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).