Tag Archives: Literature

Being Written — William Conescu

June 26, 2009 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Being Written ought to be better than it is.

The idea is clever: someone is trying to go about his life aware that he’s being written as a character in a book. Some of the writing is clever, as when one character thinks “everyone at the table appears to Monty as if they’ve dressed for different occasions.” I’ve been to those parties. But other times the prosaic invades, as when we find, on the same page, that “pinstripes complement Natalie’s pale blue silk evening dress.” Is such an adjective train really necessary?

The novel bogs down. Quickly. The second person isn’t used as skillfully as it is in, say, Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City. Its self-consciousness becomes irritating, as when a chapter begins, “This doesn’t seem like the kind of book you’d want to read. There’s so much talk. You prefer books like the new Richard Corrone novel that you’ve set across the table from you as an incentive.” The truth is that Being Written does seem like the sort of book I’d want to read. But there’s too much blather about what it is to be a writer and tell story, with too little actual story.

Chapters alternate between different characters’ points of view and the second person “you” chapters, as if the writer is writing you. The former tend to be more successful but more boring and the latter more interesting but frustrating. He’s not the first writer with similar problems. About The Trick of It, Kate of Kate’s Book Blog wrote:

I found the premise of the novel irresistible: a young scholar meets and marries the novelist whose work is the primary focus of his academic career. This seemed to me a very clever way to explore the vexing interrelationship between fiction, biography, and literary criticism. And it was. But I’m not sure that the book ever transcended its premise to become something more than a clever idea.

That’s how I feel about Being Written, except I didn’t love the premise, which reminded me too much of 60s experimentation gone wrong, right down to the cover, which pictures a guy bent double with a pencil on his back. Yeah, I get the idea: we’re all in the process of being written by the stories of our lives even if we don’t necessarily hear the voice that the narrator does, but this doesn’t feel original even if I can’t immediately cite an obvious predecessor. Still, I did like it enough that I’ll keep an eye out for Conescu’s next novel, since this one shows promise, while many novels fail even that test.

Note: this novel was provided by its publisher.

Fifteen books in fifteen minutes

June 18, 2009 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , , , , 8 Comments

Via Terry Teachout and CAAF: “The rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.”

My list:

Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings
Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon
Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd’s The Time Paradox
Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty and Out of Sight (I count them as one book—so what?)
John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor
Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem
Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy
Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose
Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum
Robertson Davies’ The Deptford Trilogy
Robertson Davies’ The Cornish Trilogy
Alain de Botton’s On Love
Richard Russo’s Straight Man

(I purposefully didn’t read either Terry’s list or CAAF’s before writing mine. If I had to add a 16th, I’d probably take How to Think Like a Computer Scientist, which definitely doesn’t fit with the list above.)

More words of advice for the writer of a negative review

May 31, 2009 By in Books, Critics, Culture, Essays Tags: , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Nigel Beale quotes Helen Gardner:

“Critics are wise to leave alone those works which they feel a crusading itch to attack and writers whose reputations they feel a call to deflate. Only too often it is not the writer who suffers ultimately but the critic…”

Beale asks: “Which is great and poetic and all, however, is silence enough?”

To me, the chief function of the critic ought to be explore a work as honestly as possible and to illuminate to the best of her abilities. This means openness and it means being willing to say that a work is weak (and why), as well as showing how it is weak. In other words, you should be able to answer the who, what, where, when, why, and how on it, with an emphasis on the last two.

One should squelch “a crusading itch to attack and writers whose reputations they feel a call to deflate,” if you’re attacking merely to attack, or merely because someone’s balloon is overinflated. For example, Tom Wolfe seems a frequent and, to my mind, unfair object of ridicule among critics. But if you’re rendering a knowledge opinion that happens to be negative, you’re doing what you should be, and what I strive to. Often this means writing about why a book fails—perhaps too frequently.

Good reviews and Updike

Every attempt at review and criticism ought to be good—but that doesn’t mean positive. A review should be “good” in the sense of well-done and engaging might be a negative one. In an ideal world, the book should decide that as much as the critic.

John Updike’s rules for reviewing are worth following to the extent possible. I would emphasize three of them:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation–at least one extended passage–of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s ouevre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?

In the end, I think such rules are designed to keep the reviewer as honest as the reviewer can be. I keep coming back to the word “honesty” because it so well encapsulates the issues raised by Beale, Updike, Orwell, and others.

I especially like the “direct quotation” comment because there are no artificial word limits on web servers, meaning that you should give the reader a chance to disagree with your assessment through direct experience. Quoting of a sufficient amount of material will give others a chance to make their own judgments. Merit can be argued but not proven: thus, a critic can avoid silence and unfair attack.

As the above shows, I like Beale’s answer—”no”—which seems so obvious as to barely need stating. I’d rephrase Gardner’s assertion to this: “beware of relentlessly and thoughtlessly attacking.”

The Aeron, The Rite of Spring, and Critics

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, he quotes Bill Dowell, who was the lead researcher for Herman Miller during the development and release of the now-famous Aeron in the early 1990s; I’m sitting in one as I type this. The Aeron eventually sold fantastically well and became a symbol of boom-era excess, aesthetic taste, ergonomic control, excessive time at computers, and probably other things as well. But Dowell says that the initial users hated the chair and expressed their displeasure in focus groups and testing sites. According to him, “Maybe the word ‘ugly’ was just a proxy for ‘different.’ ”

That’s a long wind-up for an analogy that explains how Helen Gardner might be telling us that when we instinctively dislike, we might be reacting against novelty rather than its real merit, as critics and listeners notoriously did during Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. She’s wise to warn us about that danger, because it’s how people who pride themselves on taste and knowledge become conservative, stuffy critics. If we’re saying something is “bad” merely because it’s “different,” then we’ve already effectively died aesthetically because we’re no longer able to expand what “good” means. One thing I like about Terry Teachout’s criticism and his blog, About Last Night, is that he has strong opinions but still very much seems to have aesthetic suppleness.

But the Aerons and Ulysses of the world are exceedingly rare. Dune and Harry Potter aren’t among them. Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland at least might be, which I concede obliquely in my post about it.

Most works of art are, by definition, average.

The question is: to what extent is that a bad thing? Maybe none at all: an average novel doesn’t cause the death or disfigurement of children, or propagate social inequality, or do any number of other pernicious things. Its chief ill is that it wastes time for the person who reads it and perceives it as average (as opposed to the person who reads it and judges it extraordinary, which many Harry Potter readers have evidently done).

Milan Kundera thinks otherwise—in The Curtain, he writes, “… a mediocre plumber may be useful to people, but a mediocre novelist who consciously produces books that are ephemeral, commonplace, conventional—thus not useful, thus burdensome, thus noxious—is contemptible.” He gives himself a key out here: the word “consciously.” I doubt many writers consciously set out to produce commonplace books, or do so with that intent, and so may be rescued from the burden of Kundera’s scorn. Like the criminal justice system, Kundera separates those who knowingly commit a crime from those who do so accidentally.

You need to have read widely, however, to be capable of knowing the average from the incredible, and those whose effusive praise for Harry Potter and Dan Brown splatters the web show they haven’t. Hence, perhaps, the hesitance many Amazon reviewers show toward low scores, which one of Beale’s commenters observes.

The Aerons of Art

I now look at the Aeron as beautiful, and to me the over-stuffed office chairs that used to symbolize lawyerly and corporate status look as quaint as black and white photos of Harvard graduation classes without women or minorities. If we’re open to seeing the new, I think we’ll be safe enough in condemning the indifferent and pointing towards the genuinely astonishing works that are very much out there.

Edit: The Virginia Quarterly Review weighs in.

Dune and its laughable honor code relative to Beowulf and Fast & Furious

May 23, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Philosophy Tags: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Note: this is an addendum to an earlier post on Dune.

In Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents ,* Elaine Showalter quotes a letter that Kingsley Amis wrote as a student regarding the Old English requirement at Oxford: “The warriors and broken-down retainers who strut bawling across its pages repel by their childish fits of self-glorification and self-pity. The cheapest contemporary novel has more to teach us than those painful reminders of what we have long outgrown.” Although I think Old English has more merit than Amis gives it here, the sentiment regarding the sentiment of that time is one I can get behind, and one of my major criticisms of Frank Herbert’s Dune is essentially that it is guilty of the same sins: childish warriors, ceaseless strutting, and the acceptance/embrace of retrograde cultural ideals regarding the roles of women and the need for killing.

You can see the worship of honor in Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, when the eponymous warrior’s death is occasion for twelve warriors to ride around the king and for them to “extoll… his heroic nature and exploits / and [give] thanks for his greatness; which was the proper / thing.” This scene wouldn’t be out of place in Dune, which is a problem for a novel written in 1965 rather than, say, the tenth century.

That’s not to say that these problems are limited to Dune, or to novels. Take the recent movie Fast & Furious, which is is astonishingly good when measured by decibel. In it, Paul Walker is compared unfavorably to Vin Diesel when a character implies, with a completely straight face, that Walker has no “code.” It was one of many unintentionally funny moments because the creators of the movie apparently missed, say, the last two hundred years of cultural development away from the idea of rigid masculinity codes and towards a great sense of irony and fluidity. If your code of honor forces you to kill someone because they’ve disrespected your MacGuffin, or whatever, your most likely destination is jail, which is appropriate, and your code is likely to prevent or hamper you from adapting to new social or environmental situations. But Dune and Fast & Furious both present having codes and what not as positive. In that respect they resemble Beowulf

I would like to imagine that at some point the culture as a whole will move beyond its silly obsession with tit-for-tat internecine identity fighting that causes people, usually of the male persuasion, to behave like moose who ceaselessly charge against one another because it’s mating season. Still, given the deep cultural, and maybe even biological, roots of this disorder, I’m not counting on this happening anytime soon, but maybe recognizing malady, as Amis did, is a step towards dialectically surpassing it.

