Category: Lionel Shriver

Her Last Resort

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Lionel Shriver

Lionel Shriver‘s new novel gives substantial space to a resort on a remote island she once visited. During her trip, the same resort let her stay there for free. Is this a problem?

The London Times thinks so: A story notes that she visited Pemba Island for a Times travel story last year, and later used that trip as fodder for So Much for That, set to publish in March:

[Shriver] has broken new ground by getting a holiday company and a resort to fund her research for her new novel, So Much for That.

Those who turn to the acknowledgments section buried at the back of the book, which is published in March, will find her thank-you note for the hospitality at the resort.

As is often the case, the travel piece doesn’t mention that the Times covered her travel expenses or that she got her room gratis. (The more authoritative version of the story on Lexis-Nexis notes that she “travelled as a guest of Rainbow Tours Travel,” but doesn’t make clear who covered what.) The acknowledgments page of So Much for That—which, being located at the back of the book, isn’t so very hard to find—is vague as well. She thanks the owners of Fundu Lagoon, a resort on Pemba Island, for “enabling me to be obscenely pampered with sundowners, coconut curries, and lemon-grass oil massages all under the hilariously respectable guise of ‘research.'”

“Pemba is mentioned every few pages while Fundu Lagoon gets eight direct mentions, even down to the price of the superior suite,” the Times writer notes. This is true enough, though it skews Shriver’s intentions. (What follows in the remainder of this paragraph likely qualifies as a spoiler, though this particular plot point isn’t hard to guess early on, the event is signaled well in advance, and it doesn’t qualify as the most shocking or provocative event to take place in the tail end of the novel. Not by a long shot.) To read the Times story is to think that Shriver has written a travel brochure for Pemba Island and its sole resort. But if her message were reduced to a slogan, it’d be something like: “Pemba: A pretty good place to take your loved ones to die, if they can handle the long, nerve-wracking effort to get there. And you’ll be busting your ass if you decide to stay.”

The resort is indeed described as sumptuous, but the role of the resort itself is minor compared to the main reason why the characters are there: Because it can be a torment to live in a country where corporations make it difficult to be a decent citizen and a decent person at the same. It can be easier to fulfill the American Dream in a third-world country, Shriver argues, than in the United States of America. And even then, living well means plenty of physical labor. Nobody’s getting lemon-grass oil massages by the novel’s end.

Shriver responded to the Times critique a few days later in the Guardian. She mostly reacts to the snippy tone of the piece, but the key point is this: “Fundu Lagoon allowed a free stay, as it does for any travel writer…. Fundu never offered me anything in ­exchange for a ­mention in my novel.” Those would have been excellent sentences to include in the acknowledgments, if only to defuse criticism like the Times‘ in advance. Given the option to disclose or not disclose such things, disclosure is always the better option; certainly, it would be disappointing to learn that she had arranged a pay-for-play deal with the resort. But then, the book she wrote probably would’ve been quite different; it would’ve been a story about a fantasy resort, when what she wrote is a story about what you have to do when the fantasy-resort life is something you can’t hope to afford.

(h/t Edward Champion, via Twitter)

Lionel Shriver’s Good Timing

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Lionel Shriver

I’m currently reading Lionel Shriver‘s forthcoming novel, So Much for That, which publishes in March. I’ll have more to say on it when the time comes, but for now it’s enough to say that the novel is intimately concerned with the wallet-draining powers of healthcare in America—which is to say it’s very timely. But that’s just a happy accident, Shriver writes in Standpoint magazine, and she expresses her hopes for the book in the context of recent Congressional healthcare debates with her usual dark humor:

[T]hese last few months, I’ve found myself in the perverse position of praying, in defiance of my own passionate support for legislation of this very sort, that Congressional healthcare reform would get hopelessly bogged down in internecine squabbles — just so long as no bill passed until after my release date. Sounds selfish? Hell, yes! That book was a lot of work!

