Here, in his most full-throated fashion, Kundera sets forth his central thesis that art—and the novel, in particular—operate above and beyond History. I don’t begrudge him the point, at least as it pertains to history with a capital H. But he’s wrong, I believe, to suggest that a novelist can escape the duty to hold up a mirror to human life. And, to the extent that human life changes only so much, so will novelists find that retreading old narrative ground is part of their lot.

It would be ridiculous to write another Human Comedy. Because while History (mankind’s History) might have the poor taste to repeat itself, the history of art will not stand for repetition. Art isn’t there to be some great mirror registering all of History’s ups and downs, variations, endless repetitions. Art is not a village band marching dutifully along History’s heels.

This weekend, I plan to attend the new, mammoth Edward Hopper exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. I’ll be going with friends—which may not be entirely apt, given the common image of Hopper as American painting’s poet laureate of loneliness. To me, the image seems accurate enough: Hopper imparts mystery and even a sense of chic to the fact of human isolation, splashing it with sunlight here, shrouding it in urban darkness there, but in any event framing its austere truth against a background of lavish color. His compositions, dramatic or even cinematic in form, lend focused dignity to figures who would otherwise fade into a bleached (or blackened) oblivion.

But Peter Schjedahl, reviewing the show in the New Yorker, dismisses that standard gloss on Hopper.

His preoccupied people will neither confirm nor deny any fantasy they stir; their intensity of being defeats conjecture. Imputations, to them, of “loneliness” are sentimental projections by viewers who ought to look harder. They may not have lives you envy, but they live them without complaint.

Sentimental or not, the intimation of solitude is something that I’ll no doubt carry with me as I trudge through the show—and through a crowd of duly appointed fellow art lovers. (The MFA, somewhat like a doctor’s office, is scheduling visitors in half-hour intervals.)

Another passage from the new Kundera book.

We will understand nothing about the novel if we deny that it has its own muse, if we do not see it as an art sui generis, an autonomous art. It has its own genesis . . . its own history . . . its own morality (Hermann Broch said it: the novel’s sole morality is knowledge; a novel that fails to reveal some hitherto unknown bit of existence is immoral . . .).

Historical mysteries, especially those set in the early decades of the last century, have been a staple of my reading diet over the past year or so. In the end, Wings of Fire disappointed me slightly. (But, then, most mystery novels do. They must operate on so many levels, and with so many moving parts, that a margin of failure is pretty much built into the enterprise.) Nonetheless, “Todd” is one of the most sophisticated “past” masters now practicing in the genre.

CHARLES TODD. Wings of Fire (1998).
Three descendents of the illustrious Trevelyan clan lay dead, new additions to a family crypt in the churchyard of a tight-knit, tucked-away fishing village called Borcombe. Vague doubts about their ostensibly non-homicidal deaths swirl like wisps of sea mist along the nearby coast of Cornwall. Scotland Yard, asked to investigate the matter, sends down Inspector Ian Rutledge, who here embarks on his second big case since returning to police service after his not-quite-complete recovery from shell shock. It’s just a year or so after the 1918 Armistice, and for Rutledge gruesome memories of the Western Front prove hard to separate from the gruesome family secrets that haunt Trevelyan Hall. All of the newly departed had connections to the Great War, either through combat or—in case of Olivia Marlowe, a poet who published pseudonymously as O.A. Manning—through an uncanny ability to evoke the horrors of combat. Rutledge, an avid reader of Manning, wonders how a woman and an invalid like Olivia could have understood so keenly the evil core of what he witnessed on the battlefields of France. Todd’s plot revolves around solving that conundrum. Skillfully using lines of verse from a Manning collection titled “Lucifer,” the author sets Rutledge on a hunt for literary clues that culminates in his discovery of a devil in the flesh, right there in bucolic Borcombe. Todd (the pen name of an American mother and son team) excels at taking the milieu of Golden Age British detective fiction and investing it with dark psychological shadings and clear-eyed social realism—qualities rarely found in actual mystery stories of the 1920s. This entry in the Rutledge series falters, though, in offering a resolution that is much too irresolute. A half-dozen mysterious deaths hang from the Trevelyan family tree, but Todd doesn’t fully clarify which of them were murders. A muddled final exposition also fails to illuminate several key details, swathing them instead in a haze of poetic allusion and Cornish superstition.

