Do you know Bookfessions? This Tumblr offers confessions of voracious and passionate readers. If you’re such a reader, you’ll find many of these confessions strike a chord with you.

These, and many more, at Bookfessions. (All images: Bookfessions.) And if you’ve got book-related confessions of your own, share them with us in the comments.

The woman is Marina Singh, a researcher in a Minnesota pharmaceutical lab who embarks on a mission to the Amazon. She is dispatched there to recover the details of her coworker’s recent death, and to evaluate the research of a field team deep in the jungle, a team headed up by her former mentor, Dr. Swenson. The checkered relationship between mentor and mentee, between student and teacher, is at the fulcrum of the novel’s central tension.

Deposited in the South American city of Manaus, Marina sets out to track down Dr. Swenson, whose work on developing a controversial new fertility drug suggests a  scientific quest for progress, and the invasion and potential exploitation of the Lakashi, a fictional population indigenous to the Amazon.

As in all odysseys, what particularize Marina’s journey are the hurdles, and how she reacts to them. Speed bumps along the way are also what give a story literary traction, and, as in Bel Canto, Patchett is a master of creating extraordinary circumstances for seemingly ordinary characters.  Marina loses her suitcases, her clothes, reading materials, cell phone, and ties to the outside. Once in Manaus, she must endure numerous tests of will in order to find Dr. Swenson’s whereabouts, including scorching heat and a debilitating fever. Divested of her creature comforts, we see her at a vulnerable state and one that is ripe for transformation.

Throughout, Marina is plagued with nightmares—a reaction to the anti-malaria drug Lariam—and these nightly rebellions of the psyche provide a recurring connotative trope:

Even if she went home tomorrow she would have to take it for another four weeks. It was the drug’s way of reminding the patient that the trip isn’t over. The trip would be in the blood stream, in the tissues.  All the potential disasters of the place would continue to linger inside.

The persistence of the drug’s nightmarish side effects raises questions about what exactly medicine does, if the supposed “therapy” spawns new, harder-to-cure maladies (in this case, nightmares). Conversely, Marina ingests a shaman’s cup of river liquid to bring down a near-fatal fever, and after a delirious, death-like trance, is pretty much healed. This paradox of modernization versus preservation recurs throughout the novel.

The Lariam also acts as a metaphoric stand-in for how journeys linger in your blood, even after the trip is over, as a psychological breeding ground for illness or health. The idea that a place could live inside you, ripe with disaster or amelioration, internalizes the external arc of the story, layering conflict upon conflict. Good stories, too, are likely to linger, as this one does, even after the act of reading them has ended.

In the tradition of Heart of Darkness, State of Wonder proves the delineation between civilization and jungle is a murky one. Once among the Lakashi, Marina and Dr. Swenson face medical challenges and ethical choices about the boundaries of science and its rippling implications. As Dr. Swanson sums up, their work is a slippery slope between progress and dependency:

What happens to the girl whose brother cuts her after I’ve gone? Does the tribe still have faith in the man who sewed up heads before me? Has he kept up his own skills or was he too busy watching mine? I don’t intend to be here forever…

Through the formidable Dr. Swenson, Patchett challenges the assumption that progress be defined through academic or capitalistic objectives: Is a hot pharmaceutical commodity worth the human price exacted for its potential distribution? Is scientific innovation worth taking down an entire self-sustaining society? In posing questions such as these, State of Wonder cautions against easy answers.

One explanation offered between the jungle and civilization is the existence of art. Before trekking to the jungle, Marina comes to see the Manaus opera house as a kind of sacred space:

There was no real explanation for how such a building was conceived for such a place. Marina thought of it as the line of civilization that held the jungle back. Surely without the opera house the vines would have crept up over the city and swallowed it whole.

One would hope after having lived with the Lakashi, Marina’s definition of civilization and the jungle’s menacing reach of influence would surely be more measured and less imperialistic. However, the idea that art is what creates a society or separates civilization from savagery is notable:

In these past few days of fever, Marina had forgotten herself. The city was breaking her down along with the Lariam, her sense of failure, her nearly mad desire to be home in time to see the lilacs. But then the orchestra struck a note that brought her back to herself. Every pass of the cellists’ bows across the cellos’ strings scraped away a bit of her confusion, and the woodwinds returned her to strength. While she sat in the dark, Marina started to think that this opera house, and indeed this opera, were meant to save her.

Words and sentences, then, like bows and strings, can bring us back to ourselves. The act of reading is an act of salvation; narrative and expression are lifeboats on a meandering river.

Patchett’s magic is in weaving these details so effortlessly that they never register as constructed. Her use of language and voice; the development of a wide range of characters who differ in race, age, and gender; and the elements of mystery and suspense all contribute to a bona fide page turner, an adventure story that still rests comfortably on the shelf of Literary Fiction.

Her gift for capturing emotional nuance registers throughout, as in these two (of many possible!) examples:

At that moment she understood why people say You may want to sit down. There was inside her a very modest physical collapse, not a faint but a sort of folding, as if she were an extension ruler and her ankles and knees and hips wee all being brought together at closer angles.

There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it.

The character’s modest physical collapse and the thousand small pin-pricks of loss both register with instant clarity—the universality of the feeling is rendered in such a concise, precise way, that you wonder why nobody thought to express it as such before.

Great authors can infuse a physical setting with the emotional undercurrents of their story. State of Wonder, drawing from its “exotic” locale, capitalizes on this notion that the perception of our surroundings is inflected by our emotional state. A figure undergoing transformation, then, sees the strange as familiar, the familiar as strange:

Beyond the spectrum of darkness she saw the bright stars scattered across the table of the night sky and felt as if she had never seen such things as stars before. She did not know enough numbers to count them, and even if she did, the stars could not be separated one from the other, the whole was so much greater than the sum of its parts. She saw the textbook of constellations, the heroes of mythology posing on fields of ink. She could see the milkiness in everything now, the way the sky was spread over with light.

