by Robertson Davies

Fifth Business (1970)
The Manticore (1972)
World of Wonders (1975)

Fifth Business
Taking a break between the heftier tasks of my Western Canon reading with something pleasant that goes down smooth. This presented itself for entirely circumstantial reasons – it had just been given to Beth as a gift and was on the kitchen table – but turned out to be perfect.

I had read nothing by Davies and had heard his name but not these titles, even though Fifth Business, I now see, is fairly prominent. I won’t say anything about what these books are about because my great delight in reading them has been to have absolutely no idea what I’m reading, and I wish the same to you.

Reading a lot of chew-before-swallowing dense stuff, I had forgotten what it was like to drink a tall cool glass of sheer storytelling. I don’t think this could have been more refreshing. And that’s not to say it’s frivolous; there’s an intelligence behind it – or rather in it, present on the surface – that keeps it feeling wholesome and worthy. A tall cool glass of fresh tomato juice. Or something Canadian that’s more apropos. My attention was kept wholly, but not because it was tied up in contemplating the mild symbolical underworld of the book – simply because it was being told a story, and with great ease. The book is a page-turner despite having no clear goal and seeming essentially like an improvisation. In fact it was exactly that improvisatory, story-spinner quality that drew me onward; the rhythmical alternation of exposition with development drove continuously like a skipping stone. It really hardly mattered what the book was about; stories are themselves interesting. This is, not coincidentally, the meaning of the book itself, more or less: life is a story, and stories are marvelous. Fifth Business is not the only book I’ve read with that spirit and message, but it was the book where the combined skill and attitude of the author seemed most appropriate to conveying it. In a very mild, good-natured, Canadian way.

I’ve used the word “mild” a couple times here, but “congenial” is the word that kept coming to mind while I was reading. Davies is professorial in the coziest way; the text is as thoughtful as intelligent dinner-table conversation, and underneath it are some things perhaps a bit more thoughtful yet, but we are only exposed to that layer in deft, shallow swoops. This feels like both a form of mystery and a form of, for want of a better word, good manners.

The Manticore
Can’t be as wholeheartedly enthusiastic about this one, even though I did basically enjoy it. Our eccentric professor author indulges at greater length his own particular blend of theological who’s-to-say and imprecise glancing back and forth from real life to myth, under the all-too-explicitly-stated auspices of Jungian analysis. The whole thing careens unnervingly toward pedantic flakiness several times and there are serious lapses in “show-don’t-tell.” Furthermore the elegant relationship between form and content in the previous book now becomes a liability – it’s remarkably easy to point out the ways that a man’s real life reveals eternal mythic themes when that man is in a book that you are writing. Also, while the first book packaged its endless stream of narrative into a fairly minimal bookend device, this one keeps cheerfully jumping in and out of its devices as though it’s perfectly likely that someone might, if prompted, actually speak or write a long, long, long book-like narrative. That might be part of the point but I wish it hadn’t been. Still and all, the strengths of the previous book are all here, in company with the new weaknesses, and much of it is still excellently readable. I was even willing to humor the man his Jungian talk, for the most part, so long as he kept it lively. Which he didn’t always.

This is a sequel in the Back to the Future Part II vein; it riffs on the preceding book by running in almost-but-not-quite parallel to its events. That in itself is fun, and is a satisfying extension of the best aspects of the first book – I coasted through the lesser passages on the momentum of my satisfaction with the overall conception.

World of Wonders
Even the overall conception falters a few times on the way to the finish line. The idea that a mystery from the first book is left hanging(ish) through to the end of the third seems more like a nagging back-burner responsibility for the author rather than any kind of natural motivating force. This book is also a Back to the Future Part II on the first book (rather than a Back to the Future Part III), even more directly so, and it mostly sidesteps the second one. All three main narratives are in parallel. This time the telling is staged sort of as an after-party, where the characters, who no longer seem to have any capacity to be involved in real conflict, chat it up amiably about the past. The flimsy pretexts for the storytelling are again subjected to too much attention, and the whole thing feels phonified. A bit like Back to the Future Part II. And again, maybe that’s part of the point. Anyway, the storytelling itself that makes up the bulk of the book is still delightful as ever. The Dickensian depictions of various antiquated forms of showbiz (I’m not really giving anything away there – look at the covers!) are really enthralling. Then at the end an unimpressive loose-end-tying ceremony is tacked on, at which point I was perfectly ready to go home.

But my having happily read all 820 pages in 11 days – 11 busy days – has to be taken as some kind of recommendation.

I suspect I will begin to forget the entire contents rather quickly now. Fun while they lasted though. I’ll certainly remember the tone and flavor of it – or the flavor of the reading experience, really, which was my real pleasure here, above and beyond the book. After some time has passed I’ll be pleased to pick up another by Robertson Davies, who seems like he was a right character, with an excellent flair for drama and storytelling, if not necessarily novels per se.

But not right now. Back to the Western Canon. By the way, this is being reported entirely out of order. I actually read The Deptford Trilogy this month, whereas I’m many months (I think four books?) behind in posting about the Western Canon reading. Should get around to it soon.

Before I go, let’s take an exhaustive look at the covers. That sounds fun, right?

First editions, released several years apart. World of Wonders seems to have had a different cover in the US, seen at right. The orange lettering seems to be a running theme even though these are otherwise unrelated. Fifth Business is certainly unattractive; I don’t mind the concept, vague as it is, but couldn’t it have been made to look at all good? The Manticore has a “gimme” cover design built in – this image is described in the text, functions metaphorically, and explains the title. So of course pretty much every edition actually shows a manticore on the cover. The green light is a little unnecessarily creepy. The Canadian World of Wonders, with its mechanical dove (? or is it a dove made out of pocket-knives?), is superficially surrealist in a way that has more to do with 1975 than with the book. Art by David Craig. The US edition is a dull attempt at period, which makes sense enough for the content but would probably make the book feel more boring than it is. At least to me. The face in the middle is unhelpful. Realistic character faces are generally much too leading; if they’re there, we’re going to believe in them. If that’s what’s intended, I’m all for it, but it’s rarely what’s intended. Outside children’s books.

An early Signet edition. As Beth said, the Signets of that era all look the same, and having read the book I can tell you that this cover is laughable. Not only is it cliche, but it runs almost directly against the spirit of the story; in fact the story rather specifically calls this sort of hero-centrism into question. This particular formula lives on in movie posters of the Drew Struzan variety, or at least it did well into the 90s. On the other hand the cliche allows the cover to be easily ignored; reading a Signet is psychologically as close as possible to reading a stripped book.

The first matching set, paperbacks from the mid-70s. At right is a slipcase box in which they could be bought together. Each has one clear iconic image, more decorative than illustrative, and heavy emphasis on the type design. I like all of that. Very 70s choices in the typefaces but I enjoy them and don’t think they detract at all. Also, it’s kind of cool that they chose to have the styles of the three images be different from one another.

The one on the right I know is the 70s UK paperback, published by W.H. Allen; I’m not sure when this Manticore is from so I’m sticking it here. The Manticore is badly laid out, has bad color design, and an ugly, off-putting illustration. World of Wonders is really crazy – that sculpted head, if I understand what I’m seeing, is an object that figures in Fifth Business and isn’t really mentioned in World of Wonders, and over its shoulder seems to be a little manticore face, also not mentioned in World of Wonders. I can’t tell what that is over the other shoulder. Anyway, I don’t think this illustrator read the book. Furthermore, this cover is totally freaky and looks like it’s going to be about the occult, or lost treasure, or ideally both.

These are, I believe, W.H. Allen hardcover editions from the late 70s. These are much too trippy/Dali for almost any book that isn’t extreme fantasy, and they give very much the wrong impression. The artist seems to have chosen the skeleton, which if I recall is just a dream image mentioned in passing, because it suited his style rather than because it suited the cover. Can’t find the Fifth Business equivalent.

Circa 1980. These seem to have inherited some details from the prior Penguin set, but of course the overall effect is very very different. These have not dated well, which is not to say they’re not still appealing in their own way; but they would be a serious distraction from the text, putting a very particular “period” slant on it. I was actually struck by how undated the books felt in the reading; this kind of Yellow Submarine meets Pac-Man thing would sour that. Also – even at the time, I imagine – these play up the childish, fanciful side of things a bit too much. The books aren’t as candy-like as this.

1983 or so they got these new covers by Anne “Bascove” Bascove, whose style is very familiar, though I’m not sure whether I’ve actually been seeing her work for years, or whether she’s just one of a school of illustrators that I blend together. Or whether she is the original and has spawned a school of imitators. Anyway, someone at Penguin seems to have felt that she had nailed the Robertson Davies vibe, because she did the first edition covers for his subsequent books, and for the reissues of pretty much his entire output. I tend to agree; the balance between children’s-book mystery and dignity (and what I might call “business casual” sensuality – you know, like in coffee shops and Barnes & Noble) is a fine match for Davies’ style. The designs are also sensitive to the content; they are intelligent – the surreal touches correspond to the meanings of the books, rather than to details plucked for their design value – and generous to the reader in that they neither give away anything nor pose real riddles. They are bold as designs and images, and aesthetically astute, and yet extremely soft-spoken in terms of pre-emptive meaning. The more I think about it the more impressed I am with what these accomplish.

Redesigns. I can’t figure out how these relate chronologically to the versions above; can’t find the World of Wonders equivalent, either. These look nice enough but I think the previous editions are better overall; the type design on the author’s name isn’t actually ugly here but it takes up more attention than it’s worth, as do the borders. The gray editions were a bit more to the point, to my eye. These read as “deluxe” editions of some kind, and maybe that’s what they are.

Redo of the Bascove covers circa 1992, with a new illustration for the combined edition. I know I shouldn’t like these as much, what with the addition of press quotes and the pointless boxes, but circa 1992 was a formative time for me in terms of book-browsing, book-purchasing, and book-cover-noticing, and these are very solidly of that time, design-wise, so I feel comfortable with them. They look the way that I expect books to look, still.

Mid-90s editions, from Australia I think, maybe UK too. As you can sort of see, these are designed to fit together somewhat, a secret surprise that I generally enjoy although in this case it doesn’t look like it would yield that much satisfaction. The conception here, of whimsical primitivistic iconographic “cuttings” at play in abstract art space, is standard fare for, among other soulful things, CDs sold at Starbucks, and generally annoys me. Unfortunately I have to concede that it’s more than appropriate here, and perhaps encapsulates everything I found tiresome in the latter two volumes. Had it had this cover maybe I wouldn’t even have liked the first volume as much. A little too conceptually exposed, just like the books.

The combined edition at right isn’t part of this set but it’s more or less contemporary with it. I don’t mind that cover at all; I think a little marble and quasi-heraldic pomp is suitably noncomittal (it goes without saying that 800 pages deserves pomp) and a good enough backdrop for the book itself, which is earthy enough to stand out against it but fantastical enough to sympathize with it.

Here are a few stand-alone editions of Fifth Business. The first one here (and its direct descendant in the middle, soon superceded by a new original painting, see below) is the only example in this whole survey of the pre-existing-painting school of book cover design. I love original book cover illustrations and designs, so I feel odd saying this, but I find stock art covers, when they’re well-chosen, to be extremely effective. Since one knows that the image is not an intentional illustration of the book, one is more able to carry its aesthetic world over to the book as much or as little as one chooses; it prettifies and adds to the book as a cover should without inserting its nose too far into the author’s business, which as I keep saying is always a risk with covers. On the other hand stock art covers can be, and often are, too timid. I think this one is. It’s a Canadian town, no doubt, but that’s about it, and this is a particularly unassertive painting to begin with. While we’re on the subject, I think that the people at the Modern Library Classics series have really mastered the art of the stock image cover design. Gabrielle Bordwin, I salute you.

The third version here is a UK cover very much in keeping with the current ones below; my comments there.

Current UK editions. These are stylish in themselves but the sense of obliqueness, and of chill, is unsuited to the spirit of the books. Also, the relevance of the first one to the content of the book would not be apparent to the reader for a long time, which to my mind is a mistake; the cover always comes first for a reader and it should be designed to function that way. For the designer to intentionally throw down his own enigma at the outset is presumptuous overreaching; things like that make me feel quietly aware, while reading, that I am excluded from the club of those who have finished the book and actually know what the cover means, and that sense of exclusion can poison the reading experience. The Manticore has a face, which as I’ve said is generally a bad idea, but in this case it’s clear that this photograph of a face is not meant to actually be the character; it’s a post-post-modern (?) reference to the idea of the character, and to the idea of people in general, and their faces. Well, that’s not helpful either.

Current US editions. Lest it be said that I think book covers are getting worse, I like these a lot and I admire the choice to commission this particular painter because the style seems very nicely matched to the books. However, the spookiness factor is way, way too high on that first one. I like that this manticore is clearly a symbolic, expressionist manticore. And the supersized head on World of Wonders creates a nice atmosphere like a children’s book, though it might not be as obvious to a reader that this too is expressionistic and there will not be any supersized head in the story.

The combined edition here at right is what I actually held in my hands and read. The artist has done similar paintings for current editions of the two other “Trilogies” by Davies. Having read the book I can say that this (and his style in general) is a touch too shadow-and-sparkle mysterious for this book written in, as Davies calls it, “The Plain Style.” But the idea of an empty stage with lush curtains is an excellent cover concept, totally suited to the subject matter, and I think its perpetually unresolved sense of foreboding was helpful in pushing me forward as I read. So maybe it’s actually a good thing that the cover is more mysterious than the book; at any rate it accomplishes something. Unfortunately the type design is cloddish and seriously mars the atmosphere. But all in all I was pleased holding the book, and pleased by how it looked and what it seemed to promise. Maybe something a little more childish than what it actually contained.

by J.K. Rowling

My plot for the seventh book was this:

To undo the magic linking him to Voldemort, Harry Potter must die. He has to pass through the curtain in the Department of Mysteries and descend into the land of the dead, a Greek underworld type place, with a river Styx and the shades of characters long-gone – but no grand Lord Hades reigning over it all, just eerie primal magic of some natural kind – the basic mysterious forces of the universe. However, there are some kind of personified figures of fate – Norns or something – and Harry, in trickster fashion, first has to summon them and make some kind of wager or deal to ensure his being able to return from the land of the dead, something nobody has ever before managed to do. In a heart-rending scene, he meets his parents, and Sirius, and whoever else, and impulsively tries to bargain for their souls as well. Ultimately they can’t join him – for some reason it would work out that they could be saved but only by canceling out Harry’s original purpose in entering the land of the dead, and thus forfeiting the fight against Voldemort – the lesson being: losing things that we love is simply the price of fighting the good fight, no matter how much magic we have.

A darker alternate was that Harry’s only way of walking through the land of the dead and returning would be to create his own Horcrux, killing some bad guy but in the process souring his soul forever. In the end he’d be able to mostly mend himself on magical terms, but would still become a darkened, compromised adult, like everyone who must take the burden of fighting evil. His final rite of passage into adulthood would thus be descending into the grey between good and evil, in order to protect the world; and he would finally be able to commiserate with Dumbledore, who would be revealed to have made similar compromises that somehow explained the Snape situation.

I guess I was looking for a noir ending, or something with a poignant mythological resonance. It seemed like she had been heading in that direction. But the series actually ended back where it began, with the simplest colors and the most Saturday-morning-cartoon-worn tropes. She seemed to know the book needed a feeling of compromise, but she gained it only by killing off a few sympathetic characters, and even that was never quite given the chance to sink in. The tale of Harry Potter ends, like so many disappointing video games, with a boss battle not qualitatively different than any other battle, and somewhat less interesting than much that has gone before. Then the credits roll.

My comments last time about J’s converting the epic into the technical continue to apply, with the added sadness that now the technicalities no longer really make any kind of intuitive sense. They also may not even make technical sense, though the rules have gotten so fuzzy-edged that it’s hard to know how to navigate her labyrinths of technicalities. And I’m not inclined to try. I would rather have thrown out all kinds of babies in the bathwater and been given something bold and compelling in the end. But that would have been dissatisfying to many, I’m sure. She obviously felt obliged to give a shout-out to every misbegotten bath-baby from the entire series, but a string of shout-outs just leaves us feeling like we haven’t really been there, we haven’t really found out what happens to anyone. Was that really the last time I’ll hear from Hermione? I’m not convinced; maybe I never really knew her. I think the frantically good-natured effort to give everyone what they came for is going to sap away some of the life from the preceding books, retroactively. But I don’t plan to be rereading any of these anymore.

I absolutely enjoyed the entire process of reading this series – it was truly a delight. But make no mistake, this needs to be classed as a guilty pleasure, not a proud one. Participating in a mass phenomenon is a thrill; seeing people of all types reading de-covered copies of this giant book about wizards on the subway never got old. But it fades fast, as it did after every installment, and now that it’s over I’m not sure I’ll ever have any reason to stir up the embers again.

I think the notion of J.K. Rowling and the Harry Potter phenomenon will linger on in my mind – and if I may prophesy, in the culture at large – for much longer than the content of books themselves. In this last volume I was more aware than ever of this non-writerly, pleasant but ordinary woman, gamely taking on the task of entertaining everyone in the whole world. Like someone’s mom somehow organizing an international 100 million person game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. How did we get here? How did this end up happening? Of course I have to approve.

J.K. Rowling (2005) by Stuart Pearson Wright

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2005)

by J.K. Rowling

Goblet of Fire, book four, was the best one. It had the feeling of being really comfortable with its own terms, like a sitcom that’s finally hit its stride.

There’s that comfort-pleasure we get from fictional characters being recognizably themselves; the warmly, status-quo-affirmingly formulaic joke that’s supposed to elicit an “Oh, Chandler!” Not the most edifying sort of pleasure; there’s something sleepy and doughy and stupid about reassurance-entertainment. It’s like the heat rising off a sleeping person’s body. But it is nonetheless a very desirable commodity, and it is not easily earned.

Though in our desperate need for comfort we sometimes try to snatch it out of thin air. This guy who visited my roommate in college actually said, with fond exasperation, “Oh, [Chandler]!” about a friend of ours that he had not yet met. I am tempted to use the word “American” in talking about what’s so sad about this pathetic over-readiness to be sleepily comfortable with a sitcom-life, but I don’t really believe in making pronouncements about national identity like that. Still, I bet they don’t do that sort of thing in China. For example.

