I'm an avid book reader and reviewer located in San Antonio, Texas. These videos are meant to help potential readers of these books to decide whether they might find them interesting or worth their time. I welcome all questions, comments and concerns regarding the content herein.
[The above is mostly a
reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure,
as they strike me as relevant. I welcome
questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]
“Grendel” is, of course, John Gardner’s wonderful re-telling of the great Anglo-Saxon (i.e., Old English) poem “Beowulf” (c. 675-1025 CE). It is one of the few truly successful parallel novels – the literary form that reconfigures the action of a story that the audience is already presumably familiar with – that I have ever encountered. Gardner was a medievalist by training, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he was familiar with the Anglo-Saxon of “Beowulf,” too. The book makes it clear that he has lived inside and with the character of Grendel for a long time, which only results in a richer, fuller reimagining of Grendel’s sense of deep curiosity and existential despair at his own position in the world.
This could have been a simple, straightforward narrative account of the action of “Beowulf” through Grendel’s eyes, but Gardner imbues Grendel with all the philosophical wonder and bewilderment of a human being, which makes him all the more poignant. When Grendel sees the Shaper (a literal translation of “Scop,” the Anglo-Saxon bard who sings in Hrothgar’s mead-hall) sing songs of heroic victory, he becomes incensed at how the Danes contort reality for their own purposes in their songs. “Why do they lie to themselves like this?” he asks. He encounters a brilliant dragon who happens to have a keen grasp of medieval Scholastic philosophy who explains to him that the job of the Shaper is to convince humans that their reality is in fact real. Out of this conversation comes some beautiful revelations about the art of mythopoiesis, the nature of storytelling, and art itself. When Grendel is unable to accept the dragon’s fatalistic view of the universe, he characteristically storms off, angered, confused, and in denial.
Since raw, brute power plays a not insignificant role in the Anglo-Saxon world, it’s no surprise that there is a discussion of political philosophy, too, in which the Hobbesian view eventually wins out. Grendel defends his relentless attacks on the mead-hall by saying that he is the force in their lives which gives them meaning, and therefore it is only his continued carnage against the thegns of Hrothgar’s hall that continues to let the Shaper sing the stories he sings, and therefore allows them to remain human. Regardless of what you think of this rationalization of violence, you have to admit that it has a sheer logical force of its own. To think that those in the mead-hall only feared his strength and size when they should have feared his power of reason makes for a truly formidable monster. Later, there is another conversation on the nature of religion with a priest, which again fills Grendel with a sense of existential dread.
Behind all of these characters rests Grendel’s mother – a minor but wholly compelling figure - holding down the marshy fen as only a protective mother could and whose inability to speak frustrates her son, reminding him of his distance from humanity, yet of the persistence of his reason.
I waited until I read “Beowulf” to read this, and while “Grendel” would be enjoyable for anyone, it will be more wonderful still to someone who has invested themselves in a careful reading of the original poem; it provides a narrative framework which allows the reader to focus less on the action of the story – really not the most important part of Gardner’s version by far – and instead focus on the tender, passionate humanization of Grendel himself.
[The above is mostly a
reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure,
as they strike me as relevant. I welcome
questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]
This review contains spoilers.
I originally picked this book up for two reasons: it is a Virago Modern Classics edition which I’ve heard many good things about from several people, and Susan Sontag listed Elizabeth Hardwick as one of her favorite contemporary writers a number of times in interviews. Unfortunately, I didn’t think this novel lived up to either of these recommendations.
It tells the story of two people – Joseph Parks, a well-to-do student from New York who has come to Iowa to study, and Anita Mitchell, the wife of a boring chemistry professor at the same university. These two characters who would otherwise have nothing to do with one another are brought together by the local sensationalized murder trial of Rudy Peck, another local student, who is accused of killing his girlfriend. Even though it seems very clear that Rudy has actually killed her, both Joseph and Anita are rabid partisans in defending him – Joseph for reasons he describes as “Dreiserian” (Peck as a latter-day American Tragedy, a kind of male Jenny Gerhardt) and Anita for more vaguely Freudian reasons which Hardwick never fully fleshes out.
Much of the novel consists of either courtroom testimony which is all rather uninspired and extended dialogues between Anita and Joseph which try to exculpate him or explain away his possible involvement in the murder. The possibility of riveting testimony could have salvaged this somehow by turning it into a “true crime” kind of novel along the along the lines of “In Cold Blood,” but even these parts fall completely flat and lifeless onto the page. In the end, Rudy is found not guilty, which brings out the most repulsive snobbery in Anita. She wonders how these simple Iowa farmer-hicks could possibly have so much empathy and understanding to see that Rudy might be anything other than guilty. Apparently the whole time she was thinking that they were a band of knuckle-dragging, trident-wielding witch-burners. One person echoes Anita’s bewilderment: “It is really unnerving to live in a world where everyone, just anybody, takes as complicated a view as the most clever people! … There’s no one to uphold common sense.” I finished the novel wondering if people could really be so ignorant. But of course, the unpleasant fact of the matter is they can be – and perhaps that’s Hardwick’s point.
There are fundamental questions that are never answered in the book. For example, why were Anita and Joseph interested in Peck’s trial beyond the simple, flashy headlines? What drew them to him as a person more than anyone else? Something posing as a “novel of ideas,” which this most certainly is, needs to answer these questions but they remain not even tangentially addressed making their dogged attention to the trial seem random and somewhat silly, like impish schoolchildren who have nothing better to occupy their time. Joseph and Anita are badly drawn characters; they never manage to fully become people, but instead remain contrivances to push Hardwick’s plodding, empty story along.
Ironically, there is remarkably bright and insightful afterward to the novel in this edition written in 1987, some thirty years after it was originally published. It intelligently and clearly explains what she was trying to do with the book. If only she could have written the whole thing as well as she did the afterward!
[The above is mostly a
reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure,
as they strike me as relevant. I welcome
questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]
I am about one hundred pages short of finishing the novel, and have to begin writing the review now, not because I don’t want to finish the book, but because I think I will have forgotten too many of the things I wanted to mention. Richard Yates has received quite the resurgence in interest recently, especially from online amateur book reviewers, and judging solely from “Revolutionary Road” alone, it is well deserved.
The lives of its two central characters, the married couple April and Frank Wheeler, are dripping with tragic irony. (In many ways, it resembles a modern retelling of something from Euripides or Sophocles.) The entire novel is an investigation into the different modes of irony that deeply infiltrate even the most intimate parts of their lives. April and Frank – what two names could better express the blunting dullness of the hope-springs-eternal optimism of the 1950s in which the novel is set? From the very first page, however, Yates is single-minded in his goal to have the reader see that this optimism is simply an illusion. On that first page, we learn that April is an aspiring actress who has been relegated, much to her chagrin, to a suburban amateur theatre group. When her co-actors’ weak performances disappoint her, she goes home to take it out on her husband who at first seems the model of forbearance, putting up with hours of her icy “silent treatment,” but who eventually shows himself to be every bit as cruel and calculating as his wife. To support them, Frank has taken a middle-manager job in the technology company where his father used to work. For whatever reason, and the author never makes it wholly clear, both Frank and April both think that success and everything else they deserve is right around the corner. They have convinced themselves that “these mindless drones working in the sales department don’t think and feel in the same ways we do.” Why should they? “They’re just silly brownnosing ladder-climbers.” They even secretly hold this sense of smug superiority toward their neighbors, who also happen to be their best friends.
Yates is really masterful at describing the profound changes that took place between the time when Frank’s father worked there and now. Frank’s father always worked hard, was always tired – but he seemed satisfied. He was a company man and proud to be identified as one. Frank, twenty years on, does nothing but sit and collect his check; moreover, he’s disgusted by the corporate business mentality that pervades the whole place. Yates wants you to see that the corporate workplace definitely has become more alienating, but I think he also wants to show healthy and unhealthy ways to accommodate it, and that Frank’s attitude of seeing it only as a place where you spend forty hours a week and try to do as little as possible is one of the unhealthy ways. Frank and April either refuse (or perhaps are just incapable) of discovering what they need for themselves.
If there could be anything like one clear, distinct message to be taken away from this novel, it is that meaning – what you want to do with your life, the worth of your relationships, what makes life worth living – is never simply handed to you, an artisan-crafted thing on a silver platter. You have to build it yourself, to make it with your own hands. Meaning is something that we must continually weave for ourselves out of our personal needs, passions, and drives. Waiting for it to arrive means it never will. That, ultimately, is the tragedy for April and Frank Wheeler.
[The above is mostly a
reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure,
as they strike me as relevant. I welcome
questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]
William Beckford, the author of “Vathek,” led a rather remarkable life – so remarkable, in fact, that reviewers and critics are left baffled at how to interpret it other than reading it as a sort of fantastic confabulation of his life. He was born in 1760, son of the two-time Lord Mayor of London; at the tender age of ten years, his father died and left him one of the richest men in the entire country. This allowed him to pursue his interests in art, architecture, and travel, all of which he did on grand scales. His tastes were just as spectacular as his wealth, acquiring over the course of his life Giovanni Bellini’s “Agony in the Garden,” Raphael’s “Saint Catherine of Alexandria,” and Velazquez’s “Philip IV in Brown and Silver.” He took music lessons from Mozart. After very possibly having an affair with his cousin’s wife, as well as another with a boy who just happened to be the son of William Courtenay, Ninth Earl of Devon, he exiled himself to the Continent, where he lived most of his life.
Vathek was written in 1781 or 1782, while Beckford was in his early twenties. It has heavy Gothic influences, but is very recognizable as one of the “Oriental tales” of which the English reading public could hardly get enough of at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Beckford originally wrote the book in French, only later to have it translated into English by Samuel Henley in 1786 and published by Oxford World Classics.
However grotesque and bizarre the story, two of its central characters are historical. Vathek is based on al-Wathiq, an Abbasid caliph and grandson of Harun al-Rashid, and his mother Carathis is based on al-Wathiq’s mother, Qaratis. That’s where all historical resemblances end, however. Goaded on by his mother, Vathek seeks out occult learning in the sciences, astronomy, and other “black arts” that shock some of his fellow Muslims, including his counselor-vizier Morakanabad and the eunuch Bababalouk. He is tempted by a demon named Giaour who promises him riches beyond belief in a Palace of Subterranean Fire, and does a number of heinous things to please Giaour, including tossing fifty beautiful boys to appease its bloodlust.
Vathek then meets the kind, pious Emir Fakreddin, and quickly falls in love with his daughter Nouronihar, who is already betrothed to her young cousin Gulchenrouz. Vathek’s infatuation excites Nouronihar, however, and seems equally greedy for the treasures in the Palace of Subterranean Fire. They eventually reach the Palace, ruled by Iblis (the Devil of Islamic mythology), but it turns out to be something that more resembles Dante than any kind of heavenly reward. Carathis soon joys them there, explicitly having abandoned all Hope, one assumes for eternity.
Because of all the action that takes place in an extremely short novel (this version clocks in right at 120 pages), its pace can seem hurried, confused, and frantic. This is understandable since, in several places, Beckford cites having written it in either two or three days. “Vathek” mostly seems to be a vehicle for Beckford to bandy about his criticisms of middle-class English mores and sexual morality (Nouronihar’s love interest, Gulchenrouz, is often referred to as “feminine” and “effete.”) It can just as easily be read as a very young Beckford trying to come to terms with how he sees himself and his ambitions in relation to those of society less forgiving of thoroughgoing aesthetes. Because of its length, I would recommend this for anyone interested in the ever-popular Georgian-era Oriental tale mixed with high Gothic romance. I don’t think anyone has ever accused Beckford of being a great writer – but it is not without interest, even if it is only the interest of the fascinating eccentric who wrote it.