This de-familiarization is crucial to convey the change necessary for all protagonists – the idea that a truly powerful experience upends the very definition of what we think we know. Everything, down to “such things as stars” must be redefined. Old expectations are washed clean, and we’re left with something new and dangerous and beautiful.

The title is never fully explained, but we can infer that this state of wonder is in part a reference to the magical qualities of the jungle and its inhabitants. In addition, the concrete noun “state/statehood” mixed with the dreamy uncertainty of “wonder” offers a useful dichotomy for Marina’s predicament. She is a doctor, a scientist, but, inserted into the jungle, she possesses a child’s capacity for awe and terror:

She had had a good imagination as a child, though it had been systematically chipped apart by years of studying inorganic chemistry and charting lipids. These days Marina put her faith in data, the world she trusted was one that she could measure. But even with a truly magnificent imagination she could not have put herself in the jungle. She felt something slip across her rib cage—an insect? A bead of sweat? She kept still, looking out through the top of the hammock at the bright split of daylight in front of her… she excelled not through bright bursts of imagination but by the hard labor of a field horse pulling a plow.

Reading (or writing) a book is itself a kind of odyssey. Most writers would tell you the bulk of their work is not all bright bursts of inspiration and light, but something closer to excavation. You go down to find something, to suss something out, and you come back changed, different than you were before. It is more plow pulling and less harvest. But what is lovely about this particular paragraph, and, indeed, Patchett’s latest novel, is that, in a different setting, the everyday mechanics of charting lipids and a putting your faith in data take on a larger significance, their own poetic magnitude. A lab in the Amazon is not the same as a lab in Minnesota. The charts and studies come to carry their own sacred connotations, so much so, that even when you yourself have returned to the original state, the journey is still with you.  Perhaps by being dropped down into an entirely new environment, some of our chipped-away astonishment can be restored.

As readers, we allow ourselves to be transformed by the spell a good book casts, and, if we’re lucky, that spell puts us in a state of—yes—wonder.

Further Links and Resources

At Milk + Bookies^TM events, boys and girls are provided the opportunity to select, purchase and inscribe books that are then donated to their peers who do not have access to books of their own. The fun-filled events feature music, story time and, of course, milk and cookies. [...]

Milk + Bookies^TM combines two essential and worthwhile efforts: literacy promotion and service learning. While the book donations are imperative to our mission, just as important is instilling the seed of giving into each host and their young guests, sparking feelings of importance, self-confidence and the desire to give and give again.

For example, the site offers suggestions on throwing a Milk + Bookies birthday party, in which guests bring a book to donate in lieu of a gift. My son recently had his first birthday, and my husband and I decided that for each subsequent birthday, we’d teach him to give a gift to someone else as part of his celebration. Giving books might be a good way to start!

For more information on Milk + Bookies, watch this video and visit their website:

Further Reading:

• Visit our archives to learn about other organizations that bring literature to children, including Reader to Reader and Read This.
]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/milk-bookies/feed 0 http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/reviewlet-don%e2%80%99t-tell-me-i-didn%e2%80%99t-warn-you-on-reading-george-saunders http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/reviewlet-don%e2%80%99t-tell-me-i-didn%e2%80%99t-warn-you-on-reading-george-saunders#comments Fri, 14 Oct 2011 13:00:11 +0000 Sharon Harrigan http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=27008

George Saunders by jrmyst, on Flickr

George Saunders is dangerous. A friend once said, “Whenever I read him, I can’t stop writing like him.” I’d go further: I can’t stop thinking like him. Every bizarre object I encounter starts to resemble a Saunders dystopic landscape, terrifying and hilarious.  The Game Bus: a seatless, windowless vehicle filled with videogame equipment, where teenage boys enjoy the absence of all human and environmental contact. The Make-Over Playdate: a day spa for little girls with cucumber facials and pretend Botox. The list is endless.

The last book I read that made the world over in its image was The Bus Driver Who Thought He Was God by Etgar Keret. I couldn’t get on a plane without recounting the plot of one of the stories to my unsuspecting seatmate—flight attendant claims love at first sight, jet nose-dives toward doom. Wells Tower made me see everyone as anti-hero. But Saunders’s ability to leave a dent, to filter not only what I read and write next, but what I see, is all his own.

It helps that I live in Virginia. This is Civilwarland–driving distance to a dozen battlefields, walking distance to statues of Confederate generals. Of course the theme park in “Civilwarland in Bad Decline,” the title story of Saunders’s first collection, doesn’t exist. Can you imagine? An employee/actor in full military garb pretending to be a soldier in the Civil War, trying to convince tourists it is still 1863? (OK, I’ve seen it, too, at Appomatox.)

The Civilwarland story is so goofily and scarily realistic that Saunders’s supernatural addition—the ghostly McKinnon family—feels like a wink to assure us it’s not real. He wants readers to be absolutely sure this is fiction, not Nostradamus for the 21^st century.

Saunders writes satire, but he does it with heart. His characters commit awful deeds, they hack off a boy’s candy-stealing arm, stuff “a Baggie full of human ears,” pose as conservations and fill mass graves of raccoons, and slice a boy to bits in a wave machine. But they are also capable of atonement and even self-sacrifice.

The narrator of “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz” erases forty years of his memory to care for an aging stranger. Characters feel “sick in [their] guts as the guiltless stars wheel by.” In “The Wavemaker Falters” the dismembered boy, Clive, reassembles all his minced body parts to visit his murderer. A“400 pound CEO” concludes: “At least I’m not cruel to the point of being satanic.”

Thank you, George Saunders, for giving me this mantra. Because I’m so entrenched in your really weird and weirdly real world—of Verisimilitude Directors and personal interactive holography and Centers for Wayward Nuns—I’m starting to lose all perspective.

I told you this guy is dangerous.

