The House of Mirth

Wharton, Edith.  The House of Mirth.  New York: Bantam Books, 1986.

I have tried hard — but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person.  I can hardly be said to have an independent existence.  I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.  What can one do when one finds that one only fits into one hole?

- Lily Bart in Wharton’s The House of Mirth

*~*~*

Edith Wharton‘s The House of Mirth  is both a painful and beautiful read.  Originally published in 1905, the novel describes the plight of Lily Bart, a New York socialite with a good name to uphold but little money with which to do so.  Invitations into New York’s most prominent households depend upon one’s ability to maintain a current, fashionable wardrobe and one’s willingness to lose money at the host’s bridge tables.  Thus Lily, who lives with her aunt and receives only a small, irregular stipend, finds herself continually in debt for the purpose of remaining both popular and presentable.  The only respectable means of escaping her debt lies in marriage to a wealthy man — and at 29, Lily realizes she needs to act quickly.

Wharton presents Lily’s suitors comically at first.  The incredibly wealthy Percy Gryce is almost too shy to speak with Lily until she feigns interest in his collection of old books.  Yet Lily’s forced enthusiasm is short-lived, for while Gryce refrains from both gambling and smoking on religious grounds, Lily cannot rouse herself from bed early enough to accompany him to church.  The Jewish investor and social climber Mr. Rosedale repeatedly expresses interest in Lily, yet his over-familiarity and lack of social grace repulse her.  The married George Dorset would willingly leave his wife for Lily, and the brazen Gus Trenor would gladly take Lily as his mistress, but, despite the fact that women like Carrie Fisher and Bertha Dorset carry on fairly open affairs throughout the novel, Lily, whose relative penury renders her more vulnerable than her wealthier female friends, finds such options dangerous and unsavory.

The tragedy of the novel, Greek in its proportions, is that Lily becomes the scapegoat of the very people she longs to please. Lily’s planned late-night visit with Judy Trenor instead becomes a shouting match with Gus, who practically demands sex in exchange for the money Lily had previously taken from him, naively believing that he had been investing her money wisely and delivering the dividends.  Later, on a European cruise, Bertha Dorset publicly accuses Lily of having an affair with George and throws Lily off the Dorset boat.  News of the two scandals reaches Lily’s aunt in New York, who promptly rewrites her will and dies, leaving Lily just enough to repay her debt to Trenor.  Lily resorts to working for a living, first as a social secretary to an disreputable Westerner, and later as a hat maker.  Her old friends refuse to acknowledge her, and she is left to her own devices, limited as they are by an upbringing and education that focused on poise and grace rather than on utilitarian skills.

Wharton’s inclusion of Lily’s male counterpart, Lawrence Seldon, heightens the tragedy by revealing opportunities from which Lily could benefit but may not pursue simply because she is a woman.  Lawrence must work for a living as well, but, as a man, he was permitted to study law and become a lawyer.  He lives independently in his own apartment, and when he invites Lily over unaccompanied, the critical glares of those who see her exiting the building are never cast upon him.  Selden travels through France freely and alone, while Lily must seek refuge with cousins when Bertha Dorset revokes her hospitality.  Lily’s rashness throughout the novel — her decision to snub Gryce in favor of a walk with Selden, her impulsive dress-buying, the impromptu cruise — often gets her in trouble, but this same trait simultaneously illuminates the energetic, spontaneous, witty part of Lily that longs to be unbridled, to enjoy the independence that Selden takes for granted.  Lily at one point laments, “I wasn’t meant to be good!”  However, more accurately, Lily wasn’t meant to be an early 20th-century woman — protected by relatives, monitored by men, watched and whispered about, always clinging to an appearance of virtue (unless, of course, one had the money to silence the talk), and perpetually at the mercy of baseless gossip and upper-class whims.  Lawrence’s education and profession, available only to men, allow him to exist somewhat outside of the social scene that dominates and eventually destroys Lily.

Lily never marries, as her ruined reputation renders her untouchable among the elite.  Selden, her kindred spirit and confidante, finds the courage to defy convention and profess his love for Lily too late, as Wharton thwarts the unrealized love with a frustrating yet powerful ending in the vein of Romeo and Juliet.  The last chapters of The House of Mirth, which contain Lily’s reflections on her fall, her pride, and true happiness, constitute a poignant must-read, while the novel as a whole functions as an important and insightful commentary on the historical status of women.

The Age of American Unreason

Jacoby, Susan.  The Age of American Unreason.  New York: Vintage Books, 2009.

Reading good books [. . .] does little to improve reading skills — certainly not after the age of seven or eight — but it does expand the depth and range of the reader’s knowledge and imagination in just about every area of conceivable interest to human beings.  When Anna Karenina throws herself in front of the train, the reader is left with an endless series of questions about the nature of betrayal, the sexual double standard, the compromises of marriage, parental duty versus personal fulfillment, family loyalty, religion in nineteenth-century Russia — the great and the quotidian dilemmas of life in every era and the red meat of intellectual discourse.

- Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

*~*~*

Several weeks ago, I parked myself in front of my television for my daily intake of current events while I drank my morning coffee.  CNN’s morning anchor was interviewing the lead singer and guitarist of a band I had never heard, and as I listened to the 50-year-old singer describe her impossible love for her much younger guitarist, I waited for the connection to the “real” news – that they were, perhaps, raising money for flood victims in Pakistan or for AIDS medication for Africans.  Alas, I soon came to realize that pop promotion had usurped the place of real world occurrences, as a mini-concert replaced any news of brewing hurricanes and upcoming elections. 

