1. Ulysses by James Joyce

Year Published: 1922

Pages: 552 (text only, no notes)

First Sentence: Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

Rating: 2/3 (I don't recommend it but also it blew my mind)

Review:

Part I: Introduction

Considering how long it's taken me to finally sit down and write my review of Ulysses, you'd think I wasn't quite ready to finish my time with The List. That's not quite so. I finished reading the book a little over a week ago, but of course any number of things prevented me from taking the time to write down my thoughts on it.

(To get the obvious question out of the way—no I don't feel any sense of relief just yet. I'm saving that for the day my review of Pride and Prejudice goes live on the blog.)

Now, I want to revisit my original mission statement before I get too far in this review. I began the project of reading the Top 100 novels to see if they would speak to someone without an education in literary analysis and criticism, specifically an engineer. While I've semi-abandoned my engineering career, I've stuck with this project. The books themselves have taught me a thing or two, and what with a lot of reading and a lot of life lessons, I'm a much more careful reader than the young woman who started the project by checking The Magnificent Ambersons out of the library in late 2009.

However, I still don't know anything formal or official about literature. I've never read the actual Odyssey yet in any form, despite my ongoing attachment to Greek myth. I I know the broadest of strokes: Ulysses/Odysseus goes to fight in the Trojan War, and then angers the gods such that he and his crew wander the earth for many years before they can return home. Highlights include outwitting a cyclops, being chained to the mast of his ship so he can hear the sirens' song, and getting waylaid by Circe, who transforms the crew into animals. When he gets home, Odysseus has to slaughter a bunch of men who want to marry his wife. I don't know how that all fits together, though, and I don't know anything about the Lotus Eaters, or his son Telemachus, or etc.

Of course I was already somewhat familiar with James Joyce's Ulysses by reputation as well. I knew that it takes place over the course of one day in Dublin (specifically June 16, 1904). I knew that it features, in the role of Odysseus/Ulysses, a man named Leopold Bloom. I also had heard there were some dirty parts, that the style was difficult, and so on.

Having tousled with James Joyce previously over Finnegans Wake (brilliant trolling of the literary establishment that should not be categorized as a novel) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (mostly just boring), and armed with Stephen Fry's praise from this old Youtube video, I dug in to Ulysses with cautious realism.

Part 2: Ulysses as Object

Okay okay, another digression before I actually review the book. In the case of Ulysses, one must identify the edition they've read. I always want to roll my eyes when academic types refer to something as "a text" (even as I acknowledge the usefulness of the term) but Ulysses really is a text. I read the Alma Classics edition, based on the 1939 Odyssey Press Edition. In this edition, 552 pages are the text of the novel Ulysses, 316 pages are the annotations by Sam Slote, Marc A. Mamigonian, and John Turner, and ten pages are the bibliography for the notes. I estimate that I read about 50 pages of the notes. I definitely didn't read all of them because I wanted to get into the rhythm of the novel as much as I could. The highest number of notes I found on a single page was 90 on a page in the Cyclops chapter, which had a long list of actual and invented saints.

Sam Slote wrote the Introduction, which of course I didn't read.

The final thing I'll say about this is that the print in this book was the smallest I've ever seen. I'm sure it would be over a thousand pages if the print were closer to the average size. And it was hard to hang onto already!

Part 3: What Happens

In the following section, every time I state categorically that something happens in this book, that a character is a certain way, etc., imagine that statement followed by a row of question marks in parentheses, like so (????????). I'm honestly not sure I know anything about this, but it would get very tedious for me to be repeating that as often as necessary. I'm happy to be corrected.

The book is split into three parts. The first is only 40 pages and introduces Stephen Dedalus, who you may remember from APotA. Here he's in the role of Telemachus, son of Odysseus, and he's just wandering around Dublin in the morning if I'm not mistaken.

The three chapters in Part I are:

1. Telemachus (8-9 a.m. in Martello Tower, Sandycove)
2. Nestor (10-11 a.m. in or at Boys' school, Dalkey)
3. Proteus (11 a.m.-12 p.m. in or at Sandymount Strand)

I have no idea how to account for the missing hour between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. I'd always thought that Ulysses was a full 24 hours from the exclusive point of view of Leopold Bloom, but I was definitely mistaken. In any case, Stephen Dedalus was heading to Paris at the end of APotA but now his mother has died and he's back in Dublin, still a young man. His section begins in a fairly straightforward style but it's not long before his stream of consciousness breaks in.

Part II is where Leopold Bloom is introduced and goes about his day. He's in his late 30s. He has a wife, Molly Bloom, and a daughter, Milly. The main thing that stuck with me from his introduction is that he loves to eat organs and this smell lingers on his breath. I'm both too dumb and too lazy to enumerate the multitude of styles, modes, and experiments employed by Joyce throughout this core section of the book. Each chapter has its own conceit. There are 12 of them, again covering more than 12 hours and incorporating some gaps to my astonishment:

4. Calypso (8-9 a.m. at/in 7 Eccles Street and environs
5. Lotus Eaters (10-11 a.m. around the Westland Row station)
6. Hades (11 a.m.-12 p.m. in a funeral cortège that starts from Sandymount and travels through the city centre to Prospect Cemetery, Glasnevin)
7. Aeolus (12-1 p.m. in the offices of the Freeman's Journal, 4-8 Prince's Street North)
8. Lestrygonians(1-2 p.m. in Central Dublin, from the offices of the Freeman's Journal to the National Museum on Kildare Street, via Davy Byrne's pub on Duke Street)
9. Scylla and Charybdis (2-3 p.m. at the National Library of Ireland, Kildare Street)
10. Wandering Rocks (2:55-4 p.m. throughout Dublin)
11. Sirens (4-5 p.m. at the Ormond Hotel bar, 8 Upper Ormond Quay, and environs)
12. Cyclops (5-6 p.m. at Barney Kiernan's pub, 8-10 Little Britain Street, and environs)
13. Nausicaa (8-9 p.m. at Sandymount Strand, by Leahy's Terrace)
14. Oxen of the Sun (10-11 p.m. at National Maternity Hospital, 29-31 Holles Street)
15. Circe (12-1 a.m., at Bella Cohen's brothel, Mecklenburgh Street, and environs)

Bloom gets up to all kinds of excitement over the course of his day. He attends a funeral and spends the whole day in mourning clothes so that everyone who sees him expresses their concern/dismay. He goes to the office of the newspaper where he works selling ads (apparently he doesn't earn his keep on the ads alone and is helped out by being a member of the Freemasons). He visits a few different bars, and as it gets late, he ends up in the "night town," the red light district.

That last bit is the Circe chapter. It's by far the longest chapter in the book, written in the format of a drama, with stage directions, and is overall just very surreal and weird.

At last we arrive at Part III, where Bloom and Dedalus actually meet up. They vaguely know each other somehow. Bloom is 15 years or more Dedalus's senior. Bloom's only son died in infancy (leading to the cessation of marital relations between him and his wife) and he feels some fatherly affection for Stephen. The two of them leave the brothel and go to Bloom's home.

There are three more chapters in this part:

16. Eumaeus (1-2 a.m. in/at the cabman's shelter, near the Custom House)
17. Ithaca (2-3 a.m., in/at 7 Eccles Street)
18. Penelope (3-4 a.m., in/at 7 Eccles Street and elsewhere)

Instead of actually describing the conversation between the two men in Ithaca, Joyce instead writes it as a series of questions and answers. Then, when Stephen finally leaves, we get the last chapter of the book, which are Molly Bloom's thoughts as she's drifting between sleeping and waking, as her husband joins her in bed.

Part 4: The Dirty Parts

There are a couple of notorious dirty parts in this novel that I would be remiss not to address.