* Which I’m reading in preparation for a conference. More perhaps on that later.

Dune — Frank Herbert

May 17, 2009 By in Books, Essays, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Unlike, say, Ray Bradbury and or Dan Simmons’ novels, the Dune series is probably best appreciated before one’s literary taste has better developed. It still offers some treats like a plot that moves worlds, which begins with a deadly test that, even if we know Paul Muad’dib will pass, still offers immediate tension reminiscent of the later His Dark Materials trilogy.

Granted, some of the motives regarding moves and action don’t stand up to great scrutiny—why go to Arrakis in the first place, again?—but writing that isn’t actively abhorrent. Dune does some things really, really well—most notably its descriptions of cognitive states, which have the subtlety and nuance absent from the many, many moments when the book drops into characters’ mind to telegraph what they’re feeling instead of letting us infer it. Thufir Hawat, one of the many guards and weapons masters, thinks:

He might be at that, Hawat thought. That witch-mother of his is giving him the deep training, certainly. I wonder what her precious school thinks of that? Maybe that’s why they sent the old Proctor here—to whip our dear Lady Jessica into line.

Somehow we need to be immersed in the world and given information about it, but this seems a clumsy and transparent way of doing it—and it persists through the novel, and most of the time it conveys that we’re not smart enough to understand the characters without their little soliloquies. We’re constantly hearing about how “This must not get out of hand” even when the need is already obvious. The Harry Potter series is guilty of the same problem, as revealing too much about characters while simultaneously making them flat, stealing the mystery that might otherwise make us interesting. Hamlet’s soliloquies make him less scrutable and more real; Hawat and Paul’s have the opposite effect.

Perhaps not surprisingly, much of the dialog clangs, whether it’s within or spoken. Early on, we’re treated to standard fantasy/sci-fi pablum about independence and caring:

“The old woman’s voice softened. “Jessica, girl, I wish I could stand in your place and take your sufferings. But each of us must make her own path.”
“I know.”
“You’re as dear to me as any of my own daughters, but I cannot let that interfere with duty.”

We could be in a Marine barracks, or a royal court, or a foreign planet, or a softball game, or any number of other places. This extends to the characters. The villains are irredeemably evil and cruel, taking obvious delight in those traits like a child with an over-sized ice cream. They’re more laughable than anything else, but they never laugh at themselves—how could they and maintain their dignity?—but no one else laughs at them either.

The entire absence of laughter makes Dune harder to take than it might have been in the past. The poignancy of its lack is most notable when references appear, like this one: “Paul held himself apart from the humor, his attention focused on the projection and the question that filled his mind.” But Paul never becomes part of the humor, and neither does the reader. We’re too busy being bombarded with relentless seriousness and nobility, like a 15th Century morality play. Destiny is so important that one can ignore life. Honor and codes are everything.

We’ve taken that 15th Century attitude and brought it forward thousands of years; Paul kills a woman’s husband and is asked by one of the many Noble Savages on Arrakis, “Do you accept Harah as woman or servant?” Maybe one should ask her. Maybe she should read The Feminine Mystique and ask herself if she should submit to cultural imperatives making her property to whichever buck has the biggest horns. But it’s not her place to grow—not in this narrative, or at least not in a meaningful way, and we’re not supposed to feel for her: we’re with Paul Muad’dib and his seductive powers, which give Dune its chief pleasures as he overcomes obstacle after obstacle, both physical mental, the two forming a dialectical cycle that, once begun, will of course break all the rules, as we would like to.

The issues I raise aren’t new ones, and their basic contours were known long before Dune was published. Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye writes:

It is… quite possible to take the alazon [which Frye says “means imposter, someone who pretends or tries to be something more than he is”] at his own valuation: this is done for instance by the creators of the inscrutable gloomy heroes in Gothic thrillers, with their wild or piercing eyes and their dark hints of interesting sins. The result as a rule is not tragedy so much as the kind of melodrama which may be defined as comedy without humor.

Alas, that’s Dune to the experienced reader: comedy without humor because the characters are too busy posturing to perceive their ridiculousness; they can’t see their own situation and so are affected by grandiose myopia. That seems common in descriptions of modern dictators as well; Mark Bowden’s Tales of the Tyrant describes Saddam Hussein as suffering from the same ailment. In Dune the heaviness of “dark hints of interesting sins,” or at least knowledge, is pervasive, though I didn’t have language in which to put the problem properly until I read Frye, giving better form to the ideas that had plagued me without resolution.

Although it’s unfair to say so, it seems that a great deal of fantasy has the humor problem, and for all its flaws one advantage of Harry Potter is that momentous prophecy is leavened with a sense of schoolyard folly. Lord of the Rings has Sam Gamgee and other hobbits to alleviate the gloom. Dune becomes ponderous by comparison, with characters’ religious roles of honor, death, need, and codes, as if the whole of 20th Century criticism and aesthetics hadn’t happened. This is, I suspect, the quality that science fiction and fantasy detractors point to when denigrating those two forms of literature, but just because the forms the genres tend to take are weak doesn’t mean the genres themselves have to be: their best practitioners avoid the Dune problems, or outgrow them. Some phrases, like the famous mantra that fear is the mind killer, have staying power.