Further Links & Resources

• Read “George Saunders’s Wild Ride.” In this December 2010 conversation with Fiction Editor Deborah Treisman on the New Yorker blog, Saunders says, “I think the writer’s main job is to provide a wild ride for the reader. So most of what I’m doing on a given day is just trying to ensure that the wild ride happens, trusting and hopeful that the thematics will take care of themselves.”
• For all things Saunders, visit his website: Saunders!Saunders!Saunders!
• On The Colbert Report, Saunders explains the concept behind his latest book, The Braindead Megaphone: Essays in terms of a cocktail party. Enjoy.

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
George Saunders
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/reviewlet-don%e2%80%99t-tell-me-i-didn%e2%80%99t-warn-you-on-reading-george-saunders/feed 0 http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/writing-without-reading http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/writing-without-reading#comments Tue, 11 Oct 2011 13:00:07 +0000 Celeste Ng http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=27081

Some frustrated soul on Facebook has started an “I Hate Reading” page. Even though–in keeping with the “I hate reading” theme–there’s nothing actually on the page, over 475,000 people “like” it. AbeBooks issued the following video, entitled “Long Live the Book,” in response:

Okay, so some people hate to read. Some people aren’t book people. But some writers apparently also hate to read. On the New Yorker’s Book Bench, Macy Halford writes:

[William Giraldi] teaches writing at Boston University, and has been amazed at how many of the kids possess a passionate urge to write without also possessing an urge to read. This strikes him as crazy. “There’s an analogy there that I haven’t been able to complete,” he said:

Wanting to write without wanting to read is like wanting to ____ without wanting to ____.

He’d come up with a couple, unsatisfying answers, one involving race cars, one involving sex (he wouldn’t tell us what they were). But he threw it out to the audience to ponder, and now I’m throwing it out to you. What is wanting to write without wanting to read like? It’s imperative that we figure it out, because Giraldi’s right: it’s both crazy and prevalent among budding writers.

(Via.) Why would budding writers hate to read? Can you really write without reading? And for those of you who teach writing: if the answer is no, do you have trouble convincing your students that reading is useful?

]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/writing-without-reading/feed 4 http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/literature-drop-by-drop-on-dripread http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/literature-drop-by-drop-on-dripread#comments Thu, 11 Aug 2011 13:00:32 +0000 Celeste Ng http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=24287

For those of us trying to sneak reading into our busy lives, DailyLit is a great resource: choose any of its 1000ish titles, and it will email you a snippet a day until you finish the book. (See our blog archive for more details.) But what if you want to read something that’s not in DailyLit’s library–or if you’ve already read all of DailyLit’s titles, you speed-reader, you?

Enter dripread, which functions in much the same way but, in addition to a library of titles, allows you to upload a book of your own choosing in ePub format. Says the site’s FAQ:

What does dripread mean?
The word ‘dripread’ is an adaptation of the word dripfeed, with the word ‘feed’ replaced by the word ‘read’. If you like, a dripfeed of reading material. A slow steady stream of information which is easy to process in the normal flow of life.

How does dripread work?
Readers first create a free account and upload their own ebooks (or select a book from the existing library), dripread will then store the ebook and serialise a page to the readers email address, simple.

As the parent of a young child, most things I do—from revising my novel to writing emails to doing laundry—end up happening in ten- or twenty-minute bursts. So the ability to upload a book and nibble my way through it, bite by bite (or drip by drip) is definitely appealing! In fact, once I’m finished with my latest draft, I can even imagine using dripread to send me a small chunk of it per day to re-read and re-edit—sort of like a teacher assigning a chunk of homework a day.

Has anyone out there given dripread a try?

]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/literature-drop-by-drop-on-dripread/feed 0 http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/were-going-to-miss-almost-everything http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/were-going-to-miss-almost-everything#comments Wed, 10 Aug 2011 13:00:35 +0000 Celeste Ng http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=23310

NPR commentator Linda Holmes has a beautiful essay on how we’re going to miss almost everything—and why that’s okay:

Culling is the choosing you do for yourself. It’s the sorting of what’s worth your time and what’s not worth your time. It’s saying, “I deem Keeping Up With The Kardashians a poor use of my time, and therefore, I choose not to watch it.” It’s saying, “I read the last Jonathan Franzen book and fell asleep six times, so I’m not going to read this one.”

Surrender, on the other hand, is the realization that you do not have time for everything that would be worth the time you invested in it if you had the time, and that this fact doesn’t have to threaten your sense that you are well-read. Surrender is the moment when you say, “I bet every single one of those 1,000 books I’m supposed to read before I die is very, very good, but I cannot read them all, and they will have to go on the list of things I didn’t get to.”

It is the recognition that well-read is not a destination; there is nowhere to get to, and if you assume there is somewhere to get to, you’d have to live a thousand years to even think about getting there, and by the time you got there, there would be a thousand years to catch up on.

When I was in grad school, one of my advisors told us that—except for books by students and friends—he’d decided not to read anything new. For the rest of his life, he would devote himself to re-reading books he had already read and loved. At the time I thought this was a strange thing to do for a man who’d devoted his life to writing books and teaching others to write more books. Didn’t he know he was going to miss thousands of wonderful books? But this particular professor is, without a doubt, extremely well-read already. After reading Holmes’s essay, I can kind of see his point.

(If you are the kind of person who wants to make sure you absolutely do not miss ANYTHING that’s offered, though, perhaps this bookstore is for you.)

]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/were-going-to-miss-almost-everything/feed 0 http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/reading-bad-why-writers-should-read-bad-books http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/reading-bad-why-writers-should-read-bad-books#comments Tue, 02 Aug 2011 13:00:09 +0000 Celeste Ng http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=24046

Most writers agree that in order to write, you must also read. Author Allison Winn Scotch raised this point in a recent blog post titled just that:

I think being a successful writer means reading your peers and learning from them too – I can’t tell you how much reading authors whom I admire has helped me up my game. Additionally, I think it’s hard to get into a literary state of mind without, well, being literary.

And Pulitzer Prize-winner Jennifer Egan agreed, saying in an interview (via):

My advice is so basic. Number one: Read. I feel like it’s amazing how many people I know who want to be writers who don’t really read. I’m not convinced someone wants to be a writer if they don’t read. I don’t think the problem is that they need to read more; I think they might need to readjust their life goals. Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work. To be reading good things. I feel that you should be reading what you want to write. Nothing less.

But can writers also learn from reading books they’d never want to write? Say, that bestseller most reviled by “literary” writers… Twilight? Here I’m going to take a controversial stance: Twi-hard or Twi-hater, you should read Twilight.

GalleyCat recently wrote about a literature professor who–after mocking Twilight as an example of bad writing–finally picked up the books to read them. Said the professor:

“I’m really not looking forward to reading these … Every time I reference low forms of literature, I always use Twilight as the example. Today a student asked if I’ve actually read them, and I had to say no. They demanded that I do.”

I admit I’m not a Dan Brown fan, and after I found myself citing his books in class as examples of terrible writing, I did feel guilty–so I got a copy of The Da Vinci Code. And now I can not only feel justified in my mockery, I can dissect specific sentences for my students as examples of what not to do.

So what do you think? Can you learn something positive about writing by reading a book you believe is bad?

]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/reading-bad-why-writers-should-read-bad-books/feed 9 http://fictionwritersreview.com/essays/the-confusing-pleasures-of-reading-saul-bellow-pt-2 http://fictionwritersreview.com/essays/the-confusing-pleasures-of-reading-saul-bellow-pt-2#comments Tue, 19 Jul 2011 13:00:09 +0000 Daniel Wallace http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=22911 Read Part 1, here.

Part Three: The Bellow Problem

The Adventures of Augie March and Seize the Day feel like perfect novels. Augie March doesn’t really have a plot, or even a specific theme, but these aren’t needed. Augie delivers his rambling experiences across North America and Europe, and it’s hard to come up with a sense of the book different from those Augie pronounces, because its largeness defeats a reader’s critical faculties. It is amusing to see critics gratefully grabbing the explanations the novel offers of itself, like drowning men grabbing at ropes. There is so much exuberance in Augie’s world, both in his language and the people he meets, that a plot seems out of place, and symbolism excessive. One reads to hear more about Simon’s ambition and Thea’s pride, rather than how Augie will change or grow.

Bellow wrote Seize the Day next, and I wondered if, wounded by complaints about Augie March’s shapelessness, he set out to write a planned gem. Aside from a jarring flashback in the first chapter, the novel is perfectly plotted and shaped, rising in tension and suspense as the wretched Wilhelm flails around for any possible hope of seizing his day. Bellow’s supporting cast demands that Wilhelm accept their more cheerful philosophies of life, but the novel seems to be suggesting that we are made of memory and regret, and fashionable platitudes about ‘living in the moment’ ignore what makes us human. I’m not sure, however, if my summation will agree with every reader’s impression, or even if I agree with it myself, because the book is so well plotted that it generates, rather than disseminates, ideas.

However, from Henderson the Rain King onwards, Bellow’s work poses readers with a problem. Henderson, Herzog, and Humboldt’s Gift are novels where the protagonist has to learn something, either alone or from a supporting character, and this learning takes up a large proportion of each book’s page count. In Henderson, the educational endeavour is about redeeming one’s base nature. In Herzog, it is the contrast between romanticism and reality. In Humboldt’s Gift, spirituality versus commerce. While it is a commonplace that stories are supposed to show a character learning, usually this is understood to mean that through events and experiences, a character “learns” something about life (in a metaphorical sense of “learning”—it is presumably nothing one could write down as the answer to a quiz question) and, through that insight, is able to grow. However, Bellow’s novels portray a character trying to understand an actual concept or theory, and even a reader who feels herself familiar with the concepts being introduced may remain unsure how to respond.

The idea-heavy nature of these novels should not, in itself, be a problem for the average lover of literature. After all, many great writers see philosophising as a key part of their art. But I believe that a reader can love novels like The Unbearable Lightness of Being or To The Lighthouse, and still come away bemused by Bellow. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera outlines a few philosophical ideas—such as Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence—and explains that he will now illustrate and question these ideas by introducing a cast of characters, and seeing how their lives prove or refute them. The philosophy offers a framework for understanding the events, and vice versa. One can finish the novel and feel that the events do not completely fit the interpretation Kundera gives, but everything is above board and in earnest. To The Lighthouse, by contrast, offers the reader a world in which thought and musing are as real as action, and a common human inheritance, and so the novel moves towards a climax that is at once physical (finishing a painting, sailing to the lighthouse) and intellectual (having a vision, understanding an old problem). However, neither of these approaches to the philosophical novel explain a work like Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King (1959).

I read Henderson right after Augie March, and while I adore the book’s opening and middle section, I felt perplexed by its last third. Henderson is a hilarious character, a huge tycoon maddened by desire.

Now I have already mentioned that there was a disturbance in my heart, a voice that spoke there and said, I want, I want, I want!

He goes to Africa, fleeing his wife and himself, where he becomes great trouble to two villages. However, the actual action—Henderson meeting peculiar Africans and trying out his mad schemes—largely ends about half way through. The rest of the novel focuses on a long conversation and training programme with King Dahfu, who offers Henderson a very strange kind of therapy. Now, when a novel opens with the claim that, “…the world which I thought so mighty an oppressor has removed its wrath from me,” hasn’t the author offered the reader a contract? This book promises to show how the character went from state A (unhappiness) to state B. In the actual story, however, it’s unclear how Henderson achieved this, and so the book is a bit of a puzzle. Is the king’s lion-based therapy meant to be a genuine and successful aid for Henderson? If it is, why is no turning point actually shown on the page? But if it is not meant to be genuine, why is so much time devoted to it? It seems to go on too long to be only a joke. While I was reading, I had the feeling, justified or not, that Bellow was gearing himself up to make a great pronouncement of some kind, but just couldn’t position his characters well enough to actually say it.



