Author: Mark Athitakis

One Paragraph: Tobias Wolff, “Smorgasbord”

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Tobias Wolff

“Smorgasbord” is included in Tobias Wolff’s Our Story Begins, a collection of both old and new short stories, and it exemplifies his talent for subtly tracking a character’s emotional shifts. The narrator is a prep-school student on scholarship who can’t afford to go home on break; Crosley is a classmate; Linda is the stepmother of a fellow student they barely know, and who they suspect is the son of a Latin-American dictator. The smorgasbord they wind up going to is miles below Linda’s station, and she’s clearly taking it in with mild amusement. For the narrator, however, this is his big chance—to prove his virility, his classiness, his proper place in the prep-school order. In this moment you can see how his perspective on the restaurant shifts from acceptance (we know he’s gone there plenty; it’s cheap) to contempt:

Linda smoked another cigarette while we ate. She watched the other tables as if she were at a movie. I tried to eat with a little finesse and so did Crosley, dabbing his lips with a napkin between every bulging mouthful, but some of the people around us had completely slipped their moorings. They ducked their heads low to shovel up their food, and while they chewed it they looked around suspiciously and circled their plates with their forearms. A big family to our left was the worst. There was something competitive and desperate about them; they seemed determined to eat their way into a condition where they would never have to eat again. You’d have thought they were refugees from some great hunger, that outside these walls the land was afflicted with drought and barrenness. I felt a kind of desperation myself, as if I were growing emptier with every bite I took.

Roundup: The Chicago Way

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Herman Melville, Julia Alvarez, Paul Auster, Sara Paretsky

Nancy Schnog, writing in the Washington Post, figures that books like Julia Alvarez‘s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents threaten to alienate teens from reading, and that high-school reading lists need a rethink. Commentaries on books have been done to death, she writes, and “Asking our students for yet another written commentary has a certain absurd ring to it, no?” Well, I didn’t think the goal of asking high-schoolers to write about a book was to extract shiny new insights about The Great Gatsby—just to test their comprehension and analytical skills. I also don’t see how it helps to further coddle an everybody-gets-a-trophy generation by wringing one’s hands over a 14-year-old boy who doesn’t like the book about Latinas because he himself isn’t Latina. But Schnog’s the teacher….

John McCain got through his ordeal in a POW camp by lecturing on the history of American literature. His cellmate Orson Swindle says McCain’s command of the facts wasn’t especially solid, though. “We only had the facts half right, but John said nobody knew the difference,” Swindle tells the Associated Press.

The Guardian‘s review of Philip Hoare‘s Leviathan makes the critical study of all things whale-related sound fantastic. (Naturally, there’s plenty of ruminating on Moby-Dick.) Alas, it’s not yet available in the United States.

The London Times interviews Paul Auster about Man in the Dark, a book I’m clanging on about more than usual because it’s one of my favorite novels of the year. Spoiler alert: the piece discloses a late-breaking plot point in the novel.

And again in the Post, crime novelist and blogger Sara Paretsky ponders the kind of bare-knuckle Chicago politics that she and Barack Obama grew to know:

[M]y real political baptism came in 1971, on a cold November election day. The city’s elections were notoriously corrupt, and I agreed to be a poll watcher in my South Side precinct. I watched the Democratic precinct captain repeatedly enter the booth with voters while the two election judges (one Republican, one Democrat) and a cop stood idly by. When I protested to the judges, the cop frog-marched me to the alley behind the polling place, slammed me against the wall and said, “Girlie, we’ve been running elections here since before you were born. You go home.”

Auster and Money

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Paul Auster

Paul Auster‘s Hand to Mouth is one of my favorite starving-artist memoirs, and it’s nice to see it come up in Ed Champion‘s interview with Auster—whose new novel, Man in the Dark, is just out. Champion asks Auster whether his fixation on the specific cost of things speaks to the money worries he chronicled in his memoir. To which he says:

[T]he only good thing about making money is that you don’t have to think about money. It’s the only value. Because if you don’t have it, you’re crushed. And for a long period in my life, I was crushed. And so maybe this is a reflection of those tough years. I don’t know. I don’t know…. I’m generous. I give good tips. It’s just — the way I live my life, ironically enough, is: I don’t want anything. I’m not a consumer. I don’t crave objects. I don’t have a car. We don’t have a country house. We don’t have a boat. We don’t have anything that lots of people have. And I’m not interested. I barely can go shopping for clothes. I find it difficult to walk into stores. The whole thing bores me so much. I guess the only thing that I spend money on is cigars and food and alcohol. Those are the main expenses.

(Via)

The Shortcomings of Shortcomings…

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Adrian Tomine

Or at least its readers. A lot of articles about contemporary American literature note the growth industry in assimilation narratives—led by Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Diaz, and Ha Jin, to pick just three of the more obvious examples. But to hear Kenny Tanemura tell it in a piece for AsianWeek, the lessons of those stories don’t easily penetrate the minds of college students. Tanemura, who teaches composition at Purdue University, had the excellent idea of teaching Adrian Tomine‘s Shortcomings to his class. But:

One was confused and dismayed by the Asian lesbian character, and others were confused about the main character’s sway toward assimilation and about the forces that impacted this flow. Stripped of any understanding or curiosity about the intersection of race and desire in relationships, my students could only see Tomine’s characters out of context…. My students considered Ben Tanaka a one-dimensional character—merely a man who whines for no reason except to unnecessarily annoy his girlfriend. At best, a few perceptive students might say things like, “It seems like he’s ashamed of his culture and wants to be more accepted.”

Our Fascinating Russian-Americans

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Gary Shteyngart, Keith Gessen, Lara Vapnyar, Olga Grushin

I’m not sure how you get away with writing a lengthy piece on big-deal Russian-American novelists without once mentioning Olga Grushin; perhaps only the Russian-American novelists living in New York count. Still, Emily Gould‘s awful-titled piece on the alleged trend for Russia! is an interesting read, even if a lot of the quotes from Gary Shteyngart and Keith Gessen suggest they’re wary of her thesis that these writers are (ironic caps Gould’s) So Hot Right Now. (Gessen, for his part, is resistant to be included in this grouping, and no agent or publisher is quoted.) And Gould’s riff on Lara Vapnyar seems to argue that Russian-American authors have truly arrived only because you can now treat them with easy condescension:

[Vapnyar] is the most authentically Russian member of the club for the simple reason that her spoken English is still somewhat wobbly. She’s been able to distill that linguistic insecurity into an emphatically plain, nearly featureless writing style the New Yorker fell in love with. It gave her a career: “I had never written fiction before, in any language, and I spoke English with a monstrous accent and tons of grammatical mistakes,” she reminisces in a recent essay. It also made her a few enemies. “When my first story appeared in the New Yorker… one of my American friends said, ‘What should I do to get published in the New Yorker? Screw up my English?’” (This magazine’s editor once opined in a public forum that Vapnyar’s fiction “gets published for the same reason Thai elephants’ paintings get exhibited in galleries”; he has since recanted, and even translated one of Vapnyar’s short stories into Russian).

Mansbach’s Race Question

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Adam Mansbach

Scott Thill questions for Adam Mansbach read like the thoughts of a man just freed from a Cultural Studies Department subbasement. (“Are you as done with white people as I am?” “Do you feel this fear of a literal end to the Jews raise its head in macro or micro form in your novel?”) But Mansbach—who’s written a pretty good new novel, The End of the Jews, and can put together a pretty great mixtape—gets a lot of room to expound, which makes some of the silly starting points forgivable. Much of the interview, like the novel, turns on the intersection of black and Jewish culture in modern America:

One of the most fascinating stories of the 20th century, and one that I try to tell in The End of the Jews, is how both Jewish assimilation and Jewish self-identity have relied on the immutability of black Otherness. As the Jews have become whiter and richer, we’ve also gained the ability to engage in the same kind of complacency and hypocrisy that has long characterized the rest of white liberal America. Jews can now lament racial injustice without either fighting or acknowledging the ways in which it benefits us. The post-World War II Jewish credo has been to ‘never forget,’ and maintain eternal vigilance against the smallest rustling of anti-Semitism. I understand that. But I also lament that fact that whenever something does happen, regardless of whether the offensive speech or action stems from true malice or ignorance, whether it is repented for or not, the gates come crashing down, and dialogue is considered anathema. I think it’s time to really rethink this, especially given the tremendous attacks that civil rights and civil liberties have taken under this president.

