A Couple of Reasons to Read "Hello, Goodbye" by Yiyun Li

 Did you meet someone in your first year of college who became a friend for life?  Are you a parent who has difficulty, or memorably had difficulty, dealing with the wisdom of young children?

If the answer to either of those questions is "yes," you might enjoy Yiyun Li's short story in the Nov. 15, 2021 edition of The New Yorker entitled "Hello, Goodbye."

The story, like a lot of  contemporary literary fiction, doesn't go much of anywhere at the end of the day, but it's well written. It's a partial exploration of certain interpersonal relationships as opposed to a tale that ends in the resolution of a plot or a set of issues.

The friendship is between two women, Nina, a daughter of Chinese immigrants, and Katie, who is apparently white and of European descent. Brought up in Kansas and Indiana, respectively, they went to U.C. Berkeley and ended up saying in California, both working in marketing (of course) for Silicon Valley firms. This was back in the late 1990s.

After that backdrop, the story jumps 20 years or so forward, into the current pandemic. Nina has a couple of precocious young daughters and a reliable, but boring husband. Katie, who has never had a child, wants to get out of her marriage to a wealthy jerk considerably older than she is and arrives on Nina's doorstep in need of help. Nina tries to balance her friend's needs with those of her children, the latter exacerbated by the pandemic and her husband's rather passive attitude toward parenting. 

If that sounds interesting, perhaps because you can identify with one or more aspects of the situation, I recommend "Hello, Goodbye."  The dialog in particular is good. If not, forget it. 

Perhaps the most memorable sentence in the entire story comes near the beginning. It goes as follows: "Nina was 27, not helplessly young, yet far from being trapped in a mildewed marriage, as she tended to believe many middle-aged women were." Readers can decide for themselves the extent to which she may have ended up in one. 

In the usual New Yorker author interview, Ms Li said that when it comes to relationships, she believes "muddling through" is better than wrecking things by opting for more extreme measures. The story is definitely in that vein.

Plot Similarities: Thomas Hardy and Henry James

 About half way though Thomas Hardy's "Far From the Madding Crowd," I had a sudden thought: that the basic plot was remarkably similar to that of "The Portrait of a Lady," by Henry James.  Both revolve around attractive, independent women who have come into an unexpected, significant inheritance at an early age and who are pursued by three different men.  Both women make the wrong choice when it comes to marriage, but in the end, Hardy goes in one direction and James in another.

The similarities were so striking I thought: "I can't be the only one who thinks so," and, indeed, not.

An Internet search soon turned up a thesis on this very topic, written by a woman named Susan Shepeard in 1976 in partial fulfillment of a Master of Arts degree at William & Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia.

"The striking similarities in theme, characterization and imagery go so far as to suggest that Hardy's earlier work might have influenced that of James," Ms Shepeard said, and, indeed, there is evidence to suggested that such could have been the case.  When "Far From" first appeared in 1874, it got a distinctly mixed review from James. whose "Portrait" was published in 1881. In other words, he was very familiar with Hardy's story prior to writing his own rather similar story. In addition,  the two men knew each other.

Shepeard's thesis doesn't attempt to resolve that particular controversy, focusing instead on how the two authors progressed from similar starting points to differing views on love and marriage. As such, I highly recommend her thesis to those interested in such ideas and/or the two authors.

One notable difference between the two works is their settings: very rural England in the case of Hardy and rather glittering European society in the case of James, a difference that initially serves to obscure their similarities. A young woman owning and running a farm (albeit on leased land) and, in the process, engaging in a lot of work, is enough to put Bathsheba on a pedestal in "Far From."  In contrast, Isabel, an American, needs the vast wealth she inherits to set her apart in the rather jaded European social milieu in which she finds herself and she has neither need for nor thought of employment.

Each woman is initially pursed by a man attracted to her before she came into wealth and both reject the advances. Both are also pursued by wealthy neighbors whose motives seem not dishonorable if less than ideal for women determined to be more independent than such liaisons would likely permit. And both eventually marry flawed individuals they seem to think they can help, only to be taken advantage of. 

In Hardy's case, certain circumstances serve to give Bathsheba an "out" and she then marries the man she apparently should have in the first place, an outcome Hardy justifies by offering readers a definition of the nature of true love. I wrote about that here.

In the case of James, "Portrait" ends with Isabel in such dreadful, unresolved circumstances that Irish author John Banville not long ago decided a sequel was needed. Banville's effort, "Mrs. Osmond" (Isabel's married name) was published in 2017. It is an interesting if less than totally satisfactory read.

Does Francesca da Rimini Deserve to be in the Inferno?

