Small Things Like These by Clare Keegan

As they walked on, Furlong met people he had known and dealt with for the greater part of his life, most of whom gladly stopped to speak until, looking down, they saw the bare, black feet and realised the girl with him was not one of their own. Some then gave them a wide berth or talked awkwardly or politely wished him a Happy Christmas and went on. One elderly woman out walking a terrier on a long strap confronted him, asking who the girl was, and was she not one of those wans from the laundry? At another point, a little boy looked at Sarah's feet and laughed and called her dirty before his father gave his hand a rough tug and told him to whisht. Miss Kenny, wearing old clothes he'd never before seen her in and with drink on her breath, stopped and asked what he was doing with a child out in the snow with no shoes on, assuming Sarah was one of his own, and marched off. Not one person they met addressed Sarah or asked where he was taking her. Feeling little or no obligation to say very much or to explain, Furlong smoothed things over as best he could and carried on along with the excitement in his heart matched by the fear of what he could not yet see but knew he would encounter.

Times are tough in Ireland, but Bill Furlong is doing all right: he's got a thriving business delivering wood and coal; he's got a family, a wife and four daughters. It hasn't been easy for him, growing up as a poor orphan in the house of a woman who took pity on him, but despite his hardships, Furlong has achieved a hard-won security and stability. While making his rounds, he begins to notice the girls who staff the local church laundry look frightened and worn; they say things that seem shocking to him, a passing outsider. What Furlong has discovered is one of Ireland's now-infamous "Magdalen Laundries," which were essentially forced labor institutions that tortured young women considered to be "fallen." When he discovers one of them in the church's coal shed, exiled there in the dead of winter, he is faced with a choice between stability and his own powerful moral sense.

Small Things Like These is, first and foremost, a novel about goodness. Furlong is a deeply good person, shaped by his experiences of orphanhood and penury. Goodness, in this novel, mean seeing the the things that other people turn a blind eye to. Furlong's own wife chastises him for caring too much about the plight of others, when they have their own family to support and defend. "But what if it was one of ours?" he asks, to which she acerbically replies, "This is the very thing I'm saying... 'Tis not one of ours." Perhaps goodness, too, means expanding the arbitrary lines that demarcate whom you are responsible to, as Furlong remembers quite clearly being the kind of person who fell outside of any radius of obligation. The proprietor of the local tavern advises Furlong not to get involved; it's better to get along, and what can one do anyway? But Furlong sees, and will not deceive himself, and to see is to act.

Small Things Like These goes down smooth. Keegan's clear, plainspoken prose is like water, though it's touched with a bit of folksy Irish brogue for flair. It matches well the simple working-class life that Furlong leads. And the novel's moral vision is a compelling one. Yet to me, there's a kind of smell on it, the smell of an "issue novel"--a novel about the Magdalen Laundries--that the language is unable to wash away. A smell of falseness, maybe. Probably that's not fair, but it's what I felt. And I felt, too, something that's rare in my experience with SHORT BOOK FEBRUARY: I wish there had been more of it. The moral arc of the novel--Furlong ponders whether to act, then acts--is too clean. The novel's high point comes when Furlong, having rescued the girl Sarah from the coal shed, walks her through a Christmastide gauntlet of local faces who do not yet quite understand what it is he's done. We understand that the life he's chosen is the harder one, that it will be difficult to explain why Sarah is in his home--to the church, to the police, to his wife--but that he will fight for her, because he's not a man who sees any other choice. I found myself wanting to read that novel, and I wondered if the book didn't let him off a little too easy.

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Alice, do you think the problem of the contemporary novel is simply the problem of contemporary life? I agree it seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilization is facing collapse. But at the same time, that is what I do every day. We can wait, if you like, to ascend to some higher plane of being, at which point we'll start directing all our mental and material resources toward existential questions and thinking nothing of our own families, friends, lovers, and so on. But we'll be waiting, in my opinion, a long time, and in fact we'll die first.

Here is a sentence from Sally Rooney's novel Beautiful World, Where Are You: "When the burgers arrived, they tasted normal." When I lay my head down to sleep at night, this sentence haunts me. When I wake up in the morning, it's running through my mind. When the burgers arrived, they tasted normal. When the burgers arrived, how did they taste? Well, they tasted normal. I have begun to fear that when I am old and in the grips of dementia and all my capacity for speech has gone these will be the only words left to me: When the burgers arrived, they tasted normal.

This sentence--so purposeful, nearly aggressive, in its attempt at capturing the tedious detail of everyday living--is emblematic of the novel's style. Rooney's breakthrough novel was called Normal People, a title which might work as well here, given the intense normality of three of the four main characters: Eileen, an aimless thirty-year old who works in publishing in Dublin; Simon, her childhood friend and new lover; Felix, a warehouse worker living on the Irish coast. The fourth, Alice, is a little less novel, being a newly famous novelist (and obvious Rooney stand-in), but who has come to hate the pretensions of literary life. She says of her fellow novelists, dismissively: "And then they go away and write their sensitive novels about 'ordinary life.' The truth is they know nothing about ordinary life. Most of them haven't so much as glanced up against the real world in decades." For Rooney, the attempt to capture "ordinary life" entails describing in plain language what the ordinary characters are doing ordinarily: taking clingfilm off of bowls and microwaving food; scrolling through the apps and typing names of their exes into searchbars; waiting for their burgers to arrive, which then taste normal.

Is there a beauty in the world that is accessible to us, despite the ordinary stuff that seems to make up our lives? This is the novel's big theme, and it's one of the questions that Alice and Eileen take up in their emails to each other, which break up the novel's third person narration. I was grateful for these sections, which keep the novel from becoming unforgivably tedious, and show that Rooney has, in fact, a pretty decent ear for colloquial speech. The question of beauty is actually the least interesting or meaningful of those the old friends take up, which include the nature of sex and the modern novel and whether art is possible when the world is collapsing. But the epistolary structure makes it so that Rooney doesn't have to commit to any of these ideas, which are sort of incomplete and half-baked, as they would be, in the context of two friends just shooting the shit.

One of the biggest problems of this novel for me was the point of view. Rooney has no compunction about milking the third person narrator's omniscience, as in an early section where we are treated to an enormous information dump about the history between Eileen and Simon, but in other places the narrator becomes too coy to tell us what anyone is thinking or feeling, retreating into a strange half-position, like this:

For a few seconds then he held the phone out at arm's length, headphones dangling loose over the side of the bridge, and it was not clear from this gesture whether he was trying to see the existing image better, getting an ew angle in order to take a new photograph, or simply thinking about letting the device slip soundless out of his hand and into the river.

This was not clear to whom, exactly? Felix makes a cryptic gesture with his phone, but who exactly is providing the various interpretations as to what it is he's doing? Alice, talking to Felix, "seemed to have recognised a kind of challenge or even repudiation in his tone, and rather than cowing her, it was as though it hardened her resolve." She seemed to have done this? Seem means literally to be seen; what does it "seem" like when one recognizes a challenge or even repudiation in someone else's tone? This is probably not all that tricky for someone who doesn't teach about point of view for a living, but my god, it drove me absolutely bonkers. The problem is that it wants to have things both ways: to tell us what's going on in Alice's head and show us also that people are cryptic and difficult to figure out. But it's an unwalkable line; you just can't do both. You can make your characters cryptic or you can make their emotions clear.

By now I guess it's clear that I had a lot of frustrations with this novel. I wanted to see what the fuss is about, and I've got to say, Beautiful World, Where Are You is almost exactly what I expected it to be. But I didn't not enjoy it. For all its tedium, Rooney manages to make the central foursome compelling: aimless Eileen, stalwart Simon, chaotic Felix, neurotic Alice. Alice spends a lot of time complaining about her sudden literary fame in a way that might have been lighthearted ironizing about Rooney's own life, but which I suspect is actually a gauche defensiveness. (She complains, for instance, about the parasocial relationship her fans have with her on twitter--barf-o, Sally.) Yet she, like Eileen, Simon, and Felix, has a richness and complexity.

In the end, I think what made Beautiful World, Where Are You Not My Kind of Thing is not the tedious style, or the bad point of view, or the normal-tasting burgers, but the television-ness of it all: it reads exactly like a treatment for another limited Hulu series. Like some television shows, Beautiful World just believes that the will-they-won't-they drama of young hetero sex-havers is the most interesting thing in the world. No thanks.

Milkman by Anna Burns

The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died.  He had been shot by one of the state hit squads and I did not care about the shooting of this man.  Others did care though, and some were those who, in the parlance, 'knew me to see but not to speak to' and I was being talked about because there was a rumour started by them, or more likely by first brother-in-law, that I had been having an affair with this milkman and that I was eighteen and he was forty-one.  I knew his age, but not because he got shot and it was given by the media, but because there had been talk of this, for months before the shooting, by these people of the rumour, that forty-one and eighteen was disgusting, that twenty-three years' difference was disgusting, that he was married and not to be fooled by me for there was plenty of quiet, unnoticeable people who took a bit of watching.  It had been my fault too, it seemed, this affair with the milkman.  But I had not been having an affair with the milkman.  I did not like the milkman and had been frightened and confused by his pursuing and attempting an affair with me.

Twice in a week, middle sister, the protagonist of Anna Burns' novel is invited to see a sunset.  This, to her, is strange--it's not something do, watching the sun go down.  Once, she's invited by maybe-boyfriend, and once by her French teacher, who is trying to get her entire class to see what they stubbornly refuse to see.  The sky is blue, the class insists, even though they know it can also be "black (the night sky) and white (cloudy)," but as middle sister says, "It was the convention not to admit it, not to accept detail for this type of detail would mean choice and choice would mean responsibility and what if we failed in our responsibility?  Failed too, in the interrogation of the consequence of seeing more than we could cope with?"  The sunset stands in here for everything her Catholic community in Northern Ireland refuses to see, to cope with, to find the language for.  And yet, the sky is all sorts of colors when you really look at it.

Milkman is a novel about the way that community, especially at times of intense violence and sectarian division, controls and determines the way we see and think.  This is reflected in Burns' funny choice not to give any of the characters names: Middle sister, maybe-boyfriend, first brother, third brother, Somebody McSomebody, milkman, the real milkman, also known as the man who didn't love anybody.  There is an official list of permitted names, middle sister explains, meant to keep "renouncers" from giving their kids names from "over the water," and in the end it's easier just to not name anything at all for fear of reprisal.  Middle sister, for her part, is known for her peculiar habit of reading while walking, another way of turning one's face from the facts.  It's always a nineteenth century novel, we're told, because she "did not like the twentieth century at all."

Rumor, too, is a way of forcing the world to cohere to acceptable modes of being.  The action of the novel is sparked by the milkman, a famed renouncer paramilitant who takes a sudden sexual interest in middle sister.  He appears suddenly and without warning, sometimes with cronies and sometimes alone, sometimes on foot and sometimes in his white van.  Rumor and gossip transform stalking into an affair, and an affair with a paramilitant is a dangerous thing to pursue.  Milkman is the story of how these rumors destabilize middle sister's life, throwing a wrench in her relationship with maybe-boyfriend, her mother, her community, and in her own conception of herself.

There is the frightening suggestion that the narrative of the community can overcome someone's own story about herself, reduce her to nothingness.  This fear is circumscribed by violence, and not just the historically particular violence of Northern Ireland but the everyday violence that men impose on women.  The way that rumor threatens to overpower middle sister is reproduced here, in this country, all the time, by the powers of rape culture.  I agree with Chloe, who writes that it's frustrating to watch middle sister let "rumors build and swirl around her," but how many women women in our place and time lack the language or the trust to clearly articulate what it is that menaces them also?

For all that, the novel is incredibly funny and engaging.  It has itself a kind of garrulous gossipy quality to it, and I can't think of many books that do a better job matching theme and voice.  The sentences are long, digressive, redundant, oblique, but all those qualities suggest just how difficult it is to come right to the point and see what's in front of one's face.  "The truth was dawning on me of how terrifying it was not to be numb," middle sister explains, "but to be aware, to have facts, retain facts, be present, be adult."  And despite that it retains a kind of fresh and exuberant language that really propels the book forward.

It ends weirdly, well after the milkman's death--that's not a spoiler, it's in the first line of the book--but all that violence and gossip continue well after he's gone.  We get the violent confrontation we were expecting, but not between middle sister and the milkman, but between middle sister and Somebody McSomebody, a nothing punk who only pretends to be a paramilitant.  His attack is weak, scuttled, but it's a testament to the power of narratives to outlive those who create them, and we come to understand that things are not going to go back to "normal" for middle sister.  But maybe, Burns suggests, she might be a little more aware about what is so strange about normal, and how much more there is to see in the world.

Ulysses by James Joyce

What past consecutive causes, before rising preapprehended, of accumulated fatigue did Bloom, before rising, silently recapitulate?

The preparation of breakfast (burnt offering): intestinal congestion and premeditative defecation (holy of holies): the bath (rite of John): the funeral (the Rite of Samuel): the advertisement of Alexander Keyes (Urim and Thummim): the unsubstantial lunch (rite of Melchisedek): the bookhunt along Bedford Row, Merchants' Arch, Wellington Quay (Simchath Torah): the music in the Ormond Hotel (Shira Shirim): the altercation with a truculent troglodyte in Bernard Kiernan's premises (holocaust): a blank period of time including a cardrive, a visit to a house of mourning, a leavetaking (wilderness): the eroticism produced by feminine exhibitionism (rite of Onan): the prolonged delivery of Mrs Mina Purefoy (heave offering): the visit to the disorderly house of Mrs Bella Cohen, 82 Tyrone street, lower, and subsequent brawl and chance medley in Beaver street (Armageddon): nocturnal perambulation to and from the cabman's shelter, Butt Bridge (atonement).

I did it.  I read Ulysses.  I carried it on the train, where I read from it, impressing many.  I understood, on the level of mere plot-and-character understanding, perhaps half of it.  I was in delighted, frustrated, amused, and bored, in about equal measure.  Now I will try to review it, which is probably only a little bit less sensible than having written it in the first place.

First: Actually having read The Odyssey helps immensely.  Joyce takes the pattern of the epic quite seriously, but applies it with clever humor: the cyclops becomes a bigot who throws, not a giant boulder, but a biscuit tin; Nausicaa, the beautiful young maiden Odysseus flirts with and cannot have, is a woman on the sea shore who provides the pretext for Leopold Bloom's afternoon masturbation session.  (Like Nausicaa, Gerty has "white arms," which is especially ironic because Bloom fails to notice her legs, which are "lame.")   The suitors are, alternately, one college asshole who wants to crash at Stephen Dedalus' place, and a series of adulterous lovers that Bloom knows his wife is having.  The pattern is used to elevate the tawdriness, the ordinariness, of everyday life, to collapse the difference between high myth and the life of normal people.  It's inseparable from the stream-of-consciousness methods that track the inner lives of Stephen, Bloom, and most famously, Bloom's wife Molly.  Life is in your head, Joyce says, and that's as meaningful as any grand narrative that's ever existed.

Like The Odyssey, Ulysses is a story about anxious relationships between parents and children.  Telemachus is unable to become a man until his father returns to Ithaca and validates his power.  Stephen Dedalus' relationship to Bloom, a kind of would-be paternal surrogate, is an ironic version of this.  Unlike Telemachus, Stephen is pretty ambivalent about being "adopted" by Bloom, though they spend an evening drinking and carousing together, and their relationship doesn't seem to provide meaning, power, legitimacy, anything.  Both part with their own anxieties about their parenthood intact: Stephen's depressed by the recent loss of his mother; Bloom has never gotten over his father's suicide or his young son's death.  Stephen, in a speech at the National Library, calls the entire idea of fatherhood into question:

Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man.  It is a mythical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to begotten.  On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void.  Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood.  Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life.  Paternity may be a legal fiction.  Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?

Fathers, Stephen says, don't have the same relationship to their children that mothers do.  You once had a physical connection to your mother, quite literally, but what is the real nature of your relationship to your father?  It is "a mythical estate, an apostolic sucession"; it's nothing at all.  It's this thought that makes his mother's death especially painful.  It also connects to the old themes of sex and adultery.  What does Bloom lose, exactly, when Blazes Boylan sneaks into Molly's bed in the middle of the day (as he well knows)?  What is it exactly he desires when he masturbates to the vision of Gerty on the strand?  What's lost in what Joyce calls the "Rite of Onan?"  One of the thing that undermines Ulysses' claims to universality is its singular obsession with the male sex drive and masturbation, though Molly famously gets her own account of her sex drive in the final chapter.  But all of it, Joyce contends, is "founded... on the void," and the way we connect sex and generational succession is really a con that distracts us from the meaninglessness of our own sexual desires.  I don't think Ulysses is actually very pessimistic, but I do think, for Joyce, the pattern of myth supplies something that traditional marriage, sex, and family, fails to supply.

Okay, but is it any good?  There's that old joke about the local weather, that gets told everywhere but San Diego: If you don't like it, wait ten minutes.  Ulysses is a little like that.  Each of its eighteen chapters is stylistically discrete and distinct, presenting some different gimmick or satire.  And while the story itself is unwieldy, the chapters break it down helpfully.  Some of my favorites are: chapter three, "Proteus," in which Stephen expounds his theories on Hamlet (and fatherhood) to some friends at the National Library; "Cyclops," the mock-heroic that tells the story of Bloom's encounter with the anti-Semitic bigot and the biscuit tin through the language of world myth; and "Circe," which is formatted like a play.  "Circe" especially seems like the missing link between Faust and Beckett; it's an extended drunken vision where Bloom is accosted by the mental images of his dead father, is put on trial, becomes a woman.  A bar of soap reads a little poem.  ("We're a capital couple are Bloom and I. / He polishes the earth.  I brighten the sky.")  You know, stuff like that.  "Ithaca" takes the form of a traditional question-and-answer catechism, "Penelope" is the famous single sentence stream-of-consciousness inside Molly Bloom's head as she drifts off to sleep.  (Who knew that would be one of the easiest chapters to read!)

But I didn't love all of it.  I was particularly frustrated by the chapter "Eumaeus," which was evidently Joyce's attempt at bad, circuitous, ponderous writing.  "Aeolus," done in the language of the contemporary news, is too far from my conception of that style to really make much sense.  And while I enjoyed sussing out the different parodies in "Oxen of the Sun," which I'm told is meant to mimic the development of the entire English language, I couldn't tell you what happened in it.  I think someone had a baby.

Is Ulysses the best book ever written?  Well, it certainly is the most book ever written.  Not that it's the longest, though it might feel that way, but that it has a totality to it, a breadth that nothing else can touch.  As much as it meets its reputation for stylistic difficulty, it's beauty is in the sheer capaciousness it has for language, and the way it contains multitudes.  I never want to read it again.

Pitch Dark by Renata Adler

What's new? the biography of the opera star says she used to ask in every phone call, and What else?  I'm not sure the biographer understand another thing about the opera star, but I do believe that What's new.  What else.  They may be the first question of the story, of the morning, of consciousness.  What's new.  What else.  What next.  What's happened here, says the inspector, or the family man looking at the rubble of his house.  What's it to you, says the street tough or the bystander.  What's it worth to you, says the paid informer or the extortionist.  What is it now, says the executive or the husband, disturbed by the fifteenth knock at the door, or phone call, or sigh in the small hours of the night.  What does it mean, says the cryptographer.  What does it all mean, says the student or the philosopher on his barstool.  What do I care.  What's the use.  What's the matter.  What's the action.  What kind of fun is that.  Let me say that everyone's story in the end is the old whore's, or the Ancient Mariner's: I was not always as you see me now.  And the sentient man, the sentient person says in his heart, from time to time, What have I done.

I loved Renata Adler's Speedboat.  It seemed hardly like a novel; it was an effusion of anecdotes and impression that nevertheless told a story, because real stories--as they're lived--are like that.  They're not particularly linear, and they don't have the ancient unities of time and place.  Adler, a lifelong journalist, knew from observation the fitful and scattered nature of human life.

Pitch Dark, another of Adler's novels (the only other one?  I'm not sure) has much in common with Speedboat.  The frenetic pace and style is instantly recognizable; it cares no more about situating the reader in time, place, or narrative than that other novel.  Stories are told that seem to have little, perhaps nothing, to do with the main plot.  And it can, like Speedboat, be tremendously funny:

He mentioned the Ku Klux Klan.  He alluded to it several times, the Klan.  And each time, he referred to its membership, the members of the Klan, he called them.  Clamsmen.  No question about it, that's how he pronounced it.  Clamsmen.  It was no reflection on the Attorney General.  True, the judge's wife had never thought much of his diction.  True, in the court's most important decisions, he had been so often in dissent.  But the years had passed.  He had come to speak well and to do honor.  And this business of the Clamsmen, well, it may have had to do with molluscs, bivalves.  Even crustaceans.  I remember a young radical, in the sixties, denouncing her roommates as prawns of imperialism.

But at its heart, Pitch Dark is much more troubling, and troubled.  It simultaneously boasts a more coherent main narrative and is more disorienting.  It tells the story of Kate Ennis, a journalist who has ended a long-term affair with a married man.  And if you figured that out, good on you, because Adler is stingy with context.  In fact, the man's only presence is in a repeated motif of short dialogues and recurrent statements that are devoid of any context at all.  Adler repeats them, obsessively, many pages before she gives them context or explanation: "The truth was, there was something in the ice cube.""Not here, Diana said, to her lasting regret, to her own daughter, who approached her crying, in front of all those people."  "Did I throw the most important thing, perhaps, by accident away?"

All this contributes to an image of a woman who is not well; who has unraveled along with her love affair.  If Speedboat rejoices in the fragmentary and ad hoc nature of the world, Pitch Dark is a frightening warning about the dissolution of the mind and the soul.  The main narrative, such as it is, sees Kate taking up residence in a friend's Irish castle, where she suspects the staff and is tortured by the possibility that a local cop is planning to extort her after a fender bender.  She abandons her rental car, leaving it in Ireland in the dead of night--but the abandonment, in this book, comes far before the fender bender.  Kate's paranoia, we are meant to understand, is not exactly the consequence of the fender bender.

Living in a cabin, Kate feeds a raccoon who visits her daily:

He left through his crawl space as soon as he saw me.  But because, on every subsequent evening, he stayed longer and left less abruptly; because he returned most nights, and slouched, on the stove, leaning against the stove pipe, all night, until morning; because he sometimes touched, though rarely, the water I left in a dish beside the stove for him; because he was, after all, a wild thing, growing ever more docile; we arrived at our misunderstanding.  I thought he was growing to trust me, when in fact he was dying.  So are we all, of course.  But we do not normally mistake progressions of weakness, the loss of the simple capacity to escape, for the onset of love.

Ultimately, that's what Pitch Dark is about: mistakes, and love, and abandonment, and whether one of the last two, or both, are the same as the first.  "Did I throw the most important thing, perhaps, by accident away?"  It's a challenge where Speedboat is a delight, and sparing in its rewards, but intentionally so.

Loving by Henry Green

'Oho so that's the old game,' he laughed.  'Keeping me on a string is it, to leave me to picture this and that and the other to do with you and him?'

'If you can bring your imagination to such a level you're to be pitied,' she answered tart.

'All I did was to ask,' he objected.

'You're free to picture what you please,' she replied.  I've got no hold on your old imagination, not yet I haven't.'

'What d'you mean not yet?'

'I mean after we're married,' she whispered, her voice gone husky.  'After we're married I'll see to it that you don't have no imagination.  I'll make everything you want of me now so much more than you ever dreamed that you'll be quit imaginin' for the rest of your life.'

The natural comparison point for Loving is obviously Downton Abbey: like the show, Green's novel is about the contrast in the lives of the residents of an old castle and the lives of their servants.  But whereas Downton Abbey is all melodrama, made for people with the attention spans of lizards, Green's novel demands the utmost patience, and its drama is wrought from the finer details of human life.  It's set during the war, but the war is distant, threatening--the servants at the Irish castle fretfully wonder whether they should return to their homes in England, to their loved ones, before the "Jerries" use the island as a stepping stone.  (Not like on Downton Abbey, where they have to show the pressures of war by turning the castle into a flipping soldiers' hospital.)

The novel begins with the death of the longtime head butler, Eldon.  His replacement, Charley Raunce, is by turns irascible and jovial, but the other servants (and his employer, Mrs Tennant) can see how green he is.  He's anxious to assert his new authority, but also to skim a little off the top of what he charges the household for supplies, something his predecessor did expertly for decades but which he hasn't yet learned to handle with tact or grace.  Meanwhile, he falls in love with a younger maid named Edith.  The romance between Charley and Edith proceeds sweetly but prosaically, with the happy fatalism of two people who realize, seemingly simultaneously, that they are meant to be together.  It's convincing, and somehow more affecting than it would have been with what you might call more fireworks.

Fireworks aren't Green's style.  The drama in Loving involves a missing ring, a pet peacock strangled by a bitter child, a glove full of eggs, a mouse caught in the wheels of a mechanical weathervane, a finely captured game of Blind Man's Bluff.  The house is full of characters who Green refuses to introduce with any fullness; if most people are unknowable, especially when we meet them, why should he bother?  As if to underscore this point, he names two separate young men Albert.

The result is a masterpiece of minimalism.  It seems like hardly a word is spared in Loving, nothing is extraneous.  And yet Green's sentences, often shorn of punctuation, take you on surprising, miniature journeys:

Albert laid himself under a hedge all over which red fuchsia bells swung without a noise in the wind the sure travelling sea brought with its low heavy swell.  He could watch the light blue heave between their donkey Peter's legs and his ears were crowded with the thunder of the ocean.

How can something made of such simple parts demand such attention to be understood?  That first sentence is so simple, but I swear I had to read it three times to follow it.  Not because it's a sloppy sentence, but because of its impeccable design.  Green doesn't break into these prose moments often, but often enough to seem like showing off, as if saying, I can do this, if I choose to.  Mostly the book is in dialogue, which is Green's most renowned skill.  James Wood, in How Fiction Works, praises Green for refusing to stuff his dialogue with adverbs to tell us how the characters are feeling; as with real people, our words are not as clear as we would want them to be.  In Loving, characters speak to each other like people, which is rare.

This is one of those books that I feel I haven't done justice.  Not just in this review, but in reading it; I feel like I wasn't up to its demands.  (I read this book on vacation in North Carolina; last year on the same trip I zipped through all 700 pages of Argall in the same time it took me to plod through the 200 pages of Loving.)  It's not complex, but it is exacting, and often surprising--blink and you'll miss something valuable, or extraordinary.  It's a book that ends just when you feel like you're learning how to read it.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

Stephen, following his own thought, was silent for an instant.

-The soul is born, he said vaguely, first in those moments I told you of. It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

Brent once called me the only student of Modernism to have never read Portrait or Ulysses. I thought of not ever reading them just to stick it to that smarmy jerk, but I think instead I'll just refuse to link to his review.

I will be honest and say that at times it was tough going. The length of Portrait--as opposed to the stories of Dubliners, my only previous experience with Joyce--gives the author ample space to show his versatility, but while the very first chapters recount Stephen Dedalus' childhood in the breezy, chopped style that seems germane to the very young, the adult chapters are written in an elongated prose that forces the reader to slow down and follow the snaky paths of Joyce's language. To appreciate it you must get up close, like tracing subtle patterns in design of great size, when trying to behold its entirety your eyes glaze over.

Despite that, the story is simple: Dedalus, Joyce's stand-in, is born into a family of Catholic Irish Nationalists. He briefly flirts with a religious career before deciding that to follow his impulse toward being an artist he must shed the burden of his family, country, and religion. Randy and Brent have both observed that this process is very difficult to appreciate, and I'll concur. I think the problem with Dedalus is that he is so clearly Joyce that there is no larger claim; it is impossible to imagine oneself as Dedalus because the author and character form a closed loop we cannot enter: Dedalus is Joyce is Dedalus and so on.

There is a self-referentiality in this that proves why Joyce is considered the cornerstone of Modernism. Joyce has nothing to say that is not about himself, and Portrait is about Portrait. Dedalus admits as much during a long conversation about the nature of art with a friend:

Is a chair finely made tragic or comic? Is the portrait of Mona Lisa good if I desire to see it? Is the bust of Sir Philip Crampton lyrical, epical or dramatic? Can excrement or a child or a louse be a work of art? If not, why not?

I marked this passage before returning to Randy's review and realizing that he also had chosen it, not because I think that he is fond of it. I'd like to unpack it a little, in response to some of Randy's criticisms.

There is a sublime humor to that first question. Comedy and tragedy were, for Aristotle, the two principle modes of literature and here Dedalus presumes that a chair is, if not literary, then artistic. A chair, like a novel or a play, is something that man creates and so is creative; Dedalus carries this thought to absurdity by wondering if you can say the same thing about poop, children, and lice, all of which are also man's creations. (Supposing, along medieval lines, that lice are products of spontaneous generation.) The unpopular bust of Crampton gets sandwiched between them to suggest bad art veers much closer to the excrement side of things than it does to classic works.

Earlier in the discussion Dedalus says that a thing of beauty has the quality that makes it "that thing which it is and no other thing." He calls it its quidditas, or whatness, but perhaps not intentionally I think this is the wrong word. Quidditas is the quality of a thing that makes it of a type, what you might say to the question "what is it?" The quidditas of a book is something that it shares with other books, by virtue of being books. What he should say, I think, is haecceitas, or thisness, that quality that makes it only itself. Haecceitas is a godly word, and suggests the way that each thing functions according to the design of God. The haecceitas of the finely made chair is that it, as its craftsman intended, it provides the perfect seat. But there is no perfect chair, because the craftsman is not God, and there is no perfect novel because the novelist isn't either. For that matter, what is the haecceitas of a novel?

So the question isn't about the chair, but about the book itself. One reason Dedalus may seem trite to Randy is that for someone who claims to possess inspiration he produces no art besides one thoroughly mediocre poem. This is frustrating, but we're meant to understand that Portrait is in some way the story of its own creation, the product of that inspiration that Joyce calls "pure as the purest water, sweet as dew, moving as music." To buy into Dedalus' sense of inspiration you must buy into the novel, and to do that you must return to Dedalus' sense of inspiration. No wonder then, that for Randy the whole enterprise falls flat--Portrait's greatness is predicated on an assumption of its greatness!