Dune still has flair, but not the sense of inexhaustible possibility that a novel needs to endure over a lifetime or through generations. On re-reading it, the book feels exhausted, superseded, an artifact from an earlier age rather than a living story. I wish it were otherwise.

EDIT: See also this post on Dune and its laughable honor code.

Michael Crichton — Congo, Sphere, and Eaters of the Dead

April 29, 2009 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

Curiosity and recommendations inspired me to read Michael Crichton, if one can really call that activity reading, because he isn’t a very good author; as far as I can tell, his one claim to literary style or merit is Eaters of the Dead, a decent novel with a structure that compensates for Crichton’s weaknesses.

Reading Crichton came in part for reasons mentioned in “On books, taste, and distaste,” where Jason Fisher asked:

Do you do any reading purely for non-intellectual pleasure, I wonder? I, for instance, read Palahniuk novels, Crichton novels too, and pulpy fantasy and science fiction, and so on. I know this isn’t great literature, but because I know that, and don’t expect it to be, I can enjoy it for what it is.

I answered, “probably,” but noted that a book needs to reach some baseline level of linguistic and literary skill before I could enjoy it. But most of Crichton’s work doesn’t get there, and I agree with Martin Amis’ comment:

That Michael Crichton gets on any lists is a bad sign: the best review I’ve seen of his wildly popular and equally wildly uneven, and usually bad, work is in Martin Amis’ The War Against Cliché, when he praises Crichton at his best as “a blend of Stephen Jay Gould and Agatha Christie” and then discusses what’s wrong in the context of The Lost World, but it could be transposed to most of his Crichton’s novels:

The job of characterization has been delegated to two or three thrashed and downtrodden adverbs. ‘Dodgson shook his head irritably’; ‘ “Handle what?” Dodgson said irritably.’ So Dodgson is irritable. But ‘ “I tell you it’s fine,” Levine said irritably.’ ‘Levine got up irritably.’ So Levine is irritable too. ‘Malcolm stared forward gloomily.’ ‘ “We shouldn’t have the kids here,” said Malcolm gloomily.’ Malcolm seems to own ‘gloomily’; but then you irritably notice that Rossiter is behaving ‘gloomily’ too, and gloomily discover that Malcolm is behaving ‘irritably.’ Forget about ‘tensely’ and ‘grimly’ for now. And don’t get me started on ‘thoughtfully.’

I wish this criticism from Amis weren’t representative weren’t representative. In Sphere, for example, take this passage of 429 of my edition: “Norman felt dull and slow.” “Norman mumbled something, and he vaguely felt Beth grab him strongly by the arm…” “He felt numb and stupid.” “They were under the airlock, and he began to feel surging currents of water. There was something very big out there.” “… Fletcher gripped him with strong arms…”

Apparently Norman feels everything but emotion or any larger sense of himself. If this is supposed to show him being numb, it fails, because there’s insufficient variation in register throughout the novel to even notice the change. Later, this fine sentence intrudes: “There was something very big out there.” Really? Is that the best you can do? What makes it big? What does the horror of sensing that thing outside feel like? Actually, don’t tell us what it feels like if you’re going to tell us in the same way as the passage quoted above. Crichton never moves beyond this. His plots move, yes, but it takes more than plot alone to keep me interested. I’m not in the same category as James Wood, who says in How Fiction Works that “[…] the novel soon showed itself willing to surrender the essential juvenility of plot,” which I think utterly wrong and will no doubt write about in greater detail elsewhere. Still, a novel needs more than plot to live sufficiently to move me; it needs… everything in an alchemical mix without a perfect recipe.

Crichton isn’t a very good writer under most circumstances. There are writers with strong senses of plot, motion, and characterization who are very good, the most obvious example being Elmore Leonard. Carl Hiaasen’s better books fall into that category too. They’re both pop writers, but they’re good; they don’t redundantly use the same words over and over again, and they’re subtle in ways Crichton almost never is. Leonard would never write a passage as bad as the one quoted above. Ian McEwan’s novels are tightly plotted, as are many of Graham Greene’s and Philip Pullman’s. The difference between Crichton and those other authors is that they go far beyond plot. Paragraphs like this, from Congo, are just unacceptable and too common:

The large male moved menacingly toward Peter, but he never took his eyes off Amy. Amy watched him without response. It was a clear test of dominance. The male moved closer and closer, without hesitation (219).

