Pierre Bonnard - Images of Summer

 It just wouldn't be summer without Pierre Bonnard.

The Way We Live Now

With all the current noise about Dickens, it would be easy to miss the fact that another Victorian is casting his shadow over today's literary landscape. Anthony Trollope's  The Way We Live Now remains the supreme example of the state of the nation novel, a sprawling tour de force with a huge cast of characters and a labyrinthine plot. The shifting viewpoints, keen engagement with contemporary themes, and use of London as a microcosm: this is the model upon which a number of important recent novels have drawn.

1. The Way We Live Now (Vintage Classics)
2. by Anthony Trollope
3. 
4. Buy it from the Guardian bookshop

Search the Guardian bookshop

1. Tell us what you think:Star-rate and review this book

With our robber-baron bankers, our financial panics, our privileged political elite and our disenfranchised migrant workers, it can feel as if we are living through a new Victorian era; certainly the narrative mode that Trollope established in The Way We Live Now has seen a renaissance in recent years, and specifically in a certain breed of sweeping, often sentimental London-based novel. While one can find traces of Trollope's ensemble approach to the capital in earlier books – Zadie Smith's White Teeth and Iain Sinclair's Downriver spring to mind – it has taken the boom-and-bust noughties to restore this particular novel to the forefront of our cultural consciousness.Trollope returned to England from Australia in 1872 and, disgusted by the unscrupulousness and greed he found in that particular period of irrational exuberance (one of whose features was easily secured mortgages), he wrote a satire attacking the shady financiers and those who kowtowed to them. The action turns around the banker Augustus Melmotte and some dodgy stock-price manipulation, the society dame-turned-trashy novelist Lady Carbury, the wide-eyed farm girl Ruby Ruggles, the upright young engineer Paul Montague, and a host of other characters who, over the course of more than 800 pages, fight and scheme and fall in love. In the end, the reader's sympathies are so firmly knitted into the narrative that it is something of a wrench to look up from the book and find that these are not our friends, but made-up characters. London novels have never gone away, of course, from Maureen Duffy's  excellent Capital (1975) to Ian McEwan's more recent Saturday. But as the credit crunch hit, with London at its heart, it became clear that few writers had engaged successfully with the financial and economic stories that filled the front pages of our newspapers. And it has turned out to be Trollope who provided the best model for marrying the seemingly irreconcilable worlds that make up a global metropolis like London. Foremost among the neo-Trollopians are Amanda Craig ( Hearts and Minds), Sebastian Faulks (A Week in December) Justin Cartwright (Other People's Money) and now John Lanchester  with his forthcoming Capital. The similarity in subject matter and formal approach of these four novels is uncanny. Each uses a cast of characters drawn from across the social spectrum; each has a racy thriller-ish subplot that hurries the narrative along; each is fascinated with property and money; each takes an essentially tribal approach to London, showing the isolation of the urban condition, and yet counteracts this structurally by using the intersection and (often romantic) coming together of the various strands to give London life a comforting coherence. These novels are beacons against the alienating multiplicity of city life. - Alex Preston (The Guardian 2-13-12)

