#55: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain

Ernest Hemingway wrote that the American novels begins and ends with Huckleberry Finn. Google won’t tell me exactly when and where he said it, but I’ll accept that he did. As many people know, the character of Huckleberry Finn first appeared in an earlier Twain work—The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The earlier book doesn’t rank nearly as high as its sequel—my impression is that it’s considered a kind of sentimental work perhaps more suited for the “young adult” demographic. Sort of like Treasure Island, but not so scary. I was fairly sure I’d never read Tom Sawyer.

Of course, anyone who wants to know a little bit about Tom Sawyer should probably be reading the relevant Wikipedia entry, or just googling for a more authoritative source, because the chances of me having anything original to say about this book are pretty slim. Reading a book like this is sort of like visiting a museum, or watching Casablanca for the eighth time. You might have something to say about your subjective experience of the thing, but you’d have to be pretty presumptuous to think you could tell the world anything new about it.

So with that, here are some things that I noticed. Tom Sawyer doesn’t really tell you much about what it would have been like to live at what was then the far western extreme of the United States in the 1830s—except insomuch as it tells you a bit about what some people might have been like in that time and place. In the first few chapters, the focus is on character sketches: Tom, his strict but fond Aunt Polly, his pesky younger brother Sid, his sweetheart Becky Thatcher, and his semi-homless friend Huck Finn. Tom is presented as an essentially good person who has a pretty fair idea of what the adults expect of him and would just as soon not oblige. I’m not thinking so much about how he cons some of the local yokels into painting his fence for him—it’s more when he absconds with a couple of friends to an island in the Mississippi for long enough for the people in the town to assume they’ve all drowned. Tom sneaks back into town one night and discovers that he is presumed dead, but instead of correcting this assumption he makes plans to stay away until the funeral and only then to reveal himself. The fact that I find this rather cold of Tom might indicate that I should have read this book when I was younger.

Whether by design or happenstance, the latter part of the book becomes more plot-driven, with a bona fide villain (the mixed-race Injun Joe) and an episode where Tom and Becky are trapped in a cave for a number of days. Injun Joe—a “hapless half-breed”—is kind of a frontier Shylock—he feels his outsider status as an injury, and is determined to pay it back double. Unlike Shylock, he is rendered without dignity or eloquence. But Twain does do himself proud in describing Injun Joe’s death from starvation in the same cave from which Tom and Becky were lucky enough to escape:

When the cave door was unlocked, a sorrowful sign presented itself in the dim twilight of the place. Injun Joe lay stretched upon the ground, dead, with his face close to the crack of the door, as if his longing eyes had been fixed, to the latest moment, upon the light and the cheer of the free world outside.

We read that he gnawed candle stubs before he died, and drank the water that dripped ever so slowly from a stalactite.

Has everything a purpose and a mission? Did this drop fall patiently during five thousand years to be ready for this flitting human insect’s need? And has it another important object to accomplish ten thousand years to come?

For some reason this puts me in mind of the sham eulogy that King Kong’s exploiter, Carl Denham, delivers at the end of that movie: “It was beauty killed the beast.” It might be more moving, Carl, if you’d shown an ounce of kindness or sympathy for the big guy before this. Too bad he didn’t land on you.

So we leave Tom and his townfolk, none the worse for wear in the restored purity of their town. Here’s how Twain ties it up:

Most of the characters that perform in this book still live, and are prosperous and happy. Some day it may seem worthwhile to take up the story of the younger ones again and see what sort of men and women they turned out to be; therefore it will be wisest not to reveal any of that part of their lives at present.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a charming book, and it holds up reasonably well, but it feels like a rather minor thing in the end. As though its author sat down to write one morning and proceeded to try out a few different kinds of things until he pulled it all together with some melodrama at the end. For me, it’s just a bit of preparation for re-reading Life on the Mississippi and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, two books that I’ve read before and for which I have much higher expectations.

#54: The Orenda, by Joseph Boyden

The Spanish and the English knew how to take care of business. They efficiently carved up and took possession of their respective portions of the Western Hemisphere. The Spanish came with crucifixes, but soon developed a knack for plucking the hearts out of native Empires: first Mexico, then Peru. The rest was just mop up. The English were a bit shaky for a decade or so, but by the latter part of the 17th century they were taking enthusiastic bites out of the North American continent. After rebranding themselves as Americans, they developed a system of treaty and relocation that steadily swept the original inhabitants of the continent out of their way. By the time they reached California in the 1840s and 50s they were exterminating Indians matter of factly. Missionary zeal was a distant memory. Here’s a quote from a New York Times review of a book titled An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873, by Benjamin Madley:

The slaughter of California’s Indians was rapid and thorough even by the grim standards that had been set elsewhere in North America. Before 1846, California’s native peoples suffered great losses from diseases and dispossession. Spanish colonizers and their Mexican successors wanted to preserve Indians as mission inmates or as cheap and dependent farm labor. The American newcomers, however, came by the thousands and treated natives as menaces best destroyed, the sooner the better.

It’s incredible that I had no more than an inkling of any of this until I read that review. And to think that all this was going on while, not far off, Mark Twain was writing about jumping frogs. Did he know? If he did, maybe that helps to explain the jarring depictions of mass slaughter in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

But the Spanish and the English were not the only nations with American franchises: the French were here too. They came in smaller numbers, but the crucial difference is that they did not sweep native societies before them, but rather injected themselves deep into the heart of the continent, along the St. Lawrence at Quebec and Montreal. This made them vulnerable in a way that the Spanish and English were not. The French led primarily with priests—Jesuits—rather than soldiers. Militarily, they were no stronger and far less numerous than the Iroquois of New York State, with whom they battled for supremacy for over 100 years.