First of all, in the Sirens chapter, Bloom comes across a young girl and masturbates to completion while looking at her, under his clothes. What I didn't realize when I'd heard about this incident previously, is that we get to see a big chunk of it from the perspective of the girl, and she's aware of what's happening and into it. Unless, of course, what we're actually getting is what Bloom imagines the girl's perspective is, which is certainly possible.

Secondly, and I think less well-known, is an incident that's likely to be the first example of transgender fisting in the literary canon. I saw an article that mentioned this and couldn't fathom what it might mean until I got to the part of the book it references.

BELLO 

... (He bares his arm and plunges it elbowdeep in Bloom’s vulva.) There’s fine depth for you! What, boys? That give you a hardon? (He shoves his arm in a bidder’s face.) Here, wet the deck and wipe it round!

This is from the Circe chapter, and I believe Bloom has taken the form of a sow at this point in the narrative. Like I said, it's very surreal. There are other dirty parts for sure (Molly Bloom is an undeniably sexual being, for instance). But those are some highlights.

Part 5: So What Did I Think?

I have to admit that my expectations for Ulysses were very, very low, especially after reading APotA, which I thought might be more straightforward and interesting.

In some ways, my expectations were met. I didn't enjoy the act of reading Ulysses. It was more or less hard work the whole way through and frequently I was just reading for the sake of getting through the book, rather than for understanding. It's too long, although God help me if I could figure out exactly what to chop out.

On the other hand Ulysses blew my mind.

There are several aspects of this that I didn't touch on it my relation of the broad events of the book, or only briefly. Leopold Bloom has Jewish Hungarian origins, for example, and no one will let him forget it. Stephen Dedalus has extensive opinions on Shakespeare and his relationship with his wife Anne. Various characters at various times have a lot to say about Irish home rule, the Catholic church, and prominent social and political issues of both their own and Joyce's time. Joyce is constantly referencing specific locations, shops, and offices in Dublin.

More than any book I've ever read before Ulysses captures real people in a real place. (I'm reassured to find that Virginia Woolf agreed with me on the value and boredom of the novel.) The huge specificity of the book is one of the many challenges for the modern reader, though. So many of the particulars are long forgotten, hence the 300 pages of explanatory notes.

And then, even as Joyce achieved that, he also did it while bursting through numerous bounds of the form of the novel. I appreciate this experimentation less, though I do respect it. I especially appreciated the chapter where he moves through a whole succession of literary styles, proving at a couple of points that it wasn't beyond him to write a wholly intelligible paragraph now and then.

More than anything Ulysses made me wonder at and about James Joyce as a person, and the book as a personal achievement. How did this man come to write this book, and cram so much into it? Where did the subjects of his interest end? How did he write this book? How did he know when it was done? If Finnegans Wake hadn't made me so angry I might've wondered the same things about it, except that it doesn't overflow its pages the way Ulysses does.

Ulysses made me think about my world and how I exist in it and what it would take to actually capture that world in the pages of a novel. It made me wonder if there's a 21st century version of Joyce who could write the 21st century version of Ulysses, or if he was truly one of a kind. It made me conscious of what a book is and what it can do.

Part 6: Conclusion

One of the reasons it's taken me so long to write this review (it's now three weeks since I finished reading the book) is that I'm extremely conflicted on where to come down on it.

I'll start with some low-hanging fruit.

Ulysses more than deserves its place in the literary canon. It even deserves its place on The List. No other book on The List works as hard as Ulysses or made me feel the way it did. If Finnegans Wake was trolling, Ulysses is more of an epiphany.

So, if you've ever though of reading it one day, do. I don't recommend going in as blind as I did. You'd be well-served to read one of the many, many introductory texts out there.

But what to say about Ulysses as far as it concerns the average reader? Is it a good book or just an important one? Here at the end of my journey through The List, I'm not sure if I'm an average reader anymore. Certainly I can't separate my feelings about finishing Ulysses after spending over a decade with The List, from the way it made me think about literature, from the overall bad time I had with the book on a page by page level. Despite all the time I spent with Bloom, I was too confused most of the time to feel as if I knew him at all.

I guess maybe the answer can be found back at the beginning of this whole project. I referred to a competing, reader-selected list, with Ulysses in the 100th position instead of first. The further away we all get from the time when Ulysses was written, the harder it will be to decode. If I've learnt anything from The List it's to stop reading books I don't enjoy and I don't think many people in 2021 and beyond would enjoy Ulysses. At the same time, every now and then, I think it's a good idea to experience art that challenges your assumptions.

So I guess that's what I'll recommend. Challenge yourself, or make something that will challenge someone else. I challenged myself with reading The List, and now that I've finished, I'll move on to new challenges.

For now, time is u.p.: up.

- - - - -

It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don't spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the etherial bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness...

- - - - -

We can't change the country. Let us change the subject.

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2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Year Published: 1926

Pages: 140

First Sentence: In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

Rating: 2/3 (meh)

Review:

I promise that I'm not giving The Great Gatsby a middling rating just to be edgy.

In twenty or so years of reading adult fiction, I'd somehow managed to never read The Great Gatsby before now, and also never had the plot spoiled, either. The book is narrated by a young man named Nick Carraway, who's left his midwestern town to live in New York and sell bonds. Over the course of one heady Jazz Age summer, Nick becomes involved with his wealthy neighbours. There are his cousin Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom, and then a mysterious figure named Jay Gatsby. Gatsby's in love with Daisy, and over the course of the novel we and Nick discover how the two of them came to know each other, and what eventually happens between them.

This book had a few things working against it.

First and worst of all was my other F. Scott Fitzgerald reading experience with Tender Is the Night, a book I didn't like, that felt like a complete chore to read despite its relatively short length. I am pleased to report that, previous experience notwithstanding, The Great Gatsby is not only readable but easily readable. Having Nick Carraway for a charming, personable narrator with a sense of humour is far preferable to the third person narration of Tender Is the Night. Plus, the prose in The Great Gatsby sparkles in a way that it can't have done in the other book, because I feel like I would've remembered it.

The other point against The Great Gatsby is my high expectations, which rarely bode well. The Great Gatsby has one of the biggest reputations in literature, and so I couldn't avoid getting my hopes up, but I don't know how a book can live up to the reputation this one has. I went in to this expecting to have my socks knocked off and my jaw dropped and neither of those things happened. The book is by no means a bad one, and actually I liked it, but I have no plans to read it again the way I do for several other books on The List.

Finally, I'm just so tired of The List and everything it stands for in terms of 20th century literature and my own reading, and apathy is probably worse than hostility when it comes to a book like this. No list enumerating the greatest published works of an entire century would ever be complete listing only one hundred of those works (even if you only pick one language), but I'm so ready to choose my own reading material again.

What I'm wondering right now is whether The Great Gatsby is going to stick with me or not. Again, I like this book and I think there was good stuff in it. The characters are well-developed and Nick is a likeable narrator. The themes of ambition and corruption and shallowness are still important today. But without that gut punch that I look for when calling a book truly great, I just don't think I want to be someone else adding my voice to the superlative praise of this book.

The Great Gatsby isn't bad and it won't take you long to read it. But you might want to try something less well-known instead.

- - - - -

'Look here, old sport,' he broke out surprisingly, 'what's your opinion of me, anyhow?' 

A little overwhelmed, I began the generalized evasions which that question deserves.

- - - - -

4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Year Published: 1955

Pages: 317

First Sentence: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.

Rating: 2/3 (meh)

Review:

A few months ago, I listened to a podcast called Hunting Warhead, which is about taking down an online pedophile ring. It was tough to listen to—there are interviews with reporters, cops, family members and friends of the guilty parties, and some details of the crimes. It's so hard to imagine what it's like inside the heads of people who are sexually attracted to and abuse children, some entirely unrepentant and unconcerned about the harm they've done.

