The Little Hotel by Christina Stead

When Mrs. Trollope found that the bed was not for her, she went crying to her friend Madam Blaise. They were on good terms at that moment; and the next thing I knew was that Madame Blaise had moved her chaise lounge into Mrs. Trollope's room. I flew into a temper at that, and scolded them both. I was really furious. It's simple. To keep order in a hotel, everything must stay in the same place; and then there's the logic of equality. If one guest has new linen curtains, the other must have the best of the older curtains; if one guest has a plush new armchair, the other must have a cane lounge; if one has an extra table to write on, the other must have a footstool. I sometimes let Charlie fetch things from the attic or even from my own room to be sure of this equality; but I cannot allow others to make changes; I have a plan of it all in my mind.

Christina Stead's The Little Hotel is narrated by Madame Bonnard, the proprietor of an inexpensive hotel in the Swiss Alps. Her charges are more residents than guests, long term visitors who live the life of exiles. They are eccentrics, like the beautiful but dying Miss Chillard, or the wildly bigoted American Mrs. Powell. One madman claims to be the mayor of a city in Belgium; he sends Madame Bonnard and the other residents cryptic messages that are numbered as official documents for recordkeeping--Document 126 says that the coffee was particularly good this morning, etc., etc. I was a little sad to see the Mayor whisked out of the pages early on, to be replaced with characters whose eccentricities are a little more mtued.

Though narrated by Madame Bonnard, the true protagonist of The Little Hotel is Madame Trollope, an aging woman who is traveling with her "cousin," Mister Wilkins. In reality, the pair are longtime lovers, living more or less as husband and wife; though free of their former marriages, Mister Wilkins refuses to marry Madame Trollope or live openly as partners. He prefers the wink-wink artifice of it all, even though everyone at the hotel knows the deal. He also prefers to sponge off of the wealthier Madame Trollope, who, at the hotel, begins to lurch toward a breaking point. Is it possible for her to shake off Mister Wilkins, who really is a smug little creep, when she knows that the alternative is likely lifelong loneliness? What is the cost, The Little Hotel asks, of love?

The Little Hotel really has its charms. At times it approaches the heights of absurd misbehavior that make Stead's best novels so good, as when Madame Blaise complains about how her doctor husband pesters her with photos of diseased children--by producing a stack of the very same photos at dinner. Such is the world of The Little Hotel, where the residents revenge their own petty hurts and slights upon each other. There's something here about the nature of Europe after World War II; though they are nominally all supposed to get along--especially here in always-neutral Switzerland--the enmities of the American, British, and French residents toward Germans and Italians--form a powerful undercurrent. But the enmity that once sharpened the wits and feelings of Europeans no longer does; in fact, it seems to be an image of Europe slipping into a kind of bored senility, where resentments no longer have any national shape, but turn inward, toward the bedroom and the spirit. Or maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. More than anything else it seemed like a pleasant look into one of those communities where people are a little too close, and everybody would benefit from a nap or a nice walk. 

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun.

Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio might be the ur-text of that dreaded contemporary beast: the collection of linked short stories. Set in a town much like the one Anderson grew up in in northern Ohio around the turn of the 20th century, Anderson's stories are linked by the presence of George Willard, a young teenager and the only employer of the local newspaper, who by virtue of his vocation is privy in a way no one else is to the private lives of Winesburgians. Winesburg is a conventional sort of place, an every-town; Anderson emphasizes this--I have no idea if intentionally--by naming every other character Will or Tom or some variation thereof. But the people that populate the stories are anything but unconventional; or, perhaps it would be right to say that they are conventional in that they reveal what eccentricities lie beneath the conventional surface of every small town dweller.

George is a sensitive man, a deep thinker. He is young, and coming into many revelations about himself and his place in the world. (The virtuoso passage above is George, coming to a realization about the role of happenstance in his life, and its brevity.) Like many sensitive men, he feels that he alone is sensitive, and feels more deeply than others. But Winesburg, Ohio suggests that everyone feels this way, as if they are a little too strange for the world around them. Some of the Winesburgians are genuine oddballs, like the savage proto-incel Wash Williams, who insists to George that all women are dead inside, or Doctor Reefy, who keeps a pocket full of balled-up papers and seems to have zero patients. Others are just anxious about being oddballs, as in the story "Queer," about the son of a unpopular shopowner who becomes obsessed with the idea that other people think he's weird. He flirts with a friendship with George, thinking the newspaper man can put his story right, but then pushes him away; convinced--for no reason--that George, too, thinks he's "queer," he rushes him in the night and attacks him--thus becoming the thing he fears.

