Ajax by Sophocles

A man will not accept the indignity of being laughed at

Ajax, second greatest warrior in the Greek Army, fails to be awarded the dead Achilles’ armor. Apparently valuing brain over brawn, his compatriots felt wily Odysseus deserved the honor. Humiliated, and helped along with a spell of madness doled out by cranky Athena, Ajax kills a herd of cattle, the spoils of war, thinking them humans, thinking them his Greek oppressors. He tortures a ram in his tent, believing it Odysseus. Ajax’s concubine, Tecmessa, is frantic and does not know how to help him. Once Ajax regains his sanity, and realizes he not only has failed to achieve his revenge, but has in fact made himself a fool, he decides to commit suicide. He seems to let Tecmessa talk him out of it, but instead goes to a remote location and falls on his sword. The remainder of the play is occupied with the question of whether such a person as Ajax should be buried. Ajax’s half brother Teucer declares he will be buried; Agamemnon declares he won’t. In the end wise Odysseus advises that, even though Ajax was his enemy, such a noble warrior should be buried. Because if such a horrible thing happened to Ajax, it could happen to anyone.

So many things in this play felt familiar. The terror of searching for the lost mentally ill family member, and then the sad discovery. I’m not sure a modern audience is capable of understanding Tecmessa - a slave, but it also seems like she has some sway over Ajax, like a wife – someone whom he cares for. In this play, Odysseus comes off as truly wise, moving away from emotional revenge (where Ajax most definitely is) towards more nuanced view of things. The language throughout is beautiful and evocative.

Selected Stories by Andre Dubus

Men come to terms with justice

This collection features stories written throughout Andre Dubus’s long career. A theme is the stoicism of working class men. Another is the vulnerability of women and what these stoic men are supposed to do about it. Virtually all the stories take place in the industrial towns north of Boston. They are mostly about men, but always about families. “Rose” is about a guy in bar talking to an older woman who has quite a story to tell. A sad story he can do nothing about, putting him in mind of another sad story. “A Father’s Story” is about a decent man, who, with the quiet support of those close to him, takes a matter of extreme injustice into his own hands. “Voices from the Moon” is a novella about a family with an unusual problem.

Some of the stories were very good and some not so good. The good ones, with their simple sentences and skillful juxtapositions of two apparently jarring images work well and demonstrate a mastery of the well timed emotional effect. For the most part, the descriptions are beautiful and meditative. There's a somewhat creepy fascination with young women – wanting to protect them or wanting to control them. Cuckoldry and its pleasures and pains.

In “The Pretty Girl,” Dubus lulls the reader into the homey rhythm. Then he inserts words like “rape” and “pistol.” The surprise of violence in the middle of the mundane.  “Voices from the Moon” is a novella that combines Dubus’s obsessions with a straight faced silliness. That one seemed to take forever to get through.  At times the bad stories were unintentionally funny, like a bad Hemingway imitation. The ritualistic drinking of the tequila, for example, made me laugh.

Often the stories often felt like they were written in another era- because they were. The unquestioned gulf between the roles of the sexes. The vanishing of the shoe factories and local bars where the characters worked. Also, the surveillance camera society of today would render most of these plots irrelevant.The stories felt quaint and a little dated, then along came “Killing,” which had me on the edge of my seat.

H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

A young woman mourns her dead father, trains a goshawk and meditates on the repressed life of novelist T.H. White

Helen Macdonald, a young history scholar at Cambridge, is shocked when her photographer father, in the middle of an assignment, falls dead on the streets of London. The stark weeks and months that follow, however, bring her no relief. In fact, she starts to believe she is losing her mind. Already an expert on hawks, those wild alien hunters, an idea presses on her: she will train a young goshawk. She is emulating another young intellectual at his wit’s end: T.H. White, the English novelist who wrote The Once and Future King, a magical story about King Arthur. The story is how stricken Helen trains the baby goshawk Mabel into a playful completely inhuman killing machine. What becomes apparent is that Helen was successful in training her goshawk (and has the scars to show for it), while T.H. White was not. At the end of the year of training, Mabel is an accomplished killer, Helen is enjoying life again, and T.H. White’s life remains sad and possibly unfulfilled.

For me, the book started slowly and I thought the prose was too pretty and too repressed. I didn’t understand how the book became a bestseller. However, after about 50 pages, I started to get into the story between the obsessive woman with nothing in her life and the completely wild animal she sets out to mold to her will. Interspersed with the structured story of how to train a goshawk, is the sad story of T.H. White, who could not fit himself to his time and perhaps could never fit himself to any time. What he really struggled with was not the goshawk and his contrary method of training her, but his own fears. The lesson Helen learned is that she is not an invulnerable raptor, but a softhearted human, not a hunting bird.

This felt like a book Helen Macdonald was born to write, like a million to one shot.  I'm not sure if she will be able to write another one.

