APS TOGETHER
Day 32
New Grub Street by George GissingChapter 32
December 7, 2023 by Yiyun Li
Willie died from diphtheria. My maternal grandparents lost a baby boy to diphtheria, who was said to have been such a cute child that he won a baby contest in Shanghai in the 1930s, sponsored by an American (or British) baby formula. One day I mentioned tuberculosis (TB) in the classroom and my students thought I was talking about ancient history, but my father had TB in the 1950s. We can feel that medical science has come a long way when we read literature from yesteryear, or when we have family stories passed down.
Biffen dressed up in a new outfit is the only hopeful note in this chapter. No wonder George Orwell called the novel disheartening.
The chapter title is “Reardon Becomes Practical”—there is a bit of irony in that: a dead man, inevitably, cannot go on being impractical. It reminds me of that grimly famous saying in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American: “The only quiet American is a dead American.”