Shriver’s larger point is a more considered one: It’s unfair to expect novelists to somehow “bring the news” when they need the time to think about and imagine the situation in which they’re living, not to mention go through the various time-consuming machinations required to bring a book to print. (So Much for That is mostly set in 2005.) “[I]if any budding novelists out there are searching for material that’s bound to be all too germane for years and years to come?” asks Shriver. “Here’s a tip: write about Afghanistan.”

Or write about money. Last month, Shriver was shortlisted for the BBC’s National Short Story Award, for her story “Exchange Rates.” The full story isn’t available online, but the excerpt in the video below captures some of the ranting tone that powers So Much for That. Shriver didn’t win or come in second, which means she earned £500 for her efforts. Good enough for a few pens:

Kirkus Reviews, 1933-2009

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Clifford Chase, Etgar Keret, Hans Fallada, James P. Othmer, Lionel Shriver, Michael Thomas

Update, March 28, 2013: This post was written when it appeared that Kirkus would be shuttered for good. Happily, that hasn’t happened. But out of respect for the publication’s policy of keeping the identity of a book’s reviewer anonymous, I’ve edited this post to remove references to specific books I’ve reviewed for the publication.

This one hurts: Kirkus Reviews has been shuttered. I regularly reviewed books for the publication for most of the past five years—mostly fiction, though I recently had more nonfiction assignments. Why the shift? Beats the heck out of me—in all the time I wrote for Kirkus , I never got a clear idea of the publication’s inner workings. The books arrived. I reviewed them. More books arrived.

I understand why some people felt that reviewing for Kirkus was a grind. The format had a Tayloristic rigidity—short summary sentence, review graf, pithy final-assessment sentence, all of it clocking in at 350 words, tops. Though the editors there knew my general interests, I didn’t get a vote on what was sent to me to review. In short, it wasn’t a job for reviewers who cared only about books they felt pretty certain they’d like. Which speaks to the most contentious and, I think, admirable aspect of the magazine—that Kirkus‘ reviews were more negative than positive. Conventional wisdom argues that this is because the reviews were written by large passels of smug know-nothings who used their anonymity as a blunt instrument. I prefer to think Kirkus served an uncomfortable truth—most books are mediocre. For my part, I can say that I never wrote a negative review that I wouldn’t feel comfortable putting my name on, and that only rarely did I feel compelled to fire both barrels.

Did all those negative reviews have any kind of impact? On authors’ emotions, sure: A few have taken the news of the publication’s closing to register their unhappiness with it. If nothing else, Kirkus may have been the most powerful and fearsome hurt-feelings generator in the history of publishing. But my lukewarm review of what would become a New York Times best book of the year sure didn’t influence much. And, contrary to Kirkus hate-everything reputation, I never received a directive about what tone to take, and I did write my fair share of positive, even starred reviews. In my more self-congratulatory moments, I like to imagine that I did a little something for a debut novel that seemed to get a goodly amount of attention following my rave, and one book-review editor at a national newspaper has told me he decided to cover another novel largely on the strength of my Kirkus endorsement.

But I didn’t keep reviewing for Kirkus because I was hoping to have some kind of effect on book sales. I kept writing because, for one thing, adhering to those strict demands required a certain skill—writing short while fitting everything you want to say is tough, and I enjoyed honing that craft. (It wasn’t bad training for blogging.) But I mostly kept doing it, and kept loving doing it despite all those crummy books, because it built an element of surprise into my reading habit. I blog about American fiction because it’s the category I love best and the one I figure I can blog about most consistently without feeling like I want to shove my head in a blender. But I don’t feel obligated to stay in that category, and Kirkus assignments forced me out of my comfort zone. I think every critic could stand to pick out a book at random every so often, just to test one’s prejudices; it’s a time-consuming exercise, but it helps give you clearer sense of your likes and dislikes. If I can’t have that experience as a reviewer, I’ll pursue it as a reader.

My wife once asked me if it ever felt like a burden, getting all of those books in the mail—nearly all of them falling short of what I’d consider very good. I replied by saying that I always had high hopes that the next batch of books might contain one I’d really, really like. You have to allow yourself to be pleasantly surprised every so often. When getting that package of books in the mail stopped feeling at least a little bit like Christmas, I’d know it was time to get out of the book-review racket. In all the time I reviewed for Kirkus, I never lost that feeling.

