Month: March 2010

Links: The Book of Jobs

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ayn Rand, Claire Messud, Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O'Connor, Sam Lipsyte, William Faulkner

The iPad may force designers of print books to think a little harder about the medium in which they work. Should they do so, the results can be beautiful.

What happens when you read the sex scenes in Ayn Rand‘s The Fountainhead at an impressionable age.

Sam Lipsyte: “I think I don’t shirk from emotional autobiography. I mean, I stick pretty closely to the feelings. I change a lot of details, just to avoid the court system.”

Granta editor John Freeman is interviewed at ARTicles, the recently revived blog of the National Arts Journalism Program.

Claire Messud is the latest American to sit on the jury for Canada’s Giller Prize.

Harvard Crimson columnist Theodore J. Gioia—who at last report was criticizing books he hadn’t read—has a few thoughtful things to say about William Faulkner and humor, plus a glimpse of James Wood‘s teaching style.

The literary magazine Shenandoah will become an online-only publication next year. Its final print edition, celebrating its 60th anniversary and featuring works on Flannery O’Connor, will come out in June. In advance, the editors of the journal have posted an essay (PDF) by James L. MacLeod describing the sights and smells—oh, the smells!—of life on O’Connor’s Andalusia Farm.

Two stories that Cormac McCarthy wrote in college will be included in the 50th anniversary issue of Phoenix, the University of Tennessee’s literary magazine. This presumably displeases McCarthy, who once said he “hoped to be long buried and mouldering before they were published again.”

On Board

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Housekeeping

Today I’m heading up to New York City for a batch of meetings and events hosted by the National Book Critics Circle. I was elected to the NBCC’s board earlier this year, and since then a few people have let me know how they feel about the organization. Some of what they say is positive, some of it’s negative, but in either case the common theme is that they’re not quite sure why it exists. What’s the use of a nonprofit for book critics when their authority has eroded and the Internet has made it easy for bookish people to congregate, support each others’ writing, and celebrate the books they like best?

The NBCC isn’t unique among nonprofits in that regard. I don’t mention it much here, but my employer is in the business of helping people improve their nonprofit associations—most (if not all) of which are in the same boat as the NBCC, struggling to figure out how to be meaningful to their members as the Internet finds new and exciting ways to eat their lunch. The NBCC doesn’t do a lot of the things most associations do—it doesn’t have a staff, or lobby politicians, or produce its own magazine, or run a certification program. (I’m trying to guess how many hospital visits would result from even suggesting a Certified Book Critic credential.) But whether you’re in the American Society of Widget Makers or the NBCC, there’s a pervasive worry that the recession is going to eradicate most of your reason for being and some random dude’s website is going to take whatever’s left. The NBCC can at least take some comfort in the fact that it’s not the only organization wringing its hands over this.

I’ve wound up geeking out on association work more than I expected to in the past year, which is part of the reason why I decided to run for the NBCC board. Run right, it’s an admirable culture. Association folk are easy to like because they tend to be enthusiasts for their professions without being craven businesspeople; at heart, they’re just people who really like their work and want other people to like it too. So I became a little more of a joiner than is perhaps dignified for a reader: I think book criticism is important and interesting, and I’d like other people to think it’s important and interesting too. And though there’s no shortage of places to talk about books, there’s no national organization with the explicit purpose of supporting good book criticism and pointing out its value to a wide audience. I know some people think the NBCC falls short of that mission. I know lots of people think that a bunch of critics getting together to pick their favorite books is an elitist activity that has nothing to do with how people really read and talk about books these days. But the mission itself has value, and if there’s another group that’s actively, formally, and consistently supporting the work that book critics do, I haven’t heard about it.

That doesn’t mean I know what it’ll take to make print publications solvent and respect their book sections again, or how best to support the the online outlets that have arrived to fill the vacuum. For now, I can say that I’ve edited and read enough copy about board governance to know that the smart strategy going in is to listen more than I talk. I won’t be able to hush up entirely, though: Tomorrow I’ll be part of a panel on what the next decade in book culture will be like, where I’ll mostly be figuring out ways to say something more interesting than “Beats the hell out of me.” If you’ll be there, or at one of the awards events, please say hello. (I look pretty much like my Twitter profile image, though it’s a few years old; recalibrate for less hair, larger jowls.)

“Sad smelling”

by Mark Athitakis, posted in David Foster Wallace, John Updike

After announcing yesterday that it had acquired the papers of David Foster Wallace, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin posted a few articles and images to give people a sense of what it has on its hands. It may be that only serious Wallace scholars give a damn about what words he circled in the dictionary, but his scribblings inside his books are fascinating, in part because they put your squinting ability to the test—he seemingly found a sweet spot between handwriting that was legible to himself but that few others could parse.

The jottings don’t appear to be anything serious—anybody who’s drawing vampire fangs on Cormac McCarthy‘s author photo is just goofing around before getting down to business, and it’s reassuring that Wallace puttered just like the rest of us schlubs. But it’s clear that he used the first couple of pages of his paperback copy of Rabbit, Run to work out his frustrations with John Updike. “Sad smelling,” he writes. On the next page, in capital letters: “RABBIT MOURNS HIMSELF.” It’s easy to think of these scribblings as early notes toward his 1997 essay on the “Great Male Narcissists”, in which he explored his love-hate relationship with Updike, writing, “[E]ven since Rabbit Is Rich—as his characters seemed to become more and more repellent, and without any corresponding indication that the author understood that they were repellent—I’ve continued to read Mr. Updike’s novels and to admire the sheer gorgeousness of his descriptive prose.”

Earlier this year Katie Roiphe used that essay to make an example of the post-Updike generation of novelists, who in her estimation have failed to appropriately write about penises or something—that Wallace’s attack on Updike’s narcissism was a kind of narcissism itself. But Wallace’s issue with Updike wasn’t so much with sex as with Updike’s seeming inability to recognize that his characters’ sexual obsessions could be flaws and not amusing traits; when Wallace saw a genuinely good writer behave this way, his synapses fried. He explained this a little more casually in an extended 1996 interview with David Lipsky, to be published next month as Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace:

Updike, I think, has never had an unpublished thought. And that he’s got an ability to put it in very lapidary prose. But that Updike presents one with a compressed Internet problem, is there’s 80 percent absolute dreck, and 20 percent priceless stuff. And you just have to wade through so much purple gorgeous empty writing to get to anything that’s got any kind of heartbeat in it. Plus, I think he’s mentally ill.

You really do, don’t you?

Yeah, I think he’s a nasty person.

The Unadulterated Soul of Dave Eggers

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Dave Eggers, Vendela Vida

Writing in the Awl, Maria Bustillos describes how she did a bit of googling and discovered that the most hated contemporary American author, by a wide margin, is Dave Eggers. It might be more accurate to say, though, that Eggers is the contemporary American author who is most likely to attract the kind of Internet commenters who like to talk about things and people they hate. And all that really means is that Eggers is the biggest public figure in American letters. Public figures are the ones who get the anger. Of course Marisha Pessl only has one person actively hating her on the Internet—what’s the point in voicing your dislike for somebody whose name few would recognize?

Bustillos draws some interesting connections between Eggers and the artist Wyndham Lewis, and she lists a few reasons why you ought to like the guy. But there are two things she doesn’t do. For one, she doesn’t address what people are actually writing when they say they hate Eggers—which, on a quick scan, is mainly airy fulminating against the perceived hype that surrounds him and little commentary on the actual work he does. Some of it’s just petty jealousy: “I hate Dave Eggers because he’s like me, and he dared to become successful by being me,” as one blogger put it. At least Dennis Cooper Math T was mad at his actual writing [Update: Thanks to the reader who chimed in to explain that the comment on Eggers below comes not from Cooper but from a guest post from one of his blog’s regular commenters]:

I hate Dave Eggers. His style is totally unreadable to me. Every single sentence is annoying. I’ve disliked almost everything I’ve ever read in McSweeney’s, especially that JT LeRoy one in the Best-of anthology. I don’t like the fonts in which Eggers’ writing is printed. Also, William Vollmann’s Rising Up and Rising Down, which McSweeney’s published, is SO incredibly boring.

Which starts getting at the second thing Bustillos doesn’t discuss in her essay: Eggers’ fiction. Her arguments for why you should praise Eggers have to do with his nonprofit work, his role as publisher of The Believer, and his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Nothing in the article and little in its 72 comments amounts to a defense of his fiction, which I gave up on after 2002’s You Shall Know Our Velocity and a couple of short stories. Eggers has sparked my class resentment in the past, so I may fall into the same camp of haters Bustillos describes. But is there any defense for the showy, trying-too-hard first sentence of Velocity?

Everything within takes place after Jack died and before my mom and I drowned in a burning ferry in the cool tannin-tinted Guaviare River in east-central Colombia, with forty-two locals we hadn’t yet met.*

Flipping through the book again, it seems stuffed with generalization and overstatement, Eggers straining to build up a head of steam by applying Writing-with-a-capital-w over simple things like a glass of water:

In a small city full of banks we stopped for something to drink. Nattily dressed men at cafe tables nodded to us and we walked into a dark cool restaurant and at the takeout counter we bought oranges and sodas. The sunlight over the clerk’s shoulder was white and planed, and when he poured us glasses of water it was clearer than any water I’d ever seen. It was the unadulterated soul of the world.

But Bustillos wouldn’t have a blog post to write about if Eggers persisted as a fiction writer, because whatever the jealous haters on the Internet are jealous about, it’s not Velocity or How We Are Hungry or his novelization of Where the Wild Things Are; his esteem as an author is now almost wholly connected to his charitable efforts, his nonfiction efforts, and his screenplay work.** A lengthy piece on Eggers in this weekend’s Guardian focuses almost exclusively on Zeitoun his nonfiction book on a survivor of Hurricane Katrina, and his quotes seem to suggest that, as a writer, he’s come to prefer working as a journalist:

“It is showing, not telling,” he says. “I just went back to all the things I learned in journalism school. There have been so many polemics about the war on terror, but [individual] stories illustrate these things much better. I’m interested in the human impact of the giant foot of misplaced government. After all, we encounter it every day. Every day.”

If Eggers has figured out where his talents and passions truly reside, and if they don’t involve writing novels, there’s nothing to hate about that.

* I’ve never edited fiction, but my inner Gordon Lish figures this sentence would be vastly improved if rewritten as, “Everything here takes place before my mom and I drowned in a burning ferry.” Or just cut the sentence, because expressing an awareness of your own death at the very start of the story is pretentious, confusing, or both, and best as I recall mom, death, and the trip to Colombia have no bearing on the novel’s story.

** I’m a fan of last year’s Away We Go, though at the risk of seeming willfully contrarian I’m giving most of the credit to the screenplay’s co-author—Eggers’ wife, Vendela Vida—because the movie seems designed to amplify the best qualities of her fiction: a laconic style, a sense of wanderlust, and a concern with what happens when difficult emotions don’t get expressed. Her Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name was one of my favorite novels of 2007, and her forthcoming The Lovers is one of my favorites of the new year.

Links: The Secret History

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Barry Hannah, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Ezra Brudno, George Saunders, J.D. Salinger, Lionel Shriver, Mark Twain, Mary Gaitskill, Paul Bowles, Paul Theroux, Wells Tower

At Jewish Ideas Daily, D.G. Myers—who from where I sit sets the standard for rigorous, thoughtful, and provocative litblogging—is in the midst of an ambitious study of landmarks in American Jewish literature, with a focus on lesser-known works. His second essay in the series looks at Ezra Brudno‘s 1904 novel, The Fugitive.

Thomas Doherty‘s excellent essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “The Death of Film Criticism,” is worth reading on its own terms, but there are plenty of obvious parallels to be drawn from it book criticism and arts journalism in general. If there’s anything to be learned, it’s that plugging your ears and pretending the Internet doesn’t exist won’t help. Plenty of critics embrace it, of course, and a few just might make a buck off it.

Mary Gaitskill wasn’t a fan of the cover of her 1997 story collection, Because They Wanted To, which featured a large screw. “I threw a fit, I tried to get them not to do it, but they gave me even worse covers—pictures of cannibalistic-looking women stripping the clothes off of a screaming man, or a girl in a wet dress leaning over with her hands on her butt.” The paperback cover seems reasonable enough.

Some literary passings get more attention, but few have inspired the range of thoughtful and affecting remembrances the way Barry Hannah‘s death has. A.N. Devers‘ piece evokes the shock of learning about his death. HTMLGiant gathers a few thoughts from admirers. Justin Taylor recalls Hannah’s influence. Nathan Deuel offers a contrary view. Wells Tower‘s 2008 profile includes the Hannah story “Water Liars.”

Tower, by the way, didn’t wind up winning the Story Prize this week. But Daniyal Mueenuddin‘s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders was a fine choice.

Lionel Shriver talks with the Wall Street Journal about her new novel, So Much for That: “I don’t assume any sentence is good just because I wrote it.”

