THE CODE OF THE WOOSTERS

Background: Published in 1938.

This is the one where: Bertie deals with “the sinister affair of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Madeline Bassett, old Pop Bassett, Stiffy Byng, the Rev. H. P. (‘Stinker’) Pinker, the eighteenth-century cow-creamer and the small, brown, leather-covered notebook.” Of course, if you’re a big Jeeves & Wooster fan, “cow-creamer” is probably all you needed to hear.

The action takes place at: Totleigh Towers, Totleigh-in-the-Wold, Gloucestershire, the home of Sir Watkyn Bassett

Bertie accidentally nearly gets engaged to:

• Madeline Bassett, AGAIN (“A droopy, soupy, sentimental exhibit, with melting eyes and a cooing voice and most extraordinary views on such things as stars and rabbits.…That squashy soupiness of hers, that subtle air she had of being on the point of talking baby-talk. It was that that froze the blood. She was definitely the sort of girl who puts her hands over a husband’s eyes, as he is crawling in to breakfast with a morning head, and says: ‘Guess who!’”)

• Stephanie “Stiffy” Byng, Madeline’s cousin (“Stiffy’s map, as a rule, tends to be rather grave and dreamy, giving the impression that she is thinking deep, beautiful thoughts. Quite misleading, of course. I don’t suppose she would recognize a deep, beautiful thought if you handed it to her on a skewer with tartare sauce.”)

But she’s really in love with:

• In Madeline’s case, Gussie Fink-Nottle (“a fish-faced pal of mine who, on reaching man’s estate, had buried himself in the country and devoted himself entirely to the study of newts…A confirmed recluse you would have called him, if you had happened to know the word, and you would have been right. By all the rulings of the form book, a less promising prospect for the whispering of tender words into shell-like ears and the subsequent purchase of platinum ring and license for wedding it would have seemed impossible to discover in a month of Sundays.”)

• In Stiffy’s case: The Reverend Harold “Stinker” Pinker (“a large, lumbering, Newfoundland puppy of a chap—full of zeal, yes: always doing his best, true; but never quite able to make the grade; a man, in short, who if there was a chance of bungling an enterprise and landing himself in the soup, would snatch at it.”)
  

The task at hand: Steal the cow-creamer for Bertie’s Uncle Tom, recover the notebook in which Gussie has written insults about Sir Watkyn Bassett and Roderick Spode, reunite Gussie and Madeline, and get Sir Watkyn’s permission for Stiffy to marry Stinker

Other characters include:

• Aunt Dahlia (Bertie first describes her as “my good and deserving aunt, not to be confused with Aunt Agatha, who eats broken bottles and wears barbed wire next to the skin.” After she pressures him to steal the cow-creamer, however, he changes his tune: “It is no use telling me that there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.”)

• Sir Watkyn Bassett, a retired magistrate who once fined Bertie for stealing a policeman’s helmet; also Madeline’s father (“Slice him where you like, a hellhound is always a hellhound.”)

• Roderick Spode, Bassett’s friend and the leader of a quasi-fascist group called the Black Shorts (“About seven feet in height, and swathed in a plaid ulster which made him look about six feet across, he caught the eye and arrested it. It was as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment.”)

• The dog Bartholomew, Stiffy’s Aberdeen terrier (“Reluctant as one always is to criticize the acts of an all-wise Providence, I was dashed if I could see why a dog of his size should have been fitted out with the jaws and teeth of a crocodile.”)

• Constable Eustace Oates (“In describing this public servant as ugly, she was undoubtedly technically correct. Only if the competition had consisted of Sir Watkyn Bassett, Oofy Prosser of the Drones, and a few more fellows like that, could he have hoped to win success in a beauty contest.”)
  

Bertie’s trials and tribulations include: Being constantly suspected of theft (of, variously, an umbrella, the cow creamer, and yet another policeman’s helmet) by Sir Watkyn (which culminates in Bertie being locked in his room and nearly hauled off to jail), being treed atop a chest of drawers by Bartholomew

Jeeves disapproves of Bertie’s: Unwillingness to go on a round-the-world cruise

First paragraph: “I reached out a hand from under the blankets, and rang the bell for Jeeves.
‘Good evening, Jeeves.’
‘Good morning, sir.’
This surprised me.”

Bertie fashion moment: “I slid into the shirt, and donned the knee-length under-wear…I groaned a hollow one, and shoved on the trousers…The blow was a severe one, and it was with a quivering hand that I now socked the feet.”

Slang I’d like to start using: “Rannygazoo,” which I can only assume means something similar to “hullaballoo” (“I lit a cigarette and proceeded to stress the moral lesson to be learned from all this rannygazoo.”)

Bertie gets no respect:

• “Hello, ugly.”—Aunt Dahlia

• “It’s an extraordinary thing—every time I see you, you appear to be recovering from some debauch. Don’t you ever stop drinking? How about when you are asleep?”—Aunt Dahlia

Best Jeeves moment: “Presently I was aware that Jeeves was with me. I hadn’t heard him come in, but you often don’t with Jeeves. He just streams silently from spot A to spot B, like some gas.”

Best bit of description: The silver cow-creamer: “It was a silver cow. But when I say ‘cow,’ don’t go running away with the idea of some decent, self-respecting cudster such as you may observe loading grass into itself in the nearest meadow. This was a sinister, leering, Underworld sort of animal, the kind that would spit out of the side of its mouth for twopence…The sight of it seemed to take me into a different and dreadful world.”

Best bit of dialogue:
Madeline: “You know your Shelley, Bertie.”
Bertie: “Oh, am I?”

My review: Five stars! This is perhaps the classic Jeeves novel, containing many of the series’ most memorable characters (Gussie, Madeline, Spode with his “Eulalie” secret), details (the cow-creamer, the menacing Bartholomew, the policeman’s helmet), and lines (“I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled”). Practically perfect in every way.

Had I read it before? Yes, many times. My parents own it, and I vividly remember my father reading it aloud to me when I was a kid. I was not exactly sure what a cow-creamer was, and yet I still thought it was hilarious.

Next up: Joy in the Morning

THE WORDY SHIPMATES

Overall, I didn’t enjoy Sarah Vowell’s latest historical romp as much as Assassination Vacation, but here is a choice quote:

Because of the “city upon a hill” sound bite, “A Model of Christian Charity” is one of the formative documents outlining the idea of America. But dig deep into its communitarian ethos and it reads more like an America that might have been, an America fervently devoted to the quaint goals of working together and getting along. Of course, this America does exist. It’s called Canada.

DID YOU KNOW YOUNG ALAN GREENSPAN PLAYED PROFESSIONAL CLARINET IN A TRAVELING JAZZ BAND?

Do you dork out about history? For instance, did you have ever a crush on an historical figure? I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it here before, but what first attracted me to A was the fact that he uncannily resembled the sultry portrait of Christopher Marlowe I took a fancy to in my high-school English textbook (A is not that sultry, but I still see the likeness in the eyes and hair). I’ve also frequently been heard to state that Alexander Hamilton is smokin’ hot on the $10 bill. Or have you ever found a long-dead personality so inexplicably hilarious or endearing that you been unable to resist sharing choice anecdotes about him or her with everyone you meet, or constructing elaborate jokes about him/her with your friends? In college, K and I would gossip about the Elizabethans as though they were characters on our favorite soap (I was a particular fan of Sir Phillip Sidney and—for comedic value—Sir Walter Raleigh), and later our fandom shifted to the Founding Fathers. My previous job, in which I edited collective biographies of all sorts of historical figures, was just one such obsession after another. Over long months of fact-checking, photo research, writing and rewriting, layout, and proofreading, I became personally fond of a whole series of greats, including strangely cuddly John Maynard Keynes, crazy fake-nosed Tycho Brahe, doomed hottie Robert F. Kennedy, good old chick magnet/awe-inspiring genius Ben Franklin, and sweet, tragic Alan Turing.

If you’re at all like me, it will behoove you to read the cute and clever comics of Kate Beaton immediately. Beaton’s takes on historical figures are a perfect mix of the silly and the intellectual. It takes a smart and talented person to create whimsical historical fantasies that still ring true—maybe not strictly factually, but emotionally true. I’ve edited a book about the history of computers, so I can vouch that Charles Babbage really did have a bizarre hatred of street musicians; Beaton takes this odd fact to his logical conclusion by having his wife Georgina wonder, “Does he have to make a big spectacle about it every time we go out?” Similarly, Nikola Tesla really was celibate, and although there’s no evidence suggesting that frenzied screaming ladies were throwing their bloomers up on stage when he demonstrated electricity, wouldn’t it be awesome if they had?

What unfailingly cracks me up about history is that it’s just so big and crazy and yet so ordinary and human, and I feel that (like Sarah Vowell in Assassination Vacation) Beaton gets that too. Washington decides to “Cross the shit over the Delaware.” Maud Gonne complains to Yeats, “It’s just another faggy poem.” Orwell says of Animal Farm, “Seriously that book is going to rule so hard.” Charles of Austria woos Queen Elizabeth I with a song that goes, “Your hairrr is like a giant muffin.” James Cook fatally taunts the Hawaiians, “You can’t kill me! I’m too busy banging your chicks.” Admiral Nelson goes on a date: “I’d smile at you more but I have no teeth. There’s that ‘shot in the face’ thing again.” Jane Austen copes with her fans (“This novel is a social commentary.” “Is it a social commentary about hunky dreamboats?”). Teddy Roosevelt wins the Nobel Peace Prize (“Russia, Japan, must you kill each other so? We can negotiate! Or, if you want to, we can safari.” “Fuck it let’s do both!”). Fat King George IV fears “a sexy revolution” and envisions James Monroe showing off his hot ass (“Goodness I have dropped the Constitution…let me get that”). But lest I give away all the punchlines, let me just say that my all-time favorite is the Mary Shelley one and the runner-up is the one about St. Francis. Happy reading!

VARIOUS AND SUNDRY

Reading Project Update: I’m making slow but steady progress through the Wodehouse bio, which is interesting but pretty dense. I’ve got just over 100 pages to go and have made it a priority to finish before I leave for my Thanksgiving trip to D.C., so I can read The Code of the Woosters on the plane. I always want something light (both physically and emotionally) and super-fascinating for my travel reading, and I spend a lot of mental energy planning the perfect books to bring on a trip. I have a secret terror of being trapped somewhere without something good to read. This is why I would bring half a dozen books on an overnight trip when I was a kid—of course I knew I’d only have time to read a few of them, but I required access to a wide selection. This is also probably why one of my childhood fantasies was being locked in a bookstore overnight. And why in middle school I thought being in prison wouldn’t be so bad, as long as there was a well-stocked library. Now that I’ve seen Oz and graduated to actually enjoying fresh air and physical movement, I’ve rejected that last idea, but I still carefully strategize about which books to pack in my carry-on bag…and I still usually bring way too many, although now this seems like good common sense, given the state of air transportation today. I pray to never be stuck on a runway for six hours, but I hope that if it happens, I’ll at least be reading something awesome.

Since the end of the year is when all those “Best American Whatever Writing” collections come out, that makes choosing books for holiday travel a no-brainer. Anthologies are perfect travel reading—if you don’t like one story, just turn a few pages and you’ll find something entirely different. It’s basically like having a magazine but looking smarter. Thus, my other reading selections for the Thanksgiving trip will be The Best American Crime Reporting 2007 and Best Food Writing 2007 (yeah, the 2008 books are already coming out, but these are new to me—my library’s painfully slow in acquiring the latest entries in the series I like). I’m pretty pleased about the prospects, but my flights still better go smoothly. Even a good book can only pass the time for so long.

I’m also doing the Mr. Burns “Exxxxcellent” finger-tenting gesture because I managed (through my mad hold-list skillz) to snag a library copy of Sarah Vowell’s brand-new book about Puritans, The Wordy Shipmates. I’ve only read the first few pages, but I have no doubt I’ll enjoy it.

And finally, I just finished reading two stellar young-adult novels that should be just as appealing to real adults: The Green Glass Sea and White Sands, Red Menace, by Ellen Klages. They combine a number of my favorite book elements: an interesting historical setting (in this case, the Manhattan Project during World War II in the first book, and the early postwar rocketry program in the second), strong female characters, unlikely friendships, kids who are smart without being annoyingly precocious, and people who have rich interior lives with interesting hobbies/obsessions/fields of expertise. The details of the time period are effortlessly drawn, the books are chock-full of social history and science and engineering and art, and I loved the adorably brainy characters. It’s surprisingly rare to find a work of fiction about smart people that is actually smart itself (just one of the many that fails to pull it off: the movie Smart People). I can only hope that Klages is planning another book in the series.

RIGHT HO, JEEVES

Background: Published in 1934, just seven months after Thank You, Jeeves. The original U.S. title was Brinkley Manor.

This is the one where: Bertie thinks that Jeeves’ problem-solving powers are slipping and attempts to deal on his own with “the complex case of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Madeline Bassett, my Cousin Angela, my Aunt Dahlia, my Uncle Thomas, young Tuppy Glossop, and the cook, Anatole”

The action takes place at: Brinkley Court, Bertie’s Aunt Dahlia’s house in Worcestershire (near the town of Market Snodsbury)

Bertie accidentally gets engaged to: Madeline Bassett—or, as he refers to her, “the Bassett” (“I don’t want to wrong anybody, so I won’t go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite the liveliest suspicions. Well, I mean to say, when a girl suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don’t sometimes feel that the stars are God’s daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit.”)

But she’s really in love with: Augustus “Gussie” Fink-Nottle, who is reclusive, obsessed with newts, drinks only orange juice, and “wears horn-rimmed spectacles and has a face like a fish” (“Nobody could love a freak like Gussie except a similar freak like the Bassett… A splendid chap, of course, in many ways—courteous, amiable, and just the fellow to tell you what to do till the doctor came, if you had a sick newt on your hands—but…I have no doubt that you could have flung bricks by the hour in England’s most densely-populated districts without endangering the safety of a single girl capable of becoming Mrs. Augustus Fink-Nottle without an anaesthetic.”)

The task at hand: Give away the prizes at Market Snodsbury Grammar School (or, as Bertie says to Aunt Dahlia, “strew prizes at this bally Dotheboys Hall of yours”—yay for Nicholas Nickleby allusions!); mend the rift between Cousin Angela and Tuppy Glossop; help Gussie propose to Madeline; get Uncle Tom to give Aunt Dahlia more money to print her magazine, Milady’s Boudoir (she has gambled away 500 pounds playing baccarat in Cannes); keep the brilliant but temperamental chef Anatole from quitting

Other characters include:

• Hildebrand “Tuppy” Glossop (“In build and appearance, Tuppy somewhat resembles a bulldog, and his aspect now was that of one of these fine animals who has just been refused a slice of cake.”)

• Cousin Angela Travers (“This cousin and I had been meeting freely since the days when I wrote sailor suits and she hadn’t any front teeth, yet only now was I beginning to get onto her hidden depths. A simply, jolly, kindly young pimple she had always struck me as—the sort you could more or less rely on not to hurt a fly. But here she was now laughing heartlessly…like something cold and callous out of a sophisticated talkie”)

• Aunt Dahlia Travers (“If Aunt Dahlia has a fault, it is that she is apt to address a vis-à-vis as if he were somebody half a mile away whom she had observed riding over hounds. A throwback, no doubt, to the time when she counted a day lost that was not spent chivvying some unfortunate fox over the countryside.”)

• Uncle Tom Travers (“all those years he spent making millions in the Far East put his digestion on the blink, and the only cook that has ever been discovered capable of pushing food into him without starting something like Old Home Week in Moscow under the third waistcoat button is this uniquely gifted Anatole”)

• Anatole (“This wizard of the cooking-stove is a tubby little man with a moustache of the outsize or soup-strainer type, and you can generally take a line through it as to the state of his emotions. When all is well, it turns up at the ends like a sergeant-major’s. When the soul is bruised, it droops.”)
  

Bertie’s trials and tribulations include: Being chased around a park bench by an angry Tuppy, being insulted by a drunken Gussie during the school prize-giving, having to bicycle 18 miles in the middle of the night, and suffering the company of Madeline Bassett (“I could not but remember how often, when in her company at Cannes, I had gazed dumbly at her, wishing that some kindly motorist in a racing car would ease the situation by coming along and ramming her amindships”).

Jeeves disapproves of Bertie’s: white mess jacket with brass buttons, which Bertie has brought back from Cannes. (To Bertie’s assertion that such jackets are all the rage in Cannes, Jeeves replies, “The code at Continental casinos is notoriously lax, sir.”) The jacket meets its fate when Jeeves “accidentally” leaves the iron on it too long.

First paragraph:
“‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘may I speak frankly?’
‘Certainly, sir.’
‘What I have to say may wound you.’
‘Not at all, sir.’
‘Well, then—’
No—wait. Hold the line a minute. I’ve gone off the rails.”

Bertie fashion moment: None, but he makes several proud mentions of having written an article for Milady’s Boudoir on “What the Well-Dressed Man Is Wearing”

Slang I’d like to start using: Bertie’s jaunty abbreviations; for example, “I could see at a g. that the unfortunate affair had got in amongst her in no uncertain manner. Her usually cheerful map was clouded, and the genial smile conspic. by its a.”

Bertie gets no respect:

• “Ask anyone who knows me, and they will tell you that after two months of my company, what the normal person feels is that that will about do for the present. Indeed, I have known people who couldn’t stick it out for more than a few days.”—Bertie

• “I wonder, Bertie…if you have the faintest conception how perfectly loathsome you look? A cross between an orgy scene in the movies and some low form of pond life.”—Aunt Dahlia, to a hungover Bertie

• “I am not pulling your leg. Nothing would induce me to touch your beastly leg.”—Aunt Dahlia

• “I might have known that some hideous disaster would strike this house like a thunderbolt if once you wriggled your way into it and started trying to be clever.”—Aunt Dahlia again, handily summarizing the plot of just about every Bertie Wooster story

• “Ass,” “maddening half-wit,” “fathead,” “greedy young pig,” “idiot nephew,” “treacherous worm and contemptible, spineless cowardly custard,” “abysmal chump,” “dithering idiot”—also Aunt Dahlia

• “To look at you, one would think you were just an ordinary sort of amiable idiot—certifiable, perhaps, but quite harmless. Yet, in reality, you are a worse scourge than the Black Death. I tell you, Bertie, when I contemplate you I seem to come up against all the underlying sorrow and horror of life with such a thud that I feel as if I had walked into a lamp post.”—a final coup de grace from Aunt Dahlia

Best Jeeves moment: “I shot a glance at Jeeves. He allowed his right eyebrow to flicker slightly, which is as near as he ever gets to a display of the emotions.”

Best bit of description: “Conditions being as they were at Brinkley Court—I mean to say, the place being loaded down above the Plimsoll mark with aching hearts and standing room only as regarded tortured souls—I hadn’t expected the evening meal to be particularly effervescent. Nor was it. Silent. Sombre. The whole thing more than a bit like Christmas dinner on Devil’s Island…What with having, on top of her other troubles, to rein herself back from the trough, Aunt Dahlia was a total loss as far as anything in the shape of brilliant badinage was concerned. The fact that he was fifty quid in the red and expecting Civilization to take a toss at any moment had caused Uncle Tom, who always looked a bit like a pterodactyl with a secret sorrow, to take on a deeper melancholy. The Bassett was a silent bread crumbler. Angela might have been hewn from the living rock. Tuppy had the air of a condemned murderer refusing to make the usual hearty breakfast before tooling off to the execution shed. And as for Gussie Fink-Nottle, many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance and started embalming him on sight.”

Best bit of dialogue: Madeline Bassett: “Don’t you love this time of evening, Mr. Wooster, when the sun has gone to bed and all the bunnies come out to have their little suppers? When I was a child, I used to think that rabbits were gnomes, and that if I held my breath and stayed quite still, I should see a fairy queen.”

My review: Five stars! This one includes all my favorite characters from the Bertieverse—awesome Aunt Dahlia (who, despite her bluster, is usually quite cheerful and has an affectionate relationship with Bertie), hilariously drippy Madeline Bassett, cringe-worthy Gussie Fink-Nottle, and Anatole, whose cooking inspires reverence and whose allegiance is the center of many Wodehouse plots. In contrast to Thank You, Jeeves, where most of the characters seemed to hate Bertie and I felt a bit sorry for him, he fares much better in this one, serving more as an inept advisor to his friends and family and an audience to the hijinks rather than as a victim (except at the end, when, as usual, Jeeves’ scheme to solve everyone’s problems requires a sacrifice from Bertie—in this case, a long and unnecessary bicycle ride in the dark). The plot was funnier, the characters were more vivid, and even the language seemed to sparkle more brilliantly; as you can see, I had difficulty restraining myself from quoting the entire book to you. This one is definitely required reading for Wodehouse fans and a good intro for newbies.

Had I read it before? Definitely yes. My parents own it (in fact the edition that I got from the Pasadena library happened to be the exact same cover and everything), so my father read it to me when I was a kid and I read it myself at least once or twice while growing up. But it has been at least ten years since my last reading, and since I didn’t remember how the plot worked itself out, it still felt fresh to me this time around. Wodehouse bears much rereading, especially when you are older and can better understand the slang and literary allusions.

Next up: The Code of the Woosters

THANK YOU, JEEVES

The joy of Wodehouse novels is also the problem with Wodehouse novels: they are richly inventive, encompassing hundreds of eccentric characters who intertwine in intricate ways via wild coincidences and crazy hijinks; yet at the same time, they are repetitive and formulaic (basic plot structure: Bertie visits a country house and tries to help a friend or relative with some nutty scheme; there are romantic mix-ups and Bertie ends up involuntarily engaged; Bertie thinks he knows better than Jeeves and tries to fix the situation on his own; Jeeves swoops in to save the day at the last minute; meanwhile, Bertie and Jeeves disagree over some possession or habit of Bertie’s, such as an article of clothing, and Jeeves wins out in the end, ridding Bertie of the offending object).

This means the Jeeves and Bertie oeuvre can get confusing. Even the titles are easy to conflate: there's Thank You, Jeeves; Right Ho, Jeeves; Carry On, Jeeves; and Very Good, Jeeves for starters, plus the fact that some of the books have two titles—one for the British version, another for the American edition. I know I’ve read all the short stories, because I own the complete collection in an omnibus edition, but I’m less sure about the novels. Have I read most of them but just can’t recall the details or tell them apart? Or have I just read the same few over and over again?

That’s why I wanted to read them all in order. Wodehouse books are fun to reread, because they’re so complicated that even if you’ve read them already you probably don’t remember how everything gets resolved. Also, I am a completist. What if all these years I’ve been missing out on some Jeeves books and didn’t even know it? Sacrilege! To highlight the differences between the books and help myself keep them straight, I’ve developed the following handy template that distills the Jeeves-Wooster formula (as I remember it, anyway) into its essential elements. Unless Wodehouse got experimental in the later novels, I’m guessing it will prove applicable to all 10 books I’m planning to read. (There are actually 11 Jeeves novels, but I'm skipping The Return of Jeeves because (a) I read it last year and (b) Bertie isn't in it.)

Background: Published in 1934, Thank You, Jeeves was the first full-length Jeeves novel after numerous short stories dating back to 1917.

This is the one where: Jeeves quits Bertie’s employment; Bertie rents a cottage in the country

The action takes place at: Chuffnell Hall (the home of Bertie’s friend Chuffy, in Chuffnell Regis, Somersetshire)

Bertie accidentally gets engaged to: Pauline Stoker, an American heiress (“Unquestionably an eyeful, Pauline Stoker had the grave defect of being one of those girls who want you to come and swim a mile before breakfast and rout you out when you are trying to catch a wink of sleep after lunch for a merry five sets of tennis.”)

But she’s really in love with: Bertie’s land-rich, cash-poor friend Chuffy (aka Marmaduke, the fifth baron Chuffnell)

The task at hand: Persuade J. Washburn Stoker to buy Chuffnell Hall and give it to Sir Roderick Glossop so he can open a mental institution, thus giving Chuffy enough money to marry Pauline

Bertie’s antagonists include:

• Pauline’s father, J. Washburn Stoker, “who bears a striking resemblance to something out of the book of Revelations”

• Sir Roderick Glossop, “A bald-domed, bushy-browed blighter, ostensibly a nerve specialist, but in reality, as everybody knows, nothing more nor less than a high-priced loony doctor, he has been cropping up in my path for years, always with the most momentous results.” Glossop thinks Bertie is insane and has convinced Stoker likewise, giving us this nice shout-out to the earlier Jeeves stories: “He would have touched, no doubt, on the incident of the cats and the fish in my bedroom; possibly, also, on the episode of the stolen hat and my habit of climbing down water-spouts: winding up, it may be, with a description of the unfortunate affair of the punctured water-bottle at Lady Wickham’s.”

• Sergeant Voules: “This Voules was a bird built rather on the lines of the Albert Hall, round in the middle and not much above. He always looked to me as if Nature had really intended to make two police sergeants and had forgotten to split them up.”

• Brinkley, Bertie’s new valet, an apparent Communist who gets drunk, chases Bertie with a knife, burns down Bertie’s cottage, and gives Glossop a black eye by throwing a potato at him

Bertie’s trials and tribulations include: Being repeatedly harassed by neighborhood policemen, being chased by his knife-wielding valet, being imprisoned on a yacht by J.W. Stoker, disguising himself in blackface and then being unable to remove it, trying to sleep in a variety of uncomfortable locations (a car, a potting shed, a summerhouse), and missing breakfast.

Jeeves disapproves of Bertie’s: banjolele (which meets its end in the fire that destroys Bertie’s cottage, paving the way for Jeeves to return to Bertie’s employment)

First paragraph: “I was a shade perturbed. Nothing to signify, really, but still just a spot concerned. As I sat in the old flat, idly touching the strings of my banjolele, an instrument to which I had become greatly addicted of late, you couldn’t have said that the brow was actually furrowed, and yet, on the other hand, you couldn’t have stated absolutely that it wasn’t. Perhaps the word ‘pensive’ about covers it. It seemed to me that a situation fraught with embarrassing potentialities had arisen.”

Bertie fashion moment: “I confess that it was in somber mood that I assembled the stick, the hat, and the lemon-colored gloves some half-hour later and strode out into the streets of London.” (Runner-up: “Reading from left to right, the contents of the bed consisted of Pauline Stoker in my heliotrope pajamas with the old gold stripe.”)

Slang I’d like to start using: [Of a positive event] “Well, this has certainly put the butter on the spinach.”

Bertie gets no respect:

• “There’s a sort of woolly-headed duckiness about you.”—Pauline Stoker

• “Mr. Wooster, miss, is, perhaps, mentally somewhat negligible, but he has a heart of gold.”—Jeeves

• “Anyway, you’re not the gibbering idiot I thought you at one time, I’m glad to say.”—J.W. Stoker

Best Jeeves moment: “I became aware of somebody coughing softly at my side like a respectful sheep trying to attract the attention of its shepherd, and how can I describe with what thankfulness and astonishment I perceived Jeeves.”

Best bit of description: “His voice died away with a sort of sound not unlike the last utterance of one of those toy ducks you inflate and then let the air out of. His jaw had dropped, and he was staring at the cable as if he had suddenly discovered he was fondling a tarantula. The next moment there proceeded from his lips an observation which even in these lax modern times I should certainly not have considered suitable for mixed company.”

Best bit of dialogue: Chuffy to Pauline: “I’m broke. You’re broke. Let’s rush off and get married.”

My review: The book was fairly enjoyable, but it suffered from a dated plot point involving blackface, which is difficult be amused by nowadays. It was even harder to overlook the frequent, though innocently intended, use of the n-word in reference to a group of minstrel-show performers (they never actually appear in the book, but are frequently mentioned as performing in the area—and rather cutely, Bertie hopes to consult their banjo player for pointers). Thus I've awarded the book just three stars. Still, there’s plenty to like here. The banjolele subplot and the subsequent rift between Jeeves and Bertie is hilarious, as is the scene where Pauline shows up unexpectedly in Bertie’s bed (Bertie was actually intentionally engaged to her in a past story, and I found her character much more sympathetic/appealing than most of the women Bertie gets entangled with).

Had I read it before? I think so, but not repeatedly. A lot of the plot details seemed familiar (Jeeves quitting, the cottage, the yacht, the minstrel show, the banjo), but it seems like I would have remembered the n-word stuff more vividly...unless somehow I read a censored/altered edition before? Or am I just remembering seeing this episode of the (brilliant, BRILLIANT) Stephen Fry/Hugh Laurie TV adaptation (where the banjo was changed to a trombone, as I recall)?

Next up: Right Ho, Jeeves

CHRISTOPHER AND COLUMBUS, PART 2

I flubbed Elizabeth von Arnim Month by only managing to read one book. Luckily, I adored Christopher and Columbus, a 1919 comic-romantic novel about 17-year-old twins, Anna-Rose and Anna-Felicitas von Twinkler, raised in Germany by a German father (now dead) and an English mother. They escape the outbreak of World War I by moving with their mother to England, but she dies soon afterward, leaving them at the mercy of unsympathetic relatives who pack them off to America, which at that point was still neutral in the war. On the sea voyage, they meet a friend and protector, the adorable Mr. Twist, and they all end up in California, where they attempt to open a tea room, struggle against close-mindedness (everyone they encounter assumes the worst of them, disapproving of a man traveling alone with two young women) and anti-German sentiment, and of course find true love. The plot is quite screwball, with the naïve, perky, and eccentric twins getting Mr. Twist into one scrape after another, but the wartime setting and the deep prejudices the Twinklers encounter everywhere they go lend a realistic, poignant aspect to the story. Mostly, though, this book is witty, frothy fun.

