Uncategorized

Monday Morning Books is one of many blogs initiating a #BloggerBlackout in response to Kathleen Hale’s article in The Guardian. Previously published content will still be accessible during #BloggerBlackout.

USEFUL LINKS?
Bibliodaze: An Open Letter to Kathleen Hale & Guardian Books: Stalking Is Not Okay.?
Bibliodaze: #HaleNo, Blogger Blackout and the Non-Existent War?
Smart Bitches, Trashy Books: The Choices of Kathleen Hale?
Alex Hurst: Hale vs Harris, and the Breach of Online Ethics

There are a lot of changes going on, and I don’t just mean the cold wind that blew in last night. Granted, some of them are still just whispers, but I know they will manifest themselves sooner or later. I don’t like change more than the next person, but I’ve learned to treasure my moments standing on the threshold, to love the liminal spaces that hold so much promise.

One thing that hasn’t changed, despite reams of blogs and tweets and status updates, is my love of long, closely reasoned essays about writing. I love when they take my ideas about what I’ve read and turn them upside down.

I added The Writer’s Chronicle to my pared-down list of subscriptions a few years ago, by default, when I attended an Association of Writers and Writing Professionals (AWP) conference. I’ve kept it because it consistently delivers the goods.

This October/November 2014 issue is no exception. I won’t go over every essay and interview, though each rewarded scrutiny. One standout is Gregory Orr’s essay on “Foundational Documents and the Nature of Lyric”. After anecdotally describing the ecstasy of writing—being “transported by the words in a world that the words were creating”, he points out that our western tradition, unlike India, China, Japan, does not encourage the lyric poet. Plato’s attack on poets as “weak and womanish” stood for hundreds of years until Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads granted us the freedom to feel. I condense, but truly the entire essay is fascinating, and the final reference to Elaine Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels blew me away.

Having just participated in a symposium on GeoPoetics: the intersection of geography and poetry, I paid close attention to “The World of the Story”, by Eileen Pollack. She rescues the story element of setting from mere painted backdrop and restores it to its place as creating an entire world, with its own cultures and communities. She offers an inspired reading of stories such as Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson” and William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow.

Speaking of mashups, I also enjoyed Lisa C. Krueger’s “_Ars Poetica_ and the Talking Cure: Poetry, Therapy, & the Quest to Create”. I had not before considered the common factors of poetry and therapy.

Best of all for me is Sue William Silverman’s “Memoir with a View: The Window, as Motif and Metaphor, in Creative Nonfiction”. Coming on the heels of the stunning National Gallery show of Andrew Wyeth’s paintings of windows, “Looking Out, Looking In”, this essay fed my fascination with these mythic structures. They may be transparent or reflective; there may or may not be a person present, but always “two worlds are in play: the confined interior world, and the sprawling exterior world.” She examines how each speaks to each. For example, in Joyce’s classic story “The Dead”, “the more Gabriel envisions the world outside the window, the more his interior state is revealed to the reader.”

And Silverman takes us even deeper. She reminds us that the person gazing out of the window may also be seen. She talks about the temporal aspect of a window frame in addition to its physical aspect; what we see outside may be a past or possible future. And here I’m only scratching the surface of her insights.

I highly recommend this journal if you want to exercise your mind and consider what you are reading in a different light. Change is hard for everyone, but accepting the uncertainty of the threshold can result in powerful insights.

What journals do you read regularly?

When the seasons change, I sometimes get a cold, but this one couldn’t have happened at a worse time. I had a number of author events scheduled for the coming week, including three full days at a book festival where I would be reading and helping out at various booths while also chatting about my books with one and all. Time to get serious! Falling back on my most reliable remedies, I put aside all my plans and spent the day curled up on the sofa with endless pots of tea, herbal supplements, and something to read. Desperate times call for comfort reads, and what could be more comforting than a D. E. Stevenson novel?

In this 1934 novel, recently reissued by Persephone Press, Barbara Buncle is worried about money. The dividends, which up till now have enabled her to continue living in her childhood home in the quiet village of Silverstream, have suddenly dried up. Some didn’t come in at all while others were only half the usual amount. Casting about for a way to earn money she hits on the idea of writing a book.

She has a lot of fun writing it, using her neighbors—thinly disguised—as the characters. But partway through, she realises that not a lot happens in Silverstream (Copperfield in her book), so she starts inventing twists that wake things up.

