The Bridge of San Luis Rey

The Bridge of San Luis Rey
by Thornton Wilder
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1928
Featured on Time Magazine's Top 100
          A few weeks ago I wrote a long intro where I doubted the forward-thinking nature of the Pulitzer committee, and how the selection of The Age of Innocence (the third book to win) was an indicator of how the prize would be awarded to "safe" choices over cutting edge literature. Let me walk that back a bit.The Bridge of San Luis Rey was the 10th book to win the Pulitzer, and it is definitely a cutting edge novel.
          Thornton Wilder's novel about the lives of the victims of a bridge collapse outside of Lima, Peru in 1714 is a pretty ambitious and inventive work. It is a sort of anti-story, in that there is no central narrative. Instead, the novel is bookended by the story of Brother Juniper. Brother Juniper witnesses the collapse, and feels he must find out the reason why God allowed this accident to befall these specific people. He interviews friends and family of the victims of the collapse in an attempt to find out the character and virtue of those involved, in order to see if there is any sort of moral calculus behind the disaster. The narrator lets us know that the book that Brother Juniper creates is enormous, and sits neglected in a library somewhere. During the opening pages I was expecting to be reading Brother Juniper's novel. Not so. Instead there are three disconnected sections, each dealing with a different person who was killed.
              The first is the Marquesa de Montemayor, a wealthy, important, and unhappy woman. The Marquesa has a daughter, and the two have a tumultuous relationship which is tolerable only because the daughter lives in Spain.The second is a man named Esteban, a twin who has recently watched his brother die a horrible and painful death. Finally, there is the story of Uncle Pio, the caretaker of an actress of extraordinary talent and beauty who throws her career away. The stories have some characters that overlap, but the tone of each is easily identifiable. The main thread that runs through all of the stories is a feeling of despair and loss which brings the characters some level of self-actualization. Though the reader understands that each section will end with the death of the character you are reading about, this does not blunt the power of their story, since their death is, in the end, a cosmic whim, and not the result of their actions in life.
             I am not overly familiar with Thornton Wilder, except for what is probably his most famous play, Our Town. Both the play and the novel deal with death, both our understanding of death and our relationship with it, in interesting ways. I don't remember Our Town very well, but I remember clearly the female lead of the play watching her friends and family as if through a fog after she had died. I remember thinking that what Wilder was trying to suggest seemed to be that life was an experience almost completely disconnected from death. I also remember thinking that the end of that play was incredibly moving, which is something my wife will probably have something to say about, since I tend to complain if a book or movie has a scene in Heaven. What I find interesting, though, is the thematic connection of this character in Our Town and Brother Juniper, trying desperately to make sense of existence in a way that can be understood on an intellectual level. 
              There have been two film adaptations made of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and I have not seen either of them. There was one version that was made in 1944 that I know nothing about other than what I have just put down. There was a more recent version made in 2004 which featured a cast of pretty fantastic actors (Robert De Niro, F. Murray Abraham, Kathy Bates, and Harvey Keitel to name a few), but I think was something of a mega-flop. So, avoid the movie. Read the book. I would not say that this is a must read, but it was very interesting, and fairly short (so if you find yourself not enjoying it, the experience will be over quickly).

Coming Soon:

