Middlemarch by George Eliot

Source of book: I own this.

I have been wanting to read this book for ages, but it was one of the very few George Eliot books I didn’t own. Oddly, it is still the only book of hers I own that is not a hardback. (I own all her novels except Felix Holt.) I first read Silas Marner back in high school, and then read The Mill on the Floss in my 20s. Finally, I read Daniel Deronda in my 30s. Now, with Middlemarch in my 40s, I am finally reading the book considered to be her masterpiece. 

Regular readers of my blog will know that Anthony Trollope is my favorite Victorian novelist, but I would say George Eliot is a close second. Both share a keen sense of psychology and a fascination with the ways that rural English society interfaces with politics and religion. The novels mention great events (the Reform Bill of 1832 is at the center of discussions in the story), but the focus is on everyday stuff: marriage, birth, death, inheritance, relationships. 

Middlemarch is a long book, with a lot of related subplots, so I am not going to attempt a summary. Perhaps it is best just to name some of the main characters. The heroine is Dorothea, an idealistic and naive young woman who wants to do something meaningful with her life. It isn’t easy as a woman, however, as she finds out. She marries early in the book, choosing an older, fusty clergyman who is more or less writing a book tying all mythologies together. (He dies before succeeding, leaving that task to Joseph Campbell…) In contrast to Dorothea, who is an almost impossibly good person, is Rosamond, who wishes to escape both her plebeian (if well off) family, and the narrow confines of Middlemarch. She latches on to Lydgate, an ambitious but fortuneless doctor. Needless to say, this marriage does not go well for either party. Rosamond’s feckless brother Fred has received an education (at significant expense to his parents), but declines to become a clergyman, and thus has no obvious way to make a living. He is in love with the delightfully witty Mary, but has to find his way before they can marry. Rosamond and Fred’s uncle, Bulstrode, has a dark secret in his past which he wishes to keep secret - all while he adopts a sanctimonious and self-righteous religion that alienates others. 

This being a Victorian novel, tied up with all of this is the question of money. Who has it, who inherits it, and whose prospects are crippled because of a lack of it. This is also tied up with class: those who are considered aristocracy cannot “work for a living” in the normal sense without “lowering themselves.” A marriage outside one’s social class is either “climbing” (which is mostly good) or “lowering” (which most certainly isn’t.) Eliot, like Trollope, exposes the frustrations and hypocrisy this system require. 

Eliot’s particular twist on the genre consists in her focus, not so much on the courtships, but on the marriages themselves. Dorothea marries a few chapters into the book, while Rosamond marries about halfway. These two miserable marriages form the bulk of the narrative of much of the book. “Happily Ever After” this most certainly isn’t. The marriages (and others in the book) form a series of contrasts in compatibility (or lack thereof), grace, and sensitivity. 

Another theme in the book is the problem of womanhood. What IS Dorothea to do with herself? In another era, as Eliot points out, she might have become a saint. In our own time, she would be like my wife, with a career and a mission in life. But in Victorian Protestant England, her options were mostly marriage, marriage, and marriage. 

There are so many great lines in this book, it took me a whole page (on a mini-legal pad) to write them down. I’ll just run through them in some semblance of order - although not in the order they appear in the book. First is this exchange between Dorothea and her younger sister Celia. 

“Sir James seems determined to do everything you wish,” said Celia, as they were driving home from an inspection of the new building-site.

“He is a good creature, and more sensible than any one would imagine,” said Dorothea, inconsiderately.

“You mean that he appears silly.”

“No, no,” said Dorothea, recollecting herself, and laying her hand on her sister’s for a moment, “but he does not talk equally well on all subjects.”

“I should think none but disagreeable people do,” said Celia, in her usual purring way. “They must be very dreadful to live with. Only think! At breakfast, and always.” 

In this early exchange is the germ of so much that follows. Obviously, Celia is more the sort for Sir James, who bores Dorothea to death. But also, Dorothea’s idol, the crusty Casaubon, turns out to be miserable to live with - his ability to talk coherently on a variety of subjects does not translate into affection or respect toward Dorothea. I personally would hope that this is not a universal truth, however, because I kind of like to talk about all kinds of things, but don’t consider myself dreadful to live with. 

I’ll also mention the delightful neologism Eliot uses in describing the Renaissance paintings in Casaubon’s house: “severe classical nudities and smirking Renaissance-Correggiosities.” That makes me laugh every time. 

Later in the book, Lydgate meets Dorothea, but finds her to be not his sort. 

To his taste, guided by a single conversation, here was the point on which Miss Brooke would be found wanting, notwithstanding her undeniable beauty. She did not look at things from the proper feminine angle. The society of such women was about as relaxing as going from your work to teach the second form, instead of reclining in a paradise with sweet laughs for bird-notes, and blue eyes for a heaven. 

Obviously, this is as laughably naive as Dorothea’s belief that Casaubon would accept her as an equal partner in his work. Ironically, Lydgate and Dorothea would have made the best match, in my view. If only his male ego had been up to the task of partnering with a formidable and intelligent woman, the two of them might have fulfilled both their dreams. Instead, Dorothea ends up with Mr. Casaubon, who himself has rather retrograde views of women. This passage is just amazingly perceptive - and discloses the way far too many men still think of women and marriage. 

Providence, in its kindness, had supplied him with the wife he needed. A wife, a modest young lady, with the purely appreciative, unambitious abilities of her sex, is sure to think her husband’s mind powerful. Whether Providence had taken equal care of Miss Brooke in presenting her with Mr. Casaubon was an idea which could hardly occur to him. Society never made the preposterous demand that a man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy. As if a man could choose not only his wife but his wife’s husband! Or as if he were bound to provide charms for his posterity in his own person!

He is as naive as Lydgate in his own way - Dorothea is a far more formidible intellect than he bargained for; and, while she is sweet and devoted, she needs love and respect, which he fails or even declines to give her. 

Rosamond is quite the different creature from Dorothea. Educated in a finishing school to within an inch of her life, she is one who seems rather than is.

Every nerve in muscle in Rosamond was adjusted to the consciousness that she was being looked at. She was by nature an actress of parts that entered into her physique: she acted her own character, and so well, that she did not know it to be her own.

Later, Rosamond kisses up to Lydgate’s rich relatives, much to the irritation of Lydgate. His army cousin is particularly stupid and flirtatious. Eliot wryly remarks that “but to most mortals there is a stupidity which is unendurable and a stupidity which is altogether acceptable--else, indeed, what would become of social bonds?”

The disillusionment, when it comes, is horrifying to the two men. Eliot describes Casaubon’s realization that Dorothea doesn’t just adore him uncritically. She too is human, and responds accordingly to disrespect and neglect. 

There was no denying that Dorothea was as virtuous and lovely a young lady as he could have obtained for a wife; but a young lady turned out to be something more troublesome than he had conceived. She nursed him, she read to him, she anticipated his wants, and was solicitous about his feelings; but there had entered into the husband’s mind the certainty that she judged him, and that her wifely devotedness was like a penitential expiation of unbelieving thoughts--was accompanied with a power of comparison by which himself and his doings were seen too luminously as a part of things in general. 

…

And who, if Mr. Casaubon had chosen to expound his discontents--his suspicions that he was not any longer adored without criticism--could have denied that they were founded on good reasons? On the contrary, there was a strong reason to be added, which he had not himself taken explicitly into account--namely, that he was not unmixedly adorable. He suspected this, however, as he suspected other things, without confessing it, and like the rest of us, felt how soothing it would have been to have a companion who would never find it out.

That’s just a tour-de-force of psychological analysis. These are real, human, believable characters. Sadly, Casaubon is never able to simply treat Dorothea as an equal, and speak intimately with her. Every time she lets her feelings show, he withdraws and punishes her. He becomes “hard,” as the author puts it. 

Mr. Casaubon kept his hands behind him and allowed her pliant arm to cling with difficulty against his rigid arm.

There was something horrible to Dorothea in the sensation which this unresponsive hardness inflicted on her. That is a strong word, but not too strong: it is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness--calling their own denial knowledge. 

Eliot is one hundred percent right when she says that it is in the trivialities that relationships are destroyed. It is the proverbial straw - the weight of thousands of straws - that makes happiness and consonance impossible. I can say from experience in my professional life that more marriages die because of the cumulative effect of “hardness” than any other factor. This isn’t a gender thing - it happens both ways. At best, it is a refusal to consider the needs of the other spouse; in some ways, it is a form of emotional abuse. It happens in other relationships too, of course, and I would guess that most severed or damaged parent-child relationships will have this as a crucial element as well. Eventually, Casaubon becomes so paranoid that he tries to bully Dorothea. 

“Before I sleep, I have a request to make, Dorothea.”

“What is it?” said Dorothea, with dread in her mind.

“It is that you will let me know, deliberately, whether, in case of my death, you will carry out my wishes: whether you will avoid doing what I should deprecate, and apply yourself to do what I should desire.”

Dorothea was not taken by surprise: many incidents had been leading her to the conjecture of some intention on her husband’s part which might make a new yoke for her. She did not answer immediately.
“You refuse?” said Mr. Casaubon, with more edge in his tone.

“No, I do not yet refuse,” said Dorothea, in a clear voice, the need of freedom asserting himself within her; “but it is too solemn--I think it is not right--to make a promise when I am ignorant what it will bind me to. Whatever affection prompted I would do without promising.”

“But you would use your own judgment: I ask you to obey mine; you refuse.”

“No, dear, no!” said Dorothea, beseechingly, crushed by opposing fears. “But may I wait and reflect a little while? I desire with my whole soul to do what will comfort you; but I cannot give any pledge suddenly--still less a pledge to do I know not what.”

Sadly, she is on the verge of agreeing anyway, when he dies. And fucking good riddance. He had some of my sympathy up until that moment, when he got full-on abusive. And it is abusive to demand that someone promise to do what you order them to do, without knowing what it is. And it is also abusive to try to bind someone beyond your own death. 

The situation with Lydgate and Rosamond is similar, although it is Rosamond who brutally punishes her husband for trying to get her to work with him as a team. One is left wondering how different things would have been with a bit of honest communication. Actually, come to think of it, the Garths do that - they may not always agree, but they communicate with love and respect.  

One of my favorite minor characters is Mr. Farebrother, a vicar. His interest isn’t really that much in his job - although he does work at it. He prefers his scientific experiments and his garden. Since he has several female relatives to support, he plays whist for money. As one of the more moderate religious sorts, he ends up being the most admirable of the clergymen, ironically. I mention him in this instance, to quote his mother, who gets into an exchange with Lydgate because she does not support any sort of change, including reform. 

“I object to what is wrong, Camden. I say, keep hold of a few plain truths, and make everything square with them. When I was young, Mr. Lydgate, there never was any question about right and wrong. We knew our catechism, and that was enough; we learned our creed and our duty. Every respectable Church person had the same opinions. But now, if you speak out of the Prayer-book itself, you are liable to be contradicted.” 

Mrs. Farebrother is pretty harmless, to be sure. But danged if I haven’t had this used as a weapon against me a few times. This idea that the past was a utopia is ludicrous on its face, as is the idea that everyone agreed. But “we knew the truth, every new idea is heresy” is pretty much the Fundamentalist credo, and justifies preserving the hierarchies and injustices and superstitions of the past. 

Not as harmless as Mrs. Farebrother is Bulstrode, whose militant Puritanism combines with his “sharp” business practices as banker to earn the suspicion of his neighbors. When Lydgate shows up, it is rumored that he is an illegitimate son of Bulstrode. When Rev. Farebrother points out to his mother that Lydgate has family elsewhere and never met Bulstrode, she retorts:

“That is satisfactory so far as Mr. Lydgate is concerned, Camden,” said the old lady, with an air of precision. “But as to Bulstrode--the report may be true of some other son.”

In the actual event, the truth turns out to be even worse than an illegitimate son. (I won’t spoil it.)

Men in general do not come off all that well in this book, although there is one notable exception: Caleb Garth, who is patterned after Eliot’s own father. The two men who die leaving money are particularly loathsome in their use of money to control people after their death. Old Peter Featherstone has essentially strung Fred along with promises of an inheritance before changing his mind at the end. Eliot has no difficulty speaking evil of the dead. 

He loved money, but he also loved to spend it in gratifying his peculiar tastes, and perhaps he loved it best of all as a means of making others feel his power more or less uncomfortably. If any one here will contend that there must have been traits of goodness in old Featherstone, I will not presume to deny this; but I must observe that goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance. 

I can think of a few people who fit this description. (Cough, cough, Trump, cough, cough…) Whatever good there theoretically may have been once has been killed by a lifetime of vice. 

Mr. Vincy is rather more comic, but he too shares the flaw of most of the men in the book in that they expect to be in charge and looked up to even when they clearly have not earned it. 

Apart from his dinners and his coursing, Mr. Vincy, blustering as he was, had as little of his own way as if he had been a prime minister: the force of circumstances was easily too much for him, as it is for most pleasure-loving florid men; and the circumstances called Rosamond was particularly forcible by means of that mild persistence which, as we know, enables a white soft living substance to make its way in spite of opposing rock. 

The political element of the book centers, as I noted, on the Reform Bill. Dorothea chooses not to focus on the politics (at least early in the book), in part because she sees so much to be done locally. Her uncle, Mr. Brooke, has tenants, yet he fails to maintain and upgrade his houses and fields for their benefit. Dorothea points out to him that his idea of running for parliament on a pro-Reform platform is hypocritical if he won’t do the good he can where he is. 

“I used to come from the village with all that dirt and coarse ugliness like a pain within me, and all the simpering pictures in the drawing-room seemed to me like a wicked attempt to find delight in what is false, while we don’t mind how hard the truth is for the neighbours outside our walls. I think we have no right to come forward and urge wider changes for good, until we have tried to alter the evils which lie under our own hands.”

Dorothea is partly right. To the degree she is right, she is stating the one single true criticism conservatives make of liberals: all too often they can ignore the injustice in their own neighborhoods. But Dorothea is also half wrong. Individuals can and should do good in their personal lives, but true social reform requires those “wider changes” and can only be enforced against evil, greedy people (such as Featherstone) with the force of government. I may (and do) give to private charity, but even if I gave all I have, I would make little dent in providing meaningful healthcare to the millions who go without due to our cruel policies. (Which are rooted in racism and social darwinism…) Both approaches are necessary, but individual effort is both worthwhile and grossly insufficient. 

Mr. Brooke does, however, find that his own opinion of himself is not shared by his tenants. In this, Dorothea is quite correct: he needs to tend his own garden, so to speak. 

He walked out of the yard as quickly as he could, in some amazement at the novelty of his situation. He had never been insulted on his own land before, and had been inclined to regard himself as a general favourite (we are all apt to do so, when we think of our own amiability more than of what other people are likely to want of us.)

Eliot is correct that all of us are subject to this to some degree. In the age of Trump, I think I have seen it most clearly in the response of Baby Boomer Evangelicals to the unpleasant experience of being called out on their racism. And on the way certain family members have responded when it turns out that they made themselves so unpleasant that they find themselves alone. It is nice, I suppose, to spend much of one’s life with the illusion that one is an amiable person, and never have to actually make the effort to be so. 

The chapter headings all have quotes. Often, these are from Eliot herself, in the form of poetry. Other times, they are quotations from other authors. I was particularly struck by this one from Sir Thomas Browne. 

It is the humour of many heads to extol the days of their forefathers, and declaim against the wickedness of times present. Which notwithstanding they cannot handsomely do, without the borrowed help and satire of times past; condemning the vices of their own times, by the expressions of vices in times which they commend, which cannot but argue the community of vice in both. Horace, therefore, Juvenal, and Persius, were no prophets, although their lines did seem to indigitate and point at our times.

There is a doozy in there when it comes to my Fundamentalist Cult experience. The whole premise of it was that things (and people) were better back in the old days, so if we just returned to the culture and hierarchies of the (white) past, everything would be better. But the evils they decried existed in plenty in the past too, and the so-called “prophets” they love foretold nothing - they were just screaming about how bad racial and gender equality were. Furthermore, the past was not better anyway. It just gave more power to people like them. 

Sir Thomas Browne, by the way, wrote that in the middle of the 17th Century. As in, nearly 400 years ago. Things haven’t changed - the retrograde reactionaries of any age sound exactly the same. 

Speaking of things that are older than one expects, how about this one? 

The trash talked on such occasions was the more vexatious to Lydgate...

Wait, what?? That is indeed a reference to “talking trash.” Which apparently they were doing back in 1871. I had never seen a reference to trash talk that far back, so who knew?

Going back the religious issue, Eliot puts some interesting words in Dorothea’s mouth. Eliot herself was not religious - and considering the fury her relationship with her lover brought, it isn’t that surprising she wasn’t into it. She did, however, respect religion, granting that when done right, it helped to moderate and regulate society in positive ways. After Casaubon’s death, Dorothea has the legal right (based on property) to appoint his successor in the parish. On advice from Lydgate, she appoints Farebrother - who also happens to reflect her own gentle and aspirational Christianity. Certainly, Farebrother suits her more than Bulstrode’s favorite, Mr. Tyke, and his Calvinist sermonizing. 

“It is hard to imagine what sort of notions our farmers and labourers get from their teaching. I have been looking into a volume of sermons by Mr. Tyke: such sermons would be of no use at Lowick--I mean, about imputed righteousness and the prophecies in the Apocalypse. I have always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other, I cling to that as the truest--I mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it.” 

This reflects my own frustration with Evangelicalism, which is obsessed with theories of atonement, the End Times™, and excluding as many people as possible. My journey out of that moral cesspit has been to a large degree trying to find a way that makes Christianity a force for wide blessing for everyone, not violence toward those outside the tribe. 

I do think that Calvinism is the worst of the worst - and Eliot (dang, isn’t she prescient?) nails it again.

He [Bulstrode] was doctrinally convinced that there was a total absence of merit in himself; but that doctrinal conviction may be held without pain when the sense of demerit does not take a distinct shape in memory and revive the tingling of shame or the pang of remorse. Nay, it may be held with intense satisfaction when the depth of our sinning is but a measure of the depth of forgiveness, and a clenching proof that we are peculiar instruments of the divine intention.

This explains how the people I know who care most deeply about “total depravity” and “completely unearned grace” are also the exact same people who are the most cruel to others in their political beliefs. Eliot explains, I think, how one can believe in total depravity while being horribly self-righteous and convinced that those other people totally deserve their suffering. 

While Bulstrode (mostly) gets his just deserts, the one thing the novel doesn’t really satisfactorily resolve is the problem of Dorothea. She still desires to manage her own life, and her own property. But in the end, she ends up in another marriage, and must content herself with a husband and children - the conventional ending. To be sure, Will Ladislaw isn’t abusive - he seems like a nice enough guy. And in the epilogue, it appears he makes a decent go of it in politics (with a lot of support from the faithful Dorothea.) But Eliot refuses to pretend this is idea. She is intellectually superior to Will - that is clear enough. And she has enough ambition for two of them. It feels like a letdown by 21st Century standards. 

I can’t help but feel that times are better now for women like Dorothea. My own wife is definitely more ambitious than I am, which is why her career is on a higher trajectory. I am content to do my work for clients and aim for justice in small things. I’ll never be rich, but I am fulfilled for the most part with what I do. She is management, and intends in a few years to complete her Nurse Practitioner license. Fortunately, she doesn’t find me to be a disappointment. But there is a place for women like that in today’s society, certainly more than in the Victorian Era, and she is able to follow her calling in a way Dorothea never can. 

One final bit of humor, after all that seriousness. Mary Garth is in love with Fred Vincy, and their courtship is pretty amusing. She has quite the tongue, but she is clearly good for him. When she asks her father to bless the union, after she has basically proposed (like my wife did first, btw…), she has this to say about why she loves Fred:

“Oh dear, because I have always loved him. I should never like scolding anyone else so well; and that is a point to be thought of in a husband.”

 And that, I suppose, is as good of a line as any. Mary assumes a level of intimacy and communication with Fred - which they certainly have - is a good basis for a marriage. And it is, really. In contrast to the other marriages, this one has promise, because it is founded on a mutuality, a high degree of love, respect, and good humor. 

I will say, I greatly enjoyed reading Middlemarch. Eliot is sometimes forgotten in our time and day, the greatest female novelist of the era, and one of the all time greats. Middlemarch is not exactly like any of the other novels of hers I have read - but each has been unique. This one is as good of a place to start as any, although Silas Marner has the advantage of being shorter, for those intimidated by long books. 

Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

I have loved Yiyun Li ever since I first read Gold Boy, Emerald Girl back in 2013. I followed that up with the eviseceratingly tragic yet beautiful The Vagrants about a year ago. It is hard to believe that English isn’t her first language - she shares Conrad’s ability to make amazing art in a language she didn’t grow up speaking. As this book reveals, she intentionally chose to write only in English, and never in her native Chinese. 

Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life was published in 2017, five years after Yiyun had a serious mental breakdown, attempted suicide twice, and landed in the hospital for her own protection. The book itself is a series of essays wherein she explores her own psyche, her breakdown, her past, and her relationship to literature and writing. At least, that is the best I can do to explain the book, because it isn’t really like anything I have read before. And it is really, really good. Her writing is so luminous, and simultaneously oblique and devastatingly revealing, it draws you in. 

Yiyun has said in the past that she is “not an autobiographical writer.” That is, her stories are not about her or people she knew. But, as she admits in this book, that was a lie. I don’t think it was a lie in the sense of being actually untrue. She doesn’t write stories with her as a character. But if I am reading her essay on this issue correctly, her story is told through the psyches of her characters, not their situations, plots, or choices. And that feels right, after reading this book. She is a very private person, and her characters tend to keep their emotions mostly out of sight. But, just as her stories reveal the emotions of her characters in such flayed reality that you want to look away, her essays in this book are as introspective and self-revealing as anything I have ever read. I mean, you can see the viscera and throbbing arteries of her emotional experiences. It is hard to take at times, which is why I read the book slowly. The reality is just too real to be looked in the face. 

In an interesting coincidence, this is the second book I have read in as many months that had autobiographical explorations of depression and suicide. The other was a fictional work, Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater. While the two are very different - psychologically different too - the share that uncomfortable look into mental illness. As an example, Emezi’s character has multiple personalities, tends to be loud and act out, and seems like a being on fire more often than not. It is a violent vision of suicide, of self destruction, and inner torment. Yiyun’s on the other hand, is that of a person who is quiet, pleasant, polite, thoughtful, ridiculously erudite - but who is dying internally, filled with a rather quiet self-loathing and distaste for living. It’s really spooky the way she writes it. 

As I noted in the former review, I am not particularly prone to either depression or suicidal thoughts. I’ve been in a few dark places, but they tend to be connected to circumstances, not major depression. And also, I joke that I am more homicidal than suicidal. (Don’t worry, I’m not homicidal. I’m not a violent person, but more of a fuzzball with a smart mouth. I just tend to get angry rather than depressed.) So these books were really more about seeing into the mind of someone else, and recognizing some of the darkness, if not its manifestations. It is an indication of how good the writing is that these books felt so real and familiar - and how deeply they messed with my emotions while reading. 

Yiyun takes an interesting approach to things in the book. For the most part, she doesn’t talk directly about what happened or what she did. Rather, she talks about other writers. Some of these are ones I might have guessed: Turgenev, Chekhov, Marianne Moore, Stefan Zweig. But some were a bit surprising, such as Thomas Hardy. Wait, what?? And some others which I haven’t read, and were not that familiar with, such as Elizabeth Bowen, John McGahern, and William Trevor. (The last of which she formed a friendship with, and who gets most of a chapter to himself.) Yiyun traces her love affair with literature from her childhood through the present, and you can see exactly how she ended up going from a promising career in science to taking the leap into writing. 

Rather than try further to explain the book, let me mention a few quotes that I wrote down as particularly insightful. 

After years of living in America, I still feel a momentary elation whenever I see advertisements for weight-loss programs, teeth-whitening strips, hair-loss treatments, or plastic surgery with the contrasting effects shown under before and after. The certainty in that pronouncement--for each unfortunate or inconvenient situation, there is a solution to make it no longer be--both attracts and perplexes me. Life can be reset, it seems to say; time can be separated. But that logic appears to me as unlikely as traveling to another place to become a different person. Altered sceneries are at best distractions, or else new settings for old habits. What one carries from one point to another, geographically or temporally, is one’s self. Even the most inconsistent person is consistently himself. 

