Iris Murdoch, The Bell ****

A small community of lay people live at an English estate just outside the gates of an abbey of cloistered nuns. A young wife and a matriculating college student visit at an exciting time: the abbey will soon get a new bell, to replace the medieval one that was lost long ago under legendary circumstances. The young visitors stir up turmoil within the apparently tranquil community.

The Bell would be an excellent novel to read in a college English class. It takes place over a short period of time, almost entirely on the grounds of Imber Estate, with a small cast of characters. Its themes and symbols are very near the surface, ripe for discussion. There's the bell, of course, but also birds (starting with one that Dora rescues from the floor of the train) and the literal boundary between the spiritual realm and the secular world (a building in the abbey wall in which one half of each room is outside and the other half inside of the enclosure, with a grille and gauze screen between).

The first chapter, with Dora's train ride to Imber, could stand on its own as a short story while also introducing one of the key conflicts. I loved the descriptions of the Estate and its grounds, except for a few too many "rights" and "lefts"; the setting was peaceful and clearly drawn. Only a few of the characters got proper development, though.

The Bell is the first Iris Murdoch book I've read. It's an early one: her fourth novel. Its story of people in a self-satisfied community struggling with their desires reminded me vaguely of John Updike with a British gloss.

George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain ****

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a textbook of sorts for a college writing workshop. It includes seven stories from 19th-century Russian authors (three Chekhov, two Tolstoy, one each from Turgenev and Gogol), each followed by discussion notes and associated writing exercises. It strikes a perfect balance between literary criticism and writing advice.

Saunders advocates a bottom-up approach to writing, focusing on the details of the language and on individual moments rather than coming to the task with a predefined structure or point to make.

We often discuss art this way: the artist had something he wanted to express, and then he just, you know, expressed it. That is, we buy into some version of the intentional fallacy: the notion that art is about having a clear-cut intention and then confidently executing same.
The actual process, in my experience, is much more mysterious and beautiful and more of a pain in the ass to discuss truthfully.

The very helpful exercises involve constant revision and attention, with the style and characters and themes emerging through the process. Saunders admits at one point that the "moment of supposed triumph [when he discovered his authorial voice] was also sad" because it wasn't like the voices he'd set out to emulate from the masters. In his analysis of the stories, he often imagines the author ending up with a different, fuller story than the one he started to write.

The seven classic stories are... fine. I have to admit that most of them don't speak to me as deeply as they speak to Saunders. He draws many excellent general lessons from his close readings, but I was less than fully engaged with the details.

The one story that did captivate me was Chekhov's "Gooseberries," which just happens to be the story to which the book title refers. Its richness, complexity, and ambiguity landed with me in a way the others didn't. Is it moral to be happy when your happiness depends on others' misfortune?

Saunders suggests that when we read stories –– or even an instructional book like this one ––we pretend to accept the position and views of the author "to see if there might be something in it." At the end, the reader or student "snaps out of it, disavows the [author/]teacher's view, which is starting to feel like a set of bad-fitting clothes anyway, and goes back to her own way of thinking." This view sounds quite similar to my long-proclaimed penchant for "trying on" different worldviews, which like Saunders I consider to be a moral exercise.

Steven Millhauser, Voices in the Night ***

Steven Millhauser has a unique writing style that seamlessly combines traditional realist prose with mildly fantastical premises. He is particularly good at describing small-town American life and how people react to slightly absurd situations such as the discovery of a dead mermaid or the appearance of benign phantoms. Many of the stories in this collection share a common theme: mysterious intimations of something supernatural provoke the residents of a town to ponder the meaning of their lives.

In "Miracle Polish," a man buys a bottle of mirror polish (from a strange door-to-door salesman, of course) that makes his reflection look like "a man who believed in things." In "Phantoms," people occasionally see apparitions who "are not easy to distinguish from ordinary citizens" and look at them before quietly and swiftly withdrawing. "The Place" is a hillside outside of town where people just feel free from the normal pressures of their lives.

I am very fond of the tone and atmosphere of Millhauser's stories –– I've also read We Others, Martin Dressler, and Little Kingdoms –– but they often lack a satisfying conclusion. The stories in the back half of Voices in the Night are rather vague in their details ("it was like an empty room you could put things in") or feel purposeless. 

Gtretchen McCulloch, Because Internet *** 1/2

Gretchen McCulloch is an "internet linguist," which means a linguist who analyzes language on the Internet. The most important purpose of Because Internet is to persuade a general audience that the English language used on Twitter and in text messages is just as rules-bound and complex as any other form of the language. This is a common theme in popular linguistics books, arguing against those who lament the inexorable decline of standards.

I expected the book to primarily discuss semantic and grammatical changes, such as the one illustrated by the title. (In 2014 Childish Gambino released an album called Because the Internet, which already sounded strange to us old folks; six years later we've also lost the!) McCulloch does cover a few of these changes –– for example, LOL starts as an initialism for the IRL action and ends as a conversational softener –– but she spends more time showing how texting practices are creative solutions to the problem of capturing tone of voice and gestures in textual conversations. The Internet has exploded the number of contexts in which we practice informal writing, and we need ways to enhance the social bonding functions of language in those contexts.

In an early chapter McCulloch presents a taxonomy of "internet people" based on when and why they engaged with in Internet. Old Internet People, for example, came online during the period of BBSs and hand-typed URLs; their culture and language practices assume that their cohort have technical proficiencies that Post Internet People likely don't have. The most significant generation gap is "about whether you dismiss the expressive capacity of informal writing or whether you assume it." Personally, I came online near the end of the Old Internet People period, as exemplified by the fact that I occasionally use faux XML tags (</sarcasm>) and capitalize the word Internet.

I appreciated the focus on communicative intent, enjoyed most of the stories, and was persuaded by most of the author's analyses. However, I did find myself wishing that the argumentation was a bit more structured. I thought the chapter on memes was the weakest one, despite the fact that it was apparently based on prior work.