The Voyage of the Narwhal by Andrea Barrett

Surrounded by that ice and snow, Erasmus dreamed of home--less and less often, though, as the brig passed down Lancaster Sound. Around him were breeding gulls and terns, snow geese and murres, eiders and dovekies; the water thick with whales and seals and scattered plates of floe ice; a sky from which birds dropped like arrows, piercing the water's skin. Sometimes narwhals tusked through the skin from the other side, as if sniffing the solitary ship. They hadn't seen another ship since passing a few whalers at Pond's Bay, yet Erasmus was far from lonely. Dazzled, he looked at the cliffs, and knew Dr. Boerhaave shared his dazzlement.

I love the Arctic. I'll probably never go there. Few people do. But I like reading about it, probably because it is so improbable: remote, harsh, difficult to access and inimical to comfort, the Arctic retains something of the feeling of the old frontier. No wonder that, in the 19th century, once the world had been more or less mapped, those who had explorers' hearts and minds turned to the Arctic; and for once they were pretty roundly defeated. Some of the Arctic's mystique, actually, comes from the fact that there are people who make it their home, and live lives of remarkable resilience there, not just against harsh conditions, but against the predations of people who think they know better. So it's a joy to read about, whether in The Rifles by William T. Vollmann, who was defeated by the Arctic like his alter ego John Franklin, or in Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez, a guy who knows more about the Arctic and its residents because he affords them a bit of basic respect.

Andrea Barrett's The Voyage of the Narwhal is a fiction book about an Arctic voyage gone, as all of them go, wrong. Its protagonist is Erasmus Wells, a middle-aged naturalist who signs on under Zeke Voorhees, a younger man and Erasmus' old friend. Zeke turns out to be a bad captain: he cares more about his own ambitions than the safety of his crew, and this ambition, mixed with a mercurial temper and plain poor judgment, leads to the Narwhal becoming stuck in pack ice. Like, they suspect--and we now know--the doomed Franklin expedition, of which the Narwhal is searching for evidence. Zeke's heedlessness kills, perhaps indirectly, several members of the voyage, and when the crew refuses to go on an ill-advised sledge excursion, Zeke goes by himself. When he fails to return, Erasmus takes the only opportunity to get out of the pack ice--lest they be frozen in for another year--leaving Zeke for dead.

That's all all right. I wouldn't say that Barrett has the knack for describing these alien landscapes like Vollmann and Lopez. Far more interesting, I thought, was what happens when Erasmus returns to Philadelphia. As it turns out, Elisha Kent Kane's Arctic voyage returned just before the crew of the Narwhal, having mapped first every bit of coastline the Narwhal thought they'd discovered. Erasmus returns basically empty-handed, and while Kane tours the country with tales of his exploits, Erasmus is either forgotten or loathed for having abandoned Zeke.

All this gets worse when, as any reader surely expects, Zeke shows up again, this time with an Greenlandic woman and her son in tow. According to Zeke's rendition, the pair have accompanied him voluntarily, but Erasmus suspects that there has been some coercion involved; that Zeke knew his only chance at notoriety was to bring back real life "Esquimaux." I wonder if Barrett was thinking of the Inuit woman and her son that caused such a stir in London. Like that real-life pair, Zeke's Greenlanders--Annie and Tom--grow quickly sick in the unfamiliar climate, and Zeke treats them shabbily, as curios to be shuffled onto the stage and then crammed in a drawer when not in use. Annie dies. Erasmus, working doggedly on a natural history of the Arctic--a book that lies in contrast to the dazzling half-truths of Kane and Zeke--decides that he must right Zeke's wrongs, and steals away on one final voyage to the Arctic, to return Tom to his family.

So there's a whiff of white saviorism to Erasmus' noble deed. But there's also a powerful critique of the way that natural philosophy has been practiced, of the cruel tools used to expand human knowledge. Zeke's methods are inhuman, murdering and despoiling the very places and people he claims as the field of his exploration. On the other hand, Erasmus represents another kind of scientist: humble, cautious, empathetic, and more interested in pursuing what is true and good than becoming celebrated. The book never tells us whether his natural history of the Arctic finds success; if it does, it probably still pales in comparison to the fame that the real-life Kent and the fictional Zeke claim. But the Arctic doesn't suffer fools, and perhaps like Franklin, they too will meet the ill consequences of their own recklessness.

American Meteor by Norman Lock

I've always said that a man made his own bed. But now that I'm dying--there's no point in arguing the fact--now that I am, I realize the futility of struggling against fate. Our bed is made for us: We do as we are obliged. Leastways, enough to humble us. That's a bitter pill to swallow late in the day. While we're alive, we're like the man who steps in horseshit on his way to church. Only when he's home again and has cleaned his shoes can he smile at his humiliation and--more to the point--his helplessness before what lies in wait and is beyond his power to prevent. Here's what I think: Behind every gunman stands another gunman, in a concatenation of death and destruction, difficult to break.

Stephen Moran is only sixteen when he loses his eye in the Civil War. While languishing in his hospital bed, he looks up and sees a familiar face, friendly and long-bearded: a man Stephen used to see throwing rocks into the sea many miles away in Coney Island. The face belongs to Walt Whitman, who really did volunteer as Civil War nurse, and who shares with Stephen a copy of his new poetry book Leaves of Grass. When Stephen invents a story of heroism to explain his lost eye, Whitman shares it with the military brass, who pin a medal on Stephen and make him the official bugler on Lincoln's funeral train.

American Meteor is something like a Forrest Gump for the 19th century: though a mostly ordinary person himself, Moran's destiny intersects with Whitman, Lincoln, Grant, Union Pacific railroad magnate Thomas Durant, Western photographer William Henry Jackson, Custer, and Crazy Horse. Part of its appeal is the sheer madcap joy of recognizing these figures, like Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the television set. As Stephen says, if nothing else, his story is a "hell of a yarn." But it's also a fascinating meditation on the tumultuous 19th century--the century in which the United States concretized, reabsorbing the south and expanding all the way to the Pacific, a territory bought with much blood--and the nature of destiny. The title symbol of the meteor evokes ancient omens of both fortune and disaster, but it also represents something evanescent: "I might as well be a meteor as a man," Stephen says, "for all the difference I've made on earth."

American Meteor is also a love letter to the West. I brought it with me on a trip to Utah, where we drove out to the spot north of the Great Salt Lake where the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroad lines were finally joined by a golden spike, a moment witnessed by Stephen. In that remote and wide open space it's easy to appreciate how momentous it was to have the west opened by the railroad, but Stephen also talks about it as the moment the West began to disappear, flooded by capitalists, frozen by photographers. (It reminded me of Willa Cather's A Lost Lady, which has much the same thesis, though American Meteor turns a much more skeptical eye toward the myth of the wild West in the first place.) At several points in the book, Stephen exhibits the power to look into the future--a dubious power we learn was granted him by Crazy Horse--and see the continued bloodshed and conquest of the 20th century, as if reminding us that the turmoils of the 19th century are not long past but resonating still today.

American Meteor is, for a book clearly enamored with the great figures of the American West, remarkably cynical about Western expansion. All the worst qualities of manifest destiny are collected in Custer, a vain braggart and genocidal maniac for whom Stephen acts as an official photographer. Stephen decides to kill Custer, the apotheosis of all that is poisonous about the 19th century--and does! This part of the book was the weakest, I thought: its brisk pace--American Meteor gives a crash course of westward expansion pages--doesn't allow Lock to develop the moral choice to kill Custer in a sufficient way, but the logical sense of the choice is obvious.

American Meteor, which was published in 2015, really seems like a book of its moment. It's a book for the statue-toppling era of American cultural memory: how do treasure the vision and boldness of the 19th century, which made the America of today, while excising the bloodlust and greed? Even Whitman and Lincoln are not exempt from the contradictions: "In my opinion," Stephen writes, "Lincoln was a good man." But the next sentence disquiets: "If a man can be good."

The Dying Grass by William T. Vollmann

It must be here that the loneliness of the Indian country of which we have merely commenced to take possession, and at that so nominally that nothing but violence will save our claims from being laughed away, begins to march along with us, very quick and correct in its movements, although uncouth in the gaze and teeth it turns upon us, proposing to nibble us up before we notice, our desire consequently being to ride away from here , but now as long as we continue forward, everywhere we go will be again here in the dying golden grass of what is not yet America even though it will certainly become so, which is why we pursue Joseph as far as we must, our Springfields ready with a round in the chamber and our faces fixed as we seek earth stained by his sign, riding east now toward our dear United States, the general watching us without imparting anything but affable trivialities; we will carry Joseph to the gallows, and if that isn't good enough, we will kick him down to Hell.

