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the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Thirty-Six: Gone With The Wind (1936) – Part Two

This is the second part of my review of Gone With the Wind. For the first part, go here.

“Everything in their old world had changed but the old forms. The old usages went on, must go on, for the forms were all that were left to them. They were holding tightly to the things they knew best and loved best in the old days, the leisured manners, the courtesy, the pleasant casualness in human contacts and, most of all, the protecting attitude of the men toward their women. True to the tradition in which they had been reared, the men were courteous and tender and they almost succeeded in creating an atmosphere of sheltering their women from all that was harsh and unfit for feminine eyes.” (p. 569)

Wow, what a book! Gone With the Wind is an epic read in the truest sense, in that it is big and contains multitudes of different stories within. You get Antebellum South romantic fiction, harrowing Civil War adventure, sociological examination of the dying courtly classes of the Georgia region, kitchen sink melodrama, political intrigue, and more. It had no real low points, except for one glaring omission that I started to talk about last time but couldn’t really get a handle on. More on that later.

Scarlett O’Hara is a fascinating character, one who changes a lot throughout the course of the novel’s twelve calendar years. She’s ultimately a very pitiful person, with a mind incapable of the sort of “great love” she continually moons over, and definitely not someone who should have become a mother, much less to the the three children she eventually has. For a while there, it was pretty irritating how she kept mooning over Ashley Wilkes and ignoring Rhett Butler, but once you realize that Scarlett’s love is an incredibly toxic one, I quit feeling like she should just read He’s Just Not That Into You and felt even more sorry for her (and everyone around her) than I did before.

My favorite incarnation of Scarlett’s character was once she’d moved back to Atlanta to try and raise money in hopes of keeping her ancestral home, Tara. I came to refer to this era as her “Scarface” period in my head, as from this point onwards she becomes incredibly cruel and calculating with regards to accumulating wealth. It’s fun, though a little harrowing, to see the techniques and drive she once used in trying to steal away the beaux of other girls back in the County used instead to buy lumber mills, saloons and the debts of her fellow Atlantans (Atlanteans?). She eventually resorts to another kind of slave labor to make up for that lost the Emancipation of black people: convict labor. This, in addition to numerous social transgressions against the old guard of Atlanta society, results in her becoming effectively ostracized from the gentlemanly community she was bred to rule as a Southern Belle. I think this meme I made describes it best.

The other reason I thought of this as the book’s Scarface period was that she eventually builds an elaborate mansion after marrying a rich business partner, and then proceeds to decorate it in what I could only assume was an incredibly gaudy style for the time (my knowledge of home furnishings from the era is somewhat less than it could be):

“Within the house was furnished as Scarlett had desired, with thick red carpeting which ran from wall to wall, red velvet portieres and the newest of highly varnished black-walnut furniture, carved wherever there was an inch for carving and upholstered in such slick horsehair that ladies had to deposit themselves thereon with great care for fear of sliding off … on the walls were gilt-framed mirrors and long pier glasses … steel engravings in heavy frames, some of them eight feet long … [t]he walls were covered with rich dark paper, the ceilings were high and the house was always dim, for the windows were overdraped with plum-colored plush hangings that shut out most of the sunlight.” (p. 806)

See, add a few hot tubs and televisions and you’ve got Tony Montana’s ostentatious pad from the 1980s remake, don’t you think?

I’m getting a little off topic here. Gone With the Wind does an excellent job of evolving its main character from an empty-headed nobody at sixteen to a hard-headed pragmatist at twenty-eight. As she increases her power in business dealings, she’s blithely unaware of the fact that she’s pounding nails into the coffin of the South she grew up in; Atlanta society matrons scorn her though, knowing all too well what she’s doing.

So while Scarlett, Rhett Butler and to a lesser extent, continual crush object Ashley Wilkes, are quite rounded characters, the black servants they surround themselves with are definitely not. As I sort of got at last time, I feel that even by Gone With the Wind’s publication date in 1936 the way Mitchell characterized the slaves (soon to be the free people) in Scarlett’s world was a little much. It’s not like this was a true story with transcriptions of their speech habits and mannerisms to go by (like those William Styron had to go by when writing The Confessions of Nat Turner), Mitchell must have been playing up hateful stereotypes on purpose. Maybe sometimes it was done for comic relief, as the book needed it at some points, but reading dialogue from Mammy, Pork and Prissy was cringe-worthy a lot of the time. I don’t really have much more to say on that, other than it’s almost like Mitchell used all her writing prowess up on Scarlett and didn’t have any left for anyone else? Seems somewhat fishy though, I think.

I still would like to watch the film and compare it to the text, and I should hopefully have a brief review of that coming up this weekend.

“The Lost Cause was stronger, dearer now in their hearts than it had ever been at the height of its glory. It was a fetish now. Everything about it was sacred, the graves of the men who had died for it, the battle fields, the torn flags, the crossed sabers in their halls, the fading letters from the front, the veterans.” (p. 814)

Who would I recommend this book to?: People who are interested in American history, especially people like me who had no reason to learn about the Civil War up until now, as it wasn’t really that important in the overall scheme of things. People who enjoy books with strong, flawed female leads. People who are interested in narratives about the collapse of civilizations, and what arises from the ashes.

Total pages read since January 1st: 12535 pp.

Total books on the Time 100 list read since January 1st (not including ones read before 2011): 29

Next up on the Resolution Project: Dog Soldiers, by Robert Stone (1974)

Tagged 1860s, bad parenting, Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell, movies, Pulitzer Prize, review, Scarface, The American South, Time 100

Oct 04 2011

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the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Thirty-Six: Gone With the Wind (1936) – Part One

“It was this happy feminine conspiracy which made Southern society so pleasant. Women knew that a land where men were contented, uncontradicted and safe in possession of unpunctured vanity was likely to be a very pleasant place for women to live. So, from the cradle to the grave, women strove to make men pleased with themselves, and the satisfied men repaid lavishly with gallantry and adoration. In fact, men willingly gave the ladies everything in the world except credit for having intelligence.” (p. 163)

Scarlett O’Hara is a young member of Georgia’s landed gentry in the waning days of the Confederacy. As such, her life revolves around balls, barbecues, dancing and dresses. She loves a young gentleman named Ashley Wilkes, who, strangely enough, would rather read a book than drink and ride horses like the rest of the men his age. But trouble’s a brewing in the land of King Cotton. The War Between the States looms as Scarlett moves to Atlanta, encountering along the way Rhett Butler, a scandalous man whose spoken thoughts resonate in Scarlett’s mind somehow.

I’m enjoying Gone With the Wind a lot more than I thought I would. As such, I’m going to end up devoting two posts to it, also because it is pretty long. Anyway, I think I had some misconceptions about the book coming in. I thought it was a sort of trumped-up romance novel, notable mostly for its massively successful film adaptation in 1939.

I was wrong, though.

While the romance element in Gone is still a pretty big part of it, it’s closer to that found in something like Jane Eyre or an Austen novel. While the main narrative thrust of the novel is “who will Scarlett end up with?”, it uses that as a base to examine Confederate society, and specifically women’s role in it, far more than your average bodice ripper does. Consider the way being a widow is treated. I had no idea just how intense it was at this point in time.

“A widow had to wear hideous black dresses without even a touch of braid to enliven them, no flower or ribbon or lace or even jewelry, except onyx mourning brooches or necklaces made from the deceased’s hair. And the black crepe veil on her bonnet had to reach to her knees, and only after three years of widowhood could it be shortened to shoulder length. Widows could never chatter vivaciously or laugh aloud. Even when they smiled, it must be a sad, tragic smile. And, most dreadful of all, they could in no way indicate an interest in the company of gentlemen. And should a gentleman be so ill bred as to indicate an interest in her, she must freeze him with a dignified but well-chosen reference to her dead husband.” (p. 144)

That sort of stuff is fascinating to me, and while I haven’t really researched the veracity of this description, it feels real to me. That’s why when all three of Scarlett, Ashley and Rhett chafe under the yoke of a society this calcified, I really started to empathise with them.

Another thing I’m enjoying is the main characters’ attitudes towards the Civil War. Again, I don’t really know what I was expecting here, but one thing I wasn’t expecting was for all three of them to have different, well thought out problems with the ideological underpinnings behind the conflict. Ashley Wilkes is a self-made scholar, and as such would rather stay home at Twelve Oaks than go out and die for his newborn country, even though he eventually does do so as he is one of the best riders in the County. He objects to the war on the same moral basis that sensitive people usually do, he just hates to see human life wasted for any “Cause”. Still, his love for his country gets him mired in the battlefields North of Georgia, as he is not able to reconcile his somewhat pacifistic nature with the danger posed by Yankees who would do away with the lifestyle that fostered it.

Rhett Butler, on the other hand, is an opportunist who sees in the War a chance to make a killing (not literally). He thinks the idea behind the War is a stupid one, as the Confederacy has not got the resources to fight the industrialized North for any great length of time. That’s why he stays back home and runs the blockade to bring supplies to Southern towns, as he knows the conflict’s not worth risking his own skin over. While the South runs high on valour and excellent commanding officers, it lacks factories to make things like boots and guns, aka. the very materiel needed for any modern conflict.

Scarlett has perhaps the most honest reason to hate the war, if not the best thought out. She hates the inconvenience it brings to her, she hates how it plucks marriageable men away from the County she lives in and spits them back shell-shocked and minus some limbs. She hates how the simple amenities that any Southern belle of her stature takes for granted are made much more difficult to come by in wartime, as well as more expensive.

So yeah, I wasn’t expecting all of the main characters in the book to see through the hypocrisy of the War so soon, so that was a good surprise. One thing I figured would be difficult for me would be the treatment of Black people throughout the book. It is, suffice it to say, somewhat regressive, especially coming in the wake of my having read The Confessions of Nat Turner and Beloved earlier on in this project. I’m going to try and talk about this subject at more length in my next post on Gone With the Wind, though.

I’d also like to compare the film version of Gone With the Wind to the book next time. I’ve actually been surprised, almost shocked a few times while reading the book by some of the things that happen, so I’d like to see if a Hays code-era film was able to bring some of these things to the screen. From what little I know about the movie, it’s that Clark Gable gets some pretty sweet lines and that the burning of Atlanta sequence is pretty well done, so right there that’s two things the movie and the book did equally well. I hope that the film version of Wade Hamilton is better than he is in the book, because I’d like nothing better than to smack that kid every time he shows up in the text. He’s annoying, and makes me think that Margaret Mitchell never came in contact with a real human child before deciding to write about one.

“Then you aren’t a nice girl, Scarlett, and I’m sorry to hear it. All really nice girls wonder when men don’t try to kiss them. They know they shouldn’t want them to and they know they must act insulted if they do, but just the same, they wish the men would try … Well, my dear, take heart. Some day, I will kiss you and you will like it. But not now, so I beg you not to be too impatient.” (p. 301)

- Rhett Butler

For the second part of my review of Gone With the Wind, go here.

Tagged 1860s, bad parenting, Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell, movies, Pulitzer Prize, review, The American South, Time 100

Sep 27 2011

the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Thirty-Seven: The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

“Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling.” (p. 33)

The Joad family of Salisaw, Oklahoma is in a bind. The owner of the land they sharecrop off of has decided to try factory farming as the Dust Bowl looms over the Midwest, and the Joads are left with nowhere to live. When their boy Tom Joad is released from McAlester Prison for good behaviour off of his homicide stint, the family decides to pack it all up and head West to the fabled land of California, which has been described to them by handbills as a land of plenty, with jobs and land for all who care to take them. But should the family survive the trek in their ancient jalopy, what is to separate them from the hundreds of thousands of other migrants who also have come to the Golden State?

Like The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath is one of those inviolable CLASSICS of literature that without a doubt deserves its spot on the Time 100 list. The book captures a period in time so well, and with such detail and gravitas that it will undoubtedly endure as long as books are read, a cautionary tale of what happens when too much power and influence is centered in the hands of too few. Also like Gatsby, Wrath is one of the books on the list I felt deeply ashamed for not having read before, but also probably don’t have too much to say about. Its influence has been so profound, and the quality of the text so high, that everyone at least knows about it, and won’t glean any sort of insight from my feeble attempts at analysis. So I won’t try too hard on that.

The last book I read, Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, was difficult for me to get through, partly because of the author’s insistence on keeping the argot of non-English speakers’ language intact, for better or worse. In Wrath, though, while the language of the “Okies” was nowhere near gramatically perfect, it was still accessible in a way that Roth’s text was not. Perhaps the poor sharecroppers’ English reminded me subconsciously of the people who attended my high school in rural Alberta?

One aspect of Wrath that really spoke to me was the way in which Steinbeck would occasionally shift his narrative focus away from the Joad family, giving us a glimpse into the life of another person in the era. He shows us the life of a diner waitress and a used-car salesman, among others. This alleviates a problem I thought I might have with the book going in; while the story of the Joad family is certainly gripping, it could occasionally become too depressing to bear. Shifting focus to someone else gives us time to breathe, while deepening our knowledge of the era. Even the aforementioned car salesman, who could have come off as a minor villain without this focus, is made somewhat understandable to the reader. He, like everyone else, just trying to get by. Steinbeck is more likely to blame the system that has set salesmen at odds with customers more than any individual person.

The author saves his real vitriol for the landowners, the true, though unseen, villains of the piece, and also for tractors (Steinbeck hates himself some goddamn tractors), the most visible tool of encroaching industrialism upon the dying rural society. Some of the best passages in the book are descriptions of tractors “raping the land”, or diatribes on how the owners work, just how things have gotten so bad, and why they fear the little people.

“And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored the three cries of history. (p. 249)

I think that remembering things like this are even more important in today’s society than ever, what with Wall Street engineering a housing bubble that has destroyed the global economy and plunged the world into recession yet again. The lessons of the past are always there for us to see, it is only when we either forget about them, or willfully ignore them like the bankers at Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros. did, that they come back and bite us all on the ass. I can see why Wrath faced so much political controversy upon its release, it’s because it’s filled with unhappy truths like these. It could easily be seen as a piece of socialist literature, as its critics undoubtedly tagged it, but it’s more humanist than anything else.

