Book Review - Go Set a Watchman, by Harper Lee

I have just read Go Set a Watchman, the first novel that Harper Lee ever wrote. To Kill a Mockingbird functions as a sort of prequel to it, exploring its themes in greater depth; but this was Harper Lee's original sketch of Jean Louise "Scout" Finch and her father, the lawyer Atticus Finch.

Harper Lee has a very distinctive writing style; yet as I was reading, I had the feeling I'd read something similar from a different author. Then it hit me: James Baldwin. Whether either of them ever read the other, I do not know, but the resemblance between the two writing styles is striking: frank, wisecracking without resorting to cynicism, presenting history as a series of events that no one is really happy with and the most entertaining part of life is trading stories about why we don't like to do as we're told. Almost every conversation is a series of minor incongruities over one's ideas of how we ought to live our lives, spoken between characters who are trying earnestly to understand each other but know that in the end it's just not worth all the fuss. I have the feeling that, at some point in her life, Lee discovered to her immense disappointment that life is not half as tragic as some people make it out to be. Not a discovery I recommend making, if you are an author (since I think the tragedy is an excellent form of literature); but once you stumble upon this sort of conviction it does not go away easily.

Unlike To Kill a Mockingbird, this novel takes place within a very short space of time, approximately four days (with a few flashbacks, to earlier events). Scout (called "Jean Louise" for most of this novel, although Atticus still calls her Scout on occasion) is now twenty-six years old and has been living in New York for several years. She comes back to Maycomb County by train, anticipating a restful two-week stay with her friends and family, and instead finds that the town has changed greatly. Rest does not come easily.

The book is ambitious yet cautious; it tries to tackle a great number of issues and encompass an enormous scope, yet remarkably little happens in the entire story. Jean Louise spends time with her boyfriend, Hank, who has trained with her father Atticus to be a lawyer; she finds out that Calpurnia's grandson, Frank, accidentally ran over a man and Jean Louise is anxious over what sentence Frank will receive in court; she attends a tea party with women of her own age and finds that she has nothing in common with them; and, apart from a few passionate dialogues that erupt between Scout and the key male figures in her life, that is it. The novel hints at court cases, but none is witnessed or concluded; jibes at the NAACP and the SCOTUS, but a full history of their actions is never outlined; showers the reader with emotional sparks that result from a major turning point in Jean Louise's life, but barely examines where she came from or elucidates where she will be going. The novel is powerful, but disorganized.

Although it does not dabble in "sit-ins" or peaceful protests, Go Set a Watchman is a novel about the civil rights debates of the 1950s. Scout has been living in New York, an overwhelmingly metropolitan center of world communication, where people of all different races and religions and backgrounds have learned to tolerate (or ignore) one another in every context - in school, on subways, in public restrooms, in the office, etc. She returns to Maycomb and finds out, during a citizens' council meeting, that several prominent officials of the town are racists and treat the "Brown vs. Board" decision as an infringement upon their rights. What is far more horrifying is that Atticus, though unsympathetic to the racists' viewpoints, does not denounce them; Atticus sits calmly, and he quietly defends the black man whose crime is the subject of their debate. Disgusted, Jean Louis leaves the courthouse. Later she attends a tea party held by her Aunt Alexandra, and she hears young ladies sharing many of the same opinions, mostly parroting what their husbands say. The novel finally comes to a boil when Jean Louise confronts her father Atticus and scolds her for raising her to be "colorblind" when she should have been exposed to these racist opinions earlier in her life. Jean Louise discovers that her father is not a deity, but wholly human, and that he cannot simply elevate all people to the same level of intellect at which Jean Louise was bred to live. Though Atticus justifies all of his actions with reason, the image we had of him from To Kill a Mockingbird is shattered.

The title of the novel is derived from a passage in the book of Isaiah, one that tells people to "set a Watchman" who will stay at a city's gates and report what he sees. Jean Louise's Uncle Jack warns her that she must form her own conscience, her own set of beliefs, which can function as a frame of reference when she determines what is right and what is wrong in the world. In short, this is a sort of final nudge in a series of nudges toward womanhood in Jean Louise's life - one final illusion to be shattered before is capable of being her own woman in society. It is a microcosm of a coming-of-age story, one that begins at the very end (kind of like a cross between Jane Eyre and "The Cask of Amontillado," if Virginia Woolf had written it).

