Intrinsic Value: Thoughts on Pride and Prejudice

This week marked the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice, which seemed like the perfect excuse--if any were needed--to reread it.  It also seemed like a good opportunity to write about it, especially since it's the only Austen novel I haven't written about in the course of this blog's existence (well, to be precise, one of the very first Austen-related entries posted to this blog--and the one of its earliest entries of any kind to gain real popularity--was about this book, but "4 Popular Misconceptions About Pride and Prejudice" is, as its title suggests, a response to the way others tend to perceive the book, not an essay about my own reactions to it).  Here I was more hesitant, however.  In fact, when I realized, a few years ago, that my ad hoc essays about Austen's novels were turning into an irregular series, it didn't occur to me that Pride and Prejudice would one day be included in it.  The book felt like too great an edifice, too familiar and too well-loved--unlike Mansfield Park, Emma, and Northanger Abbey, which I returned to on this blog for the first time since my teens in order to confront a novel I hadn't cared for originally, or Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion, which I reread in order to work out my difficulties with an otherwise beloved work--for me to be able to find anything new or meaningful to say.

That feeling only became stronger when I looked back through my records of previous years' reading and discovered--to my utter astonishment--that the last time I reread Pride and Prejudice was in 2003.  It seemed impossible that a novel that was so fresh in my mind when I sat down with it a week ago is also one that I haven't revisited in a decade (in comparison, during that same period I reread Sense and Sensibility twice and Persuasion three times).  But then, it's not as if I've lived a Pride and Prejudice-free life during that period.  There have been the adaptations--flawed ones like Bride and Prejudice and Joe Wright's Wuthering Heights-style film, as well as more viewings than I could count of Andrew Davies's excellent miniseries (one adaptation I haven't gotten to yet is the increasingly interesting-sounding Lizzie Bennet Diaries--being a completist, I'm waiting for the series to be over before I start).  Even more than that, Pride and Prejudice has been so present in the conversation--about Austen and pop culture in general--during all that time, never allowed to fade from my consciousness.  Unlike Austen's other novels, it felt like a work that had been fully processed and digested, one that, for all the enjoyment I still took from it, no longer had the power to surprise me.

But of course, Pride and Prejudice did end up surprising me.  Sometimes in the ways that strike me anew every time I reread it, like how well-paced is the first half of the novel, which is essentially about setting up quite a few characters and subplots in preparation for the first proposal, and how comparatively overloaded are its final chapters, in which one almost seems to feel Austen panting as she squares away every single subplot before finally being allowed to finish the story.  And sometimes in ways that I'd never noticed before, such as the fact that until the very moment of Darcy's fateful slight against her, Elizabeth isn't singled out as a point of view character--before that moment she is one of the five Bennet daughters, discussed by their parents and treated by the narrative as a single entity.  Or the realization that though a lot of commenters have noted the similarities between Elizabeth and Darcy and Much Ado About Nothing's Benedick and Beatrice, one of Austen's cleverest choices in the novel is to split the savory and unsavory aspects of that play's secondary couple between two different pairings--Lydia and Wickham are Hero and Claudio as the mercenary, opportunistic match, forced to marry in order to save her from the reputation-destroying effects of his actions, while Jane and Bingley are Hero and Claudio, the young, innocent lovers nearly torn apart by the evil designs of those around them.

None of this, however, was something I could build an essay on, and it wasn't until about a quarter of the way into the novel, when Elizabeth and Darcy were brought into constant contact with each other during her stay at Netherfield to nurse Jane, that something new occurred to me about Pride and Prejudice.  It's generally accepted (note how I avoided the obvious joke there) that the pride and prejudice of the title refer, respectively, to Darcy and Elizabeth.  He's proud of his birth and intelligence, which leads him to behave dismissively towards anyone not deemed worthy of his company, and to interfere in their lives.  And she's prejudiced because of his slight against her in their first meeting, which leads her to interpret his behavior in the worst possible light even when he's trying to be ingratiating.  There is some truth to this, obviously.  Pride is of course the defining trait through which Darcy is discussed throughout the novel, and for all of Elizabeth's rationally stated reasons for disliking him--the ones that are justified, such as his interference in Jane and Bingley's affairs and his behavior during the first proposal, the ones that turn out to be false, such as his alleged disinheriting of Wickham, and the ones that she ends up sympathizing with while still decrying, such as his openly disdainful attitude towards her uncouth family and neighbors--there is an irrational core to her actions that has no real justification.

There's a reason, I think, why the famous slight at Elizabeth and Darcy's first meeting, for all that it looms over the novel (and over the common perception of it) is never brought up again after it occurs, as if even Elizabeth realizes that you can't actually decide to hate a person for unwittingly insulting you that one time (and especially in a way that even the novel treats as the thoughtless, peevish expostulation of an introvert desperately trying to tamp down their anxiety at being forced into company with so many strangers).  Elizabeth even seems to go out of her way to avoid mentioning the insult.  It's not in the laundry list of Darcy's faults she lays at his feet during the first proposal, when they both seem to be going out of their way to hurt each other's feelings.  And a few days earlier, when Darcy and Colonel Fitzwilliam jokingly solicit her for an example of Darcy's bad behavior among strangers--when, at a point where her dislike of him is nearly at its highest (she hasn't yet learned how much Darcy did to break Jane and Bingley up), Elizabeth has the chance to make him look genuinely bad--she instead says archly

The first time of my ever seeing him in Hertfordshire, you must know, was at a ball--and at this ball, what do you think he did?  He danced only four dances!  I am sorry to pain you--but it was so.  He danced only four dances, though gentlemen were scarce; and, to my certain knowledge, more than one young lady was sitting down in want of a partner.

And yet, in her unguarded moments, there is a profound bitterness that underpins Elizabeth's attitude towards Darcy.  "I like her appearance," she says when catches sight of Miss de Burgh, whom she believes to be intended as Darcy's wife.  "She looks sickly and cross.--Yes, she will do for him very well.  She will make him a very proper wife."  It's in moments like this that we catch a glimpse of the genuine nastiness that lies at the root of Elizabeth's humor, and particularly her needling of Darcy and refusal to take him seriously--a nastiness that can't be explained by any single act on Darcy's part (and again, at this point the worst that Elizabeth knows of him is that he deprived Wickham of his inheritance) as much as it can be by a determination on Elizabeth's part to dislike him.

For all that the spark that ignites Elizabeth's dislike of Darcy can be described as prejudice, however, the further I read into the novel the more it seemed to me that Elizabeth and Darcy's flaws and failings were actually much more similar than the conventional wisdom surrounding the novel would have it, and that they both end up at the nadir of the first proposal through very similar behavior.  It's not that Darcy is pride and Elizabeth is prejudice, so much as that they are both pride, and that the novel's plot is the narrative of those two egos first clashing against each other, and then learning to accommodate one another.

When you think about it, there's something almost shockingly self-regarding about Elizabeth's behavior in the first half of the novel.  Not many of us would be able to convincingly laugh off as bald-faced an insult as she receives from Darcy in the novel's opening chapters (for all that, as I've discussed, it's clear that that insult does rankle her deep down), and throughout the novel's first half she continues to laugh off his and his friends' disapproval of her choices, behavior, and general person, even when she's surrounded by that disapproval at every turn--when she stays at Netherfield, and later when she's a guest of Lady Catherine de Burgh at Rosings.  It's hard not to feel that Caroline Bingley has a point when she describes Elizabeth as possessing a "conceited independence."  Caroline, of course, means this as a criticism, whereas we might take it as a compliment, but either way there's no denying that Elizabeth's belief in her own worth, especially in the face of disapprobation from people like Darcy and Lady Catherine, whom the rest of her acquaintance treats with obsequiousness and servility, is surprising and unusual in someone of her age, gender, era, and class.

That Elizabeth's ego is healthy enough to allow her to ignore the criticism of those she deems unworthy makes her a very similar type of person to Darcy, for all that their respective senses of pride are treated very differently by the characters around them--Darcy, as a wealthy man from a highly connected family, is considered justified in his pride, while Elizabeth, an unmarried woman with little money, few connections, and relatives in trade, is not.  Austen herself, however, takes a very similar approach, of mingled criticism and approval, to both characters' pride.  Darcy's belief that his birth and station justify his pride is punctured throughout the novel, not only by Elizabeth's pointing out how un-gentlemanly his behavior towards her has been, but by the realization that his upper class social circle offers no more guarantees of good company than Elizabeth's crass Meryton crowd--after rolling his eyes at Mrs. Bennet and her younger daughters' behavior, Darcy is shown to be justly embarrassed when Lady Catherine turns out to have equally bad manners, and the relatives that he and Elizabeth turn out to love and admire the most are the Gardiners, a lawyer and his wife.  But at the same time, the novel, through Elizabeth's changing perspective on Darcy, slowly comes to validate his sense of worth.  By its end, though Darcy has learned to be more circumspect and tolerant of Elizabeth's aggravating relatives, Elizabeth has learned some of his disapproval of her family--including her father--and is actively shielding him from their presence.

At the same time, though much of Elizabeth's point of view in the second half of the novel, and particularly after she receives Darcy's letter, is focused on her shame at her past behavior, and particularly her realization that she has put too much stock in her ability to judge and evaluate character, the end result of this is by no means to diminish her pride.  She speaks to Lady Catherine in their final confrontation with the same tone of independent self-regard with which she confronted Darcy during the first proposal.  "You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared me the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentleman-like manner," she tells him, and "you are not entitled to know [my concerns]; nor will such behavior as this, ever induce me to be more explicit," she tells Lady Catherine.  In both cases, Elizabeth has too much of an awareness of her own worth to be willing to tolerate those who ignore it, and the novel validates that behavior.

But then, Pride and Prejudice is full of people who think they know their own worth, whose behavior is guided by pride.  People like Lady Catherine, Mr Collins, and Caroline Bingley, who take the most profound pleasure in the belief that they are better than some meaningful segment of their acquaintance.  There are, in fact, more of these than there are genuinely humble characters like Bingley or Jane.  Darcy and Elizabeth are singled out for Austen's authorial approval of their pride because, unlike many of the novel's other characters, it is rooted in more than their social status, and because they take it seriously.  Unlike characters like Mr Bennet and Charlotte Lucas, who know that they are better than their surroundings but ignore that knowledge in order to get along or get ahead, Darcy and Elizabeth aren't willing to sell out their pride for the sake of convenience (this is more obvious in Elizabeth's case, but Darcy too is faced with situations where it would be easier to fall back on his social status than to reach for what he knows himself to deserve--as Elizabeth thinks when she considers that Lady Catherine might appeal to Darcy's pride to prevent him from connecting himself with the Bennets and with Wickham, "If he is satisfied with only regretting me, when he might have obtained my affections and hand, I shall soon cease to regret him at all").  Charlotte in particular is a character that readers often feel is treated too harshly by her author for her decision to marry Mr Collins.  Wright's adaptation even includes a scene in which she angrily and tearfully chastises Elizabeth for her disapproval of that decision, exclaiming that this is her last chance for a future and financial stability, but this strikes me as getting it backwards.  If anything, Elizabeth is the one who should be desperate to get married.  She's the one who has no financial future except as a wife (something that she seems almost unrealistically unconcerned with throughout the novel), while Charlotte is the daughter of a wealthy minor baronet whose recently purchased estate is not entailed away from his daughters as Mr Bennet's is.  Charlotte doesn't need to get married; she wants to, and to achieve that goal she is willing to put up with a husband she despises, and to kowtow to Lady Catherine and her daughter.  Both Charlotte and Elizabeth know that there is more intrinsic value in being Miss Lucas or Miss Bennet than in being Mrs. Collins, and that nevertheless society will always attach greater status to a Mrs than a Miss.  Only Charlotte chooses the social construction of value over what she knows to be its true form, which is why both Elizabeth and Austen disapprove of her.

Still, you can get into a lot of trouble with that notion of intrinsic value, and especially in a novel published 200 years ago.  How can Elizabeth and Darcy be justified in feeling their own worth so strongly, if they alone are the determiners of that worth?  Austen's answer is that as well as having well-developed egos, Elizabeth and Darcy have strong superegos.  They may not be guided by convention, but they do have a sense of right and wrong.  We see this, of course, when they're both confronted by their bad behavior at the novel's midpoint, and instead of retreating into their pride, acknowledge their own faults and seek to correct them.  Elizabeth, for example, believes that Darcy will never renew his advances towards her because his pride would be too wounded by her refusal to allow him to humiliate himself in a second attempt, but Darcy is more affected by his realization that a lot of her accusations towards him were justified; his pride is satisfied not by forgetting Elizabeth but by seeking to become a man she'd approve of.  But we also see it in the moments where Elizabeth and Darcy's flouting of convention stops short--at the point where, to their mind, convention ends, and morality begins. 

Elizabeth is often compared to Mary Crawford, another character who is lively and has a tendency to poke fun at social mores, and like Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park's final crisis takes the form of an elopement between two morally bankrupt characters.  The crucial difference between Elizabeth and Mary is that Mary treats this failing too as a social convention--her response to her brother's elopement with a married woman is to begin to scheme how to restore their social status, while giving no thought to the possibility that they might have actually done something wrong.  Elizabeth, meanwhile, is morally horrified by her sister Lydia's elopement with Wickham, and embarrassed by Lydia's lack of embarrassment over it--"I do not particularly like your way of getting husbands," she tartly informs the self-satisfied Lydia.

The problem here is that, no matter how expertly Austen stacks the deck, as readers in 2013 we can be reasonably expected to be more sympathetic towards Mary's stance than Elizabeth's, and particularly in the case of Lydia and Wickham, in which a young girl is punished for being led on by an older, unscrupulous man by being forced to spend the rest of her life with him.  In the chapters dealing with Lydia and Wickham's marriage, Austen juxtaposes Mary Bennet's pronouncement that "loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable--that one false step involves her in endless ruin" with Jane's comforting reply to Elizabeth's castigating herself for not exposing Wickham once she learned the truth about him (including the fact that he had once tried to seduce and elope with Darcy's sister Georgianna) that "to expose the former faults of any person, without knowing what their present feelings were, seemed unjustifiable."  Though we're clearly meant to view Mary as a blowhard (and along with her, Mr Collins, who writes to Mr Bennet to self-importantly pronounce that "The death of your daughter would have been a blessing in comparison of this"), it was hard for me not to be reminded of very recent incidents in which the presumption that sexual predators (which, in the circumstances of the novel, Wickham most certainly is) feel bad about their past indiscretions and deserve a clean slate was treated as more important than the right of women not to be thrown, unsuspecting, into their company.  If the most blatant example of Elizabeth's intrinsic value is the fact that she largely agrees with this stance (though, in fairness to her, she continues to feel guilty for not exposing Wickham, and upon learning of his upcoming marriage to Lydia exclaims "Yet he is such a man!"), that value can seem hard to accept.

On the other hand, maybe the most blatant example of Elizabeth's (and Darcy's) intrinsic value isn't what they do, but what they don't do.  As much as it is a novel about pride, self-regard, and knowing your own worth, Pride and Prejudice also reminded me of Persuasion, a novel about being part of a community.  Like Anne Elliot in Persuasion, Elizabeth is an intelligent, refined woman in a community that is beneath her.  Darcy, too, is spending a lot of his time among people, like Bingley's sisters, who are merely flatterers and posers.  (If I like both of these characters better than Anne, it is because Austen acknowledges their tendency towards self-gratifying superiority, while in Persuasion I felt that I was reading it into the character against her author's intention.)  Their journey over the course of the novel is not only about finding each other, but forming a new society, with Jane and Bingley, Georgianna, and the Gardiners.  But Pride and Prejudice is not only about knowing when to detach yourself from company that is beneath you; it is also about knowing when not to choose detachment.  Elizabeth and Darcy both start the novel as people who take the greatest pleasure from standing back and observing others, often with satirical intent.  But as we and they soon come to realize, there's no such thing as being completely detached from society--the novel's characters are divided into those, like Mrs Bennet and Lydia, who don't care that they are making a spectacle of themselves, and those who think that they are standing back, observing and judging everyone else, but don't realize that they are being observed and judged in turn--as Darcy clearly doesn't realize that while he was falling in love with Elizabeth, he was creating a terrible impression on her and her friends.  The sole exceptions are the cynics, people like Mr Bennet, who cuts himself off from the world in his study and only emerges to comment on the silliness of everyone around him, and Charlotte Lucas, who is a much more clear-eyed observer of humanity than Elizabeth, seeing, for example, that Jane is being too reserved in her expressions of affection towards Bingley, and realizing Darcy's feelings for Elizabeth sooner than any other character in the novel (including Darcy himself).  If there's an illustration of their intrinsic worth in Elizabeth and Darcy's behavior, it is perhaps in the fact that they once they realize that they must be part of society even when it disgusts them, they don't give in to that cynicism.

It would have been very easy for both Elizabeth and Darcy to fall into the same trap as Mary and Henry Crawford--two people who so flatter each other's sense of worth, and their belief in being superior to everyone around them, that they exaggerate each other's worst qualities and become fit for nobody else's company.  To an extent, Elizabeth and Darcy are spared this fate through luck--his sister is too young and nervous to amplify his pride the way Mary does Henry's and vice versa, and her sister is the sort of person who hates to think ill of anyone, and instead encourages Elizabeth's better nature.  But throughout the novel Elizabeth and Darcy are repeatedly confronted with the opportunity to form that sort of alliance of snideness with a potential romantic partner--Caroline Bingley and Wickham both try to encourage Darcy and Elizabeth's sense of superiority, and try to bond with them over the shared joy of poking fun at others' foibles.  Both characters indulge in this sort of mean girl cattiness for a time--Darcy's "I should as soon call her mother a wit"--but ultimately they recoil from it, and learn to take more pleasure in the company of people they can respect.  And as Elizabeth says to Darcy when he laments his bad behavior at the end of the novel, it's in that refusal to fully give in to bad impulses that their own value is best expressed.  The fact that they can recognize the intrinsic value of others, and learn to seek out their company without regard to social class or convention, is the best proof of Elizabeth and Darcy's own worth.

It occurs to me that these three novels--Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice, and Persuasion--are ultimately explorations of different aspects of the same question--the dilemma of being smart, sensitive, and observant among people who are, for the most part, none of these things.  Where is the line between refusing to participate in the stupidity and crassness of the people around you, and just being disdainful and rude?  Where is the line between convention and morality?  Where is the line between detaching yourself from society in order to find your own level, and doing so in order to bask in your own superiority?  To sum it all up, where is the line between knowing your own worth, and being too wrapped up in it?  (It may or may not be a coincidence that these are also the three of Austen's novels in which the hero, as well as the heroine, undergoes a process of change and growth, though of the three, Pride and Prejudice is the only one in which the hero can be said to have his own point of view.)  I don't think I'm reading too much into it by assuming that this is also a question that would have occupied Austen in her own life, and I think that, in Pride and Prejudice, she may have given it her most complete (if, perhaps, too neat) answer.  Unlike Mansfield Park, it's not a novel that gets bogged down in the question of style versus substance, in somewhat piously decrying the kind of flashy wit that made Austen the writer she was.  And unlike Persuasion, it is a novel willing to expose its heroine's faults and even leave them in place--if somewhat counteracted by her situation--at its end.  And it's a romance that still feels the most satisfying, the most heartfelt, the most equal, and the most uplifting to both of its partners, than any other in her novels.  As much as it sometimes seems that I am too steeped in Pride and Prejudice to learn anything new about it, it's good to be reminded--if only once every ten years--of just how fine a novel it is.

The Bug by Ellen Ullman

We live in a world that has been--is still being--profoundly transformed by technology, and yet you'd hardly know that to look at our fiction.  Sure, there's a whole genre devoted to inventing outlandish--albeit, sometimes, plausible and rigorously thought-out--technologies and using them, and their effects on individuals and society, as jumping-off points for stories.  But science fiction rarely turns its eye on the present and on existing technologies, and when it does--usually in the form of outsider SF--the result is rarely to imagine change and transformation, as authors plump for the familiar standards of apocalypse, collapse, and the end of human civilization, if not the human race.  Somewhere in the interstices between these two extremes, however, is a small cluster of novels that make technology their business--novels that look at the present through SFnal eyes, like William Gibson's Blue Ant trilogy, or Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (and, far less successfully, Reamde), or novels that take an anthropological perspective on the technological industry and its effects on society, like Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector.  As someone who works in the technology industry, who loves science fiction's affect and would like to see it extended past the genre's boundaries, and who is fascinated by fiction's ability to capture a world at a moment of flux, this is the kind of writing I'd like to see a great deal more of, so Ellen Ullman's 2003 novel The Bug--in which programmers and testers battle against a mysterious software error--seemed right up my alley.  But The Bug left me curiously unsatisfied, and for reasons that I hadn't anticipated.  It's a novel that is, at one and the same time, too familiar to me, and too foreign.

