Well, well, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? Let’s do this:
Reading: After all my speechifying last week about my disdain for creative works with kids as protagonists, I ended up reading not one, but two novels with….children or teens at the center. And guess what – I didn’t like either of them! But they’re worth discussing nonetheless.
Revolutionaries by Joshua Furst is based somewhat on Abbie Hoffman, told from the perspective of a young son of the fictional version of the 60’s agitator and fugitive. It was a fairly tedious read, simply in its unrelenting focus on the deluded and self-absorbed – not that they’re presented as anything but that, mind you. It’s just a few hundred pages of that is depressing. But illustrative as well. For I’ve read a fair bit of fiction with 60’s and 70’s counterculture at the center, and you know – none of it is sympathetic. (The best is Drop City by T. Coraghasson Boyle – great book.) This type of fiction is fairly consistent in portraying those involved in countercultural social and political movements as narrow-minded, mostly privileged, hypocritical, self-involved and self-serving and a little bit crazy. Underline the hypocritical and self-serving since much of this fiction – including Revolutionaries – ends up exploring the notion that those agitating for radical social and political change usually have an agenda, and that agenda has far less to do with ideas and justice than with enjoying pleasure and power, usually at the expense of women and/or children.
Trust Exercise by Susan Choi centers on an intense high school theater program. I’d read the author’s My Education and, well, not liked it at all, but considering the good reviews this one has received and my daughter’s involvement in high school theater back in the day and my interest in the dynamic between adults working with youth and those young people, I thought, well – it’s not long. I’ll read it.
I did read it – and mostly didn’t like it. It’s very self-consciously experimental fiction, which is fine, but it didn’t work here, I think, because of a certain distance from the characters. I just didn’t care about anyone involved.
But. Not all is lost. I wouldn’t say the book is worth reading for this reason – the last half is partly a struggle (because of the stylistic choices) and partly just obvious (because of plot “twists”), but something Choi does right is to excavate – expertly and brutally – the dynamic of emotional exploitation that often exists in settings in which adults work with young people – whether that be theater, school, camp or church. Screwed-up, developmentally arrested adults developing an image that attracts the young, the seeker and the vulnerable, drawing them in, and then manipulating those young people in self-serving ways – and then leaving them in the dust. That’s what happens here, and while the events Choi narrates are extreme, the dynamic is accurate – and one to watch out for, honestly, because it’s a real thing, as we well know.
Anyway, there goes my resolve about fiction with young protagonists, eh? Well, I guess I was vindicated because I didn’t really like either book. But reading them was still useful – in that both books presented judgment on self-serving adults who mistreat and exploit the children and young people they should be caring for – so it’s good, I suppose, to see that there’s some sense that if you do that – yes, you’re one of the bad guys.
Now to a very different world. I’d hoped to finish it by today, but I’ve still got a few dozen pages to go.
I read about this book, to be reissued by NYRB in September:
Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote The Corner That Held Them, perhaps the most strikingly original of this unfailingly original novelist’s works, in the aftermath of the Second World War, and it is a historical novel like no other, one that immerses the reader in the dailiness of history (history as it goes on happening, unimportant history) rather than history as the given sequence of events that, with time, it comes to seem. Time ebbs and flows and characters come and go in this novel set in the England of the second half of the fourteenth century, the era of the Black Death, and tells of the life of Oby, a Benedictine convent, quite removed from the world and of no particular note. The nuns do their chores and seek to maintain and improve the fabric of their house and chapel and struggle with each other and with themselves. The book that emerges, in which background and foreground continually shift, is not only a picture of a world run by women but also a story stirring, disturbing, witty, utterly entrancing—of what is perhaps the most defining but also unobserved of human units, a community. What is the life of a community and how does it support, or constrain, a real humanity? How do we live through it and it through us? These might be considered the deep questions that lie behind this rare triumph of the novelist’s art.
Huh, I thought – a mid-century novel about nuns that I’d not heard of? I didn’t feel like waiting for September – convinced that I’d forget by the time pub date rolled around – so I did a quick search, and yes, there’s an old edition available on archive.org, so I virtually grabbed it (it’s due in a couple of days – so you’ll have your turn. Just wait.)
It’s…okay. Some parts are beautiful and lyrical, others are incisive and absurd, but I can’t make a final judgment on the book until, well, I’m finished. I’m just not sure how it will cohere. If it ended right now, I’d give it a 3/5, no more.
One thing for sure – it’s no In This House of Brede – I don’t mean in terms of writing quality – they’re quite different – but simply in terms of approach. That is, Warner seems to have more of a sociological approach to the community, with very little spiritual or even deep insight into human motivation.
Also: In my we’re going to make up for your inadequate high school education before you go to college mode, we are reading some stuff aloud together, starting with some O’Connor. No the Catholic high school student was never assigned any Flannery O’Connor over the past four years. We read “Revelation” last week and will try to get in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “The Displaced Person” over the next couple of weeks and I hope – if schedules allow – to get in a jaunt over to Milledgeville. I haven’t been in a few years, and never with them, so that would be a good late-summer trip. For me, at least.
Watching: I’m down one kid for a few days, and the other is working and being with friends, so only one Summer Movie watch over the past few days: The Thin Man. They liked it – albeit somewhat astonished by the level of drinking – and so we’ll probably watch at least one or two of the sequels. It’s an injustice – of the mildest sort – that William Powell isn’t up there in the pantheon with other mid-century American movie stars. Oh, for afficiandos he is, but not in the general public mind when, for example, he’s actually a far better actor than, say, Cary Grant. I could watch Powell all day, while Grant, initially amusing, gets annoying. The dynamic between Powell and Myrna Loy is, famously, gold – and the studios seized it. It’s a joy to watch the repartee.
Interesting: The Thin Man, based, of course, on Dashiell Hammett’s novel, was brought to screen by a husband-and-wife writing team – Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. More on them and their long, successful collaboration, here.
Listening: Back in the music saddle, somewhat. So, listening to a lot of Brahms Scherzo, Prokofiev Diabolical Suggestions and some Bach organ prelude or other. Had lessons in both last week, jazz picks up again this week.
After listening to recordings of the Prokofiev and finally seeing the teacher after an almost six-week break (we were in Spain, he was in Paris at a study program), I said, “Okay, do you really think he can do this?” And he assured me that yes, he could. After four years, I’ve learned to trust him – we go through this every summer – he “suggests” repertoire that strikes me as way beyond my son’s abilities, the teacher is confident and sure enough, months later, the kid’s got it. So you’d think I wouldn’t have doubts at this point, but hey – wouldn’t you?
Crazy.
Anyway, today’s the anniversary of the finding of the Rosetta Stone – July 15, 1799. So here’s my shot of it from 2017.