A Certain Slant of Light

M. L. Rio’s If We Were Villains was described to me as “like The Secret History,” which is true: it’s a book about a tight-knit group of college students, Shakespearian actors in this case, who murder one of their friends. It’s also somewhat misleading: is anything REALLY like The Secret History? Surely this comparison is setting us all up for disappointment.

And it does lack The Secret History’s gleeful willingness to make its protagonists horrible people (charming as hell! But rotten at the core) who murder to protect themselves from the consequences of their own earlier vile actions. When the murder occurs in this book, it’s pretty much self-defense: the group is protecting itself from a member who has grown violently erratic and already caused some pretty serious physical harm.

The comparison also undersells the queer subtext of If We Were Villains, which culminates ( spoilers )

Anyway, the book clearly has some creaky plot problems, BUT I really enjoyed it. Highly recommend if you like murder college students, murder gays, or copious quotations from Shakespeare.

I finally finished Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend, which I’ve been hacking my way through for a while. Like The Goldfinch, this book is an unevenly paced hot mess, but unlike The Goldfinch, I’m not sure if it was ultimately worth it for the good parts.

The one part of the book that I loved was Harriet. When Harriet was just a baby, her nine-year-old brother Robin was murdered; now twelve, Harriet decides that she wants to solve the murder. Harriet is intense, intelligent, slightly unnerving with her sullen lack of social graces - in short she reminded me of myself as a twelve-year-old, although it must be said that I lacked Harriet’s single-minded fixity of purpose.

This quote, in particular, resonated with me.

She did not care for children’s books in which the children grew up, as what “growing up” entailed (in life as in books) was a swift and inexplicable dwindling of character; out of a clear blue sky the heroes and heroines abandoned their adventures for some dull sweetheart, got married and had families, and generally started acting like a bunch of cows.

Or this one: the horror of realizing that one is about to become a teenage girl in a society that hates teenage girls, and people are going to look at you and see nothing but your body when everything important about you is in your mind.

Harriet was going to be in the eighth grade next year; and what she had not expected was the horrifying new indignity of being classed--for the first time--a “Teen Girl”: a creature without mind, wholly protuberance and excretion, to judge from the literature she was given. She had not expected the chipper, humiliating filmstrips filled with demeaning medical information; she had not expected mandatory “rap sessions” where the girls were not only urged to ask personal questions--some of them, to Harriet’s mind, frankly pornographic--but to answer them as well.

Unfortunately, the book is not entirely in Harriet’s POV. Or perhaps I shouldn’t say unfortunately, because I enjoyed a number of the POV excursions: Harriet’s aunts, her grandmother, her older sister Allison. There’s an element of family history novel about the book which I enjoyed, although that’s not really the purpose of the book so it never fully blooms.

However, we also spend a lot of time in the POVs of two members of the local no-account lowlife drug-running family, the Ratliffs, who I found unpleasant to read about, not entirely convincing, and also just… I’m not sure what they’re doing there? What are they bringing to the book?

( Spoilers )

I mentioned in the Wednesday Reading Meme that I wanted to read some James Baldwin, and my own particular library branch happened to have Giovanni’s Room on hand, so I checked it out… and now I have read it and I am crushed and emotionally compromised.

(Although the Everyman’s Library edition has a black man on the cover, the main character and in fact the entire cast is white. The introduction quotes Baldwin’s comment, “I certainly could not possibly have - not at that point in my life - handled the other great weight, the ‘Negro problem.’ The sexual-moral light was a hard thing to deal with. I could not handle both propositions in the same book.” I feel a cover with two white guys staring at each other in an intensely homoerotic yet antagonistic manner would more closely fit the book’s actual content.)

The novel, set in the 1950s when it was written, tells the story of David, an American who has gone to Paris in order to run away from/embrace his homosexuality. These are, you will note, opposite actions; he oscillates between the two, and does both badly. (And it should be noted that by “embrace” I don’t mean “emotionally accept,” I definitely just mean that he keeps banging guys.)

This sort of doubling is shot through David’s character. He is attracted to Giovanni, and hence repulsed by him (because repulsed by his own attraction to men); he loves Giovanni and hates him, he wants to stay with him and feels that he is suffocating in Giovanni’s room. Although the effect is most pronounced in relationship to his attraction to men, this alienation from his own feelings - alienation is maybe not strong enough; it’s a loathing, an antagonism, and it infects everything else in his life, all his relationships, all his actions, his ability to feel anything wholeheartedly or sincerely.

