BiblioAddict The First Step on the Road to Recovery

On all those great thoughts, Sunday spotlights, and the ‘middle’ in Middlesex:

Sunday is usually the most difficult day for me to blog, which is why I generally avoid it.  I always feel as if I should write something deep and insightful about something – anything – I’ve read over the course of the week.  I do (usually) have thoughts about the things I’ve been reading, but I also have a terrible memory.  By time Sunday rolls around, that great thought I had on Tuesday has sunk into the murkiness that is my brain.

So, instead of coming up with some great thought every Sunday (and blowing a gasket in the process), I thought I’d simply take the time to highlight a book on my currently reading list.  That way, I can ramble about someone else’s great thoughts, and possibly sneak in one of my own.  This week’s Sunday Spotlight book is How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken by Daniel Mendelsohn.

I have been reading this book for some time now, and I have to say that this is undoubtedly the best book of critical essays I have ever read.  Mendelsohn covers everything from The Lovely Bones to “Troy,” from a theatrical staging of The Importance of Being Earnest to Middlesex. Mendelsohn’s essays are erudite without being over-bearing or pretentious; they are incisive without being needlessly insulting.  He seems genuinely interested in discussing and critically analyzing why a piece of art does or doesn’t work, rather than going for the cheap (and easy) jokes some critics use to show off their wittiness rather than an understanding of the material at hand.  To top it all off, Mendelsohn has a background in the Classics (like me!), which he uses to give greater insight into the history of a particular theme or artistic form.  Mendelsohn goes to such painstaking efforts to provide background and depth to the points that he makes that even when you don’t agree with him… well, it’s kind of hard not to agree with him.

For instance, I read Jefferey Eugenides’ Middlesex years ago.  I remember thinking at the time that it was one of the best books I’d read all year.  Heck, I thought it was one of the best books I’d read in years.  If you haven’t read it yet, I would (and do) recommend it to you in a minute.  It won the Pulizer Prize in 2002 and I think it was prize well-deserved.  Having said that, Mendelsohn wasn’t as enthusiastic about the novel as I was and he raised some interesting points about how it’s hermaphrodite character ultimately doesn’t live up to the book’s title: Middlesex.

Mendelsohn writes:

It’s probably safe to say that a novel whose main character—whose narrator—is someone who’s lived as both a female and a male has to justify itself by providing some kind of rare or remarkable insight into sex and gender. Eugenides himself acknowledges as much when he has Callie observe that “latent inside me… was the ability to communicate between the genders, to see not with the monovision of one sex but in the stereoscope of both.” And yet that special stereoscopic vision is not in evidence here—or rather, the privileged information you get from Callie and Cal never strikes you as being that special. There is, if anything, something cliché about the insights into gender that the author comes up with. When Callie finds she likes reading the Iliad, she wonders whether it’s the male hormones “manifesting themselves silently inside me”; so too when she finds herself falling in love with (as she thinks) another girl. Similarly, when she sees through a plan by a couple of boys to get her and the Obscure Object to take a walk to an abandoned cabin in the woods, she wonders whether she does so because she’s really a boy herself.

Rather than being more than usually nuanced insights into sex roles and gender behavior, as one would hope to have from a narrator who’s so pointedly identified with Teiresias, the characterization of boys as inherently oversexed and violence-loving—traits that Callie, as she becomes a teenager, finds she shares, and that appear meant to justify her feeling that she is “really” a boy—are hardly nuanced. (They’re the product of what you could safely call cultural monovision.) And to declare that “desire [for a girl] made me cross over to the other side”—i.e., to being a boy—seems awfully naive in this day and age, positing a kind of essentialism about sexuality and erotic affect that is equally unsubtle. (Why is it the case that Callie’s attraction to girls “means” she’s a boy? Couldn’t she simply be gay?) We may not know much about Callie by the end of this book, but we certainly get a glimpse into how Eugenides thinks. “Breasts have the same effect on me as on anyone with my testosterone level,” the adult Cal boasts, a claim that will surely come as a surprise to Eugenides’s (presumably testosterone-rich) gay male readership.

See what I mean?  Good point, Mendelsohn.  Good point.

However, one of the things I like about Mendelsohn is that he isn’t afraid to like something too nor is he afraid to say as much.  For instance, he raved about The Hours by Michael Cunningham so much that I’m currently developing a long-term plan to read A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Wolf, then Mrs. Dalloway, then The Hours before watching the movie based on it – all of which, to my great embarrassment, I have never done.

I’m only about half-way through this wonderful collection of essays, but I already feel smarter for having read it.  I may not have any great thoughts before I pick up How Beautiful It Is…, but I’m guaranteed to have more than a few after I put it down.  That is the work of a skilled essayist.

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