This is essentially what we have been doing in literature for the past century. You might uncharitably call it navel-gazing. The term Dedalus prefers is "lyrical"--"the form wherein the artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself." Randy says that Dedalus' discourse on art offers no new insight and he's right, but what it offers is the peculiarity of a novel talking about itself.

Dedalus must be selfish, because this is literary selfishness. He yearns to express his innermost self, his haecceitas, but he must abandon the quidditas of nationality and religion. I have always found religious comfort in novels, and Portrait makes me uneasy because Dedalus expresses a near encyclopedic knowledge of Catholic history and theology but rejects it anyway. I question how fully he is able to do this, because Portrait, with its long middle section recalling Dedalus' religious frenzy, stands as a testament to how much of his Catholic upbringing he has absorbed.

In my mind one of Modernism's abiding principles is the embrace of traditional forms as a defense against the crippling emptiness of the modern world, expressed perfectly in the novel's last lines:

Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

The "old artificer" is his namesake, Daedalus, the mythical craftsman who fashioned both the wings of Icarus and the labyrinth of the Minotaur. (And how did both of those stories end?) The line between ancient myth and Catholicism is not straight, but I choose to think of this ending as an affirmation that the old forms are difficult to kill. I know that this line is also a particular favorite of Nathan's, and I'd like to hear his perspective on it.

I am saddened by our collective distaste for this book--not just Randy's virulent kind, but the milder version shared by Brent and myself. It seems that it is the kind of book you could live in, and consider at serious length, but I do not know that it is inviting enough for that.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

His sins trickled from his lips, one by one, trickled in shameful drops from his soul festering and oozing like a sore, a squalid stream of vice. The last sins oozed forth, sluggish, filthy.

A month or so ago, Randy posted a scathing review of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and he and I (and Christopher) had a short discussion about it. You can read it in the comments for the post, but it boiled down, I think, to this: Randy felt like nothing that happened in the book was particularly interesting or significant. He felt like the events were interesting only to the extent the reader was invested in the character of Stephen Dedalus, the titular artist. I responded out of ignorance, not having read Portrait, but now, having finished it, I have to say, while I disagree with many of Randy’s conclusions, I do agree with one thing: Stephen is a difficult protagonist to really like.

The extent to which a character must be likable to be successful is variable; Ignatius Riley is an ignoble beast, but since A Confederacy of Dunces spends time pointing out his follies, he’s paradoxically easier to forgive. Stephen, on the other hand, seems to be presented as exactly the artist he believes himself to be. Reading Portrait, it’s difficult to determine the extent to which the reader is meant to like Stephen. On the one hand, it’s easy to cheer for his progression from mousy, guilt-ridden child to independent young artist; on the other, Stephen’s attitude changes from subservient and weak-kneed to almost unbearably arrogant and self-important.

Ok, so a quick summary for those who didn’t read the review linked above: Stephen Dedalus, a young man growing up in Dublin, Ireland around the turn of the 18^th century, grows up in a factitious family, headed by a once great father who now lives mostly in a whiskey-clouded past and a mother whose only identifiable characteristic is her passive love for her son. He attends Catholic school, hears a lengthy sermon about Hell, turns devout, gets cold feet when approached with the idea of the priesthood, turns agnostic, seeks to find his purpose in art rather than Catholicism, and finds it. The end.

The novel is structured around two Joycean epiphanies, mentioned above: first, Stephen’s venture into devout Catholicism, and second, his change of direction into the world of art. Portrait seems to present the second of these as the more legitimate, ending with a blissful, purposeful Stephen out to face the world with his newfound philosophy. Is Stephen a successful character? Well, that depends. Had I only read Portrait, I think I would feel that the story was unfinished and that Stephen, as a character, was a bit simple. However, having read Ulysses last year, my feelings about Artist are significantly more positive. Spoilers for Ulysses follow, such as they are.

While Ulysses doesn’t spend most of its time on Stephen, he does appear as the most important secondary character in the novel, and what we see of him shows us where his path will eventually lead. Education and art, far from being the void-filling purpose Stephen believed them to be in Portrait, have proven just as stifling as his pursuit of religion, leaving him a depressed, empty intellectual who garners little respect and still lingers in the shadow of his father. This, to me, seems rather in keeping with Stephen’s character: every epiphany satisfies, but only for a little while. There is, in Joyce’s world, no one solution to the human problem, and so there is none for Stephen’s either. End Ulysses Spoilers.

If I may leave Portrait behind for a moment, I’d like to say that, brilliant as his novels are, Joyce’s books make me feel sad. It’s sad to imagine that such a brilliant man spent his entire life trying to create art that would satisfy him, and, though he went blind and died nearly friendless in the pursuit, he, like Stephen, never achieved it. It’s hard to read Stephen as anything but a surrogate for Joyce, the artist as an old man who ended up exactly like I imagine Stephen will.

So, to return to the point: Is Stephen, and by association, Portrait, successful on its own terms? Stephen, with all of his ambiguities, is successful in portraying the sort of man he is. If the novel seems a bit empty to me, it’s only because, ultimately, it is, but in the best possible—and I think, intentional—way.

Read Nathan's much more coherent review

A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle

We fended and coped, we survived and grew, side by side or with Victor on my shoulders. We survived but never prospered. We were never going to prosper. We were allowed the freedom of the streets - no one gave a fuck - but we'd never, ever be allowed up the bright steps and into the comfort and warmth behind the doors and windows. I knew that. I knew it every time I jumped out of the way of a passing coach or car, every time I filled my weeping mouth with rotting food, every time I saw shoes on a child my age. I knew it every time a strange man would offer us money or food to come with him. I knew it, and the knowledge fed my brain. I was the brightest spark in a city full of bright and desperate sparks.

Took me a while to write it up, but, ladies (really just Meagan, right?) and gentlemen, I present to you a really, really good book.

When I first started reading A Star Called Henry, I told Chris it was like a grittier version of Dubliners, which, looking back, is like saying that cocaine is grittier than aspirin. Not to disrespect Joyce, but he was writing in a different era. Joyce was writing about the events leading up to the Irish Revolution, but he was writing in 1910, before the revolution. Considering the moral atmosphere of the time, and the restrictions of English rule, it's not surprising that Joyce's Dublin underbelly was considerably softer than Doyle's. Doyle published A Star Called Henry in 1999, and so was a bit more free with his expletives and references to guts and doin' it and stuff.

Henry Smart (great name) is one of my new favorite characters, at least in the top three. He's the son of a one-legged whorehouse bouncer, forced onto the streets at age five, and learns to fare for himself. At fourteen he joins up with Eamon de Valera and the Irish Republican Army, more for the sake of fighting than for the Republic, gets thrown into prison, escapes, becomes a dock worker, reunites with the IRA, escapes jail again, and is just an all around badass. He has a supernatural connection to the rivers of Dublin, and carries around his father's wooden leg (for bashing heads). His story is so huge that it's hard to believe that the book ends when he's twenty. And yet it's not hard to imagine that there were hundreds of young Henry Smarts fighting for their culture and their home in the early 20th century.

Henry Smart is like a superhero, or Irish hercules. He's invincible, his personal story is borderline mythology. I have a man-crush on this character, and a book-crush on this book. Then I found out it has a sequel (dun dun DUN).

Jim, I'm Afri-mailing this to you soon.

Dubliners by James Joyce

I first read this back in high school when I was too lazy to appreciate it, or read it. I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man two years ago, and it slowly became one of my favorites, resonating with me on a very personal level. But that's the thing about Joyce: only a few passages strike me as beautiful or profound as I'm reading them, I typically only appreciate the book as a whole, in retrospect. He isn't very given to lyricism, but when he does put flourish into his words, it shows, as in this passage from "The Dead".

The horse was whipped up and the cab rattled off along the quay amid a chorus of laughter and adieus.

Gabriel had not gone to the door with the others. He was in a dark part of the hall gazing up the staircase. A woman was standing near the top of the first flight, in the shadow also. He could not see her face but he could see the terra-cotta and salmon-pink panels of her skirt which the shadow made appear black and white. It was his wife. She was leaning on the banisters, listening to something. Gabriel was surprised at her stillness and strained his ear to listen also. But he could hear little save the noise of laughter and dispute on the front steps, a few chords struck on the piano and a few notes of a man's voice singing.

He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show off the light ones. Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter.

 

This collection of short stories is a perfect example of his work functioning only as a whole. I don't think he meant this as a set of standalone works, but rather a piecemeal portrait of dirty old Dublin: here are its drunks, here its aristocracy, here the lonely scholar. Each character is given a brutally honest once over before the next is introduced, and when all the plights and dramas of various Dubliners are stacked up, you've got a very human, bleeding, shitting city. Its citizens face the same crises as we do. A young boy is confronted with death for the first time, a woman's fear of leaving her country, dreary as it is, costs her a bright future.

 

Evelyn and A Painful Case stood out when I was reading. But, without contest, The Dead is the crown jewel, appropriately saved for last. Gabriel's inner conflict in The Dead is painfully familiar, as is his slow revelation of the fleeting nature of life, a breathtaking passage that I wanted to reproduce here, but won't for fear of taking away some of its kick. Those three are the only that I'd say could be rightly enjoyed outside the book, but you can't see Joyce's whole, conflicted portrayal of Dublin if you do. He's trying to create an Irish identity without romanticizing his people or his country, and has a hard time of it. He puts so much sorrow and so much of his own wanderlust in his characters, the overriding sense of Dublin is of a city that butts up against sorrow regularly, and covers it up and pushes on.

If you take it on, I highly recommended reading it aloud with a thick Irish accent.

In the Woods by Tana French

My mind sideslipped and spun. Every step set recognition thrumming in the air around me, like Morse code beating along a frequency just too high to catch. We had run here, scrambling sure-footed down the hillside along the web of faint trails; we had eaten streaky little crab apples from the twisted tree, and when I looked up into the whirl of leaves I almost expected to see us there, clinging to branches like young jungle cats and staring back. At the fringe of one of these tiny clearing (long grass, sun-dapples, clouds of ragwort and Queen’s Anne lace) we had watched as Jonathan and his friends held Sandra down. Somewhere, maybe in the exact spot where I was standing, the wood had shivered and cracked open, and Peter and Jamie had slipped away.

First things first: READ THIS BOOK. I’ve never felt more comfortable recommending a story to anyone who’ll listen to me. Really, no matter what kind of reader you are, I bet you’ll thoroughly enjoy In the Woods by Tana French.

In the Woods is a police procedural novel set in present day Dublin. The protagonist and narrator, Rob Ryan, finds himself investigating the murder of 12-year-old Katy Devlin of Knocknaree. Ryan must solve the case without alerting his superiors to his personal connection to the case. 20 years earlier, Ryan and two of his friends went missing in the woods of Knocknaree. A police search eventually turned up the twelve-year-old Ryan, wide-eyed with blood-filled sneakers and mysterious scratches on his person. His two playmates were never recovered. Now Ryan must discover why Katy was found bludgeoned to death on an ancient Druid sacrificial altar just outside the very woods where he lost his friends.

I’ve never been a big crime drama type guy. Law and Order doesn’t really do it or me and I could never get into the hundreds of James Patterson and John Sanford crime thrillers that stock my mom’s bookshelf. And really that’s exactly what In the Woods is, a standard police procedural: Someone commits a crime. The detectives investigate the crime. They find their suspect! But wait, they were all wrong! Dead end. Eureka! A new suspect! Crime solved. I don’t say this to take away from the narrative itself. In fact, Woods has a really interesting plot with some good red-herrings and twists thrown in. But the story itself is far from ground-breaking. One thing about the plot, though, that was particularly well done was the subliminally supernatural tone. Nothing about Katy’s murder or any of the investigation lead you to believe that this is a Stephen King-type story with a monster on the loose. But certain details of Ryan’s friends abduction and his rescue keep that window slightly ajar. As if you wouldn’t be totally shocked if the story ended with some sort of werewolf conspiracy (which it sadly does not).

