On Moral Fiction

Apologies for the recent absence, dear readers, but between the Christmas season ("Once in Royal David's City" bringing me to tears again) and working longer hours at the bookstore and logging hours in designing the online literature class I start teaching next week and going through physical therapy (owing to a car accident I was in last month) -- well, the backseat has been kitted out to accomodate the blog. Something must, right?

It's the John Gardner book On Moral Fiction that has urged me back in the saddle, pushing me to wonder (as I read, and principally agree with, his assessment that art is art when it is moral, and failed art when it is not) what constitutes that which is moral in (or about) art as I perceive art? Gardner defines morality as "nothing more than doing what is unselfish, helpful, kind, and noble-hearted, and doing it with at least a reasonable expectation that in the long run as well as the short we won't be sorry for what we've done" and as "action which affirms life" (23). To begin: I love these definitions, and I believe Gardner is both brave and correct in his assertion that art must be moral if it is to be art, and that art which is antithetical or corrosive to (be it simple, naive, roving, flawed, conflicted or complex) goodness is "false" and "requires denunciation" (15). (One cannot but wonder with what disappointment Gardner might regard the films of Quentin Tarantino, each of them, to variant degrees, rooted in -- even celebrating -- vengeance and absence of accountability as cultural cachet and currency.) And in reading page after page, I find myself asking the question: in what, most precisely, is morality grounded in fiction as I engage it? And it seems to me that when I encounter characters whom I love (and when I write "whom I love" I do not mean characters with whom I'm taken as inventions, but rather characters whom I love, whom I want to be safe, through whom and in whose presence I understand myself, and what I might be, a little better), I encounter that which is moral. A novelist (or filmmaker) does none of us any good when he encourages apathies in us, when he inspires condescension in us, when he makes of life the kind of grotesque spectacle that we cannot help but look -- and laugh -- at. On the other hand, when a novelist (or filmmaker) moves us to reflection and self-critique, or shivers us with stirring empathies -- can such good be measured, or quantified? It must be experienced -- and in being experienced, it is known.

Off to bed.

A Year in Books

This wasn't quite the banner year in reading for me that was 2008, but I still managed 50 titles finished -- almost one a week. And so, as I did last December and in the hope that some readers of this blog might be introduced to books worth seeking out, I thought I'd share with all of you my best reading experiences of 2009:

1. Last Orders by Graham Swift -- I finished this novel on January 10th, and it has haunted me all year long. It is symphonic in that it is an arrangement of emotional registers, of Cockney voices and lives that -- despite being at odds with one another (the novel teems and bristles with regrets and grudges) -- address one aim: the honoring of a friend in the drive to the coast that his ashes might be scattered in the sea. I still remember sitting in bed, weeping as I read its final pages. Nothing I read this year moved me more.

2. The Driftless Area by Tom Drury -- A romantic noir that reads as though it were written by Cormac McCarthy channeling David Lynch. One is never quite certain what is going on, or how the principal characters relate to one another -- until the finale, when mysteries are solved even while the work entire becomes infinitely more mysterious. All of this and dialogue that feels so effortless and natural, I would sometimes wonder whether the novel's conversations were transcribed from eavesdropping. I'm teaching it next semester.

3. Girl Meets God by Lauren Winner -- Among the most perceptive and striking memoirs I've ever read, this book allowed me to better understand my own religion (Christianity), the religion from which it grew (Judaism), the tradition in which I worship (Episcopalian), the nature of faith, the compulsion to read, the need for authentic sacrifice, the offense of token sacrifice. And the list goes on. That it was written by a woman then in her mid-20s is almost unbelievable, so elegant is its prose, so assured its voice, so precise its observations.

4. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel -- Literary ventriloquism of the highest order. Thomas Cromwell -- architect and overseer of Henry VIII's divorce from Katherine of Aragon, and Mantel's hero in this novel -- is bodied forth with such gravitas and lightness of touch, more than one awestruck critic has wondered whether Mantel might not be a reincarnation of the man himself. The book witness and documents abysses (i.e. the burnings of accused heretics) and draws luminosity from them (i.e. the two pages detailing the deaths of Cromwell's daughters from the plague).

5. The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought by Marilynne Robinson -- Apart from the essays "Wilderness" (too much a gloss on -- or blueprint of -- an idea she gives fuller treatment elsewhere) and "The Tyranny of Petty Coercion" (which feels too truncated, too frustrated), the collection is masterful. Whether making the (convincing) case (however successful atheists have been as spin doctors) that Social Darwinism is Darwinism (one need look no further than Darwin's articulated and specific indebtedness to Malthus to see how the former's views allowed for and encouraged the kinds of thinking manifest as eugenics and ethnic cleansing in the 20th century), resituating the historical record away from centuries of distortion where John Calvin is concerned or reading John 20:11-18 along lines that make one feel blessed that she is in the world to give us such a reading, Robinson's genius shimmers.