Vladimir Nabokov tried, and that's how we got Lolita. It's narrated from the first person perspective by a man calling himself Humbert Humbert. He likes young girls, specifically those between 10 and 13 years old, and only specific ones, who he refers to as nymphets. After taking us through some of his history (an unconsummated juvenile romance, his unsuccessful marriage, several stints in mental hospitals), Humbert goes to stay in the town of Ramsdale in New England with a woman named Charlotte Haze and her daughter. Humbert immediately identifies Dolores as a "nymphet" but Mrs. Haze doesn't identify Humbert as a monster. He calls the little girl "Lolita."

Obviously I've known about this book for a very long time. It's notorious, and it's been waiting for me in the highest reaches of The List for over a decade. That's not mentioning how it's so famous that it's become cultural shorthand. However, just like with Lord of the Flies, it doesn't play out quite as I expected from its reputation. I'd never been sure, for instance, whether Humbert actually abused Dolores during the book. The answer is yes, this book is full of child sexual abuse. It's often obscured, but it's there if you don't allow Humbert to charm you into looking the other way. 

Lolita is in some ways an objectively excellent book but I didn't enjoy it much. I like the manipulation of the English language by a non-native speaker (neither Nabokov nor Humbert has English for a first language, and the book is packed with French words and phrases). I like a good unreliable narrator, and Humbert is definitely that. But in addition to the horrifying subject matter, the pacing in the book is also not the greatest. When Humbert and Dolores are touring around the United States, things often get a bit boring.

For my second foray into Nabokov's work I'm again impressed and yet failing to connect. I don't know if it's me or him or both of us, or just the books I've tried. (I'd be a bit concerned if I had any kind of close connection to Humbert.) Maybe someday I'll read Pnin.

But as far as recommending this book goes, I don't know what to say other than read it if you were already planning to. I don't think it's essential. I do think that an understanding of pedophilia is critical for our society in order to hopefully reduce child sexual abuse in an era when it's easier to perpetrate than ever before. For daring to present things from a pedophile's perspective, I think this book has some value, I'm just not sure how much. I've seen a few descriptions that call it a love story (and also some that say it's about Europe vs America, to which I say—ok, sure). If it reads as anything other than a "love" story about one-sided obsession and abuse then I would suggest the reader needs to examine their values.

I just can't help comparing Lolita to Bastard Out of Carolina, in which we see abuse from the child's perspective. Comparing the effete tone of Lolita to the raw brutality of the other book leaves me wondering which one of them we need more right now. Is it possible that we need them both?

- - - - -

You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs—the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate—the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power. (This is (one of) Humbert Humbert's descriptions of what a "nymphet" is. -MR)

- - - - -

8. Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

Year Published: 1940 in English (2018 in the original German)

Pages: 272

First Sentence: The cell door slammed behind Rubashov.

Rating: 2/3 (meh)

Review:

Darkness at Noon is about a man named NS Rubashov. Though it's never named, his country is a fictionalized Soviet Union, and Rubashov was one of the heroes of the Revolution that brought what the book calls The Party into power. Unfortunately for everyone involved, things have gone bad, and Rubashov is arrested at the beginning of the book and accused of plotting against the Party and its leader.

He hasn't really done any such thing, but that doesn't really matter to his interrogators or to those who want him out of the way. He's able to communicate through a system of taps with the inmates in the cells on either side of him, and learns from one who else is in the prison and some of the movements of the guards. As he paces back and forth in his cell for days on end, he reflects on his past as as revolutionary and all the different compromises and betrayals he's been through.

A little bit like my experience with Animal Farm, this book really made me wish that I knew more about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union. The sketchy details I remember from high school history class just aren't cutting it these days.

The book and the story it tells are undoubtedly powerful. At one point a character describes how he didn't know there were such a thing as minutes to break up the hour until he was a teenager, and you realize the magnitude of the change that has taken place within the lifetimes of the characters. There are several scenes like that, that make you sit up and take notice. At the other end of the spectrum, there's a character in the book who is primarily referred to only as "Hare-lip," and I didn't enjoy it any more in this book than I did in The Princess and the Goblin. I won't comment on the prose style of a rushed translation, either. Rubashov's relationship with his secretary, Arlova, reads very differently in the #MeToo era than it would've a few years ago, much less when the book was published. She's one of two female characters in the novel, both of whom are secretaries.

Darkness at Noon had a couple of strikes against it before I even opened the cover.

Most gravely, for the purposes of this blog, is that The List is supposed to be the Top 100 English language novels of the 20th century, and Darkness at Noon was originally written in German. This was apparently justified in the late 90s by the fact that the original German manuscript was believed to have been lost in the Second World War prior to its publication, making the English text the original published version, and therefore the authoritative one. I am not convinced by this. I'm even less convinced having learned that the German manuscript was discovered in 2015. (Last year, a new translation by Philip Boehm was published. I read the original translation by Daphne Hardy.) This may be a great 20th century novel, but it's not an English one, and it has no business being on The List.

The second strike against the book is that at some point, I got an inkling that Arthur Koestler was a known creep. Having read his Wikipedia page, it's hard to tell just how much of a creep he was. One biographer called him a serial rapist, while another seemed to think he was just a playboy. Getting into the interpretation of playboy vs serial rapist is of course beyond the scope of this review but is definitely enough to give one pause. Furthermore, Koestler and his wife died in a suicide pact which he may or may not have coerced her into.

The real trouble, though, is that somehow I just failed to connect with this book. I'm not sure if it's the gap in my Russian history knowledge, or the prejudices I had going in, or what exactly, but I just wasn't that invested in Rubashov or the horrible things that were happening to him. Certainly it's a good read in conjunction with the more-fictionalized 1984. Maybe The List has had me under its thumb for so long that I just can't care anymore.

9. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence

Year Published: 1913 (unexpurgated text in 1992)

Pages: 464 

First Sentence: "The Bottoms" succeeded to "Hell Row."

Rating: 2/3 (meh)

Review:

After reading The Rainbow and skipping Women in Love, I wasn't too sure what to expect from Sons and Lovers, the third D. H. Lawrence novel on The List. I certainly hoped that it would be better, given its position.

In this book, Lawrence is once again writing at great length about a family, in this case the Morels. Mr. Morel is a coal miner in Nottingham and Mrs. Morel ends up married to him despite her higher social status because he's a vibrant personality and a good dancer. They're soon tremendously unhappy together, but have four children, three boys and a girl. The two older boys, William and Paul, are the "Sons" of the title. William gets work and goes out into the world, while Paul develops a bizarre codependent relationship with his mother. The "Lovers" in the title are Paul's two love interests, who show up about halfway through. At that point, the novel becomes exhaustively about Paul and his feelings, and therefore a lot less interesting.

All that being said, I did like this better than The Rainbow. I didn't necessarily like it, but I liked it better. Lawrence is exploring the same themes, which is to say sexuality and its impact far beyond the sexual act itself, as well as all the other kinds of human connection and how fraught they are. We not only see Paul's dysfunctional romantic relationships, but also the Morels' abusive marriage, the relationship between Paul and his mother and his older brother William, and on and on. Lawrence is good at this, and he's good at describing the way it feels to be conscious of one's body moving through indoor and outdoor spaces, alone or with others.

What Lawrence isn't good at is succinctness, and wow does the book ever get repetitive, especially in the second half. On a prose level, nothing in this book annoyed me as much as the word repetition in The Rainbow. On a plot level, I was annoyed to find myself again and again reading about how Paul feels about his father, his mother, his lover Miriam, his second lover Clara, wash, rinse, repeat, circling through all of these in various permutations and combinations. The book can also be unfocused and sometimes feels sloppy. The Morel family are constantly moving around from house to house in their town and this is always mentioned as an afterthought and for no clear purpose. Or sometimes random friends of Paul's are introduced by name and then never heard from again, but meanwhile a character with multiple lines of dialogue in a crucial scene is only ever named "the mutual friend."

