Author: Mark Athitakis

Stuck in the Middle(brow)

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Benjamin Kunkel

If we must endure essays that make broad generalizations about the state of American literature—and if David Shields and the Huffington Post have their way, we must, we must—I’d sooner it take it in the form of Benjamin Kunkel‘s “Letter to Norway.” Asked by the Norwegian literary magazine Bokvennen to deliver some thoughts about American fiction since 2000, Kunkel argues that the stuff has been defined by a kind of slackening of postmodern gamesmanship, replaced by a resurgence of a more formal kind of realism that’s interested in acquiring elements of other genres while not actually becoming genre fiction.

In other words, so long to the “hysterical realism” that James Wood criticized in 2000, and hello to way-we-live-now novels like Jonathan Franzen‘s The Corrections (and the forthcoming Freedom, which is no departure from that sensibility); the “neuronovel” that the n+1 set is trying to get some traction on, in which mental disorders are stand-ins for way-we-live-now ruminations (let’s say Richard Powers‘ The Echo Maker); and a postmodernism-lite that’s subsumed by old-fashioned plotting (let’s say The Echo Maker again). Kunkel at least twists the knife slowly: “[I]n spite of some postmodern or genre-bending refurbishing, we have witnessed at once a practical and an ideological return to ‘realism.’ … The disappearance of the term ‘middlebrow’ over the last decades only confirms the triumph of the thing itself: enjoyable books, not too trashy, not too hard, sentimental and well-plotted but not so much so as to totally traduce the world.”

Resistance to such statements is futile, since it’s forever true that people, in general, gravitate toward things that are more comforting than not, and that trends are created by the stuff that large numbers gravitate toward. If you want to argue that a decade’s tastes are largely middlebrow, you’ll pretty much by definition be right. (Only the authors’ names will change; two decades ago there was probably a similiar essay arguing that American literature was infected with male novelists like John Updike and Richard Ford who suffered from an overabundance of masculinity, instead of “moral and sexual innocence” male writers allegedly suffer from today.) So, point taken, though Kunkel’s critique does seem to ignore the notion that last decade was in some ways a heyday for the hysterical realists, if only thanks to Dave Eggers, who was able to publish and support all manner of arch, effortful, occasionally successful fiction; if not him, then David Foster Wallace‘s inheritors, Rick Moody and Jonathan Lethem. Love it or hate it, the path to the success of book like Junot Diaz‘s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Lydia Davis‘ recent collections was paved by that work earlier in the decade. Kunkel may be right that realism is winning the day, but it hasn’t all been easygoing sentimentality.

A Friend of George V. Higgins

by Mark Athitakis, posted in George V. Higgins, Nick Tosches, William Lindsay Gresham

I recently finished a book on boxing written by an author who was lamely striving to channel Nick Tosches, so it was refreshing to see a reminder yesterday that the original is still at it. In a guest post at the blog of Mulholland Books, a new imprint of Little, Brown dedicated to suspense fiction, Tosches considers some of the distinctions between genre and literary fiction. A worn-out theme to be sure, but he’s entertainingly open about his experiences reading two of the crime novelists who, as they say, transcend the genre: Patricia Highsmith and George V. Higgins.

I confess that Higgins is pretty much unknown to me—I haven’t even seen the film version of his bestselling 1972 novel The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which was republished earlier this year. (Sarah Weinman ran down some of the coverage of the reissue; the University of South Carolina, where Higgins’ archives are kept, has an interesting PDF file that discusses the author’s busy life as a novelist, columnist, and defense attorney.) For Tosches, the book “was the most powerful illumination of what one could achieve by going against the whole jive-ass in-the-American-grain line of shit about literature, the first and hardest prison an American writer must break out of. It was a freeing inspiration of the sort that I had not experienced since I read Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn when I was a teenager.”

Tosches digs up some old letters he received from Higgins, including a funny one in response to a question about where he acquired his style:

“I invented my style; I am a fucking genius,” he wrote. He ended the letter: “This is a long way of saying that I have no better idea about the origin of what I do than you do. Perhaps I simply have a dirty mind and the good fortune to live in a generation that talks and does dirty.”

I’m willing to take time to find out if Higgins is indeed the fucking genius he makes himself out to be, though more on Tosches’ recommendation than Higgins’. And, since I’m willing to follow Tosches pretty much any where he points me, I’m also curious about Nightmare Alley, a 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham that was recently reissued by New York Review Books, with an introduction by Tosches—who, according to a Baltimore Sun article on the book, is so impressed with Nightmare Alley he’s spent ten years off and on trying to find out whatever he can about the author. Can’t ask for much more in an endorsement.

One More Thing About Advancement, or Going Positive

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Advancement, Book Reviews

Two weeks back I wrote about The Advanced Genius Theory, a book by Jason Hartley that’s a plea in defense of the late careers of proven artistic talents—and, a little more subtly, a kind of critique of negative criticism. To be clear: I think Hartley has written a fun and entertaining book. I just don’t think he’s written an especially useful one in terms of helping readers think about musicians or writers. I’m oversimplifying, but Hartley is essentially exhorting readers and critics to give artists we love a second chance whenever they do things that baffle or annoy us. Fine, but what if giving those second chances are overly contrived and more trouble than they’re worth?

There’s nothing wrong with approaching movies, books—everything, really—in a spirit of optimism. But I confess my attempt to channel my inner Hartley failed miserably about a week back, when I was in Newport, Rhode Island, for the annual Newport Folk Festival. The fest’s closing act was a band led by Levon Helm, the great drummer and singer in the Band. I love The Basement Tapes, all those classic Band singles, and The Last Waltz, though not so much that I felt a need to consider anything he’d done since the late 70s. But that was an asset here: I could approach Levon Helm circa 2010 as a blank slate of endless artistic possibility. Optimism!

About two songs in, Helm and his band—a largish group of unimpeachably competent country and folk specialists—performed a cover of “Long Black Veil.” There was nothing especially bad about it, but nothing especially good about it either—it was the Kenmore washing machine of covers of “Long Black Veil.” Now, Advanced theory doesn’t demand that I love this cover, even if Helm is the guy who sang “The Weight.” But it does ask that I not reject it out of hand for the usual criticky reasons—that Helm’s best work is behind him, that the song’s tempo was irritatingly slow even for a mournful ballad like “Long Black Veil,” that covering “Long Black Veil” is kind of a cliche, and so on. Helm may very well be up to something that I’m just not getting, and it’s only a poverty of imagination on my part—or a pernicious cynicism, unique to critics, from which I suffer—that’s preventing me from grasping it.

At least, that’s the Advanced way of looking at things. But finding the positive in that song would require delivering the kind of praise fit for press releases and weekend shoppers (“Helm, now 70, is to be much admired for keeping the spirit of country history alive, as he and his band did on “Long Black Veil”…), engage in some grade inflation (“Considering Helm’s recent struggles with throat cancer….”) or conjure up some clever way to contextualize the performance (“‘Long Black Veil’ may be the only thing Levon Helm, Taco, and Diamanda Galas ever agreed on…”). Something, at any rate, besides saying what he actually did—play drums on a dull version of a worn-out song. What good would fake optimism do for me as a listener, or for a reader of any review I might write?

I thought about all this in the context of Hartley’s second response to my post (here’s the first), which rightfully challenged me on the glib way I ended my post. I’d written that the book is “a powerful counter against critics who come up with contrived reasons to dismiss things. But how much better is it to come up with contrived reasons to like them?” To which Hartley writes: “My take, though, is that it is far, far better to come up with contrived reasons to like something than to dislike them because liking things is more pleasurable.” He then writes that “if you need to trick yourself into liking Advance art by pretending to like it, that is fine.” Trying hard to see the good in Helm’s cover in “Long Black Veil” gave me no particular pleasure. It just made Hartley’s brand of optimism seem like a whole lot of work—not just in terms of teasing out whether or not an artist is Advanced in the first place (I concede that Helm may not be, though he seems to fit the general criteria), but then in terms of “tricking” myself into liking it, until I actually like it. Maybe.

And to what end? To prove that critics had it all wrong about Bob Dylan‘s Christian records? To not appear “stuffy,” “tweedy,” “unimaginative,” “smug,” or any of the other adjectives people use when a critic dislikes something other people enjoy? Optimism is an essential attribute in a critic—if you’re not approaching any new book, movie, record, whatever, in the hope that it might be your new favorite thing, it’s time to look into a new line of work. But optimism shouldn’t—needn’t—be so effortful. If it seems like I’ve drifted well away from this blog’s purview, it may be worth pointing out that a Hartlian argument makes its way in literary circles. While I was in Newport experiencing Helm’s mediocrity, I was also thinking about “Going Rogue,” in which Steve Almond considers the negative review he recently received from the New York Times Book Review. Almond can’t help but feel that some kind of darker agenda is occasionally at play in the NYTBR‘s star chamber. In assigning Jay McInerney to review Joshua Ferris, Almond writes, “You could just see the editors sitting around with this one going, ‘Yeah, yeah, we’ll get the old It Guy writer to take on the new It Guy writer!'” When Will Blythe didn’t like a book by George Saunders, Almond writes, “I felt this creeping suspicion that he simply had it in for Saunders.”

Almond isn’t arguing that all negative criticism (including the criticism he received) is agenda-driven, but he draws no small amount of comfort in calling out the times when he believes it does. Almond is admirably self-aware about his conflicted feelings, and he makes a point of calling attention to a few negative reviews he admired. But the question I’m left with, from reading both Almond and Hartley, is this: Do they believe that only negative reviews are written from a posture of insincerity and craven agenda-setting? Can’t a positive review be just as insincere, just as cravenly agenda-setting? The answer to that question might go some way toward clarifying how much they want to respect quality criticism, and how much they simply want to dismiss negative criticism as mean-spirited and dishonest.

Links: Move it to the Exits

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Alice Walker, Alyson Hagy, Ben Fountain, Darin Strauss, David Foster Wallace, Gary Shteyngart, Henry James, Herman Melville, Jennifer Egan, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oscar Hijuelos, Ron Currie Jr., Sherwood Anderson

Now it can be told: The inspiration for the “Great Rock and Roll Pauses” chapter in Jennifer Egan‘s A Visit From the Goon Squad (i.e., the PowerPoint chapter) was Semisonic’s “Closing Time.”

Speaking of: Trying to write a novel and raise a kid simultaneously? Jennifer Egan and Darin Strauss are here to help. (Well, in Manhattan to help. For one evening, on September 14.)

Alyson Hagy considers the appealing strangeness of Sherwood Anderson‘s “Paper Pills.” (Winesburg, Ohio was a series of “grotesques,” after all.)

Alice Walker keeps (or at least once kept) a pile of leaves by her writing desk: “She rustles them when she does her writing, because it makes her feel closer to nature as she works.”

When Hawthorne met Melville.

Oscar Hijuelos on inserting himself as a character in his most recent novel, Beautiful Maria of My Soul.

Ron Currie Jr. on reading Infinite Jest: “By the time I’d finished, my copy was a mess of grass clippings, sweat drips, and smears of axle grease and 50:1 gas/oil mix.”

The quintessential Jamesian sentence.

“I think that Shteyngart is part of a whole sweeping movement of young Jewish writers who are bringing a new multicultural picture to American Jewish fiction.”

Ben Fountain remembers the Dallas poet Robert Trammell.

Detailed writing advice from Maxwell Perkins (to be portrayed by Sean Penn on film at some future date) to Ernest Hemingway: “I’m glad you’re going to write some stories. All you have to do is to follow your own judgement, or instinct + disregard what is said, + convey the absolute bottom quality of each person, situation + thing. Isn’t that simple!!“

“Taking Time and Gathering Distance”

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Thomas Pynchon

Nick Holdstock‘s n+1 essay about presenting an academic paper on Thomas Pynchon in Poland initially reads like a study in snark—an attempt to mock the kind of people who dedicate too much of their intellectual energy to the writer. After one scholar sputters about Against the Day and the (literally) explosive power of words, Holdstock looks around to see if any of his colleagues are detecting logic in that argument. “[O]n the pad of the man to my left there were no notes, just a drawing of a cat wearing a shirt and tie,” he writes.

But if Holdstock were only interested in mocking, he’d be mocking himself too; he was there to present his own paper, on Inherent Vice. And the core of his essay is actually a sincere conversion narrative about how his early distaste for Pynchon eventually morphed into a deep love for his writing. Working his way through Mason & Dixon, one of the few books to which he had access on a trip to China, he came to appreciate that there’s more than one way to write a good sentence:

At the time I was an acolyte of the Church of Raymond Carver. If I picked up the book again a few days later, it was only out of defiance, an unwillingness to be beaten by what seemed a wilfully impenetrable style. I read slowly, carefully, occasionally out loud, and somewhere along the way my idea of what constituted a Good Sentence changed. Instead of forming clipped phrases that cut, words could be more like unravelling yarn, travelling on wood or carpet, dropping abruptly from stair to stair, taking time and gathering distance.

An appreciation of some of Pynchon’s more elegant sentences follows, though by the end of the essay Holdstock is back to raising his eyebrows at his fellow Pynchon scholars. (One delivers “a narrative of personal confession…full of hard luck—culminating in his time spent frying chickens for KFC.”) Pynchon might be clearer than he’s given credit for, the message goes, but that’ll do nothing to curb the strange intensity of his biggest fans.

Gone Fishin’

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Housekeeping

I’ll be offline for the next few days, though I may show up on Twitter on occasion. In the meantime, please consider studying up on the Advanced Genius Theory (Jason Hartley‘s thoughtful responses to my post deserve a response as well, and I’ll get to it soon), or take a look at some of the Q&As with literary websites I’ve been conducting for Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle; better yet, spend some time at the sites featured in the series.

Posting will resume around the middle of next week. As always, thanks for reading.

The Truth in Tracy Kidder’s Fiction

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Tracy Kidder

Yesterday the Book Bench linked to an interview with Tracy Kidder at the Bygone Bureau, where he discusses his history as a nonfiction author and some of his early writerly regrets. (He’s bought back the rights to his first book, The Road to Yuba City, in the hopes you’ll never read it.) He also mentions his early attempts to write fiction:

I wrote a novel that was really bad. It wasn’t published, thank god. Although I did use it in a small book that I wrote called My Detachment. It was a novel about Vietnam. It was all about experiences I didn’t have in Vietnam. It was mostly a… that’s the closest thing I had to a journal of my time as a soldier, and so it’s mostly of psychological interest. I published, I think, three short stories over the years. But I haven’t been writing fiction for quite some time. Although I’d like to write fiction again, I don’t have any fiction I’d like to write at the moment.

I’m happy for any excuse to mention My Detachment, which I like to think of as the last honest memoir: A book that is not only up-front about how humdrum the author’s experience was, but which attempts to get at why writers inflate stories about themselves. The impetus for the book was Kidder receiving a copy of that unpublished war novel, “Ivory Fields,” in the mail from a friend. Kidder had burned his manuscript, and on the evidence he provides, he wasn’t torching a future classic. (“About this time is when the sad story begins. It is the saddest story you ever hope to hear.”) But writing the book spoke to an instinct common among soldiers:

Most of the American soldiers who went to Vietnam were boys, whether they were twenty-two or just eighteen. They had watched a lot of movies and TV. I’m sure that many set out for Vietnam feeling confused or unhappy, as adolescents tend to do, and deep down many probably thought they would return with improved reasons for feeling that way. But of the roughly three million Americans who went to the war dressed as soldiers, only a small minority returned with Combat Infantryman’s Badges, certain proof of a terrible experience. Imagine all the bullshit stories Vietnam inspired.

My Detachment is largely a study of Kidder’s own capacity for bullshit, in the failed novel, in conversations, and especially in his letters back home. (“I shot a man through the head and little pieces of his brain and a great quantity of blood colored my gun and my clothes and face,” he lies in a letter to his girlfriend back home.) Kidder admits to an almost comic narcissism: After arriving in Berkeley once his stint is over, he’s disappointed that he isn’t met with the stereotypical protests and jeers. “Maybe if we’d stopped and walked around that campus in our uniforms, we’d have found someone to spit on us,” he writes. Throughout My Detachment, is hard on himself, but not so hard that he lapses into the very self-pity he’s criticizing in his youthful self. It’s essential reading for anybody who thinks their lives merit an entire book.

Inspirational Verse

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Paul Auster

In a work of fiction, one assumes there is a conscious mind behind the words on the page. In the presence of happenings in the so-called real world, one assumes nothing. The made-up story consists entirely of meanings, whereas the story of fact is devoid of any significance beyond itself. If a man says to you, “I’m going to Jerusalem,” you think to yourself: how nice, he’s going to Jerusalem. But if a character in a novel were to speak those same words, “I’m going to Jerusalem,” your response is not at all the same. You think, to begin with, of Jerusalem itself: its history, it religious role, its function as a mythical place. You would think of the past, of the present (politics; which is also to think of the recent past), and of the future—as in the phrase: “Next year in Jerusalem.” On top of that you would integrate those thoughts into whatever it is you already know about the character who is going to Jerusalem and use this new synthesis to draw further conclusions, refine perceptions, think more cogently about the book as a whole. And then, once the work is finished, the last page read and the book closed, interpretations begin: psychological, historical, sociological, structural, philological, religious, sexual, philosophical, either singly or in various combinations, depending on your bent. Although it is possible to interpret a real life according to any of these systems (people do, after all, go to priests and psychiatrists; people do sometimes try to understand their lives in terms of historical conditions), it does not have the same effect. Something is missing: the grandeur, the grasp of the general, the illusion of metaphysical truth.

—Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude

Everything Bad Is Good Again, or Notes Toward a Better Understanding of the Advanced Genius Theory

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Advancement, Joyce Carol Oates

In 2004 journalist and critic Chuck Klosterman wrote an essay for Esquire titled “Real Genius,” which attempted to explain a peculiar theory about popular culture called Advancement. The theory, invented by Britt Bergman and Jason Hartley, is at its core a way to reclaim the late careers of seemingly washed-up artists: Musicians like Lou Reed and Bob Dylan aren’t in decline, the theory goes, and they never could be. They might do things that displease you as a fan (like record Metal Machine Music or convert to Christianity), but those actions in no way signify failure; Reed and Dylan have just “advanced” beyond your understanding of them, and if you recognized their early genius you’ll ultimately come around and see the genius in their later work too.

Klosterman’s article attempted to lay out a set of principles of Advancement that struck me as obscure, arbitrary, or contradictory; a few years later I was working with a proponent of the theory, and after overhearing enough parsing about whether Sting was advanced or not, I’d had enough. I wrote a cranky blog post dismissing Advancement, got into a fun but ultimately unhelpful squabble with a commenter named “Val Kilmer,” and figured nothing more needed to be said. But Hartley has expanded the theory into a book, The Advanced Genius Theory: Are They Out of Their Minds or Ahead of Their Time?, and I confess the scales have fallen from my eyes, a little. Back then, I dismissed Advancement as “Ren Faire for rock critics,” but I got this almost completely wrong. Advancement is actually a way of looking at culture and conversations about it as a kind of vast entertaining Ren Faire in itself, but where critics are relegated to unhappy minor roles like Junior Mead Supervisor and Falcon-Poop Disposal Expert.

Because while Hartley enjoys parsing whether Elvis Costello or J.D. Salinger might be Advanced, the theory is mainly predicated on attacking the received wisdom about artists that critics like to trot out; without critics, there would be no need for Advancement. For Hartley, people who say Woody Allen makes movies too quickly and that they’re always about Woody Allen don’t appreciate the fact that a) his plots are more diverse than he’s given credit for and b) he doesn’t care what his fans think, let alone critics. (That second point is critical: One of the parlor-game aspects of deciding whether an artist is Advanced is figuring out if some dumb career move he or she makes is sincere, which would be Advanced, or willfully attention-getting, which would be Overt.) Hartley makes his frustration with critics especially plain in the book’s closing chapter, in which he criticizes the Overt, un-fun way of looking at things: For this crowd of killjoys, “a truly good book must be somewhat obscure but embraced by certain influential critics. It must feature the word ‘tumescent.’ I should have an antihero. It should end in the middle of the story. It should be very long.”

There’s nothing wrong with taking the piss out of stick-in-the-mud critics, and Advancement does have the advantage of being funnier than any other critical theory out there; Hartley is a hugely entertaining writer with a rare talent for being contrarian without being snarky. Has a great riff on the notion that the Rolling Stones were bad-ass and the Beatles somehow weren’t:

Sure, Mick Jagger wrote a song about Satan and a guy got killed at the Stones concert at Altamont, but Paul McCartney wrote a song about an amusement park ride (“Helter Skelter”) that got a lot of people killed, so I say the Beatles were just a bit badder than the Stones. How many more people have to die before the Beatles get the credit they deserve?

The problem with Advancement—and the reason why it’s easy to regard it as a parlor game, if not an outright prank—is that its scope is limited. The theory only applies to artists who have a proven history of unquestioned brilliance (15 years, Hartley suggests), so the theory tends to get caught up in details about whether a musician’s acquisition of sunglasses and “world beat” musicians signifies Advancement or not. (Yanni would be the ultimate Advanced musician, I suspect, were he ever any good.) Another limitation is that Advancement mainly considers careers, not individual works—or at least doesn’t consider individual works in any interesting way. (They’re always better than you think! Because an Advanced artist made them!) Hartley is never more flat-footed as a writer then when he writes about a particular album; when he considers Dylan’s album Shot of Love, he lapses into the kind of fanboy fawning fit for a message board. (“The second song, ‘Heart of Mine,’ is a lovely, piano-heavy tune that shows off Dylan’s ability to sing in a conventional style when called upon to do so….”)

Hartley writes about Advanced writers, but not nearly in as much depth as I would hope. He describes Don DeLillo as a Refined Overt, part of the tribe of “artists who manage to cultivate their weirdo street cred late into life while somehow managing not to annoy people.” (By Hartley’s theory, I think DeLillo seems to be best categorized as an Advanced Irritant, because he clearly doesn’t care about what his fans think, and he’s been denying his fans the big Underworld-y brick of a novel they’ve wanted for more than a decade now.) He reckons that Thomas Pynchon is Overt, which sounds about right, but his heart isn’t really in this particular aspect of the theory; the chapter on writers is less than ten pages long.

In the interest of helping to fill out the theory a little, I tried to figure out which writers might fit the bill. The first one who sprung to mind was Jonathan Lethem, because Lethem once wrote an article made up of plagiarized sentences and then tried to work in some of his theories about it into a bad novel about a rock band, but that seems like an Overt move, and being controversial in itself isn’t enough to be Advanced. (Contemporary writers don’t generate very interesting controversies, as a rule. The biggest to-do of the past year was Alice Hoffman blowing a gasket on Twitter.) James Franco deciding to take a break from acting to pursue an MFA in writing isn’t advanced, but playing an MFA student in a Gary Shteyngart book trailer might be (at least to the extent that you think Franco’s any good, as a writer or actor). I suspect Stephen King is Advanced because he immediately followed up a very thoughtful and helpful book about the principles of good writing with Dreamcatcher, a novel in which people are infected with a virus that makes them shit space aliens.

The ultimate Advanced writer is likely somebody like Joyce Carol Oates, who suffers from the same complaints as Woody Allen—too prolific, too focused on a limited range of subjects. When people say they’re tired of Oates, it’s likely not because they’re actually reading her; they just feel defeated by her sheer output, and they’re sick of hearing about it in the New York Times Book Review. But though Advancement might help clarify the reasons why people might reflexively and unfairly dislike an artist, it doesn’t do much to tell me why an artist’s particular work might be any good, why Little Bird of Heaven might be better than The Gravedigger’s Daughter, even if I accept that they’re both pretty good. (She’s an Advanced artist, after all.)

Hartley, for all his critiquing of artists, is essentially averse to committing acts of criticism, and the argument bubbling under The Advanced Genius Theory is that you’re better off being averse to it as well. As he writes in the book’s conclusion: “Once you have achieved the Advanced state of mind, something amazing happens: you start to like everything.” He’s not arguing against discernment: “You can still have ‘good taste,'” he writes. “It’s just that the question becomes how much you like a work of art rather than whether you like it.” It’s a powerful counter against critics who come up with contrived reasons to dismiss things. But how much better is it to come up with contrived reasons to like them?

Update: Hartley responds here and here.

Links: Kiddin’ on the Keys

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Adam Langer, Beverly Cleary, Gary Shteyngart, Jennifer Egan, Marcus Sakey, Michael Muhammad Knight, Paul Auster, Rick Moody, Vendela Vida

Jason Hartley reviews page 86 of Jennifer Egan‘s A Visit From the Goon Squad: “Later, Stephanie and Bennie have gin and tonics, while watching fireflies and listening to a pianist playing ‘harmless melodies on a shining upright.’ … I find the word harmless a strange choice; is it a value judgment? Should a pianist play harmful melodies while people have cocktails? Is there even such a thing as a harmful melody?” I’m probably wrong, but I think that in the context of the critical theory Hartley helped invent, Hartley is being Overt; more on this Sunday.

Paul Auster‘s City of Glass is 25.

David Means on how even short-story collections that aren’t linked are still…linked: “As a reader, you’re moved from one completely individual unit to the next, and you know that they’re not linked and that they can stand on their own, but you still have a kind of sense, in the end, that you’ve been through an experience that comes from the complete entity.”

A lengthy profile of The Taqwacores author Michael Muhammad Knight in the Abu Dhabi National.

Adam Langer recalls the deep imprint Beverly Cleary‘s books had on him.

Barbara Kingsolver: “My inspiration comes from living in the world and seeing things that aggravate me to the back of my teeth or sing for joy.”

Some pushback on the Gary Shteyngart hype (note the comments as well).

Chicago crime novelist Marcus Sakey on the anxiety-inducing but curiously predicable process of writing a novel.

The Wall Street Journal talks with Rick Moody about Kurt Vonnegut‘s reputation, music, New York, and the “old-fashioned, big long story.”

Vendela Vida on the Believer, which she edits: “I think a lot of the people who like The Believer are people who will always be devoutly attached to the physical object of the magazine.”

I’m still conducting email Q&As with literary websites for the National Book Critics Circle blog: Interviews with Three Percent and Open Letters Monthly are now up. More coming; if you have suggestions for sites to cover, please let me know. (Simple criteria: I’m looking for online publications that are committed in some way to regularly reviewing and covering books, and use multiple contributors to do so.)