In the preceding post, I talked about a woman known as Francesca da Rimini who Dante Alighieri placed in the circle of his Inferno reserved for the lustful. There, she and her lover are condemned to swirl around in the winds of Hell forever as a result of their supposedly transgressive behavior.

Why continue this topic?  An important aspect of character development involves motivations, and questions of who or what is really responsible for any particular outcome. And how reliable is the narrator?

While you can read about Dante-the-poet's justifications for the outcome in question in the previous post, legitimate questions can be raised as to whether it was actually justifiable, whether it was prejudiced by certain, debatable  assumptions about the human condition and whether the poem's sketchy account of what happened told the whole story.

Was Francesca's Punishment Justifiable?

First, one can ask whether what Francesca and her lover Paolo did really constitutes "lust." Their affair was hardly a one-night stand.  Rather it lasted for ten years and presumably would have gone on even longer had not Francesca's husband caught them together and immediately killed them both.  It sounds more like two people very much in love with each other, sex being a natural expression of such sentiments.

But it was nonetheless adultery some might say, and that's that. Maybe so, but that portion of hell -- not deep into the abyss to be sure -- is for the lustful. One could argue there is a difference and Dante was most definitely a man to make distinctions. His Commedia is endlessly about distinctions and gradations,  even in Paradiso  One might not immediately imagine there to be different degrees of beatitude, perhaps leaving Saints aside, but that's apparently the case up there.

Not much seems to be known about the state of Paolo's marriage -- how it came about why it seems to have been unsuccessful, in one respect at any rate. But it is known that Francesca's father, head of the Italian city of Ravenna, married her off at about age 20 to the very unattractive older son of the head of the neighboring city of Rimini to cement an alliance -- not an uncommon practice in the Middle Ages.

Since Francesca apparently had no choice in the matter (she was simply an asset to be deployed to the advantage of the family), it seems hard to characterize her love for her husband's younger brother as adultery.  She didn't first choose her husband and only after he had accepted her, reject him for another man. Her political marriage was something of a legal technicality, serving society, but not her. It's hard to believe Francesca was married "in the eyes of God."

Dante's Catholicism didn't expect mere mortals to be perfect even if God had given them the means, through reason and love, to be so.  Indeed, Dante-the-pilgrim as he wanders through the afterlife with various guides has much to atone for and only after he has satisfactorily done so, does he reach a level of Paradise where he can get a glimpse of God.

Indeed, there is a whole realm of the Commedia, known as Purgatorio, where people who have repented, often at the last minute of their lives, are given time to make amends and eventually reach heaven.  And the only way out of Purgatorio is up: once there, you aren't going to Hell although it could take a long time for you to work things out, as it were.

And further, there is a special level or zone of Purgatorio for the lustful.  So why isn't Francesca there? Because her vengeful husband didn't give her a chance to recant. Bad luck I suppose, but should one be consigned forever to the Inferno on the basis of luck? It doesn't seem right, and especially when it appears her husband is going to end up in one of the deepest and most dreadful regions of the Inferno, not for killing Francesca (of course), but for murdering his brother as Cain did to Abel in the Bible. (The region in question is named after Cain.)

Where is the justice in all of this? 

Is Dante Right About The Human Condition?

Now let's turn to the poet Dante's underlying assumptions about the human condition and how they could be dead wrong. 

Dante-the-poet (as opposed to Dante-the-pilgrim who comes across as clueless much of the time) operates on the basis of the following assumptions: God endowed mankind with love, reason and free will. Because of the last mentioned and because love engenders strong desires, if reason isn't properly applied, it is easy to go astray. For our purposes, the key notion here is that love is internal to a person and controllable. So by failing to use her reason properly -- to understand the moral of the story of Lancelot and Guinevere -- Francesca misdirects her love and is condemned on both accounts.

That's not the way Francesca experienced what happened to her, which could call into question Dante's assumptions. Why should we think he knows what he's talking about, or telling the truth, when we know he had an agenda in writing the Commedia?

Francesca sees love as an external force that can take control of a person. Maybe Dante-the-pilgrim's guide at this point, the Roman poet Virgil, a pagan, should explain the role of Cupid to him.

"Love, who [an external entity] which so fast brings flames to human hearts, seized him [Paolo who first kissed her] with feeling for the lovely form, now torn from me [she's just a "shade" now with no substance]. The harm of how [she was murdered] still rankles.

"Love, who no loved one pardons love's requite, seized me for him so strong in delight that, as you see, he does no leave me yet."

The message here is that Francesca had no control over what happened, and my guess is it's a feeling shared by any number of readers, and especially with respect to the first time they fell in love.