Links: Rod and Reel

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Alexander Chee, Anne Tyler, Annie Dillard, Ayn Rand, Don Carpenter, Ethan Canin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Herman Melville, Jack Kerouac, James Crumley, Lionel Shriver, Philip Roth, Ralph Nader, Raymond Chandler, Toni Morrison

In a Philip Roth interview with the Wall Street Journal—that would be the Roth interview that doesn’t address green dildos—he talks about his current reading habits, which mainly includes old favorites. “Mostly what I’m doing is rereading stuff that I read in my 20s, writers who were big in my reading life who I haven’t read in 50 years. I’m talking about Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, Turgenev, Conrad. I’m trying to reread the best before… I die.”

“Sometimes you write amazing sentences, she wrote to me, and sometimes it’s amazing you can write a sentence”—a lovely piece by Alexander Chee about studying writing under Annie Dillard.

Atlas Shrugged and Ralph Nader’s new novel, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!, have more in common than you might think.

Dan Green takes a close, thoughful look at Jack Kerouac‘s On the Road, but determines (rightly, I think) that The Subterraneans is in many ways a superior work.

The American Scholar takes a close, thoughtful look at F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s tax returns.

Ethan Canin on the film adaptations of his work: “Movies are big, exciting, hopeful collaborations, brought down by venality, pandering, and greed.”

Lionel Shriver opens up about using her family as source material for her novel A Perfectly Good Family.

The Nation on the novels of Don Carpenter. (subscription req’d)

A gallery of Tom Adams‘ curious paperback covers for Raymond Chandler novels.

Writers aren’t doing too well in the Baltimore Sun‘s contest to declare the area’s biggest local celebrity, but Anne Tyler‘s still in the running.

In related news, Laura Lippman, George Pelecanos, and Dennis Lehane speak out on the importance of the late James Crumley.

“The most overrated novel ever has got to be Beloved.”

Should you wait until you’re 40 before attempting to read Moby-Dick?

Links: Mall Rats

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Allen Drury, Audrey Niffenegger, George Pelecanos, John Steinbeck, Jonathan Ames, Kurt Vonnegut, Lionel Shriver, Lorrie Moore, Louise Erdrich, Raymond Carver, Tess Gallagher, Thomas Pynchon

Allen Drury‘s Advise and Consent, the quintessential big book about Washington power players, turns 50.

Lorrie Moore: “I don’t feel I’m a natural writer. I feel every paragraph I write stinks. But I’m a pretty good editor. I’m not that fluid in getting the sentences out right the first time. There are times when you lose confidence. There are scenes that are hard to write. So I make changes. I am still making changes.”

Audrey Niffenegger recalls her early days in Chicago’s art scene.

Henry Louis Gates recently handed out the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which are given to best books about race in the past year. Among the winners is Louise Erdrich, for The Plague of Doves.

New York magazine talks with Jonathan Ames. “Bored to Death,” the lead story in his new collection, The Double Life Is Twice as Good, is a genius riff on noir themes matched with Ames’ traditional acts of self-flagellation.

Serpent’s Tail Press (which has published some of my favorite David Goodis noirs) is launching a classics series. It’s an interesting take on classics: Among the first batch of reprints are Lionel Shriver‘s We Need to Talk About Kevin and George Pelecanos‘ Shoedog.

An excerpt from Raymond Carver‘s “Beginners,” included in Library of America’s new Carver collection.

Carver’s widow, Tess Gallagher, has a new story collection, The Man From Kinvara.

A chat with the head of the Kurt Vonnegut Society in San Francisco.

Tortilla Flat is a good name for a John Steinbeck novel, but a bad name for a Southern California sports bar.

And a Thomas Pynchon scholar picks precisely the wrong guy with whom to cop attitude about television.

Links: The Meta Angels of Our Nature

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Flannery O'Connor, George Saunders, Isaac Rosenfeld, Jhumpa Lahiri, Joseph O'Neill, Kevin Canty, Lionel Shriver, Norman Mailer, Percival Everett

The Los Angeles Times’ book blog, Jacket Copy, lists 61 essential postmodern reads. Lists are designed to be argued over, so there’s no real point in interrogating all the selections. One thing, though: Reading Percival Everett‘s I Am Not Sidney Poitier a few weeks back, I didn’t think for a moment about whether it was “postmodern” or not. At the risk of invoking some ungainly term like “post-postmodern,” it may be that the postmodern novel is just something that happened, not something that’s happening—a method of wrestling with an increasingly mediated existence in the years before mediated existences became commonplace, before a ten-year-old kid could embed video and songs on a MySpace page and make virtual friends with some stranger in Bali. A lot of the stuff on the list, like I Am Not Sidney Poitier, seems more like metafiction than postmodernism, which aren’t synonymous terms. At any rate, I’m sure one of those ten-year-olds will grow up to write a novel that sorts it all out for us.

Scott McLemee considers the new biography of Saul Bellow‘s ill-fated colleague, Isaac Rosenfeld.

A book on Flannery O’Connor‘s Catholicism is in the works.

And a film based on Jhumpa Lahiri‘s Unaccustomed Earth might be.

Also in the works: A documentary about bad writing. The trailer features George Saunders delivering one of the smartest and most succinct explanations of what bad writing is that I’ve heard.

The Ransom Center has an online exhibit of artifacts from Norman Mailer‘s coverage of Apollo 11.

And Ted Gioia considers whether the moon landing was science fiction writers’ finest hour, and one from which it never quite recovered.

There’s too much damn fiction from Montana writers coming out. (Though I did enjoy Kevin Canty‘s new collection, Where the Money Went.)

Lionel Shriver: “I probably had more reading stamina and much loftier literary tastes at the age of 16 than I do now.”

“I am a man in my mid-50’s and starting to feel the weight of the years. I am wondering if there are some good books for me to read that address my station in life. I have never read any Updike or Roth, but I have the impression these authors address the concerns of the aging male. Do you have recommendations?”

The Elegant Variation has just wrapped up a four-part interview with Joseph O’Neill.

Museums dedicated to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway are celebrating anniversaries.

H.L. Mencken once inscribed a book for Carl Van Vechten with a list of the kinds of alcohol he drank during the three years he was writing it. It’s a long list.

Links: Don’t Quote Me

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Horace Engdahl, John Cheever, Lionel Shriver, Richard Russo

Per Wästberg, chair of the Nobel Committee for Literature, spoke at Harvard last week, playing it both ways regarding his colleague Horace Engdahl: American literature is provincial, yes, but: “[Engdahl] said many things out of frustration at the end of an interview…that were not wise,” Wästberg said. “I regret that.”

Lionel Shriver to fiction writers who don’t use quotation marks because doing so would compromise the elegance of your dialogue or some other such horsehockey: “Knock it off!”

Richard Russo talks about working with Paul Newman, abandoning academia, and, mostly, his writing habits, which he gets at by way of the habits of John Cheever, who wrote in a basement storage room:

“He brought a sandwich and sat there in his underwear,” Russo remarked. “Mid-day he’d have his sandwich, edit what he had written, retype it and put it into a box. At 5 he’d get dressed and ride up in the elevator with the same people. He did this five days a week. I don’t necessarily recommend that routine, but the point of the story is that writing’s a job and you have to treat it like any other job. There will be times if you’re talented and lucky where you will be visited by inspiration, but you’ll discover it doesn’t change your habits all that much.”

Engdahl-gate: One More View

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Horace Engdahl, Lionel Shriver

I’d promised myself I’d lay off the whole Americans-are-too-insular thing—plenty has already been said, and it’s already pretty clear to just about everybody that Horace Engdahl is being silly, intentionally or unintentionally. But I’m calling attention to Lionel Shriver‘s points in Forbes, partly because she wrote one of my favorite novels of 2007, The Post-Birthday World, partly because she has a unique perspective as an American author who doesn’t spend much time in America, and partly because she does a better job of calling bullshit on all this than anything else I’ve read:

Fifty-some mostly American authors attended [“Festival America” in Vincennes, France] (not, alas, the enviable junket it appears, but two days of wearying, unpaid back-to-back appearances in “debates” with goofball and, I’m afraid, typically French topics like, “American Women: Citizens of the World?”–don’t get me started … ). The complexion of these participants, literally and figuratively, exemplified the extravagantly permeable nature of the American literary scene that has resulted from high levels of immigration from all over the world.

The writers Dinaw Mengestu (from Ethiopia), Nami Mun (from Korea) Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (from Nigeria) and Mohsin Hamid (from Pakistan), to cite but a few, have all found safe haven in the U.S., and last weekend joined a variety of more mainstream writers like Richard Russo, Amy Bloom and Tobias Wolfe. If the American literary world is sealed off from influences elsewhere, it must be protecting itself not with Saran Wrap, but with some ludicrously inappropriate material like fish-netting with big holes in it.

Now, if somebody at Forbes could just correct the spelling of Tobias Wolff‘s name…

Roundup: Bait and Switch

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Cormac McCarthy, Gore Vidal, Herman Melville, Joe Meno, Lionel Shriver, Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson

(If you’re arriving here from the Readerville Journal, welcome. If you’re not arriving here from the Readerville Journal: The folks at that venerable site have been nice enough to dub this site its Blog of the Week.)

Frank Wilson‘s Books, Inq. points to a review of Lionel Shriver‘s The Post-Birthday World, an exemplar of very divisive novels. (Wilson’s taken this up before regarding Cormac McCarthy‘s The Road.) It was one of my favorite novels of last year; my review for Kirkus is floating somewhere on the Barnes & Noble review page.

Coudal Partners, a Chicago-based marketing firm, has put out its latest edition of Field-Tested Books, in which various writers contribute short essays about their experiences reading outside of the usual contexts of libraries, living rooms, and public transit. Bless Joe Meno‘s essay on Winesburg, Ohio, which I blogged about at Allvoices.

Mark Twain‘s home in Hartford, Conn., is in deep trouble; a visitors’ center wound up costing double what was anticipated and energy costs are way up. I’d suggest putting on a short play and charging customers a ton for it, but maybe that’s a little too glib. Seriously: Donate here.

Superman is 70.

Guy Sorman, writing in City Journal, enthuses about the Amazon Kindle. Walking in Central Park one day, he convinced his wife that she needed to read Herman Melville‘s Billy Budd, right now, and uploaded it to his Kindle: “I typed “Billy Budd” on the keyboard. It took five seconds to complete the wireless download and cost me approximately $6, debited from my Amazon account.” Had Sorman talked to me, I could’ve saved him six bucks, but I will concede that the Kindle is preferable if you’re insisting your spouse read something outside at that very moment.

I knew that Gore Vidal was bitter at how he’s been treated by the New York Times over the years, but yeesh:

What do you think is your own best novel? I don’t answer questions like that. Ever. And you ought not to ask them.

Well, it was a great pleasure talking to you. I doubt that.

Dazzling!

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Lionel Shriver, Ron Carlson, Stephen King

I’m one of those needy souls who investigates books to see if my review has been excerpted in them. (I may never enjoy better exposure as a critic than having a blurb occupy the whole back cover of the hardcover edition of Lionel Shriver‘s The Post-Birthday World, though alas Kirkus doesn’t go for bylines.) So I was amused by an article in the Salt Lake Tribune about the fine art of book blurbing. Among those quoted is novelist and short-story writer Ron Carlson, who confesses that his stock went up with his students when his 2003 collection, A Kind of Flying, was blurbed by Stephen King. He wrote, “These stories glow with a radioactive cleverness.”

There’s a reason you’re seeing more awful metaphors like that on book jackets. Says Publishers Weekly editor Sara Nelson:

“Book marketing is much more complicated and difficult than it was 30 years ago, partly because we publish so many books [and] partly because publicity opportunities are fewer,” says Publishers Weekly editor-in-chief Sara Nelson, lamenting the demise of many newspapers’ book sections. “So yes, I think blurbs are thought to be a way of getting a reader’s interest. There’s no exact study or way to determine how much blurbs influence sales, but it certainly is a topic of discussion in the publishing business.”