The Haunted Bookshop (Christopher Morley)

What to say about Christopher Morley's delightful The Haunted Bookshop that I didn't already say about his first adorable novella about the bookselling life, Parnassus on Wheels? Honestly, not much. This one takes place in Brooklyn itself, itinerant bookmonger Roger Mifflin having settled down with his wife, Helen, and opened a bookshop in place. There's a bit of a romance and a shred of plot, the latter of which hinges on some embarrassing-in-retrospect anti-German sentiment, but one can overlook that in a 1919 work. There are, regrettably, no actual ghosts.

There are, however, quotable bits in spades, so I'm just gonna let Morley take it from here. Many of these could be a framed manifesto on the wall of any indie bookstore. Or a tattoo:

• "I am not a dealer in merchandise but a specialist in adjusting the book to the human need. Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a 'good' book. A book is 'good' only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error. . . . My pleasure is to prescribe books for such patients as drop in here and are willing to tell me their symptoms."
• "Living in a bookshop is like living in a warehouse of explosives."
• "The life of a bookseller is very demoralizing to the intellect," he went on after a pause. "He is surrounded by innumerable books; he cannot possibly read them all; he dips into one and picks up a scrap from another. His mind gradually fills itself with miscellaneous flotsam, with superficial opinions, with a thousand half-knowledges. Almost unconsciously he begins to rate literature according to what people ask for."
• "One thing, however, you must grant the good bookseller. he is tolerant. He is patient of all ideas and theories. . . . He is willing to be humbugged for the weal of humanity. He hopes unceasingly for good books to be born."
• "[A gathering of booksellers is] likely to be a little--shall we say--worn at the bindings, as becomes men who have forsaken worldly profit to pursue a noble calling ill rewarded in cash."
• "The beauty of being a bookseller is that you don't have to be a literary critic: all you have to do to books is enjoy them."
• "I will tell you a secret. I have never read King Lear, and have purposely refrained from doing so. If I were ever very ill I would only need to say to myself 'You can't die yet, you haven't read Lear.' That would bring me round, I know it would."

Chess Story (Stefan Zweig)

Stefan Zweig's Chess Story is small but intense, made more so by its being the last thing the Austrian Jewish author wrote before his 1942 suicide in exile. The novella nests first-person narrators: in the framing story, a passenger on a steamer heading from New York to Buenos Aires learns he's (a presumptive he, as I don't think Zweig ever specifies) traveling with the world chess champion, Mirko Czentovic, a savant who can barely read but whose rise to the height of the chess world has been meteoric. A group of enthusiasts persuade Mirko to play them simultaneously; they fail spectacularly until they begin taking the advice of a timid stranger. This man reluctantly tells the story of how he gained his chess skills: a Viennese lawyer with ties to the clergy and the imperial court, he was imprisoned by the Nazis after the Anschluss, constantly interrogated in an effort to find the monarchic assets his firm had hidden. The preferred form of torture was total isolation--he's kept for months in a bare room, his only conversations interrogations, until he manages to steal a book from a guard's overcoat. He's disappointed to learn it's only a book of chess problems; but driven by necessity, he works through them over and over, using the checkered counterpane as a board, until he can play chess games entirely in his head, against himself . . . until the psychological task of separating his internal Black player from White overwhelms him, and he goes insane. Pushed into playing against Czentovic, he once again beings to lose his grip on reality.

I found myself comparing Chess Story with Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," another masterpiece of oppression and isolation. They share a sense of claustrophobia and creeping horror that's astonishing in such a short fictional space. And I love how Zweig uses the mental projection required for expertise in chess as both a means of escape and a kind of psychic trap. Zweig was apparently one of the most popular authors in the world in the 1920s and 30s--NYRB Classics has translated several other titles recently, and I'll be reading more for certain.

Bartleby the Scrivener (Herman Melville)

Once again, I'm missing book club--just not up to snow-trudging, y'know? Sorry to miss a discussion of "Bartleby the Scrivener," the weirdest, trolling-est bit of classic lit ever. (This time around, I think maybe Bartleby's a ghost? Why not?) In lieu of new thoughts, I herewith present my favorite essay from my grad school days, entitled "Scrivening."

English 800
Dr. Brooks (aw, Dr. Brooks, wearer of beer-and-pretzel socks)
6 December 2004

Plato, in his Phaedrus, asserts his mistrust of the written word and his preference for spoken dialectic. A book’s inert ideas, he argues, can only be rhetorically questioned, while a Socratic figure in the flesh can be poked, prodded, and cajoled and can poke, prod, and cajole in turn. Since the dialogue itself, however, comes down in manuscript form, Plato’s dislike for the method ultimately rings hollow, and modern scholars reverse his hierarchy. No texts, no literature, claim critics; they dismiss verbal rhetoric as merely a short-lived version of the enduring power of the pen. That even the great Shakespeare intended most of his words to be declaimed rather than printed fails to make a dent in the press’s primacy. Despite this nearly universal prejudice, Herman Melville’s darkly comic masterpiece “Bartleby the Scrivener” fiercely indicts its own endeavor by means of a dangerous theme: there is no such thing, the story concludes, as an original text. All stories become, as Nietzsche said of the readings of them, only interpretation.

“Bartleby” itself, however, defies interpretation. Stylistically, Melville "had great difficulties with control. His modes had been erratic mixtures of narrative, drama, sermon, oration, and lyric poetry. He had had trouble maintaining a consistent omniscient or first person narrator point of view; he had allowed himself digressions in his own voice. His tone had been erratic also, and not always in a functional way; contemplative, detached, satirical . . . lyric, bombastic, and personal" (Plumstead 85). “Bartleby”’s shuttling between mundane (the mind-numbing routine of a law office) and absurd (an attorney’s illogical unwillingness to remove an wayward employee), hilarious (Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut) and heartrending (Bartleby), certainly exemplifies its author’s lack of control—or, it could be easily argued, his immense control of a wide variety of styles. They amount to the same thing. In addition, “Bartleby” marked Melville’s first published foray into the short story—a genre favored by his idol Nathaniel Hawthorne and his contemporary Edgar Allan Poe—which meant “[h]e must now exercise tight control on wordiness and lyricism not pertinent to a single effect. He must not intrude with digressions” (Plumstead 86). Without further analyzing “Bartleby”’s structure and diction, the reader should remember Melville’s failure to achieve formal coherence and the many influences of his writings.

