Detectives unstuck in time: the down side

[mrissa]

I don't know if I'll remember to talk about this if I wait for the book post upon my return from Montreal, so I'll just do it here: I'm reading Amanda Cross's Honest Doubt, and it reminded me of something that disappointed me about The Puzzled Heart, the previous mystery with detective Kate Fansler.

See, Kate Fansler is middle-aged. I thought she just happened to be middle-aged when we started with her, but no. She is apparently middle-aged the way that Nero Wolfe is fat: as a defining characteristic we cannot have changed. She is clearly getting older as the books go along, but in The Puzzled Heart we ran into a problem: we have reached the late 1990s. If Kate Fansler was already a tenured professor who could be described as middle-aged when we meet her in 1964, is she still middle-aged in 1998? Maybe. I'm kind of skeptical that most people would parse it that way. And apparently Amanda Cross was skeptical, too, because she moved things a bit. Suddenly Kate remembers being a grad student in The Sixties -- not just the 1960s, it is clear, but the bit of them with hippies in. Her ex-lover Moon changes from being explicitly described in terms of having reached hippiedom before there were hippies to...just being another hippie.

And that's where I have the problem. I had very little problem with Nero Wolfe existing in a perpetual "now-ish" that didn't substantially intersect with my own life. But Rex Stout does not appear to have written those books to say interesting things about Wolfe and Archie as members of a particular generation. And that's not true of Kate Fansler. Part of what makes Kate so fascinating over the first severalmany books of the series is that she is from that group that came of age just after WWII but predated the Baby Boomer, and her experiences as a female professor (drawn substantially, I think everyone presumes, from Amanda Cross's experiences under her real name, Carolyn Heilbrun) in the '60s, '70s, and '80s. I think you have to make a choice as an author, between placing your characters in real years and living with the consequences, or going for the vague now-ish that will stick with you indefinitely and losing some fascinating influences and ideas thereby.

I would have loved to hear about Kate being what a lot of people would parse as old in the '90s. I would have loved to hear about Kate nearing the period when most of her contemporaries were retiring, about her lanky elegance moving into the slightly more careful lanky elegance of old age. But I don't think that Amanda Cross thinks as well as I do of old people, so instead what I got was a different character, Kate becoming someone Kate would have mentored with exasperation and affection and bewilderment. In these very last books, Amanda Cross seems to have backed away from some of the intimate specificity that has made Kate Fansler herself. I'm still going to read to the end. I'll probably even enjoy the books to a certain extent. But I must confess myself disappointed, if it ends this way, if she doesn't bring back just a little bit of the real Kate in the end.

I am only slightly mollified with St. Bernards.

Comments

[timprov.livejournal.com]

Damn your titling ways.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Not the one. Not the one.

Oh how I wish we hadn't thought of Zathras doing election coverage, but since we have, I think that should be your icon for elections from here on out. I mean, along with Bob Roberts.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

Its sentiment is appropriate for all of the elections this year, as well.

[gwynnega]

Oh dear, that is disappointing...

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

It's an interesting problem with long series. Apparently Antonia Forrest solved it by having her characters gently separate off into a timeless alternate earth. Patrick O'Brian definitely separated Jack and Stephen off into a timeless period, though oddly, the men got older even if the world didn't. Several of the most famous school story series also separated off into a timeless existence. And Bertie Wooster was still wearing spats in the 1950s, and being in the height of fashion.

[ellarien]

That definitely happened to school stories -- I think Buckeridge's Jennings had at least two, maybe three or more, eleventh birthdays.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

For me, the main difference is that the Aubrey and Maturin books were dealing with the Napoleonic Wars and with the characters, and if that meant they had to stretch the Napoleonic Wars out, well, that's how it had to work. And I could accept that; I think it would have been interesting in a completely different direction if O'Brian had decided to deal with what the end of those wars meant to someone like Jack Aubrey. But he was brilliant enough in other ways that I was content.

Also I think the fact that they started out as historical novels is somewhat key: there's no false universality being proposed.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Also I think the fact that they started out as historical novels is somewhat key: there's no false universality being proposed.

This sounds intriguing, but my heat-boiled brains are having difficulty figuring out what you mean here. Explicate please?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

With something like the Nero Wolfe books, you get some change over the course of the series, but Wolfe is not really a man to change with the times, and the times don't seem to change around him in very deep ways. So you get false universality, the idea that how things were in a pretty narrow time period are more or less how things are, with slight changes in window dressing.