I first became interested in the French experience in North America while reading Francis Parkman’s seven-volume history, France and England in North America, republished by the Library of America in the 1980s. The series was originally published between 1865 and 1892. I had known little about the French experience in America, other than the gory tales of martyrdom I heard in Catholic school, but it’s a great story, from initial explorations and settlements through an extended if stunted colonial phase to a might-have-been attempt to master the entire continent, with settlements and trade networks deep into the Midwest and northern Rockies. Beyond Quebec, little remains of these ambitions other than place names—St. Louis, Des Moines, and of course New Orleans. I’d love to ramble on about things like the battle for Atlantic Canada, culminating in the French defeat at fortress Louisbourg in Nova Scotia in 1758. The result of this defeat was that French settlers near the Atlantic coast were shipped off to Louisiana, while unruly Catholic Scots from the Highlands were brought it to take their place. Another remarkable episode is that of the coureurs de bois, literally “runners of the woods,” French agents who set up trading networks that spread across thousands of miles of the North American interior. Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut, was one such, and from him we get the name of a northern city—Duluth.

But perhaps the best story of all is that of the mission to the Hurons. This took place in the 1640s. The Hurons were related to the Iroquois but not allied with them. They had established a set of agricultural settlements near the southeastern shore of what is now called Lake Huron. The French decided that the Hurons would make good partners, and so they sent several of their Jesuits out to live with and preach among them. They wanted a strategically placed ally, and they wanted to save souls. The journey from Montreal, the nearest French settlement, to the country of the Hurons required a difficult canoe journey through potentially hostile territory lasting several days. Once ensconced in Huron territory, the Jesuit priests were as far from rescue as astronauts would be on Mars.

So far from home, the Jesuits could not rely on weapons or technology to testify to the superiority of their religion. In a way they relished the challenge—saw it as a test of faith. Parkman describes one incident where a priest shows a picture of Jesus to some Hurons. Instead of noticing the white man in the picture, they noticed the animals—I think they were sheep, which no Huron had ever seen. The priest’s next annual letter to his superiors in Quebec requested some new pictures, this time without any distracting animals or vegetation that might detract from the primary pedagogical purpose of these visual aids.

Writers have not failed to recognize the dramatic potential of French Canada in general, and of the mission to the Hurons specifically. Irish author Brian Moore’s 1985 novel Black Robe, which later became a pretty good movie, is one example. Now another writer, critically acclaimed Canadian novelist and short story writer Joseph Boyden, has mined this episode for The Orenda.

Boyden sticks very close to the facts, in terms of dates and events. Some of his characters can be identified with actual people from the historical record; others seem to be composites; still others are made up.

Boyden speaks through three main characters: a Huron leader named Bird, a young female Iroquois captive named Snow Falls, and a French priest generally identified just as “The Crow.” Through the eyes of the Indians we see a strong society with rich traditions. It would be perfect, except that it is precarious, because when the hunting is not good, or when a fungus strikes one of their staple crops, they face starvation. And then there are the Iroquois—a numerically superior nation that seeks to annihilate the Huron. Perhaps only such precarious societies, where survival requires cooperation and courage, and when a people must rely entirely on themselves for everything, can ever seem perfect.

Boyden knows everything that Parkman knew, and he also knows about things that anthropological studies have turned up since Parkman’s time, like the Huron feast of the dead, which involved digging up the cemetery when it was time for the residents of a village to relocate. For a couple of days the corpses, in various states of decay, took up residence with their families.

Once all of the families have had sufficient time to see and to mourn over the bodies of their loved ones again, they then cover them with magnificent beaver robes. And when this stage of the mourning comes to a close, the families once again uncover the bodies and set to work stripping off the flesh and skin that might still be left, taking special care to burn this in the fire, along with any old furs and mats used in the original burial. Those bodies that have not yet putrefied enough are covered by a robe and left on a bark mat.

This reportage is in the context of a letter the priest is writing to his Superior. He continues:

Now, it may seem barbaric and ghastly to hear of this practice of picking bones clean, but I must tell you, dear Superior, that I have never witnessed such absolute and pure love for a relative who has passed.

The priest has by this point in the story mastered the Huron language and is sensitive, compassionate, and intelligent enough to understand how the natives think and why they do what they do. And yet he remains convinced that their lives are ruled by Satan and that he is justified to use threats, bribes, and deception to pry them away from their beliefs and practices—the term Orenda, to borrow from Wikipedia, is “an Iroquois name for a spiritual power inherent in people and their environment.”

Boyden never suggests that the priest experiences any doubt or internal conflict. Nor does he show any interest in making the priest’s Christianity appealing in any way—there’s no passion or feeling in the priest’s faith, though he is absolutely willing to die for it.

Boyden, a Canadian writer with some Indian ancestry, seems more comfortable inhabiting the minds of his Indian characters. The Orenda is the final volume of a fictional trilogy dealing with a single Indian family through the generations, though the first two volumes take place in the 20th century (I haven’t read them). As astonishing and strange as such customs as the feast of the dead are, there is a vaguely unsetting familiarity in the way Boyden presents the inner lives of his Indian characters. The language with which he renders their thoughts has an easy kind of modernity to it:

How is it that I lose one family, a family that I love so much, only to be ensnared by these two demanding and difficult children, these two being who drive me mad? I guess this is the way of our world.