As we know from the previous post, Francesca and Paolo were alone, reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere "for pure joy" and "we knew no suspicion." But when they read "the longed for smile of Guinevere -- at last her lover kissed," they were swept away in passion for each other. 

While Dante-the-poet is scornful of this outcome, his chief protagonist, Dante-the-pilgrim, can't imagine how such love can result in Francesca's fate, and he faints. (And not for the last time. One can't help thinking the pilgrim is a bit of a beta-male, but that's another topic.)

So who is correct about the nature of the human condition when it comes to love: Dante-the-poet, or Francesca, and if Francesca is correct, she most certainly does not deserve to be in the Inferno.

Did We Get the Full Story?

As we know from scholarly commentary on the "Commedia" if not from our own reading, there are a host of characters in the poem, few of whom are fleshed out in much detail.  Rather, the poet seems to think his readers will already know enough about them (despite the fact that many are fictional) that he can use an aspect or two of their lives to make a certain point.

Such is the case with Francesca. How exactly did that political marriage come about? Was Francesca complicit initially, or perhaps just a dutiful daughter going along with whatever her father (and mother?) thought best?  It would seem to be important to know in view of what happened to her.

In 1370, about 50 years after the Commedia appeared, the Florentine writer Giovanni Boccaccio, author of the Decameron and an admirer of Dante Alighieri. decided to flesh out the story and in a fashion arguably very sympathetic to Francesca. 

You can read a full account of Boccaccio's version as well as much, much more about Francesca on the website Dante Poliglotta, but in short, Boccaccio claims she was tricked into it. He says she was married by proxy, thinking she was wedding the attractive Paulo, and only on the morning after, discovered that her husband was instead his unattractive, lame older brother.

If that was the case, there is ample reason Francesca shouldn't be in the Inferno.

Well, one could go on and on because as you can see from Wikipedia's account of Francesca, her story inspired numerous plays, operas and other works of art. Which is another reason for knowing all about her.

I don't know about you, but I don't think she's really in the Inferno. Let's just mark it down to artistic license on the part of Dante. 

 

Wallace Stegner, Political Correctness and Who We Are

Here in America, we live in an age of political correctness. From time to time, it mutates, or morphs, or goes so far as to shoot itself in the foot (the election of Donald Trump, for instance), but it refuses to go away.

And as a result, "ideological pigeonholing" has, in the words of  New York Times critic A.O. Scott, "become our dominant form of cultural analysis."

This observation appeared in Scott's lengthy appreciation of Wallace Stegner, an author known primarily for his depictions of the American West, both in fiction and in other forms of writing. Scott's piece, the lead article in the June 7, 2020, NYT weekly Book Review section, was identified as the first in a series called "The Americans" -- profiles of "writers who show us who we are."

The point, an introduction to the series explained, is to restore a sense of complexity to an America that is increasingly being parsed through the medium of "the simplified, sloganized language of politics."

A certain paradox associated with Stegner  makes him worth reading at a time "when we spend so much time mapping the fault lines between privilege and resentment and fighting over who is part of the elite and who is entitled to victim status." So said Scott.

Although known during his lifetime as "the Dean of Western Writers," the author,  who died in 1993,  thought of himself as an outsider, but not in the usual sense of the region. He was an advocate of community and a critic of the rugged individualism so central to the mythical ethos of the American West and what it long appears to have stood for.

The Times said the new series will include a variety of American authors -- "some well-known, some unjustly forgotten and some perpetually misunderstood."

Stegner probably fits into the middle group -- largely forgotten.

His work "is hardly a fixture on college syllabuses or in the pages of scholarly journals," Scott said. In addition, one might add, his name is pretty much totally absent from popular cultural.

Moreover, Scott noted, "there is no Library of America collection of his writings."

In the context of political correctness, Scott noted that Stegner's work has been criticized by, among others, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, a writer and member of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe on the grounds that his works fail to significantly address the indigenous peoples of the region or a variety of non-white immigrant groups.

Well, Stegner's novels ("Angle of Repose" perhaps the most well known) are works of fiction, not sociological treatises. Novels certainly can be sociopolitical in nature, but they don't have to be. As Scott points out, Stegner was most concerned about marriage and, in particular, the nature of monogamous marriage. Stories generally need a setting and he chose the West.  All he needed to tell readers about the West is what was important to the lives of his particular characters.

Then again, one can argue Stegner's main concern -- monogamous marriage -- is sufficiently sociopolitical in and of itself.  Monogamy, with its "crags and chasms" is "the human undertaking around which all the others are organized," Scott said.

Perhaps Stegner's exploration of that topic, more than is depiction of the West" is his salient contribution to "who we are."