The work also lacks thematic coherence, to the point where few agree on what “Bartleby” is “about.” Here I must thank Henry A. Murray for, in the opening address of the Melville Society of America’s 1965 symposium on “Bartleby,” skillfully, thoroughly, and wittily collecting the wide-ranging opinions of the narrator, the psychologist, the author, the scrivener, the biographer, two dissenting critics, and the historian upon the narrative at hand, after asserting to begin with that “Bartleby per se is meaningless so long as no reader can either discover or drive a bit of sense in him” (3). In the same essay, he evinces a very Derrida-like sense of play as he riffs off of the word “I” in his title, “weav[ing] around this first person pronoun an entangling spider’s web of recondite allusions and insinuations” (Murray 3), suggesting that it may mean the narrator; Murray himself; Melville; punning on “I” as the organ of sight, "the Evil Eye? or, let us say, the Eye of History? or the Eye of Criticism? or maybe the Eye of some special cult or doctrine—theosophy, Marxism, Freudian infantology, Jungian archetypology, existentialism, Zen Buddhism—. . . . [or] the Documentary Eye, say, of the biographer, of the critic or historian" (Murray 4). A novella which allows for this kind of critical flexibility—dare I say, undecideability—contains very little that is fixed. As Lewis Leary puts it, “[this] small tale which might be thought to be about almost nothing at all has become a universal reflector” (14). While Bartleby’s silence and the wall at which he stares seem to represent stony permanence, the story containing them moves quickly and fluidly.

Similarly, Bartleby’s character resists classification. Murray’s cast of characters refer to him variously as “utterly misanthropic,” “Christ-like,” exhibiting symptoms of “catatonic schizophrenia,” and mirroring the author himself, counting “an enormous major difference and thirteen minor similarities between Melville and his scrivener” (10, 13, 24, 23). Other critics compare him to the heroes of Camus, Kafka, and Beckett, the latter having given up on Godot. To Maurice Friedman, Bartleby represents the Modern Exile, who “sees death as the final term of absurdity set to his own attempts at a meaningful existence” (78); whereas in William Bysshe Stein’s opinion, Melville “unobtrusively convert[s] Bartleby into the lawyer’s [Christian] conscience” (106). Rarely have so many contradictions arisen in the discussion of a single persona.

Yet all of these far-flung critical approaches fail to grasp the scope of Melville’s editorial project in “Bartleby.” The act around which the story centers—Bartleby’s repeated, ever-so-polite refusal to do his job—should be analyzed not in terms of symbol of style, but by what he actually refuses to do. The narrator describes it thus: "It is, of course, an indispensable part of a scrivener’s business to verify the accuracy of his copy, word by word. When there are two or more scriveners in an office, they assist each other in this examination, one reading from the copy, the other holding the original" (Melville Billy 114). Bartleby politely refuses to assist his boss in verifying his copy; that is, he refuses to establish that he has created an exact copy of the original document. Bartleby, and Melville (who, Murray’s biographer claims, preferred not to correct proofs) along with him, does not believe that such a copy can be made. It follows from this premise that, since even the first draft of a literary work is attempting to copy ideas in an author’s imagination, there are no original texts. All works of the mind cannot leave the mind without error creeping into the system.

Obviously, Melville’s assertion is shattering to his (and our) readership’s notions of reliable text. The lowest expectation a reader brings to a work is that of honesty; she trusts the author not to play her false. Inconsistencies, conventional slip-ups, and implausibilities break the contract between author and reader and cause the works containing these errors to be consigned to the dustbin. But what if, as Bartleby/Melville suggests, the author cannot tell the whole truth, no matter how much he wants to, simply because he cannot copy what is in his head? The contract becomes arbitrary; if all works are fallacious, shifts in verb tense or mixed metaphors seem less egregious. The gulf between “good” and “bad” writing narrows.

Besides its Nietzsche-like blurring of values, Melville’s allegation has other metaphysical implications. Stream-of-consciousness inventions such as “automatic writing” and the Beat drug culture’s poetry (both often consigned to the dustbin by unscholarly readers) perhaps come closest to reproducing the author’s original intent. But since thought consists of more than language, non-verbal images translate arbitrarily into proscribed arrangements of letters; if no word exists for a concept, it cannot be expressed. Thus many human experiences which cannot accurately be written down despair of reaching the literary canon. Communicable only in approximation, the immensely complicated emotions we call “fear” and “love,” the concepts designated by the signifiers “truth” and “good,” both resonate with all humanity and fall on deaf ears—both have universal weight and stubborn specificity.

That Melville should, however subtly, make so sweeping a statement about the nature of his art becomes less surprising given the place of the “original text” in his other works. “Benito Cereno,” for example, takes as its basis Amasa Delano’s 1790s Narrative; yet, after bothering to establish a provenance unfamiliar to most of his readers, Melville freely adjusts character and plot to his own designs. He “pruned” the title character, for instance, “to vein and flesh him with altruism and goodness. In life, he was a swindler, a liar, the scorn of his friends, the stabber of a helpless Negro slave” (Kaplan 61). He also tars Cereno’s opponent Babo with a far darker brush than recorded. Finally, the last section of “Cereno” consists of a series of legal documents, texts trusted above all others for truth. But, as many critics have pointed out, these texts merely obscure unpleasant truths revealed or implied in the preceding narrative; for example, Babo never gives testimony, omitting a vital perspective of the San Dominick’s tale. Melville “reads” Delano’s document in accordance with his own symbology, leaving the inviolable “original text” by the wayside.

Moby-Dick opens with Melville’s rattling off a Who’s Who of quotes about whales, from sources as diverse as Job (“Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him;/ One would think the deep to be hoary.”), Hamlet (“Very like a whale.”), and Darwin (“On one occasion I saw two of these monsters [whales] probably male and female”) (2, 3, 11). The book, although it seems to center on Ahab’s pursuit of the White Whale, digresses early and often into non-literary chatter; the Table of Contents lists chapters called “The Whiteness of the Whale,” “Jonah Historically Regarded,” and “Measurement of the Whale’s Skeleton,” none of which advance the epic, much-praised plot at all, though the section on dissecting the whale’s carcass has been called the best technical writing ever put on paper. Why, then, did Melville include these quotes and chapters in the book? What seems his attempt to “inform” the reader is rather gentle non-mocking play. “See,” he says, “I have dressed up my fanciful story in good scientific clothes. You can trust me to tell the truth about Ahab because I’ve backed it up with the Hebrew for ‘whale,’ because I’ve told the truth about its skeleton.” But he knows all the time that none of these texts can be trusted, that all stories are equally fallacious—ah, yes, but conversely, equally true. Ahab’s mad chase takes place on the same level of reality—and, at the same time, unreality—as the “fact” of “the Hanoverian flag[’s] bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger” (Melville Moby-Dick 163).

Bartleby’s bold assertion, so quietly and neatly put, colors Melville’s entire opus. Does Melville, then, jettison all literary significance? Do all texts, in his opinion, best resemble the “dead letters” Bartleby once worked with, Friedman’s symbol of “the entire hopeless attempt at human dialogue and communication” (79)? From these tragic missives "the pale clerk takes a ring—the finger it was meant for, perhaps, molders in the grave; a bank note sent in swiftest charity—he whom it would relieve nor eats nor hungers no more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death" (Melville Billy 143). In this stark reading the author’s task proves futile, and Bartleby himself imitates a reproduced text, Xeroxed into pallid insignificance; he is the hero run off a thousand times, so that only a smudge remains.

But since Melville, like Plato, made extensive use of the written word, he could hardly haven taken such a masochistic position. Instead, with his lack of formal and thematic coherence and his playful use of other’s words, Melville creates texts whose meanings—prefiguring the modern era—may exist in a wide variety of places, but not in the author’s original intent, since this intent cannot possibly reach the reader. Unlike the meaningless and miserable dead letters—texts with no context—Melville’s works fit a multiplicity of contexts; their symbolism (unlike that of Hawthorne) challenges all permanent codification. Each rereading of “Bartleby” thus rewrites him anew—according to the audience’s preference.

Works Cited

• Friedman, Maurice. “Bartleby and the Modern Exile.” Vincent 64-81.
• Kaplan, Sidney. “Herman Melville and the American National Sin: The Meaning of ‘Benito Cereno.’” Contexts for Criticism. Ed. Donald Keesey. Fourth edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003.
• Leary, Lewis. “B is for Bartleby.” Introduction. Bartleby the Inscrutable. Ed. M. Thomas Inge. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1979.
• Melville, Herman. Billy Budd and Other Tales. New York: Signet, 1998.
• ---. Moby-Dick. New York: Norton, 1967.
• Murray, Henry A. “Bartleby and I.” Vincent 3-24.
• Plumstead, A.W. “Melville’s Venture Into a New Genre.” Vincent 82-93.
• Stein, William Bysshe. “Bartleby: The Christian Conscience.” Vincent 104-112.
• Vincent, Howard P., ed. Melville Annual 1965, A Symposium: Bartleby the Scrivener. Kent, Ohio: Kent State UP, 1966.

Parnassus on Wheels (Christopher Morley)

I missed 2013's inaugural WORD Classics Book Club this afternoon, due to dumb stupid bronchitis. I've been sick this whole year so far, wheeeee! But this year's theme (after Russians and NYRB Brits) is novellas, and Christopher Morley's 1917 paean to the bookselling life, Parnassus on Wheels, started us off in most delightful fashion.

It's the story of Miss Helen McGill, long-suffering sister to Andrew, a best-selling author of Thoreau-ish meditations on the joys of rural life. While he taps away at his typewriter maintaining his reputation as the "Sage of Redfield," she's stuck running the farm, and has drifted into plump middle age without much incident. This all changes with the arrival of red-bearded Roger Mifflin and his traveling Parnassus--a robin's-egg blue wagon cleverly outfitted with bookshelves on both sides, laden with everything from classics to cookbooks, which its proprietor has driven for years around the country, bringing books, and the worlds within them, to the rural masses. Mr. Mifflin intends to sell the whole shebang--including horse Pegasus and terrier Bock--to Andrew, for he plans to move back to Brooklyn and write a book of his own, on "Literature Among the Farmers." Helen, sure that the acquisition of more books will simply make her brother more insufferable, makes a spur-of-the-moment decision to buy it herself, and have some adventures of her own.

Obviously, as a bookmonger myself, I am very much a choir being preached to here, but I think even those who have never experienced the joys of a great handsell (that is, matching just the right book with just the right customer) would find Parnassus adorable. And oh so quotable! See Mifflin's assertion that "when you sell a man a book you don't sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue--you sell him a whole new life." Or his love of his home borough: "New York is Babylon; Brooklyn is the true Holy City. New York is the city of envy, office work, and hustle; Brooklyn is the region of home and happiness. It is extraordinary: poor, harassed New Yorkers presume to look down on low-lying, home-loving Brooklyn, when as a matter of fact it is the jewel their souls are thirsting for and they never know it." And though I wouldn't call it "feminist" quite, it's always nice to read a (SPOILER ALERT) romantic comedy with a leading lady pushing forty--and forty was older in those days, too! All in all, quite worth an afternoon. And come December, while I won't be in Brooklyn to discuss it (having retreated to my low-lying, home-loving hometown), I shall for sure be reading Morley's sequel, The Haunted Bookshop.

Rogue Male (Geoffrey Household)

At the end of every WORD Classics book club meeting, the esteemed Bookavore asks us: "To whom would you recommend this book?" (Albeit sometimes less grammatically, because for goodness' sake, it's Saturday. Also this time there was beer.) For me, the question's the best way into Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male, which is both a thriller for people who don't read thrillers and a thriller for people who only read thrillers, but are willing to delve into some explorations of social class (because it is, after all, British) along with the chase.

In the opening pages of Rogue Male, the unnamed narrator, a wealthy English sportsman of some note, decides on a hunterly whim to see how close he can get to the Central European stronghold of an up-and-coming dictator (it was written in '39, so yeah, Hitler, but that's really beside the point). He has the man in his sights when he's captured by bodyguards and brutally interrogated; but he manages to escape, and from there the book divides its time between furious flight and the tedium of hiding as, pursued to his home country by the dictator's minions, the narrator goes to ground in a literal burrow in Dorset, his only companion a similarly feral cat he calls Asmodeus.

What I loved about this book is the mix of skills required for the narrator's survival--both the primal knowledge that provides him with food and shelter and the social aptitude he uses on his rare forays from his den. For he belongs to what he calls "Class X," a rank he struggles to define but which is immediately identifiable to any Englishman, who treat him accordingly. Even more so than his limitless wealth (though it certainly helps), it's this vague but unmistakable membership that allows him to navigate through the world of men. Being Class X isn't enough, of course; he needs his Bear Grylls-esque ability to eke existence from his environment, but the latter skill set also isn't sufficient to keep him out of harm's way. Watching these two very different areas of expertise complement and support each other is a joy to read, and makes Rogue Male uniquely pleasurable for the mutually exclusive sets of readers I've mentioned above. Highly recommended!

Old-school frantic catchup post.

So sometimes, I've got seven books waiting in my to-be-reviewed pile, and they all deserve a full write-up, but I've been horribly fatigued and ache-y for weeks again (the doctor thinks it's fibromyalgia), and it's just not going to happen. So rather than skip over the books, I'm gonna give them woefully short shrift in a "HERE I READ THESE I LIKED 'EM" post.

The Ugly Duchess, Eloisa James: I'll admit, while I connected to this latest entry in Eloisa's brill fairytale series on a gut-and-heart level, I found parts of the narrative kinda silly . . . i.e., the hero becomes a pirate for a while. But y'know, I feel like romance is best measured in emotional terms, and gosh I ached for the heroine, Theo, a super-smart lady who's heard from meanies all her life that she's ugly, her breasts too small, her features too large. Specifically, they say she "looks like a boy." (Yeah, this resonates like crazy, since I weathered the same insults for a good chunk of my own experience.) Her worst fears are realized when she learns that her childhood friend, James Ryburn, has married her to cover up his wastrel father's embezzlement of Theo's fortune. She throws him out, and hears nothing from him for seven years, when he barges triumphantly into the House of Lords during the proceedings to declare him legally dead--sun-browned, scarred, and savage. He's determined to prove to her that it wasn't just mercenary motives that led to his proposal, but there's bitterness and mistrust on both sides to overcome. I do like reconciliation plots in romance, but I kinda thought it was a tragedy that young, sweet James had to become so growly and alpha-male to win back his Daisy.

The Fantasy Hall of Fame, edited Robert Silverberg: A found-on-the-street coup, this is a mammoth (500+ pages) anthology of fantastic tales, selected in 1996 by the members of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. I'd only read two of the stories before--"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (Borges) and "The Lottery" (Shirley Jackson), both of which obviously bear rereading; the rest cover fifty years of imaginative writing, wildly divergent in prose style and subject matter. A lot of the authors were new to me, particularly the early ones (H.L. Gold, L. Sprague de Camp, C.L. Moore), and many were familiar names who I shamefully haven't read but now must all the more: Poul Anderson ("Operation Afreet"), Peter S. Beagle ("Come Lady Death"), Gene Wolfe ("The Detective of Dreams"), Roger Zelazny ("Unicorn Variations"), Robert Silverberg ("Basileus"). Weirdly, it seems to be out of print, but super-easy to find used. Or waiting on the sidewalk for a sharp-eyed fiancé, a gift from the city!

A Contract with God and Dropsie Avenue: The Neighborhood, Will Eisner: Speaking of pivotal genre figures, Eisner's one of the pioneers of the modern graphic novel--heck, the biggest American comics award is named for him. Both these titles are set on a fictional Bronx street; Contract contains four related tales set in the 1930s, among the mostly Jewish, working-class denizens of a single tenement. Here I had my usual problem with sequential-art-lit, which is that I read it too dang fast, so it ends up feeling slight, which I hasten to blame on my own text bias and not the medium itself. I liked Dropsie Avenue more, finding its historical ambition and Tolstoy-numerous cast much easier to follow with the aid of art. It follows the street from 1870s farmland through urban growth and sprawl and decay and renewal, through successive waves of immigrants, each in term weathering bigotry from the established inhabitants until they become the establishment: Dutch, English, Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, Hispanic, African-American, Romani . . . the grand sweep doesn't keep him from telling tiny stories as well. It's a great work of historical fiction.

Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard, Arthur Conan Doyle: Between trying to kill off Sherlock Holmes in "The Final Problem" and resurrecting him by popular demand in "The Adventure of the Empty House," Doyle spent ten years writing these charming comic tales of by Etiénne Gerard, Napoleonic soldier of great bravery and mustache, who, like Harry Flashman's good twin, manages to meet a litany of important figures and be privy to the real stories behind what the historical record believes. Gerard is delightful, a wonderful mix of full of himself and genuinely courageous and skilled, and as Flashman's chronicler George MacDonald Fraser says in his introduction, it's subtly subversive that Doyle's hero is from the wrong side of the Channel, allowing him to satirize French and English alike--Gerard's oblivious misreadings of English sport are particularly hilarious. We've got the zillionth iteration of the Holmes-Watson pairing hitting CBS this fall; surely someone can spare the time to make a miniseries with Doyle's second greatest creation? I'd love to see Thomas from Downtown Abbey with luxuriant whiskers . . .

The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets, Kathleen Alcott: Loved the writing in this first novel! It hits my literary-fiction sweet spot where the Big Themes (family, memory, identity) don't overwhelm the relentless and ephemeral details of everyday life and personality.

Among Others, Jo Walton: This having won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards this year, I feel confident in not belaboring the praise--sci-fi/fantasy is way better than literary fiction at deserved awards. It is, as fifteen-year-old Morwenna would say, brill, both a great fantasy in its own right and a paean to dozens of the best writers (several of whom appear in The Fantasy Hall of Fame), books, and short stories of the genre. Thank Zeus for the Internet--someone with more stamina than me has already compiled a list of every book mentioned!

Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (Patrick Hamilton)

Was gonna write about Patrick Hamilton's trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky--my favorite read for the NYRB Classics book club so far this year--back on Wednesday, but then I had a beer (a Magic Hat Elder Betty, which yum! also, we keep having parties, and people bring over beer, and then they leave it, and then we have, three weeks later, 14 beers left in the fridge, and should we just have another party and be like DO NOT BRING BEER WE'VE GOT SOME?). Anyway: had a beer, lost my ambition. Which is in retrospect perfect, as booze and the bad decisions derived therefrom are a recurring theme in Hamilton's working-class epic (and apparently his life, poor guy). Like in my favorite, favorite lines, stuck in my head forever:

He went to bed with a rich and glorious evening, and he awoke at seven to find that it had gone bad overnight, as it were (like milk), and was in his mouth--bitter and sickly. He had been fooled. He had not, after all, had a great time: he had merely been drinking again.

