Women Writer Reviews

WOMEN AUTHOR REVIEWS

Love Always (1985)(Ann Beattie 1947-)

I have been accused, I believe fairly, of being a misogynist, so it came as something of a surprise to find that I liked this satirical novel by one of our best female writers better than did the critics. In fact, I liked the book very much and think it belongs right up there with Bonfire of the Vanities and Bright Lights, Big City on the short list of really perceptive social novels of the 80's.

Hildon and Maureen are a quintessential yuppie couple who have moved to Vermont where Hildon publishes Country Daze, a sort of rustic Spy magazine for the New Yorkers who summer in the Green Mountains. Hildon has been carrying on an affair with Lucy Spenser since they were in college; Lucy now writes a spoof advice column for the magazine under the pseudonym of Cindi Coeur. Meanwhile, Lucy has just been jilted by her longtime lover, Les Whitehall, and now her 14 year old TV star niece, Nicole Nelson, has come for a visit while the mother runs off with a 24 year old tennis pro. Beattie spins a savage comedy of manners out of this material. It is both genuinely funny, here's one of Cindi Couer's columns:

                          Dear Cindi Couer,
                          I understand that small children often exaggerate without thinking of it as
                         a lie. My question is about my son, who has been complaining that his best
                         friend has better lunches than he has. He says that instead of bringing tuna
                         fish sandwiches to school, the boy has a whole tuna. I told him that this was
                         not possible, because a real tuna fish would weigh hundreds of pounds.
                         Nevertheless, my son refuses to eat tuna fish sandwiches anymore, and I feel
                         that tuna sandwiches are better for him than the protein found in the only
                         other sandwich he will eat - pork chop. I am also worried about his telling
                         lies. He refuses to admit that he has made up the story about the tuna. I
                         have questioned him in detail about how this would be possible, and he just
                         continues the lie. He says the boy does not bring the sandwiches in a lunch
                         box, but in a box the size of a bed. Should I discipline him, or just pack
                         tuna sandwiches and insist that he face reality and eat them?
                                                                                     A Worried Mom

                         Dear Worried,
                           It seems to me that you have quite a few options. You could refuse to
                         replace the tuna sandwiches with sandwiches made of pork chops, and
                         substitute something such as quiche, which will get soggy and appeal to no
                         child. You could also get a pig and put it in a cage, telling your son that
                         this way he would have something to rival his friend's tuna fish, and that it
                         is his problem to get it to school. You might also consider the possibility
                         that the other boy is being forced to eat sardine sandwiches and is trying to
                         compensate for his own embarrassment by insisting that they are tuna fish.
                         You may want to ask yourself what your son is missing sat home that makes him
                         have such a strong empathetic reaction with the other boy. You might also
                         consider the possibility that one or both boys needs glasses.

and devastatingly accurate in its depiction of the emptiness behind the facade of modern love.

Everything is surfaces here. People assume roles and pass themselves off as something they are not, the New Yorkers have created a Potemkin Village version of Vermont so that they can pretend to be countrified, folks sign letters Love Always as if it meant Sincerely--and it turns out that it means little more than that for most of them. Everyone is so artificial and their lives so transient that they do not really love one another, not husbands and wives, not mothers and daughters, not longtime companions, not adulterous couples. Their lives are summed up in the title of Nicole's soap opera, "Passionate Intensity"--which is taken from William Butler Yeats' Second Coming: The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity. Love has been replaced by passion; relationships have replaced true commitments.

And so ends the Baby Boomer generation, depthless, childess, loveless & artificial, they are completely atomized. And lest one hold out hope for the next generation, Nicole explains to her aunt that noone has friends anymore, that people sleep together because they are supposed to, and when her aunt asks if she has a "fave rave", responds that it's not cool to like a boy that much anymore. As Hildon says of her:

She needs an education. She ought to have a tutor or something. She's never learned anything.

She knows lyrics to songs and she knows what people are talking about if they say something dirty
and she knows who's who on television. She doesn't know anything about the world.

Lucy's generation had, at least, been exposed to and then rejected Western Civilization, American ideals and Judeo-Christian morality. The generation to come is simply being raised in a moral and ethical vaccum and, since nature abhors a vaccum, mass media and pop culture are rushing in to fill the empty space. Beattie amply demonstrates the emptiness of the lives that these people lead and the malignancy of the culture that they have created.

Reading the book, I was struck by how hard it would be for someone to relate to much of it in thirty years. Many references are already dated: Betamax, Cabbage Patch Kids, Bess Myerson, etc., and hopefully, the people themselves will seem like artifacts by then. Having just read several of the great satires from earlier in the Century (Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point, Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, Evelyn Waugh's Handful of Dust), it became obvious that, even if the authors had captured the Zeitgeist perfectly, it is very hard for the modern reader to pick up on all the in jokes and to feel the bite of the satire as their contemporaries must have felt it. But Beattie is writing about things that are all too familiar to us here and now and she writes about them with engaging wit and great perception. I highly recommend this one

GRADE: A

WEBSITES:
    -ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA: "ann beattie"
    -FEATURED AUTHOR: (NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of The Collected Stories of Richard Yates' by Richard Yates (Ann Beattie , SF Chronicle)
    -Ann Beattie & Mona Simpson
    -Where Characters Come From Beattie, Ann - Mississippi Review
    -About Ann Beattie: A Profile by Don Lee (Ploughshares Fall 1995)
    -Ann Beattie: Introduction to the Fall 1995 Issue of Ploughshares
    -Style-defining author Ann Beattie comes in from the rain (HILLEL ITALIE, Associated Press)
    -READING GROUP GUIDE: for My Life, Starring Dara Falcon by Ann Beattie (Random House)
    -READERS CHOICE: Ann Beattie Bookshelf
    -AUDIO INTERVIEW: (On the Margin)
    -REVIEW: Key for Escaping Spirit (CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT, NY Times)
    -REVIEW: Having It All (Josh Rubins, NY Review of Books)
    -Ann Beattie Opens Up: Short stories that make the ordinary seem surprising (Chris Wright, Boston Phoenix)
    -EXCERPT: from PARK CITY New and Selected Stories COSMOS (Denver Post online)
    -REVIEW: of Another You ( Imprint: Arts (Volume 19, Number 15))
    -REVIEW: of Park City (Hilary Mantel, NY Review of Books)
    -REVIEW: of What Was Mine (Patricia Storace, NY Review of Books)
    -REVIEW: of Picturing Will (Ann Hulbert, NY Review of Books)
    -REVIEW: of Falling in Place (Robert Towers, NY Review of Books)

Before and A fter (1992)(Rosellen Brown)

Ben and Carolyn Reiser live a placid middle class existence in bucolic New Hampshire. Carolyn is a doctor, Ben a sculptor, and they have two kids, Judith and Jacob. Things could not appear more mundane for this family of four. But then one night while working the emergency room, Carolyn is confronted by the brutally beaten corpse of a teenage girl whom she recognizes. What she does not realize is that it was her son Jacob who bludgeoned the girl to death with a car jack. This killing will explode in the midst of the family, driving both parents to reckless actions, pitting one against the other, mother against son and daughter against all. Narrated alternately by husband and wife and finally by Judith, Brown presents all sides of the contentious battle that ensues as Jacob goes to trial for murder. Ben unquestioningly supports Jacob from the word go, even going so far as to destroy evidence and lie to cops, courts and his own lawyer. Carolyn is more troubled, particularly as evidence mounts that, not only did Jacob commit this crime, he is a borderline psychopath who has molested his own sister. Finally, unable to deal with her own guilt, Carolyn sides with the prosecution. And so on and so forth.

Rosellen Brown is to be commended for making the effort to turn out a page turning thriller that also tackles substantial issues of family loyalty, moral responsibility and the limits of love. But the book has one huge flaw at its center--we so loathe the Reisers that there is nothing sufficiently horrible that could happen to them. Jacob is after all a predator. As I was reading I found myself regretting that he could not get the death penalty here in New Hampshire. So, suffice it to say, I did not feel much sympathy with the father who aided and abetted in the cover up of the crime. And it takes so long for Carolyn to screw up her courage and do the right thing, that by then I couldn't give her any credit. In fact, when she does finally cooperate with the authorities, it is not out of any sense of right and wrong, she is driven purely by guilt. Her action follows the best, most authentic, scene in the book, when she attempts to commiserate with the murdered girls mother, telling her that the crime has shattered both families. The girl's mother reacts with a righteous indignation that has the reader cheering. Here is the character that we can identify with, at last. And it is only after this that Carolyn finally realizes that she is not herself a victim and folks don't feel sorry for her. When she testifies, it is a selfish act, an attempt to reclaim her own reputation, regardless of the consequences to her vile little offspring.

But Ben is no better. The son he is trying to protect is some idealized golden child who bears no relation to the monster he raised. His refusal to cooperate with the authorities is less about protecting a beloved son than proving something about himself. These are not characters who love one another. Each of them is merely an object to the other and relations among them are premised on how others perceive them, not on any genuine sense of caring and family.

Ms Brown's depiction of this Baby Boomer couple and their completely self-centered reaction to these events may well be accurate. And such folks may even be so self absorbed that they could bring up this repellent child without noticing that he is evil. But their obliviousness strained credulity and once we accept it, we necessarily think less of them. This inevitably creates an emotional distance from the characters and saps the story of much of its drama. By the time I got to the weirdly happy ending, she'd completely lost me.

American society has developed a really troubling aversion to the concept of whistleblowing. Communists and mobsters are celebrated for refusing to testify about massive criminal conspiracies. Linda Tripp became the most hated woman in America by exposing wrongdoing in the Oval Office. And people were genuinely shocked when the Unabomber's brother lead the FBI to him. I don't know what the heck people are thinking. But here's a memo to friends and family, if you happen to cave in a young girl's head with a car jack, unless she's someone who was profoundly annoying, I'm not going to help you get away with it.

GRADE: C

GENERAL:
-ESSAY: THE TEXAS LITERATI: WHOSE HOME IS THIS RANGE, ANYHOW? (A. C. Greene, NY Times Book Review)
-Women's Books Online: A Cooperative Book Review: Reviews of Women's Books by Women of the World

FILM:
-REVIEW: Before and After (DAVID BRUDNOY, CNC FILM CRITIC)
-REVIEW: BEFORE AND AFTER (Renshaw)

3/14/00

The Archivist (1998)(Martha Cooley)

In this novel, Matthias Lane is the 60-something curator of Princeton University's collection of letters between T.S. Eliot and Emily Lane, an American woman with whom the poet corresponded for years. Scholars believe that they may contain many revelations, particularly since they cover the period of Vivienne Eliot's institutionalization, but the letters are sealed until the year 2020. Matthias himself retreated to this cloistered world after his own poetess wife committed suicide while she was in an asylum in the early 1960's. Like the collection, Matthias guards himself from exposure to the outside world, leading a solitary and emotionally remote widower's existence, until the day when Roberta Spire, a young graduate student, asks to see the letters.

Roberta is fascinated by Eliot's conversion to Anglicanism, in fact, she is obsessed with the concept of conversion because her own parents, Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, converted to Christianity before she was born and raised her as a Christian. Also, she regards this as a form of betrayal on their part and views Eliot's decision to have his wife committed as another instance of betrayal.

Matthias initially resists Roberta, but she reminds him of his own wife, who, it turns out, was raised by an Aunt and Uncle who initially pretended to be her real parents and then concocted a false version of how her parents had died, when in reality they were Communists who went to Europe during the War and were killed. Upon learning the truth, she became obsessed with the Holocaust and began keeping an extensive collection of clippings detailing the Nazi's crimes and subsequent War Crimes trials. As she sunk further into a spiral of manic-depression, she agreed with Matthias urging to seek help in a mental institution. Eventually, put off by her madness, Matthias put considerable distance between them. The middle section of the novel consists of her journal entries from this period, culminating in her suicide.

In the third and final section, Matthias comes to terms with his feelings about his wife, his treatment of her and his burgeoning relationship with Roberta. The story culminates with him undertaking one extravagant act, a sort of generalized attempt at redemption.

This much hyped and thoroughly praised first novel is said by the critics to be a novel of ideas and one that wrestles with moral questions. Would that it were. Oh sure, there are some big ideas in the background--Eliot, the Holocaust, insanity, jazz, etc., but Cooley never actually engages with them much and when she does she stacks the decks in favor of one viewpoint, however insipid. Take just a couple of points; first, the Holocaust. For Matthias, Roberta's parents and Vivienne's Aunt and Uncle, the Holocaust is a peripheral issue, a horrible crime, but not something to dwell on. To Vivienne, the Holocaust is the central fact of her existence and the failure of others to put it at the center of their lives indicates something loathsome about them. The relative lucidity of her journal entries serves to give Vivienne's viewpoint an intellectual heft that it obviously does not warrant. The Holocaust, horrible as it was, is in no sense the most significant event of this Century. It was part of a larger pattern of violence by the State against citizens, in many ways one of the smaller parts. Turning it into the animating concern in your own life is typical of the really disturbing tendency towards personalization of human affairs in the past 100 years. The Holocaust is monstrous because of the human lives that were destroyed and because of the degree to which the population of most of the West was implicated in its perpetration, not because one middle American poet is bothered by it.

As to Eliot himself, Cooley feels compelled to strip him of all meaning except for the ludicrous feminist notion that seems to hold that he and Ted Hughes are defined by the mental illness of their wives and their alleged insensitivity in dealing with these addled spouses. Thus, Roberta is completely dismissive of Eliot's Christianity and the religious, cultural and political meanings in his poetry. She does not even take his conversion seriously:

    Conversion strikes me as something done out of desperation--an attempt to deny something you're
    stuck with--something that can't be changed by an act of will...You know that Eliot converted to
    what is sometimes called Anglo-Catholicism, to the Anglican Church. It's up there next to
    Catholicism in terms of rite and liturgy. I want to know what that conversion cost him. There are
    clues in his work, of course, but I'm sure he wrote about it in detail to Emily Hale. Also about
    Vivienne's role in his conversion. It happened when his marriage was falling apart. I think he was
    driven from the arms of his neurotic wife into those of a neurotic church, and I find that an
    interesting swap.

Actually, as you can see by that, she does not take the idea of religious belief seriously. Religious status is kind of a genetic deal in that view; if you are born Greek Orthodox, you are Greek Orthodox, regardless of what you think or believe. It's odd, to say the least, for a book of "ideas" to fail to grasp the power of religious ideas.

Finally, there is the actual idea of the librarian or archivist. As Matthias says:

    I saw myself then, and still do, as inheritor of a rich tradition, one that straddles the line between
    mind and spirit. The great librarians have all been religious men--monks, priests, rabbis--and the
    stewardship of books is an act of homage and faith. Even Thomas Jefferson, the most rational and
    ingenious of librarians, revered what he called the Infinite Power. It's impossible to be a keeper of
    books and not feel a gratitude that extends to something beyond the intellects that created them--to a
    greater Mind, beneficent and lively and inconceivably large, which urges reading and writing.
    Judith used to complain that libraries are full of too many false, banal books--and she was right, of
    course, though it's never bothered me. A library is meant to be orderly, not pure.

This is a compelling image, the librarian as faithful guardian of the collection of ideas from which man derives his power, the collected knowledge as a supreme mind. [Special note: if you plan on reading this book, don't finish reading this paragraph. Those of you who are especially dense might be surprised by the book's ending, which is hinted at here.] But this statement is impossible to square with Matthias's eventual cathartic action, an act of such profound selfishness and intellectual arrogance that even though you see it coming, you pray that he'll be stopped.

Ultimately, the unlikeability of the characters, the shallowness of the analysis of the ideas that are raised, and the reflexive political correctness of the views expressed all combined to make this book really hard to enjoy. Instead, why not pick up some of Eliot's poems. Even a short poem like The Hollow Men (see Orrin's review) is crammed full of more serious ideas than this entire novel.

GRADE: D

WEBSITES:
    -INTERVIEW: Martha Cooley: Inside T.S. Eliot's Brain (Nicholas A. Basbanes, Lit Kit)
    -EXCERPT: The Archivist
    -READING GROUP GUIDE: The Archivist by Martha Cooley
    -REVIEW: of THE ARCHIVIST By Martha Cooley (Brian Morton, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: of The Archivist by Martha Cooley (Miranda Schwartz, Hungry Mind Review)
    -REVIEW: (Adam Kirsch, Boston Phoenix)
    -REVIEW: (Julie Checkoway, Book Page)
    -REVIEW: A Passionate Debut: Memories -- of T.S. Eliot and others-- and a leap toward the future (Dolores Donner, Fort Worth Star-Telegram)
    -REVIEW: Woman searching for answers yanks archivist's nose from dead files (HARVEY GROSSINGER, Houston Chronicle)
    -REVIEW: (Cathy Henderson, Austin Chronicle)
    -Book Review: Holocaust looms over woman's madness in new novel (SARAH COLEMAN, Jewish Bulletin of Northern California)
    -REVIEW: (Harriet Klausner, Under the Covers)
    -Review: The Archivist - Martha Cooley (Guy Teague, GT Web)

T.S. ELIOT:
    -Academy of American Poets: T. S. Eliot
    -Nobel Laureates: Thomas Stearns Eliot
    -Literature Online: Addison-Wesley's Literature Online--A site to support Kennedy & Gioia's Literature, 7th Edition.
    -T. S. Eliot Poems
     -Literary Research Guide: T. S. Eliot (1888 - 1965)
    -FEATURED AUTHOR: NY Times Book Review
    -ETEXT: The Hollow Men
    -ETEXT: Annotated
    -LECTURE: The Politics of T.S. Eliot (Russell Kirk, The Heritage Foundation)
    -ESSAY: A craving for reality: T. S. Eliot today (Roger Kimball, The New Criterion)
    -ESSAY: TS Eliot's Hollow Men (AMANDA J. WAGGONER)
    -ESSAY: What T.S. Eliot Almost Believed (J. Bottum, First Things)
    -ESSAY: Pun and Games: A New Approach to Five Early Poems by T. S. Eliot (Professor Patricia Sloane, New York City Technical College of The City University of New York)
    -ESSAY: T.S. Eliot: Poet and Critic as Historical Theorist (Scott Weidner)
    -ESSAY: Was T.S. Eliot a Scoundrel? Although the poet's anti-Semitism is beyond dispute, its centrality to his work is open to question (John Gross, Commentary)
    -REVIEW: Louis Menand: How Eliot Became Eliot, NY Review of Books
        Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917 by T.S. Eliot and edited by Christopher Ricks
        The Waste Land, the 75th anniversary edition by T.S. Eliot
    -REVIEW: of T. S. ELIOT: A Study in Character and Style By Ronald Bush (Michiko Kakutani, NY Times)
    -REVIEW: of ELIOT'S NEW LIFE By Lyndall Gordon (Denis Donoghue, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: of T. S. ELIOT. A Life By Peter Ackroyd (John Gross, NY Times)
    -REVIEW: of T. S. ELIOT A Life By Peter Ackroyd (A. Walton Litz, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: T. S. ELIOT, ANTI-SEMITISM AND LITERARY FORM By Anthony Julius (MICHIKO KAKUTANI, NY Times)
    -REVIEW: of Louis Menand: Eliot and the Jews, NY Review of Books
        T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form by Anthony Julius
    -REVIEW: The Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume I, 1898-1922 Edited by Valerie Eliot (MICHIKO KAKUTANI, NY Times)
    -REVIEW: of THE LETTERS OF T. S. ELIOT Volume I, 1898-1922 Edited by Valerie Eliot (Hugh Kenner, NY Times Book Review)

4/17/00

Black Narcissus (1939)(Rumer Godden 1907-1998)

Sister Clodagh, the youngest Mother Superior in the history of her' order, has brought a small band of nuns to establish a convent in Mopu at the foot of the Himalayas. But the sisters will have to battle native superstitions, a blasphemous handyman, the elements and, most of all, themselves if they are to succeed.

Rumer Godden was raised in India and was a convert to Catholicism and her love for, and ambivalence towards, both of them blend beautifully here. Regardless of the ultimate fate of her mission, Sister Clodagh's personal journey makes for a wonderful read.

GRADE: B

WEBSITES:
    -Rumer Godden Web Page
    -Review of Biography: Rumer Godden: A Storyteller's Life By Anne Chisolm
    -Adventure is What She Got (NY Times Review of Godden's autobiography ''A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep'' (1987), Jannette Turner Hospital)

Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (1997)(Doris Kearns Goodwin)

    When I was six, my father gave me a bright-red scorebook that opened my heart
    to the game of baseball. After dinner on long summer nights, he would sit
    beside me in our small enclosed porch to hear my account of that day's Brooklyn
    Dodger game....By the time I had mastered the art of scorekeeping, a lasting
    bond had been forged among my father, baseball, and me.

So begins Doris Kearns Goodwin's enchanting memoir of growing up in Rockville Centre, L.I. and the relationship she forged with her bank examiner father, Michael Francis Aloysius Kearns, through baseball. As she continues, she explains how this experience contributed to her becoming a historian:

    Through my knowledge, I commanded my father's undivided attention, the sign of his love. It
    would instill in me an early awareness of the power of narrative, which would introduce a lifetime
    of storytelling, fueled by the naive confidence that others would find me as entertaining as my
    father did.

Goodwin is, of course, best known for her hagiographies of democrat Presidents &
her frequent appearances on The Newshour, Imus and Hardball, but when Ken Burns
tabbed her as a talking head for his Baseball series, she found that people at
her talks were more interested in reminiscing about the Dodgers than in hearing
about the Roosevelts. The result is "Wait Till Next Year", wherein she has
interwoven her baseball memories with her recollections of growing up Catholic
in post-War suburban America.

I especially liked several of her anecdotes:

(1) She tells about her first confession, where she tearfully confesses to
praying that Allie Reynolds, Robin Roberts and others will be injured, though
not seriously, just enough so they won't be able to play against the Dodgers

(2) After winning a St. Christopher's medal (blessed by the Pope) in a catechism
contest, she presents it to a slumping Gil Hodges, who accepts it reverently &
tells her how he had one just like it growing up but gave it to his coal miner
father to protect him.

At a time when each memoir is more sensational than the next, fueling a
descending spiral of confessional aberrance, it was a real pleasure to read the
story of a nice normal American upbringing in a loving family & one can't help
but feel that we lost something valuable with the passing of the world she
describes.

GRADE: B+

I also recommend the excellent memoir Remembering America: A Voice from the
Sixties by her husband Richard Goodwin, one section of which was made into the movie Quiz
Show

Other books by Doris Kearns Goodwin:
-No Ordinary Time : Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt : The Home Front in World War II (Read Orrin's review, C+) and Wingnut's response

If you liked Wait Till Next Year, try:

Branch, Taylor
-Parting the Waters: America in the King Years. 1954-63

Buchanan, Patrick J.
-Right From the Beginning

Chambers, Whittaker
-Witness(one of Orrin's Top Ten Non-fiction / Conservative Thought)

DeLillo, Don
-Underworld(Read Orrin's review, Grade: C+)

Dickens, Charles
-David Copperfield

Durocher, Leo
-Nice Guys Finish Last

Halberstam, David
-The Summer of '49

Hall, Donald
-Fathers Playing Catch with Sons (Read Orrin's review, Grade: B+)

Kahn, Roger
-The Boys of Summer

WEBSITES:
-Brooklyn Dodgers: The Boys of Summer

The Victim of Prejudice (1799) (Mary Hays 1759-1843)

Mary Hays, an early British feminist writers, was a contemporary of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Thomas Paine, and William Blake, and like them she was excited by the French Revolution and the prospect of toppling the privileged classes. Of course, at that time all men were comparatively privileged, at least as compared to women. In The Victim of Prejudice she mounts a twin attack on the lowly status of women within society and on the exalted status of the landed gentry, who still dominated life in that pre-industrial age. The former attack is fairly successful, the latter is not.

Mary Raymond, the heroine of the novel, is orphaned at an early age, but is raised and well-educated (perhaps too well for the time) by her guardian, Mr. Raymond. Two brothers, sons of the Honorable Mr. Pelham, come to Mr. Raymond's for instruction too, and Mary falls in love with William Pelham, and he with her. But Mary is an unacceptable match for such a wealthy youth, more unacceptable than she realizes until Mr. Raymond reluctantly reveals the sordid circumstances of her birth, and so the young lovers are separated.

Meanwhile, Sir Peter Osborne, the brutal local landowner, has taken a fancy to Mary and is reluctant to accept her protestations of his advances. In a symbol laden early scene, William coaxes the teenage Mary into stealing some "forbidden fruit" from Osborne's vineyard. But he catches her and expels her from the garden, calling her "a true daughter of Eve." In the ensuing years they have several more equally unfortunate encounters, with Osborne becoming ever more determined to have her. Finally, after the death of Mr. Raymond, who had tried to get her to accept a more appropriate marriage offer to no avail, has left Mary particularly vulnerable, with no money and nowhere to go, Osborne kidnaps and rapes her.

At this point William returns to the scene and finds Mary wandering, broken and ill. Though by now married to another, he nurses her back to health. But when he proposes that she become his mistress, the outraged Mary refuses and flees. She tries to find employment several places but finds that her reputation as a fallen woman, resulting not merely from the incident with Osborne but from her time with the married William, follows her, causing scandal and encouraging other men to be forward with her.

Throughout these various travails, she remains admirably loyal to the moral upbringing which Mr. Raymond provided :

    'Let it come then!' exclaimed I with fervour; 'Let my ruin be complete! Disgrace, indigence,
    contempt, while unmerited, I dare encounter, but not the censure of my own heart. Dishonour,
    death itself, is a calamity less insupportable than self-reproach. Amidst the destruction of my
    hopes, the wreck of my fortunes, of my fame, my spirit still triumphs in conscious rectitude; nor
    would I, intolerable as is the sense of my wrongs and of my griefs, exchange them for all that guilty
    prosperity could bestow.'

but is quite annoyingly passive in the face of these injustices :

    I revolved in my mind, selected, and rejected, as new obstacles occurred to me, a variety of plans.
    Difficulties almost insuperable, difficulties peculiar to my sex, my age, and my unfortunate
    situation, opposed themselves to my efforts on every side. I sought only the bare means of
    subsistence: amidst the luxuriant and the opulent, who surrounded me, I put in no claims either for
    happiness, for gratification, or even for the common comforts of life: yet, surely, I had a right to
    exist!

Somehow this ambition--mere existence-- just seems inadequate. More appropriate, particularly as long as her life is ruined anyway, would be to wreak a horrific vengeance on the reprehensible Lord Peter. But as the rather unfortunate title of the book indicates, this is a story about unrelenting victimization. And because Mary never really seeks to do more than exist, never even seeks redress against Osborne, she somehow makes herself a participant in her own victimization. Would that she had just a smidgen of Lorenna Bobbit in her; she'd be easier to root for.

A system which would punish the victim rather than the rapist is so obviously unjust, that the purely feminist angle of the story does work to a degree. However, Osborne is so awful that it is hard to accept him as a genuinely representative figure of the British aristocracy. Eleanor Ty, editor of the Broadview Text edition of the book, suggests in her introduction that the character Osborne is intended as a specific rebuke to Edmund Burke and his conservative views on the value of ancient institutions like the aristocracy. Though I'm a fan of Burke, there are coherent arguments to be made in opposition to his theories : this is not one.

The book works well enough as a kind of Gothic thriller, and is adequate as a protofeminist tract, but it fails as a radical polemic against the prevailing institutions of the time. The existence of one evil fictional nobleman doesn't serve to turn 18th Century Britain into a den of horrors.

GRADE : C+

Buy Victim of Prejudice at Amazon.com

WEBSITES :
    -EXCERPT : From Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous, by Mary Hays 1793
    -Mary Hays Website (created by Eleanor Ty)
    -Mary Hays
    -Hays, Mary (1760 - 1843) (xrefer)

GENERAL :
-Eighteenth-Century Resources (Jack Lynch of Rutgers University)

3/14/01

The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)(Sarah Orne Jewett 1849-1909)

Okay, the time has finally come for me to make a horrible personal admission. I've had a secret for years now, one that strikes right to the core of my manhood : of an evening, I enjoy a nice cup of tea. Actually, it's an enormous mug and I steep the tea until it looks like coffee, but I still acknowledge how sketchy it all appears. Nor do I imagine my case will be helped if I state that I most often enjoy said beverage on Sunday nights during Booknotes on CSPAN, though as a general matter I do occasionally partake when I sit down to read, after we get the kids to bed. There--I've said it--that monkey's off my back. Why here? Why now? Because, this book may be the sine qua non of tea-sipping books.

Perhaps the central theme that we've been developing over the course of these reviews is the existence of a fundamental tension in human affairs, between the basically feminine desire for security and the basically masculine desire for freedom. We've examined many examples of the latter--everything from Huckleberry Finn to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest--but good examples of the former have been rarer, presumably because I just read fewer women authors. (Though we have found some good examples, try particularly the review of The House of Gentle Men) Now we come to Sarah Orne Jewett's lovely short novel, The Country of Pointed Firs, and the very essence of the book is the value of friendship (particularly female friendship), community, and continuity in providing an atmosphere of security and a bulwark against the encroachments of a changing world.

The semiautobiographical novel tells of a young woman writer spending a summer in the fictional town of Dunnett Landing on the coast of Maine. There she is adopted into a loose knit group of women who weave a web of stories about the town, the surrounding islands and the folks who live, or lived, there. This narrative tradition and the time spent in each others company take on the quality of ritual, and in light of their dismissal of the local pastor, a nearly religious ritual. In addition, Jewett's comparisons of the women to figures out of Greek drama and classical myth gives them a timeless quality. Most of all, there is her portrayal of the women as a phenomenon of Nature, arising organically from, and blending into, the rugged landscape.

