I was going to spend today's post gushing over Tobias Wolff's Old School, which I enjoyed immensely, but as I already wrote about it briefly last week, I feel like I'll just end up being repetitive. Aside from the gorgeous prose (crisp and clean--just like I like it, yet eloquent at the same time), the story has some marvelous passages that I think any reader or writer can appreciate and identify with. It seems like a deceptively simple story, but if you look below the surface Wolff writes about certain themes (race, class and identity) like someone who has lived them first hand and gets the reader thinking about them. And on a few occasions he does it all in a subtly humorous way.
One of my favorite chapters in the book deals with author Ayn Rand's visit to the school. I mentioned before that several times a year the students would compete for an hour with a famous author by writing a poem or short story that the author would read and then select one winning entry. I've never read Ayn Rand, and to be honest her work has never really appealed to me. I wish I could share the whole chapter, but I don't think the publisher would go for that. Instead I will share a couple of passages. Ayn Rand comes off as being highly opinionated and egocentric in the book. When the narrator questions her choice of 'greatest work by an American author' (her own work) and asks her 'what about Ernest Hemingway' (his idol) she ignominiously shoots him down, calling Hemingway's work and characters 'weak and defeated'. What I loved was the narrator's later musings about Ayn Rand, and how he looked at Hemingway's work and and saw in it the realities of everyday life. These are the sort of connections that make stories so powerful for readers.
This quote is a bit on the long side, but well worth reading. And Roark and Dominique are characters from The Fountainhead.
"It had dawned on me that I didn't really know anyone like Roark or Dominique. Though Ayn Rand insisted that such people existed and that she herself was one, my own experience of them was purely literary. Everyone I knew, even in the most privileged families, was beset by unheroic worries. A brilliant daughter made pregnant by her piano teacher, a sweet-tempered son gone surly and secretive, flunking out of school and shedding his friends and wrecking one car after another as if with a will; nervous breakdowns and squabbles over money. I had stayed with these families during holidays and long weekends, and among even the happiest of them I had learned to efface my presence at certain moments--the sound of a door slamming upstairs, a husband's dark silence as his wife poured herself yet another glass of wine."
"The people I knew, and the families I knew, were all more or less beset. And none of them--not one--seemed capable of the perfect rationality and indomitable exercise of will Ayn Rand demanded as a condition of respect. Nor, I had to admit, was I. Everyone was troubled, nobody measured up, and I began to think that the true failure lay in Ayn Rand's grasp of reality."
"Her ridicule of Ernest Hemingway brought this home to me. Not immediately, of course. My first reaction was shock--at her unfairness not only to the writer but to a character for whom I had a great liking. Wretched eunuch, she'd called Jake Barnes, as if the fact of such a wound, of woundedness itself, made him merely pathetic. I knew Jake pretty well, having read The Sun Also Rises twice the previous summer. He'd gotten about the worst break I could then imagine, but he wasn't wretched. He took pleasure in how Paris came to life in the morning. Pleasure in the food and drink and travel, in watching men face dangerous animals, in fishing, in friendship. Jake lingered on these things. He watched the life around him with interest. You could sometimes feel the pulse of hopeless longing, but you could not say Jake was wretched. It was wrong, and it was mean."
The Sun Also Rises was meant to be one of my summer reads, but it didn't quite happen. It's still on my radar, and I want to read it now more than ever. I think I'll still pass on Ayn Rand. But Tobias Wolff's Old School is one I heartily recommend. Cornflower's next selection is Rudyard Kipling's Selected Stories (discussion October 11). Although I got an early start on the collection, I've not picked it up as often as I had planned. I don't expect to finish it, but I will read as many stories as I can. I usually like to read stories in the order they appear in an anthology, but surely it doesn't matter? A historical novel, The Mysteries of Glass by Sue Gee, is the next book in line, which I am really looking forward to.
On the flip side of things The Slaves of Golconda are reading Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall for discussion at the end of the month. "Written as a series of vignettes and snatches of overheard conversations, Ruth Hall is as unconventional in style as substance and is strikingly modern in impact." I've only gotten the tiniest taste of her writing, but Nathaniel Hawthorne 'enjoyed the book a great deal', so I have high expectations. Of course anyone is welcome to join in the discussions.
