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| Margaret
Atwood |
Alias
Grace
ISBN: 0747527873 |
Hardcover |
The
Robber Bride
ISBN: 0385491034 |
Paperback |
The
Blind Assassin
ISBN: 0385491034 |
Hardcover |
Cat's
Eye
ISBN: 1853811262 |
Paperback |
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|  Margaret
Atwood: A discovery I made quite by accident, and one I am
savoring slowly, like a delicious cigar. Clicking on the books above will take you to reviews of Alias Grace, The Robber Bride, and her latest novel, The Blind Assassin.
In The Robber Bride, she does such a grand job of getting
inside each narrator that the voices are the surprise the story
has to offer. That, and what may be her best line: "Westley
[the thinker's husband] was boring, like one's children."
Her women are absolutely women without that seeming a parochial
limitation (I had my male childhood miseries growing up in the
forties and fifties, and I knew girls like the girls in Cat's
Eye).
A woman whose work I love and admire once announced to
a group of feminists after I had introduced her that men shouldn't
write about female characters, because not being women, they can't
understand women. She was 27 or so and had something to prove. I
expect she's outgrown that silliness by now. Atwood certainly has.
She writes brilliantly about men, and women, and how utterly they
don't understand each other. The friend who turned me on to her
praised her 'sarcasm'; I'd rather call it irony. Her books are
full of love, but not the smarmy sort, the kind that knows the
beloved is boring, and snot-nosed, and belches, and that being
loved is a temporary condition from which we usually, unless we are very lucky, recover.
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| John Barth |
Lost In the Funhouse
ISBN: 0385240872 |
Paperback |
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John Barth's books are what post-modern fiction should have been. There are a half dozen I can't live without, but for now I will mention only Lost in the Funhouse, and primarily for the title story, which is a re-telling of James Joyce's "Araby" and a devastating commentary on the role of the storyteller. There are also (I can't help myself) Chimera, On With the Story, and Once Upon a Time. All his books are about writing, and each speaks to the writer and reader in ways no one else can. Only Barth could have turned the monologue of an overachieving spermatozoan into a serious and monumentally silly philosophical tractate. Hysterically funny, with empty spaces more important than the words (the main "story" in On With the Story is never written), they entertain and sadden, they flex the intellect.
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| John Fowles
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The Collector
ISBN: 0316290238 |
Paperback |
The Magus
ISBN: 0440351626 |
Paperback |
The French Lieutenant's Woman
ISBN: 0316291161 |
Paperback |
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No book plunges deeper into the heart of darkness than John Fowles' extraordinary first novel, The Collector. Patrick McCabe's brilliant The Butcher Boy comes close, but Fowles' Freddy Clegg is the banality of evil given unwilling flesh. his slow descent into murder is all the more frightening in that it is not a descent at all but a revelation, of the consistency of his alienation and sociopathy.
I've seen complaints that Freddy's tedious blandness is boring reading. My sympathy. I don't remember too clearly my first reading (I just read it for the third time over the Millenium weekend), but I still read hoping, hopelessly, that he will crack somehow, that something will break through his crazed porcelain surface to a human heart.
The astonishing thing about the book is that it is not, in any sense, an exercise in sadism. Miranda's suffering is never enjoyable; Freddy's cruelty is never attractive. I always felt that the movie erred in casting a vaguely attractive person like Terence Stamp for the role, and early paperback covers depict a similarly romantic figure in a pose that suggests what "fun" bondage can be. Freddy is no fun at all. Freddy begins as a non-entity, as heroic as Adolf Eichmann, as banal as Ted Bundy, and he descends from that depth to a degradation, an abdication of his own humanity that is absolute.
Miranda reminds me, in her vulnerability, of a statue I once saw at the Denver Art Museum. The artist was doing three-dimensional photo-realism. He had sculpted his model as a sleeping nude so lifelike that she was startling. But his wonderful was a lifesize sculpture, also nude, of the same model standing up, staring back at us, her body language conveying so unambiguously the helpless humiliation of being nude in a room of the clothed that she was unbearable to look at. I stayed at the exhibit for a quarter hour just to watch the embarrassment and discomfort of the patrons confronted by this image.
