Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Tolkien, Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, and now Evelyn Waugh- strangely enough, early 20th-century British Catholic converts all. What a peculiar convergence of literary figures. Someone should write a thesis paper on that. Waugh himself converted to Catholicism mid-career, with the latter half of his works becoming increasingly serious and religiously centered. Brideshead Revisited comes of this era.

It seems Waugh composed the book with a mind to present his new beliefs in a manner palatable to the generally secular reading public. His protagonist, Charles Ryder, falls in with pampered young Sebastian at Oxford, and becomes intertwined with his Catholic family. Years later, Charles chances upon Sebastian's sister Julia, and begins an affair with her that lasts until her father's death. But just when all hurdles have been cleared for them to marry, Julia breaks off their relations, unable to continue in sin.

Through this family Waugh exhibits varying stages of Catholicism, from the mother's lifelong devotion, to the father's insincere conversion, to the children's agnosticism. By the end, Charles, agnostic himself, sees every member return to a more or less genuine faith, each finding their own degrees of peace and happiness. Charles, however, is disillusioned and alone. While he and Julia had both effectually disowned their respective spouses when they took up with each other, Julia turns to missions after their affair ends, replacing that void in her life, but Charles is left unfulfilled.

Waugh's linguistic craftsmanship here is superb. Far surpassing Scoop in complexity and texture, his prose yet retains a lucidity and forceful elegance that can only be admired. His characters are arresting. The only disheartening element of the book is its overtones of homosexuality. Charles' relationship with Sebastian is mostly established to be platonic, but it is startlingly intimate, and there is enough ambiguity involved to make things uncomfortable. Less uncertain is the orientation of flamboyant world-traveler Anthony Blanche, Charles' classmate, whose purpose as a character is just as unclear as Waugh's attitude regarding such things. Waugh himself carried on untoward relationships during college, but this predates his conversion. He later married happily, so surely he viewed the effeminacy of Charles and Sebastian an unsavory but inevitable aspect of adolescence to be repented of later, and the unequivocal perversion of Anthony just another vice of an uninhibited man. That's how I'd have it, anyway.

Brideshead Revisited drew me in. The plot was essentially mundane, but the people continually interested me. I hadn't the slightest idea where Waugh was going until the end, and I was relieved to discover a conclusion compatible with my own convictions, for I was with him regardless.

Erewhon by Samuel Butler

I guess this is what I get for reading a book solely because someone, somewhere, made an oblique reference to it. I can't even recall where I heard of it. Somehow, nevertheless, I got the idea the book was worth my time, which prejudiced it in my favor. I dearly wanted to like it. But a sense of the foreboding fell over me when, in the preface to the revised edition, the author admitted, "I have found it an irksome task to take up work which I thought I had got rid of thirty years ago, and much of which I am ashamed of..."

Erewhon, in its entirety, feels derivative, in part because it is, but also because so many others have gleaned inspiration from it. In the best style of Gulliver's Travels, Butler strands his protagonist in a strange society through whose unconventional manners and mores we are ostensibly to see the foibles of our own. Drawing also on Thomas More's Utopia and predating Huxley and Orwell, Butler attempts what others have done, or will go on to do, much more successfully.

The beginning is bogged down in exposition and the adventures and aspirations of a poorly drawn protagonist. This man stumbles upon the Erewhonians and becomes their, albeit well-treated, captive. He details the oddities of Erewhon, from their aversion to machines and progress, to their severe punishment of physical ailment, to their nominal forms of religion. Butler employs thick, ambiguous metaphor and his voice is often indiscernible. At points it is hard to determine whether he is mocking society through his protagonist, or mocking the protagonist himself as society. I wouldn't doubt it to be both. Butler attacks from so many sides that he seems to prevail on none.

Altogether I think I missed the boat on the satire. In fact, I think that boat set sail when Butler died. Much of his wit now seems inapplicable, having faded along with the Victorian times it set to skewer. The book's inability to transcend time is, in all probability, its chiefest shortcoming.

Butler himself, from what I can gather, was a tortured, confused man swept up in the prevailing winds of turn-of-the-century intellectualism, unable to find a tenable basis in either religion or materialism, and so, being neither hot nor cold, as it were, was incapable of forming definite beliefs, resulting in a literary work as muddled as his mind.

The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston

I checked out this book solely because it was included in the College Board's list of 101 great books, at which list, for lack of a better, I have been chipping away dutifully for nigh on two years now. I thought, perhaps snobbishly, that this book would be merely a requisite representation of the Chinese woman that fulfilled some sort of multicultural quota, and maybe there are elements of that involved in the book's place in the College Board's heart, but Kingston's work is a decent piece of literature in its own right.

Kingston retells the tales her mother mesmerized her with in her childhood in sparse, bare English that evokes the fine, linear simplicity of the art of feudal China. She gives the eponymous woman warrior her own voice, allowing her to narrate the story of her training by a mystical old couple who give her the abilities to avenge the mistreatment of her people. Kingston slowly introduces facets of her own life and eventually moves entirely to talking of her family and their transition to life in America.

Kingston is at her finest when she is recreating the world of her ancestors. Her story-telling is just as riveting as her mother's must have been for her. The legends and fables, moreover, are fresh and unusual to unaccustomed Western ears. If the book were composed only of these, it would make for excellent bedtime reading.

When she draws parallels to her own life and compares her own experiences, there Kingston approaches profundity. I've come to wonder lately if that isn't what all literary fiction is- elegant attempts to make connections. Across ages, across cultures, across categories; within a book, within a concept, within a single sentence. For what is an allusion, but a connection between antiquity and modernity; a metaphor, but an abstract connection between two concrete entities?

The book's impact wanes when Kingston enters the narrow, crowded streets of San Francisco's Chinatown and her early years. She laments the disparagement of the female in her parents' culture, and she depicts the generational conflict between the elders born in China, and their offspring, who are beginning to assimilate into the new country in which they were born. It all lacks the poetic force the ancient stories contained.

But maybe that is where Kingston was going. Her contemporary life seems somehow insufficient when viewed through the lens of the past. The old meets the new, the East meets the West, and yet here we are, by time relentlessly pushed forward.

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

So I was listening to NPR (my philosophy is that if my media is biased in the opposite direction, when I hear something I like, I can trust it to be true) and I caught an interview with the author of this book. I couldn't resist; I find contemporary nutrition research absolutely arresting. Pollan, a journalist by trade, investigates the actual origins of the foods we eat, beyond the grocery store.

He begins in an ostensibly random place- a cornfield in Iowa. Much of the supermarket can be traced to this state, not only in overtly corn-based products, but also in anything containing citric acid, glucose, fructose, maltodextrin, sorbitol, xanthan gum, modified cornstarch, and MSG, among other things that habitual ingredient-list readers like myself would readily recognize. High fructose corn syrup, of course, is everywhere. Almost all animals raised for consumption are now corn-fed. Break down the molecular composition of the average American, and you will find corn.

That is just a small portion of what Pollan serves up. There is a lot to this book, but the essential message is that we as a nation are producing and consuming plants and animals in ways they were not designed to be used. According to Pollan, we could save untold amounts of money in all sorts of areas- from health care, to fossil fuel use, to fertilizers and pesticides, to government subsidies- if we would allow a system based on the natural growth cycles of our food.

Pollan's worldview is decidedly evolutionary, but even he admits the fallibility of science. "The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables...the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters," he says in a statement that has implications outside the field of nutrition, and that speaks volumes about the shortcomings of materialism.

Moreover, Pollan profiles Joel Salatin, a "Christian libertarian environmentalist" who maintains an entirely self-sustaining farm on a few hundred acres in Virginia. Salatin's cows eat grass, their natural diet; his chickens eat the insects and larvae that come with cows and in doing so fertilize the pasture. His pigs turn the farm's waste into rich soil that feeds the garden. "'All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse,'" Salatin insists, likening his cause to the homeschool movement. Pollan is enthralled with the concept, and I'd have to agree.

Pollan's tone is sometimes overreaching but mostly elegant and accessible. He is methodical and scrupulously detailed. He is areligious, but he is compassionate to Christians and even presents one as his ideal food producer. It's a terribly informative book and I am quite glad I read it.

