Roger's Version

If you have on your personal bucket list the thought that you should read one novel by John Updike before you die, what one should that be?

The Rabbit series is over-rated.

The best single Updike, in my opinion, is Roger's Version.

Amazon's "most helpful" review, by someone calling himself "Outside Looking In," captures a nice moment from the book. The protagonist, Roger Lambert, is thinking about ancient Jews and contemporary Protestants.

"How did those Israelites get their hooks into us so deeply, sticking us with their frightful black Bible and it imprecations while their modern descendants treat the matter as a family joke, filling their own lives with violin music and clear-eyed, Godless science? L'Chaim! Compared with the Jews we protestants do indeed dwell in the valley of death."

In essence, Lambert is a Barthian. His "rascally pet" as he says at one point, is the great Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968). What he most admires in Barth is the utter Otherness of Barth's God, the rejection of even an "analogic" relationship between God's Being and our own being. God is essentially a hidden God.

Updike pits this Barthianism against the seemingly more naive views of a younger man,  Dale, who believes that contemporary physics is making God visible, and who believes he can complete that uncovering of God through computer science.

Lambert helps Dale get the grant for his project, but in subtler ways undermines both that project and Dale's faith.

As to the reviewers, David Wisehart thinks the book "both fascinating and frustrating."

David Lodge, writing in The New York Times, speaks of its "richness and viruosity," and says he finished it with "renewed respect for one of the most intelligent and resourceful of contemporary novelists."

Mark Athitakis, writing for Critical Mass, admires the way Updike "smoothly embeds dense scientific discussion into his narrative, anticipating the controversy over Intelligent Design more than a decade before it became a mainstream issue."

Not everyone liked it, though.  In The New York Review of Books, Frederick Crews spoke of "the growth of a belligerent, almost hysterical callousness" in Updike's career generally, which he sees as epitomized here.

I don't see what Crews thinks he sees.

Novelization of the Lodz Ghetto II

This will continue and complete the observations I made on October 30,  concerning the novel EMPEROR OF LIES by Sem-Sandburg.

There's a nice touch near the end, as the novelist wants to inform us that the Russian front is getting closer to Lodz. He writes, "Rosa Smolenska could feel the detonations of distantly falling bombs, dull tremors through the walls of the house and up through her own body."

I like that because it seems to be paradoxical, and because in its paradoxical way it states the precise nature of these detonbations as felt by the ghetto inhabitants. They are still "distant" and "dull," yet not so distant nor so dull that they fail to pass as a tremor through one's whole body.

Just a bit later, we get what some might call unnecessary detail about the sort of war related manufacture still taking place in the ghetto.  "Debora worked right at the end of the cold, crowded shed, where she and some other girls stood packing the finished fuses in little square boxes made of card." "Card" sounds like an awkward translation that might better have been "cardboard," but the detail work continues in the next sentence. "Twelve plugs to a box, and then the flaps and the top and bottom of the boxes had rto be tucked into the little diagonal slots on their sides."

Novelization of the Lodz Ghetto

I've been reading THE EMPEROR OF LIES, Sem-Sandberg's novelization of the Lodz ghetto, and Rumkowski's tenure there as the Nazi-approved "Eldest of the Jews."  Here's a review of the book from The Guardian.

It is, as you might expect, a depressing read. Yet in its way compelling. 

I wonder about the following passage.  Does the character "Zawadzki the smuggler" represent anybody historic?

"When the Germans heard that the Jews had caught Zawadzki themselves, they rang for a car from the centre of Litzmannstadt.  The Jewish officers realised this was the end for Zawadzki and asked him if he had a final request. He replied that he wished to go to the toilet. Two policemen escorted Zawadzki to the latrines out in the yard.  They handcuffed Zawadzki to the latrine door and then stood guard outside, keeping a careful watch on the shoes clearly visible beneath the locked door. The policemen stood staring at Zawadzki's shoes for a good hour.  Then one of them plucked up the courage to break down the door.  The shoes were still there, and the handcuffs, but no Zawadzki."  

