Author: Mark Athitakis

We Tell Ourselves XX in Order to XXXX

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Joan Didion

One of my favorite passages of Joan Didion‘s new memoir, Blue Nights, is a bit in which she discusses writing her 1996 novel, The Last Thing He Wanted. Here’s an excerpt of her draft:

“What we need here is a montage, music over.
How she: talked to her father and xxxx and
xxxxx—
“xx,” he said.
“xxx,” she said.
“How she:
“How she did this and why she did that and what
the music was when they did x and x and xxx—
“How he, and also she—”

“[W]hat I was doing then was never writing at all,” Didion writes. “I was doing no more than sketching in a rhythm and letting that rhythm tell me what it was I was saying…. A single ‘x’ differed from a double ‘xx,’ ‘xxx’ from ‘xxxx.’ The number of such symbols had a meaning. The arrangement was the meaning.” This is interesting to me, because as often as fiction writers like to discuss the “musicality” of their prose—we’re always reminded of how important it is to read it aloud—it’s unusual to see a writer concerned about that to the point where it’s the first part of the drafting process. She guesses that it’s a little like how music is written, and that sounds right. I suppose the rough equivalent would be a click track, or the way some songwriters start to come up with lyrics by singing nonsense words over music; once you’ve sorted out what the words should sound like and where you put the emphasis, the words themselves can be just a kind of a polish.

I don’t know how well this succeeds in Didion’s fiction, because though I’ve read plenty of her nonfiction books I haven’t tried any of her novels. (She includes a finished version of that bit of the novel in Blue Nights; the sentences have graduated into a set of Hemingwayesque shards, more percussive than lyrical.) Obviously the process has worked for her for a while, though. In a 1977 interview she explained how her 1970 novel, Play It as It Lays, was littered with TKs even in the late stages:

I made notes and wrote pages over several years, but the actual physical writing—sitting down at the typewriter and working every day until it was finished—took me from January until November 1969. Then of course I had to run it through again—I never know quite what I’m doing when I’m writing a novel, and the actual line of it doesn’t emerge until I’m finishing. Before I ran it through again I showed it to John and then I sent it to Henry Robbins, who was my editor then at Farrar, Straus. It was quite rough, with places marked “chapter to come.” Henry was unalarmed by my working that way, and he and John and I sat down one night in New York and talked, for about an hour before dinner, about what it needed doing. We all knew what it needed. We all agreed. After that I took a couple of weeks and ran it through. It was just typing and pulling the line through.

Links: The Envelope Please

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Benjamin Percy, Chad Harbach, Colson Whitehead, Ernest Hemingway, John Updike, Junot Diaz, Justin Cronin, Lev Grossman, Lynda Barry, Michael Cunningham, Peter Gent, Renata Adler, Richard Locke, Saul Bellow

Anne Trubek, blogging again in her own space, takes on the question of criteria in book awards. Laura Miller adds some comments and fills out her argument more back at Salon.

Bookforum reports that New York Review Books will reprint Renata Adler‘s debut novel, 1976’s Speedboat, and its follow-up, 1983’s Pitch Dark. “And now the big question about the reissues: who will write the introductions?” Bookforum asks. There’s one easy guess.

John Updike‘s homophobia, on display in a review of an Alan Hollinghurst novel, and in a short story, “The Rumor.” I don’t see the suggestion that Hollinghurst’s new novel, The Stranger’s Child, is a concession to critics for lacking more explicit sex. The novel is, among many other things, about the difficulty of speaking openly about homosexuality; I take Hollinghurst’s avoidance of detailed sex scenes as in keeping with the unspeakability he’s tracking through the decades.

Inside the newly published batch of Ernest Hemingway letters.

Richard Locke, whose new study Critical Children: The Use of Childhood in Ten Great Novels I look forward to diving into, on the evolution of criticism post-internet: “It’s true that over the past few decades the gap between literary creation and literary criticism has grown very wide, but there’s a tradition of informal, essayistic criticism that’s still alive …. Informal, untechnocratic writing about literature (often building on the tradition of the personal essay) is still possible and may be growing.” (The stuff trimmed within the ellipsis is interesting, and I think spot-on, as well.)

If you can find three examples, it’s a trend, so Justin Cronin, Benjamin Percy, and Colson Whitehead prove that literary fiction and genre are merging. (I get the points about commerce the article makes, and the idea that writers are more free now to mine what they read as kids for literary purposes, but I’m not sure Junot Diaz fits into this thesis; having a comic-book geek star in a novel isn’t the same thing as having the prose itself influenced by genre fiction.)

Lev Grossman: “Up through Shakespeare, it was not looked askance upon to have witches and magic and spirits in your stuff. The more time I spend reading and writing fantasy, the more perverse it seems to me that fiction has to pretend to act like the real world and obey the laws of thermodynamics.”

Lynda Barry on the two questions that constantly rattle through the mind of the novelist.

How Death and Venice found its way into Michael Cunningham‘s By Nightfall and (more problematically) Chad Harbach‘s The Art of Fielding.

Andy Borowitz explains why the Library of America collection of humor writing he edited is light on 19th century fare: “The book is very heavily tilted toward more recent writers because I wanted it to be entertaining to today’s readers. With the exception of Mark Twain, very little humor writing of the nineteenth century resonates today, in my opinion.” This makes sense, though the pedant in me wonders if some of that old-fashioned, now-unfunny humor writing wouldn’t be relevant in a collection from Library of America, which has as much of an archival mission as a populist one. I’d want a sense of what made people laugh out loud in 1880, even if it doesn’t do the same for most readers now.

Michael Oriard, an English professor and former player for the Kansas City Chiefs, considers Peter Gent‘s novel North Dallas Forty (Gent died last month) and how “Gent’s portrait of the relationship between the owners and the owned exaggerated the actual state of affairs in a clarifying way.”

Saul Bellow, in a previously unpublished talk from 1988 on being a Jewish writer, refusing to be told what role he ought to play by any self-declared stakeholder: “If the WASP aristocrats wanted to think of me as a Jewish poacher on their precious cultural estates then let them.”

The Anxiety of Self-Influence

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Jonathan Franzen

Last Thursday the Denver alternative weekly Westword published a report from an appearance by Jonathan Franzen. The reporter, Kelsey Whipple, gathered up his “ten best quips.” I scanned the article for the most tweetable of those quips and posted it:

“ Franzen: “At this point in my life, I’m mostly influenced by my own past writing.” http://bit.ly/pWFeJN
mathitak
October 6, 2011
There are a couple of this that struck me about that quote (besides the fact that it would fit in a tweet). It’s a provocative statement, for one—few writers publicly declare themselves the biggest influence on their own work. And though Franzen gets a lot of abuse he doesn’t deserve, I was no fan of Freedom; his comment struck me as in keeping with that novel’s self-involved tone.

Thing is, that wasn’t Franzen’s entire quote. He added: “Direct influence makes most sense only for very young writers.” This omission (the whole quote wouldn’t fit in a tweet) caught the notice of novelist, teacher, and critic Allison Lynn:

“ Hoo boy. There’s a Franzen quote being taken out of context (and mocked) on Twitter. In context, what he’s saying actually makes sense.
allisondlynn
October 6, 2011
She clarified:
“ As a young writer, you’re much influenced by other authors/works. Later on, you’re influenced by the trajectory of your own works. #Franzen
allisondlynn
October 6, 2011

But I recalled that Franzen was the writer who, in 1991 (finishing his second novel, arguably no longer a “very young writer”), found a balm for his “despair about the American novel” in Paula Fox‘s Desperate Characters.

“ @allisondlynn @matthunte …especially from somebody who made a big noise about discovering Paula Fox after he was no longer a young writer.
mathitak
October 6, 2011
“ @mathitak @matthunte Re: Fox–I think there’s a diff btwn being inspired by a writer and influenced. Inspiration shld always be happening.
allisondlynn
October 6, 2011

Let’s go to the tape:

“That someone besides me had suffered from this ambiguity and had seen light on its far side—that a book like Desperate Characters had been published and preserved; that I could find company and consolation and hope in a novel pulled almost at random from a bookshelf—felt akin to an instance of religious grace…. Yet even while I was feeling saved as a reader by Desperate Characters I was succumbing, as a novelist, to despair about the possibility of connecting the personal and the social.”

Which is to say that Lynn has a point—Franzen was making a distinction between what gave him a charge as a reader and worrying over what he was going to model his writing after.

Matthew Hunte pointed out that Franzen clarified some of this in a 2001 interview with Bomb:

“ @allisondlynn @mathitak And I don’t think Franzen considered himself a mature writer when he discovered Paula Fox : http://t.co/zzwirsQK
matthunte
October 6, 2011
“ @mathitak @allisondlynn "I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second."
matthunte
October 6, 2011

Franzen is joshing in that quote, but he’s serious when he explains how his early writing was a function of older influences:

“[I]n a funny way that”s what the first book, Twenty-Seventh City,
was: a conversation with the literary figures of my parents’ generation. The great sixties and seventies Postmoderns. I wanted to feel like I belonged with them, much as I”d spent my childhood trying to be friends with my parents and their friends. A darker way of looking at it is that I was trying to impress them. The result, in any case, was that I adopted a lot of that generation of writers’ concerns–the great postwar freak-out, the Strangeloveian inconceivabilities, the sick society in need of radical critique. I was attracted to crazy scenarios.”

While with the The Corrections, he claims to be in a different place:
“Actually the forces are substantially the same, but in the new book they take the form of interior urges and anxieties, rather than outward plot elements.” 

In any event, whatever Freedom‘s flaws are, they’re not a function of his trying too hard to imitate other writers. Asked in a Rumpus book club interview last year whether he was influenced by Roberto Bolano, Franzen demurred: “Bolano’s near the top of my nightstand reading pile, but I’m currently still quite innocent of influence.”

Arrogant or not, Franzen’s in good company, as Hunte points out:

“ @allisondlynn @mathitak …Artistic originality has only its own self to copy – Vladimir Nabokov The Art of Fiction No. 40 2/2
matthunte
October 6, 2011

Son of Cults

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Dwight Macdonald, Ernest Hemingway, Heidi Julavits, James Gould Cozzens

How much does Dwight Macdonald matter today? The pieces selected by Baffler editor John Summers for Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain seem almost engineered to complicate the question. On the one hand, Macdonald’s demolition job of James Gould Cozzens‘ 1957 novel, By Love Possessed is hilarious, intelligent, forceful, and in its own way very current. This, for instance, remains very true:

It is difficult for American reviewers to resist a long, ambitious novel; they are betrayed by the American admiration of size and scope, also by the American sense of good fellowship; they find it hard to say to the author, after all his work: “Sorry, but it’s terrible.”

On the other hand, who cares about Cozzens today, even if Macdonald is the main reason nobody cares? Many of the battles Macdonald fought have long since been settled. No middle-class families dream of acquiring a set of Great Books, and the release of a new Bible or unabridged dictionary is no longer an intellectually fraught, high-stakes event. (In last week’s New York Times Book Review, Geoffrey Nunberg suggested that the outrage over Webster’s Third Unabridged in 1961, of with Macdonald’s New Yorker essay “The String Untuned” was no small part, represented “the last great eructation of cultural snobbery in American public life.”) Macdonald’s attack on Tom Wolfe seems on the surface a fight he lost—Macdonald’s silly coinage “parajournalism” never got traction, and people know Wolfe a lot better than Macdonald today. But you’d be hard-pressed to find a journalist who wants to write anything like “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” today. Masscult and Midcult often reads like a set of dispatches from a war in a foreign country that’s long since ended.

Yet the appeal of reading Macdonald today isn’t strictly archival, to see just how pissy a man with Standards could get when forced to experience an act of new journalism. Macdonald’s rhetoric and style still endures—Heidi Julavits doesn’t mention Macdonald once in her 2003 essay against snark in book reviews, but snark is part of Macdonald’s legacy. For Julavits, snark was “a reaction to this sheer and insulting level of hyperbole” in the publishing industry, and few critics in his time or since have been so insistent as Macdonald on letting you know when he’s been insulted.

He was artful about it, though, and that’s a key distinction between the criticism Macdonald dealt in and the kind Julavits worried about. Your heart sinks for Ernest Hemingway as Macdonald’s imitation of his writing style just keeps on going, annihilating every bit of received wisdom about how great he was. Zingers abound: “If there’s an inexpressive word, Cozzens will find it”; discussing our Fact-obsessed culture, he writes, “we just like to have the little things around, like pets”; “I’ve written for Time and the only respect the editors showed for my prose was to leave my name off the final product that emerged from the assembly line.”

Unlike the modern-day snark-dispensers, though, Macdonald earned his zingers, and he generally deployed them when he was discussing literary issues that struck him as genuinely important; his essay on the Revised Standard Version is a kind of eulogy for the English language, so convinced was he that a shift away from the King James Version would do real harm to the culture. With that discussion now utterly meaningless, what endures from Macdonald’s writing is its husk of withering prose, the kind of gotcha criticism that Julavits described as a “scornful, knowing tone frequently employed to mask an actual lack of information about books.”

It’s not Macdonald’s fault if he has a lot of inheritors who are more zingy than thoughtful. But he could succumb to that problem himself. The closing essay in Masscult and Midcult is a dispiriting 1972 rant about the Saturday Review and World, a pair of populist current-affairs magazines that exemplified Macdonald’s conception of middlebrow aspirational guff. Here, though, the jokes have a bitter edge, the targets are too small to seem worth bothering with, and the only energy in the piece comes from Macdonald glorying in his earlier takedowns of middlebrow titans. “[C]riticizing [World] by the usual standards is both easy and beside the point, like shooting fish in a barrel. Since that’s the only kind of criticism I know, however, I must continue that way, with a feeling which must often afflict anthropologists: that making judgments on tribal mores is useless to the tribe.” It’s sad to see a writer acknowledge that he’s become a cliche; the critic who so ably parodied Hemingway wound up a parody of himself.

Cults

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Dwight Macdonald

For a long time I’ve tried to avoid reading anything by or about Dwight Macdonald. The reason is simple: He’s associated with the word middlebrow, and I get impatient and annoyed whenever I see the word. I recognize that this means I feel implicated by the message baked into the word itself. To be middlebrow is to suffer from status anxiety. To be middlebrow is to read/watch/listen to things that you think qualify as high art but really aren’t, because you don’t have the intellectual chops for high art. To be middlebrow is to fail—and worse, fail for trying too hard.

Which is to say that hearing the word called up all sorts of things I didn’t (OK, don’t) like to think about as a cultural consumer. Status anxiety is part of being the child of immigrants, I think—at least it was for me—and it’s deflating to be told that you’re stuck halfway up the ladder no matter what you do. I picked up this lesson as a teenager, when I discovered a used copy of Paul Fussell‘s 1983 book, Class, which laid out the distinctions in upbringing, vocabulary, coffee tables, and overall behavior among American classes, from the top-out-of-sights to the bottom-out-of-sights. Fussell’s book not only literally put me in my place in the class matrix (high prole or firmly middle, depending on how you looked at it), it let me know that class mobility was largely a lie—you may go this far, but no farther, Fussell informed me*. I intuited that Fussell was a being satirical to some degree, but to what degree, exactly? Knowing for certain would require an education that was out of my reach.**

So even as I became a more dedicated reader and more interested in criticism, I figured that Macdonald’s on-high talk about Midcult was the last thing I needed to be lectured about. But with the imminent release of a Macdonald essay collection, Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain, by New York Review Books, I might as well confront the matter head-on.

Reading “Masscult and Midcult” for the first time, I’m struck (and a little reassured) by the sense that Macdonald was writing from a position of anxiety himself. The essay was published in 1960, when World War II was not long over and the Cold War was being fought in earnest, and it didn’t seem a stretch to conflate bad, crowd-pleasing art with totalitarianism. He wasn’t predicting an Orwellian state, exactly, but was ready to point out that “Nazism and Soviet Communism…show us how far things can go in politics, as Masscult does in art. And let us not be too smug in this American temperate zone, unravaged by war and ideology.”

That’s pretty much the only time Macdonald cautions the reader not to be smug—throughout, he eagerly erects walls between High Culture and Masscult, and encourages his readers to do the same. Anxiety about the perils of Masscult drives his contempt for Midcult—bad art that makes High Culture gestures. That’s not just Our Town you’re watching, Macdonald argues—the play’s just-plain-folks sentimentality is a trojan horse for Masscult dehumanization, and dehumanization is the first step to oppression. That’s not exactly how Macdonald spells it out—the essay wouldn’t be as funny as it is if the stakes were that high—but the attributes of Midcult that he lays out are roughly equivalent to the attributes of mass manipulation. Which attributes are those? Macdonald makes them clear by naming them in Condescending Capital Letters—Midcult art makes pleas for Universal Significance, it has a Message, it Profound and Soul-Searching. To admire Midcult is to be a tool.

But what I wonder about is whether arguing over “Masscult and Midcult” (there’s a panel discussion at Politics & Prose on October 22) is strictly an academic exercise now. Macdonald’s sneering at rock music is blinkered and comic; his suggestion that pay TV could be a window into high art is downright hilarious. And totalitarianism doesn’t appear to rank high among the political fates that a red-state-blue-state America is susceptible to; high-schoolers have been mounting productions of Our Town for five decades since Macdonald’s essay appeared, and yet somehow we’re still living in a democracy. Still, much of what Macdonald discusses remains relevant. His concern that reviewers lubricate the engine of consumption more than they trade in ideas is still with us; so is his worry that publishers serve the lowest common denominator.*** And in some ways he predicted the way the audience for culture has atomized. “The mass audience is divisible, we have discovered—and the more it is divided, the better,” he writes.

Would Macdonald take much pleasure in the current divisions, though? At the time, he was expressing optimism about arthouse cinema, off-Broadway theater, and pockets of avant-garde art. Were he to look at America today and see some people nerding out on Criterion Collection DVDs, others reading Twilight, everybody watching American Idol, and the “little magazines” as little as ever, it’s unlikely he’d see the High Culture niches he dreamed of. But would he feel as threatened now by their lack? What would Macdonald think the stakes are in 2011? Does art still have the capacity to be an “instrument of domination”?

I’m sketching all this out as a way to get some general thoughts down as I make my way through the book; I hope to add more as I go along.

* I am certain that I have read Class more than any other book, most recently over the Labor Day holiday. For a long time I paid special attention to the closing chapter on Fussell’s suggested escape hatches, among them journalism.

** For instance, do the childhood bedrooms of upper-middle-class children really have that much nautical crap in them? Please email me privately if you can answer.

*** So are crappy pay rates. In a footnote he mentions that he was offered 50 cents a word to write a version of the essay for the Saturday Evening Post. In 1958.

Stalking the 9/11 Beast

by Mark Athitakis, posted in 9/11 Novels

A couple of older posts here might be of interest for those discussing 9/11 and literature in the next week or so:

A Q&A with Wheaton College professor James Mulholland and students who took his class on the 9/11 novel in 2009.

A Q&A with scholar Kristiaan Versluys on his book Out of the Blue, a critical study of 9/11 fiction.

Both were interesting to revisit, because they’re counterweights to some recent judgments that post-9/11 fiction has fallen down on the job. Think pieces, reportage, and lists all generally agree that no novelist has successfully gotten his or her hands around the event. “Very few can be considered successes (with either critics or readers),” an English professor tells the Philadelphia Inquirer. “We’re still waiting for the ‘definitive’ 9/11 novel to be written. Who knows if it ever will be?”

Are we waiting? Why? In ten years, the hope that one novelist can encapsulate the variety of emotions, politics, and aftereffects of the attacks has gone from overheated (did Foer do it?) to grumpy (why couldn’t DeLillo do it?) to resigned (Waldman couldn’t do it, but close enough). But that process is revealing—the aggregate sense of disappointment that these novels didn’t “do enough” says more about where the country was and is culturally than any one novel ever could. We’re obsessed with the work that would bring closure to the attacks, though we’d likely just resent any book that attempted to do so, however skillfully made. “The event seems so prevalent in art and culture that we seem to be ‘holding onto’ the event, without judgment of how we do so,” as Mulholland’s students put it.

Holding onto the event doesn’t exclusively mean writing about the event itself. I’ve written before that discussions of the “9/11 novel” should include Lost City Radio, Matterhorn, and The Vagrants*, because even if they don’t deal with current wars and repressive regimes, they’re products of the past ten years of concern about them. Regarding the attacks themselves, “the unsayable remains unsaid,” as Versluys put it. But there’s been plenty of talking in the meantime; 20 years from now, I suspect we’ll look back at this decade as a time of strange despair, when people wanted something definitive without recognizing that such a thing was impossible to deliver. And we’ll also take notice body of good (if not great) novels that captured the breadth of that despair, that sublimated it into domestic dramas and kid-speak and comedy and terrorist thrillers and stories about juntas and Vietnam; for the event itself, we have the raw footage, the documentaries, the nonfiction books.

* And sure, probably Freedom too, in part because it deals with an atomized post-9/11 America, but because the critical response to the book exposed the need for a definitive statement about “us” in a way no other novel in the past 10 years has. Subjects for further research: Whether the end of World War II or Vietnam produced similar urges for a novelist to sum it all up, and why the tail end of the Cold War produced that urge, as in the essay that inspired this post’s title.

Last of the Summer Reading

by Mark Athitakis, posted in 9/11 Novels, Amor Towles, Amy Waldman, George Pelecanos, Steven Millhauser

Four books I’ve reviewed in the past month, each recommendable to some degree:

Amy Waldman, The Submission (Minneapolis Star-Tribune): Waldman’s debut has been eagerly covered as a “9/11 novel” because the plot’s driver is a competition for a 9/11 memorial. But the attacks are covered only glancingly here, and The Submission is more a media critique than anything—Waldman is at her best when she focuses on the ways that cable news and partisan newspapers steer public opinion, and the ways that nonpartisan coverage gets manipulated for its own ends.

Steven Millhauser, We Others: New and Selected Stories (Minneapolis Star-Tribune): It’s been a good year for victory-lap short-story collections, including Charles Baxter‘s Gryphon, Edith Pearlman‘s Binocular Vision, and this one from Millhauser. Certain themes emerge when his stories are placed in such close proximity—the uncertainty of childhood, the power magic both real and conjured, the authority of collective voices (“we” is the protagonist in a number of these stories). But it’s his precision that’s most impressive, particularly in “August Eschenberg,” which, fittingly, is about a young man obsessed with clockwork automatons.

Amor Towles, Rules of Civility (AARP.org): Gatsby-esque, as a few critics have said, but not just because it’s about the high life in pre-World War II New York. Like Gatsby, Towles’ debut chronicles one man’s hubris from a certain remove, filtered through an outsider’s impressions. Katey Kontent’s voice emphasizes sass and attitude, and Towles’ plot always seems to be busily up to something (now we’re skeet shooting with the gentry! now we’re launching a dishy magazine! now we’re changing the subject when somebody mentions the Anschluss!). But when Towles lets Katey stop and breathe a little, she’s a fine observer of the ways that money, or the need to accrue lots of it, shade character.

George Pelecanos, The Cut (Barnes & Noble Review): Following a string of standalone novels that have ranged from excellent (2006’s The Night Gardener) to rote (2009’s The Way Home), The Cut reads like Pelecanos has finally found a comfortable groove. In Spero Lucas he has a young PI he can work with for a while, and he allows himself more room to discuss how Washington, D.C., has changed since he began chronicling the city in the early 90s. (Though as USA Today reports, his next novel is set in 1972.)

Real Life Rock

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Dana Spiotta, Don DeLillo

Last week, critic D.G. Myers moved his litblog, A Commonplace Blog, to the website of Commentary magazine. Soon after, we got to squabbling over Dana Spiotta‘s excellent new novel, Stone Arabia. We’re both fans of the book, so we’re not disputing whether the book is any good or not. Where we split is in a small matter about how rock music is represented in it, and, in a larger matter, how much the book is an inheritor of postmodern fiction.

Myers used Stone Arabia—which focuses in part on Nik Worth, a musician who’s turned his back on early success to make music in almost total seclusion—as a launchpad for discussing rock novels, a category that’s surprisingly low in quality. I think Don DeLillo‘s 1973 novel, Great Jones Street, is an exception, though, and Nik’s character bears a resemblance to DeLillo’s Bucky Wunderlick, a Dylanesque musician who rejects his stardom. Myers was having none of that: Great Jones Street “stinks” for the same reason End Zone stinks, he tweeted: “it is not about football as the game is played at Kyle Field, but a wild, wacky football which is more metaphor than reality.”

But in terms of metaphor and reality, I don’t think Stone Arabia considers rock music much differently than End Zone considers football, and I said as much—Nik’s character may be realistic, but his (and the novel’s) vision of rock music is off the grid. “It doesn’t follow that his music is ‘fake,’ even if his life is,” Myers responded, and I think we both learned that Twitter has its limits for arguing about books. In calling Nik’s vision of music a funhouse-mirror one, I don’t mean to suggest that the book is unrealistic, or that Nik’s motivations for his self-assigned obscurity don’t have real emotional underpinnings. Just that he’s less a rock musician than he is an outsider artist: In constructing fake albums with fake vinyl or real albums with anti-pop music on them, Nik is following in the footsteps of Mingering Mike or Jandek, acts who earned their cults as much through obsessive crafting of personas than through any actual music they produced.

Nik himself acknowledges the Henry Darger-esque quality of his pursuit: Oceans of concocted diaries, reviews, and ephemera, like a set of liner notes written by “Mickey Murray, Greil Marcus Professor of Underground, Alternative, and Unloved Music.” Nik is obviously in on his own joke, but that doesn’t make the joke any less obscure. As his niece prepares to film a documentary about him, she writes that it will be “about a life spent making music and art outside the mainstream. Way outside. It is a celebration of a devoted unrepentant eccentric…. Garageland will question what makes a person produce in the face of resounding obscurity.”

Which is to say that Spiotta treats Nik’s career in rock music as more metaphor than reality, or at least as much metaphor as reality. Its central conflict is the effect of Nik’s pursuit on his sister Denise, the novel’s narrator, who’s left to manage Nik’s real life while he pursues his fake one, willfully neglecting the world nearly everybody else feels obligated to live in. And to better address that tension, Spiotta does a few things that could come from the DeLillo playbook: The way the narrative deliberately breaks down, with Denise scratching out chapter titles and starting over, or the way Denise fixates on how tragic events are mediated.

That’s not to say that Stone Arabia is strictly a DeLillo-esque novel (though he delivered a rare blurb for her first novel, 2001’s Lightning Field, and he’s thanked in the acknowledgments of Stone Arabia). But like DeLillo, she’s aware of how a subculture can be used metaphorically. In the case of Nik Worth, his fake career represents not just a commentary on selling out but on how we all concoct personas. Spiotta’s achievement is in drawing out how frustrating and heartbreaking such concoctions can be.

Q&A: Evan Hughes, Literary Brooklyn

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Alfred Kazin, Bernard Malamud, Daniel Fuchs, Norman Mailer, Paula Fox, Thomas Wolfe

In his new book, Literary Brooklyn, Evan Hughes takes a close look at a handful of writers who have defined the borough, from (naturally) Walt Whitman to Thomas Wolfe, Hart Crane, Norman Mailer, Paula Fox, Paul Auster, and more. Brooklyn’s current status as a literary hub has made it an attractive target for jokes, but Hughes resists both overhyping the place or indulging its critics. “[A] lot of people living in Brooklyn now might look back with nostalgia at the current era of creative ferment,” he writes, and the book’s mix of urban and literary history goes a long way toward explaining why the city has been so consistently attractive to novelists and poets.

If you happen to be in or near Brooklyn, there are a few upcoming events connected to the book. The launch party is August 16 (tomorrow night) at powerHouse Arena, and on August 26 Hughes and Nelson George will host a walking tour of literary spots in Brooklyn followed by a discussion of the book at Greenlight Bookstore. (More dates are on the book’s events page.)

Hughes answered questions about the book via email.

What is your personal relationship with Brooklyn, and how did it lead you to write this book?

I live in Brooklyn now, in Fort Greene, and I first moved there in 1998, after college. When I arrived, I knew only a little about its literary tradition and culture. It was a happy accident that Brooklyn is where I found a cheap apartment. (My own ugly place in Carroll Gardens for $750 a month—those were the days.) The discount from Manhattan is a common first impulse for writers to move to Brooklyn, and it has been for a long time, though the gap in expense has narrowed. But then, so often, a deeper relationship with the place takes hold. And when I get curious about a place, which I quickly did about Brooklyn, I want to know, What are the great novels or poems or memoirs about this place? Who are the key writers? And what portrait of the place have they created over time? Given not only Brooklyn’s rise to literary prominence but also its rich literary past, I was surprised to see that no one had written a book to address those questions about Brooklyn, to trace its history through its literature.

Literary Brooklyn seems to argue that the collected work of Brooklyn writers serves as a kind of imperfect but representative sample of the whole of American literature—Brooklyn is less like Manhattan and “more like America,” as you put it. Certainly there’s plenty about urban life, race, and assimilation in the books you discuss. But are there larger literary trends that Brooklyn doesn’t attend to?

That’s a good question. I can think of a couple examples. Brooklyn has more breathing room than Manhattan, crucially, but it’s still an urban place. Although Marianne Moore, say, wrote marvelously precise poems about animals and plants, Brooklyn lit as a whole is less focused on the natural world than is the literature of the plains states or the South or Texas, for instance. Also, Brooklyn fiction doesn’t have much in the vein of, say, Henry James or Edith Wharton; it’s longer on grit and shorter on the society novel. Then again, you could say the same a number of major American cities, like Chicago; perhaps Manhattan is again more the exception than the rule (Washington Square, The Age of Innocence).

The first chapter of the book focuses on Walt Whitman, who wrote in the mid- to late 1800s, and chapter two leaps ahead to Henry Miller, whose Tropic of Cancer wasn’t published in the United States until 1961. What was happening on Brooklyn’s literary front from the beginning of the 20th Century through the World War I era, when Miller began writing in earnest? Or is it more correct to ask about what wasn’t happening?

Not much of note was being published, but that’s not to say that nothing was being written, and it’s not to say that no books arose, indirectly, from that period. There were pockets of wealth, largely in manufacturing, but there wasn’t much of a leisure class with the time to pursue the arts and the connections that were often needed to get published. But that era saw a massive influx of immigrants from Europe, particularly Jewish immigration, that reshaped Brooklyn’s demographics and gave rise to important literature. Alfred Kazin, Daniel Fuchs, and Bernard Malamud were children of that immigrant wave, and in their work they often wrote about the experience of their own families of origin.

You mention a couple of Brooklyn writers in passing, including Gilbert Sorrentino and John Dos Passos, who didn’t quite rise to the level of his own chapter or chapter section. What criteria did an author need to meet to merit a fuller treatment? Were there writers who almost but didn’t quite make the cut?

You just mentioned two I would have liked to discuss at more length. There were tough choices, as probably there always are in writing a book. I focused mostly on authors who have not only lived in Brooklyn but also written about it, giving evidence of their relationship with the place. The book is urban history as well as literary biography, so part of my aim was to tell a story that captures the major trends that have shaped the place, and shaped the rest of urban America. So in some cases if I felt a certain theme or historical development was well-covered by discussing the life of work of one author, I would cover another similar writer more briefly.

The overall arc of the book suggests that Brooklyn’s literary culture slowly shifted from a proudly unschooled, outsiderish tribe—you point out that “Walt Whitman, Henry Miller, and Hart Crane together had not one semester of college”—to one more connected with “liberal brownstoners” and the Manhattan publishing world. How has that changed the tone and style of Brooklyn-based fiction? Is it now a more whitebread, “classy” creature that would exclude the likes of a Hubert Selby Jr.?

I think Selby might have a hard time getting published now; it wasn’t easy then, either. Last Exit to Brooklyn’s publication owed a lot to the bravery of Barney Rosset of Grove Press, who also endured censorship battles to bring Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s work to American readers. And there are writers in Brooklyn today who consider themselves autodidacts and outsiders—and the hard time many of them are having breaking through to larger audiences is the same hard time that Whitman had. It’s part of what we mean when we say “outsiders,” right? When we talk in a decade or five about the Brooklyn writers of today, we might be talking about a different cast than we talk about now. Also, in certain respects Brooklyn’s literary culture is much more inclusive than it was in the past. You have many more women being published now than in the past, and more non-white writers as well.

If it’s true that Brooklyn was a sanctuary for artists looking for cheap rent, how likely do you think it is that we’ll see the ascendance of a literary Staten Island or a literary Queens (something that’s already happening, on the evidence of recent books by Sam Lipsyte and Ha Jin)? What is Brooklyn’s expense doing to its status as a literary hub?

It’s certainly possible we’ll continue to see more literary activity in the other “outer boroughs,” but I think Brooklyn has the advantage of a century and a half of a storied literary past. That attracts literary types. And so do Brooklyn’s trademark brownstone streetscapes where, as L. J. Davis observed, “the 19th century city is surprisingly intact.” But the rising cost of living in Brooklyn is a threat when it comes to drawing writers, no doubt about it. A place that a lot of people want to be is a place that’s more expensive, and writers, as you may have heard, do not typically make a lot of money. I don’t think, however, that the vitality of Brooklyn as a subject is going anywhere. Whether Brooklyn is becoming a better or worse place to live is a matter of spirited and sometimes acrimonious debate, but I think it’s more a question for the newspaper than a question for the novel. Literature can thrive on prosperity and it can thrive on terrible struggle—and on the tension between the two.

