Category: Fiction

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Okay, so you know how sometimes you just never read a classic book for years and years—because even as an English major you can’t possibly read all of them in college—and then you finally get around to it and you realize that it is some missing piece of your soul that has finally come home to rest?

Well, this wasn’t one of those times. It’s true that I managed not to read Heart of Darkness till now, but I kinda wish it had stayed that way. It’s one of those books that skates by on its historical significance and once-revolutionary themes, so no one bothers to mention the totally crappy storytelling.

John and I read this for our own personal book club, and basically spent the entire discussion complaining about it and tallying up all the things we wished Conrad would have done instead.

But let’s break it down.

Setting: Late 19th century, England and the Congo

Story: Naive English dude becomes a ferry-boat captain headed to the Congo. He is charged with 1) transporting ivory, and 2) picking up a guy named Kurtz, who is some fiendishly successful ivory trader who needs to be returned to civilization. Kurtz is a genius, they say, but seems to be dabbling in some shady practices.

Themes: As good little 19th century Brits, we all know that the “heart of darkness” refers to the jungle itself, the black-skinned heathens who live there. Or does it? Could it be that raping the African land in the name of Christianizing the savages is not such a pure motive after all, that true darkness perhaps germinates in the human soul?

Writing: I have no complaints with Conrad’s style. It’s the freaking plot and structure.

First, the whole thing is a frame story, which as far as I can tell has no function except to jolt the reader out of the story periodically for no good reason. But the main problem is that the book fails to deliver the goods. Conrad piques our interest for pages and pages about this Kurtz fellow. All the characters go on at length about his persuasive methods, his amazing speeches, his heroic proportions. And Conrad never shows us, never tells us, never gives us any satisfying details about who Kurtz actually is or what Kurtz actually does. I walked away from this book with literary blue balls, and I’m still angry about it.

Best thing about it: It’s short.

Worst thing about it: See “writing” above.

Final thoughts: Watch Apocalypse Now instead. It’s actually supposed to be an adaptation of Heart of Darkness, though from what I understand (I’ve only seen the big famous scene with the Wagner) it actually has a good plot.

…in order from worst to best.

The two words that come to mind when I think of Family Trust by Amanda Brown are “frivolous” and “dumb.” Brown is the author of the Legally Blonde novel, but having read Family Trust I wonder if the movie’s charm came from elsewhere. At any rate Family Trust seems to have been written solely in the hopes that it, too, would be converted into a Reese Witherspoon film. If we are lucky, it won’t be. The premise of the book is that unmarried parents die in a plane crash, each appointing a separate guardian for the four-year-old left behind. The two different-as-can-be guardians have to learn to get along as they raise their new daughter and then—wocka wocka wocka—fall in love.

The Ivy Chronicles by Karen Quinn lands in the middle of the scale. It’s not a whole lot less frivolous than Family Trust, but there’s a goofy quality about the book—the main character goes on a date with George Clooney; another character gets eaten by an alligator—that reminds me of Janet Evanovich. The plot here centers on New York businesswoman Ivy Ames, who loses her bigshot job and bigshot husband and so launches a company that helps parents get their kids into the best private kindergartens. (Aside: this topic—the snootiness and impossibility of Manhattan kindergartens—seems to deliver endless fascination to chick lit authors and audiences. It appears in both Family Trust and The Nanny Diaries. I kinda don’t get it.) Along the way Ivy does anything to make her clients successful: working with a mobster, painting a little girl black, even selling out her own (Jewish) people for cash. But in the end she regains her dignity and fixes some of her more pronounced value flaws. I recommend this book over Family Trust mainly because it’s sillier and there’s a lot more swearing.

The one I liked the best was Sabine Durrant’s Having It and Eating It, a novel about the shadowy sides of parenting and marriage. By far the most realistic of the three books, Durrant’s novel follows Maggie Owen, a stay-at-home mom of a baby and a toddler who has grown increasingly estranged from her busy advertising exec hubby. Filled with dark humor and adorable British lingo, Having It and Eating It explores the inherent tensions of child-rearing and long-term relationships, the lure of adultery, the peculiar joys and jealousies of women for whom motherhood is a full-time job.

With that, I’m over my chick lit experiment. I never could find any lad lit aside from Nick Hornby (who I think is good but ever-so-slightly overrated); apparently this was a genre more or less invented by publishing houses hoping to bring chick lit to the boys. But they failed—pretty big time—because, of course, most men don’t read fiction that isn’t headlined by the likes of Jack Ryan and Dirk Pitt. Geez, we could have told them that!

It’s been suggested by some readers here that I look into the chick lit phenomenon, a genre we skipped in Why We Read What We Read because it simply isn’t bestselling—at least not bestselling enough to thrust a title into the top 15 for any one year. Still, one really can’t ignore the hot pink drawings gracing innumerable slim paperbacks at one’s local bookstore. These titles occupy premium display space at the chain stores, proof enough that they are selling in very satisfying quantities indeed.

