Author: Mark Athitakis

“How many times’d you end up sucking on the rug?”

by Mark Athitakis, posted in John Irving, Thomas Pynchon

I don’t have the inclination or the wherewithal to collect first editions, and there’s something about the antiquarian trade that strikes me as unseemly and beside the point, but goodness the catalog [PDF] for the Bruce Kahn Collection is gobstoppingly beautiful. Kahn, a Michigan-based mergers and acquisitions lawyer, has acquired a collection of first editions of 20th century (mostly) American fiction that’s in impeccable shape, from John O’Hara to Philip Roth to Toni Morrison to Cormac McCarthy and on and on. None of it’s cheap: Plenty of the items run into five figures, with a copy of Appointment in Samarra running to $30,000. (If money’s tight, you can drop $2,500 for a signed proof of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.)

Perhaps more interesting than the books themselves are the various scribblings included. The copy of John Irving‘s The World According to Garp (apparently sold) is inscribed with a note about the author’s take on the book’s ending: “The meaning of life? ‘We are all terminal cases’, but I find that no surprise and no cause for cynicism or depression. It’s all the more reason to live purposefully and well.” The highlight of the collection on that front, though, is a 1974 handwritten letter from Thomas Pynchon to his friends David Shetzline and his wife, Mary Beal. Writing on graph paper (Pynchon apparently has a thing for graph paper), he recalls his disinterest in attending an impeachment rally in Greenwich Village. From the catalog:

“Maybe I am wrong not to show up, after all think of all that great neurotic pussy that always shows up at things like ‑‑ oh, aww, gee Mary, I’m sorry! I meant ‘vagina,’ of course! ‑‑ like that, and all the biggies who’ll be there…” He goes on to describe that he is having “what the CIA calls a ‘mid‑life crisis,’ looking for another hustle, cannot dig to live a ‘literary’ life no more…” A “lump of hash I lost somewhere in Humboldt County 3 years ago” figures into what becomes an increasingly textured, complicated narrative, the way his fiction does, at the same time that it represents his side of an obviously ongoing dialogue, and elicits further contact from the recipients: in referring to stories of bad LSD circulating, he asks “You might as well tell me. How many times’d you end up sucking on the rug?”

The letter is yours for $25,000.

Waving

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Bloggers

Yesterday Karen Templer announced that she was shutting down Readerville, her long-running site dedicated to books, writers, and readers. This saddened a lot of people, including me—I liked the site, and, more selfishly, Templer was one of the first people to approvingly take notice of what I was doing. But Readerville’s closure didn’t spawn any grim handwringing over where we might all go to talk about books now. Templer herself notes that today the field is wide open for that:

I’m thrilled at the vast assortment of tools for people to connect online—from blogs to Facebook and Twitter, to the many social book cataloging sites, and beyond. Readers have resources nobody could have imagined nine years ago, and it’s a joy to see books being talked about in every corner of the Internet.

Those conversations go in a million directions, but last week Yen Cheong, assistant director of publicity at Viking and Penguin Books, considered whether the kinds of people hosting those conversations roughly split into two camps. Working from some thoughts by Sarah Weinman, Cheong notes that there’s a distinction between “first wave” litbloggers like Weinman, Maud Newton, Mark Sarvas, and others, and “second wave” book bloggers running sites like Booking Mama and Beth Fish Reads, and others I would never have known about had Cheong not written her post.

My ignorance of the second-wavers is one of the things that helps peg me as a first-wave litblogger, as Weinman suggested. I won’t bother parsing figuring out who belongs in what wave, which strikes me as the dullest insider-baseball conversation imaginable. But the comments on Cheong’s post brought up what I thought was a very interesting conversation about engaging with commenters, and how they relate to perhaps more “journalistic” bloggers. I was particularly struck by a comment by Trish of Hey Lady! Whatcha Readin?:

The first wave is talking at the reader and sticks with a journalistic style of writing. The second wave is in it for the conversation. I don’t know any book bloggers (as opposed to lit bloggers) who have comments disabled.

I’m not saying the first wave is wrong, though it’s certainly not my preference to shut down conversation by turning off comments, so I obviously prefer the second wave. However, it just seems silly to not have conversation on a blog about books when reading is such a solitary hobby anyway. Readers tend to want to talk about what they’re reading, want to talk about books and authors and their book club.

So while I really admire what the lit bloggers did to start up what I would call book blogging, I think they continued a style that newspapers are finding unsustainable.

The “unsustainable” argument doesn’t wash for me. Book blogs, first-wave or otherwise, don’t operate under the same profit motives that newspapers do—a blog’s sustainability is attached to little more than the willingness of the blogger to get up in the morning and make time to write, and you can’t declare bankruptcy if you’re making nothing. But Trish’s overall point about how litbloggers relate to readers is well-taken. I’ve bounced around a few newsrooms and known plenty of journalists, and the relationship between writers and readers has long been awkward. Journalists often have a defensive posture toward readers because we are often literally asked to defend ourselves. Before blogging became essential parts of newspaper sites, people didn’t usually reply to articles and reviews by sending letters and e-mails saying “FIRST!” or “Nice post!”—they wrote to let you know what an idiot you were for holding a particular opinion, they wrote to call out your errors, they wrote to threaten lawsuit, they wrote to wonder out loud about the sanity of the people who ran the paper because, after all, they hired your sorry ass. People who wrote in with praise, let alone an eagerness to start a conversation, were a little suspect. Publications have a thick skin when it comes to negative feedback—the Washington Post runs a lively weekly page, Free for All, dedicated to nothing but readers calling shenanigans on Post journalists. But its very existence bears out the difficulty of the relationship—readers were people around whom you had to have a thick skin, people you had to make room for. No Post staffer who values the respect of his or her colleagues would suggest the paper run a weekly page of letters full of praise.

So by the time journalists waded into blogging, plenty of them didn’t do it very well—interaction was a relatively foreign concept, and it positive feedback was going to be rare except for star writers and columnists who’d acquired large fan bases. I recall a number of staff-meeting conversations in which Web folks would train editorial staffers about how to directly engage with commenters, which led to a lot of posts that clumsily closed with some iteration of “So, what do you think?” Insincerity was built into the process, because it was presented less as something that we might enjoy doing or that might improve our work and more as something that might help the publication make money someday. The argument was that (imagine Al Pacino in Scarface talking here) first you got the comments, then you got the page views, and then you got the money. I’ve always been cynical about that line of thinking—heaven knows that online ad revenue is nothing to bank on right now—and that feeling that only got bolstered when the comments on a post would, as it often did, melt down into a cavalcade of jackassery. “I’ll care about the commenters,” my stock line went, “when I have proof that one of these fuckers is gonna buy a futon.”

Now that I run a blog with no ambition to sell you a futon (or even a book), my attitude towards commenters has eased up. And plenty of journalists have gotten a lot better at building relationships with readers. Me, I still do a poor job on that front—my interest in presenting and thinking about information still trumps my interest in starting conversations. But I hope I get better in time, and this may all just be evidence that people who blog about books are settling into some familiar roles with new shapes; the litbloggers are doing what many daily newspapers played before they were forced to cut or eliminate their coverage (though hopefully with more awareness of and engagement with readers), and the bookbloggers get to supplement, if not replace, the traditional in-person book club. And there’s one other change, which wasn’t much discussed in Cheong’s post or its comments: the increasing role of bloggers with a more academic bent. Relatively new sites like Andrew Seal‘s and D.G. Myers‘, along with new efforts like Dan Green’s Critical Distance project, suggest to me that even very high-end critical outlets like the New York Review of Books and Harper’s will have their authority challenged as well. I don’t think we’ll see the imminent collapse of for-profit enterprises dedicated to paying smart people good money to write criticism, nor are English departments going away anytime soon. But access to serious and sustained critical thought has never been easier, which bodes well for everybody.

So, what do you think?

The Modernist Effect

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Academia, Gordon Hutner

Maybe Walter Benn Michaels is right after all? Gordon Hutner, an English professor at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana and founding editor of the journal American Literary History, has just published a book, What America Read: Taste, Class and the Novel 1920-1960, arguing that many American novels dealing with day-to-day life have been neglected in favor of modernist writers whose rhetorical acrobatics were more appealing (and perhaps more remunerative) to academics. In an interview [PDF] facilitated by the publicity department at the University of North Carolina Press, Hutner lists a few of the authors he researched, critically acclaimed in their time but largely ignored now. It’s a veritable Who’s Who of writers I’ve never heard of: The female writers alone include Margaret Barnes, Josephine Lawrence, Margaret Culkin Banning, Caroline Slade, Maritta Wolff, and Margaret Halsey. (It may say something that Elaine Showalter‘s lively, comprehensive history of American women writers, A Jury of Her Peers, makes no mention of any of these authors.)

As for why they fell by the wayside, Hutner says that their novels address “middle-class experience from a middle-class point of view,” counter to prevailing critical thought. He goes on:

[A]cademe, since the 50s and 60s, has not exerted much interest in this kind of fiction. Such novels do not typically lend themselves to the subtleties of rigorous rhetorical analysis, the methodologies of close reading that form a professor’s specialty. The disciplinary emphasis on major writers or representative writers militates against professors developing too much curiosity over less familiar names. Scores of books on Faulkner, for example—and not all of them consequential—but not very many on intriguing careers like T. S. Stribling or Hamilton Basso. In fact, a junior scholar would have been discouraged from writing a book like mine…

I imagine reviewers and literary bloggers in academia will have plenty to say about this. (I haven’t seen any formal reviews appear online yet.) Regardless, I would love to see Hutner follow through on his suggestion at the end of the interview that his next book might look at fiction from the last ten years through the same filter.

(h/t Neglected Books)

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(Brief programming note: Due to travel, review deadlines, laptop malfunctions, a few hiccups in my schedule, and, not least, the happy acquisition of a shelter dog, my blog time has been restricted more than usual for the past few days. Anticipate strangeness here for a bit. But I plan to have the D.C.-Area Readings list updated as usual, and should be back into something resembling a rhythm next week.)

“I’m a police.”

by Mark Athitakis, posted in David Simon, John Updike

Since February the Guardian‘s TV blog, Organ Grinder, has been hosting a nerd-out about The Wire—FX is airing it there, and hopefully they’ve found a way to show it without bleeping out Clay Davis. (Or, perhaps more precisely, bleeeeeeeeeeeping.) The latest entry covers series creator David Simon‘s appearance at the Hay literary festival last weekend. Much of the ground Simon covers is familiar to anybody who’s heard him speak, but I hadn’t heard the anecdote he broke out about a squabble between Martin Amis and John Updike over some Wire-y language:

He also recalled the time Martin Amis was criticised by John Updike for using the phrase “I’m a police” in his 1997 novel Night Train. Amis told National Public Radio that Updike “should get a copy of David Simon’s Homicide”. Simon, who was listening to the interview in his car, thought: “Here are these actual literary lions arguing over some small part of a police procedural; it was the most exciting day of my life.”

(Street slang definitely isn’t Updike’s thing; Roger’s Version has plenty of acute observations of the projects in its Boston-like city, but practically no dialogue between people who live there.)

Most authors have a way of disappointing Simon, even the ones in the realist tradition. He told the Hay crowd, “I like Dreiser, but the guy couldn’t write a human being to save his life.” I’m curious what books by Theodore Dreiser he’s read; I can see his complaint applying to An American Tragedy, which hasn’t aged well and makes clear how much its characters are part of the book’s plot mechanics, but I’ve always admired the portrait of George Hurstwood in Sister Carrie, which is one of the more effective descriptions of a slow mental breakdown in fiction.

Summer Reading: A Few Small Suggestions (and One 850-Page One)

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Charlie Haas, Colum McCann, Gary Indiana, George Pelecanos, Glen David Gold, Kevin Canty, Lisa See, Richard Powers, Robert Goolrick, Rudolph Wurlitzer, Simon Van Booy, Ward Just

Today’s Chicago Sun-Times has a lengthy list of summer reading suggestions, built on what the book section’s contributors are most looking forward to reading. My pick:

Exiles in the Garden by Ward Just (July 7): No novelist is more sensitive to the different moods of different cities than Just — his 2004 novel, An Unfinished Season, is a modern classic set in Chicago — so I’m eager to see how Vietnam War-era D.C. comes across in Exiles.

I could have gone on, and not only about Just, who deserves to be on the short list of great living American writers but has somehow failed to become a household name among the folks who care about such things. (It may be that Just is perceived as a “writer’s writer,” smart but esoteric, but that’s a limiting, unfair assessment. He’s highly readable, and even his Washington novels aren’t sunk in wonkishness.) There are plenty of books I’m either excited about reading or finishing, or which I’ve eagerly recommended to people in recent months. Among the 2009 books I’d suggest for the beach bag are Robert Goolrick‘s A Reliable Wife, an entertainingly sinister tale of a love triangle in the Wisconsin wilderness; Gary Indiana‘s The Shanghai Gesture, a riff on old-fashioned Fu Manchu stories whose satire cloaks some genuinely felt concern about current-day helplessness in the face of globalization; George Pelecanos‘ The Way Home, another morality tale about a neglected corner of D.C. life, this time the products of juvenile correctional institutions, that’s bolstered by its precise characterizations and Pelecanos’ increasingly stripped-down style; Simon Van Booy‘s Love Begins in Winter, a collection of elegant, ghostly, yet never melodramatic love stories set in Stockholm, Las Vegas, Quebec City, and other far-flung settings; Charlie Haas‘ The Enthusiast, an easygoing comic novel about an editor in the curious world of niche magazines; and Yoshihiro Tatsumi‘s A Drifting Life, a magnificent sprawling memoir from the manga pioneer that explores the nature of creation, the business of art, and the frustrating path to self-awareness. (At 850-plus pages, that last one probably won’t work well for the beach bag, which probably speaks to my lack of knowledge about what works well for the beach. I’ve never been much for the outdoors.)

Like a couple of my Sun-Times contributor colleagues, I’m looking forward to Thomas Pynchon‘s Inherent Vice (though there’s plenty of Pynchon I’d like to get to before that one), but I’m just as interested in Colum McCann‘s portrait of New York City in the early 70s, Let the Great World Spin, Lisa See‘s Shanghai Girls, Glen David Gold‘s Sunnyside, Kevin Canty‘s story collection Where the Money Went, the re-publication of Rudolph Wurlitzer‘s 1968 cult novel, Nog, and Richard Powers‘ Generosity: An Enhancement. That last one doesn’t come out until October, but that’s the funny thing about book reviewers—one of the best things about summer is looking forward to the books that come out in fall.

Links: Elder Wisdom

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Donald E. Westlake, Edwidge Danticat, Ethan Canin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O'Connor, Junot Diaz, Marilynne Robinson, Ry Cooder

That post I wrote on Susan Bell‘s essay about revising The Great Gatsby? The Elegant Variation has the full text of it.

That post I wrote on Charles Taylor‘s essay about Donald E. Westlake? Sarah Weinman has plenty of thoughtful follow-up comments on The Ax.

Marilynne Robinson has a few thoughts on reading Edgar Allan Poe as a child.

Ethan Canin figures the future of American fiction is increasingly in Madagascar.

I wasn’t able to make it to BookExpo America this year. I feel a little more bummed that I wasn’t able to make it to the Calabash International Literary Festival, at which Edwidge Danticat tag-teamed with Junot Diaz and Robert Pinsky expounded on the history of the saxophone.

Guitarist Ry Cooder has just published his first book of fiction, Los Angeles Stories. You’ll have to attend one of his shows to pick up a copy.

Planning a summer road trip? Here’s everything you need to know about visiting Flannery O’Connor’s farm in Milledgeville, Georgia.

Westlake’s Labor Movement

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Donald E. Westlake

It’s been difficult for me to squeeze in non-review reading lately, but a week ago I was able to start repairing a sizable blind spot by picking up The Jugger, a 1965 Parker novel by Donald E. Westlake, writing as Richard Stark. (The University of Chicago Press recently began publishing handsome reissues of the Parker novels, with introductions from John Banville, Luc Sante, and other smart folk.) Apparently I picked a lousy place to start with Westlake—the author, who died last New Year’s Eve, considered it one of his worst novels—but I don’t feel the worse for reading it. The plot is pretty ramshackle, yes, but the backstories of the corrupt police chief and aging safecracker are nicely set up, and there’s a beautifully grim sadism in the way Westlake draws out the cop’s abuses of the old man—good noirish fun.

Next time around, I’ll likely go with Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax, which Charles Taylor enthusiastically recommends in the Nation. The story follows an out-of-work paper-mill laborer who decides to kill any potential competition for a job he’s perfect for. Taylor’s reading of the novel is political, arguing that Westlake was capturing the abuses of Reaganomics on working-class America:

This is the special hell of The Ax. We have entered an ordinary, middle-class world where empathy is as useless as on the battlefield. In the opening lines of the book Burke mentions that he would have liked to ask his father, a World War II veteran, what it was like to kill someone. It’s a telling comparison. Just having the ordinary, unglamorous, comfortable middle-class life that was supposed to be the reward for playing by the rules–that’s the war for Burke’s generation….

The unspoken subject of The Ax is that Burke’s murderous project is a smaller-scale version of the corporate behavior around him. Companies that are not eradicating each other in mergers and acquisitions are eradicating the people who stand in the way of their making higher profits, even if they are the people who allowed them to make any profit in the first place.

The anti-Reaganomics argument seems sensible enough, even if the novel came out in the Clinton era. But part of me wonders if Westlake’s motivation in writing The Ax was more self-serving—perhaps he was simply sublimating concerns about losing his lofty perch in the crime-fiction pantheon?

Samarra at 75

by Mark Athitakis, posted in John O'Hara

The Philadelphia Inquirer has a lengthy piece on the current affection that PottstownPottsville, Penn., has for native son John O’Hara, who skewered the town’s polite sensibilities in his 1934 novel, Appointment in Samarra. Back then the book was only grudgingly held at the town library, behind the front desk. But 75 years will cool the anger folks feel toward a book—it’s certainly enough time for the people most directly affronted to likely pass on—and the story argues that since the novel made the Modern Library’s list of 100 greatest novels in 1998, O’Hara has enjoyed the respect usually bestowed on a town father, with a statue, themed street signs, symposia, and more. (The Pottsville Republican-Herald, digging deep, uncovers how often O’Hara’s most popular books have been checked out of the Pottsville library since 1998. Samarra has been checked out 67 times.)

One of the main sources in the Inquirer story is Erica Ramus, a real-estate agent who’s assembled an O’Hara-themed walking tour of Pottsville. “O’Hara didn’t sugarcoat things,” she tells the paper. “He told it like he saw it. He wrote his stories like he was writing a news story, not some fancy piece of fiction with a lot of metaphors.” That is, setting aside the biggest fancy piece of symbolism in the book—the title, taken from Somerset Maugham‘s short story, in which the appointment is with death.

Mr. Fix-It

by Mark Athitakis, posted in F. Scott Fitzgerald, Maxwell Perkins, Ring Lardner

Because I don’t write fiction, I tend not to read much about craft. Francine Prose‘s fine 2006 book on the subject, Reading Like a Writer, is one exception, as are the three fascinating collections of Paris Review interviews. More recently, I’ve surprised myself at how much I’ve enjoyed flipping through The Writer’s Notebook, a collection of essays based on seminars given at the annual Tin House Summer Writing Workshop from Steve Almond, Aimee Bender, Dorothy Allison, Jim Shepard, and others. One of the first pieces I gravitated toward was Susan Bell‘s essay on the revisions of F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s The Great Gatsby, which quickly but thoughtfully addresses the rigors involved in rethinking one’s writing—as well as the close, delicate relationship between a writer and editor while making fixes.

Fitzgerald’s editor was Maxwell Perkins, a consummate diplomat. As Bell writes, shortly after Perkins received the manuscript of the novel, “the editor diagnosed its kinks, the wrote a letter of lavish praise and unabashed criticism.” After writing that the book and Fitzgerald’s talents are “most extraordinary,” Perkins brings the bad news, which is pretty serious:

Gatsby is somewhat vague. The Reader’s eyes can never quite focus upon him, his outlines are dim. Now everything about Gatsby is more or less a mystery i.e. more or less vague, and this may be somewhat of an artistic intention, but I think it is mistaken.

That Fitzgerald took this critique of one of the story’s main support beams with such appreciation speaks to his confidence in the story. As he wrote back to Perkins, the “vagueness I can repair by making more pointed—this doesn’t sound good but wait and see. It’ll make him clear.” As Bell explains, Fitzgerald didn’t need much prodding and querying; Perkins, she writes, “didn’t mark up Fitzgerald’s text word for word, didn’t roll up his shirtsleeves, dig in, and reposition the prose.”

The downside of being an editor with a strong eye for structure, apparently, was a certain ineptitude at catching factual errors. As the late Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli explains, Perkins could exasperate his colleagues. Charles Scribner Jr., for his part, seemed barely tolerant: “Perkins was totally useless when it came to copy editing or correcting a text,” he wrote. “Such details meant very little to him. Consequently, the early editions of books such as Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby were textually corrupt to a nauseating degree.”

For instance, numerous small corrections, neglected by Perkins, were requested for the text by others: Fitzgerald’s friend Ring Lardner noticed a handful of errors that were flagged too late to be integrated into the first edition. At issue was stuff like what train left from what station. But it was a time when reviews sold books and reviewers could be fussy. As Lardner wrote, “these things are trivial, but some of the critics pick on trivial errors for lack of anything else to pick on.”

Links: Collectors

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Aleksandar Hemon, David Foster Wallace, Donald Ray Pollock, Haruki Murakami, Jeffrey Eugenides, Kindle, Raymond Carver, Russell Banks, Saul Bellow, William Styron

Naoko Mayuzumi, who’s generously compiled a bibliography of Haruki Murakami‘s Japanese translations of American writers, recently wrote in with news of a new translation, based on Remembering Ray: A Composite Biography of Raymond Carver. The page has been updated accordingly.

This blog isn’t available on the Kindle. The main reason I’m not signing up is that I think that free is a perfectly fine price to put on what I what I’m slinging here. But it’s not the only reason.

Telegraph classical music critic Michael White considers the recent death of composer Nicholas Maw by pulling out a 2002 feature on Maw’s opera based on William Styron‘s Sophie’s Choice, with some comments by Styron.

Jeffrey Eugenides thinks that Saul Bellow‘s Herzog is a great cure for writer’s block, but given that it’s going to be a while before he finishes a follow-up to Middlesex, it’s probably best to take his advice with a grain of salt.

Critical Distance, an new effort to create a repository of thoughful reconsiderations of recent American fiction, launched yesterday with founder Dan Green‘s essay on Russell Banks‘ Affliction. I’ll have more to say on this project soon-ish.

The summer issue of Bookforum is available online, including an interview with Aleksandar Hemon.

If you’re looking for a group summer reading project, your ship has just come in.

Knockemstiff author Donald Ray Pollock gave thanks for the $35,000 prize he received at the PEN Literary Awards earlier this week. “It was good timing,” he said. “I’m getting ready to get out of grad school and there are no jobs right now.”