Philip Roth — The Ghost Writer

No one writes books about Philip Roth quite as well as Philip Roth. Sometimes I feel as though I know more about what it’s like to be a male Jewish writer from Newark than I know about what it’s like to be me. The Ghost Writer (1979) is one of Roth’s many semi-autobiographical fictions, and the first to feature enduring Roth alterego Nathan Zuckerman.

… I was twenty-three, writing and publishing my first short stories, and like many a Bildungsroman hero before me, already contemplating my own massive Bildungsroman …

Zuckerman, an up-and-coming literary star of the 1950s, stays one night in the remote home of his reclusive literary idol, E. I. Lonoff. He’s joined by Lonoff’s emotionally frayed wife, Hope, and his beautiful young possible-mistress, Amy Bellette.

Lonoff is an aging man weighed down by the burden of his art, and the ruin a lifetime of “turning sentences around” has inflicted on his marriage. Zuckerman is a young man weighed down by the burden of Jewish identity. His father has turned on him, accusing him of betraying the Jews by portraying them in a negative light. Roth suffered similar criticism after the publication of Goodbye, Columbus (1959).

During the night, strange things happen. Lonoff has a spectacular clash with Hope and a mysterious erotic encounter with Amy. Nathan, an accidental spectator to Lonoff’s bizarre private life, mulls over how to win back his father’s support.

Outrageously, he starts to harbour the delusion that Amy is Anne Frank, living in America under an assumed name. This, he thinks, will solve his problem: if he marries Anne Frank, people won’t be able to call him a bad Jew any more.

The Ghost Writer is a wry and touching portrayal of the pitfalls of literary life. An old writer who seems to have everything turns out to be trapped and miserable. A young writer who seems to have everything turns out to be cracking under the weight of expectation.

It’s a slim novel telling a simple tale, and as such lacks the monumental significance of Roth’s later masterworks. But in its own discreet way, it’s every bit as touched by greatness. I think of Roth’s writing hand as some kind of wild animal, loosely tethered to the genius in his head. Like all Roth’s best work, The Ghost Writer is scabrous, irreverent, wacky and witty. Unlike most of Roth’s best work, you can read it in a spare afternoon.

Peter Singer — The Life You Can Save

Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation (1975), is a well-known guru of “applied ethics”, though perhaps an equally accurate term for it would be “secular preaching”. In this compact and fiercely argued piece of pop philosophy, Singer turns his attention to Third World poverty.

Singer starts off in typically aggressive fashion, arguing that it is wrong not to give as much of your income as you can to development charities. He then argues that Western nations, America in particular, don’t give very much to such charities. He discusses how we could persuade people to give more, which charities are pound-for-pound most effective, and how small donations make a big difference in the Third World.

In the final chapters, he goes into turbo-preaching mode. He tells us how our lives need to change to meet his demands. He presents a complex sliding scale, where the well-off give 5% of their income, and the superrich give a third. He openly admits this is a compromise: we ought to give far more. He then slams celebrities who fail to meet his standard, such as Paul Allen, the Microsoft billionaire who has given a mere $900m to charity.

Singer is a famous utilitarian, and there is lots of utilitarianism behind the scenes here. The basic argument is roughly that, if something is bad (i.e. a person suffering from poverty), and you can prevent it by sacrificing something less important (i.e. your disposable income), it is wrong not to do so.

The difficulty, even if you accept utilitarianism, is that weighing up benefits versus costs like this is notoriously tricky. Singer flags up a problem for his own position: if Warren Buffett had given away his first $1m, he would never have been able to give away the $30bn he has now pledged. So by reinvesting rather than donating his $1m he “saved lives” — thousands of them.

Singer uses the phrase “saving a life” loosely, as referring to the alleviation of a person’s suffering as a consequence of the work of development charities. On this definition, it’s impossible to tell what will “save” more lives: giving now, or investing your money so that you can do more later. We never know the consequences in advance when we donate now or invest for later, so we never know in advance which option will do most for the greater good.

Because of this, the phrase “saving a life” is inappropriate. It’s emotive. It makes you think that giving money to the world’s poor is something equivalent to diving into a pond to save a drowning child — a comparison Singer actually makes. But you’re not diving into a pond: you’re sponsoring a particular long-term cause from a distance. There’s no shame in holding on to your money in the short-term, and there’s no shame in using your money to sponsor another cause instead.