Cue a bit of Clint Black? What makes this a particularly great insight is her understanding of the American mythos, and the way we built an economy on the lie that we can become fundamentally different people if we consume the right way.  

There is another moment when Yiyun recalls a visit to Ireland during a heat wave, and notes that, like music, weather can be a crucial part of a memory - and trigger it. 

Children, unlike their elders, do not converse about the weather. It is a fact to them, connected to the present only. Is it because weather can represent too much that it is often reduced to small talk? Weather gives experiences a place in time: a mood in which to inset a memory, a variable or a constant when comparing now and then. 

It’s bits like that which separate competent writers from the best, and I can only dream of being able to write - and observe - like that. Or how about this recalling of what reading meant to her during her deeply unpleasant time in the Chinese Army? 

I did not see myself in Scarlett O’Hara; or Anna Karenina, or Tess Durbeyfield or Jane Erye; nor did I look for myself in Jean-Christophe or Nick Adams or Paul Morel or the old man fighting the sea. To read oneself into another person’s tale is the opposite of how and why I read. To read is to be with people who, unlike those around one, do not notice one’s existence. 

That last sentence is amazing. And I think that, while I am not so inwardly turned as Yiyun, I get that feeling. Perhaps it is how introverts tend to read? 

Running through the book is Yiyun’s own history, which certainly contributed to her breakdown. Her mother was, to put it mildly, abusive. And probably mentally ill. Yiyun was the favorite child, so her sister probably had it worse, but the things Yiyun tells of her childhood make it clear that her mother abused everyone in the family, including her father. Some of the things said and done are just horrifying, such as her mother telling her that she “deserved the ugliest death” because she didn’t love her mother enough, and on the day she got married, telling her that she had left her with only the hope for Li’s divorce. I mean, it’s bad, and yet Yiyun remains haunted and drawn to her mother. In this context, and the fact that her parents’ memories - even though she doesn’t share them - still affect her in unexpected ways, she quotes Ralph Ellison: “Things were not supposed to be this way.” 

One of the chapters is largely about Turgenev, who had a similarly abusive and possessive mother. How about this fact? After disowning Turgenev’s brother for marrying, and then acting indifferent when the children of that marriage died in the same year, she told Turgenev, “I alone conceived you. You are an egoist of egoist. I know your character better than you know yourself...I prophesy that you will not be loved by your wife.” 

Ouch. But Yiyun’s mother said something similar to her: “I don’t even need to lay my eyes on you to know everything about you because you came from my body.” Apparently, she said this to the young Li regularly. She then asks, “How do we live with what we have, unhaunted?” And the answer is clearly that we cannot. We remain haunted. 

I must admit, a good bit of this resonated with me. My mother was not even in the same class as these controlling and abusive mothers, but she was damaged by her own childhood, and never really was able to transition from the mother of children to the mother of adults in a healthy manner. I did hear all too often during my teens that she feared I would marry a sweet girl and run roughshod over her. In the actual event, I married a strong, confident, and assertive woman, and I am pretty sure my mom was disappointed, which is why she eventually antagonized my wife until she was unwilling to waste time on my parents at all. So yes, I am very much haunted, and have to live with what I have. Things were not supposed to be this way. 

Returning again near the end of the book to her mother, Yiyun gives yet another facet of the issue. 

Writing is the only part of my life I have taken beyond my mother’s storytelling. I have avoided writing in an autobiographical voice because I cannot bear that it could be overwritten by my mother’s omniscience. I can easily see all other parts of my life in her narrative: my marriage, my children, my past. Just as she demands to come into my narrative, I demand to be left out of hers. There is no way to change that; not a happy ending, not even an ending is possible.

Perhaps the most difficult and haunting part of the book is Yiyun’s description of her never-ending quest to be invisible, to not matter, to prove that nothing matters. And it is clear that she wants to be visible, to be loved, to matter, and to prove that everything matters. There is a line in which she perhaps allows herself a glimpse of why. 

Nothing matters. The belief was fallible, but I knew from experience that absence is more reliable than presence, and a lie sustains life with absoluteness that truth fails to offer. 

