The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

L Frank Baum (1856-1919)

Let me start this post by saying that I love kids' books. Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Narnia, A Wrinkle in Time, all great reads. You want to know what's not a great read? The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The characters are shallow, the action is frequent but glossed over, the lessons are nowhere to be found. This is the rare occasion when the film is better than the book, and not just because of the effects or the music. The story itself is superior in every way. There is little setup in the book before the tornado lifts Dorothy and Toto out of drab Kansas (this part of the story is accurate, Kansas is incredibly boring) and deposits them in Oz. Uncle Henry is kind of a dick and Aunt Em is a broken woman. There are no smiling farm helpers who become the trio of fellow travelers in Oz.
Next Munchkin Land is crappy compared to the '39 film version. The wicked witch of the west doesn't present herself until 100 pages in. Baum's hope that readers will suspend their belief on the lifelike characteristics given to the scarecrow (he could see once his eyes were painted on) didn't work with me. The tinman and his enchanted ax which kept chopping off his legs just made me think that he was really dumb in human form. The lion was actually the only thing cooler in the book version. He roars and is actually a lion.
Let me take that back, the flying monkeys are also pretty rad. They had to obey the golden cap because of some really lame story dealing with a princess and dropping a guy in a river. But they fly around and pretty much kick whoever's ass needs kicking. But when you have a lame story that feel patched together and then you supplement that with lame side stories, something is wrong.
Once the wizard is defrocked it turns out he's just some clown from Omaha and he has no real powers, he'd fit right in living in 2009 Omaha. After many travails and more miles of walking it turns out Dorothy could have just tapped her silver slippers any time to be sent home. Pretty weak that the first good witch decided to keep that fact to herself. Dorothy is sent back to her Kansas home, a house rebuilt, and a happy Auntie Em. Oz was not the result of a concussion, it was a real place.
As for the theory that the book is a metaphor for the silver coining crisis of the late 1800s, if it is so it's very shabbily done. Maybe every character has a parallel in the political fray, but what lesson do we learn?

Rating 1/10: This book should be immediately stricken from the classics.

The House of Mirth

Edith Wharton (1862-1937)

It seems like a bad idea to write a book about thoroughly unlikable people and make it boring until the last fifty pages. Well, it isn't the best strategy but the end of The House of Mirth is so redemptive that Edith Wharton manages to salvage a classic out of a social book of manners. Lily Bart is the socialite who is always the belle of the ball. She isn't rich, but she is cultured, mannered, desirable, and beautiful. She is nearing thirty, but retains her youthful charm and is still useful to the movers and shakers of turn of the century New York. Herein lies Lily's dilemma. She wants, needs, to keep her place in the circle of the rich. She wants to exceed the wealth of those around her. She has a few chances to make this leap, but she sabotages them for two reasons. First, she is in love with Larry Seldon, a relatively poor lawyer of middling means who lampoons high society and the desire for riches. Lily can't bring herself to commit to a life of upper middle class drudgery so she turns him down. This relationship ruins her chances with the uber rich Percy Gryce. Second, Lily always thinks there will be another man around the corner because of her manifold charms. She gets over Percy, she screws up a chance with a European prince. Well, these chances run out.

The problems start when she gets in debt to the douchey Gus Treanor. She thinks he's investing some cash for her, he thinks he's cutting checks to her for some extramarital hanky panky. This scandalous relationship with no scandal starts Lily into a string of messy relationships that, through machinations of a richer, more devious woman, gets her booted from her beloved society. Finally, things get interesting. It is during Lily's torturous fall from grace that we get to see more than the "It Girl" persona that we got before. Her decisions are more complicated, and they tell us more about what she truly values. She becomes a drug addict, fails to support herself at a hat shop, moves to increasingly seedy lodgings, and finally comes to a moment of decision.

Lily has love letters from the devious married woman who screwed her over, Berth Dorsett. Lily could use them for blackmail, which she has justified to herself, problem is the letters are to her love, Larry Seldon. At her most desperate moment she returns to Seldon, intent on extorting the cash needed to pay off her debt to Treanor and reestablish her in more favorable circles. After a heart to heart she chucks the letters into the fire and leaves, believing a reboot of her relationship with Seldon is impossible and perhaps undesirable. On her way home through Manhattan she bumps into Nettie, a girl she helped get healthy years ago by paying for her trip out west. Nettie idolizes Lily and lets her rest in her apartment and hold her baby. This act seems to ground Lily and make her happy for the first time in months.

