Word for word

A poem must be remembered word for word or it loses its identity.

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

One of the movie cliches that I hate comes when one character quotes a line of poetry and then someone else, usually an attractive person of the other sex, either quotes the next line of the poem or names the poet and the title of the poem.

Does this ever happen in real life? Rarely. If you said, "I think that I shall never see," I might be able to respond with "A poem lovely as a tree." There are a few lines of poetry that a lot of people know. Yet few people today even read poetry, let alone remember much of it. The odds of two people both having memorized lines from the same obscure poem are astronomical, yet in movies it happens frequently.

I am more accepting of those characters, such as Horace Rumpole in the old PBS series, who quote lines of poetry here and there when it seems to apply to the situation. It is much more likely that one person has memorized a poem than that two people, potential lovers, have done so.

Still, and this is what Jane Smiley seems to be getting at in the line quoted at the top of this post, lines of poetry are much more likely to be quoted word for word than lines from a novel. There are exceptions, such as the opening lines from Moby-Dick and A Tale of Two Cities, but you can paraphrase a novel with more ease than you can paraphrase a poem. Reader's Digest has never condensed a poem. You just can't do it or, as Smiley says, "it loses its identity."

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is remarkable in that, at the end, characters memorize entire books because the government is burning books. (Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which books burn.) A few people are said to have memorized the Bible, but generally speaking people never memorize books word for word. They are simply too long, and the language is rarely beautiful enough to merit memorization or repetition to other people.

Even jokes and folk tales are rarely repeated word for word.

Poetry, however, has power because it can be remembered word for word, and must be, even though few people do it anymore.

In praise of daydreaming

I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.

G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton

As someone who might frequently be described as absentminded, I rather like the above quotation from British author G.K. Chesterton. Those who are called absentminded are, in most cases, simply thinking about something else.

In school they used to call it daydreaming. We daydreamers may not have been thinking about the lesson or the lecture, but we were certainly thinking about something. I suspect that many of today's most successful people — the inventors and innovators — were once called daydreamers.

I recall the old Disney movie The Absentminded Professor. Fred McMurray played a professor whose mind always seemed to be somewhere else. Nevertheless he invented flubber, an anti-gravity substance.

Albert Einstein, often thought to possess the greatest mind of his age, had a reputation for absentmindedness. So what? In the final analysis, wearing matching socks is hardly the most important thing in the world.

The rest of the story

I look at my girls, my brilliant young women. I want them to think I was better than I was and I want to tell them the truth in case the truth will be useful. Those two desires do not nearly coexist, but this where we are in the story.

Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

Rarely can a novel be summarized in a single paragraph from that novel, but this is the case in the above paragraph found about three-fourths of the way through Ann Patchett's terrific 2023 novel Tom Lake.

Lara's three daughters are grown women, still unmarried and at home for the annual cherry harvest at the family farm near Traverse City, Mich. One of them, the eldest, believes she may actually be the daughter of Peter Duke, the famous movie star. While they pick cherries, Lara decides it is finally time to tell them the story of when she and Duke were lovers. As the paragraph suggests, she wants to tell them the truth, but just not the whole truth. The latter she saves for us readers.

Lara, originally just Laura, is in high school when she first plays Emily in the Thornton Wilder play Our Town. She turns out to be a natural in the part. She eventually goes to Hollywood to make a movie. While waiting for the movie to come out she finds herself at Tom Lake in Michigan, a summer stock theater that is putting on Our Town. Once again she is a natural for the part of Emily.

Also in the cast is charismatic young actor named Peter Duke, with whom she falls instantly in love. Patchett's novels do not normally focus much on sex, but this one is an exception, although of course Lara does not tell her daughters all the juicy details.

Joe, Lara's husband and the father of all three girls, thinks he knows the story, and he listens to just part of what she says among the cherry trees, but he doesn't really know the whole story either. Joe, whose family, owns that cherry farm as Lara's story unfolds, is then a director who helps get that Tom Lake production under way, and later he becomes a cast member. Even then he loves Lara, but she is Duke's girl and he does not interfere. They meet again much later.

The love story has its ups and downs, as most love stories do, but Duke is star material, and Lara soon realizes that she isn't. She may be a natural to play Emily and her only movie is a hit, yet she realizes there at Tom Lake that acting isn't really her future. Besides, Duke is not a one-woman man, though Lara comes to realize she is a one-man hoe.

Patchett has written a series of wonderful novels, all remarkably different. I place Tom Lake right there at the top, along with The Patron Saint of Liars and State of Wonder.

When animals age

If old age can be rough for human beings, even with Social Security and retirement communities, it must be much worse for animals. Herbivores become easy prey when they slow down, and carnivores can starve to death when they can no longer catch anything to eat.

Yet this is not always true, as Anne Innis Dagg tells us in The Social Behavior of Older Animals (2009).

A quick death in old age is not always certain in many species, although roles and behaviors certainly change. Dominate males and females lose their place when they age, as younger and stronger rivals take charge. Yet in many species the elderly are valued for their wisdom, and they may actually become leaders again when a crisis forces others to follow their lead. Older right whales, for example, know best where to find food in certain situations. Older mountain goats know what to do when a storm approaches.

In some species, older females continue to give birth, although their young may be fewer and born farther apart. Because of their experience, the older mothers often have a better success rate when it comes to raising their young.

Dagg's book is not based on any new research. Rather she simply reports what others have discovered while researching something else. Her book is valuable because so few others have focused specifically on the subject of what happens to older animals.

Better than sticks and stones

Most parents engage in wishful thinking when they regard name-calling as good-natured fun which their children will soon grow out of. Name-calling is not good-natured and children do not grow out of it; as adults they merely become more expert in its use.

Peter Farb, Word Play

That children do not grow out of name-calling, as Peter Farb suggests above, can be shown by the current political climate — and in fact by the political climate in the United States for all of its 250 years. When in doubt, call your political opponent names, it seems.

Do adults "become more expert in its use"? That is debatable.

Democrats say it is beneath the dignity of the president of the United States to refer to them as "Dumocrats" or to call Sen. Elizabeth Warren "Pocahontas" just because she pretended for years to be an American Indian. Yet they see nothing undignified about them labeling the president of the United States a racist, a fascist or even a Nazi.

According to American Heritage, George Washington was called illiterate. John Adams called Thomas Jefferson ignorant. Ulysses Grant said of James Garfield that he had "the backbone of an angleworm." Theodore Roosevelt called Woodrow Wilson a skunk. Herbert Hoover called Franklin D. Roosevelt "a gibbering idiot."

It is probably wishful thinking to believe our politicians will ever grow out of name-calling.

Sensitive, but is it a crime?

Sometimes the line between one's work and one's personal life can get a bit blurred, as it does for Ulf Varg in Alexander McCall Smith's The Talented Mr. Varg (2020).

Varg is the detective in charge of the Department of Sensitive Crimes in Sweden. His case this time — if it can even be called a case — comes when Anna, a fellow police officer in his department, asks him to investigate whether her husband is having an affair. She has found an earring in his underwear. An added complication is that Varg is secretly in love with Anna. If he can find conclusive evidence of an affair, would he possibly have a chance with her?

Complications follow, of course, not the least of them being the fact that he is using police force time and police force personnel to investigate what is clearly not a police matter. But then the investigation points to what may be an actual crime.

McCall Smith has three different series of detective novels in progress, but they can all be described as detective light. Murders don't happen, and other acts of violence are rare. Mostly there is just conversation about everyday topics, most of it interesting but hardly suspenseful. And such is the case in this novel, as well.

Yet Varg is a fascinating character, and Martin, his deaf and depressed dog who can read lips, may make this novel worth reading.

Watching the novel

Watching the movie after one has read the novel can often be disappointing, which can also be true when one does it in the opposite order. Kristen Lopez looks at things a little differently in But Have You Read the Book? (2023). She argues that the book and the movie may often tell somewhat different stories, but they both can have value.

She looks at 52 movies, from Frankenstein in 1931 to Passing in 2021) and the novels from which they were adapted. Her conclusion? The novels are as worth reading as the films are worth watching.

As the title suggests, Lopez writes with a movie bias. That is, she starts with the movie, then tells us what's different in the novel, rather than vice versa. Rarely does she say that one is better than the other, even when they are very different.