“My diligently constructed narrative”

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Francisco Goldman

Francisco Goldman‘s new book, Say Her Name, covers real people and events—it’s about a novelist and journalist named Francisco Goldman, whose wife, Aura Estrada, died in a bodysurfing accident in 2007. Say Her Name is presented as a novel, though; the dust jacket calls it the “novel of Aura.” So what makes it fiction? “I didn’t do everything the character does,” Goldman told Publishers Weekly. “I didn’t quit my job. I didn’t live off Aura’s savings.” His answer to the question to the Paris Review is a little more complicated:

I have never liked the memoir form because I tend to think that memory fictionalizes anyway. Once you claim that you are writing a narrative purely from memory you are already in the realm of fiction. I am not claiming that there is not some other side to Aura that I missed. And there is the way I portray myself: a factual account of the kind of widower I was would give a completely different impression. I was a really superb widower.

It’s hard to tell, taking those quotes together, whether Goldman played loosely with the facts or is just such an honorable stickler for accuracy that he’s more comfortable calling his memories a fiction. The book itself suggests that something closer to the latter is going on. “She died because I was being myself, an eternal adolescent, a niñote. She died because, bursting with love, I decided to join her in the water. But all of that is also an evasion of the TRUTH, against which my diligently constructed narrative collapses like a huge wave of nothing…. The utter freakishness and meaningless of it—there is the TRUTH.” The all-caps fact of the matter, for Goldman, wouldn’t fill a page; he wants to find meaning in all this, which means getting into the imprecise business of memory and feeling.

Yet however justified Goldman is in calling Say Her Name a novel, it still feels like a memoir, both for practical reasons (the real names, the lack of an any-resemblance-to-persons-living-or-dead legal boilerplate that accompanies works of fiction) and structural ones—it has the arc of somebody acknowledging and then working through his grief. That disconnect has understandably frustrated critics. “The result is somehow the worst of two worlds, a memoir you can’t trust and a novel that lacks complexity and reach,” wrote Dwight Garner in the New York Times. “[T]he incongruity distracts; questions disrupt the novel’s dream,” Kassten Alonso wrote in the Oregonian. “At what point does the fabrication of even picaresque or piddling details outweigh major plot drivers cemented in fact?”

I suspect Alonso means to say “picayune,” but “picaresque” is actually a handy word here, because it helps get at why it’s frustrating to think about Say Her Name as a novel, which has a little to do with what we expect out of memoirs too. The book is messy, alternating short chapters with long ones, heart-in-throat proclamations of grief with plainspoken details; it shifts back and forth in time, and its foreshadowing can be awkward. “Aura put her quilt away in the closet and came back into the bedroom and finished packing for her death,” he writes, and that “packing for her death” grates—it’s a needless bit of overdramatization. Every good book finds its own rhythm; Say Her Name starts out hyperventilating and has a hard time settling down.

So there’s something seductive, even calming about the book’s latter pages, which detail the circumstances of Aura’s death. There, things do settle down: Because it’s the climax the book has been working toward, there’s a clarity to those scenes, as if it were easier for Goldman to account for the moment of his heartbreak than to deal with everything that’s happened since. The 250 or so pages leading up to it are indeed a sort of picaresque novel—episodes about random meetings, romance, fights, family, and travel. The closing pages thrust its lead character into a reality that, however “constructed,” make it a different book entirely.

That makes Say Her Name a frustrating book, but it might have been more frustrating had Goldman gone ahead and called it a memoir, because the book doesn’t play by the rules that grief memoirs are expected to abide by. In books like Darin Strauss‘ Half a Life and Joan Didion‘s The Year of Magical Thinking (and her forthcoming Blue Nights), all excellent memoirs, the tone is prim and straightforward—the raw, heaving emotion that accompanies losing someone isn’t addressed head-on so much as it erupts out of the Strunk & White precision of its sentences. Even in a book like Meghan O’Rourke‘s The Long Goodbye, which is longer and more digressive, thinking takes priority over feeling—in describing her search for the right ways to think about her mother’s death, she asks the reader to work to notice all the emotional flailing underneath.

Goldman is having none of that—he simply lets his feelings fly open, from moment to moment, unafraid to let himself come off as foolish or Aura appear childish. (One of the book’s narrative arcs is Aura’s growing as a writer, tracking her literary history from adolescent diary entries to more mature MFA work.) The disorder of much of the narrative doesn’t make it any more charming, a glimpse into the blasted mind of a grieving husband or some such—a messy story is a messy story, in fact or in fiction. But it does have the benefit of sincerity, however fictionalized, and the benefit of Goldman’s willingness to question how much of the grieving process has to do with all-caps truth and how much with the narratives we invent to get through it. Any book that wrestles with that question will be hard to categorize.