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I Never Minded Standing in the Wednesday
Aug. 5th, 2020 10:41 amWhat I've Finished Reading
The Amen Corner, a play by James Baldwin about an ambitious woman preacher who gets backstabbed by her own congregation in a somewhat unpleasantly gendered way. As a play, it doesn't get to partake nearly enough of the gorgeous/vicious prose you've come to expect from a book with "James Baldwin" on the cover, but it does get to indulge in tremendous suffocating waves of Church Talk, for which Baldwin (atheist preacher's kid and ex-junior minister) has a sharp, appreciative, and unkindly ear.
I was a little less than thrilled with the latest Most Comfortable Man in London mystery, The Last Passenger, so it was either the wrong time or the only time for me to read Charles Finch's Serious Oxford Novel, The Last Enchantments. I couldn't resist taking it home from the new Larger Free Library, even though (or, to be honest, because) I knew perfectly well it was going to be bad. Unfortunately, it wasn't the fun kind of bad, just harmless and boring.
The narrator is a sensitive young non-detective, disappointingly not also named "Charles," who is taking a break from Yale and electoral politics after the disappointing 2004 election to do study abroad at Oxford (the English one). Everyone talks more or less like the sedate Victorians of Team Comfortable only with contemporary expletives and sex tourism jokes poked in from time to time so you know that you've left the enchanted kingdom of Lenox for the badly underdressed, overinformed, and clumsily razor-nicked present of 2005. Not-Charles is kind of a vague self-absorbed choad, which could have been sympathetic or interesting in the hands of a really good novelist, but isn't. The decision to make him a first-person narrator has something to do with it - a distinctive voice could have covered a multitude of sins, a colorless third-person narrator might have sustained a pleasant illusion of distance, but a colorless first-person narrator blandly enumerating his feelings for three hundred pages is just going to set the reader worrying about the finite nature of wood pulp and the human lifespan.
Anyway, Not-Charles goes to Oxford to study Orwell, his favorite author. He cheats on his girlfriend, feels bad about it, lies to her, cheats some more. ("Have I lost your sympathy?" the narrator asks earnestly after one encounter, never guessing how badly he's failed to earn any in the first place). He infodumps a little when he gets the chance, befriends some stereotypes, meets a roster of nice girls who are hard to tell apart, and has a series of experiences that are extremely meaningful and important to him as a person, less so to the reader. Every now and then there's a genuinely charming detail about a stupid college tradition, like "pennying" (bouncing a penny into someone else's wine glass means they have to chug ALL OF IT RIGHT NOW! a non-consensual and even more disgusting version of beer pong), but these are few and far between; you'd probably have a much better time keeping The Monster Book Of Stupid College Traditions Vol. II on a shelf above the toilet.
(Why didn't I like The Last Passenger? I don't know; either it or I was missing something.)
What I'm Reading Now
I'm not sure what I'm going to do with Helen of Troy (one of many; this one is by Margaret George) It's mildly and persistently engaging without being really interesting. It's an easy read, but very long, and I'm feeling jealous of my time, even though all I'd end up doing with it is read another book. I'll probably give it another fifty pages and reasses.
I don't need to reasses Axel's Castle by Edmund Wilson; it's a dry delight. Wilson does some mild interpretation and comparative literature on a few of the most interesting writers of the past 50 years (in 1931) with even-handed thoughtfulness and humor. That's all there is to it, but it's just the kind of thing I like.
Everyone in Axel's Castle reminds me a little of Bernardo Soares, the semi-fictional author and non-hero of The Book of Disquiet, which hadn't been discovered yet at the time Wilson was writing, but would have fit right in with Wilson's crew as a fairly large book (or series of notes) about how it's not only completely okay but much better, in fact more honest and even heroic, if Soares never finishes this book.
What I Plan to Read Next
I should probably cut this section because I never know. I have a letters collection of Rose Wilder Lane on my shelf, which I'll definitely get to at some point, but it's way down the queue. Next week I might try to catch up with some books I've read but haven't posted about yet.
The Amen Corner, a play by James Baldwin about an ambitious woman preacher who gets backstabbed by her own congregation in a somewhat unpleasantly gendered way. As a play, it doesn't get to partake nearly enough of the gorgeous/vicious prose you've come to expect from a book with "James Baldwin" on the cover, but it does get to indulge in tremendous suffocating waves of Church Talk, for which Baldwin (atheist preacher's kid and ex-junior minister) has a sharp, appreciative, and unkindly ear.
I was a little less than thrilled with the latest Most Comfortable Man in London mystery, The Last Passenger, so it was either the wrong time or the only time for me to read Charles Finch's Serious Oxford Novel, The Last Enchantments. I couldn't resist taking it home from the new Larger Free Library, even though (or, to be honest, because) I knew perfectly well it was going to be bad. Unfortunately, it wasn't the fun kind of bad, just harmless and boring.
The narrator is a sensitive young non-detective, disappointingly not also named "Charles," who is taking a break from Yale and electoral politics after the disappointing 2004 election to do study abroad at Oxford (the English one). Everyone talks more or less like the sedate Victorians of Team Comfortable only with contemporary expletives and sex tourism jokes poked in from time to time so you know that you've left the enchanted kingdom of Lenox for the badly underdressed, overinformed, and clumsily razor-nicked present of 2005. Not-Charles is kind of a vague self-absorbed choad, which could have been sympathetic or interesting in the hands of a really good novelist, but isn't. The decision to make him a first-person narrator has something to do with it - a distinctive voice could have covered a multitude of sins, a colorless third-person narrator might have sustained a pleasant illusion of distance, but a colorless first-person narrator blandly enumerating his feelings for three hundred pages is just going to set the reader worrying about the finite nature of wood pulp and the human lifespan.
Anyway, Not-Charles goes to Oxford to study Orwell, his favorite author. He cheats on his girlfriend, feels bad about it, lies to her, cheats some more. ("Have I lost your sympathy?" the narrator asks earnestly after one encounter, never guessing how badly he's failed to earn any in the first place). He infodumps a little when he gets the chance, befriends some stereotypes, meets a roster of nice girls who are hard to tell apart, and has a series of experiences that are extremely meaningful and important to him as a person, less so to the reader. Every now and then there's a genuinely charming detail about a stupid college tradition, like "pennying" (bouncing a penny into someone else's wine glass means they have to chug ALL OF IT RIGHT NOW! a non-consensual and even more disgusting version of beer pong), but these are few and far between; you'd probably have a much better time keeping The Monster Book Of Stupid College Traditions Vol. II on a shelf above the toilet.
(Why didn't I like The Last Passenger? I don't know; either it or I was missing something.)
What I'm Reading Now
I'm not sure what I'm going to do with Helen of Troy (one of many; this one is by Margaret George) It's mildly and persistently engaging without being really interesting. It's an easy read, but very long, and I'm feeling jealous of my time, even though all I'd end up doing with it is read another book. I'll probably give it another fifty pages and reasses.
I don't need to reasses Axel's Castle by Edmund Wilson; it's a dry delight. Wilson does some mild interpretation and comparative literature on a few of the most interesting writers of the past 50 years (in 1931) with even-handed thoughtfulness and humor. That's all there is to it, but it's just the kind of thing I like.
Everyone in Axel's Castle reminds me a little of Bernardo Soares, the semi-fictional author and non-hero of The Book of Disquiet, which hadn't been discovered yet at the time Wilson was writing, but would have fit right in with Wilson's crew as a fairly large book (or series of notes) about how it's not only completely okay but much better, in fact more honest and even heroic, if Soares never finishes this book.
What I Plan to Read Next
I should probably cut this section because I never know. I have a letters collection of Rose Wilder Lane on my shelf, which I'll definitely get to at some point, but it's way down the queue. Next week I might try to catch up with some books I've read but haven't posted about yet.
