Tara: this was sent to Lori but as I re-read it, I realize it was your post that prompted it, so I’m posting it here. Thanks for your fine contributions to this site which I find has a small but dignified presence in the forest of substacks—-Michael Sexson
MR SPITZER: EVERYONE, EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE, ALL AT ONCE. APRIL 2025
I have been absent from these pages for some time and am delighted to find that in my absence this site has grown in subscribers as well as in the thoughtfulness of its postings. I would like to weigh in on the Mr. Spitzer issue, especially as it concerns the question of whether the reader is justified in omitting the Spitzer dominated pages to get on with the more compelling misadventures of the other principals. In short, is it worth reading a book where the reader finds a major character to be either too little or too much? Too insignificant or an abundance become malignant? The clear answer is a definitive Yes. A judicious editor could strip away 90 percent of the Mr. Spitzer material without doing too much damage to the storyline and the casual reader perhaps would come away with a more positive experience. In my own history of trying to get others to read the book, I’ve found that the Spitzer sections have been responsible for otherwise committed readers abandoning the novel claiming that one of the central characters is fatally dull. While I find the argument for pruning the Spitzer sections understandable, I agree with Tara in her recent Involutions post that the time I’ve spent with the boring Mr. Spitzer has not only been enjoyable but transformative in the most positive sense of that word. In a phrase, Mr. Spitzer is the heart of the novel. Without him, the reader’s experience is markedly diminished. Without him we are left with obsessive compulsive characters convinced of the rightness of their course of action (or inaction) whether it be Catherine Cartwheel’s wholesale capitulation to the world of dreams, Miss MacIntosh’s self righteous devotion to the conventional, practical, observable and useful, or Cousin Hannah’s conviction that reality is fundamentally the historical stage on which we take political stands, to mention only three of a whole menagerie of characters whose obsessions often create the opposite of the ends they wish to achieve. The Spitzer sections act not so much as a palliative but a buffer against these unintended outcomes largely because Spitzer, who, though difficult to sympathize with, being, as the matriarch Catherine Cartwheel says early in the book, a person who “bores me into extinction,” and whose “fleshly presence” is “unendurable”, is nonetheless, in the context of these 38 chapters, on balance, a compassionate, kind, gentle, helpful, sensitive soul. Young sees in this profoundly flawed man a vision of something not just larger but mythic: the figure of Everyman. Not the pious Everyman of Miss MacIntosh’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” but the Everyman of Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom. While Young vigorously denied being influenced by Joyce, there is little question for those who have read Ulysses that Spitzer owes a lot to Bloom, an ordinary man wandering about town ruminating on both the mundane and the mystical. Being ordinary (Bloom an advertising canvasser and Spitzer a lawyer) they provoke their creators to regard them as examples of the all too human yet, through the alchemical magic of the right words bestowed upon them, they become not just examples but exemplars, “Representative Men” as Emerson would say, but without the emblems of distinction typically associated with that term. Spitzer is as crucial to MMMD as Bloom is to Ulysses or Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, i.e. “Here Comes Everybody” is to Finnegans Wake.
Mr. Spitzer is the heart (and sometime soul) of MMMD and to omit or avoid, or rush through the chapters in which he appears does damage, I believe, to the proper reading of the book. Daunting as it is, overwritten as it appears to many, exhausting and exasperating and frustrating, and, yes, boring, it remains, to my mind, one of the most impressive achievements among recent writers to compose an “everything” book—the only book, as true believers say, when they speak of the Bible, you’ll ever need, for in it you’ll learn, to crib a poem title from Wallace Stevens, How to Live and What to Do. Non biblical books that deserve the epithet of “Everything Books”, at least in my canon, would include among many others The Thousand and One Nights, Tristram Shandy, In Search of Lost Time, and the Persian epic Kathasaritsagara. The “Everything book” might better be understood by contemporary readers under a different rubric given the popularity of a recent film, “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”
Mr. Spitzer is essential to Marguerite Young’s vision of everything and everyone everywhere all at once. To cast him out in order to “get on with the story” is to throw the barrister out with the bath water. On the strictly human level, Spitzer is generous, kind, sensitive, helpful, and, as we like to say these days, there when you need him. When we magnify him, as Joyce did Leopold Bloom, he becomes the Vitruvian Man of Da Vinci as well as the the alchemists’ coincidentia oppositorum. He is, according to Chapter 56, p. 851, “all things, being none.” Young gives to her hapless hero what John Keats thought belonged exclusively to only one artist, William Shakespeare, that is, the quality of “negative capability,” emptying out so as to be filled with everything. Young bestows on her seemingly undeserving hero a set of Proustian obligations which seem to belong to a different world: kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice, “unknown laws which we which we once obeyed before birth because we bore their precepts in our hearts.”