Random Literary Quotation

"A Sunday repose prevailed the whole moribund town, peaceful, profound. A certain pleasing numbness, a sense of grateful enervation exhaled from the scorching plaster. There was no movement, no sound of human business. The faint hum of the insect, the intermittent murmur of the guitar, the mellow complainings of the pigeons, the prolonged purr of the white cat, the contented clucking of the hens--all these noises mingled together to form a faint, drowsy bourdon, prolonged, stupefying, suggestive of an infinite quiet, of a calm, complacent life, centuries old, lapsing gradually to its end under the gorgeous loneliness of a cloudless, pale blue sky and the steady fire of an interminable sun."

- Frank Norris, The Octopus

That's a nice bit of stage setting.

I especially like the word "bourdon," for a low-pitched tone, a word that seems to have dropped out of use since Norris' day.  I also love the unexpected modifiers, "grateful enervation," "mellow complainings," "infinite quiet."  The generation of writers after Norris became very reflectively anti-adjective, but here one sees there is nothing disreputable about that form of speech.

Sci Fi and Related Genres

Any of my readers who have any interest in science fiction, horror, fantasy, or related fictional genre will soon find himself in love with this graphic.

And for those with an interest in mathematics, it ends up looking a bit like a Mandelbrot set!

The key plot of the meta-story is revealed in the legends along the top:
adventure dominant; science dominant; sociology dominant; form dominant; Star Wars dominant.

As even that much information conveys, we have a wild intermingling here of high and low brow.

But I'll say no more.

Thoughts on Mad Men

Mad Men works as a series in large part because of the look. A lot of bright and hard-working people are evidently working very hard to get the 1960s right -- the clothes, the furniture, the cars, the ubiquitous use of cigarettes -- and it pays off.

But how often would you want to keep going back to the same museum? The show works, and is sustainable as entertainment, for some other reason.

Is it the plotting? As I believe all of the posts I have devoted to the question have helped illustrate: the plots are almost absurdly complicated. They deal with all the great themes that your undergraduate Lit professor told you were important: birth, death, commitment, abandonment, conflict, reconciliation, mystery. But every drama, and every comedy, treats of these themes. So what?

Is it the acting? The acting is serviceable but not, I think, in a stand-out way.

So (by process of elimination) is it character? I think there we have to say yes. The characters are indelible, and the otherwise rickity plots work only because these characters are interacting.

Why are the characters indelible? For those of us of a certain age, these characters are our parents, when we were kids and they were in their prime. (Yes, I know I'm not the first to make this point.) I was born in October 1958. Most of the events of the first season of the show took place before I turned two. But the world of the series, especially in seasons three and four, is decidedly my parents' world.

I had only the vaguest of ideas what my father did for a living, and the byzantine nature of the office intrigue at Sterling Cooper in a way captures this vagueness. The idea that the grown-ups were doing grown-up stuff and it wasn't something for me to worry about overly much.

The scenes in Westchester are priceless, they play to this sense of seeing events from a child's POV more directly.

What about for the younger fans of the show? I understand it has a lot of admirers who were born in the 1970s or later. My sense is that they pick up on the same inter-generational theme, even if it isn't meant for them in quite the same way.

What Was So Great About It?

On January 29, I quoted what I called a "great sentence from Dylan Thomas." I will wait now while you look it over again.

What, you might ask, was so great about it?

It clocks in at 100 words, by my counts. That by itself doesn't make for a great sentence, but it can certainly be an attention-getting way to start a story or essay.

Length, though, won't do the job if one simply writes a run on. This sentence is not a run-on. It is a perfectly self-contained, well-constructed, unit of thought. There are numerous places where Thomas could have put a period -- where a lesser writer would have put a period -- buit in each case we can see the logic of continuing.

"I was born in a large Welsh industrial town at the beginning of the Great War." That would be almost journalism. Start your story, they say, with a sentence that answers the four Ws: who, what, where, when.

Yet Thomas isn't writing for a newspaper, and he follows that simple statement with a colon and a striking paradox about the "ugly, lovely town." What he means by those apparently contradictory adjectives is what is to become clear as the sentence unfolds.

