Gaslight

We have gas lamps in our neighborhood; real, old-fashioned gas lamps that turn on automatically at twilight and remain softly lit until sunrise the next morning.   The light is beautiful and atmospheric (though not really authentically atmospheric, since my neighborhood was built by Levitt Brothers in the mid 1960s.) They're also useful.  A few years ago, we were plagued with frequent power failures, and the gas lamps were the only available light during those times.  Of course, if a gas lamp is on your property, as in our case, you have to pay for the gas.  Some of our neighbors have gotten rid of their gas lamps for that reason; we like ours so much, though, that we've never bothered to really analyze how much it affects our gas bill.

*****

If you want to write a novel, you have to read novels, and a lot of them.  This isn't hard for me. I still read novels for the story and for the characters, but I also like to study the differences between one approach and another.

For example, Rebecca West versus Penelope Fitzgerald, not that I compare myself to either of them, since they were two of the greatest writers of the 20th century.  I just finished Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring, which takes place in Russia just before the revolution.  It's hard to imagine that anyone could write anything about early 20th century Russia in fewer than 1000 pages, but The Beginning of Spring is just barely 200 pages, and it's really a novel, not just an overly long short story or novella. Fitzgerald was a late-in-life novelist, and I have to wonder if she didn't spend years writing this and her other novels in her head before finally setting them down on paper.  Because in her novels, including The Beginning of Spring, the reader understands the story and the characters and the conflict (though not how it will be resolved) almost from the first page.  There's nothing gradual; you're immersed in this very foreign world (and apparently, Fitzgerald herself never even visited Russia) from the very first moment.

Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows, on the other hand, is over 400 pages long, and it meanders for the first 150 or so.  I love Rebecca West; I've read The Thinking Reed at least three times, and Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is one of the best books, in any genre, of the 20th century.  And I'm usually (not always, but usually) extremely reluctant to abandon a book once I reading it, but I almost made an exception for this one.  I'm glad I stayed with it, though.   The story really picks up momentum about a third of the way through, and then it doesn't let go.

The Fountain Overflows is about an Edwardian family who were apparently very much like West's own family.  The book was written many years later, after World War II, and is told in the first person by Rose, one of three sisters whose father is a brilliant but careless writer, and whose mother was a concert pianist in her youth.  Rose, who is also telling the story from the perspective of late adulthood many years after the events of the story take place, is neither nostalgic nor sentimental.  She's just aware that the world in which she grew up is irretrievably gone, and that no one other than her father was aware that their world was endangered until it was too late.  I'm a little slow on the uptake sometimes, so it took me a while to figure out why Rose keeps mentioning the gas lamps in her family's house. Light from gas lamps is softer, less harsh and glaring, then light from electric lamps. But once the electric lamps took over, gas light was gone, almost for good, except for decorative purposes, just like my gas lamp.  I suppose that someone who spent years studying to earn an English degree should recognize an extended metaphor before it has to come and beat her over the head, but I learn everything the hard way.

*****

The Beginning of Spring (and it just occurred to me now that this title might have been ironic--again, slow on the uptake) and The Fountain Overflows are very different books, with one very big thing in common.  Both books take place in worlds that will soon vanish, completely and violently, and the occupants of those worlds are mostly completely unaware of what's about to happen.  This seems relevant right now, for some weird reason.