The shades of gray in the novel are unsettling, but the novel itself fails to form a coherent whole. There is no Boo Radley, no Tom Robinson, no character whose plight is so terrible that it distracts Jean Louise from her own personal doubts and drives her to transcend her internal struggles. The novel has many powerful moments, but if it had not been written by an author who is now famous, those powerful moments would not have been enough to merit widespread publication. Nonetheless, they were enough for me. Go Set a Watchman is an admirable first novel. It lacks the ingenuity of construction that a mature writer would possess, yet it is a stunning look at the conflict between different ideologies of 1950s America. Uncle Jack holds Jean Louise up to a mirror and says to her, "What do you see?...I see two people." He then adds, "What was incidental to the issue in our War Between the States is incidental to the issue in the war we're in now, and is incidental to the issue in your own private war." I don't claim to know precisely what he means, but my guess is that he refers to a struggle between the "New York" Jean Louise and the "Maycomb" Scout - a struggle between the desire to keep everyone living in harmony, and the assumption that harmony is already a natural occurrence between people. What is our natural state of mind? When we try to treat everyone as equals, do we actually want to make everyone equal, which then reflects an innate human dislike of those who are not already equal to us? To put it more simply - when we try to integrate the races, does that mean we really would prefer that the human race was all one color with no exceptions? Can human beings ever really live with diversity, and be genuinely happy? These are questions the novel does not answer. No definitive answers for these questions exist, of course, but some novels have produced at least a few tentative answers, i.e. Invisible Man, Huckleberry Finn. Go Set a Watchman leaves these questions unanswered, and I would have loved to see another part written - one where Jean Louise Finch, as a mature adult, confronts the world and finds out whether she is strong enough to make her ideas a reality. Alas, a trilogy that will never happen.

Book Review - Keep the Aspidistra Flying, by George Orwell

I have just read the novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, by George Orwell. It is the fifth book of his I have read, after Animal Farm, Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays, 1984, and Burmese Days.

It is not really a very good novel, and the only reason why I read it is because Orwell is one of my favorite writers. Most people use the name "Orwell" as synonymous with "Totalitarian," as if 1984 were the only important thing he ever wrote. Actually, I think his greatest writing is in his essays, particularly "Politics and the English Language" and "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool." Orwell's strength was the ability to state things simply yet eloquently, to show how matter-of-fact most things really are when you sit down to think about them. I will admit that this novel, relatively obscure today, might be obscure for a reason.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying is a story about a man who declares war on money. People have been spouting the phrase "money is the root of all evil" for centuries; but the novel's protagonist, Gordon Comstock, actually decides to work against his own desire to earn money, and he intentionally takes a low-paying job at a bookstore while writing poetry on the side that he knows will never bring him any fame or pecuniary compensation. Although he sometimes must borrow money from his sister, Gordon refuses charity from his friends (of which he has few, since he deliberately keeps up an unclean appearance).

Gordon was born into a lower-middle class family. As a boy, he suffered the indignity of his inferior economic position when he went to school:

"Even at the third-rate schools to which Gordon was sent nearly all the boys were richer than himself. They soon found out his poverty, of course, and gave him hell because of it. Probably the greatest cruelty one can inflict on a child is to send it to school among children richer than itself. A child conscious of poverty will suffer snobbish agonies such as a grown-up person can scarcely even imagine. In those days, especially at his preparatory school, Gordon's life had been one long conspiracy to keep his end up and pretend that his parents were richer than they were."

He comes to see money-worship as a kind of religion, and decides that possession of money has replaced morality - that people judge a person according to how much money he has, without caring at all about his actual virtues or ideas. Thus, Gordon wages his war against the money-god by suppressing his ability to earn money, because he fears turning into one of the bullies who made him miserable in grade school. Gordon forgoes all opportunities to make money, and bitterly complains to his friends that money is constantly conspiring to make him miserable - even though he is willingly reducing himself to abject poverty.

The novel, essentially, portrays one man's tirade against capitalism. We know that Orwell hated capitalism as much as he hated communism - in a letter to a friend in 1937, Orwell wrote, "Fascism after all is only a development of capitalism" - but the novel's protagonist goes to such extremes to reject all forms of economics that, by the end, Gordon is practically reduced to a caveman. Keep the Aspidistra Flying is a rather strange combination of Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground, Sinclair's The Jungle, and Plath's The Bell Jar (okay, The Bell Jar did not exist yet when Orwell wrote this, but maybe he kept a time machine somewhere). The strong resemblance to Notes From Underground is difficult to ignore, especially when the single word "underground" is used ten times in Orwell's 248-page novel, and the phrase "under ground" is used five additional times. Orwell was a fan of Dostoevsky - he praised Dostoevsky in an essay which can be found in a collection here.