There are layers to unpack in that one. Most obvious is that Yiyun finds that reality leads her toward suicide, and that some form of self-delusion appears necessary to prevent that. This is some crazy philosophical stuff, to be sure, and it isn’t just her. (As the book makes clear.) But I think too that she hits on a truth about...truth. Truth is complicated and messy and human and ambiguous. A lie is absolute. Lies tell you that everything can be summed up in one rule, one statement, one “truth.” And this is why cults thrive and hate multiplies and people embrace obvious untruths. It is far easier - and simpler because it is absolute - to say “my problems are the fault of those people,” than to look at the complexities of life. Far easier to exterminate the Jews, or deport immigrants, than to address the layers of kludge and rules and laws and systems which have choked the average person. Finding true solutions is always hard work - it is the work of reformation, not revolution - while “solutions” are easy to find. They have an absoluteness that truth cannot offer. On a related note, this observation is interesting, particularly in the context of whether wishing to escape suffering is selfish or not. (Many consider suicide selfish, but are other methods of escape likewise selfish?) 

It is easier to take something away than to give. Giving requires understanding and imagination; taking away requires only resolution and action.

This too ties back: giving - like truth - is complicated, and requires understanding the one to whom one gives, and imagination in finding a mutual good. That’s the complexity of truth. And the lie is easier - just take things away from other people. Send them back. Lock them up. Tell them to shut up. 

In the same chapter is an unexpected insight, which caught me off guard. I mentioned that I was not expecting Thomas Hardy to make an appearance. I was doubly not expecting to find a quote from Phillip Larkin about Jude the Obscure and the ensuing discussion to change my perspective on that book. Yiyun points out something that bothered me about the book: 

Sue is so incoherent that she raises in my mind the question of believability. Not that I don’t believe her as a character--a complaint one sometimes hears as a criticism of a less successful character--but I don’t believe a character can achieve inexplicability as she has. “Really too irritating not to have been a real person” was Larkin’s conclusion, and some biographers have suggested Hardy’s first wife as a model. 

This is true. Characters in stories are not allowed the luxury of being inexplicable. They have to do things for reasons, and Sue seems to have no reasons behind her behavior. She makes no sense. But this is, perhaps, the way a lot of people in real life are, if you think about it. Not everyone, clearly, but enough. The whole passage on Jude and Sue in particular, is really insightful. Even though I still dislike what Hardy did with her, I can understand it better. 

The chapter on language was also fascinating. Yiyun essentially “abandoned” (her words) three key things: her mother, her motherland, and her mother tongue. She compares herself to Nabokov, who likewise had to write in a non-native language. He did it for different reasons, though, and with reluctance. Yiyun did it intentionally, for rather complex reasons (although the fact that her mother cannot read English is one of them.) I can’t even begin to duplicate the extended exploration of this, but I think this line is a good start:

I feel a tinge of guild when I imagine Nabokov’s woe. Like all intimacies, the intimacy between one and one’s mother tongue can demand more than one is willing to give, or what one is capable of giving. If I allow myself to be honest, I would borrow from Nabokov for a stronger and stranger statement. My private salvation, which cannot and should not be anybody’s concern, is that I disowned my native language.

There are eight chapters, but also an “afterword” which seems in many ways to be its own chapter. I guess that is a matter of perspective. In any case, it has an amazing paragraph that I think makes a good way to finish this post. 

One cannot be an adept writer of one’s life; nor can one be a discerning reader of that tale. Not equipped with a novelist’s tools to create plots or maneuver pacing, to speak omnisciently or abandon an inconvenient point of view, to adjust time’s linearity and splice the less connected moments, the most interesting people among us, I often suspect, are flatter than the flattest character in a novel. Not only do we not have any alternatives, we discredit them. It has to be so--this indisputable conviction is often at the foundation of our decisions, including the most impulsive or the most catastrophic. It is easier to be certain of one thing than to be uncertain of a hundred; easier for there to be one is than many might have beens.

Yiyun Li has written one short story collection and two novels that I have yet to read. I was reminded again with this book why I love her writing so much. I definitely have her other works on my list, and I truly hope that she stays with us for a long time. 

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This interview in The Guardian in relation to this book is pretty fascinating. 

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A tragic footnote: soon after this book was published, Yiyun's teenaged son committed suicide. The amount of pain in this family of generations is lacerating. I wish I had a cure to offer, but life and humans are too complicated for simple answers.