Sutpen's Hundreds Hall

So, there are enough gushing reviews of Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger that it hardly seems worth the trouble to write another one.  But, considering that I haven't read a contemporary novel in almost three years, I thought it awfully significant that I was compelled to read this one, and did so in approximately 48 hours.

This book is really good.  Like, really, really good.  And creepy, and atmospheric, and thought-provoking, and tricky, and imminently fun to read.

In the best ghost story tradition, The Little Stranger makes the ordinary life of a single house suddenly become extraordinarily unsettling.  Is there really a supernatural presence?  Or have the psyches of the home's residents gone rogue and begun manifesting themselves physically?  Or is someone simply playing a dirty trick?

While a few reviewers found this ambiguity to be dissatisfying, I was only once frustrated with the text.  After the first 100 pages or so, when the ghosting kicks in, I was disappointed to read a paragraph in which the spookiness of a mirror come to life is meticulously explained.

"It was all the more sickening, somehow, for the glass being such an ordinary sort of object . . . it made one feel as though everything around one, the ordinary stuff of one's ordinary life, might all at any moment start up like this and - overwhelm one" (150).

Oh, Sarah Waters, why ruin such a nice moment with such over-explanation?  I was prepared not to like the rest of the book, but thankfully, this was my only moment of real irritation.  I'm sure if I read again calmly I'd find other such small details - but it doesn't matter: I was too busy turning pages, and cautiously observing the suspicious night that had snuck up outside my unshaded window to notice them.

The many themes of the text are right up my alley - Post-war England, a great big house that used to employ dozens of servants and now has only three, the family within trying to make sense of their new place within society, and the outsider who tries to find his place within their place.  The war, the legacy of rigid classism, the many lives that had passed through those walls . . . the setting is perfect for Waters's tale, and it puts me in mind of another ghostly story about a post-war declining aristocracy, Absalom!, Absalom! by William Faulkner.  

There are plenty of surface similarities: The house in The Little Stranger is called "Hundreds Hall" and the house in Absalom!, Absalom! is called "Sutpen's Hundred."  Both occur after a cataclysmic war (WWII and the Civil War, respectively), and both are told from the point of view of outsiders who find themselves drawn into the webs being woven and re-woven inside these homes' majestic decay.

Faulkner's masterpiece is a good counter-balance to Waters's thriller.  Faulkner's story unfolds in a swirling mess of narrative asides, parentheses, and re-tellings.  The whirl-pool spins and spins, touching only the edges of the story before sucking you in, down to the bottom where it all rests.  But Waters's linearly (if unreliably) narrated story of memory and place is complemented by Faulkner's drastically un-linear narrative.  Faulkner's maelstrom mimics the storytelling in our own lives.  His text alternately remembers, forgets, and repeats, just as we do so often.  

The ghosts haunting each story may only be the shadows of regret, our yearning for the past, or the inner-selves we repress in the light of society - but that's not going to stop you from looking a little differently at that darkened closet the next time you shut your eyes.

So, with great pleasure I heartily recommend both books!  And would love to hear from anyone else who's read either one.

Cheerio!

The Power of Sympathy*

E.M. Forster’s Howards End puts me in a typical quandry.

Either I:

A.) Admit my initial impressions that this is a very engaging book that takes a rather progressive woman’s perspective; that this book advocates for women and gender equality - only to have it later pointed out to me that my impressions are incredibly wrong and the book is in fact a sexist attempt by a manipulative man to forward his own patriarchal agenda by making it seem like the woman’s perspective.

Or

B.) Wait to express any opinion until I’ve read the “established” opinions of other scholars – then draw my own conclusions, which, invariably are heavily influenced by the things I’ve read.

Which brings up the point that I am, unfortunately, the world’s most sympathetic reader.  My friends and colleagues have been quick to point out that this is a virtue, not a vice, but existing in the competitive world of English Graduate Studies, it’s hard to convince myself.  When everyone else shows up with their articles eviscerated by scrawling, angry denunciations, it’s hard to look at one’s own carefully highlighted copy and not feel that you’ve been had.  “Actually, that just means that you’re not a dick,” says one helpful friend, “trying to make your own reputation by skewering others without actually giving their arguments a fair hearing.”

“You’re a generous reader, and I encourage and appreciate your generous readings...” says Michael Levenson, as I try to find a way to rescue “Melanctha” from the pits of utter racism (maybe it’s actually about the problem of a limited vocabulary – we’re all necessarily racist when we only have so many ways of referring to each other.  Maybe it’s actually Stein’s way of begging for a more nuanced form of language!) “...but no.  I think in this case it’s safe to say that this is a racist text.”

Well, for what it’s worth, I think it’s nice that Forster gives voice to the double standard, that the heroine flat-out tells her husband “you’re using a double standard when judging your sexuality and my sister’s.”  And I guess you could say that Howards End is all about what to do with these new women who quite literally leave their father’s house to find one of their own?  The back of my cheap-o Vintage Paperback edition has a quote from Lionel Trilling that says, essentially, who will inherit England?  Will it be the artistic, the bold, or the conventional?

Ultimately, I’m afraid to say that I don’t really care.  Howards End was a wonderful read, and I believe it’s  a wonderful book, but it didn’t move me to want to explore its themes the way other books have.  Maybe it’s the simple fact that it takes place in England, and I’m so hopelessly mired in my fascination of all things American right now.

Maybe it’s that I finished the book two weeks ago and its joys have already been usurped by Frank Norris’s The Pit. 

I quite simply don’t have much to say about it – but check back tomorrow when I’ll have read other people’s opinions about the book and, not doubt, have decided that it’s an endlessly fascinating piece of work about why men should take back England from the hysterical women who are running it into the ground.

Cheers!

*Shout-out to all you 18th Century American Novel buffs!