As a practical matter, to tell the entire story contained in a typical novel, including all the characters and all the conversations and events, could make the adapted film six hours long or more. Thus much has to be cut out.

Less forgivable, at least to those who read and loved the book first, filmmakers often change the names of characters, the locales, the titles and even the plots. The first filmed version of Frankenstein, for example, is radically different from Mary Shelley's book. Some remakes have been more faithful, yet that doesn't make the original film any less worth watching. The same is true of Rebecca, Dr. No, Rosemary's Baby, True Grit, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Princess Bride, Fight Club and all the other films/novels she discusses.

All this has frustrated students down through the years who have written "book reports" after watching the movie.

So typically different are novels and the movies based on them that it can be startling when a movie like No Country for Old Men comes along. The Coen Brothers film is essentially the same as the Cormac McCarthy novel. So if you've seen the movie, why read the book? Lopez asks. But look at it the other way around. When one loves a novel, what one most wants is a movie that puts the identical story on the screen.

The enemy of novelists?

Novelists are often portrayed by their natural enemies, biographers, as throughly in the grip of unconscious impulses or addictions or social pressures, or other forces that produce the novels, or produce what the novels really are (as opposed to what the novelists themselves thought they were).

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

There's lot to unpack in that convoluted Jane Smiley sentence, so let's take a stab at it.

The essential point may be her assertion that biographers are the "natural enemies" of novelists. Is this really true? I think of Tim Page, whose impressive biography of Dawn Powell led to a temporary revival of her work. Her books were all republished thanks to Page. There are other examples of biographers whose work revived interest in novelists.

Yet Smiley nevertheless has a valid point. A biographer's job when writing about a novelist is to not only tell us about that writer's life but also to tell us how that life became reflected in the novelist's work. Sometimes biographers go too far.

Of course, one's life is often reflected in one's writing. So many novels, especially first novels, are autobiographical. And these are often the best work the writer ever does. And the society in which a novelist is raised — Larry McMurtry on a Texas ranch, for example — often proves vital in the novels later written.

Yet biographers can give the sense that the novels are all but inevitable, that novelists are little more than conduits that lack free will. Biographers can also give the impression that their interpretation of novels is the correct one, even if novelists themselves say differently.

The beauty of great novels is that they can be interpreted differently by different people. The biographer is not always right. But then neither is the novelist.

Wear the old coat

Austin Phelps

Austin Phelps was a 19th century Congregational minister and educator who, among other noteworthy comments, said, "Wear the old coat and buy the new book."

One's priorities are reflected in how one spends money. Some people with modest incomes dress spectacularly. Someone else with the same income might drive a fancy car or live in a beautifully furnished apartment. Another travels overseas regularly. None of them can afford all these things at the same time, but they make a choice according to their priorities. Thus, the person who drives a luxury car may live in a dumpy house. The one who wears the latest fashions may drive a 30-year-old wreck.

Relatively few of us can afford to own everything we might want. Thus we have to make choices. In the view of Austin Phelps, that choice should be books. I tend to agree.

I may shop for clothing twice a year, if I have to. I got to a bookstore at least twice a month.

I have not always been this way. When I had a wife and child to support, my priorities were different. I once put a high priority on travel. I used to have to dress for my job. Today I live alone and am old enough that my needs and priorities are few. Spending my money on books, even books I doubt I will ever have time to read, does not seem wasteful to me. A new coat, however? Who needs it?

Bad choices, good results

If one makes bad decisions that somehow lead to a wonderful result — such as a bad marriage that results in a good child — were they actually bad decisions?

Leif Enger's 2008 novel So Brave, Young, and Handsome leads the reader to think such thoughts. The title comes from The Cowboy's Lament, which places that dilemma in this couplet: "For we loved our comrade, so brave, young, and handsome/We all loved our comrade, although he'd done wrong."

Enger's novel is narrated by a frustrated writer, Monte Becket, who after one successful novel seems unable to write anything of value. He, his wife and son become fascinated by a boat-building neighbor named Glendon. When Glendon decides to go West to try to find his Mexican wife, whom he abandoned years before, Becket decides to go with him, a decision his wife, Susannah, somehow approves of.

Along the way, Becket learns that abandoning his wife is the least of Glendon's sins. He is also a train robber and murderer being pursued by an aging, former Pinkerton agent named Siringo, who never gives up.

