AMERICAN PASTORAL by Philip Roth

I was fascinated and horrified in about equal measure by Philip Roth’s PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT which is, oddly, a bit like my current relationship with KOURTNEY AND KIM TAKE NEW YORK. I thus had high hopes for AMERICAN PASTORAL.

Where Roth’s early works, including PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT, were largely comic novels about Jewish American life, AMERICAN PASTORAL is clearly a work by a mature, much celebrated writer, who knows he is a mature much celebrated writer, and feels a need to write a novel as such.

So it starts off with a man named Nathan, clearly a proxy for the author (this is already what I as an experienced reader know to be a DANGER SIGN), who is attending his high school reunion. There is lots of agonising over the passage of time, which I could have gotten into, but then there is also lots of philosophizing about his generation, wich I found almost unbearably irritating. He writes about it as if the experience of Americans are the experiences of everyone. As if he can define an era. It’s sort of revoltingly insular. The pages just dripped with self-importance. I couldn’t handle it.

Then we go into how the one guy at their high school, nicknamed the Swede, went on to have this perfect life, till his daughter blew up a post office in protest at the Vietnam war. So then it becomes sort of state of the nation novel. Then I gave up on it. Sorry Mr Roth.

THE PRIME MINISTER by Anthony Trollope

I wasn’t stressed when I finished Trollope’s Barchester series, because I knew I had the whole Palliser series still to go. 6 books, 800 pages a book, surely I was good till well into my 40s? And now, somehow, oh god, I’ve almost finished all the Pallisers!

THE PRIME MINISTER is the second to last. I’m only in my 30s! What am I going to do! I’m running out of Victorians. This is terrible. I don’t know. Shall I start reading minor authors? Shall I start on people in translation? I never thought I’d reach the stage where the great partimony of world literature would start to look a bit thin.

THE PRIME MINISTER tells the story of Emily Wharton, who is much beloved of one Arthur Fletcher. She is however swept off her feet by another one, Ferdinand Lopez, and marries him in haste, regretting – in the traditional fashion – at leisure.

Ferdinand Lopez turns out to be a commercial adventurer, and gives us a very coherent explanation of today’s commodity bubble:

“If I buy a ton of coffee and keep it six weeks, why do I buy it and keep it, and why does the seller sell it instead of keeping it? The seller sells it because he thinks he can do best by parting with it now at a certain price. I buy it because I think I can make money by keeping it. It is just the same as thought we were to back our opinions. He backs the fall. I back the rise. You needn’t have coffee and you needn’t have guano to do this. Indeed the possession of the coffee or the guano is only a very clumsy addition to the trouble of your profession.” . . . Coffee and guano still had to be bought because the world was dull and would not learn the tricks of the trade as learnt by Ferdinand Lopez, – also possibly because somebody might want such articles, – but our enterprising hero looked for a time in which no such dull burden would be imposed on him.

Ferdinand commits suicide eventually, when he is ruined financially, which sadly most London bankers haven’t had the good taste to do. I was sorry to lose him, as he’s a fabulous character:

For he was essentially one of those men who are always, in the inner workings of their minds, defending themselves and attacking others. . . .He could not seat himself in a railway carriage without a lesson to his opposite neighbour that in all the mutual affairs of travelling, arrangement of feet, disposition of bags, and opening of windows, it would be the neighbour’s duty to submit and his to exact.

Emily now ought to have been happy but instead she wrapped herself in black and mourning not him so much as the ruin of her hopes and her (heavily implied) virginity. Lovely Arthur Fletcher keeps pursuing her, and I was in hell. I know Trollope well as a total bitch who won’t necessarily allow a happy ending (I am still scarred from this). But eventually he does. Hurray!

