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Okay, yes, zombies. But they are almost beside the point. This is an amazing book, one that sank its claws into me on the first page and didn’t let up until I finished the last. As the subtitle indicates, it is a series of interviews with veterans of the war against the zombies. These interviews, which range from one to four pages, are in the person’s own words, with only an occasional question interposed, and prefaced by the location and a sentence or two of background.

Michael Chabon has much to say about the literary community turning up its collective nose at genre fiction. Me, I like science fiction. It gives us an enemy—Martians, Romulans, whatever—about whom we have no preconceived notions or political stances. It can also show us the logical consequences of current cultural trends; I'm thinking of Hal the computer in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey and the social structure in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

Brooks gets in a few good jabs at our current culture, mostly sad rather than satirical, such as the spread of the plague (initially called African Rabies—sound familiar?) by infected organs provided by China on order and how do they just happen to find an organ matching the most obscure set of criteria in just a few weeks? Or that the war against the zombies can only be won if all nations come together in a truly multi-national force.

The book challenges us to reconsider our philosophy. Isn't it always right to remember that your enemy is human too, with reasons and dreams and emotions? In the brilliant and subtle depiction of the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica, I'm thinking yes. Zombies? Nah. Is it ever right to sacrifice the few for the many? How about sacrificing the many so that at least a few will survive?

Brooks also gives us a sadly accurate view of the limitations of a military machine still fighting the last war, unprepared for a new form of warfare. One voice is a former Director of the U.S. Department of Strategic Resources, explaining how in World War II the Allies won by having more food, more bullets, more men than the Axis powers, but here the enemy doesn't need rest or food and has no home front to worry about. Therefore, cutting off food supplies or transport lines is meaningless; shock and awe are emotions they are not capable of feeling; and anyone they kill immediately becomes another recruit in their army. I was reminded of the fiasco when British soldiers in their bright red coats and formal ranks first encountered guerilla warfare in the American Revolution.

But what really makes this story work is the writing. What an amazing symphony of voices! Brooks does a good job of making them different from each other, no easy task. And the dramatic momentum never stops. I've been thinking a lot about drama, how to create it, how to sustain it. Here, while there is certainly plenty of action, the drama comes primarily from the intensity of emotion. The stakes are high: the future of humanity. The peril is dire: gruesome death. But no dramatic soundtrack is needed. The various narrators' emotions come out of the conflicts, not just with the zombie horde, but with themselves and with other people. There are conflicts over strategy, over questions of right and wrong, over past politics. There are conflicts even among the survivors; I loved the references to the LMOEs (last man on earth) holed up somewhere resisting the liberating army. Even more curious are the quislings, people who believe they are zombies, imitating them, attacking others. Even in big battle scenes, it is not so much what it feels like to fight with zombies—though there’s some of that—as it is what it feels like to be sent into battle with the wrong kind of ammunition, the wrong kind of armour. Sound familiar?

This book is so much better than you think it will be. Don't be surprised if it turns up on my Best of 2010 list.

Alfred Day is returning to Germany to work as an extra in a film set in a WWII POW camp. It hasn’t been that long since he was a POW for real, after his plane was shot down over Hamburg. Alfie, the tail gunner, survives to find himself immured in a camp where he befriends Ringer, an even sadder sack, and finds new purpose for himself in caring for his friend. At the camp he learns what it is to be truly hungry, far beyond being “clemmed” growing up, as the son of the village fishmonger.

This is not an easy book to read but it is well worth the effort. For one thing, though we stay with Alfie throughout, the point of view shifts from third person to first to second, and the other voices that we hear are often unattributed. Also, Alfie’s thoughts jump about in time, touching on various memories, returning to the film set. This is stream of consciousness with a vengeance, but redeemed by the singular and consistent voice, which is Alfie’s voice, even in third person, the voice of a barely educated country boy who doesn’t really understand himself or anyone else, but tries to do the right thing.

The subject matter is the other reason the book is hard to read. Alfie joins up as soon as he turns 16, eager to escape from the fish shop and his abusive father. A simple lad with few expectations, we feel his pride at being the first crew member chosen by his “Skipper”. In fact, the interactions among the crew—their teasing, their fights, their intense loyalty to each other—are the best things about the book. These are the first mates Alfie has had, and it is a revelation to him that he can be accepted by this group and have a valued place in it.

The style takes the reader directly into Alfie’s deepest thoughts and most secret feelings. I seem to have read a number of books recently about the difficulty of coming back after a war. For me, this one more than any other most goes to the heart of the experience. Unflinching, it wades right into the mess of memories and regrets, successes and failures. A hard book to put down, a hard book to pick up again—I found it best to just read straight through, as much as time allowed.

There are some evocative, almost lyrical, phrases that Alfie in his innocence finds to describe his world. In speaking of the way his crew lives in the moment, he says, “It would not be concerned with its past and had no business thinking of its future: its cleverness was in drinking up its minutes, second by second, and making sure to drain each one. It looked at the bods outside it who did not grasp this, looked at the sleepy civilian types—the spivs and 4Fs—and saw how close they were to being dead: how the time streamed off other people like rain and ran away without them missing it.” Later, on the film set, he feels faint and sits down, feeling “the ground rushing beneath you. Your spine tingles and you wonder if this isn’t an echo you’re reading, if so many bombs haven’t changed the earth, haven’t left it always shivering and taken away its rest.”

Kennedy creates characters I won’t soon forget, not just Alfie, but the Skipper who calls him “Boss”, Pluckrose the navigator who refers to him as “A. Day”, Ivor the owner of the shop where Alfie fetches up after the war who calls him “dear boy” when he isn’t swearing at him. Nor will I forget some of the scenes, such as the crew standing in a circle, playing catch in complete darkness, a drill the Skipper thought up. Or the way they started leaving a record playing on the turntable when they left for a mission to ensure that they’d return, one of Pluckrose’s zany ideas that somehow worked. Or Alfred, who excelled with his gun, trying to learn how to fight hand-to-hand, much to the despair of the sergeant who was teaching him.

All of Alfred’s memories are filtered through the surreal experience of pretending to live through them again. Like his fellow extras, he gets caught up in creating a real garden, a tunnel, a stove out of two tin cans, forgetting that he is just supposed to go through the motions for the camera. In this world of ours—of special effects and virtual worlds and second lives—I wonder sometimes how clear we are on the difference between pretence and really living, if we know how to drain each second. This is a remarkable book.

What a great year for reading I’ve had! These are the twelve best books I read in 2009. If I blogged about the book then I’ve noted the date, so please check the archive for a fuller discussion of the book.

1. Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout
11 May 2009
A collection of short stories about a retired math teacher living in a small town in Maine. Doesn’t sound like much, but really, it is. Writers would do well to study these stories to learn structure, pacing and character. But everyone will appreciate the unflinching understanding of small town life and those who live there.

2. Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris
16 March 2009
Set in a company caught in an economic downturn and starting to lay off employees, this story captures the nuances of the life most of us spend our weeks living. The main character is the collective “we” of the cadre of workers, which shouldn’t work, but does. Funny, accurate, and unexpectedly moving.

3. Stoner, by John Williams
16 November 2009
Another surprise: a quiet and unassuming story which mesmerised me with its honest depiction of a man’s life, an ordinary man, a man of his time and place. Growing up at the end of the 19th century on a poor clay farm in Missouri, Stoner life is changed when he is sent to the university as an agriculture student where he discovers the peculiar intoxication of literature. Stoner’s life may be easily summarised, but the joy of this book is in the detail. Although a stolid and quiet man, Stoner’s thoughts and feelings run very deep indeed.

4. The Painter of Battles, by Arturo Pérez-Reverte
5 October 2009
The story of an award-winning war photographer who has retired and taken up residence in an old tower on the coast of Spain where he is painting a mural depicting battles ancient and modern. Pérez-Reverte himself was a war photographer, so he speaks from a position of authority about what it’s like to be one, the degree of immersion he feels, and the degree of responsibility he has towards his subjects.

5. Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson
21 September 2009
At sixty-seven, Trond Sander has moved to a small cabin in the woods to create a new life, a simple life, a life alone. Since the death of his wife in a terrible car accident three years previously, Trond has felt increasingly unable to go on with his prosperous life in Oslo. Interwoven with his quiet days are memories of a summer in his childhood at a similar cabin with his father, who was newly returned from the war. The way this book is structured is so delicate and yet completely sound, and the writing is just amazing: clear and simple sentences that resound with emotion.

6. Old Filth, by Jane Gardam
7 September 2009
Sir Edward Feathers, a retired judge, is called Filth by his colleagues (an acronym for “failed in London; try Hong Kong”) in tribute to his successful career as an advocate in the Far East. Since the death of his wife, he has the chilliest of connections to the people around him, but events conspire to make him reflect upon his life and reconnect with people from his past.

7. Life Sentences, by Laura Lippman
11 February 08
Cassandra returns to Baltimore to research her next book and gets caught up in untangling her own past. I believe that what Lippman does here represents the best of what fiction is capable of. Yes, fiction can be entertaining and escapist, but where it really shines is when it opens our minds and our hearts and enables us to see the world from within someone else’s skin. This is what I look for in fiction, and what the books mentioned in today's blog have achieved so admirably.

8. The Friends of Meager Fortune, by David Adams Richards
4 May 2009
This is the story of a logging family and the rough men who work for them in the harsh, 30-below woods. It is also the story of the townspeople whose opinions shift with the wind of rumors born of boredom, envy, greed, or pride. Richards’ incantatory narration reminds us that this story happened a long time ago (just before and after the Great War) and far away (New Brunswick in the Maritimes), making it over into a legend, something that has been handed down in the oral tradition.

9. Maps and Legends, by Michael Chabon
2 February 2009
Readers of Chabon will be familiar with the subjects of some of these inventive essays, such as his passionate defense of genre literature and comics/graphic novels, his appreciation of Sherlock Holmes, the metaphor of the Golem of Prague. Where he takes these subjects, though, may astonish you.

10. In the Woods, by Tana French
14 September 2009
This award-winning mystery revolves around two cases twenty years apart in the same small suburb of Knocknaree in Ireland. It boasts an interesting story, a variety of characters, and enough suspense to keep me reading late into the night. What I loved most about this book, though, was the incredible writing.

11. The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery
This is the story of a French concierge who hides her reading of literature and philosophy from the wealthy residents of her apartment building and the young girl who discovers her secret. At 12, Paloma feels as out-of-step with the bourgeois existence her parents and the other residents lead as Renée, the widowed concierge does. A funny and touching tale of masks and secret lives.

12. The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins
27 July 2009
In this book, the first and some say the still the best detective story, Collins starts with a scene worthy of Raiders of the Lost Ark, an account of the storming of Indian town of Seringapatam by the English army, full of riot and confusion, death and plunder. The marauding army is obsessed by the tales of the Moonstone, a fabulous jewel that carries a curse on whoever steals it, said to be somewhere within the town. Collins creates a tangle out of a country house weekend, a returning prodigal son, family tensions, and the long wake of repercussions from a single act of treachery and heartlessness. And it’s a love story too. Amazing.

Songs are stories, too, even when there are no words. This was a year of new beginnings, of renewal, the chance to do a little better. Thanks to my friends for all the great music and for all the sweet dances.

