Elvis Has Left the Building

Yesterday I finished Anna Karenina. It wasn’t momentous. The book peters out, quite deliberately, in an imitation of regular life – a mixture of pettiness and exaltation. The ending finds the hero, Levin, contemplating a recent spiritual and philosophical breakthrough and recognizing that it won't change him much, if at all. He’ll continue to be short-tempered, to argue with his wife, to be socially awkward. He’ll just have a different belief system in the back of his mind. He believes he’s found the right one, of course, but he also recognizes theory is no more closely related to life than clouds are.

The novel is an astonishing collection of human moments like this one. Tolstoy is passionately direct and realistic, noting at one point the nagging discomfort one feels after forgetting a disquieting thought and the counterintuitive need to keep searching until you remember source of the bad feeling. Oh yeah! you keep going. That is exactly what that feels like.

He reminds me of D.H. Lawrence in his minute scrutiny of human emotions. Has anyone else made this comparison? If not why not?

The experience was marred for me only when I read, after much anticipation, Mona Simpson’s introduction. She, to put it without Tolstoy’s eloquence, is out to lunch. She asked, for instance, if Kitty really had to end up with the boring prig, Levin. Could she not have had a baby by and felt the same devotion to Vronsky?

Vronsky! Vronsky is a wealthy lightweight, a social gadfly, a man elevated by his love for Anna K. but essentially shallow. Yes, it seems he’s good in bed, and he’s rich and caring, but he’s too insubstantial to lean on, as Anna finds to her peril. Levin is a big, dark, serious thinker who plainly overshadows Vronsky almost as early as Anna steals him from Kitty. Very soon after refusing Levin, Kitty realizes what a mistake she’s made and sorrows so deeply she has to be taken to a spa. Yes, a spa!

Ms. Simpson also writes that she always thought Kitty was something of a drip. Kitty isn’t as nuanced or dashing as Anna but she’s far from a drip, Mona Simpson. Kitty nurses Levin’s dying brother with loving patience, while Levin can’t cope at all. Kitty is a princess and has a certain preciousness, but we see her through Levin’s eyes and it’s hard not to love her. Talk about the male gaze! I was overwhelmed with tortured longing for Kitty just like Levin and would have proposed to her too. But I also yearned for dark, restless Levin with his crushing gait and lack of social graces.

Simpson explains that she read Anna Karenina when she was at Yaddo and feeling like an outsider. Anyone can sympathize with that feeling, but what does it lead Simpson to do? To identify with a minor character, Varencka, who’s at the spa where Kitty goes to recover her health, and who envies Kitty her wealthy family and position. Since the book is about Kitty and Levin’s courtship and marriage, Levin’s philosophical struggles with Russian economic life, and Anna and Vronsky’s love affair and tragic end, it seems obvious the spa section is quite minor and that identifying with Varencka is a bum move.

I didn’t mean to go on and on about this. I’m stressed like all of us by the holiday season. It’s supposed to be fun but it’s a giant strain. That’s a cliché by now but it’s still true. I’m tired, my friends are tired and ill, everybody’s feeling it. My sister’s family just went down the coast of Mexico and rubbed mud all over their bodies. Now, they know how to enjoy the holidays.