James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has something to say about beauty and attraction. The final quarter of the book is much concerned with a debate among Stephen and his peers about classic definitions of what is beautiful. The boys define and reduce things rather coldly—and the dialogue here makes a curious contrast to the chapters that precede it about Stephen battling lust. The intellectualization of beauty, looking at everything with the “the dullness of a thundercloud, charged with intellection and capable of the gloom of god” (175) is, perhaps, the real sin. The boys misguidedly attempt to distill what is primal and beyond language. What rings truer than these scholarly debates is Stephen’s battle with sexual desire as it is played against a terror of the afterlife and the threat of pain and misery therein. “What did it avail to pray when he knew that his soul lusted after its own destruction?” (95). There’s a rich complexity to the psychological conflict here (Stephen becomes terrified at the thought of pleasure) and Stephen’s battle is reminiscent of something every young person brought up to fear hell must at times consider.

At one point in the novel, Stephen’s friend Davin interrupts the richly poetic and deeply intellectual tone of the whole book to declare, “Too deep for me, Stevie…But a man’s country comes first. Ireland’s first, Stevie. You can be a poet or a mystic after” (190). Interesting words in light of the book’s title. Does Joyce consider himself an artist first? Or first an Irishman? The book concludes with a dialogue in which Stephen makes it clear that he (much like his creator) is a religious unbeliever, although still sympathetic of a system “which is logical and coherent,” (Catholicism, that is, compared with the alternative, Protestantism). Even so, Stephen declares that “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself freely in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can…” (232). I suspect that this is the novel’s primary message—to be defined as an individual first (an “artist” first), as a member of a community only secondarily. 

E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

I first read A Passage to India in high school, just a bit more than ten years ago. Upon rereading it, I kept discovering charming little words and phrases that fascinated me as a teenager and that have been “echoing” in the cave of my mind ever since without my being quite sure where I first heard them. For example there’s the friendly dialogue between Aziz and Mrs. Moore just before things deteriorate, in which Aziz discusses their first chance encounter in the Marabar Caves in chapter fourteen (“…how rough and rude I was and how good you were.” “And how happy we both were.”).  Rummaging through high school papers recently, I discovered an essay titled “Broken Wings,” which I now recall is a reference to a bit of figurative language used to describe Aziz just after his arrest in chapter sixteen (“…he gasped, his wings broken.”).

The questions the book raises about colonialism (and my own family’s past in apartheid Africa) have stayed with me also. It is easy to resent the sort of old-fashioned British Imperialism that the book illustrates. However, Forster touches on challenges that are still very much with us. Still today, there is no easy answer for how two cultures should interact. The Anglo-Indians in the books throw “Bridge Parties,” intending to “bridge” the gulf between east and west, but, of course, this cannot be so easily done. Mr. Fielding and Dr. Aziz each begin the book with seeming earnestness and open-mindedness, complete willingness to interact civilly with an unfamiliar population, but in time their connection is strained, and the book ends with the two having a moment of friendly rivalry before parting. Here we see another phrase (the very last sentence of the book) that has haunted my memory “…the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House…they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices ‘No, not yet,’ and the sky said, ‘No, not there.’” Except I remembered it wrong until I checked the phrase once in college near graduation. I had in mind “The Sky said, ‘No, not yet.” As if it were God Himself who had forbid friendship between east and west (not “the palace, the birds” as Forster implies), which left me with the question, “Well, God, how about now?”

The book is nuanced in its depiction of westerners, and it becomes difficult to say exactly how Miss Quested, who began so well-intentioned it seemed, went wrong. Forster describes Miss Quested as erring in that she “wanted to see India, not Indians…” (elsewhere “seeing India” is described by the narrator as “a form of ruling India; no sympathy lay behind it.”). She attends “Bridge Parties” in which Anglo-Indians intend to bridge the gulf between East and West. Miss Quested embodies, it seems, the cavalier attitude of westerners who imagine that the two cultures can be blended in such a way as to benefit both parties—the disadvantages of the arrangement upon the native Indians go unnoticed. Instead, she is drawn to an India for capitalists and sight-seers; she imagines an India united in religion, a “Universal Brotherhood,” which Forster scoffs at as something to be “dreamed of,” but which “as soon as it was put into prose… became untrue.”

