Apologies are in order for last night’s somewhat testy paragraphs about circling like a dog. It was one of those late-night mistakes; too tired to write about what was really on my mind (that’s what I’m doing now), but determined not to write about what was bothering me (never finding the time to write about what’s on my mind, a topic that I find at least Ï€ times more irritating than you do), I turned my attention to a problem that I’m actually well on the way to solving. Perhaps that’s what made it possible to make use of the metaphorical frustration of endless circling: the end is in sight.

The problem is, in a word, reviews. I don’t write reviews. A review is a notice designed to steer the buying public to or from books, plays, movies, and other optional entertainments. Ideally, a reviewer communicates her interest and enthusiasm (or their opposites) without giving away too much of the novelty that the buying public rightly craves. Even more important than getting the facts right, for a reviewer, is knowing the language and expectations of his readership; without this, the reviewer will say either too much or not enough. Reviewing is a service industry, designed to help people save and spend time and money wisely. It is not to be confused with criticism.

Don’t think me sniffy. Reviewing is very hard work, and you’d think that it would be in the interest of arts providers to see that it is done well. They don’t, and the job is generally pretty badly done. Week after week, I peruse the pages of The New York Times Book Review and am amazed by the lack of rigor and even attentiveness. As I parcel out my complaints in this area elsewhere in my digital domain, I’ll say no more about it now, except to note that every now and then someone slips in what is effectively a good blog entry. I’ll come back to that.

What I have to say about the books that I read (and the movies that I see, but not so much the plays and concerts that I attend), snaps naturally into two kinds of writing, each lying on one side or the other of the well-done review. For my Web sites, Portico and now Civil Pleasures, I write what used to be called “appreciations.” These are intended for people who have read the book in question and are curious to see what others have to say about it. The appreciation is in many functional ways an inversion of the review: spoilers are not a problem, but frothy enthusiasm is out of place. The accent shifts from the fun to be had to the source of the fun.

Appreciations may not be harder to write than book reviews, but they require a good deal of thought, and plenty of rumination, too — by which I mean that you can’t expect to appreciate a book the day after you put it down. Judgments must settle and clarify. In most cases, the book has to be read a second time before it can be written about comprehensively — comprehensiveness being, I hasten to note, the last thing that the consumer of a book review is interested in. What I’ve really been circling, this past year, is the problem of finding time for that second reading, not to mention the writing-up itself.

The other kind of writing is about me, not the book. It’s about how I feel the day after putting it down — or, even better, the minute after. This isn’t as easy at looks, but it is the sort of thing that I can usually write off the top of my head. Why haven’t I done it more often? Well, I’m still catching up to the iPad, and to what I call “reading the Internet.” In the bad old days, blog entries had to be kept short, no matter how easy they might be to read. The difference between the blog entry and the Web page became for me the difference not between improvisational and deliberate but between short and long. Writing short doesn’t come naturally to me. As is already evident right here.

In any case: calling for New Forms! (With hopes of being less futile than Konstantin Gavrilovich), I offer a roundup of some books that I’ve read recently.

¶ I’ll begin with the book that I mentioned last night, Hans Keilson’s Comedy in a Minor Key, translated by Damion Searle. The German original (Komödie in moll) appeared in 1947, but has only just been rendered in English. The time is right, I think. Until very recently, Comedy would have been read as a Holocaust book, and readers might have objected to its mordantly smiling tone. (Keilson, it must be noted, is of Jewish background; he is also still with us, at the age of 100 — 101 next month.) Very little can be said to people who have not read the book through (it’s quite short, a novella with the heft of a novel).

By the third page, we have learned all the basic plot elements (save one, a detail that gives the book a propulsive kick about twenty pages before the end). Toward the end of World War II, somewhere in a coastal city in the Netherlands, a stranger who has been hiding in an upstairs room of the home of a married couple has now taken ill, and is about to die — of natural causes! A somewhat hasty search indicates that the stranger’s being a Jew is not stated until page 25, but anyone who requires that disclosure is too young to be reading this novel on general grounds. By page 25, by the way, the stranger — his hosts call him “Nico” — is long dead. And yet, thanks to the author’s agile shifts of time frame, never obtrusive but never missed, either, we’ll hear a lot more from Nico, and in a way he has the last word. But the book is not about Nico. It is about his beneficiaries, Wim and Marie.

Wim and Marie are good people, and at no point in the story do they do anything that isn’t morally unexceptionable. There is nothing special about them — Keilson almost goes overboard in stressing their ordinariness. (But only almost.) They do fret a bit, Marie especially. It turns out that doing the right thing — hiding a Jew in their home is presented as a “patriotic” act — is complicated, and it’s easy to trip over complications. Let’s just say that, not being saints, Wim and Marie expect, however unconsciously, to reap a reward for saving Nico — or at least for doing everything that they can to save him. Comedy in a Minor Key is about how circumstances force Wim and Marie to confront their expectations, and, in the process, lose their innocence. It occurred to me as I was brisking through the last pages of the novel that Keilson has retold the Adam and Eve story, only without the damning transgression (quite the reverse), and without the exile from Paradise. But Wim and Marie do eat from the tree of knowledge, however unknowingly, and the result is that Paradise goes up in smoke as if it never existed.

