The Shifting of the Fire, Ford Madox Ford

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This is an early (1892) Ford Madox Ford novel, which has been undeservedly forgotten. Yes, there are some strange bits (the crows) and some overly stagey-Gothic bits, but there is so much good here that shouldn't be rushed by. Ford, like Woolf, has a keen awareness of subjectivity: the compressed/dilated experience of time, the gap between the interior and exterior in conversation.

The premise of the book is a mercenary marriage a young woman (Edith) makes to an elderly millionaire when her fiance (Clem) suddenly loses his fortunes. What makes the story fascinating, I think, is Ford handling of it, starting with a rather extraordinary paragraph about the realities of poverty that keeps the reader from sliding into conventional moralizing.

He concludes:
"If you are sentimental you will shudder and feel righteously horror-struck at the turn of affairs, if practical you will say, 'H'm, a very proper arrangement under the circumstances."

Edith herself, when considering her options, justifies her decision as a form of 'earning money' toward her future happiness, and although Ford does not explicitly pursue this, it at least raises the reality that for young women of her class of her time, autonomy is largely beyond reach.

You find here, in early form, an observation repeated in "Parade's End" that the English are, in Ford's view, singularly ill-equipped to deal with passions and life's great events.

And then there are the tiny gems which give depth and dignity to the unremarked, like Clem's maiden aunt:
"I have little doubt that the poor old lady, stiff and starched as she was, cried a little the night before he departed, for the sight of him had caused the return to her mind of an old, sweet sorrow, and she had grown old and feeble, and her frame was ill able to stand even the shadow, falling thus after long years, of a passion that had once moved her in her most occult being."

Even Edith's horrible husband gets his moments of sympathy:
"Delays of any kind were dangerous to Mr. Kasker-Ryves, inasmuch as they forced his thoughts inwards, and he detested his thoughts."

Crosstalk, Connie Willis - NO SPOILERS

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This is a recent release, and if you’re like me and pre-ordered the book a million months ago, the last thing you want is for someone to give away the plot (!!!), so I’ll keep my comments general.

Willis consistently creates characters it’s easy to like. She’s particularly good at setting up love triangles in which a smart, beautiful woman is trying to get closer to a charming, perfect, preoccupied Guy A, only to discover through the execution of the plot that it’s the smart, sweet, slightly rumpled Guy B she wants. It’s about moving from love-out-there to partnership; it’s about a woman (anyone, really) turning away from being dazzled by “perfection” to recognizing true worth is a good heart inside a less flashy exterior, which is partly about romance, but also about what we expect of ourselves, and being kind to the less-than-perfect aspects of ourselves. That never gets old for me.

I think, collectively, of Willis’ work as an indictment of superficiality. She has a set of stock characters she shows as silly: people who gossip, helicopter parents, women who date a string of wrong men without knowing why, the Mr. Perfects. To her credit, she often finds a way to add a twist – so in “Bellweather,” the insufferable Flip turns out to be a key to the puzzle. But essentially Willis uses them as obstacles, delays, and for easy comic effect, which is fine, of course. I do think it loses on compassion, because people (or parts of ourselves) driven by the Urgent rather than the Important are fearful and in pain under the surface – so I can moderately enjoy them, but I think her style of comedy works best in her short stories and in her novel-length books I prefer her at her more serious: Passage, Lincoln’s Dreams, Blackout, etc. I love her comedy; I think she is at her best when she grapples with loss and specifically death.

There’s one line – not a spoiler – in Crosstalk that sums up Willis’ style of writing for me: 

Every thought was connected to every other in a tangled maze of memories and cognitive links and associations... 

because I don’t think Willis writes “plot-driven” books, nor are they really “character-driven”…. I think they’re “theme-driven.” She’ll take an idea, like in this case communication, and riff on it – names, images, setting, elements of the plot – in this kind of ever expanding, looping back in on itself and shooting off in new directions style – and by the end you’ve found out a lot of really fascinating tangentially related things and have a sense of having thought more deeply about something important. She often builds these around a question, or a series of related questions, that form the “quest for knowledge” plot that hook me and drive me to keep reading page after page. I ADORE her books. She is the writer who has made me want to write.