When I was in college and first really started learning about Literature (high school gave absolutely no direction on this score, although I did end up with Miss Engler’s treasured Book List), I found out that I did not care for certain works by Hemingway and for certain poems by Wallace Stevens. And I knew that I did like the works of Charles Dickens (I had read, I think, two of the novels by that time). So in my thirst for knowledge, I encoded in my head the summary judgment that I did not like Twentieth-Century Literature and did like Nineteenth-Century Literature. (Please read those names the way a pretentious twenty-year-old would pronounce capitalized phrases.)
Of course, over the next few decades, I found plenty of exceptions, some even by Hemingway and Stevens. And yet my dumb rule still held sway in my head. Now to be fair, if a twentieth-century work has a certain streak of modernism in it, I will probably like it less than a nineteenth-century work with a certain strain of Romanticism or of Realism. (Grr. Why are some artistic movements capitalized and some not?) And so I avoided current literature for most of the last two decades of the previous century and the first two decades of this.
To be brutally candid, I was pretty old before I realized that just because the year of a book had a 9 as the second digit doesn’t mean that it falls under the rubric of modernism. “Twentieth century” means a lot of things. The twentieth century was a long time, and it witnessed a lot of different artistic sensibilities. I was served poorly by the clunky names of college classes and my facile acceptance of them.
Now good British expository style would find this off-center introduction leading right up to a tangent point with the central topic of the essay. But I see that I’ve missed the mark: I want to talk about one twentieth-century novel that irks me and one twenty-first-century novel. But I took some time to write that preamble, so I’ll leave it there. I hope you find it informative or entertaining!
I’m well ahead of schedule this year and recently read two books not on my plan, both of which I thought deserved a mention. I think both could be considered somewhere in the vicinity of Great Books. The first one is by a Pulitzer winner, and the second one has been mentioned twice on Jeopardy! in the last year.
First up is a note about Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist. I loved this book until the last page. Macon Leary’s series of travel books for the “accidental tourist” is an excellent joke: Macon hates to travel and assumes others do, too, so his guides show his readers how to travel in Europe while seeing as little as possible and feeling as much as possible that they have never left home. He tries to make feeding his dog easier by pouring the dog food down the old coal chute, but then finds that his dog is afraid of the basement and has to be carried down to his meals. That’s good stuff. I could read a thousand pages about Macon. He wants everything regular and predictable and comfortable, and then he meets Muriel Pritchett. I could read two thousand pages about Muriel and never get bored. She offers to train the dog and says she charges $10 a session but will only charge Macon $5 since they’re friends, even though they’ve just met. Their relationship is hilarious and weird and sad and heart-warming, and I loved reading about every high and low for n-1 pages. But Muriel says that a man can’t just throw away a girl like a piece of trash, and then that’s just what Macon does. On the last page. And I wondered, why did I read about this man if he can’t learn anything? The dog is more sympathetic. There. I think I explained why the last page of the book ruined the whole thing for me without giving away the ending, because there’s also a wife, and if you read it, you’ll still be left guessing right to the end just as I was.
I had a much better experience with Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow. I couldn’t help thinking of War and Peace when I saw that the protagonist’s name was Count Rostov, but Towles, while no Tolstoy, is good enough to get away with it. (Is “Towles” pronounced like the first half of “Tolstoy”?) In the earliest days of the Russian Revolution, Rostov is sentenced by a committee to lifelong house arrest in the Metropol Hotel. Rostov has stayed there often and even has a dedicated suite there filled with family heirloom furniture. But the bailiffs pass that familiar door and take him to a small attic room. No problem, Rostov thinks. Become master of your circumstances so they don’t master you. Thus Count Rostov is wise and inspirational. He finds ways to treat the attic as a private suite. Thus Count Rostov is resourceful. It seems the Communist Committee is not the only authority that can force one to live in a hotel, and over the course of his life he befriends one nine-year-old girl and later adopts another. Thus Count Rostov is caring and charming. Eventually he becomes the head waiter at one of the hotel’s restaurants. Thus Count Rostov is humble and industrious. Count Rostov also proves to be intelligent and courageous, but to give examples would give too much away. I won’t say this novel is better than Tolstoy’s book, but this Count Rostov is better than Tosltoy’s Count.
At the Norman, OK, Public Library, I once saw a poster that said, over the face of the Statue of Liberty, “BE FREE! READ!” I get what the poster’s maker and the library’s decorator were trying to do. But all-caps commands coming from the stern visage of that lady are hardly consonant with the notion of liberty. Still, I think of that poster when I enjoin you to read this book. (The gentleman in me, as inspired by Towles’s Count, prohibits me from capitalizing those last three words, but perhaps you should read the phrase the way a pretentious twenty-year-old would.)
