BOOKS

Darcy's Point of View: A Writing Exercise by Kate

2009-06-30T10:27:00.000-07:00

To learn why I started this writing exercise, see the following posts: J is for Janites and Darcy's Point of View: First Impressions.

Darcy Rejects Elizabeth Without Realizing It

The assembly room was too hot and too crowded. People maneuvered close to the Bingley party. They were introduced to Bingley, to his sisters, to Mr. Hurst, to Darcy, to Bingley, to his sisters, to Mr. Hurst, to Darcy. Darcy wondered why they bothered; he would never remember their names. He was unlikely to spend much time at Netherfield anyway. Bingley would get bored soon and move on somewhere else. Darcy thought sometimes that Bingley only bought an estate because Darcy owned an estate. Bingley knew nothing about estates. Darcy gave the Netherfield experiment six months.

More faces—more introductions. People shrieked at him. An over-scented woman cried, "Doesn't the quartet sound lovely?"

There was nothing to say to that. It wasn't as if Darcy would hear the music with all the chattering and thumping and unending introductions. "What beautiful gowns," another woman shrieked. Darcy managed to detach himself. The women whispered as he edged away. Darcy shook his head. You'd think lace and ribbons were state secrets the way women carried on.

He circled the room, nodding to Mr. Hurst. "What an odd company," Miss Bingley mentioned as he passed her, "don't you think?" but he didn't pause. He'd already danced with her and didn't need to oblige again—she had plenty of partners. Most worthy women always could obtain partners. He started another circuit, looking for Bingley. They'd been here nearly two hours—long enough. Bingley could make his excuses, they could go back to Netherfield, Darcy could read and go to bed.

Bingley was ending a dance with a tall, serenely smiling woman, and Darcy waited near the edge of the woman's party. Bingley bounded over to him like a Pemberly pup. Wasn't this ball splendid? Weren't all the girls pretty? He was having a wonderful time—

Darcy felt the beginnings of a headache. They weren't going to leave early. Which didn't mean Darcy was going to dance—not with anyone he didn't know in an overheated room amongst a crowd of people exchanging pointless remarks.

Bingley was puzzled. Wasn't Darcy having fun? He'd have fun if he danced. Bingley would get him a partner-another Bennet sister, there, behind Darcy. Darcy turned his head, caught the eye of a sitting young woman and snapped a negative. Bingley laughed, slapped his back and strode back to the serenely smiling woman: Miss Bennet, Darcy supposed. His headache was getting worse.

Elizabeth Turns Down Darcy, and He Doesn't Mind

Elizabeth Bennet had lovely dark eyes. She was a trifle short, her smile was crooked, and she was far from elegant. She wasn't shrill though, being easy to listen to. At the Lucas's, Darcy placed himself in a group near her. He also listened to her sing. She wasn't as polished or as adept as his sister Georgiana, but the songs were well-rendered: pleasing. She was a pleasing, intelligent young woman.

The Lucas's entertainment went downhill after that, and some couples started to dance which didn't bode well for the rest of the evening: why did people want to hop around rather than converse on interesting subjects? Darcy glanced around for Mr. Long, hoping they could continue their conversation about tax laws.

He found he was next to Sir William who was prattling: "There is nothing like dancing after all. I consider it as one of the first refinements of polished society."

"Every savage can dance," Darcy pointed out, but Sir William was making pleasantries, not actual conversation, and Darcy subsided. Sir William began to ask Darcy pointless questions about his dance habits, and Darcy glowered—if he stopped answering, maybe Sir William would go away.

The questions finally ceased, and Darcy was ready to move off when he realized Sir William was presenting Miss Elizabeth Bennet to him as a potential dancing partner. Darcy held out a hand, but Miss Elizabeth refused. Correctly, Darcy allowed: this wasn't an appropriate venue for a dance. Still, he bowed and repeated Sir William's proposal. She was after all, preferable—much preferable—to another five minutes of questions about where and when Darcy liked to dance.

She raised her brows, and her eyes—dark brown with flecks of gold—met Darcy's momentarily. She was, he was disconcerted to see, amused—by Sir William, he guessed. It occurred to Darcy that amusement was probably a better tactic with someone like Sir William than monosyllabic responses, and he wondered if he should smile back, but Miss Elizabeth had moved away. He gazed after her, marking the straight line of her back and her dark curls. She turned to pass a remark to Miss Lucas, and he noted again the liveliness of her eyes when Miss Lucas made her laugh.

Miss Bingley had approached. She was talking in her rapid, caustic way. Darcy caught the last sentence: "What would I give to hear your strictures on them!"

On Miss Lucas and Miss Elizabeth, Darcy assumed. He had no strictures. He said so: "I have been meditating on the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow."

"Which lady has the credit of inspiring such reflections?"

"Miss Elizabeth Bennet."

She began to tease him about wanting to marry Miss Elizabeth—typical for a woman. Darcy shrugged and occupied himself with watching Miss Elizabeth until the evening finally ended.

Elizabeth Comes to Netherfield, and Darcy Gets All Flustered

Darcy and Charles returned to Netherfield from an evening at Colonel Forster's. Miss Bingley greeted them with the news that Miss Bennet, who had come for dinner, was ill. Charles began to pepper his sister with questions. "I hope she feels better," Darcy said and went to bed.

The next morning, he found that the local apothecary, Mr. Jones, had been sent for. Charles insisted on giving Darcy a detailed account of what he said to Mr. Jones and what Mr. Jones said to Charles and what Miss Bingley said to Mr. Jones and what Mr. Jones said Miss Bennet said to him and so on and so on. Darcy ate his kippers and waited for Mr. Hurst to finish with the newspaper.

Towards the end of breakfast, the door opened, and Miss Elizabeth Bennet entered. Darcy started to his feet and looked beyond her, expecting Mr. or Mrs. Bennet as well, but Miss Elizabeth was alone.

He frowned. He hadn't heard a carriage. "No," Miss Elizabeth was saying to Miss Bingley, "I walked from Longbourn" which was quite a distance even if one cut across fields which she obviously had. She looked exceptionally well, Darcy acknowledged, her eyes bright and her cheeks glowing.

Charles was shaking her hand and telling her all about what Mr. Jones said. Miss Bingley took Miss Elizabeth upstairs to her sister, and Darcy went to the library to figure out exactly how many miles it was between Longbourn and Netherfield. It was over three miles like he'd thought.

He spent the rest of the day with the stable master. Charles came out towards mid-afternoon, agreed with every recommendation Darcy and the master made and returned to the house. Darcy sighed. Maybe the Netherfield experiment would only last five months. He realized Miss Bennet was a concern, but Miss Elizabeth was more than capable of coping with any contingency.

His belief was confirmed at dinner. Miss Elizabeth answered all Charles' questions thoroughly and equably, allaying most of his concerns. Now, maybe Darcy could convince Charles to focus on his new property's easements. After Miss Elizabeth returned upstairs, Darcy retrieved Netherfield's plans from the library. When he re-entered the dining room, Miss Bingley was holding forth on some subject or other. Darcy unfolded the plans, forcing Mr. Hurst to move his dessert plate.

"You observed it, Mr. Darcy," Miss Bingley said, and he raised his head. "I am inclined to think that you would not wish to see your sister make such an exhibition."

"Certainly not," Darcy said. Georgiana never made exhibitions of herself.

"To walk three miles, or four miles—"

"Three point four," Darcy muttered.

"—shows a conceited independence, a most country-town indifference to decorum."

"It shows an affection for her sister that is very pleasing," said Charles.

Miss Bingley leaned towards Darcy over the table, disarranging Netherfield's plans.

"Likely, this adventure has affected your admiration of her fine eyes."

"Not at all. They were brightened by the exercise," he said and moved himself and the plans further down the table.

Miss Bingley and Mrs. Hurst fell to discussing the Bennet relations: one of the uncles was an attorney; one was in trade. Charles contended that this did not affect the Bennet sisters' agreeableness which comment—however true—rather missed the point: relations directly influenced a woman's ability to marry well. Miss Bingley, for example, would marry well because of Charles. Darcy pointed this out, more or less, but no one seemed to understand what he was saying, so he went back to the plans.

Charles, however, wasn't in the mood for a discussion of easements; he, his sisters, and Mr. Hurst were going to play loo; Darcy should join them. Darcy reluctantly agreed and replaced the plans in the library on his way to the drawing room.

They were playing when Miss Elizabeth came downstairs. This meant her sister was feeling better or asleep which was a good sign, and Darcy nodded to her. She didn't see him though, as she was selecting a book from the shelves. The others began discussing libraries, and Charles mentioned that he would love to buy Pemberley for the sake of its library. Darcy smiled to himself at the idea and looking up, found Miss Elizabeth near him. She looked quite nice in some blue-greeny gown. She had a book closed on one finger, and she was half-smiling at Charles' cards.

Miss Bingley said to Darcy, "Is Miss Darcy much grown since the spring? Is she as tall as I am?"

Georgiana was five feet four. "She is now about Miss Elizabeth Bennet's height," Darcy said, "or rather taller."

Miss Bingley began to discuss Georgiana's accomplishments, then female accomplishments in general. Charles chimed in, listing typical female accomplishments such as painting and covering screens. Darcy considered the ability to make things out of paper to be rather useless. Being accomplished didn't mean producing crafts like a provincial at a village fete; it meant being graceful and talented and having the ability to converse on a range of subjects. Off the top of his head, he could think of six accomplished women: Georgiana, obviously. His own mother, now deceased. Mrs. Reynolds, his housekeeper. Mrs. Annesley, Georgiana's companion (he never would have engaged her if she weren't accomplished). His aunt by marriage, Lady Beatrice Fitzwilliam. And Miss Elizabeth Bennet.

He said so, more or less, but he must not have mentioned the part about Miss Elizabeth because she laughed:

"I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women. I rather wonder now at your knowing any."

She had a point, but Darcy had restricted his claim to six because he didn't know many more women than six-not well, at least.

As soon as Miss Elizabeth went upstairs to see her sister, Miss Bingley started discussing her. Darcy was getting rather tired of Miss Bingley discussing Miss Elizabeth when Miss Elizabeth wasn't in the room since Miss Bingley said the same things over and over. Now she was saying that Miss Elizabeth was the kind of woman who put down her own sex in order to make herself look better which completely missed the point of Miss Elizabeth's remark. Anyway, as far as Darcy could tell, Miss Bingley did that sort of thing more often than Miss Elizabeth. And he said so, which seemed to shut everybody up. Thank goodness.

The next morning, Mrs. Bennet came to check on her daughter's health. She was a shrill woman, and Darcy wished he could be like Mr. Hurst and wander out of the room. But one didn't. One was taught to stand and be courteous while this woman went on and on and on about her daughter's illness and her daughter's sweet temper and what Mr. Jones thought. They had heard more than enough about what Mr. Jones thought from Charles.

Mrs. Bennet hoped that Charles would occupy Netherfield for a long time. That was unlikely. In fact, Charles started bragging about his spontaneity when making plans. Darcy never could understand why people considered spontaneity a virtue. It always struck him as rather shallow and thoughtless. Miss Elizabeth had it right when she described Charles as uncomplicated. What you saw with Charles was what you got, which was rather refreshing except for Charles' penchant for spontaneity: Darcy couldn't cure that.

"Studying different characters must be amusing," Charles said to Miss Elizabeth after she called him uncomplicated, and she agreed that it was one of her favorite things to do.

She wouldn't get many chances in the country, and Darcy said so. She smiled at him and pointed out that people change over time: one could study a single person over many years rather than many people all at once. The idea interested Darcy, and he might have responded, but Mrs. Bennet interrupted with some declaration about the country being better than London. Darcy didn't know why people couldn't stay on topic.

The conversation moved on to a discussion of poetry which topic did interest Darcy. Miss Elizabeth claimed that her sister lost interest in a suitor who sent her poetry. Darcy smiled to himself but offered Shakespeare's opinion: poetry, like music, is the food of love.

"Of a fine, stout, healthy love," Elizabeth agreed. "Everything nourishes what is strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away."

Darcy had to think about that, and the conversation moved on before he could respond.

He was still thinking about literature and the nourishment of sensibility when he wrote a letter to Georgiana that evening. Miss Bingley was talking to him, and he made replies, but he mostly concentrated on asking Georgiana what she thought about poetry and requesting an update on Mrs. Annesley. He trusted Mrs. Annesley, but he had trusted companions of Georgiana before and been disappointed.

He reread the letter and crossed out a few words. Charles was bragging about spontaneity again: his ability to write quickly without proofing. Darcy frowned. There was nothing commendable about acting or reacting quickly any more than there was anything commendable about suddenly changing one's plans—unless there was a good reason, of course. Darcy said so.

Bingley laughed. Bingley always thought it was funny when Darcy wanted people to say exactly what they meant or when he asked for specific information, but, Darcy wondered, how could you decide anything without the facts? What was the point in talking in generalities? Darcy would never change his plans unless someone was ill, like Georgiana, for instance, or unless his steward needed his attention at Pemberley. But he wouldn't know the reasons until they occurred. How could he say ahead of time—now—what he would do at some later date?

The discussion was becoming an argument, and Darcy hated arguing with people. He liked to exchange ideas, not wrangle over who was right or wrong. If they wanted to argue, they could wait till he left the room. He said so.

Miss Elizabeth's smile went crooked. She had amused him again. He wasn't sure why.

She said, "What you ask is no sacrifice on my side; Mr. Darcy had better finish his letter," so he did, but Miss Elizabeth's amusement still bothered him. Was she amused because he didn't want to argue? Was she amused because she agreed that the argument was pointless? Was she amused because Darcy didn't like people to change their plans? Was she amused because Darcy had been too curt? He watched her cross to the pianoforte. She was still smiling slightly as she looked through the music-books stacked on the lid. She glanced back at him now and again, and he noted that she looked quite lovely in the reddish-brown thing she was wearing.

She'd been wearing a reddish-brown thing at the Lucas's and for the first time, it occurred to Darcy that her amusement there might have been directed at him, not at Sir William. Perhaps she hadn't wanted to dance because of Darcy's attitude, not because of Sir William's behavior.

He got up, crossed the room, and asked her if she wanted to dance a reel. She didn't respond or look at him. He really didn't understand this woman. He repeated the request.

She turned to him then. No, she wouldn't dance with him. Darcy was testing her good taste; "I have therefore made up my mind that I do not want to dance a reel at all; and now despise me if you dare." And she grinned up at him.

Darcy's heart turned over.

He was not interested in her, he told himself in his room that night. She was intelligent and lovely and quick-witted. She was good company. That was all.

He felt confident of his feelings when he went downstairs the next morning-until Miss Bingley began teasing him about Miss Elizabeth again; Darcy started to worry. Did she think he was pursuing Miss Elizabeth? Did everybody think that? Did Miss Elizabeth? Why would she? He hardly spoke to her.

You asked her to dance, he reminded himself and winced. That was fairly forward behavior. Had anyone noticed? He didn't even like to dance.

He worried on the matter, missing the rest of Miss Bingley's conversation.

"Are you looking forward to cards this evening?" she said as they parted.

"No," he said and went to drag Charles out to meet Netherfield's land steward. Charles didn't yet have a full complement of servants, but a land steward was necessary. Darcy wanted to discuss the steward's recommendations with Charles after dinner, but Miss Bennet came downstairs, obviously feeling better, and Charles bounced over to her and started to chat. About Mr. Jones, most likely.

Darcy picked up A general view of agriculture, vol. 2. The others were chattering. He heard mention of the Netherfield ball and turned a page. He heard Miss Elizabeth's name and looked up.

Miss Bingley wanted Miss Elizabeth to take a turn about the room. Darcy smiled to himself. This was an old ploy. The ladies wanted to show off their figures. Or gossip together, although that seemed unlikely; Miss Elizabeth wasn't much of a gossip. In any case, Darcy could admire them very well from where he sat. He said so.

Miss Bingley said she was offended. She wasn't really-Darcy could tell that much. "How shall we punish him?" she said to Miss Elizabeth.

Darcy felt himself tense. Miss Elizabeth had a sharp tongue and a knowing eye, and Darcy amused her for some reason. If she wanted to, she could make him look foolish.

"Tease him—laugh at him," Miss Elizabeth said.

Darcy tried not to glower. There were people who liked to mock others for the sake of mocking, not because there was anything to mock at. He said so.

"I hope I never ridicule what is wise or good," Miss Elizabeth said, but she did like to laugh at "follies and nonsense." Perhaps Mr. Darcy was without folly?

Darcy considered that he was intelligent, consistent, dependable with a good head for business and a strong sense of purpose. He was not lazy, vain, or stupid, which were the sorts of faults that deserved criticism. He was prideful, but that was understandable given his position and duties in life. He tried to make this clear.

Miss Elizabeth cocked her head. The amusement was there but something else as well: she was studying him, and Darcy felt a kind of panic. He didn't know if he liked being studied, but he didn't want Miss Elizabeth to form the wrong conclusions.

She began to turn away, and Darcy heard himself say, "I have faults enough, but they are not, I hope, very profound." He wasn't flexible, like Charles. He didn't feel sympathy for people of low character nor did he easily excuse such behavior. "My good opinion once lost is lost for ever."

She didn't like that. "You have chosen your fault well. I really cannot laugh at it. You are safe from me."

That didn't make Darcy feel better. He got the impression that Miss Elizabeth didn't like people who were safe from her. "Every disposition has a tendency to some particular evil," he pointed out rather desperately.

"And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody."

Darcy almost laughed. She was so smug in her playful way, but he had been watching and listening to her since he arrived in Hertfordshire: "Yours is willfully to misunderstand them."

She was surprised but not, Darcy was relieved to see, offended. She opened her mouth, and then Miss Bingley interrupted with a request for music. Miss Elizabeth turned away. Darcy found he was leaning forward in his chair and carefully sat back.

He was not interested in her. He was not foolish like his friend Bertram from college who went and married his landlady's daughter. Darcy had listened to a thousand panegyrics of the daughter's affectionate nature and lovely face and kind heart. The couple lived separately now, and Darcy believed the affectionate, lovely, kind daughter was being kept by another man.

Forming instantaneous affections was imprudent. It resulted in nothing but misery. But many men had been caught by a careless interest. He had been too obvious, too forward in his appreciation of Miss Elizabeth. He must not speak to her again while she remained at Netherfield with her sister.

And he didn't.

Darcy and Elizabeth Go to the Netherfield Ball and Neither Has a Good Time

Darcy hated fancy events. He put them on at Pemberley, of course, but there, he had things to do, such as consult with Mr. Talbot, his butler, on where to park any extra carriages. Moreover, he always knew his guests, and when things got too noisy, he just went to his study.

Charles had opened up Netherfield's study for the ball. Darcy stood in the front hall and tried not to look at his watch. He greeted Colonel Forster and several of the officers; Wickham wasn't among them. Darcy wasn't surprised. He had seen Wickham several days earlier with the Bennet sisters; he had guessed that Wickham, having seen Darcy, wouldn't attend the ball. Wickham had made his excuses no doubt. He was good at that. Even Darcy had thought him charming and plausible until he lost Darcy's good opinion.

The Bennets arrived. Darcy could hear Mrs. Bennet's voice. He found himself looking for Miss Elizabeth among the family group. He wasn't interested in her. He was just curious about her well-being.

She was wearing a pale blue dress. Her dark hair formed ringlets about her face. She was laughing as her eyes searched the company. Perhaps she was looking for Darcy, but he wasn't interested in her, so he retreated to the wall.

Not being interested didn't mean he shouldn't ask her to dance. This was Charles' first ball at Netherfield. Darcy wanted to help make it a success. He would even dance a few times. He approached Miss Elizabeth during the fourth dance and solicited her hand for the next. She agreed, and Darcy walked off smiling to himself. Apparently, Miss Elizabeth just needed the right venue to agree to dance.

He collected her for the fifth dance. She seemed unusually serious, but part way through the opening steps, she smiled and said, "Mr. Bingley has had good weather for his event."

Darcy nodded.

A few steps later, "It is your turn to say something now, Mr. Darcy," she told him.

"I will say whatever you want me to say."

That amused her, which was rather a relief. She liked to talk, and he had no problem with her chatting if she wanted to, but instead she said thoughtfully, "Conversation ought to be so arranged that couples have the trouble of saying as little as possible."

That remark was aimed at him. He'd never been good at small-talk, but she needn't copy his example. He said so.

Miss Elizabeth raised her brows. Oh, they were very alike, she assured him. Neither of them would say a word unless it could impress others.

She was not describing herself. Was she describing Darcy? Did she think he gave his comments special weight? He worried over her insinuation through the next few moves. He didn't think he was a pompous man—

Miss Elizabeth's next remark stopped his train of thought. She said, "When you met us the other day, we had just been forming a new acquaintance."

Wickham, she meant, and Darcy tensed. He had intended subtly, carefully, to warn her against Wickham, to say something like, "Not all of the officers in Meryton are of equal worth." She was bright; she would understand his point.

Instead of him warning her, she was challenging him. He said slowly, "Mr. Wickham is blessed with such happy manners as may insure his making friends; whether he may be equally capable of retaining them is less certain."

But Mr. Wickham had lost his friendship, Miss Elizabeth pointed out, and Darcy felt his temper rising. He should have guessed that Wickham was already spreading tales about their relationship. Why did Darcy never see it coming? He hadn't seen it coming when he was a boy. He hadn't seen it coming with Georgiana. His father hadn't seen it. For intelligent men, they had both been remarkably stupid about Wickham.

And now it was happening again. And with Miss Elizabeth who was bright and intelligent and kind and ready to believe anything that was said to her in a plausible manner.

"The orchestra is performing well," he said to change the subject.

Her mouth went crooked which meant she was amused, but Darcy was too upset to be charmed. He needed to say something about Wickham; he needed to warn her. They were standing across from each other, waiting to join hands. He would take her hands and say . . . and say . . .

Sir William interrupted his thoughts. As expected, Sir William had stopped to comment on the dancing. He also mentioned "a certain desirable event"—with a glance towards Miss Bennet and Charles; Darcy followed the glance—and Miss Elizabeth's bright eyes. On and on Sir William went, talking about nothing. Finally, he bowed and strolled on, leaving Darcy to Miss Elizabeth, and Darcy realized that he wouldn’t be able to say anything about Wickham—to Miss Elizabeth or anyone else. They would question him. They would want to know his reasons. Miss Elizabeth especially would never accept such a statement without explanation.

He prepared himself to ask a question about books. To his surprise, Miss Elizabeth reverted to the earlier subject: "You are very cautious, I suppose, as to your resentment being created?"

"I am."

"And never allow yourself to be blinded by prejudice?"

"I hope not. May I ask to what these questions tend?"

She was trying to make out his character, she told him, and there was no amusement in her voice. "I hear such different accounts of you as puzzle me exceedingly."

Wickham again. Darcy could imagine—he knew—the sorts of things Wickham would say about him. She shouldn't take the word of one man about Darcy. He tried to say this, but she cut him off lightly: "If I do not try to understand you now, I may never have another opportunity."

She said it as if they were barely acquainted. Darcy felt like he'd known her for years. He'd been forward with her. He'd told her things about himself. They were more than barely acquainted.

The dance ended; they separated. Darcy strode into the dining room, wishing he could go riding or help the gardener move rocks or shoot something. He leaned his head briefly against the doorframe and tried to block out all the noise and chatter.

Someone was speaking to him—a prim-looking man with flaccid hands; he introduced himself to Darcy. Darcy had no idea why. Darcy wasn't the head of the ball; this wasn't his house.

The man's name was Mr. Collins. He was a clergyman. He had the honor of holding a position at Hunsford. He humbly begged Darcy's pardon, but he could assure Darcy that Lady Catherine, Darcy's aunt, was in good health—on and on and on the man went. Monosyllabic responses didn't stop him. Darcy waited for a pause and moved away.

He remembered, as he sat at one of the supper tables, that his aunt had written him about finding a clergyman for the rectory in her parish. Darcy had never responded; apparently, she had found someone on her own. He remembered too that Miss Bingley had mentioned a Mr. Collins in connection with the Bennets—a cousin of Mr. Bennet's. If anyone had asked, Darcy would have guessed him a cousin of Mrs. Bennet's: their unending chatter was so similar.

He could hear that unending chatter now. He'd sat at the same table as the Bennets, diagonal to Miss Elizabeth. He tried to catch her eye; he needed to make up for what happened in the ballroom—he'd walked off rather abruptly—but Miss Elizabeth was busy shushing her mother.

Good luck, Darcy thought. The mother was nattering about her daughter's upcoming marriage. Darcy felt a qualm until he realized Mrs. Bennet was talking about Miss Bennet, not Miss Elizabeth. He hadn't known Miss Bennet was engaged; surely, Miss Bingley or Charles would have told him.

With an utter sense of shock, Darcy realized that Mrs. Bennet was talking about her daughter and Charles. Charles? Charles wasn't interested in Miss Bennet; he was friendly towards her, yes, but that was Charles' way.

Except—except Sir William had mentioned "a desirable event," and the lady to whom Mrs. Bennet was speaking seemed to agree that the engagement existed.

Ridiculous. Charles wasn't interested in Miss Bennet or Miss Bennet in Charles. She'd hardly shown Charles the same interest that, well, her sister had shown Darcy.

Darcy suddenly felt ill. His stomach hurt. If these people had decided that Miss Bennet was going to marry Charles, what had they decided about Darcy and Miss Elizabeth? Was he going to have to set matters right? Talk to people about his feelings? Since Darcy had no idea what his feelings really were regarding Miss Elizabeth, he couldn’t think of anything more dreadful.

No. It was nonsense. Nobody had behaved improperly—except for Mrs. Bennet. Charles was not interested in Miss Bennet. Miss Bennet was not interested in Charles. Darcy and Miss Elizabeth had not crossed the lines of decency. These assumptions were the ravings of a mad woman—not lunatic, maybe, but extremely silly.

Except . . . her friends and neighbors believed her.

Charles and his sisters were going to have to leave Netherfield. Soon.

The music hour had begun. Young ladies were exchanging places at the pianoforte. Miss Mary Bennet massacred "The Lass With the Delicate Air" in her weak, reedy voice, but all Darcy could think about was how to convince Charles to leave the area. Charles would tire of Netherfield eventually but not in the next week or so and engagements could be formed in less time.

Mr. Bennet's voice interrupted Darcy's thoughts: "You have delighted us long enough. Let the other young ladies have time to exhibit," and Darcy saw Miss Mary blush and scurry back to her seat. He frowned. No father should humiliate his own child. What kind of parents were these Bennets—publicly exposing their children right and left?

Avoiding Miss Elizabeth, Darcy left the supper room. Charles was going to have to leave—and not come back—before the Bennet parents exposed their oldest daughter, both their oldest daughters, to neighborly ridicule.

Charles did leave Netherfield the next morning to go up to London. He had to speak to his solicitors there about some of his father's stocks. Darcy rode with him to the Meryton junction. He watched Charles ride on, Charles waving his hand in a casual salute and shouting, "Look for me in a few days!"

Darcy wished suddenly, desperately, that he could talk to Miss Elizabeth about Charles. She knew what Charles was like. She knew her sister wasn't interested in Charles. She could solve this problem. She was good at problems. Darcy was not good at problems, not these sorts of problems anyway. He could figure out tax problems and weather problems and dirt problems and horse problems. But everything else he left up to people like Mrs. Reynolds. Like when the second housemaid got pregnant by Jarrad, one of the stable hands: Mrs. Reynolds talked to the girl and to Jarrad, Darcy approved the marriage, and the couple moved to one of the cottages. They were hard workers; Darcy liked them; he was glad not to lose them. He was very glad Mrs. Reynolds had done all the talking. Darcy surrounded himself with people who did all the talking.Right now, all he had was Miss Bingley and Mrs. Hurst, but presumably they loved their brother and wanted the best for him. He rode back to Netherfield and asked their advice about Charles and Miss Bennet.

They were as horrified as Darcy at the idea of the engagement—which was a relief. He didn't like to think he was overreacting. But no, the sisters were stunned: What an inappropriate connection! Those parents! Miss Bingley started to say something disparaging about Miss Elizabeth, caught Darcy's eye, and said instead, "The three younger sisters have no discipline," which was true. Miss Mary had no musical discipline and the two youngest flirted with the officers: Darcy had noticed the flirtations, although not as much, it appeared, as Miss Bingley and Mrs. Hurst. No matter. They all agreed that any connection should be severed.

"Does Miss Bennet care for Charles at all?" Darcy asked.

Of course not, they assured him. She was their friend, not their brother's.

They would all leave Netherfield immediately. They would go up to London and inform Bingley of the change in plans. Darcy went to his room to pack. He considered sending a note to Miss Elizabeth, then shook his head at the thought. They were not on such intimate terms.

Darcy, Miss Bingley, and the Hursts arrived in London, loaded down with trunks. Darcy would stay another few weeks and then depart for Pemberley. He didn't need to be there as often in the winter as the rest of the year, but he liked to check in with his steward and Mrs. Reynolds, and it was a good excuse to get away from London. From Pemberley, he would visit the Fitzwilliams and then Lady Catherine.

Charles looked at him blankly as Darcy explained his itinerary. "I thought you would come back with me to Netherfield," he said finally.

"I think you should stay in London."

"Why?"

Darcy was alone with Charles. Miss Bingley and Mrs. Hurst were upstairs unpacking. He said, "The families there seem to think you and Miss Bennet are engaged." He tried to laugh, then wished he hadn't. Charles wasn't laughing. He had got up and wandered over to the sitting room windows.

"Is that so bad?"

"It isn't a suitable match, Charles."

"She is—"

"She and Miss Elizabeth are genteel young ladies, but the family, Charles, is not what you should aim for."

"I'm from trade." Charles said to the curtains. His back was rigid.

"I'm not referring to the Bennet's relations. Though your father did hope better for you."

"Like owning an estate." Charles was as caustic as Charles could be. Darcy winced and was silent.

"I'm not good at that sort of thing," Charles said. "You know that."

Darcy took a deep breath. "What do you want for your children, Charles? The Bennet father does not tend to his family or his estate. You would not be so lax."

"She isn't like that."

"Perhaps not. But you inherit the family when you marry and the family's legacies. Charles, you can do better."

He shook his head.

Darcy said, "If you return, you will encourage the rumors and hurt her chances for a suitable match."

"She expects me to return."

Darcy almost smiled. "I don't think she is that committed," he said as gently as he could.

Charles hunched his shoulders.

Darcy said, "Has she teased you? Flirted with you? Commented on your character?"

Charles said stiffly, "We discuss many things."

"Personal things?" Darcy had never heard Miss Bennett ask Charles about his faults.

Charles came back from the curtain and collapsed into a chair.

"No," he said.

"She has no expectations, Charles. Only her mother and her neighbors do. You haven't hurt her."

Miss Bingley and Mrs. Hurst came down then and reiterated everything Darcy had said with many more examples and expostulations until Darcy rather wished they would leave Charles alone.

But at least the matter was settled. In January, shortly before Darcy left for Pemberley, Miss Bennet visited the London house. She was staying with her uncle and aunt in Cheapside, Miss Bingley informed Darcy, "but of course, Charles needn't know."

No. It was better that Charles not know. The issue was over. The Bennet sisters were in the past. They could all move on with their lives.

Darcy and Elizabeth Meet at Rosings, and Darcy Makes a Huge Miscalculation

Darcy arrived at Rosings with his cousin, Colonel John Fitzwilliam. Lady Catherine greeted them in her usual way: condescension mixed with pleasure.

"The Collinses have the oddest visitor," she said at the dinner table. "A friend of Mrs. Collins from before she was married. I can't speak to modern manners, but the friend seems a very forward sort of person. Of course, she claims to know you Darcy, but I can't believe—"

Mr. Collins had married Charlotte Lucas: Darcy knew that from letters he had received from the Bingleys. Charlotte Lucas was friends with Miss Elizabeth Bennet. He set down his knife and fork and concentrated on his aunt.

"—and very self-assured which I'm sure is not entirely proper for a young lady, even a young lady of twenty—"

Would she never state the visitor's name?

"—and all five sisters already out."

It was Miss Elizabeth. Darcy's stomach felt odd, and he realized he had no more appetite.

"Five sisters," John was saying in his mild humorous way. "Good heavens."

"Astonishing, isn't it," Lady Catherine said without hearing John's irony; she never did. Had Miss Elizabeth tried to laugh at her? If so, Darcy couldn't imagine the encounter had been a success.

"Do you remember this Miss Elizabeth?" John asked on their way to the drawing room to play cards.

"Yes," Darcy said.

"A bit more entertaining than our aunt?"

"Yes."

John was all for meeting the two young ladies—Mrs. Collins' sister was also visiting. The next morning, they headed to Hunsford, encountering Mr. Collins on the lane. Mr. Collins bowed and reminded Darcy of their last meeting and apologized for forcing Darcy and Colonel Fitzwilliam to walk all the way from Rosings without his companionship. Darcy decided that Miss Elizabeth's current living situation must provide her with a surfeit of follies and nonsense.

He entered the parsonage parlor after John. "Hello," John said, striding up to Miss Elizabeth. "A pleasure to make your acquaintance." Darcy turned to Mrs. Collins. John could afford to bypass such courtesies; no one ever noticed. Darcy sat besides Mrs. Collins, who seemed pleasant enough; he remembered her from Hertfordshire as a calm, intelligent person. Mr. Collins was rather lucky in his choice of mate.

John was discussing the countryside with Miss Elizabeth. She smiled and responded, glancing occasionally at Darcy. Their last conversation had been at the Netherfield ball. They had discussed Wickham. He could hardly raise that subject now. He could ask her about poetry, but no, that was too complex a subject for this brief meeting. John had already covered the countryside. Darcy could ask her about her travels to Hunsford, but no, John had already covered that topic too.

"How is your family?" Darcy said.

Miss Elizabeth broke off a light remark to John and turned to him.

"They are well," she said. "My eldest sister has been in London for several months. You didn't see her there?"

He'd known Miss Bennet was in London. He hadn't seen her. The correct response was "No" except the question implied knowledge of Miss Bennet's whereabouts, not just an actual meeting. But if he said, "Yes," Miss Elizabeth would want to know how her sister appeared, and he couldn't answer that, so, "No," he said.

She cocked her head slightly, and Darcy felt a sudden qualm, but he could hardly explain his thought process at the current moment.

"Very nice gel," John said as they left the parsonage, and Darcy nodded. Yes, she was.

He spent the next few days closeted with the house steward going over the household books. Lady Catherine had a tendency to underpay her land servants and lower house staff while vastly overpaying her upper house staff. The house steward made some rather pleading suggestions, and Darcy agreed to effect certain changes. He would simply tell Lady Catherine that the changes had been made. She would respond with long rants on her servants' habits—which rants Darcy never listened to—but she wouldn't counter-command the changes. Until Darcy left, anyway.

He told the steward this, and the steward agreed, looking depressed. But Rosings wasn't really Darcy's responsibility.

Every evening, John and he took a walk to view the grounds—Rosings was a lovely estate. During these walks, Darcy learned that John was spending almost every day at the parsonage; John would report on his visits: "Miss Elizabeth is very clever," he would say, or, "Miss Elizabeth agreed that Evelina lacks sparkle" or "Miss Elizabeth is quite the walker."

She was clever. She had interesting opinions about literature and people and other such things. She was quite a walker—in fact, Darcy could tell John . . . but he decided, No. John might not understand about Miss Elizabeth walking three miles to see her sister; he might put the wrong interpretation on Darcy remembering the incident. Darcy thought of Miss Elizabeth's dark eyes and glowing cheeks and friendly smile and kept his thoughts to himself.

He saw her at church where they all sat through a rather rambling sermon on the importance of respecting one's betters. He thought about speaking to her—he could ask her about . . . about . . . she was already gone, her arm linked with Mrs. Collins's.

"I've invited the Collinses and their guests for a small party," Lady Catherine announced that evening, and Darcy felt a wash of relief. He would have a whole evening to come up with a conversational gambit.

John got Miss Elizabeth's attention first, of course. Darcy was stuck listening to Lady Catherine's critique of Mr. Collins's sermon while Mr. Collins listened avidly. Darcy watched John question Miss Elizabeth about Kent and Hertfordshire—"And what do you think of Scott's latest?" Miss Elizabeth answered his questions with her usual ease, laughing occasionally.

John could be droll.

"—and of course, Fordyce is always an excellent resource," Lady Catherine was saying.

John was a younger son, of course, with little money. He had good prospects; he was a good dependable man. But Miss Elizabeth couldn't afford—

Darcy frowned at his train of thought. She was just being friendly. There was nothing personal about her conversation with John. Darcy was making untenable assumptions. He was getting as bad as Mrs. Bennett.

Lady Catherine ended her critique and shouted to John: "What are you telling Miss Bennett? Let me hear what it is."

John turned, brows raised. His eyes met Darcy's, and he winked. Darcy felt a sudden chill. Surely, John and Miss Elizabeth's conversation had been general, impersonal. One couldn't have intimate conversations in drawing rooms—

One could actually, as Darcy knew.

"We were talking of music, madam."

Darcy let out a breath.

Lady Catherine proclaimed that she loved music. "If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient." And what about Georgiana and her music?

"She is quite accomplished," Darcy said. He had seen Georgiana before he visited the Fitzwilliams. He had been impressed at how far she had come in both singing and playing. She had a clear mezzo-soprano and had mastered several Haydn sonatas. He said so.

"Pray tell her from me," said Lady Catherine, "that she cannot expect to excel if she does not practice a great deal."

Georgiana practiced constantly, Darcy explained, trying not to snap. Snapping never made any difference with Lady Catherine. She hardly heard him now.

"I have told Miss Bennett several times that she will never play really well unless she practices more."

Darcy glanced at Miss Elizabeth, expecting a mocking rejoinder, but Miss Elizabeth folded her hands in her lap and looked demure. Darcy thought he saw her lip twitch.

Lady Catherine tapped his arm to regain his attention. "I have often told her to come to Rosings every day and play on the pianoforte—"

That was a kind offer, and Darcy looked back at Miss Elizabeth, hoping to see a smile of appreciation.

"—in Mrs. Jenkinson's room. She would be in nobody's way, you know, in that part of the house."

Darcy winced and stared at the carpet. He hoped Miss Elizabeth would still play and sing tonight despite his aunt's rudeness.

She did at John's request. She chose an adagio, and Darcy sat back, relaxing as she began.

"Of course, Anne much prefers pieces by Charles Avison," Lady Catherine said, and Darcy tensed, annoyed. He hated people to interrupt performances, musical, theatrical, or otherwise. He got up abruptly and walked across the room, so he could watch Miss Elizabeth.

And she spoke to him, directly to him: "You mean to frighten me, Mr. Darcy, by coming so seriously to hear me. But I will not be alarmed though your sister does play so well—"

So she had attended to his comments about Georgiana. Darcy smiled.

Miss Elizabeth continued: Darcy wouldn't frighten her. "My courage always rises with every attempt to intimidate me."

That was true, only she wasn't really afraid of Darcy. She knew he would never try to discomfort her; she knew him pretty well, in fact. She was teasing, pretending alarm she didn't feel. He said so, and she laughed, and Darcy felt himself relax a little more. This was the kind of camaraderie they had had in Hertfordshire.

Miss Elizabeth was telling John that Darcy knew her real character and she could expose Darcy's character if she wished. Darcy wasn't worried. John already knew his character pretty well, and Darcy had learned that Miss Elizabeth was never as critical in her judgments as she threatened.

"I am not afraid of you," he told her.

John laughed and asked for particulars. Miss Elizabeth lowered her voice to a shocked murmur: Did he know, could he comprehend . . . the first time she'd met Darcy he had only danced four dances "though gentlemen were scarce; and more than one young lady was sitting down in want of a partner."

It took Darcy almost a minute to realize she was speaking of that first ball in Hertfordshire—when he had refused to dance with any one but Miss Bingley and Mrs. Hurst. He had refused to dance with a young lady suggested by Bingley.

He had refused to dance with Miss Elizabeth.

He flushed. He hadn't noticed the imbalance of men and women. He had barely noticed who Bingley recommended, but Miss Elizabeth had noticed and remembered; all this time, she had thought him uncivil, deliberately rude.

He said, "I am ill-qualified to recommend myself to strangers." She must understand that. She knew him well enough.

But she was shaking her head. Darcy said desperately, "I have not the talent of conversing easily with those I have never seen before." She must have noticed that.

She was still shaking her head. She took the time to practice the piano, she pointed out. Surely, Darcy could take the time to be sociable.

She didn't practice that much. But she did practice enough to give pleasure to her friends and family. Darcy was the same although he admitted that sometimes even his friends and family were a little confused by his behavior. He would have to try harder. He said so. "Neither of us perform well to strangers."