For a while now, the editors of the New York Times Magazine have been contracting well-known fiction masters to write serialized works whose carefully doled-out segments, presumably, will give readers a spot of relief from reports on Darfur and advertisements for lingerie. This past Sunday, the magazine published the first chapter of an art-heist caper by Ian Rankin. The tale (a stand-alone novel, not an entry in the John Rebus series) will unfold over the next three months, and Rankin will then adapt it for book publication in 2008.

Like a lot of people, I like the idea of publishing a novel in serial form. The image of a Dickens or a Wilkie Collins sweating out chapters of his latest potboiler, scrambling to end each installment on a properly suspenseful note, and handing ink-still-wet pages to an impatient typesetter has time-honored appeal. It corresponds to our romantic view of the novelist as part wandering troubadour (spinning an endless yarn and stringing along a willing audience, Scheherazade-like) and part industrial craftsman (making piece goods for a booming mass market). The idea of serialized publication also plays to the assumption that suspense is the cardinal feature of storytelling—that waiting isn’t the hardest part, it’s the best part.

The reality, however, is that waiting a week or more between stints of reading a novel is pointless. The practice of distributing long works of fiction through periodical literature has fallen into disuse, and for very good reason. When you can buy any of thousands upon thousands of novels in paperback, each for less than a ten-spot, when you can then read such a book at your own sweet pace and without interruption, why would you turn to a magazine to sate your narrative needs?

(With TV shows, by the way, it used to be that you had no choice but to “tune in next week” if you wanted to follow a sequence of episodes through to its finish. Now, thanks to the DVD revolution, you can watch an entire season of The Sopranos or Lost over the course of several evenings, much as you might march through a novel in nightly reading sessions. I’ve reached a point where the idea of watching a show when it’s first broadcast—and waiting seven days for the story to resume—has become unthinkable.)

I read the first chapter of “Doors Open,” the new Rankin serial, and it’s a decent work of stage-setting that leaves me with no inclination to buy or log on to the Times Magazine next week. Rankin writes in a stock manner (he gives one character “dark piercing eyes”), and his plotting moves along rails that many a screenwriter has greased before him. The magazine includes the serial in its Funny Pages section, so “caveat lector” applies to those who come looking for deathless prose or matchless storytelling. I just wonder: Who does come looking for a phoned-in, chopped-up narrative of this kind, and why?

A work of narrative art, as I noted previously, needs to exist as a self-contained, fully realized whole. Serial publication doesn’t prevent a novel from attaining that exalted state, once all of its parts have made their appearance. But this format does seem to compromise a work—by altering its natural flow, by converting it into a vehicle of audience-grabbing entertainment. (“What will happen next to our hero . . . ?”) Audience grabbing and entertainment are all right in their place, but novelists and novel readers also have other business to attend to.

Back in 1996, Stephen King published The Green Mile in six parts than hit bookstores at the rate of one trim volume per month. I was then working at a bookshop, and I recall the modest flurry of excitement that attended each new installment of King’s Depression-era tale. (There was something apt, I suppose, in his choosing that period for a story that followed the structure of a Saturday-afternoon movie serial.) Readers cleared out our stock of each title, month after month, and King cleaned up financially by bringing out The Green Mile twice—first in that series of little chapbooks and then in a one-volume edition. Still, however lucrative it may have been, this gimmick is not one that King has repeated.

This week, I’m reading The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, by Milan Kundera. The book, fresh from the presses (the New Yorker published excerpts from it earlier this year), is Kundera’s latest attempt to construe a poetics of prose—a deep theory of the novel as a distinct art form. Here, he begins to make his core argument that, because art has a history, it must either move forward or fail. Incidentally, I take issue with that argument, or at least with the dead-end fetish for innovation toward which it leads.

