Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party

(October 26) I really liked Three Men in a Boat – it’s the buddy movie of its day – the Seinfeld or Mary Tyler Moore Show of the 1880s. It’s very funny. The story is nominally about one trip up the Thames in a rowboat undertaken by three young urban professionals, but this particular trip is really just the backdrop for a series of comic monologues about other boat trips and adventures and about life in general, à la George Carlin or Dave Barry. As the friends get ready for the excursion, for example, J., the narrator, pauses to lampoon weather forecasting and barometers:

Then there are those new style of barometers, the long straight ones. I never can make head or tail of those. There is one side for 10 a.m. yesterday, and one side for 10 a.m. to-day; but you can't always get there as early as ten, you know. It rises or falls for rain and fine, with much or less wind, and one end is "Nly" and the other "Ely" (what's Ely got to do with it?), and if you tap it, it doesn't tell you anything. And you've got to correct it to sea-level, and reduce it to Fahrenheit, and even then I don't know the answer.

The book is fun also because of the sensation of travelling back in time 120 years – paid work is done by children, people move their bathtubs around, a complete supper can be bacon and a jam tart, young men share single beds matter-of-factly. Spookily at one point, J. reverses the time-travel effect by making fun of the fashion of collecting antique china:

Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd?

Well, yes, they will!

It was surprising that interspersed among the funny anecdotes and clever observations are serious little flights of poetic fancy that occasionally verge on the mawkish. I was struck by this one, though:

And yet it seems so full of comfort and of strength, the night. In its great presence, our small sorrows creep away, ashamed. The day has been so full of fret and care, and our hearts have been so full of evil and of bitter thoughts, and the world has seemed so hard and wrong to us. Then Night, like some great loving mother, gently lays her hand upon our fevered head, and turns our little tear-stained faces up to hers, and smiles; and, though she does not speak, we know what she would say, and lay our hot flushed cheek against her bosom, and the pain is gone.

I can’t ever remember encountering a metaphor for Night that presents it as a maternal experience.

Three Men in a Boat and Jerome K. Jerome were unknown to me till I read Robert McCrum of The Observer’s list of the 100 greatest novels of all time a couple of years ago. He put it at No. 33 and called it “one of the funniest English books ever written.” I can easily think of 20 or 30 books that are far funnier, but it’s pretty funny.

Empire Falls, Richard Russo

(September 28) Liked it. I picked this up because a booKCEL member recommended Russo to Irving lovers.

I can see why Irving and Russo would be compared -- their novels have many broad characteristics in common (bearing in mind that I'm basing my knowledge of Russo entirely on Empire Falls): there's a motley crew of likable characters, modern New Englanders, who are trying to carry out plain-vanilla lives as best they can while something evil and frightening looms in the background. Despite the dark clouds on the horizon, there's a charming and humorous passage on every page.

But I would say Irving and Russo are fundamentally very different. Or, perhaps, what I think of as "Irving" is a very specific quirkiness in the point of view and in the mapping out of the tale that Russo just doesn't have. Irving is a step away from his characters -- you can hear him lovingly puppet-mastering above the fray. Russo (like many writers) is much closer to his characters, more invisible as a narrator. Irving is also eccentric in the way he tells his characters' stories, often taking up and developing topics and side-stories that never get returned to in the course of the über-story -- which is a way of disarming professional readers, who are used to taking note of seemingly random details, confident they'll later on be woven neatly into the climax of the book.

In some ways, Irving is an "unprofessional" novelist.

Russo is professional -- in both the good and bad senses. Empire Falls is very neatly plotted: all the disparate issues affecting individual characters are brought to bear on the novel's climax, which is a series of surprising, and in some cases shocking, revelations about individual characters' secret intentions. The climax of Empire Falls is quite dramatic, in fact -- way more than any Irving novel ever is.

But Empire Falls is also a bit conventional. You kind of know right off the bat how the chips should fall, and they do fall that way. It's a TV-generation quality. Irving definitely doesn't have that quality.

The best thing about Russo is the witty little turns of phrase he often uses to capture a detail in a scene or the mood of a character. He's in the Dave Barry or Bill Bryson schools of humour, only subtler.

Overarching observation: with The Cider House Rules and Empire Falls, I have spent the month of September in Maine.

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks