I've been recommending Peter Carey's 1997 novel Jack Maggs (UK ebook here, US paperback here) for almost as long as it's been around. I usually refer to it as a 'riff' on Dickens' Great Expectations--but I obviously need to be saying more, or less, because I'm not aware of a single reader I ever won for Jack Maggs that way.
Carey's US publisher clearly chose to go the way of saying less: the connection to Dickens has never been mentioned in American publicity for Maggs, perhaps on the assumption that huge chunks of its possible readership had never read Great Expectations, or hadn't reread it in so many years that they'd fear they'd forgotten too much of it, or possibly thought of it as an unpleasant bit of required reading best forgotten. Such generalizations are always tricky: most of the people with whom I've discussed this say they and everyone they know read it as teenagers and found it a difficult book to put down and one of their favorite Victorian novels. Still, it's long been customary to tell prospective readers that no familiarity with Dickens is required of readers of Maggs, and this is, in fact, true.
The next question that always comes up is whether Maggs is 'as good a novel' as G.E. Well, if we assume that such comparisons are meaningful, it would be only fair to point out that not many novels are as good as G.E. You can embrace Maggs without turning aside forever from G.E. Just as you can love Dickens and still find room in your heart for Carey.
Still, most readers of Maggs, I think, will focus on similarities and differences between it and G.E. Carey's title character has a great deal in common with Magwich, the escaped convict whom readers of G.E. first see encountering young Pip in the early pages of that novel. Maggs even has a Pip of his own, now (in 1837, when Carey's novel begins) grown up to be (like Dickens' Pip) something of a gentleman but (unlike Pip) neither hero nor protagonist.
For many readers, the most memorable and perhaps most disturbing character in Jack Maggs, however, will be a young journalist and emerging novelist, full of ambition but uncertain of success, newly married but already emotionally entangled with his beautiful young sister-in-law. His name isn't Dickens (it's Tobias Oates), but if you think your way back to 1837 and Dickens' situation prior to Oliver Twist, the resemblance is unmistakable. This is, needless to say, not Dickens as the most prized of all Victorian novelists: at best, it's an unsentimental (view of) Dickens, Dickens 'warts and all', or warts and then some.
Carey (born in Australia in 1943) has spoken of his long-standing interest in Dickens' Magwich, arguably the first Australian character in fiction. In this context, the first distinction between the two novels is that one is Victorian, the other postcolonial.
Still, for me, Jack Maggs is of particular interest as a novel that lets us think about how writers (like Dickens, or Tobias Oates, to name only two) rework their lived reality and transform it into fiction. (That's what I meant last time by 'a certain kind of novel'.) Maggs suggests how a writer somewhat like Dickens might have transformed a series of events with which his own century was not prepared to confront directly--to form a novel that it could comfortably embrace. So when we read Maggs we get Carey's take on the realities of the Victorian era--which include implicitly that era's own efforts to conceal what it cannot confront.
And we may also get some insight into the... Victorian? (neo)colonial? canonizing?... aspects of ourselves--which might begrudge Magwich, Maggs, or Carey a place at the table.
Is it the right reading for you for the Dickens centenary year ahead? I don't know. But it's my most contrarian recommendation. And, what's more, it's a good read.
Showing posts with label Dickens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dickens. Show all posts
07 November 2011
Housekeeping, and Returning Home
It was good to be on the road (mostly in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina); now it's even better to be back home. For some reason, however, it's taking me a while to get used to the time change (daylight saving time, elsewhere known as 'summer time', just ended in most of the United States; the November transition is supposed to be easier than the one in March)--and to communicating with everyone again.
I tweeted occasionally from Myrtle Beach, and wrote a few urgent emails, but otherwise focussed more on relaxing than on anything else. I believe I admitted on Twitter that my addiction to the new ABC-TV series Revenge had grown so intense that I started rereading The Count of Monte Cristo as a sort of readerly methadone. Dumas's best books are great to come home to, by the way, and this is surely one of his greatest. By the way, I'm just starting to look for the right methadone for my Once Upon a Time 'issues'.
What seemed to me like the biggest 'event' of last week in the world of (US) ebooks, an event that I would have blogged about last Friday if I'd been at home, was Amazon.com's introduction of its 'lending library', which offers free access to several thousands of ebooks for Amazon Prime customers who own Kindles. This is limited to a single free checkout per owner per month, and your browsing for books to check out begins on your Kindle, in the Kindle Store. For more information, click here.
