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Reading Roundup, December 2023
Dec. 26th, 2023 04:47 pmI hope you’re having a good week in the lead up to the end of the year! I’m hosting, so my real break comes in January, which means it’s a good time for tying the bow on my reading progress (and not setting any more goals until I’m quite free of guests).
Eric, or, Little by Little by F. W. Farrar
What a book! This is by far the most sensationalist of the school novels I’ve read, including multiple deaths, perilous rescues, and a last-minute diversion to a sea adventure, in addition to the more traditional elements of lying, drinking, cribbing, and smoking. Actually, I was surprised by the fervency with which Farrar denounces smoking, and it made me curious about the cultural perception of smoking and healthfulness in the Victorian era. There’s a book on it, apparently!
As for the preachiness—wow is this preachy. Many of the chapters end in what could be a sermon about the moral lesson of the chapter, which is not something I’ve encountered before. Most other novels recognized their primary role as being entertainment. This one did not. I think that my verdict would be to say The Hill is sanctimonious and Eric is preachy. It’s not enjoyable, but also easily skimmable as these sections are so divorced from the actual events of the story.
But I really must discuss the sensationalism because I was not prepared for there to be a death in the middle of the novel! The first half of the book revolves mostly around Eric’s relationship with his best friend, Edwin Russell, who is a good all-around boy but is especially kind and pious (thought not in a grating way; Farrar only puts some of his sermons into the mouth of Russell). His presence is a beacon for Eric, but that’s also a curse, and Eric drifts from their friendship in shame when he knows he’s done something bad. It all seems to be on the mend again when they get stranded on an outcropping of rock by a high tide and Edwin, in attempting to jump to shore and safety, is injured—Eric stays with him for the night, out in the elements, but Edwin’s leg must be amputated (!!) and he soon after dies (!!!!).
The second half of the book is a downward spiral with few moments of brightness. By the end of it, Eric’s little brother has died, his mother has died, and Eric has run away from his school, been abused at sea as the cabin boy of a ship, and returned to his aunt’s house to die. Through death, redemption—in his final weeks, he’s told that his name was cleared of a misattributed wrongdoing, so he can go in peace. Everyone who takes to the sickbed in this story seems to hang around exactly long enough to have necessary conversations before they expire. It’s very convenient.
I think what’s most interesting to me is that I can see the bones of what became the boarding school novel formula in this book, which I’m pretty sure is one of the early popular examples (along with Tom Brown, which I haven’t read). So it’s yet more interesting to me to ask what didn’t come along to later examples, and those seem to be the dramatic deaths, the sermon-like passages, and the massive changes in the cast of characters throughout the story. (Because you’ve killed or written off the earlier cast, Farrar!)
On that last note, I think that Eric has plenty of potential shipping partners, including his own little brother. Russell, the best friend, of course; Upton, a senior boy who he admires (and who leads him to some vices); Wildney, a junior boy who he later takes into his care. Four! But one of the reasons that certain boarding school novels enjoy such success as slashy ship fodder is that they feature a central relationship for the whole of their word count, showing boys growing from acquaintances at 12 to love declarations at 18 (or acquaintances to friends to enemies, as it sometimes is). The relationships in this are varied, which makes for an interesting bunch, but also scattered, in that I often found myself annoyed or surprised by how much page time some new boy suddenly occupied. Farrar did not much believe in the slow build. And while I think one leaves Eric with a strong sense of Eric, I would add this to the story’s weaknesses, that its secondary characters are somewhat underbaked.
The Monster of Elendhaven by Jennifer Giesbrecht
I did not finish this at a third of the way through, but I had a thought about it when discussing why with some friends. This horror/fantasy novella was recommended to me on the strength of the main relationship. I didn’t end up finding that especially compelling, but the reason that I quit was the prose—despite being an original fantasy setting, I felt as though I had no sense of place. A name, of course (it’s in the title), and a cultural basis (the names are mostly German), and perhaps a time period (19th c.? they talk about trains). What did the town look like, though? What was the texture of the people, what did they eat and drink, what did their arts look like, what is their understanding of an average and an exceptional life? I couldn’t tell you anything about the landscape. I couldn’t give you a summary of colors, or smells, or sounds.
But the prose was praised in some recommendations and so I sat with that. There are metaphors in the text, lots of them, and they’re nearly all metaphors about feelings or behaviors—he smiled like X, he felt like X. The prose’s attention is all caught up in adding depth and mood to its main characters’ behavior but hasn’t placed them in a context for me to care about their behavior, and it feels like a shortcut. I sometimes see comments about the fanfic-to-profic pipeline and how it leads to professional writing being like fic. I don’t feel qualified to generalize on that as most of my professionally published reading material predates fanfiction as a modern concept, but this absolutely hit me in the “feels like fic” way. It came on as though I shouldn’t much care about things beyond the mystery and tension of the relationship between the two MCs, and by a third of the way through a story, I really wanted those elements to have grounding in a larger world.
Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett
This is a reread for me. Pond is a book I often list as one of my favorites because it so thoroughly consumed me when I read it during its release, and I wanted to revisit to see how that held up. I still really love it! It’s such an intensely rewarding book to read, both because the language is worth examining at the sentence level and because the broader scope is so well-crafted.
This is a collection of loosely-connected short stories told primarily in the first person by a nameless narrator who lives in rural Ireland. They hint at specific narratives—family strife, past romances, strange friendships—but do not fulfill any of those narratives, leaving most ideas which are usually the center of a story to exist vaguely at the fringes. Meanwhile, the minutiae of the narrator’s daily life are examined in exacting detail in a stream-of-consciousness style. Only on this reread did I realize that there is not a single dialogue quotation in the entire book: while the narrator will tell us that someone said this or that, these are recounted more like she is chatting with us and relaying the details of a conversation already over. It’s a wonderful effect, like we’re perhaps sitting with her in her cottage as she rummages around for a cartridge of fountain pen ink and tells us what went down at the party she hosted last night. It’s similar to some of what Judith Hermann does in Summer House, Later.
Looking back, the influence on my love of the mundane remains obvious. I’d forgotten how essential first-person narration was, though, and now that I’ve written a lot of it myself, I appreciate the particular effect it has in this collection. The narration is both achingly intimate and extremely constructed. I don’t feel manipulated by the narrator—she’s not Humbert Humbert—but I feel very aware that she’s evaluating how she comes across ahead of sharing her stories. And Bennett is so skillful that you get a layered sense of this, some distinction between the types of self-myths that are so old they come out automatically and the kinds of invention which occur spontaneously at the moment of telling.
It remains a very very good little book, in sum. Bennett has since released a full-length novel that I’ll read in 2024. I’m curious how her writing translates to something that’s more consciously attempting to construct a consistent story.
Eric, or, Little by Little by F. W. Farrar
What a book! This is by far the most sensationalist of the school novels I’ve read, including multiple deaths, perilous rescues, and a last-minute diversion to a sea adventure, in addition to the more traditional elements of lying, drinking, cribbing, and smoking. Actually, I was surprised by the fervency with which Farrar denounces smoking, and it made me curious about the cultural perception of smoking and healthfulness in the Victorian era. There’s a book on it, apparently!
As for the preachiness—wow is this preachy. Many of the chapters end in what could be a sermon about the moral lesson of the chapter, which is not something I’ve encountered before. Most other novels recognized their primary role as being entertainment. This one did not. I think that my verdict would be to say The Hill is sanctimonious and Eric is preachy. It’s not enjoyable, but also easily skimmable as these sections are so divorced from the actual events of the story.
More on Eric
Eric, our protagonist, is in the model of the schoolboy who falls into dissolution. The first half of the novel sees him starting at school as first a day-student and then a full boarder, which is an interesting choice, as I think I’ve only ever read stories of full-time boarders before this. The progression mirrors his descent into bad behavior as he draws further away from the influence of his family (his father is briefly on leave from a station in India, and so when Eric becomes a boarder, he is very distant from his parents). His dissolution is fairly mild (drinking, smoking, masturbation?, victim of extortion) but receives the most morally severe treatment that I’ve yet read. I compare this to something like Burrage’s Esme, where these same vices are the subject of comedy in the novel, or how Frank Maddox internalizes his sin of masturbation but the narrative never quotes scripture about it, or Loman in Fifth Form whose failures are very very similar but whose guilt feels very relatable and more appropriate to his context. The Muscular Christianity at play here takes on a massive role in shaping the treatment of each character, and that certainly is most similar to The Hill.But I really must discuss the sensationalism because I was not prepared for there to be a death in the middle of the novel! The first half of the book revolves mostly around Eric’s relationship with his best friend, Edwin Russell, who is a good all-around boy but is especially kind and pious (thought not in a grating way; Farrar only puts some of his sermons into the mouth of Russell). His presence is a beacon for Eric, but that’s also a curse, and Eric drifts from their friendship in shame when he knows he’s done something bad. It all seems to be on the mend again when they get stranded on an outcropping of rock by a high tide and Edwin, in attempting to jump to shore and safety, is injured—Eric stays with him for the night, out in the elements, but Edwin’s leg must be amputated (!!) and he soon after dies (!!!!).
The second half of the book is a downward spiral with few moments of brightness. By the end of it, Eric’s little brother has died, his mother has died, and Eric has run away from his school, been abused at sea as the cabin boy of a ship, and returned to his aunt’s house to die. Through death, redemption—in his final weeks, he’s told that his name was cleared of a misattributed wrongdoing, so he can go in peace. Everyone who takes to the sickbed in this story seems to hang around exactly long enough to have necessary conversations before they expire. It’s very convenient.
