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Several things explain why I haven’t posted much lately–some extended Netflixing, rereading things that don’t fit here, like Mary Stewart and some early John Le Carre, and also rereading, yet again and very slowly, Mary Jane Holmes’ Tracy Park. This isn’t a review. I couldn’t write a review. I wrote a really long synopsis once, and that’s here. This is, I guess, an appreciation.

It’s ridiculous how much I love this book. Objectively it’s not very good, probably, but I’m not objective about it. And anyway, I think it’s Holmes’ best work, and that counts for something. It’s got things that others of her books have–insane people, and the name ‘Hastings,’ and a lot of low-key cruelty–but it’s also a lot kinder than her other books. No one is stripped entirely of their wealth, or left to die alone. No one goes  crazy to the point of raving and tearing their hair out. Frank never has to make a full confession to his brother. Everyone’s okay with each other in the end.

Frank is my favorite, probably, keeping on doing wrong and torturing himself over it for years and years. In a way he’s the villain of the story, but he might also be the most moral person in it–he never really convinces himself that what he’s done is okay. I tend to cry a lot reading the last few chapters of Tracy Park, and most of the bits I cry at involve Frank.

If he’s not my favorite, the Peterkin kids are. Ann Eliza gets my favorite happy ending, popular and wealthy and doted on by her husband and living in Paris–although Tom could be a little more doting. Tom’s happy ending is pretty good for me, too, and the faint praise with which Jerrie damns him is such a delight. “So much more of a man than she had ever supposed he could be.” And it’s better because this is Tom under the least trying circumstances possible: he’s rich, respected, has never had to work a day in his life. Things are pretty great for him, but I enjoy knowing that he’d still go to pieces if anything bad ever happened to him. I have a lot of affectionate hate for Tom Tracy.

And Billy Peterkin. Ann Eliza does pretty well for herself. All Billy gets is Jerrie’s friendship and the author’s promise that he’ll never marry. And I’m not sure how much I think of Jerrie’s friendship, considering that her first reaction to his proposal was to mock him. I reject Holmes’ vision of Billy’s future, and I’ve imagined, in rough outline, an alternate one, where he settles out west somewhere, and is properly appreciated by the people around him, and marries someone who both loves him and impresses everyone in Shannondale. If I could wish a single book into existence, it would be that story about Billy Peterkin.

Dolly Tracy deserves a mention, too. She’s so uncompromising as a character. She’s the one who, in another book by Mary Jane Holmes, would die bald and insane in a shack. And I don’t know how that doesn’t happen, or where Holmes’ change of heart came from, but she walks a very fine line with Dolly Tracy, making her equal parts awful and sympathetic. I wouldn’t want to hang out with Dolly Tracy, but I’m glad she travels to Florida every winter, and I’m sad that she’s lonely.

The main characters are less interesting. They have their moments, but their moments don’t always add up to anything. Harold’s the worst in that respect. Harold’s moments come early in the book, and there is nothing interesting about him at all once he grows up. Jerrie is better–I don’t think I would love this book as much as I do if I didn’t care about Jerrie–but Harold infects her with his blandness and also she made fun of Billy Peterkin for being short that one time. Arthur’s fun when he’s being super weird, but I don’t care about him the way I care about my favorites.

No one’s all bad or all good — except Harold, I guess, which may be why he doesn’t do anything for me — and that’s kind of special even in books where everyone is objectively good. Tracy Park is such a ridiculous melodrama, but it’s also pretty human, and…I don’t know. Mary Jane Holmes manipulates me very effectively, and I enjoy the experience.

So, I think The Miz Maze might be the best collaborative novel I’ve read. The authors are:

Frances Awdry
Mary Bramston
Christabel Rose Coleridge
Mary Susanna Lee
A.E. Mary Anderson Morshead
Frances Mary Peard
Eleanor C. Price
Florence Wilford
Charlotte Mary Yonge

Nine authors is a lot, and I want to know more about them and about the dynamic between them. But all I’ve got is the obvious textual evidence that they weren’t as acrimonious as The Whole Family‘s lot. Beyond that, I’ve got nothing but a page of signatures, a few Wikipedia pages, and a random selection of facts about Charlotte Yonge. And that’s okay. It’s a pretty self-sufficient book, I think, and the authors seem to agree.

The information they do and don’t choose to give is so interesting. First, the authors’ names appear only as facsimile signatures, and they don’t specify who wrote what. Second, they provide a list of characters, and it’s crazy. See, for example, “Sir Walter Winkworth, Baronet of the Miz Maze, Stokeworthy, Wilts, age about 64, residing, when the book opens, at High Scale, a small property in Westmoreland, which was his in right of his second wife, Sophia Ratclyffe, recently deceased.”

