Sharing Anne Tyler

I wonder if this holds for other areas of study; I haven’t noticed Paul Krugman complaining that he can’t just enjoy an afternoon’s shopping any more.

#2 – the classic statement of the phenomenon, from Life on the Mississippi:

Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river! I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came floating, black and conspicuous; in one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water; in another the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal; where the ruddy flush was faintest, was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and radiating lines, ever so delicately traced; the shore on our left was densely wooded, and the sombre shadow that fell from this forest was broken in one place by a long, ruffled trail that shone like silver; and high above the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a single leafy bough that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed splendor that was flowing from the sun. There were graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft distances; and over the whole scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it, every passing moment, with new marvels of coloring.
I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture. The world was new to me, and I had never seen anything like this at home. But as I have said, a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river’s face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them. Then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented upon it, inwardly, in this fashion: “This sun means that we are going to have wind to-morrow; that floating log means that the river is rising, small thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody’s steamboat one of these nights, if it keeps on stretching out like that; those tumbling ‘boils’ show a dissolving bar and a changing channel there; the lines and circles in the slick water over yonder are a warning that that troublesome place is shoaling up dangerously; that silver streak in the shadow of the forest is the ‘break’ from a new snag, and he has located himself in the very best place he could have found to fish for steamboats; that tall dead tree, with a single living branch, is not going to last long, and then how is a body ever going to get through this blind place at night without the friendly old landmark?”

3: there’s a similar anecdote about Wellington (possibly?), out on a ride in the English countryside and calling his companion’s attention to a particularly impressive view; only to make a remark along the lines of “Now, if we were on that ridge down there, and the French were on the other side of that river, how would we deploy ourselves?”

Twain’s example is a good one, but gives the lie to its own conclusion; Twain did, after all, write the description which precedes the moral point. My own favorite example is the description of a Victorian gentleman at the strand, from Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Not having the book at hand, I can’t quote it, but I remember vividly the image of the determined naturalist with his notebooks and specimen jars, his nets and his digging tools. Fowles was bemused, but also respectful, as I think he ought to have been. Those determined, focused, serious types bequeathed to us a very precious ease in the natural world, and in the process, granted us the permission we now have to go down to the edge of the water with nothing in our minds but the pleasant sensation of digging our bare toes into the sand.

Interesting. I’ve read one Tyler so far (Ladder of Years) and really liked it. Completely agree about the sparse but memorable language. As for studying literature killing the joy in reading, well, hasn’t worked for me! In fact, at the book club I go to, three of us are literature graduates and remain avid readers.

So, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, eh? Will check it out.

Speaking only for myself, of course, my years studying literature (doctorate in comparative lit, 26 years plus teaching the stuff, about the same writing it, Middlemarch is my favorite novel next to Eleanor Arnason’s Women of the Iron People, etc) have only given me a wider appreciation for what’s possible.

It’s true I don’t like very much of what Anne Tyler or John Grisham is doing anymore. But what I have lost in the field of pop lit (and I do still like some popular literature, because some of it is excellent — see China Mieville, for instance) I have gained by finding a wider range of other works available to me, and in learning to read that wide range of works.

And this ability is what I try to pass on to my students.

I used to like the (perhaps dubious) etymology of theory as that which helps you see something in a work of art that you might’ve missed otherwise. The test for lit crit’s value is as stated by Pater:

Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. “Philosophy is the microscope of thought.” The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.

What typically happens instead — and I was actually going to write a bitter, twisted dissertation on this, before I came to my senses and went to law school instead — is that instead of using his craft to find something new in a book, the critic or theorist uses his box of cookie-cutters to reduce the work to something familiar. There’s a fascinating sadistic dynamic of wanting to be the one acting on the book, rather than vice-versa. At all costs, this commoner sort of critic seeks to avoid the experience Rilke describes in the famous sonnet, of being challenged by a work to change oneself.

Ladder of Years is one of my favorites – reminded me of Winter of Our Discontent, which is my favorite novel at the moment.

I’m visiting Johns Hopkins in Baltimore this semester and, following a tip from Chris, read and enjoyed Ladder of Years. I’ll have to read more, if I ever get a free moment to read a book – things are pretty hectic for me here, though mostly in a good way.

Thanks for this, Chris. I remember Geras’ appreciation of Tyler but, regretfully, never acted on it. I will, now.

And, contrary to your aside, I find Geras’ politics congenial; he’s a shrewd deconstructor of bien pensant cant and I find his arguments clear if not always compelling. His politics are a bit like his taste in literature (he’s a great fan of Austen), a marriage of sense and sensibility.

on reading as a critic, the Twain quote is what I first thought of, too.. from earlier in that passage,
“The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book.. There never was so wonderful a book written by man; never one whose interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparklingly renewed with every reperusal. ”
I read rivers for pleasure only, canoeing, fishing and swimming (the first two readings are quite similar, since the canoeist is looking for many of the same things in the river as a fish). Of course as William points out, Twain’s unraptured reading does not preclude the joyous ones. When guiding a trip of novice canoeists down the river, I do read it more as a catalog of dangers to be avoided, but still the primary pleasures are always there. Not that I have any training in lit crit, but in other areas I find the pleasures of understanding are accretive rather than reductionary.

Anne Tyler, yes indeed. Quietly funny, fine prose, and always kind to her characters. My mother bought the novels as they came out, so I read them up until moving away.. time to reread.

The old saying about knowing just enough to be a danger to oneself springs to mind: when you’re interested in ‘criticism’ as such, you go looking for chances to ‘do criticism’ or ‘be critical’ – and the difference between, say, economics and lit-crit in this regard is that a beginning-‘critical’ (let’s just say ‘joyless’ and be done with it) view of literature cuts right into the very reason one got into literary academia in the first place, namely love of stories. Beginning ‘critics’ tend not to feel confident talking about their emotional experiences of stories, and that’s precisely the problem: for humans and other mammals, emotions are the important bit.

My grad work in the humanities sucked away much of my joy in reading; it took a long time to return. Having accepted my merely human relationship to what I’m reading, I’m more-than-ever able to speak freely and joyfully (i.e. correctly) about the actual experience of literature, instead of just blahblah formal features (or worse, blahblah political subtext).

Carry on then!

Well, I’ve read a lot of Anne Tyler, less Grisham. Some of her books I like — Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant was nice. But lots of them leave me cold these days. Not enough there there. I’ll agree with you that her style is better than Grisham’s, if that’s what you mean.

Whereas once, as a child or an adolescent, he could immerse himself in a novel, the academic study of them had taught him to read as a critic.

My problem is the opposite: though I have read a ton of literary and film theory, I instantly suspend disbelief and immerse myself in the work if it’s any good (for me). If I actually want to analyse the rhetoric of an author or the editing of a film, I constantly have to make a huge effort to maintain a critical distance. That’s probably why theory was never a threat to my enjoyment of reading a book or watching a film, instead it has broadened my horizon in a more general way.

@Matt, the great philosopher John Dewey wrote a wonderful book, entitled Art as Experience, about this. In it he explores your point about greater knowledge about artworks, sometimes through practicing them ourselves (though perhaps not always through theoretical or thetic approaches, which seems to me to be what the original post is suggesting ruined reading for Simon Kuper) deepening our experience of them.

I add my voice to the chorus for Homesick Restaurant, which is a great book. I also enjoyed Accidental Tourist, but not as much. Norman Geras reviewed Tyler’s last novel, Noah’s Compass, for my online book review: http://thesecondpass.com/?p=4380

“The Art of Fiction” is great, I also liked “How Fiction Works” by James Wood.

David Lodge also has a great reader Modern Criticism and Theory if you’re interested in literary theory.

Relatedly, one of the problems about writing for a blog like Crooked Timber with so many readers who know more than I do on just about any topic is the the difficulty in sharing books, films, or music that you’ve enjoyed because I’m scanning the horizon (or the potential comments thread) for the dorsal fin of the Great White Critic for whom the immediate pleasure taken is a symptom of hopeless naivety and a failure to adopt the necessary critical distance.

Ain’t this the truth.