Now in November: A Chat

DreadfulPenny: SO MY NEW FAVORITE BOOK OMG?!?!?

Diablevert: OMG indeed. I defer to you to start us off, partly b/c I don’t think I can stop you. But at some point I will have to tell you about my flags.

DreadfulPenny: I will now gush like a tweener over the Team Edward/Jacob divide.

Diablevert: Guh-hunh

DreadfulPenny: … but for me, this was all about the immediacy of the narrator and the style. I just think it was full of goddamn gorgeous writing, like, I was writing bits of it down in a notebook throughout.

Diablevert: Really? Not sarcastically really, but like, really, which bits? I’d be curious.

DreadfulPenny: Still have the book? The first paragraph at the start of part II, for example. Little phrases like “a wry perfection in the slow murder of all things” just work for me. Or the scene on the next page where Merle is putting up the cherries…

Diablevert: Okay. So this is where we may have to take up battle stations. Because while I do agree – and your support for this book helped me to see – that while on a sentence level some of these are arresting, page after page after page of it became just a wee bit de trop.

DreadfulPenny: Now I will freely concede that this kind of thing is not to the taste of all readers… but it hit my Jane Eyre/belle-laide/Marilynne Robinson sweet spot in lines like “There must be some reason why I was made quiet, and homely and slow and then given this stone of love to mumble.” sigh, crushes book to chest because IT SO GETS ME.

I thought it was the perfect length for this kind of writing. And I love that there’s no real resolution or ending…. because life is miserable and then you die! Isn’t it beautiful? * spins around like a long-haired girl in a maxipad commercial *

Diablevert: See, that is like….”stone of love to mumble” is quite, quite lovely…but it doesn’t make we want to crush the book to my chest. I just find my chest crushed. Because….you are fucked, and you’re not wrong, and there ain’t much you can do, but if it was me I would have run the motherfuck away, and clearly you’re not going to do that, and instead I just get to stand by holding your hand while you get sucked into the mire.

This book reminds me of Atryu’s death scene, basically. But I’m older now so I can defensively close myself off to the gutwrenching, if I want, and with this I kind of do want.

DreadfulPenny: ARTAX! YOU’RE SINKING! I was gonna call your nerd street cred into question for a minute there.

Diablevert: Fight against the sadness, Artax!

DreadfulPenny: It’s funny… I never felt depressed by this book. What happens in it is bleak and awful, and I understand that academically, but I really wasn’t saddened by it…

Diablevert: I dunno, maybe that’s part of the book, too – the dominant emotion was this overwhelming resignation. The character I had the most sympathy for was Kerrin, that mad, bad bitch, because at least she still got mad at stuff.

DreadfulPenny: I also keep trying to think about this book coming out in 1934, in the height of the Depression, and how beautifully it transforms that sadness in a clearheaded, unsentimental way.

Diablevert: Seriously, though — after our first chat I was like, as I go through this I should flag some of the stuff so I better can illustrate the kinds of things I mean, where I felt the desolation was just grinding me down, and I had four flags in seven pages and I was like, f-it, I’m-a end up flagging the whole book.

DreadfulPenny: I think it’s mostly lyrical, not sentimental…. I mean, I feel like I’d rather read this book about miserable rural poverty than Lamb any day, and rather celebrate it as literature.

Diablevert: I agree with you that it’s clearheaded and unsentimental – or at least, unsentimental in the usual way we mean that word, not given to gilded nostalgia, to the elevation of the sweet, the kind. But in other ways, the only thing it is concerned with is sentiment. I’m still not sure where they live. Every single thing is about how the main character feels about the situation, to the point where oftentimes the actual situation is kind of fuzzily described.

DreadfulPenny: You’re going to hate The Road when we get to it, then.

Diablevert: Re: The Road: Possibly, I’ve only tried to read Cormac McCarthy once. Once.

DreadfulPenny: I’ve read the Border Trilogy, No Country for Old Men, and The Road. While I like most of that, The Road made me want to cry in my pillow fort for days and days.

Diablevert: Oh, goody goody gumdrops.

DreadfulPenny: Yeah, you’re right about the sentimentality too. Although as it nears the end and things start to go to shit for everyone and the taxman shows up, I feel like you get a better idea of where they are in the economic scheme of things. Like, not eating their shoe leather starving, but still damn hungry.

Diablevert: Sigh. I feel like I’m coming off here like a soft bastard, which I find rather appalling. I’d like to think I can take the bad with the good.

DreadfulPenny: And I don’t know why I like it so much (except I really do feel that, on the sentence level, it’s the best book we’ve read since Bridge of San Luis Rey). I mean, I’m gonna make the ultimate confession here: I might actually buy a copy.

Diablevert: Go for it. I know that’s big, coming from you.

DreadfulPenny: It’s true.

Diablevert: I dunno – see, one of the things I like about Wilder is his insightfulness. Johnson share that to a large degree – Grant is a very finely drawn character – but for me I kind of felt like the character’s self-obsession got in the way sometimes. Take Kerrin: Like, until the very end I wasn’t quite sure if there was something actually wrong with her, or if she just couldn’t stand being in that house, which had a lot of sympathy for.