Much to her surprise, Mr. Abbott wants to publish it and summons her to his London office. He’s not entirely sure whether it is satire or in earnest, but he enjoys reading it so much that he is sure it will be a big hit. Newly rechristened Disturber of the Peace, the book will come out under her pseudonym.

It never occurs to Miss Buncle that her neighbors in Silverstream might get their hands on the book, much less that they will recognise themselves in it. She is shocked by their reactions: a few are delighted but most are angry and determined to find out who “John Smith” is.

The fun continues. Stevenson handles her large cast with ease, making each so memorable that I never got confused. How they handle this vision of their alternate lives entertained me right up to the last page.

Miss Buncle’s confusion and fear that she will be found out made me think wryly of when my memoir came out a few years ago. I wasn’t trying to be anonymous, but I did wonder what people who were in it would think. I was also a bit taken aback when I realised how many of my friends were reading it. There was a resounding silence from my family (other than my sons who had pre-approved it). I don’t know if any of them even read it. Luckily, they didn’t play a large role in the events covered by the memoir.

Any writer, whether working with fiction, poetry or memoir, reveals herself. If you don’t take that risk, you won’t dig deep enough, leaving your words to lie lifelessly on the page. It helps to laugh in the face of fear, and Miss Buncle’s adventures certainly gave me plenty to laugh about. I think all the laughing drove away my cold.

What are your comfort reads?

Tóibín has long been one of my favorite authors. I was bowled over by the first of his novels that I read and have continued to enjoy his fiction. Then at a reading at Goucher College I picked up his collection of essays, New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families, which I found both amusing and intriguing. However, short stories require a different sort of approach. I wondered how his breadth of vision and depth of emotion would fare here. I feared it would be like plunking down an ocean liner in a small pond.

I’m relieved to say that he is a master of short fiction as well. This collection of short stories only confirms my appreciation of his work. The protagonists may be male or female, Irish or Spanish or Pakistani, but each is fully imagined.

The first story drew me into depths so profound it was some time before I could go on. “Silences” recounts Lady Gregory’s experiences leading up to a dinner conversation with Henry James in which she tells him a story. I don’t want to give away too much, but it seemed to me that Tóibín captures what it is to be a storyteller, the alchemy we perform and the strange satisfaction we take in the telling.

Yet he titles it “Silences”. I think about what is not said, what core of emotional truth becomes the secret spring for a story.

There are silences at the heart of many of the stories in this collection. Some trauma has occurred in the past that has thrown the protagonist’s life off course, but often we aren’t told what it is. We don’t need to know. What we are seeing are the effects, now, many years later. Alex Sokoloff and others talk about the protagonist having a secret wound, some event from the past that haunts them. Because of course we all do, no matter how uneventful our lives. It may be something small or large, superficial or deep, but it is there.

The stories in this collection made me understand that it is not only the family that can disappoint, empty of the loving support or the tribal identity, but our lives and relationships as well. The emptiness of endeavor: we set out to do great things in the world, yet we shy away or postpone, thinking we have all kinds of time. Still, the past holds us close; we get dragged back into situations we think we’ve left behind.

One of Tóibín’s great skills is his ability to convey banked emotion. Each of these deeply felt stories contains huge emotional power. It threatens to spill over but never does. How does he do it? Partly by making the stakes high. In “One Minus One”, the narrator is called back to Ireland by the impending death of his mother, pulling him away from his new life teaching in New York City. As if a mother’s death is not enough, he remembers another earlier and deeper wound. Then at the end, when he speaks quite simply, you know the roiling and complex storm held in check behind his simple words.

Even in more mundane situations Tóibín can make the stakes seem high. In “The New Spain”, Carme returns to Spain after eight years in England. As she travels to the house her recently deceased grandmother has left her, she remembers summers she and her sister spent there as children. With only a few details, Tóibín summons the smell and taste of those days and nights in the beloved house under her grandmother’s benevolent rule.

Another way he conveys the emotion behind a seemingly ordinary event, such as looking at the sea through a telescope, is through the rare burst of poetry. It may be just a phrase, but it creates the leap Robert Bly speaks of as essential to poetry, the moment when you the reader are invited to take part in the story. The ground falls out from under you and you see that there is more here than you thought.

The silences between the characters also invite us in. In “The Street” Malik, newly arrived in Madrid from Pakistan, is afraid to leave the street where he works with the other eight men who share his single room. He’s been told not to wander, but anyway he doesn’t speak the language. Even with the other Pakistanis, though, there are silences and it is only gradually through the story that dialogue begins to appear, tentatively at first, and then growing stronger.

In my fascination with Tóibín’s talent, I probably haven’t conveyed how strong and satisfying these stories are. By the end I felt as though I’d lived an additional nine lives.

Have you read any of Colm Tóibín’s work?

Jen Michalski is a Baltimore writer who had a great year in 2013. I wrote about her amazing novel The Tide King. Her collection of novellas, Could You Be With Her Now also came out that year, and she was named one of “50 Women to Watch” by The Baltimore Sun and won a “Best of Baltimore” for Best Writer from Baltimore Magazine. She is also the editor of the literary quarterly jmww, host of a local reading series, and editor of City Sages, an anthology of Baltimore writers.

Now this year, she has a new collection of short stories out, From Here. It is as a short story writer that I first heard of her. Her short fiction workshops are jammed, and when I took one I could see why. Her generous but incisive comments made me look at my story in a new way and enabled me to strengthen it.

It is an earlier collection of short stories that I’d like to talk about today. My friendship with the author aside, I found these stories astounding. The title is perfect, for these encounters with odd and ordinary people bring us close indeed to their worlds.

Some are children, such as a girl named Lincoln in “The Body” who discovers just that in the woods behind the trailer park where she lives. Some are teens, discovering how to appreciate those who are different. Some are adults, such as Diana Sprigg in “The Assistant”, famous as America’s Housewife, who comes across as a slightly deranged Martha Stewart. And then there is the hilarious “Commencement Speech, Whitney Houston, East Southern University, June 9, 2006”.

Some stories stretch the imagination, such as “In Fetu” where two people, two separate souls, inhabit one body. The accommodations they must make for each other from babyhood on are astutely described. By limiting the fantastic to that single element, making everything else thoroughly realistic, Michalski helps the reader suspend disbelief.

Her sentences evoke an entire world, such as in this excerpt from “The Body”:

The body—was it someone she might have known? There were many characters who swept in and out of the trailer park, boyfriends and drug dealers of some of the women who lived there. These women had the weight of children gathered around them like moths—children who cried, wanted, needed those dim blue flames that lit up only when the women smoked. Men like Harmon, shiftless but virile, lethargic but prone to rage. Dark shadows that moved quickly over the sun in random sequences.

Michalski has a marvelous ability to inhabit each of her characters fully and to find each one’s unique voice. Given a short story by a writer whose work I’ve read, without being told I can usually identify the author. I would never mistake a story by Ron Rash for one by Ryan O’Neill. However, here Michalski displays a chameleon-like ability to take on a new speech pattern with each story. She explores a variety of characters, adapting her style to suit each one. Here is an excerpt from “The Assistant”:

I think these reports of my being difficult are exaggerated. As you know, I am the hardest-working woman in the business. I have to be to keep up my numerous projects that are designed to make your life Easier. Better. Smarter. Of course my assistant will be expected to work as hard as I do.

Even Michalski’s ordinary people become extraordinary as we come to know them. Our journey with each is intense, whether the story is told in few or many pages. I look forward to reading her new collection.

Many of us read classic stories in school, such as those by Chekhov, Faulkner, and Joyce. What modern short story writers have you read?

This is the first poetry collection by the former British poet laureate to be published in the U.S. However, I first heard him read some years ago at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto. His low-key manner and wry sense of humor did not prepare me for the emotional impact of the poems he read that evening, some of which are included in this collection. Reading them now, I am moved all over again.

In his poetry, Motion beautifully achieves the balance to which I, as a poet, aspire: to write poems in clear and comprehensible language that pack an emotional wallop. I enjoy puzzling out a difficult poem as much as the next person, and meet with a like-minded group of people once a month to do just that: we read and discuss the work of a different poet each month.

But there is something magical to me in the delicate craftsmanship required to phrase a line that could almost be speech but is so much more. I love to read a poem that suddenly transcends itself, the leaping poetry that Robert Bly describes in his book of the same name. Such poems have within them a gap, a leap, that requires the reader to engage and leap as well, encountering that which is mysterious and unspoken.

