"Here's To You Mrs. Dalloway"

"And here's to you, Mrs. Dalloway,
 Culture loves you more than you will know"

 

With apologies to Simon & Garfunkel, this bit of doggerel came to me when I read the Bookends feature of the "New York Times" weekly Book Review Section on April 19.

 

"A weekend is a much bigger character than Watergate."  That quote from Wilfred Sheed was used to kick off the usual "Bookends" offerings by two commentators, this time on the question of whether everyday life is better fodder for fiction than grand events.

 

The most interesting aspect of the unprovocative exchange of views was that both of the commentators, presumably independently, cited Virginia Woolf's novel "Mrs. Dalloway"  as a prime example of "everyday life" fiction. 

 

I think they got the right author, but the wrong book. In "Mrs. Dalloway," one of the main characters commits suicide and the prime minister of England is coming to the party Clarissa and her husband, a government official, are hosting that night. These are not everyday events.

 

In contrast, Woolf's equally well regarded novel "To the Lighthouse" is concerned entirely with the quotidian affairs of family and friends.

 

Do Moralists Make Bad Novelists?

Alison McCulloch, reviewing Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's collection of stories called "Invisible Love" in the Sunday, Jan. 4, 2015, edition of the New York Times, said Schmitt, in a writer's dairy appended to the stories, argued that moralists make bad novelists.

"When they try, they bring to their reproduction of reality a coldness, a clinical attitude, a dissection of living matter that reeks of the laboratory."

That got me wondering as to what extent my story "Manhattan Morning" deals with moral issues and what that might say about it.

The Question of Pleasure and "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn"

The "Bookends" page of the "New York Times" Sunday Book Review section has become one of my favorite reads.  The format is always the same: two guest contributors horse over a particular topic or question. On April 5, it was "When it comes to reading, is pleasure suspect?"

Here we need to pause for a moment and consider the question. Why might the concept of pleasure (happiness, delight, joy, satisfaction, gratification, contentment, amusement, etc.) be considered suspect at all? What does this say about our society?