Middlemarch by George Eliot, Part II

Marriages in Middlemarch

Middlemarch is a study of a provincial English town in the 1830’s, at a time before the railroad when people stayed put --  most of them preferring it that way. The society in the novel is viewed through the prism of several marriages, and the progression of those marriages plays a key part in the plot. At the core of the novel is a study of two marriages – the Casaubon’s and the Lydgate’s. Both marriages, which end up crushing the husband and wife’s hopes, are based upon each partner’s mistaken apprehension of what the other will bring –that the other will fulfill them, propel them to their highest possibility. The ideal view of marriage is as a partnership. When times get tough, two are stronger than one. But the four are blinded by immature egoism, and so come to sorrow. What makes the book interesting and what gives the characters depth is that Dorothea and Lydgate accept their mistakes and try to make the best of a bad situation by sacrificing their dearest dreams and apply themselves to figuring the weaker spouse out.

Dorothea and Casaubon – Dorothea imagines herself a handmaiden to genius, and then she realizes her husband is a terrified little man with no intention of letting her get close, poking around his unfinished, indeed, unstarted Key to All Mythologies. She presented herself as a wonderful gift and he doesn’t even understand. But she doesn’t completely lose heart – she resolves to give him what he needs.

Lydgate and Rosamond – Once Lydgate realizes that Rosamond is never going to be supportive, he abandons his dreams of pure research and becomes a gout doctor. I guess that would be sort of like plastic surgeon or dermatologist in Beverly Hills nowadays. He gives up his dreams for his duty.
Mary Garth and Fred Vincy – Fred is a wastrel, but Mary is wise and won’t fall into the same romantic mistake as Dorothea and Lydgate. She doesn’t rush into anything but waits until Fred has swallowed his pride and lowers his expectations (improving his upper class illegible handwriting, for example)and starts making some money.

The Bulstrodes. Bulstrode is the villain but at the end he gets the comfort of a good marriage, because his submissive wife is prepared to suffer with him, and to stand by him and ease his suffering. This is contrasted with his first marriage in which he behaved like a criminal in order to inherit money from his wife.

What’s even more remarkable is that the novel is set at a time when women had not very much legal power and even less economic power. The only power they had was influence over the men in their lives. And it seems to this modern reader that many of the women have a significant amount of influence. However, the plot is bound by those old strictures. Like why doesn’t Dorothea run off to Vegas and get a divorce? And why doesn’t Rosamond go out and get a job so she can have some spending money? You might as well as them to fly.

Middlemarch by George Eliot, Part I

In a small town, egotistical pride blinds people's judgement, leading them to unhappiness

Well, this book took me on a journey. A journey of eventual understanding and education (a bit like the theme of the novel). The other classics I’ve read invaded my imagination quickly, filling my brain with thoughts of the book.  Their stories were all I could think about. Middlemarch was different, very tough going at first, for the first half of the book, actually, as Eliot created this world, family by family, plot point by plot point.  The sentences needed to be savored and intellectually decoded versus the instant rush of emotion in the other classics.  I felt like I was tasked with eating 100 bowls of unsweetened oatmeal.  I was beset by anxiety – oh jeez I have to get through 800 pages! I read only one book at a time and Middlemarch was so offputting that I was reading 3 pages a day which meant 2012 would be devoted to single novel. Uh oh, I thought, you gonna pull the ripcord on Middlemarch? I felt only profound boredom and a cold admiration for the technique – the multiplicity of characters, the plotting, the social analysis, and the variety of scenes and tones. I sensed the message was, They’re all fools every one of them. Dorothea’s a fool, Casaubon’s a fool, Mr. Brooke is a fool, Lydgate is a fool. I got it. THEY ARE ALL FOOLS.

But I gave the book one last shot on a flight from Spokane to Boise to Oakland to Burbank, assisted by Southwest’s terrible red wine. Something happened on that flight. I started to get it. The novel revolved around Dorothea. Her tragedy is the glue holding the scenes together. Because once she realizes she was deluded by her egoism, her foolish idealism, she still tries. She still tries to help. There are no villains here.

It’s a meditation on marriage, of course, and a careful picture of humanity, an observation of society. Dorothea offers Casaubon the beautiful gift of herself, only he’s too afraid and egotistical to accept it. He is afraid of being judged as he is avoiding the fact that his Key to All Mythologies is a folly. Dorothea is the last one to figure that out. Like many stories in the novel, it’s tragic and funny at the same time.

Next week: Marriages in Middlemarch.

Jackson by Max Byrd

A young man attempts to write a life of Andrew Jackson while a pretty young woman flirts with him

I have not read much historical fiction because I am not particularly drawn to it. Doesn’t the author feel constrained in the building of the story? Is historical fiction art? Or is it more like an educational textbook? What is its purpose? To delight? To instruct? My guess is that most people read historical fiction to learn something. The veneer of fiction makes the history part go down as easier, as when you give the child a tablespoon of cod liver oil followed quickly by a tablespoon of M&Ms.

For the most part Jackson is delightful, more fiction than history. The author does this by inventing a few characters who are quirky – whose actions cannot be predicted, unlike the historical characters who cannot deviate from what they did in life. David Chase, the invented young man, has a clear motivation. His actions move the story along-- he is hired to write a life of Andrew Jackson and hopefully find some disgraceful dirt about Andrew Jackson’s wife. David Chase serves as a detective and every novel needs a detective.  

The dialogue and descriptions are light and easy, not didactic. Max Byrd is a skillful writer. But the story had some drawbacks and started to drag. The meat of it, Andrew Jackson’s life, is a Procrustean bed for a plot. The reader has to waste time at the Battle of New Orleans with its fortifications as that was Andrew Jackson’s most significant achievement. However, the Battle of New Orleans and its fortifications are not very dramatic. Also, I’m not sure if in this type of traditional historical fiction we can ever see Andrew Jackson as a living breathing person, he can never be quirky, his actions are always completely predictable. His spine is always ramrod straight, there’s always a steel blue glint in his eye and a tender vulnerable love for his woman in his heart. The interesting thing for me was the fact that Andrew Jackson kept dueling people right and left. I needed to hear more – that sounded wonderfully crazy.

In some ways this novel reminded me of Stations of the Cross – no irreverence allowed and you must hit all the high points. Almost like a James Bond movie. Is all historical fiction like that?

Le Mariage by Diane Johnson

An American groom and Parisian bride encounter distractions on the way to the altar

It was relaxing to return to the hands of a master – the telling of a story, the juggling of many characters who are the cogs of a farcically complex plot, the painting of a moral picture. It’s all very skillfully done. I love Diane Johnson's sentences. The best have an elegantly flowing preface ending with a common or almost vulgar thump. For example, “Tim always spoke with great affection of his mother, inadvertently giving the impression she was dead, though she lived in Michigan.”

The story begins by introducing the three main characters - Clara Holly, the beautiful young retired actress, Tim Nolinger, the classic somewhat dopey good American, and Anne-Sophie, the cute whimsical Parisian who owns an antique stall specializing in equestrian themes. The three of them undergo many comic misunderstandings, Franco-American and otherwise, on the way to Tim and Anne-Sophie’s wedding. There’s a murder, a forgery, a doomed love affair, American wackos, obscene French novelists, paranoid Polish movie directors, limping girls and growling attack dogs. However, eventually I thought there may have been one too many things going on. Sometimes the brass machinery of the plot was visible clicking away beneath the too thin skin.

I’m not sure if you need all the Oregonians (however humorous those hicks may have been) as well as the hasty trip to Oregon three days before the wedding. I was never quite sure what was going on with the Oregon cultists. Were they supposed to be like the Branch Davidians?

Diane Johnson writes comedy though with a ribbon of tragedy. I felt this time the tragedy never cut to the bone the way it usually does. The story felt a little frenetic.