Humboldt’s Gift has a similar structure. Citrine says, early on, that he has since found “light,” and so now, from his future perspective, views the madcap events he is describing with newly found peace. Yet what actual event or insight causes this “light” remains dark. Citrine talks at great length, and often movingly, about the importance of spirituality, and speaks fairly persuasively about his interest in Rudolf Steiner’s theories of “anthroposophy.” And Citrine’s mental operations, which often take place while he lounges on his sofa, seem to form the real structure of the novel—Citrine is on a mission to figure something out, something important, and the reader turns pages with the anticipation that this quest will either succeed or fail. Or that by the end, the two plotlines—of wild, unthinking Chicago-on-the-make, and Citrine’s grandiose meditations on art and the soul—will somehow merge into a revelatory unity. However, the book ends without any sense of whether the mental journey was a sort of comic red herring, or whether it succeeded or didn’t succeed, or whether parts of it were meant to be significant and other parts not, and, if so, which parts. I read the very lovely paperback Penguin Classics editions of Bellow’s novels, which come with celebratory introductions by writers such as Philip Roth and Jeffrey Eugenides, and it is clear that while Roth and Eugenides love Bellow, they acknowledge this feature of Humboldt’s Gift is a problem, and they don’t have an easy answer to it.

I remained confused about these questions throughout my reading of Bellow’s novels. After I ended the novels, I began his collected essays, and his letters, and through those, I have since come to a kind of greater understanding, a kind of lightness, which I will explain in this essay’s final section, but before then, I want to develop here my own take on the “Bellow problem,” and suggest a slightly different view of it.

I suspect that the difficulty readers find in Bellow’s work is not actually, or not only, his ideas, but his characters. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf’s narrator makes it clear that Clarissa Dalloway is no great intellect. She is not supposed to be either especially brilliant or deep. She is a normal woman. From where, then, come the dazzling reflections and speculations that fill Woolf’s pages? Certainly the narrator is telling them to us, but the implication seems to be that these are thoughts and memories everyone has, and it is just chance that the novel has picked Clarissa as its focus. The novel proposes that we are all like Clarissa Dalloway, that one doesn’t need to be an intellectual or an artist to be filled with poetry—the artist’s power is simply to put it down on the page and so reveal it. We get Clarissa’s thoughts in the form of Virginia Woolf’s incredible prose because that elevated language is the only way to understand the experience of living, of which thinking is one joyful part.



This is not the sense I get from reading Bellow’s Herzog. Herzog does not suffer from the “endings issue” I described above: it has a terrific ending, poignant and sublime. What made it hard for me to read was the nihilistic portrayal of the supporting cast. One can easily love Herzog, who is eccentric, vain, troubled, learned, and lusty. But his world is populated by monsters. We learn about Herzog’s ex-wife and her lover (Herzog’s once-friend) only from Herzog’s reminiscences, but if his view of them is faulty, we have very little information with which to form a second opinion, and the outside evidence that the novel presents is that Madeline, the sultry liar who has left him, really is as crazy as Herzog says. Valentine, the ex-friend with a wooden leg, seems equally nuts. I think this ruins the novel’s philosophising. Herzog often contrasts high ideals with “reality,” as if there is a world made of romance and a world made of pragmatism, and the two are not compatible. Both attempt to educate the other, and as the world of romance is the weaker, it needs to accept its chastisement, and toughen up. But because Madeline and Valentine are so monstrous, and their explanations so self-serving and deluded, Bellow’s duality fails. To me, they represent psychosis, not “reality,” and poor Herzog simply needs to get away from them, not learn from them. This made the middle section of the book frustrating going, as it was obvious no encounter, insight, or flashback could have any value where these two were concerned, and the reader must simply wait for Herzog to realise this.

In his survey of Bellow’s work, Philip Roth writes of Herzog, “In all of literature, I know of no more emotionally susceptible male, of no man who brings a greater focus or intensity to engagement with women than this Herzog,” a man “as lavish in describing the generous mistress as Renoir.” I find this judgement troubling. Certainly, one can agree that Herzog is lavish and intense. But through his eyes, we see women as very peculiar creatures. We meet a devotee of sex in Herzog’s lover, Ramona, the sad, enigmatic, emotionless pencils that are Valentine’s wife and Herzog’s first wife, and the castrating sex bomb that is Madeline. Very rarely do we feel that these characterisations are different from these characters’ reality—the novel seems to suggest that these women really are as limited as Herzog sees them.



Anita Berber, by Otto Dix (1925)

And what is more regrettable still is how these same types reappear in Humboldt’s Gift. Citrine encounters three kinds of women in his travels: his lover Renata, a deceitful sexual priestess, Denise, his cold, hate-filled ex-wife, and a variety of leggy, doe-eyed students and secretaries. Harold Bloom is right to dismiss Bellow’s female characters of the later novels as “third-rate pipe dreams.” When a reader, holding Humboldt’s Gift in his hands, looks back at Augie March, the journey Saul Bellow has taken in his depiction of people is a very sad one. There is no way to compare the daring, principled Mimi Villars, Augie March’s one equal in oration, to the simple Ramona (Herzog), or to the comically shallow Renata (Humboldt’s Gift). Where is a woman equal to Augie’s Thea in these later books? And the male cast goes on a similar, if less marked, decline. Cantabile in Humboldt’s Gift is a hilariously manic plot device, but as an individual he no offers no comparison at all to the volcanic ambitions, peculiar code of honour, and suicidal longings of Simon, Augie March’s elder brother.

It seems that as Bellow re-focused his lens on thought, and a main character’s deliberations over it, the fictional world around that central character darkened and cheapened. As the narrator / protagonist’s internal action grows, around him warmth and depth shrinks, until, by Humboldt’s Gift, it is clear that on a mental level, Citrine is utterly alone. This falling away of the world then renders the interplay of thought and reflection a sterile joke, as whatever the main character finally decides, there is no outside world for his deliberations to have meaning. Bellow has little choice, in the world of raging shadows he creates, other than to step away from the quest of thought at the climactic moment, and pretend he was only kidding. The novels remain staggering for their invention, their comedy, their culture, and their mingling of riotous squalor with the precepts of a course in philosophy. Bellow writes with a genius that is hard to fathom. Readers may, however, feel troubled by the books’ frequent difficulty in forming a coherent whole.

I finished my study of Bellow’s novels a frustrated fan. I loved Seize the Day and still find myself dreaming of the verbal rhythms of Augie March. I would recommend newcomers to start with either Henderson the Rain King or Seize the Day, then read The Adventures of Augie March. After that, I would recommend putting his fiction aside for a while, as I did not do, and turning to Bellow’s essays and letters, before reading the big late books, which, while unquestionably incredible works of art, contain certain potholes for the reader, as described above. His non-fiction, however, has given me a different insight into Bellow, and has made me re-see his novels.



Part Four: It All Adds Up

The closing of my local Borders allowed me to pick up a copy of Bellow Collected Letters for half price, and I downloaded the audio book of his collected essays and lectures, It All Adds Up, from Audible. I have since been recommending It All Adds Up to everyone. Bellow is a brilliant essayist, and listening to his Nobel Prize lecture while wandering in Philadelphia, I had to pause halfway down Eleventh Street, restraining tears. For these essays and talks, Bellow seems to have created a very different self than that of both his letters and his novels. Bellow the essayist is calm, rueful, valiant, and he expounds, through essays on Mozart, Paris, and Chicago, his central theses about the challenge of creating art in his America, and the dubious pessimism of much modernist art.

From the introductory essay on Mozart, I was stunned straightaway, because what the essays reveal is that Saul Bellow is more than capable of making a clear argument. I realise this seems an absurd claim to make about a writer laurelled with almost every major award, but having read several of his novels, in which his heroes, who often seem slightly altered versions of himself, strain to launch their ineffectual polemics, one becomes accustomed to the enormous pressure of a grand intellect not quite expressing itself. At first, the essays’ fluency only bewildered me further. Why can Bellow express in clear, kind language his thoughts about the soul when speaking as himself, and why can he not when writing as Henderson? Perhaps Bellow considered those fragmentary insights which litter his novels the true location of his visions of the universe, and, focusing on those, he was content let the overall shape of the story, and its climax, come out however it wished.



More importantly, the essays suggest that great fiction writing may not be the controlled, serious, balanced activity implied by the present-day world of MFA workshops and books on craft. Bellow seems to have accessed quite different sides of himself when he wrote his fiction and when he tried to explain it. Something wild and sorrowful and titanically self-pitying becomes clear when one sees the novels in relation to all of Bellow’s words—they express the part of him that struggles to cease weeping. Perhaps really great writing takes place in hell, where no wounds heal, and the same ex-wife, long dead in reality, is demanding alimony with the same ferocity every minute. Whatever the author might wish from his or her art, the path down to the inferno changes little over the years, and the same world-making toolkit is available for each project, no matter what the writer chatting away up in the sunlit world would prefer.

I would not recommend the Collected Letters with the same fervour. At least during Bellow’s early years, they do not form a coherent biography, and, more remarkably, they contain very little discussion of the craft of writing. As a writer, Bellow seems pitifully alone through his twenties and thirties, and seems, in these letters and the memoirs contained in It All Adds Up, to have had no one with whom he discussed his work on a technical level. Even when he passes by James Baldwin in Paris, he avoids him, afraid the broke Baldwin will ask for a loan, and when, in a wonderful fantasy that he scribbles for his agent, Bellow imagines himself meeting F. Scott Fitzgerald in Switzerland, all the two men do is drink and gossip. I came to believe that this isolation was connected to the structural problems I have described above, how the novels don’t come out with the full clarity that Bellow as a thinker and polemicist was capable of. When complaining about a criticism, or building up a story’s worth to an editor, his letters show him using the most vague criteria—he says a story is too risky for the establishment, or “very good,” or makes some other basic claim. Thirty-something Bellow also hates explanations of his work, and asserts a rigid division between scholars and artists, between the dead leaves who analyse a book to death, and the living readers who enjoy it—but this is to claim an unworkably crude divide between conscious and unconscious pleasures, and one that his own fiction does not recognise, depicting a succession of scholars ruminating on Plato as they chase skirts.

One feels that a young Bellow today would be a very different writer, attending workshops and having to teach theories of screen-writing, and that the private hell that forged his novels would have necessarily been a more public, better-lit location. Perhaps, as a result, the novels would have been more tightly organised. Perhaps they would have been less remarkable. The connection between isolation and greatness that I have just implied is probably, of course, nonsense, another permutation of the old boring duality of “genius versus talent.” But Bellow’s works do lead me to consider either that cliché or something much like it, combining as they do such immense technical skill and such immense technical peculiarity. Hearing Bellow say of his youth that he was the only full time novelist in Chicago, one senses that we will not see his like again.



Further Links & Resources:

• Curious about the still-vibrant dialogue surrounding Saul Bellow’s work? Visit The Saul Bellow Journal, which publishes scholarship and criticism about Bellow, and has a very nice Bellow chronology available on their site.
• Explore the wonderful New York Times archive of Bellow-related pieces, including reviews of all the novels mentioned in this essay, and many more pieces, including a moving audio tribute to Bellow by Edward Rothstein, cultural critic at the Times, following Bellow’s death in 2005.
• Because it’s too interesting not to include, Bellow in a NYT piece from January 31, 1954 on “How I Wrote Augie March’s Story”
• In Saul Bellow’s 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature Lecture he describes the challenge of writing fiction in terms that feel as fresh today as they did thirty-five years ago:
  

  Characters, Elizabeth Bowen once said, are not created by writers. They pre-exist and they have to be found. If we do not find them, if we fail to represent them, the fault is ours. It must be admitted, however, that finding them is not easy. The condition of human beings has perhaps never been more difficult to define. Those who tell us that we are in an early stage of universal history must be right. We are being lavishly poured together and seem to be experiencing the anguish of new states of consciousness. In America many millions of people have in the last forty years received a “higher education” – in many cases a dubious blessing. In the upheavals of the Sixties we felt for the first time the effects of up-to-date teachings, concepts, sensitivities, the pervasiveness of psychological, pedagogical, political ideas.