The aspidistra, a house-plant that is known for surviving long periods of time without much sun or watering, is used in this novel as a symbol of the mediocrity that the middle-class tenants have come to accept in their lives when they buy into the mindless product-placement of commercial corporations. They believe what they see on the advertisements and posters, and so they brainwash themselves - but they have an aspidistra in the window, and so they look and feel respectable.

Ultimately Orwell does not assert Gordon's viewpoint as true. Gordon later admits that "to abjure money is to abjure life," and that we must "keep the aspidistra flying," that is, find a way to live with the world even if we have to compromise some of our principles.

In the end, I don't think Orwell accomplished much with this novel, and I think he knew it. Instead of telling a realistic story or a clever satire, Orwell unsuccessfully tried to do both, creating an absurdly confused protagonist who tries to take a stand against the age-old concept of money, but he ends up so dirty and beaten that his journey is too pitiful to be profound. This book is not really interesting in itself but in the lesson that Orwell might have learned from the experience of writing it: that writing satire is a tricky business.

Book Review - Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell

The term "cloud atlas" is an oxymoron - not because an atlas of clouds would be meaningless to the average person, but simply because such an atlas could never exist. An atlas is a bound collection of maps, and the very idea of a map presupposes that whatever the area being represented, that area will continue to take up the same size and shape for an indefinite amount of time. A map of Europe, for example, will always be accurate at least in a topographical sense, because Europe's land does not shift drastically on a daily basis. But clouds do not stay in the same formation. They move constantly - breaking apart, pulling together, traveling with the wind, exhausting themselves in rainstorms, engorging themselves with evaporated water. The title of this book, therefore, refers to something that cannot exist: an atlas of things whose deviating masses resist the defining power of maps.

At its most basic level, Cloud Atlas is a series of short novels that occur at different points in time. Mitchell has arranged six different narratives, in a sort of pyramid structure: we read the first half of the first narrative, next the first half of the second narrative, and so on, until we reach the sixth narrative and read it in its entirety uninterrupted. Then we read the second half of the fifth narrative, the second half of the fourth narrative, until we have finally gotten back to the first narrative and learn what happened to the characters who last appeared four hundred pages earlier. Decades, if not centuries, separate each narrative; the author does not always specify the year.

Doubtless, critics have taken great pains to analyze the different narratives: I will summarize them here. In the first story, we read the diary of an American notary in the 1800s named Adam Ewing, who witnesses the savage treatment of colored natives at the hands of white settlers while he is on an expedition by boat. In the second story, we peruse the letters that the British musician Robert Frobisher writes to his friend while apprenticing himself to an ailing composer in the 1930s. In the third story, an American journalist named Luisa Rey pursues the truth about the safety flaws of a nuclear power plant in the 1970s. In the fourth story, an aging publisher named Timothy Cavendish struggles to prove his intellectual acumen to the world as he navigates an unfriendly world in the early twenty-first century. In the fifth story, we hear the testimony of a genetically-modified servant-woman named Sonmi-451, who criticizes a technologically advanced but morally bankrupt future as she explains her rebellion against it. And in the sixth story, which probably takes place many centuries later and in a dystopian distant future where most technology has perished, a teenager named Zachary ponders how to deal with a series of terrible events when he believes that he has brought bad fate upon everyone with his own actions.

As an author, I was tempted to interpret this structure in an elemental sense - that is, to classify each story as a representation of a certain general quality, with the different qualities adding up to a sort of philosophical whole that the author offers as an ideal for the human mind. Adam Ewing, with his sympathy for those who suffer the ill effects of colonialism, represents compassion; Frobisher, reveling in a world of music and having an affair with the composer's wife, represents sensation; Luisa Rey, in her relentless pursuit of the journalist's perfect "scoop," represents impulse; Cavendish, who quotes every book he has read (his favorite author seems to be Solzhenitsyn) in a futile attempt to convince the staff of a nursing home that he is of sound mind, represents intellect. These four qualities then correspond to the four elements of Greek mythology: water (compassion), earth (sensation), fire (impulse), and air (intellect).