An American in Tangier, a 1993 documentary on Paul Bowles, is available on the incomparable cultural archive UbuWeb.

A guide to the J.D. Salinger letters now on display at the Morgan Library & Museum.

Paul Theroux isn’t impressed with John Edwards‘ charitable efforts in Haiti.

Lots of folks get suckered into Ayn Rand‘s philosophy as teenagers. Count George Saunders among them.

Missouri legislators are planning to rename a stretch of highway in Saint Louis after Mark Twain, having decided that Mark McGwire doesn’t deserve the honor. A radio station doesn’t think Twain deserves it either, so a petition is making the rounds. Hall of Fame Cardinals shortstop Ozzie Smith seems to be getting most of the votes, though I’d feel skittish driving on a highway named after somebody known for backflips.

Category-ized Fiction

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Pearl S. Buck, Sarah Blake

Jessica at Read React Review is spending the next few days walking through Thomas J. Roberts‘ 1990 book An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction, which studies the differences between genre and literary novels, and the points where their readerships diverge and overlap. Jessica (who isn’t divulging her last name, best as I can tell) is an academic and a romance reader, so she brings an interesting perspective to the matter. And though she doesn’t quite say it explicitly, her post opens up the question of how much some of these distinctions have collapsed recently—and how often writers have tried to collapse them.

As Jessica describes it, Thomas breaks down fiction into four categories: At the extremes are classics and “junk fiction” (ie, genre fiction), and in the middle are “serious fiction” (literary fiction, apparently) and “plain fiction” (i.e., bestsellers). Thomas attempts to define who reads what, and Jessica has a lot of fun calling him on his nonsense. What I’m trying to figure out is if the problem here is with Thomas or with the time he was writing in. The past 20 years have been defined by hybridization on all fronts, with plenty of literary novelists rising up from genre writing and literary novelists trying their hand at page-turners.

But these conflations have always been with us, yes? I recently read a forthcoming biography of Pearl S. Buck, and if any writer had a mission to bring sentiment to literary fiction, she was at it in the 1920s. Tom Wolfe‘s The Bonfire of the Vanities, everything else aside, was an episodic page-turner from a literary writer. What may have changed is that such attempts to merge of literary and genre are more intentional. It’s just one data point, but I’m thinking of Sarah Blake‘s The Postmistress, a likable novel about three women during World War II. Its mix of war stories and tales from the home front isn’t cynically devised—indeed, Blake writes engagingly about how Londoners endured the Blitz—but it is intended to whipsaw the reader between the sentimental stuff and the stuff of literary novels. That’s not just my judgment; it’s Blake’s editor’s. In a letter attached to attached to pre-publication copies of The Postmistress, Amy Einhorn writes: “When I started Amy Einhorn Books, my mission statement was to hit that sweet spot between literary and commercial. … Sarah Blake has written a book that has nailed that sweet-spot with a bull’s-eye.”

None of which means that the differences between genre and literary have entirely collapsed, and Jessica points out various cases where literary types fail to read and understand genre on its own terms. But there’s a lot more movement between Thomas’ categories than what Thomas seems to address.

Randian Ranting

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ayn Rand

Northwestern English professor Bill Savage, who taught me plenty about noir and Chicago literature (not at the same time) in classes at the Newberry Library, is apparently enduring a steady stream of Ayn Rand enthusiasts walking through his office door. Two years ago, he agitated in the blog of Seattle alt-weekly the Stranger (edited by his sex-columnist brother Dan) that such students require quick correction: “I will teach them that any philosophy which cannot differentiate between Hitler or Stalin and Mother Theresa or Jane Addams is not just a system of thought in need of tweaking and elaboration, it’s objectively in need of ridicule, rejection and righteous anger,” he wrote.

That rant earned Savage a Rand poster for his office, but apparently it’s done little to diminish the number of teaching moments. Last week he returned to the blog to chastise the new batch of undergrad Randians: “The young readers who buy into Rand’s nonsense share two features in common: immense narcissism and utter cluelessness. They see themselves as heroic inviolate individuals, owing nothing to anyone, since everything they’ve achieved is due to their own genius and hard work.”

Fine by me—much like J.D. Salinger, Ayn Rand is rite-of-passage reading, a philosophy to get excited about in your teens and then quickly get over. Though Salinger was more nuanced, and unlike with Rand, nobody is paying universities money to preach Salinger’s gospel to students.