Gilead

Hello, friends. To those of you who have been faithful participants in our very special book club: thank you. I'm having a lot of fun reading and talking books with you, and I very much hope you feel the same.

My number has come up in the book selection process, and as I've previously stated I would like us to read Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. She's an author I've been meaning to get to for some time now, and I figured there's no better place to start than with the novel that earned her a Pulitzer.

Gilead is written in the form of a letter from John Ames, an aging Iowa preacher who believes his time is this world is running short, to his young son, a product of a late marriage. The New York Times describes it as "religious, somewhat essayistic and fiercely calm. Gilead is a beautiful work -- demanding, grave and lucid," and The Washington Post says it's "written in a prose so gravely measured and thoughtful, that one feels touched with grace just to read it." We've read a lot of different things so far in this club, but we've yet to read anything by a female author, nothing that could be classified as spiritual, nor anything that can safely be called "beautifully ruminative." I say it's time.

Random Notes

I thought that this was an enjoyable read, but still covered a serious topic. I found a more serious tone to this novel compared with some of Vonnegut's other novels, but maybe just because I was reading more critically than I sometimes do.

Symbolic Names

What does everyone think of the names? Campbell as American as the soup? Krapptauer=Crap Tower? What's the deal with "the Black Fueher of Harlem?"

Destiny vs. Choice

Is there a stronger argument for free will or free will? Which one wins? If Campbell had all of these events fall into his lap, was this his destiny? Did he "choose" free will in the end by hanging himself?

Innocent?

Even if the story were true, is Campbell really innocent? Are people who allow themselves to manipulated in such a way innocent of the crimes that they commit? Were the German citizens not guilty of the Holocaust in some way?

Hoax?

Are we supposed to think that this whole story is a hoax, somehow thought up by Campbell to prove his innocence? If not...is this a plausible story? Could there really be a vast conspiracy with the Americans, the Russians, and the Jews? Did Resi really fall in Love?

Mother Night

FInal Note on Yates

The RR discussion fell at a hellish time in the semester for me and perhaps there was a bit more that I wanted to say. Though I'm a bit past it now, Steve just handed me yesterday the Mar/Apr issue of The Believer magazine which contains an interesting interview with Sam Mendes primarily concerning his adaptation of Revolutionary Road (which I have still not seen).

You can't get the full interview online, but there are two Mendes quips I'd like to share so we can put a nail officially in the RR coffin. The first concerns a level of symbolism I didn't pick up on, the other an interesting dissection of the story structure in general.

"Yates describes Route 12 [if I remember correctly, the route leading to Revolutionary Road] cutting through the countryside at the beginning of the novel and he sets the house right on the border of the woods... the same woods April runs into when she's trying to escape from Frank toward the end. There's that deliberate sense of being right on the edge of centuries of nature and yet also within a very sterile and new environment."

"The story starts in such crisis. Anyone who's directed a Shakespearean tragedy or anything that involves characters spiraling down into chaos and despair can deal with that particular shape of story. But the strange thing about the novel Revolutionary Road is that is starts with despair. The story has a pyramid shape: starts bad and goes up in the middle when they decide to go to Paris, and then it goes back down again, but deeper and much darker that before. [The difficult thing about Yates is] his default position is to go dark."

Agreed.

Now, when do we move on to the lighter good Dr. Vonnegut?

Symbolism

I think the use of symbolism is something that could be really interesting to discuss. What about Knox Business Machines as Frank’s place of employment? What about Frank’s working place hallmark, Speaking of Production Control, and how that relates to the greater situation in the book? What about Revolutionary Estates and Road? Frank's unfinished stone path? What do you make of the names in the book themselves? Wheeler. Givings. Campbell, Grube (which in German means “hollow cavity, hole”). Brace? Other examples of symbolism you can think of?

Revolutionary Road

Anxious and round-eyed, two by two, they looked and they moved as though a calm and ordinary escape from this place had become the one great necessity of their lives; as if, in fact, they wouldn’t be able to begin to live at all until they were out beyond the rumbling pink billows of exhaust and the crunching gravel of this parking lot, out where the black sky went up and up forever and there were hundreds and thousands of stars.

This is when Yates had me hooked. This final line of the first chapter, so beautifully written and exquisitely crafted, was where I knew I would enjoy the hell out of this book even though the Oscar buzz had me aware of the content (“This novel locates the American tragedy squarely on the field of marriage” – Alfred Kazin) and stupidly, due to some unfortunate TV viewing, the ending got spoiled for me before I opened the first page. Also, reading it over again now having considered the novel as a whole, the sentiment expressed above from the first chapter read again in context of the entire novel is just a further testament to Yates’ symmetry and craft here. Obviously, this club has brought some weighty, emotional, and depressing literary business down upon us. However, I can’t help saying that I loved this book. Not just for the book club, but in life, people. It may very well be one of the best books I’ve ever read.