I loved the stories in Winesburg, Ohio that deal with longing and desire. George pines for a small sequence of girls, each of whom pines for him or someone else; they are all in love with love, as the saying goes, but unable to really love or even see the objects of their affection. One of the most powerful stories is "Adventure," about a woman who believes her boyfriend when he tells her he will come back to marry her. She waits and waits, until she realizes that she has grown old waiting (old in 1910 terms, so, like, thirty) and rushes out naked into a rainstorm as a kind of cathartic release, or collapse. The story "Loneliness" captures a timeless truth when one character tells George, "I wanted her and all the time I didn't want her"--the great ambivalence of human connection.

Winesburg, Ohio sounds like it ought to be one of those dreary 19th century realist works, something on par with Theodore Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis. (Though I do like those books, I think you have to admit they are a little tedious and unimaginative stylistically.) But it really stands shoulders above those; in places its quite strange and modernist-sounding. In other moments it resembles Willa Cather, who had just published her first novels when Winesburg came out in 1919. Like Cather, Anderson captures a time and a place--a small Midwestern town at the turn of the century--but the truths within feel as true as ever.

Picture by Lillian Ross

The sun had gone down and the light coming into the suite, high in the Tower, was beginning to dull. Huston looked as though he might be waiting--having set up a Huston scene--for the cameras to roll. But, as I gradually grew to realize, life was not imitating art, Huston was not imitating himself, when he set up such a scene; on the contrary, the style of Huston pictures, Huston being one of the few Hollywood directors who manage to leave their personal mark on the films they make, was the style of the man. In appearance, in gestures, in manner of speech, in the selection of the people and objects he surrounded himself with, and in the way he composed them into individual 'shots' (the abrupt close-up of the thumbnail scraping the head of a kitchen match) and then arranged his shots into dramatic sequence, he was simply the raw material of his own art; that is, the man whose personality left its imprint, unmistakably, on what had come to be known as a Huston picture.

In 1950, director John Huston set out to make a film adaptation of Stephen Crane's novel The Red Badge of Courage. He was followed in his attempt by Lillian Ross, a veteran journalist from The New Yorker who wanted to see the process of making a picture from start to finish. If she had only waited a little bit (and had an expense account that would take her to Africa) she might have seen Huston filming the critical and commercial hit The African Queen, but The Red Badge of Courage turned out to be a flop, just as MGM chief L. B. Mayer expected it to be. But it wasn't a disaster, either--although it failed to make back its budget, it received good notices in the press, among a few detractors. It wasn't some big Fitzcarraldo-style fiasco, where the cast and crew were tortured by the grand delusions of an auteur. Though that might have made a salacious and readable novel, what Ross captures here is something much more subtle and enduring: the steady grind of the studio system, and the way that vision sometimes fails when transferred to celluloid.

The star of Ross' novel is Huston, the legendary director. Her Huston is determined and imaginative, but also practical and collaborative; he believes firmly in the movie he's making, even as he takes in the critiques of his entourage, including producer Gottfried Reinhardt and studio liaison Dore Schary. Huston is an artist, but he can speak in dollars and centers. Studio head Mayer is Huston's foil, a inveterate bottom-liner who extols the virtues of sentimental entertainment like Mickey Rooney movies. You want to hate Mayer, because he's so anti-art, but it's hard to come away from Picture unimpressed by his discernment; he knows that Red Badge will struggle with viewers in a way that Huston and his entourage can only admit when it's too late. Ross captures the voice of both characters in a way that makes them feel magnetic and real; she manages, too, to cut through the backlot lingo and give us a sense of the deeper motivations animating these men.