I mean, all else aside, that’s a hell of a lot of commas.

On the scale of literary parlor game pretension, these women fall somewhere between the authors of The Affair at the Inn and William Dean “Control Freak” Howells, progenitor of The Whole Family. Instead of, “hey, let’s write a story,” or “hey, let’s be super deep together,” they’re saying, “hey, let’s write something realistic.” And, I mean, it’s still a sentimental novel, so a Venn diagram with circles labeled “People who don’t think Italians are entirely respectable” and “People whose relations married Italians” would encompass most of the characters, with significant overlap. But the governing principle seems to be the idea that everyone has a different point of view, and that people rarely understand each other. And…well, a) that is obviously my favorite thing, even more than secret insane wives and people falling in love with their spouses, and b) they are so amazingly committed to this principle that I can’t help but kind of love them, even when the story doesn’t do a whole lot for me.

Let me tell you, for example, about Algernon Bootle. Algernon Bootle is the son of the vicar and his busybody wife. Sir Walter Winkworth (of High Scale and Miz Maze) hires him to tutor his eldest son, Miles. Aunt Dora, Sir Walter’s sister, says she wouldn’t have thought any real person could sound so much like Mr. Collins. All the Winkworth kids kind of hate him. And yet Miles, writing to his twin, says “He isn’t such a bad fellow at bottom. I told him the other day that you would have been a more creditable pupil, and he became natural on the spot and said: ‘I wouldn’t have undertaken him for a thousand pounds.’”

I thought Algy was the one character who was only ever going to be the butt of jokes. But no, the authors of The Miz Maze are committed to everyone’s humanity, and it’s awesome. Which is not to say that Algy’s not still continually the butt of jokes. But he’s not just that.

I want to talk about Miles, too, but I don’t quite know what to say. He’s shy in that way that comes off as dullness, and Aunt Dora says, “Miles will be better looking by and by, when he has overcome the heaviness that clings about fine young men in the undeveloped stage.” He’s desperately in love with his sister Zoe’s best friend Emily, but she’s not interested. His more outgoing twin is in the Army, and also Canada, and it makes sense for Miles to be the steady, stay-at-home one. But when Aunt Dora tells him that he and his brother had their initials written on their feet as babies so their folks wouldn’t get them mixed up, he says, “I think it’s rather a pity they didn’t.” He’s sort of inarticulately, endearingly young.

And then, Aunt Dora. You may have already noticed that I can’t describe other characters without help from Aunt Dora. That’s because she’s the best. She’s one of Sir Walter’s two spinster sisters, and while the other one, Bessie, has a tragically dead fiancé in her past, Aunt Dora is happily single. She’s also kind and intelligent, funny, and a little bit intimidating to the younger women before they know her well. And she’s awesome at gently taking Sir Walter down a peg when he deserves it, in a very realistically sibling-like way.

The family relationships in this book are fantastic all around. Or, the Winkworth family ones are. Other families don’t get the same amount of attention. But there are plenty of Winkworths, and I can’t decide which I like best. There’s Sir Walter’s fraught relationships with his eldest children, and the way his obvious love for them doesn’t lessen the weight of his expectations. There’s Miles and Clyffe — short for Ratclyffe, which ouch — who have been the most symbiotic of twins, and now have to learn to be apart from each other. There’s Miles and Zoe, who are so much alike and so different, and confide in each other and bully each other in equal measure. And there’s Sir Walter and Aunt Dora, whose teasing, open affection was my first sign that the characters in this book were going to closely resemble real people. I think this is what William Dean Howells wanted for The Whole Family, and that The Miz Maze happened 15 years earlier makes me feel even better about Howells’ book being a hilarious train wreck instead.

It gets a little worse toward the end, as books often do. There was a point at which I felt like everything had been wrapped up to my satisfaction, but the romances had yet to be resolved, so the book had to keep going, and I just didn’t care as much anymore. Also there was a while there where I thought Algy was going to be converted to Catholicism, and it would have been so funny, and I wish he hadn’t been rescued. Still, I kind of love The Miz Maze, and its authors, who clearly made an effort to agree instead of undermining each other. I think it’s because they were all women.

Of all the English classes I ever had, my 7th grade one was the best. And part of it was that my teacher was great, and part of it was that I realized that grammar is equal parts fun and fascinating — although I realize I may be alone on that one — but probably the single biggest factor was that we had to write an essay on a short story each week. And I could talk a lot about how helpful it was to have to churn out essays and learn to construct an argument and stuff, but what I’m here to talk about today is how much I hated the short stories.

Middle School and High School English classes do a lot to instill in kids the idea that serious literature is super depressing, and short stories, which tend to be sort of single-minded in pursuit of an idea, make it worse — at least with novels, there’s usually time and space to put in a few scenes that will make you laugh, or, you know, offer sidelights on a character that give you hope that they have inner resources to draw on and won’t spend the rest of their lives completely miserable. If they live to the end of the story, that is.

I mean, there were bright spots: “The Speckled Band.” Dorothy Parker. Vocabulary lessons. But I came out of Middle School English with the conviction that all short stories were terrible and that I would hate them forever, with a grudging exception for detective stories.

Anyway, the point of this is that for a long time I really believed I hated short stories — until a couple of years ago when I realized that I was reading short stories all the time, and loving them. It was just that they were short story series, character-driven and funny instead of literary and depressing. These days I get really excited when an author I’ve been enjoying turns out to have a series of short stories or two. So this is the first in what I expect to be a extremely rambling series of posts about those, and how much fun they are — starting with the super obvious.

Sherlock Holmes

It doesn’t get a lot more obvious than Sherlock Holmes, right? To the point where I don’t need to describe the series at all, because if you don’t already know the premise, you’ve been living under a rock since 1887.I’m only including the Holmes stories here to point out that they’re exactly the same as everything else I’m about to talk about — focused on a character, based around a central conceit, and closely tied to a specific setting. And all about a person who’s better at stuff than everyone around him, which is preferred, if not essential. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is, I think, the most fun — first collections usually are — and I retain my 7th grade fondness for “The Speckled Band,” although I think the one that kind of bowled me over the most when I first read it was “The Red-Headed League.”

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

The Return of Sherlock Holmes

Project Gutenberg doesn’t have the complete Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes or Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, but you get the idea. And the novels are sort of beside the point in this context, but I will freely admit that my favorite Sherlock Holmes Thing is Hound of the Baskervilles, which I love probably beyond reason.

Jeeves and Wooster

Then there’s P.G. Wodehouse. And if Sherlock Holmes is typical of the thing I’m trying to talk about, I don’t know what the Jeeves

It’s Christmas story time again! I started, as has become my tradition, with The Romance of a Christmas Card, by Kate Douglas Wiggin. It continues to be wonderful.

I thought I’d continue on with Wiggin for a bit, so the next thing I read was an earlier Christmas story of hers, The Birds’ Christmas Carol, which is a delightful combination of making fun of poor people and glorifying childhood illness. And by “delightful”, I mean “unpleasant and a little bit disturbing.”

Project Gutenberg has decided that the subject of The Birds’ Christmas Carol is “Terminally ill children — Juvenile fiction,” which might be my new favorite category if there was more than one  book in it. I love PG’s subject headings, but I wish they applied them with some kind of consistency.

The terminally ill child — fortunately there is only one — is Carol Bird, not a song but a girl born on Christmas Day. She spends the first five years of her life being rosy-cheeked and red-lipped and unusually generous for a small child; she spends the second five years of her life being pale and patient and angelic and non-specifically ill. Clearly she is destined for death.

Carol not only brightens the lives of her various family members, but makes them better people. She also, at the age of ten, runs a circulating library for the benefit of children in the hospital.

Apparently, though, these things aren’t sufficiently angelic, so, for her tenth or eleventh birthday — I got a little lost, I think — she decides to provide a Christmas dinner for the nine poor children next door. And isn’t it entertaining that they don’t have enough nice clothes to go around, and that they don’t know how to behave in polite company? Wiggin certainly thinks so. But of course the angelic Carol doesn’t mind their bad manners at all, and additionally has given up her own Christmas present in order to buy things for the Ruggles children. This seems to be sufficient to qualify her for angel-hood, as she dies while listening to music from the church through her open window almost as soon as the Ruggles’ have gone home.

The whole thing made me feel a bit ill, to be honest, but Wiggin can kind of get away with it. She’s a good enough writer to make this story almost palatable, and she’s got all the necessary Christmas things — small children, a moral, an uplifting ending if not a happy one, and, most importantly, the Unity of Christmastimes. It’s just — angelic dead children, you know? I keep having to remind myself that I’m not required to like it.

6 Comments on Christmas Stories: The Birds’ Christmas Carol, last added: 12/13/2010