The main problem I'm aware of as I return to blogging, is that topics are 'clumping': they're occurring to me in clusters that make them less manageable than usual, especially considering my resolution to limit individual posts to a maximum of 500 words.
For example, I've left a great deal unsaid about recommended reading for the Dickens centenary (even after previous posts here, here and here), all of which unsaid material clumps together in a supertopic that you might call 'Contrarian Responses to Dickens 2012'. But the first of those 'contrarian' recommendations--that you read, if you haven't already, Peter Carey's Jack Maggs (1997)--seems also to be part of a second supertopic, for which my best title so far is 'A Certain Kind of Novel' (referring to a kind that I encountered in an accidental cluster in the 1990s and that included, most memorably, both Jack Maggs and Barbara Vine's [i.e., Ruth Rendell's] The Chimney Sweeeper's Boy).
Please bear with me, though, and keep coming back. I promise to do my best to 'get it all down'... even if it takes a few attempts.
Barring some unforeseeable cyberevent (that stops the presses, so to speak), I'll pick up on Wednesday with Jack Maggs--and, although I won't be indiscreet about the plot per se, I'll be quite frank about the kind of novel as which I read it. If it's been out there for 14 years without your reading it, and it's as good as I think it is, then perhaps a little indiscretion about its subgenre is not too high a price to pay.
I tweeted occasionally from Myrtle Beach, and wrote a few urgent emails, but otherwise focussed more on relaxing than on anything else. I believe I admitted on Twitter that my addiction to the new ABC-TV series Revenge had grown so intense that I started rereading The Count of Monte Cristo as a sort of readerly methadone. Dumas's best books are great to come home to, by the way, and this is surely one of his greatest. By the way, I'm just starting to look for the right methadone for my Once Upon a Time 'issues'.
What seemed to me like the biggest 'event' of last week in the world of (US) ebooks, an event that I would have blogged about last Friday if I'd been at home, was Amazon.com's introduction of its 'lending library', which offers free access to several thousands of ebooks for Amazon Prime customers who own Kindles. This is limited to a single free checkout per owner per month, and your browsing for books to check out begins on your Kindle, in the Kindle Store. For more information, click here.
The main problem I'm aware of as I return to blogging, is that topics are 'clumping': they're occurring to me in clusters that make them less manageable than usual, especially considering my resolution to limit individual posts to a maximum of 500 words.
For example, I've left a great deal unsaid about recommended reading for the Dickens centenary (even after previous posts here, here and here), all of which unsaid material clumps together in a supertopic that you might call 'Contrarian Responses to Dickens 2012'. But the first of those 'contrarian' recommendations--that you read, if you haven't already, Peter Carey's Jack Maggs (1997)--seems also to be part of a second supertopic, for which my best title so far is 'A Certain Kind of Novel' (referring to a kind that I encountered in an accidental cluster in the 1990s and that included, most memorably, both Jack Maggs and Barbara Vine's [i.e., Ruth Rendell's] The Chimney Sweeeper's Boy).
Please bear with me, though, and keep coming back. I promise to do my best to 'get it all down'... even if it takes a few attempts.
Barring some unforeseeable cyberevent (that stops the presses, so to speak), I'll pick up on Wednesday with Jack Maggs--and, although I won't be indiscreet about the plot per se, I'll be quite frank about the kind of novel as which I read it. If it's been out there for 14 years without your reading it, and it's as good as I think it is, then perhaps a little indiscretion about its subgenre is not too high a price to pay.
24 October 2011
Towards an All-Access Pass: Dickens & Co.
A week ago, when I started writing about the coming Dickens bicentenary, I said I was addressing 'primarily… people who in some way or another love Dickens, or who can remember deriving pleasure from a Dickens novel at some point in their lives'. The response to that post suggests that there are many such readers. But what about the others?
I'm not talking about people who prefer Austen or Thackeray or one of the Brontës or George Eliot or Henry James or Virginia Woolf to Dickens.
What concerns me today, and what has concerned me for decades, are the perceptions, or beliefs, or phobias, that inhibit some readers' access to all of these authors, if in differing degrees--to say nothing of the factors that inhibit access to books in general, or to art in the broadest sense.