A New Beginning, Bare Necessities
The Boatman, Bare Necessities
The Hole In The Wall, Bare Necessities
La Gitana, Jacqueline Schwab
Trad: Dolce De Coco, Yo-Yo Ma, Paquito D' Rivera, Romero Lumbambo
Hable Con Ella, Alberto Iglesias Featuring Vicente Amigo & El Pele
Dongo, Elixir
Bird In The Bush, Elixir
Red Star Line / The Adirondack, Elixir
Brae Reel / Rare / Old B, Elvie Miller & Naomi Morse
Flatworld, Elvie Miller & Naomi Morse
Emma's Waltz , Elvie Miller & Naomi Morse
Bought And Sold, Neko Case
Pretty Polly, Orange Line Special
Polly, Kate Rusby
Young James, Kate Rusby
Singing Bird, Leela & Ellie Grace
Morning Grace, Leela & Ellie Grace
Queen Of The Earth, Child Of The Stars, Leela & Ellie Grace
Waltz Three, Susan Conant
Bonnie at Morn, Susan Conant
Bonny Cuckoo, Bare Necessities
Mad Robin, Bare Necessities
Oft in the Stilly Night, Flow Gently, Sweet Afton, Jacqueline Schwab
Coaineadh Na Dtri Muire (Lament Of The Three Maries), Jeanne Morrill
Glory, Jeanne Morrill
My Images Come, Jeanne Morrill

I so much liked Gardam’s Old Filth that when I saw this novel of hers at the Ivy Bookstore, I picked it up without even checking to see what it was about. Once I started to read, I was surprised to see that it was an epistolary novel, surprised because of the coincidence of just having read two epistolary novels (The Sorrows of Young Werther and Pamela) and also because the form is not much used these days, though it was very popular in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

In general, I ‘m not very fond of gimmicks in novels because they often substitute for good writing. An example is this year’s best-selling Pride and Prejudice and Vampires. Yes, the title is funny, but after the cover and maybe a page or two, it becomes obvious that the odd juxtaposition is all there is to the book. The new sections inserted into the text of Austen’s novel are poorly written and offer no further surprises. When I realised I was chuckling over Austen’s wit and skipping over the execrable interpolations, I chucked the book and went to reread the original.

Using an old-fashioned form, such as having the whole book be letters to someone, seems like a gimmick to me. However, Gardam does not disappoint. Eliza, one of Barbara Pym’s “excellent women”, lives in a London suburb with her husband Henry. She begins by writing a letter to her neighbor, Jean, who has apparently taken off on a world tour, leaving behind husband and children, suburban neighborhood, and the rather snarky note Eliza had sent her containing what Eliza believed to be constructive criticism. Although Eliza does not actually know Jean except to wave to in the Army and Navy Stores, she continues to write to her, shifting gradually from talking about neighborhood concerns to more personal ones.

Reading her riveting and often uproariously funny letters, one begins to wonder just what kind of skewed glasses Eliza is viewing the world through. In last week’s blog on Pamela, I mentioned how hard it was (maybe just for me, as I’m notoriously gullible when it comes to what people say about themselves) to tell if Pamela was telling the truth, or maybe the whole truth, since we only get her point of view. No such problem with Gardam, who plays on our suspicions through Eliza’s recounting of scenes with Henry, other neighbors, the director of the hospice where she volunteers with “the Dying”, not to mention her accounts of her own actions. However, even as Eliza begins to unravel, there is never any doubt that she is telling the truth as she understands it.

We see a relationship grow between the two women, even though we never hear Jean’s voice and Eliza only occasionally mentions responses she’s received from Jean (a few letters, a gift) without quoting them. I was so seduced by Eliza’s voice—hilarious, poignant, painfully open—that I was willing to follow her anywhere, even into what, in retrospect, seem pretty bizarre adventures. And in the end, she touched me deeply. This book is even better than Old Filth and that’s saying a lot.

Having spoken last week about what I believe is the honorable, even heroic calling of writing and reading fiction, I thought it appropriate to go back and read one of the earliest novels. As with The Sorrows of Young Werther I was very familiar with this 1740 classic but had never actually read it. I knew that it was an epistolary novel, a series of letters, and hugely successful. Unlike earlier epistolary novels which were adventure or romantic adventure stories, Richardson’s story is more about the character of Pamela, a 15-year-old housemaid and life in an upper-class household.

