A review of Francine Prose's review of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch - "Doesn’t anyone care how something is written anymore?"

Today I review a review of a book I have not read.  So many good ideas in one place.

The book is current sensation The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, an author I have never read; the review is by novelist Francine Prose in the New York Review of Books, January 9, 2014, pp. 10-12 (unfortunately subscriber-only).  The review is entirely negative.  Prose is dismayed by Tartt’s novel.

Because I have an ideally equable critical temperament, if I were to read The Goldfinch, which given its 2013 publication date and 771 pages is unlikely, I would surely enjoy its pleasures and wince at its faults.  Prose’s review is 100% wincing.

Come to think of it, I have never read any of Prose’s books either.  I would probably like them, too.  What is easier than liking a book?  All sorts of people do it every day.

Prose’s review is useful for the way it pins down an approach to literature.  I share a lot of her assumptions.  Prose begins her piece with an overview of the word “Dickensian,” misapplied to this novel she thinks (this part is available at the link).  Does the word mean “long” or “lots of characters” or “orphans” – and Tartt is Dickensian in this sense – or does it mean “the depth and breadth of his powers of observation, his cadenced, graceful language”  and a long list of other attributes which can be packed into one word, “style.”  All of us, Prose and I who are thinking of style, and others who are referring to content, mean “in the manner of Dickens.”

The Goldfinch is about an orphan who falls in with a bad crowd, a bit like Oliver Twist, including a version of the Artful Dodger.  He is not actually an orphan, but has a father who is utterly useless – if this is not in the manner of Dickens, nothing is.  Unlike Oliver Twist, the entire big book is in the first person, so a grown-up Oliver is telling his own story, making the book a lot more like Great Expectations.  A painting and a lot of stuff about fine art is in the novel, too, about as un-Dickensian a subject as there is.

I am picking this up from reviews, that of Prose and others.  But as I paw through the book (a library copy), I come across bits like “The night was a dreamlike mangle of past and present: a childhood world miraculously intact in some respects, grievously altered in others, as if the Ghost of Christmas Past and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come had joined to host the evening” (468) and

The other section of Honors English was reading Great Expectations.  Mine was reading Walden; and I hid myself in the coolness and silence of the book, a refuge from the sheet-metal glare of the desert.  (234)

Cute, right, the presence of the absence of Dickens.  But I have not read the novel, so perhaps there are as many parallels with and references to Henry David Thoreau.

Neither of those fragments sounds the least bit like Dickens.  Prose goes after Tartt for “sections that seem like the sort of passages a novelist employs as placeholders, hastily sketched-in paragraphs to which the writer intends to go back,” generic descriptive lists, and the frequency of clichés, although Prose is wrong about this point, since the character should actually be using far more clichés.  This is, after all, his first book, and he is writing a memoir, not a novel.  I assume this problem is explained away early in the novel.  Perhaps Theo Decker murdered someone.  “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”  The narrator’s name is, yes, Theodicy.

Near the end of the review Prose invokes Great Expectations herself, the paragraph describing Mrs. Havisham’s bridal banquet, which is cheating – of course The Goldfinch has no sentences that good – and a bit of Edward St. Aubyn’s druggy Bad News in order to highlight Tartt’s “careless and pedestrian language” and demonstrate “why I found it difficult to respond when strangers assumed I was ‘loving’ Tartt’s novel as much as they were…  Reading The Goldfinch, I found myself wondering, ‘Doesn’t anyone care how something is written anymore?’”

A cry from the heart after my own heart, since I care about little else, but why should everyone else care about what Francine Prose and I care about?  I hope a book blogger who loves The Goldfinch is working on a five-part rebuttal to Prose right now – The Goldfinch in fact is well-written and ingeniously constructed, full of traps for unsuspectingly narrow readers like Francine Prose, and here is how Tartt did it.  I would love to read that.

I've run out of reviews, which is fine with me

Now I really have run out of reviewable books. I had some ideas, but none of them quite worked.

