Editors’ picks: Christmas rereads

But it’s not always murder, rape, etc. Sometimes, it’s the lesser vices of gossip, snobbery, petty jealousy, and casual, routine mendacity. These, too, can make high art. And few works delving into such common, often trivial, human follies can compare with Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which rewards the reader and rereader with fresh comedy and wisdom, much of it doubtless missed the first time around, in page after page depicting the charm, ugliness, joy, and tragedy of ordinary life.

It is impossible to say what the novel is about exactly, for it is about everything — society, families, nature, sex, aesthetics, you name it. As its title suggests, it is also, centrally, a meditation on time and memory. The neurotic narrator looks back from middle age after at last finding a measure of peace following decades of stumbling misunderstanding and intermittent sadness. He sees himself as a little mamma’s boy in a French country village, as a mooncalf adolescent, as a lascivious yet tentative young man, and he records it all with unsparing honesty about his own and others’ failings.

But this is not a brutal or grim novel. Far from it. It is also wonderfully funny. Proust’s depictions of narrow-minded scheming among parochial neighbors, of his cook’s malapropisms and snobbery, and of his own absurd, euphoric drunkenness are recreated in scenes of Shakespearean brilliance. Deep belly laughs articulate a story as entertaining as it is profound.

The central wisdom of the work, with its accumulated recollections, willingness to disappear down every memory hole, and its naked truthfulness, is that no experience should be expunged or entirely regretted. In the second volume, Within a Budding Grove, Elstir, a prominent impressionist painter (based on Whistler and Monet, among others) tells the young narrator,

There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it. … We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.

The events take place a century and more ago, but the novel remains dazzlingly modern. Proust looks ahead to “the photo-telephone of the future” — this was 1919! — and even casts light on cancel culture, with journalists “at work castigating the preceding epoch.”

He has a reputation for being the most difficult of writers, but if you read and reread him at his slowly unfolding pace, the obscurities melt away. Decades ago, a friend of mine bet a group of colleagues that they couldn’t finish all seven Proust volumes within a year. Most of the gamblers failed. But read Proust again in midlife and the years and pages fly by.

— Hugo Gurdon, Editor-in-Chief

Demons, by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

What is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons about? Whom is the novel intending to portray? Coming up on this classic’s 150th anniversary year, some of its most basic questions remain without definitive answers. Here’s another: What is the title of the book? Demons and Devils are both acceptable, but it was first translated to English (incorrectly) as The Possessed. (The 1936 copy I am leafing through as I write this is The Possessed.) All of this exemplifies the Talmudic mystique of a book that rewards, if not demands, rereading.

But its mystery isn’t gimmickry. Demons is timeless in a way most books about political extremism aren’t because Dostoevsky did something brilliantly effective: He issued a warning about the type of person who is drawn to radicalism. Not the brand of radicalism, not the ideology or sect or geographic center, but the radicals themselves. Beware, says Dostoevsky, those who wish to overthrow the existing order to leave a vacuum. Some will want to fill that vacuum with all manner of coherent despotism, but the real threats are those who are in it for the chaos of the vacuum.

Verkhovensky, the ideologue-grifter at the center of the plot, seeks the nihilistic political disordering of a Russian village. To gain followers, he crafts a reputation as a revolutionary from abroad. This appeal to authority doesn’t get him as far as he’d like, so he turns to manufacturing connections with more famous thinkers and relying on the aloof charisma of a friend he selects as a surrogate figurehead. When even that isn’t enough, he turns to binding his loose band of misfits with the outlaw loyalty produced by political murder, in which they are all together implicated.

The incident is modeled after the real-world event known as the “Nechayev affair,” in which nihilist revolutionary Sergey Nechayev and several others killed a dissident member of his group in 1869. That historical touchpoint was elevated into a larger critique of anarchism a la Mikhail Bakunin and the radicalism that led to the 1917 revolution. But Dostoevsky had a less-personal target in mind, as James Goodwin notes in Confronting Dostoevsky’s Demons. The central conspiracy’s “false revolutionary auspices, its crude and primitive political tactics, its autocratic aims and criminal means of preserving itself,” writes Goodwin, “all comprise an allegory on the hazards of uncritical reverence for fashionable ideas and their bearers, especially of a violently iconoclastic nature.”

The book deserves rereading because in every age, in every type of political system, and in any language, there arise those who seek not mutual strength but mutual weakness and depravity as the basis for societal restructuring. The relative organizing power of each and every “ism” may ebb and flow, but the human vulnerability that both leads to and threatens societal bonding does not have nearly as inconsistent a presence.

— Seth Mandel, Executive Editor

A Bend in the River, by V.S. Naipaul

“The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” The opening lines of V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River are among the starkest and most frightening in the history of literature. They are also, as with much of Naipaul’s gloomiest writing, liberating. A cold shower in the early morning. You have been dreaming, and now it is time to wake up.

First published in 1979, A Bend in the River is set in a fictionalized version of Mobutu Sese Seko’s Democratic Republic of the Congo, where Naipaul had traveled and taught earlier in the decade. The novel is short and spare. Its plot comprises the observations of Selim, an Indian from East Africa who has fled revolution in his home country to become a shopkeeper in a small village, as he attempts to keep his business running amid the dislocations following the end of Belgian colonial rule. There are wars, revolutions, violence, and upheaval, but most take place off the page. The world of Selim’s village is tiny, isolated, and claustrophobic, and news comes slowly or not at all. Events in the outside world must be gleaned from visitors or inferred from the sounds of gunfire in the forest at night or the sudden appearance of European mercenaries at a local bar.

But on this simple foundation, Naipaul tells a tale about nearly everything we have come to recognize as the subject of serious “political” literature: race, migration, colonialism and its aftermath, the rise and fall of civilization, the pain of exile, individualism and collectivism, and its author’s own struggle to find a place in the world. Naipaul’s worldview could be fairly characterized as not merely conservative but reactionary. He has Dostoevsky’s eagle eye for the appeal of revolutionary politics to the broken and the resentful, for the grotesque ways in which abstractions about freedom and liberation can serve as masks for cynicism and brutality, but his vision, as those opening lines suggest, is unredeemed by Dostoevsky’s faith. What saves him from nihilism is simply his faithfulness to what he sees — his belief, which is a moral one, that an ugly truth is always better than a pretty lie.

I’m not sure that A Bend in the River is Naipaul’s “best” novel. That distinction might go to his 1961 breakthrough, A House for Mr. Biswas, an altogether funnier and more humane book. But it is my favorite. I’ve read it four times in the last decade, and whenever I do, it is a reminder of something a writer should never forget: Your first obligation is to the truth. It might hurt, but without it, everything else is worthless.

— Park MacDougald, Life & Arts Editor

Rebel Without a Crew: Or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker With $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player, by Robert Rodriguez.

The phrase “starving artist” doesn’t conjure up images of a painter on his deathbed from lack of nutrition. Still, it’s a term widely heard in the creative community. For the most part, it takes time to earn a decent living doing artistic work, whether one is a painter, musician, writer, actor, etc.

There is another phrase among creatives that says, “Limitations can be liberating.” Hollywood director Robert Rodriguez knows all about it. He shot his first feature film, El Mariachi, with a budget of $7,000, using a 16 mm camera as opposed to the 35 mm typical for feature films. His experience making the film started with him volunteering as a human lab rat for a medical study to scrounge up some money. It ended with awards at major film festivals and a career as a writer and director.

Rodriguez chronicled his experience in a series of journals, excerpts that became the book Rebel Without a Crew: Or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker With $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player. Rodriguez’s story takes place over two years, starting in March of 1991, just before his entrance into the lab, and ending in February of 1993, when he completed a slew of interviews, including with Peter Jennings and David Letterman.

Elements of the book are certainly dated. There’s no internet and, consequently, no social media. Heck, there’s not even email. So what possible relevance could it have in an era when anyone with a smartphone could shoot a film for a lot less than $7,000?

The answer lies in the book’s central thesis, which is about embracing limitations and working hard to overcome them. Does one need a laptop and Microsoft Word to write? No. A sheet of paper and a pencil will do. Legendary blues guitarist Buddy Guy spoke of getting sound from a “button on a string” when he had no money to buy a guitar. Rodriguez recognizes those limitations and works through them while providing a framework for others to do the same.

The second half of the book details Rodiguez’s adventures in Hollywood, good and bad, going into his frustrations with what he sees as an overly bureaucratic industry that spends far too much money on trivial things. It’s interesting reading, but the book shines most in its first half, in which Rodriguez proves that creativity, not money, leads to satisfying results.

— Jay Caruso, Managing Editor

The Beautiful and Damned, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The Great Gatsby is widely considered to be one of the greatest novels of all time, but I’d rank it only third among F. Scott Fitzgerald’s works. There are several reasons for this, but the primary one is style. The great virtue of The Great Gatsby, after all, is in its brevity. But I prefer my Fitzgerald to be wordy, full of asides, epigrams, and almost self-indulgent opinionating. And it is in The Beautiful and Damned, his second novel, that I find him to be at the height of his powers.

The Beautiful and Damned was published in 1922, three years before The Great Gatsby, and contains many of the same themes as that more famous work: an ill-starred romance, the glamour and indolence of New York high society in the Jazz Age, and a disillusioned protagonist. As H.L. Mencken wrote in 1925, “The thing that chiefly interests the basic Fitzgerald is still the florid show of modern American life — and especially the devil’s dance and that goes on at the top. … What engrosses him is the high carnival of those who have too much money to spend and too much time for the spending of it. Their idiotic pursuit of sensation, their almost incredible stupidity and triviality, their glittering swinishness — these are the things that go into his notebook.” While The Great Gatsby offers you a crisp but fleeting look into this world, The Beautiful and Damned puts you right in the middle of the spectacle and forces you to sit there with it as it slowly, painfully rots.

It is a dark and depressing book, one drenched in irony and autobiographical expression. The protagonist, Anthony Patch, is an examination of where a spirit of laziness, assumed and unearned superiority, and Nietzschean disregard for the pursuit of meaning or a well-ordered life leads. Patch, a man who always “considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and immortality,” spends his life obstinately doing nothing, waiting for his rich grandfather to die. His is a portrait of manque, a life unfulfilled.

The Beautiful and Damned is a warning and a lamentation, and the ill-fated Patch and his wife, the beautiful, petulant Gloria Gilbert, are among Fitzgerald’s most personal characters. But above all, it is a gloriously written book, dripping with cleverness and insight even as it ironically depreciates their value.

— J. Grant Addison, Deputy Editor