The effect of all of this is that as the women speak they seem to be tapping into an eternal tradition. Their voices and stories summoning echoes from the past, not just of Dunnett Landing, but of similar communities across time and space. The term that has apparently been adopted to describe this kind of novel is "fiction of community," and that's a perfect description. There's something wonderfully comforting about the togetherness, shared sense of experience and the act of communal memory that Jewett's stories summon.

The flip side of this however is that the novel, not surprisingly since it is so clearly a response to classic masculine fiction, suffers from some inevitable weaknesses when judged by those standards. It is almost totally formless and plotless, being little more than a collection of reminiscences. It celebrates stasis rather than progress and at some level reflects a genuine and unhealthy fear of human development in general, and of industrialization specifically. Though relentlessly good natured, there is a marked indifference or even hostility to traditional religion. Politics and economics are completely, and unrealistically, absent from the scene.

Just as the "action" of the novel occurs at the very edge of the nation, figuratively outside the bounds of late 19th Century America, so the community it describes is a utopian one that is an alternative to our actual Western culture. Ultimately, that utopia, like most, seems like it might be a nice place to visit but like it would prove stultifying to the human spirit, the longing to discover and to achieve, the desire of the young to create their own place in the world rather than to simply assume a bequeathed place in their parent's. There's always something comforting about maternal unconditional love, but we prefer it in smaller doses; too much becomes cloying and suffocating.

The Country of the Pointed Firs is a comforting place to visit--try it with a big mug of tea by your side--but it's not a place you'd want to live.

GRADE: B

N.B. from Stephen Judd : Sarah Orne Jewett is your Seventh Cousin, three times removed. Our lines
split around 1642!

WEBSITES:
    -ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA : "sarah orne jewett"
    -Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project
    -ETEXT : Country of the Pointed Firs (Bartleby)
    -Sarah Orne Jewett Home Historical Site (South Berwick, ME)
    -PAL: Perspectives in American Literature : A Research and Reference Guide : Chapter 6: Late Nineteenth Century - Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909)
    -Domestic Goddess : Sarah Orne Jewett
    -SARAH ORNE JEWETT (1849-1909)(Local Color : 19th-century Regional Writing in the United States)
    -SAC LitWeb Sarah Orne Jewett Page
    -American Literature Online: Sarah Orne Jewett
    -LINKS : Sarah Orne Jewett (About.com)
    -LINKS: Resources on Sarah Orne Jewett, American author, and Annie Adams Field. (About.com)
    -ESSAY : A REVISITATION OF TRANSCENDENTALISM : WITHIN SARAH ORNE JEWETT'S THE COUNTRY OF THE POINTED FIRS (Melissa Richardson, 1998)
    -ESSAY : Journeys in Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs
    -ESSAY : Sarah Orne Jewett & the Ghost Story with a note on her influence on H. P. Lovecraft (Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Violet Books)
    -ESSAY : HIRED GIRLS AND COUNTRY DOCTORS: WORKING WOMEN IN THE DOMESTIC FICTION OF SARAH ORNE JEWETT AND WILLA CATHER ( Kim Wells, 1998)
    -ESSAY : SARAH ORNE JEWETT AND ANNIE ADAMS FIELDS: Boston Marriage and Cultural Nexus
    -ESSAY : Maine Women Authors and the Atlantic: The Voice of Local Color (Melanie Law)
    -ARCHIVES: "sarah orne jewett" (NY Review of Books)
    -Book Group Review : of The Country of the Pointed Firs
    -ANNOTATED REVIEW: Jewett, Sarah Orne A Country Doctor (Coulehan, Jack, Medical Humanities)
    -REVIEW : of SARAH ORNE JEWETT Her World and Her Work. By Paula Blanchard. (Lisa Alther, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of SARAH ORNE JEWETT A Writer's Life. By Elizabeth Silverthorne (Doris Grumbach, NY Times Book Review)

GENERAL:
-ESSAY : NEW ENGLAND VOICES (Thomas Williams, NY Times Book Review)

9/08/00

Gift from the Sea (1955)(Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1906-)

Based on its reputation as one of the seminal works of Feminism and a callow belief that the author was merely riding her husband's coattails to fame, this is a book that I have pretty studiously avoided. As it turns out, that was a colossal mistake on my part. This little book contains more interesting and compelling thoughts on the nature of human relationships, particularly the marriage relationship, than just about any other book I've ever read.

It's not possible to address them all here, but here are two ideas that I found particularly striking. Here is a passage describing a quality marriage:

    A good relationship has a pattern like a dance, and is built on some of the same rules. The partners
    do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate but gay
    and swift and free, like a country dance of Mozart's. To touch heavily would be to arrest the pattern
    and freeze the movement, to check the endlessly changing beauty of its unfolding. There is no place
    here for the possessive clutch, the clinging arm, the heavy hand, only the barest touch is assign.
    Now arm in arm, now face to face, now back to back - it does not matter which. Because they know
    they are partners moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together, and being invisibly
    nourished by it. The joy of such a pattern is not only the joy of creation or the joy of participation,
    it is also the joy of living in the moment. Lightness of touch and living in the moment are
    intertwined.

    When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment
    to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of
    us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at
    the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on
    permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in
    growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass,
    but partners in the same pattern.

    The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping,
    even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward
    to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as
    it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now,
    within their limits - islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and
    abandoned by the tides.

This image, of a loving couple as partners in a dance, not gripped in a hammer lock, but tracing a unified pattern via different steps, just seems profound to me. We all know people who demand of love that it be unchanging, or demand of a partner that they do things in lockstep; these people are never happy and we immediately recognize their relationships as unhealthy. At the same time, we recognize the good marriages around us as the ones where each partner is confident enough in the other to have faith that their separate paths will remain intertwined and will lead to the same place.

The other section that truly brought about a personal epiphany, was when she says:

    ...marriage, which is always spoken of as a bond, becomes actually, in this stage, many bonds,
    many strands, of different texture and strength, making up a web that is taut and firm. The web is
    fashioned of love. Yes, but many kinds of love: romantic love first, then a slow-growing devotion
    and, playing through these, a constantly rippling companionship. It is made of loyalties, and
    interdependencies, and shared experiences. It is woven of memories of meetings and conflicts; of
    triumphs and disappointments. It is a web of communication, a common language, and the
    acceptance of lack of language, too; a knowledge of likes and dislikes, of habits and reactions, both
    physical and mental. It is a web of instincts and intuitions, and known and unknown exchanges.
    The web of marriage is made by propinquity, in the day to day living side by side, looking outward
    and working outward in the same direction.

As I read that, I was reminded of some of the marriages i've never been able to fathom, from my own grandparents to that most analyzed relationship of our day, the Clintons. The notion of the years together creating a web and of reaching a point where you, the couple, are within, looking out in the same direction, seems to me to go a long way to explaining such marriages. Think of how completely the Clintons are entangled within their own unique web, how insular their world must be, and, so long as they do work in the same direction, their relationship at least starts to make a little sense.

There is much more here besides. I approached with trepidation, fearing a chick book, and found instead a marvelous exploration of the human condition in general and of the extraordinarily complex
nature of marriage in particular. It is a book that anyone will benefit by, especially actual or prospective husbands and wives.

GRADE: A+

Be sure to also read:

Berg, A. Scott
-Lindbergh (1998) (read Orrin's review, Grade: A+)

Lindbergh, Charles A. (1902-1974)
-The Spirit of St. Louis (1953) (read Orrin's review, Grade: A+)

de Saint Exupery, Antoine (1900-1944)(trans. Katherine Woods)
-The Little Prince (1943) (read Orrin's review, Grade: A-)

REEVE LINDBERGH:
    -PROFILE: Flight From Celebrity (Bob Thompson, Washington Post)
    -REVIEW: of UNDER A WING: A MEMOIR, by Reeve Lindbergh (Frank Allen, Catholic News Service)
    -REVIEW: of PAST FORGETTING My Memory Lost and Found. By Jill Robinson (Reeve Lindbergh, NY Times Book Review)

GENERAL:
    -Aerogirl: A not-for-profit society focused on helping women in aviation
    -REVIEW: Gore Vidal: Love of Flying, NY Review of Books
        The Winged Gospel: America's Romance with Aviation, 1900-1950 by Joseph J. Corn

5/19/00

Moon Tiger (1987)(Penelope Lively 1933-)

As this 1987 Booker Prize winner opens, Claudia Hampton, a 76 year old journalist/historian, lies dying in a hospital bed in England. Before she dies, she is determined to write: "The history of the world as selected by Claudia: fact and fiction, myth and evidence, images and documents." She takes a kaleidoscope view of history and so her visitors trigger different memories from throughout her life. The central characters (and they are characters) in her life are her brother Gordon, daughter Lisa, Lisa's father Jasper and the lost love of Claudia's life, Tom Southern, a British tank commander killed in North Africa during WWII.

This book reminded me of, though it's much different than, The Sportswriter or Rabbitt, Run. Claudia is just such a consummate bitch, that it's hard to develop much empathy for her. She's infuriating, self contradictory, selfish, condescending, heartless, well, you pick a pejorative. But Lively is such a wonderful writer that Claudia's life story becomes enthralling.

Grade: B-

WEB SITES:
-New York Times review (Ann Tyler)
-Lively thoughts: Sophie Craig on Penelope Lively (Varsity Online)

West With the Night (1941) (Beryl Markham 1902-1986)

This exceptionally beautiful book is the memoir of renowned Kenyan aviatrix
Beryl Markham. It has engendered much controversy over whether Markham herself
wrote the book. It now appears to be pretty reliably proven that her third
husband, the writer Raoul Schumacher, was the author. However, the story is
still that of Beryl Markham and it is the extraordinary story of a remarkable
woman.

In the first half of the book she tells about her experiences growing up on a
farm in Njaro, Kenya. From the adventures of her dog Buller, who fought boars
and leopards, to her own experiences hunting with Nandi tribesmen, on to
encounters with mad horses & not quite domesticated lions, this section is the
equal of, if not superior to, Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa. (In fact, in it's elegiac
evocation of a way of life disappearing before the author's eyes,
it reminded me of nothing so much as the wonderful How Green Was My Valley
by Richard Llewellyn.)

Then there's a brief interlude while she trains race horses after her father's
farm fails & he leaves the country. Here she relates the thrilling tale of a
race between a horse, Wild Child, with bad legs and another horse that she had
trained, Wrack, but that was taken away from her because of her lack of
experience. The description of the race is as good as anything I've ever read.

Finally, Tom Black teaches her to fly & she befriends men like Bror Blixen &
Dennis Finch-Hatton (Dinesen's husband and her lover). The deft & understated
comedic touch that is displayed throughout the book is evident in this passage
about a Kenyan landing strip:

"A high wire fence surrounds the aerodrome-a wire fence and then a deep ditch.
Where is there another aerodrome fenced against wild animals? Zebra,
wildebeest, giraffe, eland--at night they lurk about the tall barrier staring
with curious wild eyes into that flat field, feeling cheated.

They are well out of it, for themselves and for me. It would be a hard fate to
go down in the memory of one's friends as having been tripped up by a wandering
zebra. 'Tried to take off and hit a zebra!' It lacks even the dignity of
crashing into an anthill"

After several years scouting for elephants by air & flying medical supplies
around, she heads to England and a friend stakes her in a 1936 effort to be the
first pilot to fly solo from England to New York non-stop. Though she crash
landed in Nova Scotia & couldn't make it to New York, she was still the first
person to make the solo flight from England to North America non-stop.

Each of the three sections is united by one unique thread: Markham's obvious
love of Africa; horses; & flying. Her passion shines through regardless of who
the actual author may have been.

GRADE: A+

Dorothy Judd's Review:

West with the Night by Beryl Markham (or her husband as the case may be) is
an outstanding example of poetic prose. Based on my sketchy knowledge of
Beryl Markham, the cover photo, and the title, I expected a factual account
of aviation and a transatlantic flight. While the book does, in fact, cover
these, it is the brilliant descriptions of people, places, and animals that
captivated me.

Being informed that Beryl Markham probably did not herself write the book
lessened my enjoyment of it as it lost the power of a first person account.
However, the masterful descriptions stand on their own.
If you read nothing else, read the chapter entitled "Royal Exile" for an
achingly beautiful trip into the spirit of a horse!

Here are some of my favorite examples of use of language:

*(in the future it will be discovered) .that all the science of flying has been captured in the breadth on an instrument board, but not the religion of it.
*human beings drew from Mr. Darwin's lottery of evolution both the winning ticket and the stub to match it.
*Even in Africa, the elephant is as anomalous as the Cro-Magnon Man might be shooting a round of golf at Saint Andrews in Scotland

Grade: B+

WEBSITES:
-Author and Hero in West With the Night (Robert Viking O'Brien in The Journal of African Travel-Writing)
-Beryl Markham (short bio)

If you liked West with the Night, try:

Boyd, William
-An Ice-Cream War

Dinesen, Isaak
-Out of Africa

Fox, James
-White Mischief : The Murder of Lord Erroll

Watkins, Paul
-In the Blue Light of African Dreams

Watson, Lyall
-Lightning Bird : The Story of One Man's Journey into Africa's Past

Wood, Barbara
-Green City in the Sun

Katherine (1995)(Anchee Min 1957-)

Nations, in order to provide themselves some unity and cohesion, manufacture myths which rapidly become dogma and provide a template from which public opinion is not allowed to vary. We can readily see this truism in action in the visceral reaction that Pat Buchanan has fostered simply by questioning America's role in WWII. He has violated one of the central myths of 20th Century America: "WWII was a good war, which we fought well, in order to stop Hitler and save the Jews, and we won it." To question these assumptions is to undermine the foundations of the American mythos; it is not allowed.

Okay, but that's a relatively minor instance. Assume Pat is right and the war failed horribly, sentencing several generations of Eastern Europeans to the Gulag. Big deal. It's over. The 40 or 50 million people who were murdered by the Soviet Union are long gone. If we want to delude ourselves about how great it was to stop Hitler and ignore the fact that we left an even worse regime in power, so be it. Noone is really hurt by it now. The damage has been done.

No, the real danger of this kind of myth making arises when we maintain myths about events and processes that are still going on--like those in Red China. For fifty years now, we have found it convenient to tell ourselves that Maoist China is a qualitatively different case than other totalitarian genocidal regimes. Whether we say that Maoism was a natural reaction to decades of exploitation by the West or a necessary corrective to centuries of inept rule, whether we pretend that the mammoth number of state sanctioned murders and human rights abuses are due to a uniquely Chinese xenophobia or are somehow the result of tension between the Chinese and the Russians, whether we accept the rampant infanticide of female babies and forced sterilizations and other barbaric population control methods because we'd like to do the same thing worldwide or because we think there are too damn many of them already, regardless of the specific reasons, the fact remains that we blithely accept and continually make excuses for all of these intolerable features of this inhuman system. This willful blindness on our parts makes the works of Anchee Min all the more important.

Anchee Min was born in Shanghai in 1957. As a youngster she became a leader in her school's Little Red Guard, even denouncing one of her teachers. At 17, she was sent to the Red Fire Farm, to become a peasant by working in one of the huge state collective farms. In her terrific memoir, Red Azalea, she recounted her experiences in this dehumanizing laboratory of social engineering. Now in her first novel, she tells the story of the effect that Katherine, a young American teacher of English in Shanghai, has on a class of Chinese students who were raised under Mao. As Zebra Wong, a 29 year old woman in the class with a life story pretty similar to Min's own, recalls:

    As a teenager, my greatest wish was to die for him [Chairman Mao]. All the children at school
    wanted to do the same. We hoped that we would be given the chance, whether it was in Viet Nam
    in battle against the USA, or on the Soviet border absorbing machine-gun fire in our hot-blooded
    chests, or even on the street saving a child from getting hit by a bus. Anything. We were willing to
    do anything to honor Mao.

Sixteen years after the revolution we had to ask ourselves why, when we had worked so hard, so
happily, were we now so miserable?

    We resented what Communism had done to our lives, but we couldn't escape Mao. We couldn't
    escape his myth. the only truth we knew was that he had created us. We were his spiritual
    offspring; we carried his genes. the blood that pumped through the chambers of our hearts was his
    blood. Our brains were stuffed with his thoughts. although we were furious with our inheritance,
    we couldn't change the fact that we would always be his children.

    My generation had become disillusioned with the government. Yesterday's glory and honor brought
    us embarrassment in today's capitalistic world. We did not have a proper education. The Chinese
    we wrote read like Mao quotations, the characters we printed looked crabbed and ugly. But how
    could we forget the thousands of bottles of black ink we used to make posters from Mao's Little
    Red Book? Our entire youth was written across these posters.

    My education from age seven to eighteen was spent learning to be an honest Communist. We
    worshipped Mao and his teachings. He was like Buddha--we could not expect to understand
    everything immediately. We believed that if we spent a lifetime studying, we would have a total
    awakening by the end.

    We waited patiently until Mao died on September 9, 1976, only to discover that the pictures blurred
    with passing time, that the ink on the posters dripped with the wash of each year's rain, that the
    paper peeled off and was blown away by the wind, that our youth had faded without a trace. we
    'awakened' with horror, and our wounded souls screamed in devastation. How am I to explain
    what I have become?

Katherine drops into this milieu and deepens their confusion. Smart, beautiful, funny and engaging, she is also impossibly naive. She does not understand China at all and is especially dense about the type of totalitarian government that has shaped her students. They in turn don't know what to make of her. She reaches out to them and they are strongly attracted to her, but a yawning cultural chasm separates them:

    She laughed, then she told us about how her hometown was 'surrounded by oak trees'. 'We sold
    our old house and bought a new one with a big backyard in the sixties. My parents preferred the
    suburbs to the city..." The lake, she said, was called Lake Michigan. "The lake was the real reason
    our family chose to move there. I love to smell the air and listen to the sound of waves at night...'

    Her words were incomprehensible to us. We had no notion of such phrases as 'preferred', 'chose',
    or 'bought a house'. We believed that we were wild seeds; we grew and died where the wind
    dropped us. It never occurred to us that we had a choice in life, that one could do what one 'loved'
    to do. We were never asked what we 'preferred' or what we would like to 'choose'. We never
    thought that a house could be 'sold' and 'bought'. We began to see what we had missed in our lives
    and understand what it meant to sacrifice individualism to serve the ideals of the group.

As we learned about Katherine's life in Michigan, America, we began to taste something that had a
sweet-sad taste.

Inevitably, of course, even as Katherine opens new vistas to her students, she runs afoul of the Chinese authorities with predictably ugly results.

Anchee Min is an extremely gifted writer and she has an important story to share. If the book is not quite the equal of Red Azalea, it is still very good. There are several points that she raises which are especially important. First is simply the fact that Communist China is no different than any of the other totalitarian states that have so horrified us in this century. Were we honest about China, she might be as well known as Solzenitsyn or Pasternak or Weisel or Anne Frank or any one of the myriad others whom we have honored for speaking truth to power in the politically unpopular cases of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Second, she makes clear the uncomfortable fact that regimes like this survive and thrive through the complicity of their citizens. There is a strong undercurrent that draws the students back to the government, even as they realize the damage it has done to them. Perhaps the most interesting corollary of this is the submerged but omnipresent that the students feel towards Katherine. Her very openness and her freedom seem to stand in condemnation of them for the collaborative actions that they have committed in the past for the repressive regime. Finally, the story confirms, once again, the indomitability of the human spirit as members of even this generation, which was spoon fed Maoist pabulum, yearn for, fight for and ultimately achieve freedom.

As I write this (October 6th, 1999), Red China has just celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Revolution that brought the Communist Party to power. Many stupid and dishonest words have been spilled in commemoration of this achievement. Anchee Min reminds us that a half century of Maoism has been an unmitigated catastrophe for the people of China and that the regime's demise can not come quickly enough.

GRADE: A

Other recommended books by Anchee Min:
-Red Azalea

WEBSITES:
    -REVIEW: of KATHERINE By Anchee Min (BERNARDINE CONNELLY, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: of RED AZALEA By Anchee Min (Judith Shapiro, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: of RED AZALEA By Anchee Min (MARGO JEFFERSON, NY Times)
    -REVIEW: of Red Azalea Proper Passions (Gertrude Chock, Instructor: Andrew McCullough, PH.D., English 257M
    -Nothing to Celebrate: China's wasted half-century (Jonathan Mirsky, New Republic)

If you like Anchee Min, try:

    Dandelion Wine (1957)(Ray Bradbury 1920-)   (Grade: A+)
    A Clockwork Orange (1962) (Anthony Burgess 1917-1993) (Grade: A)
    Forever Flowing (1970)(Vasily Grossman 1905-64)    (Grade: A+)
Brave New World (1932)(Aldous Huxley 1894-1963)   (Grade: A)
Darkness at Noon (1941)(Arthur Koestler 1905-1983) (Grade: A+)
Animal Farm (1946) (George Orwell 1903-1949)   (Grade: A+)
    1984 (1949)(George Orwell 1903-1949)     (Grade: A+)
Night (1958) (Elie Wiesel 1928-) (Grade: A)

Wise Blood (1952)(Flannery O'Connor 1925-68)

All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.
-Flannery O'Connor

Wise Blood is Flannery O'Connor's grotesque picaresque tale of Hazel Motes of Eastrod, Tennessee; a young man who has come to the city of Taulkinham bringing with him an enormous resentment of Christianity and the clergy. He is in an open state of rebellion against the rigidity of his itinerant preacher grandfather and his strict mother. So when one of the first people he encounters is the blind street preacher Asa Hawks and Motes finds himself both attracted and repelled by Hawks' bewitching fifteen year old daughter Lily Sabbath, he reacts by establishing his own street ministry. He founds the "Church without Christ":

    Listen you people, I'm going to take the truth with me wherever I go. I'm going to preach it to
    whoever'll listen at whatever place. I'm going to preach there was no Fall because there was
    nothing to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgment because there
    wasn't the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar.

As you can guess the church is singularly unsuccessful, although he does attract a couple of other crackpots: Enoch Emery a young man who works at the zoo and longs for a kind word from anybody; and Onnie Jay Holy, yet another rival preacher who believes Motes when he says he's found a "new jesus."

While at first this cast of bizarre characters, ranging from merely repugnant to truly evil, and the scenes of physical, moral and spiritual degradation through which they pass all seem to be just a little too much, the reader is carried along by O'Connor's sure hand for dark comedy. The book is very funny. But as the story draws to a close, O'Connor's true mission is revealed; Motes loses his fight against faith and he achieves a kind of grace, becoming something like a Christian martyr to atone for his sins. O'Connor has something serious and important to say about the modern human condition and the emptiness of a life without faith. That she is able to disguise this message in such a ribald comic package is quite an achievement.

Reading the book inevitably called to mind Carson McCullers' dreadful book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), which made the Modern Library Top 100 Novels of the Twentieth Century list. It too is a Southern gothic, populated by dismal misanthropes. But it is devoid of humor and has nothing to say about the characters and the world they've created. Wise Blood is a superior novel in every sense and really deserves that spot on the list.

GRADE: A+

GENERAL:
    -BOOK LIST: The best titles proclaiming or applying a biblical worldview in a hostile 20th century (The Editors, World Magazine)
    -ESSAY: What makes for 20th Century Catholic fiction? A theory of what Catholic fiction is and what books conform to it (Tracy Dowling, Catholic Standard)
    -ESSAY: Reconstructing Southern Women's Literature: A literary critic says it's more than sugar and honey (SCOTT HELLER, Chronicle of Higher Education)
    -ESSAY: AND NOW, A WORD FROM OUR CREATOR (Dan Wakefield, NY Times Book Review)

3/22/00

The Violent Bear It Away (1960)(Flannery O'Connor 1925-68)

    From the days of John the Baptist until now, the Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, and the
    violent bear it away.
           -Matthew 11:12

Flannery O'Connor wrote with one of the most distinctive voices in American Literature; a kind of grotesque amalgam of Jonathan Edwards, Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allen Poe, and William Faulkner. She perceived the world in starkly Manichean terms, as a struggle between the forces of Light and Dark, Good and Evil. The Violent Bear it Away is a psychomachia--literally a battle for the soul--the story of a backwoods Southern boy named Francis Marion Tarwater (see The Violent Bear it Away and The Bible by Angela Lucey for more on this). The boy's great uncle, an Old Testament style patriarch, kidnapped him away from an uncle, George Rayber, and has raised him to be a prophet of God. Upon his great uncle's death, Tarwater rejects the prophetic mission and heads to the city to live with his uncle, who tries to wean the boy away from the teachings of the great uncle. Through a series of increasingly violent actions Tarwater is eventual driven back to the woods and a final acceptance of God and his own role in God's plans.

This is powerful stuff, O'Connor felt that exaggeration and caricature were more likely to reach a modern audience than more subtle styles ever could. Combine that with her vision of violence as a sort of crucible which forces the individual to make a final choice between Good and Evil, and you've got the makings of a truly disturbing fiction. The book will surely not appeal to all tastes, but it is undeniably affecting and thought provoking.

GRADE: B-

7/13/00

Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) (Mary Shelley 1797-1851)

The 19th Century bequeathed us four immediately recognizable, vibrant & enduring fictional icons: Shelley's Frankenstein; Stoker's Dracula; Melville's Moby Dick (& Ahab); and Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Each of them has, I fear, suffered a horrible fate: they are so familiar to us, in their many modern incarnations & imitations, that too few people return to the original texts. This may be particularly true of Frankenstein, whose portrayals have been so frivolous and distorted. In fact, in addition to being written in luxuriant gothic prose, the original novel is one of the most profound meditations on Man and his purpose and relation to God that has exists in our literature.

Victor Frankenstein is a young man of Geneva who is fascinated by the sciences and the secrets of life and death:

My temper was sometimes violent, and my passions vehement; but by some law in my
temperature they were turned not towards childish pursuits but to an eager
desire to learn, and not to learn all things indiscriminately. I confess that
neither the structure of languages, nor the code of governments, nor the
politics of various states possessed attractions for me. It was the secrets of
heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward
substance of things or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man
that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or in
its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world.

While at University in Ingolstadt, his life course is set when he hears a professor lecture on modern chemistry:

'The ancient teachers of this science,'said he, 'promised impossibilities and
performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that
metals cannot be transmuted and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these
philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to
pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They
penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her
hiding-places. They ascend into the heavens; they have discovered how the blood
circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and
almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heavens, mimic the
earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.'

Such were the professor's words--rather let me say such were the words of the
fate--enounced to destroy me.

Victor goes on to discover, through the study of chemistry, the secret of bringing dead flesh to life. Inevitably he tests his discovery and of viewing his creation cries:

How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavored to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.

And so, repelled by the mere appearance, the inevitable imperfection, of his work, Frankenstein rejects the creature utterly. However, unlike the mute stupid monster of the movies, Shelley's monster is articulate and sensitive and longs for companionship, but all of humankind reacts to him with horror. And so he demands that Frankenstein build him a mate. When Frankenstein refuses to provide him with a companion, the creature resolves to destroy those who Frankenstein loves.

Finally, Frankenstein determines that he must destroy the creature and pursues him into the frozen wastes of the North.

It all makes for a rousing adventure, but there is much more here. Frankenstein, through his work, has attempted to become a god, but his creation is a horrible disappointment & so, is banished from him. Meanwhile, his flawed creation, filled with ineffable longing and confusion, wanders in exile seeking the meaning of his existence. And what is the impulse that he settles upon, but another act of creation; a mate must be created for him. The Biblical parallels are obvious, but they work on us subtly as we read the novel. In the end, the uncontrollable urge to create, to imitate God, stands revealed as Man's driving force. And the inevitable disappointment of the creator in his creation, is revealed as the serpent in the garden.

If you've never read this book, read it now. If you've read it before, read it again.

GRADE: A+

WEBSITES:
    -Frankenstein (etext)
    -Mary Shelley & Frankenstein
    -Literary Research Guide: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797 - 1851)
    -Mary Shelley (Most Web)
    -REVIEW : of Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life by Janet Todd (Susan Eilenberg, London Review of Books)
    -ESSAY : NIGHT OF OUR GHASTLY LONGINGS (George Stade, NY Times Book Review)

Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (1994)(Christina Hoff Sommers)

In this wonderfully harsh polemic against modern feminism, Christina Hoff Sommers essentially sets out to hunt a mouse with an elephant gun. In a successful effort to demonstrate that radical feminists have betrayed the concerns of the vast majority of women, she does a great job of reporting horror stories from the gender wars, but she is not as good at analyzing the ideology that is causing them. When she's done, her target has certainly been destroyed, but there's not much meat left for us to chew on.

Her basic thesis is inarguable: the "First Wave" of feminism was based on the idea of equity, that women should have equal opportunity to succeed in society; but the "Second Wave" of feminism is based on a fight against men and an imaginary patriarchy bent on subjugating women. Unfortunately, the book consists almost exclusively of presenting anecdotes to demonstrate that the second half of this thesis is accurate. Whereas, if only Ms Hoff Sommers had taken the time to examine her own argument and place it in a broader historical and philosophical context, she could have both obviated the need for presenting quite so much detailed proof and taken advantage of the powerful preexisting critiques of this same tendency in other groups.

The transition she identifies is after all nothing more than the common historical movement by disadvantaged interest groups from a demand for equality of opportunity to a demand for equality of results. The Second Wave feminists, or gender feminists as she refers to them, are simply your garden variety radical egalitarians. Their ideas are nothing new--they are borrowed from Marxists and Black activists and others--all that has changed is who gets grouped in the victim class (in this case it's women rather than proletarians or people of color) and who gets grouped in the oppressor class (men instead of the bourgeoisie or whites). The solution offered by the gender feminists is nothing new either; when equality of opportunity fails to produce equal results, egalitarians only have one recourse and that is to place restrictions on those who are succeeding in the existing system.

Egalitarians are always coercive utopians. Having determined an ideal set of outcomes, but unable to produce them in the rough and tumble of the free market, they resort to limitations on certain individuals and classes, and to privileges for others, as the only means to reach their cherished goal. It is hardly surprising that some 100 years into the era of women's rights, the most radical fringe element of the women's movement should have reached this stage.

This book offers an important portrait of the real life effects that these feminists and their authoritarian tactics are having, particularly in American schools. The litany of abuses which these activists have perpetrated should serve as a wake up call to anyone who is concerned about the decline of the educational system and who believes in freedom of expression, in basic civil rights, in equality of opportunity and, ultimately, in the future of women specifically and society in general. One can only wish that the author had drawn back a little from her passionate but parochial concern with gender feminism and integrated her argument into the much wider ongoing struggle against coercive egalitarians everywhere.

GRADE: B-

For a fuller discussion of some of these ideas, see:

Hayek, Frederick
-The Road to Serfdom

Henry, William A. III (1950-1994)
-In Defense of Elitism (1994) (read Orrin's review, Grade: B-)

WEBSITES:
    -C.V.: Christina Hoff Sommers W. H. Brady Fellow (American Enterprise Institute)
    -ESSAY : Hillaryís Radical Feminism (Christina Hoff Sommers, The American Enterprise)
    -ESSAY: The war against Boys: This we think we know: American schools favor boys and grind down girls. The truth is the very opposite. By virtually every measure, girls are thriving in school; it is boys who are the second sex (Christina Hoff Sommers, the Atlantic)
    -ESSAY: Feminist fatale (Christina Hoff Sommers, New Criterion)
    -ESSAY: Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong: We need a "great relearning," to restore our moral environment (Christina Hoff Sommers, Hudson Institute)
    -ESSAY: Researching the "Rape Culture" of America: An Investigation of Feminist Claims about Rape (Christina Hoff Sommers, The Real Issue)
    -ESSAY: Are we living in a moral Stone Age? (CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS, Ph.D, Philosopheye)
    -ESSAY: Fleeing Science and Reason (Christina Hoff Sommers, AEI)
    -REVIEW : of The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem by Carolyn G. Heilbrun (Christina Hoff Sommers, New Criterion)
    -LECTURE: Where the Boys Are (Christina Hoff Sommers, A Bradley Lecture delivered at the American Enterprise Institute, November 9, 1998)
    -LECTURE: THE 'FRAGILE AMERICAN GIRL' MYTH (Christina Hoff Sommers, AEI)
    -EXCHANGE: Barbara Dafoe Whitehead vs. Christina Hoff Sommers (AEI)
    -INTERVIEW: Sommers on Deconstruction, Feminism (Benjamin Wallace-Wells, Dartmouth Review)
    -INTERVIEW : The War Against Boys : A conversation with Christina Hoff Sommers (Michael Cromartie, Christianity Online)
    -PROFILE: A FEMINIST ON THE OUTS Christina Hoff Sommers' book irks her ideological kin by attacking their excesses and downplaying the downtrodden fate of women (BARBARA EHRENREICH, TIME)
    -EquityFeminism.Com: Christina Hoff Sommers
    -ARCHIVE: Christina Hoff Sommers (Upstream)
    -RESPONSE: American Association of University Women Memorandum To: Branch and State Presidents, Communication Chairs, and Initiative Chairs Re: Responding to Who Stole Feminism? by Christina Hoff Sommers
    -RESPONSE: The "Stolen Feminism" Hoax: Anti-Feminist Attack Based on Error-Filled Anecdotes (Laura Flanders, FAIR)
    -LETTER: Defense of Christina Hoff Sommers published in The Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association (Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D.)
    -ESSAY: WARNING: Feminism is hazardous to your health (RUTH CONNIFF, The Progressive)
    -REVIEW: of WHO STOLE FEMINISM? How Women Have Betrayed Women. By Christina Hoff Sommers (Nina Auerbach, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: of Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (Mary Lefkowitz, National Review)
    -REVIEW: of Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (Sanford Pinsker, Shadek Professor of Humanities at Franklin and Marshall College, Academic Questions)
    -REVIEW: of Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women, by Christina Hoff Sommers (Steve Roby)
    -REVIEW: of Who Stole Feminism? By Christina Hoff Sommers (John K. Wilson, Zmag)
    -REVIEW: of Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women, by Christina Hoff Sommers Reactionary Feminism (Tama Starr, Reason)
    -REVIEW: of The War Against Boys How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men. By Christina Hoff Sommers (Robert Coles, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: of The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, by Christina Hoff Sommers The Male Eunuch (Richard Lowry, National Review)
    -REVIEW: It's payback time: In "The War Against Boys," author Christina Hoff Sommers claims that unfair programs to empower girls have taken a toll on boys. (Cathy Young, Salon)
    -REVIEW: of The War Against Boys : How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men By Christina Hoff Sommers (Isabel Lyman, Enter Stage Right)
    -REVIEW : of The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men by Christina Hoff Sommers (Chester E. Finn, Jr., Commentary)

GENERAL:
    -The Dissident Feminist
    -REVIEW: of PROFESSING FEMINISM Cautionary Tales From Inside the Strange World of Women's Studies By Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge (MICHIKO KAKUTANI, NY times)
    -ESSAY: Feminists Must Begin to Fulfill Their Noble, Animating Ideal (CAMILLE PAGLIA, Chronicle of Higher Education)
    -DOCUMENT: BEYOND TITLE IX: GENDER EQUITY ISSUES IN SCHOOLS
    -Feminists for Free Expression
    -EquityFeminism.Com: Critiques of Feminism page. This site is home to numerous essays debunking feminist authors and oft-repeated feminist myths as well as links and other resources for anyone interested in looking into the claims made by feminists or their opponents
    -Friesian School: non-peer-reviewed electronic journal and archive of philosophy (Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D.)
    -Independent Women's Forum
    -Upstream: a home for the intellectually heterodox, the politically incorrect and other independent thinkers
    -DEBATE : Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Susan Moller Okin, Boston Review)
    -GREAT: Gender Relations in Educational Applications of Technology
    -Women's Freedom Network
    -Expect the Best from a Girl, That's What You'll Get (WOMEN'S COLLEGE COALITION)
    -INTERVIEW: Interview with the Vamp: Why Camille Paglia hates affirmative action, defends Rush Limbaugh, and respects Ayn Rand (Virginia I. Postrel, Reason)
    -INTERVIEW: The corruption of feminism An interview with Jean Curthoys (Philosopher Magazine)
    -ESSAY: Team players or tools of the patriarchy?: Women often are supplying the muscle behind the fathers' rights movement. (Cathy Young, Salon)
    -ESSAY: When Fairness Is Unjust: In an attempt to "level the playing field," education bureaucrats are lowering standards for minority students. The result? The bureaucrats are dooming minority students to lives of missed opportunities. (Thomas Sowell, Hoover Digest)
    -ESSAY: In the Land of Conservative Women: A diverse group of woman activists, including many young people and small-business owners, are bringing new energy to the Republican Party (Elinor Burkett, The Atlantic)
    -ESSAY: The return of the housewife : The full-time mother (FTM) is now a career aspiration for many working women (Lowri Turner, Times of London)

7/05/00

The Secret History (1992)(Donna Tartt 1963-)

Donna Tartt's outstanding first novel, written while she was a student at Bennington, is a terrific mystery and, I think, an insidious look at the pathologies of the modern university. Richard Papen is a lower middle class Californian who has wended his way to Hampden College in Vermont, largely because he like the picture on the catalogue. Richard happens to be proficient in several languages, so he tries getting into one of Professor Julian Morrow's classical language classes. But he discovers that Morrow only teaches a select handful of students and teaches every class that they take. They form an elite clique within the elite campus. Eventually, Richard attaches himself to this group and is admitted to Morrow's disciple hood.

Morrow remains a sort of opaque presence, but Richard's life is soon entwined with the other students, lead by the wealthy & arrogant Henry Winter and including Charles and Camilla MacCaulay, the overly close twins, Francis Abernathy, a flamboyant homosexual, and Edmund "Bunny" Corcoran, a rumpled preppy of dubious social grace. Richard longs to fit into this group and, ashamed of his rather plebeian origins, is soon inventing a fake background for himself and taking on pseudo sophisticated airs.

However, there's more to this little clan than meets the eye, and as the story unfolds, he discovers that during an attempt to recreate a Dionysian frenzy, Henry, Francis and the twins have killed a local man. Now Bunny has found them out & is basically blackmailing them, exacting a cruel revenge for their many slights. Inevitably, they decide that Bunny must die and the rest of the book deals with the murder's aftermath.

When this book was first published it was attended by tremendous hype, both because of the youth of the author and because of her mentors, Willie Morris & Brett Easton Ellis among them. But the hype, and the comparisons to Crime and Punishment, could not obscure the fact that Ms Tartt had penned an absorbing gothic mystery which quickly became a bestseller.

I agree with many of the criticisms of the novel. Some of the characters are underwritten and we are not adequately exposed to the teaching of Julian Morrow that makes him so attractive to the students. However, these legitimate gripes are outweighed by the creepy mesmeric can't-put-it-down story that the author weaves.

In addition, I think there's another reading that you can apply to the book with some profit. The effete, elitist, amoral, hothouse atmosphere fostered by Morrow and embraced by the clique is an apt metaphor for the modern university. Here are students who are absorbed by their studies, or at least by the aura of their studies, 24 hours a day, who cede complete control of their own minds to their instructor. Not content with the elitism of a University so expensive that there are few middle class students anyway, they've further segregated themselves into a small band of like minded students. If they get in trouble, it's in the pursuit of some romantic intellectual ideal and after all, who do they kill, just a townie and a slacker student.