A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Everybody has a Before and an After

Oh, boy. I was set up by all the stellar reviews, probably, but this book disappointed me. Luckily there weren’t many pages, so there wasn’t much debate about whether to quit or not. I stuck it out. Unfortunately, this book also directly touched on my pet peeve, which is the book of short stories being marketed as a novel. This was not a novel. It was a miscellany. And a gimmicky one at that.

Two of the stories I really liked. “A to B”, a story of infidelity in an upscale suburb, and “Selling the General” which was a funny satire of the public relations industry. Everything else felt to me like it was treading water. The multiplicity of characters never generated any tension for me, even though I believe each main character gets two stories (before/after). But Jennifer Egan is good at the “bon mots,” the home truths, even though they felt occasionally too glib. I enjoyed reading those, and they were studded throughout the stories.

The biggest problem was that I kept thinking, God, these people are annoying. Sasha, one of the “main characters,” suffers from kleptomania, and I lack sympathy for affluent Caucasians suffering from kleptomania. I just do.

The famous Powerpoint chapter was clever, though cloying sentimental. My expectations when reading a novel is that the story will engage the emotions directly through the character’s struggle with some conflict. Bottom line, I never connected to these people.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

A sister gets pregnant, ruining her three brother’s lives.

This classic was number five in my Re-reading the classics. Once again, I’m wondering why I waited thirty years to reread this book. It’s so much better than I remembered. Faulkner had stuck in my memory for his run on sentences, and hysterical obscurity, but now I see that his primary gift was dialogue. He’s a master. The Benjy section is composed in large part of dialogue, and comprehensively sets up the story. The writing is beautiful and emotional and I cried. I cried at: You mustn’t cry. Caddy’s not going away. The betrayal of children is tragic.

The four Compson children inherited a grand name, a great history and they degraded it. I told someone from Mississippi that I was reading this book and he said he lasted about three pages himself but that the first thing I needed to know about Mississippi is that the white man runs everything. And that fact does seem to explain a lot of the internal dynamics of the plot. Many of the plot obstacles in the novel would be completely dissolved by inevitable social advancement. Nowadays Caddy would be an Ole Miss freshman lifting her tee shirt at Mardi Gras; Dilsey would be a municipal bus driver or the Mayor.  It’s almost like the pivot of the whole novel is based upon a mistaken Victorian idea about female sexuality.

Not sending Benjy to Jackson becomes the essential moral core of the book. Are you working for or against that? The characters almost all fail that test, lost in their own selfishness, especially Caddy and Quentin. Jason actually turns out to be the one who is at least “not sending him to Jackson”. Not yet anyway. In many ways, the characters are sentimentalized and the plot melodramatic, but highly gripping. 

Faulkner is such a good writer. The walk with the little Italian girl in the Quentin section is vividly rendered. And the Jason section is really funny. He’s like one of the Three Stooges, chasing Miss Quentin all over town. I wasn’t that crazy about the Dilsey part because I didn’t like the run on sentences much. It felt too monumental. His real strength were the voices.

And the appendix.  Huh? Are we actually supposed to read that?

Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky

A woman takes a baby on a trip, despite it not being her baby

I loved this book and read it delighted in one sitting

It’s about Marie, three weeks out of prison, who for some inexplicable reason gets hired by her childhood friend to be a nanny for her only child. Marie likes being a nanny, on her terms, which include getting drunk and giving the baby in a bathtub, seducing her friend’s husband and snatching the kid for a transcontinental road trip. She’s an active character and this makes her interesting. Although the book is like a primer on bad decision making.

I loved the crackling limpid prose, the sharp to-the-point dialogue, the screwy flawed characters. Marie is incapable of following the rules as so far the rules have not served her well. She doesn’t seem to care about anyone, only Caitlin, her little charge. The tone is whimsical, and because of the child, there’s an undercurrent of real danger. Only in the final scene, however, do we taste the fear - would she really abandon the child, do something really evil to an innocent? All of Marie's other "marks" completely deserve being conned.

What makes the scenes come to life are crazy weird situations – a cat with no teeth gnawing on a cat food can. In a way, this is also a novel about Paris. It’s a road novel which makes the plot simple and direct. I really enjoyed it.