No, the beauty of In the Woods is all in French’s style. Her dialogue is fresh and realistic. There’s none of the melodramatic, hard-boiled bull-crap you almost expect to get in a crime drama. Or perhaps that’s that fair to say. You get a lot of the stuff you expect in a crime drama. Good cop, bad cop. Commanding officers behind desks questioning tactics and threatening to “take your gun and badge so quickly your head will spin.” Interrogation room scenes with jumpy suspects. The more I think back on it, the more cliché a number of things in the story were. I think the genius is in French’s ability to show you those clichés through the eyes of a player fully aware of those clichés. Ryan and his partners just come across as completely normal people who play the role of ‘television cop” when they find it necessary. Ryan explains his quick rise from uniformed officer to detective as having occurred because “he looked the part.” French’s characters are all too aware of the stereotypes and caricatures of police officers. And unlike the characters of so many other crime novels, they only use them to their advantage. They don’t live them.

I also enjoyed French’s uses of pop-culture references. A lot of times, things like that strike me as annoying for forced. As if the writer is trying too hard to relate to the reader. Maybe other’s will feel that way about French’s writing, but to me it just felt natural. Every random Simpsons or South Park reference felt appropriate. The detectives skipping lunch to play Worms on their computers or getting hammered and playing Cranium succeeded in making these characters seem flesh and blood. The way they talked and interacted after-hours reminded me of my friends.

As I’m sure you’ve already distilled, I loved In the Woods. It’s an exciting story from a new author that I think people are really going to enjoy. The plot/conclusion is nothing mind-blowing but it captures your interest enough for you to enjoy French’s dry sense of humor and smart dialogue. I’m already looking forward to reading French’s next book, whatever that may be.

Highlights: The hint of the supernatural, French’s dialogue, the cultural references

Lowlights: The ending was a little ho-hum, with too many questions left unanswered.

At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien

I'm a little ashamed that it's over two weeks into the month of May and I have completed exactly one book. Part of that is having just finished exams, but part of it also that the book I have chosen, Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two- Birds, is not exactly "light reading." It is, in fact, just the opposite.

Here is something similar to a summary: A college student in Dublin is writing a novel. His novel is about a man named Dermot Trellis, who himself is writing a novel. The idea held by both the student and his character is that it is unnecessary to create characters when you can use the ones that exist in the corpus of literature, so Trellis' novel (and by extension the student's, and by extension O'Brien's) is filled with strange characters: cowboys, fairies, and denizens of Irish myth like a pooka (demon) and the legendary hero Finn MacCool, which sounds like a mascot for a family seafood restaurant. But the characters won't stay put and they drug Trellis so that he'll stay asleep and they can do what they please instead of doing what he tells them to do by writing.

So, yeah. The story of the college student is told, but mixed in with it are pieces of his novel as well as whatever excerpts the student feels necessary to include, like a lengthy translation of the legend of Finn MacCool or selections from (probably fictitious) books meant to explicate on given concepts. Structurally, the whole thing is messy, and stylistically it's purposefully formalized and stiff, but humorously so, in a way. I can't on good conscience recommend this to anyone without a certain warped kind of taste, but just beholding it produces in me a certain kind of awe. It lacks a certain sense of direction, but that too is on purpose it seems, and in a way reflects on the character of the student, who constantly avoids doing any real schoolwork.

This is one of those books that you're not sure whether you love or hate. If you're a big Joyce fan, you might enjoy it, because it's as difficult and twice as Irish. Maybe I should just say, "approach with caution."

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

This book is largely autobiographical, and Joyce invents Stephen Dedalus, whose name I love, to play the role of himself. The name comes from the Catholic Saint Stephen and the pagan legend Dedalus. This juxtaposition perfectly characterizes, and foreshadows, a lot of the internal struggle that Dedalus goes through in the novel. He alternatively devotes himself to and draws away from what he ultimately comes to view as the narrow-mindedness of Irish-Catholicism. Though it isn’t stream of consciousness, like I’d been told, the novel mostly follows Stephen’s internal musings (in the third person), and the occasional dialogue with another, very minor, character. Stephen is the only character that really gets any room to grow in the book, and others come and go without fanfare whenever they prove useful to some point in his development.

The story follows Dedalus from birth to age 22, usually skipping a few years between each episode. He grows up, over about 300 pages, from a schoolboy in rural Ireland to a university student in Dublin. I can relate completely to the narrative of his personal growth: he grows up Catholic, slowly rejects his beliefs, has a brief, dramatic reunion with the church, and then, once again, lets his beliefs slide away and educates himself through what he calls the snares of this world. I know what it’s like to have an estranged relationship with family over the same issues he does. I could even relate to the embarrassing pseudo-intellectualism, the secular humanism and the wanderlust that he passes through between ages 16 and 22. At some points of the book his sense of superiority and literary name-dropping turned him into a less likeable character, but he always redeemed himself with some epiphany as to the futility of whatever he was involved in. At one point he wanders along the oceanfront all night, inspired, by way of an epiphany, to re-create himself through dwelling on his namesake:

What did it mean? Was it a quaint device opening a page of some medieval book of prophecies and symbols, a hawk-like man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and had been following through the mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being?

Dedalus struggles against Irish culture at a time when Irish nationalism was gaining popularity. He’s initially embarrassed by his people’s history, their language and their religion, which is another thing that he slowly comes to terms with. Joyce left a lot of pieces of the story to be filled in by the reader; a lot of important events in Stephen’s life are only vaguely alluded to in the narration of his train of thought. Also the reader is subjected to a miserable thirty pages of fire and brimstone sermon, and, later, another equally miserable thirty pages of philosophical discourse on the aesthetic. There’s a lot to dig through, but there’s also a lot to say about personal growth, and “finding yourself.” I’ll bet it spoke volumes to the Irish in the early 1900’s. I, unfortunately, cannot identify myself as such, but thoroughly enjoyed the book.

Note: I’d recommend this version (pictured at the top of this review), published by Penguin, with a black cover and a picture of Joyce, for its great introduction and tremendously helpful notes in the back. I, regrettably, bought the shittier version, and had to borrow a friend’s to find out what doing something “for a cod” meant (it does not mean doing something in order to get a fish, as I had previously assumed).