Tag: book review

Review: Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita came first and has a moral arc like almost every example in the literary canon. Pale Fire does not have any moral arc that I can find, and it seems to me to exist solely to illustrate Nabokov’s prose mastery and organizational brilliance. It certainly does that. As to its physical organization, we must remember that in 1959 there were no personal computers with word processors. Nabokov’s ability to cross-reference everything in a moderately lengthy novel of four sections using only—I presume—a typewriter and whatever notes he kept is extraordinary! 

The novel is usually divided into three sections, but I count four. They are:

A Forward

Pale Fire, a 999-line poem in “four cantos.”

Commentary on the poem—the bulk of the novel.

A long glossary/index—not usually considered as a part of the novel, but perhaps it should be. It constitutes almost ten percent of the text. There is considerable background here given after the story, and it further illustrates Nabokov’s organizational skills.

The Foreword tells of the arrival of Charles Kinbote, an assistant professor of literature at a small college (Wordsmith) in the fictional town of New Wye somewhere in America’s Appalachia. Charles has come to New Wye from Zembla, an island country somewhere in the Baltic Sea. He chose this obscure place to hide, evading pursuers. By happy coincidence, he discovers that the big drafty house he rents is next door to his favorite poet, John Shade, who, like Kinbote, teaches at the college. We learn how he and the poet become friends, and how the poem and commentary came to be published. We also learn, soon enough, that the poet has been killed, collateral damage, the assassin’s target being Kinbote, who is not who he claims to be. 

The poem follows in four parts. It is about life, death—the Shade’s daughter perishes in an accident at only twenty years old—marriage, the afterlife, and of what sort, and so on. The poem is no masterpiece (deliberately so), but it is competent in its phrasing and structure, which the narrator uses to inspire his commentary.

Following the poem is Kinbote’s commentary, structured by reference to the poem’s lines. The lines are addressed sequentially, but there are many gaps. There can be a short paragraph commenting on line 100 while the next comment might be two or three pages inspired by line 150, and so on. But while Kinbote ultimately likes the poem, it is not, as he had hoped, about Zembla and the tales he told to Shade before the poet begins the poem. The commentary, then, uses lines from the poem to frame parts of Kinbote’s story of the last king of Zembla (Charles IV, AKA Kinbote): his upbringing, his overthrow in a revolution (with a hint of Soviet sponsorship), and his escape from Zembla.

Kinbote contrives to meet his idol, the poet, early in 1959 and, over the following months—all of this is revealed to us, the reader, only in the commentary written after Shade is dead—tells his story without revealing that he is the king. The poem is written between July 1 and July 21st, finished on the very day the poet is murdered. Nabokov speaks in the first person when discussing himself as Kinbote, but switches to the third person when recounting the king’s history. Also in third person is his account of Gradus, the assassin sent by the Zemblan revolutionaries to find and kill King Charles. Salted throughout the commentary, we learn of Gradus’ election to assassin and his travels from Zembla to Paris, Geneva, and Niece, where he learns of the king’s hiding place in obscure New Wye. How does the narrator know all of this? The answer waits for us until the story time moves to the period following Shade’s death.

Kinbote (Charles) is disappointed that the poem has nothing to do with the tales of Zembla and the king told to Shade in the months preceding the poem’s composition. Kinbote makes use of the poem’s lines (many, but by no means all) as launching points for the different elements of the story/commentary. The commentary is cross-referenced—often multiple times on each page—into itself; the narrator is constantly asking us to “see the comment to line so-and-so.” In the Kindle version of the book, these references are links, which is helpful, except that following them all (there are many dozens) and returning to the story thread is time-consuming and unnecessary for grasping the whole.

On July 21, Shade proclaims the poem finished and gives the “fair copy” and some notes on possible substitutions to Kinbote. It is then that they run into the incompetent assassin who shoots but misses the king and hits Shade instead. At that moment, a gardener, linked to Kinbote’s rented property, hits the assassin from behind with a hoe. The police arrive, and Gradus is taken alive. Shade is dead, and his wife mistakenly believes that he, Shade, was the real target and thanks Kinbote for trying to shield him. This elevates Kinbote to hero status in the wife’s eyes and allows him to persuade her to give him the poem he has not, at that point, read, for publication—with all royalties accruing to her under their contractual arrangement. 

There is a small plot-hole here. In the Foreword, the narrator notes that two “trustees of the school” and its President know Kinbote’s real identity. These three (whom we never hear from) would know that Shade was not the assassin’s real target, but no mention is made of this.

Charles flees to another hiding place somewhere in Wyoming—he believes there will be others sent to kill him—where he begins to write his commentary telling us he managed to interview the imprisoned Gradus “once or twice” before the would-be assassin commits suicide. It is in these interviews that Charles, presumably, learns the details of Gradus’ travels and how he located the exiled king. I leave out a lot of character and story details throughout this review.

No part of the story is continued in Nabokov’s glossary-index, so I suppose this is not a true part IV, but it creates a structure parallel to the four quartos of the poem (Nabokov gets a lot of commentary mileage out of the poem’s structural elements) and gives us more detail—backstories–about all the novel’s characters. I assume Nabokov intended it to have some significance because there is a lot of authorial work in it.