Susan Jacoby‘s The Age of American Unreason discusses the American culture of anti-intellectualism that has permitted the above-mentioned conflation of entertainment, pop culture, personal testimony and opinion to replace straight information and true culture — literature, music, fine arts — over the course of the last century.  It is not unusual for Anderson Cooper to speak of Supreme Court rulings and Lindsay Lohan over the course of a single broadcast, nor is it unlikely that viewers will be more familiar with Lohan’s legal troubles than with a recent ruling that allows corporations to make unlimited contributions to political campaigns as a form of free speech under the first amendment.  Jacoby’s purpose in writing, however, is not simply to chastise Americans for our diminished attention spans and passive absorption of infotainment, but to detail the development of the pervasive cultural force that too often prompts us to distrust the educated, cater to the emotional, and discount fact as political distortion.

Americans have long had a contentious relationship with education and the educated.  Indeed, we revere the self-made man, the autodidacts Ben Franklin and Abraham Lincoln, the college drop-outs turned billionaires Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.  Americans strive to send their children to college while simultaneously glorifying those without degrees.  Jacoby illustrates in great detail how this phenomenon is partially the result of early twentieth-century intellectuals’ penchant for Marxism, which public opinion conflated with Soviet Communism and Stalinism, particularly during the McCarthy era.  That some educated people supported Marxism as a philosophy is different than intellectuals wholeheartedly supporting a Stalinist world order, yet the intellectual-Communist-anti-American conflation of the 1930s and ’50s was born and persists, as we saw in the 2008 presidential election, during which Sarah Palin and her fellow conservatives branded Columbia- and Harvard-educated Barack Obama a “socialist” for advocating progressive taxation.  Thus to be uneducated is seen as somehow more genuine, less frightening, and the American voters have been more willing to trust the verbally bumbling George W. Bush than they have more educated politicians with the experience and capacity for nuanced thought required for leadership, diplomacy, and forming public policy.

Another factor fueling American anti-intellectualism is religion, particularly fundamentalist Christianity, whose followers espouse a literal interpretation of the Bible that forces the faithful to discount any science, logic, or facts that might challenge their literalist reading and thereby endanger their salvation.  This fundamentalist resistance to reason has rendered the United States the only developed nation in the world in which evolution and climate change remain matters of heated debate, as what Jacoby terms “junk thought” has achieved equal status with scientific evidence and study.  Yet while the political and religious right have employed junk science to further their refutations of carbon dating and global warming, left wingers are, in this instance, equally guilty of dumbing down scientific discourse.  As Jacoby concisely states, “Since the late sixties, there has been a growing acceptance of social and psychological theories in which great weight is accorded the passionate emotional convictions of believers.  In this realm of emotion, absolute value is placed on personal testimony based on personal experience.”  Personal belief is thus elevated to the level of objective research, and something becomes “true” simply because one “feels” it to be true.  Whether such conviction stems from personal experience or literalist religion, the result is a subjective, arguable “truth” that can be manipulated for political or personal gain while facts and hard science are forgotten.

An additional — and, to me, the most deplorable — force driving anti-intellectualism in this country is Americans’ failure to read.  I chose the epigraph for this review carefully and with purpose, for in it Jacoby powerfully illustrates that reading rises above mere entertainment.  Reading — reading literature in particular — exposes readers to history, to opposing points of view, to ambiguity, to the traumas and turmoils of humankind.  Reading and analyzing literature requires critical thinking, promotes discussion, and teaches readers to construct well-supported arguments based on textual evidence.  Reading is both intellectually demanding and personally enriching.   Unfortunately, the advent of television in the 1950s and video games in the 1980s and ’90s spurred a decline in both reading and the conversation that often accompanies the exposure to new ideas through reading.  Our educational system, which ought to encourage students to read, only further contributes to the decline in that it mandates reading as part of a student’s hated homework regimen to the point where homework has become, in Jacoby’s words, the “enemy of reading for pleasure.”  Reading is now something to be dreaded and avoided rather than sought and experienced and loved.  Our university English departments, once bastions of culture, now struggle to defend their existence, remaking themselves into composition programs that perform the utilitarian service of teaching students in other majors how to construct a thesis statement, cite sources and use the library.  A nation that does not read knows itself but little, lazily relying on other media and individuals — television networks, pastors, politicians — to rewrite its history and define its beliefs.

Jacoby’s arguments are timely, well-researched, and convincing; nonetheless, if her purpose is to ignite fervor in readers in need of an intellectual conversion, her abrasive tone at times works against her.  Referring to all religion as “superstition,” for example, will immediately alienate a religious reader who may otherwise have been open to arguments against biblical literalism.  Jacoby disparages Americans’ unwillingness to expose themselves to ideas differing from their own while simultaneously denigrating faiths she does not share and the very people she is trying to convince.  Similarly, when Jacoby speaks of the Soviet Union’s censorship of music and poetry as an agent of intellectual expansion (Jacoby writes that the Soviets she encountered while living abroad in the ’60s demonstrated a greater appreciation of the arts because their exposure to such was limited and criminalized), she scolds Americans for enjoying too much freedom in an oddly anti-democratic and off-putting passage.  Finally, despite the cover’s claim that the 2009 edition of The Age of American Unreason has been “revised and updated,” the editorial seams are painfully visible.  Jacoby periodically refers to the Bush administration in the present tense, as though Bush were still in office, while elsewhere referring to Obama as the current president.  It is maddening that such a carefully researched book is at times undone by its editorial deficiencies.  But, as Jacoby emphasizes repeatedly, not liking something, or disagreeing with something, is not an acceptable reason for failing to read and engage those ideas with the intellectual vigor this country so desperately needs.

In Cold Blood

Capote, Truman.  In Cold Blood.  New York: Vintage Books, 1965.

It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did.  Even inappropriate.  But I do.  I apologize.

- Perry Smith’s last words before his 1965 execution, quoted in Capote’s In Cold Blood

*~*~*

Sitting in the Atlanta airport, awaiting a flight to Salt Lake City, I watched the gate’s flat-screen TV broadcast the gruesome details of a crime committed three years ago in Connecticut.  Steven Hayes, whose trial began this week, and Joshua Komisarjevsky took hostage a family of four, drove the mother to the bank to withdraw $15,000, and then proceeded to beat the father, rape and strangle the mother, rape the 11-year-old daughter, and set the house on fire, killing all but the father.  I looked down at the book in my lap, Truman Capote‘s In Cold Blood, struck and saddened by the continued relevance of Capote’s nonfiction account of a family murdered in Kansas in 1959.

In Cold Blood details the lives and crimes of Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, who in 1965 were put to death by the state of Kansas for murdering four members of the Clutter family in the remote town of Holcomb.  Informed by a cellmate that Mr. Clutter kept a safe in his home, parolees Perry and Dick drove from Kansas City to Holcomb in the middle of the night, tied up each member of the family, and shot each of them in the head with a shotgun.  Ironically, had the murderers bothered to make further inquiries about Mr. Clutter, they would have discovered that he was famous for never carrying cash and paid all of his expenses by check.  Thus there was no safe found in the home, and the killers headed to Mexico with less than $50 in loot, a pair of binoculars, and an old radio from the Clutter ranch.

What lends In Cold Blood more depth than an episode of Law and Order, however, is Capote’s efforts to understand how the criminal mind is formed, particularly with regard to Perry Smith.  Perry was one of four children born to a white father and a Cherokee mother.  His parents divorced when he was young; his mother became an alcoholic, while his father remained emotionally and often physically absent, content to leave his children in state custody when their mother could no longer care for them.  Two of Perry’s siblings went on to commit suicide.  A mixed-race child in an intolerant America, a chronic bed wetter from a dysfunctional family, Perry barely completed the third grade and maintained no close friendships.  A motorcycle accident that maimed his legs inspired him to tone his upper body until it was disproportionately large; however, despite his efforts at compensation, he remained embarrassed and uncomfortable in his own skin.  Thus, while shooting four strangers at point-blank range is never justifiable, Capote aptly conveys the factors — the abuse, the neglect, the loneliness — that may lead one to desire to annihilate the world.  In so doing, Capote locates what scraps of decency remain in the shooter — Perry’s unwillingness to allow Dick to rape 16-year-old Nancy Clutter, for example — and paints a portrait of a killer that is both terrifying and eerily sympathetic.

And yet, even though Perry pulled the trigger, Dick Hickock scares me the most.  This charismatic, personable pedophile and would-be rapist came from a respectable family.  His parents, though far from affluent, provided Dick with a comfortable life.  He married young, had several children, got into debt.  He passed bad checks as a means of maintaining his lifestyle without caring that the cheated vendors would later demand payment from his parents, even after his father was diagnosed with cancer.  Dick recruited Perry for the crime in Holcomb, pretending to be his friend, egging on the unstable, eager-to-please ex-con with repeated references to “no witnesses.”  Dick was all talk when it came to killing people, but he was enough of a sociopath to inspire others to do his killing for him.  He was manipulative but charming; he could tell a good joke, could pass as normal.  Whereas Perry both behaved and appeared creepy, Dick was the average guy down the street, the criminal in plain sight, thus rendering him far more dangerous.

Try as he might, though, Capote never solves the nature vs. nurture riddle.  Despite leading vastly disparate lives and stemming from completely different families, Dick and Perry joined forces for the same crime, wound up in the same prison, and were executed by hanging on the same night.  Perhaps better parenting and education may have saved Perry, though parental love and a high school diploma clearly had no positive impact on Dick.  And while one criminal proves sympathetic while the other does not, the Clutters are nonetheless dead, their murders nonetheless unforgivable.  50 years later, as we view the mugshots of Hayes and Komisarjevsky on the news, wondering how two human beings could discuss, conspire, and agree to commit such a heinous crime, we find ourselves in Capote’s shoes, longing to decipher human evil, only to find that the humanity of a killer renders the evil all the more baffling.

Going Rogue

Palin, Sarah.  Going Rogue: An American Life.  New York: HarperCollins, 2009.

I told reporters what I still believe today: government experience doesn’t necessarily count for much.

- Sarah Palin in Going Rogue

*~*~*

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin exploded onto the national political scene in August of 2008 when Senator John McCain selected her as his running mate on the Republican ticket.  She was pretty, folksy, and, importantly, a woman.   Yet she was also no stranger to controversy, as her pregnant teenage daughter and penchant for inventing words and speaking in nonsensical non-sentences kept the McCain campaign on the defensive.  Going Rogue is Palin’s attempt to set the record straight, to explain her career, the 2008 campaign, and her political vision for the future in her own words (or her ghost writer’s) rather than in soundbites edited to tarnish her image by what she deems the liberal mainstream media.

The writing is actually quite engaging.  A ghost writer’s more eloquent constructions dominate the text — “We must abandon the false dichotomy that says you can’t be pro-environment and pro-development” — but there are enough unmistakable Palinisms to evidence that this is her book — “we took our broke butts down to the Palmer Courthouse and lassoed a magistrate to pronounce us man and wife.”  And, yes, she even humors readers with a single use of “mavericky.” 

I found the earlier chapters — more biographical, less political — easier to stomach.  Born in Sandpoint, Idaho, Palin and her family relocated to Alaska when Palin was a child.  Once in the largest state in the union, in which travel by small plane is often more convenient than driving, in which hunting for survival remains an important part of life in remote villages, Palin excelled in high school basketball, found her faith, and met her husband, Todd.  After attending college in Hawaii and receiving a degree in journalism from the University of Idaho, Palin returned to Alaska to be a wife, mother, fisherman and part-time sports anchor.

Palin’s political ambitions started small.  She was elected to the Wasilla city council and was later elected mayor.  During her tenure in Wasilla government, Palin consistently advocated limited government intervention in the lives of private citizens.  She supported sales taxes rather than property taxes, thus taxing consumption rather than ownership, advocated voluntary annexation of neighborhoods into the city, and kept the city’s budget in check.  After unsuccessfully running for lieutenant governor, she was appointed commissioner of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, at which point she witnessed the abuses — bribery, unresolved conflicts of interest between government officials and oil companies — occurring within her own party.  As numerous Alaska Republicans came under federal indictment, Palin was elected governor in 2006.  She vowed to hold her administration to ethical standards previous administrations had ignored, thus raising the ire of her own party and later earning her the title of maverick.

Although Palin’s account of her time in Alaska politics is one-sided, I believe she was good for her state.  Federal indictments prove that corruption within her predecessor’s administration and within the state legislature was rampant, and people she knew in those days who now speak out against her include incompetent staffers she fired and a sleazy ex-brother-in-law.  She clearly understands her state’s history, geography, culture, natural resource potential and independent spirit — which is exactly why she should stay there.

The nationalized Palin, the vice presidential candidate we encountered during the campaign, was inarticulate, inexperienced, and irritating.  The McCain campaign deliberately kept her away from the press in order to avoid her rambling pseudo-statements from becoming headline news and fodder for SNL’s Tina Fey, who at times simply repeated Palin’s statements verbatim before a laughing audience rather than writing parody.  Yet at no time does Going Rogue admit mistakes.  Indeed, Palin inscribes the few moments that verge on admission — Palin acknowledges she campaigned less than passionately for the lieutenant governor position and thinks she may have hidden her last pregnancy from her constituents for too long — within Providence, stating that whatever she has done, whatever her failures, they are simply part of God’s larger plan for her.  Her faith may be genuine, but it is also convenient, for in subscribing her inaction and poor choices to the divine, she simultaneously sidesteps personal responsibility.

What Palin does not delegate to Providence she blames on McCain staffers, the vague, unidentified “headquarters” and “political machine.”  The one villain Palin does identify is McCain’s campaign manager Steve Schmidt, whom Palin blames for neglecting to shift the campaign’s message from national security to the economy; disallowing her to give a concession speech on election night; telling her what to say, wear, and eat; not permitting her to jog; and swearing in front of her daughter.  The $100K+ spent on her high-end wardrobe was the campaign’s doing, not hers, naturally.  The campaign forbade Palin from discussing Obama’s connections with “domestic terrorist” William Ayers, the controversial Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and ACORN not because the public saw them for the crackpot conspiracy theories they were, but because the campaign was poorly managed.  Going Rogue becomes increasingly self-righteous at this point, as Palin proceeds to assert once again that Alaska’s proximity to Russia qualifies as foreign policy experience, equates being interviewed by newspapers with reading them, and compares the hacking of her email account to Watergate.

But no one can compare to Going Rogue‘s arch-villain, that despised liberal pundit Katie Couric.  Palin repeatedly indicates that she was insulted to be interviewed by a news anchor with such low ratings.  She also accuses Couric of posing “repetitive, biased” questions and editing the interviews to highlight Palin’s weaknesses and worst moments.  Indeed, Palin spends much of the latter half of the book portraying herself as a victim of a liberal media behemoth, never acknowledging that the interviews conveyed weaknesses because she had them, or that her inability to construct an intelligible answer may have prompted the repetitive questions.  The election and post-election sections of the book largely constitute a series of blame games; Palin wanted to interact with the media and with everyday Americans more, but “headquarters” wouldn’t allow it and punished her for speaking her mind, and when she did speak to reporters, they twisted her words and damaged her credibility and reputation.  Palin never admits fault or takes responsibility (If you don’t want to be filmed in front of someone decapitating turkeys, try not standing in front of someone who is decapitating turkeys rather than blaming the cameraman in your memoir).  In Palin’s defense, though, her decision to resign as governor in 2009 comes off as reasonable.  Bogged down in ethics complaints and lawsuits, which Alaska’s government requires the governor to dispute using his or her own funds, Palin and her staffers were personally going broke, while abundant Freedom of Information Act requests brought the government to a standstill and monopolized taxpayer funds.  Leaving office saved Palin and Alaska’s taxpayers a lot of money.

Going Rogue‘s final chapter is supposed to outline Palin’s vision for America’s future, but it primarily consists of Obama bashing and unsubstantiated claims (Cap and Trade will destroy farms!  The New Deal caused the Depression!).  Palin decries the escalating national debt yet supports U.S. involvement in two oversees wars and opposes raising taxes, despite the fact that 47% of Americans paid no income taxes for tax year 2009.  She states that she empathizes with people who cannot afford health care, yet she offers no solutions for fixing the broken system.  Like most Republicans in office today, Palin rants against Obama but offers no concrete alternatives to the Democrats’ proposals.

