Month: October 2008

Links: Foot Traffic

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Charles Wright, Henry Kisor, Horace Engdahl, Ishmael Reed

The New York Times has a sad obituary for Charles Wright, who wrote three novels about black street life in New York City between the early ’60s and early ’70s; after that his life was largely defined by his alcoholism. Mercury House’s page for its reprint of 1966’s The Wig quotes from Ishmael Reed‘s introduction:

“Charles Wright’s THE WIG marked a change in African-American fiction. All of us who wanted to ‘experiment,’ as we were seeing our painter and musician friends experiment, used it as a model. Though some would call me the literary son of Ralph Ellison, in the 1960s I was the younger brother of Charles Wright.”

Henry Kisor, my old editor at the Chicago Sun-Times who’s now writing mysteries, gets a little testy at a proposal that authors boycott Amazon.com for the sake of preserving independent bookstores:

As an author I’m going to support whoever sells me. If an indie likes my book enough to put it in the front of the store and invites me to come and do an autographing, I’ll happily do so. So will I if the store is Barnes & Noble or Borders. And I will most certainly maintain my relationships with Amazon.com and other online retailers — before, during and after my books have sold through. That’s how the world, not just Main Street in Podunk, becomes — and stays — aware of them.

Lastly, I thought I didn’t need to read one more word on the Nobel Prize foofaraw, but Inside Higher Ed’s Scott McLemee does a nice job collecting assessments of it from a range of scholars, publishers, editors, writers, and bloggers. Including this bit from Stanford professor Franco Moretti:

“Engdahl seems to me to be perfectly right. But unfortunately I am traveling, and cannot do any better than that. Sorry.”

The Indecent Edmund Wilson

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Edmund Wilson

I am (very slowly) making my way through the Library of America’s two-volume collection of works by Edmund Wilson, so I was at least curious to see the essay on Wilson by Algis Valiunas in the Claremont Review of Books. Sure, it’s published by a conservative think tank that spends a lot of time thinking about missles, but there has to be an oasis of high-minded lit crit somewhere in its pages, yes?

Well, first comes the cheap shot at genre writing:

What is not such a good thing is the Library’s tasteless inclusion, in the name of postmodern expansiveness, of such trivia and grotesquery as the works of George S. Kaufman, H.P. Lovecraft, and James M. Cain, all of which Wilson dismissed as low, wretched stuff, bound to offend a palate of any discrimination.

But even if we take Valiunas’ word that Wilson did dismiss those writers, the remainder of the essay is a creaky attempt to point out Wilson’s awkward embrace of Marxism to reach the assertion that Wilson was a failed moral writer—that his disinterest in Christianity and his study of Communism damns him (even if he later renounced Communism). Valiunas ultimately works himself into a lather, driving in the final stake by noting Wilson’s alcoholism and infidelities:

The poet Delmore Schwartz paid tribute in a 1942 essay to Wilson’s “fundamental decency,” a phrase that would “do very well if it reminds the reader of the heroes of Henry James,” and a quality that was “a living remnant perhaps of Christianity.” Both Henry James and Jesus Christ would frown at the comparison.

It’s entertaining, if nothing else, to see a critic use an ideological filter to accuse somebody of being a foolish ideologue. To clear my head, I went to Alex Ross‘ excellent 2003 New Yorker piece on To the Finland Station. Ross’ essay captures the nuances of what was running through Wilson’s mind when he was studying Soviet Russia:

What is most characteristic in American criticism is something that Wilson had plenty of. He was a literalist and a skeptic. He believed, when he started his book, that Marx and Engels were the philosophes of a second Enlightenment. The notion appealed to him because he himself was, in many respects, a man of the eighteenth century (and liked to say so in later life). The pose of seeing through other people’s fancy phrases was part of this persona. Empiricism and common sense—Hume and Johnson, the reporter and the critic—were all the philosophy that Wilson required. What he most admired about Marxism was the practical side: people were suffering under the conditions of industrial capitalism, and something needed to be done for them. He thought of the theory as simply an interesting example of the use of ideas as a spur to action.

Jonathan Lethem’s Artistic Filter

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem, who just a few weeks back was buried chin-deep in work with only enough time to argue that The Dark Knight is a pro-conservative fantasy, spoke last weekend at the Cleveland Museum of Art on the subject of “Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow.” The subject of plagiarism, the theme of an ingenious essay and a lousy novel, is still very much on his mind, apparently. He tells the Cleveland Free Times about how he learned about art through imitative artists:

“The preeminent American artists when I was going to museums and galleries were Warhol, Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg,” he says. “Then it was Peter Saul and all sorts of people who were grabbing onto stuff. It was second nature. I thought this is what engaging with culture consists of. I credit a lot of it to Warner Bros. cartoons and watching Daffy Duck do Edward G. Robinson before I even knew who Edward G. Robinson was. I had this voice in my head and was always encountering culture backwards, meeting half-digested chunks of interesting material inside of other artwork. That seemed exuberant to me.”

Ron Rash’s Women Trouble

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ron Rash

Discussing his new novel, Serena, with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Ron Rash brings up an interesting point:

“It struck me as I got deeper in the book that there are very few women in American literature who have real power,” he says. “There are plenty of women who have power within a family, but women who have the real kind of power, to kill people, to control a 100 men, as in this case. That was intriguing to me; we don’t have that many views of that kind of women, particularly during the Depression.”


Serena is on my to-read pile, so I can’t speak to the specifics of Rash’s definition of a powerful woman. But if the standard is a woman who runs armies, cities, companies, he may have a point. There are plenty of novels about successful, empowered women (Sister Carrie is the first to pop into my head, for whatever reason), but not on Rash’s terms. Maybe it’s an improperly framed question—outside of spy novels, there isn’t too much fiction specifically about male leaders. (Excepting Sinclair Lewis; inside my brain this morning, World War II hasn’t yet begun.) But this can’t be entirely a dead zone—female power brokers in American fiction? Anybody?

Engdahl-gate: One More View

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Horace Engdahl, Lionel Shriver

I’d promised myself I’d lay off the whole Americans-are-too-insular thing—plenty has already been said, and it’s already pretty clear to just about everybody that Horace Engdahl is being silly, intentionally or unintentionally. But I’m calling attention to Lionel Shriver‘s points in Forbes, partly because she wrote one of my favorite novels of 2007, The Post-Birthday World, partly because she has a unique perspective as an American author who doesn’t spend much time in America, and partly because she does a better job of calling bullshit on all this than anything else I’ve read:

Fifty-some mostly American authors attended [“Festival America” in Vincennes, France] (not, alas, the enviable junket it appears, but two days of wearying, unpaid back-to-back appearances in “debates” with goofball and, I’m afraid, typically French topics like, “American Women: Citizens of the World?”–don’t get me started … ). The complexion of these participants, literally and figuratively, exemplified the extravagantly permeable nature of the American literary scene that has resulted from high levels of immigration from all over the world.

The writers Dinaw Mengestu (from Ethiopia), Nami Mun (from Korea) Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (from Nigeria) and Mohsin Hamid (from Pakistan), to cite but a few, have all found safe haven in the U.S., and last weekend joined a variety of more mainstream writers like Richard Russo, Amy Bloom and Tobias Wolfe. If the American literary world is sealed off from influences elsewhere, it must be protecting itself not with Saran Wrap, but with some ludicrously inappropriate material like fish-netting with big holes in it.

Now, if somebody at Forbes could just correct the spelling of Tobias Wolff‘s name…

Links: Engdahl-gate

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Horace Engdahl

Here’s video of Nobel Prize literature judge Horace Engdahl responding to a question about what American literature he reads by saying, “All of ’em, any of ’em that have been in front of me over all these years.” Just kidding, he’s chatting about famous non-American author Doris Lessing:

Some more responses in the past 24 hours:

Harvard English prof James Engell, in the Harvard Crimson: “[I]t is not clear what [Engdahl] is talking about. Is he talking about American publishers, American writers, American institutions?”

Michael Dirda in the Guardian: “My general reaction is that he is just betraying an insular attitude towards a very diverse country.”

At the American Prospect, Dana Goldstein echoes that sentiment, calling out Junot Diaz, Ha Jin, Denis Johnson, and Annie Proulx for special attention.

The Chicago Tribune‘s Julia Keller, who’s apparently no longer getting edited: “There is a sweep and a vigor and a swagger and a dash about the United States, even amid our woes, and our literature reflects that. Shrinking violets, we’re not. We aim high, dream big—and sometimes, tumble hard. But we love a good comeback story.”

And Engdahl himself tells a Swedish paper that he hasn’t read the article that caused the foofaraw in the first place:

In a letter to newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, Engdahl said he had not yet read the article but had the impression he had been misunderstood.

“The Nobel Prize is not an international competition but a reward for individual authors. It is important to remember this when feelings of national pride are running high,” he said.

Links: Ain’t That America

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Dashiell Hammett, Junot Diaz, Nicholas Sparks, Richard Price, Tom Perrotta

The Nobel Prize’s literature judge says that American writers are too “insular.” But what does some dumb foreigner know?

Hubris alert: Big-name venture capitalist Tom Perkins has built a 289-foot yacht called The Maltese Falcon.

In related news, Tom Perrotta dreams of being Sam Spade: “Who wouldn’t want to be a tough-talking private eye?”

Olsson’s, the leading independent bookstore chain in the Washington, D.C. area, closed all five of its stores yesterday after filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection. A memorial page is up and running.

Junot Diaz is deeply impressed with Richard Price‘s handball skills.

Nicholas Sparks is just pretty darned pleased with everything.