One Paragraph: Marilynne Robinson, Home

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson‘s third novel, I’m sorry to report, isn’t perfect. Her famed control unravels a bit in the final pages of Home, and for anybody who loved Gilead, the new novel may feel like more of the same. But as I point out in a forthcoming review, Robinson has few rivals at the sentence level. This paragraph, I think, exemplifies that skill: homespun and often free of action, but with an uncanny power:

Starting all over again, she made a dinner to welcome him home. The dining room table was set for three, lace tablecloth, good china, silver candlesticks. The table had in fact been set for days. When she put the vase of flowers in place, she noticed dust on the plates and glasses and wiped them with her apron. Yellow tulips and white lilacs. It was a little past the season for both of them, but they would do. She had the grocery store deliver a beef roast, two pounds of new potatoes, and a quart of ice cream. She made biscuits and brownies. She went out to the garden and picked young spinach, enough to fill the colander, pressed down and flowing over, as her father would say. And Jack slept. And her father slept. And the day passed quietly, with those sweet savors rising.

Roundup: Don’t Talk That Way

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Charles Bock, Herbert Gold, Richard Price, Selden Edwards

In the process of blogging about Richard Price‘s Lush Life for the National Post, police dispatcher Heather Clark seems to have acquired a touch of Price’s rhythms: “I lived with a cop who metaphorically swept away the stress of his world with the comforting, sucking hum of the vacuum cleaner. In our seven years together he hoovered his way through three rugs, and blew the engines on six Dirt Devils (that doesn’t include the busted Bissell brooms). It doesn’t take the pain away, but it sure as hell takes away the caring.” (Lush Life is now out in the U.K., receiving unsurprisingly enthusiastic reviews.)

The Santa Barbara Independent has an expansive feature on Selden Edwards‘ The Little Book, a fall big book decades in the making. (h/t Liz)

Novelist Herbert Gold speaks with the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles about his new memoir, Still Alive!, which recounts his relationships with Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, and other literary folk.

Finally, trust Radar to ask the tough questions. From an interview with Charles Bock:

I’m actually supposed to ask you about Bennington. Apparently, all of the girls there have claw-shaped vaginas that can recite Andrea Dworkin to the tune of “Old Dixie.” Is this true?
That’s really, really funny. I don’t know if Dworkin might be too outdated now. I can tell you this: During my time in the MFA program, I worked like absolute hell to get laid as much as I possibly could. At no time did any woman’s intimate area recite anything to me to the tune of “Old Dixie.”

Nam Le on Writing Young

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Nam Le

As part of the run-up to the Melbourne Writers Festival, Australia’s The Age has an inventive feature in which writers of various ages are asked to address what it’s like to write in their teens, 20s, 30s, etc. Nam Le, who was born in Vietnam, raised in Australia, and now lives in the U.S., takes on the business of being a writer in one’s 20s:

What I know, at 29, is this: writing is hard, and it is slow, and its condition is failure. Everything I’ve written has fallen short of its ideal conception; I know this will be as true when I’m 60 as it is now. What’s more, I know I’ll only get a handful of failures: we writers have to face the finiteness of words fitted to time the same way we all, eventually, have to face death. Still, I’m excited. I’m young. I have nothing and no one to answer to. My failures are mostly ahead of me.

L. Rust Hills and the Death of the Short Story

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Jhumpa Lahiri, L. Rust Hills, Stephen Amidon

Two stories worth pressing against each other. First, today’s news that L. Rust Hills, former fiction editor at Esquire, has died. Hills provided a home in Esquire‘s pages for Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and many more. But:

When he was first hired at Esquire, in 1957, the magazine’s fiction had turned away from its original lofty aspirations; once the home of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, by the late 1950s it had shifted more toward adventure stories for adventure’s sake.

That’s a detail worth noting in relation to Stephen Amidon‘s interesting recent meditation on the death of the short story in the Times (U.K.):

Even in America, the readership for short stories is undergoing a significant contraction. Fewer large-circulation magazines are publishing fiction, and those that do fail to pay enough to keep writers in the black. (The New Yorker pays a dollar a word for first-timers, which means you can’t even buy a car if you are lucky enough to place a short story there.) Lahiri notwithstanding, New York publishers are increasingly less likely to take a chance on a short-story collection.

It’d be facile to extrapolate any big statement from this—to either say that the short story is on its deathbed, or that these things are cyclical. Esquire still publishes fiction (gives it its own silo on its Web site, in fact), yet people don’t read as much as they used to; it’s complicated. But there’s little question that a book like Jhumpa Lahiri‘s Unaccustomed Earth is an outlier, that by and large the short-story collection doesn’t have the prized place it did, say, 20 years ago. It may be that Lahiri is one of the few working writers today who feel the form is a destination, not a launchpad. It may be there are fewer magazine editors today who care to curate the form. Money’s probably involved, too. In any case, Amidon’s piece is worth reading as a cautionary essay—a warning that while the short story will never die, it’s at risk of becoming a niche enterprise.