Even if we restrict ourselves, for now, to questions of the accessibility of 'Dickens', by which I mean to say, roughly, of authors from Austen through Virginia Woolf, this is still an enormous topic, one that I approach with great humility and with no illusion that I can resolve anything with a single blogpost. My ambition, instead, is to start a conversation, one that will be open both to those who have and those who don't have the 'access' we're talking about.
I said that this has concerned me for decades. One starting point for me was a conversation in Washington, D.C., in the late 1980s, at one of the Endowments. I was there to interview for a job, but the conversation was small talk between interviews. Someone was mentioning the 'exiling' of 'classics' (meaning something like Austen-through-Woolf or Homer-through-Steinbeck) to a separate section in the back of some bookstores in shopping malls, and the fact that most readers had their last contact with 'classics' when they took their last formal literature course in high school or college. I asked why the speaker thought that was, and he or she quickly responded, 'Oh, they find them too difficult.' At this point, without thinking, I said something like: 'Yes, but how do they end up with that perception? After all, Dickens isn't any harder to read than Robert Ludlum.'
Well, it was immediately obvious that I had 'lost' my audience--and I hadn't seen it coming. Here I was in a group of writing and reading professionals, all of whom, I'm still certain, had been reading Dickens and all the other 'classics' for most of their lives. I expected them to be briefly taken aback but then, on reflection, to agree with me. But they weren't having any of it. (It later emerged from the same conversation that at least one of them, an 18th-century specialist, found Gibbon hopelessly dry and perhaps a bit forbidding. Go figure.)
Perhaps I was wrong. Or perhaps I was trying out my material on the wrong 'room'. (I didn't get the job, either, but that's a different story.)
To be continued. Soon: the example of Jane Austen.
I'm not talking about people who prefer Austen or Thackeray or one of the Brontës or George Eliot or Henry James or Virginia Woolf to Dickens.
What concerns me today, and what has concerned me for decades, are the perceptions, or beliefs, or phobias, that inhibit some readers' access to all of these authors, if in differing degrees--to say nothing of the factors that inhibit access to books in general, or to art in the broadest sense.
Even if we restrict ourselves, for now, to questions of the accessibility of 'Dickens', by which I mean to say, roughly, of authors from Austen through Virginia Woolf, this is still an enormous topic, one that I approach with great humility and with no illusion that I can resolve anything with a single blogpost. My ambition, instead, is to start a conversation, one that will be open both to those who have and those who don't have the 'access' we're talking about.
I said that this has concerned me for decades. One starting point for me was a conversation in Washington, D.C., in the late 1980s, at one of the Endowments. I was there to interview for a job, but the conversation was small talk between interviews. Someone was mentioning the 'exiling' of 'classics' (meaning something like Austen-through-Woolf or Homer-through-Steinbeck) to a separate section in the back of some bookstores in shopping malls, and the fact that most readers had their last contact with 'classics' when they took their last formal literature course in high school or college. I asked why the speaker thought that was, and he or she quickly responded, 'Oh, they find them too difficult.' At this point, without thinking, I said something like: 'Yes, but how do they end up with that perception? After all, Dickens isn't any harder to read than Robert Ludlum.'
Well, it was immediately obvious that I had 'lost' my audience--and I hadn't seen it coming. Here I was in a group of writing and reading professionals, all of whom, I'm still certain, had been reading Dickens and all the other 'classics' for most of their lives. I expected them to be briefly taken aback but then, on reflection, to agree with me. But they weren't having any of it. (It later emerged from the same conversation that at least one of them, an 18th-century specialist, found Gibbon hopelessly dry and perhaps a bit forbidding. Go figure.)
Perhaps I was wrong. Or perhaps I was trying out my material on the wrong 'room'. (I didn't get the job, either, but that's a different story.)
To be continued. Soon: the example of Jane Austen.
21 October 2011
Doing the Numbers, or, The Swimming Hole
Just a few words, this morning, about numbers. And thresholds.
I'm going to ignore, briefly, one of the best pieces of advice I've seen given to bloggers/tweeters, which goes something like 'No one but you cares about your own numbers; so what if you just added your 1000th follower or got your 5000th hit?'
But I'm blogging not only for what you might call read-only types; I'm blogging for everyone, potentially, and that includes people who are themselves bloggers or who might start blogging some day if they only knew how easy it is.
And I opened the door in Wednesday's post to at least a little talk about numbers when I mentioned that Monday's post about the Dickens centenary and readathon had become in less than 48 hours my sixth most-read post (of 'all time', which in the world of Jascha Writes means about 30 months). What I didn't realize at the time (because I was looking at the automatically generated most-read list that appears at the foot of every page of the blog and not at the actual numbers) was that Monday's Dickens post was in truth in a three-way tie for fourth place. By this morning, moreover, it was tied with last February's Ellery Queen post for third place. (The leader, if you will, continues to be Jo Nesbø, with my sole real Nesbø post to date scoring almost four times as many hits to date as the Dickens. Still back in the pack is determined newcomer James Hulbert, whoever that is, with respectable numbers of hits for four posts [in the top 10] relating to his novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me.)
As today's new business, I'd like to note two (additional) numbers, before they're swept away in the wash of ones and zeros in which we seem at times to be living.
Yesterday, Jascha Writes crossed the 10,000 threshold for cumulative page views ('pageviews all time history', in Blogger-speak)--thanks in no small measure to my friends Dickens and Nesbø, and, even more, to you. And, to every one of you who might have been wondering whether, if you 'gave' a blog, anyone would show up, I think this answers that question with a definitive yes.
The week's second threshold number may be less immediately significant to non-bloggers (and pre-bloggers, not-yet-bloggers), but most of the rest of you will understand. This is a Twitter number. Twitter caps at 2000 the number of people it allows you to follow--until you have enough followers yourself to justify letting that cap drift higher. The (unpublished, unofficial) threshold is currently 1820, and @jaschawrites crossed it a few days ago. Beyond this point, growth in the number of followers can become geometric again, after having been hampered in the run-up to 1820. And all of that I owe to the first 1820 and all the others to come. Thank you!
The moral of both of this week's threshold crossings, to put it succinctly, is a message of abundance: there's room here for everyone, and we create possibilities for one another and for ourselves. And that's something that we 'qualitative' types can hang on to when all the ones and zeros have moved on.
Because it isn't really a racetrack. It's a swimming hole.
Come on in....
I'm going to ignore, briefly, one of the best pieces of advice I've seen given to bloggers/tweeters, which goes something like 'No one but you cares about your own numbers; so what if you just added your 1000th follower or got your 5000th hit?'
But I'm blogging not only for what you might call read-only types; I'm blogging for everyone, potentially, and that includes people who are themselves bloggers or who might start blogging some day if they only knew how easy it is.
And I opened the door in Wednesday's post to at least a little talk about numbers when I mentioned that Monday's post about the Dickens centenary and readathon had become in less than 48 hours my sixth most-read post (of 'all time', which in the world of Jascha Writes means about 30 months). What I didn't realize at the time (because I was looking at the automatically generated most-read list that appears at the foot of every page of the blog and not at the actual numbers) was that Monday's Dickens post was in truth in a three-way tie for fourth place. By this morning, moreover, it was tied with last February's Ellery Queen post for third place. (The leader, if you will, continues to be Jo Nesbø, with my sole real Nesbø post to date scoring almost four times as many hits to date as the Dickens. Still back in the pack is determined newcomer James Hulbert, whoever that is, with respectable numbers of hits for four posts [in the top 10] relating to his novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me.)
As today's new business, I'd like to note two (additional) numbers, before they're swept away in the wash of ones and zeros in which we seem at times to be living.
Yesterday, Jascha Writes crossed the 10,000 threshold for cumulative page views ('pageviews all time history', in Blogger-speak)--thanks in no small measure to my friends Dickens and Nesbø, and, even more, to you. And, to every one of you who might have been wondering whether, if you 'gave' a blog, anyone would show up, I think this answers that question with a definitive yes.
The week's second threshold number may be less immediately significant to non-bloggers (and pre-bloggers, not-yet-bloggers), but most of the rest of you will understand. This is a Twitter number. Twitter caps at 2000 the number of people it allows you to follow--until you have enough followers yourself to justify letting that cap drift higher. The (unpublished, unofficial) threshold is currently 1820, and @jaschawrites crossed it a few days ago. Beyond this point, growth in the number of followers can become geometric again, after having been hampered in the run-up to 1820. And all of that I owe to the first 1820 and all the others to come. Thank you!
The moral of both of this week's threshold crossings, to put it succinctly, is a message of abundance: there's room here for everyone, and we create possibilities for one another and for ourselves. And that's something that we 'qualitative' types can hang on to when all the ones and zeros have moved on.
Because it isn't really a racetrack. It's a swimming hole.
Come on in....
19 October 2011
Even More 'Readable' When the Price Is Right
First Oprah, now this.
While everyone else is congratulating Julian Barnes for winning the Man Booker Prize last night for The Sense of an Ending--at the end of what felt like a very long Booker season in which the most loaded term in public literary discourse was 'readability' (saluted by some as a genuine strength of certain books under consideration, decried by others as code for 'dumbed-down-ed-ness')--let's recognize Charles Dickens' latest triumph: Monday's post about his bicentenary and the Dickens readathon, immediately shot to sixth place (out of 84) in the list of all-time most-read entries at Jascha Writes. Dickens still has a way to go before he overtakes Jo Nesbø (who has long been in first place), but the Nesbø post has been up, collecting clicks, since March. (Soon it will be time for a 'sequel', a post about the eighth and ninth Harry Hole novels, The Leopard and Phantom.)
In that Dickens post I mentioned in passing that Amazon.com was offering some very attractive Kindle deals on Dickens titles in Penguin Classics. I recommended that you consider Pickwick Papers and the other Dickens titles to which you could surf from there. What I didn't realize at the time was that there are dozens of other Penguin Classics at Amazon prices the likes of which I haven't seen for close to three years.
In my experience, prices like this don't last. So if you take one of the links below and don't find anything special... well, that means the train has left the station. But, as of this writing, the prices for US Amazon customers are under one dollar. If you share any of my attachment to Penguin Classics, such prices for annotated editions with introductions, may just be too good to pass up.
From today's perspective, the Victorian novelist best situated to rival Dickens, is of course George Eliot, and her masterpiece is Middlemarch. Virginia Woolf called it 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people'; to put it quite differently, I can assure you that there is life after Silas Marner.
My second recommendation comes with multiple caveats. The edition in question is an abridgment, and the work is one that could be assailed from either side of the 2011 'readability' debate. I find it highly readable in the best sense of the term, and an edition like this one (or the old Viking Portable, with which I'm more familiar but which this one has supplanted) is a good way for first-time readers to test that assessment. The book is Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire--which I propose as a document of its own time (the 18th century) rather than of the centuries it treats. (Notes to the principal text, incidentally, are Gibbons' original ones; editor David Womersley provides a good introduction and the bridging passages.)
In each case, surf on from the initial link to find more.
While everyone else is congratulating Julian Barnes for winning the Man Booker Prize last night for The Sense of an Ending--at the end of what felt like a very long Booker season in which the most loaded term in public literary discourse was 'readability' (saluted by some as a genuine strength of certain books under consideration, decried by others as code for 'dumbed-down-ed-ness')--let's recognize Charles Dickens' latest triumph: Monday's post about his bicentenary and the Dickens readathon, immediately shot to sixth place (out of 84) in the list of all-time most-read entries at Jascha Writes. Dickens still has a way to go before he overtakes Jo Nesbø (who has long been in first place), but the Nesbø post has been up, collecting clicks, since March. (Soon it will be time for a 'sequel', a post about the eighth and ninth Harry Hole novels, The Leopard and Phantom.)
In that Dickens post I mentioned in passing that Amazon.com was offering some very attractive Kindle deals on Dickens titles in Penguin Classics. I recommended that you consider Pickwick Papers and the other Dickens titles to which you could surf from there. What I didn't realize at the time was that there are dozens of other Penguin Classics at Amazon prices the likes of which I haven't seen for close to three years.
From today's perspective, the Victorian novelist best situated to rival Dickens, is of course George Eliot, and her masterpiece is Middlemarch. Virginia Woolf called it 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people'; to put it quite differently, I can assure you that there is life after Silas Marner.
My second recommendation comes with multiple caveats. The edition in question is an abridgment, and the work is one that could be assailed from either side of the 2011 'readability' debate. I find it highly readable in the best sense of the term, and an edition like this one (or the old Viking Portable, with which I'm more familiar but which this one has supplanted) is a good way for first-time readers to test that assessment. The book is Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire--which I propose as a document of its own time (the 18th century) rather than of the centuries it treats. (Notes to the principal text, incidentally, are Gibbons' original ones; editor David Womersley provides a good introduction and the bridging passages.)
In each case, surf on from the initial link to find more.
17 October 2011
Dickens: What Are You Doing for the Next 16 Months?
I already know that this will be just the first of many posts I'll devote to Charles Dickens (1812-1870) over the course of the next 15 months or so--and not just because the Dickens year 2012 (the bicentenary of his birth) is approaching.
What I have to say today is addressed primarily to people who, in some way or another, love Dickens--or who can remember deriving pleasure from a Dickens novel at some point in their lives.
On the weekend I came upon a series of posts on the Penguin UK blog, about how one group of readers is celebrating the approaching anniversary: with a massive 'Dickens readathon'. Their goal is to read all 16 of Dickens' novels at the rate of one per month. They've already made it through Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and David Copperfield--and they're having a ball. Here's a temporary link to Penguin's 'feature' about the readathon, and here, here and here are more permanent links to the three 'Doing Dickens' posts (to date) chronicling the group's progress and impressions of the first three books.
I'm posting these links today because there's some chance you might like to join the readathon yourself. And because I notice that Penguin has slashed prices on the Penguin Classics ebooks of many Dickens titles. If you'd like to explore this, click here for Amazon UK or here for Amazon US to get to the page for the first novel, Pickwick Papers, then surf from there (using 'Customers who bought this item also bought') to see additional titles. Ordinarily I'd recommend searching for free ebooks at Amazon, but at the current prices the Penguin Classics editions with introductions and notes are very tempting.
I confess that I've never managed to read Dickens following a timetable. Even my attempts to read individual novels on a schedule imitating their original serialization have met with little success: I've been unable to stop at the end of an installment when I've had the rest of the novel ready and waiting, right there in my hands. (Some readers, however, love to read Dickens at a regular pace. I believe it was J.B. Priestley who read all of Dickens every three years, and that Anthony Burgess kept a similar schedule.)
What I can say, though, is that there's no bad Dickens, not even a novel that's slightly less enjoyable than it was on an earlier reading. How many writers can you say that about?
I'd planned to suggest alternative ways of celebrating the Dickens bicentenary, but let's save them for another day--and for your comments. To see more about how Dickens fans are celebrating around the world, though, see the Dickens 2012 website.
What I have to say today is addressed primarily to people who, in some way or another, love Dickens--or who can remember deriving pleasure from a Dickens novel at some point in their lives.
I'm posting these links today because there's some chance you might like to join the readathon yourself. And because I notice that Penguin has slashed prices on the Penguin Classics ebooks of many Dickens titles. If you'd like to explore this, click here for Amazon UK or here for Amazon US to get to the page for the first novel, Pickwick Papers, then surf from there (using 'Customers who bought this item also bought') to see additional titles. Ordinarily I'd recommend searching for free ebooks at Amazon, but at the current prices the Penguin Classics editions with introductions and notes are very tempting.
I confess that I've never managed to read Dickens following a timetable. Even my attempts to read individual novels on a schedule imitating their original serialization have met with little success: I've been unable to stop at the end of an installment when I've had the rest of the novel ready and waiting, right there in my hands. (Some readers, however, love to read Dickens at a regular pace. I believe it was J.B. Priestley who read all of Dickens every three years, and that Anthony Burgess kept a similar schedule.)
What I can say, though, is that there's no bad Dickens, not even a novel that's slightly less enjoyable than it was on an earlier reading. How many writers can you say that about?
I'd planned to suggest alternative ways of celebrating the Dickens bicentenary, but let's save them for another day--and for your comments. To see more about how Dickens fans are celebrating around the world, though, see the Dickens 2012 website.
22 June 2011
Devour Your Serial
I’m going to try to make today’s post a simple love letter to serial fiction... or a confession to a mild readerly addiction from which it turns out I never fully recovered... a safe, easy reminiscence (no analysis, please) about bits of my childhood reading and what came along a few days ago to stir up those memories and reawaken some old passions.
Today, I won’t do the (general) history of serial fiction (whether you start with Scheherazade or Eugène Sue, the usual suspects down the road are Balzac, Dumas, Dickens, Wilkie Collins... on to All Quiet on the Western Front and beyond). And I won’t get to riffs on the relationship between serials and the sexual (postponement and anticipation as ploys of the story-teller as seducer; life and death as the stakes of narrative; seriality, transference and desire; serial horror in Sade...).
Instead, something more personal.
I grew up in a world in which not just magazine fiction (remember that?) but magazine and newspaper serials seemed to be everywhere. I can’t remember a time when my father wasn’t following multiple serials in The Saturday Evening Post (there were always two running concurrently, staggered so they never ended with the same issue), and from the time I was nine I followed his example. When I wasn’t reading the Perry Mason backlist in 25-cent paperbacks, I was reading, for example, the new Mason in the Post, serialized over the course of eight weeks just before it was to appear in hardback. Of course, it wasn’t just Erle Stanley Gardner (of the others, I remember most vividly Alistair MacLean’s Guns of Navarone and Hammond Innes’ Wreck of the Mary Deare, but there were also books from John P. Marquand’s Mr. Moto, Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe and C. S. Forester’s Hornblower series, as well as the occasional Western [ADDED 18 JULY 2011: and my first sci-fi novel, John Christopher's stunning No Blade of Grass, a/k/a The Death of Grass]), and it wasn’t just The Saturday Evening Post or just magazines: I read a string of Agatha Christie (mostly Jane Marple) novels as serials, in newspapers (starting with the novel now known as The 4.50 from Paddington, in the national ‘Sunday’ edition of the New York Daily News, and ending with A Caribbean Mystery in The Houston Post) and at least one in a magazine (a walk on the wild side: Cat among the Pigeons in my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal; technically not a serial, since the entire novel appeared, lightly condensed, in a single issue). Other newspaper serials I read ranged from nonfiction (Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring) to two of the lesser James Bond novels. I won’t include John D. Macdonald novels condensed in single issues of Cosmopolitan (yes, Cosmopolitan: before Helen Gurley Brown arrived, every issue contained a novel, and the magazine tried to appeal to both women and men) or the ‘nonfiction novels’ originally fostered in the pages of The New Yorker and Esquire.
At some point it all tapered off: all I remember of serialized fiction in the 1970s were Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet in The Atlantic and Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer in The New Yorker. And in the following decades I somehow missed most of The Bonfire of the Vanities and Harlot’s Ghost when they were serialized in Rolling Stone.
By that time, or so I thought, serialized fiction had become largely the stuff of nostalgia. With The Bonfire of the Vanities Tom Wolfe was explicitly seeking to return to the model of Dickens. And Stephen King’s The Green Mile (first published in 1996 in six monthly paperback instalments) was also conceived as a return to Dickens and was the work of a writer with strong childhood memories of serials in The Saturday Evening Post.
Nostalgia or not, the first appearance of The Green Mile struck a chord with me. I remember devouring it as it appeared; if I was on the road, I calculated where I could snap up each instalment the day it came out. I even had fantasies that the huge success of The Green Mile might lead to a return of serialization on a larger scale.
Fifteen years went by, the way years do, and, if we make an exception for the enormous impact of the Harry Potter novels (it’s not always clear what counts as serial fiction and what doesn’t, but hundreds of thousands of readers lined up outside bookstores awaiting the release of the next Potter, feels to me a lot like U.S. readers lining the docks, impatient to learn whether Little Nell lives or dies), the next blip on my radar was a double one, and it came last week.
First, the new Paris Review arrived, containing the second of four parts of the magazine’s serialization of Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous novel The Third Reich. (Bolaño deserves multiple posts all to himself, presumably outside the context of serial fiction. And the same for The Paris Review. What might surprise you about the latter, if you don’t know already, is that it’s not a ‘duty read’. It's also available on your iPad.)
Second, I came under the spell (after 50 years of our passing like [space-]ships in the night) of the German sci-fi serial phenomenon Perry Rhodan. English speakers who don’t follow science fiction are unlikely to have heard of Perry Rhodan (of the 2600 weekly numbers of the series, which appears initially in pulp-booklet format every Friday in German, only a limited number have been translated into English, and none currently)—but the cumulative international sales of the series (which breaks down into cycles or story arcs of 25 to 100 numbers, each number running in the neighborhood of 25,000 words and selling for the equivalent of a few dollars) run close to one and a half billion copies.
Yes, it’s another space opera; yes, it’s (now) set thousands of years in the future; yes, it’s a bit like joining a TV soap or any other series in midstream; yes, it draws on principles of physics that were not imparted to school children in, say, my Perry Mason days. But it’s all coming out in ebook format, last Friday’s release (Das Thanatos-Programm, number 2600, the beginning of a new cycle) was free and the easiest iBooks download ever, future instalments will go for $1.99 in the U.S....
...and it’s an honest-to-God serial!!!
To be continued.
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