Raising criticisms, however loving or justified, about monumental achievements is embarrassing. About six months ago, for example, I asked a friend what she thought of Hilary Mantel's novel, Wolf Hall. I'd just bought the book, but I hadn't yet read it. "It's me," said my friend, feeling apparently that she had to apologize for not raving passionately about it. "I'm Tudor-ed out."
Having just finished the novel (no, it didn't take me six months to read; it took me six months to get around to reading it), I feel - like my friend - a teeny bit let down. And like my friend, I feel like I have to apologize. Wolf Hall is stunning; it dominated my life for the 48 hours it took me to read it. The novel every bit earns the adjective "consuming." Hilary Mantel's writing is so readable, and her organization of this massive tale so masterful, that any non-laudatory comment about Wolf Hall seems ungrateful. But - call me ungrateful - I was mildly unsatisfied at its end. If the problem is me, though, it's not because I'm Tudor-ed out. Like all proper Americans, I lack formal education in history.
But my sense of let-down wasn't merely a function of expectations raised to unfairly vertiginous heights. Wolf Hall let me down in respect of one reasonable expectation that Stephen Greenblatt elucidates in his NYRB review:
The historical novel . . . . offers the dream of full access, access to what went on behind closed doors, off the record, in private, when no one was listening or recording. The great realizations of this dream . . . provide a powerful hallucination of presence, the vivid sensation of lived life. They set the dead in motion and make them speak.
"Historical novels," Greenblatt adds, "generate a sense in the reader best summed up by exclamations like 'Yes, this is the way it must have been.'"
My sense of let-down with Wolf Hall goes exactly to Greenblatt's point: I kept thinking, It couldn't have been this way.
Yes, yes, I have already admitted that I have no formal history education. How the hell would I know what it must have been like? A valid objection, I agree. But the reason I kept getting jolted out of my suspension of disbelief was the dialogue. Without exception, the dialogue was relentlessly witty. Too often, dialogue seemed to be either a laugh, a set-up to a laugh, or a set-up to a set-up. For example, here is Thomas Cromwell speaking to his boss, Cardinal Wolsey:
The servants efface themselves, melting away towards the door. "What else would you like?" the cardinal says. "The sun to come out?" "So late? You tax my powers." "Dawn would do." The cardinal inclines his head to the servants. "I shall see to this request myself," he says gravely; and gravely they murmur, and withdraw.
(p. 19.) Here, in another example, is Cromwell speaking with his wife, Liz:
"You're sweeter to look at than the cardinal," he says. "That's the smallest compliment a woman ever received." "And I've been working on it all the way from Yorkshire."
(p. 35.) The only people who so consistently talk that way are in sit-coms. And even I know that they didn't have sit-coms in the court of Henry VIII.
And, at the risk of appearing really ungrateful, let me elaborate on my complaint by saying, the wit was clearly that of Hilary Mantel; hers is an admirable wit - one that entertains and enchants - but I often felt that the characters were deprived of individual voices. Is that his sister Kat, his wife Anne or his sister-in-law Johane quipping? Is that his nephew Richard, his clerk Rafe or his servant Christopher - or for that matter Kat, Anne or Johane - wise-cracking? To my ear, they all possess the same interchangeable humor. For instance:
"You'll make the magistrates' bench for sure . . . with your close study of the difference between a corpse and my brother." (Kat)
"Heaven direct me: boy or hedgehog?" (Liz)
The dialogue is, in fact, tremendously fun to read, and the moments were many when I was smiling or even laughing out loud. ("Tweet tweet," to those of you who have read the book, left me guffawing.)
Nonetheless, just as historical characters depicted in movies are always better looking than they'd been in life, the dialogue in Wolf Hall didn't strike me as 16th century speech "the way it must have been.'" Hilary Mantel may have "set the dead in motion and ma[d]e them speak," but she made them speak like the hippest, sexiest, funniest, most modern, Platonic ideal versions of themselves.
Anyone who takes a writing creative class these days is admonished to "show, don't tell," and the prescription has escaped the classroom and entered the market. An industry professional reviewing an early draft of my current novel, The Celebration Husband, noted that I was "telling" more than "showing."
But with all respect accorded to the industry professional, "show, don't tell" is more of an ideology than a precept of good writing. While in certain instances - particularly the presentation of exposition and other background material, the revelation of character traits, or an action scene - "showing" can be more effective than "telling," the foregoing is not absolutely true.
For instance, P.G. Wodehouse, one of the world's best selling authors, relies heavily on "telling" in all three instances. In Right Ho, Jeeves, after sighing about the "dashed difficult problem" of how to begin a story, Wodehouse commences with a recitation of Bertie Wooster's trip to Cannes with his Aunt Deliah and Cousin Angela - a classic instance of "telling" background details.