In the long run, it’s good to be kind. And punctual. Those “morals” seem odd in relation to a book like this, but there you are. And, as to excising pages in order to get on with the story, it should be remarked that Marguerite Young does not write “Page turners,” or “Who done its”, the books we read in order find out what happens at the end.. She writes books we read in order to find out what is happening on the present page. There is, she thinks, nowhere to get to other than where we are. And as to finding her or her characters boring, it would be well to read David Foster Wallace’s novel, The Pale King, which features boredom as a central issue. Wallace thinks that we don’t get rid of boredom by avoiding what bores us but by boring into it. He (or his character) imagines the most boring life possible—-that of a tax accountant— and so he takes the requisite classes necessary to become one. What he discovers by boring into the boring job is, to say the least, illuminating and dangerously interesting. MMMD is one of those rare books which reward the habit of turning to a random page and boring in on it. I would love to see the results of our fellow bus companions doing such an assignment.
I would like to end by identifying 3 passages I feel would be tragic were they to be tossed out with the bath water. The first is about a bird, the second a frog, and the third about music heard so deeply it is not heard at all.
Several subscribers in their posts have lamented that omitting the Spitzer chapters would deny readers the most incantatory and moving episode in the entire book: the death of Martha, the last of the passenger pigeon species, who died in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo. Her story, beginning on p. 644 in Chapter 49, foregrounds Young’s talents as a distinguished historian and journalist (clarity, historical accuracy, and awareness of the needs of what might be called the “average” reader). Mr. Spitzer wrote the date of the death of Martha down on his shirt cuff for it ignited his need to write music about how the death of one is the death of all. The second passage comes in Chapter 61 and concerns Spitzer meeting (or dreaming he meets) a deaf mute street musician who gets a frog to sit in his mouth, and, through a series of “labial and laryngeal and dental manipulations,” gets him to recite the Lord’s Prayer. Spitzer befriends the mute and his frog and when the frog dies, agrees to journey with the mute to a mysteriously remote burial site. The frog, within a cigar box, is buried with the mute and Spitzer seeking to find the right words for the occasion. The mute, having no words at all, performs an elaborate and complicated series of hand and body signs that appear to designate the very novel that the reader is encountering—-both the mute’s gestures and Spitzer’s pathetic attempts at oratory are failures but at the same time are deeply moving to the reader. They constitute a kind of music, which, though obviously inadequate to the occasion, succeeds at another level which I take to be the level the novel is seeking, that of music heard so deeply it is not heard at all. Those words are from T.S. Eliot’s third of his four quartets: “The Dry Salvages.” And they underscore Young’s fascination with the notion expressed by Keats that “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.” The last of the three passages I have culled from the excesses of the Spitzer chapters is 62, the final chapter before the story comes back to the charms, such as they are, of the redoubtable character Miss MacIntosh. It is a passage that tries, and fails spectacularly, to render music heard so deeply it is not heard at all. This passage, (p. 937-940) a part of which was excerpted by Ryan Ruby in his splendid review of MMMD in The New Yorker, can be used by both detractors and supporters of Miss Young’s deranged symphony of a book. And I suspect that she wouldn’t have preferred it otherwise. ——-Michael Sexson, April, 2025.
