This Refection of Oysters

 

Abundance of choice, it ain't always a good thing. There can be too much on the menu, a lesson learned from of all people, shoutin' chef Gordon Ramsay. He used to do those television horror shows where he went to filthy restaurants operated by horrible people and then blew them up. When he was done, every restaurant of whatever kind was transformed into something he called a "gastro pub." It was all delightfully savage, not unlike those hoarding programs but with overly elaborate burgers in the last act. One of the mistakes made in every episode was the twenty page menu. Have to assume this is because everyone opening a restaurant in America has spent happy days in The Cheesecake Factory and Denny's. Get it? Sandwiches, pizza, sushi, deli, pancakes, waffles, suckling pig; in other words trying to do too many things and in the end doing nothing well. They all do it and it never succeeds, just like karaoke singers who select Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. 

Ambition rather needs to be particular to succeed, don't you think? Lots of eight-year-olds want to grow up to be doctors. The wise twenty-three-year-old has already settled on proctology, or thoracic surgery, or puppeteering. (I knew a guy. Hey, things change.) My own ambitions tend to the small and practical: find the remote, dust today, go back to sleep after I get up to pee, or to the large and vague: write, remember, finish things. Maybe I lack the requisite fire.

Also, work. Real ambition requires real work. I enjoy reading cookbooks. That doesn't make me a cook, does it? I am not that ambitious. I will never work hard enough to acquire the necessary knife-skills for fancy stuff like butchery or uniformly slivered things. Not going to happen. I know this in part from reading cookbooks. I have a few rules: 1) The phrase "season to taste" is a red flag. If that's all the direction you get, it's not a recipe, it's kitchen gossip; a conversation between cooks and I am eavesdropping. (Also? All they are usually talking about is salt, but how rude not to say so.) 2) "One simply must use tubular turmeric, not angular turmeric, which is fine for more common Indian dishes, and at all costs avoid ovoid turmeric..." 3) Mandolins in the kitchen are either distractingly folksy if musical (rest in peace, Dash Crofts) or deadly when slicing while on blood-thinners. 4) No good comes of "mulling." That last is really more cocktails I suppose, but like good middle eastern food, charcuterie, and flower arranging, the whole point of living in a civilized community is that there are professionals to do that sort of thing. Also? Marry a good cook if you can. I did. Simplifies things. Yes, I will dice those onions for you, and then you will make the stove-magic, and I shall toss a simple green salad and feel very good about myself indeed. Know what you're willing to do to make dinner. That's another of my long-term relationship tips. Or, we could order in again.

Which rather gets us back to overabundance, doesn't it?

Before we've finished reading the current selection for my Big Fat Book Club I am already be thinking about the next, naturally. Gotta keep making the donuts. Also, deciding which book to read is hard, even given the stated framework of only reading books of substantial length and established reputation. Got in a bit of a pickle with the last but one when I decided to read a well reviewed contemporary novel that I had not first read the whole way through myself. Turned out, nope. Lesson learned. So for the foreseeable future I plan to stick to established classics. So far we've read three that were very familiar to me, all by authors I love, and Bob's your uncle. I knew who I wanted to do next so the question was only which.

In my head, Dickens is by now one book. I own three uniform sets, two pretty, one practical, as well as individual volumes of this and that. I have letters and journalism and biographies and criticism and the scripts for his public readings. I have celebratory editions and reproductions of  firsts. All together this is Dickens. There is a famous unfinished portrait of the author, titled "Dickens' Dream," painted five years after the writer's death by Robert William Buss*. In it we see Dickens drifting in his favorite chair, surrounded by a great cloud of his characters. So it is I think of the work: Sairey Gamp at the elbow of Tony Weller, Little Nell's deathbed hard by Lady Dedlock's foggy end, Mr. Peggotty higgledy-piggledy with Pecksniffs. It's not so much that I can't keep them all straight as it is that they are all of 'em now a part of the big show. Yes, I've read them all at least once, the novels. (Notoriously, I have described in detail very moving scenes that I ascribed to the wrong novel. It happens.) Dickens is abundance above all others. 