However you interpret the story, it's a rewarding reading experience.

GRADE: A-

WEBSITES:
    -Mississippi Writers Page
    -Review from NY Times (Michiko Kakutani)
    -Review from New York Times Book Review

If you liked The Secret History, try:

Levin, Meyer
-Compulsion

The Color Purple (1982)(Alice Walker 1944-)

I liked this 1983 Pulitzer Prize & American Book Award winner an awful lot more than I thought I would. It is quite possibly the greatest piece of black lesbian fiction I have ever read, or ever will read. & there's the rub... There's something weirdly comforting to a straight white male in this portrait
of black lesbian women.

First, there are virtually no white's in the book. So it's possible to view all of the characters problems as purely black people problems. White's can't be guilty for the conditions the characters live in, since whites are nonexistent in the book.

Second, Celie is sort of forced into lesbianism by the beastly behavior of the men in her life. Shug is the only person who's ever been decent to her (other than her sister). Again this is a concept that a male can feel comfortable with; lesbians haven't consciously turned away from men, they are just
overwhelmed by them. There's a certain docility that's central to this thesis which confirms 50, 000 years of chauvinism. (On the other side of the coin, homosexuality is repellent because it reflects male surrender to women & subjugation by other men.)

So, I like the book, but I'm pretty sure I don't like it for the right reasons, more for the "Right" reasons.

GRADE: B+

WEBSITES:
    -Anniinna's Alice Walker Page
    -REVIEW: Robert Towers: Good Men Are Hard to Find, NY Review of Books
                          The Terrible Twos by Ishmael Reed
                          The Color Purple by Alice Walker
    -REVIEW: Darryl Pinckney: Black Victims, Black Villains, NY Review of Books
                          The Color Purple by Alice Walker
                          The Color Purple a film by Steven Spielberg
                          Reckless Eyeballing by Ishmael Reed
    -ESSAY: The Color Purple and the State of Literary Criticism (Rick Clewett)

Ethan Frome (1911)(Edith Wharton 1862-1937)

This brief but tragic novel casts a weirdly mesmeric spell, helped greatly by the fact that you can read it in one or two sittings. Ethan Frome is a strapping young New England farmer; like George Bailey he dreams of becoming an engineer and getting out of his small town. But circumstances conspire against him as he is first forced to care for his ailing parents, then impulsively marries the young woman who was brought in to help his Mother in her final days. His wife, Zenobia, proceeds to develop her own health problems, real or imagined, and Ethan is trapped in a loveless marriage on a hard scrabble farm that he can not possibly maintain.

Then Zenobia's cousin Mattie Silver, who is destitute, comes to stay with them and help around the house. Ethan falls in love with her and she with him, but Zenobia, realizing that something is going on, determines to send the girl away. Ethan struggles against fate, but is too decent to actually run away with Mattie and leave an invalid wife behind. Despite which, an awful tragedy intervenes and warps the lives and bodies of all concerned.

This ineffably sad tale is filled with all the revulsion at convention that we associate with Wharton and it is also an insidious and subtle attack in the long American war between the advocates of urban and rural life. Wharton, the ultimate chronicler of urban society, marshals everything from the name of the town, Starkfield, to the portrait of the barren homestead, to the final image of the shattered family left on that farm, to paint the most dismal possible picture of rural life.

It is a deeply affecting work and you will not soon forget the heart rending plight of Ethan Frome.

GRADE: A

Other recommended books by Edith Wharton:
    -The Age of Innocence (1920)(Grade: A)
    -The House of Mirth (1905)(Grade: C+)
    -Ethan Frome (1911)(Grade: A)

WEBSITES:
    -The Edith Wharton Society Home Page
    -Edith Wharton Restoration
    -Edith Wharton's World (National Portrait Gallery)
    -Edith Wharton: an Overview with Biocritical Resources
    -Domestic Goddess: Edith Wharton
    -PAL: Edith Wharton (1862-1937)(PAL: Perspectives in American Literature:   A Research and Reference Guide)
    -The San Antonio College LitWeb Edith Wharton Page
    -Edith Wharton (Kutztown)
    -Wharton, Edith: Ethan Frome (Medical Humanities)
    -Literary Research Guide: Edith Wharton (1862 - 1937)
    -ONLINE STUDY GUIDE: Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton (Spark Note Writer, Jim Cocola)
    -ETEXTS: by Edith Wharton
        The House of Mirth (1905)
        Ethan Frome By Edith Wharton (1911)
    -ETEXTS: of Contemporary Reviews of Wharton's Works from the University of Virginia E-Text Center
    -TEACHING GUIDE: Edith Wharton (1862-1937) Contributing Editor: Elizabeth Ammons
    -ESSAY: Edith Wharton's World: Portraits of People and Places (Stephen May, The Bee)
    -ESSAY: The New York That Wharton Turned Into Art (MICHAEL FRANK, NY Times)
    -ESSAY: In Search of Edith Wharton (BARBARA SHOUP, NY Times)
    -ESSAY: Summers in an Age of Innocence: In France With Edith Wharton (Leon Edel, NY Times Book Review)
    -ESSAY: Streetscapes: Edith Wharton; In 'The Age of Innocence,' Fiction Was Not Truth (CHRISTOPHER GRAY, NY Times)
    -ESSAY: Wharton and the House of Scribner: The Novelist as a Pain in the Neck (Marc Aronson, NY Times)
    -ESSAY: Filming Edith Wharton's World: You Were How You Ate (JIM KOCH, NY Times)
    -REVIEW: Elizabeth Hardwick: Mrs. Wharton in New York, NY Review of Books
        WORKS BY AND ABOUT EDITH WHARTON DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
        Edith Wharton: Novels (The House of Mirth, The Reef, The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence)
        The Mother's Recompense by Edith Wharton
        Old New York: False Dawn (The 'Forties), The Old Maid (The 'Fifties), The Spark (The 'Sixties), New Year's Day (The 'Seventies) by Edith Wharton
        "Bunner Sisters" in Madame de Treymes and Others by Edith Wharton
        Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
        Edith Wharton: A Biography by R.W.B. Lewis
        Portrait of Edith Wharton by Percy Lubbock
    -REVIEW: of THE HOUSE OF MIRTH THE REEF THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY THE AGE OF INNOCENCE By Edith Wharton (Janet Malcolm, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: Gabriele Annan: A Night at the Opera, NY Review of Books
        'Fast and Loose' and 'The Buccaneers' by Edith Wharton
        The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton and completed by Marion Mainwaring
        The Age of Innocence directed by Martin Scorsese, screenplay by Jay Cocks, and Martin Scorsese
        The Age of Innocence: A Portrait of the Film Based on the Novel by Edith Wharton by Martin Scorsese and Jay Cocks
        The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton and introduction by R.W.B. Lewis
    -REVIEW: of THE BUCCANEERS By Edith Wharton. Completed by Marion Mainwaring (Wendy Steiner, NY Times Book Review)
      -REVIEW: of A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton by Cynthia Griffin Wolff Edith Wharton's Secret (Karl Miller, NY Review of Books)
    -REVIEW: Irvin Ehrenpreis: The Rescue of Edith Wharton, NY Review of Books
        Edith Wharton: A Biography by R.W.B. Lewis
    -REVIEW: Eleanor Clark: "Angel of Devastation", NY Review of Books
        The Two Lives of Edith Wharton by Grace Kellogg
        Edith Wharton and Henry James: The Story of Their Friendship by Millicent Bell
        Edith Wharton 1862-1937 by Olivia Coolidge
        The Edith Wharton Reader selected with an Introduction by Louis Auchincloss
        The Reef by Edith Wharton and Introduction by Louis Auchincloss
    -REVIEW: Marius Bewley: Mrs. Wharton's Mask, NY Review of Books
        A Blackward Glance: The Autobiography of Edith Wharton Introduction by Louis Auchincloss
        Summer by Edith Wharton
        Old New York by Edith Wharton
    -REVIEW: of THE MOTHER'S RECOMPENSE. By Edith Wharton (MICHIKO KAKUTANI, NY Times)
    -REVIEW: of The Stories of Edith Wharton Selected and Introduced by Anita Brookner (Michiko Kakutani , NY Times)
    -REVIEW: of The Letters of Edith Wharton Edited by R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (Michiko Kakutani , NY Times)
    -REVIEW: of NO GIFTS FROM CHANCE A Biography of Edith Wharton. By Shari Benstock (Greg Johnson, NY times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: of EDITH WHARTON An Extraordinary Life. By Eleanor Dwight (Angeline Goreau, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: of HENRY JAMES AND EDITH WHARTON Letters: 1900-1915. Edited by Lyall H. Powers (Maggie Paley, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: of HENRY JAMES AND EDITH WHARTON Letters: 1900-1915. Edited by Lyall H. Powers   (Michiko Kakutani , NY Times)

FILM:
    -REVIEW: of Ethan Frome (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times)
    -REVIEW: of Ethan Frome (Rita Kempley, Washington Post Staff Writer)
    -REVIEW: of Ethan Frome (A Film Review by James Berardinelli)

GENERAL:
    -REVIEW: Helen Vendler: Feminism and Literature, NY Review of Books
        Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change by Rita Felski
        Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination: A Socialist-Feminist Reader edited by Karen V. Hansen and Ilene J. Philipson
        Feminism/Postmodernism edited and with an introduction by Linda J. Nicholson
        Women Writers of the Seventeenth Century edited by Katharina M. Wilson and Frank J. Warnke
        Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology edited by Roger Lonsdale
        Hamlet's Mother and Other Women by Carolyn G. Heilbrun
        No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century Vol. I, The War of the Words Vol. II,
        Sexchanges by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
        Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia
    -ESSAY: Listening for the Scratch of a Pen (SUZANNE BERNE, NY Times)

1/24/00