Tara: this was sent to Lori but as I re-read it, I realize it was your post that prompted it, so I’m posting it here. Thanks for your fine contributions to this site which I find has a small but dignified presence in the forest of substacks—-Michael Sexson
MR SPITZER: EVERYONE, EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE, ALL AT ONCE. APRIL 2025
I have been absent from these pages for some time and am delighted to find that in my absence this site has grown in subscribers as well as in the thoughtfulness of its postings. I would like to weigh in on the Mr. Spitzer issue, especially as it concerns the question of whether the reader is justified in omitting the Spitzer dominated pages to get on with the more compelling misadventures of the other principals. In short, is it worth reading a book where the reader finds a major character to be either too little or too much? Too insignificant or an abundance become malignant? The clear answer is a definitive Yes. A judicious editor could strip away 90 percent of the Mr. Spitzer material without doing too much damage to the storyline and the casual reader perhaps would come away with a more positive experience. In my own history of trying to get others to read the book, I’ve found that the Spitzer sections have been responsible for otherwise committed readers abandoning the novel claiming that one of the central characters is fatally dull. While I find the argument for pruning the Spitzer sections understandable, I agree with Tara in her recent Involutions post that the time I’ve spent with the boring Mr. Spitzer has not only been enjoyable but transformative in the most positive sense of that word. In a phrase, Mr. Spitzer is the heart of the novel. Without him, the reader’s experience is markedly diminished. Without him we are left with obsessive compulsive characters convinced of the rightness of their course of action (or inaction) whether it be Catherine Cartwheel’s wholesale capitulation to the world of dreams, Miss MacIntosh’s self righteous devotion to the conventional, practical, observable and useful, or Cousin Hannah’s conviction that reality is fundamentally the historical stage on which we take political stands, to mention only three of a whole menagerie of characters whose obsessions often create the opposite of the ends they wish to achieve. The Spitzer sections act not so much as a palliative but a buffer against these unintended outcomes largely because Spitzer, who, though difficult to sympathize with, being, as the matriarch Catherine Cartwheel says early in the book, a person who “bores me into extinction,” and whose “fleshly presence” is “unendurable”, is nonetheless, in the context of these 38 chapters, on balance, a compassionate, kind, gentle, helpful, sensitive soul. Young sees in this profoundly flawed man a vision of something not just larger but mythic: the figure of Everyman. Not the pious Everyman of Miss MacIntosh’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” but the Everyman of Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom. While Young vigorously denied being influenced by Joyce, there is little question for those who have read Ulysses that Spitzer owes a lot to Bloom, an ordinary man wandering about town ruminating on both the mundane and the mystical. Being ordinary (Bloom an advertising canvasser and Spitzer a lawyer) they provoke their creators to regard them as examples of the all too human yet, through the alchemical magic of the right words bestowed upon them, they become not just examples but exemplars, “Representative Men” as Emerson would say, but without the emblems of distinction typically associated with that term. Spitzer is as crucial to MMMD as Bloom is to Ulysses or Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, i.e. “Here Comes Everybody” is to Finnegans Wake.
Mr. Spitzer is the heart (and sometime soul) of MMMD and to omit or avoid, or rush through the chapters in which he appears does damage, I believe, to the proper reading of the book. Daunting as it is, overwritten as it appears to many, exhausting and exasperating and frustrating, and, yes, boring, it remains, to my mind, one of the most impressive achievements among recent writers to compose an “everything” book—the only book, as true believers say, when they speak of the Bible, you’ll ever need, for in it you’ll learn, to crib a poem title from Wallace Stevens, How to Live and What to Do. Non biblical books that deserve the epithet of “Everything Books”, at least in my canon, would include among many others The Thousand and One Nights, Tristram Shandy, In Search of Lost Time, and the Persian epic Kathasaritsagara. The “Everything book” might better be understood by contemporary readers under a different rubric given the popularity of a recent film, “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”
Mr. Spitzer is essential to Marguerite Young’s vision of everything and everyone everywhere all at once. To cast him out in order to “get on with the story” is to throw the barrister out with the bath water. On the strictly human level, Spitzer is generous, kind, sensitive, helpful, and, as we like to say these days, there when you need him. When we magnify him, as Joyce did Leopold Bloom, he becomes the Vitruvian Man of Da Vinci as well as the the alchemists’ coincidentia oppositorum. He is, according to Chapter 56, p. 851, “all things, being none.” Young gives to her hapless hero what John Keats thought belonged exclusively to only one artist, William Shakespeare, that is, the quality of “negative capability,” emptying out so as to be filled with everything. Young bestows on her seemingly undeserving hero a set of Proustian obligations which seem to belong to a different world: kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice, “unknown laws which we which we once obeyed before birth because we bore their precepts in our hearts.”