“There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates – died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.” (p. 365)

Total pages read since January 1st: 11601 pp.

Total books on the Time 100 list read since January 1st (not including ones read before 2011): 28

Next up on the Resolution Project: Gone With The Wind, by Margaret Mitchell (1936)

Tagged 1930s, California, Great Depression, John Steinbeck, Pulitzer Prize, review, The American Midwest, The Grapes of Wrath, Time 100

May 28 2011

the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Thirty-Two: Falconer (1977)

“He seemed, in prison, to be a traveler and he had traveled in enough strange countries to recognize this keen alienation. It was the sense that on waking before dawn, everything, beginning with the dream from which he had waked, was alien. He had dreamed in another language and felt on waking the texture and smell of strange bedclothes. He bathed in strange and rusty water, wiped his ass on strange and barbarous toilet paper and climbed down unfamiliar stairs to be served a strange and profoundly offensive breakfast. That was travel. It was the same here. Everything he saw, touched, smelled and dreamed of was cruelly alien, but this continent or nation in which he might spend the rest of his living days had no flag, no anthem, no monarch, president, taxes, boundaries or graves.” (p. 32)

The Resolution Project: For my New Year’s resolution this year (that being 2011), I decided to try and read all one hundred of the novels picked by Time Magazine as the best since their inception in 1923 to the list’s publication in 2005. I exempted myself from reading ones I’ve already read, leaving some eighty-six or so to read before the end of this year. Some spoilers may lie ahead, so be warned if you’re the type to be bothered by that.

Ezekiel Farragut is a disgraced former professor now serving “zip to ten” at Falconer Correctional Facility for the murder of his brother Eben. He is also a drug addict, kept alive by his daily does of methadone in the mornings. The book follows the entirety of Farragut’s stay at Falconer, starting from the moment he gets off of a bus to the moment he leaves. Along the way he meets many memorable inmates, like Chicken Number Two, a second-story man who put all of his criminal gains into his body in the form of tattoos and the Cuckold, a man serving time for killing his nymphomaniac wife and has a side business in selling prison “jewelery”. When he briefly falls in love with a young hustler named Jody, Farragut starts to break out of his drug-addicted, past-dwelling shell to think of how he too can live outside of the walls that surround him.

This is an excellent novel. It’s kind of funny, though, that this is the first of John Cheever’s books that I’ve come into contact with. Cheever was apparently known primarily for genteel suburban dramas and New Yorker short stories before writing this vulgar and vivid prison story. Looking a bit deeper than the modicum of research I usually do for these reviews, I found that Cheever, like Farragut, was also an addict, as well as a conflicted bisexual. Falconer, then, is the result Cheever’s inner being reaching out, breaking from the WASPy shackles that constrained his earlier work and telling a deeply personal story.

And what a punchy little tale it is. As opposed to the last book I read, James Dickey’s Deliverance, Falconer doesn’t tip toe around the subject of homosexual romance between men in a tough situation. It presents the love between two men as being completely natural, Farragut and Jody being only one of a few duos mentioned in the narrative. While the narrator of Deliverance made his affection for his best friend known primarily by describing how much he idealized his physical form, Cheever shows us these love stories from all sides, physically, mentally, with warts and all. His descriptions of the rituals men behind bars succumb to to slake their thirsts, like the gross, but kind of funny and definitely understandable “Valley” masturbation area, are matter-of-fact and honest, in a way I’d liken to Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I also quite liked Farragut’s attempts to visualize what kind of life would be out there for him and Jody should they, by some miracle, find themselves outside of Falconer’s walls. It feels like a very mature way of looking at gay relationships and how they would have been seen at that time, somewhat akin to the ”On Ruegen Island (Summer 1931)” sequence in Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories. Farragut, before his incarceration, was a man of the world, and knew gay couples primarily from seeing them at European boardinghouses while on vacation:

“How they gratified their venereal hungers would remain, for the rest of the company, acrobatic and bizarre … [s]ocially the prejudice against them was very light; at a more profound level it was absolute. That they enjoyed on another’s company, as they sometimes did, seemed astonishing and subversive.” (p.66)

Ultimately, Farragut just cannot see a way that he and Jody could live together in the outside world, partly because of prejudice, but also because of who they are as people.