Giovanni’s Room put me in mind of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, another book with a narrator so crushed by his own internalized homophobia that he can barely admit even to himself that he’s attracted to men. (Also, the boyfriend character in both books is about 10,000 times more in touch with his emotions than that narrator, and in particular more capable of experiencing genuine joy when the circumstances allow.)

But Giovanni’s Room is much darker (and The Goldfinch is not exactly a walk in the park!) In The Goldfinch, the other characters realize that Theo is an adorable human dumpster fire; in Giovanni’s Room, both Giovanni (David’s boyfriend) and Hella (his fiancee) have nothing like this level of insight into David. They take him as he presents himself, and because he has fragmented himself so aggressively, this gives them nothing like the complete picture.

Hella does not know that David is gay; he is, after all, trying very hard to hide it. Giovanni, meanwhile - well, Giovanni is the bartender at a gay bar where David goes because he is “intent on proving, to them and to myself, that I was not of their company. I did this by being in their company a great deal and manifesting toward all of them a tolerance which placed me, I believed, above suspicion.”

But of course Giovanni isn’t aware of this tortured rationale. He figures that David’s just looking for a boyfriend, a take that David seems to corroborate by moving into Giovanni’s room and making love to him and basically mooching off him all summer. (This is especially egregious because David comes from an almost infinitely more comfortable background than Giovanni, who is barely scraping by.) Only far too late does Giovanni realize that David will not and perhaps cannot love Giovanni for more than the most fleeting of instants, when that feeling overwhelms David’s carefully constructed armor.

This all makes David sound absolutely awful, and, let’s be clear: he is awful. You can’t even trot out “Well but he’s even WORSE to himself than to other people,” because as awful as he is to himself, the consequences of David's awfulness are far worse for Giovanni than anything that happens to David. (This isn’t a spoiler; we learn that Giovanni’s about to be guillotined on about page three.)

But at the same time, David is so vividly, mercilessly drawn, this mixture of harshly repressed tenderness and self-protective cruelty, that I found the book terribly compelling and… not hard to put down, exactly, I did keep putting it down because it was hard to read about such sadness. But I kept having to pick it back up.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

William Dean Howells’ My Year in a Log Cabin, a very short book - really more of an extended essay - about the year in Howells’ boyhood when his family lived in a log cabin in southern Ohio in 1850. What really struck me is the sense that he and his brothers had that they were almost engaging in a living history reenactment: they had the delicious sense of having moved into one of their father’s stories about his own childhood, when log cabins were the common domicile, even though by 1850 log cabins were out-of-date and the Howells only stayed there till they got a more modern house built.

It’s easy to generalize airily about the 19th century - I know I myself am guilty of it on occasion - so this was a good reminder that daily life changed enormously over the course of the century, just as much as it did in the twentieth. Sometimes the exact decade really matters.

But also, conversely, newfangled devices don’t instantly sweep all old things out of their way. The log cabin era in Ohio ended long before 1850, but here’s the Howells family living in a log cabin, and poor Mrs Howells reduced to cooking on a crane over an open fire rather than using a stove.

I also finished Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, and I stand by my thoughts last week: it’s a good book, but not as good as The Handmaid’s Tale, although honestly making comparisons to The Handmaid’s Tale would set most any book up to fail. I think it would have been better if Atwood hadn’t tried to build suspense by having the characters withhold information from the reader: I guessed all the major twists before they happened. And it really added nothing to the book: the best parts by far are the moments when Atwood fleshes out the world of Gilead, and these would have been entirely unchanged if, say, ( Spoilers )

I know I’ve complained about this before with other books. In general, I feel that if a character knows something, they ought to share it with the readers sooner rather than later - unless they have a very good reason to withhold it, like an in-universe audience from whom they must conceal the truth. And anyway, you can build just as much suspense by telling the reader the gist of what will happen, and leaving them hanging about exactly how or why that event will occur!

What I’m Reading Now

I began William Dean Howells’ Suburban Sketches, but the first essay is a comical piece about a black cook whom the Howells employed for a while, and it is pretty much what you would expect from that description, and I decided to give Suburban Sketches a break for a while.

This is particularly depressing because in Benjamin Brawley’s The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States (first published in 1918), Brawley (an African-American educator) singles out Howells as unusually thoughtful and sensitive on this subject for a white author: “Such an artist as Mr. Howells, for instance, has once or twice dealt with the problem in excellent spirit.” That only serves to drive home just how absolutely dire was the field as a whole.

I’ve been reading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch in a desultory manner, interested without being deeply invested, but this week I finally got to the part where Theo meets his best friend-who-he-occasionally-hooks-up-with Boris Pavlikovksy and my investment immediately quadrupled… and then Theo and Boris lost touch, and now I’ve slowed down again.

Oh! And I've begun Don Quixote! evelyn_b, I'm thinking I might do a Thursday Don Quixote post, like I did about The Count of Monte Cristo back when we were reading The Count of Monte Cristo.

What I Plan to Read Next

All of a sudden I’ve got LOADS of holds coming in all at once. The one I’m most excited about is Bessel A. Van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, but I’ve also got Eva Ibbotson’s The Reluctant Heiress if/when I need something less heavy to read.

I waffled about whether to post my Wednesday Reading Meme as usual even though it's Christmas, but in the end the siren song of habit simply proved TOO STRONG, as did the fact that I read Donna Tartt's The Secret History and I simply had to share.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, which was An Experience, a little bit like Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, another book full of whip-smart college students in beautiful surroundings having crackling intellectual discussions full of allusions to a thousand books they all read and can quote at the drop of a hat - except that The Secret History is like if Tam Lin took place inside its own insular classics department, and also the magic was… possibly nonexistent? There’s an important (off-page) incident in The Secret History that could go either way.

Or you could also compare this book with Brideshead Revisited, in that both of them begin with a sort of college idyll, “Et in Arcadia Ego,” beautiful well-off young people (and their less well-off admirer) hanging out in the country and drinking far too much and whiling away the happy days as if they have all the time in the world. But in both books, this is an illusion: this is only a golden bubble in time before darkness bears down to crush the characters. (Both books also have an atmosphere saturated with homoeroticism.)

It’s also - well, it’s just an experience. I was also really impressed by Tartt’s use of, hmm, inevitability? The book centers around an event, an murder, that most books would make a great mystery of, but Tartt lays out the basic facts about it in the prologue, and then the first half of the book is just laying out how it came to that point, a march of doom toward a predetermined end - while the second shows what came after.

I also finished William Bowen’s The Old Tobacco Shop: A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure, which, as you may recall from my post last week, is bananas. When last we left Freddie and his friends, they were being menaced by pirates from the reign of King James, who were at length banished with the churchwarden’s Odour of Sanctity (an evil-spirit-banishing perfume that he keeps in a little stoppered bottle) once it finally occurred to him that two-hundred-year-old pirates had to be spirits and not mortal men.

But before the churchwarden realized this, the pirates (with Freddy and company in tow as their prisoners) retired in High Dudgeon, which is their castle stronghold. There’s a certain Phantom Tollboothishness about all this that makes me wonder whether Norton Juster read this book in his youth.

I also finished Aminder Dhaliwal’s Woman World, which I would have liked more if I went into it with the understanding that it’s a gag comic rather than a high concept one. The basic premise is that it takes place in a world where men have gone extinct, so you can see why I expected some in-depth worldbuilding.

But all the world-building questions are dealt with perfunctorily, as in the early comic where Gaia announces to an assembled crowd, “The men are extinct! What will the straight women do?” She ponders a moment, then asks, “How many of you skewed bi anyway?” and then almost all the women raise their hands, and that’s the end of that. We never come back to the question.

It’s not that I wanted the comic to navel-gaze specifically about the difficulty of being a straight woman in a world that no longer has men, but this is the level on which Woman World deals with everything and I found it disappointing.

What I’m Reading Now

The introduction to Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North states specifically that the book is not about amputees, which I suppose is fair enough, but as I got the book specifically because I’m working on a novella where the hero is a Civil War amputee… well, I put it aside for most of the week in a fit of pique. However, I’m sure it has lots of interesting information and I should read it anyway.

Oh! And I also began reading Elizabeth Goudge’s The Dean’s Watch! But then I got distracted by The Secret History, so I haven’t finished it yet, although I’ve gotten far enough to strongly suspect that this book has a truly off-the-charts woobie concentration.

What I Plan to Read Next

A few days ago I realized that I was six books away from reading all the Newbery Honor books of the 2010s (have since whittled this down to three), and my goal is to knock those last three out before 2020. Heart of a Samurai! Splendors and Glooms! (This one has puppets on the cover, which intrigues me. Magic puppets?? And was written by Laura Ann Schlitz, who wrote Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village, which I liked a lot.) Bomb: The Race to Build - and Steal - the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon! CAN I MAKE IT???

I have also decided that I should read Donna Tartt's other novels, of which there are only two, The Little Friend and The Goldfinch. My impression is that The Goldfinch is more highly regarded than The Little Friend, although possibly this just reflects the fact that I've heard more about it because there was a recent movie adaptation?