In re: the fifth book. The first time I read it, I think I was dismayed by what seemed at the time like a nerdy, undeserved emphasis on characters less essential, less earned. Just like my impatient annoyance as a third grader finding that “Eowyn” and “Theodred” and so forth, introduced long after exposition time had come and gone, were actually going to figure in the plot. As if! Furthermore, my degrading memory had wiped away several secondary characters, especially those introduced in book three and then played down in book four, like “Sybil Trelawney” and “Remus Lupin.” It’s dismaying to return in search of the warm sitcom glow and realize that you’re watching an episode from that off-key season where they have a monkey.

On this read, however, “Cornelius Fudge” and even “Bellatrix Lestrange” still meant something to me, and as a result the book seemed less arbitrary and, you know, Trekkie. Nonetheless, by book five, a calculating soapiness has crept into the plotting. I’m not complaining about the kids flirting and dating each other – that stuff’s fun, particularly when it’s indulged at length in the sixth book – I’m talking about the main storyline, which becomes increasingly crabbed and finicky as the series plays out. Considering that she started with the broadest possible mythical strokes – young chosen one vs. legendary evil – she’s certainly worked herself into a lot of loopholes and thumb-twiddling. The recurring and confused issue of House-Elves typifies the way she’s maybe let her imagination run in too many different directions at once.

This state of affairs is reinforced, if not actually worsened, by book six, in which she systematically demystifies the bad guy and literally breaks the threat into a series of technicalities. It’s too late to be disappointed at this turn in the series, which has been happening gradually all along. Like I said about book three, it feels like she’s constantly working out clever solutions to having been backed into a corner. There are worse forms of entertainment. For my part, I find this sort of plotting inspiring to read – if I ever have to solve these problems, it tells me that there are always solutions and everybody will love them even when they’re complicated. Plus, the very ubiquity of the franchise makes it exciting to find out what happens next, since it involves us in a worldwide phenomenon – another “American” line of reasoning, there.

This last book owed the most obvious debt of any of them to The Lord of the Rings, if you ask me. I could swear it included a couple of shots described directly from the recent movie versions thereof. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; fantasy is all in good fun and good fun is community property. But it’s more satisfying to tour this funhouse when you can’t still hear the echoes of the group in front of you, if you know what I mean.

Hey, you know what was pretty good when I was in fourth grade? Those Lloyd Alexander books.

by J.K. Rowling

This is book 3. As I write this, we’re in the middle of the fourth book, so once again I am inclined to see this in terms of its standing compared to its neighbors. It was far better than the second book, which was ill-planned and generally lifeless, but still not quite as attuned to the potential in the characters as the fourth book. Whereas the fourth book seems like an actual attempt to let the world breathe on its own, Prisoner of Azkaban was another shot at that puzzle of sequel-writing, albeit with much more inspired solutions than Chamber of Secrets. Bringing in characters and intrigues from Harry’s parents’ generation was in principle a smart move, although J.K. seems to have found ways of distributing only some of the back-story through the book and then dumped the rest on us in a big clumsy pile at the end. This is a recurring problem for her, and one that even when she does it well, I am aware that she is “solving.” That was unfortunately how the book often felt: like a series of solved writing problems. The seams were in the right places, but they were still on the outside.

I liked the shameless “clue” in the form of a top that spins when there is a bad guy nearby. She sets it spinning twice because she’s so proud of her idea for who the bad guy should be. And I’ll grant her that it was a cute idea, although it doesn’t totally make sense. That’s another problem for J.K. – she comes up with something clever, realizes there are objections, and then puts in awkward “okay but then how?” dialogue in an attempt to iron out the objections before our eyes. “But wait, how could he have been there if he wasn’t born yet?” “You see, Harry, he must have used a calendar inversion spell.” “Oh, I see!” This sort of thing is fair game for the nerds to bicker over at recess, but it drags down the book into feeling like an exam that she’s just barely squeaking past.

I liked that the Back to the Future DVDs (again with this?) included a list of frequent objections to the logic of the film, with the creators gamely attempting to justify everything. That’s exactly where that sort of thing belongs. We want to hear the answers, but only so that we don’t have to feel that the questions were actually worth asking. The movies themselves are better for not addressing the questions. J.K. should have just stuck with whatever stuff made for the best drama and then distributed the fine print from her website or, at worst, in her next book. This is going to be an even worse problem in book 5, if I recall.

by Ellen Raskin

Everyone liked The Westing Game (1978), and back when I was 11 or so, I read Ellen Raskin’s other three puzzle-mystery-ish books, The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel) (1971), Figgs and Phantoms (1974), and this one, The Tattooed Potato and Other Clues (1975). In the years since, whenever I’ve looked these books up, this one has been by far the hardest to find and the least often recommended (I think it was reprinted fewer times) and so I’ve come to think of it as more interesting. I have a geekish tendency to assign things a secret value based on how forgotten or well-hidden they are. This sometimes gets weirdly doubled up in my own head and I end up assigning vague prominence to the things that I never think about. After listening to a CD many times and always skipping some track that doesn’t appeal to me, suddenly one day there’ll be turnaround in my brain and that track will take on a certain mystique for being the underdog “lost” track. I think this is related to some kind of defensive mechanism – my subconscious does passes over itself checking for potential weaknesses, and maybe skipped tracks feel, in their way, like blind spots that might potentially be exploited against me. Well, ha ha, I’m too smart for that sort of thing! I don’t know, maybe not, just a little psychological theory I came up with on the spot.

Point is, after re-reading The Westing Game several times over my increasingly adult life, including, most recently, aloud to Beth last year, I thought maybe it would be fun to go back and find the unsung other books and read those. Somewhere along the way I had tricked myself into thinking that as a kid I had actually liked The Tattooed Potato better than The Westing Game and The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon. And you know, I very well might have, out of pure underdog-logic.

But it’s not as good, not at all, and I felt a little ashamed of myself, having to face down that truth. It has things going for it, conceptual things and atmospheric things. But the details are fussy and frequently inelegant, and the semi-grotesque silliness of the character names, the plotting, the flattish whimsy – it just doesn’t flow into a satisfying whole. In The Westing Game she manages a much larger group of characters and concepts, going for the same kind of silly/serious gray farce, and attains a marvelous balance. I really think Wes Anderson should make a movie of it. In The Tattooed Potato, her essentially improvisatory style is more apparent and comes up with less satisfying goods. A lot of the comedy, and this is a major issue, just isn’t funny. But probably the biggest problem was that the two main characters were sketched ineffectively and their faces remained more or less blank for me to the end. That’s a serious flaw when the promising premise of the book is that it will investigate the way that art can reveal the underlying truth of a person. The thought in the book is about depth, and yet the world in which it takes place persisted in seeming superficial.

It was all, I think, purely a question of craft. I liked what the book was trying to do, and I liked it when on occasion it got there. But when the charm of any given event faded, there wasn’t a sturdy enough ground to fall back on. It felt too loose and the author didn’t seem invested enough in her characters, only in her concepts. The concepts, as I said, are good, and I’m glad I was exposed to them in 5th grade, or whenever. The book asks the question “what is art for and what are artists trying to do?” and answers it through parodic Encyclopedia Brown-isms. That’s an inspired idea for children’s literature. The idea at the heart of the book, that an artist is like a detective of essences, made an impression on me and stayed with me. Even if I’ve moved past it since then.

It’s just a real shame that it’s not a better book, that’s all.

Also, Ellen Raskin was an illustrator and book designer, her stories all incorporate art and/or design-like thought, and in their original editions (as I read them back in elementary school), they left particular impressions through their integrated, carefully worked-out design. This wonderful site, including all sorts of manuscripts and sketches for The Westing Game plus a long and interesting audio recording of Raskin talking about her working methods, makes clear how the fidgety fun of solving design problems is an integral part of her work. But the edition we read recently had some stupid new 90s paperback cover illustration, and though the interior seemed to have been offset from the original edition, the overall feeling was that we were reading just another junky kids’ book. These things make a real difference, especially in the world of children’s literature, where fragile aesthetic effect is frequently the raison d’être. Sorry, I don’t want to be the kind of person who says raison d’être, but there I go anyway.

The Tattooed Potato and Other Clues is such an unsung “lost” book that I can’t even find a proper scan of its original Ellen Raskin cover online. All I can find is this “Amazon reader-submitted photo” of what looks to be a library copy, of the sort where the center of the jacket cover is snipped out with scissors and glued down to a binding made of some indestructible brightly-colored material.

Despite the quality of the image and the library-binding isse, just looking at it, I can see how much better I would have liked the book this time around if it had had this cover on it. I really don’t understand why books – especially children’s books – get refitted with new covers when they get reprinted. Are kids really that sensitive to the “dating” of earlier styles of illustration? And if they are, aren’t they also sensitive to the “dating” of the associated book itself? I find it much easier to get into the proper mindset to appreciate a book if the entire package is sending me the same signals, historical or otherwise, and I think this applies to kids too. A book severed from its own design, certainly whenever the author participated in it (or in this case, created it herself), is a book severed from a part of itself. Right? At least in the 20th century.

by R.A. Sharpe

Acumen Publishing, UK, 2004
McGill-Queens University Press, North America, 2005

I swear I can do this fast.

