Dr. Wortle’s School – Anthony Trollope
In this late (and short) novel by Trollope only the title character has depth and dimensions. The plot revolves around the predicament of Mr. and Mrs. Peacocke, but he’s a dry stick – a gentleman who always does the upright thing – and his wife is so vapid that she’s no more than a twig. When it’s found that they’re unmarried, they face the condemnation of Society. The issue at stake has to do with morality; because Dr. Wortle believes the Peacockes to be innocent of any sin, he’s determined to stand by them to the end, even if it means the collapse of his beloved school. In doing so he reveals strengths and weaknesses; it’s his weaknesses that make him interesting. His injured pride provokes him to enter into reckless battle, yet he can often see that he’s acting in a foolhardy way. We follow his struggle not only with public opinion but with his own self. This is a novel filled with religiosity – Wortle is a Reverend – but he sees so-called religious people acting without compassion, and at one point he thinks “It is often a question to me whether the religion of the world is not more odious than its want of religion.” Also, it’s suggested that part of Wortle’s spirited defense of the beleaguered couple is motivated by Mrs. Peacocke’s beauty. Without the bull in the china shop, this would be no more than an insipid Victorian novel. The tacked-on romance involving Wortle’s daughter and Lord Carstairs has only one notable aspect: it shows the obsequious attitude people have toward status and wealth; Mrs. Wortle thinks with ecstasy of “the diamonds her daughter would certainly be called upon to wear before the Queen.”

A Clergyman’s Daughter – George Orwell
Orwell’s intent in this novel was to bring up social and religious issues, and he crudely manipulated events to achieve that goal. Most striking was his having Dorothy lose her memory. In chapter one she’s living in Suffolk with her father, resolutely doing good deeds that go unappreciated; in chapter two she’s on a London street, wearing strange clothes and not knowing her name. She joins a ragtag group and winds up in the fields picking hops. I almost quit reading when this switch occurred. What kept me going was that I got involved with the more muted Dorothy and her new life. Then, abruptly, we’re with Dorothy and a weird assortment of the homeless spending the night in Trafalgar Square; she’s penniless and freezing (this hallucinatory section is constructed like a play of voices). In the next sequence she gets a job as a teacher in a girls’ day school where minds are stunted rather than developed. In the final chapter Dorothy is restored to her life as a clergyman’s daughter; here Orwell introduces his last issue: she’s lost her faith. The question for her is how to go on, because, as she sees it, without faith life is “meaningless, dark and dreadful.” Orwell’s ability to create vivid characters makes the issues he introduces engaging. Mrs. Creevy, the principal of Ringwood Academy, ranks high in fiction’s assemblage of petty monsters. Dorothy’s father, the Rector, is constricted by a selfishness so stifling that he’s unable to love anyone, including his daughter. But Orwell must have loved his creation, because he made me care for Dorothy. She goes through an enormous journey and ends up with nothing; even the possible consolation of marital love is denied her, for at no point does she have the least interest in sex. In the closing scene she’s making costumes for a church play by gluing together sheets of brown paper; she gets caught up in this mindless task and “The problem of faith and no faith had vanished utterly from her mind.” A bleak ending to a bleak but honestly felt book.

The Autobiography of My Mother – Jamaica Kincaid
The novel begins: “My mother died at the moment I was born, and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity; at my back was always a bleak, black wind.” Later in that opening paragraph she refers to the “black room of the world.” Xuela grows up without love; when that word appears it’s always in the negative sense (in reference to her father, “He could not love me”). She becomes stoically defiant: “Until I was four I did not speak. This did not cause anyone to lose a minute of happiness; there was no one who would have worried about it in any case.” The word “happiness” seems out of place because nobody in this novel is capable of that emotion. When Xuela strikes up a short-lived friendship, she describes it as “something I did not experience with anyone ever again in my life.” So something positive appears in a negative light (and with a warning that things are not going to get better). Xuela’s first sexual encounter is with a man (or, rather, an automaton) who shows her not one grain of affection. She becomes pregnant and has an abortion; she suffers extreme and prolonged pain. Afterwards she becomes hardened to the point of being inhuman: “I would bear children, they would hang from me like fruit from a vine, but I would destroy them with the carelessness of a god . . . I would cover their bodies with diseases, embellish skins with thinly crusted sores, the sores sometimes oozing a thick pus for which they would thirst, a thirst that could never be quenched.” This litany of motherhood goes on, but I could not go on. Kincaid’s world is airless and without light. She indulges in and expands the unhealthy aspects of her psyche. I know anger, hatred, cruelty exist, but it’s the indulgence and the expansion that renders it unreal. Kincaid makes no concession to the reader: we will be immersed in her negative emotions. But the reader also has the choice not to remain in her “black room.”

