It’s a busy morning, so just a quick note that today I’ll be on Minnesota Public Radio’s show “Midmorning,” discussing books with Janice Harayda, proprietor of the fine blog One-Minute Book Reviews. The theme is “literary escapes,” and to my great relief I’ve been told that the conversation needn’t stick to escapist fiction. Still, I’ll try to avoid talking about Every Man Dies Alone or something. It’s a call-in show, so you can make your own recommendations on-air, and it’ll be available online later, so you can be among the many people who tell me I talk too fast. I’ll try to update this post later with a list of books that were discussed and recommended.
Author: Mark Athitakis
Confessions of a Disease Geek
A few months back I posted about the lack of fiction about the flu pandemic of 1918; the books that followed immediately in its wake seemed to have forgotten that the whole thing happened, though as one commenter pointed out, it would start working its way into literature in the decades after. The outbreak of 2009 would appear to be sputtering out (though Laurie Garrett‘s excellent article in Newsweek assures me that a viral apocalypse is pretty much assured, eventually), yet more examples of flu fiction keep appearing; the more you say that something doesn’t exist, I suppose, the more examples that suddenly arrive proving you wrong. I recently stumbled across a mention of Thomas Mullen‘s 2006 novel, The Last Town on Earth, and today the Washington Post‘s book blog, Short Stack, has a Q&A with Mary Doria Russell, whose historical novel on the pandemic, Dreamers of the Day, came out last year. Morris, a self-declared “disease geek,” is a little cynical about reaction to the current outbreak: “In a world where lawyers decide what’s safe, everything is dangerous,” she says. And she has an interesting insight about why the 1918 flu is something of a cultural blind spot for Americans:
Well, of course, in America, we use the phrase “It’s history” when we’re dismissing something as unimportant. Part of my job as a historical novelist is to get readers to feel an intense connection with the past, but I’m swimming upstream, culturally.
That said, it’s only been in recent decades in our culture that speaking of grief and trauma and emotional distress has been tolerated, much less encouraged….
We now recognize the corrosive damage of buried emotional trauma, and try to prevent it or deal with it if it’s already occurred. We may make way too much of a big deal over a lot of trivial stuff, but we are much better than our antecedents at mitigating the harm done by life’s inevitable losses. That’s progress.
Arthur Phillips’ Pocket Symphony
I’ve recently finished Arthur Phillips‘ latest novel, The Song Is You, and liked it much more than I’d expected—I’d pretty much given up on Phillips after actively disliking the opening pages of his debut, Prague, and I now have an inherent distrust of novels about rock bands. (This is largely Jonathan Lethem‘s fault.) But The Song Is You, happily, isn’t a novel about a rock band in the sense that it stresses how fun/agonizing/sexy it is to play on a stage; its best passages explore how songs have a way of reworking our emotional wiring, how MP3 players give us a strange amount of freedom to recalibrate our feelings at will, and how a snippet of abstracted lyrics motivates us to search for deeper meanings. (This is one of the few novels that includes made-up lyrics that aren’t cringeworthy; Phillips has figured out how to make them read simply, but not dumb or florid.)
If all that means that the plot feels a little absurd and makes its hero, Julian, look like he’s a little creepy, quite nearly stalking up-and-coming star Cait O’Dwyer, it’s not a bad thing for the novel, and Phillips acknowledges Julian’s problem—one of the nice things about The Song Is You is that it doesn’t work under the assumption that music is a magical balm that makes people better, as so many such books do. Pop songs are usually unrealistic visions of the world, and though the book isn’t a tragedy, it suggests the foolishness of falling for their lies.
My main problem with Phillips still applies—he’s prone to overwritten sentences that seem to strive for Faulkner or Roth but often wind up sputtering and backfiring like a old lawnmower. Try, for instance, reading this sentence out loud: “Nor could it be called charm or charisma, because he knew people with it who positively repelled onlookers to a distance of about twenty-five feet but then held them there, in an unbreakable orbit, like a fly hovering immobile, trying to escape the effect of a vacuum cleaner nozzle held just so.” This combination of subordinate clauses and an iffy simile isn’t a deal-killer. But is it too much to ask that an author of a novel about songs be more vigilant about unmusical passages?
If Phillips’ writing is a little brocaded, it may be because his reading looks mainly to the past. In an interview with Bookslut, he talks about his reading habits:
American writers that have really, really, really influenced me are Hemmingway [sic], Fitzgerald, Salinger, Henry James, the second half of Nabokov’s career as an American writer… Those are the big stars for me. I’m very fond of Paul Auster and George Saunders. Let’s leave that for American writers.
Do you read much contemporary fiction as well?
I read some, but I don’t read a whole lot because I feel like I’ve got so many holes in the list of dead people that I need to fill in. But I do read some contemporary.
His idea of “contemporary,” though, is William Gaddis‘ The Recognitions, a book that I suspect won’t fix the problem.
Who’ll Buy His Memories?
