The experiment I am running in the fourth-year core subject Contemporary Fiction in English is progressing well, but there are some snags that I’d like to address here. Here we go, then.
We have now finished Unit 1 (1990-1997) and have started Unit 2 (1998-2006) and even though most students have finished reading the first book out of four assigned to them (they had three weeks to do so), some are still struggling. In one case at least this is my fault, as I assigned a student Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander (1991), the first in her series, without realizing it is 800 pages long. The student in question is coping reasonably well, as she tells me that the book is easy enough to read, but I may have made a mistake here.
In other cases I’m sharing the struggle with the students. I have not read the 152 books that the 38 students will read in the subject (four different volumes each student, if you recall) so I’m making a point of reading as many as I can as the units progress. I have read recently some very good books, others less so, but I’ve got hopelessly stuck with two: Tim Winton’s novel Cloudstreet and Alice Munro’s short story collection Open Secrets. Worse than that, these two books have dragged me down so much that I have stopped reading altogether for a couple of weeks, which is unusual with me. I have spent my evenings instead reading lots of articles from newspapers and magazines (some of which I have used in class), and endlessly poring over Bored Panda’s enticing threads.
I managed to read 40% of Cloudstreet, a very well known novel in Winton’s native Australia, but its fragmentary nature, the lack of punctuation indicating dialogue and its rather disperse chronology finally put me off. I could finish it in other circumstances, but I see in the end no enticement to do so now. The case of Open Secrets is much, much worse. I was about to eliminate Munro from our reading list following the scandal regarding her cold failure to protect her own daughter from her stepfather’s sexual abuse. Yet, in the end I decided that as a Nobel Prize winner she deserved some credit. I marvel now that she won this award, for I found the few short stories I managed to read from her book rambling to the point of meaninglessness.
The student reading Cloudstreet has loudly complained throughout the three weeks of Unit 1 that he could not cope with it. The student reading Munro has shared with me his puzzlement at her stories; we both have sought in online comment help to grasp what Munro is trying to communicate. So we face now this singular problem: the two students need to write a review of their respective books, but might not be able to finish them. I have given students permission to write negative reviews no matter how illustrious the writer they have been reading may be, but it is really hard to convince them to finish books I myself don’t like at all. My approach is that they must act like professional reviewers and finish the books as if they were paid for it; of course, the student in charge of Winton argued back that in real journalistic work reviewers negotiate what to review. He might have a point… I suggested that he cheats by writing the review as well as he can since I have no way to check that everyone has read their books. I know of a film critic, an habitual of the Sitges Film Festival, who regularly wrote reviews of films he never saw. And, yes, I know I should not encourage any student to cheat, but it’s a sort of desperate measure.
On average, along the six sessions of Unit 1 students have spoken with 20 to 22 of their classmates. I initially imagined that we could use a sort of speed-dating system, with very brief exchanges so that students would speak to all of their classmates. This has turned out to be unrealistic and in some sessions conversations have been limited to 3 partners (I use 40 minutes for this part of class). Students seem happy to have met and interacted with so many people, some of them classmates they had never spoken to along the years of the degree. In fact, it is clear to me that they very much prefer this part of the class to my own minilectures (lasting the other 40 minutes). I enjoy very much the excitement and the noise; above all, the chance to talk to students individually as I move around the classroom.
So, yes, the classes are lively and apart from their own assigned book, students have learned about 20-22 other books of the 1990-1997 period, which is what I was aiming at. I don’t think I am succeeding, however, at convincing students that most of the books in our reading list are indeed worth reading. I don’t know what the reviews will be like, but I anticipate that about one third will be positive, one third negative and the rest mixed. I assigned the books randomly and each set contains four very different volumes so the chances that some students have books not suited to their tastes are high. I do have students who grant they have been positively surprised by the first book assigned to them, but I don’t see very enthusiastic responses. I am particularly worried by the impression that very few, if any, will read any of the books their classmates have described to them, now or at some later point.
The book that is pulling me out of the slog of despondency into which Winton and Munro have pushed me is John Carey’s The Unexpected Professor (2014), a memoir with delicious humouristic touches that deals mainly with his literary education. Carey grants candidly that he did not enjoy any of the compulsory readings as a young scholar who very much preferred popular narratives. Yet, something clicked when he entered grammar school at age eleven, and he started absorbing like a sponge the classics taught to him (apparently nothing published after 1832 was part of the syllabus, on the grounds that Victorian and contemporary literature required no specific training). Although Carey reports the difficulties of other illustrious readers with some classics, he shows great admiration for works as diverse as Beowulf and the poetry of T.S. Eliot. Reading him this week I finally realised what I’m missing in class: the centrality of the writer and more admiration for their task. Allow me to explain.
We, readers, are a narcissistic bunch with a poor understanding of the effort it takes to write a (good) book—with the exception of those of us who are also writers. In Carey’s memoir, the writer stands above the reader, in this case a young man who has the good luck to get a scholarship to study at Oxford’s St. John’s college and thus start his own brilliant academic career. He is well aware of the beauties of good literature before he enters St. John’s and wishes to take a degree to be able to enjoy them even better. There is never a suggestion that it is the writers’ job to please him; the other way round, he wants to acquire an education that will enable him to rise to a level high enough to better understand the art of writing. Carey reads from a position of constant admiration which I don’t see that in class, if I have ever seen it. The general position seems to be, rather, focused on the reader’s impressions and sensations, with notable disregard for the writer, who is only seldom found to be admirable. I grant that few contemporary writers can be admired with the passion that Shakespeare or Tolstoy may awaken, but even so I am quite amazed at how quick students can be to judge a well-known work as just passable or worse.
As I joked the other day it’s sobering to see books I love debunked by my students as politically incorrect (Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is sexist) or a total borefest. One of my most brilliant students has got in her four-book set Susan Orleans’ The Orchid Thief (1998), which was made into that very crazy film called Adaptation (2002), with a script by the one and only Charlie Kaufman. This student has been positively surprised by her first book, Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990), even though she doesn’t like science fiction, but is struggling with Orleans’ book, which for me stands out among the non-fiction books of the whole period that our subject covers. I tried to explain that what makes the book so attractive is the contrast between the poor manners of hillbilly John Laroche and his deep knowledge of the exquisite world of orchids, a contrast that Orleans portrays superbly. Yet, although I could establish this much more forcefully in a conventional subject on non-fiction in which all students were forced to admire this book, I cannot force a student whom I am training to express opinion to accept my own, or the general consensus of the many reviewers who praised to Orleans’ book. For her, this is not an admirable book.
This is nothing, however, in comparison to the shock I got when another student told me she had found no appealing book among the 22 she had discussed with her classmates because they had been published long ago. That was in the period 1990-1997, when she was not born, but still not that long ago. She expects to find more attractive material among the more recent books. In contrast, I offered a student who is now reading Sally Rooney’s new novel with great interest the chance to write the corresponding review instead of reviewing her first book (Yann Martel’s Life of Pi) but she declined because she did like her assigned book. I’m happy about this.
So, to sum up, I wish students were more enthusiastic about their assigned books and the books other students describe to them, and that they valued a little bit more the effort it takes to write. I am nonetheless having a lot of fun in class, and my impression is that the experiment is working reasonably well. I am 100% sure that they are learning far more about contemporary fiction in English than if we were close-reading the same four books together. Still, my decision to teach them to express opinion is offering unexpected challenges that I hope I can face appropriately as the subject advances.