I know how to party: Reading "The Dead" on St. Patrick's Day

Saturday was St. Patrick’s Day, and being American and of mostly Irish extraction, it’s a holiday I’ve always celebrated. Not in the Irish tradition, which I’ve been told involves a visit to church, but in the American tradition of wearing green and drinking beer. When I met the man who became my husband, I was a vegetarian, but when I went back to being a carnivore about ten years ago, he seized the opportunity to add corned beef to our holiday observation. He usually makes potatoes and cabbage as well. It’s a meal that I enjoy, once a year.

And that’s all we do on March 17th, usually. But this year, I decided I would also mark the day by reading something Irish. There’s a lot to choose from; the Irish are a wordy people. I didn’t have a lot of time, though, so I decided to go with a short story: “The Dead,” by James Joyce. It appears in his short story collection, The Dubliners, published in 1914.

It was actually a re-read for me. I first read “The Dead” years ago, in college, and I really liked it. I’m not a huge fan of James Joyce in general. I never did make it very far into Ulysses, though I may have been a victim of my own bravado. I had heard the prose was dense but assumed that I, of course, would be able to handle it. I did, for about a chapter, then fell asleep. And then I tried again the next day, and felt annoyed. It remains one of the very few books I’ve ever started and not finished.

But The Dead is a fairly accessible story about how the dead haunt the living. It’s about a party held at the house of two older women and their niece, on or around the Epiphany, in early January. Events are seen mostly from the perspective of their nephew, Gabriel, who is there with his wife. He’s making a fool of himself, at least in his own mind, throughout the evening. Toward the end, another guest sings a song that seems to deeply affect his wife, and after they leave, he finds out that the song reminded her of a boy she loved when she was a teenager. The boy had been sick, and died at age 17, after coming to see her one last time in the rain. Gabriel realizes that the boy his wife loved as a girl has stayed in her mind as a romantic, idealized image. It’s very difficult to compete with that type of perfection. He also realizes that the boy, Michael, had experienced love in a way that Gabriel never had, and this lead to his own epiphany:

“His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.”

That the dead never leave us, and that we eventually have to join them, is something that I understand a little better now than I did when I was 20. Also that the dead can become idealized in the minds of the people they leave behind, because they can no longer make mistakes. There are other themes that are probably just as important- Gabriel’s epiphany and awakening, Joyce’s commentary on Dublin society and the position of women, etc. But that’s what I take from it. Maybe it’s the Irish in me. If there was ever a group of people more obsessed with death and the past, I haven’t found them.

  

La Fhéile Pádraig Shona Daoibh.

In Celebration of Women’s History Month 2012: 10 Awesome Women Novelists

March is Women’s History month, and it gives me a good excuse for a theme to start this blog: women novelists. I’ve picked 10 of my favorites, just for fun. It is by no means an inclusive or representative list of female fiction writers. Obviously.

I gave myself some parameters for compiling my list. Each woman had to have published more than one novel, and I had to have read a majority of her books. And I stuck to novelists, and didn’t include women who write mostly non-fiction and poetry.

So here they are, in order of when they first were published, because I have a strange zeal for organizing things chronologically.

Jane Austen: I can say, without hyperbole, that Jane Austen is the greatest writer in the entire history of human existence, and possibly in the history of the entire universe. Pride and Prejudice is my all-time favorite book, and I reread it at least every year or two, and each time I’m still a little on edge, wondering if Darcy and Elizabeth will figure things out. But it’s not the love story that makes it my favorite; it’s the humor, and the observations on human nature. After P&P, I have a very specific order for my favorite Austen works: Persuasion is a close second place, then Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, her various short stories, and then, and only then, Mansfield Park. I guess because she never married, she’s been criticized for her supposed lack of understanding of romantic love. But I think she understood it very well; Darcy and Elizabeth, and Captain Wentworth and Anne, are flawed creatures who make each other better people. She didn’t always get it right; the less said about Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram the better, but I’ll take her least interesting novel over most other books any day.

Louisa May Alcott: Alcott is one of those writers about whom I have mixed feelings. When I read Little Women around age 10, I was instantly hooked, but she was a true 19^th century sentimental novelist. She manipulates her readers and leaves them emotionally exhausted at the end. Beth is sick! Oh no, she’s going to die. No, it’s ok, she’s fine. Oh wait, she’s dead. And don’t get me started about Jo marrying the old German professor instead of Laurie. Ugh. I also couldn’t forgive her for naming the youngest sister Amy, and then making her a self-centered bitch. And yet, Little Women still makes me want to stroll around 1860s Concord, and go visit my old aunt in the hopes that she’ll take me to Paris. Technically I’m already violating my rules because other than Little Women, I’ve only read Jo’s Boys and Little Men, and I’ve just realized she published quite a more novels than I thought. But they can go on the to-read list.

Virginia Woolf: Perhaps the least accessible author on this list, at least for modern readers, Virginia Woolf seems to be one of those writers who people either love, or more often, hate, if my erstwhile book club is any guide. A few years back we read To the Lighthouse and I was the only one who made it through the entire book. Everyone else hated it, and I was puzzled, because although it wasn’t my favorite, I thoroughly enjoyed its stream-of-consciousness style. But my favorite book of hers is Mrs. Dalloway. It’s about a wealthy woman giving a party in post WWI England, and one of the more compelling stories within it is of a young man back from the war, suffering from shell shock. It’s kind of like Downton Abbey, but nobody miraculously recovers from a spinal injury or runs off to marry a hot Irish chauffeur.

Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Little House books were my favorite books in childhood and are still among my favorites. I started them around age 5, the same age as Laura is in Little House in the Big Woods. I didn’t read them all right away- but I finished the entire series around age 8 or 9. I felt a certain kinship with Laura when I was young. She tried very hard to be obedient, but clearly had some issues with authority, as I did. My favorite book of the series is The Long Winter, which really made me appreciate central heating and telephones.

Toni Morrison: The summer right after I finished college, I was working as a personal assistant to a woman who had an amazing library and almost all of Morrison’s books, and she let me borrow them. Morrison is one of those Important Writers who deals with issues of race, gender, and power. I read almost all of her novels that summer, and liked them all, but it was Beloved that stood out for me, because it’s essentially a ghost story.

Anne Rice: Anne Rice may not technically meet my criteria either, because I just looked up her bibliography and damn, she’s a lot more prolific than I realized. I’ve read her Vampire Chronicles series and quite a few of her stand-alone books (The Mummy, Cry to Heaven, etc.)  though I haven’t yet read her Mayfair Witches series or any of her pseudonymous works, but I have a few of them on my to-read shelves. I know she became a born-again Catholic or something about a decade ago, and that kind of put me off, so I haven’t read anything of hers since then and probably won’t. But her books were the first in the fantasy/supernatural genre that I ever read, and I’ve been a fan of supernatural fiction ever since.

Charlaine Harris: I didn’t expect to like Charlaine Harris’ books, about which I’d heard conflicting reviews. I figured that nobody could do vampires any better than Anne Rice, and an unfortunate decision to read the Twilight books had made me wary of any other series that featured characters with fangs. But after we started watching True Blood a couple of years ago, I decided to give the first book in the Sookie Stackhouse series, Dead until Dark, a try, and I didn’t regret it. Harris’ writing isn’t elegant, and the characterizations are bit inconsistent, but all her books have strong female protagonists, and they’re just very readable. After I finished the Sookie Stackhouse books, I ended up picking up her various mystery series, including the Lily Shakespeare, Aurora Teagarden, and Harper Connelly mysteries. I found the Harper Connelly series a bit too grim, but the others were great reads.

Diana Gabaldon: I had heard of Diana Gabaldon’s books for years but never got around to reading them until a couple of years ago, when I finally picked up Outlander. Although it’s approximately 9 million pages long, it’s such an engrossing story, right from the start, that I finished in two days. I love almost everything about the Outlander universe. It’s basically historical fiction crossed with fantasy, and you can pick up a bit of Gaelic and herbology along the way. I’m also a fan of her spin-off series featuring Lord John, a minor character in the Outlander books. I don’t really identify closely with her very practical time-traveling heroine, Clare, but I totally get Lord John.

Audrey Niffenegger: I was on the fence about including her on this list, in part because she’s only published two traditional novels so far (and apparently a few graphic novels). But I absolutely loved The Time Traveler’s Wife- I love stories about time travel in general, but this one was unique. And though I was kind of squicked out by some of the premise (the hero first meets his wife when he’s an adult and she’s a child? Ew!) she totally makes it work. Her second book, Her Fearful Symmetry, about ghosts, left me completely unmoved. But she has so much obvious talent that I’m still going to read whatever she writes next.

Gail Carriger: Carriger is probably not very well known to most people, because she writes steampunk novels. Although I’m still just started in steampunk fiction, Carriger’s books were the first I read and continue to be my favorites. Her Alexia Tarabotti series of novels (Soulless, Changeless, Blameless, Heartless, and the just-published Timeless) feature a strong female protagonist, and are just great fun.

Then there are the authors who didn’t make the list, whose books entertained me, even changed my perspective on life, but didn’t meet the criteria I made for myself, because I haven’t read enough of their work yet. So, sorry Louise Erdrich, Amy Tan, Alice Walker, Margaret Atwood, Anita Diamant, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Agatha Christie, Kate Chopin, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Mary Shelley, I’ll get back to all of you later.

So, if anyone’s made it this far…who are your favorite female novelists?