Slump

I'm currently in a Pulitzer slump, distracted as I am by all of the other fiction that has come my way: The Accidental, No Country for Old Men, Iodine, Edmund and Rosemary Go to Hell, among a few others. Right now, I' m reading Cather's One of Ours. It's very good, of course, but my name was next on my library's waiting list for Edgar Sawtelle, so now I'm on the clock to get through that one. It'll be at least two weeks before I get back to my Pulitzer reading. By then, I should be getting slammed by end-of-the-semester hysteria and will be unable to process anything more serious than a Newsweek conventional wisdom column.

The House of Atreus Redux

As a literary device, the family curse is as old as it gets. A method that illustrates how the seeds of tragedy arise from within a community, how blame for catastrophe can very often be laid at the feet of a beloved insider rather than the more convenient stranger. Arrogant and the complacent parents incite the wrath of the gods and suddenly the kids, if they are lucky enough to survive, find themselves without money or marriage prospects. Distant descendants of this literary tradition are The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz, and Sartoris, by William Faulkner. Both tales were penned by New World authors with 20th century perspectives. But the difference between the goods needed to pull off a Pulitzer Prize (Diaz) and a Nobel Prize (Faulkner) is precisely that which separates those forgotten tragedians from the great Aeschylus himself.

Oscar Wao is an uber-nerd. A Dominican-American man with a penchant for high fat, low nutrition diets—both physically and mentally—he is , in the end, that most familiar of American clichés, an underdog fighting against universal meanness, this time in the ethnic strain. From the beginning, Diaz’s narrator explains how Wao’s family fled Dictator Trujillo Molina’s Dominican Republic for New Jersey to escape fuku, a family curse. A convoluted narrative explains how Wao’s grandfather, unwilling to give up the privileges of a wealthy, respected man during the early days of the cruel regime, brought the curse on himself and his descendents, leaving the work of undoing the curse to his Americanized, pop-culture saturated grandson.

Diaz peppers his prose with a bewildering array of sci-fi and gaming references and then underscores the whole thing with footnotes explaining Trujillo’s mid-20th Century Dominican Republic. Most disappointing, finally, is that the novel’s compelling subject matter—the problem of South American unrest and U.S. involvement in the atrocities there, as well as the problem of the immigrant—is undermined by the author’s insistence on establishing his narrator’s (and his own) street cred using language that is already so-five-minutes-ago. While Trekkies and Con participants throughout the country will hail this book as their coming-of-age tract, readers over the age of thirty-five and those younger readers innately convinced of their own coolness will probably find this book alienating if not irritating.

Compare this to Faulkner’s 1929 novel Sartoris, featuring shell-shocked Bayard Sartoris, a World War I veteran returning to his family’s sleepy Southern plantation after witnessing the death of his twin brother. The Sartoris curse, like that of Wao’s family, was invoked by forces within the family itself, a genetic predisposition exacerbated by environmental factors. Looming above the Sartoris men is Colonel Sartoris, a legendary Confederate hero who more than once outwitted Union forces. Famed for his acts of outrageous courage and cleverness, the Colonel is a family exemplar of insouciant bravery, of what it means to be a man. Yet, as the family generates itself and moves into the 20th century, the Sartoris men find themselves acting merely outrageous and insouciant—careening about the country-side in sleek automobiles, drinking themselves senseless, and inciting other drunkards to fight. Aunt Jenny, elderly spokesperson for the clan, vocalizes the community’s concern for young men of her family: They cannot destroy themselves fast enough.

Faulkner’s tale, like Diaz’s, is universal. Bayard Sartoris could be seen as a stand-in for the confused young men of the modern period. Unlike Colonel Sartoris, a mature man who fought for his piece of land and for the safety of his family, Bayard and his brother were asked to die extravagant deaths for an intangible cause. What’s more—and Faulkner makes much of this throughout—they were asked to take on this burden before they were old enough to exercise self-control, to understand that power should be tempered by responsibility.

Also like Diaz, Faulkner is not above authorial tricks of his own. References to people and events are made off-handedly, with no back-story, just as they would be for a listener casually following the gossip of a couple of friends. But the reader is wise to trust Faulkner who, unlike Diaz with his Spanish dialogue and phrasing, always follows through with an explanation later. Though Faulkner’s later works require nearly as much effort to read as Diaz’s Oscar Wao, the effort results in a revelation—what does it mean to witness a crime from this perspective rather than that one, for instance –that is more intellectually rewarding than feeling one has successfully solved a clever crossword puzzle.

The Living is Easy

In heart of summer I find myself--like all good Hoosiers--dreaming of fall. For this reason, my husband and I are in a flurry of home improvements designed make living easier in the winter, when we hope to do little more than snuggle on the sofa with books, tea, and knitting at hand. The garage is clean, the utility room is outfitted with a stackable washer/dryer unit that should prevent the drainpipe from freezing, and a new closet door is awaiting installation.



The big project for the summer is new window installation. Our house is 35 years old, and the windows are the originals. Not many things manufactured in the '70s were designed to withstand the test of time (this includes many books and films), and our windows are no exception. While relaxing in my rocking chair last winter, I noted how the curtains puffed in with the gales buffeting the house. Worse, snow filtered in between the sill and window frame. I vowed we would not spend another winter with those windows. So, it is July and I still don't have new windows. The reason: estimates. I don't like paying for estimates, and I don't like the hard sell I'll get from some of the national window retailers. Even so, it must be done, but to do this I must put down the book I am reading and get to it.



What have I been reading? Katherine Anne Porter's Collected Stories is the most memorable. Her work, like Cather's, is as refreshing as a tall glass of water. Her prose is muscular, but entirely feminine, even when she writes from a masculine point of view. One excellent example is "A Day's Work," a short story about a down and out man of Irish extraction who vows to pursue employment in any form, even if it's dirty. Lacey Mahaffy, his wife, is an albatross around his neck. She serves as his conscience and keeper, taking in laundry to keep the family in money. The violence in their lives is understated, but evident; Porter never loses while "playing chicken with sentimentality" here and the result is chilling.



A beautiful rendering of the macabre and grotesque is "Holiday," a story about a young woman vacationing (for reasons unstated) with a German American farm family. Her friend Louise describes the place as picturesque but the narrator soon learns that "amusing stories" about the place "turn grim on you a little while later when by chance you saw and heard for yourself." What the narrator sees and hears teaches her about the cost of this supposedly simple life. The food-laden table, rolling pastures dotted with sheep and cattle, and the half-tame winding river all come at the cost of back-breaking labor and human individuality. The intrusion of death itself provides an excuse for no more than a day's vacation from the misery of routine.



Finally, Porter's take on the ugly American is convincingly rendered in "The Leaning Tower," where an American dilattante visits Berlin on a whim just prior to World War II. His bumbling efforts at art are matched by his bumbling efforts to socialize with the wary German, British, and Polish men living in his boarding house. This world-in-a-house sets the scene for an epiphany on the part of the American, whose clumsy naivete makes him not charming, but dangerous in a time of complex international tensions.



Other reads of the summer so far: The View from the Seventh Layer by Kevin Brockmeier, one of my current favorites. His is the freshest, oddest voice out there (by out there, I mean in mainstream publishing). This collection is strange and beautiful, and often I finished the stories sighing, "Ahhh." My favorite is "The Lives of the Philosophers."



A flatter, more self-conscious attempt at strangeness is An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England. Clearly this author took to heart the oft-stated advice to grab the reader (or editor) in the first line. Hence the title. The premise of book is diverting enough: A young man accidentally burns down Emily Dickinson's home, thus becoming a hero to disgruntled citizens who decry the celebrity of authorship in this country. The humor of the situation wears thin after awhile, and the narrator is too guileless to be believed for long. However, near the middle of the book a thoughtful discussion about the meaning of story nudges the reader to perhaps see this narrative as metafiction, but cues like this one are not consistently provided in the book. All in all, a fun but light read.



Very funny, but not light at all is Dave Sedaris's When You are Engulfed in Flames. I snorted all the way through this book, even though I'd read many of the essays before in the New Yorker. One not-so-humorous essay, "The Man in the Hut," made me uneasy. Not because of the hut man's alleged crimes, but because of Sedaris's ostracism of a clearly incapacitated person. Even so, Sedaris's impulse is completely human and understandable, if not laudable, which is what often makes his writing so complex, honest, and cringeworthy. My favorite essay was "The Smoking Section."

After reading McCullers's Reflections in a Golden Eye, I decided to take on another Southern work that is more likely to stick to my ribs--Faulkner's Sartoris. Usually, I love McCullers's work, because she, unlike many famed Southern writers, often wins that game of chicken with sentimentality. Here, however, she fell into the potboiler trap. The book is sensational. Aside from a few wonderful, canny observations and descriptions, it really isn't her best work in terms of character development or plot.

I've just begun Sartoris, not the longest book on my list of summer reads, but Faulkner's prose is so dense I'll need help just to hold the thing close enough to my eyes to read it. I'll still be reading it a month from now, but there are much worse ways to pass the dog days.

The Challenge

My officemate slapped a list on my desk about three weeks ago. The heading was "The Challenge," and below that was a list of all the books that have ever won the Pulitzer prize in fiction. Our job, she said, was to read all of them.



Then, as she looked at the list, she realized she would have to read Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. She declared she simply couldn't make herself deal with him. He's currently much out of favor in the academy, owing to his sexism, cardboard cutout female characters, etc., etc., etc. I, for one, find his work quite stimulating despite his shortcomings, but since I cannot bear Annie Proulx's precious characters, we then allowed as how each of us could elect to omit ONE selection. Note, however, that in order to count Updike's Rabbit is Rich, we have to read the entire trilogy. Another thing: books on CD or audiotape are not permitted.

Here is what I have already read:

The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (who hasn't?)
The Optimist's Daughter, Eudora Welty
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry
Beloved, Toni Morrison (what happened to her?)
Breathing Lessons, Anne Tyler
A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields (an Indiana connection here)
The Hours, Michael Cunningham (in my top ten list)
Empire Falls, Richard Russo
Middlesex, Jeffry Eugenides
The Road, Cormac McCarthy



I just finished McCarthy's The Road, an excellent but grim book that has made me exceptionally grateful that spring is only a month away. Two nights ago, I picked up Styron's Angle of Repose. I've read perhaps twenty pages and it is excellent so far, a quality distinctly absent from some of the selections on this list. Despite the trendy choices the esteemed committee has made in the past, it's a great list to chew through, though I suppose this contest ranks right up there with my current mania for knitting as an exercise in futility. Perhaps it is self-indulgent and pointless in the long run; there are many great books and films written today, and sweaters in every color are available for fifty bucks or less right now at Macy's. But it's winter time, and even though the writers' strike is ended, there is nothing on television (there never really was), and these pasttimes keep me from mischief.

Hold Up

The wailing and gnashing of teeth accompanying Caitlin Flanagan’s To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing the Inner Housewife, was completely lost on me until after I read it, perhaps because I am too busy working and raising children to pay too much attention to the social critics. Even so, I had read many essays in this collection of loosely connected vignettes beforehand in Atlantic Monthly and the New Yorker. Because of her brilliant defense of Martha Stewart (even though she finds the domestic icon personally unappealing) and her sense of humor, I became interested in her work, even if her perch of privilege prevents her from seeing how the issues affect those of us toiling far below.
The book, which is an attempt to vindicate the ‘50s housewife (and she correctly makes a distinction between the old-fashioned housewife and today’s stay-at-home-mom) infuriates many feminists who insist to themselves and others that working outside of the home is inherently fulfilling, that it poses no threat to the harmony and order of a house that is properly run (i.e. everyone in the house is fully evolved and chores are de-genderized), and that children of such mothers suffer no deprivation of any kind, which as most working mothers know, is flat bunk.
Of course, the problem is that both sides, as they are presented on the public stage today, are represented by the privileged and the well-educated. Unlike Flanagan and her detractors, millions of women have to work without the benefit of quality, dependable in-home care, and we know, without a doubt, that this prevents us from being the parents, wives, friends, daughters, and selves we could be. A daycare means we have to leave work early and inconveniently to pick up a sick child. It means that every few months new employees hired in the ever changing world of a daycare facility will be caring for our children, and we have no idea who these people are. It means less than nutritious food and less interaction with adults. Most women, unlike Flanagan and her detractors, do not have the luxury of working jobs that truly utilize their best skills or interests in any meaningful way. Few women grow up dreaming of a job in the food service industry, yet there they are in every restaurant, working hard to make quick cash, which is necessary given their lifestyles. Many simply sell desired services—the ability to memorize an order or deliver food with a smile, the willingness to type someone else’s letters and then sign his name to them—to a company that couldn’t care less what their employees' real talents are. And these women do this to finance not swimming pools and Solstices, but braces, mortgages well below the national average, second-hand minivans, and maybe, if they’re lucky, an inexpensive hobby that does utilize some of our talents.
My point is that Flanagan and her opponents are fighting a battle that has little to do with the rest of us. The Women’s Rights Movement, as it is presented in the media today has left us behind for the most part. Strides have been made, particularly for the wealthy and the educated—the very ones who currently have time to banter semantics on television and the Internet. But what hasn’t been addressed is the fact that there are millions of cesspool organizations where women still go to work early, off the clock, to wash the boss’s coffee cups from the day before, or where they are spanked if they don’t sell enough product; where they are unable, because of their family and work commitments, to get an education because a university advisor archly tells them that “One cannot get a graduate degree here by taking night classes.”
As for Flanagan, she does attempt to tackle a dilemma many feminists consider solved and dispatched long ago, and that is the longing many working women and stay-at-home moms have for domesticity, solitude, and a well-ordered, working home life, even if we don’t know how to make that happen. She claims some feminists threw out the baby with the bath water when they rejected and trivialized the ‘50s housewife, who, in fact, had a far deeper wisdom and sense of self than we ever suspected. I believe Flanagan may be right about this. I, too, suspect that today’s sexless marriage is a product of a screwy sense of priorities that my never-divorced grandmother would have found laughable. I very much believe in the sanctity and power of the dinner table and do my best to make this happen nearly every night. And yet I consider myself a feminist—a woman who believes I have the same right to political and financial power as any man walking.
So while Flanagan’s message is not difficult for me as a feminist to swallow, I do find her work frothy and facile. She never really addresses the necessity of passing on housekeeping customs from one generation to the next (which is the real reason I am able to provide for and insist on a sit-down dinner every night). She glides over the difficult issues so quickly that her sleight of hand bewitches the reader, renders her incapable of remembering that the ‘50s housewife was but a blip on the screen of history. The multitudes of women before (even during) that time were living hand to mouth existences in factories, sweatshops, other farmers’ tomato fields, their own farms, etc., and they certainly had no time or energy for philosophical issues such as mother’s guilt. I firmly believe Flanagan tries to assuage both working and stay-at-home mothers in her book (as opposed to the critics who deliberately misread the last chapter), but her tools are too paltry and class-blind to be all that convincing. Instead she could have shown us the centuries of women who rose at four and fell into bed at nine every night after a day of unceasing, back aching, but necessary work. These were working mothers whose children, as soon as they were old enough to count, became employees—either of the family farm or someone else’s business (think chimney sweep or mine worker). Flanagan would have gone a long way toward relieving our angst—genuine as it is, considering the number of hours many of us work away from the home each day--had she shown us how much luckier, healthier, and happier all of our children are today by comparison.
The self-described feminists who oppose her would do well to turn their sights on the work yet to be done for the working poor and middle class women in this country. Their finger-pointing and shouting is part of another class-blind argument that insists on the inherently ennobling nature of employment and decries the evils of traditional marriage—an institution designed as much to protect the interests of women and their children as men’s. Can they really claim, without a clutch of the heart, to have made great strides when they see the statistics revealing the vast number of single mothers out there? When they know what sort of financial and personal fate awaits most of these women as they struggle to hold down two minimum-wage jobs with no insurance? Surely the finer points of this debate (Is Flanagan a hypocrite? Does she drive her readers crazy?) can wait until a more leisurely hour, when, top-down, all women (their children and their men) have access to the fruits of the Women’s Rights Movement. Hold up, sisters, and take look around.