The Nez Perce, like so many of the indigenous tribal nations of the 19th century in the land that is now the United States, were "good Indians" until they weren't. They cooperated with the U.S. government and the Army, they were friendly with settlers--even intermarrying with them--and signed a treaty agreeing to a large reservation in the land that now lies at the intersection of Washington, Idaho, and Oregon. But of course there isn't a single Indian treaty that the United States didn't break, and the thief treaty was the same: the Nez Perce saw their reservation chiseled away to a tiny fraction of what it had been. Many Christianized Nez Perce stuck to the reservation, took English names, and began the process of assimilation, but several bands totaling about 750 people decided to refuse the terms of the treaty, touching off a war of attrition that lasted from June to October of 1877. The Nez Perce led the Army on a strategic retreat through Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana, before finally being routed just a few miles south of the Canadian border.

William T. Vollmann's novel The Dying Grass tells the story of the Nez Perce War from beginning to end, from both the perspective of the Nez Perce, and the Department of the Columbia that pursued them. It is the longest of Vollmann's five written Seven Dreams novels about conflict between settlers and Native Americans--at 1200 pages it is almost certainly, by page count at least, the longest book I have ever read--but also the most stylistically adventurous. When a perspective shifts--perhaps from one character to another, or from what someone is saying to what they are really thinking, or just from the action to a description of its natural surroundings--Vollmann indents that section or set of lines. The result looks and often reads like poetry, but it also reminded me of the "stacks" of computer code (sorry Brent that's probably not right). The result is that The Dying Grass seems uniquely polyphonic, woven from hundreds of different voices. More than any of the other Seven Dreams books, The Dying Grass captures the sheer breadth of the conflict and its many actors.

On the white side, Vollmann's main character is the General Oliver Otis Howard, known by his detractors as "Uh Oh Howard" for his defeat at the Battle of Chancellorville. Many of Howard's soldiers also call him "General Prayer Book" because of his piousness, and rankle under his proscription of alcohol and his friendliness toward Indians and blacks. Howard's virtues are indeed very virtuous: his sincere concern for black Americans--something that could not be said for many other Union generals--led him to found Howard University and steer the Freedman's Bureau. His attitude toward the Nez Perce is similar: when he says he had counted them friends and is aggrieved by their rebellion, we believe him, but he is blind to the limits of his own paternalism. He wants for the Nez Perce what he wanted for the Negroes--a little bit of land and assimilation into the social order of the United States--but cannot see how such largesse entails the destruction of the nation's cultural history and way of life. 

Only one of the soldiers, Howard's aide-de-camp Erskine Wood, slowly comes to believe that the Army's pursuit of the Nez Perce is a moral outrage; Vollmann's depiction of him is second only to Howard in its richness and sensitivity. And yet even Wood's protest remains in his heart only; his creeping doubt does not spur him to reject his Army commission or aid the Nez Perce (though we find, in a true and fascinating fact, that later in life Wood sent his son to learn "how to be an Indian" from the captured Nez Perce Chief Joseph). Wood's foil might be Ad Chapman, the volunteer interpreter who knows how to speak Nimipuutimt from his marriage to a Nez Perce woman. Crude, mercenary, and untrustworthy, it might be said that the whole war is Chapman's fault because he fires first on the Nez Perce, and yet his position between two worlds makes him indispensable. In a touch that is both meaningful and historically true, it's Wood and Chapman, dissident and bigot, who pen the famous translation of Chief Joseph's surrender speech: "From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever."

Howard's counterpart on the Nez Perce side is Chief Joseph himself, called by his true name, Heinmot Tooyalakekt. The Nez Perce's strategic retreat bestows upon Joseph the title of the Red Napoleon, but this relies on a grave misunderstanding: Joseph is the chief of his own small band of Nez Perce, but he's never made war chief, a role given to Looking-Glass (named for the shard of mirror he keeps around his neck) or Lean Elk. Jane Smiley's review of The Dying Grass suggests that Vollmann is so sympathetic to the Nez Perce that it verges on "noble savage" ideology, but not only is this a poor moral judgment--a kind of bothsidesism projected onto the past--I'm not sure how she could have read about the great disagreements between the restrained Joseph and the more militant members of the Nez Perce party, like the "Three Red Blankets" or the bloodthirsty Toohoolhoolsote, and came away with that conclusion. One thing Vollmann, who wrote an 800-page treatise on the nature of violence, does well is to show the way violence cycles out of control, no less among the Nez Perce than the Army: their rebellion against the "Bostons" becomes all too easily an excuse to raid and murder uninvolved white settlers.

For his part, Joseph always advocates for surrender and peace, though his stature is not such that he's often heeded. But among the many disputing chiefs Joseph emerges as the most virtuous because he unerringly thinks of the welfare of his people, and women and children especially, before abstract concerns like honor. The Dying Grass suggests that the American press might have it right when they imagine Joseph to be supreme among the Nez Perce:

now his heart begins too late to understand

--although many other best men dispute this, preferring White Bird, who planned our victory a Sparse-Snowed Place and led us across the Medicine Line--

that our greatest chief was Heinmot Tooyalakekt,

he who never had hope,

desiring only to help our women, children, and old ones:

Yet The Dying Grass echoes an idea that first came to me by way of Dee Brown's history of the Indian Wars, Bury Me at Wounded Knee: in the end, the various responses to removal mattered very little. The Bannocks and Cheyennes who help the "Bluecoats" stomp out the Nez Perce will find themselves at the barrel of their guns within a year, and even the disputation between the various Nez Perce chiefs seems, in the end, meaningless: "The prudent and trusting submission of Looking-Glass," Volmann writes, "the violent resistance of the Three Red Blankets, the flight of White Bird and the restraint of Chief Joseph all produced the same result. So did General Howard's kindheartedness and General Sherman's pitiless fury." It is interesting to think of Howard and Sherman--and Wood and Chapman, perhaps--in the same boat, one which rises on the tide of history but which can barely be guided or steered. Did the rush of settlement in the latter half of the 19th century mean that the cruelty of the Indian Wars and the reservation system were foregone conclusions? In Fathers and Crows, Vollmann wrote of the Jesuit conversion of the Haudenosaunee, "If it had to be done, it could have been done differently." Is that true here, too? Or is Howard right when he tells Wood that there's no other way?

Either way, The Dying Grass is a tremendous panorama of those caught in the rush of history. Beyond Howard, Wood, Chapman, Joseph, Looking-Glass, and Toohoolhoolsote there are dozens and dozens of individual characters whose interior lives are thoughtfully imagined and evoked by the unusual structural choices of the novel. It's a novel as big and breathtaking as the mixed-grass prairie, or the mountain valley, or the camas meadows over which that history moves.

How Much of These Hills is Gold by C. Pam Zhang

There is claiming the land, which Ba wanted to do, which Sam refused--and then there is being claimed by it. The quiet way. A kind of gift in never knowing how much of these hills might be gold. Because maybe if you only went far enough, waited long enough, held enough sadness pooled in your veins, soon you might come upon a path you knew, the shapes of rocks would look like familiar faces, the trees would greet you, buds and birdsong lilting up, and because this land has gouged in you an animal's kind of claiming, senseless to words and laws--dry grass drawing blood, a tiger's mark in a ruined leg, ticks and torn blisters, wind-coarsened hair, sun burned in patterns to leave skin striped or spotted--then, if you ran, you might hear on the wind, or welling up in your own parched mouth, something like and unlike an echo, coming from before or behind, the sound of a voice you've always known calling your name--

Lucy is a young Chinese-American girl living in the gold rush region of the American West in the nineteenth century. Since the death of her mother, her little sister Samantha has cut her hair short and taken to calling herself Sam, posing as a boy. When Lucy and Sam's father--known as "Ba"--dies suddenly in the night, the pair end up alone in this frontier land, and without a way to stay in their house, they set out into the wilderness to find a place to bury Ba's putrefying body.

How Much of These Hills is Gold wrenches the reader through several chronological shifts: no sooner is Ba's body buried than Zhang winds back the clock several years to illuminate the kind of hardscrabble life the family lived before the death of Ma and Ba. Ba, it turns out, was one of the very first to discover gold in the California hills, a secret he has been keeping--and mining--for years, but when the secret gets out, it's only a matter of time until white men find a way to use his race to lock him out of the munificence of the gold rush.

There's even an As I Lay Dying-style section written from the point of view of Ba's corpse as he rides on back of Lucy and Sam's horse, written as a farewell to Lucy in which he fills in the history of his own relationship with their mother and his first experiences in what the Chinese called, appropriately enough, Gold Mountain. This section, I thought, was one of the most successful of the novel--despite its fancifulness, Ba's voice grounds the narrative; I found the third-person present-tense mode of the rest of the novel to be a little too precious at times.

From there, the novel zooms forward again five years, when Lucy and Sam meet again for the first time after splitting up in the wilderness. Lucy has found safety and comfort in a frontier town, attaching herself to a vain, rich white girl; Sam has been an adventurer in the hills, in the spirit of long-dead Ba. The two are foils in many ways: civilized and wild, assimilating and proudly Chinese, feminine and masculine, Ma and Ba. Against the backdrop of the Wild West, Zhang explores these themes of race, gender, and identity with a great deal of subtlety and complexity. But the story never quite recovers from the time jump, I thought, and tries to fill in too much. Still, How Much of These Hills is Gold offers a new and welcome perspective on the familiar myths of the West.

The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic

"We really were happy, and I--I really was a good man.  Here's the kind of joke God plays!  You see me here six months after.  Look at me!  I haven't got an honest hair on my head.  I'm a bad man through and through--that's what I am.  I look all around at myself, and there isn't an atom left anywhere of the good man I used to be.  And, mind you, I never lifted a finger to prevent the change.  I didn't resist once; I didn't make any fight.  I just walked deliberately down-hill, with my eyes wide open.  I told myself all the while that I was climbing up-hill instead, but I knew in my heart that it was a lie."

When this novel opens, the protagonist, Theron Ware, is a Methodist minister in upstate New York.  He's just given an inspiring sermon, and he's hoping that he'll snag the crown jewel of ministerial placements, but instead he's assigned to small-town Octavius, a place where congregants are suspicious of multisyllable words and he's warned not to let his wife walk around with flowers in her bonnet.  On top of that, the trustees of the church are intent on squeezing their profit out of the church and out of Theron himself.

Eventually, Theron, a dyed-in-the-wool primitive Methodist, finds himself mixed up with the town's other half, a population of Irish Catholics.  He makes the acquaintance of Father Forbes, the priest, and his friend Dr. Ledsmar, as well as the beautiful redheaded organist Celia Madden.  In despair over the petty ugliness of his own congregation, the Catholics of Octavius open Theron's eyes up to the possibility of another religion and another life.  That religion is not quite Catholicism, but a kind of modernist (for 1896, but recognizable in today's liberal traditions) humanism that regards Theron's Methodism as remarkably quaint and backward.  Celia and Dr. Ledsmar represent two opposing prongs of this intellectual awakening: Celia is a neo-Pagan who plays Chopin like an orgiastic ritual; Ledsmar is an atheist and rationalist suspicious of both Theron's religion and Celia's.  Only Forbes' Catholicism--an empty shell of ritual--seems right to Dr. Ledsmar.

For Theron, these acquaintances offer an intellectual awakening.  They introduce him to Renan, to George Sand, to all sorts of writers and thinkers he has never heard of.  Slowly and surely, he finds himself drifting away from the church and reconsidering the Methodist beliefs that have defined his life.

The Damnation of Theron Ware sets itself up as a novel of ideas: fundamentalism vs. liberalism, Methodism vs. Catholicism, Christianity vs. paganism, religion vs. science.  In the end, though, I think all of that is a kind of feint; Theron Ware is not a novel of ideas, but a novel about the way we use ideas to justify and conceal our human instincts at their basic and most tawdry.  Theron's embrace of Celia's paganism can hardly be extricated from the embarrassing crush he has on her.  He blames his own drifting away from his wife Alice on her redoubled fundamentalism, rather than his interest in another woman.  Is his ardor for Celia produced by the ideas she embodies, or is it the other way around?

The Damnation of Theron Ware is neatly and effectively constructed: for a long time I was right there with Theron as he grew out of the simple-mindedness of his youthful religion, and I found myself rooting for his relationship with Celia.  But little by little, Frederic punctures the myth that Theron's constructed around his life by abandoning his point of view long enough to let us see that each of his newfound friends--Forbe, Ledsmar, Celia--actually thinks Theron is a pathetic boor.  By the climax, in which Theron follows--or stalks--Celia on her way to New York City, we see the truth just barely before Theron does, that he has become pathetic, abandoning his wife to chase a woman that doesn't love him.  There's no romance in it, no big ideas or revelations, just the small and repulsive tragedy of a horndog who can't get his shit together.

In his review, Brent wonders if the story is a "morality tale," but if it is I think it's a moral of the most basic kind.  Don't be a pretentious dick, and don't treat your wife like garbage.  On that, at least, the Methodists, the Catholics, the neo-Pagans, and the rationalists, I hope, can agree.

Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

"This cursed business, accursed of God and man, what is it?  Strip it of all its ornament, run it down to the root and nucleus of the whole, and what is it?  Why, because my brother Quashy is ignorant and weak, and I am intelligent and strong,--because I know how, and can do it,--therefore, I may steal all he has, keep it, and give him only such and so much as suits my fancy.  Whatever is too hard, too dirty, too disagreeable, for me, I may set Quashy to doing.  Because I don't like work, Quashy shall work.  Because the sun burns me, Quashy shall stay in the sun.  Quashy shall earn the money, and I will spend it.  Quashy shall lie down in every puddle, that I may walk over dry-shod.  Quashy shall do my will, and not his, all the days of his mortal life, and have such a chance of getting to heaven, at last, as I find convenient.  This I take to be about what slavery is.  I defy anybody on earth to read our slave-code, as it stands in our law-books, and make anything else of it.  Talk about the abuses of slavery!  Humbug!  The thing itself is the essence of all abuse!"

I recently realized something: many, many white people in the United State of America simply do not think that slavery was all that bad.  It becomes quite obvious when I hear someone like Roy Moore say that "even though we had slavery," America was greatest before the Civil War because we had strong families.  (Never mind that slavery tore family after family apart, as Uncle Tom's Cabin shows quite well.)  Or I read stories like this one from Vox, where a docent at a Southern plantation recounts some of the questions she received, like, "Did the slaves here appreciate the care they got from their mistress?"  It stands out quite clearly when people defend the statues of Confederate generals, because of how upright they were despite their defense of slavery.  That "despite" says a lot.  The most humbling thing about this realization is that I had it at all; all of this has doubtlessly been clear to black Americans for hundreds of years.

I bring this up because the most striking thing about Uncle Tom's Cabin is how it captures the rationalizing, the hemming and hawing, the rhetorical and political cowardice of white Americans.  Uncle Tom lives with his wife and children in Kentucky under a kindly man who treats his slaves well and promises never to separate them, and yet, when money is tight, he does exactly that.  From there he's purchased by a compassionate but indolent man named St. Clare, who slowly but surely is convinced to do something about the injustice of slavery and set Tom free--and ends up getting killed in a bar fight on his way to draw up the papers.  It's St. Clare who delivers the stirring monologue up top, recognizing that slavery itself is an abuse that can't be ameliorated by treating your slaves well, but it takes the superhuman patience and goodness of a man like Tom to drag St. Clare to do what he already knows what's right.  And the fact that it's too late just goes to show how right he was; his own kindness to Tom amounts to nothing when his proud, selfish widow sells Tom to the vicious Simon Legree.  Time and time again, Stowe shows us the mental gymnastics necessary for white Americans, slaveowners and otherwise, to keep their egos intact.

Uncle Tom himself has given his name to a rather nasty epithet.  But the character Tom couldn't be farther from the stereotype of the black betrayer who sides with his masters, although he does form strong and compassionate relationships with many of them.  Rather, Tom is a picture of perfect Christian goodness, designed to emphasize the injustice slavery does to good people.  This is best exemplified by the moment when Tom refuses an order by Legree to beat another slave--a typical tactic meant to divide slaves and pit them against one another.  Tom has no problem recognizing Legree's ownership and mastery over him, but he claims a higher allegiance to God.  In doing so, Tom seals his own death warrant, turning Legree's petty viciousness into an unquenching resentment, and turns Tom into very much a Christ figure himself.  It's hard to square that act--the pointed refusal of his owner's command, at his own severe expense--with the image of the traitorous, sycophantic "Uncle Tom."

Jane Smiley has suggested that we should read Uncle Tom's Cabin in schools instead of Huckleberry Finn, which she finds wanting in its attitude towards black Americans.  I can't get behind that.  First of all, Uncle Tom's Cabin is twice as long, and contains long stretches of inaction that would make it hell to teach, compared to the zippy Huck Finn.  It also drops an important and exciting plot thread--that of a couple of escaped slaves named George and Eliza--for literally hundreds of pages in favor of the tedious exploration of St. Clare's saintly little girl, Eva.  But what makes Huck Finn such a rewarding book to teach is its complexity and nuance, and one of my favorite things to do in class is to ask students to evaluate its attitude toward race.  You couldn't do that with Uncle Tom's Cabin, which is written in the polemical mode and lacks that kind of complexity.  As a polemic, it's terrific--the best and most influential polemic we ever produced in America, probably--but I doubt it would work well in a classroom.

But that doesn't mean we should stop reading it.  It has been credited with reshaping American attitudes toward slavery in advance of the Civil War, and sad to say, I think there are still those in need of its message. 

Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle

While I--Good Heaven!--have thatched myself over with the dead fleeces of sheep, the bark of vegetables, the entrails of worms, the hides of oxen or seals, the felt of furred beats; and walk abroad a moving Rag-screen, overheaped with shreds and tatters raked from the Charnel-house of Nature, where they would have rotted, to rot on me more slowly! ... Am I a botched mass of tailors' and cobblers' shreds, then; or a tightly-articulated, homogeneous little Figure, automatic, nay alive?

I really enjoyed Stanislaw Lem's collection of review of books that do not exist, A Perfect Vacuum, when I read it earlier this year.  Lem's book comes from a larger tradition of fake literary treatment that is traced back through Borges to Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, which claims to be a commentary on a book by one Diogenes Teufelsdrockh called Clothes, their Origin and Influence.  The whole exercise, like in Lem and Borges, is inherently silly: Teufelsdrockh is a "Professor of Things in General," and his name means "Devil's Turd."

The effectiveness of the genre comes from the author's ability to discuss ideas without wholly committing to them.  There's a lot of tension between the unnamed Editor, who only dimly seems to understand Teufelsdrockh or his clothes-philosophy, and Teufelsdrockh himself.  Are we supposed to agree with the Editor that Teufelsdrockh is stylistically obscure, and philosophically extreme?  Or are we supposed to reject the Editor's (relative) literalism and shortsightedness?

The Editor hopes that having some biographical information about Teufelsdrockh will help; so he writes away to the Professor for any relevant information.  What he gets is a mess of receipts, scraps, and notes, organized for no apparent reason into six bags labeled with the signs of the Zodiac.  Teufelsdrockh's life, as the Editor sorts it out, is a kind of parody of the hypersensitive young hero of The Sorrows of Young Werther, whose trouble in the sensual world leads him to embrace the life of the mind.  Teufelsdrockh doesn't kill himself, like Werther; instead he writes a philosophy about clothes.

For Teufelsdrockh, and perhaps Carlyle, clothes represent the symbolic order of things: a monk is made by his cowl, a king by his crown, et cetera.  But the symbolic order of things is very important, and in fact, may be the closest language we have to the divine.  I really liked this passage, which I'm going to use in the future when my students wonder if an author really meant to include that symbol in her novel:

Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows' meat, for a piece of glazed cotton, which they called their Flag; which, had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen?  Did not the whole Hungarian Nation rise, like some tumultuous moon-stirred Atlantic, when Kaiser Joseph pocketed their Iron Crown; an implement as was sagaciously observed, in size and commercial value, little differing from a horse-shoe?  It is in and through Symbols that man, consciously or unconsciously lives, works, and has his being: those ages, moreover, are accounting the noblest which can the best recognise symbolical worth, and prize it to the highest.  For is not a Symbol ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of the Godlike?

Sartor Resartus, beneath its silliness and floridity, is an investigation into what it means to be a human being.  Carlyle ends up endorsing a mind-body dualism that embraces man's spiritual nature without really attaching to any programmatic religion.  Teufelsdrockh moves from a Wertherian despondency and separation from religious ideals he calls the "Everlasting No" to an affirmation of the spiritual nature of the world called the "Everlasting Yes."  For the Professor, what seems to matter is a willingness to see the world as properly spiritual, rather than sensual.  But then again, the book is so difficult, and the "clothes-philosophy" so removed from Carlyle himself that I could be completely wrong.

The Last Man by Mary Shelley

We were all equal now; magnificent dwellings, luxurious carpets, and beds of down, were afforded to all.  Carriages and horses, gardens, pictures, statues, and princely libraries, there were enough of these even to superfluity; and there was nothing to prevent each from assuming possession of his share.  We were all equal now; but near at hand was an equality still more levelling, a state where beauty and strength, and wisdom, would be as vain as riches and birth.  The grave yawned beneath us all, and its prospect prevented any of us from enjoying the ease and plenty which in so awful a manner was presented to us.

The late 21st Century.  England has gotten rid of its monarchy.  Citizens zip from place to place in--wait for it--magnificent balloons!  It is truly a brave new world.  And yet, in the face of this inestimable progress, there is a threat: a plague from the East, wiping out entire nations, sparing only England, and only for a little while.  Eventually, the plague jumps the channel; soon, few are left outside the small circle of Adrian, the Lord Protector, including Lionel Verney, who--as we know, by the dint of his writing the book--will be THE LAST MAN.

Sounds pretty cool, yes?  But unfortunately, while Shelley's imagination is again ahead of its time, the prose and plotting of The Last Man are as turgid as Frankenstein.  For one, it is the kind of book where every time the narrator alludes to being THE LAST MAN, he writes it in all caps, which reminds me of this Family Guy gag.  Second, it's the kind of book where a scheming Countess, thinking she has administered a "sleeping draught" to her daughter to prevent her from marrying Lionel (In the 21st century, we call this a "roofie") leans over the faking girl and cackles:

'Pretty simpleton, little do you think that your game is already at an end for ever.'

But more to the point, it is the kind of book that wastes an interesting premise by devoting its first half to a stuffy political drama about the fate of the newly republican England. As it turns out, the family of the abdicated king still has its partisans, though the presumptive heir, Adrian, is too kind-hearted and generous to pursue a claim to kingship.  The protectorate falls to another of Adrian and Lionel's circle, the brash, impetuous Lord Raymond, who is supposedly modeled on Lord Byron, as Adrian is on Shelley's husband, the poet Percy Shelley.  If you are into that sort of thing, The Last Man presents an interesting biographical sketch of the two of them.

One thing I did like about The Last Man--sorry, THE LAST MAN--was the way that it seems to support a very conservative ideology that it simultaneously questions and subverts without dismissing completely.  For example, though Adrian never becomes king, he does become Protector after Raymond abdicates, and helps to guide England through the plague to the best of his ability.  Shelley often places value in birth and status in a way that seems very un-21st century, while suggesting, as in the passage above, that those concepts may ultimately be purposeless.  So too with ideas of romantic love and the sublime, which are made to seem vital up until the point at which nothing can be vital any longer.  Is Shelley promoting a kind of nihilism, or challenging us to hold even closer to our social and national values in times of great crisis--even in the face of death?

Alas, the book is too tedious to make me want to ponder these questions past THE LAST PAGE.

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg

I felt greatly strengthened and encouraged that night, and the next morning I ran to meet my companion, out of whose eye I had now no life.  He rejoiced at seeing me so forward in the great work of reformation by blood, and said many things to raise my hopes of future fame and glory; and then, producing two pistols of pure beaten gold, he held them out and proffered me the choice one, saying, 'See what thy master hath provided thee!'  I took one of them eagerly, for I perceived at once that they were two of the very weapons that were let down from Heaven in the cloudy veil, the dim tapestry of the firmament; and I said to myself, 'Surely this is the will of the Lord.'

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is a first hand account of religious fanaticism as told by the fanatic, who sees his deeds as divinely inspired.  It is also an account of the fanatic's mental, physical, and spiritual destruction, perhaps at his own hands, perhaps at the hands of darker forces.  Its narrator, Robert Wringhim Colwan--the "justified sinner"--is consumed, in both senses, by his fanaticism.

Legally, Robert is the son of the wealthy Laird Dalcastle, but his probable father--Robert calls him "my spiritual father"--is the Reverend Robert Wringhim, a severe Puritan Calvinist preacher who serves as the Lady Dalcastle's spiritual adviser.  Brought up in this strict Puritanism, Robert Jr. is well instructed in the tenets of Calvinism, which say that only the elect, those whom God has predestined, will be redeemed, and Robert wavers between a profound anxiety regarding his redemption and a snobbishness toward those he knows to be unchosen reprobates, like the Lord Dalcastle and his half-brother George.

One day, Robert meets a stranger in the woods who calls himself Gil-Martin and looks strangely like himself:

'My countenance changes with my studies and sensations,' said he.  'It is a natural peculiarity in me, over which I have not full control.  If I contemplate a man's features seriously, mine own gradually assume the very same appearance and character.  And what is more, by contemplating a face minutely, I not only attain the same likeness, but, with the likeness, I attain the very same ideas as well as the same mode of arranging them, so that, you see, by looking at a person attentively, I by degrees assume his likeness, and by assuming his likeness I attain to the possession of his most secret thoughts.'

What is Gil-Martin?  Is he a projection of Robert's own mind?  Is he, as is frequently suggested, a demon?  The novel is not particularly interested in providing answers to these questions.  Whatever he is, Gil-Martin has a knack for echoing Robert's own theology back to him in a way that strikes Robert as slightly askew, even as it seems to agree with him precisely.  Gil-Martin helps to assure Robert of his position in the elect, and persuades him that the Lord has chosen him to "cut off" the wicked by murdering those who are not along God's elect, including his father and half brother.

Justified Sinner is a parody of antinomianism--the idea that the elect are exempt from God's moral law because they are already redeemed, and their sins cannot affect their redemption.  But Robert's position in the elect looks increasingly like a membership in a group of one (or two, if you discount the fact that Gil-Martin frequently seems little more than a shadow of Robert's own self) and ultimately none, as Robert himself begins to unravel.  He begins to black out, losing long periods of time where he is told that he has been doing some serious sinning, including seducing a young girl and bringing about her ruin--and possibly murdering his own mother.  His self divorced, as antinomianism dictates, from his own deeds, he begins to dissolve:

Immediately after this I was seized with a strange distemper, which neither my friends nor physicians could comprehend... I generally conceived myself to be two people.  When I lay in bed, I deemed there were two of us in it; when I sat up, I always beheld another person, and always in the same position from the place where I sat or stood, which was about three paces off me toward my left side... The most perverse part of it was that I rarely conceived myself to be any of the two persons.  I thought for the most part that my companion was one of them, and my brother the other; and I found, that to be obliged to speak and answer in the character of another man, was a most awkward business at the long run.

Ultimately, Robert tries to run from his "companion," Gil-Martin, but he is unshakeable, because, as Gil-Martin tells him, "I am wedded to you so closely, that I feel as if we were the same person.  Our essences are one, our bodies and spirits being united, so, that I am drawn towards you as by magnetism, and wherever you are, there must my presence be with you."  There is no avoiding the tormentor, because Robert's tormentor may as well be himself.  The final scenes of Robert's account are feverish, terrifying visions of demonic torture that directly parody the book of Revalation.

Robert's account is book-ended by "The Editor's Narrative," in which the scientific-minded Editor tries to make some sense the story.  He dismisses the possibility of any supernatural truth, but his own biases hardly equal an objective take, and so the novel lies on shifting, indeterminate ground.  This quality--as well as a very strange and funny cameo by the author himself as a rustic shepherd--have led some to claim Justified Sinner as a precursor to the postmodern novel.

That's a fair description--and in fact, of all the books I read for my class on the 19th-century Romantic novel, this is the one that seems most attuned to 21st Century sensibilities, and one of only two I'd say are really worth reading (the other being The Monk).  But it also obscures the way that Justified Sinner is deeply invested in its own time and place, and what it meant to be a Calvinist in Scotland in the 1800's.  

Waverley by Sir Walter Scott

From the minuteness with which I have traced Waverley's pursuits, and the bias which they unavoidably communicated to his imagination, the reader may perhaps anticipate, in the following tale, an imitation of the romance of Cervantes.  But he will do my prudence injustice in the supposition.  My intention is not to follow the steps of that inimitable author, in describing such total perversion of intellect as misconstrues the objects actually presented to the senses, but that more common aberration from sound judgment, which apprehends occurrences indeed in their own romantic tone and colouring.

Sir Walter Scott's first novel, Waverley, was a huge hit.  Let me repeat that: This book was a huge hit.  That is quite an amazing fact--almost as amazing as the fact that I somehow made it through this rambling, horrid turd of a book.

Why did people love Waverley so much?  It promises a rousing adventure tale: Edward Waverley, a young and diffident nobleman, joins a company of English military dragoons in Scotland, yet finds himself drawn to the charismatic rebel Fergus Mac-Ivor and his beautiful sister, Flora.  Eventually he forsakes his regiment to join with the rebels, who are about to stage a military campaign to put Prince Charles, the heir of the Stuart line deposed in 1688, on the British throne.

The first problem is that the book never really delivers on this promise, preferring interminable passages of exposition and terrible Gaelic poetry to actual battle scenes.  The second problem is that Waverley himself is about as engaging as a plate of haggis.  And yet everyone in this book, Brit and Scott, Whig and Tory, Anglican and Presbyterian, is constantly heaping praise on him, despite his general lack of personality and absence of actual achievement, military or otherwise.

Scott goes to great lengths to depict Waverley as someone who reads too much, and gets carried away in his "own romantic tone and colouring."  That's the reason he gets so caught up in the cause of the Scottish rebels.  But Scott's is a winking criticism, because the novel romanticizes the Scots as much as the protagonist himself does, and Waverley's romantic notions in practice only make people more affectionate toward him.  The earnestness, in fact, that marks the relationship between Waverley and Fergus--and for that matter Waverley and everyone else--is noxious.  Let's call that the third problem. Naturally, Waverley never receives any real punishment for joining the rebels (who Scott's readers would know failed in their attempts to restore the Stuart line) and only comes out of the ordeal preposterously more respected.  Scott even supplies a noble English captain who is captured by the Scots, just so he can blather on about how gallant Waverley is despite what is technically capital treason.

The fourth problem is that Waverley contains sentences like this one:

He was about to proceed, but Callum Beg said, rather pertly as Edward thought, that "Ta Cean Kinne did not like ta Sassenagh Duinhe-wassal to be pingled wi' mickle speaking, as she was na tat weil."

Scott means this impenetrable Scot dialect to be funny, but it's just exasperating, from the first instance to the thousandth.

And yet, people loved this book--even Jane Austen.  It was the Da Vinci Code of its day.  The history and the politics were probably more relevant to them, and even though the dialect would have been just as inscrutable to Scott's English audience, the depiction of the Scottish Highlanders would probably have accessed both some fascination toward their exoticness and a  nostalgia for the outdated modes of gentility they embody, neither of which is available to an American today.  Waverley is, at the very least, a reminder that the past is a very strange country indeed.

The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne

In truth, it was dizzy work, amid such fermentation of opinions as was going on in the general brain of the Community.  It was a kind of Bedlam, for the time being; although, out of the very thoughts that were wildest and most destructive, might grow a wisdom, holy, calm, and pure, and that should incarnate itself with the substance of a noble and happy life.  But, as matters now were, I felt myself (and having a decided tendency toward the actual, I never liked to feel it) getting quite out of my reckoning, with regard to the existing state of the world.  I was beginning to lose the sense of what kind of world it was, along innumerable schemes of what it might or out to be.

How do you balance the world as it is with what it might or ought to be?  How can you, when the latter is imagined a million ways, when it is constructed from "innumerable schemes?" As Miles Coverdale, the protagonist of Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance, tells the ingenue Priscilla, "People never do get just the good they seek.  If it come at all, it is something else, which they never dreamed of, and did not particularly want."

The Blithedale Romance is all about competing visions of "the good."  It's based on Hawthorne's abortive experience at the Utopian community of Brook Farm, with which Blithedale shares a lot of similarities: A place of communal farming, cooking, and living, like an American kibbutz or something.  These Utopian communities were, apparently, an important part of 19th century ideas of reform: They promoted both social and individual improvement, and emphasized a closeness to the land.  Coverdale, a famous poet who goes to live at Blithedale, is Hawthorne's stand-in, and he grows to believe very strongly in the Community's mission, perhaps more strongly than Hawthorne himself ever did.

The problem, as presented through Coverdale's eyes, is the surfeit of good intentions: His friend and fellow Community member Hollingsworth is a philanthropist committed to prison reform, and surreptitiously plans to purchase Blithedale's land and build a prison on it.  The scene where Hollingsworth begs Coverdale for his allegiance is a really fantastic chapter, full of pathos:

"Coverdale," he murmured, "there is not the man in this wide world, whom I can love as I could you.  Do not forsake me!"

As I look back upon this scene, through the coldness and dimness of so many years, there is still a sensation as if Hollingsworth had caught hold of my heart, and were pulling it towards him with an almost irresistible force.  It is a mystery to me, how I withstood it.  But, in truth, I saw in his scheme of philanthropy nothing but what was odious.  A loathsomeness that was to be forever in my daily work!  A great, black ugliness of sin, which he proposed to collect out of a thousand human hearts, and that we should spend our lives in an experiment of transmuting it into virtue!"

It is not at all clear to me who is being selfish here.  Is it Hollingsworth, steamrolling Coverdale's (and everyone else's) ideas about the common good to establish his own?  Is it Coverdale, whose idea of reform stops conspicuously short of doing anything for other people?  At the heart of The Blithedale Romance is, I think, this idea that even the best intentions can destroy each other.

Complicating this relationship is the love triangle between Hollingsworth, the wealthy beauty Zenobia, and the waifish, innocent Priscilla.  Though Blithedale is supposedly about an entire community, only these four seem to exist in it, and even Coverdale admits that some of his tension with Hollingsworth comes from a feeling of being left out:

Generosity is a very fine thing, at a proper time, and within due limits.  But it is an insufferable bore, to see one man engrossing every thought of all the women, and leaving his friend to shiver in outer seclusion, without even the alternative of solacing himself with what the more fortunate individual has rejected.  Yes; it was out of a foolish bitterness of heart that I had spoken.

