James Wood and the comic novel

This week’s issue of the New Yorker features one of James Wood’s most interesting reviews in a while, a dismissal of Howard Jacobson’s Booker-winning novel, The Finkler Question. The novel is one I wouldn’t have been likely to pick up anyway; rather, what’s interesting about the review is how Wood uses it to characterize a particular type of bad comic writing--and thereby define a different, better version as well.

After explaining that The Finkler Question “is always shouting at the reader,” as if it needs to make sure we’re getting the joke, Wood states his broader case:

The problem might be put like this. There is comedy, and then there is something called the Comic Novel, and these are related to each other rather as the year is related to a pocket diary--the latter a meaner, tidier, simpler version of the former. Comedy is the angle at which most of us see the world, the way that our very light is filtered. The novel is, by and large, a secular, comic form: one can be suspicious of any novelist who seems entirely immune to the comic. But the Comic Novel flattens comedy into the bar code of “the joke”--a strip of easy-to-swipe predictability. The Comic Novel might imagine itself descended from Cervantes and Fielding, but it is really the stunted offspring of Waugh and Wodehouse, lacking the magic of either. In the work of English comic writers like David Lodge, Malcolm Bradbury, and Tom Sharpe, there is, too often, a tiresome need to be always seen to be funny. The novel’s prose may be calm enough, but the novel’s form will seem exaggerated, because it is monochromatically devoted to funniness, as a fever is devoted to heat.

I think the phrase he's looking for here is "flop sweat."

Wood is at his best when he’s writing on the comic; though his book on comedy, The Irresponsible Self, is just a collection of review essays, it is more consistently interesting--and convincing--than his other two books. And he makes an important, useful distinction here: most novels worth reading are comic; not all of them are comic novels. Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time is unquestionably comic, though you would be hard-pressed to find anything that could be called a joke in it. There is comedy in Iris Murdoch (though it’s overwhelmed by romance), in Barbara Pym, in Trollope, and in Halldor Laxness--to pick just four writers off my shelves. Those four are wildly disparate, but all in their own ways are practicing a form of psychological realism, and all realize that such an approach to the world requires them also to acknowledge their characters' occasional absurdities, smallnesses, and failures. Even such grim writers as Hilary Mantel or Roberto Bolano find room for comedy--hell, Richard Stark, in his Parker novels, some of the hardest-edged books I know, can’t help but allow glimmers of comedy to peek through, simply because he’s attending closely to the ways of people.

None of those writers (with the exception of Powell) are as funny as J. F. Powers, another of my favorites--nor did they set out to be--but a description of Powers’s writing from Wood’s essay about him in The Irresponsible Self would seem to apply to them as well, if in lesser form:

Powers is at his most comic when catching, as if by luck, this brackish overflow of people’s souls. . . . Powers shows again what comic realism can do: how it attends to the human exception, how it scathes our pretensions and blesses our weaknesses.

Wood’s other category is also clear--and, not unsurprisingly, it overlaps quite a bit with his other bete noir, the bustling, capacious, cosmopolitan genre he calls “Hysterical Realism.” It is the “cartoonish and inauthentic reality” he has complained of in Rushdie, the “pursuit of vitality at all costs” that he notes in Pynchon and others; you could take this description of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and apply it, nearly unchanged, to Wood’s demolition of The Finkler Question:

As realism, it is incredible; as satire, it is cartoonish; as cartoon, it is too realistic.

By pointing out the overlap between the two, I don’t intend to criticize, or even seem to be making a particularly revelatory point: I appreciate that Wood is consistent, and I expect that, pejorative labels aside, Howard Jacobson wouldn’t balk at a categorization scheme that placed The Finkler Question with White Teeth. To a large extent, I share Wood’s point of view: I prefer the quiet comedy of the former category to the manic madcap of the latter; I prefer classic psychological realism, because what I’m most interested in in fiction is the age-old question of how we are to live in this world.

Yet I feel that Wood’s division leaves something out--that for someone who truly values comedy, who loves Fielding and Wodehouse and Waugh and Ivy Compton-Burnett and Kingsley Amis and others, who enjoys bursting into laughter on the subway (which I can’t quite imagine Wood ever doing), there are other novels that don’t quite fit the dichotomy of good/bad, gentle/madcap, natural/trying too hard that Wood sets up. They’re novels whose comedy--or perhaps satire--is not incidental, but the point, yet at the same time they neither use Wodehouse’s trick of unmooring us from all reality nor do they fall into the pit Wood identifies of rendering reality unintentionally unbelievable (and therefore unfunny).

Two recent examples give a clue as to how such a book can succeed: Personal Days, by my friend Ed Park, and The Ask, by Sam Lipsyte. Of the two, Personal Days is by far the more sucesssful; The Ask, like Lipsyte’s previous book, Homeland, eventually collapses under the weight of its awkward plot. But along the way Lipsyte wraps the reader up in language so carefully polished that the jokes--and yes, there are jokes, a few of them awful--for the most part don’t feel like impositions, or demands for laughter, but instead feel more like the hidden sting in the sentence’s curved tail. And sting is the right term, for the rest of the genius of The Ask lies in its self-loathing, whose acid can dissolve any pretense; as you read it, you alternate between laughing and cringing. Laugh:

Bernie and Aiden slipped from their respective parental grips and commenced conversation about an action hero, something not quite human that maybe transformed or transmogrified but in any event could easily exsanguinate any mother or father or adult guardian, which was the crucial part, the takeaway, as TV commentators put it. It would have been hard to tell, witnessing the boys together now, that one had recently tried to bite off the other's penis. The flipside to the fickleness of children was their ability to transcend grudge, adjust to new conditions. Innocence, cruelty, rubbery limbs, amnesia, successful nations were erected on these qualities.

Cringe:

We knew the price of Christine’s criminally low price [for daycare], namely that under her supervision, or lack thereof, Bernie was becoming a criminal. Child care was like everything else. You got what you paid for, and your child paid for what you could not pay for. . . . A few seasons in Christine’s cement yard with Queens County’s puniest toughs and Bernie had the strut of an old-time dockside hustler. It was hard to imagine the boy completing kindergarten; remarkably easy to picture him in a tangle of fish knives and sailor cock under some rot-soft pier.

The satire of Personal Days is much gentler, but no less on point, and it's given strength by the formal inventiveness of the novel, which allows for a sneaking accretion of emotion that unexpectedly explodes in the novel's rushing final section. Along the way, there's some truly wonderful comedy. Here, for example, is a passage that distills the frustrations of modern office life into a few short lines:

Lizzie drags an icon out of a cluttered corner of her screen but lets go too soon. It falls into the document she's working on, which happens to be her resume. The icon bounces back to its starting place with a boinggg noise she's never heard before. She learns that Word cannot insert a file into itself.

Word can seriously go fuck itself, she mutters. She's been talking to herself a lot lately but maybe we all have.

Later she's trying to put a chart into a different document but gets scolded: That is not a valid action for footnotes.

This is funny--the quick response, the finger-wagging strictness--but it also creeps her out. She calls up Pru except she accidentally dials her own extension and the little screen says, You cannot call yourself.

Our machines know more than we do, Pru thinks. Even their deficiencies and failures are instructive. They are trying to tell us something about the limits of the human, the nature of the possible. Or something like that, says Pru, who has been reading a novel about cyborgs set in the year 2012.

The message that kills us is the one that pops up on the rare occasions when we remember to shut everything down for the weekend, just before we turn the computer off.

Are you sure you want to quit?

Then there's this description of the enigmatic boss, Maxine, which absolutely revels in the pleasures of language, its shifting rhythms and registers:

Maxine's new outfit was completely inappropriate for winter, in fact for any season or situation. It had two kinds of pink going on, and ornate beaded strappy things, and a fairly explicit bondage motif. There were parallelograms of exposed flesh that were illegal in most states, a bow in the back that looked like a winding key. One area involved fur. Her hair had a fresh-from-salon bounce that clashed with the rest of the getup, but this being Maxine, everything kind of went together in the end. . . . Pru and Lizzie instinctively flinched. They might as well have been rolling on the ground like bowling pins, with xs for eyes.