In the long run, it’s good to be kind. And punctual. Those “morals” seem odd in relation to a book like this, but there you are. And, as to excising pages in order to get on with the story, it should be remarked that Marguerite Young does not write “Page turners,” or “Who done its”, the books we read in order find out what happens at the end.. She writes books we read in order to find out what is happening on the present page. There is, she thinks, nowhere to get to other than where we are. And as to finding her or her characters boring, it would be well to read David Foster Wallace’s novel, The Pale King, which features boredom as a central issue. Wallace thinks that we don’t get rid of boredom by avoiding what bores us but by boring into it. He (or his character) imagines the most boring life possible—-that of a tax accountant— and so he takes the requisite classes necessary to become one. What he discovers by boring into the boring job is, to say the least, illuminating and dangerously interesting. MMMD is one of those rare books which reward the habit of turning to a random page and boring in on it. I would love to see the results of our fellow bus companions doing such an assignment.
I would like to end by identifying 3 passages I feel would be tragic were they to be tossed out with the bath water. The first is about a bird, the second a frog, and the third about music heard so deeply it is not heard at all.
Several subscribers in their posts have lamented that omitting the Spitzer chapters would deny readers the most incantatory and moving episode in the entire book: the death of Martha, the last of the passenger pigeon species, who died in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo. Her story, beginning on p. 644 in Chapter 49, foregrounds Young’s talents as a distinguished historian and journalist (clarity, historical accuracy, and awareness of the needs of what might be called the “average” reader). Mr. Spitzer wrote the date of the death of Martha down on his shirt cuff for it ignited his need to write music about how the death of one is the death of all. The second passage comes in Chapter 61 and concerns Spitzer meeting (or dreaming he meets) a deaf mute street musician who gets a frog to sit in his mouth, and, through a series of “labial and laryngeal and dental manipulations,” gets him to recite the Lord’s Prayer. Spitzer befriends the mute and his frog and when the frog dies, agrees to journey with the mute to a mysteriously remote burial site. The frog, within a cigar box, is buried with the mute and Spitzer seeking to find the right words for the occasion. The mute, having no words at all, performs an elaborate and complicated series of hand and body signs that appear to designate the very novel that the reader is encountering—-both the mute’s gestures and Spitzer’s pathetic attempts at oratory are failures but at the same time are deeply moving to the reader. They constitute a kind of music, which, though obviously inadequate to the occasion, succeeds at another level which I take to be the level the novel is seeking, that of music heard so deeply it is not heard at all. Those words are from T.S. Eliot’s third of his four quartets: “The Dry Salvages.” And they underscore Young’s fascination with the notion expressed by Keats that “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.” The last of the three passages I have culled from the excesses of the Spitzer chapters is 62, the final chapter before the story comes back to the charms, such as they are, of the redoubtable character Miss MacIntosh. It is a passage that tries, and fails spectacularly, to render music heard so deeply it is not heard at all. This passage, (p. 937-940) a part of which was excerpted by Ryan Ruby in his splendid review of MMMD in The New Yorker, can be used by both detractors and supporters of Miss Young’s deranged symphony of a book. And I suspect that she wouldn’t have preferred it otherwise. ——-Michael Sexson, April, 2025.