What is the upshot of all of this? Lolita carried a heavy moral. Pale Fire, the title of the poem, seems to carry no moral weight. It is merely a story. The poem does not justify the story, but the story—told in the Foreword and the Commentary—is the vast bulk of the novel. I ended up reading each canto of the poem separately and then the commentary covering the lines of that canto. Since the commentary had little to no narrative relationship to the poem, this mattered little. What Nabokov produced was a novel that gave generations of literature students material for their theses. In the end, it was a delightfully entertaining, if silly, story that illustrated Nabokov’s linguistic brilliance throughout.

Review: Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding

In 1740 Samuel Richardson wrote a novel called Pamela. It was about an exceptionally chaste, modest, and stunning young woman of fifteen, and a man, her pursuer, rich, handsome, persistent, and ten years older, the squire Mr. B____. It is what you think, but it doesn’t exactly end the way a modern reader would expect. I’ve reviewed it here, but what happened after Pamela is my subject today.

About a year after Pamela was published, Henry Fielding published his first novel (really a novella, only 55 pages long). Called Shamela, it is a very crude parody of Pamela, and Richardson was not amused. It is also reviewed via the link above.

The next year, 1742, Fielding published his first full-length novel, The Adventures of Joseph Andrews. Fans of Pamela would have immediately recognized that Joseph and Pamela happen to share the same surname! We learn early on in the novel that Joseph and Pamela are indeed sister and brother (Richardson never mentions a brother). Since born to low family (though when Joseph Andrews takes place Pamela is married to the squire), as Pamela was originally servant to the squire’s mother, Joseph is servant to the sister, who is the squire’s aunt. Welcome to the Booby family. Richardson never alludes to the squire as other than Mr. B____, and he never mentions a brother of his now-bride Pamela, nor an aunt. Fielding makes use of a family invented by Richardson in which to plant his characters. He first calls Mr. B____ Booby in Shamela and brazenly uses it in this novel.

Now, Lady Booby, the aunt employing Joseph, is but recently a widow, said to be a remarkably good-looking woman, about forty. Joseph, at this point, is just over twenty, and Lady Booby has the hots for him, as does Mrs. Slipslop (Fielding’s names can be pretty crude), another of the servants. Joseph is a very handsome and virile-looking young man! If Joseph had been Tom Jones, he might have acceded to both women, but Joseph is as chaste as his sister and rejects them both. They are furious, and the lady fires him, much regretting it throughout the novel.

A good deal of the story is the journey of Joseph and a mentor, Parson Adams, the curate of Joseph’s home parish, from Lady Booby’s summer place to their home parish, along the way meeting up with the one woman Joseph has or will ever love, Fanny, another resident of the parish with whom Joseph grew up. It is also the home parish of Lady Booby (what else could it be?).

Compared to the later Tom Jones (1744), Joseph Andrews is very linear. Things happen along the journey, but each is resolved in turn. There is a big twist near the end, and Lady Booby can taste her conquest of Joseph, who, being brother to Pamela—the squire’s wife—is now an in-law! But the twist untwists through very clever—I can’t believe Fielding came up with all this stuff—manipulation of all the characters, including a pair who otherwise appear only in Richardson’s original novel! In its rather rushed ending, everyone gets what they want, and love triumphs! Even Lady Booby flees to London and meets a dashing officer who makes her forget Joseph—we can only imagine how.

Google tells me that Richardson was “deeply offended” by both Shamela—understandably—and Joseph Andrews—less understandably, writing that it was a “wretched performance,” and that it was only fit “to entertain none but Porters or Watermen.” I’m sure revealing the family name to be Booby was a great part of Richardson’s ire, but come on… Mr. B___? Richardson set himself up for that one! In my view, Joseph Andrews is a very clever take-off from, and not parody of, Pamela. Unlike Shamela, it is not crude (ok, except the name Booby), but clever and very funny.

Review: Essays Two by Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis is a writer and translator. In her first book of essays (Essays One, which I haven’t read), Google tells me her subjects are the craft of writing, literary influences, the visual arts, found arts, religion, and translation theory. In Essays Two, she focuses on translation theory and practice. In a lead-off essay, Ms. Davis explains her love for the translation process. From there, she discusses specific English translations from French (Proust, Leiris, and Flaubert), how she learned Spanish, Dutch, and Norwegian, and observations from visits to various parts of France. Along the way, she discusses her own theory and style of translation, comparing it to other well-respected translators of canonical novels, in particular Proust and Flaubert. There is also an interesting essay on translating older English—particularly nineteenth-century North English and Scottish dialogue—into more modern English.

I do not usually read books of essays, but I chose to read this because I am a writer—ironically, mostly essays—and like many of my contemporaries, my novels (there are presently four) may someday be picked up and translated into languages other than English (fat chance. Maybe if I pay). I was interested in the various philosophies that motivate particular translations and translators. In particular, one essay, her translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, caught my eye because of all the novels Ms. Davis discusses, Madame Bovary is the only one I’ve read, and it just so happens in her translation. 