I agree broadly with Singer’s sentiment. The problem of poverty is troubling. Of course it is.  But I don’t like his “naming and shaming” strategy, and there’s a question mark over his basic argument. And there is another more practical problem for Singer: his view implies that no one should buy this book. How can you justify buying a hardback when children in Africa are starving?

The “Father of Biology”

Historians don’t consider themselves in the business of hero-worship, but for Charles Darwin they almost make an exception. In the 150 years since the publication of the Origin of Species, academia’s “Darwin industry” has spawned libraries full of biographical detail and textual interpretation. Elements of Darwin’s biography have reached the status of legend in the popular imagination: the Beagle voyage, the Galapagos finches, the 20-year wait before publishing, the religious wrangling over the implications of his theory: if you aren’t tired of hearing the story yet, you will be by the end of the year, when Cambridge’s celebrations will have reached their apotheosis and Paul Bettany will be re-enacting Darwin’s life in cinemas. Darwin is the “father” of biology, the exemplary “great scientist.” But what did one man do to earn such epithets?

Individuals vary. Their traits are heritable. Some individuals reproduce more successfully than others, and the traits of these individuals are better represented in the next generation. Over millions of years, by means of “natural selection,” or “the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life,” species evolve. This is Charles Darwin’s big idea, but, increasingly, it is our idea too: in the hands of a century of popularizers from T.H. Huxley to Richard Dawkins, it has been held aloft as the crowning glory of the Western scientific enterprise, and our best explanation for why we exist.

Russian biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky’s slogan that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” has become a catchphrase for the contemporary study of life; and this shows how the impact of evolutionary theory extends outside the textbooks—it embodies an ideology of science, the belief that, through constructing mechanistic accounts of the causal history of living things, we shed light on the secrets of the world. In a culture in which the spirit of Enlightenment is tainted with the guilt over what followed, in which science is associated as much with atom bombs and CFCs as with human progress, Darwin’s theory is the case for the defence.

But it would be misleading to think Darwin’s status derives entirely from his idea. Indeed, it’s arguably misleading to call evolutionary theory his idea, though his causal contribution to modern biology is not in doubt. Darwin grew up in a culture where evolution was, so to speak, in the air. In the early decades of the 19th Century, Britain’s genteel community of wealthy scientific enthusiasts dedicated much time and ink to combating the radical French evolutionism of Lamarck and Geoffroy. In 1844, evolutionary controversy exploded in Britain with the anonymous publication of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, an ambitious speculation telling of the progression of life up a chain of being from spontaneously generated simple organisms through to mankind.

The growing fossil evidence of extinct life forms needed an explanation: such theories filled a niche. Darwin did for the study of life what Charles Lyell, his friend and inspiration, had done for geology. Lyell proposed the uniformitarian principle: that the geology we see today is best explained by small, currently-active forces acting over staggeringly long periods of time. When Darwin set off on the Beagle, filled with Romantic dreams of finding unifying laws of nature after reading Alexander von Humboldt’s travelogues, he took Lyell’s book along with him, and took his principle to heart.

Darwin’s theoretical innovation was a not the idea of evolution but a new mechanism for its occurrence. A very speculative mechanism, of course—scientific objections to his theory were warranted and widespread. Why should advantageous traits spread through the population? Wouldn’t they end up diluted, swamped by the prevailing disadvantageous traits? And how did these traits arise at all? And could complex traits really develop like this? The 20th Century culture of laboratory testing and mathematical modelling expanded, quantified and reinforced Darwin’s ideas to answer such questions—it is largely through the work of 1930s scientists such as J.B.S. Haldane and R.A. Fisher that today’s “modern synthesis” theory was born. Darwin is not the author of modern evolutionary theory, and to credit theories to the first person to contribute “significant” work is a dubious practice. So is he really the “father” of biology?

I think so, but not because of his idea. Darwin was venerated long before the notion of natural selection had acquired the widespread acceptance it enjoys today. He was given a state funeral, celebrated as a genius, venerated on his first centenary, largely by people who judged his central hypothesis to be wrong. It was his personal virtues, his fatherly qualities no less, that earned him the reverence he continues to receive. Darwin is portrayed as the iconic “gentleman of science”: wise, moral, conscientious, companionable and modest. And no amount of industrial historical research has disproved the hypothesis that really did live up to these attributes.

