The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Beautiful and Damned was published in 1922 and is the second novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. When reviewed by The New York Times, the critic found Fitzgerald to be "pessimistic".

WES:

The Beautiful and Damned, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is our novel for this month and it appears quite representative of the genre of the 1920s. It seems to reflect the persona of the time, a time when the universities began kicking out God, society was becoming ever more soulless, Progressives (ala Woodrow Wilson and Teddy/Franklin Roosevelt) were busy reshaping policy and society, with people bouncing from one fad to another looking for something but never seeming to find it. This novel appears to me to be almost the epitome of the meaninglessness and fecklessness of lives where there are no moral guideposts, no strictures, and no basis for one’s life except the pursuit of pleasure. The book seems to have several themes that intersect in the lives of Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert whose travails are depicted in this tale. Those themes appear in the quotes below. I shall highlight in the ensuing paragraphs what I think the author’s purpose was in these quotes as well as a few of my own perspectives on these themes:

·         “It seemed a tragedy to want nothing – and yet he wanted something, something. He knew in flashes what it was – some path of hope to lead him toward what he thought was an imminent and ominous old age.”

·         “Gloria’s penchant for premonitions and her bursts of vague supernaturalism were a surprise to Anthony. Either some complex, properly and scientifically inhibited in the early years with her Bilphistic mother, or some inherited hypersensitiveness, made her susceptible to any suggestion of the psychic…”

·         “But the book lived always, so beautifully written, and so astounding the quality of imagination with which these men of mind and genius had endowed it. They neglected to give it a name, but after they were dead it became known as the Bible.”

·         “He had been futile in longing to drift and dream; no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret.”

·         “’I always have an instinct to kick a cat,’ he said idly.”

·         “Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin.”

·         “There was nothing it seemed, that grew stale so soon as pleasure.”

·         “Only a few months before people had been urging him to give in, to submit to mediocrity, to go to work. But he had known that he was justified in his way of life – and he stuck it out stanchly….’I showed them,’ he was saying. ‘It was a hard fight, but I didn’t give up and came through!’”

Anthony’s life surely was drastically affected by the loss of both of his parents before he was 11. His father died while they were in Switzerland so he must have been tremendously traumatized by that event and the strenuous journey home with his father’s body nearby. His early life was impacted by his grandfather’s great wealth and long, intimidating shadow. He felt a need to do something after Harvard but could never actually get around to doing anything. Instead he lived on his mother’s limited legacy and his grandfather’s yearly Christmas bond. That money was quite enough for a fellow right out of college but soon melted away after he married Gloria and their joint lives became more and more expensive. They began to depend on the grandfather’s inheritance but that became only a tenuous hope when the grandfather was disgusted over a drunken incident and completely wrote Anthony out of his will. 

Fitzgerald apparently coined the word “Bilphism” himself in this book as it does not appear in dictionaries. It supposedly means the science of all religions where the soul lives on in reincarnation. Gloria appeared to be afflicted with this curse and demonstrated it at the deaths of her parents but it seems apparent that Fitzgerald did not believe in it. He cynically appears to have invented the term as a derogatory reference to anyone foolish or stupid enough to believe in or have a psychological “complex” involving a supernatural religion.

As above noted, Fitzgerald consistently denigrates religion, especially the biblical account. One particular scene where this occurred was where Gloria left a drunken party after Joe Hull made a pass at her and she decided on the spur of the moment to return from the summer cottage upstate back to New York. Everyone in the party goes searching for her and they all end up at the train station in the wee hours of the morning waiting for the train with each drunken sot revealing their psychological motivations and religious underpinnings or lack of same. The quote cited was the end of a long cynical monologue by Gloria’s cousin who spends his time temporizing quality literature by writing claptrap to make a buck. 

Anthony reveals himself to be a thoroughly unlikeable guy. He cannot make a decision and puts off ever making a move to succeed in life. He is in it only to engage in pleasure and constantly asks forgiveness from Gloria as he falls deeper into alcoholism, debt, and ennui. This is revealed in the quote about nightmares and the simple one liner about kicking the cat. Any man who kicks a cat is worthless in my book. He reinforces his roguishness by shacking up with Dot while in the Army, then dumping her and later throwing a chair at her when she shows up in New York hoping to resume the relationship he simply had abandoned.

The theme of this book has got to be the utter futility of life. Life constantly stinks for Gloria and Anthony as everyone around them moves along while they sink deeper and deeper. They apparently fail to move because of the promise of millions from the contested inheritance that they believe will solve all their problems. They can’t see what is happening even when Anthony is thrown out of the club after drunkenly accosting Joseph Bloeckmann, the film producer, who had genuinely tried to help Gloria.

Pleasure consistently is the principle purpose of their lives and that mostly comes right out of the bottle. They had to do something, meet someone, or party every night and it nearly ruined them. As every addict is well aware of, it took more booze each time to get the desired effect and that meant more and more money and fewer and ultimately fewer friends.

After all the time spent showing a downward spiral, finally, in the last couple of pages, their legal appeal is a success and suddenly Anthony comes into a $30 million inheritance. The last quote is actually the last couple lines in the book. It shows or I think it shows Fitzgerald’s ultimate belief in the sheer uncertainty of life. Anthony and Gloria in a moral universe should have been wrecked but instead they are rewarded. Anthony actually thinks he has won out due to his own abilities given in the quote when it is actually a pure twist of fate that has put him safely on the ship to a holiday in Europe.

Overall, this book had a few plusses and held some interest but I found much I disliked. I did not like the characters. There was nothing redeeming in their actions and reactions. The title might really be an insightful one. These characters wanted to be beautiful and lived for pleasure but as the Bible says, pleasure is only for a season. Without morality and redemption, they are damned – except in this one everyone apparently will live happily ever after. Is that life – I don’t think so. I also did not like the high degree of fluff with many characters and scenes irrelevant to the main story line. This is probably due to the author’s inexperience. I will have to explore his career more fully – maybe this was an early effort for him. I rate this book as a 7 on my scale of 1-10 (1 as best).

ALLISON:

Dad wrote an email to remind me that the title of this book is The Beautiful and Damned and not “The Beautiful and the Damned” as I have always called it, even after reading the damn thing, and carrying it around with me, staring at its beautiful cover for over a week.

            The Beautiful and Damned.

Well, that changes everything.