What did I hope to get out of these essays? I thought I might pick up some stylistic nuances—in English—by exploring different approaches to translation. Particularly as regards Flaubert, who has been translated many times, Ms. Davis does not disappoint, giving numerous examples of differences between her translation and others’, even showing us changes in her own work as she revised her opinion for later editions. This has helped me as a writer in at least one specific way. Ms. Davis points out that, beginning with a lyrical passage in the original, the translation can be more literal, but less lyrical in English, or the translator can try to retain the lyricism of the original and possibly sacrifice some literalness. Her examples help me to understand the difference, in English, between lyrical and non-lyrical language that nevertheless—and in perfectly good English grammar—faithfully represents the original.  

What struck me was that her non-lyrical examples were, nevertheless, examples of perfectly good style, even if they did not reflect the poesis of the original.

In my Kindle edition of Bovary, Ms. Davis includes an introduction in which she discusses the novel, Flaubert, and her translation. There is material here that is duplicated in the essays volume or vice versa—I do not know which came first.

At one point in her introduction, Ms. Davis points out that in the first love scene between Rudolphe and Emma, Flaubert waxes lyrical about Emma’s reverie—giving it 20 or so lines—followed immediately by the short sentence: “Rudolphe, cigar between his teeth, mended with his penknife one of the bridles which was broken.” The reader is left to surmise that while Emma still lies on her back in reverie, Rudolphe has gotten up and is standing next to his horse. Davis calls this an irony in the “… juxtapositions Flaubert creates between the ‘poetic’ and the brutally commonplace.” Flaubert, she says, “undercuts his own lyricism.” 

Me thinks she has missed a point… This is a brilliant Flaubert commentary on men, women, and affairs, especially adulterous ones… Emma is experiencing post-coital reverie, what my girlfriend and I call “basking in the glow.” Emma is in love with Rudolphe (always a bad idea where adultery is engaged). Her mind floats on the experience’s aftermath. By contrast, for Rudolphe, Emma is but one more successful seduction. Sex being over (hopefully, the cad gave her at least one good orgasm. We never know in these novels), one moves on to other tasks—fixing the bridle being necessary for the ride home, after all.

All in all, a book that helps one appreciate the art of translation and a pat on the back to the translator community. There were a few useful insights for me here. She spends far more pages on Proust (whom I haven’t read) than on Flaubert, but all of it together enlightened me at least a little.

Book Review: Foreign Agent by Matthew Rapaport (2021)

The short version by Wehttam Tropapar

Matthew’s first, rough, and unpolished novel nevertheless delivers all the salacious thrills for which Matthew’s work is known. In addition, this novel, melded into all the pure fiction, contains several “true stories,” however much disguised. The pacing is rapid, slowing only for the sex and, in the novel’s early stage, for descriptions of the narrator’s geopolitical work. The story is utterly implausible. The Chinese will employ and pay the narrator for his geopolitical opinions. In addition, they wish to involve him in certain sex experiments. The reason for the sex is eventually revealed—no, it’s not what you think. The reason for the Chinese interest in his geopolitics is never revealed, despite the narrator repeatedly asking for clarification on that subject.

 All the women in the novel are painted sympathetically with a broad brush, but they are the novel’s rounded characters. About himself, the narrator says a lot in the opening chapters, and his character becomes more fleshed out as we see him react to situations arranged entirely by others. There is no transformation here. He goes along with everything. He is the man who “cannot say no to a woman.” Not until the last chapter does he act independently, and that to protect the women who have put him through this adventure. 

This is not a book of art. There is no deep truth to be discerned, no cogent observations of the human condition to be found, its cunnilingual lessons and observations notwithstanding. Foreign Agent is not a commentary on real life, but something more like a game or rollercoaster ride enjoyed for nothing more than the experience of playing or the thrill of riding.

When Foreign Agent first appeared, I wrote a much longer review to be found here. Matthew told me this was to be his only book, and I thought a chapter-by-chapter summary would stimulate scholarly work. Luckily for the world of pornographic literature, Matthew found a second book—Foreign Agent, the Last Chapter—embedded in the first—my short review linked here.

In 2025 there are four novels. Foreign Agent and Foreign Agent, the Last Chapter, are closely related. The geopolitical question is answered. The third novel, Cult of Aten, takes up a riff opened in the second book, but is otherwise a story that stands by itself, as does LoveMe Inc., Matthew’s fourth novel. There are links to all their reviews and Amazon connections here in “My Fiction,” a blog page explaining how all of this nonsense came about.

Foreign Agent can be found here on Amazon.

Review: How Fiction Works by James Wood

How Fiction Works by James Wood (2018)

One of my favorite books on the subject of fiction (a few others are listed at the end). Not how to write a novel, but more focused on how to read them. He doesn’t say much about plot because whatever it is, the magic in fiction is how a good author embeds us in the story. This book is about the linguistic tricks (if you will) that form the technical structure of that embedding. 