It's an open question, perhaps, whether Red Badge would have done better if Mayer and the studio had supported it or promoted it more. Reinhardt makes a number of last minute moves to "save" the picture from its middling early screeners, deleting some of the scenes cherished by Huston and adding a cheesy voiceover narration from Crane's novel. (Huston, swallowed up by The African Queen, has washed his hands of the whole thing.) I think, in the end, that Mayer was right, that the shapelessness of Crane's novel just wouldn't play for audiences of the time, but the last-minute editing process makes a double tragedy of the film, turning it into something that is both not a moneymaker and not the artwork that Huston had imagined. That's the story of Picture: not a failure, not an underappreciated masterpiece--just a hash and a disappointment.

Otter Country by Miriam Darlington

We are eye to wild eye; its face is armed with a startling array of walrus bristles. Its ears are larger than I expected, almost like a cat's, and its nostrils are visibly measuring my scent. There is nothing shy about this animal. I have got close enough to see five different sets of whisker around its face and under its chin. In its eyes I can see shock at what on earth I am, and at what I could be doing in its hunting ground. The live current in both of us prickles. When I do not move, it comes a little closer, huffs, then melts bodily into the water surface, leaving the shadow of a ripple and nothing else.

As a child, Miriam Darlington was obsessed with otters: otters in aquarium, otter skeletons in the natural history museum, and so forth. And who wouldn't? Few animals seem to combine the wildness and precociousness, the sheer charisma of an otter. But Darlington's obsession was confined to aquaria and museums because it's very hard to see a river otter in the wild; unlike their sea cousins who float happily in the harbors of northern America, river otters are secretive creatures whose sensitive powers of perception are rivaled only by their power to slip away and not be perceived. Otter Country is the story of a year in Darlington's life in which she vows to seek out the otter in the wild and learn its ways, a journey that takes her from Scotland to Wales to Cornwall and elsewhere in the British Isles.

Otter Country, it must be said, contains mostly scenes of Darlington not finding otters. Like I said, they seem to be quite elusive. They leave behind certain signs of their existence, like the feces, called spraint, they use to mark the paths of their territory, but by the time you see them, the otter has already disappeared again. It's all right, because Darlington is a talented writer of landscapes and a patient noticer of the natural world. Though she never makes this quite explicit, I got the sense that one of the great rewards of Darlington's otter search is that it forces her to pay closer attention to the world around her, to take in what one might not ordinarily notice. The otters are rare visitors, but there always trees and birds and things. When the otters do appear, the encounters are transformative: Darlington describes coming face-to-face with an otter while disguised as something like a hunk of tree branches. And of course these encounters last only seconds--small fare when compared with the months and months that Darlington spends searching.

Otter Country reminded me quite a bit of H is for Hawk, perhaps pointedly so. Darlington makes a push at the kind of intertextual literary quality that book possesses when she brings in a pair of otter books: Gavin Maxwell's accounts of raising African otters at his Scotland home (haven't read it), and Henry Williamson's imagining of an otter's life, Tarka the Otter (read it, liked it). Later, the book takes a more scientific-personal-essayish mold, as Darlington meets with otter experts about the significant ecological dangers that the river otter faces in the England of the 21st century. (Like the stories of many of the world's endangered species, it's one of great improvement and still-great risk.)

I'm not sure if I learned much about otters, and the book is quite intentionally very slow. But I did find it pleasant and purposeful, and like Darlington, I felt the enchantment of providence when the otters finally do show up.

Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy

She slept through the first wan auguries of dawn, gently washed with river fog while martins came and went among the arches. Slept into the first heat of the day and woke to see toy birds with sesame eyes regarding her from their clay nests overhead. She rose and went to the river and washed her face and dried it with her hair. When she had gathered up the bundle of her belongings she emerged from beneath the bridge and set forth along the road gain. Emaciate and blinking with the wind among her rags she looked like something replevied by grim miracle from the ground and sent with tattered windings and halt corporeality into the agony of sunlight. Butterflies attended her and birds dusting in the road did not fly up when she passed. She hummed to herself as she went some child's song from an old dead time.

In a remote Appalachian cabin, a woman named Rinthy bears her brother's child. Her brother, Culla, takes the infant out to the forest and leaves it, telling Rinthy that it died. But the infant is saved by a passing tinker, whom Rinthy sets out to track down, first for her child's body, and then, learning the truth, the living child. Culla sets out after Rinthy, but he'll never find her again: their paths have diverged permanently. He wanders around the mountains, taking odd jobs where he can find them, narrowly avoiding the judgment of posses who find his shiftlessness suspicious. He's followed closely by three sinister men known only as "the Trio," who seem to be murdering those who cross Culla's path.

