Customer Reviews

Family and a Fortune

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It's sad that the one-star reviewer on this page just didn't get it. It happens at some point to all of us. Compton-Burnett is an unusual writer, true. She is not a "realist". "Do people really speak this way?" he asks. Strangely enough, there are no actual people inside the covers of this book - only characters. And characters in literature speak any damned way the author pleases. Did King Henry IV speak in verse? This may not be one of Ivy's top five (I particularly recommend "Manservant and Maidservant"), yet it is still quite distinctive and enjoyable. But it's a highly literary fantasy/satire. If you enjoy Peacock, Firbank, Beerbohm or Schuyler, this is your cup of tea. "Germinal" it's not.

"The rich are different from us," Scott Fitzgerald is reputed to have once said to Ernest Hemingway -- to which the celebrated Nobel Prizewinning author is said to have (obviously with tongue in cheek) replied: "Yes, they have more money." Now whether Hemingway was speaking in a kind of jest, or whether the whole thing, like Oscar Wilde's declaration of his genius at the New York Customs House, was apocryphal, we will never know for sure; yet the point is well taken.

The rich ARE different. But only in an economic sense. Human nature remains human nature. And it seems the novelist's job is to illuminate the conundrums of the human condition for the reader. So why do Compton-Burnett's characters speak in what is best described as an almost inscrutable language? Yes, the characters in her novels are quite different, but it's difficult to believe people do or have ever spoken like this; it's difficult for the reader to identify with or sympathize over characters such as these being portrayed here. It's a Jacobean or a Herculean struggle for the reader to read this odd, quirky, mostly dialog-laden prose of this strange, albeit unique writer.

So to any reader comptemplating dipping into this author's almost impregnable prose, unless doing it out of an academic exercise or personal sense of obligation, I would issue a strong caveat -- be advised: don't. Not unless you're the masochistic type or the type who enjoys the monumental struggle of trying to ferret out meaning from virtually every sentence, having to read twice or thrice, so much so, that quite often the reader is left adrift in a sea of uncertainty as to where he or she is in the course of the story; you'd be well-advised to pass this up.

Still, I am aware that there are reviewers, readers and critics who swear by this author, as being an acute observer of the human condition. Fair enough. But what I would want is to read an author who does not take language and twist and bend it into an instrument of his or her own choosing and give it an almost alien life to that found in this one in which we live. To those who find meaning in her works for them, I say fine, and best of luck. This reviewer doesn't. For communication should be of more substance than merely the esoteric. It should speak to all.

Nevertheless, there are artists who are considered great and are virtually laden with layers of interpretation and enigma, providing commentators and scholars with plenty of work to last some of them -- and us -- a lifetime: Joyce, Faulkner, Proust, Picasso, and on and on.

Let there be no mistake: I am not a stranger to difficult writers, having worked my way through a good portion of them. Start with the works of Shakespeare and go on to that of Faulkner, Henry James (with the exception of WHAT MASIE KNEW, which is one of those books James wrote, like the writer under discussion, which seems to be a kind of closet drama and an insoluble puzzle) and Joyce's ULYSSES, the latter twice and well understood. Even Thomas Pynchon in our own time, who is quite a challenge; even he yields much pleasure, much wit. Never, I say, had I had the kind of comprehension struggle with those mentioned, and even boredom I had with Compton-Burnett. Besides, I have been through a great deal of 18th and 19th century British literature; yet never have I encountered the kind of resistance I get with this author.

A FAMILY AND A FORTUNE is the kind of novel one rejoices in seeing come to a merciful conclusion. I think perhaps a large part of the problem rests more with the reader than the writer. Perhaps. For I suspect this is a woman's book, with a woman's perspective and a woman's sensibility. Consider, for example, this kind of sentence:

"Oh, don't let us joke about it. Do let us turn serious eyes on a serious human situation."

Oh. Do people really speak this way? Even English people of the upper classes? I'm not persuaded. Why not say something like this: "Oh, let's not be funny, but do be serious about this." There are oh so many other examples of this kind of thing that could have been cited. But I'll spare the reader further examples.

This reviewer has been visiting the U.K. for over a fifteen-year period in summers and has never had the kind of epic struggle in understanding them (except in Scotland) that I find here.

Again, I cannot recommend this author to most readers who read for pleasure, which, after all, is the goal of almost any book that purports to be published to be read. The other kind is the kind that the writer writes for the writer's own benefit. In other words, a self-indulgent undertaking. But its author is gone, and like the Faulkners, the Jameses, et al. of this world, will never return to remedy and make clear what, in many respects, should have been made clear for the reader in its original incarnation. The only reason I embarked on this arduous struggle is the fact that I had a professor -- highly regarded and respected in his time in matters of taste and subtlety -- who mentioned this in the context of a lecture on MACBETH. In short, I wish he hadn't.