I just noticed that Barney Rosset, literary provocateur and founder of Grove Press and the Evergreen Review, is selling a few books in his collection. Fitting for somebody who was seemingly open to publishing anything, the 30-odd books available reveal a man who reads broadly—everything from the Spanish Civil War to Yukio Mishima to Theodore Dreiser to Terry Southern‘s infamous Candy.
One of the best parts of the book listings, though, is that they have very little of the dull language of an antiquarian catalog—these are listings written by somebody who used these books a lot, didn’t care what damage to the spine and dust jacket would do to resale value, and knows that books carry the history of the reader with them. Rosset’s listing for Anita Brenner‘s cultural history of Mexico, Idols Behind Altars, reads thusly:
Hardcover. No DJ. Possible first edition. Part of DJ glued to inside cover. Edges of spine are a little tattered. Pages unevenly cut. Pages barely yellowing. Many photographs, all intact. When Barney Rosset was first going to Mexico, at age 17, he was instructed to meet Anita Brenner in Chicago. He met Anita Brenner, who then introduced him to Frida Kahlo. This book can be signed by Barney Rosset upon request. Price: $300
Rosset will apparently sign most of the books he’s selling. The Google site isn’t handling direct sales, best as I can tell; contacting him through the Evergreen Review blog may be your best bet. (h/t Lauren Cerand)
It’s Not OK
The Oklahoman commemorates the 70th anniversary of the publication of The Grapes of Wrath with a pair of stories, a slideshow, and a video, elegantly presented, about how frustrated some Oklahomans continue to be with the book. (For starters, it’s “Oklahomans,” not “Okies.”) The Joads, the lead story notes, lived near the town of Sallisaw, but at least one expert argues that the town had nothing to do with the migration to California during the Dust Bowl:
The only hard feelings about the book are related to this and other discrepancies over what is true, [Sequoyah County Librarian Bethia] Owens said. Although Steinbeck had his book’s characters traveling to California for work, Owens said many migrant workers actually moved to Sallisaw to work and live.
“If he wanted to talk about pain and agony during the Depression here, he could have,” Owens said. “But we were going through different things.”
A different version of the article, published in the Tulsa World, mentions Rilla Askew‘s Harpsong, a 2007 novel that was intended in part to correct the portrayal of Oklahoma in John Steinbeck‘s book. As she explained in an interview shortly before the book came out:
I have tried to capture a different aspect of the Oklahoma character, not because of others’ complaints but from my own desire. The new book is set in the 1930’s, and of course that’s a troubled, iconic era for Oklahoma. We’ve lived in the shadow of Grapes of Wrath these many decades, and I both wanted to demythologize the era and set a few things straight. Mr. Steinbeck just got a few things wrong, you know. But besides that, I wanted to try to capture some of the best parts of us, our essential decency, the fact that, among Oklahomans, there’s a sense that people will ultimately do the right thing.
Short Subject
The Chicago Reader, one of my old employers, has just put out its latest books issue, which includes a feature on Bich Minh Nguyen, whose first novel, Short Girls, comes out in July. (Her husband, Porter Shreve, published a fine, funny novel about life in D.C. in 1976, When the White House Was Ours, last year.) The novel centers on two Vietnamese-American sisters—height is a recurring theme, as the title suggests—and the Reader story points out that it wasn’t until Nguyen went to college and discovered Maxine Hong Kingston that she felt her own heritage was worthy subject matter:
Nguyen was a shy, serious student, terrified of being singled out. She read voraciously. “It was a great way to escape the world of my family for my own mind,” she says. Inspired by the likes of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series, she wrote stories for her own amusement, about pioneer and British girls—always white. “I thought that’s what you write, that’s what people read,” she says.
As it happens, her next book is a historical novel based on the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder. The Reader‘s books issue, which has the Asian-American experience as a theme, also has a piece on Ha Jin‘s most recent book, his essay collection The Writer as Migrant, and notes that Jin has a new story collection, A Good Fall, out in November.
Snark, the Early Days
The latest issue of the New York Review of Books features a piece (subscribers only) by Christopher Benfey on the work of Transcendentalist writer Margaret Fuller, who was among the first well-known and well-respected female literary critics in the country. Not respected enough, Benfey argues. He gets a few jabs in toward writers who tried to present Fuller as a weak flower suffering her father’s abuses because he made her read Virgil as a child (something a lot of smarty-pants boys were compelled to do); and he zings Susan Cheever‘s book on New England intellectuals, American Bloomsbury, for openly speculating about a romance between Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Cheever’s lively and well-written book, which fans fires where few have found smoke, is perhaps best treated as a historical novel,” he writes.
If that seems a little snarky, Benfey is just calling up some of the same spirit that Fuller brought to her book reviewing, particularly for Horace Greeley‘s New York Tribune. He writes:
Fuller’s book reviews have never received the attention they deserve. Amid the chaos and contention of American publishing . . . Fuller was able to identify the most vigorous and promising writers of her time: Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe, Frederick Douglass, and Melville. . . . She was reading their books at an early stage in their careers, and did not live long enough to read Hawthorne’s novels or to find the promise of Typee—in which she relished the savage irony directed at missionaries in Hawaii and the South Seas—fulfilled in Moby-Dick and “Bartleby the Scrivener.”
