Harriet Stark's THE BACILLUS OF BEAUTY

Man, there are as many crashing disappointments as there are genuinely interesting moments in this strange relic of also-ran science fiction from days gone by. The Bacillus of Beauty, the only known novel penned by Mrs. Harriet Stark of the little town of Payson, UT, first saw print in 1900, and is very much a relic of its time, with more of ordinary literary than science fictional interest on offer, but I'm glad to have found it and am very interested in seeing what its fellow volumes from the Legacy of the Corridor have to offer. 

In an important way, Stark's novel is more than a bit prescient; its plot concerns a young woman who is every bit the ancestress of heroines such as the narrator character in Ling Ling Huang's Natural Beauty; Elisabeth Sparkle/Sue in Coralie Fargeat's body horror sensation, The Substance; Infinite Jest's Joelle Van Dyne, the PGOAT (Prettiest Girl of All Time), whose extreme beauty comes to seem to her a deformity that forces her to go veiled in public; and Jolenta, the artificially created Marilyn Monroe-esque bombshell of a monumental genre fiction series I've mentioned once or twice in this blog, The Book of the New Sun. Which means that yes, The Bacillus of Beauty concerns a young woman, Helen Winship, who has lived the first 20 years of her life as a normal, healthy, fit but ordinary- looking specimen until she chances in the course of her studies (one refreshing element to the novel, considering its age, is its matter-of-factness about the very notion of a young woman pursuing scientific studies, though her aim is not, if course, what we would nowadays consider a career in the field so much as a way to contribute something of greater than usual value to society while she waits to earn that coveted MRS degree) upon an old Dutch scientist who has discovered/invented a very simple biotechnological tool that can give Miss Winship absolute and perfect beauty, make her the absolute apex of her type (in this case, brown-haired, brown- eyed white women), if she will consent to be his test subject. 

The rest of the novel follows her career as she takes the New York City, more or less of Edith Wharton and co., by storm, becoming such a sensation, once the treatment takes effect, that like Joelle Van Dyne she must go about her daily business veiled lest she be mobbed everywhere she goes. She is taken up as a novelty by high society, feasted on by the press, romantically linked with minor British aristocracy, all very Cinderella-coded -- but the dark side to the story gets very dark indeed, though not as dark as it probably should, and...

Look, this is a fascinating little historical document and very competently constructed, at least as well written as a Robert W. Chambers "shop girl" romance, say. And it's neat to have this early example of science fiction written by not only a woman, but a woman from a part of the world not normally associated with women getting to be autonomous creative artists, a newly incorporated U.S. state that only recently gave up polygamy in order to be admitted to the Union, but still very much run as a theocracy by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Sants. It's fascinating that this exists at all, and it's really cool that someone has made the effort to rescue it and several others somewhat like it from oblivion. 

But, that rescue also feels just a little bit icky, for reasons that I really can't discuss without first pointing to that text and the tagline for this blog that so many people ignore: WARE SPOILERS FOR A 126 YEAR OLD BOOK. 

While the world of this book is a little bit more progressive than I'd expected -- see my remarks above about it being somewhat unremarkable that Helen has chosen to pursue post-graduate work in biology -- it's still an artifact of its time in that Helen is still expected to marry, and soon, and indeed before she even sets foot in New York, she has been claimed as fiancee by a hometown guy about eight years older than she is, who was her high school teacher for a while and later was a law student while she was an undergrad at the same unspecified Utah university. This alert young man, John Burke, who Knew Her When she was just a very good student but covered in freckles, with her hair in pigtails, is the novel's other narrator, because of course his feelings about what he finds on his first visit to Helen after she has had a few months in New York are very important: in place of his perfectly presentable but still ordinary-looking bride-to-be, he finds he is somewhat unofficially engaged to the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, whose appearance at the Metropolitan Opera has stopped a performance so that everyone in the audience, orchestra and on stage can get a look at her, who has garnered the admiration of every man and the envy of every woman in the city, whose roommates in the modest little studio apartment she calls home (even in 1900, a girl can't afford to live alone in Manhattan unless she comes from Serious Money) can hardly function for falling all over her in near-worship -- one is an artist and illustrator and the other is a newspaper reporter, so their enthusiasm for Helen does not help matters. And while Burke quickly puts a modest opal ring on it, he knows full well that he might already be too late. So yeah,  we get to hear all about it, of course.

But just as it starts feeling like that's all we're going to get -- how Helen's transformation affects her intended -- we at least get a switch to Helen's own perspective. And she is, at first, utterly delighted. She had concluded at a very young age that Beauty is Power and that she wanted it, even though while not exactly an ugly ducking, she's not the most promising raw material for her project of Getting Beautiful. Fortunately, she was counseled by a pretty aunt that the way to attain beauty is to work on everything else -- improve her mind, maintain a healthy outlook, and exercise to keep her body capable and strong and fit, and you'll at least grow up to be the prettiest version of yourself that you are capable of being. And soon Helen is the best student in her little school, which is how she first attracts the attention of Burke, and the  habit of excellence she has cultivated in pursuing beauty is what allows her to enroll at Barnard College in New York for a post-graduate program under the tutelage of the weird scientist who will change her life forever. Burke will simply follow her there in a bit and take up a post at a good law firm and then they'll marry. HEA! Meanwhile, Helen has an aunt who married very well, to a New York judge, who can keep an eye on her. Or such is the plan.

One thing at which Stark truly excels is tracing Helen's changing attitudes toward herself and others, as the kind of flattering attention that we might think only 21st century media could drown a person in becomes part of her daily life, much richer and handsomer men than her fiance start vying for her attention, and her OG friends, female family members, and the Society Matrons who take her up gradually stop blowing smoke up her skirts and start trying to sabotage her when they realized that nobody else is going to be able to get married until she does, and maybe not even then.

Because of course, even if she comes through all of this with a Master's degree or PhD and a pile of scientific accolades under her belt, she's still expected to chuck it all once she is married, so that she can start giving the world beautiful babies* and be a perfectly beautiful hostess and helpmeet and ornament to her husband's career. She'll be all the better a trophy for being a scientist who could have been great. 

Meanwhile, of course her head is turned by all of the attention, until it starts getting exhausting. More interestingly, her own attitude towards her fellow women, who will someday benefit from the same boon granted to her, evolves in interesting ways. As the story progresses, Helen begins more and more to express disdain for the less-beautiful in everything, to feel affronted when confronted by ugliness, to regard the plain, the infirm, the actually ugly, with real disgust she does not bother to hide. Really, she becomes kind of a bitch.

But really, it could and should be so much worse. Somehow, Helen never encounters the kind of dude that is ubiquitous in pretty much every other sphere or work of art. Nobody hits on her. Nobody grabs at her or makes crude propositions or cat-calls her. Nobody ever disrespects her or in any way tries to do her harm, except socially and later, possibly by accident, economically. For of course her only real obstacle in the story is the fact that she's been thrown into high society and everybody just naturally expects her to keep that society's standards of dress and amusement and environment. And daddy is just a simple farmer back in Utah. And nobody wants to hire her, even to work as a scientist or lab assistant; she is too distracting and, it is implied very subtly, she might not really be as competent as she and we have been led to believe (or at least everybody is assuming she's not really that competent and probably has coasted on her looks -- even though those looks are only weeks or months old). As for any other work, it is obviously beneath her, both by her standards and those of her employers, and she's looking at the classic self-supporting woman's two choices, which are really kind of one: she can earn some money on the stage, but more on her back, though, again, this second option is never even a little bit alluded to except in one brief scene where an acquaintance suggests very, very obliquely that some men might pay a little for her company.

But so, good thing John Burke is such a, sorry, but there it is, a Nice Guy. He's watched with long suffering adoration from afar as the girl he used to know conqued New York and was kind of conquered back, biding his time and waiting until he's her only option again. Though of course the fact that this is what he's done couldn't possibly be further from his mind. He's no Incel waiting for his Stacy to fall into his arms after the Chads are done with her. No sir. Not at all. Well, maybe a little.

So this is really kind of a frustrating book that made me feel pretty awful, but only because I'm encountering it in the context of 2026 -- an utterly unfair basis on which to evaluate a book. It's just, well, I feel weird about its surfacing now the way it has. It was first reissued for the Legacy of the Corridor project in 2022, when all the modern circumstances that made this kind of an icky read for me (including how even more warped beauty standards have gotten, especially in the author's home state) since this book's heyday) were already very much in effect. But so, why now, for this book? I am going to have to think about this for a while. I have some ideas, and yes, they tie into a more common name for the Corridor invoked by the project's title, and how certain organizations are interacting with the greater world nowadays, but they feel really cynical and paranoid and I don't feel ready to broach that subject just yet. Maybe after the Midterms...

Is this an anti-feminist work? Not quite. But it sure isn't a feminist one, either. It's a pretty misanthropic one in general, but not so overtly ugly as to make it a fully unpleasant read. It is what I keep calling it: an artifact, the only one we have from a creator who showed greater than average potential as a novelist and a writer of speculative fiction, but for whatever reason exercised her talents in other directions. She had, for instance, eleven children, most of whom survived to adulthood. I can't help but wonder what else she might have had to offer us in other circumstances, but I also can't help but wonder if she wouldn't have been an early version of Phyllis Schlafly.

I don't know. I'll see what else the Corridor has to show me, I guess.

*Though it is, of course, by no means so that her uberbeauty will be heritable. But by then she should no longer be the only one infected by the Bacillus and it can be administered to her children at a suitable time, is the plan. Because the scientist's stated intention is that someday every woman in the world will be physically perfect, the better to please men, basically. Because of course that's the only thing that's ever going to matter to the women. Of course.

Otohiko Kaga's MARSHLAND (Tr Albert Novick)

Time is really like an army of cockroaches. I have to force my hands to keep moving; it is like making myself squash cockroaches, one at a time. By my calculations, it takes one hundred finished tags to squash one cockroach.

By the time the above passage hits and makes sense to the reader, she understands the character expressing it so thoroughly that she doesn't even notice how nonsensical these words seem unless she goes back and reads it again later. At the time, she just knows that she feels it deeply, knows exactly what the character means, has been there, too, counting cockroaches with luggage tags. We are in the hands of a master of his chosen form.

It's been a while since I've indulged my love of big, sprawling social novels that 19th century Europe and North America produced in plentitude. There are still many of them I haven't read yet. I've only scratched the surface of Balzac's Human Comedy, for instance, and there are still a few Henry James chonks I haven't read yet, and while I've made a pretty throrough study of the Big Russians, Anna Karenina is still somewhere in my TBR. But I'm a perverse chooser of what to read next, and very much on the sucker lists of Open Letter, Deep Vellum and the Dalkey Archive so of course when I got the urge to grab a mammoth again, I turned to... late 20th century Japan. 

First published in 1985, Marshland is set in the late 1960s and early 1970s and flashes back to even earlier. It is, as I've hinted, a very long and involved and in-depth look at Japanese society, mostly in its post-WWII years but also in earlier times in the life of its hero, Atsuo Yukimori, ex-convict, ex-soldier, and, as we first get to know him, soon-to-be universally vilified suspect in a shocking terrorist attack on Tokyo's train system. 

Atsuo is a very satisfying and meaty character to follow through a realist fictional life, introspective and honest, ashamed but never blaming anyone but himself for his many strayings from the straight and narrow path his poor family tried so hard to set him on. We meet him first as a middle aged bachelor living a very self-regulated, respectable but limited bachelor life in Tokyo, where he is the shop foreman for an auto repair business in the heart of the city. But, as we know from the very first, he has a checkered past, a deserter from this service in the Japanese army during World War II (and we'll get all of the details of his less than illustrious career in the Empire's service), a petty thief, something of a con man, a pickpocket... But we also know, before novel's end, that several of his stints in prison were pretty much entered into by his choice as the only way to stay alive, sheltered and fed through the devastating years of Japan's reconstruction, years that didn't have much use for him as a free man but did offer the chance for him to gain useful skills as an incarcerated one.

But I'm focusing too much on Atsuo, who is about as much the main character of Marshland as McNulty is of The Wire; he's the first one we get to know but is only one of many, all of whose stories matter to the overall narrative and scope of the book. There's Atsuo's vain and self-important employer, Mr. Fukawa and his devious secretary/mistress; Atsuo's nephew, also a worker at the shop and the dormitory "mother" who runs it's employee housing; there's the beautiful young student Wakako, who brings love and romance into Atsuo's life even as she draws him, inadvertently, into the world of student revolutionary politics and the police attention that brings; there are the hard-working, poor and honest members of Atsuo's family and the spoiled, immature but passionate student revolutionaries busy occupying buildings and trashing businesses and preaching doctrine at each other; and the police officers and prosecutors who have been watching them and whose baleful and possibly fatal attention comes to rest on Atsuo and Wakako after a train bombing... And the defense attorneys and private citizens who come together in the name of justice and hope and won't let Atsuo and his fellow defendants give up. All of them have lives and backgrounds and motivations and fears and desires that a good thousand pages or so allow us to explore in considerable depth and lets most of not all of them claim at least a little of our sympathy.

And, in Otohiko Kaga, we have a supremely confident novelist who misses no opportunity to put the emotional screws to us like a detective interrogating a prime suspect. Thus even the moments that should shine through with supreme happiness are tinged with tragedy and despair and bitterness, while those of desolation and enforced solitude still have hints of bitter humor and, sometimes, of possibility.

All of this is accomplished in a sound and unflashy style, so spare and simple that I honestly don't know how much is Kaga's and how much is translator Albert Novick's. Regardless, neither is trying to show off any dazzling chops or experimental elan. They've got a big, complicated, emotionally devastating story to tell and they're too committed to it to mess around with tricks of language or narrative beyond the occasional extended flashbacks.

Kaga has, also, a magnificent gift for nature writing. I have so many examples of this marked, but I think this is my favorite, from when Atsuo and Wakako are out in the Hokkaido wilderness, exploring scenes from Atsuo's childhood when he dreamed of becoming a hermit in the titular Marshland:

Those columns of ice really did take on individual forms as they grew over time, forms that were ever changing; forms that expressed - something. Some kind of will, the will that set nature in motion. That was the thing. This was not human will. There was too much variety there. It was beyond what people could make. In Tokyo the will that moves nature was in hiding. It was hidden by concrete and steel and cars and glass - the things made by people. But the stars showed the will of the creator of the natural world. So did the forest, the sea, the lake.

And yes, partaking in even earlier literary traditions, the state of the landscape is a beautiful stand-in for the emotional lives of the characters as well as the essential changelessness of the world beyond the socio-economic and political struggles of Tokyo and Osaka and Nemuro. Indeed, the final chapter for Marshland is a bravura example of linking the break-up of the ice atop frozen rivers and lakes to the freedom of new possibilities the characters are only just daring to consider as they fantasize about leaping onto an ice floe and letting it carry them out to sea. The beauty is all the greater for having been earned through hundreds and hundreds of pages of every kind of sight and sensation and emotion known to man crowding in on us and seeming like they'll never let us budge.

Anybody out there who's wondering what to put on a syllabus alongside, say, Crime and Punishment or The Portait of a Lady or Middlemarch could do worse than adding this; anybody who loves deeply involving modern-ish narratives like The Wire or just in the mood for the deepest possible exploration of the mid 20th century and how its various tensions and social currents affected real people should block out some time to spend in the Marshlands. This book is brilliant.

Henry James' THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA

It's been a while since I spent some time with good old Henry James, America's greatest social novelist.* And it's only because I stumbled across a nifty-looking biography of the man when Open Road Media had a 24-hour free-for-all on Amazon that I realized I hadn't read any James since Portrait of a Lady. But which to read, which to read?

Then I encountered, somewhere I don't remember, an observation that Princess Casamassima was likely an inspiration for Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, probably my favorite Conrad after Nostromo, and so there I went.

But so anyway, stop me if you've heard this one: Boy meets Princess. Boy falls head over heels for Princess.  Princess loves communists. Boy pretends to be communist to get closer. Princess sees through him but figures she can get him to bring her some real communists. Boy complies and brings her tiny half-French bastard bookbinder. Princess will love bookbinder and pet bookbinder and hold bookbinder and squeeze bookbinder and she will call bookbinder George. Exeunt Boy, with blue balls. Exeunt bookbinder, by his own hand. As such.

Which is to say that neither the Princess Cassamassima, nor the bookbinder, Hyacinth Robinson, is the driver of this plot, even though the book is named for the former and the latter is the point of view character. Hyacinth is so passive that even his choice of profession only comes about via the vigorous exertions of others; the Princess is equally passive, at least until someone finally brings her what she wants and she must work a bit to keep it. 

Doing all the actual work of the novel is a character who hardly appears in it, at least at front and center: the gentlemanly, the cosmopolitan, the conventional Captain Sholto (the Boy), who manipulates everything behind the scenes: he's even partly responsible for the radicalisation of Hyacinth, who might have stayed a drinking dilletante himself had he not been presented with Sholto's annoying example of same. 

And the romance- and- radicalization plot isn't even the only thing. James has at least as much fun with two other stories, both of which would be right at home in a modern high school dramedy: The competition between Hyacinth and Sholto over who a picturesquely poor family " belongs" to (settled, inconclusively but forever, when the Princess sails in and takes it over. They're hers.  They were always hers. You boys were just keeping the sofa warm for her), and the even more brittle-ly funny one between the Princess and one Lady Aurora, better born than the Princess but a middle aged spinster, whose lifetime of actively visiting and nursing and spending her meager allowance on the genuinely poor is somehow made to look amateurish and gauche when the Princess announces that actually, she owns nothing  ( probably because her estranged husband took it all away?) and "when thousands... haven't bread to put in their mouths, I can dispense with tapestry and old china." 

Straight out of, say, Clueless, or maybe Mean Girls, am I right?

What this all amounts to seems to be James' version of social satire,  a take on the class war that doesn't take it very seriously. James' socialists don't really seem to understand socialism, and spend most of the novel trying to hide this from one another while also trying to simultaneously impress each other with how aware and committed they are, and to discreetly pump each other for information as to what they should be doing to further their cause. Thus there are moments of actual humor, genuine laugh-out-loud moments, that I did not expect from James.

Does that mean a re-assessment is in order? It may. But I've got a lot of other stuff going on, so don't hold your breath for one, K?

*Indeed, the last time I took him up, I was just beginning to have joint problems and thought recording audioboo blog posts was a temporary solution until they got better, ha ha ha ha ha ha sob...

Ford Madox Ford's LAST POST

A lot of people -- including no less a figure than Dorothy Parker -- have bagged on this final novel in Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End quartet, but Last Post might actually be my favorite of the sequence. And largely for the same reasons that Parker et al have found it an unsatisfactory read.

I suspect this is largely because everyone expects this last novel to just wrap up Chrissie and Valentine's love story -- which it does, sort of -- but Last Post throws a bit of a curve ball, if I may use an American baseball metaphor about this veddy veddy British novel. For Last Post is told almost entirely from the points of view of Parade's End's ancillary characters, particularly Chrissie's much older brother, Mark Tietjens. And Mark Tietjens had some kind of stroke or attack or idiopathic something* on Armistice Day, leaving him paralyzed and speechless, communicating with eye blinks alone.

Sharing internal narrative duties are his life-long lady love, the French actress he "took up" in a very businesslike arrangement early in his youth and only married after his idiopathic violent unknown event left her potentially financially vulnerable to the machinations of Chrissie, or, really, Chrissie's estranged wife, the magnificent and malicious Sylvia.
Marie Tietjens has only been obliquely referenced before this novel, but swiftly becomes a character whose experiences and perspectives are a pleasure to share, the only Tietjens-or-Tietjens-by-marriage who actually appreciates the thousand-some acres of Yorkshire, the famously massive cedar tree and the ancient grey house of Groby. Marie has long had her heart set on someday retiring to the French countryside, marrying some nice undemanding landholder, and ending her days as mistress of a nice old agricultural establishment; since the war put paid to that and so Groby becomes her paradise instead, where she does a nice job dealing with the chickens and the cider presses and doesn't seem to mind that she also has to minister to an invalid.

Marie's pleasure is contrasted with the displeasure of Sylvia's life-long tantrum, which in this last book takes the form of renting out Groby (control over which Mark and Chrissie turned over to her earlier in the quartet) to an insufferable rich American woman who entertainingly claims "spiritual descent" from Madame de Maintenon (but who keeps insisting Marie Antionette was mean to her. Um.) and who considers it to be rich Americans' job to take over for the ancien regime, not by replacing it with democracy, but by supplanting Europe's hereditary aristocracy like a brash young understudy edging out the aging prima donna.The fact that the unseen (for the whole novel!) Chrissie is now making his living selling off the prima donna's clunky old unwanted antique furniture to furnish the understudy's homes in America is an enjoyable irony on which no one in the story comments. The hereditary aristocracy, both Tietjens brothers have been seen to observe in these novels, is pretty much played out, exhausted, never really up to the task of governing the simpler pre-War world they ruled, let alone this complicated modern one everybody sees coming.

It all serves to comment somewhat bitterly, perhaps, on how completely things both have and haven't changed as a result of the Great War. Which is really, after all, what these novels are for, pitting as they do "The Last Tory", the "18th Century" Chrissie Tietjens against the 20th century. We don't have to do much thinking to figure out who's going to win that one.

It would thus be easy to dismiss Parade's End as so much reactionary harrumphing, but that would be an error. As I've mentioned, both Tietjens brothers come around to the idea that maybe the existence of a hereditary "administrative class" was never all that great an idea to begin with, so while neither of them is eager to embrace the new world they see coming, unlike the types that nowadays bray about being conservative, the brothers Tietjens are trying neither to hang on to power nor to use what power they do have to thwart progress. The world can go harum scarum if it wants; they're going to stay in their little corner of the 18th century and enjoy it while it lasts; it looks like it can last at least until the next generation is grown up. That, they seem to say as "Last Post"** is blown over the story, will have to do.

*A doctor describes what's wrong with Mark as "fulminant hemiplegia" which is one of those Latin terms that basically just describe what is wrong (in this case, extremely sudden paralysis of half of the body) in Latin and sheds no actual light on what is wrong. Various others in the novel -- including Mark's lover and later wife Marie -- seem mostly to regard this as something Mark chose, as his final withdrawal from the stupidities of early 20th century social life and his responsibilities therein. There may be an actual medical component to Mark's problem, they concede, but it could have been overcome or at least accommodated had he wanted to, but Mark's not even going to try to overcome it, and prefers his new life as someone to be waited on hand and foot and propitiated like a god.

**Sort of the British version of "Taps".

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky's ROADSIDE PICNIC with remarks on Andrei Tarkovsky's STALKER

I recently and for the first time* saw Andrei Tarkovsky's glorious lo-fi sci-fi (before that was much of a thing) adaptation of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic, Stalker, and loved it so much I watched it four times before I could bring myself to send it back to Netflix.** And it turns out that I love the source material just as much, which doesn't always happen with books-adapted-to-films. But then again, this is Tarkovsky doing the adapting.

The film is a stripped down version of the book, its trio of main characters deeply abstracted and Tarkovskified from the cast of Roadside Picnic, partly due to the constraints under which the director was working -- hence the low-fi part of the sci-fi, i.e. nothing near the special effects budget that would be required to render all of the alien artifacts and gadgetry the novel's characters encounter -- and partly because Tarkovsky, as always, had his own things going on. Like creating breathtaking underwater Cornell boxes while contemplating the bitter hilarity of our mortal existence:



But what's this all about, you're probably asking?

Roadside Picnic and its adaptation concern the aftermath of an alien stopover on Earth by beings so incomprehensibly different and presumably advanced that they might not even have realized (or cared) that this planet was inhabited by at least one species that presumes itself sentient. Like careless travelers stopping for a picnic lunch, the aliens left behind a fair amount of crap, to which we humans are drawn as ants are to the wrappers and napkins and food scraps human picnickers might leave.

But what crap it is, glorious and dangerous and mysterious and powerful and did I mention dangerous? As are the Zones themselves that were visited and contain the Alien Crap (a list of which can be perused over at Wikipedia but ware spoilers!), in which the laws of physics, life and death, etc. are profoundly different from those prevailing in the good old ordinary universe as we know it and may also change from time to time.

So of course humanity is studying it (carefully) at very high levels and of course at lower levels there is a black market in Alien Crap and in unauthorized trips to the Zones to acquire more Alien Crap and also to exploit some of its properties like the Golden Sphere (which in Tarkovsky's film is changed into a Room), which grants wishes! Hence the existence of folk like our main character (and the title character of the film), Red, who is a Stalker -- a guide into and smuggler out of the Zones, who starts off his career as an unskilled research assistant, takes up a line in Stalking to make a little beer money, and then, when he gets his girlfriend pregnant, realizes he's got to keep breaking the law to keep his new family in groceries.

So even though the novel has a lot more gee-whiz sci fi elements than the film did, it's still a bottom-up view of a world transformed by an alien visit; Red is a working stiff, not an eminent scientist or astronaut, something which critics have made much of when writing about this book over the years; this book, of course, predates the "high tech/low life" scenarios to which cyberpunk and its spawn have long accustomed us. But just as we never get tired of working stiff stories in other genres, there's still plenty of room for working stiff sci-fi, especially when it's this good.

Roadside Picnic manages to be a slightly farcical (in that dry, dark and Russian way) quest narrative, a meditation on how small and insignificant we very probably are in the universe, a family drama and a cautionary tale. With Alien Crap.

In other words, it's completely wonderful.

But what really keeps it intriguing is the novel-world's central mystery: is there an overall, coherent, logical system behind all the Alien Crap and how it works, as in did the Brothers Strugatsky plan it all out and develop it as a complete puzzle for us to solve -- one with a solution -- or is it just a whole bunch of weird phenomena that they thought would be cool and just brainstormed one night over, say, some mushroom tea a la Babylen and Andrei in the fantastic Generation P (an adaptation of some more amazing Russian science fiction, my beloved Victor Pelevin's Homo Zapiens, and which film contains more than a few visual and narrative homages to Stalker. It's fly agaric all the way down, yo.)? Which might mean it's still weirdly meaningful, but not in a systematic way that one can tease out with mere reason... an exercise all the Alien Crap and Zone Traps which Roadside Picnic offers pretty much irresistibly invites the reader to try.

The film, of course, has other things with which to bake one's noodle, big philosophical and religious questions without which a Tarkovsky film would not be a Tarkovsky film, as well as long, slow, meditative and dreamlike scenes like this travel sequence:
:


This sequence should be required viewing for anyone who thinks he or she could pull some lo-fi sci fi cinema. It's just three guys sitting on a railroad car watching the scenery go by, but Eduard Artemiev's perfect musical accompaniment (which I played on a loop for a while during my reading of Roadside Picnic) and the transition from gritty industrial sepia-toned film stock to full color film*** and a lush green landscape**** makes Tarkovsky's Zone feel just as strange as the Strugatsky's but in a completely different way.

 Wonderful as Stalker is, though, now that I've read the novel from which the film is abstracted, I kind of wish Tarkovsky used more of the source material, not so much the Alien Crap as  the novel's social dimensions: the novel takes us inside the Institute which studies the Alien Crap and has a lot to say about the difficulties being encountered in figuring out how it works, why it works, what some of it might be for; it also spends some time with what must surely be the organization behind the Professor's mad scheme in the film, with those who oppose the exploitation of the Zones and regard them and their products as EVIL. Too, a movement within the Institute charged with policing and shutting down the Stalkers introduces a huge friendship and betrayal plot/theme that adds layers of intrigue to the novel (but also, sadly, winds up not being resolved within its text). But all that would require a different filmmaker altogether to develop. Richard Linklater, say.

It's hard, too, to read this book now without perceiving a lot of Soviet themes and thinking, spotting allegories about the dangers of Western-style materialism, for instance, as well as a certain environmental/pollution-themed cautionary tale. Careless aliens made whole swathes of our planet uninhabitable and hostile. Careless people have the same effect on other species' habitats. Species have evolved that are entirely dependent on our artificial impacts; in Roadside Picnic, we are in danger of adapting irrevocably to the impact of the Visit. Which, for all the novel's cast knows, might just be the whole point!

Oh, so much to think about, when we think about The Other...

*This to my shame, because I do consider myself a fan of Tarkovsky. But I'm a fan of a lot of things, and it takes time to get to them all!

**And no, this was not just so I could keep looking at Anatoliy Solonytsin. No, really!

***This is probably due to another one of the famous Soviet austerity/resource choking constraints that left directors like Tarkovsky having to work with little bits of lots of different kinds of film rather than a deliberate choice to do some Wizard of Oz-ish gimmicky contrast, I'm pretty sure. But that's Tarkovsky, making lemonade. But, you know, the lemonade might transform your digestive tract and eventually your whole body into more lemonade if you drink it.

****And the whole theme of a gorgeous natural landscape transformed into something still beautiful but deadly as hell strongly prefigures/predicts what would become of the environs of Chernobyl as you can observe in Michelle Boganin's 2011 Stalker-esque tour of Terre Outragee.

Ford Madox Ford's A MAN COULD STAND UP

I read most of A Man Could Stand Up, the third volume of Ford Madox' Ford's Parade's End, on Armistice Day, which lent a certain extra poignancy to the central image evoked by the title, of a man being able safely to stand up to his full height, above ground, without worrying about thereby meeting instant and violent death. The experiences of trench warfare as evoked in the book's middle third reduce pretty much everybody there to longing for a world in which that simple act, which nearly everyone who has ever lived has probably never even thought about, so ordinary is it, would again be possible.

That the other two thirds of the book take place on Armistice Day itself, the very first one, was interesting too, in a way, but like those sections themselves that fact paled in comparison to the thought of thousands of Tommies dreaming of the day when they could stand up again.

In a similar way, the focus of Parade's End has also narrowed to something simple, elemental, and boring, its core as an (admittedly unconventional) love story. While the newly introduced and the already known subordinate characters -- the Head of the girls' school where Valentine Wannop has spent the war as a games mistress (aka gym teacher), the subalterns and brother officers and members of the battalion over which Christopher Tietjens assumes command -- are all fully realized and get their moments to shine, this book is really all about Valentine and Chrissie. This makes it a leaner and sharper (and yes, shorter) read than Some Do Not or No More Parades, but also, surprisingly for a story that contains all of the tension and drama and horror of the fighting in France during the Great War, rather a pallid one.

I attribute this mostly to its most glaring absence: Sylvia Tietjens. We do not know for certain that she has ceded the field to Valentine, but she is, at any rate, not on it at all; she is barely even mentioned except in passing. We feel her most strongly in another absence: all of the furniture is gone from the flat she shared with Chrissie in London, a plot point on which a lot of Valentine's story turns as Lady MacMaster, once Valentine's close friend but now "siding" with Sylvia out of hatred for the man who kept her husband financially afloat and supplied the idea that got MacMaster his knighthood (it has been observed before that sometimes there is no more hateful figure in one's life than one's benefactor) seizes on it as a way, perhaps, to manipulate Chrissie via Valentine into forgetting that MacMaster owes him pretty much everything. Look at to what a sad state of affairs Chrissie has come home, Lady MacMaster says, none too subtly hinting that Valentine owes it to everyone to be his reward. Ugly stuff, this.

But of course, Valentine doesn't care about the ugliness, even though the possibility looms that the gossip that this news has started could cost her her job. Though there has been no contact at all between Valentine and Chrissie since he returned to France at the end of Some Do Not, though they've never spoken of feelings for each other and have barely even admitted to themselves that they even have feelings, Valentine's thoughts go immediately to the notion that she shall live with Chrissie now that the war is over.*

That Chrissie's thoughts have gone in much the same direction is pretty much just conveniently coincidental. These are neither of them people who air out their feelings to their closest chums or analyze them or think about romance at all; indeed, the way in which they are actually very well matched is that both cherish an idea about couplehood that is very much outside the norm: that domestic and (presumably) sexual intimacy is merely the means to the end of getting to talk to each other whenever they want, to have the kind of long and deeply involved conversations that are impossible to have in public, where any old idiotic acquaintance can interrupt them, where any old busybody can half overhear and misinterpret and blow into a scandal or a misunderstanding with ridiculous consequences (as is pretty much the very nature of the overall story of Parade's End!), where closing time or the end of a party or a car crashing into the horse pulling their cart can put a premature end to things.

Of course, Sylvia might very much have liked to have that, too. As we learned in No More Parades, Chrissie is the only man she's ever talked to who didn't bore her to death. And he was hers by law. But she'd gone about accomplishing this all wrong: Chrissie was probably the only man left in England for whom the first move of jumping his bones in a railway carriage was the worst way to begin the relationship. Had she let her brains show first instead -- and Sylvia, though perhaps not a great Latinist, is no dumb blonde -- she might have gotten all she could wish for. But how was she to know that, in Edwardian England?

