J M Barrie--The Admirable Crichton (1902)

It didn't take me long to get through this one (it has now officially taken me more days to put up this post than it did to read the book--1/30). That is one of the beauties of generally intelligible plays. The Admirable Crichton was famous in its day, and for many decades afterwards, and the story, which concerns an aristocratic English household that is shipwrecked on a tropical island, during the duration of their confinement on which their butler establishes himself as the master of the party, remains something of a modern archetype, though much less so in the last twenty years, as the perception of the general competence of anyone stuck in the mass of the population has declined. In an earlier post I described this plot as sounding like 'Jeeves and Wooster meet Gilligan's Island', though on reading it, which I had not done before, it reminds me more of the World War II prison camp novel King Rat. It doubtless has other spiritual offspring in 20th century literature and drama.   

I had anticipated was that it would be more of a comedy. It tries to be that some of the time, but only Lady Brocklehurst, who is a less light-hearted cousin of Aunt Agatha in The Importance of Being Earnest, is at all funny to me, and she does not appear until the final act. The character of Ernest, with his foppishness and fondness for insipid anagrams, seems to be something of a spoof of Oscar Wilde himself, though it falls mostly flat because Oscar Wilde actually was funny, and at a level that Ernest does not begin to approach. The character of Crichton himself was the biggest surprise when contrasted with my expectations. There is nothing comic about him at all, and if anything he is almost unsettlingly hard. Perhaps this is necessary to illustrate how nonsensical the family and society are, but it has the effect of making the main character unlikable. The play is on the whole much darker and has a more bitter edge than the references I had seen to it in the past had led me to believe.

Is it worth reading? Well it was easy to get through (by which I really mean I had no difficulty motivating myself to read it), and I do not think it would be a chore to sit through a good production of it in a theater either. These are obviously marks in its favor. Because of the extra 100+ years of cultural conditioning that have formed me since the original appearance of the play, I anticipated it to unfold in a completely different way than it did, and for the particular emphases of the author to be different from what they were. So while I always looked forward to seeing what would happen next, what did happen next usually felt to me to be not the thing that offered the most interest or opportunity for effect. Often it simply was the case that the dialogue or the arc of the story failed to be memorable, to strike the imagination. The play at this point is not very alive for readers, I don't think, and I am guessing this is part of the reason why its fame has declined. Its sensibility is not in sync with ours.

The Challenge

The results of the last challenge (winner: Quiet, by Susan Cain) left me in a bit of a dilemma regarding whether I should really have moved on to the next IWE book or not, since by my own rules I should have tried to read the challenge book. I was able to resolve this by taking out the audiobook version from the library and listening to it in the car. My children don't like it that much, but it won't go on much longer, and I do not see myself making a habit of consuming books in this way. Quiet is exactly like dozens of other non-fiction books that have come out over the last fifteen years or so. First, its author is an extremely well-connected Ivy League graduate active at the highest levels of the Manhattan/D.C./Boston meritocracy. Second, the book centers around a single rather flimsy premise (in this case, that introverts are undervalued in the current ethos that prevails in our society's leading institutions), a greater attentiveness to which will ultimately reveal unsuspected sources of talent and potential economic productivity. Third, the author, in the name of research, makes a number of field trips to places where her thesis can be demonstrated in an extreme form--so far in this book we have been to Harvard Business School, a Tony Robbins event/revival, and Rick Warren's Saddleback Church (all of these places frown on taciturnity and reflection). Fourth, numerous important academics and scientists are interviewed and a waterfall of studies and researches are quoted from to support the author's premise (authors of this class swear by the findings of academic research). On the fourth disc the amygdala and the ways in which it responded (when possessed by an introvert) to various stimuli made its appearance. The amygdala and its activity is another staple of this genre of literature. It is an oracle of Science that people who read and write these kinds of books want to see consulted before they will buy into anything. For me it is an oracle telling me that it's time to abandon the book.

The tone of this is very much of that 'Anyone who doesn't live and work in my particular Manhattan/upper class milieu and did not go to an Ivy League school are not really identifiable to me as sentient beings' camp that has become increasing prevalent in the writing and analysis coming from this quarter of society. I actually don't think Susan Cain herself is mean-spirited, or a snob, or even intentionally condescending--it's just that people of this sort can't help themselves anymore. Any other kind of life is more or less unfathomable to them, and usually in an exaggeratedly horrible way (there was a profile of one woman who had languished too much in high school and missed out on going to an Ivy League college, which was presented as a kind of catastrophe that she had determined never to experience the equivalent of in her adult career).  This includes Tony Robbins and Rick Warren, even though both clear tens of millions a year and have provided life coaching to presidents and Nobel Prize winners. It is as if these things aren't really real, don't mean anything, if you haven't gone to the proper schools...But onto this week's results.

1. The Woman in the Dunes--Kobo Abe....................................83
2. Charles Dickens: A Life--Claire Tomalin................................46
3. The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft--Claire Tomalin...3
4. Building For Life--Stephen R. Kellert.......................................2
5. Cricket Radio--John Himmelman..............................................1

Books in this challenge that received 0 reviews were The Mystery of Mary Stuart by Andrew Lang, The Encyclopedia of Literary Romanticism by Andrew Maunder, and Songs From the Past by He Waiata Onamata.     

A small field this week, and a winner with what I suspect will be an unusually low score in these competitions. Technically I do not have to read this book either, as my library does not have a copy and it is not available online for less than $1.00. However, as this is exactly the kind of book--it is a fairly modern (1962) Japanese novel of some literary value (of which a well-regarded film was made as well two years after it came out)--that the Challenge was designed to lead me to, I am going to bend my old rules and order a copy of it.

Till next time...

Even though I do not think her book was any good, and she is obviously much more market and media-savvy and comfortable in the company of the powerful and the great than she would like me to believe, and even though her worldview, as determined by her background and collegiate and post-collegiate experience, is so extreme that it is impossible she and I would be able to get along or talk about anything even I were to become a talented and successful person of some kind tomorrow, I admit I still have a tiny crush on Susan Cain. I guess as a reminder that I once perceived there to be chance that my life would lead into this segment of society (though only heaven knows why I ever imagined that).

George Eliot--Adam Bede (1859)

So it took a little less than two months to re-read this at my necessarily deliberate pace. I was aiming for six weeks, but I had the stomach flu for a while, there was the Christmas season, I had to go camping. There were doubtless other distractions as well. Anyway, I enjoyed the book about as well as I did on the earlier occasion when I read it, in 2000-2001, though I was a little more attentive to its deficiencies this time, and the gap in quality between it and the other two George Eliot books I have read (Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss) seemed larger than it did thirteen years ago. As I often note, even at age 30-31 I was still much more impressionable than I am now. I recognized on that reading many of the characteristic George Eliot qualities, particularly of detail of description and psychological investigation, that I admired in those other books, and that was good enough for me at the time. I rarely find anything as good now as I did when I was younger. I have also been beaten down over the years by my failure to maintain connections to and friendships with vital and capable people who have a strong literary education, as well as the constant overexposure to the general negativity towards literary study that is predominant in much of the remainder of society, or if not that, the negativity about the ability of people like me to get anything of value out of them, that is predominant among the people presiding over our dying humanities departments and literary magazines. But while my critical guard is perhaps more raised, I still derived no small pleasure from the exercise, except for one night just before Christmas when I was too depressed to read anything and determined to get rid of all of my books once for all. However, the next day I haltingly took up the book  one final time to confirm my determination to break myself of the habit and worked through a chapter. It did not restore my spirits entirely, but I had to confess that I at least felt a little like myself, or what I imagine myself to be (the sort of person who reads Victorian novels as if it were entirely natural and served a real purpose in life), and that there was perhaps value in that. Within a couple of days I was reading more or less in my normal way again, and held off on giving up the project for the time being, though I am still not ruling out taking this step in the future if I can convince myself that it would be beneficial to me to do so. I accept that it will probably never happen however.

The modern criticisms of Adam Bede are I think pretty consistent--the main characters are not compelling, and Adam Bede himself is especially wooden. There are several excellent minor characters whose appearances supply the best parts of the book--Bartle Massey, Mrs Poyser, Reverend Irwine. The young squire (Donnithorne) is about half well drawn--the parts where the laziness of his mind and the non-development of his will and character are depicted are good descriptions of what those states of mind are like in a young man who should have been more attentive to correcting these faults in the course of his education. But there is not much else to him, and he essentially disappears from the last half of the book.

Adam Bede's brother Seth seemed a decent enough fellow who deserved a little better treatment from his creator. I know women--even George Eliot, in some instances, betrays characteristics of the stereotypical feminine mind-- cannot help regarding any man who is not in the front rank of his particular society as pitiful and substantially without sex, but poor Seth not only has to endure his mother's blatant preference for his brother (accompanied with constant assertions of his own inferiority, which is more a matter of his brother's extreme forcefulness of personality rather than his own shortcomings, either moral or in general ability), but is reduced to having to joyfully endorse his brother's marriage to the woman who had previously rejected his own proposals and swore she could never consider marrying anyone, and even when the book wraps up with an update on what everyone is doing eight years later he is still living, presumably as a virgin, with his mother and happily playing the role of the fun-loving uncle to the children of his brother and the woman he was formerly infatuated with. George, you couldn't have managed to throw him a nice and dutiful, if somewhat boring girl from the village to warm his youthful bed and keep house for him? Brutal.

Apparently there is a TV Movie of Adam Bede.

The IWE's introductory box for Adam Bede notes that 'The novel is quite short and partly for that reason has long been a school favorite'. Huh? The edition I read (a modern Everyman's Library) was 613 pages. I have another copy, part of an incomplete set of the collected works of George Eliot from around 1900, that is 544 pages. I guess they really did use to read a lot more in school. Actually, I wonder if whoever it was that submitted this for consideration on the list and wrote the plot summary was not thinking of an abridged edition. I noticed that the plot summary given in the encyclopedia left out a considerable chunk of the middle to three-fourths part of the book, and the summaries of these books in this encyclopedia are usually pretty thorough. Two editions are noted in the introduction--the Pocket Library, which my researches tell me clocked in at 529 pages, and the Rinehart Edition (551). I think somebody was confusing this with Silas Marner, which I believe actually is short and is read (or used to be read) in school in part for that reason. Of course schools used to rather famously make kids read The Mill on the Floss, which is not short either. I have never met anyone who had to read it in school who doesn't consider it the most boring book of all time, though I thought it was quite good, much to my surprise after a lifetime of hearing it trashed by reasonably intelligent people.



The Challenge

I've decided to tweak the challenge, since there was a flaw in the old system which favored books that had achieved a high rating based on a handful of reviews, or even one review. I decided to experiment with just choosing the book that had the most reviews total, which seemed more likely to produce the kind of winners I am looking for, popular books tending towards the more contemporary which I likely had some interest in reading anyway. If this results in a Jodi Picoult book winning, I do still have the option of declining the challenge. If a Jodi Picoult book wins more than 50% of the time, I will have to revamp the system again. Here is the Adam Bede list, with the number being the total of reviews the book has received on Amazon.com:

1. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking--Susan Cain.....1,916
2. Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance--Robert Pirsig.............................................893
3. The Lowland--Jumpha Lahiri..........................................................................................549
4. Plenty--Yotam Ottolenghi...............................................................................................365
5. Love Amid the Ashes--Mesu Andrews............................................................................151
6. Vegetable Literacy--Deborah Madison...........................................................................111
7. Hotel du Lac--Anita Brookner...........................................................................................83
8. Everyday Food Light--Martha Stewart Living Magazine....................................................54
9. The Geography of Love--Glenda Burgess.........................................................................21
10. Balaboosta--Einat Admony..............................................................................................18
      Salad For Dinner--Jeanne Kelley.....................................................................................18
12. The Common Reader--Virginia Woolf...............................................................................6
      Out of Their League--Dave Meggyesy..............................................................................6
14. World's Best Ciders--Pete Brown & Bill Bradshaw............................................................2

There were no books that received no reviews.

This was a slightly shocking result, as I had never heard of the Cain book, which is apparently quite popular. I had thought for sure that Zen, which I have never read, would be the winner, and I was planning to go ahead and accept. I was going to accept the Cain book as well. It is only 277 pages of text, and looks to me to be one of those pop psychology books you can wolf down in little more than an hour. My library has three copies of it, all of which, however, are currently checked out. I don't want to wait around for two weeks or whatever, so I will move on to the next encyclopedia selection & perhaps I will come back to Quiet at some time in the future. I have not looked too far ahead on the list, but the next six selections at least look to be short (300 pages or less): a play, a poem, a child's book, a political philosophy treatise, and a couple of short novels. So I should be able to made some headway on the list here.

Bestselling Author Susan Cain (1968--    ) Education: Princeton Class of '89, Harvard Law Class of'93. Worked as a Wall Street Lawyer & Negotiations Consultant before becoming a writer.

Since one of the keywords in one of the media generating exercises was "Dinah", there was an LP showdown between Dinah Shore and Dinah Washington. More surprising results:

1. Dinah Sings, Previn Plays--Dinah Shore...............................19
2. Everybody Loves Me--Dinah Shore.......................................10
    For Those in Love--Dinah Washington...................................10
    Unforgettable Dinah Washington.........................................10
5. Mad About the Boy--Dinah Washington...................................7
6. Dinah '62--Dinah Washington...................................................5
7. Dinah Washington Sings Fats Waller......................................1
    In Love--Dinah Washington.......................................................1
    Love Songs--Dinah Shore.........................................................1

Two albums got no reviews, both by Dinah Washington, The Queen, & Somebody Loves Me: The Very Best of Dinah Washington Volume 2. 

I don't know much about Dinah Washington, though I thought she was something of a legend. This status doesn't translate into a lot of commentaries about her records, apparently.

I don't really have a system as far as the records go. I'm curious to see what comes up, if it's anything I would like.