Cheever also does an excellent job of describing the mental state of an addict. Farragut’s love of methadone is the greatest love story in the book, and the metaphysical lengths he goes to to rationalize his addiction are funny, and kind of lovely in their way:

“Farragut was a drug addict and felt that the consciousness of the opium eater was much broader, more vast and representative of the human condition than the consciousness of someone who had never experienced addiction. The drug he needed was a distillate of earth, air, water and fire. He was mortal and his addiction was a beautiful illustration of the bounds of his mortality.” (p. 26)

I wouldn’t compare Falconer to Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption or anything, as it’s not really a story about an innocent man getting the justice he so desires (everyone in prison says they’re innocent). Falconer feels much more realistic in its approach to the monotony of prison life, in the thousands of minor annoyances, fights, checkups and hookups that must occur behind those walls. It put me more in mind of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, another great novel (and Time 100 member) about men cooped up with one another who have to learn how to dream again, but written in a non-sentimental way.

The List:

4. ~~An American Tragedy~~

5. ~~Animal Farm~~ (read before 2011)

8. ~~The Assistant~~

9. ~~At Swim-Two-Birds~~

10. ~~Atonement~~ (read before 2011)

11. ~~Beloved~~

12. ~~The Berlin Stories~~

13. ~~The Big Sleep~~ (read before 2011)

14. ~~The Blind Assassin~~

15. Blood Meridian

16. ~~Brideshead Revisited~~

17. ~~The Bridge of San Luis Rey~~

18. Call It Sleep

19. ~~Catch-22~~ (read before 2011)

20. ~~The Catcher in the Rye~~ (read before 2011)

21. ~~A Clockwork Orange~~

22. ~~The Confessions of Nat Turner~~

23. ~~The Corrections~~

24. ~~The Crying of Lot 49~~ (read before 2011)

25. A Dance to the Music of Time (1st Movement)

26. ~~The Day of the Locust~~

27. ~~Death Comes for the Archbishop~~

28. ~~A Death in the Family~~

29. The Death of the Heart

30. ~~Deliverance~~

31. Dog Soldiers

32. ~~Falconer~~

Total pages read since January 1st: 7216 pp.

Next up on the Resolution Project: John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)

Tagged 1970s, Falconer, homoerotic text, John Cheever, post-modernism, Pulitzer Prize, review, Time 100

May 18 2011

the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Twenty-Eight: A Death in the Family (1958)

“Look at me, Poll,” he said. She looked at him. “That’s when you’re going to need every ounce of common sense you’ve got,” he said. “Just spunk won’t be enough; you’ve got to have gumption. You’ve got to bear in mind that nobody that ever lived is specially privileged; the axe can fall at any moment, on any neck, without any warning or regard for justice. You’ve got to keep your mind off pitying your rotten luck and setting up any kind of a howl about it. You’ve got to remember that things as bad as this and a hell of a lot worse have happened to millions of people before and that they’ve come through it and you will too. You’ll bear it because there isn’t any choice – except to go to pieces.” (p. 141)

Family man Jay Follet is called to his father’s bedside in the dead of night in the summer of 1915. Fearing the worst from his ailing father, Jay speeds through Tennessee backroads only to find a false alarm waiting for him at his childhood home. On his way back to Knoxville, however, his car malfunctions while on bad terrain and Jay is killed instantly by hitting his chin on the steering wheel. A Death in the Family, then, is about how his family deals with the grief of his loss. The narrative floats between his now widowed wife, his atheist brother-in-law and his eager-to-please son Rufus, as they come to terms with Jay’s death over the two or three days following the accident.

The thing I liked best about this book, in addition to how real it felt (author James Agee lost his father to an accident when he was six, some have called this novel autobiographical), was how good a job it did at putting you into the mindset of a child. There are flashback sequences from young Rufus’ point of view scattered throughout the book, delineated from the rest by way of being italicized. In these parts, Agee deftly captures the feeling of being a small child, a precocious child who only half gets things that he is told and ends up extrapolating meaning for words like “instantly killed,” “drunk,” and an “eightfoot embankment.” Rufus is an excellent reader surrogate as, through a child’s eyes, we have to look again at the world to see what is trying to be imparted to the boy. It’s also helpful given the time period the novel is set in, 1915, to have an inquisitive mind that wouldn’t take for granted some of the social mores and taboos of the era, allowing us to experience a way of life that has since moved on.

Agee is also blisteringly critical of organized religion and its role in helping grieving families. Most of this work is done through the character of Andrew, who is what we’d call either an atheist or more likely an agnostic, and for this reason is set apart from Jay’s wife Mary and her aunt Hannah, who are very devout. He warns her that if she starts falling down the hole of religious fanaticism after her husband’s death, it’s not likely that she’ll ever make it out again. Christianity is also demonized in the form of Father Jackson, who comes to officiate the funeral. Rufus and his little sister Catherine never really hear what the priest tells Mary and Hannah upstairs; they instead intimate through everyone’s tone of voice that she is subsuming her grief into devotion, rather than having it out in the world to be dealt with:

“And they felt that although everything was better for their mother than it had been a few minutes before, it was far worse in one way. For before, she had at least been questioning, however gently. But now she was wholly defeated and entranced, and the transition to prayer was the moment and mark of her surrender.” (p.272)

A lot of people seem to use their devotion like that, like a crutch that explains every single thing that happens. It’s defeatist. But enough about that. A Death in the Family is by no means a fun novel, but it is a very interesting one. Agee pours his real-life grief into the story, and it feels palpably real as a result. Definitely a must for someone who wants to understand how death changes people.

“That’s what they’re for, epitaphs, Joel suddenly realized. So you can feel you’ve got some control over the death, you own it, you choose a name for it. The same with wanting to know all you can about how it happened.” (p.158)

The List:

4. ~~An American Tragedy~~

5. ~~Animal Farm~~ (read before 2011)

8. ~~The Assistant~~

9. ~~At Swim-Two-Birds~~

10. ~~Atonement~~ (read before 2011)

11. ~~Beloved~~

12. ~~The Berlin Stories~~

13. ~~The Big Sleep~~ (read before 2011)

14. ~~The Blind Assassin~~

15. Blood Meridian

16. ~~Brideshead Revisited~~

17. ~~The Bridge of San Luis Rey~~

18. Call It Sleep

19. ~~Catch-22~~ (read before 2011)

20. ~~The Catcher in the Rye~~ (read before 2011)

21. ~~A Clockwork Orange~~

22. ~~The Confessions of Nat Turner~~

23. ~~The Corrections~~

24. ~~The Crying of Lot 49~~ (read before 2011)

25. A Dance to the Music of Time (1st Movement)

26. ~~The Day of the Locust~~

27. ~~Death Comes for the Archbishop~~

28. ~~A Death in the Family~~

Total pages read since January 1st: 6798 pp.

Next up on the Resolution Project: James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970)

Tagged 1910s, A Death in the Family, Catholicism, Christianity, James Agee, Pulitzer Prize, review, The American South, Time 100

Apr 19 2011

the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Twenty-Two: The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967)

“I had for going on to several years now considered the necessity of exterminating all the white people in Southampton County and as far beyond as destiny carried me, and there was thus available to me more time than I had ever had to ponder the Bible and its exhortations, and to think over the complexities of the bloody mission that was set out before me.” (p.48)

This book took a while to get going, but once it did, it was pretty gripping. As the story opens, Nat Turner is sitting in a Virginia jail cell waiting for his certain death. His state-appointed attorney, Gray, asks him to dictate all of the actions and events that led to his bloody uprising, which was to be the biggest sustained slave revolt in the history of the United States (this was an actual document by the way, used by author William Styron as the starting point for his narrative). Gray takes that narrative and argues it in court, but we as readers are privy to the version of events as Nat himself would have laid them out. The novel goes over most of the young man’s life, becoming both an indictment of the South’s “peculiar institution” as well as a detailed character study of a man who believed angels told him to murder every white person in Southampton County.

In his afterword to the book, Styron notes that while he was initially critically lauded for the book, eventually it became held up as being a racist and misleading work. Which is a little strange to me, but it does seem a little weird for a white author to try and tackle what most people would consider to be a quintessentially black story. I felt he was pretty successful though, given the scarcity of primary sources dealing with Turner. I haven’t read the real confession booklet (which was apparently a huge seller back in the day, as Turner’s rebellion scared the slave-owning states absolutely shitless, and with good reason), but then again, I didn’t really have a bias either way going into it.

To be honest, actually, the historical figure that Nat Turner as presented to us in this text actually reminded me most a Canadian man, Métis leader and Father of Confederation Louis Riel. Riel, like Turner, also used his religious conviction and personal magnetism to essentially wage war, his of course being the Red River Rebellion of 1869. I thought Styron did a great job of getting us into the headspace of a religious zealot, which is something I don’t really have too much knowledge about. I really liked the scenes when Turner has visions of how to decimate the white population, an idea imparted to him by armored angels (not to mention days spent fasting in a forest, those helped too).

Styron also does a great job setting up the social-economic and religious conditions that drove Turner into a life of nigh-celibacy. His vaguely-privileged status on the farm of his first owner plus the emphasis on religion delivered by only really having a bible to read most of the time, it really makes sense why the furtive sexual encounters he has over the years are awkward and weird. He’s all twisted up inside, and this makes his only confirmed murder during the rebellion have an additional emotional power (I’m not going to tell you why though, go read the book to find out!)

Here’s what Time’s Richard Lacayo has to say about the book: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1951793_1951939_1952251,00.html. This is a pretty challenging book for a great number of reasons, but it’s definitely worth seeking out if the themes of slavery, religion and violence sound up your alley.

