Channeling Henry James and The Opposite Sex

Eilis Lacey is a young, working class Irishwoman who reluctantly immigrates to America, settling in Brooklyn in the 1950s, where she becomes a stronger, more independent woman. Henry James is born into a prominent American family in 1843 and becomes one of the great novelists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

What do these two have in common? Both are the richly imagined protagonists of novels by Irish writer Colm Toibin, who is blessed with what Willa Cather termed "the gift of sympathy."

In his novel based on the life of Henry James, aptly titled The Master, Toibin tunnels so deeply into the mind of his fictional Henry James that I felt as though, yes, this is exactly what James must have felt, though rationally, of course, I recognize that it's ultimately a fictional rendering of James.

Toibin is no less insightful in his latest novel, Brooklyn, which won the Costa Book Award and which is the selection of the Thursday evening book group on October 14th at 7:30. (You can register and pick up a copy of the book at the 3rd floor Readers' Services desk.) Especially impressive is Toibin's ability to view the world through the eyes of his young heroine; not every author can write convincingly from the point of view of the opposite sex. Willa Cather and Gustave Flaubert, in My Antonia and Madame Bovary, respectively, are two who excelled at this. Into which company I'd add Colm Toibin.

Here's a passage about the heroine of Brooklyn, Eilis: "She found herself thanking him in a tone that Rose might have used, a tone warm and private but also slightly distant though not shy either, a tone used by a woman in full possession of herself. It was something she could not have done in the town or in a place where any of her family or friends might have seen her."

What author has impressed you with his or her ability to write convincingly from the perspective of the opposite sex?

The Good Stuff: A Gate at the Stairs

Literary fiction - everybody thinks they know what it means but no one has a decent definition. Rather, we describe it by what it's not.

It's not popular. It's never on the best seller list. James Patterson, Danielle Steel and Dan Brown don't write it. High school students groan when they're assigned it. It doesn't have a plot. It never ends happily. It ain't mystery, sci-fi or romance. There are too many words and absolutely no pictures.

Sound horrible? Many are, even though they win Pulitzers and National Book awards like moths to light. So what good are they except to make yourself sound smart at cocktail parties? Why bother?

I'll tell you why to bother: Lorrie Moore's novel A Gate at the Stairs. I can't stop thinking about it and I want everyone I love to read it. Why do I feel so strongly? I have no idea.

And thus we come to my own personal definition of literary fiction: a novel with characters so vivid that you feel you either know these people or are these people, which uses language instead of plot to do the heavy-lifting of conveying meaning and which, in answer to the question, "what's that book about?", the reply is always "life".

Lorrie Moore has written about life in the shape of college student Tassie Keltjin. Tassie was raised on a small farm and is now enrolled in a big liberal state college (think Madison or Ann Arbor). What Tassie lacks in experience, she makes up for in intelligence, humor and keen powers of observation - great qualities for a character-narrator. Tassie faithfully describes college life from the inanity of some of her classes, to the loneliness when her roommate "Murph" ditches her for a boyfriend, to the excitement when Tassie herself first falls in love.

But there's that lack of experience thing again. Tassie confuses sex with love. Her boyfriend Reynaldo does not. When he leaves college suddenly, Tassie is devastated. She has neither Murph nor her family back home to comfort her.

But the real education results from Tassie's job. She becomes a nanny for a newly-adopted baby, and the adoptive parens Sarah and Edward Thornwood-Brink become Tassies "life teachers" in a manner of speaking.

Sarah explains that she is unable to have children, and now in her forties, she and Edward have decided to adopt as a last chance. She takes Tassie to meet various birth mothers, all Tassie's age, all in trouble. One of the girls chooses Sarah and Edward as suitable parents for her two year old baby Mary, whom Sarah immediately renames the tonier "Emma".

Even when Emma comes home and the family settles into its new routine, Tassie can not forget the birth mothers she met. Will they be alright? Will they always miss their babies? She googles Emma's birth mother and sees the same name in an obituary.

But the authentically sad characters in this book are the adults. Like most young people, Tassie implicitly looks to the grown-ups for answers but the grown-ups don't seem to know any more than the college kids. Sarah deludes herself into believing that she can run her successful restaurant and be a successful mother. She can't. Edward deludes himself into thinking he wants to be a father. He flirts with Tassie instead. Tassie's own father drinks and her mother is a minor mess.

Which begs the question, what exactly do we expect kids to learn when they go away to college? Tassie studies Sufism and wine-tasting. Is that enough? Or do we want to offer them a safe 4-year introduction to adulthood? Just enough time to insure safe transit to "the real world." If that's the case, college surely didn't help any of the adults in this novel. Tassie draws her own conclusion: there's no such thing as wisdom but there is definitly lack of wisdom.

The beauty of this book is not the story: it's Lorrie Moore's telling of the story. It's rich in figurative language (the autumn moon is a "tangerine shard - an orange peel stuck up there like the lunch garbage of God") and void of cliche. Moore never tells us what to think. She just shows us Tassie observing the world, interacting with the world and let's the reader draw his own conclusion.

A Gate at the Stairs is a thoughtful and loving examination of the rigors of college. Not the rigors of classes. Rather, the rigors of first discovering that life does not come with operating instructions.