This comes up in science fiction when you have square-jawed 30-year-old male protagonists written by 70-year-old men behaving, not as 30-year-olds do now, not in some extrapolated 30-year-olds-in-future fashion, but as 30-year-olds did 40 years ago. Because that's how younger men are; they were younger men once, and they know. So you don't even have the defensive "I know I'm old-fashioned but" lines from these heroes, because it hasn't occurred to the authors that young men like them are no longer as much like them as they think. (I think we see less of this in SF among women writers but will see more of it as women who took for granted that there would be all sorts of women writers in SF age.)

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Oh, I get it--yes. I have noticed that with some series. I think the most obvious was Angela Brazil, whose girly girls giggled and cooed in escalating girlishness as she got older, blithely speaking in the slang of fifty years before. In her early books, they actually had personality.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I remember reading that O'Brian established multiple versions of each year, but I say that knowing extremely little about Napoleonic history (and half of what I do know is contaminated with dragons). I saw it as a way to eliminate travel times more than anything.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Yep--he talks about this at the front of one of his books.

[ellarien]

I hit a similar problem from the other side with the Adam Dalgliesh mysteries, when it became harder and harder to suspend my disbelief as perpetually middle-aged and virile Dalgliesh, moving through a recognizably present-day world, remembered a childhood that must have been pre-WWII.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And sometimes it feels a bit too much as though the authors have decided that the way things were in their own childhoods and their own youth was more or less universal, that people from other generations may behave somewhat differently, but surely their experiences are all the same. In modern American culture we see this most with the myths of How People Have Always Been that are really How Middle Class People Were In The Fifties and Early Sixties. Sigh.

The thing is, Amanda Cross/Carolyn Heilbrun of all people was conscious that 1950-1964 was not a period in unique possession of universal truths of human experience. Kate Fansler would certainly have denied that vehemently and explicitly. But Cross/Heilbrun fell into similar traps from a different perspective.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

One troubling thing about this kind of change is how unnecessary it is. There is no problem with calling Kate "middle aged" as the decades go by.* I've known women of that generation (the generation Kate started in) and many of them won't dream of admitting they're getting old. (Not that it's all that much easier for younger women.) When the pretense of being young has become completely implausible, and so long as one is not overwhelmed by stigmatized diseases of old age, a person can claim "middle age" while passing 60, even 70. I'd expect Kate to be like my aunts in taking considerable trouble to avoid what she thinks of as any "mistaken" perception of old age. Some of that is clothing and cosmetics, but some is the art of deflecting curiosity about how one's personal history lines up with the calender.

My former rabbi used to work in Florida, land of our ancestors, and he said, "Middle age is halfway between where you are and 100."

*It's entirely plausible to me that Kate might have been born in 1932, which would make her old enough for tenure in 1964, and young enough to claim to be "middle aged" in 1998. It would be nice to have some explanation for why a woman like Kate would accept the "middle age" classification, rather than being that bright young thing until she was 50.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Was 32 old enough for tenure for a woman in 1964? Because I know precious few 32-year-olds with tenure at the moment, though I know lots of academics in their early 30s, and I have a hard time thinking that it would have been easier for a woman in 1964.

But I do take your point about people being middle aged as late as they can manage, sort of like being middle-class no matter how poor they were. And it would have worked better than the way it's actually working: in Honest Doubt, in 2000, Kate is "in her fifties." Even if we take that to mean 59, that's born in 1941: really, really not tenured in 1964 at the age of 23, unless it was such an outstanding thing that it would change the character even more completely.

My grandfather was middle-aged until a year or two ago. He's 80 this year, and he and Grandma are just now starting to get old in some fairly concrete ways. I think that they are probably on the unusual end of the curve there, and the fact that I don't automatically equate "grandparents of an adult person" with "old" is probably unusual as well. But I wish Kate Fansler had gotten the same opportunity, to be herself and have people actually notice whether that self was old or not; possibly more to the point, I have the suspicion that I wish Carolyn Heilbrun had.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

It was a lot easier for a 32-year-old to get tenure in 1964 than now. (There was a shift in grad school practices, during the 1960s, towards having people spend more and more time in grad school. Part of the driving force was young men wanting to stay on as students until they were too old to be drafted. But once the shift started, university finances came to depend on having grad students take on a fair amount of the teaching and research load, so it became self-perpetuating (and extended to women and other students not eligible for the draft.) Kate could have finished high school at 17, earned her BA at 21, MA at 23, and PhD at 25 or 26 if all went well with her research and writing. I don't know any young people who finished a PhD from a US university before 27, but my father did it at 26 (in chemistry), and my PhD advisor did it at 25 (in metallurgy). Neither believed they were unusually young, and both had the impression that it took significantly longer to finish a doctorate requiring lab or field research than one without.

That's a good analogy between middle aged and middle class. People claim to be middle class from both margins: ie, some people are claiming to be middle class because they don't want to admit to being poor, and others are claiming to be middle class because they don't want to be regarded as *rich*. I know a lot of people claim to be middle aged because they don't want to be seen as old...relatively few claim to be middle aged because they don't want to be seen as young. I'm sure it happens occasionally, but it's not common enough to go without saying.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I wonder how much this trend has contributed to the infantilization of people in their 20s -- they're still in school and therefore still "kids"? Hmm. Probably not as much as I'm thinking, since my friends are far more likely to go into grad programs than the national average.

I thought about greeting my 30th birthday with, "Hurrah, I'm middle-aged!", but I suspected that I would get, "Oh, suuuure you are, dear, *patpat* (isn't that cute?)," and so I didn't. I think in 1964 a 32-year-old tenured Kate would have been able to claim middle-age without making anybody blink (especially because she was unmarried, and in many circles that would have been "old" to be unmarried at that time), but I think now she'd get laughed at -- or more likely comforted that of course she wasn't, whether or not she found that comforting.

[redbird]

For that matter, a narrative voice in Honest Doubt saying "Kate admitted to being in her fifties" or "Kate didn't like to discuss personal matters like age, but if pressed was willing to admit to being in her fifties" would allow room for doubt as to whether she might actually be deciding whether to send in the paperwork for Medicare.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Although the narrative voice in Honest Doubt being Woody Woodhaven, it might well have sounded very different!

[redbird]

My aunt (the one who hosted the seder) was cheerfully and at least half-seriously insisting that she's not old, but that my mother and their older sister are old. She said that "old" used to be her parents' age, but that now it's Mom and Aunt Ruth.

My aunt, for everyone but Adrian's reference, is I think in her early 70s, and now retired from teaching as well as research. She's still in vigorous health, living a happy, quiet life with her partner of many years, and traveling regularly. So, not "old" in the sense of significantly impaired by age, but on Medicare and collecting Social Security and I assume her pension.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Your aunt is making at least a *little* sense, in defining the boundary between "middle aged" and "old" as being between her age and the age of her two older sisters. (It might be a relative standard, thus the same even when they were all ten years younger.) It has a lot more internal plausibility than my aunt's definition...she doesn't mess around with "middle aged," but says she is "young" or more often simply denies being old. She refers to my mother as her older sister, and got away with it for many years, despite the fact that my mother is actually 5 minutes younger.

[redbird]

Mom doesn't seem to think my aunt's definition makes much sense, but she didn't seem bothered by it either.

My aunt on the other side was (or is) several years older than my father, but has the sort of old-fashioned "can't admit to being more than x years old" thing that goes with it being considered improper to ask a woman her age, and equally improper for her to volunteer the information in response to something like "I shouldn't ask you how old you are." Somewhere along the line, she told my father that he was now her older brother, because she wasn't going to get/admit to getting any older than she then was.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This sort of thing just never seems to have shown up in my family. Possibly we never achieved (or sought) that level of gentility. My Onie will go around telling people that she will be 96 on Tuesday with nary a blink.

[redbird]

I cheerfully tell people my age as well; the sort of person who expects me to lie about it probably considers it unfeminine or scandalous that I don't dye my hair. (They're welcome to the former; I don't consider it an insult.)

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Love, you are all *kinds* of scandalous. I think not dying your hair may count as fair warning.

