Wednesday Wheel of Things
What I've Just Finished Reading
About three-fourths of the way through Of Human Bondage, Philip Carey meets the most insufferable character -- Thorpe Athelney, a kind of Edwardian proto-beatnik: exuberant, sentimental, deliberately careless, endlessly facetious. I want to throw eggs at him. I think it's the condescendingly gender-essentialist praise he heaps on his wife and daughter that bothers me more than anything -- always extolling their hips and telling Philip to get himself a nice ignorant country girl who will bear healthy children and make her own cakes for tea. But he and his family are kind to Philip when he loses all his money in South African stocks and has to quit medical school, and he helps Philip get a job in a shop, and some people are just a little insufferable like that; what can you do? Philip does not find him nearly as insufferable as I do, which is in character for Philip.
W. Somerset Maugham has become one of my favorite authors without ever doing anything noticeably spectacular -- slipped into my pocket with my car keys, as the song says. The Razor's Edge bored me a lot of the time and ended in a cheesy sermon about The Wisdom of the East, but it got under my skin, and I found I was still talking about it a week later. Of Human Bondage sucked me right in from the start. Maugham's prose isn't delicious like Jane Austen's, and he's very far from being as funny, but he's close-up and meticulous like Austen, and I think that's part of what I like so much. Of Human Bondage follows a lonely boy through childhood and into an awkward, fumbling adulthood, where he makes friends and mistakes and tries to work out what his purpose is, or if he should have one. It's got a wonderful slow pace and the narration is quiet, nonjudgemental and matter-of-fact, with the exception of a few very irritating euphemisms (the book was published in 1915, so some euphemism is indicated, but every now and then Maugham feels the need to spackle on a big whack of pointless coyness, e.g. "a profession whose most notorious member for our generation was Mrs. Warren," and it always jars a little). Philip is always believable, and that makes him likeable even when he's not.
I loved it a little less toward the end. Philip's tendency is always to feel set apart from people and to summarize them at a distance in a fairly condescending way, and this gets a little worse when it should be getting better, as he completes his medical training -- though that's probably accurate to a lot of young doctors' coming of age. The last few pages were kind of awful. But I enjoyed the rest of it enough that it didn't matter. I really like all of Maugham's stubbornly self-destructive female characters, even as I feel I ought to be a little suspicious of Maugham for writing so many of them. The Sturdy Mothers of the Race, not so much.
What I'm Reading Now
Mistress Pat by L. M. Montgomery -- one of my Yuletide fandoms this year, so I'm re-reading it. It's a little rougher going that I was expecting. I was prepared for Pat to be change-averse to the point of pathology, because that's the whole point of Pat and I love her for it -- but I'd forgotten just how pervasive the Gardiners' snobbery is these early chapters. They might be even worse than the proverbially proud Murrays of New Moon, who at least have the excuse of being old and disappointed (and/or orphaned and raised by old disappointed Murrays and the spirits of trees). I'm not at all invested in how tacky all the Binnies have been since the Creation, but Pat and Judy are going to press the point really hard for two hundred pages anyway.
I do love how much of a weird outlier Pat is among Montgomery heroines -- Montgomery called her "the most like myself" at one point, but I don't know if that's really accurate. It felt accurate at the time, probably, when she was writing the Pat books and suffering from severe depression (and writing constantly anyway, as if/because her life depended on it). She's an intense picture of one or two aspects of Montgomery's personality. In Pat, it's the less obviously admirable ones -- love as obsession, nostalgia overgrown into paralysis, defensive judgmentalism as a bulwark against any too-painful understanding. She has Montgomery's overwhelming love of nature in common with Emily and Anne and Valancy and Sara, but in Pat it seems to be as much a source of pain as of solace. Or at least that's how I remember it; I'm only on Chapter Two.
Anyway, Pat. Pat hates change, but life is change -- that's pretty much the whole story. Pat gets put through the wringer in this book. I vaguely remember hating the ending, but I'm not sure anymore about why. You'll get to hear all about it eventually whether you're interested or not.
What I'm Reading Next
Brideshead Revisited, finally! I'm getting back on the 99 Novels train.