For example, in his chapter on character, we learn that Wood is not so enamored of distinctions like “round” and “flat” characters. Both can be important to the story, and importantly, some of the flat ones turn out to be highly memorable, while character rounding, as it has evolved from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries, has changed markedly. A modern author writing like Balzac or Eliot sounds hackneyed, imitative, “overdone.” But the modern has the advantage that, once the long form of character has been articulated and the technique becomes well known, the modern author can use evolved and much shorter techniques to invoke a fully rounded character (or environment); or as Thomas Hardy wrote (Tess of the d’Ubervilles 1891) “…we wander the long paths many times to discover the short ones” (my paraphrase)

This works for other aspects of what is called “realism” as well. All of modern genre fiction, from romance to action-adventure, mystery, and so on, is made possible by reference to this history. Wood points this out in his last chapter. Is realism in literature real? Not in the sense that it encompasses all of reality. Yet there is truth in it. The art (and this is true of all fine art) is arranged so that what it reveals of reality enhances whatever truth—insight—the artist wants to convey.

There are chapters on narration, detail, form (organization), language, character development, dialogue, and consciousness in literature—the invention and evolution of “free indirect discourse” being, in Wood’s opinion, the keystone in the development of the modern novel. Many, many authors are referenced, some of whom I’ve read, a few I’ve never heard of. There are two chapters focused on Flaubert (1821-1880), the lynchpin of “realism”, with supporting reference to Austin, Eliot, and Balzac, and more. How these nineteenth-century developments transform in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century novels—with examples—is also addressed

How Fiction Works is a well-crafted examination of how to read a novel and appreciate the literary mechanisms behind the magic. I first read this book six or seven years ago, having never read (other than Shakespeare) any of the canonical authors mentioned. This review is based on a re-read after having read at least one novel from many of them.

Here are a few other books on structure in fiction:

How to Read Novels like a Professor (Thomas Foster 2008) 

How to Read Literature like a Professor (Thomas Foster 2005). This one is mostly about symbolism.

Aspects of the Novel (E. M. Forester 1927)

The Writing of Fiction (Edith Wharton 1925)

Review: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, 1928 The Kindle edition is only $0.99!!

Woolf is mentioned in so many books on writing fiction that I thought I’d better have a look at her. To the Lighthouse is, I am told, one of her “more approachable” novels. 

So what have we got here? Take any group of ordinary people, a few adults, and children of varying ages. Throw them together in an ordinary scene, say a small neighborhood barbecue on a summer evening. Every one of those people, adults and children, has an “inner life,” observations, thoughts, emotions, sometimes vocalized to others in the group, sometimes only thought. You could write a novel exposing these inner lives over the course of a few hours. James Joyce (Ulysses) does this over the course of a day for one character and then, famously, for his wife at the end of the novel.

In Woolf’s case, the people are the Ramsays: husband, wife, and eight children who own a summer home on the Isle of Wight and, along with a handful of guests (helping to afford the food and a couple of servants), occupy the house summer after summer. The first [almost] two-thirds of the novel takes place over one day, from early afternoon to night. Mrs. Ramsay’s inner life is given the most attention—she is the masterful lynchpin of the whole family—but the mental gyrations of Mr. Ramsay and some of the children and guests, in particular Lily, a wannabe painter, are also explored as they reflect on their own thoughts and interactions with others.

The only “story” here is a planned sail (the Ramsays own a small sailboat) to a lighthouse on a rocky island some distance from their home on the bay. The youngest child, five-year-old James, is very excited about the trip but is traumatized by his father, who cancels it due to an oncoming storm that will make the next day’s sail impossible. They all finally go to sleep.

Turn the page, and ten years have passed. Mrs. Ramsay had died. Presumably natural causes. She was only in her fifties. World War I has come and gone. Andrew, the oldest son, was killed. Rue, the oldest daughter, married and then died in childbirth. The house has been unoccupied for some years.

But people are returning. The first mind Woolf relates is one of the servants charged with cleaning the place up, getting it ready. Mr. Ramsay, his six living children (James is now fifteen), Lily, and Mr. Carmichael, another guest from the old days, and two others arrive. In the novel’s last third, Lily, now in her mid-forties and never married, is the mind most often explored. Mr. Ramsay, James, and Cam (a daughter), along with two other semi-characters—we never know their real names, only James’ mental meanderings about them—end up sailing to the lighthouse—they make it safely. The mental narratives switch back and forth between Lily on shore trying to paint while watching the boat make its way across the bay, and James and Cam on the sailboat. The boat disappears from Lily’s view, safely reaching the lighthouse island. Lily thinks they must be there by now. Mr. Carmichael vocalizes the same thought. Lily makes one last brushstroke on her painting. The novel ends.

Call me crazy, but aside from Woolf’s masterful word-craft, the novel’s rhythm, her representation of thought’s flow, and the novel’s “realism,” the story is trivial—a “shaggy dog” story. I know, I know. The story is deliberately trivial. The novel is about the characters’ minds and how their occasionally expressed thoughts affect one another. Mrs. Ramsay’s death greatly affects Lily, and likewise—we perceive through Lily—Andrew’s death saddens Mr. Charmichael.  But all the “action” is ordinary, lacking in any drama. Except for Mr. Ramsay—who occasionally shows a temper—the conflicts and contradictions experienced remain locked in mind. 