With her female competition out of the way, Maxine leveled her extremely hot gaze right at Grime, who stood his ground. He swayed in place, gently rocking on one heel. Maxine was saying something about Wednesday, but it wasn't clear whether she meant tomorrow or last Wednesday.

Grime's not-flinching was making Maxine flinch. It looked like a nod but it was actually a flinch. Lizzie and Pru saw it all unfold. They're filing away the subtleties for Jack II and his blog. Maxine lost the thread of what she was saying, eyes gleaming in panic. She could have been talking about the general concept of Wednesday, its status as a hump day, its complicated spelling. No one had seen her quiver like this before. It was like she'd been set in italics.

There was a historical vibe to the scene.

Though the two books are, themselves, wildly different--it would be hard to convey just how much less corrosive Pesonal Days is than The Ask, while being no less insightful--at the same time they're more like each other than they are like either of Wood's categories. They are neither hysterical realism nor comedy that is trying too hard: instead, they're well-grounded satire written in language of almost Nabokovian polish--and they put that language in service of a story about recognizably human characters. I wonder what Wood would think of them. Would he see that they're different from the books he's writing about--or is there, as I suspect, a limit to his sense of the comic?

All I know is that I want more novels like these, books that manage to dedicate themselves simultaneously--and almost equally--to comedy, carefully wrought prose, and the basic problems of being human. What more can a reader ask for?

"We both are rather comic people," or, Letters Week, Part II!

It seems right to follow the high seriousness of Tolstoy's letters with the more down-to-earth concerns of Barbara Pym. She offers a nice contrast, too in that, for all that Tolstoy took himself too seriously, Pym, at least in her letters, often presented herself too lightly; like the sharper characters in her novels, she tended to try to put the best face on bad news, offering up everything with a leaven of wry, self-deprecating humor.

In this letter to Henry Harvey, a longtime object of failed love interest, for example, her attempts at levity can't hide the emotional strain of a collapsed affair:

I can't exactly remember what I did tell you in my last letter. Did I tell you that I was in love and that it was all hopeless? I expect so--well if I did you may be interested (and relieved?) to hear that we parted at Christmas and haven't seen or written to each other since then--a real Victorian renunciation--the sort of thing I adore in novels, but find extremely painful in real life. Of course we may come together again in the future--time alone will tell (sorry!) but in the meantime he thought it better I should try to find somebody else who can marry me, which he wouldn't be able to do for at least a year. . . . Luckily we both are rather comic people so it isn't as bad as it sounds.

Or take this letter to her friend Bob Smith, from April 22, 1954, about her recurring struggles with the publishing industry:

I had a letter from Jock recently. He liked Jane and Prudence very much. But the Americans and Continentals most definitely don't and now I am feeling a little bruised! In answer to my enquiries Cape tells me that 8 Americans and 10 Continental publishers saw and "declined" (that seems to be the word) Excellent Women and they are still plodding on with J & P. So humble yourself, Miss Pym, and do not give yourself airs!

But late on this Tuesday night, something more truly cheerful seems in order--and what's more reliably entertaining than descriptions of Cyril Connolly? This one is from another letter to Henry Harvey, dated February 20, 1946:

If you haven't read Cyril Connolly's book The Unquiet Grave, you will wonder what I am talking about and say [angst] is just one of my silly German words, but as I expect you have read it you will see that I am keeping up to date with all our clever young men. Not that he is young exactly--he is approaching forty, indeed, probably is forty now, is fat and given to self-pity and nostalgia. But he is clever and puts his finger on what it is we suffer from now--though maybe you don't in the bracing air of Sweden. He is "soaked in French Literature"--not my expression, but the kind of thing one would like to be!

