With honors.

I did not actually fall off the face of the earth or anything. What I did was get married, go on a honeymoon, and get really sick. For a while there it was all I could do to read Anne Rice novels and drink tea. I wound up abandoning the Rushdie novel at the halfway mark, not because I wasn’t enjoying it but because I just ran out of time and energy.

Now school has started and I am not exactly awash with verve and enthusiasm. I have decided to drop my writing tutorial because it is going to be a huge time commitment and it is not what I wanted it to be. I thought I would be able to work on my novel in the class, but the professor is really busy this semester and has instituted extremely tight deadlines and guidelines, and is actively discouraging anyone from working on a novel in the class. I would have three tight writing deadlines, including one three weeks from now, and everything that is handed in must be complete (a complete short story, which would be fine, or a complete chapter, which is a little more problematic because my chapters are all going to be long). And you have to turn something in at each deadline, something new, and there is a maximum page limit that he is being very strict about, and mathematically it is just impossible. And it is impossible in a lot of other ways, too, and I don’t want to write three short stories this semester just to write them and meet a deadline. I’m done with that; I’m too busy and it won’t give me any pleasure. So I’m dropping the class.

All that’s left is my comp exam. “All.” Just the comp exam. I am starting to be a little bit scared, even though I’ve read everything on the list except for two short contemporary novels. I should probably have felt better when I heard people at the informational meeting last night saying that they had only heard of about a third of the novels on the list, but that just depressed me. And no, I didn’t join that study group. Holy god, no. I joined a quasi-study group made up of people who work full time and do not have time to do work for other people, so we are going to check in by e-mail and share resources as we find them but not dump a bunch of work onto one another, which is the approach advocated by our advisor.

Jeremy is taking a post-colonial lit class this semester, which is kind of fun for me. He is a computer science major but he has a couple of upper division electives to fill, so I helped him pick out an English class that I thought he might like. I based that guess on the reading list, which has since changed twice, and on the professor, whom I only know from one meeting of a class I decided not to take. But I got a good vibe from him and I still think Jeremy will enjoy the work. I hope. In any event it will be nice if our study dates just involve sitting in a coffee house reading, and he doesn’t have to sit there and do math or something awful like that. And Jeremy has felt a little more confident about the class ever since the professor asked how many people had heard of the Booker prize, and Jeremy was the only person to raise his hand.

I am not allowed to know who is on the exam committee (since I am not doing a thesis I don’t choose my own committee; I get a list compiled by a secret cabal, and the cabal then scores my test without knowing my name until it’s over) but I am about eighty percent sure that his post-colonial lit professor is one of the three, and I am about ninety percent sure that another one is my Faulkner professor. (Linda Hogan on the exam list: that is the tip-off.) I am crazy about her as a professor, but she is a really tough grader, and it occurs to me that I actually could fail this fucker. I don’t think I will, but it could happen. Or I could pass without honors, which would make me sad. Because, dude: some people have only heard of a third of the novels on the list?

The third reader is a mystery to me. I actually think it could be my grad advisor, but he says no. I think he might be lying, though. Seamus Heaney is on the list, too. I have no idea who teaches Heaney. And I am not sure why I am obsessing about who is on the committee, because what I am going to do, offer them money, chocolate, or blowjobs for a passing grade? It is all pointless.

Anyway. I am back from the land of the half-dead honeymooners, but I am not sure how much I will be posting here. I have made a vow that between now and exam time I am only reading books for my test and maybe the occasional Mayfair witch novel (and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, if I ever finish it), and I am not sure how much you want to hear about that. I will post here if I have something to say, how is that?

Yesterday afternoon I turned in my final papers for the semester — a day early in one case, and three days early in the other. I never hand anything in early so this has me kind of stunned and also very relieved.

The three papers (two short stories, one take-home final essay) totalled just over 40 double-spaced pages. Between Thursday and Friday at work, I wrote a little over 80 double-spaced pages. That is 120 pages in four days, and they were hard pages.

Don’t anyone ever let me say I don’t have time to write a novel, okay? I may not have the brains or the ideas to write a novel, but I don’t get to complain about time. Not if I can write 120 pages in four days.

This de Bernieres book is never going to end. Just slaughter the Christians already so I can listen to something else.

