Category Archives: literature

Greater women in Kate Christensen’s The Great Man

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Terrible title, but I picked it up because there was a paint brush on the cover. I didn’t know about Kate Christensen’s other novels or that this one had won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Instead of the light trash I imagined, I’m in the midst of the lives of some intriguing women as they sort themselves out as the great (dead) man’s biographers stir up their static lives. On knowing this, the title becomes amusing, especially because the book is about the not-so-great, great man’s many women.

The dead artist, Oscar Feldman, binds his wife Abigail, his sister Maxine, and his mistress Teddy together, and not always in ways they enjoy. These very different and complex women are complex and passionate. Oh, they happen to be old. That’s by no means a focus of the story, but I find it interesting to see old women as active characters. The fact the Oscar was a selfish womanizer who got everything he wanted makes their stories a bit more poignant.

The male biographers who come to interview these women think of Oscar as a great painter, a great man. As the women see it, Oscar was a good painter rather than a great man, and a closely guarded secret bears them out. The Great Man theory, according to Wikipedia, is a theory that aims to explain history by the impact of “Great men”, or heroes; that is, highly influential individuals who, due to either their personal charisma, intelligence and wisdom or Machiavellianism, used power in a way that had a decisive historical impact. Examples would be Stalin or Napoleon, my image left, or Oscar Feldman. Except the novel snips away at the Great Man theory with curt comment after snide remark. A purely feminist approach to this novel would be limiting, but it is satisfying to see the women come into their own in the wake of Oscar’s death. It certainly beats cats and knitting.

Christensen captures the competitiveness of the art world and its strikingly different personalities with tongue-in-cheek humor. The character Maxine provides a stringent perspective on all art (besides her own), like

the dinner party where she criticizes the artist across the table and her dealer in a sweep of faux pauxs. Oscar’s paintings get ripped apart women by women to the starry-eyed biographers dismay. A question of authenticity arises about some important paintings, and the art world buzz is so strong the book hums a bit in the reader’s hands.

Vibrant women and art transforms this book on the great man into a delightful dialogue that would be a home Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Chicago, who created the art installtion of a triangular table with 39 places for iconic women, stated that its purpose was to “end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women were written out of the historical record.” Appropriately enough, The Great Man is the story of women writing themselves into history.

I’m 2/3rds of the way through, which is the perfect time to review a book: I can’t give away the ending, but I know quite well what I think. The characters are delightful, and the plot well-constructed. I got more swept up in it than I expected, despite having reservations about the writing itself. Obviously it’s well-written enough to convey characters that are sweeping me along, yet the language itself is predictable and non-distinct. Don’t let my nit-picks or this sketchy plot outline dissuade you though; Christensen is onto something quite delightful.

Of Russians: Returning to Babel’s Verve

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My Russian kick (first Chekhov, then Vladimir Sorokin) has led me back to Isaac Babel, and the rogue is finally starting to get interesting. As I mentioned in a previous post, I ambitiously took out Babel’s collected short stories from the library, then found one story might have been enough for me. On a second perusal, I find his lively verve thrilling and terseness masterful.

Babel’s folksy tales are rollicking in a way Sorokin’s The Queue was not. (To The Queue‘s credit, it ended with a hilarious dialogue of sex sounds.) Babel writes the Jewish experience in Odessa in the 1920s and 30s, so he isn’t dealing with Communism as Sorokin is. Yet he critiques society in a way that suggests he must poke fun at life because he must somehow bear the status quo. These Russians attempt humor through criticism, or criticism through humor, but I’m not sure to what effect, as I haven’t laughed out loud as of yet.

I flipped through Babel’s collection again, hopping from Odessa stories to Red Calvary stories to autobiographical stories. There’s always a joke on someone by the end, and with a modicum of detail he suggest a world of characterizations. His people don’t always have great depth, but they fit in their role in society that grows increasingly complex as we read his cycles of stories. His portrait is one of Russia rather than an individual. Humble lives are transformed into red-blooded exercises in existence. What I’m trying to say is, Babel is a great storyteller.

Babel, photographed upon his arrest

Babel’s life is a story unto itself: he survived the 1905 pogrom that killed his grandfather. He became a journalist and fiction writer, only after fighting in wars and studying finance for lack of other options. He become silent under Stalin’s tightening control. Accused of being an aesthete, Babel would pay for his artistic licence (see Wikipedia article here):

After the suspicious death of Gorky in 1936, Babel noted: “Now they will come for me.” …In May 1939 he was arrested at his dacha in Peredelkino, and eventually interrogated under torture at the Lubyanka….After a forced confession, Babel was tried before an NKVD troika and convicted of simultaneously spying for the French, Austrians, and Leon Trotsky, as well as “membership in a terrorist organization.” On January 27, 1940, he was shot in Butyrka prison.

Reportedly, while Babel confessed under torture, “once he realised he was doomed, he recanted” but “it made no difference.” His last recorded words were,

“I am innocent. I have never been a spy. I never allowed any action against the Soviet Union. I accused myself falsely. I was forced to make false accusations against myself and others… I am asking for only one thing — let me finish my work.”

Soho Poetry Reading and its After-effects

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Standing on a stool with papers in hand, the young poet declaims visions. The crowded back room of the Soho bar softly stirs fruit around sangria glasses, as he heaps polysyllabic words on their ears. The warmth and the crowd dull the senses a bit.

This was my night last nigh; a quick bike ride in the suddenly descended chill, and then crammed into a small barrel of a room to be shot at by local wordsmiths.

I didn’t catch much. With all three of the readings I heard, the imagery obscured the train of thought, as if they ambitiously wished to express everything, rather than one thing. ‘Poetry reading’ sounds stuffy. On the contrary, it was familiar and relaxed, even if the deluge of verbal images stirred the heart without reaching the intellect. The energy of the live performance was a treat that somehow left me tracing the words of other poets around the inside of my head.

Is this the best way to experience poetry? Poetry takes one another life when it is read aloud and its musical quality predominates. Yet one–or I, at least–can’t understand it as well as I can by sitting in silence with a poem and reading it again and again.

Yet I was reminded of a favorite poet of mine, who I’ve not read in many months, Edna St. Vincent Millay. The tone of her structured, explosive sonnets number her among my favorites (if I could do such a thing as pick favorites). Please allow me to present, for your reading pleasure, Ms. Millays’ sonnet XLI in Sonnets From an Ungrafted Tree (1923), and allow me to fantasize she is reading it aloud at a Greenwich village speakeasy:

I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body’s weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn wtih pity, – let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.