My Graduation Speech

What I would tell the graduates this year: Fellow mortals and sensitive bipeds out there, grappling with the pains of existence and the current lousy job market, I come with more words of advice for you which may at first glance seem overly sober and gloomy... please don't blame me, though, I'm just the messenger here. This isn't much - I know - but it's all I have on the spur of the moment (I'm not getting paid for this) and besides, it's a topic that I predict you'll keep coming back to in the days ahead: Whatever else you take away from this special moment, please remember as you go forth, today, mindful of various blessings and advantages you have received along the way,  and looking to the future with starry-eyed hopes, that attached to every one of us is some unwanted and unasked-for circumstance, some dreaded fateful condition, an obstacle, a hindrance, an albatross, a curse, a blight, a wretched hassle, a wound, a hurt - something that we're stuck with for the long haul, something that gets in our way, makes us upset, keeps us vulnerable, adds to our insecurity, gives us reason to feel cheated, to feel handicapped, goes against our most cherished agendas of survival, success and prosperity in life. It might just be an obvious physical blemish, a mental quirk, a flaw in temperament, a cognitive deficit in some obscure area,  a personality glitch (shyness, anyone?), a traumatic memory, a shift in fortune, a bad year, a lost decade, a troubled sibling or problematic parent, an extended dysfunctional family or inauspicious cultural climate (feeling like we were born in the wrong decade or century). We carry IT around with us and IT marks us for life; IT grates upon our nerves because IT's like some alien presence, an unexpected guest, an unwanted care-package, this random prosthetic to our otherwise normal physique, this fly in our daily soup that continuously spoils the feast - bringing us back to the lingering question of how things might have been - if only we had not been strapped with IT. And the problem in a nutshell is very simple - what to do about "the gift that we didn't ask for" - to view the pink elephant in the room as some weird, unexpected blessing-in-disguise from the great beyond or to use it as our ongoing Exhibit A of "more sinned against than sinning." How many of us carry around this familiar rock, for years and years, never knowing quite what to do with it, where to put it, how to hide it, what to make of it, until IT drags us down several notches from where we expected to be; or else we run from it, pursuing alternative paths down which such afflictions cannot follow us, generating as we go oodles of new commotion and chaos around ourselves designed to overshadow the problem, to deny that it's really there. So much of life is taken up with responding (somewhat negatively, I must add) to the dark cloud in the sky,  rebelling against what we didn't #$@%#^ choose and never in a million years would have requested voluntarily. But there you have it. Even at this very late date in human history, when it seems that we (modern liberated types) should have finally gotten every last one of our wishes met, given how the weight of nature, tradition and large institutions has been lifted from our backs somewhat, even now in the year 2012, how absurdly difficult it remains to do away with these sources of discontent, troubles that we can't walk away from and which have the effect of forcing us to stop, to pause, to question, turning inward upon ourselves, inquiring as to what kind of creatures we really are (aside from all the hype and self-promotion), what strange entities capable of intense frustration, regret and self-conscious misery. And so graduates, I end my little jeremiad by telling you in advance that, although there is no solution to this awful package, and that even pharmaceuticals, sensuality and rock-and-roll can't reverse the trend, nevertheless, the good news is, if there is any, that what seems like the biggest downer - the source of isolation, frustration, alienation, angst, sadness, resignation, despair and whatever else we go to the doctor to complain about, is for some lucky mortals out there, also a source of the most sublime healing power. Who knows how and who knows why, but  there are actually some people out there who know how to transform their hurt to advantage, their weakness to strength, their pain to motivation; these are the cherished few among us who keep us afloat during tough times,  keep us inspired by their example - not  from ease but from hardship. How strange it is, how paradoxical to consider that we admire most those whose lives we ourselves would never wish for. Pleasure seekers come and go; life on Easy Street gets old. But people with soul, with gravitas, endure forever.  So when you bump into one of these enlightened ones during your journey, be sure to ask them what their secret is - how they turned lead into gold - knowing that they share the same wounds as you - different in form and content surely - but the similar as to genus - that of the unasked-for gift.

My Name is Hope...

Aside from the catchy titles, I have to admit: I'm drawn to books like these - written from a "faith perspective" in both cases - yet seriously grappling with all the messy irregularities of human experience  -  afflictions that weigh us down and leave us befuddled, exhausted, embittered. All your favorites here: pain, fear, death, separation, loss, grief, cruelty, neglect, abandonment, betrayal, alienation, anxiety, depression... Where is God in all of this? We can't stop ourselves from asking that question....Or at least, I can't.

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

I highly recommend this novel as a great "summer read." I began by thinking of it strictly as a plot-driven "who done it" about a lost diamond (complete with detectives, quick sand, thieves, opium users, etc.) - the narrative of which is told, re-told and sometimes re-constructed and re-directed by various interlocutors. But it is these shifting narrators, these eccentric and memorable voices whose personas have a way of resonating throughout the entire book. I refer of course to the inimitable: Gabriel Betteredge (the dutiful butler), Franklin Blake (the endearing chap and suitor), Sergeant Cuff (the logical, methodical detective),  Miss Drusilla Clack (the prim, pious and hilariously obtuse relative), Matthew Bruff (the no-nonsense lawyer),  Ezra Jennings (the hapless fellow with a far-fetched remedy), Doctor Candy (the forgetful one), Rosanna Spearman (the doomed servant), Limping Lucy (the woe-begotten misfit ) and last but not least, Rachel Verinder (the refreshingly self-assertive young lady).

Gadflies among us... Are there any left?

Henri Matisse - King of Color

Follow Matisse through the open window...