As I Lay Dying. Another fast reread for school. I reread this because I wrote my seminar paper on this novel and Last Orders; the latter borrows plot and structure and theme pretty heavily from Faulkner. As I Lay Dying is a book that I like better every time I read it, because the story is deceptively simple and you can miss a lot.

This will be on my exam list and the book club is discussing it in March, so I will probably have more to say about it then.

Atonement. I forgot to list this one because it was a very fast reread for school. When I read it last year, I had this to say:

I did not hate it. I enjoyed some parts of it a lot, and some parts of it just went on and on forever. I disagree with Ian [scroll down to his Atonement review] about the metafictional elements; I think they were the only reason for this book to exist. (And I am very glad that people aren’t still just rewriting the works of Jane Austen.) That said, I don’t think the metafictional stuff here is particularly interesting. The long section at the end was too much.

Do not read this next section unless you have already read both Atonement and Life of Pi; if you have read both, drag your mouse over the blank space to see my comments:

These Booker nominees really need a new gimmick. Life of Pi definitely pulled it off in a more interesting and enlightening fashion, but this trick is getting a little old. I might have been more impressed by Atonement had I not seen this coming a mile away. I feel like I’ve read the same book eight times in the last few years. In Life of Pi I felt like he was doing something different with the gimmick, but I don’t think McEwan is doing anything new here and his story is not otherwise very interesting.

Another spoilery bit that you should skip unless you’ve read Atonement:

Over the last week or so I was worried that McEwan was going to give me a cheater ending like he did with Amsterdam, but the fact that Briony was revising history wasn’t what I was worried about. (I figured that out as soon as we got to Robbie’s story. I’m not sure what clued me in, though; it just felt obvious.) I was just afraid that he was going to make Robbie the villain after all, which would have been cheating. I am still not sure if Marshall as the villain was supposed to be a surprise; I don’t think it was because McEwan practically told us that he was the rapist even before the rape happened.

This is probably my last McEwan novel for a while.

After rereading the novel, I tend to give it more credit and I will even go so far as to say that I liked it and think it is probably McEwan’s best, at least of the books I’ve read. The novel is far more interesting on a second reading, knowing what you know at the end: that information gives far more texture to the character development (although you could argue that there is really only one character in the story) and makes the novel more intellectually satisfying. I still disagree with Ian — without the metafictional frame, this book has no reason to exist, but within that framing McEwan is doing something interesting here.

Flaubert’s Parrot. A lesson to be learned: do not read back covers. A review quoted there compared this book to Pale Fire, so I read it without ever trusting the narrator. Which might have been fine, but I think my mistrust was too deep and it kind of spoiled the book for me. Once again, I admired this book more than I loved it; I think it would annoy the crap out of anyone who is not a past or present English major. I also can’t imagine reading this without having read Madame Bovary, although I was the only person in my class who had read the Flaubert and most of the students enjoyed the book a lot. One guy said he wanted to throw it in the fire, and several people were entirely silent during the class discussion, but at least one person really engaged with the narrator’s story, and several more, like me, admired the writing enough to get over not really caring about the narrator.

I would classify this as a novel but some of my classmates disagreed. It’s a fictional biography and autobiography, an essay on literary biography and criticism, a collection of styles and approaches and sly in-jokes. It is a lot of fun if you are familiar with Flaubert or have an interest in literary criticism, and I suspect it is just a big mysterious mess otherwise.

Jeremy wanted to read this book at one point but I am going to hide it, because if he reads it he will go back to mocking and deriding and generally bitching about lit majors, and I just broke him of that habit, and if he picks it up again I am going to have to kill him.

Last Orders. Public service announcement: Audible’s version of this book is missing several chapters at the end. Audible has not responded to my complaint about this issue. Do not purchase this book from Audible. Too bad, because it was not a bad recording at all up to that point.

A very good book. Far more entertaining if you have read As I Lay Dying, since this borrows the basic plot and narrative structure from Faulkner, along with a nod or two to Chaucer. Taking that structure — a group of people take a loved one’s remains to his desired resting place, with each character taking turns telling the story in his or her own voice — and transplanting it to post-war working-class England, Swift manages to retain a whole lot of the humor and pathos of Faulkner’s original without being annoyingly derivative or overtly clever.