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

I sympathise because I am having a similar problem with the Betsy books.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, La Petite Hatbox has discovered Carolyn Haywood's Betsy series, and she likes me to read them to her. So far, we have found only the recent reprints of the early parts of the series (which is what our local library has) and that was all fine and good: a little girl and her friends, between first and third grades (roughly), in pre-WWII middle America (more or less). Then we trotted off to visit Mirth's parents, and stopped in at *their* local library, and of course I had to check to see what Betsy books they might have. The only one I found that we hadn't yet seen was "Betsy's Play School," which was written in 1977. Now, the front of the book has a chronology of all Haywood's books, which is very interesting and solves a lot of mysteries (though not the one about how their neighborhood has been untouched by the Great Depression or wartime rationing, which would have been fun to see, but still enjoys the post-war affluence of the 1950s).

I can believe that childhood doesn't change much between the 30s and the 50s, and it helps that Haywood's tone stays pretty consistent. but there's a BIG difference between attitudes in 1939 (B is for Betsy) and 1977. Even if we ignore the fact that Betsy ought to be in her mid-40s and yet she's still a pre-teen kid trying to earn extra cash babysitting local preschoolers, enough has changed (including Haywood's writing style) that it's mighty hard to suspend disbelief and agree that this is the same Betsy we saw before, or even the same neighborhood/universe...

The saving grace is that I dimly remember reading "Betsy's Play School" when I was eight or nine, and it's nice to visit that universe again. Even if it's clearly not the universe I was looking for, and I should go about my business.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have a very hard time believing that childhood doesn't change much between the 1930s and the 1950s. But what I don't have trouble believing is that an idyll of childhood wouldn't change much between the two, and that Haywood was writing exactly such an idyll.

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

I think that "an idyll of childhood" is what I meant to say or convey (it was 5am when I wrote it. I hate insomnia). And it's pretty clear if you read the 1930s books and 1950s books side by side that childhood does change.

but even an idyll of childhood changes drastically once you get to the 1970s and that sort of breaks suspension of disbelief.

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

and this reminds me that Beverly Cleary's "Ramona" books have the same problem as they go on. Are we really supposed to believe that Ramona is a preschooler when Henry Huggins wants a coonskin cap more than anything, and by the time she gets to the middle of the elementary school years, her family is dealing with the economic downturns of the 1970s? Hard to stomach, that...

Maybe there should be a time limit on some character series. That would be sad but might be necessary.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think they should just stick with where they started. You're writing about a character who is in preschool in the 1950s? Fine. Keep doing that.

(I suspect that books set in the decade immediately preceding whichever decade you're in are harder to sell than those with "contemporary" or historical-before-that settings, though.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, definitely: the idyll of childhood now is different from in the 1970s in some pretty obvious ways, too.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I didn't like Cross, and maybe this is why, because character integrity is more important than everything else.

Have you read Donald Westlake's Dortmunder books?

In those, technology and the world changes and the characters are changed only by the events of the novels, which start in the sixties and are ongoing, without anyone having got more than a year or two older.

I have a fix for this in my head, which I need every time I re-read them close together. The fix is an imaginary story called "Maybe This Time", in which Dortmunder and Co go to steal a time machine, over and over, and never notice anything weird because, well, you wouldn't. The books happen in between time machine stealing attempts.

Rendell's having the same problem with Wexford, sort of, in that he's still middle aged and not yet retired which makes no sense when you add up dates. But she's not eliding the way you say Cross is, it's just one of those things, he's been in that position in Kingsmarkham since 1970 and he was gone forty then and he's getting on for sixty now. Which is more like the Aubrey-Maturin thing, except backwards. Inside out. (I have a fix for the Aubrey-Maturin thing too. Padeen is one of the sidhe, and time goes weird around him. This totally fixes everything. As you may apprehend from all these fixes for the problem, it's a problem that bothers me a lot.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I was wondering how it would get with Wexford. He's had his eye problem and the doctor-enforced vacation that followed, and I looked at how many books I had ahead of me and said, "Hmmm."

The nice thing about Inspector Wexford is that if he has a group of aliens giving him and his wife and Burden and everyone rejuvenation treatments so they can continue with their jobs, I can easily believe that he wouldn't make a big fuss over it, if it's been ongoing and is part of his world. He adjusted more easily than Burden to the hippies in Some Lie and Some Die, so aliens, hey, as long as they keep things reasonably peaceful.

[writingortyping.livejournal.com]

Bravo. If one's going to indulge in timeline retcon, might as well really go for broke. Sidhe? Great. Aliens? Knock yourself out. Time machines? Why not?