R46. The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence

Year Published: 1964
Pages: 308

First Sentence: Above the town, on the hill brow, the stone angel used to stand.

Review:

I inherited The Stone Angel in the same batch of CanLit and other stuff as The Tin Flute.  I'm sure I'd heard of it before, but I didn't realize that the book has appeared on high school English reading lists until just before I finally read it.  What a huge mistake, which I'll get into more in a moment.

This is the story of Hagar Shipley, born in the fictional town of Manawaka, Manitoba.  At the beginning of the book, she's an old woman living on the west coast (presumably in Vancouver, British Columbia), with her oldest son Marvin and daughter-in-law Doris.  The book is just her reflection on some of the key moments of her life, as well as her struggles to hang on to her dignity as an elderly woman with dementia.  She marries a man her father doesn't want her to marry, neglects her son Marvin, and favours her son John.  She ends up leaving her husband and working as a housekeeper.  Nothing much happens of a particularly earth shattering nature.  Still, because of the fact that Hagar is losing her grip on herself in the novel's present, she makes a fascinating unreliable narrator.  She's a proud woman who has always been very concerned about appearances, and she's also mean and a hypocrite.  She's a really great character.  Unfortunately, she tends to overshadow the characters who surround her, who are well-sketched but hard to get a good handle on.

This isn't my first kick at the Margaret Laurence can.  I also inherited her book The Diviners and read it before I ever started this project.  I liked both of these books fine.  They're critical of gender roles and racial politics on the Canadian Prairies and are decently paced, although by no means a laugh riot.  In fact, if CanLit can be believed, no human has ever been happy in Canada.  I wonder how many other countries have a national literature as dour as mine, and I'm adding a wider survey of CanLit to my ever-growing list of things to explore as a reader.  Interestingly, I found this novel fairly short on its descriptions of scenery, the town, and so on, which is rare for a novel in a "genre" that is typically so concerned with PLACE.

And that's also the main reason why I don't think that this is a good choice for high school students.  The Stone Angel is rich with meaning, reflection on aging and death, repentance, and so on.  I'm not old by any means, but I'm old enough that I can at least grasp the concept that one day I will be old.  I don't think most teenagers are capable of understanding that as something real that will happen to them.  When I was in my teens, years in the future were so abstract.  I could think to myself that I would be X years old in 20YY and I'd like to have four kids by then and be a published writer or whatever, but that person I pictured wasn't me, it was some other person with my name.  Now, when I think of being A years old in 20BB, I am thinking of the work I'll have to do to get there, wondering about my health, which cataclysmic events may occur in the interval, and understanding that my body will keep changing in ways that resemble decay rather than the growth I experienced in my teen years.  Ideally, this book would help teens to grasp the concept that they too might be old someday, but for the vast majority of them reading this book, it would just be a boring story about a bitchy old lady.  And it's so much more than that.

P.S. I've been trying hard to remember what novels I read in high school English and failing miserably to recall anything outside of "independent" reading studies (when I read Morley Callaghan's Such Is My Beloved, another dirgey CanLit novel, and Ragtime), but I'm sure there must've been something.  Anyway, I just want to say that I have no idea who develops the curriculum for this sort of thing, but including The Stone Angel is something I'd urge them to reconsider.

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I try, a little, to pray, as one's meant to do at evening, thinking perhaps the knack of it will come to me here. But it works no better than it ever did. I can't change what's happened to me in my life, or make what's not occurred take place. But I can't say I like it, or accept it, or believe it's for the best. I don't and never shall, not even if I'm damned for it. So I merely sit on the bed and look out the window until the dark comes and the trees have gone and the sea itself has been swallowed by the night.

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Five Years Ago This Month: December 2011

Five years ago this month...

...I was belatedly distracted. For once I had a good excuse, though: I had pneumonia in late November/early December 2011.

...I reviewed The Parasites. This was such an odd book, which makes more and more sense the more I learn about Daphne du Maurier. Having read five of her books now, I think it's safe to say she's become one of my favourite authors, with her touches of luridness all over the place.

It seems that I have no pictures from December 2011, which is a little bit amazing, but here we are. Remember I didn't get my first smartphone until August 2012 or so. Amazing.

55. On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Year Published: 1957
Pages: 307
First Sentence: I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.
Rating: 2/3 (meh)

Review:

Oh God.

I'm not sure where to begin with this one, so I'll start off with the plot summary for a change.  Sal Paradise is our first person narrator, a college student who has already divorced one wife and lives with his aunt.  He is a writer.  In 1947, a young man named Dean Moriarty drives into Sal's life and brings "the road" with him.  From 1947 to I think 1950, Sal ends up crisscrossing the United States in a sort of mad chase, penniless and under the influence of various substances.  There isn't really a plot at all, really, and although maybe there's some reason why the chapter breaks exist where they are (I pay very little attention to chapter breaks), the book reads exactly the way Jack Kerouac wrote it: as a spooled narrative based more on feeling than anything else.

On the Road has been familiar to me by reputation for quite a long time but I'd never actually picked it up before.  As soon as I did I started to wonder about it, and it became one of the rare List books that I actually sought out additional context on while reading.  Specifically, who the hell is Jack Kerouac and what made him this way?  The other post-WW II books I've read so far have felt more marked by it, and the character of Sal Paradise, who is barely a character and very much the author, seems to have no connection to that experience.

So thanks to Wikipedia I discovered all kinds of cool things about Kerouac: he had French Canadian parents and spoke French, he wrote On the Road in three weeks on an enormous roll of paper, and alcoholism killed him at 47.  Also, he served only eight days of active duty during the Second World War.  I didn't have the energy to learn anything more about the Beat Generation, besides the fact that Dean Moriarty was inspired by a man named Neal Cassady.

I didn't enjoy reading this book.  It's breathless and also pointless, just an exploration of sad white kids being horrible to each other and everyone else, that runs around in circles.  I'm too old and have never been cool or reckless enough to find the ideas expressed in this book appealing. Dean Moriarty and the rest of them strike me as incredibly tragic rather than liberated, although I can see how at that time, they'd be a bit of both things. Both the style and the characters' actions pushed me away.  Dean and Sal are the only two who pop off of the page as anything more than names most of the time, and the women are especially underserved, usually just staring wide-eyed and despairing at the wild actions of the men around them.

I can appreciate that this is an important book in the history of 20th century literature, but I don't feel as if I learned anything from it. Unless the Beat Generation and their philosophies hold a lot of fascination for you, On the Road is pretty skippable.

- - - - -

They rushed down the street together, digging everything in the early way they had, which later became so much sadder and perceptive and blank. But then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"

- - - - -

A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.

- - - - -

Dean took out other pictures. I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalk of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, or actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road.

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