Pamela is by her own account a pious and respectable girl whom everyone loves. Unfortunately, her master loves her a bit too much for her comfort and makes unwanted advances which she parries using her feeble weapons: words, fainting fits, and the support of other servants, though that support must be tempered by their fear of and dependence on their master. Thinking about how helpless she was to prevent him if he chose to force himself on her, I was reminded of The Tale of Genji and how such behaviour was considered commonplace. 18th century England is a long way from 11th century Japan, but I was not surprised to find Pamela’s aristocratic neighbours and servants from other houses declaring that Mr. B making her his mistress should be the obvious and ordinary outcome. Even today, with all the strides we have made in enabling women to be our own selves and not some man’s servant or property, there are too many women who are helpless against their abusers.

The first part of the story is a series of letters Pamela writes to her parents relating her problems with Mr. B. and asking for their advice. The second and much longer part is a journal that she keeps, still addressing her parents as though writing a long letter to them, telling them of her trials and assuring them of her determination to preserve her honor. She also tries to analyse people’s motives, including her own.

Richardson chose the epistolary form because of its immediacy. The first-person voice of someone in the throes of the experience does draw in the reader, and I happily plunged into the story. Unfortunately, Pamela’s voice did not interest me for very long. I soon began to find her endless complaining tiresome and her infinite perfection quite irritating. Of course, she is writing to her parents, so it is natural to relay compliments that she has received, knowing that they would enjoy hearing praise of her, but she goes on at such length about how everyone finds her so remarkable, so good, so smart, so beautiful, that it’s hard not to think “and so vain”.

One of the drawbacks of first-person voice is that we only hear that person’s view of events. Is Pamela a reliable narrator? Probably Richardson means her to be, since his intention with the book is to present a portrait of how girls ought to act. And not just girls. The last few pages are taken up with reminders to gentlemen, aristocrats, servants, clergymen, etc. of the lessons they should have learned from the story. Yet, it is hard not to wonder if Pamela didn’t plan the whole thing from the start in order to trap Mr. B. into matrimony, and if she isn’t perhaps a bit more wicked than the image she presents to her parents.

What kept me reading, in spite of the long lists of rules for right conduct in serving maids and wives, was the tension between the social classes, the niceties of who could sit down in whose presence, the particular amount of authority that a housekeeper might have, what happens when a woman marries a man from a lower class and vice versa. Richardson specifically instructs “lower servants” to “distinguish between the lawful and unlawful commands of a superior”, implying that they should disobey the latter. But, however radical he may be about social class, Richardson promotes a coldly conventional view of women’s roles, where a wife is little better than a servant.

Cassandra’s two memoirs have been bestsellers, but her recent novel is not doing so well. While she’s trying to decide what her next project should be, she hears a reference on the news to an old murder case involving a former classmate of hers and decides to use it as the core of a memoir describing the very different paths she and her school friends have followed.

When I was writing my memoir, I not only read many memoirs and books about writing memoirs, I spent a lot of time pondering the ethics involved. I couldn’t tell my story without mentioning other people, and I debated about what sort of rights I had to tell someone else’s story. Knowing how faulty memory and perspective may be, I worried about getting things wrong. While it’s generally understood that a memoir is one person’s view of what happened, I wanted to be as accurate as possible. I didn’t want to be one of those memoirists who take liberties with the truth, but I did want to include dialogue and other dramatic devices. In the end, I did my best and trusted the emotional truth to compensate for any errors. The danger, of course, in revealing one’s emotional truths is that they are not always pretty.

Some people criticised Cassandra’s first memoir, which told her father’s love story, how he fell in love with a young Black woman whom he rescued during the riots in Baltimore following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. During the rescue, he was badly beaten and taken to the hospital, leaving ten-year-old Cassandra bereft, waiting for him to bring her birthday cake home. Some months afterwards he left Cassandra and her mother to live with and then marry Annie, braving the censure of friends and colleagues alike, censure which was not so much for the divorce but for the bi-racial marriage.

