Monday, June 4, 2012

Bel Ami

Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893)

Vampire Guy as Georges? Could work I guess. 
I know Guy from his short stories, most notably "The Horla" so I was expecting some twisted mental anguish with a little touch of the supernatural. So boy was a surprised when I got a realistic novel about Third Republic France and the ins and outs of social advancement in journalism. Georges Duroy is our main character, a small time former soldier who gets a grunt job at a newspaper through a chance encounter with a former military friend. Georges is swept up into the world of intrigue and high society and that's when Bel Ami gets really French. Dinner parties, torrid love affairs, rendez-vous with married women and the seduction of everyone in sight typify Bel Ami. Each conquest Georges makes, and there are many, is mostly strategic and only somewhat romantic. We see him progress from a rank amateur writer to a slashing gossip columnist and political reporter, he makes the same change in his love life. He initially seduces women for love or at least the thrill, later in the book he makes his moves with calculated conniving. His attitude is best summed up by his first wife, Madelaine. When he's given the Legion of Honor, an event that would have been unthinkable just a few years before, he scoffs at it, thinking he deserves more. "You're never satisfied," she says (roughly).
     The think I find most French about this book is that Georges, who's a bit of a dolt and heavy handed with his sweet talk never gets caught and keeps reeling in these smart, rich, uppercrust women. I kept expecting him to get caught and challenged by a jealous husband, found in flagrante delicto by one of his other lovers and murdered, but no, he goes about his merry way becoming richer and richer, casting women aside when he sees a chance to improve his position. It's not very satisfying, but it's probably a more realistic portrayal than if Georges would have got his comeuppance.

Rating 8/10: Lots of really good stuff in here. Georges shark-like focus makes this book pretty dark, but what else do you expect from Guy de Maupassant. After all, the guy's grave reads, "I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing."

Angle of Repose

Wallace Stegner (1909-1993)

If I was a good writer instead of a middling historian this is the kind of book I would write. Stegner uses the letters of Mary Hallock Foote, a Gilded Age artist who moved out west with her engineer husband, and creates a fictional story around them. In the hands of Stegner these letters gain context and reveal a place and time in America. By layering this narrative with that of Lyman Ward, the fictional professor emeritus, and grandson of the fictionally renamed artist Susan Burling Ward, we not only get to view Susan & Co.'s lives through the prism of the early 1970s, we get a glimpse at the great character that is Lyman Ward.
      Lyman is wheelchair bound and struggling to stay out of a nursing home. His delves into his grandmother's life, submerging himself to the point where he's more involved in it than with his day to day life, as a way to prove that he's still relevant. What we end up getting is Lyman commenting both on the era around 1900 and the early 70s and their relation to each other. Lyman's assistant, the free-loving Shelley, questions the prudery and stuffiness of the Victorians. It is here when Lyman describes how foolish we are to look back in time and assume our ancestors are foolish. Where we see prudery about Vicorian sexual mores and discourse, they saw propriety. Lyman argues that the Victorians would feel that modern Americans are just as repressive and reluctant to talk about death out in the open as they were about sex.
      The story is also one of movement. Susan moves every few years from one ramshackle mining camp to another. Her husband, most of the time through no fault of his own, leaving one failed project after another in his wake. This is sharply contrasted against Lyman who literally is stuck in his grandparents' old house and doesn't want to go anywhere.
     Stegner masterfully weaves Susan Burling Ward's letters into Lyman's memories, revealing why she acted the way she did and making her a much fuller character to both the reader and to Lyman.

Rating 10/10: Brilliantly done.