Search Results for: B.R. Myers

Good Books Don’t Have to Be Hard

August 29, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

In my essay on Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, I cited his Wall Street Journal article Good Books Don’t Have to Be Hard:

It’s not easy to put your finger on what exactly is so disgraceful about our attachment to storyline. Sure, it’s something to do with high and low and genres and the canon and such. But what exactly? Part of the problem is that to find the reason you have to dig down a ways, down into the murky history of the novel. There was once a reason for turning away from plot, but that rationale has outlived its usefulness. If there’s a key to what the 21st-century novel is going to look like, this is it: the ongoing exoneration and rehabilitation of plot.

Where did this conspiracy come from in the first place—the plot against plot? I blame the Modernists. Who were, I grant you, the single greatest crop of writers the novel has ever seen. In the 1920s alone they gave us “The Age of Innocence,” “Ulysses,” “A Passage to India,” “Mrs. Dalloway,” “To the Lighthouse,” “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “The Sun Also Rises,” “A Farewell to Arms” and “The Sound and the Fury.” Not to mention most of “In Search of Lost Time” and all of Kafka’s novels. Pity the poor Pulitzer judge for 1926, who had to choose between “The Professor’s House,” “The Great Gatsby,” “Arrowsmith” and “An American Tragedy.” (It went to “Arrowsmith.” Sinclair Lewis prissily declined the prize.) The 20th century had a full century’s worth of masterpieces before it was half over.

Read the whole thing. I’m drawing special attention to it because there are few essays I’ve read recently, or maybe ever, that I agree with more, ranging from Grossman’s analysis of the current situation to its historical roots to his call for future action.

The next step is B.R. Myers’ A Reader’s Manifesto.

EDIT: See also Jeff’s excellent comment.

Good Books Don't Have to Be Hard

August 29, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

In my essay on Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, I cited his Wall Street Journal article Good Books Don’t Have to Be Hard:

It’s not easy to put your finger on what exactly is so disgraceful about our attachment to storyline. Sure, it’s something to do with high and low and genres and the canon and such. But what exactly? Part of the problem is that to find the reason you have to dig down a ways, down into the murky history of the novel. There was once a reason for turning away from plot, but that rationale has outlived its usefulness. If there’s a key to what the 21st-century novel is going to look like, this is it: the ongoing exoneration and rehabilitation of plot.

Where did this conspiracy come from in the first place—the plot against plot? I blame the Modernists. Who were, I grant you, the single greatest crop of writers the novel has ever seen. In the 1920s alone they gave us “The Age of Innocence,” “Ulysses,” “A Passage to India,” “Mrs. Dalloway,” “To the Lighthouse,” “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “The Sun Also Rises,” “A Farewell to Arms” and “The Sound and the Fury.” Not to mention most of “In Search of Lost Time” and all of Kafka’s novels. Pity the poor Pulitzer judge for 1926, who had to choose between “The Professor’s House,” “The Great Gatsby,” “Arrowsmith” and “An American Tragedy.” (It went to “Arrowsmith.” Sinclair Lewis prissily declined the prize.) The 20th century had a full century’s worth of masterpieces before it was half over.

Read the whole thing. I’m drawing special attention to it because there are few essays I’ve read recently, or maybe ever, that I agree with more, ranging from Grossman’s analysis of the current situation to its historical roots to his call for future action.

If you haven’t clicked the link, you shouldn’t be reading this. Once you have clicked it, however, consider the next step: B.R. Myers’ A Reader’s Manifesto.

EDIT: See also Jeff’s excellent comment.

