Month: February 2009

Links: Government Work

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Akhil Sharma, Gerald Early, Ha Jin, Harriet E. Wilson, John Updike, Joseph O'Neill, Marie Arana

Propaganda alert: America.gov, a Web site of the State Department, is publishing essays from the latest edition of its eJournal USA, which this month focuses on multicultural aspects of American literature. Among those included are Ha Jin (whose excellent essay collection The Writer as Migrant is excerpted), Marie Arana, Gerald Early, and Akhil Sharma.

Responding the Stuart Evers‘ celebration of American English in the Guardian, D.G. Myers has a few thoughts on how the language shifts depending on whether you’re in the South or whether you’re Philip Roth.

Harriet E. Wilson, author of what’s presumed to be the first novel by an African American woman, 1859’s Our Nig, was recently learned to be a hair-product entrepreneur.

Wyatt Mason follows up on the Joseph O’Neill firmament kerfuffle not once but twice.

Writing in the New York Review of Books, Ian McEwan studies how John Updike invented Rabbit Angstrom’s middle-class nobility: “Harry’s education extends no further than high school, his view is further limited by a range of prejudices and a stubborn, combative spirit, and yet he is the vehicle for a half-million-word meditation on postwar American anxiety, failure, and prosperity. A mode had to be devised to make this possible, and that involved pushing beyond the bounds of realism. In a novel like this, Updike insisted, you have to be generous and allow your characters eloquence, “and not chop them down to what you think is the right size.”

Lastly, if your reading choices are largely dictated by the number of awards a book has pulled in, this should come in handy.

God Bless (Cliche-Ridden) America

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Joseph O'Neill

Could folks living in the U.K. please make up their mind about how they feel about American writers? Just the other day, Joseph O’Neill was all but dismissing American fiction as a spent force, but this morning the Guardian‘s Stuart Evers writes about realizing that most of his shelf space is filled with books by Yanks:

American fiction fascinates because of the country it seeks to depict: its vastness, its extremes of landscape and temperatures, its hundreds of races, its gulfs between wealth and poverty. When permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Horace Engdahl called American fiction “insular” he was right: when you’ve got so many stories to tell at home, why would you look abroad?

Fair enough. But as much as I support Evers’ enthusiasm, I get the feeling he’s got a wrong, or at least narrow, idea of what American writing is. To show how much he prefers American English over British English, he comes up with a representative sentence from each:

Mary fills up at the gas station, then drives her Chevy Impala to Roy’s Diner.

Mary fills up at the petrol station, then drives her Nissan Micra to Roy’s Rolls.

Sure, the British sentence is a little drab, but the American one is a cavalcade of cliches. Gas stations, Chevys, and diners might be nice to work with if it’s 1932 and your name is James M. Cain, but Evers’ sentence doesn’t prove that American English is somehow better—only that we pulled off noir a lot better than his countrymen did. The notion that American stories are all about the open road and some troublesome dame is a deeply ingrained one; foreigners believe it the same way they believe that Chicago is an interesting city because it’s where Michael Jordan played basketball. Reducing the country’s fictional product to a handful of notions risks marginalizing it—and validating O’Neill’s argument. Not that either writer has the power to wreck an entire country’s literary output. Perhaps it’s enough to be thankful that the British are still concerned about it.

Joseph O’Neill, Careful With His Words

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Joseph O'Neill

The Telegraph has a wide-ranging interview with Netherland author Joseph O’Neill, in which he expounds on his disappointment with not receiving a Man Booker nomination (“I can honestly say I wasn’t that disappointed although the sales would have been nice”), and delivers a slight dig against his semi-peers in American fiction (the “cupboard is slightly bare when it comes to American writers under the age of 65.”). He also explains why it took him so long to write the novel:

One of the reasons that Netherland took seven years to write is that its author spent ages poring and re-poring over each sentence. In a previous interview, he said he was unsure about the book until he came up with the phrase “invertebrate time”, which, he said, even Shakespeare would have used. “Oh for God’s sake, did I say that?” He looks mortified as perhaps he should. “But you do take pleasure from the word combinations, and that was probably one of them. You know what I was driving at there – the mixing of the metaphors … it’s very Elizabethan.”

But perhaps O’Neill wasn’t quite as careful with those words as he says. Harper’s critic Wyatt Mason brings up an interesting exchange he had with a novelist about Netherland regarding the finery of the book’s prose. Mason’s friend calls shenanigans on this passage:

Over half the rooms were occupied by long-term residents who by their furtiveness and ornamental diversity reminded me of the population of the aquarium I’d kept as a child, a murky tank in which cheap fish hesitated in weeds and an artificial starfish made a firmament of the gravel.

A discussion of the definition and proper usage of “firmament” ensues, and it’s worth reading the whole thing instead of summarizing it. Mason writes that he’ll pick up the conversation again today; it should make for an interesting close reading, something that doesn’t happen often enough online.

Skating By

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Bret Anthony Johnston

Buried in the brief online bio of Bret Anthony Johnson, head of Harvard’s creative writing department, is an interesting factoid: He’s be a “skateboarder for almost twenty years.” More info is hard to come by, but the writer of the collection Corpus Christi and Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer (mentioned here last February) fills out the story with McSweeney’s, locating a few connections between skate culture and fiction writing. Authors and skaters are both prone to faceplants, and the main trick is getting up again:

Q: How has skateboarding influenced your writing?

BAJ: The two have always complemented each other. There are so few things that seem as difficult to me. The biggest link between skateboarding and writing is the discipline. Like here. (Gestures to the park below.) This kid is trying this trick and he hasn’t made it and he’s going to keep trying. It’s like when we go to work on a sentence. You have to log the hours, take the hits, suffer the pain and discouragement, then come back at it.

You’re going to have to jumble this around and make it sound smart.

Q: Don’t worry. I’m a professional.

Hair Metal Bands: Too Busy to Read

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Samantha Hunt

Littoral, the blog of the Key West Literary Seminar, has plenty of coverage to check out from last month’s event: audio of a lecture by Allan Gurganus, photos of Gore Vidal in a good mood, and more quips and reports. I’m especially amused by a comment by Samantha Hunt, who during the KWLS explained the genesis of her 2008 novel about the life of Nikola Tesla, The Invention of Everything Else:

[S]he was at a museum exhibit that included a reference to Alessandro Volta, realized she didn’t know much about him and should look him up when she returned home. But once in front of her computer, she found herself instead looking up Nikola Tesla, the man who invented radio and AC electrical technology and is at the center of her novel. She said she thinks she looked up Tesla because she was thinking of “the 90s hair metal band.” “I actually sent them copies of the book, but never heard back from them,” she said.

Links: Crunching the Numbers

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Edgar Lee Masters, John Updike, Manil Suri, Paul Theroux, Peter Stephan Jungk, Philipp Meyer, William Dean Howells, Yiyun Li

For about another week, the great works of American literature come dirt cheap: The Library of America is having a 50-percent-off sale.

Edgar Lee Masters had it in for Abraham Lincoln (and Carl Sandburg too).

Paul Theroux wore bell bottoms in the 70s.

Mathematician Manil Suri spent seven years working on his second novel, The Age of Shiva—by his accounting, 64.19 words a day.

Bob Hoover finds a few connections between John Updike and William Dean Howells.

One of the better takedowns of a book I’ve seen in a while is Benjamin Alsup‘s assessment (not online, best as I can tell) in Esquire of Philipp Meyer‘s American Rust: “[I]t sounds like an Ivy Leaguer mimicking the speech patters of white working-class people. It’s one part Woody Guthrie, one party All the Pretty Horses, and 98 parts Hillary Clinton.” (I haven’t read it.)

On a more positive note: Newsweek catches up with Yiyun Li, whose debut novel, The Vagrants, is one of my favorite novels of the young year.

(And while I’m playing tipster, Peter Stephan Jungk‘s Crossing the Hudson, out next month, is one of the best contemporary novels I’ve read in quite some time.)

New in D.C. Readings

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Uncategorized

The winter doldrums finally appear to be ending, at least in terms of upcoming book events in the D.C. area. Next week looks particularly solid: Crisis editor Jabari Asim speaks on What Obama Means Sunday at Politics & Prose, and sociologist Dalton Conley speaks there Monday night. (I have a brief review of Conley’s new book, Elsewhere, U.S.A., in this week’s Washington City Paper; the book itself is something of a disappointment, but Conley is an engaging thinker and researcher on class and social trends.) Journalist and Atlantic blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks next Friday (note the new date) at College Park’s Vertigo Books. And, because all things Lincoln-related are pretty much unavoidable in this town, former senator George McGovern speaks not once but twice next week about Honest Abe.

One date of note a little further ahead: On February 28, American Independent Writers and George Mason University’s MFA program in creative writing will host a day-long seminar on fiction writing. A few of my favorite local writers and bloggers will be in attendance, including Louis Bayard, Alan Cheuse, and Art & Literature blogger Art Taylor. And, for what it’s worth, me too: I’ll be speaking on a panel titled “New Media and Publishing Creative Writing” with No Tell Books honcho Reb Livingston, poet Bernadette Geyer, and fiction writer and teacher Laura Ellen Scott. Should be fun. If you happen read this blog and plan to attend, please say hello.

The more time I spend compiling this calendar, the more aware I become of events and venues I’m missing. As always, if you know of a reading that ought to be on this page, please let me know.

Jennifer Weiner Isn’t Gonna Fix The Newspaper Book Review Problem; Or, “No Lagniappe For You!”

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Jennifer Weiner

Jennifer Weiner has a few thoughtful ideas about what book review sections can do—her post certainly deserves better than the grossly offensive blog post that I suppose I’m obligated to say pointed me to it. (If the amateurs over at Philebrity are incapable of spotting a tongue-in-cheek statement when they see one, what makes them feel worthy of passing any sort of judgment on literary culture? And if their alleged insights are framed around fat jokes, what makes them feel worthy of the task of typing blog posts, or typing at all?)

Anyway. A bit of Weiner’s modest proposal:

[H]ere are some things I don’t want to read about: new books by Philip Roth (I prefer the old ones, which were funny). New books by Cormac McCarthy. New books by any male writer prone to complaining about the indignities of old age, either general or prostate-specific, or or having his male protagonists do the same.

New short-story collection by Alice Munro. Instead of wasting eight hundred words, just say it’s every bit as wrenching and finely wrought as the last short-story collection by Alice Munro, and be done with it. Chances are, I’ve already read most of the stories in The New Yorker, and I know that they are wrenching and finely-wrought (unless, of course, the new collection gets a ridiculously tarty cover, in which case, you can make fun of that for eight hundred words).

Weiner’s complaint, of course, isn’t with Roth but with the saturation coverage that big books get at the expense of many others, not to mention the reflexive cliche-mongering of all too many reviews stuffed with meaningless praise-gunk like “stunning” and “achingly beautiful.” This is an old complaint—indeed, it’s pretty much the central thesis of the litblog culture that’s emerged in the past five years or so. Some very smart people have pressed book reviews to spend more time and attention on genre fiction, graphic novels, works in translation, and small-press books in general—or that just figured it was hopeless to fight that battle and decided to do it themselves.

Anybody registering those complaints has my support—at least, as much support as a guy who reviewed Roth’s last novel for a metro-daily books section can offer without feeling like a hypocrite. But when the book-sections-slit-their-own-damn-throat rhetoric gets a little loud—as it has with the much-mocked National Book Critics Circle petition to save the Washington Post‘s standalone book section—it’s worth pointing something out. Even if all the Sunday book sections of American daily newspapers turned into the kind of sections that Weiner and many others dream of—a worthy small-press novel featured on the cover, a regular feature on books in translation, romance novels treated with care and respect, local author profiles a-go-go—it wouldn’t make a lick of difference for the health of the newspaper. Newspapers are suffering a financial collapse of such magnitude that a content failure—and content improvement—hardly registers. And book reviews never really mattered in this accounting.

I’m a dues-paying member of the National Book Critics Circle, and I’ve contributed to the Post‘s book section. I support both. But I didn’t sign the petition; I didn’t see the point. I’ve been trying to find a way to articulate my reasoning behind this seemingly self-contradictory posture, and Hitsville blogger Bill Wyman (an old editor of mine), found the right word to explain what’s going on. Responding to Walter Isaacson‘s Time essay proposing (yet again) micropayments for online news, Wyman writes:

The few that did publish stand-alone book sections did it as a lagniappe, and these gradually disappeared, not as papers began to lose money, but to prop up the sky-high earnings Wall Street supposedly demanded of companies like Tribune.

Lagniappe. That’s about right. It’s hard to argue that a book-review section is essential to the mission of a newspaper, which is to bring the news and watchdog those in power. Of course, it’s in a newspaper’s best interest to promote literacy, but there’s no reason why a book review section is necessary to do that; arguably, the newspapers-in-schools programs promoted by most dailies do a better job of it. Promoting literary culture in the community that the paper serves? Covering local authors and events would go a long way toward that, but there’s no reason why that coverage needs to be in the form of a book review. No, the reason why newspapers have, or had, book pages because a) Everybody else was doing it, and b) they’re nice things to have. These are bad economic times, so you don’t get to have nice things to have.

So I can resign myself to this decline without feeling like I need to cheer it on—I won’t miss “achingly beautiful,” but I suspect more people will miss the reviews when they’re gone than we think. At any rate, perhaps book-section editors will now start feeling that there’s less to lose by experimenting more. It’s not particularly important to me that the Post‘s book section be in one place in the Sunday paper—I’ve argued before that newspapers might better serve their readers and themselves if they found ways to integrate book coverage throughout the paper. If the Post can find a way to innovate with spreading book reviews around its pages and Web site, the shift can be something to cheer, and a model for other news operations to look to; if it’s just stuffing the same reviews in different slots, it only sets the stage for further cutbacks. That doesn’t serve readers, it doesn’t serve writers, and it doesn’t serve the folks like Jennifer Weiner who, bless them, want more out of book reviews.

The Great American (Sports) Novel

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Don DeLillo

D.G. Myers recently published a thoughtful blog post about the dearth of great novels about football. Mentioning some of the better-known examples of the genre—Don DeLillo‘s End Zone, Peter Gent‘s North Dallas Forty—as well as a few I haven’t heard of (including John R. Tunis‘ All-American), he suspects that the reason there aren’t more examples to choose from may be because “football is understood (wrongly) as the least individual of sports” or that players are forever doomed to be “represented as careless brutes.”

At the risk of overgeneralizing, novels about all sports tend to have a rough go of it. For all the great nonfiction that’s been written about boxing, fine novels about the sport are rare (Leonard Gardner‘s Fat City and Nelson Algren‘s Never Come Morning spring to mind as exceptions). Baseball fares better (W.P. Kinsella‘s Shoeless Joe, Bernard Malamud‘s The Natural) but also worse: Among Philip Roth’s weakest novels is The Great American Novel, an overstuffed attempt to satirize much of the mythology that surrounds the game. Hockey? It may be meaningful that while DeLillo did try his hand at writing a hockey novel, he didn’t put his own name on it.

Part of the problem, it seems, is that most sports are too defined by their mythologies—it takes a diligent and attentive novelist to collapse their cliches and find something new to say about the subject. (Novels about rock bands suffer from much the same issue.) Which, actually, brings us back to DeLillo one more time: Yesterday Maud Newton pointed to “Total Loss Weekend,” a short story by DeLillo that ran in Sports Illustrated in 1972. It’s not his most muscular work, but it uses the lingo and myth-making that surrounds professional sports to advantage, not to satirize or celebrate but to show how it feeds an obsessive-compulsive personality. The hero of the story, CJ, bets on games, and DeLillo, in his very DeLillo-like way, shows how the surging tide of sports narratives drives him. The familiar phrases of scores and other sports talk offers a deep comfort:

The Reds trail 5-1. Michigan State trails 6-0 but seems to be doing things right as the second quarter progresses. With perfect timing CJ switches (radio) from Columbia-Princeton (no score) to the re-creation of the second race at Belmont. With 70 yards to go a horse named Siberian Native threatens to take the lead from CJ’s selection, Early Judgement, but the 3-horse holds on to win by a head, and CJ has his double—a sign, an omen, an early-warning signal. He clenches his fist, nods his head firmly and then gets up and switches to baseball on the color set, football on the black and white. “I gamble because when I don’t gamble I feel sick,” he says.

There’s lots more to be said on this—there are plenty of sports novels I’m forgetting, I’m sure, and I’m not quite sure how to fit Joseph O’Neill‘s Netherland into this—I did think that the book’s passages on cricket are beautifully turned, but perhaps I was just giving them more of a pass because cricket is an unfamiliar sport to me. Would I (or other Yankee critics) have tolerated O’Neill’s rhapsodizing about the sport if we were discussing a baseball diamond or a football field?

Sara Paretsky and the Case of the Electronic Galley

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Sara Paretsky

Chicago-based crime writer Sara Paretsky recently learned that her publisher intends to stop sending her edits on paper; in the future, she’ll have to manage all edits electronically. This displeases her:

I think the blogosphere and 24 hour web news makes us sloppy as readers and as writers, and that going to a strictly electronic book will make books sloppier, less carefully written, less carefully edited.

Her editor tried to unruffle her feathers, and so does Kevin Guilfoile, her colleague at the Outfit blog of Chicago crime writers; in the comments responding to her post, he points out that one could always print out the manuscript in your e-mail in-box.

There are a lot of reasons to worry about the future of book publishing. An online copyflow process isn’t one of them. It’s possible to read an online galley just as carefully as any other document—as I’ve learned recently, working with an all-PDF system goes quite smoothly. Perhaps the “blogosphere and 24 hour Web news” are making us generally sloppy readers, but there’s no reason why careful writers and careful editors need to be caught up in the swim while working on the document at hand. And if a cratering publishing industry saves a small fortune on document shipping costs, so much the better.