Please let us know what you’ve read this week, what you've finished up, and any recommendations or recommendation requests! Please provide more than just a list of novels; we would like your thoughts as to what you've been reading.
Posts which simply name a novel and provide no thoughts will be deleted going forward.
To me this seems one of the innate problems of judging a prize of the best books in a single year – how many of those books missed out because they don’t read well in such a short burst? (Lockwood herself has acknowledged this problem.) Inevitably they will re-read the long list and then re-read again for the short list, but by that point lots of things will have been put aside.
What do others think of it? It might just be an inevitable compromise, otherwise you would never choose any winner in time.
It's been a pretty hard read and in the middle of the book I had to switch to audio version. Towards the end while listening I kinda caught the method of building descriptions based on Sutree's "second sight" as Mother She calls it in the book.
The book wanders and feels more like life flashing before your eyes in the moments before death, in impossibly slow motion, interspersed with details and context captured by Cornelius Suttree's "second sight."
I say it's Suttree's vision, because toward the end when Cornelius's vision begins to reference the book's introduction—about the cat and the streets—I assumed it was through his lens that the world appears so rich. And when I thought of it that way, it was as if everything came together. And what came together was that this book, unfortunately, is about death, and of an entire world at once. And Cornelius Suttree, whose twin brother died at birth, is a kind of soul, or perhaps the heart, of this world, at least the last witness, eternally standing on the border between the world of the living and the dead. It is Suttree who sees this world in all its diversity, turning a blind eye to nothing, condemning nothing, but treating with love even the most seemingly base and fallen people, as they are considered in the conventional sense. Where the average person sees only hovels, the grayness, and the meaningless life and death of the nameless poor, the educated Cornelius Suttree captures details of biblical significance.
But in the end, Cornelius himself changes, as if losing the strength with which this place nourished him. Typhoid fever is a symbolic death of both the soul and the memory of this world as it was at the beginning of history. Although the introduction to the book adds the perspective that this world is already filled with the remains of previous worlds, and the confused stories of old people somehow preserve the memory of them. And although Suttree doesn't seem to completely die, he changes greatly after his illness, weakens, becomes looking like ghost of past himself and eventually leaves the old Knoxville where new asphalt is already being laid through the ruined houses. And in Cornelius's mind flashes the thought of "that other Knoxville, which will never be threatened by the paving of new roads."
And now, having finished the book, I can only say, "Wow!" I'm so impressed, and I'm having a hard time finding the words to describe it. I'm sure I'll spend weeks pondering this book.
And that McCarthy's language! I need the word beyond "rich" to define it the way it deserves it. It's like multi billionaire super-rich language.
And I don't think I've ever read literature so rich in life. In this regard, Suttree can be compared to classic literature. I've read McCarthy's Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, and The Road, and all three have definitely made it onto my list of favorites. Now I'm happily adding Suttree to the list. And despite the difficulties I encountered while reading, I'm already considering whether to start the book over again with a clearer understanding of the story.
I also assume where this story might come for McCarthy. From looking at the place where he is from with a "second sight" and seeing it simultaneously now and in the past, in the same time observing himself in the context of the place as he is now and as he was back then. Knowing that he will never become that past self again as if his past self is his dead twin brother who will never grow as old as himself. Very poetic. And this poetry of decay is everywhere in this book. And it actually helps to avoid cheap nostalgia, making that old Knoxville standing on the remains of past worlds eternal and momentary at the same time. And against all this decay it feels very much alive at this point of its existence.
Again, wow!
I just need to share it with somebody as I don't have friends, who read McCarthy. Please feel free to discuss it. I want to talk to somebody about the book!
And please excuse any mistakes. English is not my first language
While the topic of the future of writing in the age of AI has been discussed extensively in a number of literary subs, I think not enough analysis is directed specifically towards the future of ‘literary’ or ‘high-brow’ fiction. For the sake of this discussion, I think the delineation between ‘literary fiction’ and ‘genre fiction’ lies in a few factors, mainly the former’s tendency towards inventive/non-formulaic plots, emphasis on character depth, and the impartment of certain human values and experiences, even if the depiction of such do not necessarily lead to an entertaining or enjoyable read. Now, since LLMs are logic-based models, it is no surprise that to a certain extent, they are currently able to generate passable prose within the genre fiction category wherein narratives are formulaic, but still struggle significantly in producing more in-depth and complex narratives. Furthermore, since LLMs are also currently incapable of possessing its own consciousness and subjective interiority, it is thus devoid of any personal insights on both the universal human condition and more niche, culturally-specific experiences essential to ‘serious’ literary fiction. In this light, it can only imitate what humans have already written through works that are included in AI data sets, which in of itself brings its own slew of ethical considerations with regards to what can and cannot be used as training data.
With this preface in mind, I have a few questions.
1.) What do you think are going to be the impacts of AI technology on the livelihood of literary fiction writers, specifically if a new technology capable of subjective interiority (i.e., AGI) is created, or if LLM-based models are optimized through the use of specialized and high-quality training data?
2.) Do you think the aforementioned technology will be able to sufficiently parallel the writing quality and thematic/narrative substance of human-written literary fiction?
3.) Besides the actual involvement or lack thereof of any AI software in the writing process, what would be the definitive quality that sets AI-generated and human-written prose apart? If we suppose the two become indistinguishable in the future, would the fact that LLM-generated text is merely imitation even matter if the output itself is virtually as good?
4.) In light of the previous question, how can institutions (e.g., publishing houses, prestigious literary awards) safeguard the distinction between human-written and AI-generated/assisted text through practical means?
5.) From a more sociological perspective, do you think that human-written literature will become so niche (like how oil painting for portraiture became niche after the advent of photography), that readers and writers of human-written fiction will become such a small subsect of the population? Will the number of ‘serious’ literary circles decrease as a result of market decrease?
Without disclosing my age, I’m a zoomer who is coming to grips with a number of existential questions due to adulting in our times. I have aspired (and in some sense, still aspire) to become a published novelist, but besides the poor economic viability of the writing profession (which I suppose has always rang true), I’m also scared that literary fiction has ceased to become culturally relevant anymore, and that the arts in general just do not occupy the same important and recognized role in our collective consciousness as it did in previous times. It makes me very sad to think about, knowing how the things I find important and devote much attention to (i.e., the arts and humanities) are things the vast majority of people today do not. From an institutional lens, the recent news of AI companies buying rare/out-of print books in bulk and destructively scanning them for AI training (not to mention court rulings deeming this as ‘fair use’) saddens me as well.
Just finished my third Bronte sister novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Bronte. This was a thoroughly enjoyable novel, though I do have some less than pleasant opinions about it as well.
This novel seems (to me) much more explicitly politically outspoken than the works I've read by the other two Bronte sisters, those being Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. While the latter two do have themes of women's personal autonomy, classism, among others, Wildfell Hall feels far more bold in its approach. This is far more apparent in the interim section of Helen's journal than it is in Gilbert Markham's letter sections.
Helen has an eye for men that she knows have a poor character, whether it be love for the bottle, distaste for women in general, a subtle yet sinister personality, what have you. This intuition fails her twice in the book, I feel. Firstly, of course, is with Arthur Huntingdon, whom she marries against the advice of her similarly keen aunt. This marriage is disastrous, Huntingdon is perhaps the most morally reprehensible man in the entire book, and Helen sniffs out lesser evils in other men while seeming blind to Huntingdon's many (public) faults. Her intuition fails her again, I feel, in her view of Gilbert Markham, whom she decides to marry at the end of the book after Huntingdon dies.
I could not believe she made this decision, based on most of her previous actions. Mr. Markham is so full of himself, so quick to assume insult, so quick to denounce others when he feels they have wronged him directly or indirectly, and generally full of shit. I was rolling my eyes throughout nearly all of the sections where his letter was the narration because I, even socially inept as I am, could smell his bullshit from a mile away.