When allies like Ernst Haeckel defended natural selection through brash confrontation, Darwin advised them against it. While Huxley, “Darwin’s bulldog,” forcefully took the argument for evolution to its critics, Darwin (for reasons of health and modesty) confined himself to his home at Down, Kent, where he lived with his devoutly Unitarian wife, Emma. When correspondents asked Darwin if his theory was incompatible with Creationism and other Christian beliefs, he gave guarded replies, professing to be “muddled” by the matter; and the thorny issue of the origins of man was never broached in the Origin. Despite his doubts on matters of religious doctrine, he continued to support his local parish church; and though appearing increasingly to withhold belief in God in later life, he preferred the neologism “agnostic” to the more confrontational “atheist.”

Darwin’s work is a testament to the value of perseverance and painstaking effort. Lucky enough to have the inherited wealth necessary to avoid paid work, he filled his time with science. He was a careful and gifted writer, and his bewildering attention to detail in the study of barnacles, of botany, of domesticated animals, and of fancy pigeons in the groundwork for the Origin upheld his overt commitment to the “inductive method”: in the code of 19th Century men of science, this amounted to the imperative that obsessive fact collection must come before speculative theorizing.

In later life, he mentored countless botanists through correspondence: Down became the hub of an international network of botanical knowledge. Darwin’s enterprise was truly collective, and the many friends he made in scientific circles ensured his immaculate reputation. Darwin’s theory of evolution was the first deemed respectable by the genteel scientific community because the man behind it was respected. The virtues that earned him this status continue to impress and inspire his disciples today.

Varsity 23/01/09

Marilynne Robinson — Home

I mistakenly thought Marilynne Robinson’s Home (2008 ) was a sequel to Gilead (2004). It’s not. It’s contemporaneous — the same story from a different perspective, though knowledge of the earlier Pulitzer-winning novel is assumed. One almost wonders whether Home started life as a notebook for Gilead. Ever wondered what supporting characters in novels do when they’re not on the page? No? Well now you can find out anyway. It’s probably a good idea to leave all your expectations at the door with Home, as its markedly different to Robinson’s previous novels.

Whereas Housekeeping (1980) and Gilead were masterful fictionalized memoirs that dove deep into their narrator’s personal and family history, Home is a reasonably straightforward, third-person, temporally-continuous narrative. Jack Boughton arrives home after twenty years to live in the desolate house of his ailing minister father, Robert, and his heartbroken spinster sister, Glory, whom Robinson describes with particular tenderness:

She had dreamed of a real home for herself and the babies, and the fiancé, a home very different from this good and blessed and fustian and oppressive tabernacle of Boughton probity and kind intent. She knew, she had known for years, that she would never open a door on that home, never cross that threshold, never scoop up a pretty child and set it on her hip and feel it lean into her breast and eye the world from her arms with the complacency of utter trust. Ah well.

Though the narration often looks-in on the thoughts of Glory (now all but a servant to her father), she is primarily a spectator to the comings and goings of Jack, who is the central driving force in the plot. In his childhood, he fathered a child and ran away. He returns from his time in the wilderness disgraced, determined to win the support of his father and the Rev’d John Ames (his namesake and the narrator of Gilead), hoping against hope to build a settled life for himself in this isolated Iowa town, dreaming that his black wife will return to him from St Louis.

It sounds like the setup for a great novel. And it is. But that novel is Gilead. Home pales in comparison. Housekeeping and Gilead are wonderful for their subjectivity, their whimsical, unreliable narration, full of little reminisces, stories from long ago and (in Ames’s case) offhand insights regarding theology. Home is practically a study of boredom: it’s three miserable, ordinary people, living in an empty house. It’s Big Brother 1956.

The book’s redeeming strength is, unsurprisingly, Robinson’s sensational descriptive prose. I was left nonplussed by Home, but I still say without hesitation that Robinson is one of the best stylists of English I’ve ever come across, and the magician that wowed the world with Housekeeping is still in evidence here — notably when describing the slow decay of a house through time:

Other pious families gave away the things they did not need. Boughtons put them in the attic, as if to make an experiment of doing without them before they undertook some irreparable act of generosity. Then, what with the business of life and the passage of time, what with the pungency of mothballs and the inevitable creep of dowdiness through any stash of old clothes, however smart they might have been when new, it became impossible to give the things away.

