Month: May 2010

Old-Time Confusion

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Joanna Scott, Maureen Howard, Robert Coover

The latest issue of the Believer includes an exchange between novelists Maureen Howard and Joanna Scott (full interview subscription-only), and the conversation eventually turns to the various ways storytelling attracts interest and creates tension—and whether technology can make storytelling more engaging. Howard suggests that the old-fashioned printed page today lends itself to “careful, or do I mean conservative, fiction,” to which Scott responds:

Are you saying that here that a story that charges toward the end is necessarily conservative? You’re arguing in favor of a narrative made up of digressions? But I wonder if those sidebars can be deceptive. I think of the footnotes in Nabokov’s Pale Fire—these end up moving the plot forward in sneaky ways. … Suspense can come in many flavors. it isn’t just generated by a sequence of actions. There might be a suspense in the delays of a meandering narrative, or in the invention of competing voices. As a reader, I love to get caught up in paragraphs that are full of vivacious details. Confusion can be very suspenseful, if we’re able to move through the murk. I’m convinced that the most essential suspense in fiction is generated within each sentence.

Before the two drifted onto the subject of words on the page—it’s a drifting interview—they discussed a 2002 New York Times feature on a virtual-reality reading project at Brown University that Robert Coover is involved in. In the “Cave Writing” project, words were projected onto to the walls, and could be “peeled” away to float by themselves and discussed; animated images and music were included too. All of this, Coover said, was designed to elude “the dogmatic solidity of the printed text.” But he noted that there was a downside to all the bells and whistles: “[W]hen you ask afterward, ‘What were the stories about?,’ not many people noticed.” The work continues, though without access to the actual virtual reality presentations, they appear to be more like interesting art pieces than any replacement for conventional printed-page narrative.

Crisis Management

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Richard Yates, Sam Lipsyte

The New York Times is apparently determined to make a man out of me. In January Katie Roiphe chided the post-Boomer generation of writers for being diffident about sex, if not outright scared of it. Now, A.O. Scott laments the wussiness that he believes seems to pervade members of Generation X as they—as I—approach middle age. “How can a generation whose cultural trademark is a refusal to grow up have a midlife crisis?” Scott asks.

Exhibit A in Scott’s argument is Sam Lipsyte‘s The Ask, a very funny novel about modern-day Weltschmerz, but one that says more about particular moment in life than any particular generation. That’s not to deny that Milo, Lipsyte’s schlumpfy anti-hero, is an Xer, or that his concerns and tone don’t have a uniquely Gen X spin to them. The cynicism about a culture that broke up their parents, that argued against corporations, and that handed them a recession as soon as they got out of college—it’s all there. And a degree of shock over what everyday success and attainment might meant to them is there too. Milo notices early on that his doppelgangers stalk the streets of his neighborhood:

A man who looked a bit like me, same eyewear, same order of sneaker, charged past. They were infiltrating, the freaking me’s. The me’s were going to wreck everything, hike rents, demand better salads. The me’s were going to drive me away.

If that’s an X-ish experience, the sense of disorientation captured in those sentences isn’t so specific, which speaks to the creakiest beam in Scott’s essay. “Earlier versions of the crisis were, by and large, reactions against social norms,” he writes. “Members of the Greatest Generation and the one that came right after — the ‘Mad Men’ guys, their wives and secretaries — settled down young into a world where the parameters of career and domesticity seemed fixed, and then proceeded, by the force of their own restlessness, to blow it all up.” But Xers, like every generation, were raised with social norms too, just an inversion of what Boomers were raised with—the new rule was that we were going to have to figure out a lot of this ourselves, because families, corporations, and government had largely proven themselves untrustworthy. The norm was to be entrepreneurial, to the point of investing heavily in crackpot Dot-com Boom projects. To the extent you consider yourself more or less successful by that standard, the more or less susceptible you might be susceptible to a midlife crisis.

Which is to say that there’s no good reason to think that any of the midlife-crisis novels Gen Xers will increasing pump out in the coming years will be much different than the ones that came before them—every generation grow up to clash against the standards they were raised with. After reading Scott’s essay, I couldn’t help but think of The Ask as a kind of cousin to Richard Yates‘ 1961 novel, Revolutionary Road. A grumpy, bitter, alcoholic cousin, to be sure. But the despair that stalks that novel’s hero, Frank Wheeler, has the same wellspring as the one that stalks Milo—the feeling of being stuck in a dead-end job with ridiculous demands, of believing you were destined for bigger and better things. When Frank first takes a gig at his father’s employer, a stand-in for IBM called Knox Business Machines, he does it with a sense of irony that would cheer the heart of anybody who caught Reality Bites when it opened in theaters:

And so it started as a kind of joke. Others might fail to see the humor of it, but it filled Frank Wheeler with a secret, astringent delight as he discharged his lazy duties…. And the best part of the joke was what happened every afternoon at five. Buttoned-up and smiling among the Knox men, nodding goodnight as the elevator set him free, he would take a crosstown bus and a downtown bus to Bethune Street … and there a beautiful, disheveled girl would be waiting, a girl as totally unlike the wife of a Knox man as the apartment was unlike a Knox man’s home.

Milo could relate. And Yates wasn’t unique; a list of novels that capture similar emotions wouldn’t be too hard to put together. (Add to the tally Saul Bellow‘s Henderson the Rain King, Richard Ford‘s The Sportswriter, and James Hynes‘ brilliant new novel, Next.) Midlife crises are an American tradition, and Lipsyte (in that knowing, Gen X way), writes as if he’s aware of it—indeed, perhaps the biggest difference between Yates’ brand of despair and Lipsyte’s isn’t so much generational but authorial. Revolutionary Road is written in the third person, with Yates authoritatively applying fear and anxiety onto his poor characters. In The Ask, written in the first person, Milo takes control of the story, embracing his initial inability to manage things when they go off the rails. I’ve read that book and seen that movie, Milo’s character seems to say. Let me figure it out; I’m a grownup.

Links: Go Tell It on the Mountain

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Adam Langer, Barry Hannah, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Percival Everett, Richard Price, Sam Lipsyte, Shalom Auslander, Thomas Mallon

At the Rumpus, Eric B. Martin writes, “if we think literature is still worth talking about, every book is part of that debate, which is why reviews of non-blockbuster books should do one of two things: either convincingly shout to the hilltops, “Read this book!” or, in explaining why there’s no shouting, try to find larger truths about literature in a book’s strengths and flaws.” Why can’t reviews of all books just do the second thing? When somebody shouts “Read this book!” from a hilltop, who finds that alone convincing?

Adam Langer, whose next book is about the publishing industry, on the strangest thing about publishing: “That sometimes it’s easier to lie and get away with it, than to get away with telling the truth.”

Southern Methodist University Press is at risk of closing due to budgetary concerns. Ann Beattie, Madison Smartt Bell (the press’ closing would be “a body blow to American literature”), Richard Russo, and others have registered their displeasure.

Richard Price on what to do when Hollywood comes calling about adapting your work for the screen: “Take the money and run.”

“I am very protective of books. They don’t deserve half the projections that readers cast onto them.”

Shalom Auslander works a stomach-churning but not inaccurate metaphor to describe the experience of writing.

Current events have a way of leading back to The Grapes of Wrath.

Percival Everett‘s entertaining comic novel, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, picks up the annual Believer Book Award.

D.G. Myers, bullish on litblogging: “For the first time—I mean the first time in literary history—critics have the means at their disposal to concern themselves ‘fre­quently and at length with contemporary work.'”

The case for slow reading.

Philip Roth and Judy Blume are inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.

In related news, Sam Lipsyte writes a letter to Barry Hannah: “I was a Jewish kid from New Jersey. My literary heroes were meant to be Roth and Bellow and maybe Updike, for ethnic variety. Their accomplishments rightly endure. But your books burned me down.”

Thomas Mallon takes the helm of the creative writing program at the George Washington University, just a couple of months after the school announced that Edward P. Jones has joined the English department faculty.

On Saturday, Al “Red Dog” Weber, who is 84, will impersonate Ernest Hemingway at a book festival in Laguna Hills, California. How will you be channeling Papa, Mr. Weber? “A lot of rum, honey. I’m going to be bombed out of my gourd and in perfect character.”

Inspirational Verse

by Mark Athitakis, posted in James Baldwin

One hears, it seems to me, in the work of all American novelists, even including the mighty Henry James, songs of of the plains, the memory of a virgin continent, mysteriously despoiled, though all dreams were to have become possible here. This did not happen. And the panic, then … comes out of the fact that we are now confronting the awful question of whether or not all our dreams have failed. How have we managed to become what we have, in fact, become? And if we are, as indeed we seem to be, so empty and desperate, what are we to do about it? How shall we put ourselves in touch with reality?

—James Baldwin, 1962

Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ander Monson, David Shields, Jack Kerouac

Writing at the Poetry Foundation blog Harriet, Kenneth Goldsmith points out that the recent spate of books that aggressively “borrow” from other texts may have less to do with the death of the novel, the death of the author, or any other such nonsense. It’s just that today it’s a lot easier to copy and paste:

The previous forms of borrowing in literature, collage and pastiche—taking a word from here, a sentence from there—were developed based on the amount of labor involved. Having to manually retype or hand-copy an entire book on a typewriter is one thing; cutting and pasting an entire book with three keystrokes—select all / copy / paste—is another.