There’s also an entire parallel story with Lady Glencora Palliser, who we met in the first novel, and who has been appearing since. It’s like meeting old friends. Her husband is a rather failed Prime Minister, and we get lots of boring Corn Laws, Home Rule, etc etc in typical Trollope fashion. But we have to forgive him when we get letters from fathers like this:

Everett is well again, and as idle as ever. Your aunt Roby is making a fool of herself in Harrogate. I have heard nothing from Herefordshire. Everything is very quiet and lonely here. Your affectionate father, A Wharton

And this observation:

People seen by the mind are exactly different to things seen by the eye. They grow smaller and smaller as you come nearer down to them, whereas things become bigger.

Or this:

What beasts, what brutes, what ungrateful wretches men are! – worse than women when they get together in numbers enough to be bold.

THE SLAP by Christos Tsiolkas

At a barbeque in suburban Melbourne a man slaps a bratty child who is not his own. Then everything kicks off. The parents of the brat decide to involve the police (!), which creates a problem, as the mother is the best friend of the wife of the slapper’s cousin. You may need to read that last sentence twice. Everyone in this small middle class world is now slowly drawn in to the drama.

It makes for an entertaining story which manages to capture within a small group of characters a swathe of contemporary Australian identity. The slap’s a small event, followed by a bunch of small reactions, that somehow manages to give an insight into a big continent.

It’s also a very interesting exploration of a certain life stage – lots of the characters are in their 40s, and seem to be faced with the fact that they have achieved much of what they set out to achieve, and now have to ask: what’s next? Here’s a television writer:

She was chic, and with age, that mattered more than looks. Chic didn’t desert you. She did look her age but she looked fantastic. She was secure, comfortable and she had a good life. She knew this but it was not enough. She wanted to do great things. Television was not a great thing. Rhys was not a great thing. She wanted to write a book that would shake or move of be known throughout the world. She wanted the grand success. Or the grand failure. It did not matter. She did not want the pleasurable and comfortable mediocrity in which she now wallowed to be the sum of her life.

The book did falter a little towards the end. The author clearly does not sympathize with the slapped child’s parents, and so there was towards the end a certain mean-spirited kind of banging away at his theme, which made it a less rich and complex book than it could have been. The characters also are not always as diverse as they could be – every single married man in the book is rather miserably having an affair. Thus we get lots of this sort of thing:

. . . the tearing open of a condom packet, and then his cock was entering her. she gritted her teeth, chocked back a cry as he pushed hard inside her, the pain slicing her . .

It’s also all a bit suffocatingly bourgeoisie after a while:

A cruel thought flashed quickly and guiltily in her mind: be a man, deal with your fucking mid-life crisis – it is so boring. She scanned the list of dishes. She would order the whole fish smoked in a banana leaf in nonya spices. She shut her menu.

These niggles aside, it’s a very fine book.

THE JOY LUCK CLUB by Amy Tan

This is a famous best seller which I have been ignoring for years fearing it was going to be a bit of a let-me-milk-my-heritage cheesy Americana. It’s not quite that bad, but I’m afraid that yes, that’s the general area.

The story revolves around four Chinese immigrant women in San Francisco who meet to play Mah Jong. Their daughters join them. We flash back in time to the mothers’ lives in China so we can all be in touch with our heritage. Yes, it’s a cheese fest.

There are some interesting stories, and some sweet bits – here’s a description of a little boy who’s just been disciplined:

So Bing wandered down the beach, walking stiffly like an ousted emperor, picking up shards of rock and chunks of driftwood

But then there are some dire bits. Here’s some quality believable dialogue, which shows how people talk in China:

Thank you Little Queen. Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not you hope. How to laugh forever.

Eventually one of the daughters travels to China, and to her horror, her mother’s home of Guangzhou “looks like a major American city.” Worse yet, in her hotel “There’s a colour television with remote-control panels built into the lamp table between the twin beds.” What a betrayal. But then luckily she takes a shower: “The hotel has provided little packets of shampoo which upon opening, I discover is the consistency of colour of hoisin sauce. This is more like it, I think. This is China.”

BELGIAN WAFFLING

I rarely blog my reading of blogs, this seeming just too 21st century to bear, but today I do just have to record a blog I really enjoy, Emma Beddington’s BELGIAN WAFFLING. Describing herself as “an ex-Eurodrone, unfit mother, slattern,” she writes a most amusing blog on that most difficult of subjects, herself. With the added bonus of an ongoing series of pictures of mournful dogs.

Most really recently she has been writing about ZAFARA by Michael Allin, which is about the first giraffe in France. She reports:

Zarafa WALKED from Marseille to Paris in 1826, accompanied by 4 Egyptian handlers, 2 antelopes, some cows, and zoologist Etienne Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire, who kept a sort of diary of the trip:

“Today the giraffe toured a part of the city, accompanied by her keepers, a numerous picket of police and a great crowd of the curious. The courteous animal did not fail to visit the Prefect, who accorded her the welcome due to a beautiful stranger. In order to protect her from the cold temperature she was dressed in a mantle of waxed taffeta”.

I also like this:

“One can say that the Giraffe has nothing elegant or graceful in the detail of her forms; her short body, her high and close-together legs, the excessive length of her neck, the declivity of her back, her badly-rounded rump and her long and bare tail, all these things contrast in a shocking manner; she seems badly built, unbalanced on her feet, and yet one is seized by astonishment at the sight of her, and one finds her beautiful without being able to say why”.

Isn’t that lovely?

A COLOSSAL FAILURE OF COMMON SENSE by Lawrence McDonald

The subtitle of this book is “The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers,” and so it proves to be, written by a former trader there, in a somewhat embarrassingly breathless I-read-bad-thrillers kind of style.

We begin with McDonald’s early years, in which we get a bit too much information about his various family issues and his obsession with working on Wall Street. Once he is hired at Lehman the book improves, and the author does an excellent job explaining clearly the complicated financial products that were Lehman’s undoing.

What I found particularly interesting was the fact that (at least according to McDonald) long before the crisis many people were aware how shaky the American mortgage market was, including many people at Lehman, and made repeated efforts to get the company out of the web of mortagage debt in which it was entrapped. I’m puzzled by how total the collapse was, and how unprepared the world’s governments seem to have been for it, given that so many people seem to have been aware for so long of which way the CDO winds were blowing.

You may recall I recently read Ehrenreich’s BRIGHT SIDED, about the role of so-called positive thinking in the financial crisis, and I was interested to see how ‘positive’ Dick Fuld, the head of Lehman, insisted on being, right through to the bitter, bankrupt end. Warned of the risks by Mike Gelband, the firm’s fixed income chief, he responded: “I don’t want you to tell me why we can’t. I want you to be creative, and tell me how we can. You’re much too cautious. What are you afraid of?”

Presumably he was afraid of world wide financial armageddon.

So, an interesting book, but also a sort of interesting view in a trader’s life. Leaving aside the horribly bad thriller style writing, what stays with me most is the idea that trading is somehow a higher profession, a profession that singles you out as special, and that making money is genuinely its own reward. I’m sure these ideas are widely held, but you don’t usually hear them quite so baldly put. His idea of describing someone is to describe what their fancy flat is like. His description of their work day makes it sound like they were nobly fighting in the trenches. Take this, about a bonus:

Not one day passes when I do not hink with profound gratitude of those moments when I stood up there with Rich and Larry and received my million-dollar reward. No day. No night.

I mean, seriously, get a hobby. Or become obsessed with some woman or something. It’s creepy to think about some bonus, every day. Every night.

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by JD Salinger

This famous American novel of adolescent angst follows the story of a young man named Holden Caufield.

Holden is on the verge of being expelled from his expensive boarding school when, on impulse, after a fist fight, he decides to leave the school a couple of days early. The novel follows that couple of days, during which Holden wanders around New York and struggles with his many and various issues.

Holden is a seriously unhappy young man, but the book is often very funny. Here he is describing one of his old teachers:

He started going into this nodding routine. You never saw anybody nod as much in your life as old Spencer did. You never knew if he was nodding a lot because he was thinking and all, or just because he was a nice old guy that didn’t know his ass from his elbow.

