Have You Seen the White Whale Wednesday
Jul. 20th, 2016 01:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bArchived from Livejournal
What I've Finished Reading
I had some advance warning that The Whale: A Love Story: A Novel wasn't going to live up to its promise, but the idea of a novel about the relationship between Melville and Hawthorn during the writing of Moby-Dick was too tempting, and anyway, I read all those Most Comfortable Man in London books set in a carefully over-explained and present-palatable nineteenth century; how bad could it be?
It turns out the answer is "pretty bad!" In the abstract, it's a smart move on Mark Beauregard's part not to attempt any kind of Melvillian pastiche (he does paste in some actual letters). But the writing is too amateurish to stand on its own. It's full of earnestly overwrought dialogue tags and cartoony spit-takes (at one point, "[t]he Melville women's mouths all dropped open at the same time.")
The Whale suffers not only by comparison to Moby-Dick, which would have been perfectly understandable, but also to every other book I have read this year. Most of these books have had their flaws but all of them have been comparatively. . .adult, I guess (this sweeping category includes a YA novel I haven't written about yet, a children's book in which a little girl rescues a fallen star and puts a Band-Aid on it, a silly detective rom-com with only one fully functioning character, an incredibly dumb but good-hearted thriller, and JUSTINE by Lawrence Durrell). I don't think there's anything wrong with it not "sounding" like a 19th-century novel, but I'm a little baffled by how author Mark Beauregard could have done the research necessary to write this book and still managed to write it the way he did.
Even if the writing were a little better, the book would still suffer from a bad case of the anachronisms. In part, the two problems are linked: characters tend to think and talk as though someone were painstakingly transcribing a TV show, but there's a deeper misunderstanding of, or indifference to, or difficulty imagining how things might have been different in the past. It's easy to fall into the trap, when setting a story in another time, of simply adding or subtracting things from the present we're familiar with -- so Beauregard has imagined Melville's passion for Hawthorne by pasting some vaguely old-timey inhibitions onto late 20th-century categories of sexual orientation, with some vague late 20th-century homophobia as backdrop. I am not a 19th-century scholar, or any kind of scholar, but I have read several books that were not The Whale, and it was hard for me to believe that Melville OR Hawthorne would have thought of, or talked about, their relationship in the way they are made to here.
There is an impossibly impetuous young slash fangirl who “helpfully” creates a rumor that she and Melville are having an affair, in order to deflect suspicion from his feeling about Hawthorne. Because she has time-traveled in from the early 21st century without bothering to do any research, like those painfully unprepared adjuncts in To Say Nothing of the Dog, she assumes that "everyone can see" Melville's crush on Hawthorne and has naturally sorted it into the box marked "CANON GAY," which, because this is the past, must therefore be shocking and scandalous. Eventually she tricks them into the same room so she can force a reconciliation and beam at them from the sidelines. She has not actually time-traveled in, but it would be more believable if she had.
Is this also a deliberate choice? By allowing Hawthorne and Melville to think and talk like characters in a contemporary YA romance, Beauregard is trying to make them more real to us? It doesn't work, for me anyway; Melville was already real enough and this hapless line drawing is someone else entirely. There are flashes here and there that might be echoes of Ishmael, but they are few and far between. The Whale can't illuminate Melville and Hawthorn for us because the connection to their books and letters is too weak. It would have been better as an actual YA romance set in one of those mid-apocalyptic Christian Dominionist dystopias (aka “the present”), with confused and difficult teenagers discovering an unexpected parallel to their own love story between the lines of their conservative Am Lit reading course.
Speaking of the apocalypse, The Girls of Slender Means is a good book.
I read it all on the same day I got it and when I got to the end I read it again. Then I spent a lot of time trying to describe it to people, but maybe it's best just to say it was a good book and you should probably read it if you haven't.
What I'm Reading Now
I started Nana before I left, but didn't get very far. It's good! The young courtesan is such a likable ordinary character: frustrated with her aunt, hopeful about her baby, always struggling to keep her clothes clean (those long skirts and those streets and stairwells soaking with filth! You can count on Zola to notice the difficulty). The back cover promises me an ignominious downfall, which is too bad. I like Nana.
I've actually finished A Buyer's Market, but I'll probably get through The Acceptance World and the end of the volume before I say any more about the world of Anthony Powell. Well, I will say that he loves his gigantic clunky metaphors! The rest can wait. I'm enjoying them a lot.
What I Plan to Read Next
I still have to get the first Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight book somehow. Other than that, I'm not totally sure! Oh, right, C. P. Snow. And Balthazar, the next novel in the Alexandria Quartet! I'm looking forward to that one.
What I've Finished Reading
"I am talking about you and me. I am saying that, right now, sitting by this lake together, we both would earn our scarlet A's. And deserve them."
"But we're both men."
Hawthorne smiled mirthlessly. "That is not lost on me."
I had some advance warning that The Whale: A Love Story: A Novel wasn't going to live up to its promise, but the idea of a novel about the relationship between Melville and Hawthorn during the writing of Moby-Dick was too tempting, and anyway, I read all those Most Comfortable Man in London books set in a carefully over-explained and present-palatable nineteenth century; how bad could it be?
It turns out the answer is "pretty bad!" In the abstract, it's a smart move on Mark Beauregard's part not to attempt any kind of Melvillian pastiche (he does paste in some actual letters). But the writing is too amateurish to stand on its own. It's full of earnestly overwrought dialogue tags and cartoony spit-takes (at one point, "[t]he Melville women's mouths all dropped open at the same time.")
"I cannot go to Boston for Thanksgiving, Lizzie," Herman finally said, interrupting his mother in the middle of a sentence. "I must stay and work on my book."
"But you surely won't write on Thanksgiving Day?" said Lizzie, genuinely shocked. "What possible difference could a day or two make in the writing of a book that has already taken close to a year?"
Now, it was Herman's turn to be surprised. "What difference could a day or two make in the writing of a novel?" Herman said. "Are you joking?"
"No," said Lizzie. "Are you?"
The Whale suffers not only by comparison to Moby-Dick, which would have been perfectly understandable, but also to every other book I have read this year. Most of these books have had their flaws but all of them have been comparatively. . .adult, I guess (this sweeping category includes a YA novel I haven't written about yet, a children's book in which a little girl rescues a fallen star and puts a Band-Aid on it, a silly detective rom-com with only one fully functioning character, an incredibly dumb but good-hearted thriller, and JUSTINE by Lawrence Durrell). I don't think there's anything wrong with it not "sounding" like a 19th-century novel, but I'm a little baffled by how author Mark Beauregard could have done the research necessary to write this book and still managed to write it the way he did.
Even if the writing were a little better, the book would still suffer from a bad case of the anachronisms. In part, the two problems are linked: characters tend to think and talk as though someone were painstakingly transcribing a TV show, but there's a deeper misunderstanding of, or indifference to, or difficulty imagining how things might have been different in the past. It's easy to fall into the trap, when setting a story in another time, of simply adding or subtracting things from the present we're familiar with -- so Beauregard has imagined Melville's passion for Hawthorne by pasting some vaguely old-timey inhibitions onto late 20th-century categories of sexual orientation, with some vague late 20th-century homophobia as backdrop. I am not a 19th-century scholar, or any kind of scholar, but I have read several books that were not The Whale, and it was hard for me to believe that Melville OR Hawthorne would have thought of, or talked about, their relationship in the way they are made to here.
There is an impossibly impetuous young slash fangirl who “helpfully” creates a rumor that she and Melville are having an affair, in order to deflect suspicion from his feeling about Hawthorne. Because she has time-traveled in from the early 21st century without bothering to do any research, like those painfully unprepared adjuncts in To Say Nothing of the Dog, she assumes that "everyone can see" Melville's crush on Hawthorne and has naturally sorted it into the box marked "CANON GAY," which, because this is the past, must therefore be shocking and scandalous. Eventually she tricks them into the same room so she can force a reconciliation and beam at them from the sidelines. She has not actually time-traveled in, but it would be more believable if she had.
Is this also a deliberate choice? By allowing Hawthorne and Melville to think and talk like characters in a contemporary YA romance, Beauregard is trying to make them more real to us? It doesn't work, for me anyway; Melville was already real enough and this hapless line drawing is someone else entirely. There are flashes here and there that might be echoes of Ishmael, but they are few and far between. The Whale can't illuminate Melville and Hawthorn for us because the connection to their books and letters is too weak. It would have been better as an actual YA romance set in one of those mid-apocalyptic Christian Dominionist dystopias (aka “the present”), with confused and difficult teenagers discovering an unexpected parallel to their own love story between the lines of their conservative Am Lit reading course.
Speaking of the apocalypse, The Girls of Slender Means is a good book.
The May of Teck Club stood obliquely opposite the site of the Memorial, in one of the row of tall houses which had endured, but barely; some bombs had dropped nearby, and in a few back gardens, leaving the buildings cracked on the outside and shakily hinged within, but habitable for the time being. The shattered windows had been replaced with new glass rattling in loose frames. More recently, the bituminous black-out paint had been removed from landing and bathroom windows. Windows were important in that year of final reckoning; they told at a glance whether a house was inhabited or not; and in the course of the past years they had accumulated much meaning, having been the main danger-zone between domestic life and the war going on outside: everyone had said, when the sirens sounded, 'Mind the windows. Keep away from the windows. Watch out for the glass.'
I read it all on the same day I got it and when I got to the end I read it again. Then I spent a lot of time trying to describe it to people, but maybe it's best just to say it was a good book and you should probably read it if you haven't.
What I'm Reading Now
I started Nana before I left, but didn't get very far. It's good! The young courtesan is such a likable ordinary character: frustrated with her aunt, hopeful about her baby, always struggling to keep her clothes clean (those long skirts and those streets and stairwells soaking with filth! You can count on Zola to notice the difficulty). The back cover promises me an ignominious downfall, which is too bad. I like Nana.
I've actually finished A Buyer's Market, but I'll probably get through The Acceptance World and the end of the volume before I say any more about the world of Anthony Powell. Well, I will say that he loves his gigantic clunky metaphors! The rest can wait. I'm enjoying them a lot.
What I Plan to Read Next
I still have to get the first Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight book somehow. Other than that, I'm not totally sure! Oh, right, C. P. Snow. And Balthazar, the next novel in the Alexandria Quartet! I'm looking forward to that one.
