Washington Post Book Reviews
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Friday December 24, 2010
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AN IMPERATIVE DUTY
W. D. Howells
Paperback
ISBN 978-1459035027
180 pages
$17.95
Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle
The promising young critic and novelist Frank Norris had once been a fan -- and friend -- of William Dean Howells. But eventually Norris cited the famed magazine editor and novelist ("A Hazard of New Fortunes," "The Rise of Silas Lapham") for artistic timidity. Howells' fiction, Norris charged, was too apt to dwell upon "the drama of a broken teacup, the tragedy of a walk down the block, the excitement of an afternoon call, the adventure of an invitation to dinner."
Norris must have missed Howells' "An Imperative Duty" (1892), which Broadview Press has published as part of its ongoing mission to revive neglected classics. Far from fussing over chipped china, the novella goes to the heart of the great American problem of race.
The main characters are Rhoda Aldgate, a spirited young woman (and orphan) whose good looks appear rather exotic to her fellow Bostonians, and Olney, a physician who is treating Rhoda's aunt, Mrs. Meredith. A young minister has been courting Rhoda, and the likelihood that he will propose marriage has unsettled Mrs. Meredith. Believing she has no other choice, the older woman divulges to Rhoda a secret she'd hoped never to have to bring up: Rhoda is one-eighth black. Olney, too, is smitten with Rhoda, though he has yet to tell her so. Mrs. Meredith passes on the secret to him because, as her doctor, he needs to know what is making Mrs. Meredith so jittery. The novel's central drama is what Olney and Rhoda will make of the knowledge they now share.
Readers may wince at some of the opinions expressed by Howells' characters, as when Mrs. Meredith expresses her fear that Rhoda's racial composition will be found out simply by the way she behaves: "It might come out in a hundred ways. I can hear it in her voice at times -- it's a black voice. I can see it in her looks! I can feel it in her character -- so easy, so irresponsible, so fond of what is soft and pleasant!" -- the implication being that, by contrast, white people gravitate to what is hard and disciplined. Yet views like these were gospel at the time (the 1870s): The races fell into a rigid hierarchy, with people of Northern European stock at the top and "Negroes" at the bottom. Like his great friend Mark Twain in "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," Howells was interested in depicting racial attitudes and customs as they were -- and especially on noting their effects upon people enmeshed in them, both black and white. In this case, Howells' most acute insights center on Rhoda's reaction when her aunt finally tells her the truth. The young woman isn't destroyed, but she bitterly blames the older woman for not letting her know sooner, in time for her to take steps to become not less black, but more so. As it is, she feels hopelessly divided: It's too late for her to accommodate herself fully to either of the races to which she belongs.
This is a provocative subject, and the publisher has provided much useful material for help in understanding it: an introduction (by Paul R. Petrie), footnotes and a sheaf of appendices, including one that links "An Imperative Duty" to a subgenre of 19th-century fiction: "The Tragic Mulatta." There is a big difference between other "Tragic Mulatta" novels and this one, however: The other writers played the central situation for shock value, whereas Howells made it into art.
Dennis Drabelle is a contributing editor of The Washington Post Book World.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF MAF THE DOG, AND OF HIS FRIEND MARILYN MONROE
Andrew O'Hagan
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 978-0151013722
277 pages
$24
Reviewed by Louis Bayard
Andrew O'Hagan's jeu d'esprit washes toward us on a trans-Atlantic wave of praise. It is brilliant, says Roddy Doyle, and moving and very funny. Edna O'Brien predicts it will become a classic. Colm Toibin loves it, too. What does it say about me, I wonder, that I found it a grinding, irksome bore? In my defense, I can only argue that comic novels, by their very nature, provoke a binary response in readers: Something is funny or it isn't, and nothing can persuade us otherwise. I love pretty much everything Dawn Powell or Saki ever wrote, but I still can't make it through "A Confederacy of Dunces" (God knows I've tried) or "Molloy" or Thomas Pynchon's recent picaresques. And I'm afraid I resented every minute I had to spend with "The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe."
Starting with that broadly winking title. The eponymous Maf is our narrator, deeply garrulous and, according to his papers, a Scottish-born Maltese, "the sort of dog who is set for foreign adventures and ordained to tell the story." This particular story takes him to America in the early '60s, where, through a complicated chain of ownership, he is lateraled from Frank Sinatra to America's favorite sex symbol, who has just split up with America's most revered playwright.
Nursing herself back to mental health, Marilyn camps out in an Upper East Side Manhattan apartment and spends her days crawling through long Russian novels, rehearsing scenes from "Anna Christie" at the Actors Studio, visiting her shrink and trying, in some vague but real way, to determine who she is, apart from the world's desires.
She finds a spiritual ally in her lapdog, Maf, who is entranced by her beauty and kindness and Chanel No. 5 scent. "I think," writes Maf, "we shared a feeling for the tribulations of the period, an instinct for killing the distance between the high and the low, something that would come in time to explain the depth of our friendship. If she brought out the actor in me then it might be said that I brought out the philosopher in her. The Marilyn I knew was smelly and fun and an artist to the very end of her fingertips."
Dog and owner stroll through Central Park, take the ferry to Staten Island, hang out at the Copa, drop in on Leo Castelli's art gallery and hobnob with lit-crit dragons at Alfred Kazin's apartment. But Marilyn grows "listless with thoughts, regrets" and, after spiraling into depression, flees with Maf back to California, where even the promise of a new house and a new starring role can't keep her from embracing drink and pills and the long "slide towards abstraction."
The book climaxes not with Marilyn's death but with her singing "Happy Birthday" to President Kennedy -- the moment, in short, when Marilyn was swallowed by her own caricature. Only to become, in the hands of European intellectuals, a new sort of caricature: the emblem (and victim) of Cold War America's Eros-Thanatos contradictions. Yes, they love Dead Marilyn across the pond, and no one loves her more than emigre Maf, who, having somehow absorbed the full continuum of Western culture, devoutly wishes to situate his former mistress within it.
He's the kind of pedantic pooch who can't even sit for a spell in Central Park without conjuring up visions of the Ice Age and dinosaurs and the Dutch settlers. The kind who, even when he's giving you the inside poop on his illustrious owners, has to water it with a stream of pensees: "Trotsky said there is no place for self-satisfaction at the point of revolution. ... Those of us who tell stories are committed slaves to the past's dominion, to the fresh echo of the little bell which announced M. Swann's arrival. ... It was America, dear, golden, childish America, that joined the narrative of personal ambition to the myth of a common consciousness, making a hymn, oh yes, to the future, the spirit, and the rolling land." On and on it goes, and if you're anything like me, you'll be reaching for the nearest muzzle or, failing that, a rolled-up newspaper.
I won't argue that O'Hagan is ungifted. He buffs phrase after phrase to a Turtle Wax sheen: Arthur Miller's "inky old blameless honour," John Kennedy's "dictatorship of good intentions." He sketches a portrait of Marilyn that is largely persuasive and grants her neither too much nor too little intellectual weight. And while his ear for American dialect is erratic, he can, if he wishes, create tableaux of cut-glass perfection: a wacky cocktail hour at the home of Natalie Wood's Russian parents; a moment of sisterly communion between Marilyn and Shelley Winters. The problem is that every time you find yourself inching toward enjoyment, that damned dog rushes in with his yappy lectures and his scrolls of cultural signifiers and his "Is the possibility of Being contingent on an acceptance of Mortality?" and his "I wonder if the Russian dogs care for Plutarch as much as I do,"and any prospect of joy flies out the door.
To his credit, O'Hagan has sidestepped whimsy, but he has wholeheartedly embraced pretentiousness, and if that's not a laugh killer, I don't know what is. Among the many, many, many literary allusions dropped by Maf over the course of this slender novel is Virginia Woolf's putdown of "Ulysses": "the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples." I think you can see a similar impulse at play in O'Hagan, who makes such an exhausting case for his own brilliance that he comes off like the cleverest boy in fifth form. All I wanted to do at book's end was find a real dog and rub it behind its ears.