She grew serious again, her amusement dimming as she eyed him. Lady Catherine approached, and Miss Elizabeth began to play. Darcy sat down near the pianoforte, feeling confused. Miss Elizabeth had never mentioned that first ball when she stayed at Netherfield. But then she had been occupied with her sister. On the other hand, she and Darcy had had a number of conversations—Darcy could remember all of them, nearly verbatim. She had never seemed angry with him. She'd asked him questions and smiled and bantered with him.

She smiles and banters with John.

She didn't study John. She didn't ask John about his faults. Darcy glowered at the fireplace and hardly noticed when the party broke up.

The next morning, he left Rosings early, without John, and went to the parsonage. He would visit Mrs. Collins and Mrs. Collins' sister and perhaps, Elizabeth would be there, and he could make sure she bore him no ill-will.

She was alone. Darcy paused on the parlor threshold, confused. He wasn't prepared for a tête-à-tête. He didn't have his thoughts ordered. Mrs. Collins was supposed to be there to carry the conversational ball: that's what married ladies did.

He sat slowly. Miss Elizabeth asked after the occupants at Rosings. Darcy replied. He started to get his bearings. He hadn't expected a tête-à-tête, but he wasn't sorry. He sat in the parlor's armchair and watched Miss Elizabeth at the desk. She was dressed in something soft and bright. Her hair was informally arranged, and Darcy found he liked it better than a formal arrangement. He realized she was watching him, amused, and the anxiety in him lessened. Their relationship was back to normal—to the way it had been in Hertfordshire, to the way things should be between them.

The way they should always be. Darcy realized he had forgotten he was not interested in Miss Elizabeth. There was no point denying it: he was interested.

They discussed Netherfield and whether Charles would let or sell it. They discussed the parsonage and Mr. Collins's marriage to Mrs. Collins. "It must be very agreeable to her to be settled within so easy a distance of her own family and friends," Darcy said. Miss Elizabeth was surprised. "Easy distance" for Miss Elizabeth apparently meant in the same neighborhood. Miss Elizabeth blushed when Darcy said so, and Darcy's heart beat a little quicker.

This was marriage talk—how far a woman wanted to live from her family. Miss Elizabeth had never seemed someone who wanted to spend her married life a hop, skip, and a jump from her parents' door. He couldn't think of anything more frustrating than trying to manage a household with Mrs. Bennet's interference. Pemberley, at least, was a long way from Hertfordshire.

"You are not that attached to Longbourn," he said, leaning forward.

Miss Elizabeth looked surprised, and Darcy retreated. He was being too forward, making assumptions; he was hardly prepared to—to—

To propose?

He left the parsonage in a state of utter bewilderment. She was too genteel, too intelligent, to assume an offer where none was made, but she must know—she was so good at reading people—how Darcy felt. She wouldn't be surprised if he proposed.

Which put the decision back on Darcy. He had decided she was wrong for him. He decided that in Hertfordshire four months ago. Why would he change his mind now?

He had, he admitted, thought about Elizabeth often in the last four months. He had saved up things to tell her, things he could actually never tell her unless they were engaged. He had spoken of her to Georgiana—he distinctly remembered doing that—without, however, mentioning any kind of attachment.

He couldn't marry her. It was not an appropriate connection. He sat in his room, head in hands. He had expected to marry a woman of his own status with a similar background—someone to be chatelaine of Pemberley, who could handle the work involved and be a role model for Georgiana.

Elizabeth was an excellent role model, but with Elizabeth came her family. Mr. and Mrs. Bennet were not acceptable role-models for any young person. Nor did they supply an appropriate environment for a future Mrs. Darcy. That Elizabeth could manage a household, Darcy had no doubt, but she'd had little experience with well-run estates. Longbourn was half the size or less of Pemberley, and Mr. Bennet ran it at less than full potential.

If only she was a member of his set. If only she had a stronger pedigree. His father had married Lady Anne Kenway, descended from a family of ancient Anglo-Saxon heritage. Darcy's mother had brought money and stability and worth to the Darcy line.

The line didn't need more money, but Darcy thought it could use stability. The incident with Wickham had shaken his sense of security. Georgiana would not make the same mistake again—he hoped—but she was young; she needed good examples.

Elizabeth is a good example. But not her sisters—except Jane, Jane who Bingley had wanted to court. Darcy had told him the connection was a bad one which was true. What would Bingley think if Darcy married a Bennet sister?

Elizabeth would understand Darcy's conflict. She had often blushed at her parents' behavior. She knew what they were like. She knew what Darcy was like.

But he couldn't discuss the matter with her—not unless he made an offer. Once she accepted, she would ease his mind.

If he offered. If. If. If.

He visited the parsonage several times over the next few days; he watched Elizabeth talk and laugh, listened to her good sense, observed her manners with John and Mr. and Mrs. Collins. He took her expressions and witticisms and occasional smiles at him back to his room at Rosings where he replayed them in his mind.

He shouldn't propose.

But he would.

He was going to get married.

What an absolutely astonishing thought.

Elizabeth and Darcy Have a Fight, and Darcy Tries to Explain Himself

The Collins party was invited to drink tea at Rosings. Elizabeth would be there; Darcy would pull her aside. He had prepared a short explanation of his thought process in asking her to marry him. After the explanation, he would propose. He wasn't sure he would tell Lady Catherine about their engagement. The idea made him rather tired. No, it would be inappropriate in any case. He would have to speak first to Elizabeth's father.

He washed his face and hands, dried them on a towel, straightened his collar and, heart pounding, went downstairs.

Elizabeth wasn't there. She had a headache, Mr. Collins explained amid multiple apologies. Lady Catherine looked temporarily annoyed and then promptly forgot about Miss Elizabeth's health.

Darcy sat and fretted. He was leaving soon, the day after tomorrow. His proposal couldn't wait. The last thing he wanted to do was visit Elizabeth in Hertfordshire. He might change his mind by then.

That might be for the best, he thought as he excused himself to the company. Only he'd decided to ask her today. He'd decided. He had to see her, propose to her, lay out everything for her understanding.

He hardly saw the lane as he walked to the parsonage. He knocked on the door and was admitted. He entered the parlor, greeted Elizabeth and sat. He couldn't remember his speech—what he'd intended to say or do. It would be easier if she said something, but she was silent. He got up and walked about the room, his feet scuffing the floor. He faced her:

"In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you."

It was easier then—he remembered everything he meant to say. He presented all the arguments for and against the marriage. He explained his feelings, his anxieties. He praised her attributes, especially in comparison to her family. He finished with a declaration that he could not conquer his attachment to her, and he hoped he would be rewarded with her hand in marriage.

He stopped. He wanted to sit down but decided it would probably be best to continue standing. For the first time, he looked at Elizabeth's face, studying her expression.

She looked rather blank. Darcy frowned slightly. Was she concerned about the social gap between them? Should he be more reassuring?

She began to speak. At first, Darcy wasn't sure what she was saying. He kept waiting for the "but, I will accept," only it never came. She was saying, "No." She was rejecting his proposal.

"I have never desired your good opinion, and you have certainly bestowed it most unwillingly."

She had flirted with him. She had been friendly with him. They had discussed personal topics. She was behaving as if none of that had ever happened. She was acting as if she didn't know how Darcy felt.

She stopped speaking. Darcy realized he was gritting his teeth. He took a deep breath and said, "I might, perhaps, wish to be informed why, with so little endeavor with civility, I am thus rejected. But it is of small importance."

He heard his petulance and didn't care. He wanted to goad her. She was too composed—as if their relationship was as light and careless as her discussions with John.

His goad worked. He had offended her, Elizabeth said. Insulted her. Moreover, he had ruined the happiness of her beloved sister—

Miss Bennet? He had never done anything to Miss Bennet.

Was he denying he'd interfered between her and Mr. Bingley?

Yes, he had interfered, but his actions were justifiable.

What about his treatment of Wickham?

Darcy's incredulity spilled into anger. Did Wickham mean something to her then, more than Darcy had imagined? "You take an eager interest in that gentleman's concerns."

Elizabeth proclaimed a general interest: everyone must feel pity for Mr. Wickham's misfortunes which had been inflicted on him by Mr. Darcy, by Mr. Darcy who ridiculed Mr. Wickham's position in life.

Darcy felt numb. She believed Wickham over him. She believed Wickham's sorry excuses over Darcy's example. He'd told her to be wary of Wickham; he'd told her at the Netherfield ball, and she still believed Wickham's tales—as if she and Darcy had never spoken together, never shared thoughts, never experienced any camaraderie at all.

No—this wasn't because of Wickham. It couldn't be. She was reacting to Darcy's honesty. He'd thought she was better than the ordinary type of female who needed insincere praise. He said so.

She was standing by now. There was no amusement in her face. She was breathing hard.

"You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me other than to spare me the compassion I might have felt if you had behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner."

A more gentlemanlike manner. He had—he was—

"You could not have made me the offer of your hand in any possible way that would have tempted me to accept it." She was disgusted by his arrogance, his conceit, his selfish disdain for the feelings of others.

The room was beginning to close in. He had to leave. He made the appropriate remarks, and then he was out in the lane, his head pounding. It was still dusk. Darcy felt as if a hundred hours had passed. He found he was standing at the gate to Rosings. He stared across the park, feeling sick and rather light-headed.

He was a fool. That was what happened when you made decisions based on emotion. You were a fool; you propose to a lovely girl who didn't care about or understand your character, your very appropriate reservations—

If you had behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner. Darcy winced. Perhaps he had been too detailed with those reservations. But her reasons for rejecting him—her sister and Wickam—were completely unjustified. How could she be so blind? He had assumed she had more intelligence, more insight than she obviously did.

She loves her sister.

And Wickham?

He shouldn't have gotten angry. Darcy grimaced. If he hadn't gotten angry, he could have explained himself. He turned back towards the parsonage but stopped. He wouldn't stay calm, and she was angry, truly angry. Faced with that much anger, nothing he said would come out right. He wasn't even sure she would listen.

He would write her. He returned to the house through the kitchen. The servants nodded as he passed. In his room, he lit the lamp, sat at the desk, and began to write.

He wasn't going to propose to her again—he made that clear. No, he was going to address her accusations against him. He dealt with her sister first, explaining that he didn't believe Miss Bennet was attached to Charles. He confessed he had dissuaded Charles from pursuing the relationship. He even confessed that he knew Miss Bennet had been in London: "Perhaps this concealment, this disguise, was beneath me. It is done, however, and it was done for the best. On this subject I have nothing more to say, no other apology to offer."

He sat back, breathing heavily. The lamp was guttering, and he lit a fresh one. He reread the paragraphs he had written.

The tone was not civil. Darcy wasn't sure why. He was being objective, factual. He'd even admitted to knowing that Miss Bennet was in London and that he hadn't told Charles. Elizabeth might consider that a concealment—he'd admitted as much—but he honestly didn't think it was. He should rewrite the page. He reached for a new sheet.

He heard himself say, "She doesn't need to know," and stopped, appalled.

He wasn't being objective at all. His behavior with Miss Bennet had involved concealment. And now he was justifying himself—he, Darcy, was making excuses, as if he were someone like Wickham, as if he weren't a gentleman at all.

He could rewrite it, but he didn't know how else to explain his behavior her sister. He added a line: "Though the motives may to you very naturally appear insufficient, I have not yet learnt to condemn them."

He moved on to her accusation about Wickham. This involved disclosing Georgiana's troubles, but Elizabeth would be circumspect, and she needed to know Wickham's true character. He didn't know how far Elizabeth's attachment to Wickham had gone. He had heard that Wickham was engaged to a Miss King, but that wouldn't stop Wickham from ruining Elizabeth's reputation if such a course took his fancy.

And she needed to know that he, Darcy, wasn't as Wickham had painted him. He was not as good as he should be perhaps, but he wasn't so corrupt.

He told her everything: about growing up with Wickham, about his father's will, about Wickham's decision to go into law rather than the church. Darcy had realized several years before that Wickham was idle, dissipated, and licentious. His charm was a cover for plausible lies. He was a man who looked out only for himself. When Darcy's father died, Darcy had handed over Wickham's legacy and put him out of his mind.

Until Wickham applied to Darcy, stating that he wanted to become a clergyman after all. Darcy refused to help—Wickham had already had his legacy; Darcy would never fund such an inconstant libertine—so Wickham revenged himself on Darcy by trying to elope with Georgiana.

Darcy could admit now that Georgiana's companion, Mrs. Younge, had been Wickham's confidant from the beginning. At the time, he had been furious at the woman's stupidity: to let Georgiana meet freely with Wickham—to encourage Wickham's addresses! Lucky that Georgiana told Darcy about the planned elopement. He hadn't seen Wickham's perfidy coming. He hadn't imagined it as a possibility at all. Lucky stupid man.

He was, it seemed, altogether blind about people. He'd never guessed at Elizabeth's feelings. He had thought she liked him. But he couldn't accuse her of playing games with him. Truth was, she had behaved no differently with him than with John.

Except. Except—she had seemed to understand him. She was so quick, so friendly, so exactly the sort of person Darcy would be lucky to marry. Darcy leaned his head on his hands and watched the lamp guttered into oblivion.

He lit another towards dawn and added a few extra lines. She could go to Colonel Fitzwilliam if she wished to verify all Darcy had written. "God bless you," he wrote and signed his name.

He slept for a half-hour, changed, and went out into the still morning. Everything was pale dew and new spring green. He had seen Elizabeth strolling occasionally in a grove near the park gate, and he went there now, the letter clenched in his hands. If she didn't come—but she had to come. He didn't know what he would do if she didn't come.

She did though she began to retreat when she saw him. She looked drained and unhappy; she hid her feelings so well most of the time, and Darcy felt an odd ache at how similar they were in this regard: plausible faces presented to the world.

For a terrible moment, he thought she would reject the letter, but she took it, he asked her to read it, he retreated. He called at the parsonage, knowing she would remain outdoors to peruse the letter. Then, he returned to Rosings.

He and John were going back to London the next morning. Darcy sorted his shirts in his room. He concentrated on mundane things—clothes, cravats, boots. John strolled in towards mid-afternoon.

"Good work. I'm already packed."

Darcy nodded, eyeing him. Had Elizabeth asked him to verify the contents of the letter? He couldn't ask. Surely, John would tell him.

John said, "I understand you already said farewell to our parson's household."

"Yes," Darcy said.

"So did I. I missed the lovely Miss Elizabeth unfortunately. Ah, well. Life is made up of stray encounters, is it not," and he went off good-humoredly.

Had she avoided John? Was she still reading the letter? Would she believe anything Darcy had written? He sat on the edge of the bed and watched the sky darken and wished he was at Pemberley.

Darcy and Elizabeth Meet at Pemberley, and Darcy Gets All Excited About Showing Off His Property

"I'm needed at Pemberley," Darcy told Georgiana.

They sat in their private sitting room in an Oxford inn. The Bingleys occupied rooms on the floor above. Miss Bingley had suggested breakfasting together, but Darcy preferred to breakfast with just Georgiana.

Georgiana was smearing marmalade on toast and humming softly. Darcy held a letter in his hand. "Max"—his land steward—"has a question about the Merrydew's tenancy. You'll travel on with the Bingleys."

Georgiana put down her toast. Darcy folded up the letter and tucked it into his breast pocket. The Merrydews were good farmers, but Mr. Merrydew had no money sense. Darcy wondered if he should send Mr. Jetter, his house steward, to reorganize their books.

Georgiana said, "Can't I go with you?"

Darcy looked at her in surprise.

"I'm not taking the carriage," he said. "You'll be able to see Oxford with the Bingleys and come on with them."

Georgiana picked at the tablecloth. Darcy nabbed another piece of toast and pushed back from the table.

"I could follow you in the carriage," Georgiana said.

Darcy looked at her bent head. He was missing something, something Georgiana wanted and wasn't saying. He took a deep breath.

"The Bingleys are good company."

"Oh, yes."

"You enjoy your time with them."

"Yes."

"And Mrs. Annesley is here."

"She's very nice," Georgiana said.

Then what was the problem?

Relationships, Darcy had discovered in the last four months, were quagmires filled with implications, suggestions, and underlying messages. Darcy didn't pick up on any of it.

"I thought you thought I was getting better," Georgiana had said just three days before after Darcy commented on her singing. He had stared at her, realizing that his comment had been unintentionally critical. He had stammered an explanation, and Georgiana had nodded gravely. But until she said what she did, Darcy hadn't heard how he sounded at all.

Sometimes he wondered that Elizabeth hadn't laughed him out of the parsonage when he started to propose.

Georgiana said to the tablecloth: "They compliment me a lot."

"Miss Bingley and Mrs. Hurst?"

"Yes."

"Compliments are nice."

Georgiana gave him a skeptical look, an echo, Darcy realized, of one of his expressions. He grinned. "They are a little overwhelming," he agreed. "I'll tell Charles to take you and Mrs. Annesley in his carriage. Bingley's sisters can have mine."

And that was all—she was happy again; he could go. Darcy went out of the room, wondering if Elizabeth would have figured out Georgiana's problem before Georgiana even mentioned it.

Probably. Yes.

In his breast pocket, next to the letter from Darcy's steward, was a letter Darcy had begun to Elizabeth. He would never send this one: she had rejected him; their relationship was over. But there were times when Darcy yearned to explain to her that he hadn't known he was being rude—in Hertfordshire, at Rosings. These days, when he looked back on their conversations in those places—replaying his remarks—he could only wince.

If you had behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner.

He hadn't. He'd taken everything for granted: Elizabeth's understanding; her compliance. He'd never tried to woo her. She might as well have been Mrs. Reynolds or Max or any of his other servants. She might as well have been Charles. You didn't ask a woman to marry you without, at least, giving her some reason to agree.

He stayed overnight in Leicester and arrived at Pemberley in the morning. He didn't go straight to the main house but met Max at the Merrydews. Mr. Merrydew contritely laid down a token payment and a new rent schedule was drawn up. Afterward, Darcy spoke to George Merrydew, Jr. who shook his head over his father's business practices and advised Darcy that he was taking over the financial side of the farm. All in all, a good meeting.

Darcy rode with Max along the northern edge of the estate to examine some drainage problems. He left Max at the Chandlers—Max was married to Mr. Chandler's daughter—and cut across the estate to the Pemberley stables. He would talk to Mr. Talbot and Mrs. Reynolds about the coming guests and then he would go fishing. The Bingleys, with Georgiana, would not arrive until the next morning. He whistled as he walked from the stables to the house. He liked to have Pemberley to himself, guest-less, now and again.

"How old would you say it was?" said a voice, and Darcy turned his head to see a group of callers standing on the road, looking up at the house: a man and two women, one older, one younger. The younger woman turned, and Darcy looked straight into Elizabeth Bennet's eyes.

His brain stopped working. He said something. She said something. He got the impression that he was asking the same questions over and over and over. Elizabeth answered without looking at him. He stopped talking, nodded, and walked on.

Loomis, the head gardener, came alongside him, saying, "We didn't know you'd be back today, sir," and Darcy explained about Max and the Merrydews; Loomis praised the summer weather "especially in regard to the rhubarb." Darcy "uh huhed"; Loomis walked off as they reached the house.

Darcy stood in the cool north portico, staring blankly into the foyer. She was here. She was at Pemberley. She must—she couldn't—why was she here?

She was with friends obviously or relations. On tour, but why would she be here?

"Hello, sir," Mrs. Reynolds said, coming into the foyer. "We expected you tomorrow."

"I had to confer with Max."

"We've had some callers," Mrs. Reynolds took his dust coat. "The young lady is acquainted with you."

"Yes."

"They greatly admired the house. I took them into the gallery." Mrs. Reynolds twinkled. "The young lady praised your portrait."

"Did she?" Darcy said.

Mrs. Reynolds beamed and went away, and Darcy stood in the portico, feeling like several tons of rock had landed on his head and been gently brushed away.

Elizabeth was here—at his house—on his land. Elizabeth admired the house. Elizabeth admired his portrait.

Darcy went into the washroom in the servant's wing and scrubbed his hands and face. He tidied himself, then ran outside to the gardens. He cornered Loomis.

"The callers—where did they go?"

Loomis had seen them head towards the wood. Darcy followed the walk, stopping gardeners as he went. Elizabeth and her party had crossed the bridge and were examining the trout stream. Darcy followed. He saw the man first, speaking to Josh, who maintained the stream. A tallish woman with an elegant, if tired, air stood beside him, smiling faintly. Elizabeth was strolling in Darcy's direction along the bank, her eyes following the flow of the water. Darcy wanted to stop and watch her but reminded himself to be sociable.

He approached. He greeted her. He was less stunned this time though still unbelieving. He watched her face, listened to her tone. She didn't seem angry or cold. In fact, she was praising Pemberley.

"It's delightful," she said. "The coppice-wood we came through is full of charming windings. I'd love to explore—" she flushed, falling silent.

She meant it. She wasn't prone to flattery, even at her friendliest. He should show her the orchard and the duck pond. But she had friends with her, and he requested an introduction.

They were her uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Darcy was surprised. He'd understood Mr. Gardiner was a tradesman. He must have a thriving business indeed if he could take off several weeks during the summer. The Gardiners shook hands with Darcy, commenting civilly on Pemberley's grounds and answering Darcy's questions. They were staying at the inn at Lambton; Mrs. Gardiner grew up in Lambton. Everything they said was generous, to the point, friendly.

"I've never seen such a well-stocked stream," Mr. Gardiner said. "Your man says you keep it clear of oaks—"

Darcy nodded, and they began to discuss stream maintenance with Josh chiming in occasionally. Mr. Gardiner, Darcy found, was an avid fisherman, so Darcy offered him the use of fishing tackle "if you want to fish at Pemberley during your stay."

"The best spot is there below the bridge," he added, and Mr. Gardiner began to describe useful fishing techniques. They all stopped to admire some water-plants, and then Mrs. Gardiner took her husband's arm. Darcy found himself beside Elizabeth.

She had been unnaturally silent, and he studied her with concern, still amazed that she should be here.

"We didn't know any of the family would be at Pemberley," she said. "We wouldn't have called if we'd known—"

Of course not. Darcy understood that. But at any other time, Pemberley was open to callers. "I came ahead to speak to my steward," he said. "I'm traveling with my sister—and those who claim an acquaintance with you—Mr. Bingley and his sisters."

He stopped then, wondering if she would refer to the letter, but she only nodded. He said, "Will you allow me, or do I ask too much, to introduce my sister to you?"

She lifted eyes to his face then, astonished, pleased, and Darcy wanted limp with relief. She wasn't angry at all! "Yes," she said, and they walked on.

She liked the grounds. She liked the house. She wanted to meet his sister. Darcy could hardly believe his luck. He stopped himself from demanding confirmation: Did she really like Pemberley's views? Had she really told Mrs. Reynolds she liked his portrait? Did she really want to meet Georgiana? But Elizabeth didn't lie or fib. He could trust she meant what she said.

They arrived at the house before her aunt and uncle. "Would you like to step in?" Darcy asked, thinking he could show her the improvements he'd made to the flue in the drawing room fireplace. But she had already seen the house, and she declined. So Darcy stood beside her, watching the glowing summer sky and thinking how marvelous it was that Elizabeth liked Pemberley.

"Have you visited Matlock?" she said, and they discussed Derbyshire towns until the Gardiners arrived.

"I'll bring my sister to visit once she arrives," he told her, and Elizabeth assented.

He could hardly believe his luck—Elizabeth in Derbyshire; Elizabeth staying in Lambton; Elizabeth here at Pemberley. He could never have imagined this after that terrible interview at Rosings.

She had read the letter—she must have read the letter. Had she believed him? Given him the benefit of the doubt? She must have, enough for her to be here at least, to not be angry with him. He would match her civility; he would show her he knew how to behave like a gentleman. He strode into the house and ordered a suitable repast. He hardly noticed eating it, and he went to bed with a more untroubled mind than he'd had in the last four months.

The Bingleys and Georgiana arrived the next morning. Mrs. Reynolds showed Charles, Mrs. Hurst, and Miss Bingley to their rooms. Darcy followed Georgiana to her sitting room.

"Do you remember me mentioning the Bennets?" he said, prepared to repeat his previous descriptions, but, "Yes," Georgiana said.

"Miss Elizabeth is staying at Lambton with her aunt and uncle. I'd like you to meet her."

Georgiana looked at him, and for a fleeting moment, Darcy thought she seemed amused. But no, he was reading Elizabeth's expressions into his sister's face, that was all.

"I would be pleased," Georgiana said.

"This afternoon," Darcy said. "If you're not too tired."

"No," Georgiana said, still looking at him.

"How was the trip?"

"I listened to Charles tell me all about the beauties of Hertfordshire," she said.

If he didn't know better, he'd think his sister was becoming coy.

Mrs. Annesley came in then; Darcy requested Georgiana's presence in half an hour—she would be prompt, his sister was not given to tardiness, thank goodness—and went down to the stables. He met Charles there, admiring Darcy's latest purchases (Charles never spent more than ten minutes unpacking).

"Where are you off to?" he said when Darcy ordered the curricle.

"Miss Elizabeth Bennet is visiting the area," Darcy said. "I am going to introduce Georgiana to her."

He hadn't considered how Charles would react to mention of a Bennet sister, if Charles would be upset or shame-faced, but Charles smiled hugely and said, "Oh, let me accompany you," and Darcy agreed.

Georgiana came down, and the three of them squashed into the front of the curricle. It was a beautiful day of crisp sunshine and cool breezes. Charles told Darcy about the trip from Oxford, nudging Georgiana to confirm his descriptions, and they drew up outside the Lambton inn well before the dinner hour.

Darcy went in first with Georgiana. Elizabeth and the Gardiners were waiting in the inn's upstairs parlor. Darcy greeted the Gardiners and brought Georgiana forward to meet Elizabeth. Georgiana found it hard to meet new people, but he trusted Elizabeth would put her at ease. He was proved correct. Elizabeth was asking sensible questions—the kinds of questions Georgiana could answer easily—and Georgiana was answering.

"You spend your summer months at Pemberley?" Elizabeth asked her.

"Yes," Georgiana said.

Perfect.

He fetched Bingley who came in with hands outstretched. "Hello, Miss Elizabeth. How splendid to see you again!"

Darcy turned to the Gardiners who posed several queries in their easygoing way. Yes, Darcy had met Miss Elizabeth in Hertfordshire. She was an excellent pianist and singer. She danced well. Did they know Miss Elizabeth had nursed her sister at Netherfield for a week? The Gardiners exchanged a glance, but they were well-bred people; Darcy wasn't afraid of strictures from them.

Elizabeth was looking towards him, and she smiled—though her gaze seemed quizzical. Darcy sat beside Bingley, who was still commenting on the pleasure of meeting Elizabeth. "How are all the dear friends in Hertfordshire? How is your family?"

Elizabeth answered his questions. Georgiana put her hand on Darcy's sleeve. He bent his head to her:

"They could come for dinner some night."

"You should ask them yourself," Darcy said gently.

Georgiana made the invitation; Mrs. Gardiner accepted for the day after tomorrow. On the way out, Darcy asked Mr. Gardiner to come fishing at noon the next day. Mr. Gardiner agreed.

"Isn't it remarkable?!" Bingley said in the curricle. "What a small world we live in! I never thought to see any of the Bennet sisters again."

Darcy gave him a considering look. It had been eight months since Bingley wanted to offer for Miss Bennet. Darcy had encountered him several times since, and Bingley had always seemed in good spirits. Darcy assumed Bingley had transferred his affections to a London beauty.

He felt suddenly ashamed. Bingley was impulsive but not shallow. Bingley had cared for Miss Bennet. Apparently, he still cared. Was I wrong to interfere there? For many months now, Darcy had deplored his deception in the matter, but he had not supposed Bingley's thoughts still dwelt on that tall, serene woman of limitless composure. It occurred to Darcy that Miss Bennet might even be a good balance to Bingley. He would need to speak to him.

There was no time for private conversation that night or the next morning. Darcy had to confer with Loomis and Josh about the fishing. Mrs. Reynolds, he knew, had sorted out the guests' needs, but he queried Mr. Talbot about the cook's stores (they were full). He rose early the next morning to visit the Sheldons—Mr. Sheldon wanted to purchase some trees from the estate proper; Darcy was inclined to agree, but he wanted to check the Sheldon land first. When he returned to Pemberley, Mr. Gardiner had arrived, so Darcy went immediately to the trout stream and had a fascinating conversation about gravel beds with Mr. Gardiner and Max.

Towards the end of the conversation, Mr. Gardiner said, "My wife and niece are visiting your sister this morning."

That was excessively civil. Darcy should return to the house to thank them. He said so and thought Mr. Gardiner looked amused.

When he entered the saloon at Pemberley, Elizabeth and Georgiana were sitting with Mrs. Annesley and Mrs. Gardiner near the windows. He crossed the room.

"Good morning, Mr. Darcy," Miss Bingley called. She sat at the other end of the saloon with Mrs. Hurst. Darcy nodded to them and put a hand on Georgiana's shoulder.

Mrs. Gardiner glanced up at him. "We understand Miss Darcy is an accomplished musician."

"Miss Elizabeth is also quite accomplished," Darcy said.

"Miss Elizabeth likes Haydn," Georgiana said softly.

"You admire Haydn too, don't you, dear?" said Mrs. Annesley and gave Georgiana an encouraging glance. "Which piece in particular?"

"Le Matin," Georgiana said, and Elizabeth said, "Oh, yes, it's so cheerful, don’t you think?"

Darcy decided Mrs. Annesley deserved a raise.

Georgiana was smiling at Elizabeth's analysis of Haydn when Miss Bingley cut in:

"Pray, Miss Eliza, has not Colonel Forster's militia removed from Meryton? That must be a great loss to your family."

Darcy frowned and glanced at Elizabeth. If she'd read the letter, if she'd believed the letter, she would have cut off any close relationship she had with Wickham. Darcy trusted her that far. But he had no guarantee that she had read or believed anything he wrote.

She didn't appear disconcerted, however. "Yes," she said, "the town greatly misses the militia's business," and returned immediately to a discussion of symphonies with Georgiana.

Darcy arranged for his carriage to take Mrs. Gardiner and Elizabeth back to Lambton. Elizabeth stood beside him as they waited for the groom, and he thought how much he had missed her brown curls and amused mouth. She was a warm presence against his shoulder—as natural there as everything at Pemberley. She said, "Your sister is lovely," and Darcy said, "Yes, she is," and their voices combined with the clop of the horse's hoofs and far-off gurgle of the stream. Darcy returned to the house feeling more content than he had even before he visited Hertfordshire.

Entering the saloon, he found Georgiana sitting stiff and unresponsive on the sofa while Miss Bingley held forth on some subject. To his astonishment, Darcy realized she was criticizing Elizabeth. On and on she went, disparaging Elizabeth's complexion and features and eyes.

Darcy could only wonder at the woman's lack of decorum. This was not Netherfield where Miss Bingley's notions held sway. Elizabeth and Miss Bingley were Georgiana's guests. Georgiana should rebuke Miss Bingley, but Darcy didn't expect it of her. Setting aside Georgiana's shyness, she was hardly prepared to challenge so much rudeness. Darcy listened to the stream of petty insults and wondered that Charles could have such a sister. For the first time, he considered that Miss Bingley may not have been the best person to consult in November about Charles' feelings.

"I believe you thought Miss Elizabeth rather pretty at one time," Miss Bingley said to him, and now, he could answer: "Yes, but that was only when I first knew her; for many months since I have considered her as one of the handsomest women of my acquaintance."

He couldn't storm out, but he did recollect an urgent need to confer with Mr. Jetter about some Pemberley business and left the room.

Later that night, after dinner (Miss Bingley was excessively silent, so they listened to Mrs. Hurst and Charles discuss shooting), Darcy wondered if Georgiana had caught the earlier reference to Wickham. Wickham hadn't entered the corps when Georgiana agreed to elope with him, but of course, that information was known. On the way to his room, Darcy saw a light beneath Georgiana's sitting room door and tapped.

"Come in."

Georgiana sat in a window seat. Darcy said, "Are you well?" and sighed with relief when she turned a tranquil face towards him. There had been many tears as well as self-reproaches in the months after the aborted elopement. Darcy had felt ineffectual. He hadn't returned Georgiana to school until her mood improved, and he could find her a suitable guardian which had taken over a month. He had submitted Mrs. Annesley to several long interviews with both he and Mrs. Reynolds.

Mrs. Annesley had proved a trustworthy and kind guardian. Georgiana was still cautious, even somber, but tonight, she looked reflective, absorbed, rather than sad.

She said, "I like her."

Darcy settled into an armchair. He knew what "she" Georgiana was referring to.

"She's genuine," Georgiana said.

Yes, she was. They were probably the only two siblings in the whole of England who understood the substantial worth of that quality. Brother and sister smiled at each other.

Georgiana turned back to the window. "I'd liked a sister," Georgiana said to it.

Without a doubt, his sister was becoming coy.

Darcy Learns about Elizabeth's Troubles and Goes Hunting for Wickham (but doesn't actually kill him)

The next morning, Darcy rode to Lambton alone to see Elizabeth.

He was not going to ask her to marry him: a proposal would embarrass and alarm her. But he could improve her opinion of him. He wasn't thinking further ahead than that.

He looped the horse's reins through the hitching post and requested a servant to announce him. He followed close on the servant's heels and had to jerk to a halt when the servant suddenly stopped. The door to the parlor had opened; Elizabeth darted through.

She was shaking. She saw the servant, then him, and blurted, "I beg your pardon, but I must leave you. I must find Mr. Gardiner this moment on business that cannot be delayed; I have not an instant to lose."

Darcy begged her to send the servant, and she did, retreating into the parlor and collapsing onto a chair. She was white and breathing unsteadily. Darcy offered her wine. She refused; she had heard dreadful news from Longbourn, she said and started to cry.

Darcy stood over her, aghast. There was nothing he could do. He forced himself to sit and clenched his hands on his knees.

Elizabeth explained: her youngest sister had eloped with Mr. Wickham. It was unlikely that Wickham would marry her. "I might have prevented it!" Elizabeth cried. "I who knew what he was."

Darcy flinched, but she was not accusing him. She was reproaching herself.

"Is it certain, absolutely certain?" Darcy said.

"Yes!" Wickham and Lydia had left Brighton together. They had been traced to London. Her father had gone to London to search for them. Her sister had written for Mr. Gardiner's assistance. The Gardiners and Elizabeth would hopefully leave soon for Longbourn. "I have not the smallest hope," Elizabeth said and Darcy's insides twisted at the wretched unhappiness in her face and voice.

He had never felt so powerless. He hated this feeling. With Georgiana, the danger had been past. But this—this—

"My eyes were opened to his real character. But I was afraid of doing too much. Wretched, wretched mistake!"

And still she did not reproach him, though her words could have been Darcy's own. He had known Wickham's character. He had done nothing, and now this sister of Elizabeth's was paying for Darcy's inaction.

He realized he was pacing and stopped himself. He was useless here. He could do nothing to ameliorate Elizabeth's pain. In any case, this was a family matter; she would much prefer her uncle and aunt to Darcy's company.

He made his excuses, saw her gather herself to respond with courtesy. She requested secrecy, and he gave it: she didn't need to ask. He looked at her carefully before he left; she was white and shaky, but she would be alright until the Gardiners came. He ran down the inn steps, unhitched the horse.

This was where reticence got you. This was what happened when you protected yourself and your family from other people's snickers and sidelong glances and expressions of concern. Darcy had let Wickham operate freely amongst reputable folk. What had he thought would happen?

Ashamed, he realized he had assumed others would be wise enough to avoid the worst—as Darcy had with Georgiana. But he had only avoided the worst with Georgiana by luck. Perhaps the Bennets, the Lucases, and Colonel Forster should have recognized Wickham's basic insincerity, but no one would make the leap from insincerity to rake—not when Darcy remained so profoundly silent on the subject.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

It would not have been difficult to warn them. He would not have had to reveal much. A hint in Mrs. Bennet's ear would have exiled Wickham from all good homes. A word in Colonel Forster's ear would have given that military gentleman reliable, even necessary information about one of his officers.

Stupid.

He knew before he reached Pemberley what he needed to do, and he needed to do it. His London solicitors would follow instructions, but Darcy needed to move, act, do something.

He encountered Charles at the stables. "I'm called to London," he said as much to Hutchins, the stable master, as to Charles. "I'll leave tomorrow morning."

"Very good, sir," Hutchins said while Charles said, "What's wrong? Do you want me to accompany you?"

"I can't provide details. Please, stay on, enjoy yourself. I'll return as soon as I can."

Charles looked concerned, and Darcy felt a wrench of disappointment. He would have liked to confide in Charles; he would have liked Charles' help in London. But what he told Charles, Charles would tell his sisters, and Darcy had to keep Elizabeth's secret for as long as possible. Wickham's actions had tainted her, had tainted her whole family, including Miss Bennet; if Charles ever intended to propose to Miss Bennet, he could not know of this calamity.

Darcy alerted Mrs. Reynolds to his journey. She sent his valet to pack a valise, and Darcy went in search of Georgiana. She had escaped the Bingley sisters and was seated in the Yew garden, embroidering with Mrs. Annesley. Mrs. Annesley agreed good-humoredly when Darcy requested a moment alone with his sister.

"I have to go to London," Darcy said when Mrs. Annesley had departed.

"Why?"

"The Gardiners have been called back to Longbourn. There's been a misfortune in the Bennet family."

"Oh, no," Georgiana said, and he took her hand.

"I think I can fix it," he said. "But Miss Elizabeth had to leave also."

"Has someone died?"

Darcy pondered. They were a family of almost abnormal privacy, yet he had to tell someone even if the news hurt Georgiana.

"Wickham has run off with Elizabeth's youngest sister."

He wasn't sure what he expected: a swoon, perhaps tears, but Georgiana only breathed a little quicker. She frowned.

"I have to find Mrs. Younge," Darcy said, rising.

"You should ask Gloria Faintree," Georgiana said.

He re-sat abruptly. Georgiana's color was high, but she was serious and determined.

"They were friends," Georgiana said.

Gloria Faintree was a servant in the London house, had been when Mrs. Younge was Georgiana's guardian.

Darcy said, "Did she—?"

"No," Georgiana said quickly. "She wasn't at Ramsgate. I don't think she ever met Wickham, but she might still be in contact with Mrs. Younge."

"Yes." Darcy squeezed his sister's shoulders. Georgiana smiled at him sadly:

"I guess I'm not the only silly girl in England."

He'd been right to tell her. If he'd thought more about the situation, he wouldn't have said anything—but Georgiana had faced the news with maturity. And she had helped him.

So much for well-meaning reticence.

He had meetings with Max and various tenants that afternoon. More meetings were scheduled for the rest of the week. He discussed with Max which meetings could be postponed until Darcy returned and which Max should carry out on his own. They discussed all the estate business Darcy had meant to tackle over the next month. Max took notes. Darcy trusted him; Max would do alright.

He returned to Pemberley late. His valise was ready. He slept for a few hours, waking at dawn. Mrs. Reynolds had packed breakfast for him. The carriage was waiting. They departed Pemberley at a muffled trot. Darcy meant to make it to London in one day, which meant several stops to exchange horses, but speed mattered. The more time passed, the more likely the scandal would break. Darcy would lose any leverage he possessed with Wickham, and Elizabeth's reputation would be ruined.

It wasn't going to happen. Darcy could fix this. He would fix this.

They arrived in London near midnight. His groom, Paul, would return to Pemberley tomorrow, retrieving the Pemberley horses on the way. Darcy collapsed into bed and slept until late morning.

He asked the housekeeper to send in Gloria Faintree while he ate breakfast. As he was finishing, a short, plump maid entered the room. She froze like a hare at the end of the table. Only her fingers moved, endlessly pleating her apron.

Darcy said, "Do you know Mrs. Younge's whereabouts?"

The girl opened her mouth and whispered something. Darcy said, "What's that?"

"I've heard, sir," the girl said in a slightly louder voice, "that she's in Edward Street, sir—she keeps lodgings."

"Thank you," Darcy said. The girl was shivering now. He didn't think he'd been unduly harsh. Perhaps she thought Darcy would dismiss her.

"Do you have dealings with her?" he said gently.

"Oh, no, sir. I did, sir, when she was Miss Georgiana's companion. Before. She wrote me after when she moved to Edward Street—I never responded, sir."

"Good," Darcy said. "Thank you," he added and smiled, and the maid smiled awkwardly in return.

He went to Edward Street. Mrs. Younge wasn't there; he told the maid he would return but didn't leave his name. He loitered in the area, taking refreshment at a tap house that overlooked the length of the street.

A hackney carriage pulled up to Mrs. Younge's door. A trim woman in a velvet lined gown descended with several boxes: Mrs. Younge. Darcy paid for his drink and went out. He was at the lodging house door almost as soon as it closed. He knew he was bordering on incivility, but the longer he waited, the greater the chance that Wickham would leave London with or without the Bennet girl. He knocked. The maid answered.

