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Sixteen Geese and Tristram Shandy

Tuesday morning, when Albert, the border collie, and I went out to Gardiner pond, a half inch of rain had already fallen on our rain gauge. The rain did not let up while we walked. We were later than usual; in these dark days, a few minutes after nine is early enough. The pond was high: for two days, off and on, the inflow had exceeded outflow. The shallow brown water was lethargic and bloated, reaching beyond the pond’s border of cattails, which looked sodden and defeated by the gloomy weather.

We spotted four Canada geese huddled on the north side of the island in the center of the pond. Walking past the old birch that had crashed to the ground in the strong southwest wind that blew in before the rain started, we were surprised by an additional dozen geese across the water, sitting and strolling on the south bank. We don’t often see geese out of the water this time of year. As we rounded the west end of the pond, several geese blocked our path. Albert pulled me on. He does not cotton to anserine interruptions on a serious walk. Goose psychology is not an open book, but I guessed their low cackles expressed goosey aggrievement at the intrusion of a determined border collie and his human.

We saw no mergansers, hooded or otherwise; the heron that surveys the pond from the trees on the island was absent, but the usual dozen oblivious, quacking, and dabbling mallards were checked in for the day.

I’ve been following up on an old promise I made to myself years ago: I’m reading Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, a confusing book by an Irishman from Clonmel, County Tipperary, who wrote in Yorkshire England about twenty years before the American revolution. The book is considered a novel, although it is hard for me to think that it even resembles novels written today. Some say that Tristram Shandy deeply influenced authors like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Pyncheon, and David Foster Wallace. I have books by all of these authors on my shelves, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to finish any of them, which says more about my limitations than anything else, I suppose. In Sterne’s favor, he was accused by critics, then acquitted by posterity, of plagiarizing from Robert Burton’s meandering and wordy The Anatomy of Melancholy, written about a hundred years prior to Tristram Shandy. The Anatomy is one of my favorites.

Nevertheless, I have enjoyed Tristram Shandy immensely so far, but it’s hard to read. The vocabulary is more recondite than my own. I keep a dictionary at my side. Saying the book rambles is understated inanity. Duh. I’ve gotten near the end of the second volume of nine.

The book begins at the moment of Tristram’s conception, taking the routine of beginning an epic with the birth of a hero to an extreme. At the scene’s climax, Tristram’s mother asks his father if he was forgotten to wind the clock. From that high point, Sterne bumps, doubles back, and twists on toward Tristram’s birth. Some one hundred fifty pages later, his mother is in the pangs of childbirth with a woman midwife in attendance while Tristram’s father Walter, his uncle Toby, and a man-midwife, Dr. Slop, chosen by Tristram’s father and detested by his mother, listen to a sermon that fell out of a technical book on military fortifications, Uncle Toby’s obsessional HOBBY HORSE [Sterne’s caps.] The sermon is read by Uncle Toby’s theatrically inclined servant, Corporal Trim. If you think the names Slop and Trim are salaciously suggestive, I think you are right.

This is either a train wreck or a masterpiece. Oddly, I am finding Tristram Shandy surprisingly relevant to my thoughts in the first month of 2020.

Father, Toby, and Dr. Slop debate a plan for a wind-powered chariot. Piloting a wind-powered vehicle does not require purchasing horses and feeding them. The vehicle is fast and free, but they decide it should not be built because it would threaten the critical trade in horses and fodder. The climate change debate, anyone?

The sermon read while Tristram’s mother suffers could have been written and delivered by Anglican clergyman Sterne himself. Its subject is the co-dependence of moral ethics and religion. The gist is that a morally ethical man without religion is free to act despicably when ethical rules do not prohibit an action. For example, ethically upright bankers may throw widows and orphans out to starve and die on the streets while following the letter of laws and ethical rules. Without religion to question their greedy motives, they feel no compunction to stop.

Conversely, religious people who place religion above morality may steal and murder for profit, but as long as they intend to later repent, which may be years after the profits from their crimes are enjoyed and gone, they remain secure in the good graces of their religion.

I read op-eds and tweets on these subjects every day in 2020.

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What a Terrible Way to Begin a Novel! But I Love It


Anthony Trollope’s The American Senator begins with a description of Dillsborough. Might as well call it Dullsville.

Trollope explains that Dillsborough county has no special landmarks, the village is small, the populace is mediocre, the curate doesn’t preach well, the church is shabby, the prominent families are not that prominent, and no one is notably prosperous. Nothing of interest. He goes on to describe the family history of several generations of the Morton and the Masters clans. Somewhat complex, as most family histories are, but devoid of dramatic tension. Dillsborough is dull. The residents of Dillsborough are dull. Ho hum. Is there a Seahawks game on TV? I’m not a football fan, but when there’s nothing better…


Why would anyone want to read this book? Well, I, for one, love it. I’m reading it a second time now with an online Trollope reading group. If you like Trollope, join the group. It’s informed, witty, welcoming, and civil. If you like Trollope, you’re one of us.

I bought a copy of The American Senator in the book department of Harrods on a business trip to London twenty years ago. A few years before, I received Trollope’s headliner Barsetshire and the Palliser series as a premium for joining the New York Review of Books book club, read, and enjoyed both series, but I had not read much else of Trollope. I was surprised at Harrods’ range of Trollope titles. I came home with as many of Trollope’s less well-known books as I could cram into my roll-aboard and read them all soon after.

I am in the straits of interesting a literary agent in my own novel and have read more about how to construct a compelling story than is likely good for anyone. Trollope breaks all the so-called story rules in the first three chapters of The American Senator.

Henry James complained that Trollope talked to his readers too much. He does that in the first few chapters of The American Senator. When a little interest sparks, the omniscient narrator informs us more will be said later about this person or that place, so we best not trouble our little heads about it. Today, critics would cite Trollope for reader abuse if such a thing could be done, but they would be wrong. Anthony Trollope was no fool. When The American Senator was written, he was a seasoned novelist with his craft well in hand. He was economical and he knew how to keep his story lines straight.

An omniscient narrator is somewhat rare these days, but it’s one of Trollope’s strengths. His narrator is a character speaking in the first person. The narrator is not an active participant in the story line, but he is a distinct and appealing personality. The reader hears the narrator’s voice as he tells the story and his role is as important as any of the plot characters. At times, I suspect that Trollope is offering us an unreliable omniscient narrator, if such a chimera can be permitted. I don’t question the omniscience of the narrator’s knowledge of events, but sometimes I catch a hint that the narrator’s commentary is designed to raise the reader’s hackles rather than represent an interpretation that Trollope, the author, believes is true.

From the day I started reading Trollope, I was amazed at Trollope’s descriptions of people and places that are fiercely remote from my experiences as a farm boy and software engineer, and yet somehow as familiar as neighbors across the line fences when I was growing up. The first chapters of The American Senator exercise that draw on me. Trollope’s descriptions are perfectly scaled to yield a sense of living community. In The American Senator, he adds piquancy to familiarity with the observations on Dillsborough society from a bizarre apparition from a sister planet in a distant galaxy, an American Senator from the imaginary state of Mikewa.

By the time Trollope wrote The American Senator, he was an experienced novelist and author; critics like me should not kid themselves; he knew exactly how far he could go before events had to begin to pop. And he knew how to build a setting to turn pops into explosions.

Trollope exercised some brinkmanship in these three ostensibly dull beginning chapters. The American Senator is anything but dull as the narrative rolls out and the story is enhanced by its contrast with a seemingly dull backdrop. He risked putting impatient readers off, but Trollope was saying “See, even in this dull place, life is intense and dramatic.” The seasoned master novelist takes readers to the edge of boredom, plays them with telling details, then yanks them back like a fly fisherman luring mountain trout.

The first three chapters of The American Senator are clearly not the failure predicted by modern novel writing rules or Henry James’ scolds. And I don’t accept the snide explanation that Victorian readers were starved for entertainment and therefore willing to suffer boring introductions to overly long novels. These chapters are successful for a significant swathe of readers of any era including the digital network age of the twenty-first century.

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Matt Goldman’s The Shallows

The final chapters of Matt Goldman’s The Shallows are amazing. I won’t reveal them, but they add a gracious note to the chaos of current affairs.

Mystery stories restore order: a crime is committed, the order of life is perturbed, the detective sets out to uncover the disorder and see that justice is done. In the process, the reader learns something about the causes of the perturbation, the meaning of justice, and, often, an encouraging sense that with the aid of the detective, the world will be, to some degree, restored. The best mysteries are those which both address the disorders of the time when the story was written and also touch something universal and timeless. For me, The Shallows is one of those.

As a mystery story, The Shallows reads well. Lots of punishing action, the characters are unique, yet relatable, the plot is well-constructed (surprising, but reasonable) and the setting is compelling. However, I found the beginning slow to get into; the prose was plain, choppy, generally lacking profluency, and I considered setting the book aside. But about 20 pages in, the story caught and carried me through to the end. Either the style changed, or I got used to the style. I don’t know which, but I am glad I kept on reading.

The setting is Minnesota summer: hot, humid, and proudly flyover chic. Nils Silver is a private investigator and former police detective. A lawyer is found drowned in a suburban lake. Everyone— the drowned man’s wife, his employer, and the suburban police force— wants to hire Silver to investigate. His relationship with the police is complex, not the usual blind antagonism. Silver’s cool industrial loft apartment is inadequately airconditioned and blazing hot. At every opportunity, Goldman upends the hackneyed order of events and emotions, giving the book a pleasantly askew texture.

The book is the third in the Nils Silver series. I confess that I have not read the preceding two books, but after The Shallows, they are on my reading list.