The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

Chestertober, my informal, monthlong exploration of GK Chesterton’s fiction, concludes with his best novel and the one that has always been my favorite: The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare.

Where to begin? I think with a favorite line from Flannery O’Connor, who once wrote that “A story is good when you continue to see more and more in it, and it continues to escape you.” Any time I reflect on that line, this is one of the few books that comes to mind, vividly and specifically.

The Man Who Was Thursday is Gabriel Syme, an English poet who, when the novel begins, is at a garden party in a fashionable London suburb. There he finds himself in conversation with the beautiful Rosamund and her testy brother Lucian, who, like Syme, is a poet. He takes himself dreadfully seriously and the puckish Syme can’t resist goading him. Finally, dared to prove that he really means what he says in his nihilistic modernist poetry, Lucian reveals that he is an anarchist. He invites Syme to a meeting of his anarchist terrorist cell that very night.

“Your offer,” Syme says, “is too idiotic to refuse.”

Syme and Lucian arrive early and, just before the others enter, Syme repays Lucian for his dangerous revelation with one of his own—he is an undercover cop.

In a masterfully suspenseful scene, Lucian, who is nominated for a position on the supreme anarchist council under the codename Thursday, attempts to downplay the violence of their group. Syme denounces him—the path to success among radicals—and is elected the new Thursday, at which point he is whisked downriver to Westminster. There, at a luxurious breakfast on a balcony overlooking Leicester Square, Syme meets the five other members of the council and the man behind them all, Sunday.

The other members—Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday—are all grotesques. One is a cadaverous German professor named de Worms, another a crooked French aristocrat, another, one Dr Bull, a man who grins ominously from behind opaque sunglasses. But their leader is the most frightening of all. Sunday, an enormous man, a giant who fills Syme’s senses with his overpowering presence, announces that he has uncovered a spy among their number. Syme thinks he has failed just as he’s begun, but it turns out to be one of the other members, a Pole named Gogol who tears off his wig and beard to reveal a Cockney policeman underneath. After threatening Gogol with death, Sunday sends him on his way.

Sunday then reveals the council’s plot: the Tsar is en route to Paris for a meeting with the President of France. Wednesday, the French marquis, is to blow them up with a bomb when they meet in three days. Syme’s goals at this point become clear: stop the assassination and bring down Sunday—the former because he is a policeman, the latter because Sunday terrifies him.

But as Syme leaves Leicester Square he discerns that he is being followed. After failing to elude his tail, he turns and confronts him. It is Friday, the elderly Professor de Worms, who insistently asks whether Syme is a policeman. When Syme finally denies it, the professor is crestfallen: “‘That’s a pity,’ he said, ‘because I am.’”

With astonishment and frustration, Syme and Professor de Worms realize that three of the seven anarchists at the council meeting were actually undercover detectives. Only their ignorance of the fact prevented them from moving against Sunday on the spot. They determine to stop Sunday’s plot together by forcing Saturday, Dr Bull, to reveal the marquis’s plans for carrying out the bombing. Once they find and interrogate the inscrutable Dr Bull, a scene in which the hapless Syme and Professor de Worms struggle to break through the man’s defenses, it turns out that he, too, is a policeman.

From this point on, the three race to cross the Channel and find and stop the marquis—who turns out to be a policeman.

One by one, every member of the supreme anarchist council, the organization working to overthrow the entire world, has been revealed to be an undercover agent of the forces of law and order. And one by one, each reveals that he was recruited by the same man—a Scotland Yard official who questioned them in a completely darkened room in which, despite their inability to see him, they felt awed and overpowered by his presence. Each has derived an extra measure of strength for his work from remembering that interview. Each wants to please their unseen boss by defeating Sunday.

After repeatedly cheating death by fighting a duel against an expert swordsman and fleeing a zombie-like mob in northern France, Syme and his allies, eventually including Gogol and the menacing council secretary, who is second only to Sunday himself, decide to turn the tables on Sunday by returning to England and confronting him.

“This is more cheerful,” said Dr. Bull; “we are six men going to ask one man what he means.”

“I think it is a bit queerer than that,” said Syme. “I think it is six men going to ask one man what they mean.”

What they discover defies expectations or explanation.

“A story is good when you continue to see more and more in it, and it continues to escape you.”

— Flannery O'Connor

Likewise, The Man Who Was Thursday defies easy summary or explanation. It’s hard to describe the plot without giving too much away, but I’ve tried to avoid spoiling important episodes, major plot points, and most especially the ending. It’s also hard to describe, period. See again that quotation from Flannery O’Connor.

A good place to begin is that subtitle: A Nightmare. The subtitle, as I noted earlier this month, is easy to overlook, especially once one has started reading, but important for both stylistic and thematic reasons.

Artistically, Chesterton’s most effective tool in establishing a nightmare feeling, and the one that sets The Man Who Was Thursday most clearly apart from all of his other fiction, is pacing. This novel maintains a breakneck speed that creates a sense of barely controlled panic as crisis flows into crisis and surprise piles upon surprise. There is no lag or dull spot and Chesterton metes out his surprises and twists expertly. Kingsley Amis, in a line commonly reprinted as a blurb on paperback copies, called The Man Who Was Thursday “the most thrilling book I have ever read.” High praise, and well earned.

The book’s atmosphere and tone are also crucial. Chesterton evokes better and more subtly than any other writer the feeling of being in a nightmare. Anyone who has dreamt of being chased will know the feeling. Over and over again, Syme is followed or chased by enemies of obscure purpose who always keep up with him no matter how hard he strives to get away. And, as in a dream, the familiar—Chesterton, a lifelong Cockney, sets the first half of the book in a believable and realistic London—mutates almost imperceptibly. Under the influence of this paranoia, which prefigures that of the political thrillers of John Buchan and his successors, home becomes a foreign battlefield, nothing appears quite right, and the human face and form both prove horrifyingly changeable.

But alongside the pursuit and paranoia of the nightmare is the reversal. Enemies turn out to be allies, being chased turns into chasing, disguises do not conceal, and, in the climax, the villain flees his accusers only to welcome them. The reversal, the inversion, the topsy-turvy turning of the world on its head—this is one of Chesterton’s recurring motifs and the great load-bearing structure of this novel.

It is also the key to Sunday, who is both a threat and the solution to the threat, both feared and trusted, both hated and loved, both a destroyer of the world and its creator and preserver.

I can say little more without revealing too much. The Man Who Was Thursday can be described, even spoiled, but must be read. It has to be dreamt.

When Chesterton published this book in 1908, he had taken a live issue, the waves of anarchist terrorism and assassination in both Europe and America at that time, and used it to explore doubt and despair and madness. The plot, in a way hard to explain but easy to describe, provides an answer by rejecting the question. On this read-through, as I read the novel’s concluding scenes, with Sunday and the six policemen of his council reunited, I thought of a passage from Chesterton’s “Introduction to the Book of Job” in which Chesterton describes how Job, after all his questions, finds himself

suddenly satisfied with the mere presentation of something impenetrable. Verbally speaking the enigmas of Jehovah seem darker and more desolate than the enigmas of Job; yet Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told. The refusal of God to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

Chesterton’s message is all the more powerful because, unlike some of the other novels we’ve read this month, it is never made explicit, much less preached.

I’ve read elsewhere that readers wrote to Chesterton to tell him that The Man Who Was Thursday had saved them from despair. I can believe it. This time through, my fourth or fifth in about fifteen years, I finished it feeling steadied and content, something I had not expected to get out of this rereading. I finally understood. The Man Who Was Thursday is not just witty, surrealist fun and genuinely thrilling espionage action, it is an allegory that strikes to the heart through the imagination.

Our world is no more settled or peaceful than it was in Chesterton’s time. If you’re feeling that, especially if you’re feeling that right now because of the forces at work to destroy civilization—whichever forces you think they might be—The Man Who Was Thursday may be the nightmare you need. A paradox worthy of its author.

Saving the world from the reading nook

Writing at Front Porch Republic in response to several recent news stories—like this one—that suggest our civilizational decline is further along than even the pessimists thought, Nadya Williams argues that saving and restoring civilization begins at home:

In the midst of the (il)literacy crisis unfolding around us, I would like to propose an old-fashioned response: Home libraries will save civilization. Why? Because a home overcrowded with books sets the tone for how its inhabitants spend their time at home. Bored? Read a book. Want something to do for fun? Read a book. Have friends over? Read a book together. Relaxed family night at home? Start a read-aloud.

The right domestic tone is key. So is opportunity. Williams continues:

When books are everywhere, they distract us with their presence in a good way—they demand to be read, shaping the people around them in small but meaningful ways, moment by moment, page by page. They send us on rabbit trails to find yet more books on related topics, to ask friends for recommendations, and sometimes just to sit quietly and reflect, overcome with an emotion sparked by an author who has been dead for centuries but one that expresses the state of our soul in this moment.

This combination—a mood at home that encourages reading and abundant opportunity to do so—reminded me of the early passages of Lewis’s spiritual memoir Surprised by Joy. Here he describes the home his family moved into when he was seven:

The New House is almost a major character in my story. I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstair indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.

Lewis’ father, you see, had the same bad habit I do: he “bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them.” Feel free to consult my wife for more information on me, but for the young Lewis this was the happy result:

There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interests, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.

The results speak for themselves.

But of course opportunities have to be seized, and the decline of reading, at least among the American populace, is not for lack of reading material. Books are plentiful and cheap. Where a private library used to be a ruinously expensive luxury, the most precious resource of a monastery or the hobby of an aristocrat, Williams argues that “in this day and age, with periodic public library sales and book giveaways, one doesn’t have to be rich to accumulate an impressive home library.”

But that word accumulate my put off the more Marie Kondo-ish among us. Williams suggests we embrace the stacks:

[S]peaking of luxuries, let’s forget aesthetics at least to some extent. Does my home feature many cheap mismatched bookcases? Yes, it does. Do we have too many books for our little space? Most definitely. Are there too many books piled up on every desk, side table, coffee table, and even hidden under the covers in the five-year-old’s bed? Yes. Is everyone in this home living with the joy of books as their primary companions each day? Yes, and that is the point.

Our home library is several thousand volumes, now. I stopped counting at over 3,000 a long time ago. We have a stuffed home office lined with the IKEA Billy bookcases I recently described, three tall bookcases in the master bedroom and large bookcases in our kids’ rooms, shelves on the landing, baskets of kids’ books in the living room, and you can always find stacks here and there that Sarah valiantly keeps under control. Clutter is the danger, but we’re creating opportunity.

Lewis’s memories of tone and opportunity resonate with me. In the little house where I spent the first fourteen years of my life, my parents had one big white wooden bookcase in the foyer by the front door. It had a 1970s-era set of World Book, a big hardback book on the top shelf mysteriously emblazoned Josephus, and scads and scads of kids’ books: Value Tales, Childcraft, Berenstain Bears, Golden Books, etc. We were free to read any of it, any time. I certainly did.

As a high schooler with a taste for literature, I discovered that classics series were helpful. I started as cheaply as I could with Dover Thrift Editions, which at that time were mostly one or two dollars apiece. You got what you paid for, to an extent (when I took a bunch of these to college a friend started calling them “Dover Homeless Editions”), but they gave this hillbilly kid with little pocket change easy access to lots of great old books for very little money. From there, Signet Classics, mass market paperbacks that ranged from $5-$8 when I was in college, and finally the larger and marginally more expensive but better quality Penguin Classics beckoned. I have hundreds of the latter.

The rest of our library has grown up around these like an artificial reef. And I’m glad to say that our reef is now teeming with little fish, busily reading. It is sweet to see them nestled down somewhere with a book, even when they should be doing something like sleeping. For once, I am not so pessimistic about the future.

Read all of Williams’s essay here and be encouraged—and motivated. Relatedly, read this piece on moving a home library from my podcasting friend Michial Farmer, which posted at Front Porch Republic just a day or two after Williams’s. Cf. his thoughts on collecting and loving cheap paperbacks versus cultivating a perfectly matched room full of leatherbound hardbacks. And you can read more about Lewis’s bookish childhood here.

Bigfoot and the resurrection, a Frog Pond test case

A few weeks ago I wrote about Alan Jacobs’s three-strike system for determining whether a current book is worth reading. He laid out some of his system here back in April, writing specifically of new literary fiction. (Brooklynite, three strikes; Ivy Leaguer, two strikes; MFA, one strike, etc.) I brought it up in the context of elite cultural bubbles in general, Edgar Allan Poe’s hated Boston “Frogpondians” being a paradigmatic example.

This was already on my mind because of a trip to our local library with the kids during which I picked up a new book on a whim: The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster, by John O’Connor. Leafing through the book at home, I alighted on this paragraph:

Even demonstrably batshit belief—in headless cannibals, in Jesus rising from the dead, in the COVID-19 pandemic being a global hoax orchestrated by the CDC and Zoom to prevent the Tangerine Tornado from being reelected—can make you feel as if you’ve pierced the Baudrillardian veil to see the world as it truly is. Not so long ago, perfectly reasonable people thought exposure to moonlight could get a girl pregnant. Or that rainwater found on tombstones removed freckles. Or that 7,409,127 demons worked for Lucifer, overseen by seventy-nine devil princes and helped by countless witches who multiplied faster than they could be burned alive. “I believe because it is absurd,” went the credo of third-century Christian theologian Tertullian. In many ways, our lives remain influenced by beliefs that were set in place when we crucified people on the regular.

It’s hard to know where to start with a specimen like this: the flippant tone (flippancy being the devil’s preferred form of humor), the cloying in-group signaling in which the author invokes meme culture and internet slang and Baudrillard at the same time, the cheap dunk on a bad-faith misquotation of Tertullian—all are worth attention. When Strunk and White condemned what they called “a breezy manner” (elsewhere O’Connor refers to Beowulf as “Mr Big Dick himself,” and Leviathan as “God’s way of reminding Job . . . that He is not to be fucked with”) they had good reason.*

No, what stuck out immediately was the lumping together of COVID conspiracy theories, superstitions, creatures reported in Herodotus, early modern amateur demonology, folklore, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ as “batshit.” (Presumably he means “batshit crazy,” though he chooses to economize his words here, of all places.) And not just “batshit,” but “demonstrably batshit.”

Someone should alert the press.

I decided to find out more about the author, and what do you know? Ivy League MFA, has written for The New Yorker, teaches at Boston College,** and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, making him an actual Frogpondian. Using Jacobs’s system, the Columbia MFA is three strikes by itself. At this point the knowing, dismissive tone is self-explaining.

Jacobs’s strike system is a simple heuristic meant to weed out works produced within and for intellectual bubbles. The passages I read—many more than the paragraph I quoted—and the author’s credentials suggest just such a bubble pedigree. So who is O’Connor’s Secret History of Bigfoot written for? As with all bubble writing, the likeminded. NPR, voice of the Frog Pond, called it

a smart, engaging, incredibly informative, hilarious, and wonderfully immersive journey not only into the history of Bigfoot in North America and the culture around but also a deep, honest, heartfelt look at the people who obsess about, the meaning of its myth's lingering appeal, and the psychology behind it.

But ordinary readers aren’t so sure. Here’s a well-put sample from a reader review on Goodreads, where the book has three out of five stars—a vigorously middling score:

I’m really confused as to what the purpose of this book was. As a person who’s uninitiated into Bigfoot lore I didn’t learn hardly anything about the phenomena. The same could be said for the commentary on psychology and delusion. I also don’t think this book is designed with Bigfoot enthusiasts in mind (nobody wants to be casually shrunk and mocked), or skeptics, who wouldn’t have much to take away from this book.

In a bit of serendipity, Jacobs wrote a short, one-paragraph post on his blog that I missed during the hurricane. It’s called “Parochialism,” and is a response to a New Yorker essay by Manvir Singh (Brown undergrad, Harvard PhD, UC Davis anthropology faculty). Jacobs notes simply that “the radical parochialism of elite opinion is quite a remarkable thing” and that, for a writer of Singh or O’Connor’s ilk, “ideas that aren’t present (a) in his social cohort and (b) at this instant simply don’t exist.”

Point (a) is especially important there. Living in a bubble leads the people in the bubble to think that the cocksure, mocking tone characteristic of work like this is just wit. The author can assume that everyone who matters agrees with him, and that anyone who disagrees doesn’t matter.*** We used to call this “preaching to the choir.” And the thing about preaching to the choir is that it’s unnecessary, and no one pays attention.

If you’d like a quick demonstration of just why it’s, well, batshit crazy to lump the resurrection of Jesus in with conspiracy theories and folk medicine, you can start with Richard Bauckham’s Jesus: A Very Short Introduction, a short work by a careful, earnest scholar for Oxford UP. Pages 104-9, which you can start reading here, offer an excellent précis for just why billions of people have believed something like this for two thousand years.

* “The breezy style is often the work of an egocentric.”

** I find it curious, albeit not terribly surprising, that someone who teaches at a Catholic college can blithely describe the resurrection of Christ as a “demonstrably batshit” idea.

*** A different Goodreads user counted 28 mentions of Donald Trump—by name, with more through brilliant nicknames like “the Tangerine Tornado,” which is, bizarrely, indexed—in O’Connor’s book. What writer who is not a well-submerged Frogpondian would risk alienating half of his potential readership to make puerile political digs in a book about Bigfoot?

Homer and His Iliad at Miller's Book Review

I’m excited to say I have another guest post at Miller’s Book Review on Substack. Today I review classicist and historian Robin Lane Fox’s excellent recent book Homer and His Iliad, which I read this summer and briefly noted in my summer reading post here.