Shamefaced

My cheeks are actually burning as I type this--July to November is an inexcusably long time to avoid one's own creation. To my credit, I have been very busy with classes this semester, busier than usual, it seems. And now the holidays loom ominously in the not so distant distance.
Much has happened since late summer. We have a new driveway and an actual sidewalk that leads from said driveway to the front porch. Imagine that! We've tilled two enormous flowerbeds in the front yard (which will remain unplanted until I have energy and money enough to address the problem next spring). I have graded hundreds of pages and re-read Dante's Divine Comedy as well as Milton's Paradise Lost for my honors classes. My daughter had her nose broken during basketball practice just last week and must wear a scary face guard for the next month (during games and practice only).
My hair is longer.
In contrast to all this activity, I barely managed--with the hair-growing and all--to get through even the simplest magazine article. That article was Anthony Lane's review of the Incredibles, which I read just this morning over my cup of tea. Mr. Lane is, in fact, my cup of tea. My husband is on notice--if this lovely Brit ever shows up at the school, for instance, or my favorite restaurant--if he happens to be pumping gas at the local Village Pantry--I reserve the right to drop all pretense of wifehood, motherhood, and teacherhood to run off with him to the Bahamas--or New York. I don't care. Anyhow, I did make time for his review, which was, as always, precisely modulated to suit the film, and based on it, I will make time to see the Incredibles this holiday season.
Books have been out of the question until this week, when I picked up Grendel, which I have, by turns, hated and admired. Some of it, the flights of philosophy offered by the dragon and Grendel himself, are simply unreadable. Other sections offer a wonderful elaboration, in contemporary terms, of the beautiful old legend of Beowulf. All of it is perfectly suited to bedtime, wind-down reading. It has not once failed to send me successfully off to sleep--which is not to say it's boring. It is, instead, meaty and satisfying to a frazzled mind.
That, I must report, is the sum of this autumn's reading. As Grendel feels shame for his sorry state, I'm ashamed of my shortcomings as well and should perhaps resolve to take it out on my students by becoming a holy terror in the classroom.

July 29

      How I feel about my daughter getting her driver's license:

1. Thank the Baby Jesus! No more paper grading in a cold car, waiting on yet another self-important coach.  
2. Omigod, is she really old enough?
3. Omigod, am I old enough?
4. Think of what I'll do with all those extra minutes.
5. What the hell am I going to do with all those extra minutes?

    Here's what I did the night she drove away for the first time on her own:

1. Visited my parents.
2. Drank two glasses of very good homemade wine.
3. Cried--for the first time in two years--on my husband's shoulder.