"Perfect Reader" by Maggie Pouncey

There's a confusing force behind the (mis)label of "first novel" that mythologizes the new author, flooding him/her with the misnomer of "rising star," among other deceiving titles. My purpose is not to criticize the process of examining an author's experience or maturity and how the media introduces said author; this, I believe, is inconsequential. What I am most concern with is how this label straddles the thin line between a promising future and the proverbial "kiss of death" effect. Maggie Pouncey needs not be afraid. Her "first novel," "Perfect Reader" shines with the quality of an established author. The novel evokes not only the writer's experience in terms of plot building and expository techniques, but also a curious knowledge of intimate emotions--the very emotions that make fiction a mirror of life. Ms. Pouncey's talent is "up there" with the likes of Claire Messud, Arundhati Roy, and Zadie Smith. "Perfect Reader" is a bright start to a future in contemporary fiction that totally banishes the artificial barrier of "first" or "debut" novel. I recommend "Perfect Reader" without reserve.

The novel builds on the relationship between Flora Dempsey and her recently deceased father, Lewis Dempsey, poet and college president, among many other known and unknown roles. I've already read some reviews out and about the Internet encircling interpretations around the theme of Electra complex. I will borrow a statement previously recorded to describe this limited interpretation: To say "Perfect Reader" is about Electra complex is to say the Grand Canyon is just a big hole in Arizona. Catch my drift? The fact that Flora shares the spotlight with so many other characters in the plot is not a deficiency in this novel. On the contrary, there's Cynthia, Flora's father's last lover, and the strain it puts on Flora to account as one of those examples of shared spotlight. Cynthia is characterized in a way that makes the reader change directions... to like her, or not to like her, that might just be the question. Flora's mother is another case of unpredictable twists and turns. It is the same with Flora, I am afraid, but it is that ambiguity that made me want to read this to whatever conclusion it came to. The ties between the characters is masterfully done. Who would think to make Lewis Dempsey's attorney (Paul) Flora's lover? That I did not expect. It is not that it makes the plot complicated in frivolous ways, but the nature of the relationship between Flora and Paul is a novel in and of itself. Those who claim Flora as an ambiguous character impossible to relate to must consider the opposite of that argument: Flora is NOT a predictable character. Would that had made her more likable? I doubt it. The character does its job quite well, and keeps the reader interested in not just the protagonist and her decisions.

Reviewing a book is not the same thing as summarizing a plot. My reading of "The Perfect Reader" was also enjoyable because of the craft and artistry of the language. Here's a passage that I just had to reproduce here: "He imagines the two of them meeting years earlier, when they were young, when she was still a girl, her body 'serpentine, unbitten; the bulb below my ribs not yet ripened.' Had he not realized what was undone under such revisions? For example, Flora? Better to have Cynthia from the beginning than to have had Flora at all? And her mother, beyond being erased, became the emblem of all that had gone wrong, fifteen years of marriage reduced to a regrettable error corrected only with the second coming of love, the Edenic Cynthia, the post-apocalyptic redemption of sins past, the clean slate, or brave new world, the wonder and rightness of it all, at long bloody last. If her father had lived, these paroxysms might have come to seem overdone even to him, but he had not lived, and so their passion was poised and immortalized in the state of perfection, in the state of poetry." This passage refers to Flora's painful interpretation of her father's poems. She feels he wanted to erase his Ante-Cynthia life, erase Flora from the face of the planet, and the rest of an entire world with it. And all of this for Cynthia? Impossible. Thus Flora does all she can (as her father's literary executor) to delay and/or stop the publishing of the poems. The conclusion of the struggle regarding with the poems displays a character that, having gone through a gamut of emotions, grows in perspective, maturity and compassion. Her relationship with Cynthia settled, Flora embarks on seeking her future away from Darwin College.


There's another passage I had to keep reading again and again. This takes place when Flora meditates on what the place (Darwin College) and her father's role in it meant to her. The reason I love this passage so much is because, for the first time in my academic life, I have been told what academia really is and what it stands for without any need for apologies. "She was done with Darwin College. What was it to her? Her father's employer; her family's former landlord; the setting of her childhood. A collective of disappointed people burying themselves under ideas. Who privileged (their word) thought about all else. Ambitious thinkers, grasping, striving, while trying to look contemplative, nonchalant, and depressed. And reading, reading, reading. Infinite reading. Always ready with the right reference, the counterargument, the dazzling associative leap. They had what looked to the rest of the world like the most outrageous gig--you barely had to be there; you were an expert; you walked to work. And yet there was something wrong with all of them." I take this as someone having the insight and the brass to tell it like it is. I read this quote to a colleague and she asked me if I didn't feel in the slightest insulted. Like a politician, my answer could have been based on false emotion, but it felt great to see her react to such an aggressive definition of what we do.


I enjoyed "Perfect Reader" tremendously. I pray and hope Ms. Pouncey is not buried under the monikers and titles defining "Perfect Reader" as her "first novel." She has much to offer and knows quite well how to do it.

Teaching and Time to Write

Maureen Corrigan writes beautifully about her appreciation of literature. Books like these make one wonder why on earth is someone else writing what we ourselves could have written years ago. She explain the excitement she feels while reading the extreme-adventure stories, especially when it is a woman protagonist of the same. She defines the extreme-adventure books as "Into Thin Air," and "The Perfect Storm." I can see both of those stories populated by eager heroines, ready to embrace whatever the world throws at them. I am wanting to read more and hopefully this weekend I will make time to do so.
This weekend the students began reading "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets" by Stephen Crane. I have taught this novella before; it is an extraordinary story to introduce students not only to the Naturalist/Realism movement, but also to help them interpret the story from a nihilist/existentialist perspective. I've had little problems with the novella in the past, so this next week might prove for one with little or no inconvenience.
I signed up for the National Novel Writing Month (November) program. The goal is to write a 50,000 words or 175 page novel in 30 days. The good thing about it is that you only have to keep the story moving; editing is done after the first draft is completed. Then you can take the rest of the year fixing it up. We have to agree that the most challenging part of writing is getting that first draft out. What is difficult is to keep going; being a perfectionist, I know this will be very hard. I have plots swimming in my head since I left Washington DC, and I know with a much better discipline I would have finished at least one of them in the past. No crying over spilled milk, though, and I am taking this project seriously. I feel so much better when I fancy myself a writer! :-)

James Salter & The Case for Literature

This is the essay from "Writers on Writing" that prompted my diatribe about the end of literature: James Salter's "Once Upon a Time, Literature. Now What?" Here's a nice passage:

We know that what is called popular culture has over-whelmed high culture with consequences not yet fully realized. Pop culture's patrons, youth and a large number of those who were formerly young, have rewarded it with immense riches, advancing it further.... Are we witnessing a mere collapse of taste or the actual genesis of a new myth worthy of replacing the outdated Trojan War or of standing beside it? As with the glorious stock boom, age-old standards of value are henceforth cast aside.

I think Salter is right on target here when he writes about the supplanting of the one for the other. There was a clip on television once of a young man (obviously a great fan) just coming out of a theater after watching the latest Star Wars installment. He was screaming at the top of his lungs that George Lucas was a god and that Star Wars was the greatest story ever told. I was deeply disturbed. No doubt the young man was a fanatic, but some thing else seems to be out of sync here. Has anyone ever heard of the genealogy of myth? I think it was Joseph Campbell who first coined the idea that all great stories are geologically based on previous ones; especially those stories based on the struggle of good versus evil. Star Wars inarguably has its roots in many previous stories, the legend of King Arthur being the most obvious one (Excalibur i.e. light saber, etc.). So I think that this is what this generation is losing. They take everything at face-value and bother little with what came before. Perhaps I am sounding like an old-bite, but when I was a teenager things had substance; all things seemed to evolved from the root of art, poetry, music, literature, history, philosophy. In fact, there wasn't a good story in secondary school that we didn't compare to our Greek Mythology class. We are, above all, losing this type of critical thinking and drawing connections between things. And the Luddite in me keeps wanting to come out... "it's the technology, stupid!"

The Politics of Ruining a Book

Manguel ruins his book in the end with a manifesto of political proclamations against the United States and its allies. The book was written in the year the Iraq war began, so I can see how he might include some criticism, but to ruin such a potentially great book to make a political statement or to bash George Bush is simply ridiculous and irresponsible. The last third of the book is injected with a leftist diatribe that Manguel intends to forcefully link to the books he read throughout the year. I am disappointed. I wonder how books like these fall through editorial nets (perhaps they don't). I am not writing this from either side of the political spectrum; I would still hold right-conservatives to the same scrutiny. Manguel simply ruins the book and there's no excuse for it.

I am reading "Writers on Writing," a collection of the essays that appeared in "The New York Times" over a couple of years. There are two volumes of this collection so I'll be writing on individual essays and hoping to apply some of the advice to my own writing. Also, I think I am (for the first time) reading two books at the same time. The other books is a collection of short stories by Yoko Tawada, "The Bridegroom was a Dog." Most of the reading for the Tawada volume I will be doing between the hours of 11:30 and 12:10, since that is the time that I'll be most likely to be able to read without interruptions. I am really sorry for the Manguel book, really, it just doesn't make any sense to me.