The Confessions of Nat Turner

The Confessions of Nat Turner
by William Styron
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1968
Featured on the Time Magazine Top 100
            During the spring of 2008 I was at a restaurant with my mom, aunt, and grandfather. This was during my last semester of graduate school, and everyone was being very polite as I talked endlessly about all of the books I had been reading. Towards the end of the evening my grandfather mentioned that, "No one really talks about Bill Styron anymore." I told him that I had read Sophie's Choice, his 1979 novel, over the summer, and that I had very much enjoyed it (the restaurant we were eating in was actually just a block off of a street that was mentioned in that novel). Then he said that he had known Styron during the war, and they had been in college together. And while he didn't come right out and say it, he let on that he had thought Styron was kind of a conceited jerk. I have no problem believing this. The narrator of Sophie's Choice is (or at least seems to be) a thinly disguised version of a postwar William Styron (his name is Stingo, which is, well, pretty close to Styron). As much as I loved the book, the narrator is pretty full of himself. But there does seem to be some self-discovery going on in this novel, as if a much older Styron looks back on his youth and chastises himself for being immature.
            Sophie's Choice came over a decade after The Confessions of Nat Turner, and it is curious to think of Styron's progression. His SC narrator, Stingo, has actually begun working on the novel that will become Nat Turner, and his initial critics call it alternately a work of genius, and the scratchings of a hick. Considering the subject matter of Nat Turner, as well as the time it was written in,  it is easy to see that Styron was sensitive to this criticism. The novel deals with a semi-successful slave uprising in south central Virginia in 1831. Nat, the leader of the uprising, has been caught, and as he awaits his execution by hanging, he communicates his reasons for the revolt which led to the murder of 56 white people. After an initial back and forth between Turner and his attorney, a man more concerned with an answer as to why this happened than he is with saving Turner from death, Styron takes Turner back to his childhood and tells his life story as a slave.
          Turner's attorney, Thomas Gray, is an important figure who is only quickly touched on. Gray was a real person, who wrote a short book about Turner, and Styron uses this book as his starting point. Since Gray's account of Turner's story is brief (and I have not read it), it is unclear how much of the background is Styron's invention. What I noticed is that Styron employs the tactic of separating Turner from the bulk of the slave population. Turner grows up in the main house, is taught to read, and spends most of the first two thirds of the book with white people. It is not until Turner is in his early twenties and is sold to a cruel new master that he is forced to work the way he has seen other slaves do. I think that this wading into the realities of slavery was cleverly done, and it helps the reader identify with Turner's sense of injustice. But other aspects of Turner's personality and behavior are much harder to understand. He is deeply religious, and often quotes Old Testament passages that deal tangentially with what he is experiencing. He fasts, and these fasts put him in a quasi-dream state where he has visions. In one of these visions he is instructed by God to destroy the white race.
           Throughout the novel Turner provides a sense of Central Virginia as a land that is decaying and falling to ruin. That ruin can be interpreted as spiritual, or moral, and as an avenging figure doing God's work, Turner would be eliminating that decay, and returning the land to the fertile and life-affirming state that is natural. The perversion of slavery, Turner believes, is the cause for the droughts, blights, and famine. Turner compares himself to Joshua, who led the Israelites in battle to defeat their enemies and preserve God's promised land. That is one way to look at this incident. Another, probably more accurate, way of viewing this incident is that the perversion of slavery has destroyed the mental faculties of a mind to the point that he became a dangerous weapon. This tragic reality is compounded since the reader must recognize that Nat is a genius, wasted by a system that is only concerned with getting as much labor out of him as possible.
           Styron was heavily criticized for this book in the black community. Whether this is fair or not, he was brought to task for portraying a black historical figure in not always the most positive light. Indeed, Turner at times is a deeply conflicted individual, and that internalized conflict as portrayed by Styron can be disturbing. I think that Styron took this personally, and it is this criticism that I think SC's Stingo responds to. He defends his good intentions as trumping over issues of authenticity that are complicated by race, and this is something that I buy. When Nat acts in a way that is not completely heroic, is is easy to interpret this as an acknowledgement that anyone who would lead a revolt would have to be a complex and conflicted individual. Styron was defended, however, by James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, two celebrated African American authors who were also his contemporaries.
            I liked this book. A lot. If you only read one novel by William Styron, it should be Sophie's Choice. But if you read two, well, I'm sure you could do worse.
Coming Soon:

Pale Fire

Pale Fire
By Vladimir Nabokov
Featured on the Time Magazine Top 100
         I wrote a short story years ago which featured (kind of obnoxiously, sure, but I think also effectively) about five to ten pages of endnotes. And the endnotes had footnotes. I submitted this story during a creative writing class I was taking, and this feature of the story divided the class considerably. I knew this would be a controversial move when on my way to class, one normally friendly student refused to acknowledge a greeting on a street corner, and another saw me and laughed while shaking his head. When our instructor opened the class discussion she read the title of the story with, what I was afraid was...disdain? Boredom? I wasn't sure. There was what felt like a full minute of silence before anyone said anything. Finally, a woman sitting to my right said: "I hated it...well, I didn't get it...well, I didn't read it." And away we went.
          The people who objected to my story almost down the line did not like the way they had to flip back and forth. I pointed out that I was not the first person to employ endnotes or footnotes in a story, but these folks were having none of it. It is interesting to consider how those classmates of mine, fine people all, would respond to this novel. While I was just trying to be playful, silly and inventive, Nabokov seems to be actively hoping to frustrate and alienate his audience (although I hope that if I were to be in a creative writing class with Nabokov I would be more polite than to open the discussion with "I hate it." I mean, seriously, who does that?). 
         The form of the novel is unlike anything I have ever seen. It is presented as a 1000 line poem, introduced by the late poet's neighbor and friend, Charles Kinbote, with his instructive annotation afterwards. The poet is the fictional John Shade, and his poem is Pale Fire. I was intrigued at first by the idea of a novel explicating a poem, and how Nabokov was playing both with the form of the novel but also the conventions of academia. But as the novel continued, I saw he was going for larger targets. An early line annotation betrays Kinbote's self serving qualities, and he begins to relate the story of the fictional kingdom of Zembla, and Zembla's brave and beloved king, Charles II.  As this annotation gets longer and more involved, it becomes apparent that Kinbote is less interested with the poem than with showing off his knowledge of Zembla. Charles was deposed by revolutionaries, and aided in escape by the Soviets. And (mild spoiler) may just be Kinbote in hiding. Unless, (again, mild spoiler) Kinbote is crazy.
           Kinbote's relationship with Shade is also a thread that runs through the annotations. While he describes himself as a friend, the anecdotes that he relates resemble stalking more than friendship. The disconnect between Kinbote's perception of his relationship to Shade, as compared to what it is, provides a great deal of the novel's humor. But it is this relationship that Kinbote feels is the key to Shade's poem, which he thinks is an epic description of the Zemlan history.
            The events surrounding Shade's death (note and mild spoiler: it is not of natural causes) adds a significant amount of ambiguity to the text. (Spoiler)It is unclear if Kinbote is Charles II, crazy, a murderer, liar, or all of the above. It is also unclear how much of his interpretation of the poem is his own personality projecting itself. By playing with the form of a novel, Nabokov invites (or dares) his readers to do the same thing.
             Pale Fire is not Nabokov's most notorious work (I'll be doing a write-up on that eventually), but it does play with some of the same themes as that novel. Most notably, Nabokov plays around with what he considers the obsession that Europe has with the United States (and vice versa), and how one's understanding of the other is often comically and tragically flawed.
           Like most works that play with form, Pale Fire was received by critics in a variety of ways. While some referred to it as a work of genius, some considered it all but unreadable. While I very much appreciated the form of this novel, and, upon reflection, found it to be very clever, I found the process of reading this book to be very frustrating. I guess, with that in mind, I should ease up on my inconsiderate classmate who said of my short story, "I hated it." I don't want to suggest that the short story I handed in to my divided creative writing class was a work of genius, but fill in the blank.