What are we to make of an adjective like "jerry-villa'd"? Jerry-built is the more common compound. Or jerry-rigged. We recognize that at first read, and we may even think that "jerry-villa'd" is a misprint. But, no ... that is how Thomas wanted it. Andit has an obvious connection with the "ugly, lovely" conjunction.

Not only is this sentence a great work of art in itself, it is endlessly fascinating in its parts.

The Broom of the System

I've lately been reading the 1987 novel "The Broom of the System," by the late David Foster Wallace. Broom was his first novel, though he later became famous with "Infinite Jest" (1996).

The title reference to a "broom" alludes to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, which is a theme of the novel. LW wrote: "For a large class of cases — though not for all — in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language." That line is often shortened to just three words: meaning is use.

One character in this novel explains this to another using the example of a broom. What is the more essential part of a broom, the straw bristles or the wooden handle? Most people if pressed, will say the bristles, because the bristles do the actual cleaning. But one says this because one is thinking of the use of a broom -- its use is to clean. If one thought of the same object as a baseball bat, or as a burglar's tool for breaking windows, the handle would be vastly more valuable. The change in use would change the meaning.

The protagonist of the novel is a young woman named Lenore, a 24-year-old telephone switchboard operator for a publishing company that does hardly any publishing (since it is in reality somebody's tax dodge). The catalyzing crisis of the plot is Lenore's discovery that her Wittgensteinian great-grandmother, the one who uses the broom example to explain language -- this woman, also named Lenore, had studied in England in her youth and had known LW personally -- is no longer in the nursing home where she is supposed to be -- that she and several other residents have disappeared.

One intriguing character in the novel is the manager of that nursing home, David Bloemker. Bloemker repeatedly expresses himself in an overly elaborate manner, only to have to reduce his own locutions to a much simpler form. For example, he tells Lenore that if they find her great-grandmother they will likely also find the other missing residents of the facility. Why? Because, she "enjoyed a status here -- with the facility administration, the staff, and, through the force of her personality and her evident gifts, especially with the other residents that leads one to believe that, were the mislocation a result of anything other than outright coercion ... it would not be improper to posit the location and retrieval of Lenore as near assurance of retrieving the other misplaced parties."

The younger Lenore says that she doesn't understand all of that.

Bloemker tries again, "Your great-grandmother was more or less the ringleader around here."

That sort of trick -- the comic reduction of ornate speech to plain speech -- is commonly attempted, yet it is rather hard to pull off, and I think Wallace handles it well when he uses it.

Better than, say, the screenwriters for the old television show "Gilligan's Island." In one episode of that show, the castaways discover helium escaping from the ground, and attempt to leave from the island in a balloon. When Gilligan shows the professor the source of helium, the prof says, "why, it's obviously an invisible and odorless gas." Gilligan replies, "not only that, you can't see it or smell it."

The Gilligan version of the joke is lame, Wallace's version shows how it can be done properly.

The conjunction of the two isn't unfair to Wallace, because he actually introduces Gilligan's Island into this novel. There is a restaurant in this novel's fictional version of Cleveland Ohio that is decorated like the set of that TV show.

"Once an hour the bartender would be required to do something cloddish and stupid -- a standard favorite had the bartender slipping on a bit of spilled banana daiquiri and falling and acting as if he had driven his thumb into his eye -- and the patrons would, if they were hip and in the know, say with one voice, 'Aww, Gilligan,' and laugh, and clap."

Wallace's use of the baroque-speech-turned-plain meme is not just a gag to pull out, and pull off, when Bloemker happens to be in a scene -- it is a contribution, after all, to the novelistic meditation upon language -- a contributor to the Wittgensteinian theme of the whole.

One character suggests (this is young Lenore's father, the older Lenore's grandson) that the elder Lenore has left the home because she no longer believes that she has any use. In her worldview, use is meaning. And without use, as a broom incapable anymore of sweeping, she has no further meaning. So she is willing to involve herself in a biochemical experiment in order to again have a use.

