“A Gate at the Stairs”

Well, I’ve been promising this review for almost a week now, and I’ve finally gotten to it. Lorrie Moore is yet another writer of whom I had not heard until this year. Obviously, my knowledge of contemporary literature is less comprehensive than I thought. I first heard of A Gate at the Stairs when I noticed that it had been named one of the New York Times Book Review’s best books of 2009. This got me intrigued, and I waited for an opportunity to read it. Luckily, my brother bought the book with his Christmas money, so I got the chance to swipe it from him and see what the fuss was about.

I’m happy to report that in Moore’s prose, I’ve finally found a writer who knows how to write about Midwestern life. Her narrator, Tassie Keltjin, has a voice that comes right out of Midwestern experience. She is naïve compared to many of the people in her college town, and her experience with the wider world is a quintessential Midwestern experience.  In an interview I heard with Moore, she remarked that people often think of the Midwest as “fly-over territory,” forgetting that a good number of people live there. Many even spend their entire lives without leaving it. I’m glad that Moore has decided to take Midwestern experience as her subject in this case. I think it is a service to an area of our country that is not often treated in “literary” fiction.

As a Midwesterner, I found the novel relatable. Adding to that connection is the fact that, like Tassie, I am now in college, and grew up in the shadow of 9/11, which plays a considerable role in the novel’s events. The conflict between Tassie’s upbringing and her new life as an emerging adult is familiar to me. Moore writes this clash believably, and without sentimentality, which is an achievement for anyone.

Another thing that struck me about Moore’s writing was the way in which she was able to describe the land. Even though her novel is set more in the Iowa-Minnesota-Wisconsin area, her evocation of the flatness and bareness of much of the land is dead-on. This kind of land starts north of Indianapolis and continues North and West into the area of Moore’s novel. She also captured the cold of Midwestern winters quite well.

However, all my praise for her prose aside, Moore’s novel does have some trouble with plotting. Certain revelations are not developed believably, and seem to come from out of the blue. From what I know of Moore, she is predominantly a short-story writer, so maybe this is just something that got lost in translation between forms. Without giving too much of the plot away, I’ll say that some developments felt like they were grasping to make the novel “relevant” to recent events. I think that the setting of the novel in a recent time period was enough to achieve this effect, and some of the plot twists felt contrived to make that “relevance” more urgent than it already was. It was these twists that really hampered the novel.

I would definitely recommend this work as a Midwesterner who has been longing to see contemporary writers produce quality fiction about where I live. Moore’s style is enchanting, and I’d like to explore more of her work as she has a good reputation from what I’ve read. Some plot issues do keep the book from being entirely successful, but it is still worth the read.

Coming Up: I’ll review Harold Evans’s My Paper Chase and (likely a long time after that) Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea.

A Geek-Out Moment

I discovered a website today that I think everybody should check out. It’s at http://bookcoverarchive.com

What I love about this is that it really showcases the type of design that’s going into book covers these days. I like what I see.

Sex and the Modern Writer

This post is in response to an essay that ran in the New York Times Book Review this Sunday, which can be accessed at  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/books/review/Roiphe-t.html?ref=books.

Katie Roiphe writes about how the male novelists of the post-war era, especially Philip Roth and John Updike, are often condemned for the portrayal of sex in their works. Many critics either find it awkwardly graphic or sexist/misogynistic (whichever you prefer). On the other hand, Roiphe argues that the writers of our moment (Eggers, Foer, Chabon, etc.) often treat sex with kid gloves. She seems to imply that she prefers the brutal honesty of the Roths and Updikes to the coyness of the current literary scene. This article has already sparked response on many websites, so maybe my thoughts are just adding to the blogosphere noise, but I found the ideas interesting enough that I wanted to engage with them.

I’ll try to stick to writers I’ve read for my thoughts. Sadly, Updike is the only one of the elder generation with whom I have significant experience. He is definitely one of the most beautiful prose stylists I’ve read. When I think of Updike, the word crystalline seems to be the most appropriate. His novels are always perfectly clear, but they are also multifaceted, like quartz. Rabbit, Run is definitely an American classic.

However, literary admiration aside, his sex scenes often are as awkward as Roiphe says. I had to stop reading Roger’s Version because one scene was really just too much, and it interrupted the flow of what had promised to be a truly interesting novel about faith and doubt. I’m not quite so sure about the misogyny claims, but I can see where they might stem from. Updike is simply a male, and as such, is limited in his perspective regarding the sexuality of women. Thus, they often appear as objects for the male characters. I’m not saying it’s right, but I can see where it originates.

So why, then, did Updike write so graphically about issues of sexuality, while in our own (purportedly) more permissive culture, prominent writers do not confront these issues with as much gory detail? I think it has to do with the stream of cultural history. Updike and his contemporaries lived through the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Thus, while sex in fiction was nothing new, they were the first generation that was free to explore man’s sexual impulses more openly in their writings without having to leave the American cultural mainstream to do so. As a result of this, we got novels like Updike’s Couples and Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (neither of which I’ve read, but their reputations precede them). These novels were sensations because they engaged the sexual revolution head-on. Even if their authors could veer into sexism, the impact of their work on post-war American culture cannot be denied.

