Month: August 2008

Mansbach’s Race Question

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Adam Mansbach

Scott Thill questions for Adam Mansbach read like the thoughts of a man just freed from a Cultural Studies Department subbasement. (“Are you as done with white people as I am?” “Do you feel this fear of a literal end to the Jews raise its head in macro or micro form in your novel?”) But Mansbach—who’s written a pretty good new novel, The End of the Jews, and can put together a pretty great mixtape—gets a lot of room to expound, which makes some of the silly starting points forgivable. Much of the interview, like the novel, turns on the intersection of black and Jewish culture in modern America:

One of the most fascinating stories of the 20th century, and one that I try to tell in The End of the Jews, is how both Jewish assimilation and Jewish self-identity have relied on the immutability of black Otherness. As the Jews have become whiter and richer, we’ve also gained the ability to engage in the same kind of complacency and hypocrisy that has long characterized the rest of white liberal America. Jews can now lament racial injustice without either fighting or acknowledging the ways in which it benefits us. The post-World War II Jewish credo has been to ‘never forget,’ and maintain eternal vigilance against the smallest rustling of anti-Semitism. I understand that. But I also lament that fact that whenever something does happen, regardless of whether the offensive speech or action stems from true malice or ignorance, whether it is repented for or not, the gates come crashing down, and dialogue is considered anathema. I think it’s time to really rethink this, especially given the tremendous attacks that civil rights and civil liberties have taken under this president.

One Paragraph: Marilynne Robinson, Home

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson‘s third novel, I’m sorry to report, isn’t perfect. Her famed control unravels a bit in the final pages of Home, and for anybody who loved Gilead, the new novel may feel like more of the same. But as I point out in a forthcoming review, Robinson has few rivals at the sentence level. This paragraph, I think, exemplifies that skill: homespun and often free of action, but with an uncanny power:

Starting all over again, she made a dinner to welcome him home. The dining room table was set for three, lace tablecloth, good china, silver candlesticks. The table had in fact been set for days. When she put the vase of flowers in place, she noticed dust on the plates and glasses and wiped them with her apron. Yellow tulips and white lilacs. It was a little past the season for both of them, but they would do. She had the grocery store deliver a beef roast, two pounds of new potatoes, and a quart of ice cream. She made biscuits and brownies. She went out to the garden and picked young spinach, enough to fill the colander, pressed down and flowing over, as her father would say. And Jack slept. And her father slept. And the day passed quietly, with those sweet savors rising.

Roundup: Don’t Talk That Way

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Charles Bock, Herbert Gold, Richard Price, Selden Edwards

In the process of blogging about Richard Price‘s Lush Life for the National Post, police dispatcher Heather Clark seems to have acquired a touch of Price’s rhythms: “I lived with a cop who metaphorically swept away the stress of his world with the comforting, sucking hum of the vacuum cleaner. In our seven years together he hoovered his way through three rugs, and blew the engines on six Dirt Devils (that doesn’t include the busted Bissell brooms). It doesn’t take the pain away, but it sure as hell takes away the caring.” (Lush Life is now out in the U.K., receiving unsurprisingly enthusiastic reviews.)

The Santa Barbara Independent has an expansive feature on Selden Edwards‘ The Little Book, a fall big book decades in the making. (h/t Liz)

Novelist Herbert Gold speaks with the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles about his new memoir, Still Alive!, which recounts his relationships with Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, and other literary folk.

Finally, trust Radar to ask the tough questions. From an interview with Charles Bock:

I’m actually supposed to ask you about Bennington. Apparently, all of the girls there have claw-shaped vaginas that can recite Andrea Dworkin to the tune of “Old Dixie.” Is this true?
That’s really, really funny. I don’t know if Dworkin might be too outdated now. I can tell you this: During my time in the MFA program, I worked like absolute hell to get laid as much as I possibly could. At no time did any woman’s intimate area recite anything to me to the tune of “Old Dixie.”

Nam Le on Writing Young

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Nam Le

As part of the run-up to the Melbourne Writers Festival, Australia’s The Age has an inventive feature in which writers of various ages are asked to address what it’s like to write in their teens, 20s, 30s, etc. Nam Le, who was born in Vietnam, raised in Australia, and now lives in the U.S., takes on the business of being a writer in one’s 20s:

What I know, at 29, is this: writing is hard, and it is slow, and its condition is failure. Everything I’ve written has fallen short of its ideal conception; I know this will be as true when I’m 60 as it is now. What’s more, I know I’ll only get a handful of failures: we writers have to face the finiteness of words fitted to time the same way we all, eventually, have to face death. Still, I’m excited. I’m young. I have nothing and no one to answer to. My failures are mostly ahead of me.

L. Rust Hills and the Death of the Short Story

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Jhumpa Lahiri, L. Rust Hills, Stephen Amidon

Two stories worth pressing against each other. First, today’s news that L. Rust Hills, former fiction editor at Esquire, has died. Hills provided a home in Esquire‘s pages for Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and many more. But:

When he was first hired at Esquire, in 1957, the magazine’s fiction had turned away from its original lofty aspirations; once the home of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, by the late 1950s it had shifted more toward adventure stories for adventure’s sake.

That’s a detail worth noting in relation to Stephen Amidon‘s interesting recent meditation on the death of the short story in the Times (U.K.):

Even in America, the readership for short stories is undergoing a significant contraction. Fewer large-circulation magazines are publishing fiction, and those that do fail to pay enough to keep writers in the black. (The New Yorker pays a dollar a word for first-timers, which means you can’t even buy a car if you are lucky enough to place a short story there.) Lahiri notwithstanding, New York publishers are increasingly less likely to take a chance on a short-story collection.

It’d be facile to extrapolate any big statement from this—to either say that the short story is on its deathbed, or that these things are cyclical. Esquire still publishes fiction (gives it its own silo on its Web site, in fact), yet people don’t read as much as they used to; it’s complicated. But there’s little question that a book like Jhumpa Lahiri‘s Unaccustomed Earth is an outlier, that by and large the short-story collection doesn’t have the prized place it did, say, 20 years ago. It may be that Lahiri is one of the few working writers today who feel the form is a destination, not a launchpad. It may be there are fewer magazine editors today who care to curate the form. Money’s probably involved, too. In any case, Amidon’s piece is worth reading as a cautionary essay—a warning that while the short story will never die, it’s at risk of becoming a niche enterprise.

Steinbeck’s Whitewash

by Mark Athitakis, posted in John Steinbeck, Louis Owens

Tony Ortega‘s feature “Louis Owens and John Steinbeck’s Ghosts” is something of a hybrid of personal essay and literary essay. Starting with the suicide of novelist Louis Owens six years ago, the Village Voice editor recalls his research of Steinbeck’s novel In Dubious Battle, which uses white Okies instead of the Mexicans who actually participated in the Great Cotton Strike of 1933. The entire piece is worth your time—it’s a nice tribute to Owens and an interesting exploration of Ortega’s own family ties to the strike. But this bit summarizes what’s at issue:

Making the workers all one ethnicity made sense in a couple of ways—not only was it easier to consider groupthink among a homogenous group, but by 1936, when the book was published, many more white Okies had poured into California as a result of the Dust Bowl in the Midwest. You could argue that Steinbeck wasn’t only “whitewashing” the details of the strike in his novel to keep his theme pure, but also to reflect the times.

Other things, however, weren’t so easy to reconcile—in particular, some troubling remarks that the author had made in newspaper articles at about the same time. More than once, Steinbeck made the point that it was time for the larger public to pay more attention to the plight of farm workers for the very reason that so many of them were now white. As he put it, “their blood was strong”; democracy, he argued, came more “naturally” to the white farm worker, who wasn’t going to put up with the kind of treatment that earlier workers had.

Although Steinbeck didn’t use the bigoted language that was so common at the time, he was nevertheless implying that the “blood” of the Mexican workers wasn’t “strong,” that democracy didn’t come naturally to them, when the opposite was true: Organizers found the Mexicans more willing to stand up for their rights.

Harlan Ellison Has Just About Had it With Kids These Days

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Harlan Ellison

The so-called millennials have been on my mind lately: Last weekend I spent a little time at an educators’ conference where Topic A often was the frustration of teaching to a new group of college students that (according to the anecdotes) has Dad call the prof when grades are subpar, thinks the best way to save a department is to remove everybody older than 30, and feels it’s OK to e-mail the prof to ask, “Are doing anything important in class today?” Whether this means that the Everybody-Gets-a-Trophy generation will be our ruin or that my generation is simply full of grumpy old coots is an open question, but Harlan Ellison knows what side he’s on. His interview with the Toronto Sun is ostensibly about the DVD release of Masters of Science Fiction, a series of films, originally aired on Starz last year, that includes the Ellison-scripted The Discarded. But the good stuff involves Ellison’s “splenetic rage” at the students he met at UCLA recently:

At a recent lecture in front of 27 students at UCLA, Ellison used a reference to “the emperor’s new clothes” as a metaphor. “And they all looked at me with a blank expression. I literally had to go back to the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale and explain to them the whole thing. And they still looked at me and they still didn’t get it. So I had to explain what the trope was and what it meant.”

By the end of the lecture, after hitting other dead ends in the conversation, “I launched into a splenetic rage about their cultural ignorance. And, of course, they were furious with me: ‘Who the hell do I think I am?’

“It is part of that automatic cultural response in this age of slackers, or Y generationals, or millennials, or whatever the f..k they’re calling themselves these days. Not only are they ignorant of everything — everything! — but they’re arrogant about their ignorance. They take great pride in not knowing or bestoying geezerdom on anything or anyone who achieved anything prior to their emergence.”

An Opera of One’s Own

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Amy Tan

My knowledge of opera is admittedly shaky, but there are more operas based on American novels than McTeague, yes? Maybe it’s a San Francisco thing: Next month marks the world premiere of The Bonesetter’s Daughter, an opera inspired by Amy Tan‘s S.F.-set novel. Tan’s comments about it to the Wall Street Journal in an interview shows that her responses are as airy as ever (“My role as a librettist was not words. It was story, and emotion within that story.”), but it’s an attitude that works:

I’m writing another novel. I’ve done a lot of the research. I have the structure in my mind. That’s a lot of it. Have I got a lot of pages? No, but that part is OK. In most things creatively you have to get these other things going. The most difficult part is finding the voice and the sense of what the story is.

Posting Will Be Light…

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Dept. of Self-Promotion, George Pelecanos

as I head out of town for a couple of days. In the meantime, I’m not so humble that I won’t recommend “A Pelecanos Dictionary,” my attempt to discuss George Pelecanos‘ new novel, The Turnaround, in terms of some of his most persistent themes, tics, settings, and so forth:

Pelecanos has spent more than 15 years writing 15 novels that, taken together, make for a panoramic story about Washington, D.C. That’s a lot of waterfronts, a lot of neglected corners, and—to pick just one of the writer’s hobby horses—a whole lot of references to Stax/Volt singles. But there’s an irony buried in this career path: As his study of the city has deepened, his writing has become more and more simplified. Read his books in chronological order—starting with 1992’s A Firing Offense up to the brand-new The Turnaround—and the change in Pelecanos’ writing mirrors the change in a typical Pelecanos character. There’s a youthful recklessness, then a growing wisdom about the world’s complexities, then a kind of essentialized understanding of it. As his characters have gone through a debullshitification process, so has he.

Back to the usual schedule on Monday.

War Stories

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Heller, Robert Stone, Tim O'Brien, William Faulkner

At the Oxford University Press blog, Keith Gandal writes something of a, er, call to arms to academic critics to engage more deeply with the subject of literature and war. Gandal is a Northern Illinois University English professor who’s written The Pen and the Gun, which has a great thesis: “Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner were motivated, in their famous postwar novels, not by their experiences of the horrors of war but rather by their failure to have those experiences.”

Gandal figures he knows what’s created the dearth of war stories in academia:

We know why the subjects of war and the military have fallen out of favor, and why most professors in English, as well as history, prefer to oppose war and criticize the military rather than to study them. The Vietnam War changed the meaning of war and of the military in this country, at least on the left, and the cohort of professors that for the most part has dominated and set trends in these fields in the last twenty years is of the generation that came of age during the Vietnam era; most of these professors were students when the huge protest against the war took place, and most of them were against the war.

What struck me here is that thinking back to my high school and college days (late ’80s and early ’90s), I can recall that a great many novels about war were recommended to me, appearing on supplementary reading lists and the like, but I can’t think of an occasion when they were actually taught as part of the syllabus. I had to find Catch-22 and Going After Cacciato on my own; I never even heard of books like Dog Soldiers until I was out of college. This may speak more to the shortcomings of my schooling, but it’s interesting how rarely war literature made it to the discussion table.