Stoner by John Williams: "Glad to be unhappy and sad to be so gay"

I first saw John Williams's novel Stoner (1965) when it was given its own little table in my local Waterstones. Having worked there, albeit briefly, I know that Waterstones doesn't crack out the parlour-sized furniture for any old thing (the new Thomas Pynchon at Gower Street was the last one I remembered), so it caught my eye. I think the accompanying sign said something along the lines of "The book everyone's talking about," which, if true, had escaped me; but the equally hyperbolic jacket quote from the New York Times, "This is a perfect novel", convinced me that if I could claim any interest in contemporary trends in fiction, I should pay attention.

It turned out that the book had been excavated from near-obscurity by Vintage on the recommendation of John McGahern (Julian Barnes gives a helpfully detailed explanation of this for the Guardian), and been catapulted, in the slightly puzzling way that these things happen, into an international bestseller. Only the understated Vintage aesthetic could convince me that it wouldn't be another Fifty Shades.

Before I read it, I bought it as a present for my granny, who is an impressively wide reader. She, alas, didn't like it. Neither did my aunt. Neither did my cousin's boyfriend. Most other people I asked hadn't even heard of it. Suddenly it had become a rather flawed novel that somewhat less than everyone was talking about. So, over a deliciously rainy and relaxing bank holiday weekend in Cornwall, I got down to business and read it.

Luckily, I loved it. It's a short-ish novel (under 300 pages), and follows William Stoner as he transforms, in a stuttering kind of way, from an uneducated only child set to inherit his parents' farm, via a sudden epiphany (through Shakespeare's Sonnet 73) to a literature major, doctoral student, and finally a tenured professor at the University of Missouri. He specialises in the reception of the classics in medieval literature, which, combined with his refusal to join up to fight in World War II, sets him up as a man content to bury himself in as deep a niche as he needs to, for a quiet life.

*SPOILERS BELOW*

But he certainly doesn't deserve the fallout of his greatest mistake: to marry someone he barely knows and never manages to, Edith Bostwick, who becomes the antagonist for around half the book. It is infuriatingly ambiguous whether she's genuinely waging war against him (that's what it feels like) or simply trying to compensate for her own lack of fulfilment. She slashes at the intimacy he has with his daughter Grace, and erodes the space in which he can work, forcing him to spend most of his time at the faculty. It's not clear what she gains from this, if anything -- certainly not a better relationship with her daughter or husband. The two are perfectly balanced: William's personality is neat and simple and affectionate and unextraordinary; Edith's is complicated and incoherent, an almost complete mystery.

The University of Missouri, around which Stoner is based

Photo: University of Missouri

Everything that follows from his domestic alienation -- including a gorgeous, predictably doomed love affair, and a vicious conflict in the University department -- adds weight after weight onto the emotional cartload that William pulls with him through his life. The novel, I think, is about how a simple failure to be honest about one's feelings can lead, not just to one disaster, but to catastrophe after catastrophe, until the spirit is broken. As the other jacket quotes foretold, this novel broke my heart, quietly, often without anger. And its slightly greying, weary-feeling, straightforward narrative style -- as if Williams might have comforted himself by saying, "Come on, John, just work through the story, explain it clearly, then you can take a rest" -- only makes it more heart-wrenching. 

I did, thankfully, discover a friend who had read the novel and enjoyed it. He and I read English together as undergrads, and had a short but agreeable discussion about its brilliance (though we conceded that, as English graduates, we're pretty much the perfect audience for a book about a literature professor). We also touched on the way that certain types of American literature make you feel, as my friend put it, "as if even putting words on the page is an act of sadness". I've never felt this so acutely as I did with Stoner. 

John Williams is quoted as having said, "To read without joy is stupid." And Stoner is, despite its trajectory of tragedy, full of great joy -- not only in the rare moments of happiness that William himself finds (doomed, of course), but also the joy I experienced as a reader in being led to feel such sympathy with any human being, even a fictional one. In Harvest (which, to my mind, deserved a Booker win more than Eleanor Catton), Jim Crace writes of a fiddle melody, "His tune is both glad to be unhappy and sad to be so gay"; and so is Stoner both devastating and reassuring, all at once. It's not a perfect novel (steady on, New York Times), but it's lovely nevertheless.

Reading Diary: Eleanor Catton, more Trollope, and Bates in the woods

Eleanor Catton is not only longlisted for the Booker, she's apparently odds-on favourite -- and for a book, The Luminaries, that hadn't bloody well been released when the list was actually announced. Like AM Homes (see previous post), Catton is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is published in the UK by Granta, but she's ACRES better, with natural style and wit and a great sense of pace. Her first novel, The Rehearsal, was mind-blowingly self-assured, and my god does the fact that she's only about 28 make me depressed.

The Luminaries wasn't due out until September, though I suddenly received an email from Amazon suggesting I buy it and realised they had brought the publication forward. I have now obtained it and lugged it two miles in my backpack on a hot day -- man, it's a chunky beast. But hey, if even a bit of the £14.99 in Blackwells goes to Eleanor Catton, it'll make up for the piss-poor customer service Heffers offered, not to mention the inevitable carpal tunnel syndrome I will have after reading it.

Whilst on Mull this year, I read another by Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now, a chunky semi-panoramic drama dealing with the rise of the City and the exciting possibility of spinning money from almost nothing, simply by investing in the right places. Trollope clearly sees Cityboys as a threat to his homely standards of decency and tradition, although, interestingly, the one exception to the 'new money = bad' rule is also the only Jewish character, which at least reminds us that Trollope was in some respects remarkably liberal. 

I say 'semi-panoramic' because the book lacks the social sweep of Bleak House or Middlemarch, which are rather more substantial as a result. Nor did I find it as moving as The Warden. But The Way We Live Now has one great advantage, which is that it's also, pretty much, the way we live now, where the very rich are almost untouchable unless those in power decide to allow them to fall (Murdoch, anyone?). I have a feeling that, were Trollope alive today, some things wouldn't look so very strange to him.

HE Bates's short meditation on the joys of woodlands, Through the Woods, attracted me instantly because I've recently expanded my nature interests to include trees, wildflowers and butterflies (I've liked birds for some years already). Bates draws out a languid, vivid narrative of how several of his favourite woodlands develop with the seasons, complete with a rant about gamekeepers and pheasants: "The pheasant is the lord of life, the almost divine sovereign of the woods. You must not ... do anything to upset his chances of ordained death." Bates is sarcastic and profoundly emotional by turns, and the book is beautifully presented with an elegant, well-spaced font and a gorgeous cover. It's part of a Little Toller series of nature writing -- Frank Fraser Darling's Island Years, Island Farm is going onto my list.