From there, Goldsmith recalls a conversation with a creative writing student who was flummoxed by an assignment in which she had to write a passage in the style of a particular author—in her case, Jack Kerouac. Goldsmith suggests she might have learned more about writing if she had copied out a passage of On the Road, or, better still, the entire book. “Wouldn’t she have really understood Kerouac’s style in a profound way that was bound to stick with her?” he asks. Probably. But understanding style isn’t really the end goal of the copy-and-paste set—David Shields‘ Reality Hunger or Ander Monson‘s Vanishing Point are more interested in questioning the identity of the author than the quality of writing. (In a way, they’re actually somewhat against the quality of writing, or at least defiantly disinterested in it—Monson’s “assembloirs,” built from snippets of other memoirs, are designed to call out the same-ness in tone that afflicts such books, stripping away whatever pathos or individuality they might have.) That’s not to say that copying and pasting can’t make for some interesting commentary—just that the commentary will inevitably be about authors, not writing.

Two Perfect Pages

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Richard Powers

The comment thread for my post last week on Richard Powers eventually turned to his 2003 novel, The Time of Our Singing. “I’m always pleased that Powers takes risks, and a big book on race from a white writer carries some risks, but there’s also a sense in that book of trying to cover all the bases, straining to not mis-step,” Richard Crary writes. That echoes my feelings about the novel, though of course the book has its defenders. I mentioned that I’ve dreaded reading Greil Marcus‘ essay on the novel in last year’s A New Literary History of America, a book he co-edited, because I wasn’t prepared to be told that I’d missed something important in Powers’ book and really ought to reread it.

I needn’t have worried. Marcus admires Singing, but his admiration is less about Powers’ writing and more about what other cultural objects Marcus, in his familiar cross-disciplinary way, can bounce against it: Bob Dylan and Robert Johnson, Sol Hurok and Harold Ickes, the history of interracial marriage laws and of music. All interesting points, but arguing for the novel being an interesting synthesis of various threads in American history and culture isn’t the same thing as arguing for the novel being great, or even very good.

Still, Marcus understands the flaws with Powers’ prose that Andrew Seal, Crary, and I mentioned, so his deep admiration of Singing‘s first two pages are of interest. The book opens, Marcus writes, “with two pages in perfect pitch—two complete pages where plain, barely inflected phrases somehow steal the magic of the music they are describing … It is no small thing to write two perfect pages—two pages where the reader cannot find the seams, the artifice, the vanity of art.”

You can read those pages yourself. “Perfect” is a hard word to casually sling around, but those first paragraphs are indeed lovely, hinting at the big themes the novel is going to take on without fervently pointing at them. His description of how dam breaks in the crowd after Jonah Strom finishes singing is at once elegant and efficient: “Silence hangs over the hall. It drifts above the seats like a balloon across the horizon. For two downbeats, even breathing is a crime. Then there’s no surviving this surprise except by applauding it away.”

“All of it is so rightly balanced on its own air,” Marcus writes, “that when the first false note breaks you feel it as if you had dozed off to be wakened by the phone ringing.” Thing is, Marcus doesn’t identify what that first false note is. It’s not this sentence (Marcus admires it): “In the soar of that voice, they hear the rift it floats over.” But it ought to be; even writers capable of writing two perfect pages should think twice about awkwardly deploying “soar” as a noun. Regardless, things get decidedly less admirable in the next paragraph, the big proclamation of the important times in which the novel is set:

The year is a snowy black-and-white signal coming in on rabbit ears. The world of our childhood—the A-rationing, radio-fed world pitched in that final war against evil—falls away in to a Kodak tableau. A man has flown in space. Astronomers pick up pulses from starlike objects. Across the globe, the United States draws to an inside straight…

And so on. “The continent is awash in spies, beatniks, and major appliances,” Powers writes, and his grip is loosened—it’s unclear whether he might be making a serious statement about a prosperous early-60s Cold War culture, or making fun of a Life-reading, self-satisfied middle class paranoid about the Commies. Not a disaster, in any event, but it’s the first hint of the difficult job Powers assigned himself, and how imperfectly he pulled it off.

D.C.-Area Readings: Coming Up and Just Added

by Mark Athitakis, posted in D.C.-Area Readings

The listings below are adapted from my page of upcoming D.C.-area readings; please see that page for addresses, contact information, and full event listings.

Notable Events During the Coming Week

May 2
Sandra Beasley, I Was the Jukebox (Politics & Prose)

May 3
Dan Clowes, Wilson (Politics & Prose)
W.S. Merwin, The Shadow of Sirius (Folger Shakespeare Library)

May 5
Rosalynn Carter, Within Our Reach (Borders Baileys Crossroads)

May 6
Dave Barry, I’ll Mature When I’m Dead: Dave Barry’s Amazing Tales of Adulthood (Barnes & Noble Bethesda, Borders L Street)
Laura Bush, Spoken From the Heart (Smithsonian Associates, The George Washington University Lisner Auditorium)
Charlaine Harris, Dead in the Family (Borders Baileys Crossroads)
Rick Riordan, The Kane Chronicles, Book One: The Red Pyramid (Politics & Prose)

May 8
30th annual PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction ceremony (Folger Shakespeare Library)

Just Added

May 4
Bernard Waber and Paulis Waber, Lyle Walks the Dogs (Politics & Prose)

May 6
J&P Voelkel, The Jaguar Stones (Politics & Prose)

May 9
Louisa Shafia, Lucid Food (Dupont Circle Freshfarm Market, 1500 block of 20th Street NW, via Politics & Prose)

May 11
Zoya Phan, Undaunted: My Struggle for Freedom and Survival in Burma (Busboys & Poets 5th & K)

May 12
Emil Draitser, Stalin’s Romeo Spy: The Rise and Fall of the KGB’s Most Daring Operative (Library of Congress)

May 15
John Kenneth White, Barack Obama’s America: How New Conceptions of Race, Family, and Religion Ended the Reagan Era (Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library)

May 18
Frances Moore Lappe, Getting a Grip 2 (Shirlington Public Library)
Jeffrey A. Miron, Libertarianism, From A to Z (Cato Institute)

May 19
Robert Carlson, Biology is Technology: The Promise, Peril, and Business of Engineering Life (Reiter’s)
Timothy M. Gay, Satch, Dizzy and Rapid Robert: The Wild Saga of Interracial Baseball Before Jackie Robinson (Library of Congress)
Jennifer Steil, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky: An American Journalist in Yemen (American University, Mary Graydon Center 3, 202-496-1992)

May 21
Jeff Shesol, Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court (Library of Congress)

May 22
Chris d’Lacey, Dark Fire (Barnes & Noble Tysons Corner)

June 2
Rich Remsberg, Hard Luck Blues (Library of Congress)
John Waters, Role Models (Smithsonian Associates)

June 3
Wahida Clark, What’s Really Hood! A Collection of Tales from the Streets (Barnes & Noble Union Station)

June 6
Carol Kranowitz and Joye Newman, Growing an In-Sync Child: Simple, Fun Activities to Help Every Child Develop, Learn, and Grow (Sixth & I Historic Synagogue)

June 7
Andrew Young and Kabir Sehgal, Walk in My Shoes: Conversations Between a Civil Rights Legend and His Godson on the Journey Ahead (National Press Club)

June 16
Spencer Wells, Pandora’s Seed (National Geographic Society)
Jerry Wolman, The World’s Richest Man (Sixth & I Historic Synagogue)

June 21
Benjamin Balint, Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine that Transformed the Jewish Left into the Neoconservative Right (Washington DC Jewish Community Center)
Keith Gilyard, John Oliver Killens: A Life of Black Literary Activism (Busboys & Poets 14th & V)
Lori Gottlieb, Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough (Sixth & I Historic Synagogue)

June 23
Monte Reel, The Last of the Tribe (Borders Friendship Heights)

June 29
Gwynne Dyer, Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats (Busboys & Poets 14th & V)

July 6
Azby Brown, Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan (Smithsonian Associates)
Eva Hoffman, Time (Smithsonian Associates)

July 7
W. Joseph Campbell, Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism (Busboys & Poets 14th & V)

July 12
Nadine Cohodas, Princess Noire: the Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone (Library of Congress)

July 17
John Varriano, Tastes and Temptations: Food and Art in Renaissance Italy (Smithsonian Associates)

July 21
Michael Psilakis, How to Roast a Lamb (Smithsonian Associates)
Alison Weir, Captive Queen (Smithsonian Associates)

July 24
Stan Newman, 15,003 Answers: The Ultimate Trivia Encyclopedia, and Ken Jennings, Brainiac (Smithsonian Associates)

July 26
Alex Kava, Damaged (Borders Baileys Crossroads)

July 27
Larry Doyle, Go Mutants! (Borders Baileys Crossroads)

August 4
Mary Roach, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (Smithsonian Associates)

October 4
David Sedaris, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary (The George Washington University Lisner Auditorium)

November 13
Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates (The George Washington University Lisner Auditorium)