Ullman, who worked as a software engineer in Silicon Valley in the 80s and 90s and wrote a well-received memoir, Close to the Machine, about her experiences (as well as being lauded just this last year for her second novel, By Blood), sets her scene in the early 80s, at a start-up company that is just beginning to test the new and unfamiliar waters of personal computing.  Telligentsia's project is something that we take so much for granted we may never have considered it as its own piece of software--a networked database with a windowed user interface.  That interface is the purview--and bane--of The Bug's two main characters, software tester Roberta Walton and programmer Ethan Levin.  When one of Roberta's routine tests uncovers a hard-to-reproduce, hard-to-describe bug that freezes the system, Ethan's initial reaction is to dismiss it.  But as the bug keeps cropping up at the most inopportune moments (customer presentations, a meeting with the venture capitalists funding the company), he is compelled to investigate it, and finds a problem with no rational source, whose seemingly random appearances create the impression of a malevolent intelligence, rather than a simple software error.

I think that that description on its own should be a point in Ullman's, and The Bug's, favor, because reading it back to myself it's hard to imagine how anyone might be interested in an entire novel on so trivial a subject.  And yet, for all the reservations that I will go on to discuss, I found The Bug not only engrossing and hard to put down, but genuinely poetic, and containing a persuasive argument for the grandeur and meaningfulness of its characters' work in general, and their struggles against the bug in particular.  A lot of that is down to the fact that Ullman is an excellent writer, adept at rendering the technological into literary terms.  When Roberta, a former linguist who transitioned to quality assurance when her academic career dried up, learns that the name of the function the allocates memory is "malloc," she muses that "by the implicit structures of the English language, everyone pronounces it "MAL-loc."  Mal, loc.  Mal: bad.  Loc: location.  Bad location!  But of course they'd have trouble keeping track of memory when they'd named their tool so stupidly!"  Ethan, meanwhile, waxes poetic about the dangers of just that function:

She didn't understand: the compiler didn't watch over you.  Once you spoke to it in syntactically correct C code, it was willing to let you kill yourself, if that's what you wanted to do.  You could suck up memory like a glutton, and the first you'd know about it would be a crash.  Malloc, free.  Malloc, free.  It was up to you to keep them paired, release memory when you were done with it.  Maybe you really wanted to fuck things up, as far as the compiler knew.  So many things in the C programming language were dangerous, but legal.

Even more than Ullman's poetry, however, what brings The Bug to life are its characters, her delicate examination of the kinds of people who are drawn to programming and the computer industry, and the effect that working there has on them.  Roberta starts the novel quietly disdainful of programmers like Ethan, imagining them as narrow thinkers capable of only the most mundane tasks, but when she learns how to program herself she's quickly seduced by the programming language's simple building blocks and the seemingly endless programs that can be constructed from them.  "[C]oding was too compelling," she muses.  "It was all about creating a separate, artificial reality inside the machine."  Ethan, meanwhile, is deep into that obsession--he's introduced to us playing a game of "one more compile" while his girlfriend waits for him to give her a ride to the airport--and the bug exposes his other limitations, the other ways in which life at software companies has stunted and limited him: the compulsion to always be right, the inability to admit fault, the temptation to rush headlong into the next problem, the next task, instead of testing your work and making sure that it will stand the test of time, and the tendency to to become so consumed with the puzzle of solving a neat coding problem or getting to the bottom of a simple but satisfying bug, that all other, more challenging, less straightforward tasks become easy to ignore and put off.  Like many programmers, Ethan's stores of knowledge float on a vast ocean of ignorance about whatever happens outside of his area of the code (and particularly what happens below it, in the lower-level routines that interact with the computer's operating system and hardware), and he is self-conscious to the point of neurosis about being exposed in that ignorance.  When Roberta is finally able to produce the bug's "core"--a printout of the machine state at the moment the bug occurred--Ethan, far from being overjoyed, is terrified, because he's never learned to read most of this information.  This isn't unusual--I've been programming professionally for six years and I've never used register values or program counters to solve a bug, and probably wouldn't know how if I needed to--but his response to being put in this position is at the same time pathetic and terrifyingly familiar: "He knew this would happen someday: twelve years of faking it, and one day, an illiterate pretending to read, he'd get caught."

That this is an accurate portrait is something that I can confirm first-hand (which is to say, both from my interactions with other programmers, and from my own experiences), but on the other hand, it also points to my core problem with The Bug.  The truth is, if I wanted to know what it's like to bang your head against an impossible phantom of a bug, if I wanted to experience the contemptuous back-and-forth between programmers and testers who are each convinced that the other is an idiot who doesn't know how to do their job, or the mingled rage and triumph of discovering that someone--someone who is not you--has checked in bad code, if I wanted to be put on schedules so impossible that the only reasonable response to them is rueful laughter--if I wanted to experience any of these things, I would just go to work.  For most of The Bug, Ullman's anthropological impulse is satisfied with describing and cataloging a world that I know very well, and explaining it to those who don't know it--she spends paragraphs spelling out what a compiler or a debugger do, and when Roberta learns how to program Ullman takes the readers through a crash course on the basics of programming languages.  It's to Ullman's credit that these segments of the novel are both readable and, from my admittedly biased perspective (I spent a whole semester learning the programming language that she sums up in a chapter, after all), comprehensive and easily comprehended, and towards the end of the novel, her devotion to the technical aspects of her story--as she begins to unravel the bug, she includes not only segments of code, but diagrams and graphs--is impressive, especially in a literary novel not obviously geared towards tech-heads.  And I certainly can't deny that there are moments of recognition in The Bug that I haven't experienced in other novels--when Ethan was told to prioritize the bug because it's appeared to the venture capitalists and the company president "is acting like he never saw a bug before," I nodded in commiseration.  But I went into The Bug hoping for something a little more complex than a portrait, hoping for some contemplation of what this new field and the habits of thought it encourages mean.

There is some of this in The Bug, especially towards its end when Ullman has gotten the basic concepts out of the way and feels more free to embroider around them.  It's at that point that she starts building more complex metaphors out of the difference between the way computers experience the world--as a sequence of discrete steps, mindless and memory-less, each altering their state in some minute way--and the way humans do.  Ethan has for years been tinkering with a program that simulates a natural environment, whose denizens behave according to simple rules that govern their feeding, mating, and movement, in the belief that it and programs like it can teach us about the foundational rules that govern human behavior.  But even as he lights upon a change to the rules that creates more natural-seeming, sustainable behavior, Roberta's investigations into the bug reveal the gulf between the way computers and programs behave and the way humans think that they do--the ultimate cause of the bug's flakiness, for example, turns out to be the fact that what a human sees as the continuous movement of a mouse pointer is actually a series of discrete points, rapidly sampled.  What I found more compelling, however, and what I wish Ullman had paid more attention to, were her discussions of the disconnect between a programmer's work and how it's experienced once it's set free in the world.  In the novel's framing story, Roberta--returning from vacation on the day that the dot com bubble finally bursts and her portfolio, heavy with stock options accumulated during a decade and a half as a consultant, melts away--realizes that the immigration officer who greets her is using Telligentsia's database software, and that the delay in processing her passport is due to a bug she reported and that the programmers never dealt with, leading her to muse about the years that have been lost to that 30-second delay, simply due to a failure to imagine them.  Later in the novel, Ethan, flying to a training course, sits next to a tester for the airline industry, and complains to him about the bug.  Expecting sympathy and reassurance, Ethan instead gets a kick in the pants:

"Failure?  You feel like a failure?" said Wheatley.  "Look, kid.  It's not about you.  Who the hell really cares about you?  The failure is in the system, and the fear should be not for your ego but for the people who'll use the system.  Think about them.  Be afraid for them.  Forget about yourself for a while and then you'll find it, then you'll fix your bug.  Not because you're ashamed, but because people might be in danger and you have to."

This is good advice for any programmer, any engineer who is too far separated from the real-world applications of their work to treat its failures as anything more than an intellectual puzzle or an annoyance.  But it's advice that Ethan doesn't heed, and far too much of The Bug, to my mind, is spent explaining why, and showing how his failure to look past his own ego and insecurity eventually leads to his downfall.  Not that this character arc is badly drawn--the scenes in which Ethan twists himself into knots of insecurity and desperate desire for approval, neglecting his girlfriend in order to keep to his schedule (he's the only programmer in his group who isn't desperately behind and he clings to this achievement like a life vest), alienating his colleagues with a standoffishness born of his crippling sense of inadequacy, and stewing in the "humiliation" of not being able to fix the bug, have a certain queasy horror to them.  But as the novel draws on and Ethan's instability grows, he comes to seem less like an exaggerated portrait of a programmer's mingled ego and insecurity, and more like a parody of them, a person who literally can't function away from a keyboard.  If Ethan were alone in his dysfunction, we might assume that he was uniquely mentally unbalanced, but Ullman peoples all of Telligentsia with these unpleasant, ego-driven, childish people, who can't have a professional conversation without lapsing into semi-coherent cries of "it's your problem!  Your code!  Yours!" 

There are a lot of things about the culture in my industry that I dislike, and a lot of them are rooted in the one-upmanship and ego-stroking that Ullman captures in The Bug.  But I have never experienced the kind of consistent lack of professionalism and passive-aggressive maliciousness she describes (one possible reason for this difference is that I don't work at a start-up company, and neither I nor any of my colleagues have stock options that might make us instant millionaires if the product ships on time--but then, none of the programmers in The Bug seems motivated by money either).  We've all heard enough stories about the workaholism that goes on in software companies for the portrait that Ullman draws to make some kind of sense, but the more she stresses the nastiness and resentment that exist between Ethan and his colleagues, the total lack of support, or anything resembling congeniality, the he experiences, the way he is allowed to go crazy right in front of his colleagues and no one notices or cares so long as he's trying to track down the bug, the more it felt to me is if rather than capturing my industry, Ullman was grossly exaggerating some of the more extreme stereotypes about  it.  Telligentsia, as Ullman describes it, is the kind of company that will literally let you kill yourself if that's what you want to do, where an employee can go missing for more than two weeks before someone even thinks to call their house, much less the police.  Maybe that's true to Ullman's experiences, though I hope not.  It's not true to mine, however, and in a novel that otherwise recalls them so perfectly, this sudden deviation is jarring.

But then, there's another reason why I find it hard to read The Bug as the tragedy Ullman clearly intended it as, and that is the simple fact that the bug, that famous, malicious, random, incomprehensible bug that the characters anthropomorphize and fear and let themselves be driven to desperation by, is, well, easy.  It's obvious.  I literally predicted what was causing it and where it came from less than a third of the way into the book.  What's more, Ethan's approach to tracking it down is nonsensical.  When he finally gets the bug's core dump, Ethan--who otherwise is shown to be a conscientious, thoughtful programmer, careful about writing maintainable, well-documented code at a point in the industry's history when this was by no means the standard practice--obsesses over his inability to make sense of the computer's nitty-gritty, but dismisses the straightforward information that tells him what function the program was running when it failed, because there's no reason for the program to be in that function at that point.  Surely any programmer worth their salt would realize that this is, in itself, a huge indication of what's gone wrong?  Just by saying this, of course, I'm validating Ullman's point.  I'm behaving exactly like one of her programmer characters, obsessed with being the one to get it right (and with crowing about that fact) and utterly lacking in patience towards anyone to whom the solution isn't as obvious as it was to me.  But on the other hand, Ullman wants us to believe in a story in which a bug destroys its programmer's life.  Maybe readers who aren't steeped in the computers field will be able to accept that (honestly, I'm starting to wonder whether even this review will be comprehensible to someone who doesn't have that background), but for me, Ethan's failure to take the obvious steps out of his predicament short-circuited his alleged tragedy.