I will take one Graham Swift over ten thousand Ian McEwans.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman. By far my favorite of the books assigned in my contemporary British novel class. Will you kick me out of the cool kids’ club if I say that I am a little bit tired of metafiction? I keep having this nagging feeling that everything the young hotshots are doing, Nabokov did earlier and with far more subtlety. This novel is a bit older — 1964, I think — and now that I’ve read it, I am even more irritated by the authors who think they need to keep revisiting this particular theme (style, whatever). Fowles said everything that needed to be said, and this book is so good, so much fun to read and so engaging on multiple levels, that I think everyone else needs to find a new parlor trick already. (At the very least, now that I’ve read this I don’t understand why Possession was necessary at all.)

I confess, though, that I think Sarah is a contender for most annoying character in fiction. I loved the book in spite of disliking every single character except for the narrator.

Last Orders. Another class assignment that I am “reading” via audiobook. I will go back and skim the print version later, but I have to do a class presentation on this one in a few weeks so I am trying to get a little head start. I really like the novel so far but I kind of hate the narration: different readers for each “voice,” with exaggerated accents and vocalizations. Just read the damn book and let me figure it out.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman. I am only about seventy-five pages in but I really love this so far. Some of his sentences seem to get away from themselves, but this is a lot of fun to read and so far, much better than the movie.

The Remains of the Day. I respect but did not love this book. I admire Ishiguro’s subtlety and I think his prose is just great, but found it very difficult to get through this book for a couple of reasons. First, the humor is a type that I find intensely embarrassing; I don’t like snickering at a hapless narrator. Second, I can only stand so much butler-speak at one go; the language was too off-putting to hold my interest for more than a few minutes at a time. Finally, we come down to the great Moby Dick issue: at some point you just can’t stand one more second of all that whaling … or in this case, all that butlering.

Once I managed to read more than six pages in a row, I liked the book okay, but it will never be a favorite and I was relieved to finally finish it.

The Ghost Road. I liked this better than The Eye in the Door but not quite as much as Regeneration. I think the trilogy works better as a whole, though, than as individual novels; the only one that really stands alone is Regeneration, and even that one is more compelling as part of the trilogy.

I enjoyed the trilogy a great deal but I am glad that I read it for class, because I think that on my own I would have given up after the first book — not because Barker’s writing is bad or unsatisfying, but because her subject matter is so grim and depressing. World War I: not a barrel of laughs.

If I have a criticism of the trilogy and this book in particular, it is that it occasionally veers into a sort of preachy obviousness. Not often, though — mostly Barker is pretty brilliant in the way she weaves contemporary sensibilities into her historical fiction. Once in a while, though, I felt like the author was back there saying, “See? See how I brilliantly weave contemporary sensibilities into my historical fiction?” I still highly recommend the trilogy if you have the stomach for World War I.

The Eye in the Door. I finished this last week and as with Regeneration, I found it very affecting. But I didn’t think it was quite as good a novel; I thought her prose was a little clunky in some places and she occasionally went for the cheap emotion or explanation when I wanted something more complicated.

Regeneration. Some day when I am not in school anymore, I am going to take a blood oath to not read any more books or watch any more movies or listen to any goddamned songs about World War I. Because if there is a more depressingly-depicted era in all of human history, I don’t want to know about it.

I really loved this book, both on audio and in print (I went through it once in each edition). I am not sure that I will survive the next two books in the trilogy, though, at least not without powerful antidepressants.

Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. I liked this one more than The Newly Born Woman but I am a little embarrassed trying to come up with anything intelligent to say about it. So we are adopting a new rule here at Outside of Dog, which is that any time I have nothing to say about a book, I will just pick out a quote (preferably a quote about dogs) and you can decide for yourselves.

Here is your quote:

We need dogs to understand this strange, ambivalent relation we have to love — hatred. I don’t have a dog. I avoid having a dog. I have always been aware that I have avoided having dogs. A dog is a threat. What is threatening about dogs is their terrible love. You learn this the moment you see a particular dog. Some dogs are like human beings, full of hatred, but most dogs are bundles of love. This infinite, complete, and limitless giving of love is exhausting for a human being. We are a mixture of love and its contrary. Apparently there is no such mixture in a dog’s love. Poe wrote “The Black Cat” about this: a cat’s love that is so infinite the narrator comes to hate the cat.

Meeting a dog you suddenly see the abyss of love. Such limitless love doesn’t fit our economy. We cannot cope with such an open, superhuman relation.