Author: Mark Athitakis

God’s Work

by Mark Athitakis, posted in John Updike

Writing at the Web site for Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, David E. Anderson ponders the role of religion in John Updike‘s work, specifically through Updike’s final collection of poems, Endpoint. As Anderson points out, Updike was a deeply religious writer who enjoyed writing about New England and Pennsylvania Protestants, but changed his denomination a few times, and always seemed to approach the subject tenuously, as if his faith would crack easily. “I feared it might empty out of me the last drops of what feeble faith had got me thus far,” he writes of taking an assignment for the New Yorker on the future of faith. What finally bolsters Updike is, to be perhaps a little reductionist, a pretty show that God puts on for him in Florence, Italy:

“Lightning. Hectic gusts. The rain was furious. I was not alone in the universe. … I was filled with a glad sense of exterior activity. My burden of being was being shared. God was at work—at ease, even, in this nocturnal Florentine commotion, this heavenly wrath and architectural defiance, this Jacobean wrestle…. All this felt like a transaction, a rescue, an answered prayer.”

Anderson has a healthy run-down of many of Updike’s more religion-oriented writings, from his poem “Six Stanzas at Easter” to his 1989 novel S.. But surprisingly he doesn’t mention the 1986 novel Roger’s Version, which in many ways exemplifies Updike’s concerns about keeping faith while living in the modern world. The core of the story is a tussle between a divinity scholar, Roger Lambert, and a programmer, Dale Kohler, who believes he can prove God’s existence via computer. Lambert isn’t buying it, partly because he still wants the pretty show:

“I must confess I find your whole idea aesthetically and ethically repulsive. Aesthetically because it describes a God Who lets Himself be intellectually trapped, and ethically because it eliminates faith from religion, it takes away our freedom to believe or doubt. A God you could prove makes the whole thing immensely, oh, uninteresting.”

That’s not to suggest that Updike’s faith was shallow—he certainly read more than his fair share of theology in his time. But even to the end, in late novels like In the Beauty of the Lilies, he seemed to be based on a relatively simple worry that faith could easily slide into mere superstition. That was certainly part of the inspiration for Roger’s Version, as he told a reporter in a contemporary interview included in Conversations With John Updike: “I was sitting at my word processor one day, and I noticed this scramble of numbers that it throws up. The notion of there being a magical secret in that code of numbers occurred to me, being a superstitious sort of person.”

Forgotten Ladies

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Gary Indiana, Jane Bowles

Longtime journalist and fiction writer Gary Indiana—his new novel, The Shanghai Gesture, sits in my to-be-read pile—uses his engaging if mind-zappingly Day-Glo blog to enthuse about Jane Bowles‘ 1943 novel, Two Serious Ladies, which he argues isn’t just a lost classic but indeed a “perfect book.” There are a couple of obvious reasons why the book seems to have fallen off the larger critical radar: Bowles’ career was overshadowed by that of her more famous husband, Paul, and its lesbian themes didn’t go over well with a World War II-era audience. Best as I can tell, the book is currently out of print in the U.S., though relatively affordable used copies are available (I’m considering this one, by virtue of its cover alone). (Update: Once again, a wise commenter corrects me, noting that the novel is included in My Sister’s Hand in Mine: The Collected Works of Jane Bowles.)

But if there were problems with bad timing then, there are no excuses now. Indiana writes:

The structure of Two Serious Ladies has, as far as I know, no direct precedent in literature. Neither the lives nor the happenings in the two women’s lives are at all intertwined, nor do they “alternate” the way novels rich in subplots do. The book simply, abruptly, abandons Christina Goering in mid-¬novel, so to speak, and jumps into the story of the Copperfields in Panama….

Jane Bowles devised a brilliantly original technique to splice two almost completely disconnected narratives into perfectly harmonious movements of the same story. Each mirrors the other in ways that are both logical and inexplicable. Two Serious Ladies captures the haphazardness of human connections in a world of transience. The two brief moments of contact between its subjects constitute the book’s sole concession to “plot.” It’s the finest novel ever written by an American, actually, the only one I’ve never repeatedly picked up without reading straight through to the end.