Sonmi-451's statement just before her execution, however, shows a break from any of these attempts at a philosophical outlook on life. Horrified by the depravity she has witnessed in a bleak world that reminded me of why I don't like the movie Blade Runner, derisive at any pretensions the court officials have about their own understanding of justice, Sonmi-451 coldly tells the attentive Archivist that any sense of order in the world will collapse eventually, that a belief in one's permanence is precisely what causes one's downfall. "As Seneca warned Nero," she tells him, "No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor." After a life of being manipulated by people, most of whom she has learned to recognize as pompous fools, she sees everything as an illusion. And in the sixth story, the apex of the novel, Sonmi is the deity of Zachary's village. Her ability see past illusions, and to shame people for their hubris, is at once an oppressing force in Zachary's world and a source of hope that someday they will transcend their conditions.

It is not progress; but perhaps we are better off that way.

The writing of the novel is extraordinary. Each story has a unique voice, and I almost had trouble believing that a single author wrote all of it. Every protagonist somehow becomes aware of the previous protagonist: Frobisher discovers the journals of Ewing; Luisa meets Dr. Rufus Sixsmith, the man to whom Frobisher sent his letters decades ago; Cavendish decides to publish a manuscript of "The First Luisa Rey Mystery"; Sonmi-451 watches a "disney" about the life of Timothy Cavendish; and Zachary witnesses a holographic recording of Sonmi-451's testimony, though he does not understand her language at all. The connections between the characters are thin, and Mitchell shows little interest in bridging the gaps in the overall timeline. We have only a vague idea of what destroyed civilization as we know it and brought Zachary's world back to the stone ages. So many causes probably contributed, so many people probably worked so hard to protect one another (or perhaps just protect their own private interests).

Cloud Atlas is, as I noted before, a thing that does not exist. And Mitchell does not try to tease it into existence. We see no grand plan, no progression, no symbolic journey that leaves us with the taste of "true meaning" on our tongues. It is a profound exploration of all the wonderful and terrible things people can do, without the author plastering the inside of the cover with a "map" that shows how it all fits together. The novel has very little science-fiction or fantasy. And while I would not call it a "celebration of life" (as I did with the novel Forever; I get the feeling David Mitchell does not enjoy himself writing a novel the way Pete Hamill does), Cloud Atlas has moments of relief and wonder, in spite of the erratic, destructive nature of the plot. When Adam Ewing's father-in-law chastises Adam for his idealism, his pointless dedication to abolitionism, the father-in-law predicts, "Only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!" Unruffled, Adam merely responds, "Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?"

I will confess that I really just don't know what to make of this book. If I had written it, I would have enabled the different protagonists to meet each other, and work together toward some greater goal. But, from what I have read, Mitchell had no interest in a greater goal. Cloud Atlas is a masterpiece, but it is perhaps the least teleological masterpiece I have ever read. Somewhat in the spirit of Nabokov, Mitchell paints a world where nothing quite fits in, where everyone is "doing his own thing" and occasionally elbowing someone in the ribs because we've all been squeezed into a room that's just a bit too small. Because, if everything is connected, then the connections become pernicious snares that restrict our movements. The first four protagonists of the novel operate under the illusion of personal freedom; the last two know that everything influences and is in turn influenced:

Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds.

In 1931, Robert Frobisher begins work on the "Cloud Atlas Sextet," a piece destined to resound throughout the rest of the novel. Whereas some novels manage to be more than the sum of their parts, I think Cloud Atlas aims to expose the weakness of this technique. The stories counter and undermine each other, like harsh waves slapping the ocean's surface endlessly in the middle of a sea that does not care how many ships divide its waters. Cloud Atlas is a thoroughly unique novel, and while I am not sure if I enjoyed it, I highly recommend giving it a try.

You too can have your own Dewey Decimal Number!

When I was growing up, I was told that William Shakespeare was the only individual author to have his own Dewey Decimal Number - that is, 822.33. I have since learned that this is not quite true. There are other authors with their own DDC numbers.

(Of course, you can also argue with that statement on the grounds that William Shakespeare was not the author of all plays attributed to him, or that he was not a real person at all but simply a ghostwriting pseudonym used by a series of different authors of that time; I will not get into that here; let it suffice to say that I myself am a Stratfordian.)

There are DDC numbers for several of the Greek Dramatists: 882.1 for Aeschylus, 882.2 for Sophocles, etc. Miguel de Cervantes pretty much wrote the first modern Spanish novel, so 863.3, which is Early Spanish Fiction,  mostly belongs to him. Most of 851.1 (Early Italian Poetry) is devoted to Dante.

And so on. The DDC number for 21st Century American Fiction is 813.6; it has not been cut into subsections yet, since we do not yet have the perspective to determine which authors have been the most influential of our time. But someday you, too, might have your own DDC number.