I have to point out that this is one of the best-titled books ever. It is a comedy, and the comedy is in a minor key. There are no laughs, but almost every page brings a smile. We’re ready for Keilson’s ironies; we’re beginning not to be ashamed of how poorly we understand ourselves. Unpacking Keilson’s immense narrative skill can’t be attempted, though, until the finale has been digested a bit. In most suspenseful books, you want to know how the story comes out. In Comedy, you’ve got to see how it comes out before you know what the story really was.

When I mentioned this book to a doctor the other day, she told me that she has in-laws who were “in the camps,” and that they’re very prone to making odious distinctions about suffering: people who were hidden through the war didn’t, in their view, suffer as much as people in the camps did. I wrote down the information on a prescription form — for her, not for her in-laws. They’re past saving: what could be more American than competing about suffering?

¶ Walks With Men is a comeback event for Ann Beattie. (Isn’t it?) Where “a novel” would appear on the cover, it says “fiction” instead. It’s about the same length as Comedy in a Minor Key, and that’s about all that the two books have in common. I read the book a few weeks ago, and too much time ahs passed for me to make any positive statements about it, but I can say that it took me for a walk down memory lane, back to the good old days when the exhibition of a pleasant personality provoked the scorn and contempt of people who considered themselves intelligent. Ms Beattie’s narrative style is similarly unhelpful. If her tone of voice weren’t so bland and impersonal, her book would be one long act of rudeness. It reminded me how angry I used to be at my bright college friends for wearing the tedious and annoying patina of disaffection. Beattie suggests that it would be thick to allocate the attention that she pays to the parts of her story to their relative importance. 

Jane Jay Costner, a writer who had a splash and then a big success not longer after getting out of college — we’re in the Eighties — tells us how she fell in with another writer, a man called Neil. Walks With Men ought to be all about Neil, but it’s not; there’s also the man whom Jane left in order to be with Neil. Plus a couple of cutups who live in Jane’s building in Chelsea. Jane almost leaves Neil when she finds out (from his wife) that he’s married, but she doesn’t. Neil gets a divorce and marries Jane. In what feels like a very short time, Neil tells Jane that he is going to disappear, becoming legally dead. In the forty pages between the wedding and this announcement, about ten pages go to a drama involving Jane’s old boyfriend, and even more than that are divided between Neil’s wife (sans Neil) and Jane’s goofy housemates. Pffft! Neil’s gone. Perhaps this is how it ought to be, given Neil’s fondness for astute-sounding aphorisms. Perhaps an editor worried that any more of Neil would cause readers to tear the book apart with their bare hands. Worse, maybe someone told Ms Beattie that Neil is funny. Well, he is, in a pathetic sort of way.

• When you travel to Europe, never wear a fragrance from the country you’re in. In France, wear a perfume made in Italy.
• Notice who the cinematographer is. In the future, see movies based on that.
• When depressed, look at Halsman’s photographs of people jumping, especially the Duchess of Windsor.

Walks With Men reminds me of the time when pompous buffoons gave the exhibition of a well-stocked mind the bad reputation that it has to this day. Back in the early Eighties, when Ann Beattie was The New Yorker‘s must-read short story writer, I despaired of ever being so sophisticated. Now I just cluck my tongue. I can’t say that I minded finding out what Beattie is up to these days.

¶ The Finkler Question, by Howard Jacobson. Why did I read this book? It had just won the Man Booker Prize when I found it on a table at Crawford Doyle, out in paper already. I can’t have had any idea that it would remind me David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury — two writers named by James Wood in his withering New Yorker piece — but I did feel that reading a comedy about Jewishness would be daring and different. Different because I avoid ethnic fiction, although not so rigorously as I used to do. Daring because I grew up in a Westchester suburb where no one would sell a house to a Jew, and my shame moots any and all attempts to make judgments “about Jews.”

I happened to like Jacobson’s tone of voice right away, and I was happy to spend time in his company. But his story is not even clear enough to be dismissed as “shaggy dog.” Don’t worry about my summarizing the plot for you, because I wouldn’t want to misrepresent the book as having one. This isn’t to say that nothing happens — but it’s pretty much one-damned-thing-after-another, until we have the pleasant sense of knowing his characters — three men and two women — about as well as we need to know them. The screech of gears at the very end, where Jacobson hastily improvises a dramatic finale, was so loud that I couldn’t make sense of what was actually happening.

I could see quite clearly that The Finkler Question would have driven me crazy as recently as ten years ago. Age has definitely altered my tolerance. Jacobson’s characters spout a great deal of flash-frozen protein about Israel and anti-Semitism, but they do it so well, with such zesty panache, that I just smiled along with them. The absence of a real plot was a good thing, too; it tended to diminish the characters’ responsibility for their actions — very much as friendship does.  

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, November 5th, 2010 at 7:08 pm.