I’m glad you’re well and have just been distracted, not struck under rubble for two months.  You really should start taking out catastrophe insurance.  You’d make a pretty penny, being the human lightning rod that you are.  Who is that despondent boy to the extreme left of your family snapshot?  Chilean volcanoes make him sad.

Not that I’ve been immune to distraction.  See the nearly two week gap between this post and your last post.  I really have no excuse either.  I only had one real class this quarter!  My main project has been researching for a novel.  Coincidentally, our sliding scales of enthusiasm match exactly.

I liked everything you said about Gilead, but I can’t help but wonder if stretching the book out over four weeks contributed to its seeming to never end… Canada does seem like a mighty literary place for women; I think that image has a lot to do with Canada having Mavis Gallant, Munro, and Atwood.  Pretty broad spectrum to have for national superstars.  But what’s the difference between Ottawa and Iowa City anyway?  MaRo would fit in anywhere above the Mason-Dixon line, no further than the Appalachians or the Rockies.  Don’t even want to know what happens to her in front of a Chilean volcano.

So I’ve arranged our schedule of Peter Carey for the next four weeks (see sidebar under the book cover that makes it look like we’re reading a mash-up of Roots and The Man in the Iron Mask).  If you don’t mind, I kept it a little lighter this week in case school decides to make me pay for a quarter of relative independence.  This book looks pretty good; my copy’s cover has two wild, dirty horses that look like they don’t have much time for meandering flashbacks.  :-)

Looking forward to your reactions next week!

- Aaron

I haven’t started True History of the Kelly Gang yet (I’m actually planning to do that at lunch today), but first a mini-update:

Shortly after I posted my final thoughts on Gilead, I came across this article about novellas. I think that 150 pages would have been about the right length for Gilead; i.e., short and sweet, but long enough to appreciate the effect of MaRo’s pensive writing. I’d prefer to be left wanting a bit more rather than counting the pages to the back cover. Also, since it’s a piece about novellas in Canada specifically, I have to ask… why does Canada so often seem “more literary” than the United States, especially when it comes to female writers? (MaRo would fit right in up there with Alice Munro et al, no?)

Also, to segue into our next read, did you see this article from the New York Times about Peter Carey and his new book? The piece doesn’t have much to do with the book we’re starting, but it did seem timely. Apparently Peter Carey has won the Booker prize twice and yet I’m nearly certain that I’ve never read anything by him. I guess that means it’s time to read!

This one is about 360 pages – 90 pages a week or so? I think you’re busier than I am, so let me know if that’s going to put undue pressure on you.

- Liz

It would be convenient to claim that a certain natural disaster was the main cause of my absence, but the truth is that I could have been back online posting about Gilead by 9am on the day of the earthquake. It was certainly a distraction, but I can’t stretch it into a two-week, much less a two-month excuse.

I’ve mostly just been distracted with other activities, including:

• Studying Spanish: Technically this is priority number one, but I find that my level of enthusiasm varies wildly between –10 and obsessive, which should leave me with plenty of time for reading.
• Watching all three seasons of Mad Men (60’s bigotry! hideous clothing! I’m not quite sure why I find this show as captivating as I do) and depressing movies. Just let me know if you ever feel like your outlook on life is too positive. I might be able to suggest just the painful and pretentious cure you’re looking for.
• Family vacation: Requisite photo to go with this post — here I am on a volcano.

(poor quality – I’ll try to fix it later)

To get things back on topic, I’d like to conclude my blog commentary Gilead with a little story: One day I was sitting at work with the book on my desk when a colleague happened to notice it. He picked it up and examined it with interest, followed by disappointment. I asked him if he was familiar with the title or author and he told me that he wasn’t, but that the cover reminded him of a book he once read about an elf on a quest to avenge the death of his father.

If only?

I generally agree with your post below.  I enjoyed the Gilead and could see myself rereading it someday. But the honest sort of unsophisticated-feeling truth is that there were times it bored me. Although I don’t think that it would have worked as a short story, I think I might have enjoyed it as much if not more in the form of a considerably shorter novel.

I don’t require much action to stay interested – not even fighting elves – but I hope that the characters in The True History of the Kelly Gang will find something more interesting to do than fall asleep in front of the TV.

Until next week (I promise!)

- Liz

I think I realized why I’m having a hard time reading this book cover to cover.

I read in an interview with Ma-Ro once that she just doesn’t read books from front to back.  She simply likes to open the book to its middle and see what it has to offer her.  I feel like Gilead is sort of Ma-Ro’s gift to that particular kind of reader.  The reader who likes to approach books as if each one could potentially be a Bible, a book that you come back to and pick up a passage, hold it up to the sun, and admire its contours and see-through parts.  It helps that most of the novel is about the Good Book, so the content echoes the form.  I don’t mean to call this novel slight in any way, or that it is just a book of quotables.  For instance, I love it when Ames returns to his relationships with his brother Edward; these reflections set up Ames as the white sheep of the family and then complicates what being a white sheep actually means.  His relationship to Boughton is shaping up to be the entire point of the novel.  So, there are “storylines” per se.  But do these matter to Ma-Ro?  I think the form of the book says no.

As an experiment, I just flipped to near the end of the novel and read pages 207-209.  Ames is still talking about his wife, this time about her baptism.  Not only is the subject familiar, Ma-Ro gets a very tricky thing right: it looks like some conflict has arisen within the church over religious doctrine, but this conflict is no less present here than in the beginning.  For someone who just flipped to this point after just a hundred-so pages, it still feels completely within the frame of the letter.  All conflicts not being resolved in the writing of this letter seem to have already been resolved within the stories contained within.  The subject of the conflict, I’m sure, is also partly Ma-Ro winking at the neverending attention given to religiosity over spirituality.  As if to tease me with her grasp of the novel’s circularity, Ma-Ro even ends the passage with a very familiar line: “You ought to marry me.”

I’m going to catch up this week in time for our big finale.  However I get to the end, I’m sure it will be bodacious, in all 19th, 20th, and 21st century senses of the world.  I want to hear more about your grandparents in Iowa and what kind of old stories this book has dug up for you.  How nice to you have to be to be Iowa-nice?

What is that you are admiring there, Marilynne?  A fancy literary prize to be sure.  But with such bold reflection!

Right, the hair – I think that ‘regal’ might be pushing it a bit, but considering I haven’t had a haircut since August, I don’t suppose I’m in any position to judge too harshly. After all, Marilynne Robinson’s excuse would probably be that she is too busy writing Pulitzer Prize winners to update her style, whereas mine is that I actually don’t speak enough Spanish yet to get the job done properly. I’m glad that you posted both photographs for comparison, though. Aside from the hair, she looks exactly the same to me in both pictures (and if anything, a bit older in the first). Freaky!

Could the secret to eternal middle age be the fresh air and open sky in…

Iowa?

100% corn-fed writers

It’s appropriate that you brought up the Iowa connection, because my experience there has definitely influenced (positively) my perception of the book. My thoughts on the fine state of Iowa are almost as sentimental as John Ames’, so keep your salt handy, but I do feel like Robinson captures something authentic in her depiction of the place. Although all of the events described in the story take place between 50 and 100 (or 150, even) years ago, personal experience suggests that there are still many people in Iowa like John Ames and his family – reserved, sincere and, well, ‘nice’.

I know, I know, there are nice people everywhere, but Iowans take their niceness very seriously. Good intentions are practically the official state pastime.

…but to burst my own bubble, I completely bombed your test. The expressions that you mentioned in your last post were too old-timey Midwestern even for me. The one familiar term was ‘bodacious’, which just reminded me of Nelly’s Hot in Here. ‘Bodacious’ actually appears in the very first line  – check it out  here if you don’t believe me and/or to verify that the song is just as bad and catchy as you remember it to be.

Anyway, kind of a lazy (and late) post today, but Gilead is drifting along nicely. I’ll come up with something more on topic later this week!

-Liz

First things first:

Huh.  I guess she did change up the do sometime between 1980 and 2010.  But those eyes.  Staring down my soul.  The eyes just don’t change, do they?  The kind of eyes very well suited for general life musings.  I wanted to talk about her hair more (I remember it being super dowdy and make-funable), but suddenly it’s looking sort of regal to me.  Am I crazy?  (note: I have enough pictures of Marilynne to cover our read of Gilead two times over.  Don’t you worry.)

Marilynne Robinson?  Marilynne?  Ma-Ro?  Lynn-Ro?  MR?

Since you asked: MR does not write short stories.  When you finish this book, get excited because you’ve officially gone through 2/3rds of her entire fictional oeuvre.  I remember when Gilead came out in college, a part of the PR package for the book was her writing it in an insanely short amount of time, less than six months.  She (as I remember fuzzily from an interview) waits for a narrative voice to come to her in a kind of feverish daydream and then the book spills out from her.  Splat.  Thus the 24 year gap between Housekeeping and Gilead.  Thus the ultra speedy four years between Gilead and its companion book Home. The way she frames it, Ma-Ro’s productivity of fiction has nothing to do with her career as a teacher, her two other books of non-fiction, or her personal life at all; it’s just Ma-Ro’s fickle muse, doing its thing.

Onto the book!  I only have two main points for the first fifty-whatever pages.  I enjoyed them a lot.  They read super smooth.  Smooth like the-amount-of butter-used-in-a-mid-western-pancake-breakfast-smooth.

(1) As dorky as you might think yourself, it was mighty prescient of you to bring up grammar.  The opening of Gilead throws formal punctuation to the wind of MR’s great mid-western prairie:

“I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old.  And you put your hand in my hand and you said, You aren’t very old, as if that settled it.”

The first words set off by quotation marks come on the next page, as our dear Reverend Ames describes his heart condition:

The doctor used the term “angina pectoris,” which has a theological sound, like misericordia.

Right away, Ames is telling his son that their conversations are his central reality.  Ames is going to quote from them word for word and then place them right into the letter, right next to his own words.  Real world words, like this weird thing with the big medical title that will probably cause his death, he is going to set off in quotation marks, so that it’s a little less real for his son.

When is the last time someone deployed grammar to break your heart a little?

(2) About halfway through this week’s reading, I realized there is an awful lot of old fashioned, midwest phrasery going on.  I know you have relatives from Iowa, so I hand over the task of verifying these gems to you.  I didn’t have time to comb through pg. 1-30, but from 30-58, my favorites:

1. “But he’d walk off with a jar of her pickled beets without so much as a by-your-leave.” (33)

2. “You have begun palling around with a chap you found at school, a freckly little Lutheran named Tobias, a pleasant child.” (37)

3. “Still, they were bodacious men, the lot of them.” (50)

Bodacious I just had to look up in the OED:

Bodacious: Southern American slang, implied by bodaciously, 1837, either from bodyaciously (“bodily, totally, root and branch”) (as in “the pigs broke into my fence and destroyed the potato patch bodyaciously”), South Carolina, or a blend of bold and audacious.

Is it just me, or does this word feel more Bill and Ted than pigs run amuck?  Something tells me Marilynne would be really sad to hear me say that.

And I appreciated the the joke on pg. 34:

“Have I offended you in some way, Reverend?” my father would ask.

And his father would say, “No, Reverend, you have not offended me in any way at all.  Not at all.”

And my mother would say, “Now, don’t you two get started.”

ROFL!

A couple last points:

I also ROFL’ed a little when Ma-Ro got a little meta with Ames.  On pg. 43: “It is hard to understand another time.”  Read: MR demands poetic license.  On pg. 46: “As I write I am aware that my memory has made much of very little.”  Read: Get ready for a nearly plotless 200 pages.

Sometimes, in the middle of all the life musing, things get a little too precious for me.  See pg 9 when Ames spends half a page observing a scene with his wife, his son, and their cat playing with bubbles.  It ends with, “Ah, this life, this world.”  C’mon Amesy.  Also, “The twinkling of an eye.  That is the most wonderful expression.” (53)  Okay, we get it.  Life is sooo beautiful.

- Aaron

I agree that addressing each other directly is preferable and I am also disappointed by the fact that we can’t put our pictures next to our posts anymore. Aside from the vanity aspect, I think that it helped to make it clear who was ‘talking’.

To respond to your post, I get the impression that you feel like I ‘dissed’ David Foster Wallace. I can’t claim any interest in returning to Infinite Jest for a re-read anytime soon, but my apology into the void was actually 95% sincere. I just felt I couldn’t do the book justice. I also have to admit that I still haven’t read anything else by DFW — a hole in my mental library that I know I should fill at some point.

Onward to Gilead! My only previous experience with Marilynne Robinson was Housekeeping, but it looks like that may actually be her only other published work. Am I wrong about this? It doesn’t seem possible. Does she write short stories? I read Housekeeping several years ago, so I’m left with only the vaguest impression of it now, but I know that I enjoyed it. To compare, so far I find the style of writing in the two books similarly neat and measured – Robinson writes in a voice well suited to her characters and the stories seem similarly unbound from time and, to a certain extent, place. This ‘dreamy’ aspect of her writing started to overwhelm me by the end of Housekeeping, but I haven’t been as bothered by it here. I think this could be because it is toned down in Gilead or it helps to be reading the book more slowly.

So the important question: Am I enjoying it so far? Yes. And to respond to another point in your last post, I don’t have any issue at all with these sorts of “musings on life and fate”, in fact I love them when they are done well (I consider The Remains of the Day a nearly-perfect book). I just didn’t feel like McEwan accomplished what he intended to with Saturday. Robinson, however, excels at this. She probably would have confined the description of Henry Perowne’s squash game to a single paragraph or sentence, and a good one.

Anyway, looking forward to your thoughts on pages 1-58. I’m a bit worried about coming up with four weeks’ worth of commentary – much less titles for my posts (see today’s uninspired start). Please, let’s begin our discussion of Marilynne Robinson’s stylish coif and continue on that topic for as long as possible.

-Liz

P.S. A mundane point, but I just wanted to put it out there: I’m using the British style of punctuation because I’m used to it from work and I prefer it now. Lest you think I just didn’t know whether or not periods and commas went inside or outside brackets and quotations marks and it was driving you insane (probably only happens to me). <-requisite emoticon haha

A glimpse into summer at my present location. Let's just pretend we're both in the southern hemisphere, shall we?

Liz,

I’m gonna go ahead and just address you.  It helps me pretend that, despite the obvious facts, this is a conversation and not some freakish global transmission.

I’m glad we decided to take on another reading project, with a little more foresight to its longevity this time around.  I’m also glad that you posted first.  You’ve more than adequately dispensed with the idea (as the title of our site suggests) that we will be performing close readings of the books we read.  It’s funny, the day we settled on Distant Reading as a name, a writer in one of my classes spouted off on the idea of distant reading as proposed by hotshot literary scholar Franco Moretti.  I took it as a sign of good fortune, even though I think we mean something drastically different than what Moretti is after.  Yes, I’m talking about novel-themed game boards and place mats.

On The Infinite Jest Challenge and DFW: Unlike you, I think Infinite Jest tightened and bulked up in retrospect.  I know I left the project declaring my greater affection for his essays, but in the years since, I’ve found myself dipping back into the novel, especially from the back half.  His story collections have without doubt become touchstones for me.  I think DFW gives you the solace you need in reading him.  The general consensus after his suicide has been (and I’m just mentally collating and paraphrasing from the dozens of elegiac essays here) that Dave Wallace was a deeply empathetic, deeply diseased man whose genius in the right circumstances was the desire and true ability to impart genius onto others.  I think that’s right.  I’m glad we were a part of that before his death.

Like the rest of the Internet, I’ll link here to the recently published special of Five Dials, a free pdf from publisher Hamish Hamilton. [1/25/10 Update: HH would like you to subscribe to receive the special issue]  It includes some of my favorite remembrances of David Foster Wallace from his closest editors, friends and family.  Speaking on a completely non-feeling, editorial level, I don’t think there is a better mode for Jonathan Franzen than the obituary.  He kills it.

To give an idea of my relevant extracurricular pre-blog activity, I recently finished Dark Back of Time by Javier Marías and In the Valley of the Kings by Terrence Holt.  So I haven’t exactly been living on this side of the bestsellers list.  But, you know what, both those books should be bestsellers.  I’m just sayin.  So there.  (look forward to more intelligent arguments from this side of the round table, readers!)  Also, you may say that you’re all hands off the literary stuff, Liz, but you also wrote a parenthetical comparing McEwan to Virginia Woolf.  So there!

I hope you can get over your qualms with novels containing mostly a “protagonist’s musings on life or his fate” because I’m pretty sure that’s essentially what Gilead is    (yes, emoticons are allowed and encouraged on this site).

More on the first 50 pages of Gilead and Marilynne Robinson’s haircut next week.

Notes to the freakish global public: Liz and I will be posting once a week, most likely during our less ridiculously busy weekends.  Our scheduled pace for reading Gilead is in the sidebar so feel free to follow along and tell us when we’re completely wrong.  Also in the sidebar, a list of our planned future reads.  Please do suggest others.  The first two we have designed as a pair, but number9dream we picked out of our mutual love for Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.  Magical Internet points to the reader who finds its literary soulmate.

- Aaron

P.S. Aren’t you disappointed this new wordpress theme doesn’t feature our avatars next to our names?  I even updated mine to be appropriately myspace-like!

With this in mind, I’d like to formally state from the start that those (including Aaron) who are looking for serious criticism or an informed opinion on any of the forthcoming books should look elsewhere – perhaps to Aaron. I like to read, but I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know what I’m talking about. If you don’t believe me, just take a quick look at The Infinite Jest Challenge. Aaron occasionally wrote about the book; I did my best to write on everything but. I still remember Infinite Jest as more closely resembling a phone book (in size and coherence) than a novel. I’m sincerely sorry that I wasn’t smart enough for you, DFW.

To give you some idea of my relevant pre-blog activities, my two most recent reads have been On the Road, which I admit without much regret that I never finished, and Saturday (Ian McEwan). I did finish Saturday, but was a bit disappointed by this one as well.  The book follows a day in the life of Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon in London who leads an existence so perfect and dull that not even a plane crash, the largest political protest in London’s history, a fight in the street, an improbable break-in, or a surprise pregnancy (oh yes, it was a busy Saturday) were sufficient to make it engaging for me. The book could have been an interesting study in character and detail (was it some sort of post-9/11 take on Mrs. Dalloway?), but I found that I was never able to fully immerse myself in the details because I found that I just could’nt muster much interest in the protagonist’s musings on life or his fate, much less his weekly Saturday morning squash game, the account of which stretched on for a full sixteen pages.

At the same time,  I realize that I am not being entirely fair. I’ve really enjoyed some of McEwan’s other work, so I’m willing to acknowledge that my expectations may have been unreasonably high. To make matters worse, it’s summer here in South America. As much as I like to read, the competition between a good book and doing absolutely nothing in the sun on my balcony is pretty intense.

I hope that our upcoming reads will be up to the challenge.

My Saturday