Why did I subconsciously and so thoroughly add that the? My version is maybe easier on the ear? “The Beautiful and The Damned”—a dichotomy, one and the other, situated across a gulf. Truly, I don’t know why or how I misread, but it’s not an opposition, not at all, and I suddenly feel I’ve misinterpreted the whole book! What a difference a the can make! Our two protagonists jointly assume these descriptions rather than the assignments I had carelessly given them: Gloria, beauty, Anthony, damnation.  Well, shoot.

There are a lot of titles in this book that I didn’t pay attention to. I am a lazy reader, which is partly why I enjoy reading with Dad, who is inquisitive and follows all plot points meticulously. Fitzgerald structured the story into three Books, each with three main chapters, and countless mini chapters, all carefully labeled and I don’t know that I ingested a single title. I don’t care for fiction that comes in neat categories, so I reject chapter headings, almost unconsciously, but in doing so I am surely missing out. Titles require thought. They are not unintentional. Let this be a lesson to me.

I will come out immediately and say I struggled to identify with these characters that want for nothing, yet are entitled everything. This is a New York novel, and I love to read about New York because New York novels tell about the city as if it’s the only city—the universal, and there’s something so bold and obnoxious about that. As a New Yorker (and I call myself a New Yorker because I’ve lived in the city longer than I’ve lived anywhere else) it makes me feel included in the joke. I want to recognize myself in New York, but our heroes Anthony and Gloria may as well live on the moon, their privileged birthright so elevates them from squall of the streets. I can’t live in this version of New York, but I certainly recognize the cast of characters. I just don’t like them very much. 

As I neared the end of this book, I heard echoes of Fitzgerald in another deeply devastating American novel: Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. Despite similar fates, Yates’ book is about ambition which is arguably a theme more familiar to our American indoctrinations than that of the elite. Of course this country is supposed to offer wealth and security and love and warmth to those who only seize their opportunity. The heartbreak of Revolutionary Road comes from the dissolution of the myth of the American Dream, which is also why my heart steels toward Anthony and Gloria. They refuse to struggle. But, as Buddha says, “life is suffering.” Their agony instead manifests from the lack of fight and in the end Anthony refers to himself as a cautionary tale. If you fail to strive, fail to be motivated by a fragile ego, or shrewd greed, or even the extraordinary effort of pulling up one’s bootstraps, then you are undeserving.

Anthony thinks he is damned by a woman—by achieving the one woman he wants. But he’s not damned. He’s spared a war of over 38 million (!!!) causalities, he never starves, and he teeters on the edge of disaster the entire book, even perhaps, getting away with murder. His damnation is psychic, and his own concoction. Conversely, we want to feel compassion for the marriage of Richard Yates’ couple in Revolutionary Road which is shattered by ambition and ponderings about feminine “choices” between family and independence, or how a woman might measure a successful life against the manly American algorithm of work = reward. Gloria, finding Anthony’s role as provider lacking, asks these questions, but her only “work” (becoming an actress) relies on her beauty, employed too little, too late.  

Maurice Sendak wrote a trilogy of children’s books which he describes as “how children master various feelings - danger, boredom, fear, frustration, jealousy - and manage to come to grips with the realities of their lives.” If you ask me, In the Night Kitchen, is his book on boredom. The hero, Mickey, (clearly a child lying in bed, waiting for sleep) conquers insufferable boredom with ingenuity and creation. He takes control of his dreamworld and removes himself from peril by forcefully protesting. He then builds a plane out of dough, and delivers milk to the batter so we all can have cake for breakfast. He is rewarded with pride, a job well done. I was reminded of Mickey and Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, particularly when Anthony delivers an oft-quoted speech to his unrequited mistress, Dot. Anthony tries to temper her heartache by explaining that it’s better to desire than achieve when he says: “I’ve often thought that if I hadn’t got what I wanted things might have been different with me. I might have found something in my mind and enjoyed putting it in circulation. I might have been content with the work of it, and had some sweet vanity of the success.” He’s not exactly saying “be careful what you wish for” because there’s no real longing for anything, as all that’s to be desired has been fated already through fortunate birth—wealth, status, and beauty. Yet all of these surface advantages fall short of fruition. Anthony is only wealthy enough to not have to do anything. Gloria is only beautiful enough to find Anthony, wasting the vague prize of her youth and beauty on a sad marriage of disrepair. No one works at fixing anything, and the shiny veneer dulls and flakes with boredom turned madness. This is a novel of neglected narcissists, stuck gazing in the mirror. Anthony missed Sendak’s lesson of childhood, never learnt how to protect his own ego, so that when things spiral out of control he relents to the chaos rather than designing a world in which he is redeemed. A world in which he is the hero.

I loved the language of this book, it was so very beautiful and accessible, even as written nearly 100 years ago. But the book was so very depressing and any morals gleaned, like Mickey, I thankfully mastered in childhood. I found it hard to like this book at all. I give it a 4 out of 10. 

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett was published in the magazine Redbook in 1934. While Hammett never wrote a sequel in novel form, he went on to pen the stories for six Thin Man films, despite the literal "thin man" perishing in the only book. 

ALLISON:           

It’s no use beating around the bush. I really liked this book. Really, really. Outside of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, this is the most entertaining reading experience I’ve had in some time. I was trying to think of why I liked this book so much, especially as there are things that I’ve come to expect in crime novels that Hammett’s Thin Man doesn’t address. For example, I wasn’t particularly challenged or inspired to figure out the mystery—I took a wild guess that the murderer was Dorothy in the opening pages and was contented not to think about it from there on out. Also, my heart wasn’t tugged for the victim, she wasn’t built as a sympathetic character. And I wasn’t worried for the health and fitness of our heroes, although this isn’t Hammett’s fault. I had mistakenly assumed there were subsequent Nick and Nora novels, assuring their safe passage through this one. There are not more books, I’ve learned—only a series of Nick and Nora movies, also penned by Hammett. Nevertheless, there wasn’t a tremendous amount of suspense or edge of my seat sitting.

What I’ve listed are qualities that usually enhance a crime novel, but there are also typical interferers in the genre, devices that turn my stomach, or irritate me. As a critical feminist, I often struggle with the mores of masculine mysteries. Especially (ESPECIALLY!!) when the victim is a pretty young woman. There’s too much romanticization of women and violence in our media. Much to my chagrin, I was not piqued, not even a little, by this crime novel written in the 1930’s. I said to a coworker at the bookshop, “It’s the best kind of misogyny. The women send it back in equal measure.” I exaggerate of course, (the women are interesting, and certainly tough—the victim is killed because of her association with crime, not other more passionate and clichéd reasons) but much like the Ferrante novels, I didn’t worry about feminism while I was reading. Which is rare. While everyone is calling the Neapolitan novels triumphs of feminist literature, I find myself silently commenting, “Or, they are just good.”  Fully comprehending the benefits of scrutinizing art and media for their commentary on our cultural norms, I’m not chuckling that Ferrante’s books about a female friendship are so transcendent that men (gasp! MEN!) stand at the bookstore counter thumbing through the pastel soap opera covers. Likewise, I’m not aghast that Nora thinks dirty old men are entertaining, enabling a casual yet potentially sinister chauvinism. Because The Thin Man is just good. It’s worth saying, though that I find a crime novel to be exceptional (and I find many, many crime novels thus) is quite a bit less frustrating than the rest of the world’s surprise that a book about women should be so fantastic.

            None of this is to say The Thin Man isn’t political. One of the more startling characters in the novel is alcohol. Everyone drinks, all the time. The lawyers, the brokers, the gangsters, and even the cops. No one drinks more than Nick Charles, who despite downing a drink for every new thought, is never drunk. The only drink Nick refuses is the one offered by Guild, the police detective on the case. He abstains not because he worries about the cop (the pair have shared a drink at other opportunities) rather because of his experience with the quality of cops’ drink. The book was published in 1934, the near the time Prohibition was repealed after thirteen dry years. Late in the novel Nick says to Nora, “This excitement has put us behind on our drinking,” Drinking, despite its criminality, is an obligation, like paperwork. The alcohol consumption in The Thin Man is not sustainable. That Nick remains so lucid throughout the novel, despite the drinking and being shot in the gut within the first few pages, is a stretch. We forget his injury, even as he engages in a few physical altercations. The stitches only pop in the final reveal, as he tosses a punch at the murderer, reminding us that Nick has been tussling baddies with a belly full of booze and a bullet wound! One would think he’d have bled to death, his blood thinned to zero. The quantity drunk is ridiculous, certainly lethal, but fictionally imbibing with such obsessive punctuation can serve as a tipsy flip of the bird at the establishment.

            So Nick Charles is a tolerant man. Beyond his capacity for drink and pain, he is a successful sleuth because he can endure people. In this way he reminds me of my husband, who is not a private investigator, but a bartender. Todd rarely drinks but he deals with drunks for a living, drunks who come to the bar every evening, stay there all night, paying our rent, while considering Todd their best friend. He might be. Or might just be working. You have to be pretty obnoxious, or dangerous, for Todd to kick you out, but he’s not hesitant to put you in your place or tell a joke at your expense. All the characters in The Thin Man are desperate to win Nick’s favor, even as he claims he takes no sides. He’s everyone’s best friend, even when they shoot him in the gut. This is not the typical PI trope. He may be drunk, but he’s not a depressive or a wreck. He’s magnetic, the trouble, the talk and inevitable slips of truth, gravitating to him like the most popular kid in the room.

           I liked this book a lot. I liked it’s cheerful, sometimes silly tone punched with moments of chilling violence. I loved Nick’s bland distrust of everyone besides his quick-witted and unflappable wife. The dialogue is stunning, unmatched and somehow untimely—stylized but still relevant to today-speak. The one littlest question that never found an answer is why Nick started investigating in the first place. Curiosity would have brought him only so far, unless I’m mistaken, he wasn’t hired by anyone in particular, rather begged with by everyone specifically. Nick’s final monologue summarizing the crime was a bit over the top, (the added parentheticals or details assumed and proven through future investigations was particularly laughable) considering the man hardly uttered more than three consecutive sentences. BUT, overall, this book was true good fun, and I give it a whomping 2 out of 10 (1 being the highest) and am really excited to sit down for a Thin Man movie marathon in the coming weekend.  

Wes:

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett is an interesting detective story that became a rage in the early 1930s as its sharp repartee was easily translatable to the screen. The interesting relations between the main characters, Nick Charles and his classy heiress-wife Nora, also surely became infectious to the reading public as several of Hammett’s books were widely read and subsequently translated to the screen. Probably the most popular was The Maltese Falcon, which surely went a long way to making Humphrey Bogart a star. I heard that six “Thin Man” films were made featuring Nick and Nora Charles and their dog, Asta, the latter somehow transmogrified from a larger, more intimidating dog in the book to a small scaredy-cat dog in the movies.      

The book begins with Charles and his new wife vacationing in New York where Charles, an ex-gumshoe, is accosted by a young woman he once knew as a child when he was working as a detective. She was now looking for her long-lost father, a former client of Charles’. He passes her to the father’s lawyer and tries to move on but despite his best efforts to avoid it, he is drawn more and more into the case of the missing father. The problems intensify when people start dying and the papers mistakenly mention him as being on the case, a fact which brings a thug to his bedside with a pistol pointed at his gut. The thug lets one off when the cops suddenly show up and Charles is only grazed (the thin man??) but now has some literal skin in the game. The cops roust the thug and think Charles knows more than he does. Charles has to cooperate and, to avoid a gun possession rap, he thereafter exercises some of his old methods and contacts trying to work with the cops in solving the case.

The story is a real easy and quick read as it is almost non-stop dialogue. Nick Charles continually has run-ins with a wide range of interesting characters as he tries to find out why Julia Wolf and Arthur Nunheim are killed and who the killer(s) are. He moves around the speakeasies and invites a range of characters to his hotel suites as he and his wife wait for the New Year celebration. We never actually see them as the New Year (1933) never arrives before the end. It must have been quite a description if it had, because they spend almost all their time drinking, drunk, or waking up after noon with hangovers. To make a different New Year’s Day would have to be a day when they didn’t drink – that would be a celebration, I guess. In any case he solves the murders a day or two prior to the New Year and then decide to leave for home – San Francisco – before the big day.   

            The emphasis on booze in this book seems a clear intent to get prohibition repealed. Nearly everyone is boozing it up and the stuff is supposed to be illegal! The cops even are offered drinks and are offering up bottles out of their bottom drawers down at the precinct. The book has some weird things that in some cases are false leads and others seem a bit off – such as the long five page piece on cannibalism that Nick gives to Dorothy’s brother when he makes an off-the-cuff query on whether Nick knows anything about cannibals. After the book was finished, I had to ask what was up with that? Maybe the author needed some bulk to get to 200 pages – I can’t figure what else that section might mean.    

            One of the best quotes in the book was one that seemed very meaningful this month (October 2015) as one of our former leaders has been under the gun for truthfulness. Charles put her dilemma very succinctly in his description of Mimi Jorgensen’s stories:

‘The chief thing,’ I (Nick) advised them (Lt. Guild and Nora), ‘is not to let her tire you out. When you catch her in a lie, she admits it and gives you another lie to take its place and, when you catch her in that one, admits it and gives you still another, and so on. Most people – even women – get discouraged after you caught them in the third or fourth straight lie and fall back on either the truth or silence, but not Mimi. She keeps trying and you’ve got to be careful or you’ll find yourself believing her, not because she seems to be telling the truth, but simply because you’re tired of disbelieving her.’

Overall the story line moved forward quickly but I found some of the clues that Nick uncovered did not follow too closely when reading the wrap-up at the end when he discussed all the clues that led him to discover who the killer was and where all the dead bodies were. I did not recall some of the logic he came up with but the author must have had them covered since he conceived the whole thing. I guess the thin man was really intended to be the dead man in the grave with the fat man’s clothes. I am also still looking for the meaning of “dromomania” and “earysipelas.” I have a large college dictionary and neither of these obscure terms is defined. This was a good read and I look forward to seeing the various movies when they show up on The Movie Channel. I rate this book as a 4 on my scale of 1-10 (1 as best). 

The Reef by Edith Wharton

The Reef was published in 1912 and regarded by Wharton as her most autobiographical novel.

Wes:

Having finished The Reef a couple of weeks ago, it has been difficult for me to sit down and write my impressions of this novel after such a hiatus. From now on I will try to write the post up as soon as possible afterwards. I guess this is one of the symptoms of old age – the mind loses track of details needed to fill out one’s considerations about a story like this one. The Reef by Edith Wharton is a quite interesting story about love and hymeneal loyalties at the end of the Victorian era.     

George Darrow is a young American diplomatic staffer who has rekindled his first love after meeting Anna Leath at a diplomatic function in London. Though widowed with a child and step-son, she is relatively well off, living in France, and they both appear to have fallen back into a loving relationship that was interrupted some 12 years before in America when they were children. Now they plan to marry but Darrow is much disturbed when he obtains leave to meet her in France and gets a sudden letter from her stating there are “unexpected obstacles” and not to come visit for at least a fortnight. Not knowing what to do with his time, he meets an interestingly vivacious woman, Sophy Viner, at Dover, and they end up having an affair for some days in Paris as Darrow waits for word on when he can come to meet Anna. George has no long term designs on Sophy, he merely saw repression in her that generated “pity she inspired (that) made Darrow long to fill her few free hours to the brim.”

Forced after his leave to return to work, he finally gets to visit the Anna’s estate at Givré some months later. The plot thickens when he is shocked to find that Sophy has now been hired as governess for Anna’s daughter, Effie, and it really thickens when later the reader discovers that her brash and immature step-son, Owen, is secretly engaged to Sophy, a factor which is likely to cause much dissention with the mother-in-law, Madame de Chantelle, who will likely want better for her grandson. Anna promises her step-son she will defend his suit to her mother-in-law. Meanwhile, George wonders whether Sophy should be left with Effie while George and Anna move to Argentina and whether she is good enough for Owen. He also has to hide the fact that he and Sophy had a tryst after he had proposed to Anna. His feelings for Sophy at this point are summed up in this sentence, “The bare truth, indeed, was that he had hardly thought of her at all, either at that time or since, and that he was ashamed to base his judgment of her on his meager memory of their adventure.”  

As one can predict, Darrow tries to wean Sophy away from Owen and hide their relationship but is observed by the youth in his secretive discussions with Sophy. The entire affair is discovered and the relationships blow up under the Victorian ethos that an affair is a great and unforgivable shame to the woman and a minor misadventure or character flaw in the man. Anna vacillates between her new distrust of George and her love for him. Much of the second half of the book is absorbed with Anna’s dilemma on how she can build a marriage severely inhibited by her distrust. They break up and separate for a while and have conversations where neither he nor she can articulate what they really feel. A good synopsis of her feelings is the following when George wants her to tell him whether he should leave and both take a hiatus in their relationship:

She felt a mortal weakness, a craven impulse to cry out to him to stay, a longing to throw herself into his arms, and take refuge there from the unendurable anguish he had caused her. Then the vision called up another thought: ‘I shall never know what that girl has known…’ and the recoil of pride flung her back on the sharp edges of her anguish. ‘Good-bye,’ she said.

Sophy also found the situation unendurable and decided to leave and does. Ultimately, we find she has gone to India with her former employer from whom she originally fled to Paris and whose inn was where George and she first met when he was a lodger and she a servant. Anna and George get back together when George takes her to his room and she discovers that he really does love her and the 800 lb. gorilla in the room was her own distrust of him. She reasons that when they become intimate there “will be no room for any doubts between us.” This is essentially what happens. So I guess the Victorian ethos of the effects of illicit affairs really did win out in the end. George did not suffer a devastating and fatal blow by his actions but Sophy, on the other hand, was banished to the outer realm.

The extensive musings over Anna’s and George’s feelings were the highlights of the book for me. Just about every aspect of Anna’s deep feeling of betrayal and distrust were analyzed by the author as well as George’s rationale that his short affair was a fling largely caused by his doubt whether Anna’s really wanted to marry him. He really loved her and searched a way to show it to her to alleviate her despair. The book’s detailed analysis reminded me of Leonid Andreyev’s short stories The Seven that were Hanged where every conceivable fear and aspect of death by hanging are explicitly and excruciatingly discussed. They say this book is autobiographical so I’m sure something similar to Anna’s despair was felt by Edith Wharton at some point in her life.

One unresolved issue is why the book was called The Reef in the first place. That word never appears in the whole book. I looked it up and it is either an underwater ridge of sand or rocks at or near the surface or the part of a sail that the sailor can pull in or let out to change the wind effects on the ship. I can only surmise that the reef was the affair that wrecked or threatened to wreck the subsequent lives of the characters in the book. Overall, this was a good read and I rate this book as a 4 on my scale of 1-10 (1 as best). 

