Chris Bertram’s Fiction Recommendations

I’ve taken up both of Chris’s recent suggestions of non-genre fiction reading, and am glad of it. I suspect I liked On Beauty (a good deal in the UK) less than he did, but I still enjoyed it a good deal (like him I’ll avoid spoilers, and ask commenters to do the same, but warn potential readers that I don’t police comments very well). Discussion on his thread focused on Smith’s ear for dialogue. The book is set in a liberal arts college in or around Boston, but almost all the characters are displaced in some way, and part of what is going on is that most of the characters are putting on a face with most of their interlocutors. So whereas some of the dialogue does sound inauthentic, it reflects the in-authenticity of the characters in the situation. And I love some of the little details – a throwaway sentence about how hard the main male character (a British émigré) finds it to take American bills seriously is exactly right – after 20 years here I am still absurdly pleased to get hold of a 20 pound note, and in my head its worth way more than one of those absurd $50 bills. Two other things to add. First is that, like all campus novels, it makes university life and university politics sound so much more interesting than they really are. 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). Second, although Chris says it is loosely based on Howard’s End, I was put constantly in mind of The History Man, whom Howard (the central character) resembles in more than name – and in ways that cannot be accidental. BTW if, like my colleague who has read every other academic novel around, you have somehow missed Bradbury, The History Man is peerless.

The Company You Keep (UK) is, as Chris says, brilliant, and I liked it more than On Beauty.

I can’t add much to his comments without adding spoilers. But it does have one feature, which is not at all uncommon in fictional representations of former 60’s radicals, and which irritated me a good deal. In Gordon’s world there are decent ex-members of Weather, who became lawyers or academics, or whatever, decent servicemen, cops, FBI agents, and ordinary people. But as with other books that use Weather as the representatives of 60’s radicalism, it ignores Weather’s numerous critics, which were just about everyone involved in the (dull, boring, traditional) left. Of course most of these people left the left too, and my own perspective is a bit skewed from having spent my earliest years in America completely surrounded by them. 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. They’re now in their 50’s and 60’s, most of them – but lots of them are still active running or just working for the local labor councils, or union locals, or in local campaigns for better healthcare, better schools, against the war, etc. I don’t want to embarrass anyone by mentioning names, or get too sentimental, but anyone of these people is worth everyone who joined Weather and more. I like to think some of them read CT; if you are one of them, you know who you are. It’s not a criticism of the book, which is indeed a terrific literate thriller, but it is a lament that Weather gets as much attention as it does, relative to the much better side of the left when the late 60’s/early 70’s are portrayed in fiction and public discussion.