Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God reflects the rugged beauty and dogged sentiment of life for a young, middle-aged woman on the Canadian prairie.  The aesthetic can be found all the way down into her prose which is concrete yet flowing, occasionally flowering.

But what impressed me most about A Jest… was its ending.  To spoil it for you, it’s somehow tragic yet satisfying.  The union the reader is rooting for doesn’t happen and yet it feels very natural for it not to, not a knee-jerk counter-Hollywood contrivance.  Particularly, the last few sentences piqued my interest, “God’s mercy on reluctant jesters,” being one of them.  I admit this phrase confused me.  Jesters are not the sorts of people who need mercy?  A reluctant Jester, maybe.  But even still it feels awkward; aren’t there more worthy people of mercy?  The sick?  The poor?  I think the phrase could be a complex reference to Shakespeare I’m missing but perhaps it’s just saying that a humourous, satirical worldview is taxing (why not stop it then?) which is an interesting thought to ponder.

“God’s pity on God” is also provocation.  I suppose this means something similar to the jester line, that the prominent are not usually as flawless as they might seem, that it must be tough to be God.  

A Jest… reminds me of another great book for its dissatisfying satisfying ending:  For Who the Bells Toll.  But probably I’m getting distracted from ‘A Jest of God’ as a reference to the heroine’s lost fetus; an undesired and unintelligible event enabled (perpetrated?) by God.   

Laurence is criticizing Him, or the view of Him as perfectly benevolent.   

Wilde is either so sarcastic, he’s serious, or so serious he’s sarcastic.  That’s the message I took from the ending of IBE.  He’s obviously truly sarcastic but it’s the fact that things turn out well for Jack Worthing only after he comes clean, it causes me to wonder.  (It could also be that our age is so much more cynical that the cynicism of yesteryear appears fluffy.)  

I always thought that the title of this book was togue and cheek; that it was really the ‘unimportance’ of earnestness Wilde intended to communicate.  I suppose it still is but on this read through I felt a little different for some reason.  I guess Worthing was always acting earnestly and in the end when he finally got a sense of humour, he in turn won him the girl.  I’m not sure.

I love the first act of this play unlike any other.  It’s literature and drama at it’s most witty and scathing.  After that it becomes kind of soap-opera-ish with issues of who weds/bed whom surpassing all others (maybe this is the nature of human existence after all?).

Anyway, all satire should take a knee at Wilde’s genius.  It’s for a reader and humanist, a little hard to stomach.  I do appreciate, seeing it in my mind’s eye being performed in Victorian London, it was once a highly necessary social commentary.  I’m in full agreement over the Importance of (Appearing?) Being Earnest with historical context in mind. 

The Strength of The Stone Angel is towering.  It has voice, plot, character, setting.  It’s take-home message is profound beyond description.  But over-ambition is my calling.

Hagar Shipley - ne Currie - is a modern heroine.  Exposed to untold dangers and difficulties growing up on the ragged prarie, she endured the deaths of many loved ones, discrimination based on her gender, poverty, disappointment of all kinds.  But these are only half the story.

Hagar heroism is a rare variety.  As an elderly woman she is embittered towards the hands life dealt her and unfair to her son and daughter-in-law looking after her as she deteriorates.  What’s rare, is how this formerly self-reliance-vaulting senior learns to accept the past and the present.  How anyone who buried so many loved ones, raised without a mother in one of the most motherless environments on earth could do so is beyond comprehension.

Well, almost.  The Stone Angle is fiction, of course.  Created from real life and imagination.  Laurence does a truly stunning job of bridging the divide.  What’s incredible about The Stone Angel is that it’s a genuine tragedy in an age of glory.  Hagar, a devout atheist, is not redeemed.  She does relent to her children’s wishes but that far from absolves her from the overly-critical existence she led.  You’re left such torn emotions—love and hate for Hagar—at the end, it feels like you’ve really understood what it means to be human.  Laurences ability to tackle our hypocrisies, prejudices, negative emotions so fully and honestly is unique and wonderful.  

Mystic.  Superstitious.  Curious.  Combative.  Book-lover.

These are the words that quickly summarize my interest in reading the bible.  My reasons for reading The Gospel According Luke specifically?  I understood his rendering of Jesus’s life to be the most existential.  (I’ve since been told that this is in fact Job…Fact Check!)

Caveats:  I’m obligated to mention that my knowledge of religion is very limited.  I took a course on the old testament in university, have gleamed some facts from from pop culture, infrequent United Church services and my mother who went to Sunday school.  My aim is to comment on Luke from a literary point of view, meaning, as if it were any other narrative.  Obviously there are problems with this approach but I’m ignoring them out of the sacred principles of brevity and entertainment value.

Luke is a strange read.  Granted, it was composed around two-thousand years ago in Ancient Greek, and has been translated and rewritten throughout the millennia since.  (My commentary is based on the King James edition which was conceived in the 1500s, I believe.)  Luke’s writing style is action-centred, light on setting and description.  Characters, groups, places, dialogue and events dominate his telling of the life of Jesus.  (Interesting to think what our textes of our heros of today will look like two-thousand years from now; will post-modernism also become antiquated?)  But what was most noticeable to me were the number of villains Luke’s hero encounters:  Herod, Pilate, the Pharisees, Judas, and scribes, to name a few.  I found it bizarre that for such an apparently loving man, Jesus—or Luke or both—had so many enemies.  (I highlight this contradiction not just for intellectual showing-off, but for narrative showing off.  [I have a lot of forth-coming praise for the book, and being the even-handed pseudo-christian that I am, must take a balanced view of everything.])  

The Goods:  Luke is quite readable.  He’s clear and concise especially with dialogue (When did we decide that every time a speaker changed we should create a new line on the page?  Is this the way conversations sound in our heads or happen in life? I think not.)  And, I agree with many of the gospel’s messages such as, ’But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes ‘, and  ’And behold, there are last which shall be first, and there are first which shall be last.’  These themes of compassion and humility have always been my favourites of christian thinking among other ideologies.  But, of course, our other oddly self-sacrificing hero, Nietzsche, who, like Christ, never lived to see his opinions adopted by mainstream society, had some choice things to say about self-abnegation; that’s a whole other bussel of hay.

The Bad-ish:  ’He that is not with me is against me; and he that does not gathereth with me, scattereth.’  This tract of christian/religious thinking so heavily referenced to to justify invading sovereign nations and ignoring human rights has always bothered me.  It’s the original sin of religion that it seeks to divide, isolate, and segment as much as it seeks to unite and make peace.   But reading the neighbouring lines of the George Bush-speak in Luke’s actual text acquiesces me somewhat.  By ‘He’, existentialist-Luke might be referring to one’s own personal doubts.  It’s a message akin to the native American lore of the two wolves said to be inside each of us—the one, good; the other, bad—and that we should actively choose the good.

Anyhow, I could just be reverse-engineering my prevailing interest in making narratives out to be the basis of morality and epistemology.  Certainly, Luke would look upon me critically; for scribes were as dubious a bunch as they came in biblical time.  In our post-modern age, one might ask, should that skepticism be extended to Luke & Co. too who are, after all, scribes themselves?  Or would that be to follow The Bad Wolf/Doubt?

I’m full of bad ideas.  In this one, I, an infrequent poetry-reader, will comment on a selection of Anne Sexton’s poems spanning almost sixty years and many serious themes.  Let’s do this!

I decided to read Sexton on the recommendation of a friend.  I found her quite enjoyable which suggests she’s a good writer.  (If I’m not understanding what you’re saying, which is often the case when I read poetry, it takes good prose to keep me reading it.)  She didn’t take my breath away at many points—which I have had happen while reading other poets—but I was certainly stimulated and provoked.

Sexton’s prose is minimalist yet content-rich.  She doesn’t seem to use a lot of imagery but you get the sense she is conveying much more than the words’ literal meanings when she writes, something I often find is the case with good imagery.  The verses also come across very contemporary not withstanding many of them were written upwards of sixty years ago.

Sexton’s themes span the political-economy of health, religion, family and relationships, depression, and gender and sexuality.  I think I liked relationships and gender and sexuality of these the most, perhaps because they are the ones where Sexton shows the most humour and imagination.  ’Some women marry houses,’ she writes in Housewife; and in The Balad of the Lonely Masturbator, she casts doubt on what seems like a pretty closed idea - that solitary sexual gratification is an entirely infurior form of sex to coupling.  Other favourites include Said the Poet to the Analyst, And One for My Dame, and Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman.

Hmm, maybe this wasn’t so bad an idea.  I’m happier to have read Sexton having written this because it’s easier now to see what a remarkably talented artist and compassionate human being she was, something that gets overshadowed by her tendency towards melancholy in much of her work and, of course, her tragic death.  Obviously, Sexton was a much fuller person than that imagery suggests.  

This book; I don’t know where to start. The first time I read it I was twenty-one or two. I read it in a single sitting; two at the most.

Like other books of my youth - and my youth itself - it’s lost its lustre. On this read through, ten years later, I felt it an embellished, ornamental novel. This is probably mostly due to the greatness I remembered it having and the suspense-less nature inherent to re-readings. All-the-same, I think a few criticisms and observations are worthwhile mentioning.

Fitzgerald-prose:  Flowery, overly-editorializing. He sounds terminally fatherly and knowing. In some places this is nice - his positive observations/assertions on/of humanity and individuals - but for the most part it’s tedious. (If Nick Carraway chooses to associate with crappy people, why do I have to read about it ad nausea?).  Sometimes the language and imagery work and sometimes they don’t. Daisy’s green dock light is an example of the former par excellence.

On Gatsby’s setting, the age of opulence, the roaring twenties: This sounds like it was a terrible time according to Fitzgerald’s book. Superficiality, selfishness, and aimlessness seem to have reigned. I’ll grant they may have had cause; the Great War was a scarring social-psychological event just behind them. And, the scene may have been set as such to contrast the story’s ultimately romantic plot-lines. But again, there is little to endear the reader to Nick in the setting.  Carraway comes across capricious and self-superior towards of his contemporaries, and its hard to take this unsympathetic voice for much longer than twenty or so pages.

On the romantic plotlines: I picked Gatsby up again for personal solace.  Jay Gatsby’s is a beautiful example to aspire to; his complete and utter devotion and submission to Daisy despite the impossibility/unlikelihood of it ever being fulfilled/returned.  As the famous last pages adroitly proclaim: Gatsby believed in the Green Light of Daisy however far she receded. But what I noticed more from my reading this time was it wasn’t the Gatsby-Daisy love story that stood out; it was the Nick-Jordan. Theirs was a slow burning love built out of friendship and mutual respect.  It is a hard ideal to attain I think - we all seek the thrills and daring of Gatsby-Daisy - but maybe be its the better type to emulate.  Fitzgerald, for what it’s worth, did.

slaughterhouse90210:

“That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time. There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

David Ohle’s novel, Motorman is beyond summary.  It’s a bizarre story about an apparent invalid set in an even more bizarre United States where people have transformed into transgenic, semi-cooked, or deteriorating creatures.

What’s certainly remarkable about Motorman is Ohle’s control of language’s inner systems of meaning, nuance, and rhythm.  The ‘atmosphere’ (introduction writer, Ben Marcus’s term) Ohle creates feels like a Dali painting.  Terms like ‘structural moans’, ‘leafless ether trees’, ‘something edgeless’ and ‘jellyhead’ are powerful in how they convey an aesthetic, without a great deal of elaboration.  Perhaps another way of describing this feat would be as a distinct visual mood.  

On the other hand, I started to dislike Motorman the further it went on.  It was probably on account of its disjointed structure—the book’s sections are little more than two paragraph passages long, and jump quickly between scenes.   Also, it could have been a function of the absence of any traditional plot-lines.  Moldenke, the book’s protagonist, looses his nemesis somewhere a third of the way into the book without explanation; and his love interest seems to be someone he doesn’t even really want.

This said, I’m glad I read Motorman.  It’s an errily unsettling book like few I’ve read.  And, in addition, there are none I’ve read with as good character names and dialogue. (‘Junce’, the nemesis, ‘Cock Roberta’, the love interest; ‘shall we halt the amenities and face the grit?’ Junce says to Moldenke.)

