Hildegarde

I really wish I could say I’d invented the phrase I used for a title this morning, but it’s actually been around a long time, usually as a way to describe the nineteenth century novel in both  Frrance and England.  I was thinking about it, though, because of what somebody said about characters with goals. 

First, let me get back to escape.   I understand just how Janet feels about the word, because it repels me, too–there’s something about it that just feels wrong.   I willl say with some of the rest of you t hat there are times when my life is very unsatisfactory.  I don’t think it’s possible to avoid that in any life.  People get sick, people die, jobs don’t an out or turn out not to be what you expected them to be, relationships fail–and that’s assuming that you’re very lucky and nothing truly serious hits the fan.

But “escape” for me always has a tinge of mindlessness–of shutting down my ability to think.  I don’t think  I’ve ever actually wanted to do that, but even if I had,  I’m not sure I would have been able. 

And I do like arguments, at least political and religious and aesthetic arguments, and, like Janet,  I can be driven crazy by people who freak out and get hysterical at the first sign that anybody is disagreeing with anybody else.  If you go to the main web site this blog is on and look on the left side of the main bag, you’ll see an essay called “Jane’s Rules of the  Road.”  I wrote that in response to an incident of just that sort.

But I will reiterate what I said yesterday, and agree with Cheryl a bit here–there is something about focusing on my own problems that makes them worse.  That was true of writing journals, which, as I said, is why  I don’t write them any more.   But it is also true of the one or two times I tried “therapy.”

For me, there are two things wrong with therapy, at least as  I experienced it.  First was certainy the necessity of thinking always and forever on what was wrong with my life and what I felt about it.  Second was the need to define myself as sick, a requirement that was almost self fulfilling.

In that one period when I was severely depressed–so depressed that I couldn’t write, and it was long before I was publishing, so I didn’t have writing income (or lack of it) as an incentive–the one thing that helped was Doing Something, and what I did that time was to volunteer at  a call in help line. If you ever want a really fast dose of  “there but for the grace of God,” I’d suggest that you volunteer at a call in help line in Detroit.  And that was in the days when Detroit was still a viable city.

But the characters help as well, these days, and I still don’t know if they help anybody else but me.  Not only can I write about characters who have my problems and yet feel better about those problems as they have to do with myself, but I can read about them as well.  Writing is better, but the mere fact that the relative dying of cancer belongs to  a friendless young woman in Victorian London is enough to distance the issue from me.

That this is not true for everybody is obvious from those letters I get from readers who complain that they come to fiction to relax, not to read about all these terrible things they’ve got enough of in their own lives.

But the fact is that most of my reading isn’t in the genres any more, and it never was in any genre outside the mystery.  Most of my reading of fiction tends to be in those nineteenth century novels I mentioned, when the point of the novel was assumed by everyone to be, as Trollope put it, showing the reader The Way We Live Now.

At the momen, I’ve just managed to get started with the book I meant to read for Christmas, Trollope’s The Prime Minister.  This is the second to last in a series of books usually called “The Palliser Novels,” because the have to do–sort of, and I’ll get to that in a minute–with a man named Plantagenet Palliser and his career first in the House of Commons and later, once he’s entered the House of Lords, as Prime Minister.

And yes, I know. In these days, nobody in the House of Lords could be Prime Minister.  But  Trollope is dealing with a period in English history before Memebers of Parliament were even paid.

Anyway, Trollope’s two main obsessions were Parliament and the Church of England.   He stood for Parliament, but his career was not successful.   His more famous series of novels concerns the Church, and many college students over the years have been forced to suffer through The Vicar of  Wakefield because of it.  If that was all I had known of Trollope, I’d never have gone back.  But in graduate school I got the second of the Palliser novels, called Phineas Finn, and I loved that one so much that I went actively looking for more.

It wasn’t easy.  For a couple of decades there, most of Trollope’s novels were out of print.  For the graduate course I mentioned, we had to read Phineas Finn in a “miniature classics” edition so tiny it almost fit in the palm of my hand, and with those paper-thin pages that pocket Bibles used to be printed on.

In each of the Palliser novels, there are two threads.   One is the specific focus of the book, a set of characters who will appear in detail only in this particular volume.  This thread in The Prime Minister concerns a young woman named Emily Wharton and her family, thrown into difficulties because Emily insists on marrying a man–called Ferdinand Lopez–about whom her family knows nothing, and in spite of the fact that she is being sought by the nicest, finest, richest man in her circie, who also happens to be a man she grew up with.

Needless to say, Lopez turns out to be everything her family tries to toll her he is, and worse, and the novel follows the arc of the marriage and of Lopez’s career until both of them end in ruin.  Whether Emily will then get to live a decent life, I can’t tell.   In  Victorian England, a woman once married tended to be a woman thoroughly stuck.  But I’m interested to know what happens, and that’s what I was getting at about The Higher  Gossip.  This is the kind of information we are concerned about among the people we know, and sometimes for some of us about “celebrities.”  I don’t know that there is a goal here, but I also don’t think the characters just drift, as they do in a lot of contemporary literary fiction.   There’s a narrative arc, it’s just not about somebody achieving something.

The other thread in the Palliser novels concerns the Pallisers, and that amounts to The Higher Gossip, Extended Version.  I have by now followed Planty Pall’s career through four books.  This is the fifth, and there’s a sixth still to come.   The very first novel in the series traced the difficult early days of his marriage to the greatest heiress in England.  Once that settled down and the couple became committed to each other in every way possible, the books followed the careers of the two of them together, because Lady Glencora definitely “helps.”  She’s also a force of nature, which is fun.

The thing is this–I definitely perk up whenever one of the regular series characters shows up or has a more than passing part in the proceedings.  I like reading about Lady Glen because she’s Lady Glen and I know her, and that’s true by now of Plantagenet himself, some of their friends (like Phineas Finn and his wife, and a complete little tramp with money called Lizzie Eustace), and even some of the minor personalities who have popped in and out over time.

Trollope’s idea of a “political novel” is not what we usually think of it.   He wasn’t interested in the great issues of the day, but in the personal lives and careers of ambition of political persons.  You don’t have to know anything about the history of Home Rule for  Ireland or the county suffrage to understand what is going on in these books, and you don’t have to care.  What you’re supposed to care about is the people, and I do.

But that’s the question of the day–lots of people write to me to tell me that what they like best about the Gregor books is Cavanaugh Street and the community that lives on it.  These are the elements in the books that have the least to do with the mystery.   I did set a murder there once, in Bleeding Hearts, but I’ve always been wary of Cabot Cove Syndrome.   I mean, for God’s sake, it was a small town in Maine and it had a higher murder rate  than Beirut.

But why is it that I get excited to find series characters reappearing, and that other readers do, too?  What is it about the mere reappearance of such characters that can perk up an otherwise not very interesting book?  I do think The Prime Minister is very interesting, but there are a couple of volumes in that series that are less so, and they’re always redeemed by the re-emergency of Planty  Pall and  Lady Glen and company.  I know more about the domestic arrangements of the Duke of Omnium than I know of my own, and I’m more interested.

What is it about series characters that matter so much to readers?  Why will readers go on reading a series that has really fallen apart–and I know of some mystery series that have completely imploded–just to get to the continuing plot lines? 

“I love your books,” people write to me, “but I especially love te people on Cavanaugh Street.”  And I don’t care what the rest of the book is like, books set on Cavanaugh Street or with a heavy Cavanaugh  Street presence always seem to do better than books without it. 

I don’t understand this quite even as a reader.  As a writer, I find myself blowing h ot and cold on series characters.  Sometimes they’re just there and alive in front of me.  Sometimes I’m so sick of them I want to kill them all off in some literary version of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.