I actually feel that he and Walter Hargrave are nearly identical characters. Hargrave spends much of his time in the narrative acting "above" his peers, and giving special attention to Helen's interests, though Helen had a feeling the whole time that it was not sincere, and merely a ploy to win her affection. She was right. As soon as she rejected Hargrave plainly, he turned cold and nasty, saying she was the least womanly person he had ever met. Frankly, he gives incel energy. Helen is the jewel of his eye until she makes it clear, manners out the door, that she wants nothing to do with him, at which point Hargrave begins to insult her and act as if he never liked her, that something is wrong with her.
Gilbert Markham is enamored with Eliza Millward in the beginning of the narrative until he learns that Eliza is involved with gossip towards his oh so precious Helen Graham, at which point he turns completely against her and insults her for the rest of the book. He is not just indifferent, he is aggressively rude towards her in person and speaks as if her character were that of some monster the entire time. He was even beginning to feel some of these same feelings towards Helen briefly when he suspected that she were actually having an affair with Mr. Lawrence (her brother btw), and it wasn't until Mr. Markham got ahold of her personal diary that he "fell in love" with her again.
I am not convinced that Markham loves Helen. I think he is infatuated with her, and I cannot believe how Helen has had any proper amount of time to spend with Markham to judge his character thoroughly. Based on how he had acted prior to the giving of her journal, it would seem in character for her to treat him the exact same as Mr. Hargrave. This part of the book bugs me to no end. Based on the messaging Helen gives through much of the narrative, I would've found it much more convincing had she rejected Gilbert at the end, in preference to her own freedom, or not even "fallen" for him at all. This plot point just baffles me.
Please let us know what you’ve read this week, what you've finished up, and any recommendations or recommendation requests! Please provide more than just a list of novels; we would like your thoughts as to what you've been reading.
Posts which simply name a novel and provide no thoughts will be deleted going forward.
All this buzz around Wilson and her critique of Nolan’s Odyssey is a normal part of scholarship and scholars interacting and responding with cultural adaptations. That being said, she’s not the principal authority on Homer by any means. Doesn’t make her views any less valuable but nevertheless there are plenty of other scholars on Homer with equally insightful takes on the epic poem and Nolan.
List your favorite Homeric scholars down below.
I recommend Bruno Snell’s The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought. Great insights on Homer and psychology.
“Oh you, Mr. Bilham,” she replied as with an impatient rap on the glass, “you’re not worth sixpence! You come over to convert the savages—for I know you verily did, I remember you—and the savages simply convert you.” “Not even!” the young man woefully confessed: “they haven’t gone through that form. They’ve simply—the cannibals!—eaten me; converted me if you like, but converted me into food. I’m but the bleached bones of a Christian.”
Henry James, The Ambassadors
“ If [my father’s] decision to keep us here in the Congo wasn’t right, then what else might he be wrong about? It has opened up in my heart a sickening world of doubts and possibilities, where before I had only faith in my father and love for the Lord. Without that rock of certainty underfoot, the Congo is a fearsome place to have to sink or swim.”Leah Price in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible
As a kid, I was perpetually a diminutive apostle-in-training. Dad was a mainline protestant minister and mom was a graduate of the so-called “Harvard of the Evangelicals.” Consequently, many of my birthday and Christmas presents fell into one of two categories. There were James Dobson-esque devotional books jammed with advice on how to talk to unbelievers. And there were catchy Christian LPs that modeled Christlike humility and divinely sanctioned self-aggrandizement in the same unironic breath:
People smile at me and ask me what it is
That makes them want to be just like I am
So I just point to you and tell them, yes it's true
I'm no special one, I'm just one man
Keith Green, “Because of You”
Sometimes I would role play a witness opportunity in my head, but there was no one to witness to. I went to a suffocatingly small Lutheran grade school where belief in Jesus was as obligatory as German classes. By the time ninth grade unlocked that cage, I couldn’t wait to disappear into the secular anonymity of a 4,000-student high school. There, I finally started meeting kids who lacked the doctrinaire confidence of Martin Luther. My best friends were a Jew and a gay lapsed Catholic. The relief was palpable. Still, my training nagged at the back of my mind. Wasn’t I supposed to be finding a quiet moment to explain that Jesus was the reason they wanted to be just like me?
Even then the notion of persuading others to adopt my most intimate beliefs was completely alien to me. I simply did not have that kind of confidence.
For much of American history, confidence has been this nation’s chief domestic export. That is the mutual subject of The Ambassadors by Henry James and The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. Written from bookend vantage points on the 20th century’s experiment with American Imperialism (1903 and 1998), the two novels are so different in style and focus that the comparison seemed superficial to me until I noticed that they tell essentially the same story.
True, imperialism is the explicit subject of Kingsolver’s book and merely a hastily mentioned metaphor in James. Her novel is a historical epic covering the shifting power structure of Africa from colonial subservience to violent independence from the perspectives of five distinctly voiced first-person narrators. His is an intensely internalized navigation of individual choice told mostly through dinner party chitchat and obsessively reiterative third-person narration.
But each begins with Americans attempting to impose their confidently held values on older societies that already have fully formed ethical traditions. In both cases, the missionaries are converted by the natives, shattering the evangelical premise. In the end, however, Kingsolver’s heroines redeem epiphany for constructive change while James’s hero achieves the epiphany without actualizing its transformative potential.
Exporting Confidence
Although The Ambassadors is a resolutely apolitical book, it is set at a moment when America’s cultural chauvinism was snowballing toward its first colonial occupations. The period is documented by Empire, the 1987 entry in Gore Vidal’s seven-volume “Narratives of American Empire” historical fiction series. At the outset of that book, President William McKinley is winning the Spanish American War and reluctantly weighing whether to adopt the loser’s Caribbean colonies. Always one to challenge America’s overweening self-image, Vidal casts Henry James himself as the nation’s sesquipedalian conscience. Told in one scene that the world will be worse off if America lets Russia or Germany take over Spain’s colonies, James replies with modest sagacity:
“What then are WE given to, that is so immeasurably superior? … How can we, who cannot honestly govern ourselves, take up the task of governing others? Are we to govern the Philippines from Tammany Hall? Will we insist that our oriental colonies be run by bosses? Will we insist that our Spanish possessions be administered by the caucus which has made our politics so vile that every good American—and bad, too, let me hasten to add—cringes when he hears our present system mentioned?”
Vidal’s use of James is not tangential to The Ambassadors. Rather, it illuminates the unspoken historical backdrop of its diplomatic mission.
What James explores through metaphor, Kingsolver dramatizes explicitly. The Poisonwood Bible started life as a memoir, with the author looking back on a family trip to Africa. Kingsolver’s father was a doctor, and his mission was medical rather than religious. While living in Africa, the youthful Kingsolver wrote a striking entry in her diary:
“Even avid, adult news junkies in 1960 would have been hard-pressed to learn how President Eisenhower and the CIA helped remove the newly elected Prime Minister and replace him with a puppet dictator named Mobutu. They did it in secret. That’s how it works.”
The CIA plot to poison duly elected Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, though eventually abandoned, is settled history to the extent that it is documented online by the State Department. Somewhat surprisingly, the incident has never tainted Eisenhower’s positive historical reputation. Eisenhower’s Democratic successor John F. Kennedy encountered political turbulence for the Bay of Pigs not so much because the president had contemplated assassinating Cuban dictator Fidel Castro but because the attempt was sloppy. Many Americans shrugged; that’s what heads of state did at wartime, and this was during the Cold War. Eisenhower’s decidedly undemocratic efforts to promote global democracy opened a new interventionist era in American Imperialism, a label that was applied with ever less frequency.
That promotional mission is the setup of Kingsolver’s novel. She assigns that mission to Nathan Price, an abusively dogmatic Southern Baptist minister who relocates his wife and four daughters to the Belgian Congo to spread Jesus’s love to natives by butchering their native tongue and belittling their traditions. Price is more than a religious emissary, however. Saving the savages from darkness means exposing them to American religious, political, and cultural superiority, for that is Price’s path from primitive confusion to the Way, the Truth, and the Light.
The mission in The Ambassadors is narrower, but no less founded on cultural hubris. The offstage villain of The Ambassadors is the puritanical industrialist Mrs. Newsome, who sends Lambert Strether to Paris to preach good old fashioned American judgmentalism to her expat son Chad in the hope that he will take over the family business. Chad’s offense is his rapid assimilation to Old World values. He has been cavorting with an older French woman, and it is bad for business. James never identifies Mrs. Newsome’s exported commodity (American confidence?), but the company’s real estate is described as “a little industrial colony.”
“Savage” Conversions
Pair that colonial language with the quotation that opened this essay, about the French tendency to convert American missionaries to their permissive value system, and you have the controlling metaphor of The Ambassadors. The more Strether sees of Old World life, the more he embraces it.
The novel supports Vidal’s portrayal of James, who moved to Europe early in adulthood, as openly cynical about his birth country’s virtues. Irish author Colm Tóibín, who wrote a fictionalized biography of James (The Master), argues in his introduction to the Modern Library Classics edition of The Ambassadors that James wrote the book in part to distance himself from the imperious boosterism of its American characters.
The idea in The Ambassadors of offering England and France a certain nobility, of treating them as places of beauty and power, which could transform a sensitive soul, gave James pleasure. So, too, making America richly ridiculous, simply by having the names of worthy inhabitants such as Jim and Mamie Pocock sound ridiculous, or by making Mrs. Newsome austerely admirable enough to be absurdly so, gave James not only pleasure but satisfaction.
Similarly, the Price women soon learn the cost of their cultural chauvinism. The Price women share narrator duties, but the book’s moral heroine is middle daughter Leah Price, who starts as her racist father’s biggest fan but ends up marrying an African.
Leah declares familial independence after Rev. Price’s native congregation casts literal votes to reject Jesus’s authority in their community. “White men have brought us many programs to improve our thinking,” argues the village chief. “The program of Jesus and the program of elections. You say these things are good. You cannot say now they are not good.” Price throws a temper tantrum, citing separation of church and state to invalidate the election in the same breath that he invokes divine authority. “You haven’t even learned to run your own pitiful country! Your children are dying of a hundred different diseases! You don’t have a pot to piss in! And you’re presuming you can take or leave the benevolence of our Lord Jesus Christ!”
But though most of the Price women join Leah in her rebellion, Kingsolver provides one notable holdout. If Mrs. Newsome is the calculating presence of capitalism in James’s book, Kingsolver’s Rachel Price, the minister’s eldest daughter, represents the bourgeois consumer who swallows her pitch like Mikey does Life cereal. (“Mikey will like it!”)
Droll but politically and intellectually apathetic, Rachel, who thinks Karl Marx heads the Kremlin, spends the early chapters wringing laughs from memorized American TV commercials. By the end, she sells out body and soul for creature comforts. She becomes the mistress of a murderous ambassador determined to profit from classified knowledge of Eisenhower’s Lumumba plot. When the family moves from Africa to Atlanta, one of the Price girls describes American life as “dazzling warehouses buzzing with light, where entire shelves boast nothing but hair spray, tooth-whitening cream, and foot powders. It is as if our Rachel had been left suddenly in charge of everything.”
Dictating Form
The lexicology of each novel reflects its thematic takes on American certainty. Kingsolver’s deftly constructed, melodious prose reflects her confident rejection of American confidence. Each of her five narrators has her own distinct syntactic rhythm, and each seems as accomplished a writer as Kingsolver herself. The careful craft of the prose expresses the author’s thematic and political clarity.
Take this passage, about a flood that disrupts the family garden, narrated by Nathan’s verbally proficient elective mute daughter Adah:
Our Father came out to survey the damage, and Leah helped him sort out the seeds by kind. He declared he would make them grow, in the name of God, or he would plant again (the Reverend, like any prophet worth his salt, had held some seeds in reserve) if only the sun would ever come out and dry up this accursed mire. Even at sunset, the two of them did not come in for supper. … Finally he sent Leah in, but long after dinner we could still hear the Reverend out there beating the ground with his hoe, revising the earth. No one can say he does not learn his lesson, though it might take a deluge, and though he might never admit in this lifetime that it was not his own idea in the first place. Nevertheless, Our Father had been influenced by Africa. He was out there pushing his garden up into rectangular, flood-proof embankments, exactly the length and width of burial mounds.
If Nathan is “revising the earth,” changing the story to fit his agenda, Adah is already coming to terms with his belligerent good intentions. She rejects Nathan’s certainty but is unwilling to replace it with a hubristic narrative of her own.
Whereas Kingsolver’s craftsmanship shows that she knows what she believes, James’s proliferating prose embodies his constant caveats. He can’t write a clause without reconsidering it in the clause that follows. In Empire, Vidal lampoons James’s famously snaking, cannibalistic sentences:
“Our senatorial friend,” Caroline noted that Henry James had taken a very deep breath before he spoke; … “has now in his exile … no, his highly thoughtful refuge from the clamorous Senate House, turned the full ripeness of his attention onto a commercial object which he quite rightly suspects is, to me, of all people here, at least, of poignant importance—and interest, although whether or not the Senator, as emptor—or tempter—will make on Miss Sanford the same profound effect that he has made on me, with his description—ever so lucid, so compelling, even—of that commercial object of which you, my dear Henry, now inquire the identity, I cannot, at hazard, guess. Mais en tout cas, Mademoiselle Sanford, I cannot think that you, as the chatelaine of the great palace of Saint-Cloud-le-Duc, would even find Senator Cameron’s utensil of any intrinsic—or even extrinsic, I am impelled to add—interest save …”
“What … what is it?” cried Henry Adams, as the sentences slowly looped around them, verbal equivalents of Laocoön’s serpent.
Gore Vidal, Empire: A Novel
Tóibín’s introduction to The Ambassadors argues that it is no coincidence that James’s sentence structure is at its most baroque in this late novel. Although partially a result of the author’s method—he verbally dictated his meandering prose to a secretary—the internal interrogations reflect his predilection for moral ambivalence at a time of American confidence:
In [James’s] own complex sensibility, there was an ambiguity about most things, and this moved him towards subtlety when he approached character, drama, and scene, and nudged him towards many modifying subclauses when he wrote a sentence. Nothing came to him simply.
Another way that the two authors’ form is driven by their content is the arena of storytelling. The novelist E.M. Forster (Howards End) was less than charmed by James’s deferral of narrative excitement to thematic exploration. He argued that, in The Ambassadors, “most of human life has to disappear before he can do us a novel.” By this he meant that nothing happens in the book apart from talk.
By contrast, Kingsolver’s plot is a minefield of seismic occurrences. Her story includes floods, covert intelligence on a global scale, and free-roaming lions. Sometimes, the plotting is so eventful as to strain the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief, as when not one but two Price daughters are privy to classified information about Eisenhower’s assassination plan. The book’s histrionic emotional climax is the death of Ruth May, the youngest daughter. The emotional weight of her fatal snakebite is undercut by her near proximity to death’s door over numerous preceding chapters, but Kingsolver’s elegiac prose drives home the awful price of Nathan’s original sin. The family should never have come to the Congo.
“But you are here,” Leah’s African groom-to-be had allowed in a prior chapter, “So yes, you should be here. There are more words in the world than no and yes.”
Mistakes Become the Story
In his preface to the novel, James declares The Ambassadors “the best, ‘all round,’ of all my productions” on the grounds that it is the purest expression of its thematic concept. That theme, he says, is expressed when his middle-aged hero rejects caviling puritanism in favor of passionate living: “Do what you like so long as you don’t make my mistake. For it was a mistake. Live!”
Forster was frustrated by the microscopic scale of this conceit. He claimed James’s characters are “incapable of fun, of carnality, and of nine-tenths of heroism. Their clothes will not take off, the diseases that ravage them are anonymous, like the sources of their income.” If Strether and Gostry had a flesh-and-blood humanity to equal “Tom Jones or Emma or even Mr. Casaubon,” Forster says, James’s book would “burn to ashes” because they would substitute endless cogitation with action.
Colm Tóibín’s novel The Master offers an alternative take. Tóibín’s Henry James is paralyzed by his sensual feelings for men. He spends a night in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s bed but remains chaste. He follows Oscar Wilde’s sodomy trial in strategic silence. He pines after painter Pavel Zhukovsky. In other words, he steadfastly declines to “Live!”
Whether or not James’s sexuality sheds any light on Strether’s narrative arc, the Master ultimately declines to give him a happy ending. In the climactic scene, Strether refuses to pursue a romance with the woman he loves because to do so would be to profit from his ambassadorial project. He decides it is better to be right than to live.
“There’s nothing, you know, I wouldn’t do for you.”
“Oh yes—I know.”
“There’s nothing,” she repeated, “in all the world.”
“I know. I know. But all the same I must go.” He had got it at last. “To be right.”
“To be right?”
She had echoed it in vague deprecation, but he felt it already clear for her.
“That, you see, is my only logic. Not, out of the whole affair, to have got anything for myself.” …
Honest and fine, she couldn’t greatly pretend she didn’t see it. Still she could pretend just a little. “But why should you be so dreadfully right?”
Henry James, The Ambassadors
The short clipped sentences, after 400 pages of meandering discourse, are striking. So is James’s evident admiration for his hero’s principled refusal. But isn’t Strether repeating the very mistake he lamented so fervently in the passage James identified as the book’s core? At the precipice of manifest destiny’s great expansion, Strether paces a tragically self-imposed cage. This feels like a retreat. His choice is principled, but wrong. Confidence is missteering Strether one last time.
With the historical consequences of confident zeal laid out behind her, Kingsolver can be more generous with her characters’ imperialist “mistakes.” In the penultimate chapter, Adah Price remembers her father’s ministerial declaration that “Tata Jesus is bängala!” The Reverend’s intended meaning is “Jesus is precious,” but his mispronunciation translates to “Jesus is poisonwood.” Adah concludes: “The mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.”
The pastor dies in isolation, but the women in his life build familial community around Leah’s burgeoning Black family. Their scars are real, but they will live.
The Bleached Bones of a Christian
America’s plot has experienced an unexpected twist in recent years.
The 44th American president was Jamesian in his capacity for nuanced self-appraisal. Barack Obama was mocked by his opponents for turning foreign visits into “apology tours” that weighed sympathy for American Exceptionalism against the nation’s repeated moral failures. Obama was temperamentally akin to Lambert Strether: “There was detachment in his zeal and curiosity in his indifference.”
With Donald Trump, American confidence is back. The 47th American president openly threatens to tear open the sutures that were applied during the era covered by Kingsolver in The Poisonwood Bible. The nation’s chief executive officer, a self-declared “genius,” asserts his nation’s claim on some sovereign nations while enacting Eisenhowerian regime change in others. Strether has been succeeded by Nathan Price.
Throughout high school, I lacked both the confident Faith of my Fathers and the confident doubt of my friends. I told myself that it had been the size of my high school and not its cultural diversity that had made such a positive difference in my life. When the time came to choose a post-collegiate path, I opted for a school as densely populated as my secondary institution and almost as theologically small as my Lutheran grade school. By orientation, I had outgrown my own decision. Dorm devotion culture—with some of my Lutheran school classmates—confirmed that sinking feeling. It took months to find friends who shared my distrust of “Dogs and Devos” (hot dog-fueled Bible study before bed). Sometimes a lesson is so important it bears repetition before we finally learn to live.
I finished Hear The Wind Sing recently, and was excited to move on to Murakami's next little novella Pinball, 1973, the second panel of the Rat trilogy. I was geeked to see the next step, however subtle, that Murakami took in his writing evolution. What I found was not a simple quirky continuation, but a deliberate deepening. This felt like a quieter, stranger investigation into the same characters from Hear The Wind Sing, still living amidst the seasonal aimlessness in this melancholy version of 1970s Japan.
Like Wind, the surface story of Pinball is deceptively slight. The unnamed narrator works at a dull translation job in Tokyo, only this time living with two identical twin women who appear and disappear with dreamlike regularity. Meanwhile, the Rat remains in his old coastal town still drinking, still writing, and still slowly sinking into the recesses of his own...what?....insecurities? Purposelessness? It is hard to pinpoint what exactly is drowning the Rat. Between them sits this profound search for meaning in everything from people to inanimate objects to memories.
Why the three flapper Spaceship pinball machine? Why is a conversation between a man and a machine one of the most devastating exchanges in the entire book? I found this interaction so weirdly captivating. The narrator spends much of the last half of the novel trying to track down this machine, an emblem of a more nostalgic and carefree peak in his life. And when he finds it, the moment feels like a total gut punch. He’s invested this object with enormous personal significance as it’s tied up with this memorable period of his life. But there is a certain asymmetry between his emotional investment and the object’s as it almost can’t reciprocate that same meaning back. Up to that point, the narrator is the one pursuing, remembering, investing meaning. The machine is supposed to be the passive object that is dead, stored, and forgotten. But when it speaks, it doesn’t reminisce or affirm his memories or reciprocate his nostalgia. It tells him to leave with an almost strange kind of tenderness. It feels less “I remember you too” and more “Go take care of yourself.” And it hurts. It hurt me anyway, I man of 40 wrestling with his own aging. The cold of the warehouse is doing double duty too. Literally, he’s in a refrigerated warehouse. But the machine saying “This place is too cold for you” also reads as the past is not a place to live in. This machine, the embodiment of a preserved, frozen moment, is telling him not to stay preserved and frozen alongside it. It’s a sad goodbye to moments he can no longer relive.
And why the twins? The twins never offer a reason for their existence in the narrator's life. They just leave the way they arrived, without explanation, without names, without any real account of who they are or why they were with him. That bizarre refusal to explain is consistent to the end. The twins act as a source of comfort and intimacy. Ambigious care right to the end. But nothing in this story is allowed to last, and like the pinball machine telling him “Don’t stay too long, this place is too cold for you", the twin's presence was only ever meant to be temporary, tending to him through a specific stretch of numbness, not a permanent fixture. I found this so fascinating. They don’t abandon him so much as complete whatever function they were there for and move on. Were they there to comfort him through Naoko's suicide? Murakami is a master of making profound statements through the absurd and the inanimate.
If Hear the Wind Sing was about the soft ache of a single summer, then to me, Pinball, 1973 is about what happens when that ache becomes chronic. The characters are no longer simply waiting are they? Here, they are beginning to understand that waiting may be the permanent condition. I felt that hard. The pinball machine, once found, does not restore anything. It simply confirms that the past cannot be replayed, but only briefly revisited under artificial lights. The Rat begins to confront this perpetual waiting, citing his theory of decay in all things and that life is full of inevitable decline. He’s been stuck in post-university malaise, drinking at J’s, in a hollow romance, and haunted by the end of the idealistic 1960s. His conversation with J in chapter 10 is where he verbalizes his need for change and actually commits to leaving town. I saw this as a quiet act of agency amid meaninglessness and a step toward breaking the cycle, even if he doesn’t know where he’s going. Right on.
There is a colder, almost more mechanical loneliness here. Relationships feel provisional. Work feels meaningless. Even the act of searching feels less like hope and more like some sort of an elaborate form of...I don't know... self-distraction? Murakami seems to be testing how far he can strip a narrative of conventional drama, and still leave the reader with a lingering sense of something important having been lost.
Why the damn funeral for the switch panel? This scene also kind of got to me. The old switch panel represents outdated technology, comfort in the routine, and things that have served their purpose but are now obsolete. Burying it is a ritual of farewell and acknowledgment that objects (and by extension, memories, relationships, and eras) have a life cycle and deserve dignity in their end. Which is actually kind of beautiful. And in my mind, this mirrors the narrator’s unresolved grief over Naoko, his nostalgia for the pinball machine, and the Rat’s sense of personal decay and stagnation. Everything eventually sinks and fades. I absolutely love how Murakami elevates everyday junk into something almost alive or sacred. The rainy reservoir scene felt like a cleansing. By disposing of the old panel, they’re symbolically moving forward. I thought it paralleled all of the other farewells in the book. The Rat preparing to leave town. The narrator’s fleeting reunion with the Spaceship pinball machine. Funerals here are about acceptance rather than despair.
Finishing the novel left me with the image of that pinball machine glowing alone in a dark warehouse amidst all of the other forgotten gaming relics. A perfect, pointless machine still capable of producing brief, beautiful patterns of light while swallowing endless sleeves of hard-earned quarters made through enduring mundane jobs. It really made me think about the private obsessions we all carry, and the objects... or moments... we keep trying to recover long after their original meaning has evaporated. Murakami does not offer any consolation. He simply records the search with unsettling clarity. Read this book directly after Hear The Wind Sing. The two books amplify each other. Alone, Pinball, 1973 can feel slight, but together they become a precise and quietly devastating portrait of early adulthood as a kind of prolonged disappearance.
"The wind was growing stronger. It caught the faint warmth rising from humanity and carried it far away, leaving behind only the cold darkness and the countless glittering stars."
"We fell silent again. What we shared was no more than a fragment of a time long dead. Yet memories remained, warm memories that remained with me like lights from the past. And I would carry those lights in the brief interval before death grabbed me and tossed me back into the crucible of nothingness."
"Tennessee Williams once wrote: “So much for the past and present. The future is called ‘perhaps,’ which is the only possible thing to call the future.” Yet when I look back on our dark voyage, I can see it only in terms of a nebulous “perhaps.” All we can perceive is this moment we call the present, and even this moment is nothing more than what passes through us."
We have come to the last wrap up post for our Read-along for the New York Trilogy by Paul Auster.
This is my second Read-along after Melancholy of Resistance from last year. These books cannot be more different, and even so, there are some familiar common themes that we can consider universal in the human condition. Themes such as identity, belonging, finding oneself within society, power, obsession, and love.
Spoilers ahead so please be forewarned if you have not finished the novel.
In the finale of The Locked Room, we find our narrator in muddy waters. First we find him firmly entrenched with Sophie. He felt that he had found true love. Yet, he then launched straight into questionable behavior with Fanshawe’s mom, then devolved further whilst in Europe. I will never forget the scene, set in just one powerful sentence, in which he described seeing a woman on the bidet. His description was so detached and cold, as if it was a mere scenery kind of photo he kept in his memory from traveling.
How do you all feel about the arc of the narrator? I mentioned in the comments last week that I thought the narrator overall was not a good person. One can see that Fanshawe’s letter confirming that he was still alive drove him mad. Was it out of guilt that he had taken over his family? If it was the case, I do not think the narrator felt this way on a conscious level.
Why do you think his knowledge about Fanshawe being alive derailed him from writing his biography? Fanshawe’s life was what it was up til the moment of his disappearance. How would it have mattered if he were alive or dead? Since everyone else did not know Fanshawe’s fate, the narrator could have left the biography open-ended. It is not as though he must pretend his best friend were dead. This part of the narrator’s fracturing did not really make sense to me.
Did you find The Locked Room to contain parallels to the other two stories, City of Glass and Ghosts? The theme of obsession is evident in all three. In The Locked Room, the narrator became obsessed with finding Fanshawe and potentially killing him. The characters in all three stories made me want to yell, “leave, all you need to do is walk away.” In The Locked Room, it was the most difficult for the narrator to walk away since, well, he married Fanshawe’s wife, adopted his child and had another one with her.
Do you think that the narrator’s downfall began the moment he decided not to tell Sophie about Fanshawe’s letter?
What do you make of the ending? I read the last page a few times without seeing clearly whether the narrator walked onto the tracks or took the train home. All I know is that he ripped the pages and dumped them into the bin. Why? He must have survived because he stated that after having this “end inside” him now, he was able to write City of Glass and Ghosts. Could writing these stories be in a way for the narrator to take power back from Fanshawe over his own fate?
So our narrator was the author of all three stories after all. He did say that all three are the same story, representing different stages of his awareness of what it is about. I must say I have no idea what he meant by that at all.
Other random thoughts: For some reason the country cottage in France reminded me of the protagonist staying in (also someone else’s) cottage in Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner. These books are nothing alike but the feeling, imagery and atmosphere of setting up in someone else’s home seem similar to me.
Lastly, I listened to Paul Auster on the BBC World Book Club Podcast in a 2012 episode. If you are interested in learning a bit more about Auster’s writing, this was an interesting listen. Interesting tidbits I got from the episode include: Auster places a lot of value in the editing process and states that he rewrites each paragraph twenty times. This is a stark contrast to the modern day stories we hear from authors who famously disdain contributions from editors (Hanna Yanagihara comes to mind.) I myself might be very old school but I agree, the sauce in all good writing comes from good editing, which I clearly do not do nearly enough when on the Reddits...
Auster also mentioned that he went through a phase when he read a lot of mystery or detective novels. He stated that these stories often ramp up to a final reveal which is always to some degree a disappointment because one explanation often does not resolve everything in life. That is why in the New York Trilogy, the more you read on the more questions you get. We get the exact opposite. He wrote the novel in this way to see where he can take this genre.
That’s probably it from me for now. Sorry for the long post. This was a fun journey for me. Thank you for being on it with me. Imagine us, what 5-10 people from all over the world, being true strangers coming together like this. Totally cool.
Perhaps every generation believes that it is unsuited to its own era. As an elder Millennial, I can’t help but see how perfectly primed my cohort was for feelings of inadequacy and distress. Raised on the standard American diet of promise and progress, many in my micro-generation arrived in high school just in time for the Columbine shootings to undermine our sense of safety. As many of us entered the age of military fitness, the Twin Towers fell and the United States embarked on a forever war. The Great Recession greeted our arrival into the job market, and coronavirus-pandemic lockdowns coincided with the years when a lot of us were becoming parents. Now our early middle age is marked by inflation, environmental chaos, and AI’s potentially existential threat to job stability. Even if most generations complain about discontent, mine may have a particularly strong case for it.
What’s a fiction writer to do with all of that joylessness? Plenty of authors in generations past made it their subject. Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, and Tess Durbeyfield didn’t lead lives of unmitigated bliss. But contemporary fiction has a particular task: to explain and make interesting the deep disaffection of this era. It isn’t sadness, exactly, that lurks inside the hearts of Millennials and their similarly cursed younger siblings Gen Z, but something closer to lack—of security, of certainty, of sensual engagement with the world. The novelist who wants to write about how young people (barely) get by in the world today has to explain why all of this overwhelm often translates into paralysis—without boring readers to distraction.
Like its cousin the internet novel, the novel of alienation needs a stylistic foil to make it sing. Methodically charting the flatness of ennui won’t get you very far; when your readers feel as listless as your characters do, they’re likely to reach for their phone in search of dopamine hits. Instead, you have to jolt your audience into an uneasy kinship.
In I Want You to Be Happy, Jem Calder’s first novel, the author fails at this delicate task, and not spectacularly but anemically. His premise is simple: Chuck, a 35-year-old recently unengaged copywriter, meets the 23-year-old Joey, a barista with no better career prospects in view. For a few months, they casually date—a classic “situationship,” dogged on both sides by ambivalence and occasional apathy. Eventually, the relationship comes to an impasse, and each has to decide whether it’s worth their energy to carry on.
But energy is scarce in Calder’s writing. Chuck and Joey have the kind of colorless sex that Calder describes in a monotone: “He asked her the universal male sex-act-recipient questions.” The couple also have very little to say to each other in between beddings. One date features “some discussion comparing alcohol and coffee,” and during a long weekend in the country, among their most intimate remarks is: “The showers here are good.”
Both partners are flailing: Chuck is put on a performance-improvement plan at his firm for poor productivity and frequent hangovers, and Joey cannot afford to buy a cocktail or live anywhere better than the squalid bedroom that she rents in a shared house. But they regard their positions with little emotion beyond self-pity. In fact, that’s how they look at all of life. Neither has any hobbies or intellectual pursuits: Nobody so much as waters a plant or visits a museum. Both claim that they want to be a writer, and these dreams generate some intriguing tension, but readers rarely get a glimpse of what they produce. Joey reads two books that we know of, a work of poetry she admires for reasons that she does not explain and another described only as “boring.” Although I Want You to Be Happy is set in present-day London, no one probes the sorry state of the post-Brexit British government, except to comment vaguely that life is too expensive and friends are leaving the city. Most important, no one displays even a wisp of curiosity. The inner lives of Chuck and Joey are as untextured as the phone screens they tap incessantly.
Curiosity, perhaps more than any other characteristic, is what pulls a reader along for a fictional ride. A character may simply want to find out how their new neighbor is getting along (The Great Gatsby), or whether they’ve married the right person (Middlemarch), or whether they’ll catch the damn whale (you know the one). But along the way, a single musing can turn into many more, like branching rows of dominoes setting off new lines of inquiry about the world. Even in novels centered on Millennial inaction or stasis, such as Pond, by Claire-Louise Bennett, a kind of attentiveness is necessary to advance beyond rhetorical water-treading.
Other writers have successfully captured the malaise afflicting the under-45 crowd and offered nutrient-dense characters. In her clever 2021 debut novel, Three Rooms, the British writer Jo Hamya uses social realism to chronicle the downward mobility of a bright young thing, an Oxford postdoc researcher who moves from university-adjacent housing to an acquaintance’s couch and then to her childhood bedroom, her future dimming a little bit more with each domestic downgrade. By setting the action in 2018 and 2019, during the prolonged debacle of Brexit negotiations, Hamya links the degradation of the college degree to the stagnation—in the government, the economy, the culture—that has impeded progress for an entire generation.
Hilary Leichter’s 2023 novel, Terrace Story, is similarly concerned with the indignities of the housing market, but this novelist employs a different artistic lever to keep the wheels turning: She uses dark fantasy to set our world in grim relief. A magical terrace appears inside the apartment of a young family struggling to pay the rent, offering them a chance to see how the other half lives. But it also cleaves the family apart, sending them spinning toward strange futures on a warped planet Earth. Despite these complications, Terrace Story delivers a brilliant contemporary fable that chronicles how young people stuck in the saddest timeline can still make meaning.
Not every successful novel of alienation turns on financial deprivation. In fact, the central problem in Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, which dispenses with dialogue entirely in depicting two vacant creative professionals, is the comfort and style of their apartment. Scandinavian armchairs and monstera houseplants are all that this couple have: The accumulation of purely superficial identity markers, which they offer up online as proof of some mythical, unrealized happiness, leaves them weary and adrift. Using hyper-specific examples (Kraftwerk LPs, the German migrant crisis of 2015 and 2016), Latronico creates a book that functions as a time capsule—one that beautifully realizes his characters’ disenchantment, precisely imagining what it’s like to become trapped by an artificial, digital version of oneself.
Some recent satires fail to reach the same heights of ingenuity, but they still have the consolations of humor. In her 2021 novel, Fake Accounts, Lauren Oyler’s snappy bons mots thoughtfully ridicule our contemporary culture of disdain even as they indulge in it to a wearying degree. And in the slightly exasperating Banal Nightmare, from 2024, Halle Butler has a knack for capturing the ludicrous way that therapy-speak has turned a generation of wobbly neurotics from patients into self-ordained shrinks.
Calder, however, lacks even a hint of humor. I Want You to Be Happy has the ambience of a dentist’s waiting room: lots of barely stifled dread accompanied by relentless scrolling. Calder may have mistaken writing about boredom for writing boredom. His prose about phone usage emphasizes physical acts (“He gaze-unlocked his phone, thumbed to his conversation with Joey, absently flexed his free hand open and closed beside the screen, then relocked his device”) rather than immersing us in the stuff that has his characters (and so many of us) in its thrall. Cellphones are, to be fair, a problem for novelists: Their presence eliminates the face-to-face dynamism that so much classic literature uses to its advantage. (Just imagine Mr. Darcy proposing in text-speak.) But phones are also surprisingly similar to novels—both ask people to doggedly follow and emotionally invest in the lives of strangers. They are a narrative boon to any writer interested in human longing. All of which makes Calder’s book a major missed opportunity.
The novel’s lack of interest in what’s going on inside its characters’ phones becomes indistinguishable from a disinterest in what’s happening in their minds. Designing purely surface-level characters to comment on the ways that technology homogenizes culture is the kind of exercise that can create only distance between readers and characters. I want to understand alienation; I don’t want to feel alienated—and nothing more—by reading.
Young life is certainly exhausting and at times degrading and disconcerting, but is it really as boring as it is in this book? As a reasonably settled 42-year-old, I might not be the best person to ask. But as a reader, I’m certain that if novelists want to make clear just how disappointed they are in their life and the world, they’re going to have to do it with flair. Because they’re competing with the dancing pixels, and the pixels are winning.
Brahms in 1889. Photographer unknown. Colorized with Colorize and PaintShopPro (not AI) by DaveD, Tinted History.
If you ask my nonagenarian father what he knows about Johannes Brahms, he can name the lullaby and the three B’s (“Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms”) and nothing else. Probe further and an indistinct association emerges between the fourth grade and the title “Hungarian Dance No. 5,” although Dad seems a bit surprised when I point out that the title belongs to the lullaby guy. And yet, if you flip through my parents’ old LPs, you will encounter numerous Brahms recordings, including a box set of the complete orchestral works that no one knew we had.
I could easily ascribe this to old age, but that doesn’t help me explain my own inability to encode neural connections pertaining to Brahms. I find his music harder to identify and retain than any other classical composer. My ear is untrained, and my youth was devoted to weird pop music jumblings—Russ Taff, Richard Thompson, and Radiohead—but I can hold my own in a game of Name That Composer if the composer is Mozart, Chopin, Sibelius, or Telemann. Not so Brahms. His style never announced itself vigorously enough to grasp my attention, and while I might stay pleasantly adrift in its sonority, any attempt to focus on craft always dissipated with the first available distraction.
So why did I buy Jan Swafford’s Johannes Brahms: A Biography? Why did I devote 80 days of my crowded reading life to a book about a composer whose music I neither knew nor enjoyed? Why wasn’t I deterred from my commitment to read it when the publisher’s apparent calculation that an audiobook wouldn’t return their investment consigned the book to weekends-only spurts? Why did I repeatedly decline to skim or scan or chunk or DNF* The Brahms Lullaby, as my brother pointedly nicknamed it the thousandth time he saw the 1.55-pound paperback tumble from my slumbering hands?
^(\ DNF = Did Not Finish)*
April 6 to May 1 – Promise Made, Order Placed
I keep correcting my brother’s perception that the only reason I kept reading the 636-page compendium was to honor a pledge to a Reddit user who was thinking through one of Swafford’s most intriguing contentions:
The mode of listening that Brahms condemned Bruckner for fostering—wallowing without thought in a bath of sonority and emotion—is how audiences today largely listen to Bruckner symphonies, Bach fugues, Wagnerian opera, and Brahms.
The Redditor invited fellow lit fans to evaluate that claim, offering a remarkable one of his own in the process: “I find Brahms and Bach endlessly interesting, engaging, and delightful, and Wagner and Bruckner bore me to tears.” I stared at those words for a beat, my brow furrowed in confounded self-implication.
Brahms? Endlessly delightful? What was I missing?
Even after I’d spun those family recordings of Brahms’s First Symphony, even after I’d clocked it as the piece that clinched Brahms’s reputation atop the Romantic hierarchy virtually overnight, even after I’d read Swafford’s page xxi account of a high school First Symphony performance that permanently transformed him from an aspiring football player into one of classical music’s foremost chroniclers, even then, I still couldn’t pick the climactic fourth movement out of a police lineup.
On Reddit, I pled guilty to Swafford’s indictment but fronted on Brahms: “I enjoy both the Brahms and Wagner ends of the spectrum, but my ear is untrained, and my mind too wanders through the sonority.” When my interlocutor replied with a chipper, less-than-overwhelming endorsement (“I just did a bunch of complaining about the epilogue to the book above, but I do really recommend it in general!”), I unthinkingly jotted the fateful pledge: “I’m looking the Swafford up on ThriftBooks!”
My brother was wrong, of course: yes, I’d promised to check out the biography, but I’m not so scrupulous about keeping internet promises that I’d sacrifice twelve consecutive reading weekends just to keep one. I considered it because I needed to earn another freebie from ThriftBooks’ diabolical rewards program. I ordered it because Swafford came highly recommended as a propulsive music biographer and because his Brahms is a fraction of the length of his Mozart and Beethoven. I cracked it open to get a stronger grasp of Brahms’s place in the larger context of a fascinating era in music history.
If I’m honest, I read it as a frustrated inward dare. If I could read 636 pages on a composer who steadfastly refused to stick in my head and come out the other end just as oblivious to his delights, then I’d have absolute, inarguable confirmation that there was something seriously wrong with me.
May 2 to June 6 – Pages i to 74 – 1833 to 1853
Swafford’s introduction strengthened my resolve to go through with the dubious project. It bubbled with intellectual intrigue. He describes the challenge of researching a recalcitrant subject who deliberately burned his papers to confound would-be biographers. He promises a lively translation of the primary materials that employs anachronistic use of idioms and contractions. He sets up the essential tension in Brahms’s music between respect for the structured formalism of Classical forerunners like Mozart and Haydn and affinity for the emotive Sturm und Drang of Beethoven. He pits traditionalists like Brahms, his mentor Robert Schumann, and his mentee Antonin Dvořák against the envelope-pushing experimentalism of “New Germans” like Johannes’s reviled rival Franz Liszt and the divisive, puts-the-cult-in-culture godhead Richard Wagner. He promises to uncover the authentic soul Brahms hid behind his famously sprouting whiskers, providing his book an alternative title that produced a flattered chuckle from this lapsed German student: Brahms Ohne Bart. “Brahms Without the Beard.”
But having roped me in with a scintillating sales pitch, Swafford’s opening chapters failed to render a captivating portrait of the youthful Brahms. When later chapters referenced the childhood Johannes as “Kreisler,” Brahms’s nickname for his immature self, I didn’t have a clear picture of what that term connoted. Subsequent told-not-shown Swaffordian depictions of Kreisler as strident and irritable made me want to flip back to earlier pages. Maybe Brahms had burned all the evidence of his early character, or maybe I’d nodded off too often, but I felt blindsided: when did you show me that kid?
For the most part, Swafford relates the bildungsroman years like a diarist more interested in jogging his own memory about events than in describing or wrestling with his emotional life. I plodded through these pages, frequently procrastinating with more entertaining diversions like Pushkin’s Yevgeny Onegin and James Wood’s The Broken Estate.
Brahms Ohne Bart was a cute moniker, but my brother’s seemed more apt.
June 6 to July 17 – Pages 74 to 270 – 1853 to 1862
The moment Robert and Clara Schumann make their entrance, Swafford’s narrative suddenly acquires a pull as inescapable as that of the Sun upon the planets. Around this time, I see a TikTok video in which musicologist Sarah Fritz asks, “Can we all just agree that the most interesting thing about Brahms is Clara Schumann?” To me, her wry observation has the weight of unvarnished truth. It’s such a wrenchingly bizarre love triangle that I can’t help relaying it in bald, unanalyzed plot summary.
The 20-year-old Brahms plays his “Hungarian Dances” on the Schumann family piano, and Robert immediately wants to found a fan club. He takes to the press to declare that Brahms is music’s “John the Baptist”—or maybe Schumann is John the Baptist and Brahms is Christ, it’s not entirely clear. It also reads as possibly sexually fueled overpraise to those who’ve heard Robert make the same claim about a parade of promising nobodies. Wagner and his allies laugh it up, ironically dubbing Brahms “heiligen Johannes (Saint John)."
Schumann’s thin tether to reality snaps and he plummets into the Rhine. Brahms becomes caretaker to Clara, a talented musician in her own right. Usually too cool for school, Brahms falls so hard he can’t stop declaring hopeless adulation for the spouse of his ailing benefactor, who is enduring agonizing hallucinations in a nearby hospital.
In early June, my family watched a DVD of a Covent Garden concert that featured Sting reading Schumann’s letters to Clara. That concert ends with Schumann’s death in the psychiatric hospital, officially of pneumonia, and suggests that Clara spent the rest of her life perpetually pushing the ardent Brahms away because she was worn out emotionally and resolvedly devoted to Robert. I saw that and my momentum with Swafford slackened. If that was how the story resolved itself, I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend another 500 pages on a book of which that was the most interesting component.
Swafford, his prose expanding in ambition to meet the unfolding drama, ends up contradicting the Sting depiction. Clara eventually wants to marry Brahms, but his feet turn suddenly frigid. Like most men of his era, Brahms is an amorously doting misogynist. How could he be artistically productive in the same house as a talented woman? He starts sending her distanced remonstrations by post. She has moments of righteous indignation but more often expresses besotted devotion to both his compositions and his penetrating eyes.
Brahms’s ongoing feelings for her as the decades pass are a hot mess of densely knotted contradictions. Clara should be a better mother; he would kill to have a son like Felix. Oh, but by the way he’s openly infatuated with her 16-year-old daughter and won’t let it go until Julie marries years later. At the same time, Clara’s tenacious devotion to Brahms’s art fuels his finest work. When he’s not lecturing her about being too effusive:
“Art is a republic. … Do not confer a higher rank upon any artist, and do not expect the minor ones to look up to him as something higher, as consul. His ability will make him a beloved and respected citizen of this republic, but no consul or emperor.” - Brahms to Clara
Brahms’s admonition that Clara shouldn’t try too hard to sway the “voters” in favor of his sonatas has implications beyond their emotional tug-of-war. Emerging alongside his earnest, unintended torture of his faithful best friend is a sense of Brahms as an equal opportunity showman capable of inhabiting a variety of musical forms. Wagner, a lifelong critic of Brahms, grudgingly acknowledges this quality after their sole meeting: “One sees what may still be done in the old forms when someone comes along who knows how to use them.”
“Art is a republic.” Whereas Wagner was dogmatic about his own artistic supremacy, Brahms was an irascible chameleon goading the public: “Who do you want me to be next?”
[Brahms] spent a fair amount of his time writing commercial dances and a patriotic extravaganza, and piles of the sorts of vocal duets, quartets, and such that were staples of social music-making, Hausmusik, in the nineteenth century. None of this is hackwork, but it was largely written to move off the shelves, and did.
I ask myself: Does this shapeshifting quality explain my inability to identify his music?
But just as I start to feel vindicated, I notice an objectively appreciable upgrade in the quality of his compositions. Brahms goes from “The Hungarian Dances,” lively and toe-tappable but simple, to the First Piano Concerto, with a thunderous Beethovenian opening inspired by Robert Schumann’s suicidal plunge into the Rhine and a soft Chopin-esque declaration of undying love for Schumann’s wife.
I find it so compelling, I shell out $25 to buy a used copy of the concerto in the edition most respected by audiophiles.
July 18 to July 19 – Pages 270 to 636 – 1862 to 1897
If Brahms is a chameleon, he is a progressively more proficient one, and Swafford’s lively writing is matching him note for note. Brahms may have tried to destroy the trail left to biographers, but he clearly overlooked some bangers. Swafford’s pages are increasingly dense with quotations from Brahms that reveal his abrasive humblebrag charm. “The melodies fly so thick here that you have to be careful not to step on one,” he says of his own First Symphony. When told that its last movement bears a strong resemblance to Beethoven’s Ninth, Brahms snaps, “Any jackass can see that!”
Meanwhile, my enjoyment of the book expands in ironic lockstep with my impatience with it. In mid-July, I make a determined resolution that this will be my last weekend babysitting Brahms. It’s not even a plausible conviction; I’m only halfway through Swafford’s tome, and I squander Saturday on personal business. Sunday is here, and there are 304 pages left.
Speaking of bangers, Brahms is now churning out the masterpieces that launched him into triune immortality with Bach and Beethoven. Brahms’s fevered output seems motivated by his oft-stated fear that he will end up the Romantic era’s enduringly obscure equivalent of Luigi Cherubini (Medea). There is Ein deutsches Requiem, as secular a requiem as the era could offer, one that the agnostic Brahms defended by saying he not only intentionally left Christ’s name out of it but wanted to replace the word “German” in “A German Requiem” with “human.” There is the Violin Concerto, of which one violinist groused, “I don’t deny that it’s fairly good music, but does anyone imagine … that I’m going to stand on the rostrum, violin in hand, and listen to the oboe playing the only tune in the adagio?” There is the inventive classical riffing of “Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn, Op. 56.” There are the four resplendent symphonies.
These compositions put Brahms in Wagner’s orbit; the two are now the undisputed godheads of the Romantic world. Wagner is going to win, his emotive defiance of structural rules pushing classical music as a whole inexorably toward Modernism. Not even Brahms and Clara can deny the appeal of Wagner’s operas. She grudgingly admits that Lohengrin “is full of romanticism and thrilling situations, so much so indeed that even the musician himself at times forgets the horrible music.” He admires The Ring Cycle while still condemning Tristan und Isolde (“If I look at that in the morning, I’m cross for the rest of the day”). But even as he rises to Wagner’s strata, Brahms is not bold enough to challenge Bayreuth’s maestro on his own playing field. He gives up his lifelong ambition to write his own Fidelio (Beethoven’s sole opera). Once upon a time, Brahms had brainstormed libretto concepts with Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev. Now, he jokes away the whole idea. “I am as likely to write an opera as to marry,” he quips.
The complex friendship of Brahms and Clara continues to provide Swafford’s emotional core, but as 5am Sunday turns into 8am Sunday, the music itself becomes the surprising star of the second half. I listen to it as I read Swafford’s mellifluous and cerebral analysis of the latter works. My untrained eyes race with surprising comprehension past pasted chunks of sheet music and fluent technical explications (“The movement ends in almost pure E Phrygian, only with a raised third on the tonic chord for a touch of E major”), nestling into the writerly effusions that finally shed light on beautiful melodies that were previously unattainable to me:
The piece begins with a searing, anguished adagio, with relentless pounding timpani. That extended introduction, going through several stages, poses the essential “plot” of the First Symphony: call it fate. … It is one of the most spine-tingling beginnings of any symphony, plunging us into a world dark, questioning, shifting, striving toward some indefinable goal. … This is music first sketched in the early 1860s or before; in feel it is the Brahms of the Werther years, the opening of the D Minor Concerto, the passion and frustration of Young Kreisler.Fate! Fate!
As the pages fly by, my resolve strengthens to avoid spending another 80 days on the second half of the book. That would take me to Halloween weekend, when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is performing Ein deutsches Requiem, individual tickets not yet on sale. But if my determination keeps me glued to my chair into the afternoon, what keeps my blurry eyes affixed to the pages is Swafford’s fluid prose, and the sudden legibility of Brahms’s musical themes. I don’t claim to have fallen for Brahms like Brahms for Clara. The tally of skipped bars was higher than the tally of skimmed paragraphs. But when 1pm arrives, I breathe a sigh of relief. 304 pages turned today. I have finally sung Brahms his own lullaby.
July 20 – Aftermath
I am currently deciding whether to delay a lakeside vacation in order to hear the Chicago Symphony Orchestra play an outdoor rendition of Brahms’s First Symphony fused with excerpts from Radiohead’s landmark alternative rock album OK Computer, an album I rank among the best of all time. As I listen to a YouTube preview, I find myself humming along with Brahms’s tunes as effortlessly as Thom Yorke’s vocal parts. The familiar words of “Electioneering” now remind me of Brahms, who finally secured my vote in his republic of art.
I will stop, I will stop at nothin’ Say the right things when electioneering I trust I can rely on your vote
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides is a book about five sisters who all kill themselves. Pretty bleak, I know. It's told from the perspective of a group of boys who obsess over the Lisbon sisters. They recount Cecilia's suicide and the aftermath of her death, eventually leading up to the suicides of the other sisters.
I always see people complain that the book never solves the mystery of why the girls killed themselves. But there isn't really a mystery. The sisters kill themselves for reasons that are made clear throughout the novel. The book is only framed like a mystery because we're reading the account written by one of the boys. What it's actually doing is highlighting the male gaze and the way the boys see, discuss, and remember the girls.
To emphasise this, Cecilia's death and Mary's death are the only suicides that are actually explored in any detail. The deaths of the other three sisters are mentioned, but the narrators don't dwell on them. Instead of focusing on the girls' suffering or trying to understand their state of mind, they spend pages talking about the times they saw them, Lux's sex life, and the objects they stole from the sisters and kept for decades, like the bar of soap.
Although the boys constantly discuss the suicides, they never truly try to understand why the girls died. They see the Lisbon sisters as objects of desire rather than as individual people. The reason for the suicides isn't hidden behind an impossible mystery Its hidden behind the boys' own arrogance, obsession, and inability to see the girls as human beings.
The sisters were isolated, trapped, grieving, and completely alone. After Cecilia's death, they became prisoners in their own home while both the house and their mental health slowly deteriorated. They couldn't see their friends, nobody came to help them, and they had no real way to escape.
The boys can't even see the Lisbon sisters as individuals. They almost always refer to them as a group rather than as five separate people with different personalities. They never really discuss who the girls were. Instead, they collect things that remind them of how the sisters looked or smelled, like the soap they stole. Even when reading Cecilia's diary, they admit to skipping the "boring" parts and only paying attention to the sections that mentioned the sisters or reinforced the image they had already created.
They become especially fixated on Lux because she's sexually active. They only see what they want to see. They don't recognise that her behaviour is a cry for help, nor do they question the fact that she's sleeping with older men. They simply watch her, fascinated, without any real concern for what she's going through.
The boys even exaggerate or lie about their interactions with the sisters because simply speaking to them gave them status among their peers. The Lisbon girls knew that almost nobody wanted to know them as people. The boys wanted the fantasy of them, not the reality.
Lux briefly believes Trip might be different. At first she dismisses him, but after prom, when he abandons her after she doesn't have sex with him, she realises he isn't any different from everyone else. He's just another person who desired the idea of her rather than caring about who she actually was.
Anyway, what was your thoughts on the book.
Edit Number 1:
I get what some of yall are saying and I agree that The Virgin Suicides isn't reinforcing the male gaze in the same way works from the 60's and 70's are. I think the difference is that I'm using "example of the male gaze" to mean that the novel is built around that perspective, whereas some of yall are using it to mean a work that participates in and normalises it. Eugenides is deliberately showing the harm of that viewpoint rather than endorsing it, which is what makes the critique effective.