I will leave this open-ended.

The Alano-Sarmatian Theory

There appears to be a view in Arthurian studies known as the Alano-Sarmatian Theory.

It is an answer to the old question: "What, if anything, is the historical origin of King Arthur?"

Of course, it is perfectly possible to enjoy stories about Arthur without caring about the "what really happened" question. They are literary texts, incitements to one's own imagination, etc. Further, they are always fascinating as reflections of the times in which they were written. T.H. White's THE SWORD IN THE STONE (1938) is worlds away from Tennyson's IDYLLS, and the difference is that between England in high-Victorian confidence and England in between-two-world-wars reflectiveness.

Still, some of us want to know whether there was a historical person behind it all and, if so, who the heck he was. And there are various theoreticians who presume to sort that out for us.

The predominant theory for a long time was that "Arthur" was an ancient Brit thoroughly assimilated to the civilization of the Roman conquerors, who sought to save that civilization on his home island in the chaotic circumstances of the late Empire, after the legions were withdrawn from that distant place to defend Italy. Arthur, then, would have been a leader of the resistance to the barbarian Angles and Saxons, a defender of the fading Roman ways. [Caution, if you use that link, you'll have to scroll down a bit before you find the relevant discussion.] This certainly seems like an appropriately romantic and doomed enterprise for him. And there is a name attached: Ambrosius Aurelianus.

The Alano-Sarmatian view is quite different. It places the original of Arthur a couple of centuries earlier and at the extreme opposite end of the Roman Empire, amidst the steepes of what we would now call the Ukraine, with the nomads then known as Alans or Sarmatians. A figure named Lucius Artorius Castus apparently earned his fame in the fighting in that area, and later was transferred to Roman Briton. He was not alone when he got there -- there were Alans and Sarmatians already in Britain, and he became a rallying figure for them, on this view. The mythologies from the two opposite ends of Europe merged to make the body of Arthurian legend.

At least, that's how I understand it. If I understand it.

Can I solve the question for you and tell you, or tell myself, who was the "real" Arthur, whether he was Aurelianus or Castus or somebody else. No.

Alas, I can not pull that sword out of the stone of complicated distant history.

Bernard Malamud

In the June issue of Commentary, there's an article by Cheryl Miller, "Why Malamud Faded."

The premise of the title is simple: in the late 1950s and through the 1960s, American letters was possessed of three very prominent Jews (both by background and thematically), amongst its authors of prose fiction. This triad consisted of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Bernard Malamud.

Roth was the kid of this group. Malamud was born in 1914, Bellow in 1915, and both are now deceased. Roth came into the world in 1933 and amongst us still.

Roth criticized both of his elders in an essay in 1974, "Imagining Jews," which Miller quotes.

Roth said there that Malamud paints any of his Jewish characters as "innocent, passive, virtuous and this to the degree that he defines himself as or is defined by others as a Jew."

This gave to Malamud's work "the lineaments of moral allegory." Roth wants none of it.

Miller quarrels with this reading of the differences among the troika, but she doesn't doubt that there are important differences, and that in terms of the history of taste, they've so far worked in Roth's favor against Malamud.

I summarize all this because I enjoy listening to deep things being argued about, I suppose. I'm not sufficiently erudite to make any observations on Malamud here. And I've read only two of Roth's novels, so I won't pontificate on him either.

I would guess, though, that the tides of opinion will continue their movements which, being tidal, have ebbs as well as flows. Malamud, in short, will have his day.

American Pastoral

I finally broke down and bought a Philip Roth novel.

I keep hearing how wonderful he is. All I can say in reply is that I read "Portnoy's Complaint" once, and was underwhelmed by it. But I figured I owed him (Roth, not Portnoy) another chance.

Also, my uncle and aunt (bless them) got me a coupon for use at any Barnes & Noble as a Christmas gift this year. I used most of the value of the card to buy a non-fiction book on a subject that of course holds some interest for me but that will be unlikely to warm up any entries in this blog. So I inferred I should cut loose and use the remainder of it for something more literary.

So ... Roth it was. I bought a paperback copy of AMERICAN PASTORAL, a novel published eleven years ago.

I was the managing editor of a journal of political polemics at that time, and I edited a rave review of this book. [To be frank, I took a passage in a letter from a friend and turned it into a review with a little editing, but ... hey ... let's just say I edited it.]

Early on, Roth (or, rather, Nathan Zuckerman, the famous author who serves as the first-person narrator) recounts the plot of a novel he read as a boy called THE KID FROM TOMKINSVILLE -- a novel about baseball and a particular baseball player. We can't credit Roth with the plot. There really was such a book:

http://brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/127/Kid%20from%20Tom.htm

Yet the way Roth writes about the book, its illustrations, and Nathan's reactions to reading that book as a kid is a thing of beauty itself.

Here's just a bit:

"The drawings seemed conceived out of the dark austerities of Depression America. Every ten pages or so, to succinctly depict a dramatic physical moment in the story -- 'He was able to put a little steam in it,' 'It was over the fence,' 'Razzle limped to the dugout' -- there is a blackish, ink-heavy rendering of a scrawny, shadow-faced ballplayer starkly silhouetted on a blank page, isolated, like the world's most lonesome soul, from both nature and man, or set in a stippled simulation of ballpark grass, dragging beneath him the skinny statuette of a wormlike shadow."

You gotta love it.

Bram Stoker

It hasn't been so long since Halloween already that we can't spare a moment to remember Bram Stoker, 1847-1912, the novelist and dramatist who gave to vampire lore its classically Victorian formulation.

I say "dramatist" because Stoker -- an Irishman -- was an actor at, and the manager of, a London theatre beginning in 1878. To an ambitious Irishman in the arts in the 19th century, politics notwithstanding, going to London was "making the big time." Indeed, it is still thus, as you can see from the attitude of the Dublin musicians in the recent bittersweet romantic movie "Once."

It is, I submit, worth spending the time and pixels to make that observation because Stoker gave to vampire lore the element one might expect from a man who crashed the London dramatic scene in his early thirties. Dracula is the same way. A man trying to make it in the big time.

One theme of the fanous novel, I submit, is that the Count could be a frightening bigshot to the peasants of Transylvania. He could have the huge scary castle on the mountain. But if he really wanted to be in the center of the world he's have to bite some blood in London!

When we first see him, the Count is already negotiating with a real-estate agent to obtain a house in that city.

I can hear Frank Sinatra in the background of the novel. "If you can bite necks there you'll bite them ... anywhere."

HJ on Flaubert

I know nothing about Flaubert, but I find this comment intriguing.

Henry James Jr., my intellectual mentor's bright kid brother, wrote a review of
"The Temptation of Saint Anthony," in 1874. Although he began with that book, he quickly turned his attention to the whole arc of Flaubert's literary career.

Although he acknowledged that Madame Bovary was a great work, HJ expressed disappointment with the rest of the curve, and especially with the work before him as its culmination.

"M. Flaubert and his contemporaries have pushed so far the education of the sense and the cultivation of the grotesque in literature and the arts that it has left them morally stranded and helpless. In the perception of the materially curious, in fantastic refinement of taste and marked ingenuity of expression, they seem to us now to have reached the limits of the possible."

Who is that "us" in the final clause? Henry was simply employing the privilege of reviewers to speak in the first person plural, "we, the arbiters of taste who understand these things...."

The review interests me precisely because this isn't "just" a critic. This isn't Pauline Kael writing about Alfred Hitchcock. This is the 19th century literary equivalent of John Ford writing about Hitchcock.

Tolstoy's screed against Shakespeare is analogous, except that Tolstoy was past the peak of his own powers at the time, a former artist turned eccentric sage.

Was there justice in James' complaint that Flaubert had cultivated the grotesque to an extent that left him "morally stranded and helpless"?

I end as I began -- I have no idea. I'd be happy to hear from those who know about Flaubert's post-Bovary writings though.