Sleepless Nights — Elizabeth Hardwick

March 8, 2008 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Sleepless Nights isn’t much good for sleepless nights because it’s not somnolent, and yet it also isn’t engaging. Rather, it’s a jagged and random novelette that so leaps from idea to idea and style to style as to make me roll my eyes and give up. It is a novel only in that it departs least from that form, but, unlike In Search of Lost Time, which has been described the same way, Sleepless Nights is irredeemably irritating. Nothing in it hangs together, and it is like a cruel parody of modernism without the levity of satire to make up for its deficiencies. With it I’m tempted to play the Derrida parlour game.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, the game goes like this: take one of Derrida’s convoluted sentences and negate it, such that the sentence says the opposite of what it once did. Read or give both sentences to someone else, ideally an expert in Derrida, and ask them to decide which he wrote. I once tried to play this with a literary theory professor, who didn’t like the game. The same game could be played here too: does Hardwick say, “Nothing groans under treachery,” or,”Everything groans under treachery?” Does she say, “Real people: nothing like your mother and father, nothing like those friends from long ago […]” or “Real people: everything like your mother and father, everything like those friends from long ago […]”? Does she say, “The weak have the purest sense of history,” or “The strong have the purest sense of history?” Either could be true, with no change in the narrative or outcome, if you can call what happens “outcome.”

Then there is fuzzy language of the sort B.R. Myers hates; I have yet to see “acrimonious twilight [fall].” And do the weak have the purest sense of history, which the narrator (also named Elizabeth) posits? Maybe: but if so, this novel doesn’t prove it, or even do more than state it and move on. It also goes for the obvious and tautological in the place of the profound: “It was what she was always doing, and in the end what she had done.” Yes, the present becomes the future and we’ve eventually done whatever it is that we’re doing. This would seem obvious, and I wouldn’t note it if it were somehow connected to the rest of this disjointed narrative.

Nothing connects and little happens, which Geoffrey O’Brien excuses in the introduction: “The norms of fiction, the reader of Sleepless Nights might well conclude, are after all a constriction, or at least a superfluity: Since to live is to make fiction, what need to disguise the world as another, alternate one?” There is much to be said about challenging the norms of fiction, but this book doesn’t: it wanders and meanders into nothing. And what O’Brien means by saying “to live is to make fiction” he never explains, and the only way to make living a fiction is to stretch fiction beyond whatever bounds it might have into something so unrecognizable that it covers all things and thus loses the specificity that make it a definitive concept in the first place.

This is, he says, “a novel that could allow itself to move in any direction in time that it chose, that could shift its attention from one person or situation to another as abruptly as a filmmaker might splice together two incongruous images; a novel that seem[s] to declare the impossibility of separating itself from life […]”. Even if a novel can move in any direction and through any time, perhaps the fact that it can doesn’t mean it should, as Sleepless Nights demonstrates. And all this double-talk is merely from the first page of O’Brien’s introduction. Compare O’Brien’s facile dismissal of “the norms of fiction” to what David Lodge says of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose: “The process [of placing the novel in a historical period, which Lodge explains] demonstrates an interesting aspect of the composition of fiction, namely, that the acceptance of a constraint which may seem frustrating and bothersome at first often leads to the discovery of new ideas and story-stuff.” It doesn’t appear that Hardwick had any problem using constraints to discover new ideas and story-stuff, since Sleepless Nights has little of either.

To be fair, in the introduction O’Brien is describing what will come more than anything else, and it is not his description so much as his defense that I attack. And I attack it all the more because a few passages ring: “Every great city is a Lourdes where you hope to throw off your crutches but meanwhile must stumble along on them, hobbling under the protection of the shrine.” In this context, the passage is vulnerable to the Derrida parlour game, but it could be something more. Alas: amid the random thoughts, incomplete sentences, and even more random shifts in place, perspective, and the like, it is adrift, cut off from its network and lost amid the vicissitudes of a book with no spine.

One more link post

January 29, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Book|Daddy has a great essay on the otherwise (mostly) silly debate about blogs, books, and criticism. You can see evidence of its percolating here and here. What caught me is this quote:

As Jessa Crispin of Bookslut said during the panel on literary criticism that book/daddy moderated at the Texas Book Fesival in Austin over the weekend, the major review outlets keep reviewing all of the same authors, and few of the kinds of books and authors she likes were getting attention, so she started writing about them on her website.

Seriously. Who is writing about Robertson Davies, and who is commenting on B.R. Myers? Somehow I’ve never found a demand that I read The Name of the Rose, a novel that encapsulates why I read in the first place: to be so blown away that it’s hard to discover where I should start writing. I linked to some of the other books that come close to that effect here.