Allison:

“What are you reading?” is a question that bounces between booksellers almost competitively. Woe to the dry spell, or a binge on books in the Self-Help section, because no one wants to sincerely answer their peers with When Panic Attacks or The Easy Way to Quit Smoking yet again (although were you in need of such books, I highly recommend both, even if they must be read thirty to thirty-five times for success). Worse, perhaps, are the parenting books I’ve been noodling through for the past few weeks. “What are you reading?” “Oh, you know, pseudo-scientific evidence that I am heinous monster, inflicting irreparable damage to my child’s delicate psyche—and you?”

What a relief it was to be able to answer this question instead with a sophisticated shrug, “Just a little Edith Wharton.”

“Oh Edith,” all my bookselling friends sigh. “Isn’t she wonderful?”

“Um. Yes?”

I bet she is wonderful. There were so many wonderful things about The Reef, but I doubt it’s the place to start. I started asking my colleagues what they liked about her books and they said her writing was like Jane Austen but snarkier, that her pointed commentary on manners of the day rivaled Henry James. James comparisons are textbook. The Reef in particular deals with strikingly similar topics as another of our book club books, Daisy Miller, written by James himself. James’ Daisy embodied an experimental rebellion in which young women of a certain status and class choose to entertain the company of men without chaperones, and with full disregard of reputation. Daisy is studied, through the eyes of our man Winterbourne, a would-be suitor—if he weren’t so casually and bewilderingly rebuffed by Daisy. Daisy is either naively, or intentionally asexual with Winterbourne. This is the crux of James’ story—does or doesn’t Daisy know the danger she is provoking by not following the traditional rules of courtship? One of the triumphs of Daisy Miller is that because we, the reader, are only situated with Winterbourne’s imperfect observations, we only know Daisy through his particular (male) gaze. The conflict lives inside Winterbourne and Daisy remains free and unencumbered by even James’ judgement. James doesn’t try to answer why Daisy behaves as she does, only how Winterbourne comes to think she behaves thus.

Likewise, the enigmatic woman, Sophy, of Wharton’s The Reef is left untethered to her own point-of-view.  Why Sophy is who she is, is only explained through the descriptions of Darrow and Anna who belong to a wealthy leisure class. Sophy is lower working class, a servant in Anna’s house, in fact, governess to her nine-year-old daughter. This distinction alone makes her an unsuitable bride for Anna’s step-son, Owen, according to the older generation—Owen’s grandmother. (This also presents an awkward logistical situation—when Sophy becomes Anna’s daughter-in-law it is assumed she will also remain under her employment as the governess. Allowed into the family, but only so much…) The problem with marrying a blue collar is that anyone who has had to work to survive has been left vulnerable to all manner of unsavory experiences. BUT! No one suspects that Anna’s fiancé, distinguished Mr. Darrow, might be the source of Sophy’s most scandalous history.

Let us be frank. Sophy’s social missteps are dated, the outrage inspired, almost silly, by contemporary customs. But, the pain and confusion caused by Darrow’s diversion—Ah! Here in lies the meat of the novel. The lengths he goes to conceal, his frustration with guilt and justification, and the mental banter Anna entertains, her frantic back and forth of what she can forgive versus forget—all of this is timeless, the universal innards of romantic heartache. And it is depicted with agonizing accuracy. Who among us hasn’t asked themselves, what will I endure to be loved? How much can I love that which hurts?

But back to Sophy, because Wharton is known for her social criticism above all else. What I found most interesting about this book is Darrow’s attempts to sum up the drive of Sophy, even as his own lived experiences are insufficient. But Darrow will try. Darrow thinks he understands how Sophy’s class complicates her prospects. In an attempt to both exonerate himself with Anna, and explain why Sophy should not be invited into this family, and justify why he would have gifted the pitiable wretch with a scandalous week of intimacy, Darrow describes Sophy’s life as somehow more life—more hardship, more passion, more stake, more filth, more intensity—just more. Anna could never understand, Darrow says, because she hasn’t lived. Darrow explains this to Anna, with a qualifier that maybe one day, with a little more experience, Anna might understand (what, is unclear), like Sophy does. “When?” I wonder. Certainly not after marriage to Darrow’s incredibly boring self.

Anna almost falls for it. Almost, except of course, Anna has lived.

For example, Anna has been married and widowed. Darrow has not. Anna (I think she is a couple years older than Darrow) was the second wife of an already widowed man who had a son by his previously alive wife (depicted in the novel so breathtakingly as a large gilded painting shut up in a library that no one but Anna visits during the marriage). Anna bore a child, she developed a significant, if not motherly relationship with her step-son, Owen. She navigated a marriage, she experienced the death of a spouse, whether beloved or not, the qualifications are scarcely important to my point. She continues to live in a house very much governed by the matriarchal mother of her dead husband.

This is life, this is life despite its padding by wealth and relative safety. Anna has lived.

It’s Anna’s life, in fact, that Darrow longs to lead. He wants desperately to be her husband. To sit at the fire and take walks in the rain, and all the other boring things he laments when Anna says, “no.” What Darrow is doing is romanticizing Sophy’s poverty, while trivializing Anna’s incarcerating wealth in a loveless, bleak marriage. It’s standard patriarchy, really. These women, he depicts as merely products of their environment rather than active participants, but it is Wharton, after all, who is telling the story. For all of Anna’s waffling, all of Sophy’s pining, in the end, it is the women who win. Despite Darrow’s markedly manipulative efforts, they take charge of their fates by cutting him out of the equation—and disrupting his gross misinterpretation of their lives.  

After writing this review, I think I like this book more than I initially thought. I’ve grown up writing with the understanding that even women writers cannot help but to write from under the influence of the male point-of-view, because that is the “standard,” the base from which we learn to craft. Edith Wharton’s greatest influence and contemporary is a not a woman, it’s Henry James, yet The Reef takes care of the interior of her women characters in a way that James (using only Daisy Miller as reference) was wise enough not to attempt.

I rate this a 3 on Dad’s scale of 1-10 (1 being highest), even though it was not much fun to read.  Wharton’s descriptions often jumped off the page and hit me in the gut as not only explicitly identifiable in my own life, but perhaps the single best way of conveying it. Ask me what it’s like to experience road rage while walking down the street with an umbrella in New York City during a rainstorm and I will recite some Edith Wharton. That’s pretty badass in my book.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, 1962, was the last novel published by acclaimed writer Shirley Jackson. It was adapted into a play and a Broadway musical. 

Allison:          

Recently someone began talking to me about a book as if I had read it, because of course I had read it. Everyone’s read it, and especially a bookseller should have read it.