May She Be Forgiven: AM Homes's prize-winning disappointment

I was thrilled when AM Homes won the Women's Prize for Fiction. I have to admit, it's not a prize that has always filled me with joy: back when it was the Orange Prize, it was won by Madeline Miller, for The Song of Achilles (2011), a sacharine romance whose only saving grace was that it was based on The Iliad, and by Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003), a self-justifying piece of narcissism if ever there was one.

However, I still cheered for AM Homes, because I read The End of Alice (1996) about five years ago, and remembered it as adventurous, beautifully-written and rather seductive. This Book Will Save Your Life (2006), her best-known since, didn't appeal to me, but I bought May We Be Forgiven (2012) shortly after her victory in the Women's Prize was announced, thinking it would be a safe bet for a great summer read. And hence I learned (as I learn regularly with the Booker) that there is no such thing as a "safe bet" in literary prizes.

The book is plastered with gushing gobbets and is marketed as a Franzen-esque "great American novel" (Jeanette Winterson's words). It certainly has some of the classic tics of one: an obsessive focus on Jewishness, race, presidential history and American branding, not to mention adultery, the failure of the nuclear family, substance abuse and gruesome scatalogical black humour -- to name but a few.

**SPOILERS ALERT** 

(Even Mark Kermode gets told off for this now, and I'm going way further than he does, so I feel bound to issue these warnings.)

The narrator, Harold "Harry" Silver, is kissed by his brother's wife Jane at a Thanksgiving Day dinner. His brother George, a just-slightly-stereotyped American big business type with penchants for sexual harassment, incest roleplay and violent tantrums, crashes his car and kills a couple (possibly deliberately). He is taken to a psychiatric unit, from which he escapes, comes home, and finds Harry in bed with Jane. He smashes his wife over the head with a lamp. Their two children are fetched home from boarding school just in time to see their mother's life support turned off.

It's fair to say the novel starts with a bang. The rest of the narrative piles up subplot after subplot in a rather rambling fashion: Harry starts finding women to sleep with on the internet and becomes temporarily convinced one of them has been murdered (she later disappears, leaving him to look after her demented parents); he goes with another woman to an erotic party in a Laser Quest; loses his job as a Nixon scholar. George's children, Nate (12) and Ashley (11), suddenly awaken to an awareness of the world around them and convince Harry to adopt the dead couple's son, Ricardo; Ashley is sexually abused by a teacher at her boarding school; George, now in a wilderness-survival prison unit, uses the iPad Harry sent him to get into arms dealing with an Israeli prisoner friend, necessitating an utterly unnecessary sequence where Harry has to be cruel to be kind and help the FBI recapture his own brother.

The novel climaxes with a trip to a tribal village in South Africa for Nate's bar mitzvah (he has done work with the village), during which the local medicine man effortlessly points out some profound and noble truths about Harry and his family (my racism radar definitely started twitching in this scene), and gives him some mysterious tea which help him to expel the vile and putrid mess he has made of his life so far (as well as rather a lot of faecal matter).

Some of the facial expressions I
perfected while reading this book

There are some highlights. The glimpse of academic thriller (thing Byatt's Possession and Frayn's Headlong), when Harry is allowed access to some boxes of Richard Nixon's previously-unseen papers, is good fun. Homes uses a first-person present-tense voice, which I generally find incredibly annoying, but which she manages to keep light with a lot of dialogue and a fairly unreflective style. It's a pacy read, with no official 'chapters', only short breaks. And Ricardo, Nate and Ashley (if not Harry) are generally sympathetic characters, though all of them seem at least five years older than they're meant to be, and I started to feel some affection for them well before the end.

I can feel what Homes is trying to do -- it's a narrative about trying to live with guilt, and the impulsiveness and soullessness of modern life. But the book never stays in one place long enough to do any of this properly. None of the subplots are developed or add anything to the story other than a sense of how random and transient most things are; none of them, in fact, really qualify as subplots at all. And I was never emotionally drawn in, even during the inevitable breakdowns and outbursts of both Nate and Harry, which should be the climax of the book; instead they are dealt with in half a page, and "told" rather than "shown". The book is stubbornly non-visceral.

Not only this, the writing is uneven and even lazy. Homes has a weird habit of ending a sentence with a dash followed by a single word. "It's a denuded glass booth -- powerless." "... pieces of the lamp -- shards." "... to suck the hot mustard directly from the plastic packets -- self-punishment." WHERE DID SHE GET THIS FROM? It's such a self-conscious piece of stylistics that I was sick of it after literally one example -- saturated. There was never a place where I thought, ah, yes, this extra word adds a whole new dimension to this sentence -- clever. Either it repeated something already expressed, or it smacked us across the face with the subtext any intelligent reader would have been able to infer -- superfluous.

I actually started marking things that
pissed me off. She repeats the same
phrase twice in two lines, for
no obvious reason. ARGH.

And that pretty much sums up my twin problems with this book -- that Homes appears to trust the reader too much in the big emotional moments and plotlines she really ought to have taken a bit more time over, but can't manage to trust us to understand the simplest of things. "I can't help but notice," Harry muses, "that I've become close to Cheryl, that I share things with her, that I'm starting to think of her as a friend, a confidante." Oh my god, I thought, that's how we should be reading the intimate conversation you've just been having. My head was starting to bleed from all that puzzled scratching, but now I understand -- enlightened.

Basically, the skeleton plot of this book has already been covered by Nick Hornby's About a Boy: empty, materialistic man suddenly encounters crisis and learns what is really important in life, i.e. engaging with the people around you. It's a decent length at 480 pages, and yet the message of the whole novel has to be sledge-hammered home by what Theo Tait termed the "keynote speech" of the book. This is fine for a dick-lit-hit-cum-Hugh-Grant-film, but for serious, prize-winning literature, it did not live up to my expectations -- disappointing.

Recent Reading and Recommendations

Exhausted as I am from writing that absurdly alliterative title, I wanted to update with a brief note about what I've been reading in the last few weeks:

• Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot - If you've read either of Eugenides's other novels (The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex), you'll know he's a writer of phenomenal imaginative power, very learned and very funny. These qualities are again exhibited in The Marriage Plot, though perhaps not to the same degree, or as consistently. The novel follows three undergraduates at Brown as they fall in love, graduate and attempt to begin their lives, confused about how to live in a post-modern where Derrida and Barthes dominate. I loved the satire of 1980s intellectual fashion -- it appealed particularly to my memories of stumbling through literary theory at university -- but in other places the writing feels a little lazy. The balance of narrative between the three characters also felt wrong, with one perhaps neglected compared to the other two; but overall it's an engaging and humane novel, if not quite as magnificent as his previous two.

• Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone - This was another gap in my literary knowledge, and did not disappoint: I raced through it in less than a week because it is both gripping and highly readable, and the last part, in which the characters try to recreate the disappearance of the prized diamond in order to try to work out what happened to it, is particularly interesting. A recognisable prototype for a kind of forensic detective fiction which really took off with Sherlock Holmes. At times with Collins, as with his more famous friend Dickens, you wonder how much his misogynistic protagonist is simply ventriloquising his own views, but this wasn't so annoying as to destroy my enjoyment of the whole.

• Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre - I reread this rapidly on a whim. There isn't much to say about its brilliance that hasn't been treated better and in more detail by others; but I had forgotten how comically dry Bronte can be at times.

• Ali Smith, Artful - This is a series of four lectures that Smith gave at St Anne's College, Oxford, dealing with 'time', 'form', 'edge' and 'offer and reflection'. As suggested by the title, the lectures are partially entangled with Oliver Twist -- Smith says she reread the novel whilst writing them -- but draw on a breathtakingly wide array of literature, film and music. She weaves thoughtful, but only lightly analytical, commentary on her topics into a narrative about a bereaved person finding her dead lover's scholarly notes (i.e. the lectures). The imitation of early novels where the authors had to invent an excuse for the narrative existing (e.g. in Moll Flanders, Pamela and Les Liaisons Dangereuses) is presumably deliberate, and it adds a lightness of touch and a humour which is quintessentially Smithian. As inspirational pieces for students at Oxford, I imagine these went down a storm.

• Fiona MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination - After months of eyeing this up, first in hardback and then in paperback, I persuaded my partner to buy it for me for Christmas. I'm only a quarter of the way through, and am enjoying it immensely: it's readable and vivid, and made me cross when I realised I'd just missed the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition at the Tate, which has now gone on tour to the USA and taken all the normally resident masterpieces with it. My only problem with the book is that it does treat some events and topics more briefly than I would have liked. It has the air of a work that was cut intensively before publication, and although paring down is a highly-encouraged habit amongst writers, in this case I think it has diminished the quality of the whole. My indignant letter to Faber and Faber will be in the post today ...

The final thing is that after March my commission for Mslexia will be finished and I'll be back blogging here more regularly. Thanks to everyone who said nice things about those posts!

Book-jacket publicity, and doing mental illness a disservice: Alex Preston's 'The Revelations'

One of my first thoughts after finishing The Revelations was that it has not been particularly well-served by the various taglines, blurb and quotations adorning its book-jacket, many of which make it out to be far less subtle and ambiguous than it really is.

For a start, there's the phrase "one weekend", which you can see in the image on the right. The book is essentially marketed as a psychological thriller (see dramatic lighting and mysteriously back-turned figures on the cover), and it tends towards this in the later stages, but it spends a chunky amount of time doing some quite admirable exposition, exploring who the "four friends" are and narrating some scenes in a lot of detail, before we get to the "weekend". In the thriller mode, it does end up being the weekend --  a spiritual retreat to a country house -- that is important, but in terms of the wider questions this book poses, I think the early stages are just as important.

The other thing that annoyed me is the use of the word "cult", which appears twice on the back of the book, both in the blurb and in a quotation from the Daily Mirror. I therefore expected to read a book about something like Scientology, or a live-in commune -- and, more importantly, I expected Preston's portrayal of it to be very much an exposé of its evils and the way it ruins people's lives. In fact, the "cult", which is called The Course, is an evangelical strain of Christianity seeking to convert people who are struggling to find meaning in life, and there are several instances in the book where it seems to do great good.

Exeter College Chapel, Oxford

I think this book is more intelligent than its packaging suggests because it acknowledges many truths that a more militant author wouldn't have done. There are many highly-educated, young, evangelical Christians who gain great strength from their religion. There are also many non-religious young people who do struggle to find meaning in their lives. And there are many people who are touched by experiences that they can only describe as spiritual, often when they would least expect it. Preston goes into some detail about one character's conversion being helped along by the beauty of a college chapel in the early evening, candlelit, filled with sacred choral music. Having experienced this particular sensation myself, my feeling is that Preston knows what he's talking about and understands that religion is more than about accepting or rejecting a set of values -- there is also "the mystery of faith", as the Christian liturgy expresses it, something beyond the purely rational and ethical that helps you accept that life is inherently complicated, imperfect and difficult.

I still haven't worked out what the author's personal position on this is, and obviously there's a debate to be had on whether it matters. In the acknowledgements, Preston refers to Karen Armstrong's The Case for God as "remarkably sane", and references some "bizarre spiritual excursions". It is tempting to view this as a closed-minded approach to something which has brought a lot of benefits for a lot of people, both intellectually and emotionally, but luckily the novel does make an attempt to explore these benefits properly.

My biggest problem with the book is the character of Lee, a (female) PhD student researching female mystics such as Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. There is a colloquial lit-crit term, a "Mary Sue", which is relevant here: a female character who is so perfect as to be two-dimensional, usually a wish-fulfilment fantasy for the (female) author. The term emerged from fan-fiction, but I have found several instances of where it is applicable to mainstream fiction, and this is sort of one of those cases.

Lee is not a Mary Sue in the traditional sense, but she certainly seems a fantasy to me compared to the other three characters. Mouse, Lee's closest friend, describes her thus:

Everyone who met her thought she was this wonderful, lively girl. Those eyes ... I'd see people look into her eyes and be transported. But behind it all she was struggling with terrible demons, unable to face the world.

This quotation exemplifies another problem with the book -- unrealistic, over-angsty dialogue -- but it was the characterisation of Lee that really irritated me. She is very skinny, highly intelligent, super-promiscuous, and above all deeply troubled. One (male) character is in love with her, another is hopelessly sexually fascinated by her.

Now, if I met Lee and she behaved the way she behaved in the book, I'd find her really bloody difficult. She is clearly very depressed, but no one seems to want to help her (unless sleeping with her/ going down on her/ secretly masturbating while she swims naked counts), and almost no one expects her to take responsibility for her actions (except, interestingly, David, the leader of the Course, and one other fairly minor character). The implication is that she can't be expected to behave properly or discuss her actions or seek help, because she's just got all these problems, you know, and, like, we just can't ever understand them, and one day she might kill herself, but hey, that's just who she is. It's deeply infantilising, and it romanticises mental illness in a way I find really distasteful.

'Universally Speaking' is the second
track on the album By the Way.

 Lee is an example of what could be described as an anti-Mary-Sue -- deeply flawed, but in a highly idealised way. Severely depressed people are not, and ought not to be, objects of sexual fascination, no matter how promiscuous they themselves are. They should be treated with respect and given support -- and that includes, to my mind, not simply ignoring selfish and destructive behaviour because it happens to cater to one's sexual desires. She reminds me of the girl described in the song 'Universally Speaking' by the Red Hot Chili Peppers -- damaged, yes, but desperately romantic and beautiful.

In short, whilst this is an intelligent book in many ways, I felt short-changed as a reader by being forced to regard this character in such a misty-eyed way. Lee represents the intellectual approach to religion in the novel, and I hoped to see a serious consideration of the fact that many, many highly intelligent people (including many academic professors) are religious. Instead we get a rather lazy association between visionaries and mental illness, and a view of the latter that sits uncomfortably and unconvincingly between science and sentimentality. Recommended if you're interested in the issue of modern religion -- but otherwise, probably not.

Henry James -- a masterclass in plot recycling

When I last updated this blog, I was very slowly progressing through The Wings of the Dove by Henry James. Since then, I have found a job, passed the 80,000-word mark on my novel, and seen a woodcock for the first time -- I'm undecided on which of those is the most exciting -- and I've also finished reading Wings, about which you can read below.

WARNING: This post includes spoilers for both The Wings of the Dove and The Portrait of a Lady.

Although James published Wings (1902) twenty years or so after Portrait (1881), the two plots are extraordinarily similar. A greedy woman and her lover/fiancé conspire for him to get close to, and eventually marry, a rich American heiress, in order that they might both have access to the money. In Portrait, the 'Lady' of the title, Isabel Archer, is the victim of this scheme, only realising exactly how cruelly she has been treated towards the end. Similarly, Milly Theale, the young American in Wings, upon realising that Merton Densher's attentions are motivated by money, not affection, experiences intense despair, "turn[s] her face to the wall," and succumbs to the illness which has threatened her life throughout the book.

James's preoccupation with the figure of a genial, intelligent, rich young woman suffering at the hands of others can be explained in biographical terms, especially as regards Wings. The character of Milly Theale is based on his young cousin, Minny Temple, who died of tuberculosis in her mid-twenties, in 1870. James was open about his interest in the immense potential that had been lost, and the strange fact that his affection for her increased after her death (as Merton Densher's does in the novel). The qualities of Isabel Archer and Milly Theale -- both are good-humoured and almost universally liked -- reflect the author's very personal feelings towards the young woman who inspired them.

It's interesting to reflect that, despite the similarities in the two characters and plotlines, it is only Isabel Archer, not Milly Theale as well, who has become the most famous and beloved of James's protagonists. And, despite my using the word 'recycling' in the title of this post, the two novels don't feel at all similar to read. This is partly because James's prose is extremely dense, though rich and expert, in Wings and comparatively light and fluid in Portrait -- but it is also because of a couple of key structural differences in the novel:

Nicole Kidman and John Malkovich 

in  The Portrait of a Lady (1996)

1. Point of view. The Portrait of a Lady is very substantially from Isabel's point of view. We see her handling Caspar Goodwood, her suitor who keeps popping up from America, her increasing regard for Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle, her unhappiness and disillusionment after her marriage, and, finally, the moment of anagnorisis (shocking recognition) when she realises that Osmond and Madame Merle are lovers. (She realises this, by the way, through the simple fact that Osmond is sitting whilst Madame Merle is standing -- a level of familiarity completely inappropriate to mere friends, and only possible with a truly intimate relationship. A stunning use of gesture.)

By contrast, Wings is mostly from the points of view of the couple, Merton Densher and Kate Croy, with only a few chapters entirely from Milly's. Towards the end of the novel, we follow Densher almost exclusively, which means we become more interested in his moral crisis than in Milly's cruel situation. Gilbert Osmond in Portrait has no such obvious crisis, and so the moral dynamics of Wings are far subtler.

Alison Elliott and Helen Bonham-

Carter in The Wings 

of the Dove (1997)

2. Proximity (or rather, the lack of it). Not only do we rarely see Milly Theale's point of view -- we are not even in the same city with her when she dies. Merton Densher, after Milly finds out about the plot to get her money -- which we don't see -- has one last, painful meeting with her in Venice -- which we don't see -- and returns to London, leaving Milly to die -- which we don't see. Her death is reported to Densher by other characters who have themselves merely received a telegram. James adds remove after remove to make Densher, and the reader, as detached from her death as possible. He challenges us to fill in the gaps, to imagine her despair.

For an author to kill off a main character is commonplace, sometimes even necessary, to turn up the emotional volume, to raise the stakes. (The deaths of increasingly important characters in the Harry Potter series is a particularly apt example.) But to keep the reader at such a frustrating distance from it, as James does, is phenomenally brave. James is choosing not to cash in on the tear-jerking moments, and implicitly argues that Densher's experiences are more interesting at this point. The difficulties he had in getting the book serialised, ironically, helped him here, enabling him to revise the book and structure it more freely. He chastises himself in the Preface for making Milly's background so scanty -- we know next to nothing about her life in America, for instance -- but the fact that we don't get to be in the room with her at her most crucial, devastating moments is surely deliberate.

3. Milly's illness. At the start of Portrait, Isabel Archer is healthy and happy and determined to have an interesting, full life. Milly takes a similar attitude, but it is given an edge of desperation by the fact that, as is slowly revealed, she knows that she is ill, and suspects that it might be very serious. The fact that the illness is never named, and that she only shows her weakness by her absence at various social engagements -- when she is present, she is vivacious and charming -- intensifies our sense of this threat through James's, and Milly's, teasing. The reader develops a creeping awareness that Milly will not find the happiness she deserves.

Isabel Archer, on the other hand, has no such doom hanging over her head. You feel that she could make a good decision, with enough perspicacity, and find a mode of living that would really suit her. But she doesn't. She marries Gilbert Osmond, and then stubbornly refuses to take any steps to lessen her own misery (until the ambiguous ending). She is complicit in her own downfall, whereas Milly makes no obvious false steps, and is simply the victim of others' schemes.

That this should lead to Isabel becoming such a cherished protagonist is surely natural, considering that she takes her place amongst Dorothea Brooke, Tess Durbeyfield, Elizabeth Bennet and so on, heroines who suffer long and hard (with or without a happy ending) because of a simple error of judgment. We like characters who make mistakes. Milly Theale is likeable, and her situation is tragic, but she is perhaps just too nice for us to get a handle on her -- compared to Merton Densher, who feels the weight of his own guilty profoundly by the end.



The Wings of the Dove takes a while to decide on its protagonist, but the sense of satisfaction I found at the end, when Densher rejects the money Milly has left him and dismisses the success of their scheme, proved to me that Henry James's choice to go back to the plot of Portrait, rearrange things a bit, and thus find a whole new area of fictive potential, is yet more evidence of a bold, masterful writer.

Reading Diary: Trollope, O'Connor, O'Brien, O'Connor again, Henry James

Since bombing my way through Death Comes to Pemberley I've been reading a rather electrifying cluster of other things ... which I will now proceed to summarise in blog-style, semi-bitesize fashion.


1. Anthony Trollope, The Warden

I had a few friends at university, and one boyfriend, who were big Trollope fans, but our tutor didn't get us to read any during the eight short weeks we 'did' Victorian literature, and, already lumbered with the bricks that were Bleak House and Middlemarch and Our Mutual Friend and so on, I left him well alone. I think it is a combination of having moved to the country and a dip back into Thomas Hardy that raised the idea of reading some Trollope in my mind, so I bought The Warden in a spanking new, very elegant Penguin edition with lovely stripes on the spine and the back. This is the first of the Barchester novels, and is also very short, so I thought it might be a good place to start.

The Warden follows the moral crisis of a quiet, cello-playing clergyman who, through generations of complacency and inflation, receives a huge income as the warden of a lodging house for poor, retired men of the parish. The sum was originally meant to give the warden a comfortable living and provide for the men's board, but whilst the warden's portion has increased, the men's daily allowance has remained the same. A young doctor, burning with the flames of righteousness, decides to stoke up the residents into signing a petition asking for their fair share, which throws the poor warden, Septimus Harding, into shock and disorientation.

Like Tolstoy and indeed Hardy, Trollope has such enormous compassion for nearly all his characters -- perhaps with the exception of Dr Grantly, the archdeacon -- that you can't help becoming rather passionate about what could be described as a dated Anglican quibble. Mr Harding tends to mime cello-playing behind his back during uncomfortable conversations, and, if things get too troubling, on his lapels -- much to the bewilderment of his interlocutors. This is a brilliant touch which encapsulates his preferment of music and emotional fulfilment rather than intellectual or public triumph. From this one gesture, you can see in an instant how the rest of the book will pan out.

Choosing an argument about the wealth of the Church, however, has larger echoes that it is important to remember when reading The Warden today. Henry VIII justified the dissolution of the monasteries partly by pointing to the vast and questionable incomes enjoyed by many abbots, and the privileges enjoyed by bishops, such as seats in the Lords, could form a modern parallel if someone were to take up the issue today. Which is not to say that Trollope is 'taking up' the issue as such. He is certainly exploring it, and also shining a light on the border between being in the right and appearing to be so -- Jeremy Hunt, take note -- but my lasting impression was not of the greed and self-satisfaction of the church; it was of the quiet anguish of the warden himself. The fact that the book is entitled The Warden, rather than, say, Those Avaricious Archdeacons, seems to indicate Trollope's intention here.


2. Short stories -- Frank O'Connor, Edna O'Brien, Flannery O'Connor.

Yes, the sudden cluster of 'O'...' in the author's names does signify a move towards Irish writing. I finally got around to reading Ulysses. A guy I was at university with was surprised I hadn't read it before -- and, frankly, so was I. But I finally did it. And it's BRILLIANT. (See the poll on your right -- if you can take a couple of seconds to vote before the end of October that would be fab!) And the gentleness, the recognisable 'Irishness' of it, pushed me to explore Irish writing a little more.

I bought a great book called The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story -- which I mentioned in my post about Colm Toibin -- which contains thirty-one stories, along with a great introduction by Anne Enright. 'The Mad Lomasneys' by Frank O'Connor and 'Sister Imelda' by Edna O'Brien are particularly brilliant, and I've since gone out and bought a collection of Frank O'Connor stories. They're gentle, uncomplicated, and then, suddenly, more heartbreaking than you might think it reasonable to expect from such a short form.

Edna O'Brien is the next on my list to explore. She has just published an autobiography, Country Girl, and thus has been in the press and on Open Book and so on. Her story 'Sister Imelda' seems to be one of her most famous, and captures exquisitely the desperation pupils have to please their teachers, and what happens if the teacher finds herself a little too keen to be pleased. "I looked into her eyes, which seemed fathomless, and saw that she was willing me to be calm and obliging me to be master of my fears, and I little knew that one day she would have to do the same as regards the swoop of my feelings for her." Without the word "swoop," this sentence would be unremarkable -- with it, it's stunning.

Flannery O'Connor -- as you might have been muttering indignantly to yourself -- was not Irish, but was born in Georgia, USA, in 1925, and died there of lupus at the age of 39. The introduction to her Complete Stories, by her publisher Robert Giroux, paints her as an extraordinarily humble, painstaking writer, but one who knew exactly what she was trying to do -- a conviction strengthened by her Christian faith. Her stories are extremely sharp and tough, and Evelyn Waugh is reported to have said, when sent the proofs of her first story collection, "If these stories are in fact the work of a young lady, they are indeed remarkable." Whether or not you'd expect this level gaze, frequently directed at men and their pretensions and prejudices, from a female writer (if you need to be angry today, go here), I think it's fair to say you might not expect it from a writer in her early twenties, as O'Connor was when she wrote, say, 'The Geranium'. Her precocity was really exceptional.


3. Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

My experience of Henry James so far had only really encompassed The Turn of the Screw, Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady. But I reread the latter earlier this year, and was struck with how lucidly and civilly and minutely he dissects the relationships between his characters, even two acquaintances striking up a conversation in a drawing room, tracing who seizes tiny advantages and triumphs over the other.

I chose The Wings of the Dove for a couple of very banal reasons. The first is that I've somehow ended up with two copies of it, so it kept thrusting itself into my field of vision -- a bit like a painting whose eyes follow you around the room. Secondly, one edition of it is a lovely Penguin classics copy -- the expensive black ones, not the cheap beige/green ones, which has a very nice font in a good size. I'm happy to admit to being susceptible to print size as a consideration given how much reading I do.