Coming Soon:

The Good Earth

The Good Earth
by Pearl S. Buck
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1932
         A few months ago I found myself on a bus with a load of students who were about to spend the entire day going to literature classes at an AP test prep session. I had woken up very early, and was hoping to make the bus ride go as fast as I could, but no matter what I did, I was pretty sure that the day was going to be sort of miserable. It was the Saturday after my birthday, and honestly, the whole day was supposed to be about me, just a little bit. I couldn't sleep in. I couldn't eat a nice breakfast. I could go on and on about the things I couldn't do, but what I could do was pull out the book I had brought with me. I had gotten through a paragraph when a student said, "You read too much." And so much for that.
           The reason I tell this particular anecdote is a) it happened while I was reading this particular book, and b) the idea of "too much" or immoderation, is a running theme in the novel. The story concerns a man named Wang Lung, and follows him from his wedding day to his death as an old man. He begins the story as a humble farmer in China before the revolution. He has a small parcel of land, and an elderly father to take care of. His wedding is arranged by his father, who goes to the town's richest lord and asks if he can buy an ugly slave for his son to marry. As the rather unromantic nature of this wedding would suggest, this is not an overly sentimental story. Instead, the novel is strongest when it steers away from sentimentality, or, Wang Lung's character is strongest when he sees a situation without sentiment. For example, he is very pleased that on the day that his wife gives birth to their firstborn son, she leaves the bed and helps him in the fields.
             The value system at work in this novel is also noteworthy. Wang Lung values hard work for the sake of financial security (which comes from even more work). But when there is a famine, he moves his family from the farmland to the city. Here their family begs in the streets. He encounters a rich family that is wealthy, and whose wealth becomes an insult to Wang Lung and his efforts. Eventually Wang Lung becomes financially stable, and with that stability he loses his connection to the work that provides his wealth. Pearl S. Buck's thesis seems to suggest that happiness comes from rewarding work, and not from luxury. This is something that probably connected with a readership in the United States that was in the midst of a crippling depression. One element of the story that would probably send up red flags (literally) now is an episode that occurs midway through the novel. During a riot Wang Lung and his wife rob the home of a rich lord. That lord, in the midst of losing everything, is described as fat and worthless. The poor people that the lord had been essentially living on the backs of were stealing his wealth and, well, redistributing it. When Wang Lung becomes wealthy himself, he begins to lose the moral high ground. He spoils his children, takes another wife and all but ignores the first, and spends his time in idleness. However, none of these changes make him as happy as he seemed to be while he was working.
             This novel set Pearl S. Buck up for winning the Nobel Prize in literature. It has been adapted into a movie, which I have never seen (although I can't imagine it being very coherent, as this novel did not seem very filmable). Here's something I haven't really gotten at though. Did I enjoy the book? Not really. As the book opened I was intrigued by foreign locale and the different approach to day to day life. But as the book progressed, I had a difficult time maintaining focus. The story was not the problem. The first third especially was fairly gripping. But Pearl S. Buck's prose were very dry, and I would often get distracted and put the book down. I was reading this at the same time as I was reading a nonfiction book, and I would go back and forth between the two. After awhile I was only working on the nonfiction book.
              For symmetry's sake, I will return to my birthday weekend, where I was accused of "reading too much." First of all, I do not read "too much." I do not feel that my reading is a luxury. It is my connection to the world, like Wang Lung and his connection to the Good Earth. Right? Right? Is that too much of a reach? Well, it's late and it's the 4th of July. It will have to be enough.

Coming soon: