Aunts, Taunts, and Old Haunts in the Penny Press!

The 17 March London Review of Books (fully enjoyable, like green eggs and ham, on a train or in the rain) is a typically diverse and involving issue of that typically wonderful publication. I've praised the LRB often enough here - In the Penny Press would be a poorer place indeed without it - as being a kind of necessary adjunct to the mighty Times Literary Supplement; I go to the TLS to breathe the pure mountain air of erudition, and to be blasted by that air, article after article, three times the number of articles in any given issue of the LRB.

In the London Review, the reviews are longer, fewer, and in some measures designed to be more accessible - no less intelligent and probing, but with a broader issue-base in mind, and no 4000-word discourses on the latest annotated historiography of late 17th century conversos memoranda. Don't get me wrong: the sheer, bristling brilliance of the TLS' bookishness is one of the wonders of the modern world, gloriously anachronistic in our age of mini-tweets (they'll have my subscription, paid faithfully every year, until the sun goes cold in the sky). But one also likes a slightly more street-level intellectual stimulation, and for that, nothing currently being published (with one possible exception!) beats the LRB.

This 17 March issue is a perfect case-in-point: 15 pieces (plus juicy extra bits, like poetry or short columns) covering as wide a spectrum of subjects as any reading public could want. Even the political stuff is so well-written I very often actually read it, when corresponding piece in The New Yorker get skipped so I can watch David Denby mud-sling semiotics all over the new Angelina Jolie car-chase. But the literary matter is what really shines. The TLS regularly prints the Introductions various authors have written to forthcoming new editions of classics, but those are finished things just showing up in print early - when something similar happens in the LRB, you get the impression more of a workshop than a shop window, and it's nice.

Take the fantastic "The Importance of Aunts" in this issue, by the great Colm Toibin (I'm sitting here trying to remember the last thing he wrote that I didn't like - needless to say, this is not a process that takes a long time, with most authors - and I'm stumped; perhaps I'll consult my own archives): I'm sure

[caption id="attachment_2535" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="the mighty elizabeth spriggs as aunt agatha"][/caption]

this piece was conceived, written, and commissioned elsewhere and for other purposes (is there an Oxford Book of Aunts coming out? If there isn't, there should be - I'd buy a copy), but it still has a convivial air about it that makes it invigorating reading. Toibin looks at the function of aunts in the 19th century novel - his readings don't take him as far as the 20th century and Bertie Wooster, so he doesn't deal with those twin titans of menace, Aunt Dahlia and Aunt Agatha - and he throws off idea after fascinating idea about the pseudo-maternal role aunts play in the fiction of the time. As you'd expect from Toibin, there's a great deal here about Henry James, as when we're told that he "followed the serialisation of Daniel Deronda. He read the book carefully, disapproved of it, and then took what he needed from it." Hee.

His essay wanders around quite a bit, which is what should happen in a piece by an extremely well-read Irishman, and it says lots of really interesting things about the various ways aunts are employed to make things happen, as opposed to the rarer mothers in the period's fiction, whose function is (or would be, if they were around to exercise it) to stop things from happening. Some wag once summarized all British fiction with the single word "aunts," and reading Toibin's essay here almost makes you believe it - I wanted more from him on the subject, which is, curiously, just what you want your readers to be feeling when they finish a piece like this.

Of course, leaving the reader wanting more isn't always - or even usually - a good thing in other kinds of pieces. In straight-up book reviews, for instance, if your reader ends the review by saying "but what about THIS? Or THAT?" then you've done an incomplete job, allowed your personal fixations to block or cramp your review. If you yourself are a high-profile professional book reviewer reading these words right now (I know quite a few of you are regular readers of Stevereads - although unaccountably bashful!), you'll know the many and powerful temptations to let your review be blocked and cramped, to give your personal hobby-horses a little gambol in print. We've all done it, and in essence there's no shame in it (provided you're interesting, the sine qua non of all writing) - the key is to do justice to the book under review, regardless of whatever else you decide to spool on about.

Naturally, in the case of this LRB issue, I'm talking about David Haglund's piece on James Franco's Palo Alto. Because it isn't a piece on Palo Alto, Franco's debut short story collection, even though it's billed as that. Instead, it's a piece on Franco's fraught public persona, with a couple of distracted paragraphs on Palo Alto tacked on. Unless you've allowed your subscription to USWeekly to lapse and are thus Franco-starved, this piece will certainly leave you wanting more, since in the place of Haglund devoting any kind of serious attention to the collection of short stories, we get Haglund drizzling baffled condescension all over Franco's non-writing career. What little there is about Palo Alto is more sizzle than steak, with pat little bits of plate-spinning like this:

But Franco's irony regarding his fame shouldn't lead anyone to underestimate the remarkable earnestness of his artistic ambitions, whether he's able to realise them or not. Indeed, that earnestness may be an obstacle to their achievement, if Palo Alto is any indication.

It's not that I'm expecting reviewers to ignore the fact of Franco's celebrity when discussing his book; authorship is a legitimate component of writership, after all. And I'm not equating Palo Alto with Franco's beloved Turgenev, not by a long shot. But it's a serious book nonetheless, some of its stories written in innumerable drafts to get them just so, and many of its effects genuinely heartfelt. It deserves more than a couple of dismissive paragraphs; Haglund should have resisted his urge to digress at such length about Franco's acting antics, especially since under different circumstances I'd have loved to read his take on those antics. Reading this piece, all I kept thinking was how disappointing Franco himself would find it - not disappointed that the critic didn't like his book (any writer has to be ready for that), but disappointed at how badly distracted the critic let himself be.

Fortunately, focus was in ample supply elsewhere in the issue, including my favorite piece, the redoubtable Tom Shippey's magnificent review of Robin Fleming's Britain After Rome, her great, endlessly entertaining, and beautifully written entry in Penguin's ongoing History of Britain. Shippy wasn't as taken with the book as I was, but he certainly does it justice with a thorough reading - and in the process he crafts an essay that's enjoyable to read all by itself, the true mark of first-rate literary journalism. It's no easy thing to write a knowledgeable 2000-word piece on a historical subject and keep things interesting the whole time - most professional historians, for example, would be helplessly stymied by such an assignment (even though they regularly give such assignments to their students), but Shippey never disappoints (well, until he eventually does, at which point Stevereads will dutifully whack him for it). Here he is on the wealth of pre-Conquest England:

No wonder William the Conqueror thought that England was worth a serious gamble. The country, with its rich estates, centralised bureaucracy, effeciently run coinage and - something at last that Roman Britain didn't have - its hundreds of watermills (a new technology), looked as if it were going to skip the Middle Ages altogether and move on to a new level of prosperity. But it took a long time to get there...

He somewhat snidely mentions how "In every TV programme about Anglo-Saxon England someone is always wheeled on to say, in effect: 'Dark Ages? How can anyone call these the Dark Ages? Just look at the amazing jewellery/magnificent artwork/superb illumination' and then offers a sparklingly pithy correction:

Nails, pots, tiles, bronze and copper coins: it's the absence of useful low-cost items in bulk that make a Dark Age, and their loss is not compensated by the ability to manufacture elite bling.

Marvellous. Couldn't have put it better myself.

There was lots else in this issue of the LRB, as there is in virtually every issue - 'something for everybody' as the useful old tag-line goes. At the risk of sounding boosterish, I'll go ahead and urge you all: take the plunge for a year's subscription, and see if you don't cheerfully renew when that time is up.

In the Penny Press - the TLS!

I get looks whenever I buy the TLS, and not just because I'm a stone-cold super-hottie. No, I get cautionary looks from bookstore cashiers (never the brightest bulbs in any bookstore's chandelier - some of the older ones don't even know how to operate their own registers!), as though I might be unaware of just how staid and boring the periodical I'm trying to purchase is.

In a way, it's understandable. After all, the TLS isn't flashy, and one glance inside is enough to clue in just about anybody that what few pictures there are exist only as marginalia for what is a very large amount of prose. Page after page of multi-columned reviews in tight type, with no pie-charts and precious little in the way of multi-color graphics.

And partially, this appearance is accurate: the TLS is the world's most serious book-review organ. It's intellectually coruscating, temperamentally abstruse, and often Olympianly unanswerable. Most of its reviewers are distinguished academics and writers (this particular issue is in large part devoted to music, and the lead-off article is by none other than the brilliant, electric Charles Rosen)(as with most of the lead-off articles of the TLS, this one is worth the price of the periodical all by itself), and although they're usually chatty and helpful, they don't slow down for their audience. The tiny handful of people I know who claim to read the TLS universally skim it (and most not even that - back issues, dutifully bought, pile up on nightstands like autumn leaves), and that, too, is partially understandable: so much depth and detail, week after week, can feel oppressive to the perpetually over-leveraged.

I read the TLS from cover to cover (in an average issue, I entirely skip perhaps two pieces, on topics that hold no interest whatsoever, but even here I'm a bit ahead of the game as far as those skimmers go, since I don't subsequently try to pretend I read those pieces); I consume it. When you read as many books as I do, when you're as often frustrated with the book-reviews you read (and of course lately there's the fact that I write book reviews, not only here on a regular - if entirely un-commented-upon - basis, but also over at Open Letters) as I am, the TLS comes appears every week like a banquet from the gods.

But even so, it's easy to see how somebody unfamiliar with it could mistake it for being dry and dull. It looks dry and dull, but oh! It isn't. Intellectual and aesthetic probity of this magnitude is always exciting, but it's not only that - very often, the TLS is genuinely funny. Not slapstick humor, mind you, and sometimes rather droll, but still possessing a definite twinkle in the eye. The uninitiated find this impossible to believe, but it's true.

Take the 7 November issue, for instance. Yes, it starts off with the aforementioned long and stunningly good Rosen article on various styles of piano-playing, but very soon after that, the issue gets down to some serious one-liners and extended guffaws.

Well, maybe not very soon after that - there's a great but somber piece on the British in WWI, for instance, and there's a review of the new Coen Brothers movie Burn After Reading that, while not specifically funny, does have a wonderful line about how, like and The Hudsucker Proxy and O Brother, Where Art Thou? "the new film is boastful rather than apologetic about its own inconsequentiality."



But what about Tom Shippey's long, openly baffled review of the new monstrously unedited bagatelle from Neal Stephenson, Anathem? Shippey pretty clearly goes back and forth between being utterly nonplussed by the book and being vaguely disappointed both with it and with its intended audience:

Stephenson says there's no reason to read the chronology at the front of the book, "If you are accustomed to reading works of speculative fiction and enjoy puzzling things out on your own." (note that there are two requirements here).

If you give it a minute to settle in on you, that closing parenthetical is pretty damn funny, in an utterly composed, even cold way.

And then there's Nicholas Vincent, whose brief review of the new Bernard Cornwell historical fiction Azincourt (about the Battle of Agincourt - I must have been absent when everybody agreed to change the spelling) is so chock-full of malicious fun that I'm going to break with Stevereads precedent and quote it in its entirety. Enjoy:

Bernard Cornwell's cast of foul-mouthed military boors are here transported to the fifteenth century, with all the consequences of setting down Andy McNab, Jake "Raging Bull" La Motta, and Dr. Tourette in the midst of Little Arthur's History of England. There are so many intestines spilled "like wet eels sliding from a slit sack", so many pukings and involuntary voidings of the bowel, so many meticulously prepared cliches, that the reader is left wading in ordure, longing for a sentence of more than thirty words, for a word of more than two syllables, and for any reflective or descriptive passages not concerned with bodily fluids.