A more skilled writer would have made us know “menacingly,” without the adverb, avoided the “Amy. Amy” repetition, and not told us about the test but let us discover the test. And if the male is moving closer and closer, implying stops or at least motion, then it seems unlikely that he’d move without hesitation. I feel like I’m repeating myself because I am; it could be argued that I’ve taken examples out of context and treated them unfairly, or that the narrator’s voice is repetitive and unimaginative because he’s being attacked by apes, or a giant squid and in cold water, or whatever other attacking monsters inhabit Crichton’s novels. I don’t think it really matters. For a novel to be merely entertaining, as opposed to something else, it must at least not be actively bad, even if its prose doesn’t remind one of T.C. Boyle or Saul Bellow or Robertson Davies.

Still, in at least one circumstance Crichton makes us forgive him. Eaters of the Dead is told from the perspective of a medieval wayfarer from 921. He’s in a foreign country and obviously wouldn’t have the highly developed style one expects of contemporary novelists, and the documentary apparatus / frame story surrounding the book, complete with scholarly detritus and explanation, helps to excuse the intentional archaisms. On the journey, we learn:

The ship was fitted with benches for oars, but never were the oars employed; rather we progressed by sailing alone. At the head of the ship was the wooden carving of a fierce sea monster, such as appears on some Northman vessels; also there was a tail at the stern. In water this ship was stable and quite pleasant for traveling, and the confidence of the warriors elevated my spirits.

Like the other two novels in the edition I have, Eaters of the Dead is flat, without any interior light, and characters lack inner being, like a cyborg version of a person. Crichton barely uses metaphor, as if comparing something to another not entirely like it might be too complex. In Eaters of the Dead, this makes sense: the Ibn Fadlan writes long before many of these stylistic conventions re-developed in the West, and he’s probably not the world’s most introspective chap anyway, given that his occupation is killing and pillaging (and probably raping on the side, but we don’t hear about that). At times this kind of writing is fun, like a sugar high, but it’s not genuinely addictive and leaves one feeling empty at the end of its consumption. And it’s not The Name of the Rose, which paradoxically combines modern writing with that of the fourteenth century, giving us a dazzling portrait of both universes at once, like a Photoshop filter turned to 50% opacity.

The final section in my edition of Eaters of the Dead contains a soul-crushing essay on whether the events described would have been historically possible. Once couldn’t imagine such a thing accompanying The Name of the Rose. My question about Crichton’s essay: who cares? It’s a novel. The better question ought to be, “is this novel any good? Why or why not?” But Crichton’s work doesn’t endeavor to undertake that more demanding task, and I suspect that I know history’s answer.

T.C. Boyle — The Women

April 17, 2009 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

(Note: I posted along interview with Boyle about his new novel here.)

T.C. Boyle’s The Women begins towards the end, chronologically speaking, and yet it ends with a different kind of end in the form of a fire, which reminds one of the transience of all artistic endeavors. The novel’s structure is appropriate for such a wittily recursive work, in which diva-esque architect Frank Lloyd Wright is examined chiefly through the perspectives of the various women who attracted him (and vice-versa). Those women represent an evolution of his own being, but they never just function symbolically; even the throwaway characters have fabulously apt descriptions attached to them, as when the vindictive Miriam’s attorney is described as having “a low, considered voice, deeply intimate, as if he’d been born to collusion.”

The Women is “written” by the imaginary Wright apprentice Tadashi Sato, and the sophisticated but clear narrative structure could have long academic papers written about it. Tadashi’s his grandson, however, is Irish and has “translated” the book, meaning that Tadashi’s frequent footnotes sometimes deal with the translated aspects of the story, giving at least four levels of frame: from Wright to his wives and lovers to Tadashi to O’Flaherty-San. One need not notice these narrative games to enjoy the novel and its presentation of numerous reactions to the great and greatly narcissistic man at its core. Even calling him a narcissist might be unfair: he’s more a man obsessed by his art, and in that respect virtually everything else comes second or lower. Consequently, what seems like narcissism might simply be drive.

We see Tadashi’s influence in moments like this:

Of course, all this happened a very long time ago and I’m aware that it is peripheral to the task at hand, which is to give as full a portrait of Wrieto-san as I can, and I don’t wish to dwell on the negative, not at all. Suffice to say that I stayed on at Taliesin, grudgingly at first (and perhaps I should have defied Wrieto-San and Daisy’s father and all the rest of the world…).

That, anyway, is the line of reasoning that excuses his sometimes ill behaviors. A less forgiving reader might see him as taking “from the rich and [giving] to himself and he didn’t give a damn about anybody so long as he got what he wanted,” as Miriam thinks in one of her bitter stages. The same could apply to her, since she’s constantly belittling those she considers inferior—which is virtually everything. Miriam thinks of herself as “high, higher than any of them,” with little reason that’s apparent to us. Still, her charges are not utterly baseless despite her grandiose posturing, and the alternate view of Wright sees him using his abilities as a cloak against charges of making and breaking promises with impunity and discarding people like excess building material.