For my part, reading to experience Woolf’s word-craft—do I dare tackle Ulysses?—is the interesting thing about the novel. It all feels like an exercise. “Class… Write me a sixty-thousand-word study of a handful of characters’ mental ruminations while interacting over ordinary matters that can be anything so long as there is no serious drama acted out between them.” OK, it’s more than a mere exercise. But what is the upshot of it all: people have mental lives that are often full of conflict and emotion, even if what happens between them—behavior—is of little consequence. OK. I concur. Real people are like this. Woolf paints minds with words. In the end, I can appreciate that even if the “story” leaves me flat.

The Novel of Adultery: An Analysis of John Updike’s Couples.

Magic always has a price — (Tag line from “Once Upon a Time” American TV fantasy/adventure 2011-2018)

Couples by John Updike, 1968

I recently learned that “novel of adultery” was a genre unto itself, like “romance,” “horror,” or “fantasy” —terms that might well apply to adultery if we want to be controversial about it. Within the genre are the canonical novels Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), Madame Bovary (Flaubert), and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (D. H. Lawrence), in which adulterous acts and their consequences are central themes. There is adultery with consequences also in Vanity Fair (Thackeray) and The Age of Innocence (Wharton), but in the former, the real adultery takes place off-stage, and in the latter comes down to nothing more than a kiss. In the nineteenth century, adultery might be nothing more than a married woman (or man) entertaining (even merely walking and talking with) a member of the opposite sex who isn’t her (or his) spouse. 

In our more enlightened times, we are allowed to say much more, and that brings us to Updike, who, in 2008, received a lifetime achievement award “celebrating crude, tasteless, or ridiculous sexual passages in modern literature” from Britain’s Bad Sex in Literature committee (Google). Published in 1968, “Couples” takes place in a fictional Boston suburb of Tarbox—a fictional Ipswich, according to Time Magazine—from roughly 1962 to 1965—events are slotted in (the 1963 JFK assassination, for example), orienting us to time’s passage. 

There are ten couples, professionals—a pilot, a dentist, businessmen, scientists, home builders—somewhere between their mid-twenties and early thirties. Most have young children. These are ordinary middle-class American couples. One or another of them hosts parties almost every weekend. They play tennis, three-on-three basketball, golf, ski, and swim together (Tarbox is on the coast) in various combinations. The parties are alcohol fueled (none of these folks appear to be familiar with marijuana or cocaine). Everyone is usually drunk, even the pregnant woman in the group drinks and, like most of the others, smokes cigarettes—this is 1962. 

The novel’s focus is Piet, a builder and husband of Angela, father of two girls, five and about seven years old when the story opens. Updike writes mostly in third-person omniscient, but Piet (and in but one scene, Angela) is the only mind he gets into. The sexual dynamics evolve between the couples, with Piet as the dominant male. With one exception, the only sex narrated (whether in present or past tense) belongs to Piet, who ends up sleeping with five of the women (six counting his wife), three only a few times, two (besides his wife) repeatedly. The exception is a scene late in the novel between Angela and one of the other husbands. All the other sex is communicated through whispered conversations, looks, and behavior observed among the characters. Sometimes what is rumored is not the case (as in real life), but their intuitions are more often accurate.

The group is not a swap club. The affairs are supposed to be secret, but it is impossible to keep such secrets for long among that many drunken people. Shenanigans multiply. Two of the couples begin knowingly swapping partners. One of Piet’s lovers gets pregnant—a big problem in 1963. At least two of the women are bisexual. Jealosies and recriminations erupt. The result, eventually, is the group’s dissolution, Piet’s (and a few others’) divorce, and so on.

Updike writes in the style of 19th-century realists like Flaubert. The novel is 650 pages long. I think easily three hundred and fifty of that are lengthy narrations of scene, dress, homes, decorative tastes, smells, sounds, events (the aforementioned sports), the kids, and so on. Every description comes salted with at least one, and usually more than one, metaphor. Early in the novel, these diversions help to build rounded characters. Later on, they are the “realist fluff.”

The book delivers a good lesson about affairs Updike may not have consciously intended. Where the illicit sex is unencumbered by emotional involvement—other than friendship—the sex has little consequence (not everyone ends up divorcing, and of those who do, most are happier after the fact). Piet, and the women involved, mostly have a good time—read orgasms, though their occurrences are only sometimes noted. But when the sex is encumbered by more serious emotional involvement, there are more serious consequences—even for the sex. One woman never (until a last scene with her near the end of the novel) has an orgasm and yet desperately wants Piet to make love to her whenever it seems to be convenient. Is Piet a bad lover? No. Piet clearly knows his way around a woman’s sex. The problem is all hers. These two, the most “in love,” get into the worst trouble! The lesson: if you’re going to have extra marital sex because your spouse is not delivering in bed, have it for the sake of “good sex” (woman has as many orgasms as she wants and only then does man get his turn) and do not fall in love with your lover.

Is Updike’s realism very real? His characters are varied in psychology and circumstances as real human beings are wont to be. The setting (New England, USA, in the early 1960s) feels pretty real (I am only ten years behind Updike’s characters. I remember the early sixties in suburban New York as a young teenager. My parents had parties!). The “fiction,” if you will, is in the concentration of affairs among this insulated group—albeit always alcohol soused—of ten couples. We hear of no affairs outside the ten but one, late in the novel, when the pilot brags (a second-hand report) of having sex with women at distant ends of international flights. Another good rule for affairs is to have them with people outside your social circle! 

How does Updike’s realism work for the sex? Why the bad sex writing award? Rather than use literal words or conventional metaphors to describe sex objects and actions, Updike extends the technique of excessive metaphorical description to sex: “He thrust upwards, seeking the light.” The upshot is that the metaphors, overly sentimental, cloying, and self-conscious in the service of “scene setting” or “character rounding” realism, become corny in the service of sex. The last thing Updike wants to write is conventional porn, so he casts about for metaphors that aren’t conventional, but remain unambiguous in their context. If his novel, like many generic romances, had one sex scene, he would, I am sure, have been forgiven. But the novel has a half-dozen long sex scenes and a greater number of shorter ones, all cast in unconventional—and corny—metaphors. I believe that is the reason for the award.

Truth be told, it is difficult to write explicit sex without being corny unless the telling is flat. Fifty Shades of Grey, despite critical opprobrium, manages it by being direct without embellishment. Anais Nin (Henry and June) avoids corniness with flat telling and a refusal to repeat herself across numerous sex scenes, often told after the fact. John Cleland (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, the first English pornographic masterpiece) uses flat reporting and varies the level of description throughout.

Needing explicitness—adultery is the point of the novel—but eschewing directness—it would clash with the metaphor-laden realism of the rest—Updike sedulously abjures the obvious metaphors and finds others (many others) that are corny because they are so obviously meant to serve explicitness without being obvious. Overt metaphors—turgid tuber, rigid pole, cloying cavern, volcanic orifice—are always corny because they are obvious. There is no irony in them. Updike’s metaphors are rich with literary irony. He was not happy with his award.

Review: Oilcraft by Robert Vitalis (2020)

Book link: Oilcraft by Robert Vitalis

The  book’s subtitle is “The Myths of Scarcity and Security that Haunt U.S. Energy Policy.”

The subtitle sums up the book’s thrust. There are two primary issues. The book’s last chapter addresses the secondary issue: There never was an “oil for security” deal between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. The famous 1945 meeting between Franklin Roosevelt and Al Saud was primarily about Palestine. Nothing in the record suggests an oil-for-security arrangement. If anything, the oil price shocks of the 1970s (precipitated by OPEC) should have been enough to falsify that myth, yet it persists.

The bulk of the book is about markets. Vitalis’ argument is essentially this: It doesn’t matter who owns the oil in the ground. If there is excess resource for the controlling entity’s needs, then the controlling entity must sell it to realize any benefit. It matters not whether the country is an ally or an enemy; they will sell their oil. If they will not sell it to us, they will sell it to someone else, and that someone else will turn around and sell it to us, or some other oil source will. 

Vitalis contends that oil, extracted from the ground, lives in a market like every other commodity. Except possibly in wartime, it is, and was, never necessary for the U.S. to use military force to defend oil sources—yes, even in the case of Saddam’s annexation of Kuwait—and every such use of the military has never resulted in less expensive or more secure oil imports. Much more important, he claims, is secure control of the means of transporting the oil from source to market. In that context, he might agree that protecting ships in the Persian Gulf from Houthi missiles is justified.

The author extensively documents his claims—the endnotes section is longer than the text.

But Vitalis is wrong about one thing. Oil is not “just like” other commodities. First oil (more generally energy stored as carbon-hydrogen bonds. There are only three natural forms of it: oil, coal, and natural gas—technically also wood, which is “pre-coal”) is the apex commodity. It is an input to everything else. No other commodity has this property (food has some of it, since it is also stored carbon energy, but it is a ubiquitous input only to living systems, and today it also requires oil for planting, harvesting, and market transport). Second, every other commodity is, at least in theory, recyclable. Even food can be recycled into fertilizer. Carbon energy cannot be recycled. You have to destroy it to use it.

What about so-called renewable energy sources? Electricity? Where does it come from? Either carbon or the sun/wind/water, but capturing those sources requires oil for mining, building, deploying, and maintaining. What about uranium, the only natural non-carbon energy source (besides the sun)? Same thing. One must mine and process uranium (carbon for digging, transport, and electricity for processing) and build nuclear power plants (more carbon). 

What about hydrogen? Hydrogen is not a natural energy source but a storage medium like a battery. How does one get electricity into a battery? You make it somewhere else and put it in by charging the battery. Similarly, we make hydrogen using electricity or chemical reactions, storing that energy as hydrogen. Either way, we are back to carbon. Note that in theory, oil, coal, and gas are stored solar energy (like food), but we count them as “sources” rather than “stores” because the sun put the energy in—via plants—millions of years ago.

Does the difference that oil (carbon energy sources) represents make a difference to Vitalis’ thesis that military intervention in oil sources is unnecessary in the absence of a global conflict? I don’t think so, but not because oil isn’t different from everything else. His thesis holds because, apex input or not, like other commodities, it is bought and sold in markets, and there is enough of it from multiple sources (for now) to permit this kind of treatment. 

That brings me to one other small criticism of Oilcraft. Vitalis points out that every time we think we are running out of oil, we find more. He tends to write as if this will always be so, but because carbon energy cannot be recycled, recoverable stocks must eventually be exhausted.

Double Review: Richardson’s Pamela vs. Fielding’s Shamela!

Pamela by Samuel Richardson

A 1740 novel credited with being the first fully “character-oriented” novel and the original, English, “novel of manners.” It is an “epistolary novel” told in the form of letters between a daughter and her parents and later, when letters are forbidden her, journal entries. The “point of view” is first person, occasionally slipping into third person, the narrator explaining a few pages on: “so and so told me all of this later…”

Some facts. At the novel’s opening, Pamela is fifteen years old. At its close, she is sixteen. Something less than a year has passed. At twelve, her poor but famously honest and good parents had sent her to work for a wealthy woman who had just passed away when the story opens. A son, twenty-five years old, inherits all the wealth and, being something of a libertine, very much wants a piece of Pamela. Bear in mind the “age of consent” in England in 1740 was twelve!

Pamela is cast as humanity perfected in motive to serve God through her treatment of others—the Christian injunction to love God and his other children on Earth is taken very seriously by her to the point that her only lapse in perspective is fear of not loving God or others well enough. She is the sine qua non of virtue with grace, and also, we are told, exceptionally beautiful. The other point reinforced over and over again is Pamela’s fanatic determination to remain chaste at least until such time (if ever) as she should be married.  

The son (known only as B___ or master throughout) makes several attempts at Pamela, eventually abducting her to a distant property where she is placed in the hands of a cruel housemistress. Her escape attempts are always thwarted. All she wants is to go home to her parents. Mr. B___ cannot believe that she is not being duplicitous for the sake of more and more material wealth that he offers her in exchange for becoming his mistress. Finally, Mr. B___ grows sick of trying and lets her leave. On her way to her parents (we are halfway through the book), Mr. B___ reads her journal (the cruel housemistress, by his orders, having kept the document) and realizes that far from duplicitous, Pamela has been sincere throughout. He sends a fast rider after her with letters begging her to return to him. He loves her (he claims) and will give her everything of his life and wealth, including marriage, which, up to this point, was precluded by her low-born status.

Is this another feint on Mr. B___’s part? Pamela isn’t sure, but she decides to go back to him anyway, and thus begins the second half of the novel in which both she and Mr. B___ become the happiest couple on Earth. The second half of the novel is the perfect complement to the first half. Not only Mr. B___, but the cruel housemistress and all the other servants—who didn’t already love her thanks to her first employment—come to love her. Even the snobish gentry recognize that she might just be the most beautiful and gracious woman in all of England!

Novelists are told to “show, don’t tell.” If you acquire a story by reading a journal, the story might be told, but you, the journal reader, are shown it through the journal’s frame. I think that is the whole point of the length of this novel. We simply could not grasp how extraordinary Pamela is, and the subsequent transformation of everybody (especially Mr. B__) without the detail (and repetition) contained in its inordinate length.

The story’s pacing is consistent throughout. There is no elaborate time management; one day mostly leads to the next. We never lack for detail, and must suspend disbelief that anyone can, by hand with a quill pen, write that much that fast on so little paper (Paper was a luxury item in the eighteenth century) as she is given.

At the beginning, I was intimidated. Did I really want to spend the time reading this? At the end, I was delighted by the story and the portrayal of Pamela (despite her own misgivings, a most spiritual and graceful woman), perhaps the most elaborate—if redundant—single-character portrayal in all of fiction.

So why did I read this? For one thing, I’ve been on a “read the classics” jag for the last year or so, but this novel in particular, because I really wanted to read Henry Fielding’s Shamela, a parody of Richardson’s novel written only a year or so after Pamela’s publication. To best appreciate a spoof, one must know what is being spoofed. But Pamela is seven hundred pages long. Shamela is fifty pages! Oh well.

Shamela by Henry Fielding, 1741

So… Pamela is not the true story! It was commissioned by Mr. B___ (whose real name—revealed by Mr. Fielding—was Booby!) to produce a work complimenting him and his new bride. The real letters and journal were fewer and shorter (which makes more sense, see my comment above) and reveal a young girl, hardly a virgin, professing her innocence to her master for the sole purpose of seducing him into a disadvantageous (for him) marriage so that she might obtain legal access to his wealth! Meanwhile she (her real name being Shamela) has been sleeping with Parson Williams (an important—and. importantly, chaste—main character in Pamela) for some time already, a liaison that continues into her marriage to Booby! 