The plot of Azincourt is thin and cinematic. It involves Nick Hook, an archer whose one claim to fame is his ability to dispatch an incredible number of victims. Even before the battle proper, Nick has stabbed or bludgeoned to death nearly a dozen men, and this before counting the occasions when he strings his murderous bow. Within the first seventy pages, there are two gang rapes, from the second of which our hero clears his mind, somewhat implausibly, with "thought[s] of the badgers on Beggar's Hill". Thereafter, Hook (note the stabbing masculine monosyllable) makes off with the fair Melisande (remark the yielding and feminine anapest), and together they and their dysfunctional families bring various, not particularly interesting problems to bear on a story best summarized as "psychopath goes to war". The introduction to this plot of the lecher-priest, Father Martin, certainly increases the pornographic element, although Martin's claim to have met the Bishop of Oxford in a brothel staffed by nuns is either mendaciously boastful or miraculously prophetic: the bishopric of Oxford was not created until 1542, more than a century after Agincourt.

Cornwell's account of events is advertised as "supremely well-researched". Certainly it has involved him in reading at least three and possibly four works of serious history. Through their cool assessment of the battlefield and the campaign's rich documentation, the experts - among them John Keegan, Anne Curry, Juliet Barker and (not mentioned in Cornwell's acknowledgements) Christopher Allmand - have recaptured the horrid history of Agincourt with its slaughter in the sucking mud of Picardy. Cornwell, by contrast, so revels in the filth that one is left wondering whether, like several of his characters, not least the disgusting Father Martin, he is secretly celebrating what he seems to deplore. Fortunately, it is at this stage of that the events of October 1415 begin to gather pace. As French hubris thunders towards nemesis unleashed from English (and Welsh) bowstrings, and as we are once again told the old story, the reader can sit back, enjoy the show, and forget about the talentless actors who Cornwell has thrust, gurning and cursing, onto his blood-spattered stage. Grand-Guignol combined with didactic display of historical knowledge is, as ever, a formula difficult to resist. Homer knew this. Bernard Cornwell not only knows it, but has used it to sell a stack of books that would stretch from Troy to Agincourt and back.

Hee.

Mr. Vincent, there's a job waiting for you at Open Letters, should you be interested.

And in this issue of the TLS, as in any issue, the reader looking for chuckles will come to the last page with high expectations. That last page, in a relatively new and eminently sensible layout decision, now belongs to J.C.'s "NB" column, always an odds-on favorite for making you laugh out loud over your lunch of spicey Indian food. It's with mounting dismay, then, that the reader gets through three of J.C.'s four little items without cracking more than a smile. Even the last item, a brief, sarcastic review of a new book of apparently nonsensical statements called Oxymoronica, seems set to be well-behaved, although the book's compiler, Dr. Mardy Grothe, comes in for some apparently well-deserved ragging for over-explaining the items he's chosen:

... just as you are delighting in Emerson's claim "All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients", Dr Grothe pops up to prick your pleasure: "How can people from centuries ago steal ideas from modern thinkers? Of course they can't. This is Emerson's way of describing a fairly common experience." You don't say. But he does: in chapter after chapter.




We get a choice selection of oxymorons, from the likes of Thomas Mann ("A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people"), Samuel Goldwyn ("We pay him too much, but he's worth it"), and Josephine Baker ("I wasn't really naked. I simply didn't have any clothes on"), but by that point we're only lines from the end of the issue, and still there's been no capping zinger from J.C.

But then it comes, in the issue's very last line - a tart, memorably witty oxymoron to take home:

If you ignore the parts written by the author, this is a good book

Hee.

So you see, appearances can be deceiving. The TLS might look frumpy and humorless, but in reality, it's seriousness and learning need the regular release of zingers, kind and unkind. I quote a great philosopher: "The more advanced the civilization, the greater the need for the simplicity of play."