Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books (4 page)

Dostoyevsky did his best to push it all toward an ending—both literature
and
the murder mystery—in his final novel,
The Brothers Karamazov
. There is a murder here which provides the engine of the plot, but does anyone recall the solution? No, because the solution is not what’s important. If I ask you to remember several years after reading the novel whether Dmitri Karamazov killed his father, you might not be able to tell me the correct answer. That is, you will possibly think, as I did at the beginning of my recent rereading, that Dmitri committed the crime. The novel itself does not come down firmly on this question. It suggests that someone else was the guilty party, but it also implies that Dmitri
could
have done it, was morally capable of it, and therefore felt and acted guilty for a reason. (But then, Dmitri exists to experience guilt: that capacity, that outright need, is the essential element in his character.) We may continue reading the novel partly to find out who killed the horribly embarrassing, graspingly avaricious, ludicrously lustful old Karamazov—a singularly repellent and not-at-all-missed character to whom Dostoyevsky has wryly given his own first name, Fyodor—but if this is the only reason we are reading it, we will find
The Brothers Karamazov
a bizarrely unsatisfying work of fiction, filled with inexplicable digressions and seemingly endless speeches. We care about the novel because of what it tells us about Alyosha, Ivan, and Dmitri, those three brothers who are simultaneously themselves and larger than themselves.

Dostoyevsky tests to the limit the idea that evil characters are the most memorable, because in Dostoyevsky (as in Shakespeare, but even more so) the violent, destructive, self-loathing characters are the ones we are most drawn to. This is obviously true of
Crime and Punishment
, where the murderer Raskolnikov is the central character, the focus of our deepest sympathetic interest. But it is also true of a strange work like
Demons
, which seems at first not even to be a novel at all, but rather a series of pointless conversations—about radical politics, domestic alliances, intellectual disappointments, petty rivalries, and everything else that made up nineteenth-century provincial Russian life. Yet even here the villainous characters stand out: not just the petty demons who enact all the devious crimes, though they are interesting in their own right, but above all the large-souled villain, the fascinating Stavrogin, who cannot help punishing himself for, but also with, his cruelty to women.

Stavrogin is the kind of character who can only exist in a Dostoyevsky novel. However much his characteristics may have been borrowed from real people (and Joseph Frank, in his masterful biography of Dostoyevsky, goes into great detail about who those models might have been), he stands apart as an unduplicated, unduplicatable figure, unlike anyone we will ever encounter in the flesh. With his intense self-hatred nestling beside his loathing for the rest of society, his profound sense of honor coexisting with his tendency to lie and deceive, and his moral corruption underlying and perhaps even reinforcing his supreme attractiveness, Stavrogin is a captivating original. Intelligence is not enough to explain his appeal (though it helps: a stupid Stavrogin would be inconceivable). Nor is physical beauty, because
we
can’t actually see him, though the women who flock to him in the novel may in part be responding to that. In contrast to the distinctly life-sized figures who surround him in his mother’s village—that anxious and commanding mother herself, her saintly young servant-companion, Stavrogin’s ridiculous and impoverished old tutor, the tutor’s scoundrel of a son, the marriageable daughter of neighboring landowners, the local radicals and spies, the pretentious village bureaucrats, even the idiot-girl to whom Stavrogin turns out to be married—he seems to glow with an excess of reality. They are all believable, and often pitiable, and in some cases loathsome, but he is something more than that: utterly present to us, yet beyond the reach of our normal, cathartic, fictionally inspired feelings. It is as if we can do nothing for him, because his fate is completely predetermined by his own personality, his own situation, and so we are helpless in the face of him. (Of course, it is literally true that we can do nothing for
any
fictional character, but our feelings tell us otherwise; in Stavrogin’s case, they tell us the truth.)

On the whole, literature—in this respect much like history, or for that matter daily life—draws us toward the kinds of people who dominate, or at least attempt to dominate, their own circumstances. I’m thinking now not only of Stavrogin, but also of other great characters like Henry James’s Kate Croy, or Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell, or Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet, or Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, or Tolstoy’s Prince Andrei. These memorable figures all forcefully, or at any rate willfully, take certain actions that result in their having the lives they ultimately have. (And this is true even of the great characters who reign by their inactivity: think of Melville’s Bartleby, for instance, or Goncharov’s Oblomov, both of whom issue a comprehensive “No” to the routines of other people’s existence.) One might say of these people that they make their own plots. And the suspense, for us, lies in seeing how they will negotiate all the different fixities that confront them: not only the author’s willful predeterminations, and not just history’s oblivious ones, but also the relentless immovability of their own characters.

*   *   *

One source of suspense is not knowing how things turn out, but an equally powerful source is knowing how they turn out and waiting for that to happen. There are certain novels that hinge, in part, on this kind of foreknowledge: their authors actually let us know the plot beforehand, not so much to ruin suspense as to heighten it. In Richard Ford’s
Canada
, for instance, the elderly narrator, reflecting back on his childhood, tells us in the novel’s first sentence that his parents robbed a bank, and then tells us again, repeatedly over the course of many pages, until we finally get to the event itself, about halfway through the book. At that point, having had something definite to look forward to, we find ourselves in freefall, with no certainty at all about what will happen next. Plot takes over, but not wholly: the role of memory is still ever-present, and we are never allowed to forget that the endangered young boy in the story turned into the older man who is telling us the tale. The novel as a whole possesses a cunning and unusual combination of forward movement and retrospective musing, with the result that the anxiety of the suspense somehow becomes infused with, or confused with, the calm of remembering.

In a different way, Shirley Hazzard’s omniscient narrator in
The Transit of Venus
gives us forecasts we don’t know how to use until the very end of the novel. Quite early in the plot, this voice announces to us that one of the main characters, the astronomer who is in love with the female protagonist, will end up dying by his own hand before he reaches the pinnacle of his career. Much later, toward the end of the book, the narrator lets fall that an extremely minor character, a doctor who appears in one brief scene, will die three months later in an air crash. It is not until the final page of the book that we understand how these facts come together and why we needed to know them, but in the meantime we have undergone a great deal of anxiety wondering which possible betrayals and discoveries (and there are several) could cause the astronomer to kill himself. Only at the end do we learn that all of our anxious guesses were wrong: the true course of events, as so often in life, turns out to be one we didn’t expect.

To watch the predetermined plot unfold, like a recurrent nightmare that we are powerless to alter or avert, is a rich and compelling experience for a certain kind of reader. What is anxiety-provoking in nightmares—the arrival of the inevitable—becomes its exact opposite in a book, where knowing what is about to happen makes one more attentive, more alert, more open to the moment-by-moment texture of the experience. This is why I frequently reread both Patricia Highsmith and Henry James. This is why I take pleasure in the kind of narrative foreshadowing practiced by Richard Ford and Shirley Hazzard. And this is why we all read works whose plots we may well know in advance, like John Milton’s
Paradise Lost
, David Malouf’s
Ransom
, and Hilary Mantel’s
Wolf Hall
.

Milton based his
Paradise Lost
on the familiar Garden of Eden story (though, granted, its familiarity to us now is at least partly thanks to Milton). In both the Bible and its Miltonic elaboration, the serpent tempts Eve and, through her, Adam to eat the forbidden fruit of knowledge, an act of disobedience that leads to humanity’s ejection from eternal paradise. The book-length poem has now been around for so long that it seems natural for it to exist, but think how odd it must have been for Milton to undertake it in the first place. An epic retelling of a brief story from Genesis, couched in unrhymed iambic pentameters and intended to “justify the ways of God to men”—only a courageous madman, or an unconventional genius, would imagine he could accomplish such a thing. And yet it works, even three or four centuries later, and even for nonbelieving readers like William Empson and me. We may have to rejig the motive slightly, turning Satan into a heroic rebel and questioning God’s degree of justification. We may feel unexpectedly moved and uplifted by the ending, which is supposed to be a tragedy of punishment, but which instead seems to view Adam and Eve’s new life with something like hope, or even excitement:

Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;

The world was all before them, where to choose

Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:

They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow,

Through Eden took their solitary way.

The common arguments about whether Milton intended us to feel this way—supportive, empathetic, almost optimistic about the possibilities open to the fallen mortals—are neither here nor there. It doesn’t matter. The poem, leading us in its own direction, exists apart from its maker, just as Adam and Eve existed apart from theirs.

Nobody reads
Paradise Lost
for the plot, of course. But knowing what will happen lends an essential element to the experience of reading, in that it creates the exact tension between predestination and free will that Milton is attempting to explore in the poem. We know where these characters are headed and yet, minute by minute, we feel no sense of moral or epistemological superiority to them. On the contrary, we undergo their fates
with
them, as if in real time, or perhaps even a stretched-out version of real time, a version that mimics eternity. It takes forever for them to fall, and we hope for every moment of that forever that they will resist; then, when they have fallen, we hope they will get away with it. Our foreknowledge and our sympathies are completely at odds, just as God’s would have been (or ought to have been, if he was a good God). If this mixed reaction on our part doesn’t finally justify Him, it at any rate makes even His position more sympathetic.

A different kind of courage—somewhat less crazy and ambitious, but nonetheless intense—must have been required for the Australian writer David Malouf to produce his marvelous short novel
Ransom
, based on an episode from the
Iliad
. For writers, Homer is almost as much of a god as God, and to tinker with his perfect stories requires hubris of a notable degree. James Joyce possessed that hubris in grandiose form, and we can feel it exercising its assertive presence all the way through
Ulysses
. But
Ransom
(which understands that it comes not only after the
Iliad
, but also after
Ulysses
and Moravia’s
Contempt
and all the other twentieth-century works based on Homer) is almost the opposite kind of work. It is small, and delicate, and intellectually modest. It does not trumpet its substantial intelligence at us.

Ransom
takes as its departure point the section of the
Iliad
in which King Priam goes forth from Troy to collect the body of his son Hector from Achilles, the Greek enemy who has slain him. Achilles has always been viewed as a great character, and centuries of writers, from Euripides to Shakespeare to the moderns, have built great roles around him. Priam has not; only Malouf has been alert enough to ferret out his inner life in this subtle way. What he does is to hinge the whole novel on the relationship between Priam and his cart driver, a man whose name the king can’t even remember (he repeatedly miscalls him by the name of his former driver), but on whom he comes to depend completely and, one might say, lovingly. Through the sensible, tender behavior of the cart driver—who, like Priam, is also a bereft father—we come to sympathize with the grief and fear and uncertainty of the otherwise inaccessible king.

It does not matter, in reading
Ransom
, whether you already know the story from the
Iliad
or not. Either way, the novel will cast its spell over you, because what keeps you going is not the larger plot question (whether Priam will or will not get his son’s body back), but the step-by-step psychological moments that lead to that outcome. And “outcome” is too thin a word, in any case, for what happens to the characters, and to us, by the end of Malouf’s novel. The result is not everything; the process is part of the result. This is one of the key realizations that accrues to Priam in the course of his quest.

The same realization, though achieved through very different methods, dawns on us as we read Hilary Mantel’s
Wolf Hall
, which is itself a work about achieving results. Mantel is a master of using history to create fiction: she does so to great effect in her excellent novel about the French Revolution,
A Place of Greater Safety
. But in contrast to that earlier book, which covers ground that is basically in the international public domain, this more recent novel deals with a passage of English history that is at once broadly familiar and completely obscure. Mantel focuses on the period from 1527 to 1535, when Henry VIII was figuring out how to dispose of his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, and marry Anne Boleyn; in order to do so, he ended up breaking Catholicism’s hold on England and naming himself the head of the church.