Comments on: Chris Bertram’s Fiction Recommendations

By: harry b

harry b — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 12:32:12 +0000

bob mcmanus—yes, you’re absolutely right about that, I wouldn’t want to imply that anyone got it right! Just that some got it righter than others, and, eg, my friends in the IS tradition have been better placed to do some good or, perhaps more realistically, to prevent some bad, than the people in Weather. The occasional small victory (eg the LA janitor’s strike in 1990) often owes a good deal to people who stuck in there. But it has been a matter of small victories, usually comprised of defeats being less bad than they might have been.

I banned White Teeth from my house because our copy had been read on the beach and was trailing sand all over the place. I’ll get a non-sandy copy and see what I think.

jacob—thanks. It sounds to me as if you are the voice of experience. Hope it improves! I’ll look on my colleagues with renewed appreciation at our next meeting.

By: Chris Bertram

Chris Bertram — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 08:27:47 +0000

White Teeth is indeed good, though I actually enjoyed OB more (which isn’t to say that it is a better book). WT’s great strengths were its characterization and dialogue, but its weakness was its lack of structure and ZS’s inability to end it properly. She managed to resolve that problem for OB by the simple device of borrowing much of the structure from Forster.

(I’ve not yet read The Autograph Man, btw.)

Incidentally, I don’t share Harry’s view of the similarities between Howard and Howard Kirk. Howard Kirk was a repellent and cynical schemer, whereas Howard is, in the main, merely weak and self-deceiving.

By: bob mcmanus

bob mcmanus — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 04:07:39 +0000

“But these are the people who rejected Weather when it was a live option, who regarded them as adventurers and terrorists, and who, instead, played a long game.”

I certainly will not here defend Weather, and certainly admire the people who played the long game.

However, while Weather may have been very wrong, looking back at the last 40 years, and looking at our current situation, I have trouble accepting that the rest of the Left was prescient or effective tactically or strategically.

But I am famously impatient. Perhaps the great-grandchildren will have healthcare, decent wages, and peace.

By: Jacob T. Levy

Jacob T. Levy — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 23:13:26 +0000

Maybe I’m oblivious to this, as well as everything else, but I just never get to hear about these great rivalries and affairs that people have with each other and with their students, or attend the meetings in which people are more than mildly irritated with each other. (This is a complaint about campus novels, not about university life, I hasten to add – I’d hate it if it were the way it is portrayed – or perhaps it is like that and I just wander around with my blinkers on).

Count your blessings! The rivalries, affairs, and—especially—meetings where people are far, far more than mildly irritated with each other are much better confined to the pages of fiction than lived through or near. I think you needn’t choose between “not like that” and “blinkers,” as there are very great instiutional-cultural differences, i.e. it’s like that at some places much more than at others and you drew lucky institutional cards.

By: MQ

MQ — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 22:45:07 +0000

On Beauty was a flat-out awful book, turgid and awkward and full of strained, mannered voices. You could feel the author groping to fill pages. It was set at Harvard, where Smith was doing some kind of fellowship, but you could get infinitely better dialogue by just going to any faculty party with a tape recorder. I’m sort of mystified at the even semi-respectful reviews it got; I guess reputation counts for a lot in these things.

The book immediately picked up and became more lively, vivid, and open to the world when the scene switched to non-academic characters in London. Smith has a much better feel for Britain than the U.S., she should stay there.

By: otto

otto — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 22:03:19 +0000

The Company You Keep is astonishingly good, thanks for the recommendation.

By: pedro

pedro — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 21:30:41 +0000

I agree with jroth’s wife. White Teeth is much better than On Beauty.

By: JRoth

JRoth — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 20:56:59 +0000

Sorry if I missed this in Chris’s thread, but my wife emjoyed White Teeth a good deal more than she did On Beauty. She liked On Beauty well enough, but if I recall, she finished White Teeth in about 2 days, where On Beauty lingered in the house.

So if you liked OB but were underwhelmed, give WT a go.