Author: Mark Athitakis

Algren at 100

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Nelson Algren

Saturday marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Nelson Algren, and if you’re lucky enough to be in his native Chicago that day, the Nelson Algren Committee will host a party at St. Paul’s Church in his old West Town stomping grounds. The site notes that “Admission is $10, $7 students and seniors, less if you’re broke,” the kind of sliding scale that Algren could certainly get behind. (The rate makes me feel somewhat better about stealing a copy of The Neon Wilderness from my high-school library back when I was a cheap and irresponsible teenager.) Booklist‘s Donna Seaman has a good overview of Algren’s career to commemorate the anniversary (h/t Frank Wilson), though the piece doesn’t dive very deeply into his complicated relationship with Chicago. Few authors have had such a love-hate relationship with their home the way Algren did. Tom Wolfe could satirize New York City; William Faulkner‘s characters could despair at the transition from the old South to the new; Armistead Maupin could mock the foibles of San Francisco’s gentry. But Algren fumed at Chicago, was both angry at and helpless about it, like a guy who kept going back to a girlfriend who only takes him back to have somebody to kick around. Algren, of course, had the better romantic metaphor: Loving Chicago, he wrote, was “like loving a woman with a broken nose.”

That line comes from his 1951 prose poem, Chicago: City on the Make, which doesn’t make Seaman’s short list of “Essential Algren.” Make it second, after Wilderness, if not first. I haven’t read anything that matches Algren’s tone in the book—it’s a mash note that throws its elbows around, proud of the city but still outraged at its inherent corruption:

For Paris and London and New York and Rome are all of a piece, their tendrils deep in the black loam of the centuries; like so many all-year-round ferns tethered fast in good iron pots and leaning always, as a natural plant ought, toward what little light there is. But Chicago is some sort of mottled offshoot, with trailers only in swamp and shadow, twisting toward twilight rather than to sun; a loosely jointed sport too hardy for any pot. Yet with that strange malarial cast down its stem….

New York has taken roots as deep as the Empire State Building is tall. Detroit is a parking lot about a sports arena. New Orleans is mellow where it isn’t sear. St. Louis, albeit still green in spots after lo these many springs, has gone as far as it can go. San Francisco is complete. San Francisco appears finished.

But Hustlertown keeps spreading itself all over the prairie grass, always wider and whiter: the high broken horizon of its towers overlooks this inland sea with more dignity than Athens’ and more majesty than Troy’s. Yet the caissons below the towers somehow never secure a strong natural grip on the prairie grasses.

Why so cynical? Blame bad poker games, blame his frustrating affair with Simone de Beauvoir, blame the hustlers and low-lifes he hung out with who inspired his fiction. The newspapers, though, played an especially strong role. As Bill Beuttler‘s fine 2001 article in Chicago magazine points out, when City on the Make came out, the Tribune dismissed it: “A more distorted, partial, unenviable slant was never taken by a man pretending to cover the Chicago story.” Algren got his revenge ten years later, in an afterword to the book, giving the paper both barrels and equating its disrespect to him to the same disrespect the city as the whole gave its citizens:

This journalistic gypsy-switch, this trick of substituting counterfeit values for true ones, leaves few readers, of the multitudes who read the Tribune‘s Sunday book-review, aware that they are really reading, not book-reviews, but editorials.

Nor is the gypsy-switch, as used by the Tribune, limited to that paper. It is the tone that now dominates Chicago in the arts as well as politics. Mediocrity is wanted. Mediocrity is solicited. Mediocrity is honored. And mediocrity will not put up with originality.

To the professional mediocrity, therefore, Chicago is today a city of golden opportunity; whether he reviews books on television or for the Tribune. But to the writer seeking to work creatively, it is a kick in the palatinate.

Arrogant, to be sure—the passage would come across as sour grapes from any other author, and even Algren doesn’t look especially dignified there. But with the passage of time it’s clear that he’s in the right, and Algren was too much the Chicagoan to ever think that calling out the authorities for their mediocrity would change anything; like any good writer, he didn’t worry much about what people would think, just took pride in finding the right words to make his anger known.

Building Strawmen With Marilynne Robinson

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson is a perfect fit for Yale’s Terry Lectures, in which writers, philosophers, and scientists speak about the intersection of science and religion. Few American writers of recent vintage engage with religion with as much depth and sincerity as Robinson—even a lesser novel like last year’s Home is miles ahead of other writers on the subject. Still, on the evidence of the Yale Daily News‘ story on her first lecture, she wasn’t making her arguments particularly clear. The paper reports:

In the first talk of the four-part 2009 Dwight H. Terry lecture series, Robinson dismissed the notion that humans have reached a stage where they have fully unraveled the mysteries of the human condition, an idea she called the “crossing of the threshold.”

Hands up: Who makes the argument that we have unraveled the mysteries of the human condition, or believes in anybody who says so? After coming down hard on a line of thought that nobody believes in anyway, she goes on:

Robinson also found fault with the tendency of academics to take the “intellectual high ground” and dismiss the belief systems of seemingly primitive societies. “Religion is a point of entry for anthropological inquiries whose intents are largely invidious,” Robinson said. “But that ancient religions contemplated cosmic origins should instill awe at what humans are, the mind is.”

Again, it’s hard to imagine that academics are so cavalier in their thinking about ancient/primitive/non-Western societies. If Robinson believes that the very act of an anthropological inquiry is “invidious,” she’s making a broad-brush and hard-to-respect dismissal of an entire academic discipline; if she had evidence of a particularly invidious recent anthropological pursuit, hopefully she actually cited and discussed it. Of course, it’s hard to make too much of this without seeing the text of the actual lecture, and I’m aware that all of this is being run through the filter of a college journalist on deadline. Plus, apparently the talk was a little dense: As one student told the News, “At times it seemed somewhat impenetrable.”

Update, March 29: Videos of the first two lectures are now online.

Sanora Babb’s Bad Timing

by Mark Athitakis, posted in John Steinbeck, Sanora Babb

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin has just launched a handsome online exhibition, Sanora Babb: Stories From the American High Plains, dedicated to the author’s writing and photography during the Great Depression. Babb was born in Oklahoma in 1907 and moved to LA just as the markets crashed; from 1937 to 1939 she worked with migrant farmers as part of the Farm Security Administration. During that time she wrote a novel, Whose Names Are Unknown, based on her experiences.

Sound familiar? Bennett Cerf, head of Random House, felt the same way—figuring there wasn’t room in the market for both Babb’s novel and The Grapes of Wrath, he broke the publisher’s contract with Babb. Whose Names Are Unknown wasn’t published until 2004, a year before her death. Scanning through it, it’s not hard to see what Cerf was so concerned about—Babb’s prose mirrors the same simple prose style, the same rough-hewn nobility in the characters, the same symbolism about the earth and life. One chapter ends with the burial of an infant, and Babb is no less shy about inserting melodrama than Steinbeck was:

At the last he beat the ground down hard with the back of the spade. Suddenly he began to cry. He did not lower his head but stood as he was, his shoulders jerking with hard cruel sobs. He did not know what to do. The broken sounds came out of his throat and his whole body shook. He could not stop because he felt a hard loneliness and despair breaking up in him, crashing against the walls of his being. It was the boy and it was everything unnoticed and unknown in him. “I ain’t cried since I was a boy,” he mumbled. He stopped down on his knees again and pulled loose dirt carelessly over the grave to make it look like the rest of the field. When he had finished he stood still looking at the pure circle of earth around him, the far, smooth, lonely plain. The earth was very clean and fresh after the rain. He could see the long straight fences miles away. They were frail and small so far beneath the great clear morning sky. The desperation of living came up in him again, in anger and humiliation; in anger he shook his fist, shook it hard and fierce at something in the world.

