A Death in the Family by James Agee

It sounds depressing, and it is, but it is also quite beautiful. Agee illustrates a young family’s noble struggle to comprehend the loss of their husband and father and move on. Jay crashes his automobile on his way home late one night, and he is killed instantly. His death devastates all his relations - that a young father, who worked out of his native rural poverty to attain a respected place in the middle class, who had recently conquered his alcoholism and reconciled himself to his wife, who had two tiny children to raise - that he should be alive one moment and gone forever the next, overwhelms them.

Agee's voice, as in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, is subdued but arresting. He writes in a mesmerizing cadence of prose, an unparalleled lilting song; his works are a melancholy ode to humanity. He describes his characters and their world in furious detail, invoking all the senses and imbuing the novel with a shocking degree of authenticity. His portrayals of sounds ring in the ears with unsurpassed verisimilitude. His is a severe but thoroughly accurate realism.

The intensely realistic nature of the book is due, no doubt, to its autobiographical origins. Agee's own father died in the same manner as Jay when Agee was six; Jay's six-year-old son Rufus bears Agee's middle name. Rufus' bewilderment and anguish in the wake of the events form some of the most poignant elements in the book; Agee's careful delineation of a young boy's thoughts surely bespeaks his own recollections.

The book must have functioned, therefore, as a tribute to his father. For Agee's work transcends reality, assuming a sort of symbolically charged air. Under his pen real life becomes loftier, more poetic, more important, drenched in deep emotion; fervently grounded in practical matters but simultaneously reaching for ethereal heights. He permits some of his characters a belief in the supernatural, and is on the whole sympathetic towards them, allowing them to cry out to God with the utmost sincerity. Spirituality pervades his work.

The novel inevitably leads one to ponder mortality, as all deaths do. In a society in which accidental deaths are increasingly rarer, and life spans are continually lengthening, these times of reflection are not as prevalent. Agee's book, then, in its ferocious veracity and breathless immediacy, functions as that reminder, urging self-evaluation on the reader: What would I do if someone close to me died? Am I ready to die?

Agee himself died rather young, at 45, of a heart attack. He never saw his book published and so did not enjoy the acclaim of the entirely deserved Pulitzer Prize that it would bring him.

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

Henry James, in sketching his Portrait, takes a young, idealistic woman and explores the detour her fortunes take when she inherits a fortune from her uncle. Isabel Archer's aunt proposes to escort her across Europe after her father dies. Isabel charms her relations and so finds herself financially independent upon her uncle's decease. Isabel is largely self-educated, having spent much of her adolescence steeped in books; from literature she extracted a varied brew of self-aware knowledge and untempered opinions. "She had a theory that it was only on this condition that life was worth living; that one should be one of the best, should be conscious of a fine organization (she could not help knowing her organization was fine), should move in a realm of light, of natural wisdom, of happy impulse, of inspiration gracefully chronic."

Isabel has lots of theories, in fact, and her newfound riches allow her to execute them. "She always returned to her theory that a young woman whom after all everyone thought clever should begin by getting a general impression of life." Isabel embarks upon her European tour. While she considers marriage important, she strives to achieve a destiny and identification without having to marry advantageously. She refuses the hands of several worthy suitors, but she is eventually captivated by a destitute widower whose good taste, veneer of decorum, ostensibly humble existence, and good favor by Madame Merle, a friend of Isabel's, do much to recommend him to her. Defying the misgivings of her relatives, she weds him.

Though she is years in discovering it, Isabel's marriage is solely mercenary on her husband's part. When a wedding occurs in the very middle of a book, depend upon it to be unfortunate. Isabel learns that Madame Merle is the illegitimate mother of her husband's daughter, and the motive behind Merle's encouragement of the courtship becomes apparent to her. Distraught over this discovery, Isabel flees to the bedside of her dying cousin, whose deteriorating health adds to her agony. After his funeral, an old suitor beseeches Isabel to run away with him and salvage some sort of happiness out of life, but she steadfastly refuses and returns home to a husband who despises her.

Isabel makes the right decision. The climactic scene is deeply reminiscent of Jane Eyre's refusal of Mr. Rochester; both women decline the fervent pleas of men to forsake their scruples and disregard the eyes of the world. Isabel's ideals may not have prevented her from being deceived when the correct path was obscure, but they allowed her to choose wisely when the decision was clear.

The story elicits many moral lessons, though from what I understand James was averse to viewing fiction in such a didactic manner. Money often causes more problems than it solves. Consult one's family in matters of romance; their sensibilities are not clouded by the illusions of infatuation. Accept responsibility for the byproducts of mistakes. Have an open mind, but not one too open. Take care as to whom one invites into confidence; even the least likely can harbor ulterior motives.

James retains vestiges of the traditional view of women as inferior. When Isabe speaks in illogical tautology, it is considered characteristic of gender. "'Because it's not,' Isabel said femininely. "I know it's not.'" And later, James remarks, "She knew how to think- an accomplishment rare in women." At the risk of disparaging my gender just to make myself look better, I'm sometimes half inclined to agree.

James' writing involves a delightful dearth of symbolism, making the book eminently accessible. He desires solely to analyze a young woman's fate when her free will is enhanced by pecuniary freedom, and the result is blatantly apparent. Stocked with a surfeit of self-assurance, she is easily ensnared, and, along with her bookish ideals, is beset by the terrible actuality of reality. But she is not vanquished entirely.

The Professor by Charlotte Bronte

The 19th-century British authoress is a paradox- Austen and the Brontes, save Charlotte, never married, and even Charlotte not until she was 39, and then only a year before she died. But all their respective works deal almost exclusively with romance. It lends their books a poignant irony.

The Professor is so plainly autobiography combined with wistful daydreaming that I could only read it detachedly. A young, intelligent, uncommitted British man, William Crimsworth, seeks employment abroad in Brussels. He becomes a schoolteacher, falls in love with an impoverished student of his, marries her, runs a school with her for some years, and eventually settles comfortably in England. As a student and teacher herself in Brussels, Charlotte undoubtedly must have developed an attachment, or dreamed of one, at least, and decided to transform her unfulfilled hopes into a novel.

William has setbacks and obstacles, but they are systematically taken care of. Crimsworth is essentially faultless- studious, scrupulous, religious, fastidious, not too good-looking. He is more or less destined to succeed in life. His love, Frances, is much the same, but being a woman at that period of time, attempting to maintain a level of self-sufficient decency, her chances at happiness before Crimsworth entered the picture were not as certain. Some of the most telling passages occur when Crimsworth discusses with his now-wife what she would have become if he had not married her. "Had I been an old maid," she avers, "I should have spent existence in efforts to fill the void...and died weary and disappointed, despised and of no account, like other single women."

The book lacks the breadth and scope of Charlotte's masterpiece, Jane Eyre, and it contains many little oddities besides. Crimsworth has an inordinate confidence in physiognomy, often describing his acquaintances solely in terms of the relation of their features to their personalities. Many conversations in the novel are carried on entirely in French, obviously intended for an audience better educated than myself. Both Crimsworth and Frances denounce Catholicism with a vigor rarely seen in novels of romance.

Male first-person protagonists drawn by female writers are overwhelmingly idealized and hardly believable. Bronte's hero complies with this, exhibiting a markedly effeminate sensibility towards life. The timid but steadfast young woman and the dashing lover come to rescue her found in Jane Eyre are prefigured here, but Frances and Crimsworth are not nearly as compelling or as vivid as Jane and Rochester.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

Robert Pirsig chronicles his intellectual journey into the essence of belief and existence within the scope of a cross-country motorcycle trip. Most of the story is related by his present self, who refers to the person he was before being treated in an insane asylum, as "Phaedrus." Phaedrus, Pirsig tells us, made a discovery tantamount to Copernicus' reconfiguration of the universe, and he, the present narrator, is here to explain it all.

Phaedrus found that by looking at the world not as a duality of subject and object only, but as a triune format in which subject and object are striving towards what he terms "Quality," or ultimate reality, he could reconcile himself to the idea of existence and achieve peace of mind. From this principle Pirsig reasons that the revered Ancients, Plato and Socrates and Aristotle, were mistaken, and the Sophists, whom the great philosophers derided, were in fact closer to the truth, that their Virtue was synonymous with his Quality, their pre-Socratic striving for "arete," excellence, more in line with the way things should be. He descends into an equation of Eastern mysticism, ultimately ending with an inconclusive attempt at transubstantiation. He partially bases his theories on the "mythos," the collective awareness of mankind that we are all privy to, almost echoing Chesterton when he said, "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors."

When Pirsig equates Dharma and the Buddha with his Quality, he loses credibility. The ancient Eastern texts have no authority; they have themselves only to offer. It is as if he fixates on them merely because they are not Western, because they are not heir to the legacy of those mistaken Greek philosophers.

Pirsig reasons for pages and pages, and though his overarching philosophy is faulty, he does have some good minor points. He takes up with the scientific method, insisting that there are an infinite number of hypotheses for any given experiment, and so the selection of the hypotheses that may be correct cannot be done scientifically, that is, in some objective textbook format; rather, the selection invariably involves a sort of subconscious art that comes from the perpetual reach for Quality.

"It is the quest of this special classic beauty, the sense of the harmony of the cosmos, which makes us choose the facts most fitting to contribute to this harmony. It is no the facts but the relation of things that results in the universal harmony that is the sole objective reality." That harmony speaks to the central drive of humanity. In literature, one continually seeks cohesion, threads of continuity, recurring symbolism- harmony. In life, one looks for meaning, purpose, reason, to make sense of it all- to bring the universe into harmony. His is a valid observation.

When extending his concept of Quality into real life, Pirsig infuses his esoterism with a more pragmatic air. "It is the little, pathetic attempts at Quality that kill. The plaster false fireplace in the apartment, shaped and waiting to contain a flame that can never exist." He identifies a feeling I have harbored for quite a while but only on vague, indefinite terms.