Author: Mark Athitakis

Links: Man Oh Man

by Mark Athitakis, posted in E.L. Doctorow, Joyce Carol Oates, Rivka Galchen

Rivka Galchen, author of an excellent debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, and nominee for Canada’s Governor General’s award for fiction (she was born in Toronto and lives in New York), registers a complaint about America’s literary patriarchy: “[I]n Canada, more than half of the prominent Canadian writers are women, whereas in the U.S. it’s just boys, boys, boys—and not even manly boys. I mean, we have a lot of great writers down here but I’m sort of ashamed about that.”

E.L. Doctorow recalls his “assault on the boundaries between fact and fiction.”

Joyce Carol Oates reports back from Las Vegas’ Liberace Museum.

Yiyun Li, Now Screening

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Yiyun Li

Galleys for books coming out in 2009 have begun making the rounds, and I’m curious what the response will be to Yiyun Li‘s The Vagrants, a somber and knotty but very affecting novel about a day in the life of a rural Chinese town during the tail end of Maoism. (“Gold Boy, Emerald Girl,” recently published in the New Yorker, isn’t an excerpt.) Li, a Beijing-born writer now living in Oakland, Calif., has gotten a little more attention lately for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Wayne Wang’s recent adaptation of one of her short stories, though it hasn’t done much business at the box office. A companion film also based on a Li short story, The Princess of Nebraska won’t do business at the box office at all. Wang released it on YouTube earlier this month:

Regardless of how much either film earns, the experience of making them at least exposed how Chinese censorship remains alive and well. Over the summer Li wrote an essay in the San Francisco Chronicle about what happened when a Chinese investor wanted a stake in the film version of Prayers:

Not long after I finished the script, Wayne told me that one of the top entertainment companies in China had expressed interest in partially funding the film. Soon preproduction began, and the film was set to shoot in late September. But everything comes with a price. As the shooting date drew near, the Chinese investors politely requested a line of dialogue about the Tiananmen Square protest be taken out of the script. Thinking we could sneak the idea back in a less explicit way, we obliged. But soon another request arrived, and another, asking for more lines to be cut. By the sixth request we decided that, as independent artists, we could not work like this. A week before shooting was to start, the investors withdrew their money. The last line they had asked to be cut: “Communism is a good thing. Only it has fallen into some bad hands.”

Richard Powers in Sequence

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Richard Powers

The latest issue of GQ has a feature by novelist Richard Powers, who agreed to have his entire genome sequenced to a) learn more about the process and b) see if he’s at serious risk for any diseases. As for a), it’s clear that getting our entire genomes mapped is becoming cheaper and faster, privacy issues be damned. As for b), if you can tolerate GQ‘s clunky web site, which breaks out the story onto 21 pages, the whole thing is worth your time. A sample:

I ask [George Church, director of the Lipper Center for Computational Genetics at Harvard Medical School] if genomicists will ever be able to look at a person’s alleles and deduce something about his or her temperament. I have in mind the novelist’s territory, those mysterious components—warmth, spontaneity, humor—that, however uncomfortable it makes us to admit, seem to be somewhat to largely heritable. Will a genetic signature ever help us understand the origin of high-level behavioral traits? Church gazes off into the distance, with that look of pure experimental pleasure. “Well, I don’t think there’s a huge difference between high-level behavioral traits, low-level behavioral traits, and physical traits,” he says. “They’re all physical, in some sense.”

(via)

John Updike, Chauvinist

by Mark Athitakis, posted in John Updike

Emily Nussbaum doesn’t feel especially compelled to be reverent toward John Updike in her interview with him for New York magazine, which is a nice and unusual thing. Like a lot of critics, she’s not impressed with his sequel to The Witches of Eastwick, the new The Widows of Eastwick, and the interview centers on some of his own personal flaws, from aging to divorce to his perception of women. Part of the fun is that Updike is game for all this, and Nussbaum that gets her jabs in subtly. I tend to get impatient with irrelevant descriptions of somebody’s looks (“she said, tugging the sleeves of her robin’s-egg-blue cashmere sweater”; “he said, removing his horn-rimmed glasses, pondering them owlishly, then putting them back on”). But this bit, where he recalls writing Witches, works beautifully:

“The era in which I wrote it was full of feminism and talk about how women should be in charge of the world,” recalls Updike, waggling the antennae of his eyebrows. “There would be no war. There would be nothing unpleasant, in fact, if women were in charge of the world. So I tried to write this book about women who, in achieving freedom of a sort, acquired power, the power that witches would have if there were witches. And they use it to kill another witch. So they behave no better with their power than men do. That was my chauvinistic thought.”

——

Housekeeping Note: This blog’s traffic data tell me that a substantial proportion of readers are in the D.C. area, so I’ve gone ahead and added a page of upcoming D.C. author readings and appearances, which at the moment lists events through next spring. This is all hand-built, so there are likely a few things wrong or missing; if you have any suggestions, updates, or corrections, please drop me a line.

Links: Selling Points

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Horace Engdahl, John Dos Passos, Mark Twain, Richard Russo

A Cape Cod home that was once owned by John Dos Passos and regularly played host to parties featuring the likes of Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, and Arthur Schlesinger is up for sale.

A teach-the-controversy idea worth getting behind: A Chicago-area school had students stage a debate over whether Huckleberry Finn should be taught in schools.

After all, who the hell knows what’s going to get high-schoolers interested in reading these days?

Would Horace Engdahl‘s bloviations have been more acceptable coming from an American?

Richard Russo knows Main Street. Main Street is a friend of his. A Sarah Palin, he says, is no Main Streeter: “”Her view doesn’t work in either small-town world, the nostalgic one or the more realistic one. She just misses both points.”

Didion’s Pre-Electoral Tension

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Joan Didion

The New York Review of Books‘ Web site has compiled some thoughts and observations from its contributors about the upcoming presidential election. Joan Didion, never much of an optimist when it comes to power-brokers’ ability to affect change, takes that last shred of hope and optimism you might have been feeling and cuts it to tatters. The campaign, she writes, has neglected any serious discussion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, race, intelligent design, the economy, education—and, perhaps least discussed of all, the role of presidential power. Didion’s final blow:

We could forget the 70 percent of American eighth graders who do not now and never will read at eighth-grade levels, meaning they will never qualify to hold one of those jobs we no longer have. We could forget that we ourselves induced the coma, by indulging the government in its fantasy of absolute power, wielded absolutely. So general is this fantasy by now that we approach this election with no clear idea where bottom is: what damage has been done, what alliances have been formed and broken, what concealed reefs lie ahead. Whoever we elect president is about to find some of that out.

9,000 Hours With Salvatore Scibona

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Marilynne Robinson, Peter Matthiessen, Salvatore Scibona

I’ve only read one of the fiction finalists for the National Book Award—Marilynne Robinson‘s Home—so I don’t have much to say about the mini-controversy over whether Peter Matthiessen‘s Shadow Country should have been considered. (Back in May, Michael Dirda argued in the New York Review of Books that the novel should be considered distinct from the three previously published novels that feed it.) In confess, though, that Salvatore Scibona‘s The End is news to me completely. The Daily Iowan recently caught up with Scibona, an alum of the Iowa Writers Workshop, who explained what went into making the novel:

His début novel, The End, is the product of 10 years of consistent, dedicated effort during which he committed to writing three hours a day, six days a week. I’ll save you the arithmetic: That amounts to more than 9,000 hours exerted to create a single 300-page novel….

The End describes a community of Italian immigrants living in Ohio in 1953. The novel centers on a baker named Rocco Lagrassa, but also gives voice to five other characters as a single day unfolds in their lives. The effect, as Scibona described it, is a “haunted sense of déjà vu” as the reader’s understanding of Rocco’s world becomes increasingly complex and informed….

“The characters are all made up,” Scibona said. “I’m sure I take little snippets of things people say, and sometimes I’ll borrow a nose or hair from somebody, but in terms of the souls of the characters, I try really hard to let them emerge on their own terms.”

Gladwell on Fountain

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ben Fountain

As I’ve noted a few times before here, I’m a great fan of Ben Fountain’s 2006 short-story collection, Brief Encounters With Che Guevara. So is Malcolm Gladwell—or, rather, he’s greatly interested in Fountain’s rise as a fiction writer, which wasn’t nearly as “overnight” as some of his press implied. In a piece in the New Yorker on the nature of genius, Gladwell describes Fountain’s long path to publication:

But Ben Fountain’s success was far from sudden. He quit his job at Akin, Gump in 1988. For every story he published in those early years, he had at least thirty rejections. The novel that he put away in a drawer took him four years. The dark period lasted for the entire second half of the nineteen-nineties. His breakthrough with “Brief Encounters” came in 2006, eighteen years after he first sat down to write at his kitchen table. The “young” writer from the provinces took the literary world by storm at the age of forty-eight.

The hard work shows in the writing. Here’s what I wrote about the book for Kirkus Reviews:

Eight powerful stories, most of them set in the world’s grimmest corners.

Well-traveled American writers can be hard to come by these days, and fewer still would go to the places where many of Fountain’s characters languish. In “Asian Tiger,” a golf pro who blew his shot at the big time gets work the only place he can—a resort in Myanmar, where he helps toxically corrupt military leaders work on their swings while they strike deals with equally immoral foreign profiteers; in “The Lion’s Mouth,” a charity worker in Sierra Leone struggles to make her relationship with a diamond smuggler jibe with her altruistic efforts to help the women who are victimized by that very trade. It would be easy enough to turn these plots into pat lectures about the injustices of globalization in general or Ugly Americans in particular, but Fountain’s smarter than that; much like Graham Greene, he has a nuanced understanding of how these circumstances affect both native and visitor, and like Greene, he can approach this kind of material with a light touch, even humor. In the title story, the narrator learns that one of his coworkers at a moving company claims to have killed the famous Cuban revolutionary, and in “The Good Ones Are Already Taken,” a special-ops soldier returns from Haiti to his wife in Fayetteville, N.C., where he tells her he’s now married to a lwa, or voodoo goddess, to whom he’ll now have to devote himself on Tuesdays and Saturdays. The closing story, “Fantasy for Eleven Fingers,” initially seems to be the outlier: It’s the story of Anna Kuhl, an Austrian Jewish piano prodigy with 11 fingers who becomes a phenomenon in the classical-music world. But the author’s main theme is alienation, and the story’s conclusion proves its effects can be as savage in a German concert hall as in the Colombian jungle.

An impeccable debut collection; if Fountain can keep it up, he’s an heir to Paul Theroux.

Still Life With Matt Bondurant

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Matt Bondurant

Something will have gone seriously wrong if the second half of Matt Bondurant‘s second novel, The Wettest County in the World, turns out to be a flop—I’m halfway through it, and it’s making a serious argument for being one of my favorite novels of the year. The story focuses on a generation of moonshiners in southern Virginia, with some perspective offered by Sherwood Anderson, who in 1934 visited the region to work on a story about the trade. A brief passage captures the the emotional detail of Bondurant’s writing, and how he anthropomorphizes the homebrew whiskey’s spectral power:

Hell, Anderson thought, that seems to be an appropriate thing to drink to, and he raised the glass to his lips and downed the last sip. When he closed his eyes for a moment he saw a great shape in a dark field, above him in the indeterminate emptiness. Its force and mass were terrifying, its slow, descending sway. By the time he got his shoes off and lay back down the whiskey crept up his brain stem and took him, dead asleep before he laid his head down.

No recent interviews with Bondurant are making the rounds that I’ve noticed, but his recent appearance on Apostrophe Cast’s reading series is worth checking out—the author reads four poems, three of which are about Peanuts characters.

Levine’s Last Stand

by Mark Athitakis, posted in David Levine

Vanity Fair intermittently winds up running an engaging story amid its celebrity coverage and overwritten Sebastian Junger dispatches, and David Margolick‘s profile of longtime New York Review of Books illustrator David Levine is a must-read. Levine, now in his 80s, is losing his eyesight; the NYRB hasn’t quite fired him, but they’ve stopped using his work, and Margolick argues that Levine ought to fight for better treatment, given his role in defining the look and attitude of the publication. (Go to its Web site—which, by the way, has very good new pieces by Joyce Carol Oates on Annie Proulx and Colm Toibin on the similarities between James Baldwin and Barack Obama—and you’ll see that the homepage is big on pushing Levine calendars. The tab icon for the Web site, at least in Firefox, is a Levine caricature of Shakespeare.) Margolick’s glum summation:

Levine is proud, even hypersensitive—when the Review recently sent him a wristwatch featuring one of his Shakespeare caricatures, he misconstrued it as a parting gift—and refuses to send in anything on spec. And the magazine, which continues to sell David Levine mouse pads, David Levine postcards, and David Levine reproductions—from which Levine derives only token royalties—is too timid or too pragmatic or maybe too considerate to ask. So the awkward pas de deux continues. Such is combat between habitual noncombatants.

The magazine also includes a slideshow of Levine illustrations, emphasizing his renderings of politicians and power brokers. The NYRB site has its own very deep gallery, including one for American writers.