When she returns to her crappy boarding house she gets a long awaited inheritance check for $10K. She debates whether to keep the money and remain under the cloud debt or to pay everything off and live in poverty, her nightmare. She cuts checks to her debtors and goes to bed. Although exhausted her mind races and she can't make it stop. She takes a big shot of her sleeping drug and drifts away, her last thought about a word that would make everything right between her and Seldon.

The next morning Seldon heads over to Lily's, ready to reconcile after the change he saw in her the night before. When he arrives he finds a crowd and Lily dead. As Seldon and his cousin Gerty sit in the room with Lily's body they examine the remnants of her life. He finds that she chose to pay off her debts and realizes that she was much more than a money hunter. As he embraces her he thinks of the word that would make everything alright between them.

Rating 6.5/10: I was really bored at many points in the novel. I didn't like the characters or Wharton's writing. When Lily was finally forced to confront her future things really turned around.

PS Gillian Anderson as Lily Bart? Casting director must have been high.

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)

Anybody who uses "Uncle Tom" as a disparaging remark should be immediately required to read this novel. I know he doesn't revolt and lead a Nat Turner-esque ass-kicking rampage against even the cruelest slaveholder. But look at his life, his devotion to his family and faith and what they caused. George becomes an abolitionist, Legree pretty much kills himself, and an entire nation of readers were forced to think about how awful slavery was. Uncle Tom's Cabin was the second best selling book on the 19th Century. It spawned an outrageously popular stage play and was hotly debated all over the United States.  

What Stowe gives us is a heart-wrenchingly, quick moving, dual narrative which follows George and his wife Eliza and Tom. George and Eliza flee north when it becomes apparent that their owners are going to sell their son. Tom decides to stay. 

Many of the stereotypes of African Americans grew out of the novel and plays. But what we see is enslaved people who are people. They are good, they are bad, they are immature, they are heros, they are faithful, they are atheists, they are smart, they are dumb. They are very human. Stowe also gives them agency. The enslaved and the owners are in a constant struggle for power. Tom's power resides in his extraordinary Christianity and it's affect on lazy, basically good owners, and evil owners. And that's Stowe's message: Christianity and love will end slavery. She might have been partially right. Her book galvanized the North in such a way that they had the courage to stand up to the Fugitive Slave Law and Southern bullying. 

Besides George, Eva is the other youth in whom Stowe invests higher powers of observation and a sense of justice. Her death is heart wrenching. Stowe endows George and Eva with the power to change things. I think she gave up on the current generation of slaveholders and abolitionists, the future depended on which way the youngest would break.

Rating 10/10: Great great read. Exciting, engaging, and a look into daily life during slavery. What every historian of the era tries to elucidate comes through in touching humanity here. 

Moby Dick

Herman Melville (1819-1891)

Alright, I read this a while ago so the plot details are not as fresh in my mind as I like. I do know one thing, there's a lot about whales. A whole lot. Whatever you want to call them: whales, leviathans, the great fish or any other of the numerous names Melville gives the big sea creatures, you'll learn about them in Moby Dick. And this is the problem. The story is awesome.  Ishmael is a great narrator. He's funny, he can spin a great action scene, he's a great relator of character and scene, he gets himself into dramatic situations, and he's got pretty much every different conflict you could want. His buddy Queequeg is maybe the coolest guy we've encountered in the classics so far. So Moby Dick is a masterpiece, right? A work of "can't put it down" literature to rival anything else I've ever read? Nope.

Quite simply about 45% of Moby Dick is really really boring. Our boy Ishmael decides he needs to prove he knows about whales and boy does he ever. We learn about every kind of whale, where they live, how to hunt them, their anatomy, and on and on and on. It just gets to be way too much. The character studies of Captain Ahab, Queequag, and the rest of the crew are brilliant and engrossing, but when they're separated by fifty pages about whale blubber you tend to get bogged down. But there is a lot of good.

Through the relationship between Queequag and Ishmael we get a look at mid-19th Century race and class relations. The book is genuinely funny at some points. Ahab is a fascinating (if over the top) character. The sea and the whale are front and center characters. Ahab's quest for the whale is all consuming and consumes the reader. I read the novel as a narrative about a guy chasing a whale at the expense of everything and everyone in his life, not as some metaphor for our desperate chase of the unattainable. Why do I not delve into these philosophical questions? Because Melville tells me not to!!

"So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory."

So maybe this is why we get so much info on whales, because otherwise people wouldn't believe a word of it. I also appreciate Melville saying this is NOT an allegory, it's about a guy chasing down an asshole whale. If you're a good enough writer (Melville is) then you don't have to shoehorn metaphors and symbolism into a novel, they just happen because we can relate to the experience of the characters. 

Rating 6.5/10: Too much whale talk = too boring for me. Let me edit this thing down to a tight 400 pages and we can talk. I like Melville's short stories better. 

This Side of Paradise

F. Scott Fitzgerald. (1896-1940)

Francis wrote Paradise in 1919 during a summer spent drinking in Minnesota, he was 22. That makes me want to go suck on an exhaust pipe. Seriously, this guy breaks up with Zelda, heads to St. Paul, gets Christmas Hammed on Martinis every night and he churns out a masterpiece which sets him on a path for literary greatness. Maybe the oppressive Nebraska humidity melted made me sweat all my potential away. Whatever the case, Paradise is pretty damn interesting.

Amory Blaine is our main character and by all accounts he's a doppleganger of Francis himself. Amory is spoiled from birth by a mother who wants him to be a societal charmer rather than a normal kid. He heads to Princeton and finds his way to fit in with all the preppy kids who generally go to Princeton. They carouse and live a privileged life on their campus and during their jaunts to Manhattan and other regional locales. One such drunken excursion ends in the death of a revered classmate on dark country roads. This incident haunts Amory for years. Our protagonist meets Isabelle and falls in love, but is rejected as the US enters WWI.

The war is treated as interlude, that is very lightly. The aftermath of the carnage is plain to see in the characters. Fitz may have cobbled together Paradise from previous shorter works. But the change in tone in the second half works beautifully. Instead of the smooth prose of the first book we get a dramatic form, just character lines to start book two. It is here we meet Amory's second love, Rosalind. Ros is pretty much a clone of Amory with one difference, she is rich and his fortune is pretty much shot. They fall for each other but she won't marry him (Can you plagiarize your own life? This is FSF and Zelda (Also who knew that's how you spell "plagiarize"?)). She ends up dumping him and marrying some rich guy. In the meantime Amory is looking for something to bring meaning to his life. There is discussion of religion, friendship, and loyalty. This is most prominent during a mess he got into with one of his buddies and a drunken floozie at a hotel. Instead of letting his friend take the fall for crossing state lines for immoral purposes with a girl, Amory takes the blame and is written up in the papers. 

As the novel ends we have a steadily increasing flow of Amory's poems and a feeling of his despondence. The war and the materialistic yearnings of Rosalind have disillusioned the poor kid. Amory leaves us with this sad line, "I know myself, but that is all-". 

Rating 8/10: I'm a sucker for anything in the 1910s. Here we see the makings of the preppie northeastern culture that has taken over today. If they made a film as a modern take on Paradise Vampire Weekend has to be the soundtrack. This is only the second FSF book I've read. I've also read four short stories (B. Button, The Ice Palace, Bernice Bobs Her Hair, and The Offshore Pirate). Gatsby is my least favorite of all these. I found that novel relatively bland and joyless compared to Paradise and the stories which pop with life. 

Rabbit, Run

John Updike (1932-2009)

Mr. Updike left us earlier this year and his death spurred me to jump into some of his work. Rabbit, Run is the first of the five part Rabbit series. What I found was perfect 1960 realism. The prose is descriptive without being flashy. The characters are painfully real. There are no good guys and bad guys, just people making mistakes and existing with their flaws in flawed world. Updike's use of the present tense is startling to the ear in a way that makes it difficult for the reader to understand how they are being startled.

Rabbit Angstrom is a former HS basketball star. He is drearily trudging home when he runs across a playground game and joins in, stroking a few jumpers before going back to his pregnant wife, Janice, and their son Nelson. The game is a bit awkward, a place where he can't return. He's only 26, but the glory he experienced in high school is long gone. His wife is pregnant and an alcoholic. His job, selling kitchen gadgets, isn't much fun. So one day he ditches his wife and drives away. He vaguely wants to head to the southern coast, but he barely gets out of Pennsylvania before turning around. He's the antithesis of the 1950s roadtrip character who roams the countryside, his roots are too strong. 

He goes to the only man who's lead him to his peak, his high school coach. Tothero, with vague hopes that the old man will guide him. Well, he guides him right into a date at a Chinese restaurant with a couple of prostitutes. He shacks up with Ruth, a wise, but lovelorn woman who makes love with Rabbit, but only slowly falls in love with him. They carry on a three month affair that again leads Rabbit nowhere because of his marriage and his jealousy about Ruth's former employment. 

Rabbit returns to his wife for the birth of their baby, and for a fleeting night feels the connection he felt with her during their sweetheart days. This feeling of being good again lasts until Janice returns home from the hospital. Rabbit's selfish desire for sex, perhaps an instinct to abuse Janice for her shortcomings (or his shortcomings) leads to Janice understandably rejecting him and his abandoning the family yet again. During Rabbit's absence Janice gets drunk and accidently drowns their baby girl. This leads to the final segment of the book.