And I'm glad I gave myself a break on that score, because Wings is really quite dense and tough-going in many places. It was published nearly 20 years after The Portrait of a Lady, and James has become even more unremittingly abstract in his descriptions of relationships. Check out this passage, from the very first chapter, on the subject of Kate Croy's relationship with her father:

Yet if there was much she neither knew nor dreamed of it passed between them at this very moment that he was quite familiar with himself as the subject of such quandaries. If he recognized his younger daughter's happy aspect as a tangible value, he had from the first still more exactly appraised every point of his own. The great wonder was not that in spite of everything these points had helped him; the great wonder was that they hadn't helped him more. However, it was, to its eternal recurrent tune, helping him all the while; her drop into patience with him showed how it was helping him at this moment.

It's the kind of writing that rewards slow, thoughtful reading. Once you've got your head round what the hell he's talking about, it's brilliant. But slow really does mean slow -- no eyeslip, no skimming, none of the normal approaches I take with easier stuff. This is not, I admit, a speed I like very much, because I like to feel the thickness of the pages increase in my left hand and decrease in my right hand as I get further into a book. (This is one reason why ebooks don't do it for me.) But it makes more and more sense to me these days to slow down, to commit to writers who have clearly pumped so much time and brainpower into their work that to read it at pretty much any speed feels ungenerous. Sitting and staring at the neat ranks of books I intend to read very soon doesn't help me remember that the main thing is the actual reading of the books -- but Henry James does.



Running my eye back up the pictures of books, this does look like an advert for Penguin -- but they are on a seemingly eternal roll with their book designs, and their fonts have always been gorgeous, so if I've got the choice, it's Penguin almost every time. Other publishers are available. (But sometimes they might as well not be.)

PD James vs. Amateur Fanfiction: Place Your Bets Now!

Who would win in a literary contest between a renowned, nonagenarian crime novelist and a bunch of (mostly) female, unpublished, scribbling fantasists? Or so I characterised in my head the comparison between PD James's Death Comes to Pemberley (DCTP) and the immense amount of online fanfiction I've read over the years.

Like many (should I perhaps say 'many women'?), I've read Pride and Prejudice a good four or five times, and have seen the two modern adaptations frequently enough to have a pretty thorough knowledge of the plot and characters. So when I heard about James's genre-shifting homage to Austen, I was intrigued. I had never read any of James's work, but I knew her name through contacts I've had with Faber and Faber, her publishers. It also made me think of EL James, the author of the Fifty Shades trilogy, which started out as a Twilight-based fanfiction, but had to be rewritten for publication for copyright reasons. PD James, of course, didn't have this problem, what with Austen having been dead for nearly 200 years.

PD did, however, have a different difficulty, one which, to my mind, stuck out a mile. Amateur fanfiction writers -- whether they're basing their stories on Harry Potter, Twilight, or, slightly amusingly, Fifty Shades -- can pretty safely assume that their readers know the 'canon', the original texts they're writing from. Thus a Harry Potter fanfiction beginning with Severus Snape storming into his classroom will probably not follow with "Snape was the Potions Master at Hogwarts, but was rumoured to desperately want the Defence Against the Dark Arts post." Readers will almost always know all this. They've come to this category because they've already read, and liked, the canon, and they want to understand or imagine more about this world, these characters.


PD James can't make this assumption. There may be readers who are huge fan of crime writing in general and PD James in particular who have never read or seen Pride and Prejudice. They might have a general idea of the plot in a 'common knowledge' way, have read Bridget Jones' Diary, or even found the clip of Colin Firth in his wet shirt on YouTube. But PD James needs more from her readers than this. She needs them to have a detailed understanding of the plot, characters, and even back story to be able to follow what happens.

She therefore begins the novel with a rather long synopsis of the events of Pride and Prejudice, from the point of view of an omniscient narrator. Sample sentence: "It was hardly unexpected; Mr Bingley's admiration for Jane had been apparent from their first meeting at an assembly ball." Put it in the present tense and it practically becomes a paragraph from SparkNotes, albeit rather better written. If James's editor/publisher had been slightly conversant with the conventions of fanfiction, s/he might have been sensible enough to suggest that this synopsis be included as a prologue explicitly aimed at people who hadn't read Pride and Prejudice. As prologues, especially of crime novels, I was emphatically not hooked.

Whilst we're mentioning the genre again, it would be unfair of me to ignore it as a work of crime fiction. But even here, I wasn't satisfied. I'd worked out much of the solution quite early on, and then when the big 'reveal' did happen, it was too soon, leaving a lot of explanation to fill the last fifty or so pages, which was not only obvious but frequently repetitious. There were no really 'thrilling' moments, and too much imparting of information was done through quite clunky dialogue.

I also, unexpectedly, found the characters very two-dimensional. I wondered whether this was because they were not PD James's own characters, and thus she had not thought to develop them: Bingley, Jane, Darcy and Elizabeth all seem to rest on the characterisation Austen herself did in P&P, and little is added. (In fairness, Colonel Fitzwilliam and Mr Wickham are more interesting, though they are not the protagonists.) Even the new characters seem to be little more than mouthpieces with one or two broad adjectives. Whether this is typical of PD James I don't know, but for someone who claims that "the greatest writing pleasure for me is in the creation of original characters" (in the afterword to the book, no less), she doesn't exactly back up that claim here.

The book ends with a sickening epilogue in which Darcy suddenly decides to explain his motives for doing a bunch of things back in the old days when Austen was deciding who did what. This is implausible (they've been married SIX years now), unnecessary and, frankly, poorly written. Sample sentence: "How could I have been so unfeeling, so presumptuous, as to seek to separate Bingley from Jane?" This is meant to be Darcy speaking. He drones on, repeating stretches of plot just in case we'd forgotten AGAIN about how much Elizabeth used to hate him, and how justified she was -- and it just doesn't sound like the way Darcy, or indeed anyone, would really speak. The epilogue to the last Harry Potter book was better, and those who've read it will know that's saying a lot.

A P&P-based 'fangirl' creation ...

The last scene, and indeed quite a few chunks of the book, read like 'fangirl' fanfiction: aiming mainly to flag up the writer's love and knowledge of the canon text. I actually found this sentence which apparently runs through Elizabeth's thoughts towards the beginning: "If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?" YAWN-VOMIT-YAWN. We get it, PD. You think Jane Austen's a brilliant novelist. Why don't you just write "Elizabeth thought again about how complex a character she used to be, and how comparatively uninteresting she was now"?

