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KLMNO Book World
LITERARY CRITICISM REVIEW BY ALBERTO MANGUEL
When the novel was novel
W
e tell stories to know the world. Stories teach us who we are and where we are. They
allow us to ask why and to imag- ine ourselves as someone or somewhere else. Readers can bring to life the world that an- other person, perhaps centuries and oceans away, has put into words for them and make it their own. Every reader becomes a wanderer like Ulysses, a lost ado- lescent like Holden Caulfield, a murderer like Raskolnikov, a se- ducer-victim like Lolita, a justice- seeker like Don Quixote. Through the ages this distinctly human im- pulse to inhabit an imaginary world has taken many forms be- fore becoming what is known to- day as the modern novel. Steven Moore, a former manag- ing editor of the Review of Con- temporary Fiction, has attempted to trace the roots of the modern novel to the first stories told
of a genre he calls “tranny clas- sics” — a group that includes Vir- ginia Woolf’s “Orlando” and Gore Vidal’s “Myra Breckenbridge” — back to a late 11th-century anony- mous Japanese novel, “The Changelings,” a book whose gen- der-crossing protagonists seemed scandalous to generations of read- ers well into the 19th century. As astute and thorough as this book is, however, it is based on a tenuous premise: That “the stan- dard history of the novel” states that the form “was born in 18th- century England.” This is not quite fair. A whole library of histo- ries of the novel has traced the genre’s origins to the same an- cient sources that Moore discuss- es. Margaret Anne Doody’s “The True History of the Novel” (1996) is perhaps the best known, but in the 1930s, Dorothy L. Sayers was tracking the detective novel back to the Bible and the Greeks. In the 1890s, Spanish scholars searched for models of Don Quixote in an- cient tales such as the Alexander Romance and the Kalilah and Dimnah story cycle. Though it is true that the word
THE NOVEL An Alternative History:
Beginnings to 1600
By Steven Moore Continuum. 698 pp. $39.95
around campfires in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Moore’s survey is splendidly comprehensive and shows a true passion for his sub- ject. Ranging from those early an- cestors to the classics of Asian fic- tion, from the love stories of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the philosophical fables of the Enlightenment and well into our time, the book displays Moore’s impressive knowledge of the world of make-believe. Not only does he explore the delightful in- tricacies of such classics as Apule- ius’s “The Golden Ass” and the Sanskrit Panchatantra, but he guides us through the adventures of early Egyptian heroes (from which Agatha Christie, among others, drew inspiration), the love tribulations of the Greeks, the co- lossal enterprises of Indian demi- gods and the vast family sagas of Japan and China. The Arthurian legend, the Scandinavian epics and the picaresque tales of medi- eval Europe are also subjects of his keen analysis. Moore makes deft connections
between past and present, too. For instance, he tracks the lineage
“novel” did not come into com- mon use in Europe until the 18th century, the thing itself thrived under many other names in the literatures of almost every coun- try. When in the early 16th centu- ry the term “novel” began to be used in English to describe a cer- tain kind of narrative (a short his- tory first and an extended tale af- terward), the split between fiction and reality became so ingrained in the collective psyche that less than two centuries later, in 1726, when Jonathan Swift published “Gulliver’s Travels” as a “true ac- count,” a certain Irish bishop ob- served that “the book was full of improbable lies, and for his part he hardly believed a word of it.” For the bishop, a book had to be fiction or nonfiction: It could not be both. Leaving aside the question of originality, Moore tells his story with erudition and wit, and in do- ing so restores to the reader of good fiction confidence in the craft. Ultimately, Moore’s book is less a genealogical history of the novel than a reader’s treasure trove. It is also a celebration of challenging novels such as “Fin- negans Wake” and “The Death of Virgil.” These books, Moore points out, “are admittedly not for every- one” (and he could add to the list the remote classics enshrined in the libraries of archeologist-schol- ars), “but they are for some of us.” Exactly.
Reading, in the deepest, most
difficult, ultimately satisfying sense, is, and always was, the craft of an elite, but, in spite of what demagogues and anti-intellectu- als would have us believe, an elite to which almost anyone can choose to belong.
bookworld@washpost.com
Alberto Manguel is the author of numerous books, including, most recently, “A Reader on Reading.”
SUNDAY, AUGUST 22, 2010
MARCO CIBOLA
MEMOIR REVIEW BY HELLER MCALPIN Magical Thinking,” MEMOIR
BABY, WE WERE MEANT FOR EACH OTHER In Praise of Adoption By Scott Simon Random House. 180 pp. $22
Scott Simon’s first night as an adoptive parent wasn’t an easy one. Holed up in a hotel on a rainy night in Nanchang, China, he and his wife tried everything to comfort their new daughter as she cried. “Her eyes were dull, defiant, and blistering. Her small cheeks burned so, I wondered if her tears would sizzle,” he writes. Still, the hysteria could not mitigate the deep feelings
Simon and his wife felt for the child. “Our baby had opened new cham- bers in our hearts,” he writes. That sense of completeness and unconditional love is what anchors “Baby, We Were Meant For Each Other,” Simon’s memoir of adop- tion. Simon weaves together his own experience adopting two daughters from China with the sto- ries of other adoptive parents and adopted children. Simon, an NPR host, and the families he interviews are strikingly candid about the chal- lenges of adoption and the events that lead to it — the suspense and heartbreak of unsuccessful fertility treatments, the nosy questions from neighbors about how much a child costs, the decision of whether to respond to overtures from a bio- logical parent. Simon’s unvarnished portrait is nonetheless an ode to adoption and the joy it can bring to both parent and child. It’s clear that each family Simon highlights, in- cluding his own, is bound by a strong sense of generosity, empa- thy and love.
— Sarah Halzack
halzacks@washpost.com
searing memoir about losing her hus- band to heart failure. But that’s as- suming it makes it to your shelf: This is a book you’ll want to share with your own “necessary pillars of life,” as Caldwell refers to her nearest and dearest. What’s the draw in reading about “unspeakable sorrow”? Well, despite Caldwell’s assertion that “the only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course,” sensitive por- traits of love and loss stir our nobler, empathic feelings, reminding us of our possibilities — and realities — as human beings. Actually, Caldwell’s book is more
Y
heartwarming than devastating. It’s about the joys of friendship as much as the ravages of “intolerable loss.” She evokes the sort of soul mate most of us yearn for. A Pulitzer Prize- winning book critic for the Boston Globe, Caldwell writes of meeting Caroline Knapp, a columnist for the Boston Phoenix, in the mid-1990s: “Finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had con- ceived.” They certainly had a lot in com- mon: Both writers were exercise fa- natics who were single by choice and temperament and worked at home. Each lived alone in Cambridge, Mass., with a beloved dog. Both were high strung, sensitive and thin. Caldwell, nearly nine years older, had grown up in the Texas Panhandle and survived not just a “family tree [with] a root system soggy with alcohol,” but child-
A friend is a light in the dark
ou can shelve “Let’s Take the Long Way Home,” Gail Cald- well’s beautifully written book about the best friend she lost to cancer in 2002, next to “The Year of Joan Didion’s
LET’S TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME A Memoir of Friendship By Gail Caldwell
Random House. 190 pp. $23
hood polio that left her with a limp. She had “given up a lot of what didn’t work,” including cigarettes, and was disturbed that Knapp, who had beat- en anorexia and was the daughter of a Cambridge psychoanalyst, continued to smoke until shortly before her di- agnosis with Stage 4 lung cancer. An even deeper connection was their shared history of alcoholism — “that empty room in the heart that is the essence of addiction.” Both had stopped drinking in their early 30s, a fact Caldwell gleaned from Knapp’s forthright 1996 memoir, “Drinking: a Love Story,” before they became close. Caldwell had told few people about her sodden past. She writes about her alcoholism for the first time, partly be- cause of its importance to her link with Knapp. “I used to think this was an awful story — shameful and dra- matic and sad. I don’t think that any- more. Now I just think it’s human, which is why I decided to tell it.” The two women bonded over their dogs, which they took on rambling, bucolic, “analytic walks.” They had “endless conversations about wheth- er we were living our lives correctly,” discussions they prolonged by delib- erately taking the long way home. In “Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Be- tween People and Dogs” (1999), Knapp described these walks as “one of the most sustaining aspects of my life, weekly shots to the soul of con- nection and laughter.” Together, the two women were “the
merry recluse” and “the cheerful de- pressive” who “named the cruel inner taskmaster we each possessed the In- ner Marine” and “gave the other per- mission to lower the bar.” Caldwell in-
troduced Knapp to the joys of swim- ming laps, while Knapp initiated Caldwell into rowing on the Charles River. How’s this for an elegant de- scription of how a supportive friend helps you blossom? “The dailiness of our alliance was both muted and es- sential: We were the lattice that made room for the rose.” If you want a great memoir written about you, it helps if you’re close to a writer: Trite as it sounds, writers process life by writing about it. As Caldwell comments, writing about Knapp years after her death helped provide “a happy limbo in which I have brought her along on the jour- ney.” Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” may be the mother of all friendship biogra- phies; Caldwell’s memoir is more akin to the recent spate of tributes to writ- er-spouses, including Didion’s “Magi- cal Thinking,” John Bayley’s “Elegy for Iris” and Donald Hall’s “Without,” along with Ann Patchett’s “Truth and Beauty,” about her intense friendship with writer Lucy Grealy. Caldwell is aware that she’s telling “an old, old story”: “I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too,” she opens, noting later that “it’s taken years for me to understand that dying doesn’t end the story; it transforms it.” Actually, what transforms the story is a combination of fearlessness and grace. Caldwell dares to ask, “What if dying weren’t a bad thing?” and concludes, “Caroline’s death had left me with a great and terrible gift: how to live in a world where loss, some of it unbearable, is as common as dust or moonlight.” Her memoir, a tribute to the enduring power of friendship, is a lovely gift to readers.
bookworld@washpost.com
Heller McAlpin reviews books regularly for
NPR.org, the Los Angeles Times and the Christian Science Monitor.
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