The writers Roiphe chooses as representative of the present literary scene do, in fact, confront sex less graphically than did their predecessors. I’ve read books by Eggers, Chabon, and Foer, and this holds up. However, this is not to say that sex is not treated in their fiction. Its presence is felt, but it is simply not as prominent. I think that this is simply because these writers are children of the sexual revolution. They did not have to live through it and work it out in the same way that Roth and Updike did. Thus, they write about sex more casually than the previous generation. It is not of the same primary concern for a generation that does not have the same emerging anxieties about sex.

Sex is a part of life, and most authors have to deal with it. Often, the cultural milieu an author inhabits will have a strong effect on how they actually write about sex, and that, I think, is the answer to Kate Roiphe’s questions. I don’t think we have to say that any generation of writers is necessarily “better” in their portrayal of sex than any other generation. Instead, I say judge people by the merits of their writing as a whole. What does it contribute to the totality of human experience? I’m more interested in that than I am in worrying about how individual compartments of life are treated.

As a concluding note, I’d like to say that Updike fits my model perfectly. If I were to judge him based on the quality of his sex scenes, I would say that they would likely lead me to have a lesser opinion of him as an author. But if I look at the way he treats humanity as a whole, I have to admire him. Rabbit, Run perfectly captured the malaise of  the suburban male. “Pigeon Feathers,” a short story, is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read. So yes, I still judge how a writer portrays sexuality, but my final judgment comes after a consideration of his/her ability to convey human experience in all its complexity. I hope this has made sense.

Coming Up: My much-promised review of A Gate at the Stairs, and a review of Harold Evans’s My Paper Chase, provided I finish it.

“Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel

How have I never heard of Hilary Mantel before now? To be honest, until she won this year’s Booker Prize (basically the British Pulitzer), I had never even heard her name. Luckily, the press she received led me to her astounding book Wolf Hall, which I received for Christmas and read last week.

Wolf Hall is a story of the reign of Henry VIII, told from the perspective of Thomas Cromwell, the man who would rise to be one of Henry’s top advisors. Since this is the Tudors, the novel has all the requisite political intrigue one would associate with the period, and even if you’ve heard these stories before, they still feel fresh in Mantel’s telling. Luckily, while capturing the political intrigue that makes the time so interesting, Mantel avoids turning her novel into a bodice-ripper, which is sadly what most Tudor-related novels (and TV shows) become.

One of the most interesting choices Mantel makes in the novel is her use of the present tense. This makes the novel more immediate, and by doing so, eloquently captures the uncertainty of a world in flux. The Reformation plays a big role in the novel of course, and the ambiguities accompanying that time period are deeply felt.

This brings me to what I think is the most exciting aspect of this novel: its surprising relevance to the present. At one point, Cromwell reflects on how the technological advances of his time period allow the writings of Luther to disseminate throughout Europe in a month, which was an astounding development. This sentiment is strangely applicable to our confrontation with globalization and new media. By giving this thought to Cromwell, Mantel shows us how much of our nature and our concerns we share with those who have come before us.

Wolf Hall succeeds on almost every level, and richly deserved the Booker it garnered for its author. I give it my highest recommendation, and hope that my readers will experience it for themselves.

Coming Attractions: I will review Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs and possibly discuss the essay on sex in fiction that accompanied this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review.

Introduction and “Under the Dome”

Well, I’ve been feeling lazy this break, and I’ve been inspired by the efforts of others to start a books blog. I figure I read enough, so why not share some thoughts about what I’ve read to help any interested blog-surfers?

Anyway, to start off, I thought I’d comment on the first book I finished in this calendar year: Stephen King’s Under the Dome.

This was the first King novel I’ve ever started and completely finished, so that’s a personal accomplishment. I found the concept (small town is trapped by mysterious glassy dome, chaos ensues) fascinating, even though it was kind of a rip-off of “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” the classic Twilight Zone episode in which a small town tears itself apart from within.

King really can do horror, and what makes this novel so terrifying is not the interference of the supernatural for which King is so famous, but the innate evil lying in the human heart. People are downright cruel to one another when pressed by dire circumstances, and needless to say, not everyone makes it to the end. Expect this one to leave you emotionally drained.
One complaint I have about this novel is that it is just a little too long to sustain some of its momentum (1,072 pages will do that to you). Also, sometimes I felt like King was unnecessarily cruel to some of his characters, especially some likeable ones. I can’t think of a novel I’ve read where I so intensely felt human suffering since Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which may just show that I don’t read many novels that deal quite so viscerally with cruelty.

Complaints aside, I would recommend this novel, at least to the King uninitiated. It shows that he is as capable of thinking deeply about the human condition as many writers of so-called “literary fiction.” Not being a long-time King fan, I can’t say how his devotees will compare it to his other work. But, as a first-time reader, the most important compliment I can give this novel is to say that it made me want to read more by this author that I have ignored for so long.

Coming Attractions: I will be reviewing Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, as well as Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.