All I want to do in times of duress is read quaint books like this one, so apologies to the late and great Mr. Kurt Vonnegut, but his month is being summarily canceled so that I can spend the rest of the year (a) further exploring the works of von Arnim, once I get myself to the downtown L.A. library, which I've just discovered has nearly all of her long-out-of-print books; and (b) tackling the entire Jeeves-and-Bertie oeuvre of P.G. Wodehouse, 11 books in all. Early-twentieth-century British comedies of manners are the sand in which I shall bury my head for the rest of 2008!

I shared the masterful first sentence of Christopher and Columbus last time; let me leave you with a few more of my favorite passages:

• “Anna-Rose, having given her the desired promise not to talk or let Anna-Felicitas talk to strange men, and desiring to collect any available information for her guidance in her new responsible position had asked, ‘But when are men not strange?”
  ‘When you’ve married them,’ said Aunt Alice. ‘After that, of course, you love them.’”

• “The twins having eaten, among other things, a great many meringues, grew weary of sitting with those they hadn’t eaten lying on the dish in front of them reminding them of those they had. They wanted, having done with meringues, to get away from them and forget them. They wanted to go into another room now, where there weren’t any. Anna-Felicitas felt, and told Anna-Rose who was staring listlessly at the leftover meringues, that it was like having committed murder, and being obliged to go on looking at the body long after you were thoroughly tired of it. Anna-Rose agreed, and said that she wished now she hadn’t committed meringues—anyhow so many of them.”

• “Edith…was born to be a mother—one of the satisfactory sort that keeps you warm and doesn’t argue with you. Germans or no Germans the Twinklers were the cutest little things, thought Edith; and she kissed them with the same hunger with which, being now thirty-eight, she was beginning to kiss puppies.”

• “The first thing this cat had done had been to eat the canary, which gave the twins much unacknowledged relief. It was, they thought secretly, quite a good plan to have one’s pets inside each other—it kept them so quiet.”

• “He stooped down as though to examine the cat’s ear. The cat, who didn’t like her ears touched but was prepared to humor him, got out of it by lying down on her back and showing him her beautiful white stomach. She was a black cat, with a particularly beautiful white stomach, and she had discovered that nobody could see it without wanting to stroke it. Whenever she found herself in a situation that threatened to become disagreeable she just lay down and showed her stomach. Human beings in similar predicaments can only show their tact.”

CHRISTOPHER AND COLUMBUS, PART 1

Now, hallelujah, it’s Elizabeth von Arnim Month. I’m such a sucker for gentle, charming, quirky, comic/romantic early-twentieth-century British novels (Nancy Mitford, P.G. Wodehouse, Dodie Smith, Lucky Jim, Cold Comfort Farm) that when I first read The Enchanted April at my father’s recommendation a few years ago, I immediately realized that von Arnim was right up my alley. I quickly read a second von Arnim book, Mr. Skeffington, which I also liked, though it was a little darker. I’ve been meaning to read more von Arnim ever since, and here’s my chance. The problem with her books is that they’re hard to find—most are out of print, so I’m stuck with whatever old tomes my library happens to have. This means no Elizabeth and Her German Garden, perhaps von Arnim’s most famous book before The Enchanted April became a movie in the 1990s, but I do have a shot at its sequel, The Solitary Summer. I’m also contemplating a reread of The Enchanted April. First, however, I picked out Christopher and Columbus, and I’m loving it so far (except for the fact that the summary on the back of my Virago edition begins, “As the Second World War looms…” even though the book was written in 1919 and clearly takes place during WWI!). I think the extraordinary first sentence—a masterpiece of both exposition and punctuation—gives a good sampling of von Arnim’s style:

Their names were really Anna-Rose and Anna-Felicitas; but they decided, as they sat huddled together in a corner of the second-class deck of the American liner St. Luke, and watched the dirty water of the Mersey slipping past and the Liverpool landing-stage disappearing into mist, and felt that it was comfortless and cold, and knew they hadn’t got a father or a mother, and remembered that they were aliens, and realized that in front of them lay a great deal of gray, uneasy, dreadfully wet sea, endless stretches of it, days and days of it, with waves on top of it to make them sick and submarines beneath it to kill them if they could, and knew that they hadn’t the remotest idea, not the very remotest, what was before them when and if they did get across to the other side, and knew that they were refugees, castaways, derelicts, two wretched little Germans who were neither Germans nor really English because they so unfortunately, so complicatedly were both—they decided, looking very calm and determined and sitting very close together beneath the rug their English aunt had given them to put round their miserable alien legs, that what they really were, were Christopher and Columbus, because they were setting out to discover a New World.

RIPLEY UNDER WATER/HUCK FINN

While on vacation, even though it was technically August, I continued Patricia Highsmith Month by reading the final Ripley book, Ripley Under Water, in which Ripley contends with a Who’s-Afraid-of-Virginia-Woolfish American couple who move to his French village and begin harassing him with hints that they know about his past crimes. It was fascinating, even though I wish it spent a bit more time on the psycho couple and a bit less time on Ripley’s gardening. With so many references to the earlier books (especially the first one), it brought things full circle and provided a fitting end to the series.

August was meant to be Mark Twain month, but I’m afraid it got truncated by my lazy, vacationing ways, so all I ended up tackling was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. My dad had read the book to me when I was a kid (along with just about every other Twain work in existence—I remember really liking Twain), and I read it myself at least once during my childhood, but unlike every other American student (including my 17-year-old cousin, who was crankily trudging through it for assigned summer reading at the family reunion—the same edition I had brought, even!), I somehow never had to read it for school, and thus remembered little about the book except the vague outlines of the plot. It was a bit too picaresque for me, and (as every literary critic ever has noted), the ending (where Tom Sawyer randomly shows up to save the day with painfully ridiculous comic shenanigans) is a travesty (in the edition I read, one of the sections of the very-well-written foreword was titled “The Ending, Oh God, the Ending”), but overall the book is great, especially the narrative tone; I fell in love with Huck’s voice. I now think it would be really interesting to read Finn, John Clinch’s novel told from the point of view of Huck’s father. Another one for the TBR list! More and more, I’m thinking that just whittling that down is going to have to be its own Reading Project for next year.

SUMMER READING MEGAPOST

May, Annie Dillard Month, was pretty much a disaster, Project-wise. I figured I’d check out her new novel, The Maytrees, and then reread as much as I could of her old stuff—I remember particularly loving An American Childhood, The Writing Life, and Living By Fiction the first time around. Well, I didn’t like The Maytrees so much—there was some good writing there, but I couldn’t identify with any of the characters and didn’t get drawn into the story. Then I started rereading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which I still liked, but man, that shit is dense. Trying to cram more Annie Dillard into the month would have been like gorging on an entire pan of fudge. So, I thought I’d cleanse my palate with some lighter fare. And that is where I fell off the wagon. In the ensuing two months, I’ve read exactly three more Project-related books and nineteen non-Project ones. Summer is just not made for discipline. Yet because I am relentlessly punitive, I feel compelled to at least mention all those books here. Or, to put it a more positive way, a lot of them were good and I thought maybe you’d like to know about them and read them for yourself.

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, by Mary Roach: I’ve adored each of Mary Roach’s books (and am dying for a book-long collection of all the short pieces she’s published in magazines), but this one might even be better than Stiff. It’s full of astounding information and is so hilarious that I kept pestering A by cracking up over nearly every page, then insisting on reading him all the best bits aloud. If you only read one book that I mention here, READ THIS ONE.

Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer: I feel like such a bad reader saying this, but one of the best ways to inspire me to read a book is to make it into a movie first. That’s not because I enjoy movies more, but you do have to admit they’re usually more accessible than committing oneself to a 400-page tome. I constantly have such a backlog of books on my “to be read” list that many books languish there for years. They hit the bestseller lists, I read favorable reviews, I hear good things about them from friends, and I keep meaning to get around to reading them, but they still need an extra little push to send them to the top of the list. Seeing the movie does that for me. If it’s not a great movie, I assume the book was better, and get curious about how the adaptation went wrong. If the movie made me think, I want to continue thinking about those themes. If I love the movie, I plunge eagerly into the book because I want to live in that world a little longer and more deeply. The movie is just a tantalizing taste that makes me hungry for the main course. So it was with Into the Wild, a fascinating film that immediately made me curious (somewhat morbidly) about the book, which of course had the added appeal of being a true story. I tore through it quickly (this was one of the rare occasions where it probably took no longer to read the book than to watch the movie), then got really paranoid about being stranded in the woods with bears while hiking in Sequoia National Park a few days later. As I’m always in the market for good nonfiction yarns, I resolved to read more Krakauer soon.

Atonement, by Ian McEwan: See above re: movies and books. In this case, I didn’t think the movie was quite Best Picture material (except maybe for the Dunkirk sequence), but it was enough to pique my interest in the book. This was a case where knowing the ending of the story from the film probably spoiled the emotional impact of the book for me, even though the book handles things differently than the movie. I’d heard this novel was a real weepie but I wasn’t moved to tears. Regardless, I really enjoyed it—a beautifully written page-turner. Of course, I have a soft spot for mysteries and comedies of manners set at pre-1950s British country houses…

Farthing and Ha’Penny, by Jo Walton: And that led me to Farthing, a 1940s-British-country-house-set murder mystery I’d heard compared to Dorothy Sayers and Josephine Tey, two of my faves in this genre. The kicker is that this one takes place in an alternate version of history, in which Britain made peace with Nazi Germany after Dunkirk. Society is seemingly normal, happy, and prosperous, but the shadows of fascism and anti-Semitism loom over it. It’s a great idea and fairly well executed, although the books are by no means perfect—the writing is clumsily executed in some places. The political message is didactic at times (it seems as though Walton is working to draw parallels with today’s war on terror), the coinage motif becomes an increasingly forced attempt to tie back to the titles of the books, and it seems like overkill—or at least awfully convenient for the author’s theme—that one character after another turns out to be secretly gay/bisexual (though it’s awesome that the protagonist, a Scotland Yard inspector. is not only gay, but also in a long-term committed relationship with his manservant). I was hooked enough by Farthing to continue on to the sequel, Ha’Penny, which is a London-based political thriller with few country houses in sight, but plenty of dollops of Hamlet to amuse me. I’ll definitely be reading the third book when it comes out in September, and I’d recommend the trilogy as light reading with a creative twist.

