Month: September 2008

Links: Wallace, Robinson, Beattie

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ann Beattie, David Foster Wallace, Marilynne Robinson

Nothing like one writer’s death to prompt idiotic overstatements about the state of a nation’s literature.

Marilynne Robinson explains the rationale behind the simple-as-air title of her third novel, Home: “There’s nothing in the world that suggests comfort in the same sense as the idea of home, and home is the absolute base in America…. And if you say, of a 45-year-old man that he’s gone back home, it tends to mean that the world hasn’t worked out.”

Ann Beattie addresses the state of the short story:

It’s always evolving. Probably it’s more various than the novel. The short story is often praised by critics for the wrong reason, though —for the subject matter. There are a lot of writers now writing short stories who don’t much interest me, because their stories are no more than shoehorning overtly weird stuff into the form. You know all those reviews that praise the story and say: “The cross-dressing leprechaun with TB turns out to be the second wife of the King of Sweden, and both are having a secret affair with Prince Charles.” Too many story writers feel they have to add MSG. The best stories have to be searched out: they’re in Narrative and Tin House and Mississippi Review.

Who’s David Rhodes?

by Mark Athitakis, posted in David Rhodes

Yesterday Frank Wilson pointed to a piece about Wisconsin author David Rhodes. The headline to the article is “The Best American Novelist You’ve Never Heard Of,” the kind of statement that would only irritate me if it were in, say, Esquire. But it’s in Books & Culture (“a Christian review”), and Phil Christman makes an interesting case for a writer who I confess is a complete blind spot for me:

[Rhodes’ 1975 novel, Rock Island Line,] is a masterpiece, one of the greatest novels ever to come out of the American Midwest, and the potential it reveals seems limitless. But he didn’t publish again for over thirty years. A motorcycle accident in 1977 left him paralyzed physically and emotionally, and his books, one by one, fell out of print. By the late ’90s, there were only a handful of places on earth (outside rural Wisconsin, where he resides) where anybody was likely to run across reference to his books.

Christman isn’t alone in his enthusiasm. Poets & Writers has a nice, widgety primer on Rhodes’ work, pointing out that his second novel, The Easter House, earned comparisons to Winesburg, Ohio. The reason for the recent chatter about Rhodes is the publication of his first novel in 30-odd years, Driftless, by Milkweed Editions. As a story in the Madison, Wisc., alt-weekly Isthmus explains, it was Milkweed editor Ben Barnhart who motivated Rhodes to publish a new novel. He’d already been working on one:

The seed behind Driftless came about after a good friend of Rhodes’ died suddenly. “I felt I knew him pretty well,” says Rhodes, but at his funeral, “there were about 300 people, and I knew about 10.” He realized that “you only know a tiny little part of your friend, and to know your friend totally, you’d have to know the people that meant something to him, and the way he meant something to them, too.”

Roundup: The Ghost Writer

by Mark Athitakis, posted in David Foster Wallace, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Philip Roth, Ray Bradbury

Today is “Indignation Day,” Philip Roth‘s anti-book-tour book tour, in which he’ll read via Web to audiences at various shops (PDF) around the country. (The only store in the D.C. area taking part is the Georgetown University bookstore.) As much as I like Roth, and Indignation, this seems destined to be a cold, uninteractive experience.

“Why is there no opera of The Scarlet Letter?” asked Alfred Kazin in 1992. David Mason and Lori Laitman at the University of Central Arkansas are working on it. “We considered a number of different kinds of books,” Mason tells the Log Cabin Democrat. “The shorter novels of Henry James, Willa Cather and Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451,’ which I continue to think would make a good opera in an odd way.”

Somebody bring that last bit of news to Texas. As part of the Big Read, the NEA’s effort to promote classic American literature, David Kipen (an acquaintance) is driving a hybrid around the country and meeting with reading groups. Today he’s talking up Fahrenheit 451 in Mesquite, Texas.

Wikipedia trolls, keeping it classy. (David Foster Wallace‘s entry looks OK now.)

