Some progress on my 2010 reading list: I finished The Living.
I wrote a review over on Goodreads:
This book is beautifully written. The prose is as fine and as lovely as anything I’ve ever read. The book is majestic and magisterial, as formidable as the densely forested lands that the characters strive to master and tame.
And yet, well, put it this way: one character is said to have written a three-hundred page epic poem in which men battle polar bears and pack ice; although the poet is a rank amateur, I wish I could have read his no-doubt-inept poem rather than this finely wrought novel.
I was profoundly unmoved. I barely cared whether the characters lived or died. I had a glimmer of interest in a sort of antisocial, woodsy Nietzschean named Beal Obenchain, but for him as well as for the rest, I felt very little emotion.
After a couple of hundred pages, I began to understand why this is so: the characters are almost always alone and lost in thought. Even when two characters are together, they are mostly caught up in their own separate thoughts. Much of the talk is summarized, rather than quoted. The quoted talk is generally trivial; the summarized talk is generally momentous. Time and again, we sit in a room with an introspective character as he or she thinks back on some horrific or exciting event, and prefer that we could witness the event, rather than read a summation of the character’s reflection upon the event.
If Dillard had set out to blunt the emotional impact of her own novel, she couldn’t have chosen better ways of doing so.
Of course, I don’t mean to suggest that it’s all introspection. A scene that takes place on a logjam that’s just about to break up, for example, is powerfully dramatic—but there, too, we are told before the scene even begins that a major character will die in it.
Another scene, depicting the ugly behavior of a xenophobic mob, is unequivocally compelling in the way it depicts the inhuman way people treat one another. The chapters surrounding that scene could make a whole book, if they were fleshed out and expanded. Instead, that passage feels oddly extraneous, as if Dillard had been loath to waste any research material.
I feel as if I’m taking more care in avoiding spoilers than Dillard herself. An example: when I say that Beal Obenchain kills a man in Whatcom just to watch him die, it sounds as if it should probably be a spoiler—but it’s not. We’re told he’s going to do it, and then we watch him do it. By the time this happens, so much has happened, so little of it apparently of any import, that I couldn’t tell whether or not this murder was even significant.
Now, having finished the book, I’d say, eh, probably not. It’s just something that happened, followed (a couple of hundred pages later) by something else that happened as a consequence. I’m still trying to avoid spoilers, here, though there’s hardly any need. There are no surprises or twists in this subplot.
A minor technical point. Dillard’s handling of point of view is, at times, jarring. It’s a little unusual, these days, to read fiction in which the POV changes from character to character within a scene. Writers of old used to do that sort of thing all the time—it’s a matter of fashion, rather than of statute—but when I come across it in writers’ groups and workshops, I usually flag it as a mistake. It usually is a mistake. The Living is an epic set in the late 1800s, though, so it seemed somewhat fitting.
But then there’s something like this:
The skin on her face looked soft as a blossom, spotted, and her black eyes squinting out seemed glossy and hard. She was watching her granddaughter Vinnie souse the plates with curly-haired Hugh Honer in the sea. The boy had hardened up considerable since the bad summer when everybody died on him and he seemed ready to curl up his own self…. [T]hough she herself favored responsible young fellows with a mite more foolery in them, that kind seemed hard to find.
It’s a minor thing, as I said, but it bugs me: We are given details of the character’s appearance—of her face, which she cannot see—and then within the same paragraph we are privy to her thoughts, in her vernacular (the italicized portions). I’m not especially fond of the god’s-eye-view sort of third-person narration Dillard employs throughout the book, but I’m particularly annoyed by this mixture of close and distant third-person.
This is the first substantial piece of Dillard’s writing that I’ve ever read. She’s been on my list for a very long time, though. In college, a friend of mine love-love-loved Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I have fond memories of reading and rereading an essay in an old Writer’s Market, in which Dillard recommended fearlessness in writing and revising. If a story is like a house, let’s say, sometimes you need to reconfigure the floor plan. Sometimes a wall needs to come down. You go at it with a sledgehammer and hope it’s not a bearing wall. Sometimes it is a bearing wall, but it needs to come down anyway. Duck.
I am sorry to say, The Living either has altogether too many bearing walls, or none. I dearly wanted to love this novel, but I didn’t. Not at all.
For the last few months, I’ve made an effort to avoid movie reviews. Over the years, I’ve seen any number of critical darlings that seemed to fall flat. On the other hand, I’ve been dragged reluctantly to supposed stinkers, only to be pleasantly surprised. Reviews didn’t come into play with Dillard’s novel, but expectation and disappointment surely did.
On the slimmest of evidence, I’d decided that Annie Dillard is a modern master. Indeed, her prose style is masterful. But I’d expected everything from this big book–the sweep of history, the grit and grind of pioneer life, characters I could passionately love and vehemently hate. By the end of the book, I suppose I felt somewhat cheated.
It’s recently come to my attention that the French word déception translates into English as either “deception” or “disappointment.” How strange, but how apt–so, so often, disappointment follows a kind self-deception, or at least misconception.
As if I learned nothing at all from the experience of reading The Living, I’ve picked up an early(ish) novel by Wallace Stegner, The Big Rock Candy Mountain.
Given that Stegner’s novel is as old as my mother and its action begins decades before that, it’s no surprise that its prose feels a little old-fashioned, and that I’m having a bit of trouble gaining momentum. Nevertheless, I read and enjoyed Angle of Repose,
I’m hoping, at any rate, that déception won’t once again lead to déception.