On the day that I wrote this review, I went into work.  I had a bug, something I thought I'd solved several times, but which kept cropping up.  "It's a black hole from which there is no escape."  I announced.  "It's a minefield," said my officemate, who was working on the same area of the code, and then we debated whose metaphor was better.  I spent most of the day repeating the same tests, staring uncomprehendingly at their results.  Some time in the afternoon, though, everything started to make sense, and I felt like an idiot for not seeing days ago what was so obvious now.  I wrote a fix, which turned out to have a mistake in it, which I fixed, only to find another mistake, which I fixed, and then everything worked, and I left work feeling pretty pleased with myself.  I've had much worse days, days when I've felt frustrated and ill-tempered and behaved in ways that I'm not at all proud of, and The Bug captures a lot of that, as well as the high of wrestling a problem to the ground, and making a program do what you wanted it to do rather than what you've told it to do.  But it's also riddled with a foreignness that I can't accept or get a handle on, an insistence that at the root of my profession there is not simply dysfunction, but disease.  Especially in a novel that cuts so close to how I experience my life, that alien perspective is too much for me to accept.

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

Here's a recommendation: even if you've already read it, take the time to reread Wolf Hall before reading Bring Up the Bodies.  This is less in order to be reminded of details from the first volume of Hilary Mantel's projected trilogy about the life of Thomas Cromwell--Mantel is actually quite good about catching up readers who haven't read Wolf Hall or read it a while ago, and anyway the broad strokes of the history it describes are well known--but because such a reading actually shows both books in the best light.  Wolf Hall is a much easier novel to appreciate when freed of the hype that surrounded its Booker nomination and victory in 2009, and even more than that, when approached as the first volume in a trilogy rather than a complete novel, and Bring Up the Bodies feels like a more complete, more polished work when compared to its accomplished but undeniably baggy and overlong predecessor.  This is, of course, largely down to subject matter and scope--Wolf Hall spanned some thirty years, covering Cromwell's rise from humble beginnings to high-ranking courtier, and concentrating on the decade during which Cromwell's mentor Cardinal Wolsey was hounded to death for failing to facilitate Henry VIII's divorce from Catherine of Aragon, Henry made a break from the church in Rome, and Cromwell rose in power by facilitating both the divorce and that break.  Bring Up the Bodies, meanwhile, covers only a single year, and concentrates on Anne Boleyn's loss of favor with the king and on the cooked-up trial by which she's gotten rid of.  The result is a tighter, tenser novel, one in which the somewhat diffuse figure of Cromwell comes more sharply into focus.  What's still unclear--and will probably remain so until the concluding volume is published--is what Mantel's project with the trilogy is, and what conclusion she is drawing to where Cromwell is concerned.

The story of Henry VIII, his six wives, his quest for a male heir, and his break with Rome is a much-retold one, and Mantel's twist on it is not only that she is telling it from the perspective of Cromwell but that she's taken a character who is usually cast as a conniving, power-hungry villain and made him a hero and a standard-bearer for compassionate humanism, who is aiding Henry not only in order to stabilize the Tudor dynasty and prevent another War of the Roses, but in order to strengthen Protestantism in England and bring an end to the corruption and brutality of the Catholic establishment.  I was intrigued by this portrait in Wolf Hall, but also worried that Mantel was erring too far on the side of hagiography.  In particular, the decision to end the novel shortly before Cromwell is called upon by Henry's increasing indifference to Anne to get rid of her by any means necessary, and chooses to do so via judicial murder and the criminalization of speech and thought, felt manipulative, and I wondered whether in the next volume in the trilogy Mantel would face up to the full ugliness of what Cromwell had done, or whether she would whitewash or excuse it (an interim reading of Mantel's previous novel, A Place of Greater Safety, in which she passes up the opportunity to ask some searching questions about the architects of the Terror in favor of focusing on their tangled family lives, didn't leave me feeling very hopeful on this front).

Bring Up the Bodies allays many of these fears.  In fact what it put me most in mind of was the middle seasons of Breaking Bad, in which Walter White's allegedly virtuous justifications for cooking and dealing drugs melt away, allowing the megalomania and thirst for power that are his true motivations to shine through.  Cromwell isn't quite as much of a villain, but the insouciance with which he cooks up the trial, twisting the letter of the law to allow Anne and her alleged lovers to be convicted and executed on the basis of no evidence at all without ever seeming to lose a moment's peace, shines a new light on his similarly even temper in Wolf Hall.  All of a sudden, that portrait of a compassionate, principled courtier who pursued power in order to do good, and sent the king's enemies (who also happened to be his own enemies) to their deaths not out of bloodlust but simply to protect the realm, starts to seem more than a little self-serving.  Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies are both told from a tight third person that allegedly gives us full access to Cromwell's thoughts and feelings, but the voices of the two novels are different.  In Wolf Hall Cromwell responds with sorrowful equanimity to the death of Wolsey and the humiliations he suffers at the hands of aristocratic courtiers who still think like feudal lords (and is equally sorrowful as the drives Thomas More to his death), but Bring Up the Bodies puts the lie to this claim of even temper:

He remembers last year, Brereton swaggering through Whitehall, whistling like a stable boy; breaking off to say to him, "I hear the king, when he does not like the papers you bring in to him, knocks you well about the pate."

You'll be knocked, he had said to himself.  Something in this man makes him feel he is a boy again, a sullen belligerent little ruffian fighting on the riverbank in Putney.  He has heard it before, this rumor put about to demean him.  Anyone who knows Henry knows it is impossible.  He is the first gentleman of Europe, his courtesy unflawed.  If he wants someone stricken, he employs a subject to do it; he would not sully his own hand.  It is true they sometimes disagree.  But if Henry were to touch him, he would walk away.  There are princes in Europe who want him.  They make him offers; he could have castles.

It's hard to recognize this petty, seething Cromwell from Wolf Hall, and it's as if in that book he was unwilling to own his feelings and desires even to himself.  But now, in Bring Up the Bodies, that he is the king's right hand and the most powerful man in the country, he can drop the pretense that he has simply been disinterestedly doing what needs to be done, and tell us what he wants: power, and revenge for the death of Wolsey.  As Mantel has it, the four gentlemen accused of committing adultery with Anne (who include Brereton from the passage above) are selected out of the dozens named by the tortured musician Mark Smeaton because they participated in a skit mocking the cardinal after his death ("It is not so much, who is guilty, as whose guilt is of service to you"), while a fifth man, Thomas Wyatt, generally rumored to be Anne's lover but also a friend of Cromwell's, is protected from suspicion.

This is not to say that Bring Up the Bodies casts Cromwell as a pure villain, or even that there is a sense that this is, Breaking Bad-like, Mantel's ultimate goal for him.  Cromwell the tireless and efficient civil servant, the reformer, the philanthropist, the mentor of industrious, intelligent young men who take up positions in court and help to spread his reform, is still present in this novel.  A major subplot involves his audit of the monasteries, his discovery of corruption and depravity within their walls and his project to turn over their wealth to the country and set the monks to useful pastoral work, which surely sets the readers on his side.  In a blatant contemporary reference, Mantel has Cromwell propose an infrastructure law:

England needs better roads, and bridges that don't collapse.  He is preparing a bill for Parliament to give employment to men without work, to get them waged and out mending the roads, making the harbours, building walls against the Emperor or any other opportunist.  We could pay them, he calculated, if we levied an income tax on the rich; we could provide shelter, doctors if they needed them, their subsistence; we would have all the fruits of their work, and their employment would keep them from becoming bawds or pickpockets or highway robbers, all of which men will do if they see no other way to eat.

This is Cromwell as Barack Obama, and when the law fails, the reasons given are pure 1% dogma: "It is an outrage to the rich and enterprising, to suggest that they should pay an income tax, only to put bread in the mouths of the workshy."  Less anachronistically, the novel's preoccupation with class--which is to say, Cromwell's own preoccupation with it--is used for more than just exposing Cromwell's own ambition.  The higher Cromwell climbs, the more blatantly the resentment felt towards him by high-born courtiers is expressed--the novel begins with Francis Weston, another of the gentlemen who will be accused of adultery with Anne, mercilessly peppering Cromwell with cruel jibes in front of both the king and Cromwell's son Gregory, and in a later scene, Henry's brother-in-law Charles Brandon hisses that Cromwell is "only for fetching in money, when it comes to the affairs of nations you cannot deal, you are a common man of no status, and the king himself says so, you are not fit to talk to princes."  This is, again, the sort of thing guaranteed to put us on Cromwell's side (especially in the latter scene, in which it is Charles, despite his harsh words, who has just committed a horrible faux pas with the emissary from the Emperor Charles V), but Mantel manages to balance the two halves of his personality, the underdog and the judicial murderer.  You can see how his anger over these repeated insults, especially as he rises in Henry's esteem, feeds Cromwell's desire to cement and increase his power, which leads him not only to revenge on people like Weston, Brereton and the Boleyns, but to a general willingness to do whatever it takes to get to the top. 

Of course, to an extent what Cromwell is doing is playing the same game as everyone around him, except better and with less of a starting advantage, and he is far from the only one to contemplate adding murder to his list of available plays--rumors abound that Catherine was murdered in order to free Henry to dispose of Anne without having to go back to his first wife, and Anne not-quite-jokingly talks about poisoning Catherine's daughter Mary in order to rid herself of a troublesome influence on Henry.  But Cromwell is the only one who actually puts this idea into practice (not to mention doing so under the auspices of the law) and what's missing from Bring Up the Bodies, despite its delicate balancing of Cromwell's humanity and monstrousness, is the moment in which that decision is made.  It is an emptiness at the core of the novel that points, I think, towards Mantel's final purpose with this trilogy.  More importantly, it points towards Henry, who is, if not quite an absence in the story, then certainly less present in these two novels than feels justified given that it's his whims and desires that drive Cromwell, and all of the other characters, to such extreme actions.  In Wolf Hall, Cromwell explains to his son Gregory his willingness to work against Catherine as the result of having picked his prince: "you choose him, and you know what he is.  And then, when you have chosen, you say yes to him"

"But you swore," Gregory says, "that you respected the queen."

"So I do.  And I would respect her corpse."

"You would not work her death, would you?"

He halts.  He takes his son's arm, turns him to look into his face.  "Retrace our steps through this conversation."  Gregory pulls away.  "No, listen, Gregory.  I said, you give way to the king's requests.  You open the way to his desires.  That is what a courtier does.  Now, understand this: it is impossible that Henry should require me or any other person to harm the queen.  What is he, a monster?"

It's a scene that almost demands a callback in Bring Up the Bodies, some scene in which Cromwell grasps that Henry does want him to kill Anne, and that he is--as nearly every iteration of this story ultimately concludes--a monster (it also demands some payoff for Gregory, who is one of the books' more intriguing peripheral characters; though devoted to his father, Gregory lacks the intelligence and killer instinct that make Cromwell such a successful courtier, and seems destined to the life of an idle gentleman.  Cromwell seems to regard him with a mixture of love and disdain, alternating between the desire to protect him and rub his face in what's been done in order to give him the cushy life he's grown accustomed to).  Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies both point out Henry's selfishness, his childishness, his need to always see himself as the good guy and the wronged party, but Cromwell himself seems to elide these--he recognizes them, but he doesn't acknowledge them or the fact that he has linked his fortunes to a sociopath, even as that connection determines his own actions.  Bring Up the Bodies being the middle part of a trilogy, it seems likely that the final volume will turn its gaze to Henry and the consequences of Cromwell's choosing him as his prince, that just as Bring Up the Bodies opens up Cromwell's voice and lets us see his ambition, the next volume will open it further and let us see his feelings towards Henry (in fact the ending of Bring Up the Bodies seems to promise this: after Anne's death, one of Cromwell's associates asks "if this is what Cromwell does to the cardinal's lesser enemies, what will he do by and by to the king himself?", an obvious question that has nevertheless gone completely unacknowledged by Cromwell's internal narrative in the previous two books).  But until the tone of Mantel's conclusion on this point is known, it's hard to know what her project for Cromwell, and with these books, is, and therefore hard to know how to take either Wolf Hall or Bring Up the Bodies.

One of the reasons that the story of Henry VIII is retold so often is how versatile it is.  It encompasses family, politics and religion, and has so many interesting movers and shakers, that you could tell it from almost any perspective and in almost any way--tragedy, romance, soap opera, political intrigue, farce--and end up with a good story.  But to me, the story is, at its heart, about women.  It would be hard to come up with a better illustration of how patriarchy screws women over, of the zero-sum game they're made to play with other women, of the chutes and ladders a woman must traverse when she sets out to parlay her biology into power, of the inescapable trap that is the virgin-whore dichotomy, than the six wives of Henry VIII.  You can play by Catherine's rules, tolerating disrespect and infidelity so long as you get to keep the titles of wife and queen, only to be told that you have to relinquish them, discovering that the protection you thought they offered you has disappeared.  You can play by Anne's rules (or rather The Rules), playing the harlot but refusing to give up the goods except for a ring and a crown, but these won't make you any safer than your predecessor, and the power you amassed when your demands for respect were enticing and sexy will melt away as soon as these become grating.  If you're unfaithful, you die; if you're faithful, you still die.  If you can't bear a male heir, you die; if you do bear a male heir, you still die.  And best of all, at no point during this decades-long process will anyone around you stop to consider that maybe the problem here isn't with the women, but with the man who, directly or indirectly, caused the deaths of four out of his six wives.  (Actually, the real best part is the surprise twist ending, the fact that all that desperate, bloody scrambling after a male heir results only in the brief, inconsequential reign of Edward VI, while the seemingly unimportant daughter of the ignominiously dispatched Anne Boleyn becomes one of England's most famous monarchs, but most of the characters in Mantel's books will never have the historical perspective necessary to get that joke.)

For all her emphasis on Cromwell, it's pretty clear that Mantel realizes this.  She uses the unequal relationship between men and women in several interesting ways, most obviously in the way that the erosion of his empathy towards women signals Cromwell's moral devolution.  In Wolf Hall, Cromwell is surrounded by women, and not just the ones familiar from history.  He has close relationships with his wife, his daughters, his sisters and sisters-in-law, his nieces, the wives of his friends, and even a poor widow who comes to him looking for work.  He develops a a rapport, and a quiet flirtation, with Mary Boleyn, and falls half in love with Jane Seymour.  In Bring Up the Bodies those women are absent--dead or married off or simply not mentioned--while the important historical figures are viewed with incomprehension and disdain.  Cromwell clearly dislikes Anne, deriding her not simply for her unsavory methods--asking him to arrange for someone to compromise Mary's honor, for example, to which he sniffily replies that "That is not my aim and those are not my methods," even though we know that he has done and will do worse--but for losing her looks and the king's favor.  He frequently comments that she uses "women's weapons," and it's clear that this is a further cause of his disdain for her.  Mary Boleyn is absent, and Jane Seymour is treated in purely utilitarian terms, as a future conquest of the king for whom Cromwell is determined to secure a good price (Jane is another one of the novel's better peripheral characters, though she's less consistently written than Gregory; where in Wolf Hall she comes off as matter of fact and plain-spoken, in Bring Up the Bodies it is never clear whether she's simple-minded or has such an unromantic understanding of her situation and what it requires of her that she has no patience for the pretty words bandied about by everyone around her, a disconnect that can't entirely be explained by Cromwell's loss of empathy towards her).  The deaths of Cromwell's wife and daughters in Wolf Hall are his defining tragedy, but over the course of that novel their memory fades, and in Bring Up the Bodies what is left of that memory is defiled.  The novel opens with Cromwell flying hawks whom he has, bewilderingly, named for his dead wife, daughters, and sisters, enjoying the sight of them slaughtering their prey.  Later, Mark Smeaton is locked in a storage room in Cromwell's house, where he's terrified into giving a false confession by something brushing his face in the dark.  This turns out to be a pair of angel wings worn by Cromwell's youngest daughter on her last Christmas, a symbol of her beauty and innocence, which Cromwell then has destroyed.  In the novel's final scene, Cromwell is so corrupted by the pageant of false accusations he's put on that he starts to wonder whether his own wife was unfaithful to him, and whether his beloved daughter was really his.

But Mantel is also concerned with the way that women determine the course of the story.  When Cromwell's wife Elizabeth first hears about Henry's plan to divorce Catherine in Wolf Hall, she says that it will set all women against him: "All women everywhere in England.  All women who have a daughter but no son.  All women who have lost a child.  All women who are forty."  And yet it's Anne, not Henry, against whom the women of England set themselves.  She becomes a figure of both fascination and revulsion to the women around Cromwell (when he sees her he always makes a note of what she's wearing because the women will want to know), and it is they who refuse to forgive her for Catherine's fall from grace, and who spread vicious rumors about her (and, of course, it is the women of Anne's household who first point Cromwell in the direction of adultery as a way of getting rid of her).  When Jane is asked, near the end of the novel, whether she feels sorry for Anne, she replies, with her typical obliqueness, that "You cannot do what Anne Boleyn did, and live to be old."  Since the accusations of adultery haven't been made public yet it seems that what Jane means by "what Anne Boleyn did" is what Cromwell's wife and the other women of England mean by it--stealing another woman's husband, playing games of power and sex with powerful men.  But of course, as we know and the characters don't yet, Jane won't live to be old either.  Being meek and obedient (the motto Cromwell invents for her as queen is "Bound to Obey and Serve") and producing a male heir will do for her just as surely as being intransigent and failing to produce that heir did for Catherine and Anne.  There is no winning in the game of patriarchy, except for the person at the top, and yet every woman in the novel directs her scorn towards Anne and women like her, while even his injured wives refuse to think ill of Henry--Catherine's last letter to Henry ends with the affirmation that "mine eyes desire you above all things," and even in the Tower Anne insists, as Catherine did before her, that Henry has been misled by false advisers, and that in any minute he will remember his love for her and restore her to her place as queen.

Which is where the connection is made back to Cromwell, and which is Bring Up the Bodies's most brilliant touch.  For all his disdain towards Anne and her weakness and her "women's weapons," Cromwell is doing exactly the same thing as she, and Catherine, and Jane, are doing--hitching his star to Henry's wagon and refusing to see that he might be discarded as easily as his predecessors were.  After Anne's arrest, the Boleyns and their circle repeatedly warn Cromwell that once he's gotten rid of Anne, Henry will have no more use for him, and will allow the enemies Cromwell has made common cause with to destroy him.  Inasmuch as Bring Up the Bodies allows Cromwell to react to this, it is to insist, as Anne does, on Henry's love and devotion, and on Cromwell's being irreplaceable to him.  Like the wives, and despite the fate of Wolsey before him, Cromwell refuses to see that he can be replaced, and that it is in Henry's nature to tire of people, or force them to shoulder the guilt he won't recognize in himself.  Patriarchy victimizes women, but it also chews up low status men, and by choosing his prince Cromwell has set himself up for the same fate as the women whose deaths he orchestrated.  As I said, it's not clear to me what Mantel's ultimate project is, and there is certainly space in the story she's written so far to make Henry the trilogy's ultimate villain and Cromwell his victim--something that could be done well, even if it would cement my sense that Mantel has a tendency to like her characters more than they deserve.  But there's also space to talk about the way that patriarchy corrupts its participants without absolving them of responsibility for their choices--as Anne is not absolved in Bring Up the Bodies--and that is what I hope Mantel produces.

Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon

Telegraph Avenue, Michael Chabon's eighth novel, is the most low-concept thing he's written since the last century.  For a little over a decade, Chabon has been the standard-bearer for the intermingling of genre tropes and literary fiction (and the writer to whom genre fans would frequently point to as an example of an outsider who "gets it" and values genre's contributions to our culture).  The works he's produced over that period have ranged across such genres and styles as alternate history (The Yiddish Policemen's Union, for which Chabon won the Hugo and Nebula awards), pastiche (The Final Solution), YA (Summerland), and swashbuckling adventure (Gentlemen of the Road) while indulging in unabashed love for such beloved geek artifacts as comic books, superheroes, Sherlock Holmes, and Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné.  Telegraph Avenue sees Chabon writing, for the first time in years, without the guiding (some might say limiting) structure of a genre plot.  There is no mystery here, no adventurous quest (though the novel's younger characters briefly believe that there is, with mixed results)--just the stuff of literary fiction: broken marriages, endangered friendships, estranged parents and children.  And yet at the same time, Telegraph Avenue is clearly informed, not only by Chabon's irrepressible geekishness, but by the tools he's accumulated in more than a decade of writing in many different genres.  Whether the result is a good novel is something that I'm still of two minds about.

The setting is Oakland, in the late summer of 2004.  Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are best friends and co-owners of Brokeland Records, a vintage vinyl store specializing in jazz, blues, and R&B on the titular avenue, a dying commercial drag.  The store is already just barely making ends meet, but when Gibson Goode, former football star and "the fifth richest black man in America" announces his intention to build one of his trademark shopping and entertainment complexes, including a media store with its own vintage vinyl department, on Telegraph Avenue, its days appear to be numbered, and Archy and Nat scramble to recruit neighborhood business owners and power brokers to stop Goode's plan.  Archy and Nat's wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkley Birth Partners, midwives who perform home and hospital births.  When their latest patient has to be rushed to hospital due to uncontrollable bleeding, the partners find their painstakingly amassed reputation and respect within the medical community quickly crumbling, while the heavily pregnant Gwen is dealt an extra blow in the form of the discovery that Archy has been cheating on her.  Meanwhile, Archy's abandoning father, former blaxploitation film star Luther Stallings, is back in town, trying to raise money to bankroll a comeback film, and Nat and Aviva's teenage son Julie has fallen in love with new kid in town Titus Joyner, who turns out to be Archy's unacknowledged son.

This plot description hints at, but by no means comes close to expressing, the importance of race in Telegraph Avenue.  Archy, Gwen, Titus and Luther are black; Nat, Aviva and Julie are white.  The two families' close relationship is allegedly a model of post-racial coexistence, but it conceals irreconcilable gaps in their worldview.  Gwen and Aviva nearly lose their privileges at the hospital to which their patient is rushed because Gwen loses her temper at the doctor who takes over the patient's care, and she does that because he peppers his unconcealed disdain for midwifery with comments like "whatever voodoo you were working" and "It's a birth ... that's one of those things you don't want to try at home.  It's not like conking your hair."  Though Aviva urges her to smooth things over by apologizing, Gwen realizes that an apology from her means something very different than it would coming from Aviva.  Gibson Goode's purpose in building a store in Oakland is "not to make money but to restore, at a stroke, the commercial heart of a black neighborhood," and when Nat gathers together the local business owners of Telegraph Avenue to oppose the project, he's dispirited--and, when Archy walks in on their meeting, embarrassed--by their near-uniform paleness.  But Telegraph Avenue isn't nearly as much about race relations as it is about the African-American experience, and specifically about the history of the black community in Oakland, which Chabon spins out from his main characters, shading in their relationships with the stalwarts of the neighborhood and those characters' pasts, touching not just on music and filmmaking, but on the Black Panthers, the Vietnam and first Iraq wars, and, of all things, the Pullman trains that terminated in Oakland.

For Michael Chabon, of all people, to take it upon himself to chronicle the African-American experience is a somewhat dubious endeavor, and by the time Barack Obama, fresh off his star-making turn as the keynote speaker of the 2004 Democratic convention, showed up at a Berkley fundraiser for John Kerry to tell Gwen that "I would ask you to dance, but I don't think my wife would be happy if it got back to her that I was observed dancing with a gorgeous sister in your condition," my eyebrow was cocked high enough to touch the ceiling.  The issue here isn't whether Chabon has gotten black Oakland "right"--something that I am anyway in no position to judge (though I'm quite curious to see how locals will respond to the novel)--or whether he is "entitled" to write about this community (though it does give me pause to consider that there are probably dozens of books out there about black Oakland by black authors, none of which have received even a fraction of the publicity and attention that a new novel by Michael Chabon does), but the fact that there is something artificial about the way Chabon constructs his Oakland, and that the novel seems to draw attention to that artificiality, as if Oakland were as much a lost fantasy world as Sitka in The Yiddish Policemen's Union, or the Jewish Khazar empire in Gentlemen of the Road.

As well as being Chabon's most low-concept novel in years, Telegraph Avenue is also probably the densest novel he's ever written, full of digressions spinning off of digressions, plot strands that fork and spawn multiple offsprings as the life history of every newly-introduced character is delivered to the reader, then expanded upon as their connections to the other characters are revealed, chapters that start in a confusing middle only to slowly work themselves back to their more comprehensible beginnings, and the kind of literary pyrotechnics that Chabon has become known for, ratcheted up to eleven.  The lynchpin of the novel is a ten-page chapter titled "A Bird of Wide Experience," which is actually a single sentence told from the point of view of an arthritic parrot, the former property of Archy's recently-deceased mentor who has been released into the semi-wild, and who in his flight visits each of the novel's main characters.  Chabon has never been a transparent writer, but in his previous novels his prose had the effect of carrying the reader along.  Telegraph Avenue is the first of his novels that requires a close and attentive reading, and its prose is more clotted than flowing:

as they came closer, Mr. Nostalgia saw that it really was him.  Thirty years too old, twenty pounds too light, forty watts too dim, maybe: but him.  Red tracksuit a size too small, baring his ankles and wrists.  Jacket waistband riding up in back under a screened logo in yellow, a pair of upraised fists circled by the words BRUCE LEE INSTITUTE, OAKLAND, CA.  Long and broad-shouldered, with that spring in his gait, coiling and uncoiling.  Making a show of dignity that struck Mr. Nostalgia as poignant if not successful.  Everybody staring at the guy, all the men with potbellies and back hair and doughy white faces, heads balding, autumn leaves falling in their hearts.  Looking up from the bins full of back issues of Inside Sports, the framed Terrible Towels with their bronze plaques identifying the nubbly signature in black Sharpie on yellow terry cloth as that of Rocky Bleier or Lynn Swann.  Lifting their heads from the tables ranged with rookie cards of their youthful idols (Pete Maravich, Robin Yount, Bobby Orr), with cancelled checks drawn on long-vanished bank accounts of Ted Williams or Joe Namath; unopened cello packs of '71 Topps baseball cards, their fragile black borders pristine as memory, and of '86 Fleer basketball cards, every one holding a potential rookie Jordan.  Watching this big gray-haired black man they half-remembered, a face out of their youth, get the bum's rush.  That's the dude from the signing line.  Was talking to Gibson Goode, got kind of loud.  Hey, yeah, that's what's-his-face.  Give him credit, the poor bastard managed to keep his chin up.  The chin--him, all right--with the Kirk Douglas dimple.  The light eyes.  The hands.  Jesus, like two uprooted trees.

This is by no means a bad thing, and taken as a piece of writing Telegraph Avenue is an impressive feat (though there are moments--most especially "A Bird of Rare Experience"--when one senses that Chabon is showing off, riffing for the pleasure of it rather than working to get his story where it needs to go).  But its denseness, the way it calls attention to Chabon's stylistic accomplishments, has the effect of casting the novel's characters and their setting in an otherworldly light, as if it were not enough for Chabon to have shown his readers a world that for most of them would have been entirely foreign, he also needed to somehow dress that world up, make it whimsical and amusing, in the same manner of his invented worlds, or his madcap romp version of history in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

"Here's my concern in this matter.  I know you think I am messing around in all that protest shit your partner's stirring up to annoy Chan Flowers.  Just because I maintain historically cool relations with the councilman.  And true, that is part of the reason.  But the real reason is something that's not that.  The reason, I remember when that record store used to be Eddie Spencer's.  And before that, when I first out of the army, right after the war, it was called Angelo's Barbershop, and those old Sicilian dudes used to go in, get their mustaches looked to or whatnot.  I have known Sicilians, and so I feel confident saying, your store been full of time-wasting, senseless, lying, boastful male conversation for going on sixty years, at least.  What that Abreu said the other day at that meeting, he was right.  It's an institution.  You all go out of business, I don't know.  I might have to let in some kind of new age ladies, sell yoga mats.  Everybody having 'silence days,' walking around with little signs hanging from their neck saying 'I Am Silent Today.'  I would take that as a loss."

Unlike other works, like Treme or The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, that seek to introduce a non-white community to an audience of outsiders, Telegraph Avenue doesn't quite avoid the pitfall of making its subject matter seem "colorful," and this is not merely because of Chabon's stylistic flourishes (there is no shortage of these in Oscar Wao, for example) but because the novel's attitude towards black culture often seems to slide into what can only be described as fannishness.  This is no different, of course, from how Chabon treats comic books in Kavalier and Clay--the same romanticizing, mythologizing tone with which he describes superhero comics in that novel is used in Telegraph Avenue to describe Luther Stallings's Shaft-like Strutter films--but the crucial difference is who Chabon is trying to appeal to.  If Oscar Wao is a novel that takes areas of pop culture usually associated with white people and appropriates them for Dominicans, Telegraph Avenue is a novel that seems to be trying to "sell" black culture to its non-black readers, and to do so not simply by exposing them to it (as Treme does) but by trading on that culture's implied, inherent coolness.  Jazz, blaxploitation, the Black Panthers, midwifery, even fried chicken--these are all things that Telegraph Avenue holds up as exemplars of black culture, but it does so in such a way as to stress their appeal to white people.

But then, that's something that Chabon seems very much aware of and may even be trying to stress.  The fact is that many of the characters within Telegraph Avenue who love black culture are white, and that this is something that the black characters are deeply ambivalent about.  The character who prepares fried chicken is Nat, from a recipe taught to him by his black stepmother, and he does so in order to curry favor with the neighborhood's most prominent businessman and landlord in order to garner support in his fight against Gibson Goode, a maneuver that meets with only limited success.  Archy is a connoisseur of predominantly black musical forms, but his customers are mostly rich white people.  Gwen, similarly, became a midwife not only to escape the stifling expectations of a family that has spent generations climbing the ladder of respectability, but in order to reconnect with a tradition of black midwifery, but she finds herself catering exclusively to the rich white women of Berkley, whose frou-frou birth plans and new age mysticism drive her to distraction, while black women disdain her work as "country shit."  Over the course of the novel, some of its characters attempt to reclaim black culture for black people--Gibson Goode tries to recruit Archy to run the vinyl department in his new store by promising him the opportunity to reintroduce young black people to a musical heritage that has been coopted by white America, and Luther Stallings, who was passed over for the Samuel L. Jackson role in Jackie Brown by another white lover of black culture, Quentin Tarantino (whose movies Julie and Titus are studying, discovering Luther's filmography through a class on Kill Bill), is trying to bankroll his own blaxploitation film.  But these projects are rejected by the main characters--Archy turns down Goode's job offer, and sneers at Luther's dreams of a comeback--and at the end of the novel both Archy and Gwen have rejected their inter-racial endeavors with Nat and Aviva.  Archy decides to settle down and provide for his family, and starts pursuing a real estate license.  Gwen, despite triumphing over the racist doctor and regaining her privileges at his hospital, decides that "I'm sick of having no power in this game, Aviva, and of them having it all.  Of always fighting against feeling useless.  Of how sad it makes me feel that sisters won't go to a midwife."  So she decides to go to medical school, so that "when I reach out to a black woman while she's having a baby, maybe then she's going to reach back."