The Other Boleyn Girl and Starship Troopers

January 24, 2008 By in Books Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

How odd it was, standing in a bookstore 7,500 miles from home and pondering the choices in a small but reasonably good English section of an airport bookshop. The most appealing books I’d already read: On Chesil Beach, The Golden Compass, The Name of the Rose (oddly enough, given that I’d read it on the first leg of the plane ride). The choices left dwindle to John le Carré’s* latest or Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl. I take the latter, figuring that once I’ve read four or five of le Carré’s novels I’ve read them all. Earlier I described them as “trust no one and everyone, including you, is guilty of something, or would be in the right situation,” novels, and I eventually tire of their torrid, in-the-know sentences.

And so I chose The Other Boleyn Girl and came to a novel I dread writing about because it is awfully, unabashedly bad, filled with adverbs as egregious as the two I just used, and I was stuck with it for too many hours on a plane. Normally I would’ve stopped after a few chapters. Trapped as though in the Tower of London, I had nowhere to go but on with the story, reading endlessly of the narrator, Mary Boleyn, reminding herself of how she is a Howard, and having other characters constantly tell her that as well. Most of the characters speak in platitudes, as though aware of history’s spotlight on them, and yet the characters are simultaneously self-absorbed to a degree tiresome in anyone, including monarchs and their playthings.

Then there is the writing: on page six a “moment of pure envy swept through me,” and on 90 a horse is coiled like a spring. Adverbs proliferate like the plague and, worse for me, I just finished The Name of the Rose, a novel with a powerful, inflammatory inquisition scene that lights up like an inferno, while Gregory offers a brief, sputtering description on page 716 of my mass-market paperback. The theological discussions are similarly opposite, with The Name of the Rose like a gorgeous Ph.D. thesis and The Other Boleyn Girl like the musings of a pupil. There is much discussion of wit and little evidence of it, just as there is much discussion of what it means to be part of the family and little evidence of it meaning anything more than being part of a band of nitwit navel gazers.

There are bizarre anachronisms in the novel, as when characters use the term slut, which, as Geoffrey Pullum’s quote from the Oxford English Dictionary in this post on contemporary usage shows, slut has meant that “bad housekeeping, loose sexuality, general uppitiness and terms of endearment have been all mixed together since the middle of the 17th century.” The Other Boleyn Girl is set towards the beginning of the sixteenth century. Likewise, despite repeated references to skill in French and Latin, no characters display any knowledge of either language or its literatures; Anne’s linguistic ability extends to saying “Bien sur!” once. Indeed, the characters seem caught purely in their own times, as if history was absent and the future as well. No culture exists outside of mentions about Thomas More and jousting. If not for the device of the king and the mention of horses, this novel could be set in a frat house, or any number of contemporary settings.

All this is frustrating because The Other Boleyn Girl shows rare moments of genuine feeling, as when Mary acknowledges to her brother that she cannot wed the man she wants. These few evoking moments come amid the tedious descriptions of royal maneuverings that read like the post-season situation in basketball. By the end of the flight I wanted to take back all those snide thoughts about le Carré, who is by comparison a writer of tremendous greatness.

The other novel I bought during a layover back in the United States: Starship Troopers, which I think a family member has lying around somewhere but I also knew would make for good and quick reading. As a teenager I missed its political context, which startled me now because that is the entire novel. Sure, the politics are simplistic and lack even the depth of Stranger in a Strange Land, but I can see why arguments for independence and power appeals to boys. There are even flashes of Wilde-like aphorisms, as when a comment from the protagonist’s History and Moral Philosophy instructor is repeated: “He says that you are not stupid, merely ignorant and prejudiced by your environment.” Glimmers of tolerance in an otherwise militaristic novel appear, when the narrator says “But don’t make the mistake of thinking that the Bugs are just stupid insects because they look the way they do and don’t know how to surrender.” Grudging, yes, but you get it.As I come back to Heinlein I see his many flaws and the reasons literati snub him, and were I to read him for the first time now I don’t think I would have much use for him. But for all his weaknesses he serves a need, much like the often-hated Ayn Rand. On a plane, when you’re inclined to skip over the more foolish discussions, Heinlein is pretty good—just as he is when you’re 12.

