Author: Mark Athitakis

Giving the Story Away With Flannery O’Connor

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Flannery O'Connor

I’m in the middle of reading Brad Gooch‘s so-far-excellent biography of Flannery O’Connor, Flannery, which has prompted me to revisit a couple of her stories, “Good Country People” and “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” As with a lot of authors that made it into my high-school literary anthologies, I read O’Connor way, way too early—I didn’t know enough about the world to get the irony, and I didn’t know enough about writing to get how carefully she calibrated her strange, skewed Southern characters. (There’s a beautifully turned couple of paragraphs in “The Life You Save,” where O’Connor conflates the fixer-upper nature of an old car and the mute woman in the story, about 75 words that are at once hilarious yet with a note of compassion to them too; O’Connor found a way to smirk at people where any other writer would just poke fun.)

A passage in Gooch’s biography struck me as interesting and perhaps relevant today, given the mood of mild-to-extreme panic from publishers about publicizing books, and some of the anxiety writers feel these days to be perpetually self-promoting. Gooch writes about a 1955 appearance that O’Connor made on a brand-new afternoon TV show about books on New York’s WRCA-TV called Galley Proof. The idea was that the host, New York Times Book Review assistant editor Harvey Breit, would interview an author, and the interview would be interspersed with a dramatization of the author’s book—I imagine a terrifying mix of titlepage.tv and America’s Most Wanted.

The story to be dramatized, as it happens, was “The Life You Save.” Gooch characterizes the introverted O’Connor’s disinterest in the proceedings by excerpting an exchange between her and Breit:

Breit: Flannery, would you like to tell our audience what happens in that story?

O’Connor: No, I certainly would not. I don’t think you can paraphrase a story like that. I think there’s only one way to tell it and that’s the way it is told in the story.

In fact, the whole conversation is pretty awkward: It’s available in its entirety in the book Conversations With Flannery O’Connor, which just happens to be available in its entirety online. Breit talks much more than O’Connor does, and O’Connor responds tersely, humoring all his needless references to Mann and Cezanne and Shakespeare. It’s hard to tell without having seen the tape, but by the end Breit sounds like he’s flailing and O’Connor seems defeated:

Breit: And I, for myself, think that although Miss O’Connor can be called a Southern writer, I agree that she is not a Southern writer, just as Faulkner isn’t and that they are, for want of a better term, universal writers, writing about all mankind and about relationships and the mystery of relationships. I think that for me the distinction of Miss O’Connor is not the oblique, refined style that we’re getting so much these days. I’m relieved that you write as simply as you do. I think it may have come out in this small dramatization. Do you think so?

O’Connor: Yes, I think….

Breit: I hope so.

A lesson, perhaps, that not all authors, or critics, are made for television—or should feel forced to be.

Brunch With Robert Coover

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Robert Coover

Short notice, but those reading this on Tuesday morning might want to tune in to a talk with Robert Coover from the campus at the University of Pennsylvania. Go to the Web site for Penn’s Kelly Writers House at 10:30 a.m., and you should be able to catch the discussion, featuring an author who doesn’t do much in the way of interviewing. (I’ve looked around to see if the site archives presentations from its impressive list of fellows, but I can’t dig anything up.)

If you’re looking for a primer on Coover, or a refresher, professor Michael S. Hennessey, who’s teaching a class in postmodern American fiction to a batch of lucky students, has gathered up a set of relevant Coover links. Coover may be the only pomo author to be attached to a crummy Alicia Silverstone film.

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Dept. of Self-Promotion note: My review of Bill German‘s memoir of his life with the Rolling Stones, Under Their Thumb, is in today’s Washington Post.

Junot Diaz’s Victory Lap

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Junot Diaz

Junot Diaz is just about done talking to you: By May, he tells the Cornell Daily Sun, he’ll be finished with readings and appearances related to his excellent 2007 novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, so he can finally get cracking on a new work. Diaz covers a handful of topics in a Q&A with the paper, including the death of literary culture (“Literacy has never been a part of global cultural practice”), Horace Engdahl (“I think that he’s simultaneously a dumbass, and I think he’s simultaneously correct”), and his best advice for teaching writing:

I teach only undergraduates who don’t want to be writers … I just wanted to say that cause it’s a different energy … the kids … they’re more fun.

Writing is for me more of an excuse to make the students critical-minded. You know … There’s really no magic. Half of it is exposure. You expose them to the forms, the grammar of whatever convention you’re talking about, whether it’s the short story or the novel … you have the students practice it. The third component is that you really have to have a tremendous amount of compassion. You have to teach the students how to be gentle with themselves, not to be so critical, not to be so incredibly self-eviscerating. The only way you can model that is that if you actually have compassion. I think all three are the components that you tend to end up bringing to the class.

What the Heck Is Dale Peck Thinking?

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Dale Peck

Last week the Washington Post ran a review by Elizabeth Hand that all but vaporized Dale Peck‘s new novel, Body Surfing. Peck, the author of literary fiction and well-known takedowns in the New Republic has recently undertaken an odd career shift, moving into thrillers and children’s books (plus a highly remunerative deal to collaborate with Heroes creator Tim Kring). So, closing her review of Body Surfing, Hand had to ask: “Given his past as a respected writer of literary fiction, and a possible future in the land of commercial blockbusters, whatever possessed Dale Peck to write this book?”

The day before the review ran, the Southeast Review had the answer, and a few more besides. In a wide-ranging Q&A, Peck says part of the impetus for Body Surfing was an interest in accessing his inner Stephen King:

The initial idea, I have to say, was just one of those inspirational flashes: “What if there was a world in which…?” But in developing it, I did think a lot about early Stephen King novels, of which I was (and am) a huge fan. I’m not the first person to notice that one of King’s greatest strengths as a writer is his insistence on locating horror within the domestic context, and in Body Surfing I wanted to make sure that readers experience Jasper as a real teenager before he became a demon—that the loss of our everyday existence is every bit as big of a loss as the destruction of the world or the universe or life as we know it, which seems to be the stake in so many thrillers these days.

And, Peck might argue, Hand’s negative review of Body Surfing is all he can expect these days. In the interview, he says that his takedowns (especially the infamous Rick Moody one) have mainly hurt his reputation as a writer, and made it harder for his books to find a home. He figures that any and all potential reviewers would have their knives out, and that left publishers wary:

[E]ditors would—cynically or wisely, depending on your point of view—reject my work, often without reading it, simply because they felt that external factors would make it impossible for it to succeed in the marketplace. At the same time, when I submitted my children’s book anonymously, nearly every publisher in town bid on it, so I knew the problem wasn’t my writing, but how people thought about my writing—or, even more ridiculously, how people thought other people thought about my writing. It’s all pretty tedious, and still dogs me to this day.

Links: Get It Right

by Mark Athitakis, posted in John Barth, John Updike, Marlon James, Richard Yates, Sinclair Lewis, Wallace Stegner

I’ve just finished Marlon James‘ second novel, The Book of Night Women, which is every bit as good as Maud Newton says it is. (If you’re in D.C., he reads at Borders L Street on March 3.)

An excellent blog post by Dave Tabler on the contretemps between Sinclair Lewis and William Stidger, the model for Elmer Gantry. (h/t Whet Moser)

Wednesday marked the 100th anniversary of Wallace Stegner‘s birth. The New York Times‘ Timothy Egan recalls how Stegner was screwed over by the Times.

The film version of Revolutionary Road tanked at the box office, but the book’s doing fine.

Scott Esposito crowdsourced his decision about which John Barth book to read first.

Michael Dirda writes an appreciation of John Updike for the Chronicle of Higher Education. And that’s it: I’m done with John Updike appreciations until the biography comes out.

Copy Editing the Great American Novel

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Denis Johnson

The Bellingham, Wa., Herald has an interesting casual Q&A with Dave Cole, a freelance editor who works on a lot of high-end literary fiction, including novels like Denis Johnson‘s Tree of Smoke, Johnson’s forthcoming Nobody Move, and Aravind Adiga‘s The White Tiger. Cole appears to be more of a copy editor than the Robert Gottlieb type the interviewer implies, but he still plays a valuable role. As Andrea Barrett points out, “In addition to tracking down and checking an awful lot of obscure details and spellings and place names, he also did that admirable thing of not fixing what wasn’t broken.”

Cole discusses the hardest part of the gig:

My greatest challenge is to determine what the author’s rules are. You can’t impose grammatical rules on manuscripts when an author deliberately breaks rules (for effect). I have to learn the structure well enough to call attention to it when an author strays. I have to be diplomatic, because you want an author to hear what you’re saying.

A particularly difficult task in the case of Tree of Smoke, I’d imagine. Cole isn’t mentioned in the novel’s acknowledgments, but then, attentive copy editors rarely get the credit they deserve.

March Through the South

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, Margaret Mitchell, William Faulkner

Next month marks the launch of the Southern Literary Trail, which honors 18 towns in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi that were home to some of the country’s best-loved writers. There’ll be readings on the grounds of William Faulkner‘s house; performances at the Margaret Mitchell house and museum; screenings of films based on the works of Carson McCullers; a whole bunch of events related to the centennial of Eudora Welty‘s birth; and more. The very idea of it was enough to get Harper Lee out of doors for a bit recently.

What If We Give It Away?

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Stona Fitch

The London Independent has a feature on Stona Fitch, novelist, Scruffy the Cat multi-instrumentalist, and founder of the Concord, Massachusetts-based Concord Free Press, which gives away copies of limited-edition novels under the condition that you give money to a charity of your choosing, and then pass the book along. It’s no way to make a living, but at least it’s a more noble method of free distribution than that of Wild Animus.

Fitch, who’s published his 2001 novel, Senseless, with Soho Press, says he’s gotten some pushback about the enterprise from some in the publishing industry:

“It’s a threatening idea to publishers. A couple have said it’s the death of the business and I should stop immediately,” Fitch laughs. A tiny not-for-profit organisation is not about to topple the bestseller list or reduce J K Rowling to begging on the streets. But it is trying to effect a change in attitude, something reflected in the website’s strapline: “Free their books and their minds will follow”.

“I’m not saying every book should be free, but the inmates have the keys to the asylum now,” he says. “Publishing books is not hard, it’s making money from publishing that’s really hard. We’re blessedly relieved of the burden of profitability.”

Interesting phrase, “burden of profitability.” To be more precise, the burden is to be profitable to a degree that the corporate owners of the mainstream publishing industry demand. Much like the newspaper industry, book publishers have shifted from a model that was long comfortable with grocery-store profit margins to one that was demanding double-digit profit percentages year over year, as Gideon Lewis-Kraus points out in one of the few useful details in what is an overall silly piece in Harper’s about the Frankfurt Book Fair. (The piece is chiefly concerned with skewering the vanity of agents and publishing honchos—as if such vanity were unique to the publishing industry, as if Morgan Entrekin would be a better publisher if he were a better dancer, dancing to better music at a better party.) So if Fitch wants to make some of his efforts available for free, that may be a better value proposition for him in the long run—he’s building more goodwill with an audience than he could with a large publisher. Everybody in the publishing industry is now facing an era of creative destruction, so clearly some new models are in order.

But Fitch’s efforts, however noble and potentially valuable, don’t address how publishers and authors make money right now, while everybody’s getting vigorously Schumpetered. I’ll be curious to hear how successful indie publisher Two Dollar Radio will be with its subscription model, where $50 gets you at least five of the books it’ll put out this year. I don’t pay very close attention to the publishing industry—watching the sausage-making processes ruined me as a music fan—but it seems that whatever efficiencies a publisher gains from such a model (a better sense of number of readers and anticipated income) is lashed to a stronger need to better brand your company (“Why do I want every book you publish?”) and retooling a list to be more subscriber-friendly could come at the expense of worthy writers who suddenly don’t “fit” the brand. In the effort to avoid the burden of profitability, such systems can become as corporate as the ones indies are trying to avoid.

Links: Government Work

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Akhil Sharma, Gerald Early, Ha Jin, Harriet E. Wilson, John Updike, Joseph O'Neill, Marie Arana

Propaganda alert: America.gov, a Web site of the State Department, is publishing essays from the latest edition of its eJournal USA, which this month focuses on multicultural aspects of American literature. Among those included are Ha Jin (whose excellent essay collection The Writer as Migrant is excerpted), Marie Arana, Gerald Early, and Akhil Sharma.

Responding the Stuart Evers‘ celebration of American English in the Guardian, D.G. Myers has a few thoughts on how the language shifts depending on whether you’re in the South or whether you’re Philip Roth.

Harriet E. Wilson, author of what’s presumed to be the first novel by an African American woman, 1859’s Our Nig, was recently learned to be a hair-product entrepreneur.

Wyatt Mason follows up on the Joseph O’Neill firmament kerfuffle not once but twice.

Writing in the New York Review of Books, Ian McEwan studies how John Updike invented Rabbit Angstrom’s middle-class nobility: “Harry’s education extends no further than high school, his view is further limited by a range of prejudices and a stubborn, combative spirit, and yet he is the vehicle for a half-million-word meditation on postwar American anxiety, failure, and prosperity. A mode had to be devised to make this possible, and that involved pushing beyond the bounds of realism. In a novel like this, Updike insisted, you have to be generous and allow your characters eloquence, “and not chop them down to what you think is the right size.”

Lastly, if your reading choices are largely dictated by the number of awards a book has pulled in, this should come in handy.

God Bless (Cliche-Ridden) America

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Joseph O'Neill

Could folks living in the U.K. please make up their mind about how they feel about American writers? Just the other day, Joseph O’Neill was all but dismissing American fiction as a spent force, but this morning the Guardian‘s Stuart Evers writes about realizing that most of his shelf space is filled with books by Yanks:

American fiction fascinates because of the country it seeks to depict: its vastness, its extremes of landscape and temperatures, its hundreds of races, its gulfs between wealth and poverty. When permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Horace Engdahl called American fiction “insular” he was right: when you’ve got so many stories to tell at home, why would you look abroad?

Fair enough. But as much as I support Evers’ enthusiasm, I get the feeling he’s got a wrong, or at least narrow, idea of what American writing is. To show how much he prefers American English over British English, he comes up with a representative sentence from each:

Mary fills up at the gas station, then drives her Chevy Impala to Roy’s Diner.

Mary fills up at the petrol station, then drives her Nissan Micra to Roy’s Rolls.

Sure, the British sentence is a little drab, but the American one is a cavalcade of cliches. Gas stations, Chevys, and diners might be nice to work with if it’s 1932 and your name is James M. Cain, but Evers’ sentence doesn’t prove that American English is somehow better—only that we pulled off noir a lot better than his countrymen did. The notion that American stories are all about the open road and some troublesome dame is a deeply ingrained one; foreigners believe it the same way they believe that Chicago is an interesting city because it’s where Michael Jordan played basketball. Reducing the country’s fictional product to a handful of notions risks marginalizing it—and validating O’Neill’s argument. Not that either writer has the power to wreck an entire country’s literary output. Perhaps it’s enough to be thankful that the British are still concerned about it.