And then there's this point to consider: Telegraph Avenue ends with Archy, Gwen, Titus and the new baby as a happy middle class family.  Archy and Gwen have abandoned their bohemian pursuits and buckled down to chase the American dream, complete with bourgeois professions: medicine, real estate.  Real estate.  In 2004.  In four years' time, when the bottom falls out of Archy's new field and Gwen is still accumulating student debt, that decision might not seem so wise after all.  Nat and Aviva will be fine--at the end of the novel, Nat moves the vinyl business online, selling to collectors in Japan and France, and Aviva will still have her 1% moms to cater to, but Archy and Gwen?  There's nothing in the idyll of Telegraph Avenue's final chapter to suggest that we're meant to take away anything sinister as we turn the last page, to believe that Archy and Gwen's future is anything but rosy.  Nothing except for our knowledge of history, which Chabon no doubt possesses as well.

My core problem with Telegraph Avenue is that I'm not certain what I'm supposed to take away from it--the sunny, sentimental portrait of a black neighborhood, or the dark undercurrents that seem to run beneath it, the ambivalence with which the black characters view their own culture and history and its appropriation by white people, and the uncertain future, and possible collapse into poverty, of the main characters who end the novel certain that they are taking their first steps on the path to financial stability.  Has Chabon written another fantasy world, this time based on a real place, or has he written a novel about the financial crisis?  With Chabon, it's never a bad bet to assume that sentimentality is the end-point--see, for example, Meyer Landsman's romantic act of renunciation at the end of The Yiddish Policemen's Union, after which he walks off into the sunset with his newly-reconciled wife, the financial and professional consequences of his actions left discreetly off-page.  On the other hand, there are enough hints in Telegraph Avenue to suggest that Chabon knows what kind of criticism he's left himself open to ("What do I know about being black?" is Aviva's stated policy when asked to do what Chabon has apparently done with this novel, interpret or judge the black experience), and thus, presumably, that he had some greater purpose for the exercise than mere sentimentality.  Depending on the answer to this question, Telegraph Avenue is either a successful novel whose project strikes me as reductive and potentially offensive, or a much more interesting novel that is nowhere near as successful at what it tries to do, whose barbs are muffled beneath that sense of the otherworldly produced by Chabon's stylistic excesses.  Perhaps Chabon would be better off wading back into genre, where his failures to fully face up to the messiness that underpin his fantastic worlds have less bearing on reality, and are thus easier to forgive.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides's third novel, The Marriage Plot, has what is probably one of the most perfect opening paragraphs I've ever read:

To start with, look at all the books.  There were her Edith Wharton novels, arranged not by title but date of publication; there was the complete Modern Library set of Henry James, a gift from her father on her twenty-first birthday; there were the dog-eared paperbacks assigned in her college courses, a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen , George Eliot, and the redoubtable Brontë sisters.  There was a whole lot of black-and-white New Directions paperbacks, mostly poetry by people like H.D. or Denise Levertov.  There were the Colette novels she read on the sly.  There was the first edition of Couples, belonging to her mother, which Madeleine had surreptitiously dipped into back in sixth grade and which she was using now to provide textual support in her English honors thesis on the marriage plot.  There was, in short, this mid-sized but still portable library representing pretty much everything Madeleine had read in college, a collection of texts, seemingly chosen at random, whose focus slowly narrowed, like a personality test, a sophisticated one you couldn't trick by anticipating the implications of its questions and finally got so lost that your only recourse was to answer the simple truth.  And then you waited for the result, hoping for "Artistic" or "Passionate," thinking you could live with "Sensitive," secretly fearing "Narcissistic" and "Domestic," but finally being presented with an outcome that cut both ways and made you feel different depending on the day, the hour, or the guy you happened to be dating: "Incurably Romantic."

It's not just that this is an extremely well-written paragraph, engaging and compelling despite being, essentially, a list, nor that it sets up the novel's heroine (Madeleine), her personality (incurably romantic and ambivalent about this fact), her situation (college student), and the novel's preoccupations (books and romance) in a few short sentences.  What's remarkable about this paragraph is how quickly and effectively it establishes The Marriage Plot as a novel for and about bibliophiles, even as it sets about making them feel welcome.  It's a paragraph that captures the special relationship book-lovers have with their books--the way that some books have special significance because of the person who gave them to us, or the time of our life in which we discovered them, or for being a particularly handsome edition, or a guilty pleasure amidst a lot of required reading--and not only affirms the book-lover's conviction that the books we read are a meaningful reflection of our personality, but does so by using the books she reads to reflect its heroine's personality, even stressing that it has started with this personality test rather than any other introduction.  And it's a paragraph that recognizes that next to reading itself, one of the chief pleasures of being a bibliophile is scanning other people's bookshelves.  This is a novel, Eugenides seems to be telling us with his opening paragraph, in which we can do both at the same time.

Coming nearly a decade after Eugenides's previous novel, the Pulitzer-winning Middlesex, The Marriage Plot is, despite its long gestation, a less expansive, less freewheeling work than its predecessor.  It is, nevertheless, an effortlessly readable novel, and one that bears out the promise of its opening sentences by being about books, reading, and how our preferences in both define us and reflect out personalities.  As more and more characters are introduced by their reading preferences, however, the niggling suspicion aroused by the novel's opening solidifies into a genuine concern--that is an awfully old-fashioned library.  Even taking into account Madeleine's scholarly preoccupations, or her incurable romanticism, the absence of any contemporary literature from her bookshelves (even Updike's Coupling is only there for reference) is jarring.  Nor is Madeleine unique.  The novel takes place in 1982 (something we wouldn't have been able to guess from our perusal of Madeleine's library), and yet the still-prominent great white men of American letters--Updike, Roth, Bellow, Mailer--rate only brief and rare mentions; the talked-about books of the day--this is a period in which authors like J.M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, Kingsley Amis, John Irving, and Ian McEwan were either kicking their careers off or in their prime--go unread by the novel's characters; genre fiction of any kind is entirely absent.  If we were to take the fiction read by The Marriage Plot's characters (which is, admittedly, the smaller part of their reading; most of the characters read primarily nonfiction) as a guide, we would have to conclude that Western literature had stopped somewhere around the 1920s.

That this is in service of a scheme would be obvious even without the hint of the novel's title, but Eugenides makes his project clear when he explains why Madeleine's particular interest, the marriage plot--in which social realism is filtered through or reflected in a character's (usually a woman) search for a good mate--is an endangered, possibly extinct species.

In Saunders's opinion, the novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had never recovered from its disappearance.  In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write about.  The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage.  Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel.  And divorce had undone it completely.  What would it matter when Emma married if she could file for separation later?  How would Isabel Archer's marriage to Gilbert Osmond have been affected by the existence of a prenup?  As far as Saunders was concerned, marriage didn't mean much anymore, and neither did the novel.  Where could you find the marriage plot nowadays?  You couldn't.  You had to read historical fiction.  You had to read non-Western novels involving traditional societies.  Afghani novels, Indian novels.  You had to go, literarily speaking, back in time. 

Eugenides, then, is writing a novel that is both an attempt to port the marriage plot into modernity, and a story about a lover of marriage plots trying to justify her predilections in the face of a hostile literary scene.  He therefore furnishes Madeleine not only with a pair of suitors--brilliant, manic-depressive science major Leonard, with whom she falls madly in love, and aimless spiritual seeker Mitchell, who is convinced that Madeleine is destined to be his wife but whom she thinks of only as a friend--but with a challenge to her literary sensibilities in the form of the burgeoning field of semiotics, which holds that texts are significant not as stories, with characters, themes, and morals, but as sets of culturally determined symbols.  Eugenides does a good line in poking catty fun at the professor and students in Madeleine's Semiology 201 seminar, painting the latter as black-clad, sickly hipsters amongst whom "Madeleine's natural healthiness seemed suspect, like a vote for Reagan," and concluding of the former "Semiotics was the form [Professor] Zipperstein's midlife crisis had taken.  Becoming a semiotician allowed Zipperstein to wear a leather jacket, to fly off to Douglas Sirk retrospectives in Vancouver, and to get all the sexy waifs in his class."  But underlying this is a genuine animosity that takes semiotics as anti-literature--quite literally, as when Madeleine theorizes that "most semiotic theorists had been unpopular as children, often bullied or overlooked, and so had directed their lingering rage onto literature."  When the star pupil in Madeleine's semiotics seminar states that "Books aren't about 'real life.'  Books are about books ... how do you write about something, even something real and painful--like suicide--when all the writing that's been done on that subject has robbed you of any originality of expression?" Madeleine's response is that this is "both significant and horribly wrong.  It was maybe true, what he said, but it shouldn't have been."

This overwrought positioning of the novel's heroine as the champion of story and character against the forces of plotless, emotionless postmodernism put me in mind of Lev Grossman's 2009 screed in the Wall Street Journal, calling for a resurgence of plot in contemporary fiction.  Which turned out to be apt, since The Marriage Plot bears quite a few similarities to the novel in which Grossman tried to put his article's ideas into practice, The Magicians.  Both are college novels.  Both center around passive, whiny protagonists whom the readers are expected to sympathize with and even pity.  Both are novels about a certain subgenre of literature--portal-quest fantasy in The Magicians, marriage plot novels in The Marriage Plot--and both play the same metafictional game, in which the story's hero is a fan of this genre, who both accepts, albeit grudgingly, that they could never live within their favorite kind of story, and finds themselves doing just that, allegedly complicated to reflect reality and modernity.  So it was probably inevitable that I should dislike The Marriage Plot, which suffers from the same core flaw as The Magicians, an aggravatingly smug cluelessness about its own genre.

The fact is, Eugenides's argument doesn't hold water.  The marriage plot is certainly no longer as dominant as it was in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but it is by no means extinct.  In novels like Dorothy L. Sayers's Gaudy Night, A.S. Byatt's Possession, Norman Rush's Mating, and Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector, modern novelists not only port the marriage plot into the present but use it to examine the very issues that, according to Madeleine's professor, render it inert--why marriage?  What form should marriage take?  Is it possible, especially for women, to be married and yet remain themselves and maintain their autonomy, emotional and economic?  (I've deliberately left pure historical fiction off this list out of fear of veering into pastiche, but there's an argument to be made for including Sarah Waters's Tipping the Velvet--the marriage plot for lesbians--and John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman--the anti-marriage plot.  When discussing this review with a friend, she pointed out that social realism doesn't have to refer to an existing, present-day society, and suggested Lois McMaster Bujold's A Civil Campaign.)  None of these are books that The Marriage Plot's characters are familiar with (in fairness, only the Sayers was published before 1982, but my list can hardly be exhaustive, and anyway it was Eugenides's choice to set the novel in that year), which seems, as it was in The Magicians, like a deliberate choice that leaves Eugenides a clean slate on which to craft his own version of the modern marriage plot, but only serves to highlight how paltry and limited his version of such a beast is in comparison to the works he has wished out of existence.  Where Sayers, Rush and the others joyfully break free of the marriage plot's conventions, both social and literary, Eugenides remains boxed in by both.  For all his pretensions to revolution, what he's produced is little more than a highbrow Twilight, whose plot is defanged, and whose characters are dehumanized, by the too-obvious shape of the story he's chosen.

