Month: September 2008

Joyce Carol Oates, Loser

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Joyce Carol Oates

Cheryl Truman of the Lexington Herald-Leader asks Joyce Carol Oates a glum question and gets a glum answer:

Does Oates see herself with that Nobel Prize? No. Her husband is dead now, and so are her parents (“It’s one’s parents who care,” she says). Who’s going to celebrate with her, be proud of her now? Winning the Nobel would be, she says, just a little sad.

“No, I must say, it doesn’t mean much to me.”

Truman’s inquiry stems from a statement she makes early in her piece that “the only major award that she has not received is the Nobel Prize for literature.” Sounds right. Isn’t right. According to Celestial Timepiece, the absurdly granular Web site dedicated to Oates’ work, JCO has never won:

The Pulitzer Prize
The Orange Broadband Prize
The PEN/Faulkner Award
The National Book Critics Circle Award

She did win the National Book Award—in 1970, which means she’s suffering a 38-year drought in which the NBAs passed over (rough estimate) 286 of her books. Her acceptance speech for that prize is worth a read. It’s been a long time since she’s won a big prize, but she hasn’t changed her mission statement:

In novels I have written, I have tried to give a shape to certain obsessions of mid-century Americans: a confusion of love and money, of the categories of public and private experience, of a demonic urge I sense all around me, an urge to violence as the answer to all problems, an urge to self-annihilation, suicide, the ultimate experience, and the ultimate surrender. The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.

Paul Theroux, Holding Court

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux has done plenty of press for his new travel book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, but there are some interesting bits in his interview with his neighborhood rag, Cape Cod Today. Every year, we learn, he hosts a reunion party with his Peace Corps buddies at his house in Sandwich, Mass.:

It used to be that we did a lot of beer drinking, but now some have died and divorced. It is a big event for all of us to keep current with each other. Among other things, we play an Italian game of bowls, called ‘Bocce’ (pronounced ‘Bachee’). I found an Italian priest at a church on Route 151 who had a design for the court and I found someone in Falmouth to copy it.

Lucky is the author who can afford his own bocce court (and odd is the writer living near Martha’s Vineyard who feels compelled to tell people how to pronounce “bocce”). There are other interesting details in the interview as well, including his thoughts on being in Boy Scouts with Mike Bloomberg, infidelity, Burma, Georgia (the Asian one).

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Dept. of Self-Promotion note: If you’re in the D.C. area Saturday, Sept. 6 (that’s tomorrow), I’ll be speaking at George Mason University as part of a day-long seminar, sponsored by American Independent Writers, called “Writers–Push the Electronic Envelope:Sharing Your Writing and Selling Your Work in Cyberspace.” I’ll chat a bit on the panel about social networking, mostly in the context of journalism, but I’ll probably blather about books and blogs a fair bit as well.

Roundup: Has “Cute Butt,” Laps Up Porn

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Curtis Sittenfeld, Michael Chabon, Norman Mailer, Porter Shreve

Bloomberg News reviews Curtis Sittenfeld‘s American Wife. Why can’t all book reviews get headlines like this?

Jeffrey Goldberg and Michael Chabon nyuk it up about Sarah Palin and Alaska.

Porter Shreve‘s next novel, When the White House Was Ours, is out soon. I’m not expecting greatness, but it’s next on my list, and I’m hopeful. I interviewed Shreve last year about D.C. charter schools, the subject of the book.

The tentpole article in the latest Bookforum, online now, is an essay by Thomas Frank on Norman Mailer and modern-day punditry, but the whole issue looks worth a read.

Tom Perrotta’s Good Timing

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Mark Twain, Tom Perrotta

If your schedule is free on Sept. 23 and you happen to be in Hartford, Conn., it’d only make sense to attend the fundraiser to help save the Mark Twain House. There’s a pretty good lineup of readers and speakers: The event is led by Jon Clinch, author of Finn (reviewed here), and he’s joined by Stewart O’Nan, Arthur Phillips, Tom Perrotta, and more.

Perrotta, plugging the event in the Boston Globe, figures this week’s political foofaraw over teen pregnancy might help the paperback release of his most recent novel, The Abstinence Teacher (reviewed here). “Everyone’s talking about abstinence,” he says. “It’s like free advertising.” Maybe so: As of this writing the book is #14 on Amazon’s bargain-books list.

Richard Wright’s Haiku

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Richard Wright

Last Sunday marked what would have been Richard Wright‘s 100th birthday. (He died in 1960.) The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette touches on some of the main points of Wright’s biography, and catches up with his daughter Julia, who discusses whether her father ever found peace amid the racial strife he documented:

“Being on the move is a cultural / historical trait that goes back to slavery and our internalized memory of it,” she observes. “Yes, I think he found peace — but not necessarily the way we have been taught to define the word, often in heavily Christian terms.” Wright recalls that during her father’s last years in Paris, a friend introduced him to haiku, an ancient form of Japanese poetry inspired by Zen Buddhism.

“In mastering the writing of these tiny little poems… he did find that sort of Oriental-style ‘peace,’ which finds more meaning in asking the right questions than in finding the right answers,” she says.

Speaking of which, the online companion to the Anthology of Modern American Poetry includes five of Wright’s haiku (via). Lots of unhappy verbs here: “sink,” “soak,” “took,” and (twice) “yearn”:

A sleepless spring night:
Yearning for what I never had
And for what never was.