For example, I thought I might review Matthew Arnold's first book, The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems (1849), and really trash it; that was the joke, just dismiss Matthew Arnold as junk. These lines, from the title poem, would be central, somehow:

With large-leav'd, low-creeping melon-plants,
And the dark cucumber.

That still seems terrible. Read that second line aloud - is there any saving it? Maybe I'll do this later.

Or how about a review of Melville's Mardi (1849)? Since almost no one has read this, which is just how it should be, I really could review it. Meaning, describe its contents, put it in some context, make a recommendation, which is, unless you are particularly interested in Melville, stay away. Maybe you should be particularly interested in Melville, but that's a separate issue. The book is a disaster, although an instructive one that may also pop up again next week.

My best idea was to review either The Jewish Cowboy (1942) by Yitsik Rabon, or The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas (1910) by Alberto Gerchunoff. I haven’t read either of those books, and almost doubt that they exist. But the Argentinean setting of the latter led me to think of Borges, who wondered why someone would actually write a book, when he could just assume the book existed and proceed accordingly. Same goes for reviews, surely. I could just review the book that The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas should be. A wonderful, wonderful book.

Let me just check something. Huh. University of New Mexico Press, 1998. So it turns out that a person - say, me - could actually read The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas, which does, in fact, exist. Says it's recommended for Jews and non-Jews alike. Hey, that’s me! Let me just - excuse me for a moment - just make a note here. OK. Review forthcoming. No promises about The Jewish Cowboy.

It never really occurred to me that I would want to review books, rather than just write about them in whatever way struck me as interesting. An image, a metaphor, a connection to another book, a quotation. All of this aside from the ludicrous aspect of a floor-to-ceiling review of, say, Wuthering Heights. Not that, per the evidence collected by the indefatigable Brontëblog, anyone cares much about that. Very few of the people I read on a regular basis do much reviewing as such. They just write about books.

When I first started poking around on litblogs, I was genuinely surprised that I found so much really high quality amateur book reviewing, as good or better than most newspaper reviewing. I'm thinking of blogs I don't even regularly look at, specialists in so-called Young Adult novels, or mysteries or what have you, mostly writing about books I'll never read. There's so much that's useful.

On the other hand, nobody in litblogland writes reviews of the quality of those that I regularly read in The New Republic or The New York Review of Books or The Hudson Review. But those folks are top experts paid the big bucks, right, $50 and a one year subscription or whatever the going rate is now. I'm looking at poet Alexander Nemser's review of Nabokov's Verses and Versions in The New Republic, March 4, 2009. It's a lot better than my review! Longer, more complete, more knowledgeable. More context, which is crucial - he recommends that I try the Alan Myers translations of 19th century Russian poetry, An Age Ago. Will do, sir. He digs into the Nabokov-Wilson feud. He compares a piece of Nabokov's Eugene Onegin to a Yahoo Babel Fish translation. Now that, I did not understand. Whaddayaknow, Nabokov ain't poetry, but the computerized translation is unreadable.

Do I still have a point? This week was an amusing experiment for me, an experiment that failed. I don't think I'm doing these reviews right. Frankly, though, this always happens. Every time I put up a post of any sort, it's not that I've finished it, but that I've given up - I think, try again next time, and hit Publish. I'm about to do it again ---

Poe on William Ellery Channing, Jr. - Yes - this is it - no doubt

At the beginning of the week, I quoted a piece of Poe's blast at William Ellery Channing, Jr. Channing has five poems in the Library of America's American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Vol. 1. It will be a long time before this book is re-edited. And since he is also extensively quoted by Poe, he actually appears in two Library of America volumes. Immortality is his!*

Based on these five poems, Channing seems, to me, competent and dull. He has a poem called "Walden" that Thoreauviasts will find interesting for its subject.

Let's look at Poe's review in some detail. Here's a sample of Poe's criticism that's not just a slash:

'Instead of "more infinite," he writes "infiniter," with an accent on the "nit," as thus, at page 100:

Hope's child, I summon infiniter powers.