Nor does Wodehouse wait to let the reader figure out his characters. Thoughout the Jeeves novels, Wooster is telling you what they're like. In Thank You, Jeeves, Wooster explains away readers' questions about the presence of his friend, Chuffy, on the pier late at night by telling us that Chuffy is the kind of guy who stands beneath his beloved's window and, if she's on a yacht (as she is), well, then he'll go stand on the pier. No need for Chuffy to "show" us this side of himself.
Wodehouse even makes masterful use of the "telling" technique for action scenes. In Thank You, Jeeves, Jeeves narrates a brawl between two small boys that draws their parents in and eventually results in the breaking off a real-estate deal. Many other writers would have shown such a juicy squabble, but Wodehouse opts to alternate between showing and telling.
Wodehouse's style of alternating between showing and telling owes something to drawing room and musical comedies. In Auntie Mame, for example, the climactic horse race is depicted from the perspective of the crowd watching the race - told, not shown. Similarly, in Pygmalion, the culminating garden party, where Henry Higgins presents Eliza Doolittle to great acclaim and triumph, happens offstage - we hear the characters talk about it.
Of course, some of these theatrical choices were pragmatic. Running a horse race in a theater is obviously a non-starter. Staging a garden party requires many actors and increases costs.
But an underlying wisdom supports these choices as well. "Showing" leaves less room for the imagination than "telling." When - in the movie of Auntie Mame - we watch the horse race (not the spectators), we see how it happened; in the musical, we imagine other possibilities. The principle is no less applicable with books. When Jeeves narrates Gussie Finknottle's attempts - and failure - to reach a fancy dress ball in Right Ho, Jeeves, we imagine Gussie's comic plight; but when we see Gussie give a speech to a boy's school while drunk, we need not imagine anything: the scene is completely detailed.
Alternating between showing and telling invites the audience to engage its imagination and thereby deepens the audience member's experience of the story. Engaging the imagination encourages the suspension of disbelief and the immersion in the world the author has created. Audience members thus become more active participants in the story, as contrasted with their more passive counterparts being shown everything (as, for example, in a James Bond movie).
Active readers are desirable readers. Their imaginations engaged, they are unlikely to recommend that writer adhere mindlessly to an ideological motto.
I have read Tayeb Salih's novel, Season of Migration to the North, more times than any other non-children's book - four or five times by my last count. I first read it in college (it may constitute my only academic take-away from those years), and my ardor was instantaneous.
In a sense, my devotion to Season of Migration to the North is odd because, even now, my understanding of the story is limited. But from the beginning, I grasped that Season of Migration to the North was a book to be read when resiliency was needed, and that its author, Tayeb Salih, was a person of immense wisdom and deep understanding of human behavior and society. That I never met him (he died last year) is one of the few regrets of my life.
Season of Migration to the North recounts the story of a young man (unnamed) who returns from studying in London to his native Sudan, where he takes a job as a civil servant in the newly-independent country's Ministry of Education. On a trip to the remote village in which he was raised, he meets a newcomer to the village - Mustafa Sa'eed - who has a mysterious past.
Like the young narrator, Mustafa Sa'eed also studied in London and lived there for 30 years, a sojourn that culminated in tragedy and imprisonment. After his release from prison, Mustafa Sa'eed returns to Sudan, where he settles down to the life of a farmer and marries a local woman, Hosna. Confiding part of his backstory to the young narrator when they first meet, Mustafa Sa'eed soon dies and entrusts guardianship of his wife and sons to the young narrator.
Some years later an elderly man, Wad Rayyes, in the village decides that he wants to marry Hosna. The young narrator is called upon to act - by Wad Rayyes, who wants the narrator to convince Hosna to marry him; by Hosna, who wants the narrator to marry her so that she can be protected from suitors; by the narrator himself, who is in love with Hosna.
Only after unearthing a more comprehensive version of Mustafa Sa'eed backstory than had been originally disclosed is the young narrator able to act. The choice he makes is simultaneously inadequate to the demands of the situation and momentous, a polarity that Salih urges us to accept and embrace as implicit in the human condition.
Season of Migration to the North unfolds non-chronologically and impressionistically, allowing its story to emerge through juxtaposition of memories, conversations and scribbles. From Salih's expert (and concise - the novel is a mere 169 pages) use of this technique, a kind of magic results. The book is a page-turner and a prose poem, an analysis of all the major power dynamics of modern times (East/West, male/female, black/white, Christian/Muslim), as well as an affirmation of the human capacity to reduce such dynamics to irrelevancies. Symbolically reenacting the confrontation of cultures wrought by colonialism, Season also contains stunning depictions of the destructive potential in sexual passion between individuals. The novel additionally features some of the most haunting descriptions and quotable phrases I have read (in Denys Johnson-Davies' superb translation).
To this list of achievements, add another: Season's power is so visceral that it compels action. "[H]alfway between north and south . . . . unable to continue, unable to return," the novel's narrator rejects paralysis and embraces volition. (p. 167.) This reader has never been able to read the book without doing the same.
For this reason, Season of Migration to the North is indispensable. I have a copy with me anywhere I live, and I am confident that - given the life span - I will yet read it many more times.
Reviews of Lori Gottlieb's new book Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough, along with Gottlieb's original Atlantic article (on the book is based), miss an important opportunity for addressing a serious problem in American society.
In her Atlantic article, Gottlieb calls the problem one of the "most complicated, painful, and pervasive dilemmas many single women are forced to grapple with nowadays: Is it better to be alone, or to settle?"
In her review of Gottlieb's book in TheNew York Times Book Review, Amy Finnerty describes Gottlieb's restatement of the problem as follows:
Gottlieb makes a case that many women today end up alone because they hold men to insanely high standards. . . . She convinces us that we women are simply too fussy, entitled and downright delusional about our own worth in the mating marketplace. We overanalyze and seek undiluted sexual and intellectual fulfillment, thus setting men up for failure.
But both formulations of the problem miss the point. Gottlieb is closest to the real issue when, in her Atlantic article, she observes:
I've been told that the reason so many women end up alone is that we have too many choices. I think it's the opposite: we have no choice. If we could choose, we'd choose to be in a healthy marriage based on reciprocal passion and friendship. But the only choices on the table, it sometimes seems, are settle or risk being alone forever. That's not a whole lot of choice.
Sadly, Gottlieb doesn't expand upon this insight. Neither female pickiness nor a sense of being forced to choose between settling and solitary lives is the problem; these phenomena are side-effects of the real problem: American men aren't well-matched for America's post-feminist women.
The most serious failure of feminism was to ignore the fact that gender roles are relational. Men's and women's roles fit together like puzzle pieces (or like yin and yang). Radical alteration of one of the roles requires a similar level of change in the other role for the two roles to continue to be compatible. Feminists devoted extensive thought, theory and action to the cause of revising a woman's role; to the extent that the gave any thought to men's roles, however, they seem to have assumed that men would adjust.
Men have not adjusted. While women struggle under extraordinary social pressure to be educated and sociable, have careers and families, be sexy and mothers, be emotionally competent and financially wise, men grapple with the sense of being intimidated by women, of feeling inadequate and fearing they are a disappointment to the beloved women in their lives. In my experience, they deal with this complex of issues by taking refuge in extended adolescence and staying stoned a lot.
In this context, settling - as Gottlieb advises - is insanity. As anyone who has lived through a divorce (or who has witnessed parents get divorced) knows, a bad marriage causes vastly more damage that no marriage. And if a society is grooming men who aren't suited to the women that the society is producing, the choice is not between settling and solitude, but between a bad marriage and a decent life.
I'm not alone in either my conclusion or my analysis: two hundred years ago Jane Austen wrote a more persuasive argument than this blog post can offer in her novel, Pride and Prejudice. As any reader of that novel can recognize, American women live today in a world where too many of the men are Wickhams, the con artist scourge of Pride and Prejudice. By the conclusion of that novel, Eliza Bennett has learned that her own haughtiness and preconceived notions had prevented her both from seeing the dangers of the charming Mr. Wickham and the goodness of the more remote Mr. Darcy, her future husband.
Gottlieb would have American women unlearn the lesson of Eliza Bennett - would have American blind themselves to the unsuitability of the available partners out of their prideful need to get married and their prejudice against carving out a satisfactory life for themselves beyond the bounds of marriage. Gottlieb urges American women to settle for Wickham.
Jane Austen has already illustrated the perils of that choice.
In Richard Dawkins' Introduction to Elspeth Huxley's Red Strangers, he calls the novel "anthropologically illuminating," and that phrase struck me as the most insightful of the compliments he bestowed on the book ("epic," "gripping," "moving" and "humanistically mind-opening" among them).
Red Strangers recounts the history of Kenya from 1890-1937 through the eyes of three generations of Kikuyu men: history, still written by the victor, but seen through the eyes of colonized, as that perspective is imagined by the colonizer.
The ambition of Red Strangers is huge, and I have great admiration for the project. With Red Strangers, Huxley courageously undertook an "experiment," as she put it in her Foreword, to record "the way of life that existed before the white men came" because "within a few years none will survive of those who remember" those days. (Red Strangers was published in 1939.) The experiment was unquestionably worthwhile, and the record she has created is of tremendous historical and anthropological interest.
Nonetheless, Red Strangers suffers two serious flaws. First, Huxley's storytelling is overshadowed by her agenda. She wants to describe a bygone society and explain its reaction to the appearance of the colonists more than she wants to tell us a story. As a result, events occur without narrative pay-off: Muthengi seduces his adopted sister Ambui . . . but nothing happens as a result. Matu runs away to live with the Athi people for some time . . . but we never find out why this matters for the plot. A conflict erupts between the Kipsigis and the Kikuyu on Marafu's farm . . . that goes nowhere. More disturbingly, the book has the "one thing and then another" feel of poorly-written historical treatises. Events appear in the Red Strangers because they correspond to actual historical events that happened, not because they advance the plot.
Second, Huxley attempts to describe to a literate society a world that was preliterate, from the point of view of the preliterate. I am not sure that this goal is achievable. The thought processes and consciousnesses of preliterate peoples is different from that of literate, modern peoples, and I am not convinced that either methodology can be transmitted directly, that is, without an intervening process of interpretation. As Huxley herself posits, "[t]he old Kikuyu . . . cannot present their point of view to us because they cannot express it in terms which we can understand." To circumvent this problem, Huxley has chosen to depict "old Kikuyu" who express their point of view in terms we can understand; in other words, she has created a hybrid character who never existed: a Kikuyu from a preliterate, precolonial society who nonetheless communicates in a literate, post-colonial way. Unsurprisingly, this character is unsatisfactory. He (because all three generations of Kikuyu protagonists in Red Strangers are men) doesn't come across as resourceful, intelligent, reflective . . . or believable. Rather, he's flat and two dimensional.
Following the lead of Dawkins' "anthropologically illuminating" comment, I would guess that a better vehicle for the information Huxley wanted to convey would have been the long-form personal history, something like Marjorie Shostak's Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, a compelling page-turner about a Kalahari bushwoman. Nisa is an anthropological text, and I suspect that Huxley - who disclaimed any anthropological rigor in Red Strangers - avoided that option because she didn't want to be accused of sloppy scholarship. All the same, Nisa succeeds where Red Strangers fails. Although Nisa came from a preliterate society, and although her story was being told through the agency of a literate academic, Nisa comes alive in her book in ways that Muthengi, Matu and Karanja never do in Red Strangers. A novel, after all, must have a story; but a personal history must only have a life.
The mystique of J.D. Salinger's isolation, and the enduring popularity of The Catcher in the Rye - along with the consequent public fascination with his freakishness and super-success - often eclipse Salinger's writing itself.
Over the years, Salinger told me about . . . trying to stay away from everything that was written about him. He didn't care about reviews, he said, but "the side effects" bothered him. "There are no writers anymore," he said once. "Only book-selling louts and big mouths."
Plainly, the less examination of his writing, the better.
Salinger stopped publishing a short while after the critics turned on him. As Janet Maslin recounts in The New York Review of Books, "[b]y the late Fifties, . . . Salinger was no longer the universally beloved author of The Catcher in the Rye; he was now the seriously annoying creator of the Glass family."
Maslin goes on to rehabilitate Salinger from the condemnations of John Updike, Joan Didion and Mary McCarthy among others:
Today "Zooey" does not seem too long, and is arguably Salinger's masterpiece. Rereading it and its companion piece "Franny" is no less rewarding than rereading The Great Gatsby. It remains brilliant and is in no essential sense dated. It is the contemporary criticism that has dated . . . [and] now seems magnificently misguided.
And, in the aftermath of Salinger's recent death, many - including Michiko Kakutani, Adam Gopnik, and Charles McGrath - have published laudatory assessments of his talent and work:
Kakutani in The New York Times: What really knocked readers out about "The Catcher in the Rye" was the wonderfully immediate voice that J. D. Salinger fashioned for Holden Caulfield - a voice that enabled him to channel an alienated 16-year-old's thoughts and anxieties and frustrations, a voice that skeptically appraised the world and denounced its phonies and hypocrites and bores.
Gopnick in The New Yorker: Has any writer ever had a better ear for American talk?
Charles McGrath in The New York Times: [Nine Stories] were remarkable for their sharp social observation, their pitch-perfect dialogue . . . and the way they demolished whatever was left of the traditional architecture of the short story - the old structure of beginning, middle, end - for an architecture of emotion, in which a story could turn on a tiny alteration of mood or irony.
But the recent reversal in critical opinion misses one big, valid critique: Salinger couldn't tell a story.
That he had an authorial voice, that he had an ear for dialogue, that he had an eye for detail - all these talents are undisputed. But as John Updike observed in a 1961 New York Timesreview of "Franny and Zooey," plot escaped Salinger:
Few writers since Joyce would risk such a wealth of words upon events that are purely internal and deeds that are purely talk. . . . As Hemingway sought the words for things in motion, Salinger seeks the words for things transmuted into human subjectivity. His fiction . . . pays the price . . . of becoming dangerously convoluted and static. A sense of composition is not among Salinger's strengths.
Indeed, time and again, reviewers use terms like "prose-poem" (Updike), "fables of otherness," "fairy tales," "Greek myths" and "Bible stories" (Maslin), and "stories within stories" (Kakutani) to describe the praise-worthy in Salinger's writing. Notably present in all these descriptions is the absence of a modern storytelling form. Catcher affirms these descriptions with its episodic, "mythic journey"-like structure; its narrative is presciently suited to a series of blog posts about a rough weekend - but not to a novel.
Coincidentally, reading Jim Windolf's review of Last Words, by George Carlin with Tony Hendra, I stumbled on a description that described Salinger perfectly:
Although Carlin spent roughly five decades performing with nothing but his brain, his mouth and a microphone, he was never much of a storyteller. Unlike Pryor and Bill Cosby, who made their names as yarn spinners, he did his best work as a secular preacher.
"A secular preacher" he was: Salinger perennially preached the message, aptly summarized by Gopnik,
that, amid the malice and falseness of social life, redemption rises from clear speech and childlike enchantment, from all the forms of unself-conscious innocence that still surround us (with the hovering unease that one might mistake emptiness for innocence).
Given the superficial, sentimental nature of this bit of "good news," my bet is that Salinger will not be remembered for his agenda. But Salinger should be remembered for his literary innovation, a point on which Maslin dwells. Apropos of Salinger's fall from grace with the critics of the 1950's and 60's, Maslin posits that:
negative contemporary criticism of a masterpiece can be helpful to later critics, acting as a kind of radar that picks up the ping of the work's originality. The "mistakes" and "excesses" that early critics complain of are often precisely the innovations that have given the work its power.
She then goes on to identify Salinger's innovation as the creation of "offensive" characters whose negative reception by the audience hammers home the point that the characters are unable "to live comfortably in the world."
Here I must part ways with Maslin. Although I agree that Salinger is innovative, I think Maslin is missing the true nature his innovation. Her resistance to criticism that highlights Salinger's inability to plot (she mocks Maxwell Geismar's assessment of "Zooey" as "interminable," as well as George Steiner's critique that it was "shapeless") simultaneously deprives her of the ability to name his accomplishment: using oral story-telling traditions and techniques to tell modern stories in which plot was replaced by shifts in psychological states.
"Fables," "fairy tales," "Greek myths," "Bible stories" - epic poems (prose or verse) and "stories within stories" - are all forms originating in oral, pre-literate societies. Episodic, rambling, redundant - indeed "shapeless" and "interminable" - are all adjectives applicable to the genre. However, the content of these stories often features extensive action and explicit violence - events that create stark mental pictures for the audience of listeners. Transmuting "words . . . into human subjectivity" is not a strong point of these types of stories. Even the idea of "human subjectivity" was different in oral, pre-literate societies, all of which were communal. Their subconscious was "collective" (according to Jung), and their stories distilled the "archetypal," not the "individual."
Salinger, whether intentionally or otherwise, used ancient forms as a vehicle for modern content. To the extent that he innovated, this combination is his contribution.
And, like other innovations of a certain type - the cigarette filter made from cheese comes to mind - its primary function is cautionary: it doesn't work. Modern plot structures provide a much better framework for telling stories involving individual psychological development (as well as balancing the story with action and ensuring sustained interest over the length of the tale).
Devotees of Salinger don't read him because he redefined the way modern stories are told. Rather, fans flock to the Salinger tent for the same reasons that any traveling preacher attracts crowds: because his voice resonates with them, and because they are predisposed to his sappy message.
(Photo of J.D. Salinger with Erik Ross from The New Yorker)
Raising criticisms, however loving or justified, about monumental achievements is embarrassing. About six months ago, for example, I asked a friend what she thought of Hilary Mantel's novel, Wolf Hall. I'd just bought the book, but I hadn't yet read it. "It's me," said my friend, feeling apparently that she had to apologize for not raving passionately about it. "I'm Tudor-ed out."