The title of this post may startle you, but there is a slim connection between a novel about sex and power in the sixteenth century and one about militarism and politics in the distant future.

I haven’t yet commented on The Name of the Rose, mentioned here, but that’s only because it’s so good that I both want to save the best for last and struggle to formulate something to say, as the novel is so vast that it’s hard merely to decide which aspects of it to discuss.

* For a fascinating essay on le Carré, see—as usual—B.R. Myers’ essay in The Atlantic.

These are the best?

December 11, 2007 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

I’ve looked at the New York Times‘ 100 Notable Books of 2007 with special attention to the fiction and can’t help but wonder if this is the best we’ve got. I discussed The Abstinence Teacher here and here, but Perrotta was better live than in print. The Bad Girl never lived at all; Harry Potter might have improved with age but I’m not about to find out. House of Meetings was better as history and essay than novel and The Savage Detectives overrated. I read five pages of Tree of Smoke in a bookstore and suspect B.R. Myers‘ slam is probably deserved. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union was likable but not lovable.

Of the books listed, On Chesil Beach deserved its place, as did The Indian Clerk (more on that in the next few days). Of the ones I discussed in the paragraph above, a few were outright bad, but most were as The Indian Clerk says of the novels of Henry James: “[…] I admire them yet I cannot love them” (italics in original). So I feel about most picks from The New York Times, which, even if I admire them, I can’t really see how they would inspire love.

That brings us to the New York Times‘ 10 best books, with two fiction books of limited interest to me, two already discussed, and one that I actually plan to read: Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End. The nonfiction was better, with Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine and Alex Ross’ The Rest is Noise, a book en route after I read a chapter online.

These year end lists—there are too many to bother linking to most—remind me how important the Everyman’s Library and Library of America are, as both feature excellent quality in thought and production; I suspect that I, like many others, will return to the books in their catalogs long after most copies of Harry Potter have been pulped and resurrected as grocery bags.

EDIT: Added a link to The Indian Clerk.

Charles Taylor on A Reader’s Manifesto

December 2, 2007 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , ,

Charles Taylor not only likes A Reader’s Manifesto—he thinks it is an essential part of a critic’s library:

A Reader’s Manifesto by B.R. Myers — It says something about the blood drawn by Myers’ argument for lucidity in literary prose that the writers who attacked it found it necessary to falsify it to make their (rigged) points. Not one of them has explained why, if Myers is arguing for dumbed-down prose, he extols Conrad, Woolf, Faulkner, and Joyce. Though their insularity does make a pretty good argument for how easily literature could go the way of the spinnet in the parlor.

Charles Taylor on A Reader's Manifesto

December 2, 2007 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , ,

Charles Taylor not only likes A Reader’s Manifesto—he thinks it is an essential part of a critic’s library:

A Reader’s Manifesto by B.R. Myers — It says something about the blood drawn by Myers’ argument for lucidity in literary prose that the writers who attacked it found it necessary to falsify it to make their (rigged) points. Not one of them has explained why, if Myers is arguing for dumbed-down prose, he extols Conrad, Woolf, Faulkner, and Joyce. Though their insularity does make a pretty good argument for how easily literature could go the way of the spinnet in the parlor.

Faint Praise

September 7, 2007 By in Books, Links 1 Comment

Gail Pool’s Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America discusses the problems inherent in book reviewing, the perceived solutions to them, the problems with her perceived solutions, and why none of this might matter if newspapers book reviews continue to diminish. Although the subtitle of her book defines it as “in America,” I suspect many of the issues about evaluating worthiness are universal. Some of her comments are specific to the American market for book reviews, and the use of the word “plight” probably comes from her implicit realization that only a small number of paid critics will work in the future. A much larger number of people like me will occupy the rest of the universe with our fractured, para- and unprofessional opinions that may or may not be worth much. Newspapers are likely to continue cutting independent reviews, which in turn reduces the number of opinions one is exposed to and the philosophies underlying why the reviewer judges a book the way he or she does.

Pool links the market pressure to the big problem with book reviewing, which remains and is perhaps exacerbated by current trends. The big problem is that “[…] assessing critical judgments inevitably comes down to taste.” You can make your argument more forcefully or less forcefully, but you can’t eliminate taste or come to a perfect solution about what makes art. I’ve been wrestling with that issue in posts concerning Elmore Leonard and B.R. Myers’ response to Leonard, and many others see it too. Taste is worth having even if it can’t be defined, and you at least need some sense of it to say anything useful about art. You also need space in which to say it, and that brings Pool’s book back to the problem of having fewer quality outlets and too few words to express a big idea.

Books about books give writers nearly infinite space to write, so Faint Praise isn’t hampered by that problem with reviews or reviews about reviews. Instead, she’s facing the problem of too many people having already dealt with the things Faint Praise discusses. You don’t need the book—Book Daddy’s discussion is adequate to understand its main points, especially since some of the comments also contribute useful ideas (oh, and read this for some juicy quotes about critics). Other writers, like Tyler Cowen, also made me think about the problem in this post. In addition to Book|Daddy, Marginal Revolution, and Critical Mass, The Elegant Variation also sometimes covers arts. I probably would’ve been much more interested in Faint Praise if its subjects hadn’t already been hashed and rehashed in so many forums. I feel déjà vu: the arguments are going in circles, the problems about what should be criticized and when and how are unsolvable, although one can be cognizant of them and thus try to write more successful. Steve Wasserman addressed current problems in the Columbia Journalism Review, and a recent symposium on book pricing dealt with similar issues. Orwell on reviewing is an older and condensed version of what Pool says. Writers keep asking about what the Internet is doing to publishing and literature, and although I won’t try to predict to the future, I do know one consequence: it has made Faint Praise superfluous because if you read all the links I posted above you’ve already learned as much if not more than you would from the book. The questions about how should one judge a work and how does one find the merit of the work remain. There is no standard and cannot be, efforts at standardization often being worse than the problem they seek to solve. So we are left with the struggle and the frequent failure of book reviews, which, like the novels they comment on, fail more often than not. Let us try to, as Zadie Smith said, fail better. I wish Pool had more and more insight on how fail better and fewer dour if correct predictions about the future of book reviewing.

The Prisoner of Convention

June 9, 2007 By in Books, Links Tags: , , ,

The Atlantic just posted a non-gated review of Elmore Leonard (the review nominally covers The Hot Kid, but B.R. Myers is more interested in Leonard than this particular book). Myers makes an intriguing but wrong point about Leonard’s shift from Westerns to caper novels in that the latter abdicate morality in pursuit of cool and hence lose their… what? Heft? Authority? I can’t exactly tell, but I argue the opposite: Leonard’s move from simple stories of good and evil to stories with a shifting moral landscape make them better and more interesting novels that avoid easy conclusions about the characters inhabiting them and hence reach a depth that some of his earlier stories don’t.

I also dislike the implicit critical assumption about cultural commentary in Myers’ piece: that books, or at least Leonard’s books, need cleanly delineated good/evil opposites to function. He writes, “Back then [Leonard] was still immune to the silly idea that it’s unrealistic to pit a very good person against a very bad one.” It may or may not be unrealistic, but Myers seems to imply that he prefers stories about very good people against very bad ones—which is fine, but if so, he shouldn’t criticize Leonard for writing the kind of books he does not prefer. I find nothing wrong with the style of novel in which good/evil characters are made evident—Lord of the Rings is among my favorite novels, and no one is worse than Sauron or better than Aragorn—but to imply that stories involving ambiguity are inherently bad means that Myers won’t let novels explore what makes good good and bad bad; Leonard, in a subtle way, usually does in his caper novels, and also manages to show how good guys and bad guys often aren’t so different, when one even can identify the good guys and bad guys. Carl Webster in The Hot Kid is the supposed good guy mostly because he has a bade in The Hot Kid, and he’s mostly comic in Up in Honey’s Room, though to his credit he is chasing Nazis. Sometimes one can’t easily tell the good guys from the bad guys. Leonard might want to write about cool, so let him, without encumbering him with moralistic baggage.

Read “The Prisoner of Cool” for its useful and interesting observations about Leonard’s style and progression, even if you too think the conclusions are wrong. There is a reason I title this, “The Prisoner of Convention.”

UPDATE: I posted again on Myers here.

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