Twenty Thousand Streets' three linked novels correspond to three connected characters: Patrick (The Midnight Bell), Jenny (The Siege of Pleasure), and Ella (The Plains of Cement). Patrick and Ella are co-workers at a pub, Jenny a prostitute who comes in for a drink one night, with whom Patrick pursues a financially ruinous and heartbreakingly one-sided relationship*. Jenny's story is told in flashback, detailing her rise from meek factory girl thrilled at the prospect of becoming a live-in maid, through her introduction to drunkenness, to her rapid slide into streetwalking. Meanwhile, scraping-by Ella suffers the courtship of middle-aged, unpleasant Mr. Eccles, seeing it as her only chance to escape being constantly broke--unless her mother's awful husband dies.

You know the crazy thing? That synopsis sounds like Downertowne U.K. (sister city to Bummerville U.S.A.), but Twenty Thousand Streets is often funny, usually thanks to Hamilton's snappy prose style--dude rocks the Sarcastic Capitals. An extended passage regarding Mr. Eccles's snaggletooth, which often passes without notice but sometimes proves "capable of exercising a partially hypnotic effect upon those who looked at it for too long, and at moments made him look rather like a tiger," is hysterical. Hamilton also, I think, sidesteps miserablism through his empathy for his marginal and tragic-in-the-classical-sense characters. He's not putting these people through these trials, but observing and, yes, loving them--this care allows the reader to inhabit these lives, and the result is immersive, emotional, enchanting.

*(This is apparently autobiographical. Yikes!)

Great Granny Webster (Caroline Blackwood)

It's hard to talk about Caroline Blackwood's novella Great Granny Webster without talking about the woman herself: heiress and muse, alcoholic and raconteur (in a time when people still called other people raconteurs). And it's hard to read this slim little oddity of a book without seeing it as autobiographical: it's the pieced-together story of several generations of upper-class British women, from the unbending matriarch of the title (which I mean pretty literally; girlfriend has crazy good posture), through her institutionalized daughter, dancing with the faery folk alone in her dilapidated ballroom; her aging flapper granddaughter, lover and leaver of more rich men than she cares to count; down to the horrified narrator/ Blackwood analogue, trying to learn as much as she can about her family history in a desperate attempt to escape it.

As brief as it is, Great Granny Webster's a heavy read, a dispassionate catalog of madness, rigidity, and decay. Except somehow not as bleak as it sounds? Well, no, wait, it is. Yet there are moments of sly humor, like the Very Correct English servants forced to wear galoshes in the leaky Ulster castle where the narrator's father was brought up. And it's a great summation of decades of British social roles, Victorian to post-Empire, with culture-recurrent themes of class stricture and the past. A lot to cover in 103 pages.

The Fox in the Attic (Richard Hughes)

Richard Hughes envisioned The Fox in the Attic as part one of a planned trilogy, or rather one book printed in three volumes, to be called The Human Predicament. The work, Tolstoyan in scope, would follow the Welsh and Bavarian branches of a family (with associated servants, friends, and historical figures) from the aftermath of the Great War to the verge of WWII. His composition was so slow as to make George R.R. Martin look like James Patterson, however, with Fox in the Attic published in 1961 and its follow-up, The Wooden Shepherdess, twelve years later (1973); when he died in 1976, only 50 pages of the final volume had been completed. (NYRB Classics includes these chapters in their edition of Wooden Shepherdess.) Does Hughes's unrealized ambition hurt Fox in the Attic as a stand-alone novel? Ehn, I didn't think so. True, there are some extraneous characters who probably gain importance later, some undeveloped subplots . . . but this is also a novel adept and epic enough to slip into the POVs of everyone from a five-year-old girl to Adolf Hitler without missing a beat, and my awe at that ability more than carried me through the rough patches.

Our Pierre-ish hero is Augustine, an aristocrat born with the century, barely too young to fight in the Great War--one of thousands of young men across Europe who expected to die in the trenches and were marooned by the Armistice with sixty more years to fill. He hasn't found much to occupy them, and he lives alone in an inherited manor, rattling about with his naive and grandiose ideas, convinced that mankind has been reborn from the cataclysm of WWI, that a new, peaceful, godless era is upon Europe. When he finds a little girl drowned on his property, the gossips of the nearby village are convinced (for no good reason) he had something to do with the death, and his older sister convinces him to spend some time on holiday with distant relatives in their Bavarian castle. There, he falls madly in love with blind, pious Mitzi, and remains utterly oblivious to the dark and dangerous politics of 1923 Germany.

The Fox in the Attic is several kinds of story. First, a bildungsroman centered with affectionate mockery on Augustine, who's constantly shocked at the world's incongruity with his worldview, though somehow unshaken in his utopian beliefs. I just wanted to pat him on the head and slap him by turns. Second, a family saga with characters galore: Augustine's brother-in-law Gilbert, a Liberal MP; Gilbert's young daughter Polly; medieval-tragic Mitzi; her monarchist father Walther; her militaristic uncle Otto, all wholly individual and conveniently microcosmic. It's also a historico-political novel of astonishing skill--apparently Hughes dug up primary sources previously unknown, and I learned a lot about the postwar upheaval of Weimar Germany--struggles between fascists, socialists, monarchists, Nazis, republicans, with runaway inflation to oppress them all. Augustine's philosophizing, tested in discussion with other idle intellectuals, make this a novel of ideas, though the ideas are as muddled as those who espouse them--there's a wonderful line about Augustine's drunkenly arguing Art with a Brazilian sculptor who has the advantage of him due to "something always essential for absolute clarity of thought: he had read almost everything which agreed with his theories and nothing whatever that didn't, whereas Augustine's notions were merely an unorganized ten-year deposit from many conflicting sources." I think this happens to me on a regular basis.

And of course, any book that spends time in the feverish brain of Hitler, in hiding after the beerhall putsch in Munich (itself a masterful scene), can be partially classed as a horror novel. The portrait of the up-and-coming Fuhrer is both eerily intimate and well-observed from without--this early in his career, few knew what to make of this weird, low-class little man, prone to violent harangues at dinner parties--and too few took him seriously.

