Lighten up, Mr. Dostoevsky
Sheed, Wilfrid
THE LAST WORD Lighten up, Mr. Dostoevsky WILFRID SHEED he great critic Sainte-Beuve held, I believe, a low opinion of Flaubert, Balzac, and Stendhal, his three most gifted contemporaries....
...More and more of these plotless monsters have been appearing lately, many of them from the direction of Russia, while supposedly responsible editors are content to look the other way...
...nothing happens for hundreds of pages...
...Melville's hero is a whale, Mr...
...Going from bad to worse, we come to a native American author every bit as undisciplined as Mr...
...Dostoevsky rather wants to be another Graham Greene—but he hasn't bothered to learn any of Greene's craftsmanship...
...The author does seem to have a certain crude power which might be put to some use by a really good editor, like Max Perkins...
...The Red and the Black by Stendhal is at least decently written...
...One begins to fear that these young authors honestly believe that everything that interests them will also interest us...
...Alas, there are no real heroes in our literature anymore...
...This is excerpted from a column by Wilfrid Sheed first published in the April 26, 1963, Commonweal...
...It looks, from his religious preoccupations, as though Mr...
...Stendhal's is a rather foppish, humorless young man obviously written with the Hollywood actor Tony Perkins in mind, who thinks that the world circles around his own petty problems, and who displays none of the broad humanity of, say, Tom Jones, who at least had the courage to laugh at sex...
...the characters are quite unreal, especially the one called Captain Ahab, who is a stage-villain of the rankest kind...
...This one has a plot of sorts, but it seems to have been tucked in at the last minute...
...but we are a little tired of having our noses rubbed in the obvious...
...The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky proves that the "unedited generation" is not confined to this country...
...They give us halffinished books, rough blueprints of books, which too often achieve a flashing, shortlived success...
...but we are shocked to hear that he is already sixty-seven years old...
...The young writers of today are obviously not willing to take the trouble that yields up masterpieces...
...In any case, American readers will find it incredible and not a little unpleasant...
...This sprawling, shapeless affair runs to some nine hundred and forty pages, of which perhaps two hundred are actually connected with the plot: the rest vapor off into amateur philosophy, mysticism, and anything else that happens to come into the author's head...
...The book is at times little more than a spluttering tract...
...I can't pretend to know how the story finally comes out, it gets bogged down halfway in impenetrable whale-lore, at which point this reader simply tip-toed away...
...Yes, Mr...
...Life isn't like that, Mr...
...and we are more than a little tired of watching authors, who feel that their own childhoods were unhappy, parading their self-pity in thinly disguised fictional form...
...or it may simply come from a callow desire to shock...
...that they hardly know the word discipline...
...This may be meant as a commentary on post-Crimean War youth...
...Dickens, and stop trying to write "great English novels...
...Whether these rather tawdry, hysterical characters are worth writing a nine-hundred-page book about, is the kind of question publishers should be asking themselves seriously these days...
...Moby Dick by one Herman Melville seems to have just about every fault a novel can contain...
...Charles Dickens, whose first book Pickwick Papers threatened (though grossly padded) to rank him with Evelyn Waugh, has decided instead to compete with James T. Farrell...
...that, in short, they are bores...
...A ridiculous mistake for anyone to make about three such famous men: and yet I sometimes wonder whether masterpieces really are so easy to spot—supposing they simply arrived on the desk with inaccurate blurbs and unfortunate jackets, like all the other novels...
...Also, it is just as inartistic to make all your characters unpleasant...
...So sloppy is he that he begins the story in the first person and then abandons the device without explanation...
...His Oliver Twist is the kind of slice-of-life realism that makes us expostulate: photography is not art...
...Get back to comedy, Mr...
...and finally the use of symbols is embarrassingly broad and overdone...
...All in all, it has been a discouraging week...
...The following weekly roundup, written in the style of one of our more spinsterish reviewers, illustrates perhaps the worst that could happen...
...Dostoevsky and a good deal more pretentious...
...But it contains most of the flaws of a typical first novel...
...It is written in dense, pseudobiblical English (the author seems to be bucking for the title of the "new James Gould Cozzens...
...Dickens...
...Dostoevsky also over-writes atrociously...
...Oliver Twist is a seering commentary on post-Catholic Emancipation youth, with rather unpleasant anti-Semitic overtones and a set of sentimental alternatives...
...Will Julien Sorel seduce the girl—well honestly, who cares, we want to shout after a few hundred pages...
...what there is of it is melodramatic, improbable, and drowned in verbiage...
...Dickens, we know that orphans are sometimes treated badly and that a bad environment can lead to a life of crime...
...His characters are constantly breaking into sweats, turning green, and embracing each other quite regardless of sex...
...We are getting a little tired by now of these sensitive young men who take themselves with such deadly seriousness...
Vol. 121 • September 1994 • No. 16
