Reviews from the past

Blindness - Jose Saramago (Portuguese)

A visceral novel comes from the guts of an author. This type of book succeeds only if it’s done so artfully that the urgency of emotion is transferred to the reader. Saramago succeeds. I entered the nightmarish world he creates. I experienced the squalor of the asylum where the blind are imprisoned, I felt the elation of the women washing clothes (and themselves) in the downpour on the balcony. But the best example of my involvement is how deeply I wanted the doctor’s wife to commit a murder; when she does, and makes a good (and grisly) job of it, I felt satisfaction. I can’t think of a more heroic female figure in fiction than the doctor’s wife. Saramago delves deep into the sordid and disgusting; but he’s describing the total breakdown of society, and he shows us the results. His scenario made me wonder: How low can man descend, how many trappings of dignity can he lose, and still struggle to survive? In the last chapters the author attempts to find meaning in what he’s created, but he flounders; this is one of those works that defy a summing up. Finally Saramago lets matters trail off in an indeterminate way. Which is the right ending. We get questions, and that’s enough, if the questions are such good ones. * (3 other books by this author are reviewed)

From Death to Morning - Thomas Wolfe

In “The Story of a Novel” Wolfe describes the struggle he had in writing Of Time and the River, and in doing so he inadvertently reveals the pitfalls that come from too fecund an imagination, an obsessive-compulsive need to embrace everything in words, a desire to impart profound truths about life, a romantic belief in the artist as a tormented soul. Missing are restraint, discipline, a sense of structure – anything that imposes limits. The editor who tried to bring some order to Wolfe’s gargantuan outpouring of words was Maxwell Perkins; what an ordeal that poor man went through. Of the stories that make up the rest of the book, most fail due to those flaws inherent in the author’s nature. Two of them, though not outright bad, have too much description; the words don’t capture the essence of the moment, nor do they serve any purpose to the plot (what plot?); things become repetitive, as if Wolfe were insisting, “Understand, damn it!” In two others emotionality runs amok, and the results are unreadable. Yet Wolfe had talent when it was reined in. The structure of “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” imposed limits. The man talking to the reader isn’t a poet; he’s a down-to-earth guy who had an encounter that he found compelling, mysterious. Wolfe lets him tell his story in his voice; it’s presented directly, simply, in a narrative that flows naturally. In “Chickamauga” an old man relates his harrowing experience in a Civil War battle. Here too the need to take on the voice of the person, and no more, put limits on Wolfe’s extravagance. These stories show how good he could be, which is very good.

Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (French)

A brutal novel. It gives off no moral light. Emma Bovary’s adulteries are its focus because they – the transitory intoxication of the senses – are the tawdry focus of her life. But unfaithfulness is merely one manifestation of her corrupt nature. She lies, she manipulates; her profligacy drags her husband and daughter into poverty. As for that daughter, Emma can barely tolerate Berthe’s presence. The novel is full of stifling dissatisfaction, cynicism, disillusionment, despair. The one aspect of Emma that makes her an object of pity is her suffering. She suffers, though not as a victim, and in her final imperious rejection of life there’s a heroic dimension. The characters around her are, in Flaubert’s eyes, merely humans – far from admirable. Pettiness, hypocrisy, selfishness, stupidity are on full display, and the greedy Lheureux attains the lofty status of evil. The one good character is Emma’s husband, Charles; on her deathbed she tells him “You are good,” but his goodness does not touch her; she’s making a cold statement of fact. Soon after her marriage she comes to loath him – a dull man, so mediocre. And such a dupe, ridiculously easy to deceive. Partly he’s a dupe because he deludes himself about Emma’s true nature. Emma lives with delusions too: her romantic and unattainable dreams of glamour and romance (which curdle into bitterness and resentment). At the end of the book Flaubert seems to revel in crushing Emma with hammer blow after hammer blow. Not only is she punished, the innocent suffer too. Charles’s cherished memories of Emma are shattered when he finds love letters from Rodolphe and Leon. Berthe – after her father’s death and in the wake of the financial ruin brought on by her mother – is sent to work in a cotton mill. There’s a perversity in Flaubert’s destructiveness. He wrote, famously, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” Could Emma embody all the pernicious and corrupt qualities he found in himself? And could his destruction of her be directed, masochistically, upon himself? At any rate, the novel he created is a work of art. It gives off no moral light, but we’re given a vision of life, and it smoulders. * (2)

See But Is That What Flaubert Wrote?

Fun with Problems - Robert Stone

This short story collection should have been called Drunks, Druggies, Nut-Cases. But it’s a literary work by a National Book Award winner, so the title can’t be blatantly lurid. It has to have class (albeit of the quirky variety). Still, the book is far from a class act; I won’t attempt to do justice to its many failings. If you’re at the library, read the four page “Honeymoon” and tell me why an author with discernment or self-respect – if they wrote such nonsense in the first place – wouldn’t have tossed it in the wastebasket. Granted, the prose throughout is fine and the title story is good, in a slummy way (it’s the only story that can be called “good”; most are bad, and the two long ones are so tediously bad that I couldn’t complete them). The problem with Problems – a huge one, endemic in today’s literary world – is content. Pandering is the name of the game. Freakiness, outrageous behavior, violence, obscenity – these make up the content of work by many young writers and some elder statesmen (like Stone). No person I can relate to appears on these pages because no real humans are depicted. Real people in real situations, though a subject of vast potential, have been largely abandoned. So why did I read the book? I heard Alan Cheuse, on NPR, highly recommend it, and I liked Stone’s Dog Soldiers (written in 1973 and also containing the content I’m condemning here); but twenty-seven years ago I was young, and the novel was fresh and had vitality and drive; now I’ve matured, but Stone, though he’s seventy, hasn’t; he’s just gotten angrier – the prevailing attitude in these stories is a mean and abusive one. In the blurb on the back cover Madison Smartt Bell writes “American fiction has no greater master than Robert Stone.” What hope is there if Cheuse and Bell (and many others who heap praise on this dismal book) can’t recognize its faults and emphatically condemn them? A last comment, regarding Stone’s anger. He heavy-handily bludgeons caricatures: an insane Secretary of Defense, a rich Silicon Valley entrepreneur; and, in a broader sense, he attacks an American society phony to its diseased core. But if he wants to see, up close, the disease that’s killing literary fiction, he simply needs to look in a mirror.