I was shamed by David Eddyshaw’s recent comment (“I highly recommend The English Understand Wool to the three Hatters who have not already read it”) — he, of course, had no intention of shaming me, as he could not possibly have known that I had failed to read the latest fiction by one of my favorite authors — and I have accordingly remedied my inexcusable omission. I have no intention of telling you “what it’s about”; the text itself will do that. I will quote a couple of early bits to convince you that you need to read the whole thing (it’s a short book and will take only a few hours). Here’s the opening of the novella:
—The English understand wool.
My mother sat on a small sofa in our suite at Claridge’s, from which the television had been removed at her request. She held in her lap a bolt of very beautiful handloomed tweed which she had brought back from the Outer Hebrides. She had in fact required only a few metres for a new suit.
I use the word “suit” because I am writing in English, but the French tailleur—she would naturally think of clothes in French—makes intelligible that one would travel from Marrakech to the Outer Hebrides to examine the work of a number of weavers, perhaps to establish a relationship with a weaver of real gifts. It makes intelligible that one would bring one’s daughter, so that she might develop an eye for excellence in the fabric, know the marks of workmanship of real quality, observe how one develops an understanding with a craftsman of talent. The word “suit,” I think, makes this look quite mad.
She had needed only a few metres, but she had bought the entire bolt to prevent it from falling into ignoble hands. We had stayed overnight on the way north in Inverness, where the shops were full of distinguished tweeds put to debased uses.
And here’s the start of ch. 4:
Maman was exigeante—there is no English word—in matters of protocol. Lunch, tea and dinner were served formally. English was spoken if my father was present, French if we were alone. It is important for the servants to become accustomed to the correct manner of serving; if the President of the Republic comes to dine, they must not be anxiously casting their minds back to the last important dinner. It is an advantage to them to speak both French and English flawlessly. (When they made mistakes, they were corrected.) If an opportunity arises in a great hotel, they will not be unprepared.
Maman spoke French with a pure Parisian accent. She used this in the normal management of the household; it was better for them to accustom themselves. She spoke the standard Arabic, the Arabic of television, of high-level functionaries, of international businessmen, on formal occasions where French was inappropriate. She spoke Darija, the Moroccan form of Arabic, when the servants were ill or had family problems. This was the hardest to learn because the language schools did not like to teach it, and private instructors felt they would lose face if they did not teach what was taught in schools. What she set out to do she did.
I will add that I am entirely in accord with DE’s “At several points I had to suppress an embarrassing desire to cheer out loud for the remarkable heroine, an eminently worthy spiritual sibling to Ludo.” Nobody writes like DeWitt.
Unfortunately, it’s one of those novels where it’s almost impossible to explain why you think it’s so good without serious spoilers. You just have to encourage people to read it and hope they take your word for it.
(The utterly different Anathem is like that, in my view. Though my view, that it’s the best thing that Neal Stephenson has written, does not seem to be widely shared.)
Well, we have done our part; we have told them it is short and has a heroine one feels like cheering, and provided them with samples so that they do not have to take our word for its virtues. To do more would be mauvais ton. Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.
How many Hatters have actually read it? I was unaware it even existed, although my excuse I suppose is that anything written in English is low priority for me at this point. But I am headed to London in a few weeks and will snag a copy.
I sometimes use exigent, after a French friend who thought it existed in English and used it (unlike Maman, I did not correct her). The word “demanding” does not have the same overwhelming and energy-sapping connotations the French word seems to have.
That adjectival sense of exigent does exist in English. It’s as a verb form that English doesn’t have it.
Just never encountered it then. I am doubly glad I did not correct my friend. Another friend with very good English asked me why I did not correct her pronunciation of the l in salmon. An ESL teacher who also knew my friend said that there could be L1 speakers that use such a pronunciation, she just did not know any.
That adjectival sense of exigent does exist in English.
There is an adjective exigent in English, but that does not mean it is used in just the same way as the French, which is the narrator’s point. “Close enough” does not exist in her world.
I’ve heard “salmon” with an <l> here in New Mexico from L1 speakers of English, and with lambdatic (?) pronunciations of “calm” and “palm” possibly the majority in the U.S., can “salmon” be far behind? (Of course I pronounce “almond” with an <l>. That’s correct.)
@languagehat: Is the French meaning really different from the sense, “requiring a great deal; demanding more than is reasonable; exacting” [OED], that was borrowed in the late eighteenth century?
Indeed, in current English exigent circumstances are exactly the sort of thing that license deviation from strict protocol rather than redoubled adherence to it. References say that there’s an English “exigeant” borrowed from the French (which I can’t immediately recall ever having seen in the wild myself) but suggest that our “exigent” is taken directly from the Latin.
It’s so good! Lightning Rods and Some Trick are also fantastic. Your Name Here is… worth reading (she’s said she changed it a lot from it’s original version; wonder what I would have made of the original).
Her PhD thesis was completely incomprehensible to me (yes, I’ve tried to get my hands on every word she’s written 🙂
“Exacting” is what I was thinking of.
Speaking of the US, I’ve heard a metalambdatic pronunciation [kʰɒːm] from someone whose LOT vowel is completely unrounded (identical to father, spa and the like, I’m pretty sure). Seems like the /l/ was reintroduced and then disappeared with assimilation again!
My excellent Collins-Robert French dictionary defines exigeant as “particular, demanding, hard to please; demanding, exacting” (in various contexts I’m not bothering to reproduce); a sample sentence: “je ne suis pas ~, donnez-moi 100 F I’m not asking for much — give me 100 francs.” This is not how we use exigent in English, and identifying them is a simple case of faux amis.
@DM: That’s the pronunciation I grew up with—my THOUGHT vowel. I suspect it originated as a spelling pronunciation influenced by “walk”, “talk”, etc. Or possibly both the “talk” words and the “calm” words started with [ɒː] as a “trace” of the original [l], and the “calm” words then shifted to the “father, spa” vowel in RP and other dialects. Wells probably knows.
B/C/P/Psalm are among the few words I’ve deliberately changed my pronunciation of (to the “father” vowel). I decided to go along with the dictionaries. By now I’m out of step anyway.
When that I was and a little tiny boy at school in Glasgow, (where indeed the rain it raineth every day), we sang [‘psæləmz].
@languagehat: What you quote as a definition of French exigeant sound just like a definition of the relevant sense of English exigent. It’s not the main sense, certainly, but it’s been in use for hundreds of years. The OED‘s most recent citation for that sense is: “The sampling process is particularly exigent: a fact that causes difficulties when using it for PhD-theses.” This is listed as from 2007 in Hist. Social Research No. 19 232, but I cannot actually find an article corresponding to that reference information.
Library hold duly placed! xo
Maman was exigeante—there is no English word—in matters of protocol.
“Strict” comes to mind. Is exigent more overwhelming and energy-sapping?
@DE: Anathem might have been my favorite among the Stephenson books I’ve read, but I didn’t see that he pulled off a stunt he needed to pull off, namely (if we’re avoiding spoilers) znxvat gur uvture cynarf ernyyl srry uvture. Znlor V arrq gb ernq gur Cnenqvfb.
Here:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40981080
As you might guess from the hyphenated “PhD-theses”, the quote is from the English abstract of an article in German, titled “Grounded Theory Methodologie in Qualifikationsarbeiten. Zwischen Programmatik und Forschungspraxis — am Beispiel des Theoretical Samplings”.
“Exigent circumstances” is by far the most common collocation of “exigent” in COCA; however, this is the OED’s sense 2, “Requiring immediate action or aid; pressing, urgent,” different from the sense 3 that Brett quoted.
“Strict” comes to mind.
“Strict” is in the same vague semantic ballpark; it is not at all equivalent here. It is not a matter of being strict (which implies severity and carries negative connotations) but of making sure everything is done correctly.
Well, one person’s exigeantness (exigeantitude?) is another person’s obsessive-compulsive disorder. I’d have to read more to see whether Maman’s view of protocol is really being praised or condemned here by the first-person narrator, who I suppose may well be hopelessly ambivalent about it.
Maman’s view is accepted without question by the first-person narrator, but she is a teenage girl who owes her very happy existence to her mother’s care and solicitude (and exigeance), so she can be forgiven her lack of skepticism.
Thank you for the recommendation. What a delightful little book!
Is that representative of Ms deWitt’s oeuvre? If so, I will have to add her other books to my to-read list.
It is, and you should head straight to The Last Samurai.
Thanks! Added to the ever-lengthening list, near the top.
If there’s anything that justifies the existence of this blog, it’s turning people on to DeWitt.
“The utterly different Anathem is like that, in my view. Though my view, that it’s the best thing that Neal Stephenson has written, does not seem to be widely shared.”
It’s shared by me. I’ve read nearly everything Stephenson has written, although I couldn’t get through Fall, or Dodge in Hell, which is pretty bad. Some years after reading Anathem I listened to it on an audio-book in the Audible app, which helped me get deeper into it because of my bad habit of reading too fast and skipping ahead without noticing.
I possess the perhaps unusual distinction of having never read anything by Stephenson *except* his very first novel _The Big U._, which apparently he subsequently disowned and for a long time refused to allow to come back into print. I read it back in the mid-Eighties when it was new and I was myself a college student (it has a campus setting, albeit a somewhat surreal one*) and thought it was fine, but he apparently subsequently shifted style and theme and found greater success.
*Not as surreal as e.g. Barth’s _Giles Goat-Boy_, which I think I also read around the same time.
I never understood why Stephenson wanted to bury The Big U; I thought it was a funny tall tale full of recognizable elements of 80s college life.