Tag Archives: novels

Ladies' Man

March 16, 2008 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Repulsive characters go a long way back before 1978, but I can’t help noticing the peculiar slime of a guy whose girlfriend has a 105 degree temperature, and then says: “She fell asleep in my arms and I lay there furious because she didn’t acknowledge my sacrifice, the comforting strength of my goddamn presence. I wanted her to say ‘Thank you’ or ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you’ or ‘Oh, Kenny’ or something […]'” Richard Price’s Ladies’ Man spans a week, and this thought occurs on Friday, but the object of his objection has already dumped him in more a de facto than de jure manner on Monday or Tuesday. Like Kenny, the narrator, I found it difficult to remember what happened on what day. This is in part because nothing major happens to him, in the physical, emotional, or intellectual worlds, though a man who thinks: “It was my ‘leisure’ time and I was blowing it. What leisure time? That’s all I had was leisure time” is an unlikely person to have a great epiphany.

Like Ladies’ Man, however, Kenny is not without some redeeming qualities; he “pretend[s] to watch a basketball game which had orange guys against green guys.” This predates The Onion’s hilarious, “You Will Suffer Humiliation When The Sports Team From My Area Defeats The Sports Team From Your Area,” which covers the same territory. But his lack of interest in basketball mirrors his lack of interest in most of the rest of his life, and he’s so ironic and distant and above the fray that I wonder if we should care about Kenny only as much as he cares about everything else. Even his relative humanity is insincere:

Nothing heavy. Just misty sadness. It was over. It had been the best and now it was over and nothing had ever felt as good. We had peaked back then, and all we’d been doing since was dying.

This is a 30-year-old reminiscing about sweaty high school makeouts. He’s self-indulgent in other ways: “No wonder I was so goddamn lonely. Friends, man. I didn’t have any fucking friends. And friends were the bottom line.” Well, yes, and we get 264 pages demonstrating exactly why Kenny has no friends. What’s he going to do when he’s, say, 50? Perhaps read The Sea, which is at least a higher level of melancholy wistfulness. Oh, and Max Morden is as nicer a person than Kenny as a golden retriever is a nicer animal than a cobra. One woman who Kenny picks up feels his bite, although it is one of indifference rather than venom. For a character with vastly greater self-absorption than Kenny who is also vastly less constrained by society, try John Self in Money, who is the king of these weak anti-Hemingways who are also created by Price, Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis.

I mention Hemingway because all three writers use devolved versions of his characters and prose. Kenny speaks without the classical background of Jake in The Sun Also Rises, and he has none of the restraint or passion of the characters in that book. Still, he whips out the occasional great metaphor in the pulp style: “For eighteen years that sound was an unnoticeable to me as my heartbeat” or “he had enough chest hair for a national park.” You can hear Elmore Leonard, or one of his models, George Higgins. These metaphors can’t redeem a long, awkward sex scene and lots of navel gazing or a character who can’t figure out that perhaps assholes are the only people who think everyone else is an asshole, as Kenny does at a bar: “Loud, suburban contractors and their wives, drunk Texans, Jap businessmen, medical students; assholes, all assholes.” We’ve been feeling scorn for the bourgeoise since Flaubert if not earlier, but now we have someone who doesn’t even recognize where his opinions come from, despite alluding to Joseph Conrad.

Kenny says things like “‘How many zorts that set you back?'” and wallows in the detritus of TV pop culture. Yes, we get it, but as the cliche goes, lie down with dogs and wake up with flees. Kenny, however, lacks the consciousness to realize this.

I read Ladies’ Man because I’d heard about Price’s Clockers and his new novel, Lush Life, both of which have been favorably compared to Ladies’ Man. I’ve read neither yet but intend to: Ladies’ Man is not without artistic redemption, and it sounds like Price’s bigger, better novels are worthier. Whether they live up to expectations remains to be seen.

Ladies’ Man

March 16, 2008 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Repulsive characters go a long way back before 1978, but I can’t help noticing the peculiar slime of a guy whose girlfriend has a 105 degree temperature, and then says: “She fell asleep in my arms and I lay there furious because she didn’t acknowledge my sacrifice, the comforting strength of my goddamn presence. I wanted her to say ‘Thank you’ or ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you’ or ‘Oh, Kenny’ or something […]'” Richard Price’s Ladies’ Man spans a week, and this thought occurs on Friday, but the object of his objection has already dumped him in more a de facto than de jure manner on Monday or Tuesday. Like Kenny, the narrator, I found it difficult to remember what happened on what day. This is in part because nothing major happens to him, in the physical, emotional, or intellectual worlds, though a man who thinks: “It was my ‘leisure’ time and I was blowing it. What leisure time? That’s all I had was leisure time” is an unlikely person to have a great epiphany.

Like Ladies’ Man, however, Kenny is not without some redeeming qualities; he “pretend[s] to watch a basketball game which had orange guys against green guys.” This predates The Onion’s hilarious, “You Will Suffer Humiliation When The Sports Team From My Area Defeats The Sports Team From Your Area,” which covers the same territory. But his lack of interest in basketball mirrors his lack of interest in most of the rest of his life, and he’s so ironic and distant and above the fray that I wonder if we should care about Kenny only as much as he cares about everything else. Even his relative humanity is insincere:

Nothing heavy. Just misty sadness. It was over. It had been the best and now it was over and nothing had ever felt as good. We had peaked back then, and all we’d been doing since was dying.

This is a 30-year-old reminiscing about sweaty high school makeouts. He’s self-indulgent in other ways: “No wonder I was so goddamn lonely. Friends, man. I didn’t have any fucking friends. And friends were the bottom line.” Well, yes, and we get 264 pages demonstrating exactly why Kenny has no friends. What’s he going to do when he’s, say, 50? Perhaps read The Sea, which is at least a higher level of melancholy wistfulness. Oh, and Max Morden is as nicer a person than Kenny as a golden retriever is a nicer animal than a cobra. One woman who Kenny picks up feels his bite, although it is one of indifference rather than venom. For a character with vastly greater self-absorption than Kenny who is also vastly less constrained by society, try John Self in Money, who is the king of these weak anti-Hemingways who are also created by Price, Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis.

I mention Hemingway because all three writers use devolved versions of his characters and prose. Kenny speaks without the classical background of Jake in The Sun Also Rises, and he has none of the restraint or passion of the characters in that book. Still, he whips out the occasional great metaphor in the pulp style: “For eighteen years that sound was an unnoticeable to me as my heartbeat” or “he had enough chest hair for a national park.” You can hear Elmore Leonard, or one of his models, George Higgins. These metaphors can’t redeem a long, awkward sex scene and lots of navel gazing or a character who can’t figure out that perhaps assholes are the only people who think everyone else is an asshole, as Kenny does at a bar: “Loud, suburban contractors and their wives, drunk Texans, Jap businessmen, medical students; assholes, all assholes.” We’ve been feeling scorn for the bourgeoise since Flaubert if not earlier, but now we have someone who doesn’t even recognize where his opinions come from, despite alluding to Joseph Conrad.

Kenny says things like “‘How many zorts that set you back?'” and wallows in the detritus of TV pop culture. Yes, we get it, but as the cliche goes, lie down with dogs and wake up with flees. Kenny, however, lacks the consciousness to realize this.

I read Ladies’ Man because I’d heard about Price’s Clockers and his new novel, Lush Life, both of which have been favorably compared to Ladies’ Man. I’ve read neither yet but intend to: Ladies’ Man is not without artistic redemption, and it sounds like Price’s bigger, better novels are worthier. Whether they live up to expectations remains to be seen.

NYT on point about memoirs and Seattle

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

Buying the paper version of the New York Times was an excellent decision, with “Book Lovers Ask, What’s Seattle’s Secret?” about Seattle’s supposed position as literary tastemaker:

In many ways, Ms. [Nancy] Pearl’s rise in the book world parallels Seattle’s rise in the publishing world. Though the big publishing houses are still ensconced in New York, the Seattle area is the home of Amazon, Starbucks and Costco, three companies that increasingly influence what America reads.

I’m not sure that I buy the premise of this article, though I do note that it implicitly argues that the success of the three companies might be harming what makes Seattle unusual in the first place:

Seattle’s literary seeds have been here for decades, with local authors, abundant writing courses and robust independent bookstores, according to J. A. Jance, the Seattle mystery author whose books have sold 15 million copies over the last 20 years. “Maybe it’s the rain, but Seattle has always been a reading town,” she said.

[…]

The flip side of the success of the big Seattle booksellers is the gradual decrease in the number of small independent stores, which have struggled as a result of a variety of factors.

(Bold added.)

Elsewhere, the little league tizzy over a faked memoir (see our comments here and, to a lesser extent, here) brings “A Bug’s Life. Really.“:

“‘The Metamorphosis’ — purported to be the fictional account of a man who turns into a large cockroach — is actually non-fiction,” according to a statement released by Mr. Kafka’s editor, who spoke only on the condition that he be identified as E.

[…]

Mr. Kafka’s publishers are now reviewing all his works of fiction — stories about singing mice, “hunger artists” and men on trial for crimes they’re not aware of having committed — to determine whether they too are true.

We’ve come to the point of observing the absurdity of memoirs through the absurdity of such standards applied to absurd fiction.

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.

… And here he is

March 7, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Two days ago I asked for an example of who championed the supposedly airless literary novel, and now Stephen Marche writes in Salon with an answer for me:*

[Alain Robbe-Grillet] was a great champion for the innovative novel, so in a way I owe him: I’m a novelist, and while I would be loath to call myself avant-garde, my first book did have marginalia all the way through and my second was a literary anthology of an invented country. But the truth is, Robbe-Grillet was a disaster for innovative novels. After him, literary innovation, experiment with form or anything mildly unconventional came to be seen as pretentious and dry, the proper domain of the cheese-eating surrender monkeys and nobody else.