Building metaphors occur throughout The Women and make for an obvious commentary on the artistic process more generally, but Boyle is too canny a writer to make Wright’s “process,” if he has one, explicit. The New Yorker chastised him for this, saying “Unfortunately, the novel avoids any sustained consideration of Wright’s relationship to his art—a passion arguably more important in forming his genius than any of the women in his life were.” But I think that’s part of the novel’s point: an artist’s relationship to his art can’t really be explained or depicted. We can only see its effects, like a black hole whose presence we discern by the debris around it. The metaphor isn’t perfect, since artists throw off light while black holes absorb it, but in Wright’s case he might absorb the personalities of the women and disciples around him. The novel’s fundamental tension revolves around how Wright “really” is versus how he’s perceived, and the novel’s strength comes from leaving that tension unresolved: we’re left with a debate more than a resolution, as we so often are in life. That’s mimesis to the world and faithful to the view of the great artist as inexplicable.

Tadashi sometimes strikes an aggressive posture for a seemingly passive character, but all of his passion shows through passive aggressiveness—perhaps the act of “writing” a history of Frank Lloyd Wright that often doesn’t show him in a flattering light is his ultimate revenge, and one we are meant to see through as we proceed through the novel, and especially in its last pages. Tadashi also undermines some of the novel’s claims; Miriam, Wright and others ceaselessly vilify and try to use the press. At one point, Miriam thinks that, “The papers were full of the story, headlines trumpeting disaster, the least detail pried from the wreckage by the ghouls of the press…” This description might be one of the more charitable considerations of the press. One wonders if Wright would have thought of Boyle what he does of the press, but Boyle has the advantage of writing long after the fact, when a reinterpretation of a figure who slides perilously towards myth can, in turn, re-appropriate that figure for the present. Boyle succeeds in doing so with panache that fortunately defies my analytic descriptions.

April Links: EBooks, Zombies, Writing, and more

April 15, 2009 By in Books, Links, Reading Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

* Terry Teachout’s prescience regarding e-books deserves to be noted and commended, despite my reservations.

* Speaking of ebooks, Randall Monroe describes how to read a Kindle while in bed. Personally, I prefer to just hold my forearms up with a book in front of me.

* It’s hard for me not to like this description, from Amazon’s review page, of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.” So begins Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an expanded edition of the beloved Jane Austen novel featuring all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem.

* Although I disagree with the conclusions in Life On Venus: Europe’s Last Man, I find it fascinating:

Precisely because novels are not, and should not be, political documents, they offer a less guarded, more intuitive report on the inner life of a society. And when novelists from different European countries, writing in different languages and very different styles, all seem to corroborate one another’s intuitions, it is at least fair to wonder whether a real cultural shift is under way.

Kirsch cites three major novelists—Ian McEwan, who is one of my favorites, W.G. Sebold, and Michel Houellebecq—as major examples of modern European-ness, and then looks at a book by each:

Three more different writers could hardly be invented. Which makes it all the more suggestive, I think, that their portraits of the spiritual state of contemporary Europe are so powerfully complementary. They show us a Europe that is cosmopolitan, affluent, and tolerant, enjoying all the material blessings that human beings have always struggled for, and that the Europeans of seventy years ago would have thought unattainable. Yet these three books are also haunted by intimations of belatedness and decline, by the fear that Europe has too much history behind it to thrive. They suggest currents of rage and despair coursing beneath the calm surface of society, occasionally erupting into violence. And they worry about what will happen when a Europe, gorged on historical good fortune, must defend itself against an envious and resentful world.

This, however, could also describe a great deal of science fiction since the 1970s, or any number of major American writers, who often take it upon themselves to demystify the American dream—and here I’m thinking of Philip Roth’s later novels, much of much of Melville, and so on.

(Once again, I found this somewhere on the web and forgot to write down the original linker. Sorry!)

* William Zinsser on On Writing Well, a book I often recommend to those interested in, well, writing well:

I would write from my own convictions—take ’em or leave ’em—and I would illustrate my points with passages by writers I admired. I would treat the English language spaciously, as a gift waiting for anyone to unwrap, not as a narrow universe of grammar and syntax. Above all, I would try to enjoy the trip and to convey that enjoyment to my readers.

(Hap tip to somewhere, but I forgot where. Sorry!)

On Writing Well is, along with James Wood’s How Fiction Works and Francine Prose’s How to Read Like a Writer, an important discovery in my own writing life. T.C. Boyle said you can’t teach writing, and maybe he’s right, but you can learn the principles that’ll make it easier to learn through experience and teaching yourself.

* Men, women, and reading:

A study of reading habits showed almost half of women are ‘page turners’ who finish a book soon after starting it compared to only 26 per cent of men.

The survey 2,000 adults also found those who take a long time to read books and only managed one or two a year were twice as likely to be male than female.

(For a really fun time, now debate whether this is cultural or biological.)

(Hat tip Marginal Revolution.)

* Although I’ve praised Amazon’s prices elsewhere, those prices come at, um, a price:

Is Amazon.co.uk targeting Britain’s indie publishers with an offer they have little choice but to accept? That’s what the trade group the Independent Publisher’s Guild is saying after a Friday meeting with Amazon in which the American internet retail giant refused to negotiate a new demand for greater discounts from the indies.

* Rouss Douthat on The Tough-On-Crime Trap.

* Regarding Literacy and Suicide, from Alan Jacobs:

Dr Andrej Maruai, a Slovene psychiatrist involved in organizing the conference, presented a paper called “Suicide in Europe: Genetics, Literacy and Poverty” which convincingly shows the links between the social factors of literacy and poverty, and suicidal behavior. . . .

According to Maruai’s theory, the higher any given country’s literacy rate and the lower that country’s GNP, the more likely the country is to have a high suicide rate. The theory can be convincingly applied to the countries with the highest suicide rates in Europe, namely the three Baltic states, Hungary and Slovenia, where literacy is at almost 100 percent and where the GNP and standard of living have been adversely affected by the transition process.

* I love this quote, provided courtesy of Daring Fireball: “My muse for the session was this quote from Walt Disney: “We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.” To me, that’s it. That’s the thing.”

* Alexander McCall Smith writes “Lost in Fiction” for the WSJ, saying that

This, and many other similar experiences, has made me think about the whole issue of the novelist’s freedom — and responsibility. The conclusion that I am increasingly drawn to is that the world of fiction and the world of real flesh-and-blood people are not quite as separate as one might imagine. Writing is a moral act: What you write has a real effect on others, often to a rather surprising extent.

I don’t buy the moral act comment, or at least not in all cases (see additional comments here). As for Smith, he wrote “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” books, of which I read, or, rather, tried to read the first two, and I quit because they were tremendously boring and kitschy. I wonder if his political views on fiction are part of the reason; later in the same article, Smith writes, “It is one of the jobs of fiction to report on the sorrows and tragedies of this world. This must be done, though, from a morally acceptable standpoint.” That line could require an entire essay to refute, but I would say rather than part of what a novel does is a) explore what is and b) explore what “morally acceptable” means, rather than reinforcing what is already considered by most of society as morally acceptable. And a novel doesn’t have to accomplish a) and b) at once, and it could accomplish neither and still be an excellent novel. I would argue that Lolita is such a novel.

* Megan McArdle asks, Whither GM? Notice this:

As GM moves through its forecast period, its cash needs associated with legacy liabilities grow, reaching approximately $6 billion per year in 2013 and 2014. To meet this cash outflow, GM needs to sell 900,000 additional cars per year, creating a difficult burden that leaves it fighting to maximize volume rather than return on investment.

This seems, if not impossible, then at least very close to it. Someone is going to write The Reckoning for this time period.

* Check this out: “The School Edition:”

One way to see the difference between schoolbooks and real books like Moby Dick is to examine different procedures which separate librarians, the custodians of real books, from schoolteachers, the custodians of schoolbooks. To begin with, libraries are usually comfortable, clean, and quiet. They are orderly places where you can actually read instead of just pretending to read.

[…]

Real books conform to the private curriculum of each author, not to the invisible curriculum of a corporate bureaucracy. Real books transport us to an inner realm of solitude and unmonitored mental reflection in a way schoolbooks and computer programs can’t. If they were not devoid of such capacity, they would jeopardize school routines devised to control behavior. Real books conform to the private curriculum of particular authors, not to the demands of bureaucracy.

* On The Radical Honesty Movement:

Once again, I felt the thrill of inappropriate candor. And I felt something else, too. The paradoxical joy of being free from choice. I had no choice but to tell the truth. I didn’t have to rack my brain figuring out how to hedge it, spin it, massage it.

“Just being honest,” I shrug. Nice touch, I decide; helps take the edge off. She’s got a thick skin. She’ll be okay. And I’ll tell you this: I’ll never get a damn gift certificate from her again.

* Alain de Botton: Brilliant or poseur? I tend towards “brilliant” with a dash of “neither.” But I think he speaks to modernity better than many other writers, and you can expect a post on his novel On Love shortly.

(Hat tip Mark Sarvas.)

* Although I haven’t actually read any of the novels mentioned in this paragraph, I’ve read about all of them prior to reading further about them in Slate’s thoughtful “Readin’ Dirty: Wetlands is the ‘2 Girls 1 Cup’ of novels.”

Looking in the most obscure corner of the Grove/Atlantic library, you might notice that the publishing house has imported such hits as 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, an “erotic coming-of-age novel” crafted by a Sicilian authoress of jailbait age; The Sexual Life of Catherine M., a French art critic’s Foucauldian analysis of having many trains pulled upon her; and Baise-Moi, a revenge thriller that is somewhat an odd duck in this subgenre as it boasts an actual plot. While studies have shown that every boat on the sea will be floated by something, even Helen’s grill tools, these books don’t rate as erotica; seldom does anything like an Anaïs Nin fever shiver through them, except perhaps Catherine M., which is kind of hot. On the whole, these books do not intend to arouse but to titillate, and, in this respect, Wetlands is the epitome of the form.

* The battle against barbarism continues, per “Video of girl’s flogging as Taliban hand out justice: Mobile phone movie shows that militant influence is spreading deeper into Pakistan” from The Guardian. The horrific video attached is difficult to watch.