It becomes difficult to say exactly what interaction between cultures A Passage to India might endorse. The answer, of course, is not an isolation of cultures, certainly not segregation. But Forster firmly rebukes the kind of dramatic overlapping—conquest, under the smiling guise of civility—that the book’s British characters mean to impose. India remains a land “which the West can disturb, but never acquire.”

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

      I first read Mrs. Dalloway as a scrambling-to-finish college sophomore. The books struck me like so much that I read back then, as something that might make a great impression on me if I were able to allow myself to linger in its world a little more. It was for me back then a very different style of writing and one that I’ve come to appreciate more and more in the years since. I remember writing in college that stream of consciousness was difficult because I had my own thoughts that I had to keep pushing aside (“like a windshield wiper” I joked) in order to follow along. Since college, I’ve grown more fascinated with the style. It’s something that you can really only get from a book—something a movie can’t do (although, I’ll admit, I wasn’t completely turned off by the voiceover-heavy Mrs. Dalloway film adaptation I saw that same year in college for extra credit).

      I think the appeal of stream-of-consciousness is that spooky resonance—that realization that other people are conscious and have minds that move and turn much like our own. It is, I daresay, one of the greatest feats of empathy, to write an entire novel in which the thoughts of a variety of characters—men and women, different ages, from different backgrounds—are so vividly imagined. It would be impressive enough if the novel were content to dwell only in the mind of its worldly, titular hostess. Instead, Woolf also delves into the minds of a hallucinating and trembling veteran, an untroubled teenager, and, among even more others, a miserable history tutor who detests our protagonist. The petty clash between Mrs. Dalloway and Miss Kilman is especially rich in that each one’s thorough hatred of the other is so richly illustrated (and, of course, explained in logical terms that make the reader sympathetic, for a moment at least, with whomever the spotlight happens to be on).

     I’m still grappling with what the book seems to say about death and suicide. Dr. Bradshaw, who means to cure Septimus, might rightly be considered the book’s only true villain.  Septimus’s jump out the window is depicted both as something the doctor gave him no alternative but to do, but also as a sort a subversive victory. When Dr. Bradshaw’s patients speak of a right to die (“In short, this living or not living is an affair of our own?”), he counters with what he sees as the cure: the re-balancing of “proportions” (whatever that means). At its core, this is a book that means to illustrate how isolated a person can feel within her mind. Septimus Warren Smith in hurtling himself out the window seems to act upon some impulse lurking just below the waters of Mrs. Dalloway’s mind too, even as she busies herself with superficial details. She feels alarmed (guilty?) at the thought of a stranger’s death (“Somehow it was her disaster—her disgrace. It was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening dress.”), and she identifies with him (“She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it.”). Chilling words in light of Woolf’s own death. If we see Bradshaw as the book’s true villain, and we recognize as valid the frenzied nature of each character’s mind (not Septimus’s only), perhaps we can understand this to be a book about the impossibility, the futility, of ever attaining, as Dr. Bradshaw would say, a sense “of proportion.” That Mrs. Dalloway, this fastidious and capable and mature woman at the head of the party—that even she should be troubled and should have misgivings, this is our solace.

Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

     There is a telling moment in the confrontation between Walter and the Count near the end of the book when the count asks Walter about his motivations for disclosing Fosco and Gylde’s scheme. When Walter declares that he acts in his wife’s interest, the young man notices that he “sank in [the Count’s] estimation as a dangerous man from that moment” (401). We get a sense of Collins’s tastes here, too. The romance between Walter and Laura seems like something he includes out of obligation, a sort of necessary motivation for our hero which the author never really develops as colorfully as he should. Instead, he depicts Laura as a wilting flower, a figure so lifeless that one suspects that even Walter is losing interest in her as he explores the machinations of Collins’s proudly elaborate plot.