Rabbit makes a scene at the funeral, insisting that the baby's death was not his fault. Once again he runs away, right to Ruth. Ruth initially rejects Rabbit, but eventually admits him and reveals that she's pregnant. As the book ends he heads out to grab some food. 

Rabbit could never find the comfort he found on the basketball court. He is constantly running but never really gets anywhere, in fact he manages to tie himself to Brewer, PA more completely. Religion is an important part of Rabbit, Run and this realm provides the two most interesting characters in the novel. The Eccleses are a reverend and his wife. Rev. Eccles is charged with getting Rabbit and Janice back together and seems to fall in love with Rabbit. It might not be romantic love (it might be) but Eccles becomes more committed to Eccles than his real family. His wife, Lucy, is my favorite character. She's disgusted by the time Eccles spends on other people's problems when it's quite obvious that the Eccles family has big problems itself. There is a strange energy that exists between Lucy and Rabbit. He feels a sense of control over her, and I don't know if she likes it, or even knows about his feelings, but she seems receptive to his advances. At one point she says he's full of life (contrast that to Ruth saying he spreads death). Lucy is also nonreligious, very interesting for a minister's wife.

Rating 7.5/10: I couldn't quite go 8. I might be too used to reading books that don't make you work so hard. Rabbit, Run requires a lot from the reader. The prose is jarring, the characters aren't really that likable and everything is tragically real. I bet if I read it again in ten years I'd like it even more. 

Silas Marner

George Eliot (1819-1880)

I can't decide whether Silas Marner was too short or just right. It is a beautifully written study of a time, place and character. Ultimately I wanted to know more about Silas, the hard-working, loner, who weaves for a living. Duncie, the cocksure son of Ravaloe's leading citizen who seems to ruin everything for everyone, flashes in and out of the novel in the blink of an eye. Eppie, the daughter of Duncie's more stable brother only enters the last third of the book. George Eliot could have fleshed more out, but there is a certain realism to characters flitting in and out of life, providing the causes and effects of life without the context. 

We find Silas working as a weaver and living as an upstanding member of a church in the north country. He leads a humble life but is singled out for his strange looks and fear-inducing fits. A conspiracy is successfully carried out against him by his best friend when Silas is framed for stealing church money. He is persuaded to leave the village, and then learns his buddy ended up marrying his former fiance. 

All these crappy happenings lead Silas to Ravaloe. He weaves for a living, more solitary then ever. He earns an almost mystical reputation as a healer, garnering admiration and fear among the townspeople. His only comfort is the gold he's accumulated over the years. He counts it religiously, in fact it is his religion since he has abandoned the church. He continues on this lonely path until his life intersects with those of the leading men in town. 

Godfrey and Duncie are brothers who are in trouble. Duncie is a jerk who screws with everybody and fritters away money. Godfrey is a coward who won't stand up to his brother because he was goaded into a loveless marriage and only Duncie knows about it. When Godfrey demands repayment of a loan from Duncie things go awry. Duncie goes to sell Godfrey's horse, but impales it on a stake instead. To get the money Duncie decides to ask Silas for a loan, but when he finds the weaver out of home, Duncie goes ahead and steals the money. He decides to walk home and jauntily begins his journey through the night. 

Problem is Duncie never went home. Godfrey figures that he skipped town and life goes on except for with Silas, who's devastated by the loss of his gold. One night, during a big party, Silas is depressed in his house. In walks a toddler from the snowy night. A woman is dead outside and Silas finds himself with a blond-haired little girl staring at him for help. An alarm is raised and we find that the dead woman is Godfrey's wife. Godfrey decides to keep his mouth shut and let Silas raise the child, He doesn't want anyone to know about the marriage so he can get married to a new belle. 

We get some comical scenes where we see Silas trying to raise the precocious Eppie and then we flash forward sixteen years. Eppie is beautiful, Silas is happy, and the small pond by their house is being drained. Lo and behold old Duncie is down at the bottom in skeleton form clutching bags of gold. The revelation leads Godfrey to reveal that he had a secret marriage and that Eppie is his daughter. He and his wife decide to try and get Eppie to come live with them and become a lady. This penultimate meeting is the climax of the novel. 

Everything that Eliot has developed in the characters is on display. Silas loves Eppie with all his heart and she is unspoiled by gentry life. Godfrey regrets his past actions and assumes he can get Eppie back with promises of wealth and care for Silas. Godfrey's wife Nancy finally sees a socially acceptable way to have a child. The showdown shocks Eppie and Silas. Godfrey's words about a better life infuriate Silas. His anger builds and he finally berates Godfrey for shunning a blessing like Eppie from his house when she was a baby, and now trying to take her away from her true father. Eventually, however, Nancy and Godfrey make Silas realize the opportunities that lay open to Eppie if she moved in with them. Silas leaves that decision to Eppie. In a touching scene she commits herself to her fiance Aaron and her father Silas. 

The novel ends here. We don't see the repercussions of Eppie's decision. 

Rating 7.5/10: The landscape is beautifully rendered and the character of Silas is complex and contradictory. There are major temporal and location shifts with little narrative description. The plot points are jarring, but the story is exciting. 

 

The House of the Dead

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881)

The House of the Dead was published in 1862. The story begins in a provincial town where a mysterious tutor dies. In his papers are found a collection of memoirs detailing his time spent in a Siberian prison. The simple device makes what follows believable and authentic. The main character is Alexandr Petrovich. He offed his wife and gets sentenced to 10 years of hard labor. As a gentleman he is kept at distance from his peasant comrades. The book is thematic rather than linear making it more of an examination of the prison system than a typical novel.

The prison is plagued by thievery, but there is sort of an understanding about it. No one really gets mad about having their things stolen. The work is monotonous and hard, but there is a freedom for those capable of a trade. The nearby settlement works symbiotically with the prison. 

I found this tale of prison life pretty dry, but a few scenes stand out. The prisoners put on a play that absorbs the attention of the entire camp. The small room bursted with prisoners who overflowed into the entry way and withstood subzero temperatures. They were enchanted by the passionate amateur production. It provided a needed diversion for the prisoners. It was also interesting that there were only bits and pieces of a script, most of the production was based on oral accounts from other prisons and towns.

The other memorable scene was the yearly trip to the bathhouse. Alexandr Petrovich aptly compared the event to hell. The writhing mass of prisoners trying to clean themselves in a steamy, disgusting room was disturbing. 

The House of the Dead is interesting because of its authenticity. Dostoyevsky spent some time himself in a labor camp so the strange characters we meet and the tortured feelings that AP endures feel real. 

Rating 6/10: The details are interesting but the story moves slowly. 

The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Charles Dickens (1812 -1870)

Penguin Classics has some explaining to do. Charles Dickens is one of our greatest writers and he deservedly has many novels on Penguin's list, but Edwin Drood does not deserve to be among them. Not only does the book, which should be an exciting mystery, get bogged down in boring characters, but it's only half finished. Meant to appear in a twelve part serial, Dickens only finished six before he died. I understand that an unfinished classic provides a fun mental mystery for hardcore Dickens fans, but it doesn't warrant a stop in the Greatest Ever list. 

The novel starts interestingly enough, in a London opium den complete with the dark, creepy atmosphere that one would expect. It's here that we meet John Jasper, a resident of Cloiserham who teaches music and sings in the choir. He's got a nephew named Edwin Drood who is has an arranged engagement to Rosa Bud. Jasper loves Rosa and Edwin doesn't really love Rosa, herein lies the problem. Two characters come to town, twins, Neville and Helena Landless. Neville falls for Rosa and has a fight with the flip Edwin when Drood seems not to care that he's engaged. Rosa and Edwin then decide to break off their engagement but they don't tell everyone about it. All of the sudden Edwin goes missing. Suspicion falls upon Neville and that's pretty much the end of the action. 

The remaining mysteries are: what happened to Edwin Drood? I got the feeling that he wasn't murdered and that he simply took off somewhere because he seemed like the kind of guy who would do that. Most everyone else seems to think he was bumped off, however, most likely by Jasper, his own uncle. Other suspects are Neville, Rosa, and Helena. The other mystery involves Dick Datchery, a minor character introduced at the end of the final installment. Dick is spying on Jasper and seems to be disguised. Could this be Helena, Princess Puffer, Grewgious, Bazzard, or even Edwin? Like a stupid multiple choice test, there simply isn't enough information given to determine the outcome.

It's fun to speculate though, so I will say that Dick is Helena trying to clear her brother. Rosa and Neville hook up and when Jasper challenges Neville to a duel Edwin reappears in the nick of time to vanquish his uncle and marry Helena. The End.

Rating 3/10: It's only half finished, how can this be a classic? I know the Gil Stuart painting of George Washington is half done and everyone loves it, but seriously including Edwin Drood among the greatest things ever written is like giving the guy leading the marathon at the 13 mile mark the gold medal.