I don’t know what the future has in store for Sarah Palin, the hockey mom turned maverick politician turned Fox News talking head.  Perhaps she will become a permanent fixture of reality television (the Palin reality show, Sarah Palin’s Alaska, debuts November 14th on TLC), or perhaps she will challenge Obama in the 2012 election.  Either way, it’s Providence — and more material for Tina Fey.

When You are Engulfed in Flames

Sedaris, David.  When You Are Engulfed in Flames.  New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008.

*~*~*

When You Are Engulfed in Flames, David Sedaris‘s 2008 collection of stories/essays, is a quick read and a good laugh.  Sedaris’s recounting of how his partner, Hugh, has a tendency to walk at light speed when they are on vacation reminds me of family outings with my dad.  Sedaris’s efforts to develop an appreciation of fine art at a mall art print store in “Adult Figures Charging Toward a Concrete Toadstool” are hilarious, not to mention the story’s title brings back memories of my high school’s bad poetry contest.  And the bad Japanese translations of English phrases in “The Smoking Section,” including procedures for how to react “when you are engulfed in flames” in your hotel room, will induce laughter in anyone familiar with foreign travel.

Unfortunately, humor alone does not make a good book.  My overall assessment of When You Are Engulfed in Flames is that it tries too hard and too overtly to achieve a degree of depth unsupported by its stories.  “That’s Amore,” for example, spends the bulk of its 25 pages building Sedaris’s crude and ornery neighbor, Helen, into a caricature — she gives disgusting, unsolicited food to Sedaris and Hugh, demands help with household chores, and continually stops by uninvited.  The last page of the story, though, seeks to engage Sedaris’s sense of guilt for not helping Helen with one final chore, tries to humanize in one paragraph a character built on irony and hyperbole, attempting a transformation of the laughable into the lovable that ultimately proves unsuccessful in the limited space Sedaris allots to it.  Other attempts appear simply disingenuous; indeed, Sedaris’s assertion in “April in Paris” that he worried more about Hurricane Katrina’s impact on spiders than on humans caused me to groan.  After reading works by authors who successfully blend humor and critique, laughter and depth (i.e. Sherman Alexie and Augusten Burroughs), When You Are Engulfed in Flames sadly does not measure up.

Washington Square

James, Henry.  Washington Square.  New York: The Modern Library, 2002.

Don’t undervalue irony; it is often of great use.

- Dr. Austin Sloper in Henry James’s Washington Square

*~*~*

Henry James didn’t much like Washington Square when he initially published it in 1880.  A quarter century later, while compiling a volume of his fiction for republication, he opted to leave Washington Square out.  Though I subscribe to the school that believes an author is not necessarily the best judge of his or her own works, I find myself in agreement with James in this instance.

At its outset, the novel, set in early 19th-century New York, shows considerable promise as a tale of young lovers grappling with a father’s disapproval.  Morris Townsend, an attractive but unemployed young man recently returned from Europe, pursues the plain and altogether unremarkable Catherine Sloper, who has inherited $10,000 per year from her late mother and stands to inherit an additional $20,000 per year upon the death of her father, the widely respected physician Dr. Austin Sloper.  Dr. Sloper naturally opposes his daughter’s engagement to a man who has already squandered his own inheritance and lives on the meager income of his widowed sister, while Dr. Sloper’s flighty and mettlesome sister, Mrs. Penniman, promotes the match by serving as an unsolicited and rather unreliable intermediary between the two lovers. 

Washington Square is not a bad book, per se; rather, its insufficiency lies in its want of a sympathetic, admirable, or remotely likable character.  Morris proves to be the mercenary Dr. Sloper believed him to be all along, as he abandons Catherine when it becomes clear that her father will disinherit her if she becomes Morris’s wife.  Rather than comforting his daughter, though, Dr. Sloper derives a sadistic pleasure from his daughter’s pain.  Indeed, ”he rather enjoyed having to be so disagreeable” to his daughter during her engagement, and when his sister states, “It seems to make you very happy that your daughter’s affections have been trifled with,” the doctor’s response is one of cold triumph: “It does [. . .] for I had foretold it!  It’s a great pleasure to be in the right.”  Even Mrs. Penniman, who ought to serve as Catherine’s surrogate mother and confidante, exploits the drama of her niece’s situation for her own amusement, using Dr. Sloper’s objections to Morris as an excuse to arrange secret meetings with him in unfamiliar churches and neighborhoods.  When Catherine goes to meet with Morris, Mrs. Penniman feels disappointment not because her niece’s lover has left her jilted, but rather because she disapproves of the setting: “To visit one’s lover, with tears and reproaches at his own residence, was an image so agreeable to Mrs. Penniman’s mind that she felt a sort of aesthetic disappointment at its lacking, in this case, the harmonious accompaniments of a dark storm.”  The unceasingly ironic narrator mocks them all, but the humor does not disguise the fact that an attractive, lazy man seeks to take advantage of an innocent young woman while her bored and wealthy elders look upon her trials as entertainment.

I had hoped that Catherine would emerge an acceptable heroine.  Indeed, she does speak her mind with honesty and conviction at several points in the novel, prompting even her father to experience “a sudden sense of having underestimated his daughter.”  She also displays a more powerful control of her emotions than most young women in her situation could evince.  But, on the whole, Catherine is neither beautiful nor brave.  James frequently describes Catherine as healthy, large, and having a broad back, meaning, in addition to having a plain face and no special accomplishments to attract suitors or friends, she is unbecomingly plump.  Shy and largely submissive, she initially lacks the passion for Morris to defy her father but later cannot move past Morris to consider another suitor.  Catherine is astounding only in that she is so quintessentially average and frustrating in that she, along with the other three main characters, neither grows nor changes over the course of the novel.  More than twenty years later, Dr. Sloper’s wishes dictate from the grave, Morris and Mrs. Penniman continue to conspire, and Catherine is content to live out her life as a spinster doing needlework on her porch.  Though the writing throughout Washington Square is fluid and funny, the lack of a satisfactory hero or heroine and the stasis of plot and character render the novel as lackluster and disappointing as Catherine Sloper herself.

Thirteen Moons

Frazier, Charles.  Thirteen Moons.  New York: Random House, 2006.

She seemed full and complete.  Though the rational, unraptured part of me figured that no one, man or woman, gets to be full and complete ever.  We all go about burdened with the reality that we are the broken-off ends of true people.  It is the severe vengeance Creation takes on us for living.

- Will Cooper in Charles Frazier’s Thirteen Moons

*~*~*

Like Charles Frazier‘s previous best-selling novel, Cold Mountain, Thirteen Moons is a beautiful, enthralling novel embracing multiple genres, enveloping a tale of frustrated love in naturalism, history, and politics.  We first meet the novel’s hero, Will Cooper, as a 12-year-old orphan sold into indentured servitude at a frontier outpost by his aunt and uncle.  Will rides west alone, save the companionship of his horse, Waverly, along the way encountering the girl who will both fill and break his heart, Claire, and his nemesis, Featherstone.  Upon arriving at the store he must keep, Will meets Bear, the Cherokee who later adopts Will as his son.

I expect the Will-Claire-Featherstone love triangle has already captured the attention of filmmakers.  Will first meets Claire after winning her from Featherstone, her husband in name, at a late-night card game, only to have her stolen back that same night.  Will finds her again as a teenager, and together they indulge in a season of hormonal hedonism that eventually ends in a rather comical duel between Will and Featherstone.  But Jackson’s Indian Removal policy soon takes effect, and Claire, a mixed-blood, heads west to Indian Territory, while Will makes the tortured decision to stay behind and aid his adopted family, Bear and the Cherokee of Wayah.

The Cherokee of Thirteen Moons are refreshingly human.  Unlike the noble but destined-to-die Uncas and the savage Magua in The Last of the Mohicans, the inhabitants of Wayah live lives characterized by pastimes other than the shedding of tears and blood.  They hunt and farm.  They drink.  They throw bawdy parties that feature costumed caricatures of the English, French and Spanish with wooden heads and fake phalluses.  And, most importantly, they realize the need to innovate in order to ensure their survival and maintain control of their ancestral lands.  Bear recognizes the authority of paper deeds and private property in the white civilization enveloping his people and begins buying the land on which Wayah is built before Will arrives.  Will in turn uses the profits from the stores he acquires in his late teens to finance the purchase of additional tracts, thereby expanding Wayah’s holdings slowly, deliberately, and legally, eventually merging the land and its people into the one unassailable American institution: the corporation.  The Cherokee thus employ the whites’ own devices against them.  In addition, Will employs his skills as an autodidact lawyer to thwart the U.S. government’s many attempts to move the Wayah Cherokee westward.  Under the joint leadership of Bear and young Will, the tiny Indian empire grows, its vast square mileage dependent on a tenuous balance of loans, debts, trades, and the whim of the War Department.  Though less racy than the affair with Claire, the politics of Indian Removal dominate Thirteen Moons, as Frazier incorporates historical figures from Andrew Jackson (whom Will calls the Old Possum after forming the opinion that Jackson’s hair resembles a dead opossum) to Elias Boudinot to illustrate the callousness with which Indians were forced west and, in some cases, betrayed by their own wealthier advocates.

As Will ages and Eastern politicians, most of whom have never encountered an Indian, implement Removal, the exuberance of Will’s youth gives way to actuality, and, after years of chasing a woman who will not marry him and fighting for an Indian nation the whites in power would just as soon exterminate, the energetic hero of Thirteen Moons arrives at the unfortunate reality of his own limitations and moral flaws.  While Will suffers perennial guilt for sacrificing an Indian rebel to the U.S. military in exchange for Wayah’s continued existence, he views his ownership of slaves with unapologetic ambiguity.  As a Confederate colonel, Will leads his Cherokee soldiers into admittedly stupid skirmishes that cost lives and achieve nothing.  And, while constantly travelling in an effort to escape his heartbreak, Will allows his business interests to crumble, thus endangering the livelihood of the very community he worked so long to save.

As the years progress, the whites keep coming.  They arrive in never-ending waves.  The world Will sees as an old man only faintly resembles that of his youth, as the railroad and the logging and the immigration have transformed and broken and scarred the land.  After a lifetime of effort, the aged Will feels the weight of his own inefficacy, similar to though lesser than the feeling of loss and futility most 19th-century Indians must have felt after decades of broken treaties, renegotiations, Removal, and outright warfare.  Thirteen Moons concludes with an old man ritualizing his own powerlessness, firing bird shot at a train it will not penetrate or impede, feebly demanding attention without effecting change.  Will continues his fight for justice — ironically, weakly, but nonetheless noticeably — reminding us in short yet violent bursts of the human price of nation building.

Adam Bede

Eliot, George.  Adam Bede.  New York: Signet Classics, 2004.

