Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

"There are only two books written: Someone goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town.” This aphorism, attributed to both Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, makes a bold claim about literature, and I think a false one. While movement in space captures the heart of many great books, from Exodus to The Great Gatsby, most of any story, or any life, depicts movement in time - or transitions, like the ones suggested in this issue’s theme. Five novels, several of which take daring approaches to their subjects, will lead us through transitions ancient and modern.

To the Western mind, few transitions match those of ancient Rome, either for significance or for the production of literature. From The Aeneid to The Inferno to Shakespeare, Edward Gibbon, and George Bernard Shaw, the story of Rome, from origins to republic to empire, may be rivaled only by the sagas of the Abrahamic religions for preeminence.

Is there anything new to be said about Rome? There was as recently as 1973, when professor and novelist John Williams won the National Book Award for his epistolary novel Augustus. Williams begins with Julius Caesar’s adoption of young Gaius Octavius and ends with the death of Octavius, now Augustus, two-thirds of a century later, but in another millennium, by our counting. However, it is not the watershed moments of those years - the Ides of March, Philippi, Actium - that concern Williams, but rather the personages that provoked and endured those events as well as some lesser known stories, such as the infidelity of Augustus’s daughter or the evolution of the poet Horace from timid soldier to immortal author. Williams’s letters, memoirs, and reports from the Caesars and their contemporaries reveal plausibly imagined personalities, speaking in voices that somehow sound exactly as one would find them translated from the Latin.

The ancient Romans were both ambitious and cruel: Caesar’s letter to his niece, telling her of his plans for Gaius, bluntly announces: “At the beginning of this letter, your uncle made it appear that you had a choice about the future of your son. Now Caesar must make it clear that you do not.” This assertion of power sets the tone for the whole book, as young Gaius and his friends maneuver around the arrogant Marcus Antonius, evolving from youthful nuisances to formidable foes. Those who obtain power wield it mercilessly. Cicero’s execution and bodily desecration, like something from The Sopranos or The Wire, is particularly gruesome, making me feel almost guilty for my boredom when plodding through his speeches in high school. Augustus stands far above the run of modern fictions about the ancient world, matched perhaps only by Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian (1951).

Jumping forward to the 20th century, Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room (2009) covers six of the most tumultuous decades in central Europe through the fortunes of a single house and its occupants. “Based on a true story” accurately, but minimally, describes Mawer’s subject. The house in question is entirely real, but what happens within and around it is thoroughly fictional. The house, Mies van der Rohe’s Tugendhat Villa, still sits above the Czech city of Brno and can be seen virtually on the Internet, or in all its restored beauty by visitors to that city. Mawer brings both the house and those who occupy it to vivid life, beginning with its first family and passing through eras of economic depression, war, Communism, and liberation.

Like other such novels, The Glass Room balances the broad march of history with the small lives and they’re all small in such contexts - of the people affected. The businessman and his family who commission the house, their servants, the characters who come after them knowing little or nothing about the past, all make a fine saga of mid-century Europe. When placed on the stage of Tugendhat, they create a drama whose stunning set almost, but not quite, overpowers the plot.

Our first two books have told the story of one life, whether of a person or a house. In Life After Life (2013), however, Kate Atkinson, with startling results, challenges the premise that each of us has only that one life. As her novel opens in November 1930, a woman named Ursula either succeeds or fails to assassinate Hitler. But this foray into alternate history is only the beginning. In the next chapter, this same Ursula is stillborn in 1910, only to be rescued from that fate in her second life. Little by little we realize that Ursula will lead many existences, each one coming to a fork at which it both ends and continues. After a while Ursula begins to act in one life to ensure that certain events, which are in some sense past, will not happen in a different future. She explains to her doctor, “‘Time isn’t circular. It’s like a… palimpsest.’ ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘That sounds very vexing.’ ‘And memories are sometimes in the future.’ ‘You are an old soul,’ he said. ‘It can’t be easy.’” It’s rare that a novel built around an abstruse idea can be so rich in character and so engrossing in plot.

After these sweeping stories, covering decades and world-altering events, our last two authors remind us that time and transitions are, so far as we know, experienced fully only by the individual human mind.

In Still Alice (2007), neurologist-turned-novelist Lisa Genova examines one of the most feared transitions of our time: the assault of Alzheimer’s on an intelligent and capable person in early middle age. One day, psychology professor Alice Howland loses a word needed for a paper she’s writing. Shortly, she finds herself lost and confused on a corner outside of her college, unable to recall where she lives. From this moment on we follow her swift decline, as more and more of her capacities vanish.

For those of us in schools, the picture of such a mind collapsing in on itself may be especially painful, and Genova is too knowledgeable about her subject to offer us any false hope. Nevertheless, she provides Alice with small triumphs. A talk she gives about her own condition to a conference on dementia care and loving moments with her family confirm the mantra with which Genova autographs copies of her book: “You are more than what you can remember.”

Genova often teams with journalist Greg O’Brien to give talks from both sides of the experience. A victim of the same illness beginning at age 59, O’Brien describes himself in On Pluto: Inside the Mind of Alzheimer’s (2014) as “the first embedded reporter inside the mind of Alzheimer’s.” Of all the author presentations I have ever heard, theirs will (I hope) remain in my memory the longest.

After reading Still Alice, I turned with no little relief to the lighthearted Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand (2010), by Helen Simonson. This wry hybrid of Kingsley Amis and Barbara Pym is set in the contemporary village of Edgecombe St. Mary, where the local lord still maintains his lands and hunting privileges, while turning most of his estate into a junior boarding school to pay the bills. Meanwhile, the village’s only small shop for some years has been in the hands of Indian immigrants, who have been reluctantly accepted economically, but shunned socially, by the locals.

Our story begins on the morning when the aforementioned Major Pettigrew (“Royal Sussex, Retired”), having just received word that his brother Bertie has died, opens the door to Mrs. Jasmina Ali, the widow who now runs the little shop and has come to collect for the newspaper delivery. In a brief paragraph, Simonson foreshadows the entire book: “There was a pause that seemed to expand slowly, like the universe, which, he had just read, was pushing itself apart as it aged. ‘Senescence,’ they had called it in the Sunday paper.” Senescence this moment certainly is not, but rather an expansion of both their universes that simultaneously challenges their own families and the village customs.

What follows is partly predictable: Two lonely widowed people find unexpected love. But Simonson’s wit, often captured in the caustic Major Pettigrew’s anti-modernism?- “He had chosen to retire [from teaching] the same year that the school allowed movies to be listed in the bibliographies of literary essays” makes the love story also a British comedy of manners. This includes both the dreadful manners of Pettigrew’s vulgarly ambitious son and the awkward efforts of the villagers to embrace “our dear Pakistani friends at the shop.” Several set pieces - a duck-hunting extravaganza interrupted by a busload of small schoolboys, a pageant featuring a theme from the Indian Partition of 1948, with dancing by the ladies of the village - lightly interrupt a more serious story of marital opposition. Oh, and a la Chekhov, there is a gun in the first act - an extraordinarily expensive shotgun given to the major’s father “by the Maharajah from his own hand” - that doesn’t quite go off in the final act, but does provide a perfect denouement nonetheless. To reuse a favorite line from Don Quixote, these last two books each prove in their own way that “until death it is all life.”