Month: January 2008

The Twain Shall Meet

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Mark Twain, William Dean Howells

At the NEA’s Big Read Blog, David Kipen is doing some interesting musing on how Mark Twain‘s reputation was built, using a piece on The Innocents Abroad by William Dean Howells in the December 1869 issue of Atlantic Monthly as a launchpad. Here Howells keys in on Twain’s sense of humor:

And it is always good-humored humor, too, that he lavishes on his reader, and even in its impudence it is charming; we do not remember where it is indulged at the cost of the weak or helpless side, or where it is insolent, with all its sauciness and irreverence. The standard shams of travel which everybody sees through suffer possibly more than they ought, but not so much as they might; and one readily forgives the harsh treatment of them in consideration of the novel piece of justice done on such a traveller as suffers under the pseudonyme of Grimes. It is impossible also that the quality of humor should not sometimes be strained in the course of so long a narrative; but the wonder is rather in the fact that it is strained so seldom.

In a post published yesterday on the Big Read Blog–it’s dated January 48, 2008, must be some government thing–Kipen fast-forwards a few years to Howells’ piece on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in the May 1876 Atlantic, and Kipen finds some amusement in the critic’s characterization of Twain’s Missouri as the “southwest”:

Still more intriguing is his reference to “the Southwest,” someplace I always thought of as closer to Pike’s Peak than Pike County, Missouri. And then it hit me. To a Brahmin tenderfoot like Howells, 19th-century Missouri was the Southwest, just as Illinois was the Northwest — and wound up with the anachronistically named Northwestern University to prove it.

Uh-Oh

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Chuck Klosterman

I’m a fan of a lot of Chuck Klosterman‘s reporting–his piece on Latino Morrissey fans is an instant classic, an inheritor to Susan Orlean‘s best, quirkiest stories, and his Billy Joel profile is as close as this heavily PR-spun age will get us to “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” But I’m usually wary about his essays, and the ones in Chuck Klosterman IV bothered me so much I didn’t try to tackle the novella that closed it. I’m rooting for him, but I have mixed emotions about the news of his first novel, Downtown Owl, which comes out in September. From Scribner’s catalog:

This is the story of Owl, a fictional town in rural North Dakota–where the successes (or lack thereof) of the local high school’s athletic teams, the weather, and the personal business of everyone in town are the primary topics of discussion….As high school principal Walter Valentine puts it, “People always say that nothing changes in a small town, but–whenever they say that–they usually mean that nothing changes figuratively. The truth is that nothing changes literally: It’s all the same people, doing all the same things.”

The Red Room Factor

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Adam Johnson, Amy Tan, Norman Mailer Anderson

Today’s San Francisco Chronicle has a story about Red Room, a venture-backed portal for writers that’s attracted investors like Craigslist founder Craig Newmark. There’s lots to like about Red Room at first glance: It boasts a slick design, features on big-name authors like Salman Rushdie, and links to news, blogs, and multimedia for individual writers. If I click on, say, the page for Adam Johnson (whose first short-story collection, Emporium, I liked quite a bit) I get info on his books, a quick bio, updates on events, audio of a story of his (reg req’d), and blog, should he ever choose to write one on the site.

I started getting skeptical, though, when I saw this quote in the article by Norman Mailer Anderson, author of a raucous, funny novel about Northern Californians, Boonville: He says Red Room is “becoming the definitive, encyclopedic reference for writers, as defined by writers, which I think is different from Amazon.com defining writers in terms of the commerce they can garner from them, or the anonymity or carelessness that goes on in Wikipedia.”

But: Amazon and Wikipedia aren’t the sole outlets for an author to promote himself, and if your Wikipedia entry is “careless,” you can correct the errors yourself. If the value of Red Room, as founder Ivory Madison argues, is that it gives lesser-known authors a foothold “much as emerging musicians do on MySpace.com” according to the article, why can’t an author simply start a MySpace page? If social networking has taught us anything, it’s not the theme of the site that matters, but the opportunities to put your name in front of lots of other people. Why an author would choose to go to Red Room, simply because it’s “all about books,” instead of simply launching a blog or a Facebook page isn’t yet clear to me. Amy Tan, richer than God, can afford to blog for the first time on a circa-2000 portal site; lesser-known writers are at a high risk of getting lost in the shuffle here.

New in 2008: Love

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Audrey Niffenegger, David Bezmozgis, Denis Johnson, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Lethem, Leonard Cohen, Lorrie Moore, Miranda July, Sam Lipsyte, Stuart Dybek, William Faulkner

Maybe it’s just that we’re sick of all the war stories we didn’t bother seeing in theaters anyway, and tired of paging through stacks of Iraq/al Qaeda/failures-of-the-Bush-administration tomes that have arrived in the past year. I know I’ll need one more example here to argue for a trend, but I have two books in hand collecting top-shelf literary writers on the topic of love. Last week I received a copy of Four Letter Word: Invented Correspondence From the Edge of Modern Romance, in which writers reimagine the love letter. Among the participants: David Bezmozgis, Leonard Cohen, Jonathan Lethem, Sam Lipsyte, Audrey Niffenegger.

And today, Very Short List (a daily e-mail I’ve found very addictive, spot-on as it often is in its recommendations) is pushing My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekhov to Munro, a collection of love stories edited by Jeffrey Eugenides. Sez VSL:

This handsome new anthology contains 26 exhilarating and heartache-producing love stories written by familiar masters (Chekhov, Faulkner, Joyce, Nabokov) as well as some new ones (Denis Johnson, Miranda July, Lorrie Moore, Eileen Chang). From the early-adolescent longing in Stuart Dybek’s “We Didn’t” to the crushing choices made in Alice Munro‘s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” (the basis for last year’s film Away From Her), each tale chips away at the mysteries of the human heart.

