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A review by mattdube
The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
3.0
I forget how this one ended up on my shelf, but I think it's good, usually, to go and read some classics every now and then. But I haven't read the Victorians in a good long while, even Dickens or Gaskell, and I forgot how tedious they can be!
Okay, so Butler is sort of an anti-victorian, which means that he punctures, and fairly effectively, a lot of the sanctimonious smugness of Victorians, but he does it in the same way they make their case, by this perspective-shifting look at the minutia of daily life. Really, I like the idea here, that we can study stuff closely and think about it out loud and that way avoid the overreach and claptrap of the Romantics. But boy, it makes everything seem kind of, I don't know, generally irrelevant and uninspired.
I don't mean to dog this book unreservedly: there are elements in the life of the adult Ernest Pontifex that I found compelling and fresh-- I don't think I've read a careful take on the life of a preacher before, or someone whose been in prison, or gone into the trades after being a gentleman. It does break new ground in that way (though I'm sure someone has written on these subjects; but I haven't read 'em.) And Butler is obviously smart and is, it seems, personally wounded by the hypocrisy of his day, and sympathetic, as much as he should be, to his protagonists inability to get out of his own way. I like, too, the interplay between Ernest and the narrator, Overton. It established a kind of bracing distance from which Butler could critique without sacrificing the design of his plot.
But a lot of the material here is shy of being fresh: I really don't need the stuff on Ernest's grandparents, and when it took a hundred pages to get Ernest's parents on the way to their honeymoon, well, you could trim some from this. There's a lot to like, but also a lot that I could've done without-- Butler, I think, fell prey to the artistic fashion of his day to a degree that intellectually he wouldn't have allowed. This would be a better book if he'd been as much of a freethinker creatively as he is socially. This book is worth it to see how a relatively detached writer tackles some serious questions of his day, but it's rarely gripping as a narrative.
Okay, so Butler is sort of an anti-victorian, which means that he punctures, and fairly effectively, a lot of the sanctimonious smugness of Victorians, but he does it in the same way they make their case, by this perspective-shifting look at the minutia of daily life. Really, I like the idea here, that we can study stuff closely and think about it out loud and that way avoid the overreach and claptrap of the Romantics. But boy, it makes everything seem kind of, I don't know, generally irrelevant and uninspired.
I don't mean to dog this book unreservedly: there are elements in the life of the adult Ernest Pontifex that I found compelling and fresh-- I don't think I've read a careful take on the life of a preacher before, or someone whose been in prison, or gone into the trades after being a gentleman. It does break new ground in that way (though I'm sure someone has written on these subjects; but I haven't read 'em.) And Butler is obviously smart and is, it seems, personally wounded by the hypocrisy of his day, and sympathetic, as much as he should be, to his protagonists inability to get out of his own way. I like, too, the interplay between Ernest and the narrator, Overton. It established a kind of bracing distance from which Butler could critique without sacrificing the design of his plot.
But a lot of the material here is shy of being fresh: I really don't need the stuff on Ernest's grandparents, and when it took a hundred pages to get Ernest's parents on the way to their honeymoon, well, you could trim some from this. There's a lot to like, but also a lot that I could've done without-- Butler, I think, fell prey to the artistic fashion of his day to a degree that intellectually he wouldn't have allowed. This would be a better book if he'd been as much of a freethinker creatively as he is socially. This book is worth it to see how a relatively detached writer tackles some serious questions of his day, but it's rarely gripping as a narrative.