The book certainly struck Bowles’ husband. As Millicent Dillon writes in A Little Original Sin, her biography of Jane Bowles, “Two Serious Ladies had a profound influence on Paul when he read it. As he himself says, it was the generating force that brought him back to fiction. And there is, in fact, in The Sheltering Sky a curious resemblance to Two Serious Ladies…. [Both] are novels that deal with the same basic themes: choice, sin, sex, and the spirit.”

Back to Dresden

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Kurt Vonnegut, Kyle Smith

This month marks the publication of Loree Rackstraw‘s Love as Always, Kurt, a collection of correspondence the author had with Kurt Vonnegut for four decades. The two were friends and sometimes lovers, which would seem to make for an intriguing story, but the book has received middling reviews for not delving too deep into the writer’s mind. That may explain why the small brushfire that Kyle Smith created in his review of the book has little to do with the book’s actual content. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Smith takes a few swipes at what he perceives as Vonnegut’s simpleminded politics, going so far as to knock down the central thesis of Slaugherhouse-Five—that the bombing of Dresden was utterly pointless and spoke to the larger pointlessness of war.

I’m no World War II scholar, and I don’t know if Smith is right. (And Smith, the film critic for the New York Post, is no WWII scholar; I know him mainly through A Christmas Caroline, a fluffy, throwaway comic novel from a couple of years back that merged Dickens and The Devil Wears Prada.) But his review has spawned some lively chatter both on the Journal’s letters page and in the comments of Smith’s blog, which has spawned a discussion not just of the Dresden bombing but of the utility of war in general. The conversation remained civil, which may speak to the power of Vonnegut’s light touch—it may be the only blog comment thread in history that discusses Nazis without exploding into a fireball of hate.

Short Shrift

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Donald Barthelme, Flannery O'Connor, John Cheever

“If it happens three times, it’s a trend,” goes the thinking at a lot of publications, so it’s easy to see how A.O. Scott‘s essay in the New York Times on the revival of the short story came to be. There are new biographies out about Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, and Donald Barthelme; all three made their reputations on their short stories; hence, there must be some newfound interest in reading short stories. “[I]f the golden age of American magazines is long gone, the short story itself has shown remarkable durability, and may even be poised for a resurgence,” Scott writes. (Note that “may,” always a useful hedge in a trend piece.)

Imagine the harm to Scott’s thesis had Brad Gooch figured he’d needed another year to work on his O’Connor biography. That’s the problem; the alleged trend is really just an accident of timing. Calling out Wells Tower‘s new collection as a special example of the power of the short story doesn’t help the argument; after all, no matter how poor the financial prospects of the short story are, every year brings a much-praised story collection. Indeed, wouldn’t the timing for this piece have been better a year ago, when Jhumpa Lahiri‘s Unaccustomed Earth topped the New York Times bestseller list?

Maybe, but back then no editor would’ve wanted to hear it. A year ago critics were engrossed in Richard Price‘s Lush Life, and the kind of people who write trend pieces were talking about the revival of the big, ambitious novel about life in the big city. Scott is a very smart critic, and he’s not so foolish as to suggest that the novel is going to be completely supplanted by the short story—even if he does suggest, glibly, that “the death of the novel is yesterday’s news.” But his notion that the Kindle might revive the short story sounds off, an effortful statement shoved into the piece in order to give it some heft. (And anyway, isn’t the point of the Kindle that it can contain dozens of epics?) Even if a publisher did come up with some kind of dollar-a-story payment scheme for short fiction, the sort of quick-hit storytelling that Scott imagines we crave—a “handy, compact package of character, incident and linguistic invention”—only really exists in flash fiction, and though many have tried, enthusiasm for that form is limited. Ultimately, readers care more about the quality of the narrative than the length of it. After all, no serious person ever recommended Raymond Carver‘s “A Small, Good Thing” to somebody simply because it’s short.

Links: Closing the Book

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Greg Schwipps, Kent Haruf

Emory Elliott, a University of California Riverside professor praised as one of the leading scholars of American Literature, died Tuesday of a heart attack. The news release from the university details his many accomplishments, including his work editing the Columbia Literary History of the United States. “He was one of a handful of the top people in American literature,” a colleague tells the Riverside Press-Enterprise. Another colleague, Cathy Davidson, tells more.

