What Are You Reading

[Fading Fast]

Christmas at the New Yorker: Stories, Poems, Humor, and Art, first published in 2003


Christmas at The New Yorker: Stories, Poems, Humor, and Art is an anthology of short stories, cartoons, covers, and comical or satirical asides sampled from over eighty years of the The New Yorker, one of the twentieth century's most successful literary magazines.

Along the way, some literary heavyweights – including John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov, Clifford Odets, John Cheever, Garrison Keillor, and others – pop up with wry, heartwarming, and irreverent Christmas tales.

A few – including Cheever's tale of gift giving warping into class consciousness, Nabokov's poignant portrayal of grieving at Christmas, and Updike's insightful look at how one man's death affects an entire community - are yuletide classics that appear in many Christmas anthologies.

Divided into amorphously wispy categories – Family Matters, Holiday Spirits, Christmas Carols, and the like – that won't mean much to readers, they give the editors a chance to move back and forth amongst years, which is fun.

Part of the anthology's appeal is seeing how Christmas writing changes over the decades. While some of the early asides feel hokey today, others are just as cynical as our modern take on Christmas often is. Even so, sentimentality was clearly more acceptable decades ago.

Being a product of New York City’s literary world, the anthology reflects the standard elitist philosophical bent toward collectivism, paired with a general sneering at capitalism. That bias has been amazingly consistent in "highbrow" publishing for generations.

Throughout, you'll see a commonality between the past and present – the commercialization of Christmas is always lamented – but also unique features to each decade – religion was woven into the fabric of 1930s life, and war rationing is all over the stories from the early 1940s.

Peter De Vries’ "Flesh and the Devil," a 1950s tale about a husband seeking kudos from his wife for not cheating on her after getting liquored up at the office Christmas party, is a time capsule of midcentury America.

Conversely, 1940's "The Spirit of Christmas" by Sally Benson – showing Christmas being reduced to a cold calculation about Christmas card lists and strategies – will feel modern to many who today find Christmas a series of obligatory gifts, cards, and greetings.

Away from the stories, the satirical asides – a persnickety department store Santa writing "true confession" stories off season, a judge reading charges against a house-robbing Santa, and a 1970s Santa telling hippies to watch whom they call "irrelevant – " tamp down the sentimentality.

The quality of the illustrations spread throughout is wonderful. There's a heart and nuance to how they capture the look and feel of the era; something perhaps being lost today in our cost-free-pictures and computer-generated-images era where illustration is a rare art.

The whole of Christmas at The New Yorker doesn’t amount to more than the sum of its good parts, as it lacks a unifying theme or consistent style, aside from a touch of highbrow snark. Still, for a quick, fun trip down a metaphorical Christmastime memory lane, it's an enjoyable read.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Sally Benson is one of my favorite classic-era New Yorker authors. Her "Junior Miss" stories really capture what it's like to be a smarter-than-your-years twelve-year-old., in a way that's neither exaggerated nor condescending.

 

[DogFacePonySoldier]

I don’t think I’ll finish the book as I am a slow reader, about Prostitution and criminality in the late 1800 revolving around a disgusting human with the made up name of Joseph Silver. I don’t read much yet I am usually reading late 1800s books due to Russian Lit giants of the day, got daunted at War and Peace. The NYC portion of the book was fascinating 10% of all thievery in NYC at the time was kicked up to cops for example.

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

It's Christmas time, so the annual reading schedule begins with Peter Spiers' Christmas!, followed by Santa Calls, then A Christmas Carol; my copy, as noted for years now, is a 1940 edition with the note reading "This text preserves the irregularities in spelling and punctuation of the first edition of 1843." The deceptively simple illustrations are by Philip Reed.
In progress is our seasonal read-aloud Merry Christmas, Mr. Baxter, by Edward Streeter, author of Father of the Bride, among others. I always picture in my mind's eye Spencer Tracy as Mr. and Joan Bennett as Mrs.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Heading for the middle of Jorge Amado - The emigrants from the Sáo Francisco/Seara vermelha (1946) and now it's even better than the beginning after the exhausting prologue! Good read!

 

[Fading Fast]

They Were Sisters by Dorothy Whipple, first published in 1944


In They Were Sisters, set in England in the decades just before WWII, Dorothy Whipple captures the lives of three middle- to upper-middle-class sisters with incredible nuance, thought, and passion.

None of us will ever live in 1920s–30s England, but Whipple captures the specifics so vividly, the emotions so movingly, and the settings so smartly, that her writing has a time-capsule feel to it.

If there is a flaw, it’s that her male characters feel more like stereotypes than fully developed individuals, as Whipple wrote this book to focus on the three sisters—and does so very well.

You'll see the sisters as products of their times, but also with timeless traits common to all women. Intensely ideological feminists will hate the water these women swim in, but with a balanced view, you can see an independence streak in two of the sisters, given the era.

The central character is the oldest sister, Lucy. After her mother passed when she was a teenager, Lucy raised her younger sisters Vera and Charlotte. This sets the relationship off balance for life, as Lucy feels motherly toward them, but they just see her as their older sister.

Lucy grows up to be the practical sister, grounded in a solid marriage, who always tries to keep an eye on her sisters. Charlotte, the most trusting of the sisters, marries a jokester and bully of a boy who becomes an emotional tyrant of a husband and father.

Vera, a true beauty, proves that having the world at your feet early can warp your emotional development for life. She seemed to make a smart marriage to a kind, solid, and wealthy man who all but worships her, but Vera quickly grows bored with having only one man's attention.

If there is a plot, it's the divergent paths the three sisters' lives take in the 1930s as their marriages mature, they do or don't have children, and aging begins to buffet their lives.

They Were Sisters, though, is not really a plot-driven story, but a character study of three siblings and a few of their children. The value, then and now, is the intimate way you come to know these girls and, then, women.

Lucy might be a bit too good to be real, but her concern for her sisters is not foreign to genuine life. Her inability to have children of her own only increases her concern for her sisters and their children.

Charlotte, the saddest of the three, has a bad marriage, a trusting nature, and a passive will. This unfortunate combination leaves her powerless to change an awful situation or to even protect her children from their bullying father.

Vera sheds light on the thoughts and motivations behind the cliché of the beautiful woman whose looks are like a superpower — a superpower that delays her need to develop other dimensions of her character until her looks fade.

Whipple's writing works because she creates engaging, believable, and complex characters. It's like seeing into your neighbor's house, not in a voyeuristic way, but in a humane and kind way to better understand the people whom we usually only know through their public faces.

It is also the value of the book, then and now, as you come away thinking a bit more kindly about your neighbors, friends and family. It makes you somewhat less judgmental, as Whipple reminds us that we know so little about someone's full life and experiences.

Why read fiction? One of the answers is Dorothy Whipple. Written in 1944, Whipple shows you middle-class England in the 1930s in a more personal way than most history books. She also opens up a window into human nature that makes us, hopefully, a bit more human ourselves.

They Were Sisters is not great literature in part because the plotting is uneven – Whipple clearly doesn't love plots. Yet its sharp observations of human nature and its ability to let you experience a different time and place make it an engaging, insightful and even valuable novel.