=Books recently read=

Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf.  This year, 1939, the Oliver family is hosting the village's annual summertime play at their estate in the English countryside. It's an amateur affair, acted by local townspeople, and meant to raise funds to supply the church with electric lighting. Meanwhile, across the channel, Europe is under the looming spectre of war with Nazi Germany. 

So basically the question Virginia Woolf is asking in this short novel is whether the people enacting the tradition of the play are engaging in a willful blindness with regards to the shattering inevitability of the war rushing towards them—or are they courageously persisting in cultivating the values that have always sustained them and which are worth preserving especially in the darkest of times. 

This entire short novel—about 150 pages—takes place in one day: the day of the play. The play itself becomes part of the novel, serving as a critical mirror thrown up to society, history, the reader, the novelist, and art itself. 

Woolf leaves herself open to the usual criticisms, that  it takes her characters 90 pages to sit themselves down to lunch, that nothing ever happens in her novels, that little if anything is ever resolved, that lots of wool is gathered but nothing so useful as a scarf is ever woven...but these sorts of objections always miss the point of all that Woolf does convey. What she conveys is the way our minds work in language that becomes synonymous with consciousness itself. What she achieves is a "stream of consciousness" as her characters seek, but never quite capture, a satisfying interpretation of the world. 

The precision of Woolf's language is, if not unparalleled, than certainly seldom equalled, and I'd venture to say, hardly ever surpassed. Although often thought of as an effete, "ladylike" writer, she can uncork a paragraph like the following, which is about as gruesome a piece of descriptive writing as anyone—from Lautreamont to Clive Barker--might execute:

"There, couched in the grass, curled in an olive green ring, was a snake. Dead? No, choked with a toad in its mouth. The snake was unable to swallow; the toad was unable to die. A spasm made the ribs contract; blood oozed. It was birth the wrong way round—a monstrous inversion. So, raising his foot, he stamped on them. The mass crushed and slithered. The white canvas on his tennis shoes was bloodstained and sticky. But it was action. Action relieved him. He strode to the barn, with blood on his shoes."

I was surprised upon reading "Between the Acts" to be reminded of Robbe-Grillet, of all people. But then again, maybe it isn't so surprising. Both authors sought to change the novel, both were interested in the workings of consciousness, subjectivity, and perception. Both had an abhorrence of the artifice and superficiality of conventional plot, except to satirize it. And both, in different ways, set themselves the project of telling the story that goes untold in most novels, specifically, what happens in the interstices between Mary does A, then B, then C. 

In a Robbe-Grillet novel, this often entails a precise description of the physical objects in a scene that become equally important as whatever human beings are on hand; occasionally inanimate things or landscapes are the sole "characters" in a scene devoid of human beings altogether. In Woolf's novels, the same impulse means describing the psychic arc of events as a character thinks her way through a time period as short as a single day. For Woolf, an entire life story—indeed, in "Between the Acts" a nation's history, even a world's history--can be contained in a single human skull; after all, where else would it exist, at least so far as it is expressed in human terms? So in the time a person lifts a teacup to the moment it touches her lips, one can travel backward and forward in time and space, across years, across continents.

To read Woolf requires a different mindset than the sort one brings, for instance, to a Hemingway novel, not to mention John Grisham. This should go without saying, but so many readers have lost this mind-set that one is compelled to say it. Did they ever have the mind-set necessary or has such a mind-set always been in relatively short-supply? Who's afraid of a Virginia Woolf novel? Almost everyone. 

Both James Joyce and Virginia Woolf died in 1941. That means we're going on three-quarters of a century after their deaths and people still routinely, unthinkingly expect their novels to have a linear plot. I'll be the first to admit that there aren't many explosions, heroic rescues from cliff-sides, oral sex scenes, gun-play or kung-fu fighting in a Virginia Woolf novel. I can't remember a single killer-clown or blood-crazed robo-vampire in her entire oeuvre. Compared to Dean Koontz, it's true: nothing ever happens in a Virginia Woolf novel. 

What "happens" happens, as it does in "Between the Acts," when a woman is sitting demurely on a couch, looking across at the husband she both desperately loves and fiercely despises. Everything takes place in the moment their eyes meet, or their eyes avoid each other, when everyone else leaves the room and they are left alone for the first time all day and Woolf pens the last lines of the book: "Then the curtain rose. They spoke."