A short sample:

The poem’s style suggests that Homer was illiterate, master of a strictly oral tradition, but with important differences from the bodies of modern oral epic so often used to understand him. These epics from Albania, Finland, and the central Asian steppes are transmitted communally, mutate from telling to telling, and have a loose-limbed, gangling structure of “and then . . . and then,” stretching across their heroes’ entire lives.

The Iliad, on the other hand, is a tightly focused and artistically unified whole that minutely dramatizes one major incident over the course of a few weeks. Its characters, themes, and setting remain consistent throughout. Even minor details which Lane Fox calls “signposts”—a hero’s armor, horses taken as booty—are established early in the poem so that, when they reappear sometimes thousands of verses later, they do not seem a contrivance.

All of which indicate a single creative mind behind the work, a mind capacious enough to keep an entire war’s worth of characters and plot lines straight without reference to writing. If the style is indicative of oral poetry, the content—in its control, economy, and subtlety—suggests one poet.

Read the whole thing at Miller’s Book Review and be sure to subscribe for twice-weekly reviews and essays. I’m grateful to Joel for inviting me to contribute again.

Being shelfish

Alan Jacobs recently recounted the bookshelf woes that have afflicted him since the reopening of the Baylor Honors College following a remodel. During the wait, he learned that he had been allotted two bookcases: “When I pointed out that my then-current office had eight bookcases, all of which were full, I was told that, okay, I could have three in my new space.” And that was all the new office had room for.

The whole situation, while faintly comic, leads Jacobs to some wry and disturbing conclusions about the fate of books in modern academia, so be sure to read the whole post. But I couldn’t help noticing one detail in particular:

I don’t mind moving into a smaller office. My former one was bigger than I needed, and the new one is better situated and is a pleasant, comfortable space—I’ll be happy there. But when I moved in I was a bit surprised to find that the bookcases—and yeah, it would’ve been hard to fit in any more than three—are thin-industrial-steel things instead of the well-made cherrywood ones I had had in my former office. 

When I started my full-time job at my college seven years ago my office had one bookcase of precisely the industrial steel kind shown in Jacobs’s photo. I learned quickly that these bookcases are not only ugly but terrible for the books themselves. The finish of the steel creates friction when one slides a book in or out of place, and unless the shelf is packed full the books will lean and warp in ways I haven’t seen on traditional wooden shelves. I even had the covers of multiple paperback books delaminate in strange patterns suggestive of unaccustomed structural stress.

And did I mention that the steel shelves are ugly?

Fortunately I was able to request an extra bookcase, which was delivered promptly. I was glad to see it was a more traditional—if cheaply made—wooden case. I eventually moved two of my own IKEA Billy bookcases to my office. This gave me a total of four, which was almost enough. For a while.

When our department shifted one hall over a few years ago, the wooden shelf and my two Billy bookcases and an additional waist-high case from Walmart came with me and I ditched the steel one. I managed to requisition a second wooden bookcase as a replacement. This is the most satisfactory office library arrangement I’ve had so far, even with books stacked on top of all of them and a couple of boxes full on the floor by my filing cabinet and more waiting at home.

The unbending, unbeautiful, ultimately damaging utility of the steel bookcase is a pretty good accidental metaphor, especially when the scholar and the lover of literature doesn’t have enough.

The Novel, Who Needs It? and The Decline of the Novel

Speaking of the good old days and present decline, this summer I read two books about novels. Or rather, The Novel, in the abstract. The first was The Novel, Who Needs It? by Joseph Epstein and the second The Decline of the Novel, by Joseph Bottum. Though starting from a similar point and assuming both the embattlement and the necessity of The Novel, they are quite different books.

Epstein’s book, which is more of a loosely structured long-form essay on a series of interrelated topics, defends the traditional novel as an essential medium for the exercise of the imagination and the cultivation of moral character. It is quite good, though with its discursive structure and a few other limitations, about which more below, I felt it never cohered into a single compelling argument. So while I may agree with some of the points in The Novel, Who Needs It? more, it was Bottum’s Decline of the Novel that I found more thought-provoking and insightful.

Bottum builds on a thesis from his earlier book An Anxious Age, which looked at the cultural and psychological effects of the collapse of the shared mainline Protestant culture of the US, but narrows his view here to fiction. The novel, Bottum argues, is a fundamentally Protestant form given its interiority, individualism, and concern with personal transformation. Long fictional narratives served to playact the sanctification of souls in individual imaginations. They were a form through which “we tried to explain ourselves to ourselves.”

As such, the novel became the preeminent artistic medium for meaning and self-understanding in the modern world and enjoyed a three hundred-year reign, from the early picaresques and moralistic epistolary novels of Defoe and Richardson to the 800-page potboilers of the 1970s.

But no more. With the decline of a shared culture has come a decline of the narrative form that once fed and shaped its imaginations. Novelists today do not occupy the taste-maker or thought-leader status a John Updike or Norman Mailer once did, nor do the educated need to have read any recent novels to be in the know—what Bottum calls “the Cocktail Party Test.”

In the best chapters of the book, Bottum traces this decline through the careers of four novelists: Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Thomas Mann, and Tom Wolfe. Faced with a “thin” or disenchanted world, all four sought to infuse meaning into life through fiction, albeit in different ways. Scott sought meaning in stories of the past, inadvertently inventing—to all practical purposes—historical fiction. Dickens, a generation on, strove to make fiction meaningful as a vehicle for pursuing the truth, for uncovering and exposing evil. But both these ends proved inadequate, giving rise to the modernism exemplified, in Bottum’s argument, by Mann, who made the novel its own point—novels for novels’ sake. It may not provide meaning, but it’s all we’ve got—let’s fuss over the artistry. By the time of Tom Wolfe, who attempted the unblinking truth-telling of Dickens in the realistic modern mode of Zola, narrated with journalistic attention to detail and rendered in frenzied prose, neither he nor his characters had the old “vision of the good life” that could give his shambling novels power and his readers no longer believed in the novel enough to take him seriously. Indeed, Wolfe became an object of scorn among the literati, especially when he dared to tip the sacred cow of the sexual revolution in I am Charlotte Simmons.

Successive failed attempts to find meaning, maintenance of empty forms without belief, and finally disbelief and disavowal—this is a deconversion story, a loss of faith. A “failure of nerve,” as Bottum puts it, but ours, not that of the novel. “The novel didn’t fail us. We failed the novel.”

There’s a lot to this argument, and Bottum argues it well. Certainly much of it jibes with my own observations, such as the way novels now tend to mean more to rabid subcultures than to any broadly shared culture—with one or two important exceptions. But I remain unconvinced by the overall thesis. Something is missing, or simply off. His narrative of disenchantment and decline is persuasive, but not because of the evidence brought forward through Scott, Dickens, Mann, and Wolfe. Since reading it a few weeks ago I’ve continued to puzzle over this.

Other reviewers have pointed to The Decline of the Novel’s narrow Anglophone focus, imprecision in how Bottum uses the word Protestant, or over-selective case studies as problems. This criticism has some merit. Here are two reviewers, Darren Dyck at Christianity Today and science fiction author Adam Roberts, who both sympathize with Bottum’s book while raising important questions about his thesis. Both reviews are worth your time for these lines of criticism.

“Ultimately,” Dyck writes in his review, “it all depends on how you define novel.” Whatever other points I could raise, I suspect this is the real problem. The Novel, capitalized, in the abstract, is probably too protean and slippery a form to describe in enough detail to prove a thesis like this.

This becomes especially clear in the book’s final chapter, about popular fiction, in which Bottum points out the way children’s fiction has taken the place of grownup novels as tools of imaginative instruction. Novels do, then, still form part of a broadly shared culture as theatres of moral drama and objects of debate and controversy—it’s just the novels of JK Rowling, not National Book Award or Booker Prize shortlisters, that matter now.

That last chapter works as an important caveat to the narrative that makes up the bulk of the book. It is also one of the several things that make The Decline of the Novel better than The Novel, Who Needs It? For Epstein, popular and genre fiction, which get barely a mention, mostly serve to prepare readers for the exquisite, lip-pursing pleasures of Henry James and Proust. Per Dyck, Epstein’s definition of novel doesn’t seem to include much beneath these delights. Blunter reviewers than I have accused Epstein of snobbery. Though Bottum doesn’t fully explore the implications of his observations in his final chapter, that he meditated on genre fiction at all makes his argument more serious and more open to emendation.

The survival of something of the novel’s function, as Bottum sees it, in however limited and compromised a form in children’s and popular fiction inevitably brought Chesterton to mind. In his early essay “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls,” Chesterton stuck up for the crude, sensationalistic popular fiction of his own time for precisely this reason:

One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is undervalued is the example of popular literature, the vast mass of which we contentedly describe as vulgar. The boy’s novelette may be ignorant in a literary sense . . . but it is not vulgar intrinsically—it is the actual centre of a million flaming imaginations.

Which means that however much The Novel has declined, as long as good stories set young imaginations on fire and keep them lit, there is reason for hope. The task is to preserve and, when possible, keep writing good stories.

Despite the limitations imposed on it by its author’s standards, The Novel, Who Needs It? offers serious, impassioned support to good fiction, and despite my minor misgivings about its overall argument, The Decline of the Novel is worthwhile as a thought-provoking, incisive look at fiction and the role it plays—or perhaps played—in our culture. I hope, alongside both Epstein and Bottum, for the novel’s return.

Bold old voices

This week’s episode of John J Miller’s Great Books podcast covers Casino Royale. An instant must-listen, as you can probably imagine. In answer to Miller’s standard opening question, “Why is X a great book?” guest Graham Hillard replies:

“1950s British mass market fiction is written to pretty much the same standard as 21st-century American literary fiction.”

I think it’s great for two reasons: it inaugurates one of the iconic characters in post-war literature, without dispute, and it is surprisingly excellent in its literary virtues, and by that I mean pacing, characterization, even sentence construction. I think I joked with you in an e-mail that Casino Royale would win a National Book Award if it came out today—that’s a slight exaggeration, but there really is something to the idea that 1950s British mass market fiction is written to pretty much the same standard as twenty-first-century American literary fiction. I absolutely think that if Casino Royale came out today, it would occasion massive coverage of the “bold new voice” variety.

Like the first sentences of Casino Royale, which Miller and Hillard go on to unpack, this is a solid opening. I’ve written about Bond creator Ian Fleming’s craftsmanship as a writer before, including at the basic level of sentence structure back in May.

But what struck me in this introduction was Hillard’s point about the generally high quality of mid-century British genre fiction. Having read Fleming for years and a bunch of Eric Ambler (crime and espionage thrillers) and John Wyndham (science fiction) over the last year, I had noticed this as well—author after author turning out brilliantly structured, beautifully and strongly written novels in accessible genres. What was in the water back then? After finishing Epitaph for a Spy and The Kraken Wakes this summer I set each down and considered what it must have been like, in the 1940s and 50s, to have books like these coming out regularly. Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive.

Two things occur to me to complicate my nostalgia:

First, high literary quality in genre fiction was not new at the time. If anything, the Flemings and Amblers were carrying on the good work of the Buchans who came before. Good writing is good writing regardless of whether or not it appears in a highbrow form. Respect it wherever it appears. (If anything, I increasingly like good genre writing more because in addition to good writing the author of a thriller, for instance, has to excite the reader.)

Second, is there a form of survivorship bias at work here? If we read only the good stuff left over from a period, it’s not because no one wrote junk at the time. After all, I’m a big believer in Sturgeon’s Law. And yet…

And yet, the gap in quality between the good genre fiction of Fleming’s time and ours is, in my experience, vast. Insuperable. Whatever it was—a more demanding public, tougher editors, skilled authors willing to use their skills simply to entertain, deeper education on the part of writer and reader, a lack of pretension among both—something is missing now.

Mr Bennet’s library

I’m currently reading Pride and Prejudice out loud to my wife every night before bed. Though I know the story well, this is the first time I’ve actually read it since college probably eighteen years ago. As much as you can appreciate Austen’s wit, goodness, and insight, there is nothing like actually reading her work to blow you away.

It’s also easy to forget, in a world full of imitators that feature the trappings of Austen’s world but not the wit, goodness, and insight—and are increasingly skanky, to boot—how fantastically funny Austen is. It’s hard for me to get through a chapter because I’m constantly laughing.

Last night we read some of the choicest early chapters featuring Mr Collins. After finding Mr Collins “as absurd as he had hoped,” Mr Bennet is stuck with a living, breathing, rapidly aging joke in his house. Specifically his library. This is bothersome to Mr Bennet, because, as Austen tells us:

“In his library he had been always sure of leisure and tranquillity; and though prepared, as he told Elizabeth, to meet with folly and conceit in every other room in the house, he was used to be free from them there.”

Sarah and I agreed to have that made into a nice sign for our own office/library door.

White whales and bleak houses

Napkin doodle by yours truly

Earlier this week, Jay Nordlinger at National Review wrote of an aging concert pianist who had “made peace” with never conquering some famously difficult classical pieces. Nordlinger continued:

This reminded me of Bleak House—Bleak House and me. I won’t retell my tale. (I wrote about this in an essay a few years ago, here.) But suffice it to say: Decades ago, Harold Bloom said that Bleak House is pretty much the best novel in English. I tried to read it for years and years. Just could not. Could not persevere in it. After a final push, I gave up.

I don’t say there is anything wrong with Bleak House, heaven knows. But there is something wrong with me—with me and Bleak House. And I have made my peace (sort of) with never reading it, or finishing it.

He solicited comparable stories and titles from readers, some of whose responses you can read here. A lot of readers concur on Bleak House, and Moby Dick and Middlemarch both come up several times. Readers also name The Sound and the Fury, Crime and Punishment, Les Misérables, and War and Peace, among others. Thematic headiness and sheer length seem to be recurring features of such books.

The one that immediately came to my mind is The Grapes of Wrath. I’ve started it at least three times, maybe four, at different periods of my life and in different circumstances, but I can never make it more than thirty or forty pages. I’ve made a game effort because I always try to finish what I start and one of my oldest friends is a huge Steinbeck fan, but somewhere just past the explicitly phallic farm equipment and the hypocritical preacher recounting his misdeeds I always set it down and never resume.

That’s the one that I thought of right away, but toward the end of Nordlinger’s post one of his readers mentions another book that I’ve worked even harder to finish and never have: Paradise Lost. Like the reader who mentioned this one, I love Dante’s Comedy and much other epic—at times I’ve read nothing but long narrative poems—but I just can’t hack Milton. I’ve written about that here before.

“The courage to put down a book,” Nordlinger writes. “It’s necessary.” And while I can own up to not liking or being able to finish certain books and recognize the value of resigning myself, setting them aside, and moving on, I can’t help but feel that each is an ancient hoard that will remain buried to me until I come back and, finally, read it.

As for Bleak House, I’ve owned a copy for years but have never even opened it. Whenever I hear the title, I always remember a conversation my best friend in high school had with his grandfather. I don’t remember why or under what circumstances, but for some reason his grandfather revealed that he had once read Bleak House. My friend asked him what he thought. After a long pause, his grandfather said, “It’s a bleak house.”

A Coffin for Dimitrios

Having read and reread a lot of John Buchan, Ian Fleming, John Le Carré, and Len Deighton—some of the great names in spy novel and thrillers—I noticed another name that often came up when, between their books, I would read about these authors: Eric Ambler. Ambler, an English novelist with a career stretching from the 1930s to the 90s, is often fitted into a crucial place in the history of the thriller between the more romantic adventure style of a Buchan, the hardened but still exciting sensibility of a Fleming, or the grey workaday espionage of a Le Carré or Deighton. Ambler’s name came up often enough, and with serious enough admiration, that it stuck in my mind, and when I ran across a copy of his 1939 novel A Coffin for Dimitrios I eagerly seized the chance to read it.

A Coffin for Dimitrios begins with Charles Latimer, a former academic now subsisting on his surprisingly successful mystery novels, aimlessly whiling away a trip to Istanbul as he prepares for his next book. When he meets Colonel Haki, a Turkish police officer, at a party and Haki expresses admiration for his novels, Latimer is given the chance to look into a real crime, to see the disorder of crime, violence, and death, the incompleteness of real mysteries.

Latimer, intrigued, agrees, and Haki takes him to the morgue. On the slab is the body of Dimitrios Makropoulos, a Greek master of organized crime. The police had fished him out of the Bosporus that morning, stabbed and drowned.

Haki briefs Latimer on Dimitrios’s record: theft, blackmail, murder, espionage on behalf of parties unknown, conspiracy to assassinate the president of a fragile Balkan state, drug smuggling, sex trafficking. Dimitrios’s crimes, Haki makes clear, are not the equivalent of a tidy poisoning in an English country house, and Dimitrios himself was thoroughly nasty. Unredeemable. And terribly powerful.

After Haki’s tour of the morgue and reading of Dimitrios’s file Latimer tries to move on, to return to work on his next book, but Dimitrios’s true story nags at him—especially its incompleteness. Haki’s file had long gaps in it, with Dimitrios disappearing from Izmir or Athens only to appear again in Belgrade or Paris years later, working another racket. Latimer decides to find out the whole story. He tells himself it’s research for a book.

Latimer’s search takes him from Istanbul to Athens, Sofia, Geneva, and finally Paris. At first he doesn’t realize what he’s got himself into. Questions about Dimitrios provoke icy silence or outright hostility. Local authorities obligingly try to help, but it’s clear that they have only the thinnest understanding of Dimitrios’s career. Latimer gets his best information from Dimitrios’s former collaborators—a Bulgarian madam, a Danish smuggler, a Polish spymaster—but he must work to convince them to talk and only slowly realizes that they have angles of their own to play now that Dimitrios is dead.

