"from Racine to a nurse romance"

A Gottlieb Crichton miscellany

Paid subscribers are supporting The Common Reader which enables me to keep writing. Subscribers also become members of the Common Reader Book Club. And there are subscribers’ only essays like this one about the way Jane Eyre’s feminism is essentially Christian.

The next book club is on 9th July 19.00 UK time. We are reading Mrs Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Bronte. Some people can’t make it so I will organise a mid-week session also. Email me or leave a comment if you have a preference.

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Reading anything

This is the true spirit of The Common Reader, from Robert Gottlieb’s interview with the Paris Review.

I will read anything from Racine to a nurse romance, if it’s a good nurse romance. Many people just aren’t like that. Some of my closest friends cannot read anything that isn’t substantial—they don’t see the point. I don’t, however, like a certain kind of very rich, ornate, literary writing. I feel as if I’m being choked, as if gravel is being poured down my throat. Books like Under the Volcano, for instance, are not for me. 

Elizabeth Jenkins was at Cambridge in the days of F.R. Leavis and much preferred her other tutor, who taught her not to enjoy only the few books that were worthy, but instead to enjoy everything literature has to offer. Quite so. No exclusionary Leavisite attitudes here. Literature is a catholic enterprise.

That quote reminded me of this, from a recent Vulture profile of Gottlieb:

At the moment, he is making his way through a recent biography of George III, the essays of V. S. Pritchett, and the work of the Soviet novelist and journalist Vasily Grossman, though I also spot copies of Janet Evanovich and Colleen Hoover, the currently best-selling romance writer.

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Michael Crichton

I have been reading Jurassic Park, which is not only much better than the film, it’s much better than the impression I had gotten of it over the years. Much more happens than in the film, and the pacing is better, with longer lead-time at the start that emphasises the way most people simply don’t know what’s going on, the secrecy of the island, and the strange, unpredictable ways it is breaking out. The obvious comparison is with The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle. Both books are period pieces, but it is wrong to compare Crichton to the boys’ adventure genre. It is a combination of that and speculative fiction, and science thriller. I’m not going to compare him to Helen deWitt, but they are both more scientifically minded than most other novelists. Her pages of Japanese writing are his blocks of genetics code.

The use of scientific material in the text was unexpected. The explanations of chaos theory are really quite good. There are several plot points which hang on the use of a distribution curve and what it implies about population growth. DNA sequences are printed into the text. Obviously, the book is scientifically fictional. But how interesting that those are features you never hear about. How much sooner I would have read it if I had known! It reminds of The Handmaid’s Tale being called Canadian feminist science fiction, which at fifteen/sixteen put me off as much as anything could. A more inadequate description of that novel I cannot imagine.

Describing books accurately is difficult and almost no-one can do it at all well.

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Crichton’s characters

Writing in the LA Times Andrew Ferguson said, “the creation of plausible characters is not, to speak generously, his strength.” That is a very modern set of assumptions. Are the characters in Joseph Andrews all so well differentiated and plausible? The novel has become hugely interested in consciousness, but that doesn’t mean we need a moat to keep out the ones which are not interested in consciousness.

Ferguson also said this:

A movie would have the advantage of being without Malcolm’s dime-store philosophizing, but it would lack too the book’s only real virtue: its genuinely interesting discussions of dinosaurs, DNA research, paleontology and chaos theory.

He thought that Crichton should have “performed a service by using this material to write books of popular science.” Instead, he wrote a “ponderous” novel to make money. Ponderous! Only a snob would think this novel is ponderous. The rest of us are happy to find someone improving on Conan Doyle. Sometimes bad writing is good writing.

If you want to get a sense of how revolutionary Jurassic Park was in its effect on the general awareness and consciousness of dinosaurs and related scientific issues, read Steve Brusatte The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, who may not have become a palaeontologist without this book.

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Paid subscribers are supporting The Common Reader which enables me to keep writing. Subscribers also become members of the Common Reader Book Club. And there are subscribers’ only essays like this one about the way Jane Eyre’s feminism is essentially Christian.

The next book club is on 9th July 19.00 UK time. We are reading Mrs Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Bronte. Some people can’t make it so I will organise a mid-week session also. Email me or leave a comment if you have a preference.