I picked this up at the bookstore because it looked like the kind of book that interests me, written in the kind of voice that appeals to me, and it had a nice cover. I was in a mood where the idea of reading non-fiction, philosophy in particular, seemed like it would be fulfilling. I resolved on purchase (in part because it was a bit expensive for a paperback) to read it attentively in its entirety. The prospect of ultimately committing my thoughts to public html here gave to that experience, as to others I have had in the past months, a kind of heft of well-formedness that satisfied me.

The book, though short, was frustrating to read and ended up taking me more than a month. My attention was not easily held, despite the fact that the subject matter and the nature of the discussion were both, as they say, right up my alley. I finished it in a spirit of determined loyalty to my needlessly formalized self-obligation, and here I am writing about it.

Because of my backlog here it’s been yet another month since I finished it, and I’ve had a lot of time to plan what I wanted to say about this book. Mostly I wanted to quantify what was wrong with it, because make no mistake, I did not enjoy it. My plan until recently was to start with the very last thing in the book, which is a brief, annotated discography: the author names some recommended recordings of a few of the works that he has mentioned in the text. Mind you, none of these works are analyzed in detail or even written about at any significant length; they are all passing examples, invoked to make passing points in the flow of the discussion. Nonetheless the author lists the recordings he likes. I don’t have the book in front of me but I’m pretty sure that what I’m about to say is a fair representation. The last recording he mentions is of Thomas Tallis’s work Spem in Alium. He says something about why he likes the recording, and then writes, “Imagine dying and never having heard this music!”

This little comment, in my plan for what I was going to write here, was going to be taken to epitomize what’s wrong with the book. The general idea was going to be that this silly construction reveals the author to be too enamored of his own tastes, too enamored of the glory and quality of the music he endorses, and too lazy of rhetoric to ever write a treatment of this subject dispassionate enough to be valuable. Because while reading the book, that was my assessment, and my principal annoyance.

In the course my college music education, I witnessed many of my professors make passionate show of the fact that they instinctively and whole-heartedly identified the work of Bach, say, as being of near-holy perfection. I was vaguely put off by the seemingly demonstrative and self-satisfied flavor of these pronouncements, and also distressed by the way they left my ambivalence – perhaps unschooled ambivalence, but ambivalence all the same – out to dry. If their sanctification of “the greats” was, as it seemed, at the core of what they wanted to convey to me as my education, what was I to make of my own uncertainty in the face of the ostensible transcendent? The implication, which I came to resent, was that I was constitutionally barred from the elite and lucky group to which they belonged. “Imagine dying and never having heard this music!” indeed. I for one have never heard Spem in Alium. I am, as per your request, Professor, imagining my death now.

Having left college behind, however, I was able to come to a new and freeing realization, one that had been with me all along but that, like Dorothy, I had had to learn for myself: classical music professors are nerds. Nerds express their enthusiasms intemperately and with little regard for their listeners; my professors had more likely than not simply been letting their likes and dislikes fly with recklessly overblown abandon, and revelling in the decadent atmosphere of academia, where for once in their lives, such indulgences were encouraged. Furthemore, to compensate for a general sense of impotence, it is textbook nerd behavior to jockey fiercely for status within a well-defined niche, somewhere on the far fringes of actual social relevance. And so it is entirely possible that I was witness to displays that were indeed meant to demonstrate that my professors were closer to God (= Bach) and more sensitive to that infinitely delicate substance, genius (= Bach) than I, but these displays reflected only their tragically elaborate ego choreography, and had very little to do with music, and certainly nothing to do with me. A further thought, that I’ve had only still more recently, is that classical music professionals spend a great deal of time engaged with 18th and 19th-century aesthetic thought, to the point where the intellectual climates of the 18th and 19th centuries may be semi-permanently emulated within their psyches. So it also seems possible that I was merely witnessing the unwitting emergence of antiquated notions and once-fashionable formulations about genius and art and such, which, by virtue of their astonishing anachronism, had sounded to me like a kind of vainglory.*

In short, I was able to see that my relationship with music was not so necessarily inferior, and that I had no reason to feel, as I had, like an uninvited boor in the cathedral. Thus freed from the intimidating and discouraging effects of classical music nerdiness, I moved to my present attitude toward it**, which is exasperation. How can we ever discuss the aesthetic qualities of Beethoven if the “greatness” of Beethoven is axiomatic? How can we ever talk about “taste” if we begin with the belief that certain assessments are undeniable?

I ask these questions rhetorically; “obviously we can’t,” is my answer. In his book, however, R. A. Sharpe, asks these questions literally. He can’t imagine dying without hearing Tallis, and he really and truly can’t imagine a reasonable and educated person not liking Beethoven. The philosophical problems he tries to untangle stem, for him, from that sort of “observation.” He gives examples of subjects on which taste might reasonably diverge, like Tchaikovsky, and those where it might not, like Beethoven. The discussion proceeds with a tone of curiosity, but the landscape he is exploring is that of his own imagination, and it is as rigidly pleased with its own status quo as any of my canon-touting professors. It seemed outrageous to me, while reading it, that this book, which by its own description was an attempt to sort out the problems that surround questions of taste and value in art, was actually a completely nerdbound tour of those problems from the inside, by a philosopher who chooses to be intellectually brave not by abandoning any of his confusedly self-satisfied notions but rather by reaching and publishing the conclusion that ideas about taste and value in art are fundamentally inconsistent and thus do not submit productively to philosophical analysis.

I was going to write this, and say that this was the principal flaw of the book. But that, I have since decided, would not be quite fair, because, to be honest, I was never entirely certain that I had correctly identified the author’s shortcomings. Repeatedly, I would begin reading a section and think, “I can’t believe these are your assumptions! They completely beg the question; it’s no wonder that you find yourself tangled up in contradictions if you investigate everything except yourself and yet base the whole thing on your own opinions!” … and then, somewhere late in the discussion, would find that he did, eventually, entertain the idea that perhaps he had been wrong all along. Sometimes he would say something like, “in fact, as we will see, I do think I have been wrong, in a certain sense.” Then the subject would disappear for a while, and only reemerge in the context of a different discussion. All this would disorient me. Perhaps I was actually only reading a book that assumed its readers to have certain biases, and was first trying to appeal to them by acting as though those biases would go unchallenged. Or perhaps he was intentionally constructing his chapters to begin with that which would later be rejected, because he thought that was good philosophical form. I just couldn’t be certain, though evidence like the “Imagine dying and never hearing Tallis!” comment supported my thinking that he was just a sloppy thinker and a sloppy writer.

What is undoubted is that the book did not shed any light on its subject matter. It did not offer me even a transitory experience of clarity, and is that not the one thing we can ask of philosophy? It may be because I misunderstood him throughout, but in that case I blame his writing, which generally meandered with no clear trajectory and never even revealed a retrospective architecture (he does, after all, end by saying he must conclude that there are few conclusions to be drawn), and which lapsed constantly and ambiguously into enthusiasms and/or tradition, to no clear intellectual purpose. He may have had one in mind, but it was never clear.

So that was the principal flaw of the book. Through one shortcoming or another, and I really can’t say for sure what it was, this book failed to offer me any sort of help in sorting out these issues. And it sure seemed to be because my guide was so fond of the hallowed haze with which he was surrounded.

By contrast, I recently sat at the library and read the Introduction to Richard Taruskin’s gigantic Oxford History of Western Music, which, in laying out his attitude about how to write music history, cleanly and convincingly sliced directly through the scatterbrained shrug of Sharpe’s book. Art is a social phenomenon. Art reception is a social phenomenon. A history of music is a history of social phenomena and can only be sensibly treated as such. The “greatness” of Beethoven, he says, is of objective importance as a concept because it influences so many people who subscribe to it, but only in this form does it have any place in a scholarly study of music history. By contrast, in that book Move Closer that I enjoyed so much, the author is writing about art’s aesthetic value to the individual, and says that this sort of value is necessarily specific to the individual’s experience; that the moving and enriching qualities of aesthetic experience are fundamentally not social phenomena, they are uniquely private. To me, these two attitudes are not only compatible, they form a complete and straightforward picture. Sharpe and some of my old professors let that picture smudge together in the center and then, like alchemists building their elaborate towers of half-baked science, delve into the smudge in search of its secrets.

There is a general principle here that I would like to be able to name. It comes up all the time in bad philosophy of all sorts. Essentially, it is the inability to look at a million ants walking in a line and talk intelligently about the fact that they are discrete ants AND that they are a line. Yes, some of the ants might actually be slightly to one side or another of “the line.” Yes, the “line” itself does not actually exist in any pure and continuous form. But this is how things are. We all get it. There is nothing here to be confused about, and yet would-be thinkers seeking to “problematize” their world find this principle endlessly susceptible to abuse, which is unfortunate as it underlies the nature of all matter, all meaning, all experience. Can someone give me a name for this? I would love to be able to dismiss these things by saying, “well, that’s just a form of THE SUPRA-REDUCTIONIST FALLACY,” or something like that, and have everyone agree. “Incompatibilism?” Anyone?

Oh man, I so didn’t do it fast. Sorry.

* “Vainglory?” Who’s writing this?