I think what’s most interesting to me is that I can see the bones of what became the boarding school novel formula in this book, which I’m pretty sure is one of the early popular examples (along with Tom Brown, which I haven’t read). So it’s yet more interesting to me to ask what didn’t come along to later examples, and those seem to be the dramatic deaths, the sermon-like passages, and the massive changes in the cast of characters throughout the story. (Because you’ve killed or written off the earlier cast, Farrar!)
On that last note, I think that Eric has plenty of potential shipping partners, including his own little brother. Russell, the best friend, of course; Upton, a senior boy who he admires (and who leads him to some vices); Wildney, a junior boy who he later takes into his care. Four! But one of the reasons that certain boarding school novels enjoy such success as slashy ship fodder is that they feature a central relationship for the whole of their word count, showing boys growing from acquaintances at 12 to love declarations at 18 (or acquaintances to friends to enemies, as it sometimes is). The relationships in this are varied, which makes for an interesting bunch, but also scattered, in that I often found myself annoyed or surprised by how much page time some new boy suddenly occupied. Farrar did not much believe in the slow build. And while I think one leaves Eric with a strong sense of Eric, I would add this to the story’s weaknesses, that its secondary characters are somewhat underbaked.
The Monster of Elendhaven by Jennifer Giesbrecht
I did not finish this at a third of the way through, but I had a thought about it when discussing why with some friends. This horror/fantasy novella was recommended to me on the strength of the main relationship. I didn’t end up finding that especially compelling, but the reason that I quit was the prose—despite being an original fantasy setting, I felt as though I had no sense of place. A name, of course (it’s in the title), and a cultural basis (the names are mostly German), and perhaps a time period (19th c.? they talk about trains). What did the town look like, though? What was the texture of the people, what did they eat and drink, what did their arts look like, what is their understanding of an average and an exceptional life? I couldn’t tell you anything about the landscape. I couldn’t give you a summary of colors, or smells, or sounds.
But the prose was praised in some recommendations and so I sat with that. There are metaphors in the text, lots of them, and they’re nearly all metaphors about feelings or behaviors—he smiled like X, he felt like X. The prose’s attention is all caught up in adding depth and mood to its main characters’ behavior but hasn’t placed them in a context for me to care about their behavior, and it feels like a shortcut. I sometimes see comments about the fanfic-to-profic pipeline and how it leads to professional writing being like fic. I don’t feel qualified to generalize on that as most of my professionally published reading material predates fanfiction as a modern concept, but this absolutely hit me in the “feels like fic” way. It came on as though I shouldn’t much care about things beyond the mystery and tension of the relationship between the two MCs, and by a third of the way through a story, I really wanted those elements to have grounding in a larger world.
Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett
This is a reread for me. Pond is a book I often list as one of my favorites because it so thoroughly consumed me when I read it during its release, and I wanted to revisit to see how that held up. I still really love it! It’s such an intensely rewarding book to read, both because the language is worth examining at the sentence level and because the broader scope is so well-crafted.
This is a collection of loosely-connected short stories told primarily in the first person by a nameless narrator who lives in rural Ireland. They hint at specific narratives—family strife, past romances, strange friendships—but do not fulfill any of those narratives, leaving most ideas which are usually the center of a story to exist vaguely at the fringes. Meanwhile, the minutiae of the narrator’s daily life are examined in exacting detail in a stream-of-consciousness style. Only on this reread did I realize that there is not a single dialogue quotation in the entire book: while the narrator will tell us that someone said this or that, these are recounted more like she is chatting with us and relaying the details of a conversation already over. It’s a wonderful effect, like we’re perhaps sitting with her in her cottage as she rummages around for a cartridge of fountain pen ink and tells us what went down at the party she hosted last night. It’s similar to some of what Judith Hermann does in Summer House, Later.
Looking back, the influence on my love of the mundane remains obvious. I’d forgotten how essential first-person narration was, though, and now that I’ve written a lot of it myself, I appreciate the particular effect it has in this collection. The narration is both achingly intimate and extremely constructed. I don’t feel manipulated by the narrator—she’s not Humbert Humbert—but I feel very aware that she’s evaluating how she comes across ahead of sharing her stories. And Bennett is so skillful that you get a layered sense of this, some distinction between the types of self-myths that are so old they come out automatically and the kinds of invention which occur spontaneously at the moment of telling.
It remains a very very good little book, in sum. Bennett has since released a full-length novel that I’ll read in 2024. I’m curious how her writing translates to something that’s more consciously attempting to construct a consistent story.