There is a lot of fanfiction out there on the internet -- I've written a few pieces myself -- and the best of it aims to go far beyond the canon texts, bringing a couple of minor characters together, unpicking strange moments or gaps in the plot, and often dispensing with original time-frames altogether. I've read stories where a relatively two-dimensional character (for instance, Professor McGonagall) suddenly gains secrets desires, a dark past, a building tension with another character. This then enriches the original texts by forcing you to ask certain questions, to consider how much deeper the world can go, when you reread them. Why would the Death Eaters, who apparently love torturing people, only have one torture spell? Wouldn't this get boring for everyone? Wouldn't they employ some sadistic spell-writer to create a specialist repertoire for them? You can end up so far from the canon that it becomes merely a speck in the distance, the place you've travelled from. This should be the joy of writing and reading fanfiction.

There are one or two moments when PD James does this in DCTP -- she gives us a plausible and wryly-described marriage for Mary Bennet, for example -- but most of her time is spent hammering through the plot, rather than exploring quirks and idioms of characters. I rarely say this, but it could have done with being a hundred or so pages longer, with the extra wordage spent on giving texture to the characters, making them actually seem real. The book made me long to go and read Pride and Prejudice, for the detail, the minute dramas of the conversations, the vivid sense that these are concrete lives being lived. I can forgive PD James -- she has a long and distinguished career, and is over 90 -- but I find it hard to forgive the reviewers who gush praise on the book jacket. They should go and have a good long look on fanfiction.net and marvel at the ingenuity and resourcefulness of some of its members. As should you, my dear readers.

Edinburgh Book Festival Round-Up (2): Colm Tóibín

This blog post is about an event on 13 August 2012. 

I had planned to write more about the Edinburgh Book Festival in later posts, but it now seems so long ago that it would feel a bit out-of-date. However, I did want to write about the Colm Tóibín event for a number of reasons:

1. His name is one I can never say without feeling awkward. I think the correct pronunciation of it -- at least the one Tessa Hadley used at the event -- is COL-um tuh-BEAN, but it sounds a bit pretentious to say it that way (like referring to 'Paree' or 'Firenze' without a hint of irony), yet ignorant to say it any differently. I wonder if Tessa Hadley checked with him about how to pronounce it at the event. I'm glad it wasn't me. I'd have probably stood there in an agonising dilemma, because on the one hand he probably gets asked that all the time and finds it annoying, but on the other hand saying it wrong in front of 570 people (a sell-out audience at the RBS Main Theatre) would be pretty embarrassing too. It was already warm enough in there without having a hot flush of mortification to deal with.

2. Tóibín is an author I have admired for a while now. I once listened to a podcast in which he was discussing his novel Brooklyn, which won the Costa Award in 2009, and I was so enthralled by his gentle, slightly nasal, Irish-New-York voice that I immediately went and bought and read the book.

It's about an Irish girl, Eilis, in the 1950s, who moves to Brooklyn to seek her fortune. It's all very understated -- no AS Byatt-type encyclopaedic detail, no Madeline Miller-type syrupy-pseudo-poetry, to name a couple of recent prize-winning authors -- and it's very hard to put your finger on what makes it so good. It is precise, it is compassionate as Tolstoy and Hardy and Henry James are (James being a particular love of Tóibín's), and it is balanced; Eilis is non-judgmental and non-aggressive, but both of these qualities appear more as absences than anything else, because she is also incredibly passive. There is tragedy, but Tóibín writes about it as something essentially low-key, banal, and to be expected.

He has the same clear sight and light touch in The Master, and I noticed it again in a story called 'A Priest in the Family', which comes from his collection Mothers and Sons and which I found in the anthology The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story. It concerns an old woman, Molly, who discovers that her son, a Catholic priest, is about to go on trial for child abuse. The passages of dialogue almost reach a Hemingway-like level of minimalism because of the lack of interiority -- she only reflects when alone, and not even very deeply then -- which, along with the ingenious decision to focus on the mother, makes the story really quite chilling.

3. His approach to talking about books is one I find extremely sympathetic, and one that was reinforced by his conversation with Tessa Hadley (see previous post). They were trying to search for a word that described the variations in tone and colour that make up a work of literature. They went through 'aesthetic' and 'pattern' before eventually hitting on 'texture'. This word quite rightly brought out the curious sensation that reading feels physical -- it has a rhythm which is not quite the same thing as the speed at which you are reading it. It is to do with the interaction between the words, the eye, the brain, and the white space around the paragraphs. Ending a paragraph with the sentence "It was over" is quite different to beginning a paragraph in the same way. I think it was this sensation they were trying to pin down.

Tóibín teaches a class at Columbia University, where he is Mellon Professor, and explained to an amused audience that he tells all students, even the ones with "massive PhDs", to leave all literary theory at the door. To students who drawl that they can only read in a Lacanian way, he responds like an Irish fishwife: "Not in here, you won't." Saying this, his rather geometric approach to texts, looking for patterns and so on, sounds quite narratological in its method. He explained that in The Portrait of a Lady and Mansfield Park, amongst other novels, the fact that the heroine does not have parents both allows and forces her to come into her own, and thus the story is born. (This is particularly true of the silly or dead mothers in Jane Austen, where aunts and sisters tend to be more important.)

Pressing his Russian Formalist-style musings further, he proposed that it was irrelevant for readers to say they 'liked' or 'disliked' characters in novels: the character serves a function in the novel and is not there to excite that kind of emotion. This sounds a very ascetic approach to reading, and one that a great many readers will surely disagree with, but I see his point. A character is necessary to the novel; there's no point complaining to a novelist that the character isn't this or that. Assuming some competence on the part of the novelist, changing the character would take it away from the novel that the novelist wanted to write.

Focusing on only the text is very out of fashion nowadays, but I admire Tóibín's approach because it encourages extended and careful reflection on the craft with which a text has been put together, and I don't think extended and careful reflection on anything can be a bad thing. Nor is he blinkered: his new book, New Ways To Kill Your Mother, is a series of essays on the relationships between writers and their parents (Yeats and his father, J.M. Synge and his mother, and so on). Clearly, he appreciates the value of biography, and probably more than many.

Tóibín has a long-term interest in parental-filial relationships, judging by the title of Mothers and Sons (2006), which some might slyly suggest is typical of a gay, solitary man. However true this may be, he is a superb writer, who displays a wonderful slow generosity when being interviewed, and makes you feel that he really does understand the slow, minute pains associated with being alive. Perhaps he gives a faint impression that he feels more pain than most, for whatever reason; but he's clearly doing what he loves best of all, and he does it with a modest virtuosity that continues to inspire and excite me.



(The next few posts will focus on a different theme, which is as yet undecided. Never say I'm not helpful.)

Sense and Sensibility: Notes on Rereading

A quick preface to the first article of this blog. I had an old blog but it has been several years since I posted with any regularity on it, and I think the direction of my blog-style writings has changed since then. So, I've started a new blog - not that there will necessarily be any more coherence in the themes, but hopefully it will reflect my modern, twenty-five-year-old self with more accuracy.

I've just finished reading Sense and Sensibility, which I hadn't read in full for a good few years - possibly since my second year of university, if not before then. Like many, I'm a big fan of the Ang Lee film (1995), which won an Oscar for Emma Thompson's adaptation from the novel and started some fantastic actors: Kate Winslet, Alan Rickman, Thompson of course, Gemma Jones, Harriet Walter, Imogen Stubbs, Hugh Grant, Imelda Staunton - so many, in fact, that it seems like a 'best-of-British-acting' reunion (perhaps foreshadowingthe Harry Potter films, which star at least six of the same actors ...?). The film is charming and funny, and includes some lovely original music.

Rereading the novel, the first that Austen published (in 1811), served to remind me of several things that the film leaves out through the need for economy:

A. Pairs of sisters
There are three pairs of sisters in the novel, and only one in the film. Marianne and Elinor of course are in both. But the film leaves out Lucy Steele's elder sister Nancy. Nancy, by the way, is rather important in the novel, since it's her that reveals Lucy's secret engagement to Edward to her prospective in-laws and sets in motion the chain of events which eventually leads to the happy ending. In the film, it's Lucy who does this herself, which is not inconsistent with her general character, but robs the film of the interesting contrast between one pair of sisters who, although very different in some ways, are both artless and behave with integrity (the Dashwoods), and the other pair who are irritating, greedy and false (the Steeles).

There are also Mrs Jennings's two daughters, one of whom was cut from the film, along with her four children, leaving her husband, Sir John, Mrs Jennings's son-in-law, a widower. This does raise a question of characterisation: what happened to his wife/Mrs Jennings's daughter, and why are they both so cheerful about it? The dead woman is never once mentioned in the film, which does start to stretch the bounds of credibility a little. I can understand why they'd cut her in the film, as she's pretty dull and doesn't add to the plot particularly, but her absence does make both Sir John and Mrs Jennings seem rather callous.

B. Willoughby's appeal
I had completely forgotten that Willoughby comes to see Elinor when Marianne is seriously ill at the end of the novel, begs Elinor to forgive him, and pours out his love for Marianne. It's a typically morally dubious decision on Willoughby's part, since he's already married to a rich young lady and is rather rude about her during his conversation with Elinor, but it serves to underline his very real love for Marianne and encourages us to see his downfall as tragic, the result of fundamental flaws in his character, rather than deliberate manipulation or evil.

In the film, this is cut, and we simply see Willoughby perched on a hill, looking down with a mournful expression at the double wedding taking place below him. On the whole, I think this was a sensible decision. The drama of Marianne's illness would have been interrupted, and the film unnecessarily lengthened, by its inclusion, and the symbolic exclusion of Willoughby from the celebrations makes him the rather lonely, regretful figure that Austen presents, but in a more efficient, visually-striking way.

C. Mrs Jennings
Mrs Jennings is a widow in both novel and film (where she's played by Elizabeth Spriggs). Along with her son-in-law and daughters (daughter singular in the film), she is continually both helpful and irritating to the Dashwoods through her lack of tact and perpetual cheerfulness. She is introduced as "a good-humoured, merry, fat, elderly woman, who talked a great deal, seemed very happy, and rather vulgar". She teases Elinor and Marianne and practically everyone else about romantic entanglements, real and imagined, and Marianne is often quite rude to her because she fails to see that most of Mrs Jennings's comments are well-meant.

What is developed much more in the novel, and gave me a lot of joy to read, was the fact that Mrs Jennings rises in the estimation of Elinor and Marianne throughout the book because of her loyalty and good sense. Four quotations are enough to illustrate this:

1. When Mrs Jennings is defending Edward for keeping to his engagement with Lucy:

'Then,' cried Mrs Jennings, with blunt sincerity, no longer able to be silent, 'he has acted like an honest man. I beg your pardon, Mr Dashwood, but if he had done otherwise, I should have thought him a rascal.'

Here, Austen cleverly has Mrs Jennings act as the ventriloquist's dummy for the reader. She says what we're all thinking: that Edward's actions prove him to be so honourable as to give up his own chance of happiness and fortune - what a hero.

2. When Marianne is ill at Cleveland, the residence of Mrs Jennings's daughter Charlotte and her husband Mr Palmer:

Mrs Jennings, however, with a kindness of heart which made Elinor really love her, declared her resolution of not stirring from Cleveland as long as Marianne remained ill, and of endeavouring, by her own attentive care, to supply to her the place of the mother she had taken her from; and Elinor found her on every occasion a most willing and active helpmate, desirous to share in all her fatigues, and often, by her better experienced in nursing, of material use. 

Again, Austen has been clever enough here to make Mrs Jennings not only kind, but actually useful and skilful. We begin to see her true worth lies beyond all her hilarity and cheerfulness, in true loyalty and generosity.

3.  When Marianne leaves Cleveland, having recovered, --

... after taking so particular and lengthened a leave of Mrs Jennings -- one so earnestly grateful, so full of respect and kind wishes as seemed due to her own heart from a secret acknowledgement of past inattention ...

The reader wholeheartedly supports Marianne's other conversions, to see that Willoughby is a scoundrel and Colonel Brandon a gentle and passionate lover - and therefore we are inclined to agree with this one, which seems to suggest that Mrs Jennings's good qualities should take precedence in our overall judgement of her character.

4. In the penultimate paragraph of the novel:

... and fortunately for Sir John and Mrs Jennings, when Marianne was taken from them, Margaret had reached an age highly suitable for dancing, and not very ineligible for being supposed to have a lover.

Mrs Jennings, still desperate for romantic gossip, is unrepentant. One possible interpretation is that she has no need to repent: her gossip has done no real harm, so she doesn't need to change. Another way of reading this is to admire Jane Austen for not making Mrs Jennings a completely likeable character, even at the end, when the characters have been properly sorted into the good, the bad, and the just-about-pitiable (i.e. Willoughby). We are much more sympathetic towards her than earlier in the novel, but we are made to remember what her essential character is like, and this possibly introduces a bittersweet note into the conclusion, as well as an amusing one.

In between reading Austen novels, I sometimes start to wonder whether her importance has been overblown. But every time I reread another, I remember: she is subtle and brilliant and deserves to be praised in the highest terms.