"Oh, hullo," she said. "Mrs. Younge has just returned—"

He stepped in, handing over his card. His name meant nothing to the maid. She went into a room at the end of the narrow foyer. Darcy waited, a large immovable object. Voices murmured: the maid's, cheery, impassive; Mrs. Younge's, surprised, alarmed. Darcy sighed, crossed the foyer, and opened the parlor door.

"You were not invited in, Mr. Darcy!" Mrs. Younge cried, bounding to her feet.

She was a compact, stylish woman. She exuded an aura of tactful refinement: a veneer, Darcy knew, but no doubt, it impressed her lodgers. It had once impressed Darcy.

"I am looking for Wickham," Darcy said as the maid, brows raised in deliberate disinterest, sidled past him out the door.

"Why do you imagine he is here?"

Because Wickham always kept a guarantee, a woman he could fall back on for money and support. Darcy didn't say so. He needed this woman's good will, at least for the moment. He took a deep breath and said as civilly as he could, "I want to help him."

"You?" She snorted and then looked annoyed at her lack of dignity.

"He's going to need help. I can improve his situation. Tell him that."

"He will, of course, leap to trust you." Her sneer was obvious.

"My word is trustworthy."

She pursed her lips and looked unbelieving.

"More than his," Darcy said. "He never married you."

She reddened, and Darcy cursed himself for losing his temper, but he might as well speak the truth now: "He's taken another bride."

"He won't marry her." The veneer was nearly gone now. Mrs. Younge was almost triumphant. Darcy quelled his disgust.

He said, "Is he hoping for someone wealthier?"

She shrugged and rose, recovering some of her poise. "The maid will show you out."

He didn't move. He didn't understand why any woman would associate with Wickham once his character was exposed. Did Mrs. Younge honestly think Wickham would repay her devotion?

"He'll gamble away any money before you ever see it," he said.

That gave her pause.

Darcy said, "I am willing to compensate you for information."

She considered, eyes half-closed. Darcy watched her, at a loss. He could not comprehend a woman such as this—without decency or self-respect or basic kindness.

"My knowledge is valuable," she said, and Darcy understood. He took coins out of his purse and set them on a table near the door.

"This is a partial payment," he told her.

"I'll see what I can manage."

He could do nothing more except go. Wickham and the youngest Bennet could be anywhere. They would surface eventually; Darcy must find them before the world heard of their whereabouts which meant he had to rely on Mrs. Younge's greed.

He returned to his house, paced in his study. There was no guarantee that Mrs. Younge would contact Wickham, no guarantee that Wickham would contact him. It was possible that Wickham had married Lydia, but if he had, he would have contacted Mr. Bennet for funds. Darcy should contact the Gardiners to find out if Wickham had made such a request.

He couldn't. He had nothing to offer them. He would be acting out of self-indulgence, a desire to share his burdens, to check on Elizabeth's health, her state of mind. He couldn't go to the Gardiners until he knew for certain that everything was fixed.

A message came from Mrs. Younge the next evening: "I have located your missing friend. I will give you more information if you call tomorrow at 11:00."

Darcy went. He handed over more coins, and Mrs. Younge gave him an address. He hoped it was valid, that he wouldn't have to return for another address for which he would have to pay more money. He didn't like being this vulnerable to rapacious people.

He was scowling when he finally came face to face with Wickham.

Darcy Finds Wickham, and Wickham Behaves More or Less as You Might Expect

"Hello," Wickham said. "I didn't know you were in London, Darcy."

"Do you have the youngest Bennet girl with you?

"The 'youngest Bennet girl'? Do you mean, Lydia Bennet?"

Darcy waited.

"I didn't expect anyone to know yet. Well, well, well, the rumors sure spread quickly. Did Miss Bingley burn your ears with scandal?"

"Why her?" Darcy said. "The family is not wealthy—"

"I'm not going to marry the girl." Wickham laughed. "I thought you knew me better than that."

"Why take her at all?" Darcy barked. "You had a good commission."

Wickham looked rueful. "And debts," he said. "Rather a lot of them. Let me tell you, Darcy, soldiers play for high stakes."

"So—" Darcy boggled. "Are you hoping the militia will just forget you owe its members money?"

"I'm resigning my commission." Wickham grinned. "Not a lawyer, not a soldier, not a vicar—your influence there—"

"You gave up that occupation," Darcy snapped, wishing he wouldn't react to Wickham's lies. He said as calmly as he could, "I want to see Miss Lydia."

"She's not your type."

Darcy waited. Wickham shrugged. "Upstairs."

Wickham was lodged near the Strand. The house had several apartments, grouped together around a dim stairwell. A single servant—there was also a live-in cook—showed Darcy to the upper room of Wickham's suite.

"Stay," Darcy told the servant. She gave him a baffled look but shrugged and followed him through the door.

A young, buxom woman sat by the windows, playing with a kitten. She rose as Darcy entered. He recognized her; he recognized too that, like Georgiana, she was well-formed despite her youth. Darcy felt a sudden aching desire to go down and kill the blithe man sitting in the room below. But that would not help anyone.

"Oh, la," Miss Lydia said, "it's Mr. Darcy."

"Hello, Miss Lydia."

"Why are you here?"

"I want you to return to your family."

"Why?

"They are worried about you. Your sister, Miss Elizabeth, was very upset when she learned you had eloped."

"Jealous, no doubt," Miss Lydia said. "I managed to capture Wickham's affections, not her."

"Are you sure he cares for you?"

Miss Lydia was not offended but rather astonished. "Of course. He gave me Bert—" she held out the kitten. It looked like a product of alley cat.

Darcy found himself exchanging a glance with the servant who shrugged.

He tried again: "He hasn't married you."

"He's just waiting to get some money that was promised him."

Darcy stared at her. She was possibly the most non-thinking creature he had ever met. And yet, there was something ingenuous about her; she was amiable if exasperating.

He went down to Wickham's sitting room, towing the interested servant behind him. It was a wise precaution. Wickham was ready with his smutty accusations—"Well, if you insist on seeing Lydia alone—" but stopped when he saw the servant.

"How much are your debts?" Darcy said, and Wickham told him: it was a huge amount, but it could have been worse.

"I'm assuming some are debts of honor," Darcy said. Wickham made a face. Darcy was suddenly fed up—with him, this place, the foolish girl upstairs—except Elizabeth's reputation was at risk, and Elizabeth loved her little sister, and neither she nor her sister would be in this situation if Darcy had been more responsible.

He said steadily, "You will draw up a list of your debts. You will remain here in this house. I don't have to remind you that duels, despite the pamphleteers, are still fought in England—over debts of honor."

Wickham blanched. Darcy exited after the servant and gave his feelings some vent by slamming the sitting room door.

At the outside door, the servant said, "Where can I reach you, sir, if he tries to decamp?"

Darcy looked down. The servant, a worn woman of any where from sixteen to thirty, looked back at him. Her clothes were grimy; her hair untidy. She had clearly been underfed for most of her life, but her eyes were lively, her mouth formed for laughter, and Darcy's heart suddenly felt a little lighter. Not everyone was taken in by Wickham.

"What's your name?"

"Kat, sir. Kat Giles."

He gave Miss Giles his card and several coins and went down the street, his objectives set out clearly before him: he was going to fix this!

He paid a visit to his solicitors the next morning. Now that he knew the amount of Wickham's debts, he knew what he could offer to gain Wickham's compliance. He knew, also, what Wickham would try for, but debts of honor were not like ordinary bills, not even for Wickham. If certain soldiers learned of Wickham's whereabouts, they would show far less restraint than Darcy. It was tempting to tell them. However, they would care little for Lydia Bennet's situation.

Darcy would handle everything. That meant paying out a great deal of money. He did not intend to raise his rents or to let go any of his servants. No one under his protection would suffer for Wickham's behavior. He would have to sell Munchen Farm. It was not part of the entailed estate but rather a farm his father had purchased during his lifetime. The servants there would have to be relocated to other parts of the Pemberley estate. Luckily, harvest time was near when extra laborers were hired by the Pemberley estate proper and by many of Darcy's tenants. The Munchen Farm servants would make up the extra labor force. Darcy would worry about their further employment come winter.

The solicitors were not pleased. Darcy wasn't pleased, but there was no point in dwelling on the repugnance of the situation. The farm must be sold; the money must be made available. Wickham's name was mentioned, and the solicitors became frigid with disapproval.

"I would suggest the money not be given directly to Mr. Wickham," the head solicitor, Mr. Garrison said.

"It won't be," Darcy promised.

He returned to Wickham's apartments. "They've been fighting," Miss Giles told Darcy, skipping up the stairs ahead of him. "She's not so sure of marriage since you came."

"Would she leave?" Darcy said, knowing the conversation was improper and not much caring.

"No, sir. He as good as told her he didn't care if she left, but she won't go. That age, they're sure they can get love just by wanting it."

Yes.

Wickham had made a list of his largest debts. Darcy looked them over, demanding particulars, receipts (some of which Wickham had).

"Are you really going to save my honor?" Wickham said smugly as the day wore on.

"Once you marry Miss Lydia."

Wickham looked pained. "I could make a better marriage."

"Miss King's uncle didn't think so," Darcy said. The uncle had broken Miss King and Wickham's engagement: Darcy had gotten that piece of information from Mr. Garrison.

Wickham actually flushed, glaring.

"You need immediate relief," Darcy said. "I'm offering it."

"I'm not going to marry the chit just to clear some bills."

"I'm aware of that."

A crafty look entered Wickham's face. He smoothed it out with a pleased laugh. As Darcy had expected, he suggested Darcy grant him an improbable sum which, of course, he wanted placed directly in his hands.

"Your debts will be paid," Darcy said, "through my solicitors. Money will be settled on Miss Lydia—in such a way, Wickham, that you will not be able to touch it. A better commission will be purchased for you, and a nominal amount of money will be settled on you."

Wickham protested. A pittance! How typical of Darcy not to be more generous! But all the time, there was wonder in his eyes: he knew Darcy owed him nothing. He wasn't sure why Darcy was offering such terms. But if he questioned Darcy's motives, he would lose his ability to bargain. Darcy had learned years earlier how Wickham's mind worked.

He went away with Wickham's list of debts, and when he returned the next morning, Wickham agreed to all his terms.

He must now inform the Gardiners of the arrangement, and he took a hackney carriage to Gracechurch Street. He rang the bell; a maid answered. Mr. Gardiner, she told Darcy, was engaged with Mr. Bennet.

Darcy hesitated. He didn't dislike Mr. Bennet. The man was a poor landowner but not actually neglectful. He would accept the terms Darcy had drawn up—and the money. In fact, he would need to pay Wickham's bills in Meryton.

The maid was waiting. Darcy just needed to say, "Tell Mr. Gardiner and Mr. Bennet that Mr. Darcy has called with information on Miss Lydia Bennet," and he would be welcomed into the current conference.

Darcy couldn't do it—he didn't know Mr. Bennett, not really. He didn't dislike him, but he didn't have full confidence in him. He did have full confidence, he realized, in Mr. Gardiner. Mr. Gardiner would be reasonable and objective. Darcy could work with Mr. Gardiner.

"I will return at a later date," he said and went to the London house.

He ate a light meal and slept fitfully, woke early. He was washing his face with cold water from the night before when he realized he had another reason for avoiding Mr. Bennet:

No one in Meryton could know what he'd done. The Gardiners were trustworthy. The Bennet parents were not. Elizabeth's reputation would be no better off if Darcy's part was known than if he had never played a part at all. Lydia must be removed to the Gardiners' home as soon as possible; the world must believe she had been there since she left Brighton.

Elizabeth, perhaps, had a right to the whole truth, but Darcy did not have the right to force the information on her. Let her believe her uncle had fixed everything.

He ate a small breakfast and took the carriage to Gracechurch Street. Mr. Gardiner was not engaged. He would be down directly. Darcy was admitted and left in Mr. Gardiner's study. He sank into a deep armchair and felt a sudden onslaught of exhaustion. It was almost over. It was almost fixed. Elizabeth's reputation was safe. No one, except Lydia, was going to pay for Darcy's mistakes, and Lydia didn't seem to know she was paying. Darcy knew, however, and was sorry for it.

He was half-asleep when Mr. Gardiner entered. He roused himself as Mr. Gardiner leapt forward hand out. "Mr. Darcy—what brings you here?" and then, before Darcy could respond, "We had such a pleasant time with you at Pemberley. We were sorry to leave so abruptly—and so was my niece."

Darcy nodded. "I hope you will visit again," he said. "I am not here, however, to extend an invitation. I have found Miss Lydia Bennet."

He explained everything. He was right; Mr. Gardiner was quick to appreciate the important point: the need to secure the marriage through the careful distribution of money, little of which would pass directly through Wickham's hands.

The only argument Darcy had with Mr. Gardiner—and later, Mrs. Gardiner—was about who the money should come from. Mr. Gardiner wanted to take on the whole expense. Darcy had looked over the Gardiners' home; it was large, well-proportioned with comfortable, tasteful furnishings. He admired the paintings on the wall, and the well-stocked bookcases. Mr. Gardiner was a well-off man. But he was not well-off to the tune of 9,653 pounds. He had, moreover, five children. Darcy would not allow this family, this overly generous family, to burden itself financially. Darcy would manage the whole; it was, in any case, his problem. He would fix it.

Lydia would come to Gracechurch Street. Darcy had to return to Pemberley, but he would come back for the wedding at which point Wickham would receive his commission and the money promised him for his own use (it would be given to help him "start a new life with his bride," but Darcy knew Wickham would spend it on himself; hence, the individual settlement on Lydia).

"Oh, you are obstinate," Mrs. Gardiner said to Darcy, half fretful, half laughing.

"That is not the worst of faults," Darcy said.

"I could also accuse you of a lack of liveliness," she said, "but I think marriage would cure that," and she kissed his cheek.

He returned to Pemberley two days later. Before he went, he issued an order to his London butler, Mr. Poole. Mr. Poole was to visit a certain house—Darcy gave him the address—and hired the services, should she agree, of a servant woman named Miss Katrina Giles.

Darcy Decides to Propose to Elizabeth (Again), Then Takes Awhile Getting Around to It

Charles intended to return to Netherfield for the shooting season. His sisters were going on to Scarborough.

"You'll come to Netherfield, won't you?" Charles said to Darcy, half-pleading, half-embarrassed.

Darcy agreed. He and Charles had not had a private chat since Darcy returned to Pemberley. Charles had not mentioned the Bennet sisters, and Darcy had wanted to forget the subject: he was hardly in a position, now, to court Elizabeth.

But Charles' suit still had merit. If Darcy went with him, he could see for himself how Miss Bennet felt. He could encourage Charles if Charles needed encouragement.

They arrived at Netherfield. They went shooting. Darcy walked the grounds and spoke to the land steward who seemed rather depressed, but Darcy couldn't summon up energy to badger Charles about Netherfield's lands.

Finally, they visited the Bennets. Charles proposed going as if the thought had just that moment occurred to him. Darcy smiled inwardly.

Mrs. Bennet, of course, was ecstatic to see Charles. Charles flushed and sat down near Miss Bennet. Darcy glanced at Elizabeth. She had greeted him, but she was focused now on her sewing. She didn't look at him. He asked after the Gardiners. She answered in a stilted manner.

Darcy sat on a hard little chair and felt miserable. What had he expected? She had suffered weeks of uncertainty when her sister eloped with Wickham. She knew how culpable Darcy was there, how much to blame for Wickham's behavior in the first place. Any kindness she may have felt for Darcy at Pemberley would have been wiped well away by now.

Mrs. Bennet rattled on about Miss Lydia and the shooting season, and Darcy sat and wished he had stayed away. But there was Charles to consider. Miss Bennet seemed pleased to see Charles, if quiet. But then that was her nature. It was not her sister's: why was Elizabeth so silent unless Darcy's coming embarrassed her?

Charles praised Miss Bennet repeatedly on the way home—so lovely, so good-natured. Didn't Darcy think so? Darcy agreed absently.

They went to dinner at the Bennets. Elizabeth spoke to Darcy a few times which eased his depression, but it wasn't like before. Nothing would ever be like before. Except for Charles, who spend the entire evening at Miss Bennet's side. On their way back to Netherfield, he said, "Isn't Miss Bennet remarkable? Even you have to admit that, Darcy."

Darcy had admitted it, rather incessantly, over the past twenty-four hours. He sighed, glancing at Charles and found that Charles was watching him earnestly.

"Do you intend to court her?" Darcy said. Surely Charles had already decided.

"Yes!" The reply was explosive. "So, you approve? You didn't approve a year ago."

"No," Darcy said. "I owe you an apology there, Charles. I presumed where I shouldn't have, and I kept information from you—Miss Bennet visited your sisters in London."

"She did? They never—"

"I convinced them the connection was a bad one."

"Oh." There was silence between them, then, "You had no right to do that," Bingley said stiffly.

"I was wrong. I was also wrong about Miss Bennet's feelings."

"In what way?"

"She cares for you."

"Really?"

Darcy gazed at him wonderingly. He had expected more recriminations, but Charles only looked pleased.

"Yes," he said. "She is pleased to see you when we visit Longbourn. She prefers your company to everyone else's."

"Then if I propose," Charles said, "you won't be upset?"

"Of course not," Darcy said, rather startled, and Charles beamed.

Darcy went up to London the next day. There were papers to sign regarding the Munchen Farm. It had been purchased by Lord Crambourne who owned land in Derbyshire. Darcy was pleased: Crambourne would be a good neighbor and landlord, and Darcy hoped he would rehire many of the Munchen Farm servants.

The London house was quiet—Georgiana would not return until after Christmas—with a partial staff. One morning, Darcy encountered a maid washing the stoop. She stepped back, said, "Good morning, sir," in a laughing way, and he recognized a primly dressed, well-fed Miss Giles.

He considered calling on the Gardiners where he could pretend for an hour or two that they were all back in Pemberley in the halcyon summer days before everything Darcy wanted collapsed forever.

He returned from the solicitors one afternoon to find the London house in an uproar. Lady Catherine was in London. She had stopped by that morning to see Darcy. She was most displeased that he was out. Darcy sighed, told Mr. Poole to ready the kitchen—Lady Catherine would insist on coming to dinner at least one night—and prepared to stay at home the following morning.

To his surprise, Lady Catherine returned that evening. She had many friends and relations in London; Darcy would have thought her wholly occupied in bothering them. Luckily, the cook, used to Lady Catherine's sudden assaults, had already restocked the larder. Darcy offered a meal; Lady Catherine swept it aside.

"I have alarming news," she announced. Darcy sat in the chilly drawing room—there was no point wasting fuel by lighting a fire—and waited for her to finish: perhaps, Lady Catherine's housekeeper had finally gotten fed up and left.

"Your name, my dear nephew, is being bandied about in the worst way."

Darcy cringed inwardly. Had she heard about Wickham and Miss Lydia (Mrs. Wickham now)? How could she have heard?

"In connection with Miss Elizabeth Bennet."

"Miss Elizabeth?"

"You are right to be astonished. I could hardly believe it. The rumors people spread—you know the oldest daughter is marrying your friend—"

Darcy didn't know, but he wasn't surprised: Charles and his spontaneity. Darcy quelled a rush of envy. Good for Charles.

"—an advantageous match for her, I must say. But there is no reason for people to suppose that simply because you are friends, you would marry the sister. I can confirm absolutely there was no suggestion of such an idea when you visited Rosings—"

Only a proposal which had been rejected.

"I have done what I can to squelch this odious gossip. I even visited the girl—"

"What?"

"Can you believe it, Darcy? She knows that such a connection would be improper, but she refused to deny the rumor. Yes, I can see that astonishes you—" Darcy had risen and was gaping at his aunt. "An obvious falsehood, yet she refused to admit it. I explained about Anne—"

Darcy looked confused. What about Anne?

Lady Catherine coughed and waved a hand—

"And she still refused to acknowledge that there is no engagement between you. She knows she would disgrace you—"

"No," Darcy said, but Lady Catherine didn't hear him. She continued, her voice rising: "She knows your family would never accept her—" (the Fitzwilliams would, John would, anyone who mattered to Darcy would)—"yet she remained obstinate. She thinks you would not care about her low connections—" (Darcy would be lucky to get the Gardiners as relations. As for Mrs. Bennet, well, Pemberley was a long way from Longbourn.) "She finally admitted there was no engagement, but she would not promise to never enter into one. I realize you would never offer for her, but her willingness to countenance the possibility will only further the rumors. She actually intimated that it was none of my business—"

On and on went Lady Catherine's voice. Darcy could only stare at the unlit fire and replay Lady Catherine's words in his head: She would not promise to never enter into one.

Into an engagement. With Darcy.

She would not promise to never enter into an engagement with me.

If she had decided against Darcy, she would have said so. She may have scrupled at being too blunt, but she would have been frank about her emotions, especially to Lady Catherine.

"You must persuade her to stop these rumors," his aunt was saying.

Darcy nodded absently. Had Elizabeth's feelings changed since April? He'd hoped so at Pemberley, but there hadn't been enough time to judge. If her emotions had changed, why hadn't she spoken to him when he visited Longbourn with Charles?

You didn't speak to her, he reminded himself. But Elizabeth was better at that sort of thing than he. He shrugged. It didn't matter. She wasn't opposed to the idea of engagement—that was what mattered.

He finished his business with the solicitors. Two days later he was back at Netherfield.

Charles was full of his engagement: Miss Bennet had said, "Yes." Wasn't it amazing? Wasn't it marvelous? They would be married before Christmas. Would Darcy be his best man? Charles was the happiest of men.

"It's rather hard to talk to her alone," he admitted. "Mrs. Bennet—" he paused judiciously—"likes to, ah, discuss the wedding. But I have a walk in mind for tomorrow. Will you come?"

Absolutely. They set out early. Mrs. Bennet was delighted to see them, even Darcy. She wanted to tell Darcy about Lady Catherine's visit. Darcy cringed, ready to apologize for his aunt's behavior, but Charles cut in with his offer of a walk, and all three sisters plus Charles and Darcy set off towards the Lucases.

Charles and Miss Bennet fell further and further behind. The youngest sister—Kitty?—left them at the Lucases' gate. Darcy was relieved that Elizabeth didn't want to go in. He needed time and relative solitude to order his thoughts, prepare himself to propose.

Suppose she said, "No."

She couldn’t say, "No."

She might. She might have said what she did to Lady Catherine out of anger—her relations with Darcy were, after all, none of Lady Catherine's business. Or Lady Catherine might have misunderstood or misread . . .

If she said, "No"—Darcy could hardly contemplate the idea, the emotional heartbreak. He wasn't good at heartbreak.

But suppose she meant to say, "Yes," and he didn't ask?

His thoughts were interrupted. Elizabeth was speaking of Darcy's intervention with Wickham. Darcy frowned, astonished. He'd trusted the Gardiners not to report his involvement.

It wasn't the Gardiners, Elizabeth reassured him, but Lydia. And Elizabeth was grateful: "Let me thank you again and again, in the name of all my family, for that generous compassion which induced you to take so much trouble, and bear so many mortifications for the sake of discovering Wickham and Lydia."

Darcy felt some of his alarm ebb away. She wasn't angry because he hadn't acted sooner or faster. She was appreciative; she understood what he'd been though. He'd done it for her, not her family. He said so, which struck him, after the fact, as a little rude, but Elizabeth blushed and looked at the ground.

Darcy felt easier. Apparently, he had said the right thing. He continued while his courage was up: "You are too generous to trifle with me. If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me at once. My affections and wishes are unchanged; but one word from you will silence me on this subject forever."

He waited, and it seemed as if the world shrunk, like a bubble, around him. He didn't hear the birds or wind or far-off rumbling carts. He waited in that narrow, quiet place where all he saw was Elizabeth's face.

"You are so generous—" she said, stammering—Elizabeth stammering!—"my feelings are nothing like they were that first time. I am ashamed of what I felt. I would be honored—happy to receive your addresses."

Darcy almost laughed. She had agreed. It seemed so completely unlikely that he stood for several more seconds in that bubble world, and then he was holding Elizabeth's hand which was warm, and he was back in the lane with the birds chirping and the wind rustling the trees. He could hear workers far-off in the fields, see the gray of early frost on the grass. He could see Elizabeth's cheek close against his coat, and he felt complete, unbelieving delight.

"I am very lucky," he told her because she needed to know. Her good sense, her good humor, her kindness and intelligence, her beautiful eyes—all these things made him the luckiest of men. He described them all, and it was the easiest thing Darcy had ever done.

They walked on, hands clasped. They discussed Lady Catherine, Elizabeth laughing at Darcy's explanation: "I knew enough of your disposition to be certain that had you been absolutely, irrevocably decided against me, you would have said so."

He was right, Elizabeth said. He knew her very well. She referred, self-consciously, to his proposal at Rosings. She was sorry now that she had been so harsh, but she hadn't been harsh. Darcy had been an ass. He behaved better now. He told her that and asked about the letter. Had she even read it? She had; she had believed it; she had been ashamed at how grossly she had misjudged him. She nudged him then—he shouldn't dwell so on the past; they were different people now.

Darcy agreed. She was so wise, his Elizabeth, but he'd waited several months to explain to her his character, and he did so now, carefully, seriously, and she listened attentively.

They moved on then to happier subjects—Charles and her sister. Darcy explained what he had confessed to Charles, and Elizabeth smiled at him. She seemed to think he had pushed Charles to propose to Miss Bennet, but Charles had intended to offer when they returned to Netherfield—Darcy assured her on that point.

She grinned, and Darcy eyed her suspiciously, but she only leaned against him, and Darcy felt bone-deep relief and satisfaction. Elizabeth was going to marry him. How astonishing.

Marriage, Darcy knew, involved other people. He told himself sternly that he would bear up under Mrs. Bennet's raptures and the curiosity of Longbourn's neighbors. Speaking to Elizabeth's father was easy in comparison although Elizabeth seemed nervous. In fact, once the engagement was announced, Darcy thought she seemed more nervous than he. But she was happy enough when they could go on walks together.

The Collinses came for a visit, and Mr. Collins simpered. Darcy was surprised Mr. Collins didn't rouse Elizabeth to her usual sarcasm. "You bear all their fawning so composedly," she said.

"We're engaged," Darcy said, which he figured explained everything, but Elizabeth only shook her head fretfully. At least she was herself around Darcy.

The fawning continued. Sir William congratulated Darcy on "carrying away the brightest jewel of the country" and asked when he would see Darcy dance at St. James with his wife. Darcy just smiled. When Sir William was gone, he shrugged for Elizabeth's benefit, and they shared reminiscences of their dances together. "Will I still have to do most of the talking?" Elizabeth said, and Darcy said, "Yes."

Georgiana wrote to Elizabeth and to Darcy. Elizabeth showed Georgiana's letter to Darcy—four pages—but wouldn't let him read it. To Darcy, Georgiana wrote, "Thank you for my new sister. I will see you both soon." The weddings—his and Elizabeth's, Charles and Miss Bennet's—would occur in early December. Darcy and Elizabeth would spend Christmas at Pemberley with Georgiana and the Gardiners. The Gardiners were pleased, Elizabeth told Darcy, to gain such a worthy nephew. "I am pleased to gain such a kind uncle and aunt," Darcy said and spoke the truth.

A year ago, he had left Pemberley alone to visit Netherfield. Now, he would return to Pemberley with a new bride; at Pemberley, his sister and new aunt and uncle would be waiting. There were times during the courtship when, Elizabeth coming to meet Darcy on the road between Netherfield and Longbourn, Darcy would halt the horse, watch her come and think, "I am a man of remarkable good fortune."

Epilogue

Darcy came upstairs to find Mrs. Reynolds and his wife removing the curtains in the front guest bedroom. He tucked his hands behind his back. He had been helping Max and the Walston boys unearth the tree trunk in the south pasture, and his hands were filthy. Lizzy wouldn't care, but Mrs. Reynolds would scold.

"Those curtains should be hung in the back room," Lizzy said. "I'm thinking blue curtains in here—what do you think?"

"They won't be too dark?" Mrs. Reynolds said.

"Maybe—" Lizzy frowned. "Green, perhaps?"

"I'll bring up some swatches," Mrs. Reynolds said and went out with her arms full. She gave Darcy a sharp look, but he smiled at her—"You can charm anyone when you smile," Lizzy would tell him—and Mrs. Reynolds only sniffed.

He sat on the divan at the end of the bed and yawned. He hadn't meant to help with the tree trunk, but it was rather frustrating to watch people mishandled a task. He studied his hands and wondered if there was any more castile soap in the house.

Lizzy was walking back and forth in front of the windows. His wife had an eye for color and had evinced an interest in decorating that surprised and sometimes alarmed Darcy. She was, however, much more frugal than he had anticipated.

He said, "Charles is looking at estates in Stafford," and grinned as Lizzy spun towards him.

"That's wonderful. Oh—" she went a little white and sat abruptly on the divan.

Darcy looked at her in concern. "Are you alright?"

"Yes. Oh, Bill, it would be wonderful to have them so close."

"Yes. I thought you'd be pleased." He gave Lizzy a hug and started to rise—they probably had some castile soap in the downstairs washroom—then stopped: Lizzy was short of breath as well as pale.

"Are you sure you're alright?"

She shook her head, frustrated. "Lately—I haven't been feeling so good. I'll be fine by lunch."

"Maybe you're starting a baby," Darcy said and headed towards the door. Half-way across the room, Lizzy said, "Bill!" and he turned back. She sat on the divan, staring at him, her face pale, eyes large.

"I think you're right," she said, stunned.

Darcy shook his head. Why was she surprised? Her mother was fertile—she had given birth to five healthy daughters and survived.

He went back, kissed the top of his wife's head. He was pleased, though babies at this stage always seemed rather remote to Darcy.

"I've never had a baby," Lizzy said to his shirt which made Darcy laugh. She grimaced up at him. "I've taken care of children, but this—"

"Lizzy," Darcy said, still amused, "you can do anything."

She laughed then and pushed him away: "Get along, you," and Darcy went out to wash his hands. Sometimes, he thought as he ran down the stairs, his wife could be a bit clueless.

Darcy, Extreme Introvert

2008-09-14T19:39:00.001-07:00

I am currently reading commentaries about Jane Austen's novels. In general, they are pretty good, but nearly every commentator feels obligated to explain away Darcy's letter to Elizabeth. The agreed-on commentatari seems to be that Darcy would never, never write such a letter in real life.

I find this reaction odd. I have never had any trouble understanding the purpose behind the letter or believing that Darcy would write such a revealing letter.

To begin with, I should state that out of all the film interpretations of Darcy, well, yes, I consider Colin Firth's to be the most accurate.

I know, I know, but my reasons do in fact go beyond the portrayal of Colin Firth as numero uno sex magnet. Rather, I am incessantly amused by Colin Firth's depiction of Darcy as the ultimate male introvert. And I am continually impressed by how pitch perfect he is in every scene (I'm convinced he either is an introvert or knows one).

I come from a family filled with male introverts of varying intensity. When Colin Firth's Darcy grumps his way around a ballroom, yet becomes downright friendly on his home turf ("Look at my computer program, my remodeling job, my lawn!"); when he wanders to the window during contentious conversations; when he drops by for a visit and then spends the whole time skimming through a magazine; when he answers questions monosyllabically . . . I laugh my head off: Yeah, I've seen this before.

This brings us to the letter. First, I find it completely plausible that Darcy would write a letter rather than explain himself verbally to Elizabeth. Darcy is a sharp dude. He is observant and can often recognize things in Elizabeth she doesn't recognize in herself. But he isn't a battle-of-wits type of guy. Faced with a verbally gifted and angry woman, he needs to draw back, regroup, and organize his thoughts.

In his book A Fine Brush on Ivory, Richard Jenkyns points out that Darcy does this at Rosings in the scene between Darcy, Elizabeth, and Colonel Fitzwilliam. Elizabeth zings Darcy. She then starts talking to Colonel Fitzwilliam and Darcy interrupts (which is not typical). But it took him a few seconds to marshal his thoughts and come up with an answer.

In the A&E production, Colin Firth nails this reaction--this is what I mean by pitch-perfect. In the first proposal scene between Darcy and Elizabeth, he walks back and forth in the drawing room, scuffing his boots. When Elizabeth accuses him of dissing Wickham, he stops at the fireplace and gives her this "Uhhhhhh" look. He knows she's wrong. He knows she doesn't get how correct his actions have been regarding Wickham (and her sister). But he doesn't know how to say it. Here's this bright, angry woman that he adores trouncing him verbally from all directions. He's got to get home and send her an email telling her how wrong she is. Oh, wait, no such thing as email. But she's got to understand that she's got him totally wrong.

This brings us back to the letter. The other reason I believe in the letter is because of how Darcy writes it. He does not say, "Oh, Elizabeth, I love you, I love you" (again). He does not say, "You stupid woman. Why don't you agree with me?" He doesn't even whine about her behavior. What does he do? He explains to her his process of thought.

This is so typical of a left-brained, male introvert, I can only assume commentators don't know any left-brained male introverts. You must get me. You must get why my utterly logical reasons resulted in my utterly logical behavior. It isn't about getting the woman to like or even love him. It's gone beyond that. His pride is on the line. A person he values (which, for this type of man, is a person whose judgment he respects even if he doesn't respect her family) has accused him of bad reasoning. Oh, man, that's just so wrong.

This doesn't mean that Darcy's reasoning is correct. Elizabeth has an invested interest in both her sister and Wickham, but she correctly deduces that while Darcy's line of reasoning re: Wickham is correct, his line of reasoning re: her sister is somewhat flawed. The reasoning "Wickham tried to seduce my sister to get back at me; therefore, he is a jerk" is pretty smart. The reasoning "The Bennett parents and younger sisters make me wince; therefore, my friend shouldn't marry the very sweet-natured Jane" is pretty bogus.

This doesn't alter Darcy's motivations though--he feels compelled to point out to Elizabeth that he actually thought his actions through. He didn't just act on a whim. He didn't behave ungentlemanly. He isn't the person she thinks he is.

Now, I do agree with those commentators who think Darcy is not a man to lightly expose himself. However, Elizabeth does not fall into the category of people to whom Darcy won't expose himself--even as early in their relationship as Rosings. Granted, he is attracted initially to Elizabeth's "fine eyes" (and lively conversation), but he would not have gone on being attracted if he had believed Elizabeth vulgar or incapable of discretion. He simply wouldn't have fallen in love with someone like that, and he is proud enough to believe that if he has fallen in love, she must be refined and discreet.

Now I will grant that at the age of almost 80, my father--an excellent example of the genus Introverti (male)--would probably no longer write such a letter. But then he has my mother edit all his letters. Now that Darcy and Elizabeth are married, whenever Darcy feels compelled to write to Lydia and Wickham, explaining exactly what he thinks of them, Elizabeth will be there at his shoulder, editing his prose.

Mrs. Harris and Angel Falling Softly

2008-09-14T19:35:00.003-07:00

I just finished reading, for the second time, Mrs. Harris by Diana Trilling and Very Much a Lady by Shana Alexander. These are both true-crime books (although Mrs. Harris is really more a memoir of Trilling's experience at the trial) of the murder of Dr. Tarnower in the late 70's (the trial ran into the early 80's) by his lover, Jean Harris.

I reviewed both books on Amazon.com when I first read them. My opinions haven't changed substantially although I am more in agreement now with Trilling (I admire her bravery in not accepting Mrs. Harris' view of herself--a view Mrs. Harris managed to sell many people on--as a woman of integrity who just happened to go off the rails).

The one major difference, and this is probably my age and experience (no, I'm not married; I just know more than I did in my 20's) is my pity for Dr. Tarnower.

I don't doubt the guy was a sleazebag. I don't doubt that I wouldn't have spent two minutes in his company. But I do feel pity for his final hours.

Basically, Jean Harris was in love with Dr. Tarnower. At one point, he offered to marry her but changed his mind. She accepted the situation. She accepted his mistresses. She continued to go on trips with him and to stay at his house despite having, towards the end, a serious (younger) rival. She accepted his coldness, his indifference, his rudeness, his blatant degradation of her.

She was also taking a massive amount of "uppers," prescribed to her by Dr. Tarnower. I consider these prescriptions (made out in different names to avoid problems at the pharmacy) to be Dr. Tarnower's major contribution to his own death although I seriously question the so-called integrity of a woman who doesn't balk (and later claims not to notice) taking prescriptions in other people's names for nearly 10 years. When Tarnower was killed, Jean Harris was in massive withdrawal. If she had meant to kill herself and had succeeded, her family could have sued the doctor for malpractice (and won a bundle).

So the night of the murder (and whether Harris intended to kill Tarnower or to kill herself, Tarnower ended up dead, and he ended up dead because the stupid woman brought a gun into his bedroom, so I call it murder), Harris drives up to Tarnower's house in Purchase, New York, goes in, sits on the bed next to his, tells him she needs to talk and waits for him to . . .

Trilling, Alexander, and Harris herself correctly diagnose that Harris expected a confrontation with some accusations, some tears, and finally, some tenderness. She probably played and replayed the scene in her head as she drove the five hours to Purchase. But Tarnower didn't respond. He knew she was coming and didn't leave the light on. He was grumpy when she woke him up. Even after he was fully awake, he didn't want to talk, closing his eyes and hoping she would just drop the whole thing and go to bed.

So Harris wanders into the bathroom, sees his other woman's stuff, and all hell breaks loose . . . in a very literal way.

Both Alexander and Trilling fault the doctor for not responding to Harris' distress that night. Okay, so she woke him up, but once he was awake, he should have responded like he would have to a man friend; he should have noticed her condition was worse than usual. The murder could have been averted if . . .

Alexander and Trilling have the honesty to admit that, well, that really wasn't the guy's modus operandi, was it, and how stupid was Harris anyway? But I think they both miss another factor, the thing that causes me to feel sorry for Tarnower.

Harris didn't leave Tarnower despite every instigation to do so. He made her happy, she claims in letter after letter she sent him after their jaunts abroad and to Florida. She can't live without him. Alexander correctly perceives that Harris needed to believe she was wasting her time on a worthwhile person. Trilling more perceptively points out that Harris would have had to re-evaluate her own taste and choices (and supposed high ideals) if she'd accepted Tarnower as he actually was. In any case, the letters and Harris' later reactions indicate that Harris needed this guy to be on a pedestal, and she invested everything he did with pedestal-quality meaning--with all the attendant pathos. (She basically created her own little Gothic romance.)

Towards the end of her book, Alexander points out that Harris didn't always remember things correctly. If Tarnower said five mean things to her in a conversation and one nice thing, she remembered the nice thing: the nice thing became the only thing the conversation was about. And while I'm sorry Harris felt the need to do this, I'm mostly sorry for the guy. Because living on a pedestal can be tiring. Having your every action, whim, bad temper, passing comment, minor thought, absent-minded choice invested with THAT MUCH MEANING would be unbelievably exhausting.

I'm not saying Tarnower is a complete innocent here. When he was younger, I'm sure Tarnower enjoyed Harris' adulation. He was an arrogant, self-involved person, and it probably gave him a thrill to have a reasonably intelligent, well-read, pretty woman think he was "all that." But as he got older, it would have just tired him out. I think it is notable that the two women he went back to (without dumping Harris) in his later years were women who accepted him as he was. The first woman accepted him as he was and walked away from the romantic side of their friendship because, well, she saw him as he was. The second woman, the direct rival to Jean Harris, Lynne Tryforos (and the only person involved in the case who behaved like a real lady: one who kept her thoughts to herself), saw him as he was and worshipped him. No matter what he did, she thought he was wonderful. No matter how few the crumbs he scattered, she gathered them up. He didn't have to do anything. And sure, that's sexist, and no self-respecting woman would put up with it, but the guy never pretended he was anything else than how he behaved. In fact, you get the impression that towards the end, he was trying to force-feed the notion of his own self-involved importance down Jean Harris' throat: this is who I am, I'm not going to change, nothing is going to be different, this is who I am, let it go.

Unfortunately, Jean Harris was just smart enough and just proud enough and just besotted enough with her "script" (as Alexander calls it) to need more than crumbs and indifference. The relationship had to have meaning: meaning to her, meaning to him, meaning to her sense of self, meaning to her past, her future, her life, her career, meaning, meaning, meaning.

The guy was nearing 70; can you blame him for being tired of it all? I don't think Tarnower noticed anything different in Harris when she showed up that night. Based on Alexander's excellent, detailed summary of their relationship, it was the same "I want you to play a role with me" as always. And he didn't want to play. And he ended up dead.

As the dominatrix on CSI points out more than once, in a domination/submission relationship, the submissive party does have power. It's no bizarre mischance that the supposed dominant party in the Scarsdale murder ended up dead. The woman who made the relationship out to be something it wasn't triumphed; she killed the disillusionment and hence, enabled herself to live forever in her disillusion. And he may have been a jerk, and he may have brought some of it on himself, but he and his family didn't deserve that. (Although from a Freudian point of view, if one puts an Electra complex into motion, one should hardly be surprised by the result; still, despite reading Herodotus, I don't think Tarnower was prepared for Greek myths to re-enact themselves all over his bedroom.)

I mention this case, despite its datedness, because this whole business of creating unreal, perfect heroes has come up recently in exchanges I've been reading. Most of those exchanges regard Twilight; however, I've beat up on that series quite a bit lately here and elsewhere, and, at the end of the day, I think the series for most fans isn't anything more or less than a fun read. However, my brother Eugene's book, Angel Falling Softly, has recently come under fire, and I can't help but be miffed by a similar audience base that prefers unreal heroes to real, fallible people. (I'm floored by readers who can't tell the difference between amoral literature, where characters end up doing the "right thing" not from choice but through some kind of accidental karma--because they are supposed to--and moral literature where the characters actually grapple, sincerely, awkwardly, with moral issues.)

It isn't just that unreal heroes don't exist or that unreal heroes always cause problems; it is that the belief in unreal heroes can hurt all the parties involved. Sure, the disillusioned Mrs. Harrises get hurt, but the Tarnowers, who never pretended to be better than they were, end up dead. Everyone is fallible. Very few people, as Buffy points out in "Earshot" know what's going on in another person's mind; we don't know other people's scripts; we don't always anticipate what is expected of us. Investing anything--anyone--with the idea that it ought to be perfect, from presidents to governments, from religious institutions to marriages, can result in a great deal of unnecessary collateral damage.

Twilight Discussion Between Carole & Kate

2008-09-14T19:35:00.001-07:00

I started Twilight by Stephanie Meyer a few months ago for a book club and never finished. Therefore, I don't feel qualified to talk (much) about the series. However, my friend Carole has read the three books in print (the fourth comes out in August--since we both criticize the series, I figure a little promotion as an apology isn't amiss) and has become progressively disenchanted. Here are her thoughts. I respond at length in the first comment.

Carole's First Point:

Bella’s flaws, while present in the books, are not clearly communicated as the underlying problem in the story.

From Stephanie Meyer's website:

Q. What are the characters' biggest mistakes in Eclipse, their tragic flaws?

A. Bella's is a lack of self-knowledge; she never would have pursued her friendship with Jacob if she had realized how much more than friendship it really was. You don't give up your friends when you fall in love; however, you do give up your other romantic interests. If Bella had understood herself better, she could have saved everyone a lot of heartbreak. Sometimes that happens when you try to do the right thing.

Carole: The biggest problem with the books is that there is no outside element telling the reader that Bella has a lack of self-knowledge and is handling the relationship with Jacob poorly, except Jacob himself and only at the beginning of the book. The first chapter of Eclipse starts with a note Jacob writes to Bella:

Bella,

[scratched out] I don’t know why you’re making Charlie carry notes to Billy like we’re in the second grade – if I wanted to talk to you I would answer the
[scratched out] You made the choice here, okay? You can’t have it both ways when
[scratched out] What part of ‘mortal enemies’ is too complicated for you to
[scratched out] Look, I know I’m being a jerk, but there’s just no way around
[scratched out] We can’t be friends when you’re spending all your time with a bunch of
[scratched out] It just makes it worse when I think about you too much, so don’t write anymore
Yeah, I miss you too. A lot. But that doesn’t change anything. Sorry.

Jacob

Even though the problem (Bella's lack of self-knowledge) is stated here, it is later blurred by events and, more annoyingly, other people’s actions. In the first chapter, Charlie, Bella's father, says, “You’re hurting Jake’s feelings, avoiding him like this. He’d rather be just friends than nothing.” Edward says his objection to Bella seeing Jacob is Edward's concern for her safety, not because her relationship jeopardizes Edward and Bella’s relationship. (Edward's reaction really is jealousy, but Edward only admits this to Jacob--not directly to Bella--and Edward is always able to rise above his jealousy to do what’s in Bella’s "best interests.") Even Jacob tells Bella she is welcome to come by. (I can buy this, though. Jacob decides he wants to fight for her. Stephanie explains that on her web site, and I can see that.)

Considering Edward's overall reaction to Jacob . . . it felt entirely uneven, especially since Edward continues to exhibit controlling behavior in other minor but concrete ways. Edward goes from being insufferable to being overly magnanimous towards Jacob, to the point of allowing Jacob to do something for Bella.

Near the end of the book, Bella does realize that she can’t be with Edward and stay friends with Jacob because it hurts everyone involved, and she decides to tell Jacob that they can’t be friends. She begins to, but then Jacob tells her that he might die in the impending fight. She freaks out and begs him not to leave. Jacob asks Bella to ask him to kiss her. She does, and during that kiss, she realizes that yes, she does love Jacob, but not enough to not be with Edward.

But she never really makes the difficult choice. Even after the above scene, when Jacob gets hurt in a fight, Bella goes to him. She doesn’t even stop to think that her decision to walk away is the right one. She is still committed to Edward, and Jacob knows that, but when she gets ready to leave Jacob, she tells him she will come back or stay away depending on what he wants. This might seem selfless, but it also allows her to not make the choice. She’s asking Jacob to decide, but the decision doesn’t just affect Jacob’s happiness. It’s also affects hers and Edward’s.

I understand what you [Kate] mean when you say the Buffy writers didn’t portray Spike as bad, they just wanted us to think that. Here it’s the same thing. Stephanie says that Bella not letting go of Jacob is a problem, but the events and characters in the book don’t lead the reader to that conclusion. It’s acknowledged in the beginning and end of the book, but in the middle of the book, it’s forgotten. Not only does Bella associate with Jacob without considering the consequences, but Meyer allows the reader (not counting people like [Kate and Carole who are over the age of 21]) to forget the consequences too. The reader never forgets that Jacob loves Bella [which causes problems for all concerned] . . . but the events are manipulated, so it seems acceptable for Bella to be around Jacob.

Bella doesn't consciously choose what man to be with.

From Stephanie Meyer's website:

Q. What's the deal with Bella just falling in love with Jacob in the eleventh hour of Eclipse? Don't you believe in true love anymore? What happened to blacken your soul, woman??

A. First of all, let me say that I do believe in true love. But I also deeply believe in the complexity, variety, and downright insanity of love. A lucky person loves hundreds of people in their lives, all in different ways, family love, friendship love, romantic love, all in so many shades and depths. I don't think you lose your ability—or right—to have true love by loving more than one person. In part, this is true because you never love two people the same way. Another part is that, if you're lucky, you learn to love better with practice. The bottom line is that you have to choose who you are going to commit to—that's the foundation of true love, not a lack of other options.

Next, Bella does not fall in love with Jacob in Eclipse. Bella falls in love with Jacob in New Moon. I think it's easy to understand why this fact doesn't occur to her. Bella has only fallen in love one time, and it was a very sudden, dramatic, sweep-you-off-your-feet, change-your-world, magical, passionate, all-consuming thing (see: Twilight). Can you blame her for not recognizing a much more subtle kind of falling-in-love?

Does this love devaluate her love for Edward? Not for me. For me, it makes that perfect true love stronger. Bella has another option. She has a really good one. An option that's easier in many ways, that takes nothing—like her family, present or future—away from her. She would have love, and friendship, and family—an enviable human future. But she chooses Edward over all of this. This makes it real for me.

Carole: The last paragraph is where I disagree and get annoyed. I think the love Bella comes to have for Jacob is one hundred times better and stronger than what she has for Edward, but the book doesn’t support that Bella made a choice. In fact, Bella says she has no choice. When she goes to Jacob after he is hurt, he realizes that even though Bella knows she loves him, she will stay with Edward . . . to which she replies:

The worst part is I saw the whole thing—our whole life. And I want it bad, Jake, I want it all. I want to stay right here and never move. I want to love you and make you happy. And I can’t and it’s killing me . . . I never had a choice (emphasis added.)

This completely contradicts what Stephanie says above. She claims that Bella is making a choice, but throughout the whole book, Bella stays with Edward, not because she likes that future better than the one that she could have with Jacob, not because Edward makes her happier (though I think Stephanie believes he does), but because Bella cannot live without Edward. Earlier in the same conversation, Jacob makes the following, very astute observation:

He’s like a drug for you, Bella. I see that you can’t live without him now. It’s too late. But I would have been healthier for you. Not a drug; I would have been the air, the sun.

Putting aside the question of whether Bella needs either man for survival (I quite disagree with that [so does Kate!]), I agree with Jacob. Jacob is more natural, more nourishing, more comfortable. Bella doesn’t disagree with Jacob either. In fact, she tells him, “I used to think of you that way, you know. Like the sun. My personal sun.” She doesn’t explain how Edward is not like a drug (i.e., he’s like water or a breeze or anything else remotely healthy). She even tells Edward the same thing:

You may be brave enough or strong enough to live without me, if that’s what’s best. But I could never be that self-sacrificing. I have to be with you. It’s the only way I can live.

In her answer above, Stephanie says, “Bella has another option. She has a really good one. An option that's easier in many ways, that takes nothing—like her family, present or future—away from her. She would have love, and friendship, and family—an enviable human future. But she chooses Edward over all of this.”

I don’t believe that Jacob is the easier option. According to the book, he’s the harder option because he would be the more painful option. Never once did Bella consider the best option.

Bella admits that had there been no Edward, no vampires, no magic, Jacob would have been the natural choice for her and she would’ve been happy. As I said to you [Kate] earlier, the whole “love is a spell and is inexplicable” thing is entirely beyond my grasp.

Stephanie doesn’t know what makes a good romance good.

From Stephanie Meyer's website:

Q: If you pitched the first book to publishers as a ''suspense romance horror comedy,'' which of those do you think your books are most?

A: I think that it's romance more than anything else, but it's just not that romance-y. It's hard to nail down, but romance tends to be my favorite part of any book or movie, because that's really the strongest emotion. Orson Scott Card is my favorite: The romances are a small part of his books, but they bring his people to life.

Carole: Show me a more "romance-y" book, and I’ll show you a pile of complete and utter blech. I seriously don’t think you could find a more "romance-y" novel in the fantasy genre, so if Meyer thinks she’s anywhere close to what OSC does in his books, she has another thing coming. I think I know what she’s trying to say because I feel the same way: OSC’s romances are great because they are important, but with OSC, the characters fall in love while doing other things, and they have motivations besides their beloved. In the Twilight saga, every thought and action made by Edward, Bella, and even Jacob is motivated by their respective love interest. There’s no action that Edward takes that doesn’t revolve around Bella; there’s no decision that Bella makes that isn’t tied to Edward or Jacob; and there’s no limit to what Jacob will do to get Bella in the end.

Stephanie says that these books started out as a dream, and she kept writing to see where the story goes. What this tells me is that she’s not thinking a lot about character development or motivation or plot as she writes, and any analysis of the book she’s done is after it’s written. I think that style of writing is very different from the kind writers do when they take complete control of the characters. It makes me think that writers who just let the characters do whatever they want are bound to write stories that aren’t as tight, or as thoughtful, or even as interesting as they could be. I might be wrong, though. There might be lots of books that I enjoy that are written that way.

Romance Recap

2008-09-14T19:33:00.002-07:00

I recently came across an email I wrote to my family several years ago (before I had a blog). Since I've been writing about men, women, and romance lately, I decided to post it:

I am reading a book called How to Write Romances on the principle that romances sell, so they must be doing something right (as in something that makes money).

Unfortunately, I haven't learned anything so far except not to switch viewpoints in the middle of a sentence, and I already knew that. The book is aimed at almost entirely unexperienced writers and is the sort of book that recommends new writers to keep a file of newspaper clippings for ideas. There's nothing wrong with this suggestion, but I can't really wrap my head around someone wanting to do something (write, paint, sing) which they have never tried before on the off-chance that it will be EASY! and FUN! [Hello, American Idol.]

However, despite the lack of useful tips, I am still reading the book because it is, entirely unintentionally, completely hilarious. I ran across this quote:

He didn't have a leg to stand on when it came to taking Petey away from Ashley. Not unless he could prove she was an unfit mother. After seeing her with Petey today, he knew that was out of the question. She was a perfect mother, and he was an out-of-state politician who hadn't known the boy existed until a day ago. That's why he had to get her to Texas.

"Study the preceding paragraph," the author writes, "to understand the wealth of information fed so discreetly to the reader."

I had to read the above sentence twice to make sure it actually said what I thought it said. And that's when I realized I was going to have a lot of fun reading this book.

This is my favorite bit of advice so far: Concerning figurative language

[y]ou should not use Artic comparisons if your novel takes place in the tropics.

Such as . . . Tarzan lurched along the jungle floor, beating his handsome, muscular chest and yoodling like an Artic seal calling for its mate!

[Unfortunately, I have found the above advice does need to be given to my composition students. At the time I wrote this email, I thought not mixing metaphors a rather obvious tip, but apparently, mixing metaphors is a national pasttime for beginning writers.]

Back to the book:

For most romance lines, a coal-mining town . . . is too difficult to imagine as a romantic setting. A small-town setting with a fashionable resort, an Olympic-trial ski run, or other point of interest could easily be considered exotic.

And whilst you are describing the exotic ski run, do NOT write, "Daphne, taking a break from her hard life as a secretary to a billionaire lawyer who might secretly love her but couldn't show it due to some silly misunderstanding that will be cleared up in Chapter 12, watched the snow fall on the ski lift like coal dust from a town very far away and completely unrelated to her." Because ski lifts and coal dust DO NOT mix.

Let's take a look at character development:

There is an advantage to keeping a character chart. When you first begin writing, it is very easy to remember names and descriptions. However, as you progress from chapter to chapter and book to book, you will soon discover how easy it is to forget names as well as color of hair or eyes. By charting or listing the physical as well as psychological makeup of your characters, you will save time and effort.

I can just see Shakespeare: "Darn it all--is it Lear with the daughters in the rainstorms or is that MacBeth? Which is the Dane? Fudge! I keep confusing Juliet's boyfriend with Ophelia's!"

And what color are Romeo's eyes anyway?

Even the most villainous people should have at least one good point to make them believable (my emphasis).

Because we all know villainous people who steal, murder, and mug little old ladies but have a soft spot for cutesy-wootsy bunny rabbits.

If you want to show strong feelings but prefer not to spell out the swear words, easy solutions exist: 'He swore competently.'

He swore COMPETENTLY? Is that like getting a prize at a spelling bee? "Jimmy, please stand up and swear competently. Are you ready, Jimmy. Begin with the s's."

How about some plot advice?

Mark, a newspaper columnist, finds himself attracted to Coryn. But after a few dates, he abruptly stops seeing her without explanation. Coryn's father is about to run for political office. Interwoven subplots involve Coryn's mother, who is in the initial stage of Alzheimer's Disease, and the death of Coryn's dog, all neatly tied together to make an inspiring and informative read.

I could write a novel like that: "The subplots of Pamela in Portland combine the ongoing search for Mr. Right (Now), the loss of the heroine's job, a sudden discovery of a cure for cancer, and the death of the heroine's cat by a passing car."

Since this how-to book IS about romances, we must discuss the PG-13 bits. The author makes a big deal about the difference between sensuality and sexuality. Sexuality is all very well and good, it seems, but it is sensuality that sells the book. Sensuality falls in to the category of "a phone call in the middle of the night to tell you how much he needs you" which proves that sensuality is all relative since I, personally, would consider battering Mr. Lover Man to death with a brick for waking me up in the middle of the night. (Actually, the conversation would go something like "Wha?" "Wha?" "I don't--" "Uh, sure." "You in trouble--need a lift somewhere or something?")

On to sex:

There are closet scenes, anthill scenes, love among the pine needles, and lovemaking under water.

An ANTHILL? Not really up there with Lady Chatterley's Lover [addendum: I have since read Lady Chatterley's Lover, and it is at about the same level. LCL is a remarkably stupid book.]

And I'm sure the sex education folks will be relieved that "some publishers now accept clinical descriptions" EXCEPT, the author adds, "too much realism--on any score--destroys the fantasy we are providing and that includes the discussion of safe sex."

[Along these lines, Katie Roiphe wrote a fascinating book called The Night After where she discusses the fantasy v. the reality of sex-in-the-moment and why the latter, despite public education, is considered more romantic. I also recently picked up a book called Predictably Irrational. Provable fact: All the sex education classes in the world aren't going to make teenagers behave sensibly in the throws of passion. When the hormones get going, "cold" promises go flying out the window. Education and supervision are the only two options and, turns out the Victorians were right, education doesn't always work.]

Back to character development, repeated several times by the author is the instruction that (1) the heroine cannot be promiscuous; and (2) the hero cannot be a wimp.

I don't find the first particularly puzzling--it's part of the finding-your-one-and-only idea--but the second is a non-starter. He can't be a wimp means the hero is not only supposed to be physically pro-active, he is supposed to be ambitious/rich. So this workaholic, ambitious, unrelentingly superdynamic multi-millionaire is also supposed to take time out to be sensitive, caring, loving, and gentle, blah blah blah.

I work for workaholics and believe me, it is an attractive quality, but it NOT romantic. Walking around with a cellphone sticking out of one's ear is NOT romantic. Demanding, "I want my fax NOW" is frankly irritating. And obnoxious bosses getting stuck overnight in an airport because of the weather is just funny. But then I'm a secretary and earn about 1/16th of my bosses' salaries, so I have the right to find those things funny.

[As many of you know, I now teach; one reason I changed careers is because I got fed up with getting snapped at by workaholics. It really isn't that datable a personality type.]

Anyway, there's something intensely schizophrenic about the romance hero who has to be all things to the heroine.

Okay, that's enough of the PG-13 stuff. Back to plot, specifically violence!

It always creates a strong plot point to surprise the reader and kill off a character or two who seemed to be a vital part of the book. But I was reminded by a speaker at a writer's conference to never kill off too many characters in a novel because it all but eliminates the possibilities of a sequel.

Agatha Christie wrote some very funny passages in which her alter-ego, Mrs. Oliver, complains that whenever the publisher demands another 3000 words, she just kills off another character.

But then Agatha Christie, who I greatly admire, was writing mysteries, not supposedly character-driven romances. There's something downright annoying about writers (book and script) who kill off characters not for the puzzle but to "shake things up."

On the other hand, I like this advice (about the Middle Ages):

It is difficult to sell a book set during any time when civilization was at an extremely low ebb.

And:

[A romance writer] asks herself if she would believe [a plot device] is she were reading it for the first time. If the answer is no, she takes it out.

Not to be rude or anything, but I suddenly had an image of a romance writer's transcript with nothing left except the sentence "Lucinda walked into the room."

Don't write about trees.

This is actually great advice! The author is saying that writers should always be specific. If you write about trees, call them "maples" or "birches."

Then, presumably, you can stick your heroine amongst the birches or maples and have her ruminate, discreetly, about her life. Using the principles noted above, the result would be something like this:

Rochelle walked through the tall fescus (Festuca elatior) grass under the looming oak (Quercus) trees, thinking of Bradley's devotion to his job, yet how he always managed to take her to champagne lunches while putting through mergers and giving money to charity. He even took time to text message her: b luv u--lines as sincere and moving as Shakespeare's poetry, the bits from The Merchant of Venice where everyone is talking about money. Perhaps she should confess to him that she had been systematically siphoning off money from his accounts for six months, but it was probably better to wait until he confessed his undying affection. There are limits to how much a women should put out.

Unannoying Gender Difference Analysis

2008-09-14T19:33:00.001-07:00

Men and women think differently--this seems kind of obvious. Yet in some circles, it is still considered bad form to say such things. In my master's program, this idea was treated very warily. And, truth be told, there's so much nonsense out there on the subject, I didn't mind; it's not like anyone in my master's program would have said anything concrete and provable on the subject.

However, I am an advocate of the belief/argument/theory that biology, rather than social constructs, makes men and women different and in more ways than the obvious. So I will occasionally pick up books about gender differences. And I will then get annoyed. The reason for my annoyance, usually, is that the writers form illogical conclusions backed by justification and self-congratulation. That is, since more men than women can be found in the top levels of hard-science, women must not be good at the sciences (fallacy), therefore (1) science stinks (justification) or (2) women just aren't made that way--sorry, ladies (self-congratulation).

And I throw the book down and that's that until the next one.

However, I think I have found a book that doesn't annoy me: Susan Pinker's The Sexual Paradox. Susan Pinker is examining why men appear to achieve more than women in "high-flying" careers, but she examines "why" using interviews, statistics, and reliable methodology, not political correctness, her own experience, or fevered socio/geo/religio politics.

So refreshing!

She also has a great perspective. First, she makes the point (through all those statistics, etc.) that, for instance, women do enter the sciences and those that do, succeed. Second, not only are these women not discriminated against, often they are sought after. Third, many of these women choose to leave the track they are on and pursue different (less kudo-offering) careers for reasons that have nothing to do with external pressures.

In other words, women consistently make choices where internal desires--job satisfaction, a sense of obligation to family, and a desire for personal time--outweigh external privileges: mucho dollars and prestige.

And, Pinker says, so what?

Well, she says more than that, but her attitude (so far) is that these choices aren't wrong, detrimental, unfair, discriminatory, or hurtful to women. And she has so far avoided the equally annoying tack that women have it right, why don't the stupid men get a clue. Rather, she argues that women should not perceive themselves (or each other) as failures if they make choices that make a lot more sense to them than the alternative.

She proves over and over that women who "opt out" of the money/prestige path are not suffering from discrimination. (Not necessarily. She does make the interesting point that women in high academic positions tend to get burned out since they are expected to be more motherly than their male counterparts. I can attest to this. I walk into a class--5'2", female, late 30's-- and I can see the "oh, she'll be so sweet to us" look in my students' eyes; I imagine coyotes look at poodles the same way before they leap. Consequently, I give a speech at the beginning of each semester where I nicely, but forcefully, advise my students that the requirements on the syllabus will not change, and they will be sadly disappointed if they think I will fold to their hard-luck stories in four months. I'll feel incredibly guilty about their hard-luck stories, but I won't fold. And I don't. And at least one student a semester gets very angry at my--to quote the expurgated version--"cold-heartedness.")

Women, Pinker says, are making choices by which they put various aspects of their lives first. A woman who goes into pediatrics rather than surgery (and this is common) is not doing so because (1) she hasn't the brains (in fact, women do better academically than men at almost every level) or (2) because she hasn't the ambition (keep in mind that the women Pinker is studying are all, for lack of a better word, alpha-females). Rather, the woman who goes into pediatrics would simply rather have her cake and eat it too, even if eating her cake means a cut in salary because she has opted for a more flexible schedule and for a more people-oriented application of her knowledge. (It isn't about choosing babies over careers; it's about making career choices that allow for babies . . . and other stuff.)

What insight! On a personal note, I've never considered myself a people-person, and yet, I work in education. Since I took on too many teaching jobs for this coming fall, I recently had to decide what to drop; what got dropped, interestingly enough, was the online tutoring: the job with the least amount of student contact (and a job I find rather depressing) even though it is probably the easiest, fastest and least inconvenient way for me to earn good money. Apparently, despite unexpurgated emails, I prefer to work with "real" students than with faceless entities.

I'm not exactly an "it's all about the people" poster girl, however, since I would rather be paid to write than to teach. But I would still teach if I got paid to write; I just don't like my entire life hanging on a career track, which actually, now I think of it, probably makes Pinker's point. However, a strong streak of "do my own thing" runs through both the men and women in my family, so it could just be a Woodbury thing.

In any case, to muddy the waters still more, men make people choices too. An ER doctor I know works ER precisely because it has more regular hours (don't have to carry that annoying beeper around), and he can be home with his family more. Pinker is not saying that ALL women are one way, and ALL men are another. She is noting consistencies, trends if you will, amongst women and men. The trends are strong, and they occur even when other social factors have been accounted for; more is going on than a social construct.

And what Pinker sees as going on is not evolutionary psychology (per se; evolutionary psychology isn't her focus) but choices. "[T]here is new evidence," she writes, "that it is a good idea to trust women's choices instead of pushing them to study what doesn't appeal to them. . . women--both those who chose science and those who didn't--knew their interests, their capabilities, their appetite for risk, where they would succeed, and exactly what they wanted." Now, that's a feminism I can get behind!

Jonah Goldberg, Calvinism, Genre Literature, and Anthropology

2008-09-14T19:31:00.000-07:00

I just finished Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg. In Liberal Fascism, Mr. Goldberg traces the historical link between progressivism, fascism, and liberalism. The history is interesting, Mr. Goldberg's points are more than a little valid, and the tone of his tome is relaxed, intelligent, and much less in-your-face caustic than, say, Ann Coulter. He's readable plus you don't feel like you're in the middle of a screaming match like with so much political pundit writing.

And man, is he insightful! While reading the book, I kept going, "Yes! Yes, that's exactly how I felt in my master's program!" In fact, I wrote similar things while in my program here.

This particular quote caught my eye:

[O]ne of the main reasons I've written this book [is] to puncture the smug self-confidence that simply by virtue of being liberal one is also virtuous. At the same time, I need to repeat that I am not playing the movie backward. Today's liberals aren't the authors of past generations' mistakes any more than I'm responsible for the callousness of some conservative who championed states' rights for the wrong reason well before I was born. No, the problems with liberalism today reside in liberalism today. The relevance of the past is that unlike the conservative who has wrestled with his history to make sure he does not repeat it, liberals see no need to do anything of the sort. And so, armed with complete confidence in their own good intentions, they happily go marching past boundaries we would stay well clear of. They reinvent ideological constructs we've seen before in earlier times, unaware of their pitfalls, blithely confident that the good guys could never say or do anything "fascist" because fascism is by definition anything not desirable. And liberalism is nothing if not the organized pursuit of the desirable.

I concur. There are few things in this world as bizarre as listening to a liberal tell you how horrible and close-minded and disgusting conservatives and Republicans are and then, in the same breath, tell you how much the said liberal hates various groups. (And no, I'm not exaggerating.)

When in my master's program, I would refer to this attitude--"whatever I say is tolerant no matter how intolerant it sounds because what I'm saying is de facto tolerant"--as Calvinism although maybe that's unfair to Calvinists. Still, the approaches bear a similarity: rather than behaving a certain way, one adopts certain attitudes or positions. If I gain a conviction that I am saved, I must be saved.

And this attitude, oddly enough, dovetails into a completely different subject I've been thinking about lately: the belittlement of the science-fiction and fantasy genre by "sophisticated" writers.

I used to read articles by Orson Scott Card and Stephen King about so-called sophisticated writers belittling genre literature, and I'd get all worked up about it, but in my heart of hearts, I didn't believe it was that big a problem. However, in just the past few years, I've had similar experiences whereby I encountered "sophisticated" writers declaring that fantasy and science-fiction pieces are just soooo childish--not real and reputable and profound and sophisticated like the stuff they write and read.

I have found these experiences bewildering, to say the least, since the attitude doesn't seem to be based on anything remotely intelligent. I always thought "sophistication" meant a knowledge of the world which, unless one ignores most of history and World Literature, includes fantasy and science-fiction (the first English novel was a fantasy: Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney, and you could argue that The Tale of Genji is fantasy although in a somewhat different vein).

Knowledge, by the way, doesn't entail liking. I have no trouble with someone who doesn't care for fantasy, who prefers, for example, Henry V to Midsummer Night's Dream, but there is little to no point in saying, "Midsummer Night's Dream would be so much better if it wasn't for the fantastical element." What, the lovers are supposed to take a road trip across America and find themselves instead? I'm sure Shakespeare could have written that sort of thing if he'd known about it, but it would kind of ruin the play. (And despite assumptions to the contrary, it wouldn't automatically make it more insightful.)

I've decided that Calvinism and what Goldberg defines as "smug self-confidence" is at work here. Rather than formulate intelligent, sophisticated arguments about the immaturity or non-insightful nature of fantasy and science-fiction, supposedly sophisticated critics and writers have simply decided to define fantasy and science-fiction by those terms. (This is marked by the fact that when they do decide to like a piece of fantasy, they redefine it as "magical realism.")

But why, I've asked myself, create the definition in the first place? It is hardly necessary for someone who likes contemporary, "realistic" (see this post for my discussion of what constitutes "realism"), finding-ourselves-in-suburbia fiction to even have an opinion about fantasy and science-fiction writing.

I've decided (and this brings us back to Mr. Goldberg's criticisms of modern-day liberalism) that humans have an intense fear of not-being-cool.

Yes, yes, I know, we all of think of that fear as an adolescent trait, but I believe the fear of not-being-cool is simply more vocalized, more honestly admitted to, in the teenage years. The hold of "the cool" never really leaves us. It is the fear that somehow one will fall out of favor with others of one's tribe if one supports that which is not tasteful, profound, appropriate, sensitive.

Now, "cool" isn't the same as "acceptable." We are not talking about murder or theft or even breaking a religious commandment here. In other words, we are not talking about actual crimes or deeds that result in ostracism, a literal outcasting. (For good or bad, all functional societies practice a form of social ostracism: it is a much more powerful force than legal punishment.) Rather, breaking the rule of "cool" results not in ostracism but in a lack of empathy. Dissonance occurs. You are no longer "one" with the group.

This happened to me in high school on several occasions. On one occasion, I was reading Izzy Willy Nilly by Cynthia Voigt. The cover of my edition was "teen friendly," a made-up girl sitting in a chair, and the cover blurbs were, for lack of a better word, "teen-fantastic." In other words, the book didn't look even vaguely sophisticated. All the "sophisticated" people I hung out with then were reading Thoreau. One of them picked up Izzy Willy Nilly and said, "Oh, what are you reading?" in a "this is just toooo pathetically teeny-bopperish" tone.

I wasn't being ostracized, but I was being informed of the "right" tastes of the group. However, another student spoke up and said, "It's a good book," and the incident passed. It wouldn't have worked on me anyway. I was as susceptible to peer pressure as the next teenager, but it never occurred to me not to read exactly what I wanted. (I got "uncooled" again when I read Gone With the Wind, which to be honest, was rather a waste of time. I never did read Thoreau.)

But I still wonder, Why the need to "uncool" people? To not just say, "I think you should believe this, and if you don't, you're wrong," but to say, "If you don't believe this, you aren't a neat, sophisticated, with-it person like us"?

From an anthropological standpoint, the need for people to hold certain tastes in common could bind the group together; still, you'd think the need to eat and not die would have a slightly stronger hold. I suppose people are more likely to find food together and not die if they hold ideas in common, but an excess of common ideas could also stagnant the group.

And I think, too, such "cool" agreement (as opposed to blatant ostracism) is largely superficial as a binding mechanism. I have remarked elsewhere that I found the supposedly uniform culture of Brigham Young University (a church-run university) more conducive to open discussion than other more liberal institutions I've attended (hey, BYU had protesters of the Gulf War and protesters of the protesters!). A society that holds fundamentals in common seems to be more ready and more tolerant of dissent than societies that don't.

So, while I haven't solved the purpose of "uncooling," maybe it explains why fantasy/science-fiction writers seem to be more open to different types of writing than "sophisticated" writers. Like conservatives, fantasy and science-fiction writers are forced to defend their beliefs so often, they learn what they believe. Rather than being grounded in a "I say I'm saved, so I am saved" mentality, they are grounded in something tangible. Which is a much healthier place to be than "I'm so tolerant, everyone fall down and worship my tolerance!"

What About Profiling?

2008-05-20T16:05:00.001-07:00

I recently read several books by John Douglas (with Mark Olshaker): Anatomy of Motive, Journey Into Darkness, etc. John Douglas worked for the FBI and was one of the guys who started the whole profiling business.

To be clear, this type of profiling is about categorizing people psychologically. This is not "Muslim extremists claim credit for a terrorist act, therefore we should look for Muslim extremists" profiling. I have no problem with the latter type of profiling. I don't even call it profiling; I call it commonsense.

In comparison, the kind of profiling John Douglas writes about is where a crime with no discernible suspect is attached to a specific type of criminal; one discovers the type of criminal by looking at the psychology of the crime itself.

I have mixed feelings about this type of profiling. I love reading the books, and I'm a big fan of the first season of Criminal Minds (it got too yucky in season 2 for my tastes). Still, the "one random bit = conclusion" angle seems rather hit-and-miss, like Sherlock Holmes (whom I also admire) saying to Watson, "Ah, I know you walked here because of the mud splashed on your boots." Don't you always half-expect Watson to say, "Actually, I took a cab; a passing cart splashed mud on me"?

Here's my personal theory concerning John Douglas. I think he was/is (he's retired) the type of guy who could go into a crime scene and see what elements belonged to an ongoing investigation and what didn't. Through experience and pure talent, he could exclude the unimportant information and focus on the important information. He could see the forests and the trees but never get distracted by either.

The whole profiling conundrum arose when he decided that his ability was a science, not a gift. So he, and a bunch of other people, created these nifty categories and clear-cut applicable definitions, and I'm not just sure that can be done. (To be fair, Douglas does say over and over, "Don't be misled by superficial applications," but he doesn't seem to realize that not being misled by superficial applications has more to do with the nature of the man rather than the beast.)

I think Douglas' ability is legitimate. That is, I'm perfectly okay with him testifying in a jury trial: he has the expertise, the experience; he knows where-of he speaks. But I wouldn't let just anyone with profiler training testified. And I wouldn't let Douglas testify about anything outside his expertise.

I say this because although Douglas makes insightful observations about serial killers, including Jack the Ripper, in his books, his comments about "ordinary" criminals are surprisingly blah. Although he accepts Lizzie Borden's guilt, he insists on perceiving her in serial killer terms. I think Lizzie Borden was the original all-American/home-spun/no-frills crime-of-greed chick. Looking at her in other terms leads to all that silly "blacking-out" and fugue-state stuff. Not very helpful.

Douglas is right about Jack the Ripper (no, it wasn't the Duke of York) which means Douglas is good in his speciality. He can cut through the crap when it comes to what he knows.

I think the desire to generalize from the speciality--create a science out of one man's ability--is a desire that surfaces beyond law enforcement. You get a manager who is good at seeing the forest for the trees, good at pinpointing problems, good at separating the wheat (useful suggestions) from the chaff (stupid, wasteful solutions), and there's this "Hey, how do we duplicate this, so every manager is as good?" reaction.

And I'm not sure you can.

That is, you would probably duplicate techniques with someone who already gets "it," "it" being the talent or perception or whatever, but you can't really teach it to people who don't. It's like trying to teach irony to people who don't get irony or trying to teach conceptual thinking to people who think concretely (all you end up with is a bunch of people who want to make rules about using the "spirit of the law."). It's like (major segue into politics here), Democrats trying to win elections by duplicating Republicans and coming over kind of flat.

You can't duplicate people if you don't understand where their hearts lie.

Modred v. Launcelot

2008-05-20T15:59:00.001-07:00

I became interested in Camelot sometime in my early teens. I read the play about a thousand times. I don't know why it enthralled me. I don't particularly like the actual musical; I never cared much for T.H. White's The Once and Future King; I didn't like the Walt Disney movie. And I never read Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley.

I have read parts of Malory.

But for some reason, the possible reality of the Arthurian legend fascinated me. I don't mean the feminist-druid stuff which I think is stupid; I mean, the real Dark Ages stuff with that wacky monk, Gildas proclaiming doom all over the place only nobody is listening, and there's all these Saxons moving in and, really, there probably weren't any major wars, just a few skirmishes, and it's very possible that the skirmishes were the Celts fighting each other, NOT fighting the Saxons. Because the Romans have left by this point, so the Saxons basically have free-loader rights to that "green and scepter'd isle." And boy, I just love that stuff.

(Now that I think about it, it's books which use parts of the Arthurian myth to create a separate fantasy that I like--like Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising series. And C.S. Lewis.)

Then, as an undergraduate, I developed a real liking for the other (older) Arthurian legends: Gawain and the Green Knight and Gawain and the Loathly Lady (Wife of Bath stuff).

But of course, if you read anything about King Arthur (or Artos) or the Round Table, you are going to run into Galahad and Monty Python and the grail and Launcelot.

I developed a distaste for Launcelot early on. It isn't just that he has an affair with Guinevere; it's that he whines about it. The whole Lady of Shalott fiasco is Launcelot feeling sorry for himself all over the place. He forgets who he is and falls in love with this other chick (the Lady) and then remembers who he is and decides to go back to the (married) woman, Guinevere, and then the Lady kills herself and instead of Launcelot saying, "Them's the breaks" or "Boy, I was a jerk," he gets all mopey and goes off to try to redeem himself and really, it is exactly like Leonardo on the Titanic and you, the audience, wishing desperately that Billy Zane would shoot him.

I much prefer Mordred. And interestingly enough, I'm not alone. A lot of YA books have been written in favor of Mordred or from Mordred's point of view: the Book of Mordred by Vivian Vande Velde; The Winter Prince by Elizabeth Wein, for example.

I think there are two reasons Mordred fascinates us Mordredites:

(1) Mordred is much more ambiguous than any of the other Camelot/Arthurian legend characters. And he is placed, plot-wise, in the position of being the character who outs the well-liked but corrupt "good" guys.

Basically, Mordred is Spike.

And ambiguity is interesting. I think it is no error of human nature that the most popular Star Trek characters are those characters who are struggling to define themselves: Data, Seven of Nine, the Doctor. (House from House.) We are more interested in people who haven't figure themselves out completely yet than people who have because most of us fall into category one rather than category two.

(2) If you root for Mordred, you inevitably don't root (that much) for Launcelot, and Launcelot is such a great guy to hate. Launcelot is the quintessential spoiled kid who goes off to college or prep school or wherever and gets into trouble with some other spoiled kids. He may even be the ringleader, but it will never be clear; he will never own responsibility. And then they all get into trouble, and the other kids may even get expelled, but Launcelot goes and cries and says how SORRY he is and how he never meant it to get out of hand and isn't it too awful and it wouldn't have gone so badly if it hadn't been for that other guy (who told on them).

I've written two Mordred stories myself. In both, he is not dissimilar to Vivian Vande Velde's portrayal of Mordred as extremely tight-lipped. (My Mordred is less heroic.) If I remember correctly, Wein's Mordred is seriously dysfunctional and kidnaps his half-brother. But he is still the protagonist.

So reason #3 for being a Mordredite must be: he supplies so much great material!

C.S. Lewis v. Pullman?

2008-05-20T15:58:00.000-07:00

Recently, Philip Pullman made a series of negative statements (or someone said he made a series of negative statements), about Christians and C.S. Lewis, and people have been forming camps.

I'm not going to talk about that.

However, you can read my brother Eugene's insightful analysis of the issue on his blog.

Since C.S. Lewis' name has been bandied about during this kerfuffle (not really a kerfluffle, but I like the word), I decided to post about C.S. Lewis.

Based on the plethora of books I have read by Lewis and about Lewis, you might imagine me a no-holds-barred Lewis aficionado. And, well, yeah, I kind of am. But over the years, I've also formed the conclusion that Lewis was not someone I would enjoy having over for lunch. For that matter, I don't think Lewis would have enjoyed coming over to lunch at my place. As Eugene says on his blog, "I also have the feeling that the eccentric Lewis was in person--like Einstein--a less agreeable person than his hagiographies make him out to be."

And I can't say that I even agree with all of what Lewis wrote. In fact, if you parse it out, you might discover that I disagree with over 1/3 of what the guy actually said.

So why IS he one of my favorite writers?

I've decided that even though I'm not as pessimistic or as Anglican or as wacky Edwardian as Lewis, underneath all that stuff, we share a fundamental viewpoint. It is a viewpoint missing from academic discourse. And occasionally religious discourse. And well, just about everywhere, if I'm honest. The best summary of this viewpoint comes from (yet another) book I'm reading about Lewis:

Everything he desired was an object of imagination; everything he believed was an object of reason. (Cunningham, 68).*

Lewis was both a logical Englishman and a dreamy, romantic Celt (his own generalizations, not mine.) And he reached a point in his life where he allowed both facets of his personality to exist simultaneously.

To me, this kind of approach is like finding a safe harbor. I sit in classes, I tutor online, I go to church, and I feel like I'm surrounded by people saying, "You must be one or the other!"

"You must accept jargon and touchy-feelingness as evidence or you must be an advocate of dead-white patriarchal males." "You must advocate rules and structure, or you must advocate creative, out-of-the-box thinking." "You must be an hoity-toity intellectual, or you must be spiritual."

I can always find people in these environments willing to give up the either/or. (And I personally believe that Mormons, whether they want it or not, find themselves at the smack-dab center of these either/or tensions. Stick grace, works, agency, democratic ideals, a heirarchal church and final judgement, continual progression, Joseph Smith, salvation of the dead, the temple, and, hey, the Protestant work/education ethic into one mix and viable either/ors just don't last that long.)

Nevertheless, there seems to be a strong human proclivity towards either/ors, or maybe it is just easier to discuss human behavior in those terms. I don't know. But I do know that Lewis is a huge comfort to me. Behind everything that he writes, no matter how daft, is this mind that won't reduce everything to logic or to gushy feelings or to jargon and politics or to relative experiences. He just won't give it all up to one side or the other. It's such a relief!

I also admire Lewis as a writer, which is kind of a different issue. I have this fall-down-on-my-face-oops-not-suppose-to-worship-idols response to writers who can communicate as easily as Lewis. I find Lewis' writing superhumanly fresh. I know he can be didactic, but I never notice because, golly, the writing just flows. I think a lot of us desperate writers start with ideas and images in our heads, and we then struggle to get them out in ways that sound right. Although Lewis states that he started his Narnia books with images, I think the man thought in words. Language wasn't a tool for him; it was the way his synapses worked.

He also had an uncanny ability to understand human fallibility. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he creates and explains Edmund's betrayal in a way that underscores the humanness of Edmund's betrayal (and he does it so easily, you hardly notice). Edmund isn't being evil or wicked or demonic or beyond the pale. He is being human and petty and prideful and self-protective (the part where he lies about being in Narnia with Lucy is heart-stabbing and yet, and yet, it goes on every day in your average Junior High). Edmund's petty, spiteful, self-absorbed behaviors have horrendous consequences. Maybe, they wouldn't have quite the degree of horrendous consequence in the material world (instead Edmund would grow up and turn into a horrible, self-serving manager whose co-workers detested him), but in the world of myth, a hero's behaviors must have horrendous consequences, and Lewis believed (as I do) that the end game of earthly religion is myth come alive.

*The book is C.S. Lewis: Defender of the Faith by Richard B. Cunningham. It is about C.S. Lewis as an apologist. Don't be mislead by the title. It is not about Lewis' contributions to Christianity. Instead, it is a fearfully academic book about apologetics--I get through about three pages every Sunday.

Where Romances Go Wrong

2007-10-09T06:02:00.003-07:00

I believe that the main reason romances are so often criticized is because they are too often convenient. I've been reading Christian romances lately. Christian romances have their own particular motifs, but they also follow the traditional romance format. And part of the traditional romance format is to create odds that the couple must overcome. And sometimes the overcoming is a bit too easy.

(Note: I'm going to use Jane Austen as my example of good romance, not because she was necessarily writing romance as we know it--she wasn't--but because her books meet MY criteria for romance: they are constructive and end with marriage.)

The particular Christian romances I am reading are evangelical, meaning that divorce of the unhappy couple (so that the happy couple can get married) is frowned upon. This type of solution is rather distasteful, and most romances avoid it. However, the alternative is so outrageously convenient, it becomes hilarious after awhile.

The alternative? All the inconvenient people die. Slews of them! They drop dead like insects in one of those zapper things. Horrible husband--zap! Horrible wife--zap! Watch out: there goes another one.

Jane Austen never did that. And she lived in a time when it was far more likely for people to die at the literal drop of a literal hat. But she doesn't kill off the dastardly Wickham. She doesn't even kill off the flightly Lydia. She doesn't kill off the horrible father in Persuasion. She doesn't kill off the snide chick in Mansfield Park. She doesn't kill off anyone in Northanger Abbey (who isn't already dead before the book begins). I believe someone conveniently dies in Sense & Sensibility, but it was her first book, and she doesn't kill off the real villainness, Lucy Sharp (although she does marry her off conveniently. Again, it was her first published book). Nobody dies in Emma or in Pride & Prejudice. People are left unhappily breathing to work their way out of their problems.

Jane Austen also didn't create wholly bad characters. Most of her "bad" guys are weak, silly, intrusive, greedy, self-serving, but rarely evil personified. Evil personified is a convenience of too many romance books. The Christian romances attempt to solve this by occasionally having bad guys get saved. True to form, Jane Austen rarely did this. Wickham may be sorry that he married Lydia, but he goes right on trying to charm everybody in sight despite the fact that everybody in sight knows what he did. The bad-tempered father and daughter in Persuasion never really grasp what happened. General Tilney in Northanger doesn't change one wit. Willoughby in Sense & Sensibility is only sorry that he couldn't marry for both money and love. All the unhappy people in Mansfield Park stay unhappy. (And the ambiguous people stay ambiguous. It isn't my favorite of Austen's books, but I do think it is her best.) And Emma only contains self-serving people, not bad ones. (I just remembered that there is a really bad guy and a convenient marriage in Persuasion, but neither has much to do with the romance.)

For Jane Austen, change always centers on the hero and heroine. They are the ones who react, change, grow, learn from the experiences around them. In real life, of course, everyone else would be reacting, changing, growing, learning, but one of the conventions (not conveniences) of fiction is that we watch the world through a few eyes, not through the experience of humanity as a mass (no, not even Tolstoy could do that).

This business of change, however, brings us to another romantic convenience: instant change. In romances, the change is often a moment of recognition; the hero or heroine recognizes his/her true feelings. Darcy undergoes this when Elizabeth taunts him, saying that a "gentleman" would not have proposed to her by criticizing her family. However, Darcy DOES NOT have that moment of revelation, and then, hey, presto, everything is okay. In fact, Darcy writes his "angry" letter to Elizabeth first. (Darcy later apologizes to Elizabeth for the letter, but she responds that although it started out angryish, it ended graciously). His pride is hurt. He has to process his reaction to Elizabeth before he can admit that he behaved badly.

In too many romances, the moment of revelation is instant, unprecedented by any believable set-up and resulting in almost immediate pay-off. The Christian romances I'm reading are particularly annoying here. The moment of recognition often occurs when the hero or heroine is saved (therefore, making said hero or heroine worthy of love). Now, I will admit that my "eerk" reaction is not just due to the convenience. As a Mormon, I don't believe in one single moment of grace, prior to which a person did not accept the Savior and after which, did. I think people just struggle along and that one's life is an accumulation of choices. I don't really buy into the idea that everything leads up to one moment in time, before which a person would go to hell, after which the person would not.

However, that's my personal philosophical reaction. Instant revelation also bothers me as a writer and a reader. Based on my brother Eugene's comments concerning Mormon romance novels (see his review of The Last Promise at his blog), this business of the instant fix/snap-judgment is not just an evangelical problem. I doubt it is just a religious problem. I would guess that it comes down mostly to bad writing. It's HARD to be constructive. It's HARD to work out problems intelligently. It's HARD to set up change and then pay it off effectively. That's why we Janites worship Jane Austen. She went for the happy ending, but she didn't do it easily!

Now, I am not talking to the writers of romances who are just trying to churn out formula, so they can make a living. Hey, more power to ya, folks. I am talking to those people who want to write character-driven romances* and write them well. In a way, I'm calling for the return of the respectable romance.

*A great many romances are, oddly enough, not character driven--the hero and heroine don't even meet until nearly the end of the book. Rather, the romances are about the hero and heroine overcoming obstacles in their personal lives before they can meet. It's Sleepless in Seattle (don't meet until the end) versus You've Got Mail, While You Were Sleeping, and Lakehouse (ongoing relationship, no matter how strange). I prefer You've Got Mail to Sleepless in Seattle. The latter falls into "world romance" category (as in world fantasy--world fantasy is more about the setting created by the author than the characters: Lord of the Rings, Stephen Donaldson, etc.); in "world romance," the romance is more about where the hero and heroine live, the people they know, what they do everyday, how many times they go to church, etc. etc. etc. than about the relationship. I have very little interest in world fiction generally (Tolkien being the huge exception), and so can't comment much on it. Hence, all my comments are directed at the character-driven romance.

Here are some (from all genres):

Monk Downstairs by Tim Farrington
Jane Eyre by Bronte
Jane Austen--naturally
Beauty by Robin McKinley
Deerskin by Robin McKinley (very unexpected)
Queen of Attolia and King of Attolia by Megan Turner
Short stories by Connie Willis--specifically, "Spice Pogram" and "Blued Moon"
Georgette Heyer--naturally
Fifteen by Beverly Cleary
Blood & Chocolate (THE BOOK!) by Annette Curtis Klause
Path of Dreams by Eugene Woodbury
Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip
Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers (not one of her best mysteries, but one of her underappreciated novels--Wimsey's character is better delineated here than anywhere else)
Rusalka series by C.J. Cherryh
Glass Mountain by Cynthia Voigt
"Straw Into Gold" from The Rumplestiltskin Problem by Vivian Vande Velde
Samantha and the Cowboy by Lorraine Heath
Changeover by Margaret Mahy (and kudos to Mahy for subtitling it "a supernatural romance")
The Road Home by Ellen Emerson White
Magician's Ward by Patricia Wrede
Howl's Moving Castle (the movie) by Diana Wynne Jones

Why Romances Are Good

2007-10-09T06:02:00.001-07:00

I think romance is an unfairly reviled genre. That is not to say that romance films and novels don't have their share of awful examples, or that romance novels and films don't make their share of blunders. A post will follow this one discussing those blunders. Before that, I want to defend the genre. I won't be criticizing it later because I think it is stupid. I will be criticizing it because I think it could be better.

The first argument against romances is that they are "escapist." I consider this the dumbest of the arguments. ALL writing is escapist, even so-called "realistic" fiction. The moment we pick up a book, fiction or non-fiction, we are "escaping" from the world around us. That does not mean that we shut off our brains or that the world of the book becomes more or less important than our surroundings or that what happens in the book has no personal relevance to our daily lives. Whatever goes on while we read is very individual. One cannot argue (well, one can, but it's a waste of time) that people who read "true life" or "realistic" or sad (which is usually what people mean by "realistic") stories are more in touch with reality than people who read fantasy or "non-realistic" or happy stories. Lots of people read horror not because they think the events in the books will happen to them but to create a distance between themselves and the events. It is possible, of course, that some people read sad stories because their own lives are sad. It is also entirely possible that many people read sad stories because their own lives AREN'T sad. The point is that there is not an automatic connection between the type of books one reads and the type of life one inhabits.

The second argument against romances is bound up in the first: romances are unrealistic. Now, I believe that what people really mean when they say, "Romances are unrealistic" is that romances are CONVENIENT. I will return to this business of convenience in the next post. But first I'm going to deal with the issue of unrealism. Setting aside the issue of convenience, the censure "unrealistic" to far too many people means a happy ending. Romances end happily; therefore, they are unrealistic. There's some weird human assumption that insists that happy events and endings are somehow not as true-to-life as unhappy events and endings.

C.S. Lewis illustrates this weird human assumption in one of his apologetics. He compares the birth of a child to war. He points out that when one is talking about the happiness surrounding birth, literal-minded we-like-relativity-because-we-can-use-it-to-make-everybody-else's-lives-miserable types will say, "But that's just subjective" or "That's just your emotions" or "That's just what our patriarchal, pro-child society has taught you to think."

But if one mentions the trauma and horror of war, the miserable ones will instantly agree that yes, absolutely, "That is what war is REALLY like."

Anything good is relative. Anything bad is "reality."

Balderdash, say I. Emotion is emotion, good or bad or otherwise. Granted the sappy sweetness of Hallmark cards can grate after awhile. But the angst-ridden chest-beating of the miserables isn't much better and a lot less hard to ignore. Unhappy endings are no more likely than happy ones and although everybody dies, not everybody invests death with terror, foreboding and glum faces. The tendency to do so is as much an emotional construct as smiling glibly, quoting bad poetry and making everybody watch the end of Ghost (good movie, by the way). Dead is dead. Life is life.

I'm not saying that death and murder and war and a thousand other tragedies are supposed to be met with a shrug, any more than I am implying that birth, weddings, new jobs, great movies, good books, a new dress, a nice walk are supposed to be met with a grumpy "whatever." To move this from relativity into the territory of 18th/19th century classicism, I'm enough of a Jane Austen fan to believe in appropriate responses to appropriate events. And I believe those appropriate responses are, to a degree, taught. The body reacts. But the how of that reaction depends on our nature, our nurture and our choices within the confines of a civilized society. (And I happen to believe in civilization which separates me from the miserable types.)

If emotions are just emotions, and the "how" of emotions is taught, then writing books where people get married and are happy is no more or less "real" than writing books where people get divorced and hate each other and fight over the kids. In fact, I've read plenty of the latter that struck me as ridiculous beyond belief--everything was so CONVENIENT (more of that later).

Which brings me back to romances. One of the things I like about romances is that they are constructive. I've written earlier posts about how much of a cop-out I consider death (and instant breakups) in a story. I've killed off characters myself, but in general, I prefer to keep them alive because in general, I prefer to work out how my characters are going to solve a story's particular problem. To a degree, that's the fascination of fiction for me. I've always wanted to know what will happen next: after the prince kills the dragon, after Beast turns into the prince, after Cinderella fits the shoe onto her foot, after Rahab helps the spies. Getting there can be fun but how everything is going to work out later is part of the fun too. So it isn't that death and divorce aren't likely; it's that they are so dull.

Romances usually end with marriage. Romances don't ask, "What happens next?" What they do ask is, "How do the hero and heroine solve the problem which is keeping them from getting married? How will they overcome their pride or prejudice or whatever?"

That's not dull.

"Where Romances Go Wrong" will follow in a few days.

Fellowship and Keeping People Together

2007-10-09T05:59:00.001-07:00

I am re-re-re-listening to The Fellowship of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. It has always been my favorite of the three books although I have to agree with those reviewers who claim Tolkien didn't really know what he was up to in Fellowship. The book is uneven and has a "feeling his way" cadence to it.

However, without pretending that Tolkien actually knew what he was doing, I think the book works for the trilogy. First of all, it exposes the reader to the Shire, giving Frodo a concrete part of Middle-Earth to risk his life for. Secondly, it establishes a progression of danger/risk. The riders are much more dangerous when they are closer to Mordor (I never had any trouble, even as a kid, understanding why the riders are more fierce and harder to resist near Mordor; I never had any trouble understanding the power of the ring either and how it is the ring's hold grows on the wearer over time. Reviewers who quibble over these points mystify me. The ideas just aren't that complicated).

I confess, however, that I like Fellowship most after Frodo reaches Rivendell and the fellowship forms. I've always liked that part of books or movies. My favorite part of The Fugitive is the on-going banter between Tommy Lee Jones and his crew. I don't really care about anything else. I don't know if this is a "gal" thing or not--if I am being particularly womanly because I like to watch people co-existing in a friendly, non-violent fashion. I don't think it is particularly womanly since I don't care for soulfulness; still, give-and-take comradeship is one reason I enjoy Star Trek: Next Generation, why I watch All Creatures Great & Small (although Robert Hardy has a great deal to do with the latter), and why I love the parish council scenes in Vicar of Dibley more than the other scenes. It also explains why I lose interest in a lot of movies/books/television shows once the gang starts hating each other.

I think my lack of interest has a lot to do with my theory that fictional death (of the individual, of the group, of the relationship) is basically a cop-out. To me, the hard part of writing (or life) isn't the ending, it's making the middle--the people-in-relationships stuff--work. Hence, I have no problem associating marriage with feminism. Construction versus deconstruction.

That's me talking as a writer. As a reader, it could be an investment issue: the reason X-Files works even though the leads don't get together until the very end. Leads not getting together is usually anathema to me; I find it so tiresome. But in X-Files, Dana and Mulder have a thriving (emotionally) intimate relationship from the very beginning. This is also true of early BallyK. The leads may not technically be together, but they act like they are, so what's the dif? And that thriving relationship gives the viewer something to invest in. The viewer, I contest, WANTS something to invest in.

Which brings us to the argument, "But life changes!" Relationships fall apart. Friends drift apart. Bodies crumble apart. This is all true and people do write/create based on what they know. However, I think there is a difference between "natural" change and "toying with the reader/viewer" change. Angel leaving Buffy was a natural change (and everybody else should have left too, really). Xander breaking up with Anya wasn't--that was "toying with the viewer." When the fellowship of Lord of the Rings breaks up, that is, unfortunately, a natural/inevitable outcome. The heroine of a mystery/romance series not being able to choose between two guys for forty-some-odd novels IS NOT natural or inevitable; it's just stupid.* Frodo leaving Middle-Earth is a necessary and natural consequence of what he has endured. U.S. Marshals, the sequel to The Fugitive, in which unnecessary people die was just lazy.

So, I prefer to keep my heroes/groups/lovers together, but I'm willing, for the sake of good writing and transcendent endings, to split them up. But ONLY for the sake of good writing and transcendent endings. Otherwise, it's just nasty manipulation and there's better things for me to read and watch.

*A note on the (trillion) mystery/romance series. I really hate some of them although I don't start to hate them until about novel 3 or 4. They almost always have a single woman who lives in a small town where she is pursued by two men. One guy is sweet, kind, not-so-handsome but a wonderful human being. The other is danger guy. And the heroine can't make up her mind. And the guys stick around and wait. What self-respecting guy would STICK AROUND? And WAIT? By the time I hit book 4, I start to suspect that the writer is indulging in personal fantasy. GET OVER IT, I say. (I had the same reaction to Charlaine Harris' vampire series. I really enjoyed the first few books, but I lost interest during the one before last. Eric was the most interesting love interest Harris had created for the heroine, but because, presumably, Harris couldn't make up her mind, the heroine couldn't make up her mind either. The new guy is just dull, so I gave up. If you like her books, though, rumors have it the series is being made into a television drama.)

Forensics: Truth & Fiction?

2007-02-27T19:37:00.001-08:00

I enjoy forensic shows, so recently I picked up a book in which the author, Connie Fletcher, interviews crime scene investigators, forensic specialists, homicide detectives. The interviews themselves are very interesting, ranging from advice to stories (true to form, I prefer the stories), but the introduction by the author very nearly put me off the entire book.

To summarize, the introduction basically says, "All that stuff on CSI shows, well, it looks clever, but it isn't REALLY the way things happen. And I went out and interviewed REAL forensic scientists, and here's the REAL scoop."

I don't get this attitude at all. I've run into it before--people who think that all fiction is basically deceitful, and therefore in need of being unmasked, showed up. Well, yes, fiction is deceitful--that's why it's fiction. I wouldn't watch forensic shows if the tests took the ordinary amount of time they do in real life. I wouldn't watch them if there wasn't some kind of consistent storyline either. I quite enjoy the occasional CSI:LV that gives you four cases in one episode (the one with the bodies conversing in the morgue is classic). But in general, I don't expect the kind of reality that, well, you find in reality. It's drama! It isn't supposed to be real.

Which doesn't mean that fiction shouldn't have a patina of reality. The ability to get the reader/viewer to (really) believe in the fictional world is part of the artist's goal. The enormous irony is how much this worries the spit out of humanities majors (the author describes herself as "English major-y"). Oh, my goodness, all those viewers out there who are being hoodwinked by shows that make forensics look more glamorous or more grim or more superficial (I couldn't figure out exactly what the author's beef was) than it really is. It's as if our colleges and universities are producing an entire generation of humanities graduates who are about as left-brained/anti-fiction oriented as anyone since Plato got into a fuss about the influence of plays on the young.

Newsflash, people--fiction is supposed to lie, enchant, bamboozle, astonish. One of my favorite movies is Galaxy Quest; one of my favorite scenes is when the Tim Allen character has to explain to the alien commander that his show (a take-off of Star Trek) is a lie ("Explain it to him in words a child could understand."); yet, at the end of the movie, Galaxy Quest (the television show) has been revived. The dangers of fiction are weighed against its joys and found less important, not because the dangers don't exist but because a world without fiction is, let's face it, dull. It is a world run not by accountants, which I wouldn't mind so much, but by well-meaning products of higher education. And, speaking as one, that I do mind. (Woe to that generation that replaces our superficial, grim, and sometimes downright stupid television programming with high-minded dramas addressing issues of class, race, and gender alongside accompanying disclosures of said dramas' underlying ideologies as well as their purposes and applications--a curse upon your heads!)

In any case, as I've been reading through the book's interviews, I've been amused by, yep, I'll say it, how accurate the shows actually are. I had figured that most of what I saw on television was hyperbole. I didn't realize how much detecting forensic specialists do. To be honest, I kind of figured the shows greatly expanded a minor role in crime investigation to create the CSIs we know and love. But no, CSIs as separate entities within the investigation heirarchy do in fact exist and do descend upon the scene after the cops go in. They even occasionally interview suspects (rather than leaving all interviews up to the cops--that truly surprised me). A couple of the stories read like episodes (and may have been the original inspirations; television writers are notorious borrowers). There truly are a huge number of specialists. You truly can squirt stuff that illuminates blood stains. Many of the stories are way stranger than anything that shows up on television (nobody would believe them). Some of the specialists are as seriously off-kilter as Greg or Grissom or Bones. Cases have been clinched with evidence as minor as a scrap of cloth or teeth found in a fire. All in all, I've been impressed--the patina of truthfulness on CSI shows is more than a patina; it is actually based on legitimate research.

But again, in terms of fiction, what matters is the patina, not the research. Do the viewers believe? Does the story work? Do the characters live for us? Do we care about them? Are we carried away by the work? Are we satisfied? That is what matters. Which isn't to say that people are always satisfied by fictional pieces. But the problem lies in the realm of artistry, creativity, not to mention plotting, NOT in the differences between reality and the "lie." Leave that sort of "I'm SO appalled" attitude to the politicians. Leave the fun of the thing to the rest of us.

Superman Simplistic

2007-02-27T19:36:00.001-08:00

I recently read Red Son, the graphic novel re-imagining Superman as a Soviet hero.

It's an interesting idea. The basis for the concept is that Superman is the all-American-spinach-eating-protect-the-flag hero, but suppose instead of dropping down into Kansas, his pod had landed in the Ukraine during the age of the Soviet Empire?

There are a few snags right from the beginning, the most basic being the implausibility that farmers in the Ukraine were any more devoted to Lenin's principles than Kansas farmers in 1938 were to FDR's New Deal (the latter being slightly more plausible than the former). It also implies a huge amount of environmental determinism. However, I'm willing to allow for the basic assumption of the concept--that the all-American boy could become the all-Soviet boy.

Unfortunately, how that concept is worked out is not at all plausible. At the heart of the Superman story is the problem of power. Superman can do just about anything he wants to. He can rescue people before they want to be rescued. He can enforce government policies or undermine government decisions. He's a god. How does a god handle that power? Does he allow for human agency? Does he allow badness to continue if it can't be stopped by legal means? Some really interesting questions, which Frank Miller, in his Batman series, deals with at length.

The essence of the American Superman is that he doesn't act outside of the law--any more than a vigilante must, that is. He allows a tremendous degree of latitude amongst his enemies. He restrains his power. The proposal in Red Son is that Superman will choose the alternative--to help people against their will, help them for their own good. Mormons would call this Lucifer's plan: that all of us will be saved, willy-nilly, whether we choose it or not.

Again, interesting idea, but in order to make an idea like this work, you have to know something about power and the problems of power and the problems of restraint. And I'm not entirely convinced that the folks who wrote Red Son do.

The first problem is that smartness and ability do not automatically translate into success. Soviet Superman decides that he must take over the Soviet Union because only he can prevent hunger and suffering. Well, okay, but those are pretty difficult problems to solve without causing catastrophic financial and social side-effects. The Soviet Union bankrupted itself trying to solve similar problems, with a great deal more personal interference in people's lives than FDR's New Deal. Yet, Superman effortlessly solves them.

The problem here is that human institutions, run by a god or not, are still human institutions. This is actually a problem that shows up a lot on Superman shows. In the delightful show Lois & Clark, the writers often had Clark use his superspeed to hunt up data on the Internet. As those of us with dial-up can attest, the Internet can only work as fast as its connection. Just because you may find things quickly, doesn't mean you can. Just because you have super abilities, doesn't mean super solutions will result, no matter how many people you mind-meld with. (To mix my cultural icons.) Just because you want to feed people doesn't mean you won't have to get the food from somewhere. Where do you get it from? Well, how about another country? But then you've just demolished the exportable goods of entire nation. So much for their economic infrastructure--what are you going to do about it? All this would take a little bit more than an occasional mind-fixin' on Superman's part to smooth out and a lot longer than sixty odd years. (It is possible that the writers are saying that Superman perceives the problems as fixed, not that they are actually fixed. However, I get the impression that the writers are saying that even if Superman could fix such problems, the loss of agency wouldn't be worth it.)

Of course, the most devastating side-effect of Superman's presidency is the destruction of freedom/personal agency, something the writers of Red Son address at length. The problem here is that it is a rather obvious side-effect. If Superman is as smart and as good at government planning as the writers attest, loss of liberty would be pretty obvious pretty fast. It would not take Superman several decades to figure out.

Once he figured it out, he might or might not make concessions to the issue--rather the way die-hard Maoists in China sort of make concessions to Hong Kong. (Why turn down a money-maker on your downstep?) But he would have to grapple with it. I find this a far more interesting dilemma than the sudden shocking realization that oh, my gosh, using absolute power annoys people. I'm thinking here of Orson Scott Card's Worthing Chronicle where a goddess is faced with a similar decision. When she decides to interfere for the sake of compassion, her father-figure is pleased, even though he disagrees. After all, how can a good person just stand by and let awful things happen? When Picard does this in Star Trek: Next Generation for the sake of the Prime Directive, you want to march into the television and punch him. (Especially since he is never consistent.)

Yet, as the writers of Red Son point out, life in a bottle--no matter how clean and safe--isn't worth much. Which is to say that the writers have a point, it's just a rather obvious one and not one that Superman could really avoid for more than, say, three seconds. Or would avoid. Issues of control usually come down to the possibilities of benefit,and every society has this issue. At its most basic level, we allow the government to put up road signs, detour traffic, and enforce driving laws for the sake of better roads and safer travel. A Superman who was far enough gone to give insurgents new personalities would not be overcome by remorse at the thought; he would be wholly convinced of the necessity. When Nixon and Krushchev had the Kitchen Debates, it was not "Control is bad" versus "Control is good." Rather, it was "Look how freedom produces such a wide range of choices" versus "Ah, you crass Americans with your love of materialism. We aren't so shallow." (And if you don't think people are still having this argument, you haven't been in higher academe lately.)

In other words, it would have been much more interesting if, during Red Son's Batman-Superman confrontation, they had debated the merits of their separate ideologies; except Frank Miller already did that in The Dark Knight Returns.

To be fair, many of the elements concerning power and its side-effects are in Red Son; they just seem too tidily disposed of, resulting in a resolution that is unbelievable (within the confines of the novel), although clever.

I do like Batman in a big Russian hat.

Read Read Read Read Read Read Read

2007-02-27T19:28:00.001-08:00

I am one of those people who checks out way more library books than I actually end up reading. I don't feel guilty about this because I worked at a library in my early 20's and learned then the connection between circulation numbers and increased budgets--as well as the connection between circulation numbers and discards, so occasionally I'll even check out a book I own in order to strengthen that book's circulation numbers. (My apologies to my sister who is a librarian and prefers "real" numbers over deliberately manufactured ones.)

Books are like candy to me. Or like beer to people who frequent bars (although I'm sure there are poeple who frequent bars for other reasons--friends, etc.--than the alcohol, just as there are lots and lots of people who attend libraries for the sake of the internet and the soft arm chairs). In general, choosing a book is almost an instinctual process for me. I am a sucker for well-designed covers, but a well-designed cover, or blurb, isn't enough to move the book onto my pile.

With non-fiction, I will often read the first paragraph or skip to the middle and read a passage. With non-fiction, the author's style is paramount. I have read great non-fiction books on subjects that don't especially interest me simply because the style was attractive. And I've put back books about subjects that interest me because *yawn* *yawn* the style put me to sleep on my feet.

With fiction, slightly different approaches ensue. I am, I admit, a tad careful over new authors. I almost always glance at (even if I don't check out) the sci-fi, fantasy and mystery books. Every now and again I get lucky and start up a new author. I discovered Sarah Monette this way. And Holmes on the Range. With fiction, however, the emotional commitment is far higher than with non-fiction. The book, if I like it, will take over my world for a day or three days or a week (however long it takes to finish), and I want to be prepared. And yes, I am the sort of person who reads the end in order to see if I really want to put myself through the rest (see the movie Alex & Emma).

All other selections fall into the categories "Tried and True" or "New Book/Known Author." Agatha Christie is tried and true. As are Georgette Heyer, Ngaoi Marsh, Catherine Aird, J.R.R. Tolkien, Connie Willis. I love rereading books although some, like the Narnia books, I have to put off rereading for long stretches. There isn't much point in rereading when you can practically recite the stuff by heart.

"New Book/Known Author" is more of a crap shoot. There are authors like C.J. Cherryh of whom I will read anything she writes (although currently, I'm sticking with the Foreigner series for time management purposes). I trust her utterly. Connie Willis is the same. The same is true of Alexander McCall Smith. Others, like Charlaine Harris and the truly creative Kerry Greenwood and even Patricia McKillip, I respect but am more leery towards. Some of their books are really good. Some aren't and in some cases, as with Harris' vampire series, the series starts to fade on me.

And some authors I read once and never touch again. It isn't that I get bored with the series or that I think one book is less rewritten than another. Often, it is simply that the one book interested me and nothing else does. Douglas Coupland's Microserfs is an example of this. I loved Microserfs, yet I've never wanted to read anything else by Coupland. The other books might actually be better. But with so many books and so little comparative time, one must be (a little) choosy.

And then, of course, there are the books, like Da Vinci Code and Gibbons' The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, that I get out and don't read and get out and don't read and get out and . . . why don't I just give up already!

Books I've checked out recently:

I'm in the middle of Agincourt by Juliet Barker--great style, not finished.
The Aeneid by Virgil--pretty stellar, almost done; never read it before!
Revolutionary Characters by Wood--good beginning, seems interesting but due tomorrow
Virtu by Monette--sequel to Melusine; I'm rereading Melusine first
Three-Act Tragedy by Agatha Christie--one of her least known mysteries
Collected Plays of Agatha Christie--I own it but it's in a box somewhere, and I don't want to bother to fish it out
Holmes for the Holidays--tried and true; great collection of Sherlock Holmes stories
New Alexander McCall Smith book--Dream Angus
Exodus: Why Americans are Fleeing Liberal Churches for Conservative Christianity--finished; quick read; okay, not great
Blenheim--will probably never get to
Behold, Here's Poison by Georgette Heyer--tried and true
A bunch of books on film criticism for my Comp class
A bunch of books on science/general knowledge--for referencing
A book on writing; I always get these out, don't read them and take them back unopened.
Jane Eyre--read it before; might be time to read it again
Evolution-Creation Struggle by Ruse--pretty interesting but a bit slow in parts; 1/3 of the way through

Stupid Historical Inaccuracies: Pride & Prejudice

2006-09-07T16:32:00.000-07:00

So in general I don't mind historical novels although I've never enjoyed historical novels where people speak forsoothly and whatnot. Just because their language sounds archaic to us doesn't mean it sounded archaic to them.

I can't write historical novels because I'm too self-conscious about the problem of decades. In the movie Somewhere in Time, the character played by Christopher Reeves meticulously researches the time period of his great love and then buys the appropriate clothes to match. But when he actually shows up in the past, he is wearing a suit that is about twenty years out of style. (A lady praises him for showing off his grandfather's suit.) Think of it this way: suppose some future writer created a 1950's drama and stuck DVD players in everybody's homes? Not a big deal to future historical fiction readers, I will grant, but a very big deal to us. Anyway, I'm always afraid that I'll make those sorts of errors, which is why I stick to fantasy.

Normally, however, when I read historical fiction that kind of inaccuracy doesn't bother me so much as a lack of historical understanding. I don't fuss if Jane Eyre is wearing the wrong kind of crinoline, but I do fuss if Jane Eyre starts acting like Gloria Steinman.

I recently began reading a take-off novel about Elizabeth and Darcy. I got about ten pages in and gave up in disgust. The author has Darcy watching Elizabeth breastfeed, during which he comments on how odd his newborn baby looks. It's a sort of "oh, isn't it cute how dumb the new father can be" moment.

Oh, pleeeaase.

First of all, Darcy is the owner of an estate, an agricultural estate. That is, he makes his money off of pigs and sheep. Specifically, he makes his money off of his tenants' pigs and sheep although it is likely that Darcy would have some of the land farmed directly for the estate.

In addition, Darcy is a good landlord. The book makes that very clear. A good landlord means that (1) Darcy gets along with his tenants; (2) Darcy has a clue about agriculture; (3) Darcy doesn't spend all his time gallivanting around spending his income elsewhere. (See (1) and (2).)

In other words (and this is something the last movie, which I otherwise enjoyed, got completely and utterly and stupidly wrong), this is not a guy who runs around buying marble statues. This is a guy who pays very close attention to his estate, visits it regularly and has a working relationship with his tenants. (Very few people seem to realize that you don't fund a big estate like Pemberly with the views. Darcy is collecting income--think rent only more of it--from his tenants on a regular basis. That's where the $10,000 a year comes from. The fact that he can do this without them hating his guts means he does it wisely.)

Second of all, Darcy grew up on this estate and regularly rode his horse to the nearest village. Darcy's "rank" did not prevent him from associating with villagers or, for that matter, his gamekeeper's son (Wickham). There is a point here that I'm not sure Americans grasp. We think class is the Astors or the Van der Bilts who enforced their sense of superiority through a rigid untouchability factor. But for someone like Darcy, the fact of his class would be so engrained into his soul, he wouldn't need to enforce it. (If you doubt me, read Middlemarch, where the gentry have a far easier give and take relationship with their tenants than they do with the burgeoning, ambitious middleclass in the town. Also check out BBC Emma and Mr. Knightly's easy, but lordly, relationship with his tenants).

Darcy's pride is at fault NOT because anyone (least of all Elizabeth) thinks class doesn't matter (like us Americans) but because his pride prevents him from making Wickham's character known. In his efforts to protect himself, he exposes another gentleman's daughter to risk. When Elizabeth claims her right to love Darcy, she does not say, "Because, after all, who cares about rank?" She says, "I'm a gentleman's daughter. I am in the same class. Get over it." (Or, specifically, "Get over my crazy mother.")

The point is that Darcy's sense of class is not something he would need to protect by holding aloof from the uncouth lower classes. It is likely that Darcy, being Darcy, would find it easier to associate with his tenants, where class would be an acknowledged but unremarked-on reality, than in more ambiguous social engagements. One of the things that the last movie got absolutely right was the Bennett father's easy relationship with his servants. Darcy, also an agricultural landowner (albeit with a lot more land), would have the same relationship ... as his housekeeper attests (and he wouldn't be a collector of marble--blech).

Finally, people in Regency England (and for that matter, Victorian England) were a lot less obsessed about privacy and childbirth and other bodily functions that we Americans.

What this all means is that the boy Darcy, running around on his father's estate, in and out of his tenants' cottages, and taking rides into the nearby village, would have seen women with newborns ALL THE TIME, funny-shaped, dead and otherwise. And he would have seen them nursing ALL THE TIME. And he wouldn't have thought anything about it. The man Darcy, an agricultural landowner, would have had a working knowledge of birth, maturation, breastfeeding, etc. etc. etc. And he wouldn't have cared much.

And he certainly wouldn’t have had time to watch his wife breastfeed. (Supposing Elizabeth would breastfeed her own children which, no matter how enlightened she was, is unlikely. But not impossible.)

I Get Artsy and Talk About Poetry

2006-09-07T16:31:00.000-07:00

At the community college where I work, a truly astonishing number of the adjuncts are poets and writers. Which just goes to show that Paglia is right and the real creativity of academe is not to be found in its upper echelons. Or it just goes to show that poets and writers make no money and must supplement their precarious financial existences with adjunct work.

In any case, they are surprisingly good. I say this because I once attended a poetry reading at the local library, and the poems read were horrible: pretentious drek posing as unique but actually just poor copies of Frost, cummings, etc. The poets struck me mostly as academic poets while the poets I've encountered at the community college are what I think of as working poets: people who write poetry when they aren't driving trucks. The latter do take their writing seriously because writing, the craft, is what they want to do; that is, their poetry isn't merely an approved vehicle for expressing angst.

I really can't analyze it more than that. Poetry is a blind spot in my mind. Writing prose is NOT the same thing as writing poetry. Poetry is much more mathematical, for one thing. I was always reasonably proficient in algebra, but then algebra tells a story. Abstract math like trigonometry completely bewilders me. And yet poetry seems to draw on that aspect of the brain.

Poetry is also much more emotional. Prose is, to a certain extent, about hiding emotion. Or at least, it is about revealing emotion under carefully controlled circumstances. But poetry seems, well, naked to me as well as being much more autobiographical. In my fiction, I may use personal experiences, but the characters are never me. In poetry, it seems the "I" is always the author.

Due to my blind spot, I can't really comment on what makes good poetry good. But, as many a person has said when staring upon a Jackson Pollack, "I may not understand it but I know what I like."

Some favorites:

A.E. Housman: "To An Athlete Dying Young"

Rilke: "The Panther" Okay, I heard it first in the movie Awakenings, but I really, really like it.

Shakespeare: Well, yes, of course. (And actually, that isn't just a knee-jerk famous-guy-must-be-great reaction. He truly is astonishing. A kind of genius of geniuses.)

Keats: actually, I think Coleridge was the better poet, but I've always gotten a kick out of Keats. I have a picture of him on my wall. He was this short, rambunctious, passionate and off-kilter guy who then upped and died very romantically. And he got taken over by the Pre-Raphaelites whom I've always liked, despite their garish taste.

T.S. Eliot: "The Journey of the Magi"

Randy Newman: well, yes, that's music rather than poetry. But I admire Randy Newman.

Ezra Pound's translation of "The River-Merchant's Wife"

Walt Whitman's "Oh Captain My Captain" (but I never much cared for that incredibly long poem he wrote: "America, America")

Yeats, another strange dude: "Leda and the Swan" and "The Second Coming" (it's the one that ends "Slouching towards Bethlehem to be born")

Masefield's "Sea Fever"--I love this poem. I know it isn't great poetry, but it has always solicited an emotional response from me. I've reproduced it below.

Some non-favorites:

e.e. cummings: I liked e.e. cummings for about 2 seconds when I was a freshman in college. It passed very quickly. I can't stand e.e. cummings now. It isn't so much the pretentious writing
withoutcapitals
or for that matter
grammar
It's just, I don't think the stuff is very good.

Archibald MacLeish: I adored MacLeish when I was eighteen. Eighteen year olds are very odd. I adored him so much, I bought his collected poems, special order. I still like him, but I don't adore him. He's a tad too heavy handed.

Recommended Anthology:

Disenchantments: An Anthology of Modern Fairy Tale Poetry: one of the few poetry collections I own (T.S. Eliot's Wasteland and Archibald MacLeish's Collected Poems--see above--are the others).

Sea Fever

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

Casting Emma Lathen

2006-09-07T16:24:00.000-07:00

Emma Lathen is (or, "are"; "she" is two women collaborators) a mystery writer. Her amateur detective is John Putnam Thatcher, the second or third in command at the second (or third) largest bank in the world: the Sloan Guaranty Trust. He resides on Wall Street where, through luck, curiosity and inside knowledge, he ends up solving murders committed amongst bankers, accountants, business owners, stockholders and so on and so forth.

It is a great mystery series and despite being, now, rather dated, it would make a great television series. In order for it to work, however, it would have to done with at least a vaguely positive attitude towards capitalism. It simply wouldn't work if the whole thing was aimed at showing how corrupt and underhanded and Enron-ish the United States Stock Exchange is. Thatcher himself is a very content banker. He is also conservative, although not rabidly so, and intensely interested in specialized areas of finance. That is, he and his friends don't sit around yammering on about the purpose of life a la Oliver Stone. They talk about stocks and bonds and exchange rates, etc. etc. etc.

In fact, a really good production would include the slight amusement that Thatcher feels towards people who want him to be all soulful and unhappy in his chosen profession. In one book, an earnest non-profit producer wants to film Thatcher holding an artistic vase as the definitive image of callous and unfeeling businessman everywhere. Thatcher is appalled at the idea; do they really think he would manhandled an expensive, and uninsured, vase?

The first step in creating the production is the main cast: a police officer, Miss Corsa and, of course, Thatcher. In many of the books, various police officers interview Thatcher, drawing him into the case or, as the case may be, giving him necessary information to solve the case. The police officers change in every book, but for the series, there would be just one (or one with a partner).

Miss Corsa is Thatcher's secretary: efficient, proper and one of his links to the "ordinary" (that is, non-billionaire) populace. I picture her as being a lot like Miss Lemon on Poirot.

Before I get to Thatcher, I will cover the secondary cast (regularly appearing extras). They would include Everett Gabler (the Spock of the Sloan) who would play straight man to the ebullient Charlie Trinkam (Thatcher's immediate subordinate) who I see as a Wall Street version of Greg from CSI: Vegas. Also amongst the secondary players would be Tom Robichaux, Thatcher's closest associate outside of the Sloan, who is always in the process of getting divorced from the latest Mrs. Robichaux (rather like the dad in You've Got Mail); Laura Carlson, Thatcher's daughter and his source for inside knowledge concerning high society balls and other shindings (which he doesn't like to attend); Brad Withers, the president of the Sloan, a guileless, rich yacht owner who is continually putting his foot in his mouth (and whose associates are always sending him off on trips to keep him from making actual decisions).

Thatcher himself is not the stereotype of the hyperactive Wall Street yuppie. For one thing, in the books, he is about 60 (and, as in so many book series, he stays 60 for about 25 years). For the purposes of the television series, I would take off 15 years or so, making him 45-50. He is a widower, which detail I would keep. He is a hard worker, laid back, a man who likes puzzles and is reasonably extroverted but has a core of reserve that keeps his associates from getting too personal (although they bring personnel problems to him all the time). Approachable but not intimate. He is a confident man, with a degree of charisma, the degree of which he himself doesn't realize. (In the books, he is continually confided in, turned to or put in charge of things without his direct encouragement.) He is always trying to get his associates to stick to the everyday job and always getting sidetrack by murders and such. He is a conservative. I picture him as a cross between Thomas Gibson and Mandy Patinkin (but much less intense than either).

And, naturally, he needs a love interest. There's no love interest in the books, other than Thatcher's interest in and appreciation of female beauty. But a TV series needs a love interest. I would make it the police officer, a woman of about 35-40 who has worked her way up the ranks to detective. She has a blue-collar background and is a little contemptuous of Thatcher's high society background. (There has to be tension!) She is an expert, however, in white collar crime. I see her as being an American version of DS Barbara Havers (Sharon Small) in the Detective Lynley mysteries. I chose Havers because although Lynley is sometimes brought down a peg for his lordly condescension towards Havers, Havers is not the insightful cockney who understands reality so much better than her rich boss. Their relationship is more complicated than that.

That said, I don't see the Emma Lathen series as being terribly complicated psychologically; financially complicated would be okay since the target audience would be people who watch money/business shows on PBS. In other words, the series would be a kind of a Wall Street CSI, the expertise being finance, rather than forensics. It would have to be funny, and it could never get all MAKING STATEMENTS ABOUT GREED IN AMERICA. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that any current producer could keep him/herself from heavy-handed commentary. Maybe in a hundred years, it will be done as a historical series.

Novel Sequels

2006-06-14T10:12:00.000-07:00

Price of Eggs in China's posts "10 Worst Sequels" and "Sequel Season" got me thinking about novel sequels I've liked, and others I haven't liked so much.

For instance, my favorite book out of the Riddle-Master trilogy is Heir of Sea and Fire (by Patricia McKillip). I don't necessarily think it is the best written of the three books, I just like it the most what with the main characters seeking revenge, yet neither precisely sure who they are seeking revenge from or on. I feel the same way about Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowlings, which I've always been very fond of. It has the strongest horror (as in genre, not as in lots of people croaking) of all of her books; I'm also convinced that it was originally supposed to be the first book or was combined with the first book and then her editor said, "Hey, you know you could turn this entire plot into a separate book." It feels introductory.

There are those sequels I've grown to love over time. When I was a kid, I didn't care for The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; now it is one of my favorite Narnia books. The same is true of Perelandra, also by C.S. Lewis. It is just so heavy content-wise and exposition-wise, I couldn't get through it. I have since, and I like the book, although I still think Out of the Silent Planet is the best of the three. All in all, I don't think Lewis' sci-fi has ever received the credit it deserves. He was writing in the age of Asimov; now, I admire Asimov tremendously, but I also admire the sci-fi writers who have concentrated more on people and societies than machines and systems (although someone like Cherryh does both effortlessly). Anyway, Lewis was one of the first to write sci-fi that was about "first contact," as Star Trek would call it, rather than about tech/robot/alien wars. (Although to be honest, I think I just love Out of the Silent Planet for the part where the bad guy, Weston, is blathering on with his academese and pompous references to "Life As She Is Lived" and Ransom, who is trying to translate Weston's long-winded speech, gets confused and says, "I'm sorry, I forgot who She is.")

Back to sequels, Madeline L'Engle wrote somewhere that the first book you write is always the best because it is the one you really wanted to write. That might be true. When it comes to mystery series, however, I have found that nearly always (with exceptions) the latter books are better than the first, or, at least, more grounded. The author knows her characters better, her milieu, her detective's history. I much prefer Christie's later Poirot books to her first; I enjoy Crocodile on the Sandbank (first Amelia Peabody) by Elizabeth Peters, but it has an incredibly convoluted plot (although actually, most of Peters' books have convoluted plots). Mystery writing is evidently a craft that has to be practiced to be learned. Unfortunately, once it is learned, it quickly becomes trite so mystery series follow a kind of bell curve: okay first novels with convoluted plots, better sequels, a peak and then a falling off where every book is just a repeat of the one before.

Speaking of series, Steve Hockensmith recently wrote a book called Holmes on the Range, a Sherlock Holmes inspired mystery. The main character is not Holmes; he is a cowboy whose younger brother (his Watson) reads him newspaper stories about Holmes. The cowboy becomes convinced, with reason, that he has the abilities, if not the book learning, to emulate Holmes and sets out to prove so. It is fantastic, and I am hoping it is the first of many.

Returning to sci-fi, and fantasy, I prefer Ender's Game to its sequels, which lost a little of the magic, I think. Also, Fellowship of the Ring is my favorite of Tolkien's trilogy; I have read it more than the remaining two books. I'm not sure why. I don't think Tolkien knew where he was going in Fellowship, and it's a little uneven as a result, but I prefer both the book and the movie. I think part of it is the wrenching one feels when the story ends in book 3, a wrenching, I'm happy to say, Jackson (with the help of Annie Lennox) did invoke from me at the end of Return of the King. There are two solutions to great quest stories: Lewis' solution was transcendence; Tolkien's solution was loss. Either way, one cannot return to the status quo and either way, something will change. So, the ending of Lord of the Rings must be sad. But being sad on a regular readerly basis is asking rather a lot.

Turning to good sci-fi/fantasy sequels, I include Diane Duane's Deep Wizardry (#2), Chernevog by C.J. Cherryh (#2: Rusalka is the first); Asimov's The Naked Sun (#2: Caves of Steel is #1); Douglas Adams' Long Dark Tea Time for the Soul (sequel to Dick Gentley's Holistic Detective Agency, both great and less well-known than Adams' Hitchhiker's series); Queen of Attolia and King of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner (books #2 and #3: #1 is The Thief; I LOVE this series); The Lives of Christopher Chant by Diana Wynne Jones (prequel to Charmed Life, also good); not sci-fi or fantasy: Ashes to Ashes by Emma Lathen (my favorite of that mystery series); Parting Breath by Catherine Aird, my favorite of that mystery series; the latest P.N. Elrod, Song in the Dark (vampire/mystery series), more thoughtful, less gorey than its predecessors; The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs by Alexander McCall Smith (#2 of a 3-book series), which is absolutely hilarious; and finally, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke--not really a series, but I've seen it split into three books, I highly recommend it all.

Disappointing sequels (not necessarily sci-fi/fantasy): Murdering Ministers by Alan Benchley (his first, An Embarrassment of Corpses is hilarious; his second is just tedious; I guess L'Engle was right!); the last Sarah Caudwell book The Sibyl in her Grave which is, in fact, very good but depressing without the panache of the others; The Gypsy Game, sequel to The Egypt Game by Z.K. Snyder, written many years later; it does not stand up to the comparison; McKinley's Rose Daughter, her re-retelling of Beauty and the Beast; she did it already with Beauty; why do it again? The last few books in Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising series. She didn't go for transcendence or loss--series ended with a thud.

Montmorency and Other Thoughts on Children's Lit

2006-06-09T10:07:00.000-07:00

I'm in the middle of the third Montmorenecy novel (Montmorency and the Assassins by Eleanor Updale), and I have been struck, as I was with the first and second books, on the oddness of age designations. I found the third Montmorency book in the YA section, but the books are often found in the early teen section (with other chapter series books like Anne of Green Gables, etc.) I'm not opposed to twelve and thirteen-year-olds reading the books; apparently, Updale came up with the idea for the series by telling stories to her pre-teen/teen sons. What bemuses me is that despite the patently adult themes of the books, and their presentation in a patently adult way, the books are not considered "adult" literature.

The character Montmorency was originally a thief and the series begins when he suffers injuries while being chased by the police. He is pretty banged up, but a doctor (Dr. Fawcett) puts him back together and then hauls him around to lectures in order to show off his handiwork. Updale has an uncanny ability to capture the feel and attitudes of the time period (nineteenth century England/Europe). She makes it clear that Fawcett perceives Montmorency, at this point, as little more than a speciman. There is no friendship between the men, and they don't meet again until after Montmorency has become Montmorency.

This understanding of class and class attitude continues in the other books. Although Montmorency's friends in general know his past, they are appalled by his low origins and practice great forebearance by overlooking them. Montmorency himself adopts wholesale the appearance, lifestyle and attitudes of his new class. In the third book, the nephew of one of Montmorency's friends is upset by how blind his uncle and Montmorency are to an elderly servant's health. They take certain amenities for granted. Servants are just there, part of the background. One is civil, but one doesn't thank them for being servants.

Updale's understanding of the nineteenth century upperclass continues in other regards. A reformed prostitute (not really reformed; she just isn't practicing her trade anymore; it is never implied that she feels practically repentant) is also one of Montmorency's friends; without saying so outright, it is clear that one of three people (a lord, the doctor and Montmorency himself) could be the father of her son. There is no apology for this. Updale is not writing salacious literature; she is writing from within the thought processes and mores of the time. She doesn't dwell on these probabilities; nor does she point them out as bad behavior. She allows them to exist because that is the world she is writing about.

The result is a rather unsettling series. You like Montmorency but he is so thoroughly himself that he doesn't always behave heroically (or what we think of as heroic behavior; he has survived against great odds). Psychologically, everything he does (his self-protection, his vanity, his adopted attitudes) make sense, as do the psychological profiles of the other characters.

I find it bizarre that these books would be placed in the young teen section. Montmorency is not even a young character. Several books about thieves have appeared recently, all the protagonists being teens. Montmorency is possibly a teen at the beginning of book one, but he is well into his twenties by book two. In book three, he is about forty, and a few other characters (all in their late teens) have taken his place as the young protagonists.

This isn't to say I would be surprised if pre-teens/young teens adore the books. My surprise isn't at the readers but at this whole business of determining that books are for child readers or for young adult readers or for adult readers. What on earth constitutes the criteria? Is is subject matter? Montmorency books deal with--amongst other subjects--class systems, drugs, ambition, anarchists, prostitution, opera. Is it the style? Updale does use a straightforward style that is deceptively simplistic in its presentation. But then, so does D.H. Lawrence.

Personally, I think is comes down to explication. If Updale never "shows" characters having sex; if she never employs long, Freudian analyses; if she never blathers on (a la D.H. Lawrence) about nineteenth century politics or compares, heavy-handedly, nineteenth century politics to modern day politics...voila, her books must be for children. Which is, in my estimation, ridiculous. Doing such things doesn't automatically make a book "adult-like" any more than not doing those things makes a book "child-like." Yet somehow we have this idea (it started in the eighteenth century or so) that a lack of long-winded explanations constitutes non-profundity. Hence, fairytales and folktales become the property of children while Dickens edges his way into the category of adult literature.

It's the sort of thing that made Lewis and Tolkien grind their teeth. Folktales and fairytales, despite the lack of analytical explication, originally belonged to a community as a whole. You can't really say that they were originally considered adult tales (although they kind of were) because "childhood" as a concept didn't really exist until the eighteenth century. But eventually, the split was made. And I think, alongside Lewis and Tolkien, that it did more damage than good (although I can understand the publishing/commercial need for designations and genres; unfortunately, I think these designations go beyond that).

The determination that certain kinds of content/styles were "childish"--namely content and styles employing supposedly simplistic forms--meant that "mature" literature got linked with complicated, expositionary, profound-type (or obviously profound) passages, usually depressing or historical; these latter definitions eventually got linked with GREAT literature. And an entire generation of teenagers were doomed to read Hamlet instead of Much Ado About Nothing; The Pearl instead of Greek myths and The Scarlet Letter instead of Bruce Brooks' Midnight Hour Encore of Brock Cole's The Goats. Good writing, that is the kind of writing that adults (and English programs) study, became equated with Dickens and Faulkner and such.

Don't get me wrong, I like Faulkner, but good writing as non-expository has become harder to promote and harder to explain. Agatha Christie was an excellent craftswoman; Where the Wild Things Are by Sendak is a perfect read; E.Nesbit coined a conversational writing style that influenced generations of writers; Elizabeth Enright's books have flawless prose; The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner is an amazing adventure/love story with entirely believable characters. None are books/writers studied in regular English programs. (You have to take Mystery Novels or Children's Lit.)

The love of good writing has been swallowed up by the search for MEANINGFUL applications; MEANINGFUL applications are easier to talk about than good writing; they are also easier to find in heavy-handed exposition. As a result, not only the good writing but the possibilities of meaning and thought in YA and children's literature has been overlooked.

I'm in the middle of the third Montmorenecy novel (Montmorency and the Assassins by Eleanor Updale), and I have been struck, as I was with the first and second books, on the oddness of age designations. I found the third Montmorency book in the YA section, but the books are often found in the early teen section (with other chapter series books like Anne of Green Gables, etc.) I'm not opposed to twelve and thirteen-year-olds reading the books; apparently, Updale came up with the idea for the series by telling stories to her pre-teen/teen sons. What bemuses me is that despite the patently adult themes of the books, and their presentation in a patently adult way, the books are not considered "adult" literature.

The character Montmorency was originally a thief and the series begins when he suffers injuries while being chased by the police. He is pretty banged up, but a doctor (Dr. Fawcett) puts him back together and then hauls him around to lectures in order to show off his handiwork. Updale has an uncanny ability to capture the feel and attitudes of the time period (nineteenth century England/Europe). She makes it clear that Fawcett perceives Montmorency, at this point, as little more than a speciman. There is no friendship between the men, and they don't meet again until after Montmorency has become Montmorency.

This understanding of class and class attitude continues in the other books. Although Montmorency's friends in general know his past, they are appalled by his low origins and practice great forebearance by overlooking them. Montmorency himself adopts wholesale the appearance, lifestyle and attitudes of his new class. In the third book, the nephew of one of Montmorency's friends is upset by how blind his uncle and Montmorency are to an elderly servant's health. They take certain amenities for granted. Servants are just there, part of the background. One is civil, but one doesn't thank them for being servants.

Updale's understanding of the nineteenth century upperclass continues in other regards. A reformed prostitute (not really reformed; she just isn't practicing her trade anymore; it is never implied that she feels practically repentant) is also one of Montmorency's friends; without saying so outright, it is clear that one of three people (a lord, the doctor and Montmorency himself) could be the father of her son. There is no apology for this. Updale is not writing salacious literature; she is writing from within the thought processes and mores of the time. She doesn't dwell on these probabilities; nor does she point them out as bad behavior. She allows them to exist because that is the world she is writing about.

The result is a rather unsettling series. You like Montmorency but he is so thoroughly himself that he doesn't always behave heroically (or what we think of as heroic behavior; he has survived against great odds). Psychologically, everything he does (his self-protection, his vanity, his adopted attitudes) make sense, as do the psychological profiles of the other characters.

I find it bizarre that these books would be placed in the young teen section. Montmorency is not even a young character. Several books about thieves have appeared recently, all the protagonists being teens. Montmorency is possibly a teen at the beginning of book one, but he is well into his twenties by book two. In book three, he is about forty, and a few other characters (all in their late teens) have taken his place as the young protagonists.

This isn't to say I would be surprised if pre-teens/young teens adore the books. My surprise isn't at the readers but at this whole business of determining that books are for child readers or for young adult readers or for adult readers. What on earth constitutes the criteria? Is is subject matter? Montmorency books deal with--amongst other subjects--class systems, drugs, ambition, anarchists, prostitution, opera. Is it the style? Updale does use a straightforward style that is deceptively simplistic in its presentation. But then, so does D.H. Lawrence.

Personally, I think is comes down to explication. If Updale never "shows" characters having sex; if she never employs long, Freudian analyses; if she never blathers on (a la D.H. Lawrence) about nineteenth century politics or compares, heavy-handedly, nineteenth century politics to modern day politics...voila, her books must be for children. Which is, in my estimation, ridiculous. Doing such things doesn't automatically make a book "adult-like" any more than not doing those things makes a book "child-like." Yet somehow we have this idea (it started in the eighteenth century or so) that a lack of long-winded explanations constitutes non-profundity. Hence, fairytales and folktales become the property of children while Dickens edges his way into the category of adult literature.

It's the sort of thing that made Lewis and Tolkien grind their teeth. Folktales and fairytales, despite the lack of analytical explication, originally belonged to a community as a whole. You can't really say that they were originally considered adult tales (although they kind of were) because "childhood" as a concept didn't really exist until the eighteenth century. But eventually, the split was made. And I think, alongside Lewis and Tolkien, that it did more damage than good (although I can understand the publishing/commercial need for designations and genres; unfortunately, I think these designations go beyond that).

The determination that certain kinds of content/styles were "childish"--namely content and styles employing supposedly simplistic forms--meant that "mature" literature got linked with complicated, expositionary, profound-type (or obviously profound) passages, usually depressing or historical; these latter definitions eventually got linked with GREAT literature. And an entire generation of teenagers were doomed to read Hamlet instead of Much Ado About Nothing; The Pearl instead of Greek myths and The Scarlet Letter instead of Bruce Brooks' Midnight Hour Encore of Brock Cole's The Goats. Good writing, that is the kind of writing that adults (and English programs) study, became equated with Dickens and Faulkner and such.

Don't get me wrong, I like Faulkner, but good writing as non-expository has become harder to promote and harder to explain. Agatha Christie was an excellent craftswoman; Where the Wild Things Are by Sendak is a perfect read; E.Nesbit coined a conversational writing style that influenced generations of writers; Elizabeth Enright's books have flawless prose; The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner is an amazing adventure/love story with entirely believable characters. None are books/writers studied in regular English programs. (You have to take Mystery Novels or Children's Lit.)

The love of good writing has been swallowed up by the search for MEANINGFUL applications; MEANINGFUL applications are easier to talk about than good writing; they are also easier to find in heavy-handed exposition. As a result, not only the good writing but the possibilities of meaning and thought in YA and children's literature has been overlooked.

Audio Fever

2006-06-09T10:03:00.000-07:00

I have always been partial to audio performances of books. These days, I listen mostly to books-on-tape (unabridged, of course). I also enjoy radio dramatizations, about which I have some particular likes and dislikes. I started listening to dramatizations when I was really young. We had the Let's Pretend collection of records, dramatized fairytales which, in retrospect, were surprisingly morbid. They weren't warm, fuzzy kinds of fairytales. They weren't as bad as Grimm (no chopped off toes) but they were pretty dark. I remember characters dying a lot. I loved them. Oddly enough (or maybe not so odd considering my feelings about anthropomorphic animals, see post), I really hated the Walt Disney Bambi record we had. (And in general, I don't have a problem with Walt Disney.) Actually, I think it may have been the fire at the end. I had a terrible fear of fire when I was a kid.

Anyway, since then I've listened to several different dramatizations of Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and numerous dramatizations of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. I recently got A Pocketful of Rye and Gaudy Night out of the library and was seriously disappointing.

The problem with most radio dramatizations, in my experience, is the narration. The scene has to be established of course, but there's the kind of narration that sets the scene and the kind of narration that becomes pretty much a cop-out for the writers. Too many dramatizations simply use a narrator to tell the story with occasional interjections by other characters. This is how the Gaudy Night dramatization was written. Now, it is tremendously difficult to write interesting dialog that doesn't lose people and doesn't sound stilted, but if a dramatization is just narration, why not simply listen to the book? (Which is a performance in its own right.) (The best part of the Gaudy Night production was an interview at the very end with P.D. James and Jill Paton Walsh.)

The Pocketful of Rye was slightly better (both were BBC productions) but somewhat dull. In comparison, the latest Lord of the Rings radio dramatization starring Ian Holm as Frodo is amazing. (There's an earlier one from the 70s or 80s that is horrible so make sure you don't get fobbed off with it.) The Ian Holm's LTR has got great writers, great actors (many of whom have done books-on-tape--pinpointing voice cameos is almost as much fun as spotting visual cameos), great music. The beginning is a bit slow and a bit talky but by the time they hit the second CD, they are going strong. The dialog is allowed to carry the story. It gets enormously confusing in the middle, with all the wars, but there's this awesome Viking-type music going on that makes up for it.

Basically, I'm willing to take confusion over heavy-duty narration when it comes to dramatizations. This brings us to more of less the same topic I've been hammering away at for awhile (and, actually, brings us to a much bigger topic that I will leave for another day): the nature of mediums and doing things right within each medium. Both Gaudy Night and Pocketful of Rye were trying too hard to give the reader the same experience they would have gotten from reading the books, which is impossible. The result was a very episodic dramatization in which every scene of the book was referred to, with the occasional exchange of dialog to highlight it. But that isn't a dramatization; that's, well, a narration with highlights. Ironically enough, Agatha Christie understood the need to alter texts between mediums better than anyone so that her version of, say, The Hollow varies between the novel and the play. She would combine characters, cut red herrings, change the love interest, anything that would make a story more playable. She altered the endings of both Ten Little Indians and Murder for the Prosecution when she turned them from novellas into plays. (It's one reason why the recent Charles Osborne novelizations of older Christie plays are so terrible; he took the plays and just stuck on he said/she said tags. His setting descriptions actually sound exactly like stage directions [Christie gave very precise stage directions].) Too bad they couldn't have had Christie write the radio scripts for Pocket & Guady; she would have done a stellar job!

Anyway, here are some good dramatizations:

1. The Sittaford Mystery, Christie, BBC
2. Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, most recent version
3. Murder in Mesopotamia, Christie, BBC
4. Sad Cypress, Christie, BBC (great music here too; 1940s jazzy stuff)
5. Murder Must Advertise, Sayers, an old BBC version which I don't think is available anymore; I found it in a library
6. As Time Goes By (radio version; I've only heard bits and pieces but it's excellent dialog: fast and snappy)

Extras:
7. There's a Frasier episode where they do a radio dramatization of an old-time mystery; it is absolutely hilarious, one of the funniest sitcom episodes I've ever seen.
8. Cosby does a routine about listening to the "Chicken Heart" episode on the radio when he was a kid: very, very funny, sound effects (made by Cosby) and everything; this is old Cosby, by the way; post-Cosby show Cosby is funny but not as classic.
I have always been partial to audio performances of books. These days, I listen mostly to books-on-tape (unabridged, of course). I also enjoy radio dramatizations, about which I have some particular likes and dislikes. I started listening to dramatizations when I was really young. We had the Let's Pretend collection of records, dramatized fairytales which, in retrospect, were surprisingly morbid. They weren't warm, fuzzy kinds of fairytales. They weren't as bad as Grimm (no chopped off toes) but they were pretty dark. I remember characters dying a lot. I loved them. Oddly enough (or maybe not so odd considering my feelings about anthropomorphic animals, see post), I really hated the Walt Disney Bambi record we had. (And in general, I don't have a problem with Walt Disney.) Actually, I think it may have been the fire at the end. I had a terrible fear of fire when I was a kid.

Anyway, since then I've listened to several different dramatizations of Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and numerous dramatizations of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. I recently got A Pocketful of Rye and Gaudy Night out of the library and was seriously disappointing.

The problem with most radio dramatizations, in my experience, is the narration. The scene has to be established of course, but there's the kind of narration that sets the scene and the kind of narration that becomes pretty much a cop-out for the writers. Too many dramatizations simply use a narrator to tell the story with occasional interjections by other characters. This is how the Gaudy Night dramatization was written. Now, it is tremendously difficult to write interesting dialog that doesn't lose people and doesn't sound stilted, but if a dramatization is just narration, why not simply listen to the book? (Which is a performance in its own right.) (The best part of the Gaudy Night production was an interview at the very end with P.D. James and Jill Paton Walsh.)

The Pocketful of Rye was slightly better (both were BBC productions) but somewhat dull. In comparison, the latest Lord of the Rings radio dramatization starring Ian Holm as Frodo is amazing. (There's an earlier one from the 70s or 80s that is horrible so make sure you don't get fobbed off with it.) The Ian Holm's LTR has got great writers, great actors (many of whom have done books-on-tape--pinpointing voice cameos is almost as much fun as spotting visual cameos), great music. The beginning is a bit slow and a bit talky but by the time they hit the second CD, they are going strong. The dialog is allowed to carry the story. It gets enormously confusing in the middle, with all the wars, but there's this awesome Viking-type music going on that makes up for it.

Basically, I'm willing to take confusion over heavy-duty narration when it comes to dramatizations. This brings us to more of less the same topic I've been hammering away at for awhile (and, actually, brings us to a much bigger topic that I will leave for another day): the nature of mediums and doing things right within each medium. Both Gaudy Night and Pocketful of Rye were trying too hard to give the reader the same experience they would have gotten from reading the books, which is impossible. The result was a very episodic dramatization in which every scene of the book was referred to, with the occasional exchange of dialog to highlight it. But that isn't a dramatization; that's, well, a narration with highlights. Ironically enough, Agatha Christie understood the need to alter texts between mediums better than anyone so that her version of, say, The Hollow varies between the novel and the play. She would combine characters, cut red herrings, change the love interest, anything that would make a story more playable. She altered the endings of both Ten Little Indians and Murder for the Prosecution when she turned them from novellas into plays. (It's one reason why the recent Charles Osborne novelizations of older Christie plays are so terrible; he took the plays and just stuck on he said/she said tags. His setting descriptions actually sound exactly like stage directions [Christie gave very precise stage directions].) Too bad they couldn't have had Christie write the radio scripts for Pocket & Guady; she would have done a stellar job!

Anyway, here are some good dramatizations:

1. The Sittaford Mystery, Christie, BBC
2. Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, most recent version
3. Murder in Mesopotamia, Christie, BBC
4. Sad Cypress, Christie, BBC (great music here too; 1940s jazzy stuff)
5. Murder Must Advertise, Sayers, an old BBC version which I don't think is available anymore; I found it in a library
6. As Time Goes By (radio version; I've only heard bits and pieces but it's excellent dialog: fast and snappy)

Extras:
7. There's a Frasier episode where they do a radio dramatization of an old-time mystery; it is absolutely hilarious, one of the funniest sitcom episodes I've ever seen.
8. Cosby does a routine about listening to the "Chicken Heart" episode on the radio when he was a kid: very, very funny, sound effects (made by Cosby) and everything; this is old Cosby, by the way; post-Cosby show Cosby is funny but not as classic.

Dissecting Harry Potter

2006-06-09T10:00:00.000-07:00

I've been listening to the first Harry Potter book (read by Jim Dale) as I drive to work in the mornings. It's been awhile (no, I'm not one of those avid fans who rereads the books every six months. Not avid about Harry Potter, that is. I am an avid fan of C.S. Lewis. I've read the Narnia books so many times, I've started forcing myself to wait five years before I go through the books again).

My memory of early Harry Potter (the character) was of someone who had been put down, sat on--poor kid living with that horrible family who force him to sleep in a cupboard. I think this viewpoint was reinforced by Daniel Radcliffe's rather gentle persona. Not that I thought Harry Potter acted like a victim, but I definitely thought he had been victimized.

Listening to the tape, however, I was struck by how aggressive Harry actually is in the books. He is a self-confidant kiddo with an edge to his tongue, the kind of kid who would (in different circumstances) make sotto voce comments that get other kids laughing. I don't think this is an implausible characterization by Rowlings. He has been neglected by the Dursleys but not actually, abused (yes, yes, I know emotional abuse can be a horrible thing but one gets the impression that the Dursleys ignore and grumble about and even fear Harry more than they actively go after him). Harry's father was, we learn later, a rather aggressively confident person himself. And I decided that, given Harry's intrinsic personality, it probably was just as well that he got sat on for eleven years. Unrestrained sarcasm coupled with ebullient self-confidence would have made him a misery to be around (not to mention the whole Harry Potter celebrity stuff) if he'd stayed in the wizarding world after his parents' deaths.

I have no idea if Rowlings intended this kind of character insight in the early books. She may have intended it later (where she gave us sneak peeps into Harry's dad's life). I know people say she had the whole Harry plotline/universe figured out from the beginning, but the books have an uneven feel to me that don't correspond to seven fully fleshed out outlines. Rowlings may have a general idea of where she is going, but I never got the impression that she knew what she was going to do with, say, Snape in the early books.

And I wonder how many character insights actually come more from the fans than from Rowlings: fans reading their opinions about Harry, Hermione, Sirius, etc. into the narratives. There's nothing wrong with that. As Jane Espenson stated about an Angel episode, Thank goodness for the fans. They do all the hard work of coming up with explanations that make sense of the scripts' flaws. In fact, I would argue that it is the ability to do this that attracts fans to certain works. Rowlings has created more a series of myths or fairytales than a group of novels. Myths and fairytales can be played with, molded. Fans have more room to work out their creative desires. We decide whether Harry is best understood from a Jungian or Freudian or whatever perspective. Which is, frankly, a whole lot of the fun.

FEVERS: Thoughts After Reading Michelle Malkin

2006-06-09T09:57:00.000-07:00

I just picked up Michelle Malkin's Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild. Very well-written. Very funny. Very apropos. And super depressing.

I've always believed that both sides of the political spectrum mirror each other, that you will find similar degrees of emotion and objectivity at all levels of liberalism and conservatism. Consequently, I would be tempted to dismiss the compilation of Malkin's experiences as the kind of stuff that happens only to pundits (on both sides). That is, if I hadn't been there too (and I'm not a political pundit, only a fiction-writing blogger). My own experience is that Malkin is right; yes, extremists exist on the conservative side of the political spectrum, but they aren't given nearly the lee-way (by their own party or American culture) as extremists on the liberal side (my apologies to Barak Obama and Christopher Hitchens).

There is a particular mind-set that I have encountered on both the left and the right. The difference is that when I meet it on the left, I encounter no shame, no self-awareness, no ambiguities, no qualifiers, no self-policing. I call the mind-set FEVERS.

F: Fix the opposition. In the feverish mind-set, people are never educated or converted or persuaded. They are fixed. Something is wrong with them. They aren't just different or human or free agents or imperfect. They are broken; their broken state is often due to one cause. If that one cause (culture, family, economics, lifestyle, George Bush) is removed, chucked out, dismantled, undermined (the feverish are very destructive), the broken ones will become perfect, happy (and just like the people doing the fixin').

E: Everyone dies. The feverish mind-set is usually doom-laden. The world is ending! Everything stinks!It is invariably an apocalyptic view of the future.

V: Villain! There must be a villain! (Replete with twirling mustache.) The villain is inevitably compared to Hitler. He or she is evil, one-dimensional. And there is always a conspiracy involved.

E: Edenic past. There must have been a time before the villain came along when life was perfect, pastoral, wonderful. Feverish mentalities dwell incessantly on that supposed past. They rarely enjoy progress. Show them our modern age; they don't see the lack of slavery, rights for women, cheap transportation, dental care, improved education, religious freedom, antibiotics. They see nuclear weapons, urban sprawl (don't you just love it?), no prayer in school, troops over sea, corporate chicanery. They think living without dental care is worth taking everyone back to the nineteenth century (they are wrong). If they are really extreme, they think our ancestors should have remained hunters/gatherers.

R: Right-brained literalism. This is the really odd thing about the feverish mindset. The fevered do not like objective historical evidence which they say is just the dominant capitalist culture (or the dominant liberal media) trying to brainwash us. They prefer warm fuzzy, gushy sentiments. Or angry epithets. They dislike science. BUT they aren't right-brained enough to go the Joseph Campbell, Star Wars route. They don't really like theology or even art (both of which require a degree of discipline and self-awareness). Everything is power-related, personal, relevant. Events have obvious causes and effects and contain literal (usually power-related) definitions. And everything--everything!--can be blamed on someone/something.

S: Self-righteous. Now, everyone is self-righteous to a degree. I'm sure I come across as a bit self-righteous myself. If people didn't think they were right about stuff (and weren't willing to defend that rightness), life would be pretty boring. The difference between ordinary self-righteousness and feverish self-righteousness is that feverish self-righteous will go on and on (and on and on) about how bigoted and close-minded the other side is and then turn around and, in the same breath, make truly bigoted, violent and horrible remarks about, say, Bush's cabinet, Michelle Malkin, Christians. I've been there. I've heard it. It is weird beyond belief. It is almost as if they honestly think that just saying, "I'm open-minded" is the same thing as being open-minded. For those of us with standards (against which we apply ourselves as much as others), open-mindedness is a behavior, not a self-proclaimed label.

As I've said, I've encountered this mind-set on both sides of the political spectrum. I've also encountered elements of FEVERS. Many people fit one of my descriptions, and many people would defend the F,E,V,E,R or S. However, as I've said, I've encountered the feverish mind-set in its purest form (no hesitation, no "well, okay, maybe I'm going too far") and in its entirety on the left. And I think it is the reason why, despite the many mistakes Bush has made, the Democratic Party still doesn't seem to have a chance in 2008. There are many objective, thoughtful, intelligently passionate Democrats. But it's hard to hear them amongst all the hate-mongering.

And There Goes Another Wife . . .

2006-06-09T09:54:00.000-07:00

I just finished The Wives of Henry VIII by Antonia Fraser. What I found most astonishing about the events of 1500 C.E. was the willingness, the positive eagerness, with which various families backed certain matches. When any wife got shuffled off (divorced, beheaded), she didn't go alone; she had a tendency to take swaths of relatives with her as well as various political supporters. And yet, oh, well, there's one down; now, who else can we promote?

Of course, a modern reader has the benefit of hind-sight. We know that number three wife (Jane Seymour, who died in childbirth) is actually the exception to the rule. Yet, it should have been reasonably obvious by the time the king reached Katherine Howard (after Anne of Cleves, divorced, which debacle lost Cromwell his head) that it might not be the best idea in the world to have a pretty niece at court who might attract the king's interest.

Of course, there are some things people have no control over, and I'm willing to bet that when Katherine Howard caught the king's eye, her uncle (Earl of Norfolk) started practicing pre-execution speeches. (As a matter of fact, he survived her, but barely.) Nevertheless, at the same time, hanger-ons piled out of the woodwork, demanding kudos, rewards, estates, etc. etc. (it was the great age of patronage). And you'd think that a certain amount of uneasiness would have crept into the picture. That people would have, rather than running to attach themselves to this new, young and wholly reckless young woman, might have thought, "You know, I think I'll stay away from court for the next three years" (and probably some did).

Because it wasn't just Henry himself who encouraged the divorcing, beheading of his queens. Every queen was surrounded by supporters and detractors, and the detractors spent an enormous amount of time trying to figure out how to get the queen and her supporters locked up in the Tower. Kind of like if Kenneth Starr and the Clintons, instead of just holding legal proceedings and issuing press statements, had actually been trying to maneuver the other party in front of a firing squad.

But then, thinking of the Clintons and politicians in general, I decided that believing, "This time it will be different. This time, our queen won't do anything stupid to annoy the king" is what makes politicians tick. Otherwise, well, they wouldn't bother. But those who would willingly (and consistently) play such dangerous (and quite often, petty) games must believe at some basic level that they have got their finger on the pulse this time.

It makes me very grateful for us boring middleclass types who just go to work and pay our taxes. Idealists and politicians may get all the credit for making history interesting, but at least the middleclass survivalists keep history going.

Oprah v. Franzen

2006-04-03T07:00:00.000-07:00

I'm sure Oprah & Franzen are old news to many, but I'm in the midst of reading a book Reading With Oprah by Kathleen Rooney; she has a chapter on "Jonathan Franzen versus Oprah Winfrey." The entire book is a fascinating study of the Oprah Book Club and why it engendered such controversy (amongst certain groups).

Basically, Franzen is a literary writer who, before Oprah came along, was selling in the 50,000-100,000 range. This isn't a lot, granted, but it's more than I've ever sold so my sympathy meter regarding Franzen registers somewhere in the nil category. Like many poor but struggling writers (of literary ilk), Franzen bemoaned his lack of popularity, putting it down to a national lack of good taste (it's that whole "most Americans don't know their geography!" argument: once upon a time Americans were educated and listened to their parents and had good taste).

Then, Oprah reads one of Franzen's books (Oprah's tastes don't run anything close to mine; with the exception of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' A Thousand Years of Solitude, I haven't read any of the books on her list. However, Rooney's very, very good point is that within her particular genre--realism--Oprah is fairly ecletic and her taste is no worse--and could be better--than your average high culture critic). Franzen was scheduled to be on Oprah. His book sales immediately shot up (Rooney estimates that Franzen made $1.2 million off of Oprah's decision).

But, and here's the rub, this hurts Franzen's image (or self-image) as a poor, struggling, misunderstood literary writer. Franzen proceeded to make a number of remarks critical of Oprah's Book Club in various interviews. Upon which, Oprah disinvited him. Upon which, Franzen issued a number of sincere (and puzzled) apologies.

Rooney thinks that Franzen was being somewhat disingenuous. (Although she agrees that his apologies were sincere.) Being quite young, she evidently has a higher opinion of the saavy of literary greats than I do. Just because Franzen can write intelligently and insightfully about life, doesn't mean he has a clue how the real world works. I think Franzen really didn't see it coming. And I think that Franzen really didn't make the connection between "my publishers promoting me and putting me on book tours and wishing I would sell more" and "Oprah promoting me." Some kinds of advertisement are okay. Other kinds are not. It's like people who think that Natural Health Food stores aren't out to make a buck--or at least, not in the same way that, shock shock, CHAIN grocery stores are.

To put it simply, Franzen, who isn't as horrible guy as some of the pundits painted him, was self-conscious, like a teenage boy at a dance. He was cool, now he isn't cool (according to the people he likes). How does he get his coolness back? He disses the other clique. And because he is basically a well-meaning soul, he is surprised when the other clique gets offended. So, now he isn't cool to anyone (hint to teenagers: this will inevitably happen: "No man can serve two masters," and although Jesus was talking about God, it works as a lesson in popularity as well.)

Not only does Rooney think Franzen was disingenuous in his protests of surprise, she thinks Oprah could have handled the issue better. Franzen may have been behaving in a silly way, but his attitude is not atypical amongst the kinds of authors that Oprah tended to pick. Why not, Rooney asked, have the guy on her show? Why not air his grievances and discuss them?

I could answer that. Oprah doesn't like that kind of controversy. And she's probably wise. Look what happened when she defended Million Little Pieces guy.

Rooney wishes that Oprah had addressed Franzen's self-consciousness because Rooney believes that the high brow/low brow split is an issue. Rooney has just finished her MFA. The high brow/low brow split is an issue to people who think they are arbiters of literary taste (or should be) and to the people who know the afore-mentioned "arbiters" and think they are nuts. They didn't get the memo: Nobody else cares.

To do Rooney justice, I think she was willing for someone to go on Oprah and say that: Nobody cares. People read whatever they want. People don't listen to the academic world or to literary critics. But I'm not sure that Oprah would be willing to take on the academic world. Like many intelligent people who are not academic, I'm betting that Oprah is a little awed by academic hoity-toityness. She doesn't need to be: it's just bluster. But, to an extent, you have to speak the language before you figure that out.

Self-Help Diatribe

2006-03-06T06:57:00.000-08:00

Actually, not from me. I've been skimming a book called Self-Help Nation: The Long Overdue, Entirely Justified, Delightfully Hostile Guide to the Snake-Oil Peddlers Who are Sapping Our Nation's Soul by Tom Tiede. Like most diatribes (and self-help books), it goes on and on and on. His first chapter "Magic Bullets" sums up his position, which is then repeated ad nauseum for the next nine chapters. He goes after various self-help writers like Schlessinger, Peck, The Rules ladies, etc. And he has a point. He just only needed to make it once. Which, to be fair, I think he knows, but hey, if other people can write long-winded books, repeating the same advice over and over, why can't he?

Basically, his point is that self-help books are giving the kind of advice you can get from your mother or the Sermon on the Mount. He blames self-help manuals for creating dysfunctions when all that is really there is life, messy but liveable. That is, people make stupid choices and get into bad relationships and take dumb jobs and hurt their families and themselves because they are human, not because they are "dysfunctional."

And he goes on from there. And he's right. And it's very refreshing. But I think he misses something in the meantime. He opens by telling a story about going to a house that had just been repossessed. The house was filled, top to bottom, with self-help guides, worth $12,000. The ex-tenant's marriage had broken up, his business had failed and his house had been, as mentioned, repossessed. Tiede points out that the guy could have used that $12,000 to keep his house. (Since the books obviously didn't help.)