Plot, plots, virgins, villains, disabilities, and dull men, small arts, large themes, the city, poverty and excess, the weather, education, economics, funny walks, funny faces, funny -- it might be easier to name what isn't in him as so very much is. He lacks for nothing as I read him. However impatient I may become, it is never with what he withholds intentionally -- he does like a twist more than may suit me -- but rather with what even he couldn't say outright and continue the most popular author in English. Had he said just what he meant, he might not even have been publishable. Victoria's was notoriously a more seemly era. Watching Dickens get around restrictions of language and subject is one of the real pleasures of reading him in middle age. He wants very much to tell. There is much to say. He usually finds a way, but the way isn't always straight. Even his contemporaries, nearly all of whom loved and envied him, often found him excessive. Many thought him vulgar. Not a few since think him slap-dash and have even questioned his sanity. To my mind, the faults in Charles Dickens, the writer not the man, are so much a part of the pleasure to be had of him as to be hardly worth the teasing out and ticking off. Yes, he crowds. He nudges. He goes on. He weeps like a paid Greek mourner. He laughs and roars and isn't always as funny or effective as he intends. But who else ever meant more to so many and deservedly so? Who else rewards rereading more? Short of The Bible and Shakespeare, was there ever one man who made so many memorable names, and scenes, who else broke so many hearts? (And more of his jokes land than Will's now, and require less deadly explanation.) 

So all of this, the good and the muddle, make it all the harder to choose. For example, on rereading I have become an unlikely defender of The Old Curiosity Shop. I am not an allegory guy. I've read the mockers and heard Oscar's famous joke. I am now prepared to defend the novel as superior to its critical reputation and among the greatest sermons Dickens or anyone else ever preached. A friend recently participated in what from all reports was a most satisfactory online book club reading of David Copperfield with a paid host. As with Dickens himself, Copperfield is perhaps the dearest to me of his novels. I understand the famous host's selection entirely, but am a little undone by the idea of competing even in a very small way with that great crowd of already satisfied and paying readers. Our Mutual Friend was the book I had most recently reread myself. My shelf quite literally teamed with volunteers.

Then I picked. Not but a day after I had, we had our second virtual meeting for our current book and of all things, Bleak House came up in the course of the conversation. The minute it was mentioned, a light began to flash in my head warning me that my decision, not yet announced, was wrong. It should be Bleak House, surely? So after the meeting and for the next two days I reread bits of Bleak House. But so many people will already have read Bleak House, if they've read anything at all beyond A Tale of Two Cities or Hard Times. (The short ones used to be assigned in high school. Are they still?) 

Should I have had the fish? Now I look again at the elaborate menu, maybe I should order the suckling pig?! Hot punch and syllabub?! 

Little Dorrit it is. 

In the first place I did not remember the opening chapter or the characters in it at all. It has been a long time since I read it last, and two good dramatic adaptations in the mix as well, to confuse me further. I was encouraged by the unfamiliarity. This will be fun. Then there was the weirdness. I like Dickens when he's weird; dreams and doubles and old dark houses and a gloriously furious tantrum, and then there was Mrs. Clennam's stoically self-denied lunch and that decided me again. "This refection of oysters" is a delicious archaism and quite perfect in context. And it ought to be the title of something, ought it not? And so now it is and I am happy again in my choice.

Fewer members are likely to have read Little Dorrit, or reread it recently, myself it seems included. It is late enough in the canon to be rich and dark in just the way that has brought so many moderns to the side of Bleak House, but it is not yet so far as that from the hullabaloo of the earlier comedies -- and less time spent in Chancery the better, I think. Instead we have the Marshalsea, the equally terrifying if much less complicated Hell of debtor's prison, and a fascinating setting for some of Dickens' most acid observations on money and class. Little Dorrit also sports one who for my money is Dickens' best male protagonist in Arthur Clennam, and of all the choir of Dickens' angel-virgins, in many ways the most immediately sympathetic and strong we find in the titular character. The great noise of crowded characters penned together, the eccentricities of speech and surprising description, the sheer force of Dickens at the very height of his powers, all contribute to the soundness of my choice. Shall we read a Dickens next? We shall, and this one among the many, I've decided. 

As to why we would read Dickens, might as well ask why we should read. If you don't, or won't, or can't I am frankly inclined to have no truck with you. I don't say you are a bad person or in any way inferior to those who do, only that I am full of sorrow to think that anyone, for any reason should turn away from such a feast. Self-denial? The avoidance of richness? How very Squeers. But again, I am letting characters in from the wrong book. Apologies. 

*When he was a younger man, Buss was briefly employed as one of the illustrators of The Pickwick Papers. The original illustrator, Robert Seymour, infamously killed himself after an argument with the author who had rejected some of the illustrations. Buss hadn't any experience with etching on steel plates and so when his drawings were eventually reproduced even he admitted they weren't very lively. At the time Pickwick was already a blockbuster in serial publication. He was replaced in turn by Phiz, aka Hablot Knight Browne. No hard feelings this time. Buss remained devoted to Dickens, ultimately producing the great, unfinished "Dream" after Dickens' death.