#11: Parrot and Olivier, by Peter Carey

Europeans in the 1820s and 1830s saw America as the hope of the future. The great democratic experiment had managed to survive early scuffles with the great powers and looked to be gaining momentum. We had entered our adolescence as a nation, and so reading about that earlier America is like looking at the teenage image of someone you only got to know in middle age. At first you see no resemblance—the youthful face is blade-thin, the hair thick and shiny. But then you notice the angle of the nose, the distance between the eyes, and the identity begins to emerge.

In the Age of Jackson, American democracy was fluid and effortless. There were no entrenched aristocracies or theocracies. If you needed land, you could move west a few hundred miles and find some for the taking. As long as your ancestors came from a select short list of approved countries, you bowed to no-one, and no-one bowed to you.

America in 2012 still sees itself as a classless society. We believe that anyone can become rich if they’ve got the brains and the determination. This is why millions of people working 50-hour weeks for $10 an hour rally around a political party that refuses to tax the rich—couldn’t that be them with just a little luck and effort? And it’s why teachers are held in such low esteem—if kids don’t learn it isn’t because of where they live or who their parents are. Because this is America and everybody starts even. So it must be the system—those teachers.

Parrot and Olivier is the story of two Europeans—an Englishman and a Frenchman—who come to American in 1830. Parrot, the Englishman, has to his credit no family and no money, and just a modest amount of talent. Fate has carried him from England to Australia and then to France. His real name is John Larrit, but he is called Parrot in recognition of his mimetic abilities—he can draw pretty well and can reproduce the vocal mannerisms of others. He is a copier rather than a true artist. Shrewd, ironic, elliptical and precocious, Parrot is an elusive figure who tends to blend into situations. When others look at Parrot, they don’t really see him—they see his status (or lack thereof) or they see an instrument to do their bidding, because Parrot lives by making himself useful.

Olivier is Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Barfleur de Garmont, the only child of two French nobles who have managed—just barely—to survive the French Revolution. We first see Olivier as a high-strung sickly 10-year-old trying to make sense of the mayhem around him. He is a weak, rather pathetic creature given to puking and nosebleeds. But there is determination and imperiousness in him, as well. Olivier adapts the high drama and self-importance of his parents’ circumstances to his own cosseted little world:

Then Odile arrived carrying a large rose-tinted Ch’ien-lung goldfish bowl. This contained my leeches. She set it on an English giltwood stand and removed the muslin cloth from around its neck. These vieilles amies had always been in her charge and she was constantly ready, at whatever hour her bell rang, to scoop out the starving parasites…

Olivier, the book’s jacket copy tells us, is “an improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville.” Not being well acquainted with that figure, I perused his wikipedia entry and decided that the similarities were relatively superficial. Their circumstances are obviously very similar, but I would be rather surprised to discover that de Tocqueville was nearly so pompous and fantastical as Olivier.

The book consists of alternating first-person chapters from Parrot and Olivier. We wonder, at first, how they will find each other. It happens after they have both grown up. Olivier’s mother, worried that her son might be becoming a conspicuous target for political intrigue, arranges to get him out of harm’s way by having him shanghaied to America. The pretext for this removal is that he is to compile a report on prison conditions in America (as per de Tocqueville). Parrot is sent along as servant and spy—to protect the incautious nobleman but also to report back on on his doings.


Once his characters reach America, Carey keeps several balls in the air. One is the evolving relationship between Parrot and Olivier. After some early spats, they come to appreciate and assist each other. Each has a view of the other that adds perspective and depth to our understanding. Each see the other’s flaws, vanities, etc., but sometimes the observer underestimates the observed, as when Parrot thinks Olivier is failing to woo a certain American heiress when in fact Olivier (who is after all a Frenchman) has matters well in hand.

A second ball is the appraisal of America performed by Olivier. This is where a better appreciation of de Tocqueville would probably have served me well. Olivier admires America and recognizes that its experiment in democracy will eventually spread back across the ocean.

A third ball would be Parrot’s American transformation. Parrot becomes an entrepreneur, helping to publish a book of lavish illustrations of American birds. The reference, of course, is to John James Audubon—another Frenchman who made a name for himself in early nineteenth century America. Except that here the artist is not French and in fact bears no resemblance to Audubon.

Parrot’s talents are a better fit for America than they were for Europe—he’s a swan in New York when he was just an ugly duckling in Paris. He does have a talent after all—for business. All his pecularities and shortcomings have become assets.