Electra by Sophocles

Electra spends her life lamenting the murder of her father

Electra mourns her wasted life, as her murderous mother and stepfather do not allow her to marry and have a family. Her sister and her mother do not understand why she keeps carrying on like this. Two young men approach – they bring news of the death of Electra’s brother Orestes in a chariot accident – a noble death. They carry an urn containing his bones. Electra mourns over the bones, but then one of the young men has a message: He’s Orestes, alive, and the news of his death is a ruse to allow him to kill the usurpers. His mother the queen arrives, the young man lies to her, brings her inside, then, with Electra urging him on, kills her. Another ruse follows. The king arrives – the fake news of Orestes's death makes him happy. A covered body is presented. The king lifts the veil to discover his dead wife. Orestes leads him into the house to kill him in the spot his father was murdered. The play abruptly ends.

This Electra is embittered, deranged by hatred. She certainly isn’t the instrument of blind justice getting its just due. I love how Orestes himself isn’t that much of a gung ho avenger – he’s only here because the oracle told him too. He is more disturbed than Electra with the fact that, in order to avenge the murder of their father, they must break an even bigger taboo and kill their mother. Also, I love the interplay between Electra and her younger sister Chrysothemis, who doesn’t want to rock the boat. Besides, as women, what can they do? Better to go along and not be on the outside looking in.

I read an old fashioned translation. I am coming around to the idea that the reader will get much more out of a modern translation.

Electra by Euripides

Electra can’t get over the murder of her father

Electra, daughter of the murdered Agamemnon and the murderous Clytemnestra, has been exiled to the countryside and marriage to a impoverished farmer, the premise being that any child of such an ignoble union could never consider avenging the death of his grandfather. Luckily for Electra her poor farmer is a gentleman and won’t take advantage of Electra, either for sex or for labor. Electra understands that, and appreciates it, but still goes about the village dressed in rags with a shaven head, bemoaning her inability to seek revenge. Meanwhile, her exiled brother Orestes, after consulting with Apollo’s oracle at Delphi, has journeyed to Argos, to exact the family revenge.  He is tasked with killing not only the hated usurper Aegisthus, but someone else: the woman who suckled him, Clytemnestra. Orestes is a little reluctant, but once he eventually makes his presence known to Electra, she devises a scheme for murder.

This Electra is young and sulky- she won’t conform, she won’t give up her hatred of her mother. Clytemnestra and even Aegisthus are presented at least a little bit sympathetically. Clytemnestra is killed when she believes she is going to see her infant grandson. Orestes stabs Aegisthus in the back. Yet what else do they deserve? The murder of the mother is presented very dramatically – Orestes is highly conflicted. Not Electra. Although directly afterwards, the siblings realize that they actually do love their mother, even while hating her and now must live with the fact of her murder. The play ends with two gods flying over the stage on a crane to wrap up the loose ends of the plot.

This play isn’t just stick characters bouncing along on a string, enacting the plot.  The family's actions are motivated and conflicted.  Orestes, especially, understand the unpleasant consequences of doing his duty. Electra is absolved from the duty of revenge, as she is a woman. She won't accept that, however, and is obsessed by thoughts of revenge.

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer

Young women try to figure out where they fit in

These eight stories provide a glimpse of young characters moving into the larger alien world and then trying to reconcile their reality with this larger world. From Brownies molded to excel, but then quite publicly not excelling, to a nerdy girl attempting her own lunch counter sit in, the characters are surprised by how the world actually works. A number of the stories deal with the structure and vocabulary of the African American church. The characters in one story, “Geeses,” are all underemployed young people scrounging for food and shelter in alien Japan. The insecure young high teacher in “Our Lady of Peace” has trouble controlling her class of urban youth until Sheba, a statuesque young girl, a leader who lives in a shelter, joins the class.

When I started this collection, I was expecting the expected. And that was not the case. The stories were surprising. The prose was quietly satirical, the dialogue deadpan. I’m not sure this completely worked as a collection, however; there was a certain sameness to the stories, and I didn’t feel that the collection had an arc. The final story, Doris is Coming, did end on a punch to the gut.

So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell

A man brings to life a vanished world and a long ago crime of passion

In a small Midwestern farming town, during the 1920’s, a man murders his wife’s lover. A sensitive boy, his mother dead and father recently remarried, the narrator is thrown together with the murderer’s quiet son, Cletus, igniting an odd friendship. Years later, in the much larger city of Chicago, the narrator encounters Cletus, and, from fear and shock, ignores him. Feeling guilty, the narrator imagines the scenes before and after the murder.

This was a novel? The entire time I was reading, I thought it was a memoir. An artful, technically proficient memoir. Slight in size, the book touches on numerous themes. Childhood. America, the passage of time. Fate, I guess. Lloyd Wilson, the murdered man, the lover. Clarence Smith, the insecure cuckold, the murderer. I kept mixing the two men up – I think that was supposed to be part of the book – their generic “American” names. The prose was pellucid and went down as easily as rain. Maxwell skillfully used different points of view – including that of a dog. The community felt claustrophobic, and then the writer punches holes to let in the light.