Born in Exile – George Gissing
The name of the main character is Godwin Peak. God. Win. Peak. He is a superior being as far as intelligence goes; but he was born in poverty, which, in his mind, exiles him from the world in which he belongs. It’s not mere social status he seeks; he wants cultural and intellectual stimuli and a fineness of moral values. Though Peak is a snob, Gissing manages to make his thinking justifiable; we all want to be in an environment that gives us sustenance. When he’s introduced to the Warricombe family he finds the virtues he desires; also, he’s attracted to the daughter. Sidwell and her father are devoutly religious, and Peak decides that the only way he could make her his wife is by going into the clergy. He is, however, an unwavering atheist. For someone as moralistic and judgmental as Peak, to play the role of a deceiver and hypocrite is hard to swallow. Yet he persists; the goal justifies the means. This is a novel in which intellectual matters are explored, and at times Gissing gets a bit ponderous (as does his prose, which is stodgily outdated for a novel written on the eve of the 20th century). But Gissing didn’t care; his attitude was that he would deal with matters that meant something to him, and do it in the style he preferred. If a reader wanted light entertainment or a modern approach, they could go elsewhere (in some ways he displays the rigidity of his main character). But his instincts as a writer of fiction are solid; I was engrossed throughout this very long novel, and that’s because Gissing had insight into human nature. When I approached the last three pages, and Peak’s fate had not been revealed, I was still sure that Gissing would not fail me. What was remarkable was the emotional punch he was able to deliver. With a few sure strokes the novel became a tragedy.

Laura - Vera Caspary
This is the book that the famous film of the same name was based on, and I was curious about how the two differed and were similar. But after reading Part One I had hopes that the novel would stand alone as a successful mystery. Waldo Lydecker (the Clifton Webb character) gives his account of matters, and his personality is deliciously rendered. There’s also a logical reason for him to be writing (that’s what his profession is), so his stylish prose is appropriate. In this opening Vera Caspary shows that she had talent. But in Part Two, told from perspective of the detective, Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews), things get shaky. There’s no reason for his putting into words – in a novelistic form – his account; Caspary is simply using him to move the plot along. And whereas Waldo arrogantly takes on the right to imagine scenes that he was not a witness to (an author’s prerogative), it’s not credible when Mark does it. Lastly, his voice isn’t distinct; no personality emerges. In Part Four we get the story from Laura Hunt’s diary, and here the book falls apart. My three complaints about the McPherson section are magnified to the point of ineptitude. Laura, the enigmatic figure in the film (played by Gene Tierney), comes across as weak and silly. And though she’s the prime suspect of a murder, never once does she state that she’s innocent. This is blatant evasiveness on the part of the author. I found myself reading third-rate fiction, but I kept going for the reason I began – to see how the film differed or coincided with its source (there’s very little coinciding, beyond the bare bones of a premise). That five writers (including Ring Lardner) worked on the screenplay indicates a problem; I see a revolving door of conflicting ideas. Maybe it was the director, Otto Preminger, who should get the credit for constructing a coherent story, one in which love is the major element (in Caspary’s version the love angle is so flimsily handled as to be nonexistent). Before Laura was published in book form it ran, in a seven part serial, in Colliers magazine. So it had a lot of readers. I wonder how they felt about the movie version. I hope they appreciated it.

The Good Leviathan - Pierre Boulle (French)
The name of the ship is Gargantua, but many call it Leviathan (an Old Testament creature spewed out of hell). Both names refer to its enormous size, but the hellish aspect is that it’s powered by a nuclear reactor. And, since it’s a tanker capable of carrying six hundred thousand tons of oil, environmentalists foresee the possibility of an ecological disaster. The people in the French town where it’s berthed feel animosity for the ship; the leading antagonist is a woman known as the Cripple. She’s the organizing force behind a protest in which a flotilla of boats surround the ship. When some people begin to board it, the captain has hoses release a barrage of water to drive them off. The outcome of this defensive measure is unexpected. The Cripple, who’s in a lead boat, is drenched, and is immediately cured of her lameness. One could use the word “miraculously” cured by waters from the ship, which is the interpretation given to the event by the townsfolk – and then the world at large. The issues raised in this novel are nuclear power; how faith in something can endow it with potency; capitalism’s way of exploiting any situation for profit; the survival of the planet. We get attitudes toward these matters from the viewpoints of characters with widely differing beliefs, inclinations and interests. But nobody is fleshed out to the point where one can relate to them. The closest we come is the captain – the only person who’s practical – and he starts to waver. I began to question the author’s attitude toward the melee he had created, and I reached the conclusion that he viewed humans with such cynicism that he looked down on their machinations with disdain (most of it directed at fanatical environmentalists). This theory was supported by the farcical ending: during a huge storm the characters carry on like participants in a comedy. This is a novel of ideas, but they simply accumulate and then fizzle with a sour laugh.