Fielding’s satire continues the epistolary style even beginning with an exchange of letters between two ministers one of whom lauds the newly published “Pamela” as the epitome of Christian virtue and its just rewards, while his replier tells him that Pamela was ghost written by persons unknown (not wishing to insult Richardson by naming him) and that he, the replier, has the “real” letters and journal!

What I love about Fielding is his bawdy sense of humor, combined with a polished ability to talk about sex (there is a lot of it) through metaphor, innuendo, and double entendre. We learn, for example, that Parson Williams was well endowed, while Booby possessed only a “spindle,” and so on.

Shamela is but a novella, barely fifty pages long. It is funny, but not that funny, and feels rushed (Fielding’s first “novel,” and published barely a year after Pamela). Must one read a seven-hundred-page novel to appreciate the fifty-page farce? Technically, yes, though the two reading tasks are, to be sure, disproportionate. I’m glad, in the end, that I liked Pamela, crazy and perhaps unreal as it may be. 

A year after Fielding published Shamela, he published his first full-length novel, The Adventures of Joseph Andrews, which turns out to be another take-off from Pamela! Less crude, very funny, I review it here.   

Review: In Defense of History by Richard Evans

In Defense of History by Richard Evans, 1997

This is a book about what historians do: Research (looking at lots of documents and other markers of the past in the present), and then writing books, essays, podcasts, or what have you, purporting to explain what their research has revealed about some aspect of the past. It is also a book obsessed with Postmodernism, a philosophical movement that emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century. In Defense of History is a critique of the impact (positive and negative) of Postmodernism on the research and writing of history.

Postmodernism is epistemically nihilistic in its extreme forms—there is no such thing as “truth”, everything can be interpreted in an infinite number of ways, all interpretations reflect power relationships (men over women, straights over gays, capitalists over labor, the politics of the day, etc) in our present or the present in which some book was written, and reinterpreted today. In this extreme form, Postmodernism is self-contradictory. If there is no “truth,” then why should we think that Postmodernism has anything valuable to say?

But Postmodernism also has a milder side. It comes down to saying that genuine “truth” is approachable, but there is no such thing as “the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” This can be understood purely in the present, never mind the writing of history. Suppose I am a witness to a traffic accident involving a half-dozen vehicles. I watch the sequence unfold from a position where I could pay full attention to the event. Later, I recount my recollection to the Highway Patrol. My account is valid, but not the “whole truth.” Someone bearing the same witness from the other side of the highway might describe a slightly different sequence of events. The two descriptions will essentially match up, but not be identical.

We are “perspectival creatures.” We see events from a particular angle and bring to our witness some particular experience. When we research history, the limitations of perspective are compounded. We are looking at documents (mostly) and must not only grasp their meaning (perhaps in translation, already a remove) in context. I find a document in an archive that reads like the transcript of a court proceeding. But in the absence of corroborating context, it might just as easily be a few pages torn from an otherwise lost novel. The further back we go in time, the worse this sort of problem gets because the volume of corroborating documents declines and the dating of those that are found becomes less sure. 

When we write our history book, we add another layer of perspective: our own life experience in a political and cultural environment that may have emerged from the times we are studying, and so on. Such things pull us away from “the whole truth,” while the discovery and incorporation of more documents, more monuments, and so on pulls us towards it. And thus is good history writing done. More truth, a better perspective, but never “the whole truth.” I think this is the sum and substance of Evans’ argument in this book.

In a long “afterword” chapter, Evans takes on his critics. There are more than a dozen, many of them the same people whose work he discusses in the body of the book. Some of these critics, Evans acknowledges, make good points, but most misrepresent him, and he goes to some lengths to illustrate his charges. This afterword thus amounts to a succinct summary of the whole book in which Evans clarifies, in a few sentences, some of the arguments that take pages in earlier chapters. 

One other thing I noted about the afterword. These historians can be really nasty! Some of the criticisms demonstrate a complete lack of attention to what Evans says and castigate him for claims he never makes. I was a graduate student in a university philosophy department at the height of the Postmodernist craze—the late 1970s. I read many critiques of contemporary philosophers by their contemporaries. I do not remember any of them being as careless and hot-headed as the historians appear to be.

Postscript: One of the historians (and Postmodernists) Evans mentions several times is Frank Ankersmit, but Evans does not discuss any of his work in detail. I read and reviewed one of Ankersmit’s books here. Written in 2012, the book makes quite reasonable claims in my opinion. Ankersmit must be one of the mild and rational postmodernists, or perhaps, by 2012, Postmodernism had moved past its zenith.

Ankersmit’s book is more interesting than Evans’ in my opinion. Ankersmit makes philosophical contributions, for example, on the relation between historical representation and art. Evans makes a competent statement of the down and up side impact of Postmodernism on the writing of history, but history moves on, and what was a significant debate in the last decades of the twentieth century is now made moot by the evisceration of academic humanities including history departments, not to mention the virtual victory of the more extreme versions of Postmodernism in political discourse (disinformation anyone?) and that of the political elite themselves.