I’m not a big fan of April Fool’s jokes (mainly because I fall for them too easily), but the alleged blockbuster by “Pete Tarslaw,” The Tornado Ashes Club was nicely done. The cover in particular is brilliantly conceived, taking every available tool to announce that the book is an important epic: the panoramic landscape, the earth tones, the unassuming fonts. All that’s missing is the superfluous words “A Novel” stamped on the front. More details at GalleyCat.

Susan Orlean recently asked whether book blurbs actually drive sales. All I know of Greg Schwipps‘ writing is an OK flash-fiction thing he did for Esquire, but I’m interested in his debut novel, What This River Keeps, on the strength of Kent Haruf‘s good-as-Steinbeck blurb alone. (Also, it matters to me if you’re a profligate blurber or not: Haruf blurbs rarely, so I pay more attention. Blurbs from Dave Eggers, Kurt Andersen, and Scott Turow are now pretty much meaningless.)

Speaking of Steinbeck, the students in the opera program at the University of Houston’s Moores School of Music Houston Grand Opera have impeccable timing, staging an opera of The Grapes of Wrath. (On a related note, commenters are doing a nice job schooling me in all the musical works based on literary fiction.)

Barack Obama is now a famously crummy gifter, and a good idea for what the president should have passed along to the Queen comes from, of all places, Breitbart: “Imagine how cool Obama would have looked had he handed the Queen a first edition by Paul Dunbar or W.E.B. Dubois. If he wanted to stay high-tech he could have loaded a Kindle with the works of Maya Angelou and James Baldwin.” But true to form, the usual intellectual disease vectors populate the comments.

“Oversized Sweaters and Stirrup Pants”

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Wells Tower

Books fade and the Internet takes over everything, but the urge for college students to launch a literary magazine never dies: Three seniors at Brown University have launched an online journal called Wag’s Revue. In an interview with the Brown Daily Herald, cofounder Will Litton argues that there’s room for an online publication that puts some restrictions on length and quality of content. “When there’s unlimited space to print whatever, you can blog everyday and end up with a crockpot of really mediocre writing,” Litton says. “So much is getting published, there’s no journal with stringent editorial controls.”

Fair enough, though as much as the handsome presentation of the magazine online suggests that those controls are in place, the 28-page essay on the “hipster/douchebag dialectic” is going to have to wait for another day. Instead I gravitated toward the interview with Wells Tower, having just read his excellent short story “Retreat. In the interview, he discusses the tangled history of that particular story, hitting it big in the Paris Review before struggling back up as a reporter. And amusingly, he discusses one of the crummy jobs he was forced to take along the way:

I had a data entry gig, which was so unbelievably dehumanizing. I just had huge stacks of invoices with obscure numbers that corresponded to obscure electronics parts. Even if they’d describe the electronics parts with actual language instead of numbers, I still would have had no idea what I was keying into the computer. It was me and my boss, who was this kind of satanic woman with oversized sweaters and stirrup pants. She was just constantly cracking the whip on me. I could never enter enough invoices to make her happy. It was terrible.

Pynchon, the Musical

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Thomas Pynchon

Plenty of literary novels have inspired musicals—Winesburg, Ohio, Moby-Dick, and The Color Purple, to name a few—and a few band names too. But I’m hard-pressed to think of a novel that’s inspired a musical composition. So until a commenter corrects me, I’ll think of Sam Shalabi as a pioneer; he’s written a 60-minute free-improv suite based on Thomas Pynchon‘s 2006 novel, Against the Day. Performed with a Montreal collective called Land of Kush, the piece has five sections named after the novel’s five sections, and Shalabi tells the McGill Daily he was particularly inspired by one of the book’s main themes:

The novel “is structured around light,” he explains, “and [light] becomes a character in a really interesting way.” One narrative thread traces the groundbreaking scientific advances made in the West in the years leading up to World War I – the discovery of the photon, and the connection between electromagnetism and visible light – that led to a widespread obsession with illumination. Nikola Tesla, one of the pioneers of the second Industrial Revolution, makes a cameo; Tesla “was doing many interesting things with light,” says Shalabi, “but was seen as a freak.” The story, he further explains, “is about those moments where no one knows what’s going on, but it’s all really exciting.”

I haven’t read the book, so I can’t speak to how well the piece evokes it. But on the evidence of the sample available on Constellation Records’ Web page for the album, the album stands on its own quite well—it’s busy but tuneful, full of the kind of martial drumming and chanting that would excite any modern day freak-folk and psych-rock fan. A sample from part four, the title track, is available as a free download.

Land of Kush, \"Against the Day\"

Mr. Sammler’s Panic

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Saul Bellow

If chatter about particular novels is any kind of bellwether for the state of the world, we’re in a bad way—there have been plenty of references lately to The Grapes of Wrath and, dispiritingly, Atlas Shrugged. (If you want to romanticize the second novel’s grim brand of self-righteousness, congratulations—you’ll have a bank on your side.) But lately I’ve been more curious about what seems to be a spike in conversation about Saul Bellow‘s 1970 novel, Mr. Sammler’s Planet. Last summer Myron Magnet wrote a lengthy piece on the novel’s perspective on run-down late-’60s Manhattan for City Journal; more recently, the Berkshire Review used the novel as a launchpad to discuss the construction of Lincoln Center, while both Andrew Seal and D.G. Myers smartly wrestled with the misogyny and racism baked into the novel’s protagonist, Artur Sammler. The book appeared to be symbolic of new sense that the center isn’t holding, but maybe we didn’t want to consider the matter too directly—better to read about the worries of 1968 through Bellow’s rambling intellectual than through, say, a history book like Mark Kurlansky‘s 1968.

All of which is to say that the all the discussion did what good discussions are supposed to do—it compelled me to read the book. To go from the Bellow I’d read just a couple of months ago, The Adventures of Augie March, to Sammler isn’t just to fast-forward a couple of decades in Bellow’s life—it’s like being yanked from a busy city street into a cavernous library, from life to thought. Sammler’s existence is as interior as March’s is exterior; when the Holocaust survivor steps outside it’s as a detached observer who’s had too much of people. He scrutinizes the world too much for the world to have any patience for him, Bellow seems to say, and Bellow’s chosen punishment for Sammler is what’s sparked all the discussion about racism. Early in the novel, Sammler is cornered by a black pickpocket who he’s been staring at on the bus too long; the thief exposes himself to Sammler, and it’s a vision he can’t quite shake.

It gets ugly, the way Sammler processes race, and women as well. (He’s bizarrely obsessed with how women smell.) Toward the end of the novel Sammler cops to his own shallowness, but only in the context of others’ shallowness. The names below aren’t meaningful if you haven’t read the book, but Bellow’s treatment suggests how Sammler packages the people he interacts with:

[A]t the moment of launching from this planet to another something was ended, finalities were demanded, summaries…. Thus Wallace, on the day of destiny for his father, roared and snored in the Cessna snapping photographs. Thus Shula, hiding from Sammler, was undoubtedly going to hunt for treasure, for the alleged abortion dollars. Thus Angela, making more experiments in sensuality, in sexology, smearing all with her female fluids. Thus Eisen with his art, the Negro with his penis. And in the series, but not finally, himself with his condensed views. Eliminating the superfluous. Identifying the necessary.

It may be similarly reductionist to say that Mr. Sammler’s Planet is simply a novel about fear of social change, but that’s largely what seems to drive Sammler into his interior life. The big stuff like his near-death during the Holocaust or the carnage he sees reporting on the Six Day War—the big stuff he can handle. It’s all the little changes in money and sex and race that baffle the man, which makes the novel an interesting read if you’re living, as you are, in the middle of a cultural inflection point, where much of what we’ve understood about our economy, our work, and how we get and process information, is being blown up. Bellow is brilliant at exposing the thoughts that shuttle around a busy mind in the midst of that; the bad news for the reader is that we’re not going to like every thought that moves around.

Keeping it Simple With Jonathan Lethem

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Uncategorized

Jonathan Lethem‘s forthcoming novel, Chronic City, appears to be a return to sensibilities of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude—dense characterizations matched to a strong sense of New York’s history. According to the promotional patter on Random House’s Web site, the story focuses on Chase Insteadman and “Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed free-range pop critic whose soaring conspiratorial riffs are fueled by high-grade marijuana, mammoth cheeseburgers, and a desperate ache for meaning.” As Lethem told Comic Book Resources last July:

[I]t’s set on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, it’s strongly influenced by Saul Bellow, Philip K. Dick, Charles Finney and Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ and it concerns a circle of friends including a faded child-star actor, a cultural critic, a hack ghost-writer of autobiographies, and a city official. And it’s long and strange.