Or here’s school boy talk:

He was always telling us about a lot of creepy guys that go around having affairs with sheep, and guys that go around with girl’s pant sewed into the lining of their hats and all. And flits and Lesibans.

Or here’s a movie review:

All I can say is, don’t see it if you don’t want to puke all over yourself.

A model of the sort of journalistic excellence to which this blog aspires.

What is so difficult about Holden’s situation, and perhaps what has made it so pertinent to generations of young people in particular, is that Holden can’t say why he is so unhappy. His is an amorphous, nebulous alienation.

The closest he can get to describing his feelings is to calling everyone and everything ‘phony.’ Thus, for example, on the movie:

The part that got me was, there was this lady sitting next to me that cried all through the goddam picture. The phonier it got, the more she cried. You’d have thought she did it because she was kindhearted as hell, but I was sitting right next to her, and she wasn’t. She had this little kid with her that was bored as hell and had to go to the bathroom, but she wouldn’t take him. She kept telling him to sit still and behave himself. She was about as kindhearted as a goddamn wolf You take somebody that cries their goddamn eye out over phony stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they’re mean bastards at heart. I’m not kidding.

He also finds it phony when people, to be polite, tell him the coffee’s almost ready. It’s also phony when ex-girfriends are polite to him. And ninety percent of what’s on television, also phony.

Undoubtedly, these things are phony. And Holden’s revolt against all that, I found admirable, and indeed logically coherent. But I think its a very young person’s revolt. When you get a little older, you maybe start to think that we all need to make concessions, and compromises, just to be able to keep on sliding by. Most people’s lives are sort of incoherent. ‘Marriage is compromise,’ an elderly Indian man at a wedding told me recently; and then he added, with awkward but total sincerity: ‘life is compromise.’

Poor Holden.

ROBINSON CRUSOE by Daniel Defoe

How much do you love the chapter titles of this book? A representative sample:

I GO TO SEA
I AM CAPTURED BY PIRATES
I ESCAPE FROM THE SALLEE ROVER
I BECOME A BRAZILIAN PLANTER
I GO ON BOARD IN AN EVIL HOUR
I FURNISH MYSELF WITH MANY THINGS
WE MARCH OUT AGAINST THE CANNIBALS
WE QUELL A MUTINY
I FIND MY WEALTH ALL ABOUT ME

I mean, this is not messing about. This is stuffing your book as full of plot as possible. Daniel Defoe would have done well in the twenty first century, working on BOURNE IDENTITY and REAL HOUSEWIVES OF WHEREVER THE HELL. Though I’m not sure he’s bothered, as he did pretty damn well in the seventeenth century too. This book is a big part of his life’s achievement, as ROBINSON CRUSOE has a place in history as being the first ever novel in English.

It’s a curiously modern piece of work, not least because Defoe pretended it was ‘based on real events’. He even put in a preface from ‘the editor’ assuring readerss of its veracity. This is not too surprising when we learn that Defoe was described by one contemporary as“ a shrewd, shifty, ingenious man, much mistrusted and frequently imprisoned.” According to the introduction:

He was imprisoned for debt as well as for his satirical writing, and his reverses including bankruptcy and the failure of get-rich-quick schemes, of which raising civet cats (their glands were used to produce perfume) for quick cash was just one. He was a journalist, publisher, poet, businessman and sometime secret agent

In another very modern turn of events, the book, which was huge bestseller, was immediately widely pirated.

You may not know that Robinson Crusoe was in fact Robinson Kretuznaer, a German immigrant to York, who anglicized his name; but you probably know much else about him. Essentially the story is he is shipwrecked on an island where he lives for over twenty years on his own, until he saves a local man from ethnic warfare (okay cannibalism), names him after a day of the week, and is eventually rescued.

Learning how Cruose teaches himself to survive – how he makes cheese, and tries to build casks, is very compelling. So to is his description of the loneliness, which must surely be a far greater challenge than diary or storage. Here he is at dinner:

. . .then to see how like a king I dined too, all alone, attended by my servants; Poll, as if he had been my favourite, was the only person admitted to talk to me. My dog, who was now grown very old and crazy, and had found no species to multiply his kind upon, sat always at my right hand; and two cats, one on one side the table and one on the other, expecting now and then a bit from my hand, as a a mark of special favour.

