Far Away Home by Susan Denning

She had no strength to stay awake and bid the disappointing year goodbye.

I picked it up on a lark (cheap on kindle, good reviews), and while it started strong by the end it was only disappointing. Far Away Home tells the story of Aislynn, a teenager from New York in the late 1860s who moves west to fully realize her independence after her father dies. According to blurbs on Amazon, Denning put in a lot of effort to make sure her book was historically accurate, which allowed her to paint vivid portrayals of the characters and settings that I appreciated. The first quarter or so of the book was especially good. Denning brings the characters to life through several moving scenes, at least at first. But then, about when Aislynn heads west, the book starts to unravel. Gone is the depth of all the characters except our protagonist, and she becomes uneven. Whereas I was moved by Aislynn's neighbor/love interest's recollection of Aislynn's mother's death (when Aislynn's mother doesn't even actually appear in the book), when one of the main characters dies towards the end I could only muster up a hearty, "Eh." I find a good rule of thumb when evaluating books is that if you start rooting for the protagonist to die in the end because they are annoying, the book has become boring, or both, then it's not a great book. Also, Denning drops the ball on the conclusion; Where she was probably going for meaningful and hopeful, she ended up with my-editor-needs-a-final-draft-by-wednesday-shit-how-am-I-going-to-finish-this-oh-well-here-goes-nothing...

Also, Denning doesn't do a good job of making the conflict matter. For example, at one point a couple that Aislynn befriends on the trip out West tips over in their covered wagon and drowns as Aislynn looks on. And at this point if I wrote one more sentence I'd have equaled the amount of time that Denning spends on this presumably traumatizing event.

I could go on, but hopefully no one else will read this book, so I'll leave it at that.

Pincher Martin by William Golding

He was struggling in every direction, he was the centre of the writhing and kicking knot of his own body. There was no up or down, no light and no air. He felt his mouth open of itself and the shrieked word burst out.

"Help!"

William Golding loves shipwrecks. His most famous book, Lord of the Flies, is a sort of social parable about a group of children stranded on a deserted island. Pincher Martin is what you might call an anti-social parable, about one man stranded on a desert rock in the middle of the Atlantic, fighting for survival and against sickness, madness, and dissolution.

The beginning of the book is, for me at least, almost inscrutable, a chronicle of sheer impressionistic and sensory experience that is frequently difficult to follow:

The pattern was white and black but mostly white. It existed in two layers, one behind the other, one for each eye. He thought nothing, did nothing while the pattern changed a trifle and made little noises. The hardnesses under his cheek began to insist. They passed through pressure to a burning without heat, to a localized pain. They became vicious in their insistence like the nag of an aching tooth. They began to pull him back into himself and organize him again as a single being.

Once "organize[d]... again as a single being," the story becomes more lucid: Christopher Martin, a navy officer and professional actor, has been stranded on a rock because his ship was struck by a German u-boat. In the feverish sensory assault of the wreck and its aftereffects, Christopher nearly loses himself, his personality subsumed by pure feeling. Throughout his ordeal of survival, he fears a return to this state of fragmentation, which he imagines as a kind of madness brought about by isolation. He imposes civilization on his rock, naming its various features, and tries to employ his mental faculties to prop up his own sanity:

He spoke out loud, using the voice hoarsely and with a kind of astonishment.

"Christopher Hadley Martin. Martin. Chris. I am what I always was!"

All at once it seemed to him that he came out of his curious isolation inside the globe of his head and was extended normally through his limbs. He lived again on the surface of his eyes, he was out in the air...

He looked at the quiet sea.

"I don't claim to be a hero. But I've got health and education and intelligence. I'll beat you."

Through flashbacks--which Golding suggests are the symptoms of the coming madness Christopher tries to resist--we learn that in his former life Christopher was something of an asshole. He tries to rape a girl, Mary, "the Mary who carried, poised on her two little feet, a treasure of demoniac and musky attractiveness that was all the more terrible because she was almost unconscious of it." When he learns that Mary has become engaged to his best friend, Nathaniel, he tries to murder him. He is, as an actor, fit to play Greed in the old morality plays:

"This painted bastard here takes anything he can lay his hands on. Not food, Chris, that's far too simple. He takes the best part, the best seat, the most money, the best notice, the best woman. He was born with his mouth and his flies open and both hands out to grab. He's a cosmic case of the bugger who gets his penny and someone else's bun."

Christopher's will to survive, then, is nothing but a greed for life, a manifestation of his own entitled feeling of primacy extended even over death, which threatens to dissolve the self. But in the manner of the Greek tragedian who unwittingly fashions his own demise, it is his self which threatens to devour him. In a really horrifying moment (which might have been more horrifying if I hadn't read about it already, so--spoiler alert) Chris realizes that the rock he's been set on is a perfect copy of one of his own teeth:

His tongue was remembering. It pried into the gap between the teeth and re-created the old, aching shape. It touched the rough edge of the cliff, traced the slope down, trench after aching trench, down towards the smooth surface... just above the fum--understood what was so hauntingly familiar and painful about an isolated and decaying rock in the middle of the sea.

This is the realization that launches him into full madness, or perhaps the realization that he is mad already. His greed for existence cannot stop the "black lightning" that ends the novel by tearing the universe apart, and finally dissolving him in death. Like the beginning of the book, this end part is something of a slog, phantasmagorical and anti-sensory, but unlike the beginning it seems like an earned slog, and it is terrifying even when inscrutable.

Doctor Fischer of Geneva, or The Bomb Party by Graham Greene

I think I used to detest Doctor Fischer more than any other man I have known just as I loved his daughter more than any other woman. What a strange thing that she and I ever came to meet, leave alone to marry.

Both James Wood and Gabriel Josipovici have invoked Graham Greene as a sort of bogeyman of realism, terrorizing the modern consciousness with his inert prose. Waugh accused him of lacking a "specifically literary style at all." It is true that Greene is no great experimentalist, but I have always thought these charges were trumped up, and inadequately appreciative of some of the more startling bits of The Power and the Glory or The Heart of the Matter, among others. But Greene put out a lot of work in his life, and I think it might be fair to say that much of it is inconsistent, and it may be accurate even to say that some of it is lazy.

Doctor Fischer of Geneva, or The Bomb Party is a remarkably weak Greene novel, mostly because it relies, crutchlike, on a rather brilliant premise. The protagonist, Alf Jones, marries a wonderful woman many years his junior, and comes to find out that her father, Doctor Fischer, is a wealthy psychopath who likes to throw parties where he humiliates a set of cronies. These cronies--his daughter, Anna-Luise, calls them the Toads--put up with the Doctor's savagery because at the end of each party they receive a ridiculously extravagant present. Fischer channels all of his genius until these humiliations:

"Of course you don't know what Mr. Kips looks like."

"I do. I saw him when I tried to see your father the first time."

"Then you know he's bent almost double. Something wrong with his spine."

"Yes. I thought he looked like the number seven."

"He hired a well-known writer for children and a very good cartoonist and between them they produced a kind of strip-cartoon book called The Adventures of Mr. Kips in Search of a Dollar. He gave me an advance copy. I didn't know there was a real Mr. Kips and I found the book very funny and very cruel. Mr. Kips in the book was always bent double and always seeing coins people had dropped on the pavement... The book--I suppose most children are cruel--became a popular success. There were many reprints."

And yet, Mr. Kips comes faithfully to every one of Doctor Fischer's party, in the promise of receiving an eighteen-karat gold lighter or a piece of expensive jewelry. Doctor Fischer's wealth gives him great power, and Greene's narrator is always pausing to note that Fischer is, in his own way, like God. In what should be a really striking moment, Jones is waiting for his wife at a ski lodge when he discovers that she has been in an accident. The waiter at the lodge, not knowing what has happened, is angry at Jones for reserving and abandoning his table:

The waiter was more surly than ever. He told me, "You reserved this table for lunch. I have had to turn away customers.

"There's one customer you'll never see again," I told him back, and I threw a fifty-centime piece on the table which fell on the floor. Then I waited by the door to see if he would pick it up. He did and I felt ashamed. But if it had been in my power I would have revenged myself for what had happened on all the world--like Doctor Fischer, I thought, just like Doctor Fischer. I heard the scream of the ambulance and I returned to the ski lift.

Yes, there is a nice symmetry here when Jones--having just parted the side of his dying wife!--waits to see if the waiter will endure the humiliation that Jones, in his despair, wants to inflict. But must we have it explained to us so plainly? Do we need awkward little bon mots like these?:

"He didn't invite your to a party?"

"No."

"Thank God for that."

"Thank Doctor Fischer," I said, "or is it the same thing?"

Many of the book's flaws are redeemed by the last scene, in which Doctor Fischer throws one last party. Each guest gets to pick out a Christmas cracker, all of which save one contain a check for two million francs. The last contains a bomb. Fischer's cynicism tells him that his guests will endure the enormous personal risk for the money, and he is right, except in the case of Jones, who, ravaged by his wife's death, seeks out the cracker with the bomb in it.

This is rich stuff, but it is only a small part of a short book that seems wrought with too little care. The most interesting part about it may be the way that it ends, on a note that is uncharacteristic in that it is both rather upbeat and insistently agnostic:

Evil was as dead as a dog, and why should goodness have more immortality than evil? There was no longer any reason to follow Anna-Luise if it was only into nothingness. As long as I lived, I could at least remember her. I had two snapshots of her and a note in her hand written to make an appointment before we lived together; there was the chair which she used to sit in, and the kitchen where she had jangled the plates before we bought the machine. All those were like the relics of bone they keep in Roman Catholic churches. Once as I boiled myself an egg for my supper, I heard myself repeating a line which I had heard spoken by a priest at the midnight Mass at Saint Maurice: "As often as your do these things you shall do them in memory of me." Death was no longer an answer--it was an irrelevance.

Doctor Fischer was one of Greene's final novels. Are these words an insight into a man whose long attachment to his faith had waned, or lost power, for whom death and what comes after had become an irrelevance? And is it possible that the weakness of the novel is not unrelated?

Perhaps not. More likely it is Greene's long tendency to slip into pulpiness that, in his best works, is overcrowded by his talents. Greene himself made the distinction between his more literary works and "entertainments," though it is unclear which Doctor Fischer is meant to be. If you're looking for a masterpiece lurking in Greene's minor works, though, I'd suggest skipping Doctor Fischer and going for A Burnt-Out Case.

Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt

Toward the end of Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt relates a story about Shakespeare's dealings as a property owner. When a set of wealthy landowners threatened to enclose a large area of land, some Shakespeare's, essentially transforming common land into private property, he protested the move, as it would have staunched the income he received from the tenants. Having reached a protective agreement with the landowners, however, Shakespeare quite non-heroically dropped his protest--even though the enclosure still promised to evict and impoverish many farmers. "It is not a terrible story," Greenblatt writes, "but it is not uplifting either. It is merely and disagreeably ordinary."

Merely and disagreeable ordinary--this phrase perfectly encapsulates the problem of Greenblatt's method. That is, Shakespeare's life is not particularly thrilling. While Christopher Marlowe was being assassinated by fellow spies in faked bar fights, Shakespeare quietly spent his days turning himself into a shrewd businessman, writing two or three plays a year, and avoiding his wife and children. The details we have of his life, which are extremely few, are strikingly banal.

The result is that Greenblatt's book is composed primarily of conjecture. Shakespeare may have done or seen this, if he was in this place or did that thing, and isn't it possible that that experience is reflected, here, in Much Ado About Nothing?

Shakespeare's plays then combine, on the one hand, an overall diffidence in depicting marriages and, on the other hand, the image of a kind of nightmare in the two marriages [in Hamlet and Macbeth] they do depict with some care. It is difficult not to read his works in the context of his decision to live for most of a long marriage away from his wife. Perhaps, for whatever reason, Shakespeare feared to be taken in fully by his spouse or by anyone else; perhaps he could not let anyone so completely in; or perhaps he simply made a disastrous mistake, when he was eighteen, and had to live with the consequences as a husband and a writer... And perhaps, beyond these, he told himself, in imagining Hamlet and Macbeth, Othello and The Winter's Tale, that marital intimacy is dangerous, and the very dream is a threat.

This makes for a remarkably readable and interesting biography, but what are the chances that even the most careful reader of Shakespeare--the most aloof of all writers--can sketch the map of his interiority, as Greenblatt pretends that he can do? He reminds us over and over again that this is, at best, guesswork, but that doesn't make it any more trustworthy.

