Author: Mark Athitakis

Annals of Nabokov

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Vladimir Nabokov

Yesterday was the 110th anniversary of Vladimir Nabokov‘s birth, an occasion that inspired the New Republic to open up its sizable vaults an showcase a handful of reviews that Nabokov wrote for the magazine, as well as a raft of critical assessments of his work. I was struck by his list of requirements in his 1941 piece, “The Art of Translation.” The bar’s set high:

First of all he must have as much talent, or at least the same kind of talent, as the author he chooses. In this, though only in this, respect Baudelaire and Poe or Joukovsky and Schiller made ideal playmates. Second, he must know thoroughly the two nations and the two languages involved and be perfectly acquainted with all details relating to his author’s manner and methods; also, with the social background of words, their fashions, history and period associations. This leads to the third point: while having genius and knowledge he must possess the gift of mimicry and be able to act, as it were, the real author’s part by impersonating his tricks of demeanor and speech, his ways and his mind, with the utmost degree of verisimilitude.

The critical pieces, for their part, are largely expressions of enthusiasm. For a literary culture that was apparently hurting for a new Faulkner or Hemingway in the late 50s and early 60s, Nabokov was the chosen successor; note the opening of John Updike‘s 1964 piece, in which he dismisses Norman Mailer and James Jones as “homegrown cabbages loyally mistaken for roses.” Writing on Pale Fire in 1962, Mary McCarthy enthused that it was “one of the very great works of art of this century, the modern novel that everyone thought dead and that was only playing possum.” Conrad Brenner in 1958 was given to even broader proclamations, writing that Nabokov “will never win the Pulitzer Prize or the Nobel Prize [true in both cases], yet Lolita is probably the best fiction to come out of this country (so to speak) since Faulkner’s burst in the thirties. He may be the most important writer now going in this country. He is already, God help him, a classic.”

Nabokov, on the evidence, didn’t seem to be anxious for divine intervention to handle all of this acclaim—he simply kept writing, when he wasn’t chasing butterflies. And he clearly kept his sense of humor. In 1999 Jed Perl noted Nabokov’s semi-famous, semi-serious 1972 recipe for boiling eggs (aka “Eggs a la Nabocoque”), displayed in an exhibit at the New York Public Library:

“Boil water in a saucepan (bubbles mean it is boiling!),” he begins. A few lines later, the two eggs have slipped “soundlessly into the (boiling) water. Consult your wristwatch. Stand over them with a spoon preventing them (they are apt to roll) from knocking against the damned side of the pan. If, however, an egg cracks in the water (now bubbling like mad) and starts to disgorge a cloud of white stuff like a medium at an old fashioned seance, fish it out and throw it away.”

War Stories

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Tim O'Brien, Tracy Kidder

A couple of weeks back the Virginian-Pilot interviewed Tim O’Brien about his books, more specifically his novels and stories about Vietnam. Even more specifically, he discussed the role that truth-bending plays in any narrative about war. He explains, for instance, why he chose to have a narrator in 1990’s The Things They Carried named Tim O’Brien:

I’ve intentionally used my own name (as a character) and tried to blur the line a little more. To get my readers to think about what’s true or what’s not, why does it matter to me, and to think about can a story be literally true but emotionally false, or vice versa. Truth is a fluid and volatile thing. Truths about our country that were believed 150 years ago have evolved, and they evolve every day. With our sense of what’s true about ourselves and our country, we learn things about ourselves that we didn’t know yesterday.

I’ve had this idea on the brain lately, between finishing up David Simon‘s HBO miniseries on the Iraq invasion, Generation Kill, and reading Mark Danner‘s latest dispatch on the Red Cross report on torture in the New York Review of Books. One’s a fiction and one’s fact, but both get at how slippery the truth becomes in a war zone, and perhaps more important, how arbitrarily human lives become valued in a war; they shift radically depending on the conditions of the moment.

I’m many years away from my first reading of Going After Cacciato, so I don’t recall just how much soldiers’ pride and insecurity played into the lies that get told about war. But it certainly has a prominent place in a more recent, unfortunately neglected nonfiction book: Tracy Kidder‘s My Detachment, his 2005 memoir about his experiences during Vietnam (and his failed attempts to write a novel about it). I suspect that part of the reason why the book didn’t get much heat was because there’s not a lot of action in it; it doesn’t allow the reader to fall into the shoot-’em-up fantasies about war that even Generation Kill indulges in every so often. (Kidder didn’t see combat. He was what infantrymen called a REMF—“rear echelon motherfucker.”) But what it does get into is how those fantasies start, and how frustrating it is to be in a war zone and not get to participate in any actual fighting. Kidder writes of the letters, full of evasions about how much he was doing, he sent back home. “For months I’d been trying to convince myself, by convincing everyone back home, that in the crucible of war I’d made that great transition,” he writes. Later, he writes a letter to his increasingly distant girlfriend, acting out his aggression and piling on the b.s., closing:

“I have nothing to lose. I really lost my virginity over here. I shot a man through the head and little pieces of his brain and a great quantity of blood colored by gun and my clothes and my face. I never cried so hard over you. But, not unlike you, I am becoming a whore of a different sort. I like it. I LIKE it. You filthy, rotten bitch. One letter from you at any one time would have done so much for me. You fucking bitch.”

Kidder at least had the good sense not to send the letter.

Q&A With David A. Taylor, Soul of a People

by Mark Athitakis, posted in David A. Taylor, Jim Thompson, John Cheever, Nelson Algren, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston

David A. Taylor‘s Soul of a People: The WPA Writers’ Project Uncovers Depression America is an excellent study of the personalities behind the Federal Writers’ Project, which attracted a host of writers to work on guidebooks, oral histories, and folklore collections during the Depression. Some of the participants later became very well-known—among those who worked for the FWP in some capacity were Nelson Algren, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Jim Thompson, John Cheever, and Richard Wright—but as the book makes clear, doing government work left many of the writers feeling conflicted, and the project was consistently under scrutiny by Congress for potentially harboring Communists, a hint of the McCarthy hearings that would come years later.

Taylor, who’s also a fine fiction writer, is working on a documentary related to the WPA book; the American Library Association is sponsoring a related project for libraries around the country as well. For more on the book, see Taylor’s Web site and the lengthy interview he recently conducted with George Mason University’s Art Taylor for his Art & Literature blog.

If you’re in D.C., David A. Taylor will speak about the book on Tuesday, April 28, at 3 p.m. at the Library of Congress. He answered a few questions about the book via e-mail.

The book concentrates on a handful of states where FWP projects pulled in some well-known writers—John Cheever contributed to the New York WPA guide, Zora Neale Hurston to Florida’s, Nelson Algren and Richard Wright to Illinois’. Were there any less-well-known states (or writers) that you wish you had more time and space to spotlight?

It’s true that the stories of the later-famous writers form the book’s core but most of the characters are intriguing lesser-knowns: Anzia Yezierska, a 1920s screenwriter and “Cinderella of the Tenements” who captured the weirdness of the FWP experience in New York; Rudolph Umland, the hobo editor of the Nebraska WPA guide; Lyle Saxon, the New Orleans novelist who lived and breathed the city for the WPA while he drank himself to death; and Hilda Polacheck, who documented Chicago history in personal stories, including survivors of the Great Fire of 1871. Polacheck, like some of the others, left a memoir and I interviewed her daughter Dena. With others I wasn’t so lucky and the trail went cold.

I liked finding people who never expected to be writers or great writers most of us never heard of. Juanita Brooks found her inner investigative reporter on the FWP, and through old-timers uncovered the Mountain Meadows Massacre of the 1860s. Jon Krakauer called her 1950 book about it “an extraordinary work of history” that shaped every other book about the Mormons in 1800s Utah, including his own Under the Banner of Heaven. There are tantalizing loose ends to her story and others, like Eluard Luchell McDaniel, a black hobo writer and partisan in the Spanish Civil War. And Meridel Le Sueur in Minnesota: The Girl is a noir novel centered on a woman caught up in a bank heist. She pieced it together from stories of women she interviewed. It’s The Wire in 1930s St. Paul.

The WPA guides have a reputation for being hit-and-miss when it comes to readability. Cheever, somewhat famously, described his work for the WPA as “twisting into order the sentences written by some incredibly lazy bastards.” As you were researching the book, what struck you about the quality of the writing? Were there any particular gems that you discovered?

There’s a collection of gems from the WPA guides collected in a book called Remembering America. Archie Hobson, the editor of that book, did a great service. His selection highlights local stories from all the guides—many funny as hell—that show the idiosyncrasy of what happened in a bar or when two or three people came together. The humor, often dark, struck me. Among the individual WPA guides, the Oklahoma guide still has the imprint of Jim Thompson’s noir sensibility (even though he left before the guide was done, his folklore essay and some of the tours still stand out). More than the style, for me, are the weird surprises of history—like the fact that Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian Nobel prize winner, was living in Illinois for several years while his son studied agriculture there. Then you have some ringers, like Kenneth Rexroth’s hiking notes for the Sierras in the California guide, and Aldo Leopold’s essay on conservation in the Wisconsin guide, years before he wrote Sand County Almanac.

You mention a few cases where WPA leadership edited provocative statements out of guides. (For instance, Idaho guide editor Vardis Fisher’s comments about a former Idaho governor were removed from a draft of the book.) Was there any consistency to what kind of material was cut? How much of it reflected concern about Congressional opposition to the FWP?

Nationally there was a huge reservoir of public fear, and Congress responded by watching for any hint of dissidence. When the first House Un-American Activities Committee (Joe McCarthy’s predecessor and role model) was bearing down on the FWP in 1938 and ‘39, the FWP chief felt the pressure and had a few internal censors weed out political red flags—especially communist and socialist leanings. Labor history was a powder keg, and discontent, so they could draw the censors’ pen. But there was so much coming in, the censors weren’t consistent.

Headquarters also struck out some things in an effort to give a consistent and ‘objective’ tone to the whole guidebook series. So Rexroth’s rant against California timber barons—which interestingly bleeds into a sort of Eastern-flavored portrayal of earth and water—didn’t make it into the California guide. I was happy to find his typescript manuscripts, and publish selections in the book.

One of the most compelling personalities in the book is Hurston, who did a tremendous amount of research on Florida folklore, occasionally putting herself in harm’s way to do it. You note that she had written a book for the FWP called “The Florida Negro,” but it wasn’t published. What happened?

Besides the overt censorship, there was, as Stetson Kennedy notes, the implicit censorship of local mores—including Jim Crow segregation in the South, hanging over the guide editors. The Florida WPA guide did challenge that with accounts of lynching and unfair employment practices—cheek to jowl in a book about Florida tourist spots!—but still there were projects planned that never saw the light of day. In the case of The Florida Negro, it was a combination of that and the kind of mundane editorial merry-go-round that a script might experience in Hollywood—no greenlighting, a U-turn to rewrite, etc. Sterling Brown, the remarkable poet and professor at Howard University who oversaw black studies in the FWP, planned a whole series—and some like The Virginia Negro did get published as amazing glimpses of black history. Hurston took over The Florida Negro when a version had been drafted, and she reworked it. When she left for a teaching job in North Carolina, it sort of died. A decade ago, The Florida Negro was finally published by the University Press of Mississippi, and essays Hurston wrote for it appeared in Pam Bordelon’s Go Gator! And Muddy the Water. There’s still a lot of Zora’s genius coming to light. A few years ago a musical version of Polk County, her play about life in the turpentine camps she uncovered for the FWP, was staged here in D.C. and won a Helen Hayes award for best new musical. Hurston would have loved that.

There’s been a resurgence of interest in the WPA guides of late, perhaps as a function of the material becoming available online through the Library of Congress—last year there are books like America Eats! and State by State, which both pay tribute to the FWP’s efforts, and now your project. What do you think people are searching for by revisiting the guides?