What Tiede fails to realize is that buying self-help books that don't help you when you are hoping that they will is also part of the messiness that is life. I think Tiede's cardinal sore point is the creating and marketing of "dysfunctions," and I agree with him that it's kind of icky, but the market caters to readers. I think people like diagnosing themselves. We like explaining ourselves to ourselves. Some of you know that I am not a huge proponent (which is putting it mildily) of Meiers-Briggs (that test which determines that you are a ITSJ or whatever), mostly because I think it becomes (like Marxist theory) a substitute for understanding. But I'm in a minority. At least, I feel like I'm in a minority. And even I will take personality tests in magazines.

Self-help falls into the came category. Wanting to read advice that we should already know about occurrences which aren't really controllable (in a step 1, 2, 3 kind of way) in the hopes that said advice will work some kind of magic cure in our heads, that's human nature, Mr. Tiede. Get used to it.

Cryonics

2006-02-17T04:42:00.000-08:00

The following is a review of Robert Ettinger's 1964 book The Prospect of Immortality. This review is actually part of my (much longer) thesis (which actually isn't about cryonics). But I thought the review part would make an interesting read. I would like to state upfront that although I refer to Ettinger's view of cryonics as a theology, it is not, in fact, a theology according to cryonauts. I say this because if it really were a theology--and cryonics really was a church--I wouldn't write what I've written; belief is very much a visceral, personal, wacky kind of thing. But cryonics claims to be science and not a religion. So I figure, it's fair game.

Much of cryonics theology finds its basis in Robert Ettinger's incredibly silly book, The Prospect of Immortality, which is notable for its completely sincere, and utterly naïve, complacence regarding the future. Even Star Trek, that ever optimistic science fiction drama, postulates a third World War, mass destruction of all major countries and a generation of feudalism before star travel creates the perfect future. Cryonics honestly seems to believe that the social and financial institutions that keep cryonauts frozen today will remain stable over the next hundred or so years. Do they read history, I wonder? Even if you believe in a slowly improving world, you should have noticed that it has a tendency to improve in uneven peaks and troughs: two steps forward, one step back.

The future, Ettinger believes, will be swell, a veritable Golden Age of perfection, so marvelous that we can barely imagine it today. Through genetic engineering, human intelligence, strength and health will all be enhanced, so enhanced, in fact, that frozen individuals will have to be improved, before they wake, in order to keep pace: "we shall be immediately equal to our descendents," Ettinger assures the reader. However, the issue of genetic enhancement dovetails with the issue of identity: if I am genetically altered to the point where I no longer appreciate Shakespeare's puny language (really, Ettinger says that), will I even be myself anymore, and if I am not, what's the point?

Ettinger, ever game, takes on this issue. Identity, Ettinger claims, is man-made. "We have degrees of identity," he postulates and even goes so far as to suggest that souls can share a body; a second "twin-soul" may enter the cryonically frozen body when it is revived. Which begs the question of why I can't simply be buried, leaving instructions in a vault at Alcor (popular cryonics lab) to name some future poor (but improved) slob "Katherine Woodbury." Wouldn't that satisfy Ettinger's request that I demonstrate a "strong and bold" spirit about the future by "seek[ing] growth and betterment, both for [myself] and for others"? Do I need to send my body along for the ride?

The response to the final query is answered in Ettinger's book and by current cryonauts: yes, it matters because it is my "life" or, rather, my body that has been "extended." According to cryonics, being declared dead isn't like being really dead, in the soul-leaving-my-body sense of the word (despite Ettinger's lapse into relativity) as long as the scientists get to me fast enough. I am, literally, put on ice. Eventually, I'll be revived. After all, goes the argument, people have died temporarily and been revived before and nobody squawks (they do it on House all the time). It's just a medical procedure. Penicillin preserves life; nobody bans it. Why should this be any different?

It is here that cryonics fails, to a rather startling degree, to comprehend human nature. Should I undergo hypothermia (one of the more popular examples) or suffer heart failure, I will not be gone for long. After all, if I am not revived quickly, I will die. Should I suffer a coma, my out-of-commission period may be longer, but not any longer than my body can endure. I will not last much more than a generation. I will wake up to a world that, although changed, will be fairly recognizable, and I will have suffered (albeit asleep) through the experience. In fact, I may wake up brain damaged or paralyzed; certainly, my muscles will be weak and my vision disoriented. I will have been influenced, affected, by the passage of time. I am myself because I am growing old. Ettinger would agree with this latter statement, but in Prospect he argues that we are different people at sixty than at six, why should we be surprised that we will be different people in 1,000 years? Yet, between sixty and six, I am there, present, going through the hormonal changes and life changes. I am a participant in that thing called life.

Everybody fears death, Ettinger declares. Nobody is truly courageous in the face of their mortality. Everybody wants a long life. Yet Ettinger consistently fails to appreciate what it is about death that people fear. He quotes from a doctor of psychiatry that "death can be faced more readily if there is little to lose by leaving life than if there is a great deal to lose," yet misses the implications of that good doctor's analysis. "To die, to sleep," Hamlet groaned. "To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub/For in that sleep of death what dreams may come/When we have shuffled off this mortal coil/Must give us pause." Any sensible person, that is. Ettinger, it seems, needs to read more Shakespeare.

With cryonics, Ettinger had simply substituted one unknown for another. If I believe in an after-life, the uncertainty of my future (what comes next) is just as strong as if I freeze myself. In both cases, I must exercise belief that something exists or will exist outside my immediate, temporal experience; at the very least, with cryonics, I must trust in people like Ettinger. (Trusting in someone like Joseph Smith is a good deal more entertaining and far more mind-blowing.) On the other hand, if I don't believe in an after-life, I am simply burdening the new and improved future with the task of reviving and enhancing me (which doesn’t strike me as very dutiful, no matter how bold) in a bid to avoid oblivion. But cryonauts claim that cryonics isn't about fear; they also claim it doesn't conflict with religion. Which it probably doesn't since frozen people are, well, dead, and you might as well be buried in ice as in a crypt (although your relations might balk at the bill).

What Ettinger and his disciples fail to appreciate, in their effort to promote the future, is the underlying non-fun aspect of cryonics. The pleasure of life is the participatory nature of the event. Once you remove the quality of participation, interest flags. There are, according to Wikipedia, only 140 frozen bodies in the U.S. David Koresh had as many people at Waco, Texas. Me thinks cryonics isn't in for the long haul (and those 140 bodies are, I'm sorry to say, going to be thawed).

(Ettinger really is amazingly fatuous. At one point, he postulates a future where there is no motherhood. Women who claim pregnancy and birth is positive and beautiful, he says, are just suffering from "a psychological trick, making a virtue of necessity," and he compares the experience to elimination. So, he's sexist and a jerk. Here's the point, though: Ettinger goes on to argue that "family life" and "the institution of marriage" will still exist and "people will still want children." So, we will be so different we won't want Shakespeare, but not so different that we won't want marriage, families and children. So, basically, Ettinger's future is whatever Ettinger is currently in favor of.)

(Yes, the Shakespeare comment rackled.)

The Problem of Finding Problems

2006-02-17T04:36:00.000-08:00

Recently I was reading a book about misandry. Misandry is the equivalent of misogyny except that misandry is about the hatred of men (the gender, not "men" as in "people--that's misanthropy) rather than the hatred of women. And I think the people who wrote the book have a point but like most points, they kill the horse they rode in on. It was while I was reading this book (Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture by Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young) that I decided that academics are totally clueless when it comes to popular culture.

As I mentioned, the book has a point. What bothers the writers are all those sitcoms where the husband (the doofus) does dumb things and then the wise, noble, untouchable wife instructs him in the right way of doing things. I think that sort of thing is annoying too, personally, and always have. I also agree with the writers who point out that that when Dan Quayle made his remark concerning Murphy Brown, he was (rather voraciously) attacked (on and off the show) but no one ever addressed his actual complaint: what does it say about society's attitude towards men when a woman can have a baby with a man but then deliberately (politically) exclude him from the baby-raising process? (The furor over Dan Quayle is one reason why I think liberals are going to have a hard time making hay out of the various Republican debacles lately; they claim to be better--kinder, wiser, nobler--than other muckracking politicians and then they spend all their energy sneering at the opposition rather than making cogent arguments; a few days ago on PBS, Mark Shields was practically foaming at the mouth he wanted to bash Bush so bad. There's lots of bashable stuff out there right now, but in comparison to David Brooks, who was willing to criticize Bush but wanted to keep to the issues, Shields just came across as, well, a Bush-basher.)

Anyway, I thought the writers of the above book made a good point about Murphy Brown. But then the writers turned to Home Improvement, and I just sighed because it was the typical academic take-the-argument-to-the-farthest-point-and-watch-it-crash-and-burn approach. Or, rather, watch it go ploop.

Their point was that Home Improvement uses the doofus husband and lecturing wife format, which, yes, it kind of does. But they miss a major factor: the show is about Tim.

That is, the lecturing wife stuff is peripheral. Tim Allen remains the central and constant image of the show. The camera follows him. He acts. He performs. He changes. Whatever is said pales in comparison to what you see on the screen, what you experience when you watch the show. And this is why I think academics are sincerely moronic when it comes to popular culture. They think that language (the script) or icons (specific images--Tim has his shirt off: that means . . . ) beats out performance. But it doesn't. Whatever Jill might say to Tim at the end of every episode, Tim keeps the camera, he controls the action. The dialog might say that Tim isn't responding to his family the way he should (lecture, lecture, lecture). The camera says differently.

But you can't ever argue with academic types, who are so sure that there's all this iconic ideological (ahhhh, I hate that word; I'm so sick of that word!) stuff going on that only academics can recognize (and they have to tell the rest of us poor ignorant slobs, who don't know we are being brainwashed by society's dominant narratives--ahhhh, ahhhh, ahhhh. These people never seem to wonder maybe if they are the ones preaching the so-called dominant concepts, and the rest of us are ignoring them. It's like environmentalists, who continue to behave like beleagured victims despite the fact that today, as a sub, I showed a ecology movie to a bunch of 7th graders that went on and on and on about the greenhouse effect and acid rain and so on and so forth. But the moment environmentalists admit to being the status quo, they will have to question themselves--ha ha).

Anyway, the authors argued that mostly women watch Home Improvement, therefore they must be watching to reinforce their hatred of men (and the belief in the perfection of women).

Now, think about this for a second: the logic goes something like--

Mostly women watch Home Improvement.
Women only identify with women.
The main woman on the show is Jill.
Women are identifying with Jill.
Jill lectures Tim.
Women identify with Jill lecturing Tim--therefore,
Most women want to lecture their husbands.
Because most women want to lecture their husbands, they think their husbands are buffoons.
Because they think their husbands are buffoons, they think all men are buffoons.
Because they think all men are buffoons, they are misandric.

Wow--there's like a billion assumptions there. Well, are least three: one, that women automatically identify with other women; two, that women think their husbands are buffoons because they want to lecture them; three, that a woman's opinion about her husband is the same as a woman's opinion about men in general.

It isn't just the misandry folks who argue like this. Let's try that argument from the feminist angle.

Many men watch some-movie-where-things-blow-up-and-the-guy-rescues-the-gal-and-she-falls-into-his-arms.
All men identify with men.
The main character in the movie is male.
The male character rescues the women (who is capable of rescuing herself, darn it all!).
Men are identifying with the male character--therefore,
Most men want to rescue women and have them fall into their arms.
Because most men want to rescue women and have them fall into their arms, they think women are helpless.
Because they think women are helpless, they are chauvinists.

Let's try a little non-academic thinking:

Mostly women watch Home Improvement
Tim Allen is funny
Most women have a sense of humor

Boy, that's a lot easier!

I have more to say on this subject but will save it for a later time. (See History & Learning for the follow-up.)

Dead Presidents

2006-01-26T12:48:00.000-08:00

I just finished Assassination Vacation, Sarah Vowell's memoir of visiting the many, many markers, tributes, statues, plaques, houses, museums, dead body parts, parks, etc. etc. dedicated to three assassinated presidents: Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley. Vowell plays the voice of Violet on The Incredibles, and her writing has the same deadpan humor as, well, her voice. If you have The Incredibles, there is an interview with Vowell on the DVD, which is actually where I put together the book title and the author for the first time.

It is well-worth reading, with a slight caveat. Depending on your perspective, you may find Vowell's political comments amusing or annoying. I fall somewhere between the two. She has a political perspective that I usually associate with very, very young liberals, a kind of dot-to-dot thinking that places all "good" behavior on a political continuum. I've met (youngish) liberals, for instance, who associate liking Harry Potter, as an example, with being liberal, non-religious and disagreeing with creationists. Because of course ALL Republicans hate Harry Potter, attend church on a daily basis and despise Stephen Jay Gould. Seriously, there's a lot of people out there who make those kinds of categorizations. I've met a number of them in the academic environment. They scare me a bit. I find it difficult to understand how a grown person wouldn't have lived long enough to know that it is possible to find, on this earth, a liberal, pro-life, anti-capital punishment, environmentalist person who voted for Reagan, hunts, hates Harry Potter, loves Van Gogh and Peter, Paul & Mary, adores the Yankees, never watches television, supports the war in Iraq and shops at Walmart. Oh, yes, that person does exist! (It isn't me; I adore television.)

Vowell comes across as falling in the my-entire-life-falls-along-a-political-continuum category. But she's rather endearing, mostly because she has "transparency." That's my latest favorite political word. I'll probably end up getting as sick of it as I am of "ideological" and "imperialistic," but right now, I really like "transparency." Transparency means that the writer (or politician or whoever) shows you all their cards, tells you where they are coming from and where they are going and what devices they will be employing. Like a statistician who explains the methodology behind her statistics before she presents them.

In this case, it means that Vowell knows she's making political quips all over the place. And she's very unfront about where she's coming from. And she's a good writer. Which always excuses a great deal. She uses a particular kind of writing style that I've always been rather jealous of. She gives you the background to each of the assassinations and to the assassins themselves in-between visiting various sites, but she doesn't necessarily do it in any particular order. It's an informal approach to the subject that looks effortless--oh, yes, this person is just gabbing away--but in fact takes a great deal of ability. A sort of well-crafted formlessness.

And Vowell does give the reader a good understanding not only of what happened and why but why this particular person at this particular time. What was going on in Booth's head? Guiteau's? Czolgosz's? It isn't so much Criminal Minds' profiling stuff as it is contexualization. Where they were and what they may have felt and who else was around them. She also does an excellent job introducing the reader to the strange culture of artifact conservation (basically, people will conserve anything and everything) and explaining why we, ourselves, are fascinated. And you learn more about Garfield than I bet you ever learned in high school.

So I recommend it, if you don't mind the partisanship. In general, I read P.J. O'Rourke (and that's it) for my political commentary. If political sidetracks garnish a memoir, history or biography, they had better be excusable, and in this case, they very nearly are. (And people who agree with her will, of course, be enchanted.)

Funny Gal

2005-12-19T13:04:00.000-08:00

Dorothy Sayers is often described in terms of her intellectual attainments (by her supporters and detractors), as falling in love with her own hero (usually by her detractors, including Ngaoi Marsh) and generally being high-falutin and academic and all that. What everyone seems to miss is that Sayers is also extremely funny.

I'm not refering to the blithe Peter Wimsey. Rather, I mean the wit behind the creation. There's a scene in Gaudy Night where Harriet attends a literary cocktail party which is so perfect (and so contemporary), I've excerpted it below:

The room in which [the literary cocktail party] was held was exceedingly hot and crowded, and all the asembled authors were discussing (a) publishers, (b) agents, (c) their own sales, (d) other people's sales, and (e) the extraordinary behavior of the Book of the Moment selectors in awarding their ephemeral crown to Tasker Hepplewater's Mock Turtle . . . A very angry young woman, whose book had been pased over, declared that the whole thing was a notorious farce. The Book of the Moment was selected from each publisher's list in turn, so that her own Ariadne Adams was automatically excluded from benefit, owing to the mere fact that her publisher's imprint had been honored in the previous January. She had, however, received private assurance that the critic of the Morning Star had sobbed like a child over the last hundred pages of Ariadne, and would probably make it his Book of the Fortnight, if only the publisher could be persuaded to take advertising space in the paper. The author of The Squeezed Lemon agreed that advertising was at the bottom of it . . .

"But what's Mock Turtle about?" inquired Harriet.

On this point the authors were for the most part vague; but a young man who wrote humorous magazine stories, and could therefore afford to be wide-minded about novels, said he had read it and thought it rather interesting, only a bit long. It was about a swimming instructor at a watering-place, who had contracted such an unfortunate anti-nudity complex through watching so many bathing-beauties that it completely inhibited all his natural emotions. So he got a job on a whaler and fell in love at first sight with an Eskimo, because she was such a beautiful bundle of garments. So he married her and brought her back to live in a suburb, where she fell in love with a vegetarian nudist. So then the husband went slightly mad and contracted a complex about giant turtles, and spent all his spare time staring into the turtle-tank at the Aquarium, and watching the strange, slow monsters swimming significantly round in their encasing shells. But of course a lot of things came into it--it was one of those books that reflect the author's reactions to Things in General. Altogether, significant was, he thought, the word to describe it.

Harriet began to feel that there might be something to be said even for the plot of [her latest mystery]. It was, at least, significant of nothing in particular.

This is smack dab in the middle of a rather more serious book than usual for Sayers and has nothing, really, to do with the rest of the plot. I think it's hilarious, especially the Book of the Fortnight bit and the stuff about "one of those books that reflect the author's reactions to Things in General." This sort of scene is actually more typical of Sayers than not, although she is usually more circumspect. If you listen closely to her dialog, there's all kinds of wacky stuff going on. And yet no one seems to notice.

I suppose if anyone did notice, her supporters would say she was "witty" and her detractors would say she was "flip" or "snide"--once again, artistry (or craftmanship) gets reduced to a label. So much seems to be invested these days in deciding the merits of a work rather than in actually enjoying it. C.S. Lewis once complained about students who insisted on taking everything they read so seriously, they couldn't appreciate that Jane Austen was funny and Chaucer wanted to make people laugh. Such works aren't even analyzed for whether they were well crafted or not, just whether or not they are ideologically "significant." So Sayers ends up being serious rather than funny when she was usually, for most of her books, more funny than serious.

Sunday Philosophy Club

2005-11-26T07:38:00.000-08:00

Alexander McCall Smith's Sunday Philosophy Club books cannot be read as mysteries. If they are read as mysteries, they will positively disappoint. You might call them "problem" novels rather than mystery or detective novels.

The books have the same gentle, almost whimisical, atmosphere as the Precious Ramotswe books. McCall Smith has a way of evoking large settings through the emotional insights of his characters (rather than through blatant description) so that the #1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels always give me a sense of vast skies and hot days and slow-moving cattle, even when McCall Smith isn't describing the vast skies and hot days and slow-moving cattle.

Unlike the Precious Ramotswe books, the Sunday Philosophy Club books take place in Scotland (Edinburgh) and have a positively European feel to them (more European than British, interestingly enough), although I always get a sense of sun peeping through uncertain rain clouds (which seems more British than European). And the Sunday Philosophy Club books don't really have set-up/pay-off mysteries. The Precious Ramotswe books usually do have a few puzzles--if no complex, Agatha-Christie-like corpses. I found this lack of crime a tad annoying at first, and I still feel that the books are wrongly genre-lized in the libraries. I have found, however, that if I read the Sunday Philosophy Club books as gentle dissertations on the oddity and complexity of human problems, I'm fairly well satisfied. It's the kind of book you can read before you go to bed (and I am usually opposed to the use of literature as a sleep-inducer) or while you are eating. I don't mean to imply that the books are boring. They are, rather, very soothing, like having a quiet, yet absorbing conversation with a very relaxed orator (who might even speak with a faint Scottish burr).

Melusine

2005-11-03T08:26:00.000-08:00

I recently turned in a major research paper (which will ultimately become the first chapter of my thesis) so I have a bit of a breathing space. (For two weeks until the whole reading-paper-reading-paper stuff starts up again.) In that breathing space, I read the book Melusine by Sarah Monette.

And I liked it. It is definitely book one of A SERIES. At least, it had better be considering how many threads she left hanging. It is a rather uneasy book; the first part of the book is extraordinarily well-crafted; the middle of the book wavers about until it rushes, discarding characters left and right, to the end.

The book is told in alternating first-person: Felix (a wizard with a history in the bad part of town) and Mildmay (the principle narrator; a thug from the bad part of town). Felix is off his head for most of the book, and the off-the-head scenes are believable. Felix is also carrying a lot of mental baggage, which is also believable. (And evocative; the writing is good.) That said, Mildmay has the far stronger voice in terms of character. When he talks about Felix, Felix's character also comes clearer. I think the writer was right to keep both narrators, but the difference in strength adds to the uneven feel to the book.

Around the middle of the book about five story strands are added and never finished. Since the book is 421 pages long, I don't see that any of them were necessary unless they were for book 2 (and 3 and 4); if so, I wish some kind of acknowledgement had been made at the end of the book. "Set-up and pay-off" my playwriting professor used to say, and even if payoff isn't going to come for several books, I should at least know that it is still in the cards. We never even learn what the bad guy's motive is.

Nevertheless, I approve of this book being published despite its unevenness because the set-up is so good. It's world fantasy (or, which is rather more popular, city fantasy) where the reader is thrust into a fully-developed, complex civilization on page one. Monette uses the usual world/city fantasy elements (although there are no elves, thankfully; not that I mind elves, but I get tired of the constant array of man-elf-dwarf, etc. This is mostly just a bunch of people). Monette's ability is not that she has created something totally new (check out Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint and C.J. Cherryh's Angel With the Sword) but that the reader believes in the world. Which I don't always. But I believe in this one.

And the characters are more than a little appealing. I'm a big fan of honorable-men- supporting-each-other-through-thick-and-thin fiction. I like Prison Break even though I don't really like the morality at work (I'm not sure one person's life is worth all the deaths and grief and anguish and taxpayer's money that Michael Schofield is expending. The only thing that keeps it working is that Schofield obviously didn't anticipate the problems that have occurred, and now he is in too deep. On the same note, one reason Batman is a preferable hero to so many others is the underlying acknowledgment that he is a vigilante and that there are problems attending such a stance.) In any case, Melusine comes up trumps in this area, and they are some nice subtleties of characterization . . . that are also left hanging; but, hey, at least they are there.

Tey's Grant

2005-09-07T19:16:00.000-07:00

Josephine Tey is a mystery writer. I admire her greatly. Her writing is sardonic in the extreme (although not quite as steeped in sang froid as Catherine Aird). The best description of her novels is a comedy of manners. She has a number of cryptic things to say about newspaper reporters and novelists. My favorite of her books is To Love and Be Wise in which she lightly, but elegantly, satirizes modern novelists in a small village, including the super profound novelist, Silas Weekly, who writes about manure and adultery and corruption in rural locations. A character remarks that the literary press adored Silas until he became popular, when they decided he was old hat.

Anyway, what I like best about Tey is her detective Grant, and the reason I like Grant (Alan is his first name) is that Grant is imperfect. I don't mean imperfect in the "let's deconstruct his flaws" sense, I mean imperfect in the sense that Tey herself stands apart from Grant. She doesn't defend him. With Ngaoi Marsh, one feels that Marsh is always trying to convince you what a truly nice guy Alleyn is. Christie is more detached from Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, but in terms of detection, they make no errors. And Sayers was invested in explicating Wimsey's personality, which is entirely appropriate to the kind of novels that she wrote. But Grant is simply just, this guy, ya know (as somebody says of somebody else in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). He might be her next door neighbor. Maybe her cousin.

He is fully admirable, being intelligent and diligent. Like Alleyn, he is looked up to by his sidekick, but Grant comes right out and admits that he likes a little adulation. (Alleyn has to pretend that he isn't being worshipped, which must be a strain.) Grant himself is also rather detached. His cousin, Laura, can never get him to marry, and Grant misses several opportunities simply because he isn't paying attention (he isn't absent-minded; he is too self-absorbed). Anyway, Grant doesn't want to get married. He is more Archie Goodwin than Wimsey. His female love interest (sort of) is Marta, an actress, who doesn't want to get married either and scares men. She latches onto Grant, probably because he has no fear.

In fact, Grant has tremendous confidence. He is somewhat prideful, not in the "I'm better than others" sense, but in his sureness about his own abilities. He has a "flare" for odd situations, but he isn't even remotedly the insightful, thoughtful, concerned, all-knowing, tortured detective of so much detective fiction. You get the impression that he is a bit self-centered, that he knows and doesn't care. Yet he isn't dislikable. And I think that is a remarkable feat of fiction writing.

Tey books in order of my preference:

To Love and Be Wise (Grant)
Daughter of Time (Grant)
Franchise Affair (Grant has a cameo appearance)
The Singing Sands (Grant)
Brat Farrar
A Shilling for Candles (Grant)
Man in the Queue (Grant)
Miss Pym Disposes (I don't like this one: too sad)

The Dark Pasts of Children's Writers

2005-08-16T08:11:00.000-07:00

The best scene in The Secret Garden is when Mary, infuriated by Colin's tantrum, accuses him of self-martyrdom. Colin, who is truly frightened by the idea of being a hunchback, claims that he "felt a lump." Mary insists on seeing his back and then states, emphatically, "There's not a single lump there! There's not a lump as big as a pin! If you ever say there is again, I shall laugh!"

The narrator continues:

No one but Colin himself knew what effect those crossly spoken childish words had on him . . . now that an angry unsympathetic little girl insisted obstinately that he was not as ill as he thought he was he actually felt as if she might be speaking the truth.

In this passage, Frances Hodgson Burnett reveals why she deserves her place in the echelon of children's writers. Like E. Nesbit, Burnett knew, or remembered, the quality of child fear—quite different from adult fear--the dull terror that children can live with without fully comprehending why and don't have rationals or experience to combat.

It is this quality that keeps Burnett (more than Nesbit) from descending into the maudlin. In The Little Princess, the true horror of Sarah's loss is captured in her nearly catatonic behavior. Little Lord Fauntleroy never experiences anything as horrific but Burnett does a fine job illustrating his homesickness:

Perhaps he was a trifle tired, as his bed-time was nearing, and perhaps after the excitement of the last few days it was natural he should be tired, so perhaps, too, the feeling of weariness brought to him a vague sense of loneliness in the remembrance that to-night he was not to sleep at home . . . and the more he thought of [his mother] the less was he inclined to talk, and by the time the dinner was at an end the Earl saw that there was a faint shadow on his face.

It is this ability to capture childhood unhappiness that gives good writers for children such power. It isn't the same thing as going back and creating a childhood memory. For all the great creativity and fun of Rowlings' books, I never get the impression that she actually remembers how children behave. (C.S. Lewis remembered how children behaved, but his children are ambiguous beings, not adults, not children.) But Burnett and Nesbit had remarkably clear recollections of the fear, terror and uncertainty that children carry with them. (Of the two, Nesbit is somewhat more detached.)

Now there's a difference between remembering one's childhood emotions and being so damaged by one's childhood that one's entire life becomes an attempt at exorcism. Elizabeth Enright, E.M. Boston, Z. Snyder, Barbara Robinson, J. Spinelli, Edward Eager and Laura Ingalls Wilder belong to the first group. Dahl and Barrie belong to the latter, and I can't say that I have ever cared for their books. (There are also writers who remember their childhoods and those who just know what kids like: R.L. Stine belongs to the last category.) The overall inference is that through children's literature, good children's literature, a dark thread runs, a thread that Lemony Snicket exploits quite mischievously. It cannot, however, be recreated in a serious-oh-I'm-reaching-children-now sense. The writer either has it or doesn't.

This more or less brings us to the issue of children's lit v. adult lit. The dark side of children's literature is often dismissed by people who think that all children's literature is sweet innocence and who, furthermore, mistake sweet innocence for a lack of quality. I have never fully understood these people, but then I surprised my mother by browsing the children's section well into my teenage years (and still do, but presumably teenagers are more abashed by that sort of thing). Whenever adults produce that particular 'I'm too mature for those kinds of books' moue in reaction to children's literature, I get nervous, like I do when people tell me that they "LOVED Junior High." These are the sorts of things monstrous aliens say before they bite off your head.

In terms of subject matter and approach, the split between children's lit and adult lit has validity (even in this day and age of supposedly corrupted youth), but often the people promoting the split (like the New York Times Bestseller List) are more concerned with profundity than adult themes. Children's lit, they believe, simply isn't as well-written and deep as adult lit. It's superficial, light, airy, "okay for kids," and so doesn't have to be taken seriously.

Which is just foolish. Harry Potter may be as pointless as Harold Bloom contests but it isn't any worse than The Da Vinci Code. In fact, in many ways, it is far superior.

The problem is the same problem that angstifies the Academy Awards people every year: how do you honor comedy which, on the surface, just doesn't seem as earth-shattering and profound and deep and all that as, say, American Beauty?

Well, first, you acknowledge that comedy is incredibly difficult to make, like Olympic gymnastics: sure, it looks easy, but you go try it. Slight tangent: in High School, I had to do a bit of abstract art with oils. I failed miserably. It basically ended up a dirty mess of paint on a board. And not an on-purpose dirty mess of paint. Just dirty. I only passed because the final project was painting from a still life, and I can do still life with, well, one hand holding a paintbrush. So, don't tell me your 3-year old could paint a Pollock. Cause she can't.

Secondly, profundity is not only easier than comedy but there's profundity and then there's profundity. Crime & Punishment is profound. Not much else is really. Maybe Moby Dick. There you go. There's your standard. A lot of books come off as profound because people die and have affairs and question their purpose in life and have those contemplative well-that's-life endings where people sit around and think about how much they've grown. I HATE those endings. I think they are lousy. (One reason I believe mysteries are so popular is because the ending IS an ending: bad guy dies or gets arrested or, occasionally, gets let go, but something happens.) And for those of you who think art is supposed to imitate life and people do sit around contemplating how much they've grown, see my post under Fiction on why I don't think that's the point of fiction.

Now, there are kids who react well to this kind of profundity, who like the deaths and divorces and mixed plots of young adult literature. Such kids go on to select the same kinds of things from the adult section. I am not trying to argue that such pseudo-profundity doesn't exist in children's literature, I am arguing that lack of profoundity doesn't translate into a lack of profoundly good writing. If you accept my earlier claim, then most things aren't really profound anyway. So the criteria of what makes something worthwhile to read has to undergo re-evaluation. I personally like: it's worthwhile if it's well-written. And it's well-written if it keeps your interest (isn't dull), reads smoothly (or, if it doesn't read smoothly, it reads not-smoothly on purpose), tells a story and isn't stupid.

I don't think my criteria will get me hired on at any universities, but it's a useful standard against which most things can be compared. And a great deal of children's/YA literature compares against it very well indeed.

Harry Potter Oh, Why Not?

2005-07-26T06:36:00.000-07:00

Hey, this is a popular culture site. I have to write about it!

I haven't read Book 6, or even started it, mostly because I'm still stuck halfway through the last one. I've written earlier about my difficulty with unending series and even knowing that Harry Potter ends at 7 doesn't help me much. 3-book series are about my max. And then I just get tired of feeling compelled to keep up with the various plot lines.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those people who thinks that the Harry Potter books are terrible and that Rowlings doesn't deserve to have all the money she can lay her hands on, but then capitalism doesn't bother me, and I don't believe people buy stuff unless they want to. I think there are a number of better written books out there, but I think that Rowlings' writing has an immediacy that explains, and justifies, if it needs to be justified, its popularity. But then I've also let a guy explain the Wheel of Time series to me. I didn't want to read it, but I didn't mind hearing about it.

All that said, the news that someone "much-loved" dies in the latest book (and yes, I know who it is) does not encourage me to run out and buy the book. Even if I didn't know the victim, reading 600 odd pages just to find out wouldn't be enough inducement. I don't object to Rowlings creating darker and darker books. It's her series, and I think she has a point: this is the battle of good and evil. I just, well, don't much care for books that slather me with heart-tugging grief.

It isn't that I mind a good cry. Every time I read Passage by Connie Willis, I bawl my eyes out: at the part when the teacher finally remembers what he has to tell the main character and at the end. Every time. Without fail. And I love that book. It's just that Rowlings has spoken (or people have spoken for her) about killing off various characters as "oh, I have this difficult task ahead of me, it's so terrible that I have to write this" which is precisely the kind of writing that I distrust. I believe that a writer is fully in control of her text. Fully. None of this, "But the muse spoke to me" stuff. You don't like the way the muse is speaking? Get a different muse. Yes, a certain set-up compels a certain ending, but you can change the set-up. As much as you like. It's your story. You're in control. You make it what it is. Nobody takes over. You think that, you're kidding yourself.

With that in mind, I get suspicious over deaths in fiction. At some point, death crosses the line from necessity to manipulation. It stops being the natural outcome of story and becomes a plot tool of surprise and shock, like prescribing a daily dosage of fun, then suspense, then grief. Which isn't de facto bad writing, and I won't answer for Rowlings' reasons for the last three deaths in her last three books. But, as I've said, I get suspicious. (Like people who told me that I had to go see Beaches because it would make me cry. Uh, no thanks. I don't need a dosage of squishy grief today. I'm perfectly capable of finding squishy grief just by being alive.)

But, as I've said, such prescription of emotion isn't de facto bad writing. Aristotle made THE argument in favor of catharsis. Genres like horror depend on it. And many poeple like a frisson of something or other to get them through the day. It just seems to me that if that frisson can't be delivered without killing off major characters, then something is terribly wrong.

Books Where Death Isn't Just A Plot Dosage of Grief

1. Passage by Connie Willis
2. Lord of the Rings by Tolkien
3. Narnia Books by C.S. Lewis
4. Doomsday Book by Connie Wilis
5. Penhallow by Georgette Heyer (one of the saddest books I've ever read)
6. Runner by Cynthia Voigt
7. Shakespeare's Plays
8. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
9. Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
10. Riddlemaster of Hed by Patricia McKillip

Speaking of Anthem

2005-07-25T06:37:00.000-07:00

Speaking of Anthem by Ayn Rand, here is my review from Amazon.com.

This is a completely unfair review to make. I'm not a Ayn Rand fan, and I usually try to avoid reviewing books whose authors I am more or less ignorant about and uninterested in. That said--and all readers having been warned--this is one of the few books I have ever read in my life that I completely and utterly and absolutely loathed. If I ever had the slightest inclination to read The Fountainhead, this book squashed that interest to ant-like proportions. I found it narcissistic, chauvinistic (even by my relaxed "Hey, patriarchy has some good points" standards) and bovinely incompetent in its logic. The hero's solution to his anti-individualist society--creating an "I'm the only individual that counts" society (in other words, ANOTHER anti-individualist society)--plumbs the depths of idiocy. I've been told that Ayn Rand did better than this, but I can't bring myself to find out.

To play fair, other reviews are much more positive so keep reading if I've thoroughly annoyed you.

It really is just about the stupidest book I've ever read, and I'm the kind of reader who thinks things like novelizations have the right to exist. I mean, books are great. All kinds of books. But Anthem is a sorry excuse for killing a tree, or a shrub for that matter. It's just SO bad.

My reaction isn't that unusual. Based on the reviews, people either love, love, love the book or hate it. Now, I could almost see liking it (I probably would have liked it as a teen for about two seconds). I just don't get loving it: religiously, as if it's the best book ever written, the most wonderful, insightful, inspiring book ever. I mean, huh? Try the Bible, people. If you're an atheist and The Book of Job doesn't turn you on, try Kafka (I don't know if he was an atheist, but he is very depressing about communal living). If you're still an atheist and think the Bible is the opiate of the masses, try A.E. Housman. If you're anti-corporate, try Feed by M.T. Anderson. If you really want to understand the horrors of communism, try Solzhenitsyn. If you really want to dig into the moral angst of the individual, try Crime & Punishment. If you want something big and hairy and life-shattering, plow through War & Peace. If you want to sink your teeth into the horribleness of mass hysteria, pick up Lord of the Flies. If you want someone to tell you how great the individual is and how horrible the State is, watch Borg episodes of Star Trek. If that is too vulgar and mass culture for you, read Jane Austen. She was invested in the problem of individual integrity, and her novels are classics so you can feel noble and high-falutin while reading them. Austen herself wasn't noble and high falutin, of course, so beware the stern, satirical and non-self-pitying voice.

If you prefer warm and fuzzy to stern and satirical, there's always Dr. Phil to bolster your individualistic ego. If the particular warm fuzzies you are looking for have to do with the masterful, egotistical hero of Anthem, I suggest The WWF, which has the merit of never, ever taking its masterful, egotistical men seriously. Then get Devil's Cub by Georgette Heyer out of the library. She doesn't take her masterful, egotistical men seriously either. If you insist on so-called "classic" literature about masterful, egotistical men, there's always Lady Chatterley's Lover. It's a really dumb book too, but at least it is better written. (Actually, the best masterful man of literature is the lover/bad guy/husband of Pamela.) Try Jane Eyre, try Alcott's The Long and Fatal Love Chase. But do not waste your time on humorless, unintelligent dreck like Anthem.

Georgette Heyer, Jane Austen: Plot & Story

2005-07-18T10:20:00.000-07:00

Jane Austen's novels are sometimes described as romances. As a Georgette Heyer and Jane Austen fan, I disagree with that designation.

Reason One
In Austen everyone suffers from the "everybody on the make" syndrome. Listening to Pride & Prejudice, I was struck, moreso than I have been in the past, by the hardheadedness underlying all that sensibility. Elizabeth gets angry over Darcy's interference with Bingley & Jane, but her anger is undercut by the fact that everybody is interfering with everybody all the time. Her aunt gives her advice. Elizabeth gives her sister and Charlotte advice. Charlotte gives Elizabeth advice. It's just an orgy of opinions. What is comes down to is: everybody wants love but nobody wants to be poor.

Now, the most respectable of romance novels, such as Georgette Heyer's, try to capture this on-the-make quality of Regency life. Georgette Heyer, who did a large amount of research on the dress and setting of the period, never marries her lords to peasant girls. She's no more democratic than Austen, and there are some Austenish ziggers in her comedy, although in general her comedy is lighter, fluffier and less consequential. In truth, Heyer's writing can be very funny, but she was less concerned with underlying causes and more concerned with writing a sweet story. Everyone is on the make but somehow that fact never rises to the surface. Heyer keeps it carefully under control. Lovely young ladies turn out to be heiresses. Handsome young men turn out to her heirs. Supposed changelings turn out to have Viscounts for fathers. Don't worry. There's no angst here.

Reason Two
This brings us to the other difference between Austen and romances, and it is, I think, the major one. Austen is about story. Most romances are about plot. Plot is the line of story: this happens, then this, then this, now this. Story is best described using a Stephen King image. He describes the process of writing as uncovering a skelton. The story is already there, whole, intact. It just needs to be brought to the surface. With plot, the end is always a twist, a change of fortune, the turn of the wheel. In Heyer's These Old Shades, the non-changeling changeling gets captured by her despicable father, rescued by her saturnine lover, presented to all of Paris, confronted with the supposed fact of her illegitimacy at which she runs away to save her lover from her supposed bad reputation. She is finally recovered by her lover and restored to all her rights and privileges (I'm using lover in the old sense of the word; this is Georgette Heyer; nobody sleeps with anybody until they are married, although the dandies and members of the ton always have had mistresses that occurred offstage and long before the plot began).

Now, in all honesty, this is a whole bunch of fun. But it isn't the same as story. With story, the ending is incipient in the beginning. There's inevitability about it. No twist is necessary to bring about a particular ending. The ending already exists, inviolate, known (although not necessarily revealed yet to the reader). The parts of the story hold together like a statue, a shape. As one reads, one gets a sense of an emerging totality.

Take Elizabeth and Darcy. I wrote earlier about how Darcy & Elizabeth loved each other for who they were, rather than what feats of flirtation they performed (my sister Beth reminded me that Darcy was attracted by Elizabeth's "bright eyes" and Elizabeth was impressed by Darcy's management of his estate). On the other hand, both Elizabeth and Darcy undergo an enlightenment, a point when they reorganize their thoughts and feelings. Elizabeth is angered, then humiliated and aggrieved by Darcy's letter. Darcy is angered, then embarrassed by Elizabeth's accusations of "ungentlemanly" behavior. But the argument has been coming for a long-time. The mutual feelings of attraction (I side with those who think that Elizabeth was always attracted, or at least interested in Darcy) and irritation have been growing for awhile. Elizabeth's visit to Pemberley isn't contrived. Since, as Beth points out, Darcy's property is an extension of himself, Elizabeth's arrival there is, on a metaphorical level, simply one more piece of the relationship pie. Darcy's intercession with Wickham & Lydia isn't a lucky chance. It is forecast by Darcy's behavior at Netherfield Park where he purchases reputation at the expense of Lydia's future (who might not matter but Elizabeth and Jane certainly do), behavior he must rectify.

This quality of inevitability is true of all Austen's books, including, especially, Mansfield Park. Much praise has been heaped up concerning Mary Crawford's wit with the follow-up implication that Austen herself admired Mary Crawford and that Austen only removed Ms. Crawford from the book as a kind of plot contrivance. But Edmund's disillusionment is a long-time coming. The wit of Elizabeth is not, contrary to speculation, reworked in Mary Crawford or, if it is, Austen was older and wiser and knew that wit can be a mean-spirited tool when used by superficial and self-absorbed individuals. Edmund's disillusionment is there from the beginning and no twist needs to bring it about. Austen's interference is only to remove his blinders before he proposes. (And since the said removal comes through Henry Crawford's behavior, it too was foreseeable.)

Conclusion
I'll go so far as to say that all great works have story, rather than just plot. However, plot isn't a bad thing. My abilities as a writer, with a few lucky exceptions, extend about as far as plot. Better to have something happen, after all, than just profound navel-gazing. Still, in the end, story reigns supreme.

Amazon.com reviews and one of mine: My Brother Louis Measures Worms

2005-07-13T06:23:00.000-07:00

The following is a review I wrote for amazon.com. Unfortunately, amazon.com reviews more often than not turn into tabulations against or in favor of the book. That is, rather than voting on whether or not a review has been helpful, people vote on whether or not they agree with you, which isn't the same thing. My review of Ayn Rand's Anthem is 9 to 8 (9 "helpful", 8 "not helpful") but since all I do in the review is blast the book, I think the 8 have a point. On the other hand, my extremely complete review of Richard Evan's Lying About Hitler (about Holocaust denier, David Irving) is 33 "helpful," 15 "not helpful." My bet is that my review is one of many that have become silent battlegrounds over the issue of Holocaust denial. As you can see, the Holocaust deniers are losing.

No one has voted at all on the following review, but I wrote it because the review before mine was so negative (and for such a bizarre reason; the reviewer was upset by "the use of obscenities . . . and the preoccupation with pregnancy") and had way too many "helpful" votes! I couldn't vote "not helpful" since even though I didn't agree with the woman, she had listed her objections clearly and honestly. So, in my own little effort to bring in a positive vote, I wrote the following:

This is one of the funniest--and sweet-hearted--books I have ever read. The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is a better book, but My Brother Louis Measures Worms also by Barbara Robinson is the book that I own and have read over and over and over again. It takes place in the kind of timeless neighborhood that I grew up in, where kids spend all day outside, coming in only at dusk. I don't know if neighborhoods exist like this anymore . . . so reading My Brother Louis Measures Worms may be a stroll down nostalgia lane. In many ways, it reminds me of the movie The Sandlot (the original, not the latest version) which captures to perfection my childhood memories of playing baseball with my brother (Daniel, not Louis).

The book's family is eccentric but not unbelievable. Robinson has the ability to create likeable and realistic (and intact) nuclear families without crossing the line into syrupy cliches. The book is split into short stories (that follow a consecutive timeline) and every scenario conveys the positive--if sometimes bewildering--aura of a happy childhood. My favorite story is probably the mother getting lost by following the wrong cars to flower shows but the story about the dog who comes and stays forever reminds me of my dad (who has never cared for pets).

Recommendation: It's not as classic as The Best Christmas Pageant Ever but is better than The Best School Year Ever. Buy it!

The Reality of Fantasy (or the Fantasy of Reality)

2005-06-10T07:34:00.000-07:00

What with the Narnia books being made into a movie and the revival of Lord of the Rings, I've pondered if we are living in a fantastical age, if we've somehow wormholed back to the time of Spenser and Shelley and Shakespeare. But no, I tell myself, this is the age of Reality TV shows. Except once I think about it, the 16th century was kind of the age of Reality TV shows too: all that hard-headed Elizabethean diplomacy rampaging alongside nostalgic romanticism (which is one reason Shakespeare is so multifaceted and bizarre).

In a way, our age is more like the 16th century, more like the 16th century, that is, than the 1970s were. I think the burst of mysticism and magick and earth goddess worship and Joseph Campbelling and such in the 1970s wasn't born out of hard-headedness or a desire for reality. Wishful thinking maybe. The culture of the 1970s was much closer to the romantic goop of the 19th century (more late Wordsworth than Austen). Coleridge could have made the transition from romantic goop to realistic fantasy and Keats was no drooping poet in white, despite the maudlin poetry. (He was more stocky, hacking up blood, belligerent poet.) Still, the romantics come off collectively as rather unrealistic. Supporting the French Revolution always strikes one as rather unrealistic. But perhaps that is the benefit of hindsight.

In any case, I think the fantasy of our age is aimed more at realism. I'm not going to say whether that is good or bad. At the root of it all is myth-making, but the interpretation is far more given to rationality. This is, I think, why world fantasy is so popular (as opposed to the purely modern fantasy of Paul Beagle (A Fine & Private Place) or the witty fantasy of Douglas Adams (The Long-Dark Tea Time of the Soul), the fairytales of Nicholas Stuart Gray or the even darker fairytales of Tanith Lee. Rather, the focus is on fully developed worlds, fully developed societies in which the action unwinds not in a narrow stretch of geography (see Cherryh's Rusalka) but takes place in a fully complex arena (see Cherryh's science-fiction series Foreigner).

This brings us to the fantastic Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clark; Pullman's trilogy; David Eddings, Stephen Donaldson, McCaffrey, McKillip (although McKillip's Riddle-Master series is much more character-focused than place focused); Dune (well, yes, it's sci-fi but the lines sometimes blur and this is one of them); Orson Scott Card's Seventh Son series, J.K. Rowlings and so on.

Unfortunately, all this world fantasy puts me, as a writer, at a disadvantage. My writing ability stops somewhere south of world development, and I have to fill the gap with craft and luck. (The trick is to pick one world and keep adding to it with each story and voila! before you know it, you've got a fully developed world.) I have a very high opinion of those authors who can devise functional worlds where they seem to know the population density, imports and exports and even when the trains run. And I can marvel at (and covet) the popularity.

The popularity stems not, I think, from escapism; at least, reading world fantasy is as prone to escapism as any reading (even reading hoity-toity, important, non-fiction tomes lends itself to escapism). I think it comes down rather to the sense of reality, the idea that the world is a complicated place. Even the grad students I attend classes with are less enamored than grad students used to be of blanket ideologies and assumptions. Maybe they've all been brainwashed by deconstructionalists but I choose to think they are simply more mature. As one grows older, it's a little hard to avoid the fact that the world is a complicated and fascinating place. As always, fiction reflects reality. So we revive Lord of the Rings, and we bring back Star Wars and if they fall short of our expectations, it is only because our expectations have grown expedientially (anyone remember the bobbing space stations of Classic Trek?). We don't necessarily expect fiction to solve our problems (only bad fiction does that) but we do expect it to mirror us successfully, to show us our face, and we select and discard mirrors accordingly.

Animals That Talk

2005-05-20T05:27:00.000-07:00

I don't get it.

Okay, let me rephrase that.

I don't get books which use animals exclusively (no people) where the animals do all the same things humans do and wear the same kinds of clothes and have the same kind of relationships and the only difference seems to be that they live in burrows or whatnot but otherwise, they are really just humans with furry faces. And I don't get it.

I'll leave Watership Down alone since I've never read it and I saw only 1/4 of the movie when I was a kid; I got so scared my mom took me outside and let me run around the lobby and eye the candy counter. But I have never understood the appeal of Brian Jacques' books (and please don't hate me, Brian Jacques' fans!) As far as I can tell, it makes precious little difference in Brian Jacques' books whether the heroes are mice, rats, frogs, humans, coyotes or whatever.

Let me elaborate.

In Beatrix Potter, the animal-ness of the animals is intrinsic to the plot. They may be temporarily "dressed up" but they always revert to their animal natures, and their animal natures are at the crux of the stories. Peter Rabbit is acting like a rabbit, sneaking into the farmer's garden to steal cabbages. The squirrels in Squirrel Nutkin act like squirrels. Sure, they talk but their animalness is never forgotten. You couldn't replace Peter Rabbit with George Ape. (Speaking of simians, the same is true of the Curious George books.) C.S. Lewis does this in the Narnia books. There's no point in the animals acting human; there are plenty of humans acting like humans (poorly and nicely) to go around.

Having said that, I still don't much care for anthropormophized animals but at least with Beatrix Potter and H.A. Rey and Lewis, I get it. Still, I prefer my protagonists to be human. Even that old-time classic The Wind in the Willows didn't change my mind--really, I'm an anthro-chauvinist.

After all, why write a book about frogs or moles or rats acting like humans when, voila, you could do a book about humans acting like humans?

Here's what I think may be the answer. The appeal (and C.S. Lewis says as much in his autobiography and in Out of the Silent Planet) is the idea of animals and people associating, being pals, hanging out. It isn't the biology that they like (a la Gerald Durrell); it's the image of animal-ness (or creature-ness) within the human sphere: something you can buddy up to and which won't eat you. Many people like the idea of conversing with animals, as if animals would say more back than "Mine. Mine. Mine." or "Feed me. Feed me. Feed me NOW." (Or, as The Cat says on Red Dwarf, "Shiny thing. Shiny thing. Shiny thing. Ooh, now I get real big and try to scare people.") For many people, there is something attractive about the idea of having an animal friend, not an alien animal friend (a la Ursula Leguin and C.J. Cherryh) but a lion or badger or panda as a friend.

Even as a kid, this never appealed to me. I wanted a lion cub, yes, but I never thought it would like me. This lack of sympathy for my furry/scaly cousins was reflected in my reading material. As I mentioned, I didn't much care for Wind in the Willows. I love the Narnia books but mostly for the people and for the symbolism. I read Animal Farm and yes, it's great, but I couldn't get into the movie. I adored the movie Babe, but I think Babe is an exception. (The animals are very animalish and the whole sheepherding thing is necessary to the plot--that is, it isn't pigs and sheep and dogs pretending to be humans, its pigs and sheep and dogs acting very piggy and sheepy and doggy. Beside, James Cromwell is so very, very great.) I read Black Stallion when I was ten or so and liked it but never picked up another horse book except Black Beauty which bored me senseless. I quite enjoy the BBC version of All Creatures Great and Small but honestly, the thing I like best about it is the fact that the vets actually put animals down.

Let me clarify that.

No, I don't like watching animals get killed, but I like people treating animals like animals and not like people in animal clothing.

As far as I'm concerned, my cats consider me a food bowl and their degree of love ends about two feet passed the food bowl. They aren't little people. They're animals. They're kind of dumb; their learning capacity is about the same as a two-day old amoeba. They are more fun to watch than fish and less involved than dogs. But they aren't people. If they were people, I'd want them to get a job and pay part of the rent. Not to mention the fact that they puke on my rugs and never change the litter box and like to play "I'm on this side of the door/now I'm on this side of the door" twenty times a day. One endures this with toddlers because they grow up. One endures it with pets because they are cuddly enough (and company enough) to pay off the downside. (And you can leave them for long weekends.) With anyone else, the house visit would end very quickly.

Which may explain my complete disinterest in the possibility of me and my cats exchanging views on the universe.

My Book Lists a la High School

2005-05-13T05:27:00.000-07:00

There's a general idea out there that being profound necessarily entails being depressed, depressing and generally angst-filled. It's the Occam's Razor approach: if there is a negative explanation for something, it is probably the right one; any positive assumptions made about the "dominant narrative" (that is, the facts that most people know about an event) are probably wrong and only naïve, gullible people believe them.

I think this attitude goes a long way towards explaining High School reading lists. Being profound about tragedy is a good deal easier than being profound about comedy and gets you a lot more kudos. If you debunk things like middle-class America (a favorite Hollywood occupation), people say you are "edgy," and "hard-hitting," but heaven help you if you go wry and positive and life-affirming.

To illustrate, below I have included two lists from my amazon.com profile. The first is Depressing Books I Read in High School. The second is the Reading List I Wished I'd Had.

Depressing Books I Read in High School

1. The Pearl by John Steinbeck

The quintessential depressing book.

2. Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare

Naturally.

3. The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne

See Hester with her "A"; see Hester in the woods; see the soulful preacher; see the brooding husband. Oh, the angst.

4. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Hardy

Actually, I might have read it in college; it's the ultimate Fate Hates You book.

5. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

I quite like Conrad (see #6).

6. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

I read this voluntarily in High School and LOVED it: go figure.

7. Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Also voluntary; it blew me away, but I doubt I'll ever read it again.

8. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

Yick, yick, yick. Yick.

9. Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya

An East Indian Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

10. The Crucible by Arthur Miller

Nowadays, I get tired of everything being compared to McCarthyism, but as a teen, I liked this play very much.

11. A Separate Peace by John Knowles

Dead Poet's Society, sort of.

12. MacBeth by Shakespeare

GREAT!

13. A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens

I remember liking this although I never read anything by Dickens now. I think it was the handsome, brooding Sydney C. who got my attention.

14. Cancer Ward by Solzhenitsyn

A voluntary read, I have no idea why; 10th graders are strange.

15. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

I've never been able to understand why we read this; it isn't particularly classic or good; it's kind of pointless and squishy.

So, it wasn't all bad but here's the Reading List I Wished I'd Had (or List I Would Use if I were an Literature Teacher)

1. Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Would add much needed variety to the curriculum and still satisfy the "it can't be good unless it is depressing" crowd. 100 Years of Solitude is better but too long.

2. Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

Good for interdisciplinary approaches: historical analysis; is Tey right or wrong?

3. All the Trouble in the World by P.J. O'Rourke and Lasso the Wind by Thomas Egan

Political/social commentary from two writers on both sides of the political spectrum. Similar approaches, although O'Rourke is funnier. Just a couple of chapters from both to give some examples of essay writing/travelogues.

4. Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

Not as difficult as Shakespeare or Shaw but still fun and good exposure to witty playwriting.

5. The Goats by Brock Cole

Good addition of YA (YA!) literature, a hugely ignored section in most English programs.

6. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Wonderful author and fun book. Good introduction to 19th century English prose.

7. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

Much needed addition of great children's literature to curriculum.

8. Her Stories by Virginia Hamilton

African American fairytales (two ignored subjects in one).

9. "The Bear" by William Faulkner

Only the greatest American writer ever!

10. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Much needed addition of sci-fi to the curriculum.

11. Divine Comedy by Dante

Difficult but worthwhile; I suggest The Inferno and a prose translation.

12. On Writing by Stephen King

Possibly the best book on writing out there and much needed addition of popular writer to a curriculum that pretends nobody wrote anything after Go Ask Alice.

13. Bible

So it's not P.C., so get over it. It's a HUGE part of Western literature and absent any religious training, any self-respecting humanities major ought to be familiar with it.

14. Poems by Rilke

Actually, I just like "The Panther" but it's a change from the Romantic poets.

15. Much Ado About Nothing by Shakespeare

Great teenage topics: note writing, gossip, love at first sight, brothers who don't get along, partying, friendship, jealously. It's chock full!

Documents in the Case

2005-05-11T11:57:00.000-07:00

Documents in the Case by Dorothy L. Sayers is one of the world's unsung classics. It isn't even one of Sayer's best known books. There are possibly several different reasons for this: it is not a Peter Wimsey mystery; it uses the letter-writing approach, which, despite the proliferation of fictional teenage diaries and such isn't the easiest approach to sell. I don't even especially like reading that kind of thing.

However, I had the privilege of hearing Documents in the Case read by the masterful Nigel Anthony long before I read the book. Nigel Anthony captures the various personalities excellently. The more you listen, as I do, the more stunning Sayers' achievement is.

First of all, she manages, as I think few authors who employ the letter writing style do, to create pieces that seem to generate naturally from the writers' personality. You do not learn about Miss Milsom or John Munting by reading their correspondence. You experience the writings of fully fleshed out characters that exist at some point offstage. The result is that the book is filled with highly complex personalities who, like all people, are seen from various perspectives and who do not react all of a piece to any given event.

With Peter Wimsey novels, I always feel that Wimsey, through Sayers, is in control of the text. I don't mind especially since I like Wimsey, but it does lend him an untouchable quality. But John Munting—the Wimsey of Documents in the Case—is an intelligent, perceptive, yet fully flawed individual who is seen repeatedly from other people's perspective. At one point in the book, Munting reports that he and his wife never discuss the murder "so tender had our minds become." And yet, because of this fragmented awareness of difference, the reader can guess that it is actually John Munting who is so sensitive and that, Elizabeth, his wife, a long-suffering woman, is humoring him. This kind of detachment from the hero (who is quite personable) is not really possible in Wimsey novels.

Likewise, when the murdered man's son shows up, he comes across as charismatically as Munting but of a totally different caste of mind. He is the "publisher" of the Documents since it is he, Paul, who collects the letters and statements to hand on to the D.A. His wry, black and white, yet oddly heroic voice gains its own credence. He is not refracted through Munting and therefore, he and Munting's somewhat antagonistic yet working relationship gains a edge of reality.

The result is a book in which the author presents themes and plot without intercession or moral blindsiding. It speaks for itself, a tremendously difficult thing to do (Shaw just didn't bother) unless you are Shakespeare or Austen. I think Austen achieved this in Mansfield Park, and I agree with those who consider Mansfield Park her best work. It isn't my favorite, but I do think it is her best. Through Fanny, Austen created a world in which she withheld judgment (except for the punishments at the end of course). She created characters and allowed them to carry out their actions without interference. That does not mean she didn't have a moral perspective; she clearly does. But she allows it to speak for itself. Which may be why Mansfield Park elicits such various reactions, from those who are convinced that Austen wrote it when she was depressed to those who are convinced that Austen saw herself as Fanny or saw herself as an anti-Fanny. Strange how reluctant people are to allow for the creative instinct.

To return to Documents in the Case, Sayers' moral perspective is that murder is wrong. This is surprisingly refreshing in a day when feeling sorry for the murderer (I mean, fictional murderer) is somehow suppose to translate into wishing they could get a lesser sentence. Sayers had a medieval sensibility which enabled her to create sympathetic, even charismatic murderers who still get the full punishment of the law. This, she seems to say, is the cost of a civilized society. Her theme is of the off-kilterness of life in general. She wrote the book with the help of scientist, Robert Eustace, and the science supplies the solution to the mystery as well as the thematic foundation. I won't go into it since I don't believe in spoiling mysteries, but Sayers does a thoroughly respectable job of pulling the theme through the book to its conclusion. There's an accompanying jarring of fate and randomness. It's a discussable book, although I doubt English classes will ever use it.

Ahhh, if I had my way . . .

Cinderella: No Restraints

2005-05-05T14:33:00.000-07:00

Interesting discussion in my class on Wednesday. The book under discussion was a sentimental novel/autobiography by an African-American woman (Harriet Wilson) writing in the 19th century about black indentured servitude in New England. The point of the book is that racism existed in New England in the 1800s, which is the sort of thing that upsets people who are surprised by that sort of the thing. (They aren't surprised that there was racism, they are surprised—shocked, shocked—that their high school history teachers simplified the North v. South conflict by telling them that the North was free of slavery/racism before the Civil War. These are also people who believed their teachers in high school. One of the weird aspects of college is that my professors keep trying to DISMANTLE and FIX my wrong-headed assumptions, but I don't make those sorts of assumptions so they just get aggravated, and I just get tired.)

Wilson's book actually posed a problem for abolitionists in the 19th century; New England abolitionists rather collectively despised it for detracting from the "real" problem. And they had a point. It's hard to read Wilson's book and then to read Franklin Douglass' Life and still feel that her problems should be addressed first or instead of. I suppose in a perfect world, the abolitionists would have said, "Yes, I understand. There are problems that need to be fought in our own community even as we are battling horrors elsewhere." Yeah, I'll remember to mention this approach to the next avid environmentalist I meet.

Anyway, the part of the discussion I want to talk about is the ineffectualness of the men in the book. The strongest character in the book is the evil stepmother. The men goop around and utter platitudes, but they don't do much. As one student pointed out, this is a convention of sentimental novels, and I have a theory about it. In order to write about strong women, in a period in time when they had few legal rights (comparatively), the first order of business would be to dispose of the men. This is also the first order of business in many fairytales. And it is the first order of business in the Narnia books. That is, if you have a set of people (women, children) who are restricted from grand, old adventures by social conventions and restraints, the first thing you do is get rid of the restrainers. Or, to be less chauvinistic, the fixer-uppers. You can't have Cinderella exhibiting strength by enduring her stepmother if everytime the stepmother opens her mouth, hubby tells her to put a sock-in-it.

Speaking of which, I once flipped the story of Cinderella in my head, all the male parts female; the female parts male, and the first problem I had was, "Why doesn't he leave?" It wasn't that I thought Cinderella couldn't leave; I was reared by a feminist. It was that Cinderella staying was far more acceptable (even if wimpy) to the culture of the time than for Cinder-bob to stay. I mean, after all, Cinder-bob could go join the army or go fishing or get some inheritance and go buy land or fight for his inheritance in the courts. He might end up like Jack the Beanstalk but still, he had options. But Cinderella, unless she pulled a Shakespeare-girls-dressed-as-boys-going-into-the-woods stunt could be a milliner, a governess or a prostitute. And how unfun are those employment options! (If she had more money, she could be a courtesan, but the whole point of the story is that she doesn't. A little later on timewise, her solution would be to write emotionally charged novels, marry a vicar and die from consumption, but Cinderella was a tad earlier than the Brontes.)

Anyway, for a truly wonderful Cinderella tale about a pro-active, modern Cinderella, check out the picture book Cinder Edna by Ellen Jackson.

2005-04-30T14:05:00.000-07:00

And . . . I think it's a book

Latter-Day Who?

2005-04-10T16:01:00.000-07:00

I recently read the YA book Millions by Frank Cottrell Boyce. It is a very clever book with one of the funniest lines I've read in YA literature: at the beginning of Chapter 2, "Anthony can't believe I've got this far without mentioning European Monetary Union." It has a writing style similiar to that used in The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Night-Time. The latter was written by Mark Haddon (both writers live in England). There are other similiarities, such as both books are told in first person, the narrator of both is a young boy with an odd personality. Both have bitter-sweet endings and both tackle contemporary subjects.

The similiarities end there because while Haddon is a writing a family story about a specific incident, Boyce is writing about a large incident that happens to a specific family. The difference is notable because Boyce makes a mistake that I don't think Haddon would fall into.

The mistake Boyce makes is that he uses a religious group to make a point, but he gets a whole bunch of facts wrong (and they're not the narrator's wrong facts, they are the author's wrong facts). And unfortunately, the group he picked is a group that I happen to know something about, being one of them, which is Latter-Day Saints.

Boyce is using the group to make a point. The story is about two brothers who find a sack of pounds two weeks before Britain goes over to the Euro. And they have to figure out what to do with it (other than give it back). The younger brother, who is fascinated by Saints (Catholic, not Mormon), wants to do something good, which sounds more sanctimonious than it is. And the older brother just wants to dispose of the money successfully. But what they discover is (1) inflation is a problem since if you offer ten bucks to a fellow student to get your lunch for you, they're going to demand more for anything harder; (2) everybody wants money, not just greedy capitalists but well-meaning charities as well. Money is complicated. Money can do good. Inflation is bad. It's really a very clever book.

They also discover that people become unprincipled over money. Which is where the Latter-Day Saints come in. They are used as the token religious group that says it is anti-money, until you offer them some when they will all turn into liars.

Now, Boyce's treatment of this part of the book is very light, and I'm not particularly opposed to his use of Latter-Day Saints. It's just, he got so many details wrong.

First of all, he describes the Latter-Day Saints as wearing white shirts and not owning anything. So, it sounds like he is describing missionaries, especially since he throws in bits about them being young and talking with different accents. And they ride bikes too. There's only three of them, but hey, maybe there's only three (rather than four; pairs of two) in England. The narrator gets the idea that the Saints live in some kind of commune (which is sort of accurate) which is why he gives them money.

In other words, from the narrator's point of view, it makes perfect sense that he would think what he does and make the assumptions that he does, and minor details, like one of the Mormons, Eli (where are their nametages?), coming over on his own to install a security camera in the kid's house shouldn't be that big a deal. And the fact that they carry briefcases to the laundramat. Do missionaries in England carry briefcases? Anyway, details-semtails, who cares?

Except the author does know enough to have the narrator go to www.latterdaysaints.org as a link (it gets you to www.mormon.org.) and also for the narrator to learn about the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Except that (1) you wouldn't learn about the Mountain Meadows Massacre on www.mormon.org (although you probably could at the Church History site on www.lds.org if you searched hard enough) and (2) www.mormon.org does not refer to Joseph Smith as wearing "spectacles" (in any way; I checked) when he translated the Book of Mormon (although some Mormons do believe that).

In other words, the kid is bright enough to find out about "spectacles" and the Mountain Meadows Massacre but too dumb to figure out that these are Mormon missionaries.

Personally, I don't think they are suppose to be Mormon missionaries, which is too bad because I could see a house of Mormon missionaries taking 3,000 pounds and buying VCRs and stuff and not telling anyone, including their Mission President. I actually think that is a big hoot of an idea. But, as I say, I don't think that's what the author is aiming for. For the sake of theme, he wanted some ultra-religious cult, the kind of organization where "they all lived together in the same house and in the daytime they all went off together like the twelve Apostles" and where "they walk[ed] in a line . . . as they passed you they would each nod at you, one after the other, like ducks in a shooting gallery" (which is cute writing, but I've never in my life seen 20 year Mormon missionaries act like that, even the really uptight ones), but he didn't actually know any cults, so instead of inventing one, he picked a random weirdo religious group out of the air . . . and didn't even bother to research his own link. It's pretty obvious that the kid's internet research is whatever little bits of info Boyce actually knows about Mormons, and he lays out those bits in the text so that he can have the kid say, "It was all a bit literal," which again, is a fairly funny remark, except that the kid means it negatively and this is a kid who is so literal that he buys a whole bunch of birds from a pet shop and releases them like Francis of Assisi. But the kid isn't negative about Francis of Assisi so why is he negative about Mormon theology? Unless the author just wanted him to be negative about Mormon theology.

In other words, after awhile, it started feeling a bit anti-Mormon. It doesn't quite cross the line, I still recommend the book, but as my parents used to say about anti-Mormon pamphlets at the Hill Cumorah Pageant, "I could write better stuff than this."

The Mystery Solution I've Never Liked

2005-04-03T18:55:00.000-07:00

One of the most common solutions in mysteries is the confrontation without proof. The confrontation without proof is where the detectives figure out the identity of the murderer but because they have no proof, they confront the guilty party with THE TRUTH. The guilty party then crumples into a heap and begs for mercy. Ann Perry novels often end like this, with the murderer crushed into weeping silence while the detectives stand around looking profound and righteous, kind of like Mulder at the end the circus episode.

I've never bought into this solution (except in a few special circumstances) because I don't believe that people behave like this. It's the one reason I've never totally bought into Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead idea. At the base of both is this profoundly naive idea that confronting people verbally with THE TRUTH will somehow break down their defenses.

And I always wonder: who ARE these people? Because the people that I know and the person that I am are much more self-protective. Sayers captured this perfectly in Gaudy Night when Harriet says, about her trial, that if she had committed the murder, she probably would have felt totally justified and felt extremely put upon that she'd been arrested at all.

Because that's how people truly behave. C.S. Lewis understood this (just read Screwtape Letters) and Jesus understood this (that's what all the "those who have ears to hear" stuff is about). But lots of people don't. There's probably even a part of me that thinks that if you could just say "it" (THE TRUTH about a crime or That Person or The Family or The President or politics, etc. etc.) in the right way, other people would go "Ooh-eer, I never thought of that before. Of course, now you've said it, you're right."

But really, people don't behave like that. If a Speaker for the Dead really did show up at a funeral, half the people would disagree and half would be offended and okay, the two people who thought he (she) was spot on would use it as some sort of weapon: "Ha, ha, you see we were right."

It isn't that I'm depressingly negative and think that people don't want to hear THE TRUTH or that I am confusedly relativistic and think there are "so many kinds of truth" la la la. It's that I think that truth is approached through the lens of personality. I've had conversations with people where I've realized that we didn't exactly disagree, we just came at the same point very differently. Like the fact that both lefties and religious righties think we live in a corrupt, hedonistic society, but they get to that place on completely different trains. And even I wouldn't disagree with EVERYTHING they say (I just don't want to end up at that place; I'd rather wave at it from the window).

It's why my Church has a point when it says that you can't convert people through argument; they have to feel the spirit. Despite the fact that I sometimes think members use "feeling the spirit" as an excuse not to use their noggins. But still, the point is valid.

Because the idea that one speech or one perspective or one approach will suddenly bring people together or force a confession is just, well, kind of silly. Even setting aside the defensiveness of human beings and the fact that people can lie to themselves and that criminals are not exactly renowned for thinking clearly, it's kind of silly. It's up there with people who think international problems could all be solved if the right people would just sit down and talk--it's a fundamentally academic idea: eloquent language is so powerful it will shatter people's innate convictions, their personal beliefs, their views of the universe and their very big guns just like that.

Back to murders: there are some exceptions. I buy the end of Murder in Mesopotamia, for instance. But then when the murderer confesses, he doesn't break down and cry, he just says, "I'm so tired." I don't buy the end of Murder at the Bellona Club since I think the murderer was too self-protective to gracefully confess and then shoot himself. Like I've said, I rarely buy Ann Perry endings. The ending of Murder on the Orient Express is perfect (but has never been done correctly on film or radio, despite Lauren Bacall: the mama should start bellowing in a strong Southern voice). In real life, I think murderers are probably a lot like they are on CSI where they give up information when they think it will help them. Or Barney Miller where they shrug their shoulders and call their lawyers. Isn't that how most of us behave? Change is a long-term internal process, not instant pesto "I'm so happy now." (One of my disagreements with Touched By An Angel--oh, don't get me started!)

Unending Series

2005-03-18T05:47:00.000-08:00

I've never been a big fan of World Fantasy—you know, the sort of thing: a Tolkienesque World in which a cast of thousands has adventure after adventure after adventure. Kind of like Harry Potter, except more characters, and you have no guarantee that it will end at Book 7.

I usually run out of steam on Book 3 of just about any series. Yes, even Harry Potter. I still haven't finished the latest, although it appears to be better written than the one before. But, well, I read three books and then I read number four, and surely, that was enough?

With World Fantasy, I'm simply not that interested in flora and fauna. Many people like the idea of being exposed to a different world; they can hang out, tourist-fashion, and watch the scenery. But I prefer people—even in art, I prefer people, which is why I'd rather look at the Pre-Raphaelites than the Impressionists. Give me garishly colored knights any day over blurry trees.

Which leads us to the notable exceptions to my avoidance of World Fantasy:

Tolkien. Naturally. Not only is he the original, at least in the 20th century, but he is such a very, very good original. (I've even read the Silmarillion, which is heavy going but worth it.) The characters exist in an already-made world which Tolkien never explains (in the trilogy) except in footnotes; the stuff is just there, already understood, already old.

C.S. Lewis. Naturally. Besides the fact that the Narnia books are not particularly detailed on the flora and fauna front (to Tolkien's great disgust; but then, Lewis was more interested in people as well), you get effortless prose and straightforward, non-demanding theology. The story reigns supreme. (And the 7 books are short so they more or less count as 3.)

C.S. Lewis is much more detailed in his science-fiction books, poetically so, but even there, the fascination seems to be less in creating a fully defined world than in dipping into a particular culture: anthropologist versus geologist.

The incredible C.J. Cherryh. I'm in the process of making my way through the second Foreigner series trilogy. Cherryh at least has the sense to divide her ongoing series into sets of three (she is currently on her third set of three). C.J. Cherryh is very nearly a genius. With a few exceptions (including a Superman novelization), her writing is almost flawless, and she does the thing that only Tolkien succeeded at (partly by default) and C.S. Lewis decided to avoid: she gives you a sense of a fully complicated world in which events impinge on each other: politically, socially, culturally, geographically. Her books are more people-centered than place-centered, yet place is omnipresent to the action. It's quite extraordinary.

Outside of these authors, whenever people tell me about a fantasy/World series that is fifteen books long, my first reaction is, "Please no." Which could lead me into a discussion about how much I disliked the soap opera-keep-you-endlessly-watching aspect of television shows, but I'll save that for a rainy day.

Being Read To

2005-02-23T14:04:00.000-08:00

Readers matter. I grew up being read to, mostly by my mom. Sometime around fourth/fifth grade, I began reading mostly on my own, although it wasn't until Junior High that the custom fizzled out. Ten years later I rediscovered the pleasure of being read too (especially while I'm cooking, cleaning, sorting clothes, etc.): the marvelous world of audio books.

Now, I have my pet peeves. I don't like abridged audio books. I prefer professional readers to volunteer readers and big-name actors. And I won't listen to a book with a poor reader, no matter how much I like it.

That said, let me return to the point about actors/professional readers. Some of my favorite readers, including Simon Prebble, Patrick Tull, Hugh Dickson and Rosemary Leach are also actors, either on stage or in film. Some do work for radio. But they aren't big name actors, and reading is obviously a way for them to supplement their incomes.

Other actors, such as Derek Jacobi, are not readers, but they get chosen to do readings because they are well-known. That is, Derek Jacobi, who played Brother Cadfael in the movies, reads Brother Cadfael books and David Suchet reads Agatha Christie Poirot mysteries. And they are terrible. David Suchet, who is a magnificent Poirot, is a terrible reader.

In other words, reading is a gift. On the opposite tack from David Suchet is Ian Carmichael, best known as Peter Wimsey. It is obvious even from the films that Carmichael understands the role (much better than Edward Petheridge ever did), but he just looks wrong, like if you cast David Spade as Darcy (David Spade would make a excellent Wimsey, by the way). However, as a reader, Carmichael is incomparable. He is one of the best out there.

One of the attributes I like in a reader is an ability to read different parts without taking the time to "perform." That is, I want a fast reader (Patrick Tull is a great reader but a little too slow for my liking), and I want to get a sense of the characters, but I really don't want a reader's theatre kind of deal. If I wanted that, I'd get a reader's theatre tape/CD.

On the other hand, I want some inflexion (which is what amateur readers aren't too good at). Ian Carmichael supplies all these qualities.

Here is my list of good readers:

Ian Carmichael
Joan Hickson for Christie's short stories/Rosemary Leach for her long stuff
Simon Prebble (most beautiful voice)
Patrick Tull
Hugh Dickson
Stephen Thorne
Glyn Houston
The magnificent Tony Robinson (yes, Baldrick—he mostly does children's books)
George Guidall reading Dante's Inferno (may have to go to your library for this; it's worth it!)
Nigel Anthony
Claire Bloom
Michael York

The Singular Intolerances of Elizabeth and Darcy

2005-02-11T05:44:00.000-08:00

One of the interpretations of Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice is that both Darcy and Elizabeth exhibit pride and prejudice (better known to us 21st century folks as "snottiness" and "intolerance"). I think this is true, but I think their prejudices, or intolerances, take separate and distinct forms.

The A&E version of P&P, starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle, captures this very well. (And yes, I have read the book too.) At the beginning of the movie/book, Elizabeth goes to Bingley's house to care for her sister Jane. While there, she joins the house party, and she and Darcy have a quasi-argument. Elizabeth takes Darcy to task for being such an absolutist to which Darcy quickly responds, "And yours [your fault] is to willfully misunderstand [others]."

Elizabeth is disconcerted and rightfully so. It isn't the last time Darcy will correctly size up Elizabeth. In fact, Darcy is a remarkably good judge of people. Later, when Bingley confesses how badly he writes letters (this scene is not in the A&E version), Darcy perceives that Bingley is indirectly bragging since the upshot of Bingley's "confession" is that his ideas flow so rapidly, he can't convert them to text.

In the A&E version, Darcy's understanding of Bingley is humorously expressed in the scene where Bingley tells Mrs. Bennett that he loves the country. Darcy, startled, turns to him and says, "You do?" It's such a patently inaccurate statement--Bingley would die of boredom in the country if Jane wasn't there--that Darcy is thrown, as they say, for a loop.

Darcy's intolerance then lies not in his perception. He sees clearly and accurately. Unfortunately, this accuracy of perception has increased his self-pride. Since he is invariably right, he cannot bear to be deceived or in any way humiliated. Once his good opinion is lost, it "is lost forever."

"I really cannot laugh at [that fault]," Elizabeth informs him. Elizabeth, although tart and sometimes excessively witty, is alive to the ambiguities of human nature, the non-absoluteness of behavior. People are not consistent wholes who are wonderful and good until they turn horrible and bad. In understanding this, Elizabeth is more perceptive than Darcy.

Her prejudice (intolerance) stems from her pre-assessment of people. That is, while Darcy waits to judge and then may judge harshly, Elizabeth decides, even before she meets people, how she will react to them. Her father exhibits a similar flaw when he anticipates Mr. Collins' foolishness even before he meets Mr. Collins. (In this case, both Elizabeth and her father are right.) Likewise, Elizabeth decides to think well of Wickham and does, despite gathering evidence to the contrary.

Darcy would never have made the latter mistake. On the other hand, he cannot help but admire Elizabeth for her loyalty. He blames Wickham and himself for Elizabeth's culpability. This is kind of Darcy and reveals his attraction to Elizabeth, but it doesn't alter Elizabeth's obtuseness. She is clever enough to have seen through Wickham if she had not decided, before she knew anything about Wickham, that he could do no wrong.

Both Elizabeth and Darcy rethink their positions of course. Elizabeth is brought forcibly to the knowledge that she has misjudged (and pre-misjudged) Wickham. Darcy realizes his lack of flexibility has led him to behave in an ungentleman-like manner. (An absolute honor is no good if, in order to follow it, you end up lying and concealing the truth from people, not to mention seriously ticking off the woman you love.)

It is doubtful, however, that Darcy and Elizabeth really changed. I imagine that for the rest of their lives, Elizabeth will be prone to disliking people who haven't truly offended her and liking people who may not be worth her effort (but still enjoyable company) and that Darcy will wish them all out of his house on a continual basis. Sometimes he'll get his way.

The Problem With College

2005-01-27T11:33:00.000-08:00

What college does to you is get you thinking, about books like Elizabeth Enright's Saturdays, "I wonder what gender constructions occur in this book and if they would upset contemporary critics?"

This may sound, on the surface, like a good thing to think. It isn't.

It isn't for several reasons. The first is that a socially conscious critical eye is not the best way to enjoy something.

Think of a book as a car. The narrator is the driver (the narrator is not necessarily the same person as the author; the author is the manufacturer). You, the reader, are the passenger. Now, sure, as you are driving along, you may criticize the driver's handling of the car, or for that matter the car itself. You may even want to get out of the car before you reach your destination. But the last thing you should do is run alongside the car, shouting at the narrator and paying more attention to how the car looks or what other people think about the car than where the car is driving. I mean, how pointless is that? (Not to mention, you might get run over.)

The second problem with excessive dismantling & labeling is that it creates an attitude. Some of you know I had a tough time my first semester back to college, and I won't (I promise) go on and on and on about it here. When all is said, what upset me was the attitude. It's one thing to critique writers like E.B. White, it is another to create (in the class and subsequently in the students) an attitude of disdain because the writer has failed to live up to the dismantling process.

Now, there are a number of reasons you might not want to get into the symbolic car; some of those reasons might be moral. But contempt at the car's cheapness or the car's popularity or the car's appearance (or the other passengers) is not the best reason. However, each to his own. What is far more annoying, in my mind, are those who go for the ride and spend the whole time rolling their eyes and loudly informing the other passengers that this is just too bourgeois and who, once the trip is done, turn around and scorn the ride. If for no other reason, it's kind of rude.

The final problem with aggressively dismantling books in search of social agendas is that some cars (such as Enright's Saturdays) was never intended to be a discussion of gender relationships or a discursive analysis of WWII. Shoving it into that mold is akin to hopping into a Colt and then being dismayed that you aren't in a Volkswagon. Or searching through the Colt's glove compartment and being tantalized by the lack of a Volkswagon driver's manual.

I won't go so far as to say that deconstructing narrations along sociological lines is always a mistake. It can be informative and even be kind of fun. But I am uneasy when such analyses are promoted both as a first step and a final one. As a first step, the enjoyment of the text is lost; as the final step, the true uneasiness of the text is overlooked. In this last context, I back the reader-response theorists (well, some of them) who claim that what we bring to the text is as necessary a component to the reading experience as what is already there.

I say this because so much of deconstruction seems to reside on a belief that "secret messages" are hidden within the texts, that those messages can be deciphered by the knowledgeable and the unsuspecting reader warned. Because, you know, you might just read Mein Kaumpf and turn into a Nazi.

Which is patently foolish but well describes the underlying fear: that certain constructs are being enforced through narration and that only through exposure can such insidious propaganda be defanged.

When it is much more likely, and always has been, that people see what they want to see and remember what they want to remember and learn what they want to learn and that if you want secret messages to be there, you will always, always find them.