Let us imagine a contemporary composer writing a sonata that in it form, its harmonies, its melodies resembles Beethoven’s. Let’s even imagine that this sonata is so masterfully made that, if it had actually been by Beethoven, it would count among his greatest works. And yet no matter how magnificent, signed by a contemporary composer it would be laughable. At best its author would be applauded as a virtuoso of pastiche. . . .

[I]t is only within the context of an art’s historical evolution that aesthetic value can be seen.

My mom recommended that I read The Devil in the White City in advance of my recent trip to Chicago. So I did. And I liked it. Crime, history, architecture, the seam-bursting vitality of a great city: What’s not to like? Since the book sold quite well, a wave of copycat works—books that use criminous events to enliven straightforward history—is no doubt in the offing. Which is not a bad thing, either. (Already, the Chicago Architectural Foundation puts on a tour based on the book.)

ERIK LARSON. The Devil in the White City (2003).
History, indigestible in its raw form, is ultimately a matter of how you slice it. Larson cuts out two pieces of Chicago history, circa 1893, and juxtaposes them in a way that casts a dramatic shadow over the larger of the pair and an aura of significance over the smaller one. The big piece was the World’s Columbian Exposition, an epoch-defining convocation on the shore of Lake Michigan that introduced visitors to alternating-current electricity, the Ferris Wheel, Shredded Wheat, and the idea that the frontier era in U.S. history had come to a close. The relative small piece, in world-historical terms, was the homicidal career of Dr. Herman Webster Mudgett, alias H.H. Holmes, arguably the first American serial killer of the modern type. Holmes built a hotel, later known as his “murder castle,” not far from the fairground’s White City—an expanse of alabaster buildings, all designed in a Beaux Arts style by Daniel Burnham and his team of renowned architects. (Burnham’s struggles to plan and erect the fair’s physical plant occupy much of the book; Larson has perhaps an undue faith in his readers’ taste for stories of bureaucratic jousting.) Apart from that geographic coincidence, these stories have little connection to one another. But, in wedging them together with a sure narrative hand, Larson makes vivid a previously drab-seeming period of the American past.

You can’t fight City Hall. But you can fight over City Hall. And now, it seems, a squabble is unfolding in Boston over whether to raze and replace the current seat of the city’s government—the wretched, Sixties-era slab that squats in Government Center Plaza, like an ugly concrete frog on a forbidding concrete lily pad. It’s a building that many Bostonians, very much including myself (a former Boston resident and a current observer from the “town” next door), love to hate. But the idea of actually doing something about it began gathering steam a short while ago, after Mayor Thomas Menino proposed tearing the thing down and building a new civic center near the rejuvenated South Boston waterfront.

To which I say: Bring on the demolition derby. It’s time to get medieval on that hulking excrescence of late modernity—time to get brutal with that monument to architectural Brutalism.

I haven’t been following the debate over Menino’s ambitious idea, but I’m amazed to discover—in the Boston Sunday Globe Ideas section—that serious people object to it on grounds other than cost. These people are professional architects, and, well, I wish there were a less philistine way to say what needs to be said: Architecture is too important to be left to members of the AIA (American Institute of Architects). Some defenders of the 1969 building, a recent report indicates, have even begun a campaign to designate it a legally protected historic landmark.

George Thrush, director of the school of architecture at Northeastern University, writes today in his Ideas piece:

Boston City Hall’s supporters are committed to both the architectural and political legacy of the building. And this is understandable.

From an architectural standpoint, there is also a real sense that the current City Hall is serious architecture. The product of an international design competition, the building shows little of the compromise that we associate with the design of public buildings today. And it is true that Kallmann, McKinnell & Knowles’ award-winning design was an all too rare marriage of the political and cultural spirit of the age with real architectural talent.

But that marriage, strong as it was at the time, has failed utterly. And the near desperation with which some in the architectural community are rallying around this building suggests an unwillingness to face this. It also suggests a deep pessimism—that we can no longer expect new public buildings to be great works of architecture. It suggests that only in the days of the unquestioned “hero architect” could we aspire to excellence. I disagree.