Adam [. . .] had not outlived his sorrow — had not felt it slip from him as a temporary burden, and leave him the same man again.  Do any of us?  God forbid.  It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it — if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives, the same feeble sense of that Unknown towards which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness.  Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy. [. . .] Desire has chastened into submission, and we are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our grief in silence and act as if we were not suffering.

- from George Eliot’s Adam Bede

*~*~*

Though rife with insight into human folly and heartbreak, George Eliot‘s Adam Bede (originally published in 1859) gets off to a slow start.  Eliot sets her novel in the English village of Hayslope in 1799 and devotes the first 300+ pages of her novel to character development, presenting an expansive cast of characters in which everyone has his or her foil.  The meticulous and hardworking carpenter, Adam Bede, stands in stark contrast to the wealthy and flippant Arthur Donnithorne, who joins the army only to preoccupy himself until he can inherit his fortune from an elderly uncle.  The Methodist preacher and mill worker, Dinah, reaches out to those living the most dreary and desperate lives, while Mr. Irwin, the Anglican clergyman, enjoys a comfortable life and offers little religious guidance.  Mrs. Poyser, the garrulous yet dedicated dairy mistress, is the opposite of her beautiful yet vain niece, Hetty, who spends her nights modeling her jewelry in front of the mirror.  Adam loves Hetty; Hetty desires Arthur; Arthur longs to be liked by everyone.  Adam’s brother, Seth, loves Dinah; Dinah loves the Lord.  In the beginning, Adam Bede is a slow-moving story of laborious and often unrequited love.

Eliot reveals her penchant for drama in the latter part of the novel, where we see the extent to which Eliot understated Hetty and Arthur’s earlier involvement.  Hetty, now engaged to Adam, finds herself pregnant by Arthur, who is in Ireland receiving military training.  (No one notices the pregnancy, as Eliot frequently describes Hetty as pleasantly plump even before the pregnancy.)  Hetty sells her jewelry and burns through her savings in an effort to reach Arthur, only to discover that travel is more expensive and Arthur farther away than she had anticipated.  Arthur is a wealthy landlord; Hetty is an orphan and a peasant.  She lacks money and options, and all she can look forward to is shame.  Therefore, Hetty commits the crime she hoped would save her but which instead destroys the lives of those who love her — she commits infanticide, shaming the Poysers, and devastating Adam, and horrifying all of Hayslope. 

Adam Bede thus becomes a novel about healing and surviving.  While Hetty goes to prison, the Poysers remain on their farm and endure her humiliation.  Arthur, despite inheriting his uncle’s estate, enters a voluntary exile, ironically finding life safer in the army than among his own tenants.  Adam works, expands his house, and cares for his mother.  Time passes.  And through his pain Adam grows, emerging a wiser man capable of choosing a wiser love the second time around.  Adam Bede is a novel that every high school girl should read, for it teaches us that our youthful heartache has a purpose and that our pain transforms us into better people.

Yet the story’s more uncertain moral, if we can even call it that, centers on what constitutes a good Christian.  Everyone in the novel is a Christian in the vague sense of the word.  Hetty attends church every Sunday, though she absorbs none of what is said.  Mr. Irwin is amiable but apathetic, giving short sermons and saying little about God, even while speaking at Arthur’s coming-of-age party, a perfect opportunity to impress his young friend’s Christian duties upon him.  Only Dinah, the travelling preacher woman, the aberrant Methodist, embraces the true essence of Christianity, reading her Bible rather than having it read to her, visiting Hetty in prison while her family shuns her, and coaxing Hetty to confession through patient prayer.  Dinah chooses to live among the poor, for it is the poor and despondent who need her most.  And yet, ironically, this model Christian is hindered at the novel’s end when the Wesleyan Conference outlaws female preaching.  In Adam Bede, good clearly triumphs over evil in matters of the heart, but the novel’s spiritual tensions remain unresolved when patriarchal tradition trumps Dinah’s selfless and all-inclusive Christian love.  While the novel opens with Dinah’s sermon, it closes with her submission and silence.

Adam Bede is thus a bittersweet story, for it questions as it soothes.  While blatantly “bad” characters are punished (or punish themselves) in accordance with their crimes, the lives of the righteous and good are far from easy.  The difference — the comfort, I suppose — is that the good at least learn from their pain, and while they do not overcome it, they build on it, and prosper.

The Financial Lives of the Poets

Walter, Jess.  The Financial Lives of the Poets.  New York: HarperCollins, 2009.

[T]he truly stupid mistake was believing that when we fell, a net made of money could catch us.

- Matthew Prior in Jess Walter’s The Financial Lives of the Poets

*~*~*

Thanks to the layovers and delays endemic to modern air travel, I had the pleasure of reading Jess Walter‘s The Financial Lives of the Poets in nearly one sitting.  I found the novel off-putting at first; Walter’s propensity for composing lists felt disruptive rather than stylistic, and the novel’s sex-obsessed protagonist-narrator, Matthew Prior, diminished my remaining hope that men achieve emotional maturity as they age.  A few chapters in, however, I came to appreciate the novel as a commentary on life in the current economic recession.

At the novel’s outset, the Prior family — Matthew, his wife, Lisa, their two sons, and Matthew’s senile father — clings to a middle-class dream founded on car loans, mortgages, and home equity lines of credit.  After quitting his job as a newspaper reporter in order to found poetfolio.com, a site that blends poetry with financial advice, Matthew panics at the uncertainties of self-employment and returns to his old job, only to be laid off weeks later.  Realizing that he owes more on his Nissan than the car is worth, that his home is going into foreclosure, and that he can no longer afford private school tuition for his sons, the desperate Matthew determines that the only way to turn a quick profit in this economy is to become a drug dealer.  Thus The Financial Lives of the Poets traces the journey of a middle-aged, sleep-deprived, unemployed man who cashes in what remains of his 401(k) in an effort to procure large quantities of marijuana.

