Whenever
one of my non-Janeite friends or relatives sends me a link to a Jane Austen news
item on the Internet, invariably I was already aware of it via the multiple “nets”
I already have in place for catching such news as soon as it appears. Well,
Friday night was the exception that proves the rule, and makes me glad I have
such nice friends watching out for stuff I am interested in.
A
non-Janeite friend sent me the above link to a brief interview with Adelle
Waldman, the author of a new novel, The
Love Affairs of Nathaniel P, that sounded interesting to me---Why? Because
from just from the article title….
“Author
Adelle Waldman strove to create realistic MALE LEAD, EVEN IF HE ISN’T LIKABLE”
….I had
a strange hunch that Waldman’s novel had been inspired by Jane Austen’s writing,
and in particular by Emma. The
article title of course seemed to be a sly tip of the hat to Jane Austen’s famous
quote about Emma: “I am going to take
a HEROINE whom NO ONE but myself WILL MUCH LIKE” ( as to whom, by the way, I
believe Jane Austen was actually referring to Jane Fairfax, the shadow heroine
of Emma!).
And
sure enough, once I read the interview, and read the following in the
interview, her intentional emulation of Emma
became crystal clear:
”I
started thinking about how many books I had read by male authors about this
young guy who comes to the city and conquers it with his intellect and charm
and covers a wide swath of the female population and it’s all very charming. I
thought that there was something missing in some of these books. I think what
happens with a lot of these books is that there’s a truth about the man in the
center that’s being edited out and glorified. It just seemed really interesting
if I could focus on the aspects of the character being mean and I don’t just
whitewash over the ugly, daily, minute details of rating women and things that
I think a person wouldn’t write if they were trying to write a more
self-glorifying account. …I tried really hard to not think
about whether I or others would like Nate but the thing that I thought had to
be my guiding principle was for it all to feel real. I thought of guys that I
had dated and my friends had dated and guys who would be a jerk in some way and
then there were guys who could be mean but also admirable at times, and I just
felt like that’s what I’m going for. I want Nate to seem like a person that I
had met or could have met that’s hard to categorize. I didn’t want to analyze.
And I thought that sometimes he’s not the nicest of guys and maybe people don’t
want to read about this guy, but I shut that off because I really wanted to
write about him.” END QUOTE
So I
had to take a look, and yesterday, I browsed the first 50 pages of her novel
(less the handful of pages that Amazon.com didn’t allow me to read), and from
that sampling, it seems obvious to me that Waldman was trying to do what she saw JA do in Emma (but which, I suggest, JA actually did with all of her heroines,
just less obviously), i.e., to make the reader see the war of the sexes through
the protagonist’s eyes, while still allowing the reader enough additional
narrative perspective so as to be able to read between the lines and get a more
accurate, objective take of what happens outside the comprehension of the main
character’s narcissism.
As
you might have guessed, Waldman is light years away from the mastery of JA in
pulling off such a difficult literary stunt successfully, because the reader can
readily see, as you read along, what the alternative interpretations are which
the hero keeps missing. Whereas JA “sells” Emma’s point of view so much better,
on multiple levels, keeps it mysterious—but then again, the bar JA set was high—there
has never been a better such novel written in the history of Western literature,
after all.
Nonetheless,
from what I read, I think Waldman did a workmanlike job, she writes prose that
is quite intelligent and readable, and after 50 pages I was left curious to
know how things would turn out for her dubious “hero”.—those are good things,
and so I suggest you take a look at it yourself, and see if it piques your
interest.
The
rest of this post won’t be about Waldman the novelist but Waldman the literary
critic, and I have a mixed review of her in that capacity as well.
To
begin, it is highly ironic that, despite her putting Emma at the top of her list of Austen’s novels here….
….I
got no sense whatsoever that Waldman saw at all into the shadows of Emma, and I saw no sign of her attempting
to emulate JA by creating a palpable sense of mystery, of suggesting
alternative ways of reading various subordinate characters differently than is overtly
debriefed in the novel.
And I
quickly confirmed that Waldman indeed does not read Jane Austen the way I do,
from reading her article at Slate.com about Jane Austen:
Aside
from Waldman’s discussion of Persuasion
and Northanger Abbey, she does a
pretty good job of writing about P&P and MP from a mainstream Austen
scholarly perspective. But she betrays more about herself as a reader than she
does about Jane Austen, when she writes the following astonishing negative judgments
of Persuasion, into which I will
intersperse my own responses:
Waldman:
“Why do so many of Jane Austen’s smartest readers consider her weakest novel to
be her best? Persuasion, the story of
kind, helpful Anne Elliot—who made a mistake years ago and is still suffering
for it when the book opens—is didactic and full of crude, overdrawn
characterizations... The bad characters, whether snobbish, scheming, or
hypochondriacal, are unwaveringly bad. (Directed at such easy targets, satire
ceases to be satire. It’s more like gawking at roadkill.). The book’s good
characters are even worse: boring, smug and, after a while, downright
insufferable.” END QUOTE
The
(apparently) overdrawn characters Waldman is thinking of, and their respective,
defining, exaggerated “traits”, are obviously Sir Walter and Elizabeth Elliot
(snobbery), Mary Musgrove (hypochondria), Mrs. Clay and Cousin Elliot
(scheming), Admiral & Mrs. Croft (good-nature), and she should have added Louisa
Musgrove & Capt. Benwick (excessive sensibility). I have to hope she did not intend to include
Anne and Wentworth in the category of good characters who are “boring, smug,
and insufferable”!
As to
the admittedly over the top quality of some of the characters, I first would suggest that these are no
different in that regard from Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Collins, Lady Catherine, Mrs.
Norris, Miss Bates, Harriet Smith, Lucy Steele and other Austen characters who
are apparently extremes of their types. Why are they okay in the other novels,
but not in Persuasion? I’d be curious
to hear Waldman make a valid distinction between them.
But
second and more significantly, it apparently never entered Waldman’s mind that
this pervasive over-the-topness in Persuasion
might all be one giant set-up, a garden path fifty yards wide and nicely
paved, that JA has laid out in front of readers like Waldman, to lull such
readers away from reading suspiciously, and from looking for the complexity
hidden just beneath the farcical surface. Stated another way, what if the
cardboard characterizations are actually a reflection of Anne Elliot’s subjective
inability to penetrate the masks of those around her, and of Anne’s own subjective
prejudices which subtly distort her
perceptions of others?
Waldman,
by her comments, seems to take Austen’s characters pretty much at face value---she
never suspects that there may be more going on than meets the eye in passages
like the one in which Wentworth boasts to the Musgrove girls, which I have
written about a number of times…
….or
the passages in which Sir Walter reveals an amazingly subtle sense of humor and
range of knowledge about the admiralty, marine life and fossils:
And
there many more such passages in Persuasion,
just as there are in the other five novels. So Waldman, ironically, is like
Emma, actually, in this very regard. There’s more in Austen’s novels than
Waldman the critic has every dreamt of in her literary philosophy.
But
now this one-liner (she ranks JA’s best one-liners as well) is near the top of
the list of astonishing comments by her:
Waldman:
“[Persuasion] is also the least funny
of Austen’s books.” END QUOTE
I bet
we could get a great thread going in which people could list all their favorite
funny lines and funny passages in Persuasion—not
overtly funny like the witty farce of P&P
or Emma, or the charming repartee
of Northanger Abbey, but subtly darkly
funny like the humor of MP and S&S. Anyone who wants to start that
thread, please just speak up—otherwise, I will, in a few days.
EDITED LATER IN THE DAY TO ADD THE BELOW LINK TO MY FOLLOWUP POST ACNOWLEDGING WALDMAN'S ACCURACY RE PERSUASION BEING JANE AUSTEN'S LEAST FUNNY NOVEL:
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-relative-paucity-of-humor-in.html
EDITED LATER IN THE DAY TO ADD THE BELOW LINK TO MY FOLLOWUP POST ACNOWLEDGING WALDMAN'S ACCURACY RE PERSUASION BEING JANE AUSTEN'S LEAST FUNNY NOVEL:
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-relative-paucity-of-humor-in.html
But
then, in closing, Waldman protests so much against Persuasion having any merit whatsoever, that she goes to the considerable
trouble of rationalizing why certain other famous readers of Persuasion have been taken in by, and love, Persuasion:
Waldman: “And
yet many people whose taste is generally excellent—including, for instance, Slate’s
own Ron Rosenbaum and the literary critics William Deresiewicz and Harold Bloom
—consider Persuasion Austen’s
best book. Tastes may simply differ, of course, but I have a theory: I suspect
that some readers prize Persuasion because it is superficially more
“serious” than Austen’s other novels. Anne Elliot, at 27, is older than her
other heroines, who range from their late teens to their early 20s. Her plight
is also the saddest. While Austen’s other protagonists are optimistic about
their futures, by the time we meet Anne, she feels that her life has been
permanently blighted. Seven years before the novel begins, she broke an
engagement to the man she loved on the advice of a trusted friend, and she has
pined for him ever since. Her day-to-day life as an unattached woman is dreary.
She lives with her unpleasant older sister and her father, a vain,
unintelligent man, vulgarly proud of his well-preserved good looks and his
baronetcy. Her main solace is tending to the children of her silly,
self-involved younger sister. It’s hard not to be a little moved by the
barrenness of Anne’s life. Austen herself seemed to be: The mood and setting is
autumnal, and the prose is more lyrical than it is in her other novels. The
somber tone, the sadness of Anne’s situation—those alone may dispose some
readers toward Persuasion. Perhaps even some of Austen’s most fervent
admirers are a little embarrassed by her comedies of manners and her books’
supposedly trivial subject matter, the way each one ends with the marriage of
its heroine. Perhaps these readers hold up Persuasion, with its older,
sadder protagonist, as a counterargument to the charge of frivolity.
(Rosenbaum seems to do precisely this.) But Persuasion lacks not only
the comic sparkle of Austen’s other novels. It also lacks, relatively speaking,
the fineness of observation and the psychological nuance that is enough to make
any book—even the fairy-tale-like love story of a teenage girl and a wealthy
man—a great one.” END QUOTE
That unfortunate
theory I will just allow to speak for itself.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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