And here we might as well ask Mr. Channing, in passing, what idea he attaches to infinity, and whether he really thinks that he is at liberty to subject the adjective "infinite" to degrees of comparison. Some of these days we shall hear, no doubt, of "eternal, eternaler, and eternalest."' (pp. 465-6)

The italics in "infiniter" are Poe's, showing how the line has to be read. This is basic, but serious, criticism. The line does not scan without mangling pronunciation, and a bizarre nonsense word is introduced for the sake of an extra syllable. Here's a similar jab:

'Our author is quite enamored of the word "sumptuous," and talks about "sumptuous trees" and "sumptuous girls," with no other object, we think, than to employ the epithet at all hazards and upon all occasions. He seems unconscious that it means nothing more than expensive, or costly; and we are not quite sure that either trees or girls are, in America, either the one or the other.' (p. 466)

In this case, Poe can't resist going for the joke, and I don't blame him.

Poe has an idea that poetry ought to mean something. Here he tries to apply this principle to Channing:

'At page 102, he has the following:

Dry leaves with yellow ferns, they are
Fit wreath of Autumn, while a star
Still, bright, and pure, our frosty air
Shivers in twinkling points
Of thin celestial hair
And thus one side of Heaven anoints.

This we think we can explain. Let us see. Dry leaves, mixed with yellow ferns, are a wreath fit for autumn at the time when our frosty air shivers a still, bright, and pure star with twinkling points of thin celestial hair, and with this hair, or hair plaster, anoints one side of the sky. Yes—this is it—no doubt.' (pp. 467-8)

My favorite line in the review:

'The eight lines are entitled a "Song," and we should like very much to hear Mr. Channing sing it.' (p. 468)

Poe's book reviews will be of value to anyone who grumps that only the frauds and fools get the attention, while the worthies are ignored. Yes and no, and it was always so.

* And look, there are four poems by poor William Gilmore Simms, the novelist who did not quite make the cut. I have no idea how John Hollander picked these poems. Does he like them? Are they representative of something?

Poe's reviews - the faintest incentive to thought

I don't want to give the wrong idea about Poe the book reviewer. He viewed his brutal negative reviews as a necessary enterprise, as important as identifying what was good. He also did plenty of the latter.

Poe was an early enthusiast for Hawthorne - if Poe had been intellectually weaker, he might have seen Hawthorne as a competitor. The best poets of the day - Longfellow, Tennyson, Lowell, Bryant - received detailed, serious criticism from Poe.

Dickens was treated as a sort of magical force of nature, almost beyond criticism. At least one novel, Robert Bird's Sheppard Lee, has recently been returned to print by The New York Review of Books in part on the strength of Poe's recommendation. Sheppard Lee does sound pretty good.

A lot of this should be interesting to current-day readers interested in book reviewing and criticism. But it's not as much fun, I'll admit, as this:

"If ever, indeed, a novel were less than nothing, then that novel is 'Guy Fawkes.' To say a word about it in the way of serious criticism, would be to prove ourselves as great a blockhead as its author. Macte virtute, my dear sir—proceed and flourish. In the meantime we bid you a final farewell. Your next volume, which will have some such appellation as 'The Ghost of Cock-Lane,' we shall take the liberty of throwing unopened out of the window. Our pigs are not all of the description called learned, but they will have more leisure for its examination than we." (on Ainsworth's Guy Fawkes; or the Gunpowder Treason, p. 105)

Or:

"But the book is full to the brim of such absurdities, and it is useless to pursue the matter any farther. There is not a single page of Norman Leslie in which even a schoolboy would fail to detect at least two or three gross errors in Grammar, and some two or three most egregious sins against common-sense." (on Theodore Fay's Norman Leslie, p. 547)

Or:

"We look throughout his writings in vain for the slightest indication of originality—for the faintest incentive to thought. His plots, his language, his opinions are neither adapted nor intended for scrutiny." (p. 325) and "There are twenty young men of our acquaintance who make no pretension to literary ability, yet who could produce a better book in a week." (on Captain Marryat's Joseph Rushbrook, or the Poacher, p. 328)

Poe on Poe - profound and searching analysis

This is Poe's December 1844 note on novelist William Gilmore Simms:

"Mr. Simms has abundant faults—or had;—among which inaccurate English, a proneness to revolting images, and pet phrases, are the most noticeable. Nevertheless, leaving out of question Brockden Brown and Hawthorne (who are each a genus), he is immeasurably the best writer of fiction in America. He has more vigor, more imagination, more movement and more general capacity than all our novelists (save Cooper), combined." (p. 1342)

Poe's commendations have a touch of the back of the hand, don't they? (For another example, regarding Cooper, see here). That aside, notice the accuracy of Poe's judgment. Hawthorne, Cooper, Brockden Brown - that's our early American canon of fiction writers, almost. Just replace Simms - poor Simms, not quite good enough! - with Edgar Allan Poe.

Book reviews in Poe's time were anonymous, mostly. This led to no end of abuse, as can be seen in Lost Illusions, when talented, trivial Lucien writes a vicious attack on a novel, then returns to the good graces of the author by writing a postive review that attacks his own attack, in neither case having read the actual book.*

By 1845, Poe had become a famous writer, for "The Raven" and for a number of his stories, the same ones that are well-known now. He took the opportunity to review his own new volume of Tales. Let's see what he thinks of himself.

- "he has perfectly succeeded in his perfect aim" (869)

- "The style, we think, is good. Its philosophy is damnable; but this does not appear to have been a point with the author" (871)

- The detective stories are "inductive" "of profound and searching analysis" (872), although "The Purloined Letter" does not have the "continuous and absorbing interest" of the other two (872)

- Mr. Poe possesses the "power of simulation... in its full perfection" (873)

"The Mystery of Marie Roget", we are told, should help solve an actual crime in New York City. And that as good as Tales is, it does not even contain much of Poe's best work.

Is this all an elaborate joke - I mean, were readers in on it? I have no idea. There's a digressive paragraph atacking the editor who rejected "The Tell-Tale Heart" - is this a wink at readers, or genuine revenge?

* Anonymous reviews can be highly professional - see Virginia Woolf's critical essays, for example.

Poe's Greatest Hatchet Hits - a fetid battener upon the garbage of thought

Commenter "comments i done left" asked a reasonable question about Poe's book reviews yesterday - is it all this good? Meaning, funny and vicious.

No. The Library of America edition of Essays and Reviews runs to almost 1,500 pages. I've read maybe 40% of it. I see (so far) three good reasons to read around in it.

First, as with any selection of magazine writing, the book gives a picture of the intellectual landscape that is unavailable in more standard literary histories. We get reviews of the Keats-derived Orion by R. H. Horne, the historical novels and essays of Edward Lytton Bulwer*, The Coming of the Mammoth by Henry B. Hirst, and The Swiss Heiress by Susan Rigby Morgan, as well as reviews of Longfellow, Cooper, Dickens, and, oddly, Poe. Neither I, nor you, nor anyone else wants to read that first list of books. But they were there, and Poe, savage or appreciative, is a good guide.

Second, Poe uses the reviews to address more serious issues of taste, form, and criticism. The purpose of poetry, the purpose of book reviewing, grammar and prosody, the art of the novel, the creation of a national literature. It would be an exaggeration to say that Poe was the only person in America taking these things seriously (see Emerson and Fuller over at The Dial**, for example) but not an enormous exaggeration.

And finally, gloriously, there's the hatchet. From a note on Michel Masson's Le Coeur d'une Jeune Fille:

"A corrupt and impious heart—a merely prurient fancy—a Saturnian brain in which invention has only the phosphorescent glimmer of rottenness. Worthless, body and soul. A foul reproach to the nation that engendered and endures him. A fetid battener upon the garbage of thought. No man. A beast. A pig. Less scrupulous than a carrion-crow, and not very much less filthy than a Wilmer." (p. 1337)

And Wilmer, a satirical poet, is actually a friend of Poe's!

Since I mentioned Bulwer, here is Poe the grammar cop, on Bulwer's Night and Morning:

"Our readers will of course examine the English of 'Night and Morning' for themselves. From the evidence of one or two sentences we cannot expect them to form a judgment in the premises. Dreading indeed the suspicion of unfairness, we had pencilled item after item for comment—but we have abandoned the task in despair. It would be an endless labor to proceed with examples. In fact it is folly to particularize where the blunders would be the rule, and the grammar the exception." (p. 157)

Poe on the comic novels of Henry Cockton:

"Yet, during perusal, there has been a tingling physico-mental exhilaration, somewhat like that induced by a cold bath, or a flesh-brush, or a gallop on horseback—a very delightful and very healthful matter in its way. But these things are not letters. 'Valentine Vox' and 'Charles O'Malley' are no more 'literature' than cat-gut is music. The visible and tangible tricks of a baboon belong not less to the belles-lettres than does 'Harry Lorrequer.' When this gentleman adorns his countenance with lamp-black, knocks over an apple-woman, or brings about a rent in his pantaloons, we laugh at him when bound up in a volume, just as we would laugh at his adventures if happening before our eyes in the street." (p. 177)

There's no shortage of books today to which very similar words could be applied. Yes, there's more of this. Much, much more.

* No idea why the Library of America, or Poe, or whoever, calls him Lytton Bulwer rather than Bulwer-Lytton.

** Poe, unlike the Dial writers, is interested in actual books, ugly or otherwise. The Dial is where the theorists lived. I know who I'd rather read.

Poe's Greatest Hits - mistaking it for an opossum

Edgar Allan Poe made his living as a book reviewer and magazine writer. He was a pioneer, one of the first people to take book reviewing seriously.

More about that later, perhaps. For now, though, how about this, from a review of the poems of William Ellery Channing:

"His book contains about sixty-three things, which he calls poems, and which he no doubt seriously supposes so to be. They are full of all kinds of mistakes, of which the most important is that of their having been printed at all. They are not precisely English—nor will we insult a great nation by calling them Kickapoo; perhaps they are Channingese." (p. 459)

Or here, reviewing Confessions of a Poet by Laughton Osborn:

"The most remarkable feature in this production is the bad paper on which it is printed, and the typographical ingenuity with which matter barely enough for one volume has been spread over the pages of two." (p. 867)

Or a crack at Powhatan; a Metrical Romance:

"He has gone straight forward, like a blind horse, and turned neither to the one side nor to the other, for fear of stumbling. But he gets them all in—every one of them—the facts we mean. Powhatan never did anything in his life, we are sure, that Mr. Downing has not got in his poem. He begins at the beginning, and goes on steadily to the end—painting away at his story, just as a sign-painter at a sign; beginning at the left hand side of his board, and plastering through to the right. But he has omitted one very ingenious trick of the sign-painter. He has forgotten to write under his portrait—"this is a pig," and thus there is some danger of mistaking it for an opossum." (p. 920)

The rest of the week: more of the marvels of Edgar Allan Poe, hatchet man.

Every page reference is to Essays and Reviews, Library of America, a valuable book.

Edgar Allan Poe, first literary Hatchet Man

Poe would have liked to be a famous poet, but he made his living as a magazine writer, especially as a book reviewer. He became known as the Tomahawk Man because of his vicious reviews. Here’s a sample, from a review of The History of the Navy of the United States of America by James Fenimore Cooper:

“A flashy succession of ill-conceived and miserably executed literary productions, each more silly than its predecessor, and wherein the only thing noticeable was the peevishness of the writer, the only thing amusing his self-conceit – had taught the public to suspect even a radical taint in the intellect, an absolute and irreparable moral leprosy, rendering it a question whether he ever would or could again accomplish any thing which should be worthy the attention of people not positively rabid.”

This is from a positive review!

I wish I had more of these excerpts handy. Except when he is correcting the writer’s grammar, Poe is pretty good. He was intentionally creating the modern book review, focused on the actual book, not the political party of the author or some theoretical aesthetic stance.

There’s a good passage in Lost Illusions about the old system, in Paris, at least, where Lucien writes (anonymously) influential good and bad reviews of the same book, without having read it.