I hadn’t read it.

I wasn’t embarrassed. This happens to me a lot. I talk to people about books for a living, and so many books come out every year, I must be nothing but picky! Yet, this interaction reminded me that there are marked holes in my cannon. Holes I’ve been meaning to fill. Shirley Jackson was a hole. The Grandmamma of the Horror genre. Infamous for a short story called "The Lottery," that even if I didn’t read in high school, I’ve read enough academic thought about it, seen enough Twilight Zone episodes mimicking it, to get the jist. Shirley Jackson isn’t just a horror writer. She inspired the likes of Stephen King, but (as far as I know) she never had to fight the Stephen King battle between commercialism and legitimacy (so it be known, when I say “just a horror writer,” I mean it sarcastically. Any day of the week, I will argue that 100 years from now Stephen King will be one of the most important figures in American literature, despite what crank-pot Harold Bloom has to say...but I digress). There are lots of anomalies about Shirley Jackson. She is a woman who reigns supreme of a genre (horror) otherwise populated by men. Outside of her novels, she’s a housewife, editorially unattractive (every article I read about her makes a statement about her weight, but who says the same about George R. R. Martin?) and early death aside, fairly unscandalous. Shirley Jackson is considered high literature, while still wearing the crown of horror, because her work is thick with social commentary—teachable moments, if you will. And they are easy to find.

TIME magazine called We Have Always Lived in the Castle one of the best 10 books of 1962. I picked it for bookclub because I didn’t think it had any ghosts in it. I was right, no ghosts. What it does have is perhaps the most unreliable narrator I’ve ever encountered, in Mary Katherine, called Merricat, Blackwood. Spoiler alert, I am about to ruin everything if you’ve any interest in reading the book. Merricat is a sociopath, the scariest type, the one that successfully kills on a whim—poisons her entire family, excepting her beloved sister Constance and the accidentally spared, yet crippled, Uncle Julian. This isn’t explicitly said until the final chapters of the book, but I easily sussed it by chapter three. Merricat, who is in charge of the delivery of information as our first-person narrator, is obviously deranged. Her interior monologues reveal a development stuck in pre-adolescence, despite the fact that we know she’s eighteen years old. Merricat is incapable of considering the perspective of those around her. All of her interactions are based on a risk/benefit to her and her alone, demonstrating a lack of progression from egocentricity to empathetic response—a stage of childhood development that begins at about seven years old. There’s also something feral about her and her interactions with nature, which are expertly mirrored through her attention to the behavior of her cat and constant companion, Jonas.

We don’t really know why Merricat killed her family—her mother, her father, her brother, and aunt (Uncle Julian’s wife). All details about the murder and how it was accomplished are provided by Julian, who, like Merricat, is stuck in time. Julian is obsessed with the incident and spends his days recounting and recollecting any and all details he can muster about the night the family sat down for a dinner served by Constance, and ate berries sprinkled with poisoned sugar. Constance doesn’t take sugar with her berries, which made her the prime suspect. Merricat was absent, having been sent to her room without supper. Julian, although he has lived with her for six years post-murders, believes Merricat to also be dead, having succumbed to neglect in an orphanage during Constance’s long trial (although curiously, he professes Constance’s innocence, yet never then speculates on who did it). Julian doesn’t see Merricat at all, and deals only with Constance. Constance, frozen as well, has not once left the house since her release. Obviously she knows of Merricat’s guilt, yet has never revealed the truth, and has dutifully cared for her murderous sister and ailing Uncle year after year.

Most of the story’s symbolism is found in the peripheral characters, those not living in the “castle”. The town is divided into two groups: the working class townspeople and the outlying rich. All consider Constance guilty, despite her acquittal. Most brutally portrayed, is the sheepish mass of the working class, who are villainously jealous of the Blackwood’s wealth and their snobbish isolation. They begrudge the large house and the shortcut through the property that Merricat and Constance’s mother had barred their access years ago. The rich are painted less vindictive, yet petty and frankly, stupid, considering any contact with the Blackwoods to be novelty and status-building. Fame is attractive, despite the manner under which it is acquired. These tropes were designed (among other things) to create sympathy for Constance especially, but also Merricat and Uncle Julian. All of this was fairly stated and obvious, bordering didactic, therefore not that interesting to me.

My biggest problem with the book was setting the perspective with Merricat. Making your main character a legitimate psychopath is risky business because the average non-psychopathic individual cannot relate to this train of thought. For me, it was a suspension of disbelief that I couldn’t sustain. It was ultimately impossible to believe Jackson could manifest a true interior of a murderous sociopath, having never been a psychopath herself. This is my problem, I know. Also why I won't read American Psycho. We could argue all day about the writing of fiction from the perspective of an opposing gender, or a different nationality, creed, or class. There are thousands of examples that are truly successful, and countless more failures. It is the job of the fiction writer to create a world that is believable, sustained through the book and many would probably find Merricat’s perspective, while fictional, valid and fascinating. Just not me. Crazy is one thing—but psychopath is too easy. Psychopathy is often used as a device in a murder story that doesn’t need to follow any logic, it doesn’t have to abide by any base motivation. It’s like science fiction, where reality is dictated by the parameters limited only by the author’s imagination—excepting one very important thing: psychopaths exist, here and now, in this reality, so a psychopathic perspective is very much limited to a place of truth. I prefer reality-based fiction. If someone is going to attempt to write outside their lived perspective, I want them to have taken all the measures to ensure they are building a true experience. I need to trust they know the place from which they are writing from. If, for example, I had read this same book from the point-of-view of Constance, I would have found it infinitely more interesting. And Constance is not a “sane” or even particularly sympathetic person, as evidenced by the complete disregard for Uncle Julian, allowed to perish alone in the house fire. Yet, Constance’s decisions to care for Merricat—to bear the brunt of her crime, is tremendously interesting because Constance’s motivations are tied to a traceable history, a believable cause and effect (in fact, academic writings on this book suppose many parallels between Constance and Jackson herself). Merricat’s motivations are (as perceived by me) unauthenticated bull-sh*t.

I was disappointed in this book, but only on a personal taste-level. Psychopathic narration is just never going to do it for me. I give it an 8 on Dad’s scale of 1-10, where 1 is the highest.

Wes:

It has been difficult for me to sit down and write about the latest book because to me it is an unsatisfactory novel that leaves too many questions open and seems incomplete or missing something. That may indeed be the author’s intent but it causes me problems following it and generating internal interest. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson is a dark novel about a young lady, Mary Katherine Blackwood, who is living with the aftermath of a dramatic poisoning of most of her family some six years prior that still affects the rest of her family which now consists of “Merricat”, her sister Constance, and her uncle, Julian, who remains seriously disabled from the poisoning incident.  

Reading through this book which is written from Merricat’s perspective, there appear to be several alternate explanations for all the strange occurrences that transpire with Merricat in the old Blackstone estate. Either Merricat is insane, or she is spoiled to an incredible degree, or perhaps she is a ghost, or, maybe she and Constance comprise a single person, possibly split personalities. There are probably other possible scenarios. It is hard to determine exactly what is going on and I even started back through it again after reading it the first time trying to determine by the narrative which is most likely. I did not finish because the book just was not very enjoyable to my tastes. I will outline some of the aspects of what I think is going on.     

            We learn about half-way through that Merricat was the culprit who put the rat poisoning into the fruit salad that contained the sugar-like arsenic that killed her mother, father, aunt, 10 year-old brother and crippled her uncle. Constance avoids sugar so she was spared and Merricat was banished to her room for some unknown reason during that deadly meal. Merricat’s desire to see everyone dead whom she meets discloses some kind of mental illness. She constantly dwells on death and morbidly discusses the poisonous mushrooms and their effects. She seems to live in a dream world seeing certain people as demons and constantly attempts to hex people with weird tokens such as burying someone’s possessions or nailing books to trees. She takes actions to remove people and might see her actions as justifiable for murdering her family. She takes action like breaking mirrors, causing fires, and employing hexes. She wants people dead and took action to make it so. I don’t know whether she would be ruled insane but her perspective about everyone around her seems certainly not normal.

            We also see about halfway through in one of the flashbacks that that her mother was incredibly indulgent refusing to punish her, ordering her brother to give his food to her and ordering the family to “bow all your heads to our adored Mary Katherine.” She certainly seems to be almost a semi-wild kid who has had little or no restraint. She runs wild in the woods sleeping under trees at night and burying hex items all over. The over-indulgence might have colored her view of the world and justified her action to kill those who in her view got in the way for some reason and deserved to die.

            The evidence that Merricat is a ghost is thin but on one occasion Uncle Julian in conversation with Charles, the cousin who suddenly arrives with the design to whisk Constance away, reports that Merricat had been “longtime dead…she did not survive the loss of her family…my niece died in an orphanage, of neglect, during her sister’s trial for murder.” The stupefied Charles replied that “She is sitting right here.” As the dialogue passed on to other things, this incident passes almost without comment. My observations of Merricat’s story are that they are very ghostlike but other people seem to see her so she seems pretty well a manifest being to them.

I got the feeling that Merricat and Constance could be split personalities and started looking for instances when they were actually talking not only to one another but both together with others. Those instances are there especially when Charles is there as well as when Helen Clarke and Lucille Wright came to visit. This shuts down that theory pretty well but the way they act and react when together seeming to like the same things makes this a possibility somehow.

My biggest issue with the book is all the questions that are unanswered. Why did the authorities suspect Constance as the killer? Why and how did the rat poison get in the fruit salad? Why did Constance cover for her -at that time -12 year old sister? How did Constance get set free? Why did the authorities let them go off and live alone with only an invalid and a 22 year old at the head of the household? What happened to Merricat at the orphanage? What ultimately happens to Merricat and her sister? Why would the authorities let them live in a partially burned down house? Why doesn’t Merricat go to school? I guess the author wanted to leave those questions open but that lessens my interest and makes me uncomfortable when the story never comes to closure. Based on this, I rate this book as a 6 on my scale of 1-10 (1 as best). 

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins was originally published in 1868 in the magazine All the Year Around (edited by Charles Dickens). It is widely considered the first English language detective novel.


Wes:

            The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins turned out to be a really interesting Victorian tale of mystery and multi-faceted detective work. I enjoyed reading it after reading about Charles Dickens’ relationship with Collins and the fact that this book was also written in serial form over many months just as many of Dickens’ works were. It also has the reputation of being one of the first detective novels, that has become an important genre ever since. I won’t be writing much about the plot or the characters. Suffice it to say I just enjoyed it. To me it is a classic of the Victorian era which I seem to have centered a lot of my novel reading upon over the years. I will just note a few interesting thoughts I had about the book. 

I enjoyed the “narrative” arrangement that Collins used to advance the plot. We see only what the characters saw and how they interpreted the things under their observation. I noticed that some of the characters had a distinctively different style, comparing in particular, Mr. Betteredge, Mr. Bruff, Mr. Blake, and Miss Clack. Even though these characters each had a certain character style, they all had the characteristic Victorian style of detailed elaboration of conversations and happenstances that I can’t see people today ever writing down. A novelist convention from that era for sure!

            Mr. Betteredge’s narrative was particularly interesting. He had a flair for description and loyalty to the family and to all humanity that really reflected the usual serious English butler’s outlook. I liked his bandying about with Sergeant Cuff and his amateur detective intuitions as the Sergeant’s investigation proceeded. The constant referral to Robinson Crusoe throughout (he allegedly wore out six copies of the book) was a very innovative concept. It made me wonder whether Wilkie Collins spent a lot of nights in his leisure chair perusing that volume for his “spiritual guidance.”

            Collins reveals a definite disdain for Christians with his description of Miss Clack’s continual and laughable efforts to proselytize Rachel and Mrs. Verinder. The villain also turned out to be Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite who revealed his real character to be quite hypocritical in contrast to his public persona as the zealous and self-righteous missionary type. He turns out to have stolen the diamond for necessary money to prevent the revelation that he had betrayed a trusteeship by sacking the account completely and facing imminent discovery. His desperate need for money was the reason that he acquiesced to Rachel’s rejecting his marriage proposal when he found he could not loot her estate to save himself. Turns out he also has a mistress who threatened to reveal herself to Rachel if he proceeded with his marriage plan.  

            This book had a definite page-turning or suspense building motif to it. One kept expecting the key clue to emerge but the author would repeatedly stop just short by introducing some complicating factor that would put the proceeding information in doubt. It almost reads like one of the mini-series of today where each show ends with a suspense item looming to draw the viewer to the next show or the Victorian reader to the next installment. This is a very clever device that Collins used that made me marvel at how he could maintain the depth of this story for so long. For example, we were continually led to believe that Mr. Luker had the diamond but then during the opium experiment I was expecting Mr. Blake to reveal his hiding place somewhere in his room after all. That would then fulfil Sgt. Cuff’s prediction that the diamond was not stolen, just lost.

            I didn’t see the need for Ablewhite to die at the hands of the Indian men. They didn’t do that before when they accosted Mr. Luker and him earlier. But perhaps they could not take a chance on his stopping them from leaving the country. There were some details about the 3 Indian guys that I wonder about now, like what was the significance of the bottle of ink that the boy dropped early in the story. And what was the significance of that boy whom it was suggested was a medium? What were they using him for and what happened to him? What was the identity of the fellow who discovered the rooming site of Ablewhite in his sailor disguise?

I really enjoyed this book even though it took a little longer to read it as I struggle to memorize my 156 lines for a play next month. I will probably have more questions and comments for discussion this month because there was a lot of interesting stuff in this book. I will also want to read his other great novel, Woman in White, some time. After reading this book, I definitely had an attack of the megrims (a great word – pg. 113!) knowing it was over.  Overall, I rate this book as a 2 on my scale of 1-10 (1 as best).

Allison:

            I have a confession to make about our bookclub. I don't always read the book. This month, with my son out of school and my job demanding extra hours of work at home, I had hardly any quiet to sit and read. Even the refuge of my daily F train commute was invaded with project planning for the bookstore. So, I didn't fully read The Moonstone. But, what I couldn't read, I supplemented by listening to it (don’t worry! I did actually experience the whole book). I filled the dead space of daily housekeeping, standing at the sink with dishes and swabbing bathroom surfaces, with an audio narration of the mystery. I have heard only a few audio books, but at the bookstore I have witnessed hundreds of authors read their work—let me tell you, authors reading their work is the worst. So indulgent, so insufferably boring, and somehow, just false (exceptions apply, of course). But, a professional voice over artist is quite different. The ego is eliminated and the story is manifested. The Moonstone was especially fun, with its various narrations. The reader spoke in a British accent that he nuanced between speakers—Miss Clack was perhaps the most delightfully ludicrous, as he narrated for hours in a shrill pomp, a caricature of feminine stuffiness.

            I do feel like I cheated though. The vocalizations painted in much of the scenery that if I were physically reading, I'd have to invent for myself. And I wondered frequently if how the actor's rendering of the story might compare to an interpretation I'd have come to on my own. He supplied very different voices, different inflections for each character, but did these variations exist in the text? This would have been an important consideration had I been solely reading because the dueling multi-person narrative is the central device Collins uses to tell his story. How many narrators? Let's see: Betteredge, Miss Clack, Bruff, Blake, Jennings, Sergeant Cuff, Mr. Candy (not to mention an long letter written by Rosanna Spark) and a spattering of officials summarizing the end. That's a lot! Over seven main voices to color and differentiate—seven unique motivations to flesh and illuminate, all while maintaining momentum and strategic reveal of information so that the readers are inundated with "detective fever" as Betteredge called it, eager to play along.

            I had only a mild case of "detective fever." I read a lot of mysteries and edit a crime fiction magazine with my husband and the mechanics of "the reveal" are never as interesting to me as the characters. Reading The Moonstone, I couldn't help but compare Collins' work against The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Dickens. Collins and Dickens were friends and spirited competitors alike. In fact, Dickens was the first to publish a serial version of The Moonstone in his magazine All the Year Around. Drood was Dickens' attempt to write the perfect mystery, hoped to trump all predecessors in its masterful plotting and he might have done so if he hadn't died. Do I think Drood's potential superior to The Moonstone? Yes. Does it matter? Eh…not so much. They were both satisfying to me in the same way. Like eating an expensive chocolate truffle followed by a Hershey bar. I might comment, oh the expensive truffle more delicious, but I'd still happily eat the Hershey bar. In fact, you would find it hard to tear anything chocolate away from me.

            As I was Googling around the internet trying to find the publication date, I discovered a terse two-line poem written about Wilkie by a poet, Swinburne, that appeared in a literary journal in 1889. It said:

           

            What brought good Wilkie's genius nigh perdition?

            Some demon whispered—'Wilkie! have a mission'. (http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/collins/dickens1.html)

This brief, slightly snarky poem, sort of sums up what I thought about Wilkie's story. I found all of the characters tremendously entertaining, but their foibles followed a formula from which Collins' did not deviate. Every character had some obsession that they followed to the most extreme. With Betteredge, it was an almost religious devotion to the unorthodox oracle Robinson Crusoe. He imbibed in the book like it were a sacred text, which was hilarious, often laugh-out-loud absurd. Sergeant Cuff had his roses, and Miss Clack, her puritan religious pamphlets that she spent pages and pages of her narrative trying to stuff into unwilling characters' hands. Less ridiculous was Jennings' addiction to opium, which paralleled Wilkie Collins' own malady. The Moonstone was written, by Collins' own account during a opiate haze. From the introduction by Sandra Kemp of my Penguin Classic edition: "…Collins claimed that he had little recollection of writing the novel, that he had to dictate large portions of the story as he lay sick in bed (relieved only by opium), and that he didn't recall the finale at all" (x). Such an idea, that he could have produced this work and been so stupefied that he didn't even remember, is almost unbelievable, and as Kemp notes, probably an exaggeration. Nevertheless, opium plays a far more sympathetic role in The Moonstone than it did in Dickens' Drood. Jennings' curse of need makes almost a martyr of him, and his death, as relayed by Mr. Candy, is reaching the outer echelons of drama into parodist effect. But I don't think that was Collins' intent. I think he romanticized opium because he had to, because he was in the thick of it. Dickens' portrait of opium was far more grotesque and filthy and unsavory, and likely what it looked like to those on the outside.

            In my Drood post, I mentioned that Donna Tart said Dickens' was a generous writer who revealed the genius of how he built his narratives for fledgling writers to discover. Collins is different because he's not revealing a blueprint of an architectural masterpiece. Instead it's a formula—a specific set of rules that can be followed to achieve a desired result. Formulas can be brilliant, in that once perfected, they are infallible. In a right triangle, a²+b² is going to equal c².

            Likewise, I eat the chocolate and I am happy. 

I give this book a 4 on Dad's scale of 1-10 (1 being the best). But a 4 seems so low, for how much I enjoyed it… Maybe a 3. It's really funny, and only slightly racist and misogynist for its day.