Review of David Sedaris' "When You Are Engulfed in Flames"

When sitting down to consider the overall experience that I had when reading a writer like David Sedaris, never would it have occurred to me that I would get to show off my knowledge of Eric Havelock or the Parry-Lord thesis. I’ll spare you the details, but I promise the central idea is important: people used to saying things do so much differently than people used to writing things, even when those two sets of things are exactly the same. The example that Parry, Lord, and Havelock were most to cite was Homer, arguably the best-known western writer of pre-literacy. They say that Homer communicates things in such a way that would be very different, and even unnecessary in a literate society, because he simply didn’t have this thing we call “writing.” 

Of course, the Parry-Lord thesis can quickly grow to be much more technically difficult than what I’ve said here, but the basic idea holds. When you’re reading something, the way you experience it is drastically different than from when you hear a raconteur “tell” it (especially a raconteur on the order of Homer). For about a decade, I’ve heard the occasional David Sedaris piece on NPR’s “This American Life” with host Ira Glass, who I imagine to be every bit as painfully awkward and borderline sociopathic as Sedaris is. I’ve never found Glass funny. He is what Philip Roth would have become had he taken up comedy, and one of the words that doesn’t come to mind when I think of Philip Roth is “comedian.” Sedaris, however, got the occasional chuckle out of me. I appreciate a sense of humor that’s off the beaten path, and his reflections on this or that – I somehow never seem to quite remember the content of his stories – did the trick. 

So, I found this in a used bookstore the other day for three dollars (yes, yes, I know it’s a hardback, but even at Goodwill hardbacks are going for three dollars these days), thinking that I would make up for all those times of passing him up in the New Yorker to look at the cartoons. I finished the book yesterday, and if hard-pressed to match the plots of the stories with their titles, I’m still not sure I’d be able to do it – maybe because they hardly ever have anything to do with one another. But I suppose my point is: I find the writing to be incredibly flat, overly indulgent, repetitive, and too autobiographical (if such a criticism can be made). You will hear endlessly that he lives in France, of his international travels, his long-suffering partner Hugh, et cetera. These are incessantly and grindingly shoved in your face, so much so that the book begins to lose the sense that it might have an audience.

The lack of interest in the stories on the page is probably attributable to Sedaris’ whiny, effete voice and overall stage presence. He just so much sounds the persnickety curmudgeon that he can’t help but be occasionally funny. His voice – both its physicality and tender faux sentimentality – are lost on the page. I suppose what I really found funny was his unashamed prissiness, his unmitigated misanthropy – both available, at least to me, only when I hear him reading his stories to a live audience. While even the prissiness and misanthropy can get old after a while, they never even struck me while simply reading him on the page. My reaction to this collection (at least as presented here, in book form)? Eh. I could really take it or leave it. In the future, I’ll probably do more of the latter.

Review of John Williams' "Stoner"

Until recently, I usually begin a book with the same amount of enthusiasm with which I end it. Good books have inviting beginnings, which sustain me through to the end; to be overly simplistic about matters, bad ones can be bad in many different ways (see the first sentence of “Anna Karenina”) but I usually still trudge through due to my half-hearted attempt at self-discipline and genuine belief that To Quit A Book Is A Serious Thing, Indeed. Lately, I’ve been beginning books with one opinion and finishing them with another. “Stoner” was one of those.

It begins as a tight, crisp story, without lingering over any of the main character Stoner’s biographical details too much. Stoner comes from a poor family of farmers and after a few semesters of thinking he is going to get a degree in agriculture, soon finds that his true calling is literature. He pursues an M.A. and a Ph.D. which draws him further away from his family, gets married to a cold, distant debutante named Edith, and has an adorable daughter named – and this is important - Grace. 

As the book and the marriage wear on, Edith becomes more and more inexplicably heartless, tormenting, and cruel, you feel like you’re reading “The Good Soldier” – something Dreiserian in its ability to induce pathos. One of the biggest unsolved mysteries of the novels – and it’s really one that should have been explained more carefully – is why a mild-mannered milquetoast like Stoner would have married a total bitch like Edith. Divorce wasn’t completely unheard of a century ago; they certainly didn’t run in social circles where they had to keep up appearances. So, what gives? 

The one thing the story has going for it is Williams’ refusal to romanticize Stoner, his occupation in academia, or any other aspect of his life. This certainly isn’t an Ivory Tower university (not that those are always so cozy either) where he gets paid to spend hours idling over dusty books in the Rare Books Room; he has several undergraduate classes, teaches a graduate seminar about the influence of Latin literature in late antiquity, and is responsible for a spate of graduate students’ dissertations. In addition to this, he also researches and writes to be published (how little things change over the decades). Well, two things: that and Stoner’s implacable dedication to the profession of teaching. 

Williams was once asked in an interview about Stoner’s life, and if he thought it was “sad.” He responded with an affirmative “no,” that Stoner had an absolutely wonderful life. This good life, full of wonder, can only be adjudged to be such against Stoner’s own standards of what it means to be a teacher and how closely he hewed to them. He was a passionate teacher, even though we’re told in the opening lines that “Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the other ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.” 

Let’s be brutally honest here: when all is said and done, the will be said for 99.9% of us. That old Greek wish of being remembered generations and generations hence, which came to easily to Odysseus, just will not come to fruition for most of us. Does that make our lives any less full of wonder, or regret, or even the sublime? Stoner’s life, I think, serves as an answer: “no.” For it is in how we pursue what is most meaningful to us that marks the truest measure of ourselves. As someone more eloquent than myself said in her Goodreads review, “it is about how the inner life redeems the outer.” How simply, and how beautifully said.

Review of Robert Luis Wilcken's "The Spirit of Early Christian Thought"

Anyone who has ever tried to dip their toes into the waters of medieval theology can quickly be overwhelmed by its complexities and occasional rank obscurantism. Wilken, much to his credit, knows his subjects so well that he can distill their most important ideas in historical context (especially important as this book covers a period where much of the known world begins as Roman and pagan and ends several centuries later, when both the Empire and its paganism were gone) and explain how they were important in the development of Christian intellectual history – all while remaining extraordinarily accessible for the reader with no formal knowledge of patristic theology. 

At the heart of the book are two major messages. First, to separate evidence and sensory knowledge from pure faith – very much a temptation for those of us who have been born since the Enlightenment – would have made no sense to the early Church fathers. From the time of Origen and Tertullian, earthly evidence and divine faith were both seen as necessary, and even to feed into one another. Thinking is part of believing, and vice versa. Second, the series of practices that we recognize as early Christianity are undoubtedly social and communal in nature. Wilken stresses over and over again that even the monks would lived in desert confinement for decade after decade, still saw Christianity, at its root, as love for fellow man and community.

The thinkers that he covers are all very important, and range in time from its first couple of centuries to approximately the eighth century, covering the entire harvest of early Christian thought. The most important among them include Justin Martyr, Origen, Clement (and Cyril) of Alexandria, Athanasius, Basil of Caesarea, Ambrose, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor – and perhaps the greatest mind the Church has ever known, Saint Augustine. To assist the reader who has minimal familiarity with this rich history of thought, Wilken arranges his discussions topically, with chapter names drawn from an appropriate epigram which opens each chapter. “Founded on the Cross of Christ” discusses how we come to know God, “An Awesome and Unbloody Sacrifice” references worship and the sacraments, and “Seek His Face Always” picks up Trinitarian themes (Trinitarian discussions, as fundamental as they were to early Christology, are not relegated to this one chapter alone). For me, the most fascinating chapters were on a couple of the first Christian poets, and another on importance of the Bible and how the shape and texture of its writing so differed from Greek and Roman literature that it profoundly refigured the ideas of the early fathers. 

While the author covers a wide range of topics that are often considered dry, the overall effect of the book comes across as the passionate history of a fascination with the people Wilken writes about. His vim and vigor for the fathers of the early Church is clear and unmistakable, so much so that the historical figures he presents almost seem whitewashed – pure and almost superhuman. His orthodoxy perhaps results in a lack of thorough criticism on some points where it would have been welcome. However, if you’re looking for critical responses to the fathers, these should not be difficult to find. However, as pure contemporary apology for a centuries-old intellectual tradition, this book stands above many others I have read.

Review of W. Somerset Maughm's "The Moon and Sixpence"

When this was published almost a century ago, I’m sure the story of a man abandoning upper middle-class English life (along with his wife and two children) to pursue the life of a libertine artist in Paris would have packed more of a punch. It’s difficult to write about how and why people do such things beyond just saying, “They must or else, according to the flights of their fanciful imagination, they will wither away and fail to fulfill their truest being.” But alas, that’s not even enough to fill out a short story. Sometimes a short, studied approach like this one works for huge, ponderous questions like the one this novel raises, and sometimes it falls incredibly short. 

Maugham’s writing is best suited to short stories or novels like this one, which has such a “short story feel” to it that it could easily be read in a quick sitting. The only other piece by Maugham I’ve read was “Razor’s Edge” which, though written a whole generation later, I remember having much the same literary style. The writing, especially in the first half, is so artful and balanced, and at the same time epigrammatically clever and playful, as to be unbelievable. Some of the quotations jump off the page and straight into your lap, begging to be included in the next edition of Bartlett’s. While this falls off a bit toward the end, this is one of the few pieces of fiction I have read lately where the simple elegance – and sheer, unrepentant wit - of the style can’t help but strike you. 

Despite the incredibly controlled writing, judged strictly as whether it was able to shed any light onto the artistic process, or why someone would choose to repeatedly endure the gauntlets of the self-critical artist, I learned little here. Charles didn’t strike me as the heartless cad that I’m sure he probably appears to be to other readers; he’s just pursuing what he thinks he needs to be fully happy. Maybe that’s what Maugham is trying to insinuate through the title: that we should appreciate what we have (the moon – most people seem to be perfectly happy with a spouse and two children without fulfilling their need to run away from everything and start all over again), instead of thinking that we can be well-adjusted people and wanting to absolutely have it all. 

Should we hold it against Charles that he makes such a drastic decision? It’s unclear whether Maugham takes delight in punishing Charles, but he certainly weathers a lot of punishment – living in near squalor, dying a slow, painful death. Of course none of this is to say that he couldn’t have mitigated this punishment by being a decent person to Dirk’s wife, who then would have gladly taken him in when he needed her most. Did Charles suffer the fate of being almost wholly unrecognized during his lifetime and the scourge of disease directly because he so eagerly embraced the reckless decision to leave his family? Is Maugham trying to make a moral point? If so, it’s a very subtle one; none of the language in the book comes across as sermonizing in tone.

As with any good story, there are more questions than answers. Charles is certainly supposed to strike us, I would think – to make a forceful point. That point, however, eludes me still. That it might just as easily elude others may have convinced him that he’s nothing but a heartless beast. I’m convinced that he is not one of those. But what is he? That, I don’t know.

Review of Maxine Hong Kingston's "The Woman Warrior"

“The Woman Warrior” is haunted with ghosts: Mexican ghosts, Negro ghosts, white ghosts, janitor ghosts, teacher ghosts, and so on. I don’t mean this to be a paranormal or spiritual observation. Kingston uses the term so casually, we know what she is talking about – a ghost is almost anything or anyone outside of her Chinese-born family – but that still left me wanting a fuller explanation. We don’t get one. So, what is a ghost? It is something that, despite its seeming absence, leaves a trace of itself, a residue that can’t be erased. It’s a metaphor that runs throughout the entire book, and is extraordinarily apropos for a book that is, at its core, about the archetypical clash of two cultures.

I enjoyed the novel as a total reading experience – and I suppose there’s not a lot more you can ask from a book – but I felt because I wasn’t a Chinese woman, that I was missing something vitally important. I figured that most of the people who have probably enjoyed it haven’t been either of these things, so I tried to ignore how awkwardly self-conscious the book made me feel about my own identity, and trudged merrily on. 

The book is about a lot of things – growing up in the United States with parents who were born in their native China; the difficulties one has living with parents who have yet to become properly acculturated even though you as a daughter are already intimately familiar with that culture; even what it means to be Chinese, and how the weight of Chinese history and civil mythology can weigh heavily on someone who hasn’t even set foot in that country. The book is composed of five vignettes or chapters, which don’t flow in a chronological way, but revolve around the same characters: Maxine, her mother, her female Chinese relatives she’s never met. 

I can see how this would have been a punch to the literary establishment’s gut when it was published nearly forty years ago, on the coattails of “Fear of Flying” and a myriad of other works important to the feminist tradition. Not only does Kingston’s story recognize her womanhood and coming to terms with that in a particular time and place in the United States, she complicates matters by recognizing her Chinese heritage, which has very different ideas of what it means to be a good daughter, a feminine woman, and so on.

This has been sitting on my bookshelf staring at me for several years now, and I’m glad that I finally chose to read it. Is it something that I’m likely to ever read again? Probably not. It’s exactly the kind of book that college students across the humanistic disciplines – sociology, anthropology, cultural studies – should be exposed to: horizon-expanding and full of ideas to widen the minds of parochial university freshmen, i.e., kids that need the aforementioned culture clash. Once out of school, many people would never again admit to reading for self-edification. I’m not one of those, and self-edification was part of the reason I read this book. It’s just that every time I stop to think about it, I can’t help but think all over again of how self-conscious it made me of being a privileged white male. I know, I know. #FirstWorldProblems

Review of Robert Musil's "The Confusions of Young Torless"

Despite its obvious second-class status behind Musil’s much more canonical “The Man Without Qualities,” this novel’s reputation still precedes it. Sometimes this can present an interpretive problem, and I think that is what happens here. Considering the overt mixture of both violence and masochism and their relationship to (especially political) power and the date of publication (1906), Musil’s novel is bound to be read as a critique of what “he saw coming” – the failure and abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the promise of a democratic Weimar Republic, and the eventual rise of the National Socialists and breakdown of liberal parliamentarianism as Germany had known it up to that point. There are certainly instances in which political circumstances are paramount in the consideration of a piece of fiction. I would never argue that this is an exception. However, to argue that Musil anticipated something like the rise of fascism an entire generation before it came to be would be to commit the critical mistake of a posteriori reasoning. 

The novel is horrifying enough without any knowledge of pre-Weimar Germany, but the entire piece – essentially a novel-length reflection on the brutality of power gone awry – can be read with political implications still. The novel opens with Torless being delivered by his blithely unsuspecting parents to an all boys boarding school. The events revolve around Torless (whose first name we never learn) and three others boys: Reiting, Beineberg, and Basini. One day Torless, Reiting, and Beineberg catch Basini stealing some money from one of the follow boys, and begin to threaten and ostracize him over it; in time, this turns into physical abuse, and eventually Reiting and Beineberg “taking turns” violently sodomizing Basini. 

Instead of evoking a pure disgust in Torless, a complex mixture of pure sexual passion and moral confusion ensues which provides the forward momentum for the novel. Torless’ own less-than-ambiguous homosexuality only adds to his feeling as an outsider, and to his “confusions.” He is at once physically drawn to Basini’s small, tender, epicene physique, but revolted by the violence that he endures at the hands of those who he thought to be his friends. When Torless finally advises Basini to report his abuse, a formal investigation comes to an unsurprising conclusion, but I won’t spoil it here. 

During his testimony, Torless gives a bewildering speech on the nature of the rational and irrational. It consists of an expansion on what Reiting says earlier in the novel in regards to torturing Basini: “If everyone, and there are no many, contributes just enough it’s enough to tear him to pieces. I like these mass movements as a rule. No one intends to do anything in particular and yet the waves grow ever higher until they crash together over everyone’s heads. You’ll see, no one will stir, yet there will be a raging storm. It gives me extraordinary pleasure to stage something like that” (130-131). Words like these, from the mouths of babes, make it easier to understand why “The Confusions of Young Torless” is so easily read as Musil trying to be yet another author-prognosticator.

Review of Wole Soyinka's "Ake: The Years of Childhood"

Wole Soyinka, the first African to ever be awarded the Noble Prize in Literature, grew up in Nigeria in the fifties, when both his native country and much of the rest of Africa was still roiling under imperial European rule. To no one’s surprise, this results in a memoir that very much reads as if the writer is being torn between two priorities, two sets of values, two worlds. Soyinka’s “Ake: The Years of Childhood,” which cover his earliest memories up through approximately age eleven, is no different: he grew up in a world of ancestral religious, social, and cultural practices that mostly coincided easily with, but occasionally butted heads, with the imperial English culture with which it had to share its lebensraum. 

This volume of Soyinka’s memoirs (there are several more by now: see below) is bound up mostly with his domestic life, though later there are memorable recollections of an emerging political consciousness which I’ll mention later. His father (“Essay”) is a local schoolmaster; his mother (“Wild Christian”), the very embodiment of a free spirit who occasionally takes in boarders to their house. Because the memoir uses the limited perspective of a very young boy in a mostly domestic environment, the voice can have the naiveté of a boy this age; however it never has the provincialism that you would expect to accompany that innocence. From the very first episodes of the story, we are able to envision him as a vibrant, curious, enthusiastic, and very precocious little boy. 

Though he is stuck at home, the family’s recent acquisition of a new television set gives Wole an initial way of understanding the complex political world around him. He heard of Hitler faintly and vaguely knew that he was an important figure. Later in “Ake,” Soyinka begins to track the actions of a group called the Egba Women’s Union which fights against excessive taxation. Wild Christian becomes prominent in the Union and begins a series of talks with the Alake of Egbaland, a native administrator.

Soyinka’s recollections of his early childhood resemble the kind of person I have seen him to be in interviews – joyous, thoughtful, intellectually curious, and appreciative. He displays the kind of wonderment and delight that we can only hope to have in fully grown adults. From the first chapter which describes the beautiful geography around Ake to the tumultuous politics of colonial Nigeria, the reader walks away from this memoir feeling that he has inhabited the shoes of a child who is bigger than the land that contains him, but at the same time will grow up to write its stories and tell its histories like none of his contemporaries have. Oh, and the language. The language! I will not quote anything directly, but suffice is to say that’s simply magisterial. 

To compliment this volume, readers might also be interested in “Isara: A Voyage Around Essay” (1989) which deals with the years directly before the ones in “Ake,” “Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years” (1994) which discusses tracks Soyinka’s life after “Ake” through the time of his arrest and two-year imprisonment, “The Man Died: Prison Notes” (1972) detailing those two horrific years, and most recently “You Must Set Forth at Dawn” (2006), about his experiences from young manhood until publication.