* That battle isn’t just far away, either, since the Phoenix police raid[ed the] home of [a] blogger whose writing is highly critical of them. Apparently no one can find out any specifics regarding the alleged reason the police raided Miller’s house, as this Arizona Republic article shows.

Get Shorty and Out of Sight redux — Elmore Leonard

April 2, 2009 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Two years and change ago I wrote a short post about Elmore Leonard, introducing him by asking “Why is Elmore Leonard so damn good when he’s at his best?” (the linked post has a long passage that’s still among my favorites for its verisimilitude in terms ofs form and content). I still have no answer, but seeing him at the Tucson Festival of Books inspired me to reread Out of Sight, Get Shorty, and Mr. Paradise. At boring panels when I couldn’t gracefully leave, the mass-market paperback edition of Out of Sight helped pass the time, but it’s not the sort of novel one can quit after 60 pages.

Leonard writes women with teeth, which numerous reviewers have noted; as Peter Wolf wrote in 1990, “Since Stick (1983), [Leonard’s] female characters have taken on a dimension rivaling that of his men; as a result, they generate more plot movement and spring more surprises than their earlier counterparts.” Describing just how Leonard does it might demand an entire academic paper; one of my favorite examples popped up in Out of Sight when Karen Sisco, the Marshall, says that, “Once you’re into it and you’re pumped up and you know who the guy is and you know you can’t give him one fucking inch . . . he has the choice, you don’t.” That might be as accurate a comment on human affairs as anyphilosophy book ever written. Or it might be empty pop commentary; another such moment happens when Sisco compares her bank robbing lover, Jack Foley, to Harry Dean Stanton in affect but not looks, saying that they were “both real guys who seemed tired of who they were, but couldn’t do anything about it.” One pleasure of the pulps is the blurred and indistinct line between the profound and silly, and one gets the impression that Leonard doesn’t care about the difference, if there is one.

The same kind of realism pervades Get Shorty. In describing Harry Zimm, Leonard says, “Forty-nine movies and [Harry] looked more like a guy drove a delivery truck or came to fix your air-conditioning when it quit, a guy with a tool kit.” Dropping the “who” and other connectors is a classic Leonard move; it looks ostentatious in a single sentence, as if the novel was poorly edited, but in the context one quickly adapts to the rhythms of speech. Martin Amis’ Money is the only other novel I can think of with so distinctive and vigorous a voice that also succeeds. And notice that description of Harry the movie guy: it’s so good because it’s accurate and tells us that many producer and production people are essentially technicians, and the skills they employ aren’t fundamentally different in deployment than the guy who fixes your car or Xerox. Leonard compresses into a sentence what Julie Salamon conveys without stating in all of The Devil’s Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood.

Harry is desperate and foolish; when he makes a mistake he’ll rationalize, as he does here after disobeying Chili Palmer’s advice regarding discretion:

“I had to,” Harry said, sounding pretty definite about it. “I’ve got a chance to put together a deal that’ll change my life, make me an overnight success after thirty years in the business. . . . But I need a half a million to get it started.”

In Chris Matthew’s wonderful nonfiction account/short story collection/political primer (the book has elements of all three) Hardball, he has an entire chapter called “Don’t talk unless it improves the silence.” Chili knows that. Harry doesn’t. And yet that quote conveys all of Harry’s greed, desperation and vanity all in one spot, and the link between Hollywood hustlers and drug/mob hustlers is so pervasive and intertwined with this novel that merely pointing it out is almost gratuitous. And yet the section is compelling because one always thinks of that big chance to change your life—what would you do to accomplish it? It’s an enduring question and reminds me of Scott Smith’s A Simple Plan, where the answer seems to stretch a little bit more with each passing act until the answer effectively becomes, “anything.”

Earlier I mentioned that Leonard probably wouldn’t care for elaborate discussion about the difference, if any, between genre and literary fiction. You almost hear his derision through one of his characters when Karen Flores, the woman consistently underestimated as the bimbo, says

I got the feeling the studio forced the script on her and she has to go with it. She said… [the story is] involving, reflective, has resonance, a certain texture—those are all story department words.

All of them are weak, empty synonyms for “I like it.” Why not just say that? Leonard would. Maybe that’s why he can write a novel that so effectively mocks Hollywood, feels some bizarre compulsion to dress its rationalizations—there’s that word again—in jargon to try and prevent people from seeing beneath them. Leonard doesn’t, and I think that’s part of the reason his female characters are so effective when they’re so often props in wiseguy novels: he writes them in with their own desires and hopes and goals, beyond mooning after the hero. They’re competent. So are many of his heroes: competent but flawed describes them well. His writing, on the other hand, is so competent that it transcends competence and becomes nearly flawless. I have a short list of writers whose new books I will buy almost automatically, and Leonard is on it for good reason.

Life: Frankenstein edition

March 30, 2009 By in Books, Life Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

“The world was to me a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imagination of her own.”

—Mary Shelley, Frankenstein