And this passage from a letter to her friend Richard Campbell Roberts, from January 5, 1965, seems a good way to close for today:

It says on this Airmail pad that 12 sheets and an envelope weighs less than half an nounce, but I doubt if I can go on at that length. Also I am writing this in the office in the morning, which seems frightfully sinful.

If simply writing a letter in the office of a morning makes her feel sinful, I think she needs a copy of Personal Days! Ed, how's your time machine working?

Cataloging the Imaginary Library

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Vladimir Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) is a novel purporting to be a biography of a recently dead writer, penned by his half-brother. As such, it's full of the titles of books that don't exist outside the world of the novel. Like other prolific fake-titlers, such as Anthony Powell (J. G. Quiggin's Unburnt Boats, St. John Clarke's Fields of Amaranth, etc.), Nabokov seems to have greatly enjoyed the task of naming these phantom books, which at their best reside comfortably at the mysterious juncture of plausibility, originality, and amusement.

When, the day after reading Sebastian Knight, I encountered yet more fake titles in Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark (1938), then even more--though tipped more towards verisimilitude--last night in Graham Greene's The End of the Affair (1951), I began to think . . . what better, more Borgesian use could there be for the infinite capacity of the Internet than to assemble a catalog of the world's Fictional Library?

Thus was born a new feature! If I end up sticking with this over the months and building a ridiculously long list, I'll probably at some point figure out a different place to put them and a different way to organize them. For now, however, those of you who enjoy the art of fake titling as much as I do can simply enjoy this first batch:

From Graham Greene's The End of the Affair

For Ever Fido (1912), author unknown
The Ambitious Host, by Maurice Bendrix
The Crowned Image, by Maurice Bendrix
The Grave on the Water-Front, by Maurice Bendrix

From Vladimir Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark

Memoirs of a Forgetful Man, by Udo Conrad
History of Art: Volumes One through Ten, by Nonnenmacher

From Vladimir Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

The Laws of Literary Imagination, author unknown
The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight, by Mr. Goodman
Fall of Man, by Godfrey Goodman
Recollections of a Lifetime, by Samuel Goodrich
The Doubtful Asphodel, by Sebastian Knight
The Funny Mountain, by Sebastian Knight
Lost Property, by Sebastian Knight
The Prismatic Bezel, by Sebastian Knight
Success, by Sebastian Knight

Finally, I can't resist sharing some of the titles of go-getting business books featured in Ed Park's great new novel Personal Days (2008):

Every Worker's War Chest, by Fred Glass
Office Politics 101, by Randall Slurry
Climbing the Seven-Rung Ladder: The Business of Business, by Chad Ravioli and Khader Adipose
The Business Warrior's 30-Day Mental Fitness Plan (Revised Edition), by Cody Waxing
Yes, I Drank the Kool-Aid--and I Went Back for Seconds, by M. Halsey Patterson
Mine for the Taking: or, Some (INCREDIBLY!) Irreverent Notes on the Business of Wealth, by Parker Edwards
Letters to a Young Tycoon, by Percy Ampersand, edited by Percy Ampersand IV

Because part of the fun of that section of Ed's book is coming across these and other titles, I won't share nearly all of them--but maybe Ed will offer more at his reading at Chicago's lovely Book Cellar in Lincoln Square tomorrow night. Come out and see for yourself! Thursday, June 5th at 7 o'clock, 4736 N. Lincoln Avenue!

Criss-cross!

In what I think will be the last post linking Ed Park's Personal Days to Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov, we turn to the place of unusual appearance in business dealings.

First Ed tells us about the office's tarty bombshell, Maxine, whose faith in the powers of an outfit that can be described only with the aid of italics is, unexpectedly, proved to be misplaced:

Maxine's new outfit was completely inappropriate for winter, in fact for any season or situation. It had two kinds of pink going on, and ornate beaded strappy things, and a fairly explicit bondage motif. There were parallelograms of exposed flesh that were illegal in most states, a bow in the back that looked like a winding key. One area involved fur. Her hair had a fresh-from-salon bounce that clashed with the rest of the getup, but this being Maxine, everything kind of went together in the end. . . . Pru and Lizzie instinctively flinched. They might as well have been rolling on the ground like bowling pins, with xs for eyes.

With her female competition out of the way, Maxine leveled her extremely hot gaze right at Grime, who stood his ground. He swayed in place, gently rocking on one heel. Maxine was saying something about Wednesday, but it wasn't clear whether she meant tomorrow or last Wednesday.

Grime's not-flinching was making Maxine flinch. It looked like a nod but it was actually a flinch. Lizzie and Pru saw it all unfold. They're filing away the subtleties for Jack II and his blog. Maxine lost the thread of what she was saying, eyes gleaming in panic. She could have been talking about the general concept of Wednesday, its status as a hump day, its complicated spelling. No one had seen her quiver like this before. It was like she'd been set in italics.

There was a historical vibe to the scene.

Then there's Goncharov's account of Oblomov's landlord, who is, perhaps intentionally, awkward and a bit grotesque:

The brother tip-toed into the room and responded to Oblomov's greeting with a triple bow. His tunic was tightly buttoned from top to bottom so that it was impossible to tell whether he was wearing any linen underneath. His tie was knotted with a single knot and the ends were tucked inside the tunic. He was about forty with a tuft of hair sticking straight up from his brown and with two identical tufts sprouting, wild and untended, from each temple, resembling nothing so much as the ears of an average-sized dog. His gray eyes never settled on their target directly, but only after some stealthy reconnoitering in its vicinity.

It seemed as if he were ashamed of his hands and whenever he spoke to someone he did his best to keeping them out of sight, either placing both hands behind his back or keeping one tucked inside his coat and holding the other behind his back. When handing a document requiring some explanation to a supervisor he would keep one hand behind his back and, with the middle finger of his other hand, making sure to keep the nail pointing downwards, he would point to the line or word in question. Then, at the earliest possible moment he would tuck the hand out of sight, maybe because his fingers were on the thick side, reddish and trembling slightly, and he felt, not unreasonably, that it was somehow too indelicate to expose them too frequently to public scrutiny.

Despite that seeming insecurity, the landlord manages to successfully dun the relatively hapless Oblomov for 1,354 roubles and twenty-eight kopecks for a two-week rental.

Were we able to jumble these scenes, I think that Oblomov might successfully deploy his congenital mix of apathy and vagueness to hold out against Grime's unflappability, whereas I have no question that Maxine's wardrobe (mal)function would cut the landlord's bill at least in half.

As Patricia Highsmith might have put it, criss-cross! Inter-novelistic loans, that's what we need!

Reading the signs

Reading Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov (1859) and Ed Park's Personal Days (2008) at the same time continues to offer unexpected (and unexpectedly rewarding) affinities. Take, for example, this bit of contemporary folklore offered up by one of Ed's charactes:

Jack II says that when you feel a tingling in your fingers, it means someone's Googling you. We take to this bit of instant folklore immediately.

I wonder whether a Yahoo search triggers the same response? Or an Alta Vista search?

If Goncharov were alive today, he'd surely know the answer, if the following conversation between Oblomov's parents is any indication:

Suddenly Ilya Ivanovich stopped in the middle of the room, and, with a look of alarm, touched the tip of his nose. "Oh, no, this is terrible," he said, "look, the tip of my nose is itching, there's going to be a death."

"There you go again!" his wife exclaimed, clasping her hands, "it's not the tip of your nose itching that means there's going to be a death, it's the bridge of your nose! Really, what a scatterbrain you are! What if you were to say something like that when we were visiting people or when we had guests--it would be so embarrassing!"

"Well, what does it mean then when the tip of your nose itches?" said Ilya Ivanovich, discountenanced.

"A death! Really, what can you be thinking of?"

"I'm always mixing things up," said Ilya Ivanovich. "How can a personal be expected to know what it means when you itch in all these different places, the side of your nose, the tip, the eyebrows. . . ?"

