No one who reads and writes can honestly doubt that the literary media is partial to work by men, and that this is indeed a story of injustice and inequality enabled by patriarchal stereotypes often excused as an unconscious bias.  Unconsciousness on this subject this late in our history is unconscionable, and therefore unforgivable.  But this conversation about gender inequality obscures the more important one we should be having if we care about the novel as a living form.

As it happens, I am teaching a Major Author’s course on Virginia Woolf this semester and my students and I read “Modern Novels,” her essay about what makes a novel great.  For contrast, we also read the recent NY Times review of Freedom in which the reviewer rejoices because this work “gather[s] up every fresh datum of our shared millennial life,” “abound[s] in journalistic touches,” “teem[s] with information,” and “data flow[s] through the arteries of narrative,” as if this kind of sweep guarantees greatness.

Woolf would say: “He is a materialist…taking upon his shoulders the work that ought to have been discharged by Government officials, and in the plethora of his ideas and facts scarcely having leisure to realize…the crudity and coarseness of his human beings. Yet what more damaging criticism can there be both of his heaven and of his earth than that they are to be inhabited here and hereafter by his Joans and Peters?”

Or, I might add, Franzen’s Pattys and Walters, the characters that the NY Times reviewer goes on to describe with surprising approbation as “caricatures,” that finally emerge “misshapen and lopsided,” not “rounded characters, in the awful phrase.”  The phrase, by the way, is from E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, and you and I might ask when the novelistic call for full or round characterization has turned “awful”?  And since when is an inserted diary written for therapeutic purposes an “ingenious device” in literature?  Throughout the review, you can hear the heavy breathing that such heavy lifting brings forth.  The point of this detailing is to bring us back to the main question: What makes a novel great?  And what makes a novelist great?  The Russians, Woolf writes, interested as they were in “the dark region of psychology,” in the soul and heart, got at the essence rather than the externals of life.  “No one but a modern, perhaps no one but a Russian, would have felt the interest of the situation…one of a shipload of ill Russian soldiers dies and is taken away; the talk goes on among the others for a time; until Gusev himself dies and, looking like a carrot or a radish, is thrown overboard.”   Woolf is describing the plot of Chekhov’s Gusev, which is interested in a mere passing moment.  Chekhov places the emphasis on evanescence, an image; we learn nothing about the ship itself, are given no details about the soldiers’ lives, nothing about Gusev, but the story haunts the reader with an experience that has more life in it than many a thousand-page doorstop filled with things, hard objects with firm outlines, easy certainties, but with none of the wavering, surrealism of our inner lives, our essence.

You might well ask why this sense of urgency, why do we have to choose between realism and essence?  At a time when the novel is threatened on all sides, when the majority of readers has come to expect from fiction only escapist entertainment, offering them more of what they know, the realist materialism of the materialist culture they already live in, gives them every reason to turn around and ask what does fiction tell me that I don’t already know.

Woolf’s conclusion is that fiction asks of us to “honor and love her” by “break[ing] and bully[ing] her…for so her youth is perpetually renewed and her sovereignty assured.”  Loving and honoring the novel means pushing and stretching the envelope to force the form to new places, while promoting conventional work that merely offers a facile though sometime eloquent caricature of our very real, materialistic lives most certainly is not.

The question must be asked, and my students and I asked it:  Do these reviewers of fiction truly love the novel, or are they more comfortable with hard facts, hence with realism rather than the profound uncertainties of life?  We looked up Sam Tanenahaus. Wikipedia informed us that he is an American historian, biographer, journalist, and though he studied literature, his work has been in non-fiction, writing for The New Republic, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and now The NY Times.  We think the answer is rather clear, and it therefore comes as no surprise that review pages for fiction keep getting cut in favor of non-fiction, and the fiction that gets top placement is often work that does less than it should to help the novel live and breathe.

In contemporary synagogues, when there is a qualified priest—a direct patrilineal descendent from the tribe of Aharon—he performs this ritual while the members of the congregation cover their eyes and their children’s eyes to protect them from what are said to be blinding magical powers this finger trick conjures. I couldn’t have been the only child who peeked and survived. My friends and I practiced the finger tricks and concluded that those who could were daughters and sons of priests. I, granddaughter of a priest, can easily separate the middle and ring fingers of both my hands.

My grandfather, who is said to have had written proof of priesthood, blessed the members of the renowned Breslover synagogue in Jerusalem every Sabbath and holiday. On Friday nights, after candle lighting, he also blessed all his grandchildren (there are a lot of us) who lived within walking distance. When I moved with my family to America, opportunities for his blessings diminished, a loss of biblical dimensions for a child raised on the stories of Isaac and Ishmael, of Jacob and Esau, who for a bowl of pottage sold his birthright, which was his right to the first-born’s blessing.

Perhaps to make up for this loss, my father provided us with alternate opportunities: Family trips took us to the homes of significant scholars and grand rabbis and the visits would end with each of us receiving blessings. And every September, for the Jewish New Year, my father blesses each of us. When I’m unable to be there in person, he offers the blessing over phone lines and though his voice and the whispered words of the prayer— May you be as the matriarchs, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah—convey the heat of his passion, I have to imagine his warm hands on my head.

The notion that one needs more than the genetic gifts and abilities one is born with can be off-putting. It means that persistence and hard work aren’t enough. It means that complete independence is a disadvantage. It might require that you stay in the good graces of the patriarch, whose hovering hands can hold sway over your future. Most startlingly, it informs you that the metaphysical matters.

Of course respect for magic, superstition, miracles, and the extraordinary are all part of religious life and came to me as a birthright practically. So that if more than one thing goes wrong on a given day, if disaster strikes too often, I can’t help but give myself up to an accounting of my sins, or think of Job, hapless pawn in God’s plan. Though in modern life we might call such behavior paranoid, a persecution complex, I’m not entirely ungrateful for my built-in overinvestment in meaning. Some days I might go so far as to say that my early indoctrination was a sort of blessing. It’s taught me how to read literature, alert to pattern. It’s taught me that humans are endowed with imagination as well as intellect for a purpose, because we are meant to rely on both. In our attempt to grow beyond superstition, in our enlightened embrace of the rational, we’ve abandoned knowledge of the extraordinary, the hidden, the transcendent, blessings that make for human excellence.

Chiasmus

At first only Mrs. James noticed: Robbie’s style had changed. His shrug, or perhaps it was the way he used his hands—where before he had moved with the efficient swing and stride of an athlete, with nothing extraneous, he was slower now and newly expressive. Home after surgery and weeks of therapy, Robbie picked up the book that Ritchie had been reading—Christopher Ricks on Bob Dylan—discussed Ricks’s gloss on Dylan’s lyrics, and added his own. When Robbie wasn’t reading, he worked out. He was determined to get back in the game the following season, and he started by putting himself through his rehabilitation exercises every day, sometimes twice a day, though it was painful.
Mrs. James encouraged him. She made energy shakes and purchased liquids infused with electrolytes. When he was well enough to make his way down to the basement to his bench, he wanted to start lifting weights again; he wanted, he said, to regain the upper body strength necessary for lacrosse, though his therapist warned him to go easy because his newly-transplanted organs were still settling in, ribs, muscles and ligaments still healing. You’re young, she said, and you were lucky, you couldn’t have had a closer match, but your connective tissues are new and still forming. If suddenly it feels like glass breaking, ease up right away.
One day, Mrs. James heard the rat-a-tat-tat of drums, and when she went downstairs, she found Robbie on Ritchie’s drums.
“Thought I’d give them a workout,” he explained, “so they don’t gather dust. Watch.” He struck the cymbals and a hundred dust motes floated white in the sunlit air.
Mrs. James watched the lonely motes settle, dust to dust, and listened to Robbie find his rhythm, fumbling at first, then confident enough to add a secondary off-beat thump. He kept this going a while, and soon he attempted a third track and kept it up, and soon drumming was part of his daily routine and he was going downstairs to give Ritchie’s drums a workout even on off days, when his muscles were repairing.
He’s coming through beautifully, the doctors said.
Traumatic experience can, in the best cases, set off a period of intellectual growth, the occupational therapist said when Mrs. James mentioned Robbie’s new interests.
She was anxious about Robbie’s state of mind, about the difficulty of finding himself alive while his brother was not. He didn’t talk about it and she didn’t want to press. Fortunately, he had not been driving. In this, at least, God had been merciful. Though it was an accident, it would have been hard for Robbie to live with the knowledge that he had killed Ritchie, and it would have been difficult knowing that the perpetrator had survived. Still this tragedy was impossible to understand, impossible to accept, and most days, halfway through the day, Mrs. James felt her head grow too warm and inside shells shattered, became shells again, which shattered, which became shells, which shattered which became which shattered which—
until she swallowed a sedative.
Ritchie wasn’t, had never been, a wild driver. He had never been a boy easily pushed toward daredevilry, had never performed stunts on demand, not even as a toddler. Though he had walked from bed to bed and wall to wall, arms akimbo for balance, though Mrs. James had seen him perform it in the morning and knew he could, he refused to show Poppa. Baby Ritchie walked only when and where he wanted to. And grown-up Ritchie impressed, when he wanted to impress, suddenly, so that they didn’t see it coming, so that by the time he let them in on a newly learned skill, he’d perfected the act. He’d surprised them all with his musical ability. They’d had no idea that he was practicing the drums at school until one day he invited them to a performance, and hearing him play, Mr. James, who years ago had played the banjo in a traveling bluegrass band, was moved to go online and bid on an awesome set of Double-Helix drums.
Now the band was looking for a drummer to take Ritchie’s place, they posted ads, and without saying anything to anyone, Robbie recorded and mailed a demo tape.
“The band will be rehearsing downstairs today,” Robbie announced one morning at breakfast, as if he were Ritchie informing his mother in advance, as they’d long ago agreed, so that Mrs. James could schedule errands or a movie or coffee with friends for that cacophonous afternoon. Mr. and Mrs. James exchanged glances and, then, seeing Robbie pour himself a bowl of Cheerios and top it off with raisins, as if he’d never disliked Cheerios with raisins, Mrs. James started out of her seat, propelled herself out of the room, out of her home—out of her mind, she felt—and Mr. James had to coax her inside and back to bed.
For his first public performance, Robbie needed black pants and a white shirt, the band’s uniform, and he borrowed Ritchie’s. After which, he started wearing Ritchie’s school hoodie, and Ritchie’s jacket, and Ritchie’s favorite flannel shirt, and soon Ritchie’s closet became Robbie’s second wardrobe, and Mrs. James understood that she wouldn’t have the dreaded task of clearing out Ritchie’s things, though she also wanted or needed it.
In September, when the lacrosse season started again, Robbie looked at the schedule and realized that he couldn’t participate in the band’s rehearsals and performances as well as in lacrosse practice and games. He didn’t debate long. After weeks of weight training and body conditioning, he gave up lacrosse for the drums. At first he continued showing interest in his former team’s scores and wins, and he high-fived his former teammates, but it was the band that came to the house for rehearsals, and it was with the band he spent his free time, so that Ritchie’s old best friends became Robbie’s new friends. But the way he was with these new friends, Mrs. James noted, was unnatural. Robbie had always been self-assured in his friendships, carefree and confident and largely unconcerned; now he showed a tentative, fragile quality. He’s trying too hard, she thought. She watched him and became convinced that he was trying to fill Ritchie’s shoes, he was trying to be Ritchie.
She worried that it was somehow her fault, that she had favored Ritchie over Robbie, rousing jealousy unthinkingly. She remembered that Ritchie had called Robbie an illiterate idiot at least once, and tone deaf too, but if they were sometimes jealous brothers, they were also often playful.
At the end of hard days came harder nights, when Mrs. James lay awake. One night, she asked herself if, given the option, she would have chosen Ritchie over Robbie. But no, it wasn’t true; she’d loved them equally, and for their very differences: Ritchie for his quiet subtlety and imaginative sensitivity, Robbie for his obtuse ease, taking life always easily. She’d loved well, loved equally, and yet. Between reality and perception floats the cloud of unknowing. She thought she heard Ritchie, or was it Robbie’s voice, reciting in her ear, a lyric without its music, with only the treble of voice, “I hurt easy, I just don’t show it/ You can hurt someone and not even know it.” The voice was Robbie’s, but the words belonged to Ritchie. She was blind and groping. She was blind biblical Isaac groping to identify which son. She no longer knew anything. She’d given life to two sons, twins. They’d arrived equally blessed, with enough in the world for both. And she had sent them into this world, to partake of it, and only one had returned, blessedness damaged.
For the anniversary of the accident, when Robbie was back in school and walking and eating and breathing as well as almost anyone, Mrs. James ordered Ritchie’s headstone etched with lines that Robbie had selected from Dylan’s Forever Young, and family and friends gathered for the long-delayed memorial. The band played Mr. Tambourine Man, and Robbie spoke eloquently, remembering characteristic moments with Ritchie, and seeing him up there, hearing him speak and read, Mrs. James understood that she had been mourning for Ritchie though it was Robbie they’d lost.