I missed the new production of E. M. Forster’s A Room With a View on PBS on Sunday night, so I can’t comment on its success or lack of it. But it would be easy to misread Forster as a romanticist — just as it’s easy to misread Jane Austen that way — based on A Room With a View. David Garnett avoids the trap in his Great Friends: Portraits of Seventeen Writers (Atheneum, 1980). Forster was a social reformer, notes Garnett, the late author of Aspects of Love and son of the Russian translator Constance Garnett. All of his novels are about “the tyranny of conventions, the subjection of women and the indifference or contempt of the British upper middle class for all people of different race or origin.”
Forster typically assaults his society by bringing in an outsider who exposes its hypocrisy. That role goes in A Room With a View to old Mr. Emerson, whose son George comes between Lucy Honeychurch and her attachment to the dull Cecil: “Mr. Emerson is the touchstone who shows up the values of the conventional middle classes as genteel nonsense and brings the book to a happy ending by telling the heroine that, ‘Love is of the body’ – which she doesn’t understand at once, but which makes her see that the engagement she had accepted would not do.”
© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
First, you sign a paper saying that you won’t sue if you go crazy on the job
I ran into the critic James Marcus at a National Book Critics Circle event last month, and he said that he’d launched a literary blog. James has great taste, so I headed to his House of Mirth housemirth.blogspot.com. I learned from it that after he and I served on the NBCC board together, he wrote a memoir of his time as a senior editor at Amazon.com, Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot-Com Juggernaut (New Press, 2004).
James worked for the online bookseller in its infancy, when job descriptions had greater fluidity, so he did more than write reviews for the Amazon site. He wrapped books and pitched in on customer service by answering e-mail queries from shoppers:
“I saw a book on television last week, I would read. The one with the red cover. Can you tell me what it’s called?”
James writes from the perspective of a self-described “token humanist” at Amazon, not an MBA who itched to see his picture on the cover of Wired. But Amazonia is still the most entertaining book about a business that I’ve read since Liar’s Poker.
You think the forms you get from your HR department are bad? Before going to work Amazon, James had to sign a 10-page work agreement and, in Amazonia, quotes from its section on job-related stress. “Strip away the legalese and what remains is a fairly colorful stipulation,” he writes. “Namely: if you go crazy on the job, the company won’t pay to patch you up.”
© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