** Or more generally toward any sort of aestheticization, in the humanities, of the canon. And, I suppose, even more generally, toward treating taste as a human virtue rather than a means to experience.

by J.K. Rowling

It’s been a busy time and the prospect of scrounging up some thoughts about this book hasn’t been particularly appealing. But I’ve got to either give up on my project of writing about everything I encounter, or just spit something out and move on. Since I don’t think I should be allowed to do the former until I’ve caught up doing the latter, here’s the latter.

This is a sequel that reads like a sequel. It reads like a sequel written by someone uncomfortable with the problem of writing a sequel. In the commentary track on the Back to the Future Part II DVD – a fine start to a sentence if ever there was one – Robert Zemeckis (or more likely, the other guy) sums up the no-win quandary of sequels: people want a sequel both to be the same as the original and to be different from it. If the sequel is too much the same, it feels like a weak retread. If it’s too different, it feels like a betrayal. Bob Gale or maybe Zemeckis then says that they tried to address the problem head-on with a playful “meta” approach. Nope, people didn’t like that either.*

So it’s not surprising that poor Joanne Kensington-Moames Rowling comes off more than a bit timid and uncomfortable in her second Harry Potter book.** Rather than expanding or exploring any of her existing characters, she just shuffles them around and “makes them talk,” like a kid improvising a new campaign for his army men. The major new additions to the cast are mostly clownish distractions – Dobby the whimpering idiot elf is the worst kind of non-amusing miscalculation, and Moaning Myrtle the whiny pathetic ghost is another shot in the same wrong direction. Though the ridiculously self-centered “Gilderoy Lockhart” has a great name and gets the best material in the book, he doesn’t really have anything to do with the plot and feels like a stowaway who is clinging desperately to one side of the story, trying unsuccessfully to liven things up.

The plot is based on a lot of oddly unsavory “pure bloodline” talk. I don’t actually care in a serious way about the racial implications, because clearly J.K. doesn’t, but there’s something strange going on in these books, and this one brings it to the foreground. Hitler Youth-style bully Draco Malfoy slurs wizards from non-magical families as “mudbloods,” and the book shouts him down as a bigot. But then all of Harry’s exciting claims to greatness turn out to be based on his line of descent – ’cause that’s exciting and magicky, when it happens to good guys. That’s in fact how he comes by the snake-talking talent that allows him to enter the Chamber of Secrets, a sort of temple to bigotry. The school’s four houses, which conveniently correspond to the character of their students (heroes, villains, thinkers, laborers) turn out, at the end, to be tied, via bloodline logic, to the four founders of the school. Why are the bad guys so bad? Because they have the pure blood of the founding bad guy in their veins.

I’m not saying either the racist or the anti-racist model is inappropriate for a children’s book; just that it’s odd to see them butt heads in one place and that the one sours the other.

Rowling’s prose is, if anything, clunkier than before. Or maybe it just seems that way because there’s less entertaining content to distract us. In talking about the first book I said that her strong suit was making up stuff and her, um, weak suit was choosing words to convey it. In this installment it was as though the inelegance of the prose had spread to infect the plot and even, worst of all, the stuff.

We’re on to book three now – almost done, in fact – and it’s much better than this one. So it’s not just me. This one was just no good.

* Although, actually, I think the Back to the Future sequels get a bad rap. Part II and Part III might only hold up as riffs on the original rather than equals to it, but since the premise of the whole thing is nerdy time-travel gamesmanship, I don’t think that’s so wrong. Last year we rewatched Part II and had a good time with it. People who tell me I’m too negative and sour in my posts here, to you I say: you, sir, are too negative and sour, in your cranky dismissal of Back to the Future Part II and perhaps also Back to the Future Part III. Now let’s return to my cranky dismissal of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

** Kathleen.

by J.K. Rowling

Published in the U.S. as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. This well-publicized name change goes without comment a lot of the time, as though it makes perfect sense that the American public would prefer Sorcerer’s Stone to Philosopher’s Stone. I find it slightly upsetting. Was the problem that Americans were deemed less likely than Brits to be familiar with the medieval notion of the “philosopher’s stone” – a magical substance that could convert lead to gold, and possibly also do any other magic you wanted – and would thus miss out on the meaning of the title? That this is the reason for the change seems unlikely, since Rowling’s “philosopher’s stone” is not, in fact, the lead-to-gold type of philosopher’s stone – it’s some other thing she made up, using a borrowed old name. Her use of the phrase “philosopher’s stone” does not depend on any kind of knowledge of what “philosopher’s stone” means (in fact, knowing what it really means may ultimately confuse the reader) – it only requires a reader to understand that the philosopher’s stone is something of mysterious significance, and yes, possibly magical. It seems to me that the Some Character and the Thing I’ve Never Heard Of construction just about conveys this information in and of itself.

No, it’s much more likely that the title was changed because someone at Scholastic Books thought, “I’m worried that Americans will hear that word ‘philosopher’ and instinctively balk, because before they even try to figure out what kind of book it is, their ‘no fun’ alarm will go off. Americans have much more sensitive ‘no fun’ alarms than you Brits (do you even know what fun is, egghead?), and we are incredibly averse to the very word ‘philosophy,’ regardless of context.” And this bothers me. Not because I think that the US market isn’t anti-intellectual, but because this change seems overeager to cater to that tendency in a case where I really doubt it would have been an issue. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone sounds plenty magical to me. It’s not like the book was called Harry Potter and Math.

As with my comment on The Haunting (of Hill House), I’m not saying that publishers should put editorial integrity above sales! I’m saying that regarding title changes, the attitude of “this might not matter, but hell, just in case people are really really stupid, we might as well dumb it down,” is insufficient integrity. Someone show me the marketing data to prove me wrong and I’ll gladly retract this.

That was long but my comments are going to be short.

This was my second time through this book, which I first read very quickly several years ago with the sole intention of “culturally catching up.” This time, I already knew what was going to happen and was, additionally, reading aloud, which is slow going (at least by comparison to the “CHUG! CHUG! CHUG!” speed at which one is inclined to read a book like this), so I was forced to actually stop and take a look around at Ms. Rowling’s handiwork.

After my first read, my mildly anti-hype review to friends was something like “okay, it was fun enough, but so are the Roald Dahl books this reminded me of – there are tons of cute, competent kids’ books out there, and sure, this is one.” I mostly stand by that assessment, though now, at this slow pace (and with several sequels worth of perspective in hand) it was clearer to me that Rowling does not write with much force or consistency, and is actually far outclassed by Roald Dahl and many others.

There are several distinct levels on which fiction needs to work: 1. It must create a reality of events, characters, etc., 2. It must tell a story about them, 3. It must deliver that story dramatically, and 4. It must be constructed out of actual prose. Fiction writers can put their emphasis in any of those strata. The works that satisfy me most are generally those that show off in 2 and 3 and just put something sturdy in 1 and 4. Harry Potter books are mostly about 1, take a calculated practical approach to 3, and are downright lazy about 2 and 4. Rowling’s “plot,” certainly in this first book, is little more than the gradual revealing of her various level 1 inventions. The reader is pretty much invited to ignore the prose, not worry about any storyline, and go straight for the cozy Halloween party goodies – pumpkin juice, chocolate frogs, secret passages, and of course THE WIZARD VERSION OF EVERYTHING, which is a game that can never run out of steam (‘That’s wizard cheese,’ said Ron, ‘made from real wizard cows! It’s like normal cheese except magic!'”). Then, when it turns out that deliberately hidden among the goodies were a few “hints” at a secret, the book feels tight and complete. Good device.

Of course, as the series wears on, J.K. comes up against the problem that if you don’t tell real stories and just make up stuff, it’s hard to carve out a coherent long-form plotline. In the later books she seems to spend a lot of time working out inconsistencies between her various made up stuffs – or tries to extract interest from their interactions (Always a nerdy direction to go – sometimes it starts to feel like just this side of “Who would win in a fight? Dumbledore or Captain Picard?”).

This first book, though, seemed more clear on its intention: to be a book about the pleasures of imagining a wonderful place rather than to be any kind of serious epic. The opening scenes that establish the Harry Potter “backstory” are handled casually, almost distractedly. It doesn’t seem like J.K. thinks any of us are really going to care about this “Voldemort” business she made up, and why should we? It just serves as a device to give sufficient resonance to the main idea of the book, about wizard cheese etc. The initial character-interest setup, where Harry lives under Cinderellian conditions, is familiar and boring, and more importantly, isn’t really in keeping with the comfortably-everyday-except-for-all-the-magic tone of what follows. Rowling doesn’t really hit her modest stride until the kids get on the train for school and start eating candy.

And how clever and cute is her wizard world? Moderately clever, moderately cute. She comes up with semi-viable rules for her wizard sport, and she follows her wizardification project past boring junk like “wizard chess” (the pieces fight? big deal) to somewhat less predictable territory, like wizard back-to-school shopping and wizard detention. That we all, as non-wizards, are in fact “muggles,” – that’s definitely cute. “You-Know-Who” – that’s stupid. I would give her about a 65% success rate on the “cute or stupid?” front.