     This isn’t to say that Collins is completely disinterested in romance. In fact the book includes a compelling love story—between Fosco and Marian. Fosco gives mouth to the reader’s (and Walter’s and Collins’s) fascination with Marian. After Fosco, she is the most developed character. This is due to the chance she is given to narrate and the amount of agency she has in the story. Laura says little and does even less. Walter regards her as a little sister or a child, and the fond remarks he makes of Marian (each more unsettling than the last) give evidence to his latent attraction.   

     Fosco, though, is the most developed character. The way that Collins relishes every paint stroke of his characterization gives evidence to the author’s deep identification with the Count. He is the only character with any nuance—and Collins takes time to depict his cruelty towards humans and his tenderness with animals in such a way that they somehow each make sense and lend themselves overall to a more elaborate portrait of a man. I suspect that Collins imagines himself like Fosco. As with Collins, the Count takes pride in his writing skills, and he even suggests that his caper might be fodder for a compelling English romance. But Fosco, like Collins, is disinterested in traditional love stories that end in marriage (his apathy towards blank-canvas Madame Fosco is evidence of this). His written account, much like Collins’s entire book, swerves again and again to fawning discussion of Marian. His attraction to the more “masculine” sister (much like his cruel aristocratic worldview or his unapologetic love of himself) might be a latent aspect of Collins’s own mind. The Woman in White ends with Collins bored and confused with the Walter-Laura pairing and, as a consequence, not doing much with it at all. He leaves Laura upstairs with a headache for too much of the novel and chooses instead to end the novel with an acknowledgement of Walter’s real love, Mariane, “the good angel of our lives” (426).  

     It seems that the masculine aspects of Marian keep her from being depicted as “desirable” in the traditional sense. Is this merely a consequence of Collins’s period? Jayne Eyre is desirable and autonomous, so I suspect that Collins’s depiction of Marian has to do with his gender as much as his time period. At what point did male romance writers realize that a woman could be both desirable and self-assured—that a woman like this need not be divided into two sisters, and that, if she wasn’t, it would make for a more compelling read? 

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

     I've taught this book for three years now to ninth graders. The opportunity to re-read the book (each year, and even in multiple periods throughout the school day) has given me the chance to appreciate the sheer density of humor that Dickens packs in his prose. Somehow, every time I open the book, my appreciation of Dickens humor grows stronger. The only others I’ve read by Dickens are Hard Times and Oliver Twist. These led me to disparage the author for his sentimentalist streak. But here, maybe because Dickens wrote this when he was older and more jaded, the sentimentalism and wit seem even-handed. I’ve come to the point where I feel like the humor might even be the book’s most dominant quality—although I wasn’t as struck by it on my first read through, in which it was all I could do keep straight all the characters and plot twists. I’ve tried my hand at analyzing specifically how and why the book achieves such a comical effect. I sense that a lot of it comes from the blending of the absurd with the proper, as when Herbert tells Pip all about Miss Havisham through a dinner conversation in which Pip commits a number of absent-minded social blunders, including stuffing his napkin into his empty cup (189) His other mistakes are more understandable—this one comes out of left field. A second element to the humor is that Dickens is comfortable completely belittling the characters. Joe meets Miss Havisham and stands with “his mouth open as if he wanted a worm” (105). It helps that the characters are so cartoonishly exaggerated to begin with. They are fascinating to read about, but essentially walking caricature completely defined by a single quality. A third element to the humor is Pip’s narration itself. He has a way of undercutting a moment of sincerity or needless propriety. Take for example Joe’s admission that Mrs. Joe can be a “buster,” which Pip claims Joe pronounces as though it begins with “at least twelve capital Bs” (50).

     Even after re-readings, I have questions about the book's message. Is it really so wrong of Pip to crave social mobility? I like to think that Dickens means to share something about finding happiness in what might appear like mundane circumstances. However, I understand that some have analyzed this to be a corrupt element of Dickens writing. For example, Herbert tells Pip, describing Miss Havisham’s fiancé, that, “…he was a showy man…but that he was not to be, without ignorance or prejudice, mistaken for a gentleman…no man that is not a gentleman at heart ever was, since the world began, a true gentleman in manner…no varnish can hide the grain of the wood, and the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself” (189). These are interesting words in the context of a novel about a poor person who wishes to be rich. By saying that only some people can ever be a true gentleman—does he mean gentleman in terms of someone who exhibits appropriate social behavior, or someone who was born to be “upper class.” Pip’s awkwardness at the dinner here complicates the picture. By mixing up the social cues, is Dickens saying that Pip isn’t fit to be among the wealthy by virtue of the fact that he was born poor?

Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

     Questions about which characters are “likable” are sometimes difficult to answer because I sense that the characters we like in a book we wouldn’t like in real life. I think, though, that likability issues have some relevancy here because the book seems so often to lack a figure with whom the reader can identify. Jane Eyre, by contrast, made the reader-stand-in its narrator. Here, though, there are a few narrators, and none have quite the charisma of Jane. I think the book’s central accomplishment, especially in the early chapters is in getting readers invested in such a troubled romance as Healthcliff’s and Catherine’s. Nelly states that “the two, to a cool spectator, made a strange and fearful picture” (189), but I think, on the contrary, that there are many who will identify with the frenzied passion of these characters, even if these moments of recognition are not ones to be proud of.

     Heathcliff makes an engaging centerpiece for the novel. There's something intriguing about his ambiguous background and how that might affect how the others respond to him, including Bronte. Is he a gypsy? If so, I am specifically interested in the question of whether or not Bronte meant to depict racism in her characters’ reactions against Heathcliff, or if his ethnicity were only a small part of his role as an outsider as she imagined it—an element she added subconsciously. Early in the book, Healthcliff laments his status when he cries, “I wish I had light hair and a fair skin, and was dressed and behaved as well, and had a chance of being as rich as he will be!” (66) Nelly counsels him against understanding himself purely as a victim, but she later remarks that, in his moments of jealousy and guardedness, he seems almost monstrous. “I did not feel as if I were in the company of a creature of my own species” (191). Does Nelly recognize that prejudiced perceptions like these have made Heathcliff such a subversive figure? Does Bronte? ­

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Thoughts half-way through:

     I am unfamiliar with this book (and with the Bronte sisters in general). I wonder how feminists have traditionally responded to it. I suspect that Bronte imagined herself creating a subversive, pro-feminist figure—an intelligent young woman, comfortable learning new skills and placing herself in a new environment when she feels threatened or unhappy. Is this how her figure is interpreted today? Or have contemporary feminists scholars objected to the way that she learns from her friend at Lowood that “It is far better to endure patiently a smart which nobody feels but yourself, than to commit a hasty action whose evil consequences will extend to all connected with you” (40). A scene that might be interpreted two ways, for example, is the one in which young Jane quietly endures Mr. Brocklehurst’s punishment for accidentally breaking her slab. Is this today interpreted as a regrettable message from Bronte that subversive women should be more passive? Or do we read it like the author intended—a depiction of a young woman learning to take the moral high ground?

     In some ways, Eyre seems infatuated with her boss in ways that I suspect a contemporary, liberated woman might frown upon. One might ask why Bronte depicts Eyre’s happiness as being so contingent on being near Rochester. However, feminists might also appreciate the degree to which Eyre is unintimidated by Rochester’s guile. A more misogynistic writer might have depicted young Eyre learning discipline from the older, worldier Rochester, but Bronte seems to depict the two as intellectual equals. Eyre is able to keep up with Rochester tit-for-tat. Jane even states, “I don’t think, sir, you have a right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience” (103). What are we to make of this relationship in the contemporary day?

Upon finishing the book:

     I suspect there are some who object to Jane ending up with Rochester. This relationship is, after all, a reaction against the more intellectual brand of love Jane is offered by St. John (of course, this relationship with St. John is objectionable for different reasons, but that’s a different issue). Although there may be some who might have liked the novel to end with Jane completely independent, I will admit that I found myself completely won over by the romance between Jane and Rochester. Bronte creates an endearing chemistry between them in the early chapters, and, she makes the relationship more palatable to feminists in the end by diminishing Rochester’s agency and increasing Jane’s. On page 343, Jane says, “I love you better now, when I can really be useful to you, than I did in your state of proud independence, when you disdained every part but that of giver and protector.”

     Bronte's faith is an interesting component of the novel. There is a line in Bronte’s Preface that has stayed with me. “Self-righteousness is not religion…to pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee is not to lift an impious hand to the crown of thorns.” The book itself seems to reflect this nuanced take on faith. Helen Burns is presented as a sympathetic character who urges Jane to “Read the New Testament, and observe what Christ says and how He acts; make His word your rule, and His conduct your example” (42). However, later in the book, the very pious St. John is presented as a somewhat unsympathetic character. I suspect that Bronte, like Jane, valued her faith in the sense that it inspired feelings of self worth and freed her from petty vexations. St. John’s faith by contrast seems to have more to do with an anxious zeal which seems to Eyre to spring from “a depth where lay turbid dregs of disappointment” (270). The difference between his faith and Helen’s might make for an interesting study.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

In the book, Frankenstein warns, “Learn from me, if not by my precepts at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town the world that he who aspires to be greater than his nature will allow” (275). Something here will rub most contemporary intellectuals wrong. However, I also think that, in the character of Victor Frankenstein, Shelley presents some reasonable questions about what it is that really motivates our quest for knowledge: is it really only a reverence for truth or is it also a desire for something more grandiose?—perhaps even for immortality. Frankenstein dreams that “A new creation would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent creatures would owe their existence to me in a manner no father could claim…” (273).  What I found most fascinating about the book were those first few chapters which chronicle Frankenstein’s transition from a cynic, then a champion of then-contemporary science, its surface-level dullness notwithstanding. His conversion is interesting to watch—especially in a pivotal moment when a professor assures him that “…these philosophers whose hands appear only made to dabble in the dirt and their eyes to pore over the microscope … have indeed performed miracles” (268, emphasis mine). I appreciate the suggestion here that what motivates the scientist is in some ways what motivates the poet and priest also—a childlike affinity for things that seem “magic.”  

        I’m no expert in Freud, but I imagine he would have had some fun making sense of the story of a creature that is created, then rejected, then that dedicates his life to destroying his “father” (maybe the monster got his hands on some Sophocles at some point). I would say that the relationship between creator and creature is the compelling force of the book, right down to the final scene when a weeping monster laments “That is also my victim…in his murder my crimes are consummated” (426). The monster’s desire that Frankenstein might build him a mate, his intentions to attack his creator on his wedding night—these seem like ripe details for psychoanalytical discussion. Perhaps what’s most fascinating is that the symptoms of what Freud describes as a male-exclusive complex are so ably depicted in the imagination of a young woman well before Freud’s time. Shelley is, like her book’s eponymous scientist, almost unsettling skilled at imbuing life.

(Note: I read an 1816/1817 version unedited by Shelley’s husband. My apologies if I am ignorant of plot developments in later editions. I intend to read those too).

Karen Desai: The Inheritance of Loss.

The Inheritance of Loss explores issues of cultural displacement in a Darjeeling community suddenly overrun with Nepalese revolutionaries. In it, Desai toys with her readers’ sympathies. This is a plus for me. I enjoy books without clear villains because this seems more like how real life is—issues are complex, and even people who seem to be on the wrong side of the debate usually don’t mean to be hurtful. So perhaps the greatest triumph of The Inheritance of Loss is the fact that the reader is made to feel conflicted about the revolutionaries in a way that helps us identify with our young protagonist, Sai, and her bumpy romance Ghorkaland fighter Gyan.