City Hall is an interesting building, to be sure, and architecturally important too. But this location is more important. To insist that the preservation of this building is critical to our future is to see that future in the narrowest way. It is to imagine that Boston had vision just once in recent memory—in the 1960s.

Thrush, whom I interviewed for a class reporting project a couple of years ago, is a good urbanist. He understands (better than I do, of course) the value of a clear and sustained street wall, the need for pedestrian pathways that knit parts of a city together, the virtue of density, and the magic of mixed-use development. And thus he lands on the right side of the fight between “saving City Hall” as it stands and rescuing the ideal of a city hall as a place that draws people to it.

But he concedes far too much, alas, in saying that the current City Hall is “interesting” and “architecturally important.” Interesting and important to whom? Not to anyone whose eye remains uncorrupted by Miesian professional dogma. A building exists within a context of urban use and enjoyment. Unlike a painting or a scupture, it can’t earn its keep as a museum piece—as an artifact in its own right, as a testament to an artist’s conceit. If people don’t enjoy it, if they use it only with difficulty and only under duress, there’s no reason to preserve it.

In fact, there may be one reason: In the case of Boston’s City Hall, it may contain so much concrete that the cost of bulldozing it would bleed the civic treasury dry.

Would you mess with this fellow? He is Shiva—Shiva the Destroyer, to you and me. In the Mahabharata (according to Priya Hemenway, author of Hindu Gods), he bears no less than 1,008 names, a different one for each of his many incarnations: the Lord of Sleep, the Lord of Songs, the Lord of Fire, the Lord of Tears, and the lord of much, much else. Along with six arms and hair that represents the flow of India’s sacred rivers, Shiva possesses a third eye from which he can send out flames of wrath to those who do him wrong.

Yet Shiva readily calls upon more earthly powers when the occasion calls for it. From a recent New Yorker piece on the illegal trade in Indian antiquities:

When, in 1986, the Indian government sued for the return of a twelfth-century bronze Shiva that had been looted from a village in Pathur, it did so on behalf of the offended god himself: Shiva was named as a plaintiff in the case. “In the south, people still don’t tell lies in Shiva’s temple,” Ashok Shekhar, a former state arts and culture official in Rajasthan, [said]. “These are very hotheaded deities.”

Here’s a review of the classic PI novel from which I quoted a while back.

HOWARD BROWNE, Halo in Blood (1946).
Circles. A halo is a circle. The Chicago Loop, where private investigator Paul Pine keeps an office, is a circle. Around the inner circle of the Loop are ringed outer circles, extending to Oak Park and Winnetka and Glencoe, and Pine works those circles in a case that pushes him around and around, down and down—corkscrew-like—until he ties the end of the case to its beginning, and thereby forms a perfect circle. Browne should be better known than he is. Writing in the manner pioneered by Raymond Chandler, he spins better similes than Chandler does (and boy, does he spin a lot of them), and he’s a better plot-spinner, too. To be sure, the raw material of this first novel of his does have a derivative quality: The wealthy patriarch John Sandmark calls Pine to his suburban manse and asks the sleuth to look out for his beautiful, wayward daughter, Leona. Sandmark doesn’t like Leona’s latest male conquest, an oily fellow named Jerry Martin. Pine, tailing the couple, watches as a gunman emerges from the night to shoot Martin dead. More murders follow, and Pine links the killing wave to a heist committed in San Diego a quarter-century earlier, and to a strange funeral that he chanced upon in the opening scene of this adventure. All of that linking culminates in a smash triple finish, with Pine pounding out three solutions (separate, but nested within one another) in order to bring the matter full-circle. What Browne lacks in originality, he makes up for in formal elegance.

(For a secondary illustration to this post, I plucked from the Web the cover of a 1940s pulp magazine that—as best I can tell—features the novel Halo in Blood under a slightly different title. “John Evans,” the author listed in the cover blurb, was the pen name under which Browne originally published his Paul Pine stories. Browne, by the way, was the editor of Mammoth Detective, among other pulps.)