Ferrante's "The Days of Abandonment" Can Feel Out of Date

Emily Temple, a senior editor at Literary Hub, just published a recommended list of relatively short contemporary works of fiction entitled "The 50 Best Contemporary Novels Under 200 Pages." Sadly, my novella, Manhattan Morning isn't among them.

But that isn't why I bring this up. Rather, one of the books on Temple's list is "The Days of Abandonment," by Elena Ferrante, the author of a series of novels known as the Neapolitan Quartet.

"This is the real Ferrante. I mean, look, I love the Neapolitan series as much as everybody ... but in my opinion, this short novel about a woman unraveling is her true masterpiece," Temple says.

I am not a woman and therefor probably relatively unqualified to make the following observations, but I read this book and its depiction of a woman's place in a marriage struck me as out of date.

This is the story of Olga whose husband leaves her for a younger woman after 15 years of marriage, a distressing upheaval no doubt, but one that is particularly shattering for Ferrante's heroine because she feels her very identity has been wiped out.  That's because, and this seems particularly odd for an educated woman in a feminist-sensitive Western world, Olga has given herself over to her husband in totality on the believe that this is what love, in the context of marriage, is all about.

At a couple of points in the story, Olga enumerates lists of things that she did for her husband, starting with getting him through university and supporting him in his work life to the point where she had "made him what he had become." 

In the process, "I had put aside my own aspirations to go along with his," she says, noting that she "had had no work, any sort of work, even writing. for at least five years," as she took care of the house, the children and the family finances including the income taxes.

"While I was taking care of the children, I was expecting from Mario [her husband] a moment that never arrived, the moment when I would again be as I had been before my pregnancies, young, slender, energetic, shamelessly certain I could make of myself a memorable person."

Instead, she at one point spends several evenings searching through old photographs "for signs of my autonomy."

As she disintegrates, Olga feels not only the loss of her identity and sexuality, she most fundamentally feels increasingly vulnerable and, in the end, instead of remaking herself as an independent woman, settles for safety above all else in a relationship with an older neighbor.

Asked in an interview (re-published in her book "Frantumaglia," or jumbled fragments) if she would call "The Days of Abandonment" a feminist novel, Ferrante replied yes, and no.

"Yes, because it's sustained by the female reaction to abandonment, from Medea and Dido on. No, because it doesn't aim at telling what is the theoretically and practically correct reaction of the contemporary woman faced with the loss of the beloved man nor does it brand male behaviors as vile," Ferrante said.

Mario, Olga's husband, simply fell in love with someone else.

All You Need is Love, or How to Tanscend a Happy Marriage

In 1967, the Beatles released what was arguably their sappiest song: "All You Need Is Love." It became an anthem of the hippie era -- encapsulating the sentiment of the San Francisco Summer of Love -- much the way "We Shall Overcome" became an anthem of the slightly earlier civil rights movement.

The notion that love can conquer all is back, in the form of a play by Sarah Rhul called "How to transcend a happy marriage" that is currently playing in New York at Lincoln Center.

George Saunders & Katie Kitamura: One Thing In Common

What do George Saunders and Katie Kitamura have in common apart from having just published highly regarded novels?  It turns out they both like a book called "The Argonauts" by Maggie Nelson which revolves around .... well, anal sex.

Saunders, whose debut novel "Lincoln in the Bardo" currently qualifies as Book-of-the-Moment, was asked in a recent "New York Times" interview "what's the last great book you have read?"

Marriage as a Ménages à Trois

"Goodreads" just send out by email a February newsletter in which several authors suggest books to read within certain categories.

Katie Kitamura, author of the recent novel "A Separation," listed five of her favorite books on the topic of marriage.

A Story of Manners That Calls To Mind Graphic Novels

I'm going to stay with the Dec. 21 & 28 New Yorker for the moment and talk about Tim Parks' concise short story called "Bedtimes," which I like for two reasons: first it is essentially a story of manners -- that once popular genre that few writers seem to view as a suitable subject for contemporary fiction.

Novels of manners -- Jane Austin, of course, immediately comes to mind -- concern how people behave toward each other in conventional social situations, or, to put it another way, in ordinary life.

Second, I like this story because it is written in prose so straight forward it reads like an ever-so trendy graphic novel. All that is missing is the pictures, but the nature of the story is such that one can easily imagine them.

"There is a willful simplicity and a mechanical, monosyllabic repetition to the prose. Almost as if it were written for children, in places, as if everything were terribly simple and clear, when in reality none of the important or complicated things are being said," Parks explained in an author interview.

What important or complicated things? A marriage has stagnated, but perhaps not terminally, and neither spouse wants to take the issue on. Among other things, there are children in the picture.

To say more would give it away. It's only two pages. Read it and see what resonates.