I think part of it is actually a continuation of the flowering of local stories that started with the FWP and unfolded in the decades afterward, like Studs Terkel’s oral histories, which just kept bubbling out. Then others took up the idea with permutations like StoryCorps. A lot of writers came across the WPA guides in used bookstores and found in them authentic voices and experiences. Even where the writing is musty, the guides can be exotic because of the time that’s passed. Some have a Ghost World quality that fits with an aesthetic popular now too. For me it was a shock of recognizing a tone and voice that I didn’t expect to find. Many FWP writers wanted to get beyond industrial and commercial treatments of life. They wanted to scratch beneath the surface and see what made people tick and where the pressure points were. I think we’re seeing that again.

Sherman Alexie and the Case of the Crazy-Ass Fifteen-Year-Old

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Sherman Alexie

Sherman Alexie is busy: According to an interview with Failbetter, he’s working on Fire With Fire, the “great big American Native American Novel,” a sequel to The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, another young adult novel, Radioactive Love Song, that may or may not be narrated by an iPod, and he’s currently promoting Face, a collection of poetry. But I was mainly struck by the portion of the interview in which he discusses his 2007 novel, Flight, which struck me as a young-adult novel. Apparently the interviewer feels the same way:

You wrote Flight during the same time that you were writing True Diary. Did you think about that as YA at all too?

No—it’s funny that people would even think so.

But I would’ve loved that book when I was fifteen.

But you were probably a crazy-ass fifteen-year-old. It wasn’t the kids I was worried about, it wouldn’t get past the teachers, the gatekeepers. There’s genital mutilation in that book! No, I never thought of it as YA. It’s way too violent. It’s funny, people don’t even remember how violent it is. You know people will say that to me, “Why isn’t that a YA?” I’ll start listing everything that happens and they say, “Wait a second. That never would’ve made it past the school board.”

Well, True Diary didn’t—

True Diary didn’t make it past the school board in a couple places! But it’s so funny—the amazing thing is, it’s certain communities, because tomorrow I’m reading from it in the George Bush Library here. I want to get a photograph of me reading at the George Bush Library and send it to that school and say, “At least a Republican president doesn’t mind.”

Fair points. But I don’t doubt that more than a few fifteen-year-olds, crazy-ass or no, might find Flight more relatable than much of what what’s officially sanctioned for them.

Links: Keeping It Classy

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Bill Holm, David Simon, Dinaw Mengestu, Susan Straight, Walter Benn Michaels

A few reactions to Tuesday’s Bookforum-sponsored event featuring Walter Benn Michaels trying to convince David Simon, Susan Straight, and Dale Peck that American literature is off the rails because there’s not enough poverty in it, or something:

“The animated exchanges…demonstrated how everything Benn Michaels said could be totally right, as far as it went, yet be achingly incomplete.”

“David Simon got excited for a second while making the point that slavery DOES TOO STILL EXIST, HAVE YOU BEEN TO THE GAS STATION BY MY HOUSE, but that line of thought was pretty quickly abandoned.”

Michaels: “The majority of poor people in America are white. They’re not victims of racism. They’re victims of capitalism. The one thing no one wants to talk about is capitalism.”

None of the reports convince me that Michaels is being anything besides a little doofy and a lot willfully provocative, or that he’d be satisfied with any novel you’d recommend to him.

Better to just read a sensible commentary on the current primacy of historical novels.

Or the “bible” for The Wire that Simon wrote before pitching the show to HBO. (h/t Whet Moser)

AbeBooks.com lists ten forgotten Pulitzer Prize-winning novels. Nearly all of them are news to me, but Karen Vanuska is doing some research.

Dinaw Mengestu‘s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears a novel set in Washington D.C.’s Logan Circle neighborhood before it was revived by the city’s housing boom, has been adapted for the stage. It premieres tonight. In Seattle.

A scene from the funeral for Minnesota author Bill Holm: “Bill was laid out in his coffin with Bach sheet music and Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass’’ in his hands.”

Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher weighs in on the closing of College Park, Maryland, store Vertigo Books: “When a big company goes away, a Circuit City or a big bank, for example, the local impact is relatively minimal–some workers lose their jobs, but the effect is regional or national in scope. But when a small local business dies, we lose a chunk of ourselves, a piece of the thing we call community, the reason we live wherever we might live.” The store’s “Wake & Potluck” is tomorrow evening.

The Bobbasheely Business

by Mark Athitakis, posted in William Faulkner

The AP reports that the Dictionary of American Regional English, a multivolume, comprehensive reference text that has been in the works since the mid-60s, is nearing completion. According to the story, the fifth volume (“S-Z”) should be published next year, thanks to a $295,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to the staff at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Joan Houston Hall, current editor of the project, tells the AP that once the final volume is finished, the next step will be to get the book online. Hall’s favorite word out the batch? Bobbasheely, a Gulf Coast word meaning good friend, or to hang out with a friend; she notes that William Faulkner used it in one of his novels, though the story doesn’t mention which one. Turns out Faulkner preferred the verb definition. It appears in 1962’s The Reivers in this sentence: “You and Sweet Thing bobbasheely on back to the hotel now, and me and Uncle Remus and Lord Flaunteroy will mosey along.”

Hall inherited the project in 2000, after the death of the dictionary’s first editor, Frederic Cassidy. His headstone reads, “On to Z!”

Austin S. Camacho’s Airport Pitch

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Austin S. Camacho

Earlier this week I came across a blog post by Austin S. Camacho, a D.C.-area author of crime and adventure novels, in which he mentioned the great experience he had signing his books at . . . Dulles International Airport. The idea of signing books in one of the cramped Borders Express outlets was a new one on me—I imagine it’s not a great place to find return customers—but now that even authors with books published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux have to find innovative ways to promote themselves, I shouldn’t have been too surprised. Since November of 2007 he’s done 16 signings at three D.C. regional airports (Dulles International, Reagan National, and Baltimore-Washington Thurgood Marshall International). Camacho answered a few questions about his experiences via e-mail.

He has two signings this weekend: Saturday, April 18, at the Borders Express in Wheaton, Maryland, and Sunday, April 19, at Reagan National between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.

How did you get the idea of doing book signings at airports? Had you seen or heard about other authors doing it?

I haven’t met anyone who approached book signings the way I have. Using the Yahoo Local search I made a list of all bookstores within an hour’s drive of my house. The stores in my local airports are all Borders stores (one in Reagan National, two in BWI and three different stores in Dulles Airport) so they came up on the list.

Any lessons learned from your first signing?

You learn quickly to leave your pocketknife at home, print eye-catching table signs, and clue the bookstore staff on who your books should appeal to.

I found the store managers very welcoming. Apparently they don’t get any of the corporate-arranged signings other stores get, and writers never call them, so they’re happy to hear from us. They print big posters at their expense (other stores don’t) and try to book the next signing at the end of the present one.

I imagine that there are a number of barriers to getting readers’ attention at an airport—they’re tired, they’re rushing to catch a flight. How do you grab somebody’s attention in that context, and is the strategy different than at a more conventional bookstore?

Most bookstores attract browsers actively looking for their next good read. Airport shoppers are either bored with time to kill waiting for their flight or rushing to find something to read on the plane. These will be impulse purchases made with little consideration so you really have to have your elevator pitch down pat. You must engage quickly, tell them in a few seconds why they might want your book, then move on to the next person if they’re not interested.

Another assumption is that people who shop at airport bookstores prefer to take comfort in the familiar: They want the new James Patterson, or a celebrity/business magazine. As a small-press author, how do you get potential readers out of that headspace?

To help their decision making process you need to know whose writing compares to yours. I can say, “If you like Patterson’s Alex Cross novels you’ll love Hannibal Jones,” and “If you like reading about Jack Reacher or Dirk Pitt you’ll enjoy the exploits of Morgan Stark and Felicity O’Brien.” If they don’t know who Pitt and Reacher are, they aren’t the market for Stark and O’Brien. If they do know those characters you can say, “I’m a big Clive Cussler fan too, but he’s not here to personalize and sign your book. I am.”

Sales-wise, how does a signing at the airport perform compared to a more conventional signing?

Sales numbers are about the same, but there are some differences. I get fewer multiple sales. More people ignore me. More people don’t speak English. On the other hand, the airport stores never return books, my books fly all over the world not just in the town the store is in, and these stores have no regular customers so I could go back the next day and find a whole new set of customers.

Are there any unique security issues that you need to be concerned about with airport signings?

Just give yourself extra time to get through security, and be prepared to be escorted if you need to visit the bathroom. I’ve packed lots more tips into my manual, Successfully Marketing your Novel in the 21st Century, which is available on Amazon.com.

What Did You Write During the Class War, Daddy?

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ha Jin, Philip Roth, Richard Price, Susan Straight, Toni Morrison

What does Walter Benn Michaels want? In a frustrating essay in Bookforum, he argues that in recent years American literature has fallen down on the job, mainly because it has failed to get into the business of “criticizing the primacy of markets.” Instead writing novels about, say, the widening income gap, we’ve written much-praised novels that spend too much time looking backward to slavery or the Holocaust—Beloved, The Plot Against America, and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union are particular failings for Michaels on this front, while American Psycho is praised for at least working off the premise that this country is sickened by its consumerism.

Setting aside for a moment the implied argument that what American literature really needs is a good novel about the widening income gap, the maddening thing about Michaels’ piece is the author’s seemingly arbitrary decisions about what books get to be considered as worthy. If he wants to say that historical novels, by definition, fail to look at the present, that’s fine as far as it goes. (Though The Plot Against America had plenty to say about present-day anti-Semitism and propagandistic administrations.) But, strangely, memoirs are wiped off the table because their stories are not about society but individuals. Margaret Thatcher is quoted to exemplify the problem here; Michaels cites her saying, “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” So a book like Maxine Hong Kingston The Woman Warrior would be too shallow, concerned as it is with just one family; apparently so would Adrian Nicole LeBlanc‘s Random Family (while we’re talking about nonfiction), even though it’s one of the best-researched, most granular portraits of the effects of that widening income gap you’ll ever read—and it was written during the boom years, which according to Michaels caused this current failing in American letters. (I’m sure LeBlanc will be disappointed to hear that during that all those years of reporting in the Bronx she was just playing into Maggie’s hands.)

But The Woman Warrior has a double failing for being a story about immigrants, according to Michaels:

And no more stories about the children of immigrants, trying to figure out whether and where they fit into American culture. Ethnic identity is just the family writ large, and no move is more characteristic of the neoliberal novel than the substitution of cultural difference for (one of the things Thatcher meant to deny) class difference. What the neoliberal novel likes about cultural difference is that it sentimentalizes social conflict, imagining that what people really want is respect for their otherness rather than money for their mortgages.

Here, I’d love to shove a copy of Ha Jin‘s A Free Life in Michaels’ hands; though he may be obligated to dismiss it for being an immigrant story, it is a story about money for the mortgage. It may not be the Great American Class War Novel he’s dreaming of, but he’s never going to find it if he keeps paging through novels by Toni Morrison and Philip Roth. (Presumably the latter’s portrayal of Newark in American Pastoral didn’t scratch the itch for Michaels in the way he’d prefer.) He’s also not going to find it if he keeps moving the goal posts.

If you’re in New York tonight, you’ll be able to catch a discussion about all this, featuring Michaels, critic-novelist Dale Peck, novelist Susan Straight, and journalist David Simon. Simon’s Great American TV Show, The Wire, is praised by Michaels at the end of his essay, so I have to imagine that at some point during the conversation Richard Price‘s Clockers will come up—the novel was, as Simon has said many times, a key inspiration for The Wire, and a better argument for the book Michaels is looking for than American Psycho. One question I hope somebody asks: Would anything change if we had more novels of the kind Michaels wants? (Assuming, of course, there’s been any drop-off in them.) Would we have better public policy? A better society? Simon, I suspect, would say no—in numerous interviews he’s shied away from any big statements about the show’s impact. Novels simply don’t change the world in that way. Some time back I asked Price about the legacy of Clockers, and he figured the book mainly affected how his books were shelved:

Q: What do you think is Clockers’ legacy?

A: There are a lot of books about the urban world where Clockers will come up in the blurbs. “Not since Clockers….” Or something like that. The only thing I don’t like is that because I stay with writing about the cities, and use the police for access to a world that otherwise I would not be privy to, I don’t like crime books, and I don’t ever want to see my stuff in the crime section. I don’t want to be genre-ized.

So before we get into too many high-flown statements about what responsibility fiction has to society, it’s worth considering whether fiction has any capacity to transform it.

John Irving’s Bad Habits

by Mark Athitakis, posted in John Irving

I’ve had little interest in reading John Irving‘s recent books, and part of the reason for that is encapsulated in an ingenious chart on Wikipedia displaying recurring themes in his fiction—by the time of A Prayer for Owen Meany, I figured I’d gotten his moves down, and though deeply admired The World According to Garp as a teen, I never liked Dickens enough in the first place to keep up with an author who’s just “Dickensian.” Still, the Q&A with Irving in the Denver Post—tied to a stage production of Owen Meany—is interesting reading, partly because Irving cops to a few of his thematic tics. A reader notes that a number of violent deaths in the book have a sports element to them, to which Irving replies:

This is a novel about the damage Americans do to themselves; sports are a part of that damage. If world news were covered as extensively, and in such detail, as the ceaseless March Madness over college basketball, wouldn’t Americans be better informed about the world, and our place in it, than we are? Your observation is a good one. It’s not literally, of course, that sports are killing us; but what we pay intense attention to it, and what we ignore is surely doing us some harm.

And he suggests one more column for that Wikipedia page:

Virgins (in my novels) apparently interest me. Jenny Fields (Garp’s mother) is a virgin, except for once. Also (“except for once”) Dr. Larch in “The Cider House Rules.” But Jenny’s reasons are feminist, and Larch’s are eccentrically a part of his overreaction to everything. Johnny Wheelwright is in love with Owen; his heart is broken.

Links: First-Time Callers

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Don DeLillo, Jay McInerney, Kurt Vonnegut, Mark Sarvas, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison

Hello there. There’s a goodly chance that you’re here today because Mark Sarvas was nice enough to include this blog on his list of ten “Really, Really Smart Literary Blogs.” I feel a bit like the little old lady whose hair is still in curlers when the Prize Patrol van arrives, but I appreciate your swinging by. If this is your first time here, a few “greatest hits” posts you might want to look at: my piece on the best books of 2008, some stray thoughts on Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet, a few more on the future of book reviewing, a guide to Haruki Murakami‘s translations of American authors, and some thoughts about best practices about for DIY publishing. I usually do link roundup like this once a week, but as with many things in life, this is changeable. Onward.

Don DeLillo‘s America points to a cache of DeLillo radio
interviews on YouTube.

Jay McInerney talks to the Wall Street Journal about his new story collection, How It Ended which includes an update on the life of Alison Poole, the protagonist of his novel Story of My Life. Poole was modeled after one of his ex-girlfriends, Rielle Hunter, perhaps better known for her attachment to former presidential candidate John Edwards.

One less teacher is using Toni Morrison‘s Beloved in the classroom. Kids are still using The Scarlet Letter to learn about public humiliation, though.

The Daily Iowan catches up with longtime Kurt Vonnegut confidante Loree Rackstraw; make sure to check out the slideshow, which has some fine images of Vonnegutiana in Rackstraw’s home.

It’s the 25th anniversary of Sandra Cisneros‘ The House on Mango Street. At a recent event at Rice University honoring the book, she offered some of the best advice for writers I’ve heard: “First, you write like you’re talking to someone in your pajamas. Then you revise like your enemy is reading it.”