The story is a fairly simple one.  There is a heroine, the wrong man she falls in love with and marries, and the right man who suffers as he waits in the wings for her to notice him.  Though Eugenides is obviously trying to complicate these character types, he doesn't do enough to get around the fact that our knowledge of the three leads' roles informs, affects, and finally clashes with our emotional reactions to them.  To start with, look at our heroine.  As appealing as it is that Madeleine is characterized first and foremost through her reading preferences, as the novel draws on it becomes clear that being a reader is her only personality trait, and that despite graduating from an Ivy League school and spending four years away from home, Madeleine's personality is still largely unformed.  She's childish and spoiled, still willing to be infantilized (and supported) by her parents, and a lot of her behavior seems calculated to inoculate herself from anything that might be difficult or challenging.  That's not a bad starting point for a character, even a heroine, but Eugenides never quite manages to develop Madeleine the way the heroine of a marriage plot novel ought to be.  Her story isn't about becoming more mature or indeed any sort of personal growth, but about falling in love.  And even that isn't rendered convincingly--her passion for Leonard, who even before his illness becomes apparent is chilly and emotionally withholding, is never very persuasive, and within her romantic attachments Madeleine remains passive and unobservant.  When Leonard, despondent over the crippling intellectual and physical side effects of his mood-stabilizing medication, secretly stops taking his pills, Madeleine notices only that he's lost weight and regained his lust for life (and for her).

The marriage plot is unique in the canon of Western literature in being a form that is predominantly about women, and Eugenides doesn't hesitate to use this fact as yet another cudgel against semiotics, drawing a stark comparison between the latter's misogyny (Madeleine's first encounter with semiotics, through her roommate's boyfriend, ends when "Madeleine said she was going to make coffee.  Whitney asked if she would make him some, too") and the former's feminism, as when Madeleine attends a conference on Victorian literature and not only makes two female friends but rubs elbows with such luminaries of feminist criticism as Terry Castle and the authors of The Madwoman in the Attic.  This would be a simplistic contrast even if Eugenides's modern take on the marriage plot did not so thoroughly sideline his heroine, but he undermines it even further with the character of Mitchell.  Mitchell's Greek surname and his upbringing in the Detroit suburbs mark him out as a stand in for Eugenides himself, which makes his positioning as the right man to Leonard's wrong one somewhat dubious, but the more we learn about Mitchell, the less he seems like anyone's idea of a Mr. Darcy.  There might be something sympathetic in Mithell's desperate spiritual seeking--he's one of those people who find the idea of faith very seductive but can't manage to feel it, and in keeping with the novel's bibliophile preoccupations, he's introduced trying to force belief in God by reciting Franny Glass's Jesus mantra from Franny and Zooey--but his journey takes a predictably narcissistic form.  Volunteering in Mother Teresa's indigent hospital in Calcutta (as Eugenides did after graduating from college), Mitchell recoils from the patients and the messy work of tending to them.  The fact that he recognizes how unsympathetic it is for a privileged white Westerner to feel sorry for himself for not being willing to touch people who are dying in squalor doesn't make Mitchell's angst over this fact any more appealing--or any less familiar from a thousand other stories featuring just this type of character.

But the crowning glory of Mitchell's awfulness is, undeniably, the fact that he is a Nice Guy par excellence.  It's hard to know what the worst example of Mitchell's poisonous attitude towards women is.  Is it the way that his every interaction with them is filtered through his self-pity over the fact that so many of them don't want to sleep with him?  How he alternately cozies up to Madeleine and lashes out at her--usually in ways that infantilize her or belittle her intelligence--when she makes it clear that she doesn't want to be more than friends?  The fact that, when Madeleine, having finally had enough, informs Mitchell in a letter that she wants nothing more to do with him, his response is that "Madeleine had been putting Mitchell off for so long that her refusals were like boilerplate that his eyes skimmed over, looking for possible loopholes or buried clauses of real significance"?  The way he mansplains to his roommate's girlfriend when she makes the--one would think, entirely indisputable--observation that the Abrahamic religions are steeped in patriarchy, which leads to a heated argument that comes to an abrupt end when Mitchell "jokingly" asks whether she's on her period?  My favorite would have to be the scene in which Mitchell hears from his recently out friend Larry about Larry's disastrous relationship with a Greek named Iannis--"Almost immediately, he'd begun asking Larry how much money his family had ... If they went to a gay bar, Iannis became insanely jealous if Larry so much as looked at another guy.  The rest of the time he wouldn't let Larry touch him for fear people would learn their secret.  He started calling Larry a "faggot," acting as if he, Iannis, were straight and only experimenting."  That Iannis caters so blatantly to the homophobic stereotype of the foreign gigolo is a problem in its own right, but what strikes me is that Mitchell's response to Larry's litany is that "It was comforting to learn that homosexual relationships were just as screwed up as straight ones."  In other words, upon hearing that his friend was entangled with a borderline abusive fortune hunter, Mitchell's response is that this is just like being with a woman.  As unimpressive as Madeleine is, the idea that Mitchell might be her--or any woman's--true love is so terrifying that it makes the experience of reading those chapters The Marriage Plot that concern him almost like a horror novel.

But the greatest impediment to enjoying The Marriage Plot as a marriage plot story is the fact that Leonard, the story's alleged wrong man, is the most sympathetic and interesting character in the novel.  It is, to begin with, enormously problematic that the reason for Leonard's unsuitability as a mate is the fact that he is mentally ill.  The chapters told from Leonard's point of view, detailing his struggles with the side effects of his drugs, and his growing despondence over the conviction that under the drugs' influence everything he's wanted from life--his scientific career, his relationship with Madeleine--is permanently outside his reach, are heartbreaking.  That the relationship between Madeleine and Leonard is doomed, and damaging to both of them, is obvious shortly into the novel--Madeleine is too young and too inexperienced to cope with Leonard's illness and his needs, and far from helping him, her frustrations goad him into taking risks with his drug regimen in order to be the man she fell in love with.  But by telling the story of this relationship within the form of a marriage plot and casting Leonard as the wrong man, Eugenides encourages us to read his manic-depression not as a tragic affliction, but as a moral failing.  He even seems aware of this, hanging a lantern on the problem by having Madeleine accuse her disapproving mother of just the same flaw that afflicts his novel, but this does not get around the core problem, which is that Leonard, in order to play his part in the story he's been cast in, needs to be gotten rid of.  In a classic marriage plot novel--such as The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, of which The Marriage Plot is strongly reminiscent--this is achieved through death, and the prospect of that death hangs constantly over the novel in the form of Leonard's increasing hopelessness over his situation, and his psychiatrists' repeated warnings that manic-depressives are prone to suicide.  Not helping matters is the fact that many reviewers have taken Leonard as a stand in for David Foster Wallace (Eugenides has disputed this reading), who also suffered from mental illness and did kill himself in 2008.  Leonard's death would therefore not only complete the real life parallel but act as yet another blow against semiotics, Wallace having been a famous standard-bearer for postmodernism.  In other words, Eugenides has written a novel in which the suicide of the most sympathetic and pitiable character is painted as a necessity of plot--and a rebuke to the semiotician star pupil's claim that even suicide can no longer be written about originally--calling so much attention to the fact of that necessity that we could never be expected to accept that suicide as organic to the story or characters.

In fairness to Eugenides, he's clearly aware of everything I've written here--of Madeleine's passivity, Mitchell's misogyny, and Leonard's mingled appeal and artificiality.  He's quite clearly crafted each of his characters deliberately in order to buck against their assigned role in the story.  The problem is that, as it turns out, dismantling the marriage plot and its characters doesn't result in a clever, thought-provoking exercise--or, at least, not as Eugenides has done it.  It just leaves you with a muddled, unsatisfying mess, neither a touching realist novel about the struggles of a young couple with the husband's mental illness, nor a mannered romance about the finding and getting of husbands, but some halfway concoction that doesn't scratch any sort of literary itch.  As if desperate to pull a rabbit out of a hat and prove that the whole exercise had a point, Eugenides ends the novel with a string of reversals.  Leonard does not, in fact, kill himself, but he does leave Madeleine for her own good.  Mitchell rushes to her side, but the two aren't united in romantic bliss.  Instead, Mitchell finally lets go of his dream of being with Madeleine, and signals this by asking her whether there is

any novel where the heroine gets married to the wrong guy and then realizes it, and then the other suitor shows up, some guy who's always been in love with her, and then they get together, but finally the second suitor realizes that the last thing the woman needs is to get married again, that she's got more important things to do with her life?  And so finally the guy doesn't propose at all, even though he still loves her?  Is there any book that ends like that?

The answer Eugenides wants us to give is obviously "well, there is one now," thus cementing his claim to fame as having modernized the marriage plot and been a great feminist while doing so.  But once again, this just doesn't hold water.  Is a last-minute display of menschliness in the book's final pages really supposed to make up for 400 pages of Mitchell's misogyny?  And what about Madeleine, who ends the novel as passive as she started it, her happy ending achieved not through any of her own choices but through the love and selflessness of her two suitors, who make decisions on her behalf?  Leonard, meanwhile, isn't even present for this ending, and as if realizing that his happy ending is hollow without a satisfying conclusion for Leonard--a conclusion that, as he's constructed the character and his predicament, is highly unlikely--Eugenides does the equivalent of telling us not to worry, everything will be fine, when he has Mitchell--who has met Leonard all of once--muse that "It was possible that he might recover from his depression; in fact, given time, it was more than likely."  Far from cleverly justifying the novel's perceived flaws, then, The Marriage Plot's ending only compounds them, and the sense that Eugenides has bitten off more than he can chew.  In patting himself on the back for the revolutionary spin he's put on the form, Eugenides only sheds a harsher light on the paltriness of his vision and achievement.  For me, the effect of his exercise has been to send me back to the cleverer, more resonant authors who have done far better work with the marriage plot, as a reminder that, despite the hash that Eugenides has made of it, it is still a relevant, vibrant form.