I realize that depicting the lives of people so different from ourselves is a no-win situation. If you show only as much of their articulation as could authentically be gleaned through the language and cultural barriers, you end up with the kind of clichéd utterances we know from movies—Many moons have passed since the buffalo has roamed our lands, etc. But if you take Boyden’s strategy, opting to equip his Indian with a full set of emotions and thoughts, you have no emotions or thoughts to equip them with except our own modern-day emotions and thoughts, rendered in modern day language. It just doesn’t feel authentic, no matter how well researched or how true it may be to actual events.

What Boyden might have done is to include some discontinuities in his tale, some jagged pieces that don’t quite fit together, to at least acknowledge the bits that must inevitably be lost in rendering their world in our words. But I can appreciate that Boyden might not be that kind of writer. You can’t just sprinkle obfuscations into a text to create the impression of authenticity. Some writers have a knack for that sort of thing, and some don’t.

Like a lot of people, I am fascinated by Native American culture. I took an anthropology course in college titled “Prehistory of North America,” but I was disappointed to discover that after a few weeks the syllabus came down to differentiating among various types of arrowheads—how they were shaped, how they were serrated, etc. It’s works like Parkman’s history, or Edward Curtis’s The North American Indian, a 20-volume work combining photography with descriptions of native language and customs, that connect with our imaginations. Works that don’t try to inhabit the minds of the Indians, but merely the experience of encountering those minds, and trying to present them with sympathy and scrupulousness.

Which is not to say that Boyden hasn’t written an engaging and beautiful novel. If I touch on what left me unsatisfied about The Orenda, it is because it feels like a single nagging defect in an otherwise wonderful novel. Details of how people lived, what they ate, what their experience of the natural world was like, and how the various tribes, along with the French, competed and cooperated by turns, are all rendered perfectly. The fictional lives of his characters mesh perfectly with the historical disaster that ultimately befell the Huron.

But does such a book keep those people, in the their time and place, alive, or does it just add one more filter, one more set of assumptions, between us and them?

#53: My Struggle, Book 4, by Karl Ove Knausgaard

It’s becoming an annual tradition for me to read the latest installment of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume autobiographical saga My Struggle. The middle volumes are less intense than the first two, but I’ve read that he dials up the intensity again in the final 1000+ page volume. In book four our narrator conducts us down the stream of time in a relatively laminar manner, with only one major chronological perturbation. We begin with the 18-year-old author arriving in a small village above the Arctic Circle in Norway, to undertake a year of schoolteaching. Norway has difficulty attracting and retaining teachers for such remote locations, and so the government has a program that allows recent high-school graduates to come north for one-year postings. The communities get inexperienced teachers, but I guess the alternative is no teachers at all.

In the UK edition, they give each volume a title in addition to a number—this one is Dancing in the Dark. For about 130 pages we read about 18-year-old Karl Ole’s first few weeks in the north, weeks filled with solitary microwaving, lust, and drinking. He is also attempting to write, and I did admire his determination in that regard, for what on earth does he have to write about? But he’s just as determined about the drinking. He regularly drinks to the point where he “blacks out,” such that he has no memory of what happens beyond a certain point in the evening. In relating one such incident, he writes:

I had experienced blackouts like this, after which I remembered only fragments of what I had done, ever since I first started drinking. That was the summer I finished the ninth class, at the Norway Cup, when I just laughed and laughed, a momentous experience…

Then he begins to fill in the details about that earlier time. We expect to return to the Arctic shortly, but in fact half the book, about 200 pages, elapses before we do so, by which point we have begun to suspect that we might never return. Because Knausgaard has no use for such quaint literary conventions as chapters, we have only a single blank line to mark the transition.

This time slip is strange because the 18-year-old Karl Ove, obsessed with sex and alcohol, that we encounter in the first and last hundred pages isn’t much different from the 16-year-old Karl Ove, obsessed with sex and alcohol, that we encounter in the middle two hundred. It’s like a double image in photography—if there is any intent to put these two periods of his life into perspective, to “compare and contrast,” it isn’t apparent to me. The discontinuity serves to remind us that Knausgaard is a meta-novelist and that this isn’t your everyday fictionalized memoir. Maybe that reads as if I’m accusing the author of being cynical, and maybe I am a little, but I didn’t really mind the discontinuity, and it did sort of raise my level of vigilance, and also reminded me that it’s neither the 18-year-old nor the 16-year-old who is delivering words to the page, but the 44-year-old writing in 2009.

Knausgaard’s much despised father is not spared in this volume any more than he is in any of the previous three. Here he is divorced and remarried and sinking steadily into chronic alcoholism. He alternates between grim white-knuckled sobriety and unsavory drunken sentimentality.

The memoir of a teenage boy in the 1980s who faces no daunting challenges, learns no dark family secrets, and makes no remarkable journeys is a peculiar thing. Who would undertake to read such a book, in translation no less, if it were not part of a larger, more remarkable series of books? But that is exactly the sort of brinksmanship that makes Knausgaard so remarkable. The reward is in the workmanship, the attention to detail, and not in any dramatic flourishes. Any number of passages could serve to illustrate this point. I’ll choose one that describes the onset of encompassing darkness as winter comes on in the Arctic:

The days became shorter, and they became shorter quickly, as though they were racing towards the darkness. The first snow arrived in mid-October, went after a few days, but the next time it fell, at the beginning of November, it came with a vengeance, day after day it tumbled down, and soon everything was packed in thick white cushions of snow, apart from the sea, which with its dark clean surface and terrible depths lay nearby like an alien and menacing presence, like a murderer who has moved into a neighbouring house and whose unheeded knife glints on the kitchen table.

The snow and the darkness changed the area beyond all recognition. When I first came, the sky had been high and luminous, the sea vast and the countryside open, nothing seemed to hold together the village with its random huddle of houses, it barely existed in its own right. Nothing stopped there, that was the feeling. Then came the snow and the darkness. The sky fell, it lay like a lid over the rooftops. The sea disappeared, its blackness merged with the blackness of the sky, no horizon was visible any longer. Even the mountains disappeared and with them the sensation of finding yourself in wide open country. What remained were the houses, which were lit day and night, always surrounded by darkness, and now the houses and the lights were the focal point to which everything gravitated.

#52: The Crimson Petal and the White, by Michael Faber

What could be more charming than a big old Victorian house? Turrets, gingerbread scroll work, verandas, rooms galore. They make ideal bed-and-breakfasts. But actually owning an authentic Victorian house is another matter. Expensive to heat and maintain, they tend to have too many bedrooms and not enough bathrooms. Better to buy a modern house with a few Victorian flourishes and up-to-date wiring and plumbing.

Victorian novels are also commodious and finely wrought. But how many modern readers really care to make the necessary investment of time and energy to read David Copperfield? Those long sentences, those classical allusions, that excruciating propriety. Better to find a book that has the heft and moral gravity of a nineteenth-century “baggy monster,” but updated for modern sensibilities.

I don’t know whether Michael Faber could be accused of such cynicism in writing The Crimson Petal and the White, but I’m pretty sure that “Victorian-lite” was part of the appeal to some readers--including me. Over the course of 900 pages we read about the rise of the unfortunately named Sugar, a successful prostitute in 1875 London. Sugar is 19 and commands a high price for her youth, her exotic appearance, and her intelligence. Tall and thin with a wild mane of red hair, Sugar spends her free time reading and writing: she is composing a novel in which she fantasizes about the violent forms of revenge she would take against her clients if she had the opportunity. But she is at the same time the consummate professional, able to “read” her clients as well and conform to their expectations. She is also willing to “do anything,” which assertion kind of appalled me, even though the specifics were (fortunately) never spelled out. You would think that her other “qualifications” might exempt her from having to be quite so…obliging.

Anyway, young manufacturing heir William Rackham seeks out Sugar’s services and is so smitten that he offers to take an option on her 24/7, setting her up in a suburban flat. She graduates from prostitute to mistress. Sugar not only gratifies Rackham’s appetites, she becomes a valued business consultant, helping him with his correspondence and giving him advice on packaging, marketing, and the like.

Unlike novels by George Eliot and Charles Dickens, The Crimson Petal and the White has a relatively short list of characters. Besides Rackham and Sugar there is Rackham’s dotty wife Agnes, his brother Henry, and Henry’s very proper lady friend Mrs. Fox. Late in the book we also meet Rackham’s young daughter Sophie. There is also the rather peculiar fact that most of these characters seem to spend most of their time alone. Indeed, The Crimson Petal and the White is a rather sad and lonely book. Rackham only rarely visits Sugar; Agnes spends most of her time in her room, under sedation, dreaming of angels. It’s one solitary stalemate after another. We wait in vain for scenes, confrontations, emotional outbursts.

I began to look forward to mad Agnes’s scenes as the other characters stagnated. Here she is at the piano:

Open before her is the sheet music of ‘Crocuses Ahoy,!’ marked with her own annotations to warn her when the demi-semiquavers are coming. She plays the opening bars, plays them again, plays them over and over. Softly and sweetly, using this piano phrase as accompaniment, she hums a new melody, her own, purely out of her head. The notes she sings, hesitant at first, resolve themselves into a fetching tune. How inventive she is today! Quite the little composer! She resolves to sing this song of hers as long as she can stand it, to send it as far as Heaven, to nag it into the memory of God, to make time pass until someone is summoned to write it down for her, and it’s printed up nicely and ferried to the far corners of the earth, for women everywhere to sing. She sings on and on, while the house is discreetly dusted all around her and, in the concealed and subterranean kitchen, a naked duck, limp and faintly steaming, spreads its pimpled legs on a draining board.

Agnes is so detached from the world that she does not realize that she has a six-year-old daughter. I know there are cases where women have given birth without realizing they had been pregnant; it never occurred to me that this kind of ignorance could continue after the blessed event. Agnes and Sophie share the same house. But they never meet.

Nobody could ever accuse author Michael Faber of looking away from awkward physical matters. The sex scenes are aren’t especially detailed by modern standards, but let one of the characters have digestive problems and he brings us in close for all the details. I’m not complaining, but over the course of 900 pages there are several such …crises, and I’m not sure what the point is. Perhaps it is to supply what the Victorians have omitted, to complete the picture of their times. Whatever his intent, this septic orientation reminded me of Angela Carter’s astonishing story, “The Fall River Axe Murders,” from her collection Saints and Sinners, which gives us Lizzie Borden’s life in all its revolting, unsanitary glory:

How often, nowadays, in summer does your milk turn into a sour jelly, or you butter separate itself out into the liquid fat and the corrupt-smelling whey? When did you last see the waxy clusters of the seed-pearl eggs of the blow fly materialize disgustingly on the left-over joint?

Great stuff, this. We read about how the family’s Sunday mutton dinner is husbanded carefully through the week, each day’s preparation growing increasingly more rancid due to the lack of refrigeration. Reading the story, I actually began to feel vaguely sick—my brain lit up the way it does when you’re coming down with a fever, and I could not get to sleep that night as too-vivid images flitted past my closed eyes. You would not have wanted to be living Lizzie Borden’s life in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892. Whether murdering your parents with an axe was a rejection of the hideous constraints of that life or a kind of emphatic affirmation, I’m not sure.

The Crimson Petal and the White is not quite so infectious. It has wonderful scenes and characters, and yet it somehow feels less than the sum or its parts. It’s a curated view of the Victorian world, a vaguely anachronistic condemnation of its hypocrisy. Where Eliot and Meredith directed their irony against individuals and elements in their fictional worlds, Faber directs his against the very notion of writing—or reading—such a book. At times he addresses the reader directly:

The main characters in this story, with whom you want to become intimate, are nowhere near here. They aren’t expecting you; you mean nothing to them. If you think they’re going to get out of their warm beds and travel miles to meet you, you are mistaken.

When husband Henry Rackham is getting ready to bundle his mad wife Agnes off to an asylum, Sugar, who has since come on board as the family’s governess, intervenes and puts the delusional Agnes (who thinks Sugar is her guardian angel) on a train to the country, instructing her to find a convent when she reaches her destination and to ask for sanctuary there. I kept expecting Agnes to reappear at some dramatic juncture, to challenge the rather staid reality of the book’s final sections with her strange perspective. I wanted more Agnes, more "Crocuses Ahoy!" But she never came back.

#51: The King’s Peace (1637 – 1641); Volume 1 of The Great Rebellion, by C.V. Wedgewood

We Americans can’t get enough of our Civil War. There’s even a Civil War book club: you can read entire books about a single general, entire books about a single battle, and even entire books about a single general at a single battle. The English also had a Civil War, but I could not name you a single battle or a single general. I’m not even sure they had generals. What they had was roundheads and cavaliers.

I’d read C.V. Wedgwood’s history of The Thirty Years War a few years ago. If she was able to wrestle a coherent narrative out of that colossal mess, I was pretty confident that she could make the English Civil War interesting. She covers the war in three volumes: The King’s Peace, The King’s War, and A Coffin for King Charles.

Though the period described in this first volume was largely peaceful in a literal sense, it was not a happy time for King Charles I, nor for his kingdom. It was a time of political infighting, factions searching for ways to deceive and outmaneuver each other. It was much like our own time in this regard, and it is good to be reminded that unchecked rancorous partisanship can actually destroy a nation.

It’s interesting to consider that religious wars are often wars between different factions within a larger religious tradition, rather than wars between completely different religions. Think Shites vs. Sunnis, or Catholics vs. Protestants in 20th century Ireland. And yet it’s never *just* religion—the greatest enmities seem to blend religion with other grievances. In the case of 17th century England, Charles I certainly had Catholic sympathies—his wife was a Catholic princess from France. But he was also rather mediaeval in his world view and seemed to view efforts to resist his attempt to enforce doctrinal purity and higher taxes as though they were the pranks of disobedient children. He also tended to bluff and overplay his hand, and in The King’s Peace he seems to botch just about every important confrontation or negotiation. It’s almost funny at times, and if we have any sympathy for him, it’s because of his complete ineptitude.

Opposing the king were devout and no-nonsense protestants. Disputes could be about substantial issues, but they could also be about matters such as the placement of altars during church services. The protestants didn’t like mysticism and they didn’t like being told how to worship. This kind of plainspoken self-sufficiency seems noble in a certain light, but knowing how this tradition has evolved over the centuries into the hermetic intolerant sects of the American South dilutes our sympathy somewhat. In fact, it is rather hard to find anyone to “root for” in this book.

The king’s nemesis is one John Pym, an unassuming bureaucrat but also a master tactician, who bests the king again and again during the so-called Long Parliament of 1640. By the end of the book we feel as though we are watching a chess match in which one the players has already lost a significant number of key pieces. The game may drag on for a while, but already the outcome is foregone. It will be interesting to find out how Charles manages to hang onto his head for another 500 pages or so.

#50: Notes from No Man’s Land, by Eula Biss

This is a collection of essays. The introductory essay is titled “Time and Distance Overcome,” and it begins with some historical notes about the invention of the telephone.

Biss makes the interesting point that it was as much the rapid deployment of infrastructure, in the form of poles and wires, as it was Bell’s actual invention that remade the world so quickly.

Bell's financial backers asked him not to work on his new invention anymore because it seemed too dubious an investment. The idea on which the telephone depended—the idea that every home in the country could be connected with a vast network of wires suspended from poles set an average of one hundred feet apart—seemed far more unlikely than the idea that the human voice could be transmitted through a wire.

In fact, for a brief period of time there was considerable resistance to the idea of putting up poles everywhere:

By 1889, the New York Times was reporting a “War on Telephone Poles.” Wherever telephone companies erected poles, homeowners and business owners were sawing them down, or defending their sidewalks with rifles. Property owners in Red Bank, New Jersey, threatened to tar and feather the workers putting up telephone poles. A judge found that a man who had cut down a pole because it was “obnoxious” was not guilty of malicious mischief. Telephone poles, newspaper editorials complained, were an urban blight. The poles carried a wire for each telephone— sometimes hundreds of wires. There were also telegraph wires, power lines, and trolley cables. The sky was netted with wires.