For anyone who knows of Lawrence because of his scandalous reputation, I'll say that this book is more explicit than The Rainbow. However do note that I mostly read the "unexpurgated text" from 1992 rather than the 1913 version censored by the publisher. (I saw mostly because I started off reading the 1913 version as an ebook prior to getting a hard copy from the library, and was way too lazy to go back to the beginning once I realized they were different texts.) When I say "more explicit" I should also clarify that it isn't all that explicit to a modern reader, but there's definitely fornication involved.

The main trouble with this book is that even though I was interested in its themes, I was never very interested in Paul Morel or his mother. That, and there was an uphill battle to climb here thanks to my need for the book to prove itself compared with my preconceptions based on Lawrence's other work. 

So I dunno, this certainly wasn't a Top 10 book in my opinion and now that I'm done I probably won't be reading any of Lawrence's work in the future. Feel free to give him a try if you want.

- - - - -

He looked round. A good many of the nicest men he knew were like himself, bound in by their own virginity, which they could not break out of. They were so sensitive to their women, that they would go without them for ever rather than do them a hurt, an injustice. Being the sons of mothers whose husbands had blundered rather brutally through their feminine sanctities, they were themselves too diffident and shy. They could easier deny themselves than incur any reproach from a woman. For a woman was like their mother, and they were full of the sense of their mother. They preferred themselves to suffer the misery of celibacy, rather than risk the other person.

- - - - -

15. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Year Published: 1927
Pages: 200
First Sentence: ‘Yes, of course, if it’s fine to-morrow,’ said Mrs Ramsay.
Rating: 2/3 (meh)

Review:
When I first started this project, way back in the mists of time, my gimmick was that as someone with a technical background and no literary sacred cows, I'd be able to review the books on The List honestly. I now find myself, many years and books later, having to express an opinion about Virginia Woolf for the first time and I am struggling.

The last book on The List written by a woman, prior to To the Lighthouse, was The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, but before that was Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence at #58. After such a long drought of women writers, and considering how poorly I've reviewed some of the other List books by women, and considering the author, I really wanted to love To the Lighthouse.

And I'm afraid I have to admit that I didn't.

To the Lighthouse is the amorphous tale of the Ramsay family and some of their hangers on, who are at a vacation home in some part of England. Mr Ramsay is a philosopher of some kind and kind of an ass. Mrs Ramsay is his domestic goddess of a wife, mother of many children, gardener, reader of stories. The book flits between a multitude of characters' perspectives and interior monologues. Nothing exactly happens. During the very best section, "Time Passes," well, time passes, and it passes in a way that forces the reader to consider their relationships, their home places, and their mortality.

This is my first time reading Woolf and I'm as impressed and awed as I hoped I'd be by her insight into her characters and their ambivalent experiences in the world. There are so many emotions crammed into this short book.

But here's the thing, and maybe it's a me problem and not a Woolf problem, but I found myself not really caring at all about most of it. I'm a reader who needs at least the semblance of a plot. Being dropped into the midst of this family in medias res was one thing, but then being uprooted and left to continue caring was... difficult when there was no sense of rising action. I get it: time passed, what was once can never be again. I care about that sentiment more now than ever, but I was bored by large chunks of this book.

I guess I have a sacred cow or two after all because I hate to find myself saying this about Virginia Woolf's only book to make it onto The List. I do want to try out more of her work, because her level of human insight is very impressive.

The books I don't care that much about either way are always the hardest ones to review. This is close to being worth a read for the shortest part of it ("Time Passes," like I said), except that I already reprimanded Henry Miller for expressing the sentiment that any book is worth reading if there's just one good part in it.

16. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

Year Published: 1925
Pages: 814
First Sentence: Dusk—of a summer night.
Rating: 2/3 (meh)

Review:
The first thing that you need to know about An American Tragedy is that it's over 800 pages long. I was looking forward to it. You may or may not recall that I quite enjoyed Theodore Dreiser's previous entry on The List,Sister Carrie, and I was eager for more of his perspective on morality vs the American working class experience.

This book has that, but also it's just way way way too long. The length of a book is seldom the most important thing about it, but in this case it is.

Clyde Griffiths is the main character of this particular American tragedy. The book begins with him still a boy, living with his parents who are poor, nondenominational Christian missionaries of some kind. He and his family are living in Kansas City but tend to move from place to place as their lifestyle necessitates.

For obvious reasons, young Clyde chafes at the missionary/street preacher life and soon leaves the family home to work. Due to his lack of education, the first place he lands is at a semi-fancy hotel, working as a bellboy. This position leads to his first misadventure, when he and some of his bellboy friends take some girls and a car that doesn't belong to them out on a day trip, get drunk, and end up involved in the hit and run death of a little girl.

Fleeing to Chicago and working under a different name, Clyde avoids any prosecution for this crime (which he wasn't really responsible for—he wasn't driving the hit and run vehicle—while not being a completely innocent bystander either). After a few years pass he decides to use his own name again and gets a new hotel job in Chicago. This is where he meets his uncle, Samuel Griffiths. Samuel is the wealthy owner of a collar factory in New York state, and he offers Clyde a position (feeling bad because his brother, Clyde's father, was cut out of inheriting family property).

Clyde takes the job, and moves to Lycurgus, NY, where he finds himself socially isolated due to his status of a relative of one of the town's first families, while simultaneously not being paid very well. He's put in charge of a small department of young female factory workers, and that's where he meets Roberta and becomes obsessed with her. Having been cautioned not to fraternize with any of the employees working under him on pain of job loss, he at first resists making contact with her. Then, they spot each other one weekend at the lake and Clyde takes Roberta and her friend canoeing.

The relationship between Roberta and Clyde is the core of the story and it just begins at the one third mark of the novel, which is usually the only part that I recap. Suffice it to say that the title of this book is An American Tragedy, not An American Happily Ever After, and things do not end well for Roberta and Clyde.

Dreiser excels when it comes to creating characters that you love to hate. Clyde is weak-willed and lustful and selfish, but Dreiser frames him in a neutral way. Everyone in the book is flawed somehow, either greedy or selfish, hypocritical, whatever. They're people, basically. Clyde is easier to sympathize with than my old nemesis Hurstwood from Sister Carrie, but not by much. Just as he did with Hurstwood, Dreiser makes sure you feel both disgust and compassion for Clyde by the end of the book.

But back to the beginning of the review, this book is way too long. If it had been half as many pages as it is, it'd probably be a new favourite. Dreiser cuts right to the heart of several issues that are still relevant 95 years later: reproductive rights, capital punishment, workplace harassment, wealth inequality, justice issues, and I'm sure I could name others. But all of these things are buried in the repetitive and redundant events of the plot. He's also never met a multisyllabic obscure word he didn't like.

I was going to tell you not to bother with this book but then I got to listing all that stuff about the relevant issues it tackles and upgraded it to a "meh." There's important stuff in here but I can't help feeling like someone has probably done a better job with this same story in the intervening years. Hopefully I'll remember to let you know if I ever find that story.

- - - - -

But there was this to be said in connection with the relationship between these two, that no time, owing to the inexperience of Clyde, as well as Roberta, had there been any adequate understanding or use of more than the simplest, and for the most part unsatisfactory, contraceptive devices.

- - - - -

19. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Year Published: 1952
Pages: 581
First Sentence: I am an invisible man.
Rating: 2/3 (meh)

Review:
For some reason I always love it when a first person narrator remains nameless throughout a novel, and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man remains nameless for almost 600 pages. These pages are filled with amazing incidents and the whole thing ends up pretty surreal.

The narrator is a young black man who describes himself as being invisible in the book's prologue. He is in a hole, literally. The reader will not discover what all this means until the end, because after the prologue, we revert to the young man's childhood. The first scene of the book is a completely flabbergasting incident in which the narrator goes to give a speech to his town's leading white citizenry, and instead ends up going through an ordeal of a "battle royal" in which he and several other black youths are blindfolded and put into a boxing ring to fight, then made to grasp for shiny coins on an electrified pad. Bruised and bloodied after this, the narrator still delivers his speech. (It's about humility.)

This whole thing earns him a scholarship to the state college for Negroes (this is the book's word and capitalization). We next catch up with him there, acting as chauffeur to one of the college's investors, a white man called Mr Norton. The two of them end up at a black sharecropper's cabin where they find the man, two heavily pregnant women, one older and one younger, and a whole bunch of small children. The man tells them about how he accidentally got his daughter, the younger woman, pregnant. Mr Norton swoons, and our narrator brings him to a nearby black bar, where, to make a long story short, all hell breaks loose.

This leads to the narrator's expulsion from college. The president sends him to New York with many letters of recommendation and says that maybe he'll be able to work his way back into the school. It's not until one of the addressees of the letters takes pity on the narrator that he learns he's been sabotaged by the college president. Each letter instructs the addressee not to give the narrator a job under any circumstances.

The whole book continues in this vein and frankly, while many of the separate incidents were shocking and impactful, the overall effect was pretty overwhelming and, dare I say, sometimes pretty tedious. It's interesting that Invisible Man and Native Son are side by side on The List, because it throws their different protagonists into sharp contrast. This narrator is almost nothing like Bigger Thomas other than the fact that they're both young black men, originally from the American South, who have immigrated to northern cities and are continuing to deal with the various forces of racism and oppression that exist within the worlds. Invisible Man has a problem though, and that's the fact that the surrealism of it keeps the reader very off-balance.

Or perhaps I shouldn't say "the reader," because I actually mean "me."

Obviously this is a work of fiction and therefore nothing in it is "real" when it comes to the events that occur. But with so much happening I wasn't sure what was meant to be heightened and what was mean to be an illustration of things as they are or were at the time when the novel was written. This is yet another case, though, of me feeling like I've failed a novel rather than it failing me. I'm just really not good at figuring out symbols. You'd think that, this far into the project, I'd have gotten better at this sort of thing, but I still have just as little patience for it as ever. Maybe even less?

Here's the thing, though: Richard Wright had rage on every page of Native Son and it made me want to read so much more of what he had to say, but all I picked up from Ellison in Invisible Man is a sense of bewilderment. He isn't bewildered, and it's not really up to me to say that he isn't just as enraged as Wright, it's just that Wright was better at conveying it, in prose, to me. Invisible Man of course, was written in a post-Native Son world, and it has a lot more to say about identity and race relations than the older novel. The narrator has no name for a reason, largely because he is constantly trying to figure out who he is, who he needs to be, who he wants to be, and how others see him.

Frankly I think I'd have liked this book better if it'd been 200 pages shorter.

- - - - -

I was puzzled. Just what did she mean? Was it that she understood that we resented having others think that we were all entertainers and natural singers? But now after the mutual laughter something disturbed me: Shouldn't there be some way for us to be asked to sing? Shouldn't the short man have the right to make a mistake without his motives being considered consciously or unconsciously malicious? After all, he was singing, or trying to. What if I asked him to sing? I watched the little woman, dressed in black like a missionary, winding her way through the crowd. What on earth was she doing here? What part did she play? Well, whatever she meant, she's nice and I like her.

- - - - -

23. U.S.A.: The Big Money by John Dos Passos

As per usual, the fact that this is a sequel means that there's a good chance this review contains a ton of spoilers. -M.R.

Year Published: 1936
Pages: 483
First Sentence: Charley Anderson lay in his bunk in a glary red buzz.
Rating: 2/3 (meh)

Review:
I'm going to try to avoid it, but this may end up turning into a review of the whole U.S.A. trilogy sooner rather than later.

The Big Money is the final book in John Dos Passos' trilogy, which started out strong but that I wasn't able to maintain my patience for. The book is in the same format as the previous two, with "Camera Eyes," "Newsreels," prose poem profiles, and narratives from the perspective of several characters. It is very explicitly about its title, the Big Money, and the enormous forces of capitalism in shaping post-WWI America.

The characters we follow this time are two that we've encountered before and two new ones:

• Charley Anderson, WWI flying ace who goes into business to build planes and goes off the rails at the same time.
• Mary French, one of the new characters, a young woman who begins college and ends up becoming a journalist and labour activist.
• Margo Dowling, who begins life being adopted by her dead mother's best friend and ends up as a famous actress, the other new character.
• Richard Ellsworth Savage, my old least favourite, now working in public relations for an aging J. Ward Morehouse.

The two female characters in this book were quite fun and/or interesting to spend time with. Mary's the kind of person who's so committed to her cause that she makes you feel ashamed for not having the guts and conviction to follow her lead. Margo has been chewed up and spit out by the world she lives in, and keeps rising from the ashes through a combination of determination and luck.

Having spent what felt like a lot of time already with the male characters, though, it was hard to sustain any interest in their stories. Charley Anderson ends up being a wealthy brute (though honestly his arc is pretty good when considered in a macro sense, not distributed over a hundred pages) and Dick Savage is still boring.

The biggest problem is that, having read the two prior books in the trilogy, I knew that this was all going to just drop off into mystery. It's hard to stay invested in characters that the book itself isn't that invested in. This may be realistic, but I don't find it to be great when it comes to readability, entertainment, and, dare I say, memorability.

Because that's the biggest problem with this trilogy. I spent over two straight months reading it practically every single day, and I can barely remember a single thing in it outside of the prose poem profiles of historical figures that I enjoyed so much. I'm left with a vague sense of the universality of injustice and inequality and the violence and urgency of the early labour movement and the greed and nepotism and amorality of the people at the top and maybe that's the point? But how long will that sense stay with me? We'll see.

In that respect and several others, it's hard not to compare U.S.A. to the Studs Lonigan trilogy. I read them both in nice bound editions of all three books together, with onionskin paper pages. I spent a lot of time with them both. They're set around the same time. But Studs Lonigan and U.S.A. have very different scopes, it's right there in the titles. And yet Studs Lonigan, being specific about one man in one city does a lot more to develop a sense of a place and time and world. U.S.A., in its ambition, just doesn't deliver on its title.

It's possible, of course, that I'm getting unjustly hung up on that title. Dos Passos is successful when it comes to the struggle between capital and humanity (though 1919 is a mess). He's not showing us the whole USA, though. There are no immigrant stories featured in the trilogy (Mac only semi-qualifies, others are just alluded to). There are no rural stories. There are no African American stories.

The fact is that those stories probably weren't on Dos Passos' or his readers' radar in the early to mid 1930s, whereas now we're finally clamouring to hear them. I wonder if I'd read this trilogy even five years early, if I'd've noticed the lack of those voices.

Certainly I still would've found it boring back then. I enjoyed the first book well enough, was still curious at the end of the second, and then, when the book was overdue at the library with no renewals left, and I was 120 pages from the end, I nearly abandoned the whole thing.

So, Dos Passos' reach exceeded his grasp.

Nevertheless, I hope that someday some brilliant person attempts this same project for the early 21st century. They will need far more than a trilogy, and they may not be successful either, but I think it's a worthwhile enterprise.

- - - - -

Here I am pulling a boner the first thing, she thought.

- - - - -

23. U.S.A.: 1919 by John Dos Passos

As per usual, the fact that this is a sequel means that there's a good chance this review contains a ton of spoilers. -M.R.

Year Published: 1932
Pages: 413
First Sentence:
Oh the infantree the infantree
With the dirt behind their ears.
Rating: 2/3 (meh)

Review:
I'm a bit surprised that anyone manages to get past the second book of a trilogy at all. So often, second books are just sort of there, not as impressive as either the introduction or the conclusion. John Dos Passos' second book in the U.S.A. trilogy, 1919, suffers from this problem. It was at least good enough to keep me interested in the third book, but not much better than that.

And of course, as is typical when I review multiple books in a trilogy or series, expect some spoilers ahead.

So, 1919 has the same format as The 42nd Parallel, which is to say there are four modes/formats of storytelling: "Camera Eyes," "Newsreels," prose poem historical character profiles, and narratives about several characters. There still isn't a specific plot, more a circling of characters around the First World War. For a book about the U.S.A., a surprising majority of this one is set in France and a handful of other European locations.

The crop of characters in this book is new, though adjacent to those from the first book:

• Joe Williams (brother to Janey Williams), a sailor who has deserted the Navy and is generally adrift in all sorts of ways, both literal and metaphorical. The character most prone to high levels of racism.
• Richard Ellsworth Savage, originally from Oak Park, Illinois and other than that I read probably a hundred pages about this character and never got a good handle on him. He likes poetry and I was pretty sure he was gay but later events in the novel made me doubt that assessment.
• Eveline Hutchins (friend of Eleanor Stoddard), a Chicago native who seems to drift around either taking care of family members or trying out various business ventures. Her presence recontextualizes the character of Eleanor in interesting ways, to the point where it's hard to be sure which of them is the frivolous one, because they each see each other that way but not, of course, themselves.
• "Daughter" Anne Elizabeth Trent, a Texas belle who gets treated very badly by this book. She dabbles briefly in the labour movement then ends up in France with literally everyone else, Dick Savage gets her pregnant, and then she dies in a plane crash. The desperation of being a woman, ladies and gentlemen.
• Ben Compton, a Jewish boy from Brooklyn who manages to squander (?) all his promise by getting involved in the labour movement and then promptly thrown in jail.

In case it's not obvious, I had a really hard time with the characters this time, which sucks because the whole novel depends on the reader's interest in these characters, even if they aren't likeable. Dick Savage's sections, in particular, felt endless. And Joe Williams' racism makes it even more noticeable that although this novel and trilogy purport to be about the whole American experience, the characters are almost exclusively WASPs.

Still, there's something special enough going on here that I want to read the final book. The second to last prose poem section, "Paul Bunyan," is a total gut punch. It's about Wesley Everest, wobbly, WWI veteran, and lynching victim. I have a feeling that this is intended to set the tone for the third and final book, The Big Money.

27. The Ambassadors by Henry James

Year Published: 1903
Pages: 639
First Sentence: Strether's first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive till evening he was not wholly disconcerted.
Rating: 2/3 (meh)

Review:
We come now to the second of three Henry James novels on The List. This one is about a middle-aged man named Lambert Strether. He's a widower of relatively slim means, who is engaged to a fabulously wealthy woman named Mrs. Newsome back in the town of Woollett, Massachusetts, but at the beginning of the novel, he's been sent to Europe to fetch Mrs. Newsome's son from the clutches of a presumably evil woman and bring him back to run the family business. Perhaps unfortunately for Strether, when he finds Mrs. Newsome's son in Paris, the situation is not at all clear cut. Chadwick, more commonly referred to as Chad (yes, really), is not living in some den of iniquity with a beautiful French prostitute, although he is engaging in some kind of relationship with a respectable woman who has had to flee her abusive husband. Strether and his friend Maria Gostrey, who he met upon landing at his English hotel, puzzle through this situation together.

At this point I'm really starting to feel like Henry James is gaslighting me. In my review of The Golden Bowl I was already beginning to doubt that I liked previous works of his that I'd read. But seriously, did I? I'd like to believe that I've never been so pretentious that I'd pretend to enjoy a classic novel, but after reading over 1000 pages of James's work in the last few months I'm questioning everything I thought I knew. I can only imagine that this will get worse when I pick up The Wings of the Dove.

In any case, as for the book at hand, I enjoyed it more than The Golden Bowl. While that novel felt extremely empty, there is actual content in this one. I got a sense of the plot happening in the background somewhere, even though it was obscured by James using about 500% more words than he really needs to, in the form of alternating walls o' text and long dialogues between characters in which no one ever says what they mean, instead communicating everything with dashes and exclamation points and rephrasing questions with the italics used on a different word this time. The one thing you can count on from James' prose is the use of the expression "hung fire" which appears here seven times plus one time as "hang fire." (It also showed up seven times as "hung/hang fire" in The Golden Bowl.) This repetition may seem innocuous in otherwise very long novels, but the fact is that it really jumps out at me as a Saskatchewan resident.

To get back on track, and this is the reason it rated higher than The Golden Bowl, if you wanted to spend a lot of time and energy reading The Ambassadors, I think you could get a lot out of it. I have neither time nor energy nor most importantly patience for this sort of thing, and so I found it more frustrating than anything. I loved many of the characters in this novel. The name "Chad" in a novel written in the early part of the 20th century is inherently hilarious. Mrs. Newsome is a wonderful villain. Strether is an excellent deluded sad sack. Best of all is Maria Gostrey, who I wished could have had her own series of novels in which she travels Europe befriending wealthy people and poking about in their affairs. She's honestly a bit of an aspirational figure for me, and I'm only kidding a little bit about that. The trouble with what James is doing with his prose and his obfuscation is that I didn't feel like I was spending time with the characters, I felt like I was watching them on a tv screen with the volume turned way down.

James throws in a touch more anti-Semitism here for good measure, in case you were wondering. He also, if you'll allow me to be facetious about one of the darkest communities on the internet, may have been the original incel, as evidenced by the name of the young man in the plot, and stuff along these lines:

He reconstructed a possible groping Chad of three or four years before, a Chad who had, after all, simply—for that was the only way to see it—been too vulgar for his privilege. Surely it was a privilege to have been young and happy just there. Well, the best thing Strether knew of him was that he had had such a dream.

If a vaguely dark comic story of a man having a turn-of-the-20th-century midlife crisis sounds appealing to you, and you want to work very hard for it, this novel might be the one for you. If you prefer for reading not to be work, I'd stay away.

- - - - -

He had been wondering a minute ago if the boy weren't a Pagan, and he found himself wondering now if he weren't by chance a gentleman. It didn't in the least, on the spot, spring up helpfully for him that a person couldn't at the same time be both.

- - - - -

"Well, the party responsible is, I suppose, the fate that waits for one, the dark doom that rides. What I mean is that with such elements one can't count. I've but my poor individual, my modest human means. It isn't playing the game to turn on the uncanny. All one's energy goes to facing it, to tracking it. One wants, confound it, don't you see?" he confessed with a queer face—"one wants to enjoy anything so rare. Call it then life"—he puzzled it out—"call it poor dear old life simply that springs the surprise. Nothing alters the fact that the surprise is paralysing, or at any rate engrossing—all, practically, hang it, that one sees, that one can see."

- - - - -

29. Studs Lonigan: Judgment Day by James T. Farrell

As per usual, the fact that this is a sequel means that there's a good chance this review contains a ton of spoilers. -M.R.

Year Published: 1935
Pages: 414
First Sentence: "Red, I tell you, when I saw poor Shrimp Haggerty laid out in the coffin, I got a damn snaky feeling," Stan Simonsky, riding backward by the window, morosely said, turning to Red Kelly beside him.
Rating: 2/3 (meh)

Review:

Well, here we are over 900 pages later, at the end of the Studs Lonigan trilogy. Was it worth it? This review attempts to look at Judgment Day as well as the entire trilogy.

This book has the most compressed timeline of the three. It's 1931, Studs is 29 years old. He's on a train, on his way home from yet another one of his friends' funerals. Red Kelly is still around, and Weary Reilley went to prison for the crime he committed at the end of the previous novel. Studs was laid low by a bad case of pneumonia after his adventure on NYE 1929, and it's pretty much resulted in the total wreck of his health. Whether it be his health or his increasing maturity, he seems to have settled down a bit, though. He's seeing a girl named Catherine Banahan now, and while talking with his friends on the train, he decides to propose to her.

She accepts. The relationship between Studs and Catherine is perplexing, in that most of the time he doesn't seem to feel anything for her at all. Studs is out of work for the majority of the book because his father's painting business is failing. Catherine has some sort of clerical job. His mother and sisters look down on her for no apparent reason. Studs makes an incredibly stupid investment and loses the majority of his savings. In one particularly interesting scene, Studs and Catherine spend many hours in a crowd watching a marathon dance competition that neither of them actually cares about, which was painfully familiar in the binge watching/reality tv era.

I mentioned before that I thought Studs would probably die by getting run over, because there was so much foreshadowing about that happening in the first two books. I was wrong! Or maybe the author changed his mind. In any case, here's what actually happens: Studs gets Catherine pregnant before they're married. This accelerates their timeline significantly. The two of them go to the beach one day, and Studs suffers an attack that results in him seeing a doctor who instructs him that he needs to take it easy, and that means he can't do his painting job anymore. He goes out job hunting in a downpour, and by the time he gets home, he's sick with pneumonia again. He doesn't make it through a second time.

Again this is a portrait of a particular man at a particular time. Studs seems to be much more alone than at any point in the past. Of course, it's now the Great Depression, and so things are pretty terrible all around. I did read the brief biography of James T. Farrell at the end of the edition of this trilogy that I had from the library, and he doesn't appear to have shared his characters' politics (i.e. he was a communist of some kind), which makes his achievement here even more impressive and also, even more unsettling.

So much of this novel and the other two books in the trilogy feels so relevant to the current political climate, where people are more concerned with blaming a mysterious cabal of international Jew bankers and social justice warriors for the world's problems, when powerful people and unfettered capitalism are the real villains. There are a lot of passages here that are flat out painful to read, either because of their racism, their misogyny, or their extreme pertinence to life in the early 21st century.

That pain is where the trouble comes in, though. This trilogy is long, and while I don't think you necessarily need to read all three books one after the other the way I did, if you read the whole thing in any configuration, you will end up spending a lot of time with a lot of reprehensible characters. The trilogy was probably always going to end this way, in the sense that I appreciate the whole thing, but it's not exactly a fun experience. More of an ordeal, really. The anti-capitalist, culturally critical message was clear enough to me, except that after being immersed in racial slurs and the objectification of women for over five hundred pages, I started to question my perception and had to read the author's biography to be sure of his intentions.

Could these books be dangerous? Would another reader find the characters' opinions and actions endorsing their own prejudices? I'm not sure. I do think that the fact that this trilogy is #29 on The List but no one has ever heard of it has a lot to do with how long and difficult it is. I mean, I'm saying all this stuff about how tough it is, because there were long sections I really enjoyed in spite of everything, and I found this extremely illuminating, and I still never ever want to read it again. If you miss the fact that Farrell is critiquing his characters, this would read more like a bigoted screed than a trilogy of novels about the way American society (or Irish-Catholic-American society) fails the individual.

So all of that is the reason why my rating for this third book of the trilogy is lower than the first two. These books are absolutely worth reading, but I'm not sure they're worth the pain and suffering and time that they take. We all already know society is failing the individual.

- - - - -

"Maybe if we get a man like Al Smith next year, and kick out Hoover who's only a tool of the Jew international bankers, we'll turn the corner. This country is too great and too rich to be going to the dogs the way it seems to be these days. And you know, I was speaking to a fellow today who seems to know what he's talking about, and that's just what he was saying. But we got to get a strong man in the White House, a man like Al Smith or Mussolini, to kick out the bankers and grafting politicians and racketeers, and that'll make America a country for Americans only. If we don't do that, we give arguments right into the hands of the Reds who want anarchy here like they got in Russia," Lonigan said, and Studs nodded.

- - - - -

A girl with tan raincoat and galoshes, a few inches of silk stockinged leg showing. Neat. Who was she? Had she ever been made? How did being made change a girl? And before they were made were they as curious about what it was and how did it feel as he'd been as a punk kid? Good girls from good homes, once they got started, became the hottest. Or did they? She was out of sight. Neat little girl anyway.

- - - - -

40. The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene

Year Published: 1948
Pages: 255
First Sentence: Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork.
Rating: 2/3 (meh)

Review:

The Heart of the Matter is all about Catholic Guilt, and thus should be right up my alley. Catholic guilt is one of those things that I will never stop finding fascinating and I'm always interested in narratives about people's struggles with faith. However, it's only in the last year or two that I've really begun to recognize how much of an impact Vatican II had on Catholicism and how my experience of the religion (baptized and confirmed Roman Catholic) is very different from the experience of those who belonged to it prior to the Second Vatican Council.

Blah blah blah. All this to say that I'm lukewarm on Graham Greene's novel. There are, I think, three main reasons why, which I suppose I shouldn't get into until I've described a bit of the plot.

Major Henry Scobie is a British police officer living in some coastal African colony during the Second World War. He doesn't get a promotion, his wife is a pile of misery, he's a solid, honest man, and also he is Catholic to the max. Said pile of misery is named Louise. She likes to read books, her child is dead, and Louise wants to go to South Africa for whatever reason. There are money problems, and in order to send Louise to South Africa, Scobie ends up borrowing money from a man named Yusef, who is an organized crime boss of sorts. Basically moments after Louise has departed on a boat to South Africa, Scobie starts up an affair with a young woman named Helen Rolt. Guilt ensues.

Here are my problems with this book:

First of all, colonial narratives are almost always a hard sell for me. The way locals are described is often uncomfortable, and this book is no different. E.g. "His bare feet flapped like empty gloves across the floor." I simply do not have the energy or the education to parse the way bodies of various characters from various communities are treated in this book. And I am just not interested in hearing about how horrible the heat and the bugs are for British colonists in Africa.

And speaking of that, I also was not terribly enamoured of any of the characters in this novel. They're not bad or unlikeable, but they seldom jump off the page. Scobie was mostly just boring.

Which brings me to my third, and most important, point: the adultery in this book is so perfunctory. I'm pretty sure that's exactly what Greene was going for, looking at the mundane futility of sin and guilt and the ultimate mercy of God. It's more realistic to examine this sort of thing in the light of a bland love affair and blander marriage, rather than some grand romance. But while realism is fine, I guess, I'd prefer a little more actual entertainment.

And I guess that's really all I have to say. I like my Catholic guilt to pack a bigger punch in some indefinable way. The plotting of the story is very tight and I enjoyed that aspect of the book. Greene does well in conveying the utter environmental misery of his setting, but again, that's just not something that interests me, for whatever reason.

Meh.

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If I could just arrange for her happiness first, he thought, and in the confusing night he forgot for the while what experience had taught him—that no human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.

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In our hearts there is a ruthless dictator, ready to contemplate the misery of a thousand strangers if it will ensure the happiness of the few we love.

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43. A Dance to the Music of Time: A Buyer's Market by Anthony Powell

Year Published: 1952
Pages: 274
First Sentence: The last time I saw any examples of Mr. Deacon's work was at a sale, held obscurely in the neighbourhood of Euston Road, many years after his death.
Rating: 2/3 (meh)

Review:

Well, that was quick. The rating I gave to A Question of Upbringing may not have felt too high when I was writing my review, but as I read A Buyer's Market, the second book in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time (ADttMoT), I began to have my doubts. As I mentioned in the previous review, I had a feeling that the "rich white guy" nature of the narrative would get on my nerves. I had no idea how quickly.

And it's a bit disingenuous to blame that by itself. I'll tell you what the book is about first.

Our narrator, Jenkins, is a young man working for a small art book publisher. He wants to get laid, but he's pretty conventional and still primarily an observer in the story that he's telling. Over the course of the book, he goes to a dance and finds that Widmerpool has been invited to the same pre-dance dinner. At the dance, a girl named Barbara (who Jenkins and Widmerpool both have a thing for) dumps a dish of sugar on Widmerpool's head, and Jenkins and Widmerpool end up leaving the dance at the same time. During their late night walk, they run into an old friend of Jenkins' parents', called Mr. Deacon. Mr. Deacon is out distributing anti-war pamphlets with a young woman named Gypsy Jones. The four of them then proceed to run into Charles Stringham, who brings them all along to a party.

Etc.

Peter Templer doesn't appear in this book, although his sister Jean does.

I say "etc." because the reason that I found the previous/first book in this series so entertaining was the promise of more to come. Powell's observations are astute and his foreshadowing is spectacular, and I can only imagine that really plumbing the depths of this entire series would be really rewarding. For some readers.

For me, though? After reading a little past the halfway point of this book, I decided to look up some plot summaries of the future books in the series, and didn't find anything there particularly compelling. My main problem is that life is short, and rather than pushing through this series, what I'd rather do is try out some other book series that I might give me more immediate enjoyment. I believe in reading difficult books (if I didn't, I wouldn't've stuck with this project as long as I have) but there are limits.

My apologies for such a lackadaisical review. This is where I leave ADttMoT for now.

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This affair with Barbara, although taking up less than a year, seemed already to have occupied a substantial proportion of my life; because nothing establishes the timelessness of Time like those episodes of early experience seen, on reexamination at a later period, to have been crowded together with such unbelievable closeness in the course of a few years; yet equally giving the illusion of being so infinitely extended during the months when actually taking place.

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There is, or at least, should be, a fitness in the follies each individual pursues, and uniformity of pattern is, on the whole, rightly preserved in human behaviour. Such unwritten regulations seemed now to have been disregarded wholesale.

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44. Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley

Year Published: 1928
Pages: 432
First Sentence: "You won't be late?"
Rating: 2/3 (meh)

Review:

Aldous Huxley is most famous nowadays for his novel Brave New World, which I read in high school and will be rereading in several years because it's #5 on The List. Certainly dystopia is having a moment right now and for the past decade or so, but the novel at hand, Point Counter Point, is less popular for a few other reasons.

Point Counter Point is concerned with human passions versus reason and the intellect. To illustrate this, Huxley throws situational dice featuring an enormous cast of characters in 1920s London, some of whom are based on real people who were running around at the time. Walter Bidlake is dealing with his boring, silly mistress Marjorie and also pursuing a woman named Lucy Tantamount. Philip and Elinor Quarles are generally trying to navigate the fact that their marriage is in trouble because Philip struggles to express his feelings. Lucy's father's lab assistant, Illidge, is bitter about how everyone he interacts with is rich. There really isn't an overarching plot, just this overarching question of what happens when passion is pitted against reason.

The lack of plot and surfeit of theme are not insurmountable issues. The way the beginning of the book is structured, I thought that the perspective would jump from one character to another without stopping throughout, but eventually we return to Walter and Marjorie and then things settle down in terms of character introductions. There are a few too many characters to keep track of, although they at least all are distinct personalities within the narrative. It's just hard to keep track of all of the Burlaps, Bidlakes, and Webleys (I had to look up that last name since I couldn't remember it at all and thought it also started with a B). And although they're well-drawn, all of the characters are basically mouthpieces for different ideas. There's even a fantastic meta bit in which Philip Quarles writes in his notebook about a novel he wants to write featuring musicality and variations on a theme. He writes:

Those incredible Diabelli variations, for example. The whole range of thought and feeling, yet all in organic relation to a ridiculous little waltz tune. Get this into a novel. How? The abrupt transitions are easy enough. All you need is a sufficiency of characters and parallel, contrapuntal plots. While Jones is murdering a wife, Smith is wheeling the perambulator in the park. You alternate the themes. More interesting, the modulations and variations are also more difficult. He shows several people falling in love, or dying, or praying in different ways—dissimilars solving the same problem. Or, vice versa, similar people confronted with dissimilar problems. In this way you can modulate through all the aspects of your theme, you can write variations in any number of different moods. Another way: The novelist can assume the god-like create privilege and simply elect to consider the events of the story in their various aspects—emotional, scientific, economic, religious, metaphysical, etc. He will modulate from one to the other—as, from the aesthetic to the physico-chemical aspect of things, from the religious to the physiological or financial. But perhaps this is a too tyrannical imposition of the author's will. Some people would think so.

And then after a break:

Put a novelist into the novel. He justifies aesthetic generalizations, which may be interesting—at least to me. He also justifies experiment. Specimens of his work may illustrate other possible or impossible ways of telling a story. And if you have him telling parts of the same story as you are, you can make a variation on the theme. But why draw the line at one novelist inside your novel? Why not a second inside his? And a third inside the novel of the second? And so on to infinity, like those advertisements of Quaker Oats where there's a Quaker holding a box of oats, on which is a picture of another Quaker holding another box of oats, on which etc., etc. At about the tenth remove you might have a novelist telling your story in algebraic symbols or in terms of variations in blood pressure, pulse, secretion of ductless glands, and reaction times.

The novel is saved from being a boring set of dialogues like Walden Two by a few factors: Huxley is a much better writer than Skinner, the characters are all distinct people in distinct situations, and finally Huxley's mind-boggling prescience. The book is more quotable than anything else I've read in a long time, except maybe Julius Caesar. I don't know enough about the 1920s London lit scene to have picked up on who any of the characters were modelled after besides being convinced that Philip Quarles is Huxley's portrait of himself (and not a very flattering one). My favourite part of the book was the chapter featuring the courtship of the characters Mark and Mary Rampion, a poor man who married a rich girl and eventually made a living through art. I was surprised to find out that Mark Rampion is apparently modelled after D. H. Lawrence. Maybe I shouldn't be quite so surprised, though, since I at least appreciated the concept of The Rainbow, if not its execution.

Would you believe that I'm struggling with a rating yet again? I almost regret the conclusion I drew when reviewing Light in August about not adding a 2.5 rating. Books tend to end up getting 2/3 ratings when I find them a chore to read, but just because something's hard doesn't mean it's not worthwhile for other reasons. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I hope that ultimately you'll decide to read some of these books not solely based on my ratings, but on my reviews as well. In this case, yep, Point Counter Point was a chore and I never really wanted to pick it back up again. It's dense for obvious reasons, and I can't enthusiastically recommend it to just anyone, but I think there's a lot of interesting stuff in this novel that would reward a close reading by an interested party.

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Polly's voice dropped again to a stage whisper. She liked to make everything sound exciting—as exciting as she felt everything to be. She was only twenty.

- - - - -

"...Because... yes, because I really like hating and being bored."
He liked it. The rain fell and fell; the mushrooms sprouted in his very heart and he deliberately cultivated them. He could have gone to see his friends; but he preferred to be bored and alone.

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Her stockings were the colour of sunburnt flesh. Brought up in an epoch when ladies apparently rolled along on wheels, Mr. Quarles was peculiarly susceptible to calves, found modern fashions a treat, and could never quite get over the belief that the young women who adopted them had deliberately made themselves indecent for his benefit and because they wanted him to become their lover.

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But the very possession of a body is a cynical comment on the soul and all its ways. It is a piece of cynicism, however, which the soul must accept, whether it likes it or no. Elinor duly went to bed at eleven and came down to meals—if only that she might have strength to endure yet more unhappiness. To suffer was the only thing she could do; she wanted to suffer as much and intensely as she could.

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