Some of her readers were offended by Cassandra’s complaining about the ruin of her birthday party because it seemed so petty compared to the horror of King’s death. I, too, have been offended by novels that co-opt tragedies of the Civil Rights Movement to add ready-made drama to the relatively trivial problems of some White girl or boy. Similarly, I resent books that use the attacks on the World Trade Center to heighten the drama of a pet dog dying or the silly problems of a bunch of spoiled yuppies.

So I was not disposed to like Cassandra very much, and the description of her subsequent book and other actions didn’t appeal to me much either. Eventually, however, she did begin to grow on me. Cassandra doesn’t flinch from the truth. Instead of striking back when criticised, she looks for where she may be in the wrong. I like that. As she returns to Baltimore and reconnects with her former friends, she learns some home truths about herself.

Cassandra contacts the three women who were her close friends in elementary school, chosen on the first day not because they were Black but because they seemed self-confident and had already staked a claim on the best-placed quartet of desks. She had attended a different junior high and when they met up again in high school, somehow she was no longer part of their group.

There are many references to heroes—Cassandra’s father is a Classics professor—but this is really a book about race. I sometimes think pretty much everything in Baltimore is really about race. Kudos to Lippman for taking on issues so hard to explore without giving offense and impossible, in the end, to see from both sides. To me, the heart of the book is Cassandra’s inability, no matter how close she may have been to her three friends, to understand what life was like for them. Lippman adroitly expands this theme beyond race, adding a resonance that lingers long after I’ve set the book down.

I believe that what Lippman does here represents the best of what fiction is capable of. Yes, fiction can be entertaining and escapist, but where it really shines is when it opens our minds and our hearts and enables us to see the world from within someone else’s skin. Undertaking this journey is the most honorable motivation for our becoming writers and readers and thus makes heroes of us all.

Hampl’s search for the sublime led me to thinking about the Romantic Movement. Reacting to the dry rationality of the Enlightenment, artists and young people of the 18th century turned instead to nature and the reasons of the heart. It is perhaps not surprising that such an explosion of youthful energy should, like the 1960s, come after a period of prosperity and the growth of the middle class. Impatient with bourgeois complacency and bored by their parents’ prudence, the new Romantics embraced the passions of the day for blue flowers, brooding heroes, dark ruins and terrible peaks.

I was bit surprised to realise that I had never actually read this classic. Even though today most people would associate the name Werther only with candy, the book was immensely popular in its time, making Goethe perhaps the first literary celebrity. Young people formed Werther clubs and imitated him, even wearing clothes like his. Tie-in merchandise was sold: china figurines, perfumes, fans and gloves with images of Werther and his beloved Lotte. There was even a wave of young people copying Werther’s actions, which led to the book being banned in some cities. Goethe himself compared the book to “a small firing charge . . . needed to detonate a powerful mine” and said that “everyone could now burst forth with his own exaggerated demands, unsatisfied passions, and imaginary sufferings.”

Having heard so much about the story already, I tried to approach it with an open mind. In some ways, it is the oldest story in the world. Vacationing in a rural German village, Werther meets a beautiful young woman as she delays leaving for a dance in order to cut bread for her motherless brothers and sisters. Even though he has been warned ahead of time that she is engaged to be married, he cannot help falling in love with Lotte. She, too, seems aware of the instant connection between them. The tale is told entirely through letters written by Werther to his friend, William, giving us at first hand the young man’s feelings and sensations. And such feelings!

My friend, Chris, has been talking about the two sisters in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility lately, asking who would we rather be, passionate Marianne or serious Elinor. It does often seem that siblings take on opposite roles. If the first child is introverted and quiet, then the second may be reckless and melodramatic. Of course, one wants both: Elinor’s stability enlivened by Marianne’s sense of fun.

In recent years I’ve seen too often the destructive results when people are guided by emotions rather than reason, their willingness to be conned. It is not that I never feel the passions that roiled my youth; rather it is that I don’t have to indulge them. Werther consciously chooses each step in his path. It is not that he is carried away by the strength of his feelings, but that he dwells on them and magnifies them. Even with that element of self-dramatisation, however, his openness compels sympathy. I admit, though, that I also had to sympathise with the young man’s poor employers, each in turn begging him to moderate his passions.

