JOPLIN, Mo. —
I like to have things explained to me in a nutshell, so I was intrigued when I saw “The Western Lit Survival Kit: An Irreverent Guide to the Classics, from Homer to Faulkner,” by Sandra Newman.
The book comes in at 280 pages, which is a fair number of pages, certainly, but to cover 3,000 years of literature? Not bad!
Newman has written several books, including “How Not to Write a Novel” and “Read This Next,” as well as numerous short fiction and nonfiction pieces that have been published in magazines. She has also been a professor of literature and writing at Temple University, Chapman University, the University of Colorado and The New School, so I trust that she knows what she’s talking about.
I am of two minds about this book. When I first sat down to read it, I felt like Dorothy Parker -- I thought perhaps the book was “not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.”
Maybe it was just my mood, or perhaps I had made mental adjustments before my next reading session, because I found it much more fun the rest of the way. That said, I find it lazy to drop “f-bombs” in writing and conversation. I wish she had used vulgarisms less often than she did.
Additionally, your tolerance for this book may be contingent on how you feel about the writing style of the “... for Dummies” series of books, as they have a similar snarky tone. Irreverent? Darn tootin’.
As advertised, it runs through the Western canon from Homer through Faulkner, including novelists, short story writers and poets. The book is divided by literary periods into 13 chapters, from “Greece: Cradle of Greek Civilization” to “The Messy Twentieth: Finally Over.” The chapter titles alone give you a sense of the tone of the book.
Each chapter covers various authors of the period and has boxes delineating the importance, accessibility and fun of each of the authors’ works on a scale from 1 to 10. Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus,” for example, gets a 9 for importance, 6 for accessibility and a 7 for fun, while Milton’s “Paradise Lost” receives a 10 for importance, a 4 for accessibility and a 4 for fun.
In addition to discussing the works, Newman also covers the private lives of the authors. Most of the really irreverent material comes from those entries, but the books, plays and poems themselves come in for more than a little ribbing.
Let me close with a sample of the book to clarify the tone of the writing. Here’s the author take on “Ethan Frome” by Edith Wharton:
“This turgid Gothic, set in a poor New England town, has so little in common with Edith Wharton’s other novels that one suspects her muse was cheating with the mailman. If you love ‘The House of Mirth,’ you will hate ‘Ethan Frome.’ In fact, if you don’t love ‘The House of Mirth,’ you will hate ‘Ethan Frome.’ If you have the ability to hate, you will hate ‘Ethan Frome.’ It has everything that made ‘The Scarlet Letter’ go down like a brick: heavy-handed color symbolism, a pointless frame story, dreary characters, cold weather. In the climax, the protagonists attempt suicide on a sled, yet it is not played for laughs. Basically, if you’ve read ‘Ethan Frome,’ and you enjoyed it, you’re asleep and dreaming. Soon you will wake up in a world where you too hated ‘Ethan Frome.’”
If you like sarcasm and would like to cover many classic works of fiction from since the dawn of time -- and you don’t mind some vulgar language -- this may be just the book for you.
Globe Life
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Linda Cannon
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Linda Cannon: Book breaks down Western literature
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