It is brilliant book, an absolutely flawless portrait of alienation and sociopathy, an exercise in tragedy. What a wonderful beginning for a brilliant novelist's career.
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I first read The Magus in 1965. Since then I have read it again every five or ten years. It is one of the most intelligent, most stimulating books I have ever read. Like a country you revisit, each tour is different, deeper layered, flawed by age and familiarity, perhaps, but always, at the same time, new.
My own maturity has affected the way I have read this mirror and palimpsest; I remember being shocked, on second reading, to recognize what a callow, shallow creature Nicholas was. Now, myself Conchis' age if not his equal in wisdom, I can scarcely bear this vain poetaster with his self-absorbed despair and self-serving rationalizations.
On my first reading, I was sure the monsters were on the balcony, staring at Nicholas and Alison. On my second, I was sure they weren't, and weren't monsters either. Last year, I understood that it doesn't matter; it is not knowing that matters, but doing. It is not what is done to us, but what we do, that matters. That is the lesson Conchis learns, standing with a machine gun before the dying partisans. To this day, I am uncertain Nicholas ever learned it.
I have adopted as my own motto that of the elder Lily: "Cause no unnecessary pain." What greater gift can another mind give us, than a single rule to live by? This great book; it is an exercise in learning wisdom.
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What to make of a Victorian novel by a contemporary existentialist who steps into the book twice and can't decide how to end it? I cannot imagine a more satisfying inconclusive book. Charles gets the girl. Or maybe not? It doesn't matter.
Fowles' stories are always superficially simple and unplumbable in their philosophical depths: The Collector, The Magus, The Ebony Tower, A Maggot. In his wonderful, Barthian novel, Mantissa, he sends up post-modern fiction with an execution both accurate and witty. (Look at the illustration on the original hardcover editions. Note that the man is more naked than the muse, and both he and the titanic lopped-off head look very much like John Fowles &3151;delicious.)
Sarah Woodruff is at once utterly inexplicable and absolutely believeable. And her believeability extends to the unthinkable. As well as we "understand" her, we cannot choose the "right" ending any more than Fowles can. Humans are creatures of dizzying Hazard. I once heard Richard Loewentin argue that even if behavior could be "determined" by complete knowledge of motives and stimuli, as the social Darwinists believe, the sheer volume of those motives and causes would allow virtual free will. Even so, no depth of understanding can determine Sarah's behavior, no fount of self-knowledge binds her to any course.
Chance circumstances, the 'hazard' of Fowles' philosophy, trivial as the nail lost from the horse's
shoe, trigger the chaotic avalanche of the action after the incredible sex scene. So it is in life; the trivial becomes the deciding element.
I lost a Sarah myself, as randomly and as much through my own error as Charles did. And I remain as uncertain as he of the magnitude of that loss, however familiar I am with the scale of my grief. What a heartbreaking book, what terrible truths.
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Wallace
Stegner 
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Angle
of Repose
ISBN: 014016930X |
Paperback |
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For sheer elegance of prose and nobility of spirit, nobody in
contemporary American letters matches Wallace Stegner. He lived to
a ripe maturity, but still his loss, in a stupid traffic accident,
was tragic. Angle of Repose may not be his finest work;
the competition is pretty stiff. Until I finally got around to
reading this book, Wolf Willow, his essay in personal
memoir, history, and fiction, was my favorite. But Angle of
Repose is the sort of novel that raises the bar for every
writer coming behind.
The grandson of 'Susan
Burless Ward' tells the story of writing her biography. Layers on
layers of narrator and narrated, all done up as a nice simple
story anybody could enjoy. Lyman Ward's own angle of repose is the
key to the book, and we never see the book he actually writes
about Mrs. Ward.
Stegner has taken some
flack from special-interest critics who accuse him of
'plagiarizing' Mary Hallock Foote's memoirs and letters. This is
like accusing Stravinsky of plagiarizing Pergolesi to write Pulcinella.
The book is not a roman a clef revealing the seamy side of a
Victorian lady's life, f'Heaven's sake; it's a novel that draws
unambiguously on reality for its details. Why invent Ward's
letters when Foote's are virtually perfect for Stegner's purposes?
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Here
Comes Everybody! 
Miscellaneous
Titles
