The Mill on the Floss (5+*)

According to a recent article by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, Marcel Proust's favorite novel was The Mill on the Floss.  Now that's what I call a recommendation, especially since I've never read George Eliot, and in spite of the fact that I've never completed Remembrance of Things Past.

Quelle surprise, I couldn't put it down despite its early embrace of capitalism.  Some young actor in Hollywood looking for an Oscar should commission a screenplay quick so he can play Bob Jakin who, along with his pooch Mumps, is one of the funniest, smartest and sweetest characters I've ever encountered in fiction.

Eliot has it all going on:  plot, structure, character, acute psychological insight (her children, on whom she spends way more time than most novelists, actually think and act like them) and occasionally meandering but always right-on humanistic philosophy.  For example:

For there is nothing more widely misleading than sagacity if it happens to get on a wrong scent; and sagacity, persuaded that men usually act and speak from distinct motives, with a consciously proposed end in view, is certain to waste its energies on imaginary game.

* * * * *

 . . . moral judgments must remain false and hollow, unless they are checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that make the individual lot.

Eliot more than satisfies as a proto-feminist, an important credential which she demonstrates by contrasting Maggie, her spitfire but extraordinarily conscientious protagonist, with prevailing 19th century attitudes:

an over-‘cute woman’s  no better nor a long-tailed sheep,—she’ll fetch none the bigger price for that.

* * * * *

So it has been since the days of Hecuba,  and of Hector, tamer of horses; inside the gates, the women with streaming hair and uplifted hands offering prayers, watching the world’s combat from afar, filling their long, empty days with memories and fears; outside, the men, in fierce struggle with things divine and human, quenching memory in the stronger light of purpose, losing the sense of dread and even of wounds in the hurrying ardor of action.

* * * * *

“We don’t ask what a woman does. We ask whom she belongs to.”

There's also quite possibly the most sensitive love letter ever written,  penned by a sensitive hunchback, no less, if that term is allowed.  Unrequited, of course.  It had me bawling.

And did I mention that Eliot is hilarious AND her book has a killer ending that seems contemporary in its form if not resolution?