The Trio are the most Cormacesque element in Outer Dark. Anyone who's read Blood Meridian or The Road will see in them a kind of trial run at the frightening figures of those novels. It's tempting to see them as a kind of precursor to the Judge in Blood Meridian, but I don't think that's quite right. The Judge is a gnostic, an amoral killer, but the Trio are explicitly depicted as a kind of vengeful force, perhaps even a kind of justice. What's interesting about them is that the justice doesn't seem to be very well targeted: Culla first meets them face-to-face after escaping a horrible ferry accident that kills two other men and a horse. He meets the Trio at a campfire--where they are eating a meal of suspiciously unidentifiable meat--where they clearly suspect that Culla has killed the two men. They see his new boots and think them stolen, and in this they're partially right: he stole them, not from the ferryman or his client, but a rich squire--who, ironically, was later killed by the Trio! They know that Culla is guilty, but he's not quite guilty of what they say he is. Does that matter? And if the Trio is set on dispensing justice upon Culla, why is it that they kill everyone who comes into Culla's path but him?

There's a suggestion here, I think, especially when you consider the Biblical allusion of the title, of the idea of original sin, a fundamental evil that moves miasmically through existence and poisons everything. Culla's original sin is the impregnation of his sister and his attempted killing of the infant, and this poisons his path. Everyone he comes into contact with it is, in a sense, killed for it; but he himself will be punished for something else. And if original sin is something that's passed from one generation to another, it makes sense that the infant gets it worse--in a scene that prefigures the most horrifying moments of The Road, and which I will decline to describe.

Reading McCarthy's Southern Gothic novels, written before his move to the Southwest, reveal how much of Faulkner is in him. The flyblown language, the literal darkness of the primitive landscape, these seemed to me to be directly inspired by Faulkner's Mississippi. McCarthy's Appalachia is a primitive place--I think the word he'd use is atavistic--but the archaic language works here especially because it highlights a kind of timelessness to the narrative of sin and perdition. Blood Meridian and the Texas novels do that, too, but I also think they only makes sense in their historical context; they're novels of a particular kind of violence and conflict produced by the American frontier. Outer Dark, by contrast, has the out-of-time quality of a fable. It's a minor McCarthy, for sure, but I found a lot to appreciate in it.

The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard

On any day of the year Grace Thrale might be smiled at in the street by an elderly couple or by some young mother herding her noisy brood: saluted, that is, as a kindred spirit. Caroline Bell never attracted this delectable complicity. There were times when Grace wished the world were not so sure of her, so confident that boredom had claimed her. Yet in her daily existence feared the smallest deviation form habit as an interruption that might bring chaos. Grace no more wanted adventure than Dora wanted peace. She did not convince herself, as some women do, that she retained capacity for a wholly different existence ruled by exalted and injurious passions: Grace knew perfectly how the practised conformity of her days gratified her own desires. Yet one might cling to security and still be bored by it. In its first appeal, security offered an excitement almost like romance; but that rescue might wear down, like any other.

Grace and Caroline Bell are sisters from Australia, and orphans, whose parents have died in a ferry accident. By the time The Transit of Venus begins they have already been shuffled off to England, looked after by their depressive aunt Dora and an astronomer named Sefton Thrale. Caro is the beautiful one, the one who enchants; Grace is beautiful, too, but a more practical and everyday kind of beauty. She marries quickly, to Sefton's son Christian, a bland bureaucrat who offers stability and security. It's Caro that sweeps Ted Tice, a junior astronomer who arrives to work with Sefton Thrale, off of his feet, sparking an ardor that he will cherish and nurse all of his life. He tells Caro he will meet any requirement, but Ted's unwavering loyalty is not that kind of love that Caro is looking for; she drifts instead to Paul Ivory, a playwright and rake who is, in addition to being kind of a jerk, married. Her affair with Paul flowers and dies, and eventually she marries another bureaucrat, an American, but Ted's love survives even this marriage, survives her husband.