  Read the full text here.

• Read Gordon Lloyd Harper’s classic interview with Saul Bellow from The Paris Review, Winter 1966: Saul Bellow, The Art of Fiction No. 37
]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/essays/the-confusing-pleasures-of-reading-saul-bellow-pt-2/feed 0 http://fictionwritersreview.com/essays/the-confusing-pleasures-of-reading-saul-bellow-pt-1 http://fictionwritersreview.com/essays/the-confusing-pleasures-of-reading-saul-bellow-pt-1#comments Mon, 18 Jul 2011 13:00:31 +0000 Daniel Wallace http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=22906

Part One: a season’s reading

I began the year without having read a page of Saul Bellow, and made a plan to fix this. As a writer concerned with the life and sensuality of his own prose, I wanted to provoke an encounter with the American novelist who James Wood claims, “…makes even the fleet-footed—the Updikes, the DeLillos, the Roths—seem like monopodes.” If Wood’s claim was true, I wanted to first enjoy this fleet-footedness, and secondly figure out how it was done. Planning my survey, I was not necessarily interested in achieving completeness. I would read, I decided, five Bellow novels, absorbing and savouring something of Bellow’s sentence and novel-making, and go further if the feeling moved me. Bellow, of course, had written more than five books, and far more than five books had been written about him, but I invoked the artist’s sweet prerogative of leaping to conclusions, of being biased, partial, fanatical. We are not as moral as scholars, who feel unjustified if they judge from a position of half-knowledge, a desire for credibility that perhaps obscures for them a little of each book’s divine fire. I tried, therefore, during my reading project—which ended up including the six novels The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, A Theft, Herzog, Seize the Day, and Humboldt’s Gift, plus his Collected Letters and his collection of essays, It All Adds Up—to read more as writer than critic, to eat well, although I am not sure I succeeded in avoiding the mind set of the English teacher, and in the judgements that follow, you may well feel that I have failed. Although I have now read a major portion of his work, Saul Bellow’s fiction continues to perplex me.



However, before I begin my introduction to Saul Bellow’s beauties and confusions, I’d like to answer any readers’ doubts about the value of making such a single-author study. There are disadvantages: for instance, flaws that recur novel to novel become disproportionately noticeable. Probably Bellow’s contemporaries noticed that the female characters in Humboldt’s Gift seem awfully like the female characters from Herzog, but as eleven years had passed between their reading of the two works, it may not have bothered them the way it bothered me. And it is hard not to assign a narrative to the development of the writer’s art, seeking in the current novel what one felt incomplete in the just read. But I think the more serious doubt a writer or lover of literature might have, in our hurried age, is that to focus on one author like this seems indulgent, a fatal luxury when so much unread literature cries its demands. How can I devote a season to Bellow while still ignorant of Cervantes? Against this worry I must stand firm. Reading is not worth doing if it becomes a craven struggle to feel well informed. Remaining human in our continuing search for pleasure and education in literature, we should accept that we are people, not filing cabinets, and the two best ways I have found to do this involve either focusing on a writer’s work or a critic’s recommendations. Better to cultivate and care for one garden than, like a squirrel, dig frantic holes in a great number.

Part Two: Bellow’s staggering paragraphs.

The first Bellow novel I opened was The Adventures of Augie March (1953), a six-hundred-page word-avalanche. I’m not sure anything can prepare you for the density, the vitality, the variety of Augie March’s delivery. What takes this beyond the merely impressive—any writer can open a thesaurus—is how Augie sounds like he is inventing his language as he goes along. He is a self-educated street urchin who just happens, somehow, to be able to throw out with unconscious ease one unique phrasing after another.

The filth of the house, meantime, and particularly of the kitchen, was stupendous. Nevertheless, swollen and fire-eyed, slow on her feet, shouting incomprehensibly on the telephone, and her face as if lit by that gorgeous hair which finally advanced her into royalty, she somehow kept up with her duties. She had meals on time for the men, she saw to it that Friedl practiced and rehearsed, that the money collected was checked, counted, sorted, and the coins rolled when Coblin wasn’t on hand to do it himself, that the new orders were attended to.

Part of this “vernacular” effect comes from how the final parts of the long sentences do not live up to the grandeur of what precedes them. After we read about fire-eyes and royally gorgeous hair, Augie finishes with, “She somehow kept up with her duties,” an abrupt drop in register, as if he has heard what a periodic sentence is but didn’t quite grasp the principle, or seems dubious of his own eloquence.

One has the feeling of simply getting more in one of Augie’s paragraphs than one gets from some whole chapters of other narrators, as if he could present a dozen more adventures without fatigue.

At first we often worked in the same places. We went to Coblin’s sometimes when he needed us for his crew, and down in Woolworth’s cellar we unpacked crockery from barrels so enormous that you could walk into them; we scooped out stale straw and threw it in the furnace. Or we loaded paper into the giant press and baled it. It was foul down there from the spoiled food and mustard cans, old candy, and the straw and paper. For lunch we went upstairs. Simon refused to take sandwiches from home; he said we needed a hot meal when we were working. For twenty-five cents we got two hotdogs, a mug of root beer, and pie, the dogs in cotton-quality rolls, dripping with the same mustard that made the air bad below. But it was the figure you cut as an employee, on an employee’s footing with the girls, in work clothes, and being of that tin-tough, creaking, jazzy bazaar of hardware, glassware, chocolate, chicken-feed, jewelry, drygoods, oilcloth, and song hits—that was the big thing; and even being the Atlases of it, under the floor, hearing how the floor bore up under the ambling weight of hundreds, with the fanning, breathing movie organ next door and the rumble descending from the trolleys on Chicago Avenue—the bloody-rinded Saturday gloom of wind-borne ash, and blackened forms of five-storey buildings rising up to a blind Northern dimness from the Christmas blaze of shops.