Prince Caspian, by C.S. Lewis: Speaking of books turned into movies… I was a big fan of the Narnia books as a kid, but often skipped over Prince Caspian to get to my favorite entry in the series, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; I seem to recall Caspian boring me with all of its battle stuff. So when I saw the movie in May, I had only the faintest of memories to compare it to. I enjoyed the movie, even though it suffered from the same syndrome as its predecessor, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in which the battle scenes were majorly pumped up in an effort to pass it off as some sort of Lord of the Rings, Jr. But when I decided to reread the book shortly afterward (and found it not as boring and battle-filled as I remembered, though still not my favorite Narnia book), I realized the movie wasn’t a true an adaptation as I’d thought. Most egregiously, the film added an entire action sequence (where the Narnians attempt to storm the Telmarine castle) that wasn’t in the book at all. Still, it got me excited for the Dawn Treader movie. Sure, Caspian looked like a male model and had a cheesy accent, but I continue to enjoy the actors playing the Pevensies and loved Eddie Izzard’s Reepicheep (although comparisons to Antonio Banderas’s Puss-in-Boots are probably inevitable).

Henry Huggins and Ramona Quimby, Age 8, by Beverly Cleary: Reread at the end of June, in honor of my impending trip to Portland, where Cleary’s books are set. (It turned out that there wasn’t enough time during our quick visit to fulfill my goal of actually visiting the real-life Klickitat Street in the neighborhood where Cleary lived and the books take place, but I at least got the cheap thrill of seeing the street sign from the window of a moving bus.) I had all kinds of interesting thoughts upon rereading these books, but they’re all gone from my head now. I do remember being struck by a fact I hadn’t noticed as a child, which is that the books were written over an incredibly long timespan, with the Henry Huggins and early Ramona books being products of the 1950s (with all kinds of quaint period details, like Henry buying horse meat at the pet store to feed to Ribsy), while the rest of the Ramona series (including Age 8) was written much later, mostly in the 70s and 80s. This is the kind of thing that slipped right past me as a kid (as well it should—all the books are equally good and timeless), but now I find the contrast interesting. I picked up some more Cleary books at Powell’s, so maybe I’ll revisit them in the near future.

D.A., by Connie Willis: I try to avoid reading books that involve spaceships, but I’ve already read all the major non-spaceship stuff by Connie Willis and was starting to go into withdrawal, so I picked up this slender little young-adult novella. It was cute enough, but too predictable and too short. With its large font and ample white space on each page, I felt as though it was really a short story stretched to book length, and like many short stories, I found it unsatisfying—just when I was starting to get attached to the characters, it was over. Still, it’s better than no Connie Willis.

Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer: Riveting. Afterwards, somewhat obsessed, I watched the IMAX documentary, Everest, that was being filmed when the events of the book occurred. The movie was just OK (IMAX movies are rather slow and ridiculous on a 20-inch TV screen), but the “making of” special feature gave me all the behind-the-scenes glimpses of the disaster I’d desired.

Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov: Finally, a Project book! This was the sole book I managed for Nabokov Month, but it was a doozy—a squirmy, clever, wistful tragicomedy. I almost wish I hadn’t chosen to read the annotated version, though; usually I like some helpful footnotes, but this was a bit much. For every French phrase that it translated or Quilty appearance it pointed out, I think it deadened some of the joy of discovery.

Strangers on a Train, by Patricia Highsmith: First book for Patricia Highsmith Month—my first non-Ripley Highsmith book and her first novel ever. Again, a movie tie-in: I’d seen the Hitchcock movie and was curious how much the book differed. As it turns out, quite a lot—in the film, Guy doesn’t go through with the reciprocal murder, and in the book, he does. This makes the book much more hardcore, but I did tire of chapter after chapter of Guy’s remorse and indecision. The book wasn’t as action-packed as I’d imagined, and I was surprised that (given the persistent gay undertones of the Ripley books and the fact that Highsmith was herself a lesbian) it wasn’t much more homoerotic than the movie. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, considering Hitchcock’s gift for sly innuendo.

The Best American Magazine Writing 2008: I love to read these “Best American” anthologies while traveling. They’re the perfect cure for airplane restlessness; if you get tired of the topic, it will change after a few pages. This kept me happily amused on the plane to Spokane and back from Portland, the best part being Janet Reitman’s enthralling Scientology expose from Rolling Stone.

Change Your Underwear Twice a Week: Lessons From the Golden Age of Classroom Filmstrips, by Danny Gregory: A few weeks ago, as part of the Pasadena Film Festival, P, A, and I attended a late-night showing of an assortment of vintage mental hygiene films on the rooftop of one of the Old Town parking garages. It was a unique location, the audience was small but appreciative, and the films—covering everything from how to be popular to the dangers of drugs—were hilarious (I recognized a few, like “A Date With Your Family,” as MST3K shorts, but most were new to me). I’m fascinated by the hyper-propagandistic tone of 1950s media, as everyone rushed to get society back in order and reinforce desirable behaviors after the chaos and relative freedom of World War II, particularly where women and teenagers were concerned. Watching the films immediately made we want to reread the definitive book on the subject, Ken Smith’s Mental Hygiene, but instead I lent it to P after she batted her eyelashes at me. Next to Mental Hygiene on my bookshelf, I noticed a book I’d bought during the height of my classroom-film obsession but had never read, Change Your Underwear Twice a Week. So I read it. This book is actually about filmstrips, something I hadn’t thought about in years (though I wasn’t alive during their heyday, I’m still old enough to remember being subjected to that series of still pictures with accompanying tape-recorded narration, complete with the beep that told the teacher to advance to the next frame). It wasn’t as in-depth or funny as Mental Hygiene (there’s actually very little text—mostly just introductory paragraphs followed by a series of frames from each featured filmstrip), but it was a breezy, amusing read and a nice tribute to a forgotten medium.

The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan, by Wendy McClure: The book version of an online feature I have loved ever since I first started working in a cubicle, McClure’s hilarious commentary on her collection of disgusting-looking 1970s Weight Watchers recipe cards. I’m a sucker for vintage kitsch, particularly when it comes to hideous food (see James Lileks’ Gallery of Regrettable Food and the book of the same name—which now has a sequel called Gastroanomalies that I just stumbled across at the library yesterday!). After years of looking in vain for this book at my library, I found it for half price at Powell’s in Portland. (We visited two different Powell’s locations on two different days, that is how much we loved it; I noticed that there was even a Powell’s at the airport, which seemed to me like selling out until I realized it had a way better selection than any airport bookstore I’d ever seen, including a whole shelf of used books!) At first I questioned whether I really needed to own it—I mean, it’s certainly not a deep read—but then I remembered that owning things that consistently make you laugh is an important life survival skill.

The Boy Who Followed Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith: Highsmith Month Book #2, and the fourth of five Ripley books. I’ve grown attached enough to Tom Ripley (and his quiet, comfortable life in France that is always being interrupted by dangerous circumstances) that I feel compelled to finish the series, even though I don’t think any of them will be quite as good as the first one. They always feel a bit strange and uneven, and I have to keep reminding myself that it’s because they’re written from the point of view of a character who, although he seems perfectly pleasant most of the time, has no real conscience or emotional affect. Still, this book seemed to feature a kinder, gentler Ripley and occasionally verged on dullness (except for the sequence where he dresses in drag and goes undercover at a gay nightclub in Berlin); I preferred the manipulative Ripley of Ripley’s Game.

Things I Learned About My Dad (In Therapy), edited by Heather Armstrong: Essays on fathers and fatherhood from a number of my favorite bloggers, including Dooce, Mighty Girl, and Que Sera Sera. Yay to my library for finally buying this so I could read it!

When You Are Engulfed in Flames (David Sedaris): I’ve read a number of reviews declaring that this newest collection of essays isn’t as good as Sedaris’s earlier books, but honestly, it’s been so long since I’ve read his other books that I don’t have a clear basis for comparison. Suffice to say that this one kept me fully entertained on the flight home from Indianapolis—in fact, I was too hooked on reading it to do much napping, even though I’d gotten up at 3:45 a.m. to leave for the airport. I didn’t laugh aloud, but I smiled often, and I finished the whole book within a few days, which is a good enough testimonial for me.

The Separation (Christopher Priest): I started reading this right after Ha’Penny, without realizing that it, too, involves an alternate version of history in which the British make peace with Nazi Germany—weird coincidence! This book features the same obsession with twins and doubles that Priest explored in The Prestige, but I didn’t find it nearly as compelling. The concept is fascinating: the story centers on a pair of twins, one an RAF pilot during WWII and the other a pacifist. In one half of the story, the pacifist twin dies, the RAF twin lives, and history proceeds as it did in real life; in the other half, the RAF twin dies, and the pacifist twin lives to help negotiate peace with Germany. These two realities somehow coexist or overlap at various points in the book. It’s intriguing in a mind-twisting postmodernist way, but unfortunately the writing style is on the dry side—the story is told through a series of historical documents (diaries, etc.), and while it’s clear Priest did a lot of research on bombing raids and such, I felt that I had to wade through a swamp of mundane detail just to get to the story (which is why it took me nearly two months, reading off and on, to finish). The twins seem emotionless and never become engaging characters, and to be honest, I wouldn’t have minded a little more explanation of the dual-reality thing. It wasn’t a bad book, but after loving The Prestige so much, I was disappointed.

The Penderwicks (Jeanne Birdsall): Utterly charming—just the type of gentle narrative about smart, eccentric siblings having fun that I used to love reading when I was a kid. I can’t wait to get my hands on the sequel, which by all accounts is even better.