Hyperbolic as Matthew’s story is, the factors that drive his darkly humorous decisions ring uncomfortably true.  There is all too much reality in Matthew’s repeated efforts to figure out which company owns his mortgage and how to get in touch with an actual human being at that company.  Particularly insightful is Walter’s linking of financial and marital stability; as the Priors’ financial security declines, so, too, does the quality of their relationship, as Lisa uses Facebook and text messaging to reconnect with her former high school flame and heir to a successful family business.  His job loss and descent into bankruptcy reveal to Matthew how much of his middle-class happiness — his home, his car, his children’s education, his job, his retirement, his nuclear family — is grounded in money, and how the sudden loss of that money threatens to destroy everything he holds dear.  It is a lesson all too many have been forced to learn in recent years.

Within the satire, though, lies hope.  Ultimately, The Financial Lives of the Poets is a tale of humility, of learning to live with less, of valuing relationships and memories more than material items purchased through unsustainable debt.  It is a story of scaled-back dreams that, in a way, prove more satisfying than middle-class success.  Amidst all the unlikely plot devices and black comedy, Walter’s novel emerges as timely, teachable, and illuminating.

Stones into Schools

Mortenson, Greg.  Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  New York: Viking, 2009.

 Of the hundreds of soldiers I have spoken with during the past six years who have been deployed in Afghanistan, almost every one of them firmly believes that the best way to augment our security is by truly being of service to the Afghan people — and moreover, that the capacity to render this service meaningfully and well is predicated upon listening, understanding, and building relationships.  In this respect, the goal of enhancing our own security is best achieved by enhancing theirs.  And the most critical building block to accomplishing both is education.

- Greg Morstenson, Stones into Schools

*~*~*

Americans have far more to learn from the people of Afghanistan than we could ever hope to teach them.

- Greg Mortenson to Admiral Mike Mullen, Stones into Schools

*~*~*

Greg Mortenson‘s 2003 bestseller, Three Cups of Tea, chronicles how Mortenson’s failed attempt to climb K2 landed him, lost and hungry, in the Pakistani village of Korphe, whose inhabitants inspired him to not only promise to build them a school for boys and girls alike, but to actually fulfill that promise.  Mortenson thus evolved from a failed mountain climber into the head of the Central Asia Institute and champion of female literacy.  Stones into Schools provides the next chapter of the story, describing the CAI’s endeavor to build a school for Kirghiz children in one of the most remote parts of Afghanistan.

Mortenson’s mission, as Stones into Schools articulates more than once, is to promote female literacy and empowerment by building schools, establishing women’s centers, and paying teachers’ salaries in a land previously dominated by Islamic extremism.  As Mortenson argues, an educated population, particularly an educated female population, can help reduce infant mortality and women’s deaths in childbirth, contribute extra income to their families, and thwart the Taliban by opening the hearts and minds of the Afghan people to possibilities beyond the rule of “men with Kalashnikovs who help sustain the grotesque lie that flinging battery acid into the face of a girl who longs to study arithmetic is somehow in keeping with the teachings of the Koran.”  Mortenson, with the aid of his dedicated partners, Sarfraz Khan and Wakil Karimi, constructs schools in the most remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, areas in which traditional international aid never arrives, in hopes of improving lives while simultaneously undermining the extremists who have long held hostage the people they purport to serve and protect.

While charting the growing number of CAI schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Stones into Schools likewise describes the growth and maturation of the CAI itself.  In Three Cups of Tea, one CAI board member laments that the CAI was, essentially, Mortenson himself, and that if something ever were to happen to Mortenson, the CAI would cease to exist.  Fortunately, this situation has been rectified in the years since Three Cups of Tea was penned, as Mortenson has finally learned to delegate.  Sarfraz Khan spearheads the CAI’s operations in Pakistan, while Wakil Karimi builds relationships and schools throughout Afghanistan.  Supplies are purchased locally, transported by local drivers or yak trains, and the schools are approved and built by natives of the communities they will serve, communities that donate both their land and their labor to make these schools more personal and important than a gift of international aid could ever be.  Mortenson continues to struggle with his role as author and chief fundraiser (he would prefer to be on the ground), but he simultaneously recognizes the toll his incessant working and travelling has taken on his health and his family.  Indeed, he finds it necessary to apologize to his children in the book’s acknowledgements: “I’m sorry that I missed out on nearly half of your childhoods.  That reality is the most painful part of my work.”  Stones into Schools illustrates Mortenson’s process of learning to share this burden, as Sarfraz and Wakil spend up to nine months a year away from their families, reporting to Mortenson in Montana via satellite phone, asking for funds when necessary.

Stones into Schools may reiterate the three-cups-of-tea metaphor a bit too often for my taste, but it is easy to forgive Mortenson his literary foibles when faced with the tale of his courageous, if unlikely, fight for universal education.  Mortenson and his CAI colleagues fight the War on Terror one book, one schoolgirl, one school at a time, hoping to eventually erect a girls’ school in Mullah Omar’s home town as a powerful slap in the face to those who would deny women their right to read and learn.  I firmly believe Mortenson will win the Nobel Peace Prize someday.  After reading Stones into Schools, it is difficult to reach any other conclusion.