Emma by Jane Austen

When I people-watch, I don’t care much for evaluating someone’s physical appearance. Instead I try to figure out what they are thinking and feeling at that moment I’ve caught them in. That couple in line ordering breakfast at the Carnegie Mellon University café kissed for the first time last night, I decide. They have none of the casualness born of the reassurance of long-term intimacy and all of the enthusiasm for an exciting new experience.

I watch her press herself up to him. In response he straightens up to give himself another inch or so before he says “We’d like pancakes, please,” to the cashier. The girl wonders if she looks good enough for him. With the hand not holding his, she primps in a way frantic enough to suggest it’s driven by concern about her merits, not by normal nerves the first daylight after the first kiss brings. She settles her shirt hem over the waistband of her jeans just so—now her stomach looks its flattest—and pulls her hair forward like that, perfect. I can see what she can’t. This is silly fussing: he’s just thrilled with himself. He walks her to the silverware bar, hand on the small of her back, looking around the café for (male) friends to give a pleased good morning nod to. She dismisses him to find a table; he lurches away from her in his haste to do this right. He stands over one: This one? She—the princess of breakfast—shakes her head. Chin up, she picks a table next to the window. He scoots after her. Seated now, she rearranges herself to perfection; he scans the room for friends he might have missed. He holds both her hands. Pancakes arrive. The first breakfast in this new world begins.

I sit at a table near this couple, holding Jane Austen’s Emma open to the last page. Reading Emma is people-watching the way I like to do it, and in the company of a very talented guide. Here, Austen says, we have a gentlemen who is stymied by the sort of ordinary occurrences most of us just go with. Let’s see what he does when it snows a little more than he expected it to. Now this next woman fears herself inferior to all she encounters. Listen to her tell everyone that her brother-in-law has two carriages, not one. And now, here we have the girl who plagues herself and others with her conviction that she knows best in every circumstance. And there’s her friend who suffers as a result. They are going to sort out who should marry whom: let’s watch.

My only complaint about people-watching is that nothing extraordinary happens: I’ve never gotten to sit on a bench across from an Edison at the moment he turned on a light bulb for the very first time. Everyone I’ve watched is merely going about the business of being people as mundanely as it can be done.

And so too it was with Emma. The story was a delightful afternoon of people watching at its best. For me, it added up to nothing more significant.



Emma: 2.5 stars: indulged as well as any author has, my curiosity about people. But neither impresed me at any one point with anything it offered nor added up to anything in total.

Recommended by: my friend Fiona. It’s one of her favorites; she wasn’t sure if it was a good book for me. I read it because she convinced me to take recommendations that are not generated specifically by my chase for my ideal book. She fears I’ll miss many books that I couldn’t have guessed I’d love if I become too narrowly focused on finding my ideal.

Personal ad responses

Thank you, to John who suggested a book below (which I haven't read and am excited to), and to the many on Librarything who gave me book ideas as well. I posted the ad at the New York Review of Books as well to see what happens.

I'm thick in the middle of recommendations from the Seattle librarians as well as several that Librarything generated when I told it which what my top few favorite books were.

Clayhanger #3

**spoilers ahead**

In the next pages, Edwin announced his interest in architecture to his father and then felt bullied enough by his father’s disappointment to drop it and join his dad’s printing business. Then he met Hilda, who kissed him one day and married another man the very next. Next, his father’s brain began to deteriorate, and for the following two years, he had to pay extra attention to both his dad and the printing business. Then his dad died.

While these things were happening, Edwin did little with his private projects. I didn’t mind: I was as distracted as Edwin by all that life imposed on him to take him away from his plans.

Hilda reappears in the story, trailing a rumor that she was widowed and we’re off again—Hilda’s son is sick and needs Edwin’s care, Hilda’s bankrupt and needs Edwin’s money—and the projects are once again neglected. Neglected until the end of the story, when Edwin deals with them a final time, this time with nothing more than a few bitter sentences of regret.

Somehow though, this failure didn’t make the book a disappointment. I was pleased, quite simply, with the idea that someone would try to sustain a private program to enrich his life with no promise of reward for his efforts. To have Edwin succeed at his projects would have required some breaks—a less imposing daily life, chancing upon an activity exciting enough to inspire him to sacrifice his other commitments for it. It was enough for me to spend time in the company of someone extraordinary enough to think to try.


Clayhanger: 3.5 stars. Almost one of my favorite books

Recommended by: David Wright, Seattle Public Library, based on my reactions to Middlemarch, North and South and A Town Like Alice

Clayhanger #2

Edwin is thrilling me. He has set aside a special spot, a room in his attic, for projects with which to exhaust himself. He’s bought paper and attempted to draw a building in Paris to teach himself architecture! He’s begun reading and building a library! He’s going to practice painting!

Clayhanger by Arnold Bennett #1

Bennett had promised me in Anna of the Five Towns that if I read enough of his writing, he would describe something that would fascinate me. He kept his promise in Chapter 4 of Clayhanger when he told me that Edwin, a young man I thought ordinary, has a private desire to do something extraordinary. He is not yet sure what, particularly, he’ll do, but, to repeat what Bennett told me, he wants to do his best, to exhaust himself in doing his best, in pursuit of honest and terrific endeavor. This I wanted very much to watch.

Anna of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett

I like the way Arnold Bennett thinks. In Anna of the Five Towns, he asks questions that I’d like to hear answers to: what would you do you if you had unlimited funds? How do you find what we might call meaning in life, an unwavering sense of what you would to do with yourself?

Anna is a short book, too short to allow Bennett to answer these questions as thoroughly as I would have asked him to do, if he’d been writing it for me. But no matter, I’ll just read more of what he’s written.



Anna of the Five Towns: 2 stars. There was a lot of promise but not a lot of delivery, to my mind.

Recommended by: David Wright, Seattle Public Library, based on my comments about Middlemarch, North and South, and A Town Like Alice

Introducing Seattle Public Library recommenders

Nancy Pearl suggested I speak with Misha Stone and David Wright, ace book recommenders from the Seattle Public Library. They read my blog entries on North and South, A Town Like Alice and Middlemarch and came up with this list:

Misha:

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell
Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
A Death in the Family by James Agee
Old Filth by Jane Gardam
A Summer Birdcage by Margaret Drabble


David:

Anna of the Five Towns and Clayhanger by Arnold Bennett
The Millstone by Margaret Drabble

Thank you, Misha and David.