Tag Archives: novels

Rereading A.S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance

December 12, 2009 By in Academia, Books Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The key moment in A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance comes when Roland Mitchell, a prematurely desiccated academic, wonders why he might have stolen letters written by an invented 19th Century poet from the British Library. In explaining why, he says, “Because they were alive. They seemed urgent[….]” Nothing else in his life does, which straddles comedy and sadness. The act propels the action of the novel as well as a return of urgency and of discovery to his own life, implying that when we lack such attributes, we begin to die ourselves.

I’ve previously discussed Possession here), and the novel concerns academics who begin emotionally dead, and their intellects are perilously close to the same state. The key to their resurrection—their return to what one might skeptically call “the real world”—comes in an act of very minor theft by Roland. It’s out of character but brings him rolling to a beautiful academic, to a secret, and to the double discovery of his own romance and of someone else’s. Tracing the path of another person’s romance teaches him how to live his own; without that signal, perhaps he would remain among the academic undead, or the undead more generally. A rare forbidden act—sex has lost its forbiddenness, so theft of an academic nature will have to do—has a rejuvenating effect, reminding us of the limits and limiting nature of bounds and boundaries, sexual, textual, and otherwise. For a novel that is composed heavily of invented texts, stealing carries a larger moral rigor that it might otherwise not, and it helps Roland see his own life and work in way that is, again, finally, urgent.

Late November Links: Academia, artistic dangers, reading, and more

November 28, 2009 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The Ph.D. Problem: On the professionalization of faculty life, doctoral training, and the academy’s self-renewal.

* A Little-Known Occupational Hazard Affecting Writers: writing (or wanting to write) outside your field.

* When Great Artists Dry Up.

* Cellphones, Texts, and Lovers, on how technology is or is not reshaping romance in the digital age. I don’t really buy the argument, but I find it suggestive nonetheless.

* James Fallows has a typically nuanced, brilliant series on Obama’s trip to Asia, and especially its Chinese implications.

* Das Keyboard is sponsoring the Ultimate Typing Championship. Do you have the “fiercest typing skills around?” Me neither. But those who do can win $2,000 at the SXSW festival in Austin. The e-mail I got says, “Oh, and don’t forget to sign-up yourself to compete! At a minimum, it’s an opportunity for bragging rights among your friends and co-workers. :)”

Alas: I’m a relatively slow typist at 50-ish WPM. Usually the problem isn’t typing speed—it’s thinking speed, and I haven’t found a hardware solution for that yet.

* Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization. Like me, Clay Shirky finds it more than a little difficult to believe that cheap hardcover books are bad for readers, even if they might be bad for publishers as they currently exist.

* What the iPod tells us about Britain’s economic future.

* Secret copyright treaty leaks, and it’s bad. Very bad.

* Sunday afternoon at the Shenzhen Public Library. As James Fallows says at the link, “No wonder Shenzhen is on the rise.”

* Gossip Girl might be worth watching again.

* Are too many students going to college?

* Learn your damn homophones.

* No one wants America to be the sole global superpower, but no one wants to share the load.

* I love it: the bookstore Lorem Ipsum is having an “anti-sale.” As they say: “Everyone like’s a sale, right? But does anyone like an anti-sale? We hope so!

What’s an anti-sale, you ask? It’s when nothing in the store is on sale. We’re proud to announce that none of our items are on sale, instead they are for purchase for regular price. We think it’s ground-breaking.”

* Inculcating a Love for Reading: Children’s books that might help repel the armies of electronic distraction.

* From Oxford to Wall Street: what the rising number of Rhodes Scholars in business and finance means. Or, according to actual Rhodes scholar, maybe not.

* Are U.S. Wages Too High?

* Why are some cities more entrepreneurial than others?

* The Writing Habits of Great Authors.

* Hilarious search query of the day that brought someone to The Story’s Story: “bookworms sex.”

Life: Writers' edition

November 17, 2009 By in Life Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

“Never underestimate a writer’s vanity, especially that of a mediocre writer.”

—Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel’s Game

Max Jamison — Wilfrid Sheed

November 13, 2009 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Really good and really bad books often announce themselves early: in the case of the former, you find that moment of shock and astonishment that propels you forward. In Max Jamison, that moments hits on page 7, when Flashman is described not as “a theater critic at all, but a maid-of-all-work gossip columnist and second-string reviewer who scooped up free tickets like a mechanical crane and prowled the lobbies for carrion.” Status and aesthetic contempt intermingle: Flashman doesn’t appreciate art because he’s “like a mechanical crane,” and yet at the same time he feeds on the dead—dead plays, dead reviewers, dead everything.

Max, on the other hand, sees himself as an antidote of sorts to that: he’s a theater critic with, if not heart, then at least acerbic taste, which is better than no taste at all. But he’s not terribly happy and is too aware of his own faults to let something like sentimental happiness buoy him; in another early scene, he thinks that “The actors he talked to were dull as ballplayers and degradingly anxious to please.” Or, more likely, the actors are worried about angering critics on whose fancy rides their career. But if that critic is sufficiently cantankerous, their actions simply won’t matter, and Max is holding the line against—what? Not the cavalry charge, certainly, but against something, even if he’s not sure what.

In the two paragraphs above, I’ve utterly failed to convey how funny Max Jamison is, perhaps because explaining the joke also kills it. Max is funny to himself but to few others; his estranged wife says, “I wish you wouldn’t attend so much. I wish I could split an infinitive with you sometime, or have a really silly discussion.” If Max worries about split infinitives, he truly is a nasty pedant, since split infinitives are a problem in Latin, not in English. Pedants who half understand their problems and are trying to remedy them are sometimes the most amusing of all, since they’re in the joke enough to be aware of their situation but not so much that they can remedy it.

Saul Bellow frequently exploits this metaphysical, intellectual, and sometimes sexual state; so does Mordecai Richler in Barney’s Version. It also might lend heft to a novel that could otherwise flutter—what’s most fascinating about Max is his sense of infinity within a confined space, which avoids the flutter problem. He’s a theater critic, unlikely to change professions, and stuck (if one can ever use the word “stuck” with this city) in New York by virtue of that profession. He’s confined, like so many of us, by those proverbial silk chains, given that he makes enough money, gets to sleep with admirers if he wants to, doesn’t have to worry about food, and only carps about status—which is difficult, since he’s at the top of his pyramid. But the pyramid is too short for him, and there’s probably none tall enough for him, and seeing him try to climb is hilarious without being mean.

(Note: I read Max Jamison thanks to D.G. Myers’ post on The Hack, which says that Sheed wrote “… perhaps the best novel ever written about a critic. Max Jamison (1970) is about a Broadway theater critic who no longer believes in what he does for a living.” It used to be that we thrashed when we no longer believed in God. Now we thrash when we no longer believe in ourselves. What will we thrash about next?)

Life: Children and The Children's Book

October 26, 2009 By in Books, Life Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

“The young desire to be free of the adults, and at the same time were prepared to resent any hint that the adults might desire to be free of them.”

—A.S. Byatt, The Children’s Book (which is excellent and highly recommended so far).

Life: Children and The Children’s Book

October 26, 2009 By in Books, Life Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

“The young desire to be free of the adults, and at the same time were prepared to resent any hint that the adults might desire to be free of them.”

—A.S. Byatt, The Children’s Book (which is excellent and highly recommended so far).

Malcolm Gladwell on Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird

October 24, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Essays Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

I have two fundamental problems with Malcolm Gladwell’s piece in the New Yorker concerning To Kill a Mockingbird: one is philosophical/moral, and the other aesthetic. The philosophical/moral problem is that incrementalism is not necessarily an invalid approach to major social injustice. Gladwell says:

Old-style Southern liberalism—gradual and paternalistic—crumbled in the face of liberalism in the form of an urgent demand for formal equality. Activism proved incompatible with Folsomism.

That’s true: but it doesn’t mean that the James Folsom approach—who was progressive by southern standards in the first of the twentieth century—wasn’t an improvement over what came later as part of the unjustified backlash. Gradual change can set the stage for radical change, as it did with the Civil Rights movement, and pragmatism is sometimes more effective than attempting to radically alter social, economic or political life.

The Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy describes the philosopher Richard Rorty this way: “Rorty is a self-proclaimed romantic bourgeois liberal, a believer in piecemeal reforms advancing economic justice and increasing the freedoms that citizens are able to enjoy.” Rorty gives a convincing defense of those piecemeal reforms in his various books, and I’m not wholly convinced of Gladwell’s interpretation that To Kill a Mockingbird is problematic for that reason.

And this idea applies to more than politics. Megan McArdle just posted a piece on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernacke that ended, “As it says in To Kill a Mockingbird, Bernanke did the best he could with what he had. It was not perfect. But looking around at the mostly employed people on the streets, I’m glad he was there.” From what I understand of the recent financial crisis, I basically agree with her assessment: Bernacke and the other players in Washington did the best they could given the information they had at the time, which is based on pieces like The Final Days of Merrill Lynch in The Atlantic and Inside The Crisis: Larry Summers and the White House economic team in the New Yorker.