The List:

4. ~~An American Tragedy~~

5. ~~Animal Farm~~ (read before 2011)

8. ~~The Assistant~~

9. ~~At Swim-Two-Birds~~

10. ~~Atonement~~ (read before 2011)

11. ~~Beloved~~

12. ~~The Berlin Stories~~

13. ~~The Big Sleep~~ (read before 2011)

14. ~~The Blind Assassin~~

15. Blood Meridian

16. ~~Brideshead Revisited~~

17. ~~The Bridge of San Luis Rey~~

18. Call It Sleep

19. ~~Catch-22~~ (read before 2011)

20. ~~The Catcher in the Rye~~ (read before 2011)

21. ~~A Clockwork Orange~~

22. ~~The Confessions of Nat Turner~~

Total pages read since January 1st: 5393 pp

Next up on the Resolution Project: Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001)

Tagged 1830s, Christianity, Louis Riel, peculiar institution, Pulitzer Prize, Red River Rebellion, review, slavery, The American South, The Confessions of Nat Turner, Time 100, William Styron

Feb 15 2011

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the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Eleven: Beloved (1987)

The Resolution Project: For my New Year’s resolution this year (that being 2011), I decided to try and read all one hundred of the novels picked by Time Magazine as the best since their inception in 1923 to the list’s publication in 2005. I exempted myself from reading ones I’ve already read, leaving some eighty-six or so to read before the end of this year. Some spoilers lie ahead, so be warned.

“It’s gonna hurt, now,” said Amy. “Anything dead coming back to life hurts.” (p. 35)

Beloved cover

Beloved, by Toni Morrison

This book is a ghost story that takes place after the end of the American Civil War. Sethe is a former slave who escaped north while very pregnant. Some years after her ordeal, her house at I24 is continually haunted by a malevolent spirit whom she and her daughter Denver believe to be the ghost of her youngest daughter, known only by the name on her headstone, “Beloved”. Later, Paul D, another former slave from Sethe’s old workplace Sweet Home, shows up after many years spent on the run, and proceeds to force the spirit out of the house. Finally, after this is done, a nameless girl of Denver’s age shows up at Sethe’s door, claiming to be the reincarnation of the dead child. What happens next is a psychological drama of the highest order, as all of the house’s inhabitants must come to terms with their pasts, and with the girl whose coming seems to herald a dark future.

This was quite the book. I felt as I was reading it that I was developing a contentious relationship with it, with a little too much postmodern fuckaroundery near the middle for my tastes, but it really picked up by the end and I quite liked it. Beloved is definitely not a plot-driven book; rather, in typical postmodern style, it focuses more on the points of view and histories of all the characters in the plot, at that exact moment in time and beyond. Much of the book is taken up by stories and “rememory”, people telling each other of harrowing escapes and the trudgeries of a life spent born into servitude. The indignities suffered by the main characters really make you think about the psychological torment that would come from being a slave, and having your very person be measured in monetary value rather than any sort of human quality. Some of the passages seared my mind; Paul D’s remembering a prison camp (I think anyway) in Alfred, Georgia, is absolutely horrifying, as is the ultimate fate of Sixo, another slave.

The book also possessed another trait, one I’d consider postmodern, but this may be my own personal interpretation, a character who is referred to all the time but never really shows up for more than a moment. This is Sethe’s husband Halle, who is alluded to constantly by those who knew him (and imagined about by those who didn’t get the chance to), but is only briefly used as a narrative element on his own, and his eventual fate is never resolved.

Beloved, too, is a fascinating character. Is she a crazy person? An actual reincarnation? Some sort of demonic possession? You never really find out for sure, and by the end, I feel I was imagining her to be all of them at the same time. I also quite liked Morrison’s depiction of what I’m assuming is the underworld, or limbo, somewhere where dead things are anyway. It’s creepy as all get out. The schoolteacher is also used really well, never really elaborated on more than being a figure of absolute evil intentions, which is powerful as hell. Although I could have done with a little less of the wacky antics of Beloved as she begins to come into her power, I quite liked this book by the end.

Beloved Movie Poster

I knew that Oprah Winfrey had made a movie of the book in 1998, and I’m kind of curious to see it now. To be honest, I didn’t see Paul D as being old enough to be played by Danny Glover, but that wasn’t really my decision to make. Hopefully I’ll be able to track it down once my great work for this year is finished.