So far so good—or at least, not You Don’t Love Me Yet, his clunky, thin 2007 novel about an LA rock band. In the latest issue of Stop Smiling magazine (packed with interviews with, among others, Roberto Bolano, Alex Ross, Paul Auster, and Junot Diaz), Lethem registers an unusual defense of that novel:

I was ready to throw off any sense that I was going to write sprawling social novels set in Brooklyn and become the Brooklyn Faulkner. Neither Motherless nor Fortress exactly fits that description, but the accumulated image of the two books seemed to project that.

I don’t know if it would have been easy or hard for someone else to follow through with it, but it was totally out of the question for me. And really, for anyone who had even glanced at the earlier work that’d be obvious. But there were a lot of people—an important critical framework—which had never glanced at the earlier work. YDLMY was a way to shrug that off with a degree of self-destructive glee, to say I’m going to disappoint people on a number of different levels so we can start over again about expectations.

Is it overly reductionist to summarize this as, “I purposefully wrote a crummy novel so critics wouldn’t expect too much from me?” Either Lethem was overthinking his reputation or thinking too little about readers; in any event, it seems like he wasted too much energy being concerned about critics.

On a related note (at least in terms of avoiding big, ambitious novels), Lethem is going to spend the month of April running a Twitter feed for Brooklyn Museum as part of an ongoing series where artists commandeer a Twitter handle operated by the museum (@1stfans). Lethem explains what he’s planning on the museum’s blog:

I’ve finished a novel, to be published in October, called Chronic City, in which the object in question is called a “chaldron.” During the years of this book’s writing I found myself by chance repeatedly drawn into collaborations with a series of other artists or art-presenters (see: Jennifer Palladino, Matthew Ritchie, and THE THING) and in each case I used it to further the foolish postulate that “chaldrons” were a part of the world outside the novel, an error shared by my book’s characters. On the 1stfans Twitter Art Feed you’ll overhear tweets from a group of deluded aspirants to chaldron-ownership, as they debate strategies for winning a chaldron in an on-line auction.

You’ll likely have to pay for the privilege of reading Lethem’s Tweets: The feed is locked, a premium of joining the museum’s 1stfans “socially networked museum membership.”

Bart Schneider’s Second Job

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Bart Schneider

Bart Schneider, author of four novels—including Secret Love, a meditation on San Francisco in the 60s that’s not nearly as saccharine as the title suggests—writes a worried piece in Metro Santa Cruz about his fate as writer. In the 80s he helped launch a literary journal, Hungry Mind Review, which was distributed in independent bookstores around the country. (It later became the Ruminator Review, a journal to which I contributed; it went bust a few years ago after a rebranding as a general-interest cultural magazine failed to take off.) Pulling out a 1996 issue of the journal, dedicated to the “State of the Book,” Schneider had reasons to despair:

Glancing through the huge list of independent bookstores from that issue, I fear that more than two-thirds, along with Hungry Mind itself, have gone out of business. Most New York publishers are no longer independent companies run in the old-gentleman spirit of their founding, but are more likely the poor cousins of huge multinational entertainment corporations that demand greater returns than mere books can ever provide.

This isn’t enough to prompt Schneider to get out of the writing racket, but the experience does do some damage to his flinty midwestern demeanor. He describes what happened during the run-up to the publication of his most recent novel, The Man in the Blizzard:

Last summer, when I asked my publisher how to get the word out about my new novel, given that it had no advertising budget, he had a simple answer. Start a blog. But there was more. “You’ve got to contribute actively to other people’s blogs,” he said. In other words, become my own full-time publicist. As someone with an unfailing instinct for the dead end, I started my next novel instead.

Well, he didn’t give up entirely. And shopping an op-ed to an alt-weekly is probably as good a promotional tactic for him as any print ad in a newspaper. Nobody likes being told that a job that others used to do professionally now falls to you, an amateur. The sole comfort is that the pros no longer know the right path any better than you do—if it leads to a dead end, a least it’s your dead end. And it’s probably not a dead end anyway—if a four-time novelist knows anything, it’s that persistence counts, and audiences online have a way of rewarding persistence.