Reading critics on Bellow, one sometimes gets the feeling that they believe such language is to a large extent a memesis of actual Chicago Jewish street-talk, that Bellow wrote like this because it was how he spoke or thought. But when one reads lines like, “… hearing how the floor bore up under the ambling weight of hundreds,” one realises that such a view is simple craziness. Vowel hunters will have already noticed how the phrase starts on one loose pattern—how, floor, bore—and then switches to another—under, ambling, hundreds. Perhaps something similar occurs in the equal marvel that is, “the bloody-rinded Saturday gloom of wind-borne ash.”

But Augie was not the end of Saul Bellow’s development as a stylist. The novel came out when he was thirty-eight, and he continued to write during his long life, publishing his last novel, Ravelstein, almost fifty years later. I detected two additional style periods in my incomplete survey. Firstly, in Seize the Day (1956) and Herzog (1964), Bellow seemed to create a “mature” style, restraining the abundance of Augie in order to create pure beauty. Herzog, in particular, reads so beautifully at times it doesn’t feel like reading, more like looking out a window on a breezy day, or overhearing music.

This is from the novel’s first page:

It was the peak of summer in the Berkshires. Herzog was alone in the big old house. Normally particular about food, he now ate Silvercup bread from the paper package, beans from the can, and American cheese. Now and then he picked raspberries in the overgrown garden, lifting up the thorny canes with absent-minded caution. As for sleep, he slept on a mattress without sheets—it was his abandoned marriage bed—or in the hammock, covered by his coat. Tall bearded grass and locust and maple seedlings surrounded him in the yard. When he opened his eyes in the night, the stars were near like spiritual bodies. Fires, of course; gases—minerals, heat, atoms, but eloquent at five in the morning to a man lying in a hammock, wrapped in his overcoat.

Why is this so great? The tone is quiet, deliberate, a narrator explaining just how things are, someone who will introduce us to the metaphysics in Herzog’s mind but will not be pushy about it. A voice both authoritative and agnostic. And the sentences vary so well in length and rhythm, creating that effortless reading experience I just waxed about. The paragraph opens with two short and simple “be” sentences (“It was,” “Herzog was”), then the third puts the main clause in the middle, and ends with a list whose items come in increasing brevity. Between two sentences that begin with dependent clauses (“As for sleep,” “When he opened his eyes”), Bellow gives us a one clause sentence with an long subject phrase (“Tall bearded grass and locust and maple seedlings surrounded him…”). This variety makes for easy eyes. And, intellectually, we feel like we have touched many things journeying through this one short block of text—the warmth of day and cold of night, processed food versus the thorns of berries, a failed marriage surrounded by pleasant nature, the stars, spirituality versus science, solitude. We feel that real life is actually like this, this constant interplay of complexities, and we were longing for a novelist who knew how to do justice to the scope of our own shimmering thoughts.



Then, in Humboldt’s Gift, published when Bellow was sixty, Bellow seems to deconstruct his own stylistic achievement, creating for his frantic narrator Charlie Citrine a more repetitive, less various prose.

Cantabile caught me by the sleeve. “You wait,” he said. I didn’t really know what to do. After all, he carried a gun. I had for a long time thought about having a gun, too, Chicago being what it is. But they’d never give me a license. Cantabile, without a license, packed a pistol. There was one index of the difference between us. Only God knew what consequences such differences might bring. “Aren’t you enjoying our afternoon?” said Cantabile, and grinned.

Humboldt’s Gift means to race along, in a five hundred page dash of subject-verb-object sentences, as Citrine’s so-called friends pull him onwards through journeys of crime, divorce, sex, socialising, at the same as he attempts, in the quiet of his own mind, to remember his friend and hero, the dead poet Humboldt, and to come up with a genuine solution to the decline of poetry in our modern age. Humboldt’s Gift is frenetic, sexy, unbelievably erudite, and for about 380 pages of its 500 was one of the greatest reading experiences of my life. I have not often felt so compelled to keep reading a literary work, grabbing time to stretch out on my sofa and catch another thirty pages, feeling satisfied on so many mental levels, from carnal to abstract. And yet, the novel’s last hundred or so pages were a colossal letdown. I have rarely been so dismayed by a book’s so-called climax, and wished that Saul Bellow were still alive so I could ring him to ask, “What the fuck?” The novel seems to fall away from its ambitions, losing faith in itself. By the last few scenes, Bellow seems to be pretending that he hadn’t wanted to say or dramatise anything in the first place. A reader may at first feel cheated, and then start to wonder if she has missed something.



Indeed, during my reading of his six novels, this discordant mix of emotions was a regular companion. For me, Bellow’s work continually captured my admiration, but only rarely my loyalty, and for all his obvious genius, few of his novels landed quite right. Now, I may have been too picky, my critical impulses sharpened by the speed at which I moved from one Bellow book to another. I may be one of the intellectuals that Bellow is constantly critiquing in his letters and essays. But reading his critics, it’s clear that there is a sort of “Bellow problem,” whose parameters have a remarkable degree of uniformity among critical readers, and which even his admirers feel the need to justify. It is this problem that I will now address, and try to find a solution for.

Editor’s Note: Please return to Fiction Writers Review tomorrow for the conclusion of Daniel Wallace’s essay “The Confusing Pleasures of Reading Saul Bellow.” In it, Wallace considers how Bellow constructs philosophical briar patches into which character and reader may fall, the progression of characters throughout the six novels, and how reading Bellow’s nonfiction provides the perfect foil to his fictional expansiveness.

Further Links & Resources are included at the end of Part 2.

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