… or the inner turmoil of poor Glory, arguably a dead ringer for Housekeeping’s Sylvie:

She had learned to compose her face, so that from a distance she would not necessarily seem to be weeping, and then they made a little game of catching her at it — tears, they would say. Ah, tears. She thought how considerate it would have been of nature to allow the venting of feeling through the palm of a hand or even the sole of a foot.

Robinson can still write a stunning sentence, but this whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Penelope Fitzgerald — The Beginning of Spring

The Beginning of Spring (1988 ) is a real oddity: every exquisitely-crafted chapter seems loaded with meaning, but what that meaning might be, if anything, remains a mystery. On the first page, Frank Reid, a second-generation British immigrant running a printing press in 1913 Moscow, discovers that his wife Nellie has disappeared, marooning him with their three young children: Dolly, Ben and Annushka.

While he seeks an explanation for this vanishing act, he faces further emergencies including, among other things, the printing of a book of poetry by his wacky “Tolstoyan” accountant, Selwyn; a break-in at the press by an angsty student, Volodya; the scheming of his merchant friend, Kuriatin, whose house is memorably trashed by a dancing bear; the unwanted attentions of a “dowdy” English woman, Miss Kinsmann; the visit of his brother-in-law, Charlie; and, most portentously, the arrival of a mysterious Mary Poppins-like governess, Lisa — a young blonde whose presence in the household scandalizes Moscow.

Fitzgerald provides a great service to the reader in cramming into 250 pages what almost any other author would smear over 500. Like Flash, Fitzgerald does the hard work so you don’t have to. This Booker-shortlisted novel is terrific fun: concise, eventful, historically fascinating and, best of all, humorous. Fitzgerald’s tone is wry, her characters clumsy and endearing. Here, Volodya confronts Frank:

“What I have written is not political.”
“What’s the subject?”
“The subject is universal pity.”
Volodya’s expression was strained, as though he had entered his remark for an important prize, and could hardly believe that he wouldn’t receive it.

The craftsmanship of this book, the effort, the patience, the care and the precision required to render some of these paragraphs, to not only go out and painstakingly research every bureaucratic detail of running a business in 1910s Russia (how the type was set, what was sold in the markets, how messengers were paid, what the accountants did, who had to bribe whom…) but to then incorporate that research in such a tidy, unshowy, laconic fashion… it’s astonishing. Take this little vignette:

He was heading toward the river, and the air was full of the vast reverberations of the bells from the five golden domes of the church of the Redeemer, not at anything like their full power, but like the first barrage of artillery before the main attack. The attack did not come — it was Lent, and they chimed only once, but they were answered from across the river by a hundred others, always with one chime only. He stood listening to the bells in the open starlight. From the cathedral square a ramp went down to the water. The river ran darkly, still choked with the winter’s majestic breaking ice and the debris carried along with it, and an inconceivable amount of rubbish — baskets, crates, way-posts, wash-tubs, wheels, cradles, the last traces of the traffic the ice had carried while, for four months, it was a high-road. Watching the breaking ice from the bridges was one of Moscow’s favourite occupations. The Gazeta-Kopeika said that a pair of dead lovers, clutched together, had floated by, frozen into the ice. The Gazeta repeated this story every spring.

Wish you were there? But this isn’t just literary tourism — this is excavation, exhuming a past that any right thinking person would assume had been buried forever by the 1917 revolution and the century that followed.

But is this staggeringly accomplished novel a case of storytelling for its own sake? Pure aesthetic pleasure? Or is there an overarching allegorical point to it all? Search me. It seems too real to be pure allegory, too strange to be no allegory at all. In particular, a climactic scene in which Lisa and Dolly wander through a forest seems to both demand and defy interpretation. Julian Barnes writes:

Among the birch stems Dolly begins to see “what looked like human hands, moving to touch each other across the whiteness and blackness”. In a clearing, men and women stand pressed each against the trunk of a tree. Lisa explains to the tree-people that, although she knows they have come there on her account, she can’t stay; she must go back with the child. “‘If she speaks about this, she won’t be believed. If she remembers it, she’ll understand in time what she’s seen’.” They go back along the path, and Dolly returns to bed; but the forest has invaded the dacha. “She could still smell the potent leaf-sap of the birch trees. It was as strong inside the house as out.” Does Dolly understand what she’s seen – and do we? Is the scene – for which we have only the child’s point of view – a dream, a hallucination, the memory of a sleep-walker? If not, what is its register? Are the woods coming to life, as they do in the pantheistic poetry of Selwyn Crane, the novel’s Tolstoyan dreamer? Does the scene symbolise female awakening or personal liberation, for Dolly, or for Lisa, or both? Perhaps Dolly has witnessed the preparations for some pagan rite of spring (only a few pages later, Stravinsky’s name is quietly mentioned). Or might the secret meeting in the forest be straightforwardly political, even revolutionary (Lisa, we later discover, is a politico)? Some, even all, of these interpretations are possible, and, mysteriously, not incompatible with one another.

Julian’s answer is a cop-out, but I’m afraid I fare no better. I cannot begin to fathom Fitzgerald’s grand plan in this strange and engrossing work, if there ever was one. Fitzgerald has crafted a novel as incomprehensible as Russia itself.

(P.S. John Self has an enjoyable recent post about the same novel)

Cormac McCarthy — The Road

It’s cold, it’s rainy, big grey clouds are whirring past my window: what better time to write about Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic smash hit, The Road (2006)?

I avoided it for a long time, on the grounds that it sounds for all the world like a grotesque hybrid of B-movie science-fiction and Disneyfied schmaltz. The end of the world is here — will a father and his cute small child have the perseverance to get to the end of the road and make a better life? It sounds awful. But it isn’t. As Michael Chabon notes in a wonderful review, McCarthy’s novel is a genre hybrid, but not the sort you’d expect. This is a horror/epic — a nightmare odyssey.

The book follows an anonymous father and son crossing the underworld: an American landscape stripped of all life in a catastrophe years past that is never described. They must scavenge canned food wherever they find it among the long-deserted habitations. They must never stop moving. They must never give up. They must keep alive the hope that at the end of the road lies something better. McCarthy’s debt to Homer is clear.

But the hellish scenarios our heroes confront along the way are drawn from pure horror, and it’s this ever-present threat of grisly death that makes The Road unputdownable. In short, our heroes seem to be the only two humans left alive not sold on the idea of cannibalism. They must fend off not only evil, but also the temptation to do evil themselves:

We wouldnt ever eat anybody, would we?
No. Of course not.
Even if we were starving.
We’re starving now.
You said we werent.
I said we werent dying. I didnt say we werent starving.
But we wouldnt.
No. We wouldnt.
No. No matter what.
Because we’re the good guys.
Yes.
And we’re carrying the fire?
And we’re carrying the fire. Yes.
Okay.

These brilliantly realized father/son dialogues constitute a big chunk of the book, and are by far McCarthy’s greatest achievement here: they give the book its plausibility, its immediacy, its momentum — they elevate the book above every other literary post-apocalypse I’ve encountered. For once, here is a disaster scenario in which real people (not Tom Cruise) have survived, and you can sense battles for survival raging in their very conversations. What’s at stake is the survival of morality, the survival of faith in a better future, and, most strikingly, the survival of language. Names have already gone. Natural kinds are going. The boy, who was born after the apocalypse, knows a different world. One of my favourite moments in the book comes when the man has just explained to the boy what is meant by “as the crow flies”:

They sat for a long time. They sat on their folded blankets and watched the road in both directions. No wind. Nothing. After a while the boy said: There’s not any crows. Are there?
No.
Just in books.
Yes. Just in books.
I didnt think so.

It’s only by telling the boy about crows that the man can sustain “crow” as a referring term. As the man observes, the world is still full of books — but they don’t mean anything any more. Take this passage:

The country went from pine to liveoak and pine. Magnolias. Trees as dead as any. He picked up one of the heavy leaves and crushed it in his hand to powder and let the powder sift through his fingers.

Little descriptive vignettes like this illuminate every page. But one is struck by the thought that, once this man is gone (and we get the sense, right from the start, that he is unlikely to last past these 300 pages), who else will pick out the “pines” and the “liveoaks” and the “magnolias” in that scene? The matter itself is still there, but the categories, the concepts, the way human reason carved up the world — that’s what is fading. This makes McCarthy’s apocalypse perhaps the most complete in all of literature, and the most terrifying.

W. G. Sebald — The Rings of Saturn

I recently had the chance to visit Orford Ness, a shingle spit on the Suffolk coast upon which stand the ruins of a disused military testing facility; and this strange and wonderful experience prompted me to write about one the most remarkable books I’ve ever read: The Rings of Saturn (1998 ) by W.G. Sebald, tr. Michael Hulse.

Everyone who encounters this book struggles terribly to pigeonhole it, including the book’s publisher, Vintage, which describes it as “Fiction/Travel/Memoir”. It’s all of these things and none of them. Sebald’s concern is, in his own words, “the natural history of destruction”. He considered himself “not a writer of fiction, but some sort of chronicler of damages caused.” The point of the book is discreetly set out on page one, when the narrator tells of how he “set off to walk the county of Suffolk”, a walk that supplies the book’s basic scaffolding.

At all events, in retrospect I became preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralysing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place.

The Suffolk coast is a smartly chosen setting for this literary undertaking. With the coastline receding at around four metres a year, coastal settlers wage a constant battle against the encroachment of nature. On the frontline, buildings are continually taken prisoner by the waves: the lighthouse above will be gone in five years. As Sebald notes touchingly and perceptively, even the trees have been ravaged by Dutch Elm Disease. But this destruction only frames the episodes of destruction that fascinate Sebald — those brushed-over chapters in history in which humans have busied themselves inventing new ways to destroy each other. From early modern dissections of criminals to 17th Century naval warfare, from the Belgian Congo to 19th Century China, The Rings of Saturn is an excavation of past suffering.

Much to my envy, Sebald visited Orford Ness before the National Trust acquired it:

But the closer I came to these ruins, the more any notion of a mysterious isle of the dead receded, and the more I imagined myself amidst the remains of our own civilisation after its extinction in some future catastrophe. To me too, as for some latter-day stranger ignorant of the nature of our society wandering among heaps of scrap metal and defunct machinery, the beings who had once lived here were an enigma, as was the purpose of the primitive contraptions and fittings inside the bunkers, the iron rails under the ceilings, the hooks on the still partially tiled walls, the showerheads the size of plates, the ramps and the soakaways.

In German the book carries a subtitle: “An English Pilgrimage“. Pilgrimage to what? This is an allusion, perhaps (and similar allusions appear elsewhere in the book), to Suffolk’s centrality to the British blitz of German cities in World War Two. Suffolk was where the planes armed, took off and landed. Orford Ness was where they tested their weapons. For Sebald, this air war is one of the great suppressed traumas in world history, one he addresses in his celebrated essay Luftkrieg und Literatur (1999). It’s an irony that, in any war, even the victors are ultimately obliterated without trace.

The weight of the subject matter is leavened by the wonderfully light touch of the prose, marked by a poet’s eye for metaphor and obsessional attention to detail. One of Sebald’s most powerful and idiosyncratic techniques is to embed photographs in the text: they are so well chosen, so well integrated that they make a major contribution to the book’s evocative power. As you can see, I’ve embedded some mock-Sebaldian photographs of my own.

Sebald was on to something. A topic I’ve landed on several times recently is the question of what exactly, if humanity were obliterated tomorrow, we’d leave behind us as a geological legacy. People tend to assume we’d leave behind a world of junk (carrier bags, fridges, chewing gum). In reality, as Jan Zalasiewicz notes, it will be very little, if anything. A minute stratum of rock that might well be interpreted as some giant natural disaster (not necessarily inaccurately) by a future intelligent species. In the end, everything goes.

Pre-1789, natural history was the natural history of creation — the project of cataloguing all God gave to humanity. Post-1945, perhaps we should consider whether it’s the natural history of destruction that provides the bigger catalogue — and the truer picture of the world. Sebald was PR spokesman for the Faustian worldview. The Rings of Saturn is bleak, terrifying, dispiriting, and yet (and how often do these qualities go together?) an utterly beautiful work of art.

Marilynne Robinson — Gilead

A lot of great novels are dispiriting — I don’t ever remember coming across a great novel so thoroughly spiriting as Marilynne Robinson’s wonderful Gilead (2004).

The heart and soul of Robinson’s Pulitzer-winner is the Revd. John Ames, the novel’s utterly convincing and highly likeable narrator. An elderly man with a new wife and a young child, Ames’ narrative takes the form of a long letter from father to son, to be read posthumously, blending reminisces about past generations with a diary of Ames’ present-day life in the town of Gilead, Iowa, 1956. The framing device has built-in poignancy, on which Robinson capitalizes from the first words:

I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old. And you put your hand in my hand and you said, You aren’t very old, as if that settled it. I told you you might have a very different life from mine, and from the life you’ve had with me, and that would be a wonderful thing, there are many ways to live a good life.

When Ames’s sinister namesake, John Ames Boughton, “Jack”, the prodigal son of a lifelong friend, returns from self-imposed exile, Ames feels his destiny has become strangely intertwined with that of this errant wanderer, whose  darkly mysterious past adds suspense to the narrative.

How should I deal with these fears I have, that Jack Boughton will do you and your mother harm, just because he can, just for the sly, unanswerable meanness of it?

Ames makes frequent offhand remarks on theological topics, and these diversions are, surprisingly enough, Gilead’s trump card: measured, thoughtful and modest, they are in some sense plainly Robinson’s attempt to encourage a new perspective on the austere “Bible Belt” Protestantism that Europeans tend to regard with sniggering contempt.

It seems to me that people tend to forget that we are to love our enemies, not to satisfy some standard of righteousness, but because God their Father loves them. I have probably preached on that a hundred times.

Ames is smart enough to see the barriers between human understanding and ultimate truth. He is sceptical of the reach of language and argument: “Does God exist?” he asks himself, and refuses to answer — not because he lacks faith, but because he doesn’t even consider himself capable of truly grasping the content of the question. But Ames’ introspective musings also illuminate, albeit obliquely, Ames’ troubled mind as he negotiates the threats that face him: fatherhood, age, death, and Jack.

As I have said, the worst eventualities can have great value as experience. And often enough, when we think we are protecting ourselves, we are struggling against our rescuer. I know this, I have seen the truth of it with my own eyes, though I have not myself always managed to live by it, the Good Lord knows.

Not much happens in the novel’s present-moment, but it doesn’t have to. In Ames, Robinson has given an authentic voice to the “lost continent”: Mid-Western small-town America. The subtle, laconic, understated prose, presumably honed through Gilead’s 24-year maturation, is something to savour. The writing reads like a relic from an gentler, simpler, antiquated time: it is not obviously a work of fiction at all, such is the precision of Robinson’s craft.

I have paid a good deal of attention to light, but no one could begin to do it justice. There was the feeling of a weight of light — pressing the damp out of the grass and pressing the smell of sour old sap out of the boards on the porch floor and burdening even the trees a little as a late snow would do. It was the kind of light that rests on your shoulders the way a cat lies on your lap.

But what surprised and pleased me most in Gilead was the rare virtuousness of its characters. In a time when many authors (including many of my favourites — Philip Roth, for example) plumb the depths of taboo-smashing libertinism in search of a good story, few deal with the enduring problem of how to be good. I’m open to suggestions, but I think Robinson may be one of the first authors since Dostoevsky to grapple with the question head-on. John Ames joins Alyosha Karamazov and Prince Mishkin in that tiny drawer marked “virtuous heroes”.

Wally Lamb — The Hour I First Believed

Wally Lamb began his new novel about the Columbine school massacre, The Hour I First Believed (follow-up to 1998’s I Know This Much Is True), on the day of the shooting itself. Nine years later, here we are. A 750-page brick with a preface, afterword, notes, bibliography and a list of Columbine-related charities. Don’t say this man doesn’t take his work seriously. It will sell millions of copies, so enjoy the world’s forests while you can.

The Columbine setting gives the book spray-on seriousness (Lamb even includes real journal entries from the killers), but it struck me as a cheap trick. Lamb doesn’t tell us anything new about the killings. He hasn’t unearthed new details (this is unequivocally fiction) and he doesn’t try to empathise with the killers — his analysis extends as far as “Oh God, wasn’t it tragic?”. For Lamb’s oddly named narrator, Caelum Quirk, the massacre witnessed by his wife kickstarts an interminable odyssey through his family history.

“Caelum”, by the way, is Latin for “Heaven” — I think this is what Lamb calls “symbolism” and I call “corny”.