Yeah, I'm still Team Sylvia, even though I also find myself kind of happy for Valentine as she stands shyly next to her man, holding his hand for the first time as he toasts the very first Eleven Eleven toast with his army buddies. I missed Mrs. Tietjens terribly, this novel, and hope against hope to see her again in the last volume, The Last Post.

Otherwise, I'm not sure there's any point to finishing this. Hmph.

*Though she does entertain some thoughts against making a move toward him, and they're very good thoughts:  "What was the coming together that was offered her? Nothing... but being dragged again into that man's intolerable worries as machinists are dragged into wheels by belts..." I read that and punched the air, but alas, Valentine gave herself very good advice and didn't follow it. Le sigh.

Ford Madox Ford's NO MORE PARADES

Where the Great War was just a trace element of Some Do Not, the first volume of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End tetralogy, in the second, No More Parades, it's the main event, the setting. From its first pages we are plunged into the tumult and confusion of Christopher "Chrissie" Tietjen's efforts to get a brand new draft of over 2000 Canadian soldiers ready for their posting -- and they've turned up with their uniforms and nothing else. All part of a day's work for Chrissie, pulling tin hats and identification discs and soldiers' wills out of thin air all because some military bureaucrats back in Blighty are earning themselves knighthoods by cutting corners and saving the taxpayers' money.*

Interestingly, for the first several chapters of the novel I found a certain ambiguity as to where these events fit chronologically with those of Some Do Not. From that first novel, we know that Chrissie has gone to the Front at least twice: which time is being depicted here? The ambiguity adds an extra intensity to Chrissie's struggles to outfit soldiers, survive a German air attack, not think about his wife, Sylvia, or about "his girl" (who is not named for quite some time but whom we know is Valentine, but... does he know that? Has he sustained his traumatic brain injury and come through it or is that in his future?) and to write a sonnet in two and a half minutes.** Which his fellow captain is then to render as Latin hexameters in the same amount of time as a sort of friendly competition to divert them a bit from the pressure and the horror. Good God I love this book!

But mere scenes of war and chaos are never enough for writers like Ford Madox Ford, who (quite properly) cannot resist messing with things by introducing his other brilliantly vivid characters into the mix at the worst possible times for them to be introduced. Enter Sylvia Tietjens, beautiful and bored and cruel like a neglected cat, who as a high society beauty, a lady of fashion, a veritable queen in her own right, can pull all sorts of strings (an image that recurs towards the end of No More Parades when Chrissie phrases her actions in terms of her having "pulled the string of a shower-bath", meaning her thinks of them as pranks and nothing worse) and manages to barge in on Tietjen's commanding officer demanding to see her husband.

Oh, Sylvia! I feel for her even more after the second half of this novel, which is mostly told from her point of view. Her respect and admiration for Chrisse have only grown together with a strong sexual desire for him that makes her "tremble" and "vibrate" even when discussing him with the man she once eloped on him with (who is in every way Chrissie's inferior and who, we learned, bored Sylvia to tears almost before they made landfall in France back in 1912 in Some Do Not). Nothing she has managed to do from home seems to have gotten a rise out of her husband, so she'll do her best to achieve that in person, war and duty be damned. This is selfish of her, of course, but the reader has already decided that the surname "Tietjens" is probably the word for "the most stubborn person like ever" in some obscure dialect of medieval Dutch; Chrissie is stubborn in his clinging to his rationality and his outmoded ideals (he tells his C.O. at one point that he took all his public school education on morals and conduct seriously, never outgrew it, and seems to be the only member of his generation so afflicted); Chrissie's brother Mark was stubborn, last novel, in believing the worst of his little brother and in determining to bring Chrissie's imagined shortcomings to their father's attention whatever the cost, and, in this novel, in making all of that up to Chrissie in well-intentioned but unworkable ways that only wind up making things worse for Chrissie; Sylvia is only a Tietjens by marriage but is just as stubborn as the born Tietjens about how her marriage was supposed to be and how she must settle for nothing less than exactly what she wanted, which was a loving and passionate life-long twosome with the most brilliant and capable man she has ever known: her husband.

Sylvia's desires are natural and understandable; her "villainy" if such it must be called lies in her limitations: she is a wealthy, well-born Lady of Fashion; men fall at her feet; her job is simply to keep herself beautiful because her purpose in life is decorative, is as an object of desire. She's more than doing her job, but the rest of society is not living up to the bargain she has always understood to have been struck since someone first noticed she was pretty. The rapt adoration and constant attendance on her of her chosen consort is her due! But having never had to be anything but pretty and fashionable and socially adroit, she's never learned how to actually deserve said adoration and attendance. It's tragic, really.

As is the way things are left at novel's end, which leaves Chrissie with no choice but to go to the front and probably be killed. His marriage is his undoing in every way: the lies he allowed to be spread to protect Sylvia the consequences of her earliest tantrums, the malice and jealousy exercised upon him by her other admirers, and, yes, the feelings he's allowed himself to develop for "the girl" who is his true match -- feelings he's not acted upon, but is believed to have done so by everybody, including his wife, which is what set her on her trajectory to pull the string of the shower bath. Oh, if only what had doused Chrissie had really only been water!

*This puts the current war's ongoing controversy over body armor and lack of toiletries into a certain perspective, doesn't it? Except of course the modern counterparts to Tietjen's faceless adversaries don't get knighthoods; they just get to keep their jobs.

**Of course I love this bit above all others, though I find his methods differ strongly from my own. My own record for speed sonnetry before witnesses is two minutes and about ten seconds, on October 8, 2009 at Chicago's Argo Tea House. But I was among friends only and no one was bleeding out at the time.

Ford Madox Ford's SOME DO NOT

The first volume of Ford Madox Ford's brilliant tetrology later called Parade's End*, Some Do Not is the story of a deeply rational man living in deeply irrational times and the consequences of his irrational clinging to outmoded standards for proper conduct far more than it is, as generally marketed, that of a love triangle.**

Christopher Tietjens, youngest son of "the" Tietjens, a family who originally came over with William of Orange in the Glorious Revolution, is an unprepossessing figure of a man, fair, doughy, of a "good old family" but otherwise of no real consequence except for that some freak of heredity has left him a mathematical genius. As the novel opens, he is wrestling with the issue of whether it would be correct of him to accede to fudging some numbers for the government that employs him to be a brilliant but pliable mathematician. Which "Chrissie" is not, even when it is in his very best interests possible to be so.

For this is also a guy married to a seriously beautiful woman, the gorgeous and careless Sylvia, who was already pregnant when she jumped his bones in a railway carriage and thereby convinced him to throw in his lot with her for good or ill. When a child is born not quite enough months after the wedding, he claims it anyway and fiercely refuses to care that it might not be his, because that is not rational and it would create unseemly drama were he to do otherwise (and, actually, he loves the boy). Avoiding drama is his highest priority, making him a deeply relate-able figure for this reader.

And so later on when a bored Sylvia, who would, thank you very much, have preferred a row over the child's parentage as a sign that the man she married actually gave a damn about her and their life together, not only cuckholds him but runs off to France with a guy, he is so drama- and gossip-phobic that he lets it be generally believed that he is the cheater and Sylvia recovering from her being so very ill-used on the Continent. Better, he reasons, that the Public thinks him as just another philandering jerk like all the other philandering jerks out there, than for that same Public to regard his wife as a whore.

This pattern of behavior is very much his stock-in-trade, even though it never comes out well (his careless generosity with his inheritance, for example, earns him far more hatred than gratitude; far better, it would seem, if he'd just blown it on whores and coke women and the ponies like a proper entitled douchebalrog). The seeds thus planted bear wicked mutant fruit and flower; once the Public thinks of him as just another philandering idiot, everybody's ready to believe the worst of him in every encounter. Whether it's being caught comforting his best friend's mistress in a train cabin not unlike the one in which Sylvia thrust herself into his life, or driving a young woman home through the fog and having their horse and cart smashed up by an idiot in a motorcar, circumstances always conspire to make Chrissie look like a jackass.

All of this would be drama -- and comedy, for sometimes the piling on of woes and misunderstandings evokes the work of P.G. Wodehouse -- enough, but there's oh so much more going on. Such as the young woman he was driving home when her horse got nearly killed by a car, one Valentine Wannop, whose name gossip has linked with Chrissie's already because Chrissie's father was close friends with Valentine's and has basically supported Valentine and her novelist mother since Professor Wannop died (so naturally some of the gossip is that Valentine could be Chrissie's half-sister). The plot here reminds me a lot of that of Robertson Davies' Leaven of Malice, in which false and malicious rumors of a young woman's engagement have similar results; towards the end of Some Do Not Valentine compares their situation to having been caught in a vice and forced together. It's an apt comparison. But there is, apparently one thing you must never, ever put in a trap vice, and that is Christopher Tietjens, a Good Soldier even before he becomes one.

Where Some Do Not excels the most is in its little scenes -- conversations between Chrissie and Sylvia (who actually is in love with her husband), exquisitely uncomfortable breakfast parties, slow and thoughtful interludes in mid-golf game, philological arguments in a horse-drawn cart -- where the dialogue only tells a tiny bit of what is going on. The plot developments are extraordinarily subtle, revolving around things like bounced checks and the way Sylvia does or does not walk into a room.*** And the simple, ordinary prose style is glorious; if Ford Madox Ford isn't one of your literary heroes, it's gotta just be because you haven't read him.

I haven't even come to the fascinating sub-plots: the stories of Chrissie's best friend and semi-toady MacMaster and Mr. and Mrs. Duchemin; the faint background struggles over the inheritance of the Tietjens' estate since a combination of death and desultoriness bump Chrissie from youngest son to heir (once his father has died) and thus render his own-not-his-own son the heir's heir even though he's not really a Tietjens -- and a Roman Catholic to boot, like his mama, and like the original owners of the Tietjens' estate of Groby before the Glorious Revolution led to some good Protestant Dutchmen taking over the place; Sylvia's own entire life apart from her husband. Trust me: it's all fantastic, though.

Oh, and then there's the Great War.

World War I is really just a backdrop for this first novel in the quartet, but what little of it there is, explodes the plot to an extraordinary degree: Some Do Not and, presumably, its sequels, may call it "shell shock" as that was the contemporary term but what is really being dealt with is, not post-traumatic stress disorder, but traumatic brain injury, giving the whole work a chilling present-day resonance that makes me think Parade's End might be a wonderful candidate for another modern high school update the way Emma became Clueless and The Taming of the Shrew became 10 Things I Hate About You. Say, high school and the years right after, to accommodate Chrissie's going to war.

Which is to say that this book, these books, are truly timeless.

And they're on all those best ___ novels of ____ period or category or whatever for a reason.

*Yes, yes, recently adapted as a television miniseries by HBO, but I found said adaptation a disappointment about which I decline to speak further.

**Which the fact that this very phrase makes me vomit in my mind and yet I love this book to pieces should tell you something right there about marketing and how people who have only skimmed a book cock up trying to describe it to others. Hurl.

***And while we're on the subject of Sylvia, whom I suspect was maybe sort of intended as the villain of the piece but is actually the character who most captured my sympathies, Ford Madox Ford writes women extraordinarily well. By the middle of the novel, the reader understands perfectly everything that Sylvia does and feels she might have done much the same; by novel's end Valentine has gone from annoying diversion with LOVE INTEREST in neon over her head to a person whose struggles feel as real and well-realized as any heroine's ever have.

John Brunner's THE SQUARES OF THE CITY #OneBookAtATime

The Sheep Look Up utterly devastated me when I read it for the first (and definitely not the last) time earlier this year, and I realized that John Brunner was a guy whose books I would definitely need to track down one by one until I had read them all.

Then my pal Paul Weimer and  a relatively new Twitter friend, Fred Kiesche, applauding my resolution, told me that if The Sheep Look Up was "death by pollution", The Squares of the City was "death by chess". As in the structure is modeled after a World Championship game in 1982 between Wilhelm Steinitz and Mikhail Chigorin. I thus knew that this one would have to be my next Brunner, because if there is one thing I love, utterly hopelessly*, it's chess. And people who are obsessed with chess.

And I also like a good jaw about urban planning and cities. So, um, as they say nowadays, hell yes.

The city in question here, Vados, is a relatively newly founded capital city in a ficticious South American Republic, Aguazul, to which our hero, the delightfully named Boyd Hakluyt,** has been summoned to help improve its traffic flows. Vados might be the most modern and well-planned city in the world, but the problem of moving people and goods around is never really solved, is it?

But of course, it's not really a traffic problem our hero has been brought in to solve. See, the circumstances behind the founding, just 20 years ago, of the city of Vados, are troublesome. Aguazul's president, Vados (yes), did not trust his people and their meager resources to create the perfect city he dreamed of, so he threw it open to the global elite as what amounted to an investment opportunity with big returns -- the biggest return being a place to live with a guaranteed high standard of living, elegance, order, and freedom from riff-raff. Yeah, he sort of built Galt's Gulch.

But wait! In order to assure the city had adequate water, most of the nation's water supply was diverted. Water that peasants and villagers and small farmers depended on. Water that said peasants etc. wound up having to follow to Vados, even though Vados had no place for the likes of them, resulting in unsightly slums and shanty towns and the general presence of riff-raff in this perfect city. Oh noes!

So what Hakluyt is really there to do is come up with a "traffic improvement plan" that requires the city to eliminate said slums and shanty towns, thus forcing the riff-raff back "onto to the land" where they belong. Any plan he might come up with that does not require this will be rejected; he is there to provide an excuse and act as a scapegoat.

It takes him a while to discover this, of course. And once he does...

Here is the source of the novel's real interest and tension (the chess plot is really just window dressing, though it's kind of fun to track plot developments -- deaths, arrests, kidnappings -- and see how they map onto the moves of the famous 1892 game): Hakluyt spends a lot of this novel trying to rationalize his presence in Vados, to justify to himself and a few key others his dogged determination to do some appoximation, at least, of what he's being paid for. Among those key others is one Maria Posador, leader of a small faction of native-born privilege who have taken up the cause of the slum-dwellers. If there is an opposite term for "femme fatale" that term would apply to Maria, who is constantly trying to get our hero to do the right thing and tell his employers to pound sand.

Lots of others would like him to do so as well, and many of them are less subtle than Maria, which means there are some decent action scenes, conspiracy elements, even a bit of a mystery plot woven in with this meditation on haves and have nots and what the former might be seen to owe to the latter. Which is to say that once again, Brunner showed a great deal of prescience -- but this time his work has not achieved anything like the status of self-denying prophecy that The Sheep Look Up has.

And of course it's a bit of a dig at the history of the New World in general, isn't it?

Well worth a read.


*As in I adore the game and never miss a chance to play but pretty much suck at it to a hilarious degree.

**I suspect his name is a nod to Richard Hakluyt, an Elizabethan era writer who promoted the settlement of North America in his work.

100 Books #119 - Fydor Dostoevsky's POOR FOLK

At first glance, there would appear to be just two characters in Dostoevsky's epistolary first novel, Poor Folk, but really there are four. We have the two letter-writing doomed lovers, Barbara (Varvara) Dobroselova and Makar Devushkin, and we have the pair's mental models or emulators of one another. The story told in the letters of this pair of chastely loving neighbors, in which they live out their lives of privation and longing for one another, is thus given an almost unbearable tension as they all but scream at one another for understanding. "Ah, little angel, you are a perfect child! I know well you are weak as a blade of grass," Makar might say to the decidedly not weak Barbara, for instance, projecting quite forcefully his distorted ideal of femininity on the woman he has decided he must protect even though it is obvious from the very beginning that, sad as Barbara's straits are, she is doing a much better job of taking care of herself than Makar is.*

It's this tension, rather than the horrible living conditions described or the novel's famed status as a possible satire on Gogol's "The Overcoat" and other works, that kept me reading this**; it's the same inter-character tension that I love best about Dostoevsky in particular, and Russian novels in general, after all. There is a perverse streak in me that loves to watch characters willfully misunderstanding each other while claiming (usually dismissively) to understand each other perfectly. I say perverse because nothing makes me angrier than when this happens to me in real life. In fiction, however, it's my crack.

So, while earlier this year I decided, after having thoroughly loved the first volume of Joseph Frank's giant biography of Doestoeversky, that I needed to read Poor Folk right away, I kind of put it off, largely out of a feeling of obligation to others. I am comrades with lots of writers who released new fiction this year and whose work could benefit from what small light I could shine on it; I finally allowed some friends, new and old, to talk me into reading all the Harry Potter and all the Dark Tower novels.... the year slipped away.

But as it comes to an end, I find myself in what my good pal EssJay aptly describes as a "sneaky hate spiral" in which all fiction annoys me or otherwise fails to keep my attention. I've been here before; I know what I need, and so I keep "guaranteed good stuff" that I know I'll like against such times. Hence Poor Folk at last. AaaaaaAAAAAaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh.

My own pecadillos notwithstanding, this book is a searingly worthwhile read even if  you don't get off on the kind of tension I'm celebrating here. Doestoevsky at the kinda-faltering start of his career is better than almost anyone else at his or her peak. Listen: I hate epistolary novels. Hate them. But if all of them were like Poor Folk, I would love them. They would be my favorites.

For instance, a good chunk of Barbara's correspondence is devoted to a rather lengthy account of her childhood and upbringing, which means Dostoevsky, brand new novelist, has already set for himself the daunting task of writing convincingly in a female voice -- and a unique and specific female voice at that, for Barbara is revealed as a woman whom we would now understand as a survivor of domestic violence, both physical and emotional, whose character has been shaped/warped by terrible events that she simply understands as commonplace, as just the way the world works. Her presentation of self, not precisely from a victim mentality seeking redress but as one who subtly demands a weird blend of pity and respect for her suffering, is astonishing and uncomfortable to read, and utterly masterful. One cringes at lines like "Yet this did not arise from any WANT OF LOVE for me on the part of my father, but rather from the fact that he was incapable of putting himself in my own and my mother's place. It came from a defect of character." Isn't making excuses for one's abuser a classic sign of abuse in the modern paradigm of same? But Dostoevsky knew it and saw it from the very beginning of his career, decades before it got codified into modern social services jargon. He was that good, right from the start.

All that and a bravura depiction of the humiliations and extraordinary degree of unrewarded effort that poverty inflicts on its victims, whatever the century.

Dude. My jaw is still in my lap. And I'm thinking about opening a hot dog stand.**

*Indeed, Barbara spends a lot of the novel berating Makar for spending money on unwanted gifts for her, which he insists on doing despite her many, many protests, because as far as he is concerned, that is what men must do for women they love, and women who claim they don't want them are just being coy. This, of course, enrages Barbara further, even as it also causes her to worry because it is plain that not only can Makar not afford the bonbons and presents of cash he is constantly sending her, but that he is basically endangering his own survival to do so. Her protests just drive him to try harder to please her with gifts. And so on. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so awful. Or vice versa.

**Well, that and the "just enough" funniness, chiefly achieved in exchanges between our lovers about whether or not a writer for whom Makar serves as amanuensis is a genius (Makar's version) or a hilariously bad hack (Barbara's), complete with extensively quoted passages so ridiculously overblown that they can't even be counted as satire. When Barbara continuously declines to read more, Makar's assumption that she is simply reading them in the wrong spirit and might like them better "when you have a bonbon or two in your mouth" makes it all even funnier. If you're the type who can laugh at patriarchy and patronizing, anyway. Which I can.

***Wink again at Unca Harlan.