To begin: on one level, I admire and appreciate what Tolkien was doing with The Silmarillion. He began writing it at (or near) the height of Modernism, when novelists pushed fiction into uncharted waters, experimenting with form in ways that feel -- even a century later -- fresh and vibrant. So for a young writer to begin cobbling together interrelated stories that felt not only traditional, but aggressively antique in style and content was a bold move, a setting himself apart from the pack. Other writers of the time did this as well: Sigrid Undset wrote epic medieval fictions just post-WWI when others were dabbling in stream-of-consciousness and all manner of tricksiness, and she won the Nobel Prize in Literature for those fictions, trends be damned. Undset's work, however, was successful where The Silmarillion most assuredly is not because of many reasons, but one reason above all: she had readers in mind when writing her great epics, and she cared about whether they cared about her stories. Which leads me to say: I have never before encountered a work of fiction so utterly indifferent to, or dismissive of, the idea of readership as The Silmarillion. So, although I applaud Tolkien's resistance to, and likely suspicion of, Modernism, this book is a stain on his reputation as a storyteller, as a spinner of yarns.

Now, I'm the first to admit that one shouldn't go into reading this book expecting a novel, because it is not that (however its being broken into chapters suggests otherwise) and should not be judged as such. However, neither is it a collection of short stories. Nor is it even more than ostensibly a collection of myths of Middle-earth, or a cosmology of that universe, although it has been, and continues to be, classified as such by its most ardent admirers. It has been oversold along those lines, as it turns out. The Silmarillion is more a reference work than anything else, a compendium of names tied together with the merest sinew of narrative, description, context; it reads more like the Elvish yellow pages than like an origin narrative. And how can a reader actually love a book if unable to recount when asked -- in more than the broadest, most vague strokes -- the narrative arcs and names, roles and relationships of that narrative's minor (to say nothing of major) characters? From memory -- be honest-- who or what is Menegroth, or Drengist, or Finarfin, or Elwe, or the Teleri, or Amlach, or Nienna? Etc, etc. Having now finished the book (and being a closer reader and better retainer of texts than most people I've ever known), I can tell you, with some confidence of accuracy, about Iluvatar, Aule, Yavanna, Feanor, Luthien and Morgoth -- and that's pretty much it. (Pardon the missing umlauts and accents.) Everything else is this vast wash of white noise, or what amounts to a dictionary of names -- the trial that is reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (in which all principal characters seem to either share or have variations on three or four different names) taken to the hundredth power. It stands comparison with another classic in another way, too: The Silmarillion, like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, is a concept of genius impoverished in the prosaic execution. People say: it can only really be claimed and embraced by hardcore Tolkien fans -- which seems to me a way of excusing its inscrutability, of apologizing for its failure as prose in a way that feels less like acknowledgment of that failure than like pretentious cliquishness. The thing is: I am a reasonably hardcore Tolkien fan. I read The Lord of the Rings in my early 20s and felt so intimate a connection with it, I had plans to name my daughter (should I ever have had one) Lothlorien. The trilogy was not quite talismanic for me, but it blew me away and felt more like a comprehensive and necessary work of art than anything I'd read up to then. (The films, too, bowl me over: I cry my eyes out over at least half a dozen different scenes each time I watch them. Between the three films, I went to the cinema seven times to see LOTR.) But, above all, I'm one who demands that literature not be difficult for the sake of being difficult. The Silmarillion, though, is not just difficult, but almost wholly indecipherable -- an opaque work of literary masturbation, the clearest geek creation of any work of art perhaps ever made or written. And art ceases, on some level, to be art when it is made in a bubble, when its ignorance of its audience is willful almost to a point of hostility. Is there magnificence and loveliness in this book? Certainly. I love the Christian echoes (not just the obvious analogies of Iluvatar/God and Melkor/Lucifer, but also the subtler paralleling of Aule's creation of -- and willingness to smite, on Iluvatar's command -- the Dwarves with Abraham's willingness, on God's command, to sacrifice Isaac), and some of the scenes are enormously stirring (Aule's creation of the Dwarves, the death of Feanor with his body fallen to ash from the force of his fiery spirit and "borne away like smoke," Fingon -- in classically Greek mode -- cutting off the hand of Maedhros from the back of the eagle, Fingolfin challenging Morgoth to single combat), but these scenes are less remembered than dogeared to reference in this review, lost as they become in continued reading, in the powering through genealogy after genealogy in which characters have few or no distinguishing personalities or characteristics. Everything about the book feels engineered to frustrate, to confound rather than illuminate. Consider the following paragraph:

"The sons of Hador were Galdor and Gundor; and the sons of Galdor were Hurin and Huor; and the son of Hurin was Turin the Bane of Glaurung; and the son of Huor was Tuor, father of Earendil the Blessed. The son of Boromir was Bregor, whose sons were Bregolas and Barahir; and the sons of Bregolas were Baragund and Belegund. The daughter of Baragund was Morwen, the mother of Turin, and the daughter of Belegund was Rian, the mother of Tuor. But the son of Barahir was Beren One-hand, who won the love of Luthien Thingol's daughter, and returned from the Dead; from them came Elwing the wife Earendil, and all the Kings of Numenor after."

Now, I understand that some of these characters prove significant in the book. But my problem with this paragraph is that, given that these are introductions to these characters, how are we meant to remember them or their relationships to one another later in the book when each of them does become significant if Tolkien has given us nothing whatsoever to remember them by? The passage echoes the genealogy of Christ at the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew, but that genealogy works because it sets the stage for the narrative to come by giving us, in brief, what has come before, whereas Tolkien's does not because it sets the stage for the narrative to come by giving us the narrative to come in lineage shorthand, in microcosm that would benefit readers with detail but discourages them from reading further in the absence of detail. It's as though Tolkien looked to the Bible as a template for much of The Silmarillion but failed to understand why biblical narratives, architectures and tropes succeed as narratives, architectures and tropes -- which is bizarre, given his stature as an academic and his devout religiosity.

By the end, I was feeling snarkier than I would've liked: how convenient that the giant eagles would show up and save the day the very second it went from bad to irredeemably screwed (ornithology as deus ex machina -- and we see it in the LOTR films and likely the novels, too, with Gandalf's escape from Isengard, with Frodo and Sam stranded in the river of lava...), or interpreting the Dunedain's "numbers increas[ing] only slowly in the land" as commentary on Dunedainian sperm count (poor, poor Aragorn)...

Is there good stuff to be found in these pages? Certainly. I've touched on much of it above, and haven't even mentioned the ephemeral fairy tale soul of the tale of Beren and Luthien, or the degree to which Tolkien honors Sophocles with the fates of Turin and Nienor. But the achievement here is so overwhelmed by the strikes going against it -- e.g. the incessant multiplication of names (Turin has S - E - V - E - N different names), the eye-rollingly vague and self-important portentousness ("For they told how a blind Darkness came northward, and in the midst walked some power for which there was no name, and the Darkness issued from it" -- gimme a break), the off-putting navel-gazing zeal with which Tolkien rattles off his Middle-earth Xs and Os (how often does The Silmarillion feel like a sound loop of the possessed Louis Tully in Ghostbusters?) -- that finishing the book felt like cause for celebration.

A marvelous, if too brief, interview with one of our best living poets. His intellect, precision and candor put one in mind of Marilynne Robinson.

Since the beginning of June, my friend Graham and I have embarked on a project that we have yet to name and which is proving to work wonders for our friendship (not that it was imperiled before), our depths of patience (much-needed in this world of hustle-and-bustle, where skimming texts is preferable to reading them), and our critical faculties (Graham has a BA in English, while my degrees are in English, too -- but without classrooms, the tools at our disposable lose their edges). In short, we're reading one longish poem a month together (taking turns in choosing) and writing proper, sit-down, longhand letters to one another about it. As a result, in the last two-and-a-half months, I've handwritten more letters than I had in the previous five years at least -- and I used to be a prolific writer of letters. As well, I've had more success this summer nosing into the strata of poems than I have since my first semester of graduate school in 2006. The project (which was Graham's idea, it should be noted) has come to feel -- in this very short amount of time, in the midst of the turbulent relationship I'm having with my church, and in the midst of my current appalled disenchantment with politics -- necessary for my sanity, for my sensitivities to all things beautiful and worthwhile. My wife has taken to have me say three nice things a day about people, so quick have I been to resort to snark and viciousness in considering the news, the drivers on the road, the customers at the store at which I work, the narrow-mindedness of certain fellow parishioners, etc. It has been a challenge, but I imagine time will bear out her wisdom in having me push myself to kindness. And this poem project feels like one half of this focus on kindness -- or if not kindness, generosities. God makes us whole, but that wholeness is often achieved through art, through relationships. I like to think of God inhabiting the ink of a page of a book, the insistence of a loved one, the thoughtful reproach of someone I have wronged. These things -- novels and poems, marriages, even confrontations -- become the cosmos. Or at least we're reminded of the cosmos existing within them. Art can be a harbor for us when the rest of the world seems to have gone mad (even art about a world gone mad -- Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon is impressing me in spades just now), when we ourselves seem to have gone mad.

What constitutes a classic? It is the question of questions among book lovers (and one to which Harold Bloom, of course, believes he has the answer). Is a specific elapsed time a prerequisite? Or rather: an elapsed time taken alongside a book's aesthetic and moral gravitas? It's a question that puzzles me often -- with respect to what I read and to what those around me read (everyone I've ever known who has read Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow wonders how the hell it managed to purchase passage into the canon). I despised Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary when I read it in my early 30s -- what is it about that novel that makes it quite so beloved (and it is beloved, placing second in this list of tallied, weighted votes from well-known authors naming their favorite books)? Did I somehow read a clunking translation (I should note that I've linked to a more recent, and perhaps better, translation above in an attempt to steer readers away from Eleanor Marx Aveling's)? (Such translations are out there and -- in certain cases -- make all the difference. Compare the translations of Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter from Charles Archer and Tiina Nunnally. Night and day, the former a linguistically anachronistic nightmare, the latter a sublime rendering of a sublime fiction.) But is the translation the problem when the novel is a study in despicable people behaving despicably (a la the Flaubert)? Leaving translated works aside, what about the notion of national identity or a novel's place in a nation's consciousness as an earmark of its inclusion in the canon? Why, for instance, does (Canadian) Timothy Findley's novel Not Wanted on the Voyage remain in print in Canada as a Penguin Modern Classic despite being long out-of-print here in the States? Can a book be a classic in one place and not another? Or more to the point: can a book be marketed as a classic by a top publishing house in Canada while a branch of that same publishing house in America doesn't even see fit to lift the book from obscurity in the most limited way? (It bears mentioning here that Penguin is the very publishing house that classifies Pynchon's above-mentioned poo-fest novel as a classic.) Isn't the establishment of a literary canon necessarily a nod in the direction of subsuming the insular question of national identities into the larger fabric of shared humanity as expressed in art striving to outdo itself? Having just finished Not Wanted on the Voyage, I consider its absence from American bookshops a tremendous loss to serious readers -- indeed, as great a loss as it would be to Canadian readers if Philip Roth's American Pastoral were to suddenly find itself without an edition in the provinces.

Food for thought. Goodnight all.      

Sometimes we dig ourselves into holes (rabbit warrens?) of commitment and find ourselves floundering a bit to keep our heads above water. On the rare occasions this happens to me -- me being who I am -- it more often than not has something to do with books. And so while two months ago I was merrily going about my days, working at Target, reading in the evenings, exercising at the gym, watching Family Feud with my wife during supper -- I'm now (in addition to working at Target and riding the elliptical for three or four hours a week) taking tennis lessons on Monday nights, teaching a community education class in fairy tales on Wednesday nights, hosting a film series at church on Thursday nights, engaged in a handwritten-letter dialogue with a friend in which we tackle a different poem each month, have put together (i.e. have solicited signed copies of novels and memoirs from writers all over the map) and am now raffling off book baskets for our church fundraiser this summer -- and have fallen a little behind in both my Eclectic Shade Tree and Dickens bicentenary reading as a result of this whirlwind of busyness. To paraphrase Bilbo Baggins in Peter Jackson's adaptation of Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring: I feel a bit like butter scraped over too much bread. Come the end of July, the fundraiser will be over, as will the tennis lessons and the film series, and I'll be able to start looking ahead in earnest toward teaching English Composition II in the autumn, to spending the early winter curled up with coffee and Little Dorrit, to Les Miserables and Anna Karenina and Cloud Atlas hitting the big screen.   

Onward.