If Fox in the Attic has a dominant theme, I think it's miscommunication. None of these people, fictional or real, makes any effort to listen to or understand each other as independent consciousnesses (to get slightly Hegelian for a second . . . or at least my ten-year deposit of memories of same). One scene in particular highlights this for me: Augustine, full of paternalistic passion for Mitzi, finds her praying in the family chapel and walks her back to the main house through a heavy snowfall--but he does this by hovering silently just beside her, hand floating at her waist but without making any contact. In his head, they form a profound spiritual connection; she, on the other hand, has no idea he's there. And from the attic, a malign presence watches, with a third interpretation as wrong as the others. Only we the readers see the whole picture, with the benefit of time and distance.

Hav (Jan Morris)

Thank Jupiter for the phrase sui generis, or I'd never be able to succinctly describe Hav, Jan Morris's genre-bending fictional travel memoir. Yeah: it's not quite a novel--no characters nor plot arcs on which to hang one's hat--it's an account of a visit (two visits, actually, of which more later) to the eponymous city-state, which never existed, but is entirely plausible.

Were Hav located anywhere but Morris's imagination, it would lie somewhere in the nebulous area where Europe, the Middle East, and Asia collide, as Greek as it is Arab, as Russian as it is Turkish, with the aftermath of colonial millennia adding British, Chinese, and French to the mix. And of course, there are the Kretevs: cave-dwellers, friends to bears, and cultivators of that rarest of fruits, the snow raspberry.

(Hav also clearly borders the dual cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma from China Mieville's mindbending murder mystery The City and the City--and indeed his note acknowledges a deep debt to Morris.)

I'll admit it took me roughly half of Hav's 300 pages to start enjoying myself--as it turns out, I don't find travel memoir that interesting, even when it's technically speculative fiction. But the skill of the world-building, Morris's insertion of real history and historical figures into the story of Hav, and the wealth of charming detail (the Hav mongoose! the urchin soup! the trumpet tune that wakes the city every morning) won me over. There are two parts collected here; first, her original 1985 novel, Last Letters from Hav, and then Hav of the Myrmidons, a follow-up novella written in 2005, bringing the tale up to then. Both serve neatly (but not heavy-handedly) as allegories of their eras on the world stage, the late twentieth-century's discomfort with and glorification of the past, the twenty-first's twin demons of fundamentalism and money, as Morris returns to a Hav made unrecognizable by a Cathar theocracy and Chinese cash.

The latter is more straight dystopia territory, and hence I liked it better (OK, except for the too-precious last paragraph). This is, in fact, a book I'd recommend first to sf/f readers, partly because they've more patience with alternate histories and invented societies. Its appeal is far broader, though--rather like Hav itself.

A House and Its Head (Ivy Compton-Burnett)

I came perilously close to giving up on Ivy Compton-Burnett's vicious family drama A House and Its Head, published in 1935 and set fifty years earlier. It's probably 90% dialogue, with sparse unspoken segues, and the characters talk over each other and the topic at hand in such a stilted, forced-chipper register that it's sometimes difficult to follow who's in the room or where the action is taking place. I pushed on, however, and once the simmering subtext moves closer to the surface (though it never boils over), I better understood what she was doing, and then I was fascinated.

Also? It helps to imagine the whole thing acted out by the cast of Downton Abbey. There's even a Sibyl! Of course, she's a sociopath. But they kind of all are.

At the helm of this whole sick crew is Duncan Edgeworth, cold patriarch, inflicter of constant verbal cruelties as abusive as a punch to the face and possibly even more wounding. He lives with his two daughters, witty Nance and surface-sweet Sibyl; his wastrel nephew and presumptive heir, Grant; and meek wife Ellen, whose death several chapters in sets off a chain of horrifying events, participated in and covered up by the family and a village network of hangers-on and gossips.

Once crazy shit starts happening, the novel accelerates. What Compton-Burnett pulls off, though, necessitates the sometime-tedium of the first half. Because whether they're discussing being late for breakfast or accusations of murder, no one's demeanor changes. These people are so skilled at mannered dissembling that they've become capable of anything. And as I became more adept at reading between the lines, I grew more chilled by what I found there. In the end, it's practically a horror novel in Victorian fancy-dress--but one that, like the ghost in the Edith Wharton story, only reveals itself afterward.

Mr. Fortune (Sylvia Townsend Warner)

Sylvia Townsend Warner's Mr. Fortune is an odd little book--or rather, one and a half odd little books, the short novel Mr. Fortune's Maggot (1927) and its novella sequel, "The Salutation" (1932), collected by NYRB Classics in one volume. I set out to confuse myself by not reading the introduction, so that I assumed it was written in the 50s--and being off by decades in 20th-century literature can really throw one for a loop, believe me. I still can't put my finger on just what it is I don't quite get about the stories, but there's a nagging sense of irresolution. Though not an unpleasant one.

Anyway, enough about my reaction to the book. The first installment (which uses the term "maggot" to mean "fancy or whim," a definition hitherto unknown to me) takes place on the Polynesian island of Fanua, where the title character has spent three years as a missionary with only one convert to show for it--and his relationship with said convert, an adolescent boy, is less shepherd and sheep than vaguely romantic, right on the edge of being unsettling. An earthquake causes a crisis of faith for them both, and leads Mr. Fortune to some strikingly modern conclusions about the imperial exercise. "The Salutation" picks up some years afterwards, when Mr. Fortune, adrift and bereft after his sudden decision to leave Fanua, ends up living on the charity of an Argentinean woman, the widow of an Englishman who feels an obligation to her late husband's countryman.

My favorite thing about the book is feeling the author's attitude towards her own character slowly shift, from satire to affection. Warner starts out, I think, with Mr. Fortune as a comic villain, imposing British society on a people with no need of its strictures; but as time wears on, his basic good nature gets under her skin, and he becomes less a figure of fun than a sympathetic striver, a man prone to rushed decisions who has little to no idea how to deal with other human beings or his own emotions. And that makes Mr. Fortune fascinating to read: lyrical, interior, a portrait of a man who, while hardly unusual in real life, is rarely so deeply depicted in fiction.

The Possessed (Elif Batuman) . . . and a wee Christmas-y Gogol!