The second problem is aesthetic: like Nabokov, I don’t think novels need to play the role of social arbiter or champion. A novel that is sufficiently abhorrent—like one that actively praises segregation in the fashion that Soviet novels would advance inaptly named social realism, or one that shills for retrograde religious ideals—would probably be bad by virtue of their social commentary, but I think To Kill a Mockingbird is subtler than that, and to me the novel’s most interesting component is the development of Scout as a person. That’s inherently tied up with morality and politics, of course, but how and whether the novel succeeds in that respect ought to be the major consideration in evaluating a novel.

In other words, once the novel passes the relatively low bar of not being actively abhorrent, it should be judged on other principles than whether it conforms to what appear to be a person or age’s moral norms.

Do editors still edit? A response in part based on Mark McGurl's The Program Era

October 2, 2009 By in Books, Publishing Tags: , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Betsy Lerner tries to answer this reader query: “Is it true that editors no longer edit, and if so, why?” Her basic answer: “I think most do, and some quite brilliantly.” But it’s hard to say beyond anecdote: I’ve read various answers that range from hers to simply stating “No.” One letter to the editor in The New Yorker has a perceptive comment on the issue—the author is responding to an essay about Mark McGurl’s The Program Era:

The days of editors like Maxwell Perkins shepherding talented young writers through their early years are long over. With publishing houses now expected to turn profits of around fifteen per cent, as opposed to the three to four per cent of Perkins’s day, what editor can afford to give a latter-day F. Scott Fitzgerald the devotion, time, and professional advice needed to hone his talents? Creative-writing programs have stepped in to fill this void by teaching young writers, in effect, to be their own editors––an essential skill in the current publishing climate.

In the absence of hard figures, it’s difficult to tell whether this is true, and if it is, how true it is. McGurl does write about the “… wide distribution… of elevated literary ambitions, and the cultivation in these newly vocal, vainglorious masses of the habits of self-conscious attention to craft through which [their writerly ambitions] might plausible be realized…” I doubt this makes editors superfluous, but it might mean that, in the face of layoffs, increased workloads, and so forth, editors might be more likely to rely, implicitly or explicitly, on the skills that universities and other writing programs cultivate. Granted, this is based on speculation from someone peering in through the glass rather than someone with direct experience inside of publishing, but it at least seems plausible.

Furthermore, it might be easier for writers to learn some of what editors once might have provided because of the wide availability of pretty good books on the craft parts of writing. This doesn’t mean reading such books will automatically make one a good author, or that any book can substitute for good secondary readers (or editors), but they still might occupy a small part of the function professional editors once held.

(Incidentally: The Program Era is a wonderful book I keep meaning to write a post about. One reason I don’t is because there’s so much to talk about that I get overwhelmed. At some point, however, I’m just going to write that post, completeness be damned.)

Lev Grossman vs the haters

September 15, 2009 By in Books, SF/Fantasy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

I’m on the record praising Lev Grossman’s essay “Good Books Don’t Have to be Hard.” Predictably, that piece generated a fair amount of blowback (and a concomitant amount of misinterpretation, like the fallacious argument that Grossman is arguing that good books can’t be hard); see a sample of it here, complete with a comment from yours truly.

Now, however, we can see how Lev Grossman Responds to Criticism of His Wall Street Journal Piece, as spoken by the man himself. Read it when you get a chance. It’s not terrible, but I think he could do better, and I hope he does “write more (if anybody cares) when I’m back in civilization.”

One thing I’d strongly disagree with comes when Grossman discusses Twilight’s sales: “All those millions of people might be idiots or have bad taste. But I think it’s kinda intellectually lazy to say that.” I don’t, and they do have bad taste. I’ve read a book and a half of the series, and they’re so cliche-ridden that they make Harry Potter look like Shakespeare, and the writing has originality and verve that make Dan Brown impressive by comparison.

To be fair, he goes on to say, “Meyer is doing something very very well, or at least giving people something they really really want, and I don’t think we have a good critical vocabulary yet for talking about what that something is.” She might be doing something well, yes, but writing isn’t it. That’s why a lot of people who are literary and/or like good writing don’t think much of her.

Last Night at the Lobster — Stewart O’Nan

September 13, 2009 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Stewart O’Nan’s Last Night at the Lobster reminds one that small can be engrossing and that real stories often underlie the vast news that floods our lives. One of the two epigraphs for Last Night at the Lobster says “Darden Restaurants, Inc., raised its outlook and expects full year 2005 diluted net earnings per share growth in the range of 22% to 27%….” Normally we’d skip by that headline on page C7 of the Wall Street Journal.

But underneath the earnings reports, sometimes far underneath it, are the people doing the earning. In this case it’s Manny DeLeon, who’s managing (Manny? Manage? Get it?) a Lobster joint closely modeled on a Red Lobster as it closes permanently. He’s self-aware enough to know that his activities aren’t likely to shake the counsels of the great, but he’s also trying to do what he can to do well for its own sake—in this respect, he’s like a writer with a limited audience who nonetheless takes pride in the craft itself. Furthermore, Manny seems human, aware, as when he’s pondering a perhaps finished affair with Jacquie one of the waitresses. The specifics fall away, and “All he can recall are still images—her black hair wet and heavy from the shower, her stockings laid over a chair, the glass of water on the floor by her bed holding the light from the window—yet instead of weakening with time, they’ve grown more powerful, liable to paralyze him if he dotes on them too long.”

Those images aren’t susceptible to the moves of the stock market or socioeconomic positioning: once they’re Manny’s, they’re his forever. If that were somehow the “lesson” of Last Night at the Lobster, it wouldn’t be much of a book. It’s more of a slice of life, or a whisper about an event that one can’t entirely make sense of: one has to run the Lobster on the last day of its life, but how does one draw any larger ideas from that? And if one can’t, does it matter? The classical economics answer would be “no,” but the answer for Manny is yes.

If it weren’t, his non-relationship relationship with Jacquie would be equally empty: they have nothing to commit themselves to one another outside of wanting something to commit to. If I were more fond of grandiose pronouncements, I might say that Last Night at the Lobster is about finding a place to anchor in a transitory, bottomless society, where the tides now rearrange the world faster than people can keep up. Hence the failing Lobster in the failing mall in the failing town where people nonetheless do what they can, even if it’s not enough. For it to be enough, you have to be a master of abstraction, creativity, computer science, unusual skills, and more: yet most people aren’t up to that. They’re still people, even as they shake downwards to the Lobster, where they can still succeed on different definitions than what social cues shout success is.

For all this commentary, the narrative tension in Last Night at the Lobster is slack and the sense of anything major being at stake is absent; Manny’s soul is muted and confused more than tortured, and in this sense the book might be a defining work of realism, since it seems that few go through life with Nietzschian-esque metaphysical worries. Last Night at the Lobster also reminds me of some of the European novels that I called sheer and taunt; this book is equally short, and if it’s more explanatory than In our Strange Gardens or The Reader, there nonetheless isn’t a tremendous amount of emotional energy invested in its characters, who are nearer to short story sketches than to round, novelistic heroes or anti-heroes. But the moments and images tide the novel, as when “The guy with the bow tie nods as he passes, one boss to another, as if Manny’s done all this for him.” There’s so much in the line that I stopped and pondered it, asking too: how often have I been the guy in the bow tie? Manny? The crew that set up?

I don’t see too many novels like Last Night at the Lobster. As Mark Sarvas and Alain de Botton have pointed out, books about work are fairly uncommon. I hadn’t noticed till they observed it, but I find innumerable books on my shelves about love, affairs, geography, family, and destiny, but few about what people do to support those other endeavors. Perhaps that’s because writers are deracinated from the larger work world, as de Botton has suggested, or perhaps that’s because work can seem too mundane or not worthy of literary fiction’s point of view and linguistic pyrotechnics or genre fiction’s suspenseful plots. In The Grapes of Mild Outrage, Mark Athitakis writes that “… though O’Nan has admirable respect for his characters, the overall tone is one of defeat—the Red Lobster in which the novel is set is about to close forever, the snow outside is miserable, and nobody cares to thinks much about the restaurant itself.” I’m not sure if the tone is so much one of defeat as of recognition. And isn’t self-recognition part of what the novel is supposed to lead us to, and what life is supposed to be about?

On a final, structural note, I was ready to pass on Last Night at the Lobster till positive recommendations rescued it—most notably Terry Teachout. Book publicists occasionally ask me how they can get me to read their books or what kind of books I pick up, and the short answer to both is often that if they get Teachout, Sarvas, Nigel Beale, Tyler Cowen, Kate Sutherland, John Scalzi or a handful of others I’m no doubt forgetting to write favorably a book, the probability of me reading it skyrockets—as does the probability of me getting something from the book, even when I don’t necessarily like it without reservations; this happened with two books Sarvas liked, including The Gift and Nobility of Spirit, both of which were not self-critical enough and overly indulgent despite having powerful messages to avoid the cynicism that’s par for the contemporary course. In terms of books, I often look for social proof: the idea that, if others whose opinions I trust recommend a book, I’m more likely to read it. I still at least begin everything I’m sent, and I’m only too happy to find a book delightful—like the recent Carlos Ruiz Zafon novel, The Angel’s Game, which I need to post about shortly—but it doesn’t hurt to let in some air from elsewhere too.