Wisconsin Depth Trip

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Robert Goolrick

I’ve just finished Robert Goolrick‘s debut novel, A Reliable Wife, which may not have been the best choice for airplane reading—its themes of perpetual deception and impending death doesn’t mix well with white-knuckling. But it does draw you in, and if its series of abuses, lusts, poisonings, and general debauchery occasionally seems over-the-top, Goolrick has a fearsome command, and his narration is a fine fit for the story he’s telling—simple but with a slightly demonic touch, like an issue of Tales From the Crypt written by Ernest Hemingway.

Actually, you don’t have to guess at the book’s genuine inspiration, which Goolrick discusses in an afterword, and in a recent Publishers Weekly interview:

I am largely uncomfortable with contemporary fiction. And I wanted to write a novel that had a great story and I started to think of it with the final scene of the novel—the scene in which the garden comes to life. It seemed to me a metaphor for redemption, so I needed a bleak landscape in which that scene would be miraculous. I thought of Wisconsin, which I used to visit quite often on business when I was in advertising, and then I’ve always held Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip very dear to my heart. I think it’s a brilliant book. And so I leafed around that book for probably the 500th time and decided to set it there. His book is set in 1896; I wanted it to be a little later, so there would be electricity and automobiles—a little more modern life.

If you grew up a horror fan—or, in my case, were friends with one growing up—you probably know about Wisconsin Death Trip, which had the sure-fire ability to creep you out without dealing in blood and guts. Words were enough. Lesy’s approach was to set longer stories about the brutality of Wisconsin life against Twitter-brief items from newspapers like this: “The 60 year old wife of a farmer in Jackson, Washington County, killed herself by cutting her throat with a sheep shears.” Add in black-and-white photographs of babies in coffins or headshots of people you knew later became murderers, and voila—nightmares for weeks.

If you care to revisit all this online, the Google Books version of Wisconsin Death Trip includes the words but not the photos; the Wisconsin Historical Society’s Web site has the photos but not the words.

Links: For Art’s Sake

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Colum McCann, Emily Winslow, Junot Diaz, Nelson Algren, Russell Banks, Ward Just

Artist Cindy Kane apparently has an easy time making friends with her writer friends in Martha’s Vineyard: For the past few years she’s been working on a series called “Mapping Writers”, for which Ward Just, Tony Horwitz, Geraldine Brooks, Jules Feiffer, and others contributed pages from their notebooks. (If you happen to be in the Boston area, the Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, Mass., is showing work from the series through May 17.)

The organizers of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s most prestigious literary award have broken with tradition and put a couple of non-Canadians on the judging panel, including Russell Banks. Not everybody is pleased.

New Hampshire author Emily Winslow‘s debut novel, The Whole World, doesn’t come out until next year, but you can moon over her sweet pad in Cambridge, England, in the meantime.

The next issue of PEN America looks great. Included is an excerpt from Colum McCann‘s forthcoming novel, Let the Great World Spin. I very much enjoyed his 2007 novel, Zoli, so I’m looking forward to this one.

Also looking good: The new issue of Stop Smiling, which is thick with interviews with writers, including Paul Auster, Jonathan Lethem, and Junot Diaz. The entire Diaz interview is available free online.

Not available free online but worth chasing down is a piece in the April Harper’s about New York whorehouses by author (and alleged inhuman turd) Nelson Algren. The piece, written in 1979 and included in the forthcoming Algren collection Entrapment and Other Writings, is an almost tender defense of johns, written in the wake of a crackdown on Manhattan brothels:

[The mayor] assumes that the average fellow, in search of sex, wears shades and a false beard and lurks in the shadows near the whorehouse door. When he sees there is no cop in sight, he makes a run for the door, disguises his voice to the girl at the desk, and keeps his coat collar turned up while waiting.

That isn’t how it is. The man walks up to the window in the same way he would walk to the mutuel window at the racetrack, gets his ticket, and hopes for a winner. The mayor makes a false presumption of guilt that causes not only whores to suffer but johns as well. Because it forces both to employ extraordinary means to have an act that is good only when it is kept simple.

Edwidge Danticat Makes a Case

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Edwidge Danticat

Yesterday Edwidge Danticat was at a press conference where two groups, the Florida Immigration Advocacy Center (FIAC) and Human Rights Watch, registered serious complaints about how immigrants to the U.S. are treated while detained. If you know Danticat’s excellent 2007 book, Brother, I’m Dying, you have a sense of how serious the problem is; her uncle Rev. Joseph Dantica died in the custody of U.S. Customs and Homeland Security officials, who she describes as slow to provide him with medical treatment after he escaped to Miami from Haiti.

Rev. Dantica’s story is at the center of FIAC’s report on the problem, Dying for Decent Care: Bad Medicine in Immigration Custody (PDF); in fact, the report is dedicated to him. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reports that Danticat spoke at the press conference, and that she has little reason to believe American authorities have changed their ways:

“When one has a loved one die in this situation, what you hope for, what you pray for is that it never happens to another family, another child, another loved one,” she said at the press conference. “But it keeps happening again and again.”

Miami New Times, which also covered the press conference, received a release yesterday from an ICE spokesperson, which said that new Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is on the case and laid out some baseline medical practices regarding immigrant detentions.

Let’s Make a Canon

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Adam Langer, Ben Fountain, Carter Scholz, Daniel Alarcón, JT Leroy, Ken Kalfus, Laird Hunt, Nathaniel Rich, Russell Banks, Sue Miller, Ward Just

At the Reading Experience, Dan Green is hoping to launch a regular feature dedicated to critical appreciations of American fiction since 1980. This excites me for all the obvious reasons—it could supplant the generally fine but intermittent “In Retrospect” series dedicated to older works, and might even prompt me to start doing more long-form criticism, now that newspaper reviewing doesn’t offer much in the way of that. (When I started doing it a few years back, the standard word count was still around 1,200 words; these days it’s closer to 400.)

I think you and I can both agree on the usual suspects that such a new canon might include—Green’s first choice, Russell Banks‘ Affliction, being one of them. (Wouldn’t Continental Drift be better, though? Anyway.) The list of ten books below is a hasty attempt to propose a few ideas that go beyond the typical choices. In general, they’re all books of relatively recent vintage that I admire but haven’t seen much sustained critical thought about; I’ve clanged a bell for most of them before, here or elsewhere, and I’d be excited to see a smart, precocious critic tackle any one of them.

Laird Hunt, Indiana, Indiana
Daniel Alarcon, Lost City Radio
Nathaniel Rich, The Mayor’s Tongue
Ward Just, Echo House
Sue Miller, The World Below
Adam Langer, Crossing California
JT Leroy, Sarah
Ben Fountain, Brief Encounters With Che Guevara
Carter Scholz, Radiance
Ken Kalfus, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country

Not a very diverse list at first glance, I confess. But as I mentioned, it goes without saying that, say, Marilynne Robinson and Edward P. Jones would be on any longlist. Who else?

Joyce Carol Oates’ Rough Year

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is making the interview rounds again—she’s about to release a new story collection, Dear Husband, which, oddly, doesn’t get mentioned in Chauncey Mabe‘s interview with her for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Doubly odd, because Topic A is the death of Oates’ husband, Raymond J. Smith, last year:

An English professor, scholar and editor of The Ontario Review, Smith shielded Oates, helping make her prodigious output possible.

“I’m living alone now, so I’m literally taking care of the household things he did,” Oates says. “He took care of them well, but really quietly. Suddenly all the finances fell to me, which is stressful.”

Though she notes in the interview that her infamous productivity has gone down since Smith’s death, this is still a busy year for her: A film version of her novella, Rape: A Love Story, is in the works, the Oates Web site Celestial Timepiece is making much of the fact that 2009 marks the 50th anniversary of her first published professional work, and more novels are in the pipeline. In September she’ll publish Little Bird of Heaven, which she described to San Diego CityBeat last November as “a love story in the guise of a mystery; or a mystery in the guise of a love story. Mostly it is an elegy mourning the passing of a way of life in a small city in upstate New York, hard hit by the economic recession of recent decades.” And in January 2010 she’s publish A Fair Maiden, a novel about a young girl who becomes a painter’s model.