After reading this the first time, I wrote a little musical “Theme for a Harry Potter Movie” for fun – it was essentially a slightly John Williamsed takeoff on “The Sorceror’s Apprentice” – a skipping, Disney-style whimsical/magical sort of thing. When the actual Harry Potter movie came out, and the actual John Williams took a shot at this assignment, I was dismayed at the spooky music box approach that he took. There’s nothing spooky-music-box about this jelly bean of a book; it’s only in retrospect that Rowling has decided to take her franchise to would-be epic places. The (awful) movie had a better idea of what it had to aim at in the long run (whereas J.K. didn’t have any reason to believe she’d be writing any sequels, when she finished this one, is my understanding), so I suppose I can understand the thinking behind the ominous musical approach.

Hypothetically I’m scheduled to read through all six of the books on the read-aloud plan, so this will probably do for now.

But I do want to call attention to this: just now I was looking for details on the title change, and ended up at what is apparently one of the premier Harry Potter fan sites online, The Harry Potter Lexicon. The site includes an “open letter” to J.K. Rowling, asking her to answer various extremely non-essential questions about the first names and ages of minor characters, etc. Apparently, she has been not unwilling to do this sort of thing. Anyway, the site editor asks her at one point whether a Harry Potter timeline included as an extra on one of the movie DVDs was taken from a timeline that he had speculatively assembled and posted on his site. It sounds like it was. And why not? So then the amusing part, wherein he complains about the mind-boggling problem posed when his fan-created database is used as the source for “official” materials:

But like I said, this is not just an important question for me. It’s an important question for everyone. Think about it. If they did get the timeline from the Lexicon and if Rowling never really gave it a careful look-over, then we can’t treat it as canon. If, however, they used Rowling’s notes as the source, then we CAN treat it as canon. I mean, honestly, how can I call something canon if I’M THE SOURCE?! I need to know if I am.

“How can I call something canon if I’M THE SOURCE” indeed! I know that feeling well. The desire to believe in a canon, to hang out next to it, to number all its drawers and build a steel outline around it and polish the corners until they gleam – this is exactly the desire to NOT be responsible for its content. It’s just like the desire to believe in a higher power – nobody wants to hear that man created the idea of God because it ruins the idea of God by putting it in the same sentence as responsibility. Nobody wants to hear that aesthetic value is culturally relative, that morals are constructed, or any of that other post-modern stuff, but despite what people will say, I don’t think it’s because they really believe otherwise – it’s because their whole relationship with those things is predicated on NOT being responsible for them. Once you realize that not only is J.K. Rowling making it up, but that in fact everyone is making it up and YOUR hands are dirty too, the satisfaction goes out of the enterprise. Nobody wants to uphold a “canon” that’s actually just a bunch of mostly-agreed-upon more-true-than-nots – people want shining, numbered truth that they can’t touch! This is a fundamental human impulse and explains not only why there are so many damn fan databases on the internet, but also why the “intelligent design” debate has managed to grab hold recently: “science” that people just revise as they go isn’t real truth; real truth comes direct from J.K. Rowling and is the only thing that can be called canon, precisely and exclusively because WE ARE NOT THE SOURCE, thank God.

The philosophical answer, in all seriousness, would seem to be that it is in fact possible to know that we ARE THE SOURCE for many things but that we must also take them seriously – that we must be both trusting and skeptical at the same time; that, just as the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, the price of authority is eternal self-doubt. (Or, as one is more likely to feel it, the up-side of eternal self-doubt is the power of authority). The Harry Potter Lexicon fellow ought to take a deep breath, admit that there is no Harry Potter timeline more canonical than his own, acknowledge the power that this places on his shoulders and then, like Spider Man, handle it with great responsibility. And well might we, the human race, all do the same.

But obviously we won’t.

Oops, that was supposed to be the end, but parting thought here about how wikipedia manages, through clean design and thorough self-archiving, to be both absolutely anti-“canon” and at the same time seem even more authoritative than any “mere” consistent source. This perhaps reflects an increasing general sophistication of the culture in dealing with the idea of truth – I know that people who use the word “blogosphere” would like to think so – but I think it’s probably just because the layout is so much more inviting than any free online non-wiki alternative. The unknowability of absolute truth is just a bonus.

But you don’t have to take my word for it!*

* Get it?

by Shirley Jackson

[extended as of 9/23/05]

Okay, but the book I read was retitled The Haunting, so as to be absolutely unambiguously identifiable as being a tie-in with the 1999 movie of the same name. I guess Penguin (or, more likely, DreamWorks) thought that using the movie poster for the cover wasn’t clear enough. And they sure as hell weren’t going to be bullied into some kind of wimpy compromise like reducing the size of “of Hill House.” No time for that crap: marketing is serious business and we’re not taking any chances. Out of the way, Shirley! They even went in and erased half of the running heads – “OF HILL HOUSE” appeared on the right-hand pages, originally, but in this edition (otherwise a direct offset) they were blank. Unfortunately, when Ms. Zeta-Jones was going through the book with white-out, she missed a spot – at one point, a chapter begins on a right-hand page, and since there’s no running head on the first pages of chapters, the whole head is on the left-hand page, where it has the temerity to remember the complete title.

Those marketing guys sure know what they’re doing: I bought this copy for exactly $1 in the über-discount bin.

Oh well, that’s not really fair. The tie-in edition is only meant to be sold for a few months, and for all I know, it might well have sold better than it would have otherwise because it had been retitled. One copy left in the beach bookstore doesn’t mean anything. All I’m saying is that I, an investor in neither Penguin nor DreamWorks, wish it hadn’t been done.

The book is short and I very much enjoyed reading it. Some – maybe a lot – of my enjoyment was in the very fact that I was reading a short, classic haunted house novel from 1959. What a delightful thing to be doing! The rest of my enjoyment – maybe less than half – was in the book itself. But the two kinds of enjoyment were intertwined.

The two things that pleased me most about the book: 1) It took on the task of being a “haunted house novel” and succeeded. The haunted house is one of those notions (“memes”) that are well-formed in the cultural consciousness and yet don’t have any clear “key text.” This is also how I felt about the movie Pirates of the Caribbean (perhaps not coincidentally the other major non-movie Disneyland ride) – that the screenwriters had done a great job building a framework from scratch to support all these previously untethered concepts about cursed treasure and ghost pirate sieges and so on. We all know that haunted houses have doors that close by themselves and creepy libraries gathering dust, etc. etc., but what is the story framework into which these things fit? It’s a difficult task, to keep the beloved details alive while you’re weaving them into a larger structure, when previously they were just loosely-related free-range thingies – a good description of what one sees on any Disneyland ride. Those rides all end up being more lists than narratives. This book did a very nice job turning a standard list into a reasonable narrative and still preserving the flavor of the list intact.

She actually accepts that she’s working with old materials, and has the characters all be quite aware of the haunted house clichés into which they’re stepping. The premise of the story is that a haunted house scholar is delighted to have found a real haunted house, and brings a couple of psychically susceptible types there so that he can study it. He and the other characters all talk about haunted houses the same way you or I might; they know all about them, and to them, the only thing novel about their situation is that they are actually in such a house. The quasi-knowing attitude of the characters toward their genre goes a long way toward bringing the atmosphere to life. Unlike in Scream, it’s not used for some kind of winking, meta-clever ends. It’s just a way of letting the book be firmly inside an absurd and naive genre without seeming too absurd or naive. When scary, ghostly stuff is happening, they nervously joke about how it seems to really be happening. That might be an old device but it was used effectively here and I appreciated it.

2) Shirley Jackson’s writing is uncluttered and firm and very pleasant to read. It is careful and writerly, but in a pared-down, completely unpretentious way. The very existence of this sort of thoughtful, tough “middlebrow” voice seemed like it dated the book. Where is this voice today? I feel like there is a psychological over-transparency to contemporary writing, where intelligence feels the need to parade itself in the text. Maybe I just feel that way because I am so used to the gimmicks of contemporary writing that I see past them, whereas I was blinded by the old 1959 gimmicks in Jackson’s writing. Still, there’s something inherently appealing to me about that cold, quiet style, girded by a dark hum of knowingness, and I hadn’t read anything quite like it in a while. There is something effective for horror writing – or for any writing, really – about calmly, boldly leaving things unsaid, or what’s equally bold, giving simple two-word descriptions to things about which the reader has at least ten words of curiosity. A strong sense of purpose seems to govern every sentence.

But the cold 50’s-ness of it goes beyond that. A thought I had while reading the book was that everyone has a clear sense of the distinctive personality of “30’s dialogue,” but you don’t generally hear about other eras, like “60’s dialogue,” even though I think it probably has just as distinctive a character. The dialogue in the book was all a kind of would-be casual would-be repartee that was meant to portray guarded, brittle pseudo-camaraderie on the part of the various houseguests. But the brittle quality went well beyond anything in real life – there was something lightheaded and ringing about every jaunty line. The characters’ jokes and insincerities come off like some kind of heightened, dream-like ceremony in masks. To me anyway! I was reminded of my impressions, when I was younger, when reading Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and Rosemary’s Baby (1967). All the vernacular stuff somehow seemed infused with a slightly maniacal overemphasis. In all three works there is a theme of revealing how hollow it all is, but choosing to do so by giving it that crazed falseness is very much of the era. Probably this fits in to someone’s theory of literature during the Cold War, but I’m not really interested in going that far right now; I’m just talking about dialogue. In the movie of The Graduate (1967, book 1963), the loopy intensity of crass commonplaces is actually played for laughs.

