Author: Mark Athitakis

It’s a Dystopian Novel, People

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Michael Chabon, Philip Roth

I don’t entirely disagree with James Lewis‘ review of Michael Chabon‘s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union in the American Thinker. “Plotwise the novel is shapeless, as if the writer could not restrain himself and trim the excess,” he writes, and it’s a fair complaint. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay managed to be sleek and epic simultaneously, while The Yiddish Policemen’s Union clangs about, its deeply imagined world not quite connecting to its dry, overextended plotting. The remainder of Lewis’ review, though, is an interestingly rageoholic misreading:

There is no love unspoiled by hate in this book, there is no joy or pleasure, no innocence and playfulness, no music and dancing, there are no High Holidays, there are no happy children in Chabon’s imaginative world.

This is a bit like complaining that Robocop didn’t have enough love scenes. The American Thinker is a repository of right-wing vitriol, and its book reviews are clearly no different. (Lewis introduces Chabon to the reader by calling him “an American Leftwing atheistic Yiddishist, living, significantly, in Berkeley, California.”) Yet what struck me about this post is that I haven’t stumbled over much like it—I thought that there would be more of this nuttiness, both among critics and commenters, when the novel came out. Same goes for Philip Roth‘s The Plot Against America, another successful novel about a Jewish dystopia that didn’t seem to ruffle many feathers. Maybe the novel doesn’t have the power to provoke that it once did?

Annals of Assimilation

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Leo Rosten

Jennifer Weisberg has a lovely essay on Leo Rosten, who in the ’30s received acclaim for his short stories about Hyman Kaplan, an immigrant eager to shrug off his Yiddish and pick up English. Those stories originally appeared in the New Yorker, were later collected in a bestselling book, and inspired a 1968 musical. Weisberg argues that the appeal of Rosten’s stories was simple:

When Kaplan made his first appearance on the printed page, the American Jewish community was on the cusp of change. By the 1930s, Jews of Eastern European origin were increasingly confident, working assiduously to leave behind not just the shtetl, but the tenements and crowded streets of the Lower East Side, and to join in American life more fully. Perhaps no one could sum up their growing Americanization as well as Kaplan himself, explaining to Mr. Parkhill one day that he declined to attend his friend Jake Popper’s funeral, opting instead to “tink like Americans tink! So I tought, an’ I didn’t go. Becawss I tought of dat dip American idea, ‘Business before pleasure!’”

Yates’ Fighting Words

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Richard Yates

In the New York Sun, Benjamin Lytal revisits Richard Yates‘ Revolutionary Road—a fairly unprovocative work about suburbia today, now that Little Children can be a bestseller (a movie version will come out at the end of the year), but tough to wrestle with in 1961:

Yates isn’t interested in expressing tenderness. His characters are doomed, and he leaves it at that. One of his many rejection letters from the New Yorker complained of his “mean-spirited view of things.” Yates was never published there, while “Precious John,” as Yates called Updike, found ample space.

Hoop Dreams

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Rus Bradburd

The Ball State Daily News covers the online literary journal Freight Stories, which has just published its second issue. (I’d recommend “Scene & Dialogue,” a story about a college basketball prospect that’s full of potent ironies; the story’s author, Rus Bradburd, jumped from coaching basketball at UTEP to getting an MFA.) The journal’s founders, husband-and-wife Ball State English profs Victoria Barrett and Andrew Scott, figure they’ve found a way to avoid printing costs without delegitimizing their efforts. Citing Narrative Magazine as a model, they explain:

“Online publishing has become both easier and less iconoclastic,” Barrett said. “Web journals began to emerge as a viable outlet for the highest quality work, the work of writers who, a few short years before, wouldn’t have considered publishing online. And so, Freight Stories was born.”

For Those About to Revise…

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem is in a band, which may be a smarter thing than writing a crummy novel about being in a band. I’m Not Jim, his collaboration with the Silos’ Walter Salas-Humara, will put out its first album in September on the fine Chicago alt-country label Bloodshot Records. If the PR for the album is to be trusted, Lethem was a quick study for songwriting. Says Salas-Humara: “I loved Motherless Brooklyn, but after reading The Fortress Of Solitude, a book I consider a stone cold masterpiece, I knew had to work with Jonathan. We carved out a couple days and met at his house in Maine. I hoped we would get a few things down and I was totally unprepared, and completely blown away, by the speed in which Jonathan gets ideas on paper.” (Via Wired’s Listening Post)

Remainders in Light

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Christopher Buckley

Writing in the Washington Post, Twelve publisher Jonathan Karp—no, Twelve doesn’t put out a lot of fiction, though it’s Christopher Buckley‘s home—indulges himself in a revenge fantasy held by editors worried about the coming tyranny of the commons. Most books are too junky, too designed to capitalize on short-term trends, and written all too quickly, he writes, but he has an idea for a fix:

The barriers to entry in the book business get lower each year. There are thousands of independent publishers and even more self-publishers. These players will soon have the same access to readers as major publishers do, once digital distribution and print-on-demand technology enter the mainstream. When that happens, publishers will lose their greatest competitive advantage: the ability to distribute books widely and effectively…. Consequently, publishers will be forced to invest in works of quality to maintain their niche. These books will be the one product that only they can deliver better than anyone else. Those same corporate executives who dictate annual returns may begin to proclaim the virtues of research and development, the great engine of growth for business. For publishers, R&D means giving authors the resources to write the best books — works that will last, because the lasting books will, ultimately, be where the money is.

Arguments like this swirl around in journalism on occasion—once people recognize the inherent crappiness/unthoughtfulness/unjournalisticness of most blogs, the thinking goes, they’ll see the value of actual reported stories, and as a result newspapers will (somehow!) monetize the distinction. There are distinctions: The Post has people in Iraq, and most (all?) political/military/policy blogs don’t. But much of the small-press/POD culture that Karp speaks of is already happening, and the response from the larger publishing industry doesn’t appear to be a greater investment in quality; forced to choose between letting a pretty good book marinate for another year or two to become a great one or simply upping distribution and promotion, I suspect that most publishers will choose the latter. After all, book that’s not available for purchase makes no money, and more time on each individual book means few books for a house to work on. And when a company is mindful of the quarterly returns—very mindful if the owner is publicly traded—it knows that “we’re investing in quality” won’t cut it with creditors.

(Via Henry Kisor, who nicely weaves Karp’s story into a smirking commentary about what gas prices are doing to the road novel. Also, the print version of the story notes that a “Jessica” Crispin will respond to Karp’s piece on the Post‘s Web site later in the week.)

Update: Crispin’s response is now online.

The Unreliable Narrator’s Mostly Reliable Narrator

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Joyce Carol Oates

Time catches up with Joyce Carol Oates, author of the fascinating/maddening novel, My Sister, My Love, which was inspired by the JonBenet Ramsey case. (I hope to have time at some to write down some of the issues I have with the book.)


Is it a bad thing that there was so much publicity about the real case?

I think it satisfies a certain desire or hunger in the populace. It depends what you think news is.

Actually, Oates has more than a couple of sentences’ worth of thoughts on the matter.

Roundup: While You Were Out

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Charles W. Chesnutt, Mark Twain, Tobias Wolff, Walter Hines Page

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Still making people mad.

Tobias Wolff speaks with Australia’s The Age (where his latest story collection, Our Story Begins, has just been published). He recalls the experience of reading galleys of his first novel, Ugly Rumours, a book he now disowns: “”I thought I had gotten way ahead of myself. I wasn’t smart enough to be Pynchon, but I liked the almost 19th century Dickensian layering of perspectives, the kind of wild sense of humour that Pynchon allows himself and the mingling of realism and urban myth and absurdity. Nothing is a waste of time for a writer, but this was not my medium.”

Penguin Classics is launching its African American Classics series with a collection of works by Charles W. Chesnutt. The Atlantic‘s Web site pointed to some of his work in January.

Scott Romine revisits Walter Hines Page‘s The Southerner. The 1909 novel has just been reissued by the University of South Carolina Press.

Lastly, if it’s true that we’re all not reading anymore, at least the book titles are still good for something: “If you decided to name your horses after classics in American literature, you could have horses named Red Badge Of Courage, Tender IsThe Night, The Last Tycoon, O Pioneers, Pudd’nhead Wilson, Absalom Absalom, A Moveable Feast, Travelswithcharley, Tortilla Flat and many others. I’ve just scratched the surface.”

Vintage Singer

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Dara Horn, Isaac Bashevis Singer

Love Comes Lately, a film based on three short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, opened last weekend to fair-to-middling-to-negative reviews. Perhaps coincidentally, last week fiction writers Dara Horn and David Bezmozgis discussed Singer’s legacy as part of Luminato, a Toronto arts festival. A report from the Canadian Jewish News doesn’t suggest any fireworks occurred, though Horn didn’t just engage in polite praise of Singer:

In a critique, she said that he was “a bit lazy” stylistically, at least later in his career, and that he falsely presented himself as “the last voice of Yiddish literature” when, in fact, the opposite was really true.

Turning an old saying on its head, Horn, a fluent Yiddish speaker, elicited waves of laughter when she joked that she and her husband converse in Yiddish when they don’t want their parents to understand what they have just said.