Book Review 005 / Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

 

Tom Jones 

by Henry Fielding 

1749

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The 100 best novels / No 5 / Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749)

John Pistelli

3 February 2021

For a 900-page novel, Tom Jones’s famously well-made plot can be summarized briefly. The titular hero is a foundling raised in the ideal country estate of the benevolent Mr. Allworthy. There Tom’s natural goodness and high spirits are checked by several challenges: the rival but empty ideologies of his two flawed tutors, the brutal cleric Thwackum and the dry philosopher Square; the enmity of his scheming cousin Blifil; and eventually his own immoderacy or imprudence, when he impregnates Molly Seagrim, daughter of his dissolute servant-friend, Black George. In the midst of these adventures, he falls gradually in love with the daughter of the neighboring estate, the auroral Sophia Western, whose drunken, vulgar, alcoholic, hunting-obsessed Tory father and arrogant, cosmopolitan, semi-learned, cynical Whig aunt will unfortunately never let her marry a bastard foundling and instead wish to wed her to the odious Blifil.

Book Review 007 / Emma by Jane Austen

 

Emma

by Jane Austen 

1816

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The 100 best novels / No 7 / Emma by Jane Austen (1816)

John Pistelli
3 August 2019

She knew the limitations of her own powers too well to attempt more than she could perform with credit; she wanted neither taste nor spirit in the little things which are generally acceptable, and could accompany her own voice well.
—Jane Austen, Emma

Jane Austen’s detractors always attack the whole premise of her aesthetic: its circumscription. The anti-Janeites, from Romantics like Charlotte Brontë and Ralph Waldo Emerson to Marxists like Raymond Williams and Edward Said, are forever complaining that she leaves too much out—the natural world, the spiritual world, the human body, the Napoleonic Wars, the capitalist system, the British Empire. As Virginia Woolf writes in her Common Reader essay on Austen:

Book Review 008 / Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

 

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley 

1818

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The 100 best novels / No 8 / Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)

John Pistelli
31 October 2021

About a book as over-familiar as this—and accompanied by infinitudes of scholarship, criticism, adaptation, and continuation, much of which I don’t intend to consult—there is everything and nothing to say. In two decades, I’ve read it three times, one time in the 1831 version, twice in the 1818 first edition (now preferred by critics), and I even taught it once. I find it elusive, better and worse than it should be, a work of intermittent Shakespearean power linking tragic drama and Gothic romance to modern horror and science fiction, alternating with the dull effusions of the sentimental novel and Romantic travelogue—in fact, it’s such a fantasia on Romantic themes (the sublime and the beautiful, the power of imagination, the solitary outcast, social injustice, the faults of the Enlightenment, domestic utopia, incest and parricide) that this subject of endless secondary sources almost seems to count as secondary literature itself. It was written by a 19-year-old in a radical milieu and is an unmistakable rebuke to radicalism, a reproof that only grew more definite with the novel’s later and more moralized revision.

Book Review 010 / The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe

 

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

by Edgar Allan Poe 1838 

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The 100 best novels / No 10 / The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1838)

John Pistelli
22 October 2016

Calm block fallen down here from some dark disaster
—Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Tomb of Edgar Poe”

Edgar Allan Poe must have the strangest legacy in modern literature: he invented both pulp fiction and the literary avant-garde.

While these two tendencies may—in their shared commitments to sensationalism and formalism—be allies in a high-low war against the middle mind (exemplified in literature by the realist novel and the expressive lyric), it is quite a feat to have birthed them both. But Poe codified several important popular genres that would later flourish in the era of mass literacy and mass media (horror, detective fiction, science fiction) and thereby influenced such proto-pulp and pulp writers as Doyle, Stevenson, Wells, and Lovecraft. At the same time, his theoretical insistence on a “pure” (i.e., non-mimetic) literary writing designed to affect the reader through the manipulation of form and surface, not to mention his depiction of disordered psychological states and waking dream-worlds, bequeathed a legacy to modernism and the avant-garde through Baudelaire and the French Symbolists and Decadents as well as such other admirers as Dostoevsky, Wilde, and Kafka.

Book Review 016 / The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

 

The Scarlet Letter 

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

 1850

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The 100 best novels / No 16 / The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)

John Pistelli
6 April 2017

This short 1850 historical novel, written by a middle-aged and modestly successful short story writer and lately deposed customs inspector, tells a tale of crime and punishment in Puritan Boston. Its heroine, Hester Prynne, has committed adultery before the story begins; it opens with her exposure, along with her illegitimate baby, Pearl, on the town pillory. There she is spied by her husband, lately arrived in America after having sent her on ahead from Europe years before. She vows to him and to the community to keep her paramour’s identity a secret, even as her husband disguises himself as a doctor and enters the life of the colony under the name Roger Chillingworth.

Book Review 017 / Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

 

Moby-Dick

by Herman Melville 1851

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The 100 best novels / No 17 / Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)

John Pistelli
11 December 2016

In his 1850 manifesto-essay in praise of Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Herman Melville scorns the Anglophile polish and traditionalism of Washington Irving, then considered the greatest American fiction writer, and affirms instead that “it is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man cannot be great. Failure is the true test of greatness.” This credo of the modern or even modernist writer from Blake to Beckett is the first step to approaching Moby-Dick, a novel sufficiently original that its contemporaries did not know how to value it. Even at this late date, online reviewers complain about its miscellaneousness and bizarre structure and generic variety; in this, they echo the earliest reviews, included in this Norton Critical Edition, that called the novel “an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact” and “a singular medley of naval observation, magazine article writing, satiric reflection on the conventionalisms of civilized life, and rhapsody run mad.” At least we no longer charge Melville with blasphemy or lunacy.

Review / The Sign of the Four by Arthur Conan Doyle

 

The Sign of Four

 by Arthur 

Conan Doyle 

1890

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The 100 best novels / No 26 / The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)

John Pistelli
23 February 2016

Halfway through The Sign of Four, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle steals the literary critic’s thunder by aptly “theorizing,” as we used to say in grad school, the novel’s own genre through two minor characters:

“It is a romance!” cried Mrs. Forrester. “An injured lady, half a million in treasure, a black cannibal, and a wooden-legged ruffian. They take the place of the conventional dragon or wicked earl.”

“And two knight-errants to the rescue,” added Miss Morstan, with a bright glance at me.

 

The late Victorian period saw a general revival of romance in Britain, for a variety of reasons: the ideological and commercial collapse of the three-volume realist novel; the increasingly martial cultural tone of an expanding empire; the reaction against the previous dominance of female authors and female modes (domestic realism, sentimentalism) in fiction; and the rise of a newly literate, non-classically educated audience seeking more adventurous fare. (I derive my information from such useful literary histories as Elaine Showalter’s Sexual Anarchy and Hugh Kenner’s A Sinking Island.)

Doyle’s myth-making imagination scored an undeniable triumph with the invention of the maven of deduction, Sherlock Holmes, and his more practical partner, Watson. But aside from this, he lacked the virtues of his fellow romancers. He could not write the perfect prose of Stevenson or Kipling, nor philosophize over his own phantasmagoria as Wilde could, nor embody in vividly imagined tales whole new concepts of time and nature like Wells; even Stoker’s Dracula, while a bit schlocky, is prodigiously imagined and intricately composed. I find Doyle’s narrative gifts and his style weaker—at least in the first two Holmes novels—and cannot bring myself to care much about the story or characters.

 

 

The Sign of Four, a complicated mystery involving the schemes of various parties to acquire treasure that a British army officer mysteriously won in India, is mainly interesting today for what I might call “cultural studies” reasons. That is, it fascinates readers for what it suggests about late-19th-century British attitudes toward drugs, race, empire, law enforcement, homosocial relations between men, statistics, etc. I imagine the scene where Holmes deduces a killer’s identity from his footprint, complete with a lengthy pseudo-scientific racialist disquisition on the characteristics of various non-Western people’s feet (“The Hindoo proper has long and thin feet”—who knew?) has launched a dissertation or two.

But even I am not immune: as a student of aestheticism, I was interested in Doyle’s portrayal of Thaddeus Sholto, son of the major who brought the jewels back from India. In Sholto, Doyle provides an amusing caricature of the aesthete, an ineffectual and hypochondriacal lovers of the beautiful; and Doyle, in his bluff way, communicates directly what Pater and Wilde never quite get around to telling us, namely, that the aesthete is able to enjoy his refined pleasures only because he sits at the pinnacle of an imperial hierarchy (I think I learned somewhere or other that Edward Said, whom I have had cause to mention here before, re-read the Holmes stories on his deathbed).

But Holmes’s disinterested gaze knits the seeming chaos of crime into patterns that are pleasurable for the reader to behold: he is only another kind of aesthete (he is called in this novel a “connoisseur of crime”), which is no doubt why we find him, on this novel’s famous first page, in the languid Huysmans-esque pursuit of intoxication:

Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction.

And there is also some fine atmospheric writing about London here; not as good as Dickens, but moody and dream-like:

It was a September evening, and not yet seven o’clock, but the day had been a dreary one, and a dense drizzly fog lay low upon the great city. Mud-colored clouds drooped sadly over the muddy streets. Down the Strand the lamps were but misty splotches of diffused light which threw a feeble circular glimmer upon the slimy pavement. The yellow glare from the shop-windows streamed out into the steamy, vaporous air, and threw a murky, shifting radiance across the crowded thoroughfare. There was, to my mind, something eerie and ghost-like in the endless procession of faces which flitted across these narrow bars of light,—sad faces and glad, haggard and merry. Like all human kind, they flitted from the gloom into the light, and so back into the gloom once more.

 

Arthur Conan Doyle

    

The novel ends with a long narrative from the main villain explaining the background to the crime. His narrative is an imperial romance within the detective romance, a tale of desperation, greed, and betrayal amid the upheavals of the Sepoy rebellion. The villain’s strong will and loyalty—he is the only non-racist character in the novel, being bound in solidarity with his Sikh collaborators in crime and his Andaman islander confederate—make him a good foil for Holmes, a man of equally strong drive but also of total abstraction and misanthropy. Here is Holmes watching a shipyard empty at quitting-time:

“Dirty-looking rascals, but I suppose every one has some little immortal spark concealed about him. You would not think it, to look at them. There is no a priori probability about it. A strange enigma is man!”

“Some one calls him a soul concealed in an animal,” I suggested.

“Winwood Reade is good upon the subject,” said Holmes. “He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician.”

Holmes’s utterly detached aestheticism is necessarily his readers’, since we too are reading rather than acting (on the other hand, the active villain says, “reading is not in my line”); we contemplate the abstract that is literature rather than the individuality of life. But the passion of those who have to fight or work for their lives, even at the price of their souls, is the material from which Holmes shapes his narrative designs—communicated to us by Watson, who is the author of all Holmes’s adventures. Like those heralds of modernity, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Holmes and Watson have already read of their earlier exploits by the time this book opens. We readers and writers are detectives all in the ghostly city, looking with mastery but also longing (“imperial nostalgia,” it has been called) on those—poor Englishman and colonized Indian alike—whom we leave no choice but to live.

JOHN PISTELLI

Book Review 026 / The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle

 

The Sign of Four

by Arthur 

Conan Doyle 

1890

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The 100 best novels / No 26 / The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)

Title: The Sign of the Four

Author: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Series:  Sherlock Holmes: Book 2

Publisher: Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine‎

Genre: Crime, Mystery, Detective Fiction

First Publication: 1890

Language: English

Major Characters: Sherlock Holmes, Dr. John Watson, Jonathan Small, Mary Morstan, Thaddeus Sholto

Setting Place: late 19th century London

Narration: First person

Preceded by: A Study in Scarlet

Followed by: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

 

Book Summary: The Sign of the Four

As a dense yellow fog swirls through the streets of London, a deep melancholy has descended on Sherlock Holmes, who sits in a cocaine-induced haze at 221B Baker Street.

Book Review 031 / Dracula by Bram Stoker

 

Dracula 

by Bram Stoker

1897

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The 100 best novels / No 31 / Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)

John Pistelli
17 October 2019

Though “undiscovered” and “forgotten” works are thrust at us from every corner, I find that the most startling books are often the most famous, the most classic. Supposedly so well known they no longer merit study—we might as well throw them in the trash—they are in reality so omnipresent that we don’t closely attend to them. Their messages skulk and lurk in plain sight, like Count Dracula sauntering through central London.

Book Review 043 / The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence

 

The Rainbow 

by D. H. Lawrence

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The 100 best novels / No 43 / The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)

John Pistelli
28 May 2022

You can’t read The Rainbow with a pencil in hand. You can’t highlight sentences on paper or onscreen. There’s just too much of it, and it’s constantly in motion.

I took a creative writing class in high school. The teacher told us to write about an experience. The next day we had to go around the circle and read what we’d written aloud. The class-clown stoner, amid much giggling, read out some stream-of-consciousness gibberish. He had fallen into the kind of displaced stern-mother-and-wayward-son relation to the instructor that is one of the possible high-school teacher-student bonds, so Ms. K. scolded him that he had not written about an experience. “It’s an ongoing experience,” he backtalked. It would have been a good defense—in theory, it’s a great defense—if what he’d written had been any good. It’s also the motto of modernism. It’s also what Lawrence’s 1915 novel The Rainbow is: an ongoing experience, in service to a new vision of life, love, sex, and the universe. The book just keeps coming at you in a torrent of language, all sorts of language, though not in the montage Ulysses style, just an aggressive fusion of the naturalistic, the Biblical, and the psychological. Critics like to quote more than one letter in which Lawrence described the novel as written in a foreign language or as something he found himself translating, which is why much of it is, at least to me, so blurred. For all the experience, there aren’t enough images, not enough real scenes.

Book Review 054 / Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon

 

The Maltese Falcon 

by Dashiell Hammett

1929

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The 100 best novels / No 54 / The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1929)

John Pistelli
20 March 2019

Like Arthur Conan Doyle, who begins The Sign of Four with Sherlock Holmes in a drug trance, Dashiell Hammett can’t get his detective novel started without an infusion of aestheticism. The Maltese Falcon, named as it is for an objet d’art, opens with two descriptions that strike several notes of the art for art’s sake and decadent movements of fin-de-siècle England and France, even though Hammett was writing almost two generations later, in 1930, in America, on the cusp of a hard-boiled decade: