not even resolve anything by the end is even worse.

So it's very hard to know what to think about this book. Soldier of Sidon is much less dense than its predecessors -- Latro doesn't make up names for every area they pass through, there aren't major leaders or major events going on around the periphery, and the lacunae aren't so glaring (with one major exception, where the party are taken prisoner). But that clarity comes at a price -- in the first two books, one felt that there was a lot to learn on a second or third re-reading. I'm not so sure that's true of Sidon -- it feels more like a WYSIWYG novel.

It definitely didn't help that everything seems to have been put on hold here -- what of Io? What of the triple goddess? What happened to Latro's memory palace? And so on. There are tantalizing hints that he can remember more than he used to, but what does that mean? Is he naturally healing? I think Wolfe really needs to get the fourth book out soon, not wait another 20 years...

I also read Storm Front, first of the Harry Dresden books. It was good enough to make me want to read more of them, but I think I want to withhold judgment until then.