UniBrow

Rule No. 8:

At play and at fire it is good manners to give place to the last comer, and affect not to speak louder than ordinary.

Rule No. 7:

Put not off your clothes in the presence of others, nor go out of your chamber half dressed.

Rule No. 6:

Sleep not when others speak, sit not when others stand, speak not when you should hold your peace, walk not on when others stop.

Rule No. 5:

If you cough, sneeze, sigh, or yawn, do it not loud but privately; and speak not in your yawning, but put your handkerchief or hand before your face and turn aside.

Rule No. 4:

In the presence of others sing not to yourself with a humming noise, nor drum with your fingers or feet.

On-the-go Jane is killing me. She won’t let up. She’s pressing my face into a bowl of soup. Bear ye–if ye can–with extracts from today’s New York Times post: 

I’ve been reminded by our discussion of a couple of studies that we’ve read about in the last two years–one said that women are likely to read books written by men and books written by women equally, while men are likely to read only books by men. I think we can extrapolate from this an artifact of the electoral process in this survey–if 69% of the responders were men, then they were most likely to vote for other men. If 31% of the responders were women, they were likely to split their votes, and therefore to skew our picture away from what really happened in these years.

This is too much. I would think it hardly needs pointing out that the reading habits of this highly specialized group polled by the Times–and here’s the list, if you’re interested–are likely to differ greatly from those of the general population. And of course we know nothing about the sample criteria of these two unnamed studies. A male writer, critic, or literary scholar is much more likely, I’ll wager, than the average book-reading Joe to know something about what female writers are up to. Maybe not as much as he should, if it comes to that, but more than most, if only out of professional obligation. Anyway, I’m still breathing soup: “One thing I learned from our discussion, is that if I am ever asked to answer this question again, I will ask myself, ‘What would Roth do?’ If I think Roth would vote for himself, then I will vote for myself, also.” Look at the list of poll respondents. Roth’s name doesn’t appear. So either he wasn’t invited to participate (unlikely) or he declined. Which means he voted for no one. So … hmm … I don’t know if she’s got a usable pretext for self-canonization there or … um … or not. “To me,” she goes on, “it’s the women, young and old, who have been doing new and interesting things, both large and small, and that’s who I’ve been reading.” Wait. I thought women read men and women equally. If that’s the case, then it must also be the case that Jane Smiley, one of the gilded custodians of American letters who qualified for the Times survey, doesn’t perfectly conform to what studies indicate are the reading habits of general-population females. Now I wonder if that can be said of any of the male poll respondents. ”And when I suggested this to David Lodge at lunch”–holding his face in the soup–”he agreed.”

There is more still: “Another study in the past year or so indicated that of all the groups that have stopped reading literature, adult men have stopped reading it the most. This does not speak well of the ‘importance’ of the big four guys. Are they central to the lives of their own demographic cohort?” (My lungs are filling with soup.) Let’s not forget, now, that the book that finished on top in this silly poll was written by a woman. If we’re going to talk about this in these terms–demographic cohorts and everything–we should definitely allow that fact to exert its pressure. But the sad fact is that you would have to cut a demographic much more finely than by gender to find one whose members consider any literature ”central” to their lives. But I don’t know. Maybe I’m missing something. Or maybe discursive prose isn’t the ideal medium for Smiley’s case. I’d really love to see this in PowerPoint.  

Rule No. 3:

Show nothing to your friend that may affright him.

More eye-popping, self-admiring silliness from Jane Smiley, coming right up. But let me first recur to the statement I quoted, and should have commented on, in my last post. Recall that Smiley is currently reading Philip Roth’s American Pastoral and is favoring us, thanks to the good offices of The New York Times, with her accumulating impressions. Smiley notices that protagonist Swede Levov seems incapable of learning from experience, and she’s not buying it. “This is not my experience of adults,” she declares. “Life long learning is more the norm, as Oprah might say.”

I’m not going to touch the Oprah reference, by the way–but is she kidding? Call me a cynic, but among the adults that I’ve so far met with on life’s journey, I have not observed a commitment to life-long learning in anything like the frequency that justifies calling it the norm. But the larger point is that this is simply irrelevant. Should a fictional character be judged an artistic failure solely because his psychological makeup is different from Jane Smiley’s, or mine, or yours? Does a novel have to play some version of our own experience back to us in order to be seen as plausible and worthwhile? At another point in one of her posts, Smiley says:

… I have arrived at page 213 of “American Pastoral,” and the author has not persuaded me to willingly suspend disbelief. … Zuckerman would have me believe that the Swede is so grandiose in his conception of himself that everything that happens in the world is important only in the way it affects him. By extrapolation, I am supposed to believe that this is the way humans work. But that goes against my own experience, and I don’t accept it.

No. Holy Mother of God, no. As a matter of fact you are not supposed to believe that Swede Levov’s actions and attitudes necessarily reflect “the way humans work.” Give that Sears Craftsman Character Extrapolator a rest, Jane dear. What you are supposed to believe is that this human with this background and these specific problems behaves this way when a particular sequence of events brings him to a specific point. Roth may or may not succeed in bringing this off in the case of Swede Levov, but the reader–even one so eminent as the author of Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel–who consults nothing but his or her own experience is in no position to decide. If a novel never transgresses the boundaries of a reader’s experience, there’s no disbelief to suspend.

Maybe we’ve discovered a 14th way of looking at the novel.