        To be clear, there is a distinctive antagonistic force in the book. As Edward Said states in Culture and Imperialism, “…imperialism lingers, as we shall see, where it has always been, in a kind of general cultural sphere as well as in a specific political ideological, economic, and social practices” (9). The remnants of British Imperialism seem to lurk like ghosts around every corner of the book’s setting. This haunting presence is perhaps never better illustrated than when Sai absentmindedly picks up The Indian Gentleman’s Guide to Etiquette, a book so unapologetically bigoted that she is overcome with a desire to find the author’s decedents and “stab the life out of them” (218).  This is a significant moment because it also illustrates Sai grappling with the questions of privilege and innocence that have already come to so entangle the reader by this point in the book. Children shouldn’t pay for their parents’ crimes, Sai reminds herself, “But should the child, therefore, also enjoy the father’s illicit gain?”

There is a sense of right and wrong in the book, but it is depicted in terms of a generations-long battle that is greater than any single individual. Although it is not quite, as the judge’s father thinks, that “by the time a case of a stolen cow arrived at court, centuries of arguments had occurred between warring families, so many convolutions…that there was no right or wrong anymore” (65), Desai does concede the daunting enormity of straightening things out. For example, as readers, we sympathize with Lola and Noni when the rebels invade their home, and Desai affirms this sympathy, but also indicates that the characters are caught up in something so much larger. “…Lola and Noni were the unlucky ones who wouldn’t slip through, who would pay the debt that should be shared with others, over many generations” (266). 

Arundhati Roy: The God of Small Things

     Curiously, it is not the visiting Londoners who act as antagonists in The God of Small Things, but rather the Indians who wish to be more like them. Chakko tells his niece and nephew that they are “a family of Anglophiles. Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footsteps had been swept away” (51). With this in mind, it isn't surprising that it is Baby Kochamma's reverence for western culture that brings about the most trouble in the novel. The novel is similar to The Inheritance of Loss in this regard. Both novels feature children of some privilege at their center. Because of their youth, we do not begrudge them their privilege; instead, we identify with their dismay as they grow in awareness of the cruelties and injustices of the world around them.
     I think what is most distinctive about the book is the playfulness of its prose. At its best it helps readers identify with the child protagonists. A reader may begin to feel “childlike” after hearing a concessions-stand operator referred to as “the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man” again and again. Rahel imagines her scheduled afternoon nap as a “Gnap,” meant, I suppose, to sound like the word “Gnat,” indicating to us the somewhat irritating qualities of this daily chore from a child’s perspective. Sometimes, the narration is even interrupted by snippets from a song or rhyme (often in juxtaposition to a dark moment in the story). These non sequiturs are reminiscent of the wandering attentions of children, and specifically of Estha, who begins the novel so innocent and full of life that he is kicked out of the movie theater for so often erupting into song.
     The book is distinctive also for its structure. In the interview that follows the book, Roy states that writing the book inside-out was meant to make each moment “more poignant because it is viewed through the complex lens of the past and the present” (329). The first three-quarters of the book include numerous references to the fact that Sophie will die and a handful of scenes that take place after her death. By repeatedly mentioning that Sophie will die, and that this will change everything and ruin everyone, Roy creates a near-Victorian level of suspense. I’m not sure if the anticlimactic nature of Sophie Mol’s death (falling off a boat, unnoticed) is an intentional poke in the eye on Roy’s behalf, or a real failure to deliver what she promised.
     The novel makes better use of its structure in its final two chapters, which return to a theme first explored in the final sentences of chapter one. Readers are asked to consider “the Love Law,” regarding “who should be loved. And how. And how much” (311). Here Roy depicts a midnight tryst between Velutha and Ammu. An effective place for a nonlinear work to stop, I think, in that this is the “central” event in the story chronologically, it is so much anticipated by the reader, and, unlike the quiet death of Sophie Mol, the reader’s patience is thoroughly rewarded here with a scene that is mesmerizing, both as a standalone example of beautifully crafted prose, and in light of the whole story—we know the violent, terrible aftermath to which this quiet, intimate moment will lead, and there’s a deeply chilling effect to ending with such tragic irony.

Suzanne Collins: The Hunger Games

In The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins imagines a world where children are made to hunt each other for sport, all in the name of creating compelling reality television and keeping the proletariat down. Ostensibly, this is a book about the wrongness of offering up violence as entertainment. But isn’t that the appeal of this novel too? Specifically, I have a problem with the way Collins depicts some of the “tributes” as deserving of death; there are tributes from the rich districts who are depicted as pampered and egotistical. In characterizing them like this, Collins apparently means for us to join in the “fun” of the games, to root for protagonist Katniss as she kills her uppity competitors. The only way the inhumanity of the games could have really gotten across was if Katniss was made to kill sympathetic figures—she never does. 

I think Collins would say no, what compels the plot is the romance between Peeta and Katniss, our two heroes who are made to fight all those snotty rich kids to the death. The conflict, the book’s defenders might argue, is between the “Tributes” and the “Gamemakers”—not merely among all the tributes fighting each other. I could buy this if the romance were a more compelling element of the book, if Collins seemed even half as interested in it as she does the bloodbath. Katniss’s ambivalence about anything besides hunting and muscle drains the life out of the romantic elements of the book.

Speaking of which, why exactly is Katniss the narrator? First person narration is really only effective, I feel, if the narrator has a distinctive or engaging voice. Because she is a figure mostly defined by her athleticism and physical prowess, Katniss’s voice seems pretty generic and forgettable. Third-person-omniscient is needed here. As the novel is structured now, the narration is question-begging. I am wanting at every moment to know how the audience is reacting to seeing Katniss on television (especially because she constantly tantalizes us with what's out of the frame, saying things to the effect of “Gee, I’ll bet they’re sure going nuts watching me right now”). She’s supposedly creating a quite a stir in the Capital, and if that tension is supposed to be the crux of the conflict, why are the readers locked out of what’s going on among the big-wigs? Collins keeps her villains trapped in the shadows. Depicting the bad guys like this might be easier for the author, but it reduces any complex approach towards morality that the book might have aspired to.

The Hunger Games is strongly reminiscent of two famous stories—Ray Bradbury’s novel, Fahrenheit 451, and Richard Connell’s short story, “The Most Dangerous Game” (the latter I suspect Collins read in high school, but then, while writing The Hunger Games, she half-forgot who she was stealing from). The two works combined are shorter than The Hunger Games, but a quick reading of either makes clear everything Collins missed. Bradbury and Connell give their villains time to talk, to explain themselves in a way that makes them all the more believable and terrifying—all the more recognizable among figures we see in real life. They develop their protagonists too. Fahrenheit and “Dangerous Game” are stories of conversion, of minds made to be more self-critical. Collins, by contrast, simply asks us to reject what is obviously grotesque from page one. Katniss ends the book simply as a more vivid version of who she was in the beginning. The reader is given a warm hug for identifying with her all along. 

Come on, Suzanne, give us a challenge!      

(NOTE: Okay, fine, I’ve only read the first book. Maybe, maybe, maybe the next two will address all these concerns. I am interested, too, in seeing if the movie, freed from Katniss’s narrow narration, can fill in some of the blanks in order to create something enjoyable). 

Jeffery Eugenides: The Marriage Plot

       The title of The Marriage Plot comes from a research paper written by Eugenides’s main character, Madeleine Hanna, a lit major at Brown University in the eighties. Madeleine’s essay asserts that “The Marriage Plot” is a lost form in contemporary literature. Madeleine considers matrimony—and the drama that surrounds a protagonist’s choice among suitors—to be the compelling force of classic romances. Since society no longer reveres “the institution” of marriage in the way it once did, she speculates as to whether a contemporary novel could generate anything like the same gravity with the stakes having changed—that is, with everything meaning so much less than it used to.