Coverdale styles himself as an outsider, and observer, selectively ignoring the way that he, Heisenberg-like, participates in the very events he imagines himself to be separate from.  He observes and wonders: Which does Hollingsworth love?  Is he after Zenobia's money for his ludicrous prison?  What is his interest in Priscilla?  And yet for all his watching, he never penetrates much into the reality of what he sees, which involves (in some typically Hawthornian twists) a suspicious stranger, a fortune teller who never removes her veil, and long-lost siblings.

Ultimately, Blithedale is a very small and human drama which seems more tragic against the backdrop of the Community, with its all-encompassing social project and Utopian aims.  It it is about the bittersweet triumph of people and relationships over ideas:

The bands, that were silken once, are apt to become iron fetters, when we desire to shake them off.  Our souls, after all, are not our own.  We convey a property in them to those with whom we associate, but to what extent can never be known, until we feel the tug, the agony, of our abortive effort to resume an exclusive sway over ourselves.

The Italian by Ann Radcliffe

I want to get this out of the way now: The Italian is a dumb title.  The whole damn book takes place in Italy, and there's not a single character who isn't Italian, so who is this supposed to refer to?  The young protagonist, Vivaldi?  His beautiful but common love interest, Ellena?  Or the sinister monk Schedoni, who secretly plots on behalf of Vivaldi's mother to prevent an unfavorable marriage by kidnapping Ellena and hiding her in a nunnery?

Now that I've gotten that off my chest, I can focus on the book itself.  You know, I had two basic impressions of Radcliffe from Austen's parody of her work in Northanger Abbey: Her books were pulpy and engaging, but overall she was a poor writer--the Dan Brown or Stephenie Meyer of her day.  Both of these impressions are wrong.  The Italian continuously impressed me by the quality of its language, but it fails to be engaging after the first few chapters.

Coming as I was from the rather stilted and laborious prose of Caleb Williams and Maria, Radcliffe's quick, capable prose was really refreshing.  She has a particular knack for scene-setting--descriptions of towering mountain vistas, or obscure ruins, or shadowy dungeons--that supports her interest in 19th century ideas of the sublime, the idea that the soul can be enlarged and developed by the majesty of nature.  Ellena, trapped in the nunnery with the help of the cruel Prioress (Catholics don't come off too well in this genre), is secretly given access by a friendly nun to a tower overlooking the tremendous beauty of the Italian landscape, which gives her the strength to go on.  The passage I want to share here, however, is the one where Vivaldi is being carted off to Rome to face the Inquisition:

After quitting the Corso, it proceeded for some miles through dark and deserted streets, where only here and there a lamp, hung on high before the image of a saint, shed it's glimmering light, and where a melancholy and universal silence prevailed.  At intervals, indeed, the moon, as the clouds passed away, shewed, for a moment, some of those mighty monuments of Rome's eternal name, those sacred ruins, those gigantic skeletons, which once enclosed a soul, whose energies governed a world!

I love this because 1.) I'm really fascinated by the fact that Rome, once the center of the Western world, had become nearly a ghost town for centuries, vacant except for the Holy See, and 2.) It's a good example of the kind of suspense and terror that Radcliffe tries, and only infrequently manages, to achieve.

Radcliffe believed that terror was also an agent of the sublime, and could enlarge the soul, but she contrasted it against horror, which was more explicit.  Terror is only beneficial when it is ambiguous, predicated on the fear of the possible and not the shock or disgust of real violence.  But this philosophy, at the extremes to which she takes it, is untenable.  First of all, when there is no payoff for our apprehension, the threat diminishes.  Like a 19th century Velma, Radcliffe loves to go back and explain away the sources of fear.  We must know, for example, that the bloody surplice discovered in the ruined palace belonged to a character who had been shot with a stray bullet fired by a character we had forgotten about, and who was inserted just so that such an explanation can be dredged up later.

Secondly, Radcliffe has no conception that there are diminishing returns to this stuff.  As if one scheming, shadowy monk wasn't enough, Radcliffe introduces a second one, and then in the final scenes where Vivaldi must go in front of the Inquisition, suddenly we're in a dark room filled with like twenty scheming, shadowy monks and it all seems a little ridiculous.  Was it really necessary for Austen to parody this, when it does such a good job of parodying itself?

There are elements to The Italian that really work.  The love story between Vivaldi and Ellena, devoted to each other across class barriers, is wonderfully compelling even though the characters themselves are thinly drawn.  But I think that it's not a book one can love in the 21st century, when our bogeymen are made by Industrial Light and Magic.

Caleb Williams by William Godwin

My life has for several years been a theatre of calamity.  I have been a mark for the vigilance of tyranny, and I could not escape.  My enemy has shown himself inaccessible to intreaties and untired in persecution.  My fame, as well as my happiness, has become his victim.  Every one, as far as my story has been known, has refused to assist me in my distress, and has execrated my name.  I have not deserved this treatment.

William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams was originally titled Things As They Are, which is admittedly a strange title for a fictional book.  Godwin, a 18th-century radical writer and philosopher, believed that his fiction spoke to fundamental truths about the operation of the class system in the England of his day, and while that might have been so, the Gothic improbabilities and overblown melodrama of Caleb Williams make the title even stranger.

Caleb is a servant in the household of Ferdinando Falkland, a wealthy landowner who is renowned but depressive and withdrawn.  Another servant informs him that Falkland was once cheerful and sociable, but a conflict with another squire, named Tyrrel, took such a toll on him that his character was forever changed.  Godwin devotes a full third of the novel to this story.  Tyrrel, Caleb learns, was so jealous of Falkland's eminence and popularity that he endeavored for years to destroy him.  Falkland's behavior in account is comically noble--at one point he just happens to be in the right place to save Tyrrel's beloved cousin Emily from a deadly fire--but all that ends when Falkland is put on trial for Tyrrel's shocking murder.  Falkland, being noble and well-loved, is acquitted of the crime, but Caleb notices inconsistencies in the story that suggest Falkland may have been guilty after all.

Caleb's curiosity gets the better of him, until he essentially goads his master into confessing.  Though Caleb insists he will remain silent, Falkland persecutes him doggedly throughout the rest of the novel, falsely charging him with theft, condemning him to prison, and generally making his life miserable.  Caleb's counter-accusation of Falkland only serves to make his crime more notorious, because Falkland's nobility protects his reputation.  Caleb, having escaped from prison, finds he has become an infamous criminal.

It seems as if Godwin has set up a classic tale of vengeance, but Caleb only desires to be out from under Falkland's persecution.  In fact, the most interesting element of Caleb Williams is Caleb's insistence throughout his ordeal that Falkland remains essentially good, and his unwillingness to accuse his former master except when he feels there is no other recourse.  The novel wears its social program on its sleeve in a way that often seems preachy and didactic, especially a long section describing prison life, peppered with footnotes directing the reader to firsthand accounts of the English prison system.  But Godwin's depiction of a man who has so thoroughly absorbed the dictates of social inequality that he prefers suffering to exposing his master to infamy is its strongest commentary.

Unfortunately, it cannot salvage Caleb Williams' ragged plot.  The resolution in particular is extremely unsatisfying--after fleeing Falkland's persecutions for 200 pages, Caleb's solution is to accuse Falkland a second time, but like, harder.  This scene has an elegant reversal to it--instead of denigrating Falkland, Caleb somehow manages to force a confession from him through adulation--but Godwin fails to explain why this scene couldn't have taken place months before.

I read this novel for a class I'm taking on 19th-century literature, so that's a lot of what I'll be posting over the next few months.  One thing I'm noticing about the century as a whole: They thought abstract nouns were awesome.  (Fortitude, depravity, sensibility...)  Apparently we didn't decide that "show, don't tell" was a maxim of writing until the 20th century.  It might be a long semester.

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt

Charlie and Eli Sisters are notorious hired guns from Oregon Territory.  In 1851 they're sent to San Francisco for a job and end up involved in a sort of alchemical get-rich-quick scheme.  The book charts their trip from Oregon to complete the job from the perspective of Eli Sisters, the larger and kinder of the two.  Once they set out the story turns into this sort of series of vignettes of all the bizarre people and situations they encounter on the way.  The only continuous thread is this final job and the rising tension between the two brothers now that Charlie has been put in charge of operations.

I was a little disappointed by this book.  It was way too episodic for my taste, bouncing around from very vivid mini-plots with almost no segue between them.  Charlie and Eli encounter 'the crying man' twice, randomly, in Oregon and again in California, without every discovering why he's sobbing uncontrollably.  They may or may not have been cursed by an old woman who may or may not have been a witch.  Then Eli's horse gets attacked by a bear.  I think the intention was to have these be smaller pictures of a bigger, magical West with a capital W during the Gold Rush, but it ended up just making the whole book seem disjointed.

It's an entertaining read but don't expect to be blown away by an epic gunslinging tale.  I also don't think I buy Patrick DeWitt's assumption that everyone out west in that 1800s talked like a polite robot that doesn't understand contractions:

'What are you doing?' he asked me.
'You are giving me this?' said the boy.
'What do you think you are doing?' Charlie asked. 