Some of the surmises here seem innocent enough--it seems probable that the mobs in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus show Shakespeare's familiarity with, and suspicion of, similar occurrences in London. Some of it seems dangerous, like the long story about the show trial of Elizabeth I's once-Jewish adviser Dr. Ruy Lopez, which suggests to Greenblatt a wariness about public anti-Semitism that informs The Merchant of Venice.

Will in the World can be compelling, and convincing, and as far as biographies of Shakespeare go, it's probably the best that we're going to get. But the method of cherry-picking passages from the plays and matching them to biographical possibilities makes me deeply uneasy, not least because it is the method that leads a whole host of otherwise reasonable people to believe that Shakespeare's plays were written by Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.

It probably isn't Greenblatt's fault. It is ours, who crave to see the man "behind the plays," and who want Shakespeare to be as interesting as Marlowe or Greene or Kyd. Shakespeare's texts are so compelling, it seems inconceivable that he could be "merely and disagreeably ordinary," but that may be a fact we shall all have to accept.

Henry V by William Shakespeare

CHORUS: O, for a muse of fire that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention!
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars, and at his heels,
Leashed in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire
Crouch for employment.

You will forgive me for skipping straight from Henry IV pt. 1 to Henry V without reading the second part of the trilogy; I am taking part, you see, in the NEH Summer Shakespeare Institute at Columbia University and this is one of the plays we have been asked to read. While I enjoyed it more than the other two (The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet) it has less immediacy than 4H1, and without this class I may not have appreciated it as much as I do now.

Henry V is, more than anything else Shakespeare wrote, a war-play. Henry, the once reckless Prince Hal, has ascended to the throne and wants to legitimize his power by invading France, having a (somewhat tangential) claim to that country's throne. The Dauphin, the heir to the French throne, thinks that this is a hilarious prospect and sends Henry a gift of tennis balls as a jest regarding his reputation. Henry's response would surprise the Dauphin for its savagery, if he could hear it:

And tell the pleasant prince this mock of his
Hath turned his balls to gun-stones, and his soul
Shall stand sore charged for the wasteful vengeance
That shall fly with them; for many a thousand widows
Shall this mock mock out of their dear husbands,
Mock mothers from their sons, mock castles down;
And some are yet ungotten and unborn
That shall have cause to curse the Dauphin's scorn.

Whether this causes you to like Henry more or less I will leave to your judgement, but it resounds with the king's personal history. Though he has cast off Falstaff and his Eastcheap companions, the king does love a good mock--later in the play he plays a somewhat more harmless trick on a pair of his men--but there is no joy or levity in this speech; Henry's jesting has become much more humorless and much more dangerous.

This is just one example of how problematic Henry's war-making is. The most famous lines from the speech are Henry's rousing speech before his unmatched soldiers prior to the Battle of Agincourt, on St. Crispin's Day:

The story shall the good man teach his son,
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered--
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now abed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Shakespeare clearly bestowed Henry with all of his own verbal prowess, and Henry's ability to inspire gulls many of us into taking his claims to glory and honor seriously. They are, of course, quite serious, but they are not the only thing that exists in this play. Henry's words and actions are repeatedly parodized by a group of soldiers in his army that were once his friends at Eastcheap. So Henry's memorable call, "Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, / Or close the wall up with our English dead!" becomes Bardolph's ludicrous, "On, on, on, on, on! To the breach, to the breach!" While Henry refuses to make a deal with the French and rationalizes his decision to kill his prisoners of war, the Eastcheap soldiers steal remorselessly, shake down French soldiers, and engage in petty squabbles. Henry himself promises that the battle will "gentle [the] condition" of the commoners who fight with him, but when the list of the dead is read out, he forgets everyone but the titled corpses.

At the same time, we are constantly reminded that we are sheltered from this war. There are no actual scenes of battle--unless you count when Fluellen beats Pistol senseless with a leek--and the chorus reminds us repeatedly that we are watching only a play. The sense that, through theater, we can share in the glory of one of England's most admired monarchs is repeatedly undermined. We are so enamored of Henry and his golden tongue that we--like Kenneth Branagh and Laurence Olivier--may miss the many signs that the war Henry fights is not the one he describes. Am I the only one that thinks the bravest, most honorable character in the play is the soldier Michael Williams, who refuses the king's money as recompense for the practical joke that Henry plays on him?

(Perhaps I am not--members of the Supreme Court and other judges found for the French during a 2010 mock trial.)

In the end, I must admit that my perception of war in the play is inextricable from my opinion of Hal's character and actions in the first part of Henry IV, and my general attitude about Shakespeare's political opinions. But there is much in the plays for Branaghs and the Oliviers of the world to point to, and ultimately that is a testament to Shakespeare's unequaled ability to negotiate multiple perspectives without giving any supremacy.

The Watch by Rick Bass

My roommate gave me his copy of Rick Bass' short story collection The Watch to take on my recent road trip from New York City to California. I don't think we passed through any area really represented in these stories--Mississippi, Idaho, Utah, etc.--but we passed through a lot of empty space, huge swaths of the country nearly devoid of people, which seemed to match the book's setting as well as any place else. Bass' characters are lonesome as a rule, wanderers in empty spaces, ignorant of their own idiosyncrasies because they lack social context. Some stories are set in Houston; even these seem more like a Childe Harold-like wasteland.

The stories that work the best are the ones that dial down this strangeness and emptiness, however, like "In Ruth's Country," about a doomed romance between a Mormon girl and a non-Mormon boy. The two care a great deal for each other, but ultimately the girl must be married off to an insensitive cattle baron who already has several wives. The characters are thinly drawn, as elsewhere in the collection, but Bass is able to wring considerable pathos out of the situation:

"Ruth," I said, and looked at her. She was all dressed up, and wouldn't say anything. She was just looking at me: that look as if she was afraid I wanted to take something from her, that look that said, too, that she could kill me if I tried.

"The baby, Ruth," I said. I ran a hand through my hair. I was wearing my old cattle-chasing clothes, and I felt like a boy, out there in the hall. There was no one else around. We were in a strange building, a strange hallway, and the river seemed very far away.

"Not yours," she said suddenly. She clutched the Bible even tighter. There were tears in her eyes. "Not yours," she said again. It's the thing I think of most, when I think about it now, how hard it probably was for her to say that.

Less successful are offerings like "The Watch," an interminable story about the owner of a desolate general store who joins forces with a bicyclist to track down his elderly father, who has run away to found a community of poor black women in a malaria-ridden swamp.

The women had all screamed and run into the woods, in different directions, the first time Buzbee leaped into the water after an alligator; but now they all gathered close and applauded and chanted an alligator-catching song they had made up that had few vowels, whenever he wrestled them. But that first time they thought he had lost his mind: he had rolled around and around in the thick gray-white slick mud, down by the bank, jabbing the young alligator with his pocketknife again and again, perforating it and muttering savage dog noises, until they could not longer tell which was which, except for the jets of blood that spurted out of the alligator's fat belly--but after he had killed the reptile, and rinsed it off in the shallows, and come back across the oxbow, wading in knee-deep water, carrying it in his arms, a four-footer, his largest ever, he was smiling, gap-toothed, having lost two in the fight, but he was also erect, proud, and ready for love. It was the first time they had seen that.

It's hard to say why "In Ruth's Country" works while "The Watch" fails; clearly Bass prefers the latter story, since he named the entire collection after it. You certainly can't say that "In Ruth's Country" is more creative than "The Watch," but perhaps it resonates more deeply because the central conflict--the unattainable girl--is more generalizable. Reading about Hollingsworth and his father (named Buzbee, of all things) is a little unpleasant and deeply unsatisfying; it does not leave the impression that you have come into contact with another human being.

Human stories are the best stories, after all, and at its best The Watch provides them. When it doesn't, though, it can be a little like walking through that characteristic wilderness--Mississippi, Idaho, Utah, etc.--completely alone.

08 The Remains Of The Day-Kazuo Ishiguro

Written in 1988, the author seems Japanese, and he is. But while he was born in Japan he also grew up in England. He writes in a very specific style. His sentences are elevated to a level of perfection only a British perfectionist could accomplish.

With 8 Academy nominations in 1994, the movie adaptation of The Remains Of The Day seemed to be taken quite well, critically. Let me just say that the movie was horrible. Anthony Hopkins will forever be Hannibal Lector in my mind. And as a butler, this Hopkins’ character would have eaten the leading men of Europe before WWII. This realistic fiction novel takes place in England after WWII. It is a story told by a butler, about his experiences with his employer who was extremely involved in British Foreign policy between WWI and WWII. 

The story is told as a series of journal entries by the protagonist Mr. Stevens, and he thinks his job is the only thing that fills his life with purpose. His opinion of dignity-a seriousness of behavior and a sense of self-respect and pride in ones actions-is the one most important aspect of his existence:

“The story was an apparently true one concerning a certain butler who had traveled with his employer to India and served there for many years maintaining amongst the native staff the same high standards he had commanded in England. One afternoon, evidently, this butler had entered the dining room to make sure all was well for dinner, when he noticed a tiger languishing beneath the dining table. The butler had left the dining room quietly, taking care to close the doors behind him, and proceeded calmly to the drawing room where his employer was taking tea with a number of visitors. There he attracted his employer’s attending with a polite cough, then whispered in the latter’s ear: ‘I’m very sorry, sir, but there appears to be a tiger in the dining room. Perhaps you will permit the twelve-bores to be used?’
            And according to legend, a few minutes later, the employer and his guests heard three gun shots. When the butler reappeared in the drawing room some time afterwards to refresh the teapots, the employer had inquired if all was well.
            ‘Perfectly fine, thank you, sir,’ had come the reply. ‘Dinner will be served at the usual time and I am pleased to say there will be no discernible traces left of the recent occurrence by that time.’” (page 36)

Mr. Stevens is a rather boring man, that lives to work, in opposition to the way I live my own life, I work to live, and try to find joy in my profession along the way. Stevens’ life is his job. He has no social life, no friends, no aspirations or goals. He only cares about his job and making his master happy. The detail and amount of work that go into serving as butler are a bit preposterous. From shining silver, to dusting, to serving dinner, tea, drinks, and ordering other servants around the house. I would never want to be a butler, but while reading the first 30 pages I felt I would have made an excellent butler. I like to think I am one that has “a dignity in keeping with his position”

07 Tender Is The Night-F. Scott Fitzgerald

I never liked Gatsby, but I like recommendations. Tender is the spectacular study of one man, Mr. Dick Diver. Told in the third person, the three sections are dominated by three characters thoughts: Rosemary, Dick, and Nicole. Tender is a somewhat autobiographical look into Fitzgerald’s own life of love and mental illness. They are expats living it up on the French Riviera during the depression. I’m remembering why I didn’t like Fitzgerald in high school and college; while reading Tender I did begin to appreciate and even love his style.

We first meet Rosemary, the young American actress that has just hit the big time in a Hollywood production. She stumbled to the French Riviera with her mother and while on the beach, happens upon a lovely young couple-Dick and Nicole Diver. She falls in love with Dick, and we learn of all the upstanding and admirable qualities that Dick possesses. The three of them get along famously, and nothing scandalous occurs.

Dick is a young American psychologist writing a book about mental treatments. In Book two, his life is explained. He married Nicole, who was a mental patient, but not his patient. She is the youngest daughter of Chicago “old money.” The love they share is a fantastic thing. They have two children. Dick grows weary of the mental episodes Nicole displays and runs away to work and write and lecture. There is nothing funny about the sadness of the love between these two. It’s meant to fall apart.

I’m willing to give Gatsby another chance, I was young, and it’s easier now to appreciate style, and not use one’s personal life as a reason to not enjoy good writing.

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

Christopher Hitchens once called Lucky Jim the funniest novel of the second half of the twentieth century. I don't think I can agree with that assessment--in fact, I would give my vote to Amis fils' novel Money, or maybe A Confederacy of Dunces--but I can understand the sentiment. The savagery of its satire, and its send-up of the British academic universe, are exactly what I would expect would make Hitchens laugh. It does contain what I think is probably the best description of a hangover ever written:

Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

He will feel worse, when he discovers that he has burned a hole in the sheets of his host, Professor Welch, who happens to be the Dean of History at the provincial college where Dixon is a lecturer in history. Dixon's job is in danger--for other similar unintentional shenanigans--and his attempts to ingratiate himself to Welch are complicated by the fact that Welch is an insufferable blowhard, and so is his son, the painting Bertrand:

It was Bertrand who won the little contest. "The point is that the rich play an essential role in modern society," he said, his voice baying a little more noticeably. "More than ever in days like these. That's all; I'm not going to bore you with the stock platitudes about their having kept the arts going, and so on. The very fact that they are stock platitudes proves my case. And I happen to like the arts, you sam."

The last word, a version of "see," was Bertrand's own coinage. It arose as follows: the vowel sound became distorted into a short "a," as if he were going to say "sat." This brought his lips some way apart, and the effect of their rapid closure was to end the syllable with a light but audible "m." After working this out, Dixon could think of little to say, and contented himself with "You do," which he tried to make knowing and sceptical.

That's pretty funny, and it's funnier when Amis begins to slip this tic in elsewhere; at one point, Bertrand uses the word "obviouslam." To make matters worse, Bertrand has a very pretty girlfriend--blowhards often do--named Christine, who seems to fancy Dixon, though he himself is tied up with a manipulative and not very attractive girl named Margaret.

Much of the best comedic bits in Lucky Jim depict Dixon trying to navigate his precarious social and professional situation, and sometimes just pursuing sheer malice, through a series of pranks and tricks. He hides the sheets; he calls the Welch home pretending to be a reporter looking for Betrand; he writes a threatening letter to a rival pretending to be someone else. This is funnier because he isn't good at it, and is always being found out. The mockery quickly becomes something of a compulsion, reaching a disastrous head when Dixon, intoxicated, can't stop himself from delivering a public lecture while mimicking Welch:

When he'd spoken about half-a-dozen sentences, Dixon realixed that something was still very wrong. The murmuring in the gallery had grown a little louder. Then he realised what it was that was so wrong: he'd gone on using Welch's manner of address. In an effort to make his script sound spontaneous, he'd inserted an "of course" here, a "you see" there, an "as you might call it" somewhere else; nothing so firmly recalled Welch as that sort of thing. Further, in a partly unconscious attempt to make the stuff sound right, i.e. acceptable to Welch, he'd brought in a number of favourite Welch tages: "integration of the social consciousness," "identification of work with craft," and so on... Sweating and flushing, he struggled on a little further, hearing Welch's intonation clinging tightly round his voice, powerless for the moment to strip it away.

Ultimately, Dixon is only able to continue by mimicking someone else, and passes through a number of different voices before collapsing on stage. To some extent this is what Dixon deserves, not because he is a trickster but because he is as much a sham as anyone else. His recently finished article, "The economic influence of the development in shipbuilding techniques, 1450 to 1485," bores him to death, and was only written to please his superiors and lead the expected life of an academic:

Dixon had read, or begun to read, dozens like it, but his own seemed worse than most in its air of being convinced of its own uselessness and significance. "In considering this strangely neglected topic," it began. This what neglected topic? This strangely what topic? This strangely neglected what? His thinking all this without having defiled and set fire to the typescript only made him appear to himself as more of a hypocrite and fool.

Being a comedy, things will work out for Dixon. But it isn't at all clear to me that he deserves them, except perhaps in that he seems to know he is a sham, which is something Professor and Bertrand Welch refuse to admit. But the title suggests that maybe deserving the girl, the job, etc., is irrelevant:

It was all very bad luck on Margaret, and probably derived, as he'd thought before, from the anterior bad luck of being sexually unattractive. Christine's more normal, i.e. less unworkable, character no doubt resulted, in part at any rate, from having been lucky with her face and figure. But that was simply that. To write things down as luck wasn't the same as writing them off as nonexistent or in some way beneath consideration. Christine was still nicer and prettier than Margaret, and all the deductions that could be drawn from that fat should be drawn: there was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.

This is an interesting statement, and a troubling one, though it forms the lynchpin of the novel's serious treatment of moral questions. How then, do we revise our understanding of the luck that has enabled someone like Bertrand Welch to become a privileged, leisurely artist? As Hitchens notes, Dixon avers that "he badly needed another dose of luck. If it came, he might yet prove to be of use to somebody." The lucky Welches have spent their lives being useless to precisely no one--that's why they're academics, har har--and Amis leaves us with the suggestion that maybe Dixon, lucky for the first time in his life, might be able to make better use of it.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Wuthering Heights is awful. I don't mean, of course, that it is bad, but that the experience of it is like being caught in a vice, so rife it is with cruelty and horror. The petty tribulations that Jane Eyre's family put her through do not compare, nor do the benign torments of Mr. Rochester, to what Heathcliff perpetrates in Wuthering Heights. My memory of him from pretending to read this book in high school was that he was a sort of Byronic anti-hero, devoted to his soulmate Catherine Earnshaw despite attempts to tear them apart, but that is only a partial--and thus very mistaken--perspective.