Is Ted pathetic or heroic? You can't say he's a romantic, really, except in the narrowest sense. His love resembles a train, something set on a track from which it can never be moved. We learn late in the novel that, in the very beginning of Caro's relationship with Paul, Ted learned a terrible secret about Paul, one that could have destroyed his life. Though Ted might have used this secret to his advantage, he never does, and perhaps this is the final statement about love as virtue: it's Ted alone, in the novel, whose love seems not like a kind of self-gratification. His abasement before Caro may not seem dignified, but it is love, and perhaps the purest kind. The Transit of Venus follows the two sisters in their separate lives, growing older, having affairs or merely fantasizing about them, having kids. Ted is kept off the page for long stretches, but it seems to me that his love for Caro forms the novel's spine and gives it a kind of shape. It's always there, lurking in the background.

I really enjoyed the writing in The Transit of Venus, which is lush, luxurious, and full of sharp detail. It's the kind of book that forces you to go slow; skip over a line and you run the risk of having missed the key to something. But I wasn't sure about the whole of the novel. It strikes me as one of those books where every page works, but the whole feels like it's lacking something. I never felt like Caro or Grace resolved into a psychological whole, or even a collection of traits that added up to something terribly interesting. (Caro, I think, is one of those characters who are magnetic and charismatic because they are magnetic and charismatic; we are asked to take Ted's love as a kind of credit on her personality.) The novel's attempts to situate its characters in a post-World War II Anglosphere--Australia, Britain, Canada--struck me as sort of half-baked and unpersuasive.

Here's the thing that annoyed me the most: the way The Transit of Venus waits until the end of the novel for a "big reveal" that's supposed to recontextualize the entire thing. To explain it, I have to give a spoiler alert. But here's what happens, more or less: Paul Ivory, years after their affair, confesses to Caro that he had affairs with men as well as women. He was being blackmailed by a lover whom, in a strange incident, he let drown. This is the secret that Ted Tice, having seen Paul and the lover--on the bank of a river that Paul soon learns is downstream of a broken dam, about which he does not warn the blackmailer--could hold over Paul if he wanted to. Paul's affair with Caro is a way of striking back at Ted Tice, who never even struck first. This is all very interesting in the way it makes us reconsider Ted, and confirms our worst ideas about Paul, but I found the "reveal" inorganic and wedged in, and very strange in the context of a book that is otherwise mostly bare of "incident." It felt cheap and a little condescending. Worse is the very ending of the book, in which Caro finally accepts Ted's love, only to board an airplane that immediately crashes, leading to Ted's suicide. We are asked to read between the lines to pick up these details: Hazzard tells us 100 pages previous that Caro's ophthalmologist will die in a plane crash en route to Rome, then Caro sees him on the plane. I thought this ending rather lame, and I found the suggestion that I was supposed to piece it together kind of stupid. I liked the book a little better, actually--for its richness, its depiction of the ebb and flow of ordinary lives--before I pieced it together.

The Tenth Man by Graham Greene

Charlot stared back at him with horror. The fleshy and porky figure of the actor momentarily was transformed into his own ideal--the carnal and the proud, leaning negligently there on the axis of the globe offering him all the kingdoms of the world in the form of six freehold acres and a house. He could have everything--or his three hundred francs miraculously renewed. It was as if all that morning he had moved close to the supernatural: an old woman was dying and the supernatural closed in. God came to the house in an attaché case, and when God came the Enemy was always present. He was God's shadow: he was the bitter proof of God. The actor's silly laugh tinkled again, but he heard the ideal laughter swinging behind, a proud and comradely sound, welcoming him to the company of the Devil.

A German prison camp in France. The prisoners are told that one out of ten of them will be liquidated in the morning, and they may choose among themselves. Thinking it fairest, they draw lots; among those marked to die is Chavel, a wealthy man. Chavel desperately offers all his fortune and estate to anyone who will take his place. Janvier, a man dying of tuberculosis, takes him up on the offer, which will provide for his mother and sister. Later, when Chavel is released, he travels back to his country estate. Under the name Charlot, he takes a job as a servant in the household and falls in love with Janvier's beautiful and bitter sister, who waits for the "real" Chavel every day so that she may spit in his face, and then shoot him. 

In many ways, The Tenth Man reminded me of Daphne du Maurier's incredible novel The Scapegoat, but reversed: in Du Maurier's novel, the protagonist is mistaken for a rich man who may have been a Nazi collaborationist, and must play the part in order to be accepted by his "family." Greene's Chavel/Charlot must deny his identity and his connection to the estate; of course, it's no surprise that the subterfuge transforms him into a real servant, a humbler and more generous man. It's a great premise--Greene wrote it as a treatment for a film that was never released, although after its publication as a novella, they did make a movie of it with Anthony Hopkins--but to Greene's credit, he recognizes that the premise needs a wrinkle, a turn. He introduces the character of Carosse, a malicious professional actor who recognizes that, in the wake of the war's end, he can use his actorly skills to transform himself into whoever he wants. Hearing second-hand the story of Chavel, he shows up at the estate claiming to be Chavel, and even schemes to "re"-possess it using a law that invalidates property transfers during the war. Carosse is Chavel's true doppelganger, a man who delights in subterfuge instead of living by it by necessity, and who takes up the identity that Chavel has cowardly forsaken. It's Carosse who, of course, will provide Chavel the opportunity to make good on his cowardice in the prison yard, and offer himself up for sacrifice for a greater good.

The Tenth Man is subtitled "a novel," but it's really a novella, unmistakably a minor work, though it has all the hallmarks of a great Greene story. The prose is so effortless and smooth that it reads to me like a man in the self-assured late stages of his career. (Certainly it is more classically "Greene" than his other late works, like Doctor Fischer of Geneva or Monsignor Quixote, which have a kind of strangeness that reads like boredom with his familiar topics.) It's packaged with a couple other treatments for movies that were never made, one of which, "Jim Braddon and the War Criminal," sounds like a kind of twin to The Tenth Man: Braddon, who bears a striking resemblance to an escaped Nazi, crash lands in the South American jungle where said Nazi is said to be on the lam. Having contracted amnesia, Braddon is captured and must face his "identity" as the Nazi, until the look of self-sacrifice and remorse on his face convinces a court psychologist of the mix-up. It's a fun little idea, over the top even for Greene, but it resonates in an interesting way with the doppelgangers and identity swaps of The Tenth Man.

The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein

This is now a history of a number of men and women from their beginning to their ending; these will have then the last touch of being that a history of any one can give to them, sometime it will be that any one who ever was or is or will be living, sometime then it will be even if they have had only a very little of any living, sometime then it will be that every one will have the last touch of being, a history of them can give to them, sometime then in my feeling there will be a history of every kind of men and women, there will be a history of every one from the beginning to their ending, every one will have sometime before the ending the last touch of a being a history of them can give to anyone.

First of all, yes, it's all like that. Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans is one of the most baffling books I've ever read. The vocabulary is simple, but the sentences are mazes of repetition that lurch sometimes into ungrammatical thickets or contradict themselves. Ove rand over again, Stein gives minor variations on the same sentence, with new clauses added or slightly adjusted, and then again and again, for paragraphs and pages. The structure is all like the passage above, making large claims about men and women, their living, their being, their history, etc., etc. The vocabulary is simple, even to a fault, but the experience of reading 400 pages of sentences like these manages to strip these simple words--living, history, being, men, women, even eating, drinking, etc.--down to an alien aspect.

The story--there is a story, despite everything--focuses on Alfred Hersland and his marriage to Julia Dehning. Stein begins by telling the story of their marriage, which, despite being unsuccessful seems rather unremarkable, and then expanding outward to tell the story of the whole Hersland family, including Alfred's grandparents, parents, and his siblings Martha and David. It extends also to many of the minor figures who people the lives of the Herslands, including friends and servants; we're told over and over again (and I mean literally a hundred times at least) that the Herslands are wealthy but choose to live in a section of Gossols, Stein's fictionalized version of Oakland, California, where no other rich people live. This is an interesting detail, but the lives of the Herslands are otherwise pointedly unremarkable, and unremarkable in a way that allows Stein to take them as avatars of the human condition that is the real subject of the book. (The title's claim that the book is about American lives seems even too limited.)