From what I’ve found, a lot of people respond negatively to Revolutionary Road, particularly women. This is a book that takes place before feminism (or at least before The Feminine Mystique) and I’ve read in many places that Yates himself was a “marital traditionalist,” which I think is perhaps just a nice way of calling him a chauvinist. Of course, that and the context and place in history where the story takes place, forces you to be a bit forgiving of some of this in your reading (or at least that was the case with me). The thing that really got me past this anti-woman message that so many claim is a prominent factor in the book is that fact that both of our protagonists are so deeply flawed. They equally contribute to their unhappiness as a unit and both of them are, in the end, kind of unlikable characters. April and Frank both are kind of fucked up. And, one of the central issues in the book, I think, is whether or not it is (at least entirely) their fault.

Obviously, they are both very unhappy people. It seems as though Frank is the kind of person who has that IT factor, something that draws people to him, a handsomeness and natural charisma. However, we're constantly forced to question just how "natural" that charisma is as he constantly is rehearsing conversations, speeches, courses of action in his head before he actually carries any of them out. April is in many ways the same, a natural beauty and talent who at heart is a romantic. She feels there is something better out there for her, but at the same time understands that her situation and the parlance of the times has her tethered to her husband, who she emotionally manipulates as much as he her. Throughout the book though, you feel this tremendous pressure from the world around them. They feel like they need to be or want to be the perfect bohemian intelligentsia that flies in the face of the suburban drawl that weighted down so many WWII veteran families in mid 50s. This pressure seems to come most notably in the form of the Givings ("She cried because she'd had such high, high hopes about the Wheelers... and now she was terribly, terribly, terribly disappointed") and this suburban funk in the form of the Campbells, who the Wheelers seem to detest but can't seem to shake themselves from. There really is just so much to talk about here and I want to see where this discussion leads us before I say too much more...

In the end, regardless of the questions of content and theme, what I really appreciated mostly was the craft of the book. The beautifully written sentences. The skillful and seamless handling of flashback as a way to move the story forward. The very seldom and difficultly used omniscient third person narration.Though Yates himself seems to have been a sad and unhappy man (I read his follow up to this, a collection of short stories called Eleven Kinds of Loneliness for Christ-sakes) there is no doubt that he was a superb wordsmith and, in the end, I think that kind of skill is necessary to keep a reader engaged throughout this kind of story.

Anyway, enough for now. I created a couple of posts below containing prompts for the facets of the book that I think could be interesting to discuss. By all means though, please have at it however you'd like. I'm really curious to see what everyone thought.

John Givings

Beside the proposal for the trip to France (something every reader, I think, knows will never happen) the one real curve-ball, the one real Thing that happens in the story, is the appearance of John Givings. Though he is mentioned several times, what do you make of his two most notable appearances, Part 2 Chapter 5 and maybe more importantly Part 3 Chapter 1? What role does he serve in both the definition of the Wheelers as characters and the general theme of the story?

Now you’ve said it. The hopeless emptiness. Hell, plenty of people are on to the emptiness part; out where I used to work, on the Coast, that’s all we ever talked about. We’d sit around talking about emptiness all night. Nobody ever said ‘hopeless,’ though; that’s where we’d chicken out. Because maybe it does take a certain amount of guts to see the emptiness, but it takes a whole hell of a lot more to see the hopelessness.

Structure

How does the structure of the novel serve the story? Two examples…

--You could make the argument that the novel begins and ends with a performance. First, The Petrified Forest, at the end Mrs. Givings’ “performance” for the Braces.

--The skilful use of flashback throughout. My favorite? From the last chapter of Part 2 to the first of Part 3.

Misc.

A few more things that crossed my mind as I read...

--What do you make of the role of alcoholism in the novel?

--What role do you think each of the Wheelers’ extra-marital affairs had both in terms of defining the story and each of their characters?

--What do you make of the role of parenthood in the novel and Yates' commentary of it? As exhibited by Frank's and April's parents, Frank and April themselves, the Givings', the Campbells'?

--I mean, can we avoid it: abortion? It comes up at two distinct points in the story and the lives of Frank and April. How is it used by the characters and by Yates throughout Revolutionary Road?

Dan's Choice #1

I have picked my book.  So that all of you can score it early, I'm announcing it.

It is..."Mother Night" by God rest his soul Kurt Vonnegut.

I decided to add a little humor to our little club, albeit dark humor.

Hopefully not too many of us have read it.

Our next discussion...

Hi all. Some great discussion on the last book. Sorry I didn't participate more, but I kept thinking I didn't have that much to say. Apparently you all proved me wrong.

By all means feel free to keep the discussion of O'Nan going, but I thought I'd let you all know that i plan to put up my post on Revolutionary Road sometime early in the week on April 12th. That should give everyone who is interested about four weeks to get it read if you haven't started already. I've already finished, so if the general sentiment seems to be that we can discuss it sooner, by all means let me know. I found it to be a really easy and engrossing read.

Also, if anyone is interested, many people theorize that the return to literary grace that Yates has had in the last ten years or so (most of his books were out of print after his death in '92) was due mainly to this piece in the Boston Review written by, strangely enough, Stewart O'Nan.

Happy reading!