Weights and Measures - Joseph Roth (German)

This novel is lightweight – it’s only 150 pages long – and the edition I have is midway between the size of a mass market and a trade paperback. Oh, you want to know about content? Well, there’s hardly anything to it. In a review of Roth’s The Radetzky March, which I liked very much, I described the characters as “muted” and wrote that they proceeded to their fates like “dumb animals.” The same can be said for W&M, yet it lacks the panoramic social aspect of March. We get Inspector Eibenschutz and little else. He’s supposed to be extremely unhappy, but he comes across as emotionally inanimate. The book is sloppily constructed; only near the end do we find out that the Inspector is thirty-six (all along I thought he was in his fifties). It’s also silly. Eibenschutz is obsessed by a gypsy woman (those gypsy women!); when she first appears “her dark blue-black hair led him to think of southern nights, which he had never seen but had possibly once read or heard about.” The prose is simple and precise, but in a self-consciously studied way; you know this when you’re constantly thinking, “How precise and simple!”

Immortality - Milan Kundera (Czech)

Kundera isn’t a novelist. He’s a thinker whose writing serves as a forum for his ideas. He has attained such eminence in the literary world that he can do whatever he wants; this shapeless grab bag of a book is what I’ll call philoso-fiction. In it the author plays a role, as does Goethe and other real-life figures from the past. The fictional modern-day characters are subordinate to Kundera’s larger aims, so they aren’t fully-developed. Free rein can liberate or lead to self-indulgence, or it can do both. Immortality may offer up a unique potpourri for the intellect, but it lost its luster for me (and it did have luster for a while). The overall perspective on human nature is a cynical one. An example: a woman is given the choice (it’s one or the other) of spending the next life with her husband of many years or of never meeting him again; her answer is “We prefer never to meet again.” (She phrases it as “we” because her husband is sitting next to her.) The point being made (with Kundera everything has a point) is that her love is an illusion, and with her answer she’s made to face that fact. Despite invigorating moments, I grew weary. The fictional side wasn’t holding up, and ideas that were intriguing and insightful were examined so rigorously that the freshness was leeched out of them. Plus I had my fill of Goethe; when he reappeared at the beginning of Part Four I called it quits. I did so with absolutely no curiosity, no regrets. I just wanted class to be over.

The Test - Pierre Boulle (French)

In France there’s a test youths must take to get their General Certificate. Or maybe the government has curtailed it due to this 1957 novel, in which it’s depicted as a scourge worthy of use by the Inquisition. Marie-Helen is uniquely unprepared to digest the work of the intellectual giants of the western world. She had lived in a Malaysian fishing village from age nine to seventeen; at that point she was kidnapped and returned to “her people” (white people). But she considered the villagers to be her people. Not only was she assimilated into their culture, but she was happily married. Boulle clearly believed that his heroine should have been allowed to carry on her life in Malaysia. Certainly she should! – all that happens after the kidnapping borders on the ridiculous. Her failure to pass the test leads to her breakdown, a number of murders and a suicide. The agony and despair the various characters feel is rendered in prose that would make a writer of Harlequin romances cringe. At first I thought the translator might be responsible, then I thought he might be partially responsible, but finally I put the blame on Boulle. How could a novelist whose work I’ve admired (The Bridge over the River Kwai, Planet of the Apes) come out with something as clumsy as this? I read those other books long ago. Was I lacking in discrimination? I find it reassuring that the edition of Kwai I have is from the Time Reading Program, and they made excellent choices. 

Life and Times of Michael K - J. M. Coetzee

Michael K is like Robinson Crusoe, yet his isolation takes place in the midst of war-torn South Africa. The opening sentence presents us with one factor that will separate him from others: “The first thing the midwife noticed about Michael K when she helped him out of his mother into the world was that he had a hare lip.” His life passes in solitariness, which he finds easier than dealing with people. At age thirty-one Michael is thrust into the turbulent world when he tries to return his dying mother to the place where she was born. After her death we follow his wanderings. I was involved with the problems he faced and his attempts to solve them, and the unadorned prose was effective in conveying facts. But Coetzee wasn’t satisfied with facts, nor with the character he had created. He wanted to impart a higher meaning to Michael’s existence. As a result, things go badly off course. First he has Michael reject life by rejecting food. Not only didn’t this ring true, but following a person’s loss of bodily substance wasn’t interesting. In a brief Part Two, Coetzee changes the point-of-view to that of a doctor treating the emaciated Michael in a camp; through this deep-thinking character the author tries very hard to inject significance into the situation. In the even briefer last section we return to Michael, but everything – particularly a sexual encounter – seems fabricated. Ultimately we wind up someplace murky and inconclusive. The path Coetzee chose to take – one in which he aimed for profundity – led to a dead end, both for the novel and for Michael K.