How great literature can change your life

Wednesday

Last week I commented on Katie Kontent’s love of Charles Dickens in the Amor Towles novel Rules of Civility. Today I enjoy how Towles has his protagonist turn to Agatha Christie to cope with the betrayal (or so she thinks) by the man whom she loves and who loves her.

The problem (spoiler alert!) is that he has deceived her about a wealthy benefactor, who has been making him wealthy in exchange for sex. When Katie learns that he is not her godson but actually her gigolo, she is shattered and turns to Christie’s crime novels for comfort. In a Christie novel, as in her own life, someone observant should be able to see through the deception. Katie has been so smitten, however, that she has missed clues that should have been obvious.

Kontent believes she find Christie’s novels satisfying because the plots are reassuring. Readers may think they are treading new ground, only to learn that the ground is thoroughly recognizable. As we read, we encounter our own predictable lives step by step:

You can make what claims you will about the psychological nuance of Proust or the narrative scope of Tolstoy, but you can’t argue that Mrs. Christie fails to please. Her books are tremendously satisfying.

Yes, they’re formulaic. But that’s one of the reasons they are so satisfying. With every character, every room, every murder weapon feeling at once newly crafted and familiar as rote (the role of the postimperialist uncle from India here being played by the spinster from South Wales, and the mismatched bookends standing in for the jar of fox poison on the upper shelf of the gardener’s shed), Mrs. Christie doles out her little surprises at the carefully calibrated pace of a nanny dispensing sweets to the children in her care.

The criticism that Christie’s plots are formulaic will be made by critic Edmund Wilson six years (in 1944) after Towles’s novel is set (1938):

Her writing is of a mawkishness and banality that seem to me literally impossible to read. You cannot read such a book, you run through it to see the problem worked out; and you cannot become interested in the characters, because they never can be allowed an existence of their own even in a flat two dimensions but have always to be contrived so that they can seem either reliable or sinister, depending on which quarter, at the moment, is to be baited for the reader’s suspicion … Mrs Christie, in proportion as she is more expert and concentrates more narrowly on the puzzle, has to eliminate human interest completely, or, rather, fill in the picture with what seems to me a distasteful parody of it. In this new novel, she has to provide herself with puppets who will be good for three stages of suspense: you must first wonder who is going to be murdered, you must then wonder who is committing the murders, and you must finally be unable to foresee which of two men the heroine will marry. It is all like a sleight-of-hand trick, in which the magician diverts your attention from the awkward or irrelevant movements that conceal the manipulation of the cards, and it may mildly entertain and astonish you, as such a sleight-of-hand performance may.

These are harsh words but they match my own assessment. I want more depth in my characters and more exploratory plots. It’s as though, in a Christie novel, a murder is not an earth-shattering event but a social faux pas. Or to put it another way, lapses in social etiquette are treated as earth-shattering events. Someone has upset society with an indecorous murder, and it takes a shrewd detective to restore order and return things to what they were.

In other words, Christie is not writing mind-bending literature.

 But if you’re someone who has just had her heart broken, maybe you need reassurance that the world is, despite appearances, fair and just. At this juncture, Samuel Beckett’s theatre of the absurd (to choose someone who was writing at the time the novel is set) will not assure us that justice and fairness will prevail. As Kontent puts it,

But I think there is another reason [the novels] please—a reason that is at least as important, if not more so—and that is that in Agatha Christie’s universe everyone eventually gets what they deserve.

Inheritance or penury, love or loss, a blow to the head or the hangman’s noose, in the pages of Agatha Christie’s books men and women, whatever their ages, whatever their caste, are ultimately brought face-to-face with a destiny that suits them. Poirot and Marple are not really central characters in the traditional sense. They are simply the agencies of an intricate moral equilibrium that was established by the Primary mover at the dawn of time.

For the most part, in the course of our daily lives we abide the abundant evidence that no such universal justice exists. Like a cart horse heads down and our blinders in place, waiting patiently for the next cube of sugar. But there are certain times when chance suddenly provides the justice that Agatha Christies promise. We look around at the characters cast in our own lives—our heiresses and gardeners, our vicars and nannies, our late-arriving guests who are not exactly what they seem—and discover that before the end of the weekend all assembled will get their just deserts.

If Kontent turns to Agatha Christie when her feelings are in turmoil, one can’t altogether blame her. As it turns out, however, her own life (and Towles’s novel) are far less predictable than an Agatha Christie novel. Indeed, resolutions we expect do not come to pass. Tinker Gray, the man who breaks her heart, proves to have unexpected depth, and Kontent grows as she discovers this. Each must break out of conventional settings in order to step into their best selves.

Nuanced authors such as Proust and big-hearted novelists such as Tolstoy prepare Kontent much better for this soul-expanding growth than do Christie’s murder mysteries.