Which isn't to say that it's without its high points.  It reminded me of The Yiddish Policeman's Union in that they're both reasonably captivating and good, easy reads, but lacking real substance, or connective meaning.

My very center was beginning to expand, as it always did before violence, a toppled pot of black ink covering the frame of my mind, its contents ceaseless, unaccountably limitless.  My flesh and scalp started to ring and tingle and I became someone other than myself, or I became my second self, and this person was highly pleased to be stepping from the murk and into the living world where he might do just as he wished.  I felt at once both lust and disgrace and wondered, Why do I relish this reversal to animal?  I began exhaling hotly through my nostrils, whereas Charlie was quiet and calm, and he made a gesture that I should also be quiet.  He was used to corralling me like this, winding me up and corralling me into battle.  Shame, I thought.  Shame and blood and degradation. 

 

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. -- Ecclesiastes 7:4

It was indeed miserable to be poor, to look forward to a shabby, anxious middle age, leading by dreary degrees of economy and self-denial to gradual absorption in the dingy communal existence of the boarding-house. But there was something more miserable still--it was the clutch of solitude at her heart, the sense of being swept up like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of her years.

You might call The House of Mirth a riches-to-rags story. Its heroine, Lily Bart, is in the generally dreadful position of having friends who have more money than she does. Her beauty and her connections go a long way of installing her in the high society of 19th century New York City, but it is an awfully expensive place to stay, with its new dresses, high-stakes bridge games, and Mediterranean cruises. Lily's problems will go away if she can marry rich, but neither stupid or venal enough to pursue the meager pool of men that surround her:

She had been bored all the afternoon by Percy Gryce--the mere thought seemed to waken an echo of his droning voice--but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must be follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptabilities, and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life.

The first half of The House of Mirth is in this savage vein by which Wharton exhibits a great affinity for Jane Austen. Her skewering of high society can be quite funny:

The Wetheralls always went to church. They belonged to the vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets. It is true that the Bellomont puppets did not go to church, but others equally important did--and Mr. and Mrs. Wetherall's circle was so large that God was included in their visiting-list.

Of course, it is impossible to imagine Austen calling anyone "the vast group of human automata." These quips nearly drop out entirely in the book's second half, where they would be unbearably vicious, as Lily's star descends and she approaches destitution. Ironically, it is her beauty that does her in: She accepts a stock "tip" from a friend, Gus Trenor, and collects and spends nine thousand dollars before realizing that the money she is given is not the dividends of her investment at all, but a gift from Trenor, who expects to collect his repayment in a "pound of flesh." The scene where Trenor lures her alone to his house so that he might confront her about her debt is one of the most horrifying scenes I have ever read, as it always seems a moment away from becoming a sexual assault.

Lily is not shallow enough to pay Trenor this way, but too shallow to reject the desire for society that led her to such a predicament. Caught between these two worlds, she wastes away, loses her inheritance, becomes a social pariah. She is in love with a man named Lawrence Selden, but he has cultivated what Lily cannot, an aloofness from society, and this becomes a barrier between them. She seems constantly to be on the verge of denouncing these misbegotten wants:

"Some women are strong enough to be good by themselves, but I needed the help of your belief in me. Perhaps I might have resisted a great temptation, but the little ones would have pulled me down. And then I remembered--I remembered your saying that such a life could never satisfy me; and I was ashamed to admit to myself that it could. This is what you did for me; that is what I wanted to thank you for. I wanted to tell you that I have always remembered, and that I have tried--tried hard--"

...But the moment never comes, or comes too late. Lily has tried hard enough, but Selden has not tried. That is his secret; he knows the task is impossible for the good and the free. Lily's ultimate ruin is the result of her trying to live in both Selden's world and in society, which is beyond any mortal creature, and the final catastrophe presages the horrible end of Ethan Frome (Carlton, Brent), though it lacks that novel's tidy sense of inevitability. Nor does it resonate as strongly as the final tragedy of The Age of Innocence, which is less "sound and fury" and more "quiet desperation."

Still, The House of Mirth is powerfully tragic. As with The Age of Innocence, it remains worth reading today, not least because there is no shortage of Lily Barts in the 21st Century. Like Lily, we remain aware of the shallowness of the game of wealth, yet we play it anyway because we don't like the thought of losing. The House of Mirth reminds us why it is that a camel cannot pass through the eye of a needle.

Other reviews:

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The Mookse and the Gripes

Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

Probably some one man on average falls in love with each ordinary woman. She can marry him: he is content, and leads a useful life. Such women as you a hundred men always covet--your eyes will bewitch scores on scores into an unavailing fancy for you--you can only marry one of that many. Out of these say twenty will endeavour to drown the supposed bitterness of despised love in drink; twenty more will mope away their lives without a wish or attempt to make a mark in the world, because they have no ambition apart from their attachment to you; twenty more--the susceptible person myself possibly among them--will always be draggling after you, getting where they may just see you, doing desperate things. Men are such constant fools! The rest may try to get over their passion with more or less success. But all these men will be saddened. And not only those ninety-nine men, but the ninety-nine women they might have married are saddened with them. There's my tale. That's why I say that a woman so charming as yourself, Miss Everdene, is hardly a blessing to her race. --Gabriel Oak


One of the strongest impressions one receives when reading Far from the Madding Crowd is awe at Hardy's vast knowledge. The story is crowded with offhand allusions to poetry, the Bible, and to Greek mythology, some of which are absurdly obscure. These vary in subtlety, but none is so plain as the name of the heroine, Bathsheba Everdene. Just as King David, having seen Bathsheba sunbathing from his roof, was overcome with a lust which engenders violence, Bathsheba Everdene cannot help but become the object of obsession.

She has three suitors, and together they form a catalogue of the ways men fall in love with women: The first is Gabriel Oak, a patient and pragmatic shepherd who is refused by Bathsheba at the beginning of the book. The second is Mr. Boldwood, who owns the farm adjacent to Bathsheba's, and his love is more along the obsessive King David line, madly begging her for a promise of marriage and allowing his own farm to go to ruin. The third is a young soldier named Frank Troy, whom Hardy describes thusly:

He spoke fluently and unceasingly. He could in this way be one thing and seem another; for instance, he could speak of love and think of dinner; call on the husband to look at the wife; be eager to pay and intend to owe.

Troy is a scoundrel, engaged to another girl, and his attachment to Bathsheba is short-lived, but she is charmed by him and allows herself to descend into Boldwood-like love-madness on his account.

Meanwhile, Gabriel exhibits an actual devotion to Bathsheba by toiling unceasingly on her farm. He solves every crisis: He cures the sheep when they are sick; he puts out fires; when a drunken Troy refuses to cover the hay-ricks for the coming storm, Gabriel does the work of ten men single-handed. He is a shepherd in the Christian sense, and like his analogues in Count Belisarius and The Good Soldier he performs this imitation of Christ before a backdrop of religious confusion and ignorance. Hardy plays this for laughs:

"How did Cain come by such a name?" asked Bathsheba.

"Oh you see, mem, his pore mother, not being a Scripture-read woman, made a mistake at his christening, thinking 'twas Abel killed Cain, and called en Cain, meaning Abel all the time. The parson put it right, but 'twas too late, for the name cold never be got rid of in the parish. 'Tis very unfortunate for the boy."

But there is a very serious sense that religion provides little of the necessary wisdom of living. Instead, Gabriel's pious devotion is a product of the simplicity of country life, which forms a kind of religion. Hardy notes that the barn on Bathsheba's farm resembles a church with transepts:

One could say about this barn, what could hardly be said of either the church or the castle, akin to it in age and style, that the purpose which had dictated its original erection was the same with that to which it was still applied. Unlike and superior to either of those two typical remnants of mediaevalism, the old barn embodied practices which had suffered no mutilation at the hands of time.

Gabriel's constancy is the constancy of the earth, the constancy of the country farm. He is opposed in this by Troy, who represents the fickleness of the modern city, and who nearly drives the farm to ruin (a ruin presaged by his name, a city synonymous with destruction) by neglect of his duty both as farmer and lover. We want desperately for Bathsheba to return to Gabriel's offer of marriage, though the years pass and he seems unlikely to renew it, resigned to laying down his life in quiet service.

Hardy has a terrific style that thrives on grammatical tension. He will overload you with winding, circuitous sentences and absurdly elevated vocabulary before delivering a short summary statement of incredible power. The effect is like the inflating and popping of a great balloon, or being spun in a funnel until expelled violently from the tip:

Above the dark margin of the earth appeared foreshores and promontories of coppery cloud, bounding a green and pellucid expanse in the western sky. Amaranthine glosses came over them then, and the unresting world wheeled her round to a contrasting prospect eastward, in the shape of indecisive and palpitating stars. She gazed upon their silent throes amid the shades of space, but realized none at all. Her troubled spirit was far away with Troy.

And, because two points make a line, here is another:

Hence Bathsheba lived in a perception that her purposes were broken off. She was not a woman who could hope on without good materials for the process, differing thus from the less far-sighted and energetic, though more petted ones of the sex, with whom hope goes on as a sort of clockwork which the merest food and shelter are sufficient to wind up; and perceiving clearly that her mistake had been a fatal one, she accepted her position, and waited coldly for the end.

How wonderfully this maps Bathsheba's inner thinking: We are taken through the labyrinthine course of one who clings to their own reasoning to find comfort, only to emerge from such pondering into an inevitable and nearly ineffable truth: Bathsheba, having chosen wrongly, is alone.

The Red and the Black by Stendhal

No one knows the source of the Nile, Julien said to himself. It hasn't been granted to mortal eyes to see the king of rivers in the state of a simple stream: thus no human eye shall see Julien weak, first and foremost because he isn't.

Julien Sorel is a man of great ambition. He is a carpenter's son, but longs to distinguish himself among the upper classes, like his hero Napoleon once did. Napoleon's route--the military--is no longer available to him in 1830, but perhaps a life of distinction in the clergy will be equally good. Like all egoists, the endgame matters little; while he would have preferred the red coat the black will do. And like all social climbers, he harbors a deep and bitter antipathy toward the social classes through which he wants to rise.

At the very beginning of the novel he manages to procure a job as a tutor for the children of the mayor, M. de Renal, based on the merit of having memorized the entire Latin New Testament. But Julien has no religious sentiment; he cultivates what he calls hypocrisy, an outward expression of piety and orthodoxy that belies his disgust. And yet, Julien is a poor hypocrite: his education is too limited, and he is too impulsive. When he begins to suspect that M. de Renal's wife has fallen in love with him, he considers it his "duty" to seduce her--a Napoleonic conquest--but, in a manner not unlike the way that a Catholic sacrament transmutes the heart, his outward actions of affection compel him too toward love. The principle struggle of The Red and the Black is the surface vs. the interior, and despite Julien's cultivation of hypocrisy this struggle affects him most strongly because his rivals in the nobility have little of his inward depth. He permits himself to internalize such frauds, as when his friends try to legitimize his newfound wealth by spreading a rumor of noble parentage:

Could it really be possible, he wondered, that I might be the natural son of some great lord driven into exile in our mountains by the terrible Napoleon? This idea seemed less improbable to him with every passing moment... My hatred for my father would be proof of it... I shouldn't be a monster anymore!

The Red and the Black, strangely, offers two iterations of the same story: After being forced to leave Mme. de Renal, Julien is hired as a secretary to a Parisian nobleman, M. de la Mole, whose daughter Mathilde becomes Julien's mistress. Such repetition allows us to see clearly how Julien grows, and becomes more adept at playing the games of the upper class, but his rage grows with him. When, for a second time, it becomes clear to Julien that society will not suffer both his ambition and his love, he rejects society in an act of shocking violence.

I won't spoil anything, but I will say that I was impressed with the simple admiration with which Stendhal treats Julien's actions. They are an anachronism, Napoleonic in their way, and they are strangely redemptive. Julien refuses to play a rigged game, and as such he frees himself from time, and from society. By banishing his hypocrisy, he is freed unto himself.

Two things frustrated me about The Red and the Black: The first is that it is replete with very topical references to French politics of 1830, and the appendix in the back is not very illuminating. The second is that Julien is remarkably fickle, and much of the second book is consumed by Julien falling in and out of love with Mathilde, who alternately falls in and out love with him. A sense of absurdity redeems this, though, and I admit that it seems to accurately map our propensity to change our minds about love. The Red and the Black is called the first psychological novel, and its depiction of Julien's inward thoughts is especially fine, including what I would call an early form of stream-of-consciousness. That psychological detail is what makes the novel so rewarding, and I will concede that when Julien is at his most frustrating, he is at his most human.

Persuasion by Jane Austen

His choice of subjects, his expressions, and still more his manner and look, had been such as she could see in only one light. His opinion of Louisa Musgrove's inferiority, an opinion which he had seemed solicitous to give, his wonder at Captain Benwick, his feelings as to a first, strong attachment,--sentences begun which he could not finish--his half averted eyes, and more than half expressive glance--all, all declared that he had a heart returning to her at least; that anger, resentment, avoidance, were no more; and that they were succeeded, not merely by friendship and regard, but by the tenderness of the past; yes, some share of the tenderness of the past. She could not contemplate the change as implying less.--He must love her.

Anne Elliott hardly belongs in the same company as Austen's more infamous heroines, Emma Woodhouse and Elizabeth Bennet. She has nothing of either's more appealing flaws--Emma's gregarious meddlesomeness, and Elizabeth's prideful wit--and indeed Austen is famous for having remarked that Anne herself was "too good for her." Like the other two, she is fiercely intelligent; though while Emma's intelligence is social and Elizabeth's bookish, only Anne's can be called practical. Her most singular trait, however, is her perceptiveness: Anne alone sees and knows those around her, though she is rarely seen and hardly known except by the object of her love, Captain Wentworth.

He, too, is perceptive, but more narrowly in that his perception extends chiefly to Anne. Once, eight years before the book begins, that shared perception nearly led to marriage, before Anne allowed herself to be persuaded against it by her godmother, Lady Russell. When Wentworth appears again, compelled to renew his association with the Elliots by (as is always the case in Austen) a matter of property, he spends most of his time trying to avoid Anne in spite of his feelings. Here is a book in which the two principals barely speak to one another, and yet Anne and Wentworth operate on a separate wavelength, by which their thoughts are available to each other, whether they wish them to be or not.

Wentworth's detachment makes him something of a cipher. Is there anything else to recommend him to us? He is a decorated serviceman, with impeccable manners but an undistinguished intelligence and a clumsy romantic impulse. One suspects that only die-hard Austenites would read Wentworth fan-fiction. But we believe in him because we trust Anne, and while she is being roundly ignored by her father, sisters, cousins, et cetera, Wentworth is attuned to her, which must count for something.

The perceptiveness that Anne and Wentworth possess enables their survival in Persuasion's universe, which is marked by some of Austen's most savage satire:

The real circumstances of this pathetic piece of family history were, that the Musgroves had the ill fortune of a very troublesome, hopeless son; and the good fortune to lose him before he reached his twentieth year; that he had been sent to sea, because he was very stupid and unmanageable on shore; that he had been very little ared for at any time by his family, though quite as much as he deserved; seldom heard of, and scarcely at all regretted, when the intelligence of his death abroad had worked its way to Uppercross, two years before.

One of most interesting questions about Austen's work is to what it extent it opposes the social framework of her era; attempts to categorize Pride and Prejudice as a feminist novel, for example, inevitably overshoot the mark. Persuasion seems to me to be Austen at her most radical, and the above paragraph presents a view of an England that has no conception of true value. Anne's blessing is that she understands the worth of others; Wentworth's is that he understands the worth of Anne.

And yet, as with her other novels, Austen's social commentary cedes precedence to the expression of character. In The Western Canon, Harold Bloom has an essay called "Canonical Memory in Early Wordsworth and Austen's Persuasion." It's one of Bloom's shaggiest pieces, and I don't think I can really describe what Bloom means by "canonical memory," but I will agree that memory is the novel's most vital force.

There are, by my count, three widowers in Persuasion and one widow. Lady Russell is one, and so is Anne's hopelessly vain father, Sir Elliot. Anne is linked romantically to the other two: William Elliot, a cousin and the inheritor of the Elliot estate (think Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice), whose marriage was unhappy, and Captain Benwick, who, while not technically a widower, recently endured the death of his sweetheart. At first blush either would seem a match for Anne--Elliot is insanely wealthy and charming, Benwick bookish and intelligent.

And yet by the book's end we come to understand exactly why Anne needs Wentworth. Her perceptiveness, combined with her innate kindness, has led to a lifelong campaign of self-denial in which she quite admirably suffers the pettinesses of her family and friends without complaint. Wentworth represents Anne's past and as such does what no one else can: He connects Anne to herself. She, in turn, does the same for him. Neither Elliot nor Benwick can do this for Anne, nor she for them; having buried their first loves their pasts are wasteland, ruinous, irrevocable.

Persuasion, quite simply, is a novel of second chances, of memories reclaimed as living truths. Elizabeth and Emma require a great deal of self-discovery before they can find love; Anne is fully fledged and only needs to rediscover Wentworth, whom she has lost, and who, quite happily, has found her again.

P.S.: I didn't read the version pictured, but I wish I had, because that is an illustrator that really understands the book they're illustrating. Love the symbolism of Anne's telescope.