Month: June 2010

Type Casting

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Henry Roth

What to make of Henry Roth‘s An American Type? The book, chiseled out of one of the sizeable autobiographical chunks of writing Roth left unpublished, is apparently much cleaner than the source material. But does that do Roth a disservice? And what would it mean to do a disservice to a self-loathing, cantankerous writer who seduced his sister? In Slate, Judith Shulevitz worries: “I can’t help bristling at these repeated attempts to impose a conventional morphology on an artist who seems to have been determined to eschew one.” She admires that the reworking of An American Type is “skillfully done” but reasonably wonders what got cut out in the process.

In a demolition (sub. req’d) of the book in Harper’s, Witz author Joshua Cohen asserts that the book never should have been published—and, comparing An American Type with the source material, finds an unseemly effort to streamline, polish, and scrub his prose. The before-and-after passage Cohen uses to prove this point doesn’t seem like a Gordon Lish-grade overhaul, though—it matters, of course, that the draft shifts from first person to third, but editor Willing Davidson mainly seems to be attempting to apply some action (or at least active verbs) to the author’s ruminations.

That shift in voice is enough for Cohen to dismiss the book as misbegotten, though: “It is not my belief that these pages should have been published without intervention; rather it is my belief that these pages should not have been published at all…. Batch II [the source for An American Type] is a work best intended for the interest of the author’s family, scholar-specialists, and the exceptionally sentimental; for Rothians sympathetic enough to interpret their writer’s geriatric lapses as a sort of Kabbalistic prosing of mortality itself, or as emblematic of the horrible humanness behind all expressive effort.” Seems like rereading Call It Sleep would be more rewarding.

Keynote Speech

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Jennifer Egan

Critics generally agree that Jennifer Egan‘s new novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, is a very good one, though there seems to be little consensus on what, exactly, makes it so good. Entertainment Weekly gives it an A- for being metafiction about human foibles; the Millions celebrates it as a novel about childhood; the Associated Press admires its commentary on the internet and social networking; as if to suggest that there’s no way to pin the damn thing down, the New York Press says it’s “a profound and glorious exploration of the fullness and complexity of the human condition.”

A Visit From the Goon Squad is indeed a good book, but it also has a flaw that’s echoed in the disorganized responses it’s received—Egan invents a host of characters, but she doesn’t always seem to have a firm grasp on them, or on what it is she might want us to think about them. (Quick plot summary: The novel loosely revolves around the music industry, starting with the San Francisco punk rock scene in the late 70s and ending in the 2020s. The two lead characters are Bennie, a record exec, and Sasha, his assistant, though the book features many others.) It’s not a comic novel, though Egan enjoys satirizing character types: the publicist who takes a gig improving the image of a genocidal dictator; the sleazy music-industry type who preys on young women; wealthy country-club types with awful politics; the washed-up punk guitarist making an unlikely comeback. In one chapter we meet Jules, the brother of Bennie’s wife, who’s just been released from prison and a model case of rehabilitation (he won a special citation from the PEN Prison Writing Program). Two chapters later, we learn about the cause of Jules’ incarceration, in the form of a Vanity Fair-ish profile by him that describes dinner with a celebrity and the mental breakdown that prompts his prison term. Throughout, it’s unclear what Egan means to criticize here. Vapid Vanity Fair profiles? Celebrity culture in general? Needy writers? If we’re meant to come to some understanding about Jules’ mental plight (or sympathy for the starlet he assaults), framing it around hollow magazine-profile writing doesn’t help do it.

And if Egan means to describe “fullness and complexity of the human condition” by talking about its hollowness, then let me the hell out of this book—the irony is too thick in there. There’s “seriocomic,” and then there’s undercutting your characterizations in the name of “complexity.” The novel isn’t a failure—Sasha’s character, confused and kleptomaniacal as she is, doesn’t suffer from Egan’s overworking. But there’s really only one point in the book where Egan’s tone stabilizes and it couldn’t be more clear who her characters are and why we might care about them. It’s the chapter-in-PowerPoint you might have heard about, and which you can read in full here.

“Great Rock and Roll Pauses” is narrated by Sasha’s 12-year-old daughter, Alison, sometime in the 2020s. The environment has apparently crapped out enough that the desert is awash in solar panels. And attention spans have apparently crapped out enough that children are taught to write not on pages but on presentation slides, with a focus on draconian simplicity. Alison tells Sasha some of slogans she’s learning in writing class (slide 21): “Give us the issues, not the tissues!” “A word-wall is a long haul!” “Charts should illuminate, not complicate!” “Add a graphic and increase your traffic!” This seems set up to be another human characteristic that Egan might poke holes in—so it’s come to this: we’re teaching kids to write in PowerPoint. But a funny thing happens on the way to rhetorical dystopia. As Alison literally charts her brother’s obsession with finding the pauses and false endings in rock songs, Egan allows a host of childhood concerns to spill out—her need to understand her mom’s past, the way she misses her often-absent father, the way her brother’s fixation has to become her own fixation, for the sake of the stability of the family.

PowerPoint also forces Egan to write with a concision that’s often absent in the rest of the book. Slide 54 is particularly lovely in its simplicity: “The desert is quiet and busy. I hear faint clicks like the scratchy pause in ‘Bernadette.’ There is a hum like the pause in ‘Closing Time’ by Semisonic. The whole desert is a pause.” It helps, too, that Egan is assuming the voice of an adolescent, which makes her eagerness to make things plain and to keep peace in her family all the more affecting. The final slides, in their curious, brutal way, reveal how hard those tasks are going to be for her. But there’s an optimism embedded in that chapter, too: No matter what the future does to the way we communicate, Egan seems to say, we can find a way to take a story and make it meaningful.

Links: Bright-Sided

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Benjamin Percy, Brady Udall, Don DeLillo, E.L. Doctorow, Jeffrey Eugenides, John Kennedy Toole, O. Henry, Peter Matthiessen, Richard Price, Stephen King

Drew Johnson‘s spirited defense of O. Henry on the hundredth anniversary of his death: “[I]t’s worth remembering that this is a register with which all writers have terrible difficulty. For all the contempt lavished on stories which crudely bring on the tears, my nagging sense is that the skills to traverse the terrain of ‘The Last Leaf’ or ‘Magi’ are widely lacking—and so we hide behind the ‘happiness shows white on the page’ excuses. It’s hard to think of happy stories.”

Falling hard for the hero of A Confederacy of Dunces.

E.L. Doctorow on how Ragtime might resemble a rag: “In the way it plays off personal lives against historical forces, you could make the claim, I suppose, that the historical forces are the basic stride or the inevitable irrepressible beat, and the attempt to escape history is the syncopated right hand.”

Peter Matthiessen recalls visiting Prague in 1948.

What’s killing fiction? MFA programs? Publishing house editors? Anybody willing to step up and blame readers?

Benjamin Percy recalls his early admiration for Stephen King‘s The Gunslinger.

Richard Price‘s novel Lush Life has inspired a series of art exhibits on the Lower East Side.

“Grocery store owners, it seems, have more dignity, more potential for sympathy, and more substance, than politicians, at least if you’re an up and coming novelist.”

Jeffrey Eugenides isn’t very excited about the upcoming film version of his short story “Baster.”

Any appropriate name for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is going to have a Don DeLillo-like affect.

Writing about American sports fiction, Benjamin Markovitz notes that “[John] Updike probably chose basketball for Rabbit because it’s less Waspy than tennis or golf. Even so, the class lines in American sports are not fixed. Basketball is played by inner-city blacks and rural whites. American football grew up on the playing fields of east coast prep schools, but early on it also became a way out of poverty for the working classes.” This may explain why fiction writers find sports so useful for their purposes—and why the Great American Lacrosse Novel will probably never be written.

Brady Udall on researching his new novel, The Lonely Polygamist: “I figured I’d meet a lot of megalomaniacal men with their shirts buttoned up to their necks, and their meek, cow-eyed wives (the ones with the pioneer dresses and weird hair-dos). I have to say I was almost disappointed when these people turned out to be nice, everyday, regular folks, hardly distinguishable from the rest of the populace.”

I’m mindful of the fact that all the writers mentioned in this links post are men. I don’t think all of them are purveyors of manfiction, though. On a related note: Are female authors in movies always broken/weepy types?

One Last Thing (For Now, Anyway) on Possible Reasons for the Death of Regionalism in Literature

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Dan Chaon

Following up on yesterday’s post (and last month’s) on the matter: Dan Chaon, speaking to the Chicago Tribune, suggests that travel and global publishing rights take their toll on the would-be regional writer:

For a long time I thought of myself as a Midwestern writer, and I was partly interested in exploring what Midwestern stories are. As I’ve begun to travel more and sort of begun to publish internationally and so on, I’ve been more interested in trying to write more about the larger world and about the ways in which, as in “Await Your Reply,” these sheltered Midwestern people are connected to larger world, even if they don’t know it or like it.

Social media too: “We’re all aware of it now with Facebook,” Chaon says. “You can see how that six-degrees-of-separation stuff works now.”

This Must Be the Place

by Mark Athitakis, posted in David Guterson

Is literary regionalism dying—and if so, why? Some points have been recently argued by D.G. Myers (who suggests the rise of MFA programs may play a role) and Andrew Seal (who suggests that there’s a kind of growing alienation between writers and readers). No offense to either of those two smart people, but I’ve been hoping to see something from a working fiction writer on the matter. Yesterday, the Official Blog of the Western Literature Association* posted an excerpt of an interview with David Guterson in Crab Creek Review in which he bristled at the idea of being categorized as a Northwest writer:

The pursuit of regional identities in the arts is at best a nebulous activity. It seems to me both arbitrary and useless to categorize writers geographically. There might have been a time when geography and culture converged in such a way as to make the regional identification of artists a worthwhile practice. There might have been something fruitful, once, in pondering why a particular art arose in a particular place. Today, with the exception of the handful of essentially isolated cultures remaining on the planet, human beings have a limited relationship to place, and this is, of course, reflected in the arts. To be a “Northwest writer” in the 21st century simply means that, like billions of people in other places, your sensibility and view of the world are informed by influences near and far—but mostly far.

There’s more in the post, and probably more in the journal proper. Guterson may just be whipping up a newer, fancier version of the artists’ common complaint that they hate to be pigeonholed, but he does make clear that something changed—at one point regionalism was important, and now it is less important. The post’s author, D. Seth Horton, interprets Guterson’s comments as saying that the change was globalization, but also points out that money may have something to do with it too: they may be under “self-imposed pressure, to borrow Guterson’s phrase, to resist the regionalist designations that have, in the past, threatened to reduce the number of books they are able to sell in the global marketplace.”

* Perhaps this issue could be studied quantitatively: Take a look a the membership rolls for regional literature associations over time and look for trendlines. Better still, find out how many such associations have gone defunct in recent years, or if any new ones have cropped up.

Facilitators and Explicators

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Book Reviews

So, yes, this Nation piece about the death of book reviewing. John Palattella, literary editor of the Nation, does a good job of rehashing how the newspaper book review has collapsed in recent years. No news there, though Palattella at least puts a new, somewhat positive spin on what’s happening by honoring the survival of magazine-based reviewing. I’ll take it one step further and suggest that there are not one but two bright spots here. What’s survived in reviewing from the print era are the advance publications (Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal, etc) and the long-form essays in the New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, and so on. What didn’t survive, at least in their old form, are the Sunday newspaper book reviews, which even at the largest metro dailies have thinned considerably. Print reviews now, more or less successfully, serve publishing professionals and the most serious of readers; the casual reader reading newspapers for books coverage is now generally underserved.

But are those readers now underserved online? Palattella seems to think so, though it also seems he hasn’t studied the matter very closely. “We are in the throes of another newspaper crisis, yet nothing comparable to the NYRB or the LRB has emerged, in print or online, even though there is, I believe, a genuine hunger for serious books coverage,” he writes, in a much-blogged sentence. From there he takes a few whacks at Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle, which he calls “dismal.” This hits me where I live, but look—if Critical Mass were the only place I looked for literary criticism online, I’d fear for the future of the discipline too. As plenty of people have pointed out, websites that take reviewing seriously are—I won’t say abundant, but there are enough around to argue that the same spirit that launched the NYRB and LRB exists today. (Also, enough exist that I can help feed the aforementioned “dismal” blog with some features on those sites. The latest one, on the Quarterly Conversation, was posted yesterday.)

Sorting out how money works in this new world is tricky issue (and TQC Scott Esposito has some interesting thoughts on it). But the end goal shouldn’t be so much to save the book review (as the headline to Palattella’s piece suggests), but book reviewing—which is to say that even experienced reviewers need to look at their work differently. Douglas McLennan, writing at the National Arts Journalism Program blog, is as exasperated by this discussion as everybody else seems to be, but he clearly spells out what the stakes are:

That’s not to say that many of journalism’s traditional values aren’t worth preserving. Yet what I see among a lot of arts journalists is unwillingness to consider new ways of critical response to work. Who says that the 500-word or 1000-word review is the apex of that response? Let’s not forget the audience, the community. They expect more from an interaction with us. They have valuable things to offer, and I don’t just mean commenting on what we do.

Perhaps one expanded role of a critic/journalist is to curate the best people/perspectives out there and not only report what those people think but find ways to have them interact with readers. This is journalist as facilitator-of-smart-discussion rather than journalist only as explicator. Everywhere, arts organizations are looking at their changing relationships with their audiences and trying new things on. And we think arts journalists don’t have to do the same?

One Under 40

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Yiyun Li

The main thing that interests me about the New Yorker‘s “20 Under 40” list of young writers is that Yiyun Li is on it. Her first two books, the 2005 collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and last year’s novel The Vagrants, reflect an admirable skill at taking melancholy situations (separations, deaths, family resentments), and mining them for a whole host of emotions; her forthcoming collection, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, is just as good, and it includes a novella, “Kindness,” that’s among the best things she’s written. I can’t tell what story of Li’s the New Yorker included (it doesn’t appear to be in the magazine proper this week), but a brief Q&A with her is online. Not that it’s especially illuminating:

What, in your opinion, makes a piece of fiction work?

I don’t know. This is an unanswerable question for me.

That’s not to say she hasn’t studied the matter though. The “Work” issue of Granta, published earlier this year, includes a essay by Li called “Secrets of the Trade,” in which she describes growing up in China and helping her father copy out articles for his job. She was eight years old at the time, and caught the fiction bug early, smitten with the stories she came across in newspapers while working as an assistant:

[W]hat a world I discovered in those folders. Many newspapers published serialized novels at that time and I indiscriminately devoured everything. A suspense novel, serialized in a provincial paper, began in a town where young girls went to sleep, dreamed of being kissed by a white-cloaked man, and woke up insane…. An evening newspaper carried a ghost story in which the imperial family of the last dynasty recorded the location of their hidden treasure within a young prince’s blood…. A new translation of Tolstoy’s Resurrection, too long to be serialized, was nevertheless excerpted for months in a major newspaper, and it agonized me not to be able to find out what happened next when, halfway into the folder, the excerpt was replaced by a historical novel about the Boxer Rebellion.

She wasn’t supposed to copy those fiction stories—her job was to write out the red-circled news stories near them. But she picked up a skill for multitasking, and the essay’s conclusion serves as a sort of mission statement for her fiction: “In time I would learn to copy the articles while reading outside the circles, a secret of my trade, to be at one place and then elsewhere at the same time.”

Third-Person Shooters

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Karl Marlantes, Tom Bissell

I spent most of last week in Halifax, Nova Scotia, so I didn’t have an opportunity to blog.* I was able to get some reading done, though: I left with Tom Bissell‘s Extra Lives, a collection of personal essays, reporting, and essays on video games, and Karl Marlantes‘ Matterhorn, a hefty novel set during the Vietnam War. The two have a lot to say to each other, it turns out. Both to a large extent wrestle with the same question: How do you tell a story about combat without boring people?

The first time I heard about Extra Lives, it sounded like the worst-case scenario of the stunt-memoir trend: Bissell, a talented reporter and fiction writer, had apparently squandered a great deal of his time and talent in recent years snorting coke and playing Grand Theft Auto IV. True enough, he had: The Guardian excerpted the relevant chapter from the book last March. But Bissell’s book isn’t a story about morals and addiction—or even Bissell himself, really. It’s a story about story: It’s a study about how the people who create the console games Bissell favors struggle to create compelling guiding narratives while also giving users an opportunity to create their own compelling narrative as they play.** Both the former and the latter (also known as the “ludonarrative”) tend to fall short for Bissell; rare is videogame that can deliver the same satisfactions for him as a film or novel, though he’s more fascinated with game designers’ limitations than critical of them. He writes:

For me, stories break the surface in the form of image or character or situation. I start with the variables, not the system. This is intended neither to ennoble my way of working nor denigrate that of the game designer; it is to acknowledge the very different formal constraints game designers have to struggle with. While I may wonder if a certain story idea will “work,” this would be a differently approached and much, much less subjective question if I were a game designer. A game that does not work will, literally, not function.

For Bissell, the compromises designers must make to get a game to “work” can be a seemingly endless source of frustration for him as a gamer. Games that are too overtly gruesome and random can feel pointless, but games’ “cut scenes,” in which characters talk in an effort to give the game some movie-like gravitas, can feel hacky and ham-fisted. (Even the story of Bissell’s beloved GTA IV is only “pretty good for a video game, which is to say, conventional and fairly predictable.”) To that end, Bissell makes a point of discussing a few games that attempt to upend the typical game model. The most interesting one—the one I’d be most interested in taking a crack at myself—is Braid, a time-warping, save-the-princess journey that seems built to avoid giving players the familiar lizard-brain pleasures of killing combatants, or even putting your own life at risk. The deliberately counterintuitive structure of the game is exactly the point. As Jonathan Blow, the game’s designer, tells Bissell: “People want to have an interesting story, but what they mean by that is this weird thing that comes out of copying these industrial Hollywood process. The game developer’s idea of a great story is copying an action story. Isn’t it a little obvious that that’s never going to go anywhere?”

Well, it only goes so far. The dullest section of Extra Lives is a passage in which Bissell relates an extreme act of heroism he performed in the multiplayer zombie-apocalypse game Left 4 Dead. The emotions he felt in that moment, he writes, “were as intensely vivid as any I have felt while reading a novel or watching a film or listening to a piece of music,” he writes. But description of how he pulled it off dies on the page; it’s a string of this-happened-and-then-I-did-this sentences. I’m not sure if this is Bissell’s failure, though, or an occupational hazard of writing about war and violence. Here’s a passage from Marlantes’ Matterhorn that I think represents the problem:

The sawed-off M-60 stopped firing. The belt had run out. Vancouver dived for the side of the trail, and Connolly rolled over into it on his stomach. He let loose on automatic just as an NVA soldier emerged from the wall of jungle to finish Vancouver off. Connolly’s bullets caught the NVA soldier full in the chest and face. The back of the man’s head exploded. Connolly rolled over again, fumbling wildly for another magazine. An M-16 opened up on Vancouver’s right, almost on top of him, the bullets screaming past his right ear. The another M-16 followed almost immediately to his left. Vancouver was crawling backward, along with Connolly, as fast as he could. Connolly was pushing a second magazine into place, shouting for Mole. “Gun up! Gun up! Mole! Goddamn it!”

The hallmark of Matterhorn is its extreme plainspokenness. Marlantes avoids metaphor, similes—anything that might smack of “literary” writing, actually—presumably because doing so would risk romanticizing or prettifying war, the last thing the author wants to do. In fact, the novel is probably as much dialogue as description. I’m a little more than halfway through and intend to finish it, but not because of I’m enjoying combat scenes like the one above. It’s a study in flat-footed prose, from the bullets that scream (what bullets always do) to the head that explodes (what heads always do when they’re shot at in war) to the soldier’s “Goddamn it!” (what solders always say when they’re shooting screaming bullets at exploding heads in war).

For the most part, Marlantes’ keep-it-simple strategy is to the book’s benefit. But if Matterhorn were strictly a novel about combat, it would be an utter failure. A war novel needs something besides fighting, and Matterhorn has the benefit of multiple threads about race, the everyday lives of Marines, and, especially, how flaws in the command structure trickle down to the soldiers, sometimes fatally. Is there a game about organizational failure in command structures, and how those failures trickle down? Can there be?*** Novels and more ambitious films seem uniquely capable of capturing human interaction with that kind of scope, in a way that (in Bissell’s reckoning) videogames largely don’t. The games he describes tend to live at the level of the exploding head, or at least need to return there regularly. The game that finds (has found?) a way to integrate the way people struggle to relate to each other, not just fight against them—that’s the game that competes with the novel.

* So I wound up feeling like a crummy host late last week, when M.A. Orthofer cited this blog as an example of one of many places where efforts at engaged criticism are happening online—contrary to Nation literary editor John Palattella, who recently lamented the death of the book review and bemoaned the web’s inability to fill in the gaps. More later, maybe, if I can think of a way to address it that doesn’t feel like preaching to the choir.

** If I sound a little tin-eared talking about videogames, there’s a good reason: I don’t play them, at least not the console games Bissell discusses. That’s not a value judgment; it’s just that there are only so many hours in the day for so many cultural pursuits. I mean, I’m certain that I’ve spent more hours in the past year on my favorite futzing-around web-game site than I’ve spent watching plays or seeing live music.

*** To perhaps put the question another way: What would the videogame version of The Wire look like? What would I, as the player, get to do?