6. Coming Up for Air by George Orwell -- I haven't laughed aloud so much reading a novel in years.

7. Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses by Bruce Feiler -- As obnoxious and rehearsed as Feiler seems on camera (in his unwatchable companion film to this book), he is as captivating on the page. Few things as mesmerizing as seeing a skeptic mesmerized.

8. Nothing to be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes -- Barnes's unmasked elaboration on the mosaic of sorrow, shame, resentment, rage and embarrassment that he felt during and after what would prove to be his final visit with his dying father is riveting.

9. A Stay Against Confusion: Essays on Faith and Fiction by Ron Hansen -- In some ways a stronger collection than Robinson's in that there is no weak link among the essays. I wish everyone in the world would read Hansen's courageous account of the assassinations of the Jesuits in El Salvador.

10. Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith by Nora Gallagher -- Another stunning memoir that I would recommend to non-believers looking to make sense of (insofar as "sense" -- and, so, logic -- applies) why anyone would believe.

Cinema Par Excellence

Although we have a few weeks remaining in 2009 and this tumultuous decade, I've been buzzing away at a brief list of the best films of the decade (that I've seen, that is -- it should be noted that I've seen no more than 250-300 of the films released in the last 10 years). Will there be movies released (or finding wide distribution) in the next three weeks that'll knock the wind out of me? In all likelihood, yes (I've got high hopes for Avatar, An Education, Invictus, Up in the Air, The Last Station, The Young Victoria). But I can't wait. (And then there are three films I own on DVD -- The Weeping Meadow, Into Great Silence and The Wind that Shakes the Barley -- that I anticipate thinking the world of and have still managed to not find the time to watch. And the one I hope to get for Christmas on DVD -- Silent Light -- that I missed having the chance to see in NYC by mere days...) Could I put together a top 50 with neither regret nor compromise? I could -- but I have six that outshine all others. And so, without commentaries, the best films of the decade (according to me)...

1. Lord of the Rings, The (Peter Jackson: 2001-2003)
2. Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch: 2001)
3. Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, The (Andrew Dominik: 2007)
4. Where the Wild Things Are (Spike Jonze: 2009)
5. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson: 2007)
6. Tillsammans (Lukas Moodysson: 2000)

Numbers

From the Ron Hansen book A Stay Against Confusion: Essays on Faith and Fiction:

Saint Irenaeus said that the glory of God is a human being fully alive. But what is it to be fully alive? We are apt to look at Ignatius's life as one of harsh discipline and privation, and find only loss in his giving up of family, inheritance, financial security, prestige, luxury, sexual pleasure. But he looked at his life as an offering to the God he called liberalidad, freedom, and God blessed that gift a hundredfold in the Society of Jesus. The house of Loyola ended when Dona Magdalena de Loyola y Borgia died childless in 1626, but in that same year there were 15,535 Jesuits in 36 provinces, with 56 seminaries, 44 novitiates, 254 houses, and 443 colleges in Europe and the Baltic States, Japan, India, Macao, the Philippines, and the Americas.

Well, Nook and Kindle: The E-Book Debate

My wife and I are dead set against purchasing an e-reader -- that is until we find ourselves well enough off that we're able to take two or three holidays each year of durations permitting the reading of more books than we might carry with us. Will this ever happen? I hope we'll one day be able to travel as extensively as we long to -- but not at all so we might have what is for us the lone logical excuse to plump for an e-reader. I want to see the world, but I don't want reading experiences that prove to be inextricable from the sweat-grubbiness implicit in holding a shell of plastic for hours (and hours, and hours) on end. Likewise, I hate the idea of abandoning reading as a shorthand means to telling the world (in parks, in cafes, on buses, in waiting rooms, in halls before class) something about me -- even if that "something" is little or nothing more than that someone in the world is reading Peter Carey, or Marilynne Robinson, or -- gasp! -- the Bible. On a local bus this afternoon, I saw a girl reading A Farewell to Arms. Do I know who she was? No. Will I ever know? In all likelihood, no. But was my day (and, hence, my existence) brightened a bit in the knowledge that someone was (verifiably) reading a Hemingway novel? Yes.

I'm a little chilled by the possibility of widespread subsumption of individualism (individualism as manifest in what we read and that what we read -- and that we read what we read -- insists on a diverse intellectual and emotional landscape) under the corporate hegemonic umbrella that is the e-reader phenomenon. Imagine a world in which we're encouraged to tear the covers from our books before leaving the house with them, and you've imagined a world according to Nook and Kindle. I don't want that. Do I want people to read more? God yes -- but I don't want the imaginations of people held captive less by texts themselves (and the wonders therein) than by technological novelties and trends.

That said, if the advent of e-readers can usher back into print and wide circulation the likes of novels including Josephine Johnson's forgotten Pulitzer Prize-winner Now in November (I'm doubtful, having requested that Amazon make this one available in Kindle format for months and months, to no avail) and assure that little-read and little-printed novelists like Frederick Buechner (seven of whose individual novels -- the four Bebb books in an omnibus edition -- are available for download to either Nook or Kindle) remain in print (even if "print"), then there is some light (however compromised) in this turning point (and it is a turning point) in the evolution of publishing.