     Eugenides’s novel asks the same question. The Marriage Plot mimics a Victorian structure insofar as the book’s tension arises over questions of whom Madeleine will fall in love with—maybe even marry. Generally, the book seems to be a re-affirmation of this traditional form, a reassurance that contemporary literature can still be about marriage—even in an age when the stigma of divorce is lessened.

     Adding to the complexity of Madeleine’s questions about the weight of marriage is the book’s setting. Eugenides depicts the young adults of the early eighties as a generation glad to have avoided the “whiplash” that followed the rocketing sixties, but still meaning to push envelopes of their own. Madeleine, near graduation, studies Jacque Derrida and semiotics. She meets students who insist that books have nothing to do with real life, that all of language should merely be considered a self-referential vacuum.

     Just as Madeleine struggles with questions about the reality of love, her two potential lovers—Leonard, a biology student, and Mitchell, a religious studies major—wrestle enigmas of their own. Leonard tries to make sense of his manic depression, Mitchell yearns to understand God. The novel’s three themes (love, faith and mental health) taken together suggest that Eugenides has something to say in general about the validity of a mind’s internal experiences. I suspect that the book is an acknowledgement of the way things can weigh heavily on one’s soul, even if those things (and even if the soul itself) can be found to be deconstructable.

     Take that, Derrida.  

Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart

           Conventional wisdom among Christians today is that international evangelism need not necessarily bring about cultural conflict, so long as missionaries arrive abroad with spiritual, not political, objectives. However, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart intends to remind us that the two motives—conquering and converting—were originally mixed. The missionaries here don’t arrive in Africa meaning to imprison and kill, but the tension they bring about makes instability seem inevitable.

            What I like best about the novel is how so much time is given to the world of the Ibo village in the first three quarters of the book. If, say, the novel had begun with the arrival of the missionaries, or if they became just gradually more present, the reader wouldn’t be able to recognize the greatly disruptive quality of the white intruders in quite the same way.

             Developing the setting so thoroughly was a smart move on Achebe’s behalf for a few other reasons: spending so much time in a world so foreign to me is enjoyable in that I am able to learn so much, but it also makes the moments where I identify with the characters seem that much more vivid. I’m thinking specifically of the way a son wishes to be the opposite of his father, so much so that grandfather and grandson seem sometimes like the closer match. Okonkwo and Nwoye each mean to live a life that cancels the wrongdoings of their fathers, and in trying to erase the shame, each creates mistakes of his own. This is a universal experience.

            My family’s background being what it is (my grandparents were missionaries—all of them), I am naturally fascinated with moments when Achebe is “gentle” in his depictions of the intruders. Nwoye’s conversion is an especially interesting moment in that Achebe makes it seem like a natural move. For a moment we are in Nwoye’s mind as, “The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul—the questions of the twins crying in the bush and of Ikemefuna who was killed” (147). And, indeed, the practices of the tribe may seem troubling for the readers also. But then the missionaries are no less cruel. By the end of the novel, their court-ordered executions and imprisonments appear to the reader as merely another type of needless brutality. There is nothing so cruel in the Ibo culture that it isn’t matched in some way by the practices of the missionaries.

            Still, it is interesting how Mr. Brown is offered up as a sort of peaceful alternative to the much more aggressive Mr. Smith. Brown preaches against “an excess of zeal” (178) and has thoughtful conversations with the tribesman in which he appeals to their existing religious structures, (“‘In my religion, Chukwo is a loving Father, and need not be feared by those who do His will’” [181].). I don’t doubt whose side Achebe is on, but I feel there is a model in this peaceful dialogue that he might embrace as an alternative to the brutality that has come to characterize interactions between the two cultures.