Louis Bayard is a novelist and reviewer. His new novel, "The School of Night," will be published in March of 2011.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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ADAM SMITH: An Enlightened Life Nicholas Phillipson
Yale Univ
ISBN 978-0300169270
346 pages
$32.50
Reviewed by Michael Dirda
Say "Adam Smith" (1723-1790), and many people will know that he wrote "The Wealth of Nations" (1776), the foundational treatise of modern economic thought. But for most of us Smith has usually been more honored (or vilified) than actually read. Too often he has been reduced to a phrase -- "the invisible hand" -- or to his advocacy of what we now call laissez-faire capitalism. Many people aren't even aware of what he regarded as his greatest work, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" (1759).
Thus, one good reason to read Nicholas Phillipson's excellent intellectual biography is to gain a more nuanced understanding of Smith and, in particular, of his vision of an all-embracing science of man.
Born in the small town of Kirkcaldy, Scotland, and brought up by a widowed mother to whom he was devoted, Smith made himself immensely erudite in the way of so many 18th-century philosophers. A youthful student of the ancient Stoics, he became an admirer of his contemporary Voltaire; a superb university teacher at Glasgow and Edinburgh (one of his pupils was Samuel Johnson biographer James Boswell); and, in due course, the second-greatest luminary of what's often called the Scottish Enlightenment. The greatest, David Hume (1711-1776), that most likable and readable of all modern philosophers, was his best friend. "I am positive you are wrong in many of your Speculations," Hume once teased Smith, "especially where you have the Misfortune to Differ from me."
While some 18th-century thinkers talked constantly about themselves (Rousseau) or were memorably chronicled by disciples (Johnson), Adam Smith resolutely guarded his privacy. He left few letters and insisted that all his manuscripts -- apart from an essay on the history of astronomy -- be destroyed by his executors.
He did occasionally travel outside Scotland: to Oxford for the equivalent of postgraduate study (mostly consisting of intense private reading); to London, where he got to know Edmund Burke and other members of Johnson's "Club"; and even to Europe as the tutor of the young Duke of Buccleuch. During his last dozen years, his position on the Scottish Board of Customs made impossible any sustained scholarship, even though he had long planned to write "a sort of Philosophical History of all the different branches of Literature, of Philosophy, Poetry and Eloquence" and "a sort of theory and History of Law and Government."
As Phillipson explains, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments " is Smith's attempt to "develop a coherent and plausible account of the processes by which we learn the principles of morality from the experience of common life." At its heart lies the fundamental importance of sympathy, of the ethical power of the imagination. In essence, we can through our imaginations identify with the suffering or joy of others. "I judge of your sight by my sight, ... of your resentment by my resentment, of your love by my love. I neither have, nor can have, any other way of judging about them." Smith concluded that we gradually learn to evaluate conduct through the growth of "an impartial spectator," derived from our experiences of sociability and daily life. "We may like," Phillipson summarizes, "to believe that the voice of the impartial spectator is the eternal voice of conscience or of the deity, but in reality his voice is that of the world to which we belong." The virtuous man or woman needs self-command in order to live a life suitably directed by the impartial spectator.
As the years went by, Smith's thinking about society led him to economics and its sometimes unpalatable truths: "Till there be property there can be no government, the very end of which is to secure wealth, and to defend the rich from the poor." Smith soon grew convinced that labor established value, arguing, in Phillipson's words, that the "opulence of a nation was to be measured in terms of the flow of consumable goods and not its reserves of gold and silver."
When Phillipson discusses "The Wealth of Nations," it's hard not to discern parallels between Smith's time and our own. For instance, the collapse of Scotland's great Ayr Bank caused severe economic damage for half a century. It resulted, Phillipson says, from "the insatiable demand for credit from projectors and improvers anxious to cash in on a boom. The bank expanded rapidly, its notes being said to have represented two-thirds of the entire paper currency of the country. But it overtraded, discounting bills of exchange almost on demand and accruing a dangerous amount of insecure debt." Sound familiar?