Here’s what Grossman had to say about the book: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1951793_1951936_1952111,00.html

“For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you’d have a little love left over for the next one.” Paul D (pp. 45)

The List

4. An American Tragedy

5. ~~Animal Farm~~ (read before 2011)

8. ~~The Assistant~~

9. At Swim-Two-Birds

10. ~~Atonement~~ (read before 2011)

11. ~~Beloved~~

Total pages read since January 1st: 2438 pp

Next up on the Resolution Project: Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1938)

Tagged 1860s, Beloved, Danny Glover, Oprah Winfrey, peculiar institution, Pulitzer Prize, review, slavery, The American South, Time 100, Toni Morrison

Jan 27 2011

the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Three: American Pastoral (1997)

“Of old. Stories of old. There were no longer stories of old. There was nothing. There was a mattress, discolored and waterlogged, like a cartoon strip drunk slumped against a pole. The pole still held up a sign telling you what corner you were on. And that’s all there was.” (p. 236)

American Pastoral cover

American Pastoral, by Philip Roth

Phew, what a relief to be done this book. While it is undeniably brilliant, it is a very difficult read, owing to the depths of despair and inhumanity that it delves into on a regular basis, with the above quotation being one of my favorite descriptions of how bad things can get.

Seymour “Swede” Levov is a man who ends up getting eaten up by history. An athletic star nigh-worshiped by his hero-seeking community in a 1940s New Jersey reeling from the Second World War, the Swede finds out just how far he can fall from grace by the end of the book’s core narrative in the 1970s. This is due to his daughter Merry, who becomes a violent radical in the SDS/Weathermen mold during the Vietnam War, and becomes involved with a bombing that irrevocably changes the life of her family, allowing for the layers of artifice that held the Swede’s American “pastoral” ideal life to start sloughing off like so many layers of decaying wallpaper in a shitty apartment.

This novel presents, to me, the greatest argument ever in favor of corporal punishment for disciplining children that has ever existed. Yes, I know this is nowhere near the real point of the book, but to me, the entire problem could have been solved with a few swats on the ass of Merry Levov, the world’s most indulged terrorist. I spent most of the book hoping, almost pleading with the Swede to finally just snap and beat the shit out of some of the people who were ruining his life, but he never indulged me. His sin is that he only ever wanted everyone else to be happy. He was so happy himself early on, after getting back from a hitch in the Army and marrying Miss New Jersey, that he could not even fathom the idea that the other people around him were, for the most part, miserable sacks of neuroses and yearning.

I must say though, for as depressing and frustrating as I found the Swede’s inability to recognize how much he was truly being screwed over, and his reluctance to do anything about it, American Pastoral taught me a lot. For one thing, I certainly know a lot more about how gloves were made over the first half of the last century, far more than I really needed to know, but still. Also, Roth definitely helped me get into the mindset of how a radical ideologue was constructed during this era. This is a period in history I find very interesting; I wrote what I feel was my best paper in university about the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers, and the respective reactions of the FBI to them both. Note of course that Merry was not actually old enough to be an original member of the Weathermen; she instead takes their philosophy and runs with it let’s say. The book doesn’t go into much detail about the groups she gets tangled up with, but other SDS offshoots are mentioned.

Weather Underground logo

Roth doesn’t really spell out what drove Merry to start chucking bombs around, at least that I saw, but he does lay out a series of social pressures put upon her, that could in turn perhaps drive her to radical behaviour: being precociously smart at a young age, having something that marks you out as different to your peers (in this case a stutter), having parents who either dote on you or do not attempt to sympathize with you at all, etc. Where it’s fairly easy to see where the Black Panthers were coming from, what with the centuries of oppression and all, I’ve always had a little difficult of a time seeing how a member of the Weather Underground could be forged. I always saw them as dilettante-y, but this book at least gave some background into how at least one of them could have gotten to that point.

The structure of the novel is interesting too. I didn’t know until after reading it that it technically falls into Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman series of novels, because I found him to be of limited use to the narrative. Zuckerman, a writer, narrates in the first part of the book, “Paradise Remembered”, where among other things he attends his 50th high school reunion and shows us how he and the Swede’s other high school classmates saw him from the outside. Later on he eats dinner with the Swede, who wants him to eulogize his father, Lou Levov, with a book. Zuckerman spends most of this sequence being bored by the Swede’s pleasant descriptions of his life and believing that it is as bland as it appears. Most if not all of the commentators I’ve read just now indicate that the second and third parts of the novel, “The Fall” and “Paradise Lost” are Zuckerman’s retelling of the Swede’s downfall. How Zuckerman finds out all this stuff, I’m not too sure, he has a brief conversation with the Swede’s brother but that’s it. I guess he’s just an amazing writer or something.

Apparently this book is being made into a movie for 2012. There are definitely going to be some things taken out so as to not get an NC-17. And Hollywood? Paul Bettany is not the Swede. Jon Hamm with bleached hair is the Swede.

“He’d had it backwards. He had made his fantasy and Merry had unmade it for him. It was not the specific war that she’d had in mind, but it was a war, nonetheless, that she brought home to America – home into her very own house.” (p. 418)

The List

3. ~~American Pastoral~~

4. An American Tragedy

5. ~~Animal Farm~~