Reviews from the past

The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope

Trollope is true to his title. He depicts the world of upper class Londoners in the1870s. There are at least ten major characters and as many secondary ones. All are drawn with intelligence and insight; the women play roles as significant as those of the men. I especially admire how people are not one-dimensional; they have good and bad qualities, strengths and weaknesses. Trollope embraces complexity and ambiguity; it took an extraordinary mind to create this novel. Many Londoners objected to the book because of the greed, decadence, false values, hypocrisy, prejudice (and a variety of other vices) to be found in its pages. But every country, in every stage of its history, needs a Trollope. The author provides a happy ending for most of his characters (in the form of marriages that will, ostensibly, be of lasting contentment). Well, happiness is to be found at one’s hearth. But the driving force behind this work is a cynicism about society and human nature. No single person dominates; what we get is a sprawling panorama of lives. I mentioned the complexity and ambiguity. Those qualities aren’t in the prose, which is simple and direct; they’re in the characters and situations, which are engrossing to a high degree. Trollope was so accurate an observer that he was able to bridge the barrier of time; remarkably, this novel has relevance for us, today. * (11 other books by this author are reviewed)

Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

This novel is sabotaged by its author. Rushdie’s brilliance as a stylist and the inventiveness of his mind are on relentless display; he overwhelms his own work. The characters and plot can’t move; they’re buried under his ego. And why does Rushdie constantly (over and over!) interject remarks about what will happen later in the story (when something will, ostensibly, take on meaning)? At the point where the authorial conceit had gotten waist deep, I decided to slog on no further.

An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser

It’s a tragedy that Dreiser didn’t recognize the virtue of conciseness. Not that I expect minimalism from him; he was an expansive writer. But the reason I stopped reading this novel (at around page 400, just short of the halfway mark) is that he belabored everything, and did so in a lumbering prose. I knew I had enough when I expected the next chapters to hash over the same emotions. Couldn’t someone have clued Dreiser in to the fact that when he had revealed a state of mind he didn’t need to repeat it twenty times? He had a strong story to tell, but we get the material in its crude form, every last bit of it; there’s no selectivity. Dreiser’s first novel, Sister Carrie, also long (though half the length of Tragedy), was more artfully done; he created a full and detailed picture of life, but it was accomplished with a deft touch. In Tragedy he constructs scenes as if he were moving heavy blocks of stone. Instead of getting better as a writer, Dreiser became long-winded and boring. (2)

Coming Up for Air - George Orwell

Orwell had no sense of compromise. He depicted the world and its people as he saw them, and what he saw was not pleasant. In this book we’re in the mind of George Bowling, a fat, forty-five-year-old married man with two children and a mortgage. He has false teeth (the book begins, “The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.”). He’s a salesman, barely getting by financially. He doesn’t much like his wife, nor his children, nor his job, nor his life. He doesn’t believe in anything spiritual, thinks that things in the present are much worse than they were in his boyhood, and he foresees the future (Orwell wrote this on the verge of WWII) as even more bleak. He goes back in memory to his early years. Though life for young George was often ugly and emotionally arid, this segment is a beautifully-wrought evocation of the past. Being inside George’s mind does get hard to take – where are his higher feelings? Love, charity, kindness? They only appear in flashes. But – here’s the tough part – it dawned on me that George is the common man; instead of being fed platitudes about human nature, in George we get the unvarnished truth. At the book’s end he visits his boyhood town, and if the reader expects any pretty codas – a reunion with the love of his young manhood, his catching that big carp in the deep, hidden spring – we must remember who we’re dealing with: Mr. No Compromise. The sweetheart is a hag, the deep spring has been drained and is now being used as a dump. Even the simple values people lived by have been undermined by the forces of progress. He returns home; he had lied to his wife to make the trip, and she’s onto the lie; on the last page he’s enduring a tirade of accusations (mainly of unfaithfulness, which is not true); he knows this badgering will go on for months. And that’s it. Orwell leaves us with nothing. (5)

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