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Reading Roundup, March 2025
Mar. 30th, 2025 03:16 pmTwo books up this month.
Changing Places by David Lodge
I got this recommendation from an article in The Chronicle of Higher Ed, and in true Baader-Meinhof fashion, have since seen it mentioned another handful of times. This is a campus novel about two academics, one British and one American, completing an exchange semester at the other’s university during the sunset of the 1960s. It’s a highly referential novel—both of these characters, and the author, were English professors—and would reward a reader who is deeply situated in classic British literary references and tropes of novelistic structure/form.
It was a good novel but not an enjoyable one. I struggled particularly with the sexism in the story. Both of the professors were at midlife crisis points in their careers and marriages: one’s wife is demanding a divorce which prompts him to accept the exchange, and the other’s lack of career (and thus financial) success is straining his ability to be present for his wife and three children. This is a premise which I expect to deal with gender, especially roles within a marriage/household, and I’m not sensitive to the mere fact of sexism. But in this book I struggled to determine where the characters’ sexism ended—not all of it felt like commentary, and I think that the combination of intentional commentary and unintentional (?) bias made all of it feel intolerable. I guess that the short explanation is that this felt like a book written by a man who thinks that sleeping with students is caddish at worst.
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
This was my book club book for Spring 2025. It’s my first piece of sensation fiction—and now I understand the name! The book is a thrilling tale of a young woman who, through a bad marriage, loses both money and identity. It follows the subsequent quest to try and regain them for her. It contains classic tropes like mysterious parentage, an inheritance plot, women wrongfully committed to asylums, identity switch-ups, dastardly foreigners, and more. In 250k words, there is certainly room for all of that! And all the excitement makes the book a snappy read, despite the length.
Unfortunately, this also somewhat decided me on my future with sensation fiction. I would read another novel with a discussion group, but not on my own. I found it challenging to feel a meaningful connection to the characters (positive or negative) as the plot around them was all-consuming. Now that I’ve got those answers, I’ve no interest in continuing to dwell on the characters’ lives or experiences. My favorite two were definitely Marian Holcombe, half-sister of the female romantic lead, and Count Fosco, a villainous Italian with a mysterious background.
Of all it covers, the book has the most interesting things to say about the role of women in English society at that time. Not all great things to say, mind, but the author’s training as a lawyer leads to more care and attention towards the legal complications of the central female character’s situation than one might get from a less-informed writer. There will be a sequence of high melodrama, and then grounding conversations which remind us of what would actually be required to reverse some new horrible circumstance. I do recommend it in that vein—there’s much to consider about why it would be possible for our villains to engineer the disadvantages that they do, above and beyond the usual questions around motives.
But this is paired with the unskippable narration of Marian, a female character forced to embody the “contradictory” (to Collins) roles of proactive agent and, uh, womanhood. At every daring action, she bemoans some womanly quality of weakness in herself—whether or not she’s actually demonstrating it!—and other characters are constantly praising or demeaning her for how well she does or does not fit feminine ideals. Her treatment is complex and the plot could not exist in this form without her; I don’t mean to suggest that her writing is flat or that her creation deserves scorn. Rather, Marian is an example of some of the characteristic difficulties in the handling of proto-feminist characters in books of this period, and the unique decisions in this portrayal make her essentially unpalatable to me. Which is a shame, as she’s one of the two main narrators of the piece, and the other is the dreary male romantic lead who is best when playing investigator and not character.
Overall, I am always glad for having taken part in these discussion groups, but of the Victorian bricks that I’ve now read, my preference remains in Middlemarch.
Changing Places by David Lodge
I got this recommendation from an article in The Chronicle of Higher Ed, and in true Baader-Meinhof fashion, have since seen it mentioned another handful of times. This is a campus novel about two academics, one British and one American, completing an exchange semester at the other’s university during the sunset of the 1960s. It’s a highly referential novel—both of these characters, and the author, were English professors—and would reward a reader who is deeply situated in classic British literary references and tropes of novelistic structure/form.
It was a good novel but not an enjoyable one. I struggled particularly with the sexism in the story. Both of the professors were at midlife crisis points in their careers and marriages: one’s wife is demanding a divorce which prompts him to accept the exchange, and the other’s lack of career (and thus financial) success is straining his ability to be present for his wife and three children. This is a premise which I expect to deal with gender, especially roles within a marriage/household, and I’m not sensitive to the mere fact of sexism. But in this book I struggled to determine where the characters’ sexism ended—not all of it felt like commentary, and I think that the combination of intentional commentary and unintentional (?) bias made all of it feel intolerable. I guess that the short explanation is that this felt like a book written by a man who thinks that sleeping with students is caddish at worst.
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
This was my book club book for Spring 2025. It’s my first piece of sensation fiction—and now I understand the name! The book is a thrilling tale of a young woman who, through a bad marriage, loses both money and identity. It follows the subsequent quest to try and regain them for her. It contains classic tropes like mysterious parentage, an inheritance plot, women wrongfully committed to asylums, identity switch-ups, dastardly foreigners, and more. In 250k words, there is certainly room for all of that! And all the excitement makes the book a snappy read, despite the length.
Unfortunately, this also somewhat decided me on my future with sensation fiction. I would read another novel with a discussion group, but not on my own. I found it challenging to feel a meaningful connection to the characters (positive or negative) as the plot around them was all-consuming. Now that I’ve got those answers, I’ve no interest in continuing to dwell on the characters’ lives or experiences. My favorite two were definitely Marian Holcombe, half-sister of the female romantic lead, and Count Fosco, a villainous Italian with a mysterious background.
Of all it covers, the book has the most interesting things to say about the role of women in English society at that time. Not all great things to say, mind, but the author’s training as a lawyer leads to more care and attention towards the legal complications of the central female character’s situation than one might get from a less-informed writer. There will be a sequence of high melodrama, and then grounding conversations which remind us of what would actually be required to reverse some new horrible circumstance. I do recommend it in that vein—there’s much to consider about why it would be possible for our villains to engineer the disadvantages that they do, above and beyond the usual questions around motives.
But this is paired with the unskippable narration of Marian, a female character forced to embody the “contradictory” (to Collins) roles of proactive agent and, uh, womanhood. At every daring action, she bemoans some womanly quality of weakness in herself—whether or not she’s actually demonstrating it!—and other characters are constantly praising or demeaning her for how well she does or does not fit feminine ideals. Her treatment is complex and the plot could not exist in this form without her; I don’t mean to suggest that her writing is flat or that her creation deserves scorn. Rather, Marian is an example of some of the characteristic difficulties in the handling of proto-feminist characters in books of this period, and the unique decisions in this portrayal make her essentially unpalatable to me. Which is a shame, as she’s one of the two main narrators of the piece, and the other is the dreary male romantic lead who is best when playing investigator and not character.
Overall, I am always glad for having taken part in these discussion groups, but of the Victorian bricks that I’ve now read, my preference remains in Middlemarch.