One Paragraph: Stuart Dybek, “Blight”

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Stuart Dybek

Over the weekend I was reading a forthcoming collection of short stories set in Chicago. It’s not bad, but it’s also clearly attempting to evoke Stuart Dybek’s classic collection, The Coast of Chicago, and it inevitably looks worse for the comparison. It’s been a few years since I read Dybek, but “Blight” in particular reminded me pretty quickly what Dybek was best at—arraying small details of everyday city life (well away from the city centers) that seem to speak for whole communities. “Blight” is set just after the Korean War and follows a group of South Side buddies who learn that their neighborhood has been declared blighted by the mayor. “Blight” is an unfamiliar word to them, and it’s not good news, but it becomes a deeper part of their identity than they’d expect; one man works on a novel called “Blight,” and the narrator is in a band called the Blighters. Dybek’s South Siders aren’t much for existential discussions, but they still find a way to voice their slightly despairing worry that outside forces are telling them who they are. The passage below is about how this kind of naming plays into local softball teams, and in the process Dybek reveals much about a community’s social strata. (This is two paragraphs, I know; this feature’s a work in progress.)

We had liked being the No Names at first, but had started to seem like an advertisement for an identity crisis. The No Names sounded too much like one of the tavern-sponsored softball teams the guys back from Korea had formed. Those guys had been our heroes when we were little kids. They had seemed like legends to us as they gunned around the block on Indians and Harleys while we walked home from grade school. Now they hung out at corner taverns, working on beer bellies, and played softball a couple of night a week on teams that lacked both uniforms and names. Some of their teams had jerseys with the name of the bar that sponsored them across the back, but the bars themselves were mainly named after beers—the Fox Head 400 on Twenty-fifth Street, or the Edelweiss Tap on Twenthy-sixth, or down from that the Carta Blanca….

There seemed to be some unspoken relationship between being nameless and being a loser. Watching the guys from Korea after their ball games as they hung around under the buzzing neon signs of their taverns, guzzling beers and flipping the softball, I got the strange feeling that they had actually chosen anonymity and the loserhood that went with it. It was something they looked for in one another, that held them together. It was as if Korea had confirmed the choice in them, but it had been there before they’d been drafted. I could still remember how they once organized a motorcycle club. They called it the Motorcycle Club. Actually, nobody even called it that. It was the only nameless motorcycle gang I’d heard of.

David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008

by Mark Athitakis, posted in David Foster Wallace

Edward Champion first delivered the sad news that David Foster Wallace hanged himself on Friday. I have nothing to add, really, except to express bafflement that a person who seemed to so clearly understand the lives of people in recovery couldn’t reach out for help himself. (That’s not to suggest that Wallace’s death was addiction-related, just that healing depression similarly demands that you say something. Why on Earth didn’t he?) Back in 1996, I spent a lot of time lugging Infinite Jest to my dreary Web 1.0 job in San Francisco’s South Park, and the book made those bus trips and lunch breaks a lot livelier; I doubt that I could pass a quiz on the novel’s plot points now, but I recall the powerful feeling that he had crafted a postmodern novel whose metatextual games were inviting and respectful instead of cold and esoteric. That is a terribly difficult thing to pull off, even if you’re good. (Who here has finished Ratner’s Star? Anybody? Anybody? Right.) He was a fine reporter, an artful essayist, and the closest thing the generation that doesn’t read had to a writerly voice of a generation.

A source for a good laugh line too, if it’s not too indelicate to mention. Even at this glum moment, the bit at 1:20 in this video still makes me smile. Who else could so climactically turn on a pair of bright minds?

The Evil in the Two-Car Garage

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Leonard Cassuto

Nice to know this is coming down the pike: Columbia University Press is about to publish Leonard Cassuto‘s Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories. Cassuto, an American lit prof at Fordham University, has spent a few years drawing connections between the crime novels and the nineteenth-century sentimental novel. As he explains to a Fordham in-house publication, a lot of crime fiction deals in family values:

“Fictional serial killers are always going after members of the middle class. They pick off people who are members of families and people who, when they die, will be missed, or when they’re kidnapped, are going to be chased after,” Cassuto said. “In real life, serial killers don’t work that way. Made-up serial killers are engaged with ideas of family in ways that real serial killers are not.”

Denver, Noir City

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Dashiell Hammett

Dashiell Hammett‘s The Thin Man is the latest selection in Denver’s “One Book, One Denver” initiative. The novel was personally chosen by mayor John Hickenlooper—who, on the evidence, has completely lost the angry local-TV-news-station-Web-site commenter vote. As some have noted, there’s nothing especially Colorado-like about a New York-set detective novel by a writer who spent most of his life in San Francisco. But Westword‘s Michael Roberts does locate one small connection involving gold-rush-era cannibal Alfred Packer:

Packer allegedly dined on some of his traveling companions in 1874 — and after Thomas S. Duke retold the story in a book called Celebrated Criminal Cases of North America circa 1910, the tale became a fixture in the young century’s popular culture. Just over twenty years later, Hammett quoted from Duke’s account in The Thin Man, where screenwriter Ted Griffin eventually stumbled upon it — an act that is responsible for giving shlock-cinema lovers the gift that is 1999’s Ravenous.

Roundup: Shooting Script

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Donald Roy Pollock, Keith Gessen, Willy Vlautin

The film version of Willy Vlautin‘s Northline (reviewed) will be directed by Courtney Hunt (Frozen River); yes, they sent a copy of the book to Paul Newman.

Thank Photoshop for the cover of Donald Roy Pollock‘s Knockemstiff, which shows a sign for the downtrodden Ohio burg riddled with bullet holes. “The actual sign had only one, but they (the publishers) liked the look of it, so they put in several more,” Pollock says.

Keith Gessen attempts to Tumblr some sense out of the current Georgian turmoil. Not that the media are helping: “So information moves very quickly. But Russian fighter planes—even more quickly.” (FWIW, George Friedman‘s article in the New York Review of Books is the clearest assessment of the situation I’ve read.)

The Arab-American Translation Gap

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Isaac Bashevis Singer, Robert Heinlein, William Faulkner

What works of American literature should be translated into Arabic? The government of Abu Dhabi is asking: Kalima, an initiative founded last year by the country’s Authority for Culture & Heritage, is soliciting suggestions for American novels, short stories, and poetry in conjunction with this year’s National Book Festival in D.C. Kalima’s first to-do list, announced last year, includes William Faulkner‘s The Sound and the Fury, Isaac Bashevis Singer‘s Collected Stories, and Robert Heinlein‘s Stranger in a Strange Land. Kalima’s head, Dr. Ali bin Tamim, tells the United Arab Emirates Daily News: “It is noteworthy to mention that the complete works of great American writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner—are inaccessible to Arab readers.”

One Paragraph: Francine Prose, Goldengrove

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Francine Prose

Francine Prose has written one of the handiest guides to understanding literature I’ve read in recent years, Reading Like a Writer. In it, she spends a lot of time discussing the work that specific words do—ratcheting up the tension, easing it down, conveying fear or joy. In this bit from Prose’s new novel, Goldengrove, she has to manage a slew of emotions simultaneously. The narrator is a 13-year-old girl, Nico, whose older sister has recently died; Nico is sitting in a restaurant with her father, trying not to discuss it, even though it’s clearly Topic A. To get that idea over without dialogue here are food metaphors aplenty; the viscera and textures she describes echo her anxieties, and many of the words could come straight from a cookbook:

As we polished off the Nibble Corner’s buttery, warm, melted cheese, my father and I concentrated on our sandwiches as if we were teasing the flesh from some lethally bony fish. I chewed slowly and without stopping, to keep my face from going slack and collapsing like a pudding. For my parents’ sake, I was trying to act remotely sane. And in a way, I was. I could get through an hour or so without thinking about my sister. Then a wave of sorrow would crash into me and knock me flat.

Sometimes, when the silence thickened, my father would ask me what I was reading.

Living with Heart Disease. Surviving Loss. The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

“Nothing much,” I’d say. In the old days, he might have kept asking till I came up with an answer, but now we acted as if the tiniest pressure could shatter our eggshell selves.