But the resistance was brief, if spirited. The price for overcoming time and distance was poles and wires everywhere.

In a note at the back of the book, Biss tells us how she came by her information about telephones and poles in the 1880s:

I began my research for this essay by searching for every instance of the phrase “telephone pole” in the New York Times from 1880 to 1920, which resulted in 370 articles.

So here we are embarked on an essay about how technology changed the world. That’s a familiar theme and one that’s easy to cozy up to. But then some of Biss’s short factual paragraphs begin to weave in a very different kind of theme:

In 1898, in Lake Cormorant, Mississippi, a black man was hanged from a telephone pole. And in Weir City, Kansas. And in Brookhaven, Mississippi. And in Holdenville, Oklahoma, where the hanged man was “riddled with bullets.” In Danville, Illinois, a black man was hanged from a telephone pole, cut down, burned, shot, and stoned with bricks. A black man was hung from a telephone pole in Belleville, Illinois, where a fire was set at the base of the pole and the man was cut down half alive, covered in coal oil, and burned. While his body was burning, the mob beat it with clubs and cut it to pieces.

A part of me thought: “Are we to be scolded now?” Was Biss deliberately ambushing unsuspecting readers by trying to make us feel guilty after such an innocent beginning? Turns out, in her search for articles about telephone poles she found an intersecting theme—lynching. Here is how the paragraph describing her research methodology continues:

I was planning to write an essay about telephone poles and telephones, not lynchings, but after reading an article headlined “Colored Scoundrel Lynched,” and then another headlined “Mississippi Negro Lynched” and then another headlined “Texas Negro Lynched,” I searched for every instance of the word “lynched” in the New York Times from 1880 to 1920, which resulted in 2,354 articles.

The connection is that telephone poles proved convenient for lynchings. Or maybe it’s just that the juxtaposition of technology and brutality is itself incongruous. The second time I read this essay, I knew what was coming, and I think I was able to see Biss’s point, or at least to appreciate the significance of the unexpected juxtaposition of “America the technological dynamo” with “America, the country that was routinely and blithely lynching its own citizens until a couple of generations ago.” In the standard history of our country we tend to like to keep such things separated.

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This essay, like many in No Man’s Land, is not a static argument or exposition, it is a device, an arrangement of words designed to recreate the evolution of the author’s thought, or to baffle and surprise the reader just enough to make him or her ask—“Why are these things together?” At first I wasn’t sure I liked Biss’s method. I liked her moral sensibility, but I wasn’t always sure mine was as finely tuned as her’s. Would her exquisite zen gardens of facts and meditations just look like a bunch of rocks to me?

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But I grew to appreciate Biss’s method, which is quite consistent across the essays in this book. She has a kind of recipe, a set of ingredients that she likes to mix in different ways. The first ingredient is her personal history—during the course of the book we learn that she grew up in the northeast, moved to New York City after college, then moved from there to San Diego, on to Iowa City, and finally to a suburb of Chicago. Along the way Biss tries on and eventually discards one potential life, one set of assumptions about herself and the world, after another.

The second ingredient is the details that Biss gives us about her somewhat unconventional family and upbringing:

My mother was thirty-four when she left her husband, who was the father of her four children. She moved into a duplex with a poet and was initiated into the Yoruba tradition, a West African religion. A few years later, she left the poet and moved to a farmhouse with an African drummer from the Bronx.

Race is a major theme for Biss, and her personal history—she also shared an apartment for a year with a first cousin who is half black—certainly gives her a personal investment in this theme. As Biss says,

What exactly it means to be white seems to elude no one as fully as it eludes those of us who are white.

So ingredient one is her personal experience, and ingredient two is her rather unconventional family and its contribution to her makeup. Ingredient three is the surprising things she is able to excavate about the history of the United States. One of my favorite essays in the book is titled “Back to Buxton.” In this essay, Biss describes moving to Iowa City (presumably because of the writing program) and thinking she had finally found a place where she felt like she belonged:

On the evening of my first day in Iowa, in a humid darkness full of the purring of cicadas, I finally went down to the river, where I had been waiting to go all day, ever since I first saw the water from the car as I drove into town that afternoon. When I stepped onto the bridge across the Iowa River and stood looking out across the water, I knew I was home. I was wrong about that, as it turns out.

Biss initially appreciates the anonymity her white skin confers in Iowa. But then she comes to realize, “[i]n the end I suffered not for lack of anonymity, but for lack of a community to which I belonged in some essential way.” She cites sources on the concept of community in America, how the necessary interdependence of pre-industrial communities planted across the continent gradually gave way to “joining things” in the form of clubs, churches, and societies in the late 19th century. Then she tells about Buxton, a company mining town in Iowa where blacks and whites managed to coexist harmoniously for a couple of decades.

Biss cites a report from the 1980s that investigated the “legend” of Buxton and determined that “yes, Buxton had been a utopia.” Buxton was a company mining town, but it was untypical because the company in question, Consolidated Coal, made no effort in this case to play one ethnic group off against another, standard protocol for keeping wage demands in check. They brought in white people, and they brought in black people. How and why it happened the way it did is not clear, but what might have seemed at the time quite normal to the residents of Buxton seems quite fantastic in retrospect:

Buxton was built in 1900, and it was a ghost town by 1920, but it continues on in books and songs and folklore and public-television documentaries as a myth and a specter and, as I came to see it, as a kind of promise.

In America, we take racial strife almost as a given, but Biss suggests that there is nothing spontaneous or inevitable about it. And yet, in America, nothing seems quite so elusive as a sense of community. More and more, we define ourselves in ways that separate us from other people. “Good fences make good neighbors,” said Robert Frost. But then he also said “Before I built a wall I'd ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out.”

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No Man’s Land is very much a young person’s book—very earnest and serious. But it is also an eloquent and honest book, written with art, skill, and intelligence.

#49 The Neapolitan Novels, by Elena Ferrante

Elena Greco is an Italian woman who was born in Naples in 1944. (“Neapolitan” means “of Naples.”) As a girl, she lives in a shabby tenement in an outlying district of the city. Families in her neighborhood are identified by their trade: the Greco’s are “the porter’s family”; the Cerullo’s are “the shoemaker’s family”; and the Peluso’s are “the carpenter’s family.” Children stay in school for as long as they distinguish themselves, which for most is only a few years. Then they take to the family trade (if they are boys) or marry (if they are girls). Elena Greco continues to distinguish herself and is allowed to attend high school and then to go away to college in Pisa. She becomes engaged to the scion of a family with academic and publishing credentials, writes and publishes a book, and becomes a success. She goes on to publish many more books, both fiction and nonfiction.

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Elena Ferrante is an Italian woman who was born in Naples, probably some time after 1944. We know little of her life except that she has published many books and become a success. The Neapolitan Novels is her magnum opus, and Elena Greco is her fictional creation. Elena Ferrante is provisionally real—she has chosen not to reveal her real name, and what little we know of her cannot be verified. So what we have here is an unknown author, who has created a provisionally real avatar named Elena Ferrante, also an author, who has written a series of books about a third author named Elena Greco.

If this is all starting to sound rather metafictional, there is nothing insubstantial or notional about the 1600 or so pages that make up the four Neapolitan novels. They present a set of lives lived that is as real seeming and as emotionally compelling as anything I’ve read in a long while. There are four volumes—My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child—but they are really one book.

I used to live in New York City, not far from the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the edge of Central Park. Every so often I would skip work and walk over and spend a few hours in the museum. Once I went after a few inches of snow had fallen overnight, and the pure white light coming in the windows of the museum gave everything a kind of religious radiance. The thing about the Met is that it’s just too gigantic for anyone to take in during a single visit. There are galleries and there are wings, there are paintings and sculptures, and there are even entire buildings that have been crated up and then reassembled inside that museum. The Met will exhaust you, even if you spend only the minute or two in front of each painting that museum decorum requires.

I suppose it’s a bit of a stretch to suggest that the wonders of The Neapolitan Novels rival those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but this is my way of letting you know that there is no way I can hope to catalog all the things that Elena Ferrante has done well in this mega-book. So I’m going to focus on two things that seemed especially significant to me.

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First is Ferrante’s psychological realism. There are two main characters in the story, Elena Greco and her childhood friend Rafaella Cerullo (called Lila), but there are several other prominent characters and then a whole gallery of lesser characters. This book is as populated as War and Peace, and in much the same way, with interlinking extended families. Elena Greco is the first-person narrator and her world is so detailed and intense that, as we’re reading, we become Elena. Her insecurities are our insecurities; her triumphs our triumphs. Never mind that she’s female and I’m male, I barely exist while I’m reading these books. It’s virtual reality in the most traditional sense possible. To take a random example: Elena marries Pietro Airota, the son of two distinguished academics who are well connected in the publishing world. Pietro becomes a university professor and is working on a book. He has intelligence, but he also has a kind of dull, mulish obstinacy, in contrast to his mercurial sister Mariarosa. He courts Elena shyly, without a great deal of heat. I was suspecting that he might turn out to be gay. They marry, and he gives her a solid, upper-middle-class respectability; they move to Florence, where he joins the faculty of the university, and they have two children, daughters. When Elena leaves Pietro after several years of marriage for another man we wonder what he will do—we don’t know at first, but as we continue reading we find out that he does exactly what such a character would inevitably do, which is to rant and rage for a while, make a dramatic scene, allude to suicide, but then finally accept his fate stoically. But the “inevitability” of this outcome is only apparent after the fact. As events unfold, our ability to predict what will happen is about as good as our ability to predict how people will react to such events in the real world. Ferrante depicts people and events as well as any author I’ve ever read. You simply can’t hold the idea in your head that what transpires is “made up.” Is this writer really skilled enough to create such an abundance of detail and incident out of her head? Or is it just because we can never know the extent to which she has borrowed from her own life that we are so conscious of the sheer weight of reality the book conveys?

Of course, as we ponder such things, it is quite entertaining to watch Elena throw a bomb (metaphorically speaking) into what had seemed a solid, prosperous existence. Nobody is spared and nothing is easy. The husband’s parents turn against her in their subtle, mandarin way, with the children as emotional hostages. The sister-in-law maintains her connection to Elena for while, but then becomes involved in her own struggles. The world changes around Ferrante’s characters, and they change too, except that they remain the same people. The daughters grow up through the next several hundred page and turn out to be people we could never have anticipated—just the way our friends’ children do. And yet they could not have turned out to be anybody other than who they are.

And I’m not even going to talk about Nino Sarratore, the Byronic cad that Elena leaves Pietro for. Ah, Nino, you scoundrel.

Book clubs will critique the decisions, qualities, and failings of the various characters. That’s how I assume most book clubs operate, and when authors fails to deliver on such expectations, people find books disappointing. I wouldn’t disdain the book club perspective—I could offer my own opinions about how various characters behave. In fact, I felt a little disoriented when I came to the end of the last volume and realized I’d have to part ways with this society.

So this book is like one of those large, intricate, and amazingly interesting paintings that you come across from time to time in a museum. You know that it’s artificial, but you appreciate that there is enough going on in a single square foot of the billboard-sized canvas to gaze at for hours. In the foreground are children dancing, or a dog hiding under a woman’s skirts; in the distance are mountains with chasms and waterfalls, and in between are roads and houses giving way to towns and fields. Off to one side is the ocean with an armada of ships fighting the wind. It’s an entire 17th century universe in a single picture. That kind of comprehensiveness is one of the pleasures of The Neapolitan Novels.

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But what I liked best about the book is the mystery of the two characters at its center: the narrator Elena and her lifelong friend Lila. We see less of Lila than of Elena, which makes sense because the book is Elena’s account of her own life. But Ferrante never lets the reader forget that Lila is not just a supporting character in a large cast. Reviewers acknowledge this by describing the book in terms such as “one of modern fiction’s richest portraits of a friendship,” or “an intense, forensic exploration of the friendship between Lila and … Elena.” But that word—friendship—is so inadequate to describe the relationship at the core of this book. Lila is as much Elena's nemesis as she is her friend.

The first thing we learn about Lila in the first volume is the last thing that Elena knows about her—before Elena begins to tell us the story of their lives, she tells us that Lila has disappeared at the age of 66, vanished from her home in Naples after removing every trace of her existence from that home. Elena learns this from Lila’s son, Rino.

"It’s been at least three decades since she told me that she wanted to disappear without leaving a trace, and I’m the only one who knows what she means. She never had in mind any sort of flight, a change in identity, the dream of making a new life somewhere else. And she never thought of suicide, repulsed by the idea that Rino would have anything to do with her body, and be forced to attend to the details. She meant something different: she wanted to vanish; she wanted every one of her cells to disappear, nothing of her ever to be found. And since I know her well, or at least I think I know her, I take it for granted that she has found a way to disappear, to not leave so much as a hair anywhere in this world."

Whatever creative impulse drives Elena Greco to unspool her world in words, there is a counterforce, personified by Lila, that wants to conceal or erase the details. She wants to un-write The Neapolitan Novels.

As a precocious child, Lila does actually write a bit of a story, a fable she calls “The Blue Fairy,” which to Elena demonstrates that Lila possesses a creative power that she can never hope to equal. But while Elena pursues her education and becomes a writer, Lila’s family will not allow her to continue past elementary school, and thereafter she becomes a kind of dark force, more significant for what she will not do (write), and for what she will not reveal about herself and what she knows. She is a fallen angel, an occult force. The word “occult” in fact is from a Latin word meaning to hide or conceal.

Elena and Lila are like a binary star system, where Elena shines brightly and Lila evolves over time into a kind of narrative black hole. As with such an astronomical pair, we only deduce the presence of the invisible one by its effect upon the visible one. The story is Elena’s but Lila is a catalyst, a refutation of the idea of narrative omniscience. Lila’s is the creative power of destruction. At one point she takes a blown-up photograph of her wedding day and enhances it by covering parts of it in black paper:

Then, with that expression of extreme concentration which enabled her to isolate herself from everything around her, she went back to the panel. Before our astonished and, in the cases of some, openly hostile eyes, she cut strips of black paper, with the manual precision she had always possessed, and pinned them here and there to the photograph, asking for my help with slight gestures or quick glances.

I joined in with the devotion that I had felt ever since we were children. Those moments were thrilling, it was a pleasure to be beside her, slipping inside her intentions, to the point of anticipating her. I felt that she was seeing something that wasn't there, and that she was struggling to make us see it, too. I was suddenly happy, feeling the intensity that invested her, that flowed through her fingers as they grasped the scissors, as they pinned the black paper.

Lila adds by subtracting, reveals by concealing. It is a thing great artists must master, but one that Elena Greco could never manage on her own.

The reader learns to pay attention to anything Elena Ferrante has to say about Lila, because much of what she says is meaningful on both a narrative and a metaphysical level. Lila’s life is harder and stranger than Elena Greco’s. She is bitter and often rude, yet she has a mysterious power over many of the characters in the book. Elena says:

I felt all the fascination of the way Lila governed the imagination of others or set it free, at will, with just a few words: that speaking, stopping, letting images and emotions go without adding anything else. I’m wrong, I said to myself in confusion, to write as I’ve done until now, recording everything I know. I should write the way she speaks, leave abysses, construct bridges and not finish them, force the reader to establish the flow…

But if Elena Greco cannot write like that, Elena Ferrante can. There is so much more that could be said about how Lila and Elena together, like deities or demiurges in some unknown religion, bring the universe of The Neapolitan Novels into existence. The triumph of this book is that these metaphysical elements never slow or deflect the story, never make it seem like an allegory or a fable. Even Lila, the presumptive avatar of non-existence, leads a full life, marrying young, then embarking on a disastrous affair, having two children, working in a factory, and ultimately becoming a successful businesswoman. But somehow she accepts the need to exist only provisionally. Life is a contract she has signed by having children, and once she has made good on the terms of this contract to the best of her abilities, she disappears, and the story ends.