Tag Archives: Literature

Novels, notoriety, and memoirs

March 5, 2008 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Megan McArdle discusses contemporary literary culture in the context of yet another fake memoir that’s apparently famous but I’d never heard of prior to its notoriety:

I do think, though, that Matt has hit on something about our own time, though I’m not quite as down on contemporary fiction as he is. Since the modernists, all contemporary literary fiction–including narrative fiction–has focused less on certain aspects of telling a story. I understand that some cognitive scientists theorize that the reason we enjoy stories so much is that they activate the parts of our brain that deal with social cognition and learning. The reason that genre fiction, even though it is usually not a masterpiece of prose styling, can be so absorbing is that it provides this function. The fantasy of a space opera or a bodice-ripper is compelling because we’re imagining ourselves as the hero–imagining ourselves as a better, more interesting version of ourselves. We’re also exploring how we should/would act in certain (unlikely) situations; the novels that do best in these genres are the ones where the hero ultimately acts rightly, which is to say, producing the best result in some sense. This is possibly silly, even counterproductive–one sees women actually acting like heroines of romance novels, and wondering (though not in so many words) why men do not respond to them in the same way as in the book. But it’s a deep element of most peoples’ fantasy lives.

This is an itch that contemporary novels try very hard not to scratch. “The moral of the story . . . ” is an archaism.

So for people who wouldn’t be caught dead reading a bodice ripper, memoir fills that space. Having neatly separated fact and fiction, we now read only “fact” as a way to learn about correct behavior, where a hundred years ago people were perfectly accustomed to taking moral or social lessons out of obvious fiction (from whence the term “morality play”). Memoir alone do we permit ourselves to read for the (now conscious) purpose of obtaining information about how human beings behave in other situations than ours.

My take: I’ve never been interested in memoirs because fiction and journalism are vastly more interesting than what a person did/has done, especially if that person hasn’t done something vital or important. Call this preference for something vaguely important an offshoot of the popes and princes school of history. My lack of interest in the memoir notwithstanding, the genre seems to be quite popular, and I suppose McArdle has as plausible an explanation about why this is as anyone.

But I’m not sure I buy the premises that McArdle’s piece is based on, which I’ll call the stultifying literary hypothesis theory or the literary/genre split theory. Neither, apparently, do some of McArdle’s colleagues. Good writing is good writing, no matter where it comes from, as was discussed recently. Furthermore, I don’t think I’ve seen all that many people highly invested in defending airless literary fiction; if I could find these strawmen who wield influence out of proportion to their size, I would love to meet them.

Furthermore, the biggest problem with these literary / genre distinctions is that different people have different wants, and the quality of writing itself cannot be measured by what “genre,” if any, a book belongs to. I hesitate to say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but it’s true, and how a novel uses language to express itself is an important quality of what makes good fiction. What the fiction says is, I think, a separate issue that too often gets muddled in with how it is said.

That being said, I think the novel still has many places to go, and rumors of its death have been circulating such a long time that I wouldn’t be surprised if it is still dying whenever I am. Being 24, I hope that won’t be for a while yet.

Orhan Pamuk interview

February 10, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Orahn Pamuk gives a fantastic interview at the Brooklyn Rail. A sample:

The novel, beginning in the 18th century, began to take over all the previous literary forms. In fact, we can even say it was the early form of globalization. The world, in so many ways, is so culturally globalized that our ways of seeing it are very similar to the post-Renaissance, let’s say from the invention of perspective in Italian and Dutch painting to the invention of photography and thereafter; we still see the world in a similar manner. We are likewise all globalized in our literary imagination, in the forms that we use, and I would say the literary globalization of the world had been completed years ago, when nobody was talking about globalization.

This resonates with Milan Kundera’s The Curtain, a book that deals much with the inherent internationalism in literature. I’m especially prone to such arguments because I’ve been reading so much in translation lately: a post on The Name of the Rose is due tomorrow, I finished Pamuk’s My Name is Red not long ago, right after that I finished Madame Bovary, The Curtain itself was originally written in French by a Czech author, and I’ve even finished books I didn’t especially like translated from Spanish: The Bad Girl and The Savage Detectives. And I began Doctor Faustus a few days ago, though I fear I will have to put it aside for a time so I can work on an academic project. Nonetheless, given the above, what Pamuk says about the globalization of literature is well-taken.

(Link stolen, as usual, from TEV.)

Read and understand: Doris Lessing on books

December 17, 2007 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , ,

Doris Lessing‘s Nobel Lecture is up at The Guardian:

Some much-publicised new writers haven’t written again, or haven’t written what they wanted to, meant to. And we, the old ones, want to whisper into those innocent ears: “Have you still got your space? Your soul, your own and necessary place where your own voices may speak to you, you alone, where you may dream. Oh, hold on to it, don’t let it go.”

This would also be a good time to go back to Orhan Pamuk, Seamus Heaney, and J.M. Coetzee’s Nobel lectures. Notice the four have in common: a reverence and love for books, and their underlying power, knowledge.

(Hat tip to The Elegant Variation.)

A Reader’s Manifesto — B.R. Myers

November 12, 2007 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , 5 Comments

I read and loved B.R. Myers’ A Reader’s Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose, an essay decrying the literary and critical tendency toward, respectively, writing and praising mushy “self-conscious, writerly prose,” that lacks artistry, coherence, and story. The same Myers wrote an article about Elmore Leonard I derided in The Prisoner of Convention, but as much as that was misguided A Reader’s Manifesto is dead on target. Both first appeared in The Atlantic, though chopped to a smaller, shriller form. A short version of A Reader’s Manifesto is ungated, but the whole, unexpurgated book form shows more examples of what Myers perceives to be good prose, providing more balance. The printed version also rebuts many of the retorts, which often misstate Myers’ argument, to A Reader’s Manifesto. It’s easily to parodied: many critics write that Myers argues against experimentation, or demands conformity, or lacks the acuity to understand modern literature. He preemptively deals with such points, and my single sentence pop summary doesn’t contain the essay’s nuances, which are subtle and important enough to merit reading everything.

Despite my praise, you see can see precursors to A Reader’s Manifesto in Tom Wolfe’s, Stalking the Billion-footed Beast: a Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel and in others who echo Wolfe, like Dan Simmons in this Salon interview.

None of the three directly address one of the harder problems for the average reader: deciding what to read, especially if one should not trust many critics. I doubt most readers follow the debate among mandarin book reviews and the like. As Robert Towers writes in The Flap over Tom Wolfe: How Real is the Retreat from Realism?, “The overwhelming impression one gets is that Mr. Wolfe has read very little of the fiction of the last 30 years – the period during which, he laments, realism became hopelessly old-hat, practiced chiefly by such antiquated figures as Saul Bellow, Robert Stone (born six years after Mr. Wolfe) and John Updike (one year younger than Mr. Wolfe), who ”found it hard to give up realism” (as if they ever tried!).” Wolfe and Myers infight, and are in danger of ignoring the vast corpus of modern fiction, the operative word being vast: I, for one, hesitate to make too many generalizations given the sheer number of titles published. You can find good fiction of the kind Wolfe says is no longer written, and of the kind Myers says is too-often ignored by prize committees.

To be fair, Myers never says that strong, important writing has utterly disappeared—he only laments that so many mediocre or bad writers receive so much adulation. I agree and try to defend the writers worth defending, deflate those not, and remind others of the great but forgotten, or underloved, or poorly publicized authors who deserve notice–most notably Robertson Davies. In doing so, I try to avoid the hype machines manufacture hype and reputations. A Reader’s Manifesto is a useful corrective to the hyperbolic claims of much bad modern literature, especially after trying Don DeLillo’s bizarre soporifics White Noise and Underworld. The person I love to hate most is critical sensation Jonathan Safran Foer, whose two best-known novels are so awful that it takes restraint not to write off the entire taste in books of any devotee. Skip Foer and DeLillo, and take up Myers: he is willing to say that the emperor has no clothes.

EDIT: This post also covers A Reader’s Manifesto.

A Reader's Manifesto — B.R. Myers

November 12, 2007 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

I read and loved B.R. Myers’ A Reader’s Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose, an essay decrying the literary and critical tendency toward, respectively, writing and praising mushy “self-conscious, writerly prose,” that lacks artistry, coherence, and story. The same Myers wrote an article about Elmore Leonard I derided in The Prisoner of Convention, but as much as that was misguided A Reader’s Manifesto is dead on target. Both first appeared in The Atlantic, though chopped to a smaller, shriller form. A short version of A Reader’s Manifesto is ungated, but the whole, unexpurgated book form shows more examples of what Myers perceives to be good prose, providing more balance. The printed version also rebuts many of the retorts, which often misstate Myers’ argument, to A Reader’s Manifesto. It’s easily to parodied: many critics write that Myers argues against experimentation, or demands conformity, or lacks the acuity to understand modern literature. He preemptively deals with such points, and my single sentence pop summary doesn’t contain the essay’s nuances, which are subtle and important enough to merit reading everything.

Despite my praise, you see can see precursors to A Reader’s Manifesto in Tom Wolfe’s, Stalking the Billion-footed Beast: a Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel and in others who echo Wolfe, like Dan Simmons in this Salon interview.

None of the three directly address one of the harder problems for the average reader: deciding what to read, especially if one should not trust many critics. I doubt most readers follow the debate among mandarin book reviews and the like. As Robert Towers writes in The Flap over Tom Wolfe: How Real is the Retreat from Realism?, “The overwhelming impression one gets is that Mr. Wolfe has read very little of the fiction of the last 30 years – the period during which, he laments, realism became hopelessly old-hat, practiced chiefly by such antiquated figures as Saul Bellow, Robert Stone (born six years after Mr. Wolfe) and John Updike (one year younger than Mr. Wolfe), who ”found it hard to give up realism” (as if they ever tried!).” Wolfe and Myers infight, and are in danger of ignoring the vast corpus of modern fiction, the operative word being vast: I, for one, hesitate to make too many generalizations given the sheer number of titles published. You can find good fiction of the kind Wolfe says is no longer written, and of the kind Myers says is too-often ignored by prize committees.

To be fair, Myers never says that strong, important writing has utterly disappeared—he only laments that so many mediocre or bad writers receive so much adulation. I agree and try to defend the writers worth defending, deflate those not, and remind others of the great but forgotten, or underloved, or poorly publicized authors who deserve notice–most notably Robertson Davies. In doing so, I try to avoid the hype machines manufacture hype and reputations. A Reader’s Manifesto is a useful corrective to the hyperbolic claims of much bad modern literature, especially after trying Don DeLillo’s bizarre soporifics White Noise and Underworld. The person I love to hate most is critical sensation Jonathan Safran Foer, whose two best-known novels are so awful that it takes restraint not to write off the entire taste in books of any devotee. Skip Foer and DeLillo, and take up Myers: he is willing to say that the emperor has no clothes.

EDIT: This post also covers A Reader’s Manifesto.

Catch-22 and overrated novels

June 28, 2007 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

Lester Hunt thinks Catch-22 is the most overrated novel of the Twentieth Century, a stance I strongly disagree with (link originally via Marginal Revolution, which also asks what readers think the most overrated novel is).

The most pernicious aspect of Hunt’s post is that it misrepresents Catch-22: he writes, “But it consists of basically the same joke over and over again: military people are evil and stupid. They are also stupid and evil.” The joke is that military life—like much of life, especially in bureaucracies—is absurd, and made all the more so by its officiousness and self-importance and lack of awareness of its officiousness and self-importance. With this starting point, Hunt goes on to say that, “It’s a bad argument,” for Catch-22 to argue that military people are evil and stupid. But literature, even satire, is not necessarily written to make an argument: its point, if it has one, is to create art which exists for its own sake. Even so, and even if his initial point is correct, he’s dangerously close to making an argument like the one I attacked in The Prisoner of Convention, a post about Elmore Leonard: that you have to have the “good guys” in a traditional sense—white knight, armor, etc.—be more sympathetic than the “bad guys.” Novels should have the option of making one perceive a situation from other points of view, and one major point of a great deal of art, especially in writing, is that it is often difficult to tell who the bad guys are. (Saddam Hussein was a bad guy and always has been and always will be, right? So why did the former Secretary of Defense shake his hand? We’ve always been at war with Eurasia, right?) If art lacks this option it becomes propaganda.

Although I’d need to reread Catch-22 to cite textual elements for my criticism, I’d suggest Hunt start with some reading with regard to his fourth point, “[t]here is less than meets the eye[:]””Spindrift and the Sea: Structural Patterns and Unifying Elements in Catch 22” by Clinton Burhans, Jr., “It Was All Yossarian’s Fault” Power and Responsibility in Catch-22″ by Stephen Sniderman, both in the journal Twentieth Century Literature, and “War and the Comic Muse: The Good Soldier Schweik and Catch-22” by J. P. Stern in The English Journal. As far as books go, Critical essays on Joseph Heller by James Nagel is probably worth reading, and even big boy on the block Harold Bloom wrote in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

My own choice for most overrated novel depends on whether one is dealing with the question of whether a novel is overrated by critics of the general public. As The Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels list shows, the two have substantially different ideas about what constitutes greatness. I’m more concerned with what “The Board” thinks, because its choices are more likely to stand up over time, but my choice overlaps: Catcher in the Rye, a novel that manages to combine spectacularly boring writing with a whiny, indulgent brat. Its only redeeming quality is that high schools assign it—or least mine did—despite the swearing and such, thus potentially moving out of the curriculum books like Ethan Frome—though mine made us read it. Read might be too strong a word—mind assigned it.

To Kill a Mockingbird is also a decent choice, but I doubt most scholars and critics take it seriously anymore, so it does no harm on high school reading lists, and probably a fair bit of good: it’s simple in language but still has enough to sink one’s ill-developed intellectual teeth into, and the symbolism is readily understandable even by 13-year-olds. Catcher in the Rye, on the other hand, still seems to have institutional support. I suspect that when the literature professors and teachers who came of age in the 60s retire, Catcher in the Rye will fade into a curio of its time. D.H. Lawrence I don’t love and can’t see aging well, but he is extremely important in terms of the novel’s history. On the Road is another vastly overrated novel, but I hesitate to call it the most overrated.

The Amis Inheritance

April 23, 2007 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , , , ,

The New York Times Magazine from yesterday ran a long article on “the curious writerly firm of Amis & Amis, founded by Kingsley, who died in 1995, and now run by his son Martin.” It deals with an obvious question in the lives of both writers, but one that hasn’t often been seriously examined because Martin is equally often hostile and dismissive of those who ask one-off questions about how Kingsley affected his writing. Take this response from January titled Martin Amis: You Ask The Questions; The novelist writes in answer to ‘Independent’ readers about misogyny, Islamism, Iran’s nuclear threat and Kirk Douglas’s naked body:

How do you think you might have ended up spending your working life if your father hadn’t been a famous writer? JOHN GORDON, Eastleigh

Well, John, that would depend on what my father had chosen to do instead. If he had been a postman, then I would have been a postman. If he had been a travel agent, then I would have been a travel agent. Do you get the idea?

That echoes dialog between John Self and a character named Martin Amis in Martin’s novel, Money:

‘Hey,’ I said, ‘Your dad’s a writer too, isn’t he? Bet that made it easier.’
‘Oh sure. It’s just like taking over the family pub[,]’ [Martin said.]

Money also tempts an autobiographical reading into aspects of the protagonist, John Self, as he also has an overbearing, promiscuous father and other similarities to Martin. To be sure, I doubt even people inclined towards biographical readings would argue that the Self’s excesses reflect Martin’s lifestyle, but there are certainly parallel elements.

The father figure issue is a subject Martin must get far too many questions about—perhaps his equivalent of “where do you get your ideas?” or like John Banville being asked about Benjamin Black. As a result, the article from The New York Times provides as good a summary as one’s likely to find about them in particular and literary progeny (in a literal sense) in general.

This Amis mania—the links above are just a smattering of recent press coverage—probably comes in part from Martin’s new novel, House of Meetings, and from Zachary Leader’s new biography, The Life of Kingsley Amis. Christopher Hitchens reviewed it favorably in The Atlantic. “Favorably” probably isn’t a strong enough word, as Hitchens says: “In this astonishingly fine and serious book, which by no means skips the elements of scandal and salacity, Zachary Leader has struck a near-ideal balance between the life and the work, and has traced the filiations between the two without any strain or pretension.” The rest of the article discusses little about the book but much about Hitchens’ recollection of Kingsley, as Hitchens knew the father and knows the son, and so complements the larger work.

Like Hitchens, I loved Lucky Jim when I read it, but I didn’t care for Girl, 20 the first time through. I recently gave it another shot, though, and changed my opinion, making posting the previous link a tad embarrassing to post. Regardless, “The Amis Inheritance” is worth reading, as are the books of Amis & Amis.

An update: The New Yorker also has a piece on The Life of Kingsley Amis available online.

Update # 2: Terry Teachout writes more on Kingsley in Commentary magazine.

The Deptford Trilogy

November 17, 2006 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I mentioned The Deptford Trilogy in relation to Brian Evanson, but the novels are worth an independent post. I have a bit of trouble with whether I should write “a novel” or just “novels,” because although they were published separately, their thematic and structural links means that severing one from the whole—though any one could stand alone—would lessen their combined power, which is greater than the sum of their parts.

Those parts are fabulous: finishing the trilogy leaves one with a sense of completeness, like finishing an excellent meal but not gorging. The books are realistic and yet steeped in the mythological. If this sounds like a difficult to feat, that’s because it is. And yet the blending of myth and commentary on myth into life is so smooth that the mythic overlay is never ostentatious. It is made explicit at times, but not in a way that seems like a lecture or, worse yet, a dissertation.

The books—though I do think of them as a single book than as parts—explain thought without being didactic, and their powerful story—they do tell a single story—allows the many quotable sections to flow without damming the work.

The skeptical but not cynical Dunstan Ramsay narrates and is the subject of, Fifth Business, but only narrates the third, World of Wonders. He is, among many other things, a teacher of the sort it would have been marvelous to have; Ramsay is never fanatical about anything but inquisitiveness, is serious and yet self-effacing, and possesses the quiet and stern humor mastered by the British, but perhaps also understood by their Canadian cousins. He felt a little like a provincial Gandalf stripped of overt manifestations of power but still possessing his wisdom—only Ramsay’s is infused with irony.

Ramsay takes himself seriously enough not to be a fool but laughs at himself enough to know his own limitations. That’s probably the sanest way to go through life without being as utterly ridiculous as so many of us are.

The irony keeps him from being a joiner or true believer. It is impossible to assign Ramsay a conventional political point of view, for what he knows best is human nature, and political views are most often adapted to whatever is most convenient for their holders. The holders, meanwhile, are often unable to perceive themselves, and instead leave to the marginal characters of a society to speak, if not the truth, something close to it:

… like so many idealists, [radical party members] did not understand money, and after a meeting where they had lambasted Boy and others like him and threatened to confiscate their wealth at the first opportunity, they would adjourn to cheap restaurants, where they drank his sugar, and ate his sugar, and smoked cigarettes which, had they known it, benefited some other monster they sought to destroy.