As a clueless outsider, I wasn’t sure even what “chick lit” really was. After all, 70% of literary fiction is read by women, and with even autobiographical journeys like Eat, Pray, Love scoring big with the ladies, it wasn’t clear to me that all of those offerings didn’t qualify. However, according to the book reviewers over at ChickLitBooks.com, chick lit is women’s fiction of a very special type:

It’s all in the tone. Chick lit is told in a more confiding, personal tone. It’s like having a best friend tell you about her life….Humor is a strong point in chick lit, too….THAT is what really separates chick lit from regular women’s fiction.

Got it. Less Maya Angelou, more Bridget Jones.

I also learned that chick lit, like romantic fiction, comes in multiple sub-genres. You’ve got City Girl Lit, and Wedding Lit, and Hen Lit (for “older” women in their 30s to 60s). You’ve got Christian Lit, “Bigger Girl” Lit, even “Lad Lit” that’s written by and about men (but in that all-important light and humorous tone).

I started with Mom Lit. It seemed like it would be different from The Nanny Diaries (which I did read once) and Sex and the City (which I still watch a lot) without veering too far into one of the more peculiar branches of the genre.

And I started with a powerhouse: Jennifer Weiner. Though chick lit hasn’t broken through to an annual list’s top 15, Weiner is still a bestselling author who sold nearly 300,000 copies of The Guy Not Taken in 2007. That’s not the book I read, though. I picked up Little Earthquakes, a story about women who meet in a prenatal yoga class and become friends, supporting each other through their trials with their husbands and new babies.

Well, I wasn’t very impressed. I just felt so neutral about this book: it wasn’t horribly boring, but it wasn’t terribly interesting. And, disappointingly, despite the promises of ChickLitBooks.com, it just wasn’t that funny. It was light, certainly, and it had scenes that I know were supposed to be funny, but the only thing that I thought was genuinely amusing was when the women took turns tossing yarmulkes across the room at their babies’ bare heads.

Of course, a book needn’t be funny if it has depth, but I thought Little Earthquakes was lacking in that department as well. It wasn’t really about anything—except that caring for an infant is really, really hard. That’s all true, and I can see the book being comforting to overworked new moms (if they would even have time to read it), but I just needed more.

Halfway through, in fact, I needed so much more that I swapped Little Earthquakes for Tom Perrotta’s Little Children. Both the titular and thematic similarities were coincidental, but the comparison well demonstrated what I want from a novel that my foray into chick lit just wasn’t delivering.

Themes. Themes! Themes!! I like my books to be about something bigger, to comment upon the human condition, to explore our tweaked-out selves in some thoughtful way. It’s not a matter of topic: like Weiner, Perrotta writes about parents, children, marriage, and suburban life. But he does it in a way that’s so much less shallow, so much less predictable, and just—honestly—so much better.

His story follows a number of befuddled characters: a stay-at-home mom who can’t quite figure how she ever ended up married with a child; a hot stay-at-home dad who sneaks out at night to watch skateboarders instead of studying for the bar exam he’s failed twice; an angry retired cop with an agenda; a panty-sniffer; and yes, even a child molester. Perhaps these dark edges give Perrotta an immediate literary advantage. But either way, he works his theme both literally and figuratively: the characters are linked by the “little children” around which their lives revolve, while also becoming helpless “little children” themselves in the face of their own desires.

After finishing Little Children, I did eventually get to the embarrassingly shallow ending of Little Earthquakes, in which all is magically resolved. What’s so strange to me is that Weiner goes out of her way to crystallize the genuine, overwhelming difficulty of motherhood, but then gives us an ending that glazes over all the problems she’s spent 400 pages cataloging. Does realism not apply to denouements? Perrotta’s ending, on the other hand, manages to be generally positive without undermining the issues and complexities explored in the novel.

I wonder—and this is a theory, not a statement—if one difference between literary and genre fiction is how they deal with truth: the former dishes it out relentlessly while the latter can’t quite look it in the eye.

We’ll see. I’m not judging all chick lit based on this one book. I’ll be back with reviews of Family Trust, Having It and Eating It, and maybe some of that quirky “Lad Lit” if I can get my hands on it.

So here’s a cool idea. You start a story, get the reader into it, and then abruptly cut it off 4o pages later—in mid-sentence, no less. Then you begin a totally different story, one that takes place in a different time with different characters—written, even, in a different style—and wriggle in a reference to the previous story somewhere in the process.

Then you do it five more times.

That’s the methodology underlying David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, which begins as a colonial travelogue but quickly morphs into a sassy correspondence—then a thriller—then a black comedy—then an interview—and finally a storytelling session in a tribal dialect of the future. But just when you’ve reached the last story—in the middle of the book, that is—the whole piece unwinds, returning to and tying up each story in reverse order.

As if that wasn’t painfully clever enough, Mitchell even has one of his characters, a musician, compose a piece called the “Cloud Atlas Sextet,” which shares the book’s structure. In a letter to a former lover, the character describes his work:

In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? (445)

Well, the world has spoken, and it looks like the vote is for “revolutionary.” Or at least awesome.

Of course, even so, Cloud Atlas was not a bestseller. It often requires, like, concentration—which would explain why it took ME so long to finish it—and each plunge into a new story can leave you discombobulated. So this is definitely not your mainstream fare. But snobs and linguaphiles, take this one on! The reward for your efforts is lush and beautiful writing, the work of a clear master.