Motion achieves such an effect with surprising imagery or clever word choice or a line that changes your understanding of the whole poem. It could be something that increases the gravity of some everyday event, such as cutting the grass, or something that undercuts it, such as a comparison to “a wind-hammered plastic bag.” It could be an unexpected image, such as a fox climbing the garden wall appearing to have slipped out of his skeleton.

An example of a poem where he manages all three—imagery, word choice and the leap—is “Mythology”. Here is the second and last verse:

And you? Your life was not your own to keep
or lose. Beside the river, swerving underground
the future tracked you, snapping at your heels:
Diana, breathless, hunted by your own quick hounds.

Some of his most remarkable poems achieve their power through total immersion in the experience, such as in “Serenade”, a poem about his mother's horse that moved me to tears in that long-ago Toronto evening and again when I read it now. The first three-quarters of this long poem describe a blacksmith’s visit to reshoe the horse. The detail—of the blacksmith's apron, the waiting collie, of the horse “gone loose in her skin”—draws the reader irresistibly into the moment, into that world, until the final matter-of-fact lines tumble us out into heartbreak.

I have several of Motion's poetry books, some picked up in Canada, some in England, and his stunning biography of Keats. Even though there are some duplicates in this volume, I purchased it for the new poems, as well as for the chance to examine his choices.

I've found in assembling my own poetry collections, and helping others assemble theirs, that a poem sometimes takes on new and unexpected meaning when set alongside another poem. I was curious, not only as to which poems he'd selected, but also in how he ordered them.

For example, in Public Property, “Serenade” is the last part of a four-part poem, each a memory of childhood: “fragments of the world / in place, yet muddled, and me floating too.” Here, not only does it stand alone, but it is bookended by poems about losses that are not just ameliorated but transformed by a companion, presumably his spouse.

The title poem, while about his father, also reflects his link to the pastoral poetry of Andrew Marvell, according to the introduction by Langdon Hammer. I enjoy the balance of past and present in these poems, and enjoyed hearing Motion read them again recently at Johns Hopkins University.

What poet have you read recently whose work you particularly liked?

Recently there has been a Facebook challenge going around to name a book that changed your life. There have been several for me, but certainly one was the Tom Stoppard play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Near the end, as the two hapless courtiers realise that their deaths are imminent, they wonder if there wasn’t a moment when they could have chosen differently, a moment they did not recognise, that slid by and left them on this fatal trajectory.

This idea has haunted me ever since: that I will make the wrong decision or—worse—not realise that I had made a decision that would have awful consequences. Already risk-averse and preferring to keep my options open, I tried to be hyper-aware of turning points. Looking back, I can certainly see the places where a single decision changed my life irrevocably, but at least I was aware of making the decisions and—even though I might choose differently now—am not unhappy with who and where I am as a result.

In the prologue of this book, Carol Wentz, a suburban housewife, has one of those moments. At a neighborhood barbecue, Carol snaps at six-year-old Iris Neff who has demanded a juice box. Later that afternoon, Iris wanders off and disappears, leaving her mother, Lydia Neff, heartbroken and Carol consumed by guilt. For the next ten years, Carol continues to search secretly for Iris, hiring private investigators and joining a missing persons chat room. Then she receives a mysterious phone call that jolts her into renewed action.

With the end of the prologue, we move to the point of view of Brenna Spector, the private investigator to whom Carol turns. Brenna specializes in missing person cases, a legacy of the loss of her older sister, Clea, who stepped into a blue car when Brenna was only ten and never came back. Shortly after Clea disappeared, Brenna developed an extremely rare syndrome called Hyperthymesia causing her from that point on to remember everything she experiences with complete accuracy.

I found Brenna a fascinating character, someone who is constantly dragged into the past and has to develop tricks to keep from disappearing into a memory, forced to relive it completely. I also enjoyed her 27-year-old assistant, Trent, a technological genius who thinks he is God’s gift to women. His bizarre clothing and slang sparkle like rhinestones in the story. Detective Nick Morasco also satisfied my taste for new and interesting characters. Gaylin expertly avoids the cop stereotypes to give us a man with secrets.

As other people disappear, it becomes apparent that everyone has secrets. The joy of the prologue is that the reader knows some things about Carol that Brenna doesn’t. As one secret is revealed, there are always more to keep you reading. Working within the mystery/PI genre framework, Gaylin gives us not only remarkable characters, but also a plot full of twists and turns.