Poll is the parrot he spends hours teaching to talk so he can hear some kind of voice.

Of course when he finally does get to meet a human, and thus hear a voice, I think we can be pretty confident that the main thing he’d be doing is blubbing and shaking. However Defoe seems to feel that in fact he would be delighted to have extra domestic help, name him FRIDAY, and get the poor unfortunate to call him MASTER.

You can see why this book is often read as a metaphor for colonialism, and that’s certainly one way to understand it That said, it has many themes, and even the naughty-western-hegemony-naughty thing can be overstated. Crusoe is very upset by having to watch cannibalism on his island, and is tortured by feeling he ought to save the victims. There follows then a really interested and complicated debate about what constitutes ‘right’ in other cultures, which struck me – again – as curiously modern.

. . .who, however they were isolators and barbarians and had several bloody and barbarous rites in their customs, such as sacrificing human bodies to their idols, were yet, as to the Spaniards, very innocent people; and that the rooting of them out of the country is spoken of with the utmost abhorrence and detestation by even the Spaniards themselves, at this time, . . . as a bloody and unnatural piece of cruelty, unjustifiable to god or to man . .

So, curiously modern. So too is the ending:

All these things, with some very surprising incidents in some new adventures of my own, for ten years more, I may perhaps give a further account of hereafter.

Sequel anyone? He needs something to fall back on if the whole civet cat thing doesn’t work out.

THE BLIND ASSASSIN by Margaret Atwood

I am insanely far behind in blogging my books for 2012, so without further ado lets turn to the appalling BLIND ASSASSIN by Margaret Atwood.

This dire book won the Booker, which after this and the THE FINKLER QUESTION, I’m beginning to regard as a mark of shame.

It tells the story of two young women whose father is slowly going bankrupt. The oldest one agrees to marry a rich man to save the family. She lives a terribly constrained life, which she enlivens with an affair. Her sister comes to live with the family and eventually kills herself.

The story is told primarily from the perspective of the older sister, as an old woman in the present. She lives a very dull life, and this is for some reason detailed for us in excruciating detail. If you have any familiarity with the tastes of the Booker committee, you won’t be surprised to hear that this is not the only narrative voice. The story is interwoven with a science fiction story (how innovative, I could just puke) and a pretentiously third person account of the affair.

Here’s a representative extract, a description of a man in an old photograph:

. . .he’s holding up his hand, as if to fend her off in play, or else to protect himself from the camera, from the person who must be there, taking the picture; or else to protect himself from those in the future who might be looking at him, who might be looking at him through this square, lighted window of glazed paper. As if to protect himself from her. As if to proect her.

I mean honestly. And to think I used to like this writer. Who was I?

THE MAPLES STORIES by John Updike

THE MAPLES STORIES is an unusual format, being a string of short stories following one long marriage, of Mrs Maple to Mr Maple.

Updike is an immensely accomplished author. Try this wonderful description of a cabbage:

. . . the pure sphericity, the shy cellar odor, the cannonball heft. He chose, not the largest cabbage, but the roundest, the most ideal, and carried it naked in his hand to the checkout counter . . .

Note how he describes the cabbage as naked. I have never thought of any vegetable as naked, but these are the kind of lines along which Updike’s mind runs. He is well obsessed with sex, as we observed last year on reading RUN RABBIT RUN.

It is Saturday; the formless erotic suspense of the afternoon – the tennis games, the cartoon matinees – has passed.

The erotic suspense of cartoon matinees?

Anyway, the Maples have a very depressing suburban midcentury American marriage. They are constantly going to suburban cocktail parties and having affairs with their suburban friends. It is all very repressed and alcoholic and dramatic. I had to say: get a divorce. Or at least take make every third drink a soft one. Beautifully written, deeply felt, I just found it all very difficult to relate to.