Pelegaya Ivanovna was quick to supply the information. "The side means news, between the eyebrows means tears, the forehead means meeting someone, on the right a man, on the left a woman, the ears means rain, the lips, kissing, the whiskers, eating sweets, the elbow, sleeping in a new place, the soles of the feet, a journey."

"Well done, Pelageya Ivanovna!" said Ilya Ivanovich.

For maximum enjoyment, I recommend reading Pelegaya Ivanovna's litany out loud at top speed.

"Consequently, the initial prospect of spending the major part of his life going to work was painfully depressing."

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Those of you who've served time in an office will surely recognize this guy:

At work he has no clearly defined tasks because his colleagues and supervisors have never been able to detect in him any particular skills or competence. Whatever task he is given he performs in such a way that his supervisor is always hard put to it to say whether he has performed it well or badly. No matter how closely he looks or how carefully he reads, the best he can come up with is: "Leave it for now, I'll take a look at it later . . yes, well it seems more or less alright."

Apparently some aspects of office life never change: the above is not from Ed Park's brand-new, critically acclaimed novel of office life, Personal Days, but from Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov, which was published in 1859. As I was traveling when Ed's book was published this week and therefore couldn't pick up the copy I'd pre-ordered at 57th Street Books, I was pleasantly surprised to discover some office comedy in Oblomov.

The titular gentleman of the novel is primarily known for spending most of his life in bed, alternately daydreaming and dozing--but as a young man he worked in Russia's senselessly bureaucratic civil service. Like many a person entering on his first job, Ilya Ilyich Oblomov brought some misconceptions to the workplace:

He imagined that office colleagues were just one close, happy family constantly putting themselves out for each other's comfort and pleasure and that attendance at the office could not possibly be a kind of compulsory custom that you simply had to observe every single day and that slush, heat, or mere disinclination would be adequate and legitimate grounds for non-attendance.

Imagine his dismay on realizing that nothing short of an earthquake could excuse a healthy civil servant's absence from his place of work and that, in any case, St. Petersburg never had the good fortune to have earthquakes. No doubt a flood would also be acceptable grounds, but floods hardly ever happened there either.

Worse was his misunderstanding of the role of the boss:

At home, he had heard that a boss or a supervisor was a father to his subordinates and had formed an image of such a personage, an image as beaming and benign and indulgent as a member of his own family. He saw him as a kind of second father who lived and breathed only to reward his subordinates and to cater, unceasingly and unremittingly, regardless of their merits, not only to their needs but even to their pleasures. Ilya Ilyich thought that a superior was so intimately bound up in the welfare of his subordinates that he would inquire anxiously whether he had had a good night's sleep, why his eyes were a little cloudy and whether he might not have a little headache.

His first day on the job was thus a rude awakening. The moment the supervisor appeared, everyone started hustling and bustling and bumping into each other from sheer agitation, some even nervously fingering their clothing in case he might deem them not sufficiently presentable. The reason for this, as Oblomov subsequently became aware, was that in the person of a subordinate scared out of his wits and rushing to pay his respects, a certain type of boss saw not only proper respect for his person, but a mark of zealousness and indeed at times even of competence.

And all that frantic kowtowing occurs despite Oblomov's department having a relatively good supervisor:

He was never heard to utter a harsh word or even to raise his voice; he never demanded but always asked. If he wanted you to do something, he asked; if he invited you to his house, he asked; if he had you arrested, he asked.

Between the rush of duties ("It doesn't leave a moment for living!" Oblomov laments) and his fear of his supervisor ("[T]he moment the boss addressed him, he would find that his natural voice had been replaced by something nauseatingly insipid."), poor Oblomov quickly becomes a wreck . . . so he forges a doctor's note diagnosing himself with hepatitis and an enlarged heart, both blamed on the office, which he then forsakes forever in favor of his bed.

Those of us without substantial private incomes from large country estates, however, will inevitably be back on the train Monday--but with Personal Days under one arm, Oblomov under the other, we'll have an extra spring in our step and a glint in our eye, our quiet laughter a sufficient defense against our fellow commuters' confused contempt.