Can a work of this enormity really be bad? The answer, tragically, is yes. The length is unjustified by the plot, which rambles on and on and on, as though Lamb lacked the confidence to send a shorter, punchier work to the publishers. This is one for speed readers. And not because of its length, but because of how it’s written. Slick, neat, professional, functional, events-dialogue-events-dialogue — poetic as a patio, evocative as Aldi. Reading this dull and humourless book at my usual 30 pages an hour, I nearly lost the will to live.

Philip Roth — Sabbath’s Theater

If Philip Roth deifies sex, Sabbath’s Theater (1995) is his Bible. I recently saw it described by Linda Grant as “Roth at his most Rothian,” and this is the right adjective — indeed, I finished it thinking I’d had enough Roth to last me a lifetime. The novel, at 450 pages one of Roth’s meatiest, chronicles the sexual exploits of arthritic ex-puppeteer Mickey Sabbath in exhaustive and exhausting detail. The extent to which Sabbath is yet another Roth alterego is debatable — of course Roth is, in some sense, a puppeteer too.

Mickey’s dedication to the performing arts is absolute; his definition of them is loose. Seduction is his favourite form of showmanship, and he gleefully tramples across marriages and humiliates husbands — to Sabbath, the marriage is no less amoral, no less of an act, than the affair. But Sabbath is luckless: during a street theatre performance, for instance, he gets himself arrested for exposing the breasts of an audience member. Our hero crashes his way through a series of disastrous entanglements: two failed marriages; a phone-sex scandal with a student; a lurid threesome; a farcical encounter with a girl’s underwear draw; and a 13-year affair that takes place in Sabbath’s private theatre, a remote mountaintop grotto where only helicopters provide the audience.

Sabbath is something of a Rothian messiah, the ultimate, ludicrous extrapolation of that Sixties rebel stereotype: the one who Made Love Not War, who smashed the old taboos, who loved Portnoy’s Complaint first time round.

Maybe it wasn’t at all repulsion he felt but something like awe at the sight of white-bearded Sabbath, come down from his mountaintop like some holy man who has renounced ambition and worldly possessions. Can it be that there is something religious about me? Has what I’ve done — i.e., failed to do — been saintly?

This is Roth’s puzzle. I’ve read so much Roth that, from time to time, I even sympathise with his worldview. A Rothian marriage is, at best, institutionalised casual sex. But that doesn’t make lasting relationships meaningless. On the contrary — they’re all we have. Sabbath thinks of sex as a performance — until he sees that (just as he observes of his actress wife Nikki) it’s when he’s in character that he’s truly himself. His sexual relationships are his real life, his sole reason to stay alive. When Drenka, his lover of 13 years, dies, he breaks down:

And this brought forth Sabbath’s third round of tears. He had cried like this only once before in his life, over Nikki’s disappearance. And when Morty died he had watched his mother cry worse than this. Hospitalized. Until that word had been spoken he had believed that all this crying could easily be spurious, and so it was a considerable disappointment to discover that it did not seem within his power to switch it off.

Poignant moments such as this are few, and the novel’s disjointed structure undermines its credentials as a morality play. But lives are like that. In the novel’s present moment, Sabbath is ruing his fate after a lifetime of failure. The resultant tale is something like Herzog on crack — not literally, mind you: Sabbath gets high on copulation alone. This is a work of evil genius, at once ragingly serious and outrageously silly:

He had learned to stand with his back to the north so that his icy wind did not blow directly on his dick but still he had to remove one of his gloves to jerk off successfully, and sometimes the gloveless hand would get so cold that he would have to put that glove back on and switch to the other hand. He came on her grave many nights.

A study as lavish and comprehensive as Sabbath’s Theater could do with at least a vaguely likeable figure at its centre. Yet Sabbath is deeply unsympathetic — not only to all around him but to the reader too. He’s misogynist, racist, grotesque. This is, of course, Roth’s intention: a deliberate bid to affront liberal orthodoxy. But at times I wished I was reading the real Herzog, the one without the crack. Bellow’s is a work of poise and restraint; Sabbath’s Theater exudes an excess of ink and semen.

It’s overlong, filthy and mean-spirited — but Sabbath’s Theater is still a formidable piece of writing, peppered with set pieces of raucous comedy and touching sensitivity. It’s the sublime and the ridiculous, in a single package. Lives are like that.

So then, this had been his existence. What conclusion was to be drawn? Any? Who had come to the surface in him was inexorably himself. Nobody else. Take it or leave it.