If Your Name Is James, Your Book Is Probably Mentioned Here

Washington Square by Henry James. I read this maybe a year ago. I also read it in high school. As did, I suppose, everyone. I had no recollection of its content or characters from my high school assignment, but I know I read it because when I went to New York and visited Washington Square I said to myself "I read this book!".

But really, why bother with these old books? Why bother high school kids with them, why bother when you're 59 and riding a bus? A gold digger tries to con a young girl starved for love -- gosh, never heard that one before. Why, really, bother?

In my case - partly because the book was on the shelf at Goodwill. But, given that, I did choose to read it. Ivanhoe is sitting there currently, and there it will continue to sit. I've skipped others, too, but OTOH I've read The Prince and the Pauper, Candide, The Idiot and a few others whose combined age reaches back to before novels existed.

The thing about books, and maybe art in general, is that you get into them. I don't mean like hippie talk or love talk, "so into you little girl" stuff. I mean you are sucked in, there is nothing else, you are experiencing something. How well, whether it's worth it, depends on the skill of the writer. There could easily be a tale told of a gold digger and an anxious daughter that's just a story, that doesn't allow you to feel what any of the characters experience. The fact that a book is old, that it's language or form is out of date, can be interesting, actually, and is merely incidental to the experience, to the insight. The characters in Washington Square are complex, for the most part. Catherine, the daughter, the victim, is neither gorgeous nor brilliant (as she would probably have to be for mass marketing purposes today -- I see Hilary Duff in the role), but is caring, longing for emotional union. Her father is cold, mean, but right in his appraisal of what's going on, and has has an excuse for his frigidity. Morris is smart, can be caring, knows the form of love but not the substance but is, after all, only in it for the money. Mrs. Penniman -- well, imagine if Mrs. Kravitz had moved in with Darren and Samantha.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with old books. For instance, no one would speak like this, even in a song: "She hangs upon the cheek of night like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear." Yet our culture, with excellent reason, can't let go of Shakespeare.

At one point in Washington Square, Mrs. Penniman says "I shall see him often; I shall feel like one of the vestals of old tending the sacred flame." She could have made that reference any time from around 1000BC until Henry James's time, and most educated people would know what she meant. How many would know now? Few, I'd bet. It seems to me there was a common thread, a thread of knowledge or culture or whatever, that ran for a long, long time and is now in danger of being cut and lost. That might be good, it might be bad, it might be neutral, it might not even be true. But if true, it's at the very least something to be wistful about. Reading these old books isn't so bad. Those people back then - they were us.

A Taste for Death by P.D. James. Why does anyone commit murder when there are English detectives around? Clever as you think you are, Murderer, you will be caught. Oh yes, you will be caught.

I don't know if Ms James has been Damed like Dame Agatha Christie. But based on this book alone, I'd have to say she is more literary, if not as concise a story teller as Dame Ag. Her hero in this one is a master detective and a poet (though we see none of his poems). The victim has recently thrown off his worldly possessions and was hiding in a church when he died; his bereaved survivors are, for the most part, jerks, and the secondary detectives struggle with various shades of inner turmoil. Poirot doesn't have inner turmoil. Mr Marple doesn't write poems. The solution was satisfying. A good book. I would read more of PD, yes I would.

Omaha by James Celer. Not written yet.