Instead of returning to his family in Minnesota, Becket decides to stick with Glendon, even when this makes himself a fugitive pursued by Siringo.

The consequences of Becket's decisions go from bad to worse, yet somehow it all works out in the end. And Becket, who tells his wild story, proves he can still write after all.

Back in the hills

I'd never seen a Tussie's pants worn out at the knees. They wore out on the seat first ...

Jesse Stuart, Taps for Private Tussie

I first read Jesse Stuart's Taps for Private Tussie (1943) when I was in high school. I just finished reading it for the third time, each reading from the original edition with those wonderful Thomas Hart Benton illustrations. The novel doesn't get old.

Narrated by a boy named Sid, whose parentage remains a mystery until the end, the story tells of what happens to a hill family after Kim Tussie's widow, Aunt Vittie, receives a check from the government along with Kim's remains following a World War II battle.

Members of the Tussie family, especially the men, are allergic to work. They prefer to drink, dance, sleep and subsist on relief checks. As the story opens they are living in a schoolhouse that bas been left vacant for the summer.

Vittie proves generous with her money, however, and soon the family is living in a 16-room mansion with more food than they can imagine. Tussies from miles around hear about their good fortune and move in with them. One of these is Uncle George, Grandpa's brother, whose slick words and lively fiddle music steal Vittie's heart, angering Uncle Mott, Kim's brother, who wants Vittie for himself.

Soon enough the money runs out and the bad feelings that had been kept below the surface boil to the top.

Meanwhile, Sid has belatedly started attending school and discovers that he is a good student with what is perhaps a different world view than others in his family, however much he love them all.

Stuart is all but ignored by readers today, but in his day he was an important American writer, and Taps for Private Tussie is his masterpiece.

Saving the world

Weddings have long been a favorite way to wrap up film comedies, Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, television series or whatever. But thrillers?

Joel C. Rosenberg brings not just The Beijing Betrayal (2025) but his entire series of Marcus Ryker thrillers to a climax not just with a wedding but with a wedding that takes up several chapters. I don't think I have ever seen a fictional wedding that is described in such detail. I kept expecting terrorists to show up at any second. But no. It's just a wedding.

Ryker finally gets to marry Annie, his CIA sweetheart, and after six world-saving adventures, they deserve it.

Ryker, also with the CIA, expects the president to fire him at the beginning of the novel after his previous mission ends in embarrassment. But he is given one more chance to kill an aging terrorist, who has teamed with China to poison Americans as a diversion so that China can attack Taiwan. 

As in previous novels in the series, Rosenberg keeps the adrenaline running. Even transitional chapters, needed to set up the next bit of action, are brief and tension-filled.

One hopes nobody in China reads this novel. It might give them ideas.

The transgression of reading

The greater the clams a social system makes on an individual, the graver the transgression of reading will be,

Heather Cass White, Books Promiscuously Read

Joyce Carol Oates

Heather Cass White's comment above seemed relevant to me before reading Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates. Afterward they are all the more relevant.

The novel tells of a high school student who is punished for being smart. For reading books. For asking questions. For thinking independently. The story may be set in the future, but as White suggests, something similar could happen at any time, past, present or future. Social systems, political systems, religious systems can all, at their extreme, seek to control information.

This happened during the COVID epidemic. It happened in Hollywood during the Hays era. It happens at so many colleges and universities today where diversity and inclusiveness are celebrated, at least until someone says something or reads something that might be considered conservative.  It happens when Amazon makes certain books difficult to purchase. Reading, especially the reading of fiction, is frowned upon by many parents.

White cites an example in Jane Austen's novel, Northanger Abbey, where one woman interrupts another, "'And what are you reading, Miss —?'" The other replies, "'Oh, it is only a novel!'" She then "lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame."

In Austen's story, the prejudice against reading a novel is at least subtle. Nobody is seizing the book or burning it or preventing its circulation.

Reading, White says, can be viewed as a "crime" in two ways. First, it is an independent act — one person voluntarily reading something, whatever it might be. Second, "it removes that self from circulation, from its possible use as the property of others."

Systems, at their extreme, want to own you. They want to control you. They want to dictate what you read and, therefore, what you think.