Not so here. The Haunting of Hill House, in its dialogue, overall style, theme and construction, achieves a very particular kind of eerie effect. “Floating horror” or “lightheaded horror” I’m tempted to call it – it’s not fear of anything, exactly, but just the increasingly unnerving sense that arises from never being allowed to touch solid ground. The narrative starts off hovering uneasily on the line between the protagonist’s external world and her anxious, flighty inner life, and then proceeds to hover there for the remainder of the book. It works very well, though at times the details (what exactly is going on between these characters? what exactly is happening now?) get a bit murkier than necessary, or get murky earlier than is reasonable. It’s a book all about executing a slow burn, and page for page, the pacing of that slow burn isn’t always exactly right. But it’s not a big problem.

I just looked up “slow burn” and it apparently only means a gradual “display of anger,” but I want to use it to mean any very gradual change from a neutral state to some other state. Is there another expression for that?

The Shining owes an obvious (and probably acknowledged) debt to this. Apparently the Robert Wise movie version is quite good, and Shirley herself liked it, so I’ve got to see that. The 1999 version is, by contrast, supposed to be a big dud. But I might have to see that too.

Here’s the original edition cover, which is kind of dated – but I like that it’s sort of reserved about showing the house (unlike the current cover, not to mention the cover on my copy).

And here’s Shirley Jackson as she appeared when she was the age of her protagonist, which is pretty much how I was picturing the woman in the book. Your Hollywood choices follow.

[ONE DAY LATER, 9/23]

Something I planned to mention but forgot – there is a brilliant stroke toward the end of the book. Just as you begin to feel that the protagonist is in peril, the author suddenly brings in two new loud comic characters who irritate everyone and are completely insensitive to the creepy atmosphere. This is at the three-quarters mark, or further. It’s a really clever device, because it very effectively heightens the reader’s sense of hopelessness. The only real struggle, for the characters in this book, is just to keep their wits about them and stay level and focussed in the face of all that “floating horror” uneasiness. Just as that task gets dangerously hard, the author throws a couple of annoying people in their (and our) faces. On the surface, it seems like the new characters completely ruin the atmosphere – but in fact they allow Shirley’s slow burn to run nice and cold all the way to the end, because now the horror has to be glimpsed only in the background, behind the stupid people. Ingenious, really.

Rather than the standard horror movie “don’t go in there!” we want to shout “shut up! we need to concentrate!” Which ends up feeling like a more sophisticated version of the same thing.

In thinking about this device and why it isn’t used more often, I was reminded of the similar effect in the scene in Punch-Drunk Love where cruelly distracting drumming in the incidental score creates the sense that the mundane conversation being had is in fact frightening and difficult. (The same director does something comparable in Boogie Nights, in the tense scene during which a kid keeps unexpectedly setting off loud firecrackers nearby). There, as here, that particular sense of urgency that arises from being distracted has been harnessed. But The Haunting of Hill House does P.T. Anderson one or two better, by making the distraction something amusing in its own right.

by Michel Houellebecq
translation of HP Lovecraft: Contre le monde, contre la vie into English by Dorna Khazeni (2005)
with an introduction by Stephen King
and two stories by H.P. Lovecraft:
“The Call of Cthulhu” (1926)
“The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930)

Michel Houellbecq is a contemporary French author of some note, but I have not read any of his (other) works. Most articles about this (non-fiction) book, his first published work, discuss the ways in which it connects to his more famous, more recent novels. But I can’t comment on that because I don’t know.

My first encounter with Lovecraft’s astonishing name came when I played the old Infocom text adventure game The Lurking Horror, which stages Lovecraftian stuff at an essentially undisguised M.I.T. to create what must therefore be the nerdiest game of all time. It’s not bad. The unholy-summoning storyline is of course a big Lovecraft “homage,” but I didn’t know it at the time. I was only able to gather from context that his name (which makes a cameo as the name of a computer) was somehow a genre-appropriate “reference,” and I remember thinking that there was something etymologically unsavory about the idea that the words “love” and “craft” should in combination connote monsters and evil.

It was not until several years later that I finally saw evidence that “love-craft” had been a real person and a writer of horror stories: passing through the hallway of some other high school (on a “science team” trip, I believe!), I came across a copy of one of his story collections, abandoned on a table. Something still seemed unsavory. The book was from some godawful sci-fi publisher, had a terrible over-the-top illustration on it, and all around looked like something both obscure and shoddy. Infocom had expected me to know about this guy? It seemed to me like maybe he wasn’t a real writer, he was just some creepy underground thing for creepy underground people, best ignored – like, say, the Church of the SubGenius.

As the years went on, I continued to come across references to Lovecraft, many of them seeming to take for granted that his literary importance was widely acknowledged. Well, not by anyone I knew, it wasn’t! This was not an author that anyone ever seemed to read, nor one whose works were apparent at the bookstore. I knew where “important” authors’ names came up, and his didn’t. Nonetheless I seemed frequently to come across winking references to ridiculous garbage words like Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth, as though the significance of this gobbledygook was common knowledge to normal cultured people.

You might well point out that I was, among other things, playing computer adventure games, so what did I expect? But the form and structure of the interlocking worlds of nerddom are not readily apparent to one who has only ventured into one or two of them.

Anyway, finally one day in college, while on duty at a very quiet library desk job, I decided to educate myself. So I and my roommate, who had come to hang out, read library copies of “The Dunwich Horror,” which had been recommended somewhere or other as Lovecraft’s greatest story. The horrendously overripe, relentlessly inelegant writing – humorless, monotonous, and altogether amateurish* – was a surprise. So was the particular combination of horror tropes (which I have since learned is exactly characteristic of Lovecraft): zoological mix-and-match half-human monsters with color-changing fins and such, IN COMBINATION with decrepit farmhouses and drawling, hostile New England country folk. These two varieties of horror didn’t seem like a natural match, to me, and yet here they were, unapologetically wedded, in this purportedly important story. My roommate thought the only redeeming aspect of the story was the opening passage, a description of the discomfort one feels driving deeper and deeper into the wild rural countryside. I thought the ultimate monster (an enormous egg-shaped mess of “squirming ropes” with a “half face”) was odd enough to deserve some respect. We also appreciated the historical significance of horror that was based on cosmic abominations rather than on mere hauntings and curses. Both of us agreed that as a whole it was really, really junky.

Now, armed with first-hand knowledge of just what the hell “H.P. Lovecraft” was, I was better able to be baffled by the breadth of his reputation. Who were these crazies calling him one of the major writers of the twentieth century? How had they convinced Penguin, and then this year – Good Lord! – The Library of America!? to buy into this? Who dared invent the notion of a “Lovecraft scholar?”

I am fascinated by the fact that Lovecraft, a phenomenally bad writer of phenomenally pulpy PULP – I mean really, the very pulpiest imaginable – is held in such high esteem by what seems to be an ever-widening circle of nerdified critics. Here, for example, is Joyce Carol Oates going off unreservedly about Howard Phillips. It make me feel a little lightheaded to think that when they’ve been coaxed into the right mood, critics are willing to overlook (or even embrace) the most glaring, painful, high-school-literary-magazine-grade stylistic offenses. How am I supposed to learn taste from these people when nobody seems to object to this most obvious tastelessness? And yet, for all that, I am simultaneously attracted to Lovecraft’s aesthetic goals, and pleased by the idea that all this eager critical disregard for his screaming faults is apparently motivated by a general enthusiasm for those goals.

The man wanted to recreate the unnerving sensations akin to fear that arise during dreams and fevers. I think that’s cool. Like Lovecraft, I think that there is, at least, the impression of profundity in these feelings, a subconscious suggestion that perhaps our basic assumptions about perception, experience, life on Earth, consciousness, reality at its basic level – perhaps these are flawed and subject to revision based on new information. A bit like the Timothy Leary types who insisted that LSD showed them new truths, there is a potent and upsetting impression, in certain dreams, that one’s understanding of THE NATURE OF ALL THINGS has been broadened. It’s not just any old being-weirded-out, it’s ominous and important being-weirded-out. The principle, I suppose, is that a broad enough sense of uncertainty and unease can call one’s whole life into perspective, which can be a gratifying experience. This sort of impression is hard to recreate while awake and sober, but when you get it, it’s really something. Pondering death is a natural way to get there, as is any real consideration of the depth of time and the size of the universe. But the impressions caused by these real-world thoughts are not nearly as potent as those in dreams, because at some level, we ARE always aware that we will eventually die, or that the universe is vast beyond our capacity to imagine. Whereas until we have it, we are completely unaware of the impression, in a dream, that the whole world is purple and dark and is slowly tilting and creaking. The unnameable, everything-revising implications of that experience will be felt to the fullest. My post about Scriabin’s Prometheus talked a bit about this, and how I respect it as an artistic goal, and enjoy it as an experience.** Lovecraft was going for something like that.