Perhaps surprisingly, "The Wealth of Nations" also cautions against the commercial sector's inherent rapacity and monopolizing spirit. The interests of the nobility, merchants and manufacturers, Smith maintains, are never the same as those of the general public. In fact, he states almost axiomatically that "the government of an exclusive company of merchants, is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatever." Rather, we should avoid all obstructions to trade, whether through attempted monopoly or through government regulation, and we should focus on domestic industry. Our innate self-regard may then lead to a greater general prosperity. As Smith says, in his most famous sentences: "By preferring the support of domestick to that of foreign industry," an individual "intends only his own security, and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention."
There's far more to Smith's arguments about what Phillipson calls "the exchange and circulation of goods, services and sentiments" than can be touched on here. But in the last resort, says Phillipson, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" and "The Wealth of Nations" were together a call to Smith's contemporaries "to take moral, political and intellectual control of their lives and the lives of those for whom they were responsible." That's still a call worth heeding.
Visit Michael Dirda's online book discussion at washingtonpost.com/readingroom.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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RESCUE
Anita Shreve
Little, Brown
ISBN 978-031602072
288 pages
$26.99
Reviewed by Brigitte Weeks, a former editor of The Washington Post Book World
With more than a dozen highly readable novels to her credit, including an Oprah's Book Club pick for "The Pilot's Wife," Anita Shreve is a reliable presence on the best-seller list. "The Pilot's Wife" opened with a mysterious plane crash, and another novel, "A Change in Altitude," began with a spur-of-the-moment decision by unprepared amateurs to climb the treacherous Mount Kenya. From such opening crises, her novels spread quietly and inexorably, drawing readers into the hearts of her characters.
No one can create the beginning of a complex relationship like Shreve. Her latest book, "Rescue," opens with a car accident that changes both lives involved. Peter Webster, a rookie emergency medical technician, is roused at 1:10 a.m. to race to the scene of a one-car wreck involving a drunk driver who has "wrapped herself around a tree." The injured driver is a young woman named Sheila Arsenault. After she is rushed off in an ambulance, Webster, overcome by an unexpected desire, talks his way into the hospital to see her and then returns to the crash site, finds her keys and takes them to her. He feels a puzzling link to this patient he knows nothing about.
Sheila is defiant and prickly. She resents Webster's lecturing her on drunken driving. Just the same, his interest remains strong: "She was sexy and beautiful, and Webster wondered if he could smooth out the rough edges. Though maybe it was the rough edges that he liked." Confused by her anger but intrigued by her strength, he tracks her down after she leaves the hospital. Her greeting to the medic who probably saved her life is hardly inviting: "How do I know you're who you say you are," she snaps. "And, more important, why ... should you care how I am?"
Shreve gets deep inside these characters, and her insights draw us into their lives. This random encounter in the small hours of the morning leads into a story of hope and fear, of promises made and broken. Sheila, almost an anti-heroine, drinks to excess, remains in an abusive relationship and resists the young EMT who's so concerned about her. Webster, a beloved son of a strong family, nurses a mission to save lives and avert tragedies. He seems her opposite in every way.
The relationship between the secretive, hard-drinking, oddly vulnerable Sheila and the down-to-earth small-town hero is wonderfully etched. Shreve creates a little world, peoples it with believable characters, and puts them through agonizing and joyful moments without a false note or a dissonant figure of speech. We learn how a competent EMT works, how he feels about it and how each step of the routine can make all the difference. As Webster wrestles with his attraction to a patient who becomes his girlfriend and then his wife, who breaks her promises and puts herself and others at risk, we see her weaknesses and yet understand why he remains entranced by her.
Although Shreve is an unquestionably accomplished writer, she sometimes gets pigeonholed as a good women's novelist. Kirkus Reviews has grumbled that her work is "slick but lacking depth," and the Observer once called her fiction "not quite literary." But such dismissive comments miss her greatest strengths. Readers don't see the puppet mistress pulling the strings, labeling her characters as heroes or heroines. She gives them lives and then lets them stumble along -- as do we all. Sheila and Webster fight and reconcile and fight again. Most important, we care about what happens to them.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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