At any rate, the pleasure in writing is still there for her, based on a few comments she made to the UK Guardian recently. You have to do it for love, she says, because there’s little point in doing it for money: “A prose fiction writer’s hourly wage, broken down into units, would be in the modest range of the US minimum wage of the 1950s—approximately $1 per hour.”

Links: Stranded

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Elizabeth Bear, Harper Lee, Laura Lippman, Richard Powers

Vanderbilt University’s Jay Clayton teaches a class that I wouldn’t dream of skipping: Biotechnology and Culture: From Victorian Eugenics to Contemporary Genomics, whose syllabus includes Middlesex, Cloud Atlas, White Teeth, Blade Runner, and a whole lot more. That gobstoppingly excellent reading and viewing list is bolstered by a fine blog that’s currently drilling into some plot points of Richard Powers‘ The Gold Bug Variations. (via)

If you’d prefer a primer in the basics, Yale University has posted 26 videos of Amy Hungerford’s course in the American Novel since 1945.

In the Daily Beast, Laura Lippman posts an good list of five of her favorite works of fiction, which includes books by Jack Pendarvis, Philip Roth, Kate Atkinson, Megan Abbot, and Herman Wouk. (Haven’t heard a plug for that last author in quite a while.) (via)

I don’t have the patience to read all the squabbling, but apparently fantasy author Elizabeth Bear launched quite a kerfuffle about racism in her genre.

Which has, in turn, prompted an assertion by an anonymous industry insider that publishing in general has a race problem.

The Second Pass, a new Web site dedicated to reviewing new books and revisiting old ones, has just launched. Looks promising.

The NEA’s Big Read honcho, David Kipen, promises he’ll eat a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird if he can’t get all 128 residents of Kelleys Island, Ohio, to read the book. (I picture a tragic scene where the last holdout, after hours of browbeating, breaks down in tears and cries, “I never learned to read!”) This should come in handy for prep work:

Just a Regular Guy

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Richard Ford

In the new Bookforum, Richard Ford addresses the question of whether his three Frank Bascombe novels were intended to make their hero into an American everyman. He says he’s flattered whenever the subject comes up, but the question also seems to raise his back hairs a little—on top of seeing the idea as too simplistic, he also fears that it may put off some people thinking of reading him for the first time. He writes: “I realize I may not be telling a prospective reader exactly what she or he wants to know about these books, imagined as a ‘trilogy,’ but am only saying what’s on my mind as I’ve begun to think about them all together for the first time—and wanting to free a new reader from some binding and unlikable expectancies, while admitting him to better ones.”

As somebody who hasn’t gotten to the Bascombe novels—a sad admission given this site’s nameplate, I know—I can say that I’ve never been put off from reading the books because critics saw something emblematic in them. If anything that made them more appealing, like an opportunity to meet Rabbit Angstrom’s brighter, more thoughtful cousin. Ford makes a good point, though, that intent is everything in this case—that deliberately trying to create an everyman type (unless you’re Philip Roth) is setting yourself up for failure. The best part of the essay describes how Bascombe tried to force himself into the narrative of Independence Day, and Ford’s ultimately failed attempts to keep him from knocking down the door:

[O]ver that time I began to notice that all the father’s projected calculations about life and events seemed, in my notes, to “sound” like those of Frank Bascombe—the character who’d narrated The Sportswriter. I made dogged efforts to scuttle all thought of a “linked” book. I was fearful of helplessly writing that first novel over again; fearful of having more ambition than skill or sense; fearful of gloomy failure. And yet these fears finally succumbed to the recognition that to be given a “voice” and with it an already-plausible character who can transact the complex world in reasonably intelligent, truthful, even mirthful ways was just too much of a gift from the writing gods to decline. And so Independence Day, after some considerable prewriting adjustments to my original plan, came into existence.