I have graduated from Swarthmore College, and now admit that my skills are totally useless. I've been spending four years doing what I love: reading books and writing about them. I don't just mean literature, I also mean history books and all kinds of other things. And most horrifically, all I've ever really wanted to become was a writer (like everyone else on the internet). Here's what I think: why the hell should I need a PhD in literature to write quality criticism?
I recently read a book by Doris Lessing called The Golden Notebook, and she said in her 1971 introduction to that book (which has since won numerous prizes) that she gets thousands of letters a year asking "for a thousand details of total irrelevance, but which they have been taught to consider important." She tells those kids, "why don't you read what I have written and make up your own mind about what you think, testing it against your own life, your own experience. Never mind about Professors White and Black." She never went to college, and educated herself entirely by reading whatever she thought was worthwhile. In her opinion, literary critics usually focus on things that are stupid and petty, and have arbitrary standards for what makes good literature. Because she wrote popular books and has won a Nobel prize, she must be right (irony intended). In all seriousness though, I agree with her.
Now I intend to create my own kind of literary criticism. And just like Doris Lessing said, now that I have graduated, I plan never to read literary reviews again. Keeping up with modern literary thought be damned! I will not even be constrained to writing about books that have been recently published, to help you determine whether or not you should buy it. THIS BLOG will be about whatever book I have most recently read. That said, I will only write about books that I liked for some reason or another, ones that spurred my thoughts. In fact, this is not actually because I am being 'individualistic' or even 'controversial,' it's because I am unemployed, and can only afford to buy books that have been out for a while. So those are the ones that I will review! My formats will hopefully be somewhat like the way I reviewed the following.
Book 1: The Golden Notebook
This novel has several layers. It is about a writer, Anna Wulf, formerly Anna Freeman, who wrote a novel several years ago but cannot seem to produce another piece of work. Instead, she keeps several notebooks. A yellow notebook contains a novel she is writing about a sort of ultra-ego, Ella, who is having an affair with a man named Paul. It is pretty clear that it is an autobiographical novel about Anna and the man she has an affair with, Michael. Interestingly, Ella the character is also writing a novel, about a man who is taking all of the steps in his life towards suicide without recognizing it until one day he decides to commit it (psychological question: were they really leading up to suicide, or did it just seem that way when he was depressed and finally thinking about doing it?). A blue notebook contains a record of her thoughts and feelings, for a time recording daily events, and later in describing her attitudes in a much later affair she has with an emotionally abusive American writer. A red notebook records Anna's disillusionment with the communist party. There is also a novel, Free Women, that serves as a frame for the whole network of notebooks, written in third person about Anna (and presumably by Anna once she gets herself together and finally produces another piece of literature). The Golden Notebook is a notebook that she creates at the end of the novel to try to tie the parts of her disparate life together, although it is hardly so conclusive; reading the description on the back of the book I had expected that it would all come together at this point, but in fact, her relationships with these people simply desintegrate and you get the feeling that the book just sort of ends rather than finding some sort of greater truth to take home (which I realize would have been a silly thing for me to expect given the tone of this novel: this book is painfully realistic, and life does not offer answers so cleanly).
Why you should not read this book:
It is very long, and it will make you very sad. It sucks you into a world of discontentment; in fact, brooding is even a theme in the novel. Young Tommy, the son of the friend whose house she lives in for some time with her daughter, accuses her of condemning the whole world in her little private notebooks and then refusing to give the world a chance to respond by refusing to publish. It also means there are hundreds of pages of beautiful, intensely dense analysis of the loneliness that she feels, of the cruelty of the thoughtless or emotionally abusive men with whom she has affairs.
Why you should read this book:
This book feels incredibly complete to me because it tells the same events in so many different ways, from so many different perspectives. I loved that it created such a wide universe of explanation. She is able to abstract into Anna or concentrate into an 'I' which allows for multiple ways of seeing and explaining the same unexplainable phenomena. I love novels best when they try to explain something un-explainable. Here are the un-answerable questions: how did this happen to me? Why do I feel this horrible way that I do? It centers around that trauma and offers a variety of explanations: this guy is a jerk, society is arranged such that women have horrible opportunities and little choice such that they end up with jerks, this was the person who she happened to meet at a particular time in her life and somehow through chance they came together. And of course there is ultimately no answer to all of this, just a very thoughtful, painful pondering.
What it sparked in me:
What is the use of thinking and pondering all of the horrible things that have happened in your life? Is there ultimately something wrong in saying how you feel? If you feel horrible, and you say that you feel horrible, does it simply confirm your suspicion that you feel horrible, whereas you could have said nothing at all, and perhaps you would have been distracted by something else and ultimately felt a different way? If you hadn't explicitly said you felt horrible, when you thought back on that time you might just remember the feeling after it, in which case maybe you never have felt really horrible after all...
Being happy is a very difficult thing to accomplish. Novels that seem meaningful in this way, that seem to grow out of some kind of trauma and try to explain something have been so powerful to me in the past (I am thinking of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz and Bone by Fae Myenne Ng). But I am always wondering this same thing: is creating out of a process of brooding necessarily bad?
Especially as a blogger, I feel that people write not necessarily to be heard, but to remind themselves that they are alive. You need to articulate a voice that could be heard, even if it isn't, so that you can be sure it is really there, that your process of observing the world must be an active one if you are able to spout on about it: I do exist! Because I read this book! Or I saw that movie! Or I walked outside and I saw a gorgeous sunset and then said to myself: "The yellow ball of the sun disappeared behind the rapidly greying bay, leaving a smear of yolky orange behind as Mr. Jones, seeing but unobservant, tried to find a way to cross the road without bumping into a confused tourist gazing across the water."
Novels about trauma turn out beautiful and real because they seem vitally important, the emotions seem to really matter. They are enjoyable because of the emotional sensation that they cause, not because they offer life lessons. But are articulating those emotions as a writer, or experiencing them as a reader, eventually only harmful to your emotional health, especially given that books like these never come to a satisfactory conclusion? I think Lessing herself wonders this about her book. She calls Anna's previous novel a 'negative' one that never helped anyone. So what's the point?
Note: Doris Lessing said that she hates blogs in her Nobel prize speech. Probably because they are narcissistic and use a bunch of emotional energy without forming them into something meaningful (like a novel). But wait...that's exactly what Anna does in her notebooks...And even the conclusion that leads her to write a second novel just sparks these emotional sensations that cause more questions in an endless cycle of circling around feelings and events. So what's the point?
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