About three-fourths of the way through Of Human Bondage, Philip Carey meets the most insufferable character -- Thorpe Athelney, a kind of Edwardian proto-beatnik: exuberant, sentimental, deliberately careless, endlessly facetious. I want to throw eggs at him. I think it's the condescendingly gender-essentialist praise he heaps on his wife and daughter that bothers me more than anything -- always extolling their hips and telling Philip to get himself a nice ignorant country girl who will bear healthy children and make her own cakes for tea. But he and his family are kind to Philip when he loses all his money in South African stocks and has to quit medical school, and he helps Philip get a job in a shop, and some people are just a little insufferable like that; what can you do? Philip does not find him nearly as insufferable as I do, which is in character for Philip.
W. Somerset Maugham has become one of my favorite authors without ever doing anything noticeably spectacular -- slipped into my pocket with my car keys, as the song says. The Razor's Edge bored me a lot of the time and ended in a cheesy sermon about The Wisdom of the East, but it got under my skin, and I found I was still talking about it a week later. Of Human Bondage sucked me right in from the start. Maugham's prose isn't delicious like Jane Austen's, and he's very far from being as funny, but he's close-up and meticulous like Austen, and I think that's part of what I like so much. Of Human Bondage follows a lonely boy through childhood and into an awkward, fumbling adulthood, where he makes friends and mistakes and tries to work out what his purpose is, or if he should have one. It's got a wonderful slow pace and the narration is quiet, nonjudgemental and matter-of-fact, with the exception of a few very irritating euphemisms (the book was published in 1915, so some euphemism is indicated, but every now and then Maugham feels the need to spackle on a big whack of pointless coyness, e.g. "a profession whose most notorious member for our generation was Mrs. Warren," and it always jars a little). Philip is always believable, and that makes him likeable even when he's not.
I loved it a little less toward the end. Philip's tendency is always to feel set apart from people and to summarize them at a distance in a fairly condescending way, and this gets a little worse when it should be getting better, as he completes his medical training -- though that's probably accurate to a lot of young doctors' coming of age. The last few pages were kind of awful. But I enjoyed the rest of it enough that it didn't matter. I really like all of Maugham's stubbornly self-destructive female characters, even as I feel I ought to be a little suspicious of Maugham for writing so many of them. The Sturdy Mothers of the Race, not so much.
What I'm Reading Now
Mistress Pat by L. M. Montgomery -- one of my Yuletide fandoms this year, so I'm re-reading it. It's a little rougher going that I was expecting. I was prepared for Pat to be change-averse to the point of pathology, because that's the whole point of Pat and I love her for it -- but I'd forgotten just how pervasive the Gardiners' snobbery is these early chapters. They might be even worse than the proverbially proud Murrays of New Moon, who at least have the excuse of being old and disappointed (and/or orphaned and raised by old disappointed Murrays and the spirits of trees). I'm not at all invested in how tacky all the Binnies have been since the Creation, but Pat and Judy are going to press the point really hard for two hundred pages anyway.
I do love how much of a weird outlier Pat is among Montgomery heroines -- Montgomery called her "the most like myself" at one point, but I don't know if that's really accurate. It felt accurate at the time, probably, when she was writing the Pat books and suffering from severe depression (and writing constantly anyway, as if/because her life depended on it). She's an intense picture of one or two aspects of Montgomery's personality. In Pat, it's the less obviously admirable ones -- love as obsession, nostalgia overgrown into paralysis, defensive judgmentalism as a bulwark against any too-painful understanding. She has Montgomery's overwhelming love of nature in common with Emily and Anne and Valancy and Sara, but in Pat it seems to be as much a source of pain as of solace. Or at least that's how I remember it; I'm only on Chapter Two.
Anyway, Pat. Pat hates change, but life is change -- that's pretty much the whole story. Pat gets put through the wringer in this book. I vaguely remember hating the ending, but I'm not sure anymore about why. You'll get to hear all about it eventually whether you're interested or not.
What I'm Reading Next
Brideshead Revisited, finally! I'm getting back on the 99 Novels train.