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Book Chat: The House of Mirth

So my girlfriend is going to graduate school, which means there is a whole fun curriculum of books she is reading that I can read and pretend that I am going to graduate school too! Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth is the first of these books, and it is kind of great.

Essentially The House of Mirth is a book about a dystopia such as one might read about in We, 1984, or Brave New World, a hellish world in which women have no power or agency, in which merely to be accused is to be tried, judged, and convicted in a swift, crippling blow, in which vast amounts of ingenuity must be expended in order to attach oneself to an available bachelor without one having one’s own ability to earn money directly in the profane world of business, in which the simple attempt to like invest money in the stock market in order to earn enough to pay off gambling debts one is kind of forced to accrue must be done through the auspices of men who expect sex as their reward. Basically it is a horrible story about a grim alternate reality in which women have no power, except that it’s just New York in the early 1900s.

Despite being kind of wicked smart, effective, and judicious within her circumstances, Lily Bart does not have either the courage to leave behind her society and class altogether or to like dutifully marry horrible men for the sake of their money, thus she dies in poverty. What bothers me a lot is how Wharton seems to join in condemning Lily, mostly through the alternately adoring and contemptuous eyes of Selden, the cool independent New York dude who does not mind living in a boarding house and having only moderate means, because it is more important to him to be True To Himself than it is to join all those rich jerks in their corrupt, evil social world. And Selden just can’t understand why Lily is such a jerk, why she wants to hang out with those rich jerks so much, when she could be her REAL ACTUAL SELF . . . with him! He is one of the good ones! She could be SO HAPPY!

Yet Lily can’t go off and be happy with Selden because she has to survive in a world where she’s just like definitively not free. Why should she want to be happy with Selden, even? At the end of Part I, Selden is all “I <3 you Lily wait for me to call on you,” but Lily is in the process of getting KINDA ALMOST RAPED by a friend of the family. He sees her coming out of this guy’s house in the dead of night, after being ACTUALLY SEXUALLY ASSAULTED, and is like “How terrible, LILY IS A REAL WHORE,” and storms away. And Edith Wharton kinda sides with him, one gets the impression. Appearances are everything!

I think The House of Mirth is pretty worth reading for a lot of reasons–the “tableaux vivants” scene is great and I want to have a tableaux vivants party at earliest opportunity, for example–but the author’s relationship with her main character is, um, problematic. But the character is great, and the depiction of her Totally Awful World is frankly scary. (The class stuff in the book is kind of odious–everyone is Really Really rich–but it’s interesting to see how much the author takes it as a given that no one actually deserves this wealth, or believes they deserve it. The American Dream is like in no way a part of this plot.) Fortunately I guess my characters are here to provide you all with the only truly correct, definitive interpretation of Lily Bart, through which you can better enjoy not only The House of Mirth, but perhaps all American literature ever.

Next update: MORE LILY BART RELATED FUN, OF COURSE

The Book without Qualities

I like this joke! I was also proud of not having to actually refer to the text of Ulysses, which is why I didn’t even know how to mispronounce “introibo” and why some sentences are missing. Presumably Mona owns the expurgated version or something, or maybe she blacked out sentences herself when she was in her rebellious early twenties! (Also, I haven’t read Robert Musil, so I’m dissing his work in a really frivolous and uninformed way, and if you have strong opinions about why I should read The Man without Qualities, PLEASE LET ME KNOW YOUR REASONING IN THE COMMENTS, or I’ll assume that you, too, haven’t read this book)

The thing I like least about the art in this comic is trying to draw Betty well! The Man Who Hates Fun has kids in it, and has had for a while, but it’s really distinctly hard to draw kids for some reason, especially when they’re supposed to be very young. Betty is supposed to be five going on six–how many people get that? Probably none, unless it’s by context! That said, I think the second panel here is one of the better efforts, and I’ll figure out how to do it better in time — already we’re better than something like this, where she looks like twelve.

News: I judged a short story contest on Tuesday! Here are the finalists, plus my comments on their work. My favorite wasn’t the one that won the finalist voting, but that is the nature of democracy in fiction!

Should be a new comic on Tuesday!

Doctor Christ-X and the Corrections

I want to go on record that this is the first appearance of William Gaddis’s US National Book Award winning novel, JR, to appear in any comic strip ever. I feel confident in making this assertion.

It’s possible that this is also the first time the works of Jonathan Franzen have been discussed with any degree of seriousness (um, in this case an extremely low degree of seriousness) in any comic strip ever. Perhaps this is funnier if you’ve read the Corrections? Okay, how many people have read The Corrections, or any book by Jonathan Franzen? WHAT DID YOU THINK?

I’ll start: The Corrections seems, despite its flaws, to be actually impelled by some kind of serious individual pain, and by the kind of moral questioning where you don’t know the answer in advance. Sure, evil drug companies have stolen the patent of a noble working man to disseminate a kind of evil brain drug to the masses, and sure, video games corrupt EVEN NARNIA, but there’s a sense that these are perhaps the best possible roads, and that the characters the book kind of forces us to identify with are really just Luddite scum for resisting the technological corruption of man in the name of happiness. You could make a pretty good case for both sides and the book is ambivalent in the best sense. Contrast with Freedom, which I hell of don’t like: Freedom’s moral dilemmas just sort of exist in a void. The answer to the question of whether mountaintop removal mining to save a single bird species is justified doesn’t seem that interesting to Franzen anymore: the large moral questions loom in the background, but essentially as flavor for the domestic drama, horrible wunderkammer set dressing: kid gets in big trouble selling bad Russian tank parts to US Blackwater-style contractors (that may be wrong; I don’t have the book on me, but something like that); husband faces pressure at work because mountain families refuse to move so that their land can be destructively mined; gentrification divides two families, etc. Think of it in TV Guide synopsis format: “An Occupy Wall Street protest forces Rick and Cindy to reassess their marriage,” “A bad investment in a Far Eastern iPhone sweatshop causes Michael to lose millions, creating tensions with his wife.” Whereas w/ The Corrections: “Incredibly unethical ecstasy-like drug allows Midwestern mom to cope with horribly dissolving marriage” — the social horror is more directly, satisfyingly tied to the situation.

(I also sort of remember writing this a few years ago: http://fictioncircus.com/news.php?id=46&mode=one. It’s a review of Franzen’s STRONG MOTION, whose plot I almost don’t even remember anymore. I think an evil corporation is generating earthquakes? I remember a really good scene with a raccoon living in horrible urban blight. But I stand by pretty much all of that review except the quality of the writing.)

Further: there’s a dejected quality to Freedom, whereas The Corrections had some kind of terrible sense of hope and possibility, like Kobo Abe-level terrible. I just don’t like Freedom. Who likes Freedom, or has any kind of thought about Franzen whatsoever, I guess?

Okay, so on Saturday we get to see where Inez works, plus also a desperate confrontation between Old and Young. Enjoy it!