Persepolis and Persepolis 2 (Marjane Satrapi): Yet another case of reading inspired by seeing the movie (if you’re counting, that's the sixth occasion in this post alone). Here, the movie is such a perfect adaptation (as it should be, considering Satrapi did it herself) that reading the books is pretty much like watching an extended-edition DVD (but one where all the deleted scenes are just as good as the ones that made into the film). A quick, fun, yet moving read.

THE LONG GOODBYE

I’m embarrassed to realize that I never even finished blogging about Raymond Chandler Month, which was, er, April. It turned out that The Long Goodbye is my favorite Chandler book. I’ll refrain from sharing all the quotes I jotted down from it, but I do have to tell you about this hilarious passage I think of as the Eyebrow Epic. Marlowe is questioning a guy, and every few paragraphs Chandler just cannot resist offering another aside about the guy’s enormous eyebrows. Each eyebrow description would be amusing enough in itself, but the cumulative effect was enough to make me chortle aloud on the Amtrak to San Diego. I think reproducing them out of context won’t quite capture the full humor, because the timing plays an important part—you finish laughing at one eyebrow gag and start trying to follow the conversation again, and then another eyebrow joke pops up, and then another, and then just when you think “jeez, how many eyebrow references can there be?” Chandler hits you with one more. Still, I can’t resist:

• “He hoisted a couple of eyebrows that would have interested a Fuller Brush man.”
• “He frowned. When a guy has eyebrows like that he can really do you a frown.”
• “He made with the eyebrows again. They fascinated me. Parts of them curled off all by themselves as much as an inch and a half.”
• “He looked sad when he said this. The eyebrows drooped at the outer corners to match his mouth. Give them a little more growth and they would be in his mouth.”
• “He remained dignified. His eyebrows went all the way with him.”
• “He sighed. His eyebrows waved gently, like the antennae of some suspicious insect.”

THE LITTLE SISTER

It was a blast. Not quite as good as The Lady in the Lake; Chandler’s wife was dying of cancer while he wrote it, and also, he was working on screenplays in Hollywood at the time, which definitely seems to have embittered him. Every character in the book is unlikeable (at least The Lady in the Lake had decent-hearted, homespun Sheriff Patton to take the edge off everyone else), some parts are repetitive (all three female characters seem irresistably attracted to Marlowe as soon as they meet him, and I can’t believe I'm saying this, but the sexy banter eventually wears thin), and Marlowe himself seems extra-despairing, possibly in danger of going off the rails. Still, Chandler’s writing continues to prompt a lot of page-dogearing from me—so many good parts! Here are the high points:

• Cat-related metaphors pop up in Chandler with unusual frequency, and I’m glad he seems to find the word “kitten” as endlessly amusing as I do. This one is the best, though: “She probed the inside of her tool kit again and dragged out a red change purse and from that she took a number of bills, all neatly folded and separate. Three fives and five ones. There didn’t seem to be much left. She kind of held the purse so I could see how empty it was. Then she straightened the bills out on the desk and put one on top of the other and pushed them across. Very slowly, very sadly, as if she was drowning a favorite kitten.”

• People are constantly drinking and smoking in Chandler books, providing him with some running action to describe during the dialogue scenes. At least Marlowe calls himself on it occasionally: “I killed my cigarette and got another one out and went through all the slow futile face-saving motions of lighting it, getting rid of the match, blowing smoke off to one side, inhaling deeply as through that scrubby little office was a hilltop overlooking the bouncing ocean—all the tired clichéd mannerisms of my trade.”

• I love it when Marlowe gets all jaded and world-weary: “We went on staring at each other. It didn’t get either of us anywhere. We both had done too much of it in our lives to expect miracles.”

• Chandler’s character descriptions are always priceless: “A fat man in sky-blue pants was closing the door with that beautiful leisure only fat men ever achieve… Above the sky-blue gabardine slacks he wore a two-tone leisure jacket which would have been revolting on a zebra. The neck of his canary-yellow shirt was open wide, which it had to be if his neck was going to get out. He was hatless and his large head was decorated with a reasonable amount of pale salmon-colored hair. His nose had been broken but well set and it hadn’t been a collector’s item in the first place.”

• Good scenery descriptions, too: “The Chateau Bercy was old but made over. It had the sort of lobby that asks for plush and india-rubber plants, but gets glass brick, cornice lighting, three-cornered glass tables, and a general air of having been redecorated by a parolee from a nut hatch. Its color scheme was bile green, linseed-poultice brown, sidewalk gray and monkey-bottom blue. It was as restful as a split lip.”

• Four great sound-related similes:
  1. “Her voice was as cool as boarding-house soup.”
  2. “The room was suddenly full of heavy silence, like a fallen cake.”
  3. “Her voice faded off into a sort of sad whisper, like a mortician asking for a down payment.”
  4. “She had a low lingering voice with a sort of moist caress in it like a damp bath towel.”
  

• Poor Marlowe. Always too smart for the room:
  “‘Out. I don’t know you. I don’t want to know you. And if I did, this wouldn’t be either the day or the hour.’
  ‘Never the time and place and the loved one all together,’ I said.
  ‘What’s that?’ She tried to throw me out with the point of her chin, but even she wasn’t that good.
  ‘Browning. The poet, not the automatic. I feel sure you’d prefer the automatic.’”

THE LADY IN THE LAKE

As much as I loved my two months with Dickens, it’s a joy and a relief to move on to Raymond Chandler. While his voice may be just as distinctive as Dickens’, his descriptions as vivid, and his characters as colorful, it’s such a relief to read his clear, direct, unabashedly twentieth-century prose. While Dickens did encompass violence, corruption, sex, and moral depravity, you had to wait around for it, or dig through several layers of propriety to figure it out, but here it’s out in the open and it’s awesome. I adore Chandler’s writing: muscular, action-packed, hard-boiled but often beautiful, bittersweetly funny, occasionally just bitter, and drowning in alcohol. Not to mention that (a) he writes so intimately about Los Angeles, now that I live here it just adds to the fun (see the joke about Pasadena’s legendary heat in the quotes below); and (b) I’ve got a crush on Philip Marlowe about a mile long (tough, lonely, sad, morally compromised, a standup guy trying to survive a crushingly dirty world…swoon!). I’ve read the early Chandler already—The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, The High Window, and his short stories—so this month I’m tackling the later four books. (How I love authors with manageable oeuvres! Austen, Forster, Fitzgerald—just a handful of novels to read before you become a completist.)

Forget the plots—no, seriously, I’ve already forgotten the plots of all the Chandler books I’ve read. The plots aren’t the point. Famously, when the screenwriters of The Big Sleep called on Chandler to unravel a tangled plot detail for them, even he wasn’t able to do it. The point is the atmosphere, particularly that hard-boiled, wisecracking, simile-ridden private-detective narration that has been so frequently imitated and parodied in a million noirish books and movies since. Here are a few gems from The Lady in the Lake, which I finished yesterday. For maximum effect, imagine all of them being read to you in the voice of Humphrey Bogart:

• “She looked playful and eager, but not quite sure of herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don’t much care about kittens.”

• “His head with the hat off had the indecent look of heads that are seldom without hats.”

• “I got home about two-forty-five and Hollywood was an icebox. Even Pasadena had felt cool.”

• “Grayson was a long stooped yellow-faced man with high shoulders, bristly eyebrows and almost no chin. The upper part of his face meant business. The lower part was just saying goodbye.”

• “I smelled of gin. Not just casually, as if I had taken four or five drinks of a winter morning to get out of bed on, but as if the Pacific Ocean was pure gin and I had nose-dived off the boat deck. The gin was in my hair and eyebrows, on my chin and under my chin. It was on my shirt. I smelled like dead toads.”

• “The clerk snapped at Degarmo’s back like a terrier.
  ‘One moment, please. Whom did you wish to see?’
  Degarmo spun on his heel and looked at me wonderingly. ‘Did he say “whom”?’
  ‘Yeah, but don’t hit him,’ I said. ‘There is such a word.’
  Degarmo licked his lips. ‘I knew there was,’ he said. ‘I often wondered where they kept it.’”
  

• “Degarmo swung his head hard at him. ‘What about this scarf, fatty? Isn’t that evidence?’
  ‘You didn’t fit it in to anything—not that I heard,’ Patton said peacefully. ‘And I ain’t fat either, just well covered.’”

• “‘However hard I try to be nice I always end up with my nose in the dirt and my thumb feeling for somebody’s eye.’”

DAVID COPPERFIELD

I spent all of March working through David Copperfield (including some marathon reading sessions on the plane back and forth to Minnesota), and am ashamed that I didn’t manage to post about it at all. In short, it was really good, even better (literature-wise) than Nicholas Nickleby, but not quite so enjoyable to me personally. NN was formulaic but just more good old-time Victorian-melodrama fun; DC, written in the first person and occasionally in the present tense, with its focus on dreams and memory and shaping one’s own identity, felt shockingly modern, though still definitely chock-full of Dickensy flavor. (And inscrutable Victorian mores—even with all I knew of the period, it was hard for me to swallow it when after Little Em’ly ran off with Steerforth, her friends and family kept suggesting that she was obviously about to become a prostitute at any moment, and it would have been better if she had died than be seduced by him, even though after she leaves Steerforth she reunites with her family and ends up living a long and happy [if never-married] life in Australia.) I was maybe getting a bit overloaded on Dickens by the end of my two-month stint with him—so much so that when my company switched over to Microsoft Office 2007 recently, during a training session I found myself momentarily unable to interpret the phrase “widow and orphan control” in its correct typographical context, my mind clouded by diabolical Dickensian implications of oppression and villainy. Still, I know my thirst for Dickens will return after a short break—in fact, I’d like to try to read all of his novels eventually.

NICHOLAS NICKLEBY, PART 2

I’m still wholeheartedly enjoying Nicholas Nickleby. I’m now more than halfway through (page 484 of 770) and hope to finish by the end of the month. What I love about the book is that it’s basically about the Nicklebys forming a new family after the death of their husband/father, but the new family is an unconventional one, full of assorted pleasant, eccentric people who meet by chance, show each other kindness in the face of adversity, and bond together against the evil people in the world and the alienation of modern life. It’s a very contemporary idea (the “tribe” replacing the nuclear family), and it means Dickens gets to take a break from the grotesque caricatures he’s so deservedly known for and indulge in gentler portraits of a whole bunch of lovable, downright cuddly characters. I’ve grown quite fond of the Kenwigses, the Brothers Cheeryble are so wonderful I want to put them in my pocket and take them home, and John Browdie had me practically cheering aloud in Chapter 39. Here are two particularly adorable bits of description:

• Tim Linkinwater and his old, blind pet blackbird: “Tim would utter a melodious chirrup, and cry ‘Dick’; and Dick, who, for any sign of life he had previously given, might have been a wooden or stuffed representation of a blackbird indifferently executed, would come to the side of the cage in three small jumps, and, thrusting his bill between the bars, turn his sightless head towards his old master—and at that moment, it would be very difficult to determine which of the two was the happier, the bird, or Tim Linkinwater.”

• Miss La Creevey: “Here was one of the advantages of having lived alone so long. the little bustling, active, cheerful creature existed entirely within herself, talked to herself, made a confidant of herself, was as sarcastic as she could be, on people who offended her, by herself; pleased herself, and did no harm. If she indulged in scandal, nobody’s reputation suffered; and if she enjoyed a little bit of revenge, no living soul was one atom the worse. One of the many to whom, from straitened circumstances, a consequent inability to form the associations they would wish, and a disinclination to mix with the society they could obtain, London is as complete a solitude as the plains of Syria, the humble artist had pursued her lonely, but contented way for many years; and, until the peculiar misfortunes of the Nickleby family attracted her attention, had made no friends, though brimful of the friendliest feelings to all mankind. There are many warm hearts in the same solitary guise as poor Miss La Creevey’s.”

All that said, I hate Mrs. Nickleby. I know she’s supposed to be silly comic relief, but she’s even worse than Mrs. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice—she prattles on and on like a moron, not only boring but dangerous besides, because she’s completely oblivious to reality and thus useless to help or protect her children. Ugh. Oh, but I must admit totally love the villain, Ralph Nickleby—I can’t help it, maybe it’s because thanks to the movie I envision him as Christopher Plummer, or maybe it’s just because he’s just the kind of villain I always end up falling for, chillingly dastardly in his selfishness but with just a glimmer of humanity that makes him sad and tragic.

A few other choice bits:

• As a euphemism for pregnancy, Dickens says “in an interesting condition.” I love it.

• After the doctor declares the Kenwigs’ baby “The finest boy I ever saw in all my life,” Dickens notes, “It is a pleasant thing to reflect upon, and furnishes a complete answer to those who content for the gradual degredation of the human species, that every baby born into the world is a finer one than the last.” Hee.

• Best line out of context (and pretty funny in context, too): “You know, there is no language of vegetables which converts a cucumber into a declaration of attachment.”

DICKENSMANIA, PART 2

I finished the Dickens biography. Here are the remaining highlights:

• This is why I love the Victorians: “Torment is not uncommon in the lives of novelists and in the lives of nineteenth-century novelists seems to have been the rule rather than the exception. Thackeray’s wife was irredeemably insane; George Eliot lived out of wedlock with G.H. Lewes, whose wife continued to produce children with other men; Charlotte Bronte watched her sisters die of tuberculosis and her brother perish of alcoholism before herself dying in childbirth at forty-one; George Sand, Nikolai Gogol, Feodor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy all lived lives that to us seem dramatic, strenuous, and even traffic, beset in some cases by debt, in others by illness, madness, loss, grief, political imprisonment.” Good times!

• Scandal! “In October [1857], as a result of a dispute, Dickens told Catherine’s maid to erect a partition in their bedroom so that he could sleep separately from her.” Although I had heard about Dickens’s affair with actress Ellen Ternan before, somehow it had never occurred to me that he was divorced before that started, and the public messiness of it surprised me—Dickens behaved just plain badly, kicking Catherine out to live with her parents while keeping custody of the children (Catherine’s sister, Georgina, who had lived with the Dickenses and cared for the kids for many years, stayed with Charles and continued in her role), trying to alienate them from their mother, and severing contact with any of his friends who helped Catherine. Wild rumors flew, including one that Dickens had slept with Georgina and she was actually the mother of the Dickens children (Dickens refuted this by having poor Georgina examined by a doctor to prove she was a virgin)! Dickens then began living a double life, carrying on an 11-year affair with Ternan so secretively that modern scholars still have no idea what the exact nature of the relationship was—sexual or no? (There are hints that Ternan miscarried one or two children, and even that Dickens was with her when he died, contradicting the official story that he spoke his last words to Georgina, but no one knows for sure.)

• Charles Dickens, action hero! “On June 9, 1865, when Dickens was returning from France with Ellen and Frances Ternan, the train in which they were riding went off the tracks as it was crossing a bridge…and seven first-class carriages went over the bridge into the river below. Dickens’s carriage dangled over the bridge, held by its coupling to the baggage car behind it. Dickens and the Ternans were thrown into the downward corner of the carriage, buit Dickens managed to climb out the window and then procure a key and get the two women out. At this point he saw the chaos below. He took his brandy flask and his top hat and went down among the dead and injured; he filled his top hat with water from the river and went around, succoring where he could. Some people died as he was helping them; others he helped, only to return and discover that they had died…. He persuaded one young man to get himself out from under the wreckage; he helped another confront the death of his bride…. When it was time to be taken away by an evacuation train, he climbed into the dangling carriage and found his manuscript.”

• I like Smiley’s advice: “Newcomers to Dickens can do no better than to begin with a novel—my suggestion is David Copperfield, to be followed by Great Expectations, Dombey and Son, A Tale of Two Cities, and Our Mutual Friend, in that order, light, dark, light, dark, light, a wonderful chiaroscuro of Dickens’s most characteristic and accessible work.” Dombey and Son and Our Mutual Friend had not previously been on my want-to-read list (though I’ll be doing Copperfield next month), but maybe I’ll have to add them.
  

Taking advantage of the holiday weekend, P and I spent all day Sunday watching the 7.5-hour 2005 BBC adaptation of Bleak House, and holy shit, we totally loved it! We hadn’t planned on watching the whole thing in one sitting, but as soon as we started at 11:30 a.m., we were hopelessly hooked, pausing only to walk to Whole Foods for lunch (nice veggie pizza, insanely expensive and delicious chocolates, and an intriguing gingerbread beer) and then Azeen’s Afghani for dinner with the menfolk. I must say, Bleak House makes Nicholas Nickleby seem tame by comparison—sure, NN has some child abuse, several carriage accidents, leering old men, and eventually a suicidal hanging, but it can hardly compete with what BH has to offer: A secret illegitimate child! (OK, technically NN has that.) Consumption! (Er, NN has that too.) Pneumonia! Opium (addiction and overdose)! Smallpox (with scarring)! A dwarf! A murder mystery (and one of the earliest detective characters in fiction)! A legal battle! Three different men vying for the hand of one woman! A homicidal Frenchwoman! And, of course, spontaneous human combustion! Awesome. It’ll definitely be the next Dickens novel I read (after this year’s Project is over).

NICHOLAS NICKLEBY, PART 1

Having chosen Nicholas Nickleby as my February read, I put the Penguin edition on hold at the library, and when I received it I was disappointed to see that it was the movie tie-in edition (always more embarrassing to carry around, plus it warps my vision of the characters, so that Wackford Squeers is always Jim Broadbent and Nicholas is that cute British guy from Undeclared, which I guess is not too much of a problem now that I think about it). Instead of being written by a Dickens scholar, the introduction was by Douglas McGrath, the screenwriter/director of the film. Luckily, McGrath is a smart, nimble writer who charmingly details the agonizing process of distilling such a rich novel into a short screenplay: “Most readers begin a new chapter with the hope that it will have something interesting in it. I often kicked off a new chapter with the hope that it contained something boring I could remove.” In doing so, he sums up the themes of the book more clearly than many literary critics would be capable of.

McGrath says (brilliantly, I think), “Given the astonishing fact that Dickens wrote Pickwick and Twist simultaneously, Nicholas Nickleby is their love child: it merges the wandering, comic qualities of the first with the gothic social vision of the second.” Honestly, I was a little worried about that “wandering” bit. Combined with the description on the back of the book, it made me downright twitchy: “Nicholas Nickleby’s loose, haphazard progress harks back to the picaresque novels of the eighteenth century.” Ack, the P-word! Give me something described as picaresque, and nine times out of ten I’ll hate it. Sure, I found Candide, Don Quixote, and Moll Flanders intermittently amusing, at least conceptually, but in practice they left me cold. And bored. I like a good plot, and it’s the Victorian-melodrama aspect of Dickens that appeals to me.

Luckily, so far I’m liking NN. The only time the P-word sprung to mind was in Chapter 6, when the coach crashes on the way to Yorkshire, and the passengers engage in a little impromptu storytelling session, a la The Canterbury Tales. We are treated to two random stories that are completely irrelevant to the story and drag on for about 15 pages. The endnotes observe that “Dickens seems to have inserted this…as a means of filling out the second number,” or installment, of NN. McGrath more charitably calls them “the literary equivalent of bonus tracks.” I skimmed them. As long as it doesn’t happen again, I’m OK.

NN high points so far:

• Dickens’s famously concise summary in Chapter 1 of how Nicholas’s father was financially ruined by poor investments: “A mania prevailed, a bubble burst, four stockbrokers took villa residences in Florence, four hundred nobodies were ruined.”

• Chapter 2, which hilariously brings to mind the 1990s dot-com boom (new, ludicrously named companies springing up every day, making sweeping claims to lure stockholders and boost share prices until the bubble bursts) and takes full advantage of the comic potential of the word “muffin” while describing the joint-stock meeting of the United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual Delivery Company:
  
  “The honourable gentleman made a speech which drew tears from the eyes of the ladies, and awakened the liveliest emotions in every individual present. He had visited the homes of the poor in the various districts of London, and had found them destitute of the slightest vestige of a muffin…. He had found that among muffin sellers there existed drunkenness, debauchery, and profligacy…. He had found the same vices among the poorer class of people who ought to be muffin consumers, and this he attributed to the despair engendered by their being placed beyond the reach of that nutritious article, which drove them to seek a false stimulant in intoxicating liquors.”
  