I had read two previous Peter Carey novels—Oscar and Lucinda and The Tax Inspector. I think of him as a highly entertaining and very original writer. Parrot and Olivier is all that and much more—a book full of riddles, crosscurrents and obscure parallels. That’s what two Man Booker prizes will do for an author—up the ante. It is a book that should probably be read twice. It might not be unfair to say that it is a rather strenuous book that is perhaps a bit overwritten.

Parrot and Olivier is also a very late flower of what Henry James called the “international novel”: the collision of old world sophistication and corruption with new world energy and artlessness. Except that in the 21st century it is no longer possible to present this theme without considerable irony, where innocence corrupts and sophistication is naïveté. In this respect, Parrot and Olivier reminds me in places of another unlikely late specimen of the international novel: Lolita. Humbert Humbert and Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Barfleur de Garmont are alike in being simultaneously enchanted and appalled by American vitality and vulgarity. Both contemplate marriage. Both are humorously high handed. But Humbert has a kind of moral disease in him. He and his teenage nymphet are infecting each other even as they seduce each other. There is tragedy and monstrousness amid the sparkle of Lolita. That’s what makes it a great book. Parrot and Olivier is a fine book as well, but it’s no Lolita.

#10, A Time of Gifts, and Between the Woods and the Water, by Patrick Leigh Fermor

I found about about these books by reading the author’s obituary in the New York Times on June 11, 2011. He had died at the age of 96. The two books are parts one and two of the author’s account of his journey, mostly on foot, southeastward across the continent of Europe, from Holland to Istanbul, in 1934. He was 19 at the time. The books were published in 1977 and 1986, respectively, so a lot of time elapsed between the walking and the writing. In fact, the two books only cover the first two thirds of the author’s journey, getting him as far as the border between Romania and Bulgaria. (He’s only averaging about two miles a page!) According to the Times, “his biographer Artemis Cooper told the British newspaper The Guardian that Mr. Leigh Fermor had completed a draft [of the third and concluding volume], and that it would be published.”

If I had the opportunity to change lives with another person (or at least to take part in a parlor game with that premise) I would have to give serious consideration to choosing Patrick Leigh Fermor. Besides exploring and getting to know many remote corners in the world, Fermor was also a war hero, who kidnapped a Nazi general on Crete in 1942. This exploit was made into a film, “Ill Met by Moonlight,” directed by Michael Powell and starring Dirk Bogarde. Of course, it is always possible that someone having an interesting and full life is for one reason or another not able to fully enjoy that life, but having read these books, I don’t sense that this was the case with Patrick Leigh Fermor.

When I was 19 and under the spell of Jack Kerouac I found myself with no job and nothing to do during the summer. So I decided to go hitchhiking. Here are two key differences between my excursion and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s: One, walking is a lot more open-ended than hitchhiking. I may have been looking for experience, but most people in cars, as it turns out, are looking to get somewhere, so hitchhiking turns out to be about transportational assist more than adventure. People take you into their cars to keep them awake, to complain, or just to fend off boredom. I covered 33 states and several thousand miles in a little over three weeks before finding myself back in New York City again. It was a bold and probably dangerous journey in its way, but nobody would ever suggest that there was a book to be written about it.

The other key difference is that I lacked Fermor’s gregariousness and his ability to enter into the fabric of peoples’ lives. I met some nice people and had some minor adventures, but it would have been better had I been able to “stick” in a few more places for a few more days. Fermor not only makes friends, he gets invited to stay in a series of sumptuous ancestral manses across Middeleuropa. To quote Jan Morris in the preface to Between the Woods and the Water, “[F]riends had passed him on to friends, a count here had recommended him to a baron there, and by the time we join him he is almost as often being picked up in a limousine, or riding a borrowed thoroughbred, as he is plodding along a highway.”

These differences are closely related—to travel on foot is to be a kind of pilgrim, to qualify for a traditional form of charity. For centuries religious pilgrims had crisscrossed Europe depending on just this kind of charity. It is odd, though, that after hundreds of kilometers—and pages—Fermor has not one rude or hostile encounter to report. My luck as a hitchhiker was not nearly as good.

In Patrick Leigh Fermor’s memoirs, as in Karen Blixen’s, the authors present accounts of their lives that are essentially free of elements like self-doubt, envy, fear, and resentment. Is this because these elements were lacking from their lives? I don’t think that’s the case. I think it’s that these authors are writing about the times and places in which they lived, as much as they are writing about their own lives. In writing of this type, it is appropriate to filter out certain psychological frequencies that would otherwise obscure the view of the world outside. As an example of an entirely different kind of autobiographical writing, consider Dave Egger’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which dwells on the author’s suffering and personal development more than on its author’s times and places. Do memoirs and autobiographies generally fall into one of the other category, or is there more of an even distribution across the spectrum? Are more personal accounts becoming more common? These are matters to consider.

On the foundation of his personal experiences, Fermor has built an impressive edifice of erudition. After taking his walk, he spent a half century studying, revisiting, and considering the significance of those times and places. His art is in making the personal experience and the added learning blend so well. We are not often reminded that he is commenting on and looking back at a former self. Somehow, he has invested that former self with the knowledge and perspective of the older man. The books do not feel particularly elegiac or nostalgic.

Fermor’s command of information is evident from the precise and extensive vocabulary he uses to describe his experiences. There is hardly a paragraph in these books that does not contain a word that I did not know. Once in a while I would look one up—for example, incunabula, a word that describes a category of early printed books, or aurochs, a type of wild Eurasian cattle that became extinct in the 17th century. Occasionally, Fermor’s precision goes a bit too far, as when he spends 10 pages describing the architecture of a single building in Prague—lintels, ashlars, cusps, ogees; even if I was familiar with these architectural terms, there is no way I could reassemble the images that Fermor is trying to capture in words. I would gladly visit such structures with such a knowing and enthusiastic guide, but the words alone will not suffice.

I am glad to finally know something about the geography and the history of places like Hungary and Transylvania and Romania: of the procession of peoples over the plains and mountains of southeastern Europe over the past 20 centuries. Of the Dacians who made war against Rome and were ultimately subdued by Trajan’s legions. Of the Turks who pushed up the Danube as far as Vienna before slowly being pushed back to Asia Minor. And of the Tatars of central Asia who were still raiding Hungary as late as the 1780s. Few places on Earth have been as fought over as southeastern Europe.

But Fermor’s books are more than a collection of wikipedia entries. There is warmth and charm in his accounts. I felt a bit sad when I finished the second book, because I liked hanging out with Paddy. I look forward to meeting up with him again.

#9 Middlemarch, George Eliot

Every former English major knows that Middlemarch is one of the great novels in the English language. It’s the Victorian novel to end all Victorian novels. I just searched online for “greatest novels of all time”; the first list I found has Middlemarch in eighth place, between Madame Bovary and The Magic Mountain. If Middlemarch were a baseball player, it would be Ted Williams.

I read Middlemarch in grad school, and I remember that I asked the professor, whose name was Felicia Bonaparte, if I could write my master’s thesis on it. She recommended that I take on Eliot’s next and final novel, Daniel Deronda, instead. I produced a 36-page paper, which seemed at the time almost as epic as the 900-page book it was about. I worked at it most of one summer—1982, perhaps—and I truly enjoyed it. Daniel Deronda spoke to me. I thought I’d produced a masterpiece, and I got an A. If I read it today I’d probably be appalled, but if nothing else I’m sure it was bursting with enthusiasm.

I wonder how clear an idea I had, back in 1982, about what I would have wanted to say about Middlemarch—what it said to me back then.

Middlemarch is about two marriages, both unhappy. All four principals marry an idea of the other person, and all four find afterward that the reality does not match the idea. The psychological insight is wonderful and it all seems very real and nuanced. What little I remembered from my first encounter with Middlemarch had to do with these two marriages.

Middlemarch is also the story of various citizens of a country town. They all struggle and scheme; some come out well and some do not. Invariably, though, everybody seems to get according to their desserts. George Eliot is a just god and moral law is strictly enforced in her universe. I’ve sort of lost my taste for this sort of moral exactitude—it doesn’t tally with the world I live in.

There’s really only one character in Middlemarch who has the ability to surprise us—or her author. Dorothea Brooke is a young woman who marries a dry and dreary scholar, imagining that she will help him illuminate the universe with his wisdom. In the Prelude to Middlemarch, Eliot invokes St. Teresa of Avila:

Teresa’s passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and fed, from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction…

Dorothea is a modern-day St. Teresa. You might imagine that such a character would be insufferable, but in fact the scenes with Dorothea are luminous—and sometimes even a bit funny. She’s exalted, but she’s not particularly shrewd. She provides an interesting mirror in which other characters can see themselves. Inherently good characters see their goodness in her and are sustained by that vision. Bad or tedious characters see their deficiences, or see nothing.

But I am just saying the obvious things about this book—these comments are like snapshots of the Eiffel Tower. Proof that I’ve been there—not much more. I don’t seem to have any way to “warm up” Middlemarch. I am not generally attracted to the idea of book clubs, because I’m pretty sure I would find my own opinions more interesting than everybody else’s, and therefore would find myself engaged in an exercise in patience (or, failing that, rudeness). But with Middlemarch, it might be interesting to hear how different people reacted to and assessed the different characters. Each so perfectly framed by circumstances and by other characters. Each facing a moral dilemma or difficult choice. Each bathed in the light irony of the author’s prose, with thoughts and feelings presented in a detached way that provides the necessary clues to each character’s flaws. To talk about Middlemarch is to consider how one might live better.

#8 Winter's Bone, by Daniel Woodrell

I was about two-thirds of the way through Winter’s Bone when I realized it wasn’t the book I was expecting it to be. So when I finished, I decided I had better read it again right away (it’s less than 200 pages). I had it on my radar in the first place because it was made into a movie that got a 2010 best picture nomination (with the implicit stipulation that it wasn’t going to win). The movie was featured on a couple of the NPR programs that I listen to, including Fresh Air and Studio 360. I heard how this fine, fine movie was based on a fine, fine book, so I thought I might try both. Haven’t found the movie yet at a reasonable price—it might be time to sign up for Netflix again.

So I’m blaming NPR for my faulty expectations. Yes, there was the feisty 16-year-old heroine, as promised. But the other angle I kept hearing about was the unflinching depiction of the harrowing socioeconomic conditions in the Ozark backcountry of southern Missouri. I was expecting an expose, social realism, a story about the devastation wrought by lack of opportunity and methamphetamine. A book that would bring important matters to my attention that I had no right to ignore, etc.

It’s not that you couldn’t read the book that way, I just don’t think that’s the book that Daniel Woodrell was writing. The poverty and the meth are the setting, but they are not the story. Woodrell’s wikipedia article starts this way: “Woodrell coined the phrase ‘country noir’ to describe his 1996 novel Give Us a Kiss. Reviewers have frequently since used the term to categorize his writing.” Winter’s Bone actually does have a lot more in common with The Big Sleep than it does with, say, The Grapes of Wrath. (I have not actually read either, but I have seen the movies.)

The plot is this: Ree Dolly’s father Jessup has disappeared, leaving her in charge of her eight- and ten-year-old brothers and her mentally broken-down mother. They are poor, and it’s the middle of a cold, snowy winter. An officer comes to their house one day and informs them Jessup has a court appearance the following week and that if he fails to show, the house and property will be confiscated to pay his bond. Ree assures the policeman that she will find her father, since if there is no house then there can be no family.

The real story begins to be told as Ree begins her search for “Dad.” This story could be called “The Dolly clan and how they got to be the way they are.” The hills are alive with Dollys—they seem to constitute the majority of the population in the area. Dolly men are almost all given one of four first names: Milton, Jessup, Arthur or Haslam.

To have but a few male names in use was a holdover from the olden knacker ways…. Let any sheriff or similar nabob try to keep accounts on the Dolly men when so many were named Milton, Haslam, Arthur or Jessup. The Arthurs and the Jessups were the fewest, no more than five apiece, and the Haslams amounted to double the Arthurs or Jessups. But the great name of the Dollys was Milton, and at least two dozen Miltons moved about in Ree’s world. If you named a son Milton it was a decision that attempted to chart the life he’d live before he even stepped into it, for among Dollys the name carried expectations and history.

What is the exact nature of those expectations? We can easily infer that it is a kind of outlaw life. We also know that Ree and her mother lobbied hard to prevent either of her brothers from being named Milton. (It is perhaps a bit of a stretch to imagine Ree being quite so aware of such larger implications when her brothers were born—she would have been six and eight.)

When you have twenty men within a few square miles named Milton Dolly you have to come up with a system for telling them apart. When Ree is waiting patiently to see one of the many Miltons one day, she passes the time thusly:

To occupy her mind, she decided to name all the Miltons: Thump, Blond, Catfish, Spider, Whoop, Rooster, Scrap . . . . Lefty, Dog, Punch, Pinkeye, Momsy . . . . Cotton, Hog-jaw, Ten Penny, Peashot . . . . enough. Enough Miltons.

Then there is Ree’s uncle Teardrop (ne Haslam), Jessup’s brother. He has three teardrops tattooed on his cheek, one for each man he has killed in prison. Has also has had half his face melted away in a meth lab accident: “There wasn’t enough ear nub remaining to hang sunglasses on.”

Ree understands that she must put her case to one Dolly man after another until she finds the one who can tell her how to find Jessup. Woodrell does not explain the protocols that dictate Ree’s course of action, but despite the lack of nice manners these folk are as formal and precise as Japanese diplomats. In Winter’s Bone, on three separate occasions, Ree approaches the home of a Dolly man, submits her request to a woman who meets her before she enters, and, if necessary, identifies the nature of her kinship to the lord of the manor. Sometimes that’s enough to get her an audience, sometimes not.

She works her way up some sort of ladder of importance, starting with Uncle Teardrop, then going to a cousin named Little Arthur. These men treat her with a hint of avuncular solicitation, but they also threaten to knock her around for not following their advice, which is to abandon her effort to find Jessup. Both keep firearms at hand; both offer a hit of “crank,” which she declines.

The third and final Dolly man that Ree petitions is Thump Milton, who is clearly the top Milton. The exact nature of his authority is never stated, but Ree’s attempts to get in to see him remind me of the Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy and her allies first attempt to see the wizard. Except that Thump is no humbug—his power is as absolute as it is mysterious. He is almost like a god—Ree never actually gets a clear look at Thump, as though looking at him were taboo, at least to a young unmarried woman who has no official business with him.

The Dollys, in the end, seem to resemble a biblical tribe more than an Appalachian clan. They may live in a place called Missouri and drive pickup trucks, but they respect no law and known no history but their own. It isn’t that the Dollys have decided to separate themselves from the United States, it’s more that they share a time and a place with us without really being in the same universe. As I read Winter’s Bone, I was struck by the almost complete lack of references to politics, media, name brands, or proper nouns of any kind. When cultural references do occur, they are as if seen through smoked glass:

She parted her lips and snapped her teeth in step with that happy silly old song they sang in grade school about the submarine that was yellow and had everybody living in it.

For a few pages about midway through the book Woodrell provides a glimpse of the Dolly back story. It happens as Ree passes the stone ruins of an early Dolly settlement:

The walls of the old places had been pulled apart, the stones tossed asunder and tossed furiously about the meadow during the bitter reckoning of long ago.

Later she repasses them and recalls what she knows about what happened in the distant past:

She knew few details of the old bitter reckoning that erupted inside those once holy walls, but suddenly understood to her marrow how such angers between blood could come about and last forever. Like most fights that never finished it had to’ve started with a lie. A big man and a lie.

The big man and prophet who’d found messages from the Fist of Gods written on the entrails of a sparkling golden fish lured with prayer from a black river way east near the sea was Haslam, Fruit of Belief. The sparkling fish had revealed signs unto him and him alone, and he’d followed the map etched tiny on the golden guts and led them all across thousands of testing miles until he hailed these lonely rugged hollows of tired rocky soil as a perfect garden spot, paradise as ordained by the map of guts sent to his eyes from the Fist of Gods.

No allusions to Christianity—the Dolly cult is a from-scratch religion, with Haslam as its Abraham or Muhammad. In fact, the name Haslam has a middle-eastern sound to it, though google tells me that the current governor of Tennessee is named Bill Haslam. Scramble the letters around and you almost get salaam or lamas. It’s a very suggestive name.

There are a few more paragraphs of Ree ruminating on the Dolly creation story as she holes up in a cave to wait out a storm. But once she gets back on task we hear little more about Dolly deep time, except for the occasional reference to “Fist of Gods” or “Fruit of Belief.” But we now realize, as Ree pursues her quest to its harrowing conclusion, that these people aren’t merely ignorant depraved hillbillies, they are a failed nation, a seed that fell on stony soil, and did not flourish. The events that transpire are more than just one young woman’s quest to save her house and family, they are a glimpse into a world that has collapsed, but that has resisted, for better or worse, dissolving into the wider American culture.

Are there really such pockets of archaic culture in America? We have more successful cults, like the Mormons, and we have groups like the Scientologists and the People’s Temple, but I’m not aware we have any such mouldering tribe of Israel as the Dollys in our midst. Maybe Daniel Woodrell knows otherwise.

My second pass through Winter’s Bone was quite a bit more interesting than my first. Woodrell requires the reader to think and work, and that’s why I mentioned The Big Sleep earlier. Ree isn’t really sleuthing, but the reader must take pains to notice and consider the numerous anomalies and stray details that keep cropping. What of Aunt Bernadette that got swept off a bridge in a flood? What exactly happens between Ree and her friend Gail? When I was paging through the book looking for the Yellow Submarine reference mentioned above, I discovered that the word yellow appears on almost every other page in Winter’s Bone. What’s up with that? I have no idea. Maybe I need to read the book again.

#6 and #7: In Ruins, by Christopher Woodward, and Crazy U, by Andrew Ferguson

I read these books in tandem. Each is about 250 pages, and each describes a particular aspect of its author’s experience.

I was pretty certain I would like In Ruins. It name checked books and places and things that I already knew and liked—the peculiar buildings and history of the tidelands of east England, as described in W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, the ruins of Rome through the centuries, the fate of the monasteries and abbeys of England after Henry VIII seized them for the crown, Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln Inn Fields, London (which I had visited last year), and the life and work of Giuseppe Tomasi, 11th Prince of Lampedusa and author of The Leopard. Plus, it had lots of pictures! The author even manages to work in former world middleweight champion Marvelous Marvin Hagler, who, after losing a title bout, came to Rome and put his life in perspective: “I was angry as hell when they took away my title. But when you stand in the Pincio Gardens at sunset looking down at the whole of Rome, across centuries, it sorta puts things in perspective.” Hagler still lives in Italy, where he appears in television and films.

The book is about (spoiler alert!) ruins—how people have seen them through the centuries, what ruins tell us about ourselves and the past, etc. About half the ruins the author discusses are in Italy, and half are in England. You would think that once a building was ruined, that would be more or less the end of the story. But modern, excavated, groomed and managed ruins of the kind available to 21st century tourists are much less interesting than the haphazard, untended, overgrown ruins of the 18th century. In 18th century Rome, the colliseum had small forests growing in its grandstands, and Christian shrines—and even a small building, a hermitage—on its floor. In those days you could ride a horse into the colliseum under the moonlight. A 19th century botanist collected seeds from plants growing in the colliseum and determined that many of them were exotics from Africa and the Middle East. His only guess as to how those plants could have gotten there is that they grew from seeds that had been excreted by lions and other exotic fauna brought to the colliseum in its heyday to munch on Christians and other dainties.

Crazy U is a brisk and perfunctory piece of extended journalism by one Andrew Ferguson, “a senior editor at the Weekly Standard.” Ferguson has a 17-year-old son who was getting ready to apply to college. Since I have a 15-year-old son who might be getting ready to apply to college in about two years, I thought the book might provide some useful insights. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting, but after about 50 pages I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be getting it. I can’t say that I didn’t pick up a few useful tidbits—for example, I told my son he should start thinking about which teachers might be good for a reference now rather than two years from now when his freshman teachers will be just a dim memory—but my overall impression was that this was a stale piece of hackwork.

I think years of reading New Yorker articles has spoiled me for mainstream journalism. Ferguson does a very professional job of interweaving his son’s story with sections on things like the SAT and the U.S. News college rankings. These expository sections are a bit dry, so the author spices them up a bit with witty asides: “That something so dull [as the SAT] could have an effect so pyrotechnical is hard to credit. It’s as if the Trojan War had been fought over Bette Midler.” This is humor intended to provide respite for the reader who might be beginning to fidget after all the “heavy” information. Jay Leno humor.

Ferguson pretends to be appalled at how excruciatingly careful the people who create the SAT have to be to avoid the faintest hint of political incorrectness, but his book is similarly scrubbed of anything that might align it with one faction or another in the culture wars.

The author’s son is a good student but not exceptional. It could hardly be otherwise, though, since if he were too bright his experience would not generalize well, and if he were not bright enough, it would be cruel to expose him.

Overall, Crazy U felt less like a book and more like a seminar presentation minus the PowerPoint. Written with the discipline of the professional who wants to get the maximum financial return on his time and effort. No wasted speculation, no risky digressions, no stepping off the path for even a second. Crazy like a fox.

#5: The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens

This is one of the most popular books of all time, as big in its day (1836) as Harry Potter is in ours.

But who would want to read it today? A massive Victorian novel without sex, violence, or vampires. Even among Dickens novels, I don’t think it would be in many “top five” lists. I wasn’t really hankering to read it myself, but I had an old Penguin paperback that I had picked up. I liked the cover illustration, I liked the heft of it, and so I started reading, sort of on a self-dare.

I work harder than most people at deciding what books I should read, what movies I should see, and what music I should listen to. For that very reason, I think it’s good idea every so often to “take a flyer.” Taste can be confining, a groove we wear in what the world has to offer. I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing to have too much faith in your own taste. Have you heard of “desert island discs”?—this is a genre of music writing where people are asked what five records they would want to have with them if they were stranded on a desert island. (Or rather, they answer without actually being asked.) I realize the real question behind this conceit is merely “What are your favorite records?”, but I can’t help trying to imagine what it would be like if you really were forced to spend the rest of your life under a cocoanut tree with a record player and five records. Maybe one of those wind-up grammaphones with a speaker like a big lily. I suspect that after a few weeks it would not matter what the discs were—or rather, it would matter in ways that we could not imagine in advance. Maybe we’d just want happy music, or singable music, or music that told a story. Would we want Sgt. Peppers or Dark Side of the Moon? I might be just as happy with Celine Dion, Tom Jones, and The Beegees as I would be with the Beatles, Bach, and Charlie Parker. Because taste is an extravagance, a way of coping with surplus. Music is music.

So am I comparing The Pickwick Papers with Celine Dion? Not exactly—but both have sustained and entertained a lot of people. Given the choice, though, I’ll take Pickwick. (Unless I’m in Vegas and I get a good deal on tickets.)

I was somewhat indifferently entertained while reading Pickwick. I didn’t work at it, as I would have if I’d owed somebody a term paper afterwards. There were some good bits of comedy and lots of great period detail about coaches and inns and servants. After finishing the book I went back and read the introduction, and began to understand how to “value” Pickwick. I felt a little guilty for not having recognized all the virtues of the book, all the things that make it remarkable. Pickwick was just a country I was passing through—I dipped a little into what it had to offer, as I would try a few Portuguese dishes if I were staying in Lisbon. Or maybe Dickens is the country, and Pickwick is a small coastal port. In any case, I’m not going to try to be your guide to the Pickwick experience, or to suggest for a moment that this is a trip you should put at the top of your list. Which puts me in mind of those “1000 X’s to See/Do/Hear Before You Die” books—another consumer trope that I am rather inclined to look at too literally. Whenever I see one of those books I am more amazed that some cheap trade paperback has the nerve to remind me of my mortality, than I am interested in the list of items. (OK, yes, I am interested in the list too.) But since I am going to die, and perhaps in the not-too-distant future, the best thing to do might be to dispense with lists and collections altogether. I suspect these books are for twenty-five year olds, who have trouble imagining their own mortality.

Dickens was a hot young journalist when he was offered the Pickwick project. A popular illustrator wanted a pretext for publishing a series of illustrations, and the publisher was looking for someone to supply some narrative to fill in around the pictures. The pictures were to be of a “sporting club,” and they were to be satirical—people in extravagant hunting costumes discharging their pieces ineptly, and so forth. The first few chapters did little to transcend this flimsy concept, but as he wrote, Dickens began to realize that he was, in fact, Charles Dickens. Characters, descriptions and themes began to pour forth. The sporting club gave way to intrigue, adventure, and romance. A star was born. As monthly installments were published, Dickens took note of “what worked,” and promptly supplied more of those commodities. Sam Weller, the shrewd and practical cockney manservant, introduced as a peripheral character in one episode, was brought back and made a key cast member. It wasn’t “reality” novel-writing, but it had that element of audience interaction that keeps shows like American Idol on everyone’s lips.
After the fourth installment, the illustrator shot himself. A new illustrator was found, but the ratio of text to illustrations was increased. Advantage: Dickens. For the modern reader, reading Pickwick is somewhat like watching a sitcom without the laugh track. Or like watching the performers on American Idol without the judges and the audience. You’re seeing only one half of a dialogue between artist and audience.

You’re also lacking the cultural perspective of the early Victorian English audience. The knowledge of current events, the gentle satire regarding master/servant relationships, etc. Humor can either be “of the moment,” full of satire and parodies of people and events in the news, or more what I would call, for lack of a better word, universal. When they rebroadcast ancient Saturday Night Live episodes, I suspect they edit out skits making fun of Edmund Muskie, Billy Carter and the like—the fact that Generalissimo Francisco Franco is “still dead” isn’t nearly as funny as it was 35 years ago, when the audience knew that the Spanish dictator had clung to life for months before finally expiring. Monty Python skits, in contrast, seem mostly free of such cultural specifics, and so have aged better.

Of course the ultimate challenge in this regard is Shakespeare. Consider “Romeo and Juliet”—there are parts of that play that are chock full of cultural references and topical jokes that nobody today can appreciate—unless they read the footnotes carefully. Yet they assign this play to high schoolers. Of course, the play does work on other levels at the same time. It’s interesting when you watch a Shakespeare comedy performed—especially a low-budget production without famous actors. Productions that cannot rely on opulence and acting skill to blow you away. The actors always make sure they give the audience plenty to laugh at. I always wonder—how much of this humor was put there by Shakespeare (and typically missed by me as I read the play and tried to navigate the iambic pentameter), and how much is part of the cultural inheritance of the play—gestures and effects handed down through the centuries as younger performers absorbed the tricks and gambits of their predecessors. Not unlike magicians. There is a third possibility—that actors and directors can invent humorous readings, gestures, and “bits” without any guidance from either the bard or their mentors. I suspect that when you watch a Shakespearean comedy you’re seeing a blend of all three of these potential sources of humor: what Shakespeare put in, theatrical traditions, and new inventions.

In any case, there is no way for us today to recapture the excitement that would have been felt by the original readers of The Pickwick Papers. We can only admire it the way we admire surviving Roman ampitheaters, with only perhaps 60% of the rock still in place.

#4: Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen

I found two Isak Dinesen books at a yard sale a couple of months ago for ten cents each—Seven Gothic Tales and Out of Africa. I read the former first and just finished the latter. The two books are very different—the former is a collection of highly stylized and intricately weird romantic tales, the latter a factual account of the author’s experiences running a sort of plantation in Kenya. But what unites them for me is the strength of the author’s personality, as expressed in her writing. This was a person who wrote confidently and boldly, and I get the definite sense that she would have showed those traits in other aspects of her life as well. I don’t think she was a timid person.

Seven Gothic Tales has a spooky Scandinavian feel, it's an orchestration of effects and sleights and nuances. She chooses the role of artificer, a maker of illusions and effects. Some of the stories are thrilling and exotic, others are a bit vague and dream-like.

In Out of Africa, the sense of power comes from the way the author so capably puts across her personal understanding of her experience managing a large coffee plantation in Kenya. The book is neither modest nor grandiose; the author has a cool, supple, and poised intelligence which can be philosophical, analytical, or sympathetic as the occasion requires. She presents her 17 years in Africa exactly as she wishes us to see them, selecting people and events to give her experience resonance and coherence.

Reading the book in 2011, though, it’s difficult not to wonder about certain things. Dinesen runs a 6000-acre farm, staffed by hundreds or perhaps thousands of Africans, primarily of the Kikuyu tribe. She is friendly with many of her so-called natives and tells us of the lives and tribulations of several of them, but never without a certain paternalistic distance. Indeed, she writes of favorite horses and dogs, as well, and in much the same way—they are noble, they endure, they die. Dinesen’s natives are being run off the land as systematically as the Indians of the American west were—at one point she explains why her people will have to relocate after she sells the farm: “The natives cannot, according to the law, themselves buy any land…” If this fact caused Dinesen any dismay, it is not evident from this book. Perhaps she is just extending her own personal stoicism to those around her.

We read of the blue peaks of the Ngong Hills, of safaris down into the Masai Reserve. We read of the slaughter of several lions, and of a plague of locusts. We read of the ways of the hardworking Kikuyu, of the warlike Masai, and of the Somali, with their fierce Islam religion and their sequestered wives. Somalis served as loyal major domos to the white landowners, aristocrats among the Africans, and you wonder how their homeland could have come to the awful state it is in today. Reading Out of Africa makes me want to visit Kenya, to walk the cool uplands of the west country and to see the stars and the moon and the sky as Dinesen describes them. Of course, today her property is within the suburbs of Nairobi, so I doubt if the walk would be quite as exhilarating as in her day.

I would like to someday read Judith Thurman’s biography of Blixen to learn about everything that she has left out. Even just a few minutes of browsing in wikipedia provides all sorts of surprises—What of the husband who gave her syphilis and whom she divorced in 1921? What of the brother who came out to help her run the plantation for four years? What of her love affair with Denys Finch-Hatton (or is it Hatton-Finch), which is the main substance of the 1985 film made from Out of Africa? It is odd to think that the movie, using the same title, tells of events that are barely hinted at in the book. Dinesen is a ruthless editor of her own life, throwing out whatever doesn’t suit her purpose. I haven’t decided if I think this is quite honest.

Was Kenya in the 30s really so idyllic? Perhaps not. But I do not think it was any the worse for Karen Blixen’s having been there.