Heathcliff enters the novel mysteriously, a gypsy urchin brought home by Catherine's father. Heathcliff is his only name (and it matches the windswept, bleak terrain of the Earnshaw estate, Wuthering Heights). He and Catherine form an instant bond, and when their father dies, Catherine's cruel brother Hindley contrives to keep them apart, debasing Heathcliff as a servant, and the difference in their social station drives Catherine to marry the handsome, effete Edgar Linton. Yet, Catherine maintains that she and Heathcliff are so connected to one another that they share a soul:

"This is nothing," cried she; "I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth, and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights, where I woke sobbing for joy. That will do to explain my secret, as well as the other. I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low; I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff, now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not be cause he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.

Separated from Cathy, Heathcliff vows to wreak havoc on the external forces he perceives to be at fault, namely Hindley Earnshaw and Edgar Linton. He doesn't dare while Catherine is alive, but the tensions between Heathcliff and Edgar push her into madness and illness, and when she dies his cruelty becomes extreme:

He seized, and thrust her from the room; and returned muttering, "I have no pity! I have no pity! The more the worms writhe, the more I yearn to crush out their entrails! It is a moral teething, and I grind with greater energy, in proportion to the increase of pain.

The second half of the book--the better half, I think, though not the one that seems to be best remembered--details Heathcliff's revenge. He becomes a tenant at Wuthering Heights, knowing that the near-mad Hindley would not refuse his money, and swindles him out of the property by buying up the mortgage to support Hindley's alcoholism. He marries Edgar's sister Isabella, whom he hates and abuses, and fathers a sickly, irritable son, Linton Heathcliff, whom he contrives to marry Cathy and Edgar's daughter, Catherine. Knowing that Linton will die young--and doing his part to help!--and that Edgar's home Thrushcross Grange will pass to him, Heathcliff becomes the owner of both of his rivals' estates.

It is difficult to describe how cruelly Heathcliff goes about this. He cares about no one but the dead Catherine, and terrorizes everyone else, including his own wife and son. And yet Heathcliff and Catherine's relationship is the most spiritually powerful thing in the entire novel. Attempts to cast Heathcliff's actions in a moral--specifically, Christian--light nearly always come off as weak, and God never seems nearly as powerful as Heathcliff. As the young Heathcliff says to his nurse Nelly, "God won't have the satisfaction that I shall" when Hindley is punished. It is difficult to call Heathcliff a villain because the moral and spiritual compass of Wuthering Heights is centered, like everything else, on his relationship with Catherine.

In the end, the only thing that saves the two houses from utter destruction is a sort of spiritual elevation that Heathcliff experiences, whereby he feels himself closer to Catherine, and therefore also to death, and disinterested in what remains of an earthly world:

"It is a poor conclusion, is it not," he observed, having brooded a while on the scene he had just witnessed. "An absurd termination to my violent exertions? I get levers and mattocks to demolish the two houses, and train myself to be capable of working like Hercules, and when everything is ready, and in my power, I find the will to lift a slate off either roof has vanished! My old enemies have not beaten me--now would be the precise time to revenge myself on their representatives--I could do it; and none could hinder me--But where is the use? I don't care for striking, I can't take the trouble to raise my hand!"

This is horrible, but it is right: We could imagine the entire territory of the novel being wiped off the face of the earth by a sweep of Heathcliff's hand, but the same intensity of love that sparked his anger calls him away from it.

Wuthering Heights endures because it is like a funhouse mirror toward our most worn ideas about romantic love: It leads us toward destiny; it elevates us spiritually; it is more powerful than what surrounds it; it will survive despite all obstacles. Here, in the earthly realm at least, all these things are true, but they make no one happy, not even Cathy and Heathcliff.