Missed the last meeting of the Russian year of the WORD Classics Book Group due to dumb ol' stupid ol' fun-ruining illness, but I did read the book, and it was indeed a fitting cap to the Tolstoy-Dostoevsky-Gogol experience. Elif Batuman's The Possessed is a joyous journey through the lives and peculiarities of people of all nations who find devote themselves to Russian literature. Batuman is an unapologetic member of their ranks, having almost accidentally found herself a Stanford graduate student in comparative literature.

But though she's got a wonderful analytical mind, her prose evades even a whiff of academic density. The long essay that (in three parts) forms the backbone of the collection, "Summer in Samarkand," details her experiences ostensibly learning Uzbek in that still-exotic city--it's a laugh-out-loud funny culture-shock story, a historical introduction to the complexities of Central Asia (as she learned later, "Uzbek" was not even a defined ethnicity or language until the Soviets decided it was in the early twentieth century), and a guide to a literary tradition largely unknown (and honestly somewhat nebulous) outside of the region. Her writing's lovely, witty, smart--even if you've never read a word of those daunting Russians, I highly recommend the book.

I also read, in the spirit of the season, a wee New Directions paperback edition of Gogol's novella, "The Night Before Christmas," a decidedly un-Moore-ish romp featuring the devil, guilty husbands hiding in sacks, and caroling for sausages. It's a fun, frisky folktale, and just cemented my opinion: Gogol is totes my favorite Russian writer!

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Alexander Solzhenitsyn)

WORD's classics book club, aka Talking to Stephanie and Toby About Stuff, strikes again! Really, one of my favorite events every month. This time around it was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's slender but powerful account of life in a Stalin-era work camp.

I first read this book for junior-year English class in high school--I remember some of my friends mashing it up with Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat ("Go go go Ivan, you know what they say!") for a weird-ass little video. (This is something we did a lot: we were a very special type of nerd.) I've read it a few times since, notably a few years ago when I graded essays on it for a teacher at my old high school--I managed to blank on the due date and had to grade 90 papers in, like, two days. Teachers of America, I salute you!

It is, I think, a perfect book. In many ways it's a stark contrast to much of the nineteenth-century Russian literature the club has read this year; whereas in Tolstoy or Dostoevsky there is much melodrama over trivialities, in One Day the everyday injustices faced by Soviet political prisoners is barely reacted to by the zeks. The lack of one catastrophic incident for a plot to turn upon is an ambitious and ultimately effective way to structure the novel--this one day is nothing special. Its importance lies in the succession of thousands of days just like it.

It's also a very habitable novel, by which I mean it's easy to see yourself in it. Despite obvious disparities, both Ivan and I wake up, head to work, solve problems, eat dinner. We both have routines, minor deviations from same--we both divide our life into what is ours and what belongs to others. This ease of correlation is both comforting and terrifying, and inspiring in a non-hokey way. Human beings approach survival in the same way, whatever obstacles--major or minor--they have to overcome. And as a species, we're damn good at surviving. One Day is one tiny example.

Fathers and Sons (Ivan Turgenev)

It happened with Anna Karenina, again with Brothers Karamazov, finally with Fathers and Sons: read the book, was worried the other WORD Classic book-clubbers were wholeheartedly into it and I'd be the odd one out. And for the third time, nope--we were all in puzzled agreement. But this wasn't the frustration we felt with AK, or the irritation we found in BK, just a certain gentle bemusement. I'm not sure what to make of Fathers and Sons. It's not a bad book at all; I didn't not like it; I didn't like it either. I have a near-perfect neutrality towards it, in fact.

As the title suggests, it's largely concerned with intergenerational conflict, at a particularly crucial time in Russian history (then again, I can't think of any non-crucial times in Russian history. "Volatile" is putting it mildly)--right before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. The sons are self-styled nihilist ("Sounds exhausting") Yevgeny Bazarov and his naive hanger-on Arkady. These kids were hilarious, let me tell you: completely recognizable as early-twenties reject-everything quasi-philosophers. Yet while Turgenev is clearly smirking at their earnestness, he's got a nostalgic affection for them as well, which saves the satire from being mean-spirited.

But while the characters are sharply observed, they're not emotionally compelling. That's more or less the issue we had with the book: it just didn't engage us, for good or ill. Stephanie wonders--brilliantly, I think--if much of our shared trouble with these 19th-century Russian novels is simply having readers' brains attuned to modern English-speaking fiction, which is constructed so differently as to be an entirely different mental experience. It is, essentially, hard for us to read. This is definitely a factor: all three of the novels mentioned above contain unnecessary scenes, operatic melodrama, digressions into philosophical argument, and little concern with character development or kinetic prose. Of course, these are not bad things! Nor, obviously, necessary for The Novel as Form. Still, it goes a long way towards explaining why we didn't have much to say about these books. The mere practice of reading them, though, is flexing literary muscles little used, and can only make us better readers. Thanks, WORD, for giving us this opportunity! Best book club I've ever been in.

Two book club reads.

(Pre-book-talking-about ramble: I couldn't decide what adjective to use in this post title. I first thought "marvelous" or "awesome," and then I got sidetracked on how many of our laudatory superlatives come from religion, how we apply words designed for temporal revelations of God/god/gods to, you know, food we like, and then I got weirded out. So I thought "fantastic," and then I was like, huh, that's closer, but there's an unreality to it--which isn't that off for novels, I suppose, but there's another category of praise that's strange when you think about it. So: I think I want to go for is "lovely." Because I loved these books. Gosh and golly did I love 'em.)


Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol: For WORD's Year o' Russians. I've read some Gogol before--SJC read "The Nose" for an all-college seminar (and I subsequently participated in an inebriated parody of dubious taste called "The Ponytail." My school was weird), and my mom picked up Village Evenings Near Dikanka and Mirgorod in prep for a trip to Ukraine several years ago. Both were top-notch--"The Nose," especially, that streak of ultra-modern that comes up sometimes to my surprise and joy in some nineteenth-and-previous-century writing (*cough* Tristram Shandy). Dead Souls, too, reads like it was written yesterday--though its picaresque humor and outsize-but-authentic characters might remind one of Dickens or Twain, the latter particularly in the Duke & King sections of Huck Finn. It's the rambling tale of Chichikov, charmer and con man extraordinaire, who's found a loophole in imperial Russian bureaucracy: every landowner was responsible for collecting taxes from the adult male serfs he owned (yup, slavery! Fun times!), but the number was determined by intermittent census, and there were always muzhiks who died before the next count. Chichikov wheedles or buys these "dead souls" from their owners, taking on the taxes--but also amassing collateral for a mortgage, making money without the bother of actually taking care of anyone. Along the way, he meets a gallery of satirical types--peculiarly Russian but still familiar: gambler Nozdryov, hoarder Plyushkin, ladies and gentlemen and pretenders to both. It's riotously funny, full of sly authorial interjections. So fun.

The Brief History of the Dead, Kevin Brockmeier: For Freebird's Post-Apocalyptic book club (which I didn't make, because I got lazy and tired on Thursday. But I have been keeping up on the readings since February). This novel is beautifully written, and elegiac in the truest sense of the word: an original take on the post-apocalyptic trope, as most of it takes place in an afterlife, a City where the dead go about workaday lives until the last living keeper of their memory dies. New arrivals tell the story of worsening global war and then a rapid pandemic...and then the City begins to empty out, as humanity dwindles away. Meanwhile, a researcher named Laura Byrd, stranded in the Antarctic, undertakes an unbearably arduous journey across the ice to what she hopes is salvation. It's a gorgeous, gorgeous tale of memory and grief, and the lives that surround our lives.

The Master & Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov)

I'm so in love with WORD's Classics Book Group, you guys. To wit: dragged myself the three-mile roundtrip up and down Greenpoint last Saturday--despite battling nigh Week Two of a too-sick-for-a-cold, not-sick-enough-for-the-flu ailment (I think I'm finally OK now. Thanks for asking!)--because I wanted to talk about The Master and Margarita SO BAD. And it was worth it, despite the truly ferocious exhaustion that ensued.

Stephanie had sold this book pretty endlessly and noted that everyone who bought it seemed to be getting a copy as a present for a friend. Since it's a very particular kind of book that's propagated like this--one can love a book and even urge people to read it without taking the step to put it in their hands--her curiosity was piqued. Generalizing hastily: I think it's a book that's either beloved or culturally important; Master and Margarita is both. It's also surreal, thought-provoking, funny, tender, and subversive. AND THERE IS A CAT THAT DRINKS VODKA. (Awww, man, I just wasted several minutes trying to find a LOLcat pic of him. I mean, there's a LOLcat "The Waste Land"...my faith in the Internet is shaken.) (UPDATE: THERE, I FIXED IT.. YOU'RE WELCOME, UNIVERSE.)

The novel is, in unranked order, 1) a satire of Stalinist Russia; 2) a retelling of the trial and death of Christ centering on Pontius Pilate; and 3) a love story. You can haz explication:

1. It's that peculiar kind of satire bred by terror and oppression, where you laugh and then gasp in horror...the devil and his minions come to 1930s Moscow and wreak trickster-god havoc, but they're not at all the evil at work in the city. Dreams and magic stand in for the surreality of an "ordinary life" marked by survival-instinct-bred mistrust and constant disappearances. The book itself wasn't published contemporaneously, of course--apparently its publication (albeit still in censored form) in 1966-7 represented a huge step forward in literary freedom in the Soviet Union, and it's a favorite of many Russians who lived through the Communist era, faithfully and obliquely detailing what it was like to do so. Without being, you know, The Gulag Archipelago (an obviously amazing and important work, but one of the worst birthday presents I can think of).
2. Interspersed with the Satanic antics--starting as a tale told by the devil himself and following through in dream and novel-within-a-novel--is an absolutely beautiful (though unorthodox) version of the prosecution and condemnation of Jesus by Pilate. (Sidebar: I was amazed that there was more than one person in the group who had to look up who Pilate was!! Cultural currency varies so much.) For me (and for Bulgakov, I think), Pilate is a crucial figure in Christianity because he represents the challenge of living in the world, the impossibility of always doing the right thing, that faces every human being. He had to sentence Christ to death. Muscovites had to protect themselves and their families while their neighbors were denounced and executed. There are always saints, yes--but one can be a good person without being a saint. One can be a good person and have done bad things.
3. AND there's also the Master and Margarita! And they are about love, and art, and loving an artist, and what love and art can and cannot do. And selfless deals with the devil.

So: yes, you should read this book, and then give it to your friends. Next up is Dead Souls, Gogol's only novel. Hooray!

I'm a failure as a classicist, I guess.

I just didn't like Anna Karenina, you guys.

I did like the writing. Many of the similes were striking--I remember particularly Stiva's "almond-butter smile," just a perfect fit for his jovial smarm. And I loved Levin's saying in regard to his upcoming wedding that "he was as happy as a dog that has been taught to jump through a hoop and, having finally understood and done what was demanded of it, squeals, wags its tail, and leaps in rapture on to the tables and windowsills." And I liked Levin's dog Laska a lot.

But I didn't like any of the people--OK, not quite "didn't like" even, I felt little for them at all. (I just learned the word cathexis, "mental or emotional investment in a person, object, or idea," and that's exactly what I didn't have.) When I felt (almost universally negative) things towards the characters--irritation with Anna, contempt for Vronsky, disgust towards Stiva--there was always the knowledge that I was rather feeling these emotions towards Tolstoy himself, thinking, "Really, dude?" And while I can intellectually appreciate the novel as a snapshot of its time--politically, economically, philosophically--I was hopelessly bored every single time the conversation turned to 1870s Russian issues. And that happens a lot, so I was hopelessly bored for most of the book.

Reading a Classic Novel and not liking it can feel like a personal failure, can't it? That the book must be good, that it's me, that I'm missing something. Then my St.-John's-primary-source-bred tendencies kick back and say, "No, each individual must evaluate each work from themselves, on their own terms. One must never be intimidated by authority into acknowledging value you don't find." Then my mom-instilled-politesse counters: "True, but don't be the grouch in the corner at the book club meeting tomorrow, OK? If everybody else loved it, let them love it."

So that's the plan: unusual levels of self-effacement in tomorrow's discussion, then Ms. K goes back to the library. And now? I can say I've read it.

**POST-BOOK-CLUB UPDATE** OK, that was an amazing discussion. And it turns out my feelings about the book were in keeping with everyone else's, so I feel absolved of all guilt!