That’s some purple prose there. But the book is for a good cause: Proceeds benefit literacy nonprofit 826 Chicago.

Is “The Wire” a Novel?

by Mark Athitakis, posted in David Simon, John Steinbeck, Richard Price, Upton Sinclair

HBO’s series about organizational dysfunction in Baltimore, “The Wire,” debuted its fifth and final season last night. Me, I’m one of the critics who received advance screeners of the season, and I’m holding fire on registering an opinion on it for a little bit yet; I’m working on a piece for City Paper about it. I will say that much of the season scratches the itches I want “The Wire” to scratch, but I’m also wrangling with a few things I’m finding problematic. Getting too deep into that right now involves spoilers, so for now I’ll hold tight.

One thing that I and other critics have been discussing, though, is whether to call “The Wire” a novel. Maud Newton says no: “Watching it is not the same as reading. But I can’t join in pulling out the violins over the (supposed) death of fiction when TV as a form is revealing itself to have this kind of narrative potential.” The New York Times says yes, making much of how the word Dickensian gets batted around in the show. (One episode is titled “The Dickensian Aspect.”)

Me being the third-way fellow that I am, I think both make good points. “The Wire” is certainly in the tradition of social novels like Hard Times, Upton Sinclair‘s The Jungle, and John Steinbeck‘s The Grapes of Wrath. The difference, though, is that those novels had ambitions to affect social change. (And, to some extent, they followed through.) But “Wire” creator David Simon knows he’s in an era when the social novel doesn’t matter the way it used to–one of the chief models for the show, Richard Price‘s Clockers (a novel as Dickensian as American fiction has been in recent years), didn’t do a thing about the crack epidemic it describes, let alone American drug policy. “The Wire” understands that lack of force, and tries to understand the reasons why these stories don’t penetrated the public consciousness anymore. It’s a social novel that acknowledges the toothlessness of the modern social novel.

Sunday Miscellany

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Frank Wilson, Frederik Peeters, Lydia Millet, Sheehan Miles

The New York Times Book Review is all about Islam this week; the sole review of a work of American fiction in Washington Post Book World is Ron Charles‘ (positive) assessment of Lydia Millet‘s How the Dead Dream.

Phoenix Press, as this piece by the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Frank Wilson reports, specializes in condensed versions of classic novels. The Phoenix version of Moby-Dick, for instance, lacks “lengthy descriptions of whaling history and of whales, some philosophical observations, a number of other digressions and reflections.” Which, as Wilson rightly points out, are “the pith and marrow that are precisely what makes Melville’s idiosyncratic masterwork the epic that it is.”

Sheehan Miles is giving away his new novel, Republic: A Novel of America’s Future. Why? “[M]ost authors (including yours truly) suffer from a different problem entirely — no one has ever heard of them.”

Also, my review of Frederik Peeters‘ nicely turned graphic memoir,  Blue Pills, is in this week’s issue of City Paper. ComicsDC was nice enough to notice. (Our online version, for the record, is no longer shaky.)

Weekend Miscellany

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Harlan Ellison, Heather E. Goodman, John Updike

GalleyCat has a heads-up about a new documentary on Harlan Ellison, Dreams With Sharp Teeth. Fun trailer here.

A new short story by John Updike, “Outage,” is available at the New Yorker‘s Web site.

The Chicago Tribune‘s Books section, which moved to Saturdays as a cost-saving measure last year, has published the winners of its annual Algren Awards for short-story writing. First place goes to Heather E. Goodman‘s “His Dog.”

More Previews

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Adam Langer, Andrew Sean Greer, Samantha Hunt, Ward Just

The Millions has a nice round-up of some of the most-anticipated books of 2008. (Anticipated by whom? Poster C. Max McGee, pretty much, though many of the books qualify as obvious consensus picks.) Among the ones on the list that caught my interest are Adam Langer‘s Ellington Boulevard (Langer’s Crossing California, along with Ward Just‘s An Unfinished Season, was one of my favorite Chicago-set novels of recent years); Samantha Hunt‘s The Invention of Everything Else (currently on my to-be-read pile for an upcoming review); and Andrew Sean Greer‘s The Story of a Marriage (I’m a sucker for San Francisco novels).

New in VQR

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Daniel Alarcón, Don Waters, Drew Johnson, Manuel Muñoz

The Virginia Quarterly Review has posted the table of contents for its Winter 2008 issue, some of which is available online. Among the freebies: Reviews of Don Waters‘ Desert Gothic and Manuel Muñoz‘s The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, and a complete story, Drew Johnson‘s “The Last Dead.” Not online is a piece by Daniel Alarcón, whose Lost City Radio was one of my favorite novels of 2007. [Bookslut]

Winter Preview in USA Today

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Dan Brown, Geraldine Brooks, Richard Price, Russell Banks, Sue Miller

Complete with an odd if strangely compelling snowman widget, USA Today previews some of the bigger books coming out in the next three months, among them novels by Geraldine Brooks and Dan Brown. Mentioned among the high-profile literary fiction releases:

The Senator’s Wife by Sue Miller, due Tuesday. “She doesn’t write often, but when she does, it’s always an event,” [Barnes & Noble’s Sessalee] Hensley says. Also: Russell Banks‘ The Reserve (Jan. 29). In March: Lush Life by Richard Price. In April: Unaccustomed Earth, stories by Jhumpa Lahiri.

I can speak to the worthiness of both Miller’s and Price’s novels, and I’m hoping to get to The Reserve soon. The Namesake put me off Lahiri a bit, but her talents as a short-story writer (if not a novelist) is indisputable. [Shelf Awareness]