There is much more to A Coffin for Dimitrios, but to explain more would be to reveal too much. One of the pleasures of Ambler’s sprawling detective tale is the manner in which it unfolds, with Latimer picking up clues, chasing leads, and often stumbling across information that is more meaningful to the criminals he meets than to himself. Simply understanding what he’s uncovered makes up a large part of his work, but his sense that he’s onto something important keeps him searching even as his research grows more dangerous and the surviving members of Dimitrios’s criminal network start to ensnare him in their own schemes.

The novel’s setting proves another of its strengths. This is eastern Europe twenty years after the catastrophe of the First World War, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the creation of new states like Yugoslavia out of the rubble of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Memory of the war and the violence and chaos that, rather than ceasing, grew worse in the aftermath haunt every place Latimer visits and every person he meets. Cops, customs officers, nightclub dancers, and even strangers on trains all have stories to tell. This is the bustling, seedy, multilingual, darkly cosmopolitan world of international crime—imagine Casablanca crossed with The Third Man—and Ambler evokes it brilliantly.

And, like all of the other writers I began this review with, Ambler is an excellent writer. Strong, direct prose and precisely observed descriptions immediately draw the reader in, and, despite the globetrotting plot, Ambler does not waste time on travelogue. In addition to The Third Man, which I enjoy just as much in Graham Greene’s novella as the noir film based on it, A Coffin for Dimitrios reminded me a lot of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, another thriller whose plot bestrides Europe just before the Second World War and one of my favorite reads last year. This is a spare, tense story of obsession and revelation, of an ordinary man drawn by his own curiosity into a dark world standing just out of sight in the streets of Europe’s most important cities.

If A Coffin for Dimitrios has any flaw, it is that the pacing flags somewhat in the middle as several characters in a row retell their stories of falling in with Dimitrios, but these chapters are entertaining and interesting in their own right and set up a suspenseful and satisfying final confrontation between Latimer, one of the many crooks he has met along the way, and a figure he never expected to meet when he began his search.

If you like any of the other authors I’ve mentioned above—and if you follow this blog you must surely like a few of them—or if you simply enjoy solid, well-crafted, fast-paced, and suspenseful thrillers, check out A Coffin for Dimitrios. Having read this one, I’ll certainly read others by Eric Ambler.

Suspicious Minds

Rob Brotherton’s book Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories had been sitting on my shelf, waiting to be read, for just over four years when I ran across an Instagram reel in which a smirking mom wrote about how proud she was of her homeschooled child questioning the reality of the moon landing “and other dubious historical events.” When people in the comments asked, as I had wondered the moment I saw this video, whether this was really the kind of result homeschoolers would want to advertise, she and a posse of supporters aggressively doubled down, lobbing buzzwords like grenades. I think the very first reply included the loathsome term “critical thinking.”

Silly, but unsurprising for the internet—especially the world of women mugging silently into phone cameras while text appears onscreen—right? But I had not seen this video at random. Several trusted friends, people whose intellects and character I respect, had shared it on multiple social media platforms. I started reading Suspicious Minds that afternoon.

Brotherton is a psychologist, and in Suspicious Minds he sets out not to debunk or disprove any particular conspiracy theory—though he uses many as examples—but to explain how and why people come to believe and even take pride in believing such theories in the first place. He undertakes this with an explicit desire not to stigmatize or demean conspiracy theorists and criticizes authors whose books on conspiracism have used titles like Voodoo Histories and How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World. He also, crucially, dispels many common assumptions surrounding conspiracist thinking.

First among the misconceptions is the idea that conspiracy theories are a symptom of “paranoid” thinking. The term paranoid, which became strongly associated with conspiracism thanks to Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” is inappropriate as a descriptor because of its hint of mental imbalance and indiscriminate fear. Most conspiracy theorists, Brotherton points out, believe in one or a small number of mundane theories that are untrue but not especially consequential, much less worthy of anxiety. A second, related misconception—and by far the more important one—is that conspiracy theories are a phenomenon of the “fringe” of society: of basement dwellers, militia types, and street preachers in sandwich signs. In a word, obsessives. As Eric Ambler puts it in A Coffin for Dimitrios, “‘Obsession’ was an ugly word. It conjured up visions of bright stupid eyes and proofs that the world was flat.”

The idea of conspiracy theories as fringe is not only false, Brotherton argues, it is the exact opposite of the truth. In terms of pure numbers, repeated polls have found that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe in at least one major conspiracy theory—the most common by far being the belief that JFK was killed by someone other than or in addition to Lee Harvey Oswald—and often more than one. Conspiracist thinking is mainstream. It is the norm. This cannot be emphasized enough.

But why is this? Is it, as I must confess I used to think, that those numbers just provide evidence for how stupid the majority of people are? Brotherton argues that this conclusion is incorrect, too. There is no meaningful difference in how often or how much educated and uneducated people (which is not the same thing as smart and dumb people) adhere to conspiracy theories. Conspiracism is rooted deeper, not in a kernel of paranoia and fear but in the natural and normal way we see and think about the world.

Conspiracy theories, Brotherton argues, originate in the human mind’s own truth-detecting processes. They are a feature, not a bug. The bulk of Suspicious Minds book examines, in detail, how both the conscious and unconscious workings of the mind not only make conspiracist beliefs possible, but strengthen them. In addition to obvious problems like confirmation bias, which distorts thinking by overemphasizing information we already believe and agree with, and the Dunning–Kruger Effect, which causes us to overestimate our expertise and understanding of how things work, there are subtler ways our own thinking trips us up.

Proportionality bias, for example, causes disbelief that something significant could happen for insignificant reasons. As an example, Brotherton describes the freakish luck of Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian assassin who thought he had missed his target, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, until the Archduke’s car pulled up a few feet in front of him and stalled out as the driver changed gears. This farcical murder of an unpopular royal by an inept assassin caused a war that killed over twenty million people. That people after the war—on both the winning and losing sides—sought an explanation more commensurate with the effect of the war is only natural. And the classic example is JFK himself, as many of the conspiracy theories surrounding him inevitably circle back to disbelief that a loser like Oswald could have killed the leader of the free world.

Similarly, intentionality bias suggests to us that everything that happens was intended by someone—they did it on purpose— especially bad things, so that famines, epidemics, stock market crashes, and wars become not tragedies native to our fallen condition but the fruit of sinister plots. Further, our many pattern-finding and simplifying instincts, heuristics that help us quickly grasp complex information, will also incline us to find cause and effect relationships in random events. We’re wired to disbelieve in accident or happenstance, so much so that we stubbornly connect dots when there is no design to be revealed.

That’s because we’re storytelling creatures. In perhaps the most important and crucial chapter in the book, “(Official) Stories,” Brotherton examines the way our built-in need for narrative affects our perceptions and understanding. Coincidence, accident, and simply not knowing are narratively unsatisfying, as any internet neckbeard complaining about “plot holes” will make sure you understand. So when outrageous Fortune, with her slings and arrows, throws catastrophe at us, it is natural to seek an explanation that makes sense of the story—an explanation with clear cause and effect, an identifiable antagonist, and understandable, often personal, motives.

Why does any of this matter? As I heard it put once, in an excellent video essay about the technical reasons the moon landing couldn’t have been faked, what is at stake is “the ultimate fate of knowing.” The same mental tools that help us understand and make quick decisions in a chaotic world can just as easily mislead and prejudice us.

This is why Brotherton’s insistence that conspiracy theories are, strictly speaking, rational is so important. As Chesterton put it in a line I’ve quoted many times, “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” Merely thinking is not enough to lead us to the truth. Brotherton’s book is a much-needed reminder that finding the truth requires discipline, hard work, and no small measure of humility.

The Mysteries

“‘In our world,’ said Eustace, ‘a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.’
‘Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.’”

— CS Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

I feel like the publication of a new book by Bill Watterson, whose “Calvin and Hobbes” ended its run twenty-nine years ago and who has remained almost entirely quiet since, should be more of an event than the release of The Mysteries has proven. But then, given the book’s title and most especially its subject matter, maybe that’s appropriate. Call it a mystery, but not one of the Mysteries.

The story is simple enough. This blog post will probably end up several times longer than the entire book. The Mysteries introduces the reader to a medieval-ish world of castles and half-timber towns in which the people and their king are bounded by dark forest. The forest is the domain of the Mysteries, whom no one has ever seen but everyone knows have terrible powers. At first the people strive not to understand but to protect themselves from the Mysteries, putting huge efforts into building walls and chronicling the long history of their fears in tales and art.

Then one day the king decides to strike back against the Mysteries, dispatching knights into the forest on a quest to capture and bring back a Mystery. After a long stretch of futile searching, one knight succeeds, returning with an iron box chained to a cart.

At last, a Mystery is revealed—and the people discover that there’s not, apparently, very much to them. Their fearful powers turn out to be “mundane.” And capturing one Mystery opens the way to capturing others, to the point that the people not only lose their fear of the Mysteries but come to find them boring. One clever illustration shows a medieval newspaper stall full of headlines like “YAWN.”

Then, the Mysteries understood and no longer feared or the object of much attention at all, the people demolish their walls, cut down the forest, and overspread the land. They mock the old paintings inspired by the Mysteries. They now live in a world of jet aircraft and skyscrapers and the king no longer appears on the balcony of his castle but on TV or behind the wheel of a car on a busy freeway, drinking a Big Gulp. At last, the narrator tells us, they control everything.

Or do they? The sky turns strange colors and, ominously, “things” start “disappearing.” The king assures them that this is normal, wizards study the phenomena, and life continues apace. Then, “too late,” the people realize that they’re in trouble. An indifferent universe wheels on.

In the final pages the viewpoint of the illustrations pulls back farther and farther from the people and their conquered land, into space, beyond the solar system and the Milky Way. “The Mysteries,” the story concludes, “lived happily ever after.”

One notable aspect of The Mysteries is that although Watterson wrote the story, it is illustrated by caricaturist John Kascht. Watterson and Kascht worked on the pictures in close collaboration for several years, experimenting with and abandoning many styles before arriving at an atmospheric, unsettlingly dreamlike aesthetic combining clay figures, cardboard scenery, and painted backdrops. The effect is powerfully eerie, especially as the pace of the story accelerates and the fairytale world at the beginning of the book gives way to one that resembles, disconcertingly, our own.

If the pictures are murky, moody, and ambiguous, often more allusive than concrete, so is the story. This, according to Watterson, is by design. I’m not typically one for deliberate ambiguity, but it works brilliantly here. This “fable for grownups,” as the publisher describes it, achieves a timelessness through its strangely specific soft-focus art and a broad applicability through its theme.

And what is that? The most obvious and easy referent to the consequences the people face in the book’s closing pages is climate change, whether anthropogenic or not. But The Mysteries is not an allegory but a fable. To narrow its message, if it has one, to a policy issue is to cheapen and limit it.

The core theme of The Mysteries is disenchantment. Since the Scientific Revolution uncovered the wheels and levers of the universe and the Enlightenment insisted that the wheels and levers were all there is, was, or ever will be, the mysteries of our own world have retreated further and further from our imaginations and the place we once gave them in our daily lives. The powers that once kept people within their walled towns have been banished—or rather seized and repurposed, put to work for the people’s desires. Fear or, to put it more positively, awe of the world has given place to self-assured technical mastery. We control everything.

Or do we?

The Mysteries is probably not what anyone anticipating the return of Bill Watterson would have expected. I was certainly surprised, but pleasantly. As befits the creator of “Calvin and Hobbes,” a work that prized imagination above all else, The Mysteries treads lightly but surefootedly across deep ideas, and powerfully suggests that whatever Mysteries once lived in the forest, we have not sufficiently understood them to warrant our boredom, apathy, and self-indulgence, and we certainly are not free of them. We are, in fact, in graver danger through our indifference to the Mysteries than we ever were when we feared them.