DreadfulPenny: Yeah, I couldn’t quite figure out what specifically was eating Kerrin besides an excess of spleen, but that contributed to the unease and suspense of the thing for me… helping to move a long what is a slight plot using just tone and foreshadowing.

Diablevert: Which has nothing to do with the beauty of her sentences, now that I think about it.

DreadfulPenny: Well, a book that’s just full of beautiful sentences can be super tedious… but that’s where I thought the length worked to its advantage. Also, I’m blown away by how adeptly Johnson can describe the feeling of debt. Like, the weight and heft of it, like a beast with a burden. I still can’t think of a single book I’ve ever read that does this so well, or even attempts it so often.

Diablevert: But to return to Kerrin — Sorry I’m so tangential — you knew something had to happen there, and it was going to be bad. But it was sometimes hard to tell how bad, or what kind of bad – the ultimate resolution, in which we determine for sure that Kerrin was no-shit crazy, but the only person she ends up harming is herself, is kind of the most ….and this is a merciless word….disappointing. For a minute there, I thought she’d stabbed Grant, and that would have been some crazy-bad-assery to go with her batshit crazy. Or like, taking off with a bunch of money would have been on the less-crazy, more-happy side, but crazy-plus-suicide is just sad.

DreadfulPenny: Well, she did clasp Grant in a sooty embrace and throw a knife at her dad’s head before she did it. She just happened to miss. I mean, she killed the dog in Part 1.

Diablevert: Well, that was her and her Dad. (Poor dog.) But I just wanted her to go out in some kind of blaze, glory, madness, actual fire, whatever.

DreadfulPenny: I get why the narrator thought her madness was selfish though. I could imagine Magret thinking “I’m stuck here with no menfolk or prospects same as you, and I’m too slow to teach school, and you don’t hear me complaining… mostly because you can’t hear my internal monologue, but still.” I mean, I had vague sympathies for Kerrin, but mostly I was just annoyed that she wouldn’t get any work done, and that she was clearly such a creeeepy teacher. Like the governess in Turn of the Screw or something.

Diablevert: Well, this gets back to the whole It’s a Wonderful Life thing again – I have a strong bias towards, what-the-hell-you-only-live-once, seize-the-day-ed-ness, and tend to have more sympathy for the character who longs to break free, even if that is a bit selfish, than the one who knuckles under and does their share without complaint, George Baily, you could’ve been an architect and traveled around the world it would have been awesome, it does suck that that never happened….mutter, mutter

DreadfulPenny: Yeah, then you’re totally not going to love a book that ecstatically states: “Make me content to live on the outside of life. God make me love the rind!” But I generally like reading about recluses and compulsive hoarders and nuns under vows of silence, so am predisposed to like this book. I wouldn’t want to live like that, but I find it utterly fascinating to read about.

Diablevert: I should just curl up with my copy of Auntie Mame and suck my thumb.

DreadfulPenny: Or go out on a tear and get smashed in Paris! I’ll be bounded in my nutshell.

Diablevert: It’s funny because what with your busting out of upstate to come to the Big City and seek your fortune – and I don’t think you could be winkled out of it now with a long needle – I’d say at first blush you’re more of a seize the dayist yourself.

DreadfulPenny: Yeah, my fortune as a school librarian. Ho, the glamorous life.

Diablevert: Two impulses at war within!

DreadfulPenny: No, I totally get that, and it’s really weird for a happily married person to be swept up in, and so strongly identify with, such a lonely sad loveless story… but, like I mentioned before, I’m a Jane Eyre girl through and through.

Diablevert: See, Jane’s a seizer, too, though – when ol’ St. What’s-his-face wants to yolk her to his missionary work she takes a dive for the moors.

DreadfulPenny: That’s true… but she also responds to “mustard-seed” and “fearful hag” as terms of endearment. Self-loathing, much?

But I was exceedingly glad to be slightly starry-eyed over any Pulitzer. At all.We’re probably done talking about it… it made you sad, it made me rapturous, and that’s that until we’re face to face and I insist on reading large swaths of it to you until you throttle me.

Diablevert: Dude. Shall I close?

DreadfulPenny: After you…

Diablevert: “Day after day it went on. Hot wind, hot sun, hot nights and days, drying ponds and rivers, slowly, carefully killing whatever dared to thrust up a green leaf or shoot. Only the willows lived. There were times when I wanted to crumple up like an ash, or scream. It was unbearable, I tell you! Death in the hot wind, in the blazing sunlight and dry air. The fields scorched white.”

….and scene. Not my excalmation point, I wish to point out.

DreadfulPenny: Touche. But how about this?

“But there is the need and the desire left, and out of these hills they may come again. I cannot believe this is the end. Nor can I believe that death is more than the blindness of those living. And if this is only the consolation of a heart in its necessity, or that easy faith born of despair, it does not matter…since it gives us courage somehow to face the mornings. Which is as much as the heart can ask at times.”

Diablevert: I would quote duel with you all night and I want you to know that.

DreadfulPenny: It was actually much more fun to disagree and have someone love the book than both experience the great “meh”… I hope it happens again!