If I got something out of the book--and I can't claim to have gotten a great deal--it's this idea: that at their heart, human beings are not so different from one another. For Stein, everyone has an essential being (she uses the term "at bottom") that is shared with other people of the same "type"; a personality may be a mix of these different types, but it presents nothing unique or new. Human identity is a kind of repetition, a repetition that mirrors the repetition of the prose. There's a kind of beauty in this, Stein suggests (I think), in that it unites all people into a common being and history. Over and over again, Stein remarks that at some point there will be a full history of all human beings, suggesting that The Making of Americans is a step toward the project of understanding not just humans but humanity.

But I could be wrong. Frankly, this book defeated me like few other books ever have. Outside of a few flashes of interest, or the smooth wear of the prose dulling my senses as it wired my brain, I can't say I enjoyed it.

Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill

EDMUND: The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can't see this house. You'd never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn't see but a few feet ahead. I didn't meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That's what I wanted--to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was a ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.

A couple weeks ago, we got to tour Eugene O'Neill's house near Oakland, California. I knew nothing about O'Neill--it's possible he's the most important author I have no real experience with or knowledge about--but the house made an impression on me. It's in a beautiful spot, high in the golden hills of the East Bay, with a square-on view of Mt. Diablo. The house itself is odd, a white cinder block affair filled with African masks and odd chinoiserie (O'Neill and his wife called it "Tao House"). In his bedroom, O'Neill had a black mirror, as hideous and dour a decorating choice as any I've ever seen. But on the other side of the bedroom, past a number of intervening doors meant to keep out guests, was O'Neill's study, where, as the guide explained to us, O'Neill shut himself up to write the masterwork of his life, Long Day's Journey Into Night, a fictionalized version of his own upbringing. The experience was so difficult and cathartic that he emerged afterward like someone coming up from the sea, and made his wife Carlotta promise it wouldn't be published until several decades after his death.

These are the terrible secrets that plagued O'Neill, and which are transposed into the life of the Tyrone family of Long Day's Journey Into Night: before O'Neill was born, his brother Jamie inadvertently caused the death of another, infant brother, Edmund, by ignoring their mother's command to not go into the baby's room when he had measles. Grief-stricken, father James implored wife Mary to have another child to replace the lost one; this was O'Neill. The birth was so difficult that it set Mary on a path to lifelong morphine addiction, a fact that explained Mary's distance as a mother, though O'Neill never knew about it as a child. Long Day's Journey Into Night puts these various strands of crossed guilt on display: Jamie Tyrone's guilt at having killed the infant Edmund; Eugene's guilt at having caused his mother's addiction; James and Mary's guilt about the insuffiencies of their parenting, and the resulting resentment toward their sons. Only, O'Neill makes one switch, subtle and profound--he names the protagonist Edmund after the real-life dead son, and the dead son Eugene. Take what you will from that.

The main thrust of Long Day's Journey Into Night seems to be that "truth will out." Set, as the title suggests, over a single day at the Tyrones' fog-cloaked summer house, it depicts the family driven to a breaking point by the looming diagnosis of Edmund with tuberculosis. James and Jamie try to keep the diagnosis a secret, from Edmund at first, and especially from Mary, whose distrust of doctors and fear of losing another son can be easily traced back to the infant's death. The details come out drib by drib, and only in moments of intense pressure and anger. The characters are constantly confessing things, and then admonishing themselves or others to shut up about them; the Tyrone family lives in a fragile but totalizing web of self-repression that they require to continue a baseline of functioning. Confessions and outbursts are lubricated by drink; the three men seem to inhale inhuman amounts of whiskey from morning to night, while Mary slips further away from them, into a morphine fog. The most powerful scene, perhaps, comes at the very end (of course) when Mary descends the stairs into the room where the men are drinking and recriminating, holding her wedding dress, having mentally receded to her youth, before the point at which she was forced to decide between her love for James and her desired life in the convent.

The way our guide described it to us--and again, I know so little about O'Neill, that I'm sure this explanation is painfully simplistic for anyone who's more acquainted--O'Neill ushered a transition on the American stage from shallow entertainments like musicals and Vaudeville to a tradition of serious realism. (It's easy to see, now, the way Edward Albee drew on the play for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, another play about serious repression in a single family.)  Long Day's Journey Into Night might mark a prototype, but as is often the case with prototypes, it is in itself something really stunning and not quite surpassed. The last act especially is full of rich and desperate language, the kind of things that people say when they are creative, overeducated, and miserable. I enjoyed the running battle between Edmund and James over their literary heroes; James is an old school Shakespearean actor and Edmund reads Baudelaire, Nietzsche, etc., authors that James regards as unhealthily morbid. In the end, O'Neill's widow published Long Day's Journey almost immediately after his death, which, in a way, seems appropriate, because as the play suggests, you can't keep the truth under wraps for very long.

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

Every night now Guitar was seeing little scraps of Sunday dresses--white and purple, powder blue, pink and white, lace and voile, velvet and silk, cotton and satin, eyelet and grosgrain. The scraps stayed with him all night and he remembered Magdalene called Lena and Corinthians bending in the wind to catch the heart-red pieces of velvet that had floated under the gaze of Mr. Robert Smith. Only Guitar's scraps were different. The bits of Sunday dresses that he saw did not fly; they hung in the air quietly, like the whole notes in the last measure of an Easter song.

Four little colored girls had been blown out of a church, and his mission was to approximate as best he could a similar death of four little white girls some Sunday, since he was the Sunday man.

How could a novel like Song of Solomon exist? It's so overloaded with moments, images, ideas; it actually seems to totter like an overburdened basket, sure to fall over. Although I haven't read all of Morrison's books, I feel safe in saying that only Beloved comes close to the sheer scope and audacity of this novel (and in my opinion, Solomon easily outpaces it). I'm planning on teaching it for the first time in many years, and for every key detail that stuck in my mind--the doomed flight of the insurance salesman at the beginning of the novel, Milkman earning his nickname by feeding at his mother's breast well into his childhood, Pilate's name hanging from a box in her ear--there's another that I had forgotten all about--Reba's uncanny luck, Circe luxuriating in her dead master's house with her pack of dogs, Hagar's attempts to murder Milkman... How does it all manage to work together?

The word that comes to mind for me when reading Song of Solomon is "inheritance." What can be handed down, and what must be left behind? The inheritances in Song of Solomon are often unwanted: Milkman inherits his father Macon's self-centeredness and materialism in the same way that the mistaken name "Macon Dead" is passed down through the generations. Pilate's name is essentially meaningless, plucked out of the Bible by an illiterate father, and yet she treasures it by keeping it in her ear. Men and women fight to pass on their own secret souls to their children; when Ruth continues to give the child Milkman her breast, it seems to me that she is trying to claim him by bestowing something upon him from his own body, and thus fend off the cruel, possessive Macon's more aggressive claims on her only boy. In contrast, Pilate's navel-less stomach shows how her mother died in childbirth and was unable to pass anything on at all. And, of course, there's the literal inheritance of the book, a bag hanging from Pilate's ceiling that Macon believes contains a stash of gold they discovered together in the wake of their father's death. The bag of gold is one of literature's most powerful MacGuffins, and through a series of convoluted turns, is transformed into something far more meaningful, a real inheritance. (Although, having read this book probably four times now, I don't think I can faithfully render the shaggy dog story that results in Pilate stealing her own father's bones without knowing it.) Milkman's journey into the South undoes the great migration and performs inheritance in reverse, seeking out the secret messages and forms that lurk in his own psyche in the same veiled way as the song that children in Virginia sing about his ancestor, Jake Solomon.

But for my money, nothing in Song of Solomon is as effective or unnerving as the character of Guitar and the group of the Seven Days. Guitar is Milkman's best friend, but he comes from poverty while Milkman comes from the Black upper class. He routinely chides Milkman for caring too little about civil rights, and he's right, but Guitar's sense of bitter injustice leads him to join the Seven Days, who are tasked with "keeping the balance" by murdering an equivalent white person whenever a Black person is killed by white. (Guitar's ultimate turn against Milkman is fed by the need to fund a mission to kill four white girls after the Birmingham church bombing of 1963). What is so frightening and effective about Guitar is that his terror ideology is seductive and compelling. The reasoning is wonky, bordering on innumerate--you don't "balance" unequal amounts by removing the same number--but the larger logic of a people who face a true existential threat is hard to dismiss, especially when compared to Milkman's wishy-washiness and naivete. The Seven Days are Morrison's Grand Inquisitor: a way of thinking that the novel rejects but nonetheless finds too powerful to entirely expunge.