Klassicks Korner

The Fox by D.H. Lawrence

The Shadow-Line by Joseph Conrad

After nearly passing into a coma while reading Richard Russo's latest, Bridge of Sighs, I decided to forsake overhyped contemporary fiction for some classics. Aside from some painfully obvious symbolism in both books, D.H. Lawrence's The Fox (1923) and Joseph Conrad's The Shadow-Line (1917) proved to be elegant and provocative diversions.

In college I read some short stories by Lawrence and at some point I made an aborted attempt to read Sons and Lovers. So unless you count watching the soft-core film version of Lady Chatterly's Lover on Cinemax After Dark I'm a novice when it comes to this frequently banned author.

The Fox is a novella, a 60 page study of two spinsters who live on a rural English farm, contending with the fox who invades their property to devour their livestock. Then a soldier on leave arrives on the scene, believing he's visiting a relative (who, we learn, sold the property to one of the women). He schemes to get back the house and land by romancing the mannish woman March and kicking Banford - the other gal - out of the picture. He's a consummate predator just like the fox, and the only major flaw in the storytelling is the heavy-handed way Lawrence drives that metaphor home.

Onto Conrad's The Shadow-Line, which I'd never heard of until I read Philip Roth's latest, Exit Ghost. In that novel Roth's recurring protagonist Zuckerman rereads his favorite literary works before he croaks. He's especially fond of The Shadow-Line.

It turned out that the final stretch of October was a perfect time to read this short novel because it's totally freaking creepy overture to Halloween, detailing the nightmarish voyage of a young captain who nearly succumbs to madness when someone sabotages his quinine supply in the midst of a deadly flu epidemic on board the ship. Heart of Darkness is the only other book by Conrad I've read, and I think The Shadow-Line is a worthy companion to that bleak masterpiece to end all bleak masterpieces. Like The Fox, the main problem is the oft-uttered significance of the title, the "shadow-line" being the line one crosses when she or he passes from wide-eyed youth to world-weary adulthood.

Now I may need a break from classics, but after yesterday's pillage of the Goodwill book department I'm well stocked for future forays into Classicsville. Among other titles I picked up Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native and D.H. Lawrence's interconnected novels The Rainbow and Women in Love.