  Then an Irishman gets up “with such a speech as only an Irish member can make, breathing the true soul and spirit of poetry, and poured forth with such fervour, that it made one warm to look at him; in the course whereof he told them how he would demand the extension of that great boon to his native country; how he would claim for her equal rights in the muffin laws as in all other laws; and how he yet hoped to see the day when crumpets should be toasted in her lowly cabins, and muffin bells should ring in her rich green valleys.”

• The delightful description of Squeers in Chapter 4 (even if, as the endnotes tell me, Dickens did crib it from Sheridan): “He had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs in favor of two.”

• Dickens’s description of the poor, neglected students of Dotheboys Hall in Chapter 8 is a tour de force: “Pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures, children with the countenances of old men, deformities with irons upon their limbs, boys of stunted growth, and others whose long, meagre legs would hardly bear their stooping bodies . . . there were the bleared eye, the hare-lip, the crooked foot, and every ugliness or distortion that told of unnatural aversion conceived by parents for their offspring, or of young lives which, from the earliest dawn of infancy, had been one horrible endurance of cruelty and neglect. There were little faces which should have been handsome, darkened with the scowl of sullen dogged suffering; there was childhood with the light of its eye quenched, its beauty gone, and its helplessness alone remaining; there were vicious-faced boys brooding, with leaden eyes, like malefactors in a jail; and there were young creatures on whom the sins of their frail parents had descended, weeping even for the mercenary nurses they had known, and lonesome even in their loneliness. With every kindly sympathy and affection blasted in its birth, with every young and healthy feeling flogged and starved down, with every revengeful passion that can fester in swollen hearts, eating its evil way to their core in silence, what an incipient Hell was breeding there!”
  
  Wow.

DICKENSMANIA!

Month of Chabon is over, and I consider it a great success. I read four great books—three new to me, and one reconfirmed as a favorite. I would have liked to revisit Wonder Boys (or at least rewatch the movie), but now I’ve got bigger fish to fry. 700-page-long fish, to be exact.

A brief history of my relationship with Dickens: My dad loves Dickens. He reads a Dickens novel every year, in order of publication. He’s being doing this as long as I can remember, and he’s restarting the cycle anew with The Pickwick Papers this year, so I figure he’s read each of the 14 novels at least two or three times, if not more. When I was a kid, he read me A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities, The Old Curiosity Shop, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, and The Pickwick Papers, and I adored them. (This amazes me a little now, because I picked up Pickwick a couple of years ago and could barely get through the first few chapters. That puppy is loooong and meandering. I figured Dad must have skipped some stuff to keep his 10-year-old audience interested, but he swears he read it to me the whole way through, every single word. I would be curious to know how long it took to read that entire book aloud, in 30-minute nightly increments.) I revisited Oliver Twist and Great Expectations a couple of times for assignments in high school and college, and added Barnaby Rudge and Hard Times to my repertoire during my English-major years, and each time I was reminded how much I enjoy reading Dickens (in contrast to my classmates, some of whom were less than thrilled about it). But I’ve never read Dickens for pleasure, under my own steam, until now.

I thought I’d kick things off by reading a Dickens biography to put things in context. I sought out the definitive bios, only to realize that—duh!—they’re thousands of pages long. Plan B: Jane Smiley’s 200-page Charles Dickens, part of the Penguin Lives series. While it’s got less trivia than I’d like (the only factoid I’ve picked up so far is that Dickens’s recreational daily strolls sometimes clocked in at 20 to 30 miles), it also dispenses with all the grindingly dull detail (I’ve read way too many bios that begin by profiling the subject’s parents, grandparents, or even more distant ancestors for 20 pages or more) and cuts right to what I need: a decent overview of Dickens’s life, organized more thematically than strictly chronologically, with emphasis on analyzing the novels. Smiley is affectionate without being overly reverent—she seems as annoyed as I am with the fact that Dickens seemed to blame his wife for their enormous quantity of children and her subsequent health problems and recurrent postpartum depression. Still, Smiley manages to be fair and insightful to both sides, succinctly summing up the troubled marriage as follows:

Victorians as a group believed in effort and in making one’s way by dint of personal force, especially masculine personal force. But even his fellow Victorians were exhausted by Dickens’s restless productivity. [To Dickens] a good life is a busy one; an idle life is boring and morally suspect. Rest is something ever sought, never found, only occasionally imposed by illness. If every marriage is a belief system, and if one spouse usually dictates the terms of the belief system, then the evidence was growing stronger that Catherine was unable to maintain her part in the Dickens family mythology. The reserves of energy that Charles could call upon at will, even when ill, were not available to Catherine, But it must be said that sustaining ten pregnancies and several miscarriages in sixteen years, along with many house movings, social engagements, and long trips, is a task that few modern women would even consider, much less be able to manage.”

For the novel itself, I’ve chosen Nicholas Nickleby as my assignment for February. About all I knew about the book before I started was that (1) It’s so long and dense that the Royal Shakespeare Company famously adapted it into a stage play lasting nine hours, and (2) I really enjoyed the 130-minute 2003 movie. I picked it because I was curious about all the stuff that must have been cut from the book to make the movie, and also because Smiley describes it as the “first wide-ranging ‘Dickensian’ novel,” “a lively and entertaining reading experience,” “ebullient,” “bright,” and “high-spirited.” Sounds like fun, right? Stay tuned for my thoughts on the first 150 pages later today.

BOOKS TO FILM: THE GOLDEN COMPASS AND MANSFIELD PARK

The Golden Compass finally moved to the cheap theater (now just $3, yay!), so A and I went to see it. Not having read the books, he thought it was OK, but I kept writhing and smacking my forehead so much I think he wanted to smother me with his coat. It wasn’t a total loss—everything looked just as I’d envisioned it while reading, and the casting was brilliant. Nicole Kidman, Sam Elliott, and the girl who played Lyra were especially perfect, and you could play “Spot the famous British actor” throughout—Derek Jacobi! Christopher Lee! The voice of Ian McKellen! I thought Freddie Highmore was too squeaky as Pan’s voice, but at least we got Kathy Bates for Hester. I’m not usually a fan of CGI talking animals, but the daemons and armored bears were very well rendered. The plot, however, was a mess—hamhanded and dumbed down. I’d been prepared for the dilution of the (anti)religious themes, but not for the watering-down of everything else. Small examples: in the movie Iorek Byrnison is exiled from Svalbard for losing a fight with another bear, rather than for killing another bear in a fight. (Why? Were the filmmakers afraid of making him too scary or unsympathetic?) And he doesn’t eat Iofur Raknison’s heart after killing him, although at least they left in the jaw-ripping-off part (ew! and awesome!). One of the things I loved most about the book is that nothing is overly explained; you experience and learn things from Lyra’s point of view over time. In the movie, there was lots of very clumsy exposition, some of it in the form of Old Evil British Guys Talking, which was not only annoyingly non-Lyra-POV, but boring for kids as well. And although I knew going in that the downer ending of the book was going to be saved for the next movie (which I think is perfectly fair—the Lord of the Rings movies did it effectively enough), now that I know there’s not likely to be a sequel (since The Golden Compass wasn’t a hit), I wish they’d just gone for it. The film’s ending was dreadfully bland and toothless, especially if you’ve read the books. Overall, it seemed like the filmmakers were afraid of their material—I think they wanted to adapt the book so they could show a lot of cool computer-generated animals, and then they realized they’d have to wince and duck all the inconvenient story details. (Still, I reread The Subtle Knife the next day, remembered I like it even more than the first book, and found myself totally yearning for a second movie—for one thing, Sam Elliott got totally robbed of Lee Scoresby’s big scene!)

And given my Mansfield Park angst last year, of course I had to watch the new PBS adaptation. Surprisingly, I liked it. It made me appreciate the story more. It was snappy and streamlined (though I was sorry to get the Portsmouth part get cut), and I think the morality-play aspects were easier to watch than to read. Body language and tone of voice goes a long way in conveying why certain people in the book are supposed to be good and others are supposed to be “bad” (but seem way more fun than the goodniks—I’m looking at you, Crawfords). I really enjoyed the portion of the film after Mary and Henry show up and all the young people start flirting and running amuck—I even laughed aloud a couple of times. Also, I loved Pug. However: While I figured they’d have to change Fanny’s personality to make her more likable and less passive, did she have to run all the time? In the book she’s practically an invalid and it’s a big deal when she has to walk a quarter-mile, and in the movie she’s manically racing all over the place, romping with children, dancing, and playing badminton, for pete’s sake. A slight adjustment to her character would be fine—no need to bend over backwards and make her a freakin’ tomboy. Also, I know Mansfield Park isn’t the most romantic of Austen novels, but the adaptation went a bit overboard to rectify that at the end, with about 10 minutes of longing glances over the breakfast table, gooey confessions of love, kissyface, and wedding frolicking. It didn’t work for me…although maybe that’s because A (who tuned in halfway through) was so repulsed: “But…they’re cousins! They were raised as brother and sister!” Yeah, no matter how cute and nice you make Edmund and however much you amp up the romance, that’s a hard detail to overcome.

By the way, is anyone else cranky about the new Masterpiece Theater format? Television Without Pity’s Blogfile nails it in the fittingly titled entry “Goddammit, PBS!”:

Oh, sorry, it’s Masterpiece now, isn't it? What—the second word was too much to handle? We live in such an impatient blog-ridden society that no one can manage to wait around for a two-word title? Wait, I know—it was the use of “Theatre” and not the Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, and E.M. Forster that made the series seem too intellectual for all those PBS-watching theatre-phobes. Like Masterpiece alone is so much better. It’s just hanging out there all cold and unfinished. “Masterpiece” what? Society? Barbecue Sauce?