[…]

English fiction in the wake of Robbe-Grillet has become a deliberately old-fashioned activity, like archery or churning your own butter. He represented, through his status as cultural icon of the avant-garde, an entire generation that turned literary experimentation into self-involved blandness.

I’ve heard of Robbe-Grillet but never read him and appear not to be alone in this. Yet I’m skeptical of a single novelist’s ability to have so great an effect on culture**, especially because literary culture still produces all kinds of novels, and, even if it didn’t, old novels are still available. In financial terms, this is one problem with being a current novelist: you still have to compete with The Great Gatsby and All the King’s Men, but Honda is not too worried about people choosing cars made in the first half of the twentieth century usurping current sales. Obviously there can be currents and trends within a literary culture, but it seems to me that literary culture and literature are so big as to give us whatever we want.

Fortunately, I wrote all this before Marche came to his conclusion:

The two strands of postwar literary fiction, the ultraradical and the willfully archaic, are both antithetical to the spirit of the novel itself, which is polyglot and unpredictable. Novels are supposed to be messy. They are written to express ideals and to make money; they steal from everything and everyone, high, middle and low, belonging to everyone and no one in the same moment. They don’t fit anyone’s conception. That’s why we love them.

Though I hate to descend into high school argot, I have to say: duh. So why does the bulk of this essay deal with questionable generalizations that Marche then throws down?

* I see no reason not to assume a causal connection.

** Except Joyce, as virtually everything written in English after him has felt his touch, whether the writer wants to feel it or not. But even Joyce had a little-known forerunner named Edouard Dujardin, who wrote Les Lauriers sont coupés. In Modernism, Peter Gay writes that “Dujardin […] later reported that his experiment sold just a few hundred copies […] But among its few readers was James Joyce, [who later] signed a copy of Ulysses to Dujardin, calling himself ‘an impenitent thief.’ “

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.

Attachment to paper?

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

Ars Technica reports on a little noted section of a study on “Digital Entertainment” from the UK:

According to the research, sponsored by UK media lawyers Wiggin, survey data shows books have the highest “attachment” rating of any leisure media activity. People are more attached to their books than they are to their satellite television, radio stations, newspapers, magazines, social networks, video games, blogs, DVDs, and P2P file-swapping. And it’s not like this high rate of affection for the book occurs only among a small group; books came in second only to “listen to the radio” in terms of the number of people who engage in those activities.

Not surprisingly, Ars says that this isn’t good news for the e-book market. Well, the the problem is partially an attachment to paper, but it’s also that the devices aren’t very good yet and the books to actually be read on the devices are encumbered with perfidious Digital Restriction Management (DRM).

A direct link to the survey itself doesn’t seem to be widely available. If anyone sends one, I’ll post it.

Richard Price on Clockers, research, and much more

March 1, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Prior to the NBCC’s “In Retrospect” series, I’d never heard of Richard Price’s Clockers. Now that I’ve been reading about it, I’m determined to read it, especially because the series has excellent taste—Norman Rush’s Mating was another featured novel.

See a marvelous interview with Price here. I can’t find a good representative sample of the interview, which is too big to summarize, but I’ll note this:

Q: So why not do a nonfiction book?

A: Because nonfiction is nonfiction. There’s nothing for me to do there except report. I ask journalists the same question: Don’t you want to just make this stuff up? And they’ll say to me, “You can’t top this stuff.” Their attitude is, you know, “I’m very good at summarizing what’s out there. And what’s out there is: God’s a first-rate novelist.” My attitude is like, is if it’s already out there, to me, that’s like clerical work. Although it’s not–I know that. But to me, I want to take all that stuff and fashion a metaphor from it. Because oftentimes, the way life unfolds, it’s very random and chaotic. It’s only in the history books where you look back everything seemed like it all happened in seven streamlined paragraphs. But daily life is much more meandering, and what a novel can do is condense and essentialize, and highlight. That’s what I like.

More on the long-predicted demise of reading

February 21, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* Steve Jobs thinks reading is dead; Timothy Egan disagrees. If it’s dying, would it just hurry up?

* In the same vein: a paean to the departed past where civilization dwells. The Wonderful Past, redux.

* Philippa Gregory watches a novel with no literary merit anyway and still gets the Hollywood treatment. Compare to Philip Pullman, whose books have literary merit.

* Terry Teachout quoting T.S. Eliot. Compare and contrast to Richard Russo in Straight Man: “Virtually everybody in the English department has a half-written novel squirreled away in a desk drawer. I know this to be a fact because before they all started filing grievances against me, I was asked to read them. Sad little vessels all. Scuffy the Tugboat, lost and scared on the open sea. All elegantly written, all with the same artistic goal—to evidence a superior disposition.”