The Man Without Qualities (Vol. 1) by Robert Musil is a weighty book in many senses.  It is chalk-full of profound observations and insights over the human condition and social existence.  From a writing stand-point, it’s powerful (and labourious), having multiple narrative voices and no romantic arch to rely upon to propel the reader forward.  

I have to admit I only read the first two-hundred pages carefully - and the final three-hundred, I skimmed.  One idea that was cause for reflection is Musil via Ulrich’s description of happiness.  They/he argue/s that man is happy only in-as-much as his ability to work exceeds the demands of his work, similar to the nature of a donkey.  And, his/their ability to work is primarily determined by the demands placed upon him/them, and thus, rarely is anyone much happier than any other.

I like the metaphor.  It’s comforting to me to think that most apparently happy people are not as they seem.  Maybe the secret to living happily is to have more modest expectations; to be a man without qualities, so to speak.

I’ll start with the ending of Raise Hight the Roof Beam, Carpenter, and Seymour:  An Introduction, by J.D. Salinger.  In it, narrator Buddy Glass, goes on a vignette about his brother Seymour catching him in a foot-race around the block as kids.  The preceding hundreds-of-pages are spent describing all the high-minded virtues of Seymour but it’s an apparently trivial one that Salinger chooses to elevate.  I’m not sure I understand why, but I’ll give it a shot.

Raise… is the tragic tale of the Glass family, interpreted through the lens of the second eldest son from a family of seven.  It is set in two parts; when Buddy is twenty-one and when he is forty.  The two novellas comprising the single-bound book contrast dramatically in style, and somewhat in world-view.  Raise… is narrative whereas Seymour is a free-flowing meditation.  Salinger doesn’t refrain from the profound and quotidien in either voice but the second is more direct about it.  

Unlike Franny and Zooey, another dualistic story about the Glass’s, Raise… is less critical of social and intellectual norms, preferring, with Buddy as the prime example, to skate over contentious issues such as psychoanalysis, marriage, and the meaning of writing than barrage them with his incisive mind.  

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and oddly find little to say about it.  Perhaps it’s just too personal.  Salinger turns his hyper-critical mind on himself by choosing to write about writing—perhaps I just don’t want to hear the tough things he has to say about me/him. 

In any case, there are many purely entertaining parts of the book; the cartoonishly earnest maid-of-honour in Raise…, and readers as birdwatchers, and astronauts as middle-aged hot-rodders among others.  (Aside:  The passage about ‘the grounded everywhere’ shows that the Beats owe a debt to Salinger for their style.)  And on the serious side, there are a lot of erudite statements: guilt as an imperfect form of knowledge; children as guests in their parent’s house, to be served not possessed; how writers should let all their stars shine and write their hearts out; the deconstruction of sentimentality as the over-application of tenderness to things (more than God would bestow); and art as an imperfect-able vocation and aspiration.   

My ambiguity is getting clearer.  I read (thank you internet) that Raise… and Seymour were written separately. I’m not sure why Salinger would have published them together; maybe it wasn’t his decision, a theory that could explain his notorious vexation with the publishing industry.  In clarity, Seymour is a meditation on the difficulty of artistic endeavours whereas Roof is a more traditional story.  It’s obvious why I don’t like Seymour as much as Raise… The epigraph’s themselves describe writing as an exercise in dishonesty and masochism.  The conclusion, a small saving grace, is that there’s no depression in that but rather that we should embrace the simpler things like teaching a class or walking in a courtyard.  

I’m going to honour Salinger and not attempt a synthesis or grand meaning from these books, including Nine Stories, and Catcher, my thirteen-year-old self’s holy bible.  Or better, I will, (I lied):   

Catcher made me feel more alive in the sense of being in kismet with someone, however phoney that person turned out to be; Nine Stories showed me the variety and beauty of the world even in war and despair; Franny and Zooey made me question reality, the existence of everything; and Raise… and Seymour… made me question myself.   

I might be over-analyzing this.  Maybe Raise… and Seymour is simply a love-letter to a brother - a tall, yet sentimental task for anyone who has ever had a brother, let alone a dead one.  This is a relieving point of view, one that suggests that the simple, the beautiful, is never complete or easy.  If that’s the message then I believe Salinger may have achieved what he denied: he wrote honestly if scathingly.