He was, in fact, going for a very particular subcategory of this experience. He had given the subject a lot of thought, and most of his stories are fixedly dedicated to a certain upsetting notion; namely, that the unsettling dream world of horrible not-rightness is in fact part of our world, a reality that existed before historical time and continues to exist outside normal space. Poe put it at the south pole and in tombs; Lovecraft does those, but he also adds that it is in outer space, and, most importantly, somewhere magically parallel to us, the ether from which demons and such can be summoned. He takes old quasi-religious notions of ghosts and netherworlds from from the long tradition of alchemy- and magic-based ghost stories, and blends them with the surreal discomforts of dream-horror. Or he works dream-horror into the old mythological constructions about gods meddling among humans. Basically, his inspiration was that the powerful horror of the surreal can be worked into ghost stories, monster stories, god stories. That’s it. It’s a good idea, and yes, in one way or another it’s the foundational idea behind pretty much all horror today. I like it. Is it brilliant? I don’t know; it’s not as though Lovecraft really invented it himself. But he clarified it and pursued it with a certain consistency of concept, which is no small thing.

So to sum up: I think Lovecraft was a bad writer, but the idea(s) for which he’s known are good, and interesting to me.

I saw this book (this is about that book, remember) on display on the new non-fiction table when the translation came out earlier this year, and was immediately attracted by the title: Against the World, Against Life. It seemed to be talking about the crux of the Lovecraftian concept: that fascinating, horrifying dream-rejection of reality. The first pages were compelling; the author was talking about H.P. Lovecraft’s actual problems coping with the real world and suggesting that the peculiar anti-reality stance of his horror was actually a sort of philosophical position, and that it appeals to readers who at some level also hate reality. The psychological functions of horror interest me, and the idea of a book taking this tone toward Lovecraft seemed very appealing. I also think, for personal reasons, that Lovecraft’s biography of utter pathetic grinding hopeless failure is an interesting backdrop to his bad but beloved art, and seeing it worked into this thesis was satisfying. So (a little later) I bought the book and read it.

Unfortunately, it’s much more fannish and obnoxious than I expected. Houellebecq loves Lovecraft, and loves his own intensity in loving Lovecraft, and seems ultimately like another example of the fixation on Lovecraft himself that for some reason characterizes his readers. His emphasis on world-hating flaunts a sort of perverse enthusiasm that, I have read, is typical of Houellebecq, whose novels are apparently misanthropic in the extreme. With this sort of attitude, he’s not the right person to be discussing the work; he just barely feels that it needs defending, and most of his arguments seem like calmly self-satisfied perversion rather than a good faith offering of thought. The mission statement on the first page, “We need a supreme antidote to all forms of realism,” which struck me as charmingly bold at first, turns out to be a deadpan that is never dropped. Does he really believe it? Hard to say what that question means. One might well ask whether he really likes Lovecraft after all, or is just putting on a show. Though I am inclined to think that he really does like Lovecraft, since he talks about discovering him as a child. I think a kid’s enthusiasm for monsters is never a put-on. And I’m willing to believe that Houellebecq really thinks that life is beastly and horror is the proper response to it. But that, as they say, is his problem. He certainly didn’t convince me otherwise.

See this entry for a little bit about the book’s attitude toward Lovecraft’s prose style. Then check out this satisfying letter in which the excellent ghost story writer M.R. James (much admired by H.P.) mentions “one H.P. Lovecraft, whose style is of the most offensive.”

The one really valuable insight provided by the book (though still with a hint of tasteless, nihilistic pride) is that Lovecraft’s reccurent sub-human horrors are in fact directly derived from his own deeply felt racism. There is a really remarkable passage quoted from one of Lovecraft’s letters, sounding just like one of his overblown (“overblown” is much too mild a word) fictional passages of revulsion, but describing his experience walking down the ethnically mixed horror streets of New York City, where he briefly attempted to have a life and utterly failed. I felt like it really made everything about Lovecraft click into place – the fear we are being made to feel is racial fear, with all its various strata of disgust – pseudo-rational social and biological disgust, but always, fundamentally, a simple bigot’s displeasure with the unfamiliar. More generally, a man who lived his life alone in his room is a man whose basic discomfort with the unknown, even the benign unknown, must have been incredibly acute. It is as though his stories are furiously grotesque projections of, say, my mild anxieties about talking to strangers.

This psychological clue to Lovecraft’s horror, and horror in general, was interesting to me, and Houellebecq initiated it, but Houellebecq himself seems to dismiss it in favor of actually endorsing the conclusions Lovecraft drew about how awful life was, even as he illustrates their ridiculous extremity. What does Houellebecq think of Lovecraft’s phenomenal racism? He doesn’t lower himself to say; he’d rather keep up the show of being an apostle of nihilism.

Meanwhile, the introduction by Stephen King is really lazy and smarmy – this coming from someone who in general has no problem with Stephen King – and is an all-around bizarro pairing for the book. King offers us some downright stupid bitter put-downs for literary criticism in general, and then tells us that the present book isn’t really one of those books, even though it is. Then he rambles about himself at some length. My impression was that he had breezed through the book inattentively and is glad to write an introduction to just about anything. At one point he says something like, “I agree with everything that Houellebecq says…except for his idea that Lovecraft hated life and that you have to hate life to enjoy Lovecraft. In fact, that’s not true.” Seriously, he says that. It also made me cringe when he copies out Houellebecq’s flamboyantly niihilistic chapter-headings (“Attack the story like a radiant suicide,” “Utter the great NO to life without weakness,” etc.) and then says something dense like, “yeah, I agree with that.”

Which, finally, brings me to the Lovecraft stories that pad out the back of the book. I had read neither of them. The first was the famous “The Call of Cthulhu.” Cthulhu, for those of you who have never set foot in a comic book store, is a horrible octopusish god thing that lives in a sunken nightmare city and calls out psychically to sensitive types, who have bad dreams about him. The city rises up for a day in the Pacific somewhere, and some people in a boat come across it, and open a big portal, and Cthulhu rises out, but one guy gets away to tell the tale. There were elements of the story that were nice ideas – the idea that people all over the world are vaguely aware of this thing, that images of it show up in all different cultures, including ongoing secret cults, and that it has been sleeping since ancient times but will return…it’s all nice, though the awful prose slows it down. Most of the pleasure I took in these ideas came after reading the klutzy prose, digesting it, and then thinking about it all afterward. But the worst, I think, is that this dreamed thing actually shows up at the end of the story, and is basically a Godzilla – a big old slimy monster trudging out of the depths. I’ll grant that maintaining a sense of unreality is a tough challenge when the narrative approaches its object, but I would say this ultimately failed.

The second story was better, probably the best I’d ever read by H.P.: “The Whisperer in Darkness.” It was long but the prose was significantly cleaner than his other writing, I thought, so I didn’t much mind the length. This one was about evil aliens who live in New Hampshire. A not-so-clever but still effective conceit for keeping things at a satisfying distance is used – the horrors are mostly described to us by a skeptical narrator who hears about stuff through a written correspondence with a believer. The believer sends him bits of evidence that give him doubts. Etc. Then, in the last section of the story, the narrator travels up into the woods to meet the believer, whose letters have suddenly changed in tone and who now seems to love the aliens. You can see where this is going, but it goes there with a little bit of flair. The whisperer of the title is the believer character (maybe) sitting almost completely muffled up in the corner of the farmhouse, moving stiffly, and hoarsely telling the narrator about how wonderful it will be to have his mind removed from his body and taken to faraway worlds by the aliens. To the just-discovered Pluto, in fact, where the aliens are from. They call it Yuggoth.

It was actually kind of a fun story, though the final punchline is pretty clearly telegraphed by what comes before, so the ending is a little anti-climactic. But the horror, I would say, was not dreamlike, not really. This was your typical story of lobster aliens deceiving people in New Hampshire, and as such set itself an easier task.

Okay, I’m done with this, finally, though I just had another thought about Lovecraft, so I guess I’ll end with this. He writes in that style we know so well from old newspapers: the stilted, wordy, overpadded propriety of the mustachioed old men of the turn of the century. Despite the fact that it’s 1925, Lovecraft thinks that he’s one of those old men and he thinks that style is super keen, a really dignified, solid weight in his pen, which he, like those old men, will nourish with selected power words from his own particular storehouse, and bring to poetic heights with romantic outpourings. To him, his Oh god! The thing had no face! Such eldritch abominations cannot be! is just a new spin on the old O! My love, death has taken thee! And now his fans buy into it as well: Lovecraft was a great old man of literature; he wrote important texts with dignity.

Can’t we all be a little more embarrassed about all this? That’s all I ask.

* It’s really satisfying, coming up with ways to describe what’s so bad about Lovecraft’s writing. I have more adjectives if anyone wants to hear them.

**This is of course also something that the surrealist painters explicitly attempted, with, I would say, only occasional success. My quickie reviews: Magritte was too clumsy a painter and too conceptually “clever” to get these sensations across very often; his images have a satisfying waking mystery to them but aren’t actually very dreamlike. The sexual ones in particular don’t really work, I think. Dali was closer to the mark, but he was too caught up in the idea of populating his canvases with symbolic doodads and goo on stilts. That goes double for Yves Tanguy. Most of it feels pretty contrived and silly, not to mention ugly. Max Ernst had a particular couple of things he could convey, though a lot of his work doesn’t signify much to me and even some of the dream-ish stuff seems like icky overkill. De Chirico had that nice thing that he did over and over, which works for me. My dreams are often like that, though a little less flat. And where would UPA have been without him? Remedios Varo seems to be more and more popular these days, and I can see the appeal. A few too many tissue-paper vaginas and alchemists and wispy people for my taste, but the overall atmosphere is certainly effective, even if you think it’s schlocky.