"Read this 25 years ago. Notes as I reread.

� Bleak House on the whole is astonishing. Is it conventionally Victorian? Oh yes, but there are pages and pages here of drop-dead writing.

� It reminds me, in its deft use of characters high and low, of the novels of Martin Amis � particularly Money, London Fields and The Information. Both writers also possess a keen grasp of the slang of their respective periods. Whereas Amis can be sparing in dialogue, Dickens is voluble almost to a fault.

� Surprising how readable the novel is after 171 years.

� Mr Skimpole is a sponge; Mr Jarndyce knows it but allows this drain on his resources since he finds Skimpole amusing. Later, we understand Skimpole’s con and how well it pays him. That he’s a child, doesn’t understand money� well, the fellow “doth protest too much, methinks.� These endless self-justifications become tiresome.

� Dickens use of patterning is often a pleasure. If it ever seems careworn though, I think it’s because he was writing this novel in serial to be published over a period of more than two years. So he’s creating mnemonic devices for his readers.

� Henry de Montherlant's famous saying "happiness writes white" seems undermined by Dickens's capacity to make happiness � and kindness � fairly sing on the page. Consider Mr Jarndyce, who is a doer of good works, and Miss Esther Summerson, whose very name radiates delight. But when Dickens pushes this pedal too hard � as he does in the scene between Mrs. Rouncewell and her son George � the result can be cloying.

� Preacher Chadband is vile with his halting oratory of pious hooey. Poor Jo, the little orphan, is blamed for being a victim, hounded for witnessing a key piece of the book’s core scandal.

"All this time, Jo . . . feels that it is in his nature to be an unimprovable reprobate . . . Though it may be, Jo, that . . . if the Chadbands, removing their own persons from the light, would but show it thee in simple reverence, would but leave it unimproved, would but regard it as being eloquent enough without their modest aid � it might hold thee awake, and thou might learn from it yet!" (p. 414)

Thus we move toward redemption. But not for Jo! His death from neglect is hideous.

Later, Jo, in a fever, is rescued by Miss Summerson, who puts him up at Bleak House, only to find he has mysteriously disappeared come morning.

——Young Richard Carstone is such a pigheaded twit. He can't be told anything. He must make his own mistakes� by taking Jarndyce & Jarndyce seriously � and he must suffer. Sad to watch, like an addict toward the end, pushed on his course by the despicable Vholes. The speaker here is Richard:

“‘Mr Vholes! If any man had told me, when I first went to John Jarndyce's house, that he was anything but the disinterested friend he seemed � that he was what he has gradually turned out to be � I could have found no words strong enough to repel the slander; I could not have defended him too ardently. So little did I know of the world! Whereas, now, I do declare to you that he becomes to me the embodiment of the suit; that, in place of its being an abstraction, it is John Jarndyce; that the more I suffer, the more indignant I am with him; that every new delay, and every new disappointment, is only a new injury from John Jarndyce's hand.'� (p. 626)

Truly, no good deed goes unpunished!

—Interesting, for all its concern about the dysfunction of Chancery, there’s almost no mention of how the great 19th century families (Dedlock et al.) made their fortunes. There is Mrs Jellyby’s colonialist monomania for Borrioboola-Gha, Africa. Then on page 699 a passing reference is made to a “large Indiaman� trading vessel. (See Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea as a kind of fictional corrective.) But empire feels very much like the elephant in the room.

� Mr Bucket is a detective and the soul of discretion. The last third of the novel is effected through him. He’s the narrative glue tying virtually all the characters together. Indeed, he seems almost oracular toward the close, which is suspenseful."

"Notes (not a review)

1. This novel is superb. It has near-perfect tonal consistency throughout. The story is set in Chicago between the wars. It is profoundly vivid in its characterizations. It feels like everything you’d like to know about Chicago and its environs at that time is here. 2nd reading.

2. I’ve been googling all the store names and street names and other place names in Chicago while reading. It’s like having an illustrated Augie March. My (sad) idea of fun.

Oh, one other point: it’s very white. Just saying.

3. The story of Augie helping a woman friend to navigate a back alley abortion is tremendously sad and, now that Roe is gone, poignant, since it’s what the U.S. is returning to. Page 294 onward in this edition. And the result, my God, is absolutely worst case scenario. Harrowing � astonishing writing.

But don’t let this put you off, the abortion sequence is a very short part of a long book. It’s only one of Augie’s many adventures.

4. The reader really gets to see the gender imbalance of the mid 1930s. When Augie makes friends with Mimi, no other male that he knows, and there are dozens, can conceive of their relationship as anything but sexual. (BTW, Mimi is the friend Augie helps through the abortion episode, even though it’s not his child.) Bellow is pointing out a ugly truth of the time. The question of how much we’ve really changed is an fascinating one.

5. There’s a wonderful description of lovemaking in the narrative context (p. 360) � and that’s rare. Usually we get nothing but love making, but Bellow has integrated it, so the storytelling doesn’t stop. And there’s nothing graphically cringey either � just more beautiful writing.

6. Thea is a nut. Augie‘s got to be thinking: how do I wind up with these kooks? But she’s a great beauty and the sex is astonishing; she drags him to Mexico to train this eagle to hung. Thea’s a rich and privileged and I found myself actively hating her.

7. When Augie leaves Chicago and the fabulous characters he knows there, something goes out of the novel. The writing remains superb, but I’m not so interested in the rural scene in Mexico, where he and Thea are training the eagle. I want that city! I want that grid of streets. I want to go back. That’s what I’m reading for, our return to Chicago."

"It's impossible to overstate the importance of All the President's Men, considering its impact on journalism and political culture and its not-inconsiderable role in turning the public against Richard Nixon. Woodward and Bernstein's book is structured less as a political saga than a detective story, with two intrepid reporters unraveling the Watergate conspiracy at a time when the press and the Beltway are mostly ignoring it. The book's sometimes criticized for this limited, perhaps self-aggrandizing angle, which seems unfair: Woodward and Bernstein would naturally focus on their own effort. They do pay tribute to government investigators who helped them, whether through anonymous tips or their public findings, and (somewhat more grudgingly) to other reporters and newspapers who unraveled the story in parallel. Yet the book's thrill is less in the particulars of Watergate than displaying the nitty-gritty, old school reporting: Woodward and Bernstein, using bluff, guile and instinct, try persuading reluctant or uncooperative informants to speak with them, spend hours playing phone tag with officials and interview subjects, prying nuggets of information from less-than-forthcoming sources (notably Deep Throat, now unmasked as FBI official Mark Felt) and try to win over skeptical, cautious editors (notably the crusty Ben Bradlee) to their cause. It's not, for my money, the definitive chronicle of Watergate - there are more thorough, equally engrossing accounts by, for instance, J. Anthony Lukas and Stanley Kutler available - but it's also not trying to be: it's the tale of two young, scrappy journalists unraveling a monumental conspiracy which strikes at the foundations of democracy. And that's as compelling now as it was 45 years ago."