I read a lot of mysteries, partly for the puzzle but mostly because the writing is so often excellent. This story makes me understand that another reason I love them is this idea of secrets. What can we truly know about other people? In mysteries, the detective or PI must peel away the layers that people use to veil their secrets, sometimes revealing things even the culprits themselves are not aware of or moments of decision that slid by without being noticed.

I enjoyed this debut novel immensely and am delighted that there are already two more books in the series.

Have you discovered a new mystery series that you enjoy?

I don't often read historical fiction, but occasionally a story of a particular period or event will pique my interest. This saga by Humphreys is about the fall of Constantinople to Mehmet II in 1453.

Originally the Greek city of Byzantium, Constantine the Great rebuilt and renamed it in 324 CE as the capital of the Roman Empire. After the fall of the Roman Empire, it remained the capital of the Byzantine Empire until the events of this book, after which it became part of the Ottoman Empire and eventually renamed Istanbul. So its fall, after 1,129 years must truly have seemed like the end of the world, of a world at least.

Although there is plenty of description of both sides' strategies and vivid battle scenes, Humphreys wisely conveys all of that information through the characters. We learn it as they do. And I was truly interested in the people through whose eyes we experience these events.

They are a mix of real and fictional characters. The protagonist is a fictional one: Gregoras, who has been unjustly condemned as a traitor and banished from Constantinople to make his way as a mercenary, leaving his twin brother to marry Gregoras's beloved and become one of King Constantine's most trusted advisors. This Cain and Abel pair gives us a view into the king's secret deliberations as well as the front line of battle. On the Turkish side, we experience the life of a foot soldier through Achmed, a farmer hoping to find rich plunder in the fabled city, enough to protect his family through droughts and destruction. Moving between Greeks and Turks is the sorceress Leilah, whose prophecies and visions weave through the events like a glittering thread.

Besides Constantine and Mehmet, other real characters include John Grant, the Scotsman trying to open the ancient secret of Greek Fire; Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, a former mercenary who commanded the Greek defenses, and Hamza Pasha, Mehmet's servant, through whose eyes we see the 21-year-old Turkish sultan.

Part of the problem with historical fiction is that you know the ending. The solution, of course, is to give us characters we care about and whose fate we are desperate to discover. Humphries does this effectively.

He uses multiple point of view characters, which sometimes made scenes feel superficial. I normally dislike shifting points of view, and particularly when they shift too often. Staying with one or two characters provides a more in-depth experience, I believe. However, as the story unfolded, I understood that he needed all of these people in order to tell it. I would have preferred that he stick to one character at time, which he mostly does. But sometimes he shifts point of view within a single scene, also known as head-hopping, a maneuver that distracts and confuses me.

Still, I loved the characters and found the story exciting. I rather dreaded the battle scenes, but we experienced them through the characters, so that I found them fascinating too. I'm impressed with the way Humphreys revealed the necessary information—such as battle plans, geography, and history—seamlessly through the characters' stories.

What historical fiction have you enjoyed?

The first collection of stories by the Australian writer was given to me by Hayley, who rightly guessed that once I read the first page I’d be hooked. That first piece, “Collected Stories”, remains my favorite, and not just because the protagonist is named Barbara. The mother-daughter relationship struck me as being as true as can be and the writing brilliant. Here is the first paragraph:

My mother, Margaret Hately, was a short-story writer. In the few photographs I have of her she is carrying a book, holding it against her chest as if she were suckling it. There are no photographs of my father. My mother destroyed them when he left her, a month before I was born. I only know him from the parts of him she put in her stories—a limp, a way of reading the newspaper at arm’s length. Whilst my mother wrote, my father was made of words.

The characterisation here bowled me over. The telling details, that wonderful image of suckling a book, and the stunning final sentence left me feeling I knew all three of these people intimately.

The story has an unusual format: it is organised in five parts, each one titled by and referring to one of Margaret’s published books. As we move through her career, we see the relationship with Barbara developing in sometimes surprising ways, always with eminently quotable sentences.

Nearly all of the stories in this collection have some kind of experimental format: one is a series of figures; another a list of rules for writing a short story; yet another an examination paper. Some, such as the one told by labeling the components of a short story, probably appeal most to other writers. However, they are clever and surprisingly effective.

For example, one story, “Tyypographyy”, uses different fonts and a sticky key to tell Amy’s first-person story of grieving for her recently deceased mother, trying to relate to her father who is stuck in his own mourning, and juggling well-meant attempts at sympathy from teachers, including a maths teacher who speaks to the class only in lists of numbers.

Another, one of my favorites, called “The Footnote” tells the story of Thomas Hardie, an aspiring author, who at the age of seven demands to be “called by his middle name, Edward, so there would be no confusion when his first book was published.” We discover from the footnotes that this account is actually being written by his son. Although the footnotes are fairly cryptic at first, the emotion behind them is strongly conveyed by their juxtaposition with the text and by the significant selection of memories incorporated. The footnotes gradually grow longer and we find out why the son’s memories are expressed there. I found the ending enormously satisfying.

As my friend mentioned, the repetition of certain themes and subjects gets a little old. Not another story featuring the Rwandan genocide! I found myself thinking. Not Newcastle again! Perhaps if I hadn’t torn through the book so fast, let days pass between each story, the repetition wouldn’t have bothered me so much.

I also found the cuteness of the experimental formats sometimes overwhelmed the genuine human story within. There are some more traditional stories, including another of my favorites, “The Saved”, about an Australian woman who is in Rwanda teaching English. Mrs. Watt’s efforts to teach the village children and to help another teacher bring her into conflict with the Bishop, the head of the school who makes Mr. Brocklehurst look like a saint.

I highly recommend this collection and am eager to see what else O’Neill has written.

Have you read fiction using experimental formats? What did you think of it? Another example is Jennifer Egan’s popular book, A Visit from the Goon Squad.

It was interesting to reread this novel after Forster's Aspects of the Novel. Although it's been quite a few years since I last read it, the story remains vivid in my memory, partly because of the 1992 Merchant-Ivory film starring Emma Thomson, Vanessa Redgrave, and Anthony Hopkins.

Sisters Margaret and Helen Schlegel love literature and music and good conversation, all readily available in pre-World War I London where they live with their young brother, Tibby. Secure in the funds left to them by their parents, they occupy a particular niche in the English class structure, the intellectual, somewhat bohemian middle class. They become involved with Leonard Bast, a denizen of the lower middle class, a clerk who aspires to raise himself by attending classical concerts and reading serious books.

The sisters also become involved with a family of wealthy capitalists, the Wilcoxes, first Helen, the younger and more melodramatic sister, who visits their country home. The spirit behind Howard's End is Ruth Wilcox, whose love for her family home has made it a charming country hide-away for her husband and children. Like the heroine of Coventry Patmore's poem, satirized by Virginia Woolf, Ruth is “the Angel in the House”, the woman whose selfless devotion to her family and submission to her husband makes her the unappreciated foundation of family life.

Given these three families from different levels of the middle class, my book club started our discussion with the question stated in the novel: “Who is going to inherit England?” We also asked how Forster followed his own edicts.

Here the plot is indeed “a narrative of events arranged in a time sequence” that are also linked by causality. Our point of view is primarily Margaret, the more practical of the sisters, who struggles to hold within her value system two opposing forces: a devotion to culture and the life of the mind along with an appreciation of the aggressive capitalists who have built the railroads and trust funds and England itself.

If “the test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way”, then Forster succeeds with his main characters. Their sometimes-unexpected choices continue to be credible. The events grow believably out of the characters, avoiding Forster's criticism of Hardy's novels that events are controlled by “the fate above us, not the fate working through us.”

Most of all we wanted to know if Forster incorporated what he called “prophecy” in his lectures, something universal. He says it only comes through subtly, in the writer's tone of voice, “the implication that signifies and will filter into the turns of the novelist's phrase.” It does come out in some of his phrases, such as “Private life holds out the mirror to infinity.” But I found some of his high-flown paragraphs—rare as they are—a bit abstract. Although impatient to get on with the story, I understood that these abstract reveries were the meat of Margaret and Helen's discussions.

But, if I understand it correctly, Forster's prophecy is more generally a theme that makes the story larger than it is, more than just the fate of Margaret or Leonard or any other character. Forster says, “There is more in the novel than time or people or logic or any of their derivatives, more even than fate . . . something that cuts across them like a bar of light.”

And here is where Forster excels. For this is not just a novel about class differences or about love and marriage. It is not even just about the fate of England, as symbolized by the shifting ownership of Howard's End. This novel is about how we connect to each other and begins with Forster's famous epigraph: “Only connect”. What could be more fundamental to the human condition?

What do you think of Forster's idea of “prophecy”?