Why Stop?

What makes you give up on a novel? We've all done it – you read 50 or 100 pages and then just don't want to keep going. It hasn't happened to me in a while, but I reached in point in Susan Choi's A Person of Interest where I closed the book and had no desire to open it again. Why does that happen?

For some people it's important that they like the main characters. That's never been my criterion. I still remember the horror on my high school English teacher's face when I told her that my favorite character in “David Copperfield” was Uriah Heep. Her lip actually curled. But he was much more interesting than that simp Dora.

Obviously poor writing can cause any reader to give up, but sometimes even a good writer can fail to hold your interest. In the case of Susan Choi, whose “American Woman” I had enjoyed, I just got too annoyed with the main character. Choi's book includes plot elements from the real-life stories of both the Unibomber and Wen Ho Lee, the Chinese-born American scientist at Los Alamos who was accused of espionage. Ho's fictional main character, also named Lee, a Chinese-born math professor, is suspected by the FBI of being connected to the bomb which killed another professor. And in order for this suspicion to grow, Cho needs the professor to act incredibly guilty (and stupid) when being questioned by the FBI. After a while I just got too annoyed with him, and with Choi. I felt like she was manipulating her character in order to force her plot into the direction she wanted to go, and I just balked at following her.

So think back on books you've abandoned. Can you identify the reason you did it?

Do Not Go Gently

If you have ever wondered what it will feel like when your mind and body start to betray you as you near the end of your life, this book will terrify you. How the author Oscar Casares, who looks from the book jacket picture to be no more than 40 (aside: he has done a masterful job of keeping his personal data off the internet), can write so convincingly of his main character who is 91 is a mystery. I can hope that he is wrong – but I doubt it. It feels quite true.

Amigoland is the name of the nursing home in Brownsville, Texas to which Don Fidencio, 91, has been sent by his daughter. He has enough mental agility and physical mobility to be out of place with the other residents. Casares’ descriptions of the home and its residents are heart-breaking – and terrifying.

The other actors in the novel are Don Celestino, his younger brother at age 70, and Don Celestino’s girlfriend Socorro, age 38. Don Fidencio has repeatedly expressed his wish to visit the birthplace of his grandfather across the border in Mexico. After much disagreement the three of them set out on this journey/pilgrimage. The incidents of a lost passport, lost medicine, incontinence, missed busses might be humorous unless you have ever had to deal with similar incidents with an aging parent or relative.

For most of the book I was focused on the geographical journey that the three were making: the descriptions of an unfamiliar part of the country and the travel mechanics. Only at the end did I realize that each of them was on a much more significant inner journey of his and her own making.

Academic Satire

All I knew about Kingsley Amis was that he was the curmudgeonly father of novelist Martin Amis. But I recently stumbled on a list of most influential books of the 20^th century, which included his first novel Lucky Jim. Published in 1953, the novel associated Amis with the “Angry Young Men” school of British literature, working and middle class writers and playwrights whose anti-establishment works contrasted with the more urbane and delicate upper class writers of the 30's and 40's (think Evelyn Waugh).

The title character Jim Dixon is a lecturer in Medieval History at an unnamed provincial university in the early 1950's. He is frustrated by the stiflingly pretentious atmosphere, yet he gamely attempts to win favor with his superior, the absent-minded and boring Professor Welch, in order to hold on to his job, even though he loathes it. He's also involved in a quasi-relationship with a woman he alternately likes and despises. Jim's rage at the pretensions he is forced to observe is relieved by two methods – copious amounts of alcohol and making faces when no one is looking.

The results are almost always hilarious. Amis is adept at painting quick humorous sketches (“a small bullied-looking woman with unabundant brown hair”), but he's at his best in his longer descriptions of Jim's predicaments. I have probably never read a funnier description of waking up with a hangover (“His mouth had been used as a latrine for some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he's somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police.”), and it gets even funnier when Jim discovers the damage he has done to his guest room at Professor Welch's house in his inebriated state.

Viewed from more than fifty years later, it's hard for me to measure the impact this biting satire must have had on post-war British society, but it certainly provided me with lots of laughs.

Another Classic

For most people the name Charlotte Bronte is quickly associated with her novel Jane Eyre - but only with Jane Eyre. For some time I have had on my bookshelf a copy of Bronte's Villette. How it came to be there I have no idea. But at 464 pages it was unlikely that I would be reading it any time soon. So I decided to take advantage of a free audio download to listen to it while running. It turned out to be a great choice with one reservation. Villette is the name of the town in which most of the story takes place (not the name of the main character as I had erroneously supposed). It is located in Belgium where they speak French. Bronte has included a lot of French dialogue in her book - which is fine if you have the printed version that includes the translations in the back. But somewhat difficult if you are listening to a recording and your French is very rusty. That said, I don't think that I missed too much.

In the most general terms this is the story of a poor English girl Lucy Snowe on her own whose luck or fate brings her to a girls' school in Villette where she becomes a teacher of English. As you would expect Bronte is superb in describing the physical surroundings as well as portraits of a host of other characters. Bronte herself lived for a time in a Brussels boarding school where she taught English so she can write vividly from experience.

One of the aspects that I found particularly interesting was the portrayal of the differences and animosity between the Romanists (aka Catholics) and the Protestants. Lucy is the sole Protestant among the Catholic faculty of the school. Great efforts are made to convert her in the course of which Bronte lays out for the reader/listener some of the significant differences between these two philosophies and their respective views of life. So much more interesting than reading an encyclopedia.

The ending of the book took my breath away. I still want to say "Wait - that can't be," but of course it can and for Bronte's purposes it can only be that way.