The Road to Wigan Pier – George Orwell
In the late 1930s Orwell was sent by a socialistic book club to investigate conditions in a coal mining district of England. Being Orwell, he didn’t just observe from the sidelines, he tried to immerse himself in the lives of the people he was writing about. Though no personality (except his own) emerges, Orwell’s rigorous intelligence is (as always) refreshing, and he had the ability to express what he thinks simply but forcefully. He includes some autobiographical material; it seems that the critical event in his life was his five year stint with the Imperial Police in Burma. Being a part of an oppressive system left him with a bad conscience; he did things that went against his nature, and as a result he sided with the oppressed and became opposed to “every form of man’s dominion over man.” With Wigan Pier I have now read every book Orwell wrote. Since I respect him so much, I have always found it distressing when he shows prejudice toward Jews. In A Clergyman’s Daughter Dorothy is treated callously when she moves to London, but it is “The Jew on the corner, the owner of Knockout Trousers Ltd., who was the worst.” Too often, with Orwell, it is the Jew on the corner who is the worst. But I did some research and found that later in life he acknowledged his anti-Semitism and renounced it. Actually, I expected no less of the man.

Annie John - Jamaica Kincaid
The author was born in Antigua; this book follows a girl’s life in Antigua from age ten to eighteen; it ends with her on a ship bound for England. She leaves her mother and father and all the people and places she had known without regret: “the world into which I was born had become an unbearable burden and I wished I could reduce it to some small thing that I could hold underwater until it died.” Until it died? I found no justification on the pages of this book for such a venomous thought. Annie’s early life is idyllic; she basks in the largesse of love bestowed upon her by her parents, especially by her mother, and she comes across as a pleasant child. But in her mid-teens she changes into an angry, deceitful, malicious troublemaker. Most significant is the hatred she harbors for her mother. Why? The woman isn’t the monster Annie perceives her to be. She’s strong-willed and wants to control her daughter; Annie, equally strong-willed, resists. Such clashes are normal; this one, in its implacable intensity, is not. When Annie is fifteen she has an illness that keeps her bedridden for many months; it’s some sort of emotional crisis, but its root cause is never accounted for; she simply recovers. Too much about her is allowed to remain murky; instead of insight into what makes her tick, the author empowers Annie with negatives. In presenting her as a hateful young woman Kincaid seems to be gloating about it. There was something perverse – and false – in this portrayal. When Annie left Antigua it was without my good wishes.

The Miraculous Barber - Marcel Ayme (French)
In the dazzling opening chapter, which takes place at a luncheon party, we gradually realize that the man observing the people around him is having a stroke and is in a slow motion struggle to keep contact with a world that’s becoming increasingly distorted and fragmented. His death sets off an improbable chain of events. What matters in this book is not the ungainly plot but the characters, each of whom has some quality that’s just short of being fantastical. Ayme holds his avaricious, pretentious, vain, stupid, spineless, amoral, crazy characters up to ridicule, but his attitude is amused rather than cruel. Since the book involves politics, one is left wondering how a country made up of such bunglers can survive. The barber of the title provides the answer: he’s a man with no expertise (beyond cutting hair), but he’s running France from behind the scenes simply because he’s practical and decisive. If a reader takes this novel as a farce, he’ll find it entertaining, fresh, and smart.

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.

My Brother - Jamaica Kincaid
Kincaid must be praised for her honesty; she expresses feelings that are “unacceptable” (most notably, hatred for her mother). She returns to the island of Antigua to try to help her brother, who’s dying from AIDS; it’s an unpleasant task, an unpleasant reunion with people and a place that she wanted no part of. She presents her complex and conflicted emotions in an incantatory prose style, a cross between Gertrude Stein (simple and repetitive) and Henry James (she follows a thought through its many convolutions). I originally listened to the book read on tape by the author, and the style worked quite well – better than it did when I read it. In my review of the autobiographical Lucy I was left with questions about what would become of the young protagonist; some of those questions were answered in this book. The answers aren’t pleasant or easy ones. Unlike her brother, Kincaid escaped her mother and the stifling world of Antigua, but only physically. Her life in the United States has the trappings of happiness, but she’s aware of how hard it is to shake off past influences; she worries about the effects her old destructive feelings will have on her present-day relationships. It turns out that her misgivings were well-founded. A look at her biography reveals that she and the man she was married to in My Brother subsequently divorced.

Penhally - Caroline Gordon
This book has strong virtues and stronger flaws. The main virtue is the author’s ability to write well: the narrative voice is smooth and scenes come to life. But taken as a whole – as a chronicle of the fall of the house of Penhally – the novel lacks structure. After an excellent beginning Gordon seems hellbent for a conclusion (one generation is covered in about five pages). The irascible Nicholas, present in the opening section, is a forceful character, but many who follow are indistinguishable from one another. Relationships (cousins, great-grandfathers, slaves belonging to this and that person) got so complicated that I gave up trying to sort everybody out; my reading became inattentive. The ending to this multi-generational saga rings decidedly false; a bullet in the heart is dramatic, but the man Gordon created would never have fired that shot. Last word . . . About the author’s use of ellipses . . . Was she trying to set a world record?

The Incomparable Max - Max Beerbohm
Beerbohm’s writing is the epitome of elegance, carried off effortlessly (though such finely-crafted prose surely took great effort). I don’t read for an author’s style, but this book was an exception. My only quibbles are that the prose occasionally turned from elegant to ornate and some pieces were too learned – way over my head. Also, Beerbohm’s ideal audience is upper-class Brits familiar with the post-Victorian era. I skipped a few essays involving people and matters I knew little or nothing about, and I couldn’t stomach more than five pages of the foolishness in the long last story, “The Happy Hypocrite” (which should be expunged from the record). Yet much is outstanding, particularly the pieces on his brother and on King George the Fourth. In “Diminuendo” he gives the reason why his literary efforts were limited, and all writers will find his thoughts of interest. If you haven’t read the two stories from Seven Men – “Enoch Soames” and “A. V. Laider” – you have a unique treat awaiting you. Max is bracing company, intelligent, original, entertaining and eminently likeable. One feels better after spending time with him, and I can understand why his contemporaries considered him to be “Incomparable.”

The Chateau - William Maxwell
I’ve always thought that, as a writer, Maxwell had something special. That special quality is at the core of this novel. It presents a married couple on vacation in France; the man relates their experiences, observations, conversations – all the little and large events that occur. It’s pleasant enough, interesting enough. But what matters, underlying everything, is that this is a book about love. Harold and Barbara are inseparable – one is not complete without the other. The word “love” is not bandied about, but it’s implicit on every page. And there’s more. Maxwell (who is Harold) is aware of what he has; he’s also aware of the other side of life: loneliness, loss, depression (Maxwell didn't marry until he was 37). So there’s an appreciation of joy and a recognition of sadness. In The Chateau the author and his wife relive something precious to them, and Maxwell lets us share it. *

Kafka’s Other Trial - Elias Canetti (German)
In this book Canetti studies, with his stressful, nitpicking intensity, the letters Kafka wrote to Felice. I could only read half the book, then skimmed the rest. What struck me forcefully is how miserable Kafka was and how he tried to make others miserable (poor Felice). I suppose one can see his work as the only redeeming element in all the suffering. I was left disturbed and depressed.

Lucy - Jamaica Kincaid
I disliked Lucy. Maybe I have a problem with women being so blunt, especially when it comes to sexual matters (such as Lucy’s having sex with two men in the same day, with no compunction – ugh). Since we’re in her mind, we get a big dose of Lucy (Lucifer – and she likes that name). She’s selfish, extremely self-absorbed, depressed, ungrateful (she’s blessed in her circumstances – blessed!). She acts badly, has errant emotions that are mean-spirited, and she blames it all on her overpowering mother. On the last page she’s weeping about wanting so much to love someone, but she didn’t devote one lousy sentence in the book to the four little girls she was au pair to. Spare me your tears, I thought. Still – here’s the rub: my strong response shows how honest a writer Kincaid is; surely she knew what a bad impression she was making, but she did it anyway. I was left wondering about Lucy: did she grow up to become a decent person; did she get the love she wanted; did she relinquish her consuming hatred for her mother?

Unwelcome Words - Paul Bowles
Bowles dabbles at the typewriter, working over his old themes: world-weary sophistication, depravity, ornate cruelty. Yet he writes well, and he does have an ingrained world view, an alarmingly bleak one. The last story, which seems to be real letters written by him, is nastily effective – unwelcome words indeed!