Author: Mark Athitakis

Junot Diaz, Straight Up

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Junot Diaz

Newsweek has a nice online-only Q&A with Junot Diaz. (Though that subhead needs fixing: He won the National Book Critics Circle award, not the National Book Award.) (Update 4/5: It’s been fixed.)

Do you get frustrated by always being identified as a “Dominican” writer or a “Latino” writer, and never just as a straight-up “writer”?
No, because there’s no such thing as a straight-up writer. I think when people say a straight-up writer, what they really mean is a white writer. In other words, historically there has never been this concept of a nonracialized, nongendered writer. The fact that the word “writer” has to be modified so often is because everybody knows that when people speak of writers, we tend to mean, on an unconscious level, white males.

Dept. of Self Promotion

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Dan Fesperman, David Hajdu, Harold L. Turley II, Mike Sager, Rebecca Flowers, Walter Kirn

So, that question I asked a little while back? I was being a bit mercenary in putting it out there–I’ve been cobbling together a piece about D.C. novels that’s now up on Washington City Paper‘s Web site. This may stoke the anger of people convinced that reviewers are “one of the lowest forms of life.” But to paraphrase something Walter Kirn wrote a while ago, if we’re not interested in arguing about books, why are we reading them?

I also have a brief review of David Hajdu‘s new book, The Ten-Cent Plague.

The Chicago Way

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Scott Simon

From Scott Simon‘s new novel, Windy City:

“You think that all we have to worry about here is picking up trash, plowing the snow, and keeping Al Capone in his grave? My God, man. There are a hundred languages spoken here. Assyrian, Lakota, Urdu, and Yiddish. The Yoo-nited Nations doesn’t have to worry bout how to say ‘beans’ in as many languages as any diner on Western Avenue. All of these folks with five-day beards and black head scarves who are going for each other’s throats over in Snowdonia? They send their kids to the same school here and tell them, ‘Now behave!’ This nation kicks a little ass some place, and soon we got thousands of them living in basements on Halsted Street. Next day, you’re in the back of their cab while they’re on their phones, plotting a coup. We’ve got nuclear physicists from the Poon-jab and goatherds from Namibia. We’ve got brain surgeons from Ogbomoso–that’s in Nigeria, if you were too embarrassed to ask–and rocket scientists from Petropavlovsk–that’s in Kazakhstan, as I’m sure you knew–working as doormen. One day, after they find life on Mars, we’ll have bug-eyed, green-ass Martian-Americans bussing tables on Clark Street. This great heaving mass of diversity is united by a single, momentous desire: They expect you to get the snow off their street.”

Crime Fiction Isn’t Real Fiction. Except When It Is. But Wait…

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Richard Price

James Wood has a nice piece on Richard Price‘s Lush Life–though in truth it’s actually a neat little primer on how great dialogue does useful figurative work and isn’t just a play at “realism.” All the same, I stopped paying close attention when I got to this line:

Price has greater novelistic ambitions than his genre can accommodate, and one longs to see him free himself from the tram track of the police procedural. For that is exactly what his language does, time and again: it breaks away.

If his language successfully transcends genre fiction, then what is it he needs to break free of? Wood’s complaint here seems close to the argument that genre fiction can’t be “real” fiction. Lacking much background on Wood, I can’t speak to his long-held opinions on the matter, but it seems like a shallow argument that’s beneath his stature.

The Long Hauler

by Mark Athitakis, posted in A.I. Bezzerides

Jules Dassin, who directed the classic films The Naked City, Brute Force, Rififi, and many others, died yesterday. I’ve known about Rififi for years, but I’d only recently caught up with many of the tremendous noirs he made in the late ’40s and early ’50s, thanks to their Criterion Collection reissues.

Two of those films are novel adaptations. British author Gerald Kersh wrote the novel Night and the City, which Dassin made into a great tale of small-time crooks in the London wresting world. Kersh was also apparently Harlan Ellison‘s favorite writer, and a section of Ellison’s official Web site is dedicated to Kersh’s life and works.

Bezzerides is the better-known writer–or at least his works are better known. He wrote the script for one of the all-time great noirs, Kiss Me Deadly, and his novel Thieves’ Highway was made into Dassin’s film of the same title, a great night-in-San Francisco down-by-the-docks yarn that Bezzerides also scripted. The tale largely revolves around the seemingly simple matter of trucking apples up to the city. Which, of course, isn’t so simple, as this exchange points out:

Nick Garcos: Hey, do you like apples?
Rica: Everybody likes apples, except doctors.
Garcos: Do you know what it takes to get an apple so you can sink your beautiful teeth in it? You gotta stuff rags up tailpipes, farmers gotta get gypped, you jack up trucks with the back of your neck, universals conk out…
Rica: I don’t know what are you talking about, but I have a new respect for apples.

Bezzerides died early last year. The Criterion Collection reissue includes a documentary on the author, 2004’s The Long Haul of A.I. Bezzerides, which features commentary by Mickey Spillane, George Pelecanos, and Barry Gifford; the Web page for the film also has an essay by Michael Sragow. I haven’t read Bezzerides’ books, but Sragow nails what he brought to film: “Bezzerides’ writing at its peak boasts a dynamic blend of iconoclasm and bitterness––an ideal combination for the intersection of kinetics and moodiness that is film noir.”

Riding the Rails

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux writes in the Guardian about the inspiration for two of his best-loved travel books, The Old Patagonian Express and The Great Railway Bazaar. As usual, his great admiration for the folks he meets around the world is connected to a certain weariness, a realization that travel is a lot of being held up, a lot of standing around and waiting:

Air travel is very simple and annoying and always a cause of anxiety. It is like being at the dentist’s; even the chairs are like dentists’ chairs. Overland travel is slow and a great deal more trouble, but it is uncomfortable in a way that is completely human and often reassuring. The mood of The Old Patagonian Express, which is at times sombre, was the result of my knowing Spanish. It was easy for me to be light-hearted when I travelled to write The Great Railway Bazaar. I had little idea of what people were saying in Japanese and Hindi. But speaking to people in their own language – hearing their timid turns of phrase, or the violence of their anger, or the idioms of their hopelessness – could be distressing.

A New Complaint

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Philip Roth

NPR revisits Philip Roth‘s Portnoy’s Complaint for no particular reason that I can see. (Not that I’m complaining.) The relevant Roth quote, dusted off from a 2005 interview: “I think they were shocked and outraged by the revelation of brutality — brutality of feeling, brutality of attitude, brutality of anger. ‘You say all this takes place in a Jewish family?’ That’s what was shocking.”

Roundup: Great Plains Drifter

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Jack Pendarvis, Kent Haruf, Michael Cunningham, Susan Choi, Zora Neale Hurston
  • Laurie Muchnick, writing at Bloomberg News, has a guide to some recent Brooklyn lit.
  • Newsweek‘s Jennie Yabroff nicely ties–coils, even–together the multiple authors who’ve obsessed over Nikola Tesla.
  • Kent Haruf (Plainsong) and photographer Peter Brown discuss their book about the Great Plains, West of Last Chance, at the Rocky Mountain News. (The Photo-Eye Web site has some sample images, which call to mind Richard Misrach‘s dusty western landscapes, though Brown’s photos of people are compelling as well.)
  • If you’re in Mississippi next weekend, the Oxford Conference for the Book has an interesting lineup of readings. The conference theme is the work of Zora Neale Hurston, though the schedule looks to be wide-ranging–the Jack Pendarvis–Susan Choi reading in particular looks like fun.
  • Michael Cunningham isn’t interested in what Michiko Kakutani has to say: “I don’t read that shit. Any of it. The good reviews or the bad,” he told an audience at Boston’s Northeastern University. “The bad ones feel like they’re true and the good ones feel like you just fooled that one reviewer.” (Kakutani said that Cunningham’s 2005 novella collection, Specimen Days, “reads like a clunky and precious literary exercise….nothing but gratuitous and pretentious blather.”)

Disaster Lit

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon

The Literary Saloon points to a new online magazine, Triple Canopy, an arts-and-literature publication whose design stakes out an interesting middle ground between dull seas of text and clunky PDFs. One of the more interesting features in issue No. 1 is “Thinking Through Images,” in which photographer Craig Kalpakjian and editor Sarah Kessler discuss the intersection of imagery, disaster, and literature. In particular, they look at Three Mile Island, a meteor crash in Siberia, staring directly into the sun–that last not a disaster per se, but the two find a way to connect it to Don DeLillo‘s White Noise, and there’s some commentary on Thomas Pynchon and Will Self in there as well. The conversation is a tad pretentious, but Kalapkjian’s images are compelling, and the conversation is worth a look.

The Man America Loves to Hate

by Mark Athitakis, posted in John Steinbeck

Robert Gottlieb, writing in the New York Review of Books, uses the Library of America’s release of a collection of John Steinbeck‘s later writings to reassess his legacy. Gottlieb argues that much of Steinbeck’s work is actively awful, and that in the late-period stuff was among the worst offenders. But while the piece doesn’t quite state it as a theme, floating in there is an argument that the more journalistically Steinbeck behaved, the better he was. Gottlieb writes:

His finest work is almost always reportorial. Although he didn’t (as was frequently misreported) go to Oklahoma to observe the migrant Okies as they set out on their hegira to the West, he did spend weeks with them in California—on the road, in their camps. At first he was working as a journalist to air their desperate situation, but quickly he realized that here was the material for the major novel he felt ready to write….

The Grapes of Wrath is a vertiginous conjunction of sweeping, irresistible narrative and highfalutin theorizing. That readers in 1939 tolerated the latter is testimony to the power of the former—and to the readiness of America to be affected by the terrible story of the Joads. With the book’s overwhelming success—it was the best-selling novel of the year, won the Pulitzer Prize, etc.—and the further impact of John Ford’s impressive film version, which appeared in movie houses only months after the book’s publication, Steinbeck graduated from being an admired young writer to worldwide acceptance as a major figure in American literature.