This reminds me of someone I knew who would type his anti-corporate screeds on a Dell computer and defend his choice of a Volvo station wagon as being “less commercial.” He did not perceive the webs that made him, like all of us, complicit in the schemes we disagree with. I do not approve of China’s record on human rights, yet I write this on a computer manufactured there, and I no doubt own clothes made there. China has benefited me—but I do understand the webs that the radical party members do not, and Ramsay, though he doesn’t say as much, probably does.

As such, Ramsay is not easy to co-opt. Ursula K. Le Guin, in receiving a recent Washington State Book Award , said: “most governments dislike [literature], justly suspecting that all their power and glory will soon be forgotten unless some wretched, powerless liberal in the basement is writing it down.” Governments dislike literature and idealists dislike money: Ramsay could believe both things and avoid being a fool by being observant.

That is his chief value as a speaker: the power of observation combined with self-reflection. David Staunton, fierce lawyer and uncertain man, narrates The Manticore, is also observant, but lacks Ramsay’s inner ballast. Still, his therapy sessions illuminate much beyond his inner self, or even the lives of the principal characters from Deptford. As Dr. von Haller says: “The patterns of human feeling do not change as much as many people suppose.”

So they don’t: we read The Odyssey and see the pattern it set—or noticed—in many lives, whether our own odyssey is conquering nanotech or just getting to work in the morning. We see it today as we did then, just as our own history is seldom so exceptional as we might wish it. Much of Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence, which synthesizes his lifetime of studying Western culture, focuses on history’s repetition (or rhyming). The similarity of so much of human existence is more astonishing than the differences.

For one thing, the capacity for self-deception seems eternal. As David’s therapist observes in The Manticore:

DR. VON HALLER: Yes, I think that would be best. You have got into your swing, and done all the proper lawyer-like things. So now let us get on.”

MYSELF: What do you mean, exactly, by “the proper lawyer-like things”?

DR. VON HALLER: Expressed the highest regard for the person you are going to destroy. Declaring that you have no real feeling in the matter and are quite objective. Suggesting that something is cool and dry which by its nature is hot and steamy. Very good. Continue, please.

In other words, the way one wants to appear and present oneself is perpendicular to the way one is, and we accept the deception as a way of continuing to function despite contradiction. It’s much like accepting mythic narrative: the specifics of any life or story will not completely conform to the arc, but the arc remains nonetheless. Dr. von Haller specifically talks about lawyers, but she could just as easily discuss a myriad of professions, occupations, or people.

The best part of the book is the language itself, which is so rich that I could post a quote of the highest quality for a month and still have more. I find it odd that I’ve never heard about Robertson Davies in newspapers, blogs or school. For all I know Davies is relatively famous, although this seems unlikely because I’ve seldom seen any reference. I wonder if literary politics explain why I hadn’t heard of Davies before pulling Deptford off the shelf of a bookstore. The school issue is understandable—Canadians are a tough lot for American schools: the “big” authors like Shakespeare and Joyce have to be covered, as do big American authors like Hawthorn, Emerson, and the like. Curriculums need some minority voices as well, which usually get covered by Richard Wright, Zora Neal Hurston, and whoever wrote Bless Me, Ultima. Then, if there’s room, they want a few European writers not from Britain and maybe even an author or two from the third world. The Canadians, meanwhile, are close enough to not to count as foreign or exotic but not actually part of the U.S., so their important authors don’t get stuck in the American lit sections. Therefore, they don’t get read, although if I recall correctly Margaret Atwood is Canadian, which would make her an exception. Australians are in a similar boat: they’re of British descent and mostly white, which means they don’t get minority points, and they’re not sufficiently foreign to make it in under the third world rubric.I’d like to think that’s a view Ramsay could hold about his author’s own relative lack of fame.