About those missionaries—Fuller’s review of Typee for the Tribune in 1846 tries to rattle the high-minded women who sponsor missionary work in the hopes of taming the savages:
[I]t would be well if the sewing societies, now engaged in providing funds for such enterprises would read the particulars, they will find in this book…and make inquiries in consequence, before going on with their efforts. Generally, the sewing societies of the country villages will find this the very book they wish to have read while assembled at their work. Othello’s hairbreadth ‘scapes were nothing to those by this hero in the descent of the cataracts, and many a Desdemona might seriously incline her ear to the descriptions of the lovely Fay-a-way.
Not exactly Dorothy Parker, but as a skewering of old-fashioned sensibilities, I imagine it did the job.
Shock to the System
Paul Auster, whose Man in the Dark was one of my favorite novels of last year (it’s now in paperback), is featured in a new documentary titled Act of God, about people who were struck by lightning. That’s familiar territory for Auster; in his 2002 nonfiction collection, The Red Notebook, he wrote about an incident in summer camp when he was 14 where the boy standing next to him was struck dead. Acts of God director Jennifer Baichwal tells the CBC that the writer played a critical role in the theme of the documentary, because “his whole body of work is preoccupied with coincidence and meaning and chance.” (Apparently Michael Ondaatje tipped her off.)
Indeed, as he told the New York Times in 2006, the incident inspired his obsession with chance incidents:
“Hundreds of things made me feel that way,” he said, “but probably the pivotal moment was when I was 14 and at summer camp” in upstate New York.
“We went out on a hike and we got caught in an electrical storm.” He and another boy found themselves crawling underneath a barbed-wire fence when a lightning bolt struck, electrocuting the boy instantly.
“My head,” Mr. Auster, now 58, recalled, “was inches from his feet.”
He expands on that soberly in the trailer to the film:
The Gass Doctrine
Spectacle, the A&E Web site of Columbia University’s student newspaper, has Q&A with novelist and essayist William Gass (h/t Books, Inq.), who discusses his teaching career, the intersection of prose and music, the shifts in meanings of words over time, and couple of issues that made noise among the media (or at least litbloggers) in the past year. Discussing the Horace Engdahl incident, Gass is willing to concede that Americans are closed-minded, but that they don’t have the market cornered when it comes to being provincial:
Significant American writers rushed to support, extol, and copy the Latin American boom. But Latin Americans weren’t Europeans, who are the provincial ones here. We read Calvino, Kis, Sebald… etc. French and other language departments went goofy over deconstruction, and made its import unwisely popular. I founded and directed the International Writers Center at Washington University for a decade. Incidentally, Robbe Grillet was on our faculty. Philip Roth did wonderful things to support Polish etc. writers, and tackled Israeli issues in one of his greatest books. Perhaps it is Europe who is insular.
He has a similarly sly take on book reviewing in the United States:
There is no state of literary criticism in America. I think this is a very wholesome condition. Deconstruction and all its dreadful bloodsucking “isms” are now reduced to squalling helplessness. There are fine critics who have various individual takes on things who regularly write for NYRB, Bookforum, NYTimes, Washington Post, Atlantic, Harper’s, and so on, whom one may read agree or disagree and enjoy. As civilized persons are supposed to.
Spoken like a true survivor of academia’s PC wars of the 90s. Those not interested in re-engaging in those oft-fought arguments—I admit I’m a little tired of them myself—can simply admire photos of Gass’ 20,000-volume library.
Links: The Names
Here’s Don DeLillo, winner of the 2009 Common Wealth Award, along with three fellow winners who, unlike him, don’t seem to mind smiling: Doris Kearns Goodwin, Kevin Spacey, and Buzz Aldrin.
Growing up bookish in Chicago meant, at least for me, that Nelson Algren was all but unavoidable, but apparently that’s not true in the rest of the country, according to a Los Angeles Times report, which includes comments from DeLillo and Russell Banks. Just wait until everybody gets a load of Stuart Dybek.
The Great Gatsby: the ballet.
Alice Walker‘s papers are now available at Emory University. The university’s Web site includes a slideshow of some of the more interesting holdings, including the invoice of Walker’s purchase of a headstone for Zora Neale Hurston‘s tomb.
Andrew Seal has what I’m hoping will be the last word on the Walter Benn Michaels foofaraw. I’m grateful that somebody’s willing to marshal the intellectual rigor to dismantle Michaels’ bloviations, and get in a few good zingers too. (“To say that Michaels is being absolutist is like saying an elephant is heavyset.”) Seal also points to video of the New York Public Library event that inspired all the chatter.
Literary agent Eric Simonoff, whose roster includes Edward P. Jones, Jhumpa Lahiri, and many other heavy hitters, discusses his recent jump to the William Morris Agency in Crain’s New York Business. He points to the recent six-figure sale of Danielle Trussoni‘s debut novel, Angelology, to Viking as proof that the publishing industry isn’t completely off the rails: “It was viewed as a test case, to see if we can still fall in love with a book and pay lots of money,” he says. “The answer is yes. There are still enough publishers, and few enough great books, that we can.
markathitakis.com 