Reviews from the past

L’Assommoir - Emile Zola (French)

The title refers to a type of bar where people go to get smashed – to drink to the point of physical and mental destruction. Gervaise, the novel’s main character, is affected by the alcoholism of her husband, but for most of her life she never drinks. Her hopes as a young woman are modest: to be able to get on with her work, to always have something to eat and a half-decent place to sleep, to bring up her children properly, not to be beaten, and to die in her own bed. None of her hopes are realized. Zola belonged to the school of Naturalism, which advocated a strict adherence to reality. I believed in his depiction of life in the Paris slums (this is raw stuff, sordid and vulgar even by today’s standards). But it’s Gervaise’s story and, near the end, as I followed her slide into the mire, I became increasingly detached. As a writer Zola was drawn to extremes, and extremes distort reality. He reduces Gervaise to an animalistic state; her corpse is discovered when people smell rotting flesh. I wasn’t moved because she had ceased to be the woman I knew and cared about; she had become a vehicle to make a point about the ills brought on by poverty. Zola also went to extremes in the other direction, toward a Victorian mawkishness; he includes two characters who are so saintly that they’re preposterous. But, despite its faults, this work aspires to greatness and in many ways achieves it. I wrote that I knew and cared about Gervaise; she’s as real as anyone in fiction. In the twenty years we spend with her all is not bleak: there’s her glory as she makes her laundry business a success, her contentment in the first years of marriage. Though she’s far from perfect, at her core she’s a good, kind-hearted woman. She’s also hard-working and determined, but she slips in her resolve. Just a slip, but it begins her slow, inexorable (and sadly overdone) dissolution. Zola is like a painter on the grand scale, able to make, with words, his settings and people emerge from the canvas; throughout the novel are scenes that teem with life. The first of these takes place in the washhouse, culminating in an epic fight between Gervaise and Virginie. Gervaise’s saint’s day feast sprawls, in all its roistering vitality, over thirty-eight pages. Zola also chose the right ending for the book. The undertaker’s assistant had made brief appearances. Being an agent of death, people see him as an ominous figure, yet he jokingly refers to himself as “the ladies’ comforter” because he brings to them the sweetness of eternal sleep. On the last page he speaks tenderly to the corpse of Gervaise as he lifts her, with fatherly gentleness, and places her in the coffin. At this moment she did, again, matter to me. (3 other books by this author reviewed)

The Road - Cormac McCarthy

The main problem with this post-apocalyptic novel is that it’s monotonous. Regarding the action and the feelings of the two characters, what happens on page one is happening (with little variation) on page seventeen, and on page 84, and on page 116 – which is when I suddenly found myself flipping through the remainder of the book. In his depiction of love between a father and son, McCarthy spreads it on too thick; he’s in his true element with menace and cruelty. But since I’m not a fan of horror flicks, I couldn’t appreciate the atrocities committed by the cannibalistic monsters he has roaming the land. Nor was his style of writing to my liking; I’ll close with three examples. The opening sentences: “When he awoke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some glaucoma dimming the world.”  From page 31: “He woke toward the morning with the fire down to coals and walked out to the road. Everything was alight. As if the lost sun was returning at last. The snow orange and quivering.” And here’s a conversation between father and son (each person’s words occupy their own little paragraph): “Is it cold?” “Yes. It’s freezing.” “Do you want to go in?” “I don’t know.” “Sure you do.” “Is it okay?” “Come on.” As was the case with Hemingway, McCarthy calls attention to his prose under the guise of simplicity, and I find this annoying and false.

Sons and Lovers - D. H. Lawrence

Reading Lawrence’s short stories – notably, “The Odour of Chrysanthemums” and “The Rocking-Horse Winner” – made me aware of how good he could be. So I returned to a book that I had abandoned many years ago; I thought that this time around I’d be more sympathetic and patient – and I was. I also found that my preconceptions (garnered from commentary I had read) were baseless. In the first third of this autobiographical novel Lawrence examines the dissolution of his parents’ marriage. To place all the blame on Walter Morel doesn’t do justice to Lawrence’s insight; the Morels were a tragically mismatched couple. But the major misinterpretation is the characterization of Mrs. Morel as a suffocating mother. Though she does look to her children as her reason for being, believing that in their lives hers would find purpose, she isn’t selfish; she wants her sons and daughter to be happy and fulfilled. As for Paul (who is Lawrence), she has no desire to possess him; her hope is that he’ll find a woman who will be good for him. That the two women he’s attracted to are not right for him isn’t something she dreams up; it’s a fact that he’s aware of. His devotion to his mother is not coerced; he gives it of his own free will. The novel weakens considerably in the last third, when Paul is an adult. The intense scrutiny Lawrence devotes to him turns into emotional nitpicking. A law should be passed decreeing that nobody under the age of thirty-five can write anything autobiographical. They don’t have enough separation from their youth to see that what they went through wasn’t that momentous. Lawrence compounds the problem by presuming to enter the minds of the women Paul is involved with, so we not only get too much of conflicted Paul, but the conflicts of others too. It’s convoluted and ponderous; the prose (which in the first part has an unadorned beauty) gets overripe with abstract ideas that must be conveyed. To put it simply, Lawrence thought too much. When he detached himself from himself and didn’t attempt to express inexpressible states of being he could write with an immediacy and power that few authors have been gifted with. (2)

The Last of Mr. Norris - Christopher Isherwood

This short novel was combined with the equally short Goodbye to Berlin to make up The Berlin Stories. In Goodbye, which I read decades ago, Isherwood writes, “I am a camera with its shutter open . . .” This time the camera is focused on an aging confidence man operating on the international stage. Though Arthur Norris has some talent for double dealing, his weak nerves make him unfit for a life of intrigue; also, his schemes fail as often as not, leaving him in dire financial straits. But he has a remarkable ability to shake off his fears (and to enjoy life in a blithe way), and during his flush periods he lives high on the hog (and is quite generous). He’s a scoundrel without malice, both guileful and oddly lacking in guile (he makes no effort to conceal his taste for sadomasochistic sex, in which he’s on the receiving end of the whip lashes). The narrator, William Bradshaw (a pseudonym for Isherwood), takes a liking to this old debauchee, who in return is childishly eager for his friendship – and his assistance (Mr. Norris is an incorrigible user of people). Little is revealed about Bradshaw’s life; Isherwood stays focused on Norris and a handful of secondary characters. The action takes place in the years preceding the Nazi takeover, so we get the author’s perspective of this tumultuous period in German history. I admired the novel on all levels and wondered why I had put off enjoying the pleasures it provided for so long. (2)

What Maisie Knew - Henry James

I’ve criticized authors for having a Henry James-like prose style. Now I can criticize The Master himself. I liked the novel’s premise – a little girl being shuttled about by adults – but James’s convoluted wordiness doesn’t reveal emotions, it obfuscates them: “ . . . if he had an idea at the back of his head she had also one in a recess as deep, and for a time, while they sat together, there was an extraordinary mute passage between her vision of this vision of his, his vision of her vision, and her vision of his vision of her vision.” Untangling such nuances wore me down; I began to think, in exasperation, “Just spit it out.” As an experiment, I took the book’s opening sentence and simplified it. James: “The child was provided for, but the new arrangement was inevitably confounding to a young intelligence intensely aware that something had happened which must matter a great deal and looking anxiously out for the effects of so great a cause.” Me: “Though the child was provided for, the new arrangement was perplexing to her, and she was anxious about how her life would be affected.” The elegance of James’s sentence has been lost; but, if I have to choose, I’ll take clarity over beauty. And I’ll always choose truth over falsity. James’s main goal was to capture the sensibilities of a little girl. But his Maisie has only one dimension: she’s an analyzer of adult feelings and motivations. She’s not a real child; Maisie is Henry James.

See Density in Fiction