Act One by Moss Hart

Maybe it's the lofty editorial pretensions I harbor, but Moss Hart's autobiography, hailed by its back cover as "the dramatic story that captured a generation," seems not so much a refined, time-honored classic as much as the early draft of a rough, albeit worthy, manuscript. Hart's story in itself is captivating, and the immediacy and authenticity of his telling quality stuff, but a firm, guiding hand such as George Kaufman's could have made this book that much better. For Kaufman was the catalyst to Hart's career, and there is no little irony to be found in the fact that this excellent but improvable narrative climaxes with the drastic revision of the author's first literary success.

Hart begins this book in his childhood, tracing the thread of theatre that has wefted throughout his life. He travels through his impoverished adolescence and chronicles the development of his embryonic attempts at plays, climaxing with veteran playwright Kaufman's collaboration on his first quality play and concluding with its acclaimed debut on Broadway. It's a decent ghetto-to-glamour account, and Hart deftly fashions himself into a protagonist to be sympathized with and cheered on.

"It was astonishing to find how much of what we had written was unnecessary," Hart says of Kaufman's subsequent revisions to his play. If only Kaufman had applied his red pencil to this autobiography. Hart's prose is mired in unneeded words, rough cliches, stilted dialogue, repetition, inconsistencies, and contradiction. In one place he writes, "a historic," and later, "an historic." He asserts that he has "never really heard" the laughter of the audience for he is always "listening ahead for the next line," but then goes on to describe his elation at the sound of that very laughter.

Hart also spouts universal truisms left and right, as an old, rich, successful, self-satisfied man ruminating over his life can only be expected to, I suppose. "It is always a little dismaying to discover that the truth, as one explores it, consists largely of a collection of platitudes," he avers. Whether or not this "truth" is itself true I cannot say, but Hart certainly believes it.

So sometimes I had to restrain myself from marking up the library copy I read with notes in the margin. But like I said, it was a good story, and my interest rarely flagged. Moreover, I learned much about playwrighting and the creative process. The other morning I read an article in which a tv show producer commented,"If this were a play, we'd still be in previews," a reference which would have been entirely lost on me had I not read this book.

Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton

So one day I was watching, of all things, a Catholic channel on TV, because some learned men were discussing G.K. Chesterton and his major works, and my curiosity was piqued. One man, a professor at a Catholic college, expressed his admiration for Orthodoxy and recommended it as an introduction to Chesterton's religious writing. So here I am.

Chesterton makes it clear his is not an argument of apologetics; rather, he is concerned solely with the moral and philosophical implications of belief in Christianity, for, he says, "having found the moral atmosphere of the Incarnation to be common sense, I then looked at the established intellectual arguments against the Incarnation and found them to be common nonsense." From what I can surmise, Chesterton's basic foundation for his beliefs stems from this: he has observed life is a certain way, and Christianity, of all possible belief systems, fits most perfectly this perception of his, so therefore Christianity is true.

It's a legitimate position, if not entirely fact-based. When Chesterton attempts to access factual information, he strays into archaism. Trying to establish a basis for supernatural occurences, he makes a case for contemporary appearances of ghosts, and he says "science will even admit the Ascension if you call it Levitation." Unfortunately, I don't think "science" will readily admit even levitation anymore.

Chesterton was a Catholic, and his writing retains elements of some of the extra-biblical features of such a faith, from constant reference to "the Church" as means of salvation, to saint-worship, to excessive reverence for priests and nuns, to all but condoning the atrocities of the Crusades. Nevertheless, he does accept Quakers, whose beliefs must have been vastly removed from his own, as true believers. He did not seem to consider salvation achievable through Catholicism only.

Chesterton emphasizes his conviction that of all worldviews, Christianity is the only one with any claim to humor and joy. I appreciated his reasoning. I've always entertained privately the belief that existence is inherently funny. Satan, Chesterton maintains, fell from taking himself too seriously, while "[t]here was some one thing too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth."

The writing is quite pretty, undoubtedly, and the philosophical points no less so. Chesterton's poetic approach to finding the meaning of life is refreshingly novel. Some of his arguments are outdated, and parts of his book are trivial and extraneous, but the essentials remain pertinent, poignant positions on what it truly means to exist.