Goethe said that he wanted to write about a man who opens himself fully to the urgings of nature, both inside and out. Werther has a wonderful sense of oneness with the world around him: the linden trees, the stream, the cliffs.

I’m reminded of Jane Eyre, that passionate girl whose story was published 73 years after Werther appeared in 1774. One of the most fascinating things about Jane’s story is how, as she grows older and with only herself to rely on to make her way in life, she learns to contain her feelings. Her control and the banked strength of her passion give her immense power, the power that comes from knowing yourself through and through, a power far more important than what can be conferred by wealth or position. Her dignity and integrity despite her lowly station always inspire me, whereas this young man’s tale simply makes me sad.

The last few books I’ve read have made me think about what constitutes a good life. Last week I blogged about Stoner, a quiet and unassuming story which mesmerised me with its honest depiction of a man’s life, an ordinary man, a man of his time and place. Looking back at the book now, I see William Stoner’s similarity to his father, a farmer who toiled year after year with little reward. The worth of his father’s life was in the labor itself. Hard and wearing as it was, the work was the meaning and vision of his father’s life, the doing of it, not the result.

The I read Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, having just seen the man’s photo at the National Portrait Gallery. By comparison, Cather’s story seemed almost a fairy tale. Like Stoner, Father Latour faced hard and unrelenting labor in his New Mexico parishes, strengthened by friendship and his own integrity, but in the end he had measurable results: more and better-run parishes, even a cathedral. Still, what he seemed to value most was a moment in his youth when he helped his friend stay the course. What Stoner and Father Latour have that Stoner’s father does not is a faith in something larger than themselves: religion for Father Latour and art—literature—for Stoner. Making their labor an offering gives them a sense of purpose.

It is this sense of the sublime—something greater than us, perhaps inspiring awe or terror, but filling our spirits and lifting us out of ourselves—that Hampl goes in search of here. In deft, poetic essays she examines what has influenced her as a writer and as a woman, what has inspired her: a painting by Matisse of a woman alone contemplating a bowl of goldfish, his series of Odalisque paintings, the fascination with cloistered life left over from a Catholic childhood, Katharine Mansfield’s journals and letters, the St. Paul of her childhood. She writes about the Côte d’Azur where she is currently staying, visiting the towns where Matisse lived, and Mansfield, and early experimental filmmaker Jerome Hill whose glass bowl of a sunroom she could see from her father’s greenhouse.

Hampl writes as a poet would, talking around the subject, layering images and sensations until they begin to coalesce. She talks about the beginnings of modernism in painting, when a "painting must depict the act of seeing, not the object seen . . . We have wanted to look not at the thing but at the mind beholding and rendering itself in the act of attention." She says of both Hill and Matisse that their real subject "was individual perception: not simply what was seen, but how seeing was experienced." The layering of Hampl’s fragments lets us take this journey of discovery with her.

In these marvelous essays, Hampl examines the creative process itself. The woman alone with her thoughts, Mansfield with her "ardent confusion of art and life": they model for her not what to write or how to write, but who to be. Her inspirations all represent some form of confinement—a goldfish bowl, harems, corset’s, a nun’s cell, illness, early death—yet at the same time they represent freedom, freedom to be yourself, freedom to sit and think. What is the point of a contemplative life? For an artist, it is everything. You must dig deep into yourself, past the point of comfort and self-delusion, in order to do your best work. You must give all of yourself. Hampl says that what spirit, in the sense of a having a spiritual life, does for us is "to breathe its mystery into our fiber so that we might breathe out the bit of meaning it entrusts to us."

I’ve been thinking about this idea of what makes a good life off and on for a few years. We live; we die and are forgotten. The things we collected and treasured are scattered, their significance lost. Our little accomplishments, the things we are proud of, mean nothing to anyone but us. When those who knew us die or forget us, what is left to show that we lived at all? Does it matter if there’s nothing?

What I keep coming back to is the belief that you choose something—anything, as long as it’s not hurting others—and devote yourself to it. It doesn’t matter what you accomplish or who is aware of it. What matters is that you stay the course. What you choose doesn’t even have to be sublime; it can be the red clay farmland that Stoner’s father spent his life working, the students who pass through your classroom, or the elusive women in Matisse’s paintings who will live forever.

What a find! Many thanks to NYRB for reprinting this 1965 novel and to my book club for selecting it. My interest was piqued immediately by the cover, which I recognised as a reproduction of a portrait by Thomas Eakins, thanks to the wonderful show of his work that Cynthia and I attended a few years ago. At a recent meeting of the publishers’ association to which I belong, we were talking about the importance of the cover design and some of the principles for different genres. This portrait, from 1900, of a man dressed in black, apparently deep in thought, tells you that the book will be serious, will reflect its time, and will, despite its apparent simplicity, convey deep and complex emotion.

And it’s all true. The very first paragraph gives us a summary of William Stoner’s life: a student and professor at the University of Missouri who is barely remembered after his death. Not a remarkable life, apparently, yet I was completely engaged by this story, drawn in by the author’s honest and compelling depiction of Stoner’s thoughts and emotions. Growing up at the end of the 19th century on a poor clay farm in Missouri, Stoner expects nothing more of life than the unending labor his parents, and even he as a child, expend on their arid, hardscrabble farm. His parents are patient, reticent people, accepting of their failure to do more than get by. “In the evenings the three of them sat in the small kitchen lighted by a single kerosene lamp, staring into the yellow flame; often during the hour or so between supper and bed, the only sound that could be heard was the weary movement of a body in a straight chair and the soft creak of a timber giving a little beneath the age of the house.”

All this changes when the County agent mentions to Stoner’s father that there is a new College of Agriculture at the University. As an agriculture student, Stoner takes a required survey of English literature course which troubles him because it requires more than the rote learning of his science courses, trouble which comes to a head when the professor one day demands that Stoner explain what a particular Shakespeare sonnet means. The discovery, for this man, of the peculiar intoxication of literature moved me profoundly. The author summons my response by talking around this sublime moment, like a mime creating walls and tables out of air, as Jane Hirshfield says, leaving me to fill the space with my own memories and experiences.

I cannot say enough good things about this book. The characters and their lives reflect their cultural context, reminding me about a nearly forgotten time and place when Puritan influence was still strong, making almost a fetish of work. Even as Scott and Zelda were partying across Europe, farmers were fighting day after day to make hard clay yield some kind of crop; assistant professors worked to find ways to pass on their knowledge and love of learning to students; ordinary and obscure men and women struggled to make their lives mean something. Not so different after all, perhaps. I thought about my grandfather, who died when I was a child, a serious and reticent man, and felt I understood him a little bit better.

Stoner’s life may be easily summarised, but the joy of this book is in the detail. Although a stolid and quiet man, Stoner’s thoughts and feelings run deep. Some of the characters seem almost too grotesque, yet of course such people exist. One of my book club members found her own troubles reflected in Stoner’s battles with university politics, and another recognised the portrait of Stoner’s wife. We talked at length about Edith, the wife, trying to understand how her formal and lonely childhood could have yielded such a woman, a woman who had “no knowledge of the necessity of living from day to day”.

My book club disagreed as to whether Stoner’s life was a sad one or whether it was, as the author himself described it in an interview quoted in the Introduction, “a good life”. I’ve mentioned before how depressing it can be to traverse an entire life within one small novel, seeing how disappointingly short the characters fall in achieving the goals they once dreamed of. It is seldom enough in life that we meet the expectations we have for ourselves. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what constitutes a good life. Perhaps it has to do with the trying, with persistence. While it could be said that Stoner ultimately fails at everything he tries, he does not give up. He does not run away. He stays and does his best. And at the end there is a sense of himself, of being his own person. His dreams may be simple, but he is not a simple man.