My friend Brian has built himself a Web page here. You would do well to familiarize yourself with this man before he wins a Pen award.

As I’m sure a lot of writers have done, I’ve gone back and revisited some of Salinger’s work this week. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is a very fine story. The dialogue in particular is spot-on and pitch-perfect. It’s a sad week for literature because, recluse though he was, Salinger might belong to the last generation to believe – to truly believe – it meant something to be a novelist, and the last generation for whom serious fiction could reap serious monetary and cultural rewards. What young writer today could pull a Salinger, or a Harper Lee, or a Thomas Pynchon, and still have an effect? If Joshua Ferris or Dan Chaon said, “That’s it, I’m through,” and holed himself up in the Berkshires or somewhere, would anyone come looking for him?

For retrospectives, the Guardian has a lot of good articles; I especially enjoyed this comment from Jay Parini: “He came often to read books or magazines in the Baker Library at Dartmouth, and several times I saw him reading by himself at a table, often late at night, in the basement of that library. Once he brushed passed me in the hallway outside my office, a lean and lonely figure. Everyone knew he did not want to be disturbed, and I would never have dared to say a word.”

As for whether he’s got a trove of hidden manuscripts, I’m skeptical. I’m sure he was writing all those years, but I suspect there are more insane ramblings than not. If I had to put money down, I’d say there’s one absolute masterpiece in the lot, and everything else is either unfinished, precious, heartless or nonsensical. Whether we ever get to see that masterpiece, and whether anyone will care about it, is a separate issue altogether.

What it is:

This novel is about a working-class woman with an abusive husband. Told by the woman herself, the story spirals around in time, back to her childhood, back to her wedding day, back to fights with her husband, all interspersed with the news that her husband, whom she’d kicked out of the house, had just been killed.

Why it’s interesting:

I had trouble with this one, not because of the subject matter, but more, I think, with the way Doyle moves around in time. I had trouble finding an anchor. The anchor is meant to be the present, when the police tell her the man is dead, but all the scenes are so short that I felt scattered and off-balance. Part of the problem might be that our world is so scattered right now (I can feel my brain sliding into Twitter mode) that I really turn to fiction to get anchored, to read 50 or 100 pages in an established zone. Now that I’m thinking about it, I had the same qualms with Chaon’s Await Your Reply. Like Chaon, Doyle moves around so much that I didn’t feel connected to any of it. I kept saying to myself, “Why am I in the past here? What’s at stake?” I might be in the minority for not loving this novel. I remember liking Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha when I was 18 or 19, and I can see how The Woman Who Walked Into Doors would have a wide appeal. Perhaps it’s time to create a new subgenre of fiction? (Like we don’t already have enough of those.) In graduate school, the debate was framed in terms of literary vs. genre, but I’m starting to see at least three separate realms: (1) Hands-down literary, driven by character, such as Henry James, (2) Hands-down genre, such as Dan Brown, (3) and commercial-literary or literary-commercial, which is most of what we lump as literary these days. I guess #3 is the best place to be, because you’ll get respect as well as some money, but I’m starting to notice something about novels in that group. I don’t know whether it’s tone, or language, or character, or moral outlook, or just a vibe I’m getting, but I’m feeling like it’s time to tighten up.

Side note: Check out Ted Genoway’s recent essay on dying literary journals.

Further Reading:

Nick Hornby, Zadie Smith, Dave Eggers, the rest of the writers in the anthology Speaking With the Angel.

What it is:

This novella revisits the same ground as From Here to Eternity, and I couldn’t help but picture Montgomery Cliff as the protagonist. On guard duty, Private Mast is assigned a pistol. Then Pearl Harbor happens, and during the confusion Mast hangs onto the pistol rather than turning it back in. The novella is a series of episodes in which the men in his platoon try to steal, buy, bribe, fight and swindle the pistol out of his possession.

Why it’s interesting:

The pistol is a clear talisman here, the same way the baseball is in Underworld. For Mast, it takes on a kind of religious significance. He believes it will protect him, will save him, and Jones uses language of salvation to reference the pistol. It’s a quick read (I read it in two or three hours), and it’s a good link between Billy Budd and, say, Denis Johnson.

Further Reading:

Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Boll’s A Soldier’s Legacy, Jones’ From Here to Eternity, Dickey’s To the White Sea, Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way.

What it is:

This tale is about a tutor, Pemberton, whose pupil has a penetrating intelligence and a physical malady, so Pemberton becomes psychologically hooked on the the pupil. The pupil’s parents are fraudulent cosmopolitans who take advantage of Pemberton and don’t pay him, even though he tutors their son for years.

Why it’s interesting:

Queer theorists and Freudians would have a lot more to say about this story than I do. I didn’t particularly care for this one, mainly because the prose was much more psychological than realistic. It reminded me of Kafka more than anyone else I’ve read. Now that I consider it, though, I’m starting to see some of James’ range. “Daisy Miller” anticipates the straight realism of Fitzgerald or Hemingway; “The Aspern Papers” anticipates the gothic comedy of Faulkner and Nabokov (well, maybe Nabokov isn’t gothic); and “Pupil” anticipates the psychological strangeness (expressionism?) of Kafka and O’Connor. I’m not sure I can delineate the difference between expressionism and impressionism; I read somewhere recently that James was a master “impressionist,” something I’ll have to consider more when it’s not past my bedtime.

Further Reading:

This was the third story in the Norton Critical The Tales of Henry James. The next few stories look short, though I’m not sure I’ll read them. I might read “In the Cage” and “The Jolly Corner,” but I might take a break from James until this weekend, let these first few tales digest.

What it is:

This tale/novella is narrated by a scholar who is trying to obtain some letters from the old (fictional) romantic poet Jeffrey Aspern. He rents a room in Venice from an old woman – the love object of Aspern’s poems – and her niece, without telling them who he is or what he wants. The old woman has expressed disdain for scholarship, and the narrator is constantly afraid she’ll burn the letters before he can get a hold of them.

Why it’s interesting:

This is one of James’ few first-person narratives*, and he makes some kind of use of the unreliable narrator. The narrator is a terrible person; he’s using these old ladies for his own relatively meaningless purpose, and he’s so callous that he doesn’t feel anything about the old woman’s impending death or the younger old woman’s (maybe) falling in love with him. Despite the dubious narrator, James does a good job of hooking the reader. Going back to John Gardner’s definition of story – a character wants something, struggles to achieve it, and arrives at a win, lose or draw – James gives us a character who wants these mysterious papers, struggles to get them, and arrives somewhere at the end (I won’t spoil it). I wonder if it’s a mistake for professors to insist on shoving James’ novels on young students, because I’m finding these novellas much more accessible. Reading them, I can see why people like James.

*Gardner quotes James as saying that the use of first-person in long fiction is “barbaric.” I don’t know what to make of that, but I like it.

Further Reading:

On to another tale, I suppose. At the library this weekend, I might pick up The Turn of the Screw and What Maisie Knew. Still not ready for The Ambassadors.

What it is:

This short story/novella is a good introduction to Henry James. If James’ career is divided into four stages – the early period, the middle period, the drama-and-horror period, and the late period – then “Daisy Miller” is on the cusp between his early (melodramatic) period and his middle period, in which he gets a handle on his material (the international theme, the complexity of character). The story is about an American expatriate named Winterbourne who becomes enchanted with this American flirt who defies the conventions of society.

Why it’s interesting:

Maybe every novelist has to confront James at some point, because he casts a long shadow across the last 100 years of fiction. I read him for classes in college and graduate school, and found him not very interesting, but I’m ready to try again. The first stumbling block to get over is that he’s writing in the Victorian period. Characters “exclaim,” “declare,” “laugh” and “ejaculate,” and everything seems to be either “dreadful” or “beautiful.” This is pre-Hemingway, so we have to give him that. Secondly, he writes about “society,” and social mores, that seem alien today. There’s a scene in Portrait of a Lady where Isabel sees Osmond sitting down in the presence of Madame Merle, and Isabel realizes the two have had an affair. What could you tell about a man sitting near a standing woman today? Not much. But, if you read it as a matter of heart and human tendency, rather than as a matter of particular 19th century conventions, it’s fairly easy to transpose social elements in James to social elements in the 21st century. You just have to let go of certain expectations. “Daisy Miller” is a good place to start, at least for me, because it introduces James’ society in a succinct narrative. Also, the narrative is told in straightforward realism. There’s plenty of “he said, she said” (or “he exclaimed, she laughed”). Characters stand up, walk across the room, make tea, etc. James, from what I can tell, loses some of that in his later style. He gets more abstract, less rooted in scene, which makes “Daisy Miller” a good warm-up (I hope) for The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl.

(Incidentally, I decided to give James another shot because I’m in the middle of Sabbath’s Theater, and there’s something of the later-style James, I think, about Philip Roth’s plot structure. His scenes are kind of abstract, rooted in character, and meandering around in time, rather than the straightforward realism of “He said, and then he lit a cigarette/took a sip of tea.” There’s not much of what one of my professors called “THADs” (Talking Heads Avoidance Devices) in Roth. The way Roth sets up a scene, and his long and convoluted sentence structure, remind me of when I briefly tried to read Wings of the Dove a few years ago. Maybe I’m ready for it now?)

Further Reading:

I found Bruce R. McElderry’s Henry James a good overview of James’ life and works. I’ve got the Norton Critical Edition of Tales of Henry James, which uses the original print versions of James’ work. He revised all his stuff for the New York edition, but I’m told his revisions screwed up his older material. Next on my list is “The Aspern Papers.” Then onto The Ambassadors.