Bookslut has some amusing correspondence between William James and his brother Henry, concerning Henry’s novel The Golden Bowl:

But why won’t you, just to please Brother, sit down and write a new book, with no twilight or mustiness in the plot, with great vigor and decisiveness in the action, no fencing in the dialogue, no psychological commentaries, and absolute straightness in the style?

This is a great baseball novel, and it’s a good time to read it (it being midseason and all). I don’t really have a whole lot to say about it because I’ve already seen the movie, and that ruined my experience with the book. Through and through, I was picturing Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs, which wouldn’t have been so bad except for Hollywood did its thing to the story. I won’t spoil it, but the novel is much darker than the movie, especially at the end. Really wish I’d read the book first.

I’m always open to recommendations. On tap:

• Dostoevsky, Demons
• Malamud, The Natural
• Steinbeck, East of Eden
• Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin
• Andrew Delbanco’s biography of Melville
• Joseph Frank’s one-volume biography of Dostoevsky
• A. Scott Berg’s biography of Maxwell Perkins
• Percy, The Moviegoer (still on my shelf)

The novel has a satisfying end, though I skimmed through about 100 pages of the trial, which felt like recap. The highlight of Part 4 is the Ivan section, where he converses with Smerdyakov and learns the true nature of the crime. He develops a brain fever, goes home, and has a nightmarish dialogue with the devil.

Things that went over my head:

• The tension between Russian values and European values. Educated characters, such as the devil, throw out these French phrases, though I don’t fully understand what Dostoevksy is getting at. France is associated with the Enlightenment, with liberal humanist values, and (maybe) with socialists and atheists.
• What it means to be a Karamazov. The family is clearly cursed, but I’m not really sure if it’s meant to be allegorical, or relates to Russian-ness. There was a note in the back about the word origin, but I forgot what it was.
• What’s the deal with the untold novel? The narrator keeps hinting that there is another story about Alyosha 13 years down the line, and in the preface says that is the main novel. Did Dostoevsky plan to write another book, or is something else going on?
• I’m not sure I understand the last scene. There’s this whole subplot about teenage boys, how Alyosha is kind of their mentor and friend. After a funeral, Alyosha gives a speech and says he’s going away but he wants to remember them, and says they should remember this moment, and they cheer him. Again, is that meant to foreshadow an unwritten book, to set Alyosha on a hero’s journey into the wilderness (he is something like Jesus preaching to disciples), or something else?

Overall, I’d highly recommend the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation. It’s an incredible book.

Reader Caroline writes:

Would be very interested in unpacking issues of the center from existentialism through post-structuralism.

It’s been a while since I read about the post-structuralist life on a “decentered” planet, and I don’t know enough about existentialism to make too many claims, but there do seem to be a couple of whopping contradiction in an existentialist worldview. The nutshell version of Sartre’s philosophy seems to be this: “Existence precedes essence, therefore there is no story (such as God) that can take accountability for our actions. We are 100 percent responsible for ourselves and our actions, and to deny responsibility is philosophical cowardice.”

The contradiction is that Sartre wrote narratives — stories in the form of novels and plays — to dramatize this philosophy. I don’t really know what to make of that. I’d argue people are hard-wired to understand things in terms of narrative — be it a morality tale you tell your kid (“the boy cried wolf”) or a myth to explain God. So one existential project is to use a story to explain why stories should be suspect (and that’s one branch of the postmodern novel). Maybe that’s not a contradiction; maybe it’s more like offering someone McDonald’s and, while they eat, showing them graphic images of clogged arteries and obese flesh.

A second contradiction, that maybe isn’t inherent in the philosophy itself (because I’m not sure there is a coherent, fully-realized version of existential philosophy), is that the worldview that emerged in the 1940s was godless — there is no story, and there is no god to explain existence. But the emphasis on personal responsibility is very Republican, very conservative of them. A liberal Democrat’s job is to provide a story — “I was talking to a woman in South Carolina, who has three kids and her husband lost her job…” — to justify a social program, such as extending unemployment benefits. Sartre, certainly, must object to that.

Dostoevsky, while offering many contradicting dialogues, seems at his core a man who wants to believe in God, and a man who believes a Christian state is the only way to hold that center together. It would be interesting to pair him with Edmund Burke: Burke was mistrustful of the French Revolution because he felt once you broke the old guard, there would be nothing to prevent the new guard from being broken. Only by holding true to the old aristocratic mores, with backing by the church, could a state succeed.

It’s also interesting to consider this material in light of the current tea party movement. I was more concerned about them a few months ago, because I wouldn’t have put it past someone, during the height of the health care legislation, to take a shot at Obama. Part of it was media — the media was showing us images of tea party rage. But were they voices calling for reform or revolution? I wrote about that a while back, but it bears repeating under the Dostoevsky discussion because the past two years in American politics feel Dostoevskian.

Dartmouth has a good resource for studying The Brothers Karamazov, including this list of secondary material.

Part 3 turns into something of a different book. Whereas the first half of the book sets up the family dynamics (and all the contrasting characters), part 3 becomes a detective story reminiscent of the cat-and-mouse chase in Crime and Punishment. Dmitri, in a delirium, runs around town looking for his girlfriend, and may or may not kill and rob his father. The law catches up to him and the interrogation begins. (I know this is an over-simplified synopsis, but, bluntly, if you’ve read the novel you know what happens, and if you haven’t read the novel you’re not going to read it for the detective story that begins on page 350.)

What’s interesting here is how Dmitri acts out what has so far been discussed in the abstract. One thinks of Ivan arguing that civil laws are ineffective because a criminal can break a civil law without putting his soul at risk.  One thinks of the Grand Inquisitor arguing that man’s freedom is a curse. And one thinks of the murderer who confessed to Elder Zosima, and, though he was hung for the crime his soul was saved. During the investigation, Dmitri makes a point to differentiate a scoundrel who squanders money from his fiancée and a thief who outright steals it. He doesn’t cast that distinction in terms of his soul, but it echoes Ivan’s point about civil law versus religious law.

So far he’s maintaining his innocence. He gladly confessed that he struck the servant Gregory, and may have killed him, so it seems likely he truly is innocent of parricide. I’m not really sure how all this connects and will play out, but I’m reminded of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, where Clyde is technically innocent of murder (but guilty of letting Roberta die). Dreiser’s novel is American Naturalism, and the characters’ fates are determined by forces beyond their control. The same might be argued about Dmitri in The Brothers Karamazov.