Month: July 2009

Five Ways of Looking at a Richard Powers Novel

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Her Fearful Symmetry, Richard Powers

For the past few weeks I’ve been trying, with little success, to clear the decks so I can start reading Richard Powers‘ forthcoming novel, Generosity: An Enhancement. I don’t get status galleys very often, but it’s been taunting me for the past few weeks. Soon, soon. But if my reading time currently has to be dedicated elsewhere, I’m at least glad I recently stumbled over the cache of videos related to Powers novels that were posted by Ninth Letter, a literary journal published at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A few years back, apparently at the prompting of the university and with the help of the art and design department, the journal helped produce short films on Galatea 2.2, Plowing the Dark, The Gold Bug Variations, The Time of Our Singing, and The Echo Maker. All except the Gold Bug video feature Powers’ own narration; I’m particularly seduced by the one for Galatea, it being the first Powers novel I fell for, but your mileage may vary. Only the video for The Time of Our Singing appears to exist in embeddable form:

Also, the most recent video in the Ninth Letter‘s series is a fun look at the visual work of Audrey Niffenegger, whose next novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, comes out in September.

The Fact of the Land

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Edward P. Jones, Ralph Ellison

Yesterday the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill hosted an all-day seminar called “The Classical Southern Novel,” during which participants discussed four acknowledged regional classics: Harper Lee‘s To Kill a Mockingbird, Margaret Mitchell‘s Gone With the Wind, Robert Penn Warren‘s All the King’s Men, and Eudora Welty‘s The Optimist’s Daughter. According to a News & Observer report on the event, the seminar concluded without much argument or incident, but the fact that no black writers were included in the discussion didn’t pass without comment:

Though the subject of race is omnipresent in most Southern classics, none of the works discussed Friday was written by blacks. There were few, if any, blacks in attendance at the event at the UNC Center for School Leadership Development.

Several participants seemed unsure whether “The Invisible Man,” Ralph Ellison’s tale of an unnamed black man who considers himself invisible due to his race, qualifies as a “Southern” novel. Ellison, who was black, was a native of Oklahoma, and a portion of his novel is set in the South.

Jill McCorkle, a novelist and professor at N.C. State University, acknowledged that many consider the portrayal of black characters in the novel she lectured about, “Gone With the Wind,” offensive.

“You have to read it in the context of time and place; otherwise you’ll wince every couple pages,” she said.

Presumably some of the handwringing over the Southern-ness of Invisible Man is because it’s largely set in New York. It also probably has something to do the novel’s allegorical nature; as Charles Johnson pointed out in his recent appreciation of the novel on the National Book Foundation’s site, the novel is more about themes of alienation than place. “His central, famous trope of “invisibility” remains universally applicable for any group that is socially marginalized,” Johnson writes. Neither he nor the three other commenters talk at all about the novel’s physical settings; it’s simply not what we remember about about it, or think is most important.

At any rate, the discussion reminded me of Edward P. Jones‘ fine introduction to the 2007 edition of New Stories From the South, which he edited. His essay addresses the question of whether he, as a Washingtonian, feels qualified to discuss the South; his comments artfully make a case for positioning him, and I think Ralph Ellison too, in the Southern canon:

[S]o much is about the heart, wherein the soul dwells, and so maybe my heart, when all the standing in the corner is done, doesn’t care if Washington is north or south of the Mason-Dixon line…. The heart knows that just about every adult—starting with my mother—who had an important part in my life before I turned eighteen was born and raised in the South. They—the great majority of them black and the descendants of slaves—came to Washington with a culture unappreciated until you go out into the world and look back to see what went into making you a full human being….

Black people passed this culture on to me, but once I discovered Southern literature I learned that much of it was shared by whites, whether they wanted to admit it or not. I read Richard Wright and Truman Capote and Wendell Berry and Erskine Caldwell and a whole mess of other writers and came up on white people who, in their way, were just trying to make it to the next day. Dear Lord, reach down and gimme a hand here. Those fictional white people lived in a world that was not alien to me. As I read, I felt I knew far more about that world of people than I did about those people who lived in cities in the North, who lived, as I did in D.C., with concrete and noisy neighbors above and below and a sense that the horizon stopped at the top of the tallest building. It does not matter where Washington fits on the map; I was of the South because that was what I inherited.

Links: Dirty Old Men

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Don DeLillo, Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, George Pelecanos, Jim Harrison, John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov, Ward Just

Playboy will publish an excerpt of Vladimir Nabokov‘s final work, an unfinished novella titled The Original of Laura. Don’t look so shocked: The magazine interviewed him in 1964.

Ernest Hemingway: KGB spy?

The Second Pass takes a look at ten books that need to be tossed out of the canon. First up, Don DeLillo‘s White Noise: “DeLillo sacrifices any sense of realism for dull, thin polemic.” I’m not buying the “polemic” bit, and who said he was shooting for realism anyhow?

The Iowa Review has a new editor.

Politico rings up Ward Just for a quote about the death of Robert McNamara.

Eudora Welty‘s estate pulled her name out of the running for the renaming of her alma mater, the Mississippi University for Women.

The Atlantic has a modest proposal: Give tax breaks to publishers who support new and little-known writers. M.A. Orthofer retorts, “don’t ‘not-for-profit’ publishers (many of the finest small publishers in the US) already get obscene tax breaks ?”

John Updike‘s longtime home in Beverly Farms, Mass., sold last month for $2.5 million.

Jim Harrison has a pretty fancy house too, though his actual writing room looks like a cubicle in an abandoned real-estate brokerage.

George Pelecanos doesn’t know jack about writing about shotguns, according to a Field & Stream gunblogger: “Pelecanos in particular will put characters in a tense armed standoff, then have someone say ‘I can shoot you before you have time to rack that pump.’ In real life the immediate reply would be ‘Boom.'”

The Cork-Country Connection

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Annie Proulx

Last Monday Annie Proulx spoke at the West Cork Literary Festival in Bantry, Ireland, where she talked about her latest project: A study of the Irish migration to her home state of Wyoming. The Southern Star reports:

Speaking to five hundred people at the West Cork Literary Festival’s first ever sell-out event, she said the stories of the people who populated Butte, Montana, and worked the copper mines is very well documented.

But there is little or nothing to account for the Irish names (like John and Timothy Mahony, who came from Kilcrohane, Pat Sullivan, Eugene McCarthy William Daly, Richard and Peter Tobin) that are attached to the vast ranches and remote regions in central Wyoming, and she named historian, Hazel Vickery, as her local contact, her “touchstone.”

Annie Proulx explained how she and her friend, Dr. Dudley Gardner, a historian and archaeologist at the Western Wyoming College, have been making a study of these people.

Proulx and Gardner have worked together before to study Wyoming history; he traveled with her as she researched her most recent work, a photo book titled Red Desert. “I like difficult places,” she told the crowd at the festival. “In Wyoming it’s a basin and range and you can see for 150 miles. It was a fine place for me to write. Walking in Wyoming works with writing.” She also noted that not everybody in the state adores her:

She said one woman came up to her at a talk and told her that the members of her book club were annoyed with her for “dragging Wyoming through the mud. Then she asked me to sign her book—that’s people.”

The Big Event

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ann Arensberg, Frederick Pohl, John O'Hara, Nelson Algren

Yesterday the National Book Foundation launched a new online project celebrating the 77 fiction winners of the National Book Awards. The organization is honoring a winner a day, starting with Nelson Algren‘s excellent novel The Man With the Golden Arm, which took the prize in 1950. The NBF has arranged all manner of competitions and contests to celebrate the awards, but I was mainly struck by the fact that nearly all the books being honored are still in print in the United States. The three that aren’t? John O’Hara‘s Ten North Frederick, Ann Arensberg‘s Sister Wolf, and Frederick Pohl‘s Jem.

Pohl won in 1980, an interesting time for the prize. According to a New York Times article at the time, the awards were discontinued the previous year, when publishers pulled their support, “contending the awards favored little-read books.” (The fiction winner at the 1979 awards? Tim O’Brien‘s Going After Cacciato.) The event was rebranded the American Book Awards in 1980, and the publishers were apparently given a freer hand in the nominations. The event took a hit in credibility: William Styron won for Sophie’s Choice, but he, like Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, had asked that his novel be pulled from consideration. There were no fewer than eight fiction categories that year, as if designed to honor every aisle and price point in the bookstore. (John Irving‘s The World According to Garp was honored for being the best book in paperback.)

A Washington Post story covering the ceremony in New York suggests it was a raucous, clumsy event. The show started late; Henry Kissinger‘s book got booed; the sound system didn’t work well, and Eudora Welty‘s acceptance speech for the National Medal for Literature was drowned out. Publishers tried to get the event televised, but, the Post reported, “according to a publisher associated with the awards, the networks ‘wanted too much singing and dancing.'” And a couple of writers got some swipes in about the awards:

More than 1,600 persons associated with the book trade attended — attracted, as one publishing executive admitted, by the controversy surrounding the awards and the hope that there might be a scandal.

Co-hosts of the event were William F. Buckley and John Chancellor, and they introduced a long series of stars to make the individual presentations, including Isaac Asimov, Lauren Bacall, Ray Bradbury, Dee Brown, Betty Friedan, Gail Godwin, Pete Hamill, John Houseman, Townsend Hoopes, Erica Jong, Edwin Newman, Sylvia Porter, Theodore H. White, and others. Each was allowed to make brief, humorous remarks lasting about 30 seconds, but the pattern was broken by poet Peter Viereck, who criticized the “dirty political deals” associated with the old National Book Awards, criticized the new American Book Awards as a “plastic Disneyland extravanganza” and suggested that some kind of award system should be found to eliminate the bad features of each.

The only author who was able to speak after winning an award was Buckley, who came back on stage as co-host right after the award to his “Stained Glass” as best paperback mystery had been announced.

“I am pleased,” said Buckley, “by this convincing evidence of the incorruptibility of the awards.”

The following year the event dialed back to three fiction prizes; by 1986 it was back to one fiction award per year.

The Old Story About the Hot New Thing

by Mark Athitakis, posted in David Foster Wallace, Jack Kerouac

Bill Wasik‘s new book, a study of online viral culture titled And Then There’s This, has a brief digression about the changing nature of literary celebrity. The launchpad for his discussion is the New York Times‘ much-maligned 2006 effort to name the best work of American fiction of the past 25 years, which was mainly a surprise-free celebration of old hands like DeLillo, Morrison, Updike, and so on. The flaw with the project, Wasik argues, wasn’t strictly fuddy-duddyism at the Times or the peculiarities of the people who were polled. The real issue has to do with what Wasik calls the rise of “niche sensationalism”—the creation, roughly in the past two decades, of a culture that celebrates young authors not for how talented they are but for how well they capture the zeitgeist. Which means that young authors now, even the very good ones, have no hope of being canonized, since they’re useful only for defining a moment that has since passed. (“Marisha Pessl? Wasn’t she somebody a couple of years ago?”)

Exhibit A for Wasik’s argument is “The Grunge American Novel,” a 1996 profile of David Foster Wallace published just as Infinite Jest was cementing his place as a major talent. The article is new to me, and it’s just as bad as Wasik says it is; Frank Bruni gives us Wallace coated with a goo of distrust and flameout-in-the-making, as if Wallace’s every motion were a canny pose designed to attract the interest of a New York Times reporter—as if following up a couple of admired but relatively obscure Pynchonesque books with a tricky thousand-page-plus novel was all some kind of prank the guy was pulling. (“He often wears a bandanna wrapped tightly around his head, as if to avoid combing his shoulder-length hair and to coddle his febrile mind,” Bruni writes. Maybe, one’s tempted to say, he just likes bandannas. And yet, Bruni writes, this bandanna thing has got to be some sort of act, because, as his investigations have uncovered, Wallace works out and uses toothpaste. The piece is truly something.)

Wallace eventually transcended such skepticism—by the time of his death last year, no reasonable person could argue that he was just some guy who got the cool kids excited back in 1996. But Wasik figures that now the media can behave no other way when it comes to covering writers: “Literature has become such a niche obsession that the only way to publish stories about it is through niche sensationalism; a new writer who can speak to some lost demographic (usually the young) is the only thing in the little world of American letters that can be called big news…. The media mind is about parasitism. And the paradigmatic act of media parasitism, one should always remember, is to sup vampirically at the neck of young, doomed fame.”

Wasik’s point is well-taken. But I still wonder if the hot-new-thing argument that he makes is all that new. From Bruni’s piece: “A decade ago, it was McInerney. Decades earlier, Mailer.” The theme of a young author rising up to speak the truth about how we really are goes back at least to the Beats. Indeed, the Times‘ famously breathless review of Jack Kerouac‘s On the Road in 1957 calls out the same problem back then that Wasik argues plagues us today: Kerouac’s novel arrives “in an age in which the attention is fragmented and the sensibilities are blunted by the superlatives of fashion (multiplied a millionfold by the speed and pound of communications).” Was the way that Wallace’s intentions were manipulated and misinterpreted any different than the way that Kerouac’s was? The speed with which young authors are digested by the media maw is certainly faster now, but I suspect the appetite for them hasn’t much changed.

Paul Harding’s Conversion

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Marilynne Robinson, Paul Harding

I haven’t read Paul Harding‘s debut novel, Tinkers, and I have only the vaguest memory of the band he used to play drums for, Cold Water Flat. (I want to say I saw them open for, say, Buffalo Tom, back in 1995, but I was going to three or four shows a week back then, and much of that period is now a blur.) But I found his interview with Bookslut interesting on a number of levels. So few musicians seem to successfully make the shift to fiction (Wesley Stace, Nick Cave, and Willy Vlautin being a few exceptions that prove the rule), but Harding also took the matter seriously, studying at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa with Marilynne Robinson. A strong sense of discipline comes through reading the interview with Harding, especially when it comes to reading: By knowing Robinson, he began devouring theology books that seem to inform Tinkers, though it’s not a book about religion:

[I’m read a lot of theology] [p]artially because of my friendship with Marilynne Robinson. Probably practically speaking that’s why I started. The thing that sustains me is the quality of the theological writing that I read. I grew up kind of an off-handed atheist. A middle class white boy charging around with my copy of Good and Evil, and I never really thought about [religion] until I’d been Marilynne Robinson’s student for some time. It occurred to me one day that this writer I admired was also one of the most profoundly religious people I’ve ever come across. I thought there can’t be a complete disconnect. She’s very much identified with Calvin, so I read a lot of Calvin, and then I started reading Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. I’ve just been doggedly chewing on the Church Dogmatics for the past five years. It’s gratifying on every single level that you could want as a writer of fiction, as a person who contemplates. It’s just some of the most vigorous, consistently world class thinking and writing. It absolutely helps me with my own fiction writing.

Robinson blurbed Tinkers, which certainly helped the novel, published by the indie Bellvue Literary Press, get some attention. But it also helped that the publisher bent over backwards to help booksellers get the word out, as Pat Holt detailed back in March. Lise Solomon, a sales rep for the book distributor Consortium, told Holt:

“The buyer at Book Passage in Marin County loved ‘Tinkers’ so much that she asked if there was any way Bellevue could print a hardcover edition for the store’s First Edition Club. The publisher did a short run of 500 copies, which sold out quickly, and ended up printing another 500. Then Powell’s in Portland, Oregon (the Northwest rep loves the book, too) asked about selling its own proprietary hardcover edition, too, and Bellevue printed 750 copies that presold out quickly.

“But most stores responded to the trade paperback. They were willing to bring in 4-12 copies of an unknown author from an unknown press.”

Links: The “Intergalactically Challenging Jacket” and More

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, Jennifer Weiner, Joseph O'Neill, Kaye Gibbons, Paul Theroux, T.C. Boyle, Toni Morrison

The summer issue of Lapham’s Quarterly is dedicated to travel, excerpting Paul Theroux‘s Dark Star Safari, Marilynne Robinson‘s Gilead, Tobias Wolff‘s This Boy’s Life, and Jack Kerouac‘s On the Road, among many other writers around the world and throughout history. The journal’s Web site features James Franco reading that Kerouac excerpt in an appropriately slackerish way. The most entertaining piece, though, not online, is a 1935 article from Pravda describing the despairing life of American cities, which are sad and largely empty of people. Contrary to popular belief in the Soviet Union, the authors write, in New York and Chicago “brokers don’t run down the sidewalks knocking over American citizens; they simmer, invisible to the public, in their stock exchanges, making all kinds of shady deals in those monumental buildings.” The West Coast is no better: It’s home to the “American film industry, which releases around a thousand well-made but egregiously tasteless and idiotically stupid films per year.”

Speaking of Theroux, he recalls hanging out at Michael Jackson‘s Neverland, and talking with the late pop star on the phone in the wee hours about, among other things, his reading habits: “‘Somerset Maugham,’ he said quickly, and then, pausing at each name: ‘Whitman. Hemingway. Twain.'”

Jennifer Weiner on studying under Toni Morrison: “Toni Morrison used to read her students’ work out loud, and hearing her read it made me believe that it was good (of course, Toni Morrison being Toni Morrison, she could have been reading my grocery list and I would have thought, ‘Genius!’ She’s one of the world’s all-time great readers).”

Edgar Allan Poe, supernatural detective.

The sad, long struggle of Kaye Gibbons.

Ernest Hemingway‘s grandson has reworked Papa’s posthumous memoir, A Moveable Feast, in a way that “attempts to give the impression of a work which is not completed but which is nevertheless readable.”

The second issue of Wag’s Revue is now online, with an interview with T.C. Boyle as its centerpiece. Excerpt: “I do not reveal much of myself, either publicly or in the work. I may have no problem wearing an intergalactically challenging jacket on TV and cracking jokes with the best of them or investing everything I have in a performance of a story, either live or recorded, but all of that is simply a way of rubbing up against the public world while all the while keeping the private world private.”

Joseph O’Neill ponders the president reading Netherland: “I suppose you flatter yourself that the story is the history of the United States. That’s the weird, disorienting feeling you get.”

And, apropos of nothing in particular except that anybody who follows the Washington Nationals badly needs a laugh, this is great.

Q & A: Ron Currie Jr.

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ron Currie Jr.

Ron Currie Jr.‘s second book, Everything Matters!, is one of the more appealingly strange novels I’ve read recently. Imagining a world that’s slated to end on June 15, 2010 (at 3:44 p.m. EST), it deals heavily in disaster stories, the nature of God, and the alternate realities. It engages with the notion of how much control we have over our fate (the title’s exclamation point might easily be replaced with a question mark). It’s also rich with tonal shifts, shifting from broad comedy to a very sober description of the loss of a parent and back to satirical jabs that place Mike Huckabee as the sitting president during the end of the world.

“I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about that one,” Currie wrote me when I asked about that particular plot point. At its core, though, the novel is a surprisingly heartfelt story about family, following its protagonist, Junior (the “fourth-smartest person in the history of the world”), as he tries to serve the best interests of his dying father and of his brother, Rodney, who recovers from an early cocaine addiction to become a star player for the Chicago Cubs. Currie answered a few more questions about the novel via e-mail.

All sorts of apocalyptic stories get referenced in your novel, from the Challenger disaster to nuclear catastrophes. How much time did you spend with apocalyptic-themed novels, movies, and stories while working on this book?

It’s an obsession of mine that has been more or less lifelong, so it wasn’t necessarily a question of what I was reading/viewing while working on Everything Matters! Pointing to any one thing as the primary cause of this obsession is tough—is it just a case of innate, hardwired interest, a mystery of genetics, or does it have more to do with growing up under the nuclear canopy of the Cold War’s latter stages? All I know for certain is to this day I’m still fascinated by dystopian or apocalyptic scenarios, so I’m a big fan of writers like Vonnegut, Orwell and Huxley, George Saunders. And I’ll drop just about anything to watch one of those “this is how the world may end” shows on television. Judging by the popularity and ubiquitousness of these programs, I’m not alone in my fixation.

You’ve gotten dinged in a couple of outlets for the book’s title—one argument being that any novel could profitably be titled “Everything Matters.” Did you struggle with the title for the book?

No, not really. I anticipated that some people wouldn’t like it, just as I anticipated that a certain type of reader and critic would choke on the book’s earnestness. Which is fine. I’m pretty weary of the hyperirony that seems to have taken over just about every form of popular culture—it’s so obvious, and easy, and too often only half-funny, which is not funny enough to justify its existence—and to an extent I conceived of the book as an antidote. The title is reflective of that: declarative, straightforward, earnest. Your usual highbrow title—the kind that seem designed to actually obscure what the book is about—wouldn’t have worked here.

The omniscient narrators who speak to Junior have shifting degrees of control throughout the novel—early on they take a “stance of supportive neutrality” but later play a more active role in the story’s events. Were you concerned that such a shift would seem arbitarary instead of playful? Or should we read the voices speaking to Junior as representive of the fickleness of God?

A careful read reveals that the omniscient voice is somewhat unreliable, and I think that’s what you’re getting at here. At the beginning of the book, for example, they claim they know nothing for certain about the future except for the inevitability of the comet impacting the Earth. But later on in the story they reveal, conclusively and repeatedly, that this is not true. And as you note, they pledge not to interfere in the events of Junior’s life, but are moved, eventually, to break this promise.

Often, the disasters you describe in the novel are mediated: We see the Challenger explosion through the TV coverage of it, nuclear catastrophe through a TV special on Nostradamus, a plot point about a standoff at a Social Security office through news reports on it. And that seems pitted against the very visceral, intimate reality of Junior’s personal “disaster”—the loss of his father. Do you feel that we’ve become desensitized to life-and-death matters, because they’re pushed at us so frequently?

Not at all. In fact, I think the opposite is true: we believe we’re desensitized and tough, because violence and death pervade our media, but there’s a big difference between seeing someone catch a bullet on TV, and the puke-inducing adrenal response of witnessing in person, or being a part of, a real act of violence. Anyone who’s spent time in the world’s poorer corners, where life as a commodity is severely devalued, can’t help but be a little taken aback by how sheltered and safe we are here. Recently at the college in the town where I live, a couple of students were roughed up by security guards after a party got out of hand. One of the kids ended up with a nosebleed, and the following day hundreds of students turned out at a rally wearing red shirts to—I shit you not—symbolize the blood that had been spilled. It only takes experiencing one act of genuine brutality to put the kibosh on such sensitive overreaction, but clearly none of these kids has been there.

The novel includes a line from a Flaming Lips song as an epigraph, and there’s also a reference to the song “Race for the Prize.” (At least, I’m assuming it’s a reference—the themes of the song and that part of the book are similar.) What role did the band’s music play for you while working on the book?

The same role that all the music I love plays in the writing of my books—I’ve learned a ton about how to tell a story in prose from listening to great music. I wanted the epigraph to be longer, because that entire song (“In the Morning of the Magicians”) perfectly captures Junior’s dilemma: the question of how important our love and industry are in the face of the Universe’s infinite indifference. That the Flaming Lips were able to do in three minutes what took me three hundred pages sort of illustrates how much storytellers can learn from good songs.

You, like the central characters in the novel, are Maine natives, but the Chicago Cubs play a critical role in the plot of the novel. Have you spent much time in the city, or were the long-suffering Cubs just another “disaster” that fit well into the book’s theme?

Ah, the poor Cubbies. They’re a little harder to like these days, what with the clubhouse full of whackjobs Pinella is charged with corralling, but I still pull for them. In fact, I